Is Arabic the oldest language (and most beautiful)?

no there are languages thousands of years older than arabic

>>3123342

Arabic is hideous and quite modern.

File: IMG_0165.jpg (47KB, 400x400px) Image search: [Google]

47KB, 400x400px

>>3123342
Arabic calligraphy is beautiful

>>3123342
No and it's one of the ugliest along with Chinese and Gaelic

It sounds horrid. Nothing compares to Japanese, everything ends with a vowel or an N. The other languages can fuck right off.

File: image.png (392KB, 640x836px) Image search: [Google]

392KB, 640x836px

>>3123342
>Is Arabic the oldest language (and most beautiful)?
No
(and no)
>John Quincy Adams is amused

File: 1485675954235.gif (3MB, 384x480px) Image search: [Google]

3MB, 384x480px

>>3123342
>>3123536

is this thread a "most retarded language ever conceived" contest with horribly worded OP?

>>3123536
>Nothing compares to Japanese
>amaterasu onii chan wenwen ponpon wa no boku no pico
japanese is easily the shittiest language, not only that but it's also damn hard as well to learn
dumb weeb

>>3123342
It's not the oldest but it's pretty beautiful. MSA/Levantine dialect is great, Egyptian is fucking awful though (by Allah what have they done to that language?). Plus it's a joy to write, everything looks like poetry.

>>3123342
Not the oldest, but definitely the most beautiful.

>>3123645
>>3123657
Agreed
>>3123546
My first language is Arabic, so no bully

>>3123342
>>3123353
>>3123382
>>3123645
>>3123657
there is no oldest language, all languages spoken today have the same age (except maybe creoles or possibly revived languages like hebrew)
you could say that sanskrit or latin are ancient languages because they are old stages of certain languages but at their time they weren't any older than the other languages that were around.

modern standard arabic is based on qur'anic arabic (but not the same), so you could argue that it is old in the sense that it still looks quite a bit like that earlier stage but then spoken arabic has changed a lot since then, so you couldn't say that about arabic as a whole.

>>3123342
No. Basque literally has holdovers from the neolithic. Also, Semitic languages are singularly disgusting.

>>3123875
this is the most retarded thing I have ever read

>>3123898
Agreed

>arabic
>oldest language
So dumb. It's, grammatically speaking, a heavily based Aramaic dialect adopted by the Nabateans mixed with vocabulary and some other language features from South-West Semitic and Ethiopian languages.

It's a young language. It probably had its proto form around the time of Jesus (plus or minus a few centuries) and developed into a variety of dialects by the time Muhammad was born. Then, one dialect was chosen as the standard, and Arabic was born.

>>3123880
Basques are interesting af don't you guys agree?

>>3123898
>>3123967
it's true though.
i have a degree in linguistics, if you have any questions about this concept i'll be happy to clarify

>>3124004
If Arabic is the oldest language in the world, how come the other Semitic languages are absent of the other conjugations and pharyngeal letters?

>>3124013
you mean if arabic ISN'T the oldest language?

there is a difference between languages that are more conservative in preserving certain grammatical features and languages that are more innovative. they still have the same age as languages though. in the germanic family you could point to english as a very innovative language, having lost most inflectional forms etc., and icelandic as a very conservative one, having changed little since the time of the eddas. generally speaking though, in language change there is always both continuity and change. different descendants of the same mother language often simply preserve different parts of the original system, so it is mostly very difficult to make general statements about the conservativeness of a certain language.

arabic is a conservative semitic language in many ways but it shows a lot of innovations as well. as for your points, aramaic also has pharyngeals and hebrew was revived with a yiddish accent so the pharyngeals aren't pronounced any more, but they were there originally. the emphatic phonemes in proto-semitic were likely glottalized though, like in ethiopic languages, so pharyngealizing them is actually an innovation.

>>3124120
Oh I thought they were replying to the OP. Sorry, didn't mean to strawman you.

>>3124013
>how come the other Semitic languages are absent of the other conjugations and pharyngeal letters?
First of all, the other Semitic languages do not lack those (maybe some modern ones do, but of the attested languages which may or may not be extinct, they don't). Secondly, if if they did lack them, that doesn't say anything by itself. As an example, nearly all Chinese languages lack voicing, but voicing was certainly present in Middle Chinese. All Germanic languages other than English have V where English has W, yet W is considered as the original sound in proto-Germanic.