Re: language diversity (was: Re: Diversity considerations)

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2018 at 03:34:05PM -0400, John R Levine wrote:
> >IMHO, english is _the_ language of international communications,
> >and the primary goal should be to give strong guidance to countries to
> >have kids speak and write english fluently. ...
> 
> Sorry, but this completely misses the point I was making.  I agree that it
> makes sense for the IETF to do its work in English.
> 
> But there are several billion people in the world who for various reasons do
> not speak English, or prefer to speak their own langauge to each other.
> Wouldn't it be nice if the Internet worked for them, too?  That's why I want
> people who understand how their own languages work and can check the
> assumptions we make who speak English and other languages written in the
> Latin alphabet.

You two are talking past each other.

Our specs should be written in English.  Our protocols should be
internationalized.

I don't think you'll find anyone here who disagrees with either or both
of those two statements.

Your point has been, I think, that you would like to see more
participants whose first languages are not English, or at least who have
useful things to say about internationalization that we might not.

I continue to say that mostly we should work with the UC on difficult
I18N problems and rely on them (since they have change control on
Unicode).  Those diverse participants who could help us with I18N should
*also* be helping the UC.  I realize that the structure of the UC makes
that difficult, so they're better off participating at least here.  I
wish the UC was more like the IETF.  I don't think we can change that.

Nico
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