World category names are not consistent

The world category names (e.g. Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, Japanese, Nederlands, Polska, Svenska) are not consistent. I don't speak all the languages ( ), but the Polish one, should I think be "Polski" (jezyk polski) rather than "Polska".

I think that they are supposed to be the name of the particular language, i.e. like saying "Dmoz in French", "Dmoz in German" etc.

As some languages (e.g. Polish) change the form of the word according to what they describe, it might be helpful to consider the following table as to what the word is supposed to be:
Language Country Adjective for 'World'
Francais France Francais (le monde)
Polski Pologne Polska (kraj)

Basically, I am suggesting that the term be the term to describe the same thing in each language.

Specifically, I am saying that the item "Polska" should be "Polski". If you speak fluently other languages, please check and comment.

(I noticed this as I was preparing a language drop-down for the http://www.localpin.com site, labelled it "Language" and used the words from Dmoz. "Language" does not correctly define what the adjective is, as my Polish wife pointed out).

1) The real rule is "in the native language for languages that use the Latin alphabet, otherwise in English". Since that page has to be viewable on as many browsers as possible, the decision was made not to have any non-Latin-style characters.

2) Concerning Polish in particular: I can pass this on but that "I think" indicates you aren't sure. Do you speak fluent Polish? I don't -- on good days I can just about manage English and Texan, but that's all -- but we do have at least one editor who is a native speaker (as well as being fluent in English and who-knows-how-many-other-languages), and who was already a meta-editor last time the language names were discussed. If this had been a problem, I'm pretty sure it would have been noticed.

Concerning point (1) (in the native language for languages that use the Latin alphabet), the Polish word is really a choice between "Polska" (adjective for describing feminine nouns, but also the noun for "Poland"), "Polski" (adjective for describing masculine nouns, e.g. Polish language). As both of these words actually use the Latin alphabet, either is lexigraphically usable.

Considering point (2):
a) "I think" indicates you aren't sure. No! "I think" indicates some humility. I am pretty sure that this Polish term IS wrong (sure, the word exists, but it is just not consistent with the adjective describing the Polish language), enough to bring it up here, and I suspect that if a full analysis would show that OTHER words are also wrong.

b) Do I speak fluent Polish? I am a native English speaker, speak extremely good French and Polish, and basic German (enough to know that "Deutsch" is the language, "Spreken sie Deutsch?"). My wife though IS a native speaker of Polish, and she says that "Polska" is certainly NOT the right word for the language

c)"If this had been a problem, I'm pretty sure it would have been noticed". I think part of the problem is that you need firstly to be pretty fluent in several languages to be able to notice the problem and secondly asking yourself strongly "what is the (ontological) meaning of these words". I have used Dmoz for a long time, as much as anyone, and it was (as I said earlier) only when I was trying to create a drop-down listbox using all of these words that I was forced to ask what these words actually meant. I thought "Language" summarised what they meant, but this is NOT the case for Polish.

Let me ask you (all who are reading this) a question. What is the 1 word or phrase which describes each of these words?
e.g. Is it "the language", or "the country", or "the world", or something else? If we try the phrase "The language"

"The language 'Francais'" (CORRECT - 'Francais' is the word for the French language.

"The language 'Deutsch'" (CORRECT - 'Deutsch' is the
German language.

"The language 'Japanese'" (CORRECT - 'Japanese' is the Japanese language, expressed using the Latin alphabet, since the real word uses non-Latin characters)

"The language 'Polska'" (WRONG!!! - 'Polska' is NOT the language)

I can pass this on. As I say, I'm monolingual, but we do have a polymathic native Polish-speaker onboard. One more question: is it possible that this is a dialectical difference?

OK, I knew I'd heard something like this before. I found the prior discussion. Our man in Warsaw says there are two ways of describing the language, of which "Polski" and "Polska" are, respectively, legitimate short forms. Think of "Polska" as short for "Polska mowa." Does this make sense?

I knew I'd heard

The English word "Polish" can be translated into Polish in many different ways:

1) Polish, adjective= of Poland, concerning Poland or Polish nationals:

polski, polska, polskie, polscy, polskie, polskiego, polskiemu, polskim, polskiej, polskich, polskim, etc.
(lowercase 'p')

2) Polish = a Pole = nationality
Polak, Polka.. Polakowi, Polaka, Polce, Polacy, Polakom, etc
(uppercase 'P')

---
The phrase 'Polish language' can be translated as 'jezyk polski' (masculine form, used in most dictionaries) or 'mowa polska' (feminine form, not shown in dictionaries).

