Michael Finney wrote:
Thank you for your comments. As a person who manages a small wiki project and two language forks from it, I found some of the comments very disturbing... almost frightening that such exist. Your comments re-affirm my confidence in the Wikimedia Foundation and its purpose.
I certainly don't see it as "frightening" that a debate over the status of small minority languages *exists*. One always has, and continues to exist, in many countries, with the prevailing views differing greatly around the world. I personally come from a family whose native tongue was Pontian Greek, a language that is quickly becoming extinct, and most of whose users actively decided to switch to modern Greek, partly in order to reduce ethnic strife between different "kinds" of Greeks and make for a more unified modern nation. There are of course negative aspects to that approach, just as there are positive and negative aspects to any aspect of assimilation versus maintenance of differences.
-Mark