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posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 04 2019, @01:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the kewl dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Because Internet makes a linguist's case for l33t speak, other online-text fads

The Internet has done good things to the English language.

That's the most important thing linguist Gretchen McCulloch has to say in her book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. Though many prominent opinion-havers rage about the imminent death of the English language at the hands of emoji-wielding teenagers, the Internet has done no more harm to English than television, radio, or dime novels.

In fact, McCulloch makes a compelling argument that Internet language, and emoji in particular, is restoring life to the relatively emotionless medium of text. For hundreds of years, public writing was limited to formal contexts like newspapers and books, written by educated people using very formal language for the edification of other educated people. Even fiction draws a clear line between informal dialogue and formal narration. On the Internet, on the other hand, the lines are much less clear. Private, informal writing (like shopping lists or notes passed between students at the back of a classroom) is now publicly visible, and the conventions developed by individuals or small groups for writing informally can spread and interact on a global scale. To McCulloch, this is more exciting than it is scary, and reading Because Internet might convince you to feel the same.

[...] McCulloch is on a mission to make linguistics relatable—and, hear me out, she's on a roll in that respect. She does this not only through Because Internet, but also through Lingthusiasm, the podcast she co-hosts with fellow linguist Lauren Gawne. As its name suggests, Lingthusiasm shows off the hosts' enthusiasm about linguistics and calls on its listeners to get excited about a wide variety of linguistic topics, such as how vowels work, the ways people from different cultures talk about time, and why efforts to create a single world language never catch on. On Lingthusiasm, McCulloch and Gawne dispel myths about language and inspire the kind of excitement that turns curious students into scientists. And in Because Internet, McCulloch continues to demystify and delight.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Monday November 04 2019, @05:09PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 04 2019, @05:09PM (#915776) Journal

    To handle all of the possible emojis let's get UTF-640.

    640 bits per character. That ought to be enough for anybody!

    I propose that out of that immense space of characters, we carve out a "tiny" 2^64 bit space reserved for a group of characters that are an 8 by 8 square grid. (Call these squares pixels if you will, but they would be actual squares in an OpenType font that has these character glyphs.) There would be an 8x8 grid of squares with one glyph in the font for every possible combination of squares dark or light. (yes, font file sizes may be gigabytes, but hey, computers will be more powerful by the time UTF-640 is adopted.)

    Among all the hieroglyphs (emojis) will be every combination of 8x8 pixels, including what we once recognized as dot-matrix text, such as on a green screen CRT or dot matrix printer. Thus our hieroglyphs will still enable us to communicate meaningfully when you just can't find the right emoji or hieroglyph.

    Once we could communicate in 7-bit ASCII. But UTF-640 will be the way of the next generation.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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