Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Writing systems/Archive 6

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Linear B

Linear B needs some mentoring. An enthusiastic editor is doing a lot with it, but some of it involves removing valuable content from the article. Please everyone have a look, also at the Talk page and revision history. -- Evertype·✆ 17:43, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Infobox issue

The infobox line "Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode" is not always appropriate. I'm thinking in particular of SignWriting and Stokoe notation. These writing systems are designed for writing or transcribing sign languages, for which IPA is irrelevant. I'd like to make a modified version of the infobox without that line, but I'm not that wikiskilled. --Thnidu (talk) 23:29, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Kufic

It appears that the article Kufic is based almost entirely on a non-academic polemic article written for a clear religious purpose. It should be rewritten on the basis of scholarly sources. McKay (talk) 12:16, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

I've been looking at the edits done, but nothing seems to have substantively changed. Islamic-awareness, whatever its leanings, is actually a pretty decent source for some things; particularly on the compilation of the Qur'an (not relevant to this), various Arabic scripts, and in particular a database of early Arabic inscription photographs. Also. The content of the article, while a bit sparse on stylistic elements of Kufic, does not appear to be polemic or religious. Could you elaborate? Msheflin (talk) 19:25, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Milestone Announcements

All WikiProjects are invited to have their "milestone-reached" announcements automatically placed onto Wikipedia's announcements page. Milestones could include the number of FAs, GAs or articles covered by the project. No work need be done by the project themselves; they just need to provide some details when they sign up. A bot will do all of the hard work. Click here for more information or to sign your project up.

I thought this WikiProject might be interested. Ping me with any specific queries or leave them on the page linked to above. Thanks! - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 11:01, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Unknown script and possible hoax

"Koothanallur Inscription from Big Mosque"

Does anyone recognize the script in the photograph to right? The inscription allegedly comes from the mosque of the village of Koothanallur in Tamil Nadu. The editor who uploaded the image —who is not, incidentally, the same as the "Professor HJ Mulliner" listed as the author— suggests that the inscription has something to do with a 13th migration of Seljuq Turks to southern India. Two users, User:Jamaldn and User:Mdnet, have made this improbable claim over half a dozen articles, always with the same citation: "J. P. Mulliner. Rise of Islam in India. University of Leeds chpt. 9. Page 215." I have failed to find any trace of the book anywhere, including the library at the University of Leeds, and believe that the citation is spurious. The whole thing seems to be a hoax —a hoax involving some pretty remote places and obscure history to be sure, but a hoax nonetheless. Can members of this project offer any light? Aramgar (talk) 23:37, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Wow... this is really weird. Southern India? I suppose it is conceivably possibly... To me, it looks like it is related to South Arabian or Nabatean... It does not look like any Seljuk inscriptions I have seen, even from the distant 13th century (for instance, in Turkey). No, I'm looking more closely, the scale is a problem for my eyesight, and some of the characters are unmistakably Semitic. For instance, take the lower right corner and move three lines up from the character closest to that corner; 4 letters in (from right-to-left) is an unmistakable 'nun' then possibly 'ayin' then possibly 'chet/hah or hay/hah' and possibly 'taa.' So, whatever language it is transcribing, I would personally say the script itself is related to the Arabian trend of Semitic alphabets. Is it conceivable these made their way by sea to South India? Yes. Is it likely? Eh... I will look for the book in Cairo, so we'll see. But yes, I would argue without further evidence it does look like a hoax; I would bet whatever this is is in Yemen (or was, before the British Museum 'acquired' it). Msheflin (talk) 19:22, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

I just asked the guy some questions about it, but FYI that book does not exist on Amazon, and that author does not appear to exist at least via Wiki and Google searches. So now the question remains, though. What is that picture of!? Msheflin (talk) 20:28, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Fairy alphabet

Does anyone know about this? Fairy alphabet 76.66.193.90 (talk) 00:49, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Coordinators' working group

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All designated project coordinators are invited to join this working group. If your project hasn't formally designated any editors as coordinators, but you are someone who regularly deals with coordination tasks in the project, please feel free to join as well. — Delievered by §hepBot (Disable) on behalf of the WikiProject coordinators' working group at 07:01, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

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Thanks. — Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 09:53, 15 March, 2009 (UTC)

Does your WikiProject care about talk pages of redirects?

