h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

At this point it may be worth mentioning the following:

http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/

From the page http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/translations.html :

"If there are any points on which you require explanation or further particulars we shall be glad to furnish such additional details as may be required by telephone."

In other words: "If you have any questions, please ring."

That site has made my day, ToyBox! I particularly love this page: http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/footinmouth.html

But it can go too far - apparently I worked for a 'joined-up' civil srevice rather than an 'integrated' one. And I'm not allowed to say 'forwarded to you' in a letter - only 'sent to you'.

Helping people's one thing - patronising them is another.

Well that is going too far, since the new words obscure the correct meaning in both cases. That's crazy talk

In the interests of avoiding mashing up an 'Announcements' thread I think, well, I think I feel a journal rant coming on...

Is Mocke Ye Olde Englisshe acceptable?

**feels a 'talk like a pirate day' rip-off coming on**

B

What do you call a soul singer who dresses up as a pirate at the weekends?

Arrrrrrr Kelly.

so you should be !

Good gracious! Did I create an whole other topic drift?

**laughs heartily at R Kelly joke**

B

*hopes to high heavens that 'high quality' doesn't apply to the quality of his jokes*

To Jimster:

Sorry about the wrong er.. pointy thingy.. er.. yeh sorry its 4am words are beginning to fail me.

Yeh mods I mean general people of power with the rules and the smiting and all that jazz.

But surely the description of language of txtspk as lazy comes from a biased view point? Txtspk is perhaps a much more complex langauge then Standard English (gah evil term) because not only do you have abriviations but abriviations of cockney rhyming slang which has entered into the the mainstream.

Yes I accept that pronouncing txtspk isn't the same as text speak, but then again its not that far if you know which things are missing. For example - as has happened at several points in this thread - textspeak. All I did was miss out the space, but its pronounced the same, and its still understandable.

Further more Jimster (sorry we do tend to have our disagreements), your postings suggests that if two people really did make the effort to write entirely in middle english then it wouldn't be yikes/closed/removed, yet without a translation or a hell of a lot of work, most people wouldn't find it any easier then text speak.

Therefore, the rulling should mention other forms of english rather then segregate one form of english. Were quite lucky in a way and I dont think we realise that. I mean, language takes centuries to evolve and change, and in around a decade (or less) we have a whole new form of english emerge that runs parrell to our own rather then the localised dialects (e.g. buns, baps, batties, barms - all for the same bread product).

Also old english - I think it has more in common with the language of the angles and saxons combined with the native languages (gaelic and its deriviations) rather then middle english which by having more in common with french and latin by loaning words and rules could be written formally (again, if this is wrong, I appologise).

<>

Old English is sometimes known as Anglo-Saxon, though that term is regarded as outdated by modern linguists. Hence, it should come as no surprise that it *is* the language of the original Anglo-Saxons. Old English, in both its vocabulary and grammatical structure, is more like modern German than modern English. Old and modern English are certainly not mutually intelligible - it's only with the sudden influx of French vocabulary following the Norman Conquest that we begin to understand the language. Chaucer untranslated is readable by the modern English-speaker, if only with a glossary.

http://www.oed.com/archive/paper-romanes/title.html

I liked the Plain English links too. Mind you, looking at the Foot-in-Mouth awards, I thought that what Richard Gere said made perfect sense. I agree. Raymondo - integrated and jointed up have entirely different meanings to me. Integrated has the sense of a zip and joined up has the sense of stitched together.

No more then txtspk, and thats the best counter to the rule.

If chaucer is the beginning, modern english is the middle, and txtspk is the end - the words get shorter, the sentences
compact.

Yes theres a level that we need, but thats only because the language is changing faster then it ever has - thats why people are complaining about it. If this had been a gradual change there'd be no need for a glossary like there is with middle english because the language has shifted a fair bit over the past few centuries without us really taking note of learning the archaic and evolving forms.

Okay lets take it a different way - computer jargon. What level of computer language - a fairly specialist language - is unintelligble.


Again, I must reiterate that I respect the rules, and I can see why, but no rules of language ever work for long. They try, they fail. In fact, the rules usually encourage the language to evolve to the point where it completely bypasses the rule - as with the 'An' example others have mentioned, and the 'but' example in the film 'Finding Forrester' starring Sean Connery.

A reply to AD's posting.

It's all about context. Text speak on a mobile device with a restricted character count is not only appropriate but highly pragmatic; you can say more with fewer characters. Likewise, in a chatroom, it's about speed of response. But on a site like h2g2, where we hope to encourage a little thought going into responses, and where character count will only affect the dangerously verbose, neither of these considerations come into play.

As for whether it's biased, well we're veering into semantics here. Bias would suggest a preference for one out of two or more viewpoints of equal merit. A system like Peer Review comes with a code of values attached, a requirement for accuracy, factual information, clarity of expression and a degree of reliability and trust. These are values worth preserving. It's not bias against freedom of expression, creativity and imagination - it's a preference that defines the core purpose of the site. Even in the less restrictive UnderGuide, there's a process where a value judgement is being made: Is this a good example of writing outside of the Edited Guide Writing Guidelines? It's not biased to make a valid value judgement.

I'm not stating that text-speak has no value, I'm just saying that *here*, on h2g2, it has less inherent long-term value than a properly-constructed posting.

TTFN - LOL... and stuff.

Jimster

You know we're in trouble when Jimster starts talking about properly-constructed postings.

B

Traveller in Time seeing a
"Even Alarming as there is talk about limited posting length !

First we lose the longposter counters on the info now we see a restriction in length "

Actually TiT, there already *is* a limit on posting length. I think what Jimster meant was that if you hit that limit, you really are in danger of being John Prescott.