From: "Gene Heskett" <gene.heskett@xxxxxxxxxxx>
On Tuesday 29 August 2006 03:24, Tim wrote:
On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 22:56 -0400, William Case wrote:
Some day it would be interesting and fun to get comments on why each
of these forms of English is needed in a computer.
Because when you use your computer, you want it to use your language,
not someone else's. Second to that annoyance, you see kids in your
country incorrectly spelling things, because they're using the language
of another country, learning it from their computer.
Some time ago our newspapers started using American spelling, which *is*
"incorrect" to do in Australia. One reason given was that it was a
complete pain trying to work around the American spell checker.
Humm, if it results in less miss-understandings between the peoples by
pushing the people toward a common ground for language usage, I can't see
as its an undesirable effect. We can all argue about color/colour,
honor/honour, but we all know those meanings well. Local dialects of a
language are ok as long as they don't drift too far and result in errors
due to miss-understanding the lexical and pronunciation nuances of the
locality.
Winston C. was right, but we shouldn't get so carried away with our
so-called local rights as to cause a general deterioration in
understanding.
In the above case, I believe there are English(GB) versions of the spell
checkers available, so why don't they use them? OTOH, the Aussies do have
a vernacular thats uniquely Australion, so maybe it would be best for the
GB version of the spell checker to be forked/updated to include commonly
used, Aussie unique words and phrases & call it the English(AU) version.
And potatoe WAS/IS a legitimate spelling for potato in the US at the
time illiterate lefties made it a means of tarring Dan Quayle.
{^_-}
