Hoi,
During my visit to India, Amir started to teach me to read Devanagari. He
did not teach me all the characters but I now have an idea on how to read
the script. One of the things we looked at were things like the difference
in writing characters for Marathi and Hindi. Effectively we looked at words
that were transliterated from English like Coca Cola ... Amir taught
himself to read Devanagari during this visit.. Amir is a linguist.
Many of the people who are functional illiterates in their mother tongue I
met at the hackathon. The way they speak about their language makes me
cringe. To them English is superior. I find it sad because they lose their
culture in this way. I asked two of them if they wanted their kids to learn
to read and write their mother tongue; they said they did.
They said that they would not be tempted to read Wikipedia articles;
English is better. They might be interested in reading the literature of
their language. I know this is a long shot but I am an optimist. I would
welcome and applaud these people when they make the effort to learn to read
and start reading the literature of their culture.
One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are
part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people
who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and
interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language
communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more
people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods,
automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but
also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal
of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 30 November 2011 14:14, Achal Prabhala <aprabh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Gerard,
>
> On Wednesday 30 November 2011 06:21 PM, Bishakha Datta wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Gerard Meijssen
> > <gerard.meijs...@gmail.com <mailto:gerard.meijs...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> >
> > The one thing I have come to understand is that many native
> > speakers of Indic languages are effectively illiterate in their
> > own language. The combination of highly educated people being
> > functionally illiterate had me talking with many people. Given the
> > structure of the Indic scripts, it is possible for me to learn to
> > read the text; it will get me as far as pronouncing something I do
> > not know the meaning of. For native speakers it must be not that
> > hard at all when they surmounted the challenge of learning to read
> > and write English already.
> >
> >
> > Dear Gerard,
> >
> > I am intrigued by this, yet struggling to understand what you mean here.
> >
> > Do you mean that many educated people can speak their own language,
> > but not read or write it? (because they communicate in English
> > instead). If so, that is probably true - but is that what you mean?
> >
> > For example, my mother tongue is Bengali - I speak it much more than I
> > read or write it (even though I can read and write in Bengali), since
> > I usually read and write in English. However, there are many people in
> > India who have the opposite experience eg who not just speak, but also
> > read and write in indic languages.
> >
> > Cheers
> > Bishakha
>
> I think the problem may be with the phrase "effectively illiterate". One
> term we use here a lot is functional illiteracy, but (like with the word
> illiteracy) it refers to a very specific problem, a developmental
> education problem. I, for instance, also do not recognise myself in your
> email. My mother tongues are Kannada and Telugu, and I speak a little
> Tamil and Hindi. I would describe myself as illiterate in Tamil, but
> literate in the other three languages. At home, for instance, I speak to
> my family mainly in English, and only sometimes in Kannada and Telugu.
> But, also, I'm one of the convent-educated people that Ravi wrote about
> earlier, and the language I am most comfortable with is English. I don't
> regularly read or write in Kannada, Telugu or Hindi, but I can - and I
> certainly use these languages regularly in speech. As Ravi pointed out
> earlier, I'm a minority and certainly not the core target of Indic
> language Wikipedias (and probably should not be). Everyone is
> comfortable with one language or another, and it's certainly true that
> most people in India (most middle-class, internet-accessing people even)
> are most comfortable reading, writing and speaking their mother tongues
> than not. This is best evidenced by media; in print, radio, television,
> and film; where the Indian-language media outstrips English-language
> media hugely, in terms of either readership or revenue.
>
> Cheers,
> Achal
>
> >
> >
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