Re: Latin Belarusian

[Ihar Hrachyshka]

On 10/28/07, Bruno Haible <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > And the last and - maybe - the largest problem is that Latin and
> Cyrillic
> > communities have different views on some fundamental l10n questions (f.e
> .
> > what kind of form to use when translating commands like "Close" -
> > "Зачыніць/Закрыць" or "Зачыні/Закрый" (infinitive or imperative),
> different
> > terminology and so on.
>
> But should the input to the script follow the modern Cyrillic orthography,
> or the Tarashk orthography? That's something worth documenting in the
> manual.
>
> Its input and output works only for Tarask <-> Latin conversion. That's
because Tarask variant is mainly just a Cyrillic notation of Latin variant
so the conversion is quite simple.
That's not the situation with Tarask <-> Normative orthography conversion.
There is no workable enough solution for such conversion. That's because for
these orthographies there are different ways of adapting foreign words,
different grammar, different lexics for some terms and so on. And these
differencies are not rules-based though tradition-based so we can't adapt
just a simple program for this work. To be able to do the work, we should
have a huge list of pairs of words that correspond to these variants like:
"філасофія" (Normative) <-> "філязофія" (Tarask), "псіхалогія" (Normative)
<-> "псыхалёгія" (Tarask) and so on. Also there are big problems with the
conversion because Tarask and Normative variants even differ in principles
of orthography. Tarask variant is more phonetically based, Normative is more
schematic/grammar based. And we can't produce a workable conversion script
without knowing f.e. a list of ALL words with stress on the first vowel. You
know, such list will be ~ 3 -4 MB in size... And creating of such list is a
big-big-big hard-hard-hard work. That's why Belarusians don't have such
script. Though I plan to start writing such piece of code it seems that this
problem is far from easy.

And to make the final statement, the impossibility to create such conversion
tool was one of the main reasons to divide Belarusian Wikipedia into to
parts.