And, to continue Monica's thoughts, the change Rainer is speaking of took place long before there were any standards for teachers at all. it also depends on time and place. In the United States, we have certainly had standards for teachers for several decades, including grammar, though I have never heard of any authority in any English speaking country that could mandate this kind of usage. However, almost all of the English speaking population of the United States still think in pints, yards, inches, gallons, and pounds. The only exception would be the scientific community, and I'm sure they're "bilingual". We made an attempt to officially go metric in the early 1970's, but the only survivor is soft drinks. I buy gallons of milk and gasoline, but liters of Coke. Best to all, and keep playing, Chris.
On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 6:27 AM, [1][email protected] <[2][email protected]> wrote: There is never likely to be any official reform of the English language. And teachers don't have a common opinion on what to teach children. The policy is to leave children to find everything out for themselves. As ever Monica ----Original Message---- From: [3][email protected] Date: 29/01/2018 9:37 To: "Lute net"<[4][email protected]> Subj: [LUTE] four and twenty A clarification: I always thought that there must have been (sort of) an official reform. At least teachers must have a common opinion what to teach children. Apparently there was none in England. In Germany from time to time "mathematicians" propose to change the German system since the current system makes learning Math hard for the children. Of course, this has nothing to do with mathematics :) I guess such a reform (in Germany) would be very confusing for several decades. Switching from shillings and pennies to 100 pence per pound must have been hard. Do many people still think in yards, miles, pints, ...? Cheers, Rainer PS A new standard kilogram will probably come soon. PPS Coming back to lute matters: most people describe string tensions in terms of Kg which is plain nonsense since Kg is the unit of matter. What should be used is Kilopond which is equal to the magnitude of the force exerted by one kilogram of mass in a 9.80665 m/s2 gravitational field. However, officially kilopond should not be used any more (since c1980). I still prefer to talk about a tension of 3 Kilopond instead of 29.4 Newton :) To get on or off this list see list information at [5]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- References 1. mailto:[email protected] 2. mailto:[email protected] 3. mailto:[email protected] 4. mailto:[email protected] 5. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
