This morning, on the bus, I was wondering about the future of the English language. I have an Armchair University degree in English linguistics, and I was thinking about the “l33t5p33k” we see on the net these days, as well as the Princification of the language, the replacement of “you” with “u” and “to” with “2,” etc.
Is this just bad English, or is this the next step? I know that the language is changing everyday, but this seems rather drastic, doesn’t it?
Additionally, for shits and giggles, I was constructing sentences of commonly-mistyped versions of words (“The dog is black” = “Hte god si balkc,” pronounced “hih-TUH dog see bowlk”). Of course, Microsoft’s handy-dandy AutoCorrect feature, which changes typed “hte” to “the,” might stifle this, but maybe not. Might we be witnessing a “Great Consonant Shift?”
Will the English language in 100 years look like the rantings of a fifteen year old hacker as we see it now, and will numbers become letters (1 = I, 2 = to, 3 = E, 4 = for, 5 = S, etc.)?
I find it pretty dubious. People simply get lots more sloppy on the net, because they feel it doesn’t matter so much.
Look at it this way: how long would any online store last if things like “7H15 PR0DVK7 1Z R33LY K3WL!!! 8LL 7H3 L337 D00DZ 8R3 V51NG I7!!!” began appearing on it? Even more briefly than they tend to anyways nowadays, is my guess.
I’m similarly enrolled in Archair U, but high levels of literacy tend to stabilize the rate of language change, as far as things like spelling and grammar go. When literacy rates began rising sharply with printing costs sinking just as sharply (thank you Gutenberg), we immediately received several hundred years of quite readable, understandable English. Stylistically different, certainly, but not tremendously so. Go back another two hundred years before that, though, and you get things that look to modern eyes like a couple cats were thrown on the keyboard–Chaucer is understandable with effort without many footnotes, earlier things get more and more cryptic. The rate of change changed to a flatter curve as the graph of literacy levels go upwards. (So goes my WAG, anyways. It certainly seems sensible to me, but that’s often just insidious.)
Rather than a massive shift in spelling conventions, I expect that in a hundred years, “English” will simply contain many more words, both appropriated out of foreign languages, and many terms for things that we can’t much imagine now but will be commonplace then. Picture explaining “e-mail” to someone from 1901. Post office is just down main street, mac. You mean like first class mail, right? Possible to get concepts across, but the effort needs to span a century of changes–and I expect the next century of changes to pack even more of them in than the last.
I ranted in the pit about this a few weeks ago…http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=70006
However, even those these kids (and most of the people I know who try to look illiterate are less than 20) write like that on the internet, they actually do write proper English when in a formal setting. I’ve read at least 10,000 written responses from kids between 4th and 11th grade over the last two months, and to my relief I’ve yet to see any of the “ur” and “b4” crap they spew out on message boards.
I’m sure that drastic is right, and message boards aren’t seen as being as “important” a showcase for one’s writing.
Mrs. Snac teaches college. Her students, mostly late teens/early twenties, are forever emailing her without any visible capitalizations. But you’d better believe they put capitals into their papers. What’s more, they know how to use 'em.
Ok, I’ll admit, I’m probably the youngest poster on this board, or at least one of them(this place is pretty diverse, so I could be wrong) but let me tell you…I NEVER use those awful internet slang terms. They completely disgust me! A lot of my friends do use them online, and I once told someone about my distaste for them, which resulted in a large argument and us not talking for about four months, but that is for another day. So have some faith, because its not all, just some, of us.
At 14, I’m seriously opposed to all of that. I may not capitalize once in a while and use all the nasty acronyms (lol, lmao, ect.) that everyone uses, but I have u, b4 and others. The ones I do use occasionally are w/ and w/o to designate with and without, respectively :).
It’s hardly likely the Internet will have an lasting effect on such things as capitalization or spelling. People have tried to change things for years, and it never works.
RealityChuck is right. In the early part of this century, there was a movement to simplify the spelling of the English Language in the United States and make all words phonetic. This movement had support from none other than the president at the time, Teddy Roosevelt. Some of their simplification worked which is why Americans do not spell words like ‘color’ and ‘labor’ with a ‘u’ like other English-speaking nations. However, in an attempt to legislate this simplification into law, Roosevelt was met with such an angry outcry that he was virtually tarred and feathered!
