Summary
Cultural bias in linguistics
A linguist working with the Jaqi people of Bolivia describes the controversy that ensued when one of her Jaqi students developed an alphabet for his language Aymara. Three other alphabets devised by foreigners had previously been used, but did not adequately reflect the Jaqi's unique culture.See the full content of this document
Extract
Humanizing science.
Part of my humanism says that, in order for science to be of value, it must have value to the people from whom our scientific information comes To use other human beings as objects of study and then hide the results from them--using such results only for the benefit of ourselves and our group--is, in my judgment, both anti humanistic and scientifically unethical It also leads to bad science, as some work in my own field of linguistics clearly shows.
I first went to Bolivia in the early 1960s to work with the Jaqi (pronounced "hah-kay") people who inhabit the high lands of the Andes mountains. Though Aymara ("eye-mah-dah") is the language spoken by the largest number of the Jaqi, I found that the people of the Andes--both Aymara- and Spanish-speaking--were not united at that ti...See the full content of this document
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