Diskussion:mælk

I'm a little confused about the proper orthography of language names in Danish. In English and in Dutch they have (fixed) capitalization. Are they (mutable) lowercase in Danish? Then the skabelons should probably be in lowercase -as they are in other wiktionaries where they are mutable-, otherwise you create a lot of confusion Jcwf 26. jul 2007, 15:04 (UTC)

I am not sure that I understand what you mean. Can you give an example where you think the templates are comfusing? In Danish the name of the language is only with capital letter if in the beginning of a sentence. Kinamand 26. jul 2007, 17:16 (UTC)

but the template {{nl}} says Nederlandsk. This would indicate that the name should always be capitalized. cf: fr:accusatoire where occitan is not capitalized in the translation section or cs:moucha just to pick two languages that have the same convention as Danish.

Actually the template {{nl}} has a parameter which decides if the first letter is capital letter or not but default is capital letter. I don't think that there in Danish are a rule about if a bullet list of issues like the translations should have capital letters or not but if you look at the article Stær (flertydig) on the danish wikipedia you can see that they also use capital letters. I think it would be easy to change it to lower letter if we want to since we can change it in the template. Kinamand 27. jul 2007, 07:18 (UTC)

The word is considered to start a new sentence and should therefore also start with capitalized letter. Only if the word is not placed first it should not be capitalized. --|EPO| ^w: 28. jul 2007, 20:29 (UTC)

This is exactly what is wrong EPO: the rule that lower case words must be capitalized at the beginning of a sentence has been eliminated in Wiktionary. There is a compelling reason to disobey spelling rules here in order not to confuse mutable lower case words with fixed capitals ones. It is not possbile to write a decent dictionary without this elimination and standard dictionaries only list words with capitals if they are indeed fixed ones. This is why the automatic capitalization was switched off and the page lemma mælk is not spelled Mælk (in contrast to Wikipedia). The reason for eliminating is as valid for the language names as it is in the pagenames because in some languages language names do have fixed capitals just like all German substantives have them too.

Jcwf 29. jul 2007, 16:43 (UTC)

I see no problem in using lower case language names in translation lists but how do we implement it in the templates? I will suggest that in translations instead of writing: *{{nl}}: [[oog]] we should write {{trad|nl|oog}} {{n}} (and not the long: :*{{nl}}: {{trad|nl|oog}} {{n}}. The result of {{trad|nl|oog}} {{n}} should be:

• nederlandsk: oog ^(nl)

Kinamand 30. jul 2007, 08:01 (UTC)

You could well do it that way. I could foresee two problems: the wikiwebsites are based on a mix of ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3. In the latter e.g. dansk is dan not da. At some point you might want to rigorously go for -3 or the upcoming version 6 of the ISO standard. On nl.wikt we have done that for the {{xxx}} templates, because it gave more flexibility as we got more languages: the old codes are a bit iffy for some languages. Another problem is that not all codes correspond wikis, e.g. sux is Sumerian I doubt that anyone will start a Sumerian wiktionary, although you never know I suppose. The latter problem is often tackled by using a trad- template that doesnt connect to a website. Alternatively you could just decapitalize the contents of all {{xx}} templates (Dansk -> dansk).

Jcwf