DUMBING DOWN

@sozobe,

sozobe wrote:

Right, I was being flip. Didn't mean that txtspk is a legitimate language.

I don't know though soz. What if you compared it to, let's say American Sign Language?

Like, I can pick up a random sign here or there, when I see someone signing, but much of it is over my head. With some help, I could pick up more, maybe enough to follow the conversation.

That's what I feel like with texting.

BTW (which is actually a good example)

When you (meaning everyone here) see's txt speak, do you just absorb the txt, if you know the meaning, as is? Or do you translate it in your head into proper English?

When I see a familiar txt expression, I don't take it in as English, but just know the meaning.

When I'm reading a menu in a Mexican restaurant, I'm not aware that I'm reading Spanish words, it's just what a dish is called. I don't attempt to translate chili con queso into "cheese sauce, with chili spices added" but I know that's what it is.

Funny story...When I wasn't in Texas long, I ordered chili con queso at a restaurant, and was dismayed when I got a bowl full of spicy melted cheese, and chips. The waitress seemed just as confused when I asked her "Where's the chili?" I thought I was going to get a plate of meat and beans in a tomato based sauce, which cheddar cheese sprinkled over the top. See, that's what I get for trying to translate into English.

Maybe text is like a language.

LOL

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By the way, this thread is something i've been thinking about for a long time--the thread from the foul-mouthed Australian somewhat precipitated it, but in large measure, it is a response to the incoherence of the philosophy refugees, who not only consider themselves highly intelligent (on little to no evidence), but take great affront at having it pointed out to them that what they've written is not coherent.

Texting speak is a problem, but it's not the only one.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

It isn't just in the United States. I play some of the Facebook games that are interactive with people from all around the world. The players are mostly English speakers, some for whom English is a second language and others for whom it is native.

One of the most frustrating ones (and sometimes most fun) is called Draw My Thing. A group of 8 people take turns trying to guess what one of the people is drawing to describe a noun or verb given to them by the game.

Many of the people, when it is their turn, have trouble coming up with a way to convey the concept visually. They also have trouble with breaking a compound word into conceptual segments. They also give up quickly when they don't get results in a couple of seconds rather than continuing to refine their drawing. More often than not, they resort to cheating and just print out the letters of the word for people to use in their answer.

For those who are in the answering mode, many have trouble connecting together the conceptual segments of a compound word being drawn. More often, they guess the right word but spell it wrong and end up losing.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

it is a response to the incoherence of the philosophy refugees, who not only consider themselves highly intelligent (on little to no evidence), but take great affront at having it pointed out to them that what they've written is not coherent.

You're just jealous because you don't know if the guy in the other room exists.

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Don't get me started on that son-of-a-bitch in the other room . . . he still owes me money on the World Series . . .

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@Setanta,

Quote:

i doubt that many of them are eager to read Jane Austen or James Fennimore Cooper.

Speaking of a very narrow view of the world.

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@chai2,

I was actually thinking of ASL when I made the initial comment, because it's often denigrated as not a "real" language, when it IS. I decided not to go into all of that 'cause it wasn't that germane to my point. But since you bring it up...

ASL has all of the markers of a legitimate language, while txtspeak is a shorthand for (or in a stretch, a dialect of) an actual language -- English. It isn't its own language. For it to be a legitimate language it would need fancy things like its own separate and consistent grammar.

As for what I do when I see it, it depends. OMG has become its own thing, I don't translate it to "Oh my god" in my head, I "hear" it as Oh Em Gee. But that doesn't make textspeak its own language, just means that it is contributing terminology/slang to English.

By the way, what I mean by bilingual is that I know people who can txtspeak up a storm (and enjoy it) AND go ahead and read Jane Austen (and write eloquent English papers about her).

This (A2K) is kind of an in-between area, as it's quick electronic communication. Most of us here use "proper" English (though I proofread minimally and am undoubtedly frequently improper), but for people who are used to dashing off texty things on Facebook or Twitter, this isn't so different, and I think some of 'em who CAN do either, depending on circumstances, choose to be texty here. (Then there are others who are just plain not good with English no matter what.)

