From: "brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
To: Varun Varada <varuncvarada@gmail.com>
Cc: git@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Standardizing on Oxford English
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2020 23:24:13 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200605232413.GG6569@camp.crustytoothpaste.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAD2i4DCyovfV78rXwH+B+tNOeDM7rJCHWSCPFOiCv7mVR+56ew@mail.gmail.com>
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On 2020-06-05 at 05:34:21, Varun Varada wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I noticed the Documentation/SubmittingPatches file reads:
>
> > We prefer to gradually reconcile the inconsistencies in favor of US English
>
> May I ask why? US English is highly idiosyncratic, illogical, and used
> by a minority of the English-speaking population of the world (see
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences).
> Since British English has its own idiosyncrasies, why not use Oxford
> English, the most international English that is used by millions of
> the world? It is used by practically every international organization
> (such as the UN, ISO, IEC, BIPM, NATO, etc.), taught in practically
> every school in non-native-English-speaking countries (and even
> native-English-speaking ones), and used by myriad publications (e.g.,
> Nature) and people around the world. Given the inherently
> international nature of the Git project, it makes complete sense to
> follow suit.
I should point out that many of your arguments about U.S. English are
true of English in general. As a native U.S. English speaker who also
knows Spanish and French, I can confidently say that even French, which
many find difficult, has a mostly regular correspondence between letters
and sounds, and, overall, a reasonably consistent set of rules for verb
conjugations, albeit with many irregular verbs. English, in any form,
has none of that. It is, as languages go, highly irregular.
I didn't write the text in question, but I suspect the reason is
practicality: most open source projects use U.S. English, and most
contributors to Git are able to write the U.S. variety. It's hard for
me personally to write Oxford English because I have never written or
spoken it, and when I need to consult a reference, the one I have is
from the University of Chicago, not Oxford. I suspect many Canadians
and second-language speakers from at least parts of the Americas are
more likely to be familiar with the U.S. variety than Oxford or British
English, although I don't know for certain.
This isn't a defense of U.S. English (after all, I wrote the first
paragraph), but just an acknowledgement of the way things are. This
project is all about practicality rather than purity; to quote from
CodingGuidelines:
Again, we live in the real world, and it is sometimes a
judgement call, the decision based more on real world
constraints people face than what the paper standard says.
--
brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US
OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-06-05 23:24 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-06-05 5:34 Standardizing on Oxford English Varun Varada
2020-06-05 19:44 ` Konstantin Ryabitsev
2020-06-05 23:24 ` brian m. carlson [this message]
2020-06-08 0:28 ` Varun Varada
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