Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2011-10/Romanization of Gothic

Wiktionary:About Gothic

Could someone knowledgeable put together a simple Wiktionary:About Gothic that explains the romanization scheme to be used? It could be something as simple as "the usual romanization scheme", if there is one, but a table of letter-mappings or a pointer to some publically-available standard would be better IMHO. —Ruakh_TALK 02:00, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

I have copied Wikipedia's table to Wiktionary:About Gothic; it contains the usual system of transliteration. (Some scholarship, eg [1], uses þ and ƕ instead of th and hw, and I suppose we could allow editors of Gothic to decide on WT:About Gothic/Wiktionary talk:About Gothic which system they would like to use, but I expect we will use th and hw for the ease of input that is one of our reasons for allowing Romanizations in the first place.) - -sche (discuss) 02:50, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

Seriously? There's scholarship that doesn't use þ and ƕ? Ease of input is not a big reason for me; it's about recording the words as they are actually printed.--Prosfilaes 07:32, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

Many printed sources don't use ƕ, but sources that don't use th are much more rare. It's also traditional to put macrons over vowels that are known to be long, and accent marks to differentiate the different etymologies of ai and au. But since we don't do this for other languages I don't think it should be done here (qino and not qinō). We should of course provide macrons in the headword line. —CodeCat 10:31, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

According to the Gotische Grammatik by Braune and Ebbinghaus (1981) there is a de facto standard for transcription of Gothic script, with 𐍈 = ƕ and 𐌸 = þ (§1, Anm. 4).

Nevertheless, I would like to avoid these in article names and use them only in the headword line (as CodeCat suggests) and in the tr= part of templates (term, l...). The same applies to e, o versus ē, ō.

Ease of input is a big reason for me. In a paper dictionary you can browse for words without typing them. In an electronical dictionary you have to be able to type the words correctly, or you have to master the search function. Yesterday I tried to look for a transcribed form the Gothic word 𐌰𐌽𐌳: looking for and didn't help me and looking for Gothic and returned only Gothic stuff (no and). The non-transcribed form of 𐌰𐌽𐌳 is even worse to search for because it didn't find 𐌰𐌽𐌳- (with hyphen). Accidental users will have more problems with finding Gothic words in Gothic script. --MaEr 11:20, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

If I were to look up 𐍈𐌰𐌸𐌰𐍂 I would most likely be searching for hwaþar, though. To give an indication of the relative use of the characters, "hwaþar" gives 274 hits on Google while "hwathar" gives 142, and "ƕaþar" gives only 147 and "ƕathar" none at all. This shows that the form with þ and hw is the most common. But we could have entries for hwaþar, hwathar and ƕaþar. —CodeCat 11:44, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

We have to distinguish between two cases (maybe more):
a) Someone finds a Gothic word in a paper dictionary (for example ƕaþar) and looks it up in this wiktionary. In this case the user won't be able to input special characters like ē, ō or þ, let alone the Gothic-only character ƕ. Therefor the article name should not contain these characters.
b) Someone is already in the article (for example 𐍈𐌰𐌸𐌰𐍂) and needs the transliteration because he or she cannot read Gothic script. In this case we should present the common linguistic transliteration (in this example ƕaþar).

Indeed: variants like hwaþar, hwathar and ƕaþar could help to solve the problems.

CodeCat, the results of your Google search are ambiguous: I'd rather say that the above-mentioned 274 hits of hwaþar show that many people have no idea how to enter the Gothic-only character ƕ. However, printed books used at universities usually have ƕ, not hw. --MaEr 17:55, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

Statement of legislative intent: It is my intention that the editors of Gothic decide the precise scheme of Romanization to be used; and I interpret the vote I wrote as allowing this discretion (th, þ, ƕ and hw are all traditional Romanizations). - -sche (discuss) 01:02, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2011-09/Romanization of languages in ancient scripts 2

A simple enough solution would be to run that vote first, and only run this one if the former fails. --Mglovesfun (talk) 16:22, 3 October 2011 (UTC)