joshuazelinsky

“Chronolinguistics is completely different. You’re thinking of glottochronology,” said Dr. Weinberg, as we walked down the hallway. “where people use estimates for how frequently  pronunciation changes occur to estimate when two languages diverged.” 

“Ah yes, so by chronolinguistics you then mean…?” I trailed off. 

“Well the term has been used to mean different things, but here, we use it to mean one very specific thing: we attempt to track instances of the presence of loanwords  in historical languages, where those loanwords come from a language which did not yet exist when the loanword entered the historical language. 

I blinked. Then I remembered how many rumors there were about what their group studied. “You’re trying to detect time-travelers based on how they impact language development?” I tried to keep my skepticism out of my voice. l had been assigned to Threat Models previously, which had tried to look seriously at things which were strange, although definitely not that strange. 

“Yes, precisely,” he grinned. “So if say we found evidence that a variant of proto-Indo-European  had a version of the phrase `to rizz up’ that would likely mean someone from my generation traveled back in time at some point.”

I struggled not to laugh at his use of what had clearly been popular slang when he was young, and felt it would be impolite to tell him that I only knew the phrase at all because I had taken an introductory linguistics class back in college where the professor had used it as an example of a now out of style slang phrase.

“Do you have examples of this?”

“Well, we have at least four which look very strong based on our models but not enough to necessarily convince a hardened skeptic.  What we would really like to do is to identify a group of loan words in an extinct or near extinct language that arise from just that sort of slang, as that slang happens.”

I struggled to politely contain my doubts. “And you had me transfer from Threat Modeling because…?”

“We see your work there as related. After all, what is a bigger threat than time travel? They could alter our history and we would not even be aware of it.  They could change things so that the most basic human cultural values are wildly at odds with what they should be. Imagine, say, some group going back in time and adding text in the Bible to justify war. ”

“Um, the Bible is full of that.”

“In this timeline, yes. But that’s besides the point.” He waved his left hand breezily. “The reason we want you is your expertise in meta-Bayesian analysis and quantifying theory-laden data gathering.”

“Because you need probability estimates but you aren’t sure about what underlying priors you should have about the accuracy of your basic techniques?”

“Yes, exactly. Take for example the actual glottochronology. We know it works in some very limited circumstances but even what sort of models to use for time is difficult. Trying to pin down whether a time traveler intervened in say 4500 BCE as opposed to 2500 BCE is just a massive range. And sometimes two languages have similar sounding words for coincidental reasons but other times the etymology is just subtle. For example, what does the word arroyo mean to you?”

“Uh, a stream that is dry during the summer?”

“Essentially, yes, in English. But English got the word from Spanish where it just means stream. Like many of the Spanish loanwords for geographic features, English speakers encountered the word in the American Southwest, where many streams dry up for part of the year. Now imagine trying to apply that sort of level of jumps over multiple languages of which we lack written records for most of them. Take for example, the word `nice’ which originally meant foolish and ended up almost completely reversing its connotations as it went from one language to another.”

 By this point in the conversation, we had come to a door with multiple security locks. While the entire complex, of course, had major security measures, including the standard Faraday meshes in the walls, and the stabilized axion shielding to prevent neutrino scans, this door clearly had more. The outer part of the door looked like our standard titanium-tantalum alloy doors, but at about twice the thickness of our usual ones. One of the locks on the door was a physical combination lock, in addition to the standard keypad, retinal, and DNA scanners. 

As the door closed behind us, I asked him the question that had been really bothering me. “So, why the emergency transfer request for me? There are normal procedures to go through, to allow us to finish up our work and make sure nothing gets overlooked when someone takes over our assignment.”

Weinberg grimaced. “Simply put. We’re almost out of time. We have what looks like what we term an ITE, an Imminent Transition Event.”

“You mean you have evidence that someone from right now, is about to go back in time?”

“Yes, or someone very near to now. And the timing is particularly suspicious. Are you familiar with the Herculaneum papyri?”

“Vaguely, partially burned scrolls preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Some were deciphered in the 2020s, but a whole group were in another language or script and so were only just recently deciphered?”

“A different language, yes. Etruscan in fact. We previously only had limited samples of Etruscan, making decipherment much more difficult since the modern systems used AI trained on large collections of the language. The key here was finding enough other Etruscan texts elsewhere, along with a few more modern linguistic modeling ideas. But from our department’s standpoint, the problem is what those texts showed. We had already seen what looked like a suspicious number of hits for plausible modern English and Spanish loanwords in some form Etruscan or proto-Etruscan. But with these texts, the numbers jumped. Worse, we also saw at least three probable loanwords unique to current teenage slang.”

“So, based on evidence just deciphered in the last few months, you think someone who is a teenager now will have been a time traveler?”

“Yes, and at least one other term appears to be a term specific to the retro-metal-slide-revival music scene, but we’re not sure.”

“So, you are looking for a bilingual English-Spanish speaking teen into a specific music genre, and you think they are going to time travel or have recently done so, and you want me to help pinpoint what time they likely traveled to.”

“Well, we have reason to suspect that from our perspective, the time traveler hasn’t traveled yet, for other reasons, that you don’t need to know.”

As annoying as that statement was, I had to accept it. I had lost track of how many times I had briefed some newcomer and had to explicitly tell them that we were concerned about some threat for reasons I could not fully lay out to them. But my threats were always much more concrete. At least they had felt that way to me. 

I looked back at Weinberg, and given it all, despite his apparent seriousness, given his age, there was one thing I just had to say. “So you really think this is going to happen? No-cap?”

He glowered. 

“I’m not that old. That phrase is from even before my time.”