UniLang

Greeklish is writing the Greek language with latin characters, commonly used in SMS, chat and other forms of ephemeral communication. It's like txt language for English and the other languages written with the latin script in the first place.
The kind of people that hate everything the younger people do is against it, the nationalists are against it (but they use it because they can't spell decently), some teachers are against it. The other half of the population sees it as a non-standard way to write which is more efficient for certain types of communication and unacceptable for others.

A month before, Ράδιο Αρβύλα (Radio Arvila), a show about funny videos and not-so-great humor/satire that has as a main target group the 15-25yos (the age group that mostly uses greeklish is also 15-25) started this Anti-Greeklish campaign, using the same arguments that the nationalists they often make fun of use.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyUEDkgs2qc
>One of the few things left in this country to be proud about, is our language.
At this moment, a whole generation writes in Greeklish non-stop. A whole generations has basically forgot how to write in Greek. And then there will be another one, and another and another...
>Except if we realize the importance of the problem... of the CRIME against the Greek language that we perform
>It may seem like a harmless habit but this habit may make the written Greek language disappear, and not only that
>We CAN break this habit. Everyone, adults and the younger alike, especially the younger, and like this we can stop that destructive to the Greek language habit, Greeklish, for good .
And it's easy, if we do it all together.
>We just have to switch the keyboard to Greek on our computers, on our mobile phones, and if we make some spellings mistakes, it doesn't matter, that's how we are going to fix them.
>GRREEKLISS NO MORR
>ONLY GRREEK. Only Greek.

There's also a longer version, were they say stuff like "the Greek language was simplified enough, let's stop here" "Greeklish is going to take over the place of Modern Greek and the latter is going to be like ancient Greek for the next generation", "no one will know Greek in few years" and so on.
And there's a clip were they make fun [url=http://youtu.be/6KODythHdtU]of Greeks that pronounce the "sh" in foreign words.

My bias is obvious. What's your view?

My view is people shouldn't worry about SMS language. It is non-standard and for private use. If this sort of language started popping up in newspapers, then they'd have a case.

In my opinion script is an important part of a language.

I have noticed that Mongolians, Arabs etc do the same




the world is more colorful with all its diversity.


That's silly.
I am not learning the languages to write with some silly transcription.

Personally, I don't use Latin letters, but I use abbreviations with the Greek alphabet (δλδ, τε/σπα, γτ etc).
Honestly, I don't see the point of standard spelling, capitalization etc in something that no one is going to read for a second time. Like the scribes in the Middle Ages used shorthand, so we do today.

I think that SMS language in English is starting to die out now that we all have dictionary input on our phones. Funnily, the only people who I know that still use SMS language are my older relatives.

As for Greeklish, I think it looks really ugly and I hope it dies out too.

the world is more colorful with all its diversity.

This, only that I think that non-standard writing (/non-standard language use in general) adds to diversity as well.

I think it's important that one can buy mobile phones in Greece with a Greek keyboard and Greek software. So that they'll have Greek characters anyway and no Latin characters.

The same for Arabic and Hebrew.

I think all these companies should try to serve their costumers better.

Writing your language in a different alphabet is just stupid - unless it's once just for fun - in my opinion. So I agree with these people.

In India, people use Roman script when writing SMS
Be it in English, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, everything is written in Latin script (and even on forums too )

I agree that only Grafos for Ellinika be used not the latin texts. Greek prevails as it's grafos prevail too. both e Glossa and e Grafos Epikratoun panta.

In India almost everything online and in sms's is in latin script. But it really hasn't affected the standard language, Hindi newspapers won't write in latin, books are not written in latin or anything academically isn't written the latin script. Arabs do the same. I honestly don't have a problem with it and I don't think it will affect the script. I think a large part of the problem is that (I dont know if this is true for Greece) is that phones don't come with the keyboard and if it would be hard to send a text to a phone that didnt have the script installed.

With Greek, multi-byte character encoding is the main problem. See, Greek alphabet on the Short Message Service takes up 2 bytes per character, effectively cutting the max SMS length to 70 characters (from 140~160 for ASCII/single-byte encodings). Add into the mix the fact that Greek words are generally longer than English's, an objective observer can see why Greeklish is still preferred for quick text communications despite Greek keyboards being available in most devices.

I wish there was a way to get English speakers to use something other than the boring old Latin alphabet en masse.

johnklepac wrote:I wish there was a way to get English speakers to use something other than the boring old Latin alphabet en masse.

Ўэл ю кан трай райтинг Инглиш ин Сириллик, but you'll have to make up your own ad hoc transliteration system. I love that Serbo-Croatian can be losslessly converted from the one script to the other.

ジャパニーズ・カタカナ・イズ・プリッテイ・クール, бат итс фар фром лослэс.

Guys, stay on topic please.

Meera wrote:In India almost everything online and in sms's is in latin script. But it really hasn't affected the standard language, Hindi newspapers won't write in latin, books are not written in latin or anything academically isn't written the latin script. Arabs do the same. I honestly don't have a problem with it and I don't think it will affect the script. I think a large part of the problem is that (I dont know if this is true for Greece) is that phones don't come with the keyboard and if it would be hard to send a text to a phone that didnt have the script installed.

Bollywood movie scripts are in Latin script, so I've heard.

Alright. Uh, yeah, I don't even see why the Greek alphabet is so problematic.

johnklepac wrote:I wish there was a way to get English speakers to use something other than the boring old Latin alphabet en masse.

ᏂᏫᎳ ᎪᏮᏫᏌᎢ ᎢᏂᎥᏕ ?
ᏝᏫᏫᏦᏕ ᏨᏌᎢᏋ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

I'm perfectly capable of inputting basic Greek characters on all of the devices I use, and that's vital to me, because I write Greek on the interwebz a lot, so I find no need to revert to Greeklish. Since I have a fervent devotion to the whole Greek language, including its most beautiful and ancient script, I'm, erm, not too fond of Greeklish. Plus, educated native Greek speakers have absolutely NO excuse not to write their language in the proper script on actual computers! However, if inputting Greek on a cellphone wouldn't be pragmatic, then I'm all for it.

johnklepac wrote:I wish there was a way to get English speakers to use something other than the boring old Latin alphabet en masse.

There's anglo-saxon futhark