I take this theme up since it is not only a Ultimate Wiktionary problem ... it is an actual problem for many minor languages.
When there are several possibilities to write a word within a language these should be treated on an equal level. No-one may ever discriminate one of the possible spellings. The important thing is that if these different spellings can be attributed to a ceratain "branch" it should be done. Those who cannot be classified just receive the general language classification. Gerard will be able to explain this better I suppose, but bein on his way to wikimania I am not so sure if he has time to explain.
Anyway: I am a translator for EN-DE and IT-DE now we have a pretty weird situation with German. There was a spelling reform that in a first place was adopted by all federal states and this year in autumn the new spelling should have become the only valid one... now in Germany these decisions are not taken centrally by the federal government in Berlin, but by the ministries for education and culture of the single federal states. Some of these federal states, among them Bavaria, will not accept the deadline of this year in autumn, but accept old and new writing. It is a funny situation for my job, since it could mean that a customer tells you that he wants the old spelling or the new spelling depending on where he lives and what he prefers or in most cases they will not even bother how things are written, since many don't even know the new spelling rules ... it is really a strange situation: imagine someone in Bavaria translates a text - legally he/she may use whatever ortography he/she likes - if the customer lives in a state where the old ortography is not valid anymore this can lead to a bad surprise.
But let's talk about minor languages. We have some difficulties on the nds wiktionary - people think that the only way to write correct is following the Sass ortography. Some days ago I had a longer telephone conversation with one of the directors of the Institut für niederdeutsche Sprache (institute for nds) - he explained that there are at least six different acknowledged ways of writing nds and if we go to details 200 to 400 ways of writing (including also dictionaries from around 1920 etc.) can be defined - so accepting only one way of writing is a discrimination to my opinion. They all need to be accepted - the important thing is that there is a distinction from one to the other. How we could achieve this - in the actual wiktionary signing all non classified words just with nds. Words that can be classified receive nds-ABC, nds-DEF, nds-SASS, nds-xyz. So not only the single term is to be classified, but also the definition (if possible) - if it is not classified there's simply no reference to a certain class.
We have a similar situation for Sicilian - it can be subdivided at least into the different provinces, but even more detailed if one wants. The stange thing is: there never was any discrimination, never any struggle, some discussions, yes, but no-one ever tried to impose "one possibility of writing a word" as the ultimate one.
Now the next problem is: if we follow the wiki-way and it comes to a vote: if people who are convinced that ABC is the only way of possible writing start up with a project and after some time create the vote they all normally vote for that writing, but is there a real majority? What if there are institutions that know more about that and these are just not being considered since people are tooooo fond of one way of writing, don't think about democracy and don't think about the damage they would do to their own language an culture excluding all other possibilities?
What happens to people who would like to contribute if a two huge ressources are starting to be non-democratic?
What happens to the language of a country/region if only one way of spelling is considered and all the otheres are discriminated?
What happens to the culture in this case?
Even if many will not agree, I am convinced that this situation can be compared to some african languages where culture is being lost since people don't study in their own language, but only in a foreign language. Language transmits culture, language transmits feelings and so much more ... it is not possible to exclude existing language (or better spelling) to favour a particular one only because that is the beloved one for some people.
Going back to UW: for us every spelling that is correct has its right "to live" - and so it will be there. If there are more possibilities: you will find them - no discrimination. UW is there not only for the big languages - I see it as a very particular chance for minority languages since using it at a certain stage we will be able to create even a papiamento-zulu glossary - something no editor would ever think about. Something that will make the culture of many of those small cultural groups live on.
Ultimate Wiktionary maybe is a particular name - maybe with another name there would have been less problems ;-) but be sure: it is only a name - it came out in a conversation, since for some language combinations it will really be the ultimate solution since otherwise it would have been very likely that some languages where we now only have approx. 100 terms would never have had the possibility to have an own place to grow and cultivate their glossaries.
