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

[M. Williamson]

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 at caseybrown.org>:
> 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
>
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