> I fully understand your sentiments, and as you are (I think) > a non-native speaker of English who has made the effort to
No I am not a native speaker of English and that's obvious! > learn a language other than your mother tongue, your opinion > is probably more important than mine. But whilst standardisation > does indeed bring many advantages, it also imposes unnecessary > entry barriers for those who are not native speakers of the > language that the standard imposes. And I, for one, feel that > those barriers should be removed whenever possible. You have a point, however, let me remind you that if one wants to study say Greek archeology, he/she must learn ancient Greek. Also, I think that people who study law need to have a good command of Latin. Scholars working in theology need to have a good command of both Greek and Latin. Also, it seems that linguists need to have a basic understanding of a number of different languages. People wanting to study art or architecture need to have basic skills in drawing. What am I trying to say? Simply that there are barriers everywhere. As I said in my previous message, if one does not feel happy with something he/she can create something new. For example, StarTeX was a project developed by someone who wanted high school pupils to be able to use TeX for their work (see http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb17-2/tb51dag.pdf). > I genuinely believe that we should > be moving towards a more inclusive society, in which each can > express his or her ideas in his or her own native language. Indeed, this a goal set by the EU who wants all Europeans to be fluent in two EU languages (three, if one includes the mother tongue of each individual). > Computers are the very tools that make this feasible : is it > not time that we started to exploit them more fully, for the benefit > of all ? Einstein once said: Make it simple, but not simpler! And here someone tries to makes things simpler... A.S. ---------------------- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
