[Foundation-l] Fwd: NYTimes.com: African Languages Grow as a Wikipedia Pr...
Delirium
delirium at hackish.org
Tue Aug 29 00:26:12 UTC 2006
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>
>> I have a lot of sympathy and fondness for African languages. However, I
>> think the attitude we are taking is paternalistic.
>>
>
> Who is? I have not seen this.
>
>
>> The same problems exist for
>> languages in many other corners of the world. Identifying this issue as uniquely
>> "African" is paternalistic and, quite frankly, a tad racist. Why do we not
>> make the same efforts for Khmer (the official language of Cambodia, 66
>> articles), Burmese (the official language of Myanmar, with 32 million speakers, and
>> just 66 articles), or Assamese (an official language of India with 20
>> million speakers and only 6 articles)?
>>
>
> I think we absolutely ARE taking efforts in ALL parts of the world,
> simultaneously. I had a meeting in Delhi with someone who is interested
> in pursuing a joint project to develop African languages.
>
> I have no idea who you have in mind who thinks anything racist or
> paternalistic about African languages, but if they do, then they do not
> represent the attitudes of the broad community or me.
>
I think the fear being expressed, or in any case the one I'll express,
is that there are a bunch of Americans and Europeans saying that we
ought to do such-and-such about African languages, or such-and-such to
change African societies for the better---basically, paternalistic
attitudes that the enlightened Westerners have arrived on their glorious
steeds of Information to fix the problems of Africa. See also,
[[en:white man's burden]].
A non-paternalistic attitude would be to treat African languages like we
treat all other languages. Even though quite a few Westerners are
interested in the subject of spreading information in China, for
example, the Chinese-language projects have been run by Chinese speakers.
-Mark
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