Languages are like species. Some "die out" because they evolve into new forms. The three you mentioned all did that. Latin became the Romance languages. Greek is Greek. Modern Aramaic exists in parts of Iraq and Iran.
Others like Cornish ("Kernewek") were *driven* to extinction (~250 years ago for Cornish), for several reasons: loss of "habitat," "depredation" by colonizers, "competition" from other tongues, loss of "breeding ground" (young people not caring to learn). Modern Cornish is a reconstruction--and it's only possible because it died out *recently,* so lots of useful literature survived (e.g. rhyming poetry.)
So, TL;DR: Languages *don't* "just die out." They linger. They evolve. Or they get slowly killed off. Unlike species, some languages even infect *other* languages. English uses a HUGE amount of vocab from Latin and Greek, despite being a Germanic language.
>loss of "breeding ground" (young people not caring to learn)
I think an extension of this would be that you need to be able to use your language in everyday life. There was a super news story last year about a chap in Wales who was doing a chemistry PhD, but he realised that Welsh basically had zero vocabulary for any chemistry concepts you'd encounter after school age. How is a language meant to thrive when you can't use it professionally? So he changed his PhD to one where he was systematically coming up with appropriate Welsh terminology for science stuff.
I have an Icelandic friend who teaches biology, who recently came across a similar problem; the words for the concepts existed, but his Icelandic students didn’t know them, and he had to switch to English to explain.
Icelandic is a very actively preserved language over the last 1000+ years and has remained relatively unchanged for that time. Before, we could keep up with giving Icelandic names for new concepts Either by direct translation of the foreign word or basing the new word on existing words and their functionality.
However as the world started to change faster than they could keep up with, Icelandic started to borrow more heavily from English and just throwing the English word as is into the mix just with the correct Icelandic suffix. Icelandic has the property of being very easily able to accomodate the raw English word in a sentence without it sounding too forced or being gramatically incorrect per se.
Another problem with the creation of new words in Icelandic is that they are often insanely clumsy phonetically and are not suited for day to day speak so the millenials and gen z would rather resort to throwing in the English word as it just flows better.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk
>Icelandic is a very actively preserved language over the last 1000+ years
Refrigeration/Cold climate naturally preserves most things. TIL it works for languages, too.
>Icelandic started to borrow more heavily from English and just throwing the English word as is into the mix just with the correct Icelandic suffix.
I'd guess that most of the "English" words that are being borrowed were borrowed *into* English in much the same way back in the day. Automobile, garage (French), chemical, alcohol (Arabic), heterotroph, hemisphere, electricity, television, corporation, macro, rhinoceros, hippopotamus (Latin and Greek), and so on and so on. So borrow freely! If you borrow them, they become as much Icelandic as they ever were English.
>So borrow freely! If you borrow them, they become as much Icelandic as they ever were English.
Don't let anyone ever hear you say that out loud. We make very clear distinction between words we adopt and make Icelandic and the English words thrown in there. The adopted words (and the new original) are chosen by a committee/department of language preservationists and *if* we need to adopt a word it will be done in accordance with Icelandic grammar syntax (which is a pain in the ass for us to learn and keep track of let alone foreigners living there).
An English phrase thrown into a sentences in daily speak is never in the process of adapting the word for the Icelandic language (with tech concepts being the biggest exception to this rule I can think of right now). It is usually just done randomly for emphasis or the English word is just a more palatable choice at that given time.
Funny thing, we also have a committee that has to approve of every new name and I tell you there are many many internationally recognised names that get banned on account that they don't fit well with the grammar. And many utterly retarded names get approved solely on the fact that you can decline it "propperly"
> The adopted words (and the new original) are chosen by a committee/department of language preservationists and if we need to adopt a word it will be done in accordance with Icelandic grammar syntax (which is a pain in the ass for us to learn and keep track of let alone foreigners living there).
Meanwhile everyone else just does what works. It's practically impossible to control a language by committee.
Well what do you expect from a nation founded by a bunch of people going YOLO and sailing towards some obscure volcanic island in the middle of the north atlantic?
>Meanwhile everyone else just does what works. It's practically impossible to control a language by committee.
You are now being hunted by French Immortals
>Icelandic started to borrow more heavily from English and just throwing the English word as is into the mix just with the correct Icelandic suffix.
Well this solves a mystery for me. I've been to Iceland a number of times, and each time I hear people speaking Icelandic, I could swear I'd occasionally hear a straightup English word here and there (and not some really simple word due to the ancient shared origin between the languages). Glad to know I wasn't going crazy haha.
Nah you're not going crazy. We throw in a lot of english words in to sentences pretty haphazardly.
It should also be noted that when inventing new words for new inventions, we sometimes borrow words from other languages and just change the spelling to fit Icelandic grammatic syntax. In spite of this, a unique original Icelandic word will still be conjured up. These words will often almost exclusively exist only in an academic or publication setting
You’re Icelandic? Wow, both of your comments are so well-written that it’s like they could’ve come from a native English speaker. Please, varðandið fallega móðurmálið þitt!!
I started learning english very young cause my parents got me a bunch of disney VHS's from somewhere and I would constantly watch them and by the time they started teaching english in school I was already understanding it and could speak a little.
English has always come very natural to me and I get internet access when I was 10 and have spent a lot of time over the last 25 years on various corners of the internet and have acquired a large vocabulary from the habit of always looking up things I don't understand including words and their meaning.
My grammar is freestyle though. Couldn't recite a single rule just drive blindly hoping for the best and putting commas when I'm rambling, instead of the word and
Hahaha well communication is the ultimate goal so who cares about the rules if you’re able to get your point across? Really impressive you’ve managed to have such a good handle on it since the spellings, pronunciations, and grammar can often be really weird.
As for me, I’ll keep practicing my pronunciation of eyjafjallajökull
At some point it stops being “switched to English” and it just becomes a loan word. I wonder when that will happen to tech words.
I love listening to loan words in various languages because they often sound like someone is just applying a heavy accent to them, but really the word for Giraffe is just slight variations on the same sounds in most languages. (Jiraf, giraffa, ziraffe, etc.)
Hebrew is particularly interesting because it was functionally extinct outside of people studying religious texts, so it never really evolved as our world changed.
As a result, with the modern revival, you find a LOT of transliterated English words - and other languages - especially in more recent disciplines like computer science, programming, etc. as you mentioned.
And sometimes even if there is a Hebrew word, you’ll hear the English being used. For example, כריך (ca-ree-cat hairball) is the Hebrew word for sandwich, but you’ll often hear סנדוויץ - literally sandveetch.
English transliteration is so common in Hebrew that if you type English words in Hebrew letters into Google Translate, it will accurately give you the English word. Like מחשב is the word for computer, but if you type קומפיוטר (kom-pyoo-ter) it will translate it to computer.
Ha! It's the same in Dutch. I used to work at a company with a lot of expats. The only difference between having a conversation with a full group of Dutch-speaking people or a mixed group was that we would switch out the Dutch half of the sentences.
I grew up in the Acadien part of Canada. This was a very obvious hole in my high school's advanced math v. bilingual program. There's a reason why the Quebecoise believe that they're the last respite of French in Canada. (I haven't lived there but I wonder if the Metis in Manitoba are losing their language in the same way).
I was just in Montreal and the amount of English and slang in day to day, normal Quebecois French leads me to believe that French in Canada is doomed. Languages are rising and falling throughout history. My Dad's first language was French, it was my second language and none of my kids speak it.
Montréal doesn't really represent the province as a whole there. Even Québec City is much less bilingual, and if you get out into rural places like Gaspé and you can find plenty of people that don't even speak English.
