"Dead" languages

[Max Wheeler]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

[Lars Martin Fosse]

> is not really my point: My point is rather the relevance of the term "dead
> language". The term dead depends upon the definition. If by "dead" you mean
> "not learned on mother's knee", both Latin and Sanskrit are dead languages
> (although I would not feel entirely certain that not some Brahmin children
> learn Skt. on their mother's knee - I have met Sanskrit speaking women). But
> is this really an interesting definition? We would probably all agree that
> Latin is a dead language today, just like Old Norse (in Scandinavia, with the
> exception of Iceland), Old English or Chuch Slavonic. But is it an
> interesting proposition to claim that Latin was dead, say, 500 years ago? As
> long as a language is used for general communication among groups of people,
> production of literature as well as a vocabulary source for vernaculars, the
> claim that it is dead sounds a bit strange. Hittite is dead, Akkadian is
> dead, Osco-Umbrian is dead: None of these languages have any use today and
> are only studied as literary sources. But when you have heard an Indian
> scholar talk for an hour in splendid Sanskrit - and heard him exchange jokes
> in Sanskrit with a colleague a bit later - then the term dead seems
> nonsensical. Which is why I think we need to modify our thinking: not to
> "win" the discussion by introducing a new linguistic term, but because
> realities are not covered by the concepts we use.

It's OK, of course, to query the applicability of the "death" metaphor to
languages. But in linguistics, and, in particular, historical linguistics,
isn't there a consesnus to take "dead" language to mean precisely one which has
no native speakers, that is, speakers who learnt the language informally, by
face-to-face interaction with other speakers --I was about to say "with other
native speakers" and then remembered the case of Hebrew which came to have
native speakers again after being 'dead' for two millennia.

The name usually used for e.g. Sanskrit, Arabic, Latin, or Hebrew while it had
no native speakers, is "classical language". Such a language may well have an
extremely wide range of functions, but is learnt formally, through instruction,
by people who have some distinct native language.

So Old English, Akkadian, Ancient Egyptian, and so on are [+dead, -classical],
while Sanskrit, Latin (in Middle Ages and Rensaissance, at least) are [+dead,
+classical]

Max Wheeler
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Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
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