Foreign Perspectives

Sure you’d know by his accent, dialect or language, wouldn’t you. After all, it’s only in science fiction programmes that everyone speaks English, isn’t it?

If he was from hundreds of years in the future chances are that the “English” that he’d speak (time travellers are always male, aren’t they?) would be a little different. However, early time travellers are probably only to go back a few decades or perhaps a century so the language won’t have changed that much. After all, you’d be able to understand someone from 1908 no problem, wouldn’t you?

To be fair, if you went back to 1908 you’d have a fair number of words that you’d be using which didn’t exist in the same sense as they did in 1908. Not that many completely new words mind you. Computers were around in 1908, it’s just that they were people who did calculations rather than machines in those days. An “inter-net” would be some kind of fishing net I imagine. Television is one of the few words that are genuinely new which didn’t exist back then.

However, John Titor used the Internet to send his messages so there was no issue of an accent or really of a dialect for that matter as both are largely confined to the spoken word.

What you might notice would be different ways of phasing things. For example, going back to say that “I called Helen” in 1908 would mean that you shouted out to her, not that you phoned her but then the difference in that is only obvious to us in 2008 and wouldn’t be obvious if you used the phrase in 1908. I suspect that in reality this kind of difference would be very difficult to pick up.