Kaixo!
On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 06:29:05PM -0500, Stephen Forrest wrote:
On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 15:37:37 -0700, Mark Williamson
<node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As has been noted before, we already have an
Alemannic Wikipedia, and
so far all SD speakers seem to have been attracted to it, whereas BSD
(not the OS) seems to have received a different reaction.
I'm not sure I understand you.
He says that only people from Basel want their own idiosyncrasic
wikipedia, and that all other Alemannic speakers agree to put their
efforts in common (I don't know how true that is, however).
Baseldytsch *is* Schwytzerdütsch (Swiss-German).
Well, is it or not?
You keep telling how extremely different it is.
but each is highly distinct in pronunciation and
orthography,
Pronunciation and orthography are not major features of a language
(pronunciation and orthography change a lot over time, and in case of
languages with not yet normalized writting form, orthography changes
from place to place, and even from people to people, yet the
language is the same).
What is a feature of a language is it grammar and lexicon.
So, is Baseldytsch different in grammar and vocabulary from what is
used in Alemannic as to require a different Wikipedia?
Or are the differences simply on the orthographic conventions used?
(A similar problem exists with Walloon language, if you write it
phonetically, at least 4 major orthographies exist (with dozens of small
variants for each one of them) to match the pronunciation differences;
however, as it is the same language, a common orthography has been
developped recently (in the 1995-2000) and that is what is used in the
Walloon Wikipedia, as that is the only way to have consistency for a
work done by multiple people from different places and different
accents)
According to the requester on [[meta:Request for new
language]],
"Baseldytsch is like other swiss dialects extremely different from the
"language" used on the Alemannic Wikipedia."
If this is correct, then it isn't true, as you say, that
Schwytzerdütsch speakers have been attracted to the Alemannic
wikipedia.
Why not?
"Distinctiveness" is often a very subjective thing.
I can perfectly believe that people from a big city are less inclined to
change their orthographic habitudes to adapt to a broader system than
people from smaller places.
I would guess that most of the language used to this
point
is Elsässisch, since that's what that wikipedia started as.
I would guess exactly the opposite.
(it may even be possible that no Elsässisch is left, and that all old
articles have been converted to a common orthography yet).
The question is, is it reasonable to grant a wikipedia
to every
Alemannic dialect? Probably this discussion should involve whoever
decided to generalize Elsässisch to Alemannic, since we can't really
call it an 'Alemannic' wikipedia if it's mostly Elsässisch and each
Alemannic dialect wants its own namespace.
That is indeed the question.
As building an encyclopedia is a *VERY BIG* task, it would be advisable
not to divert efforts, imho; so there should only be one Wikipedia
per language, not per dialect.
Note that some define themselves as different languages while,
linguistically, they are not; but they feel as different enough; but
that doesn't seem the case here.
So, imho, as long as speakers of "Baseldytsch" define themselves as
speakers of Alemannic, then a separate Wikipedia should not be created;
only if speakers of Baseldytsch claim that they don't speak Alemannic
but a different *language* should a separate Wikipedia be created.
--
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga
http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]