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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 8 September 2020 and 18 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Scowan32.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 21:04, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Should 'dead language' really redirect here? I mean, I think that going to Language death is more appropriate for the situation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.106.177.241 ( talk) 12:53, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
If language is a method of communication, who does the last speaker of a language speak to? 14:58, 7 March 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.186.110.198 ( talk)
Can Ancient Greek really be called extinct? Greek has never ceased to be spoken over time and there have always been speakers of the language since antiquity. It has simply evolved into its modern form. Also, many people in Greece are able to read and comprehend the ancient writings. For instance something English speakers can relate to, would someone call Old English extinct or merely changed into its modern form. The reason the issue is important to me is because, there is always a conscious or unconscious attempt to make Greeks seems to be some extinct group of people with no relation to modern Greeks, the language issue ties with this. I won't edit the article but leave this note here for someone less biased than me to examine in detail and edit.
Unsigned comment left at 03:31 UTC, 19 April 2005, by User:24.193.227.161
--
I am referring to the comment above: Well, it is more than obvious that you ARE indeed biased. I read all your arguments about Ancient/Katharevousa/Greek and I can, without any doubt what-so-ever, say that you are 100% wrong. I did not find not even one sentence of your text that is barely acceptable. Your statements are so dogmatic and none has been supported by any valid, commonly acceptable references. It is amazing how ignorance makes it's way into wikipedia by people like you. I have to ask you if you are a native speaker of modern Greek (Demotiki) and if you studied any Ancient Greek at all. As a person of Hellenic decent, not only I speak Modern Greek as my maternal language but -without of course being fluent- I have a deep understanding of the Ancient language as well. In short here's where you are wrong and why:
1. Ancient and Demotiki are not separate languages. Demotiki is a very simplified form of Ancient Greek. Grammar, syntaxis and form of expression have definitely changed. It is however the plethora of words and expressions still used today as they were 2.500 years ago that make your argument about separate languages, simply laughable. Of course the same holds for Old/English, latin/Italian etc. If you search the Internet you will find many quotes from important scholars about Ancient Greek being the "mother" of many modern western languages. How can you reconcile this Ancient and Modern Greek being "separate"? It is simply a thoughless statement.
2. You are wrong stating the "widespread familiarity" of modern Greeks with Katharevousa. Actually, Katharevousa was never adopted by the greek people en mass. It was an artificial language, fabricated by scholars at the time 18th-19 c. AD in an attempt to cleanse the popular spoken greek after hundreds of years of ottoman occupation and latin/slavic people invasions. The reason why Greeks can understand Ancient Greek is because still today we find ancient words, expressions, etc. in greek vocabulary. As a matter of fact the modern greek language through a self checking mechanism did not bother creating new words for words from ancient times but simply imported these words into Demotiki. I say imported but trully what happened is Greeks gave up trying to reinvent the wheel and adopted a great deal from the vocabulary of their ancient forefathers.
3. "The phonological, syntactic, and morphological differences between the Greek of Homer, Plato, and Aristotle and the language spoken on the street in Athens today are huge and certainly enough to warrant considering them separate languages." Absolutely NOT! The differences are many in some areas significant. But huge is not a word that can substantiate your argyment. For every difference between Ancient and Demotiki, I can give you words and expressions that are identical in ALL the above mentioned categories. The only way to do this is to give you examples written in greek font. Are you able to read it?
4. "And clearly, Ancient Greek is extinct under the first meaning discussed in the article: it has evolved to such a great degree that its descendants must be considered separate languages." Here, I could not stop laughing! You claim that Greek is extinct and a separate language from Demotiki, based on a wikipedia article, which is clearly biased and widely disputed. So basically you're saying, it is so, because I say so (!?!) Excuse me this is not an argument, this is a joke.
5. Finally, the analogy with dinosaurs and birds is a nice one but does not cut it. Greek has a life of (well, take this with a grain of salt) around say 3-4.000 years. Dinosaurs evolved into birds (though scientifically, not a generally accepted statement) over millions of years. I believe there is a huge difference. If we are still around in say a few more billion years I will be willing to discuss this again. And BTW how come Ancient Greek is an extinct language and you in the 21 century are using the word "dinosaur" which in Greek is spelled "δεινόσαυρος", where did "dinosaur" some from, which language does it originate from?
Dimitrios P., Athens - GR (comments can be made at x w r i s o n o m a (at) h o t m a i l . c o m ) 75.57.69.69 ( talk) 17:30, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
The existance of extinct language families should sound alarms for philosophers and linguists. A language allows us to frame our knowledge and experience so that it may be practically reconstructed by other language users. However, the symbols will only elicit the intended thoughts if they are understood in a similar way between the reader and writer.
Presently, cultural traditions and large linguistic community bases ensure that languages grow and refine over time, however, once a language ceases to be understood by any being, it loses its capacity to transfer the knowledge, experience, and wisdom that may be concealed within its markings.
This should be a sign to linguists to begin a project to ground our language into non-lingistic forms that may serve as a starting point for reconstructing our collective linguistic efforts once they loose significance.
This whole article looks like a mess of original research. Anyone got any materials that support the assertions made herein for the definition of "extinct language"? Tomer TALK 01:21, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)
The following is a quote from A Student's Dictionary of Language and Linguistics by R. L. Trask (London: Arnold, 1997, ISBN 0-340-65267-5), p. 63:
dead language A label which is applied to two quite different sorts of cases, which you should be careful to distinguish. 1. A language which was formerly spoken but which has died out completely as a mother tongue, having been abandoned by its last speakers. Examples include Sumerian, Etruscan and Cornish. 2. An earlier stage of a language which has never ceased to be spoken but whose modern forms are very different from it. Latin is a dead language in this sense: it has never ceased to be used as a mother tongue, but its modern forms, such as French, Spanish, and Italian, are so different from the language of the Romans, and from one another, that we no longer find it convenient to call them 'Latin'.
I think we can use that definition to build an encyclopedia article around, don't you? -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 2 July 2005 17:26 (UTC)
I've done a major re-write. How's it look now? -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 3 July 2005 08:20 (UTC)
Well, I've already merged Living language here; what other articles do think should be included? And what do you mean by "Language status"? Keep in mind the title of Wikipedia articles are supposed to be the names of existing concepts, not made-up terms. -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 3 July 2005 08:48 (UTC)
Well, the two I had in mind, other than living language and extinct language, at the time, were language death and endangered language. I don't think this is making up a term, so much as bringing together various language states under a common (and I believe, fitting) heading. Tomer TALK July 3, 2005 08:56 (UTC)
I suppose linguicide should go in the same group, but I'm not convinced we can cover everything in just one article. Maybe we can put these articles into a Category:Language death and endangerment or something. As to your second point, if there's a difference between a dead language and an extinct language, I don't know what it is. I can see it would be useful to have separate terms for languages with no remaining native speakers that nevertheless get used by nonnative speakers to talk to each other (like Latin and Sanskrit for sure, maybe even Old English since people use it to talk to each other on the talk pages of ang:), and languages with no remaining native speakers and also no nonnative speakers (like Sumerian, Etruscan, and Beothuk). But I don't know whether it's established practice to use "dead" for the first group and "extinct" for the second, as you seem to be doing on Talk:Latin. -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 3 July 2005 11:17 (UTC)
"Dead language", definitely. It parallels "language death" (which I've never heard called "language extinction"). -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 3 July 2005 16:00 (UTC)
Don't ask me; I had nothing to do with it! -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 3 July 2005 19:41 (UTC)
someone more biased than you did edit the article to remove all reference to Ancient Greek.
