Harmon Seaver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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