Аннотация: I've written this essay about problems of learning Elvish and other "non-real" languages. I've done it in English - though don't know why? May be, right before this text I was reading the English lessons of Quenya...
In the deepest, deepest soul's bottom almost everybody has the sense of what the harmony should be. We listen to music, we listen to surrounding voices of people, mechanisms, animals and winds. We can find some sounds amusing or just fun. But we always know that there is a difference between fun sound and harmonized, clear and correct sound. We, the People, came from the Nature - and we understand which sounds are closer to the last and what emotional features are loaded in them. That's why among us exist the feelings of what every human language holds in itself. For example - the modern English is associated with the sphere of making money, counting, some dynamic lifestyle, while the French is better for speaking and singing about love and women. Or, the Spanish for expressing of hot passions. And the German for planning and managing wars, for describing of physics and mechanisms. Russian - for everything (as Russians themselves suppose).
Every language is the main carrier of national character - its cause and consequense. So, I can say that any language in its complexity is the real song. The song of the national's soul.
The Language - is the Song.
Our world is consists of thousands of these songs. Some of them are dying with a stable or increasing speed.
I do not have to be an Elf to say that dissappearing of the languages is akin to the Death of Life and Beauty. People continue to live - but in the slightly meager world. It's awfull, really awfull - to observe how the Tree of the Beaty constantly declines down, loosing leaves.
Of course, the change of the Old by the New is inevitably, it's a great godgiven principle of the progress. But who said that saving of the dispersing splendiferous phenomenon is the stupid activity? I can tell more - as God created us with His/Her own image this means that we also can create something. Though masterpieces of the Mortal Humanity are not so perfect as godmade - anyway they are the results of the sacral process of the creativity, approximating us to the perception of the Universal Beatiful Cause.
It's possible to call this as the principle of Devanagari (the sanskrit 'alphabet of the gods').
Thus, I do not claim the false thing saying that the more we know in the languages of different nations the more we approach to the ability to understand God's ideas.
Why to understand? - in order to be Human, not Animal.
In other words, the more we deep in the structures of different songs - the more we can sing by ourselves.
I, of course, recognize that this short essay is insufficient to express the motives of such difficult and practically useless activity, as learning of the dissappearing languages, like Welsh or Manx, or even individually counstructed - like the Quenya of Tolkien's elfes.
But one statement should be neatly gotten - the learning and inventing of the non-actual languages isn't the silly hobby, but Godblessed Way of Searching Life.