THE OLDEST LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD

 

THE OLDEST LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD

Shrikant G. Talageri

 

A friend drew my attention to the following tweet, as it mentions my name:

Is Tamil really the "oldest language in the world", as claimed above by the PM of India? Perhaps such a statement on an international forum could be in the expectation that it will sweep Tamilnadu into the BJP basket. But, ignoring these political motivations, is it even remotely close to the truth? In fact, what exactly would be a criterion for declaring any language in the world to be "the oldest language in the world"? Except for artificially created languages like Esperanto which had a creator and a point of time in creation, all natural languages must have "always" (or from the point of time that human beings learnt to communicate with each other in the form of "language") existed, although not in exactly the same form that they do today and perhaps not also with the same name. Every language evolves and changes all the time, sometimes quite fundamentally; and original "dialects" diverge and take on life as new "languages", perhaps with new names ─ but they are not really "new" since they existed even before in earlier forms and are only evolved continuations of those forms. Look at English, the language in which this article is being written (and will be read): a representative narration of the history of English can be read in the book "The English language - A historical Introduction" by Barber, Eeal and Shaw. A small part of a passage, as given in that book, in "Old English" and again in the English that we know, will make the picture clear:

Old English: Ic secge eac ðe, broðor Eadweard, nu ðu me þyses bæde, þæt ge doð unrihtlice þæt ge ða Engliscan þeawas for lætað þe eawre fæderas heolden and hæðenra manna þeawas lufiað þe eow ðæs lifes ne unnon, and mid ðam geswuteliað þæt ge forseoð eower cynn and eowre yldran mid  þam unþeawum, þonne ge him on teonan tysliað eow on Denisc, ableredum hneccam and ablendum eagum.

English: I also say to you, brother Edward, now that you have asked me about this, that you are all behaving unrighteously in abandoning the English customs which your fathers practised and loving the customs of heathen men who do not allow you to live, and in doing so you make clear by those vices that you despise your race and your elders, when, as an insult to them, you dress yourselves in the Danish way with uncovered neck and blinded eyes.

Above is the Old form of English, as spoken and written a thousand years ago, but how many people will be able to even accept (without being assured of it by someone) that it is any kind of English and not some other language? Yet we call it Old "English". And it is English only because it is the language which (after successive Danish and French infusions of vocabulary, spelling and grammar, and massive infusions of technical words derived from Greek and Latin, and centuries of change) has become present-day English as a whole. If two or more different dialects of this "Old English" had developed separately into distinctly different languages with different influences and different developments in vocabulary, spelling and grammar, obviously either this parent language or one or more of its descendant forms, or both, would have been named differently. Does a language remain the "same" language because it retains the same name, and can the antiquity of any present day language be proclaimed merely on the strength of the same name?

We will examine the case for being "the oldest language" in respect of the following three languages:

I. The Case for Tamil.

II. The Case for Sanskrit.

III. The Case for the Andamanese Languages.

 

I. The Case for Tamil

In what way is Tamil "the oldest language in the world"? Even if we ─ very reasonably ─ accept that the language spoken in Tamilnadu for more than 2000 years, and called Tamil, is one and the same language (in the sense that it bears the same name and is understood to represent the same cultural and identificational entity), ignoring all the differences between the oldest written language recorded 2300 years ago and the present written language, and the differences between the present written and colloquial languages (with all their different dialects), does it still become "the oldest language in the world"?

There are scores of written languages recorded well before 300 BCE. The fact that Tamil was written 2300 years old, and is still spoken today certainly makes it one of the oldest recorded languages of the world which is still a living language, but as there were scores of other languages in the world (I will not bother to enumerate them here) which are found written from well before 300 BCE, the fact that it was written as early as 2300 years ago does not make it by any criterion "the oldest language in the world". If the Tamil of 300 BCE and the Tamil of today are one and the same language, then the Tamil of 300 BCE was a kind of proto-South-Dravidian language. Telugu for example, is a South-Central Dravidian language which has features distinctly different from Tamil, and those features are supposed to have been in existence from well before the recording of the Tamil of 300 BCE. In 300 BCE, therefore, there was already a proto-South-Central-Dravidian language being spoken in the area to the north of the proto-South-Dravidian language, and this language could well be described as proto-Telugu if not Telugu itself. Therefore the Tamil of 300 BCE (although, as pointed out earlier, certainly merits the credit of being one of the oldest recorded languages of the world which is still a living language) is not "older" than the Telugu of 300 BCE, which, although it is not found in written form in 300 BCE was still already in existence as a distinct language in 300 BCE. So Telugu is as "old" as Tamil.

