Talk:Constructed language/Archive 1

message: I've never heard this term. Who is it colloquial amongst?
 Mr. Jones 12:35, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Most creators of conlang. Google for it. Jor 20:49, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is 'conlang' Colloquial? 

message: Ïanà is now listed on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion Kevyn 22:31, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Now on VfD

message: A restructuring proposal and a question:
*Now, that Artificial language is only a redirect to Constructed language, it seems to me the major reason for a separate Planned language has gone. Also as the three subcategories Logical language, Auxiliary language, and Artistic language got separate articles, I'd suggest moving the respective lists in these articles, with the positive side effect, that Constructed language would look less like a list of lists. 
**Sounds good to me. -- pne
*Also, what's got into the list (and what's got an own article and what's got deleted) looks rather arbitrary to mee. Another idea would be, to limit all references in this 4 or 5 articles to major Constructed language, for whatever value of major seems fitting. Inclusion in ISO 639 would be a primary candidate.
**I'd tend to disagree, partly because it's a bit more difficult to determine major with non-auxlang conlangs. -- pne
*All other references can go into new article Constructed language (minor), which explains the phenomenon of large numbers of these and can give short specific information for some of them, which didn't get their own article.
*BTW, what are the conlangs based on Slavic and Celtic? I didn't find anything.
**Slovio is a pan-Slavic auxlang. I don't know of any conlangs based on Celtic roots and grammar, though there are some Romlangs which use Celtic sound changes and phonology (e.g. Brithenig). -- pne 13:18, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Planned/Constructed/Artificial Languages 

message: This page contains a list with detailed explanations of several constructed languages, not yet on the Wikipedia article page:
http://www.rickharrison.com/language/index.html
:So, how do we decide which "amateur" languages belong in the article?  There are tons out there that have no speakers and aren't used in any published works.  They also tend to come and go. --Theodore Kloba 20:17, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
::The link above only covers IALs. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but you are right: there are tons out artistic languages out there which deserve mentioning as well. Langmaker.com is an excellent source of information, covering about 1200 or so conlangs, but it does not give much info about the significance of a language (although it is able to produce listings according to vocabulary size, year of creation, language type etc.). 
::We can safely agree that the fact that certain conlangs that were published in books, movies or computer games is enough for them to deserve a Wiki entry. As far as other conlangs (published on the Internet) are concerned: that depends from case to case. There are a number of insiders who are qualified to judge that. I consider myself one of those, and I know that there are a few others around here too. IJzeren Jan 09:37, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  List of additional languages 

message: It seems like there is some overlap with the Artistic language article, maybe some of it should be removed from here. --Theodore Kloba 16:22, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)
:Yeah, you're right. The problem, I think, was that both pages contained a list of examples of the same thing. I have now merged both lists and placed it under Artistic language. I also moved the examples of international auxiliary languages and logical languages to the pages in question. That should do the trick. IJzeren Jan 07:29, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  What stays here, what goes on [[Artistic language]]? 

message: "...the term language planning refers to prescriptive measures taken regarding a natural language (in this regard, even "natural languages" may be submitted to a certain amount of artificiality, and in the case of regularized grammars, the line is difficult to draw)."
These lines show again the misguiding effect of terms like "natural language" and "artificial language". Of course, being unthinkable without human intellect, to a certain degree every human language can be called "artificial"... as well as "natural" -  to a certain degree also spontaneity plays a part in its development. For the sake of scientific clarity "human language" should be used instead. Human languages are all languages applied for human communication, both "ethnic languages" and "planned languages". -- Titbit Titbit 13:34, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: so you suggest "ethnic language" replace "natural language"? that would be idiosyncratic. I do think "natural language" is a meaningful term, but it presupposes a sort of a 'language instinct', of course. natural languages would be languages that are not regularized by conscious planning of a central authority. There are ambiguous cases of course, as in any terminology. dab (ᛏ) 13:57, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

