Slashdot Mirror
How the Internet Is Changing Language
Ant writes "BBC News reports on how the internet is changing language. What was once understandable only to the tech savvy has become common. From the article: 'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own Internet slang. But is the Web changing language and is everyone up to speed?'"
LOL.
And yeah, I've heard people say it IRL. I've also heard people say IRL IRL.
First Post becomes common
"[...] is everyone up to speed?"
No. That's the whole point of slang - you use it to show that you belong in a specific subgroup. If everyone is "up to speed" on some slang it no longer works as slang. Everyone who wants to show subgroup membership (and that's everybody, pretty much) will start using other new words and expressions instead.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
WIBBLE
d0 57upid 7r4|\|5147i0|\| 14|\|gu4g35 (0u|\|7?
The Internet lets everybody in the world talk to each other, faster and more flexibly than before. So yes, that's going to change language, because people who would have never talked to each other are doing so, and people who had obscure things to talk about can find other people to talk about them with that they wouldn't have before.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
'How teh intartubez are changing how ppl speak' ?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Is that thing still around?
back in time : Slashdot = News for nerds, stuff that matters.
now : Slashdot = Useless stuff, badly reported, just to get clicks.
I FOUND THES N3AT ANGLISH 2 INT3RNAT SP3AK TRANSLA2R!11!!! OMG LOL
http://ssshotaru.homestead.com/files/aolertranslator.html
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
and "Leetspeak" in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.
Last time I checked, none of my code l00k3d 1ik3 7h15.
... changing ur langwigez!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Not only has the internet changed the way some people speek, but just the common use of keyboards without the intervention of editing or editors (or thinking, sometimes) has contributed to the way we speak online, and occasionally in real life. A few examples that pop to mind are "borken," a simple transposition of the "r" and "o" in broken-- and of course thanks to the Swedish Chef. That transposition also gave us the incredibly useful word "bork" as well. The transposition "teh" has also crept into usage, usually to show some sort of derision or sarcasm.
What other transpositions or artifacts of keyboard usage can /. come up with?
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
OMG PONIES
Go back 50 years, and you will probably find the same commentary about television. How it was spreading new terms and speech patterns and what not.
It's funny, though. I tried to Google for articles, posts and blogs about this from 50 years ago, and didn't find anything.
Were people back 50 years ago too lazy to post crap on the Internet . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
There are some questions about BBC and the abuse of language its broadcasters seem to engage in.
BBC : Normal Humans
Reg you lay toe ree : Regulatory (lah instead of lay)
Drugs War : Drug War
Drink Driving : Drunk Driving (or Drinking and Driving)
Al bee nizm : Albinism (with a pine sound in the middle)
BBC Sport : I guess they used up there stocks of the letter s on Drugs War
Sigh rah que suh : Syracuse (with a see sound at the start)
Aw say kah : Osaka (with an oh sound and then a saw sound)
The BBC has a tongue firmly in cheeck if they are addressing the changes in language. Surely they do not speak the Englis of the King anymore. Nor that of the Queen. Nor even some unacknowledged bastard, nine degrees removed variant therof.
I am totally ignoring their pronunciation (or is that pro noun see ae shun?) of various English town names. I assume some of those are at least rooted in antiquity.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
The single most hacked word is "your" lol. Who started it?
I've been on the online scene since the Fidonet era, circa the 1980's, and I'm still trying to learn new online slangs all the time.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
My eight year old son plays the usual games in the playground but I noticed that it is now possible to pause them. The way it works in you are running around playing Tag or something and somebody says Pause and everything stops. Its a bit like time out in basketball, but for me it is directly derived from the electronic games they play which generally have a Pause function.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I have never thought languages can change. I thought they talk the way they do since stone age. Honestly. They found out that languages change due to a new innovation which changed the life of many people? The industrial revolution also changed the language of people. They now know what a company is and a factory and in most countries they know what a labor union is and what it is good for.
