"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"!"

Comments

When are we getting machine code natural language?

[Eunuch]

That is, encoding English like we encode with a compiler?

Netspeak?

[ackthpt]

'gf', 'wtf[h]', 'swak', 'asap'
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

Re:Netspeak?

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of really old netspeak, one of Alfred Bester's later novels, The Computer Connection, is completely awash in what is initially incomprehensible futurespeak. Eventually it becomes bearable, but I think he gets the dubious credit as the first to type that sort of abbreviated language. (If you read his other books, you'll see it's a natural progression from his previous experiments in language and typesetting.)

Spelling & Grammer

[andrew_0812]

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.

OSS Strikes Again

[dteichman2]

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.

Other research claims 'netspeak' is not a language

[N3wsByt3]

in the first place... so why should anyone be worried?

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

Re:When are we getting machine code natural langua

[AKAImBatman]

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.) :-)

My teacher friend would disagree

[geoffrobinson]

He gets IM-related poor grammar/spelling all the time from his kids.

Netspeak, not idiotalk

[katsiris]

Of course there's nothing wrong with playing with acronyms and trying to increase the efficiency of communications. I'm sometimes wonder about these so-called short-cuts not really being shortcuts (many of them are a lot harder to type than the actual word), but I don't think the concern is slang destroying english.

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.

Which version of English is threatened?

[jimbro2k]

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.

Re:Threatened? How about evolving?

[Fizzog]

"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.

Not a problem for many.

[totierne]

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.

Re:The problem with real-time text communication

[NoData]

While I won't comment on the irony of this post coming from someone named "133t-somethingorother,"
I agree with you completely. I'm kind of "older" for the IM crowd (early 30s), and in general, I find it absolutely infuriating. It's the most impoverished mode of communication i've ever experienced. All the absence of conversational pragmatics normally present in speech, and none of the well-formed ideas of writing. Email, while it may be half-duplex, at least has the advantage that a single message is intended as an independent "bolus" of information. Somebody has a thought or inquiry that they send to you and you can grok it without immediate interaction. They may want a response quickly, but they're not gauging your emotional reaction by the speed of your response, unlike in conversation. IM screws all of that up. How many times have I been IM'ing someone, and make some pithy, funny, or purposely inciting remark, only to hear the virtual Muzak playing while there's some sudden delay. We used to call it "rhythm springing" when I was a kid, when you'd be on the phone with a bud, mid-story, and call waiting would interrupt. Here, you have the added bonus of not knowing what the hell is going on. Younger people (like early 20s) that I IM with at work seem to be more OK with this disjoint nature. To me it's incredibly rude and exasperating not to know if you're "engaged" in a conversation or not. IM swings wildly between just a virtual bulletin board for private messages that you get to whenever you can (much like email) and a real-time conversation without much warning. Older IMers I find at least have the decency to say "hold on" or "on the phone" or "someone here" to give you a cue, whereas younger follks seem to have developed a convention where it's cool to just leave people hanging. I dunno. Maybe I IM with jerks.

So in addition to the very good point you make that you can't convey tone-of-voice (more important in a real-time conversation than an email), even conversational timing is all bollocksed in IM.

Another angle...

[Valthezeh]

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...

English is on the decline

[Lord_Scrumptious]

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).

What's up with "grammer"?

[leoboiko]

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"?

Re:What's up with "grammer"?

[Dirtside]

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.

I think you'll find that the frequency of this misspelling has skyrocketed since Frasier came on the air.

Re:Video

[modest apricot]

While it's not video, mission controllers at NASA do what's called "cross-talking" over audio. Basically, they conduct anywhere from one to several conversations simultaneously that are pertinent to their particular station. The representative I talked to said it takes some getting used to to be able to listen to one conversation while talking in another, but it's doable.

Re:When are we getting machine code natural langua

[WasteOfAmmo]

English is the most unpure language and suprisingly the most popular language because of its ease.

In what way can the term ease be used to describe anything about English? Let us see:

• 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.
• in spelling? Certainly English is easy to spell so long as you remember that there are no rules except that there are exceptions to every rule.
• 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).
• 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).

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:

We polish the Polish furniture.
He could lead if he would get the lead out.
A farm can produce produce.
The dump was so full it had to refuse refuse.
The soldier decided to desert in the desert.
The present is a good time to present the present.
At the Army base, a bass was painted on the head of a bass drum.
The dove dove into the bushes.
I did not object to the object.
The insurance for the invalid was invalid.
The bandage was wound around the wound.
There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
They were too close to the door to close it.
The buck does funny things when the does are present.
They sent a sewer down to stitch the tear in the sewer line.
To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
After a number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number.
I shed a tear when I saw the tear in my clothes.
I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
I spent last evening evening out a pile of dirt.

The English Lesson
We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox is oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice,
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be pen?
The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.
And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet,
But I give a boot... would a pair be beet?
If one is a tooth, and a whole set is teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth?
If the singular is this, and the plural is these,
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be kese?
Then one may be that, and three be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose.
We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim.
So our English, I think you will agree,
Is the trickiest language you ever did see.

I take it you already know
of tough, and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
on hiccough, through, slough and though.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead!
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight an

Re:"English"

[Atzanteol]

Currently, it's still one single language with many dialects, but it might soon reach a point where these dialects will be recognized as different languages of their own right, with different grammars.

It may have, if we were still hundreds of years ago. I think with the internet and ease of international travel, the various dialects may actually merge more. I already hear certain "britishisms" (look ma, I created a new word!) being used in the US (across the pond, 'bloody', etc.). IMHO the more the world communicates, the more we'll converge on a single language with 'minor' variations.

Weird American English Vowels

[Pfhorrest]

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.

And rightly so...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

"Rediculous"

[freeweed]

As the other poster pointed out, it comes down to most people today learning their spelling from speech. Or so it seems.

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 :) would consist of people who had to "brb" for a drink of "wadda".

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.

Re:When are we getting machine code natural langua

[lakeland]

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.

Re:Famous quote

[BadMrMojo]

[The English Language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

- George Orwell - http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html

Re:When are we getting machine code natural langua

[AKAImBatman]

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..." ;-)

Re:When are we getting machine code natural langua

[TheoMurpse]

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