Re: OT-ish: txt - Could it replace Standard Written English?

Mike Ellis wrote:
> Would Spanish teachers leave
> conjugation or gender out of the curriculum? Or leave out any instruction
> altogether, since the students will eventually pick up some form of the
> language on their own? "Don't worry about the politeness levels in
> Japanese, talk to everyone the same and they'll still get the gist of it."
What kind of Spanish or Japanese teachers? Spanish or Japanese as a
native or second language? Because I'm sure as native languages, they
could easily skip it, and as second languages, it's a poor comparison,
because most people who speak English as a native language speak it as
... well ... a native language.

>   The "corpus" is written Maggelitously. And so you must learn to read it
> that way.
Because you can read something one way doesn't mean will write it that
way. There's a difference between passive and active knowledge.

>   None of those things make spelling irrelevant. The job of the English
> teacher *is* to teach the proper language.
I'm not entirely sure about that. The existence of a 'proper language'
is in itself debatable. And thene there's the fact that English (at
least in Victoria) has become more like 'Analysing Writing'.

> And consider your audience: what
> good are arguments if your reader can't decipher the text?
That's not a valid argument here. Eventually, everyone who can't read
txt will be dead (or txt will be). Sure there'll be a while when not
everyone will be able to understand everything, and after that they'll
be a few difficulties when dialectalisms are more common, but they exist
in speech, too.

Anyway, your arguments are aimed towards a particular audience. A
Swahili monoglot can't understand English.

> The student in question demonstrates a form of English
> which is more dumbed-down and esoteric than ever before.
Sometimes you have to take a step back to go forwards again. (And it
would probably make newspapers cheaper if they didn't have to waste
space on obviously irrelevent vowels ;) )

Tristan.