Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Languages/Archive 1

message: I noticed that in the French table under "official status", only France is listed. Why not list organizations, such as the UN and IOC? I also noticed in the Poland table under "Spoken in" that a whole bunch of countries follow Poland. What's the criteria for inclusion? "significant numbers" should probably be defined. And should the list be shortened to "and 20 other countries" as is done for France? --Jiang 16:19, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Inclusion of countries in table

message: I've created a wiki template for the summary table. I've already replaced the tables at Tatar language and Japanese language with the template syntax, and added one to Elamite language. The syntax for including it is:

The parameters can appear in any order. They can also be combined on lines as long as they're separated by pipes. I like to put name and nativename on the same line, speakers and rank on another, and the three codes on their own line, but it's not necessary.
Important notes: all parameters must be supplied, or else bits of the template's coding will show through. You can leave a parameter blank, though (like "iso1=" with nothing after the =). "familycolor" must be a valid color name (like "yellowgreen") or hex code (like #dddddd) or else it'll break the table. Also, due to a limitation of MediaWiki, you use put piped links in any of the parameters, because it'll interpret the vertical pipe character as ending the parameter and cut off the rest.
Hope this helps! - G↭a⇅a | Talk 19:02, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Summary table 

message: Does anyone have any strong opinions or thoughts about adding the Linguasphere codes to the language box?  Its biggest disadvantage, of course, is that these codes mostly cannot be looked up online... - Mustafaa 02:17, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that's a good idea.--Tox 11:08, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: Yes, the LINGUIST code would be a good idea. But the Linguasphere codes--if they can't be looked up online and everybody has to buy a book not many contributors could help with that. Wikiacc 21:32, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: Change that. It seems the LINGUIST codes cannot be looked up online because the link provided by Mustafaa can only be looked up by SIL code. Am I doing something wrong? Wikiacc 21:38, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: I now seem to have it reversed. Linguasphere codes can be looked up, it's just very hard to do. Wikiacc 21:40, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Language codes and Language Families

message: I object to the creation of tiny categories for each country in the world.  It is unnecessary, and they only take up usually less than 10 articles. -- AllyUnion (talk) 05:21, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categories by Country 

message: This article has a disagreement, and input from one or more linguists could be useful. Thanks. Maurreen 09:03, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I've got involved on the talk page: I think the problem has been to do with conflicting ideas of what the concept of Interantional English is. I'm looking at approaching it mainly from an TEFL approach with some historical background and referrence to various 'popular' uses of the term. If anyone has TEFL experience or another way of approaching the article, please join in. Gareth Hughes 01:17, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[International English]]

message: In certain instances two or more color bars are applicable for the infoboxes on a page, e.g. Zuni language where both lightblue for Amerindian languages and #dddddd for language isolates. For general and specific colors I have been going with more specific, e.g. Tupi languages use the more specific deepskyblue over lightblue; is this a similar occurrence where #dddddd should be used or is discretion allowed? Wikiacc 02:23, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Conflicting color bars

