Re: French

----- Original Message ----
> From: Michael Poxon <mike@...>
> Mmm... as someone who also speaks French (though that particular thread was of
> no interest personally) I can foresee problems;
> how long would it be before we have people wanting to post in Spanish? German?
> Norwegian? Finnish?...
> Surely as a practice it's safer to use a language that all contributors have at
> least a working knowledge of than to use one that many
> may not speak at all - for instance, I speak German but no Spanish or
> Norwegian!)
> 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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