Cynthians, Ythrians and Merseians became interstellar space travellers because of their contacts with Technic civilization. One Cynthian trade-route joined Technic civilization immediately. Others later joined the Supermetals company.
Some members of Hirharouk's crew do not belong to any choth because:
"'Ythrians got as much variation as the Commonwealth - no, more, because they not had time yet for technology to make them into homogeneouses.'"
-"Lodestar," p. 650.
(We apologise for van Rijn's Anglic.)
Linguistic and cultural unification have not gone as far on Merseia as on Terra.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Anderson had fun thinking up the different ways Old Nick could mangle Anglic!
Happy New Year! Sean
Technology changes incentives.
If you live in a village and rarely go more than a few miles and do most of your interaction with people within an hour's walk, it makes perfect sense to speak nothing but the local patois, in most instances.
And people (mostly) don't learn languages unless they have strong incentives to do so.
But that condition is increasingly rare.
Eg., in Singapore, when I was born, less than 2% of the population spoke English at home.
Now more than 48% do so -- and solid majorities among people under 30.
Because it's worth the trouble to learn English -- or to a lesser extent, Mandarin.
But it's not worth the trouble for any substantial number who didn't learn it at their mother's knee to learn Tamil or Hokkien.
And children also learn language from playmates and kids at school. If speaking English vastly broadens the number you can communicate with among the peers you interact with daily, you learn.
The 19th and 20th century incentives to speak -national- languages are also decreasing, though not as strongly.
The French worry about that a lot... 8-).
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
A century from now, if current trends continue, English might well be the de facto language of the world and well on the way to becoming a real world Anglic.
You might say this Englishing of the world is the British revenge for losing the Hundred Years War with France! (Ironic smile)
The Catholic Church still uses Latin as its official language, with official documents and decrees needing to be formally promulgated in Latin. With Italia being used as the everyday language of the Pope and curia.
Happy New Year! Sean
In terms of numbers of speakers and/or nation states of economic significance (and thus able to protect their native languages) seems like the "likely" dozen or so survivors will be:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/languages-by-total-number-of-speakers-2228881
English
Chinese (Mandarin)
Hindi
Spanish
French
Arabic (Modern Standard)
Bengali
Russian
Portuguese
Urdu
Indonesian
German
Japanese
Crystal balls are notoriously flawed, but given the above realities, one wonders if an inventive SF writer has ever offered up a linguist/translator as their protagonist? The obvious character arc would be linguist to translator to psyops operator to spymaster ... some of the work of Paul Linebarger (Cordwainer Smith), or Keith Laumer, perhaps?
Kaor, Dave!
Assuming current trends continue, I can see Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, and maybe Russian still being well established languages a century from now. Not so sure about the others--e.g., many Indians resist speaking Hindi in India, preferring English.
Happy New Year! Sean
Sure, but quantity is a thing.
Kaor, Dave!
Quantity is also a factor. And I've recently found out South Sudan adopted English as its official language, instead of one of its tribal languages.
Ad astra! Sean
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