Further, the very oldest Tamil texts of the period around 300 BCE contain some Sanskrit words, and refer to the Vedas. The southern dynasties mentioned in the Sangam texts are also mentioned in the Ramayana and  Mahabharata which were given their final form in that period and contain countless interpolations pertaining to the Maurya period of that time. All this definitely shows that Sanskrit itself was already older. And Vedic Sanskrit goes much farther back in time.

Let me make it very clear: as a person interested in languages right from my high school days, I had learnt all the alphabets of India and many of the alphabets from outside India already by then. Tamil and Telugu were among my particularly favorite alphabets. And I always wanted to learn the Tamil language, and was only handicapped by the fact that in my area in Mumbai I was not well enough acquainted with any speaker of Tamil who could initiate me into the language. I bought copies of the same "Chandamama" magazine in English, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, to compare sentences; and bought all kinds of "teach-yourself" books that I could find and tried to learn the languages, particularly Tamil, through them. But it was not a very encouraging process. The "teach-yourself-Tamil" book that I had purchased contained all kinds of unlikely sentences to be spoken in various situations: for example, a visitor to one of the Great Temples of Tamilnadu, when shown some splendid sculptures by the guide, was supposed to respond with "pārttēn, rasittēn" (I saw it, I liked/enjoyed it) which seemed rather an unlikely and trite thing to say. The Tamil for "you are calling" (tum bulā rahe ho, in Hindi), in another book, was "nīṅgaḷ kūppiṭṭukkoṇḍirukkiṛīrgaḷ", which, when a Tamil colleague in my office was consulted for the sentence and spoke it, sounded completely different (much abbreviated) in the spoken form from what it was in the written form. And when I heard the same colleague, in speaking with another Tamil colleague, use the verb paṇ for "do" while the book told me the word should be cey, I (lazily) gave up the struggle and remained content with learning alphabets and the numbers 1-100 in different languages.

But the language and culture of Tamilnadu were always my particular obsessions, and although I am very travel-phobic and hate to travel outside Mumbai, a few years after joining my bank I drew up an itinerary for a round trip of South India of which the highlights were supposed to be (apart from Tirupati, Bangalore-Mysore, and Guruvayoor) mainly the Great Temples of Tamilnadu. Madurai was my primary intended object of travel ever since I had seen illustrated pictures of the temple in a Bhavan's Journal issue in my school days, but there were also Kanchipuram, Mahabalipuram, Srirangam, Thanjavur, Chidambaram, Kanyakumari, etc. Unfortunately, although I set out alone (with an unlikely group of three Gujarati colleagues from my office who only wanted to visit Tirupati and return back while I was supposed to go forward), after visiting only Tirupati and Chennai (with a day trip to Tirukalukundram, Mahabalipuram and Kanchipuram) I caught flu in Tirupati itself and ignominiously returned home from Chennai ─ while the three Gujarati colleagues moved on to Madurai, etc.!

I never ventured on my much-dreamt-of Tamilnadu temple trips after that, but my love for the Tamil language and culture remained. The very second regional film on Doordarshan, after we had bought our first TV set in 1973/1974, was the Tamil film Thillana Mohanambal, which thrilled me so much by its very Tamil atmosphere, that in recent times (although obviously that same schoolboy thrill cannot be recreated at this late age) I downloaded the film on my computer. My passion for music includes "Carnatic" music as well. In the late sixties and early seventies, in the days of gramophone records, I (or rather my father on my request) had acquired LPs of Nadhaswaram music (the only ones I found at the time were by Chinnamaulana Shaikh) along with Hindi, Marathi and Hindustani Classical ones. And, whenever I feel low, the downloaded videos of the group singing of the Pancharatna Kritis at the Tiruvayur festival are (along with Marathi natyasangeet, Gujarati/Marathi folk songs and old Marathi and Hindi film songs and classical/semi-classical pieces) my most effective medicine. I am still in desperate search for one piece of music ─ if any reader of this article can get me the signature tune (nadhaswaram) which announced the start of the "Karnatak Sangeet Sabha" on Vividh Bharati in the good old days, he will earn my everlasting gratitude.

