As Twitter and text messaging push vowels out of English to economize on space, could the language end up looking more Semitic than Germanic?
I’m used to seeing abbreviations on Twitter, Gchat, and SMS. But I was surprised recently when an editor closed an email with “Rgds.”
The “s” on the end helped me guess that it wasn’t short for “Rigid” or “Raged,” or so I hoped. Given the context, I assumed he meant “Regards.”
But I wondered how such a word ended up in a business letter? Did it mean that Twitter-ese is making its way into formal, written correspondence? And “Rgds”—a string of consonants, vowels inferred—reminded me a bit of Hebrew. While a dot system helps Israeli children learn vowels, the dots eventually come off, like training wheels, and adults read and write without them.
Might Twitter and SMS push vowels out of English? Could the language end up looking more Semitic than Germanic?
While text messages limit users to 160 or 320 characters, according to Dr. Naomi Baron, a linguistics professor at American University and the author of Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World, the average SMS spans only 20 to 40 characters. So brevity isn’t forced upon us, it’s more a matter of “how much we want to type.”
And typing has gotten easier with the iPhone and other devices that have full keypads; auto complete helps, too.
Abbreviations are a way “to show that you’re hip, you’re in the know, you’re cool,” Baron says. They’re not necessary. Nor are they new. They’ve been popular for at least 1000 years.
“There were abbreviations…out the wazoo,” Baron explains. “Because if you’re writing on parchment and you’re copying manuscripts [by hand], you would like to save sheep hides and you’d like to save your efforts.”
The advent of the printing press didn’t change this. Instead it standardized some abbreviations. Still people—out of either laziness or ingenuity, whichever you prefer—kept shortening words. As is the case today, vowels were often the thing to go.
Baron offers an example from the eighteenth century, when gentlemen closed written correspondence with “Yr hm srv,” short for “Your humble servant.”
Acronyms have also been trendy throughout history. In the 1930s and 1940s, Baron says, friends signed letters with B.F.F.—best friends forever.
I’m surprised to hear this. I remember B.F.F. from my pre-teen days, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was everywhere: on the notes we passed in class; in the saccharin sentences we scribbled into each other’s notebooks; on the heart-shaped pendants that best friends wore.
Was it really 60 years old?
“We do tend to reinvent the wheel sometimes,” Baron says. “But, absolutely, [B.F.F.] existed decades before this.”
And, by the way, btw didn’t spring from chat, Twitter, or SMS. Nor did b/c for because or b/w for between. All are, Baron says, “way old.”
According to Carmen Fought, a linguistics professor at Pitzer College and the author of Language and Ethnicity, there is a chance that such common abbreviations could make their way into the language.
In that scenario, “the word because becomes ‘bec’ because people are used to [using b/c],” Fought says, adding, “I’ve had students tell me that they hear people saying L.O.L. aloud,” pronouncing the acronym for laugh out loud like the word loll.
This phenomenon is common in the Philippines where abbreviations are embraced (a little too enthusiastically some say). For example, a Filipino who has grown up in America, or who has an American parent, is called a “Fil-am.” Overseas Filipino workers are referred to by their acronym: O.F.Ws. In my experience, saying “migrant workers” or “foreign workers” elicits weird looks and gentle corrections.
The national language of the Philippines, Tagalog, is a mixed bag. Although it’s a Malayo-Polynesian language, it has borrowed extensively from Spanish and English. Chinese immigrants also made a contribution to Tagalog; Sanskrit and Arabic have left fingerprints on the language, as well.
English is similarly open. Fought explains, “It’s like this mutt language, like the dog you pick up from the shelter that’s a little bit of this and that. “We’ve got Latin roots, Greek roots, French German, Scandinavian borrowings. English will borrow from any language.”
There are loan words from Hindi, Native American languages, and Spanish, to name a few.
“We’ll just take anything,” Fought says.
Which is exactly why we won’t end up taking the Hebrew system.
“There’s too much going on,” Fought remarks, offering the example of rbt. Is it rebate, a descendant of Old French? Or robot, on loan from Czech?
Because English is so chaotic, many English-speakers have a hard time learning to spell. And they seem to drift, naturally, towards what looks more like the Semitic system.
Baron explains, “What we do know about children learning to write English is that if they are allowed to spell however they wish… [they] leave out the vowels. In English, figuring out which vowel to put is tough. The consonants are generally much easier to figure out.”
But vowels are here to stay.
“Vowels are not our friends,” Baron says. “But, nonetheless, we have lived with them in English for a long time.”
Fought agrees. However, she adds, we could see the vowels fall out of languages that have simpler spelling systems. She muses, “It could work for Spanish where they only have five vowels.”
