Age of various language families]

[Leo A. Connolly]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I've got to agree with Jens: the question makes no sense, even if it is
rephrased to refer to "time depth" or the like.  More at the end

Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote:

>There just is no such thing as a rule of language survival. Tribes and
>peoples influence each other by domination and genocide, some disappear by
>famine or floods. The oldest language group of all may have completely
>vanished, the most proliferate may be of quite recent making (as a
>split-off from something which has not remained or cannot be made out to
>be related). The whole expectation the rpompted the question is based
on a
>monumental mistake. Sorry, but that's how clear it is to me.

Mikael Parkvall replied:

>I think there is one important flaw in this reasoning. First of all,
let us
>limit ourselves to proto-languages which have descendants today --
>otherwise, we'd simply get too speculative. Secondly, note that when I
>(somewhat sloppily perhaps) used the word "age", what I really meant is
>"time depth". In other words, the "age" of a given family is defined by
the
>first known split-up.

There's a very large problem with this version too.  Languages don't
always split.  Consider Latin and Greek in the first century BC.  Rome
was already a world power power.  Latin had spread over much of Europe
and would continue to spread for the next few centuries.  Greek had also
spread far beyone the boundaries of Greece and would continue to spread
for a bit.  (Remember, in the first century AD, Greek was more commonly
spoken in Rome than Latin, mainly because of immigration from the
eastern parts of the Roman empire.)  And what has happened since?  Latin
has split into several distinct Romance languages.  And Greek, instead
of splitting, was simply abandoned over much of the area it once ruled.
So we now have -- Greek.  Yet 2000 years ago, each was a flourishing
"world language".  (The world was smaller in those days.)  Yeah, yeah,
they're both Indo-European languages, not families.  But the principle
is the same: some split, some don't, so we can't tell the age or time
depth of a language family by the number of members, even if extinct
languages are included in the count.

Leo Connolly