Language Development During Interstellar Travel | Hacker News Reader

Language Development During Interstellar Travel

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27 pointsrustoo20 comments

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.

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.

> 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.

that also meaning that some emerging neo-Cro Magnon will do the other neo-Neanderthals/Denisovans/etc. (plug for Vorkosigan/Cetaganda - among my favorites :)

> 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?

I'd imagine we should be creating content for interstellar travellers about the life on earth & how we can inspire & comfort them on the task that they are undergoing without being on a planet at all.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm confident in predicting that by the time software is clever enough to do that, TV shows will be as laughably outdated as a form of entertainment as court jesters.

The specific form will change, but storytelling is as old as humanity.

We still have court jesters, they've just moved to TikTok.

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.

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.

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.

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

As far as I know back in the olden times most people were illiterate, so having a written language wouldn't have as much of an impact as it would today.

I bet you if you locked a Scottish guy, and someone who speaks AAVE in the same room and they had to work together to escape they easily could. If you slow down AAVE it's just normal English, along with repetition to emphasize certain points. But this varies wildly based upon where in the United States you live. In Los Angeles, a lot of these black kids grow up watching anime all day so it wouldn't surprise me to see a bit of Japanese make its way into AAVE.

Considering the American South was largely populated by Scots-Irish, you might be surprised. These are the people African slaves and their descendans learned English from.

Its so strange to me that people basically avoid recognizing that most African Americans simply speak a Southern dialect that has been able to persist outside the South because of de facto segregation.

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