One language, however, up in the Baltic language branch of the Indo-European family, retained more of the feature of what linguists call Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which is the language that they postulate was spoken around 3500 BCE. The Basque language is the ultimate linguistic mystery. However, the language spoken at the time of the Ancient Greek antiquity and the language that is spoken today in modern Greece are very different but related. Therefore, it’s impossible to say that one language is really older than any other one they’re all as old as humanity itself. Irish Gaelic was the language from which Scottish Gaelic and Manx (which is spoken on the Isle of Man) arose, but the fact that really lands it on this list is that it has the oldest vernacular literature of any language in Western Europe. Georgian is the biggest Kartvelian language, and it is the only Caucasian language with an ancient literary tradition. It is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family, which also includes Estonian, Hungarian, and several smaller languages spoken by minority groups across Siberia. Despite it not being classified as related to any other languages, authors Arnaud Fournet and Allan R Bombard published a book describing some distinct characteristics of Indo-European languages in Hurrian.
Raetic might also be just a language isolate with Etruscan influences, and we might never know the language’s true origins. The writing system of Sumerian is a script called cuneiform. Hebrew is a funny case, since it essentially fell out of common usage around 400 CE and then remained preserved as a liturgical language for Jews across the world. The Basque language is spoken by the Basque people of northern Spain and parts of southwestern France. Words can be formed or used with a chain of separate … The term may also encompass other classical languages and various extinct languages.Ĭomplex variations of morphemes and suffixes attached to nouns, verbs, and pronouns were used to convey ideas. The main languages of the three south Caucasian countries, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, come from three entirely different language families-respectively Indo-European, Turkic, and Kartvelian. A mysterious culture, little is known about how they lived and what their society was like. Tamil, a language spoken by about 78 million people and recognized as an official language in Sri Lanka and Singapore, is the only classical language that has survived all the way through to the modern world. While the modern version differs from the Biblical version, native speakers of Hebrew can fully comprehend what is written in the Old Testament and its connected texts. Linguists and archaeologists still debate over the grammar and syntax of the language, and there’s only about few hundred people in the world with a working knowledge of it.
Language evolution is like biological evolution-it happens minutely, generation by generation, so there’s no distinct breaking point between one language and the next language that develops from it. Hurrian was once the language of the Mitanni Kingdom before the Assyrian conquest. Similar to other ancient languages, Sumerian is agglutinative. Ancient in different languages Farsi is the direct descendant of Old Persian, which was the language of the Persian Empire.