Chữ Nôm support
I’m interested in starting a localization of MediaWiki in chữ Nôm Vietnamese (vi-Hani). Note that this would have to be a full-blown localization, not a machine-transliterated variant, since there is a many-to-many mapping between quốc ngữ (Latin) words and chữ Nôm characters.
Would starting this localization be just a matter of adding a variant to Portal:Vi, or should I file a bug on MediaWiki for chữ Nôm support first?
This is what I found in Wikipedia:
- Literary Chinese chữ nho characters (scholar's characters, 𡨸儒): were used by the educated elite and in official documents until Vietnam gained independence from China in 939 CE.
- Vernacular chữ nôm characters 𡨸喃) look like Chinese characters to the untrained eye. In fact, many characters were borrowed and many more modified and invented to represent native Vietnamese words. For the next 1000 years—from the 10th century and into the 20th—much of Vietnamese literature, philosophy, history, law, medicine, religion, and government policy was written in Nôm script.
Both scripts have fallen out of common usage in modern Vietnam, and only a few scholars and some extremely elderly people are able to read chữ nôm today. In China, members of the Jing Minority still write in Chữ Nôm.
Are you sure it makes sense to add this localisation? Can you please provide a motivation.
Thanks for your response. My question was about chữ Nôm, not chữ nho. Obviously, any chữ Nôm localization would be for historical interest only. It would only make sense for the Vietnamese Wikisource or perhaps a future Nôm Wikisource. There is a decent amount of literature in chữ Nôm and it’d be great to have a matching interface to view it in. Though there aren’t reliable tools to transliterate to chữ Nôm automatically, I’d be relying on quốc ngữ-based character lookup tools to produce the localization.
To be clear, I have no intent to propose a Nôm Wikipedia, but I’d consider a chữ Nôm localization to be an interesting feature for MediaWiki. If there is no precedent for this sort of thing, I guess I’ll be content with localizing into just quốc ngữ. :^)
I'm sorry for misunderstanding.
About starting Wikisource projects in script variants: That's probably something that will not be approved. Old/ancient scripts and "predecessor" languages should be in the current language's Wikisource, as far as I know. Have a look at the policies on meta:Language_proposal_policy to be certain. This isn't really the place to discuss it, so my apologies for doing so.
I'll have to look into your real question again. Sorry, no time for that at the moment.
Apologies for taking this long to follow up. Harder issues tend to stay at the bottom, and I address issues last in, first out for convenience.
I've read w:en:Chữ_Nôm. That page also states that Chữ_Nôm is an almost script: Nôm was replaced by quốc ngữ (alphabetical Vietnamese) beginning in the 1920s and is now almost entirely obsolete. (quote from first paragraph).
Are you really, really, really sure you want to spend time on this? A user interface language is a lot of work, and you create it to have it actually used. Not having vi-hani would mean that you can still have texts in vi-hani, but with the currently used vi-Latn localisation, which all users are used to. I really think it might be a less optimal use of your time, esspecially since there are still over 20,000 messages to be translated in Vietnamese.