Help preserve cultural diversity (Was: Language barriers --- financial barriers)

[Luis Gonzalez-Reimann]

Thanks, Paolo,

> excuse me, Luis, but this is a truism. How should I ignore this 
> simple, “pragmatic” fact? (although it is ironical that I should be 
> brought back to pragmatism, which is a close kin to 
> “matter-of-factness”, exactly while I am denouncing its 
> one-sidedness). Of course, we all write and publish and 
> internationally communicate in English, and this same forum bears 
> testimony to it. This is a very welcome *choice* we all have.
Alright.

> But some would have us cease altogether from writing in anything but 
> English for scholarly purposes,
Then maybe I misunderstood you, I didn't see this as the main point you 
were making. And this is a very specific point. This is not what I was 
addressing. As I said, I see no conflict with using both English and 
another language. English for international communication, and the 
mother tongue for "national" communication.

> which — to add one more consideration, apart from the perspective of 
> cultural diversity — would amount to effectively demoting our mother 
> tongues to the level of vernaculars unfit for scientific discourse. 
> And some are even going to the length of advocating the adoption of 
> English for dissertations in all countries.
Not in Latin America, I can assure you. Maybe in some European 
countries. Europe is very multilingual in a way that other areas of the 
world are not. This is (or at least was) especially true of countries 
such as Holland, Denmark and others, where students learn other European 
languages from an early age. Decisions about the language dissertations 
are written in is a very specific topic. We have already heard that in 
Germany different universities have different rules regarding this. I 
can tell you that here, at the University of California, Berkeley, 
dissertations in the Department of Spanish, for example, can be written 
in Spanish.

> Now, speaking of pragmatism, let us be pragmatic: how should a young 
> student, who (with the levels of student literacy falling everywhere) 
> is hardly at ease with his own mother tongue, be expected to handle a 
> foreign language
A student at the graduate level, I think, must be able to read (not to 
master subtle and stylistic points for writing) a couple of languages 
that are important in the field. In the US, they are usually French and 
German, with Japanese coming more and more into the picture, especially 
for Buddhist studies. Russian and Italian may be acceptable in some 
departments depending on the specific
topic of the research.

Regards,

Luis González-Reimann