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What about the LACK of language. It's these kids with their texting, they communication without language. Their form of communication is so stunted and dumbed-down, it cannot even be considered language. My teenage son tells me that many teens don't even communication in person much any more. If a boy likes a girl he met in class, he just begins texting her and that will be the dominant form of communication. .
Only going to play devil's advocate for a minute. If two people use less language to communicate and can still understand one another, would that be fair to say that this is an advance in the use of technology and culture?
The isolation of people from one another as a result of technology is sad, I will agree. I saw a young couple once having lunch across from a friend and I. It was a beautiful outdoor patio with oversize couches and trendy accoutrements. The couple were leaning on one another, sunk into a couch while their food sat in front of them. They each had a blackberry and were texting furiously. Unfortunately, I was facing them and couldn't stop being distracted by their lack of communication to one another. They were incredibly intent with the texting. They were also a very attractive couple. Maybe leaning on one another was their way of acknowledging their feelings for one another while they ignored each other verbally. I was dying to ask them if they thought they had a good relationship. Thinking about it now, I wonder if they would have said they had a fuller experience than mine because of the presence of another, non-verbal communication there, and the virtual presence of others with direct communication - although I doubt they enjoyed the visual surroundings of the patio as I did from staring intently at their crackberries.
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Originally Posted by Book Lover 21
I can only imagine the kind of wooing skills involved:
I think so long as the female responds to the male, the skills are valid. It isn't how my generation would do it, but the end result is the same.
Boy: UR HOT!
Girl: U2!
Boy: I wanna hit dat booty!
Girl: k
Boy: CU later!.
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Originally Posted by Book Lover 21
The next thing you know, these two illiterates are breeding together!.
The lack of complex communication would seem to suggest that some things would be lost. Coping skills through communication for young boys is something that I am trying to teach my nine-year-old son because I think the lack of encouragement for young boys to express or have an understanding of their feelings leads to problems later on, such as self-medicating from learned helplessness.
Abbreviated communication does scare me in this regard.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Book Lover 21
Compare this to language 50 or 100 years ago. I'm not talking about literary masterpieces either. Compare this to letters home from Civil War veterans. Using this as a guide and observation, our culture is falling apart.
I'm not sure I would agree that the culure is falling apart because we don't like one aspect of it. Different is not always bad.
I think the question remains when the youth finally get together do they use more complex language to express deeper ideas - or even, do they have deeper ideas and can they be expressed? I would also hope that as people develop and become a part of the business world that their skills improve. It may depend on the kind of positions they seek out, and would be an interesting commentary for college English teachers to make about the quality of essays from a few years ago to now. Remember the maxim that 'youth is wasted on the young.'
That is a significant incentive, and people usually do things because they have an incentive to do so.
With the Walloons it has nothing to do with culture, because as the Flemish Belgians already pointed out that the French speaking Belgians live in the poorest part of Belgium where the majority of its people live on welfare.
It has to do with the time in the past were speaking French was considered very cultured and all the rich spoke French; then speaking French was a sign of being rich and now it is the opposite.
In modern day Belgium the rich people in Belgium speak Flemish and they are tired of supporting their French speaking brothers who prefer state welfare over getting a job.
All the Flemish Belgians want is that the Walloons adapt to modern times and take care of their own unemployment problem.
Originally Posted by jtur88With the Walloons it has nothing to do with culture, because as the Flemish Belgians already pointed out that the French speaking Belgians live in the poorest part of Belgium where the majority of its people live on welfare.
It has to do with the time in the past were speaking French was considered very cultured and all the rich spoke French; then speaking French was a sign of being rich and now it is the opposite.
In modern day Belgium the rich people in Belgium speak Flemish and they are tired of supporting their French speaking brothers who prefer state welfare over getting a job.
All the Flemish Belgians want is that the Walloons adapt to modern times and take care of their own unemployment problem.
This sounds like elitism. Why would the Flemish Belgians change their language? Is there a deeper issue that sees them not wanting to share culture with the Walloons?
There were some major conflagrations resulting from the Bible being translated from the traditional Latin to German because this and other languages made the Bible more accessible to common people.
This sounds like elitism. Why would the Flemish Belgians change their language?
They shouldn't, the French speaking Belgians simply don't want to admit that they also should learn Flemish in order to get a job, since most jobs are in Flemish territory. It is about pragmatism and not culture.
Nor is it about incentive.
I was going to write this posting using jargon, vernacular and lexicon to illustrate my point, but then I thought it may confuse some people and I wouldn't want to do that. So, I will leave it up to your imagination to start the post and see if examples pop up during the discussion. I will post some examples if nothing is showing up.
The easiest thing to think about are the differences between the language of youth and the language of the office. It seems that young people strive to make language their own, whether it be for purposes of originality, to set themselves off in a clique, or as a means of baffling adults to speak in code in plain sight. Surely we have all heard language used in the streets and playgrounds, and years later it it used in a commercial, targeted at a specific audience, or to make a point.
I was involved in a conversation recently where one of the participants who was almost eighty suggested that young people (not sure exactly the age group he was referring to) today did not hold anything back in their language. He was referring to the content of language in that no subjects seemed to be taboo in mixed company any longer. He felt that the exposure to certain language over time emboldened people to drop their inhibitions and speak openly about things that at one time were not easily spoken about. "Homosexuality" is an example he used.
And what about the dumbing down of language and its effect on people? Like, if I had the answer to that, guys, I could be on CNN too. 'Sup widat? (I couldn't resist). Does casual language like this serve to contribute to lower intelligence? Is it only playful and harmless? Or does in attentuate a noble language and make it more difficult to understand one another. Isn't misunderstanding the precursor to fear, a contributing factor to violence? Is all of this a stretch?
