Slashdot Mirror
"English" Not Threatened By Webspeak
MudButt writes "Linguists say not to worry too much about Netspeak, otherwise known as the language of choice in chat rooms and IM clients. According to this Yahoo! article, linguists say that terms like "cya", "brb", "afk" are a healthy way of exploring the power of the written language. They went on to say "FYI, RTFA"!"
That is, encoding English like we encode with a compiler?
Transcend Humanity. Please.
What's up with these quotation marks? Are you being ironic, and if, then why? English is a real language, you know...
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
ffs y do u think ur funnay
English or any language is bound to change given new discoveries and ways of life. This is just normal
We are already communicating under the influence of the computer. Language must change with the way that we communicate.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
YAF,R?
fp
So who's going to be the next Netscape?
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
And let's not forget Microsoft's take on l33t sp34k =)
Enjoy an e-piphany
Sadly, that is a direct cut-paste from my IM window this morning.
All those horrid things those nasty morse code people do ...
w00t
Just look at how they're taking control of the situation http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/ kidtalk.mspx
Sigs are for Terrorists.
"blog" is a netspeak, and now it's already commonly accepted as an english word.
"E-mail" used to be a technical term, and now can be written as plain english in "email".
"Text" was never a verb until SMS.
...as long as people understand regular English (or their respective native language) first, and understand that as with all slang, there is a time and a place for it.
A lot of people in the "professional" work force don't seem to understand that professionalism is supposed to extend to their written communications, and things like "werd" and "brb" in an email to a higher level executive don't provide a professional image.
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
Not even a TFAD (Troll for a Day)! Shocking, I tell you!
They really must update their list. We're on internet time here, buddy!
...then why do I still feel an urge to castrate people who use words like "virii" and "boxen"?
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
That is, encoding English like we encode with a compiler?
OMFG. Liek nevar, j00 n00b. lololol. j/k.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
Critics object that Netspeak ignores or violates the usual rules of punctuation, capitalization and sentence structure. It's peppered with strange abbreviations, acronyms and visual symbols. Its spelling can be, well, different.
What's so bad about Netspeak? Doesn't sound all that different from your typical Slashdot Article.
1999. ROFL.
;)
2000. 4LL j00r n3tsp34k is w34k
2001. eye r owns0r joo all!
Then we all realized it was easier to communicate with normal english, and having both hands on the keyboard is a huge factor
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Why would you want to do that?
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Some of these are pretty old, probably adopted as netspeak, which should underscore that, like the muck that is the english language, so is netspeak adaptable. What's worse is when k1dz put t3xt m3ss4g3 s14ng 1n th31r p4p3rz. Teachers have seen quite a bit of it, as an article several months back in the San Jose Murky News told of. u for you, mi for me, etc. English if nothing else has accumulated and occasionally discarded words from other languages and even made acronyms words. It's an ongoing thing over generations. Quite a lot comes in from whatever the big social upheaval is at the time a lot of slang came out of WW II with returning GI's
Don't understand what people are saying today?
"I dig"
"uh, no, it's 'word'"
"word?
"word!"
eom/eot/fts
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The problem is that spelling is often uncorrected. While this is fine for a casual conversation, spelling errors are unproffesional.
Of course this doesn't mean that some people will not put in the effort to spell correctly when it matters.
More and more I'm seeing people confusing your with you're. What's worse is I often see in one sentence both switched. I'm not sure if that comes entirely from online culture but when other people keep seeing it written so often, they may accept it as correct. Thus affect what is "proper" English.
What bothers me is not the acronyms. It is the degradation of spelling and grammer that seems to be rampant on the net. It makes me cringe to see the way that some people communicate. Of course, the problem could have existed in pre-webforum times, and it is just more apparant now.
P.S. I am intentionally not spell checking this post, because if I mispelled something, it will help to proev my point.
If you can type worth a damn, then it really doesn't save you any time abbreviating everything; it just ends up making you look like a tool. The only time I could consider using such abbreviations is when I'm typing a text message on a phone, or some keyboard that is so hopelessly small that it doesn't lend itself to touch-typing.
What do these so called "linguists" know about language? Go back to eating your stringy pasta...
wtf?11!!1 r u so sure d00d?
I need more mana!
In thirty to forty years, when people can talk easily (or even use video), the netspeak culture will probably be much reduced, if not eliminated. We'll be viewed as antiquated folks, possibly like Beatniks or something, for being so nerdy as to type words all the time. I mean, you have to know how to use a keyboard for that! Ludicrous!
I like "netspeak". I don't use it much, but I like that a subculture exists, as computers have changed things so much that they very much deserve one. I also like that we've already seen a rapid turnaround: our current abbreviations are one variant, the 31337 stuff another, the variant where vowels are always lowercase and consants uppercase (or the other way around) is pretty much gone now, and the old school one from the DOS based BBSes where people used the extended ASCII set to do similar things has been extint for awhile.
Still, I think it's cool that they all exist.
Have you ever noticed how there's a lot more ambiguity trying to talk to someone over the phone than in person? Has anyone here ever gravely offended someone because of a misinterpreted IM?
face to face: Body language + tone of voice
Phone: only tone of voice, losing all the information that bodylanguage brings
IM: nothing.
The English language (others too) is at best an incomplete tool of communication. All the subtleties that tone of voice and body language convey are lost over internet chat. Why else would people use those asinine "smileys" to convey their mood? They do this because otherwise, it's rather difficult to get a feel of the other person's mood.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
I DON7 re411Y 7]-[|]\[C t]-[at d4 IntERN3t ]-[aZ h4d 4 6r34T YmpakT 0N ZPElLI]\[g @nd 1Yt3R4kY. i m3a|\|, I DOn7 e\/EN Uz3 n3Tspe@c, ! JU57 5P3Ll T]-[1NGz ]\[0Rm@1ly 0gnLi|\|3.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Although this is true, I can't really imagine reading a Ph.D report in 1337 speak, let alone the AIM/14yearold abbreviation "language".
Due to improper formatting, everything past LSHMBBB is "off by one".
Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
All my base are belongs to you.
Some of us old timers still prefer to comprehend what we're reading.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
We just need to be concerned if people can't tell when to use one form versus another. In school I was tought not to use "can't" (but to use "can not") in formal writing, but it is perfectly fine in casual writing. Language has many layers to its depth. The fact is "netspeak" fills a role where space is precious, or quick back and forth communication is desired such as in gaming.
I only worry about speech that is not clear or not precise. Netspeak is clear and precise, though you may have to learn it like any other dialect.
I'd imagine it's somewhere in those translation algorithms.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
WTF!!?
It's GRAMMAR, you retard.
Hi. I'm in high school. 3 people in my English class just failed a writing assignment because they used "u" instead of "you," "i" instead of "I" and most importantly "cum" instead of "come."
I'm guessing that English is, in fact, being threatened. If they only used Gaim instead of AIM, they wouldn't have problems with language because it replaces "webspeak" with English.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
...in the future, according to Joss Whedon's short-lived "Firefly" series, we'll speak a variation of Mandarin Chinese (???).
And yes, I pretty much don't know WTF I'm talking about.
IronChefMorimoto
Ofcourse, this is not without controversy -especially with leet-speeking people.
I tried to have a slashdot article of it, but apparently the Higher Mods were of the opinion leet wasn't interesting enough...untill now (?).
The reasearchpaper can be found on: http://www.verbumvanum.org/indexlingua.html
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Except there's a difference between written and spoken language.
The points of things like "CYA" and 'l8r' is that they sound the same as "See ya" and 'later', but they're easier to type (arguably l8r is not easier to type, however). There's no benefit to saying 'cya' versus 'see ya' because it comes out, verbally, the same.
The problem is that this sort of thing alters the way we communicate in a written manner. The English language, especially when it's being written, is already muddled enough without inviting new deficincies just because a bunch of fourteen year old kids are too lazy to type or waste too much time IM'ing each other on cell phones.
Evolving a language is fine, but it should be a purpose-driven evolution to the benefit of communication by informed people, not a reversal just because your offspring are too lazy to communicate properly or are having trivial dicsussions over inadequate mediums. Language shouldn't be negatively changing to fit the medium, the medium should be evolving to adequately handle the language.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
When are we getting machine code natural language?
:-)
It's called Lojban. (Just an interesting tidbit I picked up after having my question answered in the AI thread.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I'd say the biggest problem isn't 1337 speak, but rather spell checkers. Kids today don't correct their writing unless the spell checker catches the problem.
Therefore, no one knows how to spell "their," "there," or "they're" anymore. Same with your/you're and many others.
Sadly, teacher I know are getting lax on punishing these errors, as the problems are so common everyone's scores would be too low.
Besides, can't you just add "lol" to the spell checker's dictionary?
On the flipside, I've found that using a computer to write with has greatly enhanced my spelling. I'm a huge fan of the little red line that appears in Word. It seems like more programs are using ideas like this. For example, in the net arena, iChat for OS X checks your spelling as you type.
So I tend to think the online world has made people communicate in written form more than ever before. That considered, I think it's helped far more than it's hurt.
Mark A. McBride -- OmniNerd.com
I find it humorous when I'm leaving and say "cya" to people I'm talking to, and they translate it as "cover your ass".
"Men are more likely to engage in sarcasm, sexual humor and swearing than women," said Simeon Yates, an expert on computer communication
Welcome to Slashdot!
...of the simple fact that most cannot accept change (it's also an example of too much time on someone's hands to even study this "phenomenon".)
I use IM's all the time and use these forms of "shorthand". However I do not run around using lol instead of actually laughing, nor do I tell my cube farm neighbor "b-r-b" when I will be right back.
He gets IM-related poor grammar/spelling all the time from his kids.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
What about Geek Speak? DDR SDRAM, CPU, GPU, AGP, PCI, ISA, SLI, HP, MPEG, DPI, HDTV, etc.
I don't think 'netspeak' refers to how we actually talk, does it? I don't tell someone "LOL", I actuall "Laugh Out Loud", or in other words, chuckle.
=)
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
My best sig is this one.
English is changing, and it has always been changing. Languages always do.
For a really dramatic show of the change of English over time, check out the extended edition* of LOTR, specifically the Two Towers. When the funeral for Theodred is being held, Eowyn is singing in old english.
See if you can understand it - it is doubtful you can.
*This may be on the regular version, I don't know for certain as I only have the extended versions.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
As to netspeak, my discourse merely exemplifies the vaunted president of vocalizing the oral vernacular!
...a friend of mine and I agreed that eventually the language would evolve into a series of grunts with music following suit by being only one or two notes at a time. The music thing has happened (see electronica). The language is getting there.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Only ord North Korean Srashdotters care about speaking proper Engrish.
Good start. It's still meant to be a spoken language though.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
wtf who cares.
yeah dem ni**az know what i'm talkin' bout dawg. this be only fostering my artistic skillz and evolution of the language, cuz. holla at ya boyz! gonna hooks ya up wiff some bling bling and weez goin' chicken huntin on the dubs yo.. HOLLA!
Communications involves a message, a sender, and a receiver. The message can be thought of as a channel or a carrier. When we talk face to face or even over the phone, additional message channels are used. Body language, hand gestures, vocal tone, facial expressions, and even attire communicate messages that may reinforce the main channel, conflict with it, or provide additional information that is irrelevant to the main channel.
