Re: [LEAPSECS] Risks of change to UTC

From: John Cowan <cowan_at_ccil.org>
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 11:04:24 -0500

Clive D.W. Feather scripsit:

> Why not? Greek and Latin, to name two, were spoken that long ago and are
> recognisable today.

Indeed, and they passed through a far tighter bottleneck than anything
likely today.

        Not even the most diligently destructive barbarian can
        extirpate the written word from a culture wherein the
        *minimum* edition of most books is fifteen hundred
        copies. There are simply too many books.
                --L. Sprague de Camp, _Lest Darkness Fall_

> And the English of 1000 years ago is still an official language of the
> Netherlands (under the name "Frisian").

Bread, butter, and green cheese / Is good English and good Friese.
Brea, būter, en griene tsiis / Is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.

(That ū is u-circumflex, in case of encoding problems.)

--
Long-short-short, long-short-short / Dactyls in dimeter,
Verse form with choriambs / (Masculine rhyme):  cowan_at_ccil.org
One sentence (two stanzas) / Hexasyllabically   http://www.reutershealth.com
Challenges poets who / Don't have the time.     --robison who's at texas dot net
Received on Mon Jan 23 2006 - 08:04:42 PST

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