Escape Artists
The Lounge at the End of the Universe => Gallimaufry => Topic started by: Listener on June 07, 2007, 06:24:24 PM
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A few interesting concepts that need to have a single English word that can apply to them:
je ne sais quois - that indefinable something I cannot describe
nichevo - it can't be helped
Am I missing these words?
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A few interesting concepts that need to have a single English word that can apply to them:
je ne sais quois - that indefinable something I cannot describe
My wife has a bunch of made up words for that - watchamcallit, thingamabob, whatsis, whatchaficky, dohickey...
Somehow they just don't have the same impact. :P
nichevo - it can't be helped
Inevitable?
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nichevo - it can't be helped
Inevitable?
Yes, technically. However, when I first heard about nichevo, it wasn't just the phrase "it can't be helped" but also conveyed a sense of helplessness and despair with the fact that no one can help it and no one ever will.
If we communicated with words and pheromones or something we could probably get the meaning out correctly.
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nichevo - it can't be helped
Inevitable?
Yes, technically. However, when I first heard about nichevo, it wasn't just the phrase "it can't be helped" but also conveyed a sense of helplessness and despair with the fact that no one can help it and no one ever will.
If we communicated with words and pheromones or something we could probably get the meaning out correctly.
that reminds me of John Malcovich near the end of "Dangerous Liasons" where he kept saying "it's beyond my control"
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A few interesting concepts that need to have a single English word that can apply to them:
je ne sais quois - that indefinable something I cannot describe
nichevo - it can't be helped
Am I missing these words?
I think the problem is that these words get their "special" status by being foreign. There's value to using a phrase outside of its own language. There are ways of saying each in English, but they are not the same - because they are in English, they just don't give the same feeling. That's the same reason a lot of legal terminology is in Latin - it's not that no-one thought of translating them to English at any point, but that switching to Latin serves a purpose and lends the concepts a certain impact that they otherwise wouldn't have.
Also, je ne sais quois is four words in French. Why would you expect the English counterpart to be a single word?
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Also, je ne sais quois is four words in French. Why would you expect the English counterpart to be a single word?
Unfathomable.
My favourite foreign word is schadenfreude [sp?] - it's German and means the indecent pleasure of someone else's misfortune. Lisa Simpson taught me that word.
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Also, je ne sais quois is four words in French. Why would you expect the English counterpart to be a single word?
Unfathomable.
Really?
"Ah, the girl I met last night has that certain unfathomable that I find so attractive" - doesn't quite do it for me.
"unfathomable quality" would be far closer, but it doesn't have the same impact that the French phrase does. And, you know, it's two words.
(Just to be a little less flippant, and a bit more of the linguist that I am, I should point out that je ne sais quois is a noun in English (and I would argue that it is an English word, even though it's origins as a French phrase are transparent), while unfathomable is an adjective.)
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It should have been:
""Ah, the girl I met last night has that certain unfathomableness that I find so attractive" - doesn't quite do it for me.
And in French, "La fille qui j'ai rencontré la nuit passée a cela une certain je ne c'est quoi..." doesn't make much sense either.
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Ok, I grant that "unfathomableness" works better. But I still insist that it just doesn't feel the same, which is as important for choice of words as their origins.
Also, you might well have missed my edit above since I likely made it while you were responding to me, but it is important to note that the English uses of je ne sais quois has already evolved far past the point where it's a direct lift from French, and it behaves as a noun when used in English sentences, and can well be used for things that its French cognate cannot.
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I agree with all your points. It has far more meaning that the exact words, it sounds better, and imparts a savoir-faire on the speaker ;)
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je ne sais quois also has the wonderfully ironic quality in that most Americans probably don't know what it actually means. (...and I confess that until I read this thread, I was one of them :-[) But, the word still works in context.
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Not trying to sound mean, but I do get a giggle when people will use that phrase or a similar one like plus ca change but they treat it as one word. It's more because it sounds funny than anything else.
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I don't think I've ever used je ne sais quois because I wouldn't have a clue as to the spelling and given my ability to mangle pronunciations, it might be dangerous for me to try and say it. (Steve Martin: "Somebody help him. He spoke French!")
I just know I've heard people say things like:
"This movie has many flaws. I don't know why I like it so much. It has that certain je ne sais quois that I find so appealing."
and then brain says
"Hmmm. There's that word again. I don't know exactly what it means, but it must be some quality that can only be described by that word. Even so, I know that he likes this movie, even if he can't tell me why. I should really go look that word up so I know what it means. If I don't, I might make myself look like an uneducated idiot in some forum post somewhere. Oh look, purple spaceships!"
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here's another couple of neat ones:
Zeitgeist - It's German, and means 'The spirit of the age'
L'espirit d'escalier - French, and it refers to thinking of something clever to say in an argument you've just left behind.
One more though, and my favorite word of all time :) which is technically an English word but comes from Latin:
Defenestration, the act of throwing someone out of a window.
You have to love any language that has a word like that in it.
