Amazing, apart from obvious benefits of being Wikipedia article it's necessary to note that it was written in one of the oldest regional Indian language - Telugu; so it will serve as good medium for language preservation as well.
Just FYI, Telugu is spoken by like 70 million people. It's nice that there are 365 more articles written in it, but there is also a wide variety of media being churned out in Telugu every day, like Tollywood cinema.
I think there are a couple of ways to prove this. Archeological records of say, inscriptions in one language would help. If an inscription is older than any inscription in another language, it's possibly older. Another way would be linguistic analysis that demonstrates that one language is derived from another. For example, in India many languages are influenced by Sanskrit so Sanskrit is probably older than all of them, with a few exceptions like Tamil, which show much less influence.
In India this is a pretty contentious issue. People like to claim that they're a part of a much older tradition and that makes their culture better. This is related to the claim by people who speak more widely spoken languages that these languages should replace the older, less popular languages - for example "why can't you Tamil speakers learn to speak Hindi?"
> If an inscription is older than any inscription in another language, it's possibly older
No, it just means that the first language has an older written tradition.
I really doubt that "the oldest" language" has any meaning at all, given that most (all?) living natural languages gradually evolved from an ancestor language. Like the other poster said, it's nonsensical to say whether Spanish and Portuguese is older because they both just evolved from being a variation of Latin.
Or like, all current variant of English evolved from the English spoken in England some hundred years ago (which is different from British English today). What does it mean to say whether British, American or Australian English is older?
> I really doubt that "the oldest" language has any meaning at all, given that most (all?) living natural languages gradually evolved from an ancestor language.
There are some newer languages, which evolved quite suddenly rather than gradually.
Two regional Indian languages spoken today are, by necessity, equally old. It's not so common for new languages to form.
> in India many languages are influenced by Sanskrit so Sanskrit is probably older than all of them
Sanskrit is older than modern languages in the sense that it is from a premodern period. That doesn't apply to living languages. We can say that Latin is an older form of Portuguese; it is nonsensical to say that Portuguese is older than Spanish. They're both Latin.
Spanish has a noticeable amount of influence from Arabic, since Arabic speakers conquered the south of Spain and ruled there for a while. I don't see how this is evidence that Arabic is an older language than Spanish is, though.
No, I don't think so. If people have been speaking Language A for 2 millennia, it's 2 millennia old. If they've been speaking Language B for 15 centuries, it's 15 centuries old. Just because A and B are both spoken today doesn't make them equally old. That's as absurd as saying you and I are both alive today so we must be the same age.
It's interesting that you mention Spain. Are you familiar with the Basque language? It has almost no influence from the Romance languages spoken in all areas surrounding Basque country like French and Spanish. It's the last descendant of the pre-Indo-European languages spoken in Western Europe. Would you claim that Basque and Spanish are equally old?
Influence doesn't imply that the influenced language is younger. A language being entirely derived from another, like Hindi from Sanskrit and the Romance languages from Latin, does imply that they're younger than Sanskrit and Latin.
>Would you claim that Basque and Spanish are equally old?
If by Spanish you mean the modern history of the language, since its branching off from the other Romance languages, then you could say it's younger, but this is just an accident of naming, caused by the extrinsic fact that there are other surviving dialects of Latin with their own nation states.
If Latin had only survived in the form of Spanish, we would probably either call it Latin, or see Latin as Old Spanish. Either way we wouldn't see it as less old than Basque.
And from a linguistic point of view, unless you think Basque and IE languages derive from separate innovations of language (sort of like wings have evolved separately in birds and bats - analogy rather than homology), the language that is today called Spanish is of course just as old as the language called Basque.
> Would you claim that Basque and Spanish are equally old?
Think. How could it possibly be otherwise?
> If people have been speaking Language A for 2 millennia, it's 2 millennia old. If they've been speaking Language B for 15 centuries, it's 15 centuries old. Just because A and B are both spoken today doesn't make them equally old.
But you just made that up. As has already been pointed out, all modern languages have been spoken for exactly the same period of time, with a few rare exceptions. The fact that two languages are both spoken today is sufficient to conclude that they are equally old, unless you happen to know exactly when one of them originated.
Ah, I think I'm beginning to understand what you're saying. So Spanish might have have evolved from Vulgar Latin after the Romans brought it to the Iberian peninsula in 210BC, but in your eyes, its the same age as Latin itself. So although the Romans conquered Gaul (France) in 50BC, beginning the evolution of French, you reckon that French and Spanish are the same age.
Let me know if I've understood you correctly. If I have, then I think that's a perfectly valid way of looking at it.
For some reason people seem to call languages "old" when they really mean "archaic" or "unchanged".
