5 ms·

There's a lot of generational change due to the use of computers in writing, in general. For example, in Spanish, when I was a kid it was a given fact that exc

by kace91 6y ago

There's a lot of generational change due to the use of computers in writing, in general. For example, in Spanish, when I was a kid it was a given fact that exclamations and questions went between marks (¿? and ¡! respectively). Nowadays it's extremely rare to see opening marks - they exist in very formal contexts like books or newspapers, but even emails in the workplace got rid of them, and using them on social media or messaging apps would be just as weird as signing the message at the end.

cmehdy 6y ago
Similarly in French, some accents are casually going away and certain differences are also slowly eroding (for example in English you put no space between words and punctuation while in French you do[1], but a lot of French stuff online is written English-style nowadays). Internet in western countries really is creating some kind of English-centered shockwave. It's true (to a much lesser extent) in other languages. Japanese internet slang[2] is still very Japanese but has stuff directly borrowed or adapted from English for a lot of new tech. I'm getting into sci-fi territory now, but I think the Belta Creole[3] of "The Expanse" shows a cool futuristic take on a blend of languages where English still has the bulk of the real estate. [1] https://www.francaisfacile.com/exercices/exercice-francais-2/exercice-francais-115768.php https://www.francaisfacile.com/exercices/exercice-francais-2... [2] https://www.fluentu.com/blog/japanese/japanese-internet-slang/ https://www.fluentu.com/blog/japanese/japanese-internet-slan... [3] https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Does French not have problems with different words that if the accents are removed get written the same way, but have incompatible meanings? Portuguese is full of those, and it's a major source of resistance on changing the language in Brazil. (Although Brazilian resistance may look like plain acceptance from French standards.)
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    Not so much. French tends to have words that are pronounced the same but are written differently thanks to all the silent letters and combinations that are pronounced the same: vers, verre, vert. mer, mère, maire. In writing you can usually do away with all the accents (many of them are grammatical or the strictly correct spelling but without changing the pronunciation and with little change of the 'look' of the word) without problems.
    - Tainnor 6y ago
      il aime vs. il a aimé la porte vs. il a porté etc. there are definitely words in French, where the accent makes a difference in pronunciation. there are also some cases where there are meaning differences, even when the words are pronounced the same e.g. du vs. dû. Now it's usually not a problem, as ambiguity in general is rarely a problem in language due to context.
      - mytailorisrich 6y ago
        "il a aimé" without accent is not "il aime" it's "il a aime", which people will understand is missing the accent. Likewise for your other example.
        MayeulC 6y ago
        It requires me a mental effort without the accent, though, and I will register it as a typo. You might as well write "il a aimer". The later sounds the same as with the accent, but it's obviously very wrong to put an infinitive there. I guess I proved your point to some extent: I care less about accent errors than other mistakes, and just consider it a typo. But reading a completely unaccented text is hard for me, and I text, e-mail, and communicate online a lot. In my experience, people are not foregoing them on purpose, except on capital letters, which is an heritage of AZERTY keyboards + windows (hopefully AFNOR keyboards catches on). Capital accented letters is the example to cite if you want an example of computer technology changing our habits: my friend Etienne (Étienne?) insists there is no accent on hist first name, but it makes no sense to me.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  > Similarly in French, some accents are casually going away In my view this is partly because of the 'focus' (or lack thereof) of the education system and partly because most software is developed in English first with the addition of accents an add-on, which makes typing accents cumbersome and thus the path of least resistance is to give up, especially when writing casually.