Often there were loads of discussions with colleagues, people involved in the localisation and language industry, institutions and whatever ... we did not just say: let's do it in some way - this "let's do it in some way that we do not need to do the same work over and over again" for me started on 31 august 2004 - almost a year now. Before that I already worked on finding a solution for a glossary repository in many languages - when I found wiktionary I thought: this is near to what I want, but I missed the interchangeability - I could not create a DE-FR combination on the Italian wiktionary ... interwiki-links then were a step ahead, but it still was not what I imagined. And then came that day when I noted the first templates on it.wiktionary.org ... it was the beginning of an amazing adventure - maybe the most incredible one I can imagine for people working with languages. Things went ahead - hours and hours of discussion, of sorting out, of talking with people ... I suppose many of you cannot even imagine what it means to reach almost a dream dreamt by many linguist over and over again - for years and years ... or maybe it would be better to say decades.
We are almost there: this comunity is part of it - isn't that great? Isn't only the thought to be part of a language and culture preserving project that allows completely new results exciting? Many of us (and I am not talking about people working on wiktionary) think so - why do you think so many colleagues answer to a simple mail to a mailing list of translators where I asked for co-operation for Wikimania? Those people know my postings (I often write about wiktionary and ultimate wiktionary - to the lists and on my blog). We are on a right way - it is not an easy way - of course there will be problems to solve, but it will be fun to solve them.
Hmmm ... now this mail became much longer than I really wanted ... it is time to go to bed ... tomorrow I have the last day to finish my translation works and the day after wikimania starts ... and I don't know what expects our team of translators.
Well, I don't write often, but when I start it is hard to stop.
Ciao and have a great time!
Sabine
***** Sabine Cretella Translations IT-DE, EN-DE s.cretella@wordsandmore.it skype:sabinecretella Meetingplace for translators. http://www.wesolveitnet.com
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Hi Sabine, hi everyone,
But let's talk about minor languages. We have some difficulties on the nds wiktionary - people think that the only way to write correct is following the Sass ortography. Some days ago I had a longer telephone conversation with one of the directors of the Institut für niederdeutsche Sprache (institute for nds) - he explained that there are at least six different acknowledged ways of writing nds and if we go to details 200 to 400 ways of writing (including also dictionaries from around 1920 etc.) can be defined - so accepting only one way of writing is a discrimination to my opinion. They all need to be accepted - the important thing is that there is a distinction from one to the other. How we could achieve this - in the actual wiktionary signing all non classified words just with nds. Words that can be classified receive nds-ABC, nds-DEF, nds-SASS, nds-xyz. So not only the single term is to be classified, but also the definition (if possible) - if it is not classified there's simply no reference to a certain class.
This is not a correct representation of the discussion that we had. 1) we said want all Low Saxon entries to be classified as -nds- 2) we said that there should be a possibility to list dialect and spelling variations within one entry. But for that we need a structure that does not break your automatic im-/export to other wiktionarys. Using nds-sass as a main entry will not do it. We want to have a list of frequent other spellings below the nds heading. As far as I remember, this problem has been mentioned in our talk page, but so far there has not been a proposal from your side. I would like to see something like Article: xy -nds- * Meaning * Meaning Variations * xya( Sass, Harte) * xyb (Lindow) * xyc (etc..)
3) we do in fact not want to treat all spelling variations on one level. Minor variations should be clearly marked as such. Low Saxon is in a bad state at the moment and people who want to learn Low Saxon need some kind of guidance about which spelling is common and which is not. Wiktionary is not a means to elevate little used spellings into something official.
4) the main problem is a discussion that we had about a list that you wanted to import. This list is available for us for free, but it contains a lot of doubtful entries. We had offered to go through this list and solve the major problems. (This process is underway. Besides: it could go on faster, if you just sent us the data again in a textformat that does not break special characters, like zipped unicode.) We (the majority on nds.wiktionary.org) are only willing to accept words that conform to some standard. But the list contains lots of entries that (at least to our understanding) do not conform to any standard. They are a very private opinion of the author. (And then this list was mirrored to about 4 other places in the web.) This (to our understanding) does not turn these spellings errors into an accepted spelling. Another thing is that the original author of this list is not available (as you said). This means that we have no chance to discuss the problematic issues with the author. But you now just want to treat this list as a fact. As I said before to Gerard: the wiktionary is not a dump for all the bad spelling that you can find on the web. We are indeed open to different spellings, but for certain forms that we think to be wrong according to all standards, we just want proof that this is indeed a valid and used spelling. A reference in a Low Saxon dictionary (of whatever spelling) would be helpful. Until then, these words will not be imported into nds.wiktionary.org, or at least they will not be imported until there is a general consensus in nds.wiktionary.org about how to deal with the problem.
