Re: Standardizing on Oxford English

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Jun 5, 2020, 23:24 UTC
Message-ID: <20200605232413.GG6569@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAD2i4DCyovfV78rXwH+B+tNOeDM7rJCHWSCPFOiCv7mVR+56ew@mail.gmail.com>

On 2020-06-05 at 05:34:21, Varun Varada wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> Hello,
> 
> I noticed the Documentation/SubmittingPatches file reads:
> 
> > We prefer to gradually reconcile the inconsistencies in favor of US English
> 
> May I ask why? US English is highly idiosyncratic, illogical, and used
> by a minority of the English-speaking population of the world (see
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences).
> Since British English has its own idiosyncrasies, why not use Oxford
> English, the most international English that is used by millions of
> the world? It is used by practically every international organization
> (such as the UN, ISO, IEC, BIPM, NATO, etc.), taught in practically
> every school in non-native-English-speaking countries (and even
> native-English-speaking ones), and used by myriad publications (e.g.,
> Nature) and people around the world. Given the inherently
> international nature of the Git project, it makes complete sense to
> follow suit.

I should point out that many of your arguments about U.S. English are true of English in general. As a native U.S. English speaker who also knows Spanish and French, I can confidently say that even French, which many find difficult, has a mostly regular correspondence between letters and sounds, and, overall, a reasonably consistent set of rules for verb conjugations, albeit with many irregular verbs. English, in any form, has none of that. It is, as languages go, highly irregular.

I didn't write the text in question, but I suspect the reason is practicality: most open source projects use U.S. English, and most contributors to Git are able to write the U.S. variety. It's hard for me personally to write Oxford English because I have never written or spoken it, and when I need to consult a reference, the one I have is from the University of Chicago, not Oxford. I suspect many Canadians and second-language speakers from at least parts of the Americas are more likely to be familiar with the U.S. variety than Oxford or British English, although I don't know for certain.

This isn't a defense of U.S. English (after all, I wrote the first paragraph), but just an acknowledgement of the way things are. This project is all about practicality rather than purity; to quote from CodingGuidelines:

   Again, we live in the real world, and it is sometimes a
   judgement call, the decision based more on real world
   constraints people face than what the paper standard says.

-- 
brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US
OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204