I'm wondering if the people who are railing against saving languages are equally against organizations such as the Internet Archive? My thinking is that, as tech-savvy computer whizzes, many folk on Hacker News are happier to preserve something that makes sense to _them_ (media or website snapshots) than things that don't (languages and foreign cultural history). It's difficult to say what is useful without the benefit of hindsight, by which time it is a moot point -- the resource is long gone and will never be again. Anyways, just my two cents as an incredibly biased amateur archivist.
I see that as an apples to oranges comparison. When we say "saving languages," do we mean archiving them, backing them up, creating stores of references and recordings that can be easily recalled yet inexpensively preserved? If so, then I am definitely for that. If "saving languages" means accepting nothing less than the descendants of the speakers of a dying language needing to expend mental energy and time to remain active speakers of that language, placing them at a disadvantage when compared with those who have free time for other pursuits and contributing to segregating that group from others, I don't know if that's as beneficial.
In general, all knowledge should be preserved when possible. The question is whether it's better for it to be stored on hard drives or in brains.
Good question :) not sure I have a good answer for that one, although I'd like to point out that many people elect to expend mental energy on otherwise unproductive minutia (aka. hobbies) so perhaps the task of carrying on a spoken tradition is less onerous to some than one might expect.
Language contributing to group segregation is a very strong claim, however, and if you have any case studies (or, like, newspaper articles, this isn't academia) I'd be interested in seeing them.
Every child must expend enormous energy to learn their mother language, but the human mind is not a cup that can hold but one language. Bilingualism and diglossia are the human norm, not monolingualism. Language is a human right, and parents have a right to teach their children their heritage.
Languages are only ever "dying" because of state coercion aimed at robbing children of their cultural heritage.
Storing away all of geocities for future reference is a good thing. Having every children memorize passages from geocities would be pointless and no one does it.
Having them learn a dead language is cruel, you are wasting their time to make them learn something that will only serve to keep them isolated.
And it's all in vain, making a language alive is the opposite of preserving it because live languages change.
No-one is arguing that children from minority communities should be prevented from learning an international language. The only question is whether they should be prevented from learning the language of their heritage.
Multilingualism is the norm. And it's easy enough to learn Math in English, English in English, and literature in your mother tongue.
