Re: Future English

In a message dated 2/9/2005 9:17:04 AM Eastern Standard Time,
emgrasso@DATA-RAPTORS.COM writes:

>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?
>(Recent dialectal drift seems to me to be more in the direction of increasing
>vowel weirdness, if anything.)
On the other hand, I can think of some mergers in progress or recently
completed in varieties of AMercian English that do simplify the phonemic system
and/or lead to homophones:

The merger of /O/ and /A/ in much of the Western US.
The merger of /I/ and /E/ before nasals in much of the South.
The merger of /w/ and /W/ for most Americans
The loss of /h/ before /j/ for many Americans, leading to "Hugo" = "Yugo".

Each of those causes some homophony, but that doesn't seem to prevent the
change.

Doug

Reply