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Is The Internet Destroying Spanish?
Ant gestures ambiguously at this ZDNet Latin America story which reports the unhappiness of some academics with the increasing use of English or English-influenced words in the tech world, which they say is hurting the education of Spanish speakers. A short excerpt: "Some say the jargon of technology is destroying
Spanish, and some are worried, including Odon
Betanzos, president of the North American Academy of
the Spanish Language. Betanzos recently sent an open
letter to the other 22 academies worldwide. The letter
raised a harsh cry in defense of the Spanish tongue."
How is an influx of loanwords from other languages "destroying" Spanish? This happens all the time in other languages, and no one complains of them being "destroyed" on account of this, with the notable exception of French.
English, in parrticular, seems to thrive on loanwords. Last I checked, it had over 40,000 from Japanese alone. Why is this the case? I don't know; perhaps it has to do with the diversity and melding of cultures in the US. Several other languages, such as Japanese, also readily accept loanwords, and we don't hear people crying out that loanwords are destroying their languages.
The fact is, languages evolve over time, be that for good or for ill. Linguists have estimated that the longest any language has been able to survive without significant changes is roughly a thousand years or so. If you aren't willing to accept this, either you'll be branded as an arrogant, pretentious jerk (which you are, if you do this) or you'll find yourself left behind as the language changes around you.
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Totally disagree. You're taking darwinian logic too far. There's a BIG difference between everyone knowing one same language to communicate between each other on a global basis (this, I agree it's necessary) and everyone speaking it on a daily basis. Why on Earth would you want to do that?, losing your very own metaphors, potential jokes, songs, hidden meanings.
I think you ought to have more respect for your own language; there's got to be great literature produced for it that no one else can enjoy as much as you danish-speaking people do. That's important; that's part of your culture and defines who you are. It is NOT unproductive or stupid for everyone not to speak the same language.
Let us translate your example to computer programming. "However, I woudln't mind if Perl was removed from the face of the earth. In fact, I woudln't mind of Lisp was removed from the earth (my programming language of choice). " That statement would instantly get you flamed by thousands of Perl and Lisp programmers who, although they know there are other options, choose to use this way to express themselves. And yes, it might be a real pain to read this guy's code when you have to mantain it or if it's been OS'd and you wish to modificate it. Or it may be frustrating because the program is written on Python and you don't know Python. BUT if it really mattered to you, you could learn that new language as many people I know who've gone to great lenghts to learn foreign languages so they can enjoy local literature without the distortions of translation. And yes, it's much harder to learn Portuguese than C (or maybe not) but it's a rewarding, culturally enriching experience.
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
But which version of english?
:)
Do we stand in lines or queues?
Do we go on holiday or on a vacation?
We we watch or mind our step?
While on vacation in London, the first day I was standing in line to buy a underground pass and some lady walked up and asked "Are you in the queue?"
She had to repeat it four times before I understood what she was talking about.
Of course my immediate reaction was to wonder if the queue was FIFO or LIFO.
You DO know that there is no offical language in the US, don't you? You do know that the current de facto language de jour (English) may not remain the one in the future? You do know that we Chicanos are breeding like rabbits? You do know that we are sneaking all of our cousins across the Rio Grande?
If affirmative action was in vogue, maybe Intel would hire lots of Latinos and have them design chips. Maybe then they could name some of the discoveries and products in Spanish.
The new Intel "Caliente" -- Ouch, Hot, Don't Touch! There's truth in marketing for you!
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
I live in texas, and I know a lot of english speakers (I speak a very tiny amount myself). English is a myth, there is no "English" language anymore. The "problem', if you wish to define it as such, is that it has mutated heavily in the Americas away from "Proper English" (ie. european or "high" english), and within the Americas the differences between, say, the northern U.S. speech in Boston (northern U.S. town) and in Nashville are larger than you would expect (I seem to recall that "tar" was a black sticky substance in New York and a thing you put on the wheel of a car in Alabama, or some such, as an example). This has been occuring long before tech jargon. The differences have grown to the point that the european and american versions of the tongue are almost mutually unitelligible (according to my sources anyway). It must be emphasized that this "blurring" was I think due more to migration than contact with other languages. (Not to say that that didn't play an important role as well, within 100 miles in either direction of the U.S.'s French, Spanish, English, and Dutch borders, pretty much everyone is in linguistic euilibrium between many tongues, "American English" as it's referred to.
Seriously, the tar example happened to me after moving to the south. It confused the hell out of me when I was working at Sam's Club and a guy was asking where he could get tar from. However, I think even though there are differences, I can understand the British (their language, not their minds), the Australians, Canadians, etc. It is the same with Spanish. Even though I know Spanish as my second language, I can understand someone from Los Mochis and how they sort of pronounce their "ch" as "sh", and in Guadalajara (which sounds normal to me) and even someone from Spain (but their lisp on the letter "d" sounds like faggy Spanish IMHO.) I even understand a little Italian and Portugese because of the Spanish I know. I do agree that this guy is a purist, and copying the French. I do think the Spanish speaking people have a lot of pride in their culture, including their language but sometimes pride gets in the way of intelligence.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
Honesty. Loyalty. Kindness. Laughter. Generosity. Magic!
Languages change and evolve. Lots of words in english come from other cultures and languages. What's wrong with english words being used in other languages?
If this technological "Spanglish" continues to spread, wrote Betanzos, Spanish as such may not survive.
Of course. No language can survive if it doesn't change.
Mantle
This kind of thing's happened before. Greek became the principal language of the eastern Meditteranean, Latin became the principal language of academics in the Middle Ages, French became the principal language of diplomacy. Now it's English's turn; in a hundred years it'll change to Mandarin or Hindi or Spanish. Unless a language is spoken only by a relatively small group of people, the chances are pretty slim it will be eradicated so easily.
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By your arguments, English should never have survived. Back when the Normans ruled England, English was the "local tongue" (they called it the vulgar tongue), and French was the language of the "cultural/technical/administrative elite".
But it turned out to be a Conan thing. Norman occupation of England didn't kill English, it made it stronger. The peasants who used the vulgar tongue weren't too proud to borrow terms from French and Latin, and the variety of synonyms in English is partly because of that.
So history does NOT say that English will kill Spanish.
It might. But it might make it stronger.
The reason for this is that it's simply stupid and unproductive for everyone not to speak the same langauge. At the time, the only language that seems to have the possibility of becoming a truely universal language is English, so I hope more people will talk English.
Either unaware or blissfully ignorant you've chosen to ignore 4000 years of linguistic development.
Does it sound at all plausable that 2000 years ago, people were clamoring over Latin being the universal language, just like you are clamoring over English as a universal language?
English is destined to fail, much like Latin, as a 'universal language'.
Here's the example of Latin:
As more and more people spoke it, they each brutalized the language a little differently -- a little colloquism here and there, different stresses on syllables etc...
It grew to the point where Latin wasn't really latin anymore. Out of this grew the romance languages. From one root, came French, Italian, Spanish etc...
Now look at English. As more and more people speak it, they brutualize Standard English. The English spoken in Malaysia is nothing like the English spoken in Vermont. It's not english, it's malaysianglish.
People argue "Oh, but they just have bad accents." WRONG. They are speaking English using the pronunciation rules of Javanese (langauge of Malaysia). Further, words and phrases completely unknown in English are used.
The sucess of English will be it's downfall. Just like Latin splintered into hundreds of languages, English will follow. The world most of you envision, one cleverly ripped off from Lennon's Imagine, is that of everyone with a flower on their lapel speaking English.
The reality is that the English spoken in South Dakota will be vastly different from the English spoken in China -- it is an entirely different dialect.
Look no further than the US. Take that South Dakotan and place him in the South Side of Chichago. Do you think he is going to understand a word of English spoken there? Hell no. It's english, but it's an entirely different dialect.
That's your Brave New World. Piss on unity. We're heading toward a day of thousands of languages and dialectss, WITH NO COMMON GROUND.
No sig is worth reading.
First of all, languages are not static but rather they evolve and change all the time. This does not destroy them, it just makes them different. Just by observing that single fact one can see how rediculus this is.
However, I woudln't mind if Spanish was removed from the face of the earth. In fact, I woudln't mind of Danish was removed from the earth (my own native tongue). The reason for this is that it's simply stupid and unproductive for everyone not to speak the same langauge. At the time, the only language that seems to have the possibility of becoming a truely universal language is English, so I hope more people will talk English.
