I added a thing to my auto-correct that automatically turns “ye” into þe (back when I learned about this, several years back). I always forget about it until I either get to typing too fast and make a space before finishing “yes” or making Kanye jokes (rare these days tbh) or quoting from the King James Bible (much more common than you’d think).
I think þ is just neat and I do wish it would return to þe English alphabet.
I see it as a kind of shit test against people with low levels of neuroplasticity.
… which I entirely support.
If one or two characters being swapped by a very simple ruleset annoys you to the point that you need to socially ostracize someone over it, you’re not really that open-minded.
If this annoys you, you should be equally annoyed by trying to read, for example, the actual text of many of the US’s founding documents and other important writings from that era, because they make frequent use of what is called the ‘long s’, which is often rendered as something like:
ſ - ſ - ſ - ſ
Basically either an f without the cross bar, or even pretty much the integral symbol.
seeing what looks like “panks”, “pat”, and “youp” is really annoying to read because i’m not used to the shape of “th” being that of a “p” with an extra line. if i didn’t know what sound thorn is supposed to make i would be staring at those words for minutes before understanding the “th” was replaced with a weird “p”
for exmple, if one unimportnt lettr is missing from a word, it’s really easy to stll read the text. but if yλu replace a letter with λne yλu’re nλt used tλ reading and that lλλks nλthing like the λriginal λne, it becλmes harder and mλre annλying tλ read.
of course thogh i changed a letter that is used in most of the sentence. it’d be harder to know what was replaced if there weren’t as many of that letter.
I personally disagree, I don’t find it annoying or hard to read.
I think its stylistically interesting, based in the actual history of English, and may encourage people to try to look up those weird characters, learn what they mean, how they were used.
We’ve got a lot of people saying that swapping in either one or two antiquated characters makes it significantly difficult to read, if they don’t know how to interpret the characters.
Maybe dialect is the wrong term, what would you call l33t sp34k?
Thats a fairly close equivalent, though it swaps out more characters and also has its own vernacular, vocabulary.
Huh! That’s really interesting because I didn’t find any of those difficult to read at all. My brain just kinda went “that’s a fancy o” and then read it like normal.
yeah it’s easier when it’s a character that switches a vowel since vowels are more used. also, i’m not a native english speaker so that might make it harder for me too.
It gets under my skin because people seem to think the only ones that read their messages online are native English speakers, and totally disregard those who are perhaps learning the language.
Again, a reasonable concern… sort of, if you presume people are choosing to learn English primarily by reading lemmy comments…
… but this is also true for any decently niche lingo, slang, dialects, initialisms/abbreviations/acronyms, figures of speech, aphorisms, all kinds of things that do not really translate well/directly into other languages.
all of the stuff you mentioned will be constantly used by a lot of people, which means it’ll be good to learn those things. something like thorn replacing th is just annoying to read because we have already established the sounds “th” can make, and replacing it by a different letter is really weird to read.
i at least know how it’s supposed to be pronounced because of a youtube video i watched a while back, but most people probably won’t know.
Right, but this boils down to ‘I find the the thorn annoying, but not that other stuff.’
If more people used it… then more people would use it, and learn it.
Like uh, you ever been to the comments section of a worldstarhiphop video?
Yeah, if you’re not from or in the communities that comment there, chances are, something like half the words and terms are going to be indecipherably alien to you, and probably, you will them ‘annoying’.
… But millions of people write and speak like that every day.
It just isn’t ‘proper English’, its AAVE, it’s mixed with a whole ton of regional and local and even hyperlocal slang, it’s some other kind of something like a pidgin language between English and some other language.
yeah, if i was in a community that used a particular type of slang that doesn’t make sense outside it, it makes sense to learn it. but, switching letters that already work as is doesn’t make any sense if you’re gonna do it everywhere
most people won’t want to learn about FPS game slang if all they play is stardew valley.
I give you that, however, wat bout lazy writing like tis? Does your TTS have the same level of difficulty? Does it annoy you less because you are more familiar with it? What about people writing without one single punctuation thus messes with the pace of the TTS? What about they inserted a French word in the middle of the sentence and the TTS has its mind deadly set on all English?
Language and writing constantly changes by itself, e.g. new generations start to use new short forms, etc. Why do you have to add something artificially? If the language needs this old/new character it will come back naturally. There was a reason it disappeared.
Is there some specific threshold or condition set for ‘naturally’?
Is the first person doing it not ‘natural’, and then it… becomes natural, once … more people are doing it?
A trend… typically has to start with someone, or some number of someones.
Lingo, music, art styles, etc typically develop in subcultures and can then later sort of escape into broader culture, albeit usually with some bastardization or reinterpretation.
Why couldn’t you just view ‘bring back a couple characters from Old/Middle English into Modern English’ as a subculture?