Kind regards,
Heiko Evermann
I did not talk about our (e-mail) conversation - I talked about a discussion page on wiktionary where from one to the other day I found the note that for definitions Sass ortography has to be used and that without common consensus knowing that there were at least two people who defend all possibilities of writing. http://nds.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Sprache_der_Beitr%C3%A4ge Here Sass is called "Norm" a norm is a "standard", but Sass is no standard, but one way of more possible writings.
The discussion we had privately has nothing to do with that and I'd never take any private discussion to public.
Sorry, I now have to care about wikimania and translations :-)
Ciao, Sabine
Heiko Evermann wrote:
Hi Sabine, hi everyone,
But let's talk about minor languages. We have some difficulties on the nds wiktionary - people think that the only way to write correct is following the Sass ortography. Some days ago I had a longer telephone conversation with one of the directors of the Institut für niederdeutsche Sprache (institute for nds) - he explained that there are at least six different acknowledged ways of writing nds and if we go to details 200 to 400 ways of writing (including also dictionaries from around 1920 etc.) can be defined - so accepting only one way of writing is a discrimination to my opinion. They all need to be accepted - the important thing is that there is a distinction from one to the other. How we could achieve this - in the actual wiktionary signing all non classified words just with nds. Words that can be classified receive nds-ABC, nds-DEF, nds-SASS, nds-xyz. So not only the single term is to be classified, but also the definition (if possible) - if it is not classified there's simply no reference to a certain class.
This is not a correct representation of the discussion that we had.
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spelling. Another thing is that the original author of this list is not available (as you said).
Where ever did I say this? (please send me my mail where I said "the author of this glossary is not available for discussion - maybe I said something like it could be difficult to contact him") The availability of this author is on the internet itself (you can find it where you found the list (and copied lists) of words), but I find it rather weird to include him into a never ending discussion now (as much as I understood from other people there are similar problems with wikipedia - and it is a never ending discussion) for which I don't have any time at this stage. Since he did not only donate nds-de to us I really don't want to start criticising him as he did a lot, also for other languages.
I for myself wait first for facts from the Insitut for Niederdeutsche Sprache (institute for nds) and I wrote that in my last (private) e-mail (I mean that I am waiting for their answer). Further to that I will also wait for some answers of university professors that deal with nds in their courses. (and this might take some time) I am not going to throw any opinions into public without having a basis as at this stage it is not the case doing it. It just leads to impossible situations.
As I already said I don't have time now to answer - I did not take our conversations public and I am not going to follow up any more private discussions in public - I am goin to give the contents of the answers I receive on nds wiktionary where only people interested in nds can read them (or they can ask for having a copy).
The txt-file btw is utf-8 coded, so there are no broken special chars in it - it is just like is (it will not change if I send it zipped) - if you have problems and want an ansi coded file open the wordfiles and save them as txt that's all.
And now I really must think about some organisation work.
Ciao, Sabine
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Hello all,
What with the recent heated debate about nds: while I've been on a (less-than-brilliant) trip to Ghana, I thought I'd talk ramblingly at you fine members of the list for a while.
As we all know, English has a number of standards for spellings, usually termed "British" and "American". What some might not know is that these are not real standards at all; they are just conventions. It's similar in many ways to those parts of the UK constitution termed "conventions": Things are done that way because they always have been, it's tradition - not because it has to be. Ui kan rui' luik dhis in Inglish if ui won'. But that's just the point; I can't write like that in English, and expect to be taken seriously or even to be understood well, even though that's a reasonable go at representing my accent. It's a symptom of an age-old problem for descriptivists. Even if prescriptivist notions might stymy certain aspects of language, they still exist, and are as valid a reason for language change as borrowings or sound changes. They're certainly needed so that a Geordie could talk to a Ga in writing; in speech, they have a damn hard time understanding each other's English.
