FUTURESE
The American Language in 3000 AD

Justin B Rye 22-Apr-03
(now with 2005 addendum)

FOREWORD

Predicting the future of the English language is rather easy, in the short term.  The odds are, over the next few decades its New World dialects are going to gain increasing global dominance, accelerating the demise of thousands of less fortunate languages but at long last allowing a single advertisement to reach everybody in the world.  Then after a century or two of US dominance some other geopolitical grouping will gain the ascendancy, everyone will learn Chechen or Patagonian or whatever it is, and history will continue as usual.  Ho hum.  But apart from that... what might the language actually look like in a thousand years time?  For comparison, the English spoken at the turn of the last millennium looked like this:

(From the Colloquy of Aelfric.)  So how far will another thousand years take it?  I've already got pages about time travel and languages in SF, plus a conlang of no very specific origin; this addition, vaguely inspired by the precognitive Darwinism of Dougal Dixon's "After Man: A Zoology of the Future", should fit in nicely.  It has also now acquired a companion page titled Pleistocenese.

LANGUAGE SF - Futurese Bibliography

Before I start developing a "future history" of my own I'll run through a quick survey of the existing literature.  It's a bit sparse, though, since academic linguists know better than to try, and nobody else has ever shown much interest - except of course the supporters of language-planning projects like Esperanto or Basic English, which are a bit off-topic (though they did inspire George Orwell to produce one famous vision of the language of tomorrow).  Most genre Science Fiction ignores linguistic barriers between centuries just as it does all the other kinds - reasonably enough, since they get in the way of the plot - but a handful of stories can be picked out as featuring representations of "Futurese":

Next Year's Slang

Most works of SF feature at least a few neologisms, slang terms for cyborgs or the like, but few authors take it to the extreme of writing the whole novel in argot, as Anthony Burgess did for "A Clockwork Orange" ("viddy this, my droogs") - and even he didn't introduce any grammar or pronunciation shifts to go with the new "Nadsat" vocabulary items.  Heinlein took a more reader-friendly approach for the Loonie dialect in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"; it gives a good impression of being slangy and futuristic, but when you stop and look at it there's nothing there but a few loanwords and telegraphese mannerisms.

Post-Holocaust Vowel Mutations

Apocalytic futures and lost-colony-world settings are often studded with suspiciously familiar words (forbidden deserts named Neorksiti and the like) - which always leaves me uncomfortably aware that vowels have a short halflife compared to radioactive wastelands.  Hoban's "Riddley Walker" deserves a mention as another SF novel written entirely in an imaginary dialect; this time it's a more generally mangled form of post-nuke English, though it's still closer to the modern standard language than plenty of books written in real UK dialects!

Galactic Empires

Space Opera yarns occasionally mention that everybody is speaking a remote descendant of English, called either (for some reason) "Anglic" or less often something like "Galanglic" or "Galach".  The name tends to be as much as we learn, unless the footnote is bulked out with a claim that some other present-day language contributed a lot of vocabulary items - Russian, Spanish and Japanese being popular choices.

Time Travel

David Masson's short story "The Transfinite Choice" is the only one I can think of where the temporal language barrier is illustrated with a few sentences of vaguely credible future (British!) English - for instance, the displaced hero is referred to as an undrowda.

LANGUAGE CHANGE - Progress And Decay

Let me get one thing clear: there's nothing wrong with languages changing over time.

When looking at a biological "family tree" (such as the evolutionary history of the horse), the general public insists on seeing any movement as intrinsically "progressive", moving from "primitive" to "advanced" designs.  Yet somehow when looking at the linguistic equivalent (such as the development of the Romance languages from Vulgar Latin) they see exactly the reverse - any change is proof that the language is in decline.  In reality they're just as wrong both times!

The attitude is perfectly understandable; membership of a linguistic community is an important social marker, so people often get neurotic about the way they speak, and cling to the security blanket of vaguely remembered schoolroom mandates, despising those barbarians who split infinitives or mispronounce "shibboleth".  Ironically, it's this same group-membership effect that's responsible for many of the changes (see below), but the degeneration the purists warn against is an imaginary danger anyway.  English has gone from being a minor Germanic tongue on Europe's fringe, with a vestigial system of inflections signposting case, mood, gender and so on, to being a much more weakly inflected language dominating the global landscape.  Every step of the way, old fogeys moaned that it was going to the dogs; but although the noun-gender system of Old English has crumbled away entirely, it turns out not to have been a structural support in the first place... and the simplifications have been balanced by increased complexity in other places, such as in the sheer size of the vocabulary.

Changes can occur in every aspect of a language:

Vocabulary

Words can be lost or shift their meanings, and new ones can be derived from a variety of mechanisms.  I could fill a couple of extra paragraphs with examples of borrowings, acronyms and the like, but it would be a waste of effort if you already grok the way common parlance can be groovy one year and naff the next.

Grammar

Or in strict linguistics-jargon terms, morphology (word-building) and syntax (word-arranging), which manage the Escheresque trick of getting simpler and simpler until they end up just as complicated as ever - on the one hand "whom" becomes "who", but on the other new constructions arise like "y'all ain' gonna-hafta".