text: Wikipedia is to register the way terms are used, not set the example in usage.  If terms are used to mean different things (as "natural language", "artificial language", "ethnic language", and "human language" are) then probably Wikipedia should (in the appropriate articles; not necessarily here) discuss the ways those terms are used.  It should also note when the same phenomenon is described by a variety of terms and there is no consensus yet about what terms are most appropriate.  The article can stand some improvement in this respect, but probably no drastic changes are called for.  For instance, maybe it should note that some people use the term "natural languages" in a way that includes all the languages that evolved naturally in speaker communities and also a subset of constructed languages, i.e. those which have proven to be learnable and speakable.  It should also note that this is a minority usage and "natural language" is usually in contrast to "artificial language" or "constructed language". --Jim Henry | Talk 17:23, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: "Natural language" - an inappropriate term

message: We're trying to write up a guideline with community concensus about what conlangs should and what conlangs shouldn't be in Wikipedia.  Please go to Wikipedia:Conlangs and drop in your 2c!  Almafeta 17:04, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:Conlangs]]

message: After the recent massive attack against a fair number of constructed languages, I started digging in the archives and noticed that VFDs against conlangs happen much more frequently than I thought. Usually they lead to the deletion of the article in question. In most cases this deletion is justified, but I have seen several examples of valuable conlang-related articles that were only deleted because no one knowledgeable was there to defend them. Personally I would have if I had known. But frankly, I don't have the time to skim through the Votes for Deletion pages on a daily base, and putting all conlang-related stuff on my watchlist for just this reason. I can imagine that I'm not the only one...
Anyway, progress is being made. Go have a look at Wikipedia:Conlangs, where a policy is being discussed about establishing objective notability criteria for conlangs. If everything goes alright, it will be voted upon by the end of August. In the meantime, all input is welcome. Once we have defined those criteria, it will be a little less easy for a person to issue a VFD again a conlang just because he doesn't like conlangs.
Secondly, for the reasons I mentioned above I think it would be useful if all conlang-related VFDs would be listed here. That way, anybody who is interested in the field can simply see in his watchlist that something is going on. That is not a way to whip up support for conlangs, only to gather some more people who are interested and knowledgeable in the field, whose input could be valuable.
* At present: five VFDs against conlangs are still open: Breathanach, Brithenig, Fyksland (incl. Fyksian), Nalona, and Verdurian.
* Three conlang VFDs were recently concluded and their articles subsequently deleted: Aingeljã, DiLingo, and Lango. 
* An undelete request has been issued for Aingeljã and DiLingo, here.
* One conlang survived a VFD that belonged to the same series: Wenedyk.
If I have left out something, please do correct.
--IJzeren Jan 07:37, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Notability and deletion

message: * The following VFDs are still open: Nalona.
* The following VFDs were recently concluded resulting in delete: Aingeljã, DiLingo, Breathanach, Lango, Fyksland (incl. Fyksian).
* An undelete request has been issued for Aingeljã and DiLingo, and also for Breathanach.
* The following VFDs were recently concluded resulting in keep: Wenedyk, Brithenig, Verdurian.
I seriously consider nominating Breathanach for undeletion, too. The result of the vote was 11D, 9K - not exactly what one would consider "rough consensus", even if one discounts the votes of those with very few edits. --IJzeren Jan 13:20, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Has already been done by Pete.
After the deletion of Breathanach I feared that a similar thing might happen to Fyksland, so I temporarily stored it here (including the Talk page, but unfortunately not including the history). And yes, fifteen minutes later the page was gone. --IJzeren Jan 14:14, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

text: ok, but can you summarize the proposed criteria of notability? It seems sensible not to allow any old constructed language (possibly constructed in an afternoon, and known to five people?) on Wikipedia. I see this as comparable to bands. Which bands deserve articles? Obviously not your random highschool band. Possibly if they have produced a record available from stores? I don't know, but there certainly are borderline cases. dab (ᛏ) 14:11, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Of course, I agree that not every conlang is notable. Far from that, and I wouldn't even dare to propose that! Anyway, the subject is currently under discussion on Wikipedia:Conlangs. --IJzeren Jan 14:14, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  VfD update 

