[gregdaniels421]

> 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.

[niemandhier]

People learn Klingon or Esperanto.

You could probably convince me to join a hypothetical “Worshipful society of Gentlemen speaking Sumerian”.

[wl]

There's a lot of disagreement about Sumerian grammar. If you like to argue, that might be a bonus.

[cineticdaffodil]

Unless the language lacks concepts and like scientific recombinateability and the cultural Nexus of youth just moves.

[mohamedkoubaa]

Empirically, the best way to keep a language alive is for a user of that language to write a Great Work in it.

[gregdaniels421]

If there are 80 speaker/readers, how could a language get popular again? By interested readers of a translation?

[forgotmyusernam]

But what good can come from preserving languages that already do not have enough samples?

Do languages have value in themselves?

[mdp2021]

> 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.

[wl]

Or learn Hittite. It's got the oldest corpus in the Indo-European language family. You've got your standard assortment of Indo-European cases. Grammatical gender is animate/inanimate and the animate gender has yet to split into masculine and feminine. The script is tons of fun, especially if you write it with a stylus on clay. And as a bonus, you get to learn a smattering of Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary.

[rubberpoliceman]

Animate gender didn’t split into masculine and feminine — inanimate collective plural was repurposed as feminine.

[wl]

That "repurposing" is more morphology than grammar. You also frequently find in Indo-European languages multiple cases having overlapping morphology, but that doesn't necessarily change the cases themselves. My point, in any case, is that Hittite has the older animate/inanimate genders from Proto-Indo-European (only attested in the Anatolian languages!) whereas Sanskrit has the later masculine/feminine/neuter genders.

[NonHyloMorph]

Can you point us somewhere zo learn more about that?

[wbl]

Sanskrit is not an ancestor of English. Sanskrit is a satem language English centum. Proto Indo Iranian diverged long ago.

[mdp2021]

> Sanskrit is not an ancestor of English

Sanskrit entered into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English.

Edit: downvoter, express yourself clearly. I cannot see how the above sentence could be considered false, apart from gross interpretations of the chosen terms.

Again: you have a relation with "jñāna, gnō̃́sis, gnosco, knowledge"; then you have relations in other dimensions (jña, jñāti, gnṓmōn, gnṓmōn...): the awareness of those details enriches the awareness of the language. That is through the relation between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, post-Latin - it is just there. What is contended is not clear.

[applicative]

Sanskrit is no older than Kurdish; English Greek etc have the same relation to it as to Kurdish — they are all alike of Indo European descent.

Like Greek and Latin, Sanskrit is an anciently written language associated with major states and ‘civilizations’ - and, crucially, is like Greek and Latin in that it is still remembered if only by some thin intellectual or priestly stratum of societies.

So by use of those three, Indo European unity could be especially well validated by pure textual scholarship (especially if the scholar was British or German and thus on another branch). It is surprising as the result is intuitively scientific — how could I arrive at it if all I do is read and write?! - and was indeed of massive importance to the framing of Darwin’s quite different scientific enterprise, which needed different evidence .

[mdp2021]

If an awareness of Kurdish would help understanding Greek, than Latin, than our post-Latin languages in use, then such awareness would be surely welcome,

but "the thing with" Sanskrit is also about the prominence of its literature. The wealth of relations between the terms in those languages is enlightening, and there is an important literary corpus behind it.

(I am not quite prepared about Kurdish literature.)

--

Edit:

> still remembered if only by some thin intellectual or priestly stratum of societies

You are "setting the bar" so incredibly low...

[nkrisc]

That still does not make Sanskrit an ancestor language of English, though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago.

English has borrowed words from many languages, as all but the most isolated languages have.

[mdp2021]

> That still does not make Sanskrit an ancestor language of English

You are taking 'ancestor' in a strict technical sense, which was clearly not my intention.

> though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago

And those roots can be found and recognized in the subsequent languages, and there lies the value.

[ben_w]

> You are taking 'ancestor' in a strict technical sense, which was clearly not my intention.

Blutly, this was not obvious, and what you suggested would have been equally true if you'd said:

  Learn Lithuanian. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the descendants better.

Because Lithuanian has about as much in common with PIE as Sanskrit does.

[nkrisc]

That wasn’t clear to me. Yes, they share similar roots because they have a common ancestor language. Just like any pair of extinct or extant languages descended from PIE.

[messe]

> which was clearly not my intention.

You did not express that clearly enough then.

[carefree-bob]

Both Vedic Sanskrit and Mycenaean Greek are the same age. Of course there may have been mutual influences as languages take cognates from each other.

[wbl]

There was extremely limited contact between them until thousands of years later, and no real cultural exchange until the era of exploration.

[mdp2021]

But the point is in the strength of said relations in view of understanding the underlying roots in current languages.

[arjie]

Is that the point? Seems like Greek or Latin are more useful to an English speaker for familiarity, and Sinitic ones for foreign-ness. Sanskrit occupies a space that is less useful for a Western audience as a sibling language to English in a valley of novelty and similarity.

[mtalantikite]

I have the Assimil Sanskrit course sitting on my shelf that I’ve been meaning to spend time with. Would love to be able to read old sutras one of these days.

[sieve]

Everyone should learn Sanskrit if only to read the great poets and dramatists in the original. The translations are often nice, but you do lose something in the process. Thanks to the incredible efforts of Pāṇini[1], the language was mostly frozen in time and is still just as understandable today as it was 2500 years ago.

I started learning it because it is India's civilizational language and I wanted to read the itihāsas in the original.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini