Kaixo!
On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 06:29:05PM -0500, Stephen Forrest wrote:
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.
He says that only people from Basel want their own idiosyncrasic wikipedia, and that all other Alemannic speakers agree to put their efforts in common (I don't know how true that is, however).
Baseldytsch *is* Schwytzerdütsch (Swiss-German).
Well, is it or not? You keep telling how extremely different it is.
but each is highly distinct in pronunciation and orthography,
Pronunciation and orthography are not major features of a language (pronunciation and orthography change a lot over time, and in case of languages with not yet normalized writting form, orthography changes from place to place, and even from people to people, yet the language is the same). What is a feature of a language is it grammar and lexicon.
So, is Baseldytsch different in grammar and vocabulary from what is used in Alemannic as to require a different Wikipedia? Or are the differences simply on the orthographic conventions used?
(A similar problem exists with Walloon language, if you write it phonetically, at least 4 major orthographies exist (with dozens of small variants for each one of them) to match the pronunciation differences; however, as it is the same language, a common orthography has been developped recently (in the 1995-2000) and that is what is used in the Walloon Wikipedia, as that is the only way to have consistency for a work done by multiple people from different places and different accents)
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.
Why not? "Distinctiveness" is often a very subjective thing. I can perfectly believe that people from a big city are less inclined to change their orthographic habitudes to adapt to a broader system than people from smaller places.
I would guess that most of the language used to this point is Elsässisch, since that's what that wikipedia started as.
I would guess exactly the opposite. (it may even be possible that no Elsässisch is left, and that all old articles have been converted to a common orthography yet).
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.
That is indeed the question.
As building an encyclopedia is a *VERY BIG* task, it would be advisable not to divert efforts, imho; so there should only be one Wikipedia per language, not per dialect. Note that some define themselves as different languages while, linguistically, they are not; but they feel as different enough; but that doesn't seem the case here. So, imho, as long as speakers of "Baseldytsch" define themselves as speakers of Alemannic, then a separate Wikipedia should not be created; only if speakers of Baseldytsch claim that they don't speak Alemannic but a different *language* should a separate Wikipedia be created.