June 6, 2014 • 42 mins
Will humans in the future talk like we do today? Or is the perfect English of a Jean-Luc Picard merely a convenience for sci-fi writers?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, maybe everyone, and welcome forward Thinking. The podcast
looks at the future and says, I'll stop the world
and not with you. I'm John and strictly I'm Lauren
foc Obama, and I'm Joe McCormick. Today we are launching
(00:24):
what is hopefully going to become a series of podcasts
within the Forward Thinking podcast. I think Full of Hope
is fine because we're the ones who decide so well,
odds are good. We'll just see if it keeps happening, right,
that's fair. But here's the basic concept. It's you don't
see that in sci fi because there are a lot
(00:44):
of times when we're sitting around having conversations about things
that seem to us very likely to happen in the future,
but the majority of science fiction depictions of the future
don't realize these events. And you guys sort of touched
on this with the anti gravity or the artificial gravity
episode rather or the idea that you know in the
future the sci fi you always see people walking around
(01:06):
on spacecraft, but really, wouldn't you see a lot of
people floating around most of the time We talked about
this a lot on the show. Actually, I mean usually
are our entrance into any given topic is science fiction,
because that's where most of us experienced the future. Yeah yeah, well,
I mean I I often experienced the future, but by
the time I can talk about it, it's over. Yeah,
but if you use the example of artificial gravity, there
(01:27):
at least there are some technologies we can talk about
where we'd say, okay, there's some things we have in
mind that could probably solve the artificial gravity problem just
by simulating it with centripetal force or something like that.
But there are other things that we think are are
pretty sure bets for the future, and you rarely see
(01:50):
them in sci fi, or at least the majority of
the time you've don't. And the one we wanted to
talk about today is the consistency of modern speech and lying,
which so I want to start y'all out with a quote. Okay,
so this is a quote I grabbed from the internet
by Jean Luke Picard one Captain Jean luc Picard, second
(02:12):
best Captain of the Enterprise ever. Time to start a fight? Alright, already,
Pike was the purpose obviously, so the captain of the
enterprise in the next generation. Once said this, the prime
directive is not just a set of rules. It is
a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proven
again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less
(02:35):
developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference, maybe
the results are invariably disastrous. What's wrong with that? Well,
on one hand, he's advocating the prime directive, which I
think is debatable. Well, fine, but that's a different that's
a whole other nerd fight. But taking it completely aside,
(02:55):
the uh, the opinion of the prime directive as advocated
in Star Trek. You notice how he sounds pretty much
like how we talk today, except you know, more English. Right, Well, okay,
so he has his own literary style, his own style,
but he's three years in the future and he's speaking
like we speak. That's true. That's true. He's using the
(03:17):
same same terminology that we use. He's using the same
sentence structure, the same syntax, everything along those lines. Yeah,
I see, that's highly intelligible to us. It sounds exactly
like someone like Picard would talk today. Sure, you picked
one of the Star Trek episodes that was highly intelligible.
I kind appointed you to a few that aren't. But
there there are some things that go even farther into
(03:38):
the future, where you know, they've depicted far future civilizations
that basically just speak twentieth century English. Or the example
I polled was Planet of the Apes, very you know,
classic science fiction film. I'm talking about the Charlton Heston one. Obviously,
so in the the movie the year that the astronaut
travels to he's in he's in suspended animation, is traveling
(04:00):
near the speed of light for I think a year
and a half and lands on a um what he
believes it to be an alien planet in what is
the year three thousand nine eight, but it's actually spoiler
alert Earth. And you have this whole's cast system of
apes that have evolved over time. And the guerrillas are
like the military police, and the orangutans are the politicians,
(04:23):
chimpanzees with the scientists, and they all speak English. Uh,
they speak English that they the astronaut can understand even
if it's not English. Let's assume for a moment that
it's whatever other language it happens to be, but it
has been translated for us. The audience so we can
understand it. The fact is, the astronaut can still understand
what the apes are saying. The language itself has not
(04:45):
changed in his journey. So even if you give it
the opportunity of saying, oh, well, it's just so that
you can understand the story, the characters within it can
understand each other. So the divine spark exists only in
Simian brain. Yeah, so, so what what you get there?
Is this crazy idea that these characters are able to
communicate despite hundreds of years of separation between them. So
(05:09):
here's did you grab a doctor? I had to here
he goes. You are right. I have always known about
man from the evidence. I believe his wisdom must walk
hand in hand with his idiocy. His emotions must rule
his brain. He must be a warlike creature who gives
battle to everything around him, even himself. Touche Doctor's as
(05:31):
sounds like a particularly eloquent twentieth century English Charlton Heston
flies with dirty. Uh. Do we have anything even farther
ahead than oh? Sure? Yeah? If you want to look
at the time Machine by H. G. Wells, Do you
want to talk about super into the future. So, the
protagonist of the time machine travels to the year eight
(05:52):
hundred two thousand seven d one. That's crazy, now, flag
I read that book. I thought that in the book
they did speak a different line they do in the book,
in the original in the film from the nineteen sixties,
right in the book version. The eloy, which are the
the sort of docile um cattle, spoil her alert in
the time machine. But they are they are descended from humans.
(06:15):
Are are great great grandchildren. Ain't too bright? Right, right, Well,
half of them aren't. The other half of the Morlocks,
who are all the ones who do all the work,
and they have been using the eloy as cattle. Essentially
they eat the eloy. So the Morlocks are the bad
guys and the Elois are the good guys more or less.
Kind of Actually, there's a lot of socialist commentary in
that book. But anyway, so H. G. Wells in his story,
(06:39):
the Eloi spoke their own language that was unintelligible to
the protagonist. But in the film, again you have the
eloy and the protagonists being able to speak to one
another fluently. So, but you're talking about eight hundred thousand
years of the future and people are still speaking um.
(07:00):
Well Es era English. Now, the reason why we're finding
this so amusing is because all you have to do
is look backward, look back over time and see the
historical evolution of English and see how it has changed
dramatically just in the last thousand years or so, let
alone eight hundred thousand years into the future. Yeah, okay,
(07:23):
So we plotted a little journey, a little literary journey
for you through quotations. Through quotations, so we've started with
opening lines from literary works uh A hundred, two hundred,
four hundred years ago. The main thing to keep in mind,
which we hinted at earlier, is that each of these
is a different writer with their own literary style. So
even two writers today aren't going to sound exactly alike.
(07:46):
But even with that in mind, you're going to really
notice the differences in a minute here, sure, Okay. So
the first work that we have was published. It's called
Unlucky thirteen. It's by James Patterson and Maxine petro Um,
and we we chose it because it is the at
the top of the New York Times bestseller list this
week combined digital and printing one thee list. So so,
(08:07):
I mean, we didn't choose it because it's your favorite book. No,
but it's but it's a popular work within the culture,
and so we thought that it would be a good one.
So so I'm going to quote the first two paragraphs
their short So I chose too. It was an ugly Monday,
just afternoon. There had been no sign of sun so far,
just a thick fog that had put the blocks to
traffic around the Golden Gate. I was behind the wheel
(08:28):
of the squad car, and Inspector rich Conklin, my partner
of many years, was in the seat beside me when
Claire called my cell phone. Claire Washburn is my closest
friend and also San Francisco's chief medical examiner. The call
was strictly business. Alright, alright, so that's that's obviously modern English. Yeah,
uh nothing, I've got no qualms about it. Obviously he
was published this year, so clearly we would have a
(08:51):
very similar style. Well, what's next. I pulled a quote
from exactly one hundred years ago, not to this day,
but to the year nine fourteen, from the short story
Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker, which actually do this in
an English accent. Was No, I'm not going to do it.
Wouldn't it be an Irish accent? Well, I guess technically
I could deny yoursh accent. That would be just fine.
(09:12):
Why don't you read it, Jonathan. This is from the
short story Dracula's Guest. I think it was originally a
chapter of Dracula that was removed. Right, well, I'll do this.
I'll do this in English, because most of the characters
and in Dracula were actually English, with the exception of
the title. The character from the title, I hope you
can pronounce all these words. When we started for our drive,
(09:33):
the sun was shining brightly on Munich, and the air
was full of joyousness of early summer. Just as we
were about to depart here, Dell Brook, the major de
hotel of the Quatras where I was staying, came down
bareheaded to the carriage, and, after wishing me a pleasant drive,
said to the coachman, still holding his hand on the
handle of the carriage door, Remember you were back by nightfall.
