[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wiktionary-l] English orthographies

[Gerard Meijssen]

Jack & Naree wrote:

>>From my point of view as a native English speaker who lives in England (not 
>in the American sense of "UK"!)
>I think it's important that when I type in words like:
> "colour"
> That I get "colour" and not "color". I don't see why I need to know the 
>spelling of the word in what to me is a foreign language when I'm looking up 
>a word in a dictionary of my language.
> ---
> To GerardM
> Basically there are two orthographies for English.
> Some might argue the toss about that, I mean for myself as a "Scots" 
>speaker, I know there are some who make a big deal about it being a separate 
>language, but I myself don't know how to spell it properly, and I just think 
>of it as a regional dialect of English like Scouse, Yorkshire, Texan, Kiwi 
>and whatever else - because I would read normal English and pronounce it the 
>same way as Scots - the odd word like "leid" to me is no different than a 
>Yorkshireman saying "summat" for "something" or someone from the southeast 
>USA saying "y'all" - they're just dialect words.
>I can show you texts written in a Yorkshire orthography, but the practical 
>fact is that the overwhelming majority of the text in the modern world is 
>either spelt the English way, or the American way.
> The debate is "huge" in terms of it's implications, because up until now 
>no-one appears to have challenged the idea that American-English has the 
>right to be considered the standard form of English. It's patently obvious 
>it's a dialect, with it's own orthography and it's simply wrong for the 
>headword in English to be written in a dialect of English in a dialectal 
>orthography and presented as the standard form, when it's not.
>  
>
Hoi,
I would not consider either variation of English to be more or less 
important/relevant. What I consider is practical; how does it impact 
including this content in Ultimate Wiktionary.. Here we have a need to 
identify a word as either EE or AE or ?E and the question is how to do this.

It is up to the Wiktionary comunity how they want to have this. They can 
either have it with descriptions in definitions and etymologies spelled 
in one of the used orthographies or it can be considered not to be too 
important and it can be either.
Thanks,
    GerardM