You almost make me laugh. This 'someone' has made most of the contributions of the Greek language related articles. What have you done to prove that you have an idea? From what you say it appears that you don't.
I've decided to leave Greek out for the time being
Is it me, or do you have the impression that you own this article? Guess what, you don't, and hence you don't make decisions. This article is very poor and badly written as it is, I wouldn't be surprised if much of it was written by you, which is exactly where the problem lies. You don't know any Greek, from what you say it's obvious that you haven't read anything on Greek, therefore you're not in position to have a say on this. I've showed you my contributions on wikipedia and I've provided my sources, therefore I'm the person in position to make decisions on the given topic. I'm not even going to answer to your childish remarks, I've already explained you the different between a language, and a stage of a language (see Talk:List of extinct languages). Whether or not you choose to believe it is irrelevant. You can force your personal opinion on your children, but not on this article. By the way I'm aware of your false accusation (about starting an edit war on a stub article), and your failed attempts to get me banned. You managed to find an admin who was already biased against me because of a different ethnic debate, but it was not enough to shut my mouth. He's about to be reported on the WikiEN mailing-list, and so are you. Miskin
Miskin may not do so with a lot of tact, but he does point out a valid problem with this article. For a language to become "extinct", it has to undergo "extinction" at some point. An example would be the Manx language, the last native speaker of which died in the 1960s, I believe. This is radically different from an older, historical stage of a language that was never extinct. Ancient Greek is such an example. If you label Ancient Greek as an "extinct" language, each and every historical language is "extinct", i.e. Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English are all to be treated as separate, extinct languages. This doesn't make sense. You should separate "Old languages" from actually "extinct languages", i.e. languages that underwent extinction at some point in history. dab (ᛏ) 6 July 2005 14:08 (UTC)
I do not think similarity or dissimilarity of Modern and Ancient Greek are an issue. At no point in history did Greek die out, therefore it is not an extinct language. It may be a "dead" language, by common use, and maybe this article should discuss these problems. But how is a list of "dead" languages even useful? All historical languages, i.e. every idiom spoken more than a generation ago, is by this definition "dead". What's the point of listing these? The interesting thing here would be language death, which is pretty well defined (death of last native speaker). Most
Greek dialects however, did die out, when Koine (i.e. Attic) became successful. So we could indeed list Doric, Aeolic, Arcado-Cypriot etc. as extinct languages (or dialects), just not Greek as a whole. By your argument, Homeric Greek needs to be listed as extinct by 600 BC. Mycenaean as extinct by 1100 BC. The Koine probably went extinct around 1000 AD. That's just pointless, there is no criterion of how granular you will want to make your list. Theoretically, you could list every language, ever century or so. 12th century English: extinct. 13th century English: extinct. 14th century English: extinct ....
dab
(ᛏ) 6 July 2005 16:32 (UTC)
TShilo2 when I started editing the article I was extremely polite to Angr and tried to explain to him why he's wrong. I started a discussion in Talk:List of extinct languages where other people participated and agreed with my suggestion. Angr obviously thinks he's in charge of the article, and that's the only reason he doesn't want my changes to remain. Furthermore, after he realised that he lacked the knowledge to comprehend what other people explained, instead of replying in Talk he reported me for vandalism to an admin who had a previous ethnic conflict with me. He accused me for violating 3RR and vandalising a stub article, completely ignoring all my contributions to the Greek language-related articles. As far as I'm concerned liars and cowards deserve no respect. Miskin 6 July 2005 20:40 (UTC)
Angr said: I firmly believe that from a linguistic point of view Ancient Greek and Modern Greek are as different from each other (and therefore as much two separate languages) as Old English and Modern English are, or as Latin and Italian are.
Again, what you firmly believe is irrelevant to what the academic opinion says. Me, Chronographos and dab have contributed on many articles regarding the Greek language, and I have provided my sources on Talk:List of extinct languages. You are the one who's refusing to accept that you don't run things around here. In fact you shouldn't even participate since you're planning to contribute in terms of what you firmly believe. We don't care, deal with it. Ancient Greek is by no academic insitution on the planet a seperate language, how difficult is to understand this? I'm not going to waste my time on trying explain to you why you're wrong, I've already tried and you failed. Istead of making a valid point by providing valid theories and their sources, you foolishly quoted from articles that were are written by, in order to "convince" me that ancient Greek has differences from Modern (as if I ever said that it didn't). According to your POV logic, extinct(X) :- ancient(X), because there is no ancient form of speech that has been preserved on a perfectly intelligible extent to the present day. What makes things more comical is that you don't have the slightest clue on the Greek language, and I'm not talking about speaking it, I talking about basic knowledge on its nature. This is plainly evident by the way you speak about Ancient Greek. Anyway, based on the academic opinion this is what the arcticles Greek language and Modern Greek currently say:
but simply stated his position that Ancient Greek is not a separate language from Modern Greek.
Me and other people tried many times to convince you that this is not just Miskin's personal opinion. It's what linguistics have said, your complaints to them. Your view on the other hand, is a personal opinion, which you should establish academically before forcing it into the article. I started being sarcastic after you characterised my changes as 'vandalism'.
included in its edit summary a sarcastic-sounding question and an implication that I am ignorant of the subject matter.
Well, aren't you? Miskin 6 July 2005 21:37 (UTC)
"...the changes to the nouns have been less far-reaching. Greek has never experienced the wholesale loss of word-endings that has for instance made Spanish, French and Italian separate languages from Latin."
Unless you want people to take you seriously, you can't talk about extents if you have no personal experience with the language. Nobody said that the language has not changed, that would be at least retarded, let alone physically impossible. You can't prove a point by pointing out differences from Ancient to Modern Greek, we know that they're different, in the same way we know that an 80 year old man is physically different from what he was in his 20s. Languages do change, like people grow older. It's up to linguists to determine whether a language is dead or not, and Greek is in fact determined as one of the best preserved languages. If you say that Greek is dead, then you have to say that any language which is preceded by the word 'ancient' is also dead. This is not a magical linguistic phenomenon which occurred for some strange reason in Greece, it has to do with the history of the region, its people and of course its language (which is also summarised in my articles). Miskin 7 July 2005 01:06 (UTC)
"It is claimed that an "educated" speaker of the modern language can read ancient texts, but this is surely as much a function of education as of the similarity of the languages. Still, Koinē /ciˈni/, the version of Greek used to write the New Testament and the Septuagint, is relatively easy to understand for modern speakers."
"I started being sarcastic after you characterised my changes as 'vandalism'."
"Well, aren't you [ignorant of the subject matter]?"
