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

hi every1! plz tell me if u r n2 dis nu short language

I hate it. I just found a colony of these posts onsite

This isn't even shorter anymore. What the hell is holidayz? It's the same length of holidays, but purposely mispelled!

It just doesn't make sense to me...

Your just not down with the kidz anymore.

Yo.

I just hate what they're doing to English. Especially us Americans, who have apparently already ruined english

Textspeak, it'll be the death of the written language as we know it no doubt.

Oh yeah, and before anyone comments on the z in my nickname. I've been in posession of it since I was in primary school, and since I'm now going on 23 I can safely say it's not supposed to be trendy and just a moniker.

Never knew you were called Monica.

B

We've had job applications in at work in text speak.

I work with deaf teenagers - often their english is not great (not 1st language and all) and they use txt msgs All The Time thus the english deteriorates even further . . . it takes so long to decipher . . . and I even get handwritten notes in txt speek . . . brings out my inner Disapproving Grandad . . .

It annoys the f*ck out of me... Even when I write text messages I write them full length, and if they are too long go through shortening words... There is no need for them in a place where there is no character limit...

It just makes me think of a drama I heard on R4 (The Archers?), where two Rabbi's were discussing how to encourage youngsters to attend the synagogue.

One of them remarked that they could text message people, missing out all of the vowel sounds, which was just like the way that Hebrew used to be written anyway!

However, while I can understand the shortening of words when using an "antique" mobile phone, modern phones automatically prompt you for the whole word. So I think that "txtspk" will die out, eventually, but it will leave behind a legacy of TLA's.

In my experience, most people who use 'txtspk' turn the predictive type dictionarys off on their phone...

Good to see I'm not the only one

This would make an interesting entry now that I think about it. I'll have to check if it's in the EG

Sometime in the future I would imagine voice recognition software will make text speak a thing of the past.

And for texters:

Smtm n th ftr I wld mgn vc rcgntn sftwr wll mk txtspk a thng f th pst.

All seems like a vanity license plate to me

Gt2fly

I like vowels, personally.

ETAOIN SHRDLU
TN SHRDL

See my vague point?

B, my name's not monica, it's Mark. Oh why do I bother?

I use chat room abbrevs in chat rooms and in IM, (& with just one person here) as h2g2 is neither a chat room, nor IM I don't use it here, and don't think it should be used in serious conversations here.

I find the adding z to the end of words more amusing, than annoying, I was called Emz last night, I kinda liked it.

Emmily

You're all old fuddie-duddies. Accept that things change, rollerblades is in the dictionary, and that schools will still insist on normal written English. Change can be a good thing, otherwise we'd all still be writing like Chaucer.

It's certainly an accepted point that language evolves. However, it does _not_ evolve into a meaningless string of alphanumerics over the course of five years. That is distortion and is a bit more unforgivable.

If that was consistently the case, then anything written more than forty years ago would be absolute gibberish (excluding Dickens, which is absolute gibberish and may have evolved back into something resembling common sense ).

*Proper* language evolution is taking six months to work out whether 'spelt' is redundant.

B

But it hasn't evolved - we're using 'normal' English. It's a small set of people using txt spk. I expect the number of people who used 'queen' instead of 'kween' grew slowly. In 200 years we might all be doing it, and we'll laugh at the long winded way we used to write.

I don't like it mainly because half the time I can't understand what they are trying to say! On the other hand it drives my wife mad when I use it in mobile texts where I am limited to how many characters I can use.

Mina - you appear to have shot your own argument in the foot there. Evolution of language will only occur where there is a popular consensus. If txt spk is used by "a small set of people", a set which to my eyes appears to be diminishing already, then that consensus will never be there.

The idea of removing vowels and spelling phonetically isn't exactly a new one, anyway. Swift was doing it in the 18th Century.

B