... or any language at all ....
interesting clip from 'The Northerner':
Cullercoats writer Peter Mortimer has been fretting over the future of
the vowel. His latest column for the North Tyneside News Guardian was
written on a train heading north, and what started him off was his
own text message to his son, which said: "Im n Ptrbrgh Stn".
"The act of texting is imaginative, and good fun. Years ago, as a
writer in schools, I'd produce a poem of mine, The Boy Who Mislaid
His Vowels Writes a Letter to the Teacher," he wrote.
"It would take the kids about 15 minutes to work out the vowel-free
epic. The mobile generation can do it in 90 seconds. Texting is
evolutionary, organic. This could soon mean a global funeral for the
vowel. Newspapers, novels, the side of baked bean cans - all could
soon be vowel-free areas."
"Maybe vowels will go from speech too. When we board the [Tyneside]
Metro, a recorded voice will say, 'Stnd clr f th drs pls'. (Actually,
it won't. I've just realised vowel free speech sounds like a gagged
mouth, and makes no sense)."
Will this happen and English will become a vowel-free language like Arabic and Hebrew? Think of the scope for arguments about what you actually said, what you thought you said, what you might have said ..... what someone else thinks you said. It's bad enough already with a clearly defined language but where will text messages lead us?
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