TED translator Khalid Marbou at work in the nanotechnology lab.

TED Talks are available in 100 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our volunteer translators. So far, more than 10,000 volunteers have created upwards of 40,000 talk translations — and every week, the TED Blog brings you a Q&A with one of them. Today, meet Khalid Marbou.

1. Where do you live and what do you do by day?

I was born and raised in Tiznit, Morocco, and live in Cyberjaya, Malaysia, where I’m pursuing a bachelor’s degree in nanotechnology engineering. Aside from my studies, I spend most of my day online keeping in touch with friends and relatives — blogging, translating, reading and working on different projects in Malaysia and Morocco. 

2. What drew you to TED?

Many factors made me into a TED fanatic, but I would say that the most influential of them is my constant search for inspiration and intellectual stimulation. Before TED, I found small doses of inspiration reading novels and watching movies, but when I first discovered TED, it gave me a jolt. It’s never ceased to inspire me to this day.

3. What was the first talk you translated and how did you pick it?

Charles Fleischer insists: All things are MoleedsMy first talk was Charles Fleischer’s “All things are Moleeds.” Most of the other translators avoided the talk because of its complexity and richness – it has made-up words and expressions — but I liked Charles’ sense of humor and wanted to share it with my friends, so they could understand it. I picked it up both as a challenge and as a test to see how prepared I would be for complex translation tasks. I managed to finish it within a day, and picked up another talk right away.

4. What have been your favorite talks to translate? Why?

Beau Lotto + Amy O’Toole: Science is for everyone, kids includedI would say Beau Lotto + Amy O’Toole’s talk: “Science is for everyone, kids included.” First, because I am very passionate about science communication and involving kids in scientific activities. I’ve been working on implementing similar initiatives in Moroccan schools and raising awareness about the subject in general. And second, having attended TEDGlobal2012, I saw Beau and Amy onstage and was tremendously amazed and excited. I said to myself, “That’s a talk I want to spend hours translating.” And I did.

5. Which talk was the most difficult for you to translate and why?

The most challenging talk for me was indeed that first talk I translated, “All things are Moleeds.”

6. What’s a phrase in your language that you wish would catch on globally?

I’d like to share a quote from my native language, Tamazight:

“أورا تمون أبلا إيح ترعي”

Which translates into:

“It won’t get organized unless it first gets all messy.”

ShaoLan: Learn to read Chinese ... with ease!Her solution? A method she calls “Chineasy.” To achieve basic literacy, Hsueh says, you need only know 1,000 characters, and the top 200 allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature. Chineasy involves pairing characters with facial expressions, body movements and images that conjure up words in English.

In her talk, Hsueh moves through eight foundational characters, describing mnemonic devices and showing artful depictions. “Open your mouth as wide as possible until it’s square,” she says. Are you doing it? Voila, the character for mouth: 口. Hsueh shows a graphic her team has designed of a person going for a walk, based on the character for person: 人. Fire is the character for person with what look like two arms waving, as if the person is engulfed in flames and yelling, “Help!”: 火. Hsueh also takes us through tree (木), mountain (山), sun (日), moon (月), and door (門), which “looks like a pair of saloon doors in the Wild West.”

These eight characters “are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters,” Hsueh explains. Using Chineasy’s simple, beautiful illustrations, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to many other words and phrases. In this talk, Hsueh takes us through almost 30 characters; here, some more examples based on those foundational eight.

