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str4hler
Joined: 04 Feb 2008
Posts: 93
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 Posted: May 17, 2010 14:41 Post subject: Re: Why aren't these magazines published in English? |
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A small group of friends, together, try to keep track of mineralogical articles in ca.200 magazines/publications ; published monthly, quarterly or irregular ; and I'm sure we miss a few...
Just for fun I took 30 minutes to mark the language of each publication.
(Schweizer Strahler is written both in French and German, I counted it in both languages ; MineralUP/Revista de Minerales idem, etc) ; The list ranges from popular magazines like Lapis, R&M, RMI, Ami Micro, MinRec etc ; over professional magazines like Am.Min., Can.Min., EJM etc etc to little club magazines)
The score.......:
English: 85
German: 29
French: 27
Italian: 15
Dutch: 15
Spanish: 13
Scandinavian (I threw them together, sorry Peter ;) 7
Others: 26 (the Czech, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Greek etc that are little more difficult to read)
I have no idea what conclusions I would even want to draw from those statistics other than that statistics always lie... But ca.60% of the publications are not written in English. And I would hate to miss 60% of the information on new&interesting mineral localities (which is of course also published in english magazines and/or mineral forums, blogs etc. and often not written down at all :-). But still: I'm convinced that, if you field-collect worldwide, like I like&try to do, I would miss a lot of interesting info if I would only read the MinRec ;)
Cheers! Frank |
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lluis
Joined: 17 Nov 2006
Posts: 719
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| Posted: May 17, 2010 15:10 Post subject: Re: Why aren't these magazines published in English? |
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Hi, Frank
And do not forget the ones written in catalan.
A minority language that have more speakers than danish, swedish, norwigean and several others....
By the way, as mother speaker of a latin based language, I speak french, spanish and catalan Well, Jordi ays that I never will be confused with a parisien... :-) )
But I can read without touble portuges, italian, romanian and reto romanic.
And with my german and english I can figure out what is written in dutch...
Gosh, I plan to travel to Japan and I am worried to learn some speaked japanese ...
That would make me feel better.
To learn an idiom, and as a son of a small land for me is important, adds more knowledge of others peoples
Not a bad thing, in my opinion
Lluís
P.D.: remember the time when spanish was the universal language, then french in diplomacy, then english, then... |
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Carles Millan
Site Admin
Joined: 05 May 2007
Posts: 1538
Location: Catalonia
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| Posted: May 17, 2010 15:51 Post subject: Re: Why aren't these magazines published in English? |
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| stumpy wrote: | | Why the hell aren't these magazines ( https://www.mineral-forum.com/message-board/viewtopic.php?t=1116 ) published in English? After all, it is the universal language of science and the only true "world" language. It seems stupid to restrict their potential readership by publishing in minority languages like Italian and German. After all, in how many countries are these languages actually used by the majority of people? German: Germany, Switzerland, Austria; Italian: erm, Italy. Most educated people in these countries can read English reasonably well anyway. Bit of common sense needed here, methinks! |
We must be very respectful with all the world's languages, no matter how many people speak them. There are no minority languages, only ones that are more used and others less. My mother and usual tongue is Catalan, a language that is spoken by about nine million people in Southern Europe, not much more than the inhabitants NYC has. But we also have a minerals magazine that, according to many people's opinion, is of high quality (a translation to English is available with the name of MineralUp). I'm proud to also speak English fluently, and French, and Spanish (and a little German), and can easily read Italian and Portuguese, but I don't even think publishing a magazine in Catalan is stupid. Not to mention doing it in German, French or Italian. So don't be chauvinist and accept the real world the way it is, multilingual, and it will keep being so for all of our lifetime, and more... |
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stumpy
Joined: 08 Feb 2010
Posts: 30
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| Posted: May 17, 2010 16:02 Post subject: Re: Why aren't these magazines published in English? |
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| Tobias Martin wrote: | | stumpy wrote: | | It seems stupid to restrict their potential readership by publishing in minority languages like Italian and German. |
German has more than 100 million native speakers and is by far the most spoken language in Europe, so you should be careful with the use of the term "minority language". Apart from that, this term means - as the name says - a language which is used by a minority of a country's population. German, however, is spoken by the majority of the population in five different European countries. |
Who said anything about Europe alone? I am talking worldwide - in which case German ranks 10th. And this relates to native speakers, but it is not necessary to be a native speaker to read an article in a mineral journal! |
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stumpy
Joined: 08 Feb 2010
Posts: 30
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| Posted: May 17, 2010 16:06 Post subject: Re: Why aren't these magazines published in English? |
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| In response to all your comments, perhaps it is sufficient to ask you to consider which language we are using on this forum? Do you seriously think it would be better if we all wrote our messages in our native tongues? |
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Jordi Fabre
Overall coordinator of the Forum
Joined: 07 Aug 2006
Posts: 5094
Location: Barcelona
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| Posted: May 17, 2010 16:17 Post subject: Re: Why aren't these magazines published in English? |
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| stumpy wrote: | | In response to all your comments, perhaps it is sufficient to ask you to consider which language we are using on this forum? Do you seriously think it would be better if we all wrote our messages in our native tongues? |
This Forum is very nice Stumpy, but smaller than its twin, the Spanish Forum.
I created both Fora, the Spanish one and the English one and, starting together, this Forum has 3131047 reads and the Spanish Forum 8867669 reads.
"No hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver."
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stumpy
Joined: 08 Feb 2010
Posts: 30
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| Posted: May 17, 2010 16:19 Post subject: Re: Why aren't these magazines published in English? |
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But this forum is insignificant compared to the dominant internet mineral forum on MinDat, which is in English.
And I do not see all of the contributors to this thread posting on the Spanish part of FMF. |
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Jordi Fabre
Overall coordinator of the Forum
Joined: 07 Aug 2006
Posts: 5094
Location: Barcelona
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| Posted: May 17, 2010 16:30 Post subject: Re: Why aren't these magazines published in English? |
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OK, but at this point you are using syllogisms -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism
so, I believe that in fact you are not really interested for the topic but by the discussion itself.
Then I prefer lock this topic to make room in this forum to other topics & discussions more scientists.
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