Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 567.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: Stefan Sinclair <ss@huco.lang.arts.ualberta.ca> (26)
Subject: monolingualism
[2] From: Haradda@aol.com (21)
Subject: Re: 15.563 monolingualism
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 08 Apr 2002 06:58:49 +0100
From: Stefan Sinclair <ss@huco.lang.arts.ualberta.ca>
Subject: monolingualism
Dear Colleagues,
[Re: monolingualism]
> What do we do about this serious problem?
Among other strategies, those of us interested in promoting quality
content on the Web in languages other than English, continue to do so.
In this vein, I invite those of you who read French to visit the excellent
"Astrolabe" site that is part of the "Recherche littraire et
informatique" project led my Michel Lemaire at l'Universit d'Ottawa. The
"Encyclopdie" contains (usually rather short encyclopedic type) articles
by researchers such as tienne Brunet (Hyberbase), Michel Bernard (Banque
de Donnes d'Histoire Littraire) and Christian Vandendorpe (hypertext).
http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/astrolabe/index.html
The Astrolabe site is always interested in reviewing submissions of
scholarly articles in French on topics related to computing in literary
studies. This may be an excellent opportunity for strong graduate students
to publish a peer-reviewed article in French.
Yours,
Stfan
P.S. Hopefully the (iso-8859-1 encoded) accents in this message don't get
hopelessly deformed, thereby adding weight to complaints of
monolingualism.
______________________________________________________________
Stfan Sinclair, University of Alberta
Phone: (780) 492-6768, FAX: (780) 492-9106, Office: Arts 218-B
Address: Arts 200, MLCS, UofA, Edmonton, AB (Canada) T6G 2E6
M.A. in Humanities Computing: http://huco.ualberta.ca/
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 08 Apr 2002 07:06:30 +0100
From: Haradda@aol.com
Subject: Re: 15.563 monolingualism
> In any case, what Domenico sees is both no surprise and the cause of many
> difficulties for us -- especially the isolation from important work,
as he
> notes. In my mind the question is, what do we do about it? All well and
> good to say we should take a year or two to learn one or two additional
> languages (which we should), but few of us will, and meanwhile the
problem
> continues. Involving other languages in our conferences is
impractical for
> other reasons. What do we do about this serious problem?
My experience is somewhat different from yours in that I don't believe that
the average person can learn another language or two in a "year or
two." At least not proficiently. I have never run into a person who can
read, write and speak well in a language (not his native one) who learn
that language in school. I studied Spanish for 5 years and German for
three years and it wasn't until I spent two years in South America having
to communicate in Spanish (in order to eat), that I was able to cross the
threshold in speaking ability. And I still don't do it very well. As for
German it is hopeless to do anthing more than read for me. But of course I
was learning these additional languages after 12. The secret to learning
language is to do so when you are young and learning them along with your
own in total immersion. One of my brothers took his whole family to Mexico
for six months so that he could learn and improve his Spanish. His
children all came back speaking Spanish well while he didn't.
David Reed
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