A short version of this piece was originally published in Tablet.
For additional original analysis and breaking news, visit +972 Magazine's Facebook page or follow us on Twitter. Our newsletter features a comprehensive round-up of the week's events. Sign up here.
Mitchell Cohen
Interesting article, Mya.
Thx
Vicky
This used to be my Hebrew teacher’s argument when I weakly tried to cling on to nikkudot. Her reasoning is of no help when the newspaper mentions ‘a committed patriot’ and I get bemused by the apparent agricultural turn the article has taken: “Mushrooms, how did mushrooms get in here?”
.
I will never be used to this vowel-free business.
Daniel de França MTd2
@Mya It could be pusing to look like not only Hebrew, but Arabic or any other Semitic language, including old Egyptian.
Zach Wheat
Adopting the Shavian alphabet would fix all the spelling problems. Going back to Androcles and the Lion now.
Dena Shunra
It looks a lot like shorthand to me, which is not Hebrew but more the jargon of U.S. business.
Mya Guarnieri
Hi Dena, Thanks for reading. It was just a starting point for a discussion of the impact, or lack thereof, of technology on English.
The editor was Indian, by the way, and not in the US. But, point taken. 
sh
There used to be an alternative method to shorthand called speedwriting, which seems similar to what you describe, Mya. Thanks for reminding me that when I was young and green I saw ads for courses in speedwriting in the London tube that showed a sample phrase which was easily decipherable. I promptly began leaving out vowels when taking notes in English.
I just googled speedwriting. Turns out it was invented in Chicago in 1924 and it’s slightly more complicated than I thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedwriting
Elisabeth
Still, leaving out vowels only really works for Semitic languages, alas…
“The first type of alphabet that was developed was the abjad. An abjad is an alphabetic writing system where there is one symbol per consonant. Abjads differ from other alphabets in that they have characters only for consonantal sounds. Vowels are not usually marked in abjads.
All known abjads (except maybe Tifinagh) belong to the Semitic family of scripts, and derive from the original Northern Linear Abjad. The reason for this is that Semitic languages and the related Berber languages have a morphemic structure which makes the denotation of vowels redundant in most cases.
Some abjads (such as Arabic and Hebrew) have markings for vowels as well, but use them only in special contexts, such as for teaching. Many scripts derived from abjads have been extended with vowel symbols to become full alphabets, the most famous case being the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician abjad. This has mostly happened when the script was adapted to a non-Semitic language.”
Many other writing systems are syllabic, so one sign for ka another for ki another for ku etc. It takes time to learn, but once you have done that, writing is fast.
Dahlia Scheindlin
@Vicky – that’s funny! Great piece, Mya. One point I don’t quite buy – Fought’s argument that English is prone to these changes b/c it is a borrowing language and therefore chaotic. But this is hardly unique to English. Many languages borrow and adapt to their immigrant populations, borderlands – and if not directly into their lexicon than precisely through grammatical constructions and combination words that you describe. Modern Hebrew is one such language…with influences from arabic, german/yiddish, french (and prbly more), and even its own fluid evolution creating and discarding new words and forms all the time. I am not enough of a linguist to know if English is a greater borrower (mutt) than others, but in general, I think that languages are not truly discrete packages but overlapping cultures – much like nations themselves.
Joel
I think you’re missing the fact that Hebrew (and other Semitic writing systems to some extent) have made vowels more explicit over time. Modern Hebrew shows many more vowels than previous versions of the language. More and more vowel letters (י, ו, ה, א) have been inserted over the history of the language. This is unsurprising, given that: historical distinctions between long and short vowels no longer exist; semantic and cultural change has blurred the relationship between words of the same root; and Israeli Hebrew is borrowing a lot of words from non-Semitic languages where vowels may more readily distinguish words.
Abbreviated writing forms are nothing new; however they were often correlated with technologies that limited space (expensive tools or reproduction methods). They are now much less frequent in edited works, because they can cheaply consume enormous amounts of virtual space, so it’s not worth the increased ambiguity. Where the medium or editorial time is more limited, as in emails or SMS, abbreviations can be useful. And of course, there’s the sociolinguistic aspect of this being a new, cool dialect in some contexts.
A lot of written English vowels no longer play the great role they used to. At least in my Australian English, a lot of vowels become what both Hebrew and phoneticians call a schwa. In terms of the phones that are actually pronounced prominently in my dialect “regards” might be best written “rgads”. But spelling has been fairly standardised for a couple of hundred years, and our new technology mostly furthers that standardisation (providing a red squiggly line when it reckons I should write “standardization” instead).