Alphabet to Email-How Written English Evolves and Where It's Heading

Alphabet to Email - How written english evolved and where it's heading. NAOMI S. BARON London: Routledge, 2000, 316 pages, $18.95 ISBN 0-415-18655-4 Running through this book are questions regarding the cultural, monetary, scholastic and vernacular uses of the English language as it has continued to evolve over centuries. The author is a linguist with substantial interest in and knowledge of history and technology. She writes in an accessible manner appropriate to this hybrid book which is a cross between a trade and scholarly book (endnotes and a substantial bibliography). The primary question this book addresses is what (if anything) we gain from the former separation between the differences between formal, written English and the more informal, colloquial spoken English. Her position is that the advent of email has blurred the edges of these two forms of usage. Since World War II, written English (at least in America) has increasingly come to reflect everyday speech. While writing on-line with computers has hastened this trend, computers didn't initiate it. As writing growingly mirrors informal speech, contemporary spoken and written English are losing their identity as distinct forms of language. (24) The answer to the primary question - should the difference between speaking and writing be appreciated and maintained - has pedagogical implications. This is a time of turmoil and doubt in the teaching of English. Of what value is teaching the history of English? Should a prescriptive grammar be taught? Is punctuation based on speech patterns (breathing) or should it be a means to reveal the structural characteristics of the sentence? Is the focus on group composition detrimental to the development of individual competence and style? Does online composition and language processing mirror or change more traditional forms of writing and reading? Should one set of English conventions serve as a worldwide norm? From the perspective of history, the reader is given insightful connections between historic change and its relation to various combinations of human interpretation and b>avior and technological development. Historical information about copyright and ownership and its relationship to censorship speak to our current confusions in this regard. The notion of authorship and originality as it developed in the past speaks to our current use of appropriation and even the theoretical arguments about the interrelatedness of all text. What was and currently is an authoritative text? Even dictionaries have changed from arbiters of usage to that of descriptive record of use. Attempted reforms of spelling and handwriting accompany elocution and the differing attitudes among British and American speakers regarding what is correct and marks class. As English is evolving into a world language, the preservation or extinction of local ideosyncracies (British-American- Canadian-AustralianESL) provide either fodder for arguments regarding standardization or elaboration. Conditions fascilitating the rise of literacy offer contrast as some decry its demise. From the perspective of technology, the reader is offered not only technical development and deployment, but the effect technology has on social and private b>aviors. The radio, typewriter, telegraph, telephone and computer all figure prominently in this discussion. An example of the kind of information one might find follows, referencing the possibility of installing a house telegraph: A similar vision did, in fact, materialize two decades later. In 1877, the Social Telegraph Association the ancestor of computer listservs -was created in Brideport, Connecticut. The Association installed instruments in subscribers' homes that could be connected, through a central switchboard, to one another so that subscribers could 'speak' to one another through Morse Code once they had been taught how. (219) The telegraph did alter language use as a kind of cablese, a short, highly abbreviated message cut transmission costs for the sender. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.