[Wikipedia-l] Quenya Language response

Sun Feb 13 07:13:57 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*?

I'm not sure it would be allowed on the English Wikibooks.

> 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.

I don't believe there were any actual objections on the basis of the Tengwar.

> 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!

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I, unlike Andrew, don't believe that the "you can't create a new
Wikipedia because it takes your contributions from the Chinese
Wikipedia with its oh-so-measly 20k+ articles" type of argument is
valid.

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?
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?

> 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.

There was no objection. People were just kidding around with sarcasm
that it would be a bit funny to add a Quenya Wikipedia while at the
same time we deny a Cantonese one, which I must add is true - Quenya
is spoken by hundreds or perhaps thousands, and by nobody as a native
language or language of primary communication, whereas Cantonese is
spoken by millions of people as their native language, the language of
their home and family, etc. and is the third most-widely spoken
Sinitic variety after Mandarin and Wu.

> 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.

The thing is is that ISO codes are not something you propose for this.
ISO codes are preexisting, part of a standard for codes for languages.
Not all languages are represented, for example Aromanian
(roa-rup.wikipedia.org), Voro (proposed fiu-vor.wikipedia.org), and
formerly even Klingon.

I don't believe there is currently one allocated for Quenya, although
using the xxx-xxx nomenclature (general ISO code plus Ethnologue code)
seems feasible.

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.

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

 > 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.

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

Mark