Sounds

You'll be aware of individual words that have two alternative pronunciations, one of them "proper" but endangered and the other "wrong" but spreading (such as "etcetera" vs "excetera"); but in fact the most significant changes are the ones that happen to particular sounds right through the dictionary, like dropping aitches or lengthening stressed syllables.

These different types of language change don't happen in isolation - the blurring of word-final sounds erodes grammatical features, the development of new ways of stringing syllables together triggers shifts in pronunciation, and so on.  Nevertheless, my futurological efforts will be based purely on projected sound changes, since they tend to be astonishingly regular and thus offer the easiest opportunities for mock-ups of Futurese.

LANGUAGE TRENDS - Causes And Effects

There's a widespread popular assumption that modern technology (gramophones, cinema, CNN etc) will stop languages changing in the new millennium, because these days everybody knows what everybody else's accent sounds like.  But accents such as Cockney never did arise because working class Londoners were unaware of how the aristos talked.  They knew perfectly well; but it wasn't the accent they grew up with, and there was no reason to want to imitate it when their own accent was a badge of solidarity with their peer-group.  Nothing has happened to reduce the allure of a distinctive way of speaking as a badge of in-group membership; and the more positively people identify with some particular accent, the more likely that high-status speech variety is to drift, as social climbers refine their vowels while the native speakers react to being imitated by innovating further.  Linguists studying modern "Network English" find that it has several regional subvarieties, which are diverging rather than converging.

That's not to say that technology has no effects.  For a start, when the global media bring linguistic communities into contact with one another, that can have all sorts of unforeseeable results - for instance, we loaned the Japanese the words "walk" and "man", and got them back compounded.  The opportunities for interactions like that will inevitably increase as the number of non-native speakers of English continues to rise.

Over the centuries, language change has been affected in various minor ways by innovations such as the printing press (there were no spelling-based pronunciations such as "almond"-with-an-L until there were misleading standard spellings), and of course Chaucer didn't have a word for "helicopter".  It's easy to imagine other technological developments that might have further-reaching effects in the future:

• Once the rich and powerful routinely live centuries, the split between conservative formal English and slangy colloquial English could get absurdly wide.
• If twenty-third century computer geeks have cybernetic implants to let them offload cognitive processes to specialised hardware, new slang possibilities arise such as inhumanly complex versions of "rot-13ed Pig Latin".
• In a "world state" with an anglophone bureaucracy of artificial intelligences, ANSI-standard English could function as a sort of unnaturally preserved lingua franca even if the human native speakers died out.

I'm going to have to ignore such possibilities here - not only because they raise questions about the real likelihood of 3000 AD Earth being inhabited by hominids that still bring their young up to speak a traditional wild-grown language but also because they don't make the language's future form any more predictable.

On the other hand, some factors do show long-term directional influences.  An obvious one is ease of use: people won't bother saying "omnibus" when "bus" will do, or "environment" when their friends are getting away with "emviromment".  But another factor is that the language has to work as a language; any change that impedes communication spurs the development of workarounds - so, for instance, people who pronounce "pen" and "pin" indistinguishably soon start talking about "ink pens".  And a third, less obvious influence is ease of learning.  Children forming their initial mental model of how English works don't want to believe it's a mess of random idioms; any regularities they notice (like "past tenses end in -ED") are extended by analogy as far as their peers will let them ("bended").  All these consistent "trends" in language change make prediction more feasible, or at any rate, less obviously hopeless.

Nonetheless, futurology is a mug's game, and I don't expect my "predictions" to come true.  My methodology consists of nothing more rigorous than applying some of the kinds of changes that are commonly seen in historical linguistics and seeing what further development patterns they suggest; it's just a bit of fun, intended to dramatise the way things might plausibly end up if things go on the way they always have.

ADDENDUM

I've mentioned the two commonest misconceptions about language change - that it's a bad thing, and that it has stopped; but a few other odd assumptions seem to be more widespread than I'd realised, so perhaps I'd better deal with them here so I can avoid doing it in e-mail.

"It's changes in vocabulary that matter"

Monoglots often seem to think of languages as consisting of wordlists and nothing else!  Slang does serve as one of the most obvious markers of variation; but this is a superficial kind of change, often reversed a decade later, and rarely extending to the core vocabulary.  Meanwhile, shifts in vowel-sounds or verb-endings attract less attention, but they're cumulative and systematic; and it's these, not the vocabulary churn, that make 1000 AD English unintelligible.

"All changes can be traced back to the influence of other languages."

After the Norman Conquest, the eclipse of English as a standard language made it easy for dialectal variant forms to get established, but apart from a transfusion of loanwords, the changes themselves were things that had already been going on before the French-speakers turned up.  Grammatical "cross-contamination" between neighbouring languages is the exception rather than the rule.  Indeed, it's rare for changes to have obvious "causes" at all.

"English is a pidgin."

No, pidgins arise as grammarless codes for rough-and-ready communication between people who have no language in common.  If it has native speakers, it isn't a pidgin!  English isn't even a "creole", the kind of language that's formed when a pidgin becomes a mother-tongue.  However, the trace of truth in this myth is that being used as an auxiliary language often seems to trigger languages to become more "streamlined".

