Teaching English in 6939
BoingBoing recently linked to the “book of record” for the time capsule buried at the 1939 World’s Fair, meant to be opened 5000 years later, in 6939.
Of course, the most interesting part for me was the section attempting to teach English to the future-Earthlings. It details the sounds and syntax of “1939 English”, includes some word-lists (in both English spelling and their lovely phonetic transcription), and even includes the perennial North Wind and Sun fable. In the actual time capsule, the apparently included the fable in 25 “1939 Earth languages”, but alas the booklet only has the English.
Read the section on English [pdf] or the whole thing.
Posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 5:18 pm. Categories: Linguistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One Response to “Teaching English in 6939”
Josh Says:
March 5th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Oh, po-fung and ta-yang.
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