There's nothing special about English, though; I'd much prefer a synthetic language like Esperanto that's actually thougth out and easy to learn, instead of the random suckiness inherent in natural languages. But [i]everyone[/i] learning Esperanto or anything besides English unfortunately seems rather unlikely right now.
Some would say that this would destroy culture, but if a culture is so weak it cannot survive the "loss" of its language, I'd say that people weren't really serious about it anyway.
Bjarke Roune
Creedme, el español es una lengua importante para el norteamericano.
Hello, let me introduce myself, I import noodles into North America, mostly linguini
Todos sabemos que la cultura protestante del norteamericano le hace buscar el beneficio económico (la cultura latina es más "católica").
Although I'm catholic, I like protestant girls just like your next latino guy but they're expensive to date.
Y el mercado latino será cada vez más importante.
My large mercury capri has those controllable shock absorbers, bouncing up and down at a stop light is indeed important.
Los hispanohablantes son cada vez más, al igual que los chinos. En un mercado globalizado como este el que sepa más idiomas tendrá más mercado y ganará más dinero.
And yes, its an american car, cost me a bundle too
Esto los europeos lo tienen muy claro por su diversidad lingüistica.
Linguini is a popular form of european pasta used in many dishes
Aquí en europa los estudiantes preuniversitarios
which while primarily a european staple, is quite universal in favor and worth studying the preparation of
aprenden 2 lenguas además de la materna. Un universitario europeo que se precie (de cualquier ámbito del
I had to get this job as my protestant girlfriend is pregnant, and dropped out of university
saber) dominará su lengua materna (por ejemplo el español),
she is a dominatrix, albeit a pregnant one that speaks spanish
hablará con suficiente fluidez el inglés,
She has been 'retaining fluids' as you english say
y sabrá defenderse en alemán y francés. Si además es de una región con lengua propia
so I feed her linguini, with french fries prepared properly
(catalán, vasco, gallego)
along with some other dishes (I don't know the translations there)
conocerá esta lengua también. Sin embargo los anglosajones siguen ciegos. Yo puedo entender una
she is legal aged, I'm not a puedo or anything, i met her in LA.
conversación en inglés y se de lo que hablais, pero cuidado!, si no quiero que os entereis de lo que digo solo
she told me in conversation that I'm going to have to 'do it myself' for awhile
tengo que hablar en español...
are you understanding my spanish so far?
italiano...
something about italian
Ya sabeis que nosotros inventamos la "guerrilla", mi consejo: aprended español o perdereis. :D
So I'm being inventive, although its not consensual, my girlfriend does sleep with her mouth open :D
By its very nature, Language is the most democratic of all possible institutions. If you decide to call the thingamabob over there a wongle and everone else agrees, it is called a wongle foreverafter until folks decide that it should be called something else. If nobody agrees, then you wander the space asking for a wongle and getting blank stares. Purity of the language agruments are pure rot. The strength of American English (at least) is that it is a total mongrel and thus has hybrid vigor. Given the fact that the rest of the world shipped their treasure to us (black gold from africa, yellow gold from aisia, white gold from europe, red gold from the americas, etc...) we have one of the richest languages in existance. Each of those people had special contributions to make, and these pearls were simply strung on the tread of the old world syntactic construction (sometimes). Thank God that American English did not have any of the "purity" arguments that are being made...
This whole debate ignore the dymanic nature of language. "English" isn't a plot by english speakers to establish global control. People learn english in order to buy into that power. English speakers use so many words from other languages that the language can't be said to have evolved so much as congealed.
It's virtually impossible to go through a day in the US without using at least a couple of words that have filtered into US english from other languages. And that's the way it should be. Dr. Samuel Johnson, when he published the first english dictionary, dispaired that people would try to use it as an authority; that it would define the language. He understood that no language in static except a dead one.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Not only would Spanish (and in many cases above, also Portuguese) be severely impoverished without these words, so too in many cases would most other European languages. One can hardly begrudge them these.
What the author of this article is actually complaining about may in fact be the fact that nominally bilingual people in the United States often, in fact, no neither language particularly well. Later on in the same page as I cited earlier, one also reads the following:
That's certainly true in the Southwest, where you routinely hear this "code-switching" en las calles and with the ubquitous cucina-help chavalines washing sus dishes sucios, if tu takes my meaning aquí.One thing that's seldom mentioned, which is going here, is that Spanish is not in the United States considered a prestige language. It is widely disparaged, relegated to the working class, or even the nominal underclass. This is completely different from what happens in, say, Canada, where the French language heritage is elevated and venerated--and vehemently and vociferously so, too, for where else but Québec can you find supercilious arrête signs where in even Paris and Madrid and Bonn and Tokyo you see normal stop signs? Sigh.
