Re: Future English

Hi!

"Elyse M. Grasso" <emgrasso@...> writes:
>...
> > 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.
>...
Tok Pisin, a language that mainly uses English as its lexicon
language, does exactly that.  It has the classical five vowel system.
It's not really a descendent of English, but instead a creole, but it
shows that ambiguity introduced by collapse of vowels is no reason why
such a collapse should not happen.  It's actually a very valuable
source of insights how some future English could look like. :-)

> If the vowels flatten out, what methods will the
> resulting langauage use to counteract this ambiguity?
Either nothing, or, if the ambiguity is too bad, suppletion or
extension.  In the development of French, such things happened.
Often, diminuitives where added several times because a word collapsed
too much (I forgot a good example, shoot).  Or words were borrowed
from other languages around.

BTW, my MHG a-posteriori language Da Mätz se Basa also does that: if
two words collapse and I think that the ambiguity is unstandable, it
either borrows a word from another language, or uses a semantically
similar word (or a more or less specific one), and
adjusts/specialises/generalises its meaning.

Does any English dialect allow 'thats meaning' in the previous
sentence for 'the meaning of that word'?  I was searching for a
distinction like German 'dessen Bedeutung' and 'seine Bedeutung'.

**Henrik