Earlier today, when I was at the airport boarding for San Francisco, I got an email from a friend who pointed me to a blog post (in Italian) by somebody I do not really know.
The first few lines were the following:
There is no single day that my radar does not detect live-some objects. Two days ago twitter made its hashtags hotlinked, making the tweet flow on the tagged subject easier to find.
I guess this does not sound too strange to English readers. Now imagine this text in Italian, but with the words in boldface left in English. For those of you who are more familiar with French, it looks like this:
Il n’y a jour que mon radar ne trouve pas des objets live-quelquechose. Il y a deux jours, twitter a fait son hashtag hotlinked, en faisant le flux des tweets sur les sujets tagged plus facile a trouver.
Doesn’t it look weird? Of course many technical terms originate from the US, so they are in English. But what is happening in some countries – and certainly in mine – is that some people seem to believe that the more English terms they use, the cooler they are, even when there are perfectly appropriate (and much nicer-sounding) verbs or noun in their own language.
Maybe I am particularly sensitive to this because, before becoming an engineer, I took classical studies, including Latin and ancient Greek, and my literature teacher would kill us for not using the full power of our beautiful language (I mean synonyms in Italian, let alone using our own language). But even when English terms cannot really be translated, there are ways to distribute them more nicely in a sentence, spending a few more words that make it nicer sounding and – more importantly – less obscure.
This leads me to a more general point. While social software is allowing more people to communicate and collaborate across boundaries, this may be happening at the expense of the depth of communication. Look at how kids communicate via SMS or instant messaging, using a peculiar language based on abbreviations and emoticons to save on message length and cost. Look at their walls on Facebook. And look at tweets, where everything has to stay within 140 characters (20 less than an SMS!).
But even blogs, which should be conducive to deep discussions about certain topics, or become diaries that stimulate the writing skills of individuals, are turning into micro-blogs or series of links and fragments of text.
Of course in a real-time economy and fast-paced society there may be no time left for reflection, for those adverbs that contextualize an action or for those adjectives that not only make a paragraph alive, but provide the tempo for readers to appreciate and digest what the writer wants to tell them.
I suspect that my friends in Quebec are right. Defending a language is a way to defend new generations from losing “human” communication bandwidth. In fact the irony is that the broader the band, the narrower the ability and willingness to use the nuances of one’s language.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Paolo Magrassi // Jul 7, 2009 at 3:28 am
The people you allude to, who twit instead of talking and blog instead of writing, existed all the time in history. The only difference is that, with the internet, they have means of public expression. (Their noise is sometime entertaining but mostly tiresome, and hinders our ability to find the right stuff on the otherwise marvellous Net).
However, people who can write and talk decently are still aorund, possibily in a greater fraction than in 1990.
2 Nick Jones // Jul 7, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I agree with Paolo, but the problem is the signal to noise ratio is deteriorating. There may be more people who can write well, but finding them is getting harder.
Also, when I read your example my first reaction was that it was an example of auto-translation. This is beginning to feel like an inverse Turing test. I.e. I can no longer distinguish the person from the computer, but sadly because the person has deteriorated, not because the computer has improved.
3 Nick Jones // Jul 7, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Another thought about defending language. It’s arguable that you’re not defending it, but trying to prevent it evolving. The English language is an amazing cocktail of words originating from dozens of other languages and cultures. The development of English is in a sense very democratic because it has been created by the people who speak it, not by a committee who decide if new words are permitted and appropriate. It isn’t pure, and the grammar is a mess, but it’s certainly expressive.
I’m very suspicious of official attempts to maintain the purity of language. Many years ago I lived in Swansea, in South Wales. Although part of Wales, Swansea was historically never a Welsh speaking area as most of its inhabitants arrived from other parts of England in the industrial revolution. But the local politicians decided that as it was in Wales they must have bilingual road signs. Unfortunately, many places had never had Welsh names, because their inhabitants didn’t speak Welsh. So they had to form a committee whose job was to invent Welsh place names so they could put them on the signs. This is the sort of Pythonesque activity that results when you meddle with the evolution of a language.
4 Paolo Magrassi // Jul 8, 2009 at 3:01 am
Nick, unfortunately you’ re right. All languages evolve bottom-up. And daily use in most of the cases tends to deteriorate a language, because it lowers the number of rich syntactical constructs, eventually impoverishing expressiveness.
5 François Banville // Jul 8, 2009 at 7:06 am
Actually, I believe that the English language has more to loose than any other language with the effect of social software. Here is my argument.
Most languages evolve and adopt new terms to describe new concepts. For example, we use the word “courriel” in Quebec to refer to email. It is derived from “courrier électronique”. The rate of adoption of new terms is much slower than the rate at which new concepts become popular. So an English word is used while semantic catches up. Eventually, the language heals itself.
On the other hand, social software forces a large proportion of the population to use English to effectively communicate with one another. With so many people speaking and writing a very basic English, with a very limited vocabulary and questionable grammar, a less than correct form of English becomes prevalent. I offer my prose as a proof of this statement… Eventually the language degrades to a pidgin English that corresponds to the lowest common form of English that everyone can share. It is not clear to me if English can recovers. The fact we use English as a common language is thus a blessing and a curse for the people who still learn it as a mother tongue.
6 social software // Sep 23, 2009 at 1:51 am
Online networking has gained in popularity over the past few years using online social networking software.
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