Re: txt msgs & BrSc

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.
Lemme invoke (c). If I've got it right, Briefscript is intended as writing
system to be used in any situation, yes? The abbreviation-heavy language
examplified by your _R u gr8 @ txt msgs_ is confined mostly to web chats,
ICQ messaging and similar. This form of communication is characterized by,
among other things, generally very short messages. While I normally don't
have anything of this abbreviation-language (I like to refer to it as
"Abbrev") used in this context, I find it EXTREMELY annoying and tiring to
read longer texts in it.

Compared to normal English (or indeed any lang written by the Roman
alphabet), Abbrev makes it easier and faster for the writer but more
difficult for the reader. This makes sense in a chat, which in many ways is
closer to spoken language than to "normal" writing, but hardly in a longer
text of the one-way-communication variety.

But I suspect that a consistent Briefscript would, structurally, be more
similar to a syllabary like Japanese than to Abbrev.

                                                     Andreas

PS I disagree about you're interpretation of the characters in "msgs" as
meaning respectively /mE/ /sI/ /dZ/ and /(I)z/. I'd rather say that "msgs"
refers to the SPELLING {messages}, or perhaps rather {message} + plural.
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