June 15, 2010
Some linguists lament that in the digital age, once-sacred grammar skills will be lost in the shorthand shuffle of texting and tweeting. But language expert David Crystal isn’t worried. In A Little Book Of Language, he writes about how kids actually do love words. The book, geared toward young people, traces the history and the future of language.
A Little Book Of Language is an echo of an earlier title, E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World. Gombrich was inspired to write the book because “a little girl wrote to him and said, ‘Please tell me about the history of everything,’ ” Crystal explains in a conversation with NPR’s Neal Conan. Crystal says he read the book years ago and found it fascinating; it inspired him to write a book that would “be of interest to young teenagers, who desperately need this kind of awareness of language,” yet would not be off-putting to older readers.
One of the most noticeable aspects of language in the present generation is the pace at which it is changing — “thanks largely to the Internet,” says Crystal. At first glance, language online might not seem like a revolution, “because most of the language you see on the Web, or in a blog, or in a tweet … is pretty familiar,” he explains.
But there are aspects of online communication that are distinct from the way we use words everywhere else. Take hypertext, for example: “When was it ever possible previously to take a piece of language and click on it, and end up somewhere else?” Crystal asks. The closest comparison is probably to a footnote, but Crystal argues that hyperlinks are more essential to online communication than footnotes in books. “The Internet could not exist without those links,” he says.
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