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tone indicators
Apr. 16th, 2023 06:25 amvia https://ift.tt/3fabOLe
I reblogged this post https://www.tumblr.com/bomberqueen17/714697686059827200 without adding any commentary bc queue and not a lot of computer time lately but like okay here’s the thing about tone indicators:
they’re yet another in-group set of coded speech. like an inside joke, or a meme, or a conlang. if you are in a group that uses them, they’re great and perfectly comprehensible.
but if you don’t happen to have come from inside a group that uses them, they are exactly as exclusionary as any other heavy jargon or inside joke or acronym. I mean have you ever listened to soldiers talk? The US Army communicates in heavily jargon-ified speech, liberally laden with acronyms, so much so that it’s a self-referential joke to make up obscene or deliberately-obfuscated ones to slip into official reports since the sorts of people who’d kick up a fuss about obscene language won’t understand them.
It is exactly the same thing. Except that’s exclusionary on purpose, and tone indicators are exclusionary in effect but tout themselves as inclusionary.
So if I, an outsider to this, am reading along, and after a sentence, there’s a / and then between one and three letters, that is not enough information for me to use to look it up.
This is absolutely inaccessible if you are not alreadhy in the group that uses it.
I wouldn’t mind if the people who used them were just like ‘oh ha sorry jargon, i’ll try to explain if it’s not clear, sorry i forget you guys don’t know them’ just like any other inside joke or meme or whatever.
But I was in a discussion with someone on a Discord and when I was puzzled about them including these weird slash-acronyms after their statements they were like oh how nice for you that you’re not neurodivergent and don’t need to use these.
Uh no. The opposite actually. I’m the kind of neurodivergent that needs context. I handle being excluded from conversations very poorly. And that’s where I get pissed off, that people seem to be holding these up as the new be-all end-all of Finally Solving The Problem Of Ambiguous Tones In Social Interaction. The hell you are, kids. They’re just another layer, and I’d say the worst one yet, out of many many many attempts to solve this exact problem. They are fundamentally inaccessible. Don’t mistake the fact that you learned them (somewhere, in some context inaccessible to me) for them actually being universal.
Considered against the many different solutions that have been offered since text-only speech was invented, tone indicators stack up as among the very least-accessible of the lot, since they contain so little context in and of themselves– if a key is not provided then they’re totally inaccessible, and are exceptionally difficult for non-native English speakers, and in general require so much memorization or cross-referencing as to be prohibitively hostile to outsiders.
And that’s fine, if what your'e doing is just meant for talking to your friends. But don’t come into my conversations and berate me for not having memorized whatever incomprehensible set of acronyms you’ve newly-decided are the new universal truth. And what drives me the most insane is how many of these acronyms someone has now decided to assign a whole new meaning to are acronyms that are well-known and already existed and are in heavy use. So if you try to look them up guess what you get! is it gonna be the newly-created version or the one that’s been in use for fifty to seventy-five years??
For one, P.O.S. has had a specific meaning in written and spoken English for a really damn long time https://7esl.com/pos/ and if you call me a piece of shit in the actual language I speak I am absolutely not going to interpret your conlang as having intended something nice. (YES REALLY THEY’RE USING THAT ONE TRY TO GUESS WHAT IT MEANS. NO. NO! I know. Fuck! That’s wild. Absolutely the fuck not.) (Your picture was not posted)
