Latest comment: 12 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
In AWB Options > Normal setting uncheck 'Add replacements to edit summary' and it'll make the edit summaries only what you put in the 'Default Summary' box. Makes edit summaries shorter and more 'human'. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:38, 11 October 2012 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 12 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion
I'd like to take over WOTD — at least for now. I've already set up new words for October 28-31 to get the ball rolling again. Looking over diffs to see what others had done allowed me to figure out the basics, but there's still many other things I need to know about the process, especially what I need to do to create an archive, set up a new month, and polish the entry pages for words before they appear. Thanks! Astral (talk) 00:43, 28 October 2012 (UTC)Reply
I'm glad you're interested!
The front-end part is simple—pick words and plug them into the templates. You're already doing a good job of that; I like your Halloween pick. As you seem to have gathered, the last definition doesn't end with a full stop/period (though if a word has multiple definitions, the preceding definitions do), because the template already adds one: double-dotted vs fixed. Featured words should have pronunciation info (either IPA or audio); the template will automatically notice and include an audio pronunciation if one is present.
The more additional info an entry has, like etymology, illustration or examples of usage, the more interesting it is likely to be to users who click through to it; on the other hand, trying to cite and find a picture for every word you feature on WOTD is a recipe for burning out. Strategise.
Once you've set a word, add the was-wotd template to the entry, so that it won't be featured again (mostly).
To create an archive, do what Ruakh did here, changing {{wotd archive|PREVIOUS|NEXT|YEAR|DAYS}} to the previous month, the next month, the year (four digits) and the number of days in the month (28, 29, 30, 31), and updating the pagename to the relevant month and year. An easy way of creating an archive is to copy-and-paste the relevant month's Recycled Page, e.g. Wiktionary:Word of the day/Recycled pages/October, simply changing {{wotd recycled}} to {{wotd archive}} and adding the YEAR and DAYS parameters.
At the end of the month, subst: all of the templates by changing each day's {{Wiktionary:Word of the day to {{subst:Wiktionary:Word of the day. The reason for not subst:ing a day before it's done is that someone might tweak the definition or fix a typo, etc.
Thanks. This is very helpful. I've got a couple of questions. First, I'm not good with IPA, so is there a way I could arrange for someone who is to add pronunciation data to entries before they appear? Second, is it okay to occasionally select words I've nominated myself? I already did this with trainiac, because I wanted something "fun" between mulct and peri-urban, but I don't want to do it again if it's something that should be avoided. Astral (talk) 03:33, 30 October 2012 (UTC)Reply
Also, exactly how far back does the prohibition against using words featured as WOTDs on other sites go? It makes sense not to copy words other sites have featured recently, but three, four, five years back seems like a another matter. I need a verb, and wanted to use photobomb, but it was featured on Urban Dictionary in 2009, and more recently as a noun on September 28 of this year. Astral (talk) 03:49, 30 October 2012 (UTC)Reply
Disclaimer: I'm not Sche (@Sche: feel free to correct me on anything I say). Anyway, I think that choosing words that you nominate is fine, and that if you find a concise way to list all the entries you want IPA for pronto (on a subpage, maybe?) I would be happy to help out, as would Sche, Angr, et al. (probably) given their past contributions in that regard (and they're probably more trustworthy than I am). —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds05:14, 30 October 2012 (UTC)Reply
Yes, you can just comment that you'd like to feature a word but it lacks pronunciation info. Many users watch that page, and someone should take care of it. And yes, you can feature words you've nominated—at least, I did. It's probably best to let a couple days pass between when you nominate a word and when you use it, in case anyone comments with objections, but I doubt anything you nominate will be objectionable (you know not to nominate redlinks or offensive words). As for other sites' words of the day: personally, I never paid much attention to that rule; I checked if a word had been featured on another site in the past few months, and if not, looked no further. Sometimes, people would strike words that had been featured by other sites years ago, and in those cases, I respected the strikings and didn't use those words, but I didn't strike words that had been featured by other sites years ago myself. - -sche(discuss)05:45, 30 October 2012 (UTC)Reply
@CodeCat: thank you for the link. (And @Kephir, if you're reading this, thanks for designing that module!) @Metaknowledge: Indeed, and nai (which several things currently list as their family!). qfa-ame should also go, IMO, or at least be voted upon like Altaic and Zuni needs to be updated not to list qfa-ame as its family even if it is kept. (If qfa-ame is kept, we should reconsider having deleted Penutian.) I've been meaning to start Requests for Deletion, but I've been busy. Feel free to beat me to it. - -sche(discuss)09:19, 18 December 2013 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 years ago8 comments2 people in discussion
Have we thought out the treatment of these yet? We have both the macrolanguage code hai (and a category for terms derived from it, including the entry gwaai that I think I'll go and RFV) as well as the two sublects, hdn and hax, the latter of which I just unwittingly made a terms derived from category for. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds20:35, 13 August 2014 (UTC)Reply
I recall looking into the Haida lects, but it seems from my "Note 2" in this RFM that I held off on posting about them for some reason, and then got distracted by events in real life. WT:LANGTREAT says to treat only the macrolanguage as a language, but like the pronouncements I mentioned in that RFM, it seems there was never discussion about that. There are noticeable phonological differences between the Northern and Southern lects. Each of those lects is in turn made up of its own (sub-)dialects, but the sub-dialects within each group are mutually intelligible, so it doesn't seem to be a problem to merge those (into hax and into hdn), and it seems most references do. I looked at a number of North Haida, South Haida and plain "Haida" materials (Enrico's Northern Haida Songs, etc) and references before I posted the above-linked RFM last year and planned to comment about Haida; I'll see if I can find the notes I made then. - -sche(discuss)22:30, 13 August 2014 (UTC)Reply
A tad more research on the matter suggests to me that we should deprecate the use of the macrolanguage and reassign it, then create categories for the sublects. If you've notes on it, though, I'll wait for you to start the RFM instead of blowing ahead myself. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds23:01, 13 August 2014 (UTC)Reply
Ok, here are my notes, which I'd be happy to summarize in any RFM on the subject, or which you can feel free to pull from.
Short version: Northern and Southern Haida differ greatly, allowing only partial mutual intelligibility, like Swedish and Danish, or German and Dutch. Click for tl;dr version.
The linguist Michael Krauss, writing in The Languages of Native America (1979), says "The difference between Northern and Southern Haida is rather great, allowing only partial mutual intelligibility without practice, perhaps like Swedish and Danish, or German and Dutch."
The translator Robert Bringhurst says: "Trade, intermarriage and other relations between the northern and southern villages were continuous, but the differences in dialect are great. It is, in fact, chiefly out of courtesy that northern and southern Haida are described as two dialects rather than two close but separate languages. By 1900, north and south had clearly known centuries of diverging cultural growth." (A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, 2011.)
The linguist John Enrico notes that Northern Haida has, in addition to regional dialects, also two registers: 'song' and 'speech'. The 'song' register is often but not always phonologically closer to Southern Haida than the 'speech' register is, but in several cases Enrico determined that the phonological changes that resulted in the Southern forms occurred after the North-South split, and hence even the presence of some similar forms "in Northern Haida song must be a borrowing [...] not an archaism".
The Haida's autonym is (in Enrico's orthography) xaad /ħaːd̥/ in the North, xaayda /ħaːjd̥a/ in the South. (It's best not to get hung up on how similar or dissimilar isolated words are, however. "Talk" is kil /kil/ in both the North and the South.) The stem for "go along (while wailing)" is gyaa.isalan- /ɡ̊jaː.isalan/ in the North, gyaacisralln- /ɡ̊jaːxisʕalˀn/ in the South.
Within Northern Haida, "have you left?" is haaw-gwaa dang qaaguhla-gii? [there-QUESTION you leave-PERFECT] /haːw.ɡ̊waː d̥aŋ qʰaːɡ̊uhla.ɡ̊i/ in the 'song' register, kuu-gu dang qaaguhl-gii? [there-QUESTION you leave-PERFECT] /kʰːu.ɡ̊u d̥aŋ qʰaːɡ̊uhl.ɡ̊i/ in the 'speech' register.
All sounds good, and you can feel free to copy my Support over to the RFM for splitting and deprecating hai, but I'm not on board with the orthography. In British Columbia, I've only seen the orthography with x̱ used, so I would presume it is standard among speakers and linguists. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds07:21, 14 August 2014 (UTC)Reply
Wikipedia says SHIP's orthography "is the usual orthography used in Skidegate", while Enrico's is what I saw in my (limited) review for Northern Haida—but perhaps the set of materials I have access to is not representative of all materials. Are the texts you see in British Columbia Southern Haida, or are some Northern Haida? Meh, it would be undesirable to use two different orthographies... I suppose we can normalize both (South and North) on the SHIP spellings and mention the other spellings as alternative forms. (Cf this subthread, if you're bored.) - -sche(discuss)23:45, 14 August 2014 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
In the unlikely case that you haven't noticed my edit at mir#German_Low_German, have a look. With something as splintered as Low German, do you think it would make sense to install an L4 for "Dialects using this word" or something instead of context labels? The pronunciation sections can simply go into a collapse. Korn [kʰʊ̃ːæ̯̃n] (talk) 15:23, 1 September 2015 (UTC)Reply
@Korn: thanks for bringing this up. I thought about it a while ago when I saw anguañu, which specifies twenty different dialects that the term is used in. Perhaps in such cases the individual dialects can be specified under ====Usage notes=====, leaving the definition line to just say "many|_|dialects". (According to templatetiger, there are three other entries which use 9 or more parameters of {{label}}: recondite, quindecillion, and tu; and there are also a few entries which use 10 or more parameters of {{context}}: pardı and Mischief Night.) - -sche(discuss)00:56, 3 September 2015 (UTC)Reply
I don't; I'm sorry. I just took the text that had been added to Subarian and trimmed out the speculation on ethnic identity and other things that belonged in Wikipedia rather than in a dictionary. - -sche(discuss)21:29, 10 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 8 years ago8 comments3 people in discussion
You added the entry for "woman" here for Makalero, which is incorrect. Huber, the source you cited, simply states that it is Tongan, and that entry already existed there. I think that in your haste to create entries in a maximal number of languages, you may have made more errors that won't be caught for quite a while (you got lucky in that this one happened to turn up on my watchlist, and I felt it very unlikely that Makalero would borrow a vocabulary item like that from Polynesian, so I checked). In any case, I appreciate your project, but I think you need to take a lot more precaution to avoid these kinds of mistakes. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds06:51, 26 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Oh, you're right about Huber; I'm glad you caught that. I've been going through and checking my previous additions ever since Chuck's caution in the previous section that the Comparative Austronesian Dictionary (which had been recommended to me as a valid reference on Talk:water, when I was trying to verify the translations people had added there) normalizes orthography and so has to be checked against other sources. So, I hope to uncover any other errors. - -sche(discuss)16:42, 26 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
I see, Liliana should not have said that. Yeah, you can't really use Blust as a primary source for something serious, although the orthographic concerns run deeper; some of these languages are well nigh unwritten, and linguists might just put them in IPA. Thanks for going through them, anyhow. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds17:04, 26 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Looking at diffs of all my edits to water and woman, and so checking not only anything I added but any word I changed the spelling of and any language I updated the name of, and sometimes spot-checking things I had nothing to do with, I've found other references for the translations of water and woman into Äiwoo, Aklanon, Alaba, Alune, Antillean Creole (and added Guianese Creole and a usex to Haitian Creole), Anuta[n] (and Tikopia), and Arosi, Batad Ifugao, [Palawan] Batak (which we should possibly rename to avoid confusion with the Batak languages like Karo Batak), Bauro, Biak, Biloxi, Binukid, Bontoc (we probably shouldn't have both the macrolanguage code and the dialect codes there), Bughotu, Buli, Casiguran Dumagat Agta, Cebuano, Chewong, Dobu, Dupaninan Agta, Futuna, Fuyug, Gapapaiwa, Gedaged, and Gilbertese (should that language be renamed?). I had to fix Blust's spelling of several things, and fix Arosi and Bauro where he had the 'wrong' word, but the only translations for which I couldn't find any more-reliable references are Bukitan, Embaloh or Ende.
