I have no problems with abbreviations when they are used appropriately … my problem is that here in China I am faced time and time again by these horrible distortions that people think are the proper way to spell things and which are used inappropriately.
Because of issues like this, Chinese people think you can do what you like in the language and it will always be good English, you can make up words randomly without any knowledge of word formation rules and whatever you come up with will be a word of English … my “favourite” … ahem … horror was “Youthenisation” … meaning? A pat on the back for anyone who comes up with the right answer!
Mark
I’m not sure I understand why using an available app – sorry, application – to eliminate repetitive typing is either lazy or indicative of a need to improve the quality of one’s life.
If a screenplay is 100 pages long, and a character speaks three times per page, that means the writer is typing that character name 300 times. Three drafts into a project, that number goes as high as 900 – per character. If the script includes 4 characters with regular dialogue, we’re now looking at 3,600 instances of typing these names.
Allow me to be clear: I’m talking about the mechanical inputting of character names above or beside lines of dialogue. They are simple markers which indicate who is speaking, devoid of the novelist’s need to make an artistic choice concerning attribution. The playwright or screenwriter in question isn’t deciding whether to write “he said” or, say, “he opined pompously.” We’re just typing these names over and over, and it’s nice to have a tool that allows us to do so efficiently.
Would one hit the spacebar five times because using the tab key is lazy?
Absolutely! And I don’t want to see anyone using the Center justify tool! Count out the line length, divide by two, count out the length of the phrase, and backspace until half of the phrase length has been covered.
I usually just eyeball it. I walk back to what looks like the middle of the cave wall, adjust for the size of my glyph and begin carving there.
You got me wrong … I support you absolutely in that. I downloaded TextExpander or Textpander – I can’t remember which – but found I didn’t use it 'cos in what I’m doing I don’t have such problems. Were I writing scripts I would definitely be doing the same, but it’s not your two keystrokes that end up in the final text with the presumption that they are valid words of English. What I am talking about is the use of “u” for “you” in all contexts, the use of “nite” instead of “night” in all contexts, and many such examples, together with total misspellings which get deemed to be OK because you can do anything in English.
A well-known professor in Beijing published a book a few years ago in which, he defended the complete mangling of the English language that you get here – random use of tenses, random use of articles, making up words which breach the word-formation rules like “youthenization” (Sorry I’m a Brit, I spelled it above British way, but the original was US spelling) … – in the introduction saying “We Chinese have improved the English language”.
And why is so much stuff put out in China in totally horrendous language which purports to be English? Because, as the management of one high-tech company told me when I offered to edit their brochure into decent English, “People can understand it and that’s good enough”. For an example, have a look at eng.gxny.gov.cn/2006/0814/100137-1.html
Yes, if you’re Chinese! They don’t set up the ruler or use the tab key as Chinese is monospaced right down to the punctuation marks; they just line things up by typing spaces. I am asked to check CV’s (resumes) which look as if they have been laid out by taking chunks of text and throwing them at the page, in which the individuals describe themselves as being very good at using Office software, having passed National IT Certificate Grade IV or whatever!
Sorry … this is going rather OT … Henceforth I’ll desist! 
Mark
Mark,
I think I can understood you in this matter. It is similar in Japan, although the Japanese have a more respectful attitude towards other cultures, because they are not born in the culture of the land of the centre of whatever. (This said, I have to stress that I have many nice Chinese friends and students, and I am not at all anti-Chinese. It is just a matter of self consciousness).
The problem may be more severe in your case because of China being so big, having a dominant culture, and because the contact with the English language and Latin characters does not have an equally long / broad tradition as in Japan.
But basically the problem here in Japan is the same: There are still people who assume that foreigners do not get the tiny differences in their writing systems but who generously overlook the differences in our writing system. Some ignore rules of manner when talking to foreigners because they assume that the West is loose about manners. They shorten “Aru peshe” (which should mean something like “The fish” to Arupe and just don’t get how it hurts. etc…
But in the West there are people who call coffee “latte”, which hurts as well, perhaps even more. And there are Germans who write on English boards without checking grammar or orthography or vocabulary or sense of humour before publishing…
Are times worse than ever, or has it always been like that?
