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

Joe wrote:
> With the new advent of txt, I came to wonder - could it replace standard
> written English?   There is no doubt that its use is growing, and it seems
> that it seems to be used in more colloquial writing by some young people.  I
> wonder, could it really go that far?
I certainly hope so (sorry Nic)! I relatively rarely use it, but I'm
bored of the standard English orthography.

In some ways, I think it's similar to the Medieval(?) practice of
abbreviations, ligatures and whatnot that lead to glyphs like & and @,
sharp S's, umlauts and cedillas. So it isn't exactly a totally new thing.

Also, I think it'll serve as a useful reminder to some people that
speech is the primary form of communication and writing something that
comes later. If we come out with something abjad-like, you couldn't
exactly say that 'grwing' was meant to be pronounced like that.

On a related note, in the _MX_, a dodgy free paper, there was an article
about some British student-or-another submitting an English essay (I'm
guessing it was primary school (or whatever the equivalent may be in the
British education system)---it began with something like 'the hols wr a
CWOT [complete waste of time]').

> 3. 'txt' is a representation of the spoken language, rather than the written
> one.  It also uses a lot of abbreviations.
To which I say 'supryz supryz' (which is just a guess at how to write
it). It is, after all, generally used in a medium that replaces spoken
language (IM).

Tristan.

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