[Air-l] <Introduce interesting News about Wibro>

[joshua raclaw]

Since when are typos and punctuation errors 'incorrect English'?

I don't think anything's been stigmatized.  Anyone with an email account knows
that the non-standard syntax, the varying sentence length and structure, and
some of the other features of the South Korean emails already mentioned are
just as common to spam emails as they are legit emails from non-fluent speakers
of English.  The fact that these emails came in a rush at around the same time
period and had similar FROM headers from different addresses certainly adds to
the idea that these emails were spam, but the 'Engrish' used therein had just
as much to do with that idea.  There's no point in berating the list for not
being above simple linguistic prejudices.



Joshua Raclaw - PhD student
Department of Linguistics
Culture, Language & Social Practice
University of Colorado at Boulder
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~raclaw/


Quoting Ellis Godard <ellis.godard at csun.edu>:

* Nilz mentioned:
* > or whatnot... in what seems to me not alwayss
* > correct English... maybe it is content and we did
* > not catch the latest posting fashion in the far
* > east or it is plain spam...
*
* I'm surprised that anyone on this list, particularly a German whose messages
* (even here) include typos and punctuation errors, would risk stigmatizing
* incorrect English by identifying it as an indicator of spam.
*
* I, too, offer humble apologies if the poster(s?) is/are legitimate
* inquirers. But what concerned me wasn't the citation of commercial services
* (which happens here frequently), or the incorrect Engrish (isn't AOiR trying
* to be more international?) but (a) use of the same sentences with varying
* FROM headers, and (b) the haphazard mix of perfect sentences ("people even
* in remote villages of the world can use telephone and high-speed internet
* connections at the same time") with those not quite that ("It can make some
* change a paradigm related with phone").
*
* -eg
*
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