I'll assume that you just didn't read the multiple comments where I clearly said it doesn't before you wrote this. I'll assume you went on to read them, feel ashamed about your obvious mistake, and were about to post a retraction, but I posted this before you have time.
In language, actual usage by the majority of speakers of the language trumps all else in determining what words mean.
Then why is the standard language so different from the colloquial one?
Your argument is completely fallacious. Despite the fact that in every spoken English variety known people say sentences which end in prepositions, and use double negatives, still the standard forbids this.
And in the case of double negatives, the standard claims that these sentences mean the opposite of what actual usage shows they mean. Why doesn't "actual usage by the majority of speakers of the language", as you put it, trump this here?
The fact is that what words mean is a far more complicated thing than what you make it to be. It is an issue of power, and of representation of the world in all of its complexity; in this case, the relevant dimension is the US and its relation to the rest of America. As a friend of mine put it, when I discussed this with him: "Using 'American' to mean all of us would mean that I would have a word to jointly name all of us [people from North America, South America, and the Caribbean]. But why would I think of all of us as having anything in common?"
Of course, the last statement is terribly misguided and racist, and I immediately set him right.
The obvious reason why this discussion is going in circles is that your opponents are using a definition of "communication skills" that is more or less like the following: "ability to communicate with the particular people that live around you". [...] This isn't a very good definition of communications skills, since it means that they change as you travel
This very last bit, of course, means that I am right, and my interlocutors wrong. Yet you couldn't bring yourself to say denounce them. This says a lot about you and your morals.
it's nonetheless not prejudiced on the basis of language ("racist", as you put it).
I've said it multiple times in this thread, yet you happily disregard it: race, language and culture are tightly correlated.
Since there are large numbers of non-whites that speak English, and large numbers of whites that don't speak English, how does that work? That's like calling someone racist because they say that all South Africans are dumb. It's prejudice by language and ethnic background, not race.
Race is the immediately visible correlate of etnia and language. Discriminating against ethnic or linguistics groups is far more than significantly correlated to discriminating against a race.
In due fairness, he didn't say he couldn't understand their accents, he said they couldn't "speak English worth shit". The normal iterpretation of that statement is that they can't speak the English language well, not that they have thick accents.
Due fairness my ass. In a clearly racist context statements like that are not to be accepted.
It is well known that colleges require their students to take a standardized test, the TOEFL, to evaluate the English skills of applicants, and that there are clear guidelines as to what is a minimum score for somebody to be qualified to TA in English. If this guy thinks his univerisity is breaking such guidelines, then he should complain to the proper authorities.
But more likely than not, he's merely intolerant of anybody who doesn't speak English natively.
We aren't part of a global society, we are part of an american society.
Yes, but maybe not in the sense you think. Remember America is a continent, and everybody born between the confines of Tierra del Fuego, Alaska and Nunavut is an American.
Our official language is english and most people are adopting our ways (sadly).
America is compose of more than 30 countries, and the official language in most of them is Spanish.
As for the US, it has no official language, so even under that interpretation, your statement is false.
Now when people come here and refuse to try to learn our language, I have NO sympathy for them and they deserve what they get.
Typical xenophobic myth. "All these foreigners come here, and they don't want to learn our language." Or: "These Mexicans want to make California's official language to be Spanish."
It's a myth. Only a minority of immigrants to the US speaks no English, and among those, only a minuscule minority rejects learning it; most are desperate to learn. Hell, if you watch Hispanic TV, you'll see hour-long paid ads for competing videotape English courses.
More often than not... ok. European. What language? East Asian. What language? Central Asian. What language? African. What langage?
Again, you attempt to distort the discussion by irrelevant sidepoints. The terms of the discussion were English-speaking natives vs. non-native English-speaking immigrants. The relevant statistical regularity is that the racial makeup of the immigrants is radically different from that of the natives.
But language cannot be inferred by race and race cannot be inferred by language.
Yes. But then again, I said that, didn't I?
No worse form of bad logic than to imply I said the opposite of what I said.
It cannot even be significantly correlated. Take a "black" person. Do you wish to tell me what language they speak natively?
Depends on which country. In the US, it's African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) which is predominant among black people. In Haiti, it's Creole.
Still, you find that wherever there is a sizable population of African descent, there is, at the very least, African influence in the vocabulary of the local language, if not on the syntax. Look at creoles in the Caribbean, Cajun French, Caribbean Spanish, AAVE, and so on.
