Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 00:22:31 +0100 From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The Language Barrier [Was: Could FreeBSD be ...] Message-ID: <19971118002231.VS01973@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971117002710.5225A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu>; from Annelise Anderson on Nov 17, 1997 01:26:22 -0800 References: <24684.879743950@jkh.cdrom.com> <Pine.BSF.3.96.971117002710.5225A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu>
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As Annelise Anderson wrote: > When the Soviet empire collapsed with the fall of the wall in 1989, and > the Soviet Union itself collapsed at the end of 1991, English instead of > Russian made a big jump in being the second language of the countries of > the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. There was a dramatic shift > from Russian to English in hours taught in school, etc. Oh, i can assure you that you're over-estimating this political event here. Yep, we've been learning Russian in school, *and* English. Most of us learned Russian rather half-heartedly anyway, perhaps in the same fashion as quite a number of people in Western Europe learn English these days. If you're forced to learn something, you often don't do it with much personal enthusiasm. My basic English knowledge is still from the communist days here, and i owe more than a beer to my English teacher from the higher school (higher than an US Highschool, i think :). I still have to find these days, that whatever failures the communist system did have, education wasn't among them. It was much better, easier affordable, and more serious than it's in the Western countries (let alone the US ;-). > It's useful for people to agree on what they're going to use as a second > language. Although English is difficult in some respects, it's also > easier than some languages in terms of understanding the spoken language > (easier than French, for example); ... English is probably about as difficult to learn for some native speaker of a Slavic (or Eastern Asian, for that matter) language as German is. For me as a German, English is relatively easy. American the more, since you Americans have borrowed quite a number or German words, like "kaput" (although misspelled, we spell it with a double-t), "fahrvergnugen" (also misspelled since you don't have umlauts, nor could you speak them anyway ;), or the worst of the words German exported into any language, "blitzkrieg". However, having learned both Russian and somewhat Czech, i can estimate the problems that people like Andrey or Ruslan (whose mail started this entire thread) are faced with when expressing in English. I'm convinced that my Russian, if i'm ever going to use it again, would sound equally terrible. > It seems the major computer > languages are "in English"--if, else, while, for, do, continue, break-- > this doesn't get translated into, say, French or Russian, does it? Microsoft's Visual Basic (or some of its dialects) indeed did it. Ick. IBM's AIX at some version also exaggerated internationalization, in that their system daemons spoke error messages (like in sendmail) in the local language, and even the C compiler would only accept a comma as the decimal sign if the language environment was set to German (violating the C standard thereby, of course). -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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