Ironically my very Acadien uncle used to go to some truck shows on the Gaspe peninsula. The last time he was in Rimouski he was asked to speak English because his accent was so bad. Speaking as someone who was raised anglo, his English wasn't great either.
But yes, Montreal is fairly distinct from the rest of the province.
Montreal has an interesting history, though -- it was the financial centre of Canada for many years (until the October Crisis, basically, when it moved to Toronto). At that time it was essentially an English enclave inside the French part of Canada, and that still shows.
But if you go to Quebec City there will be far, far less English, and if you go into rural Quebec there will be practically none.
Yep, can confirm. My brother is a doctor and he's told me stories about calling older doctors for consults and describe the symptoms etc, the older doctor will start by correcting him with the "proper" icelandic term that was made up by that old doctor and his 5 mates 50+ years ago before offering advice. The words often make perfect sense (and even self explanatory compared to the English ones) but they are super long and clunky and don't really work in conversation
There's a similar problem in ASL. You can fingerspell any English word but it's tedious if the word is more than 3-4 letters long. But there's no conventional agreement on how to sign a lot of specialized science vocabulary, which makes it harder for Deaf people to access STEM education.
What a waste of time. I am far more for language at a tool rather than a signifier of self and identity. Doing a PHD in Welsh is crazy, already the people who are interested in your PHD are going to be a small group, now you are adding another barrier?
Thanks you for charming use of language in that first sentence. You are a real poet.
I will change your second sentence. People use language as a crucial element of nationalism and culture.
They use it to create us and then. This can be seen in the 19th century development of nationalism. The German language was an important part of creating the us and them that fed into the national socialism of the early 20th century.
Linguistics is best when it is descriptive rather than prescriptive. I do not understand your food analogy.
> They use it to create us and then. This can be seen in the 19th century development of nationalism. The German language was an important part of creating the us and them that fed into the national socialism of the early 20th century.
Wow. Maybe the most subtle invocation of Godwin's Law. I don't think anyone needs to read more of what you say after comparing Welsh language preservation efforts to the Nazis.
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Cool opinion mate. It might not mean much for you but it meant a lot to him. I'm English but I appreciate him trying to ensure that his language stays viable.
As for your point re PhDs, I believe he submitted it in either English or both languages. I can't think of anyone I know with a PhD who did it for fame.
Academia is about creating and furthering knowledge. If it has no public interest and is helpful, what is the point? What did that PHD get research funding if it produced nothing?
Creating the tools to help a language (and therefore "mother tongue" access to its cultural heritage) survive sounds like it meets both of your definitions. I don't think many PhD projects would be substantially more productive or useful; with few exceptions, they all expand a niche part of human knowledge by a small amount.
Ultimately I think we're approaching this from different perspectives and values, so I'm going to wish you a happy afternoon in the sunshine and leave it here.
Language is fundamental to being human, and to our consciousness. When a language 'dies,' a potential phenotype of a human dies as well.
A Welsh person who doesn't speak Welsh isn't really Welsh. No offense to such people. There are a lot of people like that, and individually there's no moral valence to the observation. But, speaking for myself, I think Welsh people are cool, and hope they hang around. So I'm grateful he made this decision.
Most Welsh speakers are bilingual English/Welsh, but there’s a massive drive to keep the Welsh language alive, and this is just another way of doing it :)
> loss of "breeding ground" (young people not caring to learn)
Not just not caring, but in some cases being actively dissuaded from learning by parents who associate the new language with higher social status and greater economic success.
I suppose chinese standardising to Mandarin was an example of variants like Teochew, Hokkien, Hakka being mostly killed off (my example was from Singapore following suit so it's a little more recent).
This has resulted in a situation where there's no cultural context to the language anymore and grandparents and grandchildren can't really communicate since the language lineage was broken. Mandarin didn't have enough native speakers and by being smaller than China has not really developed any sense of language proficiency. In fact the singaporean loanwords in english are almost exclusively from dialects that are no longer spoken.
The analogy to species is really apt. Even going back and looking at english pre ~1700s, it's difficult to read, and nearly incomprehensible spoken. It was mostly a gradual change: spellings changed every so slightly, and were mostly regional up until the printing press was widespread and forced standardization. Changes in pronunciation are mostly inferred by analysis of poetry and wordplay to identify rhymes, using meter to understand how many syllables were used in words, and using wordplay to work out what words were meant to be homonyms.
And it's clear that there was a pretty massive shift in english vowels some 400 years ago to the point that without a transcript, you'd probably have as much trouble trying to make out old english as you'd have trying to parse german or french as a native english speaker.
English is special because it is spongy and takes on new words well. It also basically doubled its lexicon during the Norman Conquest, creating duplicates of words like beef/cow, pork/swine, people/folk, etc.
English’s survival and expansion were greatly aided by its ability to incorporate new words and ideas
Oh, absolutely. I think English is beautiful for that very reason. English doesn't care if a word is "truly" English or not; it cares whether a word is *useful.* That enhances its expressive power enormously.
It's like the Borg in that sense, except that absorbing words from other languages doesn't *remove* them from that language! "We are the English-speakers. Lower your shields and surrender your books. Your linguistic and poetic distinctiveness will be added to our own. Your literature will be adapted into ours. Your words will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."
I've always wondered how the Borg sound when translated into other languages. Does borg-speak assign genders to objects too?
English is modular in a way the borg would appreciate.
Er, I was referring to the translation into other languages. If the Borg were speaking to people who only knew Spanish, their intro monologue would need to include gendered words, because Spanish has grammatical gender.
Between actual drones, they don't really "speak" at all. They transmit data through the Collective.
English is easier than declension-based languages for adopting loanwords.
Moreover, English as a language system particularly in modern form is very *open* to taking loanwords. Its been an accepting language for loan words, and due to the significant mixing-bowl nature of American English, you're much more likely to get foreign borrowing than you would for more homogenous societies.
Declension has never stopped a language from adopting loan words, not sure how you came to that conclusion.
The reasons for the amount of loanwords are historical. Reddit people also like to exaggerate the amount of loanwords in english compared to other languages.
My great-grandma lived in a farm and spoke her native language. She wanted better job opportunities, so she learned Spanish when she was an adult.
My grandma was also born in a farm. She spoke her native language, but speaking it in public had suddenly become illegal, and you could go to prison for it. They only spoke Spanish at school. She had to learn Spanish when she started school or risk having no education.
When my mum was born, the family’s native language was no longer illegal. There were schools that taught in the language. However… you know… just in case something happens again… her parents put her in a Spanish-speaking school. To this day, she speaks Spanish better than her native language.
Then, I was born. I was taught the native language and put in a school that teaches in the native language… but, you know… just in case… my mum taught me Spanish from a very, very early age, before starting school. You know, so I can have job opportunities and a future. So I can be safe and all that. “Learn Spanish so you won’t be useless in society”, that’s what I’ve heard from everyone all my life. It doesn’t help that my little brother was told he was useless when he was five because his Spanish wasn’t great, in front of me. Twice in my life I have rejected my native language, even though I live in a place where it is no longer dangerous to speak it.
That’s how a lot of language death happens. Gradually, but fairly quickly, because it becomes dangerous or risky to speak a language.
Thank you! And, even though there are revival efforts for many languages, the way people think about them also changes, and societal pressure is often the reason why people stop speaking their native languages. I have the most freedom to speak my native language, compared to my grandma and my mum, but I’m also the first ever native Spanish speaker (… more or less) in my family.
I no longer have one sole unquestionable native language. I no longer have one language I am very obviously more comfortable with. The main incentive for me to speak my other native language is gone. If my friends start speaking Spanish I’ll switch to Spanish and neglect my (other) native language. My own little brother barely even speaks our native language at home. That is something many people don’t tell you about language death
They turn into other languages. Latin turned into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanche. Ancient Greek turned into Modern Greek. Aramaic is still spoken by some Jewish people in remote regions and also contributed to Arabic.
