cythraul:coto524:cringesluts:bitches will eviscerate an entire language and go “can’t help being an

cythraul:coto524:cringesluts:bitches will eviscerate an entire language and go “can’t help being an INTP”Some things in response to comments i keep seeing in the notes:1) Scots and Scottish Gaelic are different things; Scots is a Germanic language, Scottish Gaelic (aka Gàidhlig) is a Celtic language. 2) This doesn’t look like it’ll be an easy fix; the person in question is an admin on Scots Wikipedia, and according to a Gizmodo article they’ve written about 20 000 of the 60 000 articles on Scots Wikipedia. Scots doesn’t have many native speakers, and fewer who have the time to do unpaid volunteer work. For a minority language and especially one recognised as vulnerable by UNESCO, this is genuinely damaging.3) Comparing with the English versions, it’s pretty obvious that for many of them they’ve either manually replaced everything with a dictionary entry or used a program to do it. On Reddit, where the story broke, Scots speakers are theorising this may have been Online Scots Dictionary, which has a reputation for poor quality (4) This label has been posted on some of the articles in question after the story came out:So that’s something, at least.5) This is why the discussions about learners’ influence on minority languages, the role of online media in language education and revitalisation and popular perceptions of codeswitching are so important! For example, I love to hear about people learning Welsh! Online courses in particular are often more affordable and accessible than in-person classes, especially for people who don’t live in Wales. But where they become popular, they can artificially promote a certain variant of Welsh with much more power than e.g. our schooling system has, by choosing to teach one dialect – or an unusually narrow selection of dialects – which, when various different communities each have their own word for a thing, can definitively swing the balance in favour of one demographic…Learners also don’t speak in the same way as native speakers! That sounds obvious, but think about what it implies: they may misunderstand grammatical rules because they haven’t been exposed to enough examples of their use, or they misunderstand how a minority language relates to the majority language. I think this is a good point to compare between Welsh and Scots here. Wales is a bilingual environment, and most Welsh speakers also speak English and interact with a predominantly-Anglophone society.Codeswitching – switching between two different languages on-the-fly – is a natural and common phenomenon in these circumstances and might be used for: practicality (e.g. when discussing something which is often only available or talked about in English)humour (e.g. deliberately playing with or breaking grammatical rules for effect, or alternatively following them to logical but humorous conclusions)quoting someone directlyBut a lot of people in Wales and outside of it take codeswitching as proof that Welsh is “just English with funny spelling”, which is inaccurate! And when those people work in the media – TV comedy, newspaper opinion columns, blogs, YouTube – they may have significantly more reach than native speakers do, which allows them to spread misconceptions far more easily.I think it’s even more important to consider this in the context of Scots because Scots is actually a Germanic language, like English, and there’s a lot of discussion about whether it counts as a language or a dialect (as you might have guessed by now, I’m solidly in the first camp). Although it’s perceived as “English with bad spelling”, the spelling rules are internally consistent, mostly standardised – although it’s difficult to have a standard with so few speakers – and reflect the language’s pronunciation and history. A few centuries ago, people started writing apostrophes where a Scots word lacked a consonant present in the English equivalent; that’s mostly stopped now, because it didn’t make sense, because the Scots words often never had those consonants in the first place. Does English have an influence on Scots? Yes, of course, most Scots speakers are bilingual and English is the majority language in Scotland, language contact is inevitable. Does that mean they are the same thing? No! Scots has its own spelling and grammar, and the American responsible for this fiasco either didn’t know enough about that or didn’t care. But Wikipedia is widely available, maybe the only way most people in the world even find out about Scots, and he “wrote” a third of all articles on the Scots Wikipedia. This will have an impact, and this will further spread damaging misconceptions about a vulnerable minority language.This banner gave me pause:I’d been pondering getting involved with beefing up Welsh Wikipedia, but this banner sent me googling to find out what the recommendation is on that.Turns out that at least English Wikipedia has a talk page specifically about contributing to articles outside your native language. -- source link
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