Hi Gerard,
Signed languages are completely independent systems, and are separate languages from spoken languages, different in grammar, syntax, and the like. Unfortunately, there is no universally-agreed-upon method for transcribing signed languages.
There are a few possibilities here.
1) Choose a particular transcription system. Top of the list would be Stokoe, and Sutton Sign Writing; HamNoSys is also possible but is mostly used by linguists while the other two are used more widely by people who use it as their everyday language.
2) Use multimedia. We can upload videos of people signing a particular word. Note that some signed languages also have conjugations and inflections. However, this will leave a problem of headwords -- how do you look up a word in a signed language? Which leads to the third option,
3) Introduce our own notation system. This is impractical and unlikely to work well. I suggest that instead, we adopt HamNoSys for lookup purposes, although it is not represented by Unicode, we can try an ASCII implementation.
Regarding "dialects" of Chinese and Arabic, that is very simple. Treat them as separate languages. While certainly most often people write in "Standard Arabic" or "Standard Chinese", it is also possible to write in the local vernacular. This tends to be done more with Arabic, but is possible with either. With Chinese, you only see it very often with Cantonese, other varieties are occasionally but you are more likely to find a Bible translation in them than a newspaper.
I hope very much that you will not restrict languages to those which appear on the ISO 639-3 list. It has many shortcomings and is very, very, very disappointing -- it would not allow for separate entries for Yavapai, Hualapai, and Havasupai (it has only one code for them all), even though they are very much different languages, and it by no means includes all the languages of the world. It also separates between Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian Arabic, when they're really nearly identical.
Mark
On 20/07/05, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Timwi wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
I would welcome your comments about the ERD that I posted here http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:ERD.jpg
Looks interesting, but is extremely bare. It would do well with a bit of documentation. For much of it, the purpose isn't entirely clear. I'm particularly confused as to why "Language", "Word" and "Meaning" are each duplicated.
Hoi, There is some documentation here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_data_design and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_decisions_on_its_usage here. The duplication reflects that there is at least one table that has two relations to the same table. Language refers to itself for dialects, Word refers through Conju/Decli (conjucation or declinations) to a headword and derived words, Meaning is related through "Relations" this is to allow for thesaurus like structures.
One reason why it is not as much documented as I would like is, because I am still working on the structure. At this moment I am thinking hard on how to include signed languages and the spoken dialects of the Chinese and Arabic written language.
Thanks, GerardM _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l