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Re: interlingua
by Martin on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @10:29
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
'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
    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 Eric Laffoon on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @18:00
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
    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
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
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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