Slashdot Mirror
How Technology Is Shaping Language
An anonymous reader writes "This is an interesting article about how technology is shaping the English language, which touches on the fate of the current crop of (sometimes silly) tech-inspired words, and anticipates an increased blurring of the line between the written and spoken word. Professor David Crystal, honorary professor at the School of Linguistics and English Studies at the University of Bangor, says, 'This kind of ludicity [linguistic playfulness] is very attractive for a while. People keep it going and then it sort of falls out of use. Exactly how long it will go on for is unclear but it's like any game, any novelty, any linguistic novelty — I can't see it lasting. If you look back 10 years ago to the kind of clever-clever things that were going on in the 1990s — MUDs and MOOs — all the early game strategies and lots of very interesting language features coming up as people tried to develop a style of language that would suit the technology. Well, that technology's history now and the language has gone with it.'"
f1r5t p05t
Whereas MichaelKristopeit never fails to come up with something new and interesting to say.
Pretty aure thats the early 2000s ... and mud and moo were already deprecated
I guess I seen similar article year ago at slashdot
...
As I remember it had examples what train did.
Be on right track
streamlining
e;e;s;s;s;s;w;stab Cry;flee
i dun no how teh tekknolog wurkz bit WHEn i huv it i speel nad talk lk ths111
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
i alwys thot tht tech had a negggative impakt on engrish... silly mee :) lolzorz
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Why would a linguist of all people have such a romantic attachment to the idea of an unchanging English language?
Only dead languages don't change, and that's NOT a good sign for your culture. I have no desire to see English go the way of Latin, and certainly don't want to see the political collapse that would be necessary for that to happen.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Basically, before, you used to have editors who'd mold everything into U Chicago style guidelines or some such.
Now, everybody is his own editor. Is it web server or webserver? Web site or website? You decide.
You'll probably also see stuff where editors once had their fingers in the dike (like preventing the spread of "snuck") deluge the linguistic landscape.
Also people are free to verb nouns as they please.
Finally, I've noticed people are a lot more comfortable spontaneously making up portmanteaus.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
A big DUH to the authors/article! A reseach article from long, long ago..... UG: too many new words! "Spear", what was wrong with pointy stick? Yog: "tell me about it, I'm still trying to figure out 'fire'!"
It would have been nice to include a little deeper history in this article, like maybe talking about the Jargon File, the dictionary for old school hackers that's filled with fascinating history about the technology and innovations behind some of the terms we still use online today.
Or would that detract from the idea that cultural-shifts resulting in lexical shifts is some kind of totally new and unexpected phenomenon?
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Texting has probably contributed more to the degeneration of english than moos and muds.
There is no issue with "textspeak" or anything like that. A good command of a language is needed in order to convey meaning in an abbreviated manner.
The only problem is where the literacy level of the individual is low enough that they'll use this format in other forms of communication which don't necessarily require such heavy brevity. It's not Twitter's fault, or phone networks who limit SMS characters. It's education, pure and simple.
Well, that technology's history now and the language has gone with it.
Yes, because things like "LOL" and "WTF" have disappeared from the lexicon.
On wait, no they haven't. Turns out this guy is wrong on all counts. The technology is still here, and has in fact spread, and the language it has inspired is not gone, and has in fact spread.
To pull out a fact like, less than 10% of text messages contain LOL-speak like abbreviations does not mean that will not be a lasting part of the language, it just means it's not a new language. What percentage of text messages contain 'yacht' or some other word pertaining to watercraft? If it's less than 10%, does that mean those words are not part of the language?
The article and research it's based on sound more like an undergraduate paper than mature research. Where are the comparisons to the telegraph and telephone? This is not the first time technology has changed the way we communicate and the language we use.
And I refuse to stop using kewl. It's too kewl not to. Crap I'm old.
language that existed in MUDs still exist in modern MMOs -- words like proc and mob
What I have observed in the past decades is an erosion of language comprehension; a marker is the trend (as I observe it) towards time consuming video tutorials.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Of course, an example of one of the ways language is moving is the word "anticipates" itself. From the Latin meaning "to take before", it originally meant "to foresee and prepare (for) in advance"; it's now been made a synonym for "predicts" or "expects", without the presumption of any action being taken in advance. My theory is that people originally wanted to use the word "expects," but were afraid of confusing this with its near-homonym "aspects," so they avoided both words and found a slight misuse of "anticipates" more comforting.
Of course, this has happened so many times that the original meaning is now a minor usage, and will probably disappear within a generation.
I don't have the bandwidth to read it all. ;)
So we name them (sometimes from their marketing terms) and then we verb them.
"Verbing weirds language" but it works for the time being, and then it gets accepted through repeated use or misuse.
I think we lost when I found "irregardless" in the dictionary.
- James D. Nicoll
And...