Several days ago, I removed the Ajië and Amurdag translations (not added by me — removed as part of the original project of checking the translations at water) because I couldn't find any references for them.
Abua and Abung things would benefit from more references: the only ref I find for the Abua translation of water (added by someone long ago) and of woman is R. Blench's work on the Central Delta languages; I'd prefer if there were additional sources. The Abung translation of water (likewise added long ago) is only in the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database (and in placenames, but ABVD is the only reference to define it as a common noun); likewise the translation of woman.
That's all the languages that start with A through G; I'll be going through the rest.
PS other people long ago added translations into several of these languages to the tables of a handful of other entries such as dog, which it may also be useful to check (in case they were working from Blust).
I've found other references for Hiligaynon (in several spellings, some dated), Isnag, Itawit, Jarai, Jola-Fonyi; Kambera, Kankanaey and Kapampangan (both even with citations of use), Kala Lagaw Ya (the spellings are all attested in dead-tree references, but the division into different dialects is per WP), Kedang and Kumak, Lamaholot, Lamboya, Lavukaleve and Lou; likewise Wandamen, Waray, Waropean, Wedau, Western Bukidnon Manobo, Wogeo, Woleaian, Wuvulu-Aua, Yami, Zaghawa, Zangskari, Zangwal. The Kua-nsi and Kuamasi and Sonaga translations are from the scholar who recently documented those languages and sucessfully petitioned for them to have ISO codes.
The K. Blaan translation is in ABVD and the word itself is used in Kibo Kbulung dad Fdas, but not glossed there (it might mean "sister" in addition to "woman", like a few other languages' words do).
I can't find [better] references for Kanowit (not added to the table by me).
The Komodo translation I can find a reference for, but it's in Indonesian and only glosses the term as part of longer sentences; likewise Waropean; it would be nice to find a better reference than Blust confirming or denying the spelling. Li'o is only in ABVD. Lawangan and Loniu I find only general references mentioning.
You are so wonderfully diligent. If this were Wikipedia, I'd give you some annoying barnstar, but since it's here, you just get my gratitude. As for the points you've raised: the languages you've bolded are obscure enough that it may not be possible to do better for now; I see that Ende is discussed in a book called Deskripsi naskah dan sejarah perkembangan aksara Ende, Flores, Nusa Tenggara Timur, but finding that online appears to be no easy feat. As for the renames, it makes sense not to have a language called "Batak" alone. Google Ngrams show "speak Kiribati" as being insignificant as compared to "speak Gilbertese", but Google Books show more results for "speak Kiribati"; I for one have always called it Gilbertese, and it does seem that the switch has only happened in perhaps the last decade. On the whole, it doesn't seem worth changing. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds06:15, 29 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
I'll second the gratitude. As for Kiribati, the name isn't any more aboriginal than Gilbertese- it actually is Gilbertese (or Gilbert, anyway) modified by the phonotactics of the language. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:49, 29 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
:) I learned the other day about the etymology of Kiribati — it makes me wonder what the language was called before its speakers met Gilbert! Plain "Kiribati" is considerably more common than "Gilbertese", but I suppose that's due to the fact that the former is also an often-mentioned placename. I'm fine with leaving the language name as is. By the way, I didn't keep a count, but I think (ignoring the hyphens he adds) Blust's spellings turned out more often than not to be the spellings other scholars used. - -sche(discuss)07:30, 29 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 8 years ago8 comments3 people in discussion
Hello, -sche.
Just removing ik from the "German Low German" section is not justified and not sufficient as long as there is ik#Plautdietsch. And the proper way to get that entry removed should be to use WT:RfV. Dit un jant opp Plautdietsch has the form ik (e.g. in "Ut de Nacht bün ik kamen") besides ekj. So maybe it's a valid Plautdietsch form. Please use WT:RfV if you think that it is not a Plautdietsch word.
Wikipedia says that Plautdietsch is an East Low German dialect. So it should be a dialect and not "a separate language". As the German East isn't next to the Netherlands, it should rather be a German Low German dialect and not a Dutch Low German dialect. But well, as the dialect spread through the world, one maybe could argue that it's not German anymore but a (World) Low German dialect.
==Plautdietsch== (pdt) and ==German Low German== (nds-de) are currently treated as separate languages which are related, like Danish and Norwegian, and for that matter ==Norwegian== and ==Norwegian Nynorsk== and ==Norwegian Bokmal==. Separate languages are not obliged to be linked to each other, and are not supposed to be linked as ===Alternative forms===; they are often mentioned in etymology sections, and sometimes linked in ===See also===.
If you can find Plautdietsch works which use ik, that's great, and means ik#Plautdietsch doesn't need to be RFVed.
I can find German Low German works from Oldenburg and Münsterland which use ik, so ik#German_Low_German is fine, too (and was never removed, despite your comment).
So it rather was "is treated by the English Wiktionary as a separate language" than "is a separate language". Ok, that's a different thing. — Although, I have the impression that the German Low German label "in most dialects, including Low Prussian" includes Plautdietsch as a Low Prussian variety. But well, maybe there are no German Low German labels which clearly include Plautdietsch.
In this edit you moved Plautdietsch from "Alternative forms" into "See also" (I don't object to this), and also removed the mentioning of the (purportedly) Plautdietsch form ik. But the removal is not justified and not sufficient as long as there is ik#Plautdietsch. Well, Dit un jant opp Plautdietsch is just one book, so it wouldn't give three cites which usually are needed to attest a word. Also I can't read the whole book, so the usages of ik could be dated or maybe aren't Plautdietsch as the book could also include German Low German. That is, I don't say Plautdietsch ikis attestable or exists. I'm just saying that it might exist and that Wiktionary says it exists (ik#Plautdietsch).
ik occurs in many dialects. But I can't say in which dialects it is attestable for the English Wiktionary (three durably archived cites). For example, this poem has ik too and is from Ravensberg which is in the East of Westphalia. So ik should also appear in East Westphalian. "Niu lustert mol! Plattdeutsche Erzählungen und Anekdoten im Paderborner Dialekt" (1870) from ein Sohn der rothen Erde (a son of the red earth) has ik too, and maybe also ick. But it's just one book, which usually is not sufficient to attest the Paderbornish form.
Minor note @Ikiaika: Some of this issue stems from your misunderstanding of CFI. We only need one cite to attest a word in a Low German lect, and it can be in a dictionary, not necessarily a use. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds01:05, 9 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
"Low Prussian" is the variety which was spoken inside Prussia. (It seems to be mentioned frequently because comprehensive references on it are readily available, probably in turn because it had some prestige as the variety of a large leading state.) Plautdietsch is the variety developed outside Prussia among certain (largely Mennonite) emigrants. Wiktionary has tended to keep lects with such different geographic and hence historical development separate, especially among Germanic languages (as I note on WT:T:ANDS) — indeed, we even keep cases spoken in the same place separate (as we keep Nynorsk, Bokmal, Riksmal, and other rural dialects of Norwegian separate under three codes). Merger proposals often prove controversial and get squicky fast; e.g., what would be the rationale for merging the separate(d) lects of GLG and Plautdietsch, but keeping Luxembourgish and T Saxon separate from not only other Moselle Franconian but also all the other varied things we group under gmw-cfr? But what would be the rationale for merging Luxembourgish? The rationale for keeping them all separate is of course the separate geographic/national linguistic development. - -sche(discuss)15:02, 9 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Metaknowledge: Yes, I didn't know how many cites where needed for Low German, and "usually" above refered to the practice of e.g. English and German, not to e.g. Latin and dead languages like Gothic and Old High German. Thanks for the info! That makes many things much easier.
@-sche: (1.) Well, I didn't have the impression that Low Prussian has any more prestige or was or is more common than other dialects (though that might be a wrong impression), and one one can find statements like this:
lz.de: "Plautdietsch, das Niederdeutsch aus Westpreußen mit einer über 200 Jahre alten Migrationsgeschichte" (Plautdietsch, the Low German from West Prussia ...)
hcjb.de: "Plautdietsch ist [...] eine niederpreußische Mundart" (Plautdietsch is [...] a Low Prussian dialect)
German Wikipedia: "Plautdietsch ist [...] eine niederpreußische Varietät" (Plautdietsch is [...] a Low Prussian variety), "den ostniederdeutschen Dialekt Plautdietsch" (the East Low German dialect Plautdietsch)
English Wikipedia: "Plautdietsch, a Low German variety, is included within Low Prussian by some observers"
That's why I (incorrectly) added Plautdietsch forms as German Low German alternative forms. Similary some sources or some user could have labeled Plautdietsch terms East Low German or Low Prussian. Here at Wiktionary this label would be incorrect as Plautdietsch is not treated as a part of German Low German or Low German (like you said, thanks for that!), but nevertheless it could be present in some entries. For me that seemed more plausible (again, it might just be a wrong impression). Just for clarification: It might just a wrong impression, and I'm not saying that there is any error in an entry and I'm not saying that any or even all Low Prussian labels here should be checked.
(2.) Well, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian here are merged into Serbo-Croatian. The rationale for this surely was the linguistic similarity, even though there are different nations. So maybe for the same reason Plautdietsch could be merged into Low German as a Low German dialect. I don't have enough knowledge of Luxembourgish, Serbo-Croation, Low Prussian and Plautdietsch to argue for or against any of this, and I have no intention of making a split or merger proposal.
(3.) I re-added Plautdietsch ik next to the qualifier Plautdietsch in diff as there is the Plautdietsch entry ik (ik#Plautdietsch). I'm okay with a re-removal of it, but please use WT:RfV first. Than both, the mentiong next to the qualifier and the entry ik#Plautdietsch, can either stay or be removed.
Oh, yes, mislabelling certainly could be present in some entries. Ideally, all nds, nds-de and nds-nl entries' labels would be checked and expanded (and perhaps replaced with a table as discussed on WT:T:ANDS), because many are far too short even when they contain only correct things and no incorrect things: the people who added them apparently weren't sure which dialects besides their own a word or spelling was found in, and so only listed the few dialects they were sure of, which is not entirely unhelpful, but is insufficient.
It is possible that some Plautdietsch-only things have been entered under a wrong header; we've certainly had a few Kashubian words entered as Polish because older dictionaries treat Kashubian as Polish. And quite a few apparently Middle-English- and/or Scots-only words have been entered as English, because some dictionaries (including the OED) don't distinguish those three languages.
Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are copies of the same Eastern Herzegovinian subdialect of the same Shtokavian dialect, and are so identical that their mutual intelligibility "exceeds that between the standard variants of English, French, German, or Spanish" (per WP, quoting Paul-Louis Thomas). I don't think they provide an argument for merging anything else, heh. :-p
I'll assume that ik is used in Plautdietsch based on the book you found above. It'd be nice to figure out more specifically who uses it, because standard references all seem to have only ekj / etj, but it's not a pressing concern. - -sche(discuss)19:06, 13 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
Well, I only saw a snippet of the book, and the book could have a Low German text in it (maybe similar to this, which has Plautdietsch with a Dutch translation) or an older Plautdietsch text, like from some kind of *Proto-Plautdietsch when Dutch and Low German where mixing and creating Plautdietsch.
In diff the Plautdietsch entry ik got extracted from the Low German entry. In older versions, like from 25th December 2010, there is no Low German entry but a Low Saxon entry. There it was "Ik kwam, ik zag, ik overwon (nl), Ik keem, ik keek, ik wun (pd)". In diff the nl example got replaced by nds. pd could have meant Low German (Plautdeutsch or Plattdütsch/Plattdüütsch), including both Dutch and German Low German. So it once could have been an Dutch or German Low German example, while later someone misinterpreted the abbreviation and it developed into an Plautdietsch entry. nl:ik#Nedersaksisch has the example as Nedersaksisch.
Latest comment: 7 years ago11 comments3 people in discussion
I would like to work on a proposal for this, but there's several issues to sort out first. I'm hoping you can help with this. There are two other issues which are also at play with these categories, which have come up before. First is the matter of naming the "by language" topical categories. They have literally no naming scheme, and we've occasionally run into naming conflicts with these, so adding something to the names so that they are clearly set apart as topic/set categories is useful. Second is the matter of the language codes in the names. All our other categories use language names, and people have complained about the presence of codes in user-facing parts of the dictionary before. If we're going to rename the categories, we might as well tackle all issues together, so that we don't have to rename the categories multiple times. —CodeCat17:47, 17 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Yes, this is a tricky tangle of issues. I will look back over previous discussions to refresh myself on what potential problems have been pointed out with some of the previously-proposed solutions. I agree with you that it would be useful — necessary, really — to add something to the the names of both types of categories, so that they can finally be told apart, and so that we avoid naming conflicts. Maybe we could have a poll to gauge if people would prefer quick-to-type prefixes like "t:" and "s:"/"l:", or spelled-out prefixes "topic:" and "set:"/"list:", and also if they would prefer spelled-out language names or codes. I know some people dislike language codes, but other people dislike long names, and codes are shorter (and code-based categories don't have to be moved when we rename languages, a minor benefit). If we used spelled-out names, we should probably set them off by colons (maybe someone has already suggested this), because renaming CAT:en:Dogs to "Category:s:English dogs" or "Category:list:English dogs" or even "Category:English dogs" makes it seem like it's for England's breeds only. But should the subcategory of "Category:Dogs" be "set:English:Dogs" or "English:set:Dogs"? I guess the second one is maybe more logical from a sorting perspective?
I wouldn't like shortcuts like t: and s: because these categories are meant to be understandable for the average user. —CodeCat15:20, 21 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
@CodeCat Alright, but I expect some people to balk at lengthening the category names.
Where should the language name go, in your view? "CAT:topic:English:Dogs" or "CAT:English:topic:Dogs"? (Or something else?) I'm thinking "CAT:English:" may make more sense, matching "CAT:English nouns" etc and like the current "en:Foobar" scheme, grouping all the English categories together as having "English" at the start of their names. Is there anything else that needs to be worked out before bringing this up for general discussion?
Personally, I would prefer using full language names ("English", "Chinese" instead of "en", "zh") and writing categories as normal phrases, without the colon anywhere. For example:
I know other people object to long names, however, especially for categories that are often added manually rather than automatically templates ({{rfi}}, etc). More people should use HotCat, obviously. Or {{C}} et al, which unfortunately don't play nice with HotCat. Someone should update HotCat...
"Names of" may sound off in some cases — would the "E numbers" discussed on RFM be "Translingual names of E numbers"? That's not awful, but it seems like calling "1" an "English name of a number", and/or a "Translingual name of a number". But "Translingual/English list" [of Foobars] doesn't sound great, either.
What do you think of using "names of" for proper nouns, including place names? I've been thinking this may be a good idea, but feel free to give other ideas. Examples:
Now that you said it, I think I agree with you in that "involving" is a bit weird. I'm not really sure I like any of the prefixes, but I'd be curious if other people want it. (any large scale category change would need a vote, so we're going to see what people think) I know we've been saying "topical categories" to refer to the categories starting with "en:" but I'm not sure I like it. Category:topic:Dogs (English) is short but is it clear enough? If we translated it to a phrase like Category:English terms in the topic of dogs would it make any sense? So far, I like Category:English terms relating to dogs the most. I think it's clear enough that it's related to the idea (the semantics), not the etymology. If it were Category:English terms relating to "dog", it would be the etymology. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 21:47, 31 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
We could look to other Wiktionaries for inspiration. Dutch Wiktionary literally just has "Biology in English" with its parent "Topics in English". Their grammatical categories are named the same, "Words in English" (equivalent to our "English lemmas"; they had it before us!), also singular in "Verb in English", "Noun in English" etc. —CodeCat22:01, 31 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hi! Thank you for that e-mail, @Evertype. I passed the contact information along to @Mahagaja, who I presumed would e-mail you and take it from there, because he is more familiar with the Hebrew script than I am. I should've e-mailed you to explain that's what I had done; I apologize. - -sche(discuss)16:44, 30 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
Hi, I had forgotten about this for a while, but I did eventually remember and e-mailed Evertype last night. My bad, sorry! —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk18:03, 30 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago9 comments5 people in discussion
We've had some spirited debates in the past (Talk:AsH₃, Talk:LiBr), but there's still no consensus for what to do with entries like MnS and H₂O₂ (note that the former is English, the latter Translingual). Any thoughts on what sort of proposal might meet with consensus? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds13:14, 17 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
I'd appreciate others' input as it's not my area of expertise, but:
It seems, including from the two discussions you link to, like there's more support for ones that look like they could be abbreviations (like LiBr) than ones that are obviously formulas (with numbers in them). And the longer a name gets, or the more obviously formulaic it is (e.g. having parentheses), the less accepted I would expect it to be. Maybe we could straw-poll and see if there'd be agreement for any cutoff "no formulae consisting of more than 3 parts" (or some other number), where "H₃" counts as one "part", and "no formulas with any parentheticals" (or "with more than 2", or something).
There seems to be support for a few really common ones that are used in everyday speech like Talk:CO₂ and H₂O (which even passes the lemming test, being in Meriam-Webster, which doesn't include LiBr).
Maybe, similar to how BRAND requires brand names to be attestable in places that don't clarify what the product is, we could require these to be attested in contexts that don't make clear that they're formulae by e.g. explicitly discussing chemical formulae or by listing their component parts. So, "AsH₃ is made up of an As and three H atoms" wouldn't support AsH₃, but a murder mystery saying "the air in his scuba tank had been replaced with CO2" could support CO₂.
Some of the comments in the RFD discussions suggest there might be more support for ones that have "unpredictable" common names like alabandite than for ones that refer to also-formulaically-named chemicals like S4N4 being "tetrasulfur tetranitride", but maybe that wouldn't be a wise or widely accepted distinction, as there are some long formulas with short unformulaic names (fornacite's Pb2Cu(CrO4)(AsO4)(OH)), and conversely CO₂ is "carbon dioxide".
Maybe for long chemical formulae that have short/unformulaic common names we include, we could redirect the formula to the common name, to satisfy people who want to be able to type the formula into the search box and get information. (We could have a redirect from the full chemical formula of titin...)
We should include redirects from "normal" numbers to subscript numbers (or vice versa) for any that we include.
I like the BRANDy idea, because it limits us to ones in common use. I don't like that it means sending everything through RFV. A clear cutoff would make for a very straightforward rule, but is there anything it would exclude that we'd want to keep? Also, I fixed MnS. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds01:18, 18 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Sorry to insert myself in a conversation where I may not be welcome (this page was on my watchlist from a past convo), but out of curiosity I began running our Category:mul:Chemical_formulae for BRANDesque-worthy citations, and all of the ones I've checked thus far pass. The complication I ran into is whether to count instances where a chemical is named with the formula in parenthesis (e.g. "carbonic acid (H2CO3)"), whereafter only the formula is used as shorthand--much like acronyms for things like companies, documents and organizations. --SanctMinimalicen (talk) 01:56, 18 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
I think looking at spoken usage would help- we say "cee oh 2", but I don't think people say "em n ess". Of course that really doesn't fit into our current verification / deletion policies. DTLHS (talk) 18:27, 17 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
I'm not sure whether that would work or not. On Talk:CO₂, Shinji mentions that idea, opining that we would naturally say "see-oh-two gas" but not "aitch-two gas"; OTOH, I think that many formulae would be read as letters, and indeed for more obscure ones, if a speaker doesn't know offhand what the letters stand for, they have no choice but to say "army scientists were working on an ay-ess-aitch-three gas", etc. - -sche(discuss)18:59, 17 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
I think a starting point would be treating chemical formulae as if they were spelled with spaces, so they would be considered SOP unless proven idiomatic. You would want evidence that a formula is a label for a concept, rather than simply an ingredient list (e.g. is H2SO4sulfuric acid or is it whatever you get when you combine 2 hydrogens, a sulfur and 4 oxygens?). Chuck Entz (talk) 22:30, 17 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
All formulae are "ingredient lists" by definition; some map to a single concept like H2SO4, some map to no concept because they're physically impossible, and some map to multiple concepts like MnS. What they map to is dependent on the physical laws of the universe, not anything linguistic. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds01:18, 18 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
By "concept", I meant a lexically-significant concept, something that speakers have in mind beyond the mere chemical identification of the compound- somewhat like the difference between 10 Downing Street or 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and 1600 Main Street for street addresses. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:01, 18 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I saw this in an article yesterday from the Express.
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician [Kai Whittaker] said it was still unclear in Berlin what the essence of the disagreement between the Chancellor and Mr Seehofer was and that other members of the coalition had been left "in the blue".
I'm not calling to mind any direct counterpart (the phrase I'm used to seeing is im Dunkeln lassen, as in English), but maybe I'm having a brain fart. Several German idioms do use blue this way, e.g. ein Schuss ins Blaue for a shot in the dark (and ins Blaue schießen — would you say shoot into the dark?), ins Blaue fahren, and eine Fahrt ins Blaue which English apparently calls a "mystery tour", aus blauer Luft, and the closest thing that comes to mind, ins Blaue hinein (haphazardly, without a plan/preparation or goal).
If you're interested, William Jervis Jones has a book on German Colour Terms, including about idiomatic meanings (he says that, starting in at least the 14th century, blue was linked to "distance or vagueness"), although I'm sceptical of at least of few of his analyses of idioms where the colour seems rather literal instead.
