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An extreme case is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda: the earliest parts of this text date to c. 1500 BC, [1] while the oldest known manuscripts date to c. 1040 AD. [2] Similarly the oldest Avestan texts, the Gathas, are believed to have been composed before 1000 BC, but the oldest Avestan manuscripts date from the 13th century AD. [3]
For many languages which have become extinct in recent centuries, attestation of usage is datable in the historical record, and sometimes the terminal speaker is identifiable. In other cases, historians and historical linguists may infer an estimated date of extinction from other events in the history of the sprachraum .
Oldest language" may refer to: the emergence of language itself in human evolution. origin of language; proto-language, a stage before the emergence of language proper; mythical origins of language; a Proto-human language, the hypothetical, most recent common ancestor of all the world's languages; the date of attestation in writing .
This is a list of ancestor languages of modern and ancient languages, detailed for each modern language or its phylogenetic ancestor disappeared. For each language ...
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
Eteocypriot writing, Amathous, Cyprus, 500–300 BC, Ashmolean Museum. An extinct language or dead language is a language with no living native speakers [1] [2] A dormant language is a dead language that still serves as a symbol of ethnic identity to an ethnic group; these languages are often undergoing a process of revitalisation. [3]
Before World War II, all the unclassified languages of Europe and the Near East were commonly referred to as Asianic languages, and the term encompassed several languages that were later found to be Indo-European (such as Lydian), and others (such as Hurro-Urartian, Hattic, Elamite, Kassite, Colchian and Sumerian) which were classified as distinct pre-Indo-European language families or ...