On Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:22:00 -0400, Chris Jones wrote: > On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 11:07:17PM EDT, Neil Hodgson wrote: >> Benjamin Peterson: > >> > Like Sanskrit or Snowman language? > >> Sanskrit is mostly written in Devanagari these days which is also >> useful for selling things to people who speak Hindi and other Indian >> languages. > > Is the implication that the principal usefulness of such languages as > Hindi and "other Indian languages" is us selling "things" to them..? I > am not from these climes but all the same, I do find you tone of voice > rather offensive,
I think Neil's point is that Unicode has succeeded in the wider world, outside of academic circles, because of the commercial need to communicate between cultures using different character sets. I suppose he could have worded it better, but fundamentally he's right: without the commercial need to trade across the world (information as well as physical goods) I doubt Unicode would be anything more than an interesting curiosity of use only to a few academics and linguists. > considering that you are referring to a culture that's > about 3000 years older and 3000 richer than ours and certainly deserves > our respect. Older, certainly, but richer? There's a reason that Indians come to the West rather than Westerners going to India. As Terry Pratchet has written, age is not linked to wisdom -- just because somebody is old, doesn't mean they're wise, perhaps they've just been stupid for a very long time. The same goes for cultures: old doesn't mean better. Indian culture has been responsible for many wonderful things over the millennia, but the cast system is not one of them, and any culture which glorified sati (suttee) as an act of piety is not one we should look up to. Sati was probably rare even at the height of it's popularity, and vanishingly rare now, and arguably could even be defended as the right of an adult to end their own life when they see fit, but dowry-burning is outright murder and is sadly very common across the Indian sub-continent: some estimates suggest that in the mid-1990s there were nearly 6000 such murders a year in India. If we are to be truly non-racist, we must recognise that the West does not have a monopoly on wickedness, ignorance, spite and sheer awfulness. In any case, I'm not sure we should be talking about Indian culture in the singular -- India is about as large as Western Europe, significantly more varied, and the culture has changed over time. The India which treated the Karma Sutra as a holy book is hardly the same India where people literally rioted in the street because Richard Gere gave the actress Shilpa Shetty a couple of rather theatrical and silly kisses on the cheek. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
