Forums of the Megaverse®

I tend to picture Techno-Can as the evolution of leetspeak.

Yes, you do.

Otherwise your post-apocalyptic Operator, when he reads an old tech manual, will have no clue what a 28 peta-FLOP, 10 Terrabyte CPU with 500 gigs RAM, blu-ray reader, remote access function, blu-tooth, 64-bit encrypted, USB2, LAN is.


Or some such...

Aigol wrote:Since Techno Can is not a spoken language do you need Speak language and literacy to use it

Nope. Just Literacy.

If you don't believe me you can gosub 400.

True, but Techno-can would be a derivitive of English and would consists primarily of acronyms and verbal shorthand. For all intents and purposes, having literacy is all that is needed.

I would say Techno-can is a fusion of leet and programmign language, both of which have some basis in english.

Techno-can is not typically spoken, except amoung certain "elite" hackers.

WonderingMind wrote:Methinks that Tinker is not correct in this instance. I can SAY "gosub 400". Logic would dictate that if Techno Can is a written language and you are proficient in it you could then speak it.

Logic might, but the book does not.

As of RUE, Techno-Can is an unspoken language. It is based on English, but it is used exclusively for technical documents and computer programming.

It is an interesting argument, if you can read a language you will usually be able to speak it. We as mostly sapient life forms cannot avoid verbalizing. It is just how we are built. On the flip side if we don’t have a word for it we can’t think about it… (If you don’t believe me just try it)

One can read computer languages such as COBOL, Java, and C++ that use English words, but it's impossible to converse in these languages. Unlike the spoken word, these languages do not use words and symbols to represent concepts, they use words and symbols to represent binary instructions. They are completely meaningless when verbalized.

Personally, I liked it better the old way. I used to imagine Techno-Can as an evolution of BASIC that could be easily spoken and understood by machines and people alike.

I'm going to go completely counter... you need to be able to speak it, but no literacy skill. In fact, you do not need a literacy skill for Spanish if you have one for English, nor for French.

You already know the alphabet, and the sounds that are made by the various letters. It's not like the Acadamie Francais has survived Ragnarok to correct your spelling of jes nais se quois.

Where does it say it's not a spoken language?

There are plenty of dead languages known to archaeologists which they can read and write, but have no idea how to speak. Just saying that a non-verbalized techno-can is hardly without precedant in the world.

It may still be considered to be a perfectly acceptible spoken language... if you are having a conversation with ARCHIE 3.