as an Egyptian muslim, I wish we get taught Coptic in our schools along with Hieroglyphs, it would be really cool to be able to read the texts of our ancient ancestors

@scottdoesntmatter4409

11 ай бұрын

As a Muslim, you should be aware that Islam has done all it can ever since its founder to wipe out every other culture and religion it could.

@florianbirnbaum6584

11 ай бұрын

The surprising thing is that you forgot your own language. Now you could look at China with disdain.

@manetho5134

11 ай бұрын

@@florianbirnbaum6584 Languages die all over the world, French people don't speak Gallic Celtic anymore, what's your point?

@florianbirnbaum6584

11 ай бұрын

@@manetho5134 But French is not Gallic. Coptic was the evolved language of the Pharaohs. You basically forgot your own culture. The same culture you try to sell to the world for money. If it wasn't so important, there was no need to reclaim Rosetta Stone, for instance. But I don't really care, worse for you.

@manetho5134

11 ай бұрын

@@florianbirnbaum6584 yes French is not Gallic, they forgot their Gallic language and now speak Latin based French, cultures and identities change and evolve all over the world, especially when religion and language change, no peaple have the same culture unchanged for 5000 years, Egyptian religion died in the 4th and 5th centuries with the rapid spread of Christianity, and the Egyptian language died in the Islamic period wirh the spead of Arabic

As a Hebrew speaker, it’s actually kind of easy to understand the ancient texts, it’s kind of like an English speaker reading Shakespeare

@giladbenbunan

11 ай бұрын

נכון, מות העברית המדוברת היה בערך בתקופת המשנה ולכן אפשר לקרוא משנה בקלות בעברית

@kalebmaxwell5725

10 ай бұрын

So would you say the grammar is more, or less complex than modern Hebrew?

@andrelee7081

10 ай бұрын

I'm sorry, but as a native English speaker, Shakespeare is not easy to understand

@adamodeo9320

10 ай бұрын

I find Shakespeare far more difficult for an English speaker than the bible for a Hebrew speaker

@BHHB336

10 ай бұрын

@@kalebmaxwell5725 the grammar is more complicated, so a Hebrew speaker wouldn’t really get why to use a certain form of word/different vocabulary instead of another, but it’s still understandable using context for forms/words that aren’t used today

Fun thing about Madarin. The chinese word for it is 普通話, literally “common speak”. So yeah, you know the cliche of a lot of fantasy story having a “common tongue”, yeah, it’s real for the Chinese.

@Bepples

11 ай бұрын

Same with the Greek term Koine (Κοινή) meaning common, also describing the standardised ancient Greek during the Hellenistic and early medieval periods.

@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714

11 ай бұрын

Duch/deutsch also means people or speech of the common people. The problem with labeling your language "common tongue" in a fantasy work is that it implies there is no history and this term appeared very recently, as if thats what it was called long ago phonetics and semantics will have changed.

@zimriel

11 ай бұрын

@@Bepples Yeah, D&D got its idea for a "common tongue" from Koine. D&D came to assume a common pagan culture which, for mediaeval society, wasn't pagan. A common tongue for nonChristians had to be remembered from the Hellenistic era. So: "Common".

@sabkobds

11 ай бұрын

Slavic comes from word "word". It somehow means "understandable". Interesting Slavic term for German person is "Nemec/Nijemac/Nemac..." which means "mute one", which was probably word for all "not understandable" people (aliens/foreigners), but being largest neighboring group to them, it probably stacked.

@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714

11 ай бұрын

@@sabkobds But it has morphed so much most think slav comes from slava meaning glory.

What about Basque? Isn't it a Pre-Indo-European language?

@kaby3190

Жыл бұрын

I don't claim to know much about Basque, but his criteria says that he uses the earliest attested written record, and from what I could find on Wikipedia, the earliest Basque written record is the Hand of Irulegi, which dates to around 80-72 BC, which is newer than all the items on the list I believe.

@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714

11 ай бұрын

Its Pre PIE as in its not derived from PIE, but basque is actually much much younger.

@galinor7

11 ай бұрын

​@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 yes. Claims about Basques antiquity are perhaps shrouded in myth and evidence for pre Indo-European are maybe not that evidence based.

@lu0z9_the_I

11 ай бұрын

​@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714basque should be preserved with all ways possible, it is very rare to have an Non-PIE language in Europe that isn't finno-ugric

@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714

11 ай бұрын

@@lu0z9_the_I I am not basque thus their language doesnt mean much to me.

Tamil is very long lasting and has changed relatively little in the last 2000 years. I'm surprised it didn't get more mention separate from the other Indian languages.

