Talk:чăваш чĕлхи

Request for verification

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

I've never seen this anywhere other than the Internet, only чӑваш чӗлхи. Is it attestable? -- Prince Kassad 19:09, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

The admins on the Chuvash Wikipedia use the form чăваш чĕлхи and say that the reason is that this is what almost everyone uses. Many of the non-Slavic languages of the old Soviet Union often or usually used certain Roman letters together with the Cyrillic alphabet to fill in for letters that Cyrillic lacked. The Unicode Consortium has newly provided them with special Cyrillic letters, but they have been slow to adopt them. The Cyrillic counterparts to these letters are brand-new and most people in those regions still do not have fonts that have them, even if they had the special keyboards. I have noticed that this is gradually changing. Four years ago, the Cyrillic чӑваш чӗлхи was virtually nonexistent; today, Roman чăваш чĕлхи has 15,700 Google hits, while чӑваш чӗлхи has 23,300. So the Cyrillic is catching on, at least with this language. Some other languages, such as Chechen, have been much slower to change their special Roman letters to Cyrillic ones. —Stephen 17:46, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

If you have noticed, most of the Google search results using the Cyrillic letters are only databases, and not actual Chuvash webpages. I myself don't know how to deal with this situation (especially as it affects multiple languages), but there should be a solution that works well for everyone. -- Prince Kassad 17:53, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I just now noticed that. All the Google hits that I see using only Cyrillic are databases. All the Chuvash text pages use the Roman letters. So it would seem that the Cyrillic letters still have not caught on. I think the only way to deal with it is what we have done, to have both ă, ĕ, ç and ӑ, ӗ, ҫ. But if we have only one, then prefer Roman ă, ĕ, ç, since that is what people use. It’s the same as with Spanish ch, Croatian nj, and Dutch ij. There are special Unicode characters newly provided, but nobody ever uses them. People write them separately. —Stephen 18:03, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

My idea is to use the Cyrillic versions, but provide redirects with the Latin letters. This prevents needless duplication of entries. -- Prince Kassad 20:29, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

I agree with the redirect, but I think it should redirect to the forms that are in standard use. This would mean that Serbocroatian words with nj -> nj, lj -> lj, Dutch words with IJ -> IJ, ij -> ij, but French oe -> œ (œuf). And then Chuvash words with ӑ, ӗ, ҫ -> ă, ĕ, ç. If it ever comes to pass that the Chuvash change the alphabet, it will be very simple for us to switch the direction of the redirects. —Stephen 20:46, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Oh yay, here comes the Latin vs. Cyrillic arguing again, which I wanted to avoid because we have different opinions on that subject. -- Prince Kassad 21:22, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

We seem to be talking at cross purposes. This question about the Chuvash is about Latin vs. Cyrillic. If you don’t want to talk about it, why did you start the question of чăваш чĕлхи in the first place? Chuvash and a number of other languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet also use certain letters from the Roman alphabet. There is a long tradition of this and for good reasons. But if you want to avoid the subject, then there is nothing to be said on the subject of чăваш чĕлхи. —Stephen 21:54, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Chuvash and a number of other languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet also use certain letters from the Roman alphabet - this might be what the Internet community is doing, but historically it is wrong. ӑ and ӗ were derived from Cyrillic а and е with the addition of a breve, in a similar manner to й. ҫ is also a modification of Cyrillic с, and does not originate from ç. WT:CFI dictates the use of Cyrillic letters, as these are the only ones that can be attested in printed sources. -- Prince Kassad 22:08, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

