Science Fiction 365 - All Will Be Gooden

[skonen_blades]

I figure that if a colony sets roots down on another planet, the language is going to evolve, much like how Canada no longer sounds like Europe after a few hundred years of being separate. But how much different would it be with total isolation except for supply ships now and then for a longer time? See what you think. Click on the link and let me know your thoughts.

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[osmie]

Far, far less than you'd think! The reason that Canada no longer sounds like Europe is that Europe's languages have evolved.

Homesickness tends to dominate linguistic change: the less contact there is with the homeland, the more rigorously a society cleaves to its original accent and idioms. There's no contemporary accent on Earth which sounds more like Elizabethan/Jacobean English than that of rural Newfoundland, where it froze in the seasonal fishing settlements of the 1600s. A more conventional North American accent echoes early 18th century English, just as Joual echoes 18th century French.

There would certainly be drift, largely by reference to native objects & assimilation of native terms, but the real communication barrier would be the full-scale dialectal shift by the folks on the supply ships!

There are exceptions, like Jamaica, but for the most part this rule holds remarkably well.

I believe some likely directions for English include the restriction of "he" and "she" to a singular/informal third-person pronoun, with "they" becoming ever more common for the singular/formal case, like the second-person "vous" in French; eventually "he" and "she" will be used only archaically, in the same contexts as the English "thou". The language is growing more periphrastic; words less often have an intrinsic part of speech; we get far more mileage out of word order than our ancestors. Verbing weirds language, so huggable the weirdly. Phonetically English has come to dominate the globe so much that it's no longer colonial, and there's now a different trend in every regional accent.

[skonen-blades.livejournal.com]

Hey, wow, that's fantastic. Thanks. I remember in the movie Bhaji on the Beach, a very traditional East Indian family living in London is going through the trials and tribulations of modern life influencing their daughters. In a fit of desperation, they call their great aunt to come over from Delhi.

And she gets off the plane in a tight red dress, giant sunglasses, long red nails and high heels. The London family is wearing saris to welcome her and they realize that they've been keeping a pocket of archaic tradition alive while India has been doing no such thing.

I can see what you're saying. That's a whole new way of looking at it for me. Thank you.