Re: Indo European Origins

[Tim May]

On Tuesday, January 14, 2003, at 08:25  AM, Ken Brown wrote:

Tim May wrote:

All contemporary natural languages, like all biological species, are
the same age.

This statement is so silly it leaves me speechless...

Getting my breath back,

Of course some might change more slowly than others (Greek seems to
have
a;ltered less than Latin in 2500 years), or might remain in one place
longer than others (it is silly to say that Welsh is an older language
than English, but it is older in Britain)

Nonsense. Icelandic is little changed from the Old Norse of 1000 A.D.
Icelanders can easily read the sagas without help; modern Danes and
Norwegians cannot. English, by contrast, is substantially different
from just the Middle English of Chaucer, let alone the Old English of
Beowulf.

Er, that's exactly what I said - they are the same age, but some change
more slowly than others...
and I did warn that I was being unreasonably pedantic.

Modern English is only a few centuries old, you seem to agree (with your comments about Old and Middle English). Arabic is basically what it was at the time Mohammed wrote the Koran.

Comparing the ages, then, of English with Arabic, or Chinese with Japanese, or Urdu with German, and then saying "they are the same age," is silly.

Arabic is older than both English and Middle English, but roughly the same age as Old English. Some world languages are definitely younger than others. Japanese, for example, did not even exist in any recognizable form until long after Confucian-era texts which are still readable today.

How then can a claim be made that Japanese and Chinese are the same age?

--Tim May
"Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and
strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound"