Re: Conlang for the Foundations Saga

Eric Christopherson wrote:

> On Oct 16, 2006, at 12:08 PM, Santiago Matías Feldman wrote:
>
> > Hi!
> > I've just finished reading "Foundation's Edge", the
> > sixth (I think) volume of the Foundations Saga by
> > Isaac Asimov, and in one part the characters were
> ......
> > Then I just thought: Why not create that Galactic
> > language, based on the current natlangs in the Earth
> > and trying to predict the ways in which only one
> > language may become the only language of the future
> > human Galactic society 20,000 years in the future?
>
> According to mainstream historical linguistics, AFAIK, a language can
> become pretty much completely unrecognizable in less time than that.
> So, if you don't actually care to plot out the details of its
> diachronic development*, you could just make up any a priori conlang
> and claim that it evolved from English or Mandarin or Arabic :)
Ha ha. True, but you'd have to sneak in at least 1-5% of recognizable
cognates, though that's also considered the percentage of accidental
resemblance. Still, there are several Austronesian langs. (in New Caledonia
and elsewhere in Melanesia) that measure that low against all other AN
langs. and PAN. I've never seen a comparison of English vs. Hindi, but would
guess the percentage would be quite low.  (That is, according to the Swadesh
list, which really doesn't prove much of anything.)
>
> On the other hand, I've wondered a lot what implications the
> "Information Age" has for language change. Perhaps with widespread,
> instantaneous communications, languages will evolve much more slowly
> than they have in the past. So maybe there could be some recognizable
> elements of current Earth languages in it.
That's very possible; consider how printing, and (since say the mid-19th C)
greatly increased literacy have IMO slowed down the rate of change. It's
always struck me how much more "modern" is the Spanish of Cervantes (and
ever earlier writers) than the Engl. of his contemporary Shakespeare, or the
later KJ Bible-- you don't need footnotes or a dictionary to read Don
Quijote.

> *Off topic... If you're like me, you do care about plotting out
> diachronic development. I've been wondering for a while what the
> "deepest" conlang is, diachronically -- how much time in conreality
> it takes to evolve. The deepest I've seen so far is the Drem family
> at http://www.geocities.com/dremlangs/ , which spans about 13,000
> years.
I have only a vague outline of the history of Kash, but since they had
approx. 1000 years head-start on Terra, the language(s) have to be at least
as old as ours + 1000 yrs. One probable theoretical/technical error in the
con-history of Planet Cindu is that there are only 2 extant language
families, one for each of the two developed species (there's also a third,
but they're "still primitive" [as my Indonesian friends liked to say of the
Papuans]). It's as if Earth was populated entirely by speakers of IE and,
say, Sino-Tibetan languages (with a little enclave of Georgian thrown in for
oddity).
*Obviously* there must have been other languages that never flourished, and
passed from the scene without trace.

>I'd love to plot the evolution of a language at least that far.
In my work on Gwr sound changes, it looks like it may have gone from
bisyllabic to monosyllabic/tonal in perhaps 2-3000 years. And that's only
one sub-family.
>
(Santiago:)
> > Do you know of anyone who has already created a
> > conlang for the Foundations Saga?
> > Or do any of you have devised a futurist conlang?
Not devised, but I know that one exists in my con-history. But it's probably
used more for technical matters (talking to ships' computers etc.) than
everyday use-- they've developed computerized plug-into-your-brain
technologies for transferring/learning languages. Sort of like the Universal
Translator, except you actually speak the other language almost perfectly.
:-)