Of course. Miskin 7 July 2005 13:30 (UTC)
I wanted to add it in a wiki-link. Yes it's poorly documented, this is why I mentioned the word "research". Fragments of texts do survive, but I don't think it's easy to find them on the internet. Miskin 7 July 2005 14:15 (UTC)
Instead of following the example of Decius and removing languages that are indeed dead, maybe we should restore them and improve the definition of 'dead language' on this article. Miskin 7 July 2005 14:30 (UTC)
When a language stops being spoken, it is dead. I've already discussed this with Decius. Latin has definitely stopped being spoken in all of its periods, this is why it's regarded as dead. I'm not personally familiar with linguistic opinion on Old Norse and Old English so I can't really tell. On the other hand the link of the British university that I gave you lists them as dead. I think the previous definition is better, why did you remove it? And I still don't see a reason to doubt
Language death. In fact I don't see a reason for keeping an article
Extinct language separately from
language death.
Miskin 7 July 2005 16:04 (UTC)
As your probably know, the Latin language had its historical periods (early, classic, late etc). In that respect, 'Latin' is a language one 'early Latin' is one of its stages. If Late Latin was still in use somwhere, we wouldn't say that 'Latin' is a dead language. As it is known, the history of the Latin language dies at late Latin. Romanian, Italian, French etc belong to the Romance family, whose root is Latin. To make an equivalence, 'Greek' is a language (like Latin) and 'ancient Greek' is a stage (like 'early Latin'). "Modern Greek" is a stage of Greek equivalent "Late Latin" for Latin. "Modern Greek" is living, therefore the Greek language is living, "Late Latin" is dead, therefore the Latin language is dead. The Romance languages have a heritage from Latin, but they're not a late stage of Latin. By the way don't let the word modern mislead you into thinking that Modern Greek is something contemporary. Modern Greek has in fact its starting point in the middle ages. Its original name was Neo-Hellenic, 'modern Greek' is just a corrupted translation. This is analysed in Talk:List of extinct languages. Miskin 7 July 2005 16:39 (UTC)
Decius has a contradicting logic and his reverts are POV. I'm reverting back to the old version as it was agreed with dab and chronographos. The criterion here is not the clear definition of 'dead language', it's what the majority of linguists believe. After having Latin and Old English back in the list, we should compose a better definition of this aricle, adding back the example of Latin. Miskin 7 July 2005 17:01 (UTC)
First, "dead language" is not an academic term; "extinct language" is much more widely used by linguists. Second, I can certainly see an argument for distinguishing languages that are extinct without issue (like Galatian, Etruscan, or Meroitic) from languages that are extinct only because they were replaced by their own descendants (such as Ancient Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit; but consistency is necessary. Either Latin and Ancient Greek are both alive, or they are both extinct; the only difference in their states is that Latin has diversified more than Greek has, though even for Greek Tsakonian has sometimes been seen as a separate language. - Mustafaa 7 July 2005 18:30 (UTC)
Latin never ceased to exist, just like Greek in Middle Ages the people used to talk a popular language and the clergy used the classical language. At some time, with the arouse of states in late Middle Ages people start giving names to them, firstly names based on differences, Dante talks about "oïl", "oc" and "si" language (the names of yes in Middle French, Provençal and Italian), in the Iberian peninsula there were the "fala" and the "habla" (the names of "language" in portuguese/galician and in Spanish), and only much later names of countries were used to languages such as French, Italian (this is even later), Portuguese, Castillan (later Spanish), and so on. Classical Latin is a literary construct much different from the popular usage of the time, just like the Attic Greek of say, Plutarch, is different from popular speech of his time. The change is quite similar to what happened in Greece. As an educated Portuguese speecher, I could understand much of the vulgata before learning Latin, so I can't see where lie the difference between Greek and Latin Bruno Gripp 22:20, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
Reading all of the above posts, I get the sense we are sort of bickering here. Let's have a cup of tea and discuss 'dead languages' or whatever the 'perfectly' correct term is. I think that the definition given - having to living speaking members - is a good one. However a distinction should be made clear between old and truly dead. Also, don't know if this is right or not, but it says "Normally this occurs ... " -- but what about other exceptions? Just some thoughts ... Dolphinn 03:02, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
There are a number of different situations that are both useful and difficult to distinguish:
Latin and Ancient Greek are problems: neither qualify as living languages, but they're not exactly extinct either. (I've heard Ancient Greek compared to Shakespearean English; from the (very) little I know of modern Greek, I would guess probably going back a little further than Shakespearea.) Peter Grey 7 July 2005 19:55 (UTC)
I don't think it is correct to say that Hebrew ever died. -- Josiah 03:02, July 10, 2005 (UTC)
copied last speakers section from endangered language. it obviously has my bias of being north america-heavy, so someone please balance it if you have time. peace – ishwar (speak) 18:32, 2005 July 19 (UTC)
While I can't add it myself, apparently, I expected this section would include Juana Maria, the last speaker of the Uto-Aztecan language Nicoleño (Niminocotch), who was the inspiration for the novel "Island of the Blue dolphins". Eeyore tim 17:45, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
"the success of these attempts has been subject to debate, as it is not clear they will ever become the common native language of a community of speakers." comes a little out of the blue, as the first sentence only mentions "no longer has any native speakers." What about the people who teach their children Latin or Ancient Greek? That would technically make them not extinct, but wouldn't change anything in a real sense.-- Prosfilaes 17:29, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
Can we use another term rather than family? Isn't family a larger unit than many of the items in this list? I.e. Indo-European is a family, but Romance or Germanic is a group or sub-family or branch or something else. To say an entire language family is extinct is much different than to say that a branch of the family died out.
Greek and Latin aren't necessarily dead languages. Latin is used all the time through different references- religious terms, political terms, medical terms, scientific terms, etc. Latin is also the major language of most academic works before the 19th-20th century (think Principia). Greek and Ancient Greek are extremely close, if you compare the two. As well, Latin is definitely coming alive again- about 1,000,000 students worldwide took the National Latin Exam. Obviously, I don't know much about the subject (other than being a Latin student) myself, so I won't edit the article.
