|
W∴ Balboos, GHB wrote: And I fully understand that. French is a dying language and they feel protective of it.
I was born and raised as a French speaker (in Ontario), but from my perspective, when I see Quebec's French protectionism is being enforced at the expense of teaching English, then I'm completely against it.
A parent of a good friend of mine - currently in his late 50s, early 60s, "100% pure Quebecois" - told a bunch of us that he would've loved to learn English, but because he hasn't, he's felt all his life that he had been at a disadvantage. I don't blame him.
I honestly believe that Quebec's French protectionism is purely political, and the population is smart enough to understand this is working against them. Yet they can't bring themselves to vote these people out.
|
|
|
|
|
dandy72 wrote: Yet they can't bring themselves to vote these people out.
Vote whom out? I don't think there's a major political party in Quebec that advocates getting rid of this nonsense. It's purely political all right, because it's pure pandering. Quebec voters are brain dead, no different than most other Canadian voters.
|
|
|
|
|
Greg Utas wrote: Quebec voters are brain dead, no different than most other Canadian voters.
I was going to protest, but given our current government, clearly I'm in no position to present a sensible counterargument.
|
|
|
|
|
Aren't everybody who disagees with you brain dead? Is there any reason to distinguish between them?
|
|
|
|
|
I wouldn't go quite that far... 
|
|
|
|
|
W∴ Balboos, GHB wrote: And I fully understand that. French is a dying language and they feel protective of it.
Isn't English in the same situation?
First, Chinese (Mandarin) is gaining significance in economy and industry as China's economic strength is increasing. They have the benfit of the iconic written language being common to a great variety of spoken languages. Other Asian languages also have an increasing impact - most certainy on the internet, 30 years ago almost exclusively English, today both Asian and other languages make an increasing impact.
Second, the English language, as a result of being used all over the world, is experiencing a babelization. Even for the "established" variants: If I haven't been speaking with Scots for a few months, it takes me a day or two to be re-accustomed to their variant of English. For Africans, it can take me a week. For most Far East people, I never get used to their so-called English, but must be constantly on 100% concentration to understand what they are talking about. People from India are in the middle between for me: For those I knew well, I have learned their special way of using the language. With others, I struggle.
My impression is that English has gone some way on the path to dissolve as a language. It has already gone so far that any English attempt to teach the world "the proper language" is futile. The Americans have been ecessively eager to spread the comercialism and socalled "freedom" ideals, completely ignoring cultural aspects such as language. Besides, American "freedom" ideals would never permit any control or management of such a personal thing as your language. The result of that is that every population group speaks its own "English" language - related, yet a different language. This includes "extreme" slang, leetspeak and other tribe languages.
English proponents are not really doing much seriously to keep their language from dwindling away. They trust that because it is so important today, it will reamain so forever. Hundred years ago, Frehch was the "lingo franco", the common language of the diplomats. Fifty years ago, the "International Communication Union", ITU, was recongized as CCITT, "Comité Consultatif International Téléphonique et Télégraphique", until 1993. At least into the 1980s, if you applied for a job in the Norwegian Postal Service, you had to demonstrate a basic familiarity with French - "Par avion" wasn't fully replaced by "Air mail" until the 1990s.
French dwindled away as The language among diplomats, the language for international standardization, the international postal service language... in spite of the French Academy's work to keep it unambiguos and well defined. The complete abscence of such efforts for the English language makes it a lot more vulnurable. I wouldn't be at all surprised if English fifty years from now are no more essential than French is today.
The French have always been provocative of their language. They certainly were, fifty years ago. The problem with English is that the USAnians, in their self-confidence, do not feel any need to be provocative of it. That may turn out to essential to the future of English as a world language.
|
|
|
|
|
Basically, you have it all backwards in your conclusion.
English has become dominant for precisely the reason you say it will "dwindle away": it readily embraces words from other languages and grows. It is often said that the international language of science is broken English - and my personal experience causes me to agree.
