Hello all,
I'm on a streak now. Very relevant YouTube link
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgzGwKwLmgM>.
I reached out Dr. Yuan-chao Tung, who is the director of the Center for
Indigenous Studies at National Taiwan University in order to help find
someone who can verify the language for the Sakizaya Wikipedia [1]. He
referred me to an Austronesian languages expert who basically said that it
would be difficult to find an *independent* expert because all of the
scholars who are experts in Sakizaya are already contributors to it! That's
more than good enough of a verification for me. :-)
Their activity [2] has been steady for a long time, with plenty of
contributors. The localization [3] is done for the most used messages (they
have actually translated around *6,000 MediaWiki messages* – 10 times
what's required! MediaWiki core is 74 % finished, and several extensions
are translated as well). Note that their language code, [szy], is very new
– it was approved in January of this year. Before that, they used the
language code [ais], which has now been deprecated in ISO 639. It's a long
story. Until today [4] the language code [ais] was still used for Sakizaya
in MediaWiki, but me and Nikerabbit (I did the easy parts, Nikerabbit the
hard parts) changed it to the correct [szy].
Something to celebrate about this is that it will be the first Wikipedia in
an indigenous language of Taiwan. Taiwan is considered the birthplace of
the Austronesian language family, and it is there that the variety of
Austronesian languages is greatest – out the primary branches of
Austronesian languages, all but one (the Malayo-Polynesian languages) are
spoken exclusively in Taiwan. So this will be a nice extension of
Wikimedia's language diversity.
Another interesting thing about this language is that it doesn't seem to
use capital letters at the start of sentences, but only in proper nouns.
This will be the second language Wikipedia (after Lojban) to need to have
the $wgCapitalLinks setting set to 'false'. :-)
[1]
https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/szy
[2]
https://tools.wmflabs.org/meta/catanalysis/index.php?cat=0&title=Wp/szy…
[3]
https://tools.wmflabs.org/robin/?tool=codelookup&code=szy
[4]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T174601
--
mvh
Jon Harald Søby