What is en_US ?

Thompson Freeman tfreeman at intel.digichem.net
Thu Jun 14 12:41:34 UTC 2007


On 06/13/2007 09:16:26 PM, Tim wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-06-13 at 09:37 -0700, Tim Alberts wrote:
> > Here's a thought, how about quit making up new languages and start
> > combining others.
> 
> Well, English already does that.  I don't know if others adopt words
> from other languages, like it does.  I wasn't aware of there actually
> being new languages developed, other than colloquial jargon.
> 
> > It's a global society and it'd sure be nice if we all spoke the
> same
> > language.  Being American I vote for English (because I don't want
> to
> > learn something new), but honestly, I don't care if it's
> > Spanish, French, Chinese, Russion, Arabic, pig latin, or something
> > completely new (that is efficient and makes sense).
> 
> Sure it'd be nice, but I can't see it happening.  It's all politics.
> It's going to be years, maybe centuries, if ever, before we all speak
> human.  ;-)

I can see the attraction of one species wide language. I'm not sure  
that such a situation is necessarily all that good. From what I've  
understood (and I'm not a student of languages at all - barely handle  
'merican thank you), your birth tongue has a lot to do with how you  
conceptualize the world.  My understanding is that Japanese is  
excellent at indicating relative social standing. The Inuit with twenty  
something words for snow may well do a wonderful job of equiping the  
speaker for survival in a cold, largely frozen environment. English is  
apparently wonderful for messing with those of us with dyslexia.

And then we haven't begun to look at dialects, pidgen, and other  
variants.

On a tangent, how many here have heard Gullah (think I spelled that  
correctly) from the South Carolina/Georgia coast. Pretty much dead now  
is my understanding, but absolutely wild for a midwestern speaker of  
'merican to run into.




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