On Dec 26, 2007 10:26 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
I think that preserving a language is a good goal, but it is one that Wikipedia is not well suited for and is not intended to fulfill. Creating an automatically translated article on every city and town in the US is not a way to 'preserve' a constructed or dead language. If the point is to aggregate knowledge in a way that is accessible to as many people as possible, how does a Wikipedia in a constructed language (a code, really) serve that point? Additionally, someone mentioned that there are present native speakers of Latin. I'd be interested to find out who these folks are.
You're right about that point, a conlang isn't really a method of enhancing communication so much as obscuring it. "live" conlangs, that is conlangs with an active speaking community may be worthwhile because they can help to facilitate communications between various peoples. However, dead conlangs are little more then a cypher to obscure information. Once a conlang dies, not only is it's wikipedia not a benefit, but it's actually a hurdle to the information found there.
As for latin, the Catholic church still performs sermons in latin, and Latin is one of the languages spoken in the Vatican. Some universities hold graduation ceremonies in Latin. I'm sure there are other examples as well. While there are likely no "native" speakers of Latin, it is still spoken
--Andrew Whitworth