>> 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.
Had I known that my comment would have turned into a language debate I
wouldn't have posted it.
Let's conclude this and go back to talking about DIDs.
_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com--
AstriCon 2008 - September 22 - 25 Phoenix, Arizona
Register Now: http://www.astricon.net
asterisk-biz mailing list
To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
Posts