But even more astonishing then finding out, that new things influence languages, is the fact that they came up with this result just now. The people know verbs like to google now almost since Google became so popular. And kids use abbreviations very often. So they use LOL as word or IRL or IMHO or BTW. Some of these abbreviations are used in speech and text and other are only present in text form. Almost forgot cu, me 2, and all those SMS shortcuts.
But now I have to tend to something more important. I heard a rice sack has fallen over. In China. Can you imagine.
Language evolves.. but it still evolves along the same lines and 'rules' as before.
For instance, we now have "to google" in English, but if you turn that into a French verb, it needs a French verb ending, thus "googler".
In German you'd need an -n but "googlen" doesn't work, but by transposing the letters you can use the -eln verb ending and so you have "googeln".
In Swedish, verbs need an -a ending, requiring the 'e' be dropped, so "googla".
... you'd just lengthen the first syllable so you'd have "Gooooogle".
Hey , the Muppet Show taught me all I need to know about language! Though admittedly some of
its facts were a bit fozzy around the edges.
How can they talk so "professionally" about internet slang when it took them 20 years to realize its importance?
Reminded me of this: http://i.imgur.com/MFEQB.jpg
So many complaints about /. articles.
So why do you people come back ... and waste time reading ... then wasting more time commenting?
Come to Australia so we can strip search you and rob you of your internets, pr0n, rights and freedoms.
I was expecting this to be more about how languages are infiltrating other languages (think Firefly and how they swear in Chinese). More like how the internet is making people more knowledgeable of tech terminology.
Subby, I'm afraid that if you're only going to repost the same tired article despite the fact that this issue has been chewed and rechewed throughout the entire history of written language ... well, I'm going to have to replace you with a shell script. A short one.
When I was a kid (early nineties, had no idea what the Internet was; all I knew about computers was Prolog), anyone could pause the game if they had a valid reason to do so. We even had a particular gesture for that.
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
To defeat a judicial nomination through a concerted attack on the nominee's character, background and philosophy.
To fire an honest government official in an attempt to prevent embarrassment to and exposure of a dishonest government officeholder who has conspired to commit high crimes (term first used by the National Lampoon Radio Hour in to describe the 1973 firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox by Solicitor General Robert Bork in the "Saturday Night Massacre" orchestrated by Bork and President Richard Nixon).
the CEO ends a two hour meeting with "All your base are belong to us." I'll know it's true.
People are comming here, and using words ignoring the original meaning.
- "Hackers" to describe everything maling.
- "Noob" and "newbies". People that call noob to everybody, even unskilled players (?).
- "Netiquette". This words is hardly in use today.
- "Lurking". Another word missing in combat.
- "Quoting". MIA.
- "IMHO".
- "IANAL".
If you argue that noob!=newbie, you are called nerd... ON THE FUCKING INTERNETS.
-Woof woof woof!
Just read the real bible and you'll be confusing fundies left and right.
And you can go for even nastier than confusing if you want. For example, find someone who's a fan of that Ezekiel 4:9 bread, and tell them that the whole recipe given by God there continues all the way to Ezekiel 4:13: "and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man". Yep, God's recipe there actually calls for human shit as an ingredient for that bread. (Though Ezekiel himself, for being so faithful and kosher all his life, gets Gods dispensation in 4:15 to eat his with cow shit instead.)
Especially if you spring that on them after they ate some, honestly, no amount of lolcat bible can even start to compare :p
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
n/t
All your database are belong to U.S.
I can has new vernacular?
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
"Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."
Speeded? Are they serious? They're illiterate, yet commenting on language. I see Americanism has spread far and wide. Thank you, Mr. Internet.
Never mind the internet changing language, the real change is that computers are forcing the English language itself into all the curvy corners of the globe. Sure, you can change the language settings on your windowing system to your local language but how many actual programming languages are written in any language other than English? You will be assimilated.
The BBC is capitalizing verbs now! Where will this end?
Ah, the endless capacity of apologists to BS themselves by postulating what's not actually in the text. How cute.
