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Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Sindarin 2

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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.

A committee member provided the following comment:

Ineligible language. --MF-W 12:59, 18 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • The community needs to develop an active test project; it must remain active until approval (automated statistics, recent changes). It is generally considered active if the analysis lists at least three active, not-grayed-out editors listed in the sections for the previous few months.
  • The community needs to complete required MediaWiki interface translations in that language (about localization, translatewiki, check completion).
  • The community needs to discuss and complete the settings table below:
What Value Example / Explanation
Proposal
Language code sjn (SIL, Glottolog) A valid ISO 639-1 or 639-3 language code, like "fr", "de", "nso", ...
Language name Sindarin Language name in English
Language name Eglathrin Language name in your language. This will appear in the language list on Special:Preferences, in the interwiki sidebar on other wikis, ...
Language Wikidata item Q56437 - item has currently the following values: Item about the language at Wikidata. It would normally include the Wikimedia language code, name of the language, etc. Please complete at Wikidata if needed.
Directionality LTR Is the language written from left to right (LTR) or from right to left (RTL)?
Links Links to previous requests, or references to external websites or documents.
Site URL sjn.wikipedia.org langcode.wikiproject.org

Settings
Project name Limoseliad "Wikipedia" in your language
Project namespace Limoseliad - Oseliad Lain usually the same as the project name
Project talk namespace Pedad en Limoseliad "Wikipedia talk" (the discussion namespace of the project namespace)
Enable uploads no Default is "no". Preferably, files should be uploaded to Commons.
If you want, you can enable local file uploading, either by any user ("yes") or by administrators only ("admin").
Notes: (1) This setting can be changed afterwards. The setting can only be "yes" or "admin" at approval if the test creates an Exemption Doctrine Policy (EDP) first. (2) Files on Commons can be used on all Wikis. (3) Uploading fair-use images is not allowed on Commons (more info). (4) Localisation to your language may be insufficient on Commons.
Optional settings
Project logo File:Limoseliad.png This needs to be an SVG image (instructions for logo creation).
Default project timezone Continent/City "Continent/City", e.g. "Europe/Brussels" or "America/Mexico City" (see list of valid timezones)
Additional namespaces Parfod, Pedad en Pharfod, Antaen, Pedad en Antaen, Maeron, Pedad en Vaeron For example, a Wikisource would need "Page", "Page talk", "Index", "Index talk", "Author", "Author talk".
Additional settings Anything else that should be set
Once settings are finalized, a committee member will submit a Phabricator task requesting creation of the wiki. (This will include everything automatically, except the additional namespaces/settings.) After the task is created, it should be linked to in a comment under "final decision" above.

Proposal

[edit]
  • 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.
  • The well-known and generally accepted rules of Sindarin do not cause too much dissonance when communicating between different speakers.
  • When it comes to performing the fundamental tasks of storing and communicating information about the world and people, Sindarin does a great job and is able to perform this task beyond the contexts that are available and known to modern people.
  • More people in the world today speak Elvish than Irish. Source