:)
As the article points out, chatting online is more akin to verbalizing than it is to writing. There is instantaneous feedback. However, there is only one channel that is conveyed in the words, intrepretation, connotation, and nuance aside. That's why we have begun using emoticons and other symbols. To enrich the communications process, providing additional information on the back channels. Jargon like BRB, AFAIK, CYA, and even 'K are just shortcuts. They let us communicate faster. However, like any language, the meaning of the shortcuts has to be agreed on first. Back in the CompuServe days (before emoticons even), we used *g* to indicate a grin, smile, or laugh. By setting off the term with symbols, we made sure it was confused as a word and that it had to be interpreted.
So the language is not being polluted. It's just being enhanced for the new communications method. I look forward to the day we're using picts as in Greg Bear's Eon series. Communications could be so much more that it is today.
Isaiah 43:19 (NCV)
Look at the new thing I am going to do. It is already happening. Don't you see it?
I think language butchery is ++ungood.
On a serious note, I think language is important insomuch as it conveys the intended meaning and doesn't detract from it.
Language is a useful, albiet clumsy, inaccurate and time consuming way of exchanging meaning.
My thoughts are, if we can use technology to help us achive that 'ultimate' meaning, where communication barriers are removed, so much the better.
I make no conclusions.
It's like the police explanation of "drug talk" when visiting my gradeschool in the early 80's.
Or the line in Fear and Loathing... "this is called a 'Roach', because it *looks* like a *cockroach*!"
Some people are worried about the purity of the english language? Since when did we become French?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
3/\/61!5|-| !5 /\/07 3phph3(73|)
Or IS he?!?!?!
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Rather, it's the laziness involving a complete lack of punctuation and other more subtle elements of the language which convey the tone and perhaps intent that is worrisome. Combine that with self-correcting software like spell checkers, and essentially a person never really develops communications skills beyond a certain point. And then they carry themselves in text communications as idiots.
A friend applied for a job that he wasn't really interested in and received a form-letter rejection via email, riddled with grammatical errors, incorrect usage of some words (they're/their/there, then/than), and so on. He corrected the letter rather sarcastically and sent it back to them and they actually apologized AND offered him the job! Apparently people who can write english as well as speak it are in short supply.
wtf are these guys to judge speaking 1337 as healthy or unhealthy? It's fscking language
lets face it wv all been here @ sm point
English or any language is bound to change given new discoveries and ways of life. This is just normal
;-)
Evolution? Blashphemy! Everyone right-minded person knows God created all the languages of the earth when He smote the tower of Babel!
We are already communicating under the influence of the computer. Language must change with the way that we communicate.
Tell that to someone coming out of a 20 year coma: "I'm downloading the last meg of a zipped email attachment, then I'll log-off the net and go wardriving."
Expect a blank stare.
You can't take the sky from me...
gasp hack choke gasp
Do not touch -Willie
Even if bandwidth problem is overcome. 1) it will be too difficult manage small screen real-estate to juggle images of multiple conversation participants. 2) I for one enjoy being able to roll my eyes and make other rude gestures at the party on the other end (behind their back) :-)
Unlike French, which is guarded by the French Academy, there is no "official", or "regular" English language.
Instead, there are about 500 Million Plus individual languages, each varying in the number of common elements, which are all collectively called the "English Language".
Unless I have a bigger gun than you, your version of English is just as "correct" as mine.
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
reminds me of neal stephenson's snowcrash. natural language... interesting concept.
Now, get you're ass back to work. We don't, want to piss you're boss off their do, we now?
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
...you have no sense of humor?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
"English or any language is bound to change given new discoveries and ways of life."
Personally I think that the English language being taught in schools in the USA is devolving.
Kids are taught to identify syllables in a word and then to simply 'say' those syllables. The traditional pronunciation (based on derivation and history) is simply ignored.
This is turning the language taught in schools into a purely mechanical method of communication.
'Street' versions of the language are certainly evolving, but the officially taught stuff is being dumbed down.
Why am I filled with a nameless dread as I open this discussion? Why do I fear what I shall find?
I fear I shall see a plethora of posts, all alike in their incoherent use of obscure, incomprehensible acronyms and abbreviations, intelligible only to residents of the deepest rings of the Internet's darkest places.
I fear that, upon reading the content contained herein, I hall be inundated with the text chat of the Deep Old Ones.
I fear such things, and what they portend for the future of language.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I found out a couple years ago that my Grandpa has been using "netspeak" with his ham radio (morse code) for the past 40 years!! And his English (grammar) is just fine.
-Kacy
Reminds me of a Bop dictionary in a MAD from the 50's
"Pin those Hollywood eyes!" -> "See those beautiful girls"
"Like man, that cat is the most" -> "That man is impressive"
"This cat is gone" -> "I'm leaving/I'm dazzled"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
hotboi256: heyz wan 2 cyberzzz
sk8er980: dood im a guy
sk8er980: lolz gay
hotboi256: o sry by
I Was SO scread taht ENGlISH wud TURN in2 THIS111!! omg wtf lol
That doesn't lessen my desire to stab the users of 'Net speak' any.
In fact, it may only raise my desire to stab those who say it's okay to use 'Net speak'.
Can you take this farther, speaking as someone who does not get body language and only unsubtle tones of voice, I revel in text.
See for reference Aspergers and the like.
I do not know if autistics gain by giving up on face to face communications all together, or going that direction, my guess is there are PhDs written on the subject and it is a slippery slope where the game is to play within the extremes.
I do not know but this subject interests me, I may even surf into it, the mess of detail would blunt my sword...
All spelling and grammar copyleft me.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
Same thing with foriegn languages. I had a terrible time in french class because of it. I could translate single words, but forming complete thoughts? forget it
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
... let The English-to-12-Year-Old-AOLer Translator do it for you.
;)
Source.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Most people can't understand that, coma or not.
Lol, u r so wrong! IM and net hasnt done nething 2 my english IMHO.
g2g
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
I am a teacher in a technical university. The people attending class there are expected to do rather smart stuff. Unfortunately they do not realize there is a difference in the way one addresses his friends and more 'formal' communication, so I regularly get mails like:
Hello, I need such or so. Hope u can do this, thanks for ur time
Two things annoy me about this: firstly the presense of non-words, like 'u' or 'ur' etc.
Secondly the general structure, which is completely sender-centered instead of receiver-centered. There is no wrapping of the request, just 'do this for me'. I do not in the least expect students to put me on a pedestal, but please people, thiunk of the receiver, especially when asking stuff (relying on the receiver's goodwill).
The only real changes to the english language since the archaic forms of Old English have been phonemic, and some verb tenses (or so I gathered from my overly difficult grammar course).
There IS a standard form of English, and you probably break it more than you are aware. However, no one really gives two hoots about it as long as you don't sound stupid.
I'm working on it. Right now the largest problem is establishing the correct set of fundamentals.
Example from my above comment:
IF U DONT KNOW N3TSP3AK.!!!1!!1!!!1!!111! WTF LOL LAT TEH ENGLISH-2-12-Y3AR-OLD-AOLER TRANSLA2R!!111! DO IT FOR U!1!!1!!1 OMG WTF SOURCA!11!!1!! WTF )
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
They went on to say "FYI, RTFA"!"
Since when does anyone here read the f---in' article?
Of course. Various chat abbreviations, especially when you're in a hurry are helpful (e.g. brb, because you need to leave quickly to get the cat off X piece of expensive equipment or something). Stupid chatspeak like replacing letters in words when it hardly makes a different, unless it's used in SMS for message length contraints, (e.g. 'lyk') should be banned and/or carry a prison sentence.
Is English the ultimate 'pidigin' language? *shrug* It does seem to absorb everything.
English is built upon 30% French, 30% 'Latinate', 30% West German, and the rest is what was lying around the British Islands (Celtic, Galegic, etc.). All of these influences happened because Britan was invaded...a lot. It has touched many cultures and been everywhere. Grammar and spelling rules are more dictated by historical reasons than pheonetic. It is also heavily 'exported' all over the world due to world influence of Britian and now the US.
Is it bad that Instant Messenger programs and computers communciation in general is changing English? Not really. It just shows that English is very much a living language. Besides I consider it to be a transitive thing: people generate grammatic errors and chose different patters because of the keyboard input. Once technology evolves to something different for the primary Human-Machine interface then this will be less of an issue.
I would guess that by now it's sort of a real language. "Engrish can be simply defined as the humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product design." From the Engrish FAQ Google has about 235,000 entries for Engrish. A religion in the US only need 50 people....
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I keep getting assignments constantly from my students with sentences that:
1) Do not have anything capitalized
2) Do not have periods at the end of the sentence
3) Are run-on sentences
4) Oftentimes have shortcuts for words (the most common being 'u' for the word "you").
Does anybody know where these habits are coming from?
A language is just a tool to communicate. Putting judgement on the quality of the communcation has nothing to do with it, contrary to your belief. Just as there are an unlimited number of uses for a hammer (and most are not creating something useful), there are also unlimited ways to use a language. That the medium should evolve to adequately handle a language is absurd. Tools should be just that, tools. The manner that the user decides to use them shouldn't be hampered by the limitations of the tools, but instead the tools should evolve to handle the intended uses of the user. What those intended uses are will vary by user. Saying that your way of using a tool is the only way it should be used is shortsighted at best; at worst...well those are issues you will have to work out yourself.
No offense, but who cares how the word is pronounced? That varies from region to region, anyway. (Although less so than I imagine it used to. . . it seems in my travels across America that pretty much everyone I meet who is about my age speaks the standard Television accent. I'm much more inclined to agree that the homogenization of our vowels is a problem. It's making the world a more boring place.)
Similarly, though I used to complain that nobody uses the conditional tense anymore, the truth is that the conditional tense is still being used, it's just that the vernacular conjugation of it has changed to make it much more similar to the basic past tense. I think maybe the only people who really need to be afraid of this change are computational linguists, since this change in verb conjugation most likely makes their job that much more difficult.
And using a hammer to drive in a bolt is just as idiotic as using 1337 speak to write your resume.
QED
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
01001001001000000111010001101000011010010110111001 10101100100000011010010111010000100111011100110010 00000110011001100001011100110110100001101001011011 11011011100110000101100010011011000110010100100000 01110100011011110010000001110100011000010110110001 10101100100000011011000110100101101011011001010010 00000111010001101000011010010111001100101110001000 00010101110110100001100101011011100010000001001001 00100000011011110111000001100101011011100010000001 10110101111001001000000110110101101111011101010111 01000110100000101100001000000100100100100000011100 11011011110111010101101110011001000010000001101100 01101001011010110110010100100000011000010010000001 10110101101111011001000110010101101101001011100010 00000101010001101000011001010010000001101101011011 11011100110111010000100000011010010110111001110100 01100101011100100110010101110011011101000110100101 10111001100111001000000111000001100001011100100111 01000010000001101111011001100010000001110100011010 00011001010010000001100011011011110110111001110110 01100101011100100111001101100001011101000110100101 10111101101110001000000110100101110011001000000111 01000110100001100101001000000110100001100001011011 10011001000111001101101000011000010110101101100101 00101110
Ay' 'ya' ya'.
--
make install -not war
.. You mean Jive?
Finally proof that scriptkiddies are talking gibbrish and they don't actually say anything, as I always said!!
virii, this, 1337kiddies!
Hmm.. after reading the wiki article u posted it seems that Lojban is a WYSIWYH (What you see is what you hear language). A language similar to that already exists, its called Hindi. In Hindi the alphabets you read is what it sounds like, if you have something new that you think can't be spoken in hindi, you can join words together. :)
English is the most unpure language and suprisingly the most popular language because of its ease.
