[Foundation-l] On Arabic and sub-language proposals.

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
There are requirements for new proposals. One requirement is it must be
recognised as a language. When a language is recognised by the ISO-639-3
standard, the language committee recognises it as well. There is a procedure
for getting this recognition; a successful request was made for instance for
the Lingua Franca Nova.

You may have noticed that there are strong arguments against the request for
a Lebanese Wikipedia. The code for the language is not about Lebanese but
for North Levantine Arabic, a language woth more people living outside
Lebanon than inside. There is currently nobody claiming to be interested to
work on this project... consequently this project has not been given the
"eligible" status.

Once the eligible status has been given, all the technical requerements have
been met. It is then for the community to prove itself. They have to do the
minimal localisation, they have to create a starting corpus in the
incubator. This corpus may be checked by an expert of our choosing for
consistency with the claimed language. Once the eligible status has been
given, it is not fair to deny a project at a later stage because of all the
effort involved.

There is no need for a fixed or formal orthography, there are many projects
where there is no fixed orthography. Muhammed writes about a duplication of
effort, we support many languages and there are those who say that people
should learn English because all the rest is a duplication of effort. These
people are right however it is not *their *effort that does the duplication.
When people feel a need to write in Egyptian, they can and you do not need
to. When people ask for a Wikipedia, they have their reasons. The language
committee does not know these reasons and does not really care to know them.
People do their thing for their reasons and as long as it is within the
bounds of the rules that the Wikimedia Foundation has set, they can.

The language policy is first and foremost a procedure that is followed. It
is sufficiently flexible to do the job at hand but in the end nobody is
completey happy.

In the end it is about freedom. Are you free to determine for others what
they can and cannot do?
Thanks,
        GerardM

On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 10:04 AM, Muhammad Alsebaey <shipmaster at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> The following is my belated, rather long, 2 cents regarding the creation of
> wikipedias for languages/dialects/whatever-you-want-to-call-them that stem
> from Arabic, this is mainly relevant to the creation of the Masry
> (Egyptian)
> Wikipedia, the Masry Wikitionary proposals (by virtue of the fact that I am
> Egyptian, and thus I can relate to those two projects with a better degree
> of confidence), but probably is still relevant for the proposals that
> subsequently stemmed for Morrocan, Lebanese, Sudanese and more will come I
> am sure.
>
> Let me state first though, that even though it will be obvious from my
> concerns below that I am against such a division (slightly oppose, to be
> precise), I have no opinion as to whether those languages or dialects (as
> proponents and opponents would call them) are really separate languages or
> not. I have some issues and worries, which is what I will expand on below,
> but ultimately, I don't know if what I speak is actually classified as a
> separate language or a dialect (yeah I am that ignorant :P ) so from the
> specific rules-based linguistic-jargon point of view, I am sadly out of my
> league.
>
> That stated, here is what basically worries me:
>
> I have read most of the (rather heated) arguments for and against the
> proposals, here is what I understand (from a layman point of view) about my
> language: I speak Egyptian, which is a form of Arabic, it is not the same
> as
> 'formal' Arabic, however, it is only spoken in most of the cases. I think
> the majority of the body of literature written by Egyptians is written in
> formal Arabic. I simply come to this conclusion because as an avid reader I
> must have come across only one or two literary pieces written in Egyptian
> Arabic as  'pioneering experimental' works (as one author called his
> stuff).
> Also the way of writing is not agreed upon by egyptians themselves, for
> example: words that contains the letter Kaaf (ق),  I saw some of the
> authors
> who tried writing a word containing it in 'Masry' would keep it as is and
> other people would convert it to 'Hamza' as it is actually pronounced but
> is
> rather foreign to read. I can safely assume that almost all literate
> Egyptians who read and write in formal Arabic (actually that *is* the
> definition of being literate in Egypt) will find reading their own every
> day
> talking language rather alien (kind of ridiculous, but is the case IMHO).
> The point I am trying to make here is : For a language/dialect that has
> only
> been spoken till now for the most part, Wikipedia turning it into a written
> language would be 'original research' and this is what I actually observed
> in Wikipedia Masry, people write as they please, and the result is
> sometimes
> palatable and some times very foreign and alienating (as a method of
> delivering information). I suspect the same would be the case for at least
> the Lebanese and Sudanese proposals for example, ditto if there will ever
> be
> a proposal for the gulf dialects (Saudi, Yemeni, etc.), the Egyptian Sai'di
> (upper Egypt dialect), etc...
>
> My second concern is, I am worried about duplicating the efforts in the
> name
> of language separation, granted, I speak something that is not similar to
> formal Arabic etymology-wise maybe. However, there is not one literate
> Arabic-speaking person who can claim he understands written
> Egyptian/Lebanese/etc. and not understand formal Arabic (by virtue of the
> the above argument that my language is mostly spoken, and what is taught in
> schools, and used in everyday written communication is formal Arabic). I
> dont know if it is good, given the already low participation level in my
> area of the world, to let people have Egyptian/Lebanese/Saudi/Yemeni
> mini-wiki projects, keeping in mind that all users of those will be
> perfectly comfortable reading the information in the Arabic corresponding
> project.
>
> Finally, I think the division is not purely language related, there is a
> lot
> of socio-political issues at work, taking the Egyptian wikipedia again as
> an
> example, there has been a considerable debate in Egypt about getting the
> Egyptian language to be adopted writing-wise (and to make the grammar more
> solid so as it would overcome the current problems in writing) to bolster
> the national identity of Egypt, while this proposal is currently going
> nowhere, it wont be hard to imagine groups interested in promoting this
> canvassing just to prove their point, do we want to get involved in such an
> argument? is it wikipedia's place to? isnt such a statement already made by
> Wikimedia creating one of the first bodies of written text in the language?
>
> I understand that it may be too late for Egyptian Wikipedia, the decision
> is
> apparently already in, but I am currently seeing a slew of similar
> proposals,so I thought there should be some kind of discussion regarding
> the
> broader topic and not restricted to the proposal pages. I hope I haven't
> spammed this list with this email  :).
>
>
>
> Best Regards,
> Muhammad Alsebaey
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