User talk:Firespeaker

Language in languages

Why revert the translation Romance languages? llenguatge/linguagem/langage/lenguaje/etc. refer to a different kind of language - or a particular way of using a language. Like "bad language." On the other hand, "lengua" refers to languages like French, Spanish, etc. --Chris 20:06, 27 Feb 2006 (PST)

That's the point. We're talking about "Language" as a thing, not "language" as in "French language", etc. —Firespeaker 20:13, 27 Feb 2006 (PST)

Ahh, I see. As long as others who translate are aware of the meaning that you are after. So, I wonder if other languages will reflect the same. In Tagalog, for instance, wika usually refers to language as in lingua/langue/lingua/etc. --Chris 20:40, 27 Feb 2006 (PST)

Hi. Okay, the above questions answers what I was going to ask. You should have made that point clear in the entry, that you mean way/act of talking and not regional variety of human speech. 2 more questions remain now:
2) Why are you keeping out-of-date writing systems for languages as alternate versions anyway? Like Azeri-cyr or Kazakh-ar (or whatever it was)? Azeri isn't written in Cyrillic anymore and Kazakh has ceased to be written in Arabic letters loooong ago. I'd agree to use both version for, say, Serbian, because Cyrillic and Latin is used there equally. Do you want to include Sprache in Fraktur letters, ſpræc in Runes and the Kazakh (I'm not sure, maybe it was Uzbek or Tatar) in Orkhon Runes as well? Not to forget the Irish version in Ogham Creobh... Turkic was also written with Arabic once. It actually seems that most languages from the southern part of the ex-USSR were at some time written in Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin. I mean, shouldn't the list stay at least a *bit* consistent?
3) The ASL-entry should be deleted, as it does obviously mean "American Sign Language" and not "language". I'll do that now, I think... —André 05:44, 28 Feb 2006 (CET)

2) The Arabo-Persian alphabet which Kazakh is written in is used today by over a million native speakers in China. It isn't just a remnant either—it's taught in schools and universities. Azeri is officially written in the Roman alphabet at the governmental level, but many native speakers are still much more comfortable with Cyrillic—besides, the overlap of the Oghuz languages means that there'll be one "dil" and one "дил". Orkhon runes were used to write a Turkic language/dialect that didn't have one of the Soviet-era names (like "Tatar", "Uzbek", etc), and we may actually include Old Turkic in the Orkhon alphabet, since I study it—there's nothing wrong with dead languages here (we have Latin don't we?).

3) Good point; I'll talk with the person who submitted that. Thanks for pointing it out.