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Re: interlingua
by gerd on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @05:46
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Not really. Most developers don't use english as their primary language. You can observe this at the KDE documentation. It is difficult to write larger texts in a foreign language. So I believe at least documentation shall be written in a native language first and then translated.
English is no universal language. Not with regard to quantity of speakers (hindi, chinese), not with regard to unification as most english speking countries speak non-standard English.
It is a western language which benefits from its simple structure but it also depends on western thinking. The idea of "Universal languages" is a misconception.
BTW.. Many, many developers speak German very well, french shall learn it in school. Not every developer codes in C++ and so we don't have to rely on English. Please keep in mind that the English language barrier also inhibits participation, makes us as non-native speakers play the second fiddle. I don't see a reason why you should not document your own code in your own language. Stardivision was a German company, so they did it in German. It was not their fault but it is your problem now, get a translation then. When I go to Shanghai and do not find my way around I cannot blame it on the English skills of the Chinese. We don't need language unification in the real world, so we don't on the internet. Variety makes us strong. Using English decreases my productivity. |
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Re: interlingua
by Marcos Tolentino on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @06:50
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Half agreed.
Well, it's universal enough concerning comunication between me and you. For me, brazillian, understand your point of view.
If you had wrote in German, you could have talked about universal languages, the next soccer world cup taking place in Germany, or anything else that I would feel the same about it: nothing.
[]'s
Marcos
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Re: interlingua
by DiCkE on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @10:23
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I'm sorry but I don't agree! Programming and documentation should be done in English. The major quantity of code is in English and thus why to use it.
At least we Europeans should as much as possible stick to English!
IMHO
/DiCkE of Sweden
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Re: interlingua
by Martin on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @10:29
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This is really the most stupid thing I've ever heard.
If a language like English didn't exist everybody
here in Europe would hardly be able to communicate with
each other - like it or not.
And it's a good choice as a common language.
It uses very few letters (only A-Z) is quite short
has an extremely simple sentence structure (most of the
time the words must have a predictable order) and
no articles (only "the"), no complicated cases
and suffixes, no agglutinations, etc. The only thing
which is a bit difficult is the arbitrary spelling
but you can't have it all ;-)
It's definitely one of the easiest languages
in the world (even in absolute scientific terms). If you
don't believe me - look it up on the web.
Programs (i.e. software) can
easily move across borders thanks to the Internet.
Writing comments just in German make them impossible
to read for everyone else - simply foolish IMO.
And comments are not poems: They can be written quite
easily even if you do not know the language very well.
It's just egoism and laziness that people do not want
to write in English.
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Re: interlingua
by Corbin on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @13:01
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'the' is an article? Oh crap! I got that wrong on my grammer test yesterday...
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Re: interlingua
by blacksheep on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @02:52
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Yep, it is. But Martin forgot to mention that a/an is also an article.
I think there aren't anymore, though. In latin languages there are dozens of those.
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Re: interlingua
by Anonymous on Friday 08/Oct/2004, @10:18
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"Some" is also sometimes considered an article.
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Re: interlingua
by Eric Laffoon on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @18:00
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As someone who only speaks English this is fascinating to read. Okay, I can speak a little Spanish and order a kabap in Germany. ;-) People frequently apologize for their poor English and I think it silly because I would have no hope talking to them in so many native toungues. However my recent trip to Germany was very eye opening. Yeah it was fun and there were a lot of great people... but walking down the street, me being from the US, with people from Romania, Poland, Germany, Austria, Brazil and other places the way everybody communicated was in English. And everyone seemed to do pretty good with it.
At one point during the conference I overheard someone talking about two people from the same country where one of them had such a thick local accent the other preferred speaking in English with him.
I can only say it is really weird. I would never be so pretentious to tell people to speak English and when I was young I was told Spanish was a better candidate due to how much of the world geography spoke it and how easy it was. However the internet originated in the US and English is the default language of the internet, though localization is great.
So I think the argument for communication among developers in English is certainly reasonable, but I like it better when someone from a non English speaking country in Europe makes the case because it is without bias. ;-)
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Re: interlingua
by Johannes Wilm on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @22:52
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Yes, I agree that English is the best language to be used here. But I hope you can also understand how annoying it is that you have these uber-people walking around that have English as their "native language" and that at any given meeting will call the shots as they simply respond quicker. On top of that, their English might be just as far of from standard English as the average German/Scandinavian in the meeting, but they are just talking a "dialect", while the German/Scandinavian speaks with an "accent." Having a domain in which some other language is used is for many probably part of a dream of for once being the ones that can speak up with the others going half their usual speed.
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Re: interlingua
by ac on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @15:56
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THAT is the most stupid thing I've ever heard. If English would not have existed some other language (French for instance) would probably be the common language in Europe today. 300 years ago French was much more popular in Europe than today and English wasn't spoken at all on the continental part.
And if you look at the Internet there are chances that Chinese might become the dominant language. Better book your Chinese class now!
