Re: Standardizing on Oxford English

On 2020-06-05 at 05:34:21, Varun Varada wrote:

Hello,

I noticed the Documentation/SubmittingPatches file reads:

quoted

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