Re: A doubt...

Roedy Green wrote:
On Sat, 03 Nov 2007 14:46:05 GMT, Joshua Cranmer
<Pidgeot18@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
who said :

My opinion is that the usage of English should be limited to those that most of the denizens are familiar with--the union of the Australian, British, Canadian, and American dialects of English.

The main way people even discover that a familiar phrase is not
universally understood is to use it and have people query it.

Since an increasing percentage of the new Java programmers are from
India, I think it prudent of all of us to learn some of the
regionalisms from that part of the world. Personally I get great
delight discovering colourful new vocabulary.

A better way, I suppose, to say what I did is that I should mean the intersection and not the union, the English that is the true lingua franca of the Internet and not the regional dialects thereof. I would like to think that I have excised my regionalisms from my posts, but given how embedded they are, I am sure that some of my words must seem as foreign to Indians as the usage of `doubt' to mean `question' did to many of us.

I would draw the line at using things like text speak where people are
not even speaking the standard English of their region. There is no
need to DELIBERATELY obfuscate.

I would draw the line slightly higher: I frown upon the use of expletives and extreme slang terms, although not as much as text or l33t speak.

I have not seen people decry the use of various regionalisms from
England. I suspect an unconscious racism is at play.

As I said before, I tend to disagree with the use of regionalisms in general, although I am more used to the British regionalism than to, say, the Indian ones, so I might not notice them as much.

This is an international newsgroup. We should not be giving some
nations privileged status.

My intent had not been to do this, but my words were probably too ambiguous (or more likely, a case of me not thinking through things enough before posting). However, since it is the (unfortunate) case that most people expect English to be used, text should probably be in as proper English as possible to facilitate those who use automatic translators (and those who do use them should probably indicate the fact so that others do not chastise them when the translators are imprecise).

--
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth
.

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