User talk:Stephen G. Brown/Tatar

Tatar

Are you able to sort out whether Category:Tatar Cyrillic Words is a hoax or not? Words like бэдлы and быйнг don't look like healthy loanwords. — Vildricianus 17:05, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, I know that translations from English into the languages in that area, such as Urdu and Tatar, due to a lack of decent dictionaries and a dearth of competent translators, and because there has been so little translated between English and those languages, it is common practice to simply transliterate the English document into the local script and let the readers try to sort it out. On average, a translation from English to Urdu remains 80% English, but in Arabic script. Having said that, I believe that some of this guy’s contributions are valid (the ones that are obviously not from English), but I do not consider any of his transliterated English words, and in particular those that have grammatical suffixes such as badly and baddest, to be acceptable Tatar words. They might possibly be accepted in the Tatar Wiktionary (I doubt it), but I don’t think they are firmly established enough to warrant inclusion in the English Wiktionary. As evidence of this, I have noticed that he has first entered some of these words with one spelling (e.g., бадлы), then thought better of it, blanked the entry, and re-entered as бэдлы. I deleted a number of these blanked entries where he had decided upon a different spelling. It means that he is just making the transliteration up as he goes along, and that they are not naturalized or standardized in Tatar in the least degree. —Stephen 17:20, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

So what do we do about it? Should the obvious hoaxes be deleted? Should all of the entries which cannot be verified easily (by eg the UN dictionary) be put through RFV and, if they fail, deleted? Should it all be kept due to, as you suggest, the tendency to make such transliterations in translating? — Beobach972 04:00, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

I got rid of some of the weirdest ones, but it does seem as though Eric is adding the words in good faith. I jumped on him a couple of times over glaring errors and now I think he’s being more careful to get the spelling and POS correct. I only checked on a few of the entries, but I was able to find most of the ones I checked. If there are some that, like бадлы, just look wrong, it might be a good idea to use RFV. —Stephen 04:23, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Alright, that sounds good. Re-reading my comments, I'm sorry if I came across as very pro-deletion, by the way, giving that as the majority of the options I presented; in the second case, I just meant RFV them, and deletion is the result of failing RFV. — Beobach972 04:51, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Incidently... in the situation you describe above, I can understand resorting to транслиторажин of 'big words', but wouldn't a word as basic as badly have a translation (ie, so the simplicity of the concept, not necessarily the spelling or the inclusion of the suffix, would be a red flag)? -- Beobach972 04:51, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Certainly they have a perfectly good word for badly, but it happens occasionally that one culture likes to borrow words, even common ones, from another culture. Japanese is a good example of this, which borrows English words hand over fist, chops them up to suit their taste, twists the meaning around, and then sends it back to us almost unrecognizably. I just question whether the Tatars developed have such a mentality. —Stephen 05:05, 5 May 2007 (UTC)