Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly paper, parchment and stone have a pretty bad record as a format. They either degrade or even if preserved can become unreadable (e.g. Linear B) without a surviving linguistic community. Even when the text survives and is rediscovered, translations produced with century-scale gaps often lose subtext or connotation that would still have registered across a narrower gap. I'd suggest an unbroken chain of oral tr…
> They either degrade Much more slowly and gracefully than any digital medium we have concocted so far (save for core rope memory, maybe). > even if preserved can become unreadable (e.g. Linear B) without a surviving linguistic community [...] translations produced with century-scale gaps often lose subtext This pertains to the message and not the support; also, I'll take missing subtext over missing text any day of…
https://arcticworldarchive.org/ would like a word