  - cmehdy 6y ago
    Yeah, since I've moved away from an AZERTY to a QWERTY I cannot imagine ever reverting back, but on the other hand this means no accent is directly accessible. As of right now I'm on a mac and I feel very comfortable with the way they've designed input for "roman accented" letters (using the option key, or for some using long presses) but it's a whole other thing once I see a Windows computer.
    - cmonagle 6y ago
      Have you considered the CSA layout? It's QWERTY, but the most commonly used accented characters are easily accessible. It's not ergonomic for programming, but switching between US and CSA doesn't require a significant adjustment (once you're used to it, at least). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSA_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSA_keyboard
      - cmehdy 6y ago
        Seems like a good one, and pretty fitting considering I'm in Canada right now :) I'll keep it in mind if I end up making myself a desktop PC in the future. But I guess the hardest part about any good alternative design isn't so much the design itself but its adoption and how often you're interacting with it to rewire your brain.
    - atoav 6y ago
      Moved from German QWERTZ and never looked back as well. I figured QWERTY with Eurkey layout[0] is a good middle ground. As it allows me to use EN_US as a base for programming, but access umlauts, accentos and such if needed. [0]: https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > in English you put no space between words and punctuation In “typewriter” English which is dominant because of, first, typewriters and then ASCII and then keyboards and then familiarity (as unicode and mobile keyboard usually support additional characters easily), that's true of almost all punctuation. In typeset English (which Unicode in principle supports), it's true of somewhat less punctuation.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
I don't think this is due to the use of computers per say. Rather I think this is the influence of the 'Anglosphere' online both in term of culture and of tech (for example in Spanish autocompletion could insert the opening marks but it's probably often not even considered by the devs). Perhaps the software culture has also changed. When people were mostly typing "seriously" in Word or email all the correct typography was implemented. For example Word selects the correct quotation marks automatically based on locale. Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. do not care. Just ship fast.
- kace91 6y ago
  > I don't think this is due to the use of computers per say. Rather I think this is the influence of the 'Anglosphere' online both in term of culture and of tech (for example in Spanish autocompletion could insert the opening marks but it's probably often not even considered by the devs). Indeed tech is not made in a local-friendly way normally - for example, losing those symbols is a direct consequence of the fact that they are usually buried with other rarely used symbols. But for cases like punctuation, I don't really mind it. It might just be me but I've never cared about " vs » and I'm happy to have an international standard to make things easier. diacritics are more important (n vs ñ, o vs ó) but those are usually far better covered by autocomplete, so no complains there.
  - anthk 6y ago
    ñ is not a diacritic, is a letter on its own, with a key on Spanish keyboard layouts.
anthk 6y ago
Native Spanish here. If you write emails on a computer without proper ortography, you will be seen as a lazy fuck or illiterate.
- kace91 6y ago
  I'm a native Spaniard as well. Do you write emails with opening marks? Perhaps it's a generational thing, but so far I've worked for two multinationals including a bank and I can't think of a single person that bothered to do so, except for official communications that are usually edited by someone whose very job is to do that. Neither did my teachers at University, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the official rules are changed in the next couple of decades.
  - AlbertoGP 6y ago
    A different Spaniard here: I do write opening marks everywhere including emails, and I would expect that to be a generational thing as you suggest. I’m sad but not surprised to see those parts of the language being lost for many/most people.