It is very sad but true that Spanish speakers in America are not taught their rich heritage. They do not know their writers of antiquity, like Cervantes, Unamuno, Lope de Vega, Galdós, Fray Luis de León, Santa Teresa, Quevedo, or San Juan de la Cruz. They do not know their writers of this century, like Federico García Lorca, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Manuel Puig, Jorge Luis Borges, and Rudolfo Anaya (to spread around the honors geographically). As I've heard say in New Mexico (the only State which is legally bilingual), "It is even easier to be illiterate in two languages than in one." :-( Then again, how many English speakers know their
own literature? Few, I suspect.
You can hardly fault tejanos for their curious code-switching or their rampant Spanglishization. You may flinch at hearing how in Texas then rentan something instead of alquilándolo, or talk about driving their troques instead of their camiones. (The former is especially annoying, because la renta is one of those faux amis that already has a meaning quite different in Spanish than the English cognate would suggest!) Then again, when you listen to Texans speak English, you might be a bit unnerved there, too. :-)
In technical jargon, Spanish certainly has much of its own terminology, as this article on El sistema de ficheros virtual de Linux will show you. Sure, you see a few foreign terms there, like driver and off-line, but by and large, they are perfectly native terms, such as an enlace simbólico. Somtimes there are transliterations, like superbloques and inodos (eg " El NFS guarda una tabla de inodos virtuales y su correspondencia"). But Spanish has plenty of its own words for things, like teclado "keyboard" and pantalla "screen".
(In Portuguese, interestingly enough, although teclado is keyboard, you have ecran to be screen, a French borrowing (the French word is actually éran), not an English one. I don't hear anyone in Portgual complaining about borrowing the French word, although I wouldn't completely blame them if they were to spell it eicrã to better match the pronunciation.)
Better that the hispanohablantes (hispanophones?) should use driver or superbloque though, which are obvious in derivation, than that they should use such deceptive monstrosities as the recently legally approved term in French, cédéron, meaning, of course, "CD-ROM". This is evil because it is not traceable back to Romance roots, and requires several linguistic jumps to decode. You must first say it out loud, transliterate back to English, then lookup an acronym in English (misspelled, too--see the "n"?) before you have a chance of knowing what it means. This is wicked.
Now, you'll always have people arguing about ficheros versus archivos in Spain and Mexico respectively, or ficheiros versus arquivos in Portugal and Brazil respectively. But these are no different than arguing about trucks and lorries between the US and UK, or heros versus hoagies versus grinders versus sub(marine sandwiche)s here in the States. These are really immaterial. The transliterations are a bit more jolting, such as people using salvar espacio to save space rather than ahorrar espacio, or salvar un fichero to save a file rather than guardar un fichero. It annoys because salvar is--well, originally--one of those religious things having to do with salvation. Agonizing purists tell you that you simply cannot salvar dinero--that you can only ahorrarlo, of course, and that buffers must be guardados, as their souls are not in peril. :-)
But probably, this is no greater a shift than the mutilations we see daily in English, like "unique" weakened to mean merely "unusual", "ubiquitous" weakened to mean merely "commonplace". In the technical arena, we see it when people use "hacker" to mean "cracker" and "memory" to mean "disk space"--and, I suppose, "software" to mean by default source-less for-pay "fleeceware", although I nominate "Billware" for that. :-) It's
happened before (consider "awful" last century), and there's just
no stopping it.
Let me finish this up with a note of encouragement, taken from the concluding page of the chapter in the reference book I've already quoted from:
These languages are growing, not always as one wants them to, but really no differently than they've always grown, and not as nastily as the article would have us all believe. If you want people to know a language, a literature, a history, and a culture, then you have to teach that to them!I now return you to your previously scheduled mano-a-mano diatribes; me, I've got a burrito nuking. :-)
Oooh, look at the violence inherent in the system.
