Re: Age of langs (was Tempus)

David Peterson wrote:
>        Those are very good points for claiming that there should be no
>language names at all, because they're really all the same thing.  However,
>you seem to be claiming something entirely different that can't be derrived
>from the evidence you're giving.  Anyway, that's only one way of looking at
>it: Namely, diachronically.  If you look at it synchronically, however, the
>isolated version of English spoken today can be classified as one language,
>as compared to other isolated versions of other language.  With this way of
>looking at it, there are tons more languages then people say there are now,
>and there boundaries are definite.  I tend to look at things that way.
>And,
>of course, classifications such as "older" and "younger" do apply.  Things
>like "more or less conservative" are total judgment calls and shouldn't
>even
>be entered into any sort of discussion about language, in my opinion.
Now, I still don't see what's "of course" about the designations of langs as
"older" and "younger". Do you mean that, say, English is older than, say,
Xhosa since the former have longer written history? Also, shouldn't old and
young be moot in a SYNCHRONICAL perspective?

Also, why are "[t]hings like "more or less conservative" are total judgment
calls"? To take my standard example: Norwegian and Icelandic both descend
from fornvästnordiska*. If you compare the lexicons, morphologies, grammar
etc you'll find that on most points Icelandic is closer to fornvästnordiska
than what Norwegian is. How isn't this proof that Icelandic is more
conservative than Norwegian?

                                               Andreas

* Sorry, I don't know the correct English name for this. "Old West Nordic"
is a fairly literal translation anyway, and it's the common ancestor of
Norwegian, Faeroese and Iclandic after it split off from the common ancestor
of these and Swedish and Danish.
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