So, with that in mind, what about Plattdüütsch? There's a large number of conventions, some only accepted by small amounts of people, and there's even the complicating factor of bilingualism - Just what bits of High German do you call borrowings? From what I can see, Sabine and Gerard want to take the descriptivist route and describe all spelling and pronunciation variants on a reasonably-equal footing, and for that, they must be congratulated. It's quite a task to undertake. However, Heiko, who, I take it, is a native speaker of the Sass dialect, wants a bit of space to give students and enthusiasts something to actually learn consistently. Now, let's not be too quick to jump to it being one of those descriptivist-prescriptivist debates. I seriously urge you to listen to Heiko here, he's got a point. Those more common forms should be listed precisely as that, more common forms - They shouldn't quite be on a level pegging, IMHO. Orthography is a real problem, and it'll probably never be fully unified, as the dialects diverge and merge more and the situation gets worse.
To put a bit of perspective on it, allow me to teach you something about Ga orthography. The alphabet is your basic Latin-influenced-by-IPA, like this:
a b d e ɛ f g h i j k l m n ŋ o ɔ p r s t u (v) w y (z)
The consonants I've stuck in brackets are because they're quite uncommon, extant though they are.
The alphabet is phonetic, and there's not really much of a situation with dialects. So, everyone spells everything the same way, right? Well, almost. Take the digraph 'ts'. This is pronounced, consistently, as English 'ch', German 'tsch', etc. But, its voiced companion is 'j'... Usually. You can also write it as 'dz' (as in the family name 'Obadzen') or even as 'dj'. So even here there's room for orthographical preference. Still, that's not quite the end of it.
A tilde (~) placed over a letter indicates nasalisation. My stepfather pronounces nearly all of his vowels this way, in actuality, though he only writes the tilde where it is canonically present. But if you go look at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eny%C9%94 ("enyɔ", two) you will notice there is an alternative form listed, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eny%C9%94%CC%83 ("enyɔ̃"), and it is precisely that.
By now you may be thinking "That's all well and good, but what the hell are you talking about?!". My point is, we can't simplify nds:'s problems to the extent we may like to. It has quite a unique position and we have to represent _every_ aspect of the language, if we can. That doesn't mean merely list every form we can find, it also means we have to state which forms are preferred, most common, where and when. Take "abschreim", supposedly Low Saxon, but presumably in High German orthography, and even High German pronunciation. It's a slang term, right? Slang is very often cross-language; you'll hardly ever hear a Ga saying "buulu" (fool; very, very offensive), but "motherfucker"? They've been exposed to it, and to the younger ones it seems cool to use it, even while speaking Ga for the entire conversation. Do young Low Saxon speakers use "abschreim" while speaking in their native dialect? It's worth thinking about.
So, thanks for reading this far, and I hope some of what I said made sense, and didn't offend anyone.
Wes gesund,
Wytukaze
Hoi, In the discussion on nds, there is one thing that you do not mention and that is rather relevant.to this discussion. Sass is not a dialect, it is an orthography so nobody can claim to speak Sass. I have been told that Lower Saxon has some 200 distinct orthographies. Heiko wants to have a resource for Sass, this has everything to do with the fact that the nds.wikipedia is Sass only. The fact that a great resource is created for this I fully endorse. The problem is about how to treat the non-Sass content. Sabine did get permission to use a resource. She uploaded this list onto the it and the nds wiktionary and was told by Heiko that there were many "errors" in it. It turned out that the words were from many resources, they should represent different orthographies all considered to be nds. Heiko started to change these entries to Sass and remove many entries as well.
At issue is that Sabine informed Heiko and the other people on nds.wiktionary that she is actively persuing research on this list. Words have however been deleted some of them have even been identified as "Missingsch". Now this is something I do not apreciate at all. Words that are only indicated as nds have no clear pedigree and have a limited use. When they have been identified as something specific, they can be attributed to one of the orthographies or even to non nds dialects. When atributed these words make valuable content. This is given the confusion that results from the lack of standardisation in nds not unrealistic. Heiko is aware that Sabine puts real effort in her research and I am disapointed that he has deleted many words regardless.
