From: Gregg Reynolds (unicode@arabink.com)
Date: Sat Feb 19 2005 - 14:01:46 CST
Hans Aberg wrote:
> At 21:59 -0600 2005/02/18, Gregg Reynolds wrote:
>
>>>It depends: If people cannot parse the sentence "he was a pole", or the
>>>sentence in all-caps "HE WAS A POLE".
>>
>>And let's not forget (I'm not making this up) the American baseball
>>coach Dick Pole.
>
>
> If "emotional characters" :-) are added, one can make the difference by
> writing
> <proper noun>dick <proper noun>pole
> <slur>dick <slur>pole
> etc. Emotions are clearly part of the semantics; it is just not traditional
> to add it in text.
Which calls to mind the factoid that we old geezers tend to forget: new
text communication technologies (esp. the various kinds of instant
messaging) beget new orthographies. Seems highly likely to me that
within a generation or two ideas of "standard orthography" will change
radically, so basing tech standards on our current notions of
correctness seems questionable. Emoticons have already become part of
the (electronically) written language.
E.g. cul8r = see you later. It's not so hard to imagine 'pidgin'
orthographies that mix scripts and languages lasciviously, as economic
and cultural globalization continues apace. I'll bet this is already
common in various Asian technically sophisticated subcultures mixing
bits of English into their electronic messages; it's not so hard to
imagine bits of Asian text being adopted in English language messaging
over the next 50 years as e.g. China and India exert more and more
cultural influence in the wake of economic expansion. So why not in URLs?
Then again maybe such mixing is not actually occurring. Here's my
question for you speakers of Russian, Korean, Hebrew, etc. etc.: when
the kids in your area communicate via text messaging, do they mix
scripts and languages? (I'm almost certain this happens in Japanese.)
I'm assuming that each language community is inventing its own shorthand
orthography for such messaging, along the lines of 'cul8r'.
-g
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