(Sorry to send 3 messages in rapid succession, but I have something I'd like to add, again).
I think the same goes for Indonesian and Malay, which are quite obviously the same language. Currently, both the Malay and the Indonesian WPs are quite large. Imagine, Indonesians, Malaysians, Singaporeans, how much larger it could be if these two were merged?
As you can find out on the English WP, differences between Malay and Indonesian are comparable to differences between US and UK English: some minor terminological differences, and a few minor orthographic differences, none of which prevents them from being over 99% mutually comprehensible with little to no difficulty.
As a test, I copied an article from the Indonesian WP into MS Word and used the Malay spellcheck on it... it told me all words were spelt correctly. Then, I took an article from the Malay WP, and spellcheck'd it with Indonesian spellcheck in MS Word, and got the same result: perfect spelling.
These were not short articles.
Last time I inquired about a merger of Malay and Indonesian WPs, the answer I got was that someone (don't remember who) thinks it's better separate. Again it seems to me to be more a case of politics than real linguistics.
Mark
On 09/10/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Ahh, and I'd like to add a little bit of advice for Elephantus:
Rather than letting politics blind you, why not try to look at things from the point of view of "What will be best for the Wikipedia in my language?". I think that the answer to this, is a merger of these 3 Wikipedias, because it will result in a much larger workforce and much more power and capability.
Currently, Croatian WP has just over 10000 articles, Serbian WP has just over 14000 articles, and Bosnian WP has almost 5000 articles. Now, imagine, if all people from all 3 Wikipedias had been working together from the start, maybe we'd have 30000 articles in a unified Serbocroatian WP already.
Mark
On 09/10/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Well, Elephantus apparently hasn't been monitoring the growth of the Serbocroatian WP.
The top contributors recently are:
OC Ripper, Dejvid, Myself, Pokrajac, Belirac, anonymous user.
Now, of all these people, the ONLY ONE who is not a native speaker is ME.
Now, if anybody wants to accuse me of spelling and grammatical errors, there are a number of other people they should blame first: 1) The people who wrote the original article, since I have only been copying articles from other Wikipedias; 2) The people who wrote the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian spellcheckers for MS Word since I often use them to make sure the source-article has no glaring errors.
Now, perhaps you're referring to the fact that the majority of the articles I copy are using Ekavski, which is not used in Croatia. Well, as a form of Serbocroatian, it would hardly be considered incorrect. To be fair, some of the articles I make use Ijekavski, and a couple dozen use a mix of the two. Terms which are obviously split between Serbia and Croatia, like Spanija/Spanjolska (spain), or Jevreju/Hebreju (jewish person), I try to be careful with as well.
As regards your wish to lock the Serbocroatian WP:
According to you, Serbocroatian was an artificial political construct. That is true to a certain extent, but it is undeniable that Stokavian dialects of Croatian, and all dialects of Bosnian and Serbian are all over 99% mutually intelligible when spoken, but especially when written.
These are the only "languages" for which that is the case, with the exception of Moldovan and Romanian, and Dari and Farsi (The Moldovan WP redirects users wanting content in Latin alphabet to the Romanian WP, the Farsi WP includes Dari as well).
I recall something about a Croatian law requiring all Serbian movies to be subtitled (or vice-versa?). Rather than reacting with nationalistic pride when seeing these subtitles for a language that is basically identical to their own, moviegoers generally laughed at the attempts of "translation".
Now, if the majority of Croatian WPdians do not want a united Wikipedia, that's fine. I think it should be everybody's choice. If you want to work at the Croatian WP and keep pretending that your language is somehow extremely differentiated from Serbian and Bosnian (and the emerging Montenegrin), I have no problem with that, although I think it is counter-constructive.
Already, there are Croatians at the SH.wiki, I think...
Now, perhaps a good example is Macedonian.
Although Macedonian (FYROM, that is, just so we don't offend any Greeks) is very similar to Serbo-Croatian, and it would take little effort to make a unified language, since Macedonian is a bit further from Serbocroatian, I don't hold a hope of Macedonian WP being united to Serbocroatian WP.
With Croatian, it seems that people try hard to make it a different language from Serbian, but it isn't really except in a sociolinguistic sense (and even then, not all Croatians perpetuate the idea of a separate Croatian language). Macedonian, on the other hand, has truly different words and spellings, rather than artificial divisions created by linguists for political purposes.
Mark
On 09/10/05, Arbeo M arbeo_m@yahoo.de wrote:
Hi Elephantus!
Let me just try to answer a few of your points here:
The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was reopened in June after a request from a single user of the Serbian Wikipedia -
[[sr:User:Покрајац|Pokrajac]].
This was not announced beforehand in any way on the three Wikipedias that are most affected by this issue – Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, there was no public discussion or a vote. The idea was supported here by people who weren't part of the growing communities of the three Wikipedias.
Generally speaking, only opening all-new Wikipedias requires public discussion, prior announcement, voting or the like. Reopening a previously locked wiki is not a comparable process. Locking a wiki is only a temporary measure because of some specific reason, e. g. vandalism and it can be upheld only as long as that reason persists to exist. SH had been locked because of inactivity. As soon as there were people willing to edit it there was no alternative but to unlock it.
The "phenomenal growth" (1,019 articles) of the Serbo-Croatian is mostly a result of people (some of them with little or no knowledge of the three languages) copy-pasting articles from Serbian (converting those to Latin alphabet), Croatian or Bosnian Wikipedias.
I wasn't aware that most of the editing at SH is done by non-native speakers. Hmm ... you have any idea were they come from? But there is one fact that one must admit: the Wikipedia is active now, no matter where that activity comes from.
My question is this: Why aren't Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian Wikipedias provided the same treatment as e.g. Danish and Bokmal (Norwegian) which are also mutually intelligible in the written form? There is no common Dano-Bokmal Wikipedia with well-wishing but mostly misguided non-native- speakers copying articles to it.
Well, this type of comparison is always a little bold. But I'm getting your point. I guess the main reason is because a "Dano-Bokmal" WP was never requested by anyone. Interestingly though, there seems to be some kind of common Scandinavian project going on.
Serbo-Croatian has been dead as a political collection of standard languages for 15 years now (30 years in Croatia), it is slowly disappearing, except as a historical footnote
I must admit I'm not competent to evaluate the current situation of Serbo-Croatian and it's future is even harder to predict. All I can see is that there seems to be some kind of interest in it here at WP (actually, even more than in 130 other languages).
I'd like to propose a relocking of this Wikipedia
I am well aware that the whole situation is not perfectly ideal yet. But all things considered, I think the current solution is a fairly just and neutral one. There is a minority that wishes to write in Serbo-Croatian. Even if you don't like their standpoint, why exclude them? "Live and let live!"
or at least a name change (Serbian - Latin, as a temporary bridge to the Latin conversion system now being tested for the Serbian Wikipedia).
As a total outsider I could imagine that naming it "Serbian-Latin" would not really be helpful because that name makes reference to one nation and one ethnicity exclusively. "Yugoslav(ian)" has just crossed my mind - would that be an option?
Best regards,
Arbeo
P.S.: My congratulations for your 10,000th article at hr!
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