User talk:Ojw/Quenya
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[edit] Official discussion
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Tolkien_languages
[edit] General
Quenya wikipedia wouldn't be an encyclopedia - you probably wouldn't come here to lookup the results of the 1983 UK general election, for example, unless 5000 literate contributors suddenly appear
[edit] Background
Imagine describing year-10000 science and technology concepts using standard english.
Then imagine describing year-2000 technology concepts using a language developed in middle-earth. Does it even make sense for an elf to be describing quarks or the gravitational warping of spacetime, using their own language?
Quenya vocabulary is adequate for many applications (for example, it's more literate than French for love-letters), but there's lots of vocabulary that nobody knows. How do you say "help" in Quenya?
There are plenty of other languages that are missing words. Listen to someone speak the japanese word for computer ("kom-pyu-ter"), or for the Welsh words relating to recent technology. So Quenya isn't alone in its lack of vocabulary.
OTOH, whose words would they borrow? If there's a word missing, I'd be inclined to suggest they'd borrow it from Welsh, or from a scandanavian language, rather than from English. But who would say if it's accurate?
[edit] Interface
Might be useful to have a tengwar-aware calligrapher to do the interface, and probably a few key pages
Would the elvish-speakers have a tendancy to decorate their interface more than english-speakers would?
Interface would probably benefit from graphics rather than text, as that's the most recognisable form of the language (and there's not masses of text to translate)
[edit] Transliteration
- Template graphics: Manual translation could be done using one template per symbol, which creates a symbol-graphic
- Text-based: When unicode finally becomes available, might be able to adapt tools to use that
- Image-based: Script to download database, convert roman text to tengwar image, and save one image per page for upload
Default layout seems to be one long line, so might need to adapt any typographic tools (e.g. if converting a paragraph of text to an image, how wide would we make the image?)
[edit] Which calendar?
Do non-english wikipedias refer to events in their local calendar, or defer to Gregorian?
Are there other wikipedias which use multiple calendars (actual use, not just as a curiosity)
Can the date-formatting code be modified to do calendar conversion?