In fact, in spite of my strong Hindu views ─ or perhaps because of them, since I believe in the richness and diversity of Hindu culture ─ I am even in sympathy with Tamil chauvinist views which want to "purify" Tamil of all non-Tamil words, since I am in genuine awe of languages (of which Tamil is one) which have their own rich stock of linguistic roots and shoots to create new vocabulary from its own verbal resources. I know this is neither completely feasible nor really desirable: if English were to be divested of all its Greek, Latin, French, Danish and other-language origin words, what would remain of it? What would be the state of old Hindi film music if all Arabic-Persian words were removed from the songs? Savarkar was a passionate advocate of cleansing Marathi of all Arabic-Persian borrowings, but I remember reading a book by someone (either Balraj Madhok or Deen Dayal Upadhyay) which pointed out that even after all the cleansing, the language he used still contained many such words. So while Tamil should certainly manufacture its own vocabulary from its own roots, this should be based on a love for Tamil and not on a politically created hatred for Sanskrit and "northern" languages.

But in spite of all my love for Tamil language and culture, I cannot endorse the extremely silly statement that Tamil is "the oldest language in the world".

 

II. The Case for Sanskrit

As we saw, Sanskrit is certainly older than Tamil. Even as per the most orthodox ─ or AIT-based ─ estimates, the Rigveda is older than 1200 BCE.

As I have shown in my books and articles, the carbon-dated records in West Asia (Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt) show that the Mitanni people, who spoke a form of Vedic Sanskrit, were already present in West Asia at least two-three centuries before establishing the Mitanni kingdom around 1500 BCE, and the form of Vedic Sanskrit found in the Mitanni records is derived from the language of the New Rigveda (whose geographical horizon stretches from westernmost UP to Afghanistan). To reach West Asia by 1750 BCE, the proto-Mitanni speakers must have left this area (westernmost UP to Afghanistan) well before 2000 BCE, so the language of the New Rigveda was established in this area long before 2000 BCE. The older language of the Old Rigveda therefore goes back beyond 2500 BCE, in an area originally within India in Haryana and westernmost UP.

And, if we go by the fact that there are supposed to be villages in Shimoga district of Karnataka (the district which also has my "native place" Sagar!) where Sanskrit is actually still spoken, apart from its ubiquitous use in Hindu worship, we can still call it a living language.

But can we call Sanskrit "the oldest language in the world"?

The first question that arises is: which "Sanskrit"? There is a world of difference between Classical Sanskrit and the much older Vedic Sanskrit, and within the Vedic language between Atharvavedic Sanskrit and the older Rigvedic Sanskrit, and within Rigvedic Sanskrit between the language of the New Rigveda and the language of the much older Old Rigveda! To clarify:

1. Classical Sanskrit has a truly massive new vocabulary which is completely missing in Vedic Sanskrit, and Vedic Sanskrit contains many old words whose meaning was already unknown by the time of Classical Sanskrit. Apart from that, many Vedic sounds like ḷa and ḷha were already lost in Classical Sanskrit (where they merged into ḍa and ḍha). Of the four vocalic sounds in Vedic Sanskrit (ṛ, ṝ, ḷ, long ḷ), only the first remained in Classical Sanskrit. Many rules of sandhi underwent subtle changes, and certain syllables became shortened: e.g. the word that we write as vareṇyam in the famous Gayatri mantra was actually pronounced vareṇiyam in Vedic Sanskrit. Pitch accent was a fundamental aspect of Vedic Sanskrit phonology and the presence or absence of the high or udātta accent in a word could alter the meaning of the word and even the sentence, but the pitch accent was lost in Classical Sanskrit. Many grammatical forms found in Vedic Sanskrit were completely lost in Classical Sanskrit: for example, Vedic Sanskrit had subjunctive and injunctive moods (lost in Classical Sanskrit) and twelve forms of the infinite (of which only one remained in Classical Sanskrit). Vedic Sanskrit also had end-inflected and independent morphemes, but only prefix-morphemes to verbs were retained in Classical Sanskrit. Certain forms of personal pronouns found in Vedic Sanskrit are missing in Classical Sanskrit. And so on.

2. Likewise, many words very common to later Sanskrit are missing in the Rigveda but are first found in the Atharvaveda or the Yajurveda. [This is not the place to provide a list of these very interesting and in many cases extremely important words].

3. Most significant of all, there is a chronological gulf even between the vocabulary of the New Rigveda and the Old Rigveda, with a large new vocabulary appearing in the New Rigveda which did not exist at the time of composition of the Old Rigveda. As I have shown in my article "FINAL VERSION OF THE CHRONOLOGICAL GULF BETWEEN THE OLD RIGVEDA AND THE NEW RIGVEDA [WITH THE THE HYMN-AND-VERSE WISE LIST OF NEW WORDS AND OTHER NEW ELEMENTS IN THE RIGVEDA]", these new words and new elements (new meters, etc.) are found in 684 out of 686 hymns, and in 4256 out of 7311 verses, in the New Rigveda, but are completely missing in the 280 hymns and 2386 verses of the Old Rigveda:

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2022/08/final-version-of-chronological-gulf.html

Therefore, "Sanskrit" has been constantly evolving over the ages.

