Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Writing systems

Naming consistency

archived at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (writing systems)

Good article reassessment for Sinhala script

Sinhala script has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke (talk)

Origin of the alphabet

In a lot of articles (Proto-Sinaitic script, History of the alphabet#Semitic alphabet, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Aleph#Origin, Bet (letter)#Origin, Gimel, Dalet, He (letter)#Origins, Waw (letter)#Origin, etc.), the letters of our alphabet are claimed to be derived from hieroglyphs. This, however, is a minority view the contenders of which contradict each other in the details. Therefore an encyclopedia should not represent this as a fact, as we currently do in all these articles. Please join the discussion at Talk:Proto-Sinaitic script#A complete misrepresentation of the history of writing so we can achieve a consensus before changing all these articles. --Daniel Bunčić (de wiki · talk · en contrib.) 14:00, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

Emphasis marks

I created a discussion at WikiProject Linguistics about the article emphasis mark that is possibly relevant to editors of this project. Feel free to participate if you wish. ★Trekker (talk) 12:03, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Notability of individual letters

In past AfDs launched by me, disagreements have arisen about notability of letters. Some editors claimed that letters are inherently notable under WP:5P1 (User:Cyclopia). I argued that WP:GNG applies to letters. What is your opinion on this matter?

I think there also were disagreements on what counts as WP:SIGCOV. I would suggest (to avoid misunderstandings: I haven't discussed this on-wiki before.) that letters, for which only the following information is available from reliable sources, should have their articles merged into a letters list (i.e. into an appropriate section of the article about the alphabet/orthography, or a specialized list, like List of Cyrillic letters):

• existence of the letter
• languages/orthographies/scripts, in which the letter is used
• Unicode encoding
• pronunciation, if sufficiently trivial (no firm criterion, but e.g. esh has a very trivial pronunciation, while yat has an extremely nontrivial one)
• a short piece of trivia that would fit into a trivia (or notes) column in a letters list

What do you think about these points? Your ideas are welcome.

Pinging editors who have participated in more than one of the AfDs launched by me: @Kepler-1229b, Eluchil404, Anonrfjwhuikdzz, and Stockhausenfan.

—Janhrach (talk) 15:30, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

Letters surely aren't inherently notable, but given every letter in any alphabet that descends from Proto-Sinaitic has at least a story to tell of its lineal descent, both graphically as well as functionally in the corresponding orthography, that pushes us safely into independent articles being best for many alphabets at least. For esh as a borderline example, the only thing that makes me think not to fold it into another article is that it was borrowed between more than one phonetic alphabet. Remsense ‥ 论 15:36, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

Indeed, history of a letter can amount to SIGCOV. But there are a lot of letters like esh, which are descended from much well-known letters, and listing the whole histories (In this case, this would include the evolution of sigma.) might seem excessive. And there also are articles on letters with diacritics, where the evolution of the particular letter–diacritic combination does not have SIGCOV. Janhrach (talk) 18:54, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

• WP:SIGCOV says: 'Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.' My (preliminary) opinion is that mentions of a letter in an educational resource cannot (usually) be trivial, since they must be sufficient for people to learn how to use the alphabets in question. However, learning materials will rarely have more information than that which is listed here on any specific letter, so it seems to me that it follows that we don't need more than that for these letters to meet WP:SIGCOV. I guess the discussion is primarily about WP:NOPAGE, but I will say that I personally find articles about individual letters to be very useful. Of course WP:ILIKEIT, but I'm just mentioning that to provide the background that these aren't pages that nobody wants which are just being prevented from deletion by bureaucracy. Stockhausenfan (talk) 15:49, 4 May 2025 (UTC)
  • Another point is that often these kinds of articles might look non-notable when in fact there are relevant sources, only they are not in English and do not mention the letter in the title, making them hard to search for. A case in point is the article Tje, which might look hopeless at first sight but in fact this paper quite clearly meets WP:SIGCOV. Stockhausenfan (talk) 16:15, 4 May 2025 (UTC)
  • Just to elaborate a bit on how these pages are used, I read pages on languages, and if the orthography section features a letter I am unfamiliar with, I will follow the link to that letter to find out more information. This would not be served by merging pages to a larger list of letters (many of which are rather unwieldly anyway), and I don't think my use case is a particularly niche one. Stockhausenfan (talk) 18:35, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

    This is interesting – I did not expect this argument. What makes long lists inconvenient? Would inserting anchors into appropriate rows and making redirects to that anchors fix the issue? Janhrach (talk) 19:20, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

    One issue is that I may not know the correct collation order, and the list may be very long which means there will be a lot of scrolling before I find the letter I actually wanted to search for, and then at the end of all of it the list will most likely not have any information on the specific letter other than the languages in which it occurs. Of course the last problem can be fixed with editing, but then adding this information will make the lists even longer than they already are. A good example is Yi_Syllables#Syllables - it is very tedious to try to find anything from there. Now I don't know whether the individual Yi syllables in particular are notable, but they may be, and if not, the problem isn't specific to a particular script. (I haven't personally spent any time on Yi syllables in particular - it was just an example that came to mind of an unwieldly list.) I do agree that addition of anchors would make things better, as then these can be linked to directly from articles. Stockhausenfan (talk) 20:03, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

  Hopefully I wasn't intoning too ominously or bureaucratically above. I mostly think the status quo is fine. Remsense ‥ 论 18:36, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

  Oh no don't worry about it, I thought your comment was a perfectly reasonable point of view! I'm just personally in favour of keeping things the way they are as I read these articles myself, but I will defer to the consensus if it's decided these kinds of articles shouldn't be kept. Stockhausenfan (talk) 18:51, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

  mentions of a letter in an educational resource cannot (usually) be trivial, since they must be sufficient for people to learn how to use the alphabets in question – Unless you mean textbooks for linguistics students, I am inclined to diagree. Consider the following analogy. How much of the article Silent e could have been written from introductory English books without OR? I do not think much, because (from my experience) educational books do not try to explain complex orthographic quirks, but rather demonstrate them on specific words and let the learner understand them intuitively. Janhrach (talk) 19:09, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

  If we take a specific example (I had to go to Discord to find the reference to illustrate the difficulty of finding sources as a non-Russian speaker!), the book Самоучитель хантыйского языка (Self-study guide to the Khanty language) has this to say about the En with hook:

  заднеязычный носовой согласный. При его произне сении задняя часть спинки языка прижимается к заднему нёбу (как при русском к в слоге ка-). Маленький язычок опускается и закрывает доступ воздуха в полость рта. Весь воздух идет в носовую полость (как при русском н). Кончик языка опущен вниз и прижат к нижним зубам. Сравните: пан «неводной песок» и паӈ «большой палец».

  Google Translate:

  a velar nasal consonant. When pronouncing it, the back of the tongue is pressed against the back palate (as in Russian к in the syllable ка-). The small tongue drops and blocks the air from entering the oral cavity. All the air goes into the nasal cavity (as in Russian н). The tip of the tongue is lowered and pressed against the lower teeth. Compare: Пан «non-water sand» and Паӈ «thumb».

  The book is not (exclusively) written for a linguistic audience, but rather is described as being written for teachers, Soviet and party workers working in the Khanty-Mansiysk National Okrug who independently study the Khanty language, and can also be used for work in groups of students of the national pedagogical college who do not speak the Khanty language.

  This enough for a Wikipedia article, and is quite normal for endangered minority languages. Stockhausenfan (talk) 19:46, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

I agree with @Stockhausenfan above. I have used this argument in most or all of the AfDs I participated in related to this topic. Many of the articles are unsourced, making them seem as if they were not notable. In reality, there are many learning materials created for them, such as alphabet books. This is the case for most of the old Abkhaz letters, for example. 🪐Kepler-1229b | talk | contribs🪐 18:00, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

Scope of Template:Cyrillic navbox

I'd like to open up a discussion on what should be included within the Cyrillic script navbox, looking for input.

Thanks, Underswamp (talk) 15:32, 5 May 2025 (UTC)