Simon Painter
Shropshire, UK
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Defenestration, the act of throwing someone out of a window.
You have to love any language that has a word like that in it.
Simon Painter
Shropshire, UK
Which begs the question... can we have other forms, like refenestration, or fenestration?
I imagine we're not far from a word like defenestration that means "throwing someone under the bus".
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Which begs the question... can we have other forms, like refenestration, or fenestration?
I imagine we're not far from a word like defenestration that means "throwing someone under the bus".
I believe that defenestration was actually coined in order to have a word for a period of Czech history, the Defenestration of Prague, which I think involved the people taking the nobility and throwing them out of windows (and onto spikes, I think).
It's not exactly a proper word, it's just the definition translated into Latin.
Still, you have to love it ;D
Technically you could have those other forms, but as Defenestration itself isn't exactly a proper word in itself, they probably aren't acceptable English.
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Hey, it's on dictionary.com, so I say that counts. :P
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/defenestration
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I don't believe we need proprietary English words for these concepts at all! Part of what makes English such a great language (yeah, I said it) is its amazing ability to assimilate the cool things in other languages.
Let's face it, most of the truly cosmopolitan places in the world (Toronto, New York, London, Sydney) are all English speaking places, so increasingly, English will, borg-like, expand itself by plundering its neighbours! Hooray!
I for one am glad that we're still allowed to be (at least linguistically) colonial. I know that analogy breaks down after 4 seconds' thought, but I don't care, it still sounds cool.
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I don't believe we need proprietary English words for these concepts at all! Part of what makes English such a great language (yeah, I said it) is its amazing ability to assimilate the cool things in other languages.
Let's face it, most of the truly cosmopolitan places in the world (Toronto, New York, London, Sydney) are all English speaking places, so increasingly, English will, borg-like, expand itself by plundering its neighbours! Hooray!
I for one am glad that we're still allowed to be (at least linguistically) colonial. I know that analogy breaks down after 4 seconds' thought, but I don't care, it still sounds cool.
"The English language... not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Nicoll
Being polyglottal (is that the proper conjugation of "polyglot" anyway?) I believe is one of the most underappreciated and undertaught skills in this country above all other English-speaking countries. We pay lip service to it, but when it comes right down to it, two years of Spanish class usually gives you a list of rote phrases and little else. It amuses me that one of the most complicated spoken languages in the world is becoming the language of the intelligensia -- why not one of the East Asian languages? Japanese has (IMO) a very straightforward form of grammar. Why can't we use that?
*sigh* Pardon my running-away-with-the-topic there.
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I think you'll find that in the eventual future (perhaps not too far off) the borrowing of other languages' words and phrases will become so common that English may not be recognisable as itself anymore. I predict a future in which the common language of Earth is English-based, but takes 1/4 of its vocabulary from other languages, particularly Asian ones.
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I'm not a linguist, but I think what will happen is that there will be as many languages as there are syntax structures. We may all end up pulling from the same set of nouns, verbs, etc...
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So the vocabulary will homogenize but the grammar will differ from culture to culture? I don't think I'm understanding you right, could you expand on that? (or maybe a linguist, if we have any, could chime in here!)
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I'm a linguist. (Edit: Even though that is true, my specialization is in semantics and neurolinguistics and I'm not an expert on either language history or change. I have taken courses on these topics and have discussed them with people who are experts, but I don't want to give the impression that I'm claiming more authority here than I have.)
What ClintMemo is proposing is highly unlikely. Syntax is tied in many ways to the lexicon - they can't change independently. For one, not all languages express the same concepts in the same way. Take the word "hungry". In English, this is an adjective. I can say "I am hungry". In other languages, the same concept would have to be expressed with a noun ("I have hunger", as in French), and I believe there are languages that express this notion with a verb ("I hunger"), though I don't remember which. It would be difficult to borrow these words from one language to another without changing the syntax to match. And this is just one of many, many examples.
More generally, people speak of language borrowings and change as if they are recent things. They are not. Languages have always changed and evolved over time - and it used to be a lot faster. Latin split up and became languages as different as early Italian, French, and Romanian in only several centuries. The Normans invaded England and turned Old English, a pure Germanic language, into the hybrid language that we speak today, with a lexicon that's about half Germanic, half Romance, and a syntax that's unlike any other European language. Then print came, and widespread education, and the process slowed down - once the written word became popular and massively accessible, the changes became more noticable. The 19th century gave rise to nationalism, and that led to a move to homogenize the languages spoke in the newly emerging countries. Languages became codified, but still they changed - read a 19th century novel and compare it to today's speech.
