Hoi, I have been privileged to have been at the Wikiconference India, the Mumbai hackathon and the Pune translation sprint. For me personally it was great to see the activity in the many communities. I have learned a lot and I am sure there is much more for me to learn.
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.
I wrote on the Wikimedia blog some of the points I came up with. What I would like from you is your comment. Thanks, Gerard
Gerard,
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.
//Many well educated people, people with a university level education are effectively illiterate in their own language.//
//When our goal is to get more people involved in the Indic languages, we can ask people to transcribe the scans of public domain books. We will be providing them with a keyboard mapping, the fonts that show their language. As these “illiterates” recognise the characters and reproduce them digitally, they learn not only to type their language they may even learn to read.//
*I find the above lines not only very offending but also far from truth. The people you see in conferences do not the represent the whole of India. *There exists a minority which did not learn mother tongues in their schools, but majority of the Indians do learn to read, write, speak and understand their mother tongues in schools. Most of the regional print and mass media are very active and surpass the readership for English language media.
Except for technical and professional higher education, most of the studies are still done in Indic languages. ( at least for Tamil )
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.
There are millions and millions of Indians who are versatile and are dependent on their mother tongues for knowledge. Wikimedia should think how to reach them directly.
Ravi
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
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
Hi Gerard,
On Wednesday 30 November 2011 06:21 PM, Bishakha Datta wrote:
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com mailto:gerard.meijssen@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
I think the problem may be with the phrase "effectively illiterate". One term we use here a lot is functional illiteracy, but (like with the word illiteracy) it refers to a very specific problem, a developmental education problem. I, for instance, also do not recognise myself in your email. My mother tongues are Kannada and Telugu, and I speak a little Tamil and Hindi. I would describe myself as illiterate in Tamil, but literate in the other three languages. At home, for instance, I speak to my family mainly in English, and only sometimes in Kannada and Telugu. But, also, I'm one of the convent-educated people that Ravi wrote about earlier, and the language I am most comfortable with is English. I don't regularly read or write in Kannada, Telugu or Hindi, but I can - and I certainly use these languages regularly in speech. As Ravi pointed out earlier, I'm a minority and certainly not the core target of Indic language Wikipedias (and probably should not be). Everyone is comfortable with one language or another, and it's certainly true that most people in India (most middle-class, internet-accessing people even) are most comfortable reading, writing and speaking their mother tongues than not. This is best evidenced by media; in print, radio, television, and film; where the Indian-language media outstrips English-language media hugely, in terms of either readership or revenue.
Cheers, Achal
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Hoi, During my visit to India, Amir started to teach me to read Devanagari. He did not teach me all the characters but I now have an idea on how to read the script. One of the things we looked at were things like the difference in writing characters for Marathi and Hindi. Effectively we looked at words that were transliterated from English like Coca Cola ... Amir taught himself to read Devanagari during this visit.. Amir is a linguist.
Many of the people who are functional illiterates in their mother tongue I met at the hackathon. The way they speak about their language makes me cringe. To them English is superior. I find it sad because they lose their culture in this way. I asked two of them if they wanted their kids to learn to read and write their mother tongue; they said they did.
They said that they would not be tempted to read Wikipedia articles; English is better. They might be interested in reading the literature of their language. I know this is a long shot but I am an optimist. I would welcome and applaud these people when they make the effort to learn to read and start reading the literature of their culture.
One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English. Thanks, GerardM
On 30 November 2011 14:14, Achal Prabhala aprabhala@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Gerard,
On Wednesday 30 November 2011 06:21 PM, Bishakha Datta wrote:
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com mailto:gerard.meijssen@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
I think the problem may be with the phrase "effectively illiterate". One term we use here a lot is functional illiteracy, but (like with the word illiteracy) it refers to a very specific problem, a developmental education problem. I, for instance, also do not recognise myself in your email. My mother tongues are Kannada and Telugu, and I speak a little Tamil and Hindi. I would describe myself as illiterate in Tamil, but literate in the other three languages. At home, for instance, I speak to my family mainly in English, and only sometimes in Kannada and Telugu. But, also, I'm one of the convent-educated people that Ravi wrote about earlier, and the language I am most comfortable with is English. I don't regularly read or write in Kannada, Telugu or Hindi, but I can - and I certainly use these languages regularly in speech. As Ravi pointed out earlier, I'm a minority and certainly not the core target of Indic language Wikipedias (and probably should not be). Everyone is comfortable with one language or another, and it's certainly true that most people in India (most middle-class, internet-accessing people even) are most comfortable reading, writing and speaking their mother tongues than not. This is best evidenced by media; in print, radio, television, and film; where the Indian-language media outstrips English-language media hugely, in terms of either readership or revenue.
Cheers, Achal
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*One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.*
As far as Tamil is concerned, this isnt true. You have scratched not even a tiny portion of whatever pyramid you might be looking for. Again your assumption is based on a sample size of what 50-100 that showed up at the Mumbai hackathon? (a place that is 2000 km from where Tamil speakers live in India). How hard have you tried to find other people who fit your description - people who know Tamil and are interested in working on Mediawiki?.
Please stop generalising India from a single visit and meeting 100 people. This is extremely dangerous and will result in massive wastage of time because of wrong understanding of the ground situation.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, During my visit to India, Amir started to teach me to read Devanagari. He did not teach me all the characters but I now have an idea on how to read the script. One of the things we looked at were things like the difference in writing characters for Marathi and Hindi. Effectively we looked at words that were transliterated from English like Coca Cola ... Amir taught himself to read Devanagari during this visit.. Amir is a linguist.
Many of the people who are functional illiterates in their mother tongue I met at the hackathon. The way they speak about their language makes me cringe. To them English is superior. I find it sad because they lose their culture in this way. I asked two of them if they wanted their kids to learn to read and write their mother tongue; they said they did.
They said that they would not be tempted to read Wikipedia articles; English is better. They might be interested in reading the literature of their language. I know this is a long shot but I am an optimist. I would welcome and applaud these people when they make the effort to learn to read and start reading the literature of their culture.
