Neither use complicated words if you don’t have to, nor odd grammatical constructions.
Sorry, I will begin again.
Use easy words. Do not use contractions. Keep the grammar simple.
Always. That is the assumption for all of these prediction threads, beginning at roughly the fifty-year mark if not sooner. Further, the assumption is that most, if not all, information about modern-day life and language is lost, because, you know, we don’t know anything at all about what the citizens of Rome circa 400 AD spoke, ate, or used to govern themselves. And, in case you haven’t noticed, we are a perfect and precise analogue of roughly one half of a civilization that lasted 1,800 years, only we’re the half that died after 800 years and that’s due to happen right… about… now.
A lot depends on what sort of information one wishes to be readable. Technical information, using numbers and constants and refering to known scientific priciples in a descriptive manner would probably be easiest, especially if a series of primers could be includied, each guiding the futire reader through to the next level of complexity and understanding.
Harder stuff would be the most culturally chronocentric stuff. Lady Gaga and current political humour are not going to mean much to people 1000 yrs from now.
I do agree with the rosetta stone approach. Use multiple diverse languages.
Also, a carefully packaged solar powered sim card reader with a digital video could be used, pictographic instructions on its surface. If the volatility of memory cards bothers you, archivial quality DVDs should, if adequately stored, work in a similar senario. These could contain language primers, reading instruction, a copy of the document read aloud, with each word highlighted as it is spoken.
“Greetings, people of the year 3011. If you are hearing, reading or comprehending this, you should know that Mr Ducty offers a complete range of furnace duct cleaning solutions, to fit every budget and household. Are you aware that your furnace ducts contain dust and the mites that live on them in staggeringly huge amounts? You can choose not to act and expose your family and house hold vistors to the threat of disease, asthma, alergies and even death by simply doing nothing. Or you can press one now and we will be happy to connect you to one of our many representitives.”
I would say use a classical language like Latin, Ancient Greek, or Biblical Hebrew.
There are plenty of people today who can read stuff written thousands of years ago in these languages and it’s very likely that there will be many people in a thousand years who study them for academic or religious purposes.
By that logic if you pick a single language, it would be Arabic. There are 420 million current speakers, and even if day to day arabic drifts over time, the arabic of the quran is likely to still be studied in 1000 years.
I’m not sure if Arabic is distinguished between modern and ancient like Hebrew.
The trouble with using modern Arabic is that it can be expected to change over the next 1000 years just like modern English and modern Hebrew.
But yes, if there is an ancient Arabic which is studied by Muslim scholars just like Latin, Ancient Greek, and Biblical Hebrew are studied by classicists and religious scholars, then it would be a viable choice.
we’re in the digital age, it’s disconcerting that all this wealth of information is so transient. i would assume that we’re more competent about keeping lasting records than the Romans did. how much physical space is needed to digitally store all the information at the National Library?
The Quran is written in arabic which is intelligible to modern arabic speakers and all muslims are supposed to study and read the quran in it’s original unchanged form. They don’t translate it into “modern arabic” as it’s claimed to be a revealed text.
So with arabic you have the advantage of 420 million current speakers (far more than latin, ancient greek or biblical hebrew) and that it’s likely that future muslims will still have to study the original text of the quran no matter what linguistic drift happens in everyday arabic.
Well, eventually they will have to. The language they speak day to day might not be called “Modern Arabic,” it might be called something else in the same way that no languages today are called “Modern Latin.”
I would say that it’s not so much the number of current speakers as the incentive to study the old language. Probably in a thousand years, most of the descendants of those 420 million people will be speaking something very different as their mother tongues.
Probably not. The relationship between arabic and the quran is unique in that it to some degree anchors the arabic language from drift. See here:
http://www.al-islam.org/al-serat/arabic.htm
The quran is already 1400 years old and modern arabic speaking muslims can still read it, because its a key part of their religion that they study the original text and do their daily prayers in the original language of the Quran.
for the record I’m an atheist, but if you have to pick a language with the least linguistic drift over time, due to the Quran-Arabic relation, Arabic would be it.
Well when they read it, does it seem like normal Arabic to them or does it seem more like Shakespeare would to you or me?
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. Out there you’ll find people with collections of movies on Betamax tape in boxes at the back of their garage, because they cant find a machine to play them. Anything stored digitally might well be unreadable 25 years from now, let alone 1000.
Best bet is to engrave the message on a stone tablet.
The point that you seem to be missing is that if the majority of english speakers had to recite passages from shakespeare five times a day then we would still speak a language that was much closer to Shakespeare’s english.
I’m not a comparative linguist, but someone correct me if I’m wrong, modern arabic is relatively close to quran era arabic because of the ongoing and constant link between Arabic and the Quran.
Whoa, all I did was ask a question. And I don’t know the answer.
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.
Write in Chinese characters. Mandarin as we know it won’t exist in 1,000 years time, but characters will. Use “classical” Chinese format as much as possible. That’s how poetry from the Tang dynasty (just about 1,000) is perfectly legible today.
Another example is the Georgia Guidestones, in which a relatively short message was engraved in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian and a shorter message in Babylonian, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
It is? The best way to make records last has always been to make copies and store them at multiple locations around the world. The official channels are unwilling to do that, but the pirates are certainly making it happen for a huge variety of things that otherwise would be ephemeral.
The storage space of single companies is often compared to multiples of the Library of Congress, meaning that company could store the entire contents of the Library of Congress that many times. Storage space is only getting cheaper.
Hard to know what the average size of a book is, but I just downloaded HG Wells’ “The Time Machine” from Project Gutenberg, and it was a 76K zip file. So if we call an average book 100K, then you can get about ten million of them on a 1 TB drive.
The Library of Congress has about 33 million volumes, so if enough of those are really just pamphlets or theses or something small, you only need about 3TB to hold it. You can buy an external 3TB USB drive at Newegg for $130.
Of course, for books with lots of pictures, the size quickly goes up, but the point is you could very easily store the LofC in your bomb shelter, and have plenty of space left over for guns and freeze-dried food.
I’m old enough to remember when a 10MB drive added about a thousand bucks to the price of your IBM PC. Now you can get a TB for $40. That is an increase in bytes per dollar of 250 million percent.
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.
So what you end up with is whole scads of information stored (somewhat securely, but not entirely - even bits degrade over time) and after long enough, no one can find or make the hardware necessary to access the data.
Doesn’t do us any good to have everything in the LoC on flash drives (DVD/BluRay/magnetic tape/minidisks) if no one has a USB port (insert necessary reader hardware) and compatible software to read it with in 1000 years because we’ve moved on to squishware in our heads.
tl;dr: storage SPACE isn’t the problem. Spending lots of time keeping up with the tech advances and constantly manually re-stowing everything from old formats into the current storage format is the problem.