I'm hoping not to turn this section into a "Langage Change Myths FAQ" - that would be a lifetime's work, and nowhere near as interesting to read as Snopes!

INTERMISSION - Notation And Terminology

I've delayed defining some of this glossary stuff in the hope of suckering people into reading this far, but if you want to follow the next few sections it's important to understand the difference between...

Standard Orthography: <sample>

Angle-brackets enclose examples of words written as they are currently spelled.  I imagine by 2200 nobody will be writing <anaesthetise> the same way as I do, but spelling reform is not the topic here (and nor is the kind of so-called "bad grammar" that's really just non-standard spelling and punctuation).

Phonetic transcriptions: ['sa~:mpl<vel>-]

ASCII IPA in square-brackets is a phoneTic transcription, which gives a close-up view of the sounds involved.  It shows even the "trivial" articulatory features that aren't used to distinguish words from one another - necessary because languages vary in their opinions about what counts as trivial and what sounds form natural sets.  See Evan Kirshenbaum's definitive guide to this particular scheme for converting the International Phonetic Alphabet into a net-portable 7-bit form.

Phonemic transcriptions: /'sampl-/

ASCII IPA in slant-brackets is a phoneMic transcription, a subtly but significantly different form of notation which spells things out in terms of the mutually contrastive sound "building-blocks" of a particular language and ignores the irrelevant details.  Compare my own key to my pronunciation of English (though that accent isn't directly relevant here).

Bored already?  If you can't be bothered with all this you can always just take my word for it and skip to the end where I give examples of the final result.  Otherwise here are definitions of a few phonological terms I'll be using to get there:

Voiced/Voiceless

Pronounced with or without vibration of the vocal cords.  This effect provides the glottal humming component that distinguishes (for instance) voiced "V" from voiceless "F" or voiced "G" from voiceless "K".

Vowel/Consonant

I'm not talking letters here - there are many more than five vowels!  In phonological terms, vowels are the sounds made up of little-modified bursts of voiced airflow (like "AH"), while consonants involve marked narrowing (or temporary closure, as in "T") of the vocal tract.

Stop/Fricative/Approximant

Degrees of interference in the flow of air.  Stops like "K" or "N" interrupt the escape of air through the mouth, fricatives like "Z" make the flow turbulent, and approximants like "W" only modify it slightly.

Nasal/Oral

Nasal sounds allow air to escape continuously through the nose, while oral sounds don't - compare nasal "M" and its oral twin "B".  The same can also happen in vowels, though that's never distinctive in twenty-first-century English.

Obstruent/Sonorant

This is another way of dividing up the consonants: fricatives and oral stops ("Z", "D", "CH" etc), which involve serious constriction, are grouped together as "obstruents", while the highly resonant approximants and nasal stops ("M", "L", "W" etc) are "sonorants".

Syllabic/Nonsyllabic

A syllabic sound is one that forms the main peak of a syllable.  This isn't quite the same as "vowel/consonant", since vowels (or at least semivowels) can be nonsyllabic, and consonants (or at least sonorants) can be syllabic; examples include the initial "W" and final "L"-sounds in <waddle>.

Stressed/Unstressed

The most prominent syllable in a word is said to be stressed; other syllables may have some lesser degree of stress or none at all.  The acoustic property involved is a combination of volume, pitch and duration.

Rounded/Unrounded

Rounded vowels are pronounced with the lips in position as for an "OO" sound (or maybe only an "OH" sound); unrounded ones aren't.

Fronting/Centring/Backing

These terms describe modifications in the position of (the highest point of) the tongue for a vowel; "EH" is a "front" vowel, "OH" is a "back" one.

Raising/Lowering

...And these describe the other dimension: "AY" is a half-close vowel, pronounced with the tongue quite high in the mouth; raising it gets you the close vowel "EE", while lowering it results in half-open "EH" then fully open "A".

Onset/Nucleus/Coda

The "nucleus" of a syllable is its main syllabic element (i.e. the vowel, usually); any sounds that come before the nucleus are the "onset", and any that come after are the "coda".

The last thing I ought to say before I switch from "documentary" mode to "speculative fiction" mode is this: if you aren't familiar with Comparative Reconstruction then my predicted sound changes are bound to seem wildly unlikely.  If I'd shown Julius Caesar a schedule of the changes that were to turn Latin into Italian ("PS: beware the Ides of March") he wouldn't have believed a word of it either.  And yet languages really do behave this way, with "mutations" in the system of sounds adding up to new accents, new languages, new family trees of descendant tongues... witness this Wikipedia entry on one big-name sound change, Grimm's Law.

EARLY AMERICAN - 2100 AD

I'm using a gerrymandered starting point here: the phonology described below isn't that of a major present-day US accent (although it is close enough for plausibility - close enough indeed that this section is essentially a summary of existing trends).  Instead it's just one of the accents that will be current in a century or so: the one that happens to be ancestral to the thirty-first-century language.

Assimilation In Syllable-Onset

Any syllable-onset /t/, /d/ or /s t/ with a following /r/ undergoes assimilation (that is, features of one sound bleed over into the other); the results are the clusters [tSr<o>], [dZr], [stSr<o>].