The sky looks bright, but there is a shiver in
(09:55):
the north wind, and it says there may be a
sudden storm. But I'm sure you will not be late here,
he smiled, and added, well you know what night it is, which,
of course everybody knows is Walpurchase knocked. Well, obviously night
all the banners that were up in town. Okay, okay,
(10:16):
so already this is pretty similar, sure, but I mean
there are a few cultural markers. Like in that first
passage we were talking about cell phones. There was there
was the golden gate bridge popped up. It was very clipped.
This is a little bit more, um, a little bit
more elaborate in its structure. Yeah, you can also, I
mean one easy marker is the technological differences. They mentioned
(10:36):
carriages and coachman and stuff. At The cultural difference that
I thought was interesting was it says bareheaded, like that's
a thing worth observing. Specifically, a dude wasn't wearing a hat, right,
I mean that that would be weird back then but
normal now. And there's just this, even though it sounds
pretty similar to modern English, there's a little bit less
than modern cadence to the pros. It's actually a little
(10:59):
closer to Sean Lupaccard spoke more like you know, nineteenth
maybe late eighteenth century character, but with terminology that was
obviously updated. The sentence structure was much more formal than
you would find a normal speech. Okay today, Okay, I
want to go back a hundred years before that, to
(11:21):
eighteen fourteen, where I pulled the beginning paragraph part of
the beginning paragraph of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. Now
keep in mind again this is Austin's particular literary style.
But we're definitely going to start getting into some strange
lands here. Oh, I'll do this one is Jane Austen.
Um is pretty cool and I'm a lady. About thirty
(11:46):
years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven
thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas
Spectrum of Mansfield Park in the County of Northampton, and
to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady,
with all the comforts and consequences of a handsome house
and large income. All Huntingdon's exclaimed on the greatness of
the match, and her uncle the lawyer himself, allowed her
to be at least three thousand pounds short of any
(12:07):
equitable claim to it. She had two sisters to be
benefited by her elevation, and such of their acquaintance as thought,
Miss Ward and Miss Frances quite as handsome as Miss Maria,
did not scruple to predict their marrying with almost equal advantage.
What there's fancy talk. It is fancy talk, but it's
also I mean people, I don't know. Something was happening
(12:28):
differently back then. Sentences were happening in a different way. Yeah, yeah,
well yes, and and syntax and structure and just uh,
just the culture itself changes over time. That's really what
we're getting at here. But you know, I don't think
we've gone back far enough. Ye did not scruple to
predict their marrying with almost equal advantage. Well, that seems
(12:48):
pretty normal to me. We gotta go further back, Joe,
we gotta go further back. You're gonna are you gonna
make me read? So? The next one I grabbed was
from six fourteen, that's four hundred years ago this year.
This is Ben Johnson's comedic play Bartholomew Fair. I did
a play here because I I couldn't find the full
text of a good prose work. Well didn't really exist
(13:12):
as such at that point, well okay, but certainly not
prominent in the way right. They weren't popularized the way
that plays were at the time plays were more likely
where you're going to get a lot of pros. Right.
So this is Johnson's Bartholomew Fair, which if a y
are e, yeah, it certainly is. It opens with the
(13:35):
character called the stage keeper kind of giving this meta dialogue,
like talking about the play that's about to happen. So
here we get gentlemen have a little patience. They are
in upon coming instantly he that should begin the play,
master little wit. The proctor has a stitch new fallen
in his black silk stucking twill be drawn up area
(13:58):
you can tell twenty He plays one of the arches
that dwells about the hospital, and he has a very
pretty part. But for the whole play, will you have
the truth? On on it? On on it? I am
looking less to the poet here me or his man
(14:19):
master broom behind the rs. It is like to be
a very conceited scurvy one in plain English English. That's
why I picked that part, which this to me sounds
like a bizarre mix of modern English and nonsense. It does,
it does. And then of course we wanted to go
back further, and Joe and Lauren wanted to challenge me
(14:42):
with a little Middle English, Right, so by the time
you get to like the thirteen hundreds, you are fully
into Middle English, which is basically a different language. I
mean it's the predecessor to English. Yeah, and without scholarly
knowledge of how to like I Joe or I could
not read this aloud, but Jonathan specific it turns out education. Yeah,
(15:04):
my my degree was in medieval and Renaissance English literature.
So please do forgive me if I do stumble at all.
It has been about twenty years since I've done this.
This is the beginning of Jeffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales,
the prologue one that appeared with a short s the
draftsro march had passata, rota and bad ditch vain sweetly cool,
(15:26):
which vetu and ginrich is the floor when zaforas eat
with a sweeter breath inspired. Hath actually should be in
spirit hath in every holt, and heath the tinder cropas
on the younger zona. Hath in the rams have the
coasta rouna and smaller fool is marking Melodia that's sleeping
on the with open ear, so pricketh him not pure
in here karage is don long and Folke to go
(15:48):
on on pilgrimages, and Palmeres vought the second strongest rounders
to fair in the hallways, cool thin Saundri Landa's especially
from every sharers Inda of Engleland. The Candoberry they weaned
the holy blissful mata that them hath hope and one
that they were sick. And yeah, so so I did
(16:14):
one day. It should have been thy th h e
y was pronounced thy, not they. So I realized that
after I said, well, we'll give it to you this time,
I got it right the second time. So that is
not easy to do. And and a lot of the
words are spelled in a way that's similar to modern English,
but they are pronounced in a very different and we'll
(16:35):
get into the reason for that and just a little bit.
But if you go even further back, yeah, say you
go back from the Canterbury Tales to something like Bayo Wall. Yeah,
if you go to pre Norman invasion England. So the
Middle English is that was that that French influence that
came in and mixed with Old English to form Middle English. Right,
so before the Normans decided to visit England and stay
(16:59):
awhile the language was Old English, which comes from Old Frisian,
which is also the root for Old Germans. So if
you look at Old English and you start looking at words,
the words and sent structure look a lot more like
German than they do Modern English. Um. So one of
the phrases that my favorite phrase from Beowulf is, and
it's repeated a few times, is fatwas god kinek, which
(17:20):
means which means he was a good king. So obviously,
like it's like it's said quite a few times. Um,
but yes, fatwas god kinek does not sound at all
like English. But this is all technically English. And we've
just seen how from say, I don't know, around seven
hundred a d. All the way up to modern day
(17:45):
it has changed dramatically, So why would we not assume
it would continue to do so. Yeah, if Jean Luc
Picard is born in twenty three oh five, according to
the Star Trek lore, if he's speaking in the middle
of the of the undreds, should be like the difference
between us and somewhere between Jane Austin and Ben Johnson.
All Right, so here's the question. Now that we know
(18:08):
that language changes over time, how is it How can
we predict what language is going to sound like in
the future. I mean, how does language itself actually change?
The short answers that nobody knows. Hey, um well, okay,
it's a really big question, is the thing. And it
involves genetics and the development of multiple brain structures and
plasticity of the brain. Also development of speech structures from
(18:29):
the tongue to the vocal cords, the palette, all that
kind of stuff, um and then after that the growth
of systems of vocabulary and grammar. But there are a
bunch of really cool theories out there, um like like.
Research out of the University of Reading in two thousand
and eight, which was done with statistical tools that are
usually used in biology, indicated that the languages often evolved
in sudden spurts rather than steadily over time. And okay,
(18:52):
note that those sudden spurts can take a hundred years
or more. But but still, this is this is an
interesting finding. They they analyzed three of the world's major
language group, those being bent to Austronesian and Indo European.
In all three, some third of historical language changes came
on suddenly when a subculture split off from a larger population. Okay,
and so that thing you said when they came on
(19:13):
suddenly though it could take like a hundred years, that
doesn't mean they happened immediately. It just means the rate
of change is not constant, so they can slowly change
and then quickly change. And even so, I mean, when
you think about it, I mean, languages is one of
those things that unites the people, right, Yeah, that's yeah.
Without that common language, obviously you can't have any kind
(19:36):
of communication whatsoever. And when you can communicate with someone,
you start to psychologically identify with that person. You think
this person belongs, at least in some part to a
group that I also belong to. And when you encounter
someone who cannot communicate with you and they are not
able to have that kind of meaningful conversation in any way,
then you start to think, at least on a psychological level,
(19:59):
this per and does not belong to the group to
which I belong. So there are a lot of complicated
issues here that kind of guide a a language forming
and then evolving over time. Oh sure. And and part
of it is that when when a group breaks off
from a larger group, they maybe not intentionally, but but
(20:20):
certainly in a way purposefully distinguished themselves by certain language markers.
You can see that in teenagers who are trying to
be different from their parents are from when when um
segments of the British came over to America, they began
speaking differently, right, And then in some areas, some populations
of the British coming over to America ended up preserving
(20:40):
their way of speech a lot more faithfully than others.
