(Part 2) Which has the longest language history, China or the West?

Hi xiaophil

Sorry, I feel there's somthing strange/funny about your argument, although I can't explain that properly now. I'll further look into your claim later.

Xiaophil,

Haha !

I'd still go for Greek.

I suppose the answer partly depends on how you define "The West". Most people wouldn't include the Middle East as part of the West, in which case discussion about Sumerian is redundant. Do we define "The West" geographically as Europe ? Within Europe do we exclude those languages which do not take centre-stage (eg Greek)? Do we define "The West" culturally, to include North America, Australia etc ? Do we emphasise only the English-speaking part of the West, or that which uses English as the Lingua Franca ?

It is true that Greek (not Latin) is no longer the Lingua Franca which it was in Classical times, but Greece laid the foundations of modern western society even more than Rome ( through Rome).

I suggest that if the sentence:

"No modern language is as old as Chinese.  Even Chinese primary students can read a Tang poem." 

raised your hackles, and the question is: "Which has the longest language history, China or the West?"

In the West we have Greece.

I rest my case   :-)

When my Latin teacher in 10th grade eventually gave up all hopes that we will ever get a grip (we were his worst class ever he claimed), he started handing out medieval Latin texts.

That was quite fun, as it was Latin vocab - but completely with German grammar (logic, sentence structure etc.). So you just took out the dictionary and did a word-by-word translation. Imagine: Reading Chinese that way. We would all be fluent in no time.

Pete

I was hoping you would chime in.  Actually, Yeah, I read about that.  I'm not so sure language evolution kills my argument, but it certainly is no friend of it.  I'm wondering if you know how much the style of written Chinese evolved between the 2nd century until the early 20th century?  Possibly not much as I know Chinese were often hell-bent on maintaining form.  Anyway, I didn't see a clear answer during my brief research period. 

Changye

Please tell me.  To tell you the truth, one problem could be I didn't represent myself well.  Because of time limitations, I wasn't able to polish this.

Henning

To tell you the truth, I'm a little jelous of you because I wish I could've studied Latin.  I know, a strange regret.

Hi xiaophil,

First, Latin is a wonderful language with a rich body of literature. If you ever get the chance to study it, I strongly recommend jumping on it.

Second, Chinese did change quite a bit over the centuries. Serious students of classical Chinese may have dozens of dictionaries, each for specific eras and genres. In my own limited experience, documents from, for example, the Song are markedly different from, say, Han texts.

Even within classical Latin there was evolution. A famous quote about the poet Vergil states that like his contemporary Augustus, who found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble, the author of the Aeneid found Latin a crude language and left it majestic and grand. An exaggeration, of course ;-)

And I'm not the only one who loves Vergil.

Pete

Haha, that link was a surprise.  

我倾向同意pete的观点. 楷书我觉得是现代中文的起源。讲的有道理，不过像他说的一样，总会有人抱着另一个看法，那也不是错，只是要看从什么样的因素来算。有人会，说甲骨文就算是中文的起源，还有人会说大篆或者小篆才算是。我倒不过认为因为楷书是一直被采用，而除了被简化意外，没通过大改革，所以从这点可以表达起自己的观点。

我对拉丁语不大熟悉，除了in vino veritas意外，都不认识、都看不懂。

miantiao

我跟你同意，说实话我觉得所有的观点都有点willy-nilly。

我最喜欢的拉丁语俗话是tempus fugit，是因为这个有点误导，像脏话一样，不过真正的意思根本没设么坏意思。

Again, I'd like to suggest that Greek has the oldest attested pedigree of all modern european languages, showing a more or less continuous development over about 3500 years (since linear B was deciphered). Of course, the written form is more recent, but predates Roman script. It would be fascinating to compare the ability of a modern chinese to comprehend ancient chinese language and texts with a modern greek speaker's ability to do the same with his own language.

Here are a few quotes from native greek-speakers which I found on the internet:

Ancient Greek is quite intelligible by a modern greek-speaking person, but there are different levels of difficulty. For example, the Koine (common greek language after 300 BC) is very easy for me to understand. The new Testament that is originally written in the Koine language can be easily understood by the majority of modern greeks. So can the ancient greek tragedies and comedies which are written in attic greek (500-400 BC), but they are a little more difficult. However the original texts of Homer's works (800-700 BC) are not so easy to understand. In the past these texts used to be taught in the high school (my parents had been taught them). Nowadays the translated in new greek texts are prefered, because of the difficulty of Homer's idiom (he used ionic greek with aeolic greek elements). Even older texts (before 1100 BC) in Linear B scriptures (which use the syllabical system) are partially understandable, only if someone is used to that system of scripture

So, to sum up, I would say that modern day greeks won't have much trouble to read something in Koine and Byzantine Greek since it's very close grammatically and lexilogically to the modern language. When ancient (mostly Attican) language comes into consideration then most of greeks won't get it immediately but will have to think a little or even ask someone's help in order to understand a phrase. Nevertheless a greek would probably get the meaning out of a carved script (for example on ancient statues, pottery or columns in a museum) but won't usually try to do it since carved text doesn't have spaces and it will take quite a lot of time to separate the words and then find the meaning...

