xml-dev - Re: Foreign Names, some reasons to use

[Rick JELLIFFE <ricko@geotempo.com>]

"Oleg A. Paraschenko" wrote:
> 
>   Hello!
> 
>   I scanned a thread and have some comments. Probably they will
> interest because I am foreigner.
> 
> >"most software engineers...can read English"
> -- Some even can understand.
 
I had an interesting comment from a Chinese friend on this: he said that
at School he there was an emphasis that one should be able to speak
English because it would be very embarrassing if you didn't or couldn't
understand if you had to deal with Foreigners.

He said the result of this is that Chinese here have a high premium on
avoiding embarrassment: they won't participate for fear of appearing a
idiot. (Of course, everyone who posts shows the world they are an idiot
sooner or later, merely because we all are, sooner or later.) This
relates directly to the previous comment on whether free-for-all
mail-lists are a universal solution for enfranchising all kinds of
developers.  

But it also impacts how suitable English names are. Of course, we all
use words constantly without really knowing their particular meaning,
just having gained a feeling for them from general use. But I think that
cultures that place a high premium on avoiding potentially embarrassing
situation may also tend to shy away from markup languages: it may be
that the combination of emphasizing that good markup can use descriptive
names that are readily readable and keeping the names in English will
make some people treat marked-up documents as a language examination.
Not a welcome prospect.   (Of course, Chinese culture has some kind of
high valuation on scholarship too, so that is how they balance the face
issue, as far as I can see.)  

Rick Jelliffe

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