Are social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook freezing our brains? Is the younger generation turning into slobbering nerd? Recently, Hollywood Actor Ralph Fiennes held social networking websites such as Twitter responsible for thudding down the English language. The social media debate over language skill is there to stay for some time now.
The 48-year-old actor, best known as Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter films, does not own a Twitter account, but he believes, "Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us."
During the premier of Coriolanus, his directorial debut at London Film Festival, he gave words to his worries regarding the language used by today's youth. It looks like a side-effect of being a classically trained Shakespearean actor and turning out as a pretentious defender of the English language. Throughout his speech at the British Film Institute's London Film Festival, Fiennes lectured on the current state of the English language and how it's being wrecked. He thanked the social networking sites for making the students suffer at the drama school. "I hear it, too, from people at drama schools, who say the younger intake find the density of a Shakespeare text a challenge in a way that, perhaps, (students) a few generations ago maybe wouldn't have."
It's not only Fiennes who advances on this theory. Recently JP Davidson, author of Planet Word, debated that longer words are no more favored as shorter. The text language is slowly turning into the real language; the standard words are now Twitterised abbreviations. He said, "You only have to look on Twitter to see evidence of the fact that a lot of English words that are used say in Shakespeare's plays or PG Wodehouse novels " both of them avid inventors of new words " are so little used that people don't even know what they mean now."
Linguist Noam Chomsky in an interview with DC blog Brightest Young Things calls Twitter "very shallow communication". He says, "It requires a very brief, concise form of thought and so on that tends toward superficiality and draws people away from real serious communication. It is not a medium of a serious interchange."
Language has always been subjective to changes, feel some critics. Text messaging and tweeting are only accelerating the pace of this change. Social media is just making these changes visible as they arise. We no more speak high polished English like hundred years ago; sometimes we slip back to slang instead of soliloquies. It?s unlikely to halt any changes or reverse them, and there?s nothing bad in changing. Some feel Twitter is not demolishing the English language, rather it's making it better. It only allows for 140 character musings, providing abbreviations that don't accurately chase usual spelling or grammar rules.
It does not matter much if this type of communication doesn?t live up to English ideals. The New York Times's Ben Zimmer points out, "Social scientists can simply take advantage of Twitter?s stream to eavesdrop on a virtually limitless array of language in action.? Whether people approve or not, Twitter is happening and it's really not all that bad. Language evolves and Twitter is presently making it easier to pathway what's happening.
Source:- http://www.siliconindia.com/
The 48-year-old actor, best known as Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter films, does not own a Twitter account, but he believes, "Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us."
During the premier of Coriolanus, his directorial debut at London Film Festival, he gave words to his worries regarding the language used by today's youth. It looks like a side-effect of being a classically trained Shakespearean actor and turning out as a pretentious defender of the English language. Throughout his speech at the British Film Institute's London Film Festival, Fiennes lectured on the current state of the English language and how it's being wrecked. He thanked the social networking sites for making the students suffer at the drama school. "I hear it, too, from people at drama schools, who say the younger intake find the density of a Shakespeare text a challenge in a way that, perhaps, (students) a few generations ago maybe wouldn't have."
It's not only Fiennes who advances on this theory. Recently JP Davidson, author of Planet Word, debated that longer words are no more favored as shorter. The text language is slowly turning into the real language; the standard words are now Twitterised abbreviations. He said, "You only have to look on Twitter to see evidence of the fact that a lot of English words that are used say in Shakespeare's plays or PG Wodehouse novels " both of them avid inventors of new words " are so little used that people don't even know what they mean now."
Linguist Noam Chomsky in an interview with DC blog Brightest Young Things calls Twitter "very shallow communication". He says, "It requires a very brief, concise form of thought and so on that tends toward superficiality and draws people away from real serious communication. It is not a medium of a serious interchange."
Language has always been subjective to changes, feel some critics. Text messaging and tweeting are only accelerating the pace of this change. Social media is just making these changes visible as they arise. We no more speak high polished English like hundred years ago; sometimes we slip back to slang instead of soliloquies. It?s unlikely to halt any changes or reverse them, and there?s nothing bad in changing. Some feel Twitter is not demolishing the English language, rather it's making it better. It only allows for 140 character musings, providing abbreviations that don't accurately chase usual spelling or grammar rules.
It does not matter much if this type of communication doesn?t live up to English ideals. The New York Times's Ben Zimmer points out, "Social scientists can simply take advantage of Twitter?s stream to eavesdrop on a virtually limitless array of language in action.? Whether people approve or not, Twitter is happening and it's really not all that bad. Language evolves and Twitter is presently making it easier to pathway what's happening.
Source:- http://www.siliconindia.com/
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