An'n 19.09.2010 11:32, hett Mark Williamson schreven:
We have heard this type of criticism before, that lower-prestige varieties or languages that are not "official" or "national" languages are somehow intrinsically incapable or unsuited to encyclopedic writing. Article quality on a Wiki is not high or low due to some intrinsic characteristic or trait of the language variety used, it is a result of the content not being well-developed. Also, many languages in a relatively small territory does not mean living in a ghetto; on the contrary, count how many national languages there are in Europe, then count how many across all of Latin America, then take a look at economic indicators and you'll see that there is no necessary correlation between linguistic diversity and poverty.
-m.
I agree with the points you make but I don't agree that that is what Eco said (although I don't speak Italian and automatic translation is rather poor). Eco is a very intelligent man and he wouldn't say things that are so stupid. He actually values "dialect" Wikipedias (I'd object to calling them dialect Wikipedias, that term is derogatory in the first place, but as the term was used I quote it) for their ability to support awareness of regional culture. He then counters this positive argument with the negative argument that "turning local tongues into the sole means of communication" decreases the role of the national standard language and would therefore lead to a situation where people are captured in the very limited frame of their local tongue. And here's where the intellectual mind of Eco lapses. He's thinking with the mind of a 19th century humanist who's living in a world where 90% of the population are illiterate peasants who have little understanding of the world (at least those aspects of the world that are relevant to a humanist's mind. The peasants were not dumb and had outstanding knowledge of the world directly surrounding them and relevant to their daily lifes). On one side these 19th century humanists deeply cared about the "improvement" of the peasants but on the other side they were highly arrogant about their own level of intellect. And so they were arrogant about their language. At the universities they learned Latin and the national standards. Every educated person spoke standard languages and all the uneducated people spoke non-standard languages. The correlation was clear to them. But of course there was one fatal fallacy: the correlation was not a product of the superiority of some languages over others but it was their own admission policy that created the correlaton: "you won't get any education if you don't learn the standard language in the first place". The system solely depends on its own positive feedback. Once you break the feedback chain (by establishing education in a non-standard language) the argument collapses. So Eco's idea is fallacious.
Estonian is a nice example. There are only 1.25 million speakers of Estonian. That's a rather low number. Less than the speaker numbers of most of the Italian tongues Eco is talking about (Piedmontese has 2 million, Sicilian even 8 million). But the Estonian-speaking society is in no way inferior to other societies. If Siclian or Piedmontese were not suppressed by the Italian standard language and were allowed to establish their own education systems there would be no problem. There would be no "ghettoization".
Marcus Buck User:Slomox