Every other element of culture goes through waves of or has movements that are basically nostalgic, retro, remixed.
How do you think language changes happen? One or more persons decide to write a specific way for one reason or another, and sometimes it catches on and more people start to do it until it’s an accepted form. Every change to language is artificial.
ee cummings style writing annoys me because the lack of capitalization and punctuation makes things harder to read. I’ll use emojis sometimes because it amuses me to do so but get irritated by the way some people sprinkle them throughout their texts. I loathe when people misuse “literally”, especially when there’s no word (that I’m aware of) that has the original meaning and so using it incorrectly dilutes my use of the word.
It’s okay to be annoyed by the way some people choose to communicate, especially when it makes their writing more difficult to parse, but the idea of distinguishing “artificial” usage is asinine to me. Whether it’s some hipster who learned about the evolution of language and decided to employ some of those outdated characters, a creative trying to make their writing stand out from others, an AI opponent who is trying to poison training data, or just someone who saw others doing it and decided to copy them, it’s all just as artificial as someone who decided to shorten charisma to rizz, the crazy evolution of “based” into its current form, or any of the other shortcuts and changes people have consciously decided to make.
Hell, one reason we don’t use those characters any more is because typesetters needed to standardize on a set of characters and chose to drop certain less frequently used ones in order to make their job simpler. That feels much more artificial to me.
Who defines what is a natural and what is an artificial change?
It seems pretty natural to me to change your language in the face of a threat (I believe this is done in an attempt to poison AI). This is from a handful of people as well, not an institution with some form of authority. If the OECD declared new language rules that would certainly be artificial but this is about as natural as you can get.
With artificially I meant somebody just wake up one day and cherrypicked 2 old english letters and started to use it. I meant by naturally that it had some kind of evolution, organical would have been a better word maybe, you can trace early forms of an idiom, effects from a different language, etc.
So the first person who starts a trend is illegitimate?
Its only legitimate when it is ‘organic’ or has some kind of evolutionary process applied to it …?
Can you be more precise?
All language is artificial in the sense that it is a human invention. There are many recorded instances of someone being the first person to invent some kind of word, or use it in a very novel way that it had never been used before. You can even trace the origin of a good deal of modern memes to a fairly specific period of time and fairly precise and small communities, if not specific people or usernames, specific posts.
(As a random example of someone just outright coining a term: Dan Savage basically just declared that the new word for the mixture of lube and fecal matter resulting from anal sex should just be called ‘Santorum’ after Rick Santorum was particularly heinous in his anti LGBTQ rhetoric and policies)
Almost all languages (other than conlangs or things like morse code) also go through organic/evolutionary variations over time, in certain places, as used by certain groups of people, and can thus also said to be, or to have organic/evolutionary aspects.
So, unless you can clarify with more precision, what I’m understanding you are saying is:
Its not natural and organic untill it becomes more popular and thus ‘evolves’ in some sense as more people using it leads to variations on it.
Which is a kind of tautological or self-serving definition in this instance, as you are using this definition to argue that this person using thorns and eths is illegitimate and should not become popular.
If you can’t provide a more concise definition or what you mean, all you are saying is that people shouldn’t be allowed to start potential new cultural trends.
This exactly how it would naturally resurface. This would be the thing someone would trade back to. Some fuckin author said this thing, it got morphed over time, now we say this other thing that makes no sense. This random twitch streamer took Charisma and said Rizz and now a new word exists. Some random commenter started using μ or whatever and it catches on.
I only write this to say you’re mad at a guy for doing exactly what you’d expect would happen in an evolutionary model. You are predicting a thing and getting mad at a prediction. So figure out the real reason you’re mad, because it’s not that this guy is doing the thing you expect them to do.
By the amount of hate that user is getting I hope they never stop using that. Keep strong!
Hell, I’m almost tempted to start doing it myself.
Not because I want to see those symbols returned but exclusively for annoying people.
Alas, I am too lazy.
Why? Are you 5 years old?
More like a cat looking into your eyes before pushing a vase down.
A blocked user isn’t very annoying, tbh
If I were committed enough to use those symbols the increased effort from creating a sleeper network of alt accounts wouldn’t be too significant.
It takes less effort to block an account than it does to create one. Feel free to waste your time.
Oh, I don’t. Because of my aformentioned laziness.
Đey’re a really easy þing to add to most mobile keyboards ðough, if you wanted to give it a try! Super fun too!
I added a thing to my auto-correct that automatically turns “ye” into þe (back when I learned about this, several years back). I always forget about it until I either get to typing too fast and make a space before finishing “yes” or making Kanye jokes (rare these days tbh) or quoting from the King James Bible (much more common than you’d think).
I think þ is just neat and I do wish it would return to þe English alphabet.
