[Gerard Meijssen (Re: [Wiktionary-l] English orthographies) writes:]
Jim Breen wrote:
Jack & Naree wrote:
An American-English dictionary, and a (Commonwealth) English Dictionary then. Otherwise, it has to be all listed as seperate entries.
Um. What about words that are spelled differently within and between Commonwealth countries? Or words like accoutrement/accouterment which are spelled differently within the US?
Of course they shouldn't be separate entries, but Gerard's database design seems to be dicating that one.
The fact that words are spelled differently needs to be addressed in one way or the other.
Absolutely.
Even in old style wiktionary there needs to be something both at the accoutrement and the accouterment article in order to make them "findable".
Agreed.
The English Wiktionary nowadays frowns on the use of redirects so it is more substantial than that.
Yes, in fact it is the frowning on redirects that led me to looking at the UW proposals. I was looking at the Wiktionary structure to see if it would be a suitable environment for my Japanese-Multilingual dictionary database. I ran into a number of problems, one of which was the "no redirects" policy, and someone suggested I look at UW.
In itself there is no value added to the fact that it has its own record in the tables Expression and Word. The words can be connected through SynTrans to the same meaning. They can be related through Relation to say that they are alternative ways of spelling.
Consequently, there is nothing special in having both accoutrement and accouterment exist within the database. The thing that is relevant is that they are both shown to the user of the dictionary who looks up either Expression.
Absolutely.
When they are alternate spellings within the same Language, they will be seen as such. So as far as I am concerned, this seems to me to be much ado about nothing.
Provided: (a) the essential information (senses, POS, etymology, etc.) only has to be entered once, and remains the same for all the spelling and orthographical variants; (b) the user, on entering either form, gets the one collection of information which shows all the alternative forms of the word, then I really have no objection. I can't understand why they are in different database records, and in the case of my own JMdict (XML) they aren't, but then I don't use SynTrans, etc.
Frankly I favour the first option, because to non-American-English speakers, the American spellings are simply misspellings.
Well that's news to this non-American-English speaker 8-)} I don't regard them as "misspellings" at all. Just different.
I would regard all accepted words as Expressions. In order to know more about an expression, you have to add more information to enrich the experience. It will be for instance be possible to date the first accepted use of the later spelling.
That's useful (and very often difficult to establish).
The etymology is also different.
Not really. I don't know about the languages I don't speak (i.e. everything apart from English, Japanese, French and a little Latin), but in general the spelling has little or nothing to do with the etymology.
Then again, this may not be of interest to you but it is there for those who find it of interest.
As a lexicographer I am always interested in etymology. I am a bit mystified by the view that it is somehow coupled to spelling. In the languages I know, spelling used to be highly fluid and individualistic, and has only recently been pinned down into recognized norms. In the case of English, the fact that there are two "schools" of spelling (which only affect a minority of words) is largely the result of the simplifications made and promulgated by one man: Noah Webster. Interesting indeed, but nothing to do with etymology.
Cheers
Jim