message: Code  	Character	Unicode	Use
glot  	’   	146    	glottal stopProtosemitic alpuAramaic/Hebrew אArabic ء
aa    	ā   	257    	long a vowel
ee    	ē   	275    	long (open) e vowel
oo    	ō   	333    	long (open) o vowel
bh    	ḇ  	7687   	soft b
gh    	ḡ  	7713   	soft gProtosemitic gharuArabic غ
htie  	ḫ  	7723   	Protosemitic harmuEgyptianx
dh    	ḏ  	7695   	soft dProtosemitic dhabuArabic ذ
uu    	ū   	363    	long u vowel
odot  	ọ  	7885   	(short) close o vowel
oodot 	ộ  	7897   	long close o vowel
hdot  	ḥ  	7717   	Aramaic/Hebrew חArabic حEgyptianH
hline 	ẖ  	7830   	EgyptianX
tdot  	ṭ  	7789   	emphatic tAramaic/Hebrew טArabic ط
ii    	ī   	299    	long i vowel
edot  	ặ  	7865   	(short) close e vowel
eedot 	ệ  	7879   	long close e vowel
kh    	ḵ  	7733   	soft kArabic خ
ayn   	‘   	145    	Aramaic/Hebrew עArabic ع
ph    	ṗ  	7767   	soft p
sdot  	ṣ  	7779   	emphatic sAramaic/Hebrew צArabic ص
sacute	ś   	347    	Protosemitic sannuAramaic/Hebrew ש
sh    	š   	353    	Protosemitic shetuAramaic/Hebrew שArabic ش
th    	ṯ  	7791   	soft tArabic ث
j     	ğ   	287    	Arabic ج
ddot  	ḍ  	7693   	emphatic dArabic ض
dhdot 	ẓ  	7827   	emphatic dhArabic ظ
ch    	č   	269    	extended Arabic چ
zh    	ž   	382    	extended Arabic ژ
reed  	ỉ  	7881   	Egyptiani
The table to the right is part of a proposal I have for making transliteration easier to do. I have restricted this to Semitic and Egyptian languages, but it would be possible to expand use to other groups.
The first problem is that some browsers don't deal with Unicode very well.  Template:unicode and Template:IPA are designed to deal with this issue (are the two the same?). It would, thus, be good to use these templates for all work in Unicode.
The second problem is that it is difficult to find the code you want for a particular letter, and that the codes are as memorable as telephone numbers (something else I have a problem with!). It's not so bad when you're writing Syriac, as all the letters are in the same place. However, special characters for transliteration can be spread all over the chart. It would be good to have a template that would convert sensible codes into Unicode for us.
For example, in transliteration you would like to produce ḥ. There are all sorts of ways to avoid the character, but it is a common character in the transliteration of Semitic languages. Looking at Unicode, you find that it is coded 7717. You could include ḥ in your article, and the job is done, or, being helpful, you could write .
I propose that it would be even more helpful if you could write  which would call a template that introduced  without having to type the whole lot. The table to the right shows thirty transliteration characters that could be so encoded. An alterantive would be to keep all the templates in related space by calling them ,  or something like that.
Am I completely deranged? Any thoughts? Gareth Hughes 14:25, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Probably not a bad idea. Windows browsers seem to translate Unicode characters to HTML entities if you type them directly into the edit field, but Safari doesn't do that (I'm not sure about IE for Mac). However, I have an even more deranged idea. I know Wikipedia has a certain amount of TeX processing ability (it uses it for mathematical notation); can this be harnessed to code accented characters (something TeX does very well)? --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 15:03, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That's an interesting idea. I'm not sure how easy it would be to set up a transliteration system in TeX. Virtually all of the characters we need are already available in Unicode, and template:unicode is able to sort out most of the browser problems. I've worked out how to set up templates, so I could do that, but I'm not sure about anything more technical. Some browsers will show TeX as an image, which might disrupt the flow of text. Gareth Hughes 11:28, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: TeX already has entities for most of what we need, and something like  would be a lot easier to remember than ā for "ā". As far as the browser interpreting TeX, it wouldn't have tothe conversion could (and should) be handled by the wiki software itself, as it currently is for mathematical TeX. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 14:11, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unicode transliteration proposal 

message: I recently stumbled across the article Scanian language. The article is supposed to describe a dialect of Swedish, but since SIL has given it its own language code, Scanian editors have taken this as an excuse to assign it the language template.
Scanian is used as a term for two seperate things; one is a dialect group of Swedish that has very few speakers (the 80,000 figure from SIL is most likely inflated), the other is used to describe a variety of southern Standard Swedish, which is not even considered a proper dialect by Swedish linguists, and differs from other forms of Standard Swedish only in pronunciation and to a very small extent vocabulary. The grammar and syntax is far as I know identical.
SIL is obviously not giving out language codes based on proper linguistic criteria. In the case of Flemish this is done even when the speakers themselves consider their language a dialect of Dutch, and the same is as far as I know true to Scanian. How should this be handled? Should the language template be used for very clear-cut cases of dialects? Peter Isotalo 09:26, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)
:A similar case is with the Alemannic language, which is really considered a group of dialects of the German language in linguistics. For naming the different local dialects, I've adopted the local solution of calling them XXX German, which besides is also how varieties of English are called on wikipedia (why should there be a special way of naming English varieties?).
:The Alemannic dialects are a very good example for SIL not adopting linguistic criteria. It is called Schwyzerdütsch 'Swiss German' even thoughon one handit embraces varieties that are outside of Switzerland (a third part of the speakers according to the Ethnologue).
:On the other hand, it excludes certain Swiss German varieties (in the literal and usual sense of "local German varieties of Switzerland"), which I fail to understand: There is a separate entry for Walser, a "group" of Highest Alemannic dialects which can only be grouped together because of the (definitory) fact that they are spoken in Walser settlements. Many of them are more similar to non-Walser Highest Alemannic dialects than to other Walser dialects.j. 'mach' wust ˈtʰɔ̝ːk͡x 11:06, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Are dialects languages? 

