The Daltai website states, "the Irish language, which has the oldest living literature in Western Europe. " Someone recently asked me if that were true and I didn't know exactly where this claim comes from.

Any comments?
Faber

It is a matter of dispute.

But there are writings in Irish going back to the 8th and 9th centuries.

http://www.ucc.ie/celt/publishd.html#inarr

No other language in Western Europe goes back that far - if one excludes Latin.

...which one must as Latin is no longer a living language...

I believe the only European language that can trump Irish to be "the oldest living literature on the continent" would be Greek...

Latin is a living language. It is called Spanish, Italian, French, Sardinian, etc. They all have a continuous link from "Latin". So we must exclude Latin to give this honor to Irish.

Some have it thus :the oldest vernacular language in Europe.Or - the oldest written language north of the Alps.Welsh can't be far behind Irish though.

Ceard fe Breton no Basque?

Ceard fúthu? An bhfuil litríocht i. scríbhinní níos sine acu? Go bhfios dom, níl.

There are no Basque texts that are that old.
The oldest Breton text dates ca. 750 (a text about herbal medicine, basically it's a Latin texts with many Breton words and parts of sentences).

I'd say there are Welsh texts that are more or less as old as the Irish ones.

@Seánw - ah, and that's where it gets all fuzzy, haha. The convention is to consider Latin distinct from (although an ancestor to) the Romance languages (that is, Latin and French are two different languages, but Old English and Modern English are the same despite Latin and French probably having a greater degree of mutual intelligibility...but not enough to have a meaningful conversation).

I suppose, since one could go all the way back to Proto-Indo-European (although they didn't call it that at the time) and say they're all one language, French/Spanish/Italian are not Latin because the French, Spanish, and Italians do not say that their languages are. Ergo, Latin is dead with living descendants while Modern Irish is considered a living version of Old Irish...

I think it is fuzzy only to people who don't know the history of Latin. Sure some split hairs about the differences between most written scholarly Latin of the early period and the common vulgar Latin, but that is plainly counter to the history the actual people experienced. Sure, Latin written from about the 8th century on was artificial (in the sense of not the vernacular), petrified, and scholarly, but the Latin before that is the direct ancestor of the Romance languages. French IS the modern Latin in France. Italian IS the modern Latin in Italy, etc. That is like saying that if Irish had a scholarly tradition like the Bards continue in its 16th century tongue, that that negates the Irish that may naturally exist 1000 years from now as being Irish. So since we are talking about ancient literature, the question of the Latin written in a manner completely different from the common speech is moot. Early Latin to about the 5th-6th century displays the full range of Latin speech, from the scholarly to the colloquial. This is of course somewhat off the topic of this thread, but those in the Romance countries have a literary heritage that goes back to the BC time. Irish has a very impressive cultural heritage, but we can say easily that (colloquial) Latin is the oldest living (continuous) literary tradition.

A couple of books on the line of Latin to Romance Languages:

The Story of Latin and the Romance Languages, by Mario Pei

The phonology of Italian, Spanish, and French, by Harry A Deferrari

(Message edited by seánw on September 01, 2011)

Actually, something similar *is* true of Irish prior to the 16th century - the written scholarly language was no longer the language of the people.

Do we differentiate between literature and 'writing'? If not, the earliest surviving writing in Irish has been dated to the mid 6th century.

Ogham excluded...

I would agree with Antaine and draw a line between Latin and its modern-day descentants. Just to offer a different perspective, when you look at Germanic languages, you would not mix up Dutch, German and Scandinavian languages, but rather look for first written records in the local Germanic dialect (Old Frankish, Old High German and Old Norse, respectively) from which they evolved.

Same with French and Spanish, which are commonly regarded as dating back to the 9th century, when Gallo-Romance and Castilian emerged as separate languages. Of course, Seánw has a good point with Italian, which unlike other Romance languages never lost contact with Latin in geographic terms. So who knows... :)

quote:

Do we differentiate between literature and 'writing'? If not, the earliest surviving writing in Irish has been dated to the mid 6th century.