It grows - it is a living breathing thing - certainly compared to a static corpse like French. All that's left of the language is their ego.
As for Asian languages - the major dominant 'contender' is Mandarin. It has the problem in that it is not an alphabetic language. Over the comparatively recent centuries there have even been internal wars over switching over to an alphabetic writing system. Oddly enough, their current form of government could just mandate it but, for whatever reason, has not.
But know ye this!
Adaption is necessary for survival.
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
modified 5-Mar-20 9:36am.
|
|
|
|
|
It sounds like you have learned English as a second language. ... Or, wait a second, maybe I got that wrong
If you seriously believe that all other languages than English are static, unchanging, "corpses" as you phrase it, then you are living inside a bubble with no contact with reality (outside of your English-bubble). All languages develop.
Some people's gardens grow wild with whatever wants to grow there. Other people cultivate their garden, planting in straight rows side by side, to simplify weeding, and give each kind of plant the care and nutrition that serves that plant best.
Some languages are being cultivated more than others. In some cases, the regularity and control may be limiting to the development of the language (I'd say that Esperanto is somewhat in that direction). But like a totally wild, uncontrolled growth of all sorts of weeds may look you garden look green and fertile, but it really doesn't produce very much compared to a cultivated garden, so will a carefully cultivated language produce lots of valuable results. The major reason why French is not as important globally as it once was is not that the language is being cultivated, but rather that France does not drop as many bombs, does not send as many invading soldiers, do not force their country's economic instutions, religious, moral and political ideas onto other nations.
I don't think any country's population choose to learn English because it is a dynamic and flexible, or whatever positive term you would want, language, but simply because they have to in order to communicate with the forces in power. Like CCC and MS and the Linux community, the movie industry, the economic institutions. And in some cases, the invading soldiers.
The funny thing when you refer to the Chinese ideograms as a problem, is that we are most certainly moving in that direction in all Western languages. We just refer to them as smileys or emoticons or emojis, or sometimes as e.g. "the save symbol", icons, button faces, ... What is the percentage of Americans who read an entire novel last year? What is the number of Americans who watched at least ten movies last year?
The letter and word are loosing terrain, being replaced by graphic symbols, not that unlike Chinese ideograms.
Your idea about Mandarin being "the major dominant contenter", almost as if we can ignore the rest, is a somewhat naive approach to Asian languages. As is your idea that "their current form of government could just mandate it". Here we are talking about a culture several thousand years old; noone can simply "mandate" a major change such as replacing ideograms with a letter system.
Imagine some omnipoitent president for life "mandating" that every English word should be replaced by an ideogram - how realistic would that be? What amount of force would that require? Switching the one way is no easier than switching the other way. Both require loads of books, art, signs, information folders, .... to be discarded. Millons of teachers to be trained. Billions, maybe trillions of document pages to be rewritten in the new format. You may of course "mandate" it, but realizing it is a completely different game.
I suppose you know the poem "English is tough stuff" - a nice text to read out aloud. I presented it to one US lady who had no problems at all reading it correctly. ("Everybody else" has!) It turned out that in her childhood, she never learned to read the letters. They related to the entire word, as an ideograph. Gradually, when they had learned to read fluently, it was pointed out to them that this word symbol has some similarity to that other word symbol, and if you listen to the way we say it, they have similarities in sound as well! So ideographs exist in English as well, if done in a proper manner!
|
|
|
|
|
Perhaps you best learn to read what is actually written (per static and dying languages) as only one language is mentioned - and it in no way refers to Member 7989122 wrote: If you seriously believe that all other languages than English are static, unchanging, "corpses"
your imaginings - what you'd want to read to make it easy to criticize.
Basically almost all you wrote in your reply is similarly "misinformed" (put politely).
Your emoji comparison to an entire complex language is absurd. Furthermore, a language derived from caricatures suffers from large numbers of "readers" who've no clue what a symbol means 'they ain't all smiley faces' "not that unlike" - what an absurd argument!