Post-Stress Voicing

There is a well-established phonetic trend towards the voicing of any lone obstruent that closes a stressed syllable: e.g. <pick> is pronounced [pIg] (note: the compound phoneme /tS/ as in <church> counts for this rule as a single sound).  However, the words <pick> and <pig> are still distinct - see below on vowel breaking.

Intervocalic Flapping

As a special case, /d/ or /t/ between stressed and unstressed syllables (perhaps with a preceding sonorant) is phonetically a flap, [*] - a sound many languages treat as a form of /r/.  Thus for instance <bitty> is pronounced ['bI*i].  This "flapping" context never triggers vowel breaking - <bitty> and <biddy> are pronounced identically.

Nasalisation

Nasal consonants in the coda of a stressed syllable drop out in favour of nasalisation of the vowel; e.g. <bond> is pronounced [bA~d].  Immediately following stops may also be nasalised (thus [bA~n]).

Cluster Simplification

Meanwhile, /ld/ not followed by a vowel becomes /l/ (so <build> is now simply /bIl/); /nd/ in unstressed contexts simplifies similarly (thus <England> becomes /'INgl@n/).

Unstressed Vowel Loss

Unstressed syllables may be lost immediately before or after stress; e.g. <abominable> turns into <'bom'nable>.  Unstressed /i/, /u/ tend to become nonsyllabic (turning into the approximants /j/, /w/), and other unstressed vowels reduce towards the "schwa" /@/.

Vowel Mergers

Neutralisations (the technical name given to the blurring of phonemic distinctions) are widespread before sonorants - fewer vowels are distinguished before /m/, /n/, /N/, /l/, /w/, /j/, or especially /r/.  See below for details.

Stressed Vowel Breaking

Stressed vowels begin to undergo a process called "breaking" before (phonemically) voiced obstruents, becoming generally longer and more lax; thus for instance <pick> is [pIg] while <pig> is [pII"g].  See below for details.

/i/

Occurs before a sonorant in <beer, beam, bean> and <peel> = <pill> (a recent merger)

In a non-breaking context, e.g. <beat>, [i]

In a breaking context, e.g. <bead>, [ii"]

/I/

Occurs before a sonorant in <bring>, <pin>, <him>, where it is indistinguishable from /E/ as in <pen>, <hem>

In a non-breaking context, e.g. <bit>, [I]

In a breaking context, e.g. <bid>, [II"]

/e/

Occurs before a sonorant in <Mary> = <merry> = <marry> and in <bale, bane, blame, bang> (n.b. that last is /beN/, not /b&N/)

In a non-breaking context, e.g. <bait>, [e]

In a breaking context, e.g. <bayed>, [ee"]

/E/

Occurs before a sonorant in <bell> (and see above on <pen>)

In a non-breaking context, e.g. <bet>, [E]

In a breaking context, e.g. <bed>, [EE"]

/&/

Occurs before a sonorant in <pal, ban, bam>

In a non-breaking context, e.g. <bat>, [&]

In a breaking context, e.g. <bad>, [ea]

/A/ (Already to British ears a triple merger of <ah/aw/o>)

Occurs before a sonorant in <bar, borrow, ball, pawn, bomb, bong>

In a non-breaking context, e.g. <bot>, [A]

In a breaking context, e.g. <bod>, [A@]

/o/

Occurs before a sonorant in <for> = <fore> and in <bowl, bone, foam>

In a non-breaking context, e.g. <boat>, [o]

In a breaking context, e.g. <bode>, [oO]

/@/

Only occurs unstressed (never a breaking context), e.g. initial in <about>; for unstressed syllables involving sonorants see below on "Syllabic Consonants".

/V/

Occurs before a sonorant in <bulk, bun, bum, bung>

In a non-breaking context, e.g. <but>, [V"]

In a breaking context, e.g. <bud>, [V@]

/U/ (phonetically quite fronted)

Occurs before a sonorant only as a variant form of syllabic /R/ or /L/ - see below on "Syllabic Consonants".

In a non-breaking context, e.g. <put>, [U]

In a breaking context, e.g. <good>, [UU"]

/u/ (also phonetically fronted)

Occurs before a sonorant in <pool, boon, boom> and <woman> (a recent shift from /Um/)

In a non-breaking context, e.g. <boot>, [u]

In a breaking context, e.g. <food>, [uu"]

/OI/

Occurs before a sonorant in <coin>; however, <boil> is a disyllable, [OI L-]

In a non-breaking context, e.g. <quoit>, [OI]

In a breaking context, e.g. <void>, [oE]

/au/

Occurs before a sonorant in <prowl, brown>

In a non-breaking context, e.g. <bout>, [au]

In a breaking context, e.g. <proud>, it tends towards [a@], becoming indistinguishable from /ai/ as in <pride>

/ai/

Occurs before a sonorant in <bile, mime, brine>

In a non-breaking context, e.g. <bite>, [ai]

In a breaking context, e.g. <pride>, it tends towards [a@], becoming indistinguishable from /au/ as in <proud>

Syllabic Consonants

The distinctive syllabic /R/ in words like <fury, poor, murderer> can function as a stressed vowel, varying from a merely "tongue-bunched" [U<r>] or [@<r>] to a full [r<vel>-].

