# How to Best Write Something so it Can be Understood 1000 Years from Now **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 10, 2011, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783 "2011-09-10T01:50:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 8:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/41 "2011-09-12T08:41:15Z")
> [@Lasciel](#): > > The main problem you run into isn’t the storage _space_, it’s the reading hardware format itself. > > None of our computing hardware is designed to last for more than 20-30 years at the outside. There’s no point to make it last longer, because the developments are happening so quickly that everything’s obsolete in a matter of a decade at most. Even then, most formats are designed for use, not long-term storage ability. Paper degrades, too. It’s just a different time scale. For long-term storage, you need to jump from one format to the next in as lossless a way as you can manage. This is not news: Libraries and librarians (well, those concerned with archiving) have known this for decades, if not centuries, and have been doing the newsprint-to-micro-stuff dance and others since before computers were widely used in libraries. The difference with digital is that ‘lossless’ is no longer a pipe dream as long as you don’t do something dumb like store your stuff in a format with DRM attached that you cannot crack. Luckily, DRM people _can’t_ crack is nonexistent. _Aren’t allowed to_ is a different story, but, hey, pirates to the rescue. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 9:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/42 "2011-09-12T09:25:09Z")
Another approach to this would be to use a self-unpacking symbology, like some of the approaches that have been designed with interstellar communication in mind. > **[Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_Extraterrestrial_Intelligence)** > > The communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) is a branch of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) that focuses on composing and deciphering interstellar messages that theoretically could be understood by another technological civilization. The best-known CETI experiment of its kind was the 1974 Arecibo message composed by Frank Drake. > There are multiple independent organizations and individuals engaged in CETI research; the generic application of abbreviations CETI a... However, this probably does impose limits on what you can talk about in the document. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 11:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/43 "2011-09-12T11:02:43Z")
> [@brocks](#): > > That’s really amazing when you think about it. Shakespeare’s plays are only 400 years old, but most people need extensive footnotes even for a modernized version. Chaucer is a little over 600, and you have to be a scholar to get more than every third word or so. And Beowulf might as well be in Greek, but it’s still some centuries younger than the Quran. And the oldest paragraphs preserved in Spanish are from the 11th century but I can understand them just fine, and the greater difficulty of the _Cantar de Mío Cid_ (c. 1200) is the amount of technical words which have fallen out of use. I can’t write or speak Latin (I only took a year and it’s been a long time), but we borrowed an upperclassman’s _De bello gallico_ just for kicks at the beginning of that year of Latin and, while we certainly wouldn’t have been able to produce a translation, we were surprised at the amount we understood. English has changed a lot more than Spanish (or Italian, or French, or Catalan, or Portuguese); I have no idea what are the relative change speeds of other languages, but I’ve long wondered whether it’s English that’s the outlier. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2011, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/44 "2011-09-14T03:48:07Z")
> [@](#): > > Quoth **Peter Morris** : > The problem is that in today’s world, technology becomes obsolete quickly. Plenty of information has been lost in the digital era has been lost because they no longer make the equipment to read it. That has been a problem, certainly. But it’s an easy problem to solve, once you’re aware of it, and folks now are aware of it. I’d bet money that data in electronic format right now is a lot more likely to last for more than a century than data on paper. The electronic data surely won’t be stored on the same physical medium a century from now, but it’s much, much easier to transfer it to new media as it becomes available than it is for paper. Even with a xerographic copier or the like, you have to copy each page individually, which takes a very long time, as opposed to copying the equivalent file in a fraction of a second. On the topic of stable languages, meanwhile, I’ve heard that modern Icelandic is not just mutually intelligible with, but identical to, the Icelandic of the ancient sagas. I’m not sure why that would be, though, since so far as I know the language doesn’t have any religious significance like Arabic does. ---
**Author:** ![mnemosyne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@mnemosyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mnemosyne)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2011, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/45 "2011-09-14T05:16:23Z")
> [@Sunspace](#): > > _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. **Sunspace,** I am inordinately happy to see that you got to post this. That was cool to read. And I got the gist of it, if not the entire text. It probably helps that I also know French, and recognized the word “magjara”/Magyar. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2011, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/46 "2011-09-14T12:16:01Z")
I suspect that in 1000 years people / androids / whatever with the inclination to study our era will know more about us and our language than we do. This is one of those situations where there is not a symmetry between past and future. We have difficulty finding out some things about the past because few records were kept at the time, they were generally written on perishable materials, and often many spoken languages were barely written down at all. Whereas in our era we record many trillions of times the amount of data, in thousands of different types of media, and data is continually being transferred from one media to another (so it’s not like existing media need to last 1000 years, though some may). It’s rather like how it is difficult for me to research some aspects of what I was doing 25 years ago, but I will have no problem in 25 years time finding out virtually everything about my life right now. ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2011, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/47 "2011-09-15T01:42:47Z")
> [@mnemosyne](#): > > **Sunspace,** I am inordinately happy to see that you got to post this. > > That was cool to read. And I got the gist of it, if not the entire text. It probably helps that I also know French, and recognized the word “magjara”/Magyar. 😃 _la hungara_ is also an acceptable word for “Hungarian” [language]. ---