So you will often hear interesting stories about how there
are pockets of populations in Appalachia, for example, that have
speech patterns that are more akin to the Elizabethan patterns
of speech way back when, which to me is fast
the idea that the proper English we are used to
(21:03):
hearing from television and movies is not really indicative of
what you would have heard in Shakespeare's time to hear
that it might be better for you to take a
trip to the to the mountains, the Ridge mountains. Yeah,
and even if it's not such a such a large
scale populational kind of thing, I mean, okay, So so
the exact role of all of these components of speech
(21:25):
are definitely in debate among among linguists and biologists and
psychologists and anthropologists and lots of other fields of study.
But you know, it's obvious to even the casual observer
that that vocab and grammar do change over time and
and are prompted by by cultural events. Even if they're
not this kind of break off event, it could be
a change in technology, wherein new words come into the
(21:47):
vocabulary and um, you know, new new sentence structures happen
because internet. Um, because internet is a good way of
putting that or or or just just locational and just
stuff like that. And um so, I mean, the generalized
theory is is that the you know, any current generation
of speakers will internalize the language that they were taught
(22:09):
and perhaps differently than the previous generation expects them to,
and also adopt new words, new structures, new sounds, and
then transmit them, perhaps shoddily, to the next generation. And
it's interesting in English, the way we generally see acceptance
on a larger scale is when we have certain institutions
acknowledge words as being actual words. Oh yeah, you always
(22:32):
see these news stories they you know, websters add so
and so to the dictionary. Although that's Oxford, that's that's
that's really more pr ploy than than the physical indicator
that the language is Yeah, exactly, remove you remove that
pr ploy by a couple of generations, and it's now
become part of the unofficial documented record. Now, yet it
(22:53):
does still matter. I'm just get snark. But there are
countries like their countries like France that actively try to
protect the native language and try and keep new uh
anglicanized words out of it. They don't want. So there's
no less fell they don't. They don't, they're not really
they're not really pleased with LA C D for example,
(23:14):
or C say day, I should say well, and and
in some languages, like in Japanese for example, there's a
whole separate alphabet for foreign loan words and in which
you you preserve the the original language by by voisting
off these new words onto a different alphabet. That makes
it intrinsically other. Right, So that's interesting. I want to
talk an even more basic level though, about how language changes,
(23:37):
because it's not just these macro changes where overall vocabulary change.
So we we we do get new words, yeah, and
old words go out of style, and there's a sort
of way of changing the cadence of sentences, certain ways
of phrasing things go in and out of style, but
at the micro level, even the pronunciation of the different
(23:58):
phonemes in a language, different units of sound can change
over time. So the one example I want to refer
to again is in English because we're English speakers here.
It was called the Great vowel Shift. And this happened
over the middle of the past millennium, so over many
hundreds of years, but it centered around probably like sixte centuries.
(24:21):
And this is the process by which long vowels in
English actually changed their sound. They used to sound more
like they sound in a Latin pronunciation. So for example,
the letter E would sound like an a sound. So
I guess if you wanted to get on Middle English
Twitter and compose a tweet about a sheet, you would
(24:41):
actually compose a tweet about a shade often and another example,
because yeah, that's that's exactly the other one. So Twitter
would be tweet because the letter I used to be
(25:01):
pronounced more like E. So the word mice that we
say mice, now that's spelled the same way in Middle English,
that be mes. Well, and when I did the prologue
one that April April would became April because you have
that I that becomes the e sound. So yeah, it's
amazing that this transformation happened, and that linguists still are
(25:25):
kind of wondering what exactly prompted that shift, because you know,
you thought that a lot of the changes in the
English pronunciation happened due to the various invasions that occurred,
but that all happened, that was all, you know, pretty
much over and done without by the end of the
twelfth century, beginning of thirteenth century. So yeah, I would
guess that that was printing press related, as a lot
(25:47):
of changes in language were from the four hundredsberg you scamp. Well,
before we get to the printing press, I want to
talk about the fact that, in fact, pronunciation can still
change today. Yeah, and has been observed to do so.
So are there major changes in English pronunciation of vowel
sounds today? We'll actually read a really interesting article in
(26:08):
Slate about what's called the Northern Cities vowel shift. So
this is in the United States and it was first
noticed in the nineteen sixties, and this is a subsequent
vowelshift coming after the Great Vowelshift, but this is affecting
the pronunciation of short vowels rather than long vowels. Well,
you can certainly there are enough preserved recordings that if
(26:30):
you listen to something and you call it old timey,
it's partly because of the way people were speaking, in
the way they're pronouncing pronouncing things. So or even if
you're watching a movie where a character is is portraying someone,
I think of the hudsucker proxy all the time, you know,
anything along those lines, but everyone stops talking like this,
you know, and there's all in that fast paced and
it's all it's a different vowel sound than what you're
(26:52):
used doing. Even if you're in whatever part of the
country the the film or television or radio program was
set in, it's it doesn't sound the same way, and
people will call it, well, that's old tiny And part
of this because we have had these smaller vowel shifts
happen over time, right, I mean, they can just be
part of the normal way that a dialect forms within
(27:13):
it's a subdialect of a language. So you you have yea,
and then you have yeah, and then you have yeah. Right,
And I would I would suspect I don't have any
research on this, but that that that great Northern vowel
shift had to do in fact with television. I mean,
mass media definitely has an effect on how we talk. Yeah,
(27:34):
it has an effect, except I don't know which way
the effect would go. So we if we look into
the past, we say, okay, we can observe that language
evolves like this, but they didn't have TV and radio
and the internet. And now that we have these things,
I wonder if does that really affect the rate at
which language changes, And if it does, does it speed
(27:56):
it up or slow it down? I could see good
arguments for both. Well, And here's the thing is that,
because we're talking about even speedy changes in language taking
course over a century, there's no way for us to
answer that question without dramatically extending our lifespan so that
we can actually observe it happen. Right, these are all
things that are happening generationally, and by the time you
(28:17):
get to a point where you start wondering about these questions,
you don't have anyone to ask. Well, but but these days,
we're going to have much more of a verbal record
of how people spoke a hundred years from now, and
and we'll be able to chart a lot more carefully,
especially through algorithmic investigation how exactly people were speaking at
(28:37):
different points in time and in different areas. UM. I'd
argue that that an early form of mass media, the
aforementioned printing press, uh, certainly had a a very large
and very quick effect on language relatively. I mean, I mean,
it didn't standardize any language instantaneously, but it did condense
dialects and word you specifically among populations as as literacy
(29:00):
and up I mean, you know, charitably over the course
of a couple of centuries, which is again quick as
standardized spelling right right, well again slowly, but yeah, definitely um.
And And similarly that the Internet today is bringing written
works and an authorship, perhaps more importantly, to ever wider audiences.
And you know, okay, so this will definitely change language.
(29:22):
As Joe said, it's it's kind of up in the
air exactly how it's going to do that, right? Does
it Does it get everybody on the same page and
keep them there better or does it introduce more new
usage faster some some researchers are suggesting that it's going
to cause some languages to die out um, while others
either develop in their place or grow to dominate there's
(29:44):
there's a lot of theory that that English in the
next hundred years or two is is going to be
by by far the world's dominant language, although okay, maybe
not English the way that we understand it today, because
similar to how like Creole or Yiddish developed out of
combine cultures and languages, we're currently seeing a huge burst
of media being presented in what's called Hinglish, which is
(30:06):
a combination of Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu and English spoken primarily
in India, but it's important and wind spread enough that
some British diplomats are learning it. India, as I understand,
it has quite the population. That does make sense, alright,
So we started this whole discussion talking about science fiction films,
television series, radio programs, that sort of thing where the
(30:26):
characters speak more or less in modern English, and whether
or not that's for the convenience of the audiences. That's
a matter of debate because that could come into it.
But are there do we have any examples of books
where that's not the case, where we have an evolution
of language. Well, certainly there are lots of small scale examples,
but I was trying to think of a book taking
(30:48):
place in the future where the language that the characters
speak is radically different. And I did come up with
one example, which is a clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess.
So the main characters in this novel are these brutal,
hyper violent, cruel gangster thugs, and they speak in this
very stylized, very highly different form of English. Set. Yeah,
(31:12):
they're still basically using English syntax, sort of like as
an English reader you can make sense of it referencing
a glossary. But they use all kinds of slang. It's
just rife with slang that we don't use today. Do
you want to do a line real quick? Al right, sure? Yeah.
There was me that is Alex, and my three Drews
(31:35):
as Pete, Georgie and Dim Dim being really dim. We
were making up our razor ducks what to do with
the evening. I shouldn't do all this line because there's
so many words that I would need to bleep out.
Um I could do that. It was a milk plus mesto,
and you mail, my brother's forgotten what these mestos arelike
things changing the story these days and people quick to forget.
