Please add the language code hbo to the list of language codes supported for monolingual text values.
| Subject | Repo | Branch | Lines +/- | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Add monolingual language code hbo | mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase | master | +1 -0 |
Change 453821 had a related patch set uploaded (by 1-Byte; owner: 1-Byte):
[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] Add monolingual language code hbo
Um, I'm not sure whether I'm in a conflict of interest here or not...
I'm a member of Langcom, and I speak Hebrew, and I learned it academically. The hbo code is definitely not ambiguous. Biblical Hebrew is very well-defined: it's the Hebrew as contained in the Bible. By definition one cannot add anything to it—the book had been written more then two thousand years ago.
I am wondering however, how is this useful in Wikidata. hbo is useful when it's important to distinguish between modern and Biblical Hebrew, especially for technical reasons, because it's often useful to display them in different fonts (many common modern Hebrew fonts don't support Biblical diacritical marks well). What's useful in Wikidata, however, is to write names of Biblical characters, for example, but they are written identically in modern Hebrew. For example, the famous Biblical names Moses (משה), David (דוד), and Solomon (שלמה) are all spelled in a way that is unusual for modern Hebrew, but because they are so common, their Biblical spelling is retained by convention. No distinction should be necessary here. It is useful to write a separate variant of the name with vowel diacritics (niqud), but there is already the vocalized name for this purpose.
So I'm not sure why is this necessary, but I'll be happy to hear examples where a distinction between "he" and "hbo" is useful.
I imagine it could be useful not just for individual names (where you say the distinction is not necessary), but also for longer quotes, especially in the context of lexicographical data (e. g. values for the usage example property).
Here, again, by convention, everything that is valid in Biblical is also valid in Modern (some of these words and forms are actually common in modern written Hebrew and some aren't, but all are valid in theory). All modern Hebrew dictionaries include usage examples from the Biblical language, and a comprehensive Hebrew dictionary includes all the Biblical words. Marking a citation as coming from the Bible is functionally equivalent to marking it as Biblical Hebrew (does Wikibase Lexeme have usage examples?)
A different issue would be producing a dictionary that is dedicated to the Biblical Hebrew. Brown-Driver-Briggs is a famous real-world example, and it's in the public domain. I'm not sure that it's the intended use of Lexical Wikidata to produce copies of particular published public domain dictionaries, but it would certainly be a valid use case if you ask me. In this use case, using only Biblical Hebrew is a well defined constraint, and for this hbo would be a valid distinct code. But is such use case actually planned?
WikibaseLexeme doesn’t have any special features for usage examples, but they can be stored as regular statements, e. g. using the usage example property.
I’m not sure if anyone currently has plans to import a full public domain dictionary, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out – for example, @ArthurPSmith seems to be importing some basic English words as far as I can tell from his contributions (lots of five-letter words in perfect alphabetical order).
After trying to find resources about hbo I got even more confused - I'm not sure if this is even a language.
Assuming the formal definition for hbo is https://iso639-3.sil.org/code/hbo and the links from there, I don't understand if hbo is a language or a blanket term for varieties of Hebrew used in ancient time.
I tried (unsuccessfully) to find usage examples:
However I can barely see some usages for lexams where a word in ancient Hebrew have different meaning then modern Hebrew - however in such cases there is no option to have the distinction between Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew as they are both hbo?
These definitely exist. A famous example is חשמל, which is "electricity" in modern Hebrew, and "a shining substance, exact meaning dubious" (according to BDB) in the Bible (some translations say "amber", which explains the modern meaning). Another famous example is מנזר, which is "monastery" today and something different in the Bible (no-one is totally sure what).
There are many more, but the nature of these differences is comparable to English words that have a different meaning in the works of Shakespeare. It's a significantly different style of English, but not different enough to have its own language code. These should be probably described by citations or by properties that associate the words with a certain range in time.
Just poking this after 1 month of inactivity, what's the status? Are we adding it or not?:)
Change 453821 had a related patch set uploaded (by Lucas Werkmeister (WMDE); owner: 1-Byte):
[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] Add monolingual language code hbo
Change 453821 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] Add monolingual language code hbo