Teenagers are letting their electronic communication styles creep into their schoolwork.
And as the English language evolves, he said, some e-mail conventions, like starting sentences without a capital letter, may well become accepted practice.
“I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,†said Professor Sterling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, he said, when his teenage son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.
Hmm… prescriptivism vs. descriptivism strikes again.
The funny thing is, I used to really get riled up about things like this.
My college course advisor, perhaps the most brilliant human being I’ve ever been close to, was a linguist/historian/grammarian and she was UTTERLY fascinated by how swiftly changes seem to be happening to English in the 20th/21st centuries.
She is, no doubt, utterly excited about this development as well. I must say, the idea of capitalization going away doesn’t bother me as much as terrible errors making their way into casual, then formal, usage (like using the word “of” when the correct usage is a contraction: would of for would’ve).
The “-ve” /”of” thing isn’t so bothersome — it’s just an example language evolution. Changes like that have occured in many languages throughout history.
Capital letters really add nothing to the transmission of information. Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and other writing systems have no need for them.
Punctuation, though, is crucial. At the very least, there must remain some way to indicate where a sentence or thought begins or ends.
That has been the single most maddening thing, for me, in studying the Talmud.
It could be worse, I guess. Ancient Greeks and Romans originally did not even put spaces between words and a common writing pattern was [i]boustrophedon[/i] — “as the cow turns”
ONEWOULDWRITELIKETHISUNTILONEGOTTOTHEEDGEOFTHE
NOITCERIDREHTOEHTNIENILTXENEHTETIRWNEHTDNAEGAP
Wow, those ancients were obnoxious, weren’t they.
I’ve never been a big fan of Grammar Fundamentalists; Grammatical rules impede creativity and the natural evolution of language to better express contemporary matters. Language belongs to those using it, not some elitist orthodoxy hell bent on enforcing arbitrary, often poorly thought out, rules. Let’s not forget the simple and common fact that most “grammatically correct” sentences of our modern languages would sound like utter gutter-speak to those living a century or two earlier. Poorly formed grammar is best defined by how well it’s misunderstood.
rob@egoz.org
But, but, but: while I hate the weird Ivory Tower grammarians like Wm. Safire (the type that worships the rules of English that were imported from Latin because of snob appeal, and had really nothing to do with English as it was ever spoken [i.e., the double-negatives rule, which is perfectly grammatical in most Western languages, is always quite clear as to the speaker’s intent, and became ungrammatical in English simply because it was not grammatical in Latin]), well, having said all that, I realize that rob@egoz.org‘s perfectly formed final sentence says everything that I wanted to express.
So much English sloppiness is just due to laziness. The point of communicating is, well, to communicate. What’s more, it’s been proven that written English that follows standards of usage is much more readily understood by EVERYONE, regardless of education level- this has much to do with simple familiarity. at the simplus cais, cumpaira cintance wear mose words are mispelld with thuh sayme scintince spell kurektly; whitch do you glyd threw and which taxe two much damm tieme?
As an object lesson in the difficulty in discerning meaning from sloppy writing, I suggest you attempt to read a Perez Hilton blog entry (har).
While capital letters don’t ADD anything, they do reinforce. And the point of written language is to be as unambiguous as possible and to create for ease, and the capital reinforces that it is a new sentence.
When things like this come up, I always think of my favorite essay from HS English classes, George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”
A relevant quick-summary:
Ambiguity in communication leads to/stems from ambiguity in ideas and everything that comes with it. (That essentially leads to ambiguity in culture. So speaking properly leads to everything else being more concrete and proper, as well.)
Mike: The grammar is the least of the reasons why I would never read a Paris Hilton blog posting.