No further replies (Was Bensky/Chen)

October 27, 2004

>Hey, have at me. I will not be replying on this topic

>again.

I know how you feel; it gets to be like listening to Bill Gates tell

us why open source software will end the world as we know it.

I do want to thank you, Bob, Eric and the others

who have responded to the posted misinformation.

We went through the database of what we know to be in print in

English the other day to provide statistics for a W.H.O. meeting.

More than 30% of that literature can be cross-referenced within

itself as well as referenced to the Practical Dictionary. Although

there is no way to prove it, if you take a reasonable sense

of " frequently purchased " as a filtering criteria, or look at the

choices made by new translators and writers, the percentage is much

larger.

Not only is there nothing limiting in long-established standards of

scholarship, there is something liberating. That is, people are

encouraged to write, encouraged to put more literature into the

field. People are given the tools they need to learn the langauge.

Readers aren't forced into wild-goose-chases to discover whether two

writers use the same word in the same way.

Consider this converstation about the Bensky and Chen Materia

Medicas. We are 20 some years into the business of teaching, then

licensing herbalists. Yet, teachers and students just now have a

choice between two books. Readers just now have access to a

different " slant " on the information. The same is true for all the

so-called " exam list books. " Our state of the art is somewhere in

the 1980's. It is not because there is no money to be made, or no

capital to invest, it is because people who might othewise put their

time and money behind new projects or new ideas, won't waste their

time and money trying to serve a closed market. If it weren't for

the courage of people like Bob Flaws who have put their

time and money on the line in favor of this growing library of texts

published to established standards, the information available to the

field wouldn't be half of what it is today. When sources,

translation principles and term sets are unpublished and unexplained,

it is everyone's access to knowledge that is retarded.

Bob

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