User talk:Universal Life

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Again, welcome! --WikiTiki89 23:35, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the welcome! :)) ♥ --Universal Life (talk) 00:46, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Ladino orthography

Hi Wikitiki,

I saw your question about Ladino orthography in a tea room from Nov. 2012. I am a native speaker of Judaeo-Spanish and I am competent in both speaking and writing the language. Unfortunately there aren't many online sources that are proper. However, I am more than willing to help with any question or any problem what-so-ever.

About the spelling of Judeo-Español or Djudeo-Espanyol in Merubbá (Hebrew square letters), the correct spelling is: גֿודֿיאו-איספאנייול. However, sometimes, the rafe (line) over daleth is omitted for convenience or easier spelling, even though it's fricative.

Friendly --Universal Life (talk) 23:09, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi!

It's nice to know that we have a native Ladino speaker among our editors. I don't know much Ladino, but I do know that whoever added most of our Ladino entries spelled a lot of things wrong.

It would be very helpful if you edited some of the Ladino entries and fixed spelling errors.

From what you say, I understand that the rafe is used on the letter gimel rather than a geresh (for the "dj" sound). Is that correct?

Thanks. --WikiTiki89 08:16, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Yeap, that's correct. Rafe has always been used traditionally on gimel, daleth, zayin, pe etc.

Btw, I am also an admin in the Ladino Wikipedia. And I have started a Ladino Wiktionary project. For it to be realised, all MediaWiki messages of the interface should be translated... So, I'm doing those translations mostly in my free time.

About spelling in Ladino...Basically till 1850s, it was written in Rashi (printed) and Soletreo (cursive hand-writing) and usually Merubbá (square Hebrew letters) was used for titles in printed books. From 1860 and on, the Latin letters were introduced to most native speakers, through the French schools of Alliance Israélite Universelle. So French orthography became very common, let's say till the 1930s. However due to nationalism in most countries, different types of orthographies developed.

Today, there are at least 12 styles of orthography using Latin letters + 5 different non-Latin orthographies in use. Though out of these 17, 6 are the most common and most suitable to use in the Wiktionary: French orthography (Vidas Largas), Turkish orthography, Aki Yerushalayim orthography (simplest Hebrew transcription system), Multidialectal orthography, Old Spanish orthography and Hebrew orthography. Most speakers are over 70 years of age and it is very difficult to find proper sources online. Thankfully, I have books dedicated to this subject at home. I am also in contact with speakers from different parts of the world. For example, I've recently learned that (old) Spanish-based orthography (with some French and Italian influences) is quite common among the ex-Rhodes, ex-Congo Sephardic communities. Turkish orthography is quite common in Turkey, where I am from. Aki Yerushalayim (AY) is gaining popularity in some academic circles, it's a 30 years old orthography. Multidialectal one however is the youngest, it's around 6 years old. It's also called the United Orthography and in my opinion is much more developed than AY because of it's partially a deeper system (it makes use of some morphographic and multidialectal conventions, though it's a phonographic system at its base).

In no other orthography, you could differentiate between qué (what) and ké (dock), between carar (amount) and karar (decision), between vida (life) and vidda (screw) etc. Often times, the same word is bound to be written in many different ways in the same orthography but most often not in the multidialectal one. For example sueño is spelled suenyo, suenyu, s.huenyo, s.huenyu, es.huenyo, es.huenyu, esfuenyo and esfuenyu according to the pronunciation (dialect) of the speaker, and when spelled in the Aki Yerushalayim orthography. Fuerte is spelled similarly as fuerte, huerte, fuerti and huerti. Kereste is spelled as kereste, kyereste, kyeresti, chereste and chiresti. Hijo is spelled as ijo, fijo, isho, fiju and hijo. Muchacha is spelled as muchacha, muchache and mushasha. That's why I prefer the multidialectal spelling in the interface translation, because you can write a word one way and it could be read different ways (own ways), according to the origin of the reader. Writing muchacha and mushasha is like writing tomahto and tomeito for the same word.

It would be very nice if we could fix, different orthographies or spelling standards for the wiktionary, may be use only one of them in the translations, and give the most other common spelling as alternative spellings. May be I'll go ahead and do some corrections, however I'm not so good with templates.

