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)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @05:45AM (5 children)
Suck my biatch, you biatch! I have the biatch for you right here, biatch! SJW, you biatch! Snowflake, you biatch! Mother-loving (in a literal sense) Goddamned (if there was a god) Pink dyeing; Oh, wait, is that you, Mighty Buzzard who is now Lord of All East Oklahoma? [reuters.com] Pending Appeals by exaeta. Indian Pedophiles are always the hardest to track down, because they are so light-footed.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @10:14AM (4 children)
Look, if you are going to troll for the Kremlin, you might want to aim for a bit more subtlety. Try not to be quite so obvious.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @01:42PM (3 children)
I was just going to say... I really hope the SJW's do not develop the language used on interstellar flights or anywhere else in the universe. If they did then humankind will have no chance of survival because no one will want to screw.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 10 2020, @03:13PM (2 children)
Can you imagine how difficult it would be to translate the constantly updated Code of Conduct?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @06:23PM (1 child)
I'm sure they'll get used to it after the 2nd or 3rd time they try to request consent to speak to others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @12:02PM
No you may not. Full stop.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday July 10 2020, @06:21AM (6 children)
Pretty soon we won't be able to speak the Queen's English!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @08:27AM (1 child)
So will you? Your vulgar and unintelligible gibberish from over this little pool of water of ours (and it is really ours) is hard to bear even now.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday July 10 2020, @05:04PM
:-) What, are you that weak? You gotta keep your blinders on!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @08:28AM (1 child)
To be fair, have you heard pommies speak these days, innit?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @03:29PM
Maaaaaate, you can talk.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @09:05AM
I know you are joking, but actually, it is a bit the opposite. Which is also my comment on the article, it not not sufficiently acknowledge this, despite identifying language evolution that is already going on.
On earth at least, languages in the colonies seem to have changed _slower_ than the language of the originating countries (at least in the initial years after the separation). Afrikaans still sounds much like 17th century Dutch, and American spell words like the Queen did 400 years ago. Curses in Quebecois...well, lets say they sound pretty archaic. Of course there are many other factors (the sub-populations of people who did the colonization, leveling of dialects in the colonies, etc)
Of course, in some cases, the new language (Afrikaans) because somewhat pidginized because of external influences. And indeed, as the article says, are influenced by local occurrences. But it is silly to think the the original language would not be far more influenced by development of the world, which has a far bigger population with more external influences (from other languages and dialects), and thus likely to go even faster[1].
[1] doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1419704112
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday July 10 2020, @02:48PM
Good.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @08:39AM (7 children)
A generation tends to be about 30 years on average. That's 300 years. So this article's suggestion is akin to claiming that e.g. Benjamin Franklin wouldn't be able to understand somebody of today. He'd need to be brought up to speed on a bit of slang and technical terms, but the language is still functionally identical.
One thing the article seems to be just completely ignore, probably for the sake of publication, is that languages used to change radically more quickly. Shakespeare himself is responsible for inventing hundreds of new words, many of which are now commonplace, in the language. Far from continuing to expand in anything like a similar fashion, I'd hypothesize that the average person of today has a significantly smaller working vocabulary than the average person of two hundred years ago, normalized for education to ensure we're not just claiming a conclusion by comparing a modern graduate to an 18th century farmer with a 5th grade education. In other words I suspect most people's vocabulary would be a subset of Franklin's sans slang and technical vernacular.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Friday July 10 2020, @11:05AM (1 child)
I disagree on a number of levels.
A bit of slang and technical terms? That's where the majority of change is. I think you're confusing it with grammar. And having learned a second language as an older adult, I can say grammar is the easy part of a language to learn. Think of Yoda and his backward speaking way. We can still understand him quite well. Most common words change meaning over time and some change very radically. (Look at how the word "sick" now means "great". Before that, we could "get down with the sickness" which could be interpreted a few different ways. )
I disagree here too. We lost a lot of words, but gained a lot too. The terms "driving a car" or "steering an automobile" didn't exist. The idea of driving a horse or steering a buggy did exist, but the meanings of "drive" and "steer" have significantly changed and do not mean the same thing if we compare their application between horse and car.