It makes more sense to say that Portuguese is older than Latin in the sense that it has been developing for centuries longer.
>Spanish has a noticeable amount of influence from Arabic, since Arabic speakers conquered the south of Spain and ruled there for a while. I don't see how this is evidence that Arabic is an older language than Spanish is, though.
I don't see how this is relevant, the post talked about some modern Indian languages being "derived" from Sanskrit, which definitely implies a difference in age.
>>Another way would be linguistic analysis that demonstrates that one language is derived from another
> During the Second Punic War, roughly between 210 and 205 BC the expanding Roman Republic captured Carthaginian trading colonies along the Mediterranean coast. Although it took the Romans nearly two centuries to complete the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, they retained control of it for over six centuries.
The Latin speakers (i.e. the Roman Empire) actually controlled Iberia for about as much time as Arabic speakers (i.e. various caliphates and emirates) :)
In India, it ends up being the availability of records that are (a) decipherable and (b) recognizably in that language. Among the so-called Indian "regional" langauges, the oldest Tamil records date back to about 2300 BC, while the oldest available records of Kannada/Telugu are a few hundreds of years younger. It's quite likely these languages existed long before these written records, but records are what decide the oldness olympics.
There are no records recognizably written in any modern language from 2300 BC. They can be recognizably written in an ancestral form of the language, but no language can remain self-intelligible over 4300 years.
It may not necessarily mean a new original article every day. A huge number of articles are simple translations of the english version (or vice versa). Which doesn't make them any less useful. But it makes it easier to produce a large number.
And this btw where a lot of people could contribute - just translating a good article into an under-represented language (or, alternatively, an article unique to some language into more languages) would be much easier for an unexperienced contributor than writing a good one from scratch, and the impact is pretty much as large.
Seriously right? smh. The frustration from that is where my HN username comes from if anyone is wondering...To this day there's no real alternative encyclopedia that is a legit competitor to Wikipedia unfortunately.
Have you ever tried to make a page? Like genuinely tried to make a page? Not spammed them with bs. I am not bitter because I couldn't spam them with low quality nonsense. Just the opposite actually, I am a longtime Wikipedia editor. I love the site to be completely upfront (contrary to my username), but their notability guidelines is mind bogglingly frustrating. They've deleted pages I've tried to make for local ice cream shops, ma and pa stores that have real stories (and real citations!), and local investors/entrepreneurs who might not be as famous as Mark Zuckerberg but are notable. It's maddening when you're work gets deleted. I've given up making newer pages and let the higher ups do it and just improve the pages once they are fairly mature. There are no real alternatives to Wikipedia with the same altruistic base vision unfortunately. The only notable sites are RationalWiki, Everipedia, InfoGalactic, and Wikia (if you can really even count that), but all of these are a mere fraction of a fraction as big and reputable as Wikipedia, so back to them I keep going (and back to deleting my articles they continue to do).
Even a page [1] made by Jimmy Wales himself was deleted 22 minutes after creation [2]. It was later undeleted and nominated for deletion again, sparking a rather lengthy debate [3].
> They've deleted pages I've tried to make for local ice cream shops, ma and pa stores that have real stories
A line has to be drawn somewhere though. Storage may be cheap, but every article represents a maintenance burden in the long term. Hence the notability requirement. Why would a local investor/entrepreneur be notable to a global audience?
An in-depth article on your local ice cream parlour seems more at its place on a local blog, or on Wikivoyage under the 'Eat' header, or a book about your town; perhaps even a town-wiki!
> They've deleted pages I've tried to make for local ice cream shops, ma and pa stores that have real stories (and real citations!), and local investors/entrepreneurs
Are those things really notable? I think you're overvaluing things that are only relevant to you. It sounds like what you should be doing is creating a wikia or mediawiki for your city, county, or state.
I did. It's still there. Not a super-prominent one - couple of hundreds visits per month - but useful I think.
> their notability guidelines is mind bogglingly frustrating
Notability is a frequent point of contention. I don't think there's a good final way to solve it - people are interested in different things, and some things - e.g. local businesses - are notoriously grey area and prone to both abuse and over-zealous policing. I am sorry your experience was bad, but maybe try to contribute in some less controversial area? There are tons of areas - especially in translation space - where a lot of articles about completely non-controversial topic and very prominent things and people are under-covered.
This account has posted too many trollish comments for it to be a coincidence, so I've banned it until we get a commitment from you to follow the site guidelines meticulously from now on. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com if you intend to use the site that way.
It is not a rare language as it is spoken by more than 72 million people[1]
Yet, there are languages that are in decline, because the population has dispersed or has been assimilated into other cultures. Some have less than 100 speakers, some are extinct. These languages are not just only tools for communication. They have evolved along with their speakers and thus reflect their culture and history.
