I’m sorry, I don’t want to come across as harsh, but this is honestly ignorant as fuck.
I’m not gonna claim to know everything about the importance of studying dead languages, but I think I can safely say that it would probably be a really bad thing if we lost these languages to time if we didn’t have people studying them.
We can lose hundreds if not THOUSANDS of years of story-telling history if these languages end up forgotten.
I can’t put it into clear words right now because I’m busy or go int depth because I only have a common sense understanding, but I just wanted to address this. So if anybody on Tumblr who’s more qualified to speak on this kind of matter wants to explain, then please take the floor for me.
Many, many English words have Latin roots, so studying Latin can expand your English vocabulary to the point that you won’t even need to check the dictionary meaning if you can recognize its Latin roots.
Additionally, you can make up new words as needed by mashing together Dead Words.
Lots of scientific jargon use Latin and Ancient Greek exactly because they’re dead languages - the meaning of those words are set in stone. Studying those languages can help you understand and remember the extremely complex strings of words common in those topics.
Latin is the Mother of Romance languages. Just studying Latin can make it easier to adapt to the grammar rules of the other Romance languages, or even help you Frankenstein out a meaning of a simple paragraph.
All translation is a series of compromises. Even if Ye Olde Latin Text has been translated to English again and again and again, there WILL BE several points where the translator had to circumnavigate the translation to a phrase because the exact tone and concept is difficult to convey in English!!! (I am bilingual and this problem frustrates me to no end!!)
And that’s approaching this problem in good faith. We have a history of people outright lying about their translation credentials, deliberately translating a text “wrong” for their own benefit, or adding flourishes that drastically change the tone of the translation. Reviewing that 18th-century English translation of some 13th-century Latin book instead of just thoughtlessly reprinting it is vital to having a clear understanding of that book and placing it in its proper context.
We have a LOT of untranslated archived material that have text written in dead languages, Latin included. Translating these provide us history.
And last but not the least:
Things do not have to be “useful” to have value.
also dead does not mean no longer in use, it means no longer CHANGING. No new words are being added to that dictionary. That’s all it means. Latin is only dead bc new words aren’t being added to its dictionary
