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Underground > Laboratory >

Linguistics of Space Travel

15:24 / 18.02.02

from Nature

quote:One hundred and sixty fertile, motivated, English speakers could make it to distant stars, researchers have worked out. But generations down the line, returning voyagers may speak an alien tongue.
quote:But if the journey takes 500 years, home and ship "won't be able to talk to each other", Thomason predicts. Down-to-Earth words like 'horse' and 'truck' would have no meaning on board, and the slang of interstellar adolescents would diverge from Earth-speak. The crew would have to be beamed language lessons, Thomason said.

There's more stuff about psychology an' stuff in the article, but these bit stood out. I love this stuff...

15:33 / 18.02.02

The part about language is a bit off the mark I think. So you're going on a 500 year voyage and you're not taking copies of every book/movie/media that you can store in your databanks?

Sure accents would undoubtedly change and they'd have lots of new words, but a whole new language? Unless they decided to create one themselves, I think not.

Do you think we'll still have horses & trucks on earth in 500 years?

01:51 / 19.02.02

The language would change some, certainly, but not at such a fast pace as to make it indecipherable in 500 years. Assuming the crew all speak the same language this would slow down the rate of change in language dramatically. The merging and colliding of different languages cause a great deal of language changes. See how English changed when the Normans invaded. Sure there would be new words, and some old ones might not be known to all the later generations, but communication would hardly be impossible.

02:37 / 19.02.02

I think in 500 years the language will change drastically. It just takes one asshole teenager to come up with a bunch of witless words and terms and in 200 years everyday English has a new space dialect. Same goes for writing...at first the new words and terms will creep in. After about 200 years they'll be writing in the new (more comfortable) dialect. Two more hundred years and you've got a considerably different language. Obviously stemming from English (like Spanish and French from Latin) but still another language. Eventually the old media will just be translated to make it more accessible to everyone.

And even if the English on the ship remains uncorrupted...the English on Earth, what with the increasing interaction with other languages, would be completely different in 500 years. I mean really, not many of us can read 16th century English unaided.

The Planet of Sound

07:05 / 19.02.02

Except that the current technology (films, videos, radio, CDs) means that for the first time in History, language, including dialects and slang words, are permanently stored. So the influence of this technology would no doubt affect the speech patterns of those exposed to it. We can all understand Laurel and Hardy, we can follow the slang in 'Casablanca'... that's almost 100 years ago now. Also, surely the organisers of the trip would take language distortion into account, and insist on a pretty vigorous course of elocution lessons for the young spacesters?

16:02 / 19.02.02

I find much more interesting the change in language on earth, then in the ship. After a certain distance, contact with earth will be little to none. As pointed out by others here, it's probable that this will result in little change in the language on the ship.

BUT, that means that their language is not growing and evolving with that of earth's. The result would be something like taking someone from the 16th century, and dropping them into life today. The travelers would lack a frame of reference for much of the knowledge that they would need to have to understand the language.

At the very least there would need to be some kind of reintroducting program for the travelers. Would that take though? Would the travelers feel seperated from the rest of their culture, and gravitate to eachother? Creating a possible, space traveler ghetto of sorts.

God, there's a sci-fi story in there somewhere, and I want to read it.

14:57 / 02.03.02

"The Book of the New Sun" by Gene Wolfe...it's tangential to the plot, but part of the description is the linguistic/conceptual seperation between planet-raised and space-raised humans. That bit of the book was actually more interesting than the rest....

15:30 / 02.03.02

I actually completely disagree - it seems to me that the language of six billion people on earth is relatively stable - particularly as communication gets faster and better between individuals of different nations. In fact English speakers are almost all moving towards an 'International' English, which has more than its fair share of Americanisms in it. But we can still almost understand each other..

Small isolated communities though - well that's another matter completely. With less people from outside the niche culture to come into contact with, it seems to me that the speed of language development would be radically faster. Think of it this way - your way of talking with your friends is different to the way you talk to everyone else - there are things you know you can get away with - things that they'll easily understand - think of all the private jokes that you'd have to explain after 500 years (and many many generations of people making them). The reasoning that got me to start using the word 'Badger' as a swear word around a group of friends was that one of them once referenced the concept of 'whipping the badgers' as a reference to ANOTHER joke about her car being powered by badgers in wheels. Within a small context of friends everyone is comfortable with its usage, meaning etc. Now put us on a ship as first generation voyagers, watch our children pick it up - children with very little idea of what an ANIMAL is, let alone a badger, and within twenty years a word has almost completely altered its meaning... Like referring to people as 'harpies' or something... And that's one VERY small example...

Nietzsch E. Coyote

19:00 / 02.03.02

Well lets hope its not cockney english on the ship to start with.

22:45 / 02.03.02

forget language - 500 years on board a ship would make any culture utterly alien to our own. The environment alone.

In fact, I'd be surprised if a ship full of humans could make a 500 year journey without starting a war and blowing the thing up.

08:15 / 03.03.02

I have to say that that is certainly one of the most interesting parts of the whole concept - the amount of sociological engineering that you'd need to get something like this working while minimising conflict must be ridiculous. I'd be fascinated to know what kind of utopian models people used to explain how they'd keep peace on a space ship for five hundred years....

12:19 / 03.03.02

I read in the Economist about a sociological study on generation ships. One sociologist had worked out the ideal size for a community where every person had a suitable number of potential mates, and everyone would be close enough that there wouldn't be any splitting of the group.

It came out to around 180 people, which, curiously, has been about the size limit for villages and hunter-gatherer tribes.

I'll see if I can dig out a link for this, it was quite interesting.

12:23 / 04.03.02

unfortunately it is "premium content" on their site

if by any remote chance someone here suscribes to the Economist, they can log in and get the article here I think