> political currents don’t have to move in one direction. It’s not inevitable that endangered languages become extinct.
There really isn't any good incentive to learn a language with very few speakers, since unless you already know a speaker, you really can't practice the real language. People were a few years ago at least hoping llms could help preserve the languages, but more most of them, there just aren't enough samples for any real preservation. I knew some dudes in college that were linguists that worked on recording native speakers of endangered languages, and while I hoped they would succeed, I never really had much hope of it working.
Learn Sanskrit. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the descendants better. And they are your tools, and knowing your tools is important.
Other more obscure languages? Well, as implied, languages are related... So studying the network clarifies the whole.
You know how people learn Ancient Greek to study Homer in the original language?
Gilgamesh deserves that. I'm only a beginner but the refinement of the poetry is already obvious even as someone who doesn't know the language.
Euphony was very important to the Mesopotamian poets. They liked rhythms and alliteration and assonance. And the late editions of Gilgamesh reflect about two thousand years of iterative improvement:
> ilū işinu iriša. ilū kima zūmbē eli bēl niqi iptaḫru. ("The gods could smell the fragrance. They gathered around the sacrificiant like flies.")
The ş is like sh, š is regular s, q like in Arabic, ḫ like German ch. Vowels like in Spanish or the phonetic alphabet. Macron means a long vowel. Stress on the penultimate.
It really rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
> ibri kudanu ťardu akkannu ša šadi nimru ša şēri ("my friend the swift driven mule, wild ass of the mountains, panther of the wild")
> ibri ša arammušu danniš ittīa ittallaku kalu marşāti ("my friend, whom I loved greatly, who journeyed with me through every hardship")
> ikšudāššu šimat ("fate overtook [him...]" the tablet breaks off here)
The very moral in Gilgamesh deserves that. "I went in a quest for immortality; I did not achieve it and came back, and while returning I saw in the distance the City I built, and I understood what my immortality was...".
> We show that language isn’t isolated from political currents and that this dynamic has been a facet of human history for much longer than previously thought.
Um, when did anyone think it wasn't?
The entire history of linguistics shows this. Proto-Indo European had no common word (for that family) for sea/ocean [1] from which we can deduce something about the people who spoke it. That's not political obviously but environment and culture are inseparable from language is the ponit.
Languages really only grew for political reasons. Look at the spread of Latin throughout Roman territories.
Likewise, languages splinter and diverge in isolation. Populations that remain where they are and separate from others will drift linguistically. You can look at most of Europe for this. As just one example, the drift in Swiss Germany in Switzerland, which is a relatively small country.
But more than that, it takes some kind of centralization, which is to say, political force, to maintain a language. English had massive changes from Old English (which is essentially a separate language from Modern English) to Middle English (which is largely comprehensible by the modern speaker) when French was the court language of England in the centuries after 1066. And the Normans left their own imprints on English, which is where a ton of loan words came from [2]. But English grammar also greatly simplified without a central authority telling everyone what is proper, basically [3].
One of the fascinating things I remember learning was that there are between half a million and million cuneiform tablets int he world and fewwer than 10% of them have been translated. Now cuneiform is a writing style but one of the difficulties is that it encompasses multiple languages. And this was one of the earliest recorded examples of language displacement from Sumerian to Akkadian over thousands of years. But tablets could be written in part in both languages for a very long time. This is where we have the earliest documented human name, Kushim [4].
But the point is that the rise and fall of Sumer and its displacement by Akkad is recorded in the language.
And of course we had the spread of "colonial" languages in the colonial period (ie Spanish, French, Portugese, English).
Pragmatism also is a factor here. Different languages are inconvenient between populations that interact. The natural tendency is to homogenize on language given sufficient time, even without political pressure. it's a little sad when languages die but it's kind of inevitable.
> political currents don’t have to move in one direction. It’s not inevitable that endangered languages become extinct.
There really isn't any good incentive to learn a language with very few speakers, since unless you already know a speaker, you really can't practice the real language. People were a few years ago at least hoping llms could help preserve the languages, but more most of them, there just aren't enough samples for any real preservation. I knew some dudes in college that were linguists that worked on recording native speakers of endangered languages, and while I hoped they would succeed, I never really had much hope of it working.
> learn a language with very few speakers
Learn Sanskrit. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the descendants better. And they are your tools, and knowing your tools is important.
Other more obscure languages? Well, as implied, languages are related... So studying the network clarifies the whole.
People learn Klingon or Esperanto.
You could probably convince me to join a hypothetical “Worshipful society of Gentlemen speaking Sumerian”.
Unless the language lacks concepts and like scientific recombinateability and the cultural Nexus of youth just moves.
Empirically, the best way to keep a language alive is for a user of that language to write a Great Work in it.
If there are 80 speaker/readers, how could a language get popular again? By interested readers of a translation?
An interesting tangent to the language discussion is the Epic of Gilgamesh => https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-epic-o...
You know how people learn Ancient Greek to study Homer in the original language?
Gilgamesh deserves that. I'm only a beginner but the refinement of the poetry is already obvious even as someone who doesn't know the language.
Euphony was very important to the Mesopotamian poets. They liked rhythms and alliteration and assonance. And the late editions of Gilgamesh reflect about two thousand years of iterative improvement:
> ilū işinu iriša. ilū kima zūmbē eli bēl niqi iptaḫru. ("The gods could smell the fragrance. They gathered around the sacrificiant like flies.")
The ş is like sh, š is regular s, q like in Arabic, ḫ like German ch. Vowels like in Spanish or the phonetic alphabet. Macron means a long vowel. Stress on the penultimate.
It really rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
> ibri kudanu ťardu akkannu ša šadi nimru ša şēri ("my friend the swift driven mule, wild ass of the mountains, panther of the wild")
> ibri ša arammušu danniš ittīa ittallaku kalu marşāti ("my friend, whom I loved greatly, who journeyed with me through every hardship")
> ikšudāššu šimat ("fate overtook [him...]" the tablet breaks off here)
> Gilgamesh deserves that
The very moral in Gilgamesh deserves that. "I went in a quest for immortality; I did not achieve it and came back, and while returning I saw in the distance the City I built, and I understood what my immortality was...".
> We show that language isn’t isolated from political currents and that this dynamic has been a facet of human history for much longer than previously thought.
Um, when did anyone think it wasn't?
The entire history of linguistics shows this. Proto-Indo European had no common word (for that family) for sea/ocean [1] from which we can deduce something about the people who spoke it. That's not political obviously but environment and culture are inseparable from language is the ponit.
Languages really only grew for political reasons. Look at the spread of Latin throughout Roman territories.
Likewise, languages splinter and diverge in isolation. Populations that remain where they are and separate from others will drift linguistically. You can look at most of Europe for this. As just one example, the drift in Swiss Germany in Switzerland, which is a relatively small country.
But more than that, it takes some kind of centralization, which is to say, political force, to maintain a language. English had massive changes from Old English (which is essentially a separate language from Modern English) to Middle English (which is largely comprehensible by the modern speaker) when French was the court language of England in the centuries after 1066. And the Normans left their own imprints on English, which is where a ton of loan words came from [2]. But English grammar also greatly simplified without a central authority telling everyone what is proper, basically [3].
One of the fascinating things I remember learning was that there are between half a million and million cuneiform tablets int he world and fewwer than 10% of them have been translated. Now cuneiform is a writing style but one of the difficulties is that it encompasses multiple languages. And this was one of the earliest recorded examples of language displacement from Sumerian to Akkadian over thousands of years. But tablets could be written in part in both languages for a very long time. This is where we have the earliest documented human name, Kushim [4].
But the point is that the rise and fall of Sumer and its displacement by Akkad is recorded in the language.
And of course we had the spread of "colonial" languages in the colonial period (ie Spanish, French, Portugese, English).
Pragmatism also is a factor here. Different languages are inconvenient between populations that interact. The natural tendency is to homogenize on language given sufficient time, even without political pressure. it's a little sad when languages die but it's kind of inevitable.
[1]: https://talageri.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-proto-indo-europea...
[2]: https://www.krysstal.com/display_borrowlang.php?lang=Norman+...
[3]: https://www.sciscanpub.com/index/journals/ainfo/alr/7943.htm...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushim_(Uruk_period)