One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English. Thanks, GerardM
Hoi,
- You agree with me that these people exist. - The Malayalam Wikisource is getting more attention then the Malayalam Wikipedia - It is relatively easy to learn to read the script. - Having native speakers type text that they could decipher is something they can do if they choose - Everybody benefits when more literature is transcribed
There are no losers here. Yes, there may be more effective ways of finding people to transcribe. Do that. The key thing we should not forget is that these people ARE already part of our community. They can make a difference for the Indic languages and they are even willing to do so, they have done so.
Bala would you not agree with me that the people we already know to be part of our community are at least relevant? Thanks, Gerard
On 30 November 2011 14:53, Bala Jeyaraman sodabottle@gmail.com wrote:
*One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.*
As far as Tamil is concerned, this isnt true. You have scratched not even a tiny portion of whatever pyramid you might be looking for. Again your assumption is based on a sample size of what 50-100 that showed up at the Mumbai hackathon? (a place that is 2000 km from where Tamil speakers live in India). How hard have you tried to find other people who fit your description - people who know Tamil and are interested in working on Mediawiki?.
Please stop generalising India from a single visit and meeting 100 people. This is extremely dangerous and will result in massive wastage of time because of wrong understanding of the ground situation.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi, During my visit to India, Amir started to teach me to read Devanagari. He did not teach me all the characters but I now have an idea on how to read the script. One of the things we looked at were things like the difference in writing characters for Marathi and Hindi. Effectively we looked at words that were transliterated from English like Coca Cola ... Amir taught himself to read Devanagari during this visit.. Amir is a linguist.
Many of the people who are functional illiterates in their mother tongue I met at the hackathon. The way they speak about their language makes me cringe. To them English is superior. I find it sad because they lose their culture in this way. I asked two of them if they wanted their kids to learn to read and write their mother tongue; they said they did.
They said that they would not be tempted to read Wikipedia articles; English is better. They might be interested in reading the literature of their language. I know this is a long shot but I am an optimist. I would welcome and applaud these people when they make the effort to learn to read and start reading the literature of their culture.
One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English. Thanks, GerardM
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Gerard, while what you are saying is true, I am forced to agree with Bala. You need to work with someone who knows the language to the purest of its form, knows it in and out, and also knows technology. I doubt you'd've come across MANY of those at either WCI or the Hackathon. --~~~~
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi,
- You agree with me that these people exist.
- The Malayalam Wikisource is getting more attention then the
Malayalam Wikipedia
- It is relatively easy to learn to read the script.
- Having native speakers type text that they could decipher is
something they can do if they choose
- Everybody benefits when more literature is transcribed
There are no losers here. Yes, there may be more effective ways of finding people to transcribe. Do that. The key thing we should not forget is that these people ARE already part of our community. They can make a difference for the Indic languages and they are even willing to do so, they have done so.
Bala would you not agree with me that the people we already know to be part of our community are at least relevant? Thanks, Gerard
On 30 November 2011 14:53, Bala Jeyaraman sodabottle@gmail.com wrote:
*One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.*
As far as Tamil is concerned, this isnt true. You have scratched not even a tiny portion of whatever pyramid you might be looking for. Again your assumption is based on a sample size of what 50-100 that showed up at the Mumbai hackathon? (a place that is 2000 km from where Tamil speakers live in India). How hard have you tried to find other people who fit your description - people who know Tamil and are interested in working on Mediawiki?.
Please stop generalising India from a single visit and meeting 100 people. This is extremely dangerous and will result in massive wastage of time because of wrong understanding of the ground situation.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi, During my visit to India, Amir started to teach me to read Devanagari. He did not teach me all the characters but I now have an idea on how to read the script. One of the things we looked at were things like the difference in writing characters for Marathi and Hindi. Effectively we looked at words that were transliterated from English like Coca Cola ... Amir taught himself to read Devanagari during this visit.. Amir is a linguist.
Many of the people who are functional illiterates in their mother tongue I met at the hackathon. The way they speak about their language makes me cringe. To them English is superior. I find it sad because they lose their culture in this way. I asked two of them if they wanted their kids to learn to read and write their mother tongue; they said they did.
They said that they would not be tempted to read Wikipedia articles; English is better. They might be interested in reading the literature of their language. I know this is a long shot but I am an optimist. I would welcome and applaud these people when they make the effort to learn to read and start reading the literature of their culture.
One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English. Thanks, GerardM
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On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 19:47, Srikanth Ramakrishnan < parakara.ghoda@gmail.com> wrote:
You need to work with someone who knows the language to the purest of its form, knows it in and out, and also knows technology. I doubt you'd've come across MANY of those at either WCI or the Hackathon.
Irrespective of agreeing / disagreeing with other premises, I would have to disagree with you here.
While its *ideal* if we get folks who know "Language to the purest of its form + in and out of technology", I would lower the bar on either / both of it for the sake of more hands. My premise is Indic has a very tiny community, so any help is of great help and it was the same thing I talked at WCI towards end of my talk[1] (See last slide).
[1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AImpact_of_Tools_in_Indic_Wikipedia....
The aggressive/offended tone in a couple of posts on this thread distresses me. I humbly request that all respondents may please tone down any agression you may feel. Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture in good faith. He has made some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need to not only AGF but be CIVIL also. The same points can also be made politely.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur ------------------------------------------------------
*Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture in good faith. He has made
some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need to not only AGF but be CIVIL also.*
Unfortunately Gerard's attempt at understanding resulted in a official wikimedia blog post and might result in WMF taking a path that has a potential to damage indic wikis badly. He has written this from his position as a WMF employee. If tomorrow this translates this into official WMF policy, we cant stop the clock back. We know this from previous experience from the i18n team.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.baindur@gmail.comwrote:
The aggressive/offended tone in a couple of posts on this thread distresses me. I humbly request that all respondents may please tone down any agression you may feel. Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture in good faith. He has made some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need to not only AGF but be CIVIL also. The same points can also be made politely.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
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That is a good thought implied by you, Sodabottle. Perhaps, WMF would like to discuss their proposed initiatives with affected communities before they announce them. Just as a ground check rather than depending only on one's experiences. Like a last check of a compass before walking on a certain bearing so to say.
Language in India and a citizen's involvement with his language is complex, diverse and many times unusual or interesting.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur ------------------------------------------------------
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:16 PM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabottle@gmail.comwrote:
*Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture in good faith. He has
made some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need to not only AGF but be CIVIL also.*
Unfortunately Gerard's attempt at understanding resulted in a official wikimedia blog post and might result in WMF taking a path that has a potential to damage indic wikis badly. He has written this from his position as a WMF employee. If tomorrow this translates this into official WMF policy, we cant stop the clock back. We know this from previous experience from the i18n team.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.baindur@gmail.comwrote:
The aggressive/offended tone in a couple of posts on this thread distresses me. I humbly request that all respondents may please tone down any agression you may feel. Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture in good faith. He has made some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need to not only AGF but be CIVIL also. The same points can also be made politely.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
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On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 20:23, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.baindur@gmail.comwrote:
That is a good thought implied by you, Sodabottle. Perhaps, WMF would like to discuss their proposed initiatives with affected communities before they announce them. Just as a ground check rather than depending only on one's experiences. Like a last check of a compass before walking on a certain bearing so to say.
Ashwin,
I think its critical to discuss the proposed initiatives before hand. The same was called for in this list not many days ago on the webfont buggy substandard font issue and technical roadmap of i18n team[1] and we havent heard about it yet. Though we are working together on the webfonts, a discussion before development is better. Its not limited to technical initiatives, the same should also be expanded to everything else whenever we try to stimulate artificially. Lets remember Wikipedia is purely voluntary movement and any external push (more than what is required) is bound to create harm than good.
[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005153.h...
hi,
I have learnt English and Hindi in school and am fairly conversant (read, write and speak matrix) in both. My education in reading and writing Malayalam is through my grandmother (hence, informal education in my own mother tongue). I have been trying to read Malayalam Wikipedia articles over the time of the WikiConference, since I wasnt able to contribute edits, and also a few regional dailies. I hope I can now begin trying to contribute to the Malayalam wikipedia. I had a chat with Shiju who suggested that I join the wikimedia-ml mailing list.
Hope that this gives context to whatever feedback I'm going to give in reply.
I don't think that as a movement, we need to look at regional language literacy. This is something that even Governments are sinking their money into and should be left to the individual to work out all by themelves. Being from a group (a minority group) that Gerard is trying to target, I would ask only for a few things: having a single place where things such as how to install an InScript keyboard, how to join the language community mailing list and perhaps some patience from the community members with the first few edits that I would do. I think this would greatly take care of this problem. It isn't that big a problem.
Our (movement's) strategies will change from language to language and hopefully, that language community will be consulted when these are implemented.
User:Prad2609
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 20:23:54 +0530 From: ashwin.baindur@gmail.com To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Supporting the languages of India
That is a good thought implied by you, Sodabottle. Perhaps, WMF would like to discuss their proposed initiatives with affected communities before they announce them. Just as a ground check rather than depending only on one's experiences. Like a last check of a compass before walking on a certain bearing so to say.
Language in India and a citizen's involvement with his language is complex, diverse and many times unusual or interesting. Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur ------------------------------------------------------
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:16 PM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabottle@gmail.com wrote:
Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture in good faith. He has made
some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need to not only AGF but be CIVIL also.
Unfortunately Gerard's attempt at understanding resulted in a official wikimedia blog post and might result in WMF taking a path that has a potential to damage indic wikis badly. He has written this from his position as a WMF employee. If tomorrow this translates this into official WMF policy, we cant stop the clock back. We know this from previous experience from the i18n team.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.baindur@gmail.com wrote:
The aggressive/offended tone in a couple of posts on this thread distresses me. I humbly request that all respondents may please tone down any agression you may feel. Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture in good faith. He has made some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need to not only AGF but be CIVIL also. The same points can also be made politely.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur ------------------------------------------------------
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+1 with Ashwin.
A word is not the whole of the message Gerard is trying to convey. "*ILLITERATE" *may sound little harsh, please ignore it considering the effort of Gerard and whole of Localization team for the efforts for creating a platform for Indic language. People have started using Wikipedia to type and copy pasting comments in Idnian languages, is in't that a good sign of people moving back to more usage of Indian languages in WEB. This term *illiterate*also is more of *Illiterate in Indian language on web* in the Wikipedia context as 80 % of the netizens I know (in case of Odia language) are illiterate of usage of using it on web, and the rest 20 % come up with typing with more and more typos :)
So Patient is the key, we all are here to make people aware that language is not just a medium of communication, if then, we all the city dwellers are good in English. Rather, language is a platform for a race to preserve their literature, heritage, culture and humanity in a documented and natural form. We can't just push our languages to die because we speak good English.
And IMHO, please STOP discussing more about the *"ILLITERATE" * thing and it'd be great if the discussion thread lengthens with more inputs, hurdles, solutions about Indian language usage on Web.
regards Subha
On 30 November 2011 20:08, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.baindur@gmail.com wrote:
The aggressive/offended tone in a couple of posts on this thread distresses me. I humbly request that all respondents may please tone down any agression you may feel. Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture in good faith. He has made some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need to not only AGF but be CIVIL also. The same points can also be made politely.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
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Ashwin,
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.baindur@gmail.comwrote:
The aggressive/offended tone in a couple of posts on this thread distresses me. I humbly request that all respondents may please tone down any agression you may feel. Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture in good faith. He has made some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need to not only AGF but be CIVIL also. The same points can also be made politely.
Every time there is a difference of opinion, some one starts this be CIVIL message. I don't feel anything un-CIVIL in anyone's message. So, please don't distract the TOPIC.
Srikanth,
//You need to work with someone who knows the language to the purest of its form, knows it in and out, and also knows technology. I doubt you'd've come across MANY of those at either WCI or the Hackathon.//
While I agree with your view that even people not well versed in one language can donate their technical skills, it is important that the project as a whole takes in to account the views of people who know the language well.
For example, a year back a wrong proposal was sent to Unicode consortium that wanted Grantha script being encoded in Unicode but at the expense of damaging Tamil language in long term. The Central Government passed it to Unicode consortium and it was about to approve it. Only at the last moment could we intervene and after months of discussion and wasting precious hours by both Sanskrit scholars and Tamil scholars + Technocrats, the proposal was held. If only Unicode consortium or Central Government had asked for the opinion of learned scholars of language, this situation could have been avoided. So, while lack of proficiency in a language need not be an impediment for technical contribution, we should not assume that it is enough for projects of varying nature.
Ravi
Hoi, As far as I am concerned, the discussion is civil enough. Let me be clear. When I find people illiterate in their mother tongue, I personally find this absolutely horrible. There is not much that I can do about this, there is nothing the WMF intends to do about this. If at all it is you in the language communities that can extend your hand to these people.
When these people transcribe literally what is in a book or on a scan, there is not much that they can do wrong that a proof reader will not catch. The best I expect this will bring us is that they become readers of their language (as far as our projects go). This would be their personal choice, their personal effort and their personal achievement.
Please help me understand. The Grantha script is not the same as the Tamil script and it is not used to write Tamil right ? But even so; how can characters in a SCRIPT that are not used in a language damage that language ?? I do assume that you agree that the Grantha script should be included in Unicode.
Our idea of supporting languages and scripts is to have "language support teams". We are looking to build up these teams at this time particularly for the Indic languages. The best way for us to support languages is by using standards and many standards do not support all our languages well enough. We need you to help us verify and set the standards. For instance the CLDR we use for the translations of language names; we found for Serbian that the spelling of all of these translations was wrong. Thanks, Gerard
On 30 November 2011 16:05, Ravishankar ravidreams@gmail.com wrote:
Ashwin,
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.baindur@gmail.comwrote:
The aggressive/offended tone in a couple of posts on this thread distresses me. I humbly request that all respondents may please tone down any agression you may feel. Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture in good faith. He has made some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need to not only AGF but be CIVIL also. The same points can also be made politely.
Every time there is a difference of opinion, some one starts this be CIVIL message. I don't feel anything un-CIVIL in anyone's message. So, please don't distract the TOPIC.
Srikanth,
//You need to work with someone who knows the language to the purest of its form, knows it in and out, and also knows technology. I doubt you'd've come across MANY of those at either WCI or the Hackathon.//
While I agree with your view that even people not well versed in one language can donate their technical skills, it is important that the project as a whole takes in to account the views of people who know the language well.
For example, a year back a wrong proposal was sent to Unicode consortium that wanted Grantha script being encoded in Unicode but at the expense of damaging Tamil language in long term. The Central Government passed it to Unicode consortium and it was about to approve it. Only at the last moment could we intervene and after months of discussion and wasting precious hours by both Sanskrit scholars and Tamil scholars + Technocrats, the proposal was held. If only Unicode consortium or Central Government had asked for the opinion of learned scholars of language, this situation could have been avoided. So, while lack of proficiency in a language need not be an impediment for technical contribution, we should not assume that it is enough for projects of varying nature.
Ravi
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On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 21:22, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Please help me understand. The Grantha script is not the same as the Tamil script and it is not used to write Tamil right ? But even so; how can characters in a SCRIPT that are not used in a language damage that language ??
When people start writing something else and call it Tamil, mass consumption patterns of Tamil can differ and eventually the fear is Sanskritization of Tamil. (Aryanize is the political / cultural word). I cant get more definitive links than [1] which can help you understand, but there is a lot of context that is required. May be an English wiki article might help to understand the issue for a fresh eyes and go into the references.
I do assume that you agree that the Grantha script should be included in Unicode.
I would personally agree with this blogpost[1] that Grantha can have its place, but independently, not along with Tamil. None of us(majority of Tamilians) want additional-grantha to be in Tamil's character set. Note that there exists already some grantha characters in Tamil which is in common use for last 300-400 years.[2]
[1] http://tamil.berkeley.edu/grantha-letters-in-tamil [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_alphabet#Consonants_of_Modern_Tamil
Hi All,
What many of us are sharing here are personal experiences, anecdotes from one section of the community pyramid that Gerard mentioned. This can only lead to inaccurate inferences about Indic languages. So, let's do some objective analysis:
Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India , India's literacy rate is 74.04% in 2011.
As I have no practical experience of education systems in other states, let me take the example of Tamilnadu which has a literacy rate of 80.3%. The 19.7% illiteracy rate is a social issue and let's ignore it for this analysis. This example can very well be related with other states and India as a whole.
Tamilnadu had three educations systems mainly:
* *State board ( Majority of the students are enrolled in this and most pursue education through Tamil as a medium of instruction*. *Even for English medium students, learning Tamil as a language is mandatory for 10+2 years* ). Most of the government schools and government aided schools fall under this category. You can refer www.ssa.tn.nic.in/Docu/GenEduStat.pdffor the number of schools in Tamilnadu operating under government, government aid and private sector. Except for few cities, government schools are the majority.
* Matriculation, ICSE and other boards ( Medium of instruction is English but most study Tamil as a language for 10+2 years). From this year, this system is abolished and merged with state board's uniform syllabus.
* CBSE - Only a minority of schools are in this system. Medium of instruction is English and a good number of people do study Tamil as a language for 10 years.
So, all these people can read, write, understand and speak Tamil and are functionally literate in their mother languages. Even if you assume that some studied other languages instead of Tamil in matriculation or CBSE syllabus, it is still a minority and can't exceed 10% by any means. * If you take the case of Srilanka, where Tamil is also an official language, 99% of the native Tamils complete their study in government schools with Tamil as their medium of instruction. So, they are almost 100% literate in their mother languages. *
I am sure that similar trends and statistics can be observed for other Indic languages.
