SDLC-105 journal #9

[Yian Xu]

After reading the article Tribe Revives Language on the Verge of Extinction, I began to think a question—that whether the languages we are speaking now will die out someday. Because a lot of major language had vanished and even the language we are using now had changed a lot and is quite different from what it was originally like. For example, just 100 years ago, we used to use classical Chinese, which, now, not many Chinese people can still understand it well without looking up dictionary. Classical Chinese is very obscure, and hard to understand. Although classical Chinese was a good reflection a Chinese culture and history, it actually not worked well and obstructed the transmission of knowledge since it was too difficult to learn and only well educated people could understand it at that time. After the adoption of modern language, illiteracy rate decreased dramatically. In this way, change made the language work better for us. So, if a language die out or changed so much that people barely understand the original text, that probably because of development.