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Literature Teeters on the Edge of a 'Gr8 Fall'
aicrules writes "Yahoo news is reporting that the great works of literature often read and discussed by the brighter of our up-and-comers could be the latest victim of reaching the lowest common denominator at the potential expense of everyone. The article describes the efforts of Dot Mobile to make such literary masterpieces as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet more accessible. From the article, 'We are confident that our version of 'text' books will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy,'"
The article describes the efforts of Dot Mobile to make such literary masterpieces as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet more accessible.
Perhaps Professor Sutherland ought to check out the following links:
Romeo & Juliet
Hamlet
Kudos to Chris Coutts...they're still damned funny, although the idea of Professor Sutherland pitching this sort of thing for real is just ludicrous. As the epitath on the Bard's tombstone reads:Does this mean that Professor Sutherland is cursed, since he's caused Shakespeare's corpse to spin at such a rapid rate? ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Make them into games.
Can you imagine a more violent game than Romeo and Juliet?
Two gang waring mafia type families and a plot where the two main characters die?
Have the full text and add a game requirement that you have to talk to people with the accent and all. actually walk up to people and ask them questions and make statements that forward the game, rather than the standard now where you just button mash to get through the plot and power up.
Mix the two areas, good games need good plot, and good books need to be read by later generations.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Hamlet, for examplem, is a story delivered by a writer that likely invented more new words and phrases that "stuck" with the language than any other single person, this particular play being a prime example. Is translating this story(and a translation is effectively what it is) to a particularly crude and simplistic laguage that is designed for brevity, sometimes comedy, and not much else some sort of crime? Well, no, not really, because you can translate it well, or poorly. Let's say it's poor(and it will be). This means you have a poorly translated classic. What will happen? No-one will read it, and those that do won't recommend it to their friends. This is no more relevant than a Coles Notes of Hamlet, or Reader's Digest Abridged. Last time I checked, Reader's Digest, sitting on a humble hamper in my mother's bathroom, hasn't brought about the end of civilization as we know it. It's introduced a story to someone who likely wouldn't have read it in it's original form.
What *is* bad is the lack of support for reading the original in general. Like video games and violence, I don't think cel-speak causes illiteracy. I think the illiterate are drawn to it.
DT
To some extent is is just an alarmist attack on progress. It's more efficient to write "How R U?" into a cell phone if the other person is familiar with the language. But previous generations have been right about culture loss from progress. How many people speak or read Latin today? 50 years ago there were thousands if not millions more who knew at least a little. Instead we knoew computer languages and "L337 Speak".
;-) When you're part of them, you can teach them the old ways of english, and dazzle them with complete sentences.
http://1337hax0r.com/ the URL there wouldn't have made sense 10 years ago, now it does to some people.
With every little bit lost, we gain in another area. Old people don't want change because we have to leave behind stuff that works already, and learn on top of it too. Such is life though, so embrace your leet speaking underlords when possible so you don't get left too far behind
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Actually, it's worse than that.
It's not merely substitution of "u" for "you". It's an entire dialect. If you read through it "aloud" (i.e. subvocalizing every word, in the order in which it's written), it's parsable as spoken English, but not as written English.
The frightening part is that it's an indication that we're indeed raising a generation of illiterates. People who make it through school in this state can (probably) read English, they can (definitely) speak English, but without punctuation or capitalization, they're incapable of writing it.
(random googling ensues... revealing the following representative sample that appears to discuss the physics/animation of a computer basketball game)
Stick a few commas and periods and capitals in there and it's essentially a machine-generated transcript of the following spoken English:
The punctuation and capitalization cues aren't strictly necessary to make sense of it, but their presence enables a brain to quickly scan over the passage without having to read it as though it were dialogue on a script.
Net effect: People who write English can have their ideas read and digested more rapidly than people who write in txtspeak.
But if we're moving to a postliterate society, that might not be such a hindrance for the illiterates. If you can read English quickly (because most of the written English you'll encounter still contains punctuation/capitalization), but are never required to write English (because omnipresent voice/video messaging has replaced email as a means of communication), maybe it doesn't matter that you're half-illiterate.
Oh, it is sad that I know this: You're looking for a movie called "In the Flesh". It is surprisingly, shockingly true to the play.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Did you ever think that by reading through it, it would increase you intelligence, and ability to do it again. Learning isn't supposed to be easy, the harder the climb, the more pathways you develop, and the easier it is to do again.
I'm glad I did, because now I'm trying to get through Heidegger, but I think that was mostly because I finally could read/reason through all of Kant. Sure, I could have taken a short cut, but what is the point? I don't plan on reading Ann Rice my whole life, I'd much rather read something that makes me a better person, and doing this requires work.
The best ever is the one year, in college, where I got through all of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, and the short fictions and plays of Sartre, all in the course of one lazy summer, on my own. Was some of it hard? Could I have quit and got the Cliff Notes, no, since I would feel like a moron, a cheater. I would have rather quit than that.
But this is coming from someone who has never touched a Cliffs note in their lives. Cliff Bars, though, thats a different story.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Not to mention that Billy S. was writing for a popular audience, not for the annuals of liturature and lit professors.
He had theatres to fill and Groundlings to amuse. The PhD thesies on his writing came much, much later.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
... to the three or four English majors that may read this.
"Great Literature" is [homer] BOOOOORING! [/homer]
This is not a sign that people can't read. Arguably, with the profusion of websites, mobile phones, instant messaging, and whatever other elsewise crap, people read now more than they have since dime novels were popular. That it's the modern equivalent of dime novels shouldn't come as a great shock. The best-selling books are romance novels that feature kinky sex, and the most-watched TV waffles between doctor shows that feature kinky sex, cop shows that feature kinky sex, and reality shows that tease you with the promise of kinky sex but actually only have people eating cow eyeballs.
Bitching that people can't make head or tail of Shakespeare, think the Grapes of Wrath is a shiraz that gives you the runs, and haven't got the patience to read Tolstoynian phone-book novels, does NOT make you any less of a nasty stuck-up prick who thinks he's better than everyone else.
You stop telling me to read Shakespeare, and I'll stop telling you to read Stephen King, and we'll both be happy.
That is close to correct English grammar, but is not English spelling. Old English and Middle English are very different from modern English. I know what you're saying, and I think that you know better. We aren't experiencing the evolution of a language, we're experiencing the destruction of a language. People don't know how things are supposed to be spelled, and they don't bother with grammar.
For example, if you take the average person on this site, you'll tend to get passable to good grammer and spelling. Some people are very proper, some don't try, and most make only a few mistakes: a typical distribution.
1337-speak and txtspk are, respectively, ridiculous and a throw-back to Old English. I don't like trying to read Old English, because you almost have to subvocalise it to read it. That everyone spelled different from one another does not make it better.
You might as well try to follow a symphony by reading the sheet music.
Actually, a few of us enjoy doing that from time to time.
And don't forget that Beethoven was deaf by the time he completed his Ninth Symphony. So he wrote a symphony by reading the sheet music.
resigned