I hope nobody gets the impression that I'm just an American sniping at Europeans. I wouldn't be much happier if it was half Americans and half Europeans, or even all Americans. The majority of the world's non-endangered languages are spoken in Asia and Africa, so on a committee that deals with languages it strikes me as absurd that there would be 0 representation from these places.
As far as applauding the fact that there is a single person on the committee who spent most of his life in Israel, I hope you'll excuse me if I'm not clapping. Having a single member out of 13 that lives outside Europe/US is not especially encouraging to me, it seems more like tokenism. Yaroslav, Europe does have dozens of languages, but it lags behind literally other continent: Continent - # of languages - % of world's languages Africa - 2110 - 30.5% Americas - 993 - 14.4% Asia - 2,322 - 33.6% Europe - 234 - 3.4% Pacific - 1,250 - 18.1% Let's keep that in mind here. -m. On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Michael Snow <[email protected]> wrote: > Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote: >>> 2) Eurocentrism. Not an accusation to be made lightly, but look at the >>> geographic composition of the langcom. 9/13 members currently reside >>> in Europe, another is originally from Europe, 2 from Canada and 1 from >>> California. Hmm... so the population of Europe is 10% of the Earth's >>> population, but (nearly) 100% of the population of the LangCom? This >>> is a huge bias and should not be tolerated within an organization such >>> as ours which pretends to have an international scope. >>> >>> -m. >>> >> >> I guess if 75% of the members were from the US nobody would ever complain. >> > Hardly. It's not as if there have been no complaints ever about a > majority of the board being from the US. It would be better if both the > Americans and the Europeans would cut back on sniping at each other, > acknowledge that it's unhealthy for either of them to be so > disproportionately represented, and focus their energies on recruiting > more people who add real cognitive diversity. That's part of what the > board and the foundation are trying to do in the context of the > strategic plan. > > --Michael Snow > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
