Ancient post is ancient. I've been flip-flopping on this whole issue of language extinction and preservation, and it's really hard to leave the "if it's so culturally important, how come nobody cared to use it to communicate culture?" position by some point. Maybe this will prompt discussion, maybe I'll get lynched. Let's roll. I agree with you, spirit of the Talk Like a Yoda Day's past, but few people of ability could ever take 11 years to write something, averaging out 40 syllables per week under a lucrative patronage.Language isn't anywhere near as much of an art form as it once was, and in my opinion, that is a shame.
Kriwaczek makes the point that from an external perspective, civilization can be evenly divided into "Babylonian" and "not Babylonian" as civilization centered in and around Babylon had about a 2000-year hang time. He also argues that they were nasty - a lot of their recorded cruelty to others is likely hyperbole meant to scare the provincials but theirs was a nasty and brutish empire, to themselves and to others. They were also highly regimented - the modern analog Kriwaczek uses for Babylon is the USSR, with its politbureau, its nomenklatura and its cronyism-based welfare state. Babylon didn't use coinage for internal trade, everything was state diktat; not only that, their language and math was deliberately obscure and cloistered so that their technology couldn't be stolen by the barbarians they relied on for luxury goods. We don't know exactly how the Babylonian empire fell because they started using papyrus rather than clay to write on and all the records are gone. We do know that they were superseded when their trading partners in Anatolia developed a pidgin Babylonian to trade (and do math) among themselves which effectively cut the Babylonians out of their monopoly status. Babylonian was lost as a language for over 2000 years while the barbarians kept at heel for a millennium proceeded to invent science and culture. History is a push/pull between old and new. Old never wins. You can be mad about that but ultimately the point of language is for dialog and the easier that dialog, the more successful the language.