Re: Future English

(sorry if this comes through twice... I tried sending it a couple hours
ago, and it still hasn't shown up in the archives.)

Sally Caves ha tera a:

> I'm so glad you brought this up, Estel.  I logged on for this purpose
> in particular: a colleague of mine is very interested in researching
> conlangs that deal with "future English."  Are you the only one doing
> this, or are there others?  In imagining a future English, what besides
> pronunciation would change?  Does a future English conlang anticipate
> future technology?  Enhancements to the future body?  A
> "post-human/cyborgian" culture?
> How really future are you willing to go?  I imagine she has already
> checked out  _A Clockwork Orange_.
>
> Sally
Well, my work on a future English is pretty sporadic and unorganized.
I've more been thinking of neat future English features, some of which
may come together to form features of a coherent future English at some
point.

Many of the changes I think of are more morphological/syntactic.
For example, one of the features I quite like is a simplification of
the irregular verb system, so that past participles of (all but a few)
irregular verbs are formed by adding "-en" to the past tense - for
example, in regular spelling:
sing - sang -sangen
write - wrote - wroten
hit - hit - hitten
slide - slid - slidden

and so on, basically forming a new paradigm.  There would still be a
few really irregular verbs like "be" and "have" and "go".

For an example of a syntactic change, I imagine that "used to" becomes
a single morpheme /just@/ "yusta".  In some cases it appears just as in
present English,
"I yusta go shopping every saturday", where it makes the following verb
infinitive.  However, it can also be inserted before any non-finite
form to add a past habitual meaning:
"I might have yusta done that, but I don't anymore"
"Because of it yusta being illegal, they had to do it at night."

I had some more speculations on what could happen with other
contractions, but they haven't turned into anything coherent yet.

I also imagine that "they/them/themself" has become a fully-functional
3sg epicene pronoun.  I see that there's been some discussion about
that on here lately.  (I saw a striking example online recently of it
being used in a way that I would find ungrammatical - referring back to
someone identified by name (admittedly a genderless username, but
still).)  And I imagine that "you guys" has become a 2pl pronoun
/jugaIz/ "yugaiz".

There have been one or two sound-change features I've thought of, but
they don't seem to integrate very well with the other features I've
thought of, so I don't think I could work them into the same future
English.  One of them is the loss of intervocalic taps (based on
North American English, naturally).  Except for the evidentials, most
of the changes I imagine for my future English are things that I see at least
traces of in casually spoken English.  The spelling I use for most of
my future English stuff is basically an alternate spelling I've devised
for my own pronunciation of English.  Clearly I haven't thought too far
into the future with this, and I haven't thought much about
technological or cultural change.

I remember seeing a website of someone imagining the development of
future English... let's see if I can find the address... yes, here it
is:
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/futurese.html

-Estel

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