Dear people, neither Klingon nor LFN have any native speakers. Okay, that's
not entirely true. There has been a case of a certain D'Armond Speers who
tried to raise his son in Klingon (thus making him the one and only native
speaker), but it was not a success because the language lacked elementary
words like "table". The only artificial language that has ever had more
than one native speaker is Esperanto (not counting semi-artificial
reconstructions like Rumantsch Grischun, Modern Hebrew etc.).
And this is precisely where we are getting to the issue brought in by
MF-Warburg: "Can we, by the way, define more detailed criteria for which
artificial languages should be eligible?"
My point of view is that there are two main criteria here:
a) Is the language developed enough to make such a project possible at all?
b) Is the community of people willing to work on the project large enough
to make it viable?
One might also add as a third criterion:
c) Is the language intended/suitable for human communication at all?
Klingon has a large fan base, but it fails the criteria a en c. The same
goes also for proposed projects in Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin.
Another interesting case in point is Toki Pona, which used to have a
Wikipedia in the past, but it was deleted, apparently because it was
practically empty. The language seems to be quite popular, but the
community clearly was too small to make it a success. Besides, I'm not sure
how the idea of a language with only ±120 words can really work well for an
encyclopedia.
But when a language fulfills all three criteria, I cannot see why a project
shouldn't be given a chance. The Wikipedias in Esperanto, Interlingua and
Ido are doing reasonably well. Those in Volapük and Occidental/Interlingue
to some degree as well. The projects in Lojban and Novial are practically
dead.
Cheers,
Jan
2017-12-09 17:10 GMT+01:00 Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>om>:
I suppose you have strong evidence that LFN has more
native speakers
than Klingon or you are just an ordinary liar?
On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 4:45 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
In an alternate universe maybe.
Thanks,
GerardM
Op za 9 dec. 2017 om 13:24 schreef Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>
>
> I've just said that Klingon makes more sense than LFN, as it actually
has
> native speakers.
>
>
> On Dec 9, 2017 06:55, "Gerard Meijssen" <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> Hoi,
> We had Klingon at one time.. Do you really consider revisiting that ?
> Thanks,
> GerardM
>
> On 8 December 2017 at 23:22, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 10:58 PM, MF-Warburg <mfwarburg(a)googlemail.com
>>> wrote:
>>> > Can we, by the way, define more detailed criteria for which
artificial
> > languages should be eligible?
>
> Agreed. If we count native speakers, Klingon is, AFAIK, immediately
> after Esperanto.
>
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