Introduction

When we study computability, we study problems in an abstract sense. For example,

1. a. Addition is the problem of returning a third number that is the sum of two given numbers.

2. b. Travelling Salesman problem (TSP) is one in which a list of distances between some number of cities are given and the person is asked to find the shortest route so that he visits each city once and returns to the start.

3. c. Halting Problem (HP) is one in which a program is given some appropriate input and it needs to be decided whether the program, when run on that input, loops forever or halts.

Problems (b) and (c) are the two problems of computer interest.

In both these problems, the statement of the problem does not give the actual values needed to provide the result but just tells what kind of objects they are. A set of actual values for a problem is called an instance of the problem (by this terminology, all homework problems done by school students are considered as instances of problems).

In all these problems an instance is required that is the input and the relationship between the input and the output is to be understood. In order to solve these problems, there are certain things one should know.

1. Can it be solved algorithmically – is there any definite procedure that solves any instance of the problem in a finite amount of time? In other words, is it computable? Not all problems are computable.

Introduction

In any language such as English, Hindi or Sanskrit, words can be combined in several ways. Naturally, some combinations form valid sentences, while others do not. The validity of a sentence is determined by the grammar of a language, which comprises a set of rules. For instance, ‘The boy prepares tea quickly’, although meaningless, is a perfectly legal sentence. In other words, the sentences in a language may be nonsensical, but they must obey the rules of grammar. The discussion in this chapter deals with only the syntax of sentence (the way the words are combined) and not with the semantics of sentences (meaning).

In the previous chapters, two different (though equivalent) methods: finite automata and regular expressions were introduced for describing languages. These methods have their own limitations in the sense that some simple languages, such as {0n1n|n ≥ 0}, cannot be described by these methods. Formal languages and grammars are widely used in connection with programming languages. During programming, we proceed with an intuitive knowledge of the languages, which leads to errors. Therefore, a precise description of the language is needed, at almost every step, which helps to understand the syntax diagrams found in programming texts. Among the ways in which programming languages can be defined precisely, grammars or context-free grammars are most widely used. This method happens to be a very powerful method and such grammars can describe certain features which have a recursive structure. Context-free-grammars (CFG) were first used in the study of human languages.

Introduction

A language is a system of signs used to communicate information to others. However, the language of computation is a combination of both english and mathematics. Fundamentally, a computer is a symbol manipulator, in the sense, that it takes sequences of symbols as inputs and manipulates them as per the program specifications. These symbols are precise and unambiguous, unlike the language of humans. The first step in communicating a problem to a machine is the design of a proper language of computation and this is the fundamental object of computability.

While discussing about languages, it is important to note two cases:

1. a. During the evaluation of an input expression (e.g.: calculator), the language of arithmetic expression handles both the input and the output communication.

2. b. In the case of web form, the language simply describes all the legitimate inputs to the field and the output is simply a binary value-Yes or No.

Thus, the problems belonging to case (a), have both input and an output language, while, those belonging to case (b), have only an input language. It is of interest to note that, from the perspective of theory of computation, any type of problem can be expressed in terms of a language recognition.

Since a language is a medium of communication, it should be given some meaning (i.e. its semantics). But much of the manipulation of symbols, strings and language could be done effectively without understanding their semantics and this is the subject of this section. In other words, the mathematical study of the theory of computation begins with the understanding of the mathematics of symbols and strings.

The first edition of Language and the Internet appeared in 2001, with the preface predicting rapid advances in the field, and thus the need for revision on a shorter time-scale than is usual in book publication. The prediction turned out to be accurate, but in unexpected ways. I had anticipated that the four domains of e-mail, chat, virtual worlds, and the Web would evolve in interesting directions; but I did not expect to have to add an additional domain to this list – and certainly not two. Yet that is what has happened. As will already be apparent from chapters 1 and 2, the activities generally referred to as blogging and instant messaging have developed a linguistic character sufficiently distinctive as to require separate treatment. And other activities, especially in Internet telephony, are becoming apparent just over the linguistic horizon.

Blogging

Blogs were already in existence when I was preparing the first edition of this book in 2000, but they had achieved little public presence, and I was not aware of them. Five years on, and the name is everywhere, along with a whole family of derived nomenclature. Those who blog, bloggers, carry out the activity of blogging, setting up a blogsite with a unique web address in order to do so. They may also locate their page within a bigger site, which takes blog feeds from many sources, and includes other (non-blog) material.