At that time I think it's more like names in Latin manuscripts, and Oghaim. Not really "writings" in Irish, not even sentences.

quote:

I would agree with Antaine and draw a line between Latin and its modern-day descentants. Just to offer a different perspective, when you look at Germanic languages, you would not mix up Dutch, German and Scandinavian languages, but rather look for first written records in the local Germanic dialect (Old Frankish, Old High German and Old Norse, respectively) from which they evolved.

Sure, but we can say the same about Irish. Irish is bound by water, and has far fewer speakers, and never had an empire to disperse its language. And yet we still debate about dialect ... Like a previous statement here, we can keep going back to a unified whole, but in most cases there is no evidence of the unified whole except theoretical proto languages. In the case of Latin, we have definite data of the unified language. We even have evidence of their local flavors which are still shown in the language today. For example, the gemination of Italian consonants is evident in Latin. We have evidence the "softening" of Cs and Gs. Etc. I guess I am now coming off as an apologist for Latin. We have a sort of blind spot to the Romance languages because of their names, it seems.

Bhuel, cé a scriobh seo ar an shiomh agus cen fath é a scriobh?
So, who wrote this on the site and why did they write it?

Faber

Seems to me that Irish has changed as much as Latin over the centuries so it's a hard claim to back up.

"At that time I think it's more like names in Latin manuscripts, and Oghaim. Not really "writings" in Irish, not even sentences."

Full poems in Old Irish have been dated to the 560s. Alan Titley has written about them in some detail.

@Seánw - What I meant was that there was no day where all the Latin became unintelligible, it was a gradual process that would have been almost imperceptible to those alive at the time - and yet we draw the distinction anyway.

The relationship between Latin and the oldest dialects that we would term "French" (etc) is the same as would be the relationship between Middle English and modern English. In one instance, we officially label the two varieties the same language, and in another we officially label them as different. Why? Well, "because that's what the linguists decided to do." I'd read that some dialects of Italian remained mutually intelligible with Latin into the 1300s!

So, I'm not disagreeing with you on the practical end of the argument (that French and Spanish et al are "living, modern Latin"). However, if one prohibits a line being drawn to "separate" Latin from French, then one could conceivably prohibit a line being drawn between any language and its "descendant," making discussions about language very difficult to carry on (we'd eventually wind up with all European languages simply being living extensions of Proto-Indo-European, and PIE itself ).

I mean, if the Romance languages are merely the living modern dialects of Latin, why does Latin get to be considered distinct? Wouldn't Latin itself have been but the living modern descendant of a much earlier language at the time? And what of that parent language? And that one's parent? And that one's?

So, in a way, breaking down languages presents the difficulty inherent in distinguishing points on any continuum, but we do it all the time. In the color spectrum, we consider Red and Orange distinct, and yet finding the exact point where something ceases to be red and starts to be orange would wind up looking very much like this conversation, where there does not seem a definitive point where Latin ended and Portuguese began, yet we recognize two languages as distinct (but related) anyway...

Danny, could you please give more references about the poems you mentioned? Neither Stair na Gaeilge nor Sengoidelc mention them, which is strange enough (except if the manuscripts have been found after these books were published)...
Grma

Sílim go bhfuil dhá rud i gceist - cén uair a cumadh na dánta, agus cén uair a scríobhadh síos iad!

quote:

I mean, if the Romance languages are merely the living modern dialects of Latin, why does Latin get to be considered distinct

Here is how:

a)
Old English > Middle English > Modern English
Old Latin > [Classical Latin >] Vulgar Latin French > Old French > Middle French > Modern French
Old Irish > Middle Irish > Modern Irish

b)
Old Latin > Classical Latin > "Latin"


In group A we have a natural development of the language. In group B we have an artificial development of the language. Latin, as we know it, was maintained as an artificial scholarly language. As French people noticed they weren't understanding Latin anymore, they were not saying to themselves that they didn't understand their own language, but they were experiencing a difference of their language from the scholarly use (which was petrified).

