Daniel Glazman schrieb:
On 26/12/12 10:45, Gervase Markham wrote:
So I don't agree that a reference to Santa is a religious reference.
It *is* a religious reference. In my family, Santa and Xmas represent
absolutely nothing because our background is not christian.
Neither is the background of the man from the North Pole riding the
flying sleigh. And that's the guy that is being tracked, in this weird
thing. The background of Saint Nikolaus, whose catholic holiday is on
the 6th of December, is christian, of course. Somehow somewhere those
two were merged, probably in the usual way that Christianity tried to
blend in with the already existing traditions.
Especially strange to people like us here in Austria where this all is
an alien (read: American) import into our culture. Around here it's the
little child of Christ himself who is flying around all by itself
delivering the presents.
So, of course, tracking Santa is a very narrow cultural reference,
applying only to those cultures where that Coca-Cola-colored man plays
any role. It's not a religious/christian reference, IMHO (or else he
would be an icon to us catholic Austrians as well, right?), but cultural
of course. I know a number of Austrians who ridicule stuff like
"tracking Santa" for "only the Americans being that crazy".
When communicating in an international language like English, we'll
always bump into cultural references - esp. as the language itself is
culture and therefore just using common words is a cultural reference at
some points.
We need to keep that in mind when doing posts as Mozilla, of course. I'm
not sure we can or should completely refrain from any cultural
references, but I was on the side that we decided against in some other
discussions like that already, so don't take my opinion to this as
anything that counts within the accepted canon.
BTW, I fully understand that in e.g. Spanish, we won't have that problem
at all, as the communities of people speaking that language are overall
more deeply Christian than the oh-so-politically-correct-in-public
Americans or the more global English-speaking communities.
Robert Kaiser
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