Episode 77: Indian Hospital Sells Fake COVID-19 Results, Linguists Worry About Space Language, the Mayor of Seoul Commits Suicide

A hospital in India has been caught selling fake negative COVID-19 results for the equivalent of a little more than 33 US dollars. Linguists examine just how much language will change as humans begin to travel to distant moons and planets. In Seoul, South Korea, the Mayor recently disappeared for several hours, only to be found dead in what some allege was an act of suicide. Join Ben Bowlin for more Strange News Daily, and share your stories on Twitter: #strangedaily.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Strange News Daily. It's a production of I Heart Media.
In a world full of bizarre events, unsolved mysteries, and
a billion stories from all corners of the globe, some

(00:22):
news gets lost in the shuffle. This is your gateway
to the stories on the fringe of the mainstream map.
These are your dispatches in the dark. I'm Ben Bolan
and this is the Strange News Daily. Our first story

(00:44):
today takes place in India where a local hospital has
just been busted issuing fake COVID nineteen test results. The
license of a private hospital in the main Root district
has been suspended after a video emerged showing one of
its staff members providing fake Corona reports in return for money.

(01:06):
This video went viral on social media. A Nil Dingra,
the district magistrate of Mirut, said quote a video had
gone viral in Mairut. We have registered a case in
this regard and we have suspended the license of the
nursing home. We have also sealed it on Sunday. Strict
action will be taken against anybody who does anything like this.

(01:29):
In the video, the staff member can be heard saying
that the medical facility will provide a negative coronavirus or
COVID nineteen report for just two thousand, five hundred Indian rupees.
For comparison, that's a little bit more than thirty three
U S. Dollars. Dr Raj Kumar, the chief medical officer

(01:52):
of Mairut said, quote a man from the hospital can
be heard saying that he can arrange a negative COVID
nineteen report and the patient can get his operation done.
We've identified this man. The video also shows the clients
handing over the money to a hospital manager. Uh They
give them two thousand rupees and promised to pay the

(02:13):
remaining five hundred rupees when the report arrives. Kumar says,
from the video, it's emerged that the hospital's manager, shah Alam,
is promising people of fake COVID nineteen negative report in
exchange for money. May Root has a total of one thousand,
one hundred and seventeen confirmed coronavirus cases so far. Out

(02:36):
of those cases, sixty nine people have died as a
result of the infection and seven hundred and seventy two
appear to afric covered. Still, it is troubling to note
that the corruption in this hospital implies that other hospitals
maybe corrupt themselves, and if we look at the bigger picture,
this means the numbers emerging from India at least may

(02:59):
not be as accurate as they seem. Our second story today,
have you ever spoken with someone who has an accent
or dialect so strange to you that you have trouble

(03:22):
understanding what they're saying even when you speak the same language.
I feel like most people, the odds are you have
experienced something like this, especially in the globally connected world
in which we all live today. It seems that space
exploration is only set to exacerbate this strange phenomenon. Let's

(03:44):
start with the idea of what sci fi authors and
futurists often call an interstellar arc or a generation ship.
The idea behind these ships is that we would build
a vessel wherein multiple generations of human beings can be born, grow,
and eventually pass away, handing the responsibility of steering the

(04:06):
vessel to the next generation of people. If we can
build multigenerational craft like this, then eventually, the theory goes,
human beings could colonize the galaxy and eventually the universe.
Of course, there are some pretty apparent downsides to this thought.

(04:28):
Experiment or this ambitious proposal. During these unimaginably long voyages,
multiple generations of people born and raised in closed environment
are going to run into biological issues or even mutations
that we simply cannot predict. And according to a new

(04:48):
study by a team of linguistics professors, there's another factor
here that we may consider another thing that might mutate
on the journey. Language. In a study called Language development
during Interstellar Travel, the team of linguist Andrew mackenzie and
Jeffrey Prunsky outline and discuss how languages evolve over time

(05:12):
and how this could affect long term space travelers of
the future. What they find is fascinating. Of course, language
evolves over time whenever a community grows isolated from another community,
and when it comes to the idea of isolation, it's
hard to imagine a more extreme case than that of

(05:33):
people on an interstellar voyage. Eventually, the multigenerational isolation could
mean that the language of the colonists who land on
on some far flung moon or planet would be unintelligible
to the people here on Earth, if that is, they
ever met up again. In the future. To illustrate this,

(05:56):
the Linguists use examples of different language families on Earth
to show how new languages emerged over time due to distance.
Then they extrapolated this process and imagine how it would
occur over the course of ten generations are more of
interstellar or even interplanetary travel. In a recent press release,

(06:17):
Mackenzie explains it this way. He says, quote, if you're
on this vessel for ten generations, new concepts will emerge,
New social issues will come up, and people will create
ways of talking about them, and these will become the
vocabulary particular to the ship. People on Earth might never
know about these words unless there's a reason to tell them,

(06:39):
And he continues, the further away you get, the less
you're going to talk to people back home. Generations passed,
and soon there's no one really back home to talk to,
and there's not much you want to tell them because
they will only find out years later, and then you'll
hear back from them years after that. They cite some
examples of this process on Earth. Consider the story of

(07:03):
the Polynesian sailors who populated the South Pacific Islands somewhere
between three thousand and one thousand b c e. The
roots of these sailors can be traced back to modern
day Taiwan, but their process of expansion over time lead
to the development of entirely new cultures. By the first
millennium b c e. The Polynesian languages that emerged from

(07:26):
this expansion bore very little resemblance to the ancient Austronesia
language of their ancestors. The linguists also cite language changes
that can take place within the same language community over time.
What example they site is up talk. This is also
known as high rising terminal. This is the phenomenon that

