Language that Needs Readers

[Yasna]

Is there any dead language which needs readers, in the sense that there are a bunch of documents of historical interest written in the language, but no one (or a completely insufficient amount of people) to read them and relay their contents to the rest of us? I was recently thinking how that would be a great reason to learn a dead language.

[linguoboy]

In my reading about Korean history, I learned that there's a shortage of readers of Literary Chinese who are interested in texts from the Korean Peninsula. Most people who learn Literary Chinese do so because they're interested in the culture output of China and people who are interested in Korea balk at having to learn a new language with a famously complicated orthography.

[Yasna]

In my reading about Korean history, I learned that there's a shortage of readers of Literary Chinese who are interested in texts from the Korean Peninsula.

That's surprising. I would have thought that in a country as proud of itself as South Korea is, there would be plenty of people willing to go through the pain of learning Literary Chinese in order to better appreciate their own history.

[Bubulus]

One word: Akkadian.

Apparently, there's a ton of clay tablets that are still unread by scholars simply because there's so few who read the language.

[Earwig]

How about Rongorongo. No idea if they're of historical interest or not; no-one can read them to find out.