I think it's fashionable to talk like this. When I open my mouth, I sound like a modem. The most interesting part of the conversation is the handshake.
Quite true.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
Amateur radio operators have been butchering English for 90 years, and telegraphers before them. The reason is the same: efficient use of bandwidth is more important than elegant style.
010101110001010010100100010010111000111
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
The Hip Hop crowd is screwing up the english language more than anythign ever could.
`n3t5PE4K' d01n9 M0r3 G00d TH4N HArM T0 3NGl1$H lAN9U4ge, 3XPeRt5 54y
:) - 0R 4 $@D ph@Ce L1ke thIS : (. +0 GIVe a HU9, tHe wR1+ER +yPE5 ((((N4M3)))).
8Y R0B3RT 5. BoyD, kNi9h+ RIddER NeWsp4PErS
W@$HiNG+0N - M@NY $cHo0LT3AcheR5, 3dIt0R$ 4nd p@rEn+5 pr0Fe55 +o 83 h0RR1f13D 8Y "ne+5p34K" - Th3 Di5T1nC+Iv3 L4NGUA9e th@+ y0UN9 P3Ople 4r3 U5in9 moR3 4Nd M0rE T0 T4lk w1Th 34Ch o+H3R ON t3h 1N+3RN3t.
PUR15T5 5h0ULd REL@x, 4 p@n3l 0f exPeRT5 dECl4ReD A+ @ RECEn+ 5yMP051UM oN "l4NGUA9E 0N THE In+erNE+" iN W@sH1N9+oN. tHI5 R@p1DlY 5prE4d1nG d19I+@L D14LecT 0Ph eNgLi5H i$ do1n9 M0R3 GoOd +HAn H4rM, ThEY C0nt3NDED.
"+He 1N+3RN3+ I$ fO5+Er1ng NeW k1ND$ 0pH CR34+Ivi+Y +HR0u9H l4N9u493," 54ID D4VId cRyS+4l, 4 h15+ORian 0F LAN9U493 @t THe un1VER51+y 0f w4L35 iN +h3 un1+3D k1ngdOm. "1t'$ TH3 bE91nN1ng 0f @ N3w sT@G3 1N TH3 3V0lu+10n 0Ph Th3 wRIT+eN LAN9u@Ge 4nD @ n3w m0TiV@+10N pHor chIlD @nD 4dULT L1+3R4Cy."
N3+sP34k I$ T3h L4nGuaGe oph ComPuT3r1zEd Ins+aNt mE$S493$, W38 LO9$ (OR "BL095"), ch4+ roOM5 AnD 0thEr 1nPH0Rmal +YPE5 opH 3l3ctROnIC C0MmuNIca+10n. i+ @l$o pOp$ UP 1n W1rEL355 j0t+1nGS On H@nd-H3Ld d3V1Ce5 5UCH 4$ 8lackb3RR13s AND c3LL ph0n35.
5oM3 EX@MpL35 Ar3 "CU" f0r "S3e YoU," "bPHn" pH0R "BYe Ph0R NOw" 4ND "lOl" PHOR "L4U9HIn9 0u+ l0uD." @ POpul4r phe4TuRE I$ @ cOlON foLLOWeD BY a 5p4C3 4nd @ p4R3N+HE$i5 +0 mAKE a "5m1l3y f@c3" T0 8R1GH+3n up 4 m3S54G3 - LIkE +hI$
cRi+IC5 08j3Ct tH4T n3t5p3@k 19NOR35 0R vI0Lat3s +EH U$U4L RUle5 0F pUncTU@tI0n, C4P1+@l1Z4+i0n 4nD 5EN+ENc3 5tRUC+UrE. i+'5 p3pP3ReD W1+H $tR@N9e 488R3VI@+I0N5, 4cr0nYM5 4ND v15U@L $ymbOl$. 1TS 5pELL1nG C4n Be, w3LL, D1FpH3r3nT.
PROfe5$i0N4l L1NgUi5+$ $4Y NO+ +O w0RRY. tH3Y cL4IM TH4+ n3tsPEaK h4$ B3COm3 4 +H1Rd W4Y - 1N @Ddi+10N +o +r@di+i0n@l 5pEECH 4ND WrI+iNg - FoR PeOple +0 COMmun1cAtE wI+h On3 AN0+HeR. It BrINg5 fRESHNE55 @ND CREA+IvI+Y TO EV3RYDAy EN9LI5H, +H3Y s@y. 1T'S EVeN r3v1V1n9 +he 4LM05+ l0$t 4r+ 0PH DI@ry KE3pIN9.
"THe 1NtErNEt H45 pERMiT+3d l@Ngu4gE TO EV0Lv3 4 nEw mEdiUm Of cOMMUniC@+IoN, D1FPHer3N+ In FunD@MEn+Al R35peC+$ Fr0M TR@d1+Ion4l cOnvERS4+1oN4l $pe3CH @ND phr0m wr1t1NG," CRy5tal 541D.
3ven n3TSP3AK en+hu$1@$+S 4cKN0wlEd93 tH4t YoUn9 PeOpL3 N33d T0 lE4rN H0w +O 5P34K 4nd Wr1tE PRoPEr EN9Li5H +0 GET 4He4d 1n sCh00L, h0lD 4 J0b or WR1te offICi4L dOcUMEnTs.
"CHILdr3N H@V3 TO BE +4U9HT 4BOU+ The1R lan9U@gE," cRysT4l $41D. "TH3Y H4v3 T0 lE4rN 480u+ +HE ImpORt4nc3 0F $+4ndARd 3N9Li5H 4s 4 m3DIUm 0ph edUc4TEd COMMUnICAT10n."
4$ 1+'5 u5ED ON +H3 1nT3RN3+, n3TSPe4k H45 50Me FE@+UR3$ 0F boTh 5P0kEn 4Nd WrItTEN 3NGL15h. BU+ 3v3n +HoUGH it'5 +Yped oN 4 K3Y8O4RD, 5Ch0L4R5 $4y 1+'5 Cl05ER +0 HOW wE +@LK +H@N T0 HOW We wR1+3.
LiKE c0nV3r54tION4L 5pEeCH, 1+ U$35 $HORT, B@Ck-@ND-foR+H 5+4TEm3nT5, $0m3tIM3$ c0ns15t1n9 OPh 51n9L3 WORd$. I+s VocAbuL4ry I5 R3L4+1VELY 5M4Ll. 1+'$ R3L4xED 480uT tH3 RuLe5 OPh gR4mMaR. +eh 5mIL3y pH4ce5 4nd 0+h3R $0-C@lLED "3m0+1CONs" HelP COmp3N54T3 pHor +h3 L4cK Oph F@C3-TO-f4c3 C0nT4C+.
1n5+@NT MEs$@GINg, 0R 1m, "L00K5 M0re L1K3 sP3ECH TH4n 1t doE$ l1Ke wR1tInG," 54iD N4Omi B@R0N, 4 l1N9u15+1c5 PR0Ph3$$Or @+ 4m3RIC4n UnIV3r$1+Y In wA$hING+0N WhO 4N4LYz3D MOr3 Th@n 2,100 SUcH c0nv3R$@T10NS 4+ HeR UNIvErSITy.
1T'5 B3C0M3 "@ m@INsT@y 0Ph ONL1N3 COMMUn1c4t10N, e$PeCI4LLY @M0NG TEENa93R$ 4nD Y0unG @dul+5," 5h3 S41d. +HE 3xch@N935 OphTEN inv0lvED MULTiPle P@Rtn3R5 4T +hE 5@M3 t1M3, MUcH LIK3 4 GROuP C0NV3R5@ti0N 1n 4 R0oM.
ThE cOlL393 5TuD3Nt$ b@R0n 5+UDi3D U5U@llY W3rE DO1ng $OM3+h1Ng El53 - Li5TENiN9 +O MU5iC, W4+chIng +v, +aLkINg on tH3 t3l3PH0N3, wRITIN9 M3MO$ OR LeT+eR5 On +Eh 8oXOR - WHIL3 tH3y w3re EXCHAN9iNg INs+4nT ME55493$.
c0NTR@ry +0 PURI5T$' pH3@rs, 0NLy 171 OPH t3H 11,718 w0rd5 5H3 c0lL3c+3d W3Re M155P3ll3d - L355 +h4N 2 P3RC3N+. UNUSu4L @8bRev14+iON5 @ND $Ym8ol$ WeRE R3LatiVELY R4rE. +3H MO5+ ComMOn W45 T3h l3T+3R "K" 5+4NDiN9 FOr "0k."
an0THer BR@NCH 0ph n3tsPE@K 15 8LO9$, P3r10D1C me5$Ag3S P05+3d 0n t3H W0RlD wID3 W3b, U5u@lLY W1+H +3h l4tE$t 3NtRY oN t0P.
It would be nice if(yes, famous last words, I know), like the "all browsers friendly" banners and such, websites could post a highly-visible standard that says "No l33t here, please." It's just not right to have someone going in a technical forum or newsgroup. And then they think it's insulting that people can't, and won't, bother to decipher it, and start flaming in noobish.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
evolution does not need a purpose. it has laws, like natural selection. the whole idea of evolution is to create diversity and the best adapted outsprings will survive.
dont want to troll, just saying that trying to guide this newspeak is useless too. if it turns out to be useful (and it probably is)it is here to stay.
We thought we were so cool ... ah, good times.
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
Duck -> Ducks.
Goose -> Geese.
Moose -> Moose!
See? Wasn't that easy?
but I agree it should be modded up; it's interesting and certainly on topic.
i'd be more worried about the detriments to the language from "management-speak". adjectives that become verbs, nouns that become verbs, nouns that become adjectives...just general abuse ofcertain over-complex synonyms for simple ideas... now that is somthing to worry about. now lets dialog about how we need to form a new paradigm to prevent us from becoming zombiefied and dropping our goals. results are the key!! *shiver*
sometimes, i wonder if i'm the only conservative on teh intarweb. ah well, back to mah hogs and warmongerin'....
Has anyone else ever caught themselves carrying on multiple, overlapping conversations while talking on the phone with someone they usually chat with through IM? An extension of this observation would be regularly interupting or speaking over the opposite party. Perhaps the use of text based IM discussions have a distinct advantage in conversation based on their capability of handling multiple, distinct conversations at once.
Could it also be argued that spelling/grammar aside, students are better at communicating because they have the opportunity to converse with others over the web? Especially since for some students in middle/high school, it's far easier to talk to others online than it is for them to talk in person. From personal experience I'd have to say no, but who knows...
If a male sheep is a ram,
and a wild horse is an ass,
Why is a ram in the ass a goose?
The question is all the more compelling during tax season.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Here's a quote from JH Prynne's poem "Acrylic Tips", one of many to invigorate meaning, context & words. Prynne is the greatest living English language poet, according to quite a few people, me included. The entire poem can be seen at http://www.geocities.com/barque_press/acrylic.html .
...
Over the seam flux penult dissension cries going apart
to panel strip on first insert, to nurse a flint
terrace cut away, they glimpse the line torn in order
antagonist ducted retention. The ordinate now set
Of the influence line my honey at due rain down partly
on useful toil, the ratio of he for living hurt cheeks
to the concentrated reply curtain.
The English language is growing. Put the effort in, grow with it, or you'll become lost.
The traditional pronunciation (based on derivation and history) is simply ignored.
