Re: Time machine

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".

Jeff J.

On Sat, 13 Jul 2002 00:30:03 +1000, Tristan McLeay <kesuari@...>
wrote:

>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.

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