Internet English 网络英语
[audio]http://file.24en.com/bbc/tae/assets_8113206/bbc_tae_296_internet_english_101222_tae_296_internet_english_audio_au_bb.mp3[/audio]Twenty years ago this week the British inventor Tim Berners-Lee created the world’s first webpage. It is worth pausing to consider the extraordinary impact that his invention has had on the English language.
Everyday words like google, [b]unfriend[/b] and [b]app[/b] simply didn't exist in 1990.
Even more words have had unexpected shifts in meaning in those two decades. If you had mentioned tweeting to an English-speaker a few years ago, he would have assumed you were talking about bird noises, not the use of the [b]microblogging[/b] site Twitter.
Long ago, if someone lived online, it didn't mean they spent [b]every waking minute[/b] on the internet, but that they travelled around with the rail network.
And wireless still means, to anyone [b]of a certain age[/b], a radio - not the system for [b]retrieving[/b] internet pages without wires.
"The internet is an amazing [b]medium[/b] for languages," said David Crystal, honorary professor of [b]linguistics[/b] at the University of Bangor. "Language itself changes slowly but the internet has [b]speeded up[/b] the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."
English is a remarkably [b]inclusive[/b] language, and if words continue to be used for at least five years they generally [b]end up[/b] in the Oxford English Dictionary.[img=226,170]http://www.24en.com/d/file/bbc/bbc2/2010-12-23/03d421ae4c2f8fcb6684c5ac529e9e80.jpg[/img] [p=30, 2, left]Grammatically correct? An LOLcat.
But less [b]accepted[/b] are the peculiar [b]dialects[/b] that have [b]sprung up[/b] amongst some users. For example, 'LOLcat' is a [b]phonetic[/b], grammatically-incorrect [b]caption[/b] that [b]accompanies[/b] a picture of a cat, like "I'm in ur bed zleeping".
In an article called "Cats Can Has Grammar" the [b]blogger[/b] Anil Dash referred to LOLcat as "[b]kitty [/b][b]pidgin[/b]". But does something like LOLcat have the [b]staying power[/b] to become an accepted form of English?
Not according to Professor Crystal. "They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people - thousands rather than millions. Will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised."[/p]
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