It always amazes me how even smart, educated people can hold such ignorant views on linguistics. Go ahead, try and be a prescriptivist. You will lose 100% of the time.
This isn't black or white. It's about slowing the inevitable, yes, but it increases the usefulness of text over time. Less of a probability of material, including scientific, being forgotten.
This isn't about some minor annoyance, I'm pointing out something I truly believe holds society back, though not necessarily to some major degree
How much literature has disappeared from history because certain languages or vernaculars fell out of use?
Hell, why do we even bother teaching classical English if it's just going to change, right? We should just let kids learn from their parents and media - no use being a prescriptivist!
And yes, I do believe that some languages and dialects are vastly more expressive and unambiguous than others, but I don't expect the average person to understand that. Ultimately we're all free to speak as we wish but don't shame me for trying to preserve the necessary consistency that makes language useful.
My intent was humorous, but not to shame; I didn't mean it to come out that way.
> How much literature has disappeared from history because certain languages or vernaculars fell out of use?
The answer is not very much, comparatively. Most of the known losses of old works has been due to destruction, not communal loss of ability to decipher. Here's a summary of objects with unknown scripts:
