Re: Thoughts on the Joint statement on the GNU Project

[Alexandre François Garreau]

Le mardi 15 octobre 2019, 21:21:01 CEST Stefan Huchler a écrit :
> > Selam G is a frantic person who misunderstood my words.  Perhaps she
> > did not know the meaning of the expression, "present oneself as" and
> > equated it to "be".  Her moral fault was being too quick to demonize
> > and attack.
> 
> […]
>
> 2. her hitpeace is written in as far as I remember descent english, and
> "present oneself as" is no weird saying that foreigners (me included)
> don't get because it has a hidden meaning or comes from some historical
> event that only in context makes sense.
> 
> It's just easy english words you learn in each basic english
> course. maybe oneself is a bit unusual compound-word but one and self
> are easy words and I don't see how anybody could misunderstand that
> without purposfully play dumb.

My two cents: I didn’t know nor understood the expression «present […] as» 
either while first reading it, just as I didn’t understand everything from the 
conversation at first.  My english is pretty “fluent” the way I can express 
anything I want, and understand most of what is said to me, yet some 
expressions stay vague to me.

“Present”, as far as I know, means “show”, and have some semantic specificities 
that hint the actual sense, but from a foreigner point of view, we try to only 
keep the basic meaning from the word when grasping it, in the hope we won’t 
loose some potential hiding sense and end up considering “oh shit that phrase 
makes no sense”, but extracting all the potential meaning and picking up the 
most likely one (at least that’s how I do, for foreign languages that might 
look difficult or I don’t *really* care about very much but practically/
pragmatically, like english).

Typically, here, for me the ambiguity was that in english, “as” as been 
assimilated as equivalent of french “en tant que”, more precise and specific 
than “like” (that might be given as an example from other languages lacking 
such expression (like I would say in italian)), and then carry the ambiguity 
of being “like” in the sense “looking like” (“[showing herself] looking like 
consenting”) or in the sense “being” (“[showing herself] being consenting”).

She’s not a foreigner, I guess, but can add the benefit of doubt she’s a 
student, and therefore young.  She’s a way different age generation from 
Richard, and often from one generation to another, expressions usage shift, so 
that some expression that were idiomatic before, coming out of usage, begin 
being (again, maybe) understood from the basic meaning(s) from its inner 
words, rather than usage history.

And here, the english preposition “as” looks vague enough to me to justify 
misunderstanding.

Correct me if that’s wrong.  I find this relevant linguistic discussion yet 
maybe you’d consider that nitpicking not worth your time (it just happens to 
have had important outcomes this time).