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Preserve as in archive is a critically important task, and with recursive problems of today's archived books/audio/video being accessible with next century's te
by cat_plus_plus 5y ago
Preserve as in archive is a critically important task, and with recursive problems of today's archived books/audio/video being accessible with next century's tech. Preserve as in routine use is a terrible idea. If this article was written in Elfdalian, none of us would understand it. And even among themselves, speakers will struggle to express new concepts like "Fully homomorphic encryption" for which native words were never invented. There is a lot of elegance in MS-DOS software and some even write new code as a hobby. But if you distribute your code on floppies nowadays, you will not get anywhere useful.
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoWherever one stands regarding the question, it's easy to see that preserving disappearing languages as spoken languages is futile. Young people are naturally not interested in speaking dying languages, it's the old folks who want to preserve them. Yes, they can teach the language in kindergartens and schools, but often they can't even find proper native speakers as teachers anymore when there simply aren't many left. It's a form of necromancy, languages evolve and die naturally, long term we can't do anything to prevent their deaths. We need to preserve history like you say. But even historic records can be and have been re-written. Imo we should be most concerned with the cultures and attitudes that shape our current languages.
- b3orn 5y ago> And even among themselves, speakers will struggle to express new concepts like "Fully homomorphic encryption" for which native words were never invented. Then they can just do what english speakers did and incorporate some greek words into their language as there doesn't seem to be be any good native words for it in english either.