[Wikimedia-l] New proposal for a wiki Project!

[geni]

On 18 February 2013 22:27, Kevin Behrens <kevin_behrens at hotmail.de> wrote:
> Language is identity! Would you like to tell those People that it is not bad when they lose their language. As I mentioned, I am a >member of a linguistic minority, too, and I would feel like my human rights where taken if someone tells me I should learn another >language because mine is not so much worth. Language is culture and is human right, everybody has the right for his language.
>

That doesn't mean that such languages should be actively be supported.

> What is your mother tongue? If it is English it is easy for you to tell the world to give up their languages in favor of English.
> And besides, supporting minor languages mostly always supports bi- or trilinguism because you speak the majority and minorty >language(s). Multilinguism is very beneficial for children. They can learn much easier new languages when they have two mother >tongues. And in a world where multilinguism is getting more important this might be a real useful side effect.
>

Questionable. You don't have to go back that far and I'd need latin
and probably German to get by in chemistry.

> And what do you mean by “have so little information stored in them”? Just because they are not as far developped as the main >languages doesn’t mean they carry zero information.

There is a difference between zero and little. Still if we compare the
number of scientific papers written in say russian last year to the
total amount of information in the Fayu language its pretty one sided.

> In America there are Indian languages that have more names for the flowers in their environment and whether they are toxic or not >than the biologist can’t give latin names for them.

Given that we currently have 1.2 million species currently catalogued
that seems unlikely.

>As language minorities mostly live in rural areas they are perfectly adapted to their environment and in their linguistic world/lexicon >there are more concepts and ideas than people from the cities have.

English can deal with concepts ranging from the Australian outback to
the housing projects of Detroit to CERN. Minority languages can only
be compared logarithmically (assuming they have the concept of
logarithms).


> It’s big culture goods we can’t risk to lose.

What are you proposing will happen if it does?
-- 
geni