User talk:Msh210/Archive/niqqud and excessive spellings, redux

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I don't think we've ever had a really satisfactory solution for the whole niqqud vs. excessive spellings thing, and it's been bothering me.

What do you think of this approach? : ]

It would probably be painful for conjugation tables, though. :-/

Also, unrelatedly: L'shanah tova U-m'tuka! :-D

—Ruakh_TALK 17:34, 28 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

שנה טובה to you, too! Commenting on this version: I have no major objection to the inflection line, but I prefer to have the alternative spelling listed s.v. ===Alternative spellings=== instead. I still think that both spellings should have entries, each linking to the other. Links from other pages should go to the more common spelling (for words used currently, or even a thousand years ago, that's probably usually the "full" spelling; for words found only in תנ״ך, it's often the "lacking" spelling).—msh210℠ 17:16, 2 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

More of my opinion, since you asked: The "full" spelling, since the matres take the place of vowels, should lack vowels on the inflection line and in the PAGENAME, the way you did פינק. As to the "lacking" spelling, its inflection line should have vowels (also as you did פינק). Its PAGENAME I'm not sure about. I know our policy hitherto has been to not put vowels in PAGENAMEs, but I'm not so sure that that's smart: consider the page ישב. If we could split it up by vowelization, we'd have many more pages, but each would be much more legible. (It might require a vote, though, to allow disambiguation pages from unvoweled forms.) More discussion on this issue is at Talk:ישב, and related discussion is currently at the BP (permanent link).—msh210℠ 17:16, 2 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Conjugation tables are not the only reason to not combine the "full" and "lacking" spellings into one page: there's also the general Wiktionary policy of splitting up different forms of a word.—msh210℠ 17:16, 2 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

I anticipate reading your further thoughts, but please note that I won't be very active here for the near future.—msh210℠ 17:16, 2 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. I do agree that we should have entries for both; usually I only bother with the more common spelling, but a long time ago I created {{excessive spelling of}} and {{defective spelling of}}, which I use when I do bother with the other one for whatever reason. (Usually it's when I'm creating a pa`al entry with corresponding pi`el entry.) I just meant this as a way to include niqqud in entries for k'tiv male', without putting niqqud in the actual k'tiv male' spellings (which is what my Hebrew-English dictionaries do, but which is somewhat misleading) and without using the "Alternative spellings" header as a way to indicate niqqud, which isn't exactly its purpose (since niqqud isn't really part of the spelling). I've added the "Alternative spellings" section now to ], to make that clearer. —Ruakh_TALK 11:26, 6 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh; yeah, I agree there should be no vowels in "full"y-spelled words, except where the two spellings coincide. What do you think of vowels in PAGENAMEs?—msh210℠ 16:49, 7 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

I don't think we should have vowels in entry titles, because AFAIK there's been no point in Hebrew history when writing with niqqud was anywhere near as common as writing without. In fact, I think niqqud was invented by the Masoretes, so niqqud in Biblical words is sort of fake (in that it reflects the Masoretic traditional pronunciation, rather than the actual pronunciation at time of writing). Also, because there's no one standard version of what constitutes niqqud; would we include meteg? How about non-meteg ta'amei kria? And some modern works (including many siddurim) try to distinguish between sh'va na and sh'va nakh and/or between qamatz gadol and qamatz qatan; would we try to incorporate that? Granted, these are issues we need to address whether or not we include vowels in entry titles; but I don't think we should include vowels in entry titles unless we're quite confident that we're addressing this issues rightly (if that's even possible). And it's easy to go from the spelling with niqqud to the spelling without — we can even add JavaScript to do that automatically — but if the entry title is the version with niqqud, readers will be screwed unless they can guess which niqqud they need. (I'm assuming you intend for the niqqud-less spelling to be a list of soft redirects, but those aren't useful to readers who come across a word without niqqud unless they already have a good idea what they're looking at.) —Ruakh_TALK 15:45, 10 October 2008 (UTC)Reply