But it was a place where you could peet milk
with something else in it. You could peet it with
(31:55):
knives in it, or synth masko drim com. Yeah, it's so.
So you get a mixture of Russian slang because that's
a big influence. A lot of it comes from Russia.
If it comes from Russian. Uh. Some of it is
this sort of what we've had culture or technobabble kind
of stuff, because like you get the you get the
scent mesk, this kind of thing where synthetic mescaline is
(32:16):
essentially what that means. So you get these these terms
that are all sort of slangish. And of course the
main characters are teenagers, so they speak very heavily and
slang um and some of the some of the sentences
are are absolutely beautiful and poetic. But it requires you
to look at that glossary like eight times. And so
I think that this slang vocabulary that Burgess uses in
(32:38):
this novel is really great for two reasons. Number one,
it actually does reflect how languages change over time with
the introduction of new vocabulary and speech patterns. But number two,
it actually has a role in the novel itself, because,
as I said, these characters are just awful evil dudes,
and the words they use help speak to the transformative
psychological power of language, because it's very easy to see
(33:00):
how the very words they're saying, the gang members use
these words to desensitize themselves to violence. Well, you know,
there are other examples as well. I think the interesting
thing here is uh, like you say, in this case,
it was a very calculated um decision on the part
of Burgess to create a language that reflects the personalities
(33:24):
and psyches of these these main characters. You do have
other characters in the book who do not speak in
this kind of slang. They're the adults. But that that
also gives you that whole other separation as well that
we were talking about, right, sure, and right, And there
are plenty of works that, on a very small scale level,
will give you a couple of new words or usages
of words here, and they're like like rock from Stranger
(33:47):
in a Strange Land, or green from the Fifth Element,
or shiny from Firefly. Um, but but I would it's
shiny super green, Um, so I it. I would argue
that that technobabble is a little bit of a separate
thing because it's it's vocab that's you know specifically about
technology that doesn't exist, and so it's really more of
(34:09):
a plot point, um than a linguistic device. Most of
the time. It can be there in order to give
a sense of quote unquote legitimacy to the science fiction,
to make it sound more technically advanced than what we
currently have, and you have to be somewhat invented to
do that, because obviously, you know, you can't just have
all the same technology we have today and and put
(34:30):
it forward a thousand years and expect people to think
that that's an amazing science fiction novel. Right. I think
I totally agree with you that just having the name
of a piece of technology in there that we don't
have that technology today, it doesn't really represent a change
in language, but it can depending on the level to
which the technobabble is incorporated into the everyday language of
(34:50):
the characters. So, like I'd say, there's a difference between
just making a one off reference to a technology that
doesn't exist and the way, for example, Facebook talk has
been in incorporated into the very fabric of how we
discuss our social lives, or even the fact that we
can look back in the past and what once was
a version of techno babble has become an actual word now,
(35:11):
So for example, robot um. It's not not something that
happens all the time. It's actually very rare when something
like that happens. But when it does happen, it's interesting
to see something that was was taken as as an innovative.
You know, this is a new word, or at least
a word that's being used in a new way, uh,
and and ends up being adopted worldwide. That's kind of
(35:32):
interesting too. Or for some terms like I'm like like fridge,
which comes from frigid air, which was a brand originally
and not what the actual object was called, but has
kind of morphed into that thing. Sure, I had no idea.
I thought it came from refrigerator. I'm I'm pretty sure
I could be totally wrong. Am I totally wrong? I
have no idea. I suspect you're right, but I was
just making an asset of you and me. We'll check
(35:55):
that and if I'm incorrect, you'll never hear this. Some
sci fi works actually meet us halfway, I'd say, because
the future characters speaks, they basically speak modern language, but
the narrator may give some indication that this is just
for the reader's benefit, and that the characters would actually
be speaking a much different language. One example I thought
(36:16):
of was in Isaac Asimov's The Last Question. So there's
the characters are speaking as it's written modern English. But
there's just one part where one of the characters in
this far future setting remembers that they're dealing with a
computer called a micro VAC, and the character remembers that
the a C at the end of micro vax stood
for analog computer in quote ancient English. Yeah, so so
(36:41):
it refers to the modern English of the reader, the
English that you're reading the story in as ancient English,
as if that's something alien to the character. Obviously would
be problematic to write an entire book out of a
manufactured language, right and say this is what English eventually
evolves into, and you need to learn it so you
can read the story. It's exactly the point I wanted
(37:01):
to end on, which is that I'm not trying to
chide sci fi writers for not doing this more because
I think it totally makes sense why you would write
stories in in a modern dialect of a modern language,
whatever language that is, because your readers are speaking that
Oh sure, and and it takes so much brain space
or work for the writer and or the reader. I mean,
you knows. As much as I appreciate the weird brilliance
(37:24):
of authors who write in that really heavy dialect, I've personally,
I don't know about you guys, but I've never made
it through a novel length work of like Faulkner or
China Mayville or Irvi and Welsh or even something along
the lines of a completely um manufactured language something like Tolkien.
You know, he was really interested in languages things like Welsh, Gaelic,
(37:46):
as well as Middle English and Old English and Strickland.
You speak Elvish, don't you? May? I may or may
not have an Eldish tattoo. Um, I can't say that I.
Along similar lines, I can't say that I ever read
any of the Elvish poems. But and it was interesting because,
you know, according to some accounts of what Tolkien went
(38:08):
through in including some of his own interviews, the whole
genesis of Lord of the Rings was really the creation
of the world, and that would allow these languages he
had invented to exist. So that's you know, it's obviously
a different approach. Yeah, well, as nerdy as it is.
If I'm correct, you will correct me if I'm wrong,
(38:28):
I know, But I think Tolkien was not just like
making up words. He was a linguistic scholar, Like he
understood deeply how languages are formed, the morphological relationship between
different words and certain house and taxes are created. So
he put in the work even so far as to
have two separate languages for the elves, who do have
(38:50):
a separation that lasts a very long time in the
span of yeah they can, they can, they stay around
forever as those jerks. But yeah, so so even then
with the two two different I guess you could call
them races of elves cohabitating Middle Earth. They have different languages,
(39:12):
which is very similar to what we've been talking about
with populations splitting off and forming a different dialect or
a completely new language from the parent language that they
came from. Right, So, in the end, I just want
to emphasize I'm not saying that if a writer writes
in their modern dialect for the far future that's like stupid,
of just yeah, it's no different than if you were
(39:33):
going to write something taking place in ancient sum Air
and you wrote that in whatever language you write in,
because that's just that's how readers will have So just
just make sure you put a sense at the beginning saying, uh,
everyone spoke in a language that's totally not like modern English,
but it's okay because I put it in modern English
so you can understand it, and then we're all cool,
or or incorporate something like a like a Babel fish
(39:55):
or a Universal Translator or whatever the tardest doe, and
it just so happens to also work on the audience.
It's so, what what is Jean Lucard really saying that
we're only hearing in our modern English? Its beautiful? What's
what's weird? It's actually it's actually all in French. He's
(40:16):
just being French. Because he's wearing Universal Translator, it comes
out English. Yeah, so yeah, that's all right. Well that's
all I've got in me for this episode. So this
was interesting because it was more of a of an
historical look at the English language, but really to kind
(40:36):
of think, you know, it's it's difficult to project what
language will be like in the future. What we can
say is it will likely be very different from the
way it is now. You know, at least in some form.
It may be that the syntax is more or less
the same, but the pronunciation is different. It could be
that the pronunciation remains more or less the same, but
we end up having weird syntax. Uh. It's it's really
(40:59):
interesting to us looking over the past and realizing how
a live language really is, and that that's something that
if you're ever working on a science fiction novel and
you want to address that in a realistic way, you
gotta get a little creative and figure out, you know, well,
first of all, no one, no one really right, how
do you make it readable? But no one really knows,
so really you can't make a mistake until that time
(41:21):
finally comes around, and by that time you're probably not
going to care anymore. Um So, anyway, interesting topic. I'm
glad that you guys picked this as a series, and
I look forward to exploring other kinds of things that
that is never really addressed in science fiction. Our next
idea is we want to do a we want to
do you don't see that in sci fi about the
awkwardness of technology. That'll be fun. Yeah, that will be
(41:44):
a fun one. Yeah, because well we'll save it for
that episode. I don't want to I don't want to
spoil anything, so if you guys have any suggestions for
future episodes of Forward Thinking, even if it's an episode
in this series or something completely different, let us know.
You can drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook, or
Google Plus are handled all threes f W Thinking, or
you can drop us an email FW thinking at Discovery
(42:06):
dot com and we will talk to you again really soon.
