Communicating with the distant future

It’s sobering to imagine modern English as an archaic dialect – how the language might evolve and how our version(s) of it might appear from a position many generations into the future. That English will change radically in a few centuries or a thousand years is beyond doubt: read a few lines of Old or Middle English and you’ll get an idea of how much.

This presents a problem when communication with people in the far future is an absolute must. Whatever about literature becoming ever more impenetrable, how do we warn future humans about dangerous contaminants that we’ve buried for safekeeping? It’s not enough to isolate these materials now; they may need to be kept isolated for a very long time.

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The invented languages of Ithkuil and Blissymbols

Joshua Foer has a long and interesting article at the New Yorker on Ithkuil, an original language with “two seemingly incompatible ambitions”: to be both maximally precise and maximally concise, so it can convey “nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible”.

As you might expect, sentences in Ithkuil are very information-rich and rather intimidating; for example, Ai’tilafxup embuliëqtuqh means “All the people of the land spoke the same language.” That’s Ithkuil with our familiar Roman letters – it has its own script too, shown in this translation of the opening line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: