¡Nadie espera a la Inquisición Española!
всё началось на форуме еврогеймера, в ветке комментариев о том, почему Valve не делает адд-онов к TF2 на PS3
www.eurogamer.net/article_discussion.php?articl...
осторожно, злая английская лексика
muftak
24-Sep-08 11:38:54
thats not the point gabe is a fat twat who is scared of doing anything new , apple offered to pay him a fortune for a mac version of HL2 but becasue he would have to code for mac he said no im to fucking lazy same with the ps3 a challenage comes up and hes too busy eating his porkpies and burger kings to care.
Loser
24-Sep-08 11:43:30
@ muftak,
in that case his approach to PS3 is very similar to your approach to punctuation.
muftak
24-Sep-08 11:47:36
@Loser
dont have time for that i might get caught at work
kangarootoo
24-Sep-08 12:00:38
"thats not the point gabe is a fat twat who is scared of doing anything new , apple offered to pay him a fortune for a mac version of HL2 but becasue he would have to code for mac he said no im to fucking lazy same with the ps3 a challenage comes up and hes too busy eating his porkpies and burger kings to care."
Thats rich coming from someone who is too lazy to press the shift or full stop or apostrophe keys, or learn to spell.
degville
24-Sep-08 12:05:57
He's not too lazy he said he was typing at work so obviously had to rattle his comment off, I'm sure we'd all like more time to refine our prose.
kangarootoo
24-Sep-08 12:39:55
"He's not too lazy he said he was typing at work so obviously had to rattle his comment off, I'm sure we'd all like more time to refine our prose."
Thats no bloody excuse. That implies that writing a proper sentence is something that everyone needs "a few goes" at before they get it right.
If you possess proper spelling and grammar skills then the stuff you write pretty much makes sense first time around. I don't spill out illegible nonsense and then have to go back and 'refine' it. What you are reading now, baring the odd typo correction, is exactly what came out of my head and onto my keyboard.
Being able to write a basic, properly formed sentence should not be considered a process of refinement.
/insert rant about dropping education standards here, grrmmble etc
Coughthulu
24-Sep-08 12:59:23
@kangarootoo
With trepidation, I point you at:
This.
I almost wept when I read that.
Sorry for tangentialising (this is my new made up word), this thread.
kangarootoo
24-Sep-08 15:15:33
@Coughthulu
Here begins amn off topic rant, so if reading off topic rants isn't your bag, scroll down now.
I'd already seen that story. Christ knows what that dude was thinking. Now I'll be happy to admit that plenty of words in the english language have a ludicrous spelling structure, and duplication is rife too. And I accept that language changes over time, with common usage being an influence in that change. However there is a MASSIVE principal at stake here, and it goes thus...
I come from a generation that learned to spell at school. We LEARNED TO F*CKING SPELL!!
Its not rocket science, its not some ancient art lost to the annals of time, its not a skill we should assume can only be mastered by Krypton Factor finalists (even though we all know that actually, winning Krypton Factor all just boiled down to being f*cking awesome at army assault courses). Its actually pretty trivial so long as quality education is provided over a number of years.
The reason that half of the kids in the UK don't seem to have any spelling or grammar skills these days is because education has failed over a number of years. English Language and English Literature used to be seperate GCSEs, but not anymore. There are plenty of students from other countries learning English as a foreign langusage who can write better sentences that british teens, simply because they are TAUGHT to.
Actually, none of that was the principle. THIS is the principle. This guy is essentially saying that, now we have let standards turn into a sack of crap, attempting to return to them is going to "hold back our kids". To do so is to suggest that in the name of not holding kids back, we should let standards and requirements drop instead of educating said kids up to the required level.
When this news surfaced, many from an earlier generation (into which I just about fit) voiced the exact same opinion as me. And that is, if a CV turns up under my nose that is full of l33t spelling and absent of grammar, its going in the bin. If that doesn't "hold back our kids", I'm not sure what will. And do we really think that any british child aiming to work abroad later in life would stand a hope in hell if his covering latter and CV contained words that were spelt phonetically?
Madness.
JonFE
24-Sep-08 16:13:13
kangarootoo, if it's any consolation (probably not), language rape is evident in my country (Greece) as well. As I was growing up, we used to have three different courses over the usage of our language (grammar, syntax and literature) at primary school, aiming to teach us all the quirks and twists of the modern Greek language (it can be very complicated I assure you).