Likewise the syllabic /L/ that occurs in <pullable> first as [UL] and then as [L-].

The nasals /m-/ and /n-/ can also occur as syllabics as in <Adam, Eden>, but are always unstressed.

MIDDLE AMERICAN - 2400 AD

By this time the language has fallen out of fashion; the phonemic analysis given here is the one used retrospectively in the subsequent "Classical" period.  The vocabulary shrinks and is later restocked with borrowings, but many of them are returns, and the basic core of the language remains Germanic.

Lone Consonants in Syllable-Coda

Most significantly, the post-stress voicing effect becomes phonemic: <pick> is now /pig/, while <pig> is /piag/ (see below on vowel-breaking).

The rule that converts both /d/ and /t/ to the flap [*] persists, making the two indistinguishable in that context (sandwiched between a stressed and an unstressed syllable).

Clusters in Syllable-Coda

Any obstruent forming a cluster with an /s/ or /z/ is lost; thus <six> becomes /sis/ (but is not voiced to /siz/).

Clusters in Syllable-Onset

The sequences /tr/, /dr/ and /str/ become /tS r/, /dZ r/, /Sr/, while /Tr/ as in <three> shifts to become a new /tr/.

The sequences /tS j/ or /tj/ (including such sequences created by vowel-breaking - see below) become /tS/; /Sj/ or /sj/ become /S/; and likewise for /dZj/ and /Zj/.

After any obstruent, former /w/ (but not new /w/ resulting from vowel-breaking) becomes /v/; thus <quit> becomes /kvid/.

Nasalisation

Where a stressed or semi-stressed vowel is followed by a nasal consonant without a following vowel, the nasal is pronounced only as a modification of the vowel.  In clusters, /mb/ becomes /mm/, or simple /m/ where there's a following vowel - i.e., [~m].

Meanwhile /mp/ becomes /mb/ (i.e. [~b]), even outside stressed syllables.

Equivalent changes happen to /nd/, /nt/, /Ng/ and /Nk/.  For (former) /nt/ the situation is complicated by the fact that /nd/ may be flapped as [~*].

The Great Vowel Breaking

There is a major reorganisation and reanalysis of "broken" vowels as sequences, converting what used to be a feature of the following consonants into a pattern of new distinctions within the vowel inventory.

Note throughout that vowels that "want" to gain a preceding or following /w/ or /j/ don't if one is already there; <weed> becomes /wid/, not /wjid/.  Preceding /r/ or /l/ has the same effect (<reed> breaks to /rid/), but /h/ gives way itself (<heed> breaks to /jid/).

/i/

Unbroken /i/ syllable-finally or before /r/, /l/ or a nasal (<bee, beer, bill, peel, bean, beam>) is unchanged

Otherwise, unbroken former /i/ (<beat>) becomes /i j/

Broken former /i/ (<bead>) becomes /j i/

Unbroken former /I/ (<bit>) becomes /i/

Broken former /I/ (<bid>) becomes /i a/

/e/

Unbroken former /e/ syllable-finally or before /r/ (<bay, bear>) is unchanged; before /l/ or a nasal (<bale, bane, blame, bang>) it becomes /j e/

Otherwise, unbroken former /e/ (<bait>) becomes /e j/

Broken former /e/ (<bayed>) becomes /j e/ - note that /j e/ is also a possible broken form for former /&/ (see /a/ below)

Unbroken former /E/ (<bet, bell>) becomes /e/, which also absorbs former nasal /I/ (<him, pen, bring>)

Broken former /E/ becomes /e a/ (<bed>)

Broken former /OI/ (<void>) becomes /w e/

/a/ (ranging phonetically from [&] to [@])

Unbroken former /au/ before a sonorant (<bounce, brown>) becomes the disyllable /a o/

Otherwise, unbroken former /au/ (<bout>) becomes /a w/

Unbroken former /ai/ before a sonorant (<pint, brine>) becomes the disyllable /a e/

Otherwise, unbroken former /ai/ (<bite>) becomes /a j/

Broken former /au/ or /ai/ (<proud, pride>) becomes /a a/

Unbroken former /&/ (<bat, ban>) becomes /a/, except after /k/ or /g/ (<cap>) when it becomes /j a/

Broken former /&/ (<bad>) becomes /j a/, except after /k/ or /g/ (<cab>) when it becomes /j e/

Former /@/ generally merges with unstressed /a/ (and see /an/ below under "Syllabic Consonants")

/A/

Unbroken /A/ (<paw, bot, bar, ball, bomb>) is unchanged

Broken former /A/ (<bod>) becomes /A a/

Former word-final /@/ (e.g. the end of <beta>) merges with unstressed /A/

/V/ (phonetically [V"])

Unbroken /V/ (<but, bun>) is unchanged

Broken former /V/ (<bud>) becomes /V a/

/o/

Unbroken /o/ (<blow, boat, bore, bone>) is unchanged

Broken former /o/ (<bode>) becomes /w o/

Unbroken former /OI/ before a sonorant (<coin>) becomes the disyllable /o e/

Otherwise, unbroken former /OI/ (<quoit>) becomes /o j/

/u/ (phonetically, strongly fronted [u"])

Unbroken /u/ syllable-finally or before sonorants (<blue, pool, boon>) is unchanged

Otherwise, unbroken former /u/ (<boot>) becomes /u w/

Broken former /u/ (<food>) becomes /w u/

Unbroken former /U/ (<put>) becomes /u/

Broken former /U/ (<good>) becomes /u a/

Syllabic Consonants

Unbroken /R/ and /L/ (<pert, fur, wolf, full>) become /ur/, /ul/ - or /Rr/, /Ll/ where followed by a vowel (<furry, fully>)

Broken /R/ and /L/ (<bird, bulls>) are unchanged.

