> On Feb 12, 2016, at 12:47 AM, Greg Chalik <mrg3105@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Is there even a canon source for how many languages are in use in the 3I?
>
> I never considered more than two dozen.

Depends on what happened during the Long Night, and what’s happened since.

Back when I was a college student (this was ’77 or ’78 iirc) I worked in the school cafeteria, one of the few places that students with student visas could legally work; I had one kid from Brazil and one kid from Angola on my crew. Officially, they spoke the same language, Portuguese. Unofficially, I was called in to translate between them a number of times because they were mutually unintelligible in Portugese, and they didn’t have sufficient facility in English to understand each other in that language either.

I could understand their english, and translate into more ‘american’ accent they could both understand. I don’t speak any Portuguese, and can only vaguely make it out, when it’s close enough to Spanish for me to understand.

Pre radio, England had dozens (possibly hundreds, I forget) mutually incomprehensible dialects. Post Radio (and the Beeb’s ‘standard english’) that number dwindled rapidly to near zero.

New Guinea has (or had) the highest concentration of different language on the planet; driven by  widely fragmented population with significant geographical separation. Two villages might only be ten miles apart, yet completely inaccessible to each other. After a millenium or two they’re speaking different languages.

Colonization by outside powers  tends to reduce language variety, particularly when the colonizers force assimilation; most native american languages have been lost, or nearly so by this process.

Conversely, isolation will lead to a fairly rapid divergence of two populations speaking nominally the same language.

If the language, for example, is like english (which has been described as ‘not so much borrowing from other languages as following them into dark alleys, beating them unconscious and rifling their pockets for vocabulary’ ;-) isolation plus exposure to other languages will lead to quite a rapid divergence.

Short answer: "Answer Hazy: Ask after more research” :-)

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs