> Erratum: I'd mentioned the Gutenberg was (barely) meaningful. As
> the Gutenberg was printed in Latin, it either hasn't degraded, or
> has degraded utterly, depending upon your view of the merits of
> learning Greek and Latin. From the description, I had probably
> meant to refer to the Ellesmere Chaucer:
> <http://huntington.org/HLPress/chaucer.html>
In case you can read Chaucer as your morning paper's funnies, "Sir
Gawain and Green Knight" can perhaps drive the blayde home:
And nawther faltered ne fel the freke neuer the halder
Bot stythly he start forth vpon styf schonkes
And runyschly he ra3t our thereas renkkez stoden,
La3t to his lufly hed and lyft hit vp sone,
And sythen bo3ez to his blonk, the brydel he cachchez,
Steppez into stel-bawe and strydez alofte,
And his hede by the here in his honde haldez;
And as sadly the segge hym in his sadel sette
As non vnhap had hym ayled, tha3 hedlez nowe
In stedde.
He brayde his bluk aboute,
That vgly bodi that bledde.
Moni on of hym had doute,
Bi that his resounz were redde.
Should you *still* see fragments of meaning in the above, please go
straight to ftp://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/pub/beowulf/
> So in the long run, say 600 years or so, chances are good that
> language and textual coding will have changed so much that it'll
> take a musty academic to uncover your parking ticket. Chances are
> even better that it'll take a musty academic to care about that
> parking ticket.
600 years? Make that rather 60:
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Singularity/
Your plain HTML will be as readable as Beowulf by then.