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> It's way older than English What does it mean for one language to be older than another? They are both Indo-European languages, so they are descended from a

> It's way older than English What does it mean for one language to be older than another? They are both Indo-European languages, so they are descended from a common ancestor and have each been continually evolving since then.

AlecSchueler 1y ago
What does it mean for me to be older than my sister, when we have exactly the same ancestry?
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  It means you were born before her, but that analogy doesn't work, as there is no event in the known history of English or Welsh that corresponds in an obvious way to "being born". It's more like saying that humans are (as a species) older than bonobos -- it's not even clear what that means let alone whether or not it's true. There is no identifiable specific date at which people were speaking something recognizably "Welsh" or recognizably "English" (as opposed to proto-Indo-European). Both those languages have been evolving continuously, changing slightly every generation, from the point at which they were the same language thousands of years ago until today. Just like there is no specific identifiable date at which a generation of organisms was born that was bonobos or humans rather than proto-Great Apes.
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    > Just like there is no specific identifiable date at which a generation of organisms was born that was bonobos or humans rather than proto-Great Apes. And yet you can talk about certain species being older than another can you not?
    - School-Cotton 1y ago
      No, I don't think you can. What would it mean?
      - AlecSchueler 1y ago
        I'm not sure how to answer this because people do it all the time. Dogs as a species are around 15-20,000 years old for example, while cows only branched off from aurochs around 10,000 years ago. Both species have common ancestory but they are distinct and we can trace their paths back and give approximate dates to the individual branches, exactly as we do for languages.
marcellus23 1y ago
Yeah, unless a modern Welsh speaker could go back in time to 1 AD and talk to native Britons, it doesn't make any sense. You may as well say that Italian is older than English because the Romans spoke Latin.
gerdesj 1y ago
Old English is generally considered to have arisen post Roman conquest of what we now call England. It is largely an amalgam (my term) of quite a lot of other languages extant at the time and then it took a life of its own. Prior to the Roman invasion (55,54BC and 43AD) and subsequent conquests, the predominant languages here were Brythonic or Brittanic. I believe that the last Cornish only speakers (a pair of sisters) passed away in the 1960s or 70s. The language has thankfully been revived somewhat and West Wales (Kernow) is rediscovering its roots. I also believe that shepherds across quite a lot of the modern UKoGB used to count their sheep in Cumbric numbers - the language of Cumbria (note how Cumbric looks suspiciously similar to Cwmru). Discussions about Indo-European languages is paleontology for language! I'm not so good with me Greek to work out the correct term. The notion of IE languages is analogous to fossils. We are talking about languages that are living, breathing and spoken. Obviously we must allow a bit of slack when ascribing certain attributes but I doubt any language scholar is going to get upset at Welsh being described as older than English. The history of these islands has involved invasion after invasion after invasion. How on earth that history has resulted into only a few nationalistic identities and one empire is quite something. Bear in mind that sea travel is far quicker than land when you don't have roads so being islands means easy access and not hard access.
- razakel 1y ago
  >I believe that the last Cornish only speakers (a pair of sisters) passed away in the 1960s or 70s. Allegedly her last words were "Me ne vidn cewsel Sawznek!" ("I don’t want to speak English!").
- hollerith 1y ago
  Old English descended from some other language (the name of which does not matter for the purpose of this comment). Just because some accident caused the name "Brythonic" to be applied to languages older than the oldest language with the name "English" says nothing about the importance or value of Brythonic relative to English. The assigning of names to no-longer-spoken languages is arbitrary enough that you cannot use the names to prove anything about reality.

AlecSchueler 1y ago

What does it mean for me to be older than my sister, when we have exactly the same ancestry?

School-Cotton 1y ago
It means you were born before her, but that analogy doesn't work, as there is no event in the known history of English or Welsh that corresponds in an obvious way to "being born". It's more like saying that humans are (as a species) older than bonobos -- it's not even clear what that means let alone whether or not it's true. There is no identifiable specific date at which people were speaking something recognizably "Welsh" or recognizably "English" (as opposed to proto-Indo-European). Both those languages have been evolving continuously, changing slightly every generation, from the point at which they were the same language thousands of years ago until today. Just like there is no specific identifiable date at which a generation of organisms was born that was bonobos or humans rather than proto-Great Apes.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  > Just like there is no specific identifiable date at which a generation of organisms was born that was bonobos or humans rather than proto-Great Apes. And yet you can talk about certain species being older than another can you not?
  - School-Cotton 1y ago
    No, I don't think you can. What would it mean?
    - AlecSchueler 1y ago
      I'm not sure how to answer this because people do it all the time. Dogs as a species are around 15-20,000 years old for example, while cows only branched off from aurochs around 10,000 years ago. Both species have common ancestory but they are distinct and we can trace their paths back and give approximate dates to the individual branches, exactly as we do for languages.

marcellus23 1y ago

Yeah, unless a modern Welsh speaker could go back in time to 1 AD and talk to native Britons, it doesn't make any sense. You may as well say that Italian is older than English because the Romans spoke Latin.

gerdesj 1y ago

Old English is generally considered to have arisen post Roman conquest of what we now call England. It is largely an amalgam (my term) of quite a lot of other languages extant at the time and then it took a life of its own. Prior to the Roman invasion (55,54BC and 43AD) and subsequent conquests, the predominant languages here were Brythonic or Brittanic. I believe that the last Cornish only speakers (a pair of sisters) passed away in the 1960s or 70s. The language has thankfully been revived somewhat and West Wales (Kernow) is rediscovering its roots. I also believe that shepherds across quite a lot of the modern UKoGB used to count their sheep in Cumbric numbers - the language of Cumbria (note how Cumbric looks suspiciously similar to Cwmru). Discussions about Indo-European languages is paleontology for language! I'm not so good with me Greek to work out the correct term. The notion of IE languages is analogous to fossils. We are talking about languages that are living, breathing and spoken. Obviously we must allow a bit of slack when ascribing certain attributes but I doubt any language scholar is going to get upset at Welsh being described as older than English. The history of these islands has involved invasion after invasion after invasion. How on earth that history has resulted into only a few nationalistic identities and one empire is quite something. Bear in mind that sea travel is far quicker than land when you don't have roads so being islands means easy access and not hard access.

razakel 1y ago
>I believe that the last Cornish only speakers (a pair of sisters) passed away in the 1960s or 70s. Allegedly her last words were "Me ne vidn cewsel Sawznek!" ("I don’t want to speak English!").
hollerith 1y ago
Old English descended from some other language (the name of which does not matter for the purpose of this comment). Just because some accident caused the name "Brythonic" to be applied to languages older than the oldest language with the name "English" says nothing about the importance or value of Brythonic relative to English. The assigning of names to no-longer-spoken languages is arbitrary enough that you cannot use the names to prove anything about reality.