Dragaera

Language drift and lifespan

Steve Simmons scs at di.org
Tue Sep 3 18:11:13 PDT 2002

Was Subject: Re: Some observations on Fenario vs. the Easterner homeland

I'll have a more detailed response on the subject of Fenario vs Easterners
later (already spent too much bandwidth and time on it), but wanted to
ask a related question of the language pros.

In Dragaera, we have people who live for 3,000 years.  It's not clear at
what age a typical Dragaeran has children, but it looks like a number
of them get married by 500 or so.  That means a 3,000-year-old is going
to be alive and speaking the language across five or six generations of
descendants.

With that kind of life span, what would it do towards keeping the language
stable?  This laymans guess is that the Dragaeran language would change
very slowly, if at all.  Slowly enough that 200,000-year-old texts might
be readable with no more difficulty than you or I have with Shakespeare.
-- 
  `The skills needed for dealing with a computer are not simply irrelevant to
those needed for dealing with people; they are actually a negative.  You cannot
reboot, reinstall, or power cycle a human being no matter how desperately they
need it.'  -- me, in forthcoming article