(07:49):
evolves statements ending with a rise in intonation. I didn't
quite nail it, but you get the gist. As the
researchers note, up talk has only been observed in the
English language within the past four decades or so, and
currently we don't know where it came from. Still, the
spread of up talk has been the subject of no

(08:10):
small amount of debate, especially by members of the so
called baby boomer generation. Many of them use up talk today,
but they certainly didn't have it around when they were
growing up. Another issue the languists identify is interestingly enough
sign language, because it will require adaptation from the crew

(08:30):
as statistics dictate that over the course of the long voyage,
some crew members will be born hearing impaired. Without someone
focusing on keeping track of these changes and trying to
maintain some sort of grammatical standard, this linguistic divergence will
be inevitable. But as the linguists note, keeping those standards

(08:52):
might itself become a moot point, because we have to
remember that language on Earth is going to be changing
during the same time. Mackenzie says, they may well be
communicating like we'd be using Latin, communicating with this version
of the language that nobody uses. The authors also say

(09:12):
that it would be worthwhile to have additional studies of
likely language changes aboard this spacecraft. It would help people
know what to expect in advance, As they conclude in
their study quote, given the certainty that these issues will
arise in scenarios such as these, and the uncertainty of
exactly how they will progress, we strongly suggest that any

(09:35):
crew exhibits strong levels of metal linguistic training. In addition
to simply knowing the required languages, there will be need
for an informed linguistic policy on board that can be
maintained without referring back to Earth based regulations. So for starters,
let's imagine that a generation ship one of these interstellar

(09:57):
arcs does end up taking a ten generations to reach
its destination. One example, People point two would be Proxima B,
so ten more generations passed before the next ship arrives,
bringing people from Earth who still speak a form of
modern English. This is where it gets interesting. You can

(10:21):
use language simulators like the language Evolution simulator on set,
and this can give us a tiny taste atapas sized
portion of how a simple English language hello paired with
a common request would change over the course of that
full twenty generations. So here we go. We're going to

(10:44):
pronounce it. Let us know what you think. This says hellah,
freat good to be at you to players. It's a
little bit easier to decode if you can see it
written now. But according to this evolution simulator, that would
be the future equivalent of saying hello, friend, good to

(11:07):
meet you, Take me to your leader please. It comes out,
you know, a little bit different after twenty generations of isolation.
And then would you take time to consider all of
the spoken languages and dialects that are already around today
and realize that any combination of these is potentially going
to be brought with the colonists on their journey. You

(11:30):
can see how complicated the problem becomes. So perhaps it's
possible that our descendants will need to rely on technology,
some sort of future translation software to understand each other,
or fall back on good old fashioned body language. The
problem is that after twenty generations, we have no idea

(11:53):
what colonists body language would look like. Our third story today,
the mayor of Seoul, South Korea, one Park wand Soon,
was recently found dead. According to police and other sources,

(12:16):
this appears to be one of the country's highest profile
suicides in recent history. Mayor Park, who was sixty four
years old, was found dead only hours after he had
been reported missing, and the exact cause of his death
is still officially under investigation. His daughter filed a police

(12:37):
report at five seventeen pm local time in South Korea,
saying that he had left home four to five hours
ago after leaving words like a will, and his phone
was currently off. The man hunt began. More than seven
hundred and seventy police officers, fire trucks, and an ambulance
were mobilized to track the whereabouts of the mayor. They

(12:58):
searched areas around us home, as well as near the
temple where his cell phone signal was last detected. The
Soul Metropolitan Government said the mayor did not come to
work Thursday due to health reasons. In a text message
to reporters this morning, the city government said all events
and meetings that Park had been said to attend on

(13:19):
Thursday were called off for unavoidable reasons. The day before,
on Wednesday, Mayor Park had made a public appearance while
holding a press conference on the city's Green New Deal,
a plan that intends to cut carbon dioxide emissions while
also creating jobs. According to local news reports, Bear Park

(13:41):
was recently facing allegations of sexual harassment. A former secretary
of his had filed a complaint against Park on Wednesday
with the Soul Metropolitan Police Agency for alleged sexual assault.
She claimed that Park had made physical contacts several times
since she began to work with him in twenty seventeen.

(14:01):
She also submitted messages that she had exchanged with Park
over the telegram app service. The police took this as evidence.
According to her testimony. There have also been other victims
sexually assaulted by the mayor. Police had planned to call
in Mayor Park and Soul government officials for investigations into

(14:21):
the case. Park, who was elected mayor of Soul in
two thousand eleven, was in his third and final term
in office. He was a member of the ruling Democratic
Party of Korea. It was regarded as a potential presidential
candidate for the two thousand twenty two election. As a
former human rights lawyer and a legendary civil rights campaigner,

(14:43):
Mayor Park made a public appeal for human centered policies
and equality, such as making efforts to curbs soaring housing
prices and Soul while also strengthening welfare programs for the
very young and the very old. He has survived by
his wife, his son, and his daughter. That's all for now.

(15:05):
We've been asking you to chime in with suggestions for
stories you think your fellow listeners should learn more about.
To hit us with your best or worst puns and
dad jokes, or your personal experience with COVID nineteen, the
ongoing protests, or anything else strange and unusual happening in
your neck of the global woods. Let us know. Tag
hashtag strange daily on Twitter, or reach out to me directly.

(15:26):
I'm at Ben bullin HSW on Twitter or at ben
Bullen on Instagram. Thanks as always to our super producer
Dylan Fagan, our research associate Sam T. Garden, and most importantly,
thanks to you. I'm Ben Bullet. We'll see you tomorrow.
Until then, stay strange.