Nowadays, grammar and syntax have merged into one general course, where students are being taught mostly by example and are not learning the fundamental rules that govern our language. Combine that with the spreading *disease* of text/chat messaging, mostly in the form of "greeklish" (the fine art of writing in Greek using an English/Latin character set and whatnot) and the result is similar. Sad really...
kangarootoo
24-Sep-08 16:33:15
@JonFE
"greeklish". Hehe, that is kind of funny... but also kind of awful.
Like I touched on earlier, I am not against the evolution of language, and maybe esperanto is the way forward Replacing one form of grammar with another is just the way language changes I guess, but what I object to is replacing one form of grammar with nothing. Or just accepting sentences that are quite simply wrong (using hat instead of had is a common one in the UK).
Coughthulu
24-Sep-08 16:49:08
@Kangarootoo & JonFE
I don't understand how people like who dilute a language can feel they're doing languages a favour, the point of grammar/syntax to me is to allow people with different dialects to communicate as easily as possible; these new proposals simply smack of their originators trying to get their fifteen minutes of fame. Although if someone who's meant to be a bastion of the English language is seriously proposing this, it's time to pack up now and move to somewhere like Japan.
JonFE
24-Sep-08 16:49:46
@kangarootoo and Coughthulu (: edit
It's all part of a *globalization* process that the "powers that be" have designed for us. In order for us to *think* alike we must *speak* alike as well; we must lose our national identity by forgetting our history, altering our language, changing our everyday habits...
...either that or I'm a sucker for conspiracy theories, I guess
PS The first time I heard some NPC in the streets of GTA IV calling me *stupid malaka* I laughed out loud
Coughthulu
24-Sep-08 17:03:48
@JonFE
Good God, all it makes sense now! First it'll be language, then emotions, then the next thing we know Christian Bale-alikes will be calling themselves Clerics and toting dual pistols!
I do think you've hit the nail on the head though, Globalisation does appear to be speeding all this up.
/is a sucker for a good conspiracy.
kangarootoo
24-Sep-08 17:26:02
@JonFE
"In order for us to *think* alike we must *speak* alike as well"
Coughthulu make a good point in "the point of grammar/syntax to me is to allow people with different dialects to communicate as easily as possible". Its exactlky the structures that are being lost which ALLOW us to learn other languages more easily and communicate more easily.
What these proposals fail to realise is that if we abandon grammar and puctuation in the UK, we will suddenly find that other countries are less able to understand what the hell we are on about.
Its all very well John Wells waffling on about how we teach grammar and spelling in schools, but if we start ignoring our own dictionaries without letting the rest of the world know they will just think (quite right, I might suggest) that we have turned into a nation of illiterate imbeciles.
I can't help feeling that there is something very fundamentally weak about, after all this time, saying that enforcing proper grammar is holding back our kids. If it didn't hold them back for the last 500 years, why now? It just feels like giving up on proper learning, just because it can 'be a bit tricky' sometimes and we seem to have got a bit shit at it over the last decade or so.
JonFE
24-Sep-08 17:46:11
@ Kangarootoo,
I fail to see what good will come out of all this, as well. As I see it, education in my country is failing us and that goes beyond language courses. It happens to maths and physics as well, which are being taught in a more practical than by-the-rules way.
I fear that the ultimate goal is to have less-educated (or even uneducated) people, because they are easier to control. They can be trained to do something useful or productive, but they are more inclined to accept anything imposed to them than -say- object to it or try to establish a better standard of life.
This may be a little too "Orwell-ish" for my liking
Who knows, perhaps being in my late 30's and having a kid, brings out the grimmer side of me...
PS Who knew that a news-post about TF2 and the PS3 would bring such a good conversation on the table...
makeamazing
24-Sep-08 17:50:38
It does my head in more when people feel the need to swear all the time, spelling incorrectly is a pain to read (just like CAPS)... but its this continual need to act tough/sound hard or get anger across rather than just making a good point. But then its worse when you are just standing in WHSMith and some kids walk past swearing their heads off Perhaps its just because i've got kids but it seems people today have no manners at all. :/
kangarootoo
24-Sep-08 18:13:54
@JonFE
I'm rather more plain and cynical.
So I shall take your conspiracy theory and raise you a "we took our eyes off the education ball for a bit during the post free-love baby boom, assuming that all kids really needed to get smart was enough freedom to express themselves, everything went tits up 'cos nobody was at the controls, and now we're not sure how to sort it all out" theory
@makeamazing
Man, don't even get me started on the subject of manners and common courtesy, or I might have to go all Jack the Ripper in the halls of WHSmith (only with rude kids as the brunt of my surgical meddling instead of music-hall style cockney hookers).
