Continuing the discussion from DrDeth's suspension:
I saw this comment by LHOD in an ATMB thread and it made me wonder. I’d have said the standard conventions for written language make it much more formal, and less like spoken language. The way people write in chat programs is much more like spoken language and tends to break all kinds of conventions like capitalisation, punctuation and well formed sentences. So what gives?
ifiwritesomethingwithoutusingformalconventionsitlookslikethisorrwrsytitluxlikthsanduknbarlereditifuknreaditatal
If, however, I use standard written conventions, several things happen:
-Punctuation indicates (roughly) where a person might pause for breath or change their intonation.
-Capitals indicate (again, roughly) where new ideas begin, and extra-important words (i.e., names).
-Spaces help you understand where one word ends and another begins.
-Standard spelling allows the reader to devote very little brain-power to deciphering a text, freeing up most of their brain for the purpose of understanding the message, as they’d do with spoken language.
You’re correct that many conventions of formal English–e.g., complete sentences–get broken up and down the street in speech. I said “in large part” to account for those. But it’s oral language, not written language, that comes naturally to us bald primates, and so written language tends to mimic the conventions of oral language in order to leverage our natural capabilities of translating words and grammar into thought.
I can still read it. Imagine how hard it was for ancient peoples who used Aramaic (little/no written vowels).
~Max
Of course you can read it. But you’re using a lot more of your brain power to read it when I abandon conventions than you use when I maintain those conventions–and that brain power is unavailable for understanding the message. (There’s a double-whammy, too: not only are you using cognitive resources to decipher the message, but then you’re using some to think about either why it’s written that way, or how awesome it is that you can read it).
You could certainly decipher an entire post made up of conventionless writing. But it’d be exhausting, and you’d probably not have a lot of energy left to pay attention to the content of the message.
Incidentally, text-speak isn’t conventionless. It just has different conventions. My kid text-speaks her friends. If she texted:
her friends wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. But if she texted,
she’d be breaking the conventions of texting, and her friends would be all
T prbly wsn’t tht bd.
I wonder if there’s a real written language (historical or extant) that features scriptio continua while lacking vowels.
~Max
I never thought about that before you mentioned your lesson in ATMB, but it does make sense.
~Max
I knew all that already. But apart from arguably the first one, how does that make written language mimic spoken? Is the idea rather that written conventions help supply information that is conveyed differently in spoken language?
For example, AIUI, spoken language has no gaps between words, something you can tell if you listen to a foreign language. So while I certainly agree that adding spaces makes text easier to read, how is it mimicking spoken language?
PS. I can only read the first half.
I read that Chinese internet users were using a technique similar to this to evade censorship. Since certain words and phrases were banned, they’d substitute different characters with the same sound but a different tone so it wouldn’t be picked up by the software.
Chinese and Vietnamese, for example, are tonal languages. The same phonemes pronounced with a different tone could make an entirely different word. So it is actually impossible to transliterate a Chinese word into English/Roman script without making additional conventions to differentiate tone, for example a number (Chinese has four tones) or special diacritical marks.
~Max
It mimics the experience of hearing spoken language. In your native tongue, even when people blend words together, your monkey-brain is very, very good at distinguishing between individual words. When you listen to someone speak, you don’t have to think consciously about where one word ends and the next begins: you parse that automatically (in most cases).
Your monkey-brain is terrible at doing that with written words, though. The spaces help you with that process, so you don’t have to spend mental energy figuring it out.
It seems to be more true to say that our brains are designed to interpret spoken language despite it’s deficits, but written is harder for us, since we didn’t evolve to use it, and therefore we need these conventions to aid the process.
One exception perhaps is that an unfamiliar accent can be just as big a barrier to understanding as variant spelling.
Doesn’t detract from your point at all, but I’ve spent too much time trying to figure this one out, could you explain?
I snorted milk out of my nose
I wonder if the same thing happens when trying to understand heavy accents. So all those professors, are they disadvantaged as teachers because students aren’t used to heavy accents?
~Max
It’s certainly a risk, but there are things they can do to mitigate it. For example, I once had one with an accent that could be hard to understand (same one I mentioned in another thread regarding given name vs. surname). On the first day of the course, he didn’t go into the course material at all, and just went over the syllabus and other relatively unimportant stuff. It was a basic computer networking course, so, at one point in the course, when he explained the Ethernet preamble (a bunch of alternating 0 and 1 bits that the receiving device uses to synchronize its clock with that of the sending device, so it can correctly receive the following bits of actual data), he compared it to how he had used the first day of the course to let us get used to his accent without a risk of missing something important before we could understand his voice properly. It seemed to work (though I may not be the best judge of that, because I can usually get used to accents and other unusual vocal qualities relatively easily), and was probably especially helpful for the several students in the class for whom English wasn’t a native language.
While I do do this to some extent, I usually still write much more formally in chat/text messaging than most people do. I sometimes worry that it might cause others to see me as cold or something, but I’ve never bothered to ask. It’s not a big concern, because I rarely use those kinds of communication (not having had a cell phone for several years (and not having had much to text about when I did), and not often using anything similar on the computer either). Maybe that lack of experience is a reason for it, but I think it’s probably more just a manifestation of Asperger syndrome.
Somewhat relatedly, when I write posts and comments online (including this one), I usually spend a few minutes to an hour or two (depending on the length—I’m willing to write extremely long posts when I have a lot to cover) proofreading and revising them, and adding points I initially didn’t think to include (such as this paragraph).
Sometimes yes. In college we had a professor of neurobiology with a heavy Eastern European accent. As a child of Eastern European refugees, I grew up hearing that accent, and ran informal tutorials after class explaining what the professor had said. Many of the students who did poorly in the class didn’t come to my sessions 
Do you also talk more formally than most people?
Now I’m thinking of the difference between how someone talks when giving a speech or a lecture, vs in conversation. Are there similar conventions one can follow to make speech easier for the listener to understand? Unlike with writing I don’t think I’ve ever been taught any.