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> its extremely likely no one will be able to understand our present language 10 000 years from now It's an academic pursuit, but the ancient greek philosopher

> its extremely likely no one will be able to understand our present language 10 000 years from now It's an academic pursuit, but the ancient greek philosophers are still readable in their original language. So are all the surviving biblical manuscripts. These are ~2000 year old text. I find it plausible that a much, much larger corpus of text written in present-day-English will survive the next 10000 years than that which has survived the past 2000, and so chances that are present-day-English will be readable by anyone who cares enough.

Loughla 10y ago
>I find it plausible that a much, much larger corpus of text written in present-day-English will survive the next 10000 years than that which has survived the past 2000 Tell me why you believe this, please.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  I'm not the one who made the claim, but there is a much larger starting corpus with more copies of each individual work, and better institutions dedicated to preserving works and better preservation technology. And a lot better geographic spread of those works in modern English than for any language from 2000 years ago. So it's not all that hard to see why one might make that prediction.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    In case of a nuclear apocalypse and very few survivors remaining to take care of whatever's left, your chances of having anything maintained over 10 000 years is close to nil. And nuclear conflict was an extremely likely scenario just a few decades ago, we have no way of telling it won't ever be again, with way more destructive power than prior civilizations ever possessed.
creshal 10y ago
> It's an academic pursuit, but the ancient greek philosophers are still readable in their original language. What little of them survived, and only because for 2000 years, people made a deliberate effort of keeping the language translatable and the texts around. Etruscan or even Egyptian texts of the same period, not so much (the Rosetta stone was a chance find). Even with Ancient Greek, we're limited to a very, very small fraction of the original corpus. > I find it plausible that a much, much larger corpus of text written in present-day-English will survive the next 10000 years than that which has survived the past 2000 Between copyright laws trying to punish people for preserving texts, DRM attempting to make it impossible; and storage moving to very ephemeral media (paper easily survives centuries, magnetic or optical storage maybe decades), I'm not that optimistic that our data will survive the next mass disruption on the scale of the collapse of the Roman Empire.
- samastur 10y ago
  Well, sort of. We have more papyri preserved than we have people able to read them so a good chunk, if not most of them, have not been read yet. A good deal of those that also contain mundane things like shopping lists so it is unlikely they were preserved because of deliberate long term effort. Regretfully I don't have sources for this other than talking to a friend years ago who was in fact one of those people studying them.
  - creshal 10y ago
    IIRC that's more a phenomenon with clay tablets than papyri – and it's an anomaly because of a rather unique combination of extremely sturdy media (clay tablets especially) and extremely well-preserving environmental conditions (dry deserts). And without the Rosetta stone, they'd be incomprehensible still. Preserving texts and preserving knowledge of a language are two separate problems.
- mseebach 10y ago
  I think your outlook is unnecessarily bleak. While you're right DRM certainly contributes to the unlikelihood that all, or even most, of current digital culture will survive, that's not the relevant bar to clear IMO. If even a single copy of a 20th century encyclopaedia survives (never mind a Wikipedia dump! No DRM there), the 120th century will have a vastly richer corpus of knowledge about the 20th century than we do about the 1st century (probably any pre-Gutenberg century).
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  >What little of them survived, and only because for 2000 years, people made a deliberate effort of keeping the language translatable and the texts around. Before written texts, there was an oral tradition that has been lost almost entirely. Epic poetry was learned and recited to order in a semi-improvised way, not written down. Long term digital storage will have the same problem. Currently we store text and pictures, because that's what we've always done. We also store music and moving images, which are a slightly newer concept. Why should technology stop there? Next we'll have VR imagery, procedurally generated arts that are created from code - which will need hardware and an OS to run - and eventually holographic storage. There may even be direct brain interfaces - not just in the sense of experiencing the inside of someone else's head, but also in the sense that all those experiences can be mined for patterns, shaped, generated synthetically, and so on. So text will go the way of epic poetry. It'll be an interesting throwback studied by a few academic AIs, but irrelevant for daily use, because cultural representations will become denser, more abstract, more collective, and inherently interactive.
ekianjo 10y ago
Linear B, which is a way older language, is still a mystery to us. Greek does not prove anything. And we could not even understand old Egyptian until we found the Rosetta stone way down in History.
ekianjo 10y ago
> I find it plausible that a much, much larger corpus of text written in present-day-English will survive the next 10000 years than that which has survived the past 2000, and so chances that are present-day-English will be readable by anyone who cares enough. Note that even the Bible which is probably the most copied book in History has no remaining specimen older than 1300 years old available. And the reason why we have a great amount of Greek manuscripts is because of Roman historians as well - if we had ended up with a more destructive civilization, you can be sure we would have 100 times less Greek corpus. So your assumption that a large corpus of text will survive aeons is, in practice, very dubious.