What has changed again, in the last quarter of the 20th century, is that mass media, and the internet, have changed the boundaries of language contact. Once, contact with foreign languages was limited to a relatively small sector of the population. Now, it's becoming easier and easier to be exposed to foreign languages, regardless of financial standing, education, or occupation. The effects of this are just starting to be understood, but they're neither as dramatic or unique as some of the above posts make it sound. Rather, it is the continuation of a process that has been going on throughout the life of the human race - languages have never been static, and never will be, despite the efforts of language codifiers. It is true that the number of languages in the world is on a rapid decline - but this is mostly because the number of societies is decreasing - the languages the world is losing are those spoken by tribes in South America, Africa, and Australia, which are becoming absorbed into larger societies, or wiped out by war and disease. As for the rest, more and more people in the Western world are becoming multi-lingual, speaking several languages, but this can have a lot of outcomes, merger of the languages being a highly unlikely one.
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What ClintMemo is proposing is highly unlikely. Syntax is tied in many ways to the lexicon - they can't change independently. For one, not all languages express the same concepts in the same way. Take the word "hungry". In English, this is an adjective. I can say "I am hungry". In other languages, the same concept would have to be expressed with a noun ("I have hunger", as in French), and I believe there are languages that express this notion with a verb ("I hunger"), though I don't remember which. It would be difficult to borrow these words from one language to another without changing the syntax to match. And this is just one of many, many examples.
What about Asian languages like Japanese, Chinese (aren't there several varieties of Chinese) or Indian languages like Farsi (sp?) Hindi (sp?)? I have no idea what the syntax of those languages is like, but how does it compare to Latin languages? Are there components that exist in some languages that don't exist in others? For example, doesn't some forms of Chinese use the pitch of how you say the word to establish meaning? There isn't any equivalent to that in English.
I suppose the reason I think the way I do is because I'm a programmer and I compare spoken languages to programming languages. Trying to learn a programming language with a syntax structure similar to something you already know is not too difficult. Trying to learn programming language in which the syntax structure is alien to anything you've seen before is much more difficult.
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What ClintMemo is proposing is highly unlikely. Syntax is tied in many ways to the lexicon - they can't change independently. For one, not all languages express the same concepts in the same way. Take the word "hungry". In English, this is an adjective. I can say "I am hungry". In other languages, the same concept would have to be expressed with a noun ("I have hunger", as in French), and I believe there are languages that express this notion with a verb ("I hunger"), though I don't remember which. It would be difficult to borrow these words from one language to another without changing the syntax to match. And this is just one of many, many examples.
What about Asian languages like Japanese, Chinese (aren't there several varieties of Chinese) or Indian languages like Farsi (sp?) Hindi (sp?)? I have no idea what the syntax of those languages is like, but how does it compare to Latin languages? Are there components that exist in some languages that don't exist in others? For example, doesn't some forms of Chinese use the pitch of how you say the word to establish meaning? There isn't any equivalent to that in English.
I'm not sure I understand your question - my point wasn't that languages will assimilate in syntax as readily as they do in the lexicon, but rather that the lexicon and the syntax are not fully independent of each other, and that you can't just impose a lexicon from one language on the syntax of another unless they happen to be very similar to begin with. As a general rule, languages don't merge in the way you described - they either influence one another but remain independent, or one is totally supplanted by the other.
So I'm not sure what your point is in the post above - what are those language supposed to be examples of? Certainly, they differ considerably from English - in both lexicon and syntax - but that just makes it less likely that they will acquire a fully English-like lexicon, or vice-versa, and even less likely that some hybrid lexicon will arise that can fit on either syntax.
Anyway, maybe this answers you and maybe it doesn't, I'm not sure.
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Anyway, maybe this answers you and maybe it doesn't, I'm not sure.
I think it does - sort of....
If two languages have a similar syntax, then imposing one upon the other is easier than if they are different. Right? So, ultimately, maybe all languages with a syntax similar to English will eventually either be taken over by a single language, (perhaps English), or some type of hybrid language will emerge from it.
If that's true, then maybe we'll end up as many languages as there are unique syntaxes, but it sounds like each language would have a mostly unique lexicon as well.
Maybe I just don't know enough about the topic to ask a proper question. :P
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If two languages have a similar syntax, then imposing one upon the other is easier than if they are different. Right? So, ultimately, maybe all languages with a syntax similar to English will eventually either be taken over by a single language, (perhaps English), or some type of hybrid language will emerge from it.
If that's true, then maybe we'll end up as many languages as there are unique syntaxes, but it sounds like each language would have a mostly unique lexicon as well.
Abstracting away from some important issues (what is the relevant dimension of similarity? Is English more or less similar to Turkish than Japanese is to Russian?) this is potentially a possible scenario, but once the we stop asking "is this possible?", we need to ask "is this a likely result of current trends?". The question is - is there any real reason to assume that languages are coming closer together? And the answer is - no, not really. What I think the fallacy behind your reasoning is - though this is conjecture - is the underlying assumption that bilingualism isn't a steady state, and that the growing importance of English will result in a decline in other lanuages. But that's simply not true - in fact, bilingualism is the norm, both historically and currently - most people live in societies in which they need to speak at least two languages, and this usually does not lead to either language vanishing, but rather both languages exist side by side. It is only when there is an active program to supress one of the languages - say, by not teaching it in schools - that it starts losing out.