"Some debate that a language may already be dead/extinct because of mutations by the time that only one speaker remains" Can anybody kindly explain what is meant by "mutations" here? Unoffensive text or character 08:16, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
The article says that an extinct language has no native speakers, then says that Latin is not extinct just dead. Surely Latin has no native speakers? The Latin article on Wikipedia certainly claims it does not. There's a difference between fluent speakers and native speakers.-- Santahul 12:49, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
I propose that this article be set up in the same way that List of languages by name is. Therefore: Language (Language Family) (other information) I believe that this will help with all further edits and any person who is doing research on the topic. It will also prevent things such as putting a language near the top of the article when it begins with the letter "Y". Mynameisnotpj ( talk) 11:42, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
I was very surprised by this phrase in a sentence: Latin; an extinct (and dead) language. Why would you need to go out of your way to double state this. This seems like just another part of what many are beginning to believe is a hate fill conspiracy against the Latin language. It is like you want to add insult to this instead of just stating a fact. Now, you all can have your definition of what language death or extinction is but I can tell you for my part, I spoke only Latin in my home with my father until I was of the age of 11. Outside my home I spoke Latin with some other kids but with most I spoke French (which was not allowed at home). I did not learn English until I started school at age 11. Now according to your definition, that would make me a native speaker of Latin so I do not see how it could be true that Latin is dead or extinct or whatever. You all seem to need to get your words straightened out by the way. Now, if any of you are going to write to me after this to tell me that my father was a child molestor for teaching me Latin, I have already heard it. You are crazy. All three of my children speak Latin as well as my wife. It is the language of our home and when someone enters my door it is the only language allowed. You Americans can call me a nut or a religious freak (how speaking a language sets you firmly into one religion is beyond me but we do happen to be Catholics) if you want to but you are wrong. I leave society alone to speak whatever language you want, the least you could do is leave me alone and let my family speak whatever language we want in our home. We do have freedom of speech after all do we not. All I ask is that whatever insult was intended to be directed at Latin that you retract it and show some respect. I do not go around bashing English. Ok, I do sometimes, but not like this. I can also tell you that I know I am not the only person who was raised as a Latin speaker. The odds that I am the only one, that somehow I am so unique make it impossible. I guess the question needs to be asked, How many native speakers are needed before you reconsider your insulting words against my language? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 219.127.251.137 ( talk) 07:46, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
Just a quick note: I'd recommend being a bit careful about distinctions like that between "extinct" and "dead". Terminology out in the real world is rather messy and there are a lot of competing and often rather ill-defined usages. I have no doubt the distinction as currently proposed in the article is made somewhere in the literature, and it may actually be quite a useful one, but we shouldn't present it as if it was the sole truth. I'd recommend using phrases like "according to some definitions...", "according to some authors..." etc quite a lot in this article. Same for the terminological treatment of the (at least) two different processes that lead to a language becoming extinct (or "dead", for that matter), i.e. replacement/language shift/physical extinction on the other hand and linguistic evolution into daughter languages on the other. Latin may or may not be a "dead" language today, but independently of that, whether the process that made it what it is should be called "language death" is yet a different question; many authors reserve "language death" to the other type. This is where our biological metaphors really lose their value: it makes perfect sense to say that Latin or Old English are now "dead", but that they never "died". Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:40, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
It also irritates the hell out of me when people describe Latin as a dead language. If Latin had died then Quebec, considerable chunks of the United States, the entirety of Central and Southern America, Southern and Western Europe and Romania would be very, very quiet places indeed. siarach ( talk) 16:10, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
I am always amazed by your unrelenting and exquisite eloquency...LOL. However -admiration aside- I was not wrong to feel that the semi-authoritative statements in this article should be further scrutinized and elaborated (not to mention properly sourced) in the first place, was I? All these issues should be confronted instead of being presented in a simplistic extinct-not extinct-dead-alive-undead-resurrected manner-- Giorgos Tzimas ( talk) 18:11, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
There is currently no separate article for the Nicola Athapaskan language, and the Nicola (people) article needs splitting as it is, because "Nicola" (commonly used by linguists) has a more modern context as the name of the alliance/merger of Nlaka'pamux and Okanagan peoples in the same area and both contexts are currently in that article; once it's been split a stub is all that's really available in the way of content for the Nicola Athapaskan language which I guess has to be the article-name - Nicola language perhaps but again the confusion with today's Nicola people (see Nicola Tribal Association) remains. Stuwix language I don't think has ever been used - Stuwix is a Nlaka'pamux or Secwepemc name for these people ("the strangers", it means). I think there may be some marginal information in J. Teit (Jesup Expedition) in the "History of hte Okanagan people" part of his studies; some placenames around the area are thought to be Stuwix in origin. I guess I'm just dropping notice of this here and will launch the stubs and split sometime in the next few days; if someone here has a suggestion for a preferred name of the titles suggested, or another maybe (?), please let me know. Skookum1 ( talk) 14:24, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
Manx has been revived and now has about 2,000 speakers and is being taught in schools in the Isle of Man so it is no longer extinct. Does it still belong on this page. I don't think it does. ( Bentley4 ( talk) 05:01, 19 October 2008 (UTC))
I say that, not as an expert who knows enough to edit and correct this article, but as a Wikipedia user who came to this article looking for answers and left it more confused than when I came. Indeed, I will say that I learned more from reading the Talk page than I did from reading the article (which IMHO is not a good thing). The article makes a distinction between Dead Languages and Extinct Languages but does not provide a very clear understanding of what that distinction is. After reading the comments above, I am not even sure if Linguists make this distinction at all. To me there seem to be several options (1) Linguists define the terms differently and generally agree on what the terms mean (in which case the article should so state, (2) There is a current dispute between linguist on the use of the terms and on what the definitions of the terms is to be (in which case the article should describe that dispute in NPOV terms) or (3) Linguists use the terms interchangeably but have disagreements on the exact definition of the broad generic term (in which case the article should so state, or (4) Linguist use the terms interchangeably but Wiki editors feel that a distinction would be useful and therefore are trying to create one (in which case the article would seem to contain original research). It is my hope that those that know more can edit this article to make it clearer and more informative for Wikipedia users. Franklin Moore 16:12, 7 April 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexnovo ( talk • contribs)
Apart from the old conundrum about diachronic language stages qualifying as "extinct" or not, the problem of neo-native speakers is a very much real issue and a veritable headscratcher. I, too, know a married couple who habitually converse in Classical Latin and this obviously keeps spurring semi-serious remarks about them raising children with Latin as their native language. These hypothetical children would be prime examples of neo-native speakers. However (and I don't even want to get into the muddle about standard languages probably always being to some extent deliberately archaising and artificial), when the temporal gap is much shorter, there is even more uncertainty about whether the new native speakers get to count or not. Cornish? Manx? Coptic? Worse, Hebrew? Irish has both traditional and neo-native speakers, a very important distinction, because the traditional speakers of the Gaeltachtaí employ (typically rural) Irish dialects and don't really accept the (typically urban) neo-native speakers with their standardised, artificial-sounding schoolbook Irish as genuine. When it comes to really exotic languages such as Native American languages, the issue can become even more difficult and muddled and additionally politicised. Check Eyak language for an example, still a relatively clear-cut one. But there are cases where it's not even clear if a person who claims to be a native speaker is really one in the traditional sense or has gleaned their knowledge from written sources. I remember reading about exactly such a controversial case, but can't recall the name of the language anymore. But what about intentional revival/revitalisation of indigenous languages along the lines of Hebrew? Will the revived speakers get to count? -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 17:37, 29 October 2013 (UTC)
Please see Talk:Language death#Proposed merger with Extinct language. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 03:48, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
I don't see Latin mentioned anywhere on the article, but it has to be extinct because it's not a mother tongue of any living person anymore. Cbsteffen ( talk) 02:04, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
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Could the article be longer? There's plenty of information on either Latin and Ancient Greek are dead languages or not. A section on these two could be added. Also, a good amount of books and sources are cited at the bottom of the article but the information it gives is really superficial and basic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Luisa Valencia ( talk • contribs) 01:05, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
Currently Dead language redirects to here, where it is treated as synonymous with "extinct language":
But the article Language death, which presumably deals with something becoming a dead language, says it
These are contradictory as to whether a language with speakers but no native speakers (like Latin) is dead. Someone who knows the literature should establish terminological consistency. Loraof ( talk) 20:38, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
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I've seen videos of people teaching the language. So is the language truly extinct? Mr. C.C. Hey yo! I didn't do it! 20:43, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: not moved. ( non-admin closure) NW1223 <Howl at me• My hunts> 03:14, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
Extinct language → Dead language – common name Jishiboka1 ( talk) 01:49, 18 March 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. Dreamy Jazz talk to me | my contributions 02:24, 25 March 2022 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Nüshu § Dead, extinct, or neither?. Sdkb talk 18:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
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Should 'dead language' really redirect here? I mean, I think that going to Language death is more appropriate for the situation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.106.177.241 ( talk) 12:53, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
If language is a method of communication, who does the last speaker of a language speak to? 14:58, 7 March 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.186.110.198 ( talk)
Can Ancient Greek really be called extinct? Greek has never ceased to be spoken over time and there have always been speakers of the language since antiquity. It has simply evolved into its modern form. Also, many people in Greece are able to read and comprehend the ancient writings. For instance something English speakers can relate to, would someone call Old English extinct or merely changed into its modern form. The reason the issue is important to me is because, there is always a conscious or unconscious attempt to make Greeks seems to be some extinct group of people with no relation to modern Greeks, the language issue ties with this. I won't edit the article but leave this note here for someone less biased than me to examine in detail and edit.
