[ExI] Free will was: Everett worlds

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 4:40 PM Anton Sherwood <bronto at pobox.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 8:12 AM Anton Sherwood wrote:
> >> I have a germ of an idea for a conlang: what Lojban would become
> >> if it were the inter-language of people with no interest in the
> >> philosophy of Lojban.
>
> On 2020-9-14 08:06, Dan TheBookMan wrote:
> > How would it avoid the usual language change that faces natural
> > languages, especially if it became a lingua franca along the lines
> > of English today? A lot of it would depend on enforcement of its
> > strictures. Once it becomes 'free range,' how would you maintain
> > that?
>
> You can't; that's the point of the concept.
>
> My idea in a bit more detail.  A Lojban-like language is developed to
> communicate with nonhumans, because the less you have in common the more
> you need to make explicit.  It becomes the dominant language of a
> human-settled planet, which later loses contact, allowing dialects to
> drift and diverge.  How quickly are the Lojban-like distinctive features
> lost?

I thought you wanted to implement this to stop or slow down language
change, but you just want to run the experiment to see what happens.
That would be interesting. If current theories are correct, there
might be some good guesses of what changes. For instance, the reduced
vowel set (compared with English though not with Italian or Japanese)
might evolve into a wider one or there might be a shift. All this
would depend on how it's maintained. If they're using modern recording
technology, then this process might slow -- no Great Vowel Shift. But
if not, then it's easy to imagine as a whole or via different
dialects, vowel shifts and widenings happening.

At the higher levels, things like grammar... Well, if we look to Latin
and its descendants, we see what might happen here: moving from a
fairly free sentence order with inflexions carrying much grammatical
duty to inflexions being lost and sentence order tightening down like
in French. Of course, one of the drivers here was likely people who
didn't speak Latin learning Latin as adults and then their children
hearing parents' use and copying that, maybe unlearning 'bad' habits
later on, but some of them sticking. In the scenario you envisage, it
would matter if the people were adult learners and knew other
languages.

(I was/am working on a story world something like that -- though not
with Lojban but with human languages even ancient ones to see how
they'd play out. For instance, a world at a low tech level (EBA or
LSA) with human settlements spread out with some using Latin, some
using Nahuatl, some using other languages, and limited contact between
the groups for hundreds of years and starting out with no writing --
enough time for many human generations to pass so presumably much
language evolution. I don't want to go into too much detail, but it's
an idea I've been toying with for years. I was working off the notion
that the settlers were 'clean-slated' -- started out knowing only
Latin or Nahuatl, etc. and not that they used Latin, etc. as a sort of
prestige tongue or trade language but spoke other languages too.)

By the way, Ian Watson's first novel (_The Embedding_ (1973)) dealt
with trying to impose a language on children from the start. I read it
around the turn of the millenium, so I forget the deets now.

Regards,

Dan
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http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/