Re: Lingua Franca Today - a reflection on this discussion....
Do the people who think "lingua franca" is, err, verboten, think that theOK - I think that most people can agree that the Harry Potter name change was pointless. All it did was exchange one generally known word for another. At the most, it took no chances that people would be mistaken about the type of book they were buying.
great american public wouldn't understand "Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's Stone"? (ahh the sorcerer's stone, that well known
holy grail, oops, shiny thing, of alchemy, sorry, magic).
However, that doesn't mean that the selection of the level of discourse is irrelevant. It's not a question of dumbing down; it's a question of effectiveness.
When I was teaching first year English, I used to distribute an extract that explained the idea very well. Unfortunately, I no longer remember the writer and can't easily find the handout, but the argument went something like this:
The two sentences, "I saw a cat with an egg-shaped head" and "I saw a feline with an ovate cranium" both say more or less the same thing. However, the first sentence uses words that are part of most people's every day vocabulary, while the second uses words that most reasonably educated people would recognize, but would usually not see or use reguarly. As a result, the first sentence is comprehensible almost immediately. By contrast, even a very well read and educated person handles the second sentence by making a translation of it: "feline" = "cat," and so on.
The translation process for the second sentence may happen very quickly. In fact, many people might not even notice what they are doing. However, the fact that it happens at all is a distraction from the process of reading and comprehension. Sometimes, people might play with the process as a form of humour, but otherwise, forcing readers through this process is rarely an effective means of communication.
Now, I would add that, when your goal is to help readers to understand difficult material or material that they are seeing for the first time - both of which are commonplace in tech-writing - the second type of sentence is even less desirable than in most cases.
There's nothing "verboten" about the second kind of sentence - it's just a very poor strategy if communication is your main goal. Of course, if your goal is to share some word-play, or to impress people with your vocabulary, then you may want to use the second type of sentence. But I can't see how these purposes have very much to do with technical writing.
PS. note I am not knocking the "great american public" - I think theI understand that the movie used the name because American book publishers did.
bozos at Warner Bros. were though...
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Bruce Byfield 604.421.7177 bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com
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