Re: a few short notes

On Feb 3, 2004, at 8:02 AM, James Craig Burley wrote:

> Seriously, dude, get over yourself.  English is the "lingua franca" of
> the Internet;

Well, it is on English-language mailing lists like this, that's for 
sure. Funny about that.

I'm going to make a wild guess and say that most of the people making 
these arguments don't speak an asian-pacific language, have never sent 
an e-mail in it, don't know many (if any) people who are native 
japanese or chinese speakers, haven't really researched what's going on 
over there, and are, basically, shooting from the hip.

And are horribly wrong in their worldview. What I find interesting is 
that at least some of them seem to be english second language europeans 
who ought to know better, given that their native language support 
issues are subsets of the larger problem. ohwell.

I'm just going to say I'm very disappointed in the tunnel vision I'm 
seeing here and shut up, since I expect that's enough to get yelled at 
anyway, but the arguments about english-centric are both wrong and 
destructive to this process, if your goal is to actually get this thing 
accepted as a standard in our global universe here on the internet.

> (The fact that English is my native language is irrelevant.

No, it's not. Not at all. But the fact that this mailing list was built 
english-only both speaks to our underlying attitudes and excludes from 
this discussion those who are in the best position to explain why this 
discussion is wrong, because they don't use english and they don't use 
a roman language set.

and that sort of makes these kinds of decisions self-fulfilling 
prophecies.