Lately some of my students have begun communicating with me through text messages on the mobile phone. They seem to find this mode of communication comfortable and very convenient. I welcome it because they are my students after all, and I cannot help but appreciate that they take the time to talk to me. However, I must admit that I never did much appreciate, and am still sorely uncomfortable with this phenomenon called text messaging. Sometimes, I can barely understand what they’re trying to say to me - as if I’m trying to read a foreign language.
The phenomenon of text messaging has been around for quite a while now and has raised a great many controversial issues. One of the most urgent is the linguistic issue. Text messaging has caused an alarming decline in people’s language skills, most especially among the young children who begin to be exposed to text language at an early age. They have lost all sense of proper grammar, cannot recall the correct spelling of common words anymore, and their vocabulary acquisition has gone to the rabid dogs. For them, it is fast becoming inconvenient and unnecessary to spell the words correctly or to find a better, clearer, or perhaps more creative way to say one’s thoughts. Doing either of these consumes too much digital space; and text messaging demands that you say what you want to say in as short a manner as you can do it. To do otherwise is simply inefficient. So what has this done to language? More importantly, what has it done to the way people think, affecting thereby the way the modern world works?
Tagalog, the language of my heart and my soul, is probably one of the most poetic of all languages. It is also one of the easiest languages to learn to read and write, being highly syllabic in nature. But what is happening to Tagalog? Nwwl n yng mng ptng. H???! Where is the poetry in that? The roundness has disappeared, and with it, the romance of the written form. Nglsh s no dfrnt. H???!
All this reminds me of one of the greatest prophetic stories ever written: George Orwell’s 1984. It is a startling and brutal vision of the future in which people have begun to degenerate into depraved and hollow shells of what humans ought to be, or rather what they can potentially be. One of the symptoms is the deterioration of language. "Unnecessary" elements of language have been removed - for example, the use of "needless" vowels and the use of double letters in spelling. Also, the use of "unnecessary" words have been banned - for example, the words "sorrow", "grief", "despair", "dolor", etc., have been eradicated and replaced by only one word, "sad". A common sentence would be, for example, "My fdr ded. I fl sad." Somebody pinch me, please, but it sounds so much like what I’m reading out of my mobile phone these days. That’s just one symptom, but there are so many other elements in that story that can already be seen as occurring now, like the overthrow of governments and global superpowers taking over, freedom and privacy becoming things of an idyllic past, and many others. 1984, for me, is one of the scariest stories ever written, for in it, nothing beautiful, meaningful, or profound survives.
So is this really what’s happening? Is it 1984 now?! If this is true, or if that is really where this world is going, then I pray to all the gods to kill me off before it ever does. For what is life without it’s roundness and complexity? A "nife" will never be as sharp as a "knife", nor any "wnd" bleed as much as a "wound", and no "drkns" so deep and thick as "darkness"!!! What is happiness without gladness, joy, gaiety, merriment, ecstasy, rapture, jubilation, delight, exhilaration, hilarity, joviality, vivacity, elation, bliss, cheer, mirth, euphoria, glee, exuberance…
(posted elsewhere 14 Mar 2006)
The phenomenon of text messaging has been around for quite a while now and has raised a great many controversial issues. One of the most urgent is the linguistic issue. Text messaging has caused an alarming decline in people’s language skills, most especially among the young children who begin to be exposed to text language at an early age. They have lost all sense of proper grammar, cannot recall the correct spelling of common words anymore, and their vocabulary acquisition has gone to the rabid dogs. For them, it is fast becoming inconvenient and unnecessary to spell the words correctly or to find a better, clearer, or perhaps more creative way to say one’s thoughts. Doing either of these consumes too much digital space; and text messaging demands that you say what you want to say in as short a manner as you can do it. To do otherwise is simply inefficient. So what has this done to language? More importantly, what has it done to the way people think, affecting thereby the way the modern world works?
Tagalog, the language of my heart and my soul, is probably one of the most poetic of all languages. It is also one of the easiest languages to learn to read and write, being highly syllabic in nature. But what is happening to Tagalog? Nwwl n yng mng ptng. H???! Where is the poetry in that? The roundness has disappeared, and with it, the romance of the written form. Nglsh s no dfrnt. H???!
All this reminds me of one of the greatest prophetic stories ever written: George Orwell’s 1984. It is a startling and brutal vision of the future in which people have begun to degenerate into depraved and hollow shells of what humans ought to be, or rather what they can potentially be. One of the symptoms is the deterioration of language. "Unnecessary" elements of language have been removed - for example, the use of "needless" vowels and the use of double letters in spelling. Also, the use of "unnecessary" words have been banned - for example, the words "sorrow", "grief", "despair", "dolor", etc., have been eradicated and replaced by only one word, "sad". A common sentence would be, for example, "My fdr ded. I fl sad." Somebody pinch me, please, but it sounds so much like what I’m reading out of my mobile phone these days. That’s just one symptom, but there are so many other elements in that story that can already be seen as occurring now, like the overthrow of governments and global superpowers taking over, freedom and privacy becoming things of an idyllic past, and many others. 1984, for me, is one of the scariest stories ever written, for in it, nothing beautiful, meaningful, or profound survives.
So is this really what’s happening? Is it 1984 now?! If this is true, or if that is really where this world is going, then I pray to all the gods to kill me off before it ever does. For what is life without it’s roundness and complexity? A "nife" will never be as sharp as a "knife", nor any "wnd" bleed as much as a "wound", and no "drkns" so deep and thick as "darkness"!!! What is happiness without gladness, joy, gaiety, merriment, ecstasy, rapture, jubilation, delight, exhilaration, hilarity, joviality, vivacity, elation, bliss, cheer, mirth, euphoria, glee, exuberance…
(posted elsewhere 14 Mar 2006)
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