Someone would oppose me just because the difficult of developing the IME on typing Sindarin script, so I'd love to continue contributing via Latin transliterations, then make a gadget to show em. --120.6.9.47 23:02, 23 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • I assume that the Sindarin Wikipedia project, with its automation technique, can open the door to many new language projects, the development of which will turn out to be accelerated the more the more new articles are written for them.--Calad-ne-dúath (talk) 11:52, 26 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • I now use the OpenNMT neural network to translate into Sindarin. Since the neural network sometimes makes translation mistakes, I correct the translation manually. The same technique is very useful for a number of natural languages, including languages of Africa and various small peoples of the world.
  • Many interesting and relevant language projects can go the same way because of the relatively small population of peoples and/or the peculiarities of their languages. But this does not negate the need for them to convey information to their speakers, because their number is not zero.
  • The need to reconstruct individual words and speech patterns, such as those required for translation into Sindarin, may be useful for languages spoken today by linguistics specialists or small peoples of the world. These languages, and the Wikipedia projects based on them, may be of considerable value to their speakers, and to humanity as a whole.
  • Sindarin speakers. There is an ambiguous definition of a native speaker. When applied to an artificial language, a native speaker can be a person who has learned the language at a conscious age and has contributed to the development of the language. At the same time, there are cases where people have learned artificial languages from birth, which allows us to apply the term native speakers to these people, which is close in meaning to the term for native speakers of a natural language.
  • Learning Sindarin. Today, information about the Sindarin language is widely available. Various textbooks have been written, instructional videos have been recorded, publicly available e-courses have been created, and magazines publishing Tolkien's notes have been published. The speed of learning Sindarin language for beginners is 2 weeks.
  • Language development. People who speak Sindarin often invent something new: words, phrases, turns of speech. All together, this enriches the text base of the language, while demonstrating its capabilities. Software modeling shows the possibility of obtaining billions of new words in Sindarin, a number of which may have no semantic analogues in natural languages, but can be understood on an intuitive level even by a beginner. At the same time, professional linguists are engaged in the development of the language. Thanks to common efforts and the possibility of worldwide communication, there are no significant discrepancies in the rules of the language today. The irrelevant rules are found in the list of ancient ones. Therefore, if a person says Ered, his interlocutor will not get upset and will not explain to him about the correctness of Eryd, but both will know that it was about mountains.
  • Sindarin is a synthetic language created by J.R.R. Tolkien. There are two well-known facts about it:
  1. Tolkien created the language first, and then the story he placed that language in the world.
  2. Today, Sindarin has gone far beyond the fictional world, and it is used by people for a variety of needs. There are print editions, communities on the Internet, people write and communicate in it.
  • The two points above do not allow us to characterize Sindarin as a language created only for the fictional world, and which has no place in the real world. Tolkien is known to have had a passion for constructing languages from a young age, and the ease with which he spoke them, although this is a natural characteristic for a language creator. But people who had nothing to do with the creation of Sindarin have long shown that it allows the construction of verbal and semantic constructions that are relevant to the modern world. Practical research on the language and the communities that speak it has shown its great flexibility and the possibility of using it beyond the fictional world. This circumstance allows us to look at the Sindarin language from a different angle, viewing it as a phenomenon separate from the works of fiction in which it was used by its author.
  • I rely heavily on automation in the course of my work. Reconstructing the necessary words and turns of speech can be very time-consuming if done manually, but knowing the rules of the language, I write programs that function according to these rules, and they reconstruct the words and turns of speech for me. All the programs I have written allow me to automatically, with a minimum of manual edits, form a text corpus and train a neural network that helps me translate arbitrary texts into Sindarin.
  • It is a well-known fact that all language is abstract. No word is firmly attached to a subject, and this fact makes words replaceable and texts translatable. By following the grammar rules of a particular language, words and phrases can be formed and reconstructed. The grammatical rules of the language can be written into the program so that it deals with these tasks automatically. Using a similar algorithm, it becomes possible to reconstruct arbitrary languages without loss of meaning for their native speakers. Therefore, I assume that the example of a section written in Sindarin will inspire someone to translate Wikipedia into the languages of small peoples or ancient states.
  • Sindarin has complex and dual numbers, which allows a single word to name pairs and uncountable sets of different objects. This property of the language cannot be underestimated in the sense of conveying scientific and technical information.
  • Sindarin is a unique language, which has a flexible system of word formation, due to the presence of which it is possible to form a multitude of new words with different shades of meaning and significance. Thanks to this system of derivation, the language initially has the ability to give an arbitrary gender to any profession, to name any concept in a diminutive form, and a huge number of other concepts. The available system of derivation also makes it possible, in the form of one universal term, to present a phenomenon and a concept which has no analogous terms in natural languages, without violating the rules and beauty of the sound of the language. Because of these properties, it would be a great fallacy to think that Sindarin is a language incapable of describing terms and events occurring in natural languages and artificial languages, already represented on Wikipedia, also written in the article on the language in its incubator.
  • Sindarin has partially related languages among natural languages. In creating Sindarin and his other languages, Tolkien often turned to natural languages, which is very important for any professional and serious linguist aiming to create a language. These languages include Finnish, Welsh and others.
  • Separately, we should note the fact that Tolkien was not just creating a language for a fictional people and book. First of all, Tolkien created language as an actual and valid means of communication, and he personally could express in his languages absolutely any thoughts and utterances and convey with their help arbitrary information. Only when Tolkien had a ready-made language with all the rules and necessary vocabulary on hand would he write a book where he placed the people speaking the language Tolkien had created. For this reason, and also by the popularity of Tolkien's languages among ordinary people, we can say definitely that Tolkien's languages are able to exist and be used as general languages separately from the books and peoples for whom they were created. Only his books and peoples do not exist without these languages.
  • Sindarin is developing not least thanks to The World Elvish Language Association (WELA), and many linguists such as David Salo, Torsten Renk, Edward Klotzko and many others. In addition to these, there is the official magazine Eldalamberon, as well as the websites eldamo, elfdict, and others contributing to the language. One of the smallest communities of Sindarin-speakers includes thousands of people who speak Sindarin fluently. It's only one of many communities, but even its members also contribute to the language to varying degrees, such as writing poetry and prose in Sindarin, corresponding with each other, and organizing themed events. It is also learned and taught in various educational institutions around the world.

Discussion

[edit]

@Calad-ne-dúath: Here here. --120.6.9.47 23:04, 23 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think it is not difficult to write a special program that makes it easy to write the Sindarin texts using the Tengwar runic alphabet developed by Tolkien for the elven languages. Moreover, modern development tools make it possible to perform such a development in the shortest possible time, and later to refine it as needed.

About the same applies directly to the process of translating articles in Sindarin: thanks to the proliferation of advanced machine translation tools, including neural networks, it is now possible to develop software for automatic translation of texts in Sindarin, which will help the translators involved in the project to do their job (although I personally prefer manual translation and creativity, but I consider automatic translation inevitable and in general do not avoid progress).