English apparently also sometimes uses "blue" idiomatically, though (besides just in "out of the blue"), because I see e.g. a book titled "Out in the Blue: Letters from Arabia, 1937 to 1940", and
1978, Peter Hathaway Capstick, Death in the Long Grass (→ISBN):
"The problem with buffalo as well as most African antelopes as a steady diet is that they have very little marbling or body fat and, after six months out in the blue, one dreams at night of a T-bone steak sizzling in great globules of yellow fat."
I see that other (English) dictionaries have a sense we're lacking, "the far/remote distance", with usexes about vanishing or disappearing into the blue, which might cover the quotes about Arabia and Africa. - -sche(discuss)22:59, 17 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
I just noticed that w:Kai Whitaker's comments were on BBC World at One. He has a British father and a German mother and got a degree from the University of Bristol. His comments must have been in English, but they struck the Express's reporter as odd enough to put them in quotes. He apparently used blue in this sense twice in the course of his comments.
He may just have picked up on out of the blue and something like wild blue yonder, combined it with the use of Blau in German expressions and assumed that he was speaking idiomatic English. I don't think that we should count it as attestation for any sense of blue. I don't see MWOnline or Century have a definition that could enable blue to fit in to in the dark, which seems closest to what he probably meant, based on the context.
Thanks for your thoughts. I doubt that I could borrow a copy of the German Color Terms book. I'm trying to stop buying such books (and things in general). DCDuring (talk) 00:21, 18 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago12 comments4 people in discussion
Hello, I just saw your edits to absolute and I thought it was some excellent work, so I was wondering if I could come to you with requests about overhauling particularly lacking English entries every once in a while. I totally get it if you don't, after seeing the amount of redlinks on your page haha. If you're interested, I would ask you to take a look at inconsistent. Ultimateria (talk) 14:56, 14 July 2018 (UTC)Reply
You're welcome to make requests. :) I may or may not have time to fulfill them, but I'll give it a shot! I've taken a crack at inconsistent. (It may still be missing a mathematical sense, for "inconsistent equations".) - -sche(discuss)19:38, 14 July 2018 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for the edit, -sche, and for the offer, Meta! I've been around forever but I'm *very* slowly building up a network of support haha Ultimateria (talk) 13:22, 15 July 2018 (UTC)Reply
I've combined all the definitions, some of which didn't make sense ("ill office"?); I suppose service that unintentionally proves detrimental could be split from service that is intentionally injurious, but none of the other dictionaries I checked have more than one sense. - -sche(discuss)20:23, 19 July 2018 (UTC)Reply
I've been thinking about how to tweak it, sorry for not replying sooner. It seems difficult to distinguish "Irritated, annoyed" from "Indignant or offended". I might just cut "said of interlocutors expressing indignation, or merely disagreement" altogether, merge the senses and move the etymological theories to the etymology: "Sense _ is perhaps from the sharp, spicy flavor of salt, or from the salty tears a person so described is accused of crying." - -sche(discuss)07:08, 24 August 2018 (UTC)Reply
Hmm, this is an interesting case, because some authorities claim a difference, but there doesn't seem to be one in practice, at least that I've been able to discern so far. I've put my findings at Talk:reverent. - -sche(discuss)22:30, 14 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
Add a bunch of Sumbanese languages as descendants of all these proto-languages? Kambera (xbr), Wanukaka (wnk), Wewewa (wew), Lamboya (lmy), Kodi (kod). Ketiga123 (talk) 17:27, 1 August 2019 (UTC)Reply
While I don't know much about the CMP area in particular, as a rule of thumb, Glottolog agrees on recognizing the Sumba, Sumba-Hawu and Flores-Sumba-Hawu groups, which seems like a good enough starting point. Also consider though how different these stages are from each other: if only slightly, I'd like to remind OP about the possibility to treat some proto-languages as dialects of others. --Tropylium (talk) 13:52, 2 August 2019 (UTC)Reply
Unless there have been some kind of new arguments in favor of treating CMP (or something else) as a real subgroup and not just an areal unit within ECMP, then yes. --Tropylium (talk) 16:37, 2 August 2019 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
The translation table of turkey gives krakum for Akan (not Aukan!), whose initial cluster is a good match for Sranan Tongo krakun. Do you know whether a direct descent of the Sranan term from Akan is likely, as opposed to a borrowing from Dutch (which I suppose is possible, l > r is especially common)? A Twi influence on the Surinamese creoles is generally accepted as far as I know. ←₰-→Lingo BingoDingo (talk) 10:03, 23 August 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Lingo Bingo Dingo: I'm sorry, I couldn't find anything before, and was about to say I still couldn't (this dictionary says nothing about the etymology and this thesis merely compares Carib karakuna to Arawak kalakona and Sranan krakun and Dutch kalkoen without explaining the nature of the connection, which is probably that all of them descend in some form from the Dutch word), but I did spot something in Amsterdam Creole Studies, vol. 1-5 (1977), page 29, a wordlist of words borrowed from English or Dutch, which links krakún to kalkoen, saying:
[…]
fláka follow (Du. volgen)
tron turn
bron burn
Sranán Sur(i)name
krabéri corbel (Du. karbeel)
wróko work
krakun turkey (Du. kalkoen)
In fact, it seems as though metathesis of / r / has taken place in almost every case where a / V r C / cluster occurred in the lexifier language. This includes cases where a morpheme boundary occurred between the liquid and the C in the lexifier:
krofáya charcoal (E. coal fire)
It is true, as Voorhoeve (1961) remarks, that the syncope of lightly stressed vowels in Sranan is a common […]
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
hi -sche, about the latine, latino and latina noun status. surely all three would be nouns with sentences like "Los latinos hablan español." "Latinos speak Spanish." being possible. I'm on the newer side of Spanish so I could be wrong, but take "Briton" Briton which is a noun "that is a Brition" and then take "que es un latino" or "that is a Latino". I do agree however, whatever the concensus is with one, should be the consensus of all three. Thanks --Bejakyo (talk) 04:09, 3 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
Wow! I don't think I realized Ndołkah was a vandal, let alone a previously-known one. (Then again, I don't suppose my editing area and his overlapped much recently, for me to notice.) Thanks for the heads up. I also did poke around and find a couple books using bruja to refer to Wiccan witches, so I'm not going to RFV it per se, although I might merge it. I notice witch has no separate sense for Wicca (although I suspect that the note that references to men are "archaic" outside dialects and Wicca may need to be changed to say "uncommon" or something). - -sche(discuss)05:14, 11 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
He was trying very hard to behave and work from dictionaries, which is why I left him alone. He just couldn't help dipping back into the incompetent Spanish, Wicca and scatological edits, which put him on the radar for Equinox, who mentioned it to Metaknowledge, who blocked him. He never was, strictly speaking, a vandal, just careless and clueless and unwilling to listen or improve. Vandals are easy to deal with. The real damage is done by the people who think they're improving things. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:45, 11 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Just as an explanation: quite a few of these were used by Edmund Spenser (deliberately harking back to an older form of English); that is why they appear in Chambers (which aims to cover "Shakespeare to the present day") and were known to me via the official Scrabble words. Equinox◑22:38, 26 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
I suppose they've also fallen victim to our evolving criteria, no longer allowing one well-known work to cite things. Still, some do seem to be attested. Others, for which I didn't even spot Spenser cites, I reheadered as Middle English. But the ones with only 1-2 cites, from Spenser or Foxe, I'm sending to RFV. - -sche(discuss)22:47, 26 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
I've been doing my best to deal with a new user from Poland who's been adding Lakota entries, but I'm a bit out of my depth. I took a 10-week American Indian Languages class in the late '80s that included a brief lesson each week in Lakota, so I've been able to spot some very basic problems- but that's about it. I simply don't have the time needed to get up to speed and fix their mistakes. Have you worked with Dakotan languages? I could sure use some help. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 23:41, 9 February 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello -sche, thank you for the explanation in your edit summary, the ticket is in the info-en queue. I can't disclose much per w:WP:OUTING, But is it possible to capitalize black? There was no such request by the customer, it just sounds biased, since the rest of the races have the proper capitalization. Thank you. GSS (talk) 08:38, 21 February 2020 (UTC)Reply
Don't be Wonderfool and create the set of every pickleable food! Why couldn't you raise this in the RFD instead of making more paperwork? (Maybe you did; I haven't followed that one.) BOO HISS. Equinox◑06:23, 25 February 2020 (UTC)Reply
FWIW, I did bring this up (by name!) in the RFD, in a comment that pinged one of the keep voters, and only created the one entry (and, later, the other) when it seemed people were unchanged in the view that including foods was the way to go. (Also: hey, a fellow user of boo hiss!😃) - -sche(discuss)07:08, 25 February 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
I feel rather stupid asking this, but I really can't remember where language renaming/splitting/merging/retiring discussions should be archived. I'm creating some new ones, so I thought that maybe I would go and clean up some of the old ones while I'm at it. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds05:20, 10 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Thanks. Scanning it over I think I see some discussions that were archived without any action (or explicit decision for inaction) having taken place, like with Baïnounk Gubëeher. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds18:36, 10 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
I understand your point – and after my last edits, I later saw the archived RFD discussion over male prostitute, which unfortunately I did not get to contribute to. I personally think that it is overly delicate to pretend that the word is gender-neutral, when from a historical point of view it isn't – and even now, it has heavy connotations of referring to a woman. The OED does not record any use of "male prostitute" until more than 150 years after the word first appeared, and no use of "prostitute" (without qualification) to refer to a man before the late 20th century. This is IMO an issue with many two-word terms involving "male", where compound nouns are referring to occupations stereotypically or traditionally associated with women (male nurse, male model etc etc) and I think they should all have entries because this is interesting, dateable semantic information. At the moment, the Usage note at prostitute almost makes it sound as though the interpretations of the word have to do with a person's politics or open-mindedness, which I think is beside the point when it comes to ways the word is actually used in the record. Ƿidsiþ12:55, 16 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
It seems to me that we tend to start out conceptually with a norm or type, then label things by the characteristics that distinguish them from the type. I like to use the linguistic concept of the marked category here: just as the first person singular in the present tense is the unmarked category in the context of English verbs, a female prostitute, being what is considered the norm, is the unmarked category. Other tenses are marked morphologically in the case of verbs, and other genders are marked with qualifiers in the case of prostitutes. The same goes with doctors and nurses: the tendency is to think of a doctor as male and a nurse as female so the only time we use a qualifier is for female doctors and male nurses. Even when we manage to teach ourselves to think of female doctors and male nurses as just as normal as the opposite, we still are much more likely to use a qualifier for those, as if "female nurse" is redundant, but "male nurse" isn't. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:08, 16 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Hmm; I see your point. (Indeed, I now recall reading that one of the difficulties the 'legal' system had with a certain medieval male-to-female sex worker I was reading about was that in the medieval mind, the book asserted, a male who took money for sex couldn't be a prostitute.) I do think we need a gender-agnostic sense, though, and I don't think a male-specific sense is right: I don't think there's anywhere that "prostitute" means exclusively a male and a female sex worker would not be included, I think the split in senses is "any person" (including someone who's not an [adult] man or woman but is a child prostitute, or someone who is a non-binary one or a google books:"robot prostitute", etc) vs "only a woman", not "only a woman" vs "only a man". What about this? (To Chuck's point, should we just drop the usage note at this point?) - -sche(discuss)22:41, 16 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
I don't think it's a case for subsenses. Maybe the defdate is a good call – I've never seen that done before, but it makes sense. On reflection, I think "a person, especially a woman" is a fair way of handling the definition, if the Usage note is more dispassionately worded. I think re-creating such terms as male prostitute would also help illustrate how it's used in practice, but I find those RFD discussions so exhausting nowadays.. Ƿidsiþ07:31, 17 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I think that this is not a given name, I'm not able to find uses of this given name.The spelling of the given name is Rose (standard pronunciation: ʁoz, possibly ʁɔz in some regions). I assume that the surname Roze is also pronounced ʁoz but I'm not familiar with it...) Lmaltier (talk) 15:56, 7 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Hmm, OK. Thanks for the input. Is it common to use surnames in compound given names? I can find Roze in various compound given names (including occasionally spaced ones) like "Marie Roze" (full name "Marie Roze Adam"), "Jeanne-Roze-Catherine", "Roze-Catherine", "Roze-Marie", etc:
1901, Bulletin de la Société d'agriculture, sciences et arts de la Sarthe, page 74:
[…], fils de Me Jacques Amiot. avocat au présidial du Mans, et de Roze-Marie Houeau, nommé par Me Honorat Lepeltier, […]
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Merhaba, sınalgı sözcüğü Türkçe'de hiçbir zaman var olmamıştır. Yalnızca Kırgızca'dan Türkçe'ye sokmaya çalışan sahtekarlar var. Birkaç grup varmış gibi göstermeye çalışıyorlar.--123snake45 (talk) 23:39, 4 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
FYI, @Vahagn Petrosyan, those have been sitting there for quite some time, and -sche is one of the only people who will do this kind of thankless work. Expert input is desperately needed, but that means citing references and translating or summarising pertinent passages from them, rather than just telling -sche to be careful (which they are, but we all make mistakes). —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds04:39, 2 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
I know it is a very difficult and niche work and I am not blaming sche for relying on English Wikipedia.
