quality of community

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zoque999 wrote:

but if your english is very limited, for your sake and for everyone elses go to international server. that just would make one of the servers smarter at least.

smarter is good, right? i'm not suggesting something evil?

You're suggesting that English speaking is the same thing as intelligence, which is simply wrong and offensive. It won't "make one of the servers smarter" in any way, shape or form. "More English speaking" is not the same thing as "smarter", and it's quite offensive for you to pretend that it is.

If you want a Engligh-speaking only server then there's nothing wrong with asking for that (although that doesn't mean it'll happen), but there is something wrong with saying or implying people are stupid just because they speak a different language to you, which you have done repeatedly in this thread.

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whiteBoy88 wrote:

I suggest a non-cool-person server separate from the normal server. All the trolls and bigots can play there.

Man, I wish that was actually possible.

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Letamol wrote:

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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whiteBoy88 wrote:

I suggest a non-cool-person server separate from the normal server. All the trolls and bigots can play there.

Man, I wish that was actually possible.

All the trolls would starve there without normal people to feed off. Do you want to be responsible for genocide?

No, the trolliest of the trolls would troll the lesser trolls, leading to a survival of the trolliest situation.

Eventually, however, this harsh environment might see the evolution of some sort of super-troll, with disastrous consequences for the rest of the internet should such a powerful troll escape it's confinement.

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metamag wrote:

Complete nonsense and analogy failure. Difference from one language to another is not in their capacity to relay something you can't do with any other language, but in banal historically randomly generated set of symbols and its idiosyncratic rules.

That's simply not true. There are lots of concepts which can't be expressed exactly in some languages - there's almost always something lost in translation.

Languages aren't just a bijection between words and meanings, they're tied into cultures and ways of thinking, and influence them in turn.
There's a decent body of evidence from research and studies showing that our language actually changes the way we think about things and perceive the world.

If you're actually interested about learning about such things, this is a decent read - here's a brief sample:

"

To test whether differences in color language lead to differences in color perception, we compared Russian and English speakers' ability to discriminate shades of blue. In Russian there is no single word that covers all the colors that English speakers call "blue." Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category.

For English speakers, all these shades are still designated by the same word, "blue," and there are no comparable differences in reaction time.

Further, the Russian advantage disappears when subjects are asked to perform a verbal interference task (reciting a string of digits) while making color judgments but not when they're asked to perform an equally difficult spatial interference task (keeping a novel visual pattern in memory). The disappearance of the advantage when performing a verbal task shows that language is normally involved in even surprisingly basic perceptual judgments — and that it is language per se that creates this difference in perception between Russian and English speakers.

There's some more interesting stuff in there too, but the general gist is that we have some compelling evidence that the language we speak actually changes the way we think. It's a fascinating field (to me at least).
You can get a more general overview of such things from wikipedia here. But you certainly shouldn't be making claims like the ones you were without at least educating yourself about such topics first.

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metamag wrote:

That practicality(of learning other languages) significantly diminishes when you have one dominant language, as English, and would completely disappear if in every country in the world the only secondary language permitted to be learned would be English and no other.

First off, you're going to have to qualify how you're judging English to be the "dominant" language - it's not the world's most commonly spoken. It's also generally regarded as a rather tricky language to learn, compared to many others, such as Spanish - which is according to at least some figures more commonly spoken that English, so why aren't you insisting that everyone learn Spanish instead?

Second, do you actually believe that it would be a good thing to place arbitrary restrictions on what people should be allowed to learn? Really? Leaving aside the fact that languages are an intrinsic part of cultures, that is way to thought-police-y for me, and fortunately for many other people, so we'll hopefully never see such horrible things put in practice.

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metamag wrote:

Simple solution for a vast problem. And having hundreds of languages in the world is a vast problem. It impedes and wastes everything.

No, having multiple languages is vital to maintaining our rich cultural heritage as human beings. Different languages encourage people to have different ways of thinking and of approaching problems, and humanity is all the richer for it.