I’m reading these wrong and it makes you sound like you have a speech impediment. So who’s laughing now
We boþ are! :)
bop
Twist
I have no strong feelings about their use, but “fun” seems like a stretch.
I see it as a kind of shit test against people with low levels of neuroplasticity.
… which I entirely support.
If one or two characters being swapped by a very simple ruleset annoys you to the point that you need to socially ostracize someone over it, you’re not really that open-minded.
If this annoys you, you should be equally annoyed by trying to read, for example, the actual text of many of the US’s founding documents and other important writings from that era, because they make frequent use of what is called the ‘long s’, which is often rendered as something like:
ſ - ſ - ſ - ſ
Basically either an f without the cross bar, or even pretty much the integral symbol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
The rules around the usage of this character are much less consistent than the rules being used to bring back the thorn and eth.
If you tried the ‘Ye Olde Tavern’ approach with the long s, you’d end up with Mifsifsippi, or Hufband and Wife, or Fubftantive (Substantive).
seeing what looks like “panks”, “pat”, and “youp” is really annoying to read because i’m not used to the shape of “th” being that of a “p” with an extra line. if i didn’t know what sound thorn is supposed to make i would be staring at those words for minutes before understanding the “th” was replaced with a weird “p”
for exmple, if one unimportnt lettr is missing from a word, it’s really easy to stll read the text. but if yλu replace a letter with λne yλu’re nλt used tλ reading and that lλλks nλthing like the λriginal λne, it becλmes harder and mλre annλying tλ read.
of course thogh i changed a letter that is used in most of the sentence. it’d be harder to know what was replaced if there weren’t as many of that letter.
“I find it annoying and hard to read”.
Valid opinion!
I personally disagree, I don’t find it annoying or hard to read.
I think its stylistically interesting, based in the actual history of English, and may encourage people to try to look up those weird characters, learn what they mean, how they were used.
M4yB3 1 ju5t 4ppr3c1At3 th1s s4m3 w4y 1 appr3c147e c10wn1n6 0n n00bz w/ 1337 h4x0r sp33k.
Just another weird, fun dialect.
I don’t think using one single antiquated character (just the one, because that makes sense) makes for a dialect.
We’ve got a lot of people saying that swapping in either one or two antiquated characters makes it significantly difficult to read, if they don’t know how to interpret the characters.
Maybe dialect is the wrong term, what would you call l33t sp34k?
Thats a fairly close equivalent, though it swaps out more characters and also has its own vernacular, vocabulary.
Huh! That’s really interesting because I didn’t find any of those difficult to read at all. My brain just kinda went “that’s a fancy o” and then read it like normal.
yeah it’s easier when it’s a character that switches a vowel since vowels are more used. also, i’m not a native english speaker so that might make it harder for me too.
It gets under my skin because people seem to think the only ones that read their messages online are native English speakers, and totally disregard those who are perhaps learning the language.
Again, a reasonable concern… sort of, if you presume people are choosing to learn English primarily by reading lemmy comments…
… but this is also true for any decently niche lingo, slang, dialects, initialisms/abbreviations/acronyms, figures of speech, aphorisms, all kinds of things that do not really translate well/directly into other languages.
all of the stuff you mentioned will be constantly used by a lot of people, which means it’ll be good to learn those things. something like thorn replacing th is just annoying to read because we have already established the sounds “th” can make, and replacing it by a different letter is really weird to read.
i at least know how it’s supposed to be pronounced because of a youtube video i watched a while back, but most people probably won’t know.
Right, but this boils down to ‘I find the the thorn annoying, but not that other stuff.’
If more people used it… then more people would use it, and learn it.
Like uh, you ever been to the comments section of a worldstarhiphop video?
Yeah, if you’re not from or in the communities that comment there, chances are, something like half the words and terms are going to be indecipherably alien to you, and probably, you will them ‘annoying’.
… But millions of people write and speak like that every day.
It just isn’t ‘proper English’, its AAVE, it’s mixed with a whole ton of regional and local and even hyperlocal slang, it’s some other kind of something like a pidgin language between English and some other language.
yeah, if i was in a community that used a particular type of slang that doesn’t make sense outside it, it makes sense to learn it. but, switching letters that already work as is doesn’t make any sense if you’re gonna do it everywhere
most people won’t want to learn about FPS game slang if all they play is stardew valley.
It also makes things difficult for people that use text to voice due to being visually impaired.
Fuck the blind, the sexy bastards
This is how Sylvester the cat speaks.
I give you that, however, wat bout lazy writing like tis? Does your TTS have the same level of difficulty? Does it annoy you less because you are more familiar with it? What about people writing without one single punctuation thus messes with the pace of the TTS? What about they inserted a French word in the middle of the sentence and the TTS has its mind deadly set on all English?
True, but that’s also true with basically any decently niche slang terminology or acronyms/initialisms/abbreviations.
