Re: [ox-en] Englisch - nein! [was: Theses about the relation between the Oekonux ..]
- From: Graham Seaman <graham seul.org>
- Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 12:45:19 -0400 (EDT)
On Fri, 10 Oct 2003, Thomas Berker wrote:
--On 10. oktober 2003 07:57 -0400 graham seul.org wrote:
Meaning? I don't know! People are happy with the current situation,
perhaps.
But it seems to me the current situation may be a little instable..
Agreed. As for now it looks like some people from the German list just post
their contributions in English on both lists. Most of them are already
member of both lists. Posting in English on the German list is no problem
anyway. To _understand_ English should not be the problem. Many may feel
excluded there, though, because they do not feel comfortable _writing_ in
English -
exactly my situation with German
meaning that they are excluded from some discussions. What can we
do about that? Is that a necessary dilemma when a movement opens up
geographically?
The only comparison I have is with the hipatia-coordinadores list. There
the problem is less because 3 of the main languages (spanish, italian,
portuguese, english) are more closely related.
People write in approximations to a thread language (giving hybrids like
spanglish, portunol, etc), and drop into their own language if a section
of the mail is too hard to express in anything but their native language.
Some of the italians on the list say they use the same system on other
lists in Italy. The intention is to carry on with this policy even if
people from other languages (eg German!) join, though nobody knows yet if
that will work. The existing system seems to work well, though it often
results in a single mail containing parts in 4 different languages - the
benefit is that parts of an email that are in an unknown language are
often short, and not too much work to follow with a dictionary (or
can simply be ignored without losing the whole thread).
So I would like to see what happens if German people replied to English
emails in German, instead of feeling they must reply in English if the
original is English (basically, the way I sometimes write on the German
list). But it seems Germans feel this would be impolite? Can you think of
some way to carry out this experiment?
Graham
Thomas Be
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