Wikipedia:Conlangs/Notability by Proxy

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

My thoughts

I think this should be a major criteria, because:

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.
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.
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)[reply]