Well, no. In Ezekiel 4:13 so sayeth God: "And the LORD said, Even thus shall the children of Israel eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles, whither I will drive them." My emphasis. Clearly either that bread recipe from 4:9 is already defiled from the start, or that human shit is defiling it. Either way, it's not some wholesome recipe for good bread, but for defiled bread. No matter how you separate which step is defiling it, it's still not given a recipe for good nutrition.
But more telling is the exchange in 4:14-15:
14. Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! behold, my soul hath not been polluted: for from my youth up even till now have I not eaten of that which dieth of itself, or is torn in pieces; neither came there abominable flesh into my mouth.
15. Then he said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow's dung for man's dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith.
Ezekiel is clearly protesting that on account of his purity, and substituting cow dung is somehow making it better. It doesn't sound like he just has a problem with using briquettes.
But most importantly the choice of words in 4:15 makes it clearer what it's meant. "and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith" My emphasis again.
But again, regardless of how you use it, the fact remains that God gave a recipe for defiled bread. A fact that was completely lost on the cretins selling and buying Ezekiel 4:9 bread and actually believing (and some arguing) it's an example of good nutrition as prescribed by the Bible.
And basically that's what I meant by confusing fundies with the real bible. The average lemming doesn't know what's actually in it, and at best goes by some BS apology that has nothing to do with what's actually in there. The lemmings buying that bread and using it as an example of the bible prescribing good nutrition, haven't even read the couple of verses directly after it on the same page. They don't actually _know_ what that quote was actually for when in context.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What? No mention of Slashspeak? No "If you loose at poker, your a bad player, and you will run out of chip's"?
www.eFax.com are spammers
"BBC News reports on how the internet/computer/telephone/horseless carriage/steam locomotive/rifled gun barrel/frigate/fire/written language is changing language."
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I dunno. The adoption of "Googling" as a verb meaning to perform an internet search is the same as what I experienced as a kid: everyone in the neighborhood referred to their refrigerators as "Frigidaires" regardless of the brand name of the actual refrigerator they owned.
From TFA:
"Leetspeak" in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.
Uhh ... or, you know, standard Arabic numerals used in most (all?) Western languages.
Unless they're trying to say that "programming code" replaces letters with numbers. Sad to say, I don't really think you'll get very far calling C0ns0l3.Wr1t3L1n3("H3110 w0r1d!").
R.Mo
Except it wasn't that clear even to other bible translators and scholars. E.g., the Douay-Rheims Bible translates the same verse as, "And thou shalt eat it as barley bread baked under the ashes: and thou shalt cover it, in their sight, with the dung that cometh out of a man." Note the method of baking those barley cakes, and why using it even as fuel still isn't any better.
It's also not the first time that the threat of eating shit is used in the OT, and likely was a reason why Ezekiel mentions that. E.g., in Isaiah 36:12 that is used as an explicit threat in another siege of Jerusalem: "But Rabshakeh said, "Has my master sent me only to your master and to you to speak these words, and not to the men who sit on the wall, doomed to eat their own dung and drink their own urine with you?"" That Ezekiel would essentially repeat a threat they already had in a previous siege, is actually not very hard to swallow.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man"...
Wouldn't that mean, that you should burn human dung for the fire to bake the bread? Not that you'd actually put it into the bread.
Still rather gross, but dung of all animals (including humans) makes fertilizer for farming, so God probably knew it was widely available.
The comments are often vastly more interesting than the articles, or even the summaries. Moderation might obscure some valuable stuff, but it also obscures most of the crap and helps sift most of the good comments out from a sea of inane drivel.
Not reading the article is a time-honored tradition around here, but for the last few years the summaries have been so badly biased and "edited" that I barely even read those either. I just skim the summary to get an idea of what the best comments are likely to be about, and then I plunge into those.
Brick - "I tried to upgrade my PS3 firmware but it bricked my console" FAIL - "You bought a Nokia instead of an iPhone? FAIL" Several people have mentioned "LOL" before. It's annoying enough in e-mails and MSN conversations, but when someone actually says "LOL" in a verbal conversation - argh!!!!
