Re: Future English

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 09:15:40 -0500, Elyse M. Grasso <emgrasso@DATA-
RAPTORS.COM> wrote:

>On Tuesday 08 February 2005 05:48 pm, Rob Haden wrote:
>>
>> The sound changes are pretty simple, basically a simplification of the
>> current English phoneme inventory.  Aspiration, rather than voicing,
>> becomes the primary distinction between stops.  The vowels are >>
simplified, phonemically, into a classic 5-vowel scheme.
>> - Rob
>>
>I think major simplification of the English phoneme inventory (especially
>the vowels) is unlikely without some really strong external impetus. It's
>like getting rid of kanji in written Japanese: you end up with so many
>homophones that ambiguity spikes. If the vowels flatten out, what methods
>will the resulting langauage use to counteract this ambiguity? If both
>vowels and consonants simplify, where does the meaning hide? If the
>phonemic invontory drops despite this problem, what causes this shift?
Actually "external impetus" is what I'm thinking.  The vowel
simplifications would actually be the first thing to occur, as more non-
native English speakers adopt the language.  To counteract resulting
ambiguities, words from other languages will probably be borrowed.  Others
will undergo a shift from meaning.  For example, I'm thinking that the
demonstratives "this" and "that" will be replaced by "here" and "there",
becoming _hir_ and _der_, respectively.  The former locative meanings will
be expressed by prepositions, e.g. in'der [In.'te4] "(in) there", et'hir
[Et_h.'xir] "(at) here".

There are homonyms in current English, of course.  A good example is "sun"
[sVn] vs. "son" [sVn].  One could imagine replacing the former with "sol"
[soUl], but that would clash with "sole" and "soul"!  "Sole" has two
meanings, both used rather sparingly: it can be a synonym for "only" ("the
sole purpose of this discussion is...") and it can be one for "bottom"
("the sole of one's foot").  More than likely, then, this word will drop
out of usage, replaced by _onli_ ['on.li] and _badam_ ['pa.t@m] (or
similar).  Finally, "soul" may be replaced with "spirit", becoming
_sabiri_ ['sa.pi.4i] or the like.  So, "son" will probably remain the same
(even spelled the same way, though phonetically it'd be [son]) and "sun"
will be replaced with "sol", from either Latin or (more likely?) Spanish.
A related word for "soul" may be ci [tS)i], borrowed from Japanese 'chi'
(ultimately from Chinese, IIRC).

If you think about it, most vowel alternations in English are not
phonemic.  For example, one can consider a phoneme /o/ which is
phonetically [oU].  However, it is not analyzed as a diphthong in terms of
phonemics.  Rather, it's traditionally considered "long oh".  There are
also phonetic long vowels in English preceding final voiced stops
(e.g. "bed" [bE:d] vs. "bet" [bEt_h]), but they're not phonemic.

> (Recent dialectal drift seems to me to be more in the direction of
> increasing vowel weirdness, if anything.)
In some dialects, this is true.  Australian English, for example, seems to
pronounce "no" [noU] as [n&U] or [n&y].  Some dialects of British English
seem to pronounce it as [n6] or [n6:].  However, in the scheme of things,
American English, with its rather conservative (correct me if I'm wrong)
vowels, is the dominant dialect.  Even so, I think foreign languages --
particularly Spanish, Japanese, Hindi, and Mandarin -- will have a huge
influence on the direction of the English language.  Hence my supposed
simplification of the English vowel system in the future.

- Rob