@varoonnone7159

11 ай бұрын

You indulge in wishful thinking. Linguistic history doesn't really support the propaganda of tamil supremacists

@bj.bruner

11 ай бұрын

No one conquers the Tamil kings

@kremepye3613

11 ай бұрын

@@bj.bruner except the sri lankan government

@MottiShneor

11 ай бұрын

But is is really separate from the other Indian languages? is it not descended from Sanskrit? and if it is - is it NOT in the hierarchy the video shows? I'm curious... I spent 8 months in India, traveling around, from Rajasthan down to Kanya-Kumari and zig-zagging all around -- I remember many people complaining about how "un-intelligible" Tamil was... Sometimes with nasty jokes. Now I wonder... is it really different?

@MadhanBhavani

11 ай бұрын

@@MottiShneor Tamil is a dravidian language and hence descended from proto-dravidian, it is not descended from sanskrit

I am a native Greek speaker, who have studied Latin for 2 years, Sanskrit for 1 year and Hebrew for half a year. Though I don't speak Chinese, I have studied Kanbun Kundoku, which is the traditional Japanese method of reading Chinese texts. I am really happy that I studied those ancient languages!

@Thomas-lg6jx

11 ай бұрын

Brother mother horse ect...similar in latin sanskrit gallic

@MegaMaxiepad

11 ай бұрын

I know a Sanskrit word: Jangala, which means exactly what it sounds like.

@varoonnone7159

11 ай бұрын

I watch the jangala standing on my veranda in my pajamas doing yoga, a cup of chai in one hand and scratching my chakras with the other

@edwinholcombe2741

11 ай бұрын

Why are you happy about that?

@varoonnone7159

11 ай бұрын

@@edwinholcombe2741 Haven't you ever experienced the simple joy of knowing things? Especially a language that opens up a whole new world and culture to you?

Just a minor correction in 1:30, Ferdinand was the king of Aragon and Isabella the queen of Castile. Great video!

@SWLinPHX

10 ай бұрын

And they are responsible for sponsoring Columbus's voyage to America. Also their daughter Catherine was the first wife of the notorious King Henry VIII of England, who herself was the mother of Mary I of England ("Bloody Mary").

Omg I finished watching this excellent video and was surprised when I saw the number of likes, views, and subscribers. I totally thought you were a big professional youtuber! The quality of your videos are at that level at least. Keep up the great work! Just subscribed :)

@xp8969

11 ай бұрын

True, very true, I'm glad the algorithm is finally giving him some exposure, adding this reply to your comment to bump up his engagement #'s

Hebrew is particularly interesting because you have a higher rate of literacy than actual speakers due to Hebrew Schools and other institutions in the Jewish diaspora. For example, my Jewish friends and I can read Hebrew and derive sounds from the letters, but we don’t understand any more than two-dozen words.

@JB-wc9hn

11 ай бұрын

Same, I can speak and understand a little things conversationally here and there but definitely can read and write without much issue.

@lambert801

11 ай бұрын

It's the same here in Iran with Arabic. All Muslims here can read the Quran (in Arabic) and produce the sounds, but they don't understand anything they read. And the way we read it is so Persian that I don't think an Arab would understand a word of it 😅

@saucysos

11 ай бұрын

@@lambert801 yeah, when my peers and I were learning Hebrew we learned it with such an American accent, not even an Ashkenazi one like our ancestors. I would get made fun of by an Israeli if I tried to read text to them 😂

@varoonnone7159

11 ай бұрын

The revival of Hebrew as lingua franca for all jewish communities who made it to Israel was a brilliant decision. A pity India didn't do it for sanskrit

@saucysos

11 ай бұрын

@@varoonnone7159 I personally think it was a smarter decision for India to make English a popular bridge language, but Sanskrit would’ve definitely been a good choice. While it is a shame the cultural heritage of Sanskrit is gone, I feel like India’s large English-speaking population is very beneficial for it in regards to business and commerce. Overall, I think we just need to promote bilingualism and language education along with revivals to keep cultural heritage alive, but as many of my peers in school can attest to, a lot of (especially English-speaking) teenagers don’t see the value in learning a new language.

Idk if there are any other Vlogging Thru History fans on here but this is a great channel and I implore any of you who watch VTH to recommend he do a review of this video and this channel in general, it would be awesome to see this channel get the bump up in exposure that it deserves and VTH does great work highlighting small channels like this and getting more eyes on their work and more subs to their channel

My mother (in California) played mahjong with a group of elderly people from all over China. When together they speak English to understand each other. Although the spoken dialects differ the written language is mostly the same (until the communists changed the language. Movie theaters in China would show movies with subtitles so that everybody can understand.

@NZobservatory

11 ай бұрын

An India-born friend told me that when he was a kid he could not understand the language spoken by newsreaders on TV stations in neighboring cities.

@pangli2918

10 ай бұрын

In the early stages, Chinese characters did not have prescribed pronunciations, so regardless of which dialect you speak, you can understand the meaning and pronounce it using the dialect.