Does your project care about what happens to the talk pages of articles that have been replaced with redirects? If so, please provide your input at User:Mikaey/Request for Input/ListasBot 3. Thanks, Matt (talk) 02:33, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

ideogram v. pictogram

Please see my recent post at Talk:Chinese_character_classification#Ideogram_vs._Pictogram. Agradman (talk) 18:57, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

• :( nobody has responded to my question ... the mystery remains unsolved ... :( please visit the link  :(

• My goodness, is this a ghost town? *@* tumbleweeds *@* *@* tumbleweeds *@* *@* hello?? Agradman

Peter Dobrev spam

I've put this message on the Bulgarian wikiproject page too. There is an IP user:168.7.241.58 which is busy putting Peter Dobrev's fringe theories about the influence of Bulgarian runes on the development of glagolithic and cyrillic. Can an admin please handle this as I'm getting annoyed reverting so much, and I don't want to contravene WP:3RR.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 03:03, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Wiki editor looking for information about keyboard input of Japanese characters

Hi, there.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to give this feedback. I gave feedback on the Japanese typographic symbols talk page, but the page hasn't been touched since March 2008, so I though I'd try to find a talk page that is monitored regularly.

I am almost completely ignorant of the Japanese language and wanted to find out how the Japanese type their language on a keyboard. I quickly found Japanese typographic symbols, but the article didn't include this basic information. Nor could I easily find links about where this information could be found.

Maybe there is some kind of jargon -- possibly related to typography, or character-based writing systems -- included in the article that was intended to direct the reader to the information. If so, I'm also ignorant of this jargon, so I still couldn't find the information.

To give you an idea of the info I can't find: I'm looking for the very basics of Japanese keyboard symbols. How are words entered? If they can type characters from a keyboard, how do they do it? How are the characters divided up for placement on the keyboard? Do they use an alphabetic transliteration for keyboard input, the way the Chinese use pinyin?

If this kind of information is not appropriate for the scope of the Japanese typographic symbols article, I can't tell where to go to get the more basic information.

Best regards, Rosmoran (talk) 15:47, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Are there enough articles on Wikipedia to justify an Outline of writing systems?

Here's a discussion about subject development you might find interesting.

The Transhumanist 23:38, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. At first blush I can see a danger of content forks (and there are some POV warriors in writing systems). Is there a guide to what goes into outlines to avoid this?VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 04:08, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Some development guidelines are available at WP:OUTLINE. We haven't had a problem with POV forking (yet). Right now the main protection against that kind of thing is a dedicated team of outline developers. We monitor outlines pretty closely, and so far we haven't run across any problems of this type. The Transhumanist 23:33, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

East Asian calligraphy

Hello, there is a contest/dispute against/over totally undiscussed cut-and-paste blanking/merging/splitting of East Asian calligraphy by Asoer (talk · contribs). I don't see any active discussion to justify the edit, so there is naturally no consensus for that. Since it is pertinent to at least "four WikiProjects" (China/Japan/Korea/Vietnam) as well as art/writing system related, I'm drawing your attention to the article and hope you would give some useful input on the matter on Talk:East Asian calligraphy. Any active members who are interests in East Asian culture/art would be greatly helpful for the issue. Thanks.Caspian blue 03:37, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_China#What_to_call_East_Asian_calligraphy. Asoer (talk) 05:32, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Width of Contains xxx script templates.

I've just become aware of these, because of the Hebrew one being added to Israel. I think there is a problem with the inserted box being a different width to the info box below and consequently the top of the article is ugly. I notice similar problems with the Japanese box e.g. at Honda and suspect it is a recurring issue. Could something to be done to make warning tempaltes match the layout of the articles in which they appear?--Peter cohen (talk) 12:04, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Middle Bronze Age alphabets

I discussion has come up at Middle Bronze Age alphabets that I am not qualified to deal with. I reverted some material that struck me as OR, but it may not be so simple.

User Msheflin argues that both authors used for the Wadi el-Hhol section, Darnell and Colless, are unreliable, that all we have of Colless is his blog (which the article is suspiciously similar to), with nothing published, and that he treats the Wadi el-Hhol inscription as proto-Hebrew rather than more general Semitic, while Darnell is not a Semiticist but an Egyptologist, who has financial incentives for sensationalizing his find.

He thinks the article should be split in two, and also mentions a Saqqara script which I have never heard of, which is evidently supposed to be older than Wadi el-Hhol. There are certainly problems with the edits he made that make many of them inappropriate, but I'm finding his prose difficult to follow, and I can't evaluate the claims behind his edits, so I thought it would be best to call attention to them here. kwami (talk) 07:19, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Anyone please join the discussion for MBA Scripts. Kwami, while here admitting he is unqualified, and has not read some of the reverted edits, has twice bulk-reverted a series of (many cited) changes I have made as additions of new counter-evidence for the existing hypotheses/conjectural notes. i.e. I added a link to the [Gezer Calendar] translations as support that hillul is not the common root of the letters hah/chet(7a and 5a) because one of the earlier spellings of this word uses the unrelated character chaf. This was reverted as OR rather than evidence against the non-cited, currently sitting hypothesis for the word hillul. My prose is not difficult to follow...

