Today, there are a great many languages, both ancient and relatively young; both artificial and natural; both living and dead. Of course, each of them has the right to exist, because since at least some number of people use them all, it means that they are needed. In the end, many believe (and not without reason) that it is articulate speech and owning one’s own language that makes a person a person.
But, probably, everyone at least once thought about what origin the ancient languages have, how they have survived to this day and which of them is the oldest. Unfortunately, the answer to this question still does not exist.
Of course, if we talk about the language as such, the most ancient is sign language. But what about the oral option?
There is a very interesting story on this subject about a pharaoh who, like the reader, became interested in the issue of proto-language. For the purposes of the experiment, this inquisitive ruler ordered two babies who had never heard human speech in their huts to be locked in their huts. This was done so that the children “remembered” the ancient languages, supposedly embedded in their genes. So that the kids did not die of hunger, they regularly brought a milk goat, on whose milk they grew.
And so, one fine day, the grown children said their first word, and it sounded like this: "bekos." Pharaoh ordered his subjects to find the people in whose language this word is. Oddly enough, he was found - in Phrygian, "bekos" means "bread."
Of course, this experiment clarified something only for the pharaoh, since the modern reader can easily see that there are more ancient languages than Phrygian.
To date, several languages are recognized as the oldest.
So, the Sumerian was first witnessed in writing in 3200 BC.
The first mention of the Akkadian language spoken by the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia dates back to 2800 BC.
The root Egyptian language is also very ancient. The first written evidence of its existence dates back to 3400 BC.
The Semites had their own language - once very popular, but now dead. It was called the Elab, and it exists, the smallest, from 2400 BC.
In ancient Crete, the Minoan language was widely used, the heyday of which fell on the entire second century BC.
The Hittite Empire during its prosperity created its own language, called the Hittite. Its occurrence dates back to 1650 BC.
One of the oldest - not only with regard to spoken language, but also written language, is the Greek language, the first mention of which dates back to 1400 BC.
Chinese arose around the 11th century BC. Today it speaks a huge number of people.
So, from the foregoing, we can conclude that many ancient languages of the world exist to this day, which means that their history is constantly updated, and they themselves are improved.
However, there is another noteworthy language that should be mentioned. This is the language of ancient India, Sanskrit.
The birth of classical Sanskrit dates back to the 4th century AD, however, eight centuries before it Sanskrit was born epic, and its related Vedic language appeared in the twentieth century BC.
Despite more than a solid age, it has survived to the present in full, for which we should thank the ancient sages who stood on the defense of the text of the holy Vedas and the entire Vedic language. Thanks to the method invented by them, their students could remember the whole holy book as a whole, and then transfer their knowledge to a new generation.
To this day they speak Sanskrit, there are people who communicate in it in everyday life.
Of course, in ancient India, in addition to Sanskrit, there were other ancient languages, but not one of them has written so many great works as in the language of the Vedas.