On May 26, 2005, at 3:50 AM, Anthere wrote:
Nod. Most of your arguments are valid to me. But, reading them, I thought of asking a question.
- Most Americans live in a very, very large contiguous span of
English-speaking regions. There is little or no need for most US citizens to ever speak another language in day to day life. While
this
may or may not be a bad thing, it is a true thing nonetheless, and
that
being the case I'm not surprised if US citizens tend to pay little attention to matters that involve other languages most of the time.
The
same cannot be said so easily of other languages (with a couple of notable exceptions, perhaps): Europe, for instance, consists of a
large
number of countries, many of whom have their own associated languages largely distinct from the languages of their neighbors, and yet much
of
Europe would fit within the borders of one of the larger states in
the
US. This forces a certain amount of multilingual awareness on Europeans, whereas the opposite tends to be true of Americans, pretty much through no fault of their own.
Since you are focusing more on an american perspective, though english is the only official language in the usa,
Not true. We (the USA) lack an *official* national language. Depending on the state, 1-5 languages are used. Compare to the EU.
many more or less recent immigrants only poorly manage english.
When I lived in Arizona, I was in the part of the city most inhabited by teachers and students, as it was the city where the university was located (Tempe).
I'm a 'zonie too. Down in Tucson, Spanish skills were required where I grew up.
However, what was striking is that most of this area was inhabited by
mexican immigrants, some legal and some illegal; and many of them did not manage english well, or even not at all, as they only recently came in.
Again, see the EU.
So, my question is this one, and it is addressed to spanish editors as much as english ones. Do you know how much impact the spanish wikipedia has amongst spanish speakers in the usa ?
You are creating an artificial separation, based on something trivial and meaningless as the language used.
Are they participants amongst rather recently immigrated people ? Do you know if there were some articles on wikipedia in spanish speaking american press (I suppose there is press in spanish) ? Or radio interviews ?
Does it matter?
I know there are sometimes some little disagreements between the spanish editors from Spain and the spanish editors from latine american.
Try editing "Cuba".
Are they some fully spanish editors from USA ? And what is their representation in the USA media ?
I think you miss the point. We are dealing with *many* cultures, *many* languages. The concept of the "chair" can be expressed in thousands of languages. Omitting one language, or culture's, concept of chair, is bad.
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