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Ah, reached the subject atlast. Are you saying Nirvana is reached already - I thought there were development discussions going on here.
Of course not... but hardware development is not a subject that should be revolving around PCs... to pursue a new Super QXL would be as colossal a mistake as the one Miracle made. On the other hand new stand-alone QL O/S compatible hardware is IMHO very desirable and indeed makes a good investment.
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Longuistics, Sure some Greek, largely purloined by academicians but the Empire imported more than raw materials, words too from all around the world.
I suspect you are referring to the British Empire... words it did import but not from Greece..
It was the "original" empire (the Roman that is) that did most of the importing... words that were imported at that time have been incorporated and twisted almost beyond recognition. The words that were imported during the Enlightment period are still quite recognisable apart from some changes to bring them to par with what the Erasmian school thought was the correct pronounciation at ancient times ....
Besides this, English is not a difficult language to learn at all... It is extremely simple actually and compared to German or Dutch it can be learned quite succesfully and quite fast. I learned English all by myself (blame it on Black Dog by Led Zeppelin which impressed me so as a kid that I made it a point to learn English so I would understand what the song was about :-)
I took issue however with expression used that out of lack of contextual understanding make no sense :-) The words you may know but the context is what is foreign.
I recently had a conversation with a fellow QLer (not a Brit) that expressed the same idea: that expressions in English sometimes make no sense to other people... he used an example:
xx years old...
What does that mean? If you're 2 years then you are old as well? Most languages that I know do not put the "old" at the end... The reasoning is that if you are an old person you either say "I am old" or "I am old, 70 years today..." or something to that effect... but attaching the "old" to everything especially an expression that has no comparative effect (ie you're not comparing at the time with an accepted norm of being old or young) makes absolutely no sense logically :-) -At least to me :-) - But many expressions like these foreigners come to understand... it's expressions that are rarely used that we don't understand especially if they're used in a context that makes no sense at first... it's a cultural thing I guess :-)
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