Read more: "100,000 AD: Living in the deep future"
SHOULD your descendants uncover this page, yellowed and curling, thousands of years from now, many of these words will be incomprehensible - even if they call themselves speakers of English. After all, we struggle to decipher old English texts like Beowulf. You might be able to understand the hero's declaration that "Béowulf is mín nama", but a millennium of language evolution has washed away the meaning from "grimma gaést Grendel" - the "ghastly demon Grendel".
If our language has transformed almost beyond recognition in just 1000 years, how might it sound in tens of thousands of years? Languages are largely shaped by the unpredictable whims of their speakers, but by examining the forces facing our language, we can speculate about how our descendants might speak.
The most obvious question is whether they will be using English at all. Although English ...
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