[Foundation-l] An agenda for the meeting of the language committee

[Casey Brown]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 3:12 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 06:55, Bishakha Datta <bishakhadatta at 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