I think the only real way non-English languages - even those similar to English - will vanish is if there will be a societal shift that pushes away from nationalism and into true globalism, and as part of that there will be a deliberate program of "English only". I think this is highly unlikely given the current state of the world, where nationalism, if anything, is on the rise. My predicition is that, if the current balance of power in the world and media is retained for the next hundred years, then in 2107 most people in the world will speak English and another language. The only monolinguals will be a minority of uneducated poor people in the 3rd world who will not have access to mass media, and people in English speaking countries who will not need a second language. Sure, the Dutch of 2107 will be different than the Dutch of 2007, but to roughly the same degree that the Dutch of 2007 is different than the Dutch of 1907, not because it will become English.
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I think a good example of the exception to your idea, eytanz is metropolitan India. For various reasons, English is the predominant language of business, and politics. As such, ancedotally anyway, people are finding that the younger people continue to communicate in English outside of work and that their mother tongue is getting corruptted. It is similar to what Candians call "franglais", in reference to some French communities over exposure to English and their adoption of whole English words and phrases in daily conversation.
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First, the notion of language corruption is a political/socilogical one, not a linguistic one. Linguists do not assign value to language change.
Second, the situation you describe - at least, to the degree you describe it - is probably not a counter-example to what I'm saying. I don't know much about India, so I'm not talking about the specific case, but you hear about things like this a lot in the media, and 9 times out of 10 (at least) they are misinterpreted. A bilingual individual living in a non-bilingual community will only use one language at a time. When the community is bilingual as well, however, what people do is mix languages. That is not the same as creating a new hybrid language; rather, it is switching back and forth between two languages continually, sometimes within the same sentence (the technical term for this is code switching). The way you can tell code switching apart from a merged language is that the bilingual speakers are perfectly capable of understanding and using "pure" Hindi (or whatever their mother tongue is) when they go back to their families and other people who are not in full command of English.
Now, there is an interesting question here of what happens over several generations - once children grow up in a community where everyone mixes Hindi and English, do these children know they are listening to two languages or do they think they are hearing a hybrid? I don't know the answer to this, so I don't want to conjecture.
What I do know, however, is that in situations like the one you describe above, the most common result is either a stable bilingual community (if people in it have reason to use both languages), or, over time, the less useful language will mostly disappear, and the communities will become English speaking. The latter is certainly a possibility - but all I was saying above is that this will not happen on a global scale. There will be a lot fewer languages spoken in this world in 50 years than there are now, but there will still be many of them.
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Disclaimer: I am no linguist. At all. Not a bit.
Isn´t Singlish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish) a good example of a merged language? From my understanding, many who speak Singlish can´t speak correct English and they may also have no other common language, so then I guess it doesn´t come under the definition of just mixed bilingualism (is that a word?). By the wikipedia definition there, I guess by merged languages we´re talking about creole languages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language).
Whether there will be a single world-wide creole at some point in the future- no idea. I find it unlikely, if only because differing language (even only vocab) seems to be a strong social "creation" - it helps create an internal identity, a sense of belonging and to define "us" from "them". I could imagine that even with a world creole there will always be local dialects/languages, although these will probably also evolve over time from what we know now (with perhaps the exception of French, which seems to be kept well under control :) )
Hmm, not sure if I´ve added anything useful here, but there goes.
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Ok, I'm drifting more and more from things I understand here, so let me backtrack a bit. I didn't mean to say - though I agree that it looks like I did - that creole languages don't develop. But - as far as I understand - they arise in particular circumstances, such as the ones described in the Singlish article - which either involve immigrants, conquest or colonization - basically, environments where people speaking one language find themselves in a society where their daily life requires them to use another language, *and* there is no strong social force pushing for the continuation of their mother tongue. Now, I don't know the situation in India, but in most of the Western world, at least, this is not the situation.
Importantly, creoles are not formed by people importing the new, dominant tongue (English) into their native language. Rather, the reverse is true - they are trying to speak English but they don't really know it well, so they fill in parts from their mother tongue. People who are educated and can speak both languages well don't normally form creoles.
Anyway, I don't really have much new to add here, so let me just summarize my overall point -
- The number of languages in the world is decreasing. Globalization is a large factor in this.
- It is quite likely that in some areas of the world, where the social factors are suited for it, new creole languages will arise.
- However, this is not going to happen on a global scale.
- Cross-language borrowing is not a symptom of creole formation, nor does it lead to it.
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In a Darwinian sense certain of the myriad ways in which we can record thoughts are less well suited to a modern technological era and they will decline in popuarity, as they have become "overcome by events".
I think this will be hardest on the pictographic languages--alphabets seem to work better on a keyboard.
English has by far the largest vocabulary because it is officially omniverous, which is a Darwinian advantage. No one is trying to keep English "pure" by keeping foreign words out, so it is allowed to adapt and evolve. English is just "Romanticized" German, but as such it is a good bridge between those two classes of language.
