On Why English Speakers Are the Best (Part II)

What brought me yesterday to start a post On Why English Speakers Are the Best, is the frustrating fact that I am going to relate just now, finally.

Before living in the UK, I never Google-d anything in English. If I could do so in Spanish, why bothering? If it was coming up in English, fine, I'd try to understand or use the AltaVista translator facility.

Since I moved there, I gradually started using English in my researches and reading in the language, etc. Soon I shifted to only using English as I was finding things much quicker and more reliable, not to talk about the amount of information found in each language.

But the facts that get on my nerves are two:

The first one is that sometimes I am looking for an especially localized information and, guess what?, I can't find it in Spanish; I try to do so in English and voilà.

The second is just a matter of spelling and care. Sometimes, I am looking for Non-English, Non-Spanish information (especially Polish) and I find amusing how, the same, e.g., town's name, with the same spacial character or mark such accent, tilde or háček, are differently spelt in the pages of the two languages. And guess what? The pages where are most often well spelt are the English ones. The most amusing thing happened the other day when they were talking about the disaster in Katowice and they were talking of close by city, which I can't remember the name and which had an accent on a O such as " ó " which is a totally normal character in Spanish, and they didn't even care of writing it. So, they can write "mojón" but not Kraków (it wasn't this one but it will do).

That's why I really like the Wikipedia as when I spot one of these mistakes I can amend it.

My American friend says that this is just a matter of mathematics: the more English Speakers use the net, the more they can be caring about that. And surely, English Speaking Countries are the top of the list of users of the WWW. Also, Polish people use a lot the net as very often when I look for whatever, I find a few pages in the languages (which, unfortunately, I can't understand enough). And, since there are many Polish in the US, many of them could be the responsible of this perfectionism/amendment.

Though, I still feel that this is not the truth.

When I was living in the UK (and watching telly –which was just about the last year), I didn't see many news on Poland, that I remember. But, since I am here, two or three times I have spotted mistakes on the pronunciation of some information on the news. For example, when our dear Pope Karol Józef Wojtyła, John Paul II, passed away, they neither pronounced his name properly, nor wrote the stroke. They didn't do so either when talking about Częstochowa or any of the Polish words or names during that period or any of the other moments when Poland was on the news. Another thing, for example, Microsoft Word autocorrects "facade" for "façade"!

I guess, America's diversity policy has something to do with it.

I know not many people care about this perfectionism. I like the special characters that are used in other languages. Especially, my favourite, " ė " which I first saw it in the Lithuanian language. I don't know why it is my favourite, but it is.

There are many, many other reasons on why English speakers are the best, but this is the one I give today.