[Scribus] Translation/language question: Standard English vs. American English

[John Jordan]

On 4 Aug 2005, at 11:44, Craig Ringer wrote:

> (Note: I'm just poking fun at the Americans here re misspelling. It's
> a dialect; I can deal with that.)

As a stuent of linguistics (native of western US), permit me a few 
observations.

1) All languages have dialects and always will. The greater the 
number of speakers of the language, the greater the number and 
the degree of the variances.

2) Writing systems (graphemics) are a part of the dialect and there 
weill always be variations.

3) English sucks as an international language from many aspects. 
First, English uses some phonetic sounds that are very rare among 
the world's languages and, therefore, very hard for foreigners to 
master -- e.g., the retroflex r, among others. Second, English has 
some bizarre ways of creating questions (do insertion, wh- 
movement) that are almost unique among the world's languages 
and, therefore, extremely difficult for foreigners to master. Third, 
because English is a bastard language with a germanic base and a 
romance top layer, we have a morphology that is incomprehensible 
to a non-native. For example, words of Latin origin can take only 
certain suffixes and prefixes and words of Germanic origin can take 
only other suffixes and prefixes. And  finally, the spelling system is 
about 300 years past due for an update, not that it was ever close 
to accurate from the beginning.

So when y'all bitch about color vs colour, you have no idea how 
deep the problem really goes.

In the meantime, intelligent and educated persons worldwide 
understand that diversity is the wealth of our species and rejoice in 
our differences.

And as a final note, one of my passions is spelling reform for 
English. If I accomplish that, and nothing else, my life will have 
been worth living.

I will shut up now.