FUTURESE
The American Language in 3000 AD
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:
| 1000 AD: |
Wé cildra biddaþ þé,
éalá láréow,
þæt þú tǽce ús
sprecan rihte, forþám ungelǽrede
wé sindon, and gewæmmodlíce
we sprecaþ…
|
| 2000 AD: |
We children beg you, teacher, that you should teach us to
speak correctly, because we are ignorant and we speak
corruptly…
|
(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.
CONTENTS
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 that
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 leave possibilities such as this for
another day – 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. You could come up with something completely different
and at least as plausible by extrapolating from the
Northern Cities Chain Shift...
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 email.
-
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 spelled in the language's
standard orthography. 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).
(If you're wondering where the brackets are, sorry: it'll be
because your browser doesn't support CSS...)
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.
Ye knowe eek that in forme of speche is chaunge
With-inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do
(Chaucer, circa 1385)
|
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.
Mind you, if you're skipping over the phonetics and only looking
at the spellings, you'll get an exaggerated impression of the
differences between 2000 AD and 3000 AD, since our
present-day standard orthography is basically mock-Chaucerian
(for instance, we still write knight the way they used to
say it, as nit with extra consonants). As a
counterbalance to this, instead of repeating my
sample text's 2000 AD version spelled as
if it was Middle English, I'll do things the other way round and
write it according to Classical American conventions here:
| 2000 AD: |
Wi txìldran beg yu, titxar, dat yu
xùd titx as tu spik karektli, bikaz wi ar ìgnarant
and wi spik karàptli…
|
| 3000 AD: |
*ZA kiad w'-exùn ya tijuh,
da ya-gAr'-eduketan zA da
wa-tAgan lidla, kaz 'ban iagnaran an
wa-tAg kurrap…
|
- *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
.