And French was the language of diplomacy from the 17th century until WWII. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca
I guess Chinese should have been quite important in east Asia (and getting important again right now)? Any experts on that around here?
"Chinese" is a special case, in that there are actually a large number of spoken languages (of which Cantonese and Mandarin are merely the best-known outside of the region) that share a common system of writing that is largely independent of the sounds of spoken language(1). Imagine, if you will, that a person could write something in French and someone else could read it as if it were Italian, Spanish or Romanian without a hiccup. I18n would be a much easier task if European languages were so encoded, no doubt, but literacy itself would become a much more remarkable accomplishment.
(1)A large number of Chinese characters are composed of a syllable radical which originally acted as a guide to pronunciation (say, "ma") along with a context indicator which would tell the reader which of the various "ma" syllables was being used. In the original written language, it probably made perfect sense, but language drift over time have left the system essentially arbitrary in most modern Chinese languages.
[EDIT -- tried to use an asterisk there, forgetting that paired asterisks result in italics.]
So I got a Mac. Now seriously: that's not a real reason to use the whole system in English. I do that (except for the keyboard layout, I love the Spanish one <3), but I don't think I anyone should ever do it if they don't really like/feel comfortable to. Translations are very good, so that wouldn't be a reason... and IMHO what the post describes is an acceptable risk (hey, you probably will get sorted of this, but wi…
I know the blog is to help people learn English, but isn't that antithetical to helping non-English speakers learn how to use computers? Shouldn't we instead be contributing to non-English documentation so that even those who are too poor to learn English, can still learn to use a computer? Ubuntu is doing this beautifully.
No, everybody should realise as early as possible that not knowing english is damaging their ability to participate in anything international.
Not knowing english means no access to science or post graduate education, no access to international media, no access to hacker news or important blogs, no access to international job markets or even to jobs in big domestic corporations.
Not knowing english correlates with being poor, uninformed and excluded. Localised UIs are evil.
I guess Chinese should have been quite important in east Asia (and getting important again right now)? Any experts on that around here?
"Chinese" is a special case, in that there are actually a large number of spoken languages (of which Cantonese and Mandarin are merely the best-known outside of the region) that share a common system of writing that is largely independent of the sounds of spoken language(1). Imagine, if you will, that a person could write something in French and someone else could read it as if it were Italian, Spanish or Romanian wi…
What happened to grammar --- like word order? Did it not drift?
"Chinese" is a special case, in that there are actually a large number of spoken languages (of which Cantonese and Mandarin are merely the best-known outside of the region) that share a common system of writing that is largely independent of the sounds of spoken language(1). Imagine, if you will, that a person could write something in French and someone else could read it as if it were Italian, Spanish or Romanian wi…
What happened to grammar --- like word order? Did it not drift?
Good question -- and the answer is that systematic writing combined with widespread literacy tends to fossilize language, at least on the page. There is, for instance, a world of difference between written and spoken English, the written version being not too very different from what one might have expected to read in an eighteenth-century document. The vocabulary has changed somewhat, the modifiers less (ahem) magnificent, but the grammar (and the flow and phrasing) is essentially the same. In fact, it is really only semantic drift that prevents us from reading Shakespeare as easily as, say, Tom Wolfe. Even the spelling in today's written English reflects the pronunciation prevalent in the London area in the fifteenth century. None of us, though (or at least none of us who regularly interact with other English-speaking humans) would speak spontaneously in any way like the way we write. The situation is similar in other languages; in spoken French, for instance, one only hears the ne verb pas negation in the context of strong emphasis, the grammaticized pas having completely replaced the original negator ne in day-to-day speech. Only tweets, text messages and smilies will prevent English from being as static as written "Chinese".