This is fascinating. My father's ancestors came from a mountainous region in Central Germany in 1816. They spoke Niederhessische. They settled in Pennsylvania and could NOT understand to the dialect of the local Pennsylvania Dutch, who spoke either Rheinland/Pflalz or Schwietzer-Duutsch. A few years ago I was able to connect with a distant cousin who grew up in that village. He is fluent in that dialect, Standard German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and he can speak American English with only barest hint that he was not born listening to Walter Cronkite. I have studied standard German, and the documents he sent me in the Niederhessische dialect are gibberish to me. On another issue, I do some acting and am now learning a role in a Shakespeare play, AS YOU LIKE IT. I've been in productions of MIDSUMMERS NIGHT'S DREAM, and HAMLET. The job of an actor in a Shakespeare play is to convey the meanind, despite differences after all these years. In addition to that, I am learning Welsh. Today in church, to celebrate the Feast of the Pentecost, we read the Gospel in about 7 different languages (I say "about" because our Argentinian parishioner and our Mexican parishioner viscerally HATE each other's dialect). I compared the current BEIBL CYMRAEAG with the 1588 Welsh Bible and, again, it is gibberish to me.

Mayan is a strong contender as recent evidence suggests it may have had its writing system as early as 250 BC (EDIT: I previously & erroneously translated a find in a ‘2500-year-old temple’ to 2500 BC..)

@sebastien4908

11 ай бұрын

I think Mayan is still spoken by indigenous Maya peoples in Mexico and Central America

@joemiller947

10 ай бұрын

250 BC, not 2500 BC

@florianschweizer4601

10 ай бұрын

@@joemiller947 you’re right I misread the Science article detailing the find in a ‘2500-year-old temple’ 🙈

Absolutely fascinating! Thank you

In all seriousness, the question of which language is the "oldest" is misleading. Languages naturally evolve over time, split into dialects, then those dialects become languages, etc. English is just as old as Sardinian, Greek, Bengali, and any other Indo-European language, since all of them are effectively dialects of dialects of dialects of a single historical language (Proto-Indo-European). Which language families are oldest is also hotly debated and thus can't be said with certainty

@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714

11 ай бұрын

All languages arent the same in oldness tho. Modern english is about 500 years old, while icelandic is much older being quite preserved old west norse.

@Saladid

11 ай бұрын

Yes, the question should be: which language has been preserved for the longest period of time

@mastersafari5349

11 ай бұрын

Of course you can tell that any language has it's ancestors going back to the dawn of times. Honestly, this should be called "a list of dialects that had the longest recorded history". Though some languages still could be defined as "more ancient". For example: English didn't even split off of proto-Germanic language and proto-Germanic language itself didn't even diverge from Indo-European meanwhile ancient Egyptian speakers were already carving their hyroglyphs on the walls of their temples.

@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714

11 ай бұрын

@@mastersafari5349 Dialect is an even more nieshe term than language.

@Copyright_Infringement

11 ай бұрын

​@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 Languages are never "preserved". While Icelandic may not have changed as much grammatically, it has completely transformed phonologically. This is a recurring phenomenon in language, where languages differ not in how much they change, but instead in _what_ they change. I should also point out that since both are in the same family, we know that English is _exactly_ as old as Icelandic.

Fun and instructive video. Just would like to mention Georgian that has been spoken continually for 40 centuries and is still spoken by 6 millions people today.

@zimriel

11 ай бұрын

the same argument could be made for American Indian or Australian languages. Nobody 40 centuries ago was writing text in Kartuli. This one only got its script at the same time the Udi ("Caucasian-Albanians") were writing it. You know what language *is* recorded for 30 centuries? ProtoArmenian. It's probably descended from Phrygian, a relative of Greek. Phrygians were literate . . .

@florianbirnbaum6584

11 ай бұрын

​@@zimriel Phrygian is an Anatolian language as hittite. Ugly of you disrespecting your Kartvelians neighbours. They were already living there when you left the Yamnaya swamp.

@zimriel

11 ай бұрын

@@florianbirnbaum6584 reed moar

@florianbirnbaum6584

11 ай бұрын

@@zimriel You should reAd something which is not ultranationalistic propaganda. What will be next? The story of Psametikos and the Phrygian word for "bread"? Come on! And Armenian has been linked before with Greek in the same branch of IE not with the Anatolian languages. You could write to the author of the "Etymological Dictionary of the Armenian Language" to share your opinions with him. He'll have a good laugh with your comment. Next time try saying that there's a letter written in Armenian by Noah in the top of the Ararat mountain.

@jovan-noble-guy749

11 ай бұрын

​@@zimrielYour comment translated to "already tomorrow", is that you meant to say? What language is that? -Norwegian?

Top 10 moments from this vid, in no particular order: 0:08 First appearance of the king 0:16 First implied smile (based on the happiness found in the eyes (glasses?)) 0:50 Julius Cesar getting stabbed 1:14, 8:50 Barb (it's the exact same joke so it only counts once) 4:43 Revival 7:06 The reason why this video will be banned in China 9:50 Stockholm Syndrome 11:44 Tunuk tun 13:39 2 Pakistans 14:10 Correct, she is immortal

@LeMerqie

11 ай бұрын

oh, she's immortal>?