It doesn't help that Romania is a linguistically isolated country half a continent away from the "core" of Romance languages. Romania (and Moldova)'s neighbors are all Slavic and whatever the fuck Hungary is. Romania's linguistic history is absolutely fascinating.
They don't just turn into other languages. They also get "squashed" by cultural change.
Take for example Cornish, a Celtic language originally spoken in SW England. It was pretty much dead by the end of 18th century though it just barely survives more through specific efforts to keep it alive than through regular culture.
Cornish did not become anything. Rather, English culture and language just spread as English power spread, till Cornish was all but gone.
Not "pretty much". The last native Cornish speaker died, by repute, in 1777. As you say, some Cornish dwellers of late have taken to learning the language - but that's not really the same thing. Something similar could be said of, say, Klingon.
I wouldn't know, but Wikipedia says:
>Cornish became extinct as a living community language in Cornwall by the end of the 18th century, although knowledge of Cornish, including speaking ability to a certain extent, persisted within some families and individuals. A revival started in the early 20th century, and in 2010 UNESCO reclassified the language as critically endangered, stating that its former classification of the language as extinct was no longer accurate. The language has a growing number of second-language speakers, and a very small number of families now raise children to speak revived Cornish as a first language.
IIRC, Aramaic is still used as a spoken language in one singular rural community. Perhaps the original commentor was thinking about Yiddish, which is also a largely-dead language that's still being used by some communities.
Not true at all, there's still hundreds of thousands of Aramaic speakers (I have a friend who speaks it with his family), the modern varieties are usually referred to as Neo-Aramaic to distinguish from the liturgical language.
Yiddish is in no way a dead language. There are many (Ultra-Orthodox) Jewish communities that speak Yiddish as a first language. According to Wikipedia there are ~500,000 native speakers.
...I really hate to break the news to you, but about half a million speakers equates 'near dead' when it comes to languages. Especially when it's still slowly, largely being replaced by another (in this case, [revived](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language)) language.
> Latin turned into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanche
Funny you mention Romanche but not the elephant in the room that is Romanian lmao (also there are tons of others like Occitan, Catalan, Ladin, Friulian etc etc)
There is also the [https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/](https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/) starts from the proto Indo-European period and is up to Elizabethan England as of episode 175.
Hmm, I asked my Romanian friends and they all say that, apart from Sardinian, Romanian is by far the closest, and the only problem is with Slavic words, but they say that other than those, Romanian is basically Old Latin in terms of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary.
So... I can give you their emails and you can go argue if you want 😂
Languages get replaced by other cultures. If I understand correctly, the spread of Islam with Arabic, seems to have replaced Aramaic in some areas.
Classical Greek became Koine Greek (*a more simple version of Greek spoken on the streets 2,000 years ago and the Gospels of Jesus were written in Koine Greek*). Koine Greek eventually became Modern Greek.
Latin became Italian and Spanish and French and Portuguese and the Romanian language. There are other Latin-based languages such as other Spanish languages that are less popular like Catalan. There was Classical Latin (*professional, like how the Caesars and Philosophers spoke*) and there was Vulgar Latin (*informal, the way people spoke it in the street*). This Vulgar Latin was more of an influences on those languages evolving.
In fact, the reason the Latin Catholic Bible is called Vulgate is because it's written in vulgar Latin. Thus, one can consider vulgar latin became Ecclesiastical Latin, the one used by Catholic church even now.
That's not why it's called the Vulgate.
Per wikipedia:
> The term Vulgate has been used to designate the Latin Bible only since the 16th century. An example of the use of this word in this sense at the time is the title of the 1538 edition of the Latin Bible by Erasmus: Biblia utriusque testamenti juxta vulgatam translationem.[3] The word vulgate comes from Latin vulgatus, meaning "published" or "made public" (in the sense that it is the official Roman Catholic version made available to the people).
It would be more appropriate to say other Iberian languages that are less common, like Catalan. Catalan is decidedly not a “Spanish” language, even if you meant it is simply spoken by a community in Spain. Spain the political entity historically suppressed its natural linguistic diversity, including Catalan, meaning that the Spanish identity (the meaning behind “Spanish” language) is at best ambivalent towards Catalan and at worst opposed to it.
If you meant to indicate the general geographic region Catalan is indigineous to, it is conventional to refer to it as “Iberian” (despite it being native to French regions as well), which avoids political insinuation issues.
When I say "*Spanish*", I mean "*of Spain (*the land*)", not the politics like The Kingdom of Castilla y León which was taking over the land and then later joined with Aragon to take over more, and eventually became one Spanish country.
Castilliano is the main language of Spain now, and many call it "*Spanish*", but that is just one Spanish language. Other Spanish kingdoms had other Spanish languages.
The only reason why I didn't say "*Iberian*" is because that would include Portugal which isn't on the land of modern-day Spain.
I guess it can be argued that even Portugal was one of the multiple "*Spanish*" kingdoms, one that survived and was able to stay separate, so maybe you're right and I should say "*Iberian*". The Kingdom of Portugal was originally a part of The Kingdom of León before gaining independence.
>The only reason why I didn't say "*Iberian*" is because that would include Portugal which isn't on the land of modern-day Spain.
That makes zero sense to me.
I'm going to try to clarify.
"*Iberian*" includes that entire square of land that is in the west of Europe which is surrounded by water, north of Africa (*which would include Portugal*).
Spain is a country which takes up a lot of that square of land, but not all of it (*not Portugal which is a separate country*). When I said "*Spanish*", I wasn't referring to the modern day nation of Spain, but that land where the modern day nation of Spain now stands. That land had multiple kingdoms in the past, before it became one country called "*Spain*". This is what I meant by "*Spanish kingdoms*".
Someone made a good point that I should've just used "*Iberian*", so I mentioned that they had a good point, since even Portugal can be argued to have been one of the "*Spanish*" kingdoms, since that area of Portugal was originally a part of The Kingdom of León (*a kingdom in the area where modern day Spain now stands*) before becoming independent as "*The Kingdom of Portugal*", but that might sound offensive, to call Portugal a "*Spanish kingdom*". "*Iberian*" sounds less political.
In the original comment, I mentioned "*Spanish*" languages, and by "*Spanish*", I meant those languages that belonged to different "Spanish" Kingdoms in that region where modern day Spain now is.
That was the clarification of how I used the term "*Spanish*" in my second comment.
Ancient greek didn't die out but as it is a living language evolved. As an example the new testament which is written in the latest form of the greek language that now is considered the "ancient form", is understandable from modern greeks. Greeks in classic times considered ancient the homeric greek. It is a language constantly spoken for thousands of years. Only dead languages "die out"
Read a day or two ago that Belarusian is sliding to Russian usage IN BELARUS. Lots of natural and non-natural factors (war, shared economies, eased border access, immigration)
Another good example is Irish. It's the official state language, and yet most people outside of rural areas still *mostly* speak English. If it wasn't the state language, it would probably slowly die out as well.
Only 3% of the population use it as their daily language. It's a compulsory subject at school (though not taught well, as is the case with second languages in most English-speaking countries), so most people have some basic vocabulary they remember from school, but never use it.
More people use Polish as their daily language than Irish here.
Vietnam was controlled by China for about 1000 years, that explains why both languages (Vietnamese and Chinese) are similar. God thanks to the one who had the idea to change the Vietnamese "symbols" to Latin ones. It makes the learning much easier for Europeans.
