Re: Standardizing on Oxford English

On Fri, 5 Jun 2020 at 18:24, brian m. carlson
[off-list ref] 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