A query...

Mark P. Line mark at polymathix.com
Tue Oct 24 18:09:19 UTC 2006


Claire Bowern wrote:
> Mark wrote:
>> Claire wrote:
>>>
>>> For many people (and speech communities) there's a big difference
>>> between
>>> making large amounts of raw data generally available and discussing and
>>> sharing it with colleagues.
>>
>> As for speech communities for which this holds, that's the ethical issue
>> we've already identified.
>>
>> As for linguists for whom this holds, I've always wanted to meet one in
>> person so I could ask them 'why'.
>>
>>
>
> One is not being willing to be identified as a speaker of the language
> (e.g. Laz in Turkey). Another is a strong feeling of association between
> language and place (i.e. that a particular language belongs to a
> particular country and is looked after by a group of people), so reading
> mythology in that language away from that area would be inappropriate.
> Another is a worry that others will learn the language and steal it.
> Another was a worry that publishing secret language would cause harm to
> come to come to people who read it (e.g. I was warned not to tell blokes
> about women's business because the ra:galk would rip their throat out,
> and they didn't want that to happen to anyone). Then there's cultural
> knowledge that could be used as evidence in land claims (there have been
> cases of people going through archives and claiming another group's
> cultural knowledge as their own, and so publishing information such as
> the GPS coordinates of sites has potentially harmful consequences).
> People don't always give a reason beyond general misgivings and lack of
> trust of what "White people" will do with the data. This is balanced by
> wanting to have someone work on the language to help record it for the
> community's own use, with a recognition that in order to do that the
> linguist usually has to (or wants to) also do work that relates to their
> role within a university. And there's usually multiple different reasons
> within the same community, and different degrees to which people want
> data made available.

I wrote the two sentences quoted above hoping that I could make you split
apart the issues of the speech community from the issues of the linguist.

I failed. :)


-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX



More information about the Funknet mailing list