>> Including texts in Finnish and Hungarian almost ensures that parts of the archive will be lost 1000 years from now. Even if those languages are alive in 1000 years, the likelihood that interpreting period Finnish and Hungarian from 2020 will be possible is far smaller than the likelihood that interpreting period English from 2020 will be possible.
> Being trained as a historian, the idea of throwing away original texts in favour of translations because they're not in « the right language » is hurting my soul.
> If a text is lost because it's only written in Hungarian, it means the Hungarian language is lost. And that means not enough texts written in it were kept.
Yeah, exactly. The GP has it bass ackwards. If you have concerns like the GP about intelligibility, then include both the original and the translation. That way even if Finnish and Hungarian go extinct and the archive is recovered, those parallel texts can be used to recover the Finnish and Hungarian languages themselves.
And I'm sure someone who is reading this is questioning the value of even preserving the Finnish and Hungarian languages when you've already captured the "knowledge" in English. All I have to say to that is future linguists will probably be very frustrated with losing two non-Indo-European languages to study, just like we're frustrated that we can't read Etruscan writings anymore.
I thought the point of this was to preserve technical knowledge. It's not poetry. You can translate it from language to language and it should all be isomorphic, because there is something measurable and concrete underlying both expressions.
> Being trained as a historian, the idea of throwing away original texts in favour of translations because they're not in « the right language » is hurting my soul.
> If a text is lost because it's only written in Hungarian, it means the Hungarian language is lost. And that means not enough texts written in it were kept.
Yeah, exactly. The GP has it bass ackwards. If you have concerns like the GP about intelligibility, then include both the original and the translation. That way even if Finnish and Hungarian go extinct and the archive is recovered, those parallel texts can be used to recover the Finnish and Hungarian languages themselves.
And I'm sure someone who is reading this is questioning the value of even preserving the Finnish and Hungarian languages when you've already captured the "knowledge" in English. All I have to say to that is future linguists will probably be very frustrated with losing two non-Indo-European languages to study, just like we're frustrated that we can't read Etruscan writings anymore.