In general, I consider the addition of wikipedia sections written entirely in synthetic languages to be a natural progression of the project, and by now we have sufficient tools and information to translate the articles into Sindarin.

As the project develops, I am sure Sindarin Wikipedia will attract a wide variety of people working in different fields, and among them there will certainly be those willing to contribute to the development of the project. But, to do this, it is important to keep the project alive, not to cut it off at such an early stage.--Calad-ne-dúath (talk) 09:15, 24 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I have prepared two versions of the logo with captions in Latin and Sindarin Tengwar. But there's a little problem - I can't upload them in any way.--Calad-ne-dúath (talk) 22:40, 26 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ned eraid vidui 'olthant tu'wi. Neviaid vinui gert lim a vae. Neviad gonodolui ger. For the last few days I have been training a neural network. The first results are impressive in terms of speed and quality. Automated translation in Sindarin is already here.--Calad-ne-dúath (talk) 21:16, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

          • If you are asking just me, then I would say A little support, the previous rejection seems like Unicode-related, but the test project is adopted somewhat a good Latin transliteration. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 02:05, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
            • Thank you very much for your response. I asked technical support and they told me that they fixed the bug that allowed adding translations for arbitrary language codes. I was told that they would add the language code sjn and I could continue translating in the future.--Calad-ne-dúath (talk) 08:24, 28 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. I encountered a problem today with the inability to create new pages in the Wp/sjn project. Thank you all for your help, but it seems to be the end of the road. I think I will continue to stand for keeping this project on wikipedia, and want to dissuade those who don't see its future prospects. I will take the difficulties that arise and show my vision in action. It still takes some time, though.--Calad-ne-dúath (talk) 10:23, 10 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • Weak support. I think they should at least be given a chance to create one on the incubator and if it becomes successful, we can discuss giving a subdomain. -Gifnk dlm 2020 If only Middle English Wikipedia could be saved(talk) 09:27, 20 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Gifnk dlm 2020, incubator already exists and is temporarily in a frozen state. But I am sure these are only temporary difficulties, and my patience and work will overcome them. Thank you for your support. I am also worried about the sections in other languages, and I stand in solidarity with each of their authors who are worried about preserving their section. Stay strong, friends. We write and speak different languages, and we stand for sections in languages we may not share, but we share a common interest and a common goal. By this alone we can unite and be of great help to one another in our common cause. Perhaps we could benefit from one community that would allow us all to communicate, to share knowledge and experience. In turn, it would help us all to find like-minded people and individuals interested and able to help develop each language section or incubator. I am very sorry to reply after so many days, but I will try to do my best if your case can still be helped.--Calad-ne-dúath (talk) 16:43, 23 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

More people speak Elvish than Irish? The site quoted as a source links to The Independent, which includes that as part of a quote from "LOTR-obsessed David Neary (26)". Looking at w:Irish, there's 1.7 million Irish people who claim to be able to speak it, and 73,000 who use it on a daily basis outside the educational system. It's funny how Klingon gets all this attention for 20-30 fluent speakers, but Elvish has tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions, but nobody, not even the Wikipedia page, mentions it.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:25, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is a very interesting point indeed. The Klingon language is used extensively in various media productions created within the Star Trek universe, and at times even appears outside of it. I vividly remember at least one parody comedy where two geeks spoke Klingon. However, long before that, while casually walking in parks, I often saw people speaking Sindarin. I often visit one small online community of Sindarinists. One of the online communities I visit regularly, and where people speak Sindarin fluently, has many thousands of people, but it is only one community among many, and it is not the largest. Thus, there are communities of many thousands in various countries, and I am inclined to agree with the assumption that the probable number of people who speak Sindarin fluently exceeds 1 million. Outside of Britain, Sindarin is also taught in universities today, and the lack of information about it on the English-language Wikipedia page is a slight omission, due primarily to the local spread of these phenomena. If we collect all this information from all over the world as a whole, the view of the language in the article changes considerably. Calad-ne-dúath (talk) 21:33, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
You are inclined to agree with the assumption of a million fluent speakers? You seem to be the only person making that assumption. To anyone else, that number is insane. Esperanto probably doesn't have a million speakers, and has organizations in most every country, has dictionaries and grammars in every major language in the world, and has multiple periodicals currently published written in the language. The [https://ejk363.wixsite.com/world-elvish/books

World Elvish Language Association] doesn't have its own domain name, and from that website, I see no evidence of anyone producing original works in Sindarin. (Again, compare to the Universala Esperanto-Asocio, with both the name and the website in Esperanto.) For a language of a million fluent speakers, I'm not seeing much original writing in the language.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:49, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

https://imgur.com/fSx4I4G
Here are some example texts taken from various sources for a sample. In reality, there are many more texts written in Sindarin. As I wrote earlier, I use a neural network for automated translation, and for neural networks it is always important to use large amounts of data when training them. Since the volume of texts in Sindarin is large and constantly growing, I can constantly improve the previously trained neural network model, getting better and better results with each retraining. Calad-ne-dúath (talk) 07:23, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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