On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 07:42 AM, Ken Brown wrote:
"R. A. Hettinga" wrote:<pedant mode ON>At 4:25 PM -0500 on 1/9/03, Trei, Peter wrote:I remember someone saying somewhere, probably on PBS, that Basque is *very*Basque is unique, as you say
old, paleolithic, and lots of popular mythology has cropped up that it's
the closest living relative to some other ur-language, which even
Indo-European is derived from.
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,
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. I took a class in "The Canterbury Tales," in the original with a side-by-side translation, from a Chaucer scholar. A few recognizable words, a few familar patterns. But quite clearly there has been significant evolution of English in the past half-millennium. By contrast, the Koran is readable in the original by modern Arabs.
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)
Other such examples abound.
--Tim May
