Tony Sidaway wrote:
Elves, Klingons, etc, do not exist. They never did exist. There is no such thing as elvish culture; Tolkien made it all up. I believe the only recorded attempt to raise a child bilingual in Klingon was terminated by the child at the age of five; I'm unaware of any attempts to raise children bilingual in Quenya, Sindarin, Orcish or any other fictional Middle Earth language, but would expect that they'd have a similar outcome. I don't have any objection in principle to groups producing their own encyclopedias in any language, but when it comes to spending Wikipedia Foundation money I hope it will be used to cover the languages of living humans in preference to languages of interest only to fans, hobbyists and linguists.
Apparently, this particular email didn't get deleted when I was done with it. As such, it sat in my inbox, already read and forgotten for a few days. Sifting through email, I found it again, and suddenly I'm struck by a thought:
If we were going to create a(nother) Middle Earth language Wikipedia, it wouldn't be Quenya that I'd want. I'd want Orcish, personally.
Of course, I realize how ludicrous that is. There isn't even a recorded Orcish language, as far as I'm aware. As such, I must in good conscience oppose the idea of creating a bunch of Middle Earth language Wikipedias. Such is life.
Orcish would just be too cool, though. . . .
-- Chad