Dear Brennus,
our wildest nightmares have come true... You have deleted the entire German thread again. I do not really see the reason why you have done it, since nobody has written "brain-dead" nonsense or obscenity after you had deleted the thread for the first time.
Well, you are absolutely right in thinking that we have gone astray. But you seem to punish only us. You do not delete other threads which are full of nonsense and/or obscenity, and are not at all related to the original topic. Not to mention the English-Celtic banters. Banters? What an understatement! Wars!
I'd really like to know on what grounds you decide which threads have gone astray and which have not.
Yes, I appreciate the fact that the German thread was full of messages which are not connected to the original topic. But what was the original topic? Oh, you said it WAS NOT a topic. Should we restrict the topic that much? You suggested that we should have a discussion on _a_ particular German linguistic phenomenon.
Well, let's assume that we start a new topic, for the sake of argument, with the following title: "Die zweite Lautverschiebung". That is certainly a topic. Do you really think that the discussion would not go astray? Fat chance. Okay, that's a fairly restricted topic.
Now what if we start a new topic on sociolinguistics, say, about the Bavarian dialect(s). Being an applied "science" (well, not at all science, rather an academic discipline), sociolinguistics is not restricted to _a_ strictly linguistic issue. Therefore the discussion would go astray for 100 per cent sure. Is it a big problem, anyway? We have different thoughts, associations, streams of consciousness etc., so it is quite unnatural to keep the discussion strictly on one single thread. Could you imagine it happen in real life? Just think of the following situation. You are having a chat with your friends, say, about wines. One of them mentions that immediately France had come to mind, and starts talking about his journey to France, when one of the friends say: "Please don't change the topic." Is it possible? No way, man! Yes, the topic has been changed from wines to France, but these two things ARE connected. We have different new ideas, associations. We are not robots or computers, for God's sake.
So back to my original question: how can you decide which messages are connected to the topic and which ones are not? I'm dieing to know your opinion.
I'm looking forward to reading you reply.
Best regards
Liz
our wildest nightmares have come true... You have deleted the entire German thread again. I do not really see the reason why you have done it, since nobody has written "brain-dead" nonsense or obscenity after you had deleted the thread for the first time.
Well, you are absolutely right in thinking that we have gone astray. But you seem to punish only us. You do not delete other threads which are full of nonsense and/or obscenity, and are not at all related to the original topic. Not to mention the English-Celtic banters. Banters? What an understatement! Wars!
I'd really like to know on what grounds you decide which threads have gone astray and which have not.
Yes, I appreciate the fact that the German thread was full of messages which are not connected to the original topic. But what was the original topic? Oh, you said it WAS NOT a topic. Should we restrict the topic that much? You suggested that we should have a discussion on _a_ particular German linguistic phenomenon.
Well, let's assume that we start a new topic, for the sake of argument, with the following title: "Die zweite Lautverschiebung". That is certainly a topic. Do you really think that the discussion would not go astray? Fat chance. Okay, that's a fairly restricted topic.
Now what if we start a new topic on sociolinguistics, say, about the Bavarian dialect(s). Being an applied "science" (well, not at all science, rather an academic discipline), sociolinguistics is not restricted to _a_ strictly linguistic issue. Therefore the discussion would go astray for 100 per cent sure. Is it a big problem, anyway? We have different thoughts, associations, streams of consciousness etc., so it is quite unnatural to keep the discussion strictly on one single thread. Could you imagine it happen in real life? Just think of the following situation. You are having a chat with your friends, say, about wines. One of them mentions that immediately France had come to mind, and starts talking about his journey to France, when one of the friends say: "Please don't change the topic." Is it possible? No way, man! Yes, the topic has been changed from wines to France, but these two things ARE connected. We have different new ideas, associations. We are not robots or computers, for God's sake.
So back to my original question: how can you decide which messages are connected to the topic and which ones are not? I'm dieing to know your opinion.
I'm looking forward to reading you reply.
Best regards
Liz