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

[Victor Grigas]

Does language constrain our thinking? I think it does. I don't want a world
where people are limited in their thinking because there are only so many
languages available to them.


On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 5:23 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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-- 

*Victor Grigas*
Storyteller <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Knv6D6Thi0>
Wikimedia Foundation
vgrigas at wikimedia.org
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