Indo European Origins
Michael Motyka
mmotyka at lsil.com
Tue Jan 14 14:49:08 PST 2003
Harmon Seaver <hseaver at cybershamanix.com> wrote :
> You don't even have to read 14th Cent. lit to experience that. Read
> "A
> Clockwork Orange" -- most folks find they read about 1/3 to 1/2 before
> they go back and start over. Gibson, at least the earlier stuff, like
> "Neuromancer", is a bit like that, but Burgess really almost invented
> a new language.
>
I read a few Burgess novels as a teenager - A Clockwork Orange, The Eve of St.
Venus, One Hand Clapping, The Wanting Seed and I don't remember them that way. I
remember them reading smoothly and clearly without a great struggle. Probably time to
revisit one or two just to double-check my old brain.
> Language evolves more rapidly than the yours (and Tim's) examples
> tho -- look
> at innercity blackspeak, especially Chicago. Forget the ebonics jokes
> -- this is a genuine language change. Or look at other areas of the
> country with older language evolution -- Gullah in So. Caroline, for
> instance, a much earlier language specialization. When I was at the
> Univ. of So. Alabama in Mobile, I came across a group of country
> blacks in a grocery store whose language was totally incomprehensible,
> at least to me. I asked black friends about it, and they could mimic
> it a bit, but confessed that they too had a lot of difficulty
> understanding it, and they were native Mobilians.
> I was raised, for the most part, in the deep South, but I've also
> come
> across many whites there whose speech was very difficult to
> understand, and which, I'm sure, if one tried to read an accurate
> phonetic rendition, without benefit of body language, would seem be
> essentially a foreign language.
>
I know the experience - in the southern US, in Scotland - it's all English. Really? People
are probably creating language constantly like a software evolutionary experiment.
Much of it probably dies out. What remains appears to be "speciation". Write much
Forth lately?
Mike
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