Eglathrin|Sindarin ([[Portal:sjn]])

Thank you for your understanding. Today I watched a broadcast on youtube by a Sindarin linguist I know. He also gives Sindarin language lectures at universities and other educational institutions, takes an active part in language festivals, and draws full audiences every time. As far as I know, he is not the only Sindarin linguist engaged in such things, and there are many others. If you, in mentioning university lectures, are suggesting something similar, then my post will probably mark the breaking of this milestone. By mentioning the various platforms for publishing material on Sindarin, you are also describing some stage passed by the global Sindarinist community, as there are various resources on which people share their texts written in Sindarin, including translations. There are, in fact, a lot of them, and the total volume of existing texts in Sindarin allows to form a good text corpus for training a neural network, despite the specific requirements of this process to the volume of pre-packaged data. I do not mean to say that you are too late with your suggestions, for there is always some boundary that serves to indicate the results achieved, at a certain point in time, and this boundary is always possible to overcome, and the final limits that can be reached in any case - especially in the case of collective work - do not exist, by definition. Nevertheless, I aim to indicate that there are potential authors, and it is possible to interest and attract them.

Some of the prospects for building a WikiMedia community are obvious and intuitive. Nevertheless, there is a most trivial and obvious problem of human psychology, which is like a snake eating its own tail - to form and expand a team engaged in any endeavor, some success or failure previously achieved by someone, and, for better motivation of the team, a balance of error to virtuosity ratio is important. Mistakes are the best motivation for people who are either too confident or too self-assured, and since both have the same corollary - the desire for self-assertion - they will want to actively participate in the life of the project and contribute to its history in a meaningful way. At the same time, the presence of mistakes will, to a large extent, untie the hands of a third category of insecure authors who, having seen and recognized mistakes, will consider their low level of knowledge as something that can be shown to the public without unnecessary fear in front of it. Virtuosity, in turn, will unleash people in a different way, attracting literate authors and encouraging illiterate authors to improve their skills and knowledge.

I am familiar with the phenomenon of "war of edits", but I have observed and probably will observe it not because of lack of established standards in any language, including Sindarin, which we are talking about, but because some people, not having sufficient knowledge and education required to penetrate into the essence of the topic discussed in the article, assume their point of view to be true, even if their aspirations are limited to the desire to place some image with indecent content, replacing an article by it. I suppose, with all desire, it can be difficult to avoid such acts of vandalism, as there are not always objective reasons for their occurrence, but it can be useful to have well-skilled section moderators living in different time zones to combat them.

Conflicts that may arise for a number of objective reasons are easier to localize and resolve, as they are facilitated by an objective reason. Linguistic issues can be resolved through consultation with specialists, which may take place outside the WikiMedia community. Stylistic issues have some obvious solutions already - some that do not transition between languages are not recommended for translation at all, and because of their artistic nature, involve replacing them with precise expressions. Not "two melons," as in Japanese, or "two drops of water," as in a number of European languages, but "very similar. In view of the fact that a number of issues concerning the translation of texts into Sindarin have been resolved, I am inclined rather not to expect anything superlative from the MediaWiki-community, but nevertheless I cannot know in advance what contributions each particular member will make.

Calad-ne-dúath (talk)20:39, 20 February 2022

I agree, but we still need to have reliable stable sources for those claimed specialists, that initial make the good classification and classification job, manage their priorities, then ask for comments to a community to support their work and possibly help them. This can be used to create stable, curated documentation.

At this time, it makes easier to add references to assert the quality of a project that will in fine be completely open to anyone: in Wikimedia projects, these users are supposed to source their statements. But how can it be done if such stable sources are not easily available.

And of course, an open project will need to have more than a single source of references: all these specialists should be interested to maintain (in each group they are working in) their own work (even if they are incomplete, or present things in different ways: at least these sepcialists can meet and agree on common bases, or recognize their differences by documenting them, showing the advantages of one view to the other, or showing that their work do not necessarily target the same share of audience. All languages have many fields of work to present, and each group can focus on different parts or aspects without necessarily contradicting each other: each opne follows his own strategic goals, according to their own means of action and their limits (no one can do everything alone): diversity of works is then not a problem, it's in fact a good thing to bring more attention to a common project, here supporting and promoting a language.

So are you able to provide list of resources and works in progress? And list of actors working on them? And lists of contacts, publications/articles, research and progress reports, theses from students in labs, dates of public events and meetings, and so on... and then convince all these people to publish something on their works that they sign themselves and assume to defend publicly? Or innovative creation/artistic works? or articles in wellknown medias (not only in your language but any other from various places and authors)? or short videos and audiocasts? or other resources (like lexical lists, definitions, translations of common phrases)?

Verdy p (talk)21:26, 20 February 2022

Thank you for your message. It seems as if you are assuming the availability of all informational links about everything in all languages of the world. In my opinion, this point overlooks one important point, such as various locally known phenomena or memes. For example, within the English language Wikipedia, there are many articles that are not available in other languages, and the same goes for other language sections. What this should tell us is the need to translate them into other languages, in case someone is interested in this information. Speaking of claims by local Wikipedia users, as I recall, Wikipedia articles written in different languages often refer to material written in other languages. For example, an English-language article may link to a Japanese or Chinese site if it contains information borrowed from a different language environment. I think it is obvious: it is not necessary to have the help of linguists who know the target language in order to refer to them; it is enough to find material that fits the topic of the article and formulate the necessary thought to convey it to the project audience in the target language. And, as far as I can tell, a number of Wikipedia articles are written by people who are not native speakers of the target languages: these articles contain spelling and stylistic errors, expressing the target idea in a way that is sometimes even worse than the most primitive machine translation can provide. This is one of the pressing problems of modern Wikipedia and its development, to which I personally regularly pay attention and whose relevance I want to point out right now, so as not to have disagreements. By doing so, I want to find out where these problems come from in a situation where you propose to go the way of such bureaucracy.

