Re: THEORY: An English Koine? (was: Vowel shift (was: THEORY: Storage Vs. Computation))

Raymond A. Brown wrote:

> As the American nation
> has received various different groups of immigrants from right across
> Europe in the past couple of centuries, these have help push American
> English, it seems to me, towards an internation 'koine' and the growing use
> of English for international communication by speakers of quite different
> languages from most parts of the globe seems to be pushing this process
> further forward.
>
> We seem to be evolving on a global scale an English koine which,
> presumably, will eventually replace (most) local forms in a similar way
> that the Greek Koine, which developed after Alexander's conquests, spread
> Greek over a very wide area and eventually displaced most of the local
> forms of Greek in the Greek homeland
I suggest that New York City be quarantined immediately.
Its horrible sound has now engulfed my little home town
in New Jersey. Big-city speech is always ugly, ISTM; it
changes too rapidly, the whim of fashion. English should
sound, if I had my way, more like pirates of the 1700's
of the movies.