It’s not wrong historically. It’s only since the advent of Unicode that Roman e and Cyrillic е became fundamentally different symbols, or Arabic ى and Persian ی became different letters. Until about 2000, Arabic and Persian ى were the same, just as English and Spanish e are the same. In a given typeface in the days of metal type, a Roman e was also a Cyrillic e in a house that handled both scripts. A font manufacturer would create a Roman helvetica typeface and take the same e to suppliment the Cyrillic helvetical counterpart. Only the letters that were actually different were actually different. A Roman B was a Cyillic В, but letters such as г, д, з, ж had to be manufactured specially for each Cyrillic font. Until about 2000, typographers mixed and matched Roman and Cyrillic letters that were identical, and it was the letters of different typefaces that could not be mixed. And it is not just the Internet Chuvash community that uses ă, ĕ, ç, they were using ă, ĕ, ç in the days of metal type and in the days of Compugraphic film font technology, because as long as the letters were the same typeface and point size, they were the same letters. Only now have they been differentiated as though they were not similar at all, and this has so far not been completely accepted by users. If they created a single digraph for English sh , ch, gh, and th, they would only be used by a small number of oddballs...the rest of the English-speaking world would continue to use separate letters. In the same way, the Dutch write ij separately, the Croats nj separately. They don’t need or like the special Unicode symbols that were offered to them. And the Chuvash have not accepted ӑ and ӗ. Chuvash Wikipedia uses the Roman letters and always has. Chechen Wikipedia uses Roman I, as does Avar and others. What it means is that they consider ă, ĕ, ç to be Cyrillic today just as they have considered them to be Cyrillic for centuries past, that ă, ĕ, ç are the letters that the Chuvash use and have been using for decades. —Stephen 22:32, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

The question now is what the goal of our dictionary is. Either we try to be be technically correct and use the characters we're supposed to use Unicode-wise, or we decide to be a service to the readers and leave out characters which may have low font support. -- Prince Kassad 16:06, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

A similar issue comes up with traditional Hebrew punctuation; for example, Israelis usually type English apostrophes instead of Hebrew geresh-es, but conversely, an Israeli restaurant whose name ends in (deprecated template usage) ־׳ס will use a geresh on its signage. In other words, Israelis generally treat the geresh and apostrophe as one character (albeit one that looks a bit different online, א', than in print, א׳), but Unicode treats them as separate. (For that matter, I suppose the same issue comes up in English, with ASCII 's online vs. non-ASCII ’s in print.) I'd be interested in a general solution, if one is possible. —Ruakh_TALK 18:01, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

This is a living language, and we need to serve its readers and writers. On the other hand, Cyrillic e and a with breve have been in Unicode since version 1.1 (1993), so maybe these folks are not using Unicode, rather they might be restricted to some other character set's repertoire for compatibility. Are other newer Cyrillic code points used online, like Ç and Ӳ?

We should probably have entries from the one form redirected to the other. If the standardized Unicode spelling displays correctly on most computers, then let's use that for main entries.

But folks, please let's not confuse the language with technical methods for representing it. Whether you use code points from the Latin or Cyrillic block, you are still spelling the same word with the same letter. These are not alternate spellings, they are different ways of representing the same spelling.

Funny how so much work has been put into the Universal Alphabet, but Unicode still gets used and misused like metal type. —Michael Z. 2009-04-26 19:16 z

Chuvash people use ӳ online, due to lack of a Latin alternative. ҫ is used by Bashkirs for the Bashkir language. Latin Ç is not an acceptable alternate for them (ҫ needs to contrast with ҙ). -- Prince Kassad 19:55, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

I face this problem repeatedly when dealing with Soviet languages. Especially with Ossetian ӕ / æ. So, let's continue the discussion and reach a consensus. While I agree with redirecting entries from Cyrillic to Latin or vice-versa, I don't see what can be done with translation tables. Any ideas? --Vahagn Petrosyan 11:19, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

There's the alt= parameter for {{t}} which we can use to show the user the Latin version but silently link to the Cyrillic one. -- Prince Kassad 18:38, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Striking. I've made one redirect to the other. Specifically, I think I've made the one with Roman letters redirect to the one with Cyrillic letters. —Ruakh_TALK 19:20, 4 January 2010 (UTC)