JonFE
24-Sep-08 21:01:58
@ kangarootoo
Sir, you may very well have a point there! Liberals and their precious freedom. Discipline wasn't such a terrible thing now, was it?
;s)
menschenfracht
25-Sep-08 10:03:39
@kangarootoo
@JonFE
I think that every language is living on its own. If you remember the beginning of the last millennium - it was a milestone for the English language, wasn't it? But times change. The era of paper and pencil is almost over - and these were precisely the times (back from the 17th century, I believe), when you needed to be a literate man. Maybe now it's the time to refer to something new - a cane for those who don't even bother how to walk, so to say. Maybe my mother, when she was of my age, would have been very dissapointed to know that her son is capable to manage well without writing a word during two years or even more. But times change. (Maybe next generation of forums will be based on video messages and we'll all be into avatars, brushing our teeth and swallowing pebbles).
My second point is that literacy always was a trait of a well-educated man. Aristocrate, or, maybe, one of intelligentsia, if I were to use a word of my own mothertongue. Everyone can't be literate - we aren't living in a perfect world.
And the last point - about this professor and his propositions. In fact I stumble upon such projects nearly two times a year (concerning Russian language essentially). At first glance they make me laugh alright. But then I almost always get contaminated by the spirit of these madmen (and they are madmen indeed, like da Vinci) - wth? let the progeny sort it all out .) Modern languages got tied to these alphabets, they need a real good shake-up .) And from all the languages I've studied, it seems the English hurts for a new spelling rules the most. Oh, yeah, and maybe Japanese - the same island isolation, the same degree of another language contamination. Nope, no conspiracy whatsoever (except for the fact that Coca and Pepsi are the same company trying to escape from the grasp of the antimonopoly law).
Not that I defend those illiterate juveniles .)
Oh, and by the way, the education in our country has 'gone West' too, in both senses. If you don't know this, Russian higher education is free. In Soviet period, it was all about enthusiasts (I still think that was the greatest achievement of Communists - giving the people a dream to fight for), nowadays almost nobody goes teaching - the payroll is ridiculous. All the state government is bothered with is the price of barrel and imperial ambitions. Maybe it's just that the 20th century has ended, and the world is back to feudalism - why do we need literacy when living in feudalism? Somehow or other, the Soviet education didn't get acclimatized on the Democratic Russian soil. The result is the same as in your countries - everybody thinks he can speak, but almost nobody gets it right.
kangarootoo
25-Sep-08 12:40:12
@menschenfracht
Thats some good info dude, cheers for the input. I know that language is always evolving, and sometimes I think I am just getting grumpier as I get older.
I keep returning though to this apparently growing principle of moving the goalposts because we are no longer up to the challenge.
Is John Wells suggesting that we teach phonetic spelling in our schools, or just leaves kids to make up their own syntax? If he is suggesting the former then perhaps all he is suggesting is bringing forward an evolution of our language, but if he is suggesting the latter then I'm not sure how he believes communications will not suffer. Will the kids of today be able to communicate with the generation that follows then? If each generations get to work out the english language for itself, I suspect not (as well, at any rate).
And as I said before, it seems to have worked ok in the past, but of late we appear to be finding new names to call "failing education" so that we can pretend its not going wrong. What next, we change or remove parts of the scientific curriculum to avoid "holding back" kids who aren't able to grasp basic physics?
It seems to me that the whole purpose of academia is that you pursue knowledge of a given subject in a given direction (i.e. learn more, expand your knowledge, not contract it). Now you are quite right that, historically razor sharp literacy was in the hands of the rich. But if at any time a "poor person" was fortunate or driven enough to increase their literacy, their target would be exactly the same as anyone else speaking the same language, regardless of status.
To now suggest that, in the name of empowering kids who can't spell properly, we should change the structure of the language they learn is surely going to push said kids into learning what many will describe as "idiots english". The employers of this world learnt english the "old way", and the kids from the current generation that are heading toward Oxford and Cambridge will gace the same skills. A two tier system will simply divide kids into two groups - those who managed to learn their native language, and those that were risk of being "held back" and (to use the language of this arena) got taught the tard version instead.
Like I said, any CV that turns up my desk with l33t spelling and absent grammar throughout it is not going to win favour with me, and I feel great pity for any future cadidate who find their CV discarded, not through fault of their own but because they are simply writing in the way they were taught to write at school. How am I as an employer supposed to tell the difference?
