- From: Hamish Harvey <hamish@hamishharvey.com>
- Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 12:52:17 +0100
- To: "Bernard vatant" <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>
- Cc: "Karl Dubost" <karl@w3.org>, "Semantic Web" <semantic-web@w3.org>
Bernard, On 04/10/06, Bernard vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com> wrote: > Like it or not, there is an emerging language which I would call "world > english", which will eventually drift from both en-UK and en-US the same way > the latter has evolved from the former over centuries. Granted. I'm sorry if my comments seemed to suggest that I consider non-native English speakers to be barbarians with no care for a pure, correct, and unchanging English. I do not. Perhaps my comments about EC projects were in any case a distraction from the main point, which is that the article failed to provide any support for the claim that controlled vocabularies are a practical solution to the communication problem in the context of technical documentation (using a standard phrase for "get off the runway" may be a different matter). But I can't resist returning on this: > World english is > already the default language of scientific community, techies, engineers, > web communities ... Is there, will there ever be, a single "World English"? Surely not. Nor a single global "scientific community". Your quotation about Inglish, indeed, suggests (and this seems likely) that there is a distinct English variant in India. India being large, and its inhabitants far from a single coherent community constantly in communication with each other, there is surely also considerable variability within Inglish. The European Union bureaucracy has its own (also living) variant which is more different from Inglish than the variants within Inglish are from each other. All of these are different from formally "correct" British English, but few if any Brits speak that language in any case. The native residents of Newcastle, where I live, speak a variant of English---Geordie---which is quite unintelligible to many Brits, let alone Americans, Indians, or Eurocrats. I suppose that, in the end, every individual speaks their very own English, which is closer to or further from that spoken by any other individual depending on how close they are in a social network. Global communication may inhibit divergence, but it will never create overall convergence. We had better exercise care in communication---both in expressing and interpreting---appropriate to both the probability and the consequences of miscommunication. The use of controlled vocabularies may play some small part in this. Cheers, Hamish -- Hamish Harvey Research Associate, School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Newcastle University
Received on Wednesday, 4 October 2006 11:52:30 UTC