As none of you-all know, I am a proponent of Interspel, a proposal by Valerie Yule to standardize the subset of English spelling which even literate native speakers have perpetual problems with. I'll link to Interspel's Wikipedia entry below.
Anyway, I recently heard a comment about how Instant Message English -- I'll call it Instant English -- tends to be far too "cooked down" to be much use beyond vapid grunts. The example given was:
u r, u no (i.e. you are, you know)
It's quite terse. Too terse, too ambiguous beyond very simple replies. However, the principles are sound: remove useless letters. And if the vocabulary grows, perhaps it will grow alongside 20th-Century English Spelling, or even replace some of it.
Hopefully for the better.
Interspel entry in Wikipedia
No comments:
Post a Comment