Note that the above syllabic forms, along with syllable-coda /r/ and /l/ (but not the syllable-onset forms), are pronounced at the back of the mouth.

Former syllabic nasals /m-/ and /n-/ are reanalysed as the sequences /am/, /an/ (never stressed as [a~])

CLASSICAL AMERICAN - 2700 AD

Contrary to the impression you'd get from a detailed account of the chaos the spelling system goes through early in this stage, the Classical period happens to be one of relative stability in the development of the language as a whole, and one that Late American speakers continue to regard as a formal standard.

Stress Shift

Nouns (and to a lesser extent other word-classes, though not verbs) tend towards regular initial-syllable stress; thus for instance <millennium> shifts from /ma 'len jam/ to /'ma lan jam/.

Interdental Loss

The phonemes /T/, /D/ (as in <thigh>, <thy>), long gone in related dialects, finally vanish in American, merging with /t/ and /d/ respectively.

Secondary Split

The above changes undermine the rule that used to explain the distribution of the [*] sound.  It used to be a post-stress variant of /d/, but now occurs where stress has vanished, and fails to occur where the /d/ was formerly /D/; so it's left as a short-lived /*/ phoneme in its own right.

Affricate Loss

The phonemes /tS/, /dZ/ are lost, simplifying to /S/, /Z/.  This happens in onset and coda, including nasal contexts (e.g. <inch>: /EnZ/).  The "shibilants" /S/ and /Z/ also undergo a phonetic shift towards [s.], [z.] (technically, dorsal palatals, like Mandarin Chinese <sh>)

Aspiration

The voiceless stops /p/, /t/ and /k/ become increasingly strongly aspirated (phonetically [p<h>] etc) except after /s/ (or /S/); the phoneme /h/ itself is lost unless preceded by a vowel, where it becomes a voiced approximant articulated almost anywhere from the soft palate back (still labelled /h/ here).

Syllable-Coda Clusters

The nasal /N/, now uncommon, loses its phonemic status; <bang>, formerly /beN/, is now interpreted as ending in a nasalising /n/ which has assimilated in place of articulation to an otherwise silent /g/ - /bEng/, pronounced [b&~N].

Remaining consonant clusters are reduced; where there are two obstruents in the coda, the second tends to be dropped (<apt> becomes /ap/); but between vowels, /pt/ or /kt/ become /tt/.

Syllabic Consonants

Syllabic /R/ and /L/ are lost (see below); syllabic nasals are still equivalent to unstressed /an/, /am/.

Rhotic Split

Former syllable-coda /r/ becomes /h/ in inherited American vocabulary, while new loanwords use /r/ - thus <beer> has become /bih/ while the equivalent Brazilian import is /bir/.

Former syllabic /R/ always becomes /yh/; syllable-onset /r/ remains unchanged.

Lateral Vocalisation

Former syllable-coda /l/ is lost: /il/ becomes /iw/, /el/ becomes /Ew/, /al/ becomes /aw/, /Al/ becomes /Aw/ (pronounced [Ow]), and /Vl/, /ol/ or /ul/ becomes /o/.

Former syllabic /L/ also becomes /o/.

Vowel Shifts

Except before /l/ as noted above, former /u/ becomes /y/ (though this is still never a fully fronted [y]).

Former /e/ becomes /E/.

Former /V/ is lost, merging with /a/; however, in the case of the common sequence /Va/, an intrusive /h/ is inserted and the unstressed vowel then drops out - thus /bVad/ (<bud>) becomes /bahad/ and subsequently /bahd/.

Nasal Vowels

By the late Classical period the nasal vowels are more or less separate phonemes in their own right; phonetically they tend to be more open than their oral counterparts, with /i~/ becoming [e~], /E~/ becoming [&~], /o~/ becoming [O~], and /y~/ becoming [Y"~].

LATE AMERICAN - 3000 AD

The language represented by the examples in the final section.  By this point the Great Wheel of Morphology has come round from a thoroughly analytic to an increasingly agglutinative grammar, but there isn't room here to cover the complexities of Late American verb declensions.

Stop Affrication

Voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/ tend to be affricated as [pP], [ts], [kx] when they occur immediately before a stressed vowel.

On the other hand, stops after /s/ (or /S/) are unaspirated, and thus come to be regarded as voiced; former /sp/ becomes /sb/, /st/ becomes /sd/, and /sk/ becomes /sg/.

