little_tippler

Yes, here we are again. Another thread where we commiserate about bad spelling standards. Only this time the world over.

What prompted this thread, was this article:

The article is humorous and harmless enough. But, it got me thinking about how standards have fallen over the years. I take pride in being quite good at spelling and writing. Both in English and Portuguese.

This also reminded me of a recent occurrence in Portugal, that I think you might find interesting. A few months ago, Portugal signed a treaty whereby over the course of the next few years, most accents and silent consonants in words will be removed from written Portuguese, like acto will turn into ato (act) . All foreign words we use in daily language, such as dossier, atelier, and others, will be turned into portuguese words, like dossiê, or ateliê.

This viscerally upsets me. It's like levelling our language off by the lowest possible standard. Basically this is being done so all other Portuguese speaking countries have an easier time with the language. I am all for promoting harmony, but this is preposterous. I can't recall how many different petitions I have signed against this language treaty.

Well just imagine, it would be like saying now everybody in the world has to write in a particular type of english. And it has to be the simplest version of english you can think of.

I don't mean to discriminate and say that there are better versions of the language than others, but to entirely and unnaturally change the original seems a bit mad.

It seems like instead of teaching people to read and write properly, we're all just slipping into worse versions of the original language. It's lazy and I hate it. I think there is a place for slang, but it's not a substitute for the original language.

What do you think about this?

__________________
Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.

Fernando Pessoa, 1918

Baraka_Guru

I take pride in language "purity" as an editor, but that's usually within the context of books. Even then, I often let authors get away with much because I work on books published for the general reader, often in the self-help genre.

But another side of me views language as an uncontrollable and evolving phenomenon. In the past, intellectuals attempted to cement the English language in terms of spelling and grammar rules, but this failed. You can take some of the best writing today and compare it to traditional rules and find many "errors." We are much more lax now than they were in the past. Rules change.

The problem we face today is the nature of language and communication in the information age: e-mail, forums, text messages, chat rooms, etc. The mode of communication is what changes language. We no longer hand-write long letters to relatives. The literate is no longer an exclusive and wealthy class. We expect everyone to be "literate" to some degree.

When the aim of literacy is to be all-inclusive, you get variations on what we view as "literate." We gauge literacy by degrees, rather than "literate" or "illiterate." We say things like, "He reads and writes at a grade ten reading level."

We communicate beyond words more than ever as well. Internet, television, movies, video games, etc. We are moving from a world where text was king. Now we communicate to a great degree using images, speech, and maybe some well-written text if we're lucky.

Communication changes, sure, but the biggest concern I have is with clarity. Confusion arises between speaker and listener, writer and reader, when there is uncertainty. Inaccurate language can be dangerous. In the least, it can be disorienting. This is a factor in both writing and speech.

If anything, we shouldn't be concerned with how we communicate so much as how we communicate meaning. Does our message make sense as it was intended?

I pose this question: Do you think there is a problem with the communication of meaning in light of this lack of high standards of traditional literacy?

Maybe.

Personally, I think the problem is that there are few people who like to read books anymore. (I mean the good kind.) But I won't get into that yet.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

BadNick

I totally agree with you, l_t.

My one thought to the contrary, though, comes from my suspicion that what is considered "traditional" forms of many languages today have already greatly changed since centuries ago; and if they've already greatly changed, why cast them in stone now?

In spite of the fact that languages have a life of their own and can evolve and change over time, I'm in favor of adhering to traditional language and grammar in order to preserve a sense of history...sort of like maintaining old historic buildings rather than tearing them down and building a strip mall. I can see allowing common usage to change and become widely acceptable, but keep the formal details intact.

I wonder if this type of thing happens in spite of our objections because when the "least common dunces" grow up and become politicians, they pass these laws so their stupid progeny have an easier time with life...where's your sense of history and tradition!!???

inBOIL

QFT. I've noticed an increase in the pride and arrogance with which people misuse the English language. It's as if they're too cool to do it the right way, and anyone who expects them to communicate properly is being unreasonable. This attitude is particularly grating when their improper usage results in miscommunication. It's as if they're saying "I'm going to speak/write however I want and if you can't understand that's your problem."

