User:عُثمان/sandbox

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∆ @ (bgn) / ¶ (brh) / ₹ (vls) / £ (ceb) / √ (bcc) / π (ast) – (Please translate this into English.)

• Punjabi to ISO 15919 and Roman Transliteration with Phonetic Rectification (Q113192177)

General guidelines

• Two language codes should be used on (nearly) all Punjabi lexemes to represent the two commonly used writing systems:
  • `pa` for Gurmukhi (Q689894)
  • `pnb` for Shahmukhi (Q133800)

The majority of contemporary attested writing in Punjabi is in the Gurmukhi script, which is used in Indian Punjab, but the majority of speakers of Punjabi live in Pakistan and are not well acquainted with Gurmukhi. As Shahmukhi is legible in Pakistani Punjab, it makes sense to represent each lexeme in both scripts in fairness to language speakers in both jurisdictions. The order is not technically important, but at the moment these are being modeled with `pa` first and `pnb` second just for the sake of consistency. See the section below on orthographic considerations for more detail on this subject.

New lexeme page

There is a bug in the Wikidata lexeme interface which requires that the Punjabi language item not have language codes on it. If we try to "create a new Lexeme" on a Punjabi item with language codes, even with multiple on the item, the interface will suppress the spelling variant option, making it impossible to specify whether the first entry is in Gurmukhi or Shahmukhi. Just as the entering a Hindustani lexeme currently works because the Hindustani item does not have the Hindi and Urdu language codes on it, in order for entering lexemes in Punjabi through the web interface to work, the codes "pa" and "pnb" must be kept on the items for Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi respectively. Language standard bodies hold that Punjabi is two languages out of political convenience; whatever this means does not need to be interpreted as having much to do with the single language.

Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi are orthographic writing systems; they are concepts which are based around phonetic considerations specific to Punjabi. To this end the difference between Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi would be better understood as analogous to Hindi and Urdu rather than say Devanagari and Perso-Arabic script. This is likely confusing to English speakers as the terms are never used to literally describe spoken language in the way Hindi and Urdu are used to describe spoken Hindustani, but note that the Punjabi-specific nature of these terms is evidenced by the fact that they are metaphorically named for spoken Punjabi rather than written. "Mukhi" means "mouth," as in the English sense for "tongue" - the Guru's tongue or the Shah's tongue. To say Gurmukhi script or Shahmukhi script, we may say "Gurmukhi lipi" or "Shahmukhi lipi" without necessarily being redundant; there is no such thing as spoken Gurmukhi or Shahmukhi but these names do not have a one-to-one correspondence for the English sense for script. We cannot say we've "written an English word in Shahmukhi" for the same reason we cannot say we've "written an English word in Urdu" - you can write English using a Perso-Arabic based script if you have some kind of Perso-Arabic-for-English orthography which includes heuristics for how to represent English phonemes using those characters, but that would not be writing English in Urdu.

One of the most common ways Shahmukhi is described is literally "writing Punjabi in Urdu," because for practical purposes that's exactly what it is. When some Pakistanis say that Punjabi isn't a written language or that it has no writing system, they just mean the only way it is commonly attested is using the same script as Urdu. Given that the distinction between Hindi and Urdu is primarily a written one, it follows that there is Punjabi writing which has been described as "written in Urdu" without qualification. These particular notions, along with self-depracatory sentiments holding it as a "ruthless language" or "villager's language," are not prevalent in Indian Punjab. Gurmukhi has an alphabet with characters distinct enough from other Brahmic scripts that its use can be seen as unmistakably related to Punjabi, and the language's importance to the Sikh religion has prevented the degree of demotion in prestige observable in Pakistani Punjab.

To further clarify, while partition resulted in contrasts stark enough that we can associate certain tendencies with Pakistan (Muslims) and India (Sikhs and Hindus), these generalizations should not be taken as all encompassing. The region Sikhism started in is in contemporary Pakistan, and the religion's primary document, the Guru Granth Sahib, attests words which are only still spoken in Pakistan despite still being written in India. Gurmukhi is used at Pakistan's various gurdwaras despite having become relatively obscure to much of the Muslim general public, and Indian Punjab still has a few predominantly Muslim pockets such as Malerkotla where the use of Perso-Arabic scripts to write Punjabi is not so infrequent. Much of the body of historical Punjabi literature was written during a time when most writers used a Perso-Arabic based script irrespective of religion, and as such there are Gurmukhi words with spellings indicative of tendencies associated with Persian. The same Persian loan words might not indicate these tendencies in Brahmic script orthographies for cognate Indic languages.