And the name of the country is Polska (=Poland) - uppercase 'P'.

My French is not perfect but I think that the English phrase 'French language' can be translated as 'la langue francaise' (feminine form) or 'le francais' (masculine form)

World/Polska is an abnormality in the World category. Hugh is correct that *technically* it should be World/Polski, (as most people refer to the Polish language as "jezyk Polski"). On the other hand "mowa Polska" is also correct, although it's much more of a literary term, not as frequently used in everyday speech.

Back in the day, World editors basically decided on their own what to call their foreign language equivalents and World/Polska was chosen because it mirrored the dmoz.org/Regional style of naming categories for a specific country.

After a while it became apparent that it made sense for foreign-language categories to be named after the language rather than the country. Especially since languages like French, Spanish, Portugese, etc were spoken as a native language in more than one country and in more than one dialect.

Thank you for your helpful post.

You are absolutly right that
a) most people refer to the Polish language as "jezkyk Polski" (my point at the start of this)
b) "mowa Polska" is much more of a literary term, not as frequently used in everyday speech.

This is absolutely my point: "Polska" may have been chosen, but "Polski" is what it should be.

My wife is Polish, and when she heard of "mowa Polska" as any explanation of the use of the word "Polska", she died of laughter. She ridiculed it as being "village" (implying chosen by people who don't know how to speak Polish).

Mention in another post of other irrelevant forms like polskiego, polskiemu are so completely and obviously not the right form that it does not help. (For the English, it would be like discussing whether you write "100 dogz" or "100 dogs", and someone says, "there is also the form 100 dog" - yeah, right, let's change "Polska" to read "polskich". I don't think

Take a look at the front page of http://www.localpin.com where you will see a drop-down of languages, where the language name is EXACTLY that used by DMOZ. You will see that it all reads properly, e.g.:

LANGUAGE:
English
Greek
Russian
Ukranian

but, and this is why I (or, more precisely, my Polish wife) noticed the inconsistency in DMOZ:

LANGUAGE:
Polska

Doesn't this illustrate that the Polish word is wrong?

What title could I possibly use for the dropdown (of, to remind you, DMOZ terms), which would be correct? Maybe "LANGUAGE, (OR IN THE CASE OF POLISH), THE SPEECH OF THAT NATION"

One of the goals of DMOZ (I assume) is to be organised in a clear and consistent manner. It is my assertion, that the word "polski" is not consistent with all the other names chosen for the world categories.

What do you think?

<FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="http://www.resource-zone.com/dopoll.php"><INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="pollname" VALUE="1059115462hughprior">
<p>Which word should be used for the name of the Polish category in world?
<input type="radio" name="option" value="1" />polska
<input type="radio" name="option" value="2" />polski
<INPUT TYPE=Submit NAME=Submit VALUE="Submit vote" class="buttons"></form>

One thing that has not been mentioned yet, is that it is not a trivial thing to rename an entire branch. Sure, the command is simple (World/Polska/ --&gt; World/Polski/) but the database ramifications are not.

I am not a technical person, but here are the concerns I see:

1. It affects information about every one of the ~73,000 listed sites. Sometimes in the past, catmvs, or simply editing in a category, have caused listings to disappear. Sometimes they are easily retrieved, sometimes not. I would be concerned about doing something that affects so many sites without being able to easily verify that everything went OK.

2. There are a lot of links (@links, related links, altlang links) to and from these categories. Normally when a catmv is done, the software redirects all of these links, and eventually automatically corrects them. In the past, occasionally this didn't work. Currently, there is a major bug with this process and links aren't updating at all. Editors aren't doing catmvs unless they can manually verify links and reset them. This would be an enormous task for an entire branch.

3. Downstream users are required to create "become an editor" links back to ODP. If the category is renamed, we will essentially cut off all external applications to World/Polska/ until the downstream users notice the change.

4. Who knows what the other ripple effects are of changing World/Polska/ ? It is essentially a separate little directory, maybe users are scraping the data live automatically.