It is *entirely* futile to associate race with language.
No. As I've shown, the statistical patterns are irrefutable.
Anyway, I said explicitly in my earlier post that that there is no necessary relation between the two. Since you keep talking as if I'd said the opposite, I must assume you have no interest in rational discussion. Fuck off, then.
"America" is the land mass that extends from Tierra del Fuego in the south to Alaska and Nunavut in the North. By the morphological regularity of the association of the meanings of base forms to derivative forms, "American", as a gentillicium, means "from America", that is, somebody from the aforementioned landmass.
"United States" is the name of our country. By morphological derivation, the gentillicium for us is "unitedstatesian", which I abbreviate to USian.
They are called neither there is no USSR you moron.
I suspect we are both aware that we both were aware of that.
If I asked you what the inhabitants of Mars or our Moon are called, there are answers to those questions ("martian" and "lunatic", respectively). Despite the fact that there are no known inhabitants of those questions.
Yet we know that there once was an USSR, and its inhabitants were called "soviets". An former inhabitant of the USSR, thus, is called an "ex-soviet".
Race and language have nothing at all to do with one another.
You are distorting a statment from modern linguistics. You mean to say that race and language have no necessary connection. But, more often than not, there is a more tha significant correlation, which is the point you conveniently dodge.
Why doesn't your blatant bias against all things American (not "USian", shudder) count as "racist", hmm?
Now you make a presupposition not warranted by the context. Did we discuss all things USian? No? Then how the fuck you make that conclusion?
Anyone teaching at an English-language University should have basic communications skills in English. And given the amount most University students pay for tuition, I certainly don't think it's "racist" to insist on that.
Have you been professionally trained to evaluate if a person is competent in English?
I specifically referred to white surfer dude idiots in my reply to you, but I see that you have conveniently not included that part of my comment in your reply. How typical, manufacture the mindset of your opponent and then do whatever you can to present it as such. Do you normally resort to such tactics, or do you reserve them for situations when you have been so thoroughly raked through the coals of simple logic that you have no other choice?
The discussion is about workers who don't speak English natively, and USians who get pissed about this. I have done nothing but assume that the topic of the discussion is the topic of discussion, which, of course, is an a priori analytic statement. If the discussion had been started with a statement like "I don't like people who can't communicate well", with no mention of what language they speak natively, that would be one thing; still, your ad hominem, "you didn't quote this bit" attacks are especially viscious since anybody than read exactly what you wrote right here. (Ad hominem attacks involve disqualifying a party in the discussion in the eyes of third parties, and the fact that the third parties have trivial access to information that falsifies the attack makes it a really bad attack. Since I know all this, why would I make such a mistake? Not that my ethics allow me to make such attacks. BTW, I'd advice you not to argue logic with me.)
in an English-speaking industry in an English-speaking country, an inability to speak English is indicative of a lack of communication skills. Yes, I realize that the PC crowd will jump on this and call it racist, but it's not. It's the truth.
Again, it's only "the truth" if you redefine "communication" as "speaking English to your insatiable standards".
Do you normally resort to such tactics, or do you reserve them for situations when you have been so thoroughly raked through the coals of simple logic that you have no other choice?
P.S. what are those two **'s in g**ks supposed to mean. Is it a dirty word? Oh do tell!
It is a protest on the whole Jon Katz +/. ideology of "g**kness", as these open-minded yet right thinking, diverse yet alike, people who develop (mostly useless) technology, get paid tons of cash, "value people according to their merit" yet think most other people to be idiots, and such.
BTW, I agree with the rest of your post. I said elsewhere that I should have put an "all else being equal" in my original statements.
Better-equipped, perhaps, but not necessarily more competent. Communication involves much more than speaking the language.
Yeah, I'll grant you I assumed an "all else being equal".
And, in the US, speaking English fluently and clearly is a major component of having good communication skills.
Here is where we have to part opinion, of course, with very strong reasons on my part. When did "communication skills" become a one sided thing, that is, depending only on the skills of the person who speaks, and when it did become relative to the US?
Stop thinking in such a US-centric way. There's a huge world out there.
Well, learning more languages and understanding more cultures makes you a lot more aware about each one's limitations. "American" means somebody who is from the American landmass, of which the US occupies only a fraction.
What country are you from what is the reason you have a general dislike for people from the US.
I'm from the US. Miami. My father is half Irish, half Cuban, and my mother Haitian. And gee, the fact that you complain about my "general dislike for people from the US" (my country) only makes you look even stupider.