@SsvbxxYT

11 ай бұрын

@@LeMerqie After hundreds of years of overseeing the British Empire, Queen Elizabeth II decided to be reborn in an alternate universe and save the UK from German invasion during World War II. Her son, Charles III, has now been tasked with keeping order in the UK. He's not doing a very good job at it.

@StageRight123

11 ай бұрын

7:06 gave me a good laugh.

Love this!

Well done! 👍

Australian indigenous culture has been continuous for over 50,000 years. Indigenous languages are still alive today. Kinda makes them the oldest.

@joemiller947

10 ай бұрын

You could say that about literally any people group though

"Portuguese: it doesn't matter". Me, a brazillian: oh, no you didn't!

Ce vidéo est très intéressant. merci pour le bon travail.

love ur vids

You failed to mention the Macedonian dialect which belonged to North West Greek, a form of Doric, also spoken in Epirus. The expert eye will distinguish it from Attic Greek (Ionic) and as a form of local Doric. Below is a fragment of the Macedonian dialect: [Θετί]μας καὶ Διονυσοφῶντος τὸ τέλος καὶ τὸν γάμον καταγράφω καὶ τᾶν ἀλλᾶν πασᾶν γυ- [ναικ]ῶν καὶ χηρᾶν καὶ παρθένων, μάλιστα δὲ Θετίμας, καὶ παρκαττίθεμαι Μάκρωνι καὶ [τοῖς] δαίμοσι· καὶ ὁπόκα ἐγὼ ταῦτα διελεξαιμι καὶ ἀναγνοίην πάλ{ε̣}ιν ἀνορξασα, [τόκα] γᾶμαι Διονυσοφῶντα, πρότερον δὲ μή· μὴ γὰρ λάβοι ἄλλαν γυναῖκα ἀλλ’ ἢ ἐμέ, [ἐμὲ δ]ὲ συνκαταγηρᾶσαι Διονυσοφῶντι καὶ μηδεμίαν ἄλλαν· ἱκέτις ὑμῶ γίνο- [μαι· φίλ]αν οἰκτίρετε δαίμονες φίλ[ο]ι∙ δαπ̣ινὰ γάρ ἰμε φίλων πάντων καὶ ἐρήμα· ἀλλὰ [--]α φυλάσσετε ἐμὶν ὅ[π]ως μὴ γίνηται ταῦ̣[τ]α καὶ κακὰ κακῶς Θετίμα ἀπόληται· [․․․․].ΑΛ[ ]․ΥΝΜ․.ΕΣΠΛΗΝ ἐμός, ἐμὲ δὲ [ε̣]ὐ[δ]αίμονα καὶ μακαρίαν γενέσται· [- - -]ΤΟ․[- - -]․․․Ε․ΕΩ[]Α․[․]Ε..ΜΕΓΕ[- - -]. In English: I bind in magical writings[2] the ceremony and marriage of Thetima[3] and Dionysophon and all other[4] women and widows and virgins, but especially Thetima, and I entrust them to Macronus[5] and the other demons .[6] And when I dig them up, unwrap them and read them again, then let Dionysophon marry, not earlier.[7] And let him take no other wife but me, and let me grow old with Dionysophon and no other. I become your beggar! You demon friends hate your friend, because I am humble[8] and bereft of all friends. But take care for my sake[9] that this marriage does not take place and the wicked Thetima perish in an evil way... ...mine, while I become[10] happy and blessed...

Persian is also written with the Cyrillic alphabet in some parts of the plateau.

You should have called the vid „the oldest suviving WRITTEN languages“.

@faithlesshound5621

11 ай бұрын

Sanskrit seems to get special treatment here. The text says that the starting date is the earliest WRITING. For Sanskrit that would actually be Asoka's Prakrit inscriptions c 250 BC, not the Vedic hymns which had been ORALLY preserved from c 1500 BC. Asoka's inscriptions were also in Greek and Aramaic.

@user-qz4br8hy5t

11 ай бұрын

@@faithlesshound5621 I am not an expert here. Prakrit is some kind of (written or spoken) vernacular Sanskrit or something of its own?

@faithlesshound5621

11 ай бұрын

@@user-qz4br8hy5t The Prakrits were the common speech AND written language of the time, when the use of Sanskrit was already limited to priests and scholars. I doubt that ordinary people spoke a debased form of the priests' tongue. It's more likely that ordinary language grew and developed on its own, while the priests made it complicated and lagged behind changes in the vernacular. Priests use "big daddy" energy, so they try to speak like their grandfathers did. Modern North Indian languages came out of the Prakrits in the same way that the Romance languages developed from Vulgar Latin, modified by whatever language was already spoken there. They did not come directly from the language of Cicero and Vergil, except when scholars shovelled words and constructions from them into their vernacular works during the Renaissance of classical learning. It may be like what people use on the streets today differs from what you might hear a judge, priest or lecturer say, or see in a lawyer's letter. Many people don't use gerunds or the subjunctive in ordinary English speech, but they survive in written language and can be misunderstood.

