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Language Tempest At Orkut
Quirk writes "Reuters is carrying an article outlining an ongoing headbutting session between English-speaking users of Goggle's orkut and the Portuguese-speaking users of Brazil. The orkut site has more than 769,000 members; 41.2% are Brazilians and 23.5% are Americans. The sites are now mostly in Portuguese, and English-speaking users are complaining that the service is intended to be in English. Orkut is a service meant to develop by way of invitation, and the Brazilians claim since they are inviting their Brazilian friends it doesn't make sense to communicate in English. Brazilian internet users averaged an estimated 13 hours and 51 minutes in May, eight minutes more than for Americans."
Not Portspeak or Braztalk but Orkut. It should be clear even to you Aussies that English would be the obvious language for a place called Orkut.
You clearly don't know many, if any, Americans. We're human beings just like anyone else, and we certainly see social netwrking and having friends as a "big thing." Nice to see how easy it is for a racist like you to dehumanize another people.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
It has to do with trying to maintain a community and a shared experience, rather than letting language automatically balkanize the game. The game is better when everyone understands each other.
So, to ensure everyone understands each other, just get rid of all the people you don't understand. What a very enlightend position.
It seems there was this european country that experimented with this very idea in the 30's and 40's in the midst of a little war...
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
Really, you do have a major chip on your shoulder, don't you?
I don't know which department of the US government looks after promoting the US as a tourist destination. Frankly, I don't care which one it is either: if it matters that much to you then I suggest that you look it up yourself. But I do see the supplements in my Sunday paper and other ads, so it quite clearly does go on.
I don't live in non-English speaking country, but are you really suggesting that any US tourism ads run in France/Germany/Spain/Italy/Japan/wherever are in English? Do you know how dumb that sounds?
Nobody, least of all myself, is suggesting that anyone shouldn't be allowed to travel here, there or anywhere without a degree-level knowledge of the local language. But, if nothing else, being able to say "hello", "please" and "thank you", and being able to ask for directions can only benefit you the tourist, so why not do it? If don't want to do it then that's fine, it's your loss not anyone else's, but don't compound your laziness with arrogance by expecting all the locals to speak fluent English.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Nice backpedal/speculation/revisionism/whatever. I wish I could read minds the way you do... did you write "2+years" instead of "more than two years" because you wanted to save bandwidth? Or was it because you want to appeal to a mathematically-inclined audience? With your amazing skills of linguistic ESP, I'd know the answer.
In the future, I recommend you wear kneepads to any debate you enter with me, because just like this time, I will continue to completely own you, over and over.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Does anyone else hear a faint, irrelevant buzzing sound?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
The flavour of Spanish spoken in Mexico is different enough from Spanish spoken in Spain to be considered a language, dipshit.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
You'd have to get out of your mother's basement first... and that's not likely to happen anytime soon. DO NEVER TEST.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Ever thought that the non-English-speaking world (or non-Americans in general for that matter) get annoyed by the hundreds of English language, US-targetted spams they receive every day?
People who don't understand English shouldn't be using the Internet anyway. Not because I don't want them to, but because they would get annoyed very quickly. Not just because of spam... The Orkut user interface is English too, so you can't tell me the Brazilians talk Portugese because they don't know English.
Anyway, I can't say I really dislike the Brazilian communities a lot. However, messages to friends(-of-friends) in a non-English language are stupid. (yes, I also find them stupid when they're in my native language, Dutch) I disabled them for that reason, but that's another story.
More stupid is when I found a post written in Portugese right in the middle of a whole list of English posts in a community with only 15 people. I'm quite sure the person who posted it is the only Brazilian person in the community, so he quite wasted his time. Saw it happen at least one, and the person who posted it didn't seem to care at all...