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Peter Grey (talk | contribs) Making the distinctions |
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:I am in total agreement with [[user:Mustafaa|Mustafaa]]: it is counter-productive to try to make a distinction between ''dead'' and ''extinct'' languages. No such distinction is made in linguistic terminology, and they should be considered to be equivalents. There are fascinating issues here about language death as a feature of language development: one stage of the langauge becomes extinct in giving birth to the next. In comparative linguistics, we are aware of the fuzzy boundaries between ''language'' and ''dialect'', and perhaps the same fuzziness should be applied to the stages of language development. I think it would be wholly appropriate to say the Old English is an extinct language: it is not natively spoken, even though its progeny, Modern English, continues to thrive. After all, similar factors are involved in language death and language development. --[[User:Garzo|Gareth Hughes]] 7 July 2005 19:21 (UTC)
== Making the distinctions ==
There are a number of different situations that are both useful and difficult to distinguish:
# An inferred language like [[Proto-Indo-European]], which exists only as a hypothetical reconstruction.
# An unknown language, like some ancient manuscript obviously written in a real language at the time, but undecipherable.
# A language that has died out and being replaced by a unrelated language, as happens in some small ethnic groups.
# Latin, which first has a few dialects, classical/vulgar/medieval, and second although no longer a mother tongue in any community, is used in a some special circumstances for orginal documents, and is even sometimes spoken.
# An old language, like, say, [[Old English language|Anglo-Saxon]], which is not spoken in any reasonably recognizable form today, but people can study and decipher if they invest the effort.
# Something like Shakespearean-era English, which is not spoken, but could probably be understood by modern English speakers, and is more or less readibly understood in written form.
Latin and Ancient Greek are problems: neither qualify as living languages, but they're not exactly extinct either. (I've heard Ancient Greek compared to Shakespearean English; from the (very) little I know of modern Greek, I would guess probably going back a little further than Shakespearea.) [[User:Peter Grey|Peter Grey]] 7 July 2005 19:55 (UTC)
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