The decay of modern language over 10,000 years is a common assumption in the field of nuclear semiotics. This prediction is easily supported by a number of historical examples; Classical Greek, Latin, Coptic and Sumerian are just a few of the languages lost to time, and even Tamil, the longest-living language still spoken today, has been in circulation for only 5,000 years, existing in written form for less than half that period.
Languages often die out due to their accompanying empire or government becoming obsolete, but even a common and seemingly persistent language such as English remains in use through cultural change, its alteration is inevitable, and has in fact already occurred. The first recorded English inscriptions date back to around the 5th or 6th century CE, yet introductions of foreign languages as well as gradual developments in grammar and spelling have made late modern English drastically different from its Old English roots, and that’s only over a fraction of this message’s period of interest.
But perhaps language can’t be discounted entirely as a solution. For the purposes of argument, let’s assume that the writing is inscribed on a surface that will last for 10,000 years (We’ll get around to the details of material choices and writing surfaces in a later post, or an updated version of this post, soon). There are unique benefits to using writing to mark a waste disposal site, for instance, language’s exclusive ability to convey the more complex information, such as the half-lives and composition of nuclear waste, that more symbolic structures cannot. Additionally, language doesn’t have to be the only present marker. A common agreement amongst nearly every message proposal is the importance of redundancy: using multiple methods of communication to make a unified system of warnings, all describing the same intent. When used in conjunction with other markers, written messages could greatly increase the level of detail the system is able to convey.
Like any other semiotic systems, such as signs and pictographs, language requires the correct cultural context to be understood, and there may be methods of providing it. The 1984 Human Interference Task Force report identified that the deciphering of a language is dependent on its proximity to other languages. The greatest example of this, mentioned in a great number of nuclear semiotics sources, is the Rosetta stone, which carried the same message about Ptolemy in hieroglyphics, Demotic, and Ancient Greek. Because scholars were able to understand the Greek contents of the tablet, they could finally decipher the accompanying hieroglyphs.
The HITF concluded that repetition of a message in a variety of languages might accommodate for the uncertainty of which languages will or won’t persist. However, one must consider that these languages might only be translatable by scholars and specialists 300 generations in the future, as even though hieroglyphs are translatable today, there’s only a rare few who would understand them on sight; this was a concern of numerous scholars on the task force, not to mention the duo responsible for the infamous glowing cat solution. Still, there may be another stopgap which allows for the use of language in a communication system. If the inscriptions were to be updated on a regular basis as languages evolved, say once every generation or so, then the detailed information on the dangers at a disposal site could be maintained more accurately. A relay system like this is the basis for another prominent solution which we’ll discuss next week: Thomas Sebeok’s “Atomic Priesthood”.
Sources:
Sebeok, Thomas A. United States, US Department of Energy, Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies. Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia. Columbus, Ohio, Government Printing Office, 1984.
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/16/010/16010244.pdf
United States, Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation. Reducing the Likelihood of Future Human Activities That Could Affect Geologic High-level Waste Repositories. Columbus, Ohio, Government Printing Office, 1984.https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6799619
Choi, Harry. “Nuclear Semiotics.” Medium, Oct 24, 2019. https://medium.com/@mhscho0096/nuclear-semiotics-c10c434a0407 Accessed Oct 23, 2020.
[A more mainstream news source overview of Nuclear Semiotics, though I’d highly recommend this one over other similar sources, as it tends to cover a wide variety of solutions concisely yet thoughtfully, explaining why a certain method may not work in a comprehensive, almost narrative fashion.]
Choi, Harry. “Linguistic Relativism and Determinism.” Medium, June 26, 2019. https://medium.com/@mhscho0096/linguistic-relativism-and-determinism-cb35207ddb62 Accessed Oct 23, 2020.
Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju. “Tamil Language.” Encyclopedia Britannica, July 18, 2007.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tamil-language Accessed Oct 23, 2020.
Woodbury, Anthony C. “What is an Endangered Language?” Linguistic Society of America, https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/what-endangered-language Accessed Oct 23, 2020.
[A short publication by the Linguistic Society of America that explains how languages die out and the differences between an extinct, dead, or endangered language.]
Crystal, David. “Old English.” British Library, Jan 31, 2018. https://www.bl.uk/medieval-literature/articles/old-english Accessed Oct 23, 2020.
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