Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

I think that we are entering a new golden age of language, personally.

It has never been easier for a human being to take a corpus and refactor it in a fashion that they can understand it without making an energetic investment in constructing a new ontology; or that is to say, humans can use AI now to grasp text and words - language, specifically - in extraordinarily industrious, productive ways.

I know it is a crackpot event horizon, but I truly wonder if Szukalskis’ Protong isn’t just waiting there, tip of the iceberg, to be discovered. Seriously.

The Astralcodex link has a YouTube URL to a woman purportedly reading the Epic in the original tongue.

That is a very idiosyncratic interpretation of the tables of patriarchs in Genesis.

A more orthodox interpretation is that Cain's line is the urban, civilization-creating line, you have metallurgy, music, cities, trade, all coming from that line. This is because Cain represented agriculture, whereas Abel represented cattle herding, thus nomadic, not rooted lifestyles.

After Cain killed Abel (e.g. sedentary agriculture replaced nomadism in most places), it was natural for Cain to build a city as he was not nomadic. It was not for "protection" from his fellow man, but merely the continuation of his choice to be a tiller of the soil rather than a wandering nomad. God's demand for Cain to be a "wanderer" in the land of "nod" ("literally 'land of wandering' in Hebrew") is thus the opposite of what Cain did -- he settled down and built a city. This creates a nice picture: Cain choose not to be a wanderer (nomadic cattle herder) but to be a farmer (settle in one place). God told him "You will be a wanderer" but then it says that Cain built a city. So is the message -- those who are rooted in one place on earth are spiritual wanderers, and those who wander are the rooted ones?

Of course everyone is free to read Genesis and get all sorts of meanings out of it, it is ultimately a personal exercise according to your own conscience, but when you say that your reading is the correct one and other people are "mistaken", then you better be able to back it up with some kind of consensus view.

FYI, more modern scholarship has noticed that the seven generations of Cain line up with the 7 "sages" in Sumerian accounts, these were the sages that came from the deep and taught the Sumerians agriculture, metallurgy, etc, and people have been exploring associations between the names of these sages and the names in the line of Cain.

Another interesting area of the study is that the lines of Shem are basically the same names as that of Cain, but Shem has three more figures. That certainly isn't an accident - the documentary hypothesis people say it is the same line, just copied over from different places, but that is an old view and I think a minority one. There are all sorts of discussions about that similarity.

Learning latin in school as a kid/teenager vastly improved my ability to learn english. Also helped alot with latinisms and academic lingo, which feels just natural, having internalised its semantic roots. So imho your statement it's not a universal truth. Still wouldn't learn a dead language as a grown up though.

A big practical difficulty is the pressure for languages to continue to evolve in different directions when speaker communities are even slightly separated (hence the difference in present-day varieties of English, which is probably growing larger over time rather than smaller, based on (almost, approximately) a single common ancestor just a couple of centuries ago in the time of the British Empire and colonial expansion).

People can decide to try to prevent dialects from forming and diverging

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning

but they have to actively work against it if they want to prevent it, and a lot of the common means of doing so historically have been pretty harsh (e.g. corporal punishment in schools for using disfavored varieties). I guess this is partly because the consensus that we should centralize and unify and standardize language, for all of its logistical and economic and cultural benefits, is mostly a central government/imperial metropole impulse rather than something that the general public is super-attracted to.

Standardizing language and letting it diverge both have cultural benefits! Just different ones. The standardization benefit is that more people can access a much larger body of culture without linguistic barriers and without needing translation or explanations, and cultural conversations can grow larger, with more direct participants in a given conversation or genre. The diversity benefit is that the language differences themselves can acquire, or mediate, cultural phenomena and cultural creativity.

English doesn't have a significant tradition of language planning the way that some of the continental European languages do, and this is posing a (minor) challenge to English's role as a global language, as there are sometimes genuine difficulties of intelligibility between English varieties, and again I think those differences are getting wider on average rather than narrower. Then again, if we did have such a tradition, it doesn't mean everyone would care to follow it... it's not as though everyone in Latin America cares about what the RAE says (or that they refrain from having meaningfully different vocabulary and grammar between Latin American regions!), or even that everyone in Austria or Switzerland necessary cares what Duden says.