There appeared a short note on English Usage in The Hindu..
The sentence in question was — ‘Hopefully the eggs are fresh.'
Purists of the English language took objection to it and maintained that people should say: ‘I hope, the Eggs are fresh.'
Their objection was to the word ‘hopefully'. But it is difficult for the purists to stand in a market place and teach people how to ask questions. But still, The purists tried to maintain what they said was correct, The matter was referred to a Professor of English who understood their anguish and told them that their stand was correct but added that the sentence -‘Hopefully the eggs are fresh'- also can be accepted.
The purists became incensed and retorted, “You are like a priest practising celibacy for yourself but advocating adultery to the parishioners.'
When I read the article in the Open Page, September 18, “---God save the English Language” with comments “have some consideration—for someone who prefers not to butcher the English language”, I could as well understand the anguish of the purist in her.
Mobile messages have various aspects although the messages that we collect for analysis do not represent the whole range of people. We hear people say:
Language in the internet is a huge disaster.
All abbreviations in the internet are rubbish'—
If students tend to forget how to spell words particularly when they use abbreviations such as---‘C U latr'; ‘gr8' ; ‘2mrw';---- this misspelling might get into their exam also.
People feel that — spelling, punctuation and capitalisation — all the three are at stake in mobile communication. Does the language indeed suffer because of these abbreviations?
How many people use them and how do they use them?
A closer scrutiny reveals that all the words are not abbreviated. Standard English still has its sway.
Perhaps abbreviation is a crude, dramatic radicalisation. All age-groups abbreviate but surprisingly each age level has its own different ways of abbreviations. So these abbreviations are — age-level, age-sensitive and also gender-sensitive.
The question is who invented these abbreviations?
C for see; U for you—gr8 for great etc.
We can see them even in 18th century particularly in the Victorian era. For example:
ROFL—rolling on the floor laughing / RFD-request for discussion / RLF-real life friend
SWALK- ‘sealed with a loving kiss—old people did (use) it at a time when there were no mobiles at all.
Why do people abbreviate? Two factors contribute to this practice — time and money.
For a question “Is ‘txtng msgs' a revolution”, the answer is both yes and no. Yes, it's revolutionary in the sense that it deviates from the traditional type of writing. No, it's not, because nothing new happens. Sounds paradoxical.
However there are more convincing reasons to decide that it is not revolutionary for nothing NEW happens in the areas of Vocabulary, grammar, morphology and orthography.
Does Vocabulary change because of this? Yes. But the change it brought is infinitesimal because not more than 1000 words are added to the language.
Well over a million words in English a slight change in mere 1000 or 2000 words- is just a drop.
Secondly, there is no new order in Grammar — for 99 per cent of the grammar in mobiles, chat-rooms and in blogs and in the internet is the same.
In orthography the changes brought by ‘txtng' are becoming less and less in the World Wide Medium particularly in punctuation, capitalisation and spelling.
Informality standards have been extended both by mobiles and Internet. To put it metaphorically, we have some sort of linguistic wardrobe in our brains—formal to bathing costume--we choose the right one at the right time.
It has added to our linguistic wardrobe at the informal end of the spectrum.
Mobile communication is a new medium to manipulate- and to manoeuvre. However the language used is almost the same as it was before its advent.
I happened to listen to a lecture by David Crystal in Wales University-UK some time back; he discussed the ‘txt-mssgng' in mobiles and conversations in ‘chat-rooms' and concluded his speech with the following sentence:
‘Txt mssgng' does not foretell the demise of English Language. It is a myth.'
(The writer is Professor of English-EIT-Eritrea. His email id is: subra12@gmail.com)
Keywords: text messaging, mobile messages, English language, Open page
Txt Mssgng is just another convenient way of communicating in the digital era. In addition to time, money and brevity, secrecy can also be a factor! Having said that, today's students and even working people tend to misuse it by not clearly knowing or understanding where to use and where not to. Hence we see people using abbreviations like PFA(please find attached), BTW(by the way), l8r(later) and much more informal ones in official communications. It is perfectly ok in non-business, non-academic environment but, definitely discouraged in official communications. It so happens that most of the students don't learn grammar, assume that messaging and texting is acceptable everywhere and follow the same when they start working and unwittingly end up earning bad reputation for themselves. Used discreetly, it will neither cause harm nor is a dampener on English.
English is not a phonetic language unlike most Indian languages. Unfortunately the entire world has adapted it (If Hitler had taken Leningrad, we would all be coding in German). So I am not really going to Komplain if English gets corrupted slowly. I think more than text messaging, it is the auto-spell check option which is Killing the desire to learn the correct spelling ... because you wont look like an idiot with bad spelling as far as you fix the words showing up with a red underline as my "Komplain" is staring at me.
Now what computer has done to my hand-writing is a whole other subject.
In the present Fast-life Mobile phone handlers find it easy to communicate with each other in short space and time .Therefore resort to jumping,twisting letters has become handy.It is strange to use numericals in place of letters to save brevity,e.g.I 1 2 b a hero ,but not a 0.( I want to be a hero, but not a zero)This is to mean whatever strikes to a user forms a part of communication.
The stone Age man would communicate symbolically with the other person.The present text sender bends words to his convenience which is also a sort of symbolism.Perhaps Aswini felt that the charm of English language is lost on messaging nowadays which any old timer would concur with.However no one can stop the evolution of a language as time moves on.So be it the mighty English lingo.
The title of the original article -- God Save the English Language -- was perhaps misleading. The focus of the article, as indeed of the comments that followed it, was on the incomprehensibility of texting language, not so much on the 'purity' of English. At least for older people, textese is incomprehensible; to them, texting appears discourteous, an attempt by the younger generation to cock a snook at them, implying, 'Oh, you don't understand my language? Tough luck! Why are you still around?'
I refer to the Open Page article on 'txt mssgng' published in The Hindu dated 25th Sept 2011.
I do agree that in an informal context and even in official dealings between peers and business associates, txt mssgng and abbreviations make it very easy to communicate. It helps both the sender and the receiver in handling the communication with ease.
But the flip side is that the younger population finds it difficult to migrate to formal communication when required. While attempting a professional exam which includes legal studies, usage of abbreviations like gr8 (for great), C (for see), U for (you) definitely irritates the examiner (I have been one myself), who cannot help penalising the student for the usage.
More than this, today even in corporates, where proper documentation is required under the various statutes that govern the corporate, there is a dearth of talent in maintaining error-free documentation. Writing a document without spelling, punctuation, capitalisation or grammatical errors is becoming very difficult for this generation.
It is necessary that they should realise the purpose and adopt perfect writing when required to do so. This also needs adequate preparation at school and college levels of education.
The language of the mobile communication,txt mesaging and a number of short cut methods evolved to exchange ideas ,though crude and jarring at times have had no destructive influence on the beauty of the english launguage .The purists need not be alarmed nor should they loose sleep over this.Even the way the launguage is used,spoken and handled vary from region to region,country to country.It does not rob the language of its original literary richness and its pristine beauty.Even Dr Johnson'doctionary is known to contain a few definitions for words that speak volume of his personal bias and prejudices.It has no debilitating effect on the launguage.
While I tend to agree with the author, that chat-language does not affect English as a whole in a radical way; still, the state of English in our country itself is very pitiable. Most of the English graduates don't know grammar well, they can't use the words in a proper way, they just follow whatever they read on the internet or so. Hence the language in the published media like internet SHOULD be correct. Although I highly revere the language used in newspapers like 'The Hindu', internet still has a long way to go...
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