The Internet is an electronic, global, and interactive medium, and each of these properties has consequences for the kind of language found there. The most fundamental influence arises out of the electronic character of the channel. Most obviously, a user's communicative options are constrained by the nature of the hardware needed in order to gain Internet access. Thus, a set of characters on a keyboard determines productive linguistic capacity (the type of information that can be sent); and the size and configuration of the screen determines receptive linguistic capacity (the type of information that can be seen). Both sender and receiver are additionally constrained linguistically by the properties of the Internet software and hardware linking them. There are, accordingly, certain traditional linguistic activities that this medium can facilitate very well, and others that it cannot handle at all. There are also certain linguistic activities which an electronic medium allows that no other medium can achieve. How do users respond to these new pressures, and compensate linguistically?

It is important to know what the various limitations and facilitations are. A well-established axiom of communication states that users should know the strengths as well as the restrictions of their chosen medium, in relation to the uses they subject it to and the purposes they have in mind. People have strong expectations of the Internet, and established users evidently have strong feelings about how it should be used to achieve its purposes. However, it is not a straightforward relationship.

At one level, it is extremely easy to define the linguistic identity of e-mail as a variety of language; at another level, it is surprisingly difficult. The easy part lies in the fixed discourse structure of the message – a structure dictated by the mailer software which has become increasingly standardized over the past twenty years or so. Just in the same way as we can analyse the functionally distinct elements that constitute a newspaper article (in terms of headline, body copy, illustration, caption, etc.) or a scientific paper (in terms of title, authorship, abstract, introduction, methodology, etc.), so we can see in e-mails a fixed sequence of discourse elements. They will be so familiar to likely readers of this book that they need only the briefest of expositions. The difficult part, to which the bulk of this chapter relates, lies in the range of opinions about the purpose of e-mail, as a communicative medium, and about the kind of language which is the most appropriate and effective to achieve that purpose. With around 80 billion e-mails being sent every day (in 2005), a consensus seems unlikely, especially when age, sex, and cultural differences are taken into account. At the same time, it ought at least to be possible to identify what the parameters of disagreement are, to develop a sense of the range of linguistic features which any characterization of e-mail would have to include.

It seems to be a standard convention for books dealing with digital technology to begin or end by warning their readers that everything they contain is going to be soon out of date; and a linguistic perspective on the subject is no exception. Any attempt to characterize the language of the Internet, whether as a whole or with reference to one of its constituent situations, immediately runs up against the transience of the technology. The different arenas of communication described in earlier chapters will not remain as they are for long, given that the technological developments upon which they rely are constantly evolving, putting users under constant pressure to adapt their language to the demands of new contexts, and giving them fresh opportunities to interact in novel ways. The readiness with which people do adapt language to meet the needs of new situations, which is at the heart of linguistic evolution – and which the central chapters of this book clearly demonstrate – is going to be fully exploited in the next few decades, with the emergence of yet more sophisticated forms of digitally mediated communication. Nor is the population using it any more stable: it is unusual to see a disclaimer of the kind used on the imprints page of this book, for example, but there is simply no guarantee that any of the URLs [uniform resource locators] listed in my footnotes and bibliography will still exist by the time this book appears.

The uncertain linguistic identity of Netspeak, in its various Internet manifestations, is presumably why so many usage dictionaries, guides, and rule books have appeared in recent years. People seem to have begun to sense that they are dealing with something new, as far as their linguistic intuitions are concerned. They are realizing that their established knowledge, which has enabled them to survive and succeed in spoken and written linguistic encounters hitherto, is no longer enough to guarantee survival and success on the Internet. Perhaps they have encountered the ‘painful and awkward lessons’ in social interaction which Patricia Wallace talked about (p. 18). Perhaps they have been misunderstood, misperceived, or attacked (flamed) because they have failed to notice the differences between this new medium of communication and the old. David Porter sums it up this way:

‘The vision I have for the Web is about anything being potentially connected with anything.’ This observation by the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, on the first page of his biographical account, Weaving the Web (1999), provides a characterization of this element of the Internet which truly strains the notion of ‘situation’ and the accompanying concept of a ‘variety’ of Internet language. After all, language, and any language, in its entirety, is part of this ‘anything’. The Web in effect holds a mirror up to the graphic dimension of our linguistic nature. A significant amount of human visual linguistic life is already there, as well as a proportion of our vocal life. So can it be given a coherent linguistic identity?

