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You will die on that hill, won't you.


I dislike this general trend of rejecting the need for adaptation/transliteration and pretending that it's a moral failing or a rejection of diversity.

Like people who insist it's a good idea for a European website of a European business to accept any Unicode input for names, as if an employee who speaks Italian and English could be expected to know how to process a request for a customer named 田中 who claims their correspondence was mistakenly sent to 東京 instead of 京都.

There is generally too much linguistic diversity in the world to be able to expect people to know even the most basic facts about some other culture's language. There's nothing wrong with adapting your message to your audience, even if it loses a lot of nuance that they could theoretically get if they spent just a little bit of time on studying, say, Vietnamese writing.

And I want to emphasize that I'm saying this who is neither American nor English, and who is personally fascinated by language, and who has taken the time to study a little bit about quite a few languages. But I'm also someone who has understood that you can't expect people to be able to, say, pronounce your name correctly, or spell it correctly, and that there's nothing offensive about that.


I've stopped saying “hi mom” to my mother when I visit her. After all, my mother /knows/ that I love her. Hence, it's just so much more practical not to greet her every time, no? Surely no one can dispute this incorruptible logic.


"I am so fascinated by language that I wish my newspapers would include less foreign languages"




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