--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I obviously speak only for myself here, not Jimbo, but IMO promoting minority languages is separate from the main goal. The goal of creating an *encyclopedia* is to get information to people, in a language-neutral way. The only importance of any language in that context is that the encyclopedia needs to be available in enough languages so that everyone, or at least as many people as possible, can access information in a language they feel comfortable using---only creating an English encyclopedia, for example, would leave out in the cold people who don't understand English well enough to make good use of it.
Let�s not forget that language is not only a means by which information is presented, it is also part of the human experience we are documenting. One of the main reasons why many schools require students to learn a second language is to expose students to a different culture and way of codifying thought (this contrast is often very instructive in showing the student how their own language works).
Thus helping to preserve an endangered language by hosting an encyclopedia in it also directly furthers our goal. This would not include non-famous conlangs since those are largely original research.
-- mav
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Daniel Mayer wrote:
Let’s not forget that language is not only a means by which information is presented, it is also part of the human experience we are documenting. One of the main reasons why many schools require students to learn a second language is to expose students to a different culture and way of codifying thought (this contrast is often very instructive in showing the student how their own language works).
Thus helping to preserve an endangered language by hosting an encyclopedia in it also directly furthers our goal. This would not include non-famous conlangs since those are largely original research.
This would be an argument for having good articles like [[en:Hopi language]] (and the equivalents in de:, ja:, zh:, fr:, etc.) -- information about languages written in a language that people can read. Merely preserving a language that nobody reads by writing an encyclopedia that nobody reads in it isn't really furthing the goal of disseminating information to people.
-Mark
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