Loughla 10y ago

>I find it plausible that a much, much larger corpus of text written in present-day-English will survive the next 10000 years than that which has survived the past 2000 Tell me why you believe this, please.

dragonwriter 10y ago
I'm not the one who made the claim, but there is a much larger starting corpus with more copies of each individual work, and better institutions dedicated to preserving works and better preservation technology. And a lot better geographic spread of those works in modern English than for any language from 2000 years ago. So it's not all that hard to see why one might make that prediction.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  In case of a nuclear apocalypse and very few survivors remaining to take care of whatever's left, your chances of having anything maintained over 10 000 years is close to nil. And nuclear conflict was an extremely likely scenario just a few decades ago, we have no way of telling it won't ever be again, with way more destructive power than prior civilizations ever possessed.

creshal 10y ago

> It's an academic pursuit, but the ancient greek philosophers are still readable in their original language. What little of them survived, and only because for 2000 years, people made a deliberate effort of keeping the language translatable and the texts around. Etruscan or even Egyptian texts of the same period, not so much (the Rosetta stone was a chance find). Even with Ancient Greek, we're limited to a very, very small fraction of the original corpus. > I find it plausible that a much, much larger corpus of text written in present-day-English will survive the next 10000 years than that which has survived the past 2000 Between copyright laws trying to punish people for preserving texts, DRM attempting to make it impossible; and storage moving to very ephemeral media (paper easily survives centuries, magnetic or optical storage maybe decades), I'm not that optimistic that our data will survive the next mass disruption on the scale of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

samastur 10y ago
Well, sort of. We have more papyri preserved than we have people able to read them so a good chunk, if not most of them, have not been read yet. A good deal of those that also contain mundane things like shopping lists so it is unlikely they were preserved because of deliberate long term effort. Regretfully I don't have sources for this other than talking to a friend years ago who was in fact one of those people studying them.
- creshal 10y ago
  IIRC that's more a phenomenon with clay tablets than papyri – and it's an anomaly because of a rather unique combination of extremely sturdy media (clay tablets especially) and extremely well-preserving environmental conditions (dry deserts). And without the Rosetta stone, they'd be incomprehensible still. Preserving texts and preserving knowledge of a language are two separate problems.
mseebach 10y ago
I think your outlook is unnecessarily bleak. While you're right DRM certainly contributes to the unlikelihood that all, or even most, of current digital culture will survive, that's not the relevant bar to clear IMO. If even a single copy of a 20th century encyclopaedia survives (never mind a Wikipedia dump! No DRM there), the 120th century will have a vastly richer corpus of knowledge about the 20th century than we do about the 1st century (probably any pre-Gutenberg century).
TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
>What little of them survived, and only because for 2000 years, people made a deliberate effort of keeping the language translatable and the texts around. Before written texts, there was an oral tradition that has been lost almost entirely. Epic poetry was learned and recited to order in a semi-improvised way, not written down. Long term digital storage will have the same problem. Currently we store text and pictures, because that's what we've always done. We also store music and moving images, which are a slightly newer concept. Why should technology stop there? Next we'll have VR imagery, procedurally generated arts that are created from code - which will need hardware and an OS to run - and eventually holographic storage. There may even be direct brain interfaces - not just in the sense of experiencing the inside of someone else's head, but also in the sense that all those experiences can be mined for patterns, shaped, generated synthetically, and so on. So text will go the way of epic poetry. It'll be an interesting throwback studied by a few academic AIs, but irrelevant for daily use, because cultural representations will become denser, more abstract, more collective, and inherently interactive.

ekianjo 10y ago

Linear B, which is a way older language, is still a mystery to us. Greek does not prove anything. And we could not even understand old Egyptian until we found the Rosetta stone way down in History.

ekianjo 10y ago

> I find it plausible that a much, much larger corpus of text written in present-day-English will survive the next 10000 years than that which has survived the past 2000, and so chances that are present-day-English will be readable by anyone who cares enough. Note that even the Bible which is probably the most copied book in History has no remaining specimen older than 1300 years old available. And the reason why we have a great amount of Greek manuscripts is because of Roman historians as well - if we had ended up with a more destructive civilization, you can be sure we would have 100 times less Greek corpus. So your assumption that a large corpus of text will survive aeons is, in practice, very dubious.