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<DIV>Peter, </DIV>
<DIV>Thank you your quick-fire response, even so late in the day. Language is important to most of us as a means of personal and social identity, as well as a means of communication. I am not as sure as you are, that our colleagues in the media will wish to dumb down distinctions which are meaningful to the communities they are portraying and serving. One of the strengths of English (and even more so of Chinese) is that a dominant standardised language is backed up and enhanced by a rich variety of related but distinctive locally spoken forms, whether these are tagged as "languages" or not. I hope you will agree that such important cultural realities should not be swept under the carpet in the formulation of globalised standards.</DIV>
<DIV>David Dalby</DIV>
<DIV>Linguasphere Observatory/Linguasphere ICT</DIV></DIV>
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<DIV>In a message dated 10/20/2005 6:35:11 AM GMT Daylight Time, petercon@microsoft.com writes:</DIV>
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<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face=Arial color=navy size=2><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: navy; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">I suspect that for the application Karen is dealing with, fine-grained distinctions between varieties of Scottish English (or varieties of Scots) is probably not that helpful: generally, the people cataloguing the content and the people retrieving the content aren’t going to know how to tell them apart. I suspect that all she cares about is the difference between heavily-Scottish-accented English (if it isn’t Scots) and mildly-Scottish-accented English.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face=Arial color=navy size=2><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: navy; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Peter Constable<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV>
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