Edit: typos abound, but I can't be arsed to fix them (of the hypocrisy).
From: menschenfracht
Date: September 25, 2008, 2:07 pm
To: kangarootoo
i feel it does not belong to the thread any more. .)
However, yes, I can see your point. But all this motivation crysis - Why do I need to know my own language and all - it does not begin in school. It begins right where you've spotted it - in the family. Can parents teach their kids that there are other books beyond Sidney Sheldon and like? My country was vaguely illiterate in 1920s. The government changed that - people had nothing to lose, and officials had nothing to lose - and I still can't explain how the country have become industrial and literate in mere forty years. I was born and raised in Syberia, that's not exactly the cultural capital region, if you know what I mean, but every house I visited or lived in - mine, my grandmother's, my mom's friends', my friends' - all these houses had enormous collection of books. At least two walls in these three-room apartments were stuck with books. You know, I never went to any library - I could always come and pick what i need from the shelves. Not there weren't any libraries - there were big libraries, in specially constructed buildings and a multitude of small libraries - 4 or 5 in our neighbourhood - usually built in groundfloors of apartment buildings. And my town wasn't any special - just another mining town. My grandmother or grandfather weren't librarians either - miners, all their life. That was made possible by the government, of course: books were treated not as intellectual property but rather as a natural resource that was given to the masses in order to keep them quiet. Due to heavy censorship there were almost no spelling mistakes. Even the stylistics has been immaculate. I still remember myself reading Moorcock in Soviet translation 15 years ago - not the plot bedazzled me but the style.
Then the iron curtain fell, and all the censorship has gone away with it. We've got our share of tabloids, we've got our share of MTV, we've got our share of series romance. And, of course, with government support nowhere to be found, the translation level has sunk. Nowadays almost every book you open you see misprints, you see translator's errors. I work as an editor in some game localisation studio - almost every translation makes me wanna hang all them translators somewhere high and let the bloody eagles make fun with them. They, unlike me, have higher linguistical education, yet they can translate 'winding road' as 'there is a draught on the road'. And I'm sure they sleep safe and sound. Why bother? But that was off-topic.
Of course, our children don't use l33tspeak neither in school dictations nor in CVs. Yet. But I think that is the matter of time. Some schools still have old teachers in them, teachers who are obsessed with handing down their knowledge to the pupils. And, of course, families who are encouraging the kids to read (and, I think, we both understand, that reading is the most painless way to became literate). In 25 years there would be another USA here - with hairy bikers and national spelling bees.
No conspiracy, mere practicalness. As long as we have willing-to-learn Chinese and Indian why bother spending money on our youth?
here's a glimpse of the future
Oh, I'm so angry I'd better go and play Folklore some more - to relax.
From: kangarootoo
Date: September 25, 2008, 3:17 pm
To: menschenfracht
"i feel it does not belong to the thread any more"
Very true
I touched before on the post free-love baby boom era, and I totally agree with you that parental intervention actually makes far more difference that the quality of a school education. The house I grew up in was full of books too, my parents have always read a lot, fiction and non-fiction.
I recall whenever I asked my Dad what a word meant he would tell me to go look in the dictionary (we had a huge old-school dictionary in two volumes), and if I was feeling too lazy to go look (as kids do sometimes) he would go get the dictionary, read the definition and then talk to me about it.
The changes I talk about didn't happen in one generation. It seems to be a series of changes over a few decades that have left a generation of parents without the skills or will to educate their children at home. There are of course many exceptions, my sister and her husband are very focussed on making sure their kids understand subjects and develop their own enthusiasm for learning.
I don't have the big answers myself of course. If I had a time machine and could go back and change the path things took... I have absolutely no idea what I would do to make things better. I just don't like the idea of giving up on the principle of decent education. I know plenty of people who think learning is important, and I know some who quite simply don't ("history is boring, I did enough of that at school" etc). Has the balance shifted, or am I just getting older and consequently perceiving the balance in a different way.
Thanks for sharing some of your history with me dude, it made for very interesting reading. And this in particular "almost every translation makes me wanna hang all them translators somewhere high and let the bloody eagles make fun with them." made me properly laugh out loud.
