Posts by Tim

@Anonymous Coward, re. smoking

"How many people have been caught smoking and yet the observance of the law is close to 100%."

The difference is that most people are actually in favour of the smoking ban, whereas great numbers of people will see this as a draconian over-reaction that somehow managed to be shoved onto the statute books, making a mockery of the democratic process to boot. I would probably ask someone to stop smoking next to me in a pub or restaurant, unless they looked like a complete psychopath, but I'd cheerfully help and encourage people to find ways round this law, make it difficult to enforce, and generally be disruptive until it was repealed. If I lived in France, of course.

Let's get the silly Klingon references out of the way

To those who insist on ridiculing minority languages by saying "more people speak Klingon than X", where X might be Welsh, Scots, Esperanto, Nynorsk, or in this case Cornish, I refer you to Lawrence Schoen, the director of the Klingon Language Institute, who is quoted as saying, "All the fiuent Klingon speakers can comfortably go out to dinner together." (All right, that was in 1996, but I'm not aware of any hundred-fold increase in speakers since then.)

A language is far more than just a tool for communicating -- it's an embodiment of identification within a group, and ridiculing the language or denying its right to exist is akin to doing the same to the group it represents.

Now, maybe you *want* to ridicule the Cornish people -- they can defend themselves against all the "oo-ar, get orf my laaand" you can throw at them, I'm sure -- but the belittling of other people's languages as if they were worthless playthings... well, it gets on my tits, that's all.