Unsigned comment left at 03:31 UTC, 19 April 2005, by User:24.193.227.161
--
I am referring to the comment above: Well, it is more than obvious that you ARE indeed biased. I read all your arguments about Ancient/Katharevousa/Greek and I can, without any doubt what-so-ever, say that you are 100% wrong. I did not find not even one sentence of your text that is barely acceptable. Your statements are so dogmatic and none has been supported by any valid, commonly acceptable references. It is amazing how ignorance makes it's way into wikipedia by people like you. I have to ask you if you are a native speaker of modern Greek (Demotiki) and if you studied any Ancient Greek at all. As a person of Hellenic decent, not only I speak Modern Greek as my maternal language but -without of course being fluent- I have a deep understanding of the Ancient language as well. In short here's where you are wrong and why:
1. Ancient and Demotiki are not separate languages. Demotiki is a very simplified form of Ancient Greek. Grammar, syntaxis and form of expression have definitely changed. It is however the plethora of words and expressions still used today as they were 2.500 years ago that make your argument about separate languages, simply laughable. Of course the same holds for Old/English, latin/Italian etc. If you search the Internet you will find many quotes from important scholars about Ancient Greek being the "mother" of many modern western languages. How can you reconcile this Ancient and Modern Greek being "separate"? It is simply a thoughless statement.
2. You are wrong stating the "widespread familiarity" of modern Greeks with Katharevousa. Actually, Katharevousa was never adopted by the greek people en mass. It was an artificial language, fabricated by scholars at the time 18th-19 c. AD in an attempt to cleanse the popular spoken greek after hundreds of years of ottoman occupation and latin/slavic people invasions. The reason why Greeks can understand Ancient Greek is because still today we find ancient words, expressions, etc. in greek vocabulary. As a matter of fact the modern greek language through a self checking mechanism did not bother creating new words for words from ancient times but simply imported these words into Demotiki. I say imported but trully what happened is Greeks gave up trying to reinvent the wheel and adopted a great deal from the vocabulary of their ancient forefathers.
3. "The phonological, syntactic, and morphological differences between the Greek of Homer, Plato, and Aristotle and the language spoken on the street in Athens today are huge and certainly enough to warrant considering them separate languages." Absolutely NOT! The differences are many in some areas significant. But huge is not a word that can substantiate your argyment. For every difference between Ancient and Demotiki, I can give you words and expressions that are identical in ALL the above mentioned categories. The only way to do this is to give you examples written in greek font. Are you able to read it?
4. "And clearly, Ancient Greek is extinct under the first meaning discussed in the article: it has evolved to such a great degree that its descendants must be considered separate languages." Here, I could not stop laughing! You claim that Greek is extinct and a separate language from Demotiki, based on a wikipedia article, which is clearly biased and widely disputed. So basically you're saying, it is so, because I say so (!?!) Excuse me this is not an argument, this is a joke.
5. Finally, the analogy with dinosaurs and birds is a nice one but does not cut it. Greek has a life of (well, take this with a grain of salt) around say 3-4.000 years. Dinosaurs evolved into birds (though scientifically, not a generally accepted statement) over millions of years. I believe there is a huge difference. If we are still around in say a few more billion years I will be willing to discuss this again. And BTW how come Ancient Greek is an extinct language and you in the 21 century are using the word "dinosaur" which in Greek is spelled "δεινόσαυρος", where did "dinosaur" some from, which language does it originate from?
Dimitrios P., Athens - GR (comments can be made at x w r i s o n o m a (at) h o t m a i l . c o m ) 75.57.69.69 ( talk) 17:30, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
The existance of extinct language families should sound alarms for philosophers and linguists. A language allows us to frame our knowledge and experience so that it may be practically reconstructed by other language users. However, the symbols will only elicit the intended thoughts if they are understood in a similar way between the reader and writer.
Presently, cultural traditions and large linguistic community bases ensure that languages grow and refine over time, however, once a language ceases to be understood by any being, it loses its capacity to transfer the knowledge, experience, and wisdom that may be concealed within its markings.
This should be a sign to linguists to begin a project to ground our language into non-lingistic forms that may serve as a starting point for reconstructing our collective linguistic efforts once they loose significance.
This whole article looks like a mess of original research. Anyone got any materials that support the assertions made herein for the definition of "extinct language"? Tomer TALK 01:21, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)
The following is a quote from A Student's Dictionary of Language and Linguistics by R. L. Trask (London: Arnold, 1997, ISBN 0-340-65267-5), p. 63:
dead language A label which is applied to two quite different sorts of cases, which you should be careful to distinguish. 1. A language which was formerly spoken but which has died out completely as a mother tongue, having been abandoned by its last speakers. Examples include Sumerian, Etruscan and Cornish. 2. An earlier stage of a language which has never ceased to be spoken but whose modern forms are very different from it. Latin is a dead language in this sense: it has never ceased to be used as a mother tongue, but its modern forms, such as French, Spanish, and Italian, are so different from the language of the Romans, and from one another, that we no longer find it convenient to call them 'Latin'.
I think we can use that definition to build an encyclopedia article around, don't you? -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 2 July 2005 17:26 (UTC)
I've done a major re-write. How's it look now? -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 3 July 2005 08:20 (UTC)
Well, I've already merged Living language here; what other articles do think should be included? And what do you mean by "Language status"? Keep in mind the title of Wikipedia articles are supposed to be the names of existing concepts, not made-up terms. -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 3 July 2005 08:48 (UTC)
Well, the two I had in mind, other than living language and extinct language, at the time, were language death and endangered language. I don't think this is making up a term, so much as bringing together various language states under a common (and I believe, fitting) heading. Tomer TALK July 3, 2005 08:56 (UTC)
I suppose linguicide should go in the same group, but I'm not convinced we can cover everything in just one article. Maybe we can put these articles into a Category:Language death and endangerment or something. As to your second point, if there's a difference between a dead language and an extinct language, I don't know what it is. I can see it would be useful to have separate terms for languages with no remaining native speakers that nevertheless get used by nonnative speakers to talk to each other (like Latin and Sanskrit for sure, maybe even Old English since people use it to talk to each other on the talk pages of ang:), and languages with no remaining native speakers and also no nonnative speakers (like Sumerian, Etruscan, and Beothuk). But I don't know whether it's established practice to use "dead" for the first group and "extinct" for the second, as you seem to be doing on Talk:Latin. -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 3 July 2005 11:17 (UTC)
"Dead language", definitely. It parallels "language death" (which I've never heard called "language extinction"). -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 3 July 2005 16:00 (UTC)
Don't ask me; I had nothing to do with it! -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 3 July 2005 19:41 (UTC)
someone more biased than you did edit the article to remove all reference to Ancient Greek.
