Re: evolving languages

Muke Tever wrote:


From: "Peter Bleackley" <Peter.Bleackley@...>
> It makes me wonder whether a future form of English might have such forms
as
> "I wigo", "I wibee" etc. "Future English"- now there's a conlang idea for
> somebody - is anybody doing anything along those lines? I imagine there'd
> be some Spanish influence, possibly some from Indian languages too.
I think Future Englishes are a decent-enough-sized branch of the conlang
tree.

In my version though, the future tense marker from "will" merged onto the
pronouns... i.e., the future tense is formed with particles descendant from
"I'll", "we'll", "they'll"...  The present tense from "I'm", "we're",
"they're"... I dont ATM remember how the past was formed, though.

I played around with a Future English once, for a post-nuclear-apocalypse
fantasy.  Mostly forgotten, except it had undergone final devoicing and
another Vowel Shift, such that "it is" was [tEs], "I" was [æ], and IIRC "no"
was [nA]

Interesting, now that the Soviet Union is no more, that particular
post-apocalypse genre doesn't seem much in vogue.  The original
"first-contact" fantasy (1976) that gave birth to Kash took place about 2000
yrs in the future; the US and the SU had destroyed the northern hemisphere
in a nuclear war around 1990; the terran protagonist John Rodriguez was a
young spaceman of US Black/Colombian or Venezuelan heritage-- his 1990
ancestor was a crewman on a fishing boat in the Caribbean and survived the
major destruction.  JR's education had taken place in Brazil, Australia and
Indonesia-- the main powers in that world (along with S.Africa)