 

Even more to the point, the Vedic Sanskrit language was the language of the Bharata Pūrus of Haryana. But at the same point of time as the oldest hymns of the Old Rigveda were being composed in this language, there were other "Indo-European" languages to their east (the unrecorded ancestral languages of the Ikṣvākus, the Yadus and Turvasus, and even the non-Bharata Pūrus and others) and to their west (the languages of the Anus and Druhyus, which were the ancestral forms, of the later-recorded languages of the other eleven recognized branches of Indo-European languages, whose speakers took the languages out of India. At the same time, there were of course the ancestral forms of the later-recorded Dravidian, Austric and other languages to the south and east within India. All these, although unrecorded or later-recorded, were certainly as "old" as the Vedic Sanskrit language.

So, calling Sanskrit "the oldest language in the world" would be extremely inaccurate, though, as pointed out in the case of Tamil, it could be called one of the oldest recorded languages of the world which is still a living language, or (since the oldest hymns go back to around 3000 BCE at least), even the oldest recorded language of the world which is still a living language.

 

III. The Case for the Andamanese Languages

But there is another candidate ─ very definitely Indian ─ more fitted for the title of "the oldest language in the world", or perhaps "the oldest languages in the world", (though actually recorded only during the period of British colonial rule in India by European scholars): the Andamanese languages spoken in the Andaman islands.

The Andamanese languages have reportedly been spoken in the Andaman islands for tens of thousands of years (sixty to seventy thousand?), and unlike most of the known historical languages in the world ─ very much including Tamil and Sanskrit which have been influenced by other languages in the course of their known history ─ the Andamanese languages have remained relatively isolated from the rest of the world. There must be very few (if any at all) languages indeed in the rest of the world which have the double distinction of being in the same habitat for so many tens of thousands of years as well as of being almost isolated and bereft of any external linguistic influences. At the most, the various Andamanese languages may have had some influence on each other in the course of the millennia. While we cannot say the languages are exactly or very much the same as they were tens of thousands of years ago, it is perfectly logical to assume that whatever changes, developments and evolution took place in the languages over the millennia may have been entirely from within themselves without any significant external stimuli or influence. From any point of view, the Andamanese languages are very definitely "the oldest languages in the world".

And particularly among the various Andamanese languages, the language of the Sentinelese tribes, inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, may indeed be the most isolated, and therefore the most uninfluenced-by-external-elements, language in the Andaman islands. They live on their isolated island and refuse contact with any outsiders: they in fact attack with bows-and-arrows or spears any outsiders who try to approach their island ─ as an interesting aside, could it be that these universal human weapons may have been invented or discovered by the Sentinelese people on their own without any external influences? In fact, the Sentinelese are so isolated, and so little (or almost nothing) is known about them to the outside world that no-one has any idea of the nature of the language spoken by them!

The Sentinelese are very dear to my heart, and in particular one particular warrior among them: the unknown warrior (a Marathi song sung by Lata Mangeshkar talks about an "anām vīr": how appropriate is that title for this Sentinelese hero) who in November 2018 shot an arrow at an American youth of Chinese origin (John Allen Chau, aged 27) who was making his way by boat towards the North Sentinel island on an Evangelical mission to "establish the kingdom of Jesus on the island" by converting the Sentinelese heathens to Christianity! What better tribute to this noble tribe and its noble hero than that their (unknown) language be officially recognized as "the oldest language in the world"?

However, there are no political dividends in this. The Andamanese people are actually becoming extinct, and certainly in no position to reward with votes and elected MPs any government which recognizes their unique place in India and the world or tries to protect and perpetuate their unique identity and existence.

In fact, a few years ago, there was a proposal to denotify the Onge Tribal Reserve and clear the pristine forests of Little Andaman for a mega-tourist city. More recently, there was a proposal to clear the forests of the Greater Andaman islands of its original inhabitants and plant palm-oil plantations (a known source of bad cholesterol and land-soil-nutrient-destroying parasitical trees) on their land! Remember the film "Avatar"?

So whether the government, or politicians of any brand, do so or not, it is time Indians and Hindus stopped playing chauvinistic politics involving Tamil or Sanskrit, and recognized the Andamanese languages (and particularly the language of the Sentinelese Andaman islanders) as "the oldest languages in the world".