[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Language conversion

[Milos Rancic]

(Mark, thanks for forwarding mail on general Wikitech, because I am
not subscribed to the list where Zhengzhu sent the mail.)

On 4/15/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Also, as far as I know, there is only one Latin <> Cyrillic, so you
> don't need the 4 different varieties.

If you are talking about variants of articles: Ekavian/Iyekavian
problem is very simple and it needs only contributors' work and not so
complicated parsing. There would be one text in database (for
ekavian/iyekavian variants); anyone would be able to choose to see
ekavian or iyekavian and anyone would be able to choose ekavian or
iyekavian in preferences. (Mark, please, look at previous discussion
inside of this thread.) Also, you can see some differences at the page
now. (I am not iyekavian and for sure, I missed something.)

If you are talking about variants inside of syntax, you are right.
There is only need for ekavian/iyekavian manual transliteration, so
there is no need for ((sr-ec::...\\sr-el::...\\ etc.)). We need only
two variants: left should be ekavian, right should be iyekavian. So,
in general, we need only ((<ekavian>\\<iyekavian)). Left variant
should be sr-ec and sr-el; right variant should be sr-jc and sr-jl.
And it should be transliterated according to Cyrillic <-> Latin rules.

> Another potential problem is an all-caps environment: a Cyrillic
> letter which becomes a Latin digraph, if in a word of all caps, will
> still be Caps-lowercase instead of Caps-caps as it should be.

It is correct transliteration. Caps should be solved inside of
headings (i.e. markup language), not inside of transliteration. For
example, capital (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) letters are Lj, Nj
and Dž; not LJ, NJ and DŽ. Of course, capital letters should be

On 15/04/05, zhengzhu <zhengzhu at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have put up a test site for the Serbian language that supports
> Cyrillics and Latin alphabets: http://s87257573.onlinehome.us/sr/
>
>  Just for the fun of it, I also made a English version, running at
> http://s87257573.onlinehome.us/en/

First, I'll tell it to Serbian community and you will have some
comments from them about that very soon.

There is no need to have "sr" and "sr-ec" both; i.e., there is no need
for "sr", because "sr" should be "sr-ec".

And, I think, that order of alphabets/dialects should be: sr-ec,
sr-jc, sr-el, sr-jl (if it is complicated to implement, forget it).

Also, user should be back to variant which (s)he changed, not to
general page (if it is possible, of course).