Nathan 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?
While Wikipedia, where we have
original writing, is not best suited to
these small languages, the same is not the case for some sister
projects, notabnly Wiktionary, Wikibooks and Wikisource. Constructed
languages need to be viewed differently from dead or endangered
languages, because most of them need to have a culture constructed as
well as a language.
Additionally, someone
mentioned that there are present native speakers of Latin. I'd be
interested to find out who these folks are.
I don't know if their are actual native speakers. Having a top-level
domain of ".va" indicates a country that frowns upon procreation. Latin
does remain as an language that is used there. Also if you look at what
is available facing the title page of the Harry Potter books, somebody
is intent on translating them into Latin.
Ec