[Wikipedia-l] Quenya Language response

Sun Feb 13 06:40:48 UTC 2005

I decided to wait a few days before responding to any of the threads. I've 
read all your comments, and would like to briefly respond.

1. I am not opposed to Quenya articles in Wikibooks, but how does one even 
go about *that*?

2. The Tengwar do not need to be used: Tengwar and Quenya are independent of 
one another-- Tengwar is simply the type of script, and is not part of the 
language itself. So any objections to Quenya based on problems associated 
with Tengwar are easily solved by using the Roman alphabet, as many Quenya 
speakers already do.

3. There seem to be two (very opposite!) objections to Quenya: one that it 
would "never grow large", and the other that it would "take up too much 
valuable resource space". These two points of view seem quite contrary to 
me. Either it would take up too much space, or it wouldn't ever take up 
"enough" space. I don't see Quenya language on wikipedia growing huge. 
However, I think there is always too much focus on Wikipedia for largesse 
"We're currently working on 455,000 articles!". An encyclopedia doesn't have 
to have a million articles to *be* an encyclopedia!

4. Klingon hasn't been a huge success, hmm? But can't that be said of many 
Wikipedia language articles? Aren't there dozens of languages with, say, 
just one article? And since I (and other Quenya contributors; there's 
interest on the 'request for languages' page)  don't speak these languages 
anyway, it's not as if we're holding back these languages because we'd be 
working on Quenya ones. What I mean is, I don't know Alsatian, so I'm not 
ever going to be contributing Alsatian-language articles.

5. There is one really strange objection to Quenya language on Wikipedia 
that I *must* address. All the rest of the objections at least made *sense* 
to me, even if I don't hold that point of view. But my puzzlement comes from 
this idea that a Quenya language wiki is somehow an "insult" to another 
language. Without entangling myself in political debates concerning 
Cantonese, if any language was "insulted" because a fictional language made 
it into Wikipedia before a real-world language, I'd expect it was Klingon, 
not Quenya, which caused such "insult". I think the whole idea is fairly 
strange anyway... If Cantonese is sufficiently different than Mandarin, 
perhaps there should be a wikipedia for it, but that has nothing to do with 
my proposal for Quenya.

6. Someone asked about the abbreviation. My proposed ISO thingy would be qy 
, but I wouldn't object to a change on that, and didn't include one with my 
first post to the list because I think that's the simplest part of the whole 
deal, and the only part that might *not* meet with objection.

7. There is a very large subset of Quenya-speakers amongst Tolkien fans. A 
Quenya language project is not doomed to failure, and in the past two weeks 
there has been seeming interest even on the somewhat obscure 'request for 
languages' page. I can almost guarantee that a Quenya language project would 
quickly eclipse any similar Klingon project.

Response (positive or negative) is appreciated.

And, please, someone, tell me more about the Wikibooks thing. I've been a 
contributer for 2 years (mostly anon.), but I know nothing about Wikibooks.

Ron/firsfron on Wikipedia