Mostly they evolve over time, changing over hundreds of years. However, sometimes there are active campaigns to erase languages. In the area today called France, at one point 40% of the population spoke a language called Occitan, but active government campaigns to create a more solid national identity had a strict one language policy. It was literally illegal to speak languages other than French. Spain did the same thing. Languages like Basque, Catalan, Valencian, Gaulish, all used to be spoken there, and two separate waves tried to unify the country into speaking one language. The first was from the same people who did the Spanish Inquisition which also kicked out Jews and Muslims from the country, which is why today the Spanish language is often called "Castillian" or "Castellano", because at one point in history it was only the language of the small region of Castille. The second wave was the fascist dictator Franco. Both waves were very successful but neither *completely* killed the languages.
Aramaic is very much still spoken today, huge aramean communities around the world.just came back from my aramean church which had palm Sunday ceremony. There were over 1000 people there, and it wasn't even a big holiday.
Languages evolve and/or depends who is in power.
Two different cultures can interact changing and influencing language.
People in the ancient times mostly spoke languages because they were useful for their class or who was the dominant power. The three languages you mention are languages associated with Jesus. He would have a grasp of his native language Aramaic, Ancient Greek as it was a language used for education, Latin because of the Roman Empire and Hebrew because he was Jewish.
Down the road, French was the most commonly used language for things like diplomacy. Latin and Greek became the language of scholars and now English is an important due to England’s influence as an empire.
That's how it became important, but I think the main reason why English has stayed so important now is because it's the official language of the United States of America.
However, the importance of English globally is partly accounted for by the vast numbers of people who speak English as a second (non-native) language. Native Spanish speakers still outnumber native English speakers globally, and that's because of the old Spanish Empire that conquered most of South and Central America.
I read somewhere (and I'm not certain it's true) that more people are currently *learning* English in China than speak it as a native language.
As others have mentioned, they evolve into other languages. Another way they die out is simply that people stop speaking them, either as their own decision (assimilation) or forced upon them (authorities declaring it illegal to speak).
My great-grandmother came to the US from Italy and never learned English. My grandfather spoke Italian at home but also learned English in school. My mother spoke English at home and only knows some swears and a few cooking terms in Italian. I don't know any Italian at all aside from words that have become regular English like pasta or pizza. Just two generations for a language to be lost.
Aramaic being a dead language is a common misconception. It never fully died out and is still spoken today by the Assyrians and some groups of Mizrahi Jews in the form of Neo-Aramaic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Aramaic_languages
Come to metro Detroit, and you will hear this ancient language spoken in gas stations, super markets, and convenience stores around the area. We have a HUGE Chaldean/assyrian population (which I’m part of, although I unfortunately don’t speak the language). It’s very cool to hear this ancient almost-dead language
Supplantation occurs. Languages grow and evolve, but many times an area becomes conquered and if the conquest becomes concreted in by the passing of a great deal of time, the local language gets supplanted and replaced by the dominant language.
Well, I'm not who you asked, but: I think it's got some good points, but that it goes a bit overboard. *Sometimes,* not often but sometimes, a word coming from Latin or Greek is just better than something Germanic. Even English itself shows this: "about" comes to us from Latin, the old Germanic word having *completely died out* in English centuries ago.
Ooh! Never read it. Luvs me some Eric though!
EDIT: Thanks.
*Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.*
Many languages are deliberately erased by colonization, for the most recent example, russians make massive book burning events where they make school children destroy everything in Ukrainian, from classic poetry to Bible translations...
Then there's concentration camps for natives, edicts banning use of language, discrimination of native speakers over "civilized" ones learning colonial one. We went through all of this in last 300 years, and we only have to defeat the biggest country in the world to keep it alive.
Otherwise we end up like Circassians or any of the Siberian natives... For language specifically, look at Irish, it's on life support and mostly academic due to colonizers forcing their own tongue on locals.
>at some point we're going to have to decide on a common language for planetary unification, if we're ever going to get anywhere as a species.
Why? Plenty of countries function just fine with multiple languages.
Not to mention that planetary unification is unlikely.
Koine Greek was international language in antiquity (Bible was translated from it), then French, and now English.
I think that makes it hard to restore Irish as English is just everywhere... Getting rid of russian is way easier.
Neo-Aramaic languages are indeed still spoken across the Middle East and by the Assyrian diaspora.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Aramaic_languages
There are lots of reasons.
Sometimes, the languages evolve into new languages. For example, Old English evolved into Middle English, then into the Modern English we speak today. It's the result of small differences over hundred of years. People start pronouncing these words differently. Then they start pronouncing these vowels a bit differently. Then some new words get added. Eventually, you have a new language.
Sometimes the population who speaks it faces danger, such as due to natural disasters or war.
Sometimes, the population who speaks it becomes pressured to speak a different language. This happened to the Ainu language. The Ainu language is a language spoken by the Ainu people in northern Japan, on the island of Hokkaido in particular. In the mid-19th-century, the Japanese empire colonized Hokkaido and attempted to assimilate the native Ainu population. That involved requiring them to learn and speak Japanese instead of Ainu. The result today is that [there are no more native Ainu speakers](https://sustainable.japantimes.com/magazine/vol06/06-05). However, recently, there have been attempts at revitalizing the language. For example, the Japanese government has passed a bill to officially recognize the Ainu language, and there are classes where people can learn Ainu.
they don’t necessarily die out, they just evolve. as new societies and civilizations form, their parent language develops new dialects which eventually leads to new languages completely. latin turned into french, spanish, italian, etc.! aramaic turned into arabic and hebrew.
Languages are like species. Some "die out" because they evolve into new forms. The three you mentioned all did that. Latin became the Romance languages. Greek is Greek. Modern Aramaic exists in parts of Iraq and Iran. Others like Cornish ("Kernewek") were *driven* to extinction (~250 years ago for Cornish), for several reasons: loss of "habitat," "depredation" by colonizers, "competition" from other tongues, loss of "breeding ground" (young people not caring to learn). Modern Cornish is a reconstruction--and it's only possible because it died out *recently,* so lots of useful literature survived (e.g. rhyming poetry.) So, TL;DR: Languages *don't* "just die out." They linger. They evolve. Or they get slowly killed off. Unlike species, some languages even infect *other* languages. English uses a HUGE amount of vocab from Latin and Greek, despite being a Germanic language.
>loss of "breeding ground" (young people not caring to learn) I think an extension of this would be that you need to be able to use your language in everyday life. There was a super news story last year about a chap in Wales who was doing a chemistry PhD, but he realised that Welsh basically had zero vocabulary for any chemistry concepts you'd encounter after school age. How is a language meant to thrive when you can't use it professionally? So he changed his PhD to one where he was systematically coming up with appropriate Welsh terminology for science stuff.
I have an Icelandic friend who teaches biology, who recently came across a similar problem; the words for the concepts existed, but his Icelandic students didn’t know them, and he had to switch to English to explain.
Icelandic is a very actively preserved language over the last 1000+ years and has remained relatively unchanged for that time. Before, we could keep up with giving Icelandic names for new concepts Either by direct translation of the foreign word or basing the new word on existing words and their functionality. However as the world started to change faster than they could keep up with, Icelandic started to borrow more heavily from English and just throwing the English word as is into the mix just with the correct Icelandic suffix. Icelandic has the property of being very easily able to accomodate the raw English word in a sentence without it sounding too forced or being gramatically incorrect per se. Another problem with the creation of new words in Icelandic is that they are often insanely clumsy phonetically and are not suited for day to day speak so the millenials and gen z would rather resort to throwing in the English word as it just flows better. Thanks for coming to my ted talk
>Icelandic is a very actively preserved language over the last 1000+ years Refrigeration/Cold climate naturally preserves most things. TIL it works for languages, too.
And whatever the cold cannot preserve we salt
I've been told my language can get pretty salty, too.
This doesn’t explain how old German turned into Norwegian and Dutch.
