On Fri, 03 Dec 2004 17:06:59 -0700, Muke Tever muke@frath.net wrote:
On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 16:54:24 -0600, Ian Monroe ian.monroe@gmail.com wrote:
Well, I think the elitist 19th-century dictionaries serve as a poor example of what Wiktionary should be about.
No dictionary has been perfect yet. But just because some areas are flawed doesn't mean we can't learn from what good points they may have.
You seemed to be making the point that the elitism of the early dictionaries served a good purpose (they made spelling standard, a Good Thing indeed) and that Wiktionary has something to learn from this ("to suggest usage"), which I disagree with. Maybe I misread your point.
Then English Wiktionary has a Sanskrit entry for [[surfboard]] , [[तरंगफलक]], and as you noted in the discussion of it, it does create a problem because its really hard to say whether someone just decided thats how surfboard would be spelt or if there's some Hindu cleric who has been praying for तरंगफलक's for years.
It doesn't have to be about obscure clerics. Sanskrit may be a dead language like Latin, but as I understand it it didn't experienced a decline in use like Latin did starting from about the fifteenth century (see [[Humanist Latin]]). Sanskrit, according to [[Sanskrit]], is still commonly being taught and apparently is used by about four million people.
Well, that does make it much more likely that तरंगफलक is a real word if Sanskrit is being spoken. Kind of like the Irish learning Irish again.
I don't think its appropriate for contributors to Wiktionary totranslate words into languages that don't have a word for it already,thats not our place IMO. Granted, Wikipedia might have to from timeto time, but they have different goals.
Well, the neologism template on la: (Latin is a bad example, I know, but the only one I am involved with) has a call for older, better, and attested forms of words. This is important mainly because the Latin most people know is Classical Latin, but the language has been in use for a long time since then, and a lot of more modern things have actually been written about and subsequently forgotten. My hope is that wiktionary can become a vehicle for these things to be found again.
I could give an example, I guess. A user on la:wikt created [[Honsium]] for the Japanese island "Honshu", based on the wikipedia entry. Now, in general, the quality of Latin on the Wikipedia is very bad, so it's not admissible as a source and it gets the neologism template.
Afterwards another user comes by with an attestation in a Latin reference work from 1977 (Carolus Egger's _Lexicon Nominum Locorum_) where it is given as "Honsua", to which the page was moved and now currently stands, without the neologism template.
Sometimes we can do better. [[Sicocum]] ("Shikoku") was also created. The 1977 source lists it as "Sicocus" (feminine). However, we were able to go back even further, and found a 1589 source speaking of Xicocum (neuter; with a Spanish value of x, i.e. /S/, in modern spelling better Sicocum), so it gets to stay where it is. (It doesn't list Honshu by anything approximating the modern name, though. It named the island Meacum, after Kyoto.)
I know this is a ... special situation. This language has no native speakers left, so its compilation depends entirely on research. We don't _know_ if we have the words, so we put things down tentatively. Other language Wiktionaries have the benefit of native speaker intuition as well, so this system may not work as well there.
*Muke!
I think a Wiktionary user should not sit down with a phoentic guide and decide how to spell a word. Granted, I don't work on any classical languages so I guess its really up to the folks that do to make the call, and it should be the policy of en.wikt as well regarding those languages.
Ian