If they are to be successful in this country they need sufficient communication skills regardless of their technical knowledge.
This thread just shows how despite g**ks reputedly being "tolerant" and "open-minded" people, racism is predominant.
Their fucking communication skills are better than yours, you idiot. You just don't tolerate people who don't speak your language to your intolerably high standards.
I know tons of non-native English speakers, and they could deal a lot better with you speaking their language with the skill they have at English than how you deal with them speaking English.
The original poster equated "communication skills" with "speaking English with native skill". That is racist, period. A person who can speak reasonable English and her native language is far more competent at communicating than somebody who just speaks English, period.
I won't take any of this "speak another language natively" == "bad communicator" crap, thank you.
All my science TA's in college have been from foreign countries (mostly Asian) and they can't speak English worth shit. Going to discussion is worthless as a consequence. Dot com meetings must really suffer from these people.
First of all, my comment was aimed at a guy who equated "communication skills" with "skill at speaking English", which is a plainly racist statement.
Second, if you don't understand your TA's accent it's your own fucking fault. You're in college, for god's sake. The best time to hang out with different people, who speak differently from you, and work on your communication skills.
Lats week it was revealed that in California, 1999 was the year when the percentage of the population who is white dropped below 50%. This is the way of the future. Start adapting now.
The visa program is a shame. It brings in people who have little choice about the lower wage in an indentured servitude capacity reminiscent of early American slavery.
I think you should be ashamed of making such a statement.
There is no way you could compare slavery, the institution of legalized ownership of other persons, with low wage work. It's just not a reasonable comparison.
ask why a new version of a package was released?
see a list of changes between old and new versions?
Grab the version of aptitude on unstable. In the screen that shows the data about a package, you can hit 'C', and it will download and display the Debian changelog for it. This is the closest feature to that available.
Unless you count the fact that in a BSD ports style system, you can look at everything in the source before you decide to build and install...
It would be nice to see both apt and RPM adopt a rich XML-based
standard for expressing prompts, defaults and so forth for interactive
installers, along with a way to express what prompts can be silenced
and with what effect, so that text, widget-independent GUI, and
web-based (among others) interfaces to interactive installation can be
built without breaking anything.
Oh, you mean, like debconf? Well, IIRC it's not XML, and there's still a fair number of debs that don't use it, but the functionality is mostly there.
It provides an interface for front ends to ask you config stuff for packages, and stores your answers in a database-- it won't ask you the same questions again, unless the packager makes it do so for some important reason. It's configurable in the level of questions it will ask-- ask only critical stuff, and go for defaults on the rest, ask everything, and a few points in between...
Slashdot Mirror
I'll assume that you just didn't read the multiple comments where I clearly said it doesn't before you wrote this. I'll assume you went on to read them, feel ashamed about your obvious mistake, and were about to post a retraction, but I posted this before you have time.
Gee, I'm soooo nice, ain't I?
Then why is the standard language so different from the colloquial one?
Your argument is completely fallacious. Despite the fact that in every spoken English variety known people say sentences which end in prepositions, and use double negatives, still the standard forbids this.
And in the case of double negatives, the standard claims that these sentences mean the opposite of what actual usage shows they mean. Why doesn't "actual usage by the majority of speakers of the language", as you put it, trump this here?
The fact is that what words mean is a far more complicated thing than what you make it to be. It is an issue of power, and of representation of the world in all of its complexity; in this case, the relevant dimension is the US and its relation to the rest of America. As a friend of mine put it, when I discussed this with him: "Using 'American' to mean all of us would mean that I would have a word to jointly name all of us [people from North America, South America, and the Caribbean]. But why would I think of all of us as having anything in common?"
Of course, the last statement is terribly misguided and racist, and I immediately set him right.
...and bound to satisfy nobody.
The obvious reason why this discussion is going in circles is that your opponents are using a definition of "communication skills" that is more or less like the following: "ability to communicate with the particular people that live around you". [...] This isn't a very good definition of communications skills, since it means that they change as you travel
This very last bit, of course, means that I am right, and my interlocutors wrong. Yet you couldn't bring yourself to say denounce them. This says a lot about you and your morals.
it's nonetheless not prejudiced on the basis of language ("racist", as you put it).
I've said it multiple times in this thread, yet you happily disregard it: race, language and culture are tightly correlated.
