A hospital in India has been caught selling fake negative COVID-19 results for the equivalent of a little more than 33 US dollars. Linguists examine just how much language will change as humans begin to travel to distant moons and planets. In Seoul, South Korea, the Mayor recently disappeared for several hours, only to be found dead in what some allege was an act of suicide. Join Ben Bowlin for more Strange News Daily, and share your stories on Twitter: #strangedaily.
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Strange News Daily. It's a production of I Heart Media. In a world full of bizarre events, unsolved mysteries, and a billion stories from all corners of the globe, some news gets lost in the shuffle. This is your gateway to the stories on the fringe of the mainstream map. These are your dispatches in the dark. I'm Ben Bolan and this is the Strange News Daily. Our first story today takes place in India where a local hospital has just been busted issuing fake COVID nineteen test results. The license of a private hospital in the main Root district has been suspended after a video emerged showing one of its staff members providing fake Corona reports in return for money. This video went viral on social media. A Nil Dingra, the district magistrate of Mirut, said quote a video had gone viral in Mairut. We have registered a case in this regard and we have suspended the license of the nursing home. We have also sealed it on Sunday. Strict action will be taken against anybody who does anything like this. In the video, the staff member can be heard saying that the medical facility will provide a negative coronavirus or COVID nineteen report for just two thousand, five hundred Indian rupees. For comparison, that's a little bit more than thirty three U S. Dollars. Dr Raj Kumar, the chief medical officer of Mairut said, quote a man from the hospital can be heard saying that he can arrange a negative COVID nineteen report and the patient can get his operation done. We've identified this man. The video also shows the clients handing over the money to a hospital manager. Uh They give them two thousand rupees and promised to pay the remaining five hundred rupees when the report arrives. Kumar says, from the video, it's emerged that the hospital's manager, shah Alam, is promising people of fake COVID nineteen negative report in exchange for money. May Root has a total of one thousand, one hundred and seventeen confirmed coronavirus cases so far. Out of those cases, sixty nine people have died as a result of the infection and seven hundred and seventy two appear to afric covered. Still, it is troubling to note that the corruption in this hospital implies that other hospitals maybe corrupt themselves, and if we look at the bigger picture, this means the numbers emerging from India at least may not be as accurate as they seem. Our second story today, have you ever spoken with someone who has an accent or dialect so strange to you that you have trouble understanding what they're saying even when you speak the same language. I feel like most people, the odds are you have experienced something like this, especially in the globally connected world in which we all live today. It seems that space exploration is only set to exacerbate this strange phenomenon. Let's start with the idea of what sci fi authors and futurists often call an interstellar arc or a generation ship. The idea behind these ships is that we would build a vessel wherein multiple generations of human beings can be born, grow, and eventually pass away, handing the responsibility of steering the vessel to the next generation of people. If we can build multigenerational craft like this, then eventually, the theory goes, human beings could colonize the galaxy and eventually the universe. Of course, there are some pretty apparent downsides to this thought. Experiment or this ambitious proposal. During these unimaginably long voyages, multiple generations of people born and raised in closed environment are going to run into biological issues or even mutations that we simply cannot predict. And according to a new study by a team of linguistics professors, there's another factor here that we may consider another thing that might mutate on the journey. Language. In a study called Language development during Interstellar Travel, the team of linguist Andrew mackenzie and Jeffrey Prunsky outline and discuss how languages evolve over time and how this could affect long term space travelers of the future. What they find is fascinating. Of course, language evolves over time whenever a community grows isolated from another community, and when it comes to the idea of isolation, it's hard to imagine a more extreme case than that of people on an interstellar voyage. Eventually, the multigenerational isolation could mean that the language of the colonists who land on on some far flung moon or planet would be unintelligible to the people here on Earth, if that is, they ever met up again. In the future. To illustrate this, the Linguists use examples of different language families on Earth to show how new languages emerged over time due to distance. Then they extrapolated this process and imagine how it would occur over the course of ten generations are more of interstellar or even interplanetary travel. In a recent press release, Mackenzie explains it this way. He says, quote, if you're on this vessel for ten generations, new concepts will emerge, New social issues will come up, and people will create ways of talking about them, and these will become the vocabulary particular to the ship. People on Earth might never know about these words unless there's a reason to tell them, And he continues, the further away you get, the less you're going to talk to people back home. Generations passed, and soon there's no one really back home to talk to, and there's not much you want to tell them because they will only find out years later, and then you'll hear back from them years after that. They cite some examples of this process on Earth. Consider the story of the Polynesian sailors who populated the South Pacific Islands somewhere between three thousand and one thousand b c e. The roots of these sailors can be traced back to modern day Taiwan, but their process of expansion over time lead to the development of entirely new cultures. By the first millennium b c e. The Polynesian languages that emerged from this expansion bore very little resemblance to the ancient Austronesia language of their ancestors. The linguists also cite language changes that can take place within the same language community over time. What example they site is up talk. This is also known as high rising terminal. This is the phenomenon that evolves statements ending with a rise