Your dragging politics (e.g., 'bombing' into this) perhaps underlies your real motivation. However, lets just consider what your darling French are really like: they're the ones who are constantly limiting freedoms (no head scarfs, no kippas, no this - no that - even an attempt at regulating beachwear so no one "frumps" their beaches!). Freedom of speech/press . . . but you can only use the words they let you use. Sounds to me like a growingly oppressive regime.
About all they've got left in life is going on strike out of fear of having to work for a living.
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
|
|
|
|
|
Both in Norwegian and Swedish: Which English terms are replaced by local ones, which are not, seems quite random. Neither language has come up with some replacement for "embedded" - several propsals have failed to break through. For some reason, "skyen" (the cloud), a direct translation but a completely different word, was immediatly accepted. "Compiler" was replaced by the Norwagization "kompilator", while "interface" was replaced by "grensesnitt" which is really an all new word: "border cut" - both halves are old an well known, but the combination is a new word.
In Norwegian, some terms were initially frowned upon as "anglisisms", until it was understood that they are really words from the Norse language. In my childhood, "bag" was among these, but "baggin" is Norse - we just have forgotten it for a few hundred years. In east Norway dialects, the computer "printer" was first rejected, you should call it a "skriver" (writer). But West Norway dialects always referred to printed matter as "prent", a book/newspaper printer as a "prentar". So today, "printer" is a fully accepted term.
Even the worlds best known four-letter-word (... returning to the first post in this thread), "fokka" is a Norse verb for rythmically hammering, in particular when done by the male in intimate activities. So although lots of Norwegians think they use English terms when swearing, they really are using Norse ones!
Up until 20-30 years ago, Icelanders made great efforts to keep their language "clean". There was a weekly radio program for discussing "Icelandic style" terms for all sorts of new concepts. My favorite is "ferdatölva": "Ferda" is travel, a "volva" is a (semi-mythological) truthsayer, which combined with "tall", numbers, make her a "number truthsayer". A traveling number-truthsayer is what we call a "laptop". I would actually prefer "ferdatolva"
(Icelanders I meet today tell that today, they have more or less broken in to the pressure, there is no longer the same force to keep the language clean.)
I don't think there is any way you could be fined in Norway for using a "non-Norwegian" term; we have no "language police" nor "pure language" laws. You could be fined (or even imprisoned) for writing immoral texts, not based on single words but on the text as a whole. When was the last time that happened? 50+ years ago, Jens Bjørneboe with "Uten en tråd"?
(Now I am talking about publicised text - we have had a few cases in recent years where some people have written down their fantasies and shown to friends, and those friends have taken it to the police to report on the the author's fantasies. "Well, I've got a new set of friends now", as Peter Shieckele says in one of his recordings. We don't have a thought police in this country, as long as you do not reveal your thoughts to your friends...)
|
|
|
|
|
Apparently some recent update made the horizontal scrollbar "auto-hide".
So first you have to mouse-hover near it. But then the "resize window" up/down arrow shows up. It appears there is about a 2 pixel high region near the top of the horizontal scrollbar that is actually useable.
I remember when these hidden scrollbars showed up in Ubuntu. Pretty much the reason I ditched Ubuntu. Such a time waster. Move mouse, hover, wait, click, oops, moved mouse when clicked, repeat.
|
|
|
|
|
They're trying to train you to break lines at a reasonable location so that you don't need horizontal scroll bars.
|
|
|
|
|
Or just resize your window across three monitors: when your editor is 5000 pixels wide, you won't need a scroll bar. 
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
|
|
|
|
|
Won't work for me. My wife took over my large desk, so I use my laptop on a little one! She has two monitors, so I'll thank you not to give her any ideas! 
|
|
|
|
|
Why don't you just disable the scrollbar auto-hide? Or am I missing something?
It goes without saying
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
