Re: American (was Re: Cants)

Oh, definitely. This is actually already occurring. Each area of the US has
its own set of slang (even every group of people does). One only uses
English for "official" matters (school) or international communications.

Latin--Became influenced by languages of invaders into Romance languages.
Each of these became its own language, but Latin was still insisted on in
schools. Now we think of all these as separate languages.

Hmm...

-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU] On
Behalf Of Andreas Johansson
Sent: Sunday, December 14, 2003 1:59 PM
To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
Subject: Re: American (was Re: Cants)

Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>:

> At 17:14 13.12.2003, Greg Johnston wrote:
>
> >American is essentially achieved by simplifying and complexifying English
> >at once. The simplifying is effectively phonetically spelling almost
every
> >word, and not necessarily using proper grammar. This also complicates the
> >language, as one does not know if "no" is being used as "know" or,
> >literally, "no".
>
> Well, that complexity is already there in
> the spoken language, so you already know
> how to determine from context whether /now/
> is 'no' or 'know'.  The benefits of keeping
> a traditional orthography full of alternative
> spellings and silent letters hardly outweighs
> the disadvantages.  The only real advantage is
> continuity, but the real reasons English won't
> undergo a spelling reform are political rather
> than linguistic.
I suspect that the eventual solution will be that speakers of regional
variants start to insist their way of speech is a separate language, and
introducing a separate spelling scheme to indicate it.

We could even end up in a "Medieval Latin" situation, in which something
much
like today's (written) English is the IAL of choice, but what people
actually
speak in today's English-speaking regions is a plethora of "Anglance"
language
of varying mutual intertelligibility.

                                                    Andreas