On 20/09/05, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 20/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thus, if an American types a search for
"color", they get the article in
their orthography with the headword "color"; and if a
non-American-English-speaker types in "colour", they get the article in
their orthography with the headword "colour".
And what if they search for "red", which version does it link to?
a single version of course, as mentioned, and as is surely obvious.
...for words with different meanings but identical
orthographies you get a
disambiguation page;
Fine, logical, and what I would presume we'd do already.
Like "Asian" for instance. This word has markedly different connotations.
You could of course, include a section on the difference between US-EN and
CW-EN meaning if warrented (I worry about edit jerks/twats) - or simpler
still, a Wikitionary link.
for articles about the same subject that have a
different word for the thing - like Aubergine
(Am-En "Eggplant") for
example: you get a page for each; in each respective orthography.
Why? Just because the headword is different, you suggest we manually
copy all changes to one onto the other?
perhaps headwords are the problem.
Or perhaps the entry on that
plant in a US encyclopedia and in a UK one would be
fundamentally
different in some way?
in some articles, they may well be (and no, I don't have a list - I have a
life).
And what, as I say, of other articles which
happen to mention, and probably link to, the term in
one form or the
other? Should they link both?
yes; in each form, the [[same way it works now]]
Somebody has mentionned that something similar is done on Wiktionary,
but that is a very different situation: in a
dictionary, the entire
article is discussing the headword, as a word; in an encyclopedia, on
the other hand, the article is discussing the entity denoted by the
headword. That is, a dictionary entry for "aubergine" is discussing
the meaning, etymology, etc of that string of letters; an encyclopedia
entry for "aubergine" is discussing the plant itself, using the string
of letters merely as a label. It follows that whereas the dictionary
entries for the words "aubergine" and "eggplant" are distinct
(because
they are two different words), the encyclopedia entries under those
two words will always be *exactly the same* - you might even put the
article under its scientific classification, but you'd still be
discussing the same plant (and you wouldn't suddenly be discussing it
in Latin, either).
yes, you can
I'm sorry to labour the point, but this is the major problem with
splitting up articles by dialect,
this is not dialect; this is orthography.
whether in separate wikis or not -
it means that all those articles have to be written
twice, or
constantly kept in synch
not necessarily
, *even though they are for almost entirely
identical*. This seems to me a complete and blatant
waste of effort.
to you, perhaps, but these are clearly two seperate languages, plenty of
"blatant waste of effort" is invested in creating wikis for tiny, pointless
languages and dialects: Ossetic, Tartar, Walloon, Interlingua, Limburgish,
Western Frisian, Asturian, Sicilian, Scots, Macedonian, Esperanto, the list
is bloody endless.
*You've even got the two forms of Norwegian! Yet English English speakers
have to accept American-English!*
I mean how different is bloody Asturian from Spanish?!
If all these tiny latin, germanic and slavic dialects can get away with it
because they have very slightly different orthographies, then why not
English?
Now, a few months back, when the orthography converter for Chinese was
being written (and please bear in mind that Chinese
really does have
multiple different orthographies - they're related, but they're more
like different alphabets than the odd spelling difference)
I know, I've got a degree in Chinese and Japanese.
, it was
suggested that something similar might be used in
English (and
Scandinavian, and various other situations). I was opposed to that,
too, but less so - if implemented well, it would require very little
additional effort (discounting the effort of those implementing it),
because it would be automatic.
Indeed, the main problem would be defining the various variants (it
would be as arrogant to claim there are only two "proper" forms of
English as to claim there is only one)
there really are only two orthographies. Canadian and Australian just
aren't anywhere near divergent enough.
and making sure the right
things were "corrected" in the right way.
And, as people pointed out,
there'd still be arguments over what the "correct" version was within
a particular variety,
eg?
and there'd still be compromises needed on
grammar and punctuation issues, etc etc
grammar and punctuation is a different issue - one for edit whores.
Can we try and reach some consensus on this?
As others have pointed out, you seem to me to be very much in the
minority on this; everyone else seems to subscribe more-or-less to the
current consensus that it's really not that big a problem, and
certainly not worth multiplying our workload to avoid.
the "we're all against you" playground routine doesn't wash. It's
no
surprise for a handful of Americans and Americanised types to oppose this,
but I doubt you'd get the same from Brits and Irish.
If this is to be an inclusive, uniting project, then this issue over
American-English hegemony needs to be resolved in a fair way.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]
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