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Comment by offtop5 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like having a written language precludes this. Hypothetically if all the books are lost, and any audio recordings are broken, this might happen. Although unless you already landed at your destination, I can't imagine you'd still have the technology left to navigate the ship.

Historically oral language has of course come first, and then you just need to find a writing system from somewhere. Which explains why almost every Asian country used Chinese writing at some point in its history despite most of the languages being completely unrelated.

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The Cherokee syllabary was created by an illiterate Cherokee man who had heard of the idea of reading and though it was a great idea, which is pretty amazing. It looks like a combination of cyrillic and latin lettering, with some other symbols put in for good measure. But it works! Amazing how just planting the seed of an idea can have a profound impact on the world.

All English speakers share a common writing system, but if you compare, say, the Scottish highland dialect with African-American Vernacular English, you get close to the point where the two variants could plausibly be considered different languages. Given time and distance the variants will only diverge further. Also notice how having a common Latin written language didn't prevent the various Romance languages from developing in Europe.

That’s a great example. See how Vulgar Latin split off from the written form quite early on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin

As far as I know back in the olden times most people were illiterate, so having a written language wouldn't have as much of an impact as it would today.

I bet you if you locked a Scottish guy, and someone who speaks AAVE in the same room and they had to work together to escape they easily could. If you slow down AAVE it's just normal English, along with repetition to emphasize certain points. But this varies wildly based upon where in the United States you live. In Los Angeles, a lot of these black kids grow up watching anime all day so it wouldn't surprise me to see a bit of Japanese make its way into AAVE.

Considering the American South was largely populated by Scots-Irish, you might be surprised. These are the people African slaves and their descendans learned English from.

Its so strange to me that people basically avoid recognizing that most African Americans simply speak a Southern dialect that has been able to persist outside the South because of de facto segregation.

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