My best friend Xak and I talk quite infrequently. Mostly, we type.
When a great percentage of one’s interaction is via a text media like instant messaging, language rules sort of change.
I, for instance, cease to use comma’s in any sort of reasonable manner. Instead I pepper the flow of the text with them in a way that is probably illegal. When I type how I talk, you end up with sentences like this: (please disregard subject matter, I am more concerned with punctuation)
well, what if you went down to the waterfront, got some monkeys, and took them back to her hotel room, monkeys will surprise anybody, and you fill all the pocket of her clothes, each one, with cottage cheese
That is entirely grammatically incorrect. Commas become my breathes, I will insert them unconsciously whenever I would normally pause. Speak those lines aloud, pausing at each comma, and it will sound reasonable.
Anyway, my real point is about new words.
Xak and I say “Yov” to one another a lot. The story behind its origin is simple, I was trying to type “Yo yo yo” in greeting one day, and the V key is near the Spacebar. It came out “Yovyovyov”. For some reason beyond my best explanations, “Yov” has become our standard greeting.
The effect of the internet on our language is possibly underestimated by some. People are predisposed to novelty and so these phases in our linguistic development can really take off without warning.
A similar example is our perversion of the word “awesome”. A popular website used the spelling “awexome” at some point in the past and we adopted it in our instant messaging. Sometimes we have used “awezome” instead. Saying these words aloud sounds fairly ridiculous, but writing them out, they seem too work.
This is how a language begins to change, how a dialect begins to form.
More then likely, of course, that our habits won’t spread. But if allowed to spread, you would see a diversion of Geekspeak (our version or another more popular one) branch off from English, the way Ebonics has, or the way American English has spouted from British English.
200 years from now, the world will speak fewer languages then it does today, as big popular ones like English squash the others. But English pays the price of becoming like Latin, and branching off in to a multitude of daughter tongues.
Wordsmithing and an inelegance of language
My best friend Xak and I talk quite infrequently. Mostly, we type.
When a great percentage of one’s interaction is via a text media like instant messaging, language rules sort of change.
I, for instance, cease to use comma’s in any sort of reasonable manner. Instead I pepper the flow of the text with them in a way that is probably illegal. When I type how I talk, you end up with sentences like this: (please disregard subject matter, I am more concerned with punctuation)
well, what if you went down to the waterfront, got some monkeys, and took them back to her hotel room, monkeys will surprise anybody, and you fill all the pocket of her clothes, each one, with cottage cheese
That is entirely grammatically incorrect. Commas become my breathes, I will insert them unconsciously whenever I would normally pause. Speak those lines aloud, pausing at each comma, and it will sound reasonable.
Anyway, my real point is about new words.
Xak and I say “Yov” to one another a lot. The story behind its origin is simple, I was trying to type “Yo yo yo” in greeting one day, and the V key is near the Spacebar. It came out “Yovyovyov”. For some reason beyond my best explanations, “Yov” has become our standard greeting.
The effect of the internet on our language is possibly underestimated by some. People are predisposed to novelty and so these phases in our linguistic development can really take off without warning.
A similar example is our perversion of the word “awesome”. A popular website used the spelling “awexome” at some point in the past and we adopted it in our instant messaging. Sometimes we have used “awezome” instead. Saying these words aloud sounds fairly ridiculous, but writing them out, they seem too work.
This is how a language begins to change, how a dialect begins to form.
More then likely, of course, that our habits won’t spread. But if allowed to spread, you would see a diversion of Geekspeak (our version or another more popular one) branch off from English, the way Ebonics has, or the way American English has spouted from British English.
200 years from now, the world will speak fewer languages then it does today, as big popular ones like English squash the others. But English pays the price of becoming like Latin, and branching off in to a multitude of daughter tongues.