User talk:RichardW57m

If you want to talk to me, please to talk to me at User talk:RichardW57, because I'm really RichardW57.

RMaung (WMF) 17:02, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

does "57 m" stand for "57 y.o. male"? Shumkichi (talk) 15:54, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

No. I think the meaning is not to be disclosed. I'm not Boris Johnson. --RichardW57m (talk) 16:22, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Hi. Definitions for 'Burmese' belong under the heading 'Burmese'. For letters, they can also go under a 'Translingual' header, but only for what is translingual. We can't say it's e.g. the 31st letter of the alphabet, because that's specific to Burmese, and we can't say it's a letter of the Burmese alphabet, because that's at odds with our claim that it's translingual. I'm not sure what the point of such an entry would be, but we could say s.t. like "a letter of the Mon-Burmese script, used in languages such as Burmese, Mon, Shan, Karen, Palaung, Khamti etc., and conventionally transliterated X," or something to that effect.

And we certainly can't give the Burmese pronunciation and claim that it's "translingual", as I see you've done in several places. That's completely inaccurate and misleading. kwami (talk) 21:31, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Are you saying that we can't give pronunciations for translingual letters at all? I think that if we keep pronunciations for translingual letters of the Burmese alphabet, we should just label the Burmese pronunciations as Burmese pronunciations. I was largely undoing your out of process deletions of the translingual letters. As for definitions, referencing a letter to the Burmese alphabet is valid.

I will admit, though, that I don't like nth letter definitions, as these can be destabilised by adding or removing letters, as I think has happened to the Welsh letters. The letter 'j' wasn't in the Welsh alphabet when I was a boy.

Unfortunately, I have found more urgent matters, such as removing your application of {{delete}} lazily applied because you didn't check the public sources of characters. --RichardW57m (talk) 08:32, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

There are too many of these bogus articles for me to fix them all myself. Best to delete them until someone decides to do it right. It's not like we'd lose anything!

What would a "translingual" pronunciation be? It can't be Burmese, that's a language. The code words of the NATO phonetic alphabet have target translingual pronunciations, but that's the only example I can think of. There are translingual transliterations, say (hypothetically) a letter that's traditionally transliterated ca despite being pronounced /sa/ in Burmese. Presenting it as "ca" would be acceptable.

If you give the Burmese pronunciation as "translingual", and not even have a Burmese entry, then you claim that languages like Mon are second-rate. Imagine the reverse: we change all the "translingual" entries to Mon: letters of the "Mon alphabet", letter order in Mon, Mon transcription, and a recording of a Mon-speaker pronouncing the letter name in Mon. We could then give Burmese as a subsidiary use of the letter, effectively as an afterthought. Do you think that would fly?

Or let's give all the Latin letters English names and pronunciations in the 'translingual' section. Do you really think that would be acceptable to French- or Spanish-speakers?

I don't see why Burmese should be put on a pedestal that we don't allow for any other language. kwami (talk) 08:54, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

Please don't add false information to Wiktionary. It's essentially vandalism. If you think the "process" allows you to falsify information, then you misunderstand the intent of the process.

Burmese is a language. An actual language, spoken by actual people. It's not some hypothetical translingual abstraction. And Mon, Shan etc. are different languages. They are not Burmese. For you to imply that they are Burmese is simple bigotry, and has no place on Wikt. kwami (talk) 09:39, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

I've raised the issue of pronunciations at the Beer Parlour (and pinged you for it). As to what is special about Burmese, it's the Burmese Army. As to what is special about the Burmese alphabet, I think you'll find it's the best documented, and possibly stablest, alphabet using the Burmese script. Note that it's the one that the Unicode Consortium tried to support first, even though the encoding design suffered from too slavish an adherence to principles developed for Devanagari. --RichardW57m (talk) 10:24, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

That's at best nationalism, at worst bigotry. We don't do the same for English despite this being English Wikt.

Since Mon has historical precedence, we should delete all mentions of Burmese and replace them with Mon. kwami (talk) 18:55, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

As to letter order, I've a feeling that ဉ (nya.) and ည (nya.) actually come at the same position in the Burmese alphabet, so what are currently given for Mon positions are actually the natively quoted positions for the Burmese alphabet!

I supported the proposal to purge Unicode of language-specific clones of translingual letters. --RichardW57m (talk) 10:24, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

How would you handle, say, the article j? Should we claim that it's a letter of the English alphabet for the sound /dZ/, add a sound file for its English pronunciation, and maybe add a note that it's pronounced wrong in French, German and Spanish? kwami (talk) 18:52, 13 July 2023 (UTC)