Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Sindarin

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Sindarin Wikipedia[edit]

submitted verification final decision
This proposal has been rejected.
This decision was taken by the language committee in accordance with the Language proposal policy based on the discussion on this page.

The closing committee member provided the following comment:

constructed language and noone proposes this project.
Proposal summary
  • Language details: Sindarin (Sindarin, sjn ISO 639-3)
  • Editing community: {{{community}}}
    List your user name if you're interested in editing the wiki. Add "N" next to your
    name if you are a native speaker of this language.
  • Relevant pages: [[1]]
  • External links:
Please read the handbook for requesters for help using this template correctly.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Please create a new request, no more editing here. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 07:04, 21 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

There is a good number of Sindarin speakers around the world and it would form an important community. Besides it has more speakers than, for example, Toki-Pona, and Toki-Pona has it's own Wikipedia.

Arguments in favour[edit]

  • Tolkien himself wrote that The Lord of the Rings was "largely an essay in 'linguistic aesthetic' (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 220), and writers may want to celebrate the peculiar aesthetic of Tolkien's Elvish. To some it will be an attempt to immerse themselves in the world of Middle-earth. Others will be interested primarily in the languages as such, and try to learn them as some kind of intellectual challenge.
  • Especially after the appearance of the movie The lord of the rings, many people wanted brief "Elvish" inscriptions for rings (often wedding-rings), tattoos and the like. They feel attracted to the magical aura and aesthetic qualities of "Elvish", but may not have a deeper scholarly interest in Tolkien's work. Writers intending to compose longer texts must by necessity penetrate far deeper into the linguistic "lore" relating to Tolkien's languages, here is where a Wikipedia in Eldarin would help writers to establish an open canon of authority to work around the fact that Tolkien often changed his mind about many details.

--Tauiris 07:49, 3 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • The claims presented are obsolete because:
  • Sindarin has a large vocabulary and allows you to easily construct new words using its word-formation mechanism. The same mechanism allows us to express in Sindarin information about things not only of the modern and familiar world, but also about things that we do not even know. Run on an ordinary user's PC, the program, the purpose of which is to create new combinations of roots, prefixes and suffixes, allows you to get a vocabulary of over a hundred million new words. At the very least, that's enough for a dialog.
  • The experiment I started in Wp/Sjn shows how flexible this language can be already on the example of an article about the language itself. I'm sure there are no insurmountable difficulties, and the goal of translating as many articles as possible into Tolkien's wonderful Sindarin language will be successfully achieved. At present, this project has not encountered problems with the rules, which are perfectly clear and strictly defined in the Sindarin language textbooks written by many excellent authors, to whom I am personally very grateful for their work and the tremendous work they have done to make its study possible.
  • During the translation of articles in Sindarin, I have gained some experience in this field and can call the problems of rules and vocabulary in Sindarin far-fetched, and referring to my experience, I can say that I personally have not had such problems. And I don't see any objective reason why anyone else should have them, especially people learning Sindarin.

Arguments against[edit]

  • Despite the potential complications, material published by Tolkien himself during his lifetime is regarded as being as close to "definite" or "canonical" Eldarin as one can get. Therefore, Neo-Eldarin efforts are typically based on these texts as the primary normative authority. As for the LotR samples, the Second Edition forms are preferred where they differ from the First Edition.
  • But the information that can be extracted from these few samples is in no way sufficient to reconstruct a grammar that could support even a semi-functional language. Other Tolkien material, never published in his lifetime, is therefore considered as well. The fact that this material often contradicts itself is problematic from the viewpoint of researchers trying to formulate definite grammatical rules. The normal approach is to adopt forms and details of grammar that these researchers hold to be compatible with the samples of "Elvish" contained in the LotR.
  • Plus, the occasional publication of hitherto unknown Tolkien material may cause Neo/Eldarin writers to revise the conventions they have been using: Since Eldarin grammar is reconstructed from a very limited corpus, the appearance of even a few new lines of Tolkien-made Eldarin text may sometimes significantly shift the balance of the evidence.

--Tauiris 07:50, 3 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Other discussion[edit]

I am in favor of reviewing the results because the claims presented above are outdated.--Calad-ne-dúath (talk) 16:07, 19 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Calad-ne-dúath: Please, create a new request instead of editing this outdated page. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 07:03, 21 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.
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