quote:

Originally posted by Proofreader:
Forget literature. Think of all the scientific papers and books that would need to be translated and re-printed. ... soon today's books would not be understood easily, if at all, by future generations.

I don't see that as very important, simply because if future generations are like us, they would have very little interest in books from our time.

Truthfully, we read very little "old stuff" in the original. For example, Newton's Principia is a major rwork of the past, but have you ever heard of anyone who has read it? Indeed, we even much-more-recent writings, those from the 1800s, are little-read today. Ephemera from that time (magazines and newspapers) moulder in dead-storage. Scientific writings (papers and books) from that period are are outdated, and (with the possible exception of Darwin's) no one reads them. Literature? Sure, we still read some 1800s texts: Austin, Twain, Cooper, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and some poetry (Poe, Tennyson, Yeats, Whitman), and doubtless you could name more. But I doubt you could name even as many as 100 works from that century that are still in circulation.

I'll predict that in the same way, people in the year 2100 (other than historians) wil have no interest in reading the vast majority of 1900s English-writings. The few that remain of interest to future readers could easily be "translated" into any new spelling-system they might use.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: shufitz,