[Wikipedia-l] Re: Namespace manager and its potential use

[Gerard Meijssen]

Phil Boswell wrote:
> "Carlos Thompson" <chlewey at cable.net.co> wrote in 
> message news:002901c62128$d3b9dea0$0601a8c0 at thompson.local...
>   
>> Sabine Cretella wrote:
>>     
>>> On the Neapolitan wikipedia we have one particularity: it is a language 
>>> without stadardised writing (up to now) and it has local varieties that 
>>> sometimes vary really a lot. Besides that there are regions that are 
>>> attributed to the Neapolitan language group that really "far away" from 
>>> Neapolitan - this means that there are languages (that are not considered 
>>> as such) that are not understandable for us when we hear those people 
>>> talk.
>>>       
>
> Can these languages not use the same written forms? I could understand the 
> problem if you were speaking to each other aloud, but what does this have to 
> do with the written text?
>
> If they do not use exactly the same written forms, can they easily be 
> "translated"? (see below)
>
>   
They could if there was a standardised form. Without such 
standardisation is it is not possible. Within the Neapolitan language 
GROUP there are variants that qualify as a /language /when you accept 
that a language is different from another when people speaking one do 
not understand the other.

A language is not only about how you write things, it is also 
vocabulary, grammar and stuff. They do not use the same written forms.
>> If I understand this correctly, this would also help for languages with 
>> different scripts like Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) which is written in either 
>> Roman or Hebrew script.  With this we could have different namespaces for 
>> each script (orthography), interlink between scripts, etc.
>>     
>
> There's a utility on the Chinese Wikipedia which converts back-and-forth 
> between Traditional and Simplified.
>
> I believe that steps are being taken to enable this to be used for some 
> Eastern European languages which can use Latin or Cyrillic scripts.
>
> This enables an article to be "written" in either script, and read back in 
> either. This would presumably be more helpful than splitting articles.
>
> HTH HAND
>   
It is well known that this utility exists. However as I understand it, 
Chinese is a written language that is largely divorced from the spoken 
language. While some Eastern European languages are seen by some as 
being identical, it is denied by many of the people who live there. 
Having a tool for Chinese does not mean that you can use the same took 
for Judeo-Spanish, the number of people speaking Chinese or the "Eastern 
European" languages is vastly different.

When you allow for articles to be started in a namespace according to a 
script used, you can still do all the technical machinations when they 
are available. I think it was Danny who once said that there are 
multiple ways in which a Hebrew text can be written. I think it helps 
when you can identify text to how they were originally written. Using a 
namespace is one way of accomplishing it. Articles are not split this 
way any more than an English article is split from a Dutch or a French 
article.