Why/What is destroying Language

[CasperTFG]

I think the ease of creating, modifying and transfering data is what is destroying language.

In the days before correction fluid, If you made a mistake typing a letter, you started over. Therefore would also make sure you were writting the proper thing in the first place. Thought was actually put into what was typed or written down.

If anyone has ever used a telex machine you know exactly what I mean. If you made one incorrect key stroke, you would have to go back to the begining.

Our own impatients is also destroying language. Many of us would agree that we would rather read a simple to the point paragraph than a long winded essay on it.

The ease of transfering data also makes us sloppy. Today we can send out a message, then make a correction and send it again. Change our mind and adjust it again. All of this can be done and sent in a matter of minutes. If this was all going through letter carrier it could drag on for a month.

Today I got a perfect example of this. I sent a purchase order out. The company replied back to me that I priced an item in USD rather than CDN. I made the adjustment and sent it again. They replied with an invoice, on the invoice I noticed they wrote down an incorrect hardware extension.

All of this back and forth resending via fax, lasted a total of about an hour. If there was no email or fax, then this process would have gone on for months and I probably would have made sure everyone had the right information to begin with to avoid all of this.

The attitiude today is get it done and out the door. If something needs to be changed or fixed it can be changed then.

Just my thoughts.



Casper

There is room for all of gods creatures, "Right Beside the Mashed Potatoes".

 

[Dimandja]

Write more legibly than who or what?
Make fewer mistakes than who or what?
Have a broader vocabulary than who or what?

Combative, aren't we...

While I will stipulate that the practice of longhand writing will make a person's handwriting more legible than it was before. But that does not make your essay any more readable -- just more legible.

Stating the obvious?...

stella, I too wish I had all these gizmos back then. But the hard work paid off. The new trinkets only work better in my hands, because I did accumulate the previously mentioned skills.

Although technology is great, it also changes our lives; not necessarily for the better. We are introducing new technology faster than we can comprehend its consequences. This is the stuff that the dying breed of philosophers used to ponder days on end.

sleipnir, my post are supposed to show the general trend - laziness in letters and science - rather than the exception.

 

[AnotherHiggins]

Psst, sleipnir. You may want to check out the definition of "stipulate."

I think you meant to use "concede."

 

[sleipnir214]

Psst, anotherhiggins. I did.



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[sleipnir214]

Dimandja:
Not combative. Just asking important questions. Will you answer?

Nor am I stating the obvious.

All writing longhand necessarily does is improve penmanship. In other words, it improves legibility -- the ability for the reader to disambiguously discern each letter in the writing.

This does not necessarily make the writing easy, possible or interesting to read. In other words, it does not necessarily improve readability.



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[rosieb]

Tools should make life easier....

I use a calculator, BUT I always check the answer by approximation: 12.587 / 3.984 has to be roughly 3 - if the answer is 31.59, I know I've made a mistake. (I don't accept the result just because it came from a calculator.)

Similarly, if I run a spell-checker, I double check the results. I once ran one and kept hitting the "accept" button rather than "ignore", I was a bit distracted at the time; when I did a final proof - it was total gibberish (but amusing, I kept both versions for ages).

I really appreciate the ability to write a report, then spell / grammar check it, re-arrange it, re-format it and polish it until it meets my standards, before issuing it. In the old days that would not have been possible.

You have to apply effort even when using good tools, lazy people use the tools as an excuse for poor work.

These tools should be used to produce higher quality work with much less effort.

Rosie
"Never express yourself more clearly than you think" (Niels Bohr)

 

[Dimandja]

This does not necessarily make the writing easy, possible or interesting to read. In other words, it does not necessarily improve readability.

Emphasis on not necessarily. There is really no dispute here.

sleipnir, the difference between a relatively poor school and a well equipped one can be enormous. The potential for the former to produce well rounded theoriticians, and the other to crank out hopeless calculator users is great. This has been proven over and over again. <you can scream now>

This is not to say that there are bad and good schools everywhere. We are talking about potential. Many of my acquaintances who have experienced both schools say that they would send their children to school in Africa (when there is no war, that is) through high school - a good foundation; and to college in the USA (for example) - a good hands on learning experience.

What they are saying is essentially that an assured solid foundation is better than the wholesale exposure to various tools and gadgets at an early age. Teach a child how to think efficiently before immersing them in gadgetry.

sleipnir, you seem to miss the depth of my long hand example. You are still scratching the surface looking for evidence. Long hand in and by itself is nothing. Look for art and craft in long hand, instead. Writing legibly and readably is learned. You must practice to do it well to succeed.

Exams at my former schools were not idiotic multiple choices questions. You actually had to think long and hard in order to answer the questions. Grading at my former schools was not limited to mind numbing A, B, C or F. The teachers actually tried to understand what you were saying, and graded accordingly (usually in a scale of 0 to 100).

Am I saying that the state of education in the US is poor. Yes, I am. <now you can throw things>

 

[sleipnir214]

If that's what you're saying, it sure took you a long time to get there.


I agree that in order to learn to write well, one thing you must do is write.

But what you have glossed over is my whole point -- that with the exception of penmanship, the medium in which one writes is immaterial.

And you've missed that writing is only part of it. Without knowing the theory behind writing, grammar and rhetoric, the improvements gained by the practice of writing will be meager.