"Latin" -- a once natural language that became frozen in time as a scholarly language
"French" -- a living dialect of natural Latin

The breaking point for distinction of the separate languages was the dissolution of their unity under the Empire. Once that broke down, that is when the big differences started to set in and linguists mark this time as the beginning of French, for instance, as a unique language. So we are able to mark the grey areas of transition with some accuracy.

A hypothetical parallel:

Modern French : Modern English
Vulgar Latin French : Old English
Latin (petrified scholarly language) : Think of all our scholarly works written in a stylized Old English. Hwaet!

I hope this clarifies it.

(Message edited by seánw on September 08, 2011)

Lughaidh,

Alan Titley claims that an Old Irish poem entitled 'Luin oc elaib' has been dated to around 565 AD. Another source said early 7th century.

Luin oc elaib,
ungai oc dírnaib,
crotha banaithech
oc crothaib rignai,
ríg oc Domnall,
dord oc aidbse,
adann oc caindil,
colg oc mo chailg-se.

Attributed to Colmán mac Léníne [Lénéni]
(c. 522?-601?)

http://www.sengoidelc.com/node/96
http://bill.celt.dias.ie/vol4/displayObject.php?TreeID=7005

(Message edited by Danny2007 on September 09, 2011)

Seánw, I meant why does Old Latin get to be considered novel instead of but a living (at the time) extension of whatever came BEFORE Latin entirely (just as with Latin and French)? Latin itself is not some language predating the retreat of the glaciers from Europe during the ice age, so it had to come from something else.

Every language, even the ancient, dead ones, came from some OTHER language before them. If the Romance languages have to be considered "modern Latin" (again, I don't disagree with you on the general principle of that), then why are the classical languages different? Latin, Greek, etc all came from something else themselves.

True, we may not know the name of the language that preceded Latin, but that hasn't stopped linguists from making up terms to fill those spaces. We know that the people who came to occupy that region of Italy did not evolve sentience there; they migrated from elsewhere, and brought with them a language that would eventually become proto-Latin and then Latin. And that proto-proto-Latin evolved from something else itself.

In the end, we wind up classifying every human language as the "modern version" of some great, ancient proto-tongue. Now, that may very well be true, but it makes having meaningful linguistic discussions about classical, medieval and modern languages very difficult.

Do luidh Féinius as an Scitia
For an sluaghadh;
Fear oireadha eagnuidh eolach,
Bruthmhar buadhach.
Ba haoinbhéarla baoi san domhan
Mar do ghabhsad;
Dá bhéarla déag is trí fichid
Tan ro scarsad.
Scol mhór la Féinius ag foghluim
As gach eargna;
Fear adhamhra eagnuidh eolach
I ngach béarla.

http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/G100054/index.html

Sure, Antaine, I understand your point. But practically speaking we have clear evidence of Old Latin. Before then we have scanty evidence, most of which are inductions from direct evidence. Please don't think that I am saying that France and its civilization are not unique (using them, again, as an example). But I am just supporting the simple conclusion that if French does not have rights to Latin literature (circa pre-7th century), then Irish doesn't have a right either to its literature. The parallel is that close. Just because the political and geographic situation was more favorable to not branching off in numerous areas, doesn't mean Latin or Irish somehow developed different than any other language does. Another example I think of is Scottish having a right to claim early Irish texts as their own. Ultimately there is a continuum of language with branches and after branches developing as the tree grows. This is the reality of any living organism. For the sake of organization we set up separate trees, as though a seed fell and produced it, but (as far as I know) no natural language has just "appeared". So we use classifications to aid understanding and organization. And they fit with the geo-political world in which the classifications were codified. They are based on reality, but they are also formulated from a specific linguistic philosophical background.

(Message edited by seánw on September 10, 2011)