On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 02:08:38 +0000, Ron H aceron99@hotmail.com wrote:
I would like to request adding Quenya to the list of languages on Wikimedia. Quenya is the language of the elves in the works of Tolkien.
ObNitpicking: it is one such language. Sindarin is the other elvish language about which Tolkien wrote a significant amount. I suppose granting a wikipedia for one would make it rather difficult not to grant one for the other as well.
I don't see that the Tengwar fonts would be a big problem: writers could simply use hardcoded entities everywhere, which is ugly but which works for the Gothic wikipedia, at least. I have been told that, crazy as it seems, there are actually Unicode entities for this alphabet (though I haven't confirmed this).
Other fictional languages, such as Klingon, already exist on Wikipedia. I speak passing Quenya. I have already prepared several articles, including one on constellations, and would like to add them to a quenya-language wiki.
And we also have a Wikipedia in Rohirric. :)
Perhaps this goes without saying, but if a Quenya wikipedia were to exist, an article on constellations that mentions specific constellations would have to refer, by default anyway, to the real world. For example, Earendil must be described as a fictional star.
It seems to me to be a reasonable thing to insist that a language must have at one time been a native tongue of some human population in order for it to be granted a wikipedia. Otherwise we could be deluged with requests from enthusiastic 16-year-olds who have fashioned their own languages (I know, I was one once).
It's true that Klingon doesn't fit this criterion (though Esperanto does) and yet exists, but I don't think we need be bound by precedent, especially as the Klingon experiment hasn't been a particularly successful one.
Steve