FAQs regarding Scots Wikipedia controversy | Hacker News Reader

FAQs regarding Scots Wikipedia controversy

meta.wikimedia.org

33 pointselliekelly8 comments

Unfortunately, it isn't just a Wikipedia thing, and the headlines and article titles are going to make people miss another problem. There are a whole bunch of English-to-Scots translations on Wikidata and Wiktionary that were added by the same person. Wikidata in particular was designed to be machine-scrapeable, so there are an awful lot of translators on the WWW that will now tell you that the Scots for "Italian cuisine" is "Italian cuisine".

This is certainly true. After reading about this controversy, I wanted to get a feel for the level of mutual intelligibility between Scots and English. To do this, I tried to search for a translation of The Lord’s Prayer in Scots to compare to the English version but up came this Wikipedia page (https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laird%27s_Prayer), which might be fine but I can’t be sure. And then I realized I couldn’t really trust any of the other top results not to be copied from Wikipedia either.

The very title, and of course the Wikidata entry that comes from that, is highly suspect. Stevenson's and Macleod's 2012 Dictionary of Scots Words and Phrases in Current Use says, in the entry for "laird" that

> It is not used in titles for the nobility, and no-one would talk about the Laird's prayer.

Just to add to the mix: Michael Montgomery's "The rediscovery of the Ulster Scots language" in Englishes Around the World: General studies, British Isles, North America (1997, edited by Edgar Werner Schneider) gives the Ulster Scots "Lord's Prayer" from a promotional leaflet in 1994 as:

    Our Father at bes aboon,
    Yer name be tovit, Yer kangrick cum,
    Yer gate be tae be on the yird abooon forbye.
    Gie us ilk day wor day's breid;
    Forgie us the wrangs we hae wrocht
    Bein as we forgies themums at wrangs worsels;
    Dinnae airt us intil temptin, but save us fae aa ills.
    For yours bes the kangrick, the pouer an the glorie,
    For aye an iver. Sae mote hit be.

Due to all the reports of mangled English (which is indeed a problem), a lot of people seem to have the false impression that real Scots is wildly different to English. The Scots for "Italian cuisine" is in fact "Italian cuisine".

It's ridiculous incident but it's also overstated, I haven't seen any decent translators with Scots support but if they were based on that wiki they'd probably tell you that the Scots translation of "to know" is "tae ken" which is perfectly correct. It might also tell you that the Scots word for physics is "pheesics" instead of "physics" but how faith should you be putting in a public wiki as a data source in the first place?

No. Scots has borrowed from French, but it doesn't have the same spellings as English borrowings from French. Plus, various sources indicate that the better word is likely to be "kitchen".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24273851

This seems maturely handled.

I fully agree. As I understand it, the user was a teenager who did not know better and thought they made a sincere effort to contribute. Young and/or inexperienced contributors are prone to make somewhat similar mistakes, albeit usually less extreme. What message would it send if they were punished for this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com