Storage is cheap nowadays, if we can afford to archive petabytes of cat videos I'm sure we can collect endangered cultural artifacts.
Who knows what we could've learned from the destroyed works of the library of Alexandria? All those things we don't know we don't know...
I completely agree.
But we have data about many, many languages, lost and current. The chances that those newly discovered ones bring something more than "oh that's nice and interesting" on the table are quite weak.
> Who knows what we could've learned from the destroyed works of the library of Alexandria?
This is a totally different scale. As I say, we must assess the potential winning vs the cost.
Currently, the science enthusiasts are saying yes to everything, and the people with money are saying no to everything. I find it harmful both ways.
I can imagine someone saying this in the early 20th century. And then the decipherment of Hittite and discovery of Tocharian completely rewrote the history of the Near East and Central Asia. Just a few years ago, Werner and Vajda’s work on Ket finally connected a Siberian population with a Native American one. In fact, I could really go on for hours about how much Central and Northeast Asia history has been drastically revised in just the last 20–30 years from this kind of work.
Digitizing manuscripts and analyzing data collected from little-known languages is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways (especially compared to digs) to gain major historical insights.
We have tendency to consider that all knowledge is precious. That all information, especially from the past, should be treasured. It's sounds more anchored in a collector mindset that in any real assessment of the value of the discovery.
We can't save everything. We don't have to save everything.
As usual, we need to evaluate the cost vs the reward.
Now the hard part is to put a value on knowledge and potential, which I agree is very hard and controversial. But stating we must save things as soon as we discover it doesn't help.