03 August 2008

Txtg: The Gr8 Db8

Ever since Text messaging first began there have been moans and complaints that it was lowering standards of literacy, corrupting our youth, and bringing about the collapse of Western civilization. Even the normally rational John Sutherland, writing in the Guardian, complained

Linguistically, it's all pigs ear ... it masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness. Texting is penmanship for illiterates.
David Crystal has answers for every one of these common objections. Texting isn't even that new: writing in abbreviated forms has been around for a long time. Other languages (such as Hebrew and Arabic) do not use vowels as part of their writing system. In actual fact, the amount of abbreviating and acronyms such as ROFL is quite small. And most convincing of all to me, users in other languages all follow more or less the same 'rules' for abbreviation... Read more >>


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