[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] English Wikipedia ethnocentric policy affects other communities

[Mark Wagner]

On 12/20/06, sean at epoptic.com <sean at epoptic.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 20, 2006 at 02:48:48PM +0000, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> > The issue isn't really ethnocentric, or language-centric, it's
> > script-centric. SUL should have a feature that allows you to
> > transliterate your name into various scripts (or even does it for you
> > if possible, there isn't necessarily a one-to-one relationship between
> > characters [or sequences of characters] in different scripts, so it
> > could be quite hard) and it uses the appropriate one on each project.
> > The same name written in two different scripts is still the same name,
> > it's just written in a way that the people reading it can understand.
> >
> > It's not just a matter of distinguishing between two Japanese, say,
> > names, it's also a matter of pronoucing them - it can slow down
> > reading quite a lot of some of the words aren't pronouncible to you
> > (even if you aren't reading out loud).
>
> So ... what would you do about names like "Seabhcan" (or "Sean," for that
> matter) that are pronounced in ways nonintuitive to most Anglophones?

I assign a mental pronunciation that is probably quite incorrect. The
key point is that I *can* assign a pronunciation to "Seabhcan" or
"Cthulhu", and I can easily tell the difference between the two.  I
can't do that for something like "メインページ".

-- 
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]