I love how historical linguistics, archaeogenetics, and anthropology posts make it to the front page of HN every once in a while. Is this interest all because of Sapiens? Or did Sapiens do well in the ~HN/Silicon Valley community because of some other underlying reason?
> Or did Sapiens do well in the ~HN/Silicon Valley community because of some other underlying reason?
The knowledge gained from the study of historical linguistics, and from there the structure of natural language itself, was foundational to the creation of formal language theory, and from there the creation of the programming languages that we use today, which would not exist if not for the creation of generative grammars.
In that sense, there is a very direct link (down to specific people like Noam Chomsky who researched both natural language and computation) between natural linguistics and computer science.
I clicked to verify my guess that Tocharian languages were indeed linguistic, and not some esoteric branch of computing languages that I might need to know about in some future l33t interview.
If you're curious to science and how things work, you're also curious about how things work in other sciences.
And it's beneficial. Knowing linguistics, antropology or sociology (or about Khoomei singing, which is mentioned in your username) is helpful to stop thinking like "here's how I see X, so everyone should do Y in such and such a way".
