Wikipedia:Conlangs/Notability by Proxy

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[edit] Muke's criteria

I would also add (probably as a minor criterion): being created by a person or organization who has already created a language that meets the (major?) criteria for inclusion; for example, I'd say J.R.R. Tolkien's minor languages are "notable by proxy" and probably worthy of inclusion, and similarly for other works by famous conlangers. —Muke Tever talk (la.wiktionary) 15:58, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

I am not sure about this notability by proxy. In a list of Tolkien languages can be listed the minor languages without a separate article for each.
— Carlos Th (talk) 23:12, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
I agree, not every minor language by Tolkien could have enough written to merit a full article, but under the current [lack of] criteria even an article covering briefly all such Tolkien languages might be considered deletable. —Muke Tever talk (la.wiktionary) 19:21, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
Not at all, and the reason has nothing to do with notability per se. There is a corpus of scholarship, pro and con, about Tolkien's linguistic efforts, and every one of his languages (including the ones only seen in fragmentary form) has been discussed by multiple scholars. This is verifiability.
On reflection, as someone who votes to delete more often than not, I think I would vote to keep any conlang with an actual corpus of significant outside commentary that can be verified, even if it has *zero* speakers and a tiny vocabulary. The question should be whether an article can be constructed that is NPOV, non-OR, verifiable, and properly sourced. Of course, if the creator writes the article, it might properly be deprecated as POV, OR and so on, but that is true of nearly any topic.

Robert A West 02:55, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] My thoughts

I think this should be a major criteria, because:

  1. They are very commonly searched for, both because he was one of the first conlangers and because he was the author of the Middle-Earth series of books. Even his 'childish' languages like Animalish have people interested in them.
  2. They are complex... he didn't create stand-alone IALs, he created families of languages with natural evolutions. It would be difficult to just merge them all.
  3. Most of his languages have full grammars and vocabularies, and the few that don't have good reasons that they don't have full grammars and vocabularies.

I think we could easily do at least a page on every Tolkien language. Almafeta 18:44, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

    • It might, however, be better writing to combine, say, Rohirric and Hobbitish into one comprehensive article and then create redirects as needed. Robert A West 21:47, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] My opinion

This is IMO not how "notability by proxy" should work. Although I tend to be rather inclusive, I really don't think every fart made by a celebrity warrants an article. Just like I'm not happy with hundreds of articles about individual personnages from LOTR, I also have my doubts about several of the languages listed under Category:Middle-earth language. If you ask me, wikipedifiable are only those items that play an important role within notable works (Nadsat, Parseltongue). Okay, even the minor language can with a little goodwill be qualified as notable; but adding Animalic to the list would IMHO be exploiting the fame of Mr. Tolkien to unacceptable proportions. Does the article about Ravel's Bolero (Ravel) warrant articles about all other individual compositions he ever wrote?

As for the "families of languages with natural evolutions" argument: the problem is that there are many such languages. To me, that sounds more like an argument for one central Languages of Middle Earth article. Look at the recent votes for deletion: we concluded Mark Rosenfelder's Verdurian is notable. Now Verdurian is not a stand-alone language either: it belongs to a huge family of languages, all spoken on his conworld Almea (article deleted) and including proto-languages and the like. Some of these languages are highly elaborated, others less so. But much as I am in favour of the keeping the article about Verdurian, I wouldn't favour articles about Mark's other languages. Much rather I'd like to see the Almea article restored.

In short: I don't mind including the Tolkien criterion in the vote, but I'm absolutely going to vote against it. OTOH I favour the "notability by proxy" idea, but I'd like to see that properly defined first.

--IJzeren Jan 09:49, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Is Parseltongue even a conlang? Really?
As far as I know, most of the Tolkien language articles are fairly non-controversial. In most cases, there is plenty of verifiable information, much of which has already been added to articles here. Most of the really-excessive-looking links at Languages of Middle-earth (an article which does exist already!) don't point to articles on the languages involved. I agree that some of the itty-bitty articles are a bit too much (Aulëan, anyone? guess what? Aulë had a language!), and Tolkien's non-Middle-earth-related languages belong in a general article on his language work.
The Verdurian example is not really all that comparable. Tolkien's invented world is undeniably notable. His languages are notable, not just as conlangs, but for appearing in it. -Aranel ("Sarah") 02:04, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
Re:Parseltongue. It's a borderline case, really. When Harry speaks it, other just hear him hissing, while Harry himself still thinks he is speaking English. Besides, like most fictional languages it's little more than the few "samples" that we have. But look at the following info from Langmaker:
Question: We know that Daniel Radcliffe had to learn Parseltongue for this movie. How did you handle this language of snakes in the movie?
Chris Columbus: We essentially invented a language for Parseltongue. We dealt with a linguistic expert from Oxford University, and I discussed with him the sound and the feeling I wanted to get out of Parseltongue. He went back and created an alphabet for Parseltongue, enabling us to translate any English phrases into Parseltongue.
LIVEJessicaMae: Did you pick up on it at all? If so, do you ever use it? It would be sweet to yell in snake -- LOL!
Chris Columbus: Well, I used it in the film, not in real life. If I ever start speaking in Parseltongue in real life, it's time to have myself committed!
I don't know how to understand this. If I get Mr. Columbus right, he got himself an alphabet that enabled him to translate into P. How can an alphabet do that? The only explanation I can think of is that Parseltongue is rather some kind of code (substituting every consonant with Z or something similar). Just guessing of course!
Re:Tolkien. Yep, I noticed that lots of links in the Languages of Middle-earth article point to articles where no language is even mentioned. I think that's not good. And Aulëan (itty-bitty indeed) isn't even mentioned there! But of course, I agree with you that Tolkien's world is undeniably, inherently notable. But does that automatically render even the minorest personnage or other detail, notable too? Look at Galvorn, Bregalad, Sharku, Khamûl, Moriquendi... honestly, I can't see the point or value of such articles. But then, they don't disturb me either, so I leave them in peace. Then why should articles about highly detailed conlangs that were published on the Internet disturb others?
--IJzeren Jan 06:19, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
In my opinion, it primarily has to do with whether the information is verifiable, and verifiably not vanity. The existence of other articles that may be less notable is evidence of the way things are, whereas policy talks about the way things should be. (I've been working on some of the itty-bitty Tolkien articles since I got here. It's an uphill struggle. People keep making new ones.)
It does sound like the movie version of "Parseltongue" is a code for English, not a language. That actually makes it kind of interesting, although I think the information would probably go with information about the movie so long as it remains unique to the movie. -Aranel ("Sarah") 13:29, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
Agreed on all fronts. Although there's one accent I'd like to put differently: I find the question whether a subject warrants an article far more interesting than the question who wrote it. But then, vanity is a concept that is often abused; according to the article about vanity, it is not necessarily vanity when a person writes something about his own creation. --IJzeren Jan 13:35, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Opposition To All Notability-by-Proxy

