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

At 7:33 pm -0500 20/6/99, Nik Taylor wrote:
>"From Http://Members.Aol.Com/Lassailly/Tunuframe.Html" wrote:
......
>> i wonder whether english native speakers around the world will still
>> understand each other in a century.
>
>Well, in the mid-19th century, it was predicted that within a hundred
>years, British and American would be distinct languages.
That might've happened if the only way to cross the Atlantic was still by
sailing ship & no means of electrical (let alone electonic) communication
had been discovered.  But this is not so - we're across the pond in a few
hours and, ever since someone added sound to moving pictures, American
English has been familiar to us and, indeed, has influenced theb old
'Mother Tongue'.  Now there's more than enough intercommunication to stop
us drifting too far apart.

> In an
>interesting book, _The English Languages_ (available at Amazon.com, at
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521485827/niktaylor0c), the
>author argues that English is evolving towards a state much like that of
>Arabic, where a single dialect (Standard Arabic) can be understood
>across all the Arab-speaking nations, even tho the national dialects
>(Iraqi Arabic, Lebanese Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, etc.) are, in some
>cases, not mutually intelligible.
Indeed not - I've known of a case where a Moroccan & Iraqi student of mine
just couldn't understand one another's spoken language, tho they both
shared standard literary Arabic.  But Arabic was spead over a large area
centuries ago with the spread of Islam; intercommunication by ordinary
people was difficult and pre-Arabic speech habits were able to interfere
with Arabic in some areas.  This simply is not the case in our modern world
where travel is relatively easy and spoken communication with people the
other side of the globe is commonplace.


>He feels that an International
>English (or World English) is evolving, based largely on American,
>British, and Australian Englishes, and will unite the disparate English
>Languages.  It's very interesting.
Yes - and American English is the dominant partner.  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 (Lakonian apparently did hold on to
give modern Tzakonian - one can imagine some Lowland Scots forms, which are
almost incomprehensible to us in southern Britain, surviving :)

Ray.