message: I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to have a section in each language article in which a handful of basic sentences are given in the language. For example:
*"Hello, my name is _."
*"I'm sorry, I do not speak <language>." (or "I do not understand", etc.)
*"Thank you."
*"Goodbye."
Or something like that. Obviously, care would need to be taken to prevent the list from mushrooming out of control. Perhaps a link could follow to a dedicated page named something like List of useful sentences in <language> so that further contributions could be directed there. My main point is, there should be such a list/page for every language and there should be some measure of standardization among them. That's why I'm suggesting it here. - dcljr (talk) 07:11, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: A good idea, but I think it would be better in place at Wikibooks or Wiktionary. Basic sentences like this are not the best examples for an encyclopedic article about a language (i.e. to exemplify basic features of the grammar of the language). I would say: keep tourist phrasebook content at other Wiki-projects; it's not something for an encyclopedia.mark ✎ 11:02, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

text: See also Common phrases in various languages and Talk:Common phrases in various languages#Transwiki?.mark ✎ 11:04, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Basic sentences in each language 

message: Another suggestion: I'd like to see the language infobox link to the relevant alphabet/script(s) used in writing each language. (Is it POV to relegate info about written language to the text of the article?;) - dcljr (talk) 07:34, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Prominent link to alphabet 

message: I'd like to move back Swiss German language to Swiss German. Swiss German is a variety of the German language. Of course there are those who prefer to consider it a language, but it is more often considered a dialect by its speakers and almost exclusively so in German language linguistics.
Talking about "Swiss German language" seems as inappropiate to me as talking about, for instance "Australian English language". Varieties of English are called XXX English. Why should this be any different with varieties of German (and Italian, and Arabic, and Chinese, and so on). Of course, the different varieties of English are usually more intelligible with each other than the different varieties of German, but that's a characteristic of the German language, but mutual intelligibility is only one factor among others that are used to define language.j. 'mach' wust ˈtʰɔ̝ːk͡x 11:32, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Surely it's more akin to  Scots.  Considered a language by some, a dialect by others.  Scots is likewise often considered a dialect by its speakers.  BovineBeast 16:53, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: And there is considerable use of American language. The problem with Swiss language would be: which Swiss language: Swiss German, Swiss French, Ticinese, or Ladin? Septentrionalis 20:00, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Swiss German "language"

message: I had been messing about with Oceanic language families for a while before I discovered this page, otherwise I would have floated my thoughts here earlier (and used the tables properly). Anyway, what I was think is that the pages for language families with long genetic classifications are generally hard to navigate through, so I have been showing all the subgroups of each family two steps down at the bottom of the page. See Oceanic languages to get an idea.
There are two things I would like opinions on. I have started using the header Components rather than Classification (see North New Guinea languages for instance) because Classification implies looking up rather than down to me. Which would be better? Would Subclassification be a better alternative than either.
Secondly, what do people think about adopting this format for other families with many subfamilies? I personally find it easy and interesting to navigate with the components listed, but I can understand if others think it is not necessary. Conrad Leviston 16:06, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Language families, subgroups etc. 

message: Acholi language is currently nominated to be improved by Wikipedia: This week's improvement drive. If you are interested in improving this article, you can vote for it on that page.--Fenice 13:25, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Improvement Drive

message: I'm removing the usage of the rather pointless diambiguator Arabic language to discourage its usage. There's been an attempt to keep all Arab-related adjectives at Arab (disambiguation), which has resulted in a pretty confusing dab page. "Arabic" as a noun can only refer to the language, and considering that we're an encyclopedia, any adjective forms are secondary and should not motivate the use of disambiguators. This is no different from keeping "Norwegian cuisine" out of the dab page Norwegian, for example.
Peter Isotalo 08:34, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arabic 

message: I got bold and reduced the reasoning for the use of XXX language titles to the really relevant issues. "Ambiguity" and "Consistency" were somewhat overlapping and the latter isn't even relevant. The latter was also very confusing when trying to claim that EB wasn't consistent by using just "Esperanto" or the likes, since the reason for this is obvious; there's no need for it. I also removed the part about "cultural sensitivity", since using the rule: "XXX language in all cases except where disambiguation is necessary" serves the exact same purpose. No need to add more motivations to something that is already very obvious.
Peter Isotalo 08:45, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Structure change