Wiktionary:About Shina

This is a Wiktionary policy, guideline or common practices page. This is a draft proposal. It is unofficial, and it is unknown whether it is widely accepted by Wiktionary editors. Policies – Entries: CFI - EL - NORM - NPOV - QUOTE - REDIR - DELETE. Languages: LT - AXX. Others: BLOCK - BOTS - VOTES.

See also Category:Shina language, Category:Kohistani Shina language

---

Script

Shina [ISO 639-3: scl], is usually written in an adapted version of the Urdu alphabet. Also, the letter څ (ts) has been borrowed from Pashto.

For the literary Shina of Gilgit, a set of additional letters have been established for consonants that do not exist in Urdu, and a diacritic sign – represented by the Unicode character 08FF – is used to mark short vowels.

The Dras variety of Shina can also be written in a form of Devanagari script.

Varieties

There are considerable dialectal differences between the Shina of Gilgit one the one hand, and that of Chilas and the Astore Valley on the other hand.
Thus, if you are not sure if a particular word or grammatical form exists in all Shina varieties, please indicate the dialect(s) in which you know they are used.

Remember also that, at the moment, this section covers only the Shina dialects of Gilgit-Baltistan and Jammu and Kashmir, but not those of Kohistan (Palasi; [ISO 639-3: plk]), or the related languages of the Shina group – Ushojo, Kalkoti, Sawi, Palula, Kundal Shahi, and Brokskat – all of which have individual language codes.

Creating Shina entries

Basic article

The Shina entry is organised by part of speech (Noun/Verb/Adjective/Adverb...) as the primary divider. These are normally given as a level 3 header: ===Noun=== etc.

This header should be followed by the headword line which minimally contains the entry name, which must be added through a headword-line template; if no suitable template exists, use {{head}} directly.

Categorization

See Category:Shina language for available categories.

Topic categories

Main category: scl:All topics

Apart from categorising by part of speech, it is also desirable to categorize entries by topic. This is often done by preceding the definition with {{lb|scl|<some topic>}}

Grammar

• For Shina verbs, the lemma form is the infinitive, which takes a different ending in Gilgiti than in most other varieties.
• There are two grammatical genders in Shina. These are indicated by g=m (masculine) or g=f (feminine) in the headword-line template (see above).

Templates

Usage	Template	Uses
Nouns	{{scl-decl-noun}}	uses

Sources

• Thomas G. Bailey, Grammar of the Shina (Ṣiṇā) language (1924).
• Carla Radloff: The dialects of Shina, in Languages of Northern Areas, pages 89–203 (1992)
• Almuth Degener, Shina-Texte aus Gilgit (Nord-Pakistan). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz (2008)
• B. B. Rajapurohit, Grammar of the Shina language and vocabulary (Based on the dialect spoken around Dras) (2012)