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nichevo - it can't be helped
Inevitable?
Yes, technically. However, when I first heard about nichevo, it wasn't just the phrase "it can't be helped" but also conveyed a sense of helplessness and despair with the fact that no one can help it and no one ever will.
The Inuit have a saying "Ayornamat" or "Ayungnakto" (or any nuimber of regional variations) that means the same thing. It could be used for a death in the family, or accidently spilling a cup of tea.
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In a Darwinian sense certain of the myriad ways in which we can record thoughts are less well suited to a modern technological era and they will decline in popuarity, as they have become "overcome by events".
I think this will be hardest on the pictographic languages--alphabets seem to work better on a keyboard.
You would think, but the Japanese do fine with keyboards. More amazingly, they are demons with entering text on a cell phone. They type the pronunciation using roman characters. Then the computer displays a list of matching words, and the cycle through them with the space bar. It sounds cumbersome, but they seem to do OK.
Regarding the effects of technology, I could see our written language becoming infused with l33tspeak once the young whippersnappers who are growing up in chat rooms come of age.
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Regarding the effects of technology, I could see our written language becoming infused with l33tspeak once the young whippersnappers who are growing up in chat rooms come of age.
erm... no... i dont think so... Having grown up with all this, I can assure you it is not used that often. Its beaten into our heads in school to write correctly, and we (most of us, to be exact) know when to write normally and when it is okay to use 13375p34k. P1U5 13375p34k !5 h4r|) 70 Un|)3r574n|)... ! W01|) h473 70 r34|) !7 f0r 7h!5 10nG!!!1!!!!!1111!!!!!!1111!!1111111!!!!!!
p34r my 1337 h4x
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Regarding the effects of technology, I could see our written language becoming infused with l33tspeak once the young whippersnappers who are growing up in chat rooms come of age.
erm... no... i dont think so... Having grown up with all this, I can assure you it is not used that often. Its beaten into our heads in school to write correctly, and we (most of us, to be exact) know when to write normally and when it is okay to use 13375p34k. P1U5 13375p34k !5 h4r|) 70 Un|)3r574n|)... ! W01|) h473 70 r34|) !7 f0r 7h!5 10nG!!!1!!!!!1111!!!!!!1111!!1111111!!!!!!
p34r my 1337 h4x
I'm so old. Does that really translate into something?
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Regarding the effects of technology, I could see our written language becoming infused with l33tspeak once the young whippersnappers who are growing up in chat rooms come of age.
erm... no... i dont think so... Having grown up with all this, I can assure you it is not used that often. Its beaten into our heads in school to write correctly, and we (most of us, to be exact) know when to write normally and when it is okay to use 13375p34k. P1U5 13375p34k !5 h4r|) 70 Un|)3r574n|)... ! W01|) h473 70 r34|) !7 f0r 7h!5 10nG!!!1!!!!!1111!!!!!!1111!!1111111!!!!!!
Yeah, that's a good point. I agree that it's too much of a stretch for English to start looking like that cat-on-a-keyboard stuff that you typed in. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if informal written English becomes peppered with l33t words. In Japanese young people sometimes toss English words in their speech to be clever. They say stuff like "Let's go", "OK", and my favorite, "cho belly ba."* "Bye Bye" has become as normal as "gesundheit" in English.
The l33t you used looks like it is mostly spelled correctly (what I could decipher), just using different characters to represent letters. You're right, it would be much easier just to write regular English. I was thinking of l33t abbreviations like rtard, teh, LOL, cul8r, that kind of thing.
*cho belly ba: cho - a Japanese slang word for "very"
belly - "very"
ba - "bad"
Note that although this comes from English, it is completely incomprehensible to English speakers. Now I'm wondering if the l33t that comes into common usage will have mutated from "standard" l33t.
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There's an ad that's been running here that has a Mom talk to her daughter and the daughter speaks in nothing but text abbreviations.
It goes something like:
Mom: Bethany (or whatever) who are you texting all the time?
Grl: wu? (what's up)
Mom who are you texting all the time?
Grl: idk, my bff Jill?
It had subtitles so we could understand. The ending is funny to. I found it on Utube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nIUcRJX9-o)
Like wakela, I suspect this is more what slang will become, already my kids use it sometime.
Here's the translation - mostly it is character substituion - 7=t, 1= l, !=i, 5=S, 4=A :
P1U5 - Plus
13375p34k - leetspeak (short for elite speak - it's a very old hacker term, as in elite code language
!5 - is
h4r|) -hard
70 - to
Un|)3r574n|) - understand, the |) is a D
...