1. In her talk, Hsueh shows the Chinese character for person, 人, which looks like a person strolling along. Multiply by two, and you’ve got the character for everyone:
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2. In her talk, Hsueh shows us how combining fire (火) and mountain (山) gives us a volcano (火山). What happens when we add a mouth (口) to a volcano? Think about it: the mouth of a volcano is … a crater!
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3. Hsueh shows us that the character for big (大) looks like a person (人) with her arms outstretched, as if to say, “Sooooo big!” Combine those two, and you get adult (大人):’
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4. Write two suns (日) side by side and you get the character for “bright”: 昍. On her Facebook page, Hsueh writes, “I promise you, this is a character that will impress your Chinese friends. This is such a rare character that 99 percent of Chinese native speakers/readers would struggle to tell you what it is, never mind how to pronounce it.”
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5. Here’s a really clever one that Hsueh brings up in her talk: the character for “to dodge” or “to avoid” is composed of a person (人) inside a door (門), as if the person is sneaking out! 閃 What she adds on her Facebook page is that this character has a second meaning, “flash.” As she explains, “this person is sneaking out at such speed that the shape of him dashing resembles a streak of light.”
   

Language is at the heart of all our interactions — whether you’re texting, emailing, talking, singing or heatedly debating. So of course, quite a few TED Talks are about the art of language. That’s why we created the new TED playlist, “Words, words, words.”

Included in this playlist: Mark Pagel reveals how language transformed humanity, Erin McKean delivers the joy of lexicography and John McWhorter explains how texters are actually bilingual.

TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. A new playlist is added every week. We hope you enjoy this installment.

TED Talks are available in 100 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our translators. So far, more than 9,400 volunteers have created the upwards of 40,000 translated talks. To celebrate this huge accomplishment, every week the TED Blog will be bringing you a Q&A with one of our most prolific translators. Today, meet Elena Montrasio.

Where do you live and what do you do by day?

I live in London, U.K. I am a professor of Italian as a foreign language but at the moment I work as a literary translator.

What drew you to TED?

The desire to participate in a volunteer program where I could contribute my skills. That and general interest in the topics that TED deals with.

What was the first talk you translated and how did you pick it?

Peter Gabriel fights injustice with videoMy first talk was Peter Gabriel’s. I chose it because I have been in love with Peter Gabriel since I was 14!

What have been your favorite talks to translate? Why?

My favorite talks are the ones about marine conservation issues. The decay of the oceans because of damage from human beings is a topic that is very dear to my heart.

Which talk was the most difficult for you to translate and why?

It was actually a TEDx talk, “Captain Paul Watson: On upholding the international laws of marine conservation.” Not because it was hard in itself, but because I really wanted to do my absolute very best to contribute in spreading his message. So it took me a long time to make sure I was accurate and choosing words that would portray the heart that the speaker put into the talk.

What’s a phrase in your language that you wish would catch on globally?

“Se chiure na porta e s’arape nu portone.” It’s literally, “When a door closes, a wider door will open.” I think in English they say: “When a door closes, a window opens.”

John McWhorter asks us to think of texting less as “written language” and more as “fingered speech.” Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Texting is not a blight on the English language, says linguist John McWhorter in today’s talk, given at TED2013. Rather, texting is a “miraculous thing”: a novel linguistic mode that’s redefining the way we communicate with each other — for the better.

John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!McWhorter points out that texting shouldn’t be categorized as written language –but as speech. This shift makes the apparent problem of grammatical errors seem misplaced and unimportant.

If we think of texting as “fingered speech,” as McWhorter puts it, it also opens our eyes to texting’s distinct linguistic rules, structures and nuances. McWhorter dives into the example of “lol,” which originally stood for “laughing out loud.” But over the past few years, “lol” has “evolved into something that is much subtler,” signifying empathy and accommodation.

As the mediums through which we communicate quickly multiply, our modes of communication are following suit. After you’ve watched the talk, here are some more examples of new linguistic forms that have developed in tandem with technology.

