2007-05-27 16:55:17 · 19 answers · asked by crown 1 in Society & Culture ➔ Languages
The language of Adam and Eve, but it was not recorded.
jtm
2007-05-27 16:58:22 · answer #1 · answered by Jesus M 7 · 0⤊ 3⤋
I don't know which one is actually the oldest, but know that Hebrew, a Semitic language used by the Jewish people, is one of the world's oldest living languages.
In the 12th century BCE, Hebrew, which earlier may have been almost identical with Phoenician, developed into an independent language. Hebrew was spoken by the Patriarchs during the Biblical period. In the last century BCE, the alphabet of Hebrew, which is still used today, was developed. The Bible was written in Hebrew. In the post-Biblical period, Aramaic gradually replaced Hebrew as the spoken language, but Hebrew was still used as the language of ritual, prayer, literature, and written communication for centuries.
Historical linguistics has long wrestled with the idea of a single original language. Yet the well-documented branching of languages from common ancestors (such as most current European languages from ancient Indo-European) point in the direction of a single ancestral language. This would prove that the story of the tower of Babel in the Bible is true after all.
2007-05-28 00:47:05 · answer #2 · answered by Lilo and Stitch 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
The language of the Kalahari bushmen (the "!Kung" people etc) is thought to be the oldest language for two reasons:
1. Humanity descended from Africa
2. These languages have about 8 different clicks as sounds and anthropologists believe human language originally had more clicks than consonants because the human voicebox and mouth did not evolve yet to be able to produce the rich sounds of most modern languages.
2007-05-28 22:15:52 · answer #3 · answered by Michael F 3 · 0⤊ 2⤋
How do you define the age of a language? They don't usually come into being whole, overnight. They take time, separating from related/parent languages which are also changing, sometimes into things that are unrecognizable from the time that the languages split.
By that way of thinking, all natural languages are roughly the same age.
2007-05-28 01:19:12 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 0⤋
The language of LOVE!
2007-05-28 00:21:57 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 3⤊ 0⤋
I really don't know what the oldest language is but I know that Latin is the oldest recorded language. Jo x
2007-05-28 00:01:39 · answer #6 · answered by joanne a 2 · 0⤊ 2⤋
Egyptian
2007-05-28 00:04:42 · answer #7 · answered by lotusgrass 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Sanskrit or Egypt Languages
2007-05-28 00:04:33 · answer #8 · answered by Supun Sudaraka 2 · 3⤊ 1⤋
Sinhala
2007-05-27 23:57:37 · answer #9 · answered by Irosh Bandara 5 · 0⤊ 1⤋
Neanderthalian
2007-05-28 01:01:44 · answer #10 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 2⤋