by kace91 6y ago

cmehdy 6y ago

Similarly in French, some accents are casually going away and certain differences are also slowly eroding (for example in English you put no space between words and punctuation while in French you do[1], but a lot of French stuff online is written English-style nowadays). Internet in western countries really is creating some kind of English-centered shockwave. It's true (to a much lesser extent) in other languages. Japanese internet slang[2] is still very Japanese but has stuff directly borrowed or adapted from English for a lot of new tech. I'm getting into sci-fi territory now, but I think the Belta Creole[3] of "The Expanse" shows a cool futuristic take on a blend of languages where English still has the bulk of the real estate. [1] https://www.francaisfacile.com/exercices/exercice-francais-2/exercice-francais-115768.php https://www.francaisfacile.com/exercices/exercice-francais-2... [2] https://www.fluentu.com/blog/japanese/japanese-internet-slang/ https://www.fluentu.com/blog/japanese/japanese-internet-slan... [3] https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole

marcosdumay 6y ago
Does French not have problems with different words that if the accents are removed get written the same way, but have incompatible meanings? Portuguese is full of those, and it's a major source of resistance on changing the language in Brazil. (Although Brazilian resistance may look like plain acceptance from French standards.)
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  Not so much. French tends to have words that are pronounced the same but are written differently thanks to all the silent letters and combinations that are pronounced the same: vers, verre, vert. mer, mère, maire. In writing you can usually do away with all the accents (many of them are grammatical or the strictly correct spelling but without changing the pronunciation and with little change of the 'look' of the word) without problems.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    il aime vs. il a aimé la porte vs. il a porté etc. there are definitely words in French, where the accent makes a difference in pronunciation. there are also some cases where there are meaning differences, even when the words are pronounced the same e.g. du vs. dû. Now it's usually not a problem, as ambiguity in general is rarely a problem in language due to context.
    - mytailorisrich 6y ago
      "il a aimé" without accent is not "il aime" it's "il a aime", which people will understand is missing the accent. Likewise for your other example.
      - MayeulC 6y ago
        It requires me a mental effort without the accent, though, and I will register it as a typo. You might as well write "il a aimer". The later sounds the same as with the accent, but it's obviously very wrong to put an infinitive there. I guess I proved your point to some extent: I care less about accent errors than other mistakes, and just consider it a typo. But reading a completely unaccented text is hard for me, and I text, e-mail, and communicate online a lot. In my experience, people are not foregoing them on purpose, except on capital letters, which is an heritage of AZERTY keyboards + windows (hopefully AFNOR keyboards catches on). Capital accented letters is the example to cite if you want an example of computer technology changing our habits: my friend Etienne (Étienne?) insists there is no accent on hist first name, but it makes no sense to me.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
> Similarly in French, some accents are casually going away In my view this is partly because of the 'focus' (or lack thereof) of the education system and partly because most software is developed in English first with the addition of accents an add-on, which makes typing accents cumbersome and thus the path of least resistance is to give up, especially when writing casually.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  Yeah, since I've moved away from an AZERTY to a QWERTY I cannot imagine ever reverting back, but on the other hand this means no accent is directly accessible. As of right now I'm on a mac and I feel very comfortable with the way they've designed input for "roman accented" letters (using the option key, or for some using long presses) but it's a whole other thing once I see a Windows computer.
  - cmonagle 6y ago
    Have you considered the CSA layout? It's QWERTY, but the most commonly used accented characters are easily accessible. It's not ergonomic for programming, but switching between US and CSA doesn't require a significant adjustment (once you're used to it, at least). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSA_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSA_keyboard
    - cmehdy 6y ago
      Seems like a good one, and pretty fitting considering I'm in Canada right now :) I'll keep it in mind if I end up making myself a desktop PC in the future. But I guess the hardest part about any good alternative design isn't so much the design itself but its adoption and how often you're interacting with it to rewire your brain.
  - atoav 6y ago
    Moved from German QWERTZ and never looked back as well. I figured QWERTY with Eurkey layout[0] is a good middle ground. As it allows me to use EN_US as a base for programming, but access umlauts, accentos and such if needed. [0]: https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu
dragonwriter 6y ago
> in English you put no space between words and punctuation In “typewriter” English which is dominant because of, first, typewriters and then ASCII and then keyboards and then familiarity (as unicode and mobile keyboard usually support additional characters easily), that's true of almost all punctuation. In typeset English (which Unicode in principle supports), it's true of somewhat less punctuation.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

I don't think this is due to the use of computers per say. Rather I think this is the influence of the 'Anglosphere' online both in term of culture and of tech (for example in Spanish autocompletion could insert the opening marks but it's probably often not even considered by the devs). Perhaps the software culture has also changed. When people were mostly typing "seriously" in Word or email all the correct typography was implemented. For example Word selects the correct quotation marks automatically based on locale. Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. do not care. Just ship fast.

kace91 6y ago
> I don't think this is due to the use of computers per say. Rather I think this is the influence of the 'Anglosphere' online both in term of culture and of tech (for example in Spanish autocompletion could insert the opening marks but it's probably often not even considered by the devs). Indeed tech is not made in a local-friendly way normally - for example, losing those symbols is a direct consequence of the fact that they are usually buried with other rarely used symbols. But for cases like punctuation, I don't really mind it. It might just be me but I've never cared about " vs » and I'm happy to have an international standard to make things easier. diacritics are more important (n vs ñ, o vs ó) but those are usually far better covered by autocomplete, so no complains there.
- anthk 6y ago
  ñ is not a diacritic, is a letter on its own, with a key on Spanish keyboard layouts.

anthk 6y ago

Native Spanish here. If you write emails on a computer without proper ortography, you will be seen as a lazy fuck or illiterate.

kace91 6y ago
I'm a native Spaniard as well. Do you write emails with opening marks? Perhaps it's a generational thing, but so far I've worked for two multinationals including a bank and I can't think of a single person that bothered to do so, except for official communications that are usually edited by someone whose very job is to do that. Neither did my teachers at University, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the official rules are changed in the next couple of decades.
- AlbertoGP 6y ago
  A different Spaniard here: I do write opening marks everywhere including emails, and I would expect that to be a generational thing as you suggest. I’m sad but not surprised to see those parts of the language being lost for many/most people.