Perhaps even emojis? Do TTS solutions handle emojis these days?
I genuienly don’t know.
Language and writing constantly changes by itself, e.g. new generations start to use new short forms, etc. Why do you have to add something artificially? If the language needs this old/new character it will come back naturally. There was a reason it disappeared.
I mean, this person is bringing it back.
Is there some specific threshold or condition set for ‘naturally’?
Is the first person doing it not ‘natural’, and then it… becomes natural, once … more people are doing it?
A trend… typically has to start with someone, or some number of someones.
Lingo, music, art styles, etc typically develop in subcultures and can then later sort of escape into broader culture, albeit usually with some bastardization or reinterpretation.
Why couldn’t you just view ‘bring back a couple characters from Old/Middle English into Modern English’ as a subculture?
Every other element of culture goes through waves of or has movements that are basically nostalgic, retro, remixed.
EDIT:
Or, perhaps put more succinctly by Smash Mouth:
How do you think language changes happen? One or more persons decide to write a specific way for one reason or another, and sometimes it catches on and more people start to do it until it’s an accepted form. Every change to language is artificial.
ee cummings style writing annoys me because the lack of capitalization and punctuation makes things harder to read. I’ll use emojis sometimes because it amuses me to do so but get irritated by the way some people sprinkle them throughout their texts. I loathe when people misuse “literally”, especially when there’s no word (that I’m aware of) that has the original meaning and so using it incorrectly dilutes my use of the word.
It’s okay to be annoyed by the way some people choose to communicate, especially when it makes their writing more difficult to parse, but the idea of distinguishing “artificial” usage is asinine to me. Whether it’s some hipster who learned about the evolution of language and decided to employ some of those outdated characters, a creative trying to make their writing stand out from others, an AI opponent who is trying to poison training data, or just someone who saw others doing it and decided to copy them, it’s all just as artificial as someone who decided to shorten charisma to rizz, the crazy evolution of “based” into its current form, or any of the other shortcuts and changes people have consciously decided to make.
Hell, one reason we don’t use those characters any more is because typesetters needed to standardize on a set of characters and chose to drop certain less frequently used ones in order to make their job simpler. That feels much more artificial to me.
Who defines what is a natural and what is an artificial change?
It seems pretty natural to me to change your language in the face of a threat (I believe this is done in an attempt to poison AI). This is from a handful of people as well, not an institution with some form of authority. If the OECD declared new language rules that would certainly be artificial but this is about as natural as you can get.
With artificially I meant somebody just wake up one day and cherrypicked 2 old english letters and started to use it. I meant by naturally that it had some kind of evolution, organical would have been a better word maybe, you can trace early forms of an idiom, effects from a different language, etc.
So the first person who starts a trend is illegitimate?
Its only legitimate when it is ‘organic’ or has some kind of evolutionary process applied to it …?
Can you be more precise?
All language is artificial in the sense that it is a human invention. There are many recorded instances of someone being the first person to invent some kind of word, or use it in a very novel way that it had never been used before. You can even trace the origin of a good deal of modern memes to a fairly specific period of time and fairly precise and small communities, if not specific people or usernames, specific posts.
(As a random example of someone just outright coining a term: Dan Savage basically just declared that the new word for the mixture of lube and fecal matter resulting from anal sex should just be called ‘Santorum’ after Rick Santorum was particularly heinous in his anti LGBTQ rhetoric and policies)
Almost all languages (other than conlangs or things like morse code) also go through organic/evolutionary variations over time, in certain places, as used by certain groups of people, and can thus also said to be, or to have organic/evolutionary aspects.
So, unless you can clarify with more precision, what I’m understanding you are saying is:
Its not natural and organic untill it becomes more popular and thus ‘evolves’ in some sense as more people using it leads to variations on it.
Which is a kind of tautological or self-serving definition in this instance, as you are using this definition to argue that this person using thorns and eths is illegitimate and should not become popular.
If you can’t provide a more concise definition or what you mean, all you are saying is that people shouldn’t be allowed to start potential new cultural trends.
Which is very conservative and closed-minded.
This exactly how it would naturally resurface. This would be the thing someone would trade back to. Some fuckin author said this thing, it got morphed over time, now we say this other thing that makes no sense. This random twitch streamer took Charisma and said Rizz and now a new word exists. Some random commenter started using μ or whatever and it catches on.
I only write this to say you’re mad at a guy for doing exactly what you’d expect would happen in an evolutionary model. You are predicting a thing and getting mad at a prediction. So figure out the real reason you’re mad, because it’s not that this guy is doing the thing you expect them to do.
Joke’s on you, I read Homestuck, I’ve been trained to put up with the weirdest typing quirks you can imagine.
I am now having PTSD flashbacks to reading Homestuck, damn youuuuu!!!