[HN Gopher] Language Development During Interstellar Travel
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Language Development During Interstellar Travel
Author : rustoo
Score : 20 points
Date : 2021-02-02 19:04 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zenodo.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (zenodo.org)
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| What a fascinating prediction. I expect that we'll see a
| regression of sorts from the interconnected, global world if we
| start settling other planets. Unless we get an ansible, we'll
| have to contend with light speed just not being fast enough.
| Planets will start to diverge in culture, language, maybe even
| biology if we look far enough into the future.
| salmonellaeater wrote:
| > Planets will start to diverge in culture, language, maybe
| even biology if we look far enough into the future.
|
| This is good! More diversity means more chance of surviving
| catastrophes, whether they're physical, biological, or memetic.
| And it makes the world more interesting.
| trhway wrote:
| that also meaning that some emerging neo-Cro Magnon will do
| the other neo-Neanderthals/Denisovans/etc. (plug for
| Vorkosigan/Cetaganda - among my favorites :)
| akiselev wrote:
| _> More diversity means more chance of surviving
| catastrophes, whether they 're physical, biological, or
| memetic._
|
| It increases survivability against localized disasters but it
| remains to be seen whether that holds for the overall
| survivability of an interstellar species. All it takes is one
| demagogue on one planet with relativistic projectiles and a
| generations old grudge to wipe out most if not all of human
| civilization.
|
| Sure it'd take decades/centuries for the weapon to strike and
| the demagogue and his followers would be dead by then, but
| that doesn't really change anything for humanity's chances.
| For bonus points, this demagogue exhausted his planet's
| resources by building an arsenal of tens of thousands of
| projectiles - enough to hit every potentially habitable world
| in colonization range (which is always going to be lower than
| the reach of aforementioned projectile due to pesky life
| support) out of spite.
|
| Sound familiar?
| abeppu wrote:
| I think it's interesting that the section on multilingual crews
| didn't really touch on creoles or contact languages. An
| interesting comparison is Pitcairnese, which resulted from
| mutineers of the Bounty and some Tahitians. In the resulting
| creole there are features that are sometimes traceable to single
| crew members with a specific language background.
|
| I think another aspect which is somewhat ignored is that
| presumably space-faring humans could take libraries of audio and
| video content with them, which was not an option for Polynesians
| spreading to new islands. And I think we just don't know much
| about the actual rate of language change in environments which
| can include recorded spoken speech. If Chaucer had recorded an
| audiobook perhaps modern english speakers would be comfortable
| with middle english.
| Osmium wrote:
| Hypothetically, you could imagine that a long voyage might need a
| decent Netflix library, and that new media production might not
| be feasible en route -- perhaps this would help maintain a common
| language?
| Johnny555 wrote:
| For a long enough voyage that significant language drift may
| happen, then I think some accommodations for the arts will be
| necessary, including creating movies or other entertainment.
| The old Netflix library will become less and less relevant to
| the voyagers -- how will someone who was born on a ship just
| like their parents and grandparents find any entertainment in
| an episode of Seinfeld or Friends when they can't relate to
| anything in the show?
|
| But by the time such a voyage is possible, content creation
| will likely be entirely virtual, so wouldn't need much room on
| the ship.
| jltsiren wrote:
| The crew will produce new art and new entertainment, like any
| society before them. However, the new productions will be
| constrained by the limited resources of the society.
|
| In some sense, the crew will be like a small group of
| survivors living in the ruins of a great empire. They see
| what their ancestors were capable of, but they are unable to
| replicate most of it. The legacy content in the old Netflix
| library was created by a society with the same technology but
| vastly superior resources. Its creators were often more
| talented than the best and the brightest of the current
| generation, and they certainly could draw on a much wider
| range of life experiences.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Could also lead to things working other way. People on route
| would have more static language and the origin with larger
| population could have more divergent. English already have
| examples of this type of divergence.
| mLuby wrote:
| We already have (bad) ML-generated screenplays and (very short)
| deep fakes.
|
| I'm willing to bet in 50 years, software will be able to fully
| generate new episodes of TV shows, incorporating reviews of the
| previous episodes. Maybe everyone watches the same generated
| storyline so they can share the experience and talk about it,
| or maybe each episode will be tailored to your specific tastes.
|
| Point is that I doubt "running out of content" will ever be a
| serious concern for long-duration travel again.
| offtop5 wrote:
| I feel like having a written language precludes this.
| Hypothetically if all the books are lost, and any audio
| recordings are broken, this might happen. Although unless you
| already landed at your destination, I can't imagine you'd still
| have the technology left to navigate the ship.
|
| Historically oral language has of course come first, and then you
| just need to find a writing system from somewhere. Which explains
| why almost every Asian country used Chinese writing at some point
| in its history despite most of the languages being completely
| unrelated.
| [deleted]
| wincy wrote:
| The Cherokee syllabary was created by an illiterate Cherokee
| man who had heard of the idea of reading and though it was a
| great idea, which is pretty amazing. It looks like a
| combination of cyrillic and latin lettering, with some other
| symbols put in for good measure. But it works! Amazing how just
| planting the seed of an idea can have a profound impact on the
| world.
| briga wrote:
| All English speakers share a common writing system, but if you
| compare, say, the Scottish highland dialect with African-
| American Vernacular English, you get close to the point where
| the two variants could plausibly be considered different
| languages. Given time and distance the variants will only
| diverge further. Also notice how having a common Latin written
| language didn't prevent the various Romance languages from
| developing in Europe.
| mwaitjmp wrote:
| That's a great example. See how Vulgar Latin split off from
| the written form quite early on
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin
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