languages in Europe and how to overcome

[Erich Kolenaty]

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


*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu,
Visit:

http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20030712/2560af7e/attachment-0015.htm>