On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Steve Simmons wrote: #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. My first reaction was, "Do the math. The lifespans differ by a factor of 50. 200,000 / 50 = 4000. Four thousand years changes human languages beyond all recognition and comprehensibility, although not beyond analysis." But then I thought about the great-great-grandparent effect (so to speak). That could make a difference. Possibly, just barely enough of a difference, even if gg-grandma normally raises baby, which seems very unlikely!: 4000 (human-analogue years of language) divided by (4 generations instead of 1) still gives us 1000, which is pushing the limit for isolated languages like Icelandic. (English has been subject to crashing waves of outside influence and is not a good basis for guessing at Dragaeran language change.) But that still depends on great-great-grandparents raising the kids as the normal way of doing things. The only data I can recall: - Adron raised his daughter Aliera. That's a *very* special case and might not count as evidence. - Savn in _Athyra_, and his sister Polyi, live with their parents. The rural Teckla are (imho almost certainly) by far the largest population group in the Empire. This is only one family in one village, but there's no hint that they're exceptional AFAIR. As Bujold's characters are fond of saying, you can't triangulate from one data point, or even two. But these are all we have, and they both point the same way. My professional opinion, FWIW, is that Dragaeran should have changed a lot more since the foundation of the Empire than English has from Shakespeare's day to ours. -- Mark A. Mandel http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/ a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website