[WikiEN-l] Multilingual?

Sun Nov 16 08:42:28 UTC 2003

> Wikipedia, as a whole, is a multilingual project, but the *English*
Wikipedia is NOT, and it isn't acceptable to attempt to force non-English
common usage on English speakers.

RickK

Misses the point.  I get down the Concise Oxford Dictionary from my shelf:
it says chess is a game with 32 pieces and so on.  Not the general type of
king-hunt game.  That usage, which is therefore _not_ the common one, is
being suggested by people with a specialist point of view.

To clarify: mancala _is_ an English term for a class of many games (probably
over 100).  The question is whether omweso, the Ugandan game of this family,
should be called 'Ugandan mancala' instead.  Neither term , 'omweso' or
'Ugandan mancala', is common usage.  The former term is more accurate (there
is apparently an omweso variant played in Entebbe).  If you go down this
line you'd end up calling Bao 'Tanzanian mancala' and so on.  To avoid
introducing terms from another language; but in a context where you can't
say there is much common English usage, outside East Africa.

Charles