Future "Mutant" English, etc.

In a message dated 2000/08/14 05:19:01 AM, Jerry wrote:

> I think my vision of future English is more a view of a
>future English and future Romance lang combined, with the emphasis on
>future. I'm not thinking of Spanglish. This would make a great group
>lang if we could keep it civilized. Maybe it should be a project for
>Conculture first to lay the groundwork of cooperation.
>
    My ConLang pidgin Lingwa Frakas is shapin' up to be something like a
future English combined with a future Romance language
(Occidental/Novial-like) with some onomatopoeia (i.e. Japanese) and slang
from various other languages (esp'ly "technocultural" slang... some of it is
"invented" based on older slang, i.e. hard-boiled Americana).

    Does anyone have good recommendations on slang (esp'ly hardcopy
dictionaries)?
    Any resources on the electronic soundscape's influence on onomatopoeia in
a wide variety of languages? &/0r - sci-fi onomatopoeia in comicbooks
(non-English)?

    Z

-------- p.s.----
    below is an email I sent to the infamous IALlist a coupla days ago:

"It would be ironic if the answer to Babel were pidgin and not Pentecost."
            - George Steiner, _After Babel: Aspects of Language and
Translation_

    * pidgin languages' prime virtue is its extreme simplicity.
    Aboveall, it is "utilitarian" while still being almost "poetic" (or
"slang-like")
    in its seemingly imprecise ang highly limited vocabulary
    (average lexicons of pidgins range from 400 to 2,000 words).
    Many written pidgins also have very consistent orthographies
    - which has been of interest to many current "Spelling Reformers"
    in the English-speaking world.

    * the several varieties of pidgin are superficially alike in that they
    lack case, gender, tense and number... they differ in such areas as
intonation  patterns and use of "function words".

    * pidgins - like isolating or analytical languages (such as Chinese) -
    rely on word order to make sense - word order is determined by the syntax
    of the native language which serves as its foundation.

    * pidgin languages have been on occasion been the only means
    of contact between widely disparate cultures. For instance,
    in Papua New Guinea - with its 800-some languages and dialects
    and attendant tribal cultures - has Tok Pisin (a.k.a. "Neo-Melanesian
    Pidgin English") as the national language - or as they say in Tok Pisin
    _wontok_.

    * pidgin languages are omitted from most lists of the world's
    principal languages. Estimated 40-60 million people speak
    some form of pidgin - either as first language or as auxiliary.
        Even by these estimates, the collective pidgin languages
    would rank about 15th among the world's languages - roughly equal
    to that of Italian, Korean, Vietnamese, Persian, Tamil and Telugu.
        More people speak a pidgin than those who speak Norwegian, Greek,
    Armenian, Hebrew, Albanian, Estonian, Latvian and  Lithuanian COMBINED.
        (Way more than Esperanto, Ido, Novial, Interlingua, Loglan, Glosa,
etc.)


    ... and a pidgin may be created that is more attractive to
language-learners than  many of these IAL schemes that tend to being
"Euroclones."
        Perhaps a pidgin that is specifically geared to creation of a
Transnationalistic subculture...

     ... see Richard Harrison's essay:
    _ Farewell to Auxiliary Languages_
http://www.rick.harrison.net/langlab/farewell.html

    also of interest:
    _Essays on Artificial Language Design_
    http://www.srv.net/~ram/essays.html

    "One thing foreigners, computers, and poets have in common is that they
make unexpected linguistic associations."
                                - Jasia Reichardt

    "For last year's words belong to last years's language,
    And next year's words await another voice."
                                -T. S. Eliot


    zHANg

     "verbing weirds language."  ~  calvin (& hobbes)