Just as examining the DNA of a species can shed light on where it originated from, its habitat, challenges it evolved against and so on, so can the morphological analysis of the language text and word etymologies, enable one to map out invasions and associations with different cultures, periods of famine and plenty, the important aspects of the culture etc. For example, Eskimos have numerous words for snow because their lives depend on nowing the nuances of different types of snow and adapting to it. The movement of people in Central Asia, thousands of years ago, can be deduced from the tree of languages that have branched out from the original settlers. I will try to add references soon.
Languages are a part of history, a part of human culture, a part of us. Death of a language is death of a civilization, a way of life (though the people themselves may live on). Preserving the vestiges of a dying language is a noble act in service of the human civilization, future and past.
I apologize if I misunderstood your post, but I feel as though you still did not answer the parent's question. (And I'm aware Telugu is not a dead language, but I ask following questions in general)
What is the tangible benefit (in excess of the time investment) of dead languages?
And this may be a little naive but, it is nice to preserve human history in its original format, but how can that help the average person?
It's often said [0] that every language is conducive to a unique worldview - in my personal experience, I see the world very differently in Polish than I do in English. Yet even if that worldview perspective may be intangible (i.e. hard to prove), the simple cultural value of each language is tremendous. Losing a language is like burning the Mona Lisa - along with every photo, copy, or file of her ever made.
Your personal experiences are probably swamped by the fact that individuals have different personalities when speaking in different languages, due to the experiences that they've had speaking those languages. For example, it's not uncommon at all for an immigrant to have a very confident and assertive personality in their native language, compared to their personality when speaking the language of the country they live in. I know some people who are like this.
When I speak other languages I tend to be more serious. Perhaps this is because I was very serious when I was studying them? (Perhaps causation goes the other way?)
The context of the post above certainly making it sounds like Telugu was a dying, rarely-spoken language. If you, like myself, knew nothing about Telugu except the suggestion that it needed preserving, then you'd probably have assumed that too. This brings up the question of why (or whether) Telugu does need preserving if it's so active.
I am a native speaker of Telugu and working to grow digital knowledge resources in the language. So, I am also a Telugu Wikipedian. I would like to present few insights of Telugu speaking world. Telugu, like some other Indian languages, has a lot of colonial influence, especially in the fields of education and knowledge sharing. Telugu Native speakers learn Engineering and Medicine only in English Medium. No college offers a course of Medicine in Telugu, this is true with other Technical, Higher education courses. Majority of Telugu Native speakers educate from their middle or primary school in English Medium. This resulted in a negative phenomenon where you can find virtually no knowledge source about some Scientific and Advanced fields in Telugu. Many Language activists are worried that current generation and upcoming generations are brought up in an environment where they can speak Telugu and can be a doctorate holder but couldn't literally read and write in their native language. But as the language is spoken by millions 74.2 million native speakers, Entertainment (Telugu Film industry is so popular in India), News & Media, Literature, History and some other such fields persist to produce Fiction & Non-fiction works and knowledge base in Telugu. But as I mentioned above, A Scientist, who is a Telugu Native speaker won't publish his works in Telugu and unfortunately, that work even didn't get translated generally into Telugu.
Telugu Wikipedia, as a free knowledge collaborative project, helps language in improving one of its biggest knowledge repositories and partly trying to fill this specific gap.
I don't know if this context represented well in this article, but this is the context of the story.
I don't know how common this phenomenon is in India, but anecdotally, most of the Tamil people I know who graduated from college can barely read and write Tamil. They have no problems speaking it, but they'd struggle to write an essay in Tamil, let alone a thesis. No such problems in English, obviously.
You often hear the concern that regional languages could disappear because most parents would prefer that their kid studied in an English medium school.
It sounds to me like they may not see the value in preserving languages (not "anything"), whether widely spoken or not.
I don't see much value in maintaining the regular, daily use of any particular language, but I see tremendous value in preserving the written works (and nowadays spoken audio) of every language. It provides informative data to anyone seeking to understand language, history, and culture, today and in the future.
For the same reason, I support preserving all source code, even from discontinued or unfinished or shitty software. I have no idea what types of analysis might be possible in 500 years, but I don't want to deny them the opportunity to try it.
Of a guy writing wiki articles? Nothing. It's a pretty valid question in general though as people do receive grant money for language preservation projects I'm pretty sure.
I agree with the sentiment, but in this case the reply inserted "rarely-spoken" with a question of preservation. Not only that, but the addition made it predictable that "nobody does that anymore, why remember it?" would get a negative reaction.
Dravidian languages - Tamil, Telugu , Malayalam, Kannada & sub Dravidian languages still spoken by tribes came into existence in advanced civilisations when still majority of the world where inside caves.