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[strongm]

>Psst, anotherhiggins. I did.

Excellent. In which case could you clarify which particular definition of stipulate were you using as, along with anotherhiggens, I'm hard pressed to figure out what you mean.

And I suspect you don't really want to have been using disambiguously in public ...

 

[ngkatsaras]

At some point they will stop teaching long hand because it will be so useless and obsolete.. simple printing will suffice.. that's when we'll all have wireless neural interfaces and become one with cyberspace and the great AI that connects us all together. Sounds scary right? Like something out of the Matrix or Terminator. But even Steven Hawking said that the only way humans can keep up with the evolution of artificial intelligence is genetic and cybernetic enhancement. Plainly, if we don't augment ourselves mentally (and physically), there is no way, in 50 to 100 years from now that we will be able to have any control anything, our own computer systems will run everything, our lives, everything. Granted, a significant portion of the population will refuse cybernetic enhancements, others will embrace it.. This really becomes an ethical conversation at this point where people will have differing opinions. I don't intend to sound negative, but it's a very real future that people think is so horrific and terrifying that they fail to take it seriously. Go see some movies : I, Robot, the Terminator series, Bicentenial Man, A.I., Simone and many others. It's not just science fiction, it's a very real science possibility and it can all happen A LOT faster than anybody realizes. I know that some of you may think that teaching kids long hand writing is valuable and I know how to write in long hand, but just about anybody that goes through college these days and takes notes can show you what happens to penmanship eventually. It's very infrequent that I actually use a pen or pencil to write anything, 99% of the written words that I ever produce are entered electronically and I discourage printing to paper! I wonder, have any of you printed this thread thus far because it's easier on your eyes to read? If so, shame on you! I've seen the massive amounts of paper waste produced in many law firms, accounting firms and such, only because somebody somewhere said "I want a printed copy of that." I can't wait for a truly paperless society.

Imagine when wireless telepathic communication is possible and we all can have virtually unlimited, perfect memory of everything we've ever seen or heard or said, etc.. The entire thesaurus and dictionary available can be available in our minds at a nanosecond thought. Maybe not until 50 years from now, but 50 years ago how many people truly could have imagined the technology we have today??

Pardon my grammar, I didn't want to think too hard about formatting.. eventually the computer will fix all that for me automatically.

 

[sleipnir214]

strongm:
I don't understand. anotherhiggens had it right.

But see definition 2 for the intransitive form of the word here



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[rosieb]

Hmmm, 15 years ago I was told by the industry pundits that AI was imminent, it hasn't happened yet, and no real signs that it will.

I'll believe it when I see it!

Rosie
"Never express yourself more clearly than you think" (Niels Bohr)

 

[ngkatsaras]

AI has far to go, but there's been a lot of progress

check this out

http://www.jabberwacky.com

Is this real?
I am real. Are you?
What do you know?
I know that we landed a rover on Mars.
Tell me about mars.
The red planet.
Tell me about artificial intelligence.
I am humanoid.

Do a google search for "ai chat" and you'll find lots of AI that you can chat with online.

Please remember that this is only the technology that the public knows about, don't you realize that the government and certain technology research organizations (think Microsoft, IBM, etc.) have technology so advanced that society simply isn't ready for it yet! If they let their best technology out, it would wreak havock on society and people couldn't adjust to the rapid changes it would bring.

 

[ESquared]

I think the board has been invaded by a conspiracy theorist! ;-)

-------------------------------------
A sacrifice is harder when no one knows you've made it.

 

[strongm]

Jabberwocky? Crikey, just seems to be a version of Eliza that I remember playing with about 20 years ago.

Anyway, need to go a wrap some tinfoil around my head now...

 

[sleipnir214]

strongm, you have it right. The only thing I see that Jabberwacky has on ELIZA is that Jabberwacky has a built-in dictionary of random facts.

Good Lord. I just did some digging and discovered that the article which introduced ELIZA was published in the "Communications of the ACM" in 1966.



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[strongm]

1966? Wow. Never realised it was that old.

 

[jwenting]

In Dutch, are spellen and spelen pronounced differently?

They are. Spellen is pronounced with a short e and hard l like in to spell.
Spelen is pronounced with a long e and soft l like in to play.

 

[jwenting]

I started school with minimal gadgetry. For instance, all my essays were written in long hand. Some consequences of that is that people who went to the type of schools I went to:

1. Write more legibly.
2. Make fewer mistakes (typos, grammar).
3. Have a broader vocabulary.
4. Uphold the integrity of the language (no "u", "y" and other silly shorthands).

Must have been a similar school as the one I went to.
The first computer I used was for economic modelling.
Later we got to use the computer lab for a few statistics labs.
That's all the computers I used (except as a hobby at home where my dad had an IBM PC Portable from work which was too heavy for him to lift into his car) until I entered university age 19.
First time I used a computer to write something was 2-3 years after that, teachers there still expected all work to be submitted in longhand or using a typewriter.

 

[sleipnir214]

ngkatsaras:
There's a technology so advanced we must be protected from it, yet no one to date has published a spell-checker that can be trusted to do the job right?


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TANSTAAFL!!

 

[Dimandja]

If that's what you're saying, it sure took you a long time to get there.

And here I was thinking you were slow on the uptake.