Talk:Rrok

Pronunciation and declination

Catonif: also, how is your module on the Albanian declination system going? I feel like many things (like pronunciation) could be done automatically, but I can't get my way into the scripting part. I would love something like the Italian module for pronunciations {it-pr}, which renders the right accent in words such as Batone, without the necessity to specify it. Would this also be possible for Albanian? What do you think? FierakuiVërtet (talk) 13:01, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

@FierakuiVërtet Hello! It has been a while, I hope you've been doing well. :)

So, heh. :p You are very right to bring these things up. The long answer is that a pronunciation template, just like the declension one, is definitely doable, and automation is certainly good in how it makes everything more tidy and uniform: all entries have a declension table, all entries have a pronunciation, and all following the same scheme. This is very good when we're handling a standardised literary language, but for describing a language in its dialectal varieties and in its historical evolution (which in my opinion is Wiktionary's greatest strength) uniformity doesn't work so well anymore. For example, {{it-pr}} made it possibly for all terms to have a phonemic rapresentation of consistent quality, but it is a bit limitative if you want to describe dialects or historical variants, and for this reasons Italian pronunciation sections almost never give any pronunciation that isn't the standard. Taking English as another example, they don't have an automatic IPA module there, and can boast some of the most informative and exhaustive pronunciation sections, see for example bath#Pronunciation, thanks to the versatility of raw markup. It's from this this fact that stems my Hassliebe towards {{it-pr}}. The declension module more or less suffers from the same problem, it limits a word to the modern forms it can acquire. And you know my interest by now is towards the historical evolution of Albanian and its dialects, rather than toward the modern standard, which I care relatively about. But, the advantages of automatic templates here are undeniably beneficial, so...

Short answer, i.e. conclusion. Yes, they need to be done, but in a way that allows both uniformity and versatility, which is not as easy as it may appear. It has never been one of my priorities, given my inability of going through a long and demanding project from start to finish without getting bored and quitting, xD but maybe I one day I'll try to make it one. Catonif (talk) 15:49, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

@Catonif I am doing well, thanks for asking!

Then we agree that it should be done in the future (I will also see if i can manage to understand Lua's extension for Wiktionary and how it works). But I personally think that it would be sufficient at first to implement the standard language and then from there work on the implentation of the dialectal and historical variants. A module is always editable anyway. Just like a programmer constantly reviewing his sourcing code in order to fix bugs. I also think that a more, as you said, tidy and uniform layout could be more appealing to potential future Wiktionarians, which is not something to underestimate in my opinion, since Albanian entries have got 4/5 active contributors in 15 years (!).

What I am trying to say is that we should start one time, then we will always be in time to go back and view if something can be done better.

P.S. Obviously I am not implying that you should it XD, è solo per farti sapere come la penso. FierakuiVërtet (talk) 22:13, 21 June 2024 (UTC)