language wars
recently ilugc mailing list had an unprecedentedly huge flame war regarding language. This had it's beginnings a couple of years back when one or two members started posting in Tamil. Ilugc is the biggest LUG in India and has a large and active component of members from outside Tamilnadu as well as members within the state who cannot read Tamil - in many cases do not even have the fonts installed so all they see is either junk or little boxen. Repeated requests were made that the mails be tagged [Tamil] and a brief english translation be appended. The posters expressed the opinion that 'this is the Tamilnadu state LUG and hence they have the right to post in Tamil, and also every member should learn Tamil'. At that time no one was opposed to posts in Tamil - all they asked was that the posters do them the courtesy of tagging the posts so that they could filter it out - or give an english summary so that they could know what is happening. This went on for some years - periodically requests were made for tagging/summary, and the requests were ignored.
In India language is a very sensitive issue - but in Tamilnadu by and large there is a lot of tolerance as there are large linguistic minorities - although I remember torrid times in the anti-hindi agitations of the past and the Tamil-Kannada riots in the late nineties (this was actually more a dispute over water than over language). There are fanatics like the MNS in Mumbai that wants to kick out all the non Marathi speaking people - and a few hot heads in other states. Bangalore comes to mind in this regard.
Anyway the issue flared up again a couple of weeks back - and this time due to the intransigence of the tamil posters (actually only 2-3 of them in a 2000 strong list), flames erupted and this time there was heavy opposition to tamil posting itself, along with a much more insistent demand for tagging/translation. Finally the co-ordinator ordained that any language may be used as long as it is tagged and translated. This lead to posts in all manner of languages and a general state of anarchy. In the end the list owner stated that he is willing to start language lists on request, but only english posts would be allowed. Anyone posting in other languages would be warned and then banned.
So why were they posting in Tamil and refusing to tag/translate? Simply because they wanted to impose Tamil on the members. If they genuinely wanted to promote Tamil, they should have been polite, tagged the mails and also provided translations - or even transliterations to encourage people to learn. There was even one moron who suggested that Marathi posts should be allowed in Mumbai, Kannada posts in Bengaluru and Telugu posts in Hyderabad - which shows how much he knows about the languages spoken in the respective cities and the tensions wrt to language there.
Well youngsters will be youngsters - but I hope some of them get posted to some place like Kolhapur or Kannur - then they will learn.
In India language is a very sensitive issue - but in Tamilnadu by and large there is a lot of tolerance as there are large linguistic minorities - although I remember torrid times in the anti-hindi agitations of the past and the Tamil-Kannada riots in the late nineties (this was actually more a dispute over water than over language). There are fanatics like the MNS in Mumbai that wants to kick out all the non Marathi speaking people - and a few hot heads in other states. Bangalore comes to mind in this regard.
Anyway the issue flared up again a couple of weeks back - and this time due to the intransigence of the tamil posters (actually only 2-3 of them in a 2000 strong list), flames erupted and this time there was heavy opposition to tamil posting itself, along with a much more insistent demand for tagging/translation. Finally the co-ordinator ordained that any language may be used as long as it is tagged and translated. This lead to posts in all manner of languages and a general state of anarchy. In the end the list owner stated that he is willing to start language lists on request, but only english posts would be allowed. Anyone posting in other languages would be warned and then banned.
So why were they posting in Tamil and refusing to tag/translate? Simply because they wanted to impose Tamil on the members. If they genuinely wanted to promote Tamil, they should have been polite, tagged the mails and also provided translations - or even transliterations to encourage people to learn. There was even one moron who suggested that Marathi posts should be allowed in Mumbai, Kannada posts in Bengaluru and Telugu posts in Hyderabad - which shows how much he knows about the languages spoken in the respective cities and the tensions wrt to language there.
Well youngsters will be youngsters - but I hope some of them get posted to some place like Kolhapur or Kannur - then they will learn.