Ashwin,
Thanks for the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement1.svgl.... As you can see from the stats above, I do refute the central point here as it is totally wrong. Being offended by it is my personal expression and doesn't lack civility or make judgments about the one who posted the inferences. If we do not raise our concern for valid issues, India will continue to be seen as a country of snake charmers.
Shiju,
I am aware that mother language illiteracy is a raising problem in Indian cities. But, as Bala said it is a social problem and out of Wikimedia's mission. *Indic language projects are for the people and by the people who primarily gain and share knowledge in those languages* and their percentage is huge. Gaining readership / contribution from the minority English comfortable audience should not be a priority and it will not be worth the effort.
The problem mentioned by many Indic language Wikipedians is a bit different. Since, many of the present day internet accessing Wikipedians do have a city / middle class / English educated background, they are at loss to write about different subjects in an encyclopedic quality. But, that doesn't mean that they are proficient in English writing either as you can witness from IEP. This is something to do with the quality and policy of higher education in our country. But, this doesn't mean by anyway that Indians are functionally illiterate in their own languages to the extend of not knowing to read and write.
Gerard,
Here are some scenarios:
* People who know English and an Indic language well, know about Indic language projects and still contribute in only one language. Nothing much can be done to motivate them to switch the contributions. If they decide to do it by themselves, it is huge WIN.
* People who know English and an Indic language well but do not know about Indic language projects. It should be our highest priority to spread awareness about Indic language projects to these people because they can bring great experience from English Wikipedia. We do have the privilege of having few contributors like them and their roles are phenomenal in shaping the community.
* People who know only the Indic languages very well but do not know about Wikipedia. It should also be our highest priority to spread awareness about Wikipedia to these people. The moment they know that such a thing exists, they will jump on it because people are so hungry for knowledge in their own language. If you would like to know how we know this: We did a 3 day long Tamil Internet workshop practically for thousands of people during a language conference last year. People were so happy to know that they could read, write, search in their own languages.
* People who know English only and contribute in En Wiki or MediaWiki. It is good to be in touch with them to share best practices, technical knowledge but do not expect content contributions from them. Even people who learned Indic languages for 10+ years in schools are finding WP:COMPETENCE to be of very high standard.
//*One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration ....//
*Most of the early contributors to Indic language projects have a background in software / tech industry and are fairly competent to take part in RFC, Bugzilla. So, you should have no problem reaching out to respective communities in their village pumps to ask for their inputs. Ultimately, it is only the community that is going to use it so better ask it in advance. Also, please do not be of the opinion that a mere capability to read and write by self learning is enough to decide on languages. Indic language scripts and their grammar can be very complex and any tool designed without understanding this will create problems. (Example: Unicode problems in Malayalam, Tamil ) So, as Bala suggested you do need to identify capable partners from language side. To start with the community is a good start.
Regarding Grantha script, here is a long story short:
Many world languages had their own script first but many have converted to Roman script now.
Many Indic languages had their own script. But now most of them have adopted Devanagari script.
Tamil belongs to Dravidian family of languages which is very different from Devanagari. So, the ancient Tamils used the Grantha script to write Sanskrit. Grantha script has most of the sounds of Tamil but not all.
The recent Unicode proposal improvised the existing Grantha script to include more characters that represent Tamil sound. The real intention as expressed by the proposal was to use Grantha script to write both Grantha and Tamil together which will in long term make sure that Tamil script is lost and project Tamil as a subset of Grantha and in effect Indo European language. Not only was this malicious but it was against the fundamental grammar of both the languages. It is this proposal that has been held. Tamils are not opposing Grantha being encoded in Unicode as it is with the original characters.
If you need more clarification on this, we can discuss outside the list.
Thanks,
Ravi
Err.. Ravi, correction. In ISCE and ISC systems, people study a second language for only 8 years minimum, unless the school chooses to have it in 1st and 2nd. I personally opted to study Hindi as a second one [NOT in TN] for 10yrs in ISCE. In ISC, only English is compulsory, same for CBSE in the +1 and +2 stages. ONLY State Boards, across the country make it mandatory for a second language for all 12yrs. Regards,
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Ravishankar ravidreams@gmail.com wrote:
Hi All,
What many of us are sharing here are personal experiences, anecdotes from one section of the community pyramid that Gerard mentioned. This can only lead to inaccurate inferences about Indic languages. So, let's do some objective analysis:
Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India , India's literacy rate is 74.04% in 2011.
As I have no practical experience of education systems in other states, let me take the example of Tamilnadu which has a literacy rate of 80.3%. The 19.7% illiteracy rate is a social issue and let's ignore it for this analysis. This example can very well be related with other states and India as a whole.
Tamilnadu had three educations systems mainly:
- *State board ( Majority of the students are enrolled in this and most
pursue education through Tamil as a medium of instruction*. *Even for English medium students, learning Tamil as a language is mandatory for 10+2 years* ). Most of the government schools and government aided schools fall under this category. You can refer www.ssa.tn.nic.in/Docu/GenEduStat.pdf for the number of schools in Tamilnadu operating under government, government aid and private sector. Except for few cities, government schools are the majority.
- Matriculation, ICSE and other boards ( Medium of instruction is English
but most study Tamil as a language for 10+2 years). From this year, this system is abolished and merged with state board's uniform syllabus.
- CBSE - Only a minority of schools are in this system. Medium of
instruction is English and a good number of people do study Tamil as a language for 10 years.
So, all these people can read, write, understand and speak Tamil and are functionally literate in their mother languages. Even if you assume that some studied other languages instead of Tamil in matriculation or CBSE syllabus, it is still a minority and can't exceed 10% by any means.
If you take the case of Srilanka, where Tamil is also an official language, 99% of the native Tamils complete their study in government schools with Tamil as their medium of instruction. So, they are almost 100% literate in their mother languages. *
I am sure that similar trends and statistics can be observed for other Indic languages.
Ashwin,
Thanks for the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement1.svgl.... As you can see from the stats above, I do refute the central point here as it is totally wrong. Being offended by it is my personal expression and doesn't lack civility or make judgments about the one who posted the inferences. If we do not raise our concern for valid issues, India will continue to be seen as a country of snake charmers.
