A Fast Era, An Abbreviated World

Some of you may learned Pitman's shorthand

before, and know what the symbols above mean.

However we are not studying cryptography, and I cannot find much relation about abbreviated language.

Starting from the invention of telegraphy in 1830s, telecommunication boomed. Much information is received by each telegrapher in a single day, and the information tend to focus on instant and accuracy. Speedwriting in abbreviated alphabets could help them manage bundle of information and increase the speed.
Perhaps, the abbreviated language is a cradle of the future SMS or netspeak language style.

For the new era of 21st century, we can get information everywhere, free of charge.
For most platforms that receive information in almost synchronicly, people tend to send more, and send fast.
SMS and IM language relates to this objective, based on the quickness of abbreviation, and the laziness of people typing full forms.

Education sectors and parents may worry about the effect of abbreviated language, of ruining the proficiency of students. For english, we always see acronyms of different phrases like btw, tmr, ttyl, cu; for chinese we notice lot of homophonic characters, like lor, ar, gum, just like martian language. Although Rodney Jones' study noted that there are no direct relation between proficiency and netspeak usage, I find some negative faces in other nation.

In Japan, most of their language are composed by Chinese characters

"kanji" or Japanese syllabic characters "Hiragana" and "Katakana". As Chinese characters have a lot of writing strokes, for long decades some of them will use more hiragana to communicate with others, i.e. memorizing the sound only. However, there are lot of rhyme words in Japanese vocabulary, it may risk a confusion of using entirely syllabic characters. And recently, a news reported a large proportion of students didn't know how to write the related Chinese characters, knowing only the pronunciation and the hiragana style of a particular word.

For the study of effect of netspeaking to the language proficiency, I think the previous studies may not be accurate for the early stage of computer popularity and the netspeaking age. It still needs a washing of time, about 20 years to investigate the long term result of this information era.