gonna wanna think about it

So here's my point with chat, which I've been mulling over so as to put into words more clearly. For centuries writing and speaking have had a certain relationship in our language. In speaking, we could take shortcuts, change the way things sounded, experiment a little to see what we could get away with. In writing however we were much more formal. Because we had to speak to people far and wide, we reached more binding, formal agreement about how things were spelled etc., and these didn't change easily, though they did change a little over time. Speech was lively, more common, more likely to change, and far more variable. Writing was established by common rules which were argued over, but which once agreed upon, remained unchanged (relatively) in various environments.

Ah but it didn't have to be this way; it only evolved this way through cultural agreement. There is nothing about speaking which is by nature more changeable, more volatile, more informal, than writing. There is nothing about writing which is by nature stodgier and slower to change.

And that's what chat can teach us. Writing itself can be spontaneous, changeable, open to variation and even dialect. And here's the big one: Writing can in fact come first. We are used to writing coming from speech, as if speech came first, and was basic, and was the essence of language, whereas writing was a couple of steps removed: it represents speech, and then speech represents meaning, so writing by nature has to go through speech to get to the part where you understand what I mean. You have to hear it, and then understand it, right? So we have to agree on the sounds that writing represents, right?

Wrong. Or, to put it more clearly, it doesn't have to be that way by nature. Just because we have evolved that way, and it has been that way, doesn't mean it has to keep being that way, or it's always that way. It could be the other way around.

I will try to find examples. Chat is the key.

So I've retired, and I spend most of my time on my own personal writing which you are welcome to explore. As part of retiring I got all the genealogical files and I've been going through them, which means that some of the writing is mostly for family, mostly about old puritans and homesteaders and pioneers.

So I don't have much to say about chat these days except that 1) I think it has evolved somewhat and people are using chat as a medium in all kinds of places, and all kinds of ways; 2) I still think we should study it and give it the kind of respect we give written language and its evolution, in general, in linguistics; 3) in fact you could call this the golden age of chat, since it just became a thing what, maybe fifteen years ago, and people are using it so actively, and starting up on it, and by nature it's going to simplify itself and become more useful. And you see things like lol popping up everywhere; people are even saying it, which shows it doesn't always start with the oral and move to the written, i.e. not all written language comes from oral language.

It turns out, I have a lot to say, and I am busy chatting or txtng on my phone just like everyone else is. I am guilty of developing my own system and then kind of watching myself from above as I do whatever I can get away with in the chat universe. I will repeat that it does deserve respect, it does need to be studied, and I'm glad I put this blog here, even though I don't quite know what to do with it now; I certainly won't shut it down as deep within it, it documents the beginning of this era. It's actually a quite incredible phenomenon, as I said, and it's not going anywhere.