When has the traditional pronounciation been based on derivation and history? It's based on how things are actually pronounced. Frequently, when it's supposedly based on derivation and history, it's wrong: the t in valet was pronounced in the era of French that word was borrowed from, and it was pronounced for hundreds of years in English, until someone came along with "derivation and history".
If there is one thing I am learning the hard way in law school, is how much detailed grammar and accurate, precise writing matters. You cannot leave the law to vague analysis, if you do, the other guy will nail you to the wall. In the same way, video with things like "body language" and other vague interpretations will never replace precise linguistic communication. Unfortunately, it is really hard to be precise with natural language. Its time to create a new language that only has one simple definition for every word. Stupid humans.
I'm (not) sorry, but it strikes me as incredibly arrogant and history-repeated for a bunch of 30-something "those damn kids these days!" geeks to be chastising teenagers for their terrible and foolish Netspeak.
You don't have to use it. You don't have to accomodate people who do. You also have NOT been nominated to police the thoughts and minds of America's youth, and thank heavens you haven't, because I fear the results.
Let me clue some of you old farts into something: these are kids. Kids do not give a rat's ass about being professional. How long ago was it that you were a kid, scoffing at how those silly suits thought they could force you to be something you didn't want to be? One way or another, either you or those suits learned the truth, and life carried on. These kids will too.
Until you understand this point, please refrain from addressing this bugbear you call Netspeak like it's anything more than another display of youthful rebelliousness. Most of you probably spelled as poorly as these kids do now, you just didn't have or use a place like IRC or AIM to put your own incapacity under the microscope, or if you did, nobody ever called you on it either.
(Background: I'm a 25 year old software engineer who's been using the internet as a social and creative outlet for 12 years. I play video games and I often use netspeak as an enjoyable and exaggerated self-parody. Yet I still seem perfectly capable of writing in complete, moderately articulate sentences - I'd gladly put my literacy up against anyone else's who felt they had something to prove. I'm not terribly impressed with kids who use netspeak as a means to communicate with me about anything serious, but I certainly don't feel impelled or called upon to level heavy-handed judgements upon their wayward youthful souls.)
Moo
.... wtf?
If you're going to pick technicality nits with word meanings, you probably should make sure you don't suffer the same problems when you do so.
Would you care to explain to me how something which "does not need a purpose" can have a "whole idea"? Unless you're suggesting, I suppose, that evolution is a thinking thing that doesn't NEED x but CHOOSES to have x anyway?
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
IM: timing, spelling (a hint at seriousness/formlity level) emoticons, captialization (as well as other text decorations). Not to mention that you get to see exactly how it will be seen by the other person before it's sent. IMing can be far more precise and deliberate than speaking face-to-face.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
No offense, but who cares how the word is pronounced?
I do. I can't understand street names anymore, because the people saying them can't agree on how to pronounce them.
One subway driver said something closer to "Oatmeal" than "Old Mill". I had to adjust for his accent, predict his country of original, and "fix" his mistakes before I knew what he meant.
A developer I know once used the term "Lallabo": I had to consider his country of origin, realize that "abo" is an attempt to say "able", and that "lall" was a failed attempt to say "Null". Thus "Lallabo" is "nullable", as in, a "nullable" database field.
I've gotten to the point where I attemp to auto-correct nearly everything that's said to me: sometimes I even have a hard time with real English, because I'm looking for a mistranslation that isn't there. I can't just listen, and understand: I have to pause mentally, re-work the sentence, work through a series of possible meanings and pronunciations, and pick the best one. I didn't use to have to do that. Now, I do. It's a waste of time and effort. Somedays, I'm just not up for it.
One day, in McDonalds, some girl mumbled something to me in some dialect of Ebonics: I just ignored her, because I didn't understand, I was tired, and I didn't feel up to translating anymore. It was rude of me, I know, but society falls apart when we can't communicate with each other. Every day, at work, I have to struggle through the accents and different pronunciations, recasting words and sentences mentally until I figure out what they tried to say. Sometimes, I just can't: how do you explain terms taken from tax accounting to someone who can barely speak basic English? It's a real struggle, and it's very disheartening.
So, who cares about how words are pronounced? I do. We all should.
There's no benefit to saying 'cya' versus 'see ya' because it comes out, verbally, the same.
so what? writing things without capital letters signifies the same utterance; why did you use capital letters? and that gratitous apostrophe?
The English language, especially when it's being written, is already muddled enough without inviting new deficincies just because a bunch of fourteen year old kids are too lazy to type or waste too much time IM'ing each other on cell phones.
Their ancestors butchered the language in the name of typewriters, their more distant ancestors butchered in the name of printing presses; what's new? The hacky changes, like having no seperate key for 1 and 0 on a typewriter, disappear, the more sane one's stay. Or should we really still be trying to reproduce all the ligatures of monistary writing in our printing?
Evolving a language is fine, but it should be a purpose-driven evolution to the benefit of communication by informed people,
It's never happened. Probably never will, and that's probably for the better.
not a reversal just because your offspring are too lazy to communicate properly or are having trivial dicsussions over inadequate mediums.
It's not a reversal; English has never done this before. A poster on Slashdot has little grounds to mock other's trivial discussions, and in fact simple inter-personal relations are critically important to humans.
Language shouldn't be negatively changing to fit the medium, the medium should be evolving to adequately handle the language.
Again, the medium is evolving and most of the more hacky changes will disappear. But it's not like the old style was handed down from God; the reason written material looks as it does in part is because ligatures in printing is hard.
Maybe not them, but Americans are very much threatened by it.
--- What?
wow. i would always say ability to pwn whorde and help your guildmembers thru instances would be high on my list. not being a condescending grumpity old man.
you
because theres nothing 'funner' than being a guild that feigns misunderstanding in the heat of battle./
the only thing that pisses me off about kids is the ones that
spam
every
line
with
a
new
word
because
know
we
might
lose
interest
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Personally, I'd rather have the explosion of imperfect writing since the Internet took off than the much, much lower volume of better writing that preceded it. I'm more afraid of missing good ideas than being offended by poor grammar.
The problem is when netspeak or text-messaging shortcuts start to bleed into other forms of communication such as email or written documents. We have one web developer in my office who often posts internal messages with abbreviated words and inappropriate capitalization. English is not her primary language, which make it important that whatever sources she is reading to learn our language be written in proper English.
You stole my perl script!
CYA has an entirely different meaning than cya.
It's really not much different than shorthand. It's just a way to write faster. The problem is when kids start using it to write school papers.
I completely disagree with this report's findings - English is being threatened by the rise of "netspeak" and it emphatically is not due to an evolving online "culture" - it is simply because too many native-English speakers do not care about the English language and have little to no love of it. If you want online evidence of this, what better example than blogs?
The majority of (native-English language) blogs are very badly written, even popular and well-known ones. Given that many bloggers are (according to the BBC) "young, well-educated, net-savvy males with good incomes and college educations", one has to wonder why this is. I don't mind if people read blogs as long as they recognise the casual, "throw-away" style of writing that is common on these sites. By all means emulate that style if you want, but why should we hold this up as a good thing for our writing or reading skills? You can write polished prose with an informal tone of voice without simply writing your thoughts as they tumble out of your head. But writing well is a skill that takes effort.
Few authors seem to spend the time refining or polishing what they post, and given the transitory nature of many blog posts, I have absolutely no problem with that. What I object to is the incessant hype surrounding blogs that is completely disproportionate to their actual influence or importance.
If you're going to hype blogs - essentially, a written medium - why not actually encourage people to improve their writing skills? A skill that will give anyone immeasurable pleasure for the rest of their life. If you say that blogs don't have to meet anyone's expectations except their authors, then fine, I go back to my original point - why are these blogs getting the attention they don't deserve?
I fear blogs will lower our expectations of good writing, not raise them. If you want breadth, depth, quality and variety in writing, switch off your PC and go to your local library. What you'll find there will easily surpass what you can find online (and you're more likely to become a better reader and writer because of it).
I read this a while ago. I found a pdf of the New York Times article here http://msl1.mit.edu/furdlog/docs/nytimes/2004-12-0 7_nytimes_poor_english.pdf .
Cogent point:
Businesses are having to send people back to school to learn how to write. Many cannot write coherent sentences or paragraphs.
Just try to deal with requirements when not only do they not have a clue, but can't even write their non-clue.
I see it all the time in slashdot. Google returns about 945,000 hits for "grammer". I mean, seriously. I am not an English speaker, and I cannot understand where this error comes from. It's not like the 'a' and 'e' keys are next to each other. It's not a potentially confusing spelling like "it's" vs. "its", or "loose" vs. "lose". And for my foreign, non-English ear, the pronounciation of the 'a' and 'e' vowels are completely distinct.
WTF people write "grammer"?
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
Nonsense. English is the most popular language because of the political, economic and cultural power of a number of English-speaking countries, including the United States. It is actually notoriously difficult to learn for non-native speakers, but ease was never a factor in how popular a language becomes.
"OMG! LMAO!!! Every1 nos that! lol! ttfn! cya!"
OMG, TTFN, CYA are legitimate acronyms for a common phrases and LMAO and LOL express actions which are difficult to express otherwise in words. But 'Every1' for 'everyone' and 'nos' for 'knows' are slow-typer words. I can type around 60-80 WPM (probably typical among slashdotters), and even if I was as accurate with the 1 key as I am typing out 'one', I would still only be saving a fraction of a second at the most. Same with 'nos'. On the other hand, if I had to hunt-and-peck, using as few characters as possible would be the way to optimize my time.
This phenomenon is more exaggerated with cellphone text messages. Because I am fast and know how to use predictive text, I can be as verbose as I please. With predictive text, I can type out 'Everyone' with 8 key presses, but for someone who doesn't know how to use it, it would take you 20 key presses. Shortening it to 'evry1' brings it down to 12 keys.
Generally, I think that as people's typing skills improve, their use of 'netspeak' lessens dramatically. The word 'netspeak' itself is a misnomer, since it mainly signifies the way new, inexperienced users communicate. Experienced users may use dramatic abbreviations in specific venues where conciseness is valued, such as in fast-moving multiplayer games, but I think its mainly new users. As such, I move we distinguish between 'n3tspeak' and 'n00bspeak'.
"It's Dot Com!"
Do you speak Middle-English or Shakespeare in casual conversation? The language changes. Except for the Tower of Babel incident, people don't just wake up one day and decide "OK, today we're not going to speak Old English anymore, we'll speak Middle English now.".
Language change is inevitable and will continue.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
And using a hammer to drive in a bolt is just as idiotic as using 1337 speak to write your resume.
The bolts that are used on telephone poles to allow people without hooks to climb the pole are commonly started with a hammer or other blunt object. Since they are self threading and there is no hole to start with it's an easy way to start. Of course a "better" solution (in end product, if not speed) is to drill a hole first.
I do agree with the sentiment though.
AYRTS, IA?
Not before we get general-purpose artificial intelligence. As it stands, just about every language in use today is context free, so a single statement can have only one meaning. English, on the other hand, can have statements whose meaning cannot be determined in isolation.
"Time flies like an arrow."
"Fruit flies like a banana."
Both sentences can be parsed in either of two ways: Time(noun) flies(verb) like an arrow, or Time(adjective) flies(noun) like an arrow. Don't ask me what a time fly is. It might be some sort of time-travelling insect that's out to destroy us all. I don't want to think about it. The point is, a computer cannot consistently eliminate such possibilities, and therefore has a difficult time figuring out what you're talking about.