Tone (ਸੁਰ / سُر)

Punjabi is a tonal language. It is often cited as being unique among South Asian languages in this regard, but this is not really true as tonal pronunciations have been observed in a number of languages spoken in regions overlapping or adjacent to Punjab. More accurately, it is unique among the most widely spoken South Asian languages and/or the most documented ones. Tonal pronunciations are required to speak the language, but tone is not prevalent enough to require consideration in every context. The majority of syllables in the majority of Punjabi words have level tone or no tone depending on whether you like your glasses half full or half empty, but some of the word forms which require a tonal pronunciation on a syllable are extremely common. There are two tones in Punjabi besides level, which have been variably called "high" or "falling" tone and "low" or "rising" tone. These technically resemble what is commonly described as "pitch accent" as it pertains to other languages, such as Japanese, rather than "tone" as used to describe the phenomenon in Chinese languages. However, tone has persisted as the common term used by writers on the subject, and the area between tone and pitch accent is too grey to justify departing from the more frequently used label.

Phonological adaptation

The phonetic framework of Punjabi is not easily broken, and as such there are few to no true unadapted loan words in the language. Every Persian- or English-derived word, Abrahamic religious term, or Arabic/Hebrew name has a Punjabi-specific pronunciation. The "correct" pronunciation of a Muslim Punjabi's name is rarely the same as the pronunciation used by Arabic speakers even if usually spelled the same way. Lexemes which are interlingual homographs to their parents in other languages are therefore warranted as they tend to have Punjabi-specific pronunciations, senses, and forms. The existence of these adapted loan words is sometimes cited as evidence for Punjabi's supposed inadequacy outside of colloquial settings, but the justification for this sentiment does not bear out when we consider that Urdu/Hindi, English, and most prestige languages require as many if not more adapted loan words in formal and technical contexts. In light of this, it is likely preferable not to give the notion of a "real" Punjabi word too much weight.

The English word Punjabi itself is representative of a phonological adaptation from Punjabi to English. The spelling Panjabi is used less frequently but reflects a more conventional transcription of the schwa sound present in the first syllable. Punjabi has taken hold as the most commonly attested spelling as it conforms to the internal logic of English surrounding representations for phonemes; the word is like "punk" or "pundit," rather than "panic" or "panda." Some writers remain quite insistent on the spelling Panjabi, likely motivated in part by an understandable distaste for "Poonjabi," but we use Punjabi here in accordance with the general preference for common names in Wikimedia projects. The unconventional use of "u" has not stopped it from becoming the most commonly attested Romanized form in Punjab itself.

Numerals

To date, numerals have been modeled as a separate grammatical category in most languages they have been added to. This practice has been questioned for other languages for which the role numerals play in sentences may be challenging to describe in terms of the common categories, but this question is answerable for Punjabi. All numerals in Punjabi may be placed within a common grammatical category, and follow the grammatical tendencies of that category. ਸਫ਼ਰ (0) is a noun, and ਇੱਕ (1) is an adjective (not to be confused with non-numeric determiner ਇਕ). It would not be useful to erase that distinction, so items which are subclasses of both numeral and the actual grammatical category have been used to indicate that these can both be understood on the terms of common parts of speech, and represent the same notions as the numeral category in other languages. 0, 1, and 2 are more semantically complex than any of the other Punjabi numbers, which is unsurprising considering these numbers continue to confound contemporary mathematicians. Morphologically, numeric words in Punjabi have irregularities going from 0 to 100. (They regularize beyond 20 in English as a point of comparison.) At minimum, the multiple lexemes each for every positive integer up to 100 should be represented, as well as the exponential series of 10^x up to geologic orders of magnitude. Numbers like 384 and 5 billion are less of a priority since these can be derived, though there is no reason to discourage lexemes for them. After all, there may be non-numeric lexemes which are derived from numbers like 384, or Punjabi physics lecturers who might offer a reason to document orders of magnitude far removed from common perception.

As per common practice for other languages, numeric digits are not represented as separate lexemes. They do however constitute parts of representations, and for example, 28ਵੀ is a valid representation of a Punjabi ordinal numeral. 28, ੨੪, and ٢٨ are all Indic numeral representations, the first of which is the most commonly used in both India and Pakistan rather than the glyphs associated with Gurmukhi and Perso-Arabic based scripts. (The latter qualified even here because the they are not written exactly the same way as in the Arab world.) A somewhat gratuitous but notable point to consider here is that 2 is just ਦੋ upside down and reversed. As the numeric digit system(s) used in most languages originated in the Indian subcontinent, it follows that it does not make much sense to consider 28ਵੀ partially in "Latin script," or ٢٨ to be in "Arabic script." Arabic speakers call the latter Indic numerals because they do not actually fit within the Arabic script (they are always written left-to-right). 0 is exceptional besides being a special number in that the common noun is a Persian loan word despite the concept's origin in the Indian subcontinent.

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$ سوَر شاستر (skr) / ازماؤنا (ur) / ਸ੍ਵਰ ਸ਼ਾਸਤਰ (pa) / سوَر شاستر (pnb) – (Please translate this into English.)