Shiju,
I am aware that mother language illiteracy is a raising problem in Indian cities. But, as Bala said it is a social problem and out of Wikimedia's mission. *Indic language projects are for the people and by the people who primarily gain and share knowledge in those languages* and their percentage is huge. Gaining readership / contribution from the minority English comfortable audience should not be a priority and it will not be worth the effort.
The problem mentioned by many Indic language Wikipedians is a bit different. Since, many of the present day internet accessing Wikipedians do have a city / middle class / English educated background, they are at loss to write about different subjects in an encyclopedic quality. But, that doesn't mean that they are proficient in English writing either as you can witness from IEP. This is something to do with the quality and policy of higher education in our country. But, this doesn't mean by anyway that Indians are functionally illiterate in their own languages to the extend of not knowing to read and write.
Gerard,
Here are some scenarios:
- People who know English and an Indic language well, know about Indic
language projects and still contribute in only one language. Nothing much can be done to motivate them to switch the contributions. If they decide to do it by themselves, it is huge WIN.
- People who know English and an Indic language well but do not know about
Indic language projects. It should be our highest priority to spread awareness about Indic language projects to these people because they can bring great experience from English Wikipedia. We do have the privilege of having few contributors like them and their roles are phenomenal in shaping the community.
- People who know only the Indic languages very well but do not know about
Wikipedia. It should also be our highest priority to spread awareness about Wikipedia to these people. The moment they know that such a thing exists, they will jump on it because people are so hungry for knowledge in their own language. If you would like to know how we know this: We did a 3 day long Tamil Internet workshop practically for thousands of people during a language conference last year. People were so happy to know that they could read, write, search in their own languages.
- People who know English only and contribute in En Wiki or MediaWiki. It
is good to be in touch with them to share best practices, technical knowledge but do not expect content contributions from them. Even people who learned Indic languages for 10+ years in schools are finding WP:COMPETENCE to be of very high standard.
//*One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration ....//
*Most of the early contributors to Indic language projects have a background in software / tech industry and are fairly competent to take part in RFC, Bugzilla. So, you should have no problem reaching out to respective communities in their village pumps to ask for their inputs. Ultimately, it is only the community that is going to use it so better ask it in advance. Also, please do not be of the opinion that a mere capability to read and write by self learning is enough to decide on languages. Indic language scripts and their grammar can be very complex and any tool designed without understanding this will create problems. (Example: Unicode problems in Malayalam, Tamil ) So, as Bala suggested you do need to identify capable partners from language side. To start with the community is a good start.
Regarding Grantha script, here is a long story short:
Many world languages had their own script first but many have converted to Roman script now.
Many Indic languages had their own script. But now most of them have adopted Devanagari script.
Tamil belongs to Dravidian family of languages which is very different from Devanagari. So, the ancient Tamils used the Grantha script to write Sanskrit. Grantha script has most of the sounds of Tamil but not all.
The recent Unicode proposal improvised the existing Grantha script to include more characters that represent Tamil sound. The real intention as expressed by the proposal was to use Grantha script to write both Grantha and Tamil together which will in long term make sure that Tamil script is lost and project Tamil as a subset of Grantha and in effect Indo European language. Not only was this malicious but it was against the fundamental grammar of both the languages. It is this proposal that has been held. Tamils are not opposing Grantha being encoded in Unicode as it is with the original characters.
If you need more clarification on this, we can discuss outside the list.
Thanks,
Ravi
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Srikanth,
Thanks for the correction.
Take away point: Huge majority of the Indians are not illiterate in their mother languages. This statistical information should not be overlooked based on personal experiences.
Ravi
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 6:14 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan < parakara.ghoda@gmail.com> wrote:
Err.. Ravi, correction. In ISCE and ISC systems, people study a second language for only 8 years minimum, unless the school chooses to have it in 1st and 2nd. I personally opted to study Hindi as a second one [NOT in TN] for 10yrs in ISCE. In ISC, only English is compulsory, same for CBSE in the +1 and +2 stages. ONLY State Boards, across the country make it mandatory for a second language for all 12yrs. Regards,
+1 with Ravi
*For example, a year back a wrong proposal was sent to Unicode consortium that wanted Grantha script being encoded in Unicode but at the expense of damaging Tamil language in long term.
*The incident Ravi mentions came about because of a similar situation - faulty understanding by external organisations that failed to consult with native language communities. Led to months long discussions, wasting everyone's time - just because the unicode consortium didnt pause to check with the stakeholder community.
*Language in India and a citizen's involvement with his language is complex, diverse and many times unusual or interesting.*
+1 to this too. In India where various hues of linguistic nationalism are dominant (especially in the south for languages like Tamil) and language heritage is long and linguistic pride is fierce, a WMF blogpost with such words and one that suggests at changing how language should be used has the potential to turn into a long drawn out and ugly dramafest. when i said "burnt in effigy" in the earlier mail, i meant it literally - the passion that language generates in this part of the world is such.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:35 PM, Ravishankar ravidreams@gmail.com wrote:
Ashwin,
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.baindur@gmail.comwrote:
The aggressive/offended tone in a couple of posts on this thread distresses me. I humbly request that all respondents may please tone down any agression you may feel. Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture in good faith. He has made some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need to not only AGF but be CIVIL also. The same points can also be made politely.
Every time there is a difference of opinion, some one starts this be CIVIL message. I don't feel anything un-CIVIL in anyone's message. So, please don't distract the TOPIC.
Srikanth,
//You need to work with someone who knows the language to the purest of its form, knows it in and out, and also knows technology. I doubt you'd've come across MANY of those at either WCI or the Hackathon.//
While I agree with your view that even people not well versed in one language can donate their technical skills, it is important that the project as a whole takes in to account the views of people who know the language well.