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@sozobe,

Quote:

ASL has all of the markers of a legitimate language, while txtspeak is a shorthand for (or in a stretch, a dialect of) an actual language -- English. It isn't its own language. For it to be a legitimate language it would need fancy things like its own separate and consistent grammar.

Out of curiosity, Soz, with ASL being a visual language, aren't there also internationally recognized signs that you can use between any language speakers to convey similar concepts?

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@Setanta,

Quote:

do you think that this means a permanent underclass of the semi- to inarticulate will have created itself? Do you think these kids will grow up to be permanently intellectually mute? Alternatively, will they be olbiged at some point to actually learn how to coherently express themselves in English?

There have been more than a few idiots who came long before Setanta [pretending that this is his original idea] [not to mention the others who have jumped on his broken down old wagon] predicting the decline of language and its users, headed for an inarticulate future, for centuries.

It must be noted that many of these same idiots are those who led the charge in those peeves threads, the same idiots who have been raised on the nonsense fed them through Strunk & White and their offspring.

Quote:

The Decline of Grammar

Geoffrey Nunberg

...

But while it is understandable that speakers of a language with a literary tradition would tend to be pessimistic about its course, there is no more hard evidence for a general linguistic degeneration than there is reason to believe that Aaron and Rose are inferior to Ruth and Gehrig.

Most of my fellow linguists, in fact, would say that it is absurd even to talk about a language changing for the better or the worse. When you have the historical picture before you, and can see how Indo-European gradually slipped into Germanic, Germanic into Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon into the English of Chaucer, then Shakespeare, and then Henry James, the process of linguistic change seems as ineluctable and impersonal as continental drift.

From this Olympian point of view, not even the Norman invasion had much of an effect on the structure of the language, and all the tirades of all the grammarians since the Renaissance sound like the prattlings of landscape gardeners who hope by frantic efforts to keep Alaska from bumping into Asia.

http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/correct/decline/

Prattle on, folks.

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@Butrflynet,

Not really.

Deaf people tend to be good at picking up on expressions and general (not lingual) non-verbal communication, so they tend to be better than hearing people at communicating with someone who speaks another language. But different signed languages are very different from each other. (I've encountered British sign, Spanish sign, and a couple of others. French is different because it's the signed language that ASL derives from, same relationship as British English and American English.)

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@sozobe,

Left out one important thing -- people often think that signed languages are representational. Like, the sign for "tree" is to make a tree shape. That's a small percentage of the total signs though, most of them are nonrepresentational/ arbitrary. Looking at the sign for "interesting," you'd have no particular reason to think that's what it means (to pick a random example).

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@sozobe,

Quote:

ASL has all of the markers of a legitimate language, while txtspeak is a shorthand for (or in a stretch, a dialect of) an actual language -- English. It isn't its own language. For it to be a legitimate language it would need fancy things like its own separate and consistent grammar.

Are you not comparing apples and oranges, Soz? We could, tomorrow, all move towards texting but that wouldn't change the consistency of the grammar of English.

ASL doesn't have its own written form of English, does it? Those who use texting don't have a separate grammatical structure for texting; they are texting in English. Only the form differs, not the grammatical structure.

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@JTT,

I'm pointing out that it's apples and oranges. While ASL and English are both oranges (languages), textspeak is an apple (not a separate language, just a variety of English).

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Quote:

2b or not 2b?
Despite doom-laden prophecies, texting has not been the disaster for language many feared, argues linguistics professor David Crystal. On the contrary, it improves children's writing and spelling

...

An extraordinary number of doom-laden prophecies have been made about the supposed linguistic evils unleashed by texting. Sadly, its creative potential has been virtually ignored. But five years of research has at last begun to dispel the myths. The most important finding is that texting does not erode children's ability to read and write. On the contrary, literacy improves. The latest studies (from a team at Coventry University) have found strong positive links between the use of text language and the skills underlying success in standard English in pre-teenage children. The more abbreviations in their messages, the higher they scored on tests of reading and vocabulary. The children who were better at spelling and writing used the most textisms. And the younger they received their first phone, the higher their scores.

