thank you to nothinolife for requesting this episode.
welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! I’m
jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at The American Language in 3000 AD,
Futurese. Futurese is a speculative future English created
by Justin B Rye in 2003. this episode’s gonna be a bit different, since Futurese isn’t
as fully developed as most of the other languages I’ve covered on this show. it mostly consists
of a sequence of sound changes starting from General American English. does it even count
as a conlang? I don’t know but it’ll still be fun to talk about probably. anyway, my
point is that I can’t really talk about it the same way I talk about other conlangs.
that said, let’s do some good old chartlooking. the first phase of Futurese is General American
English, which has these consonants.
Rye analyzes the General American rhotic as
an alveolar approximant, and I don’t blame him, since that’s a pretty common analysis,
but it’s really a lot more complicated than that. firstly, it’s almost always labialized.
it’s also usually a bit further back in the mouth than the alveolar ridge; typically
it’s postalveolar. that’s the reason why American speakers have a tendency to pronounce
〈tr〉 sounds like /tʃr/. if the rhotic were actually alveolar, they’d say /tsr/
instead. sometimes it’s retroflex instead of postalveolar, and sometimes it’s velarized.
my point is, it’s extremely rare to hear an American English speaker actually pronounce
the rhotic as an alveolar approximant. while we’re at it, General American
has these monophthongs.
I might’ve messed up the pronunciations
on like most of those because I don’t actually speak General American! if you’ve ever talked
to me about English vowels then you know that I speak a dialect that’s undergone a chain
shift called the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, so I pronounce all of those vowels roughly
like this. we’ve gotten a bit off track. General American’s
diphthongs are:
I pronounce these sorta like this.
those two pronunciations of /aɪ/ are the result of one half of Canadian Raising. I
pronounce it like [äi] most of the time, and like [ɐi] before voiceless obstruents.
anyway, now that we’ve established our starting point, let’s apply some changes!
now, our boy JBR goes pretty in depth with sound shifts, but I’m just gonna go over
the ones that æffect the inventory. the only change to the consonants at this
stage is the formalization of intervocalic flapping. this is common among American English
speakers; it’s when alveolar plosives become alveolar flaps when they come after a vowel
and before an unstressed vowel. I’m kinda disappointed that this is the only bit of
allophony that becomes phonemic here. like, most American English speakers pronounce the
word “hue” with a palatal fricative, and since that’s the only difference between
the words “hue” and “who”, it makes sense to predict that that will become a new
phoneme. the vowels do some more interesting things.
first, as you might expect, the cot caught merger happens.
second, æ is reanalyzed as /a/? I guess? its normal pronunciation doesn’t change
though. third, the mid central vowel is treated as
two separate vowels. this is kinda contrary to how General American
works. it doesn’t make sense that people would unmerge a previously merged vowel pair.
whatever. fourth, the back close vowel is more centralized.
fifth, the diphthongs /eɪ/ and /oʊ/ become monophthongs. sure, why not.
so this is the resulting monophthong inventory. to be honest, it kinda just looks like someone
did a bad job understanding how American English works. however, a couple of remaining sound
shifts really shake things up. the less interesting one is that nasal consonants cause preceding
vowels to become nasalized, which is pretty commonplace. that sort of thing happens all
the time. the more interesting one is called “breaking”. basically, before voiced obstruents,
pretty much any stressed vowel is pronounced as a diphthong. the result looks something
like this. this is a good way to, æffectively, double
the number of vowels. the same thing happens to the remaining three diphthongs, by the
way. so now we’ve gone from five diphthongs to
three diphthongs to twelve diphthongs. I gotta say, this huge new diphthong inventory more
than makes up for not doing anything with Canadian Raising. let’s see where he goes
from here. this is where things take a turn for the boring.
first of all, absolutely nothing happens to the consonant inventory. no, not even the
rhotic. secondly, you know all those cool new diphthongs that showed up? well now they’re
all gone and reanalyzed as consecutive vowels or vowels next to glides. the original monophthongs
go from this to this, and the original diphthongs go from this to
this. dangit Justin, why’d you even introduce
all those diphthongs if you were just gonna get rid of them? now we have NO diphthongs!
none! and where’d /ji/ even come from? why the heck would people start saying /ji/? anyway,
now that there’s no diphthongs left, it’s a good time to rearrange the vowel chart.
now would you look at that! all those complicated shifts and we’re left with just a regular
seven vowel system. how will things change from here?
