[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Hyperlink convention

Fri Oct 1 09:57:35 UTC 2004

David Friedland wrote:

> Delirium wrote:
>
>> Angela wrote:
>>
>>> One reason is that the differences between American and British
>>> English are more involved than simply changing the spelling of a few
>>> words. Punctuation and grammar are also involved. If you changed
>>> behavior to behaviour in an otherwise AE sentence, the sentence would
>>> then be wrong in both languages.
>>
>> I can't seem to find the page now, but I seem to remember a policy 
>> page where we've basically settled on a compromise, 
>> partially-invented "international English" punctuation style for 
>> clarity and because it's not really worth fighting over.  The 
>> compromise included the British-style "put punctuation _after_ 
>> closing quotation marks", and something from US style that I can't 
>> remember.  As for being "wrong", that's only the case if you happen 
>> to be a [[en:prescription and description|grammatical 
>> prescriptivist]], which not all of us are.
>>
>> But as far as the spelling issue goes, it seems like a solution in 
>> search of a problem.  The current approach seems to be working well 
>> enough.
>
> I heartily disagree. The current approach is a constant source of 
> disagreement and worsening of linguistic tensions. I am always running 
> into minor tiffs over British vs American spelling that could be 
> eliminated with multi-dialect support. This would also mean that when 
> I run into a Britishism on an article that might be confusing or 
> misleading to an American reader, instead of changing it to an 
> Americanism and drawing the ire of the original author (or changing it 
> to something neutral and probably drawing the ire of the original 
> author), the original author's Britishism can stay, the Americanism 
> will be viewable to Americans, and everyone is a little bit happier.
>
> I think that the minor increase in complexity for editing is far 
> outweighed by the increase in understandability, familiarity, and 
> dialectical consistency. As for syntactic differences between the 
> dialects, I have yet to see anything that differed by more than a 
> handful of words. Most of the major differences are in informal, 
> colloquial speech. 

I agree with Mark and Angela on this. Your position is premised on their 
being only two strictly demarcated forms of English.  Canadian English 
is a hybrid that lies between the two, and often depends on the 
preferences of the individual who happens to be writing.  Australians 
and South Africans may generally tend toward Commonwealth English, but 
they too can have their esceptions.  Indian English must have a lakh of 
interesting variations, and we haven't yet considered African and 
Caribbean variants.  I can't possibly imagine a hardware fix that would 
adequately deal with all these rich varieties.

Ec