! - I
W01|) - wold = would
h473 - hate
70 - to
r34|) - read
!7 - it
f0r - for
7h!5 - this
10nG - long
!!!1!!!!!1111!!!!!!1111!!1111111!!!!!! - ???
p34r - pear? This is new to me.
my - my (who'd have guessed)
1337 - leet
h4x - hax = hacks
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LMAO
slic you got it! tho i missed the 'h' in ph34r... as in phear, as in fear. my bad.
the !!!1!!!1111!!! is a joke among the "community" i guess you can call it... its when a noob (begginner, newcomer, person who thinks he's leet) types really fast and stupidly and uses shift 1 for exclamation points. he types so fast and stupidly that he releases the shift key in some spots and doesnt bother to correct himself... heh.
by the way after i typed that stuff up, i put it through a leet translator (available on google heh) just to see how far off i was, and it was surprisingly accurate!
wakela, as for your intention (using lol, teh, etc.) again, no one writes that way in any formal situation. it is reserved to the internet, and to more carefree websites at that. at these forums i tend to deviate between the two. I type correctly, but i sometimes do not bother to capitalize I, and sometimes i do. also i sometimes dont capitalize the beginnings of sentences.... i dont go all out tho and start typin lik i would on a chat room, bein all gramatically incorrect and typin so fast and not correctin speling mistaks n stuff yo.
generally us kids know when to use chat english and when to use correct english. and i use generally because i dont have facts, just experiance.
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LMAO
slic you got it! tho i missed the 'h' in ph34r... as in phear, as in fear. my bad.
the !!!1!!!1111!!! is a joke among the "community" i guess you can call it... its when a noob (begginner, newcomer, person who thinks he's leet) types really fast and stupidly and uses shift 1 for exclamation points. he types so fast and stupidly that he releases the shift key in some spots and doesnt bother to correct himself... heh.
by the way after i typed that stuff up, i put it through a leet translator (available on google heh) just to see how far off i was, and it was surprisingly accurate!
wakela, as for your intention (using lol, teh, etc.) again, no one writes that way in any formal situation. it is reserved to the internet, and to more carefree websites at that. at these forums i tend to deviate between the two. I type correctly, but i sometimes do not bother to capitalize I, and sometimes i do. also i sometimes dont capitalize the beginnings of sentences.... i dont go all out tho and start typin lik i would on a chat room, bein all gramatically incorrect and typin so fast and not correctin speling mistaks n stuff yo.
generally us kids know when to use chat english and when to use correct english. and i use generally because i dont have facts, just experiance.
The sad thing is I'd say you intelligent kids know when to use it. I have heard at least 5 stories on NPR where teachers were saying that many kids don't understnad that the language you use for your friend is different from the language you would use writing to your grandmother or your boss.
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LMAO
slic you got it!
Thx, can't say that helped invent this stuff, but I've been around long enough to have seen my share of pr0n, make my share of art, and pass around some .nfo
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSLL
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SS LL
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SSSSSSSSSLLLLLLLLLLL
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wakela, as for your intention (using lol, teh, etc.) again, no one writes that way in any formal situation. it is reserved to the internet, and to more carefree websites at that. at these forums i tend to deviate between the two. I type correctly, but i sometimes do not bother to capitalize I, and sometimes i do. also i sometimes dont capitalize the beginnings of sentences.... i dont go all out tho and start typin lik i would on a chat room, bein all gramatically incorrect and typin so fast and not correctin speling mistaks n stuff yo.
generally us kids know when to use chat english and when to use correct english. and i use generally because i dont have facts, just experiance.
I hope you don't think that my impression of your generation is a bunch of zit-faced hackers who don't know how to communicate with real people. I have more faith in you guys than NPR does, apparently. In fact I feel weird referring to you as "you guys," because it implies you are a separate group from me. I didn't know you were a high school student until you mentioned it.
At one time using words like "OK", "thanks", "no prob", "cool" were inappropriate in all but the most informal settings. But now I feel I could use them in an email to my boss or to a customer (usually). Already instant messenger changed the way I write, but I can't go all l33ty because I don't get it and the people I'm writing to don't get it. But once you guys enter the workforce there will be a generation of people who do get it. And again, I'm only talking about the l33t abbreviations that make it easier to type, not the example you used that is harder. Then again, I'm clueless enough that what I'm talking about may not be l33t at all.
Then you could have non-l33t people pick up the lingo and use it incorrectly enough that the incorrect use becomes standard. People say "quantum leap" when they mean a big jump or change, but really the word refers to a tiny jump of an electron in a random direction. I could see a word like n00b being used as a general insult and not a comment on inexperience.
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Then you could have non-l33t people pick up the lingo and use it incorrectly enough that the incorrect use becomes standard. People say "quantum leap" when they mean a big jump or change, but really the word refers to a tiny jump of an electron in a random direction. I could see a word like n00b being used as a general insult and not a comment on inexperience.
I think maybe that started because, on the show, it's a fairly big change even though he's just making a quantum-sized leap. Pretty amusing to point it out to people, though, that they're misusing it.
I find myself speaking Kitty Pidgin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat) more and more. And when I use it to caption photos of my daughter on MySpace, people have started speaking it back to me in the comments.
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I find myself speaking Kitty Pidgin more and more.
Business presentation of the future
O hai!