The Americans stole the land from the Spanish, who stole it from various Native Americans, who stole it from other Native Americans, and on and on it goes. You are going to have a hard time finding a decent piece of land on this planet that hasn't been "stolen" several times.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I live in texas, and I know a lot of spanish speakers (I speak a very tiny amount myself). Spanish is a myth, there is no "Spanish" language anymore.
The "problem', if you wish to define it as such, is that it has mutated heavily in the Americas away from "Castilian" (ie. european or "high" spanish), and within the Americas the differences between, say, the hispanoamerican speech in Guanajuanto (sp? northern mexico university town) and in Rio are larger than you would expect (I seem to recall that "sanitares" (sp?) was fruit in Guatemala and bathroom in Mexico, or some such, as an example). This has been occuring long before tech jargon. The differences have grown to the point that the european and american versions of the tongue are almost mutually unitelligible (according to my sources anyway).
It must be emphasized that this "blurring" was I think due more to migration than contact with other languages. (Not to say that that didn't play an important role as well, within 100 miles in either direction of the texas-spanish border, pretty much everyone is in linguistic euilibrium between the two tongues, "spanglish" as it's referred to.
So to sum up, this guy is just a hyper-purist, much like hyper-purists in pretty much every culture. As is typical of most purity fanatics, he's focused on one thing as the root cause of all the changes he doesn't like (like a Southern Baptist focusing on Disney as the corruptor of Family Values).
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
This backlash against the English language [?] must be taken in a wider context. English is silently creeping its way to Absolute World Domination, IT being only its last (and most powerful) Trojan horse.
20 years ago, when the first IT wave hit our side of the Ocean, the French tried (and managed) to prevent the linguistic tsunami by creating new words (or reusing old ones) for IT-related stuff, and these words were indeed quite good ("ordinateur" and "logiciel" sound nicer to our ears than "computer" and "software") and were quickly adopted. But at some point you have to face the obvious : The Internet is 90% English-speaking. Whatever the subject, documentation written in English may be ten times as abundant as in any other language. What can you do against that ?
This is especially frightening for us in a EU context : how long will we be able to carry on with the current policy, that is,translating any document in the 3 major languages (German, French and English) and as many documents as possible in the 11 (as of now) languages of the EU ? It's already cumbersome enough today - so what will it be like in a 30-members EU ? We feel that at some point the case for "English Everywhere" will become extremely strong, and to be honest we find it not only unfair (Britons would get a huge comparative advantage) but downright terrifying.
"One world, one economy, one language" (I wonder what it sounds like in German ?). Welcome to a Brave New World of civilization and progress, where the global elite will use its own language (American English), turning every other language into minor dialects used only by poorly educated locals.
Now this may sound like plain paranoia (and it is, to some point). But History shows that whenever local tongues are confronted with a mainstream language used by the cultural/technical/administrative elite, the latter wins. Think of Russia in the 17th-18th century (or even better, read "War and Peace" to see how close Russia came to becoming a French-speaking country, and why it didn't). The only major exception I can think of is Quebec - which survived as a cultural entity thanks to the federal nature of Canada.
There's a real fear here, and although I understand that it may look somewhat ridiculous when looked at from the good side of the Babel Fish, you should realize that it is nothing like nationalistic ranting. If we were machines, driven by purely rational goals such as productivity, efficiency, etc., we would all agree to speak the same language - be it English, Latin, SmallTalk, whatever.
We're not machines. We have a thing which we call culture, and that culture is the very definition of our identity (this is especially true for old European countries). The current "Anglicization" of the world is seen by some as a menace to our national identities, virtually undistinguishable from a military one. The Quebec example, which is now seen as an exception, might soon become the general standard.
After European peasants destroying McDonald's diners, who knows the next step of the transatlantic cold war won't be angry academics sacking cybercafés ?
Being a rather fluid thing, languages are constantly evolving at the will of the people, not a government office. The French have been trying for years, for example, to get people over their to use some phrase like "sac explosif que cela se protège" instead of air bag . It isn't working. People say it air bag because it's shorter, and advertisers use it becuase it takes up less space on the page. I don't think it'll work for the spanish, either. Other countries always bitch about The United State's cultural and economic hegemony over much of the world. As most of such countries are far older than ours, they seem to have a short memory, forgetting that they already had their shot at world dominance and spreading their ways. England, Spain, Greece, Persia, Rome, and many others had their empires. Now it's our turn, and we don't have to blow anyone up to get our way.
