*The same passage translated into various modern languages has the following numbers of syllables:
Cantonese 89 Ukrainian 189
Annamese 100 Hungarian 196
English 146 Greek 234
Spanish 157 Japanese 242
Like all living languages, English is changing slowly but constantly in pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax. The first would probably cause our hero the most trouble. It changes pretty rapidly, and is responsible for the fantastic irregularity of English spelling, the spelling usually being a few centuries behind the pronunciation. The spelling of caught was reasonable when the word was pronounced "kowcht," with the "ch" as in German ach. But consider the number of sounds a single letter may represent today, as in odd, oft, come, worry, old, wolf, do, women, lemon. Shades of sound can't be represented exactly by ordinary spelling, because all readers won't interpret the letters the same way; and some sounds simply can't be spelled: for instance, the ir part of first as often pronounced in New York City and parts of the South—a sound halfway between "or and "ay."
Speech sounds can be analyzed into fundamental units called phonemes; these move around like protozoa in a drop of water, and, like protozoa, join together and split up. For instance, a few centuries ago person and parson were one word, spelled person and pronounced "pairson." But the "air" group of words split, some like jerk joining the words like turn, and some like heart joining the words like march. In this process person acquired two pronunciations with different meanings.
Much commoner is leveling, wherein two phonemes merge. For instance, vain, vein, and vane were once all pronounced differently; so were right.wright:rite:write. We can see the process at work in the leveling, by many Americans, of due:do and Mary:merry:marry. The British, with their loss of "r" except when a vowel follows, do worse, leveling over:ova, sort:sought, and paw:pour:poor.
If the process goes far enough—as it has in those concise Chinese languages—language becomes a guessing game between speaker and hearer, and speech is one long pun. In some forms of Chinese a single spoken word may have as many as 69 distinct meanings. French is worse than English in this respect, but neither is anything like as terrible as Chinese. In English a hearer can usually tell, upon hearing such an ambiguous sound, which meaning is meant from the context. If, as some people do, you pronounce whale like wail, nobody will think, hearing you speak of harpooning a whale, that you really meant harpooning a wail. But if, as some do, you pronounce oral like aural, you're very likely to confuse your hearer if he doesn't know in advance what is coming.
If we add together all the leveling tendencies of modem English, we can synthesize a dialect in which cud, card, cowed, coward are all pronounced like cod; tarred, torrid, tied, tired, towered are all pronounced like Todd; show, shore, sure are pronounced like show, and so forth. This is a reasonable speculation: some Southerners pronounce shore, sure like show; some Londoners use an "ah" sound in cud, etc. I hope it never happens, but it might, and we should probably manage to communicate—though with more misunderstandings, especially over the telephone. Leveling seems to be an inevitable linguistic development, though literacy—a relatively new thing for the masses—may have a countereffect. Boil and bile were once pronounced alike, but were pried apart by the influence of spelling.
The thing that would most completely bewilder our hero would be another Great Vowel Shift. The last occurred in the years 1400-1800, and resulted in changing time, teem, team, tame from "teem," "tame," "tehm," "tahm" to their present pronunciations. All the front vowels except those in bit, bet moved up. The top one, "ee," being unable to go higher, became a diphthong.* The back vowels underwent a similar change.
*If you can watch your tongue in a mirror while saying the vowels of beet, bit, bait, bet, bat without the "b" and the "t," you'll see why we say that beet has a high vowel and bat a low one. Front and back refer to the part of the tongue that is highest when the vowel is sounded; hence beet, etc., have front vowels while odd, all, go, good, do have back vowels; those in above are intermediate.
There are signs that another vowel shift, a little different from the last, impends. In London Cockney it has practically taken place: punt has become something like pant, pant like pent, pent like paint, paint like pint, and pint like point. Call has become like coal, and coal something like cowl.
Imagine our hero's predicament if this sort of thing becomes general. He crawls out of his time machine in 2438 A.D., as stated at the beginning of the article, and promptly runs afoul of the law.
Hero: Beg pardon, but could you tell me—
Cop: Hanh? Did jue sy samtheng?
Hero: Yes, you see—
Cop: Speak ap; kent mike it aht.
Hero: Well—
Cop: Woss thowse fanny dowse? P'ride?
Hero: I'm sorry, but—
Cop: Downt annersten ja; kentcha speak English?
Hero: Yes, of course—
Cop: Woy downtcha, thane? Luck loik a spicious kerracter; bayter cam 'lohng to the stytion. Jile for you, me led!
Another factor in linguistic evolution is the influence of sounds on those preceding and following them. We tend to take shortcuts in getting from one sound to another. The "k" sounds in cool and cube differ slightly; the second is nearer "t" than the first, because of the influence of the following "y" sound. If this process goes far enough (as it did in Latin), the "ky" combination may become "ty," and finally "ty" may become "tch," as statue has changed from "statyue" to "stat-chue." Hence our descendants may pronounce cube as "chube."
Our weakness for shortcuts—plus plain laziness—results in the complete dropping of sounds. Hence we often hear "prob'ly", "partic'lar", and "comf'table". The contracted forms "int'rest," "gen'ral" have become more or less standard; the others may follow in due course. Most of the "silent" letters in our spelling, as in askEd, WrotE, KniGHt, once stood for real sounds. The British outdo us in this respect, with their Whitehall "wittle" and military "miltry."