Is this the future of the English language?

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Well you could use the edit option

Though if you have good 'ol 56K it takes some time...

 

They are allowing that in Scotland also. Still it could be worse - ebonics.

 

How is that different, Cuchulainn? Netspeak and Ebonics are both dialects - why is one of more or less detrimental value to the overall language than the other?

My older son is now in first grade, and there is significant focus on writing. The students are encouraged to express their thoughts and tell their stories, and at this stage grammar and spelling and punctuation aren't allowed to get in the way of expression. The teacher promises that those things will come soon, but right now there are more important verbal skills to cover. If the kids want to say, "I rod my bik to the gardin on the rit sid of the rod," that's OK for now. They'll get all those myriad arbitrary spelling rules later.

Funny, though, how closely Net-speak resembles kid-speak.

 

Couldn't "txt" also mean taxed (sounds like taxt, no?) as well as text since they both sound basically the same, with very slightly phonetic variation?

Also, with something like BlckDeth's name, it could also mean Block Death, like you were killed by a block, a block death. In my opinon (clearly, since I am writing this), I find that text speak is too open to interpretation on what the "abbreviations" mean. While it has a lot of flexibility, it doesn't have much precision, which can be very important when you are trying to get a point, or points, across in a paper/post/whatever.

 

Rally, I can understand netspeak, its just English spelt differently (and a few new terms), but ebonics makes no sense to me at all. When I watch some tv programmes, I have to get my partner to translate.

 

But not surprising. They write as they speak, or at least how the word sounds like. In English, rit sounds the same as right, rigt, rite and even rait.

Allowing txt-spk in schools is a sorry solution to prevent people failing exams due to not knowing their own language.

 

@Colthrun:

Well, there are many dialects for sure. I still shudder when I think someone could get rait, rit and right the same. It's three completely different sounds to me. In fact, right and rite would sound differently if I were talking particularly slowly or clearly. "The right of way," and, "the rite of passage," just seem to sound different. Slightly, but still. Or maybe it's just the word stress.

Yeah. What a great way to put it.

@BlckDeth:

Because everyone is about rights nowadays. Rights, minorities, diversity, you get the point? The effect is that if you correct a student, you violate his rights of expression. In my view, students' most basic right is that to true knowledge and proper skills being taught. I'm very careful with my students when I have any (particularly because I'm not an officially trained teacher, so my tutoring methods are a collection of experience gathered when I was taught; by contrast, most properly trained teachers' English is quite deficient), but they still don't have any absolute right to good grades, a happy teacher, whatever else. They have the right to be taught something new, something better. Preferably the best there can be.

@Harbs:

Exactly. I tend to be offended by correspondence looking like someone hadn't even put it through Word, let alone a spell-checker, before sending. I shudder to think about the messages I'm going to get from all those plentiful management/marketing grads when I start practising as a lawyer. Fortunately, lawyers themselves tend to maintain a level of language that astonishes me (in a pleasant way).

Don't get me wrong. I'm not offended by someone's being kind and nice and just unable to figure out the tricky grammar of spelling. By far not. And I prefer the person to keep writing like that rather than stop writing at all. But I don't like the crap talk. It looks like they don't care how much effort it's going to cost when you read it and try to figure it out. Not bothering to use question marks is a prime example.

Since you like trivia, our foreign minister used to be known as Mrs Comma. That's what her subordinates called her when she was vice minister. She put missing commas in red when filling them in and probably sending back.

@Rally:

I'm a big fan of laying some solid foundations in the "workshop" area before throwing kids on big waters. Spoken language is different: you can have people talk and talk and talk and just correct them on the fly or when they have finished. But writing... I believe in communication more than in expression. Granted, you can't communicate without expressing yourself somehow, but expression for it's own sake is vain.

If we move back to Harbs's context, for example, I clearly won't be interested in Clerk X's personal liberation from the boundaries of strict grammar and spelling rules or his other juicy pecularities. I want a clear and understandable message. If I get a stream of consciousness with neither commas nor question marks, but some unclear grammar and spelling instead, I will have no qualms quoting the whole and asking, "Rephrase, please."