We just spread our Generican Culture.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Gee, the President of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language doesn't want people slowly migrating toward English.
This is about like the President of GM bitching about Honda outselling his products.
BTW, this guy's wife makes her living teaching English to Spanish-speakers in New York so they can get jobs. She's accepted it, why can't he?
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In some ways, I do resent that somehow people who speak Spanish feel it is necessary to get Spanish spoken everywhere, that somehow Spanish is the only language that matters. Here in NYC, if you tell me that you are in fear of Spanish disappearing, I'd wack you in the head! About half (I exaggerate a little, but it sure seems that way) of the signs are in Spanish! If Spanish is disappearing, it must all be coming to New York!
Here's a link: The 50 Most Widely Spoken Languages in the World that gives you an idea of where things are. It doesn't show, of course, the language spoken by income or by technological level, but with Spanish being the number two language in the world, ahead of English, it is hardly in danger of disappearing. Methinks they are being a little alarmist. Personally, I think they should go to China and demand that half of the signs be in Spanish.
Barrapunto.com
It's not a transcription of Slashdot, but many of the same topics show up. I read it once in a blue moon, and this very topic is being hashed out over there.
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
I'm not sure of all the facts of where & how & who started the internet, but I do have this much to say:
If you want more Spanish on internet sites & in tech jargon, then have more Spanish speaking people &/or companies come up with devices & give them Spanish names & slowly let it infiltrate into mainstream tech jargon.
To rant about how Spanish might be dying out because of so much English tech jargon, is crazy. You must adapt yourself to learn the technological terms of those who created the technology... I call a "Zip Drive" a "Zip Drive" because that is the name IOmega gave it, not me. And so what if it happens to be in English, it was developed by a corporation living in a predominately English speaking country.
All this is akin to the following:
If you *live* in the U.S. you *NEED* to learn English, not expect Americans to learn Spanish, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Hebrew, etc... We simply cannot learn that many languages to accomodate so many foreign cultures, but the immigrants can afford to learn one language if they choose to live here!
It's similar to what my university's career center told those of us going to coop jobs. Something to the effect of: "Write down names because the people at work only have one name to learn, you have all of their names to learn."
And don't get me wrong, if I was going to move to Canada, I'd probably brush up on my french to the point of some fluency in it. If I went to Mexico to *live* there I'd learn Spanish. If I were to live in Italy, I'd learn Italian. It's really that simple. When you move to another country, they aren't required to adapt to you at all, but if you want to have *ANY* hope of fitting in & making a life for yourself, you *MUST* learn at least their language & a lot of their customs (as long as said customs don't compromise your values).
And for any who might be lame enough to say it, *NO*, learning a new language is not compromising values.
So again, if tech jargon comes from English speaking "techies" adapt. And if it bugs you, convert the English words to Spanish equivalents in the documentation for Spanish OSes & when talking to other Spanish speaking people, but do *NOT* complain to any English speaking people if you start saying the term in Spanish & they don't know what in the world you are talking about.
In the words of John Stossel on the news program 20/20... "Give me a break."
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Where I see a REAL problem is with Germany. Use of English in their language is becoming increasingly hip. I was there this summer and about 6 years before that, and the amount of English phrases, words, and idioms being pushed on the German people largely by the media and entertainment industry is astounding. The cool thing to do was to attend the special screenings of American films that weren't dubbed... Radio advertises "Top Hits Today" and one of the major ice-cream brands in "Manhattan Ice Cream" which runs the absolutely funniest commercials with the worst American stereotypes. I also worked in a small firm for that summer, and mostly everyone knew a few phrases of business English, because they knew very well that that was THE language being used, even if they were to communicate with clients from China, Pakistan, or Canada.
I just remember this joke...
Q. What do you call a person who speaks three languages?
A. Tri-lingual.
Q. What do you call a person who speaks two languages?
A. B-lingual.
Q. What do you call a person who speaks one language?
A. American!
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Sure, you can be like the french and create your own native language word for everything from ASP to Zorkmids, but that just builds a confusing barrier when French techs and non-French techs dialogue.
Time for people like Mr. Betanzos to wake up and smell the java. Languages have mixed and borrowed since the first fork of peoples (Oh, yeah? Well you go that way and we'll go this way, alright?) American English is a hodgepodge of everything, bearing little resemblance to its germanic origins. Give it a rest.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar