On Fri, 5 Jun 2020 at 18:24, brian m. carlson <sandals@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > 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. Agreed, as I'm a native US English who knows French as well. But I guess my point is that out of all of the varieties, Oxford English is the most prevalent, international, and etymologically correct, which is why I suggested it. > > 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. The reference for Oxford is the first spelling on lexico.com, which is a very widely-used resource. Canadian English is essentially identical to Oxford except for the -yze set of words, for which Oxford maintains the etymologically correct -yse endings. And second-language speakers learn Oxford by and large, though many from Brazil apparently end up just moving to the US to learn English, where they necessarily learn US English. However, I never found the guidance of doing what other people are doing a convincing one, especially when the alternatives are more logical/convincing/"better". Though I do recognize Konstantin's point that the project is decades old. > 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. > -- While I somewhat sympathize with the sentiment, from the text, it seemed like things were in a mixed state, so I wanted to suggest picking the standard that makes the most international sense. As the usual guidance goes: when faced with two choices of relatively equal difficulty, choose the one that makes the most sense long-term. Varun
