Re: terminal dialect?

>  we know that nearly every language in existence tends to
>undergo successive phonetic changes which over the course of just a few
hundred
>years can transform the language into something remarkably different.
However, this linguistic law is based on past observations.  But there is
something radically different about the world today that will probably cause
this law to be repealed, or at least beome far less apparent.  That
something is the ability ot record sound and pictures.  At no previous time
in the entire history of language has it been possible for a people to watch
or listen to historical events from 100 years before, or to watch reruns of
I Love Lucy 50 years after the fact.

This radical change could very well cause the English language, at least, to
become much more stable in the centuries to come.  My grandchildren are
watching the same Bugs Bunny cartoons on TV that I watched in the theaters
when I was a child.  So for two generations we have been exposed to the same
pronunciation.  And once the reruns of I Love Lucy are no longer being
watched, the reruns of tomorrows sitcoms (featuring pronunciation that those
actors learned while watching I Love Lucy reruns) will continue to
perpetuate the "standard" pronunciation.

(My two cents worth, anyway.  Historians always underestimate the impact of
technology.  I suspect linguistic historians will probably do the same until
that impact becomes more evident.)

--Gary.