On a more positive note, Heiko and I are cooperating in creating a template that he will use for uploading a large number of nds-sass content. This will facilitate the inclusion of the nds-wiktionary data in the Ultimate Wiktionary..
Thanks, GerardM
Wytukaze wrote:
Hello all,
What with the recent heated debate about nds: while I've been on a (less-than-brilliant) trip to Ghana, I thought I'd talk ramblingly at you fine members of the list for a while.
As we all know, English has a number of standards for spellings, usually termed "British" and "American". What some might not know is that these are not real standards at all; they are just conventions. It's similar in many ways to those parts of the UK constitution termed "conventions": Things are done that way because they always have been, it's tradition - not because it has to be. Ui kan rui' luik dhis in Inglish if ui won'. But that's just the point; I can't write like that in English, and expect to be taken seriously or even to be understood well, even though that's a reasonable go at representing my accent. It's a symptom of an age-old problem for descriptivists. Even if prescriptivist notions might stymy certain aspects of language, they still exist, and are as valid a reason for language change as borrowings or sound changes. They're certainly needed so that a Geordie could talk to a Ga in writing; in speech, they have a damn hard time understanding each other's English.
So, with that in mind, what about Plattdüütsch? There's a large number of conventions, some only accepted by small amounts of people, and there's even the complicating factor of bilingualism - Just what bits of High German do you call borrowings? From what I can see, Sabine and Gerard want to take the descriptivist route and describe all spelling and pronunciation variants on a reasonably-equal footing, and for that, they must be congratulated. It's quite a task to undertake. However, Heiko, who, I take it, is a native speaker of the Sass dialect, wants a bit of space to give students and enthusiasts something to actually learn consistently. Now, let's not be too quick to jump to it being one of those descriptivist-prescriptivist debates. I seriously urge you to listen to Heiko here, he's got a point. Those more common forms should be listed precisely as that, more common forms - They shouldn't quite be on a level pegging, IMHO. Orthography is a real problem, and it'll probably never be fully unified, as the dialects diverge and merge more and the situation gets worse.
To put a bit of perspective on it, allow me to teach you something about Ga orthography. The alphabet is your basic Latin-influenced-by-IPA, like this:
a b d e ɛ f g h i j k l m n ŋ o ɔ p r s t u (v) w y (z)
The consonants I've stuck in brackets are because they're quite uncommon, extant though they are.
The alphabet is phonetic, and there's not really much of a situation with dialects. So, everyone spells everything the same way, right? Well, almost. Take the digraph 'ts'. This is pronounced, consistently, as English 'ch', German 'tsch', etc. But, its voiced companion is 'j'... Usually. You can also write it as 'dz' (as in the family name 'Obadzen') or even as 'dj'. So even here there's room for orthographical preference. Still, that's not quite the end of it.
A tilde (~) placed over a letter indicates nasalisation. My stepfather pronounces nearly all of his vowels this way, in actuality, though he only writes the tilde where it is canonically present. But if you go look at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eny%C9%94 ("enyɔ", two) you will notice there is an alternative form listed, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eny%C9%94%CC%83 ("enyɔ̃"), and it is precisely that.
By now you may be thinking "That's all well and good, but what the hell are you talking about?!". My point is, we can't simplify nds:'s problems to the extent we may like to. It has quite a unique position and we have to represent _every_ aspect of the language, if we can. That doesn't mean merely list every form we can find, it also means we have to state which forms are preferred, most common, where and when. Take "abschreim", supposedly Low Saxon, but presumably in High German orthography, and even High German pronunciation. It's a slang term, right? Slang is very often cross-language; you'll hardly ever hear a Ga saying "buulu" (fool; very, very offensive), but "motherfucker"? They've been exposed to it, and to the younger ones it seems cool to use it, even while speaking Ga for the entire conversation. Do young Low Saxon speakers use "abschreim" while speaking in their native dialect? It's worth thinking about.
So, thanks for reading this far, and I hope some of what I said made sense, and didn't offend anyone.
