Thank you Piotr and Glen for
your forthright views on glottochronology. As a non-academic I was rather
diffident about being too dismissive of a methodology whose bases and
mathematics I have never been able to fathom.
As for talking computers, I
hadn't thought of Prof.Hawkins' speech synthesiser. I was thinking more of the
work being done to have your car nag you about buckling your seat belt, or (for
you Glen, from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) doors saying "Swish, thank
you" when you walk through. Or, more seriously, being constrained to instruct
computers verbally using something like COmmon Business Oriented Language, which
may then spill over into everyday speech thus introducing "Newspeak" by a
different route.
As for the beachballs, that
would require a long (and to this group irrelevant) digression into late-sixties
British TV culture with its plethora of sub-James Bond action heroes, and a
background knowledge of that arch-icon of British fifties' conformism - the
Holiday Camp. It made a kind of sense, in context.
Cheers
Dennis