Linguistic Drift and changing languages

>>53852385
Technology matters a lot. Languages change much more slowly when written or recorded examples are widely available. Obviously class plays a big role too. Uneducated people have less exposure to written/recorded examples of their own language. Look at how much vulgar Latin changed compared to the academic version.

I also want in on this.

>>53852385
Historical Linguist reporting in. What do you want to know.

>>53852727
What are you wearing right now?

>>53852727
Hard to pin down to specific questions. Basically what happens in my setting is

>Humanity spreads into our solar system during the next 600 years
>Cataclysmic events happen and about 50 million people survive and are confined to a humongous space station for about 1000-1200 years
>Biggest groups are descendants of (mostly australian) english speaking, russian, german, french (until most of them are lost in an accident), standard mandarin and japanese
>After that, Mars is colonized, present day is a good 300 to 400 years from there

I'm figuring that especially those 1000 years on the space station are probably the most crucial, and that people would mostly stick to their groups during that time. I'm mostly interested in how langauges change over time, to make some educated guesses for the big languages of the setting. There's still basic education happening, but I'm pretty sure that after 2000 years there's bound to be some changes.

>>53852385

Find a PDF copy of Trask's Historical Linguistics (On its 3rd Edition I think now). It's an introductory text to Language Change over long periods.

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>>53853031
Will do. Any other suggestions?

>>53852585
>Technology matters a lot. Languages change much more slowly when written or recorded examples are widely available.
>Obviously class plays a big role too.

These are both extremely important points so I'm glad it was the first post

Now that we've got the technology to record audio AND to disseminate it across all cultures worldwide, language isn't going to mutate as quickly and easily as it has in the past as far as pronunciation divergences leading to separate languages. Conversely, languages might start to evolve more quickly now because new, interesting, and/or useful words can easily spread from group to group (just look at all the 4chan terminology that's widely used online these days, like "fap").

Eagerly waiting for someone to tell me I'm full of shit because this topic fascinates me too and I want to hear more from other people about it.

>>53853707
I'm not so sure about that. At least around here, the local german has changed substantially. Not only did we adopt a lot of english words, the entire way of talking is different compared to sixty, seventy years ago. Not to mention that we are currently in the process of completely losing an entire grammatical case because barely anyone uses it anymore. Another example would be the german word for scientist, "Wissenschafter". For some reason, putting an L in there, morphing it to "WissenschaftLer" seems more natural to people any by now it's an accepted way to spell it, even though it was absolutely "wrong" thirty years ago.

>>53853615

I didn't do much Historical Linguistics at University (it was mostly concentrated on the History of English specifically), so sadly I can't recommend any others. Here's a PDF of Trask though.

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=E49FF0130187AD4E21D2985480909F96

>>53852905

A thousand years is a long time for language change. That separates us from Old English, which is completely unintelligible to a modern English speaker and basically reads like a German author huffing paint. I'd expect any or all of those languages to be unrecognizable after 1300 years.

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>>53854377
We do have a lot more media and education nowadays, though, which still survives to the postcalaclysmic society of my setting. Mankind basically spends a good thousand years aboard a space station in a blend of your typical cyberpunk setting and bunkersociety scenario.
So I'm guessing it would happen a lot slower, but I really have no idea, that's why I'm here.

>>53854198
Thanks a bunch.

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>>53852385
don't push it too hard m9
you'll create a situation where your players/readers can't tell at a glance if a word is a place, a thing or a dude
and then they can't remember if they've met it before because it's not going into the wordy bit of their brains
so they bust out the stupid but memorable nicknames, all your work goes down the toilet
now you have to listen to them mock your efforts for the remainder of the campaign

>>53855072
Thanks, but I usually have a laxer approach to this and I'm used to players making up dumb nicknames anyway. Names usually don't stick until players start caring about the thing for real.
I'm doing this mostly for my own fun, because I wanted to go full blown turboautism for once while worldbuilding.

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>>53852385
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/futurelang.php

>1000 CE Old English: Wé cildra biddaþ þé, éalá láréow, þæt þú tæ'ce ús sprecan rihte, forþám ungelæ'rede wé sindon, and gewæmmodlíce we sprecaþ...

>2000 CE Modern English: We children beg you, teacher, that you should teach us to speak correctly, because we are ignorant and we speak corruptly...

>3000 CE Futuristic English: ZA kiad w'-exùn ya tijuh, da ya-gAr'-eduketan zA da wa-tAgan lidla, kaz 'ban iagnaran an wa-tAg kurrap...

>>53854696
That's not going to impact spoken language as much. The spoken audio might, but you could easily have a scenario where people understand it but can't speak it.

It's going to be very different. It may end up going agglugantive, which means lots of wordlets stuck together each but doing something grammatical.

>>53859050
How do you figure? I've heard people argue that a lot gets adapted from movies and tv shows that people consume

>>53854377
Isn't english kind of a weird extreme example? I'm pretty sure it's less hardcore for romance languages, considerinf that a spanish or italian speaker can go and try to understand half of a classic latin text if it's not a very complicated one.

>>53860034
Indian English. They watch a lot of American tv and don't come out like English speakers. Also they're not going to be watching 1500 year old tv shows. They'll have their own shit.