I hope nobody gets the impression that I'm just an American sniping at
Europeans. I wouldn't be much happier if it was half Americans and
half Europeans, or even all Americans. The majority of the world's
non-endangered languages are spoken in Asia and Africa, so on a
committee that deals with languages it strikes me as absurd that there
would be 0 representation from these places.
As far as applauding the fact that there is a single person on the
committee who spent most of his life in Israel, I hope you'll excuse
me if I'm not clapping. Having a single member out of 13 that lives
outside Europe/US is not especially encouraging to me, it seems more
like tokenism.
Yaroslav, Europe does have dozens of languages, but it lags behind
literally other continent:
Continent - # of languages - % of world's languages
Africa - 2110 - 30.5%
Americas - 993 - 14.4%
Asia - 2,322 - 33.6%
Europe - 234 - 3.4%
Pacific - 1,250 - 18.1%
Let's keep that in mind here.
-m.
On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)verizon.net> wrote:
Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:
2)
Eurocentrism. Not an accusation to be made lightly, but look at the
geographic composition of the langcom. 9/13 members currently reside
in Europe, another is originally from Europe, 2 from Canada and 1 from
California. Hmm... so the population of Europe is 10% of the Earth's
population, but (nearly) 100% of the population of the LangCom? This
is a huge bias and should not be tolerated within an organization such
as ours which pretends to have an international scope.
-m.
I guess if 75% of the members were from the US nobody would ever complain.
Hardly. It's not as if there have been no complaints ever about a
majority of the board being from the US. It would be better if both the
Americans and the Europeans would cut back on sniping at each other,
acknowledge that it's unhealthy for either of them to be so
disproportionately represented, and focus their energies on recruiting
more people who add real cognitive diversity. That's part of what the
board and the foundation are trying to do in the context of the
strategic plan.
--Michael Snow
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