Disclaimer: I may have experience with a secondary language, but I don't have the 411 on linguistics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @03:33PM
You're considering short term trends in a language. Phrases like "that's sick" become pretty cringe worthy within a single lifetime and die shortly thereafter. They're just not radical enough, dooood.
While surfing the web I found this [litcharts.com] bodacious list of *some* of the words Shakespeare invented. I think most don't realize what he achieved. Aside from amazing literature his additions to the language were not short lived slang or whatever, but a rather substantial reshaping of the language to be more expressive. Not all of his inventions stood the test of time but a rather large amount did and you'll wonder how awkward it must have been to express such basic notions prior to the 16th century. Which leads to a natural truism: when languages lack expressiveness they tend to grow. As they achieve sufficient expressiveness, or the intelligence/education of the speaking population declines, the languages become subsets of themselves.
---
Reread the article (or read it for the first time). They are literally suggesting that people would become mutually unintelligible to one another. Not that somebody might not immediately grasp the latest technological developments or whatever, but that 'Hi - how are you doing?' would be pushing towards incomprehensible - after 10 generations. It's hyperbolic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @01:35PM (2 children)
"...synergisticly engineer seamless e-commerce monetize plug-and-play e-markets to maximize visionary infomediaries and revolutionize frictionless ROI. Also recontextualize mission-critical systems utilized to strategize next-generation e-tailers and syndicate real-time initiatives. Which is why we reinvent distributed schemas combined with embracing one-to-one action-items to incubate cross-media users..."
[Benjamin Franklin grabs a gun and shoots himself]
(Score: 5, Touché) by sjames on Friday July 10 2020, @08:56PM
I believe he would correctly surmise that those words mean nothing and are perhaps the result of some sort of disease of the mind or a stroke in progress.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @09:39AM
Further to sjames reply, I think it far more likely that Ben would aim the gun at the speaker rather than at himself.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday July 10 2020, @08:47PM
Dis isn't a vernacular, dis is a Doiby"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @03:35PM
> Shakespeare himself is responsible for inventing hundreds of new words
Well that douchebag sounds like the preeminent SJW of his day. Curse him and his worthless labels.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EJ on Friday July 10 2020, @09:07AM (5 children)
Shaka, when the walls fell.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday July 10 2020, @09:11AM (4 children)
I always wondered how they passed on those stories without a more generic language.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday July 10 2020, @09:51AM (3 children)
Because it's fiction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @01:46PM (2 children)
Not necessarily. The Darmok episode was all about speaking in metaphors. Many people do it without even realizing it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @06:42PM (1 child)
Maybe once in a coons age, but I speak strait as an arrow from now till the cows come home!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @03:37PM
You hep wit da cats my man.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @09:35AM (5 children)
Genetics will probably drift apart faster than the languages will. That doesn't mean they won't change, of course, but no reason they shouldn't change more or less in sync with Earth.
Interstellar colonists will find themselves with a communication lag of several years from Earth, but a physical travel time of centuries. Talking to Earth will be common, if only to exchange news and the equivalent of television shows, visiting it won't be.
As weird as it seems in Star Trek when all the aliens look weird but somehow speak English... It's actually one of the most realistic things about the show.
Once civilization spreads across the entire galaxy, with 100,000 light years from one side to the other, language will probably form a continuum, with nearby worlds speaking similar languages and distant worlds also having more distantly related languages. But with a physical travel time of a million years, plus the prospect of genetic engineering, worlds on opposite sides of the galaxy will be aliens in practice, even if they all descend from the same ancestors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @03:43PM (2 children)
Yip. I'd emphasize that we all share a common ancestor. Not "we" as in all humans share a common ancestor - but literally everything living on this planet. You are related to.. grass. A cat is about 90% genetically similar to a human, chimps around 96%. And we went from wolves to chihuahua's in what may have been as short a time as 15,000 years. That's one severely disappointed great great great... grandfather wolf. Pups these days.
