What is the oldest language in the world? (Part 3)
In the third and final part of the article, we compare language to clay.
This is the third installment of the article What is the oldest language in the world?.
9. Written language
The previous part of this article ended with the sentence:
The point at which we begin to tell the history of a language is always a choice. It is quite arbitrary.
That may be true, but what matters to many people is the standard associated with written — and formal — language, based on the formal speech used in a particular zone or by a specific social group (usually the elite that inhabits the most important cities of each country). This standard is then associated to a language name: Portuguese, French, English, Irish…
In other words, when people ask what is the age of a specific language, they are asking the age of the written and literary tradition of that language.
Approaching the question in this way, it is possible to find some dates: the date when Portuguese became official; the date when Galician began being used in literature; the date when Irish gained a written standard…
It is this association between language and written standard that justifies anyone considering Irish to be a new language, as described in the first part of the article — the Irish have spoken it for millennia, but their current written standard is more recent.
The association also explains why there are some people who consider Galician an invention of the 19th century: modern Galician literature was reborn in that century — but even so, to say that Galician was born in the 19th century would mean ignoring that there had already been much older texts written in the language of the Galicians.
10. History backwards
This way of looking at language history is quite misleading: no language starts by being written.
Focusing on the written standard is telling the history exactly backwards.
The history of the written use of languages is important and interesting, but it hides so much! We must accept that dates are difficult to establish when looking at the origin of languages. We could then discover…
… how Portuguese didn’t just appear from nowhere when the first documents showed up — even though it is very difficult to be certain about what happened before.
… how the word “mother” came from the Indo-European “méh₂tēr,” a form reconstructed from a language that no one wrote.
… how those Indo-Europeans never called themselves that and never wrote the word “méh₂tēr” — but in whatever form, the word “mother” existed in the mouths of real people who perceived and felt their language how we feel ours.
… how this “méh₂tēr” will also have come from another older “mother”, until we arrive at the day when someone first said the word “mother”…
This is just an example of how language just unfolds.
11. Language and clay
Human language, in all its variability, is like mouldable clay, always becoming something else.
Every once in a while, someone picks up a piece of this clay and bakes a standard language — but on the street people continue to play with the same material, changing the shape of the language until the rigid form of the standard breaks and has to to be replaced by something else.
Fortunately, the standard doesn’t have to be too solid, and it is good that it’s not, since only then do we guarantee that it doesn’t go the way of katharevousa (as described in the previous part).
The standard, being artificial, is not invented out of thin air — it is based in linguistic materials that already exist. The standard is a selection of linguistic materials that then acts as a force on those same materials, sometimes as a conscious political act, with more or less success, sometimes through unconscious mechanisms of approximation to the speech of the elite.
There were Greeks who tried to mould the clay to resemble Ancient Greek — they failed, though some words of this artificial standard survived. The Basques now teach a unified language and this process has been going well.
Curiously, the language of the Galicians and the Portuguese lived for centuries under different standards, but the common material is still there, allowing both people to understand each other, even without noticing how similar the clay is on both sides of the border.
People tend to look at those baked pieces of clay (standards) and think that’s what language is. Then, it is easy to ask: when was it baked? However, the mouldable clay in the hands of people in the street is where the real history of language happens.
12. What is the oldest language in the world?
Let us return to our question: what is the oldest language in the world?
The only reasonable answer is to explain that languages don’t have an age, as Gaston Dorren says. Languages change, go through phases, become subject to different standards, blend and influence each other. Along this complex course, we give them names and adopt them as flags of our identities. Therefore, it’s natural that we want to know when the flags were created.
Languages have names and seem to have histories with beginnings and endings. It is natural that, for instances, Portuguese speakers wish to know if Spanish is an older language than their own — but the answer, once again, can only be this: none of those languages were born, they were just moulded over the centuries, from previous materials, in a process that began many millennia ago — and keeps going.
We all speak the oldest language in the world. We speak what resulted from the uninterrupted succession of people speaking and mixing from the beginning of time — and so we will continue, endlessly moulding words in our mouths, for centuries to come.
This new version of the article was created by the author based on a previous translation by Jennifer King (Eurologos). You can find a Portuguese version here.