"Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby kibo » 2012-10-14, 23:27

Nazīr wrote:Ok, well then please tell us how Unilang members can lobby to have specific individual language forums be eliminated in order to make room for forums that people actually will participate in?


Hmm, the problem is that you seem to operate under the assumption that the current forum structure has looked like this since always. But that's not true. The fact is that several language subforums have already been either booted or merged into one and a lot of them were actually European languages. Thank you for your suggestions, a few of them are quite along the lines of what we had in mind.

Nazīr wrote:I would also like to point out that all of the participants in this thread who actually are learning Bengali and/or Punjabi have expressed support for individual Bengali and Punjabi forums, though Bijlee is still apprehensive.


Well, that's how some of the existing forums were created. Some people wanted a place to learn the language they were interested in, the forum was created and then the learners eventually vanished and we got stuck with a dead forum.

Nazīr wrote: while languages that have hundreds of millions of speakers, but just happen to be spoken by brown people, are all relegated to a single forum?


Correlation (even if quite stretched) doesn't imply causation.

Nazīr wrote:but such a measure would only confirm Unilang's Eurocentrism.


I'm sure that a forum for Ainu does indeed prove how Eurocentric Unilang really is. :wink:

Our answer would have been the same had someone asked for a European language forum.

Nazīr wrote:Also if you don't mind me asking, in the group of administrators who make these decisions, how many people of color are there? Just curious.


Sorry, but such questions will not be dignified with an answer.
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby księżycowy » 2012-10-14, 23:29

As someone that has been involved in this sort of thing before, I figured I'd add a few words.

I agree with the mods, Yasna and Guillermo's reservations about adding separate forums for Bengali and Punjabi.Look what happened with the Tamil forum.
Guillermo wrote:The only reason I am skeptical is because somebody must have lobbied for Eskimo-Aleut and Asturian forums at one point when there was probably enough activity to justify creating them. But now those members are gone, so they're dead.

Well, I'm still around, but one person a subforum does not make, which is precisely the point. Even if you have a few people it's still hard to see it as a viable idea. It's not nessicarily the case that there is some prejudice against creating any of this, just how active will it remain and how can it justify it's creation. Something which my forums need to work on.

I'm fully in support of catch all Indo-Aryan and Dravidian forums though.

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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Nazīr » 2012-10-14, 23:48

Guillermo wrote:
Nazīr wrote:I think you misunderstood me. By underrepresentation, I was referring specifically to the lack of forums for Indian languages at Unilang, not the lack of Unilang members or people in general choosing to study Indian languages.
No, I understood what you meant, and I agree that the current setup is very unbalanced.

The paragraph you quoted was actually directed at Saim.

Guillermo wrote:I agree with Yasna in that I'm skeptical Punjabi and Bengali should have their own forums because their viability would depend on a few regulars being active. Should those regulars stop posting, they would have a hard time attracting new members. So I think it would be better to create a catch-all forum for Indo-Aryan languages first and see how much interest it garners.

I see where you guys are coming from, but in case you haven't noticed, it's a lot harder at Unilang to get a forum created for an individual language than it is to merge existing language forums.

Which is why I suggest creating individual forums for Punjabi and Bengali first. If, let's say after a year, it turns out there isn't sufficient activity in either or both forums to justify that they each have their own, then the two can easily be merged into "Other Indo-Aryan."

Doing things your way, having a catch-all forum first and then petitioning for individual forums if there's sufficient activity, would mean going through this entire process again.

Yasna wrote:Airing wild and unfounded suspicions of racism isn't standing up for a language. It'
s being rude.

:roll:
Implying that the underrepresentation of South Asian languages might be linked to the underrepresentation of people of color in Unilang's decision-making process doesn't constitute "wild and unfounded suspicions of racism" in my book.

Maybe for you, these are just languages. But for some us, languages are part of heritage, culture and identity.

kibo wrote:Hmm, the problem is that you seem to operate under the assumption that the current forum structure has looked like this since always. But that's not true. The fact is that several language subforums have already been either booted or merged into one and a lot of them were actually European languages. Thank you for your suggestions, a few of them are quite along the lines of what we had in mind.

You're welcome, and thanks for the clarification.

kibo wrote:
Nazīr wrote:but such a measure would only confirm Unilang's Eurocentrism.


