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Sanskrit you ignorant maggot :-) And yes, it is spoken and in active use. Every Hindu religious ceremony is in Sanskrit, and every priest and read/write and speak it. Given that there are 800 millions plus Hindus, that's a lot of Sanskrit out there.

Sanskrit is still in active use, indeed. But to my knowledge it is regarded as a purely scholarly language. I have known a few Brahmin (pl?) and have discussed this with them, as learning Sanskrit was at one time a hobby of mine.

Sankrit was the ancestor of modern Hindi, but there is about as much similarity between the two languages as there is between modern Amer'can English and the Olde.

Also, to be a little nit-picky, there is no "Sanskrit Alphabet". Not unless what you're referring to is Devanagari which is still in use to represent modern Hindi.

Speaking now to the issue of preserving dead languages, the uninitiated may see no use for the scholarly preservation of the spoken word of a dead people. Think of this as someone disinterested in computers saying "Who the fuck cares about C++, C# or Java"? Granted the analogy isn't perfect, because the reasons for speaking Tlingit (for example) are a bit more subtle than wanting to learn a language that helps drive technology. But there is little doubt in Linguistic research that language helps us not only to represent the world, these tools that our cultures give us also help to SHAPE our perceptions of our envirnoment, even ourselves. Language is the gateway to a culture's psychology.

The sociological influences of one people upon another may not be apparent or seem important until pieces of our puzzles are discovered and others fall into place and still different puzzles are found. In short, in some sense you can't dismiss the importance or relavance of a datum until new relavancies emerge. If that makes me a packrat of ideas, all I can say is SQUEAK. ;)

Armenian script is shown in this link in a rather square style like for typewriters - but handwritten armenian may well be more rounded. In the 1500s and before, there would have been lots of variants - And there's nothing stopping it being an unknown cryptolect in an only-slightly-less-unknown variant alphabet.

Actually, as far as I know, the main way Chinese enter text is with keyboards that have BoPoMoFo characters on them. (Scroll down the page a bit to see the BoPoMoFo part). The one Chinese keyboard I have seen did also have latin characters on the keycaps too, so they at least have exposure to latin characters. Plus, I wouldn't be surprised if there also existed a system for Chinese similar to the sometimes used Japanese system of Romaji->Kana->Kanji for input.

Actually, no. Glagolitic was indeed invented by Cyrill and Methodius, in the 9th century. I don't know where the previous poster got the St. Clement reference. See here for the character set and a bit of history.

These two also invented cyrillic. The difference is that glagolitic didn't survive very long, while the cyrillic is still in use today. The last country to use glagolitic in any quantity is Croatia, up to the end of the 19th century.