On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 15:21:39 -0400, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
Uhh... what about Hebrew? Manchu? Manx? Cornish? Since when do languages not revive successfully by teaching them to children?
They revive successfully by teaching them to children as a daily-use language. Is Wikipedia related to that? I suppose it could be in some ways, but I can't seriously see people using the Gothic Wikipedia as a source of general encyclopedia-type information. If you want to know
There is a Rosetta Project which focuses on cataloguing texts in all the world's languages. Unfortunately, it has been developing very slowly and has had trouble generating a community around its efforts, because there is no direction to its content, beyond an effort to translate basic word lists into all languages. Wikipedia provides both a forum and a direction for building a corpus in a dying or marginal language.
This isn't to demean the rosetta project in any way; they already have content in thousands of languages, and a million dollar grant from the US government to continue their work. But I think one of Wikipedia's important side-effects is its potential to preserve (and store useful, even self-bootstrapping, content in) disappearing languages.