Hmmm. I wonder if one day, kids won't even have heard of the word "laugh" as all they will ever use is lol
Cheers,
K
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осторожно, злая английская лексика
muftak
24-Sep-08 11:38:54
thats not the point gabe is a fat twat who is scared of doing anything new , apple offered to pay him a fortune for a mac version of HL2 but becasue he would have to code for mac he said no im to fucking lazy same with the ps3 a challenage comes up and hes too busy eating his porkpies and burger kings to care.
Loser
24-Sep-08 11:43:30
@ muftak,
in that case his approach to PS3 is very similar to your approach to punctuation.
muftak
24-Sep-08 11:47:36
@Loser
dont have time for that i might get caught at work
kangarootoo
24-Sep-08 12:00:38
"thats not the point gabe is a fat twat who is scared of doing anything new , apple offered to pay him a fortune for a mac version of HL2 but becasue he would have to code for mac he said no im to fucking lazy same with the ps3 a challenage comes up and hes too busy eating his porkpies and burger kings to care."
Thats rich coming from someone who is too lazy to press the shift or full stop or apostrophe keys, or learn to spell.
degville
24-Sep-08 12:05:57
He's not too lazy he said he was typing at work so obviously had to rattle his comment off, I'm sure we'd all like more time to refine our prose.
kangarootoo
24-Sep-08 12:39:55
"He's not too lazy he said he was typing at work so obviously had to rattle his comment off, I'm sure we'd all like more time to refine our prose."
Thats no bloody excuse. That implies that writing a proper sentence is something that everyone needs "a few goes" at before they get it right.
If you possess proper spelling and grammar skills then the stuff you write pretty much makes sense first time around. I don't spill out illegible nonsense and then have to go back and 'refine' it. What you are reading now, baring the odd typo correction, is exactly what came out of my head and onto my keyboard.
Being able to write a basic, properly formed sentence should not be considered a process of refinement.
/insert rant about dropping education standards here, grrmmble etc
Coughthulu
24-Sep-08 12:59:23
@kangarootoo
With trepidation, I point you at:
This.
I almost wept when I read that.
Sorry for tangentialising (this is my new made up word), this thread.
kangarootoo
24-Sep-08 15:15:33
@Coughthulu
Here begins amn off topic rant, so if reading off topic rants isn't your bag, scroll down now.
I'd already seen that story. Christ knows what that dude was thinking. Now I'll be happy to admit that plenty of words in the english language have a ludicrous spelling structure, and duplication is rife too. And I accept that language changes over time, with common usage being an influence in that change. However there is a MASSIVE principal at stake here, and it goes thus...
I come from a generation that learned to spell at school. We LEARNED TO F*CKING SPELL!!
Its not rocket science, its not some ancient art lost to the annals of time, its not a skill we should assume can only be mastered by Krypton Factor finalists (even though we all know that actually, winning Krypton Factor all just boiled down to being f*cking awesome at army assault courses). Its actually pretty trivial so long as quality education is provided over a number of years.
The reason that half of the kids in the UK don't seem to have any spelling or grammar skills these days is because education has failed over a number of years. English Language and English Literature used to be seperate GCSEs, but not anymore. There are plenty of students from other countries learning English as a foreign langusage who can write better sentences that british teens, simply because they are TAUGHT to.
Actually, none of that was the principle. THIS is the principle. This guy is essentially saying that, now we have let standards turn into a sack of crap, attempting to return to them is going to "hold back our kids". To do so is to suggest that in the name of not holding kids back, we should let standards and requirements drop instead of educating said kids up to the required level.
When this news surfaced, many from an earlier generation (into which I just about fit) voiced the exact same opinion as me. And that is, if a CV turns up under my nose that is full of l33t spelling and absent of grammar, its going in the bin. If that doesn't "hold back our kids", I'm not sure what will. And do we really think that any british child aiming to work abroad later in life would stand a hope in hell if his covering latter and CV contained words that were spelt phonetically?
Madness.
JonFE
24-Sep-08 16:13:13
kangarootoo, if it's any consolation (probably not), language rape is evident in my country (Greece) as well. As I was growing up, we used to have three different courses over the usage of our language (grammar, syntax and literature) at primary school, aiming to teach us all the quirks and twists of the modern Greek language (it can be very complicated I assure you).
Nowadays, grammar and syntax have merged into one general course, where students are being taught mostly by example and are not learning the fundamental rules that govern our language. Combine that with the spreading *disease* of text/chat messaging, mostly in the form of "greeklish" (the fine art of writing in Greek using an English/Latin character set and whatnot) and the result is similar. Sad really...
kangarootoo
24-Sep-08 16:33:15
@JonFE
"greeklish". Hehe, that is kind of funny... but also kind of awful.
