What makes you think we are perfectly copying the knowledge contained in texts from thousands of years ago? That is… a bold claim. Even if I were to accept that text is always inherently digital for the sake of argument, the storage medium is absolutely analog. You can use analog storage to store digital data just as much as you can use digital storage to store analog data like sound waves.
Yes, you’ll make the argument that the available versions of it are not perfect representations, though that is only because the language and dialect used to produce the work had been lost, the work otherwise remains intact.
Text is a digital format because you have a limited set of characters to represent sounds/syllables. For example: the meaning of the letter ‘B’ doesn’t change if a small piece of the letter is missing or if the letter is slightly tilted, it’s still a ‘B’. If the format was analog, those changes would also change the sound/meaning of the word.
What makes you think we are perfectly copying the knowledge contained in texts from thousands of years ago? That is… a bold claim. Even if I were to accept that text is always inherently digital for the sake of argument, the storage medium is absolutely analog. You can use analog storage to store digital data just as much as you can use digital storage to store analog data like sound waves.
One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad?wprov=sfla1
Yes, you’ll make the argument that the available versions of it are not perfect representations, though that is only because the language and dialect used to produce the work had been lost, the work otherwise remains intact.
Text is a digital format because you have a limited set of characters to represent sounds/syllables. For example: the meaning of the letter ‘B’ doesn’t change if a small piece of the letter is missing or if the letter is slightly tilted, it’s still a ‘B’. If the format was analog, those changes would also change the sound/meaning of the word.