On 11 Mar 2014, at 18:45, Christopher LILJENSTOLPE
<cdl_forward(_at_)cdl(_dot_)asgaard(_dot_)org> wrote:
I don't think the IETF can afford to enfeeble itself by excluding colleagues
and collaborators who do not have a fluent grasp of English (native tongue or
not).
Hm, learning English is not that hard. Hundreds of millions of people have done
it. Learning how to create good internet standards is probably harder.
Certainly fewer people have done it. I also wonder how you could learn to
create internet standards without being able to read the language those are
written in. As far as I know, translations aren't available for most of them.
So there's a good chance that the IETF can, in fact, afford it.
How would you feel if there was a countervailing proposal that stated that
participants needed equivalent fluency in 普通話 / Putonghua? I'm sure there
are a lot of participants in the IETF who would be more comfortable with that
decision rather than English.
The number of people who already speak a language is a very poor criterion for
selecting a working language. The two main things are that it's easy to learn
and easy to speak. I wasn't able to identify the language that you're referring
to, so maybe it has those qualities.
Of course if we assume that IETF participants already speak English then the
effort to learn is zero and the chance that some other language is so much
easier to speak that it makes up for that is small.