Still wondering, is there any sort of unified standard?
Languages such as Sicilian, Sardinian, etc have only recently gotten
standard versions.
Dialect differences have always been a problem for Sicilian and
Sardinian, there was no single dialect that you could use without
upsetting people or causing confusion.
So advisory committees were formed, and they formulated proposals for
unified versions of these languages. Currently, the Limba Sarda
Unificata (Unified Sardinian) standard is official in the Sardinian
province of Nugoro, and it is being promoted everywhere. Its intention
is to be a bridge between the different dialects, a sort of linguistic
"least common denominator" which works for everybody.
It did cause some upset because everybody was most supportive of their
own dialect, but it is a much better option than using any single
Sardinian dialect.
Now, whether or not this can be done for a language depends on how
different the dialects are. For some languages, you can just take the
dialect of the capital or largest city and use that, but for other
languages there is too much linguistic regionalism and such a move
would cause problems with speakers of other dialects. In these cases
it is normal for a country or political unit to try "language
planning" and to formulate a sort of "least common denominator".
That approach generally works the best with languages that don't have
really vastly differing dialects, but the dialects aren't close enough
that people understand each other easily. There have been attempts to
do the same sort of thing for groups of languages, for example
Interlingua for Western Romance languages, and in some cases they have
worked, in others they have failed.
best,
node
ps
even if this problem is not dealt with now, it will need to be dealt
with by any future kurdish nation-state
On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 12:10:36 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hmm... How different are Zazaki and Kurmanci and
Sorani? Is there any
sort of unified standard already existing?
If possible, one of the best options would probably be to use a
unified standard which either might already exist or which you might
devise yourselves (or you could find somebody else to help devise it
for you).
Of course this won't work if Zazaki and Kurmanci and Sorani are too
different, but if not it would be good because otherwise there will
need to be 6 versions of each article (Zazaki Latin, Kurmanci Latin,
Sorani Latin, Zazaki Arabic, Kurmanci Arabic, Sorani Arabic) or
something similar.
Best,
Node
On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 10:42:20 +0200, Erdal Ronahi <erdal.ronahi(a)gmx.net> wrote:
Hi Mark and everybody,
Yes, Tahoma works (but is ugly and therefore not used on ar: for
example) and is even more widespread than Unikurd Web. I just tried it
on
http://ku.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fontexample. The words there
should look similar with the only difference being the diacriticals.
I have not expressed myself correctly. The problem was not only the
font, but the fact one cannot tell Wikipedia to use one font throughout
an article if there are headings and lists. For the page name it doesn't
work anyway. Something I forgot to mention was the edit window, words
appear differently in the edit window and on the page or in the preview.
An automatic script converter would be a fine thing, but there are also
dialect differences. So an article in the two main dialects Kurmanci and
Sorani would exist four times after automatic conversion into both
scripts. At the moment we have three dialects represented which are only
partly mutually intellegible. Until now all Sorani is written in arabic
letter, all Kurmanci and Zazaki in latin letter with links to each other
if the same article exists in different dialects. We like it that way,
there were no objections yet.
But because arabic and latin script are used for either of them,
automatic script conversion would be fine on the long run. Technically
it should be possible, as far as I know 1:1 conversion is possible.
Erdal
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