"De Camp, L Sprague - Best Of L Sprague De Camp Uc" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

"And that was that. Here's Carl with the beer now. It's your deal, isn't it, Hannibal?"
LANGUAGE FOR TIME TRAVELERS



"GRADUALLY, the rainbow flicker of light died away, and Morgan Jones felt the tingle leave his body. The dial read 2438. Five hundred years! He opened the door of the compartment and climbed out.
"At first, he saw nothing but fields and woods. He was evidently in a farming country. Nobody was in sight- No, here came a rustic along the road, trudging through the dust with his eyes on the ground in front of him.
"'Hey there!' Jones called. 'Could you give me some information?'
"The man looked up; his eyes widened with astonishment at the sight of the machine. 'Wozza ya sth?' he asked.
"Jones repeated his question.
"'Sy; daw geh,' said the man, shaking his head.
"Now Jones looked puzzled. 'I don't seem to understand you. 'What language are you speaking?'
"Wah lenksh? Inksh lenksh, coss. Wah you speak? Said, sah-y, daw geh-ih. Daw, neitha. You fresh? Jumm?'
"Jones had an impulse to shake his head violently, the same feeling he always had when the last word of a crossword puzzle eluded him. The man had understood him, partly, and the noises he made were somehow vaguely like English, but no English such as Jones had ever heard. 'Inksh lenksh' must be 'English language'; 'sah-y daw geh-ih' was evidently 'sorry, don't get it.'
"'What,' he asked, 'is a fresh jumm?'
"'Nevva huddum?' said the rustic, scorn in his tone. 'Fresh people, go Oui, oui, p~rlez-vous franчais, va t'en, sale bъte!' He did this with gestures. Then he stiffened. 'Jumms go'-he clicked his heels together-'Achtung! Vorwфrts, rn~rschI Guten Tag, meine Hen-en! Verstehen Sie Deutsch? Fresh from Fress; Jumms from Jummy. Geh ih?'
"Yes, I suppose so,' said Jones. His mind was reeling slightly-"

