Re: Tempus

Frank George Valoczy wrote:
>
> Tempus is latin for "time, tense"
>
> And I think we can indeed say one natlang is older than another. Icelandic
> is older than Norwegian; Latin is older than Italian; Lithuanian is
> probably older than any other IE language...
Older in what sense?  They've all been around, in one form or another,
since whenever it was that humans began to speak.  One can say that
Icelandic is more *CONSERVATIVE* than Norwegian, but they're both
equally old, being descended from proto-Germanic, which was descended
from proto-Indo-European which was descended from something or other,
possibly ultimately from proto-World, if monogenesis is correct.

Well, I suppose that if the hypothesis of polygenesis is correct, then
some languages would be somewhat older than others, but not by much.
And probably not the ones we'd think, either.  :-)

And actually, wouldn't Italian be about 2,000 years older than Latin?

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