Comment on What do you think about Abstract Wikipedia?

• Atemu@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Somewhere inside that abstraction you’ll need to have the pieces of info that Spanish “leche” [milk] is feminine, that Zulu “ubisi” [milk] is class 11, that English predicative uses the ACC form, so goes on.

  Of course you do. The beauty of abstraction is that these language-specific parts can be factored into generic language-specific components. The information you’re actually trying to convey can be denoted without any language-specific parts or exceptions and that’s the important part for Wikipedia’s purpose of knowledge preservation and presentation.

  you’ll need people to mark a multitude of distinctions in their sentences, when writing them down, that the abstraction layer would demand for other languages. Such as tagging the “I” in “I see a boy” as “+masculine, +older-person, +informal” so Japanese correctly conveys it as “ore” instead of “boku”, "atashi, “watashi” etc.

  For writing a story or prose, I agree.

  For the purpose of writing Wikipedia articles, this specifically and explicitly does not matter very much. Wikipedia strives to have one unified way of writing within a language. Whether the “I” is masculine or not would be a parameter that would be applied to all text equally (assuming I-narrator was the standard on Wikipedia).

  Even the idea of “abstract concept of milk” doesn’t work as well as it sounds like, because languages will split even the abstract concepts in different ways. For example, does the abstract concept associated with a living pig includes its flesh?

  If your article talks about the concept of a living pig in some way and in the context of that article, it doesn’t matter whether the flesh is included, then you simply use the default word/phrase that the language uses to convey the concept of a pig.

  If it did matter, you’d explicitly describe the concept of “a living pig with its flesh” instead of the more generic concept of a living pig. If that happened to be the default of the target language or the target language didn’t differentiate between the two concepts, both concepts would turn into the same terms in that specific language.

  The same applies to your example of the different forms of “I” in Japanese. To create an appropriate Japanese “rendering” of an abstract sentence, you’d use the abstract concept of “a nerdy shy kid refers to itself” as the i.e. the subject. The Japanese language “renderer” would turn that into a sentence like ”僕は。。。” while the English “renderer” would simply produce “I …”.

  A language is not an agent; it doesn’t “do” something. You’d need people to actively insert those pieces of info for each language, that’s perhaps doable for the most spoken ones, but those are the ones that would benefit the least from this.

  Yes, of course they would have to do that. The cool thing is that this it’d only have to be done once in a generic manner and from that point on you could use that definition to “render” any abstract article into any language you like.

  You must also keep in mind that this effort has to be measured relative to the alternatives. In this case, the alternative is to translate each and every article and all changes done to them into every available language. At the scale of Wikipedia, that is not an easy task and it’s been made clear that that’s simply not happening.

  (Okay, another alternative would be to remain on the status quo with its divergent versions of what are supposed to be the same articles containing the same information.)

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  • lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Note: I’ll clip the quotes for succinctness.

    Of course you do. […]

    You can’t leave those things to the abstraction layer because how different languages map abstract concepts differs, so there’s no way to factor them into generic language-specific components. The writer will need to tag things down, to minimal details, for the sake of languages that they don’t care about. It ends like that story about a map so large that it represents the terrain accurately being as big as the terrain, thus useless.

    For writing a story or prose, I agree. […]

    As I said in the reply to the other poster, the first pronoun is an example. This issue affects languages as a whole, and sometimes in ways that you can’t arbitrate through a fixed writing style because they convey meaning. (For example: if you don’t encode the social gender into the 3rd person pronouns, English breaks.)

    If your article talks about the concept of a living pig in some way and in the context of that article, it doesn’t matter whether the flesh is included, then you simply use the default word/phrase that the language uses to convey the concept of a pig. […]

    Often there’s no such thing as the “default”. The example with pig/pork is one of those cases - if whoever is writing the article doesn’t account for the fact that English uses two concepts (pig vs. pork) for what Spanish uses one (cerdo = puerco etc.), and assumes the default (“pig”), you’ll end with stuff like *“pig consumption has increased” (i.e. “pork consumption has decreased”). And the abstraction layer has no way to know if the human is talking about some living animal or its flesh.

    And context doesn’t help much because pork and pigs are mentioned often in the same articles.

    If it did matter, you’d explicitly describe the concept of “a living pig with its flesh” instead of the more generic concept of a living pig.

    As I said in the top, you’ll end with a “map” that is as large as the “terrain”, thus useless.

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• ibt3321@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is an encyclopedia, so there are no pronouns like “I”, so this simplifies this issue. The remaining ones are in the third person, and if we link them to data about the person that is referred to it would solve this. A longuist doesn’t necessarily need to know a language in order to analyze its grammar, and a lot of the work needed in Wikifunctions is like this.

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  • lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is an encyclopedia, so there are no pronouns like “I”, so this simplifies this issue. The remaining ones are in the third person, and if we link them to data about the person that is referred to it would solve this.

    The pronoun is an example. You are confusing the example with the issue.

    This issue is that, if some language out there marks a distinction, whoever writes the abstract version of the text will need to mark it, as that info won’t “magically” pop out of nowhere. The issue won’t appear just in the pronouns, but every where.

    A longuist [linguist] doesn’t necessarily need to know a language in order to analyze its grammar, and a lot of the work needed in Wikifunctions is like this.

    Usually when you aren’t proficient in a language but still describing it, you focus on a single aspect of its grammar (for example, “unergative verbs”) and either a single variety or a group of related ones.

    What the abstract version of the text would require is nowhere close to that. It’s more like demanding the linguist to output a full grammar, to usable levels, of every language found in Wikipedia, to write down a text about some asteroid, using a notation that is cross-linguistically consistent and comprehensible.

    Also note that descriptions coming from linguists who are not proficient in a variety in question tend to be poorer.

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