User:ArielGlenn/what to include

What to include as Modern Greek entries

We are going to have, sooner or later, these questions:

Katharevousa

What do we do with Katharevousa terms? They need to be marked as being Katharevousa and not standard Modern Greek, and I suppose they ought to be in here so that people can look up words from older books, government documents, and even newspapers. What accent system should these terms have? Should they be marked up in polytonic? (My inclination is to say yes, as that's how all these texts were marked up; polytonic was the accent system for the language.) Do we want to put versions of these terms in monotonic so that people who don't have a decent polytonic keyboard layout can still find them? I'm not excited about this idea.

(Saltmarsh has two ideas listed somewhere on my talk page for markup.)

Living dialects

What do we do with terms from living dialects (Pontian, Cypriot, Crete)? They need to go in, and they should be marked as from the particular dialect. This argues for having some sort of templates that mark the dialect they belong to.

There appears to be previous history for this; see burn for an example of how dialect markup works. The template used on the definition line works like this: {{Geordie}} (for example). and we would have to create a new label template following these instructions: Template_talk:context#Creating_label_templates. We could also look at [[Category:Context labels]] for more information on these.

Obsolete forms

Englsh words are considered obsolete if they haven't been used since... well, there is no real cutoff, There is a draft policy: Wiktionary:Obsolete and archaic terms which has never made it to the real policy stage, and that has no dates in it either.

In any case the draft policy provides for marking up terms with one of the templates {{archaic}}, {{obsolete}}, {{dated}}. We might try using {{dated}} for earlier spellings of some things (like έχη for έχει).

Polytonic markup of standard Modern Greek

Sooner or later this is going to get raised. As a matter of comparison (although not definitive of course), on el wikt currently (July 2007) polytonic markup is used only for Ancient Greek entries. The current state of polytonic use is that it's not taught in school, it's not used in the current dictionaries of Modern Greek, and it's not used by most publications (books, newspapers, periodicals). There are still a few publishing houses that do use it, and its use is sometimes viewed as more "literary" somehow. Folks who had mainly completed school before 1982 may or may not still use it (I know some folks who do and some who don't) in their personal correspondence. Most (but not all) younger folks do not use it. Its use for things other than personal correspondence has a value judgment or political judgment attached, one way or another.

So, given all that, what do we do with it? Minority use, not taught, not used by the standard dictionaries. Do we include it? And if so, what context label do we give it (for surely it would need a context label)? Or, perhaps the question is, how do we include it without making it seem that this is the standard use, when it is not?

Romanizations

If there were just one standard, this would be a much earlier call: include it for convenience. Unfortunately, there are at least 30 different varieties of Greeklish and a number of so-called standard transliteration systems, none well adhered to. We would be buried alive in romanized forms if we include them all. Including just the ones based on the transliteration scheme we use here seems pointless, as that scheme (as with all the rest) is not in particualrly wide use. What's to be done?

Oh yeah, and...

What to include in translation lines

I already see some things like this: Velestino What on earth do we do with these? The markup looks like:

• Greek:

Katharevousa: Βελέστινον (Velestino)

Modern: Βελέστινο (Velestinon)

Well, we don't mark Greek as Modern. But we have to do something with the katharevousa forms... What is that something? Arbitrary decisison for now:

*Greek: {{t|el|Βελεστίνο|n}} (velestíno); {{t|el|Βελεστίνον|n}} (velestínon) ''(Katharevousa)''

which results in:

(t...) (velestíno); Βελεστίνον n (Velestínon) (velestínon) (Katharevousa)

Marking etymologies

Ran across the first eytm which needed a Katharevousa tag, didn't have one, so marked itup by hand. I wonder how many of those there are going to be.