Wikipǣdia:Macrons oþþe Accentas

This is the vote page for macrons or accents. You are voting on the proposal to change all the accent marks on Old English words across all OE wikis to macrons.

Results

Voting is now closed, and with a stunning turnout of...3! we have an overwhelming winner in changing accents to macrons. Let's get started! I can change the system messages, no problem, but I'll need everyone's help to do the articles.--James 05:39, 4 Háligmónaþ 2005 (UTC)

One other thing - we'll need a note to let people know to switch their font to Arial Unicode or something similar so the macrons don't look funny for them.

Thanks for voting!

To make the conversion process somewhat easier, I've written a little PHP utility for converting from acute accents to macrons: [1].

Be very careful to avoid including interwiki links in the text you convert; there are a lot of such links which *should* contain acute accents. --Saforrest 06:59, 5 Háligmónaþ 2005 (UTC)

Votes

Please sign all votes.

For

• Saforrest --Saforrest 21:00, 31 Wéodmónaþ 2005 (UTC)
• Yst --Yst 21:03, 31 Wéodmónaþ 2005 (UTC)
• James --James 20:55, 1 Háligmónaþ 2005 (UTC)

Deadline

Votes to be tallied after the close of voting, Saturday, September 3rd at midnight.

Information

The following lists the Unicode character set from which the characters of interest here are taken. This may be viewed as a rough measure of how well-supported they will be on different platforms, with Latin-1 being the best-supported and Latin Extended-B the least-supported.

• Latin 1: Áá Éé Íí Óó Úú Ýý
• Latin Extended-A: Āā Ēē Īī Ōō Ūū
• Latin Extended-B: Ǽǽ Ǣǣ Ȳȳ

Note that only the characters from Latin-1 above are representable in the ISO 8859-1 or ISO 8859-15 encoding formats, which was used for the Modern English wikipedia until recently (it now uses UTF-8).

Arguments for each position

The following outline some of the arguments to be made on either side. Please add further arguments or counterarguments as you see fit, within reason.

For

• Macrons more faithfully represent modern OE orthography.
• Acute accents have a defined meaning in other languages, and are occasionally used for foreign words, so it is confusing to overload them with this new meaning.
• Compatibility of ǽ and ǣ are essentially equivalent, so if we are willing to allow anything from Latin Extended-B at all, we might as well go all the way and use macrons.
• Compatibility with English wikipedia is no longer a problem since it is now using the UTF-8 encoding standard instead of ISO-8859-1.

Against

• Because Latin-1 has better support overall, the characters áéíóú are more compatible with current computer configurations than the macron equivalents āēīōū.
• The character ǽ looks better in Arial, the default sans-serif font on Microsoft Windows, than does ǣ, the equivalent character with macron.
• The y-with-macron character (ȳ) is not well represented in some fonts, including Arial and Arial Unicode, in which it looks like 'y_'.

Other comments

I would vote not to require either, there is really no precedent for being sticklers for this kind of thing. Wherever possible, leave it up to the writer to include them or not, and don't count it "wrong" if it is missing. Codex Sinaiticus 21:35, 31 Wéodmónaþ 2005 (UTC)

I agree there. I do not think macrons should be required. I favour them over grave and acute accents if it's one or the other, but the use of macrons isn't universal to modern Old English texts and writing and so I don't feel it should be a prerequisite to writing here. --Yst 03:45, 1 Háligmónaþ 2005 (UTC)

Well, the question of whether to require accents/macrons or not is an entirely independent issue: even if we decided that diacritics were optional, we could still specify which sort of diacritics to include if we chose to include them.

So, you can feel free to add sections above called "For, without agreeing that the use of diacritics be mandatory" and "Against, ..." and then specify your vote there.

However, I think there are good reasons for requiring the use of diacritics:

• Unambiguity: there are many OE words where the accents are semantically significant:
  • ǽl "eel" vs. æl "awl"
  • éoh "yew-tree" vs. eoh "horse"
  • hátian "heat, be hot" vs. hatian "hate"
  • hrán "reindeer" vs. hran "whale"
  • métan "meet, encounter" vs. metan "mark off, estimate".
  • scéad "reason, distinction, discretion" vs. scead "shadow"
  • wácian "weaken" vs. wacian "waken, keep awake"
• Standardization: if we make diacritics optional in titles, people might not know a page with the relevant information already exists, because they're looking for the version with or without diacritics.

--Saforrest 17:56, 1 Háligmónaþ 2005 (UTC)

On this note, check out Rihtwrítung on Wikibooks...--James 16:32, 3 Háligmónaþ 2005 (UTC)