Re: Age of langs (was Tempus)

Nik Taylor wrote:
>Andreas Johansson wrote:
> > How could that be, when Italian is descended from Latin?
>
>In the same sense that I as a 22-year old am older than I was when I was
>15.
>
> > To get back to the earlier question, whether it's possible to say that
>one
> > natlang is older than another, I think the answer is yes, under certain
> > conditions. Obviously a language must be younger than its ancestors and
> > older than its daughter langs.
>
>"Old" is a bit ambiguous.  One could just as easily say that a language
>is older than its ancestors, and younger than its descendants, in that
>the whole continuum of that language, traced back to the first speech,
>is longer than that of its ancestors.
OK, I see your point. I cannot, however, resist to point out that by your
logic I can claim to be older than my great-grandfather, who before I was
born! I'm afterall separated from the beginning of mankind by a few more
years ... (And in a sense all humanity during the ages is little more than
mere recombinations of the initial gene-pool).

                                                      Andreas
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