These changes are only applicable to users in the EEA. For those outside the region, Windows will continue to function as it is!
The changes to Windows for DMA-compliance include:
- You can now uninstall Edge and Bing web search using the built-in settings. Earlier, the option was greyed out.
- Third-party web search application developers can now utilize the Windows search box in the taskbar using the instructions provided by Microsoft and choose any web browser to show results from the web.
- Microsoft will no longer sign-in users to Edge, Bing, and Microsoft Start services during the initial Windows setup experience.
- Data collected about the functioning of non-Microsoft apps, primarily bug detection and its effects on the OS, from Windows PCs will not be used for competitive purposes.
- Microsoft, from now on, will need explicit user consent before combining data from the OS and other sources. It will also deliver new consent screens where required.
As you can notice, this is not in line with the definition found on Wikipedia. Also, an Italian building site is linguistically clearly not relevant.
Would the community and the variety of English it uses would be any different if instead of a French electrician you had a Turkish or Nepalese one? Because that’s a way more likely situation.
Well, I’ve just read one of the articles used as a reference on WP. It’s based on a survey among 65 Erasmus students (not a very wide sample, as the study itself admits), and doesn’t sound terribly convinced: https://hrcak.srce.hr/en/clanak/135148 - finding only a few characteristics to be markers of potential “Euro-English” (and, interestingly enough, noting that some of them appear to be arising or at least acceptable in native English too). If you have read something more convincing and systematic than the WP article, feel free to forward it to me.
Um, have you done a literature review? Yes, that’s what “Englishes” is supposed to mean, roughly speaking, it’s a commonplace term at this point and it’s odd you haven’t heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Englishes
I’m not sure what that has to do with the topic at hand. There are next to no cases here, we’re talking in English.
Do I sound like I speak it? Are there any “Slavo-English” characteristics to my writing that you notice? Pluralising a language name is an odd thing in Slavic languages too (and especially difficult in my native language, due to the same case-number suffix in Nom.sg and Nom.pl), if that’s what you’re aiming for. I used it because it’s already used in English by native speakers.
You do know you’re not supposed to just slap an [area/language family] prefixoid onto “English” and call it a day? There is no Slavo-English just because you call it that way, Slavic languages do have similarities that result in similarly mis-learned English, but that doesn’t make them all a distinct variety of English, and there remains a number of curious dissimilarities among them (as I’ve noticed while talking with other native Slavic speakers in English).
(Assuming we’re talking about the dubiously grammatical “Englishes” here, which you ascribe to Slavic influence - which is incorrect but I’ll ignore that for the sake of the argument.) Probably, though there would probably have to be more than one single grammatical phenomenon that gets widely adopted if you want to speak of a full-blown linguistic variety. But it’s all pointless to discuss. In practice, it definitely wouldn’t go down as you describe. The linguistic group that adopts the construction should be all or most of Europe, going by the name. And that’s not very likely to happen, because many speakers would barely be exposed to it at all (do you really think many Frenchmen and Germans hear Slavs speaking English?), and if they heard it they’d immediately notice the form is odd, not in line either with English as they were taught, as they might be inclined to speak due to their native language, or in line with what they hear of English in general, and thus they would reject it. It’s a bit like the “would you still love me if I were a worm” sort of question.
Oh I’m not doubting the existence of the term “Englishes”, it’s just that I’m quite sure I only speak one of them. I can do CS technobabble and go for a more academic register, I can be colloquial, but overall it’s still the same, broad, variety. I can also do the same in German and it’s all Northern Standard German (Missingsch).
This is about a many-one vs. many-many relationship. Compare “Looking at other players’ head” vs. “Looking at other players’ hands”: Both times we’re talking about multiple heads and multiple hands, but in the first case you have a head per person, in the second you have multiple hands per person. If it was “other players’ hand” you’re probably talking about a game of cards. Though TBH this is quite awkward because idiomatically it’s “looking at the head of other players”, how dare you use an actual genitive.
Be the reason why you used the plural as it may, it’s exactly these kinds of semantic details and edge cases where language evolves easily because you can say either “hand” or “hands” and be understood because people have the context that you’re talking about poker or gloves, context which takes precedence over your choice of plural. Within your poker or knitting club, as the case may be, a standard will emerge and you have a little, baby, micro-variety of English. If it matches up with what other clubs are producing then the variety grows and stabilises.
Not at all linguists are convinced that Euro-English can be classed as a variety, true, but that’s mostly because there’s no proper definition of a language variety when used as a Lingua Franca, all the definitions linguists have assume native usage. Pretty much all of the discussion is about “do we want to define this such or not”, not “are there things which can be identified as typically Euro-English”. It’s an identifiable thing, what linguists are arguing about is whether it’s a variety.
And, again, I have to emphasise language proficiency of many speakers who use these identifiable forms: C-level speakers have access to poetic registers, language at its most “anarchy is order” stage. To class much of what they do as “mistake” is akin to classing Yoda speak as “broken English”: Very much not it is, poetic register it uses, many a renowned writer using the construction you can witness. A non-native speaker preferring that construction is not a mistake, it’s an idiomatic preference (Yoda doesn’t always use OSV, btw).
That’s not terribly uncommon. Drastic example: Drop a native English speaker into Germany and within a couple of months they’re going to catch themselves saying “handy” instead of “mobile” when speaking English… and then fight it tooth and nail. But “beamer” for “projector” will fly straight past their language integrity sensors, presumably due to lack of sexual implication. Humans are funny like that.
Immersion aside languages, especially related languages, can have common evolutionary directions. E.g. Low Saxon and English both lost the ge- prefix in past participles and simplified case structure the exact same way after splitting into different languages. Low Saxon lags behind when it comes to getting rid of noun classes but the evolutionary direction is definitely there1. A change affecting all English varieties could conceptually very well start in Euro-English as one of the erm “source” languages of Euro-English could be further ahead in a shared evolutionary direction, accelerating the process of the change happening in Euro-English, and then finally the other varieties saying “oh, that’s neat, why didn’t I think of that”.
1 Low Saxon would use “Looking at the players their hands”, btw, both for a many-one and many-many relationship. Decide for yourself how well that works in English.