Like I touched on earlier, I am not against the evolution of language, and maybe esperanto is the way forward
Replacing one form of grammar with another is just the way language changes I guess, but what I object to is replacing one form of grammar with nothing. Or just accepting sentences that are quite simply wrong (using hat instead of had is a common one in the UK).Coughthulu
24-Sep-08 16:49:08
@Kangarootoo & JonFE
I don't understand how people like who dilute a language can feel they're doing languages a favour, the point of grammar/syntax to me is to allow people with different dialects to communicate as easily as possible; these new proposals simply smack of their originators trying to get their fifteen minutes of fame. Although if someone who's meant to be a bastion of the English language is seriously proposing this, it's time to pack up now and move to somewhere like Japan.
JonFE
24-Sep-08 16:49:46
@kangarootoo and Coughthulu (: edit
It's all part of a *globalization* process that the "powers that be" have designed for us. In order for us to *think* alike we must *speak* alike as well; we must lose our national identity by forgetting our history, altering our language, changing our everyday habits...
...either that or I'm a sucker for conspiracy theories, I guess
PS The first time I heard some NPC in the streets of GTA IV calling me *stupid malaka* I laughed out loud
Coughthulu
24-Sep-08 17:03:48
@JonFE
Good God, all it makes sense now! First it'll be language, then emotions, then the next thing we know Christian Bale-alikes will be calling themselves Clerics and toting dual pistols!
I do think you've hit the nail on the head though, Globalisation does appear to be speeding all this up.
/is a sucker for a good conspiracy.
kangarootoo
24-Sep-08 17:26:02
@JonFE
"In order for us to *think* alike we must *speak* alike as well"
Coughthulu make a good point in "the point of grammar/syntax to me is to allow people with different dialects to communicate as easily as possible". Its exactlky the structures that are being lost which ALLOW us to learn other languages more easily and communicate more easily.
What these proposals fail to realise is that if we abandon grammar and puctuation in the UK, we will suddenly find that other countries are less able to understand what the hell we are on about.
Its all very well John Wells waffling on about how we teach grammar and spelling in schools, but if we start ignoring our own dictionaries without letting the rest of the world know they will just think (quite right, I might suggest) that we have turned into a nation of illiterate imbeciles.
I can't help feeling that there is something very fundamentally weak about, after all this time, saying that enforcing proper grammar is holding back our kids. If it didn't hold them back for the last 500 years, why now? It just feels like giving up on proper learning, just because it can 'be a bit tricky' sometimes and we seem to have got a bit shit at it over the last decade or so.
JonFE
24-Sep-08 17:46:11
@ Kangarootoo,
I fail to see what good will come out of all this, as well. As I see it, education in my country is failing us and that goes beyond language courses. It happens to maths and physics as well, which are being taught in a more practical than by-the-rules way.
I fear that the ultimate goal is to have less-educated (or even uneducated) people, because they are easier to control. They can be trained to do something useful or productive, but they are more inclined to accept anything imposed to them than -say- object to it or try to establish a better standard of life.
This may be a little too "Orwell-ish" for my liking
Who knows, perhaps being in my late 30's and having a kid, brings out the grimmer side of me...
PS Who knew that a news-post about TF2 and the PS3 would bring such a good conversation on the table...
makeamazing
24-Sep-08 17:50:38
It does my head in more when people feel the need to swear all the time, spelling incorrectly is a pain to read (just like CAPS)... but its this continual need to act tough/sound hard or get anger across rather than just making a good point. But then its worse when you are just standing in WHSMith and some kids walk past swearing their heads off
Perhaps its just because i've got kids but it seems people today have no manners at all. :/ kangarootoo
24-Sep-08 18:13:54
@JonFE
I'm rather more plain and cynical.
So I shall take your conspiracy theory and raise you a "we took our eyes off the education ball for a bit during the post free-love baby boom, assuming that all kids really needed to get smart was enough freedom to express themselves, everything went tits up 'cos nobody was at the controls, and now we're not sure how to sort it all out" theory
@makeamazing
Man, don't even get me started on the subject of manners and common courtesy, or I might have to go all Jack the Ripper in the halls of WHSmith (only with rude kids as the brunt of my surgical meddling instead of music-hall style cockney hookers).
JonFE
24-Sep-08 21:01:58
@ kangarootoo
Sir, you may very well have a point there! Liberals and their precious freedom. Discipline wasn't such a terrible thing now, was it?
