...'textese' or 'chavspeak' filter fitted to the board please, as my lifes too short to have to start translating it into English, I can live quite easily with spelling mistakes and poor punctuation, that's not a problem, but anyone using 'textese' or 'chavspeak' should be taken out and beaten like a seal pup.I thank you.

No.


Next.....?

If only it were possible Mr Snow.

wtf

wots e on abt?
grmpy old twt

I'm getting a word here....... the word is .....dominatrix

mois?...a 'grmpy old twt'.... f*****g get in .. you say the sweetest things.

u r rght m8

lmao & lol

Totally agree.
Our 13 year old daughter uses text talk and her spelling is now dreadful
So as punishment I give her a spelling test every Wednesday.

Surely 'dmntrx??'

Nbr

u r tgh ju tde po bnq r e nmy ...kl i ovd rty ger q ws cdf njhy tif r...

no fckng txt ritin u bstrds. tlk prper

Does BovverBootBob have alias' now like

what did people do before mobile phones.... and texts, how did civilisation cope...?

You have a point MadJohn, but please, I hope you are wrong!!

When you think about it every body seems to be sending pointless messages to everyone else, how many are really necessary..? There must be zillions of words of electronic gossip flying throught the ether.. most of which consist of....'alright'....'pick us up at'.... 'what about' ....'Ooo I dunno' .....or ..'I'll have to see'....

Eh??



I bet you can't remember....

...remember what....?

Yes, month!!

'Les mois de l'annee'.....I blame the french teacher for brainwashing it into my head ....

If the reverend Charles Dodgson is to be believed, won't isn't short for "will not" but for "would not", hence in all his writings he uses the unusual construction of wo'n't: http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2 ... ntractions, but that's irrelevant to this argument.

If I can just allow myself to shoot down your analogy for a minute, txt spk came into existence for one reason only, to save thumbstrokes on mobile phone keyboards. Most people manage to get by without it, even more so now phones have T9. Txt spk is a form of specialist jargon, and jargon (quite rightly) very rarely makes it into mainstream language. Contractions like "can't" have always proved widely useful in the place of frequent combinations of words, a bit like in Devanagari where very frequent consonant/vowel combinations have their own stroke (but on the scale of a word). I would not say "mate" is a common enough word to fall into that category (ignoring the fact that to be gramatically correct I ought to have said "I should not say..."!).
There's another functional advantage of the apostrophe contractions: when used in the uncontracted form they can give extra emphasis to the negator or the verb. "I'm not going" and "I am not going" are not usually interchangeable in informal speech.

I've already had debates with Trimdon on related subjects. I stick to my position that evolution in language is something that should take place slowly to avoid whims of the day and to stop a simple typo or the misuse of a word or phrase by a NY journalist coming into common usage overnight because it is repeated (these days) a million times round the world at lightning speed. New introductions have to mature to prove their worth. There has to be some stability in language.

Plenty of stuff from previous generations has appeared then just as quickly disappeared. Ellish? Brill? Just passing fancies. The same can't be said of can't and wo(')n't.

Four hundred years ago English was very different. We don't speak Shakespear-ese any more. Where goest thou? whats that all about then ?

One hundred years ago it was very different. Try reading Thomas Hardy and tell me if it sounds like normal people would speak.
The point is we are talking in hundreds of years. You can't say we haven't had time to adapt!

Actually the structure back then was very much like French, there was no 'ings' 'they know not' for example.

No great suprise I suppose when we were ruled by the frogs from 1066 onwards.

Whereas we on the bunker would say "they are not knowing".
Have you been THAT long with your Indian girlfriend?

Just be thankful we don't speak German...or even Norwegian, which is German spoken underwater.

Lots of people in the northeast (and other places as well for all I know) still use Shakespearean past tenses.
As in, eg, 'the glass was broke'. I don't think it's just a grammatical mistake because the form is used by people who otherwise use 'conventional' grammar.

And people around Geordieland still use the old anglo-saxon 'heor' for 'here'. At least it sounds as if they do. I quite like it

My pet hate is where companies use the word 'center' instead of 'centre'... a minor point I suppose, but another irritating americanism.

you won't be pleased if you ever had to attend the local Labor Center, especially on a nite.

I have some really really bad news for you about that.

The American language has barely altered in the last 350 years, purely because it simply doesn't have the outside influences ours does. Their immigrant population is almost purely Hispanic and so while a few varied influences from Spanish and Portuguese have crept in to theirs, by comparison our language is almost purely mongrel and unrecognisable from 350 years ago as has already been said.

Innit??

You are joking, of course??
Surely 350 years ago in the West there was no such thing even as a common language? Native Indians all had their own language/dialect and immigrants from Europe and elsewhere presumably all had their own tongue to begin with
Even comparatively recently the 'main' language in the States was German.

As far as modern American English goes, you've only to compare the lingo in modern films with that common in American films when we were young, to see the difference even in that short time

Centre is great as a noun (shopping centre, etc.), but in the verb form, "centring" just looks plain wrong -- what the hell is a cent ring? -- so I use center (centered, centering) for verbs. What's more I bet nobody who reads my writing notices it. Bill Gates's spell checker does of course.

a. Clang, sound of penny dropping

b. If you depend on Hollywood for your information...........

I don't depend entirely on anyone for my information but if your experiences are anything to go by, the writers of TEFL courses are less reliable than most

So what proportion of the Pilgrims were Germanic?

Lots.

'Until recently.....'

List the dialects from North to South in the UK. Bring in the North/South Irish accents.

Talk to a Canadian, talk to a Texan, a spread of almost 7000 miles.

It gets me how people miss letters out on texts and add letters to words when they talk eg:
Filum for Film and chimmely for chimney

Gets me too.

Bunnch of Cunnts.

When the Americans declared independence, they voted whether to adopt English or German as their official language, it may have been a very different world if the vote had went the other way.

You're right...the American language has barely changed in the last 350 years

There you are you see.....'had went'. Pure Shakespeare, Snowy. Jane Austen, even

I once read a theory that suggested Northerners' English is more pure than Southerners' because 'innovations' are resisted for longer up here

yerjokinarent yer Chor. yernowarramenelike

anapple & a norange (proper poolie)

But those things are exactly what Caesar said when he first glimpsed Hexham.

You didn't fall for all that veni, vidi, vici stuff, surely?