[Wikipedia-l] RE: Welcome to the "Wikipedia-l" mailing list

[Ron H]

Thanks for your thoughts, Mark. I'd like to respond to your post briefly.

>I agree on all points. I do not think it would ever grow very large,
but as I have noted in the past I don't think Wikipedia creation
should be limited by such factors.

That's certainly good to know, although I do not know how many of your 
fellow W-listers share this point of view.


>The difference is that Klingon had a huge debate, and it had people
who committed to contributing who apparently gave up because it was
too difficult (!), while most of the languages that lie inactive were
requested by non-fluent speakers at some time in the distant past and
were created without any debate.

Well, I have no wish to create a huge debate to create a Quenya wikipedia 
section. Either it will be allowed or it won't. However, if one is created, 
or a wikibooks section is provided, I don't intend to give up on such a 
project, and I might add that I believe Quenya-language scholars are quite a 
dedicated lot. Pages such as http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/birth.htm (a 
translation of big passages from the Bible into Quenya), etc can give you a 
fair idea that Quenya is workable. RL publications such as Vinyar Tengwar 
and Tyalie Tyelellieva, Quenya language periodical publications, have been 
around for decades. Fans were compiling dictionaries on Quenya ever since 
the series was published in the 1950's. So Quenya scholarship isn't some 
fly-by-night operation. And predates Klingon by some years.

>Klingon and Gothic are the only two controversial Wikipedias that were
actually created that so far haven't attracted many users. At least
one person has committed to me to add to the Gothic Wikipedia but I'm
not sure I entirely believe that. The Klingon Wikipedia is currently
suffering from the problems resulting from the fact that some people
think they should use Conscript registry codepoints for piqad, while
others think they should use the Roman alphabet.

Well, that's all Greek to me. Actually, it's Klingon to me. ;)


>However, I strongly urge you to think over your request carefully. Is
knowledge of Quenya grammar and vocabulary extensive enough that you
could translate a good, long article on a real-world modern subject?

Yes. See examples above, or check out 
http://www.forodrim.org/daeron/md_home.html (none of these are my sites, 
I'll add, but you can see the translations can be quite extensive... 
certainly as long as many encyclopedia articles).

>What would you do when you encoutered words or grammatical structures
that are not known from those writings of Tolkien which are currently
publicly available?

There is always a way around, Mark, and it's certainly not too 'difficult'. 
I've been writing in Quenya for years (in such publications as Tyalie 
Tyelellieva). The going can be slow, but articles in sciences such as 
Botany, Astronomy, etc, aren't all that difficult, because Tolkien's 
fictional elves had a love of these subjects, so there is absolutely plenty 
to work with in terms of the language.


>As there is no Ethnologue code, I propose we use the Linguist List
code 
(http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/forms/langs/GetListOfConstructedLgs.html),
QYA, thus art-qya as the language code.

I certainly don't object to your proposal.

>Of course, this is if and only if the Wikipedia is created.

Of course.


>As far as I know, there are more fluent speakers of Klingon than of Quenya.

Although the *media* reports the use of Klingon more frequently than Quenya, 
I've seen no data to back this up. A quick google search pulls up 133,000 
hits for Quenya, but only 14,000 hits for tlhIngan (the Klingon language). 
That's a considerable difference.

Again, thanks for your opinions and ideas, Mark.

Ron :)