firespeaker.org

(17:36) [Tristan]: oh. i'd just kinda come to assume it was an american vs real english distinction

(03:42:49) kesuari: nothing backs up like chiselling a great big stone

(03:43:57) kesuari: i sometimes reckon i should do that: go carving runes somewhere in the bush

(03:44:55) kesuari: not runes per se; i mean some form of phonetic alphabet that looks like runes and is similar enough to the latin alphabet or germanic runes to be decryptable

(03:45:17) kesuari: or maybe i'll do it a bit less phonetic just to give the future linguists a bit of fun

(03:45:43) kesuari: can't be too trivial or else i'll be the Orrm of the 21st century

(03:26:05) kesuari: in a thousand years, when english has divided into many languages and tehy've all had spelling reforms, they'll divise a "standardised spelling" for classical english

(03:26:52) kesuari: because the current spelling will been seen as "irregular" and "hard to read", "a poor guide to pronunciation" &c. they will probably also add diacritics so we can tell which vowels are long and which are short, which e's are silent and which are pronounced etc.

(03:27:09) kesuari: much like we do to old english

(03:27:33) kesuari: only, for a non-linguist of the 20th/21st centuries, it'll be hard to read because we don't expect it

(03:29:08) kesuari: and because no-one can seriously expect any of our recordings to last until then and because linguistics texts will largely have been lost to time as they weren't reproduced enough, people will have debates about quite how various aspects were pronounced

(03:30:10) kesuari: they'll reconstruct a language that includes the "bath/trap" split, f'instance

(03:30:24) kesuari: and have trouble reconciling it with the other germanic languagse

(03:32:45) kesuari: but, of course, english retained *þ and *w so it's obviously conservative: it must've been that german and even icelandic lost the original æ/ɑ distinction

[wine keeps causing X to crash]

(03:26:24) [me]: wine sucks

(03:37:21) kesuari: well, at least it's emulating windows well

(21:43) Tristan: you realise of course that what you're doing here is filing bugreports for linguistic theories, which are kind of like computer programs

(21:43) Tristan: so the "maintainers" are probably going to call you mad