[Wikipedia-l] About creating a new language on Wikipedia

[Delirium]

Berto 'd Sera wrote:
> The only requests I am receiving are about totally clearing from english
> other UIs. You might be surprised, but the highest pressure comes from young
> (15-20 y.o.) bilingual users, who are native or almost native in english,
> too. It has nothing to do with liking english or not, it's about using a
> language for what it's meant to do: to deliver a clear message.
>
> The choice of words really depends on what's current in your language. In
> our case even if the dominant culture has long become industrial and it
> would take you ages to find a horse anywhere, there still are lots of
> metaphores originating from the farmers' life. Sometimes their roots are
> incredibly old.
>   

This seems somewhat different than advertised.  Localizing an interface 
to a language means making it be *in that language*.  Coining new terms 
to use in the interface, even if based on other words in the language, 
does not make the interface in that language.  Rather, it makes it in a 
new language (or dialect, at least), invented at Wikipedia.

"Purified" languages, in which loanwords are purged and replaced with 
neologisms based on "native" roots, are often created, and sometimes 
they succeed and sometimes they fail.  See [[en:Katharevousa]] for an 
example of a purified Greek that eventually more or less failed.  
Regardless of the merits of such a project, I don't think it appropriate 
for *us* to engage in such language-invention.

-Mark