Anthere wrote:
Merritt L. Perkins wrote:
What languages? All languages! Do you mean that
you
want to include
Encyclopedia articles on all languages. There are
so
many obscure
languages that you cannot expect to include them
all.
Yes, ideally, all languages
I read a great reduction of spoken languages was
expected over the next decennies.
If Wikipedia can help make some of them stay alive, so
much the best.
In Canada a genocidal policy that forced more than a generation of first
nations children into residential schools where they were forbidden to
use their own language has put many of these languages in desparate
situations. There may not be a critical mass of population for keeping
some of these languages and cultures alive. We can provide space for a
Kootenayan language Wikipedia, but what good is that if there is no-one
around with the ability to write in that language? The elders may be
the only ones with a functional knowlege of the language, but these
elders are no different from the elders of other societies who are
overwhelmed by anything having to do with computers.
PS: the English for "decennie" is "decade"
What languages should the Encyclopedia be translated
into? I think that
you should choose languages that would have many
readers. High German,
French and Spanish for example. There is a
difference
between this French
spoken in France and in Canada, in the Spanish
spoken in Spain and in Mexico.
The Encyclopedia is not translated and will not be
translated in other languages. Each language is free
'''in''' its own creativity. Articles from one language can
influence another language. But they are not copies.
I changed "of" to "in" in your comment, Anthere.
"Of" would suggest
that a language is somehow liberated from its own creativity.
Your message contains a very important subtlety. If I could translate
this text into Cree the result would not be in Cree; it would be in
English with Cree words. There exists a pervasively naïve and
simplistic view about translations that it is just a matter of changing
words that have a one to one correspondence. Some topics, notably
technical ones, can survive that transition very well, but topics that
are closely linked to culture fare rather badly.
Ec