it’s the year 2700 and FINALLY some interesting stuff is happening with the consonants. the
dental consonants disappear. (it was only a matter of time, honestly.)
the affricates merge with their corresponding fricatives.
those palatal fricatives go from postalveolar to alveopalatal.
the velar nasal disappears. then for some reason Rye says that voiceless
plosives become aspirated except after sibilants, as though that wasn’t already a thing? like
that’s pretty clearly already a thing in English now. you don’t need to say that it
starts happening in the heckin twenty eighth century. anyway.
the glotal approximant becomes voiced. next, as expected, some vowel shifts happen.
this becomes this. nothing too unusual here. the loss of that
three vowel means we’re now down to a nice symmetrical six vowel system. oh, also, nasal
vowels suddenly matter now. remember those? they’re back and now they matter!
thanks, nasal vowels! now for the main event, the year 3000. we’ve
already seen some pretty significant changes, and we’re about to see some more. aspirated
plosives become affricates! the flap merges with the rhotic! darn!
the breathy voiced glottal fricative becomes uvular!
and then… that’s it for the consonants I guess? yeah this is the end result. huh!
I’ll talk about this some more in a bit but first let’s look at what happens to
the vowels. this becomes this, which can be rearranged to look like this.
okay, so now we have the end result of all of these sound shifts. so let’s just take
a close look at it, aesthetically. the consonants… leave me wanting more, honestly.
like those affricates are kinda cool, but like, why is the rhotic still the same? why
didn’t anything more interesting come out of the alveolar flap? you know, stuff like
that. as for the vowels, I do like how they ended
up somewhat symmetrical, even though the way they got there is SUPER weird and overcomplicated.
it’s also a type of six vowel system you don’t see much, one that’s symmetrical
horizontally instead of vertically, so that’s neat.
man, it sure took me a super long time to talk about the phonology, huh? so hey, Justin,
you have this version of English from about a millennium in the future. you spent a real
long time thinking about what it’ll sound like, but what’s it gonna LOOK like? Justin
responds, from like fifteen years ago, quote, “The spellings used are the closest transliteration
I can manage within the limitations of a twenty‐first‐century characterset; fortunately by the thirty‐first
century storing information as strings of written words is something of a fossil handicraft
anyway (much like calligraphy in the present day), so an “anachronistic” font is as
good as any.” so I guess this is just his attempt to Romanize these sounds.
...oh. yeah I guess that makes sense. I personally would’ve written the affricates, like, at
all? but since they’re technically still allophones of the voiceless plosives it isn’t
completely necessary. how about the vowels? ...oh! so uh, small capital a, huh? that’s…
really what you’re going with? (sigh) I gotta tell you, Justin, this isn’t really
all that great. it would’ve made more sense to go with something like this instead.
see how much more intuitive that is? and it doesn’t even use a small capital a!
Futurese doesn’t have much of a vocabulary to speak of, but what is there mostly sounds
like modern English but with more glides, which makes sense seeing’s how that’s
one of the biggest changes that’s been made. I mean, listen to the Futurese word for “California”,
*Kyafwonyᴀ. all in all, I think that while the idea of
Futurese is very interesting, the execution leaves me wanting more. Rye seemingly has
a less than perfect understanding of where the English language is headed, or even the
amount of variation in how it’s spoken now. I don’t think it’s likely that anyone
will ever speak an Anglic language that sounds much like Futurese, but that’s not really
what JBR was ing for. quote, “Nonetheless, futurology is a mug's game, and I don't expect
my “predictions” to come true. My methodology consists of nothing more rigorous than applying
some of the kinds of changes that are commonly seen in historical linguistics and seeing
what further development patterns they suggest; it's just a bit of fun, intended to dramatise
the way things might plausibly end up if things go on the way they always have. You could
come up with something completely different and at least as plausible by extrapolating
from the Northern Cities Vowel Shift…” that in mind, I’d say that I like Futurese
more than I like Klingon, but not as much as I like FluidLang, making it the sixth best
artlang reviewed so far. thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next
time, where I’ll be reviewing Lingua Franca Nova. but actually, you know what? all this
looking at a rather underwhelming prediction of the future of the English language has
left me wanting more. because, seriously, it’s a very interesting idea that has a
lot of potential! so, before we move on to the Lingua Franca Nova episode, I’m going
to need to do something I’ve never done on this show.
make a conlang.