;s)
menschenfracht
25-Sep-08 10:03:39
@kangarootoo
@JonFE
I think that every language is living on its own. If you remember the beginning of the last millennium - it was a milestone for the English language, wasn't it? But times change. The era of paper and pencil is almost over - and these were precisely the times (back from the 17th century, I believe), when you needed to be a literate man. Maybe now it's the time to refer to something new - a cane for those who don't even bother how to walk, so to say. Maybe my mother, when she was of my age, would have been very dissapointed to know that her son is capable to manage well without writing a word during two years or even more. But times change. (Maybe next generation of forums will be based on video messages and we'll all be into avatars, brushing our teeth and swallowing pebbles).
My second point is that literacy always was a trait of a well-educated man. Aristocrate, or, maybe, one of intelligentsia, if I were to use a word of my own mothertongue. Everyone can't be literate - we aren't living in a perfect world.
And the last point - about this professor and his propositions. In fact I stumble upon such projects nearly two times a year (concerning Russian language essentially). At first glance they make me laugh alright. But then I almost always get contaminated by the spirit of these madmen (and they are madmen indeed, like da Vinci) - wth? let the progeny sort it all out .) Modern languages got tied to these alphabets, they need a real good shake-up .) And from all the languages I've studied, it seems the English hurts for a new spelling rules the most. Oh, yeah, and maybe Japanese - the same island isolation, the same degree of another language contamination. Nope, no conspiracy whatsoever (except for the fact that Coca and Pepsi are the same company trying to escape from the grasp of the antimonopoly law).
Not that I defend those illiterate juveniles .)
Oh, and by the way, the education in our country has 'gone West' too, in both senses. If you don't know this, Russian higher education is free. In Soviet period, it was all about enthusiasts (I still think that was the greatest achievement of Communists - giving the people a dream to fight for), nowadays almost nobody goes teaching - the payroll is ridiculous. All the state government is bothered with is the price of barrel and imperial ambitions. Maybe it's just that the 20th century has ended, and the world is back to feudalism - why do we need literacy when living in feudalism? Somehow or other, the Soviet education didn't get acclimatized on the Democratic Russian soil. The result is the same as in your countries - everybody thinks he can speak, but almost nobody gets it right.
kangarootoo
25-Sep-08 12:40:12
@menschenfracht
Thats some good info dude, cheers for the input. I know that language is always evolving, and sometimes I think I am just getting grumpier as I get older.
I keep returning though to this apparently growing principle of moving the goalposts because we are no longer up to the challenge.
Is John Wells suggesting that we teach phonetic spelling in our schools, or just leaves kids to make up their own syntax? If he is suggesting the former then perhaps all he is suggesting is bringing forward an evolution of our language, but if he is suggesting the latter then I'm not sure how he believes communications will not suffer. Will the kids of today be able to communicate with the generation that follows then? If each generations get to work out the english language for itself, I suspect not (as well, at any rate).
And as I said before, it seems to have worked ok in the past, but of late we appear to be finding new names to call "failing education" so that we can pretend its not going wrong. What next, we change or remove parts of the scientific curriculum to avoid "holding back" kids who aren't able to grasp basic physics?
It seems to me that the whole purpose of academia is that you pursue knowledge of a given subject in a given direction (i.e. learn more, expand your knowledge, not contract it). Now you are quite right that, historically razor sharp literacy was in the hands of the rich. But if at any time a "poor person" was fortunate or driven enough to increase their literacy, their target would be exactly the same as anyone else speaking the same language, regardless of status.
To now suggest that, in the name of empowering kids who can't spell properly, we should change the structure of the language they learn is surely going to push said kids into learning what many will describe as "idiots english". The employers of this world learnt english the "old way", and the kids from the current generation that are heading toward Oxford and Cambridge will gace the same skills. A two tier system will simply divide kids into two groups - those who managed to learn their native language, and those that were risk of being "held back" and (to use the language of this arena) got taught the tard version instead.
Like I said, any CV that turns up my desk with l33t spelling and absent grammar throughout it is not going to win favour with me, and I feel great pity for any future cadidate who find their CV discarded, not through fault of their own but because they are simply writing in the way they were taught to write at school. How am I as an employer supposed to tell the difference?
Edit: typos abound, but I can't be arsed to fix them (of the hypocrisy).
From: menschenfracht
Date: September 25, 2008, 2:07 pm
To: kangarootoo
i feel it does not belong to the thread any more. .)
