Order of languages - an ethical quibble

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Haruo's picture

I just entered "Herr, du mein Gott", in Community of Christ Sings, which is in four languages, German, English, Spanish, French. But the published version of the language field reads English, German, Spanish, French. Since our goal in an instance page is to present the data as close as modified HTML will allow to the way the hymnal gives them as feasible, and because justice issues arising from Babel are of importance both to me (I'm an Esperantist, fer crine out loud ;-)) and to the Community of Christ that published the hymnal, it irks me that hymnary.org software reorders the data to give English, which I view as the language of the global power elite, pride of place. Since French is not reordered to appear between English and German, I know that this is a matter of moving English to the front of the queue, not merely a case of alphabetizing the data.


Comments

Personally, I think it's probably best to have the database reflect the order given in the instance. Does anyone else know of a reason to give the English first? What impact does this have on search results?