I propose not to create any new language code until someone working on that language feels the need and asks for the code. That way ghost language codes will not be created. Vahag (talk) 05:18, 2 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
I appreciate the feedback. :) I did notice that Russian Wikipedia redirected its article on Jek to Kryts, but I also noticed that the article said a lot of literature has considered them separate languages. As for Èrsh, I noticed how sceptical the English article was of the existence of the people, and intended to at least find concrete statements in literature that a certain placename or word was Èrsh before creating it (I went back and forth on whether to ping you about them; I should've), since I mostly only add codes when I've identified content to be added. (In the case of Jek, I took the video Wikipedia has as demonstrating that content exists, even if it's not currently in a form [writing] that we could add, heh.) I take it I should remove the code for Jek, and just list Jek, Alyk etc as OtherNames for kry? - -sche(discuss)05:54, 2 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Thadh OK, you say moo is from Proto-Huitoto-Ocaina *mōhō, but because "sai-wit" is the code for the Witotoan family, "sai-wit-pro" (which you supplied in moo) (and not "sai-huu-pro", from ei) should be the code for Proto-Witotoan, and Proto-Huitoto-Ocaina should get a different code if we're reconstructing that level separately. How about "sai-hoc-pro" for Proto-Huitoto-Ocaina? (I'll add a family code for the family, too, in that case.) For the Boran language family we have a family code "sai-bor", so I could add Proto-Boran aka Proto-Bora-Muinane as "sai-bor-pro". Does this sound good? - -sche(discuss)20:34, 27 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
I have just filled in a "random" code in ei to refer to Proto-Huitoto-Ocaina. That wasn't intended as an actual proposed code, more as a placeholder. The codes you have proposed seem good. Thanks :D Thadh (talk) 20:41, 27 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Thadh OK, you can update (and uncomment) the etymologies at your leisure. For ei, please review if the codes (or words) are in the right order, as I think one would normally expect a word to descend from Proto-Witotoan-proper (sai-wit-pro), from Proto-Huitoto-Ocaina (sai-hoc-pro, an older proto-language ancestral to a broader grouping), but ei currently presents the etyma in the other order. - -sche(discuss)01:08, 29 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
Douglas Harper mentioned a dead language called Old Sorbian in his entry for Dresden. Category:Old Sorbian language doesn’t exist, so I did a search for other instances here of ‘Old Sorbian’ and simply aped the code assigned to it here, which is actually for Lower Sorbian… whether that was perfectly intentional on @Fay Freak’s part or not, I have no idea. In any case, I decided to approach you for this since you seem most likely to know what code (if any) to assign to this, despite Slavic languages lying outside of your expertise. —(((Romanophile))) ♞ (contributions) 19:40, 23 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Romanophile: I don’t know why you mention intentionality of me, I haven’t split any languages here.
“Old Sorbian” is a largely imagined common ancestor of Upper and Lower Sorbian which would be of little utility for this dictionary. One finds mention of it more in placenames than anything else, similar to a lot of fancied Balkan languages we do not have codes for. “Altsorbisch” may as well mean “any Sorbian language, closer distinction is of no relevance to the purpose of this work”. Consequentially Russianстаролу́жицкий(starolúžickij) is hardly even attestable, as it is no topic of Slavistics, only imagined by Germanist toponomastics. We do not have a code for Old Slovak either by the way, because of limited corpus – and recently we recognized that “Old Latin” is a more problematic than useful category. For the late medieval times, i.e. fourteenth and fifteenth century, and for loanwords from that time like Plinse, one already clearly distinguishes Upper and Lower Sorbian. Fay Freak (talk) 20:16, 23 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
We could have an etymology-only code, I suppose, or if there are only a few instances where it would be needed, we could just use wording like "[According to Harper,] from a precursor to Lower Sorbian foo" (or simply say "from Lower Sorbian" or "from Upper Sorbian" if a borrowing is of a form and date that allows it to be assigned to one or the other). @FayFreak, do you have a source for the statement (in our edit to Plinse) that Old Prussian plinxne is from German? (Btw, on the subject of tricky - or at least, repeatedly IP-disputed - etymologies of words from the Prussian area, you might take a look at Talk:Glumse.) - -sche(discuss)17:14, 26 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
According to w:Upper Sorbian language § History, the earliest written attestation of Upper Sorbian we have is from 1532; I doubt Lower Sorbian is any older. If we wanted to reconstruct Proto-Sorbian (which is quite doable, though I don't know if any linguists have done so in print), the appropriate code would be wen-pro since wen is the family code for the Sorbian languages. But I'm not actually recommending we do that unless we find that someone has actually published reconstructions of Proto-Sorbian. —Mahāgaja · talk18:01, 26 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
@-sche: I added one at the Proto-Slavic page, which sees all like I would have guessed without it. Besides Old Prussian was full of borrowings from German and Slavic with proceeding time, ultimately replaced by them, and there aren’t other Baltic forms supporting nativeness. Fay Freak (talk) 19:25, 26 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello -sche,
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hello you thought my use of the w-word for meaning woman on incel/gay cowboy communities is not a good definition. However, I have only seen the word w-word used for that.
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
You changed the second definition of politically correct to "Respectful of marginalized ethnic groups, genders, etc." I think this is wrong because that sense was displaced by the following derogatory sense in the 1980s. It fell out of use before people wrote phrases like "marginalized genders." From the quotations and etymology, the "respectful" sense was originally about women. The 1980 quotation implies an extension to non-white people by then. (The 1980s witnessed the decline and fall of the Polish joke.) Sense 2 should have a dated label and a more restricted definition. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 10:59, 20 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Hmm. You say "from the quotations" it was originally about women, but AFAICT there's only one quotation, and it's from a book that is scoped in its very title as being about both (non-white) race and gender. As I said in my edit summary, though, I'm not entirely sure the two senses should be separate at all, as opposed to being one sense which became derogatory over time. In a similar vein to your comment in the Tea Room that "you can assume a derogatory sense is used by people who don't like the target of the word", one can assume that people who refer derogatorily to something don't like that thing / think that it is bad, and sense 2 and sense 3 seem to refer to broadly the same thing, with the difference being just some people think the thing is positive (sense 2) and some think it's bad (sense 3, expressed by the "overly"); IMO maybe we should combine them into a definition along the lines of sense 3 but with "overly" in parentheses or something, although more citations might clarify matters. I would say it matters not if a sense fell out of use before the words we use to define it (such is the case for plenty of obsolete words, and entire extinct languages), as long as the definition is accurate, and certainly other marginalized genders have been known to people of the past for a lot longer than some people presently like to suppose (for example, Lou Sullivan's activism straddled the period you refer to, and folks like Alan L. Hart were significantly earlier), but again I wonder if we should just have one sense there instead of two. I also find it less than clear that the Johnson cite is sense 1, or indeed that any of the three citations under sense 1 means the same specific thing by the phrase as any of the others. (What a thorny entry...!) - -sche(discuss)04:47, 21 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion
You said in an RfD back in 2016 that the idea that senses 2 and 3 of the verb out might have different etymologies was "interesting".
The most common explanation that I have seen presented claims that sense 3 originated as an extension of sense 2.
But mightn't we have another etymological situation similar to jerk on our hands (I reference how it appears that: 1. it could be from jerkwater, 2. it could be from a verbal phrase for self-gratification, 3. it could be from jerkwater but then influenced by a verbal phrase for self-gratification, or 4. it could be from a verbal phrase for self-gratification and then later influenced by jerkwater)? Phrasing such as truth will out and out in the open is long-established. Moreover, the way that a (word that originates as a) colloquialism develops can sometimes be quite surprising. Case in point: throw down the gauntlet all of a sudden yielded throw down in contemporary slang after existing as a phrase in English (and was not an especially "go-to phrase" for children/teenagers in the late 20th century, unless I have forgotten something) for hundreds of years.
You know, on second thought, it might actually be better to bring this to the Etymology scriptorium. That way, more editors can discuss this. Tharthan (talk) 21:27, 24 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Re this edit, I'm not sure I agree with your reasoning. English has no phonotactic reason to strip the extra vowels that Japanese has added due to phonological constraints, but it does have a cognitive reason: there is no reason to introduce the new lexical item raito when it is obviously equivalent to the native word light. In order to be written in Japanese script, modification was necessary, but speakers remain aware that raito is English, and are able to transfer it back to its original orthography in a Latin-script context (provided they graduated from high school). It seems strange that waifu is thus a borrowing and light novel a calque, when the real difference is that one has to preserve a modified pronunciation in order to be distinguished from its original meaning, whereas the latter can masquerade as native because it was already unique as a compound. (An interesting test case is galge. Japanese has hacked off half a morpheme, making the second part unrecognisable to English speakers, but the first morpheme comes back into English with its original /l/ intact.) —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds20:49, 28 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Hmm; galge is an interesting case. But overall, to me, it seems stranger to think that waifu and kyabakura (instead of cabaret club) on one hand and pierce and light novel (instead of raito noberu) on the other hand are the same kind of thing: to me there is a clear contrast between the first two terms exemplifying what borrowing an English-derived Japanese word looks like, and the latter being "formed by word-for-word or morpheme-by-morpheme translation" of piasu and raito noberu [back] into English, which is our definition of a calque. Perhaps there is an even better word for the latter than calque, but the difference seems very much like the difference between beer garden being a calque and biergarten being a borrowing, to me, and a high-school graduate seems as likely (or as unlikely) to be aware that bier and garten correspond to beer and garden as they would be to recognize raito and noberu as light and novel. - -sche(discuss)22:02, 28 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Given the fact that both gal and gyaru have been used to 'translate' 「ギャル」 into English (the latter is more popular nowadays for whatever reason), just as idol and aidoru have been used to 'translate' 「アイドル」 into English, and J-drama and dorama have been used to 'translate' 「ドラマ」 into English. I think that some if this boils down to personal preference of the individual. To be very frank, those who prefer to use the latter forms ("gyaru" and "aidoru") are often either 1. those who have determined that, in their opinion, forms like "gal" and "idol" are insufficient for the purpose of creating a distinct English way of describing a Japanese concept (to prevent against the word potentially being mistaken as representing a minor difference in sense from the existing English word), or 2.weeaboos.
