Rehan Allah Wala wrote:
> I am now 35 years old, My english sucks, I was born and raised and went to school in
> Pakistan btw, Can u speak a few words from any other languages that I speak btw including
> Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Memoni btw ?
I was not looking to make this an ad-hominem issue or an egotistical
contest. There is certainly no question in mind that because you are
frmo the south/southeast Asian region of the world, you are bound to
know more languages, including ones which would be considered rather
exotic in the European and North American world and therefore, indeed,
ones that I would be unlikely to speak.
Your response about being a poor English speaker is a nonsequitur,
meaning a conclusion that has no evidentiary relationship to the
premises used to support it. The character of this mailing list - and
the open-source oriented VoIP community - is an international one. The
fact that many members of this list are non-native English speakers and
may encounter difficulties with proper grammar, spelling, vocabulary
usage, etc. is widely understood and appreciated for its implications,
and foreigners who encounter those liabilities are forgiven for
precisely those reasons. Nobody - including myself - is here to be a
language snob. We have business to conduct.
The tendency for which you are being repeatedly called out is not one
for which being a foreigner is a useful or plausible defense. It is
that you are _lazy_ - lazy to a point that undermines the effectiveness,
plausibility, authority, credibility, or marketing value of your
business-related communication.
This is a problem you have in common with many businesspeople and other
speakers of English for whom it is a native language; being a foreigner
has absolutely nothing to do with it, and you cannot hide behind that.
There are many foreigners who post on this list and elsewhere who
outperform you in the area of communication despite English skills
vastly inferior to your own.
You cannot reasonably claim, for example, that a message ridden with "u"
in place of "you" is a consequence of the encumbrance you face as a
non-native English speaker. All told, the general appearance of your
messages -- including this latest one, in a rather extreme way -- is
consistent with an amateur and unsophisticated narrative voice, and that
is the perception that you are fostering among your audience.
The difference between your missives and those written by other
foreigners whose English is somewhat lacking is that many of the latter
exhibit evidence of having actually _tried_. If they know they are
going to make mistakes that impede comprehension, they will have their
grammar and orthography proofread. They do not use juvenile conventions
such as "u" ("text speak") that further undermine the already
beleaguered communicative value of the message. Is typing "you" really
that much harder than "u?"
For example, I have a passable, basic conversational knowledge of
Spanish that I accrued through taking courses for eight years. This
knowledge has deteriorated considerably now, especially in my
recollection of various grammatical rules, as I haven't had the
opportunity to use it frequently or develop it beyond the last point at
which I encountered it in my education. If I were to post to a
Spanish-language mailing list, I would not expect to emulate the
quality, articulation, or apparent literary erudition of an experienced
speaker's sentence production, nor believe that I am somehow going to
avoid some severe grammatical mistakes.
That is not a problem, and I would expect the readership to understand
and work with me. What I think they would find disrespectful and
bewildering is not that I don't write Spanish very well, but if my
message entailed the same implicit hubris that yours does--the
presumption that it is not important to even try. So, on top of my
already broken grammar, I would write "k" instead of "que" (as many
Spanish users--and especially Latin American residents of the US--of
instant messengers are given to do). That would be seen as off-putting,
and they would probably dismiss me as a bumbling clown.
I don't think this should engender any hard feelings on anyone's part,
nor should you assume that it necessarily negatively impacts people's
perception of you or blinds them to the potential of your rich
individuality and nuances as a human being. However, this being the
only forum in which this community's understanding of you develops, you
should take care to look after yourself.
-- Alex
--
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel : (+1) (678) 954-0670
Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671
Mobile : (+1) (706) 338-8599
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