| Title: | The Joy of Lex |
| Notice: | A Notes File even your grammar could love |
| Moderator: | THEBAY::SYSTEM |
| Created: | Fri Feb 28 1986 |
| Last Modified: | Mon Jun 02 1997 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 1192 |
| Total number of notes: | 42769 |
Comments on the future evolution of languages:
There are consistent trends in the past evolution of languages, and in
all likelihood they will continue to change in the same fashion in the
future.
In 200 years, spoken French will have only one sound, a vowel. All
consonants and gaps between words and sentences will disappear, leaving
only an extended "Eauuuuuuuuuuuu..." Meaning will be inferred from
facial expression. Written French will stay exactly the same.
These consonants will not be entirely forgotten; they will migrate
to Czechoslovakia, which will by that time have no use for vowels.
In 200 years, the English vocabulary will be the union of all other
vocabularies, but the spelling will be original.
Similarly, the Japanese alphabet will be the union of all other alphabets
in the world.
The Cyrillic alphabet will eventually be the same as the Latin
alphabet, only backwards. A mirror will suffice for translating
Russian into Polish.
Finally, in 200 years, entire books in Germany will be one word. Plus
a verb at the end, of course.
--------
{Many forwards deleted, including (apparently) any appropriate attribution
... alliteratively speaking ...}
| T.R | Title | User | Personal Name | Date | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 921.1 | computers will take over... | NYTP07::LAM | Q ��Ktl�� | Thu Oct 31 1991 13:29 | 5 |
re: .0
This is terrific, where did you get it? Personally, I think with the
advent of computers entering into every aspect of society, we'll
probably be speaking languages like FORTRAN, COBOL or C.
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| 921.2 | JIT081::DIAMOND | Order temporarily out of personal name | Thu Oct 31 1991 17:46 | 15 | |
>Similarly, the Japanese alphabet will be the union of all other alphabets
>in the world.
In fact this is not likely. I don't want to repeat tbe flame
wars of Usenet, but Japanese people really do avoid adopting
foreign alphabets when they adopt foreign words. The only
exceptions are in things like bibliographies (where the authors
and titles are kept in the original alphabets) and, in technical
manuals, exact copies of command names or programming language
keywords, and such stuff. In other settings, even the names of
people and companies are transliterated into moderately similar
Japanese pronunciations.
-- �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ��
(DA I A MO N DO NO(O) MA N)
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| 921.3 | SSDEVO::EGGERS | Anybody can fly with an engine. | Thu Oct 31 1991 22:57 | 1 | |
Gee, I didn't even know my VT220 could print stuff like that. | |||||
| 921.4 | The Future Now | HLFS00::STEENWINKEL | FM2 | Fri Nov 01 1991 01:23 | 15 |
Re:.1
>advent of computers entering into every aspect of society, we'll
>probably be speaking languages like FORTRAN, COBOL or C.
One of the books that's on my desk regularly is titled
C as a second language for native speakers of Pascal
Why are you using future tense ??? :-)
- Rik -
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