The case that Metaknowledge references, waifu, is an example which I think most people would agree a literal re-transcription back into English would cause much confusion. However, it also a term that was (at least initially) used almost exclusively by weeaboos. Tharthan (talk) 03:04, 29 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
A relatively new user has added to this entry what looks to my uneducated eye to be a massive edifice of bailing wire and duct tape. It certainly seems to be in good faith and I'm guessing the content is worth keeping, but I'm not comfortable intervening- I have no idea what a correct version would look like. Could you take a look and set things straight? I don't want to discourage them, but I also don't want to have them unintentionally adding tons of junk that will have to be cleaned up later. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:00, 29 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
I suppose one thing to do to reduce the clutter of the wikitext is move the inflection tables to Template-space (standardizing them along the way), so they can eventually be transcluded into pages for the other pronouns who inflections they also contain. And many sections should be combined, with the addition of qualifiers where necessary. I'll try to take a crack at it soon. - -sche(discuss)03:52, 1 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
In this edit you moved a quote I added within the article, saying in the edit summary that it was “clearly misplaced” because in it the word “doesn't mean "unapproved badass"”; the sense in question is “A person of black African descent who acts in an unapproved manner (whether positive or negative).”
This does not seem so clear to me because I took this definition not to mean “badass” but rather “uppity”.
Ah, my edit summary was not as intelligible as it should have been, I'm sorry. I was using "badass" as shorthand for the part of the definition which says it can be unapproved in a positive manner (as well as in a negative one), which until last year was worded as "...who acts in an unapproved manner, usually a badass", but I should've used the current wording (which was an improvement over that). I don't discern anything in the quote which suggests it means someone uppity, either, though, nor unapproved except insofar as racists disapprove of black people period. I would have taken it to be the usual racial slur, but the use of "red nigger" — which shows that at least that use of "nigger" can't be either of the "person of black African descent" senses, including the "person of black African descent who acts in an unapproved manner" sense, which exists for some people contrastively with "black" like some people contrast "gays" with "faggots", etc — suggests that at least that use of "nigger" is the other, broader racial slur sense also seen in "forest niggers" and "prairie niggers", etc. The quote was a good find, btw; it does show fairly recent use of the word to refer to both "red" and black people. - -sche(discuss)08:10, 15 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I just noticed that back in 2013, you added a bunch of Zay lemmas in IPA. I don't think anyone writes in it, but if they did, they certainly wouldn't use IPA (and most scholarly works use Semitist notation). My preference would be to use Ge'ez script, which is what all the other written Gurage lects use. Do you have any thoughts on this? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds23:58, 21 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
What little information I can now find suggests or implies it'd be written in Ge'ez, yes, as far as native scripts go. (It's impressive how much more about Zay has been digitized now relative to then, and yet still how little is accessible and says much beyond passing mentions of it.) - -sche(discuss)11:31, 22 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hello,
I don't know if you follow the talk pages of articles you create, but anyway I asked a couple of questions here: Talk:proprietarian. Hopefully you may have some answers!
Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Hey, and thanks in advance for taking the time to read this. I've tried several places (BP and Chuck Entz) to address this but haven't gotten any luck. User 'The Nicodene' is suffering from pathological narcissism (presumably the vulnerable kind) which results in disruptive, toxic and abusive behaviour. The pattern repeats: they make arrogant edits out of a need for self-affirmation, they edit war with aggressively dismissive edit summaries, and when you engage in a discussion, their aim becomes to intellectually gaslight, emotionally distabilise you through various underhanded means and finally portray you as too ignorant to be able to challenge them and their edits, thus letting them "get away with it", providing narcissistic supply. They weaponise references available to them in lieu of logic and undestanding the other's position, cherrypicking and ignoring such obvious things that one could be forgiven for starting to doubt one's own sanity. Psychological splitting is the primary thought pathology they rely on in order to derail discussion and to avoid starting to engage with anything you say as a way to protect their ego. They've threatened to continue this sick and abusive behaviour if I challenge their edits in the future, which is true already to the extent that they cannot control any of these behaviours.
I've observed this person in another venue for several years and their behaviour is completely consistent with the conclusion I come to on Chuck Entz's page - I've only been able to put the pieces together while writing it. You mentioned blocking them at the fōrmāticus page - they continue to appropriate it. Now they've also appropriated Module:la-pronunc by replacing a pre-existing transcription that had been discussed by one of their own. They pointedly did this without any prior discussion. Now they have the nerve to turn the tables on me and state that by reverting their one-sided appropriating edits I'm pushing a pet-project, and they tell me to start a sub-module for the thing that they've overwritten instead of starting a separate sub-module. Furthermore they're attempting to circumvent discussion and consensus by suggesting that if I make "my own sub module" and don't edit theirs, they won't edit mine. This is just another demonstration that they've no idea how the website operates. Replacing Latin pronunciations with Old French ones, and suggesting to replace English ones with Middle English is another. I've seen them literally play a "let's make up a language called proto-Romance" pet game by coming up with sentences and all. They're using this website as their playground. The transcription they replaced with this was representing the features of the best-attested local variety of Latin, and the one normally associated with "Vulgar Latn": that of Pompeii and the wider Campania. But even apart from arguments for and against either transcription, such blatant one-sided appropriation of an IPA module is in clear violation of the principles of wiktionary.
Please, could you suggest what I could do, how do I combat this without getting ensnared and further abused? I'm an overly reasonable person and I normally rush to discuss, explain and find consensus as soon as I find that one of my edits has been reverted, and I never engage in edit wars. But this person has clearly and unambiguously blocked all path to resolution through civil discussion right from the very start, employing libel in justification of their behaviour. Even when putting on appearances, their aim to demolish their opponent ("argument is war") oozes from every crack of their façade. Even worse, they derive self-affirmation by ensnaring people like me in an endless squabble. I understand that what I'm saying about this person is not readily apparent to others, even if I do constantly exemplify it with links in the previous two appeals for help (BP and the userpage). But my observations of that person over several years strongly corroborate this recent experience interacting with them, and I firmly believe that their presence on this website is singularly detrimental to its operation and its atmosphere of civil, selfless cooperation. If nothing else, perhaps you could suggest another admin who might be interested in listening to me. Brutal Russian (talk) 01:25, 3 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
-sche, please feel free to ignore this (or simply remove it from your talk-page, as Chuck did). This user's attempt to diagnose their opponent in the first paragraph should tell you all you need to know if you've been lucky enough to avoid all this Latin-related squabbling. BR, do not ping me regarding this message. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds02:38, 3 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
I do not regard that person as an opponent, I regard them as the one who's been grasping at every opportunity to engage in abusive behaviour (provocation) against me on unrelated instances over a long period of time, and who have found the perfect place to unleash it upon me here where I'm forced to get entangled with them to challenge their edits. I'm the one person they hope to derive a feeling of superiority from proving wrong, and proving me wrong, demolishing what they perceive as my authority and thus reaffirming theirs is what they're here to do. It is this that my diagnosis is trying to give an explanation for. Disguising as an opponent and veilling their attempts at self-affirmation as disagreement over technical matters is a means, not an end, and as long as the end of self-affirmation hasn't been achieved, the order of the day is to continue disagreeing. They come to abuse and they have no a priori reason to be civil. I've tried my best treating them as any other user, trying to shame them into being civil, but even I can't fool myself indefinitely. One can't win at the non-zero-sum game of consensus when the other is playing the zero-sum game of feeding their pathological ego at the expense of another. Brutal Russian (talk) 09:52, 4 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Brutal Russian: Opponent? You yourself affirmed something like that he exemplified the maxim “argument is war”, yet yourself try to beat him in it, though it is more than doubtful it can be won. There is as much to do as before. Fay Freak (talk) 20:30, 5 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
I believe the wording you used at she lends too much credence to the possibility that it is derived from Old English sēo, given the points I've listed below:
Old English sēo doesn't mean "she"; it means "the" (I could not find a single example of it meaning "she" in Bosworth-Toller). This is probably the most insuperable problem with the sēo etymology.
There are no parallels for the purported development from /sj/ to /ʃ/. The supposed parallel with Middle English seur(“sure”) is anachronistic, as the /ʃ/ of that word is a Early Modern English development (Middle English knows only /siu̯r/); the work you sourced it from hardly reflects cutting-edge research (first published 1933).
The OED and MED both reject the sēo etymology; I believe these dictionaries' etymologies are quality work which usually surpasses the cruft found in the AHD. The sēo etymology is also mentioned unfavourably in the Cambridge History of the English Language.
Bosworth-Toller sometimes has gaps I wouldn't have expected... seo as a pronoun "she" occurs in the Sermo in festis Sancte Marie (a late text, seemingly decently well timed to be a predecessor to Middle English development towards she); sie occurs in the Vespasian Psalter and, according to the Clark reference I just added, once in the Rushworth gloss to St. Matthew.
I've tried to clarify that sure is a comparable (rather than exactly contemporaneous) change; my understanding is that it's referred to because it shows how, in general, /sj/ can naturally develop into /ʃ/, as something that's not unusual in the history of English—or indeed, thinking of Norwegian sjø, in other Germanic languages. (The alternative development from /h/ to /ʃ/ has hardly any contemporary examples, either, just a couple (uncertainly-)Norse-derived placenames, so either heo or seo is presenting an uncommon development AFAICT.)
I think(?) the MED only says she is "probably" from hīo, hēo, so they're just another dictionary that briefly reports the heo theory without mentioning seo, and can be contrasted with other dictionaries that equally just briefly report (sometimes with the same qualifier of "probably") the seo theory. That's why I tried to find works that cover the etymology of she in more detail and especially ones that evaluate both theories. I added another, which does support the idea that heo is now considered the more likely etymon, but which covers evidence in favor of each. Please add the modern OED's arguments for heo or against seo; since earlier editions of the OED favoured seo and rejected heo (even rejecting the idea that English adapting two Norse placenames' Hj- to the nearest English sound Sh- when incorporating them into the language could be considered an example of /hj/ developing within English into /ʃ/), I am optimistic that their modern entry goes over the arguments for heo and against seo. (To be clear, I don't favour the seo theory—I don't feel attached to any of the theories and was just trying to summarize them a bit better.) I'll also be interested to see what qualifications you add to the seo theory, and if I think there are issues with any, we can discuss further. :) - -sche(discuss)19:03, 4 October 2021 (UTC)Reply
Just a few thoughts before I get started on the entry:
Sermo in festis Sancte Marie uses hēo much more often and much more freely than sēo, which is usually restricted to sentence-initial position. Its occasional occurrence in that text doesn't change the fact that it's very rare in pronominal use. Use of forms unambiguously derived from sēo doesn't become more common over the Middle English period; instead, it sputters out and is replaced with þe (shortly afterwards, pronominal use of the article disappears altogether). This isn't what we'd expect if sēo really was the ancestor of sche.
