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
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