Re:Firefox 42 will not allow unsigned extensions
by kragen on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @04:03PM
(#10043952)
It sounds like you're saying that using English as the lingua franca of aviation puts at risk the lives of flight crews for whom English is not a native language, as well as their passengers. This seems like a good example of how English-as-lingua-franca gives special worldwide advantages to native English speakers.
Re:Firefox 42 will not allow unsigned extensions
by Zancarius on Wednesday August 19, 2015 @08:52PM
(#10089471)
Not at all.
What I'm suggesting is that having a standard for communication is less likely to put lives at risk. I can't help but wonder if you're invoking Poe's Law by advocating from what is arguably an extremely fringe standpoint.
Otherwise, the alternative would be to require air traffic controllers to learn a dozen languages, and then you wind up with an even worse problem than having everyone settle on a single language with codified standards.
Didn't the Browser Wars teach you anything? :)
Aviation is a curious industry. English is commonly spoke between flight crews and ground stations world wide (with few but notable exceptions). Circumstances where the English meaning of a word wasn't well understood by the flight crew or the wrong words were spoken have, on occasion, lead to disaster--Avianca Flight 52 [1] comes to mind, among others.
I simply cannot agree that mutual intelligibility is bad simply on the merit that it somehow creates a "sense of cultural inferiority."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52