For more on this topic in the future of technology,
visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you by Toyota
(42:31):
Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, maybe everyone, and welcome forward Thinking. The podcast
looks at the future and says, I'll stop the world
and not with you. I'm John and strictly I'm Lauren
foc Obama, and I'm Joe McCormick. Today we are launching
(00:24):
what is hopefully going to become a series of podcasts
within the Forward Thinking podcast. I think Full of Hope
is fine because we're the ones who decide so well,
odds are good. We'll just see if it keeps happening, right,
that's fair. But here's the basic concept. It's you don't
see that in sci fi because there are a lot
(00:44):
of times when we're sitting around having conversations about things
that seem to us very likely to happen in the future,
but the majority of science fiction depictions of the future
don't realize these events. And you guys sort of touched
on this with the anti gravity or the artificial gravity
episode rather or the idea that you know in the
future the sci fi you always see people walking around
(01:06):
on spacecraft, but really, wouldn't you see a lot of
people floating around most of the time We talked about
this a lot on the show. Actually, I mean usually
are our entrance into any given topic is science fiction,
because that's where most of us experienced the future. Yeah yeah, well,
I mean I I often experienced the future, but by
the time I can talk about it, it's over. Yeah,
but if you use the example of artificial gravity, there
(01:27):
at least there are some technologies we can talk about
where we'd say, okay, there's some things we have in
mind that could probably solve the artificial gravity problem just
by simulating it with centripetal force or something like that.
But there are other things that we think are are
pretty sure bets for the future, and you rarely see
(01:50):
them in sci fi, or at least the majority of
the time you've don't. And the one we wanted to
talk about today is the consistency of modern speech and lying,
which so I want to start y'all out with a quote. Okay,
so this is a quote I grabbed from the internet
by Jean Luke Picard one Captain Jean luc Picard, second
(02:12):
best Captain of the Enterprise ever. Time to start a fight? Alright, already,
Pike was the purpose obviously, so the captain of the
enterprise in the next generation. Once said this, the prime
directive is not just a set of rules. It is
a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proven
again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less
(02:35):
developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference, maybe
the results are invariably disastrous. What's wrong with that? Well,
on one hand, he's advocating the prime directive, which I
think is debatable. Well, fine, but that's a different that's
a whole other nerd fight. But taking it completely aside,
(02:55):
the uh, the opinion of the prime directive as advocated
in Star Trek. You notice how he sounds pretty much
like how we talk today, except you know, more English. Right, Well, okay,
so he has his own literary style, his own style,
but he's three years in the future and he's speaking
like we speak. That's true. That's true. He's using the
(03:17):
same same terminology that we use. He's using the same
sentence structure, the same syntax, everything along those lines. Yeah,
I see, that's highly intelligible to us. It sounds exactly
like someone like Picard would talk today. Sure, you picked
one of the Star Trek episodes that was highly intelligible.
I kind appointed you to a few that aren't. But
there there are some things that go even farther into
(03:38):
the future, where you know, they've depicted far future civilizations
that basically just speak twentieth century English. Or the example
I polled was Planet of the Apes, very you know,
classic science fiction film. I'm talking about the Charlton Heston one. Obviously,
so in the the movie the year that the astronaut
travels to he's in he's in suspended animation, is traveling
(04:00):
near the speed of light for I think a year
and a half and lands on a um what he
believes it to be an alien planet in what is
the year three thousand nine eight, but it's actually spoiler
alert Earth. And you have this whole's cast system of
apes that have evolved over time. And the guerrillas are
like the military police, and the orangutans are the politicians,
(04:23):
chimpanzees with the scientists, and they all speak English. Uh,
they speak English that they the astronaut can understand even
if it's not English. Let's assume for a moment that
it's whatever other language it happens to be, but it
has been translated for us. The audience so we can
understand it. The fact is, the astronaut can still understand
what the apes are saying. The language itself has not
(04:45):
changed in his journey. So even if you give it
the opportunity of saying, oh, well, it's just so that
you can understand the story, the characters within it can
understand each other. So the divine spark exists only in
Simian brain. Yeah, so, so what what you get there?
Is this crazy idea that these characters are able to
communicate despite hundreds of years of separation between them. So
(05:09):
here's did you grab a doctor? I had to here
he goes. You are right. I have always known about
man from the evidence. I believe his wisdom must walk
hand in hand with his idiocy. His emotions must rule
his brain. He must be a warlike creature who gives
battle to everything around him, even himself. Touche Doctor's as
(05:31):
sounds like a particularly eloquent twentieth century English Charlton Heston
flies with dirty. Uh. Do we have anything even farther
ahead than oh? Sure? Yeah? If you want to look
at the time Machine by H. G. Wells, Do you
want to talk about super into the future. So, the
protagonist of the time machine travels to the year eight
(05:52):
hundred two thousand seven d one. That's crazy, now, flag
I read that book. I thought that in the book
they did speak a different line they do in the book,
in the original in the film from the nineteen sixties,
right in the book version. The eloy, which are the
the sort of docile um cattle, spoil her alert in
the time machine. But they are they are descended from humans.
(06:15):
Are are great great grandchildren. Ain't too bright? Right, right, Well,
half of them aren't. The other half of the Morlocks,
who are all the ones who do all the work,
and they have been using the eloy as cattle. Essentially
they eat the eloy. So the Morlocks are the bad
guys and the Elois are the good guys more or less.
Kind of Actually, there's a lot of socialist commentary in
that book. But anyway, so H. G. Wells in his story,
(06:39):
the Eloi spoke their own language that was unintelligible to
the protagonist. But in the film, again you have the
eloy and the protagonists being able to speak to one
another fluently. So, but you're talking about eight hundred thousand
years of the future and people are still speaking um.
(07:00):
Well Es era English. Now, the reason why we're finding
this so amusing is because all you have to do
is look backward, look back over time and see the
historical evolution of English and see how it has changed
dramatically just in the last thousand years or so, let
alone eight hundred thousand years into the future. Yeah, okay,
(07:23):
So we plotted a little journey, a little literary journey
for you through quotations. Through quotations, so we've started with
opening lines from literary works uh A hundred, two hundred,
four hundred years ago. The main thing to keep in mind,
which we hinted at earlier, is that each of these
is a different writer with their own literary style. So
even two writers today aren't going to sound exactly alike.
(07:46):
But even with that in mind, you're going to really
notice the differences in a minute here, sure, Okay. So
the first work that we have was published. It's called
Unlucky thirteen. It's by James Patterson and Maxine petro Um,
and we we chose it because it is the at
the top of the New York Times bestseller list this
week combined digital and printing one thee list. So so,
(08:07):
I mean, we didn't choose it because it's your favorite book. No,
but it's but it's a popular work within the culture,
and so we thought that it would be a good one.
So so I'm going to quote the first two paragraphs
their short So I chose too. It was an ugly Monday,
just afternoon. There had been no sign of sun so far,
just a thick fog that had put the blocks to
traffic around the Golden Gate. I was behind the wheel
(08:28):
of the squad car, and Inspector rich Conklin, my partner
of many years, was in the seat beside me when
Claire called my cell phone. Claire Washburn is my closest
friend and also San Francisco's chief medical examiner. The call
was strictly business. Alright, alright, so that's that's obviously modern English. Yeah,
uh nothing, I've got no qualms about it. Obviously he
was published this year, so clearly we would have a
(08:51):
very similar style. Well, what's next. I pulled a quote
from exactly one hundred years ago, not to this day,
but to the year nine fourteen, from the short story
Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker, which actually do this in
an English accent. Was No, I'm not going to do it.
Wouldn't it be an Irish accent? Well, I guess technically
I could deny yoursh accent. That would be just fine.
(09:12):
Why don't you read it, Jonathan. This is from the
short story Dracula's Guest. I think it was originally a
chapter of Dracula that was removed. Right, well, I'll do this.
I'll do this in English, because most of the characters
and in Dracula were actually English, with the exception of
the title. The character from the title, I hope you
can pronounce all these words. When we started for our drive,
(09:33):
the sun was shining brightly on Munich, and the air
was full of joyousness of early summer. Just as we
were about to depart here, Dell Brook, the major de
hotel of the Quatras where I was staying, came down
bareheaded to the carriage, and, after wishing me a pleasant drive,
said to the coachman, still holding his hand on the
handle of the carriage door, Remember you were back by nightfall.
The sky looks bright, but there is a shiver in
(09:55):
the north wind, and it says there may be a
sudden storm. But I'm sure you will not be late here,
he smiled, and added, well you know what night it is, which,
of course everybody knows is Walpurchase knocked. Well, obviously night
all the banners that were up in town. Okay, okay,
(10:16):
so already this is pretty similar, sure, but I mean
there are a few cultural markers. Like in that first
passage we were talking about cell phones. There was there
was the golden gate bridge popped up. It was very clipped.
