[Foundation-l] Fwd: Tokipona

[Andre Engels]

2008/1/21, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com>:
> On Jan 21, 2008 12:41 PM, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I would put 2) even stricter: We should only count secondary-speakers
> > for which the language can reasonably be expected to have a Wikipedia
> > of similar or larger size than their first language. Someone with
> > English as their first language would not have much use of the
> > Esperanto Wikipedia, since they can get all and more on the English
> > Wikipedia.
>
> I tend to disagree with this. The goal of a conlang like Esperanto is
> that people with different natural languages (English, Spanish,
> Chinese, etc) can all communicate on common ground. This way, you can
> avoid the old arguments "I'm not going to learn your language, you
> need to learn mine", and replace it with "We all need to learn this
> neutral language where we will all be on equal footing".
>
> Whether this approach is beneficial is beyond me.
>
> A better way to expand that point is to ask whether more information
> could be shared by using the conlang or the ancient language then
> could happen otherwise. En.wikipedia is very large, but does that
> benefit people who don't speak english? In other words, does the
> conlang or ancient language represent a path of communication that
> would not exist otherwise? Are there people in this world who would be
> worse off if we didn't host that language project? Are there people in
> this would who would receive significant benefit if we did?

If that's your point of view, I don't see why you disagree with mine.
It seems to me that I'm looking at it the same way. What I'm saying is
that people whose first language is English, or some other language
that has a Wikipedia considerably larger than Esperanto, does not
really benefit from having an Esperanto Wikipedia, even if they have
Esperanto as their second language. On the other hand, someone whose
first language Wikipedia is comparable in size or smaller than the
Esperanto one does benefit from having an Esperanto Wikipedia if that
is their second language, because it significantly increases the
amount of information they can find on Wikipedia in one of their
favorite languages, even if it's not the first.

-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels