Chasing Lost Languages | Hacker News Reader

Chasing Lost Languages

nautil.us

18 pointsdnetesn5 comments

If you like this kind of language archeology, check out David Anthony's The Horse, the Wheel, and Language — for how the people that spoke the Proto Indo-European language were located in time and space.

I'm probably in the minority around here if I state I'm sorta fine with a whole lot of languages being lost to time.

Are there things we could have learned from them that are lost to time? Well, yeah, and that itself is bad, but preservation is simply not feasible, same as we don't store every single piece of information nowadays, we can't store all of language for the same reason it's interesting in the first place: It's alive.

It's also worth noting, there's a whole, whole lot that is bound to be uninteresting beyond historical knowledge and that deserves no more respect than, say, food.

That's true — time is a big place, and a lot of things are lost in it. I for one am rather more pained over disappearing of physical objects — genomes, books, art.

Plus, it is all the more exciting to think about what caused some languages to exist and thrive for so long, and the information about the past they retained.

I agree. Sometimes it feels like we’re going thorough a conservative age where people are trying to hold on to as much as they possibly can from the distant past, even when it wasn’t really much of anything in its time.

It also seems like the past is being romanticized out of all proportion. I’ve lived in a few countries now, and it’s funny how far off the mark people are in their perception of places I’ve spent many years living in and still visit regularly. There’s no way people can have such a faulty perception of different places in current times, but be more accurate when looking more than a generation or two into the past.

Irrational is what makes us different humans instead of one gray mass. History and traditions affect current values and perception of reality. And it's nice to have many of them instead of one 'common values' pack pushed by some minority on everybody else.

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