Hi All,
I read what struck me all as very good points. It seems to me that
choice of language always has tradeoffs, which sometimes need to be
carefully considered. If there is some problem with the extent to which
English has become a default language in ISA, I have to say that
correcting the matter by discouraging English and promoting French and
German would keep many, including myself, from much of the discourse. I
myself would be happy to accept that since I enjoy the advantages of having
English as my native tongue. (What goes around comes around, or so I've
heard.) Since I'm not yet a member of ISA I've little right to speak to
that, but I still have to wonder if the advantages of having an
operational lingua franca in an international professional association
are really so negligible. French would be every bit as obscure to me as
my cute little sentences in Chinese pinyin were to most of everyone else
participating on this list (pinyin, BTW, is a way to express the
phonetics of Chinese language in Romanized letters -- just to save
everyone any guesswork). Jozsef's point about the hazards of moving
concepts from one language into another matters not only because a
mechanical approach to translation can result in misunderstandings
which, in the worst cases can lead to widespread absurdity (as I readily
agree regarding his example of "public spaces", though the new urban
sociology appears hung on "the space problem" anyway, regardless of
anything translated from German). There's something even more serious
about Jozsef's point: we (refering to the profession of sociology at large)
often fail to express the concepts we're concerned about correctly, much
less very well, even in our native languages. Though that's a well-worn
discussion topic its worth mentioning here since you can't expect a
concept to be expressed more accurately in translation than the way it
was put in the first place.
Regarding cuteness: that caught up with me -- I'll have to resort to my
dictionary to make a few replies, though that certainly won't hurt me.
How to answer what I can only suppose Bruce was asking: How do you say
'typo' in Cantonese? Probably 'typo', I don't know. ('tai po' in Mandarin
could mean 'too broke' but never mind about that). I can't help but
wonder how long it'll be before there are calligraphy brush computer input
devices packaged with the appropriate character recognition software to
really open some channels for Eastern languages in cyberspace (said the
guy who can barely handle some basic pinyin). Still, I don't think even
shifting production from keyboards, which are of course designed essentially
for English, to something like that would help those out on the Pacific
Rim who assemble our keyboards feel much better about their jobs,
however far it might go towards mitigating the cultural aspects of
whatever alienation they feel working on the assembly line...
Bill Haller