Re: English on the internet

Russ Hunt (HUNT who-is-at academic.stu.StThomasU.ca)
Tue, 16 Apr 1996 07:57:53 AST

Agreeing with Jay and Mike on the way the dominance of English
privileges the linguistically handicapped, I'd like to point out that
the presence of people for whom English is a second -- or fifth --
language in a context like this has a strongly salutary effect on
people who might otherwise be "English teachers" about the
shibboleths Jay calls

> a million trivial rules of form and usage that are really quite
> unnecessary for most communicative purposes,

and who

> tend to be quite uncritically horrified at the smallest deviations
> by those who use other dialects of English.

It's much more difficult (not impossible, but you really _do_ have to
be an ignoramus) to exercise that sort of snobbishness when the
person you're talking with obviously is not a native speaker.

> Sharing five or six major world languages among enough people to
> have a multilingual discussion in a large listgroup seems
> completely unfeasible ... but at least saying that English as a
> language is richer for the variety of forms that non-native
> speakers produce offers a positive climate for less
> language-inhibited communication.

Hear, hear.

-- Russ
__|~_
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St. Thomas University )_ __)_|_)__ __) PHONE: (506) 363-3891
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