Allan Gottlieb schreef: > At Sat, 24 Dec 2005 15:19:27 +0100 Holly Bostick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > >> It's not much use telling a native Dutch speaker to choose >> Edit=>Preferences=>Composition=>Send Options if their desktop is >> not in English, they don't speak English, > > > Really? My (limited) experiences with native dutch people is that > their spoken english is such that the best way to detect that they > are dutch and not american is to notice the complete absence of > grammatical errors. >
That may be so, but only most likely for 1) the young (who are taught English in school as a requirement); 2) those who have a great deal of contact with the English-speaking, so have the opportunity to practice; and/or 3) live in or near Amsterdam (which is just another way of saying #2). This excludes vast numbers of citizens and aliens, including my (future) mother-in-law, who just got her first computer last month. She spoke English fairly regularly a couple of decades ago, when she regularly hosted visiting Americans, but it has long since fallen into disuse-- and she would not have her desktop in English in any case. My downstairs neighbor is young enough to have learned English in school, but since he didn't have any English-speaking companions (except those in school with him), it fell into disuse (not unlike my French), and he cannot be said to speak/understand English. Ultimately, native Dutch speakers in their own country, where Dutch is the official language, can really only be expected to speak Dutch, and certainly as consumers have every right to expect any service personnel to be able to perform their service-related duties in that language. Would you find it satisfactory to call... Dell, or CompUSA ... and have the tech support personnel help you in half English, half Puerto Rican Spanish-- or all Spanish, even though you did not choose a language to proceed in when calling-- just because a percentage of the population of New York City speaks Spanish? The Dutch speak Dutch in The Netherlands. They care about that enough to have required me to learn Dutch as a requirement to stay here. They clearly expect me (and other aliens) to conduct internal affairs in Dutch. Just because some (or even many, but not nearly as many as the propaganda claims) may have a second language (or even a third, as a lot of people speak or understand German as well, Germany being so close and German in some ways similar to Dutch, though not in as many ways as the propaganda claims) is no reason to expect that a Dutch employer would not expect an employee to speak fluent Dutch to its Dutch clients. But of course, the requirement to learn Dutch only covers "normal" language, not specialized technical language-- for that, you have to have more schooling (as a Russian woman I knew in the Dutch as a Second Language course had to-- she is a dentist, but had to have an extra... year, I think... of language school, just to cover Dutch "dental" language before she could hope to get work in the field). Since I can't afford more schooling at this time, I'm doing it the hard way. Holly -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