I don't see how the excursus about sīe is relevant (note that hīe is found for hēo too).
I think you're giving Wardale too much credit; given the ambiguous way she worded things, she could've very well believed that she and sure show the same development.
My point was that I see the dictionaries that support sēo as being higher-quality and/or more up-to-date than those which support hēo. (Generally speaking, the majority opinion seems to have recently swung from the sēo to the hēo etymology; compare the OED's earlier support of sēo to its present stance).
The development from /hj/ to /ʃ/ is just as phonetically unproblematic as the one from /sj/ to /ʃ/; for instance, it's found in dialectal Japanese. I don't think it's necessary to invoke the specific phonetic details here; the average reader will be uninterested (see below).
Rather than expanding the entry by adding arguments, my intent is to compact things a bit. I don't think most readers will be interested in the masses of detail in the current entry; if they are, they can look at the cited specialist literature.
I hope me siding with -sche won't have adverse effects.
1. You are moving the goal post: First you inadvertantly suggested that sēo did not exist in that sense, when you said you couldn't find a single example. This fact was changed. This also changes the interpretation of the fact that it's "rare in pronomial use". If written and spoken registers can be expected to differ in their observation of conventions, or lack thereof, the written evidence is not ultimately decisive anyway. For eg. the decline that you see could in this my view find an explanation in proscriptivism.
2. I guess it's implied that sie is a plausible variant spelling for an intermediate form. I didn't look at the added paper, and I don't need to to determine that it was very likely not made in reference to the verb sie (wesan.Sg.Pres.Subj).
3. You are not giving Walde enough credit to leave room for the possibility that the change was simply much older than you can fathom.
4. The either-or approach is a toxic, however common, artifact of the monotonic branching tree model. Favour for one hypothesis does not rule out the other one. Period.
5. I don't believe /hjo/ can be an accurate transcription. You simply put slashes around the words without phonological merit. In the formalist tradition, broad transcription cannot carry conviction. What if, for example, underlying /hj/ is [t͡s] because of sandi from /hʔju/ (Gesundheit!). You need to appreciate the fact that h comes from lenition and is affricative in the occasional dialect, still (hwipcream). This is essentially supposed to be an argument in favor of your position. But if you argue it poorly because the average reader like me should have no interest in arguments, then chances are you will miss the point the crossroads where it could wind up as þe. Instead you refer to Japanese. Do you really believe the Sinese are a more likely inuence than mainland european speakers where Sie "she" coincidently has occurred as well, or was your point just entirely irrelevant?
I'm sure you are interested in more literal arguments. See, I'm just on the fence spitballing and not so much to see what sticks but for aiming practice. I am aiming for 2nd.sg you which regards the similar (identical or analogous) development in German honorific 2nd. sg Ihr besides Sie 2nd.sg.pl (what I read about those is just-so and of course concerned only with the written evidence for dating instead of hypothesis with far reaching consequences; by the way, an older development seems to be er.3rd.m.sg for 2nd.m.sg, now rare and pejorative; Saterland Frisian distinguishes capitalized forms as well, but we don't have them defined).
6. I agree that "compacting" etymolohies is a worthwhile goal for the sake of the reader and I have criticized -sche for etymologies that push the headword down below the fold. I'd argue that removing detail to the oldest secure stage (ME sche if I understand correctly) and away from the main entry is a good idea, if enough breadcrumbs indicate that there's more behind the hyperlink (eg. indicating that you was once chiefly plural). I still appreciate the effort, especially here where it seems necessary to contradict common misconception immediately, while question about placement may be secondary (unless you argue it belongs in the bin).
FYI, I have been banned from r/linguistics for arguing vehemently that the Dutch influence on English cannot go ignored until I responded in kind to being called crazy. The funniest part was when I referred to r/shubreddit. So, err, feel free to take the flame bait, if you like to wrestle. But let's wait for -sche's response first to be fair. ApisAzuli (talk) 20:02, 1 December 2021 (UTC)Reply
Let me quickly respond to your points:
Past argumentative mistakes don't automatically invalidate the totality of a argument; people should be allowed to concede some points without conceding the contest. More relevantly, there's no evidence that pronominal sēo was more common in the spoken register ("it could've been" isn't adequate here); if anything, we have reson to believe it was more common in writing, as it starts to evanesce alongside the OE written standard. Your claim that this evanescence was due to "prescriptivism" is a unsupported ad-hoc explanation that doesn't comport with the evidence.
I never claimed it was. Instead, my claim was that such a form was irrelevant, as hēo also has a form hīe.
I see no reason to entertain such a possibility. If ME seur was already /ʃuːr/, wouldn't it be homophonous with shower in Modern English?
I agree in principle that forms from hēo and forms from sēo could coexist. I also believe that the evidence doesn't favour that hypothesis.
You don't really seem to understand what I'm arguing here. (A small pointer: I'm not discussing the phonetic plausibility of the change from Old English hēo to Middle English sche, despite appearances).
You can tell that I'm not exactly putting my best foot forward here. In my mind, this is done and dusted, and the arguments you adduce aren't coherent or compelling enough to reopen the case. Hazarasp (parlement · werkis) 04:17, 2 December 2021 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, I'm writing because you locked the page formaticus after user TheNicodene had started an edit war there, slandered, trolled and violently abused me at the talk page, and proceded to continue the edit war after that. I'm still trying to resolve the entire situation and get them permanently blocked from the website. That user has professed personal hatred against me and they've professed to be using this website in order to do damage to me. They're currently doing so by attempting to start another edit war at the very talk page in question: Talk:formaticus. In the process they're trying to interfere with my ability to prosecute them for their actions - to hide the evidence and weep the issue under the rug, in other words. I ask that you personally restore the edit in question so that I am not seen as contributing to an edit war and hand out a block to that user if they attempt to remove the discussion again. Until the issue is resolved, the page formaticus unlocked and my interaction with the website without being subjected to directed, methodical, violent slander, abuse and edit warring can continue, this discussion is current and cannot be archived, and most of all the perpetrator of the abuse cannot be allowed to sweep it under the rug. I would also appreciate it if you considered addressing the abuse itself. Thank you. Brutal Russian (talk) 15:09, 9 October 2021 (UTC)Reply
I would say the starter of a revert war is the first person who reverts an edit without discussion, which is what you did on the talk page. Your own actions, in continuing such conflicts, make you equally responsible for edit-warring, though you never seem to see it that way.
I would say the perpetrator of 'slander' and 'violent abuse' is the person who called me a dog and a narcissist more times than I care to count, which is what you did. Frankly, anyone should have been outright banned for that.
I would say the user with 'professional hatred' is the person who ignites and re-ignites conflicts after several months, which is what you have repeatedly done and show no sign of ever stopping.
Archiving a discussion that nobody has been replying to, which encompasses over 84000 bytes, and which made the page in question difficult to load or navigate is nothing remarkable. Most importantly, I did so in order to make room for a new discussion, since you had re-ignited the conflict on the formaticus page, this time with new objections such as one over asterisk usage. The link to the archive is provided right at the top of the page. It's not 'hidden' whatsoever.
You have shown no willingness whatsoever for a peaceful resolution or dialogue. In fact, you continue to engage in outright hostilities. So long as that remains the case, the page is best kept locked.
@-sche I kindly ask you to disregard the continued harrassment and slander by the violent abuser (at no point have I called them a dog). I'd like to understand whether you think my request is unreasonable. The user above has abused the archive feature in order to hide a conversation which I am a part of, and which I consider an ongoing and unresolved issue. They've done so within 1 month of the last activity. The page which the discussion belongs to is still locked. Surely my request to unarchive it until the issue is resolved is not unreasonable? Surely archiving conversations against the will of all the participants is not allowed? I will be greatful for a reply. Brutal Russian (talk) 19:38, 11 October 2021 (UTC)Reply
The thread you're talking about has not been replied to in four months. Your grudge against me certainly seems far from over, but that is something you are free to start new discussions on, as you constantly do anyway. You are also free to link directly to the archive. It is not hidden whatsoever: it is literally the first thing on the talk page. Actually, I would be fine with un-archiving it if you did not keep deleting the new discussion currently on the talk page by doing so.
Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I did this edit but on second thought I'm not sure whether it was correct. I thought the rhyme is just given by the coda and the nucleus but the rhyme listed e.g. at listen includes the penultimate coda as well. Fytcha (talk) 17:44, 29 October 2021 (UTC)Reply
Loanwords and long chains of intermediary languages
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I remember a listing of loanwords which trace many hops before their final destination, up to eight, from your user page if I am not mistaken. Was that hand currated or do you know of a way for automatic generation of such a list?
I have sought this list sometimes before for giggles but the reason I am asking now is a word that went from Greek through Russian and Yiddish, I guess, into German while geminating mb < b along the way, which I don't quite remember. ApisAzuli (talk) 18:20, 1 December 2021 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
See diff. According to de.wiki, the singular definite article is "de", but I wanted to ask you first whether you have a source that claims otherwise before I change it. Fytcha (talk) 01:31, 4 December 2021 (UTC)Reply
I see that somewhere along the line, someone has changed what I typed (der) to die (aha, here); I think the r was a typo on my part; in turn, the IP that rightly removed it went too far in adding the i, since the (few) sources I can find offhand agree that it is just de. - -sche(discuss)11:07, 7 December 2021 (UTC)Reply
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Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
On what basis do you support assigning a pronunciation from the first century BCE to a slang term briefly attested about a millennium later in France? That seems about as philologically sound as assigning an RP pronunciation to Middle English terms, or a Koiné Greek pronunciation to modern slang from Athens. Nicodene (talk) 19:40, 6 January 2022 (UTC)Reply
If you're this bothered about the word "classical", see if you can get people to change the module to display the label as "classicist" or something. It's the pronunciation people interested in pronouncing Latin today are looking for and (despite months of edit-warring) you haven't, AFAICT, gotten consensus to remove it. - -sche(discuss)19:44, 6 January 2022 (UTC)Reply
That would only work if people actually used this term in Modern Latin, which they do not. They use caseus for 'cheese'- not formaticus, a term lacking in any dictionary of Modern Latin (or for that matter Classical Latin), to the best of my knowledge, and I have looked through several. Nicodene (talk) 19:59, 6 January 2022 (UTC)Reply
People nonetheless encounter the word when reading the documents it occurs in, like people encounter obsolete English terms when reading old works and pronounce those according to one of that language's many standards. (In English, while people sometimes produce e.g. a version of Shakespeare in what they assume his pronunciation to have been, they're usually producing works in their/a modern pronunciation, whether that's RP or GenAm, etc, and pronouncing whatever obsolete word according to that pronunciation standard's phonemes rather than deviating for just the one word back to whatever potentially-now-unused phonemes the obsolete word might've had "in its period".) If someone is reading one of the Latin texts this word occurs in, I doubt they're going to switch to Old French for just the one word; they lack your commitment to history. (It may surprise you that, for example, all Old Norse entries are lemmatized at the normalized "anachronistic" spellings people look for them under, with manuscript spellings as soft redirects at best.) - -sche(discuss)20:24, 6 January 2022 (UTC)Reply
That anachronistic spellings are used on Wiktionary isn't news to me or objectionable, as that is the case for our Latin and medieval Romance entries- cf. the consistent distinction between the letters u and v. That follows the spellings found in the various sources that we cite, and it makes words more convenient to look up, as people are used to working with modern spelling conventions. An anachronistic phonetic transcription is another matter: it does not make anything easier to find, nor is it found in any scholarly source. It serves only to mislead.
