Re: Time machine

In a message dated 07/12/2002 06.40.26 AM, Christophe Grandsire writes:

>[ . . . ] If ever someone manages to invent a time-travelling machine,
>there's a big chance that the first passenger will be a linguist ;))) .
    Yes. In an ideal world, Christophe, and we all know that this is not
exactly an ideal world... the tragic/comic gap betwixt theory'n'praxis, ya
know...
("Je ne suis qu'une pute au service du neo-capitalisme." - versin' ;) - "la
plane'te des naufragés" ::BiG LiNGua MaNGLiN' GRiN::)

In a message dated 07/12/2002 06.43.48 AM, IJzeren Jan writes:

>He or she will really have a hard time, then. Suppose that the machine
>will work only once, what language would you elect to visit, then?
>
>I might go for Tocharian, but Proto-Indo-European seems rather tempting,
>too :)
In a message dated 07/12/2002 07.30.39 AM, kesuari writes:

>Bah, I'd like to stick to the future if I've only got one choice.
    Hmm, I, too, "be" intensely more curious about the not-so-near-future
(let's say a century or two from now - perhaps 2123 CE) - especially in
regards to newer contact languages, pidgins, creoles, slang, etc. ::crossing
fingers hoping some sort of mono[technocapi]polistic/mono[pop]cultural World
Standard English doesn't take over the world and the human race... rather
have 10,000 "mutant" Englishes::

    But Tocharian and PIE _most definitely_ come in a tie for my third choice.

In a message dated 07/12/2002 09.16.22 AM, RoMilly writes:

>Small problem:  exactly _where_ would you have the Time Machine send you?
>:-)) Better take along an *ekwos just in case you need to relocate......
    ... and a good, multi-purpose tactical *bhl@-to or *bladaz... just in
case...

    My second choice of time-travel would be late-period, modern Lingua
Franca/Sabir (before it "went extinct" in the early 20th century) ... just
'cuz I am curious (as Curious George) about how it sounds/sounded and how the
syntax works/worked in real-life intercultural contacts and contexts (ACH!
all the tenses get/got messy when trying to warp my brainie around
time-travel).
    Does any one know where Sabir was last widely spoken/used? Maybe it can
be revived and up-dated in the EU, eh?!!!

    And with a time machine, the whole bizarre Nostratic Theory and all the
even wackier, fringe "science" theories like the
Atlantis-Mothertongue-Language one & Our-Ancestors-and-Gods-Came-From-Space
bunch will _mayhaps_ be completely debunked.
    Shall we then hijack a time-machine, eh?  ::hyena-like
mad-scientist-cackling::

In a message dated 07/12/2002 09.00.47 AM, jeffsjones writes:

>This reminds me of a joke:
>A time-traveller from some university visits the future, and comes back
>and gives a report. He says there's both good and bad news for linguists. The
>good news is that there'll still be hundreds of languages, with plenty
>of diversity in syntax, morphology, phonology, and semantics. The bad news
>is they're all called "English".
    LOL... better to have 10,000 mutant Englishes than 1 New World Order of
so-call "Standard" English.

Hanuman Zhang
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