Yeah, it would be nice if I could sit down at the computer, start babbling about what I wanted it to do, answer a few clarifying questions, and hit "compile". But that's not going to happen until computers are smart enough to start wondering why exactly they need us meatbots.
English is great for getting around in everyday life, but horrible when you need the sort of precision of thought required to turn your ideas into a running program. Heck, it's not even a wonderful language for describing design requirements.
Keep dreaming, though. This sort of research is going to lead a lot of nifty places.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Unfortunately languages are evolved by the users of language, not by standards committees or any other formal controlled process.
It doesn't really matter how a language _should_ evolve. It'll evolve on it's own regardless of how you believe it should proceed.
No Comment.
There's an old joke along the lines of "How does MS achieve 100% standards compliance? By redifining 'standard' as 'broken'!". This is much the same thing -- they're not saying that overuse of netspeak will result in good english, but overuse of netspeak will result in good *netspeak*, which doesn't look the same to me...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Be sure to check out our friends at Wikipedia, which explain Slashdot, and most of these abreviations.
Slashdot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot and Slashdot subculture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_subculture. Subculture explains such oddities such as "I for one...", and the Soviet Russia jokes.
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
I used English as the example, but I mean a language that does not bother with being speakable. Nifty places indeed.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
1 d15tr4c73d 1t w17h th1s!
1 01 00111101010110010001010101001001001100010011110101 00100100010000100001001000000010000001001001001001 11010101100100010100100000010001110100111101010100 00100000010101000100100001000101001000000100011001 00100101001100010101000100010101010010001000010010 00000010000001010011010000110100111101010010010001 01001000000100000100100000001010110011010100100000 01000110010101010100111001001110010110010010000001 00011001001111010100100010000001010100010010000100 01010010000001010010010001010101001101010100001000 00010011110100011000100000010101010101001100100001
*runs*
01000111010011110010000001001001001101000011000
*trips*
Damn, I was speaking netspeek before most of you even knew what a modem was!
Netspeak is so YESTERDAY. Grow up and show your you have 1/2 a brain and learn a REAL language.
Half of what I see on the net isn't a form of english at all, most of it is crap from people who aren't very intelligent, and butchered the language.. An example: "i m betr tn u" I don't think it's an evolution of the english language, but more of a step-backwards...
"deficincies" or efficiencies? As typing becomes a larger part of the common daily experience expect written English to adapt, as I'll wager it did to the introduction of the typewriter and the pen before it.
Kid #2: "It's like a baby's toy!
Keep your eyes to the sky.
What boils me is the misuse of words - real words that have likely been spellchecked and "corrected" by something.
Homonyms (their, there, they're) are frequently misused - though one rarely sees "hour" in place of "our". Possessives are almost always misused. (It's ITS damn it!) But folks it's almost always "worse than" and not "worse then". (Unless you are saying: "it got worse, then it died.") You are more often going to "lose" something than "loose" it.
It's nice that you want to spell everything correctly, just pick the word you really want to say!
There, that should get rid of that pesky positive karma.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
In what way can the term ease be used to describe anything about English? Let us see:
I could go on with my argument on how badly English is screwed up and aught to be scrapped completely but many others have proven my point through some creative writing:
My mother was an English speaker, you insensitive clod!
Can the guy who runs this site line up the damn definitions with the proper acronyms. sheesh... It's called a table.
Google wouldn't lie!
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
Most people can read text much faster than they can speak, or comfortably listen to speech. Reading text will probably be the fastest, most efficient way to acquire information from the internet for some time. Just think about it, it probably took you 7 or 8 seconds to read this post - try reading it out loud and see how much longer it takes you.
AND ALSO SPEAK LIKE THIS
(In fact I type just about as fast as I can think of the words anyway - so typing any faster would just be a waste)
Do some googling for rate of speech, thinking, listening etc and add the keyword wpm. You'll be shocked to find numerous claims that most people think in the 500-800 WPM range internally.
In fact, while the 'normal' delivery speed is 125-150 WPM, most speakers are easily capable of talking at 300 WPM, especially if they're excited about the topic. In your google searching (see previous paragraph), you'll find plenty of links suggesting that people (educators/salesmen) should talk at 200 WPM to keep the attention of their listeners.
Forget if netspeak is making people more proficient or not in the english language, what about the fact the internet is destroying slowly the use for other languages? Not taking sides, just bringing a debate. Personally I can't wait until we all speak and write in phonetics.
And this is bull, netspeak is making teen's brains rot. We are just showing them that it doesn't matter how you write, and it's going to propagate to other things. Procrastinate!
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
Having a wife who's mother tongue is Russian, I can assure you that English is very easy for foreigners to pick up. With a relatively small vocabulary and EXTREMELY forgiving syntax (not to mention cross-polination of words), most foreingers have no difficulties in communicating well enough to be understood.
Unfortunately, English falls flat in the *mastery* area. Most other languages are easier to master, because they tend to use one word for one concept. The downside to this is that other languages tend to demand mastery, while English allows the speaker to present the concept in as simplistic terms as possible and still be understood.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It'll be handy in 50000 years when other people run out of things to study. They'll be able to study the dead language of English and how it mutated into WTFOMFGLOLOLkthxBBQ!
It's just Crap.
Moosen! I saw a flock of moosen! There were many of them, many much moosen.
Have we thought about the fact that English is already a royal pain in the ass to learn? The language is already hard enough for a non-native to speaker to use- Netspeak is a confused bastardization.
Yes, language will evolve, but for better or worse, English is a standard currency among much of the educated populace. If allowed to devolve (from Devo- devolution, not de-evolution) it's going to turn into a horrible mess.
Here's hoping that's not around the bend. (although I fear it greatly.)
befuddled (noun) 1. Unable to create a pithy sig
g3t 0ff |\/|y l4\/\/n!!!~!!111oneone!!tilde!!!!omgwtfbbq!!
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
And for my foreign, non-English ear, the pronounciation of the 'a' and 'e' vowels are completely distinct.
This is why is happens: phonetics. I myself often have trouble remembering which it should be because of this.
In American English, at least all the dialects I've personally heard, because the emphasis is on the first syllable, the second vowel is often neglected, and since the "a" is is pronounced as a nondescript "uh" in this context (as in both syllables of 'butter'), and the word comes off akin to "gram-rrr".
R is itself a semivowel, which can be pronounced alone without the use of any other vowels, though it isn't properly written that way. The closest vowel combination to a stand-alone "R" is "er", which is itself very close to the "ar" (with 'a' as 'uh', thus 'uhr') in "grammar", hence the easy confusion.
I once drew up a thing that you might find useful, deliniating the different vowel and dipthong sounds used in American English, arrayed in order by similarity, and the stupidly large assortment of different written letters that can make those sounds. This is from memory so it might be a bit off...
VOWEL SOUND
- LETTER EXAMPLES
ee
- "e" in "be", "i" in "sing", "y" in "very", "ea" in "eat", "ee" in "bee".
ih
- "i" in "bit"
aa
- "a" in "bat"
ah
- "o" in "bot", "a" in "car", "augh" as in "caught", "ough" as in "ought", "aw" as in "law"
eh
- "e" as in "bet"
uh
- "u" as in "but", "a" as in "a thing".
oh
- "o" as in "note", "ow" as in "throw", "oa" as in "oats", "eau" as in French
ouh
-"oo" as in "book"
oo
- "u" as in "dude", "o" as in "do", "oo" as in "pool", "ew" as in "new", "ough" as in "through", "w" as in "now" (as part of a dipthong)
And there are two dipthongs that sometimes get single-letter representations in English (the rest are just combinations of the above base sounds):
ee/oo dipthong
- "u" as in "butane" (pronounced like "you" the second person pronoun)
ah/ee dipthong
- "i" as in "kite" (pronounced like "I" the first person pronoun)
Seriously, English pronunciation is just fucked up in the namespace (amongst many other places). We need like twice as many written vowels as we've got to represent all the sounds.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Here's a quote from JH Prynne's poem "Acrylic Tips", one of many [ such poems intended to ] to invigorate meaning, context & words.
I've edititorialized the above quotation because it doesn't stand on it's own. Hopefully, I've supplied the correct interpretation of the words you've so carelessly elided from your prose. Then again, the entire post is heavy on vocabulary, and light on meaning, so perhaps not.
Anyway, I'll bite: In what way can vigour be applied to meaning, exactly? Specifically, by what metric can I disern "vigourous meaning" from "non-vigourous" meaning? How about "invigourated context?" In short, is there any denotative meaning to your words, or is it all obfuscantist snobbery?
Prynne is the greatest living English language poet, according to quite a few people, me included
How did you reach this conclusion, and what drugs were you taking at the time?
Here's a meta-poem I'm sure you'll love:
#!/usr/bin/perl
@wordlist = read_words_from_file($ARGV[0]);
while( $word ne "Finis" ) {
print random_word(@wordlist);
if ( rand(10) ) {
print_random_punctuation();
}
}
There you go! Enjoy! "Poetry" of the highest magnitude. Sheesh!
The English language is growing. Put the effort in, grow with it, or you'll become lost.
One of the best ways to erode a standard is to extend it. You've as yet to assert why adding still more verbiage to a language as over-complicated as English will simpify understanding, or enhance communications. --
AC
how come English is in quotes in the title rather than webspeak?
What is this language "English", of which you speak?
Get your own free personal location tracker
As the other poster pointed out, it comes down to most people today learning their spelling from speech. Or so it seems.
:) would consist of people who had to "brb" for a drink of "wadda".
My personal pet peeve, and I've only really noticed this in the past few years, has been the word "ridiculous". Seemingly overnight, half of the under-25 crowd on IRC started typing "rediculous". Drove me bonkers for months. Finally, I went on a very long and pompous tirade about spelling. I couldn't take it anymore.
Several of them then explained to me that that is how they think it's spelled, because that's how it's pronounced. Which made no sense to me at all, for 2 reasons:
1. If this were the case, channel #philidelphia (and others, I'm going to stereotype here
2. IT'S NOT PRONOUNCED THAT WAY!
Or so I thought. Being back in school at the time, I then started asking the folks I knew to pronounce "ridiculous". Turns out, an awful lot of them DO pronounce it that way. By the way, for any non-English natives, rId and rEd have fairly different pronunciations in most English dialects. But not to these kids.
I've noticed an awful lot of this lately. Kids used to mis-pronounce words because of how they're spelled. Understandable to a degree, because English is nothing if not inconsistent. But with the advent of a generation that seems to get most of its reading done online (and IM and other forms of chat simply exacerbate the problem), what I'm seeing lately is the opposite: words being mis-spelled because of how they're pronounced.
And this, folks, is how languages evolve very quickly. 30 years ago, we had a somewhat consistent written language (yes, there are differences like color vs colour), with much variation in the spoken form. These days, the written form is reflecting the spoken form. Kind of annoying for those of us with inner spelling and grammar Nazis (notice the distinct lack of apostrophe when pluralizing, people!!!).
Kind of like Hindi/Punjabi - 2 different written forms, but mostly the same spoken form. Or so I'm told by friends from India/Pakistan.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Is "English" "threatened" by "the" misuse of "quotation marks"?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Couldn't it simply be a modern form of abbreviation. People have been doing that for hundreds of years.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Unlike French, which is guarded by the French Academy, there is no "official", or "regular" English language.
Hate to burst their bubble, but the same goes for French.
Officials from France can disagree all they want, but in Quebec, they speak FRENCH. And it's rather different than parisian French, much in the same way American English is different from that spoken in London.