Maria
Youthenisation? Well, I would take it in the sense of rejuvenation, regeneration, revitalization, or something the like; or perhaps adaptation to the needs / wishes of young people. But I might be completely wrong.
@ Maria: I don’t think things are worse than before. I think things are like they always have been. But with one fundamental difference: until some time ago, only a few people wrote, and those who wrote also read, and learned from what others wrote. Now everybody writes, and almost nobody reads a decent book anymore. That’s what explains the difference between then and now. But the command of written language in every culture has always been the privilege of a rather small minority, and will always be.
I essentially agree with you, but perhaps even to a larger degree: I believe what we really have going on is not a decrease in serious readers, but an increase in the visibility of everyone else. I would go so far as to say that things are better than in the past. Even though the percentage of the extremely literate is still roughly the same (and nobody should ever expect that to change), the percentage of those who are not literate has dropped due to formal education systems for the young.
It is this basic grasp of literacy, blended with the explosion of the publishing commons (Internet/Textual telephony), which has allowed the visibility of those who are not interested in its esoteric nuances, to bloom exponentially.
And for the most part, there is nothing terribly wrong with this. It is folly to presume that our interests are a matter of mental and philosophical health when applied to the rest of the world. Most people do not spell and form complete sentences because it simply doesn’t matter to them; other things matter to them. Basic communication is all they need from language, and perhaps the ability to read a thriller or a romance now and then.
The irony in all of this is that proper English spelling is a horrific mangle of nonsense most of the time. It is woefully unphonetic, riddled through with archaic idiosyncrasies, and rife with confusing homonyms. While Joyce had a terrible amount of fun at the expense of all that, I cannot say that I am completely opposed to the notion of a spelling revolution. The bit that I pasted in a prior post above is a sample of writing using Read’s variant of the Shavian spelling system. It has around 40 letters, each one representing a single phoneme that is not duplicated anywhere else. Spelling a word in that alphabet is a purely phonetic, compact task.
While I would love to see a logical spelling reform take place, I doubt it will ever happen. It has been tried many times in the past, and it never took. What does happen, over decades and centuries, is normal etymological evolution. This evolution is speeding up for precisely the reasons mentioned above. The publishing commons is going to change a lot more than just the quantity of crap (note, not the percentage); I think it will change the very foundations of language itself.
Is this a bad thing? I’m not so sure. This isn’t pure anarchy here. Mass modifications are always held in check by “the system.” In general, both benefit from this struggle.
I’d go a bit farther: language isn’t logical; it’s natural, like a bed of ivy or pachysandra in the garden. It has roots, stems, branches, and whoa, does it grow. Writers throw on the fertilizer and occasionally train it to climb and twine. Politicians whack at it with spades and poison; they’d kill it off if they could. But it keeps on growing and evolving, between the poles of wild and tame. That’s why spelling or grammar reform don’t succeed. English is massive and eccentric because it fed off so much linquistic compost. It’s maddening that -ough has so many ways to sound (bough, through, cough, borough), but that’s in the nature of its DNA.
Mmm … it is compounded here in China by a – to my mind disastrous – official policy of the British Government through the British Council, etc. that anybody’s version of the language is as good as anybody else’s, so visiting scholars … linguists are happy to tell those people that Chinese English is as good as anybody’s. But I’m not going to hijack this thread onto that topic! Suffice it to say it reinforces the beliefs of those people that whatever they do, however they mangle grammar, semantics the logic of the language, etc. their version is just as good as any native dialect. And the British Government by the same token abandoned teaching English as a function, so apart from Americans, the vast majority of English teachers in teacher training colleges around China were non-native speakers of English anyway.