in intonation. I didn't quite nail it, but you get the gist. As the researchers note, up talk has only been observed in the English language within the past four decades or so, and currently we don't know where it came from. Still, the spread of up talk has been the subject of no small amount of debate, especially by members of the so called baby boomer generation. Many of them use up talk today, but they certainly didn't have it around when they were growing up. Another issue the languists identify is interestingly enough sign language, because it will require adaptation from the crew as statistics dictate that over the course of the long voyage, some crew members will be born hearing impaired. Without someone focusing on keeping track of these changes and trying to maintain some sort of grammatical standard, this linguistic divergence will be inevitable. But as the linguists note, keeping those standards might itself become a moot point, because we have to remember that language on Earth is going to be changing during the same time. Mackenzie says, they may well be communicating like we'd be using Latin, communicating with this version of the language that nobody uses. The authors also say that it would be worthwhile to have additional studies of likely language changes aboard this spacecraft. It would help people know what to expect in advance, As they conclude in their study quote, given the certainty that these issues will arise in scenarios such as these, and the uncertainty of exactly how they will progress, we strongly suggest that any crew exhibits strong levels of metal linguistic training. In addition to simply knowing the required languages, there will be need for an informed linguistic policy on board that can be maintained without referring back to Earth based regulations. So for starters, let's imagine that a generation ship one of these interstellar arcs does end up taking a ten generations to reach its destination. One example, People point two would be Proxima B, so ten more generations passed before the next ship arrives, bringing people from Earth who still speak a form of modern English. This is where it gets interesting. You can use language simulators like the language Evolution simulator on set, and this can give us a tiny taste atapas sized portion of how a simple English language hello paired with a common request would change over the course of that full twenty generations. So here we go. We're going to pronounce it. Let us know what you think. This says hellah, freat good to be at you to players. It's a little bit easier to decode if you can see it written now. But according to this evolution simulator, that would be the future equivalent of saying hello, friend, good to meet you, Take me to your leader please. It comes out, you know, a little bit different after twenty generations of isolation. And then would you take time to consider all of the spoken languages and dialects that are already around today and realize that any combination of these is potentially going to be brought with the colonists on their journey. You can see how complicated the problem becomes. So perhaps it's possible that our descendants will need to rely on technology, some sort of future translation software to understand each other, or fall back on good old fashioned body language. The problem is that after twenty generations, we have no idea what colonists body language would look like. Our third story today, the mayor of Seoul, South Korea, one Park wand Soon, was recently found dead. According to police and other sources, this appears to be one of the country's highest profile suicides in recent history. Mayor Park, who was sixty four years old, was found dead only hours after he had been reported missing, and the exact cause of his death is still officially under investigation. His daughter filed a police report at five seventeen pm local time in South Korea, saying that he had left home four to five hours ago after leaving words like a will, and his phone was currently off. The man hunt began. More than seven hundred and seventy police officers, fire trucks, and an ambulance were mobilized to track the whereabouts of the mayor. They searched areas around us home, as well as near the temple where his cell phone signal was last detected. The Soul Metropolitan Government said the mayor did not come to work Thursday due to health reasons. In a text message to reporters this morning, the city government said all events and meetings that Park had been said to attend on Thursday were called off for unavoidable reasons. The day before, on Wednesday, Mayor Park had made a public appearance while holding a press conference on the city's Green New Deal, a plan that intends to cut carbon dioxide emissions while also creating jobs. According to local news reports, Bear Park was recently facing allegations of sexual harassment. A former secretary of his had filed a complaint against Park on Wednesday with the Soul Metropolitan Police Agency for alleged sexual assault. She claimed that Park had made physical contacts several times since she began to work with him in twenty seventeen. She also submitted messages that she had exchanged with Park over the telegram app service. The police took this as evidence. According to her testimony. There have also been other victims sexually assaulted by the mayor. Police had planned to call in Mayor Park and Soul government officials for investigations into the case. Park, who was elected mayor of Soul in two thousand eleven, was in his third and final term in office. He was a member of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea. It was regarded as a potential presidential candidate for the two thousand twenty two election. As a former human rights lawyer and a legendary civil rights campaigner, Mayor Park made a public appeal for human centered policies and equality, such as making efforts to curbs soaring housing prices and Soul while also strengthening welfare programs for the very young and the very old. He has survived by his wife, his son, and his daughter. That's all for now. We've been asking you to chime in with suggestions for stories you think your fellow listeners should learn more about. To hit us with your best or worst puns and dad jokes, or your personal experience with COVID nineteen, the ongoing protests, or anything else strange and unusual happening in your neck of the global woods. Let us know. Tag hashtag strange daily on Twitter, or reach out to me directly. I'm at Ben bullin HSW on Twitter or at ben Bullen on Instagram. Thanks as always to our super producer Dylan Fagan, our research associate Sam T. Garden, and most importantly, thanks to you. I'm Ben Bullet. We'll see you tomorrow. Until then, stay strange.