At 2007-06-01 11:03:26 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Seriously, though. The English in which almost all the 'me too' > replies are written on that board is terrible.
I'm surprised that this surprises you, really. > There are quite a few Indians who write pretty good English. My vague statistics can beat up your vague statistics any day. "Quite a few" can be both absolutely large, and relatively tiny. In this case, I think many Indians write good-to-excellent English, and a much larger number... don't. BTW, I'm not saying Indians write _worse_ English than any other sort of people (as far as I'm concerned, the majority of everyone writes horrid English). I do think Indians write bad English in a characteristically Indian way, which is, for example, recognisably different from how bad English tends to be written by Russians. I tried to write some code that guesses the nationality of an author by looking at some text, but it is (not surprisingly) a very hard problem, much harder than the gender-guessing thing someone posted once. But I'm usually able to make a decent guess myself. -- ams
