Panel on utopias and dystopias/Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian-Swiss-German

[Carmine Colacino]

>On Wed, 11 Oct 1995, Adrian Wanner wrote:
>>
>I think you did misunderstand me somewhat.  I put the term "minor
>language" in quotation marks to imply that I don't approve of cultural
>value judgements based on the number of speakers of a given language.  On
>the other hand, it is a fact of life that some languages are understood
>by a large number of people, and some aren't. For that reason, it makes
>more sense to publish a scholarly book in English or German than, say, in
>Albanian. Of course, this does not make the English or German language
>inherently "better" than Albanian, it's simply a matter of pragmatics and
>a question of the audience you want to reach.

   Yes, you are right. It does make more sense to publish a scholarly book
in English (even though, perhaps, not as much as in German :) , but, of
course this doesn't have anything to do with the size or population of the
nation(s) where that language is spoken.
   There are other reasons (mainly political and/or economical, I'd say),
which make a language "international". For centuries Latin was the language
of scholar communications, then it was French, now it is English, in the
future, probably, some other one.
   The reason behind was military/economical power, nothing directly
related with the number of native speakers. I am generalizing and
simplifying, of course.
   That's why I did not like the terms "smaller" and "minor" and
"provincialism" you used.  That's not the point, I believe. After all, the
numebrs of native German, French, and Italian speakers are roughly
equivalent, still these languages have different "international" "status"
for reasons besides the size of the nation, the number of native speakers,
or any intrinsic characteristic of the language.
    Regards,

Carmine Colacino

________________________________________________________

         Carmine Colacino
         Dipartimento di biologia, difesa e b.a.
         Universita` della Basilicata
         85100 Potenza, Italy

         Tel.: +39 971 474172; Fax: +39 971 474256
         Internet: colacino at pzvx85.cisit.unibas.it

________________________________________________________
         Temporary address in U.S.A.(to Nov.4, '95):
         -------------------------------------------
         Dept. of Integrative Biology
         University of California
         Berkeley, CA 94720-2465

         Tel.: (510)643-9556; Fax: (510) 643-5390
         Internet: colacino at violet.berkeley.edu

_________________________________________________________

        "When it is a question of money, everyone is of the
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