On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 13:38, David Gerard<[email protected]> wrote: > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/world/asia/10iht-malay.html > > The Malaysian government has declared that science instruction will be > conducted in Bahasa rather than English. Parents, teachers and > professors are very unhappy because "English is the language of > science."
It depends on the balance of the public's desires and the powers that be. In the past Mahathir Mohammad has made very unpleasant comments about my country, and it is even less pleasant to me to read about his uneducated attitude towards the language of his own country. I am not quite sure that *all* Malay parents, teachers and professors are very unhappy. The natural condition of any person around the world is to prefer their own language and to the best of my knowledge, there's nothing inherent in the Malay language that makes it less useful than English for teaching math (there could be - see [[Piraha]]). English can and should be taught separately as a foreign language, simply because it is, indeed, a useful lingua franca around the world, but all local languages should be equally respected and promoted among their speakers. The article [[Technion]] in en.wp very briefly mentions the "language war" that occurred when the Institute of Technology in Haifa was opened in 1912. It deserves a full article, but until i write it, here's what basically happened: The German philanthropists who contributed money to the Technion and most of the teachers wanted to use German in the classroom, while public figures and educators from among the Jews who lived in Palestine then wanted the language of the instruction to be Hebrew. Despite the importance of German in exact sciences and engineering at the time, Hebrew eventually won thanks to the public pressure and Hebrew language experts of the time worked to adopt the language to be used in teaching modern science by inventing new words for the lacking terminology and writing basic textbooks. Almost a hundred years later: Technion is a respected higher education institution. Hebrew is still the only language used in the classroom there (except in lectures by foreign guests). Most textbooks are in English, though, because few people bothered to translate them, but that's not a big problem, as the level of English around Israel is pretty good. It could be better, but i strongly doubt that teaching math in English in high school would improve it. Wikimedia projects provide a good platform for developing local languages, although apparently only vigorous volunteers actually build Wikipedia's and Wikibooks in their languages. Sakha is a lovely example of a language project on WMF platform - it develops slowly, but surely, simply because the people behind it are true enthusiasts of their language. The interesting point is that the lingua franca used in their discussions is Russian, and one of the frequent topics is when to use Russian terminology in Sakha texts and when to use Sakha neologisms. The discussions themselves are very serious, and their very existence show a good deal of health of that small, but vibrant community. -- אמיר אלישע אהרוני Amir Elisha Aharoni http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
