More German than German

I remember this old joke from the pre-Internet-is-everywhere era about how German (the language) could eventually rule the world if we gradually started improving the horrible no-method-in-the-madness spelling used in English. Some of the proposals in that joke were:

-         use "s"  instead  of  the soft "c" e.g. "Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy";

-         replace the hard "c"  with "k" to "klear up konfusion";

-         replace "ph" with "f" thus making words like "fotograf" 20 per sent shorter;

-         remove double letters, something that has "always ben  a deterent  to akurate  speling";

-         remove silent letters;

Add a few more similar such rules and "ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl", the joke said.

Nice joke, but that's all it was. So I thought back then.

Then came the cell phone revolution; SMS's became popular; and now we have smartphones and instant messaging. Surely the conditions have been ripe for some years now to start making the exact kind of changes to English that the joke had suggested, right?

But that's not what happened, is it? Instead communication took a turn to become even more German than German: it became more and more machine-like! We avoid exchanging pleasantries, we avoid “fussy niceties”, we came up with new abbreviations like FYI and LOL, we stick to the point, we don't waste time (or bandwidth) with “Hello”s or “Bye”s.

After all, as Nick Bilton wrote, “Social norms just don’t make sense to people drowning in digital communication” became the new mantra of the digital age of communication.

I guess we are heading towards a new form of communication that is getting closer to Claude Shannon's information theory and optimized bandwidth usage formulas. The geeks rule the world after all!