Re: The Future Language

On Thu, 13 Jan 2000 20:17:01 PST, Artem Kouzminykh <ural_liz@...>
wrote:

<...>
>I was just thinking, have enyone made an attempt to imagine that will be
>lang(s) in 21, 22, 25, 30 etc. centuries, how modern natlangs, or theirs
>mix, can change in some centuries or even millennia? And to create such a
>conlang?
<...>

I had an idea of that kind - with no intention of actual prediction,
simply for fun.

Inspired by some fragmentary information about late Buddhist Sanskrit,
I tried to imagine how far the official Russian could go without formally
violating *any* rules of grammar. I haven't designed any elaborated
conlang, though.

Just one detail: that system (I named it Bubru, an abbreviation for
'Future Bureaucratic Russian') preserved only one case in nouns, and
it was *genetive*.

It may be funnier to analyze an example. 'Masha jela kashu' becomes in
Bubru 'So_storony Mashi imejet_mesto protsess pojedanija kashi'.

'So_storony' is ergative marker.

'imeet_mesto' is an auxiliary verb/sentence particle expressing tense and
mood.

'protsess' is a marker of aspect/verb class.

Other possible combinations of sentence particles with verb class markers
are e. g. 'nalitso fakt' and 'idet protsess'.

'pojedanija' is the normal form of the verbal stem 'to eat', which is
unchangeable and cannot stand alone. Verbal stems are easily
substantivated.

'Mashi' and 'kashi' are the only possible forms of these nouns in singular.
They cannot stand alone either.

All these huge constructions undergo a thorough phonetic compression.
Most words have no more than three syllables. There is phonemic opposition
of tones. But the orthography remains the same as in today's Russian,
except for the rules of word separation.

I doubt very much if this is what you meant ;)


Best wishes,

Basilius