For many years, I’d pondered what language to learn that might be closest to the oldest form of Indo-Europan. I’d looked at Latin & Greek, and eventually landed at Sanskrit. Along the way I also found out that EVERY language evolves, often fairly fast, and that there will be several “forms” of ancient languages. The “face slap” moment came when I was checking in at a Red Roof Inn while on a contract to do some computer work at Disney some decades ago.
The Clerk behind the counter was from Greece. I’d struck up a conversation and noted his accent. So I asked about Greek. How did he like the idea of speaking a 3000 year old language? He pointed out that he hated learning Ancient Greek in school and it was substantially alien to modern Greek. Oh Dear.
Up in smoke went my notion of being able to read 3000 years of literature… Similarly, Latin has a few “eras” that have different rules and different vocabulary and pronunciation. (And don’t get me started on Law French…a peculiar mix of Latin, French, and English used is old English law…)
That was the moment that I realized NOBODY has the discipline to not molest, warp, fold, spindle and mutilate their language over time.
Some languages change a lot faster than others, but they all change.
Languages that depend heavily on agreement between endings for meaning (highly inflected languages) change slowest. Those, like English, that have lost inflection and use a lot of “helper words” and word order to give meaning can change faster.
My theory is that since inflections are often regular across a LOT of words, you would have to change them all at once to have change; while if it is a “helper word”, you need only change the one word… So “I want to go” is an easy change to “I wanna go”, or “I will go” to “I’m gonna go” (or the horrible “I’m gonna wanna go”…) Much easier than changing the ending on 1000 words all at once. So most highly inflected languages usually change via losing a case ending entirely, or a single vowel swap. (Latin is a bit degenerate in that way as while there are 4 basic cases, IIRC, yet some of them use the same case ending… which is confusing ;-)
It looks like the oldest languages have the most inflected case endings. 8 in proto-indo-European seems to be the number. (Oh, and 3 “genders” -masculine, feminine and neuter; along with more “numbers” as well – Singular, Dual, and Plural.)
FWIW, the opposite of “inflected” is “agglutinative”. Languages that string words together like pop-beads to assemble a sentence. There’s a linguistic theory that says languages evolve over time between these two poles, but that’s a bit deep for a posting… But English lost a lot of the number, gender, cases etc. and is now more agglutinative. So there’s some merit to the idea.
In any case, I’d long sought that Idealized Ancient Perfect Form of language so that I might have a better vehicle for precise and careful thought, and a large body of ancient literature (and presumably wisdom) to learn from. I even (briefly) looked at Coptic and Ancient Egyptian / Hieroglyphs. And learned that it, too, had several incompatible eras over the several thousands of years… Similar, but changed.
But Sanskrit looked like the “most perfect” and there was a lot of old stuff written in it. It is also horribly complex with some constructions that look artificial and perhaps added to the language after the fact to make it look more perfectly regular. Well, after about a month of learning about the Grammar, Vocabulary, and structure, and finding out it had several variations, I gave up.
My eventual conclusion was that EVERY language has weird bits in it, and “the language best suited to thinking” is just your native language as you already know all the irregularities and quirks in it.
But imagine my surprise when I find out that Lithuanian has a lot of similarities to Sanskrit. Here is a modern European language that has conserved ancient forms (7 case endings for example) and has some similar vocabulary. Nice.
But no, I’m not going to run out and learn Lithuanian. For one thing, they didn’t start writing down much in it until about 500 years ago. And for another, there’s just not a lot of folks who speak it. Besides, I “got over it” on ancient language and the search for the One True Stable Unchanging Language Of Ancient Wisdom a couple of decades ago… after basically exhausting all options and finding out it doesn’t exist. They all change, they all have irregularities and quirks, and then they all record a lot of useless and stupid stuff to search through. (LOTS of tax records, business accounting, Book Of The Dead in 10,000 copies to tell you how to get past The Test and into heaven, etc. Over and over again…)
BUT, the interest in languages in general and their evolution remains. So imagine my amusement to run into this video where a Sanskrit speaker and a Lithuanian speaker trade words (and sentences at the end) to see if the other can “figure it out”.
It’s nice to know, in a warped sort of way, that two of the least changed languages can still have a bit in common after a few thousand years apart ;-)
FWIW, there’s a bit of interest in the wiki too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_language
[…]
There are approximately 2.8 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 1 million speakers elsewhere. Around half a million inhabitants of Lithuania of non-Lithuanian background speak Lithuanian daily as a second language.Lithuanian is closely related to neighbouring Latvian, though the two languages are not mutually intelligible. It is written in a Latin script. In some respects, some linguists consider it to be the most conservative of the existing Indo-European languages, retaining features of the Proto-Indo-European language that had disappeared through development from other descendant languages.