I has a softwares.
plz you 2 buy.
pay me 3 cheezbergers I gives softwares.
u makes more muhnees.
u buys more cheezbergers.
kthnxbye.
Oops! I ated my softwares.
Sry.
Pleez I can still has cheezbergers?
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I could see a word like n00b being used as a general insult and not a comment on inexperience.
Oh it already IS an insult! Noob is in no way a friendly term.
I wouldnt consider the abbreviations you're talking about to be 'leetspeak'. while they might be used just the same, they are more under the category of chat lingo if anything... either way that just changes the name of your point and nothing more. It could happen, in fact it probably is already happening, and I just happen to hang out with intelligent people who DO know the difference.
I didn't know you were a high school student until you mentioned it.
:D
Business presentation of the future
O hai!
I has a softwares.
plz you 2 buy.
pay me 3 cheezbergers I gives softwares.
u makes more muhnees.
u buys more cheezbergers.
kthnxbye.
Oops! I ated my softwares.
Sry.
Pleez I can still has cheezbergers?
i likes the cheezbergurz.
pweeze a cheezbergur for mees?
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I could see a word like n00b being used as a general insult and not a comment on inexperience.
Oh it already IS an insult! Noob is in no way a friendly term.
I'm not THAT dense. It's usage now implies inexperience. I was suggesting that it could shift to mean something like loser, dork, dweeb, etc. "That guy dumped his girlfriend over World of Warcraft. What a noob."
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To drag this thread back on topic while simultaneously raising it from the dead ;D
How about savoir faire?
Three guys were discussing the meaning of savoir faire.
The first guy said, "If you are in bed with another man's wife, and he walks in and says, 'Oops, pardon me.' That is savoir faire."
The second guy says, "No, No, if you are in bed with another man's wife, and he walks in and says, 'Oops! Pardon me, please continue.' That is savoir faire."
The third guy says, "No, No, No. If you are in bed with another man's wife, and he walks in and says, 'Oops, pardon me! Please continue...' and you CAN, that, my friends, is savoir faire."
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I think you'll find that in the eventual future (perhaps not too far off) the borrowing of other languages' words and phrases will become so common that English may not be recognisable as itself anymore. I predict a future in which the common language of Earth is English-based, but takes 1/4 of its vocabulary from other languages, particularly Asian ones.
I agree, that seems like a very probable future for English. It's elasticity will both help it survive and make it unrecognizable...
Check this out from the Freakonomics blog (http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/what-will-globalization-do-to-languages-a-freakonomics-quorum)
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http://www.rinkworks.com/words/funwords.shtml
Did you know that "spanghew" means "to cause a frog or toad to fly up in the air"?
Well now you do.
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http://www.rinkworks.com/words/funwords.shtml
Did you know that "spanghew" means "to cause a frog or toad to fly up in the air"?
Well now you do.
Well, that makes it easier to tell my friends what my hobbies are.
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I think you'll find that in the eventual future (perhaps not too far off) the borrowing of other languages' words and phrases will become so common that English may not be recognisable as itself anymore. I predict a future in which the common language of Earth is English-based, but takes 1/4 of its vocabulary from other languages, particularly Asian ones.
I agree, that seems like a very probable future for English. It's elasticity will both help it survive and make it unrecognizable...
Check this out from the Freakonomics blog (http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/what-will-globalization-do-to-languages-a-freakonomics-quorum)
Interesting article.
Living in Japan I've noticed that English-speaking foreigners will adopt certain Japanese words when speaking English. The weird thing is that they are always the same words. I just got an email from a guy who does not know me very well. He does not know how long I've lived in Japan or how well I speak Japanese, but he used the word keitai instead of "cell phone number," just because all foreigners seem to do that, and he knew that I would understand.
I could see computer translation and interpretation becoming becoming practical before everyone starts speaking English. At that point it won't matter what language you speak.
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I have a friend who's done some work on computer translation and my impression from him was that we are a long way away from a portable, real-time audio translator.
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Living in Japan I've noticed that English-speaking foreigners will adopt certain Japanese words when speaking English. The weird thing is that they are always the same words. I just got an email from a guy who does not know me very well. He does not know how long I've lived in Japan or how well I speak Japanese, but he used the word keitai instead of "cell phone number," just because all foreigners seem to do that, and he knew that I would understand.
It's the same here, also with the word for mobile phone (Handy in German. Yes they adopted and English word. Worse there is a phone shop here with the logo of a phone wearing a baseball cap called Handycapped. I kid you not). It's generally the commonly used words which you need to learn to get by with non-English speakers but then you are so used to them that with other expats you slip them into your own language. I like that my expat friends and I speak Dinglish and no-one gives a hoot which actual language it is, but it does mean that my pure English is reasonably corrupted and I do make typically German grammatical errors occasionally in my mother tongue.
