Jimmy Wales hett schreven: > Mohamed Magdy wrote: > >> (I heard that people were happy at Wikimania (Florence?) >> because of that proposal but I fail to understand why the Egyptian people >> there didn't express their opinion about it (it was in Egypt :!). >> > > I was sitting next to an Egyptian VIP in the front row when the > announcement was made, and he laughed and indicated that he thought this > was stupid. > > It is not up to me to make any decisions nor have any particular opinion > about Egyptian, but this is one of many data points that suggest to me > that the current process is widely regarded as being broken. > > --Jimbo I agree, that the current process of new language edition approval has major flaws and can be regarded as broken to some degree. And I will not take a definite stance in the matter of arz.Wikipedia.
But please be aware, that the question of whether or not language editions in language varieties widely regarded as "dialects" are "stupid", "useless" or "laughable" is highly POV. We European or American outsiders have few personal POV about the matter, but we don't know much about the real linguistic differences. Those who know about the differences, have very deep personal POVs. If we grow up in a specific society, we unconsciously internalize the prevalent POVs of that society at a very early age. It's hard to overcome those POVs. In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. "Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language." By the way: This "uniform nation" and "stupid language" thing is not a Arabian world only thing, that the Europeans got rid of by kicking Latin's ass. The whole repeats itself on lower levels. Look at French vs. Occitan. If you ask Sarkozy or the Parisiens, Occitan is a French dialect. As citizens of the French Republic they should speak French. Trying to establish Occitan as a language on par with French is trying to destroy the unite French nation. But from a linguistic POV Occitan is not very closely related to French. Not closer than to Catalan, Spanish or Italian. Catalan being the next example. The Spanish saw it as a Spanish dialect. But they couldn't manage to drum that "fact" into the Catalans and Catalan finally became a "recognized" language. So if the Egyptian VIP laughs, he does not laugh a linguistic laughter, but a political laughter. The emancipation of Arabic "dialects" could lead to the establishment of a Arabience language family like Latin fell apart in the Romance language family. And that's what many Arabs fear, just as the Latin monks didn't like the end of Latin. But the 'future' (that means contemporary) Italians and French and Portuguese live happily with the former vernaculars. Allowing the Arab dialects to go this way is a highly political decision. Forbidding it would be too. So there is no way Wikimedia could avoid making a political stance. But from the POV of 'Freedom' we should allow. If we forbid that's a definite stance. If we allow, there are still two possible outcomes: Latin will fall or it stand strong and Vulgar will stay vulgar. Marcus Buck _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
