Re: txt msgs & BrSc

On Sat, Jun 16, 2001 at 12:16:15PM +0000, Raymond Brown wrote:
> At 8:45 pm -0400 15/6/01, Nik Taylor wrote:
> >Raymond Brown wrote:
> >> It seems that ordinary, linguistically naive people have not the slightest
> >> problem in using symbols in this way.
> >
> >Some, but a lot of people find things like "R" for "are" and "U" for
> >"you" to be very annoying.
>
> Good point - but the important question, it seems to me, is: (a) whether
> people find it annoying because it is a 'distortion' of English, (b) or it
> is the use of single letters & non-alphabetic symbols to express syllables
> and/or morphemes that causes annoyance.
>
> If (a), then that is not relevant as "BrSc" has as yet no written form to
> be distorted; but if (b) is this case, then this does have a bearing on any
> decisions I make about the written form of BrSc.
Well, to my own indiosyncratic sensibilities, it's irritating to see Latin
letters used in a way completely unlike their usage in any language I'm
familiar with. That is, for <s> sounds such as /s/, /z/, /S/, etc. seem more
or less ok with me, but using <s> for /kr/ or /ma/ or /fubarb{z/ just seem
esthetically distasteful to me. But also, some of the English-specific ones
such as <u r> for <you are> annoy me too, because they give me the
psychological (and semi-irrational) *impression* of someone with low
intelligence, even though I *know* (in a rational way) that people who use
such abbreviations aren't necessarily stupid or illiterate.

Also, things such as <u r> "flow" differently for me from ones like <you
are>: whenever I read a phrase like "You are cool," it just flows like
normal speech, whereas if I read <u r k00l> I actually pause a bit between
<u> and <r>. I'm not sure why, but maybe it's a latent interpretation of the
letters as being initials or something, or maybe it's just that I don't
interpret them at first as words and thus am less likely to spontaneously
put them together.

--
Eric Christopherson | Rakko