Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certain cultures teach that diversity is a bad thing to be feared and extinguished. Diversity is only a good thing when your mind has been poisoned by "education" and "experience". It requires an open mind to see diverse experiences as a good thing, and certain cultures think having citizens with open minds is an unprofitable way to run a society.
> Certain cultures teach that diversity is a bad thing to be feared and extinguished. Ok, I take the bait. Which ones?
This blog is written in en-GB
271–280 of 474 posts
Re: This blog is written in en-GB
#272This was a great read and it reminded me of Bill Bryson's book, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. Such an awesome overview o how diverse and quirky and globally distributed English has become today. With the web and now the bots herding us into a more homogenized language, I'm a huuuuge fan of what this dude is doing here!!
Bill Bryson The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way was written by a journalist with no actual training in the subject matter, and there is a factual error or urban myth on virtually every single page of the book. In fact, among shoddy pop-sci books, this one is particularly notorious. You might want to read about this and see why this is a book that deserves to be forgotten.
Re: This blog is written in en-GB
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there an internationally agreed upon standard for designating AAV? I suppose it's a large and influential enough dialect it wouldn't hurt to have one
The main people who'd want such a thing would be linguists, so that they can label samples. The non-prestige dialects of a language don't usually attract official interest, not least because officially the people who understand that dialect could also understand a prestige variant. Scousers may not talk like King Charles among themselves, but if he speaks they're not confused about what the King is saying even if the…
I have an amateur interest in linguistics, that's partially why I asked.
>That guy is speaking a completely unrecognisable language, are there subtitles?
Interestingly enough, I remember reading somewhere that you could be legally entitled to an interpreter in a court setting (take that with a grain of salt, I forget where I read it)
Re: This blog is written in en-GB
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
So thankful that we use the correct date format (yyyy-mm-dd) in Sweden.
That's also the ISO standard since it sorts correctly
I believe it's the ISO standard because it is obviously distinguishable from both the MM-DD-YY (US) date order and the DD-MM-YY (UK/EU/Others) date order and so is unambiguous.
https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html
The fact that they are then sortable is a nice side benefit!
Re: This blog is written in en-GB
#275It should be just "en", since we invented and it's the one true version:-)
given English evolved from Norman French, it's maybe just a local variation than a true invention? fr-GB feels more correct :)
This is more or less completely false. English has an unusually high number of loan words from French (on the order of 10k or so, I think), and this has made the language less Germanic than its historical origins would suggest. But English existed before Norman French arrived in the British Isles, and is still at heart a Germanic language.
Re: This blog is written in en-GB
#276Fully agree with the author, just like I write Portuguese in European Portuguese, not Brazilian Portuguese, African Portuguese or any other variation, just because our population is smaller. Incidently I always change automatic language correction tools to English GB, I live in this side of the Atlantic, and that is variant I learnt while growing up.
not ‘whilst’? ;)
Re: This blog is written in en-GB
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is now.
In a moment of whimsy I briefly considered a date format where digits were sorted alphabetically. 2026-07-02-16-31-52 -> -----00011222235667 Hopefully it will remain a nonsense and never be seen in the wild, unlike the phone number field which I found on a real website which responded to scroll events to increase and decrease the value it contained.
Wait, can this format be transformed back to the "normal" format? If so, then it could be kinda viable for some operations... :thinking_emoji:
Re: This blog is written in en-GB
#278> Accrington Stanley I've never heard of this depite being from the UK. It seems to be some ad from 1989. Although I do remember many classic ads from the 1980's I don't recall this. Is it an English / Scottish thing ? Who knows. Why is Accrington Stanley so famous? Ian Rush reflects on famous milk advert ahead of Liverpool v ... Accrington Stanley achieved worldwide fame primarily due to a legendary 1989 television…
I suspect it was England and Wales only. It was never shown in NI, which had its own Milk Marketing Board. Scotland had a separate one too, so probably didn't get them either.
the irony of an Englishman complaining about Americans assuming cultural expectations, whilst simultaneously doing the same thing to fellows from outwith England and Wales. Yes I did say 'outwith'.
Re: This blog is written in en-GB
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roughly: British "quite" means somewhat. American "quite" means very. A Brit saying a suggestion is "quite good" is actually saying it's not good enough, whereas a US listener will think they've been told the opposite.
Good lord. I just three finger tapped on the word quite to see what the macOS dictionary says - "to the utmost or most absolute extent or degree; absolutely; completely", although it does offer a second definition "to a certain or fairly significant extent or degree; fairly: it's quite warm outside ". For context, I'm British though I have spent a fair amount of time in the states over the years and somehow never pic…
This is interesting because I assume it has suffered the same linguistic degradation as the word "fine" which in some cases means "of the highest quality" but mostly means "meh". I suspect it comes down to the dialect and social rank of the person saying the sentence. Compare how you would perceive:
"You did a fine job"
"It is quite impossible"
Re: This blog is written in en-GB
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really want to see a local Euro English[0] develop as an actual, recognized variant of English. Both because it would be really funny, but also as a way for Continental Europe to develop a common language we can shape our own way 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English (we don't have to take the examples in this page as-is, we can definitely make better local oddities!)
I think it's a bit quick to want that variant to be actual already, but eventual we might be able to make it work.
It's a weird broken import of French (could be because the EU Parliament) is in Brussels so highly French-speaking. It's also still very incoherent, it mixes up billion and trillion, and it mixes up milliard (the French equivalent) with billion. You absolutely do not want ambiguity there when you work professionally as a politician.
deadline supposed to come from delay but it is incorrect use in French. cabinet is toilet. etc
It's an artificial invented variant, like a kid would invent its own language to speak to other kids, not something that was born out of habit and unified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto shares a similar issue but at least it's cute and more logical though.
AI would be good at creating an international language