1. Like “lol,” hashtags started out with a literal function: making topics easy to tag, and thus search for, on Twitter. But in 2010, Susan Orlean, a writer and avid tweeter, pointed out that hashtags had taken on an emotional resonance. Orlean gives this (dated, sorry) example: “Sarah Palin for President??!? #Iwouldratherhaveamoose.” She writes that, while no one would search for “Iwouldratherhaveamoose,” its use here “makes it look like it’s being muttered into a handkerchief; when you read it you feel like you’ve had an intimate moment in which the writer leaned over and whispered ‘I would rather have a moose!’ in your ear.” Hashtags can also be used to indicate a joke, or even — when employed back-to-back –comment on the hashtag that came before. “Amazing how rich and complex 140 characters with a few symbols thrown in can be,” Orlean writes. And how much richer they are now, three years later.
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2. GIFs, those omnipresent video loops, are nothing new: they date back to 1987. But in recent years, they’ve started to populate blogs and articles, standing in for written descriptions, often to hilarious effect. Take #WhatShouldWeCallMe (there’s that hashtag again!), a Tumblr started by two friends in law school on opposite sides of the country, where Austin Powers stands in for the boundless joy of discovering your roommate has cleaned and a panda illustrates massive post-party regret. Or this personal essay about a New Yorker’s experience during Hurricane Sandy, where the accompanying GIFs help make the horrifying event lighter and easier to process.
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3. “Fingered speech” though it may be, cellphone communication is generating new avenues for writing, too. In 2008, The New York Times reported from Japan that cellphone novels (what they sound like: novels written on cellphones) had dominated the previous year’s list of best-selling books. One woman wrote hers, which hit number five on the best-sellers list, during her commute to work. “[M]any cellphone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers,” the Times article notes. (A 2010 Los Angeles Times article indicated the trend was still in full force.)
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4. More recently, Twitter, too, has been coopted as a tool for fiction. Last year, Jennifer Egan wrote a short story in 140-character nuggets, which were posted on Twitter before they were published in The New Yorker as “Black Box.” A few months later, novelist Elliott Holt wrote her own Twitter story, creating three different avatars/characters and posting from “their” accounts. “The three characters have distinct voices—and by telling the story through them, Holt embraces Twitter for what it is, rather than trying to bend it into some tool that it isn’t,” Slate opined. “With its simultaneous narrators and fractured storyline, this is not the kind of tale that could march steadily across a continuous expanse of white space. It’s actually made for the medium.”
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5. Email signoffs, as all things, have their haters: many a screed has implored humanity to dispense with these vulgar written appendages. (Admittedly, this rant in Slate is hilarious: “My transition from signoff submissive to signoff subversive began when a former colleague ended an email to me with ‘Warmest regards.’ Were these scalding hot regards superior to the ordinary ‘Regards’ I had been receiving on a near-daily basis?”) But others among us appreciate the space for expression that signoffs offer. Sadie Stein, in the Paris Review Daily, explains her own choice, “As ever.” And a few years ago, The New York Times offered this survey of signoffs from a bishop’s “+” to Norman Mailer’s “Cheers” to the author’s own “Carpe Diem.”

John McWhorter was a part of TED’s worldwide talent search, giving a shorter version of his talk at the New York stop of the tour. After the talk, he sat down with the TED Blog for this short Q&A »

McWhorter would also like to thank his students at Columbia University for teaching him about the new world of texting: specifically Yin Yin Lu, Sarah Tully, and Laura Milmed for the miracle of “slash.”

Steven Pinker is one of several TED speakers who’s given a talk about the art of verbal language. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

TED Talks cover an incredible breadth of topics – from mathematical origami to self-repairing architecture to personalized medicine. Some talks explore what lies at the very essence of TED — the act of talking. The 10 talks below explore the various dynamics of speech — from phonology to cognition to the socio-cultural role of language in society. These talks at times offer insight into the struggle for self-expression and at other times engage in contentious linguistic debates. As a whole, they provide a holistic and layered view of speech and language. Because what would TED be without talking?

Roger Ebert: Remaking my voiceRoger Ebert: Remaking my voice We deeply miss Roger Ebert. In this poignant talk from TED2011, he shared his remarkable rediscovery of self-expression after losing his voice in the fight against jaw cancer. While he couldn’t speak for the last few years of his life, he explained how he found a captive audience on Twitter and through his blog. The talk, presented by Ebert, along with his wife and two friends, offers an inspirational glimpse into the life of someone who overcame incredible adversity.

Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen betterJulian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better A speaker is nothing without a listener, but as it stands, we retain only a quarter of what we hear. In this talk from TEDGlobal 2011, Julian Treasure offers five tips to better navigate our cacophonous soundscape and savor the noise around us. Following Treasures’s advice, we’ll become better communicators and will live in a better world. As he says, “A conscious listening world is a world of connection, of understanding and of peace.”

Terry Moore: Why is 'x' the unknown?Terry Moore: Why is ‘x’ the unknown? Basing his argument on our physical capacity to produce sounds, Terry Moore provides a phonetic explanation for a question we’ve all asked ourselves. This is a short and sweet talk from TED2012.

Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanityMark Pagel: How language transformed humanity “Our destiny is to be one world with one language,” argues biologist Mark Pagel in this talk from TEDGlobal 2011. Outlining the social function of language evolution, he highlights the importance of language in fostering cooperation in an increasingly globalized world. In the end, it’s worth making “all this fuss about a puff of air emanating from our mouth.”

Wade Davis: Dreams from endangered culturesWade Davis: Dreams from endangered cultures A fascinating speaker, with the opposite perspective. In this talk from TED2003, National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis emphasizes the importance of a diversity of languages and cultures in our world. What the world needs is not one universal language, but rather a respect for the unique values and worldview tied up in each linguistic system. Language loss is happening at an alarmingly rapid rate: 50% of the world’s languages are facing extinction — about one language dies every two weeks. “Language is a flash of the human spirit,” argues Davis.

Patricia Ryan: Don't insist on English!Patricia Ryan: Don’t insist on English! In this talk from TEDxDubai, Patricia Ryan – who has lived in the Gulf region for 30 years — argues for a multilingual education system. She asks: What if Einstein had to pass the TOEFL? We equate English with intelligence, but some of the world’s best thinkers may not be English speakers. In different linguistic systems, we’re able to conceive of different concepts. Until we encourage multilingualism, we can never know what we know.

Steven Pinker: What our language habits revealSteven Pinker: What our language habits reveal Linguist Steven Pinker argues that language is a window into what makes humans tick in this compelling talk from TEDGlobal 2005. From metaphors to bribes to threats, indirect language speaks volumes about the inner workings of individuals and the societies we live in. By understanding the “cognitive machinery to conceptualize the world,” we will better understand ourselves.

James Geary, metaphorically speakingJames Geary, metaphorically speaking Metaphors give us Shakespeare, scientific discoveries and an understanding of financial crises. Metaphors are central to how we see the world, allowing us to understand complex or foreign concepts by putting them into a familiar context. Fun fact: we speak on average six metaphors per minute! In this cleverly worded talk from TEDGlobal 2009, James Geary explores the powerful force of the deeply influential word constructs that shape our reality.

Melissa Marshall: Talk nerdy to meMelissa Marshall: Talk nerdy to me Great communication from scientists and engineers will change the world, says professor Melissa Marshall in her talk from TEDGlobal 2012. Left-brain thinkers don’t need to dumb it down to make their ideas accessible to people without a technical bent, she argues. In this funny talk, Marshall provides a mathematical formula for perfect scientific communication.

There are seven different words in Dothraki for striking another person with a sword. Among them: “hlizifikh,” a wild but powerful strike; “hrakkarikh,”a quick and accurate strike; and “gezrikh,” a fake-out or decoy strike. But you won’t find these words in George R. R. Martin’s epic series A Song of Ice and Fire, which is where Dothraki originated as the language of the eponymous horse-riding warriors; rather these and more than 3,000 other words were developed by David Peterson, the world’s authority on Dothraki.

At TED2013, Peterson gave this fascinating TED University talk on the process of creating Dothraki for the TV series Game of Thrones. Based on Martin’s books, the HBO series premieres its third season on Sunday.

