Inventing a Soccer Ball for Poor Countries

Re:Inventing a Soccer Ball for Poor Countries by mongol on Friday November 09, 2012 @12:32PM (#4763787)

It is my belief that the common usage of this word will be an indicator when the English language stops being defined by its native speakers and starts being defined by its more numerable foreign speakers.

In most languages, it is called something very similar to football.

Since I don't have a native English language, I prefer to call it football for that reason. I don't give a damn about its history, soccer's origin as association football, etc etc.

Football is Fussball is fotboll is futbol is fudbold is futebol is futball is fútbol is ..

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Re:Inventing a Soccer Ball for Poor Countries by jacalata on Friday November 09, 2012 @04:30PM (#4764820)

No it won't, it'll indicate when the sporting options available to people have shrunk so that they no longer need words to differentiate between football (soccer), football (gaelic), football (Aussie Rules), football (rugby league), football (rugby union), football (gridiron) and any other kinds I'm not aware of.

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Re:Inventing a Soccer Ball for Poor Countries by lmm on Friday November 09, 2012 @12:57PM (#4763914)

Football is what the English, who have the best claim to being native speakers of English, call it.

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Re:Inventing a Soccer Ball for Poor Countries by vacri on Saturday November 10, 2012 @06:41AM (#4766490)

A native speaker is someone who grew up with the given language as a primary language, not someone who comes from the country the language is named after.

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