Indo European Origins

[Michael Motyka]

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