How old is language?
 

And which one is the oldest?



I was looking it up today, and couldn't really find a definite answer.
Some say Chinese or Egyptian, while others say Sumerian.
Gestures have been around since the dawn of man.
Speech probably followed by drawing and writing.

Any thoughts?

the languages of the Khoi peoples in South Africa and in particular Namibia are considered the most ancient lanuages in the world, just as these peoples DNA have been traced to be the oldest continuous lineage. of course, there is obviously the taint of the current academic 'afrocentricism' which looks at Africa as the center of everything. still, the clicking language is clearly ancient, if not the most ancient, and next in the line are the Semitic languages of the Horn of Africa, which eventually spread across the world. the semitic hard "ch" is the descendent of the vocal click. I believe there are something like twelve or 14 different kinds of clicks as well... for being ancient it actually seems kind of complicated and cumbersome to contemporary speach patterns.

well the oldest languages are as old as man himself, but these are dead languages - they weren't written down, and no one now speaks or understands them.
but it depends what you base "oldest" on. if it is what language was written down first, it would probably by egyptian or sumerian.
but the first humans (africans found about 100,000 years ago) had modern vocal cords so they would have had spoken language.

I think the earliest record of a written language 'system' is from Egypt.

when does something become "language" though?

it's likely the first species of apes (that's if you don't believe in adam and eve of course) were already communicating in some vocal way, albeit in a very primitive way that just meant roaring/shouting to strangers invading their territory etc.

but that wasn't really a language as it didn't have a certain set of rules. it's an interesting question, especially when you think of things like the first rules that were made, the first grammar and the first "translations" between languages, etc.

I find hand gestures and body language particularly interesting.

Oh yeah?

animals have body language and maybe even "gestures" too... so body language could be older than the dinosaurs (if animals can be considered to have a "real" language that is).

"10"?

you mean 10 what?

That's what I'm thinking.

Writing isn't necessarily needed to define a language.
Just take a look on the forum for example.

I thought he was clutching two imaginary mystical Ice Orbs.

True.
It's interesting in that regard that Aboriginal languages, which may actually be the world's oldest "still existing languages", had never been written down until Europeans arrived a little over 200 years ago.


one simple image and we're already lost in translation.

I might be mistaken here, but I think that is also true of the Hmong language.

which would make a point that a written language is not necessary for developping a fashion sense.

Even the deaf and blind use an appropriate language.

It's the standard historical belief that the Sumerians in ancient Babylonia developed a symbolic language first. One that, albeit primitive, incorporated characters and is alike in that respect to what we know today as language. The Egyptians similarly developed language around the same time period around three thousand years before the common era. And around fifteen hundred years B.C.E., the Sumerians were also the first to take this symbolic language and utilize it to incorporarate rules for early civilization in the codification of laws; i.e., Hammurabi's Code.

SuchFriendsAreDangerous may be absolutely correct though because simple language that facilitated the communication of ideas between early humans occurred much, much earlier and up to a hundred thousand years before the common era. So, the "standard historical belief" arising from ancient Babylon I wrote of earlier is thought of as the first perversion of communication according to Rastafarians.

And then there's William S. Burroughs who flippantly declared that, "language is a virus from outer space."
Well, life itself may have came from outer space in the form of amino acids present in meteorite debris that interacted chemically with elements on Earth. But at any rate, on the lighter side, here's Laurie Anderson's "Language is a Virus" from her Home of the Brave concert film from 1986.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FeyGTmw0I0

communication is NOT language.
hand gestures and grunts can communicate basic things but that is not language. language is the use of specific vocal "symbols"

Language isn't only about words. Algebra which consists of symbols is a good example of that.

Fair points all. There's a superlative argument from Derrida's Writing and Difference that I haven't the time to do justice to here, but those interested in the epistemological bases of language, and the alleged 'opposition' between the written and the spoken (and all that falls between) would do well to read that book.

algebra is not an actual language. it is a mathematical notation system. language is needed BEFORE anything in algebra makes any sense.