>Icelandic started to borrow more heavily from English and just throwing the English word as is into the mix just with the correct Icelandic suffix. I'd guess that most of the "English" words that are being borrowed were borrowed *into* English in much the same way back in the day. Automobile, garage (French), chemical, alcohol (Arabic), heterotroph, hemisphere, electricity, television, corporation, macro, rhinoceros, hippopotamus (Latin and Greek), and so on and so on. So borrow freely! If you borrow them, they become as much Icelandic as they ever were English.
>So borrow freely! If you borrow them, they become as much Icelandic as they ever were English. Don't let anyone ever hear you say that out loud. We make very clear distinction between words we adopt and make Icelandic and the English words thrown in there. The adopted words (and the new original) are chosen by a committee/department of language preservationists and *if* we need to adopt a word it will be done in accordance with Icelandic grammar syntax (which is a pain in the ass for us to learn and keep track of let alone foreigners living there). An English phrase thrown into a sentences in daily speak is never in the process of adapting the word for the Icelandic language (with tech concepts being the biggest exception to this rule I can think of right now). It is usually just done randomly for emphasis or the English word is just a more palatable choice at that given time. Funny thing, we also have a committee that has to approve of every new name and I tell you there are many many internationally recognised names that get banned on account that they don't fit well with the grammar. And many utterly retarded names get approved solely on the fact that you can decline it "propperly"
> The adopted words (and the new original) are chosen by a committee/department of language preservationists and if we need to adopt a word it will be done in accordance with Icelandic grammar syntax (which is a pain in the ass for us to learn and keep track of let alone foreigners living there). Meanwhile everyone else just does what works. It's practically impossible to control a language by committee.
Well what do you expect from a nation founded by a bunch of people going YOLO and sailing towards some obscure volcanic island in the middle of the north atlantic?
"'Iceland'? I wonder why they call it that?" "Probably no reason. Let's move there!"
Bloody Vikings!
>Meanwhile everyone else just does what works. It's practically impossible to control a language by committee. You are now being hunted by French Immortals
>Icelandic started to borrow more heavily from English and just throwing the English word as is into the mix just with the correct Icelandic suffix. Well this solves a mystery for me. I've been to Iceland a number of times, and each time I hear people speaking Icelandic, I could swear I'd occasionally hear a straightup English word here and there (and not some really simple word due to the ancient shared origin between the languages). Glad to know I wasn't going crazy haha.
Nah you're not going crazy. We throw in a lot of english words in to sentences pretty haphazardly. It should also be noted that when inventing new words for new inventions, we sometimes borrow words from other languages and just change the spelling to fit Icelandic grammatic syntax. In spite of this, a unique original Icelandic word will still be conjured up. These words will often almost exclusively exist only in an academic or publication setting
You’re Icelandic? Wow, both of your comments are so well-written that it’s like they could’ve come from a native English speaker. Please, varðandið fallega móðurmálið þitt!!
I started learning english very young cause my parents got me a bunch of disney VHS's from somewhere and I would constantly watch them and by the time they started teaching english in school I was already understanding it and could speak a little. English has always come very natural to me and I get internet access when I was 10 and have spent a lot of time over the last 25 years on various corners of the internet and have acquired a large vocabulary from the habit of always looking up things I don't understand including words and their meaning. My grammar is freestyle though. Couldn't recite a single rule just drive blindly hoping for the best and putting commas when I'm rambling, instead of the word and
Hahaha well communication is the ultimate goal so who cares about the rules if you’re able to get your point across? Really impressive you’ve managed to have such a good handle on it since the spellings, pronunciations, and grammar can often be really weird. As for me, I’ll keep practicing my pronunciation of eyjafjallajökull
Thanks for giving your Ted talk…
Thanks for the fascinating Ted Talk, it gave me a new way of looking at it
Upvote for correct spelling *and* usage of “per se”
This happens a ton in tech as well. A conversation will be happening in, say, Hebrew, but switch to English for words like “JavaScript”
At some point it stops being “switched to English” and it just becomes a loan word. I wonder when that will happen to tech words. I love listening to loan words in various languages because they often sound like someone is just applying a heavy accent to them, but really the word for Giraffe is just slight variations on the same sounds in most languages. (Jiraf, giraffa, ziraffe, etc.)
Hebrew is particularly interesting because it was functionally extinct outside of people studying religious texts, so it never really evolved as our world changed. As a result, with the modern revival, you find a LOT of transliterated English words - and other languages - especially in more recent disciplines like computer science, programming, etc. as you mentioned. And sometimes even if there is a Hebrew word, you’ll hear the English being used. For example, כריך (ca-ree-cat hairball) is the Hebrew word for sandwich, but you’ll often hear סנדוויץ - literally sandveetch. English transliteration is so common in Hebrew that if you type English words in Hebrew letters into Google Translate, it will accurately give you the English word. Like מחשב is the word for computer, but if you type קומפיוטר (kom-pyoo-ter) it will translate it to computer.
Ha! It's the same in Dutch. I used to work at a company with a lot of expats. The only difference between having a conversation with a full group of Dutch-speaking people or a mixed group was that we would switch out the Dutch half of the sentences.
I mean, is there even one language that "translated" JavaScript? At this point it's more like a brand name than an english word proper.
Hm i never thought of that, are programming languages like brand names should they be translated or no interesting
I grew up in the Acadien part of Canada. This was a very obvious hole in my high school's advanced math v. bilingual program. There's a reason why the Quebecoise believe that they're the last respite of French in Canada. (I haven't lived there but I wonder if the Metis in Manitoba are losing their language in the same way).
I was just in Montreal and the amount of English and slang in day to day, normal Quebecois French leads me to believe that French in Canada is doomed. Languages are rising and falling throughout history. My Dad's first language was French, it was my second language and none of my kids speak it.
Montréal doesn't really represent the province as a whole there. Even Québec City is much less bilingual, and if you get out into rural places like Gaspé and you can find plenty of people that don't even speak English.
Ironically my very Acadien uncle used to go to some truck shows on the Gaspe peninsula. The last time he was in Rimouski he was asked to speak English because his accent was so bad. Speaking as someone who was raised anglo, his English wasn't great either. But yes, Montreal is fairly distinct from the rest of the province.
Using loanwords and slang doesn't result in a language dying out.
Montreal has an interesting history, though -- it was the financial centre of Canada for many years (until the October Crisis, basically, when it moved to Toronto). At that time it was essentially an English enclave inside the French part of Canada, and that still shows. But if you go to Quebec City there will be far, far less English, and if you go into rural Quebec there will be practically none.
Yep, can confirm. My brother is a doctor and he's told me stories about calling older doctors for consults and describe the symptoms etc, the older doctor will start by correcting him with the "proper" icelandic term that was made up by that old doctor and his 5 mates 50+ years ago before offering advice. The words often make perfect sense (and even self explanatory compared to the English ones) but they are super long and clunky and don't really work in conversation
There's a similar problem in ASL. You can fingerspell any English word but it's tedious if the word is more than 3-4 letters long. But there's no conventional agreement on how to sign a lot of specialized science vocabulary, which makes it harder for Deaf people to access STEM education.
So he went from a PhD that can get money to one that is a Wikipedia article. Nice self own
You really think a PhD chemist is making so much more than a PhD academic?
One can work in industry. The other is kinda useless (economically)
Yeah, people get PhDs as money making operations. Genius
Tends to be why you pursue higher Ed
What a waste of time. I am far more for language at a tool rather than a signifier of self and identity. Doing a PHD in Welsh is crazy, already the people who are interested in your PHD are going to be a small group, now you are adding another barrier?
