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The analogy to open source projects is spot on Except that when an open source project dies, its code remains in full -- to study, take ideas from, or even pot
by llllllllllll 12y ago
The analogy to open source projects is spot on
Except that when an open source project dies, its code remains in full -- to study, take ideas from, or even potentially be revived at a later time.
When a language dies though, it's pretty much gone. Even if it's received a lot of attention from field linguists, it's near impossible to fully codify the grammar and document the nuances of any language.
- oblio 12y agoI doubt that a language dieing in 2014 would be completely gone from all record. Almost all the languages that we "lost" did not have a rich literature or sometimes even an alphabet.
- llllllllllll 12y agoThere are plenty of extant languages that don't have an alphabet either. They will be "lost" in every sense of the word. The # of languages currently spoken is typically pegged somewhere between 3000-6000 and it's thought that we lose around one a week. Most have almost no documentation whatsoever, and even so a couple papers written in the 1970s aren't going to capture any potential unique aspects of a language let alone allow for reconstruction at a later point. The analogy to code is way off.