On Sep 12, 2009, at 1:05 AM, Eris Discordia wrote:
There's a discussion of evolution of languages that involves a language going from pidgin to creole to full-blown. Maybe "text-ese" is some sort of pidgin, or more leniently creole, that draws on the "speakers'" native language but the point here is that it will never evolve into a full-blown language.
Once again, words you use recklessly turn out to have actual definitions. From Wikipedia:
"A pidgin language is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common..."
"A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable language that originates from a mixture of various languages. The lexicon of a creole usually consists of words clearly borrowed from the parent languages, except for phonetic and semantic shifts. On the other hand, the grammar often has original features and may differ substantially from those of the parent languages."
I'm sure you'll provide us with the definitions from Merriam-Webster as well.
In other words, a pidgin is what you get when you have two groups without a common language being forced to communicate. A creole is what you get when their kids learn the pidgin as a first language. Linguists and physicists have a bad habit of making their jargon colorful so I'll only deduct half the usual points.
I agree with your conclusion, but I disagree with a couple steps in your reasoning. Namely, I don't think you could discover a systemic grammatical deviation from English in leet or text-speak or whatever. These are novel and amusing orthographies and in-crowd jargon and nothing more—people pronounce ROFL and LOL to be ironic and cute, not because they think they're words and would be surprised to learn their true origin. My wife and her best friend have a policy of pronouncing those abbreviations by spelling them out and then saying the last word ("double-you tee ef fuck") to be funny. Also, plenty of people think in English differently than I do yet we all manage to communicate to the same degree (i.e. poorly but well enough to get by).
I also doubt that we'll have the kind of technology you're talking about, because I think 90% of the hard part of being a programmer comes from learning to think rigorously and that will be the stumbling block for anything digital that wants to try and digitize our thoughts. This is also the crux of my argument against the idea that computers will someday program themselves: the real barrier isn't hardware or motivation, it's that by the time you teach someone to be explicit enough that a computer can derive what they're trying to do, you've made them a programmer already (see Prolog for example). Same with strong AI: nobody has a clue how to word the problem precisely enough to write a program to solve it.
— Daniel Lyons
