The linguistic capacity of the human being as a living being is undoubtedly one of the elements that has distinguished him from the beginning of the history of the remaining living beings . The possibility of establishing a systematized language, with rules and a determined functioning has expanded the capacity of our brain and contributes in thousands of aspects to our daily life. In this sense, the history of Humanity has witnessed the development of numerous languages, some already extinct, which have nevertheless served as the basis for current languages.
The extinction of ancient languages
Throughout history, human groups or societies have developed different languages that had mainly to do with the ability to build a more or less complex system of communication . Elements such as the environment in which they lived also contributed to shaping these languages. Many of them, those that existed in antiquity, are considered dead languages today. This means that people who have any of these languages as their mother tongue are no longer born on the planet because it is no longer transmitted from human to human, although they can be learned.
The dead languages are, among others, Latin, Elamite, Hittite, Akkadian, Ancient Greek, Classical Egyptian, Classical Chinese, and Ancient Sanskrit. All of them belonged to peoples of antiquity and although they were perhaps very important and spoken by a large number of people at that time, the evolution of language caused them to lose shape, to become a new language (as occurs with derived languages). from Latin), which even disappeared.
Languages are not eternal but they can be kept as a cultural heritage of Humanity
To understand the importance of dead languages, we must be clear that all forms of language have a life that can wear out over time. The languages we know today are not the same as those used only five centuries ago and are likely to continue to evolve or even disappear. The disappearance of languages can be due to many causes: the imposition of new languages through force when one people conquers the other, the annihilation of the people themselves, the complexity of the language that does not easily transmit it to others, etc.
In any case, dead languages are nowadays considered a central element to understand the evolution of Humanity, that is why it is important to preserve them as paintings, works of art and all kinds of cultural creations are preserved.
