Servus, according to Arthurs description of iberian languages: What makes living in Europe much more complex than, for example, living in US and why is the representation of southwest european folks that small in the OS-community? Some facts and some hypothesis.
There are 48 living languages used by resident inhabitants in Europe. It ranges from about 150.000 reto-romaigns to 90, 000.000 germanspeaking (Germany, Austria and German-Swiss together). Not counted hundreds of languages immigrants brought in and speak individually. There is only one monolingual country in Europe - Portugal (Correct, Arthur?). You don't get very far with your language. An example: From my hometown Vienna I am surrounded within a range of 400 kilometers with 5 different languages; czech, slovakian, slovenian, hungarian and italian. What does it mean in practice in an opening european community, especially when your lingual homebase is small? You need to speak at least one another language well (in western Europe mostly english or french, in eastern Europe in the past russian, today english). It's fine, if you speak a third one well, or at least (as in my case italian and french) a little. And it seems, there are invisible borders. An example: In 2000 I participated at the first european learning workshop for Appreciative Inquiry with David Cooperrider which took place in Italy (in english). There was 64 people from many countries there, but only one italian, no french and so on. As Arthur describes is it very easy to stay within a family of languages, for example within the romance or the scandinavian languages. You can increase your "talk-to-abilility" a lot with low effort. The bars from english to french are very high (as the bars from french to german). And there are very concrete actions from the french authorities to limite the influence of english language in France: e.g. I read in the newspapers these days, that people working in french authorities are adviced to use instead of the term "Email" another word I cannot remember (xxxcorreil or so). Bottom line. We need french, spanish and italian Arthurs, professionals who are bilingual in english and their language, passioned for open space and willing to invest energy for organizing learning workshops, a translation of the "book" and a OS-wiki section in their language. Their benefit? An incredible USP for an idea that successfully works (what is the score today?) in 75 countries in the world. Any ideas? Erich from lovely Vienna * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
