antonim

It's alright for free. The slow downloads are still perfectly usable unless there are server-side issues, and they also provide links to other mirrors (libgen.li, which is still up, Z-lib, and IPFS).

Do not Google "HIV/AIDS in Russia", do not Google "HIV/AIDS in Russia", do not Google "HIV/AIDS in Russia"...

Absolutely the correct stance, nothing dirty about it. At this point, for better and for worse, the Internet is a basic necessity. Imagine having your water turned off because you threw water balloons at your neighbour.

No, there is no default option, just a dropdown that offers docx, pdf, rtf, txt, odf...

Yes, Google Docs exports to ODF.

I don't think this is the exact cause for the situation, but having more book related forks would probably just do harm by splitting up the audience. The book reading trackers are absolutely dominated by Goodreads, and any alternative desperately needs as much user concentration as possible.

BookWyrm was my first dip into the Fediverse, back when I was looking for an alternative to Goodreads.

This reminds me of the anti-wind-energy arguments about the turbines killing many birds...

and then it will turn out the monster was inside me all along

there's only seven stories in the world

There isn't. That's a completely nonsensical statement, no serious scholar of litearture/film/etc. would claim something of the sort. While there have been attempts to analyse the "basic" stories and narrative structures (Propp's model of fairy tales, Greimas' actantial model, Campbell's well-known hero's journey), they're all far from universally applicable or satisfying.

if you have a Danish plumber talking to a French electrician on an Italian building site it’s going to be in English

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.

Have you tried to address that doubt by doing a literature review, there’s studies going back to at least 2000

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.

Also that’s not how you use the plural of English, or do you mean that each of them speak multiple varieties?

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

Going out on a limb, the Slavic languages are quite steadfast indeed when it comes to number agreement across cases.

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.

Are you speaking Slavo-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).

If another linguistic group doesn’t mind that kind of construction and adopts it, might that constitute Euro-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.

So, I have heard, is Indians using “doing the needful”. Native English speakers using that phrase, mind you. People also get their underwear in a twist over “aks” which, as a variant, goes back to at least Old English.

You're mixing up different topics here. Indians are native speakers, if I'm not mistaken, they've learned that phrase from other Indian English speakers and they use it among themselves with no problem. Same as "aks". These are definitely legitimate varieties, acceptable within those communities, regardless of what outsiders may say.

Where is the community of speakers that finds all these "Euro English" forms acceptable? I'm evidently not a part of that community, because I don't talk as that article describes.

To call the one evolution and the other mistake you need to do better than “one group learned the language at an earlier age”, as a linguist making that claim you’d have to demonstrate that both sets of changes follow fundamentally different laws, or one side follows laws, the other doesn’t.

Well that's very much the point, exactly, Euro English doesn't follow any laws in particular. To reduce the problem to the age of learning is bordering on deliberate misunderstanding. Native English speakers learn to not use "whom" from their parents and their surroundings, they get by without using it, and the linguistic phenomenon is self-sustaining. Non-natives in Europe learn English from their teachers, who (should) have a close-to-native grasp of language, and from native speaker content that they're exposed to regularly (especially the younger generations, who can spend hours communicating with natives directly through voice chat). Deviations from the models (teachers and natives) are not created through communication with other European non-natives. With the people from your own country, you speak in your native language, and you use English for the rest of the world, regardless of whether the speaker on the other end is European, Asian, African, or anything else, and their influence won't be systematic. Deviations from the native model are always a result of the native language (again, we're talking about dozens of native languages, resulting in completely unrelated sorts of deviations), and they are not nearly as hard-coded as the native language; the speaker, if made aware of his mistakes, will try to correct them, at least when it comes to grammar (pronunciation being especially difficult to master).

I would definitely expect a linguist describing a language variety to, to express it more visually, draw a Venn diagram with the characteristics of that variety that the speakers use, and to figure out some common ground, some defining and typical characteristics. If there is no common ground, and I firmly believe there none for the supposed Euro English, then we might at best talk about multipe varieties, and not one single meaningful unit. Like, do you and me count as speakers of Euro English? Do Russians and French count, including those I've heard speaking English so bad I had to ask them to switch to their native language so I could understand them? Does my sister count, who chats with Americans, Europeans and Asians on the regular through Discord? Do the European politicians, with their awkward pronunciation and annoying jargon? These are some very different Englishes, with nothing in common with regards to pronunciation, and, I believe, also nothing with regards to grammar. The WP explicitly narrows it down to "EU staff, expatriates and migrants from EU countries, young international travellers (such as exchange students in the EU's Erasmus programme) and European diplomats with a lower proficiency in the language", which is somewhat acceptable, maybe, except I doubt these groups have actually been studied systematically and compared within themselves and against other Europeans' Englishes.

This is the crux of the issue, basically. To speak of something, you need a definition of it. There's no differentia specifica here, these people do not seem to form a community, and their language has no distinct characteristics or rules (stuff that tells you "me likes to eating cake" is not proper English - to describe a linguistic variety/dialect/language, it is necessary to be able to describe correct and incorrect sentences in it).

Find me a European language where “flea market” doesn’t translate properly.

You mean as a calque? Without digging around much: my native Croatian (buvljak), and Russian (baraholka). In Croatian the word actually is etymologically related to the word for 'flea', but I didn't even notice that it's connected until you asked this, as it underwent a sound change that's rare in Croatian (buha > buva). It also lacks the "market" element. The calque would sound very different and would be incomprehensible. The Russian word can be etymologically explained as "the place for selling old/worthless objects".

European languages have been in intense contact with each other for time immemorial there’s plenty of common structure underneath the differences

An occasional term that's been translated across several languages is hardly an element of common structure. The languages are varied enough not to be conductive to creating a remotely uniform Euro English.

English elsewhere is losing “whom” because monolingual native speakers by and large seem to be incapable of understanding the difference even if you point out to them that they’re using “he” vs. “him” all the time. If your native language is a romance one you might be in a similar boat, if it’s Slavic or Germanic, most of which retain a lot more case structure than English, it’s dead obvious and not using “whom” sounds plain wrong.

My native language is Slavic and I absolutely do not find the who-whom>who-who an issue, as I learned English from native speaker material (texts, mainly) and decent enough teachers who themselves follow native speakers, rather than applying the Slavic case structure to English. Perhaps I'm more inclined to using 'whom' than the average native, but even then I don't use it systematically (maybe I barely use it at all, really, it's hard to tell).