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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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O fpm'y yjoml dp...
[d,o;r]
formerly known as etaoin...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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i didn't read the article, but..
in aviation, there is a code-- it uses english words, but its not standard english. All pilots, all over the world use this code.. (even french pilots, flying air france jets in france..) some of the communication would be in code.. and wouldn't change much.
this code would be learned and would keep open minimal communications.. (everyday usage might change, but the code would remain the same.)
depending on the level of communications (and lets presume that we are living in the real world-- and radio waves actually take some time to travel in space.) the travelers would be 20, to 25 years 'behind' the times.. not enough to cause real problems, just enough to make them sound and behave as 'out of date' as grandparents often do. but most of the language would be understood.. (we undstand shakespeare even if we don't speak like that.)--people live 75 years or so.. language doesn't total change in a hundred years.. and as people live longer and longer, the elderly keep the old language intact-to some degree..
sure there is jargon i don't understand (like references to pokeman or sponge bob square pants).. but they don't make up the main stream of english.. i can talk to 2 year olds and to 90 year olds, and be understood.. hell, most 90 year olds understand what their great grandchildren are saying.. except in very limited circumstances.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Well, it's a real short piece, and a fascinating read, of troy, so I'll just paste it up to highliight the part that addresses your post, rather then recommend you go back and read it when you have the time. I know it prolly sounded like one of those lengthy Time articles. But I linked it because there's a pretty cool visual that goes with it:
>Space colonists' language could mutate over decades
February 15, 2002 Posted: 8:38 PM EST (0138 GMT)
Would human explorers that returned from beyond the stars speak gobbledygook?
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By Richard Stenger
CNN
(CNN) -- If humans shoved off this planet for a deep space expedition lasting two centuries, would their descendents be able to speak intelligibly with those left behind?
That is a question posed by a linguistics professor attempting to figure out what language space colonists would use and how it would evolve over time.
"What language should the travelers speak when starting on the voyage? For obvious reasons, it should be the same language," said Sarah Thomason of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
If the mission were to field a crew representative of the entire planet, artificial international languages like Esperanto have too few speakers to make them viable candidates for the official language mission. The de facto world language would make the most logical choice, according to Thomason.
"It wouldn't be hard to find genetically diverse English speakers in such countries as Ghana and India, in addition to European Americans, native Americans and immigrants from different parts of the world."
Even if all of the voyagers were on the same page linguistically speaking when they started, their language could quickly evolve into a dialect far different from any terrestrial cousin.
Word changes would take place because the long-term space environment would be radically different than that back home. New ones would form. Old ones would disappear.
"Basic vocabulary like mother, father, run, walk and sit will persist. But other words --such as airplane, skyscraper, car and train -- would not be useful to the space travelers," said Thomason, who has studied everything from contact-induced language changes among Montana Indians to pidgin Arabic in the 11th century.
Over the course of 200 years, a space language might not mutate much from the mother tongue naturally. But the explorers could consciously set themselves apart from their Earth-bound brethren.
This planet displays plenty of precedent: Hopping from continent to continent and island to island, English-speaking populations have established a wide variety of clearly defined vernaculars.
"This single, relatively homogeneous dialect will be noticeable with the first generation of children born on the space vehicle and will surely result in a dialect that differs from all the parents' dialect, and from every other dialect of English spoken on Earth," Thomason said.
Even radio contact with Earth might help little in keeping linguistic bonds intact.
"It looks as if there would be radio communication, but once the ship was far away, it could take several decades to transmit a message," said Thomason, who was to present her work Friday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
And that would just be one-way. The colonists might become increasingly reluctant to phone home or decide to forgo communication with their homeworld altogether, she said. <
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Well, maybe. But look at what happened when Tudor/Stuart-era English immigrants went to the US. Their language changed somewhat, and presumably new words entered the language and some dropped out, but it ossified the then-prevalent English pronunciation and many of the linguistic quirks which were current in England at the time they left. In the meantime English in England moved on to achieve its current status. Whatever that is.
Now we (non-USns) pretend to understand people from the US. It saves face all round. But actually we don't really understand a damn thing they say, sometimes!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Cap'a, thanks for reminding me that lack of communication is often (at least) a two-way street.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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There was a science fiction story in, I believe, Analog some years back set on a prison planet, or what had started out as a prison planet, sort of an extra-terrestrial Australia. There was a whole collection of terms that had shifted in meaning, mostly names of various sorts of criminals that had taken on non-criminal meanings. The only one I can think of is hood-winker. The meaning had changed to refer to the operator of a morse code style communication tower in which the hood-winker would alternately uncover and cover a light source sending messages to anyone within sight of the tower.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Faldage, that story reminds me of how Cockney rhyming slang got started.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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...we understand shakespeare...
- and -
...lack of communication is often (at least) a two-way street.
Do we *really understand Shakespere?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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his poetry (descripions of feelings, and things) is much easier to understand than some of his diologue in the plays.. which seem to be filled with the local "hip" words of the time..
notice please i use hip, not hepthe first is jargon from the late 1960's/70's, the later from the 1940's/50's.. spoken language has lots of words, that change for time to time.. but lots of english is still intact.
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