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"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"!"
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.
So who's going to be the next Netscape?
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
...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.
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Why would you want to do that?
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
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.
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 agree. They need to stop worrying about acronyms and start doing something about all of these overused and misplaced quotation marks.
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The slashcode sports site
Some of us old timers still prefer to comprehend what we're reading.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
English is most definately a real language albeit an extremely complicated and unorganized one. It seems there is no other requirements to be an "English" word other than a certain amount of the population has to recognize it. This is in stark contrast to other languages such as French where new words undergo much scrutiny before being admitted into the language. Languages such as Latin have strict guidelines that most words seem to follow while English has so many exceptions it's not even funny.
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!
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?
It could be an overuse of quotation marks, or it could be a sarcastic reference to the false concept of "English" as a monolithic, standardised language.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Whether gaming or chatting on AIM (or even email), I refuse to converse with people who can't make an effort to speak properly. I read english. I don't read txt-msg. I should not have to read your sentences three or four times to figure out what you're saying, just because you're too lazy to write propertly. And hell, it's more difficult to write like that than it is to write properly. Takes more time, too.
It's not an elitist thing, either. It's just a matter of time and energy. I don't have any more time to sit and puzzle together someone's stupid "netspeak" comments than I have to figure out what the fuck something like "skeet" means.
Worse is when someone can't be bothered to type "you are" instead of "u r" - but they can be bothered to put 50 exclamation points in the same fucking sentence.
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?
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
We've condensed all these down into three letters which could mean so many things they really mean nothing. You'll rarely catch me using it or conversing with people who consistently do so.
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.
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.
Indeed. It is not so much the use of Netspeak as it occurs on the Internet, but that it has a tendency to creep into other areas of written language. Those who are weaned on Netspeak may simply use it because it's all they know. While I don't think it spells the end for the English language, I am certainly reluctant to (contrary to the article's author) refer to Netspeak as creative or beneficial. Worried? Nah, I'm not worried. There are plenty of English majors and linguists around to keep the faith, but there are plenty more id10t5 whose use of Netspeak just plain makes me sad.
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?
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.
Well, I wouldn't call anything that includes getting your government to ban words a "good job".
French government forbidding their employees to say "e-mail" just because it's a word that came from English is nothing but pure nazism.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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".
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.
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!
English is what is refered to as a 'living language' which allows for a language to evolve and change as the times do so. An example of this is the term 'computer' which in the not too distant past refered to a person who performed computations, not a machine. As for 'blog', 'email' and 'text' there are few things to note. First, according to Knuth, 'Email (let's drop the hyphen)' (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.h tml). If you don't agree then use 'E-mail'; however both are technicaly correct and may be acceptably interchanged. I am a little warry of addressing 'blog' and 'text' because they are hottly opinionated subjects. In my opinion 'blog' and 'text' have similar properties as 'walk.'
Observe:
I went for a walk. (Past tense reference to a particular instant in time)
I am walking.
I will walk. or
I walk. (Active tense)
While I dislike both the term 'blog' and use of 'text' as a verb, I can't discount that the template applies.
Living languages are prone to these changes and that's what makes a language like English great. Languages that cease to change die off and slowly become less socialy pervasive as a primary form of communication, Latin for example.
As an aside, because Netspeak occurs in more than one language it shoud probably be classified as a linguistic construct associated with some non-descript language.
As with all opinions these are mine, yours may differ, and that's just fine.
I am invisble, and you can't see me.
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
I've found that to be generally untrue when coming from someone who writes like in the parent's example.
The effort expended is typically not worth it.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
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.
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)
I will feel a certain amount of schadenfreud concerning the impending demise of other languages.
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! --
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.
Ah skeet ... skeet ... skeet .... motherfucker!
English allows it fine.
People that make up arbitrary rules that have little bearing on how easy a sentence is to construct or understand may not allow it, but that's entirely different.
Most rules like that someone just made up one day. Probably because it worked like that in Latin or Greek and they're 'Proper' languages, so therefore English must be shoehorned into following their rules.
Never mind that people had been using the forms that suddenly become 'wrong' for hundreds of years beforehand. - The suprious "Don't split infinitives" rule is one of those.
Personally I don't think there are rules so much as observations. At least not when talking about colloquial speech, which is what 90% of English is.
Formal English is another matter, but even there it's not so much hard rules, as a set of guidlines chosen for a specific purpose.
Advanced users are users too!
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
I guess you are not very fond of abstract art and cubism then... Seriously, if people do communicate this way, then there might be some benefit in it, even if you can't fathom it.
You must also realise that some people can read/write in such shortcuts very easily, and it's you who can be ridiculous not being able to quickly read the "garbled" message (especially in MMOGs, counter-strike and web-chats).
I almost never use webspeak/textspeak/leetspeak, but I do appreciate the beauty of it and I would have used it more for SMSing if only I was sure that people would understand it (it's silly to ask in advance, and I suspect they aren't hip and trendy enough to be familiar with it).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
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