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"immense damage he was doing" What damage is he doing? As a Scot and someone who is rather fond of Scots (which I grew up speaking) I'm somewhat pleasantly sur

"immense damage he was doing" What damage is he doing? As a Scot and someone who is rather fond of Scots (which I grew up speaking) I'm somewhat pleasantly surprised that anyone is sufficiently interested to have a go at creating Wikipedia entries!

fatbird 6y ago
It's like he created the latin wikipedia by converting English wiki pages into pig-latin. It massively misrepresents the language, and when you're talking about a language like Scots that's very little used, and possibly in danger of going extinct, this is massively polluting to it. What he created isn't a Scots wikipedia, it's a bad parody of one that gets words wrong and is completely ignorant of Scots grammar, while sitting in a position of relative authority. If you can speak Scots, can you read these as Scots? Does it genuinely seem like it's actually written in Scots?
- arethuza 6y ago
  The articles I read came across more as someone trying to phonetically describe a Scottish accent rather than using what I would recognise as Scots dialect. I don't think that approach will get you from "How are you?" to "Fit like?".
- soneil 6y ago
  The reddit thread made a great example of "an aw" being used as a substitution for "also", so I'll round that example out to illustrate. In a nutshell, his dictionary has provided him "also"->"an aw", but it's better translated as "and all" or "as well". So "I had eggs for breakfast; I had toast also" works as "I had toast an aw" (I had toast as well). But "I also had toast" does not work as "I an aw had toast" (I as well had toast). "I had eggs for breakfast; I as well had toast"; As a native English speaker you'd find that perfectly intelligible, but jarring. I'm not Scottish, but I lived there for most my childhood - so I have a reasonable gut for what just feels wrong. And many the examples I've seen so far, look like spam that's been wrung through a thesaurus. The meaning's there but it doesn't make it correct.
inetsee 6y ago
There have been several articles linked on HN recently saying that Scots Gaelic (which is different from Scots), is in danger of dying out. This young man seems to have put in an enormous amount of effort into adding articles to Wikipedia. I think he should have spent some of that time in the beginning learning at least the fundamentals of Scots. If he had he might have contributed to keeping Scots from completely dying out.
ardy42 6y ago
>>> "immense damage he was doing" > What damage is he doing? As a Scot and someone who is rather fond of Scots (which I grew up speaking) I'm somewhat pleasantly surprised that anyone is sufficiently interested to have a go at creating Wikipedia entries! You're really responding to the parent comment of mine, but I'll answer anyway: The damage he was doing was making inaccurate or ignorant contributions to a reference work, which are at best no use to anyone and at worst things that will mislead others. Merely "creating Wikipedia entries" is not necessarily a positive act. For instance, no one wants me to create entries about Scotland based on my memories of the plot of Braveheart, no matter how enthusiastically I do it. Created entries need to meet minimum standards or be brought to those standards quickly. IIRC, Wikipedia strongly discourages blindly using machine translation because the resulting articles are so bad (to the point of sometimes having sentences that say the exact opposite of the source), and it sounds like what this guy was doing was actually worse than that.

fatbird 6y ago

It's like he created the latin wikipedia by converting English wiki pages into pig-latin. It massively misrepresents the language, and when you're talking about a language like Scots that's very little used, and possibly in danger of going extinct, this is massively polluting to it. What he created isn't a Scots wikipedia, it's a bad parody of one that gets words wrong and is completely ignorant of Scots grammar, while sitting in a position of relative authority. If you can speak Scots, can you read these as Scots? Does it genuinely seem like it's actually written in Scots?

arethuza 6y ago
The articles I read came across more as someone trying to phonetically describe a Scottish accent rather than using what I would recognise as Scots dialect. I don't think that approach will get you from "How are you?" to "Fit like?".
soneil 6y ago
The reddit thread made a great example of "an aw" being used as a substitution for "also", so I'll round that example out to illustrate. In a nutshell, his dictionary has provided him "also"->"an aw", but it's better translated as "and all" or "as well". So "I had eggs for breakfast; I had toast also" works as "I had toast an aw" (I had toast as well). But "I also had toast" does not work as "I an aw had toast" (I as well had toast). "I had eggs for breakfast; I as well had toast"; As a native English speaker you'd find that perfectly intelligible, but jarring. I'm not Scottish, but I lived there for most my childhood - so I have a reasonable gut for what just feels wrong. And many the examples I've seen so far, look like spam that's been wrung through a thesaurus. The meaning's there but it doesn't make it correct.

inetsee 6y ago

There have been several articles linked on HN recently saying that Scots Gaelic (which is different from Scots), is in danger of dying out. This young man seems to have put in an enormous amount of effort into adding articles to Wikipedia. I think he should have spent some of that time in the beginning learning at least the fundamentals of Scots. If he had he might have contributed to keeping Scots from completely dying out.

ardy42 6y ago

>>> "immense damage he was doing" > What damage is he doing? As a Scot and someone who is rather fond of Scots (which I grew up speaking) I'm somewhat pleasantly surprised that anyone is sufficiently interested to have a go at creating Wikipedia entries! You're really responding to the parent comment of mine, but I'll answer anyway: The damage he was doing was making inaccurate or ignorant contributions to a reference work, which are at best no use to anyone and at worst things that will mislead others. Merely "creating Wikipedia entries" is not necessarily a positive act. For instance, no one wants me to create entries about Scotland based on my memories of the plot of Braveheart, no matter how enthusiastically I do it. Created entries need to meet minimum standards or be brought to those standards quickly. IIRC, Wikipedia strongly discourages blindly using machine translation because the resulting articles are so bad (to the point of sometimes having sentences that say the exact opposite of the source), and it sounds like what this guy was doing was actually worse than that.