Re: Evidentials for a future English

Mark J. Reed wrote:
>
> 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. :)
I agree completely. I was recently in a training session where
we were taught several financial calculations. Two of the people
in the group consistently said things such as, "You have to minus
the base from the reserve first, then you times it by fifteen per
cent" and "At the end, you plus the two numbers together."
After a week of this, I found it difficult not to choke both of them.

--Ph. D.