You almost make me laugh. This 'someone' has made most of the contributions of the Greek language related articles. What have you done to prove that you have an idea? From what you say it appears that you don't.
I've decided to leave Greek out for the time being
Is it me, or do you have the impression that you own this article? Guess what, you don't, and hence you don't make decisions. This article is very poor and badly written as it is, I wouldn't be surprised if much of it was written by you, which is exactly where the problem lies. You don't know any Greek, from what you say it's obvious that you haven't read anything on Greek, therefore you're not in position to have a say on this. I've showed you my contributions on wikipedia and I've provided my sources, therefore I'm the person in position to make decisions on the given topic. I'm not even going to answer to your childish remarks, I've already explained you the different between a language, and a stage of a language (see Talk:List of extinct languages). Whether or not you choose to believe it is irrelevant. You can force your personal opinion on your children, but not on this article. By the way I'm aware of your false accusation (about starting an edit war on a stub article), and your failed attempts to get me banned. You managed to find an admin who was already biased against me because of a different ethnic debate, but it was not enough to shut my mouth. He's about to be reported on the WikiEN mailing-list, and so are you. Miskin
Miskin may not do so with a lot of tact, but he does point out a valid problem with this article. For a language to become "extinct", it has to undergo "extinction" at some point. An example would be the Manx language, the last native speaker of which died in the 1960s, I believe. This is radically different from an older, historical stage of a language that was never extinct. Ancient Greek is such an example. If you label Ancient Greek as an "extinct" language, each and every historical language is "extinct", i.e. Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English are all to be treated as separate, extinct languages. This doesn't make sense. You should separate "Old languages" from actually "extinct languages", i.e. languages that underwent extinction at some point in history. dab (ᛏ) 6 July 2005 14:08 (UTC)
I do not think similarity or dissimilarity of Modern and Ancient Greek are an issue. At no point in history did Greek die out, therefore it is not an extinct language. It may be a "dead" language, by common use, and maybe this article should discuss these problems. But how is a list of "dead" languages even useful? All historical languages, i.e. every idiom spoken more than a generation ago, is by this definition "dead". What's the point of listing these? The interesting thing here would be language death, which is pretty well defined (death of last native speaker). Most
Greek dialects however, did die out, when Koine (i.e. Attic) became successful. So we could indeed list Doric, Aeolic, Arcado-Cypriot etc. as extinct languages (or dialects), just not Greek as a whole. By your argument, Homeric Greek needs to be listed as extinct by 600 BC. Mycenaean as extinct by 1100 BC. The Koine probably went extinct around 1000 AD. That's just pointless, there is no criterion of how granular you will want to make your list. Theoretically, you could list every language, ever century or so. 12th century English: extinct. 13th century English: extinct. 14th century English: extinct ....
dab
(ᛏ) 6 July 2005 16:32 (UTC)
TShilo2 when I started editing the article I was extremely polite to Angr and tried to explain to him why he's wrong. I started a discussion in Talk:List of extinct languages where other people participated and agreed with my suggestion. Angr obviously thinks he's in charge of the article, and that's the only reason he doesn't want my changes to remain. Furthermore, after he realised that he lacked the knowledge to comprehend what other people explained, instead of replying in Talk he reported me for vandalism to an admin who had a previous ethnic conflict with me. He accused me for violating 3RR and vandalising a stub article, completely ignoring all my contributions to the Greek language-related articles. As far as I'm concerned liars and cowards deserve no respect. Miskin 6 July 2005 20:40 (UTC)
Angr said: I firmly believe that from a linguistic point of view Ancient Greek and Modern Greek are as different from each other (and therefore as much two separate languages) as Old English and Modern English are, or as Latin and Italian are.
Again, what you firmly believe is irrelevant to what the academic opinion says. Me, Chronographos and dab have contributed on many articles regarding the Greek language, and I have provided my sources on Talk:List of extinct languages. You are the one who's refusing to accept that you don't run things around here. In fact you shouldn't even participate since you're planning to contribute in terms of what you firmly believe. We don't care, deal with it. Ancient Greek is by no academic insitution on the planet a seperate language, how difficult is to understand this? I'm not going to waste my time on trying explain to you why you're wrong, I've already tried and you failed. Istead of making a valid point by providing valid theories and their sources, you foolishly quoted from articles that were are written by, in order to "convince" me that ancient Greek has differences from Modern (as if I ever said that it didn't). According to your POV logic, extinct(X) :- ancient(X), because there is no ancient form of speech that has been preserved on a perfectly intelligible extent to the present day. What makes things more comical is that you don't have the slightest clue on the Greek language, and I'm not talking about speaking it, I talking about basic knowledge on its nature. This is plainly evident by the way you speak about Ancient Greek. Anyway, based on the academic opinion this is what the arcticles Greek language and Modern Greek currently say:
but simply stated his position that Ancient Greek is not a separate language from Modern Greek.
Me and other people tried many times to convince you that this is not just Miskin's personal opinion. It's what linguistics have said, your complaints to them. Your view on the other hand, is a personal opinion, which you should establish academically before forcing it into the article. I started being sarcastic after you characterised my changes as 'vandalism'.
included in its edit summary a sarcastic-sounding question and an implication that I am ignorant of the subject matter.
Well, aren't you? Miskin 6 July 2005 21:37 (UTC)
"...the changes to the nouns have been less far-reaching. Greek has never experienced the wholesale loss of word-endings that has for instance made Spanish, French and Italian separate languages from Latin."
Unless you want people to take you seriously, you can't talk about extents if you have no personal experience with the language. Nobody said that the language has not changed, that would be at least retarded, let alone physically impossible. You can't prove a point by pointing out differences from Ancient to Modern Greek, we know that they're different, in the same way we know that an 80 year old man is physically different from what he was in his 20s. Languages do change, like people grow older. It's up to linguists to determine whether a language is dead or not, and Greek is in fact determined as one of the best preserved languages. If you say that Greek is dead, then you have to say that any language which is preceded by the word 'ancient' is also dead. This is not a magical linguistic phenomenon which occurred for some strange reason in Greece, it has to do with the history of the region, its people and of course its language (which is also summarised in my articles). Miskin 7 July 2005 01:06 (UTC)
"It is claimed that an "educated" speaker of the modern language can read ancient texts, but this is surely as much a function of education as of the similarity of the languages. Still, Koinē /ciˈni/, the version of Greek used to write the New Testament and the Septuagint, is relatively easy to understand for modern speakers."
"I started being sarcastic after you characterised my changes as 'vandalism'."
"Well, aren't you [ignorant of the subject matter]?"