There are a lot of other places in the world that speak French as well, with their own dialects/slang/inflection. Regardless of what the French Academy says.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I was told in an ethics class that the language itself is sexist because we use 'he' or 'she' and not some gender-neutral word as the standard pronoun. The problem is that 'them' is plural and it mucks up the language to put that in there and 'he/she' is not a good solution either. Too much punctuation (especially ('s or /'s) is distracting.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Both sentences can be parsed in either of two ways: Time(noun) flies(verb) like an arrow, or Time(adjective) flies(noun) like an arrow. Don't ask me what a time fly is. It might be some sort of time-travelling insect that's out to destroy us all. I don't want to think about it. The point is, a computer cannot consistently eliminate such possibilities, and therefore has a difficult time figuring out what you're talking about.
A computer would have no more difficulty than we would. Most people upon first hearing the time flies/fruit flies thing don't get it. Then, after thinking and sorting it out, they choose the one which has the best probability based upon context. Many words have multiple meanings, especially in English, and generally the correct meaning is easily identified based upon what is being discussed.
The real trick is in getting a computer to have the requisite background experience to derive that context. However, assuming that (large hand waving going on here) then the rest is easy (for large values of easy).
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Those were great. Wish I could mod you up.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Personally I think that the English language being taught in schools in the USA is devolving.
Kids are taught to identify syllables in a word and then to simply 'say' those syllables.
Have you considered that this is a tendency to move towards a (quasi-)phonetical language ? I don't see anything bad in this, except for the inaccuracy of the fact that it'll probably still be called "English".
It is also highly debatable that it is an involution. As far as I know, among live Indo-European languages (i.e. Europe, much of Asia and the Americas) English is the only one which has "spelling contests". Being myself a native speaker or a quasi-phonetic language, I find absurd this situation in English. I never had to worry about spelling, and there definitely weren't any "spelling contests" in school. Grammar was a different matter, but that's a whole different story.
Also, there are numerous studies that link dyslexia with non-phonetical spelling, in particular with English and French.
If you considered these aspects, I don't think that "dumbing down" the language taught in schools in US is a very bad idea. It will change the language and it will likely separate it from English (first in pronunciation, then likely in spelling as well), but it will also likely be easier to learn and understand (both by children and foreigners). Don't you think this is a good idea ? Why should we waste time with an artificially difficult language ?
Of course, it is likely it would still be called English, which is something I would disagree with. Hopefully somebody will have the brilliant idea (and the political balls) to call it something else (e.g. American).
That's not to say I find a mistake and stop reading -- typos happen to everyone, including me, as anyone who looks at my posting history knows -- but rather that those who won't make any effort to communicate effiently aren't going to impinge on my time.
There's also a difference between formal language and informal language, and a difference between monologue and discourse. Chances are that when you see a friend on the street, you don't launch into a speech. Rather, you exchange a series of mostly monosyllables and sentence fragments. If, however, you begin telling a story or explaining something, you'll use mostly complete sentences and organize them in a logical structure. If you are called upon to do some public speaking, you will probably additionally enunciate more and add extra information to cover for the fact that the audience cannot interrupt you with questions.
The "netspeak" discussed in the article is the written counterpart to conversational English. It is not derived from formal writing; it is derived from informal spoken discourse, adapted to typed text.
It is obviously inappropriate for formal writing, and students have to be taught to write well, but there's no reason that they can't chat online informally and write papers formally. No parents avoid chatting around the breakfast table for fear that they will somehow damage their ability to give speeches. Cicero didn't deliver a prepared speech when he wanted to know how his friends were feeling, and there's no reason people chatting online should write essays to each other.
(Incidentally, the plural of "medium" is "media", unless your offspring are chatting with the dead)
There's always the possiblity that you suck as a teacher.
Let's get some things straight:
1) You can certainly say that in a more tactful way.
2) I don't know what profession you are in, but even in my chair on a computer that's x miles away from you, knowing nothing about you except what you type, I can't infer nor would I even try to rate how you perform in your profession. I'll leave that up to the people that work with you.
Kapeesh?
This calls for a Spelling/Grammar Nazi:
It's spelled grammar!! Just like it, err, doesn't sound.
"There are three 2's in the English language" try to spell the word 2 in that sentence and get it right. =} surfs up
To Hell with the Queen of England!
Were the misspellings of "impure", "grammar" and "ought" deliberate, in order to further illustrate your point? ;-)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Awesome analysis. Wish I had mod points.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Somebody's been reading Wikipedia...
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Nice post. I'll just present one counter point.
Everybody can read and understand English, even PHBs. So, if we had a reliable C -> English translator, then even PHBs would be able to understand what a given function does (I doubt they'd be able to understand a complete system, since that involves holding together the interaction lots of functions.)
Rational (of ROSE fame) invented a language called 'Controlled English'. This is English with a formal lexicon and grammar, absolutely awful to write, but great for giving to PHBs to read.
While we cannot convert C to English as such, we can convert various languages (including English) to Controlled English. And we can convert Controlled English to C. Ergo, we can write English and produce C.
Now, I cannot see programmers being made redundant in any great hurry since the English to Controlled English process requires the standard set of programming skills, as does writing a full spec., regardless of it being in English. However, I can see it helping non-programmers to at least comprehend what programmers do.
Military speak.
CYA is originally a military acronym, for example, as are many of the "new" Netspeak acronyms.
So STFU and GWTP already.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Leela: 0101100101? What does it mean?
Bender: Eh, it's just gibberish.
[sees reflection in mirror]
Bender: 1010011010? Aaaah!
I wonder if some of the "dialects" of English such as those found in various Regions of the United States contribute to the mastery problem? I have found that European langauages and Slavic language speakers seem to take to English very well. Of course since English is kind of a "melting pot" lanaguage at least a few words should be familiar to almost any foreign language!
abbreviated communications has been with us since telegrams
BCNU
I am a Finn, and I'd say that English is definitely an easy language to learn and master. Finnish, for example, is much more difficult to learn, but it is also much more "powerful" language in terms of versatility in expressing things.
Also other languages like Russian and Swedish seem more difficult to learn than English.
Of course it helps learning a lot that you actually NEED the language in everyday life, which is the case with English. Major part of TV-programming is in English, although subtitled. Surfing the net and using a computer would be a pain in the ass without the knowledge of English.
So English definitely has many advantages over other languages, which make it easier to learn. But it is also quite an easy language initially.
Because grammer is also in the dictionary, it is not what you meant though.. You just need to be more careful...
Your sentence structures and seemingly drug-addled (mis)use of capitalization caused my eyes to spontaneously begin bleeding.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
So you really tried it, huh? How's that working out for you? Was the postage expensive?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Just like Shorthand did... Oh wait nevermind that didn't destroy the language. I say we don't call these people "purists". The word twit comes to mind as a better description. If people expected me to use proper English in a chat room then it would be time for me to disconnect. Its web chatter folks not Shakespear for god's sake. Imagine playing Counter Strike and not using webspeak. You would get shot in the head before you finished typing "Why that was a very humorous comment you made" instead of just LOL!
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
All this is nice and well. But it misses a major point in my opinion: when you stop exercising (any activity, not just language), you lose ability. Simple as that. Writing and speaking correctly are a form of exercising. It's a bit as though someone said: "I like to play the guitar with one finger only; after all, it sounds ok to me". And when enough people have lost enough ability to write, society will have to lower its standards to accommodate.
At the risk of going all serious, to a degree I actually disagree with this, and the conclusions of TFA.
I used to spend a lot of time helping out on a couple of technical newsgroups for newbies to programming, web design, etc. They were small communities, but very helpful to those who found and took advantage of them. However, those who contributed their advice obviously had limited time to volunteer. While most posts did get an answer from someone, those that were clearly written were far more likely to receive a detailed response.
By the nature of the groups, we attracted quite a few of the IM/txt msg generation. Some of their habits (dropping all the capital letters, for example) were simply annoying, and most posters did actually start writing in reasonable English when a polite request was made pointing out that this made responding more pleasant for those who would like to help. However, sometimes the poster was so caught up in their own L337sp33k that we simply couldn't understand what was being asked. In a discussion about a technical subject, often filled with jargon with precise meanings and code snippets that obviously have to be written exactly correctly, using random abbreviations because you can't be bothered to type an extra couple of letters and then expecting someone who's volunteering their time to spend even longer trying to figure out what you meant isn't a great way to encourage helpful replies!
YHBT. HTH. HAND.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I wonder if some of the "dialects" of English such as those found in various Regions of the United States contribute to the mastery problem?
;-)
Not really. The biggest hurdle in mastering English is laziness. Most people don't want to learn "big words" such as "pyrotechnic", "facetious", "colloquial", or "penultimate" when simpler phrases such as "explosive devices", "bad joke", "local slang", and "second to ultimate" can be used just as well. Unfortunately, the former words convey quite a bit more richness in their definitions than the later phrases do. This results in the phrase "you know what I mean?" being constantly uttered.
Even worse is when people use phrases such as "He went to the store" instead of "He walked to the store", "He drove to the store", or "He jogged to the store". The former is perfectly acceptable, but fails to communicate many of the details inherent in the described excursion.
The second biggest barrier is proper grammar. Again, it take quite a bit of practice to state, "My apologies, I was unavoidably detained." instead of "Sorry I'm late." The former conveys far more elequance of speech than the later, thus setting the stage for productive communication.
Remember, only you can prevent yourself from saying, "And I was like, ugh, and she was like duh, and he was like whatever, then I went like that, and then you know..."
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
in grammer? Well there are probably several dozen grammer nazis reading this post that can atest that there is nothing easy about the English grammer. In fact several of the grammer nazis will correct what the last grammer nazi did wrong.
Unfortunately, the "Grammer nazis" are all too busy persecuting themselves for incorrect spelling to nitpick this post right now. Another instance of Godwin's Law in action.
For anyone confused, 'FP' is a common Slashdot abbreviation for 'First Post'.
It is traditional to reply to posts that are not actually the first but still proclaim 'FP' with the phrase 'You fail it'; 'it' being the act of obtaining the first post of an article.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
I agree, but that does not make 1337 speak any less valid a form of communication than whatever word choices you make on your resume. This is exactly what I was getting at, the prejudice of one form of english over another. It is not based on fact at all, but rather opinion, so too argue one is better than another is the same as saying purple is a better color than brown. Sure, I probably would prefer the latter for my house, but I don't want my flowers that color. I'll go with the first one there. Same goes with language. All depends on what you want to do with it.
New EC Regulations
The European Commision have just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU rather than German, which was
the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase-in plan that will be known as "Euro-English":
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c"... Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favor of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with the "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e"'s in the languag is disgracful, and they should go away.
By the 4th yar, peopl will be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz yar, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After ziz fifz yar, ve vil hav a reli sesibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezy tu understand ech ozer.
ZE DREM VIL FINALI KOM TRU ! ! !
One of the HUGE stumbling blocks of many languages is grammatical gender. In German "Der" for male, "Die" for female, and "Das" for neuter.
Every single noun has a gender association and in most cases this is UTTERLY random. The word for woman, "Fraulein," is neuter! Please explain the logic of that.
English has none of this. It's "the boy" "the girl" "the dick in my ear" - which is actually an even better example because in German the 'my' (mein) must also reflect the gender of the word 'ear.' In addition to German, French, Spanish, and many many - both Indo-European and other - languages share this same problem. This is one of the major aspects of English that makes basic entry into the language incredibly easy. Mastery of English, as other posters have pointed out, is considerably more difficult.
