For example, in English, you might type something like:
r u going out 2nite?
Instead of:
Are you going out tonight?
How does that sort of thing work when texting in a logographic language? Is it just emoji city, or can they mix and match characters to make things more compact?
And similarly, is there a formal journalistic shorthand system that gets used when jotting down comments in real-time, e.g. in China, Korea or Japan?
Thank you kindly!
First things that comes to mind: Japanese for “to laugh” is 笑う “warau”. The equivalent of “lol” then started as 笑. Over time it evolved into just the first Latin letter “wwwww”. Which kind of looks like grass. And because Japanese people love word play, logically the next step was 草 “kusa” - which means “grass” and now also “lol”.
Anyway, sentences in languages that use logograms, such as Japanese, are generally shorter since they just use one character where languages that use Latin letters need several (“Want to hang out tonight after school?” - 授業後今晩遊ぼう？). So standard text message character limits are plenty to convey A LOT of stuff in Japanese. (EDIT: See comment below about the quality of that Japanese sentence lol)
You can make sentences more compact if you want to: 今晩 遊？ is not a complete sentence but the essential parts that carry the meaning, “this evening” and “hang out”, are there so if you’re in a hurry that’ll do.
Going further back in time might be more interesting, the Japanese did some crazy shit with pagers: https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2018/02/spelling-words-using-numbers.html
Minor nitpick: 今晩 is a pretty formal term; 今夜 is used instead in everyday conversation. Also in Japanese you’d only specify the moreimportant of the two timeframes, either “tonight” (今夜/夕方) or “after school” (授業終(が)終わったら), not both
lol fuck, I knew someone would call me out on my rusty Japanese. Thank you!
It’s the internet, there’s always a bigger fish.
Note to self: gain a few pounds.
Ok, so it seems like the need to shorten messages is an English problem.
On the other hand, there are languages that use conjugations, prefixes and suffixes extensively, and that changes everything. Suddenly, you can just add a few letters to include the equivalent of a few words.