Thomas Dalton schrieb:
From my point
of view, the first thing we address would be is "Siberian" a
linguistic entity.
How does "Does the language have a dictionary?" work as a definition
of whether or not something qualifies as a language? Obviously we need
a restriction on what kind of dictionaries count (eg. novelty
dictionaries of Cockney Rhyming Slang don't mean we should create a
cockney wikipedia), and some other requirements would probably be
needed as well (mutual intelligibility with other languages, for
example), but I don't see how we can write a Wikipedia in a language
which doesn't have a dictionary, since there is no way of determining
what the language actually consists of (and you end up in the
situation of having to invent words, as has been mentioned in this
thread).
In fact there is a Siberian dictionary, the Полный словарь сибирского
говора / polnyi slovar sibirskogo govora (complete dictionary of the
Siberian dialect), by O.I. Blinova (ed.), published in Tomsk, 1992-1995
in 4 volumes.
I suspect that this /is/ a reliable and authoritative source. However,
if you would cross-check the language used at ru-sib against the
contents of this dictionary, you would come to the conclusion, that the
vocabulary of ru-sib is largely invented or borrowed from other
languages (with the explicite intent of making the language
unintelligible to speakers of standard Russian) and thus is a
misrepresentation of the original Northern dialect.
Thanks,
Johannes