urban@algol (Michael Urban) (08/31/88)
In article <3782@polya.Stanford.EDU> rokicki@polya.Stanford.EDU (Tomas G. Rokicki) writes: (in response to someone else's all-numeric date proposal) >...I like the names of the months, like the names of the days of > the week. When a strictly numeric date format is adopted, the >world will be lesser for it. >When I ask the computer for the date and time, I prefer > 12:05 on Wednesday, 12 March 1943 >infinitely over > W 19430312.12:05 >or any such. Much easier to read. Well, of course, that depends on how much space you have available to display the date. You might need to use "1205 Wed 12 Mar 43", which is still more readable than all-numeric, has the advantage of brevity, but could never be mistaken for `English'. The point is... > >>> It is quite obvious that Esperanto is superior to English; >Obvious to whom, and for what purpose? ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ... expressed in that short phrase. If the purpose of representing the date is for My Consumption, then I should be allowed to select its representation wherever possible. I hope that we all agree that `all power to the user' is a `Motherhood' issue over which there is little dispute. If the purpose is communication between two individuals who likely will not have the same personal preference, than a standard may be necessary; if their languages are different, something like yyyy.mm.dd has clear advantages. If the purpose is to transmit data between two machines, I cannot imagine why anyone would have a strong emotional opinion on the subject; it might as well be ``struct tm'' for all I care, as long as I can get my output to appear as I wish. Since I notice that this is cross-posted to comp.text, I may observe that this is similar to the familiar argument for the use of markup languages rather than troffish or WYSIWYG document representations; if the document contains \Date{88}{10}{12}, the printed representation can be ``October 12, 1988'' or ``1988.10.12'' depending on the specific requirements of the document's readers. In a typical WYSIWYG system, a date in a document will often be just a string of characters, bound forever to one realization. > Esperanto, in my opinion, is ugly. I like English, for all of its >inconsistencies. Writing English is an art. Shakespeare >is beautiful; a translation of Shakespeare to Esperanto >or even modern english loses so much of its nature. > (more [reasonable] rhapsodizing on English omitted --- sorry, Tomas) Writing any language is an art. A translation of Shakespeare to any language loses much of its nature. Writing in Esperanto is also an art, and translation of original Esperanto literature and especially poetry to English would also lose much of its nature. Beauty is proverbially in the eye (or ear) of the beholder, and many people find that Esperanto hath beauties of its own. But aesthetics are, I think, beside the point. Once again, we must consider the purpose of the language. English prose is all very nice, but if you are going to communicate with a group of people from Japan, China, and Finland, you will need to use a common language. From several points of view (political neutrality, ease of learning, simplicity of structure), Esperanto has evident superiority to English. As a hint: suppose the English speaker were not present. Incidentally, when people write letters and periodicals in Esperanto, the date is typically expressed as something like ``Mardon, la 26a de julio,'' or ``26 jul 1887.'' Esperantists do not care for all-numeric dates either, precisely because of the ambiguities and differing conventions in the U.S. and Europe. >...the last thing we need is a prescriptive language, totally lacking in a >history or culture. I am disheartened enough by the disappearence of the >subjunctive in modern English. Don't even think about >teaching Esperanto to my kids. > Nobody is seriously suggesting that Esperanto replace everyone's first language. But it is a very reasonable proposal for a universal SECOND language. Surely you are not suggesting that our children should never be taught a second language? Mike Urban ...!trwrb!trwspp!spp2!urban "You're in a maze of twisty UUCP connections, all alike"