Can a phrase like, "Don't be dissing me" lead to a greater awareness of the need to have respect in certain situations, or all situations for that matter? Whether we want to admit it or not, I believe that things like this are assimilated into a greater collective awareness, no matter what one's exposure to our culture is, be it books, movies, television, or direct contact.
And finally, the English language has its roots in what linguists call High German. Most of us would hardly recognize it if we saw it. Remember the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare? This was only a transition point from the inception of our language to where we are now. Be honest, would Shakespeare be as good as he is if his language was translated into modern vernacular? I know it took me years, and thankfully a great professor, to appreciate everything that was going on inside the language he used. Apparently Shakespeare could relate to all of the people in his audience at the same time with the same language; the poor peasant standing up front with his ribald allusions, the politically aware gentry that made up the bulk of the theater, and the literati/hoi polloi who were considered to be the pinnacle of "civilized" society.
To what end has language changed culture, and where might it lead?
It has changed culture, and maybe not for the better. I am almost 57 years old, and a professional corporate office worker. My last boss (who by the way was fired) was 32 and called me "DUDE". I even though he was my boss, immediately advised him, that I was a woman, with a first name, and would consider it much more professional not to mention respectful, for him to call me by my first name.
To me a boss calling any co-worker "DUDE" sounds uneducated and or ignorant.
I have unfortunately come to realize now days, that the younger generation tends to use the "F" bomb much too much. It's to the point it's in their general conversation and they don't realize they even say it. I recently told a 25 year old co-worker who faces my desk, to please lessen up on his language. He apologized and is really making an effort to clean his language up. Personally? I don't understand why this is even allowed in the workplace.
Only going to play devil's advocate for a minute. If two people use less language to communicate and can still understand one another, would that be fair to say that this is an advance in the use of technology and culture? .'
No, because the paucity of different words would make it impossible for anyone who is not their BBF to understand them. The value of a complex language is that it widens the number of people who can all understand each other, without any other kinds of cues.
Mandarin Chinese uses a very small number of different syllables, but there is a loss. A Chinese person who turns on the radio in the middle of a news broadcast has a pretty substantial lag-time before he can piece together the context, because there are a lot of words that have ambiguous meanings. Chinese people speaking to each often have to write the Chinese character in the air with their finger, so the person they are talking to knows whether the syllable "ma" is intended to mean "horse" or "mother", which sound phonetically the same, but are written with a different character. This is not an advantage, and does not signal a superiority in the development of the languatg.
It has changed culture, and maybe not for the better. I am almost 57 years old, and a professional corporate office worker. My last boss (who by the way was fired) was 32 and called me "DUDE". I even though he was my boss, immediately advised him, that I was a woman, with a first name, and would consider it much more professional not to mention respectful, for him to call me by my first name.
To me a boss calling any co-worker "DUDE" sounds uneducated and or ignorant.
I have unfortunately come to realize now days, that the younger generation tends to use the "F" bomb much too much. It's to the point it's in their general conversation and they don't realize they even say it. I recently told a 25 year old co-worker who faces my desk, to please lessen up on his language. He apologized and is really making an effort to clean his language up. Personally? I don't understand why this is even allowed in the workplace.
So let me get this straight...you..(like)...considered you boss's behavior a bummer? I mean like...did he diss you, or what? That blows me away....like, to even THINK someone in a position of responsibility would talk so sloppy and stuff like that.
(Other than THAT, though, I wholeheartedly agree with you)...
No, because the paucity of different words would make it impossible for anyone who is not their BBF to understand them. The value of a complex language is that it widens the number of people who can all understand each other, without any other kinds of cues.
Mandarin Chinese uses a very small number of different syllables, but there is a loss. A Chinese person who turns on the radio in the middle of a news broadcast has a pretty substantial lag-time before he can piece together the context, because there are a lot of words that have ambiguous meanings. Chinese people speaking to each often have to write the Chinese character in the air with their finger, so the person they are talking to knows whether the syllable "ma" is intended to mean "horse" or "mother", which sound phonetically the same, but are written with a different character. This is not an advantage, and does not signal a superiority in the development of the languatg.
This is a good example of why I began this discussion in the first place. I am not a linguist, just someone interested in the idea of the post. I understand that there are many, many dialects of Chinese and that it is a difficult language to learn. This makes me wonder if the lack of range in the root language led people to try and make it their own by changing it to fit their needs, thus separating themselves from their countrymen even just a little bit. What would be the motivation for changing the root language? I suspect that the answer to this is due to the lack of communication between subsistence farmers in distant provinces. Language continues to evolve slowly, and because it is not expressed over a broad range people who are not exposed to minute changes do not understand the same root language over time.
I would have to say that the language of English is a unique becaues, we use words and phrases that are created from a mixture of languages. Primarily, Latin, French. and German. Geographically, this makes sense becaues if you look at a map of Europe, it's not very big. So, they would have to come up with some form of way of communicating. If you think about it, English is a hybrid language and the most easiest to learn. English has the biggest vocabulary and theres several words that mean the same thing or somthing entirely different depending on the context in witch it is used. A lot of English words have their root in other European languages. It will be intersting to see in the future what form of English will be spoken(dialect). A melting pot of worldly languages......................................... ............
As far as I'm concerned, all there is to human culture is language. Naked Apes talking to each other. When the language changes, so does the culture.
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It is about pragmatism and not culture.