[…]
Among Indo-European languages, Lithuanian is conservative in some aspects of its grammar and phonology, retaining archaic features otherwise found only in ancient languages such as Sanskrit (particularly its early form, Vedic Sanskrit) or Ancient Greek. For this reason, it is an important source for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European despite its late attestation (with the earliest texts dating only to c. 1500).
FWIW, a similar odd similarity was found between Babylonian (supposedly a language isolate) and ancient Turkic. While some folks dispute this, some native speakers of Turkish with a background in ancient forms claim similarities… But the Turkic language group is far removed from Indo-European so I’m not going there either ;-)
In general, while I like the idea of the old highly infected forms in Indo-European ancient languages, I find it cumbersome in use, and stuffy. I also have found it hard to break out of the “word order matters” pattern and embrace inflections as meaning.
Though I’m still working at it. Lately I’ve broken out my old Russian Textbook and started working on it again. I’m able to “sight read” more words now, and some phrases are coming back. Videos from Russia are helping. But even there, and despite Russian being inflected and so conservative, the Russian I learned (what little there was of it in a 1 quarter class…) seems more formal to me tham what I see now. More “little professor” and less “street guy”. Or maybe I’m just still struggling with it…
Oddly, I have also started practicing more Spanish (sometimes against my will as Roku has decided to show me some commercials in Spanish … due to my having looked at a video or two in it…); and between Macron being in the news, and Africa having French speaking nations in the news, I’m getting more news stories with French in them. So I’m occasionally swapping between those two and English; which makes trying to stuff in some New Russian Words & inflections & characters a really big challenge. Perhaps one I’ll not overcome any time soon, or ever.
All of which is to say that there’s just no way I’m going to look at Sanskrit again, nor even Lithuanian. I’m already over my head enough just trying to understand French snippets and trying to speak Bad Spanish at the store ;-) (And don’t get me started on American vs British vs Australian…)
Yet I could not resist being amused that little old Lithuania had maintained a connection to Sanskrit… with only modest mutations over time…
Musings from the Chiefio 
I also discovered Sanskrit and I am learning it now.
It truly is a fantastic language where the word order is nearly unimportant due to the use of declinations. Its alphabet is highly structured and is determined where in the mouth it is generated.
Here are examples of the language and its usages:
I’ve always had a good laugh at English teachers who believe themselves to be the guardians of the language. It’s the speakers who determine what the language is and how to use it. One case: Ain’t is now an “official” part of American English.
Fascinating and from my point of view, having grown up with soldier French, then getting 8 years of formal Parisian French instruction, 6 weeks of Spanish, 1 year of formal Muscovite Russian, and bits of Greek and Latin for chemistry and medicine. Folk like J. R. R. Tolkien would commend you, our most gracious host. @jim2, “ain’t” derives from an offshoot of Shakespearean English. Sure, they derided it, but those old forms were still officially English. That said, official arbiters like French has can be useful to prevent “newspeak”, for instance. The flip side of that is that these arbiters can be used to create “newspeak”, too.
Congrats on the Lithuanian/Sanskrit connection, E.M. That sure came as a surprise to me. I really liked this post. 👍👍
Many of the long timers here are aware of your language studies and goals from your posts and comments going way back. But this post is a great summary of your journey and arrival at a destination. Newer readers can be sure they are up to speed.
A hobby of mine for quite a few years was studying how American English changed over the years. It does change rather rapidly. Part of that is the near exponential advances in technology that required new words for totally new things or ideas.
Anyhow, my grandparents never threw anything out and had books going back to the 1890s. They saved all my father’s books that he grew up with, including some Horatio Alger volumes. These were sold as ‘dime novels’ and with no TV, reading was definitely a thing.
I’d read books only written from 1900 to 1910. Then I’d only read books written from 1911 to1920, and so on through the ’40s. You can see the changes on a decadal basis.
jim2 makes a good point that the English language is “as she is spoken”. What has always been a constant is new teen slang that every generation creates as a code that their old fuddy-duddy parents don’t understand, 23 skiddoo, far out and the like.
The only constant is change.
An excellent new topic. :-)
I suppose there could be linguistic bun-fights about the source(s) of the two languages. Did one come from the other, or did both come from some other unidentified common source? Which implies some kind of migration of people over time.