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Living in Japan I've noticed that English-speaking foreigners will adopt certain Japanese words when speaking English. The weird thing is that they are always the same words. I just got an email from a guy who does not know me very well. He does not know how long I've lived in Japan or how well I speak Japanese, but he used the word keitai instead of "cell phone number," just because all foreigners seem to do that, and he knew that I would understand.
It's the same here, also with the word for mobile phone (Handy in German. Yes they adopted and English word. Worse there is a phone shop here with the logo of a phone wearing a baseball cap called Handycapped. I kid you not). It's generally the commonly used words which you need to learn to get by with non-English speakers but then you are so used to them that with other expats you slip them into your own language. I like that my expat friends and I speak Dinglish and no-one gives a hoot which actual language it is, but it does mean that my pure English is reasonably corrupted and I do make typically German grammatical errors occasionally in my mother tongue.
This is why the pure-English speakers or pure-German speakers have trouble when we have our poker games. Wherethewild slid right in though.
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There's an ad that's been running here that has a Mom talk to her daughter and the daughter speaks in nothing but text abbreviations.
It goes something like:
Mom: Bethany (or whatever) who are you texting all the time?
Grl: wu? (what's up)
Mom who are you texting all the time?
Grl: idk, my bff Jill?
It had subtitles so we could understand. The ending is funny to. I found it on Utube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nIUcRJX9-o)
Hehe. I found this the other day:
(http://www.lurid.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/idk_my_bff_jill.jpg)
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http://www.rinkworks.com/words/funwords.shtml
Did you know that "spanghew" means "to cause a frog or toad to fly up in the air"?
Well now you do.
Well, that makes it easier to tell my friends what my hobbies are.
Spanghew is what I'm pointing at when I say it. ;D
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nichevo - it can't be helped
Inevitable?
"Ничего" means "nothing", literally. It's typical Russian fatalism that leads them to use the "it can't be helped" idiom. Kind of like our "whatever"... the real meaning is an attitude, and depends on the context for an accurate translation.
I think it was addressed a couple of different ways in the thread (and man, what a thread to miss out on!) but I don't think the slippery nature of linguist shifting is either "good" or "bad". I think it's fun. Obviously, I'm a big fan of puns and wordplay, and there are always interesting insights to be gained by looking for secondary meanings of words in the things people say or write. It's especially prevalent in writing - when people speak, they are usually using stock phrases and idioms to get their point across. Skilled writers will intentionally shape their words so that connotation and denotation work together to get the job done.
I went to go find links that would demonstrate my point, but they all had to do with profanity... so I'll have some entertaining things to read about for a few days! (If you watch my del.icio.us bookmarks, I might tag some of the better ones.)
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People say "quantum leap" when they mean a big jump or change, but really the word refers to a tiny jump of an electron in a random direction.
If anything, doesn't it also mean the smallest possible leap? So, it would mean the opposite of what the speaker intended.
I could see a word like n00b being used as a general insult and not a comment on inexperience.
But .. that won't happen until light-years from now, right? ;)
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People say "quantum leap" when they mean a big jump or change, but really the word refers to a tiny jump of an electron in a random direction.
If anything, doesn't it also mean the smallest possible leap? So, it would mean the opposite of what the speaker intended.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_leap
In the vernacular, the term quantum leap has come to mean an abrupt change or "step change", especially an advance or augmentation. The term dates back to early-to-mid-20th century, coinciding with the discoveries of quantum mechanics. The popular and scientific terms are similar in that both describe a change that happens all at once (revolutionary), rather than gradually over time (evolutionary), but the two uses are different when it comes to the magnitude of the change or advance in question.
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Regarding the effects of technology, I could see our written language becoming infused with l33tspeak once the young whippersnappers who are growing up in chat rooms come of age.
erm... no... i dont think so... Having grown up with all this, I can assure you it is not used that often. Its beaten into our heads in school to write correctly, and we (most of us, to be exact) know when to write normally and when it is okay to use 13375p34k. P1U5 13375p34k !5 h4r|) 70 Un|)3r574n|)... ! W01|) h473 70 r34|) !7 f0r 7h!5 10nG!!!1!!!!!1111!!!!!!1111!!1111111!!!!!!
p34r my 1337 h4x
I'm so old. Does that really translate into something?
You could look it up at http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/ :D
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Regarding the effects of technology, I could see our written language becoming infused with l33tspeak once the young whippersnappers who are growing up in chat rooms come of age.
erm... no... i dont think so... Having grown up with all this, I can assure you it is not used that often. Its beaten into our heads in school to write correctly, and we (most of us, to be exact) know when to write normally and when it is okay to use 13375p34k. P1U5 13375p34k !5 h4r|) 70 Un|)3r574n|)... ! W01|) h473 70 r34|) !7 f0r 7h!5 10nG!!!1!!!!!1111!!!!!!1111!!1111111!!!!!!
p34r my 1337 h4x
I'm so old. Does that really translate into something?
You could look it up at http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/ :D
"Plus leetspeak is hard to understand... I would hate to read it for this long!!!!!!!!!"
/youngin