"Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com schrieb:
My general feeling is that unless there's some very good reason not to have a particular language, we should have it. Some good reasons that I can think of: (1) the language is a joke or vanity project (2) the language is just a slight change of dialect from some other language.
For example, it would be bad to have a Klingon Wikipedia, I think. It would be bad to have separate sites for British and American English.
And finally, I think that it's very very convenient for us to avoid arguments about this by reference to ISO standards. We could, in some cases, make exceptions, but we should be cautious about doing so.
I have before proposed to go with ISO 639-2. Main rule for ISO 639-2 is that there should be 50 different documents divided over at most 50 places. I would not put it as a hard rule, but I'd say that for languages outside ISO 639-2, the onus is with the person wanting to add it to give reasons, while for languages within, the onus is with those who want to refrain from adding it.
Andre Engels
Andre Engels wrote:
"Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com schrieb:
My general feeling is that unless there's some very good reason not to have a particular language, we should have it. Some good reasons that I can think of: (1) the language is a joke or vanity project (2) the language is just a slight change of dialect from some other language.
For example, it would be bad to have a Klingon Wikipedia, I think. It would be bad to have separate sites for British and American English.
And finally, I think that it's very very convenient for us to avoid arguments about this by reference to ISO standards. We could, in some cases, make exceptions, but we should be cautious about doing so.
I have before proposed to go with ISO 639-2. Main rule for ISO 639-2 is that there should be 50 different documents divided over at most 50 places. I would not put it as a hard rule, but I'd say that for languages outside ISO 639-2, the onus is with the person wanting to add it to give reasons, while for languages within, the onus is with those who want to refrain from adding it.
The only problem with such a rule is that it's so sensible. That makes convincing people more difficult. :-)
I would even recognize SIL codes as a basis for accepting a language. On the other hand there are some languages that are officially recognized despite some very week credentials (eg. Bosnian or Moldovan)
http://www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/conlang.html shows how far things can go. If we really get bored we can always use machine translation into the "language of electric mice" at http://pikachize.eye-of-newt.com/
Ec
Andre Engels wrote:
I have before proposed to go with ISO 639-2. Main rule for ISO 639-2 is that there should be 50 different documents divided over at most 50 places. I would not put it as a hard rule, but I'd say that for languages outside ISO 639-2, the onus is with the person wanting to add it to give reasons, while for languages within, the onus is with those who want to refrain from adding it.
Klingon is everybody's favorite example of "we shouldn't have this", but it's got an ISO 639-2 code: tlh, officially added earlier this year.
http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/codechanges.html
Aside from the "it would be embarrassing" factor which seems to be the main driver in anti-Klingon sentiment, the copyright status of Klingon-language materials is somewhat unclear, as Paramount apparently claims them as derivative works. (IANAL! Feist v. Rural may not apply as creating a language is pretty clearly a creative work, and the Lojban/Loglan case doesn't apply since that was over the trademark to the name 'loglan' -- the lojban folks preemptively changed the entire vocabulary to avoid potential copyright claims.)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Kaixo!
On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 05:30:03PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
Klingon is everybody's favorite example of "we shouldn't have this", but it's got an ISO 639-2 code: tlh, officially added earlier this year.
Klingon does have quite a big amount of written stuff already.
However, wikipedia is an enciclopedia, so the question is not whether the language can be written, but whether people would actually write enough *encyclopedic content*.
A possibility would be to require showing some real activity, eg requiring having some 200 or 400 articles before fully accepting a conlang.
Aside from the "it would be embarrassing" factor which seems to be the main driver in anti-Klingon sentiment, the copyright status of
I don't see anything "embarassing" with klingon; but the fact is people that use klingon do it for fun, not to communicate knowledge, much less to build a repository of human knowledge like an encyclopedia.
Klingon does have quite a big amount of written stuff already.
However, wikipedia is an enciclopedia, so the question is not whether the language can be written, but whether people would actually write enough *encyclopedic content*.
A possibility would be to require showing some real activity, eg requiring having some 200 or 400 articles before fully accepting a conlang.
And where would they write all that? And why don’t we pose such a criterium against all those tiny languages too (not being anti-languages, here, I hope you see my sarcasm)
I don't see anything "embarassing" with klingon; but the fact is people that use klingon do it for fun, not to communicate knowledge, much less to build a repository of human knowledge like an encyclopedia.
But some of them want to, that’s exactly why they are or have been asking for a wikispace here. (duh!)
PS: it seems the mail server is crapping itself yet again and is sending out months old stuff now.
Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:
Klingon does have quite a big amount of written stuff already.
However, wikipedia is an enciclopedia, so the question is not whether the language can be written, but whether people would actually write enough *encyclopedic content*.
A possibility would be to require showing some real activity, eg requiring having some 200 or 400 articles before fully accepting a conlang.
