Re: [Air-l] languages, carnival of air-l
On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, William Bain <willronb@yahoo.com> writes:
(a wiktionary? sorry) to deal with this issue? Further to this, Beverly Trayner wrote about a carnival of blog and it struck me that possibly as a simple trial air-l (or for that matter air-la or both) could for a limited period (a week? a few days?) accept posts in a number of languages, for example the working languages used by the European
I only subscribe to air-l, but this would be lovely. --SJ +1 617 529.4266 blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/ Wikimania 2006 in Boston: wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/
As the sole person from the original executive committee still serving and as one of the original 14 subscribers to this list, I would like to clear up a myth that seems to have emerged in the last few days. Air-l has NEVER HAD A LANGUAGE POLICY. You are free to post to this list in any language you choose. That people have historically done so in English reflects, I am sure, the language of those first subscribers and the sense of English as lingua franca, but there has never been any mandate, dictate, edict, rule, or even suggestion from the executive committee that languages other than English are not to be used on this list. Nancy
On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, William Bain <willronb@yahoo.com> writes:
(a wiktionary? sorry) to deal with this issue? Further to this, Beverly Trayner wrote about a carnival of blog and it struck me that possibly as a simple trial air-l (or for that matter air-la or both) could for a limited period (a week? a few days?) accept posts in a number of languages, for example the working languages used by the European
I only subscribe to air-l, but this would be lovely.
--SJ
+1 617 529.4266 blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/ Wikimania 2006 in Boston: wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/
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What impressed me most about my travels in Europe as a child was that almost all educated Europeans I met - and this would be in Germany and Denmark, because that's where we traveled, and Spain as well - spoke some English. They had studied English in primary school and high school. However, this made for a comic situation in the caves at Alta Mira (Costa Brava), my father translating from Spanish to English, where a Danish man hovered by his shoulder translating the English into Danish for his kids. Talk about 'chinese whispers' ! The English-centric perspective is derived from (at least) these three factors: 1) the spread and dominance of the British empire throughout the world 2) the refusal of the English-speaking peoples to learn other languages (although this may be changing) 3) the analytical power of English (rather than the inflected languages of Latin derivatives and German) The analytical power of English allows for working vocabularies of 100-500 words to be useful in communicating with others - fewer than any other popular language spoken today. Where I read that - I think it was in a critique of Esperanto as an international language. Esperanto picked a format like Latin and Spanish (inflected) as I recall the discussion. Naturally the spread of the British empire is strongly linked to commerce, and political might, etc. Cheers, Denise --- Samuel Klein <sjklein@hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
limited period (a week? a few days?) accept posts in a number of
languages, for example the working languages used by the European
Denise N. Rall, Ph.D. submitted, School of Environ. Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Tuesdays: Room T2.12, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 or Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html
participants (3)
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Denise N. Rall -
Nancy Baym -
Samuel Klein