This is a little bit more, um, a little bit
more elaborate in its structure. Yeah, you can also, I
mean one easy marker is the technological differences. They mentioned
(10:36):
carriages and coachman and stuff. At The cultural difference that
I thought was interesting was it says bareheaded, like that's
a thing worth observing. Specifically, a dude wasn't wearing a hat, right,
I mean that that would be weird back then but
normal now. And there's just this, even though it sounds
pretty similar to modern English, there's a little bit less
than modern cadence to the pros. It's actually a little
(10:59):
closer to Sean Lupaccard spoke more like you know, nineteenth
maybe late eighteenth century character, but with terminology that was
obviously updated. The sentence structure was much more formal than
you would find a normal speech. Okay today, Okay, I
want to go back a hundred years before that, to
(11:21):
eighteen fourteen, where I pulled the beginning paragraph part of
the beginning paragraph of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. Now
keep in mind again this is Austin's particular literary style.
But we're definitely going to start getting into some strange
lands here. Oh, I'll do this one is Jane Austen.
Um is pretty cool and I'm a lady. About thirty
(11:46):
years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven
thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas
Spectrum of Mansfield Park in the County of Northampton, and
to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady,
with all the comforts and consequences of a handsome house
and large income. All Huntingdon's exclaimed on the greatness of
the match, and her uncle the lawyer himself, allowed her
to be at least three thousand pounds short of any
(12:07):
equitable claim to it. She had two sisters to be
benefited by her elevation, and such of their acquaintance as thought,
Miss Ward and Miss Frances quite as handsome as Miss Maria,
did not scruple to predict their marrying with almost equal advantage.
What there's fancy talk. It is fancy talk, but it's
also I mean people, I don't know. Something was happening
(12:28):
differently back then. Sentences were happening in a different way. Yeah, yeah,
well yes, and and syntax and structure and just uh,
just the culture itself changes over time. That's really what
we're getting at here. But you know, I don't think
we've gone back far enough. Ye did not scruple to
predict their marrying with almost equal advantage. Well, that seems
(12:48):
pretty normal to me. We gotta go further back, Joe,
we gotta go further back. You're gonna are you gonna
make me read? So? The next one I grabbed was
from six fourteen, that's four hundred years ago this year.
This is Ben Johnson's comedic play Bartholomew Fair. I did
a play here because I I couldn't find the full
text of a good prose work. Well didn't really exist
(13:12):
as such at that point, well okay, but certainly not
prominent in the way right. They weren't popularized the way
that plays were at the time plays were more likely
where you're going to get a lot of pros. Right.
So this is Johnson's Bartholomew Fair, which if a y
are e, yeah, it certainly is. It opens with the
(13:35):
character called the stage keeper kind of giving this meta dialogue,
like talking about the play that's about to happen. So
here we get gentlemen have a little patience. They are
in upon coming instantly he that should begin the play,
master little wit. The proctor has a stitch new fallen
in his black silk stucking twill be drawn up area
(13:58):
you can tell twenty He plays one of the arches
that dwells about the hospital, and he has a very
pretty part. But for the whole play, will you have
the truth? On on it? On on it? I am
looking less to the poet here me or his man
(14:19):
master broom behind the rs. It is like to be
a very conceited scurvy one in plain English English. That's
why I picked that part, which this to me sounds
like a bizarre mix of modern English and nonsense. It does,
it does. And then of course we wanted to go
back further, and Joe and Lauren wanted to challenge me
(14:42):
with a little Middle English, Right, so by the time
you get to like the thirteen hundreds, you are fully
into Middle English, which is basically a different language. I
mean it's the predecessor to English. Yeah, and without scholarly
knowledge of how to like I Joe or I could
not read this aloud, but Jonathan specific it turns out education. Yeah,
(15:04):
my my degree was in medieval and Renaissance English literature.
So please do forgive me if I do stumble at all.
It has been about twenty years since I've done this.
This is the beginning of Jeffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales,
the prologue one that appeared with a short s the
draftsro march had passata, rota and bad ditch vain sweetly cool,
(15:26):
which vetu and ginrich is the floor when zaforas eat
with a sweeter breath inspired. Hath actually should be in
spirit hath in every holt, and heath the tinder cropas
on the younger zona. Hath in the rams have the
coasta rouna and smaller fool is marking Melodia that's sleeping
on the with open ear, so pricketh him not pure
in here karage is don long and Folke to go
(15:48):
on on pilgrimages, and Palmeres vought the second strongest rounders
to fair in the hallways, cool thin Saundri Landa's especially
from every sharers Inda of Engleland. The Candoberry they weaned
the holy blissful mata that them hath hope and one
that they were sick. And yeah, so so I did
(16:14):
one day. It should have been thy th h e
y was pronounced thy, not they. So I realized that
after I said, well, we'll give it to you this time,
I got it right the second time. So that is
not easy to do. And and a lot of the
words are spelled in a way that's similar to modern English,
but they are pronounced in a very different and we'll
(16:35):
get into the reason for that and just a little bit.
But if you go even further back, yeah, say you
go back from the Canterbury Tales to something like Bayo Wall. Yeah,
if you go to pre Norman invasion England. So the
Middle English is that was that that French influence that
came in and mixed with Old English to form Middle English. Right,
so before the Normans decided to visit England and stay
(16:59):
awhile the language was Old English, which comes from Old Frisian,
which is also the root for Old Germans. So if
you look at Old English and you start looking at words,
the words and sent structure look a lot more like
German than they do Modern English. Um. So one of
the phrases that my favorite phrase from Beowulf is, and
it's repeated a few times, is fatwas god kinek, which
(17:20):
means which means he was a good king. So obviously,
like it's like it's said quite a few times. Um,
but yes, fatwas god kinek does not sound at all
like English. But this is all technically English. And we've
just seen how from say, I don't know, around seven
hundred a d. All the way up to modern day
(17:45):
it has changed dramatically, So why would we not assume
it would continue to do so. Yeah, if Jean Luc
Picard is born in twenty three oh five, according to
the Star Trek lore, if he's speaking in the middle
of the of the undreds, should be like the difference
between us and somewhere between Jane Austin and Ben Johnson.
All Right, so here's the question. Now that we know
(18:08):
that language changes over time, how is it How can
we predict what language is going to sound like in
the future. I mean, how does language itself actually change?
The short answers that nobody knows. Hey, um well, okay,
it's a really big question, is the thing. And it
involves genetics and the development of multiple brain structures and
plasticity of the brain. Also development of speech structures from
(18:29):
the tongue to the vocal cords, the palette, all that
kind of stuff, um and then after that the growth
of systems of vocabulary and grammar. But there are a
bunch of really cool theories out there, um like like.
Research out of the University of Reading in two thousand
and eight, which was done with statistical tools that are
usually used in biology, indicated that the languages often evolved
in sudden spurts rather than steadily over time. And okay,
(18:52):
note that those sudden spurts can take a hundred years
or more. But but still, this is this is an
interesting finding. They they analyzed three of the world's major
language group, those being bent to Austronesian and Indo European.
In all three, some third of historical language changes came
on suddenly when a subculture split off from a larger population. Okay,
and so that thing you said when they came on
(19:13):
suddenly though it could take like a hundred years, that
doesn't mean they happened immediately. It just means the rate
of change is not constant, so they can slowly change
and then quickly change. And even so, I mean, when
you think about it, I mean, languages is one of
those things that unites the people, right, Yeah, that's yeah.
Without that common language, obviously you can't have any kind
(19:36):
of communication whatsoever. And when you can communicate with someone,
you start to psychologically identify with that person. You think
this person belongs, at least in some part to a
group that I also belong to. And when you encounter
someone who cannot communicate with you and they are not
able to have that kind of meaningful conversation in any way,
then you start to think, at least on a psychological level,
(19:59):
this per and does not belong to the group to
which I belong. So there are a lot of complicated
issues here that kind of guide a a language forming
and then evolving over time. Oh sure. And and part
of it is that when when a group breaks off
from a larger group, they maybe not intentionally, but but
(20:20):
certainly in a way purposefully distinguished themselves by certain language markers.
You can see that in teenagers who are trying to
be different from their parents are from when when um
segments of the British came over to America, they began
speaking differently, right, And then in some areas, some populations
of the British coming over to America ended up preserving
(20:40):
their way of speech a lot more faithfully than others.
