Re: orthography and pronunciation

D Tse wrote:
> > > Lemme explain: almost all paper used in books today is made
> > from trees and contains a certain amount of an acid which English name
>escapes
> > me at the moment. Thanks to this, the paper will selfdestruct in about a
>hundred
> > > years. To quote the Swedish physist-novelist Peter Nilson, "in
> > 2100 they'll wonder why people ceased to write books in 1870".
>
>What? So ... they just crumble? Disintegrate? Become dust?
Sort of. But of course it's a gradual process - they don't suddenly go
Ka-Boom leaving just a heap of burnt dust behind.

According tp John Cowan, acid-free paper is becoming more common again, and
books made of such can last for centuries, even millennia, in the right
conditions.

                                                   Andreas

PS If you want your books to last really long, burnt clay tablets buried in
a desert are evidently a good idea [ajdi:@] - Sumerian texts well over 5k
years old have been preserved in original on such. Runestones etc are quite
okay too, as long as they're not exposed to too much acid rain.

PPS Somebody suggested that the ultimate method for perserving information
is to encode it into the junk-DNA of some bacterium. As the bacterium
multiplies the information is multiplied, and the inevitable slow corruption
of the DNA won't mean much since you'll be able to reconstruct the original
very faithfully if you've got a decent number of bacteria to reconstruct
from.
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