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A comment on A small town in Sweden fights to preserve Elfdalian, a dying forest language. Parent comment

Re:A small town in Sweden fights to preserve Elfdalian, a dy... by rogerclark on Friday July 09, 2021 @08:39PM (#27790057)
Why not? As far as "looking for something to do", preserving a dying language seems a lot more interesting than a lot of other things people do with their spare time.
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Re:A small town in Sweden fights to preserve Elfdalian, a dy... by bpiche on Friday July 09, 2021 @09:00PM (#27790189)
The incuriousness in this thread is atypical of the board in my opinion.

At one point I used to think that language diversity was actually a net bad thing for humanity, because it decreases our ability to communicate and so on. These days language technology and machine translation are solving that communication issue and we may choose to preserve dying languages for the sake of understanding how language itself works, how humans migrated in the past, and so on.

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Re:A small town in Sweden fights to preserve Elfdalian, a dy... by huachimingo on Friday July 09, 2021 @11:10PM (#27790828)
Some languages open your understanding of the other ones from the same family tree.

Learn one, and you are partially learning the other.

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