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Re: interlingua
by ndesmoul on Tuesday 12/Oct/2004, @03:46
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I don't think english is a so good choice. Few grammar ok but lots of exceptions. prononciation is really hard with no rules. And this langage is really well spoken by less than 6% of the world population. In fact it can only be well spoken by people for which it is the native langage. I learnt english in school for several years and my skill is still really poor (as you may already have seen).
French or spanish are not better.
What we need for a langage is a langage which is:
- easy to learn
- neutral. Today english native speakers are favorized.
- powerfull
And the good news is that such a langage exists. It's the Esperanto. see this really interesting link: http://www.geocities.com/c_piron/
This langage is spoken by 2 million peoples in the world (in Europe, china, Africa...), and is by far easier to learn.
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Re: interlingua
by Joe on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @11:33
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You are DREAMING, buddy.
English is the only way to go when you talk about a language with reach.
Indian developers speak English, and so do most German developers.
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Re: interlingua
by gerd on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @00:46
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The problem is a foreign language slows me down and limits my capacity to work. So saying everybody shall use english is as stupid as saying everybody shall use Windows. Writers of literature also write in their own language. The number of english native speakers for review is a bottleneck.
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Re: interlingua
by Daniel on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @05:21
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And the problem when you are not using english is that many other peoples are slowed down with their work.
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Re: interlingua
by Guy Forssman on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @11:39
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your fault gerd is wright, I'm happy he's coding and the ones who want to use his code should be able to undertand it. To bad they had bad education and only speak English and C#. It's only a matter of time before Spanisch will overtrown English as the most spoken language in the USA.
Everybuddy has the wright to write in his own language. I'm glad he document his code at least. Shall I go on in Dutch?
English sucks, look at what it does to the leadersof the governments of England and the USA. lol
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Re: interlingua
by lypie on Friday 08/Oct/2004, @02:28
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well i live in holland speak dutch read german
can speak bits of spanish grok french and
would love to learn korean and japanese
but still as a programmer.
dang it.
WRITE IN ENGLISH
you see the japanese using japanese in there code????
(no, we're *not* talking about comments)
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Re: interlingua
by Guy Forssman on Tuesday 16/Nov/2004, @23:35
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With all the time you put in learning these languages, I bet you don't find the time to code anymore.
If you do fine, but I guess you have to agree that the more time you put in learning to speak French, the less time you have to code.
There are only 24 houres a day.
I'm glad he's coding.
I learned that sombody who's goog in Math is less good in languages. Generally speaking this is true. So coding is a lot like math, seems to me he may put all his effort in trying to write better code and skip learning french or dutch or whatever language.
Guy Forssman
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Re: interlingua
by Anonymous Wanker on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @10:30
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<em>It is a western language which benefits from its simple structure but it also depends on western thinking. The idea of "Universal languages" is a misconception.</em>
Fair nuff, though IMHO any universal language starts with the concept that only something with a penis or vagina (or their functional equivalents) gets a gender.
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Re: interlingua
by Carlos Cesar on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @12:15
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<i>English is no universal language.</i>
Dream on, Gerd.
My native language is Spanish, I understand Italian and some French, but the only language that works all over the world is English.
German may be easier for you, but you're cutting yourself off from a vast majority of possible contributors by not communicating in English.
Like it or not, is the <i>lingua franca</i> of the age. get over it.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
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Re: interlingua
by RenoX on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @13:15
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In which language are we discussing? *Enough said*
> french shall learn it in school
Uh? Not all French speak German! Many choose Spanish instead (as I did)..
> get a translation then
OK, are you paying for it?
I work for an international company, in which language do you think we do *all* our documentation? English of course..
Very few Chinese know a foreign language true but when I went to Shangai which language did I use with the engineers, hotel's staff?
You know acting like an ostrich doesn't help.. The truth is: if a codebase is in English, it is far easier to work on it as an international OSS project, if you don't do this, you restrict quite a lot the number of possibles contributors..
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Re: interlingua: ***help offered***
by Ghans on Friday 08/Oct/2004, @07:43
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One of the main reasons to use openoffice instead of Koffice is other people working with MS-office can't read the KOffice-formats. So their are two solutions:
1 Wait till microsoft supports KOffice / OASIS formats, which is the best, but whe should stay real, this probably won't happen in the near future.
2 Try to let KOffice be able to export to those Microsoft-formats, hopefully whithout breaking any copyright and getting MS-lawyers on your neck (or back? Don't know how to say that in English!)
So, I think, instead of arguing about this language question, we could use our time better searching for someone to translate the German thing to English. If somebody sends me the code for converting those openoffice filters, which convert to and from those damn (excuse me) MS formats, I'd like to try to translate it to English. I'm only a beginning C++ programmer, so I'm afraid I can't do much about the 'messy' openoffice-source. But, hey, since the source is open, so are the German comments if I'm right, and if I can help the KOffice project translating those German comments to English (Or dutch, which is easer for me), I'd be glad to do so! (I'm unemployed due to health problems, so I've got plenty time).
Please send those german comments to sludink at hotmail dot com, and mention KOffice in the subject.
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