Dear Mal,
Thanks again for your thoughts.
> It used to be that a class A amateur had an advantage over the general
> public by being able to converse in morse code, just like another language
> except it was totally international.
Morse certainly has many advantages, but remember that it's not a language as
such: it's a sort of alphabet to represent languages.
For instance your Morse is far better than mine, but if I sent you
.- .-.. .. --.. . .-.. .. - . -.- .- ...- ---
would you pop round for some? (I admit that's not quite right, as I don't know
how to put the accent over the Z and I've forgotten the Morse for question
mark.)
A knowledge of the Q code allows you to hold rubber-stamp QSOs with people who
don't speak your language, but not to chew the rag over (e.g.) what you think
of the new US president or what's happening on Coronation Street.
> Even a worse senario, a lot of persons today cannot write, the norm is to use
> a keypad and send text messages using some abbreviated gibbirish, grammar is
> not required, sort of pigeon english.
The standard of English of school leavers certainly is a problem today, at
least in Britain.
However, no-one's perfect: for example it's gibberish not gibbirish, and
English not english.
As for grammar, I'm afraid your sentence structure punctuation leave "sort of
pigeon english" as a major clause, which needs a verb to be grammatical ;-( We
all write in abbreviations at times.
(Before anyone takes Mal to task for pigeon, I checked with the Concise Oxford
and it gives pigeon as a perfectly acceptable alternative to pidgin.)
The abbreviated forms one reads sometimes irritate me too, but I can understand
the logic. I think these derive from sending TXTs (used to be called SMSs) on
mobile phones. If I had to send much from a keyboard with 12 keys to represent
all the letters, digits and punctuation marks I'd start abbreviating, I think.
Nor is this new: telegraphese started with telegrams, to keep the word count
down (for financial reasons in that case). Nearer to home, Morse operators use
a wide range of abbreviations which must be gibberish to outsiders: not just
the Q code, but many others such as ES for AND, and HI which apparently doesn't
refer to how tall something is ;-)
Languages evolve, and the test tends to be "Does it work?" We shall see whether
TXTese (so to speak) is here to stay or turns out to be a ten-year fad.
73,
Chris G4OKW
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