Re: Evidentials for a future English

On the subject of future English, it seems likely to me likely that the
English of the near future will have lost the verbs for arithmetic
operations, replacing them with the reading of their signs.  Viz:

        "If you times 2 by 2, you get 4."

Just last night I was reading a page about poker odds which referred
several times to having to "minus" one in various formulae.  I've also
heard "plus" used to mean "add", even though it seems less necessary,
the two words being about equally simple.

And I must admit, that while hanging around CONLANG has done wonders to
combat my prescriptivist nature, I still physically cringe when I read
things like this.  The author is fortunate that modern technology
doesn't yet support my reaching through the screen to give him a good slap. :)

-Marcos

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