[ November 13, 2006, 15:26: Message edited by: chevalier ]

 

Good points, chevalier.

My big problem with any of the excuses that people come up with for why we don't want to pressure the poor kids into learning too much at once is that, how come teachers managed to teach me all about grammar, as well as everything else?

I haven't been scarred for life by being taught grammar and spelling, and for losing marks for getting it wrong. More to the point, I would simply not be capable of doing my current job without having strong written language skills. Added to that, I get really cheesed off that I now need to be an English grammar teacher as well, to all the kids who come out of university with no ability to write coherent English.

We are doing our children an enormous disservice by not insisting that basid (and I mean basic) skills such as grammar and arithmetic are not taught to them at an early age.

 

The "proper" language is the language spoken by the users of said language. Dictionaries and grammar books are supposed to be descriptive of the language and possibly pointers about the most common usage of the language not really rules to tell you how to use the language.

 

Dis iz wel siknin man ow cn u use txt tlk in a xam? wel bd man dun no ow dey low dat.

 

Where is Falstaff when you need him?

 

All I can say is God Help the teachers trying to mark that garbage!

Txt speak is not evolution whichever way we look at it, it's bastardisation to the worst degree. I refuse to use that kind of language when I text or type on-line, leave alone in any other context.

I'm with everyone who thumbs down the dumbing down.

 

That is why I like these Boards so much. By and large, the people here use reasonably good grammar, which shows respect for the other readers. Like Viking, I never use shorthand, even when texting. In fact, I don't understand why people even use that shorthand because, when I tried it, it was much harder work than typing normally and took twice as long.

 

It's an iterative process, Chev. The kids are being encouraged to express themselves freely to plant that seed, then, when it has sprouted, they'll bring up their grammar skills to match. The next step will be to expand upon the expression, then the grammar - back and forth, in steps that become closer and closer together until they're happening in parallel.

The single most important thing any child should take away from school is a love of learning. If you don't give that fragile thing a chance to get established, it will smother under all the rules and facts.

 

Good God. I'm never going to understand the younger generation ever, if this comes into common use. I simply cannot understand text messaging at all. My little brother uses it at times when he e-mails me, and my most common reply to him is: Uhhh....Ummmm...What? He then usually re-sends it with the words written out. I totally don't understand the use of numbers in text messaging. How is a number suppose to represent a letter? WTF? (yes, sarcasm intented with "WTF")

 

Well since English is pretty much the global language now, I guess it's the one that's gonna be bastardised at some point.

 

@joacqin:

And one of the purposes of descriptive linguistics is to help people keep it standard and understandable.

@Rally: Well, hammering things into kids' heads right off the bat doesn't give all of them a great love of learning and there are some flaws in traditional education (there's a reason why I'm so lazy, for example). But sometimes all the expression gets in the way of things coming into kids' heads rather than out. Well, you'll see if your kids have the same command of English as you did when you were their age. Let me know when you know this because I'm curious.

@Harbs: Since you mention maths... Even the maths-physics (middle education profile) kids can't calculate here. They know the formulae and all and tend to be able to work out tasks. But they need calculators for stuff I do in my head because I can't be arsed to mash the buttons. And they won't write it out on paper, no. Actually, some teachers already have it.

 

@ a soubriquet:

That's exactly my point. When you drop the rules and punctuations in the English language, you're bound to experience some confusion due to the lack of precision that you incur. This is what astounds me to the point of incredulity; why any sane examener would want to remove the rules of English in such a way that removes precision and understanding in an effort to IMPROVE precision and understanding is beyond me. If the two factors cancel each other out, why bother to set up the equasion in the first place?

 

It is not, as you put, an effort to improve precision and understanding, but rather an effort to improve creativity. Which also doesn't work out, because the most articulate words wouldn't have easily distinguished text-speak.

 

I believe my response to this bit of news can be accurately summed up as follows:

BWAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHH!!!! LMFAO@J00 NZ!!!!