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ON 23 September 1938, engineers from the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company sank a time capsule deep into the ground at Flushing Meadows Park in New York City, venue of the 1939 World’s Fair. Among other artefacts, the contained a printed “key to English” that described the words, sounds and grammar of 20th-century American English to help its discoverers, 5000 years in the future, understand a language that presumably would be as foreign to them as Hittite is to us.

The author of the document, John Harrington of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, presumed that modern English would be radically changed by the year 6939. But how? Is it possible to say what English will be like 5000 years from now, or even 500?

Will it be like this: “I punya manglish iz wely chekai wan lah, singlish lagi terok, i tok chinglish beter”?^*

Or this: “Our Father, who comes to us from above, your name is holy”?^**

Or this: “It musve ben some girt jynt thing hy hy up and with a shyning and a flashing to it time back way back when they had boats in the air and all the res of it”?^***

It’s a safe bet that the discoverers of the Westinghouse time capsule will need to use Harrington’s key, because 5000 years is a long time in the life of any language. Only 1600 years ago, the people who spoke the languages that would form the core of English had not yet migrated to England. A thousand years ago, English was a language so different from our own you’d have to learn it as a foreign language; very few people…