This was completely wrong. Most of what you talked about were families of languages. For this to be sensible you should look at how far back speakers of modern languages would be able to understand their ancestors.

4:38 Would Cornish count as a revived language? I remember reading about the last native speaker dying, but there's a revival movement now. There aren't many people speaking it (only a few thousand I think) but at one point the number of native speakers was 0.

@gamma_nerd

11 ай бұрын

According to my research, while knowledge and use of Cornish is revitalized, there are no native speakers and the revival is mostly in the form of a second language.

@l0os176

11 ай бұрын

@@gamma_nerd Ah, thanks! Good stuff

It was actually Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon (the "Catholic Kings").

Very good.

Hello. What about Arabic? It is a bit more relevant than some of the languages on your list, I should think? What criteria was applied to exclude it but include Aramaic or Coptic Egyptian?

@Lexivor

11 ай бұрын

This is the criterion that excludes Arabic :"1) The “start date” for a language is the earliest attested written record of that language." Arabic just isn't old enough.

LOL, trying to find old latviešu grammer in our folksongs I got thinking about song and wisdom and realized the word vēda meaning insight/wisdom is cognate of our word vieds meaning smart/wise. Is it a cogante of wisdom? Im less familiar with germanic phonology.

I think you may have forgotten AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL languages. Believe it or not they didn`t go around grunting at each other, in fact they have been happily chatting away with each other for about 70,000 years.

@chrisschneiders6734

11 ай бұрын

Asking the same question, wasn't a written language thou..

@Lexivor

11 ай бұрын

All humans have ancestors that have been speaking with each other for 70,000 years. No specific language is even close to being that old.

@im_aditya_sharma

10 ай бұрын

In that case language of north sentinelese would be oldest as they are the only last uncontacted tribe on earth.

@scriptranda2670

10 ай бұрын

Lol, Australian Aboriginals are indians. It's probably some form of sanskrit

@Lexivor

10 ай бұрын

@@scriptranda2670 That's not even remotely true.

There are many words in Bahasa Melayu & Bahasa Indonesia, possibly in the other languages in Southeast Asia that are borrowed from Sanskrit. The best example would be the city and country of Singapore - from Singapura literally translated from Sanskrit as Lion City.

What about Lithuanian?

Mutual intelligibility between Chinese languages is a joke. It is like speaking Icelandic to English person and expecting them to understand. And that is the Modern languages, Min is WAAAAY different, along with many others. Yes, there is certainly intelligibility between written languages, but it is not 1:1, and that's not even addressing the vast difference between traditional and simplified characters.

ur so underrated

12:51 Classical and Prakrit division was more like educated lingua franca vs colloquial. Therr were still upper classes who spoke Prakrit, but Classical was more often used in formal documents and poetry.

@arta.xshaca

11 ай бұрын

Classical Sanskrit was more like literary-formal one as you said, and also influenced more Dravidian languages than Prakrits did.

Nice video! Really enjoyed it and the one on the day Latin died.

How old is brythonic or gaelic languages?

Unless mistaken, Vedic Sanskrit was written down much later than 1500BCE and by examining the language, linguistics can estimate it was formed at least around 1500, no? In terms of Greek, Mycenaean texts actually date from 1400BCE, they were written down in tablets then. The language in those tablets is estimated to similarity originate further back in time (circa 1700BCE which is the limit linguists estimate that proto-Greek split into dialects).

@zimriel

11 ай бұрын

You're mistaken :) Vedic Sanskrit is noted in the Mitanni texts 1500 BCE

@vassilisxerikos3908

11 ай бұрын

@@zimriel mittani texts aren’t Sanskrit. They aren’t even IE. Just indo-aryan names appearing within non IE texts akin to how a bunch of pre-Greek toponyms appear in Greek (like Parnitha or Corinth etc). That doesn’t mean pre-Greek languages are attested. Vedic Sanskrit was written down sometime in the 4th or 3rd century BCE.

@TheodoreMasselos

11 ай бұрын

The Hathibada Ghosundi Inscriptions, sometimes referred simply as the Ghosundi Inscription or the Hathibada Inscription, are among the oldest known Sanskrit inscriptions in the Brahmi script, and dated to the 2nd-1st-century BCE. (Wikipedia)

Some sources say there are still a small number of native Coptic speakers. The Coptic pronunciation dispute is evidence of this for else the pronunciation reform, instituted by the Church hierarchy, would never has caused any controversy.

@zimriel

11 ай бұрын

My understanding is that some Coptic Christians have intermittently been devout enough to attempt to raise their children in this language but that this doesn't tend to survive school. In large part because their parents themselves speak Arabic as their first language.