I'm sure that a forum for Ainu does indeed prove how Eurocentric Unilang really is. :wink:

Glad I'm not the only one who thinks so :lol:

kibo wrote:
Nazīr wrote:Also if you don't mind me asking, in the group of administrators who make these decisions, how many people of color are there? Just curious.


Sorry, but such questions will not be dignified with an answer.

I wasn't expecting one either. It was only to make a point.
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The one who enters it drowns, and the one who drowns, gets across. |
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Guillermo » 2012-10-15, 0:13

księżycowy wrote:Well, I'm still around, but one person a subforum does not make, which is precisely the point. Even if you have a few people it's still hard to see it as a viable idea. It's not nessicarily the case that there is some prejudice against creating any of this, just how active will it remain and how can it justify it's creation. Something which my forums need to work on.
Exactly.
Nazīr wrote:The paragraph you quoted was actually directed at Saim.
My mistake.
I see where you guys are coming from, but in case you haven't noticed, it's a lot harder at Unilang to get a forum created for an individual language than it is to merge existing language forums.
It is, but I don't know why. That would really be a question for the administration and the developers. I'm not sure it's entirely a bureaucratic problem.
Which is why I suggest creating individual forums for Punjabi and Bengali first. If, let's say after a year, it turns out there isn't sufficient activity in either or both forums to justify that they each have their own, then the two can easily be merged into "Other Indo-Aryan."

Doing things your way, having a catch-all forum first and then petitioning for individual forums if there's sufficient activity, would mean going through this entire process again.
Either way works for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were eventually merged though.
Implying that the underrepresentation of South Asian languages might be linked to the underrepresentation of people of color in Unilang's decision-making process doesn't constitute "wild and unfounded suspicions of racism" in my book.
I don't believe that the Eurocentrism here is a result of conscious racism on the part of the administration, if that's what you were implying.
Maybe for you, these are just languages. But for some us, languages are part of heritage, culture and identity.
My language is part of my heritage, culture and identity just as much as yours is.
I wasn't expecting one either. It was only to make a point.
I'm pretty sure they're all white, but at the same time, we language learners tend to be a worldly bunch.
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Meera » 2012-10-15, 2:17

I still agree with Nazir. But I even think grouping all the indo-Aryan languages (including Hindi) into subforum would be a huge mess! Look at all the threads in the Hindi-Urdu forum now, could imagine that ontop of all the Bengali threads, Punjabi threads, Marathi threads. It would be impossible to find anything. Even now, in the threads for Punjabi and Bengali there are so many pages its hard to find certain resources and lessons versues the songs, movies and regular websites. Its a mess to find anything. But i think it would be better tto have two seperate forums for Punjabi and Bengali and if they don't work or have no actitavty move them to the Indo-Aryan catch all forum. Bengali and Punjabi are huge languages. They are both spoken in two countries and have "dispora" speakers around the world. Bengali is suppsodely the eigth most spoken language in the world. These aren't languages that are dying, they are critical and will start gaining more interest in the future if India's ecconmy grows.

I agree with having a Dravdian catch all forum though.
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Yasna » 2012-10-15, 2:32

Meera wrote:I still agree with Nazir. But I even think grouping all the indo-Aryan languages (including Hindi) into subforum would be a huge mess! Look at all the threads in the Hindi-Urdu forum now, could imagine that ontop of all the Bengali threads, Punjabi threads, Marathi threads. It would be impossible to find anything. Even now, in the threads for Punjabi and Bengali there are so many pages its hard to find certain resources and lessons versues the songs, movies and regular websites. Its a mess to find anything.

That's just an issue of smartly labeling the threads. Have a look at how they do it in the Celtic subforum.
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Bijlee » 2012-10-15, 2:53

Hey, Kibo, if you guys make the Indo-Aryan sub-forum, are you all really considering merging Hindi-Urdu into it? I think it would be awfully unfair to do that before it actually does becomes inactive (if it does). The entire time I've been here, it's been pretty active. Granted, I've only been here about a year, but still- I don't think we have any reason to suspect it will go inactive anytime soon....
Meera's right about what a mess that would be too with Hindi-Urdu in it's current state. There's regular posting by learners there and it's not uncommon for there to be a thread made by some one-time poster to ask questions. We get good activity and I don't know why there's this assumption of it going to stop...