- Christiana Ellis
Jeg opgiv.
--
BMO
10 years ago, even 12 years ago the MOO/MU*/MUD scene was stagnated.
Technology isn't just adding new terms to the language, it's also changing, and in some cases erasing, idioms that already exist. Take for example the phrase, "you sound like a broken record". How many people under the age of 25 even know what a broken record sounds like? As time goes on I expect that phrase to become increasingly rare, and to be replaced by a similar phrase, thus completing the circle of life :P
Monstar L
MichaelKristopeit = troll
At least he isn't a patent troll.
you _can_ post a comment without calling people ignorant, hypocrit, idot and/or pathetic just try it once else: try to learn some new curse words
Up to mid to late 90's, most of the internet users were mostly confined to members of academia, and the language used in internet forums were mostly kept as a particular vernacular used for net separate from their written or spoken language. Now, the internet use is ubiquitous, and I do believe there definitely is a blurring of written and spoken language especially for the younger population. Obviously, it's only natural for a language to change especially in the face of entirely new medium of communication that's used by the population at large, and I do find it fairly interesting to see the new form of written language developing from verbal language. As a personal rant, I find it a bit annoying that more and more people are completely disregarding spelling and grammar altogether. For a lot of people, texting and messaging are only forms of writing they do, and I kind of wish people put a bit more thought into their inputs at least in the internet forums. After all, writing in the internet forums is still a form of public speaking, and there should be some value in trying to accurately represent what you're trying to communicate. In that sense, I do miss the usenet of old. In a any given group, there were fairly informed representative of the topic, and the exchanges were usually thoughtful and relatively noise free. Even the flame wars were mostly entertaining. Of course, there's definite value in the sheer increase in the number of inputs, and I do think the changes in internet culture is mostly better and entirely inevitable. Still, porn just isn't the same without TIN and uudecode. I had to do a little work to see some boobies. Damn kids nowadays...
A language is just a mean to communicate... English itself is an evolved language. As long as people understand and communicate, language evolution is unavoidable.
http://www.montuori.net/
You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
James D. Nicoll...awesome quote. And I expect he is right--I can't think of any at the moment, but I'm sure that the usage of a borrowed word in English has managed to change its meaning in its original language, which would seem to be the literal equivalent of what he is talking about.
That's what changing English will do for you, a death of a whole part of speech: the adverb.
If you don't what I'm talking about, well, then, you're not really paying attention to how people
speak and even write these days.
For example, tl;dr
Hi Slashdot. I've been an avid MUDder for over 10 years now, spent the last several working on my own game that has recently launched. I'd like to weigh in a tick on this 'obsolete language' argument. True, MUDs are not as widespread as a number of other internet games, but they predate them and the lexicon has had a profound influence... on MMO's especially. Mobs, Aggro, Buff, Nerf, Crit, Corpse run, all of these are familiar MUD terms that the MMO'ers of today use as a comfortable (and yes, noob-gateway) language. 30+years and still going on strong. Hep cat, it's the bee's knees like pop in an icebox, dig?
Shameless self-promotion of a dying hobby - if you like MUDs, D&D (2nd edition), or role-playing games, come check us out!
Arantha - The Realms of Valor
www.arantha.net
telnet arantha.net port 4000
I hear noun verbs them adverbly.
Wait, what?
Pigs speak Latin?
Citation please.
And the second good laugh. Beautiful quotations.
> Citation please
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAMXmW61nWk
--
BMO
Just wondering.
The comedy in the ass-kissing episode of the Miller's Tale does NOT arise from a character's willingness to debase himself.
He has no clue that he going to kiss an anus. The scene takes place in the middle of the night, in total darkness. The butt of the joke THINKS he is going to kiss his crush on her lips, but she hangs her butt cheeks out the window for kissing instead.
He only becomes suspicious when he feels her pubic hair, which he mistakes for a beard.
This isn't limited to English. Apparently, it's the new chik thing in Japanese to use obscure kanji just because the IME can display it. (Shit, some of them can't even write kanji without typing it out in the IME first.)Even more oddly, some of the teenage Jap girls that I cyberstalk replace `I'\`E' with `Yi'\`Ye', even though, or because, `Yi'\`Ye' is archaic and isn't even part of the language anymore, officially. Guess it looks cute.
Looking at his other posts, I'm not so sure he can...
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
No one seems to be noticing the real change in English. It's becoming common to hear educated people say such substandard English as "I seen" and "I have did", "He done" and "...for him and I".
I think we lost when I found "irregardless" in the dictionary.
Which one? From the OED online "rregardless means the same as regardless, but the negative prefix ir- merely duplicates the suffix -less, and is unnecessary. The word dates back to the 19th century, but is regarded as incorrect in standard English."
Just because a lot of people use "light year" to mean a very long time rather than a very long distance doesn't make it acceptable.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it