Of course. Miskin 7 July 2005 13:30 (UTC)
I wanted to add it in a wiki-link. Yes it's poorly documented, this is why I mentioned the word "research". Fragments of texts do survive, but I don't think it's easy to find them on the internet. Miskin 7 July 2005 14:15 (UTC)
Instead of following the example of Decius and removing languages that are indeed dead, maybe we should restore them and improve the definition of 'dead language' on this article. Miskin 7 July 2005 14:30 (UTC)
When a language stops being spoken, it is dead. I've already discussed this with Decius. Latin has definitely stopped being spoken in all of its periods, this is why it's regarded as dead. I'm not personally familiar with linguistic opinion on Old Norse and Old English so I can't really tell. On the other hand the link of the British university that I gave you lists them as dead. I think the previous definition is better, why did you remove it? And I still don't see a reason to doubt
Language death. In fact I don't see a reason for keeping an article
Extinct language separately from
language death.
Miskin 7 July 2005 16:04 (UTC)
As your probably know, the Latin language had its historical periods (early, classic, late etc). In that respect, 'Latin' is a language one 'early Latin' is one of its stages. If Late Latin was still in use somwhere, we wouldn't say that 'Latin' is a dead language. As it is known, the history of the Latin language dies at late Latin. Romanian, Italian, French etc belong to the Romance family, whose root is Latin. To make an equivalence, 'Greek' is a language (like Latin) and 'ancient Greek' is a stage (like 'early Latin'). "Modern Greek" is a stage of Greek equivalent "Late Latin" for Latin. "Modern Greek" is living, therefore the Greek language is living, "Late Latin" is dead, therefore the Latin language is dead. The Romance languages have a heritage from Latin, but they're not a late stage of Latin. By the way don't let the word modern mislead you into thinking that Modern Greek is something contemporary. Modern Greek has in fact its starting point in the middle ages. Its original name was Neo-Hellenic, 'modern Greek' is just a corrupted translation. This is analysed in Talk:List of extinct languages. Miskin 7 July 2005 16:39 (UTC)
Decius has a contradicting logic and his reverts are POV. I'm reverting back to the old version as it was agreed with dab and chronographos. The criterion here is not the clear definition of 'dead language', it's what the majority of linguists believe. After having Latin and Old English back in the list, we should compose a better definition of this aricle, adding back the example of Latin. Miskin 7 July 2005 17:01 (UTC)
First, "dead language" is not an academic term; "extinct language" is much more widely used by linguists. Second, I can certainly see an argument for distinguishing languages that are extinct without issue (like Galatian, Etruscan, or Meroitic) from languages that are extinct only because they were replaced by their own descendants (such as Ancient Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit; but consistency is necessary. Either Latin and Ancient Greek are both alive, or they are both extinct; the only difference in their states is that Latin has diversified more than Greek has, though even for Greek Tsakonian has sometimes been seen as a separate language. - Mustafaa 7 July 2005 18:30 (UTC)
Latin never ceased to exist, just like Greek in Middle Ages the people used to talk a popular language and the clergy used the classical language. At some time, with the arouse of states in late Middle Ages people start giving names to them, firstly names based on differences, Dante talks about "oïl", "oc" and "si" language (the names of yes in Middle French, Provençal and Italian), in the Iberian peninsula there were the "fala" and the "habla" (the names of "language" in portuguese/galician and in Spanish), and only much later names of countries were used to languages such as French, Italian (this is even later), Portuguese, Castillan (later Spanish), and so on. Classical Latin is a literary construct much different from the popular usage of the time, just like the Attic Greek of say, Plutarch, is different from popular speech of his time. The change is quite similar to what happened in Greece. As an educated Portuguese speecher, I could understand much of the vulgata before learning Latin, so I can't see where lie the difference between Greek and Latin Bruno Gripp 22:20, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
Reading all of the above posts, I get the sense we are sort of bickering here. Let's have a cup of tea and discuss 'dead languages' or whatever the 'perfectly' correct term is. I think that the definition given - having to living speaking members - is a good one. However a distinction should be made clear between old and truly dead. Also, don't know if this is right or not, but it says "Normally this occurs ... " -- but what about other exceptions? Just some thoughts ... Dolphinn 03:02, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
There are a number of different situations that are both useful and difficult to distinguish:
Latin and Ancient Greek are problems: neither qualify as living languages, but they're not exactly extinct either. (I've heard Ancient Greek compared to Shakespearean English; from the (very) little I know of modern Greek, I would guess probably going back a little further than Shakespearea.) Peter Grey 7 July 2005 19:55 (UTC)
I don't think it is correct to say that Hebrew ever died. -- Josiah 03:02, July 10, 2005 (UTC)
copied last speakers section from endangered language. it obviously has my bias of being north america-heavy, so someone please balance it if you have time. peace – ishwar (speak) 18:32, 2005 July 19 (UTC)
While I can't add it myself, apparently, I expected this section would include Juana Maria, the last speaker of the Uto-Aztecan language Nicoleño (Niminocotch), who was the inspiration for the novel "Island of the Blue dolphins". Eeyore tim 17:45, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
"the success of these attempts has been subject to debate, as it is not clear they will ever become the common native language of a community of speakers." comes a little out of the blue, as the first sentence only mentions "no longer has any native speakers." What about the people who teach their children Latin or Ancient Greek? That would technically make them not extinct, but wouldn't change anything in a real sense.-- Prosfilaes 17:29, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
Can we use another term rather than family? Isn't family a larger unit than many of the items in this list? I.e. Indo-European is a family, but Romance or Germanic is a group or sub-family or branch or something else. To say an entire language family is extinct is much different than to say that a branch of the family died out.
Greek and Latin aren't necessarily dead languages. Latin is used all the time through different references- religious terms, political terms, medical terms, scientific terms, etc. Latin is also the major language of most academic works before the 19th-20th century (think Principia). Greek and Ancient Greek are extremely close, if you compare the two. As well, Latin is definitely coming alive again- about 1,000,000 students worldwide took the National Latin Exam. Obviously, I don't know much about the subject (other than being a Latin student) myself, so I won't edit the article.
