Exactly what I was going to say, only I was too busy cruising down the west coast highway in my Lamborghini Gullardo.
The only issue for decoding languages that are extinct, really, is having a big enough corpus to analyse. That's why we still know Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, because they were written down by their speakers to such an extent that they never went away. Even if there's a huge dark age, Chinese takes over the planet, and everyone forgets English, so much has been written in it now, that linguists of the future could do a pretty solid job of figuring it out. All that said, I'm recording my magnum opus in Icelandic. Þetta er tungumálið sem mun aldrei deyja, skiluru?
Faðmaðu þig, myndarlegur björn ... Nice, we got no record of Pict - or nobody's unravelled the inscriptions, as yet. Same goes for that 'Volgot Manuscripts,' or sim, that beautiful medical text from 1400? But we do have the Rosetta Stone. I'm so clever. Writers, or 'writers,' or rather WRITERS shouldn't [ab]use words like passion anyway, it's like 'positive mental attitude' or 'thinking outside the comfort zone/in the pipeline.' I wish I 'wrote to eat.' Though I dare say there's lots of 'writing to eat Mum's food' on this thread-forum. Thing is - if you only sit at home, indoors, thinking and writing you end up penning Dragon or Space stories, or in the most extreme version of the condition M on M romantic fiction. A writer needs to go outside, witness traffic jams and and the elderly people in parks, write about that in a delicate manner. That's proper, though I do have a sneaking admiration for the self-published, the mid-apocalypse/embittered cop super-rational fiction genre.
That's a good point. I hadn't realized that sound media will do far more than print media in "fixing" our language. One of the comments I hear from linguists all the time is that English is evolving into a sort of common speech, with regional accents and variations of vocabulary and syntax disappearing. Even if 99% of our recorded movies, television and radio shows, and speeches disappear (as well they should, IMO), the remaining 1% will help ensure that the English spoken today will still be understood, if not spoken, far into the future. When Kurt Vonnegut was called on to give a speech at the dedication of a library, he remarked that the twentieth century was the first "fireproof" culture. Unlike when the libraries of Alexandria and other repositories of culture were burned, we now have these texts distributed around the globe, in thousands of libraries. If the Library of Congress were to disappear today, there would be great loss, but enough copies of their books would survive elsewhere.
The way things are going, I wonder if we'll still be reading recognisable English in ten years' time, never mind 5000 years. R wl it B lk ths? lol rotfl
@jannert that thought mortifies me in ways you cannot imagine. If it turns into that gobble-dee-gook, I will fall to my knees and beg every deity that has ever existed, to invoke global extermination.
True. It does. But if it becomes so personalised and scattered that people can't keep up, or understand each other's meaning, then its purpose—which is COMMUNICATION—is lost. Obviously as new things get invented there will be new words entering the language, and we 'oldies' need to get on board with the new stuff. But when people get to the point that they believe a collective language itself doesn't really matter, that grammar doesn't matter, that spelling doesn't matter, that we can only communicate with simple words that can be easily abbreviated, then I worry. It's the commonality and richness of language (written and spoken) that makes it possible for us to communicate complicated thoughts and concepts. We lose that commonality, and sacrifice complex thinking for easy txting, we're in trouble. If we can retain our comprehension of 'real' language and are able to use it effectively AND also learn to txt in appropriate situations, then I'm happy. I'm just afraid that one might overwhelm the other, and become the only thing people can bother to learn.
If the books survive 5000 years and the language doesn't, there will definitely be translators. Goodness knows, they'll have more to work with than the ones who turn ancient literature into something that is still read today.... On the other hand, we have no earthly way of telling what readers 300 years from now will think was the quality writing of the 21st century, let alone 5000.
Well, people still read The Illiad and The Odyssey, Gilgamesh and Beowulf. Then there's that Bible that seems to have a few translations out there. If humans survive that long, who knows, they might actually enjoy our scratch.
You should try reading medieval manuscripts if you have a problem with abbreviations used today. Dropping the odd letter is one thing, but they had to contend with sheets of vellum that took months to prepare, so you'd better be damn sure they were contracting everything they could get away with. ETA: I'm 22, and all my friends are around there, and I know precisely one person who types like that in any context: my 87 year old grandmother. Those of us who've been typing our whole lives seem to have dropped text speak like a sack o' shite.
yeah i suspect text speak will die with the advent of the smart phone with qwerty inputs .. it was only ever a consequence of 10 key input on non smart phones (in fact i suspect texting generally will die now phones have proper access to email and web chat)
@J says 'it's all about communicating, lol.' Then I think about that 1st year philosophy q - 'could there be a language that only one person speaks?' Sometimes I think as a writer, that I am actually 'writing that language that only one person speaks.' But I know with application and patience I can polish my coal toward a breakthrough moment. That's the pleasure, that's the way, and why I write. The other way is to ooze language like a condition across the page, and then wipe it up afterwards. But damn those blabbermouths, their jaws wired open. I always see them as 'the enemy' or 'the competition.'
I found ten key input on a flip phone to be much easier than touchscreen qwerty. Touchscreens have no tactile indication of where you are, and I hit the m, n, or comma keys all the time while missing the space bar. I hate autocorrect, and predictive text takes me longer than typing. Yeah, I'm a Luddite.
