[WikiEN-l] Tagging foreign language text with templates

[MacGyverMagic/Mgm]

On 5/15/07, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/14/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phare_de_la_Vieille&diff=130494303&oldid=130474199
> >
> > Is there any consensus for this? Seems like a massive blow to readable
> > wikitext for not much benefit.
>
> People have been doing this to Japanese for a while - see {{nihongo}}.
> That is arguably useful in that Japanese-language names need to be
> transliterated in order to be readable, let alone comprehensible, to
> most English readers, and a standard format for putting the different
> forms is nice.
>
> The point of this template is that it marks up the language used so
> that it can be displayed or spoken correctly.  It encloses it in <span
> lang="language"></span> tags.
>
> It's important to note that Unicode does not encode the language, just
> the characters.  Read up on [[Han unification]] to understand the
> problems this gives with characters deemed the same across multiple
> Asian languages even if the characters are actually written quite
> differently when used to write Japanese vs. Chinese, for instance.
> There are less glaring examples stylistically in a number of European
> languages (exact positioning and style of diacritics, for instance).
>
> As well as display/typography issues not handled in Unicode, this also
> allows screen readers and the like to have a better chance of
> understanding words in different languages.
>
> It's certainly neater than using the HTML, but it's not exactly 100%
> intuitive either.  I'm torn on this one; the more complicated Wiki
> markup becomes, the less friendly it is, but on the other hand, it's
> not good to lose information either.
>
> -Matt


I can see how this could be useful for Japanese words and such, but what is
the advantage for French words? They're not any less readable or
pronouncable without that tag.

Mgm