7:41 what about Linear A?

Somehow, you missed the Kartvelian languages, whose most ancient member, Svan, may have been spoken by Medea.

How does Basque fit in all of this. I have heard it is a very old language whose structure is completely different to other European languages.

@vickhasackha1333

8 ай бұрын

right. it is older then greek and latin and i think persian as well. and there are other languages older then even all of those listed in video and still spoken (with original scripting).

But Sanskrit is in a continuum with Persian through the Caucasus through Slavic through all of Europe, so it that an even bigger continuum?

1500bc...where did that date come from?

What impressed me the most is that almost every person who commented here is suggesting his native language as one of the oldest. Although we all know which are the oldest languages from historical events and mentions to discoveries and resources. Every single language is beautiful, has its history, and travels through time with its traditions ❤

In the Middle Ages, Northern Italy spoke German dialects. Some villages and region bordering Switzerland or Austria still do.

@amon7039

11 ай бұрын

But molecular anthropologists indicate that the residents in Northern Italy today are mainly the descendants of Roman Italians by blood. If the Lombard migrations did not bring about large-scale population replacement, then the use of Germanic languages was probably confined only to the nobility and few Lombard settlement villages.

Very very interesting......

I'm sorry for needing out too much, but you've used Coptic for the background picture of Greek.

You did not mention the still spoken Brethonic languages which are older than the romantic latin languages and are still very much taught from England, Wales, Scotland, Isle of Man, France and Patagonia to name but a few.

@eekee6034

11 ай бұрын

The premise for this video seems to be the oldest written languages. This excludes a great many probably-ancient languages.

You forgot the Basque, in Europe. The problem is written / oral langage ?

What do you mean by Indic languages? There are 3 language families in India. Sanskirt Language Family(Indo-European languages), Tamil language family(Dravidian languages) and tibetian language family.

I wish my mom and grandma wouldve taught me Ladino, kinda sad to see that beautiful language fade away to time

@nelsonperez8855

11 ай бұрын

Yuva Yosseph: You can learned spanish language! It's very similar to the Ladino language, and then after that you can learned Ladino language! Easy right.

@talmoskowitz5221

10 ай бұрын

I attended a Seder with traditional Ladino melodies. Astoundingly beautiful. Try to find a Ladino Passover or a recording.

What about thamazight/berber

Do you mean oldest written languages? Languages with attested (non-theoretical) ancestors?

@gamma_nerd

11 ай бұрын

My criteria for the list are in the description!

4:40 isn’t accurate since the uralic livonian language died in 2013, but has since gained a new native speaker who was born in 2020 but started speaking livonian in 2022-23

@Ggdivhjkjl

11 ай бұрын

From whom did he learn? Manx and Cornish are also revived languages but no revived language has reached the success level of Hebrew, even if it was very imperfectly revived.

@a.v.j5664

11 ай бұрын

@@Ggdivhjkjl *she learned it from her parents who had learned it before it went extinct as a second language

Some Australian Aboriginal languages have been around since 2000+ BCE? Some maybe still spoken today....

@aftp4i94

11 ай бұрын

A decent number are still spoken today. The problem is they never developed a written form of their languages so pinning down a start date is near impossible. I guess that an Aboriginal language is probably the oldest still spoken language.

Why was Aramaic not mentioned, there are still some people speaking it

What about Brythonic languages of Wales Scotland Isle of Man Ireland Cornwall ? All still spoken all older than the Roman Empire all older than Latin.

Khoisan ?

Surprised you didn't mention Tsakonian during the Greek section.

@BloodRider1914

11 ай бұрын

He did it as a quick side bar

What about Maltese language cause this language is originated from various civilizations

What about African click-languages ? I thought they where the oldest existing languages.

I can read Hebrew and I am learning the language on Duolingo, as I am Jewish :) Great video!

@gamma_nerd

11 ай бұрын

עם ישראל חי

@aymanardo1322

11 ай бұрын

Free palestine 🇵🇸

@gamma_nerd

11 ай бұрын

@@aymanardo1322 You can be a proud Jew and pro-Israel while also supporting your Palestinian brothers and sisters

@varoonnone7159

11 ай бұрын

Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan are Hindu Buddhist lands under Islamic colonisation. Free those lands !

@varoonnone7159

11 ай бұрын

I'm a Hindu Atheist. A proud zionist who couldn't care less about Palestinians Our lives don't have any value in their eyes. They will never be our brothers and sisters

How about Basque? It is thought to be pre-Indo-european and still spoken today. That ought to be old enough to count! :D

Get your head out of Europe and you will find some truly old languages that are used daily, try Africa, India, Australia and the Americas. Not even close to an attempt.

@dekenlst

11 ай бұрын

This is based on written evidence. Saying that some languages might be spoken for a longer period doesn't mean anything without proof.

