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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5334916" data-attributes="member: 82106">As far as languages go it is entirely cut and dried. If a natural language has no native speakers, then it is a dead language. Latin has not been anyone's mother tongue for at least 1000 years and really longer than that in practice. It is a thoroughly dead language. Dead languages are often retained. Sumerian ceased to be a living language sometime around 2000 BC, yet it was still known and used for ritual purposes up until the 1st century AD. Its successor, Akkadian, likewise fell out of common use but was still retained as a diplomatic language in the fertile crescent until well after the 1st century AD. I think when you apply this to European martial arts the situation is a lot more complicated. They obviously never died away completely. They just evolved into other things. Fencing became a stylized sport and military swordsmanship evolved into basic infantry fighting techniques. Things like Sabat etc faded but never entirely disappeared. Still, when you compare what was available for someone to learn in say 1900 in Europe and compared it to what was still being taught in Japan or China there is a huge difference. Their schools can usually trace back directly to ancient times. European techniques have almost all at some point fallen into disuse and nobody alive today can trace an unbroken chain of teachers back to the 15th Century authors of the fechtbuken or anything like that. Many of the techniques they taught are not even fully understood today. It is worth remembering too though that even the eastern martial arts have evolved away from their roots a lot. Nobody studying kendo today is studying the same art that Musashi taught in his cave 500 years ago.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 5334916, member: 82106"] As far as languages go it is entirely cut and dried. If a natural language has no [b]native[/b] speakers, then it is a dead language. Latin has not been anyone's mother tongue for at least 1000 years and really longer than that in practice. It is a thoroughly dead language. Dead languages are often retained. Sumerian ceased to be a living language sometime around 2000 BC, yet it was still known and used for ritual purposes up until the 1st century AD. Its successor, Akkadian, likewise fell out of common use but was still retained as a diplomatic language in the fertile crescent until well after the 1st century AD. I think when you apply this to European martial arts the situation is a lot more complicated. They obviously never died away completely. They just evolved into other things. Fencing became a stylized sport and military swordsmanship evolved into basic infantry fighting techniques. Things like Sabat etc faded but never entirely disappeared. Still, when you compare what was available for someone to learn in say 1900 in Europe and compared it to what was still being taught in Japan or China there is a huge difference. Their schools can usually trace back directly to ancient times. European techniques have almost all at some point fallen into disuse and nobody alive today can trace an unbroken chain of teachers back to the 15th Century authors of the fechtbuken or anything like that. Many of the techniques they taught are not even fully understood today. It is worth remembering too though that even the eastern martial arts have evolved away from their roots a lot. Nobody studying kendo today is studying the same art that Musashi taught in his cave 500 years ago. [/QUOTE]

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