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"English" Not Threatened By Webspeak
MudButt writes "Linguists say not to worry too much about Netspeak, otherwise known as the language of choice in chat rooms and IM clients. According to this Yahoo! article, linguists say that terms like "cya", "brb", "afk" are a healthy way of exploring the power of the written language. They went on to say "FYI, RTFA"!"
English or any language is bound to change given new discoveries and ways of life. This is just normal
We are already communicating under the influence of the computer. Language must change with the way that we communicate.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
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]
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.
I agree. They need to stop worrying about acronyms and start doing something about all of these overused and misplaced quotation marks.
sportsdot
The slashcode sports site
Some of us old timers still prefer to comprehend what we're reading.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.
What's up with these quotation marks?
We shouldn't get "hung up" with things like the "misuse" of "punctuation". We're "geeks" and as such we should be "allowed" to "misuse" the English "language".
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
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 unfortunately cause french to be brain-damaged when it comes to technology or any field that moves relatively fast.
If french do have a word for things that are computer related for instance, it's likely to be akward or unusable (like the absence of distinction between download and upload).
And French is my native language.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
01011001011011110111010100100000011011100110010101 10010101100100001000000111000001110011011110010110 00110110100001101001011000010111010001110010011010 01011000110010000001101000011001010110110001110000 00101110
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
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....
How'd you get that past the lameness filter?
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:
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)
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