Mark
Mmm … it is compounded here in China by a – to my mind disastrous – official policy of the British Government through the British Council, etc. that anybody’s version of the language is as good as anybody else’s, so visiting scholars … linguists are happy to tell those people that Chinese English is as good as anybody’s. But I’m not going to hijack this thread onto that topic! Suffice it to say it reinforces the beliefs of those people that whatever they do, however they mangle grammar, semantics the logic of the language, etc. their version is just as good as any native dialect. And the British Government by the same token abandoned teaching English as a function, so apart from Americans, the vast majority of English teachers in teacher training colleges around China were non-native speakers of English anyway.
Mark
My only concern is: Phonetic for me, a native Californian? Or someone from Texas, or Cornwall, or …?
Once you start breaking down the language into how it’s pronounced, you end up with not one language, but several. (E.g., Latin into French, Italian, Spanish… etc.) I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Over time, of course, it will happen anyway, but with the consistent (sort of) spellings we keep a common ground where we can at least read the same language, if not speak it.
The Read Alphabet was designed with these concerns in mind.
Firstly: This is only a problem for a fraction of the common lexicon. Most words, though pronounced differently when spoken, are still written identically because the dialectic vowel distortion is (mostly) uniform. Thus, if one dialect pronounces ‘cat’, the way I would pronounce ‘cot’, they would still be using the same symbol that I would be using. So even though we would read it out loud differently, we would both spell it the same way. The main area of deviation is in words ending in ‘r’. Outside of the North America, the ‘r’ sound is often dropped to a very subtle nuance or even entirely in some cases. In the original specifications for Shavian, this common pronunciation error was acknowledged, and writers were encouraged to write out the ‘r’ anyway, since that is proper pronunciation (before anyone attacks me or the alphabet as being North American centric–it isn’t. The author was from Worcester, and actually contains more vowels than most North Americans even use–and again, this still translates, because even though a person might have five different ‘a’ sounds in one country, they all read the same to somebody that only has two or three ‘a’ sounds).
Secondly: It is important to stress the difference between a phonemic alphabet and a phonetic one. In a purely phonetic alphabet, such as the IPA, every single nuance is transcribed faithfully. This is extremely important for some things, but for a practical alphabet it is overkill. The Read Alphabet was optimised to be a practical alphabet, with a lot of compression built in to it. No word is spelled with more letters than its Roman English counterpart, and many are spelled with far fewer. Short, common words are abbreviated down to single letters. For example, the word ‘and’ is simply written with the ‘en’ letter. In normal speech patterns, this is actually more accurate than a perfect transcription of articulate speech. The word ‘and’ gets vocally compressed down to one phoneme at full speaking speed. Beyond the seven single-letter compressions, there are probably around fifty contractions for common words that are longer. “That” is spelled using just the voiced ‘th’ sound and a ‘t’ sound; two letters. ‘Should,’ is compressed to ‘sh’ + ‘d’. These contractions were all carefully chosen for their unambiguous short forms. They cannot be readily confused with full words spelled identically. Thus, you need no contraction marker like the apostrophe. How does this effect multi-cultural communication? Since many of the common words we use to communicate are contracted, or contain common vowel distortions, most words read identically no matter what region they were written from.
Third: The few words that are actually spelled differently, are often still legible to readers from other regions. I have communicated with a number of people around the world using this alphabet, and while there were some differences here and there, I was never confounded to the point of not understanding what was being said. In fact (and this is a matter of taste), I appreciated “hearing” the differences; I was able to read their manner of speaking right in the written text. But in general, the alphabet was very carefully designed with this concern in mind, and most spellings are “universal.” Besides, the number of times this happens is far less than the number of times you come across words in Roman English that have little or no bearing on how they are actually said, or are spelled different in different regions. “Conceptualise/Conceptualize” is spelled identically in Read, no matter where you from.
The important thing is to have a base alphabet that is “aware” of all this, and can accommodate fluctuation naturally, rather than having an alphabet which is rigid and unchanging–no matter where spoken English may evolve.