I'm Greek so of course I speak modern Greek!
I do understand most ancient Greek as I read plays and some things in it and definitely could keep a conversation with someone who speaks ancient!
Ancient Greek is also taught here in schools so many Greeks could also speak some ancient Greek if they'd had to!
In overall it still has many similarities it's just very old fashioned, maybe in some ways you could compare it to modern American English to Shakespearean or Medieval English! :)

Obviously the fact that greeks are taught ancient greek at school influences their ability to understand, but I think that the final sentence in the last quote is salient....."...it's just very old-fashioned..." .    The language of Chaucer is recognisably English, and we can understand some Chaucer without schooling, but would need an extended course of study to fully understand Middle English.

Hi xiaophil

I have two questions. Firstly, what is the topic of this thread? Is it "what language has the longest history? ", or "what character set has the longest history of retaining same shapes?" I'm a little confused now. Secondly, is it important to consider spoken and written forms separately when talking about which language (or character set?) has the longest history?

Hi xiaophil,

Medieval Latin is actually quite different from the classical Latin of the Caesars. I'm not sure about the relative differences between Classical Chinese and modern/classical latin and medieval, but they are significant. It's a little bit of an oversimplification for us to think of Latin as "continuous" all through Ancient Rome through the Renaissance.

Yeah, my objective isn't clear.  Mostly because I haven't had the time to do this properly.  Anyway, I'm trying to hit multiple aspects of Western and Chinese language, i.e. which one started first, which one consolidated into a stable literary/written tradition first and which one has had the longest, most stable oral tradition.  Right now I am on the written part.  The next and last installment will look into the oral languages of China and the West. 

user21377 pretty much has it.

Oops, more later.  Got to go.

"Therefore, for many, many years written and oral Chinese were two different languages."

Yes, I've heard the same argument regarding Sumerian writing, ie that it may have been very different from the way they actually spoke and that this is why people speak of Sumerian as a language isolate.

Xiaophil,

It may be that trying to discover which language started first is impossible to determine. Language is constantly changing. You first have to define the parameters within which we can identify a language as being "such and such" a language..... at what stage of development does a language cease to be of one 'variety' and begin to be another.

For example, how far back does English go ? At what point was it not English ? 1000 years ago English was a dialect of German....Old English has much more in common with modern German than with modern English, so can we say that English and German are the same or different languages ? (rhetorical question).

Scholars are agreed that English, German, most European languages, Persian and ancient Indian are of the 'Indo European' language family; that these languages developed from a common 'Root Language'. Chinese is said to be of the 'Sino-Tibetan' language family, which is distinct from Indo European. So is our task, reductio ad absurdam, to identify which of these two language families arose first ? It is complicated by the possibility that all world-languages ultimately arose from a single primeval "Proto-Language".

First I think it is necessary to define the limits of what we are to recognise as a single language.

I know it's just a bit of fun really  :-)

user21377

Thanks for sharing about the Greek language.  I did know that modern Greeks had some ability to read old texts, but I had no idea how extensive their ability was. 

As for the impact of Greek on the West, yes, that has been enormous.  Anybody that has some interest in the Roman Empire knows that educated Romans went out of their way to get a Greek education.  Later on the Empire divided into two divisions.  The Western half spoke Latin Vulgar and a multitude of other languages.  Pretty much the Eastern half was homogenous Greek.  Thus, the Greeks did to their conquerors what the Chinese always did to theirs-conquered them culturally.

I thought it was best to emphasize Latin in this case because it basically was for close to 2000 years (give or take a several hundred years) the lingua franca of the West.  After that, French, a derivative of Latin Vulgar, became the standard, and of course after that, English, a language loaded with Norman and Latin words (okay, a bunch of Greek words too, but less so) became the de facto international standard.  Furthermore, a good many languages in the West are Latin Vulgar derived.  Greek on the other hand, sadly, was isolated due to the Ottoman Empire, and thus its influence waned outside of its sphere. Another problem is that the division of the Church into the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church pretty much ensured that Latin would always trump Greek in the West due to physical proximity.

So basically, Latin, while not necessarily the oldest and richest language, is strategically the best one overall to bolster my argument by showing that she has been a consistent and powerful thread in Western history.

