Hello Lars A. & everyone else, This posting has two main parts: First, a reply to your recent posting quoted below; and then a summary of my arguments in light of, amongst others, your and Mark Williamson's recent postings; and finally a modified suggestion with the following main points: 1) Renaming to Norsk (bokmål) and Norsk (nynorsk) 2) Moving Norsk (bokmål) to nb:, while KEEPING NO: as an automatic ("shadow") redirect to nb: -- thus parallelling Danish, with dk:> da:, keeping full continuity through keeping the two current codes; and making cooperation with nn: politically easier through discrete use of the domain no:. ===== REPLY ===== You wrote: I will get back to this further down. What you write seems to be pretty much in agreement with what Mark wrote... I recognise the factual situation from both descriptions -- with yours maybe describing/articulating the "hatred" from Bokmål users against Nynorsk in more local terms (?) I presume you mean "400-year-night", not "4000-year-night" :) Aren't Mr. Aasens "Norske Folkesprog" as well as the mid-19th Century Danish used in Norway both quite far removed from our Nynorsk and Bokmål...? Since the 1840s, both Nynorsk (then called Det norske Folkesprog by Ivar Aasen, later coined Landsmaal, but also actually known as Bokmaal (!)) and Bokmål (then near-identical with Danish, later known in its historically increasingly norvagised form as Rigsmaal and Riksmål) have changed very much. Today's mainstream Nynorsk most closely resembles dialects in relatively "moderate" dialect areas like Lofoten, Vesterålen, eastern parts of Telemark, parts of Vestfold and Oppland (including Toten). Today's mainstream Bokmål is also quite different from the Danish used in Norway in the mid-1800s, and lies closest to the dialects of middle-class and upper-class people in the cities of SE Norway -- esp. Oslo and Drammen. It is true that Nynorsk is currently most commonly used in Sogn og Fjordane and Møre og Romsdal. However, it is also used to varying degrees most other places in Norway, and Norwegian literature abounds with authors from both Bokmål and Nynorsk. You wrote about Mark's posting: *Paints "POV" in huge red letters over Williamsons mail*. I do not agree that Mark is unprecise or skewed enough in his writing to warrant such an outburst. Whereas I personally think that one mainly Bokmål Wikipedia is more constructive than two, When some of us mention that a large proportion of Norwegians speak a dialect that is closer to Nynorsk than Bokmål, we are of course not talking about "some nynorsk words, like -a endings" (that would include, in fact, a rather large proportion of Oslo's population), but of dialects which show, *predominantly*, traits that are closer to the continuum if Nynorsk morphology than Bokmål. Such traits include, amongst others: - different plurals for masculine nouns (-a(r) or -æ(r), occasionally -ø(r)), feminine nouns (either merged -e(r) or, like in Swedish -e(r)/-o(r) depending on the class of each noun) and neutral nouns (mainly -) as opposed to a generic plural in Bokmål (-er, with neutral nouns varying between - and -er) - forms of personal pronouns that are closer to Nynorsk (such as e(g), æ(g) rather than je(g) = I; ho, hu rather than hun (she); dykk(~), dekk(~), dokk(e(r)) rather than dere = you (pl., accusative); etc.) - forms of verbs that are closer to Nynorsk (such as a higher incident of strong verbs, ablaut and umlaut forms; and, less significantly, -a in past tense of verbs were stylistically mainstream Bokmål has -et) Of secondary importance is the vowel system, with Nynorsk tending to have more historical vowels and fewer secondary vowels than Bokmål. The presence of many vowels is popularly viewed as "the" characteristic of Nynorsk -- but this trait is actually of less use in this connection. Forms that are permitted but in practice deprecated in Bokmål include: -a in past tense of certain verbs; -a as definite article in plural of neutral gender nouns; You pointed out that some -a endings are permitted in Bokmål. You did not, however, mention that these forms tend to be criticised, or even "corrected" away in practice -- because many (the majority?) of Bokmål users find them to be stylistically inappropriate. I agree that that could be a risk, and therefore I believe that such a split *should be avoided at any reasonable cost*. I believe that once there is a solution that "everyone" agrees on (including, hopefully, the Wikipedia community as a whole) -- which I hope will be an adjustment of the current language-based split rather than a fork within the current no: -- the work of adjusting the language contents of the Bokmål version will be relatively easily accomplished. I for one hereby volunteer to do my share of the job. Even though I seem to have been coined as a Nynorsk user (and even, to my frustration, as a Bokmål hater) by some, I am very interested in The Norsk (nynorsk) vs. Norsk (bokmål) (without capitalisation of nyn. and bokm.) renaming is OK with me. Whether the Norsk (bokmål) Wikipedia actually lies on no: or nb: has, as has been pointed out already, absolutely no significance: The Norsk (bokmål) Wikipedia will be exactly as continuos on nb: as on no:, with absolutely no foreseeable extra work for its admins and other users, other than an optional long-term bot task of going through the various wikipedias and automatically changing all [[no: entrances to [[nb:. Since a change of domain would include a universal redirect from no: to nb: for a relatively long period (in fact, just reversing the current situation, there should be plenty of time to do this. To illustrate the current situation: Please try clicking on this link to the article "Norge" on nb: (Norway) and see what happens... http://nb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norge See? That is how easy