Profile language selection

[haibuihoang]

Today I've looked at the forum profile edit, when I tried to edit the mother tongue language there are no Vietnamese at all. Well, Vietnamese even has more native speakers than many languages in the list (Korean, French, Turkish, Polish, etc.) (according to 2007 data List of languages by number of native speakers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) and we shares some tragedy history with Japanese in WW II.
So what is the special reason of choosing such list do you think?

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P/S: I put the title because I think this "Chit-Chat" section is not serious at all and I was quite ignorant of the sensitivity of the term "racist". Since I cannot change the title myself, admins can change if you think it's too sensitive. To "Question of the list of mother tongue languages on the profile setting", maybe?

 

[nice gaijin]

oversight? there are a lot of languages missing from the list. It'd probably just be easier to let users write it in

 

[Mike Cash]

There is a saying, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

The same is true if you replace "stupidity" with "oversight".

You spotted an omission. Assume it was a simple human oversight and ask to have it corrected instead of assuming racist motives.

Baseless allegations of racism are as repugnant as racism itself.

 

[haibuihoang]

There is a saying, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

The same is true if you replace "stupidity" with "oversight".

You spotted an omission. Assume it was a simple human oversight and ask to have it corrected instead of assuming racist motives.

Baseless allegations of racism are as repugnant as racism itself.

Oh don't take it too serious, that's why I put the topic in "Chit chat" section and with a "Hmm" in the title. I am just curious about the reason of choosing such list. Because usually the list should contains most languages in the world and this list has just a few. At fist I think it based on the number of native speakers but it's not.
Sorry if some people are sensitive to the term racist I used.

 

[Mike Cash]

White people tend to get a little tired of having insinuations of racism thrown in our faces.

Being wrongly suspected or accused of racist acts or motives is something just as vile and repugnant as being the victim of racist acts or motives.

Try to imagine how you would like it if you got accused of racist motives for something like a simple innocent oversight. If there were racist feelings toward the Vietnamese people on this site, don't you think you'd find some more overt evidence of it? Something like not allowing posts from Vietnam, for example....

 

[nice gaijin]

hmmm, is Obama a secret Al Qaeda agent?

Asking a leading a question is hardly different from just saying it. See Fox News for more examples.

 

[haibuihoang]

I state again that if I really considered this an racist act, I would post the thread in "Serious" topic group, not a chat-chit one. And I didn't mention the term again in the post itself. The title is just "just kidding" one. And of course I would not consider some kind of skin color discrimination here as there are Malay and other Asian countries in the list.

I am just curious about how to choose such list of few languages of not even the biggest ones. Of course I hope this will be corrected (a list of full languages is the best).

 

[Mike Cash]

I don't care if you really consider it a racist act or not. I'm just trying to point out that "racist" is not a word to be throwing around lightheartedly or in jest. Saying you did it in the chit-chat changes nothing.

If I started a thread called "Hmmm.....Are All Women Wh0res?" how much success do you think I'd have telling all the (justifiably) pissed-off women of JREF they shouldn't take it seriously because it's in chit-chat and I never used the word in the post?

False allegations of racists motives are insulting and hurtful, largely because they are nearly impossible to refute. The stain doesn't wash off.

 

[haibuihoang]

False allegations of racists motives are insulting and hurtful, largely because they are nearly impossible to refute. The stain doesn't wash off.

Let's put it this way, I've never been a victim of racism or a victim of racism accusation, so I didn't take the word 'racist' to be offensive enough. So this is my ignorance and stupidity you may say. But don't just accuse me of trying to hurt you or other guys here.
I've already given my sorry when I realized that, what else do you want me to do?

Back to your example, if you put a thread "Hmmm...are all women ******", I would just laugh at it, but I will try to see some point in your post as well. Refute something entirely just based on your emotion is not a good thing to do. And how many times you've seen some girl who just been broken with her bf state that "All men are jerks"? And what do you think? I've seen a lot but it's OK for me because she just doesn't mean that.

 

[thomas]

Before this issue escalates, let me explain. When this forum was relaunched in 2002, we practically had no users from Vietnam. If I remember correctly, we randomly listed languages we believed most of our users back then spoke as their mother tongue.

The demography of JREF has changed significantly over the years, and we are glad to receive a lot of new members from Vietnam.

As has been suggested above, I think it's the best to replace the current dropdown menu with a plain text field.

Thanks!

 

[haibuihoang]

Thanks a lot for your satisfied explanation, Thomas. . It's quite amazing to know that Jref has had a long history since 2002.

 

[thomas]

Funny enough, it seems to be overly complicated to switch the field type in the language selection, so I have just added some of the major languages that have been missing to the dropdown menu. Thanks again for pointing this out.
;-)