--Ryv
Use of such "dictionary" words as you posted is perfectly acceptable in some circles but not in others. I wouldn't speak to someone from "down home" in Lower Alabama with words like that, I'd say "Sorry I'm late Ya'll, there was a big Sale down at Wal-Mart and I had to get some stuff before it went off Sale". If I said "Pardon my lack of timely arrival however I was unavoidably detained by the fact of I had to take advantage of the opportunity to procure some merchandise at a massive discount at the local retail emporium" I'd be laughed out of town. Understanding when it is OK to show your intelligence and grasp of a foreign language and when you should just use the local color to blend in is very hard for non-natives. As long as someone communicates the point I don't hold using local terms against them. But I SO hate the abuse of "You know", that'll set me off very quickly you know? ;)
Wow, what utter rubbish. Maybe 200 years of time will prove me wrong, but I doubt it.
Garbage. Your post is the manifestation of a "culture war" of sorts between the Latin roots and the Germanic roots of the English language. Ever since the Norman Conquest, Latin was seen as more "dignified", which it isn't. Half the rules of modern prescriptive grammar were simply invented by people who wanted English to be more "proper", i.e. more like Latin. For instance, "split infinitives" are a myth.
V guvax rirelguvat jbhyq or n jubyr ybg orggre vs crbcyr whfg yrnearq gb pbzzhavpngr va ebg13. Guvax bs gur yvgrenel zrevgf bs fhpu n ynathntr, abg gb zragvba gur havdhr naq vagrerfgvat fbhaqf gung jbhyq or znqr jura crbcyr gevrq gb fcrnx!
Ease in getting started. You can say most anything with a knowledge of few hundred words, and remarkably few rules. That you can say the same thing in a more complicated way with a knowledge of a few tens of thousands of words, and many more rules is largely irrelevant.
But overall, yes, the gender situation drives me nuts too. To paraphrase Mark Twain, a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are masculine; nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes feminine; hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience neuter.
Oh, and it gets even worse. It's only der, die, das in the nominative case. In accusative, it's den, die, das, in dative, it's dem, der, dem, and in genitive it's des, der, des! Enough to make anybody tear their hair out.
ROZFL!
Awesome progression. Parent is definitely worth the read!
I found this sometime aeons ago and just Google'd a copy of it online here...
t ion.shtml
http://www.mipmip.dsl.pipex.com/tidbits/pronuncia
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Good Brian Regan impression. You beat me to it.
"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces." --Aldo Leopold (Paraphrased)
Engrish is easy to pick up, English eludes many of its native speakers. The article is a prime example although Yahoo! is not exactly the most scholarly source.
The 'ease' of English applies even with its convolutedness. The main advantage people run into with English is that the grammar is so deformed that almost anything can be said. Many people who are new to the language can actually speak it with their native grammar set and be intelligible, although very odd sounding. Also, a lot of what you noted is an issue with written English, but simply doesn't apply to spoken English.
Basically, being somewhat understandable with English is 'easy' while being fluent in English is 'the next best thing to impossible'.
However, I have to agree with those 'other reasons' for being popular. One of the major ones is that most modern computing originated in the US, in English. And, with us being in the 'information age', that leaves tidbits of English in every country in the world. Similarly, the disgustingly large amount of media exported by the US and the UK (they are the only net-exporters of media, as I recall) leaves more English scattered about the globe.
Every single noun has a gender association and in most cases this is UTTERLY random. The word for woman, "Fraulein," is neuter! Please explain the logic of that.
Frau is the word for woman. Fräulein is more like "young woman" or "girl" and is neutral because of the suffix -lein (Mädchen, the other word for girl is neuter for the same reason). All words ending in -lein or -chen are 'das'. The explanation I was given many years ago when I first learned German was that it was a diminuative form.
Also, the fact that Fräulein and Mädchen are neuter makes them unpopular with many women who don't want to be referred to as an 'it' rather than a 'she.'
English has none of this. It's "the boy" "the girl" "the dick in my ear" - which is actually an even better example because in German the 'my' (mein) must also reflect the gender of the word 'ear.'
It's actually worse than that even. Not only does the suffix on "mein" have to reflect the gender, it also has to point out the case (subject/direct object/indirect object/possessive). "in my ear" becomes "in meinem Ohr" rather than just "Mein Ohr".
I agree with you though. English is very easy to learn to a functional level, but once you think you have it figured out there's a million special cases where the 'rules' don't quite apply. German is more unforgiving to a beginner, but it is also a lot more rigid in grammatical form and there are few exceptions to the rules (other than the occasional feeling that a particular word's der/die/das association was picked out of a hat).
The part I would agree with you about is our relatively forgiving syntax: No genders. Almost nothing in the way of case-marking. Very simple rules for agglutination, where it occurs. And for all that, we're relatively tolerant about word order. Our pronunciation is - I think - also relatively simple, if somewhat harsh. (The Russian-born grandfather of a friend of mine once said, "English is a dog's language! Everyone who speaks it barks like a dog!")
Actually, I sometimes wish English had a little more case-marking. Consider "Bob spoke to Jim about his job." Whose job? You can't tell from the sentence, because there's no marking on "his".
WTF!!!!
People can and do speak more than one language. They also can and do speak more than one dialect, too! Humans can intentionally choose how to talk given the communicative situation!!
Would you please stop "cringing" for fuck's sake!?!!
Accept that language changes!!!!! Your rules of English are not heaven sent!!!!!!
The point of language is to communicate. Not to be "eloquent" or other such garbage.
http://archive.gamespy.com/dailyvictim/index.asp?i d=174
A red filter only lets red light through.
It's a lameness filter.
It only lets lame posts through.
Corrolary: My post is lame.
QED.
They could try to make a "worthwhile post filter", of course, but then we wouldn't have anything left to read.
"English is the most unpure language and suprisingly the most popular language because of its ease."
impure.
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
| |1|3 1337!
Tell that to your potential employer when you submit your next resume.
There's a time and place for everything. Using big words at informal gatherings or your blog might be inappropriate, but so is misspelling words in a business letter or resume. Once in a while it does matter, and when it does you need to be able to wield the language impressively.
... but it sure threatens us BOFH pedants.
/Obligatory S.O.D. reference //Someone had to lower the IQ of this thread
Eloquence \El"o*quence\, n. [F. ['e]loquence, L. eloquentia, fr. eloquens. See {Eloquent}.]
1. Fluent, forcible, elegant, and persuasive speech in public; the power of expressing strong emotions in striking and appropriate language either spoken or written, thereby producing conviction or persuasion.
[1913 Webster]
Sounds like it essentially boils down to effective communication, no?
We need more efficient keyboards. The standard Querty thing has lasted long enough.
I don't mean small, incremental fixes like the Dvorak layout, we need a substantial change in keyboard (or more generally, computer input) design. Ten fingers can press ten keys in 1023 combinations (the 1024th is with all keys up). This allows not only the common control, alt and function keys and combinations, but hundreds of codes for the most common combinations of word sequences.
Such a thing may well be surpassed by voice recognition becoming more reliable and easily usable, but I still think it could be a good change.
A radical new keyboard is far from a new idea, I recall magazine blurb of a sinle-handed "chorded" keyboard in a ball shape from circa 15 years ago.
Tag lost or not installed.
... it's often a ... I don't know, newbie? Non-USA resident? I'm not sure how to or if I can fairly categorize such a poster, but in so many of the technical groups I've seen several people respond to posts such as:
I cant get this 2 work, can u help me?
with admonitions to write proper English and cut it with the cute abbreviations, and rightly so. Such things look like Rebuses, and makes the poster look illiterate (maybe he/she is).
They might be coming from the realtime chat world which I rarely get into (perhaps it's because I'm middle age and see it as a younger person's thing), and carrying their overabbreviated "talking" into areas where it's not appropriate.
OTOH, I've fairly often done some of this myself, using common online abbreviations such as AFAIK and OTOH, as well as cutsy HTML-like statements to describe the tone of a sentence or statement.
<Sudden Insight>
Why don't you ask your students where they pick up such writing habits?
</si>
Tag lost or not installed.
> "Fraulein," is neuter! Please explain the logic of that.
Please don't use 'Fraeulein'. Its considered outfashioned and often downright rude in nowadays german.
These are a fairly big thing to some people. Ey/eir/em.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Since "pyrotechnic", "facetious", "colloquial" and "penultimate" are latin words, with similar ones on most of the western languages, I don't think that the problem is laziness. It much more feasible to have natural english speakers avoiding that words by laziness than most of the people for who it is the second language.
But I agree with your grammar observation. It is very hard to master another a foreign grammar.
Rethinking email
[1]
Thanks to the Internet, the language's "resources for the expression of informality in writing have hugely increased, something which hasn't been seen in English since the Middle Ages, and which was largely lost when standard English came to be established in the 18th century," Crystal said.
But that's not going to happen until computers are smart enough to start wondering why exactly they need us meatbots.
Correction: I think the proper term would be meatbags, master.
"Evolving a language is fine, but it should be a purpose-driven evolution to the benefit of communication by informed people, not a reversal just because your offspring are too lazy to communicate properly or are having trivial dicsussions over inadequate mediums."
g elog/
l og/archive s/000402.htmlg uagelog/archive s/000403.html
When people subtitute easyer ways to write through lasiness, it actually make language better, because it makes it easyer and more efficient. This all happens through a natural brain mechanism meant to make language evolve to be as easy and usefull as possible.
"Language shouldn't be negatively changing to fit the medium, the medium should be evolving to adequately handle the language."
That is like saying that we shouldn't update our tools to fit new technological advancments we should instead use the new technology to make the old tools be easyer to use. Language is a communication tool. It doesn't make any sense to work for our tools. The tools should work for us.
For more info read The Language Log which is a blog writen by some of the world's leading linguists:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langua
they have slashdot related entries:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/lan
gee isn't it nice that we got permission from the bow-tied ivory tower people?
"after all you have minimum, maximum, and then... "
Medium.
"Unfortunately, the former words convey quite a bit more richness"
No, not really. The word I'm looking for here is "sesquipedalian," or perhaps the *ahem* colloquial phrase "stuck up."
""My apologies, I was unavoidably detained." instead of "Sorry I'm late." The former conveys far more elequance of speech than the later, thus setting the stage for productive communication."
While the latter hurries through the apology process and skips ahead to whatever it was the speaker was late for. The former phrasing could suggest that the speaker was "unavoidably detained" because they were busy being anal about something.
By the way, "my apologies" is a fragment; what's happening to your apologies? "Sorry I'm late" suffers from the same problem, but at least they're not trying to put on airs.
Also, in America, generally, 'he went to the store' is the functional equivalent of 'he drove to the store'.
Perhaps you say 'Did I convey my dispatch in a manner which was understandable?', rather than "Do you know what I mean?". Personally, I'd say that the latter is both clear and concise, and thus a proper use of the language. Your right that we should endeavor to use language to it's fullest potential, but often I am more concerned with getting the message across than confounding someone who hasn't a vocabulary which matches my cant.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
"English has none of this. It's "the boy" "the girl" "the dick in my ear""
I dunno, that last one sounds pretty German to me. I'm sure there's a German website with that on it somewhere...
