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Languages have different ages. Now obviously you can’t ever draw a clean, exact line between when one language becomes another, but there are also clearly disti
by nkrisc 4y ago
Languages have different ages. Now obviously you can’t ever draw a clean, exact line between when one language becomes another, but there are also clearly distinct languages and those distinctions can be given upper and lower bounds in terms of dates.
Latin is clearly distinct from English, even though both languages share a common ancestor and English itself was heavily influenced by Latin, both directly and indirectly. Yet it is still useful to make the distinction between them as separate languages and what we call Latin is clearly older than what we call English.
I don’t think it’s at all useful to say Latin and English are the really the same age, even if it’s technically true per your definition.
It's a bit like saying all species are the same age because we all share a common ancestor and there's no exact date when you can say one species became another.
- akolbe 4y agoI'd say they're complementary perspectives. Latin is of course clearly older than (Modern) English, because it was spoken 2,000 years ago, whereas English is spoken today. But Mediaeval Latin was spoken at the same time as Old English; while Latin turned into Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian etc., Old English turned into Modern English. Arguably, these are just quirks of nomenclature. It's just an accident of history that Old English and Modern English are both called "English", because the difference between Old English and Modern English is just as great (if not greater) as the difference between Latin and Spanish. The verbal paradigm in Spanish for example retains far more similarities to Latin verb conjugation than is the case with Old and Modern English.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> Latin is of course clearly older than (Modern) English, because it was spoken 2,000 years ago, whereas English is spoken today. No. That makes Latin younger than modern English, not older.
- h4n1 4y agoLatin is "older" than English because Latin has been fossilized for over a thousand years due to having no native speakers. A better example would be French and English. Neither is "older" than the other since both are spoken and learned anew every day. Of course languages known to us only from a certain time period are associated with that time period. They're a snapshot of that linguistic tradition. Living language traditions don't really permit comparisons of age, because they exist in the present.