__________________
And you believe Bush and the liberals and divorced parents and gays and blacks and the Christian right and fossil fuels and Xbox are all to blame, meanwhile you yourselves create an ad where your kid hits you in the head with a baseball and you don't understand the message that the problem is you.

Manic_Skafe

Lil'tip I don't think this article supports your argument very well. The blunders of a few uni-students hardly says anything definitive about literacy as a whole. Lord knows stranger things have happened when you couple crunch studying with binge drinking

Well what exactly is the right way and who gets to create and maintain that definition? It's like the argument for hath versus has - our language is exactly as live as we are and with all of the social and cultural underpinnings inherent in our use of language, there are plenty of instances in which the use of the sort of english that's commonly taught in public schools is the wrong english to use.

In the same sense that your clothes define you, the words you select define you. Certainly you wouldn't wear a three piece suit on poker night.

Besides, I'm sure their arrogance is rather pale in comparison to the sort of arrogance it must take to write dictionaries, teach english courses, and assert that standard written english is the very best of them all.

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"Porn is a zoo of exotic animals that becomes boring upon ownership." -Nersesian

snowy

I loved your entire post, Baraka.

Perhaps what we are lacking is not so much a knowledge of particular rules so much as we are lacking a general knowledge of style. Knowledge of style would certainly help with some of the clarity issues you referred to.

The other point you made that I've been making for years (especially when people correct me when I make a mistake speaking--this is very common as it seems that people think that because I have an English degree I must be a perfect speaker and dislike slang, when in fact the opposite is true) is that English is a living language, and therefore it must grow and change to suit the needs of the people who use it. The same is likely true for Portuguese--of any language that people speak on a daily basis. It's better that a language grow and change than die off for lack of people using it.

There are certainly places where displaying your literacy at its best is called for, particularly exams and papers (that article was a hoot on the one hand, but I wish I could say that I hadn't seen such mistakes at my own university, in my own department, but I did), but it isn't always called for, and that is perhaps what is lacking more than anything: situational awareness of what usage is appropriate.

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If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

roachboy

first off, this is about writing rather than about all ways of using language.
it is curious that there's such distance between what is written and spoken. that distinction is largely about social power and it's reverse in exclusion.

i assume that there is an institution that "runs" portugese the way the acadamie francais "runs" french yes?--so changes in written portugese has far more to do with the composition of that institution and the prevailing ideology within it than it does with conditions in the world. one of the dimensions of that ideology would be the extent to which the population is understood as changing the language--this may or may not have to do with "decrased literacy" so much as the emergence of other rationalities, some of which might well link written to spoken language in a different way than was the case in the old days to total classification.

on a related note, it's probably more accurate to think of "correctness" as itself a style rather than as the measure relative to which styles operate. and given the choice between reading someone who writes correctly and reading someone who may not write correctly, but who has something to say, i'd take the latter.
if you have nothing to say, writing it correctly won't change that.

on the other hand, i like words, i like reading and trying to write things. i like the density of words, that they are never single, that they can be bent in various ways--within limits, which tend to follow from structure.

i also like trying to get words and sentences to do things they can't do--writing has trouble with motion, so i like to try to build a sense of movement into things. which could pitch me toward being more traditionally minded about the topic at hand--but i would prefer to have it both ways, really, and not to see in changes like this necessarily a loss of anything.

you might say "but poetry: where will it go?" and i'd think that it will change and that it is generally good that poetry change, like everything else does.

i think you should know the tradition, know the past, because they open up possibilities in the present--i'm less interested in them as antiques that you keep around on a shelf and take out to look at from time to time. i figure folk make the past static because they're afraid of how fleeting the present is. but it's fleeting regardless of what you think.

i value precision of thinking, but i am not at all sure that precision of thinking and correctness of writing necessarily have much to do with each other--but on the other hand, it's hard to be precise if you cannot be correct.
but i think that follows more from the fact that it's easier to push steps together if your writing is incorrect than it is if it is correct.
does that mean that correctness and clarity are the same?
if it is, then the reverse should be true: all sentences which are correct are precise.
but that'd be wrong.

i notice, as i am sure you do, that there are no caps here.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite