[Wikipedia-l] Languages: crossing a border?

[Andre Engels]

"Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de> schrieb:

> Yes, I agree that conlangs are the more serious problem than natural  
> languages. However, I don't think that there should be no criteria at all  
> for natural languages. The three criteria that Andre proposed - ISO 639-2,  
> more than 50 archived documents, or more than 10,000 speakers - seem  
> reasonable, and would probably kick out most obscure conlangs, while  
> leaving in legitimate spoken tongues, and dead languages too, if there's a  
> written record of them (not that I care at all about those, but in the  
> interest of wikipeace ..).

Actually, I think these might be too inclusive when looking at dead
languages. While I am all for the Latin Wikipedia, and would not mind
a Sanskrit one, Hittite or Sumerian are another matter. Many dead
languages are only in passive use, and to exclude those, I would
like to restrict ourselves to those languages in which (new) documents
have been written within the last 50 years or so.

Andre Engels