Anthere wrote:

Merritt L. Perkins wrote:

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What languages? All languages! Do you mean that you

want to include

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Encyclopedia articles on all languages. There are so

many obscure

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languages that you cannot expect to include them all.

Yes, ideally, all languages

I read a great reduction of spoken languages was expected over the next decennies. If Wikipedia can help make some of them stay alive, so much the best.

In Canada a genocidal policy that forced more than a generation of first nations children into residential schools where they were forbidden to use their own language has put many of these languages in desparate situations. There may not be a critical mass of population for keeping some of these languages and cultures alive. We can provide space for a Kootenayan language Wikipedia, but what good is that if there is no-one around with the ability to write in that language? The elders may be the only ones with a functional knowlege of the language, but these elders are no different from the elders of other societies who are overwhelmed by anything having to do with computers.

PS: the English for "decennie" is "decade"

What languages should the Encyclopedia be translated

into? I think that

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you should choose languages that would have many

readers. High German,

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French and Spanish for example. There is a difference

between this French

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spoken in France and in Canada, in the Spanish spoken in Spain and in Mexico.

The Encyclopedia is not translated and will not be translated in other languages. Each language is free '''in''' its own creativity. Articles from one language can influence another language. But they are not copies.

I changed "of" to "in" in your comment, Anthere. "Of" would suggest that a language is somehow liberated from its own creativity.

Your message contains a very important subtlety. If I could translate this text into Cree the result would not be in Cree; it would be in English with Cree words. There exists a pervasively naïve and simplistic view about translations that it is just a matter of changing words that have a one to one correspondence. Some topics, notably technical ones, can survive that transition very well, but topics that are closely linked to culture fare rather badly.

Ec