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Comment by fortythirteen | Hacker News Reader

The majority of those lost languages are spoken only, so we lose the culture's verbal history. Imagine if nobody ever decided to write down the Iliad.

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Language loss and change is a natural process that’s gone on forever. It’s only because we now have the means to be aware of as well as means to salvage that we even care.

What is now China with a few local variants was once covered in numerous dialects like India today, though not as numerous. However, one unifying language has led to a less fractured nation compared to say India or even Europe.

The difference is that before languages were newly created too, due to separation. Now, languages just die.

Right, for now, but what about the future? The ingredients for diversity of language and culture are isolation and time. If you send some friends to the other side of a river, or a mountain, or a wall, or an ocean, or to a different planet, and then stop communicating much for a long time, languages will be newly created again. The question is not if, but when and why will this kind of isolation happen again.

China doesn't have one language. Chinese is a family of languages as diverse as the Romance languages. This has actually been the primary reason that Chinese scholars have failed to replace their current writing system despite trying for a hundred fifty years. Imagine Italians, French, and Spanish speakers all trying to agree on a single written form of a language when they can't acknowledge that they're speaking different languages.

I understand that; however, with respect to reading, they practically have one language and additionally, Mandarin (Beijing dialect) is taught nationwide and is a strict requirement.

> About 30 percent of China's 1.3 billion population, 400 million people, can't communicate in Mandarin

When I traveled briefly in Yunnan, down in Xishuangbanna, I frequently ran into folk where I, as a white foreigner with only 4 years of study under my belt, spoke Mandarin more fluently than they did - and this included people who were nominally Han, not one of the 50-odd ethnic minorities down there.

I'm not sure requirements can be said to be strict when the locals will tell you to your face that the mountains are high and the emperor far away.

> Language loss and change is a natural process that’s gone one forever. It’s only because we now have the means to be aware of as well as means to salvage that we even care.

Just because something is doesn't mean it's right. Tooth decay is also a natural process, as is myopia, and cancer.

Sure but this is more akin to being a proscriptive grammarian rather than a descriptive one. Of course we could go old school and try to freeze language in time to be “proper”. This is taking a prescriptive approach to an extreme, in a sense.

There's a difference between a language changing, and a language completely dying out.

It’s part of a continuum. One wouldn’t say Spaniards speak Latin, not would we say Latin is a live language (beside some religious usage). One died another (of a few, in this case) grew. Some don’t have descendants, just as people.

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