@sallyhomer8558

11 ай бұрын

I agree. Very Northern Hemisphere centric. Some Australian first peoples are speaking languages that must pre date many languages mentioned.

@dekenlst

11 ай бұрын

@@sallyhomer8558 Too bad they have very limited vocabulary considering their average IQ is 65, the lowest in the world

3:09 I thought David's united kingdom (probably) wasn't historical? According to religionforbreakfast, at least ^^

@arta.xshaca

11 ай бұрын

David was. United kingdom I don’t know and scholars also.

@arta.xshaca

11 ай бұрын

*not modern UK!

@gamma_nerd

11 ай бұрын

I tried to strike a balance between the secular and religious view for people watching. But it is true that the Israelites eventually went from a tribal confederation to a united nation, whether that union was political or just cultural. King David and King Solomon likely existed though!

Thank you for taking a shot at French!

sorry but why is Coptic not on the list ? i thought it was the modern version of old egyptian!! Their Alfabet is the modern version of the old hieroglyphs. ( at least what i have heard )

@torbenjohansen6955

10 ай бұрын

@sunmoonlightning thats odd they can trace it back in time to the Hieroglyphs. and nope. coptic is used by the Cristians living in Egypt. when they read their bible and by the older generation.

Interesting video but perhaps you should have mentioned Basque which predates the introduction of Indo European languages into Europe.

Ancient Greek is a lot closer to modern than that. Modern Greek is the koine Greek. As for the pronunciation of the letter has remained largely the same. The erasmian system is nonsense. Finally, the oldest testaments of linear b is from the 16th century BCE.

Church latin might not what a written form as they write in classical latin, but make no mistake classical latin was forgotten with the monks speaking church latin.

How do you expect your audience to take this all in at your speed of delivery and understand let alone enjoy it? I gave up early.

Just because there are no surviving written records of Persian before 550 BC doesn't mean the language didn't exist before that. Same as with all the other languages on this list.

@thomasrealdance

11 ай бұрын

Wasn't there a relation with Elamite, which *was* written around the same time as Sumerian ... and what about the inscriptions of Darius the Great? Don't tell me that was as recent as 5xx CE ...

@lambert801

11 ай бұрын

@@thomasrealdance Elamite is a completely different language, much older than Persian. The inscription of Behistun (by Darius the Great) was made in about 520 BCE, not CE.

@thomasrealdance

11 ай бұрын

Thank you, good to know!

I think it is worth do honorable mention the Germanic language from where English language can be related. as well the Slavic branch of the family, spoken since the barbarian times.

We still in Egypt used many coptic words in our Egyptian dialect till nowadays

@dekenlst

11 ай бұрын

I thought the Copts were still speaking Coptic. How come they don't?

@diaamuharam6602

11 ай бұрын

@@dekenlst After being occupied by different nations from Macedonians to Romans to Arabs to Ottmans, native Egyptians started to adopt the language of the ruling elite

this vid is actully underated and this is actully the real china that the amarican mainstream media actully dont show you

North Sentinel Island is populated by people who have had no contact with the outside world for approximately 60 000 years and would have spoken aa language lasting that long , Because languages are living things changing over time this language would also have changed , slowly but staying basically the same language , now approximately 60,000 years old

@zimriel

11 ай бұрын

Show me a book the Sentinelese wrote 50000 years ago or even 4 years ago, and we can talk

@midtskogen

11 ай бұрын

This video was about the longest written tradition. As far as I know, the Sentinelese have none. The 60,000 year isolation claim is dubious anyway, but their language might belong to a family that has been pretty isolated for 60,000 years.

04:40 "first and only language...revived" Wait, what about Italian/literary Tuscan? : )

I disagree completely. I define something being the same language if native speakers of the language can understand each other. Thus latin and italian are different languages. So all languages end up being less than 1000 years old. Turn back the clock for an englishman in Hempshire and 500 years back he will no longer understand (unless hes studdied other germanic languages and especially older english). Turn back the clock for an icelander in Reikjevik for 1100 years and he will be able to understand, they have a very conservative language, this is far from the norm (the iland was settled 1100 years ago). I actually have no idea how far back the clock could you turn for me a latvietis here Madonā, partly because Im very masterful in my language and have much education including in the field of baltic filology and I cant objectively adjust for that do to my pride, but mainly because the oldest atested form of my language proper is less than 200 years old and we have dont exactly know when my language really came to be as all texts from centuries ago are german-latvian its more of a pigin language the german lords knew not the language our ancestors spoke. Looking at the fosilized grammer of folksongs I understand everything but thats the whole point when a folksons element becomes uninteligable the singers change it for something more modern so even the oldest folkson is always inteligable but we cant date them... Weird when ethnogenisis is much easyer to answer than linguistics, my people came to be after the black death in 1350 when so many people dying broke down tribal loyalties and the survivors merged to the nation that exists to this day.

