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In the world of Rifts Earth does American even use the same alphabet that English uses? Furthermore does American even sound the same as late 20th early 21st century American English? Also I assume that the non-human languages have their own alphabet but does Euro or Spanish have a different script than 21st century English? Finally does Spanish sound different than Spanish of 21st century America?

plotulus wrote:In the world of Rifts Earth does American even use the same alphabet that English uses? Furthermore does American even sound the same as late 20th early 21st century American English? Also I assume that the non-human languages have their own alphabet but does Euro or Spanish have a different script than 21st century English? Finally does Spanish sound different than Spanish of 21st century America?

Given that there's a 'Euro' language, I imagine that there has been linguistic drift, even (or maybe especially) between British and American English.
The whole knightly culture of post-Rifts Britain not withstanding, I doubt any visitor from the Middle Ages would recognize the English spoke in the current King Arthur's court, even with what attempts to romanticize it working off surviving pre-Rifts media.

Both American and British English have likely gotten a strong dose of d-bee infusions, English as a whole having a(perhaps unwarranted) reputation for mugging other tongues for vocabulary(then infecting other languages with the tendency). I figure post-Rifts Brit-Eng has taken on a lot of German and Faerie words, along with Chiang-ku dialect dragons. Druidic rune-languages have likely made a comeback too, adding to the common tongue of trade there.
American English likely has even more Spanish mixed in, as a result of massive refugee migrations, as well as Gobbely and Dragonese influences. Despite the best efforts of Coalition State make-work organizations dedicated to purging Human culture of 'corrupting alien influences' and 'purifying' alien words from Human language, it's likely a lost cause, as the aforementioned predilection of languages swallowing new vocabulary has 'corrupted' the CS language of empire enough already that attempting to exorcise it from the common language would be like trying to eject mitochondria from your body cells.
The alphabet, though? I'd assume that's fairly stable; there's enough ruins and remaining writing that the alphabet has remained fairly pure, and powers like the Coalition States and Northern Gun will enforce the standardization of Human-compatible QWERTY-keyboard setups. Some regions like Lazlo may see some new letters enter the alphabet from languages like Dragonese, and the publication or distribution of publications and equipment using those letters will be a telltale. of its origins.
TechnoCan likely repurposes a lot of punctuation marks in its heavily internet-influenced style and vocabulary, so expect permutations on symbols like @ or <>, {}.

Written language tends to be more conservative (i.e. maintain its structure) longer, so I would wager that American and English still use the same alphabet... especially since most of the close-by contaminants (i.e. French, Spanish) use the same alphabet. Another conservative force on the language would be long-range communication... I'm not familiar with Chaos Earth, but assuming radio works, it will help maintain language a bit; it's harder to fragment into a bunch of tiny languages if you can talk and listen to people several days travel away.

If I had to bet, American has, at the very least, a larger influx of Spanish and French words than it does in the 21st century, and probably some surprising stuff from Chinese and Vietnamese, especially regionally. In Houstown, I had them develop a language called Texican, which I think would be pretty similar to what you'd see, in the long run.

Mark Hall wrote:Written language tends to be more conservative (i.e. maintain its structure) longer, so I would wager that American and English still use the same alphabet... especially since most of the close-by contaminants (i.e. French, Spanish) use the same alphabet. Another conservative force on the language would be long-range communication... I'm not familiar with Chaos Earth, but assuming radio works, it will help maintain language a bit; it's harder to fragment into a bunch of tiny languages if you can talk and listen to people several days travel away.

If I had to bet, American has, at the very least, a larger influx of Spanish and French words than it does in the 21st century, and probably some surprising stuff from Chinese and Vietnamese, especially regionally. In Houstown, I had them develop a language called Texican, which I think would be pretty similar to what you'd see, in the long run.

With the advent of the printing press changes to the alphabet has been minimal and with technology using keyboards it would almost certainly limit changes even more so.

Now, during the dark ages I would say that you would see a fair bit linguistic drift but most of those would die out in favor of the mono-culture coming from the Northern tech areas of NG & CS.

In a real world setting you would see a fair amount of drift in languages under this situation but from a gaming standpoint I'm not sure how many more languages we want to add. This was the whole point of Trade Languages in Phase World. Rifts is a big expansive world, most players want to see it, and they are not looking to learn a new language every time they travel 500 miles. just my five cents.

the big thing i could see is linguistic drift combined with resulting spelling changes.. after all, the idea that words have a single fixed spelling is a fairly modern idea, and if you got back a century you see people playing a lot faster and looser with spelling.. more than two centuries and spelling is pretty much a free for all that only has phonetics as a guide.

