#futurese

[janmisali]

Futurese

[allthingslinguistic]

This is a fun thought experiment: projecting historical linguistic methods onto early-stage linguistic changes currently happening in American English, especially this vowel shift, to predict what the language might look like in another thousand years. It’s got a heavy dose of speculation, of course, but it’s very thorough and well-thought-out as far as speculation goes. 

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…

The process of getting to the prediction is really interesting and highly worth the read -- it gets a bit dense among the details in parts, but it’s still worth skipping around. Here’s the conclusion (oddly, one of the only parts that isn’t also in IPA): 

Mind you, if you've been 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, đat yu xùd titx as tu spik karektli, bikaz wi ar ìgnarant and wi spik karàptli… 3000 AD: *Zᴀ kiad w’‐exùn ya tijuh, da ya‐gᴀr’‐eduketan zᴀ da wa‐tᴀgan lidla, kaz ’ban iagnaran an wa‐tᴀg kurrap…