From Martin Pitt
We may not have the Académie Française (29 March, p 28), but English does have a central authority defining the language. It is the Microsoft spelling and grammar checker. In practice, people take its spellings instead of the dictionary (sometimes accepting completely the wrong word) and many meekly accept its recommended changes of grammar and style. Now that tools such as email are marking up what they deem incorrect, it may be computers not people that create future English.
From Martin Saville
Michael Erard mentions a number of writers who imagined how the English of the future might develop. One of the earliest to do so must have been Max Beerbohm in his 1912 pastiche Enoch Soames, in which the eponymous poet hero sells his soul to the devil in exchange for being transported forward 100 years to the reading room of the British Museum, to see how posterity has judged his work.
Soames finds himself dismissed in phonetic English as a fictional “thurd-rait poit hoo beleevz imself a grate jeneus” and Beerbohm’s story is decribed as “a sumwot labud sattire”.
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I imagine many modern-day teachers of English will find this prophetic.
Biddenden, Kent, UK
Leeds, UK