Wes gesund,
Wytukaze
Hi Gerard,
In the discussion on nds, there is one thing that you do not mention and that is rather relevant.to this discussion. Sass is not a dialect, it is an orthography so nobody can claim to speak Sass. I have been told that Lower Saxon has some 200 distinct orthographies.
Now this is something that you certainly misunderstood. What Sabine wrote us was:
Some days ago I had a longer telephone conversation with one of the directors of the Institut für niederdeutsche Sprache (institute for nds) - he explained that there are at least six different acknowledged ways of writing nds and if we go to details 200 to 400 ways of writing (including also dictionaries from around 1920 etc.) can be defined - so accepting only one way of writing is a discrimination to my opinion.
So: there are at least 6 different ways that are in use. And when we look at old books you can find more. There has been some amound of standardization over the last decades. If you count every book published in Low Saxon that deviates from any of these as an orthography of its own, then you might even come up with 10000 different orthographies. Are all of these worthy of beig included into the wiktionary? Certainly not.
Heiko wants to have a resource for Sass, this has everything to do with the fact that the nds.wikipedia is Sass only.
An encyclopedia nees a certain amount of consistency. Besides you are misstating me time and again. I said that other orthographies do have their place when they are attributed properly. Which is not the case with your data that you uploaded partially, the data that is under discussion. It contains 1) some plain errors 2) come very unusual words 3) a highly inconsistent spelling, the source of which is unknown, at least to you Gerard and Sabine. (Apart from the author of the list, of course. I am speaking of the source of the orthography.)
The fact that a great resource is created for this I fully endorse. The problem is about how to treat the non-Sass content. Sabine did get permission to use a resource.
Permission. Not duty. You press so hard with this content that I wonder why you see it as your duty to have this stuff dumped into nds.wiktionary.org.
She uploaded this list onto the it and the nds wiktionary and was told by Heiko that there were many "errors" in it.
Fortunately you only uploaded part of it. It is much much more time consuming to edit the data through the web than to edit the import file in a text editor. (I do admit that I had thought about just deleting all of it and starting all over with a fresh import, but that would be out of bounds concerning my adminship. So I took the hard way with the words that you already uploaded. And please do not put errors into quotation marks.
It turned out that the words were from many resources, they should represent different orthographies all considered to be nds. Heiko started to change these entries to Sass and remove many entries as well.
1) I moved the entries 2) I marked the moved entries as "-nds-sass-" as you requested. Now please do not complain about it. 3) I deleted the obsolete redirects that were left. 4) I deleted conjucation forms which we do not need at the moment. It will be much easier to do the conjugation entries once we have a good basis. At the moment what is lacking is a good foundation. 5) this makes your statement "and remove many entries" plainly wrong.
At issue is that Sabine informed Heiko and the other people on nds.wiktionary that she is actively persuing research on this list.
An exercise in futility. She estimated 30 min of research for each entry. 1500 entries then make 750 hours of research on a low quality list.
Words have however been deleted some of them have even been identified as "Missingsch".
You can of course do with "Missingsch" (a mix-dialect somewhere between Low Saxon and Standard German) whatever you like. (To my preference outside of nds.wiktionary.org.) But please attribute the entries as such. I will not do that for you. I will just care about Low Saxon at the moment.
Now this is something I do not apreciate at all.
I did not appreciate your upload.
Words that are only indicated as nds have no clear pedigree and have a limited use.
In another mail you criticized me when I forgot to state nds-sass after the move. You said without proper attribution the words are useless. I move them to a proper place. (Just an edit. This is what "move" is for.) I attribute the underlying orthography. And I then do delete the remaining empty redirect. (Which to my understanding is not a misuse of adminship.) Whatever is useless (even to your definition) can be deleted. This is done all over wiki-world.
When they have been identified as something specific, they can be attributed to one of the orthographies or even to non nds dialects.
Right. Exactly. Once you come up with some data to back up your words, feel free to add them again.
When atributed these words make valuable content. This is given the confusion that results from the lack of standardisation in nds not unrealistic. Heiko is aware that Sabine puts real effort in her research and I am disapointed that he has deleted many words regardless.
