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First, so you can understand what more than half of Jewish names mean

I don't speak Latin or Greek; however I can use a dictionary. If I need to learn what some names mean I can find a book written by a competent scientist which discusses that. If nobody bothered to write a book then I guess it's not that important.

Secondly, so you can understand Homer Simpson.

Now, what is the value in that? :-)

I think the value of each language is proportional to the total number of speakers of that language multiplied by the importance of written works in that language and divided by availability of good translations.

Some very old Chinese books were never translated, and they are insightful - so you need to learn Chinese. If you work for a Chinese company (in China) it probably is a good idea to pick up some Chinese.

However languages of small tribes often have no writing system, and there are no books written in them. Nobody is intentionally trying to kill those languages, they die all on their own, just because there is less interest in learning them, and few people to talk to in them. Or to put it differently: how much more valuable your message will be if you say it in Elbonian instead of French, for example? It is not a secret that some language sometimes offers a better word than some other, but is the society interested in a minute gain if it has to heavily pay for it in complexity?

It may be that in a few hundred years all languages on the planet will consolidate into one, just because it makes plenty of sense. Only die-hard scholars will want to read Leo Tolstoy's works in his native language; everyone else will gladly settle for a translation. In fact, that might be a good idea because it takes a long time to master a language, and your own interpretation of the text would be for many years poorer than a translation made by a professional.

If I were to guess, future chances of complex languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean are quite limited. That's because it takes so long to learn the writing (and it requires an ability to recognize complex images.) Japan has Katakana, though; China has pinyin - but ultimately English is one of simplest languages on Earth, and at the same time most of scientific literature today is in English, and pretty much everything worth translating is translated into it... so eventually larger local languages will join the languages of tribes in disuse.

Ladino was spoken in Spain and around the Mediterranean by Jews. It was their lingua franca ~ before the far later Yiddish, or certainly modern Hebrew.

So, why learn Ladino ~ and how hard is it. Ladino is your basic Latin with a far richer vocabulary. At the same time if you'd like to read a Medieval book in the original language, and it looks like Latin or Spanish, but not quite, that's Ladino.

Historians of the period as well as economic analysts into examining the entrails of 2000 years of just one thing after the other have to learn Ladino.

Now, Mingo ~ that one is more difficult. It's your basic non-Confederation Iroquois language ~ but, like Ladino, with a broader vocabulary.

So, you don't want to bother with it ~ but that'll keep you out of Mingo Camp where all sorts of folks go in the summer to dress and live like Iroquois!

Those Oklidokly words Homer Simpson uses? That's Mingo.

In their day the Mingo and their warrior elite were the most adanced Indians in North America.

Modern dictionaries tend to ignore both Ladino and Mingo so you get rather elaborate confabulations about what a certain word means when all you'd need to do was find a Ladino or Mingo dictionary to set the record straight. Alas, both kinds of dictionaries are difficult to lay your hands on.

Regarding the future of Chinese, Bill Gates has made sure the character language survives for eternity ~ there's a very good relationship between Windows/Office ideographs and Chinese ideographs. Most folks never notice. Then there are the more advanced "script" characters, which appear to be valid add-ons to the Chinese script character language.

It's not that English is sucking in all the others ~ rather, when it comes to Chinese languages, English has much more in common with them than the average person knows.

The problem with learning to speak Ancient Greek is there is no one to converse with in that language. There is the advantage that no native speaker can tell you that you are mispronouncing a word.

Learning to read Ancient Greek, on the other hand, is quite worthwhile. There is a lot of great literature in the language which can be better appreciated in the original than in a translation. An added benefit is that if you take it as a college course, you aren't going to be asked to write an essay on "How I spent my summer vacation" in the language.