**Author:** ![Rigamarole](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@Rigamarole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rigamarole)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2011, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/48 "2011-09-15T02:03:21Z")
Easy - you write it like an Ikea furniture assembly manual: all pictures, no words. 50,000 years from now everything we’ve ever written will be total gibberish to all but scholars and translation algorithms, but any idiot could assemble a goddamn Ikea bedframe in an hour flat, no problem. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2011, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/49 "2011-09-15T02:19:42Z")
Write like Yoda, you must, for live forever, _Star Wars_ shall. ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2011, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/50 "2011-09-15T02:26:54Z")
> [@matt\_mcl](#): > > _la hungara_ is also an acceptable word for “Hungarian” [language]. _Dankon!_ ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2011, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/51 "2011-09-15T02:27:55Z")
> [@Rigamarole](#): > > Easy - you write it like an Ikea furniture assembly manual: all pictures, no words. > > 50,000 years from now everything we’ve ever written will be total gibberish to all but scholars and translation algorithms, but any idiot could assemble a goddamn Ikea bedframe in an hour flat, no problem. Chinese started out as pictures, and look where they are now. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2011, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/52 "2011-09-15T14:12:11Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > On the topic of stable languages, meanwhile, I’ve heard that modern Icelandic is not just mutually intelligible with, but identical to, the Icelandic of the ancient sagas. I’m not sure why that would be, though, since so far as I know the language doesn’t have any religious significance like Arabic does. Becuase [Icelandic linguistic purism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_Icelandic) is the law. Seriously. Iceland has a law that new Icelandic words have to be based on old Icelandic words, thus keeping the language “pure.” (though loaner words do creep in). I think it’s really cool. ETA: So 1000 years from now, Icelanders will be able to understand anything written today in Icelandic. ---
**Author:** ![Ratmanxx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ba8739/32.png) [@Ratmanxx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ratmanxx)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2011, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/53 "2011-09-15T14:26:27Z")
> [@A\_Man\_A\_Plan\_A\_Canal](#): > > Good evening, Straightdopers; AMAPAC here. > > 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. > > Thanks!..AMAPAC A letter written in binary language would most likely survive any changes in language. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2011, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/54 "2011-09-15T14:29:46Z")
Binary language? What’s that? ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2011, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/55 "2011-09-15T14:42:51Z")
Yeah, there’s no such thing as “binary language.” There’s only binary code. The assignment of a particular character such as the letter ‘A’ to a particular binary number is arbitrary, there already have been more than one code, and a new code could be invented to replace them any time. But maybe ASCII will still be used 1000 years from now. A set of three numbers canj be recognised as meaning ‘c’ ‘a’ and ‘t’. But the word ‘cat’ will probably be known only to a few scholars of ancient languages. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2011, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/56 "2011-09-15T17:08:14Z")
> [@](#): > > Becuase Icelandic linguistic purism is the law. Then again, French has a similar law, but it doesn’t actually work, since you can’t throw people in jail for using the “wrong” words. And for _any_ single law to stay in place for over a millennium is itself remarkable, and points towards some underlying reason. ---
**Author:** ![hibernicus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hibernicus/32/2802_2.png) [@hibernicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hibernicus)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2011, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/57 "2011-09-15T17:52:23Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Then again, French has a similar law, but it doesn’t actually work, since you can’t throw people in jail for using the “wrong” words. I think there’s a widespread misunderstanding on this board and elsewhere of the normative role of the Académie in respect of the French language. French evolves like any other language and the Académie does not “lay down the law”; it merely advises on correct usage and compiles a dictionary. Its advice is routinely ignored, for example when it decided that “oignon” should be spelt “ognon”. For this reason I think people are wrong to say “English is different from other languages (French, Spanish) because it doesn’t have an Academy”. The main effect of an academy seems to be to make people subtly less confident in the correctness of their own speech, and to make them question whether something is “a real word”. But there are plenty of sources of prescriptivism in English too that achieve the same effect without a centralised academy. ---
**Author:** ![filmore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7993a0/32.png) [@filmore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmore)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2011, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/58 "2011-09-15T18:33:20Z")
I was thinking about this recently. My daughter is a big reader, but she doesn’t like to read older books. She says the writing is weird. It’s true. There is a different style to the writing in a Nancy Drew book compared to something like Harry Potter. Kids get used to the more modern style and the older books get ignored. I imagine her grandchildren will think the writing in Harry Potter is weird too. ---
**Author:** ![EdwardLost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/bbe5ce/32.png) [@EdwardLost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EdwardLost)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2011, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783/59 "2011-09-15T23:45:20Z")
Think about ancient Egyptian: Thousands of texts carved in stone and desert-preserved papyrus over thousands of years - and then it was just forgotten. All those monuments sitting in plain sight and still folks just stopped caring enough to remember how to read them. If not for the lucky fact that Coptic held on long enough for someone to finally come along and give a damn, Egyptian might have been lost forever. Civilization doesn’t have to fall (or fall very far) for a lot of knowledge to get lost. There just has to be an interest gap. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-best-write-something-so-it-can-be-understood-1000-years-from-now/595783.md?page=2)