JonboyE

Joseph Conrad is widely recognized to be the finest writer of English prose. And he was Polish.


And I doubt he ever started a sentence with and.

bazzz

Given the number of them and their rising economic status, it would probably make more sense to teach kids everywhere to speak Indian English rather than British English.

dbd33

If we place commerce before beauty.

bazzz

Maybe we should all learn French then?

dbd33

Bien sur.

Ozzidoc

Ca me plait

Oakvillian

I work for an Indian-owned organisation, so deal with the Indian idiom pretty much all day, every day. Sure, there are a few things that don't quite ring true to English (or North American) ears - your example is one of the easier ones, dbd; more often than not, here, that would have been "today first half." However, I think there are almost as many idiomatic differences between American and British usage as between either and Indian usage.

Long before there were opportunities to make jokes at the expense of Indian English there were wits like Jonathan Swift and, later, Oscar Wilde bemoaning the fact that America and Britain were two nations divided by a common language. Conversely, some of the most eloquent and powerful English literature currently being written is produced by English speakers educated in India or of Indian extraction - Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Anitav Ghosh, Bharati Mukherjee, RK Narayanan, MG Vassanji, VS Naipul (OK, the last two don't really count since Vassanji was born in Kenya and Naipul in Trinidad). I certainly haven't found my enjoyment of good writing hampered by poor English or specifically Indian idiom. Perhaps my colleagues have inured me.

Much of the difficulty in understanding is, I suspect, more to do with accent than with idiom. I don't know who's providing dbd's call centre operations, but from my own experience and in general terms I'd much rather deal with a bright graduate in Thirivananthapuram than a jobsworth Brit who can't understand my question, let alone provide a sensible answer.

</here endeth my defence of colleagues and their compatriots...>

Novocastrian

Haddaway man. Theyor aal Geordies.

montreal mike

This just has to be one of the best comments I have read at this forum. Having spent a good part of my youth in India. in the mid to late fifties, I found their command of English to be exceptional, especially when considering English was hardly their mother tongue. While there I somehow managed to learn basic Hindi which, alas, was never quite as good as their English.

dbd33

Today it was Patni but I suffer the same miserable incoherence with a variety of Indian firms. Cheap, yes. English speaking, not so much.

Understand that I am trying to convey technical information to them, for example

"type into the computer the following string: ps -ef|grep xyz"

I would do better to pick a random person at the bus stop and have that person compute than to try and have someone at one of the outsourced data centres do the same thing.

Rich_007

You simply aren't shouting loudly enough to convey the message to the simple retard.

Please, to be shouting the louder, innit.

R.

daft batty

One of the problems I used to have with call centres was the accent. When I could barely hear on the phone I used to have to ask them to repeat themselves several times, or to rephrase, or let me speak to another person. Quite a few times they were angry when I said I couldnt understand their accent. I even explained it was because I was hard of hearing etc, but they wouldnt let you talk to someone else

mkmurrays

With huge emerging markets like China, Brazil, India and Russia, dictating technology standards, and the US soon to be a nation of predominantly Spanish speakers, maybe we're debating the wrong language!

Novocastrian

Off topic (scuse me) but Rich, I'm posting on my new Macbook Pro!! I think I'm in love.

Rich_007

Good call - isn't it an absolute work of art ?

Have you tried dragging a pic direct from the interweb right into email or iPhoto yet ? Or messing with live feed widgets from various websites to create your own dashboard ? e.g. weather forecasts, web cams etc.

Running Leopard yet ? I've noticed I get a few overight crashes when running a bit torrent client but apart from that it's superb. Spaces is a cool new app that has lots of pragmatic, functional benefits if you multi task a lot.

Enjoy; I hope like me you find it to be a really worthwhile investment and so much more fun to mess around with. I truly hate working with Windoze at work now. Just so damned dull and slow and glitchy.

R.