I have seen it suggested that a constructed language should be considered worthy of inclusion because "it influenced another, notable conlang" or "was influenced by another, notable conlang". And I look at that, and I don't understand it. After all, it's not this language that people are speaking/studying/writing in/admiring as a great work of art. It's the other one, the notable one! How is that notability supposed to transfer? Just don't get it.

While we're at it, I've seen the association with a notable conculture suggested as something that should earn a conlang an article. And again, I disagree completely. At best, the conlang then is something of a "minor character", as covered in WP:FICT: it can have a section in an article shared with other topics, but not one of its own.

Basically, I think we should judge conlangs in isolation, and not allow them to use other languages (natural or constructed) or other ideas (a famous creator, as with Tolkien, or a notable concultural association) as crutches. It's one thing to judge conlangs in relationship to each other ("This has fewer fluent speakers than Esperanto, and is thus less notable than Esperanto," or even, "This has fewer fluent speakers than Klingon, which has the fewest fluent speakers a conlang can have and still be notable, so this is not notable,") and another entirely to let them piggy-back on one another ("Klingon is notable, and Zlaygon demonstrates a plausible natural evolution from Klingon in the 33rd century if atomic warfare had annihalated humans in the 20th century, therefore it's notable").

As such, I am opposed to any form of notability-by-proxy. The Literate Engineer 00:58, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Hang on, Engineer, you are confusing a few things.
  • First of all, things like "influenced another, notable conlang" or "shows plausible historical evolution from another, notable conlang" are not listed under "notability-by-proxy" at all. Someone proposed those criteria, and I've grouped them under "reputation" (influence) and "uniqueness" respectively. Personally I'm opposed to both of them.
  • Secondly, on the poll page I've noted explicitly that notability-by-proxy works only when the main article gets too long, so that subdivision into smaller articles would be warranted. Furthermore, I think there should be a relationship between the significance of the book/movie/conculture/whatever, the significance of the conlang used within it, and question whether a wikipedia article is justified. An conlang that is perhaps mentioned in a major book but doesn't play any role of significance in it (like Aulëan) or so) does IMO not deserve a separate article. But I think no one disputes that a language like Quenya, on which the entire LOTR is practically built, deserves an article.
  • Thirdly, please don't overestimate the "number of speakers" criterion. Judging artistic languages by it is unfair, because these languages were never created in other to be spoken at all! In fact, it matters for international auxiliary languages only. As Kaleissin noted, applying this criterion on artlangs is complaring apples with oranges. The ultimate purpose of the kind of music that they play in supermarkets (at least here in the Netherlands) is to make clients relaxed, quiet, walking slowly and buying a lot; you also don't measure the notability of Bach's works by the effect they have in supermarkets. --IJzeren Jan 07:34, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
  • If no-one speaks artlangs, and no-one is intended to, how can any of them be notable? The point I'm trying to make by "overestimating" the number of speakers is that at most an infant's handful of artlangs belong, because use is what makes a language notable, and only exceptionally rare circumstances, like acquiring the iconic status of Newspeak, can circumvent that. I believe the base assumption should be that 0 personal languages, 0 alternative languages, 0 micronational languages, and 0 fictional languages are notable, as they are all, by design of not being intended for use as speech, inherently non-notable, and the burden of proof is on the language to demonstrate that it has acquired significance to the world at large through accidentally picking up speakers (as Klingon and Quenya did), or otherwise picking up cultural or technical relevancy, as Newspeak did.
  • As for miscategorizing things as notability-by-proxy, I look at those two proposed criteria as involving transfer of notability from one language to another, making them notability-by-proxy issues. Even if they're listed under reputation or uniqueness.The Literate Engineer 05:20, 10 September 2005 (UTC)