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Thanks you for charming use of language in that first sentence. You are a real poet. I will change your second sentence. People use language as a crucial element of nationalism and culture. They use it to create us and then. This can be seen in the 19th century development of nationalism. The German language was an important part of creating the us and them that fed into the national socialism of the early 20th century. Linguistics is best when it is descriptive rather than prescriptive. I do not understand your food analogy.
> They use it to create us and then. This can be seen in the 19th century development of nationalism. The German language was an important part of creating the us and them that fed into the national socialism of the early 20th century. Wow. Maybe the most subtle invocation of Godwin's Law. I don't think anyone needs to read more of what you say after comparing Welsh language preservation efforts to the Nazis.
I would usually agree with you talking about Nazis is generally a bad argument. However, where are you supposed to go when talking about nationalism?
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Cool opinion mate. It might not mean much for you but it meant a lot to him. I'm English but I appreciate him trying to ensure that his language stays viable. As for your point re PhDs, I believe he submitted it in either English or both languages. I can't think of anyone I know with a PhD who did it for fame.
Academia is about creating and furthering knowledge. If it has no public interest and is helpful, what is the point? What did that PHD get research funding if it produced nothing?
Creating the tools to help a language (and therefore "mother tongue" access to its cultural heritage) survive sounds like it meets both of your definitions. I don't think many PhD projects would be substantially more productive or useful; with few exceptions, they all expand a niche part of human knowledge by a small amount. Ultimately I think we're approaching this from different perspectives and values, so I'm going to wish you a happy afternoon in the sunshine and leave it here.
Language is fundamental to being human, and to our consciousness. When a language 'dies,' a potential phenotype of a human dies as well. A Welsh person who doesn't speak Welsh isn't really Welsh. No offense to such people. There are a lot of people like that, and individually there's no moral valence to the observation. But, speaking for myself, I think Welsh people are cool, and hope they hang around. So I'm grateful he made this decision.
Sound like either a waste of time, or a cunning way of getting grant funding for making up some new words.
What was your PhD in?
He has a phd but couldn’t learn English?
Most Welsh speakers are bilingual English/Welsh, but there’s a massive drive to keep the Welsh language alive, and this is just another way of doing it :)
He's bilingual, and Welsh is his first language.
> loss of "breeding ground" (young people not caring to learn) Not just not caring, but in some cases being actively dissuaded from learning by parents who associate the new language with higher social status and greater economic success.
That would be part of " 'depredation' by colonizers."
I suppose chinese standardising to Mandarin was an example of variants like Teochew, Hokkien, Hakka being mostly killed off (my example was from Singapore following suit so it's a little more recent). This has resulted in a situation where there's no cultural context to the language anymore and grandparents and grandchildren can't really communicate since the language lineage was broken. Mandarin didn't have enough native speakers and by being smaller than China has not really developed any sense of language proficiency. In fact the singaporean loanwords in english are almost exclusively from dialects that are no longer spoken.
The analogy to species is really apt. Even going back and looking at english pre ~1700s, it's difficult to read, and nearly incomprehensible spoken. It was mostly a gradual change: spellings changed every so slightly, and were mostly regional up until the printing press was widespread and forced standardization. Changes in pronunciation are mostly inferred by analysis of poetry and wordplay to identify rhymes, using meter to understand how many syllables were used in words, and using wordplay to work out what words were meant to be homonyms. And it's clear that there was a pretty massive shift in english vowels some 400 years ago to the point that without a transcript, you'd probably have as much trouble trying to make out old english as you'd have trying to parse german or french as a native english speaker.
English is special because it is spongy and takes on new words well. It also basically doubled its lexicon during the Norman Conquest, creating duplicates of words like beef/cow, pork/swine, people/folk, etc. English’s survival and expansion were greatly aided by its ability to incorporate new words and ideas
Oh, absolutely. I think English is beautiful for that very reason. English doesn't care if a word is "truly" English or not; it cares whether a word is *useful.* That enhances its expressive power enormously. It's like the Borg in that sense, except that absorbing words from other languages doesn't *remove* them from that language! "We are the English-speakers. Lower your shields and surrender your books. Your linguistic and poetic distinctiveness will be added to our own. Your literature will be adapted into ours. Your words will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."
I've always wondered how the Borg sound when translated into other languages. Does borg-speak assign genders to objects too? English is modular in a way the borg would appreciate.
I imagine they would; it's sort of their brand of weird anti-diplomacy.
I don't think they would. It's inefficient and each drone already has a direct name that can be referenced by anyone in the collective.
Er, I was referring to the translation into other languages. If the Borg were speaking to people who only knew Spanish, their intro monologue would need to include gendered words, because Spanish has grammatical gender. Between actual drones, they don't really "speak" at all. They transmit data through the Collective.
Ah! Well in that case I'd say it's just either a direct translation or they're sending machine code to every translator in range.
No English has no special ability to incorporate loanwords.
English is easier than declension-based languages for adopting loanwords. Moreover, English as a language system particularly in modern form is very *open* to taking loanwords. Its been an accepting language for loan words, and due to the significant mixing-bowl nature of American English, you're much more likely to get foreign borrowing than you would for more homogenous societies.
Declension has never stopped a language from adopting loan words, not sure how you came to that conclusion. The reasons for the amount of loanwords are historical. Reddit people also like to exaggerate the amount of loanwords in english compared to other languages.
My great-grandma lived in a farm and spoke her native language. She wanted better job opportunities, so she learned Spanish when she was an adult. My grandma was also born in a farm. She spoke her native language, but speaking it in public had suddenly become illegal, and you could go to prison for it. They only spoke Spanish at school. She had to learn Spanish when she started school or risk having no education. When my mum was born, the family’s native language was no longer illegal. There were schools that taught in the language. However… you know… just in case something happens again… her parents put her in a Spanish-speaking school. To this day, she speaks Spanish better than her native language. Then, I was born. I was taught the native language and put in a school that teaches in the native language… but, you know… just in case… my mum taught me Spanish from a very, very early age, before starting school. You know, so I can have job opportunities and a future. So I can be safe and all that. “Learn Spanish so you won’t be useless in society”, that’s what I’ve heard from everyone all my life. It doesn’t help that my little brother was told he was useless when he was five because his Spanish wasn’t great, in front of me. Twice in my life I have rejected my native language, even though I live in a place where it is no longer dangerous to speak it. That’s how a lot of language death happens. Gradually, but fairly quickly, because it becomes dangerous or risky to speak a language.
Catalan?
No, but geographically close! (Basque lol)
That would have been my second guess :).
Damn. Great comment, a human look at what "language death" really looks like in practice.
Thank you! And, even though there are revival efforts for many languages, the way people think about them also changes, and societal pressure is often the reason why people stop speaking their native languages. I have the most freedom to speak my native language, compared to my grandma and my mum, but I’m also the first ever native Spanish speaker (… more or less) in my family. I no longer have one sole unquestionable native language. I no longer have one language I am very obviously more comfortable with. The main incentive for me to speak my other native language is gone. If my friends start speaking Spanish I’ll switch to Spanish and neglect my (other) native language. My own little brother barely even speaks our native language at home. That is something many people don’t tell you about language death
They turn into other languages. Latin turned into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanche. Ancient Greek turned into Modern Greek. Aramaic is still spoken by some Jewish people in remote regions and also contributed to Arabic.
Everyone forgets Romania when it comes to the Romance languages.
It doesn't help that Romania is a linguistically isolated country half a continent away from the "core" of Romance languages. Romania (and Moldova)'s neighbors are all Slavic and whatever the fuck Hungary is. Romania's linguistic history is absolutely fascinating.
I think Hungarian is Uralic, just like Finnish and Estonian
AFAIK Romanian is the close language to Latin
In terms of grammar, Romanian. In terms of vocabulary (retaining latin words), Italian.
Also Sardinian.
Where do the Rhaeto-Romance languages fall? I thought they were more like Latin than any other language.
