Well, the interesting thing to me is that we don't codify (in the Rules) that English is our official language. We used to say that a person was someone who was generally "capable of communicating by email in English (including via a translation service)", but that's as close as we got. In fact, IIRC we, at least once, specifically voted down an attempt to make English the official language.
Now we're governed by the precedents of "if most/all of the players understand a communication with reasonable effort, it works" while acknowledging that, because of history, that pretty much limits us to English. But if we suddenly realized we all have a second language in common, we could use that. So if we "codify" Spivak, it's two different things to say "we're calling Spivak a language and codifying it, thereby codifying English with Spivak pronouns as our official language" versus codifying "if you happen to be using English, as we mostly do, please use the Spivak version." This becomes the difference between saying "That Japanese had a perfectly clear and unambiguous translation using Google, therefore we allow it by precedent" and saying "sorry, that wasn't in English, and (Spivak) English is the official language, it doesn't matter how clear the translation is". On Thu, 12 Oct 2017, Gaelan Steele wrote: > If we do this all (doesn’t seem terribly necessary) I’d say something like > “understandable to an average English speaker.” This lets us avoid > grammar-nazi > arguments about if something counts as English(TM). (grammar issues, funner, > deja vu) > > Gaelan > > > On Oct 12, 2017, at 10:14 AM, Alex Smith <ais...@alumni.bham.ac.uk> wrote: > > > >> On Thu, 2017-10-12 at 07:39 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > >> Don't mind codifying spivak, but it's not it's own language rather > >> (by Wikipedia definition) "a set of gender-neutral pronouns in > >> English". > > > > I'd argue that an English-like language which uses Spivak pronouns (and > > a few other changes) is indeed a language which we habitually use at > > Agora. Whether is actually has a name is less certain, but Spivak is as > > good a name as any. > > > > If we're codifying this in the rules, I'd recommend defining the > > language itself (whatever we call it), stating that players should not > > perform actions that would cause rules to be created or amended to be > > written in other languages, and recommending (in a non-binding way) > > that the language is used for other communication. (I can see a good > > argument for using a consistent language for the ruleset; messing > > around with language in other contexts is probably not something we > > should ban though.) > > > > -- > > ais523 >
