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> While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft's mother-tongue is American-English. When thi
by Kwpolska 3y ago
> While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft's mother-tongue is American-English. When this is coupled with Word’s ubiquity, it at least reinforces this dominance.
> "Word primarily operates in English," says Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert at the language learning platform Babbel. "As businesses become increasingly global, the widespread use of Word in professional and technical fields has led to the borrowing of English terms and structures, which contribute to the trend of linguistic homogenisation."
Uh, what? Microsoft Word is available in dozens of languages, with spell checking available. I was able to find a copy of Word 3.0 (1986) in German on a certain well-known old-software site. If you tell modern Word your text is in German, it will underline non-English words, and if you tell it your text is in British English, it will probably complain about your mention of your "favorite color".
- mejutoco 3y agoAnd even the shortcuts are localized. A Spanish Word installation will use ctrl+g (guardar) instead of ctrl+s (save), for instance.
- voiceblue 3y agoYour last sentence is hinting on something that actually has more bearing on technology effecting language: HTML. When I was first learning HTML & CSS it irked me to have to spell "colour" wrong to get things working. Now I just use the US American spelling everywhere (it helps that I'm currently in the US).
- lemoncucumber 3y agoThat’s still not as bad as having to spell referrer wrong in http headers where it’s spelled “referer”... which is incorrect for every flavo(u)r of English.
- spydum 3y agoI remember writing a logging method for a webserver forever ago, and could not for the life of me, understand why my Referrer values were not getting logged. Finally looked at the headers, and thought it was a bug in the browser I was testing. Took way too long to figure out the problem.
- bossyTeacher 3y ago'Colour' in Am-Eng is not wrong though.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIt's wrong in HTML, which is what matters.
- cookie_monsta 3y ago> Of course, it is worth remembering that Word isn't just available in English. It supports around 100 languages, including European Spanish and Latin-American Spanish. (from TFA)
- bananaflag 3y agoMy native language (and I imagine many others) didn't have any localized version of Word until the late 90s and I (and I imagine many others, even people who didn't speak English at all) got used to using English words like "Save", "Italic", "bullets" etc.
- WalterBright 3y agoEnglish incorporates words from other languages all the time. Large numbers of American Indian words, for example. When the US occupied Germany, a number of German words. And so on. Heck, half of English nouns are taken from French, from when the French conquered England.
- bananaflag 3y agoYeah, I have nothing against borrowing words. I was just refuting the (unspoken) assumption that everything got localized since the beginning of time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]