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multiplicity_archives2005-06-29 11:05 am
shandra.livejournal.com) wrote in multiplicity_archives2005-06-29 11:05 am
Entry tags:
Lilspeak vs. age-appropriate language
This is probably beating a dead horse a little but I don't really like to see people feel their kids are being negated by a discussion about Lilspeak.
So I just wanted to distinguish a bit between bad spelling/grammar and Lilspeak, apart from the rant. And say why we decided to discourage our kids from learning or using it.
Children acquire language in a fairly specific pattern. This article from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders shows some of them. People who have worked in special ed (I did, although not at a very high level) know that quite often it's possible to identify a physical or neurological learning difficulty simply by looking at kids' written mistakes. Mistakes that transpose (flip) letters are one kind, mistakes that get the wrong sounds are another kind, etc. Not all spelling mistakes have a reason - that's why you get *really weird* spellings sometimes, that aren't phonetic - but that in itself demonstrates a clear stage that the child is at.
Why Lilspeak is controversial is that often the way it is written on the 'net doesn't follow the rules of language acquisition. It's not just a case of delayed development - someone in a multiple system writing like they're 5 when they're 7 - it's that the errors common in Lilspeak are not commonly made child grammatical errors. Also, as people have noted, quite often the errors are superficial - phonetic spelling, for example - while the underlying verb/tense/clause construction is fine (and quite advanced).
Now the reasons for this could be a zillion - overlapping adult consciousnesses, absorbing social/grammar/spelling rules on the net (kids are good at this - in fact that's how they absorb language), whatever. In a way Lilspeak is more like a pidgin language - a strange hybrid between how children "sound" inside and the adults hearing it. Functionally kids who use it have learned a new language.
But why it can be controversial is that anyone that is aware of how kids acquire language will not perceive Lilspeak as a child language. It may make them more suspicious and less accepting of system kids. It may in rare cases open a system child who /is/ trying to communicate to ridicule or skepticism that isn't necessary. And as a group concern (which I don't worry about too much, but it is there) it can make the typing look "faked" and "not really a kid" to anyone who's trying to prove that for whatever reason.
You could say to your average person Lilspeak probably looks the same as actual poor spelling, but I myself think anyone sensitive to language patterns will pick up on the bad-spelling-but-complex-sentences dissonance, on some level. And we have generally found that if people feel something is 'off' they get closed-minded pretty fast.
As long as one's system kids only talk to other multiple systems' kids, it won't be an issue if that's the dialect they choose to acquire and learn - so no harm, no foul in that sense. But if one's looking at a broader audience for system kids to communicate with, it may cause problems.
I don't think being aware of this is elite or snobby. I don't even think it means "down with Lilspeak!" Neither does it mean "down with bad spelling!"
I'm just saying, sometimes the Lilspeak hides the realness of the child rather than communicating that reality. And hopefully that information can be useful to people in making their own decisions about it.
So I just wanted to distinguish a bit between bad spelling/grammar and Lilspeak, apart from the rant. And say why we decided to discourage our kids from learning or using it.
Children acquire language in a fairly specific pattern. This article from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders shows some of them. People who have worked in special ed (I did, although not at a very high level) know that quite often it's possible to identify a physical or neurological learning difficulty simply by looking at kids' written mistakes. Mistakes that transpose (flip) letters are one kind, mistakes that get the wrong sounds are another kind, etc. Not all spelling mistakes have a reason - that's why you get *really weird* spellings sometimes, that aren't phonetic - but that in itself demonstrates a clear stage that the child is at.
Why Lilspeak is controversial is that often the way it is written on the 'net doesn't follow the rules of language acquisition. It's not just a case of delayed development - someone in a multiple system writing like they're 5 when they're 7 - it's that the errors common in Lilspeak are not commonly made child grammatical errors. Also, as people have noted, quite often the errors are superficial - phonetic spelling, for example - while the underlying verb/tense/clause construction is fine (and quite advanced).
Now the reasons for this could be a zillion - overlapping adult consciousnesses, absorbing social/grammar/spelling rules on the net (kids are good at this - in fact that's how they absorb language), whatever. In a way Lilspeak is more like a pidgin language - a strange hybrid between how children "sound" inside and the adults hearing it. Functionally kids who use it have learned a new language.
