Hi Slomox,
I find it interesting that you refer to the Sass orthography, when Heiko recently reverted changes by Reinhart Hahn to attempt to bring a page into accordance with the Sass orthography.
"Der neue Sass" makes a few important phonetic distinctions that you guys don't make. When Ron added them, as well as fixing you guys' poor grammar, his changes were reverted by HeikoEvermann.
Re running down admins... Slomox, both you and HeikoEvermann state very clearly that your native language is Hochdeutsch, not Platt. Important decisions such as orthography shouldn't be made by second-language speakers only, and neither should the entire interface be translated and thousands of articles created mostly by second-language speakers (look at na: for a worst-case scenario; ga: still has problems because much of its initial content, and the user interface, was written in poor Irish by a second-language speaker).
Re Platt being the same as Low Saxon... this is laughable at best. "Platt" includes East Low German, as well as real actual Low Saxon. You guys actually note this on your mainpage, so it's strange that you deny it here.
The solution to this problem as I see it: Fix the grammatical problems with nds.wiki which are the result of contributor incompetency. Add nessecary orthographic distinctions. Introduce orthographic converter based on the model I constructed.
And then, after this, there needs to be a recognition that nds.wiki at the current time can only be for Northern and Western Low Saxon, ie excluding Plautdietsch, Westphaelsch, Eastphaelsch... otherwise we open the Pandora's box of incomprehensibility.
Mark
On 10/07/05, wiki@marcusbuck.org wiki@marcusbuck.org wrote:
Hello.
I find it a bit weird, that you discuss about nds.wikipedia on the mailing list and not even post a message on nds.wikipedia. I found this discussion by chance after some people came into the wiki making changes without knowing really what they do.
Some people here are running down admin and other users of nds.wikipedia, which are the only people really active on that wiki for long time. They are engaged on making it a better usable resource in Low Saxon language and we introduced a common orthography based on the wordbook by Johannes Sass to make it consistent so you don't have to know all the regional variants of the language, which are for some cases mutually unintelligible. The orthography by Sass is based on the most widely used dialect, that is also mostly used when spoken in supra-regional media.
I think some people discussing here are speaking out of their ivory tower and don't know what is really going on at the "base". I see some Dutch engaged here. Let me say: Dutch variant of Low Saxon is not understandable for most of German Low Saxon speakers (Sure, they are understandable near the border). Some state the wiki is in Plattdüütsch rather than Low Saxon. This is so true as it is not true. Plattdüütsch is the most important variant of Low Saxon (Low Saxon is an academic classification) and the common name of the language in Germany. If no Dutch contribute it is no wonder, when the wikipedia is more and more germanized (or shall the German learn Dutch and Nedersaksisch to balance the Dutch contribution deficits?)
You don't need all your fingers to count all regular contributors to the wiki. Why do so much people argue here about the content of the wiki and nobody of the people, who obviously know so much about the language, contributes?
I'm a little bit angry because of the behaviour of some.
--~~~~ Greets, Slomox
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