Friendly, --Universal Life (talk) 10:12, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Here at the English Wiktionary, we require words to be citable. Since Ladino is a fairly small language, Ladino words only require one citation to be deemed "verified". This means that we should choose the orthography that has the most durably archived texts available so that we can verify whether the word exists. If we use this "Multidialectal orthography", which as you say is 6 years old, I am worried that there wouldn't be enough published books to get citations from. I found a description of the multidialectal orthography here and it seems interesting, but if we can't find citations in it, then we can't use it. See WT:CFI#Attestation and WT:LDL#Citations for more information. --WikiTiki89 18:22, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Ah! I though citation rule was for Wikipedia..and usually I like to cite everything I add to the Wikipedia. However citing every Ladino word one adds, would be quite difficult, if not impossible, especially for each orthography. I have two Ladino dictionaries at home. One of them is a small Ladino-Turkish / Turkish-Ladino dictionary, where the Turkish system is used with small modification. The other one is the biggest Ladino dictionary present, but written especially for the Salonika dialect; from Ladino to French. However it uses a very unconventional system of spelling. So if I add a word from there but use a more common orthography (passing from one style/spelling to the other is quite simple actually), then how could I cite it? Would I need to cite, every word I add, in every spelling style (Hebrew, French, Turkish spellings etc.)?

Btw, I checked again and it seems I was wrong about the age of the multidialectal spelling. I think it's around 12 years old...But it wouldn't matter which orthography I use, it would be practically impossible to cite every word I add in its every form, let alone to cite each word itself. We should not forget that Judeo-Spanish is a highly endangered language, with most of its native speakers over 70 and not using the internet. There has been orthography change, at least twice or even thrice in the last 150 years. There used to be tens of daily newspapers and thousands of books published a hundred years ago. However it's not the case today. So, my grandparents' knowledge and some older publications and books are the best resources available. --Universal Life (talk) 19:53, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

You don't actually need to cite every word. It just needs to be possible to cite the words. If someone asks for the word to be verified, then you will need to cite it. With languages like Ladino, people usually aren't very picky about verifying words. But I still think it is important that we use an orthography that would allow us to cite as many words as possible. Also note that citations are not the same as Wikipedia. Citations here need to be uses of the words rather than other dictionaries or articles talking about the words. Wikipedia is a tertiary source because it only cites secondary sources, but Wiktionary is a secondary source because we only cite primary sources. --WikiTiki89 19:59, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you WikiTiki, now I'm relieved! I imagined that I would need to find secondary sources and proof that such word exists every time I made an entry...I was discouraged for a moment there, but now I understand what you meant by citation. I have misunderstood. Thanks for explaining :) --Universal Life (talk) 20:48, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

If there is anything I can do or any question or problem that I can be helpful with, about Judaeo-Spanish, please let me know. Thanks --Universal Life (talk) 21:07, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Well there are a lot of things that you could do, depending on how much time you have to work on things:

• You could check the spelling of Ladino entries. A lot of them are wrong.
• You could add words that we are missing.
• You could add pronunciations, etymologies, conjugation tables.
• You could add citations. For an example of how to add citations, see the Hebrew word סופגנייה.
• You could add usage examples if you can't find a citation. For an example, see the Hebrew word נפגש.

Those are just some things I could think of off the top of my head. I myself don't work with Ladino a lot because I don't know enough about it. But if I had a text to work with, then I would be able to add citations. The only Hebrew-script text I can find in Google Books is a Ladino translation of the New Testament, which I think is probably the worst subject for quoting Ladino. I'm not even sure why the New Testament was ever translated into Ladino. I don't know if you happen to have any Ladino books at home, but if you do, that would be one of the best sources. --WikiTiki89 21:54, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, I will see what I can do. --Universal Life (talk) 22:44, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Orange links

If you add the following text to your User:Universal Life/common.js, it will enable orange links:

// Orange links
importScript('User:Yair rand/orangelinks2.js');

Orange links are useful for telling whether a language section exists on a page. Red links will still be red, but blue links will only be blue if the page exists and the language section exists, otherwise it will be orange. For example:

Red link: acojer (no page at all)

Blue link: aboltar (page exists and has a ==Ladino== section)

Orange link: acontecer (page exists, but does not have a ==Ladino== section)

I hope you find this useful! --WikiTiki89 23:35, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Formatting and templates

Take a look at the changes I made to abaxada. You should try to use the correct templates. If you have any questions about which templates go where or about why certain templates are needed, feel free to ask! --WikiTiki89 00:30, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you WikiTiki,

I was actually wondering how the format should be and which templates to use etc. But the changes you made were very useful :) --Universal Life (talk) 01:56, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Template:lad-noun

It seems you do not understand script codes either. Script ≠ "spelling". There is no such thing as "Fren", "Mult", "Aki" and "Turk" scripts. Valid script codes are listed at WT:LOS. Accodring to WT:LOL#lad, Ladino is written in Hebrew, Latin and Cyrillic. Spellings specific to dialects are usually handled by putting {{alternative spelling of|word|from=dialect}} as the definition. Keφr 13:33, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me, right now, I was going through the languages such as Serbo-Croatian, Azeri, Karakalpak and their templates to understand and also through parser functions...but it all looks very complicated. Anyway, I didn't know that these letters (such as l=Latin etc.) are predetermined, I thought we determined them each time, when writing the template.