Thus might almost any novel on the time-travel theme or the Rip Van Winkle theme begin. The author, having landed his hero in the far future, may either ascribe telepathy to the people of the time, or remark on how the English language will have changed. The foregoing selection shows-in somewhat more detail than do most of the stories-a few of the actual changes that might take place. To be strictly consistent, I should have changed the French and German selection also, but, in the first place, I don't know enough about French and German to predict their future evolution, and, in the second, it would have made the rustic's explanation utterly unintelligible. It might be interesting to consider in detail just what change may occur. To do this thing right we shall have to first take a brief look at the language's present state and its past history.
English is a Teutonic language, like German, Dutch, and Swedish, with a large infusion-perhaps a majority-of French words. Its parent tongue, Anglo-Saxon, was more highly inflected than its descendant-less so than Latin, but about as much so as modern German* Anglo-Saxon would sound to a modern hearer as much like a foreign language as German; English didn't become what would be intelligible to us until about the i6th Century. English of the 1 5oos would sound to us like some sort of Scotch dialect, because it had the rolled "r" and the fricative consonants heard in German: ich, ach (that's what all those silent gh's in modern English spelling mean-or rather, used to mean) which have been retained in Scottish English, but lost or transformed in most other kinds of English. We have a fair idea of the pronunciation of Shakespeare's time because about then people began writing books on the subject. It's amusing to reflect that if Shakespeare returned to Earth, he'd get along passably in Edinburgh; he could manage, with some difficulty, in Chicago- but he'd be hopelessly lost in London, whose dialect would differ most radically from his! So much for the "language of Shakespeare"!
Authors are fairly safe in having the people of the future speak
* For instance, the noun end in Ang'o-Saxon had these forms:
Singular Plural
Nominative ende endas
Genitive endes enda
Dative ende endum
Accusative ende eudas
English-which is very convenient for the authors. Aside from the fact that nobody can prove them wrong, English is, today, well on the way to becoming the world's international language. It is probably taught in the schools of more countries than any other. In number of speakers it is exceeded only by Cantonese and Mandarin, the chief languages of China, each of which is divided into a myriad of mutually unintelligible dialects; its nearest rivals, Spanish and German, are far behind it in number of speakers. It's a concise Ianguage,* and the simplicity of its gammar makes it easy to learn, though its fearsome spelling is an obstacle to the student. It's a safe bet that another century will see it as the second language of every passably educated person on Earth, and in another millennium it may well be the only living language.
Like all living languages, English is changing slowly but constantly in pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax. The first would probably cause our hero the most trouble. It changes pretty rapidly, and is responsible for the fantastic irregularity of English spelling, the spelling usually being a few centuries behind the pronunciation. The spelling of caught was reasonable when the word was pronounced "kowcht," with the "ch" as in German ach. But consider the number of sounds a single letter may represent today, as in odd, oft, come, worry, old, wolf, do, women, lemon. Shades of sound can't be represented exactly by ordinary spelling, because all readers won't interpret the letters the same way; and some sounds simply can't be spelled: for instance, the ir part of first as often pronounced in New York City and parts of the South-a sound halfway between "or and "ay."
Speech sounds can be analyzed into fundamental units called phonemes; these move around like protozoa in a drop of water, and, like protozoa, join together and split up. For instance, a few centuries ago person and parson were one word, spelled person and pronounced "pairson." But the "air" group of words split, some like jerk joining the words like turn, and some like heart joining the words like march. In this process person acquired two pronunciations with different meanings.
~ The same passage translated into various modern languages has the following numbers of syllables:
Cantonese 89 Ukrainian 189
Annamese 100 Hungarian 196
English 146 Greek 234
Spanish Japanese 242
Much commoner is leveling, wherein two phonemes merge. For instance, vain, vein, and vane were once all pronounced differently; so were right.wright:rite:write. We can see the process at work in the leveling, by many Americans, of due:do and Mary:merry:marry. The British, with their loss of "r" except when a vowel follows, do worse, leveling over:ova, sort:sought, and paw:pour:poor.
If the process goes far enough-as it has in those concise Chinese languages-language becomes a guessing game between speaker and hearer, and speech is one long pun. In some forms of Chinese a single spoken word may have as many as 69 distinct meanings. French is worse than English in this respect, but neither is anything like as terrible as Chinese. In English a hearer can usually tell, upon hearing such an ambiguous sound, which meaning is meant from the context. If, as some people do, you pronounce whale like wail, nobody will think, hearing you speak of harpooning a whale, that you really meant harpooning a wail. But if, as some do, you pronounce oral like aural, you're very likely to confuse your hearer if he doesn't know in advance what is coming.
If we add together all the leveling tendencies of modem English, we can synthesize a dialect in which cud, card, cowed, coward are all pronounced like cod; tarred, torrid, tied, tired, towered are all pronounced like Todd; show, shore, sure are pronounced like show, and so forth. This is a reasonable speculation: some Southerners pronounce shore, sure like show; some Londoners use an "ah" sound in cud, etc. I hope it never happens, but it might, and we should probably manage to communicate-though with more misunderstandings, especially over the telephone. Leveling seems to be an inevitable linguistic development, though literacy-a relatively new thing for the masses-may have a countereffect. Boil and bile were once pronounced alike, but were pried apart by the influence of spelling.
The thing that would most completely bewilder our hero would be another Great Vowel Shift. The last occurred in the years
1400-1800, and resulted in changing time, teem, team, tame from "teem," "tame," "tehm," "tahm" to their present pronunciations. All the front vowels except those in bit, bet moved up. The top one, "ec," being unable to go higher, became a diphthong.* The back vowels underwent a similar change.

* If you can watch your tongue in a mirror while saying the vowels of beet, bit, bait, bet, bat without the "b" and the "t," you'll see why we say that beet has a high vowel and bat a low one, Front and back re~fer to the part of the tongue that
There are signs that another vowel shift, a little different from the last, impends. In London Cockney it has practically taken place:
punt has become something like pant, pant like pent, pent like paint, paint like pint, and pint like point. Call has become like coal, and coal something like cowl.
Imagine our hero's predicament if this sort of thing becomes general. He crawls out of his time machine in 2438 A.D., as stated at the beginning of the article, and promptly runs afoul of the law.
Hero: Beg pardon, but could you tell me-
Cop: Hanh? Did jue sy samtheng?
Hero: Yes, you see-
Cop: Speak ap; kent mike it aht.
Hero: Well-