There is no doubt that we are still in the incunabula of the computer age. Paper, we know, can last for five hundred years, but even once ubiquitous and well-un

There is no doubt that we are still in the incunabula of the computer age. Paper, we know, can last for five hundred years, but even once ubiquitous and well-understood media--floppy disks--are now scarce and getting scarcer. The only reliable way of writing for millennia is on stone. The progression of language has been affected by mass media, which has a standardizing influence. Written language will be affected by translation technologies that are at the moment unimaginable. Once complicated problems, e.g. the Chinese typewriter--have been resolved, and ordinary Chinese typing, which used to be limiting to typesetting speeds can now outpace the fastest QWERTY speedster by 2x or 3x or more. Language will not be the problem in the future that it was in the past.