However, yes, I can see your point. But all this motivation crysis - Why do I need to know my own language and all - it does not begin in school. It begins right where you've spotted it - in the family. Can parents teach their kids that there are other books beyond Sidney Sheldon and like? My country was vaguely illiterate in 1920s. The government changed that - people had nothing to lose, and officials had nothing to lose - and I still can't explain how the country have become industrial and literate in mere forty years. I was born and raised in Syberia, that's not exactly the cultural capital region, if you know what I mean, but every house I visited or lived in - mine, my grandmother's, my mom's friends', my friends' - all these houses had enormous collection of books. At least two walls in these three-room apartments were stuck with books. You know, I never went to any library - I could always come and pick what i need from the shelves. Not there weren't any libraries - there were big libraries, in specially constructed buildings and a multitude of small libraries - 4 or 5 in our neighbourhood - usually built in groundfloors of apartment buildings. And my town wasn't any special - just another mining town. My grandmother or grandfather weren't librarians either - miners, all their life. That was made possible by the government, of course: books were treated not as intellectual property but rather as a natural resource that was given to the masses in order to keep them quiet. Due to heavy censorship there were almost no spelling mistakes. Even the stylistics has been immaculate. I still remember myself reading Moorcock in Soviet translation 15 years ago - not the plot bedazzled me but the style.
Then the iron curtain fell, and all the censorship has gone away with it. We've got our share of tabloids, we've got our share of MTV, we've got our share of series romance. And, of course, with government support nowhere to be found, the translation level has sunk. Nowadays almost every book you open you see misprints, you see translator's errors. I work as an editor in some game localisation studio - almost every translation makes me wanna hang all them translators somewhere high and let the bloody eagles make fun with them. They, unlike me, have higher linguistical education, yet they can translate 'winding road' as 'there is a draught on the road'. And I'm sure they sleep safe and sound. Why bother? But that was off-topic.
Of course, our children don't use l33tspeak neither in school dictations nor in CVs. Yet. But I think that is the matter of time. Some schools still have old teachers in them, teachers who are obsessed with handing down their knowledge to the pupils. And, of course, families who are encouraging the kids to read (and, I think, we both understand, that reading is the most painless way to became literate). In 25 years there would be another USA here - with hairy bikers and national spelling bees.
No conspiracy, mere practicalness. As long as we have willing-to-learn Chinese and Indian why bother spending money on our youth?
here's a glimpse of the future
Oh, I'm so angry I'd better go and play Folklore some more - to relax.
From: kangarootoo
Date: September 25, 2008, 3:17 pm
To: menschenfracht
"i feel it does not belong to the thread any more"
Very true
I touched before on the post free-love baby boom era, and I totally agree with you that parental intervention actually makes far more difference that the quality of a school education. The house I grew up in was full of books too, my parents have always read a lot, fiction and non-fiction.
I recall whenever I asked my Dad what a word meant he would tell me to go look in the dictionary (we had a huge old-school dictionary in two volumes), and if I was feeling too lazy to go look (as kids do sometimes) he would go get the dictionary, read the definition and then talk to me about it.
The changes I talk about didn't happen in one generation. It seems to be a series of changes over a few decades that have left a generation of parents without the skills or will to educate their children at home. There are of course many exceptions, my sister and her husband are very focussed on making sure their kids understand subjects and develop their own enthusiasm for learning.
I don't have the big answers myself of course. If I had a time machine and could go back and change the path things took... I have absolutely no idea what I would do to make things better. I just don't like the idea of giving up on the principle of decent education. I know plenty of people who think learning is important, and I know some who quite simply don't ("history is boring, I did enough of that at school" etc). Has the balance shifted, or am I just getting older and consequently perceiving the balance in a different way.
Thanks for sharing some of your history with me dude, it made for very interesting reading. And this in particular "almost every translation makes me wanna hang all them translators somewhere high and let the bloody eagles make fun with them." made me properly laugh out loud.
Hmmm. I wonder if one day, kids won't even have heard of the word "laugh" as all they will ever use is lol
Cheers,
K
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25.09.2008 в 22:08-
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26.09.2008 в 00:54-
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26.09.2008 в 10:59ЗРЕМО ВОСПИЯТЬ А РЩЕМО ЖЕ БО ОСЬ МОИ СТЫДИХОМСИА НАВЕ ПРАВЕ ЯВЕ ЗНАТИ А ОБАПОЛО
Люди не понимают, что их прекрасный правильный язык будет жить ровно одно поколение.