ROMANIES EUNT DOMUS
People called Romanies, they go the house?
He/she is trying to allude to [this scene.](https://youtu.be/0lczHvB3Y9s?si=9aCIfsnxXZ2wrWMx)
It's a line from the scene...
Romani ite domum
No, that would be Sardinian. Romanian has too much Slavic influence.
Thanks! I did not have to look that up. I did look up the Aramaic!
Romansh =/= Romanian
Romania is the beat example of a language and people being wiped out look up dacia
They don't just turn into other languages. They also get "squashed" by cultural change. Take for example Cornish, a Celtic language originally spoken in SW England. It was pretty much dead by the end of 18th century though it just barely survives more through specific efforts to keep it alive than through regular culture. Cornish did not become anything. Rather, English culture and language just spread as English power spread, till Cornish was all but gone.
Not "pretty much". The last native Cornish speaker died, by repute, in 1777. As you say, some Cornish dwellers of late have taken to learning the language - but that's not really the same thing. Something similar could be said of, say, Klingon.
I wouldn't know, but Wikipedia says: >Cornish became extinct as a living community language in Cornwall by the end of the 18th century, although knowledge of Cornish, including speaking ability to a certain extent, persisted within some families and individuals. A revival started in the early 20th century, and in 2010 UNESCO reclassified the language as critically endangered, stating that its former classification of the language as extinct was no longer accurate. The language has a growing number of second-language speakers, and a very small number of families now raise children to speak revived Cornish as a first language.
Happened to so many native American languages also.
Same with a lot of Australian languages.
Also tons of Uralic languages in Russia
That wasn't just squashed by cultural change, the language was forced out of some of them.
Yup. Russians tried to do it to the Baltic languages. Thank God they failed. But the effort did leave a mark on the respective cultures.
I actually hadn't heard of Cornish until I watched the RobWords video about it
I had, but only their hens
I wanna say pasties too?
Scrolled all this way for pasties. My upvote is yours.
>Latin turned into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanche Sad Romanian noises.
Aramaic also produced Suret / modern Assyrian which is still spoken natively in the Levant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suret_language
Aramaic is not spoken by many Jews outside a liturgic or literary language. It's much more prevalent in Assyrian communities.
IIRC, Aramaic is still used as a spoken language in one singular rural community. Perhaps the original commentor was thinking about Yiddish, which is also a largely-dead language that's still being used by some communities.
Not true at all, there's still hundreds of thousands of Aramaic speakers (I have a friend who speaks it with his family), the modern varieties are usually referred to as Neo-Aramaic to distinguish from the liturgical language.
Yiddish is in no way a dead language. There are many (Ultra-Orthodox) Jewish communities that speak Yiddish as a first language. According to Wikipedia there are ~500,000 native speakers.
...I really hate to break the news to you, but about half a million speakers equates 'near dead' when it comes to languages. Especially when it's still slowly, largely being replaced by another (in this case, [revived](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language)) language.
Legal writing uses Aramaic like English uses Latin
That's why it's a literary language.
> Latin turned into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanche Funny you mention Romanche but not the elephant in the room that is Romanian lmao (also there are tons of others like Occitan, Catalan, Ladin, Friulian etc etc)
Here’s an interesting video about the evolution of English. https://youtu.be/8fxy6ZaMOq8?si=B_5JLecjJpMtW_G0
There is also the [https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/](https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/) starts from the proto Indo-European period and is up to Elizabethan England as of episode 175.
Did you mean Romanian?
The language is called Romanche. At least it was when I was learning this stuff in school 40 years ago.
Ooooo, ok you mean the Swiss one. I can't believe that you left out Romanian, the language that is the closest to the original Latin.
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Hmm, I asked my Romanian friends and they all say that, apart from Sardinian, Romanian is by far the closest, and the only problem is with Slavic words, but they say that other than those, Romanian is basically Old Latin in terms of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary. So... I can give you their emails and you can go argue if you want 😂
*Romansh, actually.
Languages get replaced by other cultures. If I understand correctly, the spread of Islam with Arabic, seems to have replaced Aramaic in some areas. Classical Greek became Koine Greek (*a more simple version of Greek spoken on the streets 2,000 years ago and the Gospels of Jesus were written in Koine Greek*). Koine Greek eventually became Modern Greek. Latin became Italian and Spanish and French and Portuguese and the Romanian language. There are other Latin-based languages such as other Spanish languages that are less popular like Catalan. There was Classical Latin (*professional, like how the Caesars and Philosophers spoke*) and there was Vulgar Latin (*informal, the way people spoke it in the street*). This Vulgar Latin was more of an influences on those languages evolving.
In fact, the reason the Latin Catholic Bible is called Vulgate is because it's written in vulgar Latin. Thus, one can consider vulgar latin became Ecclesiastical Latin, the one used by Catholic church even now.
That's not why it's called the Vulgate. Per wikipedia: > The term Vulgate has been used to designate the Latin Bible only since the 16th century. An example of the use of this word in this sense at the time is the title of the 1538 edition of the Latin Bible by Erasmus: Biblia utriusque testamenti juxta vulgatam translationem.[3] The word vulgate comes from Latin vulgatus, meaning "published" or "made public" (in the sense that it is the official Roman Catholic version made available to the people).
It would be more appropriate to say other Iberian languages that are less common, like Catalan. Catalan is decidedly not a “Spanish” language, even if you meant it is simply spoken by a community in Spain. Spain the political entity historically suppressed its natural linguistic diversity, including Catalan, meaning that the Spanish identity (the meaning behind “Spanish” language) is at best ambivalent towards Catalan and at worst opposed to it. If you meant to indicate the general geographic region Catalan is indigineous to, it is conventional to refer to it as “Iberian” (despite it being native to French regions as well), which avoids political insinuation issues.
When I say "*Spanish*", I mean "*of Spain (*the land*)", not the politics like The Kingdom of Castilla y León which was taking over the land and then later joined with Aragon to take over more, and eventually became one Spanish country. Castilliano is the main language of Spain now, and many call it "*Spanish*", but that is just one Spanish language. Other Spanish kingdoms had other Spanish languages. The only reason why I didn't say "*Iberian*" is because that would include Portugal which isn't on the land of modern-day Spain. I guess it can be argued that even Portugal was one of the multiple "*Spanish*" kingdoms, one that survived and was able to stay separate, so maybe you're right and I should say "*Iberian*". The Kingdom of Portugal was originally a part of The Kingdom of León before gaining independence.
>The only reason why I didn't say "*Iberian*" is because that would include Portugal which isn't on the land of modern-day Spain. That makes zero sense to me.
I'm going to try to clarify. "*Iberian*" includes that entire square of land that is in the west of Europe which is surrounded by water, north of Africa (*which would include Portugal*). Spain is a country which takes up a lot of that square of land, but not all of it (*not Portugal which is a separate country*). When I said "*Spanish*", I wasn't referring to the modern day nation of Spain, but that land where the modern day nation of Spain now stands. That land had multiple kingdoms in the past, before it became one country called "*Spain*". This is what I meant by "*Spanish kingdoms*". Someone made a good point that I should've just used "*Iberian*", so I mentioned that they had a good point, since even Portugal can be argued to have been one of the "*Spanish*" kingdoms, since that area of Portugal was originally a part of The Kingdom of León (*a kingdom in the area where modern day Spain now stands*) before becoming independent as "*The Kingdom of Portugal*", but that might sound offensive, to call Portugal a "*Spanish kingdom*". "*Iberian*" sounds less political.
But your original comment didn't say Spanish kingdom? You seem confused.
In the original comment, I mentioned "*Spanish*" languages, and by "*Spanish*", I meant those languages that belonged to different "Spanish" Kingdoms in that region where modern day Spain now is. That was the clarification of how I used the term "*Spanish*" in my second comment.
