interesting futuristic English & website

http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2004/10/toktru_masen.html

Saturday October 30, 2004

Toktru, Masen?

    In John Barnes' Jak Jinnaka series, which currently includes three
novels starting with The Duke of Uranium, the characters speak a future
variety of English that's peppered with unfamiliar words. (You can read the
first chapter here.) The meaning of these words is almost always recoverable
from context, so Barnes could have just made them all up out of whole cloth,
but many of them are actually borrowings from various other languages or
clever coinages.
--

Hanuman Zhang, MangaLanger


     Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...


"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -
title of a chapter on pidgins and creoles, John McWhorter,
_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_