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

John Cowan wrote:

>Mike Ellis scripsit:
>Evidence?  Lots of highly cultured people have had trouble learning the
>maggelitous spelling of English.  As for reading for enjoyment, that's
>a matter of environment.  Kids read iff their parents do.
  Maybe someday they'll reform English spelling; I sure as hell won't stand
in the way. And it is true that kids pick up their parents reading habits.
My parents devour books; I probably learned more English through reading
books on my own than through any class at school. But I take that as a
negative reflection of the school rather than a positive one of my parents.
  But the fact remains that there *is* a standard English (well, a few
standards actually) which must be taught. 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."
  The "corpus" is written Maggelitously. And so you must learn to read it
that way.

>Umm, how about orderliness, forceful argument, coherence, appropriate
>use (and acknowledgement) of sources?  Microsoft Word can't do anything
>about deficiencies in those, and they are a *lot* more important than
>social shibboleths about "between you and I".
  None of those things make spelling irrelevant. The job of the English
teacher *is* to teach the proper language. And consider your audience: what
good are arguments if your reader can't decipher the text?

  I'm not opposed to changes in the language. Those are inevitable. I love
some of the things that are happening: new plural forms of "you", more
playful use of affixes to make compounds which were never considered proper
before, and of course loans, loans, loans. Hell, we generate new words on
this list all the time! But changes are best when they IMPROVE the
expressive potential or accessibility (again, a case for spelling reform)
of the language. The student in question demonstrates a form of English
which is more dumbed-down and esoteric than ever before.

M

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