Language is probably the single biggest discovery humanity has achieved, for it has allowed for everything else to follow from it. From the spoken word came the written word, and from this came hundreds of thousands of other breakthroughs that have been invaluable to the species. However, the languages we spoke in the past are not the languages we speak now, and this has its problems. Scholars will have difficulty learning a language when there are no native speakers to continue its heritage. While we can understand Greek, we do not know for certain how it sounds. Experts agree on a number of things about how the language might have sounded, but they are not infallible. They could be wrong and the language could have sounded completely different.
Google seems to be thinking about this themselves, for they are promoting the Endangered Languages project. This project aims to protect languages from extinction in a number of ways, to better the world of
the future. We have managed to develop languages such as Esperanto in the aim of breaking down the language barrier and creating a global tongue, yet it has not worked alone. Not only this but language could turn into more of a barrier if we all spoke the one language, for many languages and historical documents as well as other culturally significant items would become unreadable
