[Foundation-l] Future fate of Siberian Wikipedia

Fri Aug 3 11:22:17 UTC 2007

Thomas Dalton schrieb:
>> From my point of view, the first thing we address would be is "Siberian" a
>> linguistic entity.
> 
> How does "Does the language have a dictionary?" work as a definition
> of whether or not something qualifies as a language? Obviously we need
> a restriction on what kind of dictionaries count (eg. novelty
> dictionaries of Cockney Rhyming Slang don't mean we should create a
> cockney wikipedia), and some other requirements would probably be
> needed as well (mutual intelligibility with other languages, for
> example), but I don't see how we can write a Wikipedia in a language
> which doesn't have a dictionary, since there is no way of determining
> what the language actually consists of (and you end up in the
> situation of having to invent words, as has been mentioned in this
> thread).

In fact there is a Siberian dictionary, the Полный словарь сибирского 
говора / polnyi slovar sibirskogo govora (complete dictionary of the 
Siberian dialect), by O.I. Blinova (ed.), published in Tomsk, 1992-1995 
in 4 volumes.

I suspect that this /is/ a reliable and authoritative source. However, 
if you would cross-check the language used at ru-sib against the 
contents of this dictionary, you would come to the conclusion, that the 
vocabulary of ru-sib is largely invented or borrowed from other 
languages (with the explicite intent of making the language 
unintelligible to speakers of standard Russian) and thus is a 
misrepresentation of the original Northern dialect.

Thanks,

Johannes