There's extinct, and then there's extinct

As a little follow-up to the previous post:

Both Manx and Old English have been extinct (I'll explain the careful phrasing in a bit).  We know exactly when Manx went extinct: with the death of Ned Maddrell on December 27th, 1974.   We can't say when Old English went extinct, and not only because it would have happened hundreds of years ago.

"When did Old English go extinct?" is the same sort of question as "When did Middle English arise?", though it's not the exact same question.  If we were to define some set of speakers as "the first speakers of Middle English" and some other as "the last speakers of Old English", then there was, pretty much necessarily, a period of time where both were alive.  Middle English was alive, by such a reckoning, but Old English wasn't dead yet.

In fact, it's plausible that some number of people could have been said to speak both, depending perhaps on the company and occasion.  As I argued before, what's really going on here is that there is really no clear line to be drawn in cases of continuous change.

On the other hand, when the number of speakers of a language dwindles, it's reasonable to speak of the language going extinct: when the last speaker speaks no more.

The situation may become somewhat better-defined if we consider features of languages.  It's plausible that there was a last time that someone used urum for "our" with a plural noun (in the appropriate grammatical case, etc.), or a first time (probably some time earlier and/or in some other place) that someone said oure in the like situation.

This at least clarifies some of the difficulties of the exercise.  First, features do not arise or disappear everywhere at once.  At some point, there would have been some people who said urum or oure, as the case may be and some who didn't.  At some later point there were fewer who said urum and more who said oure, and eventually, no one was saying urum anymore.  And even that may be an oversimplification.

Second, what set of features we call "Old English" and what set we call "Middle English" is largely arbitrary.  More realistically, as time went on, there were more people speaking English with what we would now regard as Middle English features and fewer speaking with what we would regard as Old English features.

Except that we still retain some features of Old English, for example, the words is, on, to and he from Ælfric of Eynsham in the previous post.  When we try to draw a line between Old and Middle English, we're really looking for features unique to each.  We could plausibly say that when there are, say, no longer any people who speak with more of Old English's unique features than Middle English's, Middle English has taken over.  When no one is using that particular set of features at all, we could say that Old English is extinct ... but then we should be careful not to choose any features for that set that do survive.

If this has a sort of unsatisfying feel to it, it's because the whole exercise is of limited use.  At the bottom of all this careful definition is a distinction without a difference.  The real story is that features come and go, with enough differences eventually accumulating that we start to feel that two different sets of features denote different languages.


Now, why did I say "have been extinct" above?  Manx is, it turns out, no longer dead.  There aren't many speakers, and perhaps none who speak exclusively Manx, or few that could be said to speak Manx as their first language, but people are speaking Manx again, with pride.  This is thanks not only to modern Manx speakers, but in part to recordings of Ned Maddrell and others, and to the efforts of the linguists who made those recordings and otherwise worked to preserve a record of the language.