Re: World English (was: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs)

From: Peter Collier petecollier@BTINTERNET.COM -- Due to the pluricentric nature of
English I suppose you could hypothetically, have a situation where the world
remains multilingual but all the languages are ultimately of anglic origin.
However, I consider that very unlikely. -- P.

Unlikely, perhaps, but not impossible. After all, most of Europe's languages are
of Indo-European origin (with the obvious exceptions of Hungarian, Finnish,
and Basque, and possibly others I'm not aware of).

Regardless, I'd be surprised if there weren't at least a handful of distinct, mutually
unintelligible languages in 3001 that are descendents of English (assuming, of
course, that we haven't managed to exterminate ourselves fully by then). That
Clarke apparently suggested the opposite indicates that he didn't include
linguistics among his scientific strengths.

-- Paul