"Old World Languages"
What are "Old World Languages"?
Today, all the people of the world speak the same language, save for varying dialects of different places, but they can still understand each other very well. But things weren’t always this way. In ancient times people spoke a wide variety of languages, most of which now remain completely forgotten. All of them might have suffered the same fate, were it not for a good amount of data and literature people tried their best to preserve in either digital or physical form. However, despite their best efforts, even most of this has been lost to time in the underground labyrinths people would hide in during the apocalyptic years.
Translating Old World Languages
Nevertheless, the linguists of our modern era are working tirelessly to decipher all the preserved old texts. So far, they’ve been able to translate the ancient alphabet and parts of some languages. Coincidentally, a lot of data seemed to have been written in one language, later revealed to be called “english”. This is the language best known and understood today, mainly by historians and other researchers of ancient text. For them it's vital to know these languages for learning more about ancient people and their cultures.
After english was more or less researched and translated, researchers went on to try and crack the code on some other languages. So far they have made great progress on spanish and german, but have run into another obstacle with some other languages. As it appears, there is a second ancient alphabet that was used in ancient times.
Some researchers are convinced that, while making great progress, they have barely even scratched the surface of ancient languages. It is speculated that ancient people have been using far more numerous languages and scripts than we have found so far. What is more, many are convinced that most of those are now forever lost on other chinks of Old World that weren’t used in the creation of New World and go left behind for good. But this ties into a whole other theory about these unused remnants of Old World that is quite frankly whole nother can of worms we don’t have time to get into here.
Modern day use and significance
In today's world knowing these languages isn’t really necessary, but it is still very popular among people to learn them. For well educated people it’s generally expected to know at least one of them, for historians and researchers of old texts it’s pretty much unavoidable. While you probably won’t be running into any ancient text in your daily life, and the ones released to the public are translated in our modern language anyway, it sure does give you bragging rights over those poor saps who barely understand a dialect from a different part of the world.
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