Re: Age of langs (was Tempus)
| From: | Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, March 8, 2001, 20:56 |
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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.
--
Cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon
A nation without a language is a nation without a heart - Welsh proverb
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