Talk:б
Latest comment: 19 years ago by Stephen G. Brown
- I think it’s a very bad idea to label this or other letters as translingual instead of Cyrillic alphabet or whatever the case may be. Virtually every single letter, character and symbol in the entire Unicode range is "translingual"...the thing that sets the different ranges apart is that they are Cyrillic, Roman, Devanagari, and so on.
- Besides the fact that "translingual" is not a useful category, it’s just nonsense to most people. People know what Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese and Roman mean, but hardly anyone knows what "translingual" is. And if you explain that "translingual" is a phrase, word, letter, character, sign or symbol that is used in at least two different languages or dialects, it becomes rather meaningless, since that describes almost every letter, character and symbol in existence.
- It would be better to state on the Main Page that everything in Wiktionary and Wikipedia is translingual, and then mark Cyrillic letters as Cyrillic, Roman letters as Roman, and so on. As this page (б) now stands, it’s just nonsense. Most people won’t understand it. And after explaining that "translingual" just means "anything written," they still won’t understand.
- "Translingual" might be okay for numerals, asterisks, hearts, diamonds, and other symbols, but б is a Cyrillic letter and should be labelled that way and only that way. —Stephen 14:47, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
- Hello Stephen. Yes, I encountered this as a non-standard format from my cleanup "/todo" list. I've not noticed that Wiktionary uses "Cyrillic Letter" as a language code header before, but apparently it does (even though that is nonsense...it should be a ===third level header=== if anything.)
- So, I shall change this back to match some of the others I've seen. There are far too many Cyrillic letters and I've no way of knowing if I got them all. Could you perhaps review them all and verify that I haven't horribly mangled any others?
- Yes, I originally wrote all of the Cyrillic-letter pages early this year (or it might have been last year). I put quite a bit of thought into it so that they will work for all languages that use Cyrillic.
- I realize that "Cyrillic" is a deviation from "English," and that "Letter" deviates from "Noun," but it made sense to me. There are many different versions of the Cyrillic alphabet, and it’s very easy to enter new ones. In fact, I just got finished with the page for the palochka, i.e., Template:RUchar, where I entered the letter for the Kabardian and Avar Cyrillic alphabets. Dijan has added Serbian to a number of the pages, and we have also put some Bulgarian and others, and they work well together with this setup.
- I’ve used "Cyrillic" for every single Cyrillic letter in place of the Language header, and "Letter" in place of "Noun." I know it’s not like the standard we use for words and phrases, but then letters of alphabets are inherently different from words and phrases. They are also different from nonalphabetic symbols such as numbers, punctuation, and asterisks. —Stephen 15:23, 2 October 2005 (UTC)