message: It looks like http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Conlang is moribund.  I just discovered it recently and made a few edits before realizing I was the first person to work on it in months.  Does anyone else want to work on it as well? --Jim Henry | Talk 22:01, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm one of the previous authors of the conlang wikibook and I'm willing to help finish it off. See my comments there. -- Ingolemo 19:11, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wikibooks: Conlang 

message: Voting has started on the conlang notability/verifiablity criteria at Wikipedia:Conlangs/Votes. --Jim Henry | Talk 15:14, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Voting on conlang policy starts 

message: I've started articles on Lingua Ignota, Teonaht and Kélen. Would anyone like to expand them?
Pete Bleackley --132.185.132.12 09:59, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Expand my contributions 

message: I'd like your attention for three problematic articles:
*The List of angels in Enochian: a very huge list. Quite a lot of entries are links, and under those links are redirects to back the List of angels in Enochian. If you ask me, all those links should go, and the redirects be deleted. Furthermore, I wonder if a merge with Enochian wouldn't be warranted anyway.
*Two articles, Romanica and Romanica language, have literally the same content, although their histories are quite different. One of them should be turned into a redirect (preferably the latter). See also Talk:Romanica.
*On the page Esperanto and Interlingua compared, an anynomous user has consequently added Lingua Franca Nova to the comparison. More on Talk:Esperanto and Interlingua compared.
--IJzeren Jan 08:33, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Three troublespots 

message: To all conlang experts: would you please take a look at Kotava? To be honest, I'm having serious doubts regarding the notability of this language, but in this case I'm hesitant to issue an AFD against it. Because the article clearly has an advertising character, I've added a POV tag (see Talk page), but I'm not sure what would be better: rewrite and NPOVify it or just delete. --IJzeren Jan 09:51, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Saying that the article has an advertising character is an understatement; it's virtually an ad. :) IMHO after a very swift assessment, it seems well done in principle, though it only differs from a myriad other auxiliary languages by the fact that its website has a nice layout and that it seems to have more than one developer (or at least more than one person understands the language). It comes much, much closer to universal ease of use than the horrible mess that is Esperanto (I can be POV in talk space, no?) but it is not as good as it claims to be (the phonology is still alien and complex for the average speaker of, say, Japanese) and repeats some naive solutions to some unsolvable problems like semantic ambiguity. I wouldn't vote for deletion right now. From the position of "conlang expert" that I've shamelessly appointed myself to, I offer the ones who should decide this one thing to consider: I think I can produce a similar language in a about a week, and I've met many people who could do (and have done) the same just for fun. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 10:52, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for your comments. That last thing is undoubtedly true. I can't say I'm very impressed with the language itself, although the presentation on the web is excellent. But this is mostly about notability. I'm having some serious doubts regarding that, although admittedly there is some activitity around the language. That was also the source of my doubts. Plus the fact that within a span of one or two days, Kotava made its entrance into the French and English wikipedia with an article (apparently written by the same person) and into the lists of conlangs of numerous other wikipedias (including the Dutch one, in which I hold myself somewhat responsible for the conlang section). It looks pretty much like a coordinated action to get attention for Kotava, and that's of course not what wikipedia is for. --IJzeren Jan 06:22, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

text: I think we should AfD it.  If there are no English users of it who can at least translate the article into grammatical English, it doesn't belong on the English Wikipedia.  (An auxlang only spoken by French people reminds me of the pre-EU period when the Franc was the only currency eligible to be pegged to the Euro, resulting in it being called "a unified currency for France".  Maybe Kotava is a unified language for France?) DenisMoskowitz 14:00, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Hehe. Well, see above for the reason why I'm hesitant in this case. Of course, go ahead and AfD it, but I suppose you already know the outcome in advance. That's why I wanted to bring it in here first. BTW, there is also a version in the Spanish wiki (apparently a translation of the same text), which is already up for deletion. --IJzeren Jan 06:22, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kotava