[Wikipedia-l] Script conversion for Vlax Romany Wikipedia

Tue Dec 6 09:14:48 UTC 2005

Hi,

There is currently an approved request to set up a Wikipedia in
Vlax Romany, the main language of the Roma people, which is
mainly spoken by Romanian Roma but also throughout the world.

Now, this isn't yet a request to set up the Vlax Romany Wikipedia,
since the interface still needs to be translated and a few more
administrative things to be done. However, the main Romany contributor,
Desiphral, has already written more than 10 quite long articles on the
Vlax Romany test wiki, at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/rmy/

Now, the main reason I have written here - I talked to him and he said
that he would like to contribute in both scripts - Latin and Devangari.
Romany is an Indo-Aryan language, and while it is mostly written in
Latin script, some people, especially outside of Europe, write it in
Devangari script, which they say represents the language better and
links it culturally to its related languages, Hindi, Sanskrit, etc.
Desiphral himself said that he communicated with Roma throughout
the world in Devangari, and has already written some articles to Test-wiki,
in both Latin script and Devangari.

So, what I'm wondering here is: would it be possible to set up an
automatic conversion system to serve up Devangari and Latin versions of the
same article? For example, if a user writes in Latin script, can that be
converted
automatically to Devangari to be read by someone who's specified Devangari
as their nominated script in Preferences, and vice versa?
The conversion is very consistent in that each Devangari
symbol represents the one and the same letter or diphthong in the Latin
Romany alphabet.

Thanks,

Ronline