About the Ladino language, (see what I wrote here), there are no standardised spelling, however there are spelling norms. I'll give an example:

The word for a "young woman" is muchacha. It's pronounced the same in almost all the dialects, but the spelling is:

• muchacha (Multidialectal and Aki Yerushalayim spelling)
• מוגֿאגֿה (Square Hebrew spelling)
• mutchatcha (French spelling; tch = ch)
• muçaça (Turkish spelling; ç = ch)

The word for soap:

• xavón (Mult; x = sh)
• שאבֿון (Hebr)
• shavon (Aki)
• chavon (Fren; ch = sh)
• şavon (Turk; ş = sh)

These are the most common and citable spellings, however there also those who use other spelling conventions. About the dialectal variations mutchatche is an alternative form (e.g. dialect of Prishtine) of mutchatcha. And muçaçe is an alternative form of muçaça. However mutchatche and muçaçe are different spelling variants of each other and are pronounced the same. Do you think that these five forms (same pronunciation, different spelling rules or scripts) could be displayed under the word-class (e.g. Noun) in a raw? And the dialectal forms under the Alternative forms? What do you say? May be you could help me out.

Thanks, Friendly --Universal Life (talk) 15:54, 27 February 2014

Those single-letter arguments to headword templates are not standardised, but script codes are (i.e. the usually four-letter codes which are passed to template parameters named |sc= or similar). They exist so that different fonts can be applied to different writing systems with CSS.

This is the sort of information we are supposed to be able to find at WT:About Ladino. If we had it. You know what to do now…

I think this should be handled through something between our approaches to English and Serbo-Croatian/Hindi-Urdu: within each writing system, pick one spelling for each individual word (based on, say, the popularity of each variation) to be the main lemma, which has full definitions. For the rest, write stub definitions using {{alternative spelling of}}. But I have no strong opinions, and I am not quite convinced that this would be the best.

One thing we should take into consideration is how all these forms should be linked to one another. Would be good to know how Ladino inflects words. Right now we seem to have no inflection templates for Ladino (and the headwords only link to forms in alternative writing systems), but I do not know whether this is because Ladino words do not inflect, or just nobody got around to make these. (We seem to have a {{lad-verb-form}}, though.)

And the "word-class (e.g. Noun)" is called a part of speech. Except when it is not.

Keφr 17:32, 27 February 2014

What Universal Life meant to do was create a system of "orthography codes" for Ladino. I think the the sc= should be removed from the {{lad-noun}} and replaced with a ort= parameter from which the sc= can then be derived. --WikiTiki89 20:23, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Thank you WikiTiki and Kephir. :)) I don't know the codes very much. I tried to change them, unsuccesfully, however changing sc (which I've just now understood to be script) into ort (I guess orthography) seems very logical. I you or someone who knows the codes could help, I would be more than willing to cooperate in order to better the current situation. Friendly --Universal Life (talk) 17:23, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Well sc= is a standard parameter that we have on almost all templates. ort= I just made up right now solely for this purpose. --WikiTiki89 17:47, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Is it possible to add ort= as a new parameter? How do we do it? --Universal Life (talk) 20:40, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

You don't have to "add" it. You just need to use {{{ort|default value}}} in the template wherever you need it. --WikiTiki89 20:56, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

It looks like {{lad-noun}} already uses the first parameter to specify script. Why not use that instead of ort=? —CodeCat 21:13, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

That's also possible. --WikiTiki89 21:17, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Do you mean to use the sc= parameter? Then how can we use it to indicate orthography (or spelling system) instead of script? --Universal Life (talk) 21:31, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

No, the "first" parameter means the first unnamed parameter, in other words: {{lad-noun|this one}}. --WikiTiki89 21:35, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

obrigado

Sólo quiero decir que estoy muy gracioso por tu trabajo aquí; quiero aprender judeoespañol pero los hablantes son pocos (especialmente en mi estado); tenerte me acomoda. Saludos, --Æ&Œ (talk) 20:19, 15 March 2014 (UTC)