Well, that’s all gone to shit.
After reading Atwood’s tweet: “even Hungarians are not using hungarian notation any more.”[sic] — I got to thinking.
People have stopped writing properly.
I know what Hungarian Notation is, sillies. And I know it’s has nothing to do with grammar or spelling things right. But then, few things today have to do with proper spelling. And I’m not talking about English, either. I’m talking about mother tongues. The beautiful ones, with funny letters and groovy sounds.
Languages will tildes,breves, carons, cedillas, circles and other diacritics. Those are the ones I’m talking about. They’re not dying. Their writing is.
The process itself is called Romanization. It basically means that you can only use the letters found on standard qwerty keyboards plus a few French-ish letters.
The Romanians have long adopted this trend. Now, most of our online writing would sound funny if read out loud and with no interpretation. The Hungarians too have fallen to this group. It’s understandable, since their letters are damn funny and tough to type. The Dutch, too. Their cosmopolitanism is what caused that stroked out o to vanish from the online. And the French? Well, they’ve been eager to leave all those damn accents behind since the day they were forced to start using them.
The Ruskies, zhe Germans, the Norse and the Asians have yet to be Romanized. And that’s good!
It makes inter-cultural communication a bitch, but it’s well worth it. People will have to study, translators will be hired, eyes will be pleased. That’s what the Japanese say when they’re asked why they don’t switch to the Latin charset: ‘Ours is so damn prettier!’
Granted, adding the special letters is cumbersome, at best. And sometimes, the wrong letters are added. Sometimes we’re just too lazy to switch between keyboard layouts. Sometimes, money gets printed with the wrong diacritics because of bad character support on Macs. Some bastards will write in English because they just feel like it.
Whatever our excuse is, it stands. But we’re still on a very slippery slope.
And yeah, Jeff Atwood’s twitter account is @codinghorror. A must-follow for any developer.
6 Sexy Comments
It’s understandable, since *they’re* letters
Nitpicker extraordinaire, at your service!
I think a great deal of the blame is carried by peer pressure. Nowadays people come across as pretentious if they take the time to type properly.
Have you seen articles about high school kids writing essays in chatspeak? I seriously hope this is not the road we`re all heading down.
I’ve given up trying to understand the new native language, especially when it comes to the written part. Spoken, that’s a whole other thing, with accents and dialects, and even that makes me want to have been born german, sometimes. Kids nowadays tend to add crap to words without any concern. The wierd thing is that they al kind of do it, ever since they discovered the word cool and realized that 0 (zero) looks a lot alike with “o”… This is the entry point of all the cocalaresque writing styles and typos, since Bravo and Cool Girl were severely misunderstood, yet underestimated. And yes, I blame Burda Vogel Publishing for this bullcrap they call written language nowadays.
Everyone does it, just like Illy said, because in terms of a mean, sadistic joke, these kids have been modeled not like “play-dough” but like Sirbian Brown Matter which we all now is like the internet : infinite, always growing and most of the times something smells fishy (at best) about it.
I really feel sorry for the kids nowadays, then i feel sorry for my own damn self, because thee sad little bastards will be the ones paying our pensions when / if we grow old. o, that’s a bummer for me, actually
ily, I don’t think that if one person types things properly, the others will follow. I kinda do that, to no avail. Well, most of the time, anyway.
And yes, I’ve heard about chatspeak, leet and texting slang making their way into the academic realm. It’s not the end of the world, but we’re still in a pickle.
Raka, well, we’re also a lot dumber than our folks
If that’s any comfort.
And yes, I also remember those silly magazines. I also remember a conversation with an dear friend, while we were walking past Praktiker. That very name was sending out a message to kids. Even though it’s properly spelled in Deutsch, it looks odd in Romanian. And kids will start replacing c`s with k`s just for fun.
And that happened, didn’t it?
it’s not like most of us have a choice. let’s face it, all our keyboards only have the roman characters (standard US QWERTY keyboard), we don’t have access to our national keys. yes, i know, you can set the keyboard layout for Romanian, but then you lose some special keys and characters, and, well, it’s annoying as hell. so we got used to writing like this (esp after looong IRC and ymess chats), so now if we don’t see diacritics on some big advert put on a building we don’t even notice.
hey, them English speaking dudes have more than one pronunciation for each letter, and they don’t need special characters to understand what’s what, and it definitely makes things easier to type.
btw, when i first read ‘Atwood’ I thought you were referring to Margaret Atwood
stormrider, I doubt that Atwood tweets about Hungarian Notation
And, for the rest, well, it’s not enough for something to be hard to keep people from doing it. I think motivation is key.
People are just not motivated to spell properly anymore. Moreover, they’re living under the impression that it’s actually cool to misspell some words on purpose
And yes, because of the way the characters get shuffled around when switching keyboard layouts, I can’t use the Romanian one either. I must always know there “(” and “)” are, y`know?