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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Guillermo » 2012-10-15, 2:55

I thought the plan was to create a new forum for other Indo-Aryan languages while keeping the Hindi/Urdu one intact. That forum is still pretty active.

The thing about separate forums for Punjabi and Bengali is that there's a disconnect between the number of speakers they both have and their popularity among language learners. Since this forum has a hard time attracting new members, they might become inactive if some of the current members leave or are too busy to post in them. So I support creating forums for them in principle but I fear at some point we'll have to merge them anyway. kibo also said that it's impossible to create new forums at the moment although he didn't specify why.
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Meera » 2012-10-15, 3:40

Bijlee wrote:Meera's right about what a mess that would be too with Hindi-Urdu in it's current state. There's regular posting by learners there and it's not uncommon for there to be a thread made by some one-time poster to ask questions. We get good activity and I don't know why there's this assumption of it going to stop...


Yes exactly, plaus how would the moderators of the Indo-Aryan subforum be able to manage all of those languages and plus Hindi/Urdu. Hindi/Urdu needs its own forum.


Guillermo wrote:The thing about separate forums for Punjabi and Bengali is that there's a disconnect between the number of speakers they both have and their popularity among language learners. Since this forum has a hard time attracting new members, they might become inactive if some of the current members leave or are too busy to post in them. So I support creating forums for them in principle but I fear at some point we'll have to merge them anyway. kibo also said that it's impossible to create new forums at the moment although he didn't specify why.


But thats what I said also, see how active it is in the furture and then merge.
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby voron » 2012-10-15, 23:10

Nazīr wrote:You also have to remember that it's much easier to type in English because it's the default setting on computers/keyboards.

That's so US-centric. :D All computers and mobile phones here come with cyrillic keyboards and cyrillic layout installed and set as the default layout. Most people cannot type confidently with Latin letters and many do not know the Latin alphabet.

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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Meera » 2012-10-16, 2:22

But the Indian languages are quite hard to type on a phone or a computer, there are many letters and diffirent vowel signs. Its very hard to type them on a phone or computer.
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Guillermo » 2012-10-16, 4:19

Actually I find it quite easy to type Devanagari on my phone, because the virtual keyboard actually shows me where the letters are unlike on my computer where I have to hunt and peck until I find them. I have the same problem with Cyrillic.
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Meera » 2012-10-16, 5:29

Guillermo wrote:Actually I find it quite easy to type Devanagari on my phone, because the virtual keyboard actually shows me where the letters are unlike on my computer where I have to hunt and peck until I find them. I have the same problem with Cyrillic.


But most phones doesn't even support them, I think only the iphone does. My phone doesn't even have a devangari option.
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Guillermo » 2012-10-16, 15:16

Meera wrote:But most phones doesn't even support them, I think only the iphone does. My phone doesn't even have a devangari option.
But you have an older phone. I'd think most current smartphones would, since they're essentially iPhone clones (sorry Android fanboys, but it's true).
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Set » 2012-10-16, 15:31

Guillermo wrote:
Meera wrote:But most phones doesn't even support them, I think only the iphone does. My phone doesn't even have a devangari option.
But you have an older phone. I'd think most current smartphones would, since they're essentially iPhone clones (sorry Android fanboys, but it's true).

I have a samsung something something and it doesn't even support Persian/Arabic let alone Devangari. Just saying.
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Guillermo » 2012-10-16, 16:18

I don't know if anyone has mentioned it yet, but one forum we can definitely get rid of is Kazakh. It's completely inactive and the vast majority of the posts were in a single thread anyway. I doubt anyone will miss it.
I have a samsung something something and it doesn't even support Persian/Arabic let alone Devangari. Just saying.

Which model/which version of Android are you running?

You should be able to download fonts for it somewhere. If not, Google really shit the bed on this one.
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Meera » 2012-10-17, 3:08

Guillermo wrote:
Meera wrote:But most phones doesn't even support them, I think only the iphone does. My phone doesn't even have a devangari option.
But you have an older phone. I'd think most current smartphones would, since they're essentially iPhone clones (sorry Android fanboys, but it's true).


