How amusing!
For a language like Cherokee then (agglutinative), it seems appropriate to not use transliteration.
Thinking about agglutinative languages, do you know what the Japanese Wikipedia is called (I would imagine that it too avoids transliteration).
On 12/07/06, Jeffrey V. Merkey jmerkey@wolfmountaingroup.com wrote:
Oldak Quill wrote:
Most Wikimedia projects don't translate "Wikipedia", "Wiktionary", and "Wikimedia", they transliterate them. Even non-Latin alphabets do this: Russian Wikipedia is called "Википедию" which transliterates as Ve-I-Ka-I-Pe-Ye-De-I-Ya (those are the names of the letters, at least). Does Cherokee have some kind of formal transliteration system?
On 12/07/06, Jeffrey V. Merkey jmerkey@wolfmountaingroup.com wrote:
The name should be:
ᏗᎪᏪᎵ ᎦᏣᏄᎳ
(digoweli gatsanula) "the books = pedia " " that are fast = wiki "
to match the actual meanings of the words "wiki" and "pedia".
The current name of the site, while catchy, is not accurate for the language, and was synthesized.
Just a suggestion...
Jeff _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Yes. it does have one for words like this, but taking potshots at the name can create something you do not intend.
Let's look at it:
Wi-gi-que-di-ya
wi - (negative imperfect past tense) gi - to combine que - incomplete verb root about an animal di - plural for a non living object ya - broad area of concern (means "pertains to or covers a broad area or topic)
Not to mention "di" is always at the start of a pural word, "gi" is a modifier always at the end of a word, que isn't a word at all, and "wi" is a tense modifer always at the end of word.
Translation:
"Something very negative in the past was put together for (??? - something that resembles a contraction of the word nesgi which means keep your hands off of it) , and there were a bunch of them (di) that dwell in a large area.
In other words, its current name implies "negative place to keep your hands off of and there's a whole bunch of us here".
Based on the edit history of the site, seems to have been the course followed. Perhaps we should change its name?
Jeff
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l