Academic Kids talk:WikiProject Writing systems

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Contents

1 List of lists and categories 1.1 Categories 1.2 Lists 1.3 Lists within articles 2 To do 2.1 Lists and categories 2.2 Terminology used on article pages 2.3 Presentation of script samples 2.4 Separating the script articles from language articles? 3 WikiProject Transliteration 4 Still active?

List of lists and categories

I'm very unclear about how to distribute things between the project page and the talk page, so I put this here for the momemt. Pjacobi 11:16, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Categories

• Category:Writing systems
• Category:Logographic writing systems
• Category:Abugida writing systems
• Category:Alphabetic writing systems
• Category:Latin-derived alphabets
• Category:Cyrillic_alphabet
• Category:Undeciphered writing systems
• Category:Syllabic writing systems
• Category:Syllabary writing systems

Lists

• List of writing systems
• List of alphabets
• List of undeciphered writing systems

Lists within articles

• Abugida

To do

A rough scratch for start, please expand and comment. Pjacobi 11:17, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Lists and categories

Is this in-scope for a WikiProject?

The above mentioned lists and categories all disagree in subtle and some not so subtle points. Tedious cleanup seems necessary to me, starting with getting input from actual field experts on some difficult points in classification.

See alse these talk pages:

• Category_talk:Writing systems
• Category_talk:Abugida_writing_systems
• Talk:Devanagari

Terminology used on article pages

When to use alphabet, when to use script.

Of course the best usage would be 'writing system', but that can feel a bit awkward, particularly in the title of an article. 'Alphabet' has a distinct technical use, but is popularly used for most writing systems (perhaps excluding logographs). 'Script' just feels a bit amateur, but may be the best solution: it is equivalent to a 'writing system'.

There is also the issue of how to name individual segments of a writing system. The usual, western use is 'letter', but there is a tendancy to drop this use with more 'exotic' (from a western POV) scripts: glyphs and characters. I think the technical term is 'graph', but in popular usage that word is used for a graphical representation of statistics. There is also the issue of what to call the vowel marks in a vocalised abjad text, or the additional vowel strokes in an abugida.

Gareth Hughes 13:14, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Presentation of script samples

To rely on rendering of Unicode text or creating images. In case of images, a recommendation on size and layout and some tips for tool chains to use.

Separating the script articles from language articles?

For scripts only used to write one language, there currently often exists only one page for both language and script. Is it preferable to separate these, or can criteria given when to separate these?

In my view, yes, it would be ideal to have separate pages to describe the spoken language, and the script/writing system (of course, interlinked). Writing systems may be used (with little variation) by more than one distinct language, and a language may commonly (or formerly) be written by more than one script. Even in the case where there may be a one-to-one relationship, one might wish to discuss aspects of one or the other in more detail than would be convenient if they are presented together on the same page.

As for when to separate where they may already be conjoined, a blanket criterion could probably not be given in advance - it would depend upon how advanced the current conflated description is, how much effort it would take to separate, and if there is anyone prepared to do it. But yes, I for one would like to see separate articles appearing on each of the individual writing systems used to encode a given language, as they merit such a distinction. Whether this can easily be done, is another question! --cjllw | TALK 06:39, 2005 Jun 15 (UTC)

WikiProject Transliteration

• This WikiProject aims primarily to provide a consistent treatment of each language family on the Wikipedia.

I imagine "language family" is supposed to mean "writing system", seeing that this is what this project is dealing with?

I would like to start a WikiProject "Transliteration/Romanization" as a central place to develop policies how terms that are natively spelled in non-Latin alphabets should be represented. See Transliteration for a list. See also Talk:Islam#transliteration.2C_capitalisation.2C_diacritics for my thoughts on the Arabic language. Should this project's scope be expanded to cover these questions, or should a sister-project be initiated? dab 17:53, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Still active?

Doesn't seem to be much in the way of recent activity here - is anyone still active or monitoring this, who would be interested in firing this up again? --cjllw | TALK 03:36, 2005 Jun 10 (UTC)

I am no linguist. However, I'll contribute in whatever way I can and also give some inputs on Tamil script and related scripts. Perhaps, I can help bring that article to a model article state. -- Sundar (talk • contribs) 07:17, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

na - wikiprojects tend to be dust-gatherers. I can thing of a few efforts. The Old Italic alphabets need loving attention, for example, with articles on individual scripts, such as the Alphabet of Lugano (see Gaulish). Also, lots of articles need images of the actual script. Iberian scripts for example. dab (ᛏ) 09:09, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

ah, and most of the stuff on this talk page should be promoted to the project page! dab (ᛏ) 09:10, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

plus, nobody addressed my transliteration questions above... Maybe we should spam some alphabet articles' talk pages drawing attention to this page? dab (ᛏ) 09:11, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I saw your question above. I personally feel that it can be a part of this wiki project itself. -- Sundar 09:15, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)