(Still OT) Nationalism, language and monoculture [was Re: Python Worst Practices]

[Antoon Pardon]

Op 02-03-15 om 15:39 schreef Steven D'Aprano:
> Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>
>> alister <alister.nospam.ware at ntlworld.com>:
>>
>>> or as another analogy why don't you (Marco) try telling a Barber in
>>> Seville that he should be speaking Latin Spanish not that strange
>>> variation he uses?
>> If the barber conference language were Latin, and some Spaniard insisted
>> on speaking Western Andalusian, I sure would consider that obnoxious.
>>
>> Similarly, I've heard some Finnish representatives in the Nordic Council
>> complain how the Danish insist on speaking Danish. The official language
>> there is Swedish.
> I'm reminded of the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who
> apparently made a habit of answering difficult or embarrassing questions in
> parliament in his native Welsh.
>
>
>>> I suspect the reaction you get will be far more severe than the one
>>> you are getting from we English (& Brits)
>> I don't understand your reaction. The rest of us are willing to walk a
>> mile (say, Finnish -----> American English) and you are up in arms about
>> having to shift a foot (say, Scouse -> American English).
> "Not one inch!"
>
> Sometimes the small differences are more important than the big. Your
> Finnishness is not threatened by learning English, any more than Mark's
> Britishness would be threatened by him learning Russian.
>
> [Now there's a thought... with the historical relationships between Finland
> and Russia, I wonder whether Finns would be as blasé about using a foreign
> language if it were Russian rather than English? But I digress.]
>
> Whereas the comparatively small differences between British and American
> English are all the more important because they distinguish the two. Nobody
> is ever going to mistake Finland and the Finish people for Americans, even
> if you learn to speak American English. But for Britons to use American
> English is, in a way, to cease to be Britons at all.

Nonsense. Why should it be impossible for a Finish person speaking fluent
American English do be mistaken for an American. 

This is mostly about personal attitude --- which can be culturally enforced.
I regularly meet people from the Netherlands who came to live in Northern Belgium.
Some have an attitude like you describe above and others don't and don't mind
adapting their language without feeling any less a Dutchman.

Then we have people whose native tongue is French, who seem to think they will
somehow lose their French speaking identity by learning Dutch.

> Personally, I think that monocultures are harmful and ought to be resisted,
> whether than monoculture is one-species-of-wheat, one-operating-system, or
> one-language. The English-speaking world is threatened by American cultural
> and linguistic monoculture[1], and that's a bad thing. The same applies to
> the rest of the world, but to a much lesser extent. Having a rich and
> varied cultural ecosystem is important, and regional differences in
> language and culture are an essential part in that.

People adapting their language in order to be better understood by their audience
doesn't make a mono culture. This is just one newsgroup/mailing list. Talking
about mono culture because of adapting to one specific variant of a particular
language here makes no more sense than talking about mono culture because the
subject here is python and not other computer languages.

-- 
Antoon Pardon