But why it can be controversial is that anyone that is aware of how kids acquire language will not perceive Lilspeak as a child language. It may make them more suspicious and less accepting of system kids. It may in rare cases open a system child who /is/ trying to communicate to ridicule or skepticism that isn't necessary. And as a group concern (which I don't worry about too much, but it is there) it can make the typing look "faked" and "not really a kid" to anyone who's trying to prove that for whatever reason.
You could say to your average person Lilspeak probably looks the same as actual poor spelling, but I myself think anyone sensitive to language patterns will pick up on the bad-spelling-but-complex-sentences dissonance, on some level. And we have generally found that if people feel something is 'off' they get closed-minded pretty fast.
As long as one's system kids only talk to other multiple systems' kids, it won't be an issue if that's the dialect they choose to acquire and learn - so no harm, no foul in that sense. But if one's looking at a broader audience for system kids to communicate with, it may cause problems.
I don't think being aware of this is elite or snobby. I don't even think it means "down with Lilspeak!" Neither does it mean "down with bad spelling!"
I'm just saying, sometimes the Lilspeak hides the realness of the child rather than communicating that reality. And hopefully that information can be useful to people in making their own decisions about it.
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And we (the system adults) have to admit that yeah, we do get suspicious of kids that use Lilspeak, because of the oddball misspellings combined with that advanced grammar thing you pointed out. Also, those of us that have been about equal age with the body as it grew (like, say, me, and Setsu later on) didn't write that way at all, because we always wrote in emulation of our favorite book authors. Cira's a book-addict too, so maybe it's a thing that kids don't find as important if they prefer television or video games.
I also want to point out that way back in the early days of the internet, like 1995, spelling was a lot better in general than it was now. I remember being on IRC channels using RPI campus dial-up at 12, and everybody used complete sentences, punctuation, etc., sparsely sprinkled with the classic acronyms (LOL, ROFL, and IMHO, mostly). I remember one person would even use periods in the acronyms, "L.O.L." instead of "LOL" for instance. Chats were also slower, more like the speed of IM conversations are today, but with several people talking instead of two. It kind of stayed that way for a while, until there were suddenly a WHOLE LOT more people. I think it's 'cause they started getting access from places other than colleges (AOL, Prodigy, etc.). Or maybe it was when Mosaic started getting packaged with services. I dunno.
Uh, anyway, I think I meandered a bit there, but my point was going to be that maybe it's just a Modern Internet thing. Did littles talk in Lilspeak way back when in Usenet lists, in emails, in IRC channels? How did they sound/type back when mIRC was prettier than Lynx? Before AOL's big service premiere ad campaign? Maybe it's a social thing, like you were getting into there-- a dialect that kids take on in order to fit in, a pigdin resulting from so many people coming together and trying to speak in a common language, even if they have to invent it themselves.
Heck, that's no different from English, really. God only knows how "stupid" primary English speakers must've looked to Norman nobility. Smart people spoke French and wrote in Latin. Duuuuh. And English was written purely phonetically for centuries until someone cobbled together the first dictionary-- that's why scholars have been able to figure out what Elizabethan English sounded like from Shakespeare's plays (which have phonetic spelling), and others have figured out what 1600s London dialect Samuel Pepys spoke based on his diary.
...good grief, I'm rehashing Duckie's lectures now. HELP I'M BECOMING A WATERFOWL
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That's about how we were-- Ruka says that copying is an essential part of the evolution of a writer, and any writer who claims they don't is lying. ;) We liked TV/video games/etc, but were also inclined to using good spelling/grammar when we wrote about them because we wanted to honour the things we liked.
What I've always said is that when you come across someone who should be old enough to know better using atrocious spelling and grammar, take a look at how their parents write-- or their teachers. Sad as it is, we've had some teachers who didn't know proper grammar or the correct spelling of some basic words (and marked us wrong for spelling them correctly).
We too remember at least a somewhat higher standard of writing (and of politeness) on Usenet et al back when we first got online. I think a lot of it is just the increasing availability of the Internet-- it lost that sense of community it had in the beginning.
Of course, when we first got online, we weren't thinking of ourselves as multiple and so didn't seek out any of the websites, messageboards, etc. However, we have been told by various systems that 'lilspeak' evolved over the mid-90s-- it became more and more incoherent as things went on. I haven't ever seen it used outside the Internet (of course, I haven't seen the word 'littles' used outside the Internet either-- the youngest person we have who's interested in using the computer is Susan, who is 8; she says that she is not little, and that it's okay for people to call her a kid or a child, but never a little.)