Aspirate Shift

The voiced /h/ settles down phonetically as a uvular approximant, [j"] (a sort of gentle "ugh" at the very back of the mouth).  When /k/ or /g/ come in contact with it they themselves become uvular ([q], [G]) and the /h/ may approach a gargled "French <r>" sound.

Flap Loss

The flap phoneme /*/ is lost, turning into /r/ before an /a/ or /y/, and simply disappearing elsewhere.

Coda Approximant Loss

Syllable-coda /j/ tends to be lost or moved.  First, /js/ or /jS/ assimilate to /S/ and /jz/ or /jZ/ to /Z/; then /j/ tends to switch places with a following consonant (e.g. /jg/ becomes /gj/), even when that consonant is preceded by a nasal and/or followed by /r/ or /l/ (/jgr/ becomes /grj/); however this switching (or "metathesis") does not occur with heavier consonant clusters or word-finally.  Remaining cases of /aj/ become /E/; otherwise the /j/ is just dropped.

Syllable-coda /w/ behaves similarly.  First, /wn/ assimilates to /m/ (and /wnd/ to /mb/); then /w/ undergoes the same kind of metathesis as /j/ (e.g. /wgl/ becomes /glw/).  Remaining cases of /aw/ become /O/; otherwise the /w/ is dropped.

Syllable-coda /h/ is slightly different, in that it may assimilate to a following sonorant: /hl/ becomes /ll/ before a vowel, /l/ otherwise, and /hr/ likewise becomes either /rr/ or /r/.  In /hw/ and /hj/ the /h/ is always dropped, and the same happens with /hn/ or /hm/ if the nasals have not themselves been lost to nasalisation.  Elsewhere, metathesis occurs but is more easily blocked - non-final /hg/ may become /gh/, but /hgr/ or /hgl/ is unchanged.  Leftovers keep the /h/, which lowers preceding vowels just like a nasal (so /i/ before /h/ is [e], /y/ is [Y"], /u/ is [o]).

Nasal Neutralisation

The distinction between (e.g.) former <bean> and <beam> is lost.  It was already blurred, since both are pronounced in isolation as [be~], but when the word is immediately followed by a syllabic sound as in <beam of light>, which used to revive the final nasal consonant, it now always inserts the same one - thus [be~n@lEd].

Syllabic nasals are unaffected, though being unstressed they do tend to reduce to plain /n/ or /m/ alongside a vowel.  Stops nasalised as a side-effect of a preceding nasal vowel also escape the neutralisation: /brE~g/ (<bring>) is still pronounced [br&~N], not [br&~n].

Back Vowel Raising

Former /A/ becomes /O/ (weakly rounded if at all); former /o/ becomes /u/.  Note that as a result American at last has a more-or-less evenly spaced vowel inventory: front /i/ and /E/, central /y/ and /a/, and back /u/ and /O/ (plus their nasal equivalents).

EXAMPLES - Words And Phrases

The examples given below are selected largely on the basis of semantic stability; there's no point using a word like "computer", which means different things from century to century.  It also simplifies things to start with nouns, which have no confusingly mutable inflected forms.  The spellings used are the closest transliteration I can manage within the limitations of a twenty-first century characterset; fortunately by the thirty-first century storing information as strings of written words is something of a fossil handicraft anyway (much like calligraphy in the present day), so an "anachronistic" font is as good as any.

If you're wondering about the leading asterisks, those are a slightly warped application of the convention used for "real" reconstructed languages like Proto-Indo-European, where the star in front of *oinom is a warning that it's an unattested "best guess" at the PIE for "one" arrived at by deducing the sound-change rules that separate it from modern languages.

American language > *myeghan lengvaj

Early American /'merkn- 'leNgw@dZ/

Middle American /'mjergan 'leNgvadZ/

Classical American /'mjEhgan 'lEngvaZ/

Late American /'mjEghan 'lE~gvaZ/

Pronounced: ['mjEGg"n- 'l&~Nv@z.], i.e. "MYEGrhnn LANGvuzh"

George Washington > *Jwohj-wAjandan

Early American /dZordZ 'wAS@Ntn-/

Middle American /dZwordZ 'wAZandan/

Classical American /ZwohZ 'wAZandan/

Late American /ZwuhZ 'wOZandan/

Pronounced: [z.woj"z. 'wOzn-dn-], i.e. "zhwohghzh WAWZH'n'dnn"

Abraham Lincoln > *Yebraham-lengan

Early American /'ebr@h&m 'lINkn-/

Middle American /'jebraham 'leNgan/

Classical American /'jEbraham 'lEngan/

Late American /'jEbraham 'lE~gan/

Pronounced: ['jEbr@j"m- 'l&~Nn-], i.e. "YEB-rugh'm LANG'n"

