Sci-fi and Speech

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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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, 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. 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, 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.

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,

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 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

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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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

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 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, 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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