Re: Future of Spanish

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Carlos Thompson wrote:
> > Well, I guess this language of hundreds of million of speakers, being
> > national language of 20 countries and spoken in other parts of the
> > world... would not have an uniform evolution but reather split in
> > dialects that would eventually become national languages... if La Rea=
l
> > Academia looses it's control.
>
> That doesn't seem very likely to me, for the same reason that English
> hasn't split into national languages.  Unless civilization collapsed,
> and the countries were cut off from each other, they'd remain the same
> language.
Probably the name Spanish would still used and they would share the same
orthography... but is my opinion that dialects will become more and more
different each other.  I, for example, think unlikely that final /s/ will
disapear from Bogot=E1.

Other thing that counts is that, the more important countries for Colombi=
a
economics are USA and Venezuela.  Most inmigrants go to Venezuela and USA.
Most high tech devices comes directly from USA, then, in many fields
relationships with the English speaking USA is stronger than with other
Spanish speaking countries.  I think this situation is similar to other
Latin American countries.  One of this effects is that words related to
technology are comming into the different countries in different shapes:
example "computer" which is "computadora" in Mexico, "ordenador" in Spain
and "computador" in Colombia.

I don't think is unlikely that dialectal differences would make almost
ininteligible languages with a common writing... and at the moment that
writers become more and more colloquial in their writing even orthography
will begin to split and it would co-exist a dialectal writing and a forma=
l
spanish writing as longer as there is an Academy.

> >   Posible split of the /B/ into [B] and [v] based on orthography
> > (counter correction of speech).
>
> I suspect that that's rather unlikely.  I don't know of any examples of
> phonemes being introduced into a language from the orthography.
I've observed (heared) many people alredy making that mistake beliving th=
ey
are being more correct.  This includes school teachers, politicians,
scientist and (at least) one influent radio conductor.  And I know Colomb=
ia
is not the only country this is happening.

> >   Lost of syllabe final /s/, being replaced for a phonemic
> > differenciation of [e]-[E], [o]-[O] and [&]-[A].
>
> That's already happened in some dialects in Spain.
>
> > This would become
> > a case with the following endings:
>
> Not very likely, I think.  It's a preposition, so it would most likely
> become a prefix.  But it might fuse with the forms of "el" as it alread=
y
> has with "del".  Possible forms (assuming a loss of /l/ in final and
> medial positions, and your loss of voiced stops):
> /DE/, /Da/, /DO/, /D&/ =3D del, de la, de los, de las; perhaps they'd b=
e
> written de`, da, do`, da`
> (e` =3D /E/, o` =3D /O/, a` =3D /&/)
>
> Perhaps other fusions of preposition+el, or maybe also un.
> Possibilities:
> de + un: dun (pronounced /du~/), duna, duno`, duna`
> a + articles: au (<al), a, au (<aus < alos), a`; aun (pr. a~u~), auna,
> auno`, auna`
> in + articles: ne`, na, no`, na`, nun, nuna, nuno`, nuna`
> pa (para) + articles: pau, pa, pau, pa`, p(a)un, p(a)una, p(a)uno`,
> p(a)una`
> por + articles: pre`, pra, pro`, pra`, prun, pruna, pruno`, pruna`
>
> Perhaps others, but I think this'll be enough for now.
--
Carlos Eugenio Thompson Pinz=F3n
  ITEC-Telecom, Colombia

  cthompso@alpha.telecom-co.net
  http://alpha.telecom-co.net/~cthompso/

Di mi beh em je lok mi ju je kom lon vu am je