Everyday life on the International Space Station can’t be easy. One of the big difficulties can be how they understand themselves astronauts of different nationalities with each other. It’s one thing to in principle, they all speak English, since it is the official language of the space station, and they must also understand some Russian. However, how smoothly everyday communication goes in these languages is another matter. That’s why they were designed by astronauts a mixed language, Runglish – the not at all permanent, constantly changing language contains both Russian and English elements.
In space, English and Russian are the two most important languages
To the International Space Station (ISS) It has been since 2000 permanent staff. For a while it was for two people, since 2009 a maximum of 6 people can be on the ISS at the same time. Although the project was launched not only by Russia and the space agency of the United States of America, but other countries also participate in it (for example, the European Space Agency and Japan and Canada’s organization responsible for space research), these two countries are the two unofficial leaders. Moreover the crew until 2006 consisted only of Russians and Americans – then the first astronaut of a different nationality joined the crew: German astronaut Thomas Reiter. Among other reasons, it is understandable that the official language of the station is English. At the same time, knowledge of the Russian language is also mandatory, since – before SpaceX started performing transport tasks related to the ISS – for a long time, the International Space Station was basically serviced by the Soyuz spacecraft of the Russian Federal Space Agency. Thus, the messages and instructions related to take-off and landing, not to mention the user interface, were all in Russian.
An English-Russian mixed language was developed on the ISSMatthias Kulka / Getty Images Hungary
Nonetheless in everyday life communication between astronauts of different nationalities does not always go smoothly. It is due to this that they created their own language, which is partly English and partly Russian consists of words, phrases, elements. “I led crews of different people. Depending on how proficient one is in the other’s language, we’ve developed a common language,” said Peggy Whitson, the first female astronaut to command the ISS twice.
“Once there was a Russian cosmonaut who always mixed up Tuesday and Thursday, so I had to somehow distinguish between the two days. In the end, we developed a common language that we both understood”
said the astronaut On the University of Cambridge blog. (The English words Tuesday and Thursday are similar: Tuesday and Thursday – ed.) Peggy Whitson also told me that on her first mission, after a while, she thought she spoke Russian quite well, since she always understood what the Russian commander said him. His surprise was huge, when the head of the ISS started talking to another Russian astronaut, of which the American woman did not understand a word. “In emergency preparedness and drills, it is very important that everyone understands. You have to know the crew well to know when to say something important in Russian. Then after a while you realize what language and words everyone understood” – He told.
In maritime trade, sailors also often used pidgin languages in foreign landsmicroman6 / Getty Images Hungary
This is how mixed languages develop
Languages that have two arise spontaneously when ethnic groups that do not understand each other come into contact, we call them pidgin languages. In the course of history, languages have been formed in this way many times, and it has also happened countless times that these temporary, casual contact languages, which are usually extremely simple, have survived. Since a pidgin language becomes “permanent”, and the first generation appears whose mother tongue is this, we call them Creole.
The so-called Pidgin language is often cited as an example lingua francaalthough there is not complete agreement among linguists as to whether it is really a pidgin. It may have developed during the Crusades, but its rise to prominence can be made later, for the time when Merchants of Venice and Genoa dominated the Mediterranean region. Until the 19th century, it was mainly used to European traders should understand each other with their Arab and Turkish business partners. But it was also the language used by French diplomats to communicate with the superiors of Algiers and Tunisia, and it was also used by sailors and Christian slaves of European origin. As with later pidgins it was a very rudimentary language, its written version basically does not exist, but in some places it was published on paper. For example, in Molière’s comedy Úrhatnám burgher.
Lingua franca
Apart from the specific language used among traders in the Mediterranean region, the term has a more general meaning. It is also used in the sense of intermediary or auxiliary language between people of different languages. The first lingua franca may have been Aramaic, which was used in the Persian Empire in the 6th and 7th centuries BC. During the time of Alexander the Great, Greek supplanted it, but it remained to some extent: in this language, for example, Jesus Christ also spoke to his disciples. The lingua franca of the Middle Ages it was latin.
In the age of great geographical discoveries, peoples who had never met before came into contact with each otherLibrary of Congress Geography a / Getty Images Hungary
Helped in trade
A typical example of the development of such languages is Chinese Pidgin English. When English traders first reached China in the 17th century, serious communication was difficult. As the Chinese merchants they learned certain words and phrases from their English business partners, and vice versa, this strange mixed language slowly developed.
Even the pidgin name comes from here: according to some linguists, the word can be derived from a distorted Chinese pronunciation of the word business.
The strange language it was used until the 19th century, when they started teaching English in schools in China.
Pidgin in Hawaii
Of particular interest is the development of Hawaiian pidgin, which has now become a creole language. Pidgin was first developed on the island from the native Hawaiian language and the language of Asian slaves brought to the plantations. In the 1980s, with the appearance and rise of English, it first lost more and more importance, and then almost completely disappeared. (On the largest island of Hawaii, it is still used in certain communities). today, 600,000 speak it as their mother tongue and 400,000 as a second language. Despite this, it is still considered inferior to English or Hawaiian by many today.
Despite this, Chinese Pidgin English still had a great career. From the coastal region, where it was mainly used by English sailors, it also reached inland, as far as Seoul and even Vladivostok. Yet appeared outside the Asian continent, for example on an island in the Pacific Ocean, Nauru, where according to a 2007 research the majority of the population still speaks Chinese Pidgin English and other languages formed from the mixing of local pidgins. There is also evidence to suggest that It also reached Australia, where it underwent significant changes through its encounters with Australian English and other pidgins.
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