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> [...] regarding the "shortcuts" that
> people make when typing emails and cellphone 'text-messages'. In text
> messages people often miss out letters in order to speed up typing. So
> "let's have some fun tonight" would read "lts hve sum fn 2nte" (or
> something like that).
> 
> [...] Is this just another stage in the evolution of language? 

My theory:

This shorthand was brought about as a result of a communication medium that doesn't have enough bandwidth for the ideas its being used to express. It's derived from internet relay chat shorthand, where people who can't type well are stuck with shorthand to get their ideas though their plain old keyboards. Telephones make lousy keyboards, barely passable really, so the shorthand got even shorter.

I'm always suspected (but never bothered to investigate) that the unix world started at a time when bandwidth was really low (or was derived from soemthing that started at such a time). That would explain commands like mv, cp, ls (move, copy, list) and directories like /dev /tmp /usr (device, temporary, user).

If it weren't for bandwidth constraints (the bandwidth of the cable between a console and server, or of the keyboard and fingers between your brain and your computer), this would not have happened.

It could be a temporary thing. Maybe tiny keyboards will be replaced by voice recognition, and kb shortcuts w/b replaced by a spoken shorthand, using only words that work well with voice recognition software. IRC and IM messages are written in the typist's equivalent of a pidgin language, maybe the next will be a real pidgin language. Maybe they'll call it Nokiash (rhymes with Nokia). :-)

Or maybe it's more likely that we'll just switch to snippets of recorded speech. I wonder what it would do to language if you had to communicate every thought in (say maybe...) 3 seconds of speech?

I read a sci-fi story a while back about a eugenically created race of super-smart folks who, among other things, came up with a three-dimensional language because plain old text wasn't sufficient anymore. I wonder if anyone has written a PhD thesis on the impact of bandwidth on language or communication in general? Hmm. If not I have a new idea for grad school...

Spoken languages came about to meet certain requirements. Written languages increased the bandwidth a bit (most folks and read faster than people generally speak) and added time-shifting* but keyboards only have as much bandwidth as the typist, and phone keyboards are worse yet.

On the other hand, I think technology does provide some possibilities for increasing the bandwidth of the written word... here's a project I did a while back when I wanted to describe the relationships between a bunch of different parts of a fairly complex system:

http://www.natew.com/rcheli/frames.cgi/graph/html.Main

* About timeshifting: it just occurred to me that books are to storytellers what TiVo is to television. For some reason I think that's interesting.

Nate Waddoups, chronic thinker
Redmond WA USA
October 8 2001