Re: [tied] English.

I am speaking from the inside. Lot's of little languages complain
about how they are being oppressed by other languages, especially
English. I am complaining about how us native English speakers are
oppressed by the ubiqity of non-English-speakers helping us define our
language; Piotr, as a servant of Lady HEL, is an exemplar. Sacre
merde: it takes a Pole to tell me the truth about my own native
language.

As for the question
" What does MidAtlantic sound like? "Blub, blub, blub"?",

I already gave the answer. Patrick Stewart is the canonical example
(he's moved his haute-Royal Shakespeare Company RP to something most
of us here understand). Jude Law and Russell Crowe can do the same
trick.

--- In cybalist@..., Håkan Lindgren <h5@...> wrote:
>
> Mark Odegard wrote -
>
> > Currently, English is severely constrained by its literature (and
> > universal literacy). We need keep ourselves literate in what's
gone
> > before and thus subject ourselves to the prescriptivists,
> > notwithstanding a generations-long revolt against them.
Innovation
> > often gets stillborn.
>
> I've never heard this opinion before and as a speaker of a small,
heavily English-influenced language it's a weird experience to read
that one of its native speakers is so critical of the present state of
English and that you believe that English is a constrained language.
What do other people on the list say - does universal literacy really
constrain a language? I think you've got hold of a small and often
overlooked part of the truth, but the major part of the truth is the
opposite of what you're saying: literacy makes people want to be
creative with language (but perhaps in other, more self-conscious ways
compared to a society without books). Literacy also makes newly
coined, cool expressions spread like wildfire. To a foreigner like me,
present day English is an extremely creative language, it's rapidly
coining new words and expressions, in the street, in newspapers, in
business and science. People in the humanities are fond of creating
new and impressive-looking multi-syllable words, and how much of our
internet-related terms would be understandable to someone living in
the 1980s?
>
> What's typical of English is the ease with which nouns can be made
into verbs or vice versa. Words and expressions quickly turn into
abbreviations, which soon are used as words in their own right, and
new abbreviations and compounds are formed from them. I used to read
Suck (www.suck.com) - those writers made English sound like an
innovating, developing language - to me at least.
>
> > It would be so nice if English could go its merry way and fracture
> > into a number of interesting daughter languages. But this seems to
not
> > be in the cards.
>
> Let's say we cut off all international communication and transport
tomorrow - would anyone like to speculate how fast such a fracturing
might happen? My guess is that it would happen pretty fast. A couple
of generations and there would be obvious differences. Any conlangers
out there who would like to construct such a future language developed
from English for a change, instead of yet another Tolkienesque elvish
language or yet another Volkspraak based on Ur-Germanic? I'd be
interested to hear the results of such an experiment.
>
> Mark -
> I marvel even more at how you have to travel to Great Britain or
Ireland to find something that gets difficult to understand
dialect-wise (but just about everyone whose native dialect gives a
problem can code-switch to something resembling MidAtlantic).
>
>
>
> All the best,
> Hakan