‘Graphic’ here refers to all aspects of written (as opposed to spoken) language, including typewritten, handwritten (including calligraphic), and printed text. It includes much more than the direct visual impression of a piece of text, as presented in a particular typography and graphic design on the screen; it also includes all those features which enter into a language's orthographic system (chiefly its spelling, punctuation, and use of capital letters) as well as the distinctive features of grammar and vocabulary which identify a typically ‘written’ as opposed to a ‘spoken’ medium of communication. Most web text will inevitably be printed, given the technology generally in use.

E-mails, chatgroups, instant messages, and the Web have one thing in common: they are all electronic interactions where the subject-matter comprises – apart from the occasional aberration – real things in the real world. This chapter examines a very different scenario: electronic interaction where the subject-matter is totally imaginary. All communication between participants takes place with reference to the characters, events, and environments of a virtual world. These virtual worlds go by various names, but their most common generic designation is with the acronym: MUDs.

The term MUD has had two glosses, over the years. It originally stood for ‘multi-user dungeon’, in the popular mind reflecting the name of the leading role-play fantasy game devised in the 1970s, and still widely played, ‘Dungeons and Dragons’™. Since then, hundreds of such D&D games have been published, extending the concept from fantasy worlds to horror, science fiction, history, and other domains. All have the same orientation. They are played by groups of two or more people. One player, usually known as the ‘Game Master’, defines an imaginary environment in which the players will move and interact, the kinds of obstacles they will encounter, and the kind of powers they have. Each player creates a character and defines its attributes – size, shape, race, clothing, weapons, and so on. Adventures deal with age-old themes, such as a hunt for treasure, a battle between good and evil, or the rescuing of a person in distress.

These quotations illustrate widely held anxieties about the effect of the Internet on language and languages. The first is the subheading of a magazine article on millennial issues. The second is the headline of an article on the rise of new forms of impoliteness in communication among people using the short messaging service on their mobile phones. The third is a remark from the President of France, Jacques Chirac, commenting on the impact of the Internet on language, and especially on French. My collection of press clippings has dozens more in similar vein, all with a focus on language. The authors are always ready to acknowledge the immense technological achievement, communicative power, and social potential of the Internet; but within a few lines their tone changes, as they express their concerns. It is a distinctive genre of worry. But unlike sociologists, political commentators, economists, and others who draw attention to the dangers of the Internet with respect to such matters as pornography, intellectual property rights, privacy, security, libel, and crime, these authors are worried primarily about linguistic issues. For them, it is language in general, and individual languages in particular, which are going to end up as Internet casualties, and their specific questions raise a profusion of spectres.

In his book A brief history of the future: the origins of the Internet, John Naughton comments:

In Weaving the Web, the World Wide Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, quotes a speech made by the South African president, Thabo Mbeki:

And he adds: ‘I could not have written a better mission statement for the World Wide Web.’ Later he comments:

And again:

The Internet allows people to engage in a multi-party conversation online, either synchronously, in real time, or asynchronously, in postponed time (chapter 1). The situations in which such interactions take place have been referred to in various ways, partly reflecting the period in Internet history when they were introduced, and partly reflecting the orientation and subject-matter of the group involved, such as chatgroups, newsgroups, usergroups, chatrooms, mailing lists, discussion lists, e-conferences, and bulletin boards. In this book, I have used chatgroups as a generic term for worldwide multi-participant electronic discourse, whether real-time or not. There is a technical overlap with e-mailing: a mailing list is essentially an e-mail address which redirects a message to a set of other addresses. It is also possible for pairs of chatgroup members to arrange to communicate privately by e-mail or using some other messaging facility. However, from a linguistic point of view it is important to distinguish the chatgroup from the e-mail situation (chapter 4), in that the latter is typically between a pair of named individuals (or institutions), with message-exchanges often limited to a single transaction, and relating to a specific, pre-planned question. Chatgroups, by contrast, typically involve several people, with message-exchanges often anonymous, continuing indefinitely, and dealing with a wide and unpredictable range of issues. Although there are several points of linguistic similarity between the two situations, the linguistic features and strategies taken up by chatgroup participants are very different from those typically employed by e-mail users.