[Wikimediaindia-l] Supporting the languages of India

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
As far as I am concerned, the discussion is civil enough. Let me be clear.
When I find people illiterate in their mother tongue, I personally find
this absolutely horrible. There is not much that I can do about this, there
is nothing the WMF intends to do about this. If at all it is you in the
language communities that can extend your hand to these people.

When these people transcribe literally what is in a book or on a scan,
there is not much that they can do wrong that a proof reader will not
catch. The best I expect this will bring us is that they become readers of
their language (as far as our projects go). This would be their personal
choice, their personal effort and their personal achievement.

Please help me understand. The Grantha script is not the same as the Tamil
script and it is not used to write Tamil right ? But even so; how can
characters in a SCRIPT that are not used in a language damage that language
?? I do assume that you agree that the Grantha script should be included in
Unicode.

Our idea of supporting languages and scripts is to have "language support
teams". We are looking to build up these teams at this time particularly
for the Indic languages. The best way for us to support languages is by
using standards and many standards do not support all our languages well
enough. We need you to help us verify and set the standards. For instance
the CLDR we use for the translations of language names; we found for
Serbian that the spelling of all of these translations was wrong.
Thanks,
      Gerard

On 30 November 2011 16:05, Ravishankar <ravidreams at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ashwin,
>
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Ashwin Baindur <ashwin.baindur at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> The aggressive/offended tone in a couple of posts on this thread
>> distresses me. I humbly request that all respondents may please tone down
>> any agression you may feel. Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture
>> in good faith. He has made some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May
>> I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need
>> to not only AGF but be CIVIL also. The same points can also be made
>> politely.
>>
>
> Every time there is a difference of opinion, some one starts this be CIVIL
> message. I don't feel anything un-CIVIL in anyone's message. So, please
> don't distract the TOPIC.
>
> Srikanth,
>
> //You need to work with someone who knows the language to the purest of
> its form, knows it in and out, and also knows technology. I doubt you'd've
> come across MANY of those at either WCI or the Hackathon.//
>
> While I agree with your view that even people not well versed in one
> language can donate their technical skills, it is important that the
> project as a whole takes in to account the views of people who know the
> language well.
>
> For example, a year back a wrong proposal was sent to Unicode consortium
> that wanted Grantha script being encoded in Unicode but at the expense of
> damaging Tamil language in long term. The Central Government passed it to
> Unicode consortium and it was about to approve it. Only at the last moment
> could we intervene and after months of discussion and wasting precious
> hours by both Sanskrit scholars and Tamil scholars + Technocrats, the
> proposal was held. If only Unicode consortium or Central Government had
> asked for the opinion of learned scholars of language, this situation could
> have been avoided. So, while lack of proficiency in a language need not be
> an impediment for technical contribution, we should not assume that it is
> enough for projects of varying nature.
>
> Ravi
>
>
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