Re: French

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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