[Foundation-l] Ancient Greek reconstructed an analysis of a proposal for a new Wikipedia

[Ziko van Dijk]

Dear GerardM,
Thank you for your explanations; it is sometimes difficult to me following
the discussions, a full history of the subject would be useful to me.
So, if I understand correctly, if nowadays someone would propose WPs in
Esperanto or Latin or Anglo-Saxon, they would be rejected, because they are
"constructed" (interlinguistics say: planned) languages or reconstructed.
And they do not have native speakers, or just a small percentage of them.
When judging the vitality of a language, one can make a list of criteria as
done by Detlev Blanke: Internationale Plansprachen, Bln. 1985 (I don't
remember by heart the exact list):
- publications
- conventions
- codification by dictionaries, grammars
- sociological or political diversification of the language community
- family language
According to that, Blanke divides into:
- Planned languages: a full language, in fact only Esperanto
- Semi-Planned languages (Semiplansprachen): only some achievements, today
only Interlingua and Ido, in history also Volapük and Occidental-Interlingue
- Projects of planned languages: a very faint existence if at all: all the
others (more than 1000 projects), including Novial, Lojban

Following Heinz Kloss (Die Entwicklung neuerer germanischer Kultursprachen,
1978), a small language does not cover all fields of a big language. It will
make it possible to speak on a level of low education about 1) matters close
to the language community (language and culture, history of the region,
maybe a craft common in the region), 2) cultural subjects of a larger range,
like general politics, philosophy, 3) subjects of science and technology.
On a level of higher education the small language works only on the subjects
1) and 2).
On a scientific level the small language works only on subject 1).

>From this one could draw conclusions whether to accept a language edition of
Wikipedia, like: a planned language should be a Semiplansprache at least; an
ethnic language should cover the subjects as described by Kloss.
One criterion useful especially with regard to Wikipedia might be: Is there
a vocabulary about computer and internet matters? Would it be a major
difficulty to the language community to translate the MediaWiki? This
criterion would cause no problem to Latin and certainly not Esperanto, but
would ban very recent projects of planned languages and regional idioms who
merely are dialects or local varieties of the standard language.

Ziko







>    - The language must have an ISO-639-3 code
>    - We need full WMF localisation from the start
>    - The language must be sufficiently expressive for writing a modern
>    encyclopaedia
>    - The Incubator project must have sufficiently large articles that
>    demonstrate both the language and its ability to write about a wide
> range of
>    topics
>    - A sufficiently large group of editors must be part of the Incubator
>    project
>
> Thanks,
>       GerardM
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-- 
Ziko van Dijk
Roomberg 30
NL-7064 BN Silvolde