Language does change, of course, in response to new pressures, technologies, and environments. But there's also an advantage to having a language that is, in many ways, both constant and common. For one thing, language evolves differently in different environments - lacking rules to standard written english, or allowing them to migrate too far according to the dynamic in a particular environment or socioeconomic class results in both a limitation on personal mobility and a limitation on ability to effectively communicate.
Language will inevitably be changed by the way that we communicate, but the hope is that that will not make the great works of the past inaccessible, and that it will not have a negative influence on existing patterns of communication. The more the language changes, the less accessible are Beowulf (already pretty far-gone,) Chaucer, Milton, and even Shakespeare.
You spelled grammar wrong!
But, I'll just betyou did on porpoise just to make a point.
When spoken out loud, "should of" sounds very much like "should've" -- which is a contraction for "should have".
Like the swastika and disbelief in the whats been coined the holocost.
Let this be a lesson to you:
The former conveys far more elequance of speech than the later, thus setting the stage for productive communication.
If you're going to prescribe language like you seem to do, never, ever make a misspelling.
I also forgot to tell you that it is former/latter, not former/later.
Would you care to explain to me how something which "does not need a purpose" can have a "whole idea"?
"Idea" is a very generic term- absolutely anything you can write about has ideas about it. "Purpose" is a more specific term, and means that an intelligent being gave something an intent (either because the object under discussion is itself intelligent, or it was designed by someone with goals in mind).
Rocks have no purpose, but the whole idea is silicate atoms in a cohesive, low-reactivity form.
Gravity has no purpose, but the whole idea is that massive objects accelerate towards each other.
1. The reality of phonological change, and linguistic change in general
Not really. The biggest hurdle in mastering English is laziness.
This is a very common sentiment among educated people, cross-linguistically and cross-culturally. In basically every culture around the world, there is a group of people, usually middle-aged, that believes that people spoke their language "correctly" about a generation or two ago.
The fact is that languages change constantly, and lots of these changes can be pretty well understood as natural processes. For instance, if you're from the US, you probably pronounce the word butter with a d-like sound in normal speech (linguists call the sound a "voiced alveolar tap"). So it sounds just like "budder". When people started using that pronunciation, their elders probably thought them "lazy" as well. I can almost hear them saying, "Pronounce your t's properly!"
But think about it. In order to pronounce the word with a proper tt in the middle, you'd have to turn your voice on to say the b and the u, then turn it off to say tt, and then turn it back on to say er. It's much easier to just leave your voice on! And that's what people started doing. If you say the word with a hard t sound in America today, people will probably consider it strange.
This does not imply that the speakers are/were lazy. In fact, this is a ridiculously common kind of phonological change. The same thing happened, for instance, when Latin amicus (pronounced [amikus]) changed to Modern Spanish amigo. That [k] sound turned to a [g] because it was between two vowels.
2. Registers
The second biggest barrier is proper grammar. Again, it take quite a bit of practice to state, "My apologies, I was unavoidably detained." instead of "Sorry I'm late." The former conveys far more elequance of speech than the later, thus setting the stage for productive communication.
People use different means of encoding meanings depending upon the register. That is, you speak differently depending on the social context. If you're late for a job interview, you probably wouldn't say my bad, the fuckin freeway's a mess by way of apology. Similarly, if you're late arriving to a keg party, you probably wouldn't say my apologies, I was unavoidably detained, unless you mean to be mildly humorous. (One probably wouldn't say that last sentence to one's spouse, either. The sentence is pretty strongly restricted to formal contexts.)
3. The reality of syntactic change
Regarding grammar, that's always in flux too. Consider the sentence, I'm going to buy a car next week. This is a future tense construction in Modern English, even though it doesn't much look like one to an educated reader. The word going in this kind of sentence no longer implies any kind of movement, as evidenced by the sentence, I'm going to sit here in my chair for three hours. (This construction, by the way, is being heavily phonologically reduced these days, to I'm gonna do or even I'munna do. This is something that happens very frequently to grammatical markers.)
What is going on here? Well, English speakers used to only use the verb go to mean movement. They then began using it for movement associated with proximal futures (with modal and aspectual meaning tied in), as in
Ev
in grammer? Well there are probably several dozen grammer nazis reading this post that can atest that there is nothing easy about the English grammer. In fact several of the grammer nazis will correct what the last grammer nazi did wrong.
Newsflash! People are not as smart as they think they are! English has an interesting position in the language world -- there are those that believe that there is only one way to speak a language correctly, and they know this correct way; yet there is no body governing the English language like there is the French Academy for French.
Furthermore, I teach English, and it is not so hard to learn the grammar. Most complexities come from colloqualisms. Furthermore, the complex grammar (college-level) is as difficult as many other languages' complex grammars (I speak two other languages -- both learned -- so I am aware of the difficulties in learning high-level grammars).
Certainly English is easy to spell so long as you remember that there are no rules except that there are exceptions to every rule.
Most language have these exceptions. In Japanese, for instance, 'hana' can mean 'flower' or 'nose' depending on the pitch of the two syllables 'ha' and 'na' in relation to each other. And, yes, they are written the same. There are hundreds of these in Japanese alone. Korean is the same. In Chinese, you don't even know the pronunciation of a word you have read unless you've been taught it, because there is hardly any pronunciation help encoded into the hanzi writing system! Additionally, some characters that you have been taught change meaning AND pronunciation, despite being written the same! The only example I can think of off the top of my head (I'm not native by any means) is the 'large' character typically pronounced 'da' with a falling (4th) tone. However, in 'doctor' it is pronounced 'dai4'. There are others that I once learned, but have since forgot. Moving away from Asian languages, Spanish has a regular set of pronunciation and accentuation rules, but there are exceptions. For example, I was at a restaurant the other day and ordered the El Guero. Spanish pronunciation rules tell you it contains the pronunciation 'ge' like in 'get'. However, it is sometimes written with a diaraesis above the 'u' to remind you that it is actually 'gwe' as in 'Gwen'. I could go on and on about many different languages and their breakage of spelling rules.
There was an article I read about a linguist who derived pronunciation rules for English that were accurate somewhere around 95% of the time -- that's a highly accurate pronunciation system!
maybe it is intuitive? Certainly, after all you have minimum, maximum, and then... middlemum (my 3 year old came up with that one when trying to explain the average of something to us).
Oh, there's a shock -- your three-year old can't speak perfect English. I spend time with a 3-year old Japanese girl because she is a friend's daughter -- my Japanese grammar is better than hers, and I'm not a native speaker, because she is three years old. Also, there is a word called 'medium'. And these words are not the fault of English -- I suspect you should take your problems outside with Latin on that one.
in speech? Based on the number of lawyers we have around and the lengths of even the smallest legal document needed to clearly expain a common sense topic I see no way of descibing English speech as easy (not to use or understand).
Have you ever glanced at legal documents in other languages? They are just as complex as English documents. The problem with spoken language is that it was not created to be logically perfect -- it developed in order to allow people to express themselves. If a langauge was truly as hard to learn as people make it out to be, there would be no advantage to learning one, as it would take 20 years of non-speech before we could master it!
All that being said, I did enjoy your poem, and do agree that mastering English is diffic
true!!! but your use of ! SuXoRS!!!!!!
Most people don't want to learn "big words" such as "pyrotechnic", "facetious", "colloquial", or "penultimate" when simpler phrases such as "explosive devices", "bad joke", "local slang", and "second to ultimate" can be used just as well.
- h/15329-h.htm
Swift said much the same thing. A linguist, Elizabeth Elstob, working on Anglo-Saxon at the time, used the preface of her grammar to rip his article to pieces and demonstrate the power of monosyllables in English. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/3/2/15329/15329
Not everyone can read or write or comprehend English. The people currently in power comprehend English, but that was not the case a few hundred years ago, and it will not be the case a few hundred years later.
Remember that the bulk of the worlds population lies outside the English speaking countries.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
s/english/mandarin/ig and the argument still holds. Virtually any natual language is riddled with ambiguity, and virtually any natural language can have an unambiguious form.
Also remember that since, by definition, the computer can unambiguously parse the controlled english, it can trivially generate controlled mandarin/whatever.
Note that we don't have swastika in Unicode, even though we have a lot of symbols that don't warrant being included.
And no, that goofy Chinese rare-used ideogram that looks vaguely like swastika but is drawn in a different way ("sticks", uneven lines, etc) doesn't count.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
perhaps less less nerdish if you wrote your own decoder?
As a CW op on HF, abbreviationss are used reduce the number of characters sent. Example of a typical CW transmission:
FB Joe on ur HT-32 and SX-101. Had a 37 as my first rig. Ur RST is 5nn hr in Boring, MD. WX is cldy temp 39f. Rig is an IC730 running 100W a G5RV ant. pse QSY up 5 -- QRM. My YL is calling for dinner. BTU joe for a final W1AW de N3LSY
Translation into English: Fine business Joe on your old Hallicrafters HT-32 transmitter and SX-101 Receiver. My first shortwave transmitter was a Hallicrafters HT-37. I am receiving a strong pure and clear signal here in Boring, Maryland. Weather is cloudy, and the temperature is 39 degrees fahrenheit. My radio is an ICOM IC-730 transceiver transmitting 100 watts of power into a G5RV designed ladder-line fed dipole. Please retune your radio up 5 kilohertz because I am receiving man-made interference. Back to you Joe for a final word, my wife says supper is almost ready. W1AW from N3LSY
Bullshit. Every meeting with my friends (just kidding, I don't actually have any) starts with something like:
Beer?
OK.
And then the language deteriorates about 120 minutes later after comments about the barmaid's tits, the latest "news" and "shit, this place is crappy" interaction.
CYA and l8r are examples of rebus writing. The Mayans and Japanese did it for thousands of years. Why can't we?
If you go back to 6th century Japanese especially, the way they abused the Chinese writing system was just insane. My favorite example is the use of the number 16 to mean a wild boar.
4 is pronounced 'shi,' so shishi (boar) == 4*4 == 16.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Seriously, the English language hasn't undergone any kind of reform since well before the great vowel migration. That makes the written form of our language nearly 500 years old!
Also, we only have half as many letters as we have sounds in English. We have 1/3 as many vowel symbols as vowels! Think about that. The Latin Alphabet was super for Latin, but it's woefully inadequate for English.
Who can blame kids for wanting to hack the writing system into something useable?
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
The difference between the two parsings is in the way the words are stressed. When time (adjective) modifies flies (noun) there is considerably more stress on time than on flies. When pronounced the other way, both time and flies are stressed alike.
The proper way to get around the ambiguity in writing is to write "timeflies" as one word, like fruitflies and houseflies.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
The reference to my 3 year old was mostly humour but with the point that there are many words in English where what seems to be the logical extension is not. Your point about the Latin is well taken.
Thanks for the information...I learned a bit about other languages.
I am sure that no language out there is perfect (or even close) but I do have fun poking at my own.
Merlin.
See? You just gave the history and now it makes sense! :D
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
And there is of course the point made in the movie Men in Black, that space aliens consider english to be a primitive, infectious scourge of a language. Which I'm sure people in the Bloc Quebecois Party would agree with.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
.evom ton seod gis eht
:)
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
I'm pretty sure at this point, nobody knows how to spell segue anymore.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
The point is that speaking passable English is easy, as in easier than many other languages. Speaking correct English is difficult, but many languages are more difficult.
P.S. I don't think the word "aught" means what you think it does.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Methinks the word "facetious" does not mean what you think it does. "Facetious" does not imply bad humor. It's more of a tongue-in-cheek.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Suck it, asshat.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
sigh.