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I've been gaming since the days of the Atari and the Commodore 64, so yeah, I know how that is. At the same time, though, I had experience with text adventure games, and writing my own games and widgets in Pascal and other early programming languages, and in text games and programming, spelling and grammar can be the difference between being stuck with endless error messages and blazing through in a cloud of FUN. So there's that to be considered too. Heck, that's how come I remember the spelling for "procedure" at 9. I kept spelling it with two "e"s and the compiler would sputter over it. But I went years before learning that "counterfeit" ended f-e-i-t and not f-i-t... and as for grammar, you can't really make a good madlibs story program without knowing your grammar.
I wonder if there are any floppy backups of those old Pascal programs. If I found them, I could re-work/re-word them into Javascript or Z-Code for the heck of it. That'd be kind of fun.
I think a lot of it is just the increasing availability of the Internet-- it lost that sense of community it had in the beginning.
Yeah, I tend to refer to what happened as the "AOL Boom", because I think AOL made it easier for a lot of people to get online who might never have considered it otherwise. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but it's like the difference between a tiny private school and a huge public school, y'know?
...wait, that would explain so much about the internet. Haha, crap, why didn't I think of that sooner?
it's okay for people to call her a kid or a child, but never a little.
Cira tolerates the term "little" because she's short, and nobody's used it to dismiss her or anything like that (like, say, "Oh, you wouldn't know, you're too little"-- I HATED THAT AS A KID, RARRRR). But then she asks questions like, "Why aren't short adult people called littles too? They're as little as I am, right?" And then we all go buhhhhhh until Bao comes up with a really funny but totally bullshit answer that Nomiya will kick his ass over.
...you know, come to think of it, we're terrible bad influences. She's going to grow up believing that lawyers are born as homonculi from dented cans of pea soup or something at this rate. (Quick! We have to find an Other World where there's intelligent botulism, STAT! ;)
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Do you mean to tell me that they are not??? But
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Grr. Stupid people.
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That's a pretty assy thing for someone to do, really, to a little kid or anybody. I mean, what the hell? Yelling at someone over candy? There are probably stupider things to yell at someone over, but I'll bet it's a short list.
Personally speaking, I think avoiding being told that you're not real by adopting certain behaviors is a wasted effort. We're pretty much resigned right now to the fact that anything we do, adaptive or otherwise, is going to be used as evidence against us in a court of public opinion, and it doesn't take too much imagination to believe that's the case for other people too. I mean, if you admit to being a multiple system, you've already got a bunch of singlets who don't know you but will use every minor personal detail to try and prove you're making it all up for attention.
The sad fact is that a lot of multiple systems seem to end up doing that too, and I sure as hell don't know why, as I really don't care enough about Lilspeak to see why it should matter so much whether a kid uses it or not. I think it's dumb and hard to read, yeah, but that's personal opinion, and it doesn't reflect on what I think of the kid using it, even if the grammar does set off certain alarms.
Generally, when I run into really thick Lilspeak, the scenario my brain comes up with is that of an adult member influencing the typing to be more 'cute', not that of a scheming con-artist or something like that. I wonder how much of the Lilspeak came from the kid, and how much came from a well-meaning but old-fashioned 'typist'. It's annoyance over the difficulty of reading the phonetic spelling (Hooked on Phonics DID NOT work for me) and suspicion about the level of alteration and censorship due to the possibility of a editor-middleman.
Plus, and I might get flamed the heck out of me for this one, Asperger's makes understanding the subtext of normal speech hard enough. Lilspeak can sometimes totally blank out what little understanding I have of context-specific "unspoken rules of socialization" because then I have no clue what rules apply. (e.g., "Is this kid joking or being serious? I can't tell! If an adult was saying this, it'd probably be a joke, but this kid isn't tossing any Joke Markers...") This probably sounds idiotic, but that part of the Lilspeak misunderstanding might be improved by liberal use of non-ironic smilies. (Smilies are useful and only dumb when used to muddy up the waters instead of clearing them. That's my take, anyway. I think they ought to be used on all ambiguous statements in colloquial use. But I'm just a freak, anyway.)
So, in conclusion, people who point-blank tell a kid they're not real because they use or don't use Lilspeak are jerks. But Lilspeak does cause communication problems of a fundamental sort with people who aren't fluent in it, and kids should know that too before they choose it as a permanent way of writing online.