Race is the immediately visible correlate of etnia and language. Discriminating against ethnic or linguistics groups is far more than significantly correlated to discriminating against a race.
In due fairness, he didn't say he couldn't understand their accents, he said they couldn't "speak English worth shit". The normal iterpretation of that statement is that they can't speak the English language well, not that they have thick accents.
Due fairness my ass. In a clearly racist context statements like that are not to be accepted.
It is well known that colleges require their students to take a standardized test, the TOEFL, to evaluate the English skills of applicants, and that there are clear guidelines as to what is a minimum score for somebody to be qualified to TA in English. If this guy thinks his univerisity is breaking such guidelines, then he should complain to the proper authorities.
But more likely than not, he's merely intolerant of anybody who doesn't speak English natively.
Yes, but maybe not in the sense you think. Remember America is a continent, and everybody born between the confines of Tierra del Fuego, Alaska and Nunavut is an American.
Our official language is english and most people are adopting our ways (sadly).
America is compose of more than 30 countries, and the official language in most of them is Spanish.
As for the US, it has no official language, so even under that interpretation, your statement is false.
Now when people come here and refuse to try to learn our language, I have NO sympathy for them and they deserve what they get.
Typical xenophobic myth. "All these foreigners come here, and they don't want to learn our language." Or: "These Mexicans want to make California's official language to be Spanish."
It's a myth. Only a minority of immigrants to the US speaks no English, and among those, only a minuscule minority rejects learning it; most are desperate to learn. Hell, if you watch Hispanic TV, you'll see hour-long paid ads for competing videotape English courses.
Again, you attempt to distort the discussion by irrelevant sidepoints. The terms of the discussion were English-speaking natives vs. non-native English-speaking immigrants. The relevant statistical regularity is that the racial makeup of the immigrants is radically different from that of the natives.
But language cannot be inferred by race and race cannot be inferred by language.
Yes. But then again, I said that, didn't I?
No worse form of bad logic than to imply I said the opposite of what I said.
It cannot even be significantly correlated. Take a "black" person. Do you wish to tell me what language they speak natively?
Depends on which country. In the US, it's African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) which is predominant among black people. In Haiti, it's Creole.
Still, you find that wherever there is a sizable population of African descent, there is, at the very least, African influence in the vocabulary of the local language, if not on the syntax. Look at creoles in the Caribbean, Cajun French, Caribbean Spanish, AAVE, and so on.
It is *entirely* futile to associate race with language.
No. As I've shown, the statistical patterns are irrefutable.
Anyway, I said explicitly in my earlier post that that there is no necessary relation between the two. Since you keep talking as if I'd said the opposite, I must assume you have no interest in rational discussion. Fuck off, then.
"America" is the land mass that extends from Tierra del Fuego in the south to Alaska and Nunavut in the North. By the morphological regularity of the association of the meanings of base forms to derivative forms, "American", as a gentillicium, means "from America", that is, somebody from the aforementioned landmass.
"United States" is the name of our country. By morphological derivation, the gentillicium for us is "unitedstatesian", which I abbreviate to USian.
This is more than clear enough.
I suspect we are both aware that we both were aware of that.
If I asked you what the inhabitants of Mars or our Moon are called, there are answers to those questions ("martian" and "lunatic", respectively). Despite the fact that there are no known inhabitants of those questions.
Yet we know that there once was an USSR, and its inhabitants were called "soviets". An former inhabitant of the USSR, thus, is called an "ex-soviet".
Duh.
You are distorting a statment from modern linguistics. You mean to say that race and language have no necessary connection. But, more often than not, there is a more tha significant correlation, which is the point you conveniently dodge.
Why doesn't your blatant bias against all things American (not "USian", shudder) count as "racist", hmm?
Now you make a presupposition not warranted by the context. Did we discuss all things USian? No? Then how the fuck you make that conclusion?
Have you been professionally trained to evaluate if a person is competent in English?
No?
Then shut up.
Good we agree on something. Now I just have to figure out if there's any logical reason for you to bring it up.
What was someone from the USSR called? USSRian? Nope. Russian?
No, it's soviet.
