Sir, - John Hearne's article (Irish Times, October 29th), highlighted how new technology and the Internet have affected the English language; mentioning, for example, the creation of new words (e-mail, cyberspace) and the text message shorthand coding used on mobile phones. These developments are inevitable changes in the use of language through new communication devices and are not necessarily unwelcome.
Mr Hearne, however, did not mention how the use of punctuation and capitalization has diminished in recent years, something which I believe is a result of the influence from modern communication media. There is an increasingly common practice to write without any regard to upper-case (capital) letters, where they are necessary, i.e. for place names, etc. and punctuation marks are often ignored. In fact, the Internet is responsible for many punctuation marks having new names: a period "." is called a dot; a virgule "/" is now called a slash; and a hyphen "-" is referred to as a dash, even though a dash "-" is different from a hyphen; longer in appearance and having a separate rule of application. - Yours, etc.,
Paul Regan, Steward's House, St. Mary's Hospital, Phoenix Park, Dublin 20.