What is the language "British"?

Gene Heskett gene.heskett at verizon.net
Tue Aug 29 11:06:42 UTC 2006


On Tuesday 29 August 2006 03:24, Tim wrote:
>On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 22:56 -0400, William Case wrote:
>> Some day it would be interesting and fun to get comments on why each
>> of these forms of English is needed in a computer.
>
>Because when you use your computer, you want it to use your language,
>not someone else's.  Second to that annoyance, you see kids in your
>country incorrectly spelling things, because they're using the language
>of another country, learning it from their computer.
>
>Some time ago our newspapers started using American spelling, which *is*
>"incorrect" to do in Australia.  One reason given was that it was a
>complete pain trying to work around the American spell checker.

Humm, if it results in less miss-understandings between the peoples by 
pushing the people toward a common ground for language usage, I can't see 
as its an undesirable effect.  We can all argue about color/colour, 
honor/honour, but we all know those meanings well.  Local dialects of a 
language are ok as long as they don't drift too far and result in errors 
due to miss-understanding the lexical and pronunciation nuances of the 
locality.

Winston C. was right, but we shouldn't get so carried away with our 
so-called local rights as to cause a general deterioration in 
understanding.

In the above case, I believe there are English(GB) versions of the spell 
checkers available, so why don't they use them?  OTOH, the Aussies do have 
a vernacular thats uniquely Australion, so maybe it would be best for the 
GB version of the spell checker to be forked/updated to include commonly 
used, Aussie unique words and phrases & call it the English(AU) version.

>--
>(Currently running FC4, occasionally trying FC5.)
>
>Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
>I read messages from the public lists.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.




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