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: ___________________________________ Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB http://mail.yahoo.it

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, Now this is something that you certainly misunderstood. What Sabine wrote us was: 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. 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.) 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. I did not appreciate your upload. 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. Right. Exactly. Once you come up with some data to back up your words, feel free to add them again. 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. 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

Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella(a)yahoo.it> wrote: Hear, hear! *Muke! -- website: http://frath.net/ LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/ deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/ FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki: http://wiki.frath.net/