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I came across this image from facebook posted by my tamil-speaking friends:
In this scan of a QA from some paper, the writers say that Tamil might be one of the oldest still spoken languages possibly dating back to 10,000 years and then says that it could be the root of Sanskrit, which in turn could be the root of all other languages. This all sounds very far-fetched for me from whatever little I have learned about the origins of languages and what wikipedia says about Tamil (but some references cited there are 25 years old). Can someone who is versed with the history of languages tell me if the claims in that image are true, and if yes, point me to some sources that might enlighten me more on this regard? As a tamil-speakiing person I'd sure love to be proud about this fact but I want to be sure that this really is the consensus among historians too.
And here lies the problem. It's like Himmler writing the Ahnenerbe to find him evidence that the Romans came from the Baltic Sea (and adding that "this also be proved for the Greeks in all their parts"), inspired by the Roman culture on his travels through Italy.
Nowadays we see the remains of the Harappan culture, try to read their script and both Brahmans and Tamils are occupied claiming it to belong to their respective linguistic family (Indoaryan and Dravidian).
The premise of a great deal of the current research aiming to indentify the Harappan script as an expression of a Dravidian language is based on Tamil nationalism, and a felt need to somehow legitimise one's Tamility trough a great culture of the past.
Don't get me wrong, this is not a reproach aimed at you - you have the civility to ask here on r/askhistorians, and are concerned about the validity of the claims -, but rather a exposé of the underlying attitude of many Tamil speaking people, linguists included.
So now to the evaluation of the image/article:
First of all: No modern language spoken anywhere today, even on the Indian subcontinent, was ever spoken by members of the Indus Valley Civilization or the Sumerians. Especially not one that is as diglossic as Tamil. Kotuntamil, used in everyday conversations, is so different from centamil, the classical Tamil used in literature, that to suggest it is anywhere near an ancient language is pure insanity.
Harappan language: There are multiple theories. That it is related to Dravidian languages is just one hypothesis amongst many others (some linguists are even as bold to claim that it is identical with Proto-Dravidian). Although they deserve attention, they have no more legitimacy than Shikaripura Ranganatha Rao's claim that the language is linked to Sanskrit and thus Indo-European.
Sumerian: The hypothesis by Malati Shendge that the Harappan language and Sumerian are linked is based on the assumption that the Asuras, a form of deities in Hindu mythology, are identical with the Assyrians. There have however been found some possible links between Mesopotamian and Khasi, a language of the Austro-Asiatic family, that researcher Michael Witzel believes to be similar to Harappan.
Thank you for giving precisely the explanation I was hoping for! I did suspect that this factoid was too far-fetched and as you point out it probably is. I will try to research more into the works of all the names you have mentioned! If you have any nice reference on the early history of human language that would be great!
Well, the early history of human language is an extremely extensive field, with generous speculation and just as many accusations of pseudo-science. Google the terms "paleolinguistics", "historical linguistics", "lexicostatistics", "linguistic monogenesis/polygenesis", "proto-world" just to get an impression.
But the following wiki entry might be of some interest to you, as your focus obviously is on India: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_history_of_the_Indian_subcontinent
Age of languages is totally arbitrary. They just kept the same name. We think of English as being the same language as Old English, even though the differences are probably greater than the differences between Romanian and Latin, which we think of as different languages because they have different names. Pretty much all languages can trace their root back to a proto-language of some sort (Indo-European, Afro-Semitic, etc). The only languages which can be said to be "new" that I know of are Nicaraguan Sign Language (spontaneously developed in the 1970s) and creoles, which do originate from other languages but can't quite be said to be descended from them in many cases.
The nifty thing about Tamil is that it has a continuity of usage many other languages lack, which is probably where this claim comes from. That's pretty cool. It is a nifty language for that reason, but it isn't necessarily older.
However, the thing about it being the root of languages is pretty much entirely made up. Linguistics has been attempting for a while to reconstruct the root language of the Indo-European family, and it's not Tamil--the closest modern language to it is probably Lithuanian, which is an extremely conservative language.
tl;dr calling a language "old" is arbitrary. The claim of Tamil being the origin of other languages is ridiculous.
Wow this subreddit is amazing! Thanks for the really good explanation!
What about Basque?
Doesn't make sense. All living languages (barring something constructed like Esperanto or resurrected like Hebrew, Cornish or cobbled together from Dante like Italian) ought be the same age assuming language originated once in human history. Even if Tamil is an incredibly conservative Dravidian language in its morphology or grammar (I don't know whether it is), it doesn't change the fact that it's the same age as every other language on the planet.
What? I'm no liguist but aren't most european languages based of latin and germanic languages. Thus, making them relatively new?
I would also consider asking r/linguistics this question, they might have a better idea.
