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tacocat  ·  2197 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski, I have a language question

Right. An emulation. And not a perfect one. Yes, shorthand and slang and SMS abbreviations can and do influence spoken language. No. You can't just invent one.

But you can't translate all the nuances, imperfections, intonations, personally shared meaning into text for the purpose of narrative. You can come close in film and drama but your dialog still has to serve the purpose of the story you're telling and so it is not a 1:1 comparison of dialog to conversation.

The closest writer I can think of off the top of my head to do it is Raymond Carver and his characters still have to speak in a stylized fashion to a degree to serve the story. Speech and writing are not the same thing. You can't have two characters constantly stumbling over each other's statements as happens in real life or you get stilted tedious dialog. Conversation evolves in natural ways that serve no purpose beyond communication between people. You're really hard pressed to give a character a speech impediment except maybe a lisp.

Writing can't be speech. Maybe a transcript can be. I'm talking about writing with some overall plot or structure because I assumed that is what sp00ns is doing. You can emulate speech in a way that seems natural if you're good enough but it's still stylized which means that there is a barrier between the way we can speak everyday and the way we can write speech for the purposes of a narrative. Words are just tools and they have their limits as such and they have different limits based on how they are presented, whether orally or written.

Also I think I said LOL like once as a joke. I just gave in and started typing it in the last year.