Re: One language for the world

John Cowan wrote:
>
> Tom Wier wrote:
> > [T]he New York Times
> > recently had an article stating that scientists have indeed been able to go
> > faster, 300 times faster, by speeding it through cesium gas, which, predictably
> > oddly, causes the light to exit the tube of cesium gas before it has entered it
>
> If the New York Times said that, the New York Times is talking shite, which is
> no surprise.
>
Wasn't that 1/300 times as fast? I remember that someone somewhere was
able to slow down light to more reasonable, but still incredibly fast by
human standards, speeds. 35 sticks in my mind, but I can't remember what
the units were... m/s? I remember it involved putting it through a
certain dense gas at a low temperature. Of course, I read that in
Popular Science, not the New York Times.

> > but my question is:  how would living on another planet affect language change?
> > Lexically, yeah, I could believe that easily;  but grammatically I don't see any
> > reason for it to change in a fashion any different from the language change
> > already attested on earth.
>
> In Larry Niven's early sf novel _World of Ptavvs_, we get just a reference to the
> Jinxian accent (Jinx being one of the first settled planets in Known Space);
> it took about two generations to develop.  At that time, Known Space was
> being settled by slower-than-light freezer ships, with maser-beam communication
> at light speed.
>
> That seems to be consistent with the development of Australian English.
>
Well, a lexicon would change more readily than the grammar, so I'd
imagine that yes, a distinct dialect with a distinct accent could form,
without it having it's own grammatical constructs, provided that
communication through space was reasonably quick. Of course, if a
language already existed on the colonized worlds, the dialect could
adapt some of its constructs.