Wikipedia talk:Conlangs

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] How to present a conlang on Wikipedia

The main pages of this project discuss how to decide which conlangs are worthy to be mentioned in Wikipedia. After the vote on rules, I am certain there will be some conlangs left, so it is time to think about how to present the survivors. A conlang, no matter how complete, isn't a natural language, so it ought to be presented differently, especially as conlangs as part of fictional works often are very incomplete (to the degree that guessing on grammar and pronuniciation becomes a goal in itself, see Sindarin as compared to Quenya).

I suggest a template/infobox with the following fields (order to be debated later, this is just a listing):

• Author, authors or whatever committee made the language
• Internal name for the language, aka. what potential users would call it
• External names of the language, if different from internal. With external I mean the non-in-conlang name for the language, like "English" is the English name for English, but in French English is Anglais. At least the external name relevant to the wikipedia the article is on should be here
• Type of language, or purpose. This is the spot for "art", "aux", "enge", "log" etc., with links to definitions
• How complete the known information about the language is.
  • Is it just mentioned (most languages in fantasy-books)?
  • A list of known words (Lapine)?
  • A discussion about it's abstract structure (Marain, but people sure speculate as to how it looks and sounds)?
  • A full grammar with dictionary (Klingon, not much of a corpus in the prime source, the Klingon Dictionary)?
  • A full grammar with dictionary and corpus (Teonaht, see the web-pages)?
  • etc.
• If relevant, its claims, like "This is claimed to be a complete language for international communication even if it only has 120 words" (Toki Pona)
• If it is part of a larger work, like a family of languages or a world, like Almea or Planet Pii or the Star Trekiverse
• If the former, where and by whom it is used
• Age: what year/decade it was started or abandoned/complete, our timeline

I'm sure there are more, but this is a place to start. --Kaleissin 14:29:00, 2005-08-19 (UTC)

I agree that all these topics ought to be covered for each conlang for which they are relevant. But I would oppose cramming them all into an infobox, because some of them are only relevant to certain kinds of conlang, and others cannot be briefly summarized in an infobox field. An infobox probably ought only to include name of creator, internal name of language, external name of language, and type of language; everything else should be described at whatever length makes sense in the text of the article. --Jim Henry | Talk 14:44, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

I think completeness-info should be in the box too, then you can see at a glance if it is learanable or not, and it separates the auxlangs and artlangs from the wordlists and mentions. --Kaleissin 14:52:01, 2005-08-19 (UTC)

So, in what terms would you describe various degrees and kinds of completeness in a short phrase (the space available in an infobox field)? This is not a simple scalar variable; there are several dimensions of completeness that should be described (lexicon size, grammar completeness and originality, expressivity, corpus size, relex vs. original semantics, etc.). That's why I think it ought to be described however it makes sense in the text of the article, rather than being squeezed into an infobox field. --Jim Henry | Talk 15:25, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Conlang Wikiportal

There is now a Wikiportal about conlangs. Just thought I'd give everyone a heads up. — {{User:JonMoore/sig}} 17:19, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Template:Language for conlangs

I have done some work on updating {{language}} recently. It now has some options that are designed to make it suitable for use for constructed languages. I have updated the ne design on the articles on a number of conlangs (see Esperanto, Interlingua, Ido or Quenya for examples). The colour coding for conlangs is black with white text. There are no plans to allow different types of conlangas to be differentiated by different colours. This is because the template deals with all languages, and there has to be a limit to the number of colours we use (English and Kurdish are both the same shade of green for example). I would hope that more conlangs feel free to make use of the template. Please give me feedback and suggestions about it. In the case of international auxiliary languages, there is often a regulatory body for the language, but no state where it is an official language. Currently, calling {{{agency}}} also displays a field for official language (because this is most often the case for natural languages). I would like to know what might be a better use for this official status field for conlangs. --Gareth Hughes 12:13, 24 November 2005 (UTC)