Having looked at the ambiguity of language, I thought it might be good to set language back on solid ground with as many cold hard or comfortingly solid and sensible facts as I could tolerate with sanity about the world’s many tongues and the people who speak them. Last week’s post also made me a little dizzy, so I’m just recovering the horizon before pursuing any more ideas…
How many languages are there?
We don’t know, mainly because one man’s language is another man’s dialect. Furthermore, not all languages are official written languages. Many languages are dead and or dying and others are being discovered in remote corners of the world. The most authoritative figure from the Ethnologue organization puts it currently at 6,809. A more in-depth discussion of the problem presented by the Linguistic Society of America can be read here.
What is the oldest written language?
The oldest languages we know to have been written down would be Sumerian or Egyptian from about 3200 BC. Other languages would have been spoken at the time, but not written down until later (or presumably, if they were, we don’t have samples). The earliest records we have from a surviving language are from Chinese or Greek at around 1500 BC. Language itself is suggested to date from around 100,000 BC, once the human vocal tract was in a position which would allow us to articulate all the relevant sounds. More information can be found here. These dates are all approximate…
What are the most languages a person can or has ever spoken?
There are a range of guesstimates on this one, and again it depends on your definition of language and linguistic proficiency. I think more interesting than the facts for this question is the mythical idea of many-tongued man. This link will bring you to some interesting cases, including one Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (c.1774-1849) who is said to have spoken about 88 languages. David Crystal (1987: 362) cites him as in fact being able to translate 114. He was a cardinal at the Vatican known as the “confessor of foreigners” because of his prodigious abilities. Crystal also points out that it’s difficult to maintain abilities in a number of languages. At any one time at least one or two, or three or four languages (depending how many you speak!) will be dormant, or as the saying goes ‘rusty’ (as an unoiled machine). Click, clack, ratchet and crank it up again on holiday and soon you’ll be ordering your sangrías effortlessly with that schoolday Spanish – alas, it’s day 14 of your two week holiday. Maybe next year.
What’s the oldest English word?
Hot off the press this one, as you can see here! Well, it seems researchers at the University of Reading are tracking down the oldest words. As known for a while, the most frequently used words tend to resist change the most – particularly all those grammatical words like pronouns, which is why it’s particularly surprising that the Vikings convinced us to use their words for ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their’. If the university’s supercomputer (and all the dedicated human research input into it) is right, it turns out that ‘I’ and ‘who’ are most likely the oldest words in English, along with ‘two’, ‘three’ and ‘five’.
Well, there you have it. Enough approximate figures to jumble up the best supercomputer. We’ve maybe been speaking about 6,809 languages for roughly 100,000 years and the first word along was ‘two’. Seems I was wrong – there are no hard facts and figures. Language really is a boat all at sea in a storm after all. Well, I’ll just keep the motion sickness tablets to hand next week.