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Re: a few short notes

2004-02-03 09:02:51

So, if this was the Chinese inventing a system, are you xenophobic enough to 
not be bothered that they don't let you understand it?

The fact that standards must be produced in English, is in my opinion a 
flawed aspect of the process. We should be taking an international view of 
this and taking lessons from the UN in respect to translation into the 
languages over 90% of the world's population understands: English, French, 
Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian.

The fact that your email was written solely in English, rather than
including simultaneous ("multipart/alternative") translations into
French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian, in the context of a
*public* mailing list on the topic of an *international* NG email
system, strongly suggests you're a hypocrite who throws insults
("xenophobic") around at anyone who points out the pink elephant in
your little world.

Seriously, dude, get over yourself.  English is the "lingua franca" of
the Internet; I had to learn it to communicate in the world of
computing, so does most everyone else, and NG email is not going to
change that.  Never mind the Chinese; if the Japanese had fulfilled
the promise to deliver 4th-generation (or was it 5th-generation?)
computing languages back in the late '80s, it was all in Japanese, it
was fully interconnected, and American businesses started switching to
it, I would have either a) learned Japanese, along with the new
system, or b) conceded that market to those who did.  Fact is, lots of
English-speaking computer geeks *were* studying Japanese back then, as
a means to get in on the "ground floor" of the coming Japanese
technological tide -- see the movie "Die Hard" to get an idea of how
Hollywood viewed that inevitability.

(The fact that English is my native language is irrelevant.  First, my
communication skills were lousy, even though my computing skills were
pretty good; as a result, when I was about 18 years old, I failed to
clearly explain a design idea I had that was superior to the
alternative proposed by a top engineer in the firm, so the firm chose
his approach, which, naturally, failed to come to fruition.  Three
years later I discovered his confusion about how my approach would
work stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding, on his part, about
the capabilities of the networking component of that firm's operating
system; I realized that better communication and presentation skills
would have helped me discover and deal with that earlier, so I took an
opportunity that came up a few months later to switch to a career in
technical writing to fix that.  Second, I'm quite aware English as a
language, and Latin as an alphabet, has all sorts of problems, some
with especially serious implications for the man/machine interface;
offhand, I'd prefer modern Indonesian as a language, with its
consistent rules of pronounciation, as just one example.  So I'm not
even arguing that English is the "best" choice in an "ideal" world
where everyone is starting on a level playing field; it's largely due
to English being the "lingua franca" of computing that we're so
*collectively* far behind the potential for computers to interact with
us via audio, aka speech.)

-- 
James Craig Burley
Software Craftsperson
<http://www.jcb-sc.com>
--Fix qmail's qmail-smtpd so it doesn't crash on a big header line:--
                   <http://www.qmail.org/netqmail/>


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