Peterson, who has a masters in linguistics from UC San Diego, was teaching English composition at Fullerton College when he heard that HBO was hiring someone to develop Dothraki for Game of Thrones. For the next four years Peterson developed the Dothraki grammar and wrote a dictionary of around 3,400 words.

Peterson is also the alien language and culture consultant at SyFy’s Defiance and the president of the Language Creation Society (LCS), which is made up of conlangers – creators of conlangs, or constructed languages.

Language enthusiasts have been creating languages from scratch since at least the twelfth century: for fun, for secret communication with loved ones, in pursuit of the perfect language. Conlangs have surged in popularity in recent years thanks to films and TV series like Avatar (whose characters speak Na’Vi), Lord of the Rings (Elvish) and Game of Thrones; the grandaddy of pop-culture conlangs is Star Trek‘s Klingon, a widely studied language almost as popular as Esperanto. (Both Klingon and Esperanto are available as subtitles on TED.com).

In the conlang community, Peterson is a hero. The same goes for John Quijada, the creator of Ithkuil, who was recently profiled by Joshua Foer in the New Yorker. Ithkuil seeks to encode as much information as possible in as small a space as possible, with as little ambiguity as possible. Is Ithkuil the perfect conlang? Perhaps. But Peterson says that he has never put much stock in the idea of perfection.

“Language,” he says, “is a system. We humans aren’t. We’re quite imperfect. When it comes to using even a perfect system, we will break it in some way.”

As Peterson says in his talk, a big part of the process of naturalizing conlangs is attempting to imitate the quirks and idiosyncrasies of a natural language as it evolves over time. In developing Dothraki, Peterson started by imagining how the Dothraki people would have spoken 1,000 years in the past. Creating a protolanguage allowed Peterson to evolve Dothraki “organically,” changing its sounds, grammar and semantics. But how do you create linguistic regression?

The first challenge in imagining a lost culture is to unlearn what you know about modern technology in order to grasp a linguistic view of the world before, say, books and medicine. Says Peterson, “You become part historian, part archaeologist, part detective. You say, ‘Here were my resources, how did I know all this stuff?’”

In the case of the Dothraki, there’s the added fact that the speakers exist in a fictional world, so their history is technically unknown, yet still must be realistic to the legions of fans scrutinizing the books and show.

(Why not just call up George R.R. Martin and ask? Not an option. According to Peterson, Martin is pleased with the existence of Dothraki but not especially invested in it, given how busy he is. In fact, he’s the one who occasionally calls up Peterson for a translation. Peterson happily gives it to him.)

But some aspects of Dothraki history are available to Peterson. Martin very clearly based the Dothraki on the Mongolians of the Silk Road era, with aspects of some Native American cultures mixed in. So Peterson draws on these sources for naming flora and fauna. Recently Peterson found out that in Mongolian there are two different words for animal poop, depending on whether it’s fresh or dry. (Dry animal poop is used for fires in winter, since it burns longer.) Now, he says, the Dothraki language makes this distinction, too.

Where existing context is not available, a conlanger can bring his or her own experiences to the language, as in the case of the Dothraki word for “to dream.” Peterson wanted to capture the essence of dreaming, which for him means feeling, while sleeping, that there’s no other life or world. Peterson started with the word for wood and changed it to its adjective form, wooden, or “ido.” Since in Dothraki wood is used to describe fake swords, “wooden” comes to be synonymous with “fake.” A dream then becomes a wooden life, a fake life. In Dothraki, to dream, or “thirat atthiraride,” literally means “to live a wooden life.”

While many conlangs are created for fictional characters, the majority are not. But a language is nothing without its speaker — so how do conlangers deal with the fact that their speakers have no history or culture? Is it possible to create a naturalized conlang without also creating an entire world around it? Indeed, it’s a challenge that Peterson discovered late. Initially he wasn’t interested in creating cultures, but realized that if you don’t have a very specific idea of who is speaking the language, your language automatically carries a whole host of cultural assumptions — probably yours.

