Maybe I'm dense, but it seems to me that the world might be simpler with fewer spoken / written languages rather than more?
LEVEL I BASIC is pretty endangered, but who cares at this point?
Language is not only a means of communication, but the living trace of a whole branch of culture and its collective memory of knowledge and history.
EDIT: The matter is developed quite extensively in an article [0] linked in their FAQ[1]
[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7vQLUpU_2qcV1laYS1mZjc5Vjg...
I imagine modern India and Africa are losing languages as the main languages displace lesser languages.
Tomorrow, if English were to be lost, most of the history of the US, Great Britain and other English speaking nations (as well as records written in English but pertaining to other non-English speaking nations) would be lost.
Without writing, history devolves into a bunch of creation myths, which can be mildly interesting but tend to be very formulaic. Witness Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories, which span 40000 years of history, but can be reasonably replicated with a Markov chain of the (ancestor,kangaroo,goanna,wombat) creating (geographical feature) after it (fought,danced,mated,was cast away) (by,with) another (ancestor,kangaroo,goanna,wombat).
That is a ludicrous and ignorant caricature. Dreamtime stories encode vast amounts of information about locations, topography, history, local survival resources, and more. Read a bit of anthropology, or even just some pop/synoptic works (Lynne Kelly, Bill Gammage, Bruce Pascoe) and see if your prejudices emerge intact.
Language preservation is huge for native culture and identity, and it helps prevent assimilation (one of the reasons why the language and others like it were forcibly stamped out by the boarding schools which abducted Indian children from their parents.) There are even projects to teach Lushootseed to inmates in tribal jails, as a way of reconnecting prisoners with their culture and heritage. Iirc studies also show that depression and suicide are reduced if the native language stays alive.
There's a lot of debate and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has fallen out of favor with contemporary linguists, but I also feel like different languages encode different thought patterns. Lushootseed is nothing like English, and there are words specifically for tribal customs, religion and viewpoints that can't translate.
Overall, I see languages as living creatures. Extinction of minority languages or cultures is, to me, like species disappearing. Even if the biome doesn't suffer (and it can in both cases - Indians knew how to take care of the land before whites showed up), something sacred is lost v
I find this so interesting and I want it to be true. The Guugu Ymithirr come to mind, whose directional prepositions are based on cardinal directions. This difference, when compared to English for example, is thought to be the main factor in why the people have such a strong "internal compass".
http://nautil.us/blog/5-languages-that-could-change-the-way-...
[paywall] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-language-shape...
Would you care to share how you've done the learning you've done and any assimilation you've been able to do?
Few, if any, BASICs are endangered to this level. Nobody outside of enthusiasts may actually be significantly using the language, but it's documented and thus programs written in a BASIC are generally able to be interpreted, and if necessary the logic converted to a different language. Many of these endangered languages are at risk of total loss, akin to if all information regarding a given BASIC syntax were irrevocably removed from all of existence.
I believe the sources for the compiler can be found here, https://github.com/PDP-10/rutgers-pascal/
And at some point Knuth had modified the GNU pascal compiler to compile modified TeX sources.
But in practice everyone just translates from Pascal to C, via WEB2C. Programs like XeTeX are even writing new Pascal-H code, which gets translated to C, and seems unlikely to have ever been compiled in the original language.
It's one thing to say: "I am thristy, do you have water?" It's another to say: "She walks in beauty like the night of starry skies and cloudless climes..."
Also, poetic value is subjective. Historical value, in the sense of helping us understand things we didn't previously, much less so.
You may not find a phrase in a given language "poetic," but knowing that native speakers of said language did may be quite valuable.
For example, in Nortern Sotho: "Ditau ga di adimane meno." This means that "Lion don't lend each other their teeth." But in context it means that you can't expect that other people lend you tools when you have to do a job, everyone needs to bring their own tools (physical or otherwise; software or hardware; etc). I also suspect that this saying alludes to the fact that lions are in competition with each other. Why would a lion lend another lion it's teeth and in the process put itself at a disadvantage? The metaphor encodes this inherent truth about competition.
However, that doesn't mean that languages themselves aren't a terribly interesting field of study and research. Archiving them before they die is very important for anthropologists, historians, etc. For example, they can answer questions about the history of other, still living, languages. They should at least be recorded.
Of course, forbidding people from teaching a specific language to their children is different from this natural process and something really bad.