88: No such thing as the oldest language

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there's an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how humans are all descended from other humans, even though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are shaped by contact with other languages. We don't even know whether the oldest language(s) was/were spoken or signed, or even whether there was a singular common ancestor language or several. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what people mean when we talk about a language as being old. We talk about how classifying languages as old or classical is often a political or cultural decision, how the materials that are used to write a language influence whether it gets preserved (from clay to bark), and how people talk about creoles and signed languages in terms of oldness and newness. And finally, how a language doesn't need to be justified in terms of its age for whether it's interesting or worthy of respect. Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/739896819002277888/transcript-episode-88-every-language-is-an-old For links to things mentioned in this episode:https://lingthusiasm.com/post/739896689822990336/lingthusiasm-episode-88-no-such-thing-as-the

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:22.9	I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:24.2	And I'm Lauren Gorn, and today we're getting enthusiastic about old languages.
0:28.4	But first, our most recent bonus episode was deleted scenes with three of our interviews from this year.
0:33.1	We had deleted scenes from our live show Q&A with Kirby Conrad about language and gender.
0:39.8	We talked about reflexive pronouns, multiple pronouns in fiction, and talking about people who use multiple pronoun sets.
0:46.3	We also have an excerpt from our interview with the Chaso Rodriguez-Odunias about Basque, because it's famous among linguists for having ergativity.
0:55.7	We wanted to know what do Basque people themselves think about ergativity. It turns out there are jokes and cartoons about it
1:01.5	which Icasa was able to share with us. Amazing and charming. And finally, we have an excerpt from my
1:07.0	conversation with authors Ada Palmer and Joe Walton about swearing in science fiction
1:11.5	fantasy. This excerpt talks about acronyms, both of the swary and non-sweary kind.
1:17.0	You can get this bonus episode, as well as a whole bunch more, at patreon.com slash
1:21.8	enthusiasm. Also, yeah, maybe this is a good time to remember that we have over 80 bonus episodes.
1:27.8	We have bonus episodes about the time a researcher smuggled a bunny into a classroom to do linguistics on children.
1:34.9	We also have a bonus episode about the Quick Brown Fox jumps over the lazy dog and more phrases that contain all the letters of the alphabet,
1:42.4	plus what people do with phrases like this
1:44.8	in languages that don't have alphabets.
1:47.0	We also have an entire bonus episode that's just about the linguistics of numbers.
1:51.5	So if you wish you had more Lingthusiasm episodes to listen to right now, or if you just
1:56.2	want to help us keep making this podcast long into the future, we really appreciate everyone
2:00.4	who becomes a patron.
2:01.6	And you can find all of that at patreon.com slash linkthusiasm.
	...

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