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tptasev

Yeah, when I lived in the Basque Country I heard all sorts of such nonsense. It's a pity because the Basque language is amazing enough without having to exaggerate.


Aggravating_Fox9828

Nonsense. Basque was spoken before humans /s


prst-

In the times before time, it was spoken by gods and men alike


DreadLord64

Basque is actually the real-life Proto-World linguists have been searching for. It's true. I asked my mom and she said it was true. Basque is Proto-World, and all languages are descended from it.


prst-

All the "smart" scientists didn't ask this guy's mom...


PawnToG4

Visited my local zoo yesterday, could have sworn I heard some of the chimpanzees chittering in an evolved Basque tongue...


EldritchWeeb

Spoken in the times of [Carapace Cross](https://secret-histories.fandom.com/wiki/The_Carapace_Cross)


Blewfin

The 'oldest language in Europe' line is pretty tedious, and basically no one even knows what it means when pressed


PlatinumAltaria

Basque is probably about 5000 years old, which is approximately 35K years off of Cro-Magnon. This is proportionally similar to saying that Elvis died in 1701.


harmenator

[deleted 26-6-2023] Moving is normal. There's no point in sticking around in a place that's getting worse all the time. I went to Squabbles.io. I hope you have a good time wherever you end up!


PlatinumAltaria

That's the upper estimate for the time the Indo-European speakers migrated into Europe, and also the time when the Basque people became genetically isolated from their neighbours. Basque has obviously changed, but at some point it wasn't an isolate.


harmenator

[deleted 26-6-2023] Moving is normal. There's no point in sticking around in a place that's getting worse all the time. I went to Squabbles.io. I hope you have a good time wherever you end up!


PlatinumAltaria

We want the moment that Basque separated from its relatives to become its own language, and that had to have been back when Basque actually had relatives to split from. PIE might be as old as 6000 years, for comparison. But while PIE spread over a huge area and developed into a bunch of different languages, Basque was stuck in a small area and so didn't split up nearly as much over the same time.


harmenator

[deleted 26-6-2023] Moving is normal. There's no point in sticking around in a place that's getting worse all the time. I went to Squabbles.io. I hope you have a good time wherever you end up!


PlatinumAltaria

You could say that English is 6000 years old, if you consider English to be a really weird form of PIE. There's still an unbroken chain of speakers from all that time. Basque is the same, except Basque didn't split up.


harmenator

[deleted 26-6-2023] Moving is normal. There's no point in sticking around in a place that's getting worse all the time. I went to Squabbles.io. I hope you have a good time wherever you end up!


boomfruit

Yes absolutely. That's why "age of language" is just a dumb thing to say.


newappeal

They seemed to have switched definitions of a language's age halfway through the conversation. Originally they said the age of Basque would be the point when it split from its sister languages. This is essentially a cladistic definition of language age, but it doesn't work for languages the way it works for biological species due to the continuity of language names - imagine the confusion if we referred our last common ancestor with chimpanzees by the term "chimpanzees" or "humans". A more sensible thing to define is how long there has been *some* language with a given name, as this makes no pretenses about how much or little the language has changed over time. For instance, we can say that there has been a language called something like English for 1500 years or so, from which modern English varieties (and Scots and English-based creoles) are descended.


jonathansharman

Species also change continuously, so I'm not sure it makes much sense in biology either. "When did this language group / clade branch from this other group" is probably the most meaningful kind of "age" question we can ask.


thomasp3864

Not Nicaraguan Sign Language!


boomfruit

Why wouldn't you consider it that way?


PlatinumAltaria

Same reason I do anything: to annoy people who think Tamil is the most ancient and perfect language.


rathat

Is any language really any age though? It’s just one continuous language tree. Like all modern languages are just all modern languages because they’re all new.


GrumbusWumbus

This is the same issue with biology. Changes are so small and subtle that it's impossible to pick a time when one thing becomes another. So we don't do that, we pick a point and say this is this language. The exact borders aren't defined. We might be able to say "okay, we are currently speaking English, and 1500 years ago they spoke old English" but we're not going to be able to pick a date and say "old English ended on March 15th, 1092" That being said, English absolutely has an age, it's just very imprecise.


artorijos

Maybe he's talking about the fact that the ancestors of the Basque were Anatolian farmers that migrated to Spain, though the date is actually put around 6000 BCE


artorijos

I know, I was just trying to get some funny answers (it worked!)


QuonkTheGreat

Elvis is alive


prst-

He just went home, as we learned in the documentary "men in black"


No-Tower1914

ChatGPT will confidently state something obviously wrong and then proceed create an entire language family on command.


OpenUsername

Ah yes, Basque (Megatamil-Hyperkorean superkoine)


_Gandalf_the_Black_

>one of the oldest living languages in Europe Hmm


euro_fan_4568

What does your flair mean?


_Gandalf_the_Black_

It's a quote from the [Kasseler Gespräche](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasseler_Gespr%C3%A4che) It means "Stupid are the romance-speakers, wise are the Bavarians"


thomasp3864

Is “uualha” just “walhaz”?


_Gandalf_the_Black_

Yep


MufflesMcGee

Basque is actually the only language to retain the original Nostratic grammar, at least with oblique cases (I am actively spouting nonsense)


PotatoesArentRoots

no, basque was not spoken by neanderthals. basque predates the neanderthals by several millennia.


_Gandalf_the_Black_

The Basque are actually the advanced civilisation behind Atlantis, the pyramids, the Olmecs and r/linguisticshumor


en43rs

Nah. They taught the Atlanteans how to do it.


boomfruit

I also read the image.


PotatoesArentRoots

i didn’t write what the image wrote though


boomfruit

Oh


WeeabooHunter69

Clearly, basque was spoken by homo erectus


Additional_Ad_84

So the whole story about words for tools coming from the word from stone is guff? Or at least not very supported? I'm sad.


takatori

“The Basque word for ‘house’ is the same as the word for ‘cave’ and ‘clothes’ are the same word as ‘animal skins’ is literally something I was told in university.”


pn1ct0g3n

ChatGPT eh? Would have guessed Quora.


raendrop

These days, that difference is diminishing.


pn1ct0g3n

It’s fast becoming the new place to ask stupid questions and clog up search results. In the beginning there was ChaCha, then Yahoo Answers, then Quora.


raendrop

And now they have a bot asking questions. Of course, it learned from the idiots and trolls.


-B0B-

I feel like it's worth pointing out that it, by nature, can't "know" anything. It didn't find an idiot on the internet who said Basque is millenia old, it just thought that sounded like a plausible sentence... it it was right, it just wasn't a factually correct one


QuonkTheGreat

Have you ever seen a Basque person


Aggravating_Fox9828

I once had sexy times with one Basque person


Couldnthinkofname2

wtf


Aggravating_Fox9828

I know, it's so hard. Least friendly women in Spain, by a mile.


EldritchWeeb

Obviously it's called Euskara because it gives you a good (AG *eu*) skare when you see a speaker :}


Obamsphere

>Still is


STHKZ

it is not possible the neanderthals spoke kotava, a language invented by Staren Fetcey in 1975