I think an interesting point not brought up, is the language of internal dialogue. did humans invent vocal language to represent the ideas in their heads, or did ideas evolve in parallel with developments in language.

Human language or just language? Because I'm pretty sure the Dinosaurs had a language.

What about the international language? That's been around a pretty long while.

esperanto? esperanto sucks.

I think that human brain development was sped up by the creation of language. language allows one to maintain specific information in one's head, easily trasnefrable to someone else's head, just by talking. written language came much much later than that.
I think that human thought occurs without language. look at stories of children raised without language or people near them. their brains do not think in language.

Correct, but I'm talking about language in a broader sense of the word.
Why would you think that it's ONLY possible to speak a language when you have vocal cords?

That book Glice mentioned looks interesting.

SuchFriends' post about internal dialogue is interesting.

And Rob is first-rate with his terminology yet again.

I never said it was only possible to have language if one has vocal chords.
What I am saying is there is no evidence whatsoever that dinosaurs had language.
many birds (mynah, ravens, parrots) can "speak words" but they are not using those words as language, more of a phonetic pronunciation.

one can go threough life without language. it is possible to learn survival skills, and to co-exist in group dynamic without language, just sounds and gestures. humans and pre-humans and apes and monkeys and such would have and still do live like this.

for a sound symbol system to be language it has to be able to accomdate new ideas and new words and new concepts whether concrete or abstract.
gestures and grunts do not accomplish this.

to answer this you'd have to answer about the age of the language organs-- not jsut in the throat but in the brain.

was it homo sapiens? was it before? good luck finding that out.

to those board members whose 1st language was not english, is it hard to learn?

my 1st language was spanish.

english is actually easy to learn for comprehension, but pronunciation and spelling are quite difficult.

english is such a mish-mosh of words from all sorts of different languages that there is no "system" to figure out pronunciation or spelling.

english is a piece of cake when it comes to grammar. pronounciation and spelling on the other hand can be a bitch.

explain the difference

wild
wilderness

wtf, i ask...

in spanish, what you see is what you get. only c and g change their sound (a, o, u -- e, i) , and the h is mute (ha) but those are small quirks. also, we have less vowels (vowel sounds, you see). so for us it's basically a-e-i-o-u that sound sorta like "ah" "eh" "ee" "oh" "uh" no matter where you put them. in english, the written vowels can indicate any number of sounds. nuts.

verb tenses however are much harder in french, spanish, etc. also, we use sentences with multiple clauses and long multisyllabic words that confuse the bejeezus out of english speakers.

Some scientists claim that dolphins call each other by name when they whistle.
Others say that they simply recognise vocal inflection of other dolphins.

My first languages were Italian and Spanish. At school I learnt Engish and now I speak mostly Dutch.
It's a bitch because I often mix up the word order of sentences.

sorry

Hahahahhahahahahha !!!!!

Sonic Youth fans can be a very clever bunch when they feel like it. I wonder if the Slipknot forum has threads like this.

The Sapir Whorf Hypothesis is very interesting, someone has mentioned it on the boards before.
I was speaking to a Polish lady a few days ago, she could speak Russian and was on about how she thinks in her head with one language and then speaks another, I find this strange, but then I can't speak any other language.

Your post made me think of Firefox, one of Clint Eastwood's less artistically successful pictures.

That maybe true, but I haven't seen that film in ages, and your mentioning it has made me want to. I remember reading the book as a kid after seeing the film and being such a fan I even read the sequal, Firefox Down. My nerdishness knew no bounds even then, I'm afraid.

Anyway, didn't mean to hijack the thread.

It's pretty widely discredited; unfortunately, they get a little excited about their salient points and draw inferences that are incredibly deterministic and narrow-minded. Benjamin Whorff was a fascinating character though, there was a wonderful secondary text on him about his days as a salesman. Well worth a read - I couldn't tell you what it was called, but I could tell you where it was located in the library I read it in (2nd floor, the linguistics/ child education section by the door, second cabinet, third shelf down and about 6 from the left).