I think I can provide a list of resources and work with varying degrees of completion, including the names of the professionals working on them, with their consent. I'm pretty sure I can link to the resources I personally take information from, but because of the large number of them, I won't be able to link to all of them. There are also some contentious issues like possible links to various social networking resources as to their acceptability and necessity. As for the dates of public events and meetings, I can hardly have enough information on this matter, especially in light of the confirmed existence of closed circles, including those involved in Sindarin language learning. Thus, I cannot name a complete list of Discord servers dedicated to Sindarin learning, but I know of the existence of at least a dozen such servers, one of which I visit quite regularly. Regarding fiction, I can say the following: I have found many samples of various works of fiction on various Internet resources, including those originally written in Sindarin, including those translated from other languages, including those without translations, but intuitively understandable to a person speaking Sindarin. Short videos and audio recordings also exist, including translations of various movie trailers and songs into Sindarin. But translations of common phrases is an entirely separate topic that needs to be dealt with in a separate order, as there are certain cultural differences between different peoples, and I've touched on this topic before. Because of these cultural differences, the translation of common phrases implies a direct translation, without the inclusion of artistic turns, based on the context of the phrase, not on the words. I hope I understood you correctly?

Be that as it may, on none of these points do I see any insurmountable problems, except your bureaucracy, which, however, despite its organization, does not solve the problems for which it exists.

Calad-ne-dúath (talk)17:13, 6 March 2022

I dont understand your concern. And I'm not at all involved in "your bureaucracy", as I take no role at all in such domain. I jsut explain what exists now.

I understand yourt desire to expand the support of your favorite language, but as I said this cannot be done alone on an open project (notably Wikiemdia projects, but not only because this wiki is also open to other projects), given their existing global policies.

Having access to many resources is a good point. But these resources must also be open to the public, at least with an agreement for educational purpose, if these are proprietary resources or located behind paywalls; such possibility exists with some institutions (see for example The Wikipedia Library, but its role is not to copy-paste content from them, bnut allowing to check assertions and references at a systainable cost, without breaking copyright rules) i.e. under a crontroled limited access for some granted users; but even this requires a cooperation between multiple users: those that are contributing and others that are reviewing.

Otherwise these open projects would be open to any kind of personal inventions (and would cause severe problems caused by copyright claims by these authors or would require project admins to supervize many incoming claims of abuse by third parties:

  • notably for a language whose primary source is a collection of artistic books from a single author/creator, whose author's exclusive right have still not fallen into the public domain
  • or battles later when others will want to join the project which was entirely managed by a single person, considering it is their own project).

Global site admins (that have the legal responsability of making ALL contents available online for the huge mass of users around the world, don't have the time for that, and you need to build a sufficiently sized community to support you and with which you'll demonstrate your cooperation. Understand that such open projects also have a cost, both legally and financially (including in terms of time invested, not just hardware or costs associated with upstream service providers). That cost is recovered by the existence of the community at large, which then requires such cooperation so that everyone can benefit from the efforts.

Verdy p (talk)17:31, 6 March 2022

As you say, "these resources should be open to the public. In fact, they are, and no one is hiding them behind "paid walls". Today, there are a very, very large number of resources on the Internet where anyone can learn the Sindarin language, learn to understand it, write and read texts written in it, and speak it. Any cooperation among Sindarinists is welcomed and not rejected.

"Particularly for a language whose primary source is a collection of fiction books by a single author/creator." In this sense, it is easy to argue your point, since there have long been institutes and foundations dedicated to the development of the Sindarin language, such as WELA, and numerous linguists around the world, including amateurs, have long been active. Moreover, today the primary source of knowledge about the Sindarin language is beyond the collection of fiction by a single author, it is also fiction films, which have involved additional professional linguists, and the development of the language is also actively influenced by the huge community that has emerged around it for a very long time. As far as I remember, the transfer of an author's exclusive right to the public domain status takes place under the law of individual states 75 years after publication. The pioneer works of the Sindarin language appeared much earlier than 75 years ago.

I take it you and I have some different ideas. You talk about the need to take the second step in the line, but not the first step of hiring workers for an enterprise that is not allowed to build anything, referring to the need to hire workers or go through bureaucracy before at least something can be built. And the step of building something is partly done, and partly because there was such an unexpected halt on the way to its completion. I remind you - no one will go to an enterprise that can't build anything (regardless of the reasons). People need guarantees that their work will not go to waste, and judging by your actions, regardless of your motivation and motivation of your resource, you do not appreciate other people's work categorically, which is contrary to your own words. We can practice verbal and logical equilibrium with you for a long time, but never come to anything because of this doublethink in your policy, while at least a minimum consensus is implied. For the record, people don't like to see their work devalued overnight. I think you understand without me that such disrespect for the work of others is fraught with reputational, legal, as well as financial costs for your project. On the other side of the coin is a sober assessment of other people's work, respect for other people's work, the growth of your reputation, the attraction of additional capital thanks to your contractual ability.

Calad-ne-dúath (talk)17:08, 21 March 2022