I would like to add we need to learn all languages except mother tongue consciously and intentionally. No second language can be automagically learnt, and its learning is not free in most cases. It costs your time and sometimes money - even if we ignore opportunity. Competence of languages preferred by academia is a privilege of good living people or luckily born in a developed country, like the United States. To keep knowledge in particular language means to keep other language speaker as "the second citizen". Since their language competence of those dominant ones never exceed their mother tongue competence.
While I either don't claim saving languages is our goal, spreading free knowledge to every single the world inevitably related to saving those language in several layers. You can not freely think in a second language perfectly, and its acquisition is not free as beer. For you individual, it may cost much more than your laptop purchase and ISP bill. So reference to saving language as relevant benefit to our own mission to spread free knowledge doesn't seem to me no sense.
On 10/25/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 10/24/07, Jon Harald Søby jhsoby@gmail.com wrote:
Languages die because there is no education available in those languages.
Why would there not naturally be education available in languages that people were interested in using? I think you may have the causation reversed there. :)
Not at all. You seem to ignore the effects of European imperialism on many native languages, something that in many cases amounted to cultural genocide. The imperial powers did a lot to make the natives feel that using their own language made them inferior.
Think about that for a second, and you see that a side-effect of Wikimedia's goal of bringing free content to all the people in the world in their own language, is actually saving languages.
Yes, the side effect. It's great if that happens as a side-effect in some cases, but saving languages isn't the mission.
When there is no conflict and we can work side by side with language preservationists, extreme polyglots, and conlang advocates thats great. But if we reach a point where language preservation is being advocated as a core part of the foundation's mission and when some people are advocating that funding be diverted from the true educational mission we will need to put a stop to that.
Nobody is saying that saving languages should be our "mission".Being polyglot has nothing to do, though it is important for everyone (especially anglo-chauvinists) to have at least the rudiments of a second language. Constructed languages have nothing to do with the present discussion. It is a part of the core to make knowledge available to everyone in his or her own language. Diverting funds to that end for an endangered language is not contrary to our mission.
Ec
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