On 19/09/05, James R. Johnson modean52@comcast.net wrote:
But the issue is (to me, at least), that I can understand you, even if you spell funny (honour, colour, etc.) and have funny words (lift, pavement instead of elevator and sidewalk). And do understand that I'm being slightly sarcastic here, please don't rant-reply. Americans have some spellings, English have some spellings, but we can understand each other, except when we use our dialect-specific words. I don't really think it appropriate to dialectualize the wikipedia unless there's mutual unintelligibility (as in the Frisian case, I think it was).
And even with those dialect-specific words, there *are* points of absolute mutual unintelligibility - table as a verb, what pavement is, what a thong is - but we handle them just fine in wiki, by common-sense disambiguation. For example -
[[Table (verb)]] discusses both instances, though I suspect we might need to make sure that where possible we use different terminology in actual articles.
[[Pavement]] directs to [[Pavement (disambiguation)]], which links to both, though it's not a very clear disambig notice - if you've not encountered the word "sidewalk" before you'd be forgiven for thinking the UKian use would be under [[Pavement (roads)]]. Will rewrite that later on.
[[Thong]] doesn't even bother mentioning dialects of English, just points to various meanings.