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November 18th, 2005, 10:57 PM
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General
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Re: OT: Off shore call center workers mad at Amer
Heh you think having to learn Spanish to get a job is bad? Try having to learn (or at least take as a course) French in order to get into a Canadian university! It's quite similar to Spanish in some respects, such as the masculin/feminin designations attached to most words...really is frustrating to learn! Never have been good with languages...
What we really need is a worldwide language, something that everyone speaks. Unfortunately, everyone would want that to be their language...
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November 18th, 2005, 03:23 PM
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Brigadier General
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Re: OT: Off shore call center workers mad at Amer
I'd be more sympathetic to your plight if it wasn't for this:
http://angryasianman.com/Power99_Call_to_India.mp3
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November 18th, 2005, 03:50 PM
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Re: OT: Off shore call center workers mad at Amer
I don't like outsourcing. However, even though I've received less-than-satisfactory assistance from some of my calls to India (or wherever), it's not the fault of the person on the other end of the phone. It's the fault of CEOs and American government (who pass laws in payment for campaign donations that favor offshoring). I might also point out that I've received less-than-satisfactory assistance from people who speak English as a first language.
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November 19th, 2005, 04:35 PM
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Shrapnel Fanatic
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Re: OT: Off shore call center workers mad at Amer
This just proves my point from an earlier post that stated that companies SHOULD NOT export tech support calls to other countries....
We Americans have a higher standard of stupidity and require knowledgeable high school drop outs to provide out tech support.
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November 19th, 2005, 10:52 PM
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Re: OT: Off shore call center workers mad at Amer
Quote:
Atrocities said:
This just proves my point from an earlier post that stated that companies SHOULD NOT export tech support calls to other countries....
We Americans have a higher standard of stupidity and require knowledgeable high school drop outs to provide out tech support.
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Dammit man, I don't care if the tech support people are idiots, as long as they're knowledgable idiots! And I don't mind if the guy making my flight reservation doesn't speak English, as long as he didn't have to steal my job to do it.
Oh.... Wait....
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November 21st, 2005, 07:32 PM
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Re: OT: Off shore call center workers mad at Amer
I've been told by a variety of people that Dutch is fairly easy to learn.
I also happen to know that no South Africa dares speak Africans to a Dutchmen, as Afrikans is dismissed as 'Baby Dutch' or 'If your 10 year old kid spoke that bad you'd be seriously worried.'
Combining these two facts I would say that Afrikans is very easy to learn. Of course I have no evidence for this bar my own stab at learning Afrikans, which was conducted entirely in pubs and so isn't perhaps very representative.
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November 22nd, 2005, 10:08 AM
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Private
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Re: OT: Off shore call center workers mad at Amer
Phil,
I'm Dutch (cheers) and last year I had the chance of speaking to a South African. We found out that if I spoke Dutch and he spoke Afrikaans, we could have a perfectly good conversation. Some words are different, spelling is different, grammar is sometimes different, but we could get the meaning across.
I've got the same thing with Belgian clients who speak Flemish. No major problems at all, apart from the occasional odd word that we can then laugh about.
Speaking Afrikaans, but Flemish more so, is still somewhat considered to be a sign of having lower intelligence (but then again, some of the rural Dutch accents have the same stigma)
As for learning languages, I had no trouble learning English and almost consider it my 2nd language but I found German and French much more difficult. I really suck at those two, because they're so hard on grammar. I can speak/read/listen to German okay though.
Finally, when it comes to accents, don't forget that there's plenty of people with horrible accents in English-speaking countries too. I have a friend from Yorkshire that I simply cannot understand...
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December 14th, 2005, 07:13 PM
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Captain
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Re: OT: Off shore call center workers mad at American
Regarding a logical universal language:
It won't work. People are too insular, inventive, xenophobic, and obstreperous.
English is a good case in point. Some claim that it has become a lingua franca, but it is not quite correct to say that people in Nigeria or India or China can speak English. What they speak is Nigerian-English or Indian-English or Chinese-English. They can speak it very effectively with one another, which is very helpful in uniting their large countries with many minorities and dialects. But they need extra training to converse readily in English with outsiders. This should not surprise us. Ever try to speak (in English) with someone with a thick Cockney accent, or Southern Appalachian (U.S.) accent? Especially over the phone?
My point is that a lingua franca quickly mutates (degenerates?) into dialects and from there into separate languages. It is almost impossible to stop this process. It can be slowed by imposing a standard on everyone through the educational system, but eventually the standard becomes so far removed from daily life that only the elite use it. Latin and written Chinese are the most obvious examples from history. But even the elite can't stop the morphing, so that eventually the standard becomes rather arbitrary. A good example is English spelling, which used to be quite logical back when it was standardized, but since then the pronunciations have changed (mostly simplified). The standardization allows us to read the Declaration of Independence and Shakespeare and even older stuff, but makes good spelling into a feat worthy of contests.
Some questions to ponder: How would one re-standardize English spelling? Whose pronunciation should be used? Who would enforce it? Who would translate all of the old writing into the new spelling? Would this cause English dialects to diverge even faster?
One last point about English: It has been criticized for having so many ways to say almost the same thing (i.e., loose grammar and huge vocabulary). That is not needless complexity; it is richness. Don't fret. The richness would disappear from "lingua franca English" just as it did with Classical Greek (compared to koine Greek, the "lingua franca Greek"). If English actually does triumph and become the lingua franca of the 21st century, ironically most of our 22nd century descendants won't be able to understand most of 20th century English. Of course embedded computers will automatically translate for them, but the nuances will be lost except to scholars.
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