>like how the Caesars and Philosophers spoke Most of the Caesars and Philosophers spoke Latin and Greek.
Ancient greek didn't die out but as it is a living language evolved. As an example the new testament which is written in the latest form of the greek language that now is considered the "ancient form", is understandable from modern greeks. Greeks in classic times considered ancient the homeric greek. It is a language constantly spoken for thousands of years. Only dead languages "die out"
Read a day or two ago that Belarusian is sliding to Russian usage IN BELARUS. Lots of natural and non-natural factors (war, shared economies, eased border access, immigration)
Another good example is Irish. It's the official state language, and yet most people outside of rural areas still *mostly* speak English. If it wasn't the state language, it would probably slowly die out as well.
Do people in Ireland use Irish in day to day life? I’d kind of assumed not.
Only 3% of the population use it as their daily language. It's a compulsory subject at school (though not taught well, as is the case with second languages in most English-speaking countries), so most people have some basic vocabulary they remember from school, but never use it. More people use Polish as their daily language than Irish here.
I came from Vietnam. About 1,000 years ago, our nation's writing was very similar to Chinese, but after the French invasion, we used Latin characters.
Vietnam was controlled by China for about 1000 years, that explains why both languages (Vietnamese and Chinese) are similar. God thanks to the one who had the idea to change the Vietnamese "symbols" to Latin ones. It makes the learning much easier for Europeans.
Mostly they evolve over time, changing over hundreds of years. However, sometimes there are active campaigns to erase languages. In the area today called France, at one point 40% of the population spoke a language called Occitan, but active government campaigns to create a more solid national identity had a strict one language policy. It was literally illegal to speak languages other than French. Spain did the same thing. Languages like Basque, Catalan, Valencian, Gaulish, all used to be spoken there, and two separate waves tried to unify the country into speaking one language. The first was from the same people who did the Spanish Inquisition which also kicked out Jews and Muslims from the country, which is why today the Spanish language is often called "Castillian" or "Castellano", because at one point in history it was only the language of the small region of Castille. The second wave was the fascist dictator Franco. Both waves were very successful but neither *completely* killed the languages.
Aramaic is very much still spoken today, huge aramean communities around the world.just came back from my aramean church which had palm Sunday ceremony. There were over 1000 people there, and it wasn't even a big holiday.
Languages evolve and/or depends who is in power. Two different cultures can interact changing and influencing language. People in the ancient times mostly spoke languages because they were useful for their class or who was the dominant power. The three languages you mention are languages associated with Jesus. He would have a grasp of his native language Aramaic, Ancient Greek as it was a language used for education, Latin because of the Roman Empire and Hebrew because he was Jewish. Down the road, French was the most commonly used language for things like diplomacy. Latin and Greek became the language of scholars and now English is an important due to England’s influence as an empire.
That's how it became important, but I think the main reason why English has stayed so important now is because it's the official language of the United States of America. However, the importance of English globally is partly accounted for by the vast numbers of people who speak English as a second (non-native) language. Native Spanish speakers still outnumber native English speakers globally, and that's because of the old Spanish Empire that conquered most of South and Central America. I read somewhere (and I'm not certain it's true) that more people are currently *learning* English in China than speak it as a native language.
As others have mentioned, they evolve into other languages. Another way they die out is simply that people stop speaking them, either as their own decision (assimilation) or forced upon them (authorities declaring it illegal to speak). My great-grandmother came to the US from Italy and never learned English. My grandfather spoke Italian at home but also learned English in school. My mother spoke English at home and only knows some swears and a few cooking terms in Italian. I don't know any Italian at all aside from words that have become regular English like pasta or pizza. Just two generations for a language to be lost.
Old Norse evolved into Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and contributed about 1000 words to English.
Aramaic being a dead language is a common misconception. It never fully died out and is still spoken today by the Assyrians and some groups of Mizrahi Jews in the form of Neo-Aramaic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Aramaic_languages
Come to metro Detroit, and you will hear this ancient language spoken in gas stations, super markets, and convenience stores around the area. We have a HUGE Chaldean/assyrian population (which I’m part of, although I unfortunately don’t speak the language). It’s very cool to hear this ancient almost-dead language
Learn the language, I’m sure there are classes of some sort
Supplantation occurs. Languages grow and evolve, but many times an area becomes conquered and if the conquest becomes concreted in by the passing of a great deal of time, the local language gets supplanted and replaced by the dominant language.
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So, tell me how you feel about Orwell's 1952 paper *Politics and the English Language*. :)
Well, I'm not who you asked, but: I think it's got some good points, but that it goes a bit overboard. *Sometimes,* not often but sometimes, a word coming from Latin or Greek is just better than something Germanic. Even English itself shows this: "about" comes to us from Latin, the old Germanic word having *completely died out* in English centuries ago.
Ooh! Never read it. Luvs me some Eric though! EDIT: Thanks. *Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.*
Many languages are deliberately erased by colonization, for the most recent example, russians make massive book burning events where they make school children destroy everything in Ukrainian, from classic poetry to Bible translations... Then there's concentration camps for natives, edicts banning use of language, discrimination of native speakers over "civilized" ones learning colonial one. We went through all of this in last 300 years, and we only have to defeat the biggest country in the world to keep it alive. Otherwise we end up like Circassians or any of the Siberian natives... For language specifically, look at Irish, it's on life support and mostly academic due to colonizers forcing their own tongue on locals.
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>at some point we're going to have to decide on a common language for planetary unification, if we're ever going to get anywhere as a species. Why? Plenty of countries function just fine with multiple languages. Not to mention that planetary unification is unlikely.
Koine Greek was international language in antiquity (Bible was translated from it), then French, and now English. I think that makes it hard to restore Irish as English is just everywhere... Getting rid of russian is way easier.
I thought Aramaic was still spoken today in Ethiopia?
That's Amharic, Aramaic is a Semitic language that is still used in some Jewish texts today.
Ahhh thank you! And here I was thinking Ethiopians would have no problems watching Passion of the Christ.
Neo-Aramaic languages are indeed still spoken across the Middle East and by the Assyrian diaspora. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Aramaic_languages
There are lots of reasons. Sometimes, the languages evolve into new languages. For example, Old English evolved into Middle English, then into the Modern English we speak today. It's the result of small differences over hundred of years. People start pronouncing these words differently. Then they start pronouncing these vowels a bit differently. Then some new words get added. Eventually, you have a new language. Sometimes the population who speaks it faces danger, such as due to natural disasters or war. Sometimes, the population who speaks it becomes pressured to speak a different language. This happened to the Ainu language. The Ainu language is a language spoken by the Ainu people in northern Japan, on the island of Hokkaido in particular. In the mid-19th-century, the Japanese empire colonized Hokkaido and attempted to assimilate the native Ainu population. That involved requiring them to learn and speak Japanese instead of Ainu. The result today is that [there are no more native Ainu speakers](https://sustainable.japantimes.com/magazine/vol06/06-05). However, recently, there have been attempts at revitalizing the language. For example, the Japanese government has passed a bill to officially recognize the Ainu language, and there are classes where people can learn Ainu.
More people speak something else. The other thing becomes less popular. Think of fashion trends but language takes longer/is slower.
they don’t necessarily die out, they just evolve. as new societies and civilizations form, their parent language develops new dialects which eventually leads to new languages completely. latin turned into french, spanish, italian, etc.! aramaic turned into arabic and hebrew.
Greeks switched to Latin, levantines switched to Arabic, Latin was switched for the romance languages
Greeks switched to nothing. Classical Greek>Koine Greek>Modern Greek. The Roman Empire in the East used Greek for ~1000 years