So you will often hear interesting stories about how there
are pockets of populations in Appalachia, for example, that have
speech patterns that are more akin to the Elizabethan patterns
of speech way back when, which to me is fast
the idea that the proper English we are used to
(21:03):
hearing from television and movies is not really indicative of
what you would have heard in Shakespeare's time to hear
that it might be better for you to take a
trip to the to the mountains, the Ridge mountains. Yeah,
and even if it's not such a such a large
scale populational kind of thing, I mean, okay, So so
the exact role of all of these components of speech
(21:25):
are definitely in debate among among linguists and biologists and
psychologists and anthropologists and lots of other fields of study.
But you know, it's obvious to even the casual observer
that that vocab and grammar do change over time and
and are prompted by by cultural events. Even if they're
not this kind of break off event, it could be
a change in technology, wherein new words come into the
(21:47):
vocabulary and um, you know, new new sentence structures happen
because internet. Um, because internet is a good way of
putting that or or or just just locational and just
stuff like that. And um so, I mean, the generalized
theory is is that the you know, any current generation
of speakers will internalize the language that they were taught
(22:09):
and perhaps differently than the previous generation expects them to,
and also adopt new words, new structures, new sounds, and
then transmit them, perhaps shoddily, to the next generation. And
it's interesting in English, the way we generally see acceptance
on a larger scale is when we have certain institutions
acknowledge words as being actual words. Oh yeah, you always
(22:32):
see these news stories they you know, websters add so
and so to the dictionary. Although that's Oxford, that's that's
that's really more pr ploy than than the physical indicator
that the language is Yeah, exactly, remove you remove that
pr ploy by a couple of generations, and it's now
become part of the unofficial documented record. Now, yet it
(22:53):
does still matter. I'm just get snark. But there are
countries like their countries like France that actively try to
protect the native language and try and keep new uh
anglicanized words out of it. They don't want. So there's
no less fell they don't. They don't, they're not really
they're not really pleased with LA C D for example,
(23:14):
or C say day, I should say well, and and
in some languages, like in Japanese for example, there's a
whole separate alphabet for foreign loan words and in which
you you preserve the the original language by by voisting
off these new words onto a different alphabet. That makes
it intrinsically other. Right, So that's interesting. I want to
talk an even more basic level though, about how language changes,
(23:37):
because it's not just these macro changes where overall vocabulary change.
So we we we do get new words, yeah, and
old words go out of style, and there's a sort
of way of changing the cadence of sentences, certain ways
of phrasing things go in and out of style, but
at the micro level, even the pronunciation of the different
(23:58):
phonemes in a language, different units of sound can change
over time. So the one example I want to refer
to again is in English because we're English speakers here.
It was called the Great vowel Shift. And this happened
over the middle of the past millennium, so over many
hundreds of years, but it centered around probably like sixte centuries.
(24:21):
And this is the process by which long vowels in
English actually changed their sound. They used to sound more
like they sound in a Latin pronunciation. So for example,
the letter E would sound like an a sound. So
I guess if you wanted to get on Middle English
Twitter and compose a tweet about a sheet, you would
(24:41):
actually compose a tweet about a shade often and another example,
because yeah, that's that's exactly the other one. So Twitter
would be tweet because the letter I used to be
(25:01):
pronounced more like E. So the word mice that we
say mice, now that's spelled the same way in Middle English,
that be mes. Well, and when I did the prologue
one that April April would became April because you have
that I that becomes the e sound. So yeah, it's
amazing that this transformation happened, and that linguists still are
(25:25):
kind of wondering what exactly prompted that shift, because you know,
you thought that a lot of the changes in the
English pronunciation happened due to the various invasions that occurred,
but that all happened, that was all, you know, pretty
much over and done without by the end of the
twelfth century, beginning of thirteenth century. So yeah, I would
guess that that was printing press related, as a lot
(25:47):
of changes in language were from the four hundredsberg you scamp. Well,
before we get to the printing press, I want to
talk about the fact that, in fact, pronunciation can still
change today. Yeah, and has been observed to do so.
So are there major changes in English pronunciation of vowel
sounds today? We'll actually read a really interesting article in
(26:08):
Slate about what's called the Northern Cities vowel shift. So
this is in the United States and it was first
noticed in the nineteen sixties, and this is a subsequent
vowelshift coming after the Great Vowelshift, but this is affecting
the pronunciation of short vowels rather than long vowels. Well,
you can certainly there are enough preserved recordings that if
(26:30):
you listen to something and you call it old timey,
it's partly because of the way people were speaking, in
the way they're pronouncing pronouncing things. So or even if
you're watching a movie where a character is is portraying someone,
I think of the hudsucker proxy all the time, you know,
anything along those lines, but everyone stops talking like this,
you know, and there's all in that fast paced and
it's all it's a different vowel sound than what you're
(26:52):
used doing. Even if you're in whatever part of the
country the the film or television or radio program was
set in, it's it doesn't sound the same way, and
people will call it, well, that's old tiny And part
of this because we have had these smaller vowel shifts
happen over time, right, I mean, they can just be
part of the normal way that a dialect forms within
(27:13):
it's a subdialect of a language. So you you have yea,
and then you have yeah, and then you have yeah. Right,
And I would I would suspect I don't have any
research on this, but that that that great Northern vowel
shift had to do in fact with television. I mean,
mass media definitely has an effect on how we talk. Yeah,
(27:34):
it has an effect, except I don't know which way
the effect would go. So we if we look into
the past, we say, okay, we can observe that language
evolves like this, but they didn't have TV and radio
and the internet. And now that we have these things,
I wonder if does that really affect the rate at
which language changes, And if it does, does it speed
(27:56):
it up or slow it down? I could see good
arguments for both. Well, And here's the thing is that,
because we're talking about even speedy changes in language taking
course over a century, there's no way for us to
answer that question without dramatically extending our lifespan so that
we can actually observe it happen. Right, these are all
things that are happening generationally, and by the time you
(28:17):
get to a point where you start wondering about these questions,
you don't have anyone to ask. Well, but but these days,
we're going to have much more of a verbal record
of how people spoke a hundred years from now, and
and we'll be able to chart a lot more carefully,
especially through algorithmic investigation how exactly people were speaking at
(28:37):
different points in time and in different areas. UM. I'd
argue that that an early form of mass media, the
aforementioned printing press, uh, certainly had a a very large
and very quick effect on language relatively. I mean, I mean,
it didn't standardize any language instantaneously, but it did condense
dialects and word you specifically among populations as as literacy
(29:00):
and up I mean, you know, charitably over the course
of a couple of centuries, which is again quick as
standardized spelling right right, well again slowly, but yeah, definitely um.
And And similarly that the Internet today is bringing written
works and an authorship, perhaps more importantly, to ever wider audiences.
And you know, okay, so this will definitely change language.
(29:22):
As Joe said, it's it's kind of up in the
air exactly how it's going to do that, right? Does
it Does it get everybody on the same page and
keep them there better or does it introduce more new
usage faster some some researchers are suggesting that it's going
to cause some languages to die out um, while others
either develop in their place or grow to dominate there's
(29:44):
there's a lot of theory that that English in the
next hundred years or two is is going to be
by by far the world's dominant language, although okay, maybe
not English the way that we understand it today, because
similar to how like Creole or Yiddish developed out of
combine cultures and languages, we're currently seeing a huge burst
of media being presented in what's called Hinglish, which is
(30:06):
a combination of Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu and English spoken primarily
in India, but it's important and wind spread enough that
some British diplomats are learning it. India, as I understand,
it has quite the population. That does make sense, alright,
So we started this whole discussion talking about science fiction films,
television series, radio programs, that sort of thing where the
(30:26):
characters speak more or less in modern English, and whether
or not that's for the convenience of the audiences. That's
a matter of debate because that could come into it.
But are there do we have any examples of books
where that's not the case, where we have an evolution
of language. Well, certainly there are lots of small scale examples,
but I was trying to think of a book taking
(30:48):
place in the future where the language that the characters
speak is radically different. And I did come up with
one example, which is a clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess.
So the main characters in this novel are these brutal,
hyper violent, cruel gangster thugs, and they speak in this
very stylized, very highly different form of English. Set. Yeah,
(31:12):
they're still basically using English syntax, sort of like as
an English reader you can make sense of it referencing
a glossary. But they use all kinds of slang. It's
just rife with slang that we don't use today. Do
you want to do a line real quick? Al right, sure? Yeah.
There was me that is Alex, and my three Drews
(31:35):
as Pete, Georgie and Dim Dim being really dim. We
were making up our razor ducks what to do with
the evening. I shouldn't do all this line because there's
so many words that I would need to bleep out.
Um I could do that. It was a milk plus mesto,
and you mail, my brother's forgotten what these mestos arelike
things changing the story these days and people quick to forget.
