Muke Tever wrote:
Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net wrote:
Dmcdevit wrote: (...)
Your notion that Klingon, the language of a fictional alien race on a popular American television show, has some kind of existence separate from its origins is absurd. It only needs to be rejected for its present: which is as a linguistically unimportant, functionally nonexistent, and educationally useless language to write a dictionary in.
I agree with the closing of this Wiktionary, and this argument says it all.
It is not an argument, it is rhetoric. And very weak, at that. It can be used with equal force by the other side, e.g. >> Our language is considered linguistically unimportant, functionally >> nonexistent, and educationally useless. It is thus all the more imperative >> that we produce a dictionary in it.
Prejudice like that against a natural language (which is very often expressed in the world) would, I hope, never stand here against the opening of a wiki. The only remaining part of the agreed-with argument is that it is a constructed language, and we have not been deleting wikis merely because they belong to constructed languages.
*Muke!
You are under the misimpression that I don't like Klingon *because* it is a constructed language. Nowhere have I said that. I have given actual reasons, including its lack of speakers, lack of literature, lack of significance, lack of educational use. On the other hand, if your argument *is* "Our language is considered linguistically unimportant, functionally nonexistent, and educationally useless. It is thus all the more imperative that we produce a dictionary in it" that's not a problem. The problem would be using that argument to create an admittedly "educationally useless" dictionary as a WMF project rather than on an external site. Inclusion guidelines are not prejudice; if you are against any vetting of supposed languages at all, I think you are fighting a losing battle. Wiktionary is not for promotion of your pet project, so this is beginning to sound rather like the sort of argument I hear when I delete some kid's protologism on Wiktionary, of some high school band on Wikipedia ("The world doesn't know about it/us yet; that's why we need an article!"). In fact, it *is* important that our work support educational purposes, and it's not unreasonable to demand that.
Dominic