A Classical Language: According to UC Berkeleylinguist George L. Hart, "it should be ancient, it should be an independent tradition that arose mostly on its own, not as an offshoot of another tradition, and it must have a large and extremely rich body of ancient literature."
Speaking as a linguist, I can certify that almost no linguists talk about classical languages in this way. That is, it is not a natural class of languages. There are several reasons:
- There is no such thing as an ‘old’ language. All languages are equally old, because all languages have been evolving continuously from the same first true language spoken some quarter million to half a million years ago.
- Aside from Sumerian and Olmec script, it is very difficult to certify without any doubt that any scripts have evolved completely independently. This is because all other competing claims (Egyptian, Indic, Chinese, etc.) all had trade networks that connected them to civilizations with writing systems. Even if the script itself was 100% sui generis, it is still not clear in these cases if the idea of writing was independently invented.
- The last half century of literary criticism and anthropological research has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt not only that most early written literatures were based on oral traditions that long antedated written forms (this is most obviously true of Greek, Mesopotamian and Indic epic traditions), there are many oral cultures whose poems and narratives were never transcribed in written form — they exist solely in the minds of bards and other oral performers and artists.
Rather, when modern linguists discuss ‘classic’ forms of language, they are referring to a metatradition of textual analysis, in which people in a particular culture have a specific way of discussing traditional texts as texts. This means that when Confucius refers to the Rites of Zhou as a text, or when Sumerian scribes refer to the Epic of Gilgamesh as a text, or when Hellenistic scholars discussed the poetic properties of the Homeric Hymns as a text, they were all not merely performing the narrative, they were performing a metanarrative that goes along with the actual narrative — a specific way of referring to these texts.
The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh mentions a universal deluge, which was studied in Sumerian schools as a formal text
Thus, in this sense, classic texts become defined solely as those which are cited within a metatradition. So Shakespeare plays are classic texts, because they ar used as sample text in formal educational systems, just like Eugene Onegin for Russians or the works of Li Bai for the Chinese. There are plenty of other texts that formal education systems could discuss, but they don’t, because certain texts have been canonized.
Thus, the number of classic languages is not restricted to seven in number; it is coextensive with the number of metatraditions that exist in human cultures, whether or not those have ever been written down.
Already, I think, this query has been answered on the QUORA, several times. Tamil, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Chinese and Arabic are the seven classical languages of the world. While the modern versions of classical Tamil, Greek, Chinese and Arabic exist now as direct descendants, classical Latin died a natural death. Vulgar Latin branched off into modern Romance languages like Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. The unwritten Vedic language became the composite, literary and unspoken Sanskrit. The Hebrew of the old Testament, after being absent from its home land for centuries due to historical reasons, reappeared in a much-altered form as the official language, after the formation of Israel in the late 1940’s.
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