Children could not be good at texting if they had not already developed considerable literacy awareness. Before you can write and play with abbreviated forms, you need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relate to the letters. You need to know that there are such things as alternative spellings. If you are aware that your texting behaviour is different, you must have already intuited that there is such a thing as a standard. If you are using such abbreviations as lol and brb ("be right back"), you must have developed a sensitivity to the communicative needs of your textees.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/05/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview

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@chai2,

chai2 wrote:

When you (meaning everyone here) see's txt speak, do you just absorb the txt, if you know the meaning, as is? Or do you translate it in your head into proper English?

I'm a translator. I "hear" btw as by the way, LOL as laugh out loud.

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@ehBeth,

ehBeth wrote:

chai2 wrote:
When you (meaning everyone here) see's txt speak, do you just absorb the txt, if you know the meaning, as is? Or do you translate it in your head into proper English?

I'm a translator. I "hear" btw as by the way, LOL as laugh out loud.

wow, that's interersting.

I "hear" btw as "bitu" and LOL as "lul" and BFF as "biffffff" and I just know what that sound means.

I wonder WTF that means?
Probably that I'm strange.

BTW WTF iz mi fav

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@ehBeth,

I do both.

For ASAP, I hear A-SAP. For BTW, I hear by the way. For LOL, I hear lull. For BRB, I hear be right back. For AFK, I hear away from keyboard. For ROLF, I hear roff.

Those are all acronyms though, and not "text-speak" which is a combination of phonetic abbreviations and acronyms.

Question for everyone:

A lot of it seems to be just cultural familiarity. For instance, what do you hear when you see the following acronyms?

AKA
AC/DC
ATM
B&B
FYI
CYA
ID
IQ
OJ
24/7
PIN
SOB
RSVP
UFO
YTD
AWOL
HI-FI

Does using these common acronyms of our era in everyday communications make us any less inarticulate or less able to comprehend than those who use the common text phonetics of their era?

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I think that the point made about an electronic world (applies not just to texting speak, but to not being able to read an analogue clock, too) is important. I also think Soz has made a good point about ASL vs. English and texting speak vs. English. I chose my title--Dumbing down--because several years ago there was a floating discussion of black students who "dumbed down" in order not to appear to be participants in the dominant, white culture. So, i am also interested in the idea that kids adopt texting speak to be cool, and to demonstrate that they have thrown off the oppressive yoke of standard English.

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CBC is telling a story right now about a New York senator who wants a law to prohibit texting while crossing the street.

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Good question.
I've a thick bias for spelling things out or finding a similar phrase, and also towards getting rid of useless words whether or not they are acronyms. (This will come as a surprise as I'm one of a2kest finest babblers - where is my tower?) I've a background of saying some useless filler words that I learned in my youth, and have tried, tried, tried to expunge them. Words like really and actually. <clutches own throat>

So, I'll try to go through your list and visualize what I say in my mind when I see those acronyms:

AKA - aka; substitute for
AC/DC - something about electricity, spoken in my head as A. C. D. C.
ATM - A.T.M., letters spelled out; money machine
B&B - B & B, closely followed by my mind saying bed and breakfast
FYI - stupid acro for giving data
CYA - I've no idea what that means, would look it up in urban dictionary; oh, yes, I do know, but I'd just skip by it
ID - I. D.
IQ - I. Q. stupid acro for mental competence (oh, wait..)
OJ - murder on Gretna Green Way, a street I used to live on; O. J.
24/7 - 24, 7
PIN - pin
SOB - I'd rather spell it out, but I see it as S. O. B.
RSVP - R. S. V. P., shortly followed by risponde si vous plaix (which would be wrong as I know no french, but I remember the sounds when people told me what it means)
UFO - more familiar as letters than as the words the acronym stands for; closely followed by nutso.
YTD - I'd have to look it up, or would try to figure it out in context
AWOL - guy in deep ****, but I'd read it as awol.
HI-FI - Word to sell records, not an acro so much as a thing in itself.

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