230 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
opposed to vowels, judging by such vowel-less items asTXT[‘text’]
andXLNT[‘excellent’]. The process saves a great deal of time and
energy (given the awkwardness of selecting letters on the small
keypad), and in those companies which still charge by the charac-
ter (as opposed to the whole message), there is an economic value
in abbreviation, too. In a creation such asru2cnmel8r[‘Are you two
seeing me later?’], less than half the characters of the full form of the
sentence are used. Even more ingenious coded abbreviations have
been devised, especially among those for whom argotis a desirable
safeguard against unwelcome surveillance.^6
What is not clear is just how limiting this technology is, as a text
messaging system. There must be a serious limit to the amount of
information which can be conveyed using abbreviation, and a real
risk of ambiguity as soon as people try to go beyond a stock set of
social phrases. These constraints will become increasingly appar-
ent as people try to adapt the technology to grander designs, such
as Internet access. While it is possible in principle^7 to send e-mails
and download Web pages onto a WAP [‘Wireless Application Pro-
tocol’] phone screen or the display of our personal digital assistant,
several questions are still not answered (or even asked, it sometimes
appears), such as: what do we lose, informationally speaking, when
a graphically elaborate text is reduced to such a scale? To what ex-
tent will perceptual constraints affect our ability to process linguis-
tic contrastivity? What kind of linguistic ‘translation’ needs to take
place in order to ensure that the sentence structures used on the
small screen are manageable and intelligible? It seems inevitable
that sentence length will tend to be short, and that certain types of
complexsentencestructure(involvingrelativeclauses,forinstance)
will be avoided. If the loss or distortion of information is going to
be great, might this not have an effect on the desirability of the
(^6) The first small dictionaries of abbreviations began to appear in 2000, compiled by
Motorola, BT Cellnet (Genie), and others; for example, some 250 forms are listed in
the Genie SMS DXNRE [‘dictionary’]. As with all dictionaries of ‘new words’, it is likely
7 that only a small number of these neologisms will stand the test of time.
‘In principle’, because current WAP phones cannot access many Web sites, since they
operate on WML [‘Wireless Markup Language’], whereas the current language of the
Web is HTML (see p. 205). The arrival of XML [‘Extensible Markup Language’] should
remove this difficulty.