[Foundation-l] STOP DOUBLE STANDARD!!! OR HYPOCRESY!!!

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 2:24 AM, mboverload <mboverloadlister at gmail.com> wrote:
> Someone needs to tell me WHY we should have a Wikipedia or Wikinews in these
> kinds of languages.
>
> Has no one heard of duplication of effort? Why put information in languages
> that are only spoken or read out of curiosity?
>
> I guess my opinion is that it would be an utterly pointless waste of time.
> No one will go to the Latin Wikipedia.  Why would they?  They already have a
> Wikipedia in their native tongue that is much better and much bigger.

There is a level of usefulness. All ancient languages which the
official status in some religion are known by more people than some
languages with small number of speakers. Speaking for the Slavic
languages, there are more persons who know Old Church Slavonic than
Lower Sorbian (just Belgrade University [without Theological Faculty
of Serbian Orthodox Church] produces 100-200 persons per year who are
able to read OCS and Lower Sorbian has ~14,000 of speakers). BTW,
there is no conlang which has such academic background such OCS, Old
Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Old Hebrew and similar languages have.

This puts those languages immediately behind English, other world
languages and regional lingua francas (such Swahili is) as a tool for
international communication.

And I have one real example for that. Mother of one my friend is from
Poland, she was born in late 1930s or so. She moved to Belgrade in,
let's say, mid-60s. While she didn't know Serbian well, she
communicated with people around her in Polish-Serbian morphology and
syntax and Latin lexicon.

So, ancient languages used for liturgical purposes (so, Latin, but not
Sumerian) are useful even in everyday communication in some cases.
Simply, they have strong academic (because, usually, they represent
the earliest form of some group of languages) and religious positions.
As such, they are known by many people; usually, all over the world.
Maybe LangCom should reconsider their status.