On 2020-06-05 at 05:34:21, Varun Varada wrote: > Hello, > > I noticed the Documentation/SubmittingPatches file reads: > > > We prefer to gradually reconcile the inconsistencies in favor of US English > > May I ask why? US English is highly idiosyncratic, illogical, and used > by a minority of the English-speaking population of the world (see > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences). > Since British English has its own idiosyncrasies, why not use Oxford > English, the most international English that is used by millions of > the world? It is used by practically every international organization > (such as the UN, ISO, IEC, BIPM, NATO, etc.), taught in practically > every school in non-native-English-speaking countries (and even > native-English-speaking ones), and used by myriad publications (e.g., > Nature) and people around the world. Given the inherently > international nature of the Git project, it makes complete sense to > follow suit. I should point out that many of your arguments about U.S. English are true of English in general. As a native U.S. English speaker who also knows Spanish and French, I can confidently say that even French, which many find difficult, has a mostly regular correspondence between letters and sounds, and, overall, a reasonably consistent set of rules for verb conjugations, albeit with many irregular verbs. English, in any form, has none of that. It is, as languages go, highly irregular. I didn't write the text in question, but I suspect the reason is practicality: most open source projects use U.S. English, and most contributors to Git are able to write the U.S. variety. It's hard for me personally to write Oxford English because I have never written or spoken it, and when I need to consult a reference, the one I have is from the University of Chicago, not Oxford. I suspect many Canadians and second-language speakers from at least parts of the Americas are more likely to be familiar with the U.S. variety than Oxford or British English, although I don't know for certain. This isn't a defense of U.S. English (after all, I wrote the first paragraph), but just an acknowledgement of the way things are. This project is all about practicality rather than purity; to quote from CodingGuidelines: Again, we live in the real world, and it is sometimes a judgement call, the decision based more on real world constraints people face than what the paper standard says. -- brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204
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