標準語言

. . .After perusing through several different blogs (as a form of a sanity break from the evil that is translation between mutually exclusive languages), I've decided to create a little blurb on my thoughts. While I won't critique content -- what people want to say is their choice entirely -- I feel that for a most effective communication, there must be some sort of standard to alleviate some of the ambiguity and confusion contained in any given text. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a set of guidelines which were rigid enough to be followed, yet flexible enough to allow for personal style?
....Oh wait! It's called spelling and grammar!
[and yes, I realize I'm somewhat mirroring a friend's rant in another blog]
. . .While it is true that my background was somewhat more traditional than the average youth, I'm *positive* that basic punctuation and proper spelling were taught in public school. And while I don't expect everybody to know the difference between present, present progressive, past, past progressive, present perfect, present perfect progressive, past perfect and past perfect progressive, it would be nice to see some real punctuation instead of the abused ellipses(...) to replace the period, coma, colon and semi-colon. Conventionally (for me, anyways), I use the ellipsis to indicate a trailing after a word, or to denote the omission of one or more words. For example, "hi." is a bland, flat statement. "Hi..." however, is trailing; it hints at some sort of reservation, apprehension or hesitation.
. . .If a sentence ends with a quotation, does the period reside inside or outside of the quotation? Well, it depends. If the entire sentence is a quote, the ending punctuation ought to be inside the quotes. If, however, the quotation is a small part of the sentence, then the ending punctuation ought to be at the end. For example, consider the following:
"He'll rue the day he crossed paths with me."
and
"The above sentence states that 'he'll rue the day he crossed paths with me'."
See? Easy.
. . .On the topic of grammar, I could practically write a book, so I'll go on to spelling. I think it's wonderful for people to devise a form of short-hand writing style for a more effecient tool for taking notes or sending telegrams, since they're awfully expensive. But if something is to be published, there ought to be a level of professionalism to be considered; one would typically want the reader to easily understand what one wants to say. And as for written correspondence, telegrams are out of date; e-mails don't exactly charge $0.08 per character. Replacing "the" with "d", "my" with "mah", and all those other wonderful abbreviations become confusing, especially when they're not capitalized to indicate a replacement of something.
. . .Language is always changing, and therefore, so is spelling. But there is a reason why the Chin standardized the Chinese written language; too many variations are fun, but both cumbersome and ineffecient. One should always be aware of what one is writing. Too many are unaware of the difference between "their", "there" and "they're", or, their personal distinction is a skewed one. Remember, "their" is always a possessive pronoun, it doesn't matter WHAT it's refering to. And speaking of "it's", the difference between "its" and "it's". Or the difference between "than" and "then". While reading a fanfic, I encountered a grievious error: "eliminate" and "illuminate". Sure, they sound the same *smirks*, but one means 'to erase out of existence' while the other means 'to bring light' or 'to shine'.
. . .Or better yet are what can only be termed 'American' -- where they start to spell out the euphemisms for coarse language. For example, the word which I shall only imply here as 'f*ck' is also known as the "F-word". But this word is horribly versatile, and even has its own set of declension and conjugation. So, the adjective, "f*cken" is colloquially often said as "F-en". But now, apparently, they also spell it as "effen", which I initially mistook as an abbreviation of "effeminate". (Optimistic me, yes, I know.) Apparently, they also enjoy whole consonant-shifts, replacing every 'v' with 'b' so instead of 'every' and 'even' it's 'ebry' and 'eben'. I first thought 'eben' was somebody's name.
. . .And as I brushed on before with 'effen' above, there's also a little something to be said for diction. I'm willing to bet (without a penny in my pocket) that people who write 'leik dis' won't know the following words:
Consanguinity
Indignation
Fustigation
Cordial
Antepenultimate
At least, titles and names are helping to bring back some of the other words like 'perdition' (which means 'eternal damnation') from the movie title "Road to Perdition", and 'evanescence' (which means 'fading away quickly') from the quickly growing popular pop-group from the States. Yay!
. . .English is a beautiful language, if used properly. But I feel that because too many people don't give it enough credit, and because of the unstoppable force of today's youth and their insistence in 'non-conformation', most people won't be able to ever realize the full potential that the English language has to offer.
. . .Of course, it doesn't come close to comparing to Chinese... but that's a rant for another day... :P