And where would they write all that? And why don’t we pose such a criterium against all those tiny languages too (not being anti-languages, here, I hope you see my sarcasm)
I don't see anything "embarassing" with klingon; but the fact is people that use klingon do it for fun, not to communicate knowledge, much less to build a repository of human knowledge like an encyclopedia.
But some of them want to, that’s exactly why they are or have been asking for a wikispace here. (duh!)
My personal attitude to a Klingon language encyclopedia is a benign "Whatever..." I don't worry about it enough to care about how many articles they have. It does seem sometimes that those who object to that project best express the Klingon characteristics in their own personalities.
The argument is often expressed about this, and about a number of other issues, that dealing with these would bring embarassment on Wikipedia. Well they might inspire the occasional giggle, but that's still far removed from embarassment.
Innovators don't worry about embarassment. If they did nothing would ever move forward.
Ec
Lainaus Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net:
Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:
Klingon does have quite a big amount of written stuff already.
...snip...
I don't see anything "embarassing" with klingon; but the fact is people that use klingon do it for fun, not to communicate knowledge, much less to build a repository of human knowledge like an encyclopedia.
But some of them want to, thats exactly why they are or have been asking for a wikispace here. (duh!)
My personal attitude to a Klingon language encyclopedia is a benign "Whatever..." I don't worry about it enough to care about how many articles they have. It does seem sometimes that those who object to that project best express the Klingon characteristics in their own personalities.
The argument is often expressed about this, and about a number of other issues, that dealing with these would bring embarassment on Wikipedia. Well they might inspire the occasional giggle, but that's still far removed from embarassment.
Innovators don't worry about embarassment. If they did nothing would ever move forward.
Ec
Very well put. I would add that as Wikipedia gains visibility, we should worry about our image less, and not more. We will *define* the correct way of dealing with these and other issues.
We _will_ become the 900 pound gorilla of the net. We can have a language project for a nascent or dying language! We decide what languages we have! Not any public expectation!
-- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen aka. Cimon Avaro
Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:
PS: it seems the mail server is crapping itself yet again and is sending out months old stuff now.
Nope. The mailing list adminstrators haven't been keeping up with this list; I went through and released the (non-spam) messages that have been held for moderation over the last two months.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber wrote:
Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:
PS: it seems the mail server is crapping itself yet again and is sending out months old stuff now.
Nope. The mailing list adminstrators haven't been keeping up with this list; I went through and released the (non-spam) messages that have been held for moderation over the last two months.
Oh, Thanks for clarification.
Regarding Klingon, I have no objections to it.
I guess when it comes right down to it what I mainly want is that we have some external objective way to determine the difference between a language and a vanity project. I don't particularly care what official list we use.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales <jwales@...> writes:
Regarding Klingon, I have no objections to it.
I guess when it comes right down to it what I mainly want is that we have some external objective way to determine the difference between a language and a vanity project. I don't particularly care what official list we use.
Would the ISO 639 list be sufficiently objective? I imagine they don't add just anybody's pet conlang to their list.
Cheers, Philip
A quick google search seems to imply that "Modern Egyptian" is not exactly a conlang. Rather, it seems to be a transliteration of Coptic to the latin alphabet. This is all based on the only relevant google hit for "modern egyptian language", so "Prince of Egypt" should feel free to enlighten us if this is incorrect. The site is:
http://www.geocities.com/remenkimi/
Specifically:
http://www.geocities.com/remenkimi/KTS.html
According to this site, transliterations of Coptic into Arabic have been performed for about 250 years, and transliterations into the latin alphabet have gaining in popularity over the last 50. The "Modified Isaac's Transliteration", or MIT, was referred to as "Modern Egyptian" in the seminal book on the subject, published in 1999. This was intended to allow people to easily type Coptic with our western computer keyboards and typewriters, and to make learning easier.
Information on the cultural value of Coptic is at:
Tim Starling wrote:
A quick google search seems to imply that "Modern Egyptian" is not exactly a conlang. Rather, it seems to be a transliteration of Coptic to the latin alphabet. This is all based on the only relevant google hit for "modern egyptian language", so "Prince of Egypt" should feel free to enlighten us if this is incorrect.
Coptic has a perfectly good ISO 639 language code, 'cop', and is in no way at all "a new conlang".
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 06:50:56PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
A quick google search seems to imply that "Modern Egyptian" is not exactly a conlang. Rather, it seems to be a transliteration of Coptic to the latin alphabet. This is all based on the only relevant google hit for "modern egyptian language", so "Prince of Egypt" should feel free to enlighten us if this is incorrect.
Coptic has a perfectly good ISO 639 language code, 'cop', and is in no way at all "a new conlang".
What I think it's funny is that Prince still keeps it secret what kind of language he means. He could write a wikipedia article about it, or point us to one. Name an official ISO or whatever (official, registered) code. I believe that'd be a pretty obvious way to help us to decide.
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