Re: Time machine

On Fri, 2002-07-12 at 23:43, Jan van Steenbergen wrote:
>  --- Christophe wrote:
>
> > Indeed :(( . If ever someone manages to invent a time-travelling machine,
> > there's a big chance that the first passenger will be a linguist ;))) .
>
> 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 :)
Isn't PIE just a professionals' conlang and Common IE the name for the
language itself?

Bah, I'd like to stick to the future if I've only got one choice.
Firstly, I don't believe I could survive without luxuries such as
running water, always-available food, acceptance etc. Secondly, we can
guess about what the languages have *been*. Our guesses about what they
could be are even less reliable because we have little evidence. (My
younger brother pronounces /}:/ so fronted, it's almost /y:/. There's
every chance that is actually normal for his age group (it's not
something I've ever noticed, so I couldn't say). In English, /y:/ has a
history of unrounding. Perhaps it'll do it again? (I doubt it though.
That corner of our phonology is busy enough as it is, what with /I/
trying to get as tense as it can, the [i;] part of /i:/  being what we
judge the sound on, and /I@/ trying as hard as it can short of success
to monophthongise, we don't need an [y:] trying to unround on us as
well...)) Of course, if I could travel through time unlimitedly, mm....
just about anywhen. Progressively travelling backwards in time to see
all the changes that took CIE and before to PDE. Mmm..... And
eventually, to the genesis of language.

Tristan.