Ravi shankar said:
If your ambition is to teach the mother tongues for
the convent educated
minority English speaking Indians through a Wiki project and then make them
contribute in Indic language Wikipedias, it may never happen. I am not even
sure if it fits inside Wikipedia's mission.
Yes. that is true. I do not forsee such a thing happening for Indic wikis.
:)
Is Gerard is trying to convey the idea of *Mother Language illiteracy?
*Remember
by illiteracy of a language, we mean the inability *to read or
write*(rather than speaking) that specific language. I must say Mother
Language
illiteracy is rising in Indian cities and in some states (for example,
Kerala).
In fact if you go through the discussions that I am sharing with you (about
different language wiki communities), many Indic language wikipedians are
also raising the same concern.
Shiju
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 6:21 PM, Bishakha Datta <bishakhadatta(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Gerard Meijssen <
gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The one thing I have come to understand is that many native speakers of
Indic languages are effectively illiterate in their own language. The
combination of highly educated people being functionally illiterate had me
talking with many people. Given the structure of the Indic scripts, it is
possible for me to learn to read the text; it will get me as far as
pronouncing something I do not know the meaning of. For native speakers it
must be not that hard at all when they surmounted the challenge of learning
to read and write English already.
Dear Gerard,
I am intrigued by this, yet struggling to understand what you mean here.
Do you mean that many educated people can speak their own language, but
not read or write it? (because they communicate in English instead). If so,
that is probably true - but is that what you mean?
For example, my mother tongue is Bengali - I speak it much more than I
read or write it (even though I can read and write in Bengali), since I
usually read and write in English. However, there are many people in India
who have the opposite experience eg who not just speak, but also read and
write in indic languages.
Cheers
Bishakha
_______________________________________________
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l