News of the slightly unusual - Students using internet chat lingo in class

[ck4829]

Middle school teacher Julia Austin is noticing a new generation of errors creeping into her pupils' essays.

Sure, they still commit the classic blunders — like the commonly used "ain't." But an increasing number of Austin's eighth-graders also submit classwork containing "b4," "ur," "2" and "wata" — words that may confuse adults but are part of the teens' everyday lives.

This "instant messaging-speak" or "IM-speak" emerged more than a decade ago. Used in e-mails and cell phone text messages, most teens are familiar with this tech talk and use it to flirt, plan dates and gossip.

But junior high and high school teachers nationwide say they see a troubling trend: The words have become so commonplace in children's social lives that the techno spellings are finding their way into essays and other writing assignments.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070207/ap_on_hi_te/techbit_im_speak

[Redstone]

1. What, nobody saw this one coming? It's hardly a surprise.

Redstone

[Hardrada]

4. ur rite

[don954]

2. what, no one saw the most massive change in communications

in history causing a change, or even a fork in the language?

[sakabatou]

3. Suprise, suprise!

NOT!

[Dogmudgeon]

5. You should see it in other languages

In French, Spanish, and other romance languages, the common word "que" ("that" or "which") is often texted as "k". I've also seen "pourquoi" ("why", "because") turned into "prkwa". Cyber culture is older in France than even the USA because of Minitel, an internet-like system that the French telephone company built in the early 1980s.

There is text lingo in Esperanto. The circumflexes over some of the letters are replaced with the letter X immediately after. Grammatical endings are often dropped. ktp (Kaj tiel plu -- and so on).

Basque has a lot of computer text slang, having gone from being oppressed by Franco to becoming the center of a high-tech corridor in one generation. And since it uses ergative grammar, a lot of unnecessary words can be dropped anyway -- like verbs. The northern Basques in France also had Minitel.

Russians have THREE sets of computer slang -- one in Cyrillic, one in transliterated Roman (using mainly Polish spelling rules), and one in "Volapuk", using Roman letters and symbols to approximate Cyrillic letters. The Arab alphabet gets the same treatment.

And I'm sure I left out a whole lot ...

--p!

[LostInAnomie]

6. I saw it all the time when I was doing my student teaching.

eom

[kcass1954]

7. I see it from a co-worker in email and other writing.

She needed titles (auto auction business) from me, and left me a list of the VINs with the following message:

"ttls - 4 - fri"

which I thought meant that she needed 4 titles for the Friday sale. But there were only 3 VINs listed. I attached the 3 titles, and added a note:

"4 titles but only 3 VINs - What's the 4th VIN?"

The conversation the following morning ended with her pissed at me because my last statement was something along the lines that I was unaware that we worked in a chat room.