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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"!"
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.
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?
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 ...
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Some of us old timers still prefer to comprehend what we're reading.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
"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
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
... 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).
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 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?
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
I don't get it. President or precedent?
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.
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'....
I thought you liked your coffee cold and bitter?
Yeah, yeah, I know, Offtopic.
But, this one goes to 11.
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
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.
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
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!
1 d15tr4c73d 1t w17h th1s!
1 01 00111101010110010001010101001001001100010011110101 00100100010000100001001000000010000001001001001001 11010101100100010100100000010001110100111101010100 00100000010101000100100001000101001000000100011001 00100101001100010101000100010101010010001000010010 00000010000001010011010000110100111101010010010001 01001000000100000100100000001010110011010100100000 01000110010101010100111001001110010110010010000001 00011001001111010100100010000001010100010010000100 01010010000001010010010001010101001101010100001000 00010011110100011000100000010101010101001100100001
*runs*
01000111010011110010000001001001001101000011000
*trips*
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:
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.
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."
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.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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).
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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)
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.
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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.
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!
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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..."
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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.
"after all you have minimum, maximum, and then... "
Medium.
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
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.
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