

Futurese – The American Language in 3000AD (2003) - cryptoz
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/futurese.html

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networked
I'm not sure the "(2013)" in the title is right; this page was last updated in
2013 but it is a decade older than that. Still, this is a fun experiment and a
great read if you haven't encountered it before.

If I were to bet money on it, however, I would say that voice recordings and a
world-wide broadcast system will turn out to have slowed down very
considerably the rate at which sounds in a major language like English change.
Barring catastrophes and conquests 2014 AD English is likely to be a lot
easier to understand to 2700 AD English speakers than Middle English is to
modern speakers.

~~~
kylebgorman
Your intuition that modern technology is slowing down language change, while
entirely reasonable, is generally thought to be wrong by experts in language
change.

LETRA MAGNA - How do radio, television, films and popular entertainment affect
language?

LABOV - Our studies of sound changes in progress indicate that the mass media
have almost no effect on the development of every-day language, which is
influenced far more by the interaction of peers in every-day life. Passive
listening to radio, television, or teachers in school, does not appear to
affect the basic machinery of language production. In North America, regional
dialects are becoming more diverse even though the mass media are quite
uniform. Actprs on television programs will often reflect changes that have
taken place in the community a generation before. The same principle applies
to grammatical innovations, like the new English verb of quotation, "be like."
Rosa Saladino showed that watching television had no effect on the replacement
of dialect words with Italian.

(from an interview with Bill Labov, "founder of modern sociolinguistics":
[http://www.letramagna.com/entrelabov.htm](http://www.letramagna.com/entrelabov.htm))

[edit for whitespace]

~~~
mistercow
And you can kind of see this already in existing dialect shifts. The
"Transatlantic" dialect is largely gone, but for a long time it was extremely
popular in any form of media involving voice.

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phamilton
Stressed vowel breaking is very common in other languages. Swedish and Finnish
both rely on it heavily. In Swedish it is generally denoted by a vowel
followed by a single consonant. For example, "tak" means "ceiling" and "tack"
means "thank you". They are pronounced similarly but the "a" in "tak" is
breaking and "a" in "tack" is non-breaking. In Finnish, breaking vowels are
just repeated. For example, the name Miikael and Mikael having a slightly
different pronunciation due to the breaking and non-breaking "i".

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petercooper
Kind of a random point, but demon.co.uk is something you'd want to add to the
domain suffix list on HN, it's a bit like blogspot.com in that regard.

~~~
logn
I'd imagine they're using (at least indirectly)
[https://publicsuffix.org/list/effective_tld_names.dat](https://publicsuffix.org/list/effective_tld_names.dat)

Amendment procedure:
[https://publicsuffix.org/submit/](https://publicsuffix.org/submit/)

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baldfat
Wrong on Premessis one.

We now have recorded video and audio. Things are now stuck here.

Anyone 40+ years old remember when everyone had a serious accent and you tell
where a person was from after one sentence. Now a day NADA information UNLESS
they lived in the epicenter of that accent(i.e. lives in Boston (Not
Springfield MA to Boston etc.)

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bnolsen
Just go watch the movie "idiocracy" and there's the language that will be used
even before 3000AD.