He has also twice removed (like a distant cousin) my addition of the Arabic alphabet to a table of letter evolution, arguing that Arabic is not relevant to its antecedent languages/alphabets. This is what he is referring to as inappropriate; and since he admits here he can't evaluate the claims, could someone (else) please explain the logic behind editing without understanding!? I would appreciate ANYONE who actually speaks and reads any Semitic language please come and judge what has been said on the discussion page also. Msheflin (talk) 15:33, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

(I beg your pardon) And just quickly: I have mentioned that what was found in Unas's tomb was a Canaanite dialect written in hieroglyphs. It is not an alphabet, it was a straight-up adaptation of Egyptian hieroglyphs for one snake spell. It proves that Semitic had been "written" (though not alphabetically) earlier than these scripts regardless of the dating of the latter. It is not related, except in that small way, to this article or discussion (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070205-snake-spells.html). Msheflin (talk) 15:43, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

The NatGeo article is fascinating, and is definitely worth elaboration. Your "citations", however, were just dictionary entries; the relevance of the info ("common sense", as you call it), is synthesis, and officially something we are to avoid here, though I'd have no problem with it if other editors found it relevant.

I can evaluate your claims about Arabic, and there are three possible conclusions: either you do not understand the nature of the table, or you are completely wrong about Arabic, or there is more dispute about the evolution of the Arabic alphabet than I am aware of. In any case, it doesn't belong here. If hamza really does derive from aleph, and the traditional account of which letters are related is wrong, then you need to add that to the article on the Arabic alphabet, with citations. Certainly denying the traditional account on such a simple table is inappropriate. kwami (talk) 19:56, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

My apologies, I am reposting this as I had not logged in.

1) As I just posted on the MBAA discussion page, synthesis is not a piece of evidence presented against a standing and unsubstantiated hypothesis... it's evidence, even if it's not evidence you like. 2) Yes. You are unaware of how complex the language's evolution is, particularly since "Classical Arabic" was geographically and linguistically confined and unwritten until just before or around 800 AD (but Arabic is attested in sparse writing since at least 400 BC). Even in Arabia, at the time of the compilation of the Qur'an, there were many different dialects of Arabic and related Semitic languages present (solely in the Peninsula). The "traditional" account you have described regarding hamza and alef does not exist on Wiki; what does exist is a related evolution in which the characters eventually split when Arabic became written - the only difference is speech is pronunciation of the alef/hamza proto-letter. As I have said, the article on Hamza/Alef says the opposite of what you have asserted; you would need to add the counterargument to make your above analysis relevant. And as for a simple account, if you look into the Hebrew evolution, it's almost as disputed as Arabic (the difference is Arabic includes letters and sounds Hebrew either did not, or ditched). So presenting it as such poses the same problem. Hence, you "can" evaluate Arabic, but your evaluations come out like Mandarin or Rongorongo. Msheflin (talk) 22:37, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Guys... I need your help. I am very new to this, and was more interested in producing quality information than being embroiled in debates with somewhat ignorant and overly zealous editors. I am going to edit the Middle Bronze Age alphabets article later... pretty drastically... Removing anything not cited, attempting as best I can to cite what is valid there now, and providing a slew of citations for the accepted argument that is currently eviscerated by the information presented as wikifact presently. However, I know that this editor is going to summarily revert my citations, and that I am thus going to have to figure out some means of recourse. If there is anyone who could offer advice, support, help, or expertise, I would be very appreciative. Sincerely. Michael Sheflin (talk) 23:43, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

SKATS

Hi, I am looking at the above article from the project Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles where it is one of the longest {{unreferenced}} tagged articles that does not meet at least the barest minimum of verifiability. It has been tagged and completely without references since August 2006. It would be extremely helpful if anyone here knows of any sources that could be added to the article to support it's notability. I have been unsuccesful in finding any relevant online refs for SKATS, Standard Korean Alphabet Transliteration System or Korean morse equivalents. Any help or suggestions (even an alternative wikiproject to ask) would be much appreciated. regards, ascidian | talk-to-me 14:20, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Chinese character Radical 24

Will someone with expertise in Chinese please have a look at the article for Radical 24 ? Much of the information seems to be confused with that for Radical 12. RLM1961 (talk) 22:21, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Invitation for the Typeface collaboration

Requesting editors' help There is currently an oppened collaboration which aims in improving articles related to typefaces and font categorization. If you´re interested in this subject, please visit the collaboration page, add your self and see how you can help.

- ☩Damërung ☩. -- 20:17, 18 October 2009 (UTC)