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In the book Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin, the author created the future Kesh language and Aiha alphabet. Does anyone with an anthropological or etymological background and experience with this book have any idea how modern languages would evolve into this? Could it just be English + 5000 years, or does it seem like there's other languages that got mixed in?

From the back of the book it is stated that their written language and spoken are completely separate things and are not interchangeable which is quite a shift from modern English, but it seems like they may be many thousands of years in the future which would allow for such drastic changes. Some words such as "kailikú" for "quail" have the similar hard /k/ and "sleep" is translated to "lahe" which seems to be pronounced similarly to "lay". These seem to be fairly rare and most words have no obvious connection or similar pronunciations.

Aiha alphabet

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5000 years is a really long time for linguistic evolution, and after such a long time little resemblance between the original and the final outcome is left. So almost anything is a plausible outcome.

The feature "written language and spoken are completely separate things and are not interchangeable" has a nice scientific name alloglottography and it was quite common in the Ancient Near East. I wonder how it can survive in a society Ursula LeGuinn describes for the Kesh people because it is definitely harder to maintain than the knowledge of a simple alphabetic writing of the spoken vernacular.

The alphabet looks like a new invention but it shows some superficial similarities to Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and may have evolved from them. Or it was just reinvented at some point of time after a period of illiteracy.

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  • Thanks for introducing me to the word alloglottography, some interesting future readings on that concept. My understanding of their society for how the written language survived seems to be that it was an important system for documentation of procedures and traditions, while the spoken language was used for day to day purposes. I suppose in that way its like current mathematical notation for us, we keep it around for the sciences and math, but has next to no use in spoken language.
    – CorbinA
    Mar 13, 2021 at 20:32
  • Could it be based on shorthand perhaps? Seems there's similarities to Gregg and Pitman
    – CorbinA
    Mar 15, 2021 at 16:49
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    Pitmann's shorthand was a source of inspiration to the Canadian Aboriginal Sylabics (more in the linked Wikipedia article)
    – Sir Cornflakes ♦
    Mar 15, 2021 at 17:23

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