An example Peterson often gives is creating a native word for “book.” It seems like a simple task, but this actually assumes quite a lot about the speakers: that they have a written form of their language; that they have something to write down; that they have some value for literature or scholarship; that literature or scholarship exists; that they’ve invented paper; that they’ve invented styluses, ink and book binding. One word, a world of assumptions.

As president of the LCS, Peterson communicates with and celebrates conlangers all over the world, handing out the annual Smiley Award to the year’s best created language. So what makes a good conlanger? “It’s a combination of somebody who is very technically minded, who is very good with puzzles or coding,” says Peterson. “And somebody who has a literary bone inside them, who is a big reader and loves stories.”

This marriage of the technical and aesthetic explains why Peterson’s favorite conlang is Sylvia Sotomayor’s Kēlen, which defies a universal element of language: It has no verbs. It’s common for created languages to have alien or unnatural constraints, says Peterson, but Sotomayor beautifully naturalized hers, bringing artistry to an engineered system.

Photo: HBO

TED Talks are available in 97 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our translators. So far, more than 8,800 volunteers have created the upwards of 34,000 translated talks. To celebrate this huge accomplishment, every week the TED Blog will be bringing you a Q&A with one of our most prolific translators. Today, meet

Where do you live? What do you do?

I live in a small village in Israel, and I’m a front end web developer.

What drew you to TED?

I’ve known TED since it only had a few dozen talks, and I was always drawn to the topics and the quality.

What was the first talk you translated and how did you pick it?

Beau Lotto: Optical illusions show how we see The first talk I translated was Beau Lotto’s “Optical illusions show how we see,” I picked it since my then 9-year-old daughter didn’t know English well enough and I was acting as an online translator. Then, I saw the translate button. Ever since then, I’ve been hooked.

What have been your favorite talks to translate? Why?

My favorite talk to translate was … actually all of Marco Tempest’s talks. They are so riveting.

Marco Tempest: A cyber-magic card trick like no otherWhich talk was the most difficult for you to translate and why?

The hardest talk was the TED-Ed lesson “Making sense of spelling” by Gina Cooke. It talks about spelling and grammar in English, and it’s very hard to pass on to other languages.

What’s a phrase in your language that you wish would catch on globally? 

I think the most known phrase is “eihiye beseder” which translates to “everything will be OK.” People use it here all the time. We have so many worries, we try at least to take everything easy.

TED Talks are available in 97 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our translators. So far, more than 8,800 volunteers have created the upwards of 34,000 translated talks. To celebrate this huge accomplishment, every week the TED Blog will be bringing you a Q&A with one of our most prolific translators. Today, meet 

Where do you live and what do you do by day?

I live in Mechelen, Belgium. By day, I work for the Financial Services and Markets Authority, in the department of supervision of the rules of conduct. Basically, we check whether financial institutions act honestly, fairly and professionally in accordance with the best interests of their clients.

What drew you to TED?

I stumbled onto TED in 2010 while preparing my MBA thesis on transparency as a competitive advantage in insurance. (I worked for an insurance company at the time.) Alan Siegel: Let's simplify legal jargon!  As a lawyer with a keen interest in plain language, I found Alan Siegel’s talk “Let’s simplify legal jargon” very inspiring.

What was the first talk you translated and how did you pick it?

I wanted to share Siegel’s talk with my colleagues at work. But that meant I had to overcome the language hurdle. I saw the “Translation” menu on TED.com and I thought, “Why not give it a try and translate it into Dutch?” The fact that the talk was only four minutes long helped too.

What have been your favorite talks to translate? Why?

I have a couple of favorite speakers, like Hans Rosling and Clay Shirky. They really changed my mindset. And they’re funny — I love the challenge of doing justice to their jokes. But the most moving talks, the ones that really stick with me, are often by speakers I would never have heard of if it hadn’t been for TED, Elyn Saks: A tale of mental illness -- from the insidelike Elyn Saks’s testimonial on schizophrenia and Alberto Cairo’s “There are no scraps of men.” Last but not least, I like to translate talks I saw live at TED or TEDx events, because working on the translation brings back fond memories of the experience.

