DOS ain't dead

> > there was never much non-English posting here, was there?
> > (I don't and shouldn't demand it, obviously.)
>
> Yes. One of this forum's rules is to write in English and thankfully
> everybody does so. It's the "lowest common denominator" for multinational
> communication on the Internet.

Debatable! But I won't object. Just saying, some people may prefer another.

> English has diaeresis/trema too, though usually it is used for place-names
> that don't follow modern English orthography. But yes, English has
> accents!

Obviously it's a very big world. The great thing about standards is that there are so many of them! So my experience is, of course, very limited. Having said that, accents are very rare (ignoring loan words or proper names). This keyboard has none, not even indicated with modifier keys. No one in my (small) part of the world uses them (in normal/average/common circumstances).

But other English speakers are free to do what they wish. (ASCII normally means 7-bit because we usually do without. Of course, that minimalism all went away with 8-bit chars and networking and beyond. Even lowly DOS isn't purely 7-bit, if you do the appropriate things.)

> > Someone should ask MarcoV (or maybe Eric Auer) for more advice. They're
> > more educated than I am. (I found a book called _Old English and Its
> > Closest Relatives_ for sale online, which basically compares "Gothic,
> > Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Low Franconian,
> > and Old High German"!!)
>
> So middle (e.g. Franconian) dialects are discriminated against, while at
> the same time further removed dialects like High German and even non
> Western Germanic Gothic and Norse are included. Odd. Everybody seems to
> forget Luxembourg in Germanic language discussions.

It's easy to forget when you're thousands of miles away, separated by ocean, and have no direct links. (Luxembourg is way more obscure and exotic than Germany or the Netherlands.) Not everyone has the nerdy (or scholarly) affection for it that we do.

> I'm btw no linguist. I just started reading linguist (Germanisti(e)k) news
> and articles to keep track of a local dialect.

Amateur! (Me, too.) It's usually good to be open to communication with others. Isolation isn't necessarily great, nor are incompatibilities.

> > I pointed Eric to Beowulf online a while back, saying it
> > (unsurprisingly??) sounded like Swedish (although I don't speak/read
> > that either).
>
> Keep in mind that in the time of Beowulf, that many of the current
> separations of (West-) Germanic languages didn't exist. Coastal Dutch and
> German were mostly mutually intelligible with English.

The U.S. DoD's Ada reduced their projects from using "over 450 [languages] in 1983 to 37 by 1996". Variety is good, and you don't want to step on anyone's toes, but there is a limit to how much can be properly supported. (But "Just use English! Now!!" is too gauche! Besides, it's far from simple and elegant ... although you can simplify and standardize any subset, if you try hard enough.)

> Norse is afaik often dragged into the fold, even in discussions about West
> Germanic, because it has much newer and complete (up to the 12th century)
> sources for old Epics, while the West Germanic stuff is more like 5th.

Well, the Nordic languages still exist, but clearly English, German, and Dutch are the most popular Germanic languages nowadays. (Sadly, few truly care even that much, unless forced.)

> Gothic and Burgundian are dead. Gothic is often dragged in because some of
> the earliest Germanic sources are Gothic. Burgundian sources are so scarce
> it is probably better to not mention it at all.

Requiescat in pace.

> maltho thi afrio lito

Gesundheit.