For example, a year back a wrong proposal was sent to Unicode consortium that wanted Grantha script being encoded in Unicode but at the expense of damaging Tamil language in long term. The Central Government passed it to Unicode consortium and it was about to approve it. Only at the last moment could we intervene and after months of discussion and wasting precious hours by both Sanskrit scholars and Tamil scholars + Technocrats, the proposal was held. If only Unicode consortium or Central Government had asked for the opinion of learned scholars of language, this situation could have been avoided. So, while lack of proficiency in a language need not be an impediment for technical contribution, we should not assume that it is enough for projects of varying nature.
Ravi
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Gerard,
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi,
- You agree with me that these people exist.
- The Malayalam Wikisource is getting more attention then the
Malayalam Wikipedia
- It is relatively easy to learn to read the script.
- Having native speakers type text that they could decipher is
something they can do if they choose
- Everybody benefits when more literature is transcribed
Such people exist but they are a minority. Teaching them their language is not the way to grow Indic language projects even if they are already part of the community.
Taking the case of Tamil, we do have highly qualified tech groups like http://thamizha.com/ that support FOSS. We also have organizations like http://infitt.org/ that have the best of developers, Govt. officials, software makers, thinkers, academicians that work with international organizations like Unicode consortium.
So, you need to identify the right people to partner with for Wikimedia.
India is a country of many languages with varying problems and specialities. In this situation, don't make generalizations and call Indians illiterate of their languages in an international blog.
Ravi
Gerard,
1) dont generalise from one language to another in India. Each has its own peculiarities and features. Trying to generalise, that too from a 3 digit samle size is dangerous
2) Your information on the literary scene is incomplete. For instance if in Tamil Nadu, people who dont know how to read Tamil will be interested in read Tamil literature (contemporary or classical), i will be laughed at and rightly so. I am pretty sure malayalam wikisource's patrons are people who already know and love to re
3) It is a social issue - Wikimedia shouldnt be in the business of social engineering. Instead of running after a tiny minority who may or may not be willing to learn to read and write its mother tongue, we can save our breath for the remaining super majority.
4) *Having native speakers type text that they could decipher is something they can do if they choose* - This is the slippery slope, which we want to avoid. What next? giving a latin script version of wikipedias?. Let me tell you upfront, you go down this road, you will irreparably damage both the languages and wikipedias.
5)* Everybody benefits when more literature is transcribed* - broadly agreed . If you are still under the impression, the minority population who knows only english can be persuaded to learn mother tongue through literature, i would it is a far fetched premise.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi,
- You agree with me that these people exist.
- The Malayalam Wikisource is getting more attention then the
Malayalam Wikipedia
- It is relatively easy to learn to read the script.
- Having native speakers type text that they could decipher is
something they can do if they choose
- Everybody benefits when more literature is transcribed
There are no losers here. Yes, there may be more effective ways of finding people to transcribe. Do that. The key thing we should not forget is that these people ARE already part of our community. They can make a difference for the Indic languages and they are even willing to do so, they have done so.
Bala would you not agree with me that the people we already know to be part of our community are at least relevant? Thanks, Gerard
On 30 November 2011 14:53, Bala Jeyaraman sodabottle@gmail.com wrote:
*One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.*
As far as Tamil is concerned, this isnt true. You have scratched not even a tiny portion of whatever pyramid you might be looking for. Again your assumption is based on a sample size of what 50-100 that showed up at the Mumbai hackathon? (a place that is 2000 km from where Tamil speakers live in India). How hard have you tried to find other people who fit your description - people who know Tamil and are interested in working on Mediawiki?.
Please stop generalising India from a single visit and meeting 100 people. This is extremely dangerous and will result in massive wastage of time because of wrong understanding of the ground situation.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi, During my visit to India, Amir started to teach me to read Devanagari. He did not teach me all the characters but I now have an idea on how to read the script. One of the things we looked at were things like the difference in writing characters for Marathi and Hindi. Effectively we looked at words that were transliterated from English like Coca Cola ... Amir taught himself to read Devanagari during this visit.. Amir is a linguist.
Many of the people who are functional illiterates in their mother tongue I met at the hackathon. The way they speak about their language makes me cringe. To them English is superior. I find it sad because they lose their culture in this way. I asked two of them if they wanted their kids to learn to read and write their mother tongue; they said they did.
They said that they would not be tempted to read Wikipedia articles; English is better. They might be interested in reading the literature of their language. I know this is a long shot but I am an optimist. I would welcome and applaud these people when they make the effort to learn to read and start reading the literature of their culture.
One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English. Thanks, GerardM
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(oops. sorry for the repeat mail, the previous mail was incomplete)
Gerard,
1) dont generalise from one language to another in India. Each has its own peculiarities and features. Trying to generalise, that too from a 3 digit samle size is dangerous
2) Your information on the literary scene is wrong. For instance if i said that in Tamil Nadu, people who dont know how to read Tamil will be interested in read Tamil literature (contemporary or classical), i will be laughed at and rightly so. I am pretty sure malayalam wikisource's patrons are people who already know and love to read malayalam written works and loves them. Both these languages have rich literary traditions and robust contemprory literary scenes that are shunned by the "we speak english only" group. I will go ahead and safely say, you wont find any patrons for regional language literature from the "we know only english" crowd. (let me repeat, at least for tamil, this premise is laughable) Films yes, but literature hell no.
3) What you are describing is a social issue - Wikimedia shouldnt be in the business of social engineering. Instead of running after a tiny tiny minority who may or may not be willing to learn to read and write its mother tongue, we can save our breath for the remaining super majority.
4) *Having native speakers type text that they could decipher is something they can do if they choose* - This is the slippery slope, which we want to avoid. What next? giving a latin script version of indic wikipedias?. Let me tell you upfront, you go down this road, you will irreparably damage both the languages and wikipedias. I dont know about other languages, but in Tamil, such shenanigans will lead to irreparable damage to the image of wikipedia and probably kill the wikipedia completely. (Am pretty sure Tamil Wikipedia will get burnt in effigy in public, if we try to pull such a stunt). All this for what? the 1-2% of people who refuse to learn mother tongues?.
5)* Everybody benefits when more literature is transcribed* - broadly agreed . If you are under the impression, the minority population which knows only english can be persuaded to learn mother tongue through literature, i would it is a far fetched premise.
