I’m writing a story in which a man finds a document written around the year 913 in Old French which contains some information and references that make it difficult to accept that it is that old.
But since the language use of that era is in some dispute, it is difficult to be absolutely sure what was meant–this is critical to the plot.
It raises for me the question: How might someone go about writing something today to have the best chance of it being read and understood about 1000 years from now?
For argument’s sake, let’s say the target audience in this case are normally educated people living in North America speaking whatever English turns into between now and then.
I suspect that modern-day English would be known by academics, if not a wider number than that, primarily because such a huge volume of books and knowledge are written in it. It wouldn’t make sense to lose all that knowledge just because of linguistic changes; at worst, it would be kind of a similar situation to the Catholic Church keeping its archives in Latin; some people will be able to read it.
I think even aiming a document at college educated people 1000 years from now who speak the vernacular would be a really hard thing to extrapolate. For all we know, they may be able to plug a chip into their head that would give them the ability to read whatever language they want. Or, they may be speaking some sort of Anglic-language that bears as much relation to English as French does to Latin. There’s no way of knowing.
Does it have to be in English? Why not Esperanto? It’s not that I think Esperanto will be widely known, much less used, but it was developed systematically, with word roots borrowed from different languages. Esperanto should be easy for linguists of the future to decipher, even if no one knows what it is.
Perhaps the Rosetta Stone treatment; have it be several copies of the same document in multiple languages. That increases the chance that at least one of the languages will still be known, and makes it more likely to be decipherable even if only fragments of the various languages survive. Plus, that alone will make it valuable just as the actual Rosetta Stone was.
Sed, ĉu vi povas kompreni la signifon de tiu ĉi alinion? Jes, Esperanto estas konstruita el romanclingva vortamaso, sed ĝi funkcias ege malsimile ol la romancaj aŭ germanaj lingvoj. Konstruite, ĝi estas kuniĝema lingvo, pli simila ol la magjara.*
(Why yes, I speak Esperanto. )
But, can you understand the meaning of this paragraph? Yes, Esperanto is built out a Romance-language word stock, but it functions very differently to Romance or Germanic languages. In its construction, it is an agglutinative language, more similar to Hungarian.
A couple of big EMPs would knock out the long-distance infrastructure and anything that wasn’t faraday-shielded. Things with rotating parts–fans, hard drives–wouldn’t last centuries even in ideal conditions; the Internet, like the road system, depends on continual maintenance. It’s actually quite fragile.
Everything from nuclear war, asteroid strikes, ecological collapse and recovery over some centuries, to simply a slow erosion of information as it is deleted or overwritten or becomes unreadable. A thousand years is a long, long time in human terms.
I was thinking the same thing, but to help future readers with interpretation. E.g. if you write the document in Modern American English and, say, Spanish (pick a variety), say, and use the word “character” in the English version, the future reader may not be certain whether or not you meant a character in the sense of a person in a story (e.g. Tom Sawyer), or the sense of a letter that forms a component of written language (e.g. the letter R). If your Spanish version includes “personaje”, then it helps the future reader understand that the English version means the story related meaning because the Spanish word doesn’t include the other sense.
Get enough languages on the document so as to minimize the effect of future language drift and the unlikely event of loss of knowledge of a language.
E.g., maybe have the document in English, German, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Polish, Chinese, Swahili, Navajo, Hindi, and Punjabi.
Also, it might help that there are several groupings above of closely related languages (English and German, Spanish and French, Hebrew and Arabic, Russian and Polish, and Hindi and Punjabi) to help the future reader notice cognates if, say, they speak Spanish, but French was abandoned 500 years from now and is only well known in a few academic departments and among a few eccentric historical reenactors.
But, like, it’d only be 39 generations for my daughter…
Well. Okay, so we should like totally write like her. I am like SO not kidding, because REALLY, here’s my point, right, she is like MUCH closer to those readers in age and like relatableness. I mean come ON, if you let some parentals do it, we’re indeed talking mondo dweeb time.
Really, your mom’s note would be like “Here’s an NPR show or somethin,” and the future Bill & Ted types would be like “Wha..?” and your mom would say “Listen to Prairie Home Companion!” And the future Marty McFly would be all chill and your mom would totally FREEEEak out and be all like "Pay attention when I’m writing cursive to you!’ And the Clockwork Orange guys would be like “Me and my droogs are goinna hang at the Korova Milkbar so we don’t do some ultra-violence on your mom.”
So it’s like OBvious, hello, have my daughter-type do the like author thing.
Write it in Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi and Arabic. Those are the five languages with largest numbers of native speakers and total speakers. Considering there are people alive today who can read equivalent wide spread languages from 1000 years ago, I would think this is as safe as possible.
Here is a 350 page treatise (very large PDF) researching into how best to warn people not to dig above the WIPP site in New Mexico for the next 10,000 years.
Granted, much of the above is about using physical markers that stand the test of time/erosion/vandalism/etc. But there is still plenty of design going into the written warnings. Of particular note:
(Navajo is native to the area.)
Leaving space for future translations is another feature.
Don’t use slang at all. I really like A.C.Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories but his reference to a “life preserver” puzzled me. I finally researched and decided that it was probably what we would call a “sap” today. If anyone would care to combat ignorance . . . feel free. Doyle’s slang names for different carriages are all just carriages, so I didn’t puzzle over them.
I’d say use pictograms. And use mathematical symbols as much as possible. I think common math symbols like equal signs are least likely to drift. I would build a library with words equated with pictures using math symbols, and then create the narrative of whatever you want to communicate.
This is a pretty wise idea, especially if your message is less than a thousand words. If there’s been enough linguistic drift that your English meaning is vague, your Spanish, Chinese, or Arabic meaning should be clearer.
One particular document springs to mind. It’s about a thousand years old, but is still mostly comprehensible today. It’s called the Bayeaux Tapestry. People can look at the pictures and get a general sense of the story, even if they can’t read the captions written in 11th century Latin. Give your information in pictures, as much as is possible, and it will be understood however much the language changes.
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