Language Drift

I was thinking about languages and time, and wondering whether we should
expect more drift in the future or less.

I mean, take Latin, which over time has devolved into what, Spanish,
Italian, Portuguese, French... Seperate people from each other and they
become first two people seperated by a common language, and then
gradually can't even understand each other.

But what happens when the world starts to "shrink" with the development
of communication, and when time stops mattering so much, with the
development of recording technology?

Take Brazil, for example, where villages were so widely seperated and
travel so infrequent that "portuguese" there was starting to turn into
dialects so seperate from each other that one Brazilian could barely
understand another from halfway across the country. With the advent of
Television, though, the government introduced Soap Operas and made a
point of broadcasting them to as many places as possible; over the
subsequent years, the language has drifted back together, in an
amazingly short time.

Look at the USA. Twenty years ago, I couldn't understand people in
Lancaster PA half the time ("Dutchy") or in Atlanta, or even in Texas
sometimes; the accents and dialects were so strong I frequently had to
have people slow down or repeat themselves, or I'd end up asking someone
else what they'd said. If that happens nowadays, its usually literally
a different language (there are people here in Lancaster who really only
speak a local form of german, and of course out in Arizona I met some
who only spoke Spanish)

Apparantly the vast majority of people on the planet speak English, at
least as a second language, and do so in a way that allows them to
understand Hollywood pictures and BBC news... and likewise to make
themselves understood if they get interviewed on CNN or whatever.

So there's one thought; as TL raises, maybe language barriers will drop
back down.

But then there's the even more recent phenomenum of the internet; we can
form chat groups with other people who share our interests, and we
develop words and phrases that only other people from the same group
understand; Usenet was one thing, but go into an MMOG like Everquest and
you can end up really deeply into that sort of thing.

What if, as TL raises, we break from the monolithic culture imposed by
early Television (ABC, NBC, CBS, and f**k-all else) and get into
artificial worlds that seperate into smaller and smaller subsets of
interest. And what if, instead of being forced to all understand the
same dialect/language, we gain sufficiently developed translation tech
that we can get what anyone says translated into our own idiomatic
speech and vice versa?

At a sufficiently high TL, does a sudden catastrophic communication
failure turn the world/universe into a massive tower of Babel?

And can I hang a campaign off of it?

Which is to say, I've been looking at the GURPS language rules, and
wondering if instead of "why bother with this" which is my response 90%
of the time, I could instead turn it into one of the most important
aspects of a game.

Jefferson wrote:

> Lance Berg wrote:
>
>> I was thinking about languages and time, and wondering whether we
>> should expect more drift in the future or less.
>
>
> Less; almost certainly. Literate cultures tend to have less drift than
> illiterate cultures, and it looks like cultures with voice records will
> have even less than that.
>
> [snip]
>
>> What if, as TL raises, we break from the monolithic culture imposed by
>> early Television (ABC, NBC, CBS, and f**k-all else) and get into
>> artificial worlds that seperate into smaller and smaller subsets of
>> interest. And what if, instead of being forced to all understand the
>> same dialect/language, we gain sufficiently developed translation tech
>> that we can get what anyone says translated into our own idiomatic
>> speech and vice versa?
>>
>> At a sufficiently high TL, does a sudden catastrophic communication
>> failure turn the world/universe into a massive tower of Babel?
>>
>> And can I hang a campaign off of it?
>
>
> If you can good luck, but most of what you described is either technical
> speech or slang. Neither is, properly speaking, a different language
> and learning them isn't like learning a new language.
>
The couple examples that came to mind, yes, but what about the Brazil
example, in reverse? If you can take lots of wildly seperated villages
and turn their dialect drift back into a single monolithic language by
giving them a single set of programs all using the same single dialect,
can't you take a lot of people with a single dialect and seperate them
by exposing them all to seperate programming with seperate dialects?

Don't the examples of Valley Speech of a couple decades ago and
"ebonics" point in that direction already?

And advanced translation capability? I mean, if you speak Basque today,
and you want to communicate with anyone, you pretty much have to learn
another language, not much chance anyone is going to learn yours. But
if you could get everything written or spoken, anywhere, translated to
Basque, and could translate from Basque to whatever anyone else speaks,
well why go to all that bother?

Take the debate over Spanish speaking immigrants in the USA today; the
claim that they aren't assimilating into the culture. How much of that
is simply because its easier for them not to than it used to be? With
lots of spanish language programming on cable/satelite TV and the radio,
with access to spanish conversations on the internet, with government
documents available in both spanish and english... its a very different
situation than the irish or swedish or chinese faced decades or a
hundred years ago.

Extend that logic out to really good translation software (I know, at
the moment its still largely a good hint at whats being said, but a
decade ago it was more like a big joke) and do you really need to learn
other languages at all? And if yours happens to drift a bit, will you
even notice, since everything you say gets translated for everyone, and
everything they say gets translated to something you can understand?

More I think about it, more I think I actually read something like this
before, maybe something by Vonnegut?