This would be true for a language which is really "dead". There is a sense in which it is not entirely true for this particular language, though. It has had such a profound influence on our world (first the western world, and then the larger world through the western world) that to some degree the language still 'lives'. Moreover, the effect of the Greek Bible is that, for a sizable portion of our world, that word "still speaks to us today", and the transmission of the meaning and sense of the language has been well documented and reliable overall.Stephen Hughes wrote:In learning a dead language, the foreignness of a foreign language is dulled or even lost. We are spared the confronting experience of culture shock and personal re-orientation, in which we must find new expression for our same humanity. We are like tourists who walk through a foreign country in isolation and non-interaction with the world, bringing all of our conceptualisations and interpretations of life to bear on the experience of travel, and who go home a little richer, but not fundamentally different.
That does not mean we can experience their world, but we have inherited a considerable record of that experience from Biblical texts and extra-Biblical texts.