[Wikipedia-l] Re: new request for ASL/English wikipedia

[Andrew Gray]

On 09/09/05, Paweł Dembowski <fallout at lexx.eu.org> wrote:
> >  Regardless of the technical means and organization of a signed Wikipedia, I
> > would encourage people discussing the matter not to use wordings that may
> > suggest that ASL is not a language in its own right, or that deaf people
> > have a less fundamental right to acquire knowledge through their own
> > languages than have hearing people.
> >  Haruo
> 
> Well, the comments are mostly because the person who proposed the new
> project wanted to include also English language text of the articles,
> which would basically mean forking. And ASL might be a language, but
> unless it has also a special writing system, I don't know if it can be
> created - after all, we do not create Wikipedias for other languages
> that are only spoken and not written.

We do, however, have seperate Wikipedias for what are, I understand,
very closely related languages with seperate orthographies (cf/
Moldovan/Romanian)

It may, perhaps, be useful to consider ASL as a very unusual
orthography for a language closely related to English?

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk