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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"!"
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.
"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]
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.
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" ----------
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.
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?
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.
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."
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 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.
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
Wow! You managed to post with netspeak and produce valid Perl code all in the same posting.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
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
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:
Does anybody know where these habits are coming from?
There's always the possiblity that you suck as a teacher. One thing that pissed me off in high school was bad teaching. If an entire class fails a math test, retakes it, and fails again, the problem is most likely not the stsudents. Either the test is poorly written or the teacher didn't do their job.
I'm not saying that you're neccesarily the problem, I'm just asking you to examine yourself first if it's a seemingly widespread problem.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
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
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."
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 wonder if some of the "dialects" of English such as those found in various Regions of the United States contribute to the mastery problem?
;-)
Not really. The biggest hurdle in mastering English is laziness. Most people don't want to learn "big words" such as "pyrotechnic", "facetious", "colloquial", or "penultimate" when simpler phrases such as "explosive devices", "bad joke", "local slang", and "second to ultimate" can be used just as well. Unfortunately, the former words convey quite a bit more richness in their definitions than the later phrases do. This results in the phrase "you know what I mean?" being constantly uttered.
Even worse is when people use phrases such as "He went to the store" instead of "He walked to the store", "He drove to the store", or "He jogged to the store". The former is perfectly acceptable, but fails to communicate many of the details inherent in the described excursion.
The second biggest barrier is proper grammar. Again, it take quite a bit of practice to state, "My apologies, I was unavoidably detained." instead of "Sorry I'm late." The former conveys far more elequance of speech than the later, thus setting the stage for productive communication.
Remember, only you can prevent yourself from saying, "And I was like, ugh, and she was like duh, and he was like whatever, then I went like that, and then you know..."
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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