虎虎老婆2b or not 2b

2021年1月26日发(作者：耿宁)
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


David Crystal

The Guardian
, Saturday 5 July 2008
Vandalism? Teenager texting on a mobile phone. Photograph: Martin Godwin



Last
year,
in
a
newspaper
article
headed

h8
txt
msgs:
How
texting
is
wrecking
our
language
John
Humphrys
argued

that
texters
are

who
are
doing
to
our
language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago. They are destroying it:
pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must
be stopped.
As a new variety of language, texting has been condemned as

paper in 2002, it is
ear ...
it
masks
dyslexia,
poor
spelling
and
mental
laziness.
Texting
is
penmanship
for
illiterates.
Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would
put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology
would have disastrous consequences for language. Scares accompanied the introduction
of
the
telegraph,
telephone,
and
broadcasting.
But
has
there
ever
been
a
linguistic
phenomenon
that
has
aroused
such
curiosity,
suspicion,
fear,
confusion,
antagonism,
fascination, excitement and enthusiasm all at once as texting? And in such a short space
of time. Less than a decade ago, hardly anyone had heard of it.
The idea of a point-to-point short message service (or SMS) began to be discussed as
part of the development of the Global System for Mobile Communications network in the
mid-1980s, but it wasn't until the early 90s that phone companies started to develop its
commercial possibilities. T
ext communicated by pagers were replaced by text messages,
at first only 20 characters in length. It took five years or more before numbers of users
started to build up. The average number of texts per GSM customer in 1995 was 0.4 per
month; by the end of 2000 it was still only 35.
The
slow start,
it
seems,
was
because
the
companies
had
trouble
working
out
reliable
ways
of
charging
for
the
new
service.
But
once
procedures
were
in
place,
texting
rocketed. In the UK, in 2001, 12.2bn text messages were sent. This had doubled by 2004,
and was forecast to be 45bn in 2007. On Christmas Day alone in 2006, over 205m texts
went out. World figures went from 17bn in 2000 to 250bn in 2001. They passed a trillion in
2005. Text messaging generated around $$70bn in 2005. That's more than three times as
much as all Hollywood box office returns that year.
People think that the written language seen on mobile phone screens is new and alien,
but all the popular beliefs about texting are wrong. Its graphic distinctiveness is not a new
phenomenon, nor is its use restricted to the young. There is increasing evidence that it
helps
rather
than
hinders
literacy.
And
only
a
very
tiny
part
of
it
uses
a
distinctive
orthography. A trillion text messages might seem a lot, but when we set these alongside
the
multi-trillion
instances
of
standard
orthography
in
everyday
life,
they
appear
as
no
more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language. T
exting has added a new
dimension to language use, but its long- term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.
Although
many
texters
enjoy
breaking
linguistic
rules,
they
also
know
they
need
to
be
understood. There is no point in paying to send a message if it breaks so many rules that
it ceases to be intelligible. When messages are longer, containing more information, the
amount of standard orthography increases. Many texters alter just the grammatical words
(such as
text, an even more standardised style has appeared. Some texters refuse to depart at all
from traditional orthography. And conventional spelling and punctuation is the norm when
institutions send out information messages, as in this university text to students:
Alert! No classes today due to snow storm
to send in to programmes. These institutional messages now form the majority of texts in
cyberspace
-
and
several
organisations
forbid
the
use
of
abbreviations,
knowing
that
many readers will not understand them. Bad textiquette.
Research has made it clear that the early media hysteria about the novelty (and thus the
dangers) of text messaging was misplaced. In one American study, less than 20% of the
text
messages
looked
at
showed
abbreviated
forms
of
any
kind
-
about
three
per
message. And in a Norwegian study, the proportion was even lower, with just 6% using
abbreviations. In my own text collection, the figure is about 10%.
People seem to have swallowed whole the stories that youngsters use nothing else but
abbreviations when they text, such as the reports in 2003 that a teenager had written an
essay so full of textspeak that her teacher was unable to understand it. An extract was
posted online, and
quoted incessantly, but as
no
one
was
ever able
to
track down
the
entire essay, it was probably a hoax.
There are several distinctive features of the way texts are written that combine to give the
impression of novelty, but none of them is, in fact, linguistically novel. Many of them were
being used in chatroom interactions that predated the arrival of mobile phones. Some can
be found in pre-computer informal writing, dating back a hundred years or more.
The
most
noticeable
feature
is
the
use
of
single
letters,
numerals,
and
symbols
to
represent words or parts of words, as with b
they
go
back
centuries. Adults
who
condemn
a

u
in
a
young
person's texting
have
forgotten that they once did the same thing themselves (though not on a mobile phone). In
countless Christmas annuals, they solved puzzles like this one:
YY U R YY U B I C U R YY 4 ME
(
Similarly, the use of initial letters for whole words (n for
me back
known
from
1618.
There
is
no
difference,
apart
from
the
medium
of
communication,
between
a
modern
kid's

(
out
loud
and
an
earlier
generation's

(
In texts we find such forms as msg (
abbrvted in ths wy - though there is no consistency between texters. But this isn't new
either.
Eric
Partridge
published
his
Dictionary
of
Abbreviations
in
1942.
It
contained
dozens of SMS-looking examples, such as agn
years before texting was born.
English has had abbreviated words ever since it began to be written down. Words such as
exam,
vet,
fridge,
cox
and
bus
are
so
familiar
that
they
have
effectively
become
new
words. When
some
of
these
abbreviated forms
first
came
into
use,
they
also
attracted
criticism. In 1711, for example, Joseph Addison complained about the way words were
being
thought that abbreviating words was a
What
novelty
there
is
in
texting
lies
chiefly
in
the
way
it
takes
further
some
of
the
processes
used
in
the
past.
Some
of
its
juxtapositions
create
forms
which
have
little
precedent,
apart
from
in
puzzles.
All
conceivable
types
of
feature
can
be
juxtaposed
-
sequences
of
shortened
and
full
words
(hldmecls

me
close
logograms
and
shortened
words
(2bctnd

be
continued
logograms
and
nonstandard
spellings
(cu2nite) and so on. There are no less than four processes combined in iowan2bwu
want to be with you
initialism + a logogram. And some messages contain unusual processes: in iohis4u
have
eyes
for
you
we
see
the
addition
of
a
plural
ending
to
a
logogram.
One
characteristic
runs
through
all
these
examples:
the
letters,
symbols
and
words
are
run
together, without spaces. This is certainly unusual in the history of special writing systems.
But few texts string together long sequences of puzzling graphic units.
There are also individual differences in texting, as in any other linguistic domain. In 2002,
Stuart
Campbell
was
found
guilty
of
the
murder
of
his
15-year-old
niece
after
his
text
message alibi was shown to be a forgery. He had claimed that certain texts sent by the girl
showed he was innocent. But a detailed comparison of the vocabulary and other stylistic