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posted by martyb on Friday July 10 2020, @05:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the Rendevous-with-Rama dept.

Languages will change significantly on interstellar flights:

In this study, McKenzie and Punske discuss how languages evolve over time whenever communities grow isolated from one another. This would certainly be the case in the event of a long interstellar voyage and/or as a result of interplanetary colonization. Eventually, this could mean that the language of the colonists would be unintelligible to the people of Earth, should they meet up again later.

[...] To illustrate, McKenzie and Punske use examples of different language families on Earth and how new languages emerged due to distance and time. They then extrapolated how this same process would occur over the course of 10 generations or more of interstellar/interplanetary travel. As McKenzie explained in a UK press release:

"If you're on this vessel for 10 generations, new concepts will emerge, new social issues will come up, and people will create ways of talking about them, and these will become the vocabulary particular to the ship. People on Earth might never know about these words, unless there's a reason to tell them. And the further away you get, the less you're going to talk to people back home. Generations pass, and there's no one really back home to talk to. And there's not much you want to tell them, because they'll only find out years later, and then you'll hear back from them years after that."

There are always emojis...

Journal Reference:
McKenzie, A., Punske, J.. Language Development During Interstellar Travel, Acta Futura, (12), 123–132. (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3747353)


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  • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday July 11 2020, @04:59PM

    by deimtee (3272) on Saturday July 11 2020, @04:59PM (#1019597) Journal

    "Well regulated militia" is merely an explanatory phrase and should have no weight. "The right to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged" is quite clear.
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