Another question about Schueler

One thing people seem to forget. Langehorn created the Church of God. Chihiro changed it to Awaiting....

What's been bugging me, and this must have come up in something I haven't read, is that OAR told us that language had drifted a lot since the colony was founded.

If the revelation at the end of TFT were a pre-recorded Hari Seldon visit, the worshippers would have had trouble understanding it.

Expert snuggler wrote:What's been bugging me, and this must have come up in something I haven't read, is that OAR told us that language had drifted a lot since the colony was founded.

If the revelation at the end of TFT were a pre-recorded Hari Seldon visit, the worshippers would have had trouble understanding it.

Now you mention it, Zhaspahr "knows" the voice of Langhorne right before his execution, as he's heard it before.

ZVar wrote:

Expert snuggler wrote:What's been bugging me, and this must have come up in something I haven't read, is that OAR told us that language had drifted a lot since the colony was founded.

If the revelation at the end of TFT were a pre-recorded Hari Seldon visit, the worshippers would have had trouble understanding it.

Now you mention it, Zhaspahr "knows" the voice of Langhorne right before his execution, as he's heard it before.

It might have drifted less in The Temple lands.

Expert snuggler wrote:What's been bugging me, and this must have come up in something I haven't read, is that OAR told us that language had drifted a lot since the colony was founded.

If the revelation at the end of TFT were a pre-recorded Hari Seldon visit, the worshippers would have had trouble understanding it.

Language drift occurs as people speaking the original form spread out elsewhere. Consider the one we speak. English is part of a family called Indo-European. There was a proto Indo-European from which all members of the family developed, and linguists have been able to construct a vocabulary of about 2,500 words. But over the millenia, the language diverged enough to become many different languages, mutually unintelligible, with no obvious connection between them in many cases.

Something similar happened to Arabic, which has diverged enough to have mutually unintelligable dialects that some linguists argue are different languages. (An old linguistics joke is that a language is a dialect with an army and navy.) The closest thing to Standard Arabic these days is the dialect spoken on Egyptian TV, which is available all over the Middle East.

Linguistic drift has happened on Safehold, and there are folks in some areas whose accents make it hard for people from other areas to understand them, but the drift has not reached "other language" level. And Safehold has the additional advantage that while how English is spoken has changed, how it it written has not. Folks from different areas of Safehold can communicate in writing even if they might have problems with each other's speech in person.

The question, of course, is just when the recording of Schueler's voice that is heard when his apparition appears in his temple at the end of TFT was created. I don't think it dates from when he was still alive...
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Dennis