Harmon Seaver <hseaver@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