From owner-freebsd-chat Sat May 25 18:28:33 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2C25037B406 for ; Sat, 25 May 2002 18:28:28 -0700 (PDT) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id 924178148E; Sun, 26 May 2002 10:58:23 +0930 (CST) Date: Sun, 26 May 2002 10:58:23 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey To: Brad Knowles Cc: Rahul Siddharthan , chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: English dying out? (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c) Message-ID: <20020526105823.A43084@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20020523061551.GA237@lpt.ens.fr> <20020523155541.H230@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020523063222.GA470@lpt.ens.fr> <20020525075741.GC630@foo31-146.visit.se> <20020525131723.GA3092@lpt.ens.fr> <20020525181133.GA1210@lpt.ens.fr> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.23i Organization: The FreeBSD Project Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ X-PGP-Fingerprint: 9A1B 8202 BCCE B846 F92F 09AC 22E6 F290 507A 4223 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Sunday, 26 May 2002 at 0:59:42 +0200, Brad Knowles wrote: > At 8:11 PM +0200 2002/05/25, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > >> Sure - but why do you doubt that French will survive? English has >> never had an Académie Anglaise, and it has survived fine. So have >> most other languages. > > English is a living language and is continuing to naturally > evolve. The older French-speaking people seem to be inflexible and > unwilling to learn English (or any other foreign language), while the > younger French-speaking people seem to care a lot less about the > French language (as a whole). > > The trend seems to be pretty obvious. The older English-speaking people seem to be inflexible and unwilling to learn French (or any other foreign language), while the younger English-speaking people seem to care a lot less about the English language (as a whole). So what's the trend? Seriously, I think you're so far from the truth here that I'm surprised. Most people in any country don't look on their language as something special. They're certainly not overly interested in learning another language, and that's the reason that very few of these languages are going to die out. There may be some cases where the speakers of the language are in such a small minority that they're forced to speak another language in order to communicate, but that's obviously not the case in France or Finland. A language that might die out is Romansh, spoken only in remote parts of the Swiss Canton Graubünden (also known as Grisons). In this case, native speakers also need to speak German in order to communicate, and they probably see a lot more German speakers than other Romansh speakers. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message