Baltic Sea to be the "Baltic Sea" or for South America to be "South
America" - this is an example of English imperialism.
This "imperialism" idea of yours is just your idea. It is not
something that is widely felt.
regarding imperialism, I think it’s hard to reject the reasoning
that English is in widespread use because of imperialism.
Yes, but using it for a pragmatic reasons
for an international communication is
usually not imperialism.
I am also not a fan of blaming history for the current situation and
taking the long road because you don't like that history.
It would mean that I couldn't speak dutch with my Surinam friends just
because 400 years ago the ideas of how we should conduct ourselves
were different.
That is just counterproductive.
Indeed. But it should be taken with some care.
In particular there is a huge difference between using English as a
vehicular language, and using US or UK base culture references. A simple
example of this is the imperial system: it is currently in use in very
few countries (and even here in the UK, it has mostly been replaced by
metric measures everywhere). Yet, you will see a lot of people using
these depreciated units just because they think that it comes with the
English package. This is very sad for me.
Another think to keep in mind is that English is a difficult language.
There is a scientific consensus in this, and yet a lot of people seems
to deny this based on bare opinion (usually held people speaking less
than three languages…). Thus, is it extremely important, in the sake of
equality, that when a native is discussing with a non-native with
difficulties speaking or understanding, that the native avoid unusual
words, idioms, etc. Doing otherwise would be a very effective way to
make the non-native feel stupid, or to just not listen to him/her
because “he/she doesn’t understand”… which is just a perfect
illustration of the consequences of imperialism.
One of the base of the Esperanto movement, but also the simple/basic
English Wikipedia project, was precisely to fight against these
inequalities caused by the difficulty of the French and English
languages in a constructive way. (It’s not the only goals of these
movements.)
In short, indeed there has been a lot of past imperialism, but these
kind of things can be insidious and still continue. I really don’t think
that we want to unconsciously impose such culture in our community. This
is why I believe that we should be very careful with people trying to
impose an English name for the “name” tag in places where it is
absolutely not fit (see
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/424311641/history for a sad example).
Or state that this mailing list is English-only knowing that someone
subscribing to it is not warned about it beforehand.
Regards,
Martin.
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