Kwamikagami

• фыз - femo, edzino
• лӏы - viro, edziĉo

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Dear Kwamikagami! Thank your for your contributions to our Kabardino-Cherkess Wiktionary. You are the first person outside of our immediate group of authors who has attempted to make a significant contribution. They mostly appear to be astrological symbols and signs, modifications to macros and some code. If possible, we would like more information on the intentions behind your contributions to our project. There are many things that need doing yet, and maybe astrological symbols are not currently the most important ones. When convenient, maybe be could discuss some of our common priorties.--Rhdkabardian (тепсэлъыхьыныгъэ) 15:25, 5 ЩӀышылэ 2024 (MSK)

Dear Robert,

I don't have any long-term plans. I don't speak Kabardian (in fact, I've only met one Kabardian that I'm aware of), and don't feel I can contribute much of anything. The reason for the astronomical symbols is that they are something I thought I could work on despite not knowing the language. I know they're not a priority, but figured they couldn't hurt. (On Kabardian WP, I restricted myself to fixing palochkas, which again I could do without being able to read the text I was editing -- all I had to understand what whether an "I" was a roman numeral.) Kwamikagami (тепсэлъыхьыныгъэ) 05:57, 6 ЩӀышылэ 2024 (MSK)

Palochka.

Unfortunately, palochka is the bane of the Kabardian programmer's existence. Like all "Latin" letters included in Cyrillic minority languages (for example, "i", "I" in Ukrainian and Belarus), they are "outside the system" and mostly don't fit in standard system software. Due to the government's policy of Russification however, this has officially never concerned anyone very much.

The letter palochka as used in Cyrillic today is well-described in the English Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palochka) or the Russian Wikipedia (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%BA%D0%B0_(%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0).

Historically, palochka is the Arabic letter alif (أ) and designates a glottal stop [ʔ] or abrupt consonant [ʹ]. Since Islam was not very popular at the time the letter palochka was adopdted, it was decided to describe it as the Latin leter "I", althouth there is abosolutely no phonetic relationship.

The major souce of the problem is that there is no letter palochka available on standard Cyrillic keyboards. As a result, must Kabardians are forced to replace it either with the numeral "1" or, on a computer keyboard, with capital Latin letter "I". This requires an inconvenient shift between Cyrillic and Latin, which makes the "1" preferable. This, however, looks esthetically displeasing to most Kabardians. In handwriting, there is no problem distinguishing the two.

The second problem is that small and capital palochka are very similar in appearence, and many people simply use the capital palochka, totally avoiding the small letter (like in Arabic).

The third problem is that most programmed applications (ABBY FineReader, for example) use the standard Cyrillic values of palochka (Capital dec. 1216, Small: dec. 1231) internally in order to avoid confusing Latin and Cyrillic values. This usage is very inconsistent from application to application and largely springs from not being able to distingush between capital and small palochkas when scanning or entering data.

There is a big problem between Kabardian Wiktionary and Kabardian Wikipedia.

The Kabardian Wikipedia gives all article names in captitals and searching for "1", Latin Capital "I", or small palochka results in words not being found. In general, Kabardian Wikipedia observerves few or literary norms and avoids using small palochka almost totally.

The Kabardian Wiktionary gaves all article titles in small letters, thereby preserving the difference between capital and samll palochka, and therefore searching for "1", Latin Capital "I" or capital palochka results in words not being found.

We have tried to solve the problem by providing a full word index to the right of the appendices, where all palochkas are gvien in Cyrillic small (dec. 1216) letters.

A successful search algorythm might be:

If the search argument contains a Latin capital "I", then replace it with a cyrillic small palochka before the search.

If the search argument contains the number "1", then replace it with a cyrillic small palochka before the search.

If the search argument contains a capital palochka (dec 1216), translate it to to small palochka (dec. 1231) before making the compare.

The little keyboard box currently available on the right of this screen DOES NOT WORK PROPERLY.

In any case, palochka is only ONE of a significant number of collalating problems in Kabardian. You shouldn't undertake it unless you want a REAL RPOGRAMMING CHALLENGE!

Robert Rhdkabardian (тепсэлъыхьыныгъэ) 15:05, 6 ЩӀышылэ 2024 (MSK)

It seems to have worked. I checked with admin there as to whether we should use Unicode palochka (we should) and whether we should use casing (we shouldn't), and corrected all WP-kbd titles to match. I corrected templates and the text of a number of articles as well, but for text mostly just the articles that had palochka in the title.

There might still be errors. There were a few cases where Cyrillic (Ukrainian) I was appropriate, but I might have missed some (in text, not in article names). And I think I got the Roman numerals straightened out, but again a few might've slipped through (again in the text, not the article titles). Still, it's a huge improvement over the mess they had.

When I came here, I noticed that you do use casing. That's a relatively recent innovation.

Historically, it's been the digit 1 or a Latin capital I because that's what was available on typewriter keyboards. Russian keyboards had a key for the Roman digit I, and that was what many people used for palochka. So it's not wrong to do that, but now that dedicated characters are available in Unicode, there's this idea that those are what should be used. It doesn't really matter as long as people are consistent. The situation is similar to using apostrophes for the 'okina of Hawaiian or the saltillo of Mexican languages -- it's not wrong to use an apostrophe, but generally the dedicated Unicode characters are considered better form.

Anyway, I haven't messed with palochka here, as it's been consistent in what little I've seen.

As for computer searches, we'd need to adjust the wiki software to treat these lookalike characters as equivalent, just as it treats straight and curly apostrophes as equivalent. There are people on Wikimedia who handle that kind of thing, though I don't know who specifically you would go to. Kwamikagami (тепсэлъыхьыныгъэ) 02:41, 7 ЩӀышылэ 2024 (MSK)

I asked the tech board on meta-wikimedia. There should be people there who know how to solve the problem. (I'd assume that the engine only needs to treat the digit 1 and Latin cap I as equivalent to palochka, not Cyrillic I or Latin lower-case el.)

Do you mean the keyboard box in the edit window? The palochka there seems to work fine. Anyway, changing the layout or adding or deleting characters to that is straightforward. I've done it several times on WP-en. Kwamikagami (тепсэлъыхьыныгъэ) 03:04, 7 ЩӀышылэ 2024 (MSK)

Hmm, maybe not so easy. It should be at MediaWiki:Edittools -- even on WP-kbd that's where it is -- but I don't see anything there. Kwamikagami (тепсэлъыхьыныгъэ) 04:28, 7 ЩӀышылэ 2024 (MSK)

I answered on your talk page. See mw:How to report a bug and filing a feature request against CirrusSearch.

Kwamikagami (тепсэлъыхьыныгъэ) 11:29, 7 ЩӀышылэ 2024 (MSK)