Delirium wrote:
Angela wrote:
One reason is that the differences between
American and British
English are more involved than simply changing the spelling of a few
words. Punctuation and grammar are also involved. If you changed
behavior to behaviour in an otherwise AE sentence, the sentence would
then be wrong in both languages.
I can't seem to find the page now, but I seem to remember a policy page
where we've basically settled on a compromise, partially-invented
"international English" punctuation style for clarity and because it's
not really worth fighting over. The compromise included the
British-style "put punctuation _after_ closing quotation marks", and
something from US style that I can't remember. As for being "wrong",
that's only the case if you happen to be a [[en:prescription and
description|grammatical prescriptivist]], which not all of us are.
But as far as the spelling issue goes, it seems like a solution in
search of a problem. The current approach seems to be working well enough.
-Mark
I heartily disagree. The current approach is a constant source of
disagreement and worsening of linguistic tensions. I am always running
into minor tiffs over British vs American spelling that could be
eliminated with multi-dialect support. This would also mean that when I
run into a Britishism on an article that might be confusing or
misleading to an American reader, instead of changing it to an
Americanism and drawing the ire of the original author (or changing it
to something neutral and probably drawing the ire of the original
author), the original author's Britishism can stay, the Americanism will
be viewable to Americans, and everyone is a little bit happier.
I think that the minor increase in complexity for editing is far
outweighed by the increase in understandability, familiarity, and
dialectical consistency. As for syntactic differences between the
dialects, I have yet to see anything that differed by more than a
handful of words. Most of the major differences are in informal,
colloquial speech.
IBM {-en-us has en-gb have-} introduced several new products...
In sum, if the code is already being written to support a major case
(Chinese), it strikes me as perverse to not allow for minor cases like
English. If people want to do it, why not let them?
- David