To me, this is still a problem. If the committee never made any decisions and instead relied 100% on the opinions of others, then perhaps the composition wouldn't matter. However, think about this: if you gather a committee to make decisions about agriculture and recruit only from European countries, you will find a very different group of opinions than if you recruit from Africa or India. The same is certainly the case here. The way people think about languages and linguistic diversity differs around the world, and it is not to our benefit to have a committee composed of mostly people from one part of the world, especially considering that over 60% of Earth's population lives in Asia. What I am not suggesting is that we should invite the world's foremost expert on Hindi or Sino-Tibetan languages to be a member of the committee; what I am suggesting is that we should invite people similar to existing members, except that they happen to be from Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc. So people with a deep interest in many languages, who can bring us different perspectives.
2011/2/23, Casey Brown lists@caseybrown.org:
On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 3:12 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 06:55, Bishakha Datta bishakhadatta@gmail.com wrote:
One thought occurred to me: there is no representation of Asian languages in the committee (and I don't mean only Indian languages). Would the committee want to consider an expansion in membership to include someone who is fluent in one or more Asian languages?
In principle yes, but... [1]
Linguistic qualifications for becoming a LangCom member are not so simple. After a couple of years in LangCom, I may say that many professors of linguistics don't fit. And the main reason is not their knowledge, but attitude toward languages. Or, to be more precise, their boldness. For example, LangCom tasks require from one Indo-Europeanist to give expertize on any Indo-European language, but many of them would say that the classification of, let's say, Kurdish languages is not the part of their job, but the part of the job of an expert in Iranian languages. Such expert in LangCom is basically useless.
Doesn't the language committee also actively seek out experts in different languages when they need to? I seem to recall you guys having all test wikis checked by a linguist/expert who speaks the language before they are created.
So it's not like people who speak Asian (or other similar) languages aren't being actively involved, it's just that none of them are in the "administrative committee" at this time. At least that's how I remember it being explained many threads ago. :-)
-- Casey Brown Cbrown1023
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