Re: French

could you explain "out in the cold" ?

Le 20 janv. 09 à 19:55, Michael Poxon a écrit :

> Surely the problems are many - if someone posted in Swahili, most
> of the group would have no idea what the post was about, and surely
> that defeats the whole purpose of a discussion group. If most of us
> don't understand something, how can we discuss it? The clue's in
> the word! :-)
> There's also the problem of elitism - it may be just intuition, but
> I suspect that some people have felt "out in the cold" with the
> French thread since their French wasn't up to it.
> Mike
>
> Except from a moderation standpoint, I don't see what the problems
> might be. So someone posts in Swahili, and there happen to be only
> a few other speakers of Swahili on the list, so? I can understand
> why a moderator might be concerned that the poster is saying
> inappropriate things with nobody to keep them honest. Other users,
> though, so what? Why do each one of us have to understand every
> post on the list? The French started, after all, when one poster
> decided that he had to understand another poster's post, that it
> wasn't enough to think, "Hmmm, I have trouble understanding this
> person's English, I'll move to the next post."
>
> Speaking of which, does this list have active moderators? If so,
> I'd reckon the "approved language list" would be whatever they can
> understand, and otherwise democracy would tend to cause English to
> dominate posts. After all, it's counterproductive for someone who
> wants input on a subject to discuss the subject in a language only
> a subset of the audience understands, when they could instead
> discuss it in a language everyone ostensibly understands.
>
> -- Paul

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