Which talk was the most difficult for you to translate and why?

This summer, TED-Ed videos were added to the Open Translation Project. I translated a TED-Ed lesson on the art of metaphors, in which the animation illustrated the English imagery. I couldn’t just use the Dutch equivalent — because it would make the animation meaningless. In 3 or 4 seconds, I had to convey the meaning in Dutch and respect the original English image. This six minutes translation took me much longer than many an 18-minute TED Talk.

What’s a phrase in your language that you wish would catch on globally?

I would propose a word: “pretoogjes,” which refers to the eyes of a chuckling person who is up to mischief. It was the Dutch contribution to the Words Worth Spreading tray designed by Dick Lundgren and presented by the TED Translators at TEDGlobal 2012.

TED translators Dick Lundgren and Els De Keyser with the Words Worth Spreading trays.

]]> http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/12/meet-the-translator-els-de-keyser-who-brings-you-talks-in-dutch/feed/ 3 ElsDeKeyser ivanacat ElsDeKeyser ElsDeKeyser-with-plate http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/28/the-linguistic-miracle-of-texting-john-mcwhorter-at-ted2013/ http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/28/the-linguistic-miracle-of-texting-john-mcwhorter-at-ted2013/#comments Thu, 28 Feb 2013 18:02:31 +0000 Thu-Huong Ha http://blog.ted.com/?p=70161 ]]>

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

More than 22 million text messages are sent across the world every day … many in truly terrible English. It’s the end of the world as we know it, many decry. The decline and fall of written language means the end for us all, right? Not so fast. Linguist John McWhorter has a great new theory on what’s really going on in modern texting. Far from being a scourge, texting is a linguistic miracle.

Spoken human language has been around for about 150,000 years, but it wasn’t until much later that written language came about; as he puts it: “If humanity has existed for 24 hours, writing came about at 11:07 pm.” This distinction is crucial what it comes to the so-called degradation of written language — because texting isn’t written language. It much more closely resembles the kind of language we’ve had for so many more years: spoken language.

When you write, you can do things you can’t do in speaking. McWhorter elocutes a passage from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It’s precise, detailed and crisp — and “no one would ever speak that way. At least not if they were interested in reproducing.” Casual speech is quite different: looser, telegraphic, less reflective. Texting ignores punctuation and capitalization, but does anyone think about these things when speaking?

Formal oration, a kind of speaking that sounds like writing, has always been common. But why not try to write like you speak? Now that we have incredibly fast technology to keep up with the pace of speech — mobile phones, rather than typewriters or handwriting — that’s actually possible. What is texting? McWhorter suggests: “fingered speech.”

Texting, like any language, has its own distinct rules and structures. Take the example of “lol.” “Lol” once meant “laughing out loud.” But anybody who texts today knows that these days it has a subtler meaning. Consider the exchange:

Susan: lol thanks gmail is being slow right now
Julie: lol, i know.
Susan: i just sent you an email.
Julie: lol, i see it.

Let’s be honest, there’s nothing funny about this. As McWhorter says, “lol” here acts as a marker of empathy and accomodation, what linguistics call pragmatic particles, and which exist in many languages.

McWhorter cites a passage from 1956 bemoaning the decline of language in young people … and then three more, all the way back to 63 AD: a pedant lamenting everyone’s terrible Latin. (That “terrible Latin” eventually became French.) As he says, “There are always people worried about the decline of language. Yet somehow the world keeps spinning.” There’s no need to worry, he says firmly. People are even benefiting from texting, from this entirely different language. Being fluent in spoken language, written language and writing-like-speaking language is an unconscious balancing act that allows each “speaker” to expand his or her linguistic repertoire.

So no scourge is imminent. McWhorter says, if he could fast-forward to 2033 — besides first checking to see if David Simon had written a sequel to The Wire — he would immediately want to see texts written by 16-year-old girls to see what’s become of this linguistic miracle.