SEMANTIC ARCHAEOLOGY: Some Thoughts about Lexical Change 

	Words are like sediment layers
	that rot over time . . . .
	Some fossilize into petrified speech.
	Others get covered with lexical debris.
	Still others blend with linguistic sheets
	fragmenting on the compost of history.

	Over eons, language warps in countless ways:
	most words become twisted till inchoate.
	Some terms, though faithful to their original sounds,
	imply things formerly not found.
	Others, taken from lands far away,
	change our thinking and mutate our brains.

	How much of today's vocabulary
	will remain beyond this brief, tumultuous age?

	And as humans with computers increasingly interface,
	will it transform the ways both communicate?


Linda: Most English readers today can barely follow Chaucer, who wrote a mere four hundred years ago.

Lis:   Yep, can you imagine how language will change in another four hundred years?

Ron:   Well, I'm not confident that humans will be around in another four hundred years.

Lex:   (sipping a beer) Yep! With idiots like Trump, at times I wonder if our species will last
       even forty years!


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from _Last Poems: Lost Poems_ by T Newfields
SUMMARY: A digital image, poem, and dialog about how words change over time.
KEYWORDS:  language change, lexical shifts, lexical change, lexical displacement
Author: T Newfields [Nitta Hirou / Huáng Yuèwǔ] (b. 1955 - )
Begun: 2011 in Shizuoka, Japan ✠ Finished: 2019 in Yokohama, Japan
Creative Commons License: Attribution. {{CC-BY-4.0}}  

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TRANSLATIONS

DEUTSCH:  https://www.tnewfields.info/de/semarc.htm
ESPAÑOL:  https://www.tnewfields.info/es/semarq.htm
FRANÇAIS: https://www.tnewfields.info/fr/a-semantique.htm
NIHONGO:  https://www.tnewfields.info/jp/koukogaku.htm
ZHŌNGWÉN: https://www.tnewfields.info/zh/yuyi.htm