O-o, languages aren't discrete. Every language today evolved over thousands of years. Yes, the Romance languages evolved out of Vulgar Latin, but that doesn't mean they're an older/younger than any other language (except for dead languages which are obviously frozen in time).
So you are saying that every language started at the same time? We are not talking about the origins of the spoken word here. We are talking about the spoken word now.
English for example can be dated back to 1000AD and has anglo-frisian origins.
What you are saying is a kin to saying that the tower of babel events actually happened and that after that humanity created many different languages. I find this more inconcievable than tamil being the oldest spoken language in the world.
Languages change over time gradually enough that there's no clear point at which one side of the line is one language and the other side is not. Asking when a particular modern language started is like looking at the electromagnetic spectrum and asking at which exact frequency "green" begins. Any answer is fairly arbitrary.
There are exceptions of course, like constructed languages.
Ah right, okay i see your point. However how about languages that derive from other languages. I keep on using English as an example but English is said to have originated from anglo-frisian, however what is the origins of tamil?
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I understand where you are coming from, 'a rose by any other name will still smell as sweet'. And i do admit that i misinterpreted his message. However, that still leaves me with many questions, are you saying that english is as old as ancient greek?
What I'm trying to say is that modern languages have evolved, in some case from extinct languages. The fact that some languages have complete different set of origins could also be held as proof that there were many different set of base languages, and if this is held true then the base languages would have to have originated from somewhere and perhaps at different times.
The origins of humans as a species is still under speculation but we theoritically humanity originated in one location and spread out, so this does make sense that humanity all originated at the same time and evolved to what we know of it as today. However, can we say the same for languages? did it have a central source, a point of origin or ancestor that can be traced back from all modern spoken languages?
I am sorry, but this seems a strange argument to me.
Transposing this method in biology you could say that every species (like languages, species are certainly not discrete) is the same age as every other species assuming life originated once in earth history.
This could be technically right, but it is also pointless. It make no sense to talk about the human species in the context of 10 millions years ago: what we call human now was certainly not present at that time.
So what we call Spanish or Italian (as they did evolve from Latin) did not exist in say the first century C.E.; if Tamil is incredibly conservative (I have no idea if this is true or not) in its evolution and the form in which it was used in the first century could at least partly be understood by modern day users, I'd say that Tamil is in fact "older" than Spanish.
(I can understand how this could be misused by a nationalist agenda, but this is beside the point.)
It's just not that simple in linguistics. We don't even know whether language originated in solely one point of human history. (Apparently some evidence even suggests that Neanderthals had funerary goods which would make language a prerequisite, as the idea that the goods will be of use after death cannot made clear to other individuals without communication through language. And as soon that we know of a separate development of language, more of them become entirely plausible. This is the polygenetic approach that was common until mid-20th century - alongside the belief of multiple races.)
But if we assume that language only originated once (monogenesis), a proto language of all the languages recorded must have existed (Proto-World). If that were true, we could use glottochronology to determine the language's age - this method can effectively compare two languages' chronological order of separation from their "common ancestor".
The problem here is, that the Indo-European Spanish and the Dravidian Tamil are not related. But even i they were, there would really be no use of knowing their respective age, other than for Nationalist exploitation.
One could still by other means determine the degree of conservatism in each language. The more common features with their respective ancient version, the better - in the view of all those who care about those things.
The following paper addresses the issue of dating languages, has some nice comments on the limitations of linguistics paired with archaeology, and thus would be an insightful read for anyone in this thread:
http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/~pah1003/loe/All/PapersDownLoad/2007%20%20Heggarty%20-%20Linguistics%20for%20Archaeologists%20-%20Principles,%20Methods,%20and%20the%20Case%20of%20the%20Incas.pdf
As a student of evolutionary biology, I don't think your reply really deals with his point. We are quite sure that all life possesses a single common ancestor, but single or multiple origins wouldn't bear on the "lifespan" of species. The concept of what a species really is isn't even very well understood in biology, but that doesn't keep most everyone from believing they exist in some form or another.
Likewise, French is not Spanish. If you can claim that French is not Spanish, you have to admit that there are different languages. If French can be differentiated from Spanish, can't both be differentiated from their ancestor Latin? If they can't, you are left with the logic problem of A and B both equaling C, but A not equaling B. And if French is not Latin, at one point the one must have ended and (perhaps after intermediate steps) the other must have begun. Of course, there's not going to be a single day (or even a single century, perhaps) when this happened, but then species don't appear in a day either (well not usually anyway). That doesn't mean some species are not older than others. Some species have maintained a distinct form for much longer than others. It's likely that some languages have maintained their form for longer than others.
Hmm, side interest....species often seem to remain the same for long periods, then change rapidly. It's known as punctuated equilibrium. Do languages do this?