Hi Fredrik,
Your proposal for a Gothic wikipedia is very exciting!
I have a question though, will you be using Unicode gothic, or will you be writing it in the Latin alphabet? Also, will you be using spaces between words or not?
Also I think that the number of people who can "speak" gothic is actually higher than most would estimate, there are people who learn Gothic because they are obsessed with it, there are people who learn it because it is useful for Germanic or even general Indo-European linguistics, and there are people who learn it for various other reasons; however I seem to recall having heard about a group of university professors who are raising their kids in Gothic, together their organization has 400 individuals worldwide I think, which only includes academics whose primary interest is in Gothic (as opposed to people whose primary interest is in, say, Old Icelandic, but speak Gothic as well).
I have seen estimates as high as 2000 (well, one crackpot had a theory about there being isolated communities in the Alps and the Balkans and such that still spoke Gothic and his estimate was 1 million, but that's very crazy and there's no evidence to back it up), but nothing lower than 400.
Especially since it has a movement to pass it on to children I think it's a good idea to have a Wikipedia in Gothic.
Also I feel that as long as it isn't a conlang, it doesn't matter how many speakers there are as long as there are people interested in writing an encyclopedia.
Best, Mark/Jin Junshu
On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 10:18:09 +0000, Fredrik Adevåg gadrauhts@hotmail.com wrote:
I'd like to be responsible for the creation of a wikipediaversion in gothic.
Full name: gothic
Language code: got
Number of speakers: 0
Number of people which has knowledge about gothic: at least 400, probably much more.
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