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Don Park wrote, > I moved on to more interesting question: "What if English > language used namespaces?" There are several ways to > interpret this question but the most interesting is this: > "What is the social impact of using namespaces in English > or any other spoken/written language?" > > My answer was: massive fragmentation of society. But we don't have to _imagine_ different natural language 'namespaces' ... in the sense relevant to a comparison with XML namespaces we've had that since year dot. Not everybody speaks English as a first (or even secondary language). Within the thousands of distinct natural languages there are many different national, regional and cultural variations. There are also innumerable specialized technical and discipline specific vocabularies that get mixed in with ordinary language in various contexts. And your gloomy conclusions don't hold (or, at least, don't hold in a way that is directly attributable to language differences). Granted, language difference might contribute in a small way to social fragmentation ... but I'd be very surprised if it was a particularly significant factor in many cases. Admittedly this situation means that there's plenty of work for language schools, translators, dictionary compilers and the like ... but is that really so bad? Cheers, Miles -- Miles Sabin Cromwell Media Internet Systems Architect 5/6 Glenthorne Mews +44 (0)20 8817 4030 London, W6 0LJ, England msabin@c... http://www.cromwellmedia.com/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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