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Re: A question

From:wayne chevrier <wachevrier@...>
Date:Saturday, August 14, 1999, 21:27
patric dunn wrote
> >I'm thinking of writing a bit of a time travel story -- guy goes on a >relativistic journey that goes wrong, comes back to Earth 1000 years later >to find things suck. You know, that sort of thing. > >My point is, I want to make a new English. But I don't know what kind of >sound changes are currently occuring in our language. Does anyone know? > >My clumsy non-linguist ear hears a dropping of final /s/ and /z/, an >ellision (is that the right word?) of dentals after nasels, and a >conversion of unstressed /u/ into /a/. So "I don't want you to go to the >park." Might come out /ai don wan ja ta go ta da pak./ > >Still, this isn't weird enough for 1000 years. > >What I want to know is, what general trends is english going through. For >instance, are vowels getting higher, fronter, backer, etceteraer? Is it >my imagination, or are /th/ and /dh/ going away (that would be a relief to >my Japanese students, I'm sure!)?
Some changes found in various dialects include: the change of postvocalic /l/ into vowels often /W/,(unrounded /u/ ipa tuned m) /mIWk/ milk, /bOtW/,/bO?W/ bottle /T/,/D/ into /f/,/v/ loss of second part of final clusters if of same voicing(BEV) pos for post, han for hand, but pant stays the same ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com