On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 16:54:24 -0600, Ian Monroe <ian.monroe(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Well, I think the elitist 19th-century dictionaries
serve as a poor
example of what Wiktionary should be about.
No dictionary has been perfect yet. But just because some areas are flawed
doesn't mean we can't learn from what good points they may have.
Then English Wiktionary has a Sanskrit entry for
[[surfboard]] ,
[[तरंगफलक]], and as you noted in the discussion of it, it does create
a problem because its really hard to say whether someone just decided
thats how surfboard would be spelt or if there's some Hindu cleric who
has been praying for तरंगफलक's for years.
It doesn't have to be about obscure clerics. Sanskrit may be a dead language
like Latin, but as I understand it it didn't experienced a decline in use like
Latin did starting from about the fifteenth century (see [[Humanist Latin]]).
Sanskrit, according to [[Sanskrit]], is still commonly being taught and
apparently is used by about four million people.
I don't think its appropriate for contributors to
Wiktionary totranslate words into languages that don't have a word for it
already,thats not our place IMO. Granted, Wikipedia might have to from timeto time, but
they have different goals.
Well, the neologism template on la: (Latin is a bad example, I know, but the
only one I am involved with) has a call for older, better, and attested forms
of words. This is important mainly because the Latin most people know is
Classical Latin, but the language has been in use for a long time since then,
and a lot of more modern things have actually been written about and
subsequently forgotten. My hope is that wiktionary can become a vehicle for
these things to be found again.
I could give an example, I guess. A user on la:wikt created [[Honsium]] for
the Japanese island "Honshu", based on the wikipedia entry. Now, in general,
the quality of Latin on the Wikipedia is very bad, so it's not admissible as
a source and it gets the neologism template.
Afterwards another user comes by with an attestation in a Latin reference
work from 1977 (Carolus Egger's _Lexicon Nominum Locorum_) where it is given
as "Honsua", to which the page was moved and now currently stands, without
the neologism template.
Sometimes we can do better. [[Sicocum]] ("Shikoku") was also created. The
1977 source lists it as "Sicocus" (feminine). However, we were able
to go back even further, and found a 1589 source speaking of Xicocum (neuter;
with a Spanish value of x, i.e. /S/, in modern spelling better Sicocum), so
it gets to stay where it is. (It doesn't list Honshu by anything approximating
the modern name, though. It named the island Meacum, after Kyoto.)
I know this is a ... special situation. This language has no native speakers
left, so its compilation depends entirely on research. We don't _know_ if
we have the words, so we put things down tentatively. Other language
Wiktionaries have the benefit of native speaker intuition as well, so this
system may not work as well there.
*Muke!
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