My phone is new, I got it like two months ago and it doesnt have Devangari or Arabic script, it only has Chinese & Korean.
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby eskandar » 2012-12-27, 8:59

Nazīr wrote:I really did not want to be the one to bring race into this, but such a measure would only confirm Unilang's Eurocentrism. Like Saim said, the only way for South Asian languages to get respect and recognition is if people like us demand it.
"Eurocentrism" is an especially mild way to put it. Unilang has always revolved around Europeans and their languages, and space has been created for non-European languages mostly as the subject of European and North American members' interest in something more 'exotic', rather than spaces for brown folks to learn and teach their own languages. In the 5+ years I've been an active poster and moderator here, it's never been much of a welcoming place for people of color, and is sometimes openly hostile. This issue has come up numerous times over there years and I've never seen an administrator actually take the issue seriously rather than deny it or offer justifications. This is the main reason why I spend much less time here now than before, and post more on the Wordreference.com forums.

In addition to treating its members of color and their languages with more respect, WR is also a better place for more serious language learners. Unilang has become primarily a social forum for teenagers and young adults who like talking about languages, and perhaps spending a few weeks 'dabbling' in one before moving on to another; WR (at least the forums I frequent there) has a more mature userbase with more serious discussions of literature and the subtleties of language, alongside grammar and so on. With regards to the main subject of this thread, for what it's worth, there is an Indo-Iranian Languages subforum at WR that encompasses a huge array of languages yet actually works quite well (perhaps aided by the fact that in practice over 90% of posts are only about Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, or Persian). Each new thread title is prefaced with the name of the language(s) it concerns.

kibo wrote:
Nazīr wrote:Also if you don't mind me asking, in the group of administrators who make these decisions, how many people of color are there? Just curious.
Sorry, but such questions will not be dignified with an answer.
Translation: "There have never been any, there most likely will never be any, and if there ever are any they will be token minorities who agree with the European administrators on such issues.

Anyway, that's what I have to say on this subject. I won't post in this thread again, I have no faith at this point that the situation I described above will ever change at UL and therefore no patience to debate it further.
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Johanna » 2012-12-27, 13:06

Honestly, it has nothing to do with people of colour vs Europeans and people of European descent, the main problem is that if we create a bunch of new language-specific forums we have to know that they will be used, otherwise we will just end up with lots and lots of dead forums, which will make the forum a bitch to administrate.

I agree that we have been bad at creating forums for the more popular of the non-European languages, and that we haven't removed as many of the dead ones as we probably should, but it definitely doesn't have anything to do with racism, it's simply due to some admins being quite inactive for different reasons and others lacking the energy to do something about it. I tried, I initiated that huge moderator checkup last year, which lead to some forums being merged and others removed, but that thing is still not really finished, we especially never got around to the creating new forums part, and parallel with that I worked on the forum policy. I've been the driving force behind both things, and this combined with being clinically depressed got me too exhausted to continue a while back, and no one took over the initiative so the whole thing just died.

So yeah, thanks a lot for the pep talk, hearing that nothing happens because I'm racist really helps me gather up enough energy to continue the project of getting the forum fit with the current activity. Not. :(
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Re: "Other Indo-Aryan" subforum

Postby Lur » 2012-12-27, 15:29

I might be new here but that whole "racism" angle... seems nonsense to me. As for the skin colour of the administrators, it's kind of irrelevant.

In my humble opinion the simplest and most practical thing to do is to make the forum organization fit with the language requirements of its users, regardless of the actual dimension of the languages in the world. If a considerable amount of users are interested in a small language and work on it everyday, a subforum for it would be useful. Joining geographically adjacent languages that by themselves don't generate much activity seems like a good idea to encourage contact between users that might have similar interests. The Celtic forum works and so on. That said, if many subfora lack activity and can be reorganized by the moderators, it doesn't seem very intelligent to call them racist because people stopped posting. There's just work to be done. I'd wait. I wouldn't want to feel insulted by what seems to be slow or complex managament of a large forum where admins are busy and have to agree on things. It's a bit ridiculous.

As for that one comment about joining Asturian with Basque... if anything one would do better joining Asturian with other small Romance languages :lol: As well as putting small Germanic languages that people seem to like here together, for example.
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