Even from a very rudimentary understanding as I have, it would seem that the significance contained in a certain tongue's idiomatic expressions for instance, often tells volumes about the history and culture of the people speaking it, even if such nuggets may have to be accreted in very small increments.
Sure. There's lots and lots of information like that out there - about 99.999% of it lost for good in the course of history because nobody
really cares, and the process still continuing. Cultural quirks die, others are born, and hopefully the process allows mankind to gyrate towards greater mutual understanding. We just have to pay the price of lost diversity, but it's a trivial price to pay when we remember we have already paid it trillionfold in the past, and are still doing pretty well, thank you.
Scholars may continue to study and perhaps enjoy the various idiosyncrasies of dead subcultures. It doesn't follow that such subcultures would need to be resurrected - ancient Greek poetry can still be enjoyed through rudimentary understanding of the words used (or, indeed, through translations), without involving any further elements of ancient Greek culture, and may perhaps be better enjoyed in the context of some other culture altogether.
The reference to inferior languages based on particularly tortuous syntactical or grammatical hierarchies might as easily obscure fascinating insights into peculiar patterns a certain population's geography, climate, or political conflicts act to shape their communications as simply betray an obdurate or perverse propensity for obscurantism.
I could understand perhaps half the words you used. Were you actually saying something?
No insult, sarcasm or attempt at humor intended. It's just that we just hit a language barrier, which IMHO is pretty damn annoying.
Would you similarly consign the historic struggles to vitally maintain Gaelic, Basque, or the languages spoken in the Soviet dominated Baltic states as being personal, unimportant, or otherwise of no particular account?
Of course. Let the scholars worry about such things if they have any interest. Nobody
really cares about little lives, despite the occasional contrary claim; ranting and raving about preserving select aspects of cultural identity doesn't change that.
To say nothing of the speech of all those indigenous cultures in so many parts of the world almost completely put to the sword, the effort to recover some representation of which signifies an outsize proportion of salvaging a vestige of identity for those relative handful of descendants still amongst the living.
Not only is the effort of obsessive preservation futile, it's also hypocritical, as identities like that die with the people associating themselves with them. You can't inherit an identity - that's a blatant contradiction in terms. You aren't doing any favors to past people or peoples by pretending that you respect them through preservation of their language, walking style or handicraft.
As mentioned in the earlier post, though, all that is sort of academic: while cultures and customs and languages die, they are also born, and the birth rate far outstrips the death rate. After all, identity is born with the individual, and there are more of us today than there were yesterday.
Hopefully, we are a bit less diverse tomorrow, too, as what we have today is frankly quite ridiculous in scope. Language is a great barrier between us, and even a shared language is often an insurmountable obstacle. Why make a bad jam worse?
Timo Saloniemi