William Shakespeare > *Wiyam-xexbih

Early American /'wilj@m 'Sekspir/

Middle American /'wiljam 'Sejspir/

Classical American /'wiwjam 'SEjspih/

Late American /'wijam 'SESbih/

Pronounced: ['wijm- 's.Es.pej"], i.e. "WEE-ymm SHESHpaygh"

red, white, blue > *read, *wed, *blu

Early American /rEd wait blu/

Middle American /'read wajd blu/

Classical American /'rEad wajd bly/

Late American /'rEad wEd bly/

Pronounced: ['rE@d wEd bly"], i.e. "REH-ud wed blü"

one, two, three, four, five > *wan, *tu, *tri, *foh, *faav

Early American /wVn tu Tri for faIv/

Middle American /wVn tu tri for faav/

Classical American /wan ty tri foh 'faav/

Late American /wa~ ty tri fuh 'faav/

Pronounced: [wa.~ tsy" tr<o>i foj" 'fa"@v], i.e. "wu(ng) tsü tree fohgh FUH-uv"

six, seven, eight, nine, ten > *sis, *seavam, *ed, *naen, *ten

Early American /sIks 'sEvn- et nain tIn/

Middle American /sis 'seavan ejd 'naen ten/

Classical American /sis 'sEavan Ejd 'naEn tEn/

Late American /sis 'sEavam Ed 'na~E~ tE~/

Pronounced: [sis 'sE@Bm- Ed 'na"~&~ ts&~], i.e. "cease SEH-uv'm ed NUH-a(ng) tsa(ng)"

California, Texas > *KyafwonyA, *Tesas

Early American /,k&l@'fornj@ 'tEks@s/

Middle American /,kjal'fornjA 'tesas/

Classical American /'kjawfohnjA 'tEsas/

Late American /'kjafwu~jO 'tEsas/

Pronounced: [kj<o>afw<o>o~jO tsEs@s], i.e. "KYUFFwoh(ng)-yaw TSESSuss"

Mercury, Venus > *Muhgyurri, *Vinas

Early American /'mRkjRri 'vin@s/

Middle American /'murgjRri 'vinas/

Classical American /'myhgjyhri 'vinas/

Late American /'myhgjyrri 'vinas/

Pronounced: ['mY"g"Gjy"rri 'vin@s], i.e. "MÖRHGyürrree VEEnus"

Earth, Mars > *Uhd, *MAahz

Early American /RT mArz/

Middle American /urD 'mAarz/

Classical American /yhd 'mOahz/

Late American /yhd 'mOahz/

Pronounced: [Y"j"d 'mO@j"z], i.e. "öghd MAW-ughz"

Jupiter, Saturn > *Jubwatuh, *Sarun

Early American /'dZup@tR 's&tRn/

Middle American /'dZuwbatur 'sadurn/

Classical American /'Zywbatyh 'sa*yhn/

Late American /'Zybwatyh 'sary~/

Pronounced: ['z.y"bw@tY"j" 'sarY"~], i.e. "ZHÜBwatögh SUH-rö(ng)"

Uranus, Neptune > *Yurranas, *Nettun

Early American /'jRr@n@s 'nEptun/

Middle American /'jRranas 'neptun/

Classical American /'jyhranas 'nEttyn/

Late American /'jyrranas 'nEtty~/

Pronounced: ['jY"rr@n@s 'nEttY"~], i.e. "YÜRrranas NET-tö(ng)"

The rough pronunciation guides above have deliberately not been made too simple - that would risk leaving readers with the impression that Futurese was just a lazy, garbled version of Presentdayese.  In particular those umlauts should serve to remind readers that our successors will have different ideas about what sounds are "basic" and "easy", and which are "subtle" and "exotic".

And finally: to give an impression of how much else has been going on besides regular sound-changes, here's a Late American rendition of the Colloquy of Aelfric (as seen previously), followed by a word-by-word analysis.  3000 AD American has metamorphosed into something that is clearly a new language, yet recognisably a descendant of English - sentences even have a familiar stress-timed rhythm.

*zA, pronounced "zaw"

"Us-all", analogous in form to the second- and third-person *yA, *dA.

*kiad, pronounced "KKHEE-ud"

"Kid", obviously enough.

*w'-exùn, pronounced "weSHÖ(NG)"

Pronominal prefix ("we") and finite verb-stem; a twenty-fifth century slang term, origin unclear.

*ya, pronounced "yuh"

"You", singular.

*tijuh, pronounced "TEEZH-ögh"

From "teacher", now restricted to meaning specifically a language-instructor.

*da, pronounced "duh"

"That", as a subordinating conjunction.

*ya-gAr'-eduketan, pronounced "yagaw-RED-üket'n"

Pronominal prefix, auxiliary prefix (from "gotta") and nonfinite verb ("educate" - note the preserved form).

*wa-tAgan, pronounced "wuh-TSAWG'n"

"Talk"; pronominal prefix and nonfinite verb.

*lidla, pronounced "LEEDla"

A back-loan from Central Hindi, where English "legal" developed the specialised sense "linguistically well-formed".

*kaz, pronounced "kkhuzz"

Conjunction, "because".

*'ban, pronounced "bnn" (unstressed)

Irregular particle derived from the verb "be".

*iagnaran, pronounced "EEugnurr'n"

Regularly derived from "ignorant".

*an, (still) pronounced "'n"

The coordinating conjunction "and".

*wa-tAg, pronounced "wuh-TSAWG"

As in the previous clause, but this time in the positive-indicative form.

*kurrap, pronounced "KKHÜRrrup"

Regularly derived from "corrupt".