@lambert801

11 ай бұрын

Some languages have changed very little in the past 1000 years, such as Persian, my mother tongue. I could read and completely understand the work Persian poets from 800-900 years ago as a 11-year-old, with my limited grammar even then.

8:10 The dialect of Athens (Attic dialect) is...ionian

I’ll just add another comment about the Australian Aboriginal languages that have been in continuous use for tens of thousands of years. Makes those you feature here sound quite modern

What about ancient Turkish? It's seems to be interesting to discovered the oldest form of the Turkish Language.

Persian was actually used even before the Achaemenids.

4:43 no, that happened to other lesser known languages, such as Cornish...

I wonder if any of the ancient languages spoken by the northern nomadic peoples before their ranges were absorbed by the soviet empire survive? Those peoples migrated northwards with the tundra as the ice age ended and their way of life continued unbroken up until about the 1920's. Lacking an ancient written tradition it might be hard to research, but potentially some very ancient origins indeed might survive until the present day.

peak

If we are talking about the oldest language in the world, in terms of which language has been preserved the most, or rather, which written language has the longest living tradition, then essentially we are playing a game of debating which classical religious tradition (Christianity-Greek and Latin, Judaism- Hebrew, Islam- Arabic, Hinduism- Sanskrit, Buddhism- Pali etc., Taoism- Chinese) is the oldest. And the answer to that question is very difficult

Great, YT has again deleted my longest and most thoughtful comment.

genuinely thought you were a big channel, and i loved the video, but hebrew isnt the only language that was ever revived with no native speakers. there's even languages that died completely, with no fluent or native speakers, that have been revived today, cornish, manx and livonian!

@gamma_nerd

Жыл бұрын

thanks for the compliments and for the insight! Hebrew is definitely the most successful language revival but it definitely isn't the only one like I said in this vid. stay tuned for more videos!

@MottiShneor

11 ай бұрын

@@gamma_nerd What, Klingon?

@gamma_nerd

11 ай бұрын

@@MottiShneor Other language revival movements are more recent and less successful than Hebrew, but they're out there!

@MottiShneor

11 ай бұрын

@@gamma_nerdNever said otherwise! I visited Ireland in round 2000, and had lots of talks about their desperate attempt to revive their old Celtic variant, and their failure to "bring it back to the street" They did quite a LOT to bring it back. I just wanted to put a little more "meat" into your information - how it came to be - and what was done, and by who - to explain this quite rare phenomena. There in Ireland, I went to the north-west islands where they have signs (can't spell but they sound like "Gael Tacht" - Gaelic speaking areas) just to listen to some old guys speaking the old language. And I'm not a linguist, it isn't even my hobby... yet I really wanted to hear "real Irish" speak. English was imposed on them, and although they did VERY WELL with English - It would be nice to have "real Irish" still exist and flourish. I'm so happy to have my English mediocre in comparison to my native Hebrew...

@MottiShneor

11 ай бұрын

@@gamma_nerd 🤣Ah... you were referring to this little joke of mine... Oh, come on. There's plenty of stuff to make videos about. Not only on revival of languages, but I think - on dying languages (like the Yidish and Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic dialects) it is VERY interesting. See my notes about Ireland - It really deserves a good video - and also maybe an answer to "why it doesn't succeed" and how to make it succeed.

8:05 Attic - Ionian dilect is one and the same.

I watched because I was interested

Aboriginal Australians have been around for about 65'000 years. I'm betting their languages are older than any in your selection.

No Lithuanian? It's one of the oldest Indo European languages still retaining a lot of aspects lost in other languages all be it the written language is much more recent

@joemiller947

10 ай бұрын

The oldest Lithuanian text is from the 16th century, not particularly old. Of course lithuanian is likely older than the 16th century, but we don't know how old. Proto-Balto-Slavic only split into the Slavic and Baltic branches around 2400 years ago at most, when many of the Greek epics had already been written for hundreds of years.

that's Ferdinand of ARAGON and Isabella of CASTILE

Nothing from Australia? I thought surely there would be, with a culture stretching back for over 60 000 years, I thought there would be at least one.

@petefluffy7420

11 ай бұрын

An update - toe quotes from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pama%E2%80%93Nyungan_languages. "The Pama-Nyungan languages are the most widespread family of Australian Aboriginal languages" and "Pama-Nyungan languages evolved around 5,000 years ago through the use of Proto-Pama-Nyungan, the ancestor of Pama-Nyungan languages? If th3e age of 5 000 tears is correct it is bar the oldest, making the others merely middle aged. not old

I AM the next link in a chain lasting thousands of years...

This video is an exercise in futility, because how do you compare modern Greek to Mycenean Greek let alone classical Greek? And if different mutually unintelligible languages can be considered to be the same language, basically any language is as old as the people speaking it have existed, with the exception of the languages that don't exist anymore due to integration or genocide.

@gamma_nerd

10 ай бұрын

The criteria for this list are in the video description