How are people actually like this?

[ne555]

A majority is a subset of a set consisting of more than half of the set's elements.
English may be the biggest minority.


However, I've misread, the data is for native language speakers.

[chrisname]

You're right about English not being the majority of languages natively spoken, but it is probably in the majority when you factor in non-native speakers (it is in the real world, and if the Internet is a representative subset of the real world, it follows that it would be so on the Internet also), and it is also the majority language in the set of languages used for websites' content. I'm guessing that only refers to static content, though, not the content of forum posts (but I would also guess that the figure for forum posts would be similar anyway).

[ne555]

.zo'o: And you read playboy's articles.

I'm guessing that only refers to static content, though, not the content of forum posts

IIRC they take the 1 million most popular websites, and if some page `use' it, it counts.
Not sure what `use' means

[chrisname]

... What?

[ne555]

.zo'o: that you don't need text when looking for porn.
Cats may be harder, thought.

[devonrevenge]

hehe your gonna turn from metal to hipster in 1 year of living in brighton and you wont be able to do anything about it.

and you proly will never leave.

[BHX]

chrisname wrote:

As for the "if you're going to live here, learn the language" thing, I kind of agree with it.

Well my problem is that if you look at history, currently we are trying to enforce that now, but when we took the land from the other countries, there were more diverse languages in the US. We took land from the British, French, Spainish, Mexicans, and American Indians. So to say you have to learn the language if you are going to live here means that we should have learned French, Spanish, and Native American tribal languages. We can knock out Spanish and French due to how we took the land from them, but with the Native Americans we are just 'holding' their land and started building on it so technically we need to find what Native American land we are on and start learning their language too :P.

North America has such a diverse spoken range of language which is actually proper when looking at history. We have forgotten our history, which is bad as some think it could lead to repeating the same errors and failures.

[chrisname]

BHXSpecter wrote:

when we took the land from the other countries, there were more diverse languages in the US. We took land from the British, French, Spainish, Mexicans, and American Indians. So to say you have to learn the language if you are going to live here means that we should have learned French, Spanish, and Native American tribal languages.

A union of states invading land which is inhabited by people who don't believe in ownership of land and have yet to set up a persistent, static society is completely different to an individual emigrating to an existing society. The latter case is the one we were talking about. The conquest of North America by the colonists is totally irrelevant.

[devonrevenge]

if you move to cornwall or wales i hope you try and communicate in a celtic dialect

kernow; http://www.cornish-language-news.org/

cymraig; http://www.learnwelsh.org/

infact the romans didnt realy invade neither did the saxons or franks or jutes they sort of assimilated and the normans just placed themselves at the top of society

so i expect you all to be speaking original classical english at the very least

[chrisname]

Neither of those are independent countries and both of them have English as an official language. None of the other civilisations you mention exist any more, and their languages aren't in official use anywhere (no, Latin is not the official language of the Vatican City-State, that would be Italian).

[BHX]

chrisname wrote:

A union of states invading land which is inhabited by people who don't believe in ownership of land and have yet to set up a persistent, static society is completely different to an individual emigrating to an existing society. The latter case is the one we were talking about. The conquest of North America by the colonists is totally irrelevant.

The land was inhabited by people who believed we needed to live along side nature. Though, it is relevant, because to this day the land that we acquired from the American Indians is marked as us only holding it and not actually owning it. They had a special on the History channel earlier this year that said if the American Indians decided to, they could demand their land back and break away from the US to form an Indian Nation (that is why most Indian Reservations don't follow the US laws as they aren't considered part of the US).

[chrisname]

No, it's not relevant. We were talking about immigration, invasion is totally different. When you invade and settle a country, you're not subject to its laws. You're usually aiming to supplant its government with your own and institute your own laws.

BHXSpecter wrote:

They had a special on the History channel earlier this year that said if the American Indians decided to, they could demand their land back and break away from the US to form an Indian Nation (that is why most Indian Reservations don't follow the US laws as they aren't considered part of the US).

The Lakota already sort of did that in 2007, except they can only take the land that they held when the treaties were signed, they can't take all the land they want (which seems to be what you're implying). Also, in future, please don't use the History channel as evidence.

[SIK]

My native tongue is English and do also speak a second language. My opinion thus may be seen as biased toward the English language, so would like to report of what I encountered from people who do not speak English as their first language.

These folks are also c++ programmmers. c++ is an english based language and encountered them claiming that they considered "changing" the way they write c++ to convert the english keywords (like if, else, ...) to their native language translations via #defines but found it very akward and actually hampered their normal flow of logic (this experiment was also considered to be taken in context of new programmer living in their own bubble and not having to interface with others, so that real world issues of non standardization wasn't a considered factor to their discomfort)

Many of these folks also consequently model their solutions in mostly english but have seen traces of their native tongues being used as well.

I'm not sure if the circle of folks I've interacted with is a good measure of what actually is. Maybe some of the other people on this site who don't speak English as their first language can tell me otherwise.

[ResidentBiscuit]

@Chris,

Aren't you from the UK? You know more about American history than most people I know who live here haha

[devonrevenge]

one day devon is gonna break free from the tyranny of the english and become an independant country of its own, we may have some economic issues...wait no we wont.

[chrisname]

@ResidentBiscuit
Thanks, I studied American history for one year when I was 15/16 and then again when I was 17/18. The first one was focused on the settlement of the west while the second one was a little more general, but focused mainly on the Civil War.

@SIK
Programmierung auf Deutsch-C++:

#enthalten <dstrom>
#enthalten <eastrom>
#enthalten <reihe>

gz haupt(gz arge, char* argv[])
{
	wenn (arge < 2) {
		ubl::cflr << "Verwendung: " << argv[0] << " <dateinamen [mehr dateinamen]>" << ubl::endz;
		ruckkehr 1;
	}
	fur (gz i = 1; i < arge; ++i) {
		ubl::edstrom strom(argv[i]);
		wenn (!(strom.offen_ist())) {
			ubl::cfhlr << "Datei kann nicht geöffnet!" << ubl::endz;
			ruckkehr 1;
		}
		solange (strom.gut()) {
			ubl::reihe zeile;
			ubl::bekommen_zeile(strom, zeile);
			ubl::caus << zeile << '\n';
		}
		wenn (!(strom.edd())) {
			ubl::cflr << "Datei kann nicht gelesen!" << ubl::endz;
			ruckkehr 1;
		} sonst {
			ubl::caus << ubl::spulen;
		}
	}
	ruckkehr 0;
}

[ResidentBiscuit]

@Chris,

That's one of the many issues with American school. All through high school, there was never a class that was history of another country, just years of American history.

[chrisname]

Ours isn't like that, thankfully. Last year I did the American Civil War and the Tudors; the year before that was Russian history from Tsar Alexander II to the end of Stalin and British politics from 1945 to about 1989; the year before that was the development of medicine (from Egypt onwards) and the year before that was the Vietnam war and the settlement of the western USA. Other than that, I've done basic stuff about the Slave trade, the middle ages, the Vikings, Rome, etc. but this is going back several (> 4) years.

Do you really just do American history? That's not even 300 years!

[firedraco]

There is "World History" but it's not focused stuff, just basically an overview of interesting world events and wars.

[ResidentBiscuit]

In middle school I think we had one "world history" class which briefly hit a bunch of stuff. Nothing of significance though, as you could imagine from a class that broad. But yea, through high school we had a pre-WW2 and post-WW2 American history classes, national and local government classes, Industrial Age (in America), and a Civil War class. That was about all we had, not all of those were required. I just enjoy learning about history.

Note, I wasn't in a small school either. Upper-average sized population.