"Some debate that a language may already be dead/extinct because of mutations by the time that only one speaker remains" Can anybody kindly explain what is meant by "mutations" here? Unoffensive text or character 08:16, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
The article says that an extinct language has no native speakers, then says that Latin is not extinct just dead. Surely Latin has no native speakers? The Latin article on Wikipedia certainly claims it does not. There's a difference between fluent speakers and native speakers.-- Santahul 12:49, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
I propose that this article be set up in the same way that List of languages by name is. Therefore: Language (Language Family) (other information) I believe that this will help with all further edits and any person who is doing research on the topic. It will also prevent things such as putting a language near the top of the article when it begins with the letter "Y". Mynameisnotpj ( talk) 11:42, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
I was very surprised by this phrase in a sentence: Latin; an extinct (and dead) language. Why would you need to go out of your way to double state this. This seems like just another part of what many are beginning to believe is a hate fill conspiracy against the Latin language. It is like you want to add insult to this instead of just stating a fact. Now, you all can have your definition of what language death or extinction is but I can tell you for my part, I spoke only Latin in my home with my father until I was of the age of 11. Outside my home I spoke Latin with some other kids but with most I spoke French (which was not allowed at home). I did not learn English until I started school at age 11. Now according to your definition, that would make me a native speaker of Latin so I do not see how it could be true that Latin is dead or extinct or whatever. You all seem to need to get your words straightened out by the way. Now, if any of you are going to write to me after this to tell me that my father was a child molestor for teaching me Latin, I have already heard it. You are crazy. All three of my children speak Latin as well as my wife. It is the language of our home and when someone enters my door it is the only language allowed. You Americans can call me a nut or a religious freak (how speaking a language sets you firmly into one religion is beyond me but we do happen to be Catholics) if you want to but you are wrong. I leave society alone to speak whatever language you want, the least you could do is leave me alone and let my family speak whatever language we want in our home. We do have freedom of speech after all do we not. All I ask is that whatever insult was intended to be directed at Latin that you retract it and show some respect. I do not go around bashing English. Ok, I do sometimes, but not like this. I can also tell you that I know I am not the only person who was raised as a Latin speaker. The odds that I am the only one, that somehow I am so unique make it impossible. I guess the question needs to be asked, How many native speakers are needed before you reconsider your insulting words against my language? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 219.127.251.137 ( talk) 07:46, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
Just a quick note: I'd recommend being a bit careful about distinctions like that between "extinct" and "dead". Terminology out in the real world is rather messy and there are a lot of competing and often rather ill-defined usages. I have no doubt the distinction as currently proposed in the article is made somewhere in the literature, and it may actually be quite a useful one, but we shouldn't present it as if it was the sole truth. I'd recommend using phrases like "according to some definitions...", "according to some authors..." etc quite a lot in this article. Same for the terminological treatment of the (at least) two different processes that lead to a language becoming extinct (or "dead", for that matter), i.e. replacement/language shift/physical extinction on the other hand and linguistic evolution into daughter languages on the other. Latin may or may not be a "dead" language today, but independently of that, whether the process that made it what it is should be called "language death" is yet a different question; many authors reserve "language death" to the other type. This is where our biological metaphors really lose their value: it makes perfect sense to say that Latin or Old English are now "dead", but that they never "died". Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:40, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
It also irritates the hell out of me when people describe Latin as a dead language. If Latin had died then Quebec, considerable chunks of the United States, the entirety of Central and Southern America, Southern and Western Europe and Romania would be very, very quiet places indeed. siarach ( talk) 16:10, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
I am always amazed by your unrelenting and exquisite eloquency...LOL. However -admiration aside- I was not wrong to feel that the semi-authoritative statements in this article should be further scrutinized and elaborated (not to mention properly sourced) in the first place, was I? All these issues should be confronted instead of being presented in a simplistic extinct-not extinct-dead-alive-undead-resurrected manner-- Giorgos Tzimas ( talk) 18:11, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
There is currently no separate article for the Nicola Athapaskan language, and the Nicola (people) article needs splitting as it is, because "Nicola" (commonly used by linguists) has a more modern context as the name of the alliance/merger of Nlaka'pamux and Okanagan peoples in the same area and both contexts are currently in that article; once it's been split a stub is all that's really available in the way of content for the Nicola Athapaskan language which I guess has to be the article-name - Nicola language perhaps but again the confusion with today's Nicola people (see Nicola Tribal Association) remains. Stuwix language I don't think has ever been used - Stuwix is a Nlaka'pamux or Secwepemc name for these people ("the strangers", it means). I think there may be some marginal information in J. Teit (Jesup Expedition) in the "History of hte Okanagan people" part of his studies; some placenames around the area are thought to be Stuwix in origin. I guess I'm just dropping notice of this here and will launch the stubs and split sometime in the next few days; if someone here has a suggestion for a preferred name of the titles suggested, or another maybe (?), please let me know. Skookum1 ( talk) 14:24, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
Manx has been revived and now has about 2,000 speakers and is being taught in schools in the Isle of Man so it is no longer extinct. Does it still belong on this page. I don't think it does. ( Bentley4 ( talk) 05:01, 19 October 2008 (UTC))
I say that, not as an expert who knows enough to edit and correct this article, but as a Wikipedia user who came to this article looking for answers and left it more confused than when I came. Indeed, I will say that I learned more from reading the Talk page than I did from reading the article (which IMHO is not a good thing). The article makes a distinction between Dead Languages and Extinct Languages but does not provide a very clear understanding of what that distinction is. After reading the comments above, I am not even sure if Linguists make this distinction at all. To me there seem to be several options (1) Linguists define the terms differently and generally agree on what the terms mean (in which case the article should so state, (2) There is a current dispute between linguist on the use of the terms and on what the definitions of the terms is to be (in which case the article should describe that dispute in NPOV terms) or (3) Linguists use the terms interchangeably but have disagreements on the exact definition of the broad generic term (in which case the article should so state, or (4) Linguist use the terms interchangeably but Wiki editors feel that a distinction would be useful and therefore are trying to create one (in which case the article would seem to contain original research). It is my hope that those that know more can edit this article to make it clearer and more informative for Wikipedia users. Franklin Moore 16:12, 7 April 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexnovo ( talk • contribs)
Apart from the old conundrum about diachronic language stages qualifying as "extinct" or not, the problem of neo-native speakers is a very much real issue and a veritable headscratcher. I, too, know a married couple who habitually converse in Classical Latin and this obviously keeps spurring semi-serious remarks about them raising children with Latin as their native language. These hypothetical children would be prime examples of neo-native speakers. However (and I don't even want to get into the muddle about standard languages probably always being to some extent deliberately archaising and artificial), when the temporal gap is much shorter, there is even more uncertainty about whether the new native speakers get to count or not. Cornish? Manx? Coptic? Worse, Hebrew? Irish has both traditional and neo-native speakers, a very important distinction, because the traditional speakers of the Gaeltachtaí employ (typically rural) Irish dialects and don't really accept the (typically urban) neo-native speakers with their standardised, artificial-sounding schoolbook Irish as genuine. When it comes to really exotic languages such as Native American languages, the issue can become even more difficult and muddled and additionally politicised. Check Eyak language for an example, still a relatively clear-cut one. But there are cases where it's not even clear if a person who claims to be a native speaker is really one in the traditional sense or has gleaned their knowledge from written sources. I remember reading about exactly such a controversial case, but can't recall the name of the language anymore. But what about intentional revival/revitalisation of indigenous languages along the lines of Hebrew? Will the revived speakers get to count? -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 17:37, 29 October 2013 (UTC)
Please see Talk:Language death#Proposed merger with Extinct language. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 03:48, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
I don't see Latin mentioned anywhere on the article, but it has to be extinct because it's not a mother tongue of any living person anymore. Cbsteffen ( talk) 02:04, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
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Could the article be longer? There's plenty of information on either Latin and Ancient Greek are dead languages or not. A section on these two could be added. Also, a good amount of books and sources are cited at the bottom of the article but the information it gives is really superficial and basic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Luisa Valencia ( talk • contribs) 01:05, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
Currently Dead language redirects to here, where it is treated as synonymous with "extinct language":
But the article Language death, which presumably deals with something becoming a dead language, says it
These are contradictory as to whether a language with speakers but no native speakers (like Latin) is dead. Someone who knows the literature should establish terminological consistency. Loraof ( talk) 20:38, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
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I've seen videos of people teaching the language. So is the language truly extinct? Mr. C.C. Hey yo! I didn't do it! 20:43, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: not moved. ( non-admin closure) NW1223 <Howl at me• My hunts> 03:14, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
Extinct language → Dead language – common name Jishiboka1 ( talk) 01:49, 18 March 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. Dreamy Jazz talk to me | my contributions 02:24, 25 March 2022 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Nüshu § Dead, extinct, or neither?. Sdkb talk 18:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)