On 02/04/2008, James Robert Johnson modean52@comcast.net wrote:
Hey everyone,
I usually troll on here, reading, but not participating in
discussions, but I wanted to ask something. Old English is a dead language, yet has a living Wikipedia. For this wiki, we essentially use Early West Saxon, but the original language never had a single standard spelling. What does everyone think about using a standardized spelling for this language, as used in the Clark Hall dictionary of Anglo Saxon? I welcome any comments.
If we're going to have an Old English Wikipedia, some level of standardisation is probably required (although it's not essential to always spell words the same - see the modern English Wikipedia's policy on British English vs American English). However, such a standardisation is inherently very difficult to achieve, which is one of the reasons we don't create Wikipedia's for extinct languages any more.
I wouldn't dedicated too much effort to the Old English Wikipedia if I were you. Who's going to read it? You're just producing learning aids for people learning the language, you're not really creating an encyclopaedia.