There will also be immediate as in single generation physical changes. Living in 1/3rd G is going to result in your body musculature changing radically. Astronauts see things like dramatic muscle/bone loss, vision impairment, etc just from spending a year in 0G. It's highly likely that the first generation of native Martians may not only not end up visiting Earth but may be physically incapable of it. That's going to instantly result in a radical 'species' divide even though we'd be still be quite genetically similar (how will epigenetic factors work out in entirely different environments...?) and separated by literally just one generation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @04:52PM (1 child)
I don't think any large number of humans will ever live on Mars. Everyone will just live in space habitats. They're just better in every possible way. Earth is a nice planet to live on and so most people don't conceive of living anywhere but on planets, but except for Earth, planets are terrible places to live.
10,000 years ago, there were no cities, and while people could have conceived of them, it wasn't possible. Hunter-gatherer was the only lifestyle. Today, almost everyone lives in cities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @03:39PM
I don't think any large number of humans will ever live on Mars. RIGHT
Everyone will just live in space habitats. WRONG
But you started so well.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday July 11 2020, @09:45AM (1 child)
The speed of genetic drift is related to the size of the population. Any reasonable generational colony ship is going to include massive sperm and egg banks, which effectively increase the breeding population. I don't think the drift will be as fast as you say.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @03:40PM
But when they finish eating that after the food runs out, what will happen to the genetic diversity?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday July 10 2020, @11:57AM (1 child)
Having immigrated to Switzerland, where many areas were relatively remote until just a few decades ago, I find the dialects fascinating. The spoken language in the German areas is known as "Swiss German", but that's an umbrella term. Go to two areas at opposite ends of the country (we're talking maybe 200km), and you have sometimes huge differences in pronunciation.
This drift has taken sometimes even common words to completely different places. Example: "up, down". In Basel dialect that would be "ufe, abe" (latin pronunciation, those are two-syllable words), whereas in Wallis dialect you get "ambruf, ambri". Initially, the two dialects are mutually incomprehensible. Oversimplifying: this is the result of drift over roughly the timespan in TFA - a couple of centuries.
Small, isolated communities drift really fast. A spaceship would be effectively even smaller than the villages in rural Switzerland.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday July 10 2020, @01:43PM
Don't be on it being smaller. A star ship will need a population large enough to maintain the technology required to repair it...that's more city sized than village sized, and even then I'm depending on HUGE databases and other "automated learning assistants" (often in the form of virtual reality). Also occasional communication with somebody else who has remembered what you've forgotten.
We need to practice with habitats in solar space. There the maintenance problem is a lot simpler. I generally think of Mars as a bit of a diversion, but it would let up practice on building and maintaining habitats in a less unfamiliar environment, so it's got its points.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @12:50PM (4 children)
If you look at the English languge, and how it changed from 1200ad to even 1500ad. Or from then, to the 1900s... maasive, compared to the 20th and 21st even.
Why? Well, literacy for one. Most language was oral only, as most could not read... which means isolated areas did diverge. However with high literacy, all reading the same text, reduced change sets in.
Next comes radio, tv, etc. This moves populations to a more centralized, common pronunciation.
So no. Language usage, and pronunciation won't EVER change like in the past, unless literacy and audio is lost. Even if no audio and text exists on a new planet (purge or data loss), prononciation and such will remain static from that point, and as there is no divergence yet...
An example... you can listen to radio shows from the early 20th, and the pronunciation is essentially identical. Try that from 1700 to 1800, where even a T looks likan F, OR OTHER CENTURIES, WHERE SOUNDS LIKE U AND V SWITCHED, OR ENTIRELY NEW LETTERS WERE ADDED TO THE ALPHABET...
(Sorry about caps, phone borked, too annoying to fix).
Eg, I could travel 100 years in the past, and no one would think my pronunciation of phone, book, work, house are weird. Try that from 1900 to 1800 even.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Friday July 10 2020, @07:19PM
Second the motion. Literacy solidifies words but doesn't solidify pronunciation; transmission and recordings do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @09:55AM (2 children)
English in those time periods is a different case. In late 11th century the invading norse nobility spoke a different language to the conquered saxon peasants. There was a lot of word migration and consolidation between the two.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @03:46PM (1 child)
I've read somewhere (can't find now) that word migration almost only moves downwards - from socially higher classes to lower classes - and rarely the other way. The example used was Welsh. Almost no Welsh words have been adopted into English despite them being almost the same country for thousands of years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @04:46PM
Seems reasonable. The only obvious exception would be things the conquerors don't have words for, like native plants and animals. Still explains why old saxon changed so much over those few hundred years.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @01:24PM (5 children)
My language changes on long flights and that's before I get to the hotel and hit the mini-bar.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @01:48PM
EF... The flight from Montgomery to Lindbergh is only 5 minutes.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 10 2020, @03:55PM (3 children)
I get to hotel. I notice there are only 3 coat hangars in closet.
Tired and frustrated (my language changes) I call the front desk.
"I'm calling to complain that there are 3 hookers in my closet!"
"What?!?"
"I have more clothes than can fit on 3 hookers."
"Sir, I don't understand . . ."
"You heard me! There are only 3 hookers in my closet when I got to my room. I demand that you immediately send a dozen more hookers to my room at once!"
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @04:58PM
One of my dates in SoCal was a southern bell. One day at 7/11 the teen cashier asked her if she wanted a bag. She said she needed a poke.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday July 10 2020, @06:33PM
Since you said you wanted more hookers [wikipedia.org] in your room, did they send the plumber to fix the room flooding? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @03:49PM
Shoddy establishment probably didn't leave any sodas in the fridge either.
"I need hookers and coke. HOOKERS AND COKE. Damnit!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @02:30PM (3 children)
Yes, the languages did change significantly in that time. No, the change does not constitute any practical problem.
(Score: 3, Touché) by etherscythe on Saturday July 11 2020, @01:47AM (2 children)
Really? Let's talk about the Federalist Papers and Supreme Court interpretations.
Let's talk about the phrase "well-regulated militia."
I would say there are some serious practical problems that are perhaps only getting worse over time.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @11:21AM
and it is getting worse over time, with the tech that allows doing it in bulk and over a distance, and even automating the process.
But it has nothing to do with language, and everything with decreased likelihood of getting hit in the face for it.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday July 11 2020, @04:59PM
"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.
The reason for all the weaseling is that no-one wants to accept the blunt truth that the 2A allows private ownership of any weapon up to and including B52's loaded with H-Bombs. Really the USA should amend the 2A, but too many people don't trust the Government enough to let them change it.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday July 10 2020, @03:41PM (3 children)
Idioms are a problem in language translation.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
First example.
I'm going to use a story from Judges 3:12-30. [biblegateway.com]
In a nutshell: (in my own words)
In the King James text (from 1611) the text says the servants thought Eglon might be "covering his feet". A modern reader has no idea what that might mean. It is obviously an idiom for "taking a dump" (which itself is an idiom. taking? a dump? Don't you leave a dump instead of take one?)
Also is "covering his feet" an ancient Hebrew idiom or a 1611 English idiom that anyone in 1611 would have understood? (I don't know the answer.)
One can presume that when Ehud stabbed Eglon through the intestines and his bowels discharged that there would have been quite a smell. No surprise then that his servants thought he might be taking a dump.
In a modern translation, like NIV, which I linked above, it says they thought he might be "relieving himself" which a modern reader would understand as taking a dump.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Another example of an idiom.
"Poor Joe, he kicked the bucket."
What do you think I mean. Most people think: I'm expressing sympathy for Joe who just died.
Now write that on stone. Bury it in the sand for 1,024 years. Now translate it to the current language from what was today's English.
First off, the translators recognize that "Poor" had two meanings. Many words often have multiple meanings. (How many word in the dictionary have more than one definition.)
1. Poor most commonly means lack of financial resources
2. Poor could mean expressing sympathy for (probably a language development based on the first meaning of poor)
So the translators will translate the first words "Poor Joe" to mean Joe had lack of financial resources. Next the words "Kicked" and "Bucket" are translatable into the current tongue.
So the obvious meaning: "Joe was angry because he lacked financial resources, and in frustration kicked a bucket."
The original meaning is completely lost because translators don't recognize that it was an idiom which meant something else.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
There are also differences in dialect. Dialect is always the result of geographical separation. An example is in Judges 12:4-6 [biblegateway.com]
The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim.
Whenever a survivor of Ephraim wanted to cross over, the Gileadites would ask them to pronounce "Shibboleth".
