Has anyone seen a critique or explanation of these “facts”? I’ve been sent it by several friends and each time I cringe, thinking, “SFW if India has more ‘English Speakers’ than the U.S.? Have you ever tried to talk to India tech support? There is a clear difference between, “English Speaker” and the ability to talk English.”
There’s more bullshit about how, “The top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004,”?
Really? People didn’t serve fast food, work in the medical field, as a cashier at Wall-mart or clean hotel rooms in 2004?
I’m hoping someone has put together a debunking of this video so that I don’t have to.
I couldn’t find anything specifically debunking the video’s claims/predictions and I don’t have the time to start locating and comparing the sorts of information I would need to start debunking things myself. I did however find a website called shifthappens.us which may or may not be the source of the video. It was hard to tell, I found the site difficult to navigate - it also doesn’t appear to be arranged in any form of order currently detectable by leading scientists.
I couldn’t locate much outside information about the site or the video. Basically all I’m going on is the fact that it’s called the same thing, sorry. Don’t know if it’s much good to you.
I agree that the video is really stupid. However, what exactly do you mean by the above? Just because most Indian English speakers speak a different dialect that you (and a more popular one, to boot), doesn’t mean they can’t talk English.
I don’t understand why the video bothered you so much. I sat through the whole thing waiting for the punch line and nothing happened. Even if it’s all bullshit, what’s the big deal? Futurological predictions and statistics from US bureaucracies are flung around all the time. I just don’t see why this is a pitting instead of a GQ or a GD or something. What upset you so much?
Until we find one… There was a part where they said (paraphrasing) the amount of technical information doubles every two years, therefore half of what a student learns during their first year of college is outdated by their third year. Suppose the first part is true. I guess it’s too bad all the calculus and basic programming skills I’m learning will be totally worthless in two years.
In any case, whether they got a lot of facts wrong or not, their point, that the world is changing really quickly, is definitely a good one. Not that facts aren’t important.
It’s pretty much canon on the SDMB that any word can mean whatever anyone wants it to, and as a corollary, any word can be an English word. The way I figure it, everybody speaks English.
“In demand” are the key words there. The video attributes that quote to former Education secretary Richard Riley. Apparently it was taken from The Jobs Revolution: Changing How America Works. IMHO, the video wasn’t frank enough. Personally, I would’ve like to have seen a few lines mocking some of the more useless college courses and degrees - no doubt leading to the placement of grads doing fast food service and hotel domestic work.
What the fuck are you talking about? The OP said that 100 million English speakers in India aren’t speaking English, which is nonsense. I’ve met plenty of people who speak Indian English (check my location), and I can understand them just fine. I didn’t need to study a foreign language to communicate with them, so, yes, I consider it English. Mutual intelligibility anyone?
And who ever said that any word can mean whatever anyone wants it to? Or is this just one of those “well you know how everyone on the Dope thinks X” type bullshit complaints?
Sorry, but the bullshit complaint belongs to you this time. He didn’t say that anyone said what you asked him to document that someone said. Contrapuntal was just making an inference based on his observations of threads dealing with language, almost all of which famously become controversial over the slightest detail. What I took from his post was that there is so much disagreement over the meanings of words that one might as well concede that words can mean whatever you want them to unless you take one side over another on a case by case basis. As a veteran of such things, concerning terms from “coercion” to “skeptic” to “liberal”, I know very much what he means. And never even mind terms like “life” or “God”, which may as well be left undefined. I think he’s just saying that a lot of words mean different things to different people, and I think he’s right. His inference could even account for your misinterpretation of his post.
My point is that I have a completely different perception of those language threads, and that I don’t get the feeling that “It’s pretty much canon on the SDMB that any word can mean whatever anyone wants it to.”
Furthermore, to conclude that since any word could be an English word, therefore everybody speaks English is just nonsense.
I understand, but I’m not sure you realize that you’re only doing the same thing he has done. You’ve taken an opposite inference, but it’s an inference all the same. You’re both reading the same words in the same threads, and they mean different things to both of you.
I assumed Contrapuntal’s point was the basic prescriptivist vs. descriptivist argument that runs through any threads involving English, and his perception that such arguments end with the conclusion that “any word can mean whatever anyone wants it to, and as a corollary, any word can be an English word,” which is not exactly how those discussions end. (Or at least that summary doesn’t tell the full story.)
Right, I know I made a broad inference. But I don’t generally assert such things without supporting evidence. I only told you about my inference to explain why I asked for a better explanation from Contrapuntal. Look, he made a generalisation. I asked him to back it up with specifics.
If you want to get into some Sophistic argument about how we can never know what one another is ever talking about, I’m not interested.
Yeah, but he’s not interested in what you have to say either, which is why he cut you off and I took up the case. I was interested in what you had to say. I don’t care to get into any arguments with you; I just wanted to point out that your demand was, well, unreasonable. Even if he gave you specifics, you would likely dismiss them (and rightfully so) as not implying any sort of generality. We all know that reasoning from the specific to the general is deductively unsound. So there really was no point in asking him for specific posts since you knew (or should have known) that they wouldn’t support a generalization anyway. This thread, even from the OP, seems to be all about getting upset over nothing. So my interest stemmed from what I perceived as pretty much the same thing.
If they are providing tech support to Americans, they should be able to speak in a comprehensible dialect. If they can’t they are not qualified for their job. Anything outside of that is irrelevant.
Wouldn’t the person best qualified to determine whether they’re qualified for their job be the person who hired them to do the job? One of their qualifications is a willingness to accept a wage lower than that required by folks living in the US; apparently, that qualification overshadows the different dialect of English that they speak.
Don’t know if it’s much good to you.