I’ve been back in the UK for the Swanwick Writers’ Summer School; hence the lack of updates here.
Early in the week there was a conversation over breakfast about “txt-speke” and emoticons. Personally, I loathe emoticons, although I am happy to use the “interrobang” (?!) punctuation mark to clarify if I’m being sarcastic in writing. I was already doing that years ago, back in the days when I’d write ten page, handwritten letters to friends and family every week, so it’s not a computer influenced habit.
TLAs (three letter acronyms) were also discussed and someone said it was strange how some people now say “lol” instead of actually laughing. It was pointed out that “lol” crosses language boundaries as it is understood by internet users around the world, and we all sat there nodding sagely about “txt” and “l33t” being independently developed international languages that might just be successful in a way that Esperanto and Volapük never have been.
Suddenly it occurred to me that an actual laugh is understood around the world by pretty much everyone, not just by computer users.
We did, however, think that perhaps emoticons could be considered international.
The summer school is now over for another year, and people have gone their separate ways. On my journey I picked up a copy of the Metro free paper. It included a brief piece under the headline Why our :-) is a lot of ^.^ to the Chinese. And it turns out we were wrong. It seems that Eastern emoticons focus on the eyes rather than including the whole face.
Whether this is more than a superficial silly season filler, I’m not sure. But I’d like to know more.
don't confuse the narrator 
What else is there to say apart from :)?
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There is definitely something slightly disconcerting about that final question mark.
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I hope you’ll allow me to comment on your throw-away remark about Esperanto – which is used in text messages as other languages are.
To my mind, Esperanto has been a remarkable success. In little more than a century Esperanto has, with no support from governments or big business established a stable international speech community.
It has a strong presence on the net too. I really don’t know how many Esperanto speakers there are, perhaps a million world-wide, but the language is verry much in use.
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Delighted to have your comment. It was, indeed, a throwaway remark, based on my personal observation not any official figures or anything. Also on years of frustration teaching English to speakers of other languages when I felt we’d all do better to learn Esperanto. I’m glad to hear there are still people using and supporting the language.
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