But it was a place where you could peet milk
with something else in it. You could peet it with
(31:55):
knives in it, or synth masko drim com. Yeah, it's so.
So you get a mixture of Russian slang because that's
a big influence. A lot of it comes from Russia.
If it comes from Russian. Uh. Some of it is
this sort of what we've had culture or technobabble kind
of stuff, because like you get the you get the
scent mesk, this kind of thing where synthetic mescaline is
(32:16):
essentially what that means. So you get these these terms
that are all sort of slangish. And of course the
main characters are teenagers, so they speak very heavily and
slang um and some of the some of the sentences
are are absolutely beautiful and poetic. But it requires you
to look at that glossary like eight times. And so
I think that this slang vocabulary that Burgess uses in
(32:38):
this novel is really great for two reasons. Number one,
it actually does reflect how languages change over time with
the introduction of new vocabulary and speech patterns. But number two,
it actually has a role in the novel itself, because,
as I said, these characters are just awful evil dudes,
and the words they use help speak to the transformative
psychological power of language, because it's very easy to see
(33:00):
how the very words they're saying, the gang members use
these words to desensitize themselves to violence. Well, you know,
there are other examples as well. I think the interesting
thing here is uh, like you say, in this case,
it was a very calculated um decision on the part
of Burgess to create a language that reflects the personalities
(33:24):
and psyches of these these main characters. You do have
other characters in the book who do not speak in
this kind of slang. They're the adults. But that that
also gives you that whole other separation as well that
we were talking about, right, sure, and right, And there
are plenty of works that, on a very small scale level,
will give you a couple of new words or usages
of words here, and they're like like rock from Stranger
(33:47):
in a Strange Land, or green from the Fifth Element,
or shiny from Firefly. Um, but but I would it's
shiny super green, Um, so I it. I would argue
that that technobabble is a little bit of a separate
thing because it's it's vocab that's you know specifically about
technology that doesn't exist, and so it's really more of
(34:09):
a plot point, um than a linguistic device. Most of
the time. It can be there in order to give
a sense of quote unquote legitimacy to the science fiction,
to make it sound more technically advanced than what we
currently have, and you have to be somewhat invented to
do that, because obviously, you know, you can't just have
all the same technology we have today and and put
(34:30):
it forward a thousand years and expect people to think
that that's an amazing science fiction novel. Right. I think
I totally agree with you that just having the name
of a piece of technology in there that we don't
have that technology today, it doesn't really represent a change
in language, but it can depending on the level to
which the technobabble is incorporated into the everyday language of
(34:50):
the characters. So, like I'd say, there's a difference between
just making a one off reference to a technology that
doesn't exist and the way, for example, Facebook talk has
been in incorporated into the very fabric of how we
discuss our social lives, or even the fact that we
can look back in the past and what once was
a version of techno babble has become an actual word now,
(35:11):
So for example, robot um. It's not not something that
happens all the time. It's actually very rare when something
like that happens. But when it does happen, it's interesting
to see something that was was taken as as an innovative.
You know, this is a new word, or at least
a word that's being used in a new way, uh,
and and ends up being adopted worldwide. That's kind of
(35:32):
interesting too. Or for some terms like I'm like like fridge,
which comes from frigid air, which was a brand originally
and not what the actual object was called, but has
kind of morphed into that thing. Sure, I had no idea.
I thought it came from refrigerator. I'm I'm pretty sure
I could be totally wrong. Am I totally wrong? I
have no idea. I suspect you're right, but I was
just making an asset of you and me. We'll check
(35:55):
that and if I'm incorrect, you'll never hear this. Some
sci fi works actually meet us halfway, I'd say, because
the future characters speaks, they basically speak modern language, but
the narrator may give some indication that this is just
for the reader's benefit, and that the characters would actually
be speaking a much different language. One example I thought
(36:16):
of was in Isaac Asimov's The Last Question. So there's
the characters are speaking as it's written modern English. But
there's just one part where one of the characters in
this far future setting remembers that they're dealing with a
computer called a micro VAC, and the character remembers that
the a C at the end of micro vax stood
for analog computer in quote ancient English. Yeah, so so
(36:41):
it refers to the modern English of the reader, the
English that you're reading the story in as ancient English,
as if that's something alien to the character. Obviously would
be problematic to write an entire book out of a
manufactured language, right and say this is what English eventually
evolves into, and you need to learn it so you
can read the story. It's exactly the point I wanted
(37:01):
to end on, which is that I'm not trying to
chide sci fi writers for not doing this more because
I think it totally makes sense why you would write
stories in in a modern dialect of a modern language,
whatever language that is, because your readers are speaking that
Oh sure, and and it takes so much brain space
or work for the writer and or the reader. I mean,
you knows. As much as I appreciate the weird brilliance
(37:24):
of authors who write in that really heavy dialect, I've personally,
I don't know about you guys, but I've never made
it through a novel length work of like Faulkner or
China Mayville or Irvi and Welsh or even something along
the lines of a completely um manufactured language something like Tolkien.
You know, he was really interested in languages things like Welsh, Gaelic,
(37:46):
as well as Middle English and Old English and Strickland.
You speak Elvish, don't you? May? I may or may
not have an Eldish tattoo. Um, I can't say that I.
Along similar lines, I can't say that I ever read
any of the Elvish poems. But and it was interesting because,
you know, according to some accounts of what Tolkien went
(38:08):
through in including some of his own interviews, the whole
genesis of Lord of the Rings was really the creation
of the world, and that would allow these languages he
had invented to exist. So that's you know, it's obviously
a different approach. Yeah, well, as nerdy as it is.
If I'm correct, you will correct me if I'm wrong,
(38:28):
I know, But I think Tolkien was not just like
making up words. He was a linguistic scholar, Like he
understood deeply how languages are formed, the morphological relationship between
different words and certain house and taxes are created. So
he put in the work even so far as to
have two separate languages for the elves, who do have
(38:50):
a separation that lasts a very long time in the
span of yeah they can, they can, they stay around
forever as those jerks. But yeah, so so even then
with the two two different I guess you could call
them races of elves cohabitating Middle Earth. They have different languages,
(39:12):
which is very similar to what we've been talking about
with populations splitting off and forming a different dialect or
a completely new language from the parent language that they
came from. Right, So, in the end, I just want
to emphasize I'm not saying that if a writer writes
in their modern dialect for the far future that's like stupid,
of just yeah, it's no different than if you were
(39:33):
going to write something taking place in ancient sum Air
and you wrote that in whatever language you write in,
because that's just that's how readers will have So just
just make sure you put a sense at the beginning saying, uh,
everyone spoke in a language that's totally not like modern English,
but it's okay because I put it in modern English
so you can understand it, and then we're all cool,
or or incorporate something like a like a Babel fish
(39:55):
or a Universal Translator or whatever the tardest doe, and
it just so happens to also work on the audience.
It's so, what what is Jean Lucard really saying that
we're only hearing in our modern English? Its beautiful? What's
what's weird? It's actually it's actually all in French. He's
(40:16):
just being French. Because he's wearing Universal Translator, it comes
out English. Yeah, so yeah, that's all right. Well that's
all I've got in me for this episode. So this
was interesting because it was more of a of an
historical look at the English language, but really to kind
(40:36):
of think, you know, it's it's difficult to project what
language will be like in the future. What we can
say is it will likely be very different from the
way it is now. You know, at least in some form.
It may be that the syntax is more or less
the same, but the pronunciation is different. It could be
that the pronunciation remains more or less the same, but
we end up having weird syntax. Uh. It's it's really
(40:59):
interesting to us looking over the past and realizing how
a live language really is, and that that's something that
if you're ever working on a science fiction novel and
you want to address that in a realistic way, you
gotta get a little creative and figure out, you know, well,
first of all, no one, no one really right, how
do you make it readable? But no one really knows,
so really you can't make a mistake until that time
(41:21):
finally comes around, and by that time you're probably not
going to care anymore. Um So, anyway, interesting topic. I'm
glad that you guys picked this as a series, and
I look forward to exploring other kinds of things that
that is never really addressed in science fiction. Our next
idea is we want to do a we want to
do you don't see that in sci fi about the
awkwardness of technology. That'll be fun. Yeah, that will be
(41:44):
a fun one. Yeah, because well we'll save it for
that episode. I don't want to I don't want to
spoil anything, so if you guys have any suggestions for
future episodes of Forward Thinking, even if it's an episode
in this series or something completely different, let us know.
You can drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook, or
Google Plus are handled all threes f W Thinking, or
you can drop us an email FW thinking at Discovery
(42:06):
dot com and we will talk to you again really soon.
For more on this topic in the future of technology,
visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you by Toyota
(42:31):
Let's Go Places,
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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