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From Latin to Ancient Greek to Sanskrit, it has been more than thousands of years since words have been spoken in these respective languages. For any culture, its language is one of the primary ways it stays alive. Without the continuation of the language, the culture loses its significance as well as its influence.
For a long time, the only way to stave off a language from going extinct was to find the few native speakers and physically document the language or to labor over documents and decode the language. One prominent example of trying to save a dying language is the journey of Geoffrey Khan, a linguist at the University of Cambridge. His goal was to document Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, and was the common tongue used throughout the Middle East. Aramaic even dates back to the time of Jesus Christ, as he cried in Aramaic on the cross, "Elahi, Elahi, lema shabaqtani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). Despite its presence throughout a majority of history, Aramaic is down to its last one or two generation of speakers. As a result, Khan has taken the extended effort to interview and record the native speakers. While the direct interaction with those who speak the language is a personal way of keeping a language alive, it just isn't humanely possible to speak to everyone, nor are there always people who speak all the languages.
However, with our advanced computers, raising dead languages might not be out of reach. In fact, according to Canadian scientist Alexandre Bouchard-Cote and his research team at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver theorize that the world's dead languages could be reconstructed using computer programs to build extinct languages, word-by-word. In other words, computers could use current languages to recreate extinct ones.
Although the future of dying languages seems a little brighter, this raises an important question. Is it right to allow technology to keep languages alive, when languages fundamentally begin through speech?
The issue of dead and dying languages is an interesting matter. While I also recognize that culture is often closely tied with language, I sometimes wonder about the benefits of teaching dying languages. Should students devote more time to learning languages like Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic that could help them more in their social lives and careers, or should they take the time to learn languages like Mayan or Aramaic that are not really used any longer except when researching history and examining artifacts? I find the technology that you wrote about interesting because if a whole language could be stored into a computer, would it be necessary for students and historians to keep learning it if they could just refer to the computer? Personally, I love learning languages and studying various cultures, which is why I would say that people should continue to teach and learn dying languages. However, I feel that many people may ask the questions I posed earlier. Some people may feel that it is more useful to teach the prominent languages of today than those of the past-- especially if you have technology to refer to when you do need to access the language. At the same time, others can argue that reconstructing a language and making it available on a computer, may promote more people to look into it and again interest in it since it would become more accessible. I guess there are two sides to this.
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