Thread by @shrikanth_krish

Tamil is no doubt a remarkable language in that it is one of the few "spoken" Prakrits which has a literary history with remarkable continuity for about 2000 years

But its claims are overrated by its votaries

And the legitimate histories of other vernaculars are underrated

https://twitter.com/prasannavishy/status/1186092794714083328

Antiquity alone does not render a language "great"

English is in my view the greatest language of our times. Unmatched in its elasticity, reach and coverage of literature - imaginative, historical and scientific

Yet, English is not quite as old as Tamil, let alone Sanskrit

Its early literature (pre 11th century) comprises of Beowulf, the Anglo Saxon Chronicles

But not a lot besides that.

Yet the language reinvented itself during its "underground" phase during the early Norman rule (12th-13th centuries) and emerged much stronger

Last 5 centuries, English has built a literary corpus that is unmatched by classical tongues that are many centuries older than English

So it's not age that matters.

Let's take a look at the output of English by century -

16th cen -
Drama - Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe
Poetry - Edmund Spenser

17th cen
Drama - Shakespeare
Poetry - Milton
Philosophy - Hobbes, Locke
Other - John Bunyan
Science - Newton (Opticks was written in English)

18th cen
Novel - Fielding, Defoe, Sterne
Poetry - Pope
Other Prose - Samuel Johnson
Politics - Federalist Papers, Edmund Burke
Philosophy - David Hume
History - Hume, Gibbon
Economics - Smith

19th cen

Novel - Dickens, Austen, Hardy, Henry James, Melville, Twain, Bronte sisters, Stevenson, Hawthorne
Poetry - Shelley, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Dickinson, Walt Whitman
History - Macaulay, Henry Adams
Philosophy - Mill

20th cen - hard to cover in tweets

The point here is -

English has exhibited the sort of fecundity that is unrivalled even by old classical tongues - be it Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew

All in a span of 4 centuries...barely 450 years ago, it was nowhere on the radar

It's all very well to boast of antiquity and live in the past...

But histories and reputations can be made in our times.. One has to look ahead