Hoi, There are some 100,000,000 people in Bangladesh, some 70,561,000 people in India, some 23,602 in Nepal and some 600 people who according to Ethnologue speak Bengali. So Gregory, you do not need to shout and Bengali is alive and well thank you very much. Where you to know something about the Bangla language, you would know that is was the repression of the Bangla language that lead to the creation of the state of Bangladesh.
I dare you to explain how the preservation of a language can come at the expense of the people that need it. I could as easily say that this imperialistic tendency to promote a language like English over others comes at the expense of bringing education to people.
There are scientific studies that prove that when people that sign as their mother tongue will have improved academic results when they first learn to write their mother tongue and only then learn to read and write the dominant language that surrounds them.
These "dying" languages are the mother tongue for people. These people will do better academically when they first learn to read and write their language in stead of being pressed to learn a foreign language. Really you got it all backwards. We need to promote and invest in Wikipedias in as many languages as possible. It will have more impact then investing a similar amount of money in the English language Wikipedia. There are many volunteers that are willing to make these improvements anyway. But when investing in the ElW, it just does not give us the same return.
Thanks, GerardM
On 10/23/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/23/07, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Success is relative. The English language Wikipedia will not aid the survival of the English language. Consider that the Bangla Wikipedia is
the
The purpose of Wikimedia is not "TO SAVE DYING LANGUAGES"
If we happen to do so in our effort to help educate the world, fine. But preserving languages should never come at the expense of bringing education to people who need it.
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