You are right.  Creating parameters would be the right thing to do.  I think I am too biased, though.  I would just set the conditions to favor my aim.  Hahaha.

But this is just fun ;).

Hi xiaophil

Sorry, I should have posted this comment here, but no in the first thread of this theme.

Hi xiaophil

Spoken forms and written forms in a language are two sides of the same coin, even if they are very different in some ways from each other. In any languages, written and spoken forms are, more or less, different. More importantly, there has been no language that only has a written form, although there have been a lot of languages that don't have written forms/characters.

Unfortunately, almost all the historical records are, of course, recorded in written languages. Even Chinese 白话小说 (novels written in colloquial Chinese, appeared about a thousand years ago) don't exactly represent actual spoken Chinese in those days. In short, you have no choice but to discuss this kind of issue mainly based on written languages, but not based on spoken ones.

Hi changye (no problem.)

I am going to make one final short essay regarding this topic and it will focus on oral languages.  I don't want to reveal too much as then there won't be a reason to write it.

But you are right.  I am treating oral and written languages differently, and I would argue that is legitimate.  One reason is simply because they are easier to compare this way.  Another has to do with how this topic started in my head.  That Chinese expert said something like, "No modern language is as old as Chinese.  Even Chinese primary students can read a Tang poem."  Obviously, Tang poetry is written, so I focused on that aspect of language. 

Just to add a little more.  I feel that if a written language cannot in general be understood by someone unfamiliar with that written language's system when spoken out loud, then they are not the same language.  They may be related, but since they are not both mutually intelligible to those who are unfamiliar with one but not the other, how can they be the same language?  I know people, possibly you, will disagree, but this is the way I look at it.  Possibly because this is the way languages were, as far as I know, perceived in the West. Written Latin is similar to Spoken Latin; written English is similar to spoken English and so on.  Therefore, I disagree with the Chinese expert when he says Tang poetry is the same language.  It is no different than Westerners learning Latin, i.e. we wouldn't call Latin the same language as the one we use at home.  This doesn't mean that Tang poetry doesn't share heritage with modern Mandarin, though.  They are clearly part of the same historical lineage.

Anyway, I wish I could have told all this in my essay(s), but since the purpose was also to write Chinese, perhaps it was a bit much to get everything correct and clear.

Hi xiaophil

Looks like you'd like to make the problem even more complicated. I see no point in your remark below:

I feel that if a written language cannot in general be understood by someone unfamiliar with that written language's system when spoken out loud, then they are not the same language.

I think most Chinese people have difficulty understanding the text below only by listening to it.

士为知己者死，女为悦己者容；子期死，伯牙叹曰：从此天下，更无知音。窃为今日衲子之叹也！佛徒教世人，诸恶莫作，众善奉行，以布施为第一波罗蜜。今日社会上行慈善者，施财施物，施衣施食，救济贫穷困苦者，皆受佛教教化而来。不受佛教因果之教化，而肯行布施者未之有也。曾见新学者，见他人以一铜币与乞者， 犹谓与之不当，况肯自将财物施人乎？今之不信佛教者，责佛徒不行慈善，其不知佛教之慈善，行之早矣，天下之慈善多是佛教产生。不过是直接教人自行布施，救 济贫苦，买放生命。不同其他，集施者之财物，行自己之慈善耳。

This text was written by a modern Chinese author at the end of 20th century. Actually, this kind of old-style Chinese is still often used in modern China. Do you think it's not Chinese? I don't think so. It's only a matter of difference in writing style.

On the other hand, there are some "easy to read" texts written with oracle bone scripts more than 3,000 years ago. Here are some examples. Do you think they are NOT Chinese? I don't think so. Modern Chinese people can easily read and understand them.

王来 King comes.
子死 A child dies.
我往河 I go to a river.
王获白鹿 King got a white dear.

Hi Changye

Yeah, I know what you mean.  Your examples make a good point.  It seems defining languages is tough.  This page talks about this exact problem.

I would like to point out you said, "Some are easy to read."  That poem is quite simple.  Seems like an exception to the rule.  So if some poems are easy to read, this means all writings from the period can automatically be included as being the same language as modern Chinese even though Chinese people need special training to understand most of them?  Perhaps the answer is yes.  But I have trouble accepting that anything written or said is a part of the same Chinese language just because it was derived from some written or spoken tradition in China.  When do we draw the line?  I do feel like I might have started climbing a slippery slope, though.

Excellent points, Changye.

I'm a bit confused about this myself....the discussion itself seems of a much more general nature than the topic.  That's okay, though.

I think the topic is about the language which has the oldest continuous ATTESTED history, and which has changed the least over time.

Not sure, though.