William Safire
Bliss on bem cumendum fiusende geara, Eallum! That’s “Happy New Millennium, everybody!” in the language that the residents of England were speaking in AD 1000. For this back-translation, which I have jazzed up only a little, I am indebted to Antonette diPaolo Healey of the Dictionary of Old English Project at the University of Toronto.
Though hard to understand today, that English wasn’t gibberish a millennium ago. On the contrary, the somewhat guttural tongue spoken and laboriously written at the time of Aelfric’s “Grammaticus” in 1000 was rich in vocabulary and complex in syntax. But we can now say – in the words they would have used then – Nu we fius feorran common, cild (“We’ve come a long way, baby”). Let us not derogate their mode of communication; that’s when men were menn and women were wifmenn.
In the year 3000, will my clone – telepathically transmitting the content of this column to The Times’s Mars bureau – be using the same words as I do now? Of course not; even the word evolve will evolve, or evolute. (I just exhumed that back- formation from evolution; it’s never too early to get a jump on the changes to come.)
Oxford University Press, preparing a book of 21st century English, has been surveying language mavens like me to get answers to questions like “Will English continue its progress to becoming a global language?” (An American ear would prefer “Will English continue to become” or “Will English continue its progress toward becoming”, but perhaps I’m regressing.)
One future-fixated question engenders another: “What will happen to dialects?” (Fuggetaboudit.) And Alysoun Owen, a commissioning editor at Oxford, also wonders, in stiffly Standard English, “How will language used in relation to the sexes develop?” (Human nomenclature has already been given a unisex haircut: “You, Leslie. Me, Alysoun. Who what?”)
As it happens, I have for months been surveying Olbom – On Language’s Board of Mentors – to get a fix on 3000’s Earthlingo for today’s millennial Time Capsule.
“Anything may happen to a language in a thousand years,” says Jacques Barzun, whose House of Intellect is now in San Antonio. “Think of what befell Anglo-Saxon when William the Conqueror and fewer than a thousand men won a battle at Hastings: after a couple of centuries, a mixed English-and-French tongue with two words for the same thing.”
Like null and void; for no good reason, modern lawyers cling to both. Language has no life independent of its speakers and does not change according to laws of its own. “The mass of new words born of cybernetics is no evolution but an eruption,” Barzun notes. “English- American may be subject to even more violent change. Suppose a coalition of other continents conquers North America and unloads here its surplus population. Or suppose illiteracy gets to be the prevailing mode, with only the relative few reading and writing. There would shortly be two languages spoken, as in ancient Rome and in England after the Norman Conquest.”
But let’s stipulate that the English- speaking world is not overwhelmed. What will we sound like then?
“The English of the year 3000 will sound like some strange dialect of current English,” says Sol Steinmetz, the great American lexicographer. “It is impossible for any living language not to change. Edward Sapir, in his classic 1921 work, Language, called this inevitable change ‘the drift of a language’.”
Steinmetz predicts: “In this future language, the word cents might be pronounced as ‘since’ and the word business as ‘bidnis’. Certain grammatical cases (such as whom and whose) might disappear entirely.” (No who/whom problem? Utopia beckons.)
Despite the braking action of schools and dictionaries, Steinmetz foresees a somewhat simplified spelling (as did Noah Webster two centuries ago, and he was rawng). Vocabulary? “A great expansion from the currently conservative estimate of half-a-million to well over a million words,” he says. “This is not to say that 40% of our vocabulary will be replaced, a notion very hard to back up.”
Howzabout slang, boyo? “Most of the current slang and argot will vanish,” Steinmetz says, “but new slang, argot and jargon will continue to replenish the ever- growing vocabulary of the coming millennium.”
Presumably, this means “Man, that’s cool” will give way to “Woman, that’s warm.” (I can do that; bring on the organ replacements.)
Will English and American English fuse into a great world language, understandable not only in Kansas and Liverpool but also in Kuala Lumpur and the Congo?
Robert Burchfield, former chief editor of the Oxford English dictionaries and the man who dared to revise Fowler’s Modern English Usage, thinks not. “It seems likely that mutually unintelligible varieties of English will be distributed throughout the English-speaking world,” says this New Zealander, now resident in Oxfordshire.
“The two major forms of English, those of North America and the British Isles, will as languages be as separate from each other as, say, French and Italian and Dutch and Afrikaans are now.”
This divergence is not what most of us expect, as Brits today embrace “mind the gap”, “humped-zebra crossing” and “bug jab”, while Yanks adopt “watch your step”, “striped speed bump” and “flu shot”.
On the other hand, a parallel political theory of “convergence”, so confidently put forward only a generation ago by accommodationists between communism and democracy, is discredited today.
But Burchfield has a solution to the problematic prospect of our parting: “Increasingly sophisticated electronic devices – the third-millennium equivalents of the mobile phone – will make it possible for intercommunication to occur, face to face or at a distance.”
Here’s how: “The message of speaker A will be instantly translated into the language of speaker B,” Burchfield says. “Techniques now familiar to journalists interviewing people who speak, say, only Albanian will be familiar to English- speakers throughout the world. No need for the presence of human interpreters – electronic translating aids will be no more remarkable than spectacles and/or glasses and hearing aids are now.”
If this vision comes to pass, the uniqueness of national language and tribal dialect will be preserved, which will give societies the cohesion of tradition and a sense of cultural difference from the rest of the world.
At the same time – thanks to the tiny interpreter implanted in everybody’s teeth – thirdmillennarians will be blessed with instant understanding of what is being said in any language,which should convey a sense of worldly unity.
Think of it: language in the third millennium will defend diversity, while translated communication will assert unity. “O brave new world, that has such people in’t!”
Looking back a thou, we say, Bliss on bem cumendum fiusende geara, Eallum! Looking ahead to 3000, Kant wate.
ENDS