Re: Standardizing on Oxford English

From: Varun Varada <varuncvarada@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 8, 2020, 00:28 UTC
Message-ID: <CAD2i4DD8-iWi4WCCQyVuyy_oHzOxKqAXmcM82qWJdfx=kGn_bQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20200605232413.GG6569@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>

On Fri, 5 Jun 2020 at 18:24, brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>
> 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.

Agreed, as I'm a native US English who knows French as well. But I guess my point is that out of all of the varieties, Oxford English is the most prevalent, international, and etymologically correct, which is why I suggested it.

Show 10 quoted lines

>
> 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.

The reference for Oxford is the first spelling on lexico.com, which is a very widely-used resource. Canadian English is essentially identical to Oxford except for the -yze set of words, for which Oxford maintains the etymologically correct -yse endings. And second-language speakers learn Oxford by and large, though many from Brazil apparently end up just moving to the US to learn English, where they necessarily learn US English.

However, I never found the guidance of doing what other people are doing a convincing one, especially when the alternatives are more logical/convincing/"better". Though I do recognize Konstantin's point that the project is decades old.

Show 9 quoted lines

> 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.
> --

While I somewhat sympathize with the sentiment, from the text, it seemed like things were in a mixed state, so I wanted to suggest picking the standard that makes the most international sense. As the usual guidance goes: when faced with two choices of relatively equal difficulty, choose the one that makes the most sense long-term.

Varun