Talk:Или

So...

@Theknightwho Since you're back to stalking my edits again (and—of course—aside from helpfully correcting errors please stop, particularly with the needless and petty personal attacks and particularly when I'm creating needful entries), if you do know a meaningful difference between Xibe and Mongolian characters, can you add the correct form here?

If you have no idea what the correct form is, going out of your way to call the previous edit certainly incorrect seems dubious. Fwiw, every one of those characters appears in Mongolian script, although that may be a matter of the Unicode consortium merging things that shouldn't've been. — LlywelynII 10:30, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

@LlywelynII I don't know what the Mongolian script spelling is, but since I do know that Mongolian doesn't use Xibe letters, it can't be the one that you added. That's why I removed it without replacement. The fact that it's been grouped into the Mongolian Unicode block isn't relevant: see here for the basics on why it's not that simple. Even taking the letters used by Mongolian, many are not used in modern Mongolian (e.g. the Galik/Ali Gali letters), because they were used historically for the transcription of Sanskrit and Tibetan religious texts. Three others are only used in Inner Mongolia for the transcription of Chinese, and at least one other is only used in Buryat, not the Mongolian language. It's complicated.

Most importantly, the Mongolian Cyrillic and traditional scripts do not have a one-to-one correspondence, and they can't even be converted in a predictable way in a large number of cases, since one is based on the Mongolian koine of the 17th century, and the other is based on how the Khalkha dialect was spoken at the beginning of the 20th century. The spelling in the other script simply cannot be inferred unless you really, really know what you're doing, because they're as different as English IPA is from English spelling.

One other thing: most Mongolian speakers living in Mongolia cannot read the traditional script, and it's only really used for ornamental purposes (despite all the fuss about reintroducing it next year). That means you can't trust anything on the Mongolian version of Wikipedia, because it's very likely that the person who added it had no idea what they were doing. On the other hand, most Mongolian speakers in Inner Mongolia (where they do use the traditional script) will only be able to read Cyrillic to a conversational level at best, and probably can't access WP reliably in the first place, so they won't be contributing at all. You can trust official dictionaries like Mongol Toli, but outside of that the only non-dictionary websites you can take as reliable are the ones actually published in the Mongolian script, but most of them are local government websites based in Inner Mongolia, so it's pretty limited. Theknightwho (talk) 11:23, 8 July 2024 (UTC)