I think that you may find that people agree that World/Polski/ may be better than World/Polska/ , but this is a case where "better is the enemy of good enough", IMHO. At this point I think many editors feel that it works fine now, and that the effort to make a change would be better spent listing new sites.

Now, this doesn't mean the issue is dead, but that it lacks an experienced editor who wants to champion the idea, build consensus for the change, create a feasible plan for accomplishing the change and ensuring data integrity, and then doing the work to implement it. Perhaps you want to become that person? If you (or your wife) became an editor and gained the necessary experience to become a top level World/Polska/ editor, then I think you would be in a better position (with better knowledge) to present a case for change to your fellow World/Polska/ editors.

I'm sure we would welcome another caring, dedicated, well-spoken (written!) person such as yourself as an editor.


&lt;/shameless plug&gt;

I echo what lissa said, hughprior. I'm sure we could use more World/Polska editors.

BTW, it took me more than a year after I first posted about it, before I got World/Malaysian changed to World/Bahasa_Melayu (the former is citizenship, the latter is the language). It was more due to learning to build a consensus, which is especially hard when they're not many editors who speaks the language. But, World/Malaysian was only about 300 sites then, so it was a much simpler decision then World/Polska now with more than 70,000 sites.

In my opinion, if it's wrong, it's worth fixing. We haven't had any editors championing the idea in here because, I venture, very few Polish (polski) editors read these threads.

It's worth a vote, at the least. We can fix the problems that occur (perhaps dauntings, perhaps enough for us to vote 'no').

About users of dmoz data, I'm not an expert, but I would think they parse the data and determine their own local directory structure based on the structure of the RDF file. I would think downstream users wouldn't be terrible inconvenienced by this change. It happened to World/Malaysian, after all.

I believe it actually has been brought up before in the private meta-editor forums and wasn't been fixed then. I don't remember the reason though, probably the logistics mentioned here already.

She ridiculed it as being "village"

Click to expand...

I assume she mean "wiesniacki". I'm not sure I agree, but I see where she's coming from.

Perhaps some of the folks whose websites are listed in http://dmoz.org/Business/Business_Services/Translation/Single_Language/English_and_Polish/ should be consulted?

I'm with lissa on that point.

If we built ODP from the begginning, perhaps World/Polski would be a more accurate name, but...

1) World/Polska is a huge category and I don't see the point of renaming it, risking losing sites, @links, relcats, altlanglinks and God knows what else.

2) If you search Google for World/Polska, you'll end up with over 80 000 matches. Most of them concern this very name of an ODP category. A good part of them includes links to http://dmoz.org/World/Polska . If we rename the cat, we would break all those links.

3) "Jezyk polski" is only a bit more accurate term than "Mowa polska". (See: http://www.translate.pl/odp.php4?direction=1&amp;word=language ) "Mowa" is a less popular, more literary word. "Mowa polska" definitely is _not_ a "wiesniackie wyrazenie" (I'm not sure how to translate it in English, perhaps a "yokel's expression"). Moreover, 'World/Polska' sounds better for the ear than 'World/Polski'. 'World/Polski' gives you also instantly an association with 'the Polish world', which is not fortunate.

4) Good point, GrzegorzAlbinowski - why 'World/Francais' (le francais) and not 'World/Francaise' (la langue francaise).

5) Polish (ie. World/Polska) editors like the name as it is. There has never been amongst us a serious will to change the name of our category. My personal opinion is: "Polski may be better, but Polska is good enough."

6) Hughprior, you write: "Polska" may have been chosen, but "Polski" is what it should be.. I would phrase it that way: Both "Polska" and "Polski" could have been chosen but "Polska" has been chosen.. That is MHO.

4) Good point, GrzegorzAlbinowski - why 'World/Francais' (le francais) and not 'World/Francaise' (la langue francaise).

Click to expand...

Because in french grammatic , "Il" wins always over "Elle"
No, you can actually have both for french (the language)
- le français
- la langue française

"la langue française" will not be used so much: we would say "les sites en français" and not "les sites de/en(?) langue française" (even if it is possible).

François

&gt;&gt;Because in french grammatic , "Il" wins always over "Elle"&lt;&lt;

And for some obscure reasons it's the other way round for everything else. :explosive:

This issue was discussed in depth by /World/Polska editors. We consulted several well known experts amd we decided it is best for ODP to keep the category name as it is.

(sorry for coming late. I was off-line on my holidays).