Languages living and dead

Omniglot reports that Coptic, long thought dead anyway, is now taking its last gasps. Latin, of course, breathed its last a long time ago. One unfortunate side effect of this, of course, is that we tend to teach dead languages differently from living ones. While Assimil teaches Latin like a language for chatter, for example, 90% of what you find on Latin is linguistic embalming fluid, designed to preserve the corpse, not to re-animate it. If we want to sustain dying languages or learn dead ones, they need to be treated as vehicles for communicating living thoughts - thoughts of our own - rather than as tools for getting at the ideas of dead guys. So somebody call the Pimsleur guys while we've still got a few native speakers to record the lessons for Coptic. And when are we going to get Pimsleur Latin? That would be muy cool!