Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
We don't know. We can't know. We can only guess, and the guesses will have a lot more to do with our worldview and beliefs than anything else.
Do you assume that great and wonderful things were lost? Why?
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Dennis
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I would hazard to say, because they have been "lost" before, sometimes for thousands of years. We are only now beginning to discover much of what was lost because of that great Dark Ages Christian tradition of washing off old Greek texts and writing Bibles over them. Or, burning ancient texts because they were from non-Christian faiths and cultures.
Much of Archimedes work was lost, almost all of Imhotep's teachings on medicine are lost, perhaps forever, once as a result of the loss of understanding of their languages (thank you, Rosetta Stone), but also and mostly through destruction of the scrolls and books.
Maybe we get lucky and discover them again ... maybe we don't. Maybe it only puts our culture and science behind one or two thousand years ... maybe longer. It's still a loss.
So, yes, I think it's a loss when a language gets lost. We have suffered the loss of so much great teaching, mathematics, medicine, art, science .... it would be a shame to lose more just because it was written in a language that no one speaks or understands anymore.