At the moment these words are absolutely useless. Once the Low Saxon speaking world finds our wiktionary (with the mess we are currently cleaning up) our credibility would be gone.
On a more positive note, Heiko and I are cooperating in creating a template that he will use for uploading a large number of nds-sass content. This will facilitate the inclusion of the nds-wiktionary data in the Ultimate Wiktionary..
Yes, this is a positive step indeed. And I do apologize for anything that I have stated too harsh. This template is something that I really long for, and I think it will improve the work a lot. Besides I can really live with non-Sass-content, as long as it is properly attributed and as long as there is a possibility for the user to find his way through all the data.
Just a summary of what I want 1) I want to see the data of Werner be converted to Sass, entered as such (properly marked). I am willing to put a lot of effort in that. 2) I want to add quite a number of words coming from the translation of KDE (Linux) to Low Saxon. For all that I need a reliable template that makes sure the data can be reused in the UW. 3) I do appreciate all your efforts in researching the origin of Werners words. I do however consider that a waste of time. (But not of my time.) 4) I want to move the existing entries to Sass. They would then be properly attributed. This is something within my reach. I know the Sass-orthography well enough to do that. 5) I personnaly will not help in attributing the data as it is in Werners list. I cannot help with that, because it is far beyond my reach. I consider that data to be internally inconsistent. I can back this claim up and I think I have done so. You can, however do so, if you like. 6) I do not want to see Werners list without rework in the nds.wiktionary.org. Especially not with the label "nds". You can reenter Werners words once you find a matching orthography. You can check all 200 if you like. From my understanding of Low Saxon that will be a hard job. And that I really do not know is to whose service this will be. What are the users supposed to do with all those words that might conicide with spelling A, B, C, D and varying in each entry. Who is supposed to learn Low Saxon from that? Wouldn't it be much better to A) let us from nds.wiktionary.org (it is not just me who thinks this way over Werners list) work through the list, move everything to a proper place B) (a job for you, if you like) to dig for high quality material in other dialecs of Low Saxon, especially concerning westphalian and to work on that? The usual spellings in LS are much less different that you keep stating. And we should really discuss which ones we really need in order to provide some benefit to the user. But what is really lacking is a bit of coverage on Westphalian. Sass is based on Noordneddersassisch, which covers Lower Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg, Schleswig Holstein and the western part of Mecklenburg. Westphalian is different in some interesting ways and it really deserves some coverage. I really do not understand why you are putting so much effort into Werners list. Is ist just because we got it for free and you just dislike the criticism that you earned for that? After all it is not the language that you speak (Dutch) nor the language of Sabine (South Germany). Of course you are free to work in Low Saxon regardless of your mother lanaguage. (Please do not misunderstand me here.) I would just like to know why this list is so dear to your heart that you put in so much effort in defending it. I have been wondering about that for quite some time now, but so far I really do not know. If I came up with a word list in Zeews or Frisian or Maori and proposed to upload it (all languages that I do not speak), and several people proficient in that language told me that this list is highly problematic and if they offered to work through that list, I would just say: thank you for saving me so much of my valuable time: Take the list, improve it, put it into the wiktionary afterwards. If you need technical help, I will help you. I will have a look at it every now and then and I would proceed to another project or another word list or to implementing more functionality in the UW or whatever. Instead you just put in hour after hour in defending a list, just hoping that you will find some way for backing it up. You do not even bother to go in the details. We could tell you quite a lot about the possible origins of the (mis)spellings. We could explain the underlying phonetics to you. We could tell you about different orthographies for LS and how they came into existence, etc. But you are not at all interested in a discussion about the data itself.
OK, this mail has become much longer than I intended, and it is much to late tonight.
Just be assured that I am not interested in a war over word lists. Let us find some peaceful settelment to all this and go back to work.
One technical question: which program will you use for importing? Will it be based on pywikipediabot/wiktionary.py? How will you be able to import conjucation tables? Is that something that we will have to program fresh anyway?
Kind regards,
Heiko Evermann
Hi,
well see, it is quite simple: there is space for both ways.
If a term has approx. 160-180 recurrences in internet and let's say approx. the half of it is useless or repetitive you have 80-90 remaining - let's say only 50 unique uses remaining and this only in a language that is hardly used on the net. This means that sooner or later someone might find such a text and search for a specific word in order to understand the text, right?