While to a certain degree surviving books will keep the spelling of most words from drifting too much, the fact that most of the populace of rifts earth would only be partially literate at best (and fully illiterate at worst) would drive the attitude towards spelling back to a much looser state. which also means that any pronunciation changes in the language very likely would end up with the written versions of those words changing as well, as the writer tries to match the new phonetics.

that said, such changes would likely be stronger with regional dialects in less civilized places.

I would hazard to guess that the linguistic drift would not be very great until the end of the 'golden age' that was happening up until the coming of the rifts. As with english in the past, adding in words from other languages would still happen. Idioms would change. Like how people are now starting to say "No Problem" to a 'Thank You' instead of a 'You're Welcome' Or how the people are not saying the day of the date correctly and just saying a number. *exasperated sigh of regret*

Change would start to accelerate as the older generations that were formally educated before the fall died off. So it would not be strange for the American of the collation states to be significantly different than that of today.

However, to take an example of the past. In china they basically had several different spoken languages with but one written language that they all shared. This stayed this way over generations. Probably a side effect of the chinese imperial bureaucracy mandating education standards for applicants seeking government jobs.

actually the biggest issue would probably be that 200 year dark age? the issue of linguistic drift is not one of generational slang usage but rather how the words are pronounced themselves. much like how modern English is very different from Shakespearean English, even though the two would technically be mutually intelligible.

for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiblRSqhL04

in a more extreme case, linguistic drift is how language families form, such as how drift and hybridization with germanic languages turned latin into French, Spanish, Old English, Italian..

plotulus wrote:In the world of Rifts Earth does American even use the same alphabet that English uses? Furthermore does American even sound the same as late 20th early 21st century American English? Also I assume that the non-human languages have their own alphabet but does Euro or Spanish have a different script than 21st century English? Finally does Spanish sound different than Spanish of 21st century America?

I will point out that Techno-Can is basically English with a bunch of complex new words, borrowed words and jargon incorporated and likely represents that kind of linguistic drift.

techno isn't a naturally evolved language though, it is a Conlang, a constructed language. thus linguistic drift does not apply to its origin, as it isn't the result of the pronunciation of a language changing over time as people use it, rather a deliberate effort to create a new language.
specifically, Techno is an A posteriori Conlang, derived from english but using its own grammar and rules. most likely it would be an example of a Schematic auxiliary language, being wholly artificial rather than just a simplification of english, yet without a constructed fictional history behind it.

if you want to model linguistic drift in rifts an easy way to do it might be to make some of the rats-net of grammar rules in english more consistent. Because english has a lot of loan words, which retained their original origins grammar rules, it can often be tricky to learn. for example, why is it one foot and multiple feet, but one moose and not multiple meese? why is the letter combo "ough" pronounced eight different ways in this sentence? "though i coughed roughly and hiccoughed throughout the lecture, i still thought i could plough through the rest of it"

over the dark age, as the teaching of the language becomes less standardized, you might see some of those grammar rules become more consistent, as the users adapt the borrowed words more closely to the other words in use. depending on how long that goes on it might sound very different from our english.. this video demonstrates it pretty well.
this is similar to how children and english as a second language students will often use the wrong phonemes and apply incorrect grammar rules as they get experience with the language. in current times they get corrected and learn the variety of sounds and rules, but in the rifts dark agfe they probably wouldn't.


sneaking a few such things into your NPC's dialog would be a good way to show the kind of dialect that might evolve in less civilized regions of rifts earth.

"What sub-dialect of English is THAT?"
"It's Swedish, actually."

That video actually shows just how little drift would likely have affected mutual intelligibility. It just sounds like how many learners of English read itbearly on in the process. Still easy to make out what they mean.

That said, a major factor that is being forgotten here is rre-rifts media. We know that it exists to the point that the New West exists the way it does due to old cowboy movies. All that pre-rifts material will have a standardizing effect on populations with access to it.

So will Erin Tarn's book. You don't need to be literate to have a book read to you, and hearing the language from very popular books can indeed have a standardizing effect for illiterate members of a population as well.

Linguistic drift would be a much bigger issue for isolated populations (such as certain barbarian tribes in Dinosaur Swamp)

dreicunan wrote:That said, a major factor that is being forgotten here is rre-rifts media. We know that it exists to the point that the New West exists the way it does due to old cowboy movies. All that pre-rifts material will have a standardizing effect on populations with access to it.

That's a really good point. While mass media (including print) will help, existing media that shows how people "should" talk will be another conservative force on language.