On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 15:37:37 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
As has been noted before, we already have an Alemannic Wikipedia, and so far all SD speakers seem to have been attracted to it, whereas BSD (not the OS) seems to have received a different reaction.
I'm not sure I understand you.
Baseldytsch *is* Schwytzerdütsch (Swiss-German). There are a number of regional dialects of Schwytzerdütsch; Baseldytsch is just the one corresponding to the area around Basel (in Switzerland). All of these belong to the Alemannic language family, but each is highly distinct in pronunciation and orthography, and distinct in turn from the Elsässisch, the Alemannic language spoken in Alsace in France.
According to the requester on [[meta:Request for new language]], "Baseldytsch is like other swiss dialects extremely different from the "language" used on the Alemannic Wikipedia."
If this is correct, then it isn't true, as you say, that Schwytzerdütsch speakers have been attracted to the Alemannic wikipedia. I would guess that most of the language used to this point is Elsässisch, since that's what that wikipedia started as.
The requester also writes: "And please, don't think about a swiss-german wikipedia, the differences are extremely big, too big."
The question is, is it reasonable to grant a wikipedia to every Alemannic dialect? Probably this discussion should involve whoever decided to generalize Elsässisch to Alemannic, since we can't really call it an 'Alemannic' wikipedia if it's mostly Elsässisch and each Alemannic dialect wants its own namespace.
Steve