The discussion is about workers who don't speak English natively, and USians who get pissed about this. I have done nothing but assume that the topic of the discussion is the topic of discussion, which, of course, is an a priori analytic statement. If the discussion had been started with a statement like "I don't like people who can't communicate well", with no mention of what language they speak natively, that would be one thing; still, your ad hominem, "you didn't quote this bit" attacks are especially viscious since anybody than read exactly what you wrote right here. (Ad hominem attacks involve disqualifying a party in the discussion in the eyes of third parties, and the fact that the third parties have trivial access to information that falsifies the attack makes it a really bad attack. Since I know all this, why would I make such a mistake? Not that my ethics allow me to make such attacks. BTW, I'd advice you not to argue logic with me.)
in an English-speaking industry in an English-speaking country, an inability to speak English is indicative of a lack of communication skills. Yes, I realize that the PC crowd will jump on this and call it racist, but it's not. It's the truth.
Again, it's only "the truth" if you redefine "communication" as "speaking English to your insatiable standards".
Do you normally resort to such tactics, or do you reserve them for situations when you have been so thoroughly raked through the coals of simple logic that you have no other choice?
There is. You just wrote it, didn't you?
We prefer Yanks or Merkins.
Then how do you propose to translate "estadounidense" or "étatsunien" into English?
It is a protest on the whole Jon Katz + /. ideology of "g**kness", as these open-minded yet right thinking, diverse yet alike, people who develop (mostly useless) technology, get paid tons of cash, "value people according to their merit" yet think most other people to be idiots, and such.
BTW, I agree with the rest of your post. I said elsewhere that I should have put an "all else being equal" in my original statements.
Yeah, I'll grant you I assumed an "all else being equal".
And, in the US, speaking English fluently and clearly is a major component of having good communication skills.
Here is where we have to part opinion, of course, with very strong reasons on my part. When did "communication skills" become a one sided thing, that is, depending only on the skills of the person who speaks, and when it did become relative to the US?
Stop thinking in such a US-centric way. There's a huge world out there.
Well, learning more languages and understanding more cultures makes you a lot more aware about each one's limitations. "American" means somebody who is from the American landmass, of which the US occupies only a fraction.
What country are you from what is the reason you have a general dislike for people from the US.
I'm from the US. Miami. My father is half Irish, half Cuban, and my mother Haitian. And gee, the fact that you complain about my "general dislike for people from the US" (my country) only makes you look even stupider.
I can't help but point out that this is an unbelievably racist statement.
If you want a good tech job, you'll need to learn the language that the technology world has settled on. That language is English. Case closed.
I've met plenty of people who are in the US with H1B visas, and their English is more than good enough for the job. Period.
The problem is intolerant USians who as soon as they see anybody who doesn't speak English natively as they do get all bitchy.
This thread just shows how despite g**ks reputedly being "tolerant" and "open-minded" people, racism is predominant.
Their fucking communication skills are better than yours, you idiot. You just don't tolerate people who don't speak your language to your intolerably high standards.
I know tons of non-native English speakers, and they could deal a lot better with you speaking their language with the skill they have at English than how you deal with them speaking English.
I won't take any of this "speak another language natively" == "bad communicator" crap, thank you.
Well, linguists have problems defining what is a word and what isn't, and the same problem with "contractions", so why shouldn't non-linguists?
First of all, my comment was aimed at a guy who equated "communication skills" with "skill at speaking English", which is a plainly racist statement.
Second, if you don't understand your TA's accent it's your own fucking fault. You're in college, for god's sake. The best time to hang out with different people, who speak differently from you, and work on your communication skills.
Lats week it was revealed that in California, 1999 was the year when the percentage of the population who is white dropped below 50%. This is the way of the future. Start adapting now.
I think you should be ashamed of making such a statement.
There is no way you could compare slavery, the institution of legalized ownership of other persons, with low wage work. It's just not a reasonable comparison.
You must mean your communication skills. You know, these people speak more languages than you do, and far better than you possibly ever could.
Otherwise, how's your Hindi, Chinese or Korean doing?
see a list of changes between old and new versions?
Grab the version of aptitude on unstable. In the screen that shows the data about a package, you can hit 'C', and it will download and display the Debian changelog for it. This is the closest feature to that available.
Unless you count the fact that in a BSD ports style system, you can look at everything in the source before you decide to build and install...
Oh, you mean, like debconf? Well, IIRC it's not XML, and there's still a fair number of debs that don't use it, but the functionality is mostly there.
It provides an interface for front ends to ask you config stuff for packages, and stores your answers in a database-- it won't ask you the same questions again, unless the packager makes it do so for some important reason. It's configurable in the level of questions it will ask-- ask only critical stuff, and go for defaults on the rest, ask everything, and a few points in between...