OWNED BY PARROT01

Or you can go all the way back to 63 A.D.

或者大家可以直接跳转回公元63年。

And there’s this poor man who doesn’t like the way people are speaking Latin.

有个可怜人不喜欢人们说拉丁语的方式。

As it happens, he was writing about what had become French.

实际上，他正在控诉的是日后形成的法语。

And so, there are always…there are always people worrying about these things

所以，总有…总会有人为这些事情担心

and the planet somehow seems to keep spinning.

但是地球似乎并没有因此停止旋转。

And so, the way I’m thinking of texting these days is

所以，我对当今的短信的看法是

that what we’re seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing,

我们正在经历一种由年轻人发展出的新的书写方式，

which they’re using alongside their ordinary writing skills,

同时他们也在使用他们正常的书面表达写作技巧，

and that means that they’re able to do two things.

这意味着他们可以两者兼修。

Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial.

补充证据就是拥有双语能力对认知的发展是有利的。

That’s also true of being bidialectal.

这在精通两种方言上同样适用。

That’s certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing.

如果你会用两种方言写作的话，这也是千真万确的。

And so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act

所以短信实际上是一个平衡之举的佐证

that young people are using today, not consciously, of course, but it’s an expansion of their linguistic repertoire.

当然，年轻人们是在无意识的这样使用短信的，但这是他们语言能力的一种扩展。

It’s very simple. If somebody from 1973 looked at what was on a dormitory message board in 1993,

非常简单。如果一个1973年的人看着1993年一个学生宿舍信息栏，

the slang would have changed a little bit since the era of “Love Story,”

俚语等习惯用语会跟“爱情故事”（70年代美国热播剧）时代有些不同，

but they would understand what was on that message board.

但是他们会看明白那个信息栏上的内容。

演讲简介：

短信的出现意味着良好书写技能的丧失吗？约翰·麦克沃特提出短信在语言学上和文化上的影响都比表面看上去的更大，而且可喜的是这些都是好消息。