[Wikipedia-l] About creating a new language on Wikipedia

[Berto 'd Sera]

Ray,

Pls explain what language is missing the concept of "change" (edit), "move",
"discuss", nickname, etc. 

Calling "genocide" what you do would perfectly qualify for the forced
education in Italian imposed after the Italian Unification. Children were
beaten and publicly humiliated for generations, just for having said a "word
in dialect". Some 20 years ago I saw the last case of a piedmontese family
being taken away the custody of their daughter because "they could not even
speak Italian".

Yet, calling this "holocaust" seems quite a strong terminology to me. While
I agree that we were object of cultural deletion I cannot say that we were
physically mass slaughtered or gassed, as it happened in the Holocaust.

There was an deliberate plan to delete us all as a culture, this much is
true and must be documented. Besides, it's mostly still happening. Let alone
Italy, there are extremely worrying things happening in France, where recent
studies implies that people "exposed to regional languages in their youth"
become socially lesser. This is nazi POV, although I doubt they fully grasp
the implications of what they say.
(http://www.europe1.fr/informations/articles/714735/les-illettres-ne-sont-pa
s-ceux-qu-on-croit.html ). To make things even sadder the UNESCO
"International Mother Language Day" this year was held in Paris. Apparently
some French officers are unaware of what UNESCO is :)

For most people belonging in majorities, minorities are simply "weird
people" who must be "corrected". They actually feel they are helping you,
which makes things pretty cruel, but I'd say it excludes a comparison to
genocide in principle. BTW, the same behavior applies to left-handed vs
right-handed people (I was born left-handed and personally experienced the
joy of being "educated" to "do it RIGHT", and yes, I still "do it WRONG" any
time I can :p ). 

It's really a matter of defending your own rights without getting to
hysterics. Whether we like it or not, minorities will remain minorities
anyway, and they can only loose in direct brute force confrontation. So take
a stand, defend the rights and NEVER get to compromise on that, but pls
let's avoid a terminology that can only generate further lost conflicts. We
need rights NOW, not a formal recognition about past mischief while the
current mischief keeps going.

It's mostly a matter of learning how to market minorities to a wider
audience, and make them recognized for what they are: one culture as another
(with robbers, idiots, saints and lots of ordinary people as anybody else).
Pride is important, but hatred won't do any good.

> The pride and positive self-perception cannot be supplied by outsiders.  
> For the successful native populations in North America cultural revival 
> has needed to be accompanied by economic opportunity within their own 
> territories.
I can only agree in full. I won't rewrite what I already wrote in full, so I
can only invite you to read this:
http://eng.i-iter.org/project-presentations-0 and especially this:
http://eng.i-iter.org/quest-effective-policy-0 

It's not a WMF project and it cannot be, since while being 100% no-profit it
involves commercial activities, but it moves exactly in that direction.

> It says something about governments when they put such facilities in the 
> capital instead of the indigenous territory where it would involve more 
> people.  If the most capable individuals among the Veps are being 
> marinaded in the culture of the capital they may no longer be useful to 
> their own people.
Maybe... only no such a place as "native Veps place" exists anymore, they
are all mixed among other nationalities and always in a minority position
(Karelians enjoy a much better survival chance, because they live in compact
groups and it was possible to open schools in Karelian).

Besides, in a society whose main values are "living in Moscow" and "making
lotsa bucks", I would have expected more people to use a facility that was
opening them an easy road to a diplomatic career and to a "rich life
abroad". Yet, it did not happen. It's matter for reflection, indeed. Since
we deal with very small entities you might be interested to know that the
last pagan community in Europe is based in Yoshkar Ola (Russia) and it's
close to extinction, too. In their case the behavior of the Russian
Authorities seems to have been quite aggressive, but the results are
substantially the same. Governments, although sometimes very unpleasant in
their stance, seems to be mostly non influent on these dynamics, when it
comes to final results. So possibly the one and only answer is in the native
community itself, as you suggested.

> A lot of these documents could fit into the 
> mandate of Wikisource.  
We are already exploring that possibility. Yet it would take some
commons.wikisource, with individual page language tags, so that admin work
is shared and kept to an absolute minimum. 

> Outsiders can provide the means in the form of such things as hardware, 
> but they need to avoid introducing their expectations, and the 
> presumptions that they take for granted.
This is obviously a respectable POV, but when you have small resources you
need help, and help is better found from a neutral party. UNESCO seems the
only neutral party available. 

I understand the "leave me alone" stance, as it's quite natural for cultures
that have long being offended. But if you take that stance... then why
should WMF be any better than UNESCO? It's filled up with yanks, after all
:) Anyway, all tribes make their own decisions in full freedom, as it must
be :)

Berto 'd Sera
Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
 

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ray Saintonge
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 8:56 PM
To: wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] About creating a new language on Wikipedia

Berto 'd Sera wrote:

>>Just getting a minimal user interface in their language is a 
>>considerable challenge.
>>    
>>
>This is a myth. It takes 2 days to ONE person to fully localize Wikimedia.
>And if you don't have one person willing to spend a couple of days (and
>more) you won't get any server space anyway.
>
That two days assumes a reasonable degree of computer literacy among the 
affected people, and a stable symbolic representation of the language in 
question.  It also takes a tremendous effort to bridge the gap between 
the concepts of a highly technical society, and those of a pre-literate 
society whose language was suited to an agricultural or nomadic 
lifestyle.  The gap between Italian and Piedmontese is tiny by 
comparison; both are romance languages.

>>Some of 
>>the languages from mountainous areas may not have the critical mass 
>>needed to keep them alive.  
>>    
>>
>True. I'd say that most linguistic entities with only several thousands
>native speakers left are in serious trouble, Western Europe included. Based
>on what I saw thus far I seriously doubt that such small populations can
>make any positive use of a wiki (and of anything else). 
>
I was thinking of languages like Haida and Kootenai where ther are fewer 
than 100 native speakers.  What makes the latter interesting is that it 
is also a linguistic isolate.

>They usually developed their cultures based on total insulation, while
>living in places that offered very little food (like mountains, but also
>tundra, deserts or jungles) but very good protection based on
>inaccessibility, and can hardly stand the overwhelming cultural impact that
>comes with a sudden increase of social connectivity. 
>
In the great prairie areas of North America when food became scarce in 
one place it was relatively easy to travel to a better area.  The 
culture was built around such a nomadic existence, and became spread 
over a wider area.  In rain forests food tends to be more plentiful, and 
the barriers to migration are greater

>Besides, basically all such entities are exposed to get the "social
>stigmata". Most young people from the community will rather hide their
>origins, trying to integrate in the dominant culture asap. When this
happens
>often the number of female speakers starts to contract, since mothers feel
>they should provide their children with better "social identifiers". In
time
>this leads to a situation in which children can hear the linguistic entity
>used only by elders. 
>
Here there has been some reversal of this in recent years, but it may 
not be enough to undo the damage done by the cultural genocide of the 
residential schools where native children were taken from their families 
and put into an English environment where they were forbidden to speak 
their native languages.

>When you have a big population (say millions) you often find a determined
>minority wishing to "get their roots back", based on what they heard from
>their elders. But if you start from just several thousands people your
>statistical chances of success get very low. 
>
>I can't see how you could change their social self-perception either. The
>efforts of the Russian Government to protect the Veps minority did not keep
>it from getting smaller and smaller, and the one Veps I know admitted to be
>a Veps only years after we got to be friends, while perfectly knowing that
>I'm the kind of person that can only have a positive impression of such a
>thing. 
>
The pride and positive self-perception cannot be supplied by outsiders.  
For the successful native populations in North America cultural revival 
has needed to be accompanied by economic opportunity within their own 
territories.  It also requires having a leadership that is capable of 
pulling a population out of chronic depression.

>"Declaring yourself a Veps" in Karelia (among other things) means access to
>special elite Moscow schools (there are a number of places reserved for
>minorities). Yet, the number of people making such a declaration of
identity
>got 50% smaller since the help started to be given. 
>
It says something about governments when they put such facilities in the 
capital instead of the indigenous territory where it would involve more 
people.  If the most capable individuals among the Veps are being 
marinaded in the culture of the capital they may no longer be useful to 
their own people.

>Maybe for such desperate cases one should choose a conservative stance,
like
>saving all the material that can be saved (audio recordings, samples of
>crafts, elements of grammar, etc). In such cases I don't think there's much
>we can do as WMF, unless we open an entirely different set of projects and
>start to work in close connection with UNESCO. 
>
A lot of these documents could fit into the mandate of Wikisource.  It's 
also important not to get entangled in a lot of futile wranglings about 
intellectual property rights.  Bureaucratically waiting until 50 years 
after the apparent author's death simply because you cannot determine 
who has the rights can be highly damaging to some of this material.  All 
the people who can read and understand it now may not be alive in 
another 50 years.

>No matter how you try, it cannot be done without some active "foreign"
>intervention. So while helping mankind to save knowledge about itself it
>will also push the linguistic entity towards death, by exposing it to an
>enhanced foreign presence/influence/attention. This is why I'm saying that
>such operations are dangerous in nature and they should be coordinated by
>expert neutral parties like UNESCO.
>
God save us from the experts!

Outsiders can provide the means in the form of such things as hardware, 
but they need to avoid introducing their expectations, and the 
presumptions that they take for granted.

Ec


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