It's funny that most of the arguments people make for retaining old languages and writing systems are "so we can read old literature or perpetuate old cultures"

It's funny that most of the arguments people make for retaining old languages and writing systems are "so we can read old literature or perpetuate old cultures". Surely if everyone used the same language, that would have the opposite effect and open up far more writing to more people - Chinese people could read Shakespeare. Translators would only have to convert from each old language to the lingua franca, so Hebrew speakers could read Confucius too. That's an O(n) task instead of the O(n^2) that we currently have.