Translation is an admirable goal, but so is preseervation. Not necessarily the "preservation" that implies that the languages will remain in day-to-day use fore

Translation is an admirable goal, but so is preseervation. Not necessarily the "preservation" that implies that the languages will remain in day-to-day use forever; rather the "preservation" that implies that a complete (or nearly complete) grammatical description of the language, along with a relatively comprehensive vocabulary, will be recorded. That has more than historical interest, since the varieties of language and linguistic structures can tell us an awful lot about how language itself works in humans. It's sort of like doing astronomy/cosmology now (or at least recording the observations we can make now) will tell us very different things than we could possibly find out after the cosmic microwave background has become undetectable and galaxies outside of our gravitationally-bound local cluster have receded beyond the visibility threshold (where space between us and them is expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light). Before Hixkaryana was described, it was thought that OVS was "impossible". Amharic "made no sense" until Greenberg noticed something going on with adpositions (mostly prepositions, but a few incipient postpositions) that indicated that it was only partway through the process of settling into SOV from the ancestral VSO. That, in turn, indicates that there is something to the idea of markedness hierarchies, which, in turn, might be giving us an insight into something more fundamental about the way we're wired up.