Hebrew Wikipedia reaches 100000 articles

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Hebrew Wikipedia is celebrating posting 100000 articles, six and a half years after the first article was put on-line on mathematics....

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All that effort to resurrect (or at least resuscitate) a language which was moribund or dead, and in that state probably for a good reason.

It would be so much cooler (and save a lot of time, too) if they could just send Benjamin Netanyahu, or perhaps some well-regarded rabbi from NYC, up Mr. Sinai (or maybe that new skyscraper in Dubai-- this is a sky-god thing) to download the Official Version of Torah in modern English (nevermind stone tablets, just have him ask for a flashdrive). And in Arabic too, while he's at it, just to confound a few Islamic fundamentalists. Scatter some glowing copies on Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, also.

You know, the oddest thing about the Creator of the Universe, is His periods of great loquaciousness, followed by long periods of real reticence. It's 12 centuries between the Qur'an and the Book of Mormon, after all.

Personally, I think The Mighty One might be a little bipolar. But do YOU want to sell Him the diagnosis?

With No Wish to be a Pillar of Salt,
Milton

There are several wikipedias of dead or constructed languages. The Volapük Wikipedia, a constructed language with around 30 current speakers, has 118,000 articles most of which are bot generated stubs. I don't know what use this could be to anyone.

There are two Norwegian Wikipedias because Norwegians don't know how to spell their own language and there are two competing schools of thought on the subject.

The Irish Language Wikipedia is just short of 10,000 articles - a goal that should be reached in a few short weeks, hopefully Whatever about the Wiki We Know and Loveâ„¢, this tiny wiki is providing a valuable resource as there simply is nothing like it, neither in print nor on-line. And as a speaker, I don't mind dedicating my time and editing to something like that, where the BLP issues aren't nearly as bad and where it's genuinely providing a valuable resource to a tiny community of speakers. This is a language that was dying out until relatively recently, mind, but has experienced a resurgence over the last two decades or so via the Gaelscoileanna.

Humanity really needs a universal language, but one simple enough that everyone can learn it easily enough to keep their native languages from disappearing, like some of the Celtic languages are in danger of doing. As many of you are doubtless aware, most, if not all languages each offer different and unique insights into the relationships of humans with themselves, other humans, and with nature. I really like how much more easy it is to explain or express feelings in Spanish than in English. Japanese, although I don't speak much of it, I've noticed can express some concepts in a single word that requires an entire sentence in English.

I don't think that English should be the universal language, because it has too many problems. It has too many irregular spellings and verb tenses and the Roman alphabet has difficulty with many common sounds in other languages. I don't know which language would be the best candidate for a universal language.

Espiranto? Nah, been tried.

Since English has already infected the planet like Kudzu, it's probably far easier to regularize the bad parts of English, than to invent something new out of whole cloth. And that is what will probably end up happening.

Just about any language has some concepts which need only a word or two, but a paragraph or page in other languages. But the AVERAGE length of space it takes to say something is what counts. English is (on average) a very compact language, due to its large vocabulary. Much like Russian. English is not pretty, but it's among the top condenders for getting the com job done with precision, in minimal space.

Pity Spanish tweeters.

Heh, that's funny. Every book I've read on comparative language studies has said the same thing: Russian is restricted to its home country primarily because it's prone to greater verbosity than other European tongues. (Remember, 200 years ago the Russians controlled a good chunk of western North America, not to mention all those former Soviet republics...yet nobody speaks it in Alaska or western Canada, and it's slowly dying out in the republics.) Also, it's synthetic, like German, and has absurdly complex cases and endings, which is never a good thing when you're trying to teach it to adults. No matter how instructors try to tart it up, it's tough to learn. Think of all the things English doesn't have: sentence structure is fairly loose and variable, word endings and cases are simple, no noun gender, etc. The only major objection to English is based on its many weird, non-phonetic pronunciations.

Could be worse. You should look into Arabic sometime. What a mess.
And better yet, try learning all the Chinese ideograms. All 7500 of them.

Well, if Chinese and Japanese only had simple writing systems, they would be a lot easier to learn, because their grammars are fairly simple, with few irregularities. One thing I like about the Germanic languages like English is that a noun can easily be used as a verb, which makes it much easier to express some ideas.

The situations we find ourselves in because of a lack of a common, world language can be ridiculous. I remember once standing outside of a bar at 6 a.m. in Japan a number of years ago with my roomate. He wanted to talk to this Japanese girl that he liked, but they didn't have a common language. Her friends, however, were a Russian and and a Peruvian. So, my friend told me what he wanted to say in English, I translated it into Spanish to the Peruvian, who relayed it in Russian, who in turn relayed it in Japanese. And so on back and forth, for like an hour, for a conversation that normally would have taken 10 minutes tops.

I would recommend French, but only if people learn to speak it in a purrrrrrrfectly sexy manner. Case in point: