[Wikipedia-l] be: and be-x-old: interwiki

[Lars Aronsson]

Alexander Cajcyc wrote:

> By the way, when will the wikipedia prefix for Classical 
> Belarusian changed to something reasonable from the temporary 
> "be-x-old"? A good proposal was "be-classic", "be-class" or 
> similar.


The conclusion on an IETF mailing list is that "classic" is a 
designation that can cause controversy and should be avoided, 
because of the positive value it gives to one orthography over the 
other.  A more neutral term is Tarask... (-ievich?) based on the 
name of the author of a book that describes this orthography.

One would have guessed that these matters would already be covered 
in an NPOV fashion by the English Wikipedia article about the 
language, and it is a surprise that it has to be discussed on 
mailing lists.

The situation has been compared to Norwegian bokmål vs. nynorsk.  
But I think it is better to compare it to bokmål before and after 
the 1938 reform of the Norwegian language, and the rise of the 
riksmål movement (people who didn't accept the 1938 reform). 
Perhaps there was an international trend of radical and 
controversional language reforms in the 1930s, just as many other 
parts of society was reformed then.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se