131–140 of 207 posts
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AM: morning, PM: afternoon/evening
Yeah, but this is the problem - why noon is "afternoon"?
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Same with European Portuguese, I can’t actually use Siri or any voice controlled software because I refuse to speak in Brazilian Portuguese. It is so unnatural (frankly I don’t know how), I would just prefer to speak English.
Fewer than 5% of native speakers are Portuguese...
> While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft's mother-tongue is American-English. When this is coupled with Word’s ubiquity, it at least reinforces this dominance. > "Word primarily operates in English," says Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert at the language learning platform Babbel. "As businesses become increasingly global, the widespread use of Wor…
Your last sentence is hinting on something that actually has more bearing on technology effecting language: HTML. When I was first learning HTML & CSS it irked me to have to spell "colour" wrong to get things working. Now I just use the US American spelling everywhere (it helps that I'm currently in the US).
> While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft's mother-tongue is American-English. When this is coupled with Word’s ubiquity, it at least reinforces this dominance. > "Word primarily operates in English," says Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert at the language learning platform Babbel. "As businesses become increasingly global, the widespread use of Wor…
I'd say the article missed the mark by focusing on features, especially spellcheck/autocorrect.
It's like some sort of cognitive blindness: I mean, the article has a photo with typists at the office and yet it competely ignores the transformation that an engine/platform – a computer – with a tool – a word processor – had on the way language is used in business, leisure, creative and, of course, language work (anything from print or editing to business memos).
A hammer can have a flavor, but it's still a hammer. This article focuses on the objectionable and weak flavor of MS Word while ignoring the wider implications of a digital word processor.
> While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft's mother-tongue is American-English. When this is coupled with Word’s ubiquity, it at least reinforces this dominance. > "Word primarily operates in English," says Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert at the language learning platform Babbel. "As businesses become increasingly global, the widespread use of Wor…
Your last sentence is hinting on something that actually has more bearing on technology effecting language: HTML. When I was first learning HTML & CSS it irked me to have to spell "colour" wrong to get things working. Now I just use the US American spelling everywhere (it helps that I'm currently in the US).
> While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft's mother-tongue is American-English. When this is coupled with Word’s ubiquity, it at least reinforces this dominance. > "Word primarily operates in English," says Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert at the language learning platform Babbel. "As businesses become increasingly global, the widespread use of Wor…
(from TFA)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your last sentence is hinting on something that actually has more bearing on technology effecting language: HTML. When I was first learning HTML & CSS it irked me to have to spell "colour" wrong to get things working. Now I just use the US American spelling everywhere (it helps that I'm currently in the US).
'Colour' in Am-Eng is not wrong though.
But the OP article briefly raises an interesting point by way of linking to and quoting https://www.jstor.org/stable/40171308 :
> Analysis of the screen recording data revealed that students were more apt to make microstructural rather than macrostructural changes to their work and that they continuously revised at all stages of their writing.
The idea that we can easily make non-append-only changes to our text simply by moving a mouse or trackpad may very well change how we think about language.
A less severe version, perhaps, of the phenomenon in the movie Arrival and Ted Chiang's novella Story of Your Life (highly worth a read, and easily accessible with a quick search), where learning an alien language changes a person's entire outlook on - well, to minimize spoilers, every aspect of how life is lived.
Perhaps, insofar as I typed the word "perhaps" after I wrote the rest of the forthcoming sentence... we already live in a world where something like this has transpired.