If they said "Siboleth" because they couldn't pronounce the "Sh" sound, they would be killed because their dialect gave them away as an Ephraimite.
There are many dialects of English. All the same language, but dialects. New York. Southern Drawl. Australian. Canadian. British. Midwestern. Etc.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
But I must cut this already long post short, because my bladder is telling me I need to go leave a piss.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @07:13PM (2 children)
From the polyglot version [sacred-texts.com] of Judges 3, it seems that it is a Biblical Hebrew euphemism for defecation that the KJV wrongfully rendered literally. The Tanakh uses the word 'raglav' (רַגְלָ֖יו) which literally means 'his feet' but in context is euphemistic for bodily excretions. The Vulgate instead renders that last phrase of verse 24 as: "Forsitan purgat alvum in æstivo cubiculo" ("Perhaps he is emptying his bowels in the summer chamber").
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 10 2020, @07:42PM (1 child)
Thanks. That answers a long standing question I had about whether this was a "1611 English" or an "ancient Hebrew" idiom.
I knew that if it were an ancient Hebrew idiom, it would therefore be a mistake for the King James translators to translate it literally instead of something that captures the meaning of the idiom. That only leaves me wondering what would be 1611 English for "taking a dump"?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @11:54PM
My favorite is the African-American "dropping the kids off at the pool".
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @04:23PM
This is a bridge too far! Now they expect us to lose our own language? Phoenix, what can we do??
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Friday July 10 2020, @08:38PM
Icelanders today can read the sagas in the original because their contemporary language is still that close to Old Norse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @09:17PM
Martian explorer 1: "Musk, musk, musk?"
Martian explorer 2: "Musky mook muck musk"
Martian explorer 1: "Musk musky musk."
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday July 10 2020, @10:30PM (1 child)
I don't think TFA has it right.
Using ancient earth colonization as a model doesn't work, diasporas didn't keep in touch much back then because messages required physical travel to transfer, with travel times of weeks to years - comms bandwidth and latency and expense was simply woefully inadequate to maintain language currency. However, in modern times with availability of comparatively low latency / high bandwidth comms, with no physical travel required, languages have spread around the world over the course of decades without any loss of language currency. Which languages? - programming languages. Even before the internet.
So, it's all about the comms capability, not really (directly) distance or elapsed time. If we have the tech to build generation ships I think it's a reasonable assumption we'll have the tech for at least lightspeed comms at interstellar distances. We may in fact pretty much have the tech now, but we don't have any interstellar endpoints to test with. Our furthest endpoints are also our oldest (Voyagers) - fixed at 1970s tech.
Generation ships will have to be massive, they will need to be able to generate massive amounts of power, internally (solar panels ain't gonna work out of system), power that will very probably solve the bandwidth problem (I doubt you'll be transmitting every crew members video diary every day, but I would expect you'd be able to transmit video, or the holographic-immersive-VR equivalent of the time).
That leaves only the latency issue, which if limited to C could get indeed quite large (say 10 generations, 30yrs per generation, ave speed 0.1C = 30yr transmit, 60yr round trip). But TFA misrepresents this, it isn't a matter of it being too long to wait for question-response to be viable, that isn't how you do it, this is a solved problem (I've seen it in a sci-fi short story that was old when I read it 30-40yrs ago) - both ends keep transmitting data with previously agreed selection/priority and any responses to queries are interspersed when received.
Provided with a continuous stream of data of interest from earth (say: news, political, cultural, scientific advances, and yes, linguistic changes) your 0.1C gen-ship crew 300yrs out are going to talk like earthers from 30yrs ago, but it'll be "earthers from 60yrs ago" by time message is received. That is clearly not insurmountable, we have plenty of audio and video from 60yrs ago that is perfectly understandable today.
Now multiply up by 10, so 3000 years travel time, 600yrs comms round trip, and yes you would have a problem or two. First problem would be whether or not the earth civilisation that sent the ship would still be around to talk to, second would be whether or not the gen ship would be around (we can build some stuff with 100yr+ expected lifespans now, but stuff that is 3000yrs+? - what we have, we can't figure out how they built), language is probably some way down the problem list.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @10:43PM
Or they could, like, take a box full of DVDs.