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Texting Isn’t Writing, It’s Fingered Speech

Texting isn’t written language. It much more closely resembles the kind of language we’ve had for so many more years: spoken language.- John McWhorter, Columbia University linguistics professor

Texting is speaking with our fingers. This rapid communication has led to abbreviated expressions such as “Lol” and emoticons like “;).”

They say to write as we speak but texting has made this advice more complicated. You can’t hand in a paper written in text language.

“Fingered speech” is a third communication medium, a symbiosis of writing and speech.

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Braille

There’s only one language for the blind.  It’s called Braille.  

Before today, I knew nothing about the history of Braille:      

Braille has its roots in the French army. In the early eighteenth century, a soldier named Charles Barbier de la Serre invented a code for military messages that could be read in the trenches at night without light; it used patterns of twelve raised dots to represent phonemes. The system was too complicated for the beleaguered soldiers to master, but when Barbier met Louis Braille, who had been blind since boyhood, the latter simplified the system into the six-dot version used ever since. Braille is not a language per se but rather a code by which other languages, from English to Japanese to Arabic…

Blind readers and writers can also see.  They activate the unused visual cortex and see their way through touch and sound.  They can even use their tongue to sense images.  

Technology makes our brains even more plastic, rewiring them until the day we die.  

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