Good afternoon Why people discuss only in English on the forum whose name I've promised Iversen I won't describe or say more. This is a point, because they visit the forum for learn a language or more languages, but they discuss for billions of hours, but never practice in the language which they want to learn. English is a nice language, I do NOT criticise it at all, but it is the internet's lingua franca and the world's language also. Therefore why also on the language forum, and not in all the different languages? I have thought truly long about the word 'only', if it must be before or after 'discuss'. Please can you say? Thanks.
Même s'il était permis de créer des fils de discussion dans d'autres langues, je pense qu'il n'y aurait qu'assez peu de gens qui le feraient, vu que l'anglais est la langue qui est comprise par le plus grand nombre de personnes. Par contre, il serait intéressant de voir un forum qui était un vrai "Babel" -- qui permettait à ses utilisateurs d'écrire partout dans n'importe quelle langue. En ce qui concerne "only," je le mettrais après "discuss." "Only discuss" pourrait impliquer "discuss (and not do other things that one can do in English)" au lieu de ce que tu voulais dire, "discuss in English (and not in other languages)." -- Even if the forum allowed the creation of discussion threads in other languages, I think there were would not be many people who would do it, since English is the language understood by the greatest number of people there. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see a forum that was a true "Babel" that allowed its users to write everywhere in any language. As far as "only," I would put it after "discuss." "Only discuss" could imply "discuss (and not do other things that one can do in English)" instead of what you meant, "discuss in English (and not in other languages)."
If people write in English then they get more readers - and that makes English even more dominant on the linguistic battlefield. And making separate threads in other languages is a dead end if the content just is "hej folkens" "Guten Tag" "Allô y'a quelqu'un ici?" "Почему не существует никакой активности здесь?" "Γιατί δεν χρησιμοποιούμε πια αυτό το νήμα;" "Google translate បានសរសេរថានេះមិនមែនខ្ញុំ" and so forth. For me there are two viable solutions: 1) homepages with something different from English as their base language - but then you may have to find another target group (and quite possibly a less international one), 2) create personalized free spaces where people can write in whatever language they fancy without the obligation to be understandable for everyone. And in the place whose name shan't be mentioned here I made a personal thread with exactly that character: if I had read something in Greek then I described it in Greek - and then it was just non accessible to the majority of the readers. If I could have written in Mayan glyphs or Hurrian cuneiform I would have done so even though nobody else could have read the stuff, just for fun. And I have just written something in Khmer which I can't even read myself (thanks to Google translate, our friend and foe). But discussions which are meant to be open to all will inevitably drift towards English because any other language would give fewer responses.
I just wanted to say it's ok to mention HTLAL here. I love that forum, even though I rarely use it anymore. I seem to recall you guys have some sort of agreement about not mentioning it, which is fine, but polydog doesn't have a policy against it or anything.
