Which language is older, Japanese or Latin?

Question

How about Spanish or Japanese?

Answer 1

That's not hard to figure out. Japanese. Latin came centuries after Japanese. Spanish comes from Latin, so Spanish is the youngest language out of the three you mention.

Answer 2

Latin

Answer 3

Spanish was derived from Latin, so clearly it came later.

The first known written Japanese is dated 712 A.D.  However, it was a spoken language long before it was a written one.  The earliest date I've been able to find online is 300 A.D.:

http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/ling4...

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/ANCJAPAN/LANGUAG...

Latin goes back to about 700 B.C.  Greek is older than that.

Did you mean Chinese?  The most ancient Chinese recognizable as Chinese goes back to the 14th century B.C., according to this:

http://www.paulnoll.com/China/Culture/la...

Answer 4

The oldest written Japanese is Kojiki - which was composed in the 8th Century - more than a thousand years after the earliest Latin texts.

Of course, Japanese must have existed as a spoken language long before it was written down - but then so must Latin.

Spanish develops as a dialect of Latin, and is probably a little younger than Japanese. (But it is very difficult to say exactly when Iberian Latin stops being Latin and becomes Spanish).

Answer 5

Latin- 800/700 BC

Japanese- ?

I would say Latin is older.