the reversal of this would be on the readers! :) ================= SUMMARY OF REPLY: ================= A I think a split of the current no: Wikipedia should be avoided at any reasonable cost. B A move of this Wikipedia to nb: would not lead to any significant extra work for the admins and users on no: C If no: is moved to nb: in accordance with a more precise implementation of the language codes, then no: should be a redirect domain to nb: the way it is today, with the main page as the only exception. D In the event of such a move, bots should be set up to go through the other wikipedias and change all [[no: and [[:no: codes to [[nb: and [[:nb: E It seems that the main argument against having Norsk (bokmål) on nb: is an emotional one rather than practical (since the move would be very easy to implement and would be executed centrally rather than by no: admins) or logical (since no: is the country code and the umbrella language code, whereas nb: is the specific language code for Bokmål, including Riksmål). F Those emotional arguments must be respected, since our long-term goals as an international Wikipedia community would be adversely affected if there were to be unnecessary long-term resentment between the user groups of individual projects. Therefore, my hunch is that we should first try to reach consent about the underlying factors. Here is what I propose that these are: LOCAL UNDERLYING FACTORS - Bokmål as a written language has more users than Nynorsk - Bokmål and Nynorsk are both recognised as official languages in Norway. - Bokmål and Nynorsk are linguistically extremely closely connected with Swedish and Danish. COUNTRY AND LANGUAGE CODES IN A SCANDINAVIAN PERSPECTIVE - The Swedish language Wikipedia, primarily serving people in Sweden and parts of Finland, has the language code sv: rather than the country code se: (which is connected to the use of se: for Northern Sami and sa: for Sanskrit) - The Danish language Wikipedia, primarily serving people in Denmark, has the language code da: rather than the country code dk. There is a redirect from dk: to da: - The Nynorsk language Wikipedia, primarily serving Nynorsk language users in Norway, has the language code nn: - The mainly Bokmål Wikipedia, which started out as a mixed Bokmål/Nynorsk environment with the emphasis on Bokmål (including Riksmål), uses both the country code no: (which, when used as a language code, includes both Bokmål and Nynorsk) and the language code nb: (as a redirect). CURRENT SITUATION ON NO: - The no: Wikipedia is changing its rôle from a generic Bokmål/Nynorsk language wikipedia (albeit with almost exclusively Bokmål contents, as Lars Alvik has pointed out) to a specifically Norsk Bokmål language version. - The new Nynorsk Wikipedia works as an independent project and, while fastly expanding, has not had any significant effect in terms of disrupting the continuity of the no: Wikipedia in general except for there being a bit more activity on the Village Pump page than usual. ========================================== MODIFIED SUGGESTION FOR LONG-TERM SOLUTION ========================================== (This suggestion is based primarily on Lars Alvik's previous suggestion, with modifications/additions based on arguments that have emerged in the debate locally on no: and nn: as well as here on wikipedia-l.) 1) The "Norsk" and "Nynorsk" interwiki names are changed to "Norsk (bokmål)" and "Norsk (nynorsk)" respectively. 2) The "Norsk (nynorsk)" wikipedia uses the language code nn: 3) The "Norsk (bokmål)" wikipedia is moved to the proper language code nb:, with the central Wikipedia developers/admins making sure that the extra workload on the current no: admins is kept to an absolute minimum. (This will in effect (see #4) only be an internal reversal of the two domains already de facto used by the Norsk (bokmål) Wikipedia, thus ensuring maximum continuity.) 4) For reasons of continuity and relative size of community, "Norsk (bokmål)" Wikipedia keeps the domain no:, but for reasons of impreciseness of the term as regards the language situation in Norway, this code will only be used as a redirect of links and URLs with the code to the corresponding nb: page. (Thus parallelling exactly the Danish usage of dk: and da:) 5) The communities on nn: and nb: will commit themselves to implementing the solution locally, with a special emphasis on information about and promotion of the other Wikipedia on the "Main" and "Latest edits" page; and also, to the extent possible, through putting the interwiki link to the other language first in the list of links in each article. 6) A specific technical solution that has been brought up is the splitting of the "Donations" link into a locally wikipedia-wide universal link to the other Wikipedia of the two. This solution, while admittedly clogging up the quick navigations field slightly, may have positive effects for the local cooperation, and should therefore be reciprocally applied to the nn: and nb: wikipedias. 7) In the interest of strengthening the Scandinavian Wikipedia community, I suggest to implement points 5) and 6) also to sv: and da:, thus facilitating quick navigation between these wikipedias, effectively creating a half-integrated article pool of about 83,000 articles (on 14 Nov. at ca 7 AM GMT) and an incitement for each of the four Scandinavian communities to cooperate and expand. 8) Work towards more integrated multilingual wikipedias through making the Scandinavian wikipedias a test project for the development of an interlingual search function limited to a specific pool of wikipedias, where searches and no-hit events lead to a search within the pre-defined pool of closely related languages. For Scandinavian, this would include, in order of community size, sv:, da:, nb:, and nn:. -Olve ___________________ Olve Utne http://utne.nvg.org