Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 10:17:50 -0500

From: Mark Mandel Mark[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]DRAGONSYS.COM

Subject: Dialects that could have been -Reply



Wow... an intersection of two of my favorite subjects, linguistics and sf.



But all I can think of offhand is, hmm, in _The Man Who Folded Himself_

(time travel and changing history): when our protagonist prevented the

origin of Christianity and came back to his home place-time, he found that

not only was society enormously different, but he couldn't understand

anyone, because of the huge cumulative changes in nearly 2000 years'

worth of history due to the presence or absence of Christianity.



Lots of authors have invented languages, of course (almost all of them

really just fragments intended to give the impression of a language, and

usually badly designed); but that's another whole thread, or list. There

are a few future Englishes, some of them mere extremes of slang,

vulgarity, and/or casual pronunciation. This take on the field is new to me.

I'll keep the search churning in background. Anyone else?



Mark A. Mandel : mark[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]dragonsys.com

Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200

320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02160, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com/