On the other hand, dictionaries are a relatively new invention and it was not very long ago that there was no such thing as the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’ way to spell a word as can be witnessed if you have a chance to see documents like Shakespeare’s first folio so who knows? Maybe canonical spelling of words will again fall out of favor.
I’d say the computer’s influence would be “limited” to people’s dependence on auto-spelling [and specifically publishers, editors and proofreaders, whether in electronic or paper media], so that existing misuse of language that isn’t picked up by the “correction” program is reinforced, and put out in public circulation with the imprimatur of rectitude.
“Mute vs. moot”, things like that, which are increasingly found in newspapers, paperbacks, etc…
Consider, too, the reaction that a person gets on this board when they use that horrid “elite speak” (I refuse to mangle the term the way such persons do). Use of certain language conventions will get a person labelled as a member of a particular group, and the group implied by elite speak has negative connotations for most educated folks. It’s conceivable (though still not likely) that we might be witnessing a split in the language, with some using this new way of writing and the majority retaining the “standard” rules of grammar and spelling, but it’s not a change which will sweep across the entire language.
That sort of usage is slang, not a new dialect. It probably won’t catch on with any greater permanence than the stuff Cecil describes in his column What does “OK” stand for? Of course, we did get “OK” (or “okay”) out of that particular silly 19th century fad, which is now acceptable except in really formal contexts, so we may well pick up a few permanent additions to the vocabulary of informal English. (I suspect “LOL” will be with us always.) But I don’t think our great-grandchildren will normally spell “before” as “B4” any more than we normally spell “all correct” as “oll korrect”.
We had a similar argument when I was in grade school in the 70s. The two words. THRU and ENUFF. Today I see them often informally and on higways you always see THRU.
Somehow I doubt they’ll be accepted. After all ain’t is NOT an accepted word though everyone uses it all the time.
It’s a fad based on the limitations of a technology that might not exist in ten years. Text-only communications will go the way of the dodo once most people have DSL or better in their homes, and once audiovideo becomes more common than telephones are now all of those little abbreviations and luserspeak conventions will become obsolete. Instead, we’ll have annoying verbal and facial conventions to deal with.
I don’t think text-based conversations will go away any time soon. They offer something which oral and visual communication do not… complete anonymity.
What’s worse, getting a horrid e-mail from your son in college, or no e-mail at all? The bottom line is, people are communicating now more than ever. Sure people are busy and use abbriv. but I think it plainly shows what a rush rush society we live in. I feel the same way about spelling. The purpose in communication is to get a point across, right? So if you mess up a few words, but the general idea is still there, what’s the big deal?
Also, even in uber-geeky places, you usually only see leet-speak used ironically, or as a joke. Using it seriously marks you as a script kiddie and that isn’t going to get you any respect, even within the hacker subculture. The script kiddies probably use it mostly because they know it pisses people off more than from any actual love of typing it- it’s a pain in the ass, and its original purpose to evade white hats searching text for hacker keywords is irrelevant now. Just use encryption.
I have to say I think the phrases “teh win” and “teh suck” roll of the tongue, or the screen, rather nicely.
I never use caps in emails (unless I’m sending a resume) and didn’t use them here until wring asked me to. To be honest, when I see people using them in chat, it’s distracting, with the exception of proper names.
I believe a lot of forms of online writing are closer to spoken conversations than traditional writing, so it seems odd to adhere to formal grammar rules- I don’t do it in real life conversations, why do it online just because I’m typing?
Some relevant links (From FOLDOC):
[ul]
[li]hacker[/li][li]cracker[/li][/ul]
Some more relevant links (From The Jargon File):
[ul]
[li]Lamer-speak[/li][li]warez d00dz[/li][/ul]
And, just for contrast: A Portrait of J. Random Hacker
A brief summary: The people who do things like release virii and crack systems and write malicious scripts are not hackers any more than someone who vandalizes a building with spraypaint is a painter. It is a simple concept the mainstream media seems completely unable to grasp. Don’t make the same mistake and lump vandals with artists.
Thank you Derleth, I think all too often people don’t get the difference between a hacker and a cracker. I was about to put a paragraph in my previous post about the difference between hacker and cracker and the orgins of leet speak, but felt it might be considered a highjack. I’m glad you did it for me and I’m also glad that their are others out in the world who aren’t influenced by the media and realize that hackers (white hat) are good people too.