If you have a term that is used often by only two or three writers in poems, but these poems are likely to be read by other people and these other people could search for that term to understand what it means it should be there. If possible even here with a link to where you can find it or maybe with a quotation or a note (or more of them).
These terms are used for reference to understand a text and not to write according to a certain spelling. As long as you have not exact writing attributed to it, it is an nds term used in several texts and it is there to explain this.
When you want to standardise everyday writing you go the way of a unified language - this means you ask people to make a compromise to their "local language" and if they want they will do this. These standardised writings have rules, these rules can be explained and taught. So: these words must be categorised correctly in order to show that they are part of that standard. They will be used by those who support this kind of spelling and by those who teach it and by those who have a text in front of them and just search for the word to understand it.
But all of them exist - you cannot deny that a writer of a poem, a journalist or whoever uses another way of writing. There is no legal definition of what is wrong or right. So all have to be there. It is as simple as that.
Consider that for researching a term myself I need approx 20 to 30 minutes - then I can say: the term is widely used and these are the examples. If possible I also add the spelling category or the regional category, but I add it.
Talking about "abschreim" - I am not sure if this word is part of nds, but it could be - the thing is that I can find it written from people in the region of Fürth, but also near by Coburg or deeper in Bavaria it is used. So not being sure I sent a mail to a mailing list that among others is about low saxon and asked there (the list is moderated and the listowner on holiday, so it will need some time to receive an answer). In the meanwhile on the Italian witkionary I attributed it to Bavarian, region Fürth since this is 100% sure. The notes are on the discussion page. The thing is that Nürnberg/Fürth even having a more Franconian kind of language is attributed to Bavarian (see Ethnologue). Coburg instead not - it is categorised differently and it is clearly stated that it is part of Franconian (Mainfränkisch). Now there are some Franconian roots in the nds region as well (at least this is stated by an encyclopaedia - only in some very restricted areas) and there the word "abschreim" could be used, but of course up to now I don't have a real answer on that.
As long as you have a standardised language like Italian (I am not using German here, because it is not really standardised anymore thanks to two federal states) you don't have a problem: the correct ortography is "law". But this is not the case for Low Saxon, Bavarian, Neapolitan, Sicilian, Friulian and whatever.
Now I am asking: may we impose to people not to be able to read or write their language? May we impose them to learn any kind of "correct spelling" we decide for? Has Wiktionary the right to do this or does it have the right to describe what is there, what exisits and to try to categorise it in a way to have, in the end, some kind of very detailed language map. Some kind of ressource that will maintain these words for future generations for reference. I don't feel myself to be in a position to be able to impose to someone that his/her language, only because it is spoken and written by a minority, is not valid. Whatever is published is available for public and I hope it will be available for public for ever. If it remains available for public sooner or later someone will read this, maybe will need to understand, maybe will want understand from where a word comes from and if wiktionary can than be the place to tell this person "hei, this is a word that comes from Hintertupfingen - only 1500 people talked like this and only 500 were able to write like this" - the goal of preserving all wisdom and all words in all languages was met.
The goal of wiktionary is all words in all languages ... I for myself will not exclude one word if it exists in a publication. The only time I deleted two words I did not find any reference on the web were Italian dialectal words with very doubtful meaning (it was also a period with quite a lot of vandalism). I asked others, colleagues that come from that regions and no-one could confirm me these words, not even a similar one with a very different meaning and not even from other regions.
I repeat there is a place for both systems within the same wiktionary - all is about categorising, examples and notes and of course: taking some time.
Ciao, Sabine
Wytukaze wrote:
Hello all,
What with the recent heated debate about nds: while I've been on a (less-than-brilliant) trip to Ghana, I thought I'd talk ramblingly at you fine members of the list for a while.
.......
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Sabine Cretella sabine_cretella@yahoo.it wrote:
The goal of wiktionary is all words in all languages ... I for myself will not exclude one word if it exists in a publication.
Hear, hear!
*Muke!
wiktionary-l@lists.wikimedia.org