I will repeat this a) you met a tiny number of people at two cities in India b) formed your opinions from them and are now generalising c) You are trying to form a technical solution for a social issue, which will potentially change the way the language is used and will definitely create a huge controversy and be counter productive on a massive scale.
This is a dangerous dangerous road to take.
- Bala
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi,
- You agree with me that these people exist.
- The Malayalam Wikisource is getting more attention then the
Malayalam Wikipedia
- It is relatively easy to learn to read the script.
- Having native speakers type text that they could decipher is
something they can do if they choose
- Everybody benefits when more literature is transcribed
There are no losers here. Yes, there may be more effective ways of finding people to transcribe. Do that. The key thing we should not forget is that these people ARE already part of our community. They can make a difference for the Indic languages and they are even willing to do so, they have done so.
Bala would you not agree with me that the people we already know to be part of our community are at least relevant? Thanks, Gerard
On 30 November 2011 14:53, Bala Jeyaraman sodabottle@gmail.com wrote:
*One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.*
As far as Tamil is concerned, this isnt true. You have scratched not even a tiny portion of whatever pyramid you might be looking for. Again your assumption is based on a sample size of what 50-100 that showed up at the Mumbai hackathon? (a place that is 2000 km from where Tamil speakers live in India). How hard have you tried to find other people who fit your description - people who know Tamil and are interested in working on Mediawiki?.
Please stop generalising India from a single visit and meeting 100 people. This is extremely dangerous and will result in massive wastage of time because of wrong understanding of the ground situation.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi, During my visit to India, Amir started to teach me to read Devanagari. He did not teach me all the characters but I now have an idea on how to read the script. One of the things we looked at were things like the difference in writing characters for Marathi and Hindi. Effectively we looked at words that were transliterated from English like Coca Cola ... Amir taught himself to read Devanagari during this visit.. Amir is a linguist.
Many of the people who are functional illiterates in their mother tongue I met at the hackathon. The way they speak about their language makes me cringe. To them English is superior. I find it sad because they lose their culture in this way. I asked two of them if they wanted their kids to learn to read and write their mother tongue; they said they did.
They said that they would not be tempted to read Wikipedia articles; English is better. They might be interested in reading the literature of their language. I know this is a long shot but I am an optimist. I would welcome and applaud these people when they make the effort to learn to read and start reading the literature of their culture.
One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods, automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English. Thanks, GerardM
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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@gmail.comwrote:
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@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
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Sharing a news also (related to Mother language illiteracy).
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=2008011357590300.htm&...
Shiju
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Shiju Alex shijualexonline@gmail.comwrote:
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@gmail.comwrote:
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@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
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On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Shiju Alex shijualexonline@gmail.comwrote:
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.
I guess my point is to distinguish between illiteracy and non-use or low
use (in reading and writing), which is more my personal situ on Bengali, Hindi, Marathi.
So I feel like there may be three or more categories of persons for each language:
-Speakers who read and write in that lang -Speakers who don't read and write in that lang (non or low users) -Speakers who don't know how to read and write in that lang (illiterate, although I don't like the word)
And agree with Ravi that it would be hard to get both those who are not literate in a language or low users of it to contribute in that language. For example, I would be reluctant to contribute in the languages I speak, but don't write or read in everyday, even though I am technically literate in them.
Cheers Bishakha
Heya, Errr.. may I intrude? There are several people on this list who are illiterate in their mother tongue. I know one personally. I myself fall under this category. Being a Tamilian, presently living in TN, I am able to contribute to the English versions of articles and at the most Hindi. Re, Srikanth.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:03 PM, Bishakha Datta bishakhadatta@gmail.comwrote:
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Shiju Alex shijualexonline@gmail.comwrote:
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.
I guess my point is to distinguish between illiteracy and non-use or low
use (in reading and writing), which is more my personal situ on Bengali, Hindi, Marathi.
So I feel like there may be three or more categories of persons for each language:
-Speakers who read and write in that lang -Speakers who don't read and write in that lang (non or low users) -Speakers who don't know how to read and write in that lang (illiterate, although I don't like the word)
And agree with Ravi that it would be hard to get both those who are not literate in a language or low users of it to contribute in that language. For example, I would be reluctant to contribute in the languages I speak, but don't write or read in everyday, even though I am technically literate in them.
Cheers Bishakha
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On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 19:03, Bishakha Datta bishakhadatta@gmail.comwrote:
So I feel like there may be three or more categories of persons for each language:
-Speakers who read and write in that lang -Speakers who don't read and write in that lang (non or low users) -Speakers who don't know how to read and write in that lang (illiterate, although I don't like the word)
I would say its a matrix of read / write / speak on columns and rows filled with permutation of values in the set {Proficient, Know, Preference on usage, Dont know}. It could be much more complex.
And agree with Ravi that it would be hard to get both those who are not literate in a language or low users of it to contribute in that language. For example, I would be reluctant to contribute in the languages I speak, but don't write or read in everyday, even though I am technically literate in them.
1. While its nearly impossible to convert to low/non users to contributors, there is a significant potential in them to increase the readerbase. Nothing special needs to be done, just focusing on developing content will help. I have read some amazing content which exist only in Tamil Wikipedia. When there is improvement in Indic search and people's perception to search on Indic, and if an Indic wiki has content, people(even the non/low) will invariably come and read :) This will help in numbers look better :D
<ShamelessPlug> 2. While I still consider myself not to be a contributor on Tamil Wiki since I largely restrict myself to village pump, Ravi / many others in tamil community says am a Tamil Wiki community member. So one can be part of community without contributing :) and still be doing something. Out of curiosity i checked my edit count, that just crossed 1000 coincidentally :D . My article space edits have mostly been using HotCat and I dont think it requires great deal of linguistic competence to do it. I completely agree, understand and can relate to the reluctancy to contribute, since I have the same with me and just dont go to article space on Tamil wiki often(even for the HotCat usage). So there's a story of low/non user in a community :) </ShamelessPlug>
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