There is something very confusing to me in this paragraph.
You put forth as a premise (at least if I am understanding the logic of the paragraph correctly) that fluency in English is an important skill for doing a job properly. You also say that it is the wealthy part of the population that will have access to resources to train their children in that skill. All good so far. But then you say that it is a problem, and this is where I am lost. Are you suggesting that money should not buy good education? Assuming good education is a scarce commodity, that would go against the principles of markets. Or are you suggesting that English fluency (or other consequences of good education) should not be considered when screening for a job in a tech company? But that goes against your initial premise, and also makes one wonder what purpose a good education has if not getting one prepared for a high-skilled job.
Yes, it has been used on HN as a bludgeon but the reality is a little different!
Yes, the ancient caste system still exists in India. But today it is only relevant when it comes to politics and marriage. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-no...
He said the problem isn’t with hiring Indians, it is with cheap labor.
What the other poster meant is that you'll end up hiring out of the upper castes and they'll display a lot of bias towards other castes.
It's to the point that many from India won't admit to the caste they're in.
But the first ones to fight against this reform would be the "lower caste" strata of the population. Who would give up freebies, Government jobs as well as an education in Prestigious Universities where you can guaranteed to get it based on your birth caste and not on merit? No one would. If I am born in any of the "lower caste" groups I can easily get a Government job, free/subsidized education in any Prestigious University irrespective of my scores/performance. Now there is talk of reservation/quotas in land distribution as well (comments by a politician in a recent speech to his base). Idea is that if you want to purchase land some section of the land is reserved if you belong to a particular caste (and will probably be available for lower than market rate as well). However ridiculous it might sound.
Affirmative Action in US doesn't have a quota system or reservation. It instead focuses on equal opportunity (no denial of opportunity to anyone based on their race/creed/color/sex/religion etc). This is different from India's Caste based reservation system where you are guaranteed of a job/education if you belong to lower caste. Doesn't matter if you are merited or not. Doesn't matter if you are rich or not. Even seats in the Parliament of India have reservations/quotas for lower castes.
It is ridiculous to talk about dismantling caste system while in the same breath prop up structures that actively promotes this same caste system on the Government level. And the Politicians do not want to dismantle said system because it helps with their vote bank.
Just goes to show how bias clouds reason and logic. Propaganda in full swing!
Thank you for speaking facts.
And before you try to claim otherwise, don't bother. The English language has implicature.
Both are not borne out of facts but malicious propaganda.
"It's to the point that many from India won't admit to the caste they're in."
You are implying this in a negative manner. The reason people don't talk about caste is because we have progressed a lot in the past century. No one gives a damn about caste in their day-to-day life. It only props up in political rallies where talking about caste based discrimination is a precursor to lay the stage for either increased reservation or introducing new reservation in the already prevalent discriminatory quota system that exists in India (which should have been done away with in 10 years after our Independence as envisaged by Ambedkar himself but nevertheless continues to exist 70+ years after Independence corroding our society further).
> And before you try to claim otherwise, don't bother
I don't have to. You are a propagandist. I stand by that.
That might have been the first indication you were being unfair.
The poster I responded to thought they were talking about money, the poster was talking about castes.
Leave your religious wars at the door please.
I've both read about it and seen it first hand. You don't typically see it expressed so publicly as the above anecdote, most of the time it comes across as an odd sort of subservience. Almost the way you would expect a mail room worker to act towards the CEO.
No one said all Indian's are like this, but it has to do with the Paradox of Intolerance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.
All it takes is for 1 or 2 individuals to have this attitude and it will eventually take over.
No one ever said it was everyone, but the issue exists.
> All good so far. But then you say that it is a problem, and this is where I am lost.
…Is not referring to a problem that has, at that point in the story, been revealed. It is being evocative in a sort of dog-whistle technique - before jumping into the generalisations that follow.
Fortunately, this situation is changing rapidly. I don't see any caste discrimination in my line of work (urban IT companies). Nearly none of my coworkers know my caste, they don't care, neither am I.
It does happen in rural villages, specially inter caste marriages are still frowned upon. But it getting less effective over time. Determined people go make money and caste is not a hinder in many cases.
Thank you for your suggestion :-) Can you show where this specific point: "...and those whealty families have been raised to treat people from lower caste poorly" is made in his (we are assuming it's a he, aren't we? how bad of us) comment?
I have no idea why this is, but you can see it in literally any Indian engineering lecture recording on YouTube. It definitely does not inspire confidence they know the topic they are teaching.
Only to people who judge competence based on diction.
Having said that, actual conversational skills in English were lacking even in Delhi. You can throw out words and hope there's enough of a shared vocabulary to get ideas across, but the majority of people aren't fluent, or even conversational in it. I've heard the Southern part is somewhat better though, as Hindi is less pervasive, and English is used more often as a second language if you travel out of state and the likes.
I’m someone who loves seeing well written and hearing well spoken English. The standards I hold myself to are quite high.
However, I have never had a problem with people- native or foreign born- with less than perfect English communication skills.
Going down that route smacks of elitism, xenophobia and a hyper-normative mindset. The way you get good at standard English is by practice, which they are doing every day at work using the skills (technology) they have mastered. Some of my family are ESL and my place of birth (in the UK, for God’s sake) was and is looked down on for the dialect.
Is it really that hard to just ask someone to repeat or restate themselves?
Me speaking with an Indian with a non-{US, British} accent means that very little information is going to get across during the conversation, because this problem shows up in both directions.
Of course, the issue essentially vanishes when the conversation is written down. Unfortunately, many native English speaker that I've been in touch with fail to understand the cognitive cost of oral communication.
English is such a turd language. We have so many rules and then all those rules get broken all the time.
(Despite the English thing which didn’t get in the way of working together, my single team are the best team I’ve ever had in my career and I’ll really miss them)
Any sources for this? The lack of certain complex features (eg. gendered words) does make it seem true, but English borrows from a lot of sources and is very inconsistent.
A comparison I like to make is that Japanese is one of the simplest to pronounce languages. If you learn the kana, you essentially learn all of the phonemes (there's a bit more nuance).
I'd like to know what the simplest languages are on each dimension : pronunciation (has to be Japanese), grammar, overall consistency, vocabulary complexity, writing, etc.
It would be awesome if we gradually evolved English to be easier to learn, such as in [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...
What's the relationship?
Even if you know the origins of the word, you still have to guess: facade is pronounced correctly, but the pronunciation of Uranus was apparently left up to a 5-year old to decide. Kindergarten and doppelganger are pronounced the German way, angst and flak aren't. The non-loanwords are somehow as inconsistent, after pronunciation changed but the spelling was preserved (and the other way around). For an unknown word you can come up with reasonable guesses, but they might be totally wrong. The only thing that makes us good English speakers is extensive exposure to English media.
Or what are the other "Latin based languages" that you are comparing it to?
Do you know anything about India or are you merely talking out of your ass? This is patently false—nearly all documents are in three languages: English, Hindi and the state’s local language.
It's not a Latin-based language (French, Italian, Spanish etc are Latin-based languages).
It's not clear how you measure simplicity, but, in terms of phonetics, English is quite the nightmare as the link between the spelling and the pronunciation is often determined by the history of the word, rather than by a clear set of phonetical rules.
So, at least by that measure, English is far from being the simplest.
Compared with other european languages the english grammar is much simpler and the number of words needed to communicate is also not so high.
English has at least 4.
What? At this point I think you are troll account. You have already made wild and ridiculous statements like caste system being a form of "systemic slavery" in India. Now you are saying that only a "small percentage" of Indians speak English? Are you serious mate? English is the official language of India for literally everything. From giving exams to Government communications.
> Only a small percentage of Indians speak English and most statistics on it are heavily inflated
Where is the data for this?
> It's not Singapore or even close to it in English proficency trying to claim it is, is a lie.
And where do you get this data from?
I don't know if he's being racist or not. But the claim they can't speak english is not uncommon. I don't know what they are like in America or UK, but having worked with many while living in Singapore, I think they can speak english, but pronunciation is difficult.
> Singaporean English
I wasn't referring to Singaporean Indian speaking English, but can see how that it may have come across as that. The company I worked for in SG, all the devs were on EP, so their English was learnt in India.
I disagree, but then I would, I'm English. ;)
Tolerance of mispronunciation is one of the great strengths of English.
Even within the UK we have a plethora of different regional pronunciation. Even with the strongest accents only takes a couple of words to pick up what they're saying[1].
It's the same for those comping to English from another language. I've been lucky enough to work with people from all over the world, including India, with various standards of English. With a bit of practice on both ends it all works out.
That doesn't seem happen so much with other languages such as French. Even practicing with tolerant French or Belgian friends, my mangling of words is very hard for them to understand. They're not being difficult either, it's a case of get it exactly right or they can't understand you even with context.
1. If you're thinking Rab C Nesbit or that 19080s Nissan Sunderland advert the Japanese translator[2] you get what I'm talking about.
2. It was an advert for a new Japanese car plant in the UK. The joke being that a Japanese guy is translating a deliberately over the top English regional accent back into "English" for the audience.
As a non-Indian, the caste problem seems so endemic that the only solution seems to be to not hire anyone born in India. Their American-born children will, presumably, have overcome the issue.
(Not 100% serious, but not 100% joking.)