...to post one of my favorite quotes:
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary. -- James Nicoll
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
...early. In the early 90s, "surf" was pretty common, as was the whole idea of "going online", both of which sound silly today. Add to that, "everything-nothing sites", which would now be called "blogs". Or, god forbid "cyberspace" or cyber-anything.
Will "google" as a verb stand the test of time? Maybe. But it's too early to assume it will. I did like the "Google with Bing" parody, fantastic stuff.
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1915736
All communications systems change languages but especially the technical forms. The telegraph changed the language for those who used it - and for those who came after. The abbreviation "tks" or "tnx" or simply "tu" for "thank you" was a telegraphic form that started with wire-based telegraphy and migrated into radio telegraphy and then into satellite communications and now it's made its way into cell phone texting. When I learned this abbreviation in the 1950s I never expected it to fall into common use.
One of the most interesting things about this is that these abbreviations crossed language lines; usually the English format being understood by everyone else regardless of language. This seems to be continuing in texting and computer chat.
Two other communications-based forms that crossed over into common use would be "10-4" and "roger that" for "I understand". Saying "roger" was to use the phonetic for the letter "R" which wire telegraphers began to use back in the 19th century when they wanted to acknowledge receipt of a message. Even though wire-based "Morse" was much different than the "Morse" used in radio telegraphy many operators (including me) moved between them and brought along their abbreviations and customs.
Making "Google" into a verb is simply a continuation... not something new.
I wonder if smoke signals changed native American languages.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
/repurposed
All languages change or die. We can barely read English books written 100 years ago--they are full of long flatulent sentences. Four hundred year old englyshe is almost completely unreadable. I'm sure no one at any time liked any of the changes that led to where we are now.
Same old same olde.
A considerable population of internet users, (unfortunately they appear to be mainly Americans), seem absolutely oblivious to the difference between then and than, and their correct usage.
... but that expression has been (uh, pardon the expression) absolutely SOP in the military since before I got in (mid-80's). I think it actually dates back to Vietnam.
actually I did because the snippet was so short and I too caught that.
leet speak could be said to be used for programming good passwords but other than that?
Some people do use actual programming code, I have got the "Leet Key" firefox plugin. But that stuff is pretty obscure not going to make it into the OED except maybe the maybe the term 1337 itself? Actually, come to think of that, how are they going to alphabetise that? Before A or with LE?
Stupidity is its own reward.
To more precise, this is really more like convergent evolution than "making its way into" cell phone texting. It's not like today's cell phone texters looked back on their telegraphy experience and repurposed this technique. They reinvented it. Kind of a small point, but it's worth noting that the reason you keep seeing this kind of thing is because it's the obvious and natural thing to do when there's a non-insignificant amount of effort required to make each character.
I actually think that the individualistic perspective of our species is ridiculous: We are linguistic animals and without that culture we could neither think nor do many of the other quintessentially human activities. Hence, language evolution is integrally part of our species evolution. IMHO.
PS nice Hindenberg sig there.I actually met the owner of the White Dwarf in 2002: http://airshipworld.blogspot.com/2007/08/white-dwarf-pedal-powered-personal.html
Stupidity is its own reward.
Information Superhighway! Netizens!
Stupidity is its own reward.
what about new use of characters like ~ @ / which were pretty rare before... or now # is used differently.
Also_the_practice_of_replacing-spaces-with-something.else.instead.of.a.space.
Stupidity is its own reward.
The internet doesn't change the language, Stupid people change the language.
Clockwork Orange FTW...
The dung is fuel and is still used as fuel in many parts of the world. Ezekiel 4:12 And you must eat the food like you would a barley cake. You must bake it in front of them over a fire made with dried human excrement.
Anyone reading what Ezekiel wrote at the time would understand that human dung as fuel made the bread ritually unclean. Read all of Ezekiel (better the whole Old Testament) and it will make sense. Rule # 2 for understanding the Bible. Never take a text out of its context in order to prove a pretext.
taking a big steaming shit on it.
The efforts of teachers are futile against the deluge of stupidity net kids spew at each other.
Descriptivists defending ignorance and laziness in 3... 2... 1....
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!