By chance, I’ve recently been looking at the migration of Haplogroups. For example, Haplogroup R1a. There are a few distinct “hotspots” of R1a, in place as wide-spread as Northern India, Kyrgyzstan, Southern Russia, Belarus, Lithuania(!), Norway and the western isles of Scotland.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mapa_de_R1a.png
Wiki says:
the question of the origins of R1a1a is relevant to the ongoing debate concerning the urheimat of the Proto-Indo-European people, and may also be relevant to the origins of the Indus Valley civilization.
Any mention of the Indus Valley civilisation pushes it even further back, as the oldest part of that is underwater (as mentioned by Graham Hancock in “Underworld”)
In India, (we are told), “the frequency is higher among Brahmin castes“, and they just happen to be the custodians of Sanskrit.
How much correlation could or would there be between related migrating people’s blood groups and their preferred language?
By the way (too good to not mention) – there are still some surviving Sanskrit manuscripts that mention mathematical formulas. Like the one we know as “Archimedes Triangle” – it’s just 100’s of years before Archimedes.
This discussion reminds of the book “Moses In The Hieroglyphs”. As I recall, one assertion of the author is that Welsh has similarities with the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
I seem to remember there was talk of the tin trade that led to there being a connection between the two parts of the world.
I should ask my sibling what else they can tell me about the Haplogroups. They mentioned that East Asian groups are similar those of Native Americans along the west coast of the Americas.
Fascinating stuff!
So many directions to go from the comments…
FWIW, I’m pretty sure that the R1A type is one of the keys, but I’m likely that, or R1B, given the Dad’s Ancestry… (no, not tested, so don’t really know).
Yes, one of my understandings was that all language is change, so good luck fixing it to a single “grammar”… and that’s part of why I’m happy to “speak my own way” and use a very non-standard “English” that is all my own. Capitalizing like the German at times. Verbing nouns. Nounifying verbs. Whatever. IF it caries the idea, and if it is effective, then it is fine.
@PowerGrab:
Turns out there were Celtic Mercenaries employed by the Pharaoh, and at least one of them (Ramses III? one of them) was himself a Red Head, so lots of gene flow in that era too. BTW, one of the foundation “Myths” of Ireland had a Pharonic Princess hooking up with a “Scythian” soldier (back when Anatolia had Celts too) and running off with their troup to found Ireland… Might explain some of the Celtic oddities and connections to Egyptian forms… Also FWIW, there’s an odd parallel in some English to various Hebrew language structures – but what is the source?…. The King James Version shaped English, but is also true to the Hebrew language pattern… so which was the source…
There’s some evidence for a Semitic / Hamitic connection with English. While it is majority Germanic with a French remodeling; there’s a substrate that is not I.E. Everyone else says some variation of Mare for Sea… or why do we have Knight and King and the others have Rey? And so it goes…
There’s also a bit of intrigue in South America where a tribe has pottery similar to Japanese, and a history that matches when a Japanese coastal area was being destroyed by a volcano, so set out in their boats… and kept going. So did those Japanese make to to America? Looks like it… including some other interesting language and genetic bits…
@Keith:
As someone with the Red Head Gene, I’m interested in it as a marker. Looks like it has origin in the Steppes of Asia and/or the mountains of Europe – I.e. it is very old. Possibly even of Neanderthal origin (the “authorities” say it is different, BUT, they have only one or at most a couple of Neanderthal genes decoded so it is quite possible there were others not evident in the fossils we have found…)
So the Aryans invaded down into India AND had a lot of blonds and red heads, then blended in. And had a lot in the Brahman class later. It is now politically oppressed to mention such, but the genes still show it. (OTOH, why folks get bothered about mentioning that thousands of years ago one group dominated another is a bit odd anyway… but the simple fact is that the “Aryan” or Blond Germanic types have been prone to invading and dominating others militarily for thousands of years… and violent actions do not mean superior intellect…)
Language does tend to move with the genes. There are exceptions though. For example, my Paternal line has German speakers and Celtic Irish speakers, yet I follow my Maternal English… now warped into ‘Merican.
@CDQuarles:
I’ve heard modern English described as “German, after the French got through with it” and that is rather accurate. Old English is strongly Old Germanic / Frisian. The 400 years of French Domination and you get Modern English… and I still can’t read Old English without help…
@eilert:
Unfortunately, I have “issues” with learning to read new scripts. I’m great with the verbal form, but toss in a new alphabet and I’m moving at 1/10th the rate of others. I think it is because I learned the English Alphabet at about age 3 and then “moved on” and trying to dislodge that is hard…