The problem with the 'Shakespearian' line of reasoning is that it would have us accept modern pronunciations for any obsolete medieval term, so long as the language that it belongs to survives. That would mean accepting modern French pronunciations of 12th-century vocabulary (based entirely on spelling and gut feeling) or, indeed, RP pronunciations of Middle English terms found in Chaucer. Philologically speaking that is an exercise in fantasy- surely not the sort of thing that Wiktionary is meant for.
Shakespeare is, moreover, read to this day by students in any English-speaking country, his plays are often performed on stage, and his expressions are often quoted in day-to-day conversation. He constitutes, in other words, a living part of the English cultural milieu. I point all of this out to stress that none of it is true for the documents in which forms like formaticus (or wadius, or wapces) are found- namely obscure Merovingian-era inventories and the like. Their modern-day relevance is nil to anybody but a Romance philologist or a very specific type of historian- and these are precisely the people who would be the first to point out that a phonetic transcription reflecting the pronunciation of the first century BCE would be inaccurate for the terms in question.
If someone would like to 'perform' such a document out loud, like a play from Shakespeare- I really cannot stress enough how unlikely this is, but let's suppose it happens- then they would be better served by an Ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation, which would at least fit chronologically, if not in other ways. Nicodene (talk) 00:13, 7 January 2022 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 months ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Thanks for caring about mediaeval armour! There shall be some Eq mess to clean up, only because of old imports. How do you feel about heraldry? Equinox◑19:31, 27 January 2022 (UTC)Reply
I'm happy if you find it useful. :) I appreciate your longtime work importing Chambers (et al?), which I've noticed means we now have a lot of heraldry terms already. Trying to find translations for the Spanish heraldry words Wonderfool finds has piqued my interest in maybe adding any missing ones as a next project, though, so we'll see! - -sche(discuss)04:39, 29 January 2022 (UTC)Reply
If you can figure out what the Yi script form is, feel free to move it; I only found it in Latin script forms (but I didn't search exhaustively for Yi script forms). - -sche(discuss)02:09, 28 February 2022 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
This category is not in proper category format. Could you please make the effort to make it a proper category? On a different note, don’t you think we can make use of this to categorize nicknames like Mounties. CAT:en:Nicknames is presently a redlink. Thank you! ·~dictátor·mundꟾ14:28, 27 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
Hmm. We could add it to Module:category tree/topic cat/data/Names (or Module:category tree/poscatboiler/data/names) using the same format as the other stuff there, and that would solve the immediate issue. But it raises a question: the two subcategories are "City nicknames" and "Couple nicknames" (both already in the modules), and it would seem logical to also categorize nicknames like "Billy" / Category:English diminutives of male given names (etc for other languages and genders) into this category, but at present we seem to comprehensively separate place names from people's names; they have separate top level categories, "Names" vs "Names by language". So do we want this as a top-level category only for "Nicknames" of things excluding people (or even, of anything including couples and only excluding single people?), even though that is counterintuitive to what "nicknames" would usually entail (which is precisely: names of people, like "Ricky", "Meike", "Саша")?? Whereas, if we want this category to include place-nicknames, couple-nicknames, and people-nicknames, then it seems like we should also have a top-level category that contains both (the contents of) Category:Names and Category:Names by language, no? (I suppose this is another example of how it's hard to fit names into the rest of our category schemas.) - -sche(discuss)06:55, 28 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hey -sche, thanks for participating in the other discussion recently. I just noticed that someone has yet again changed Wade-Giles to Wade–Giles. I don't have a position on this issue because I have only had a very small amount of training on proper use of hyphen versus dash. Despite this, I do a lot of work with terms that have dashes in them (or are they hyphens?) and I really want to learn more about the appropriate use of the various forms of hyphens and dashes. Are there special rules for Wiktionary that mean that Wade-Giles is more appropriate than Wade–Giles? I've been very sloppy on these issues, but I'd like to tighten up. Thanks for any help. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 17:28, 5 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
I moved it back and move-protected it. We've always kept these things at the forms with hyphens to keep things simple. Changing a single entry just makes it inconsistent with all the thousands of other entries. If we were to start allowing this, we would need consensus to do so, first. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:46, 6 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
You dun writ:
FWIW, the RFD which resulted in -man being kept due to "no consensus" from ~7 participants was over a decade ago, and rested partly on arguments about the pronunciation, which seem obviously misguided (*-berry sometimes has reduced pronunciation too, but...). Perhaps a new RFD is in order, unless there was a more recent discussion somewhere I'm forgetting about?
OK. I'm ambivalent about the entry, so I thought it might be better if someone who could really articulate all the arguments for deleting them would start the RFD, but I've started it. - -sche(discuss)00:05, 9 May 2022 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi -sche. I clicked on "testre" at tester expecting the link to lead to something to do with Old French, but the entry is on Hungarian. Because you have worked on this entry recently I thught you might know what is goung on. Thanks. Rui Gabriel Correia (talk) 11:42, 19 May 2022 (UTC)Reply
No worries; it's a confusing word (not sure if it's obscure enough to call it {{lb|en|uncommon}}, but still). It took me a fair bit of digging, after I first saw it in some articles about "Transwar Japan" which didn't explain it at all, to find cites with enough detail to see what it meant! - -sche(discuss)23:39, 25 June 2022 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I saw your edit summary at Greek yogurt. My suggestion would be to call such terms "geographical misnomers", though it might be more nationality or ethnicity than geography that's misattributed. Then there are things like all the "Dutch" and "Welsh" terms that are more an application of generic stereotypes or tropes. I also wonder about terms like "Indian giver" and "Moorish idol" that are based on historical misconceptions/lies. It just goes to show how many different ways human beings have come up with to be wrong... Chuck Entz (talk) 14:20, 14 July 2022 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Since you blocked me from responding directly at WT:TR, I have to jump through the hoop and claim that, unless you have a medical degree and a crystal ball or other telemetric infrastructure, I shod like feel offended by your calling me neurodivergent. Not kidding, there's an indoeuropeanist active on reddit with a background in Sanskrit who changed course to became a professional psycho analyst, but not before doing work on transgender identities in Hindu scripture.
Anyway, I have looked into lible laws once and would try to consider these issues through that lense. There is, for one, the stance in US law that some words are inherently insulting. This looks to me like a typical short-circuited decision to simplify judgement, because it would certainly include the n-word (nigger toe) which is difficult to main if it is in common idiomatic use among PoCs. Anything else is more or less contextual and pragmatic (eg. "fascist" of certain politicians although the political party that popularized the name is defunct). Steven Pinker (if that name isn't itself taboo by now) has outlined a number of semantic fields that he deems most common among insults, which I understand to be inherent in human nature. Sexuality is certainly included in that list, disabilities as well. The interpretation, what to understand as a belonging to those fields, is nevertheless dependent on cultural context, so being gay for example has ceased to carry the overt connotation of homo-sexuality, in my experience; etymology and etymological fallacy notwithstanding. So it is the reference itself that may be offensive, which is why the euphemism treadmil works.
That's entirely pragmatic and out of scope of the lexical consideration unless it can be shown that the word is used with the express intent. You get the benefit of the doubt, of course, but edit warring doesn't. So the usual three citations requirement should apply, and subsenses may be necessary. I found subsenses categorically a good idea, but there's a slippery sloap to an infinitude of ideas and I find that there's enough resistance with a preference for succinct definitions. In that case, the question is simple with reslect to the informative stance in WT:SOP, "based on the determination of editors that inclusion of the term is likely to be useful to readers", as regards the label as well.
Everyone but the self-designated child-attracted will be able to figure out, sure enough. I am not entirely sure what other purpose is served by labels, but there is as of yet no label at pedophile even though anyone would take great offense at being labeled a child molester or anything like that. The idea as opined in the previous thread that it was coined as euphemism to advertise incestuous pedophilia strikes me as nonsense. By the sound of it, it stems from academic writing akin enslaved person instead of slave, coopted by activists because of this fairly neutral background. In context it would be SoP.
In the same vein, it does not matter if gibberish might derive from (offensive) gipsy, and it certainly does not matter if that's derived from Egypt as is sometimes claimed, or from RV. √yaj (ईजितुम् 'to worship, sacrifice', but ईजिप्तदेश "Egypt"), whatever. Although it's not an insult if it's true which is still kind of subjective. That's usually for the courts to decide, where expert witness may be disappointed if the court draws (wrong) conclusions from their testemony (as in the case of Washington Red Skins, cf. language log), if the judge ought to have the last word in judgement. nonsense on the other hand refers indirectly to fool, yet it is omiting the derogatory label. I'm pretty sure no judge would condemn that if they like to abuse the ambiguity no less than high profile wiktionary editors do. In fact, that's why I have taken to it myself. The disparity could be due to the nonexistance of label templates when the entry was created. Moreover, we have troll (verb sense 8-9, noun 2) defined leaning chiefly on "harrasing" although there's an entire line of trollface memes to prove that there is an understanding around the idea that trolling is a art. Hell, there is a defcon talk about that on youtube; that's literally a grey area. ("don' t feed the troll" does not refer to harrasment unless you play the victim card; personally I suspect that trell makes it an ethnic slur in origin, though I am in no position to judge this, duh).
Your background is in translation studies, I believe. Hence it is beyond me how you tread on me, who I fail to meet with fidelity and felicity at once, instead of pulling back Eirikr for typically passive agressive rhethorical questions. Of course I need to circumscribe at length if there's no common lingo. Perhaps H. H. Hock is correct in stating that "Linguists, by contrast, find lexical semantics extremely elusive and therefore difficult to deal with".
I understand you are busy. And I should appreciate the downtime, though the measures prove to be ineffective. That's no reason for you to deal out ad hominem attacks with considerations on-topic tacked on in a paranthetical as mere after thought and without any grounds. Upon inquiry with a friend, we found that auto tuning may as well refer to the sound, but I thought it was more obviously related to changing the pitch of the vehicle, if you'll excuse the pun. I have begun adding to the mainspace instead of discussing changes beforehand, but that's not going anywhere; see son of a bitch. The html comments that I add as red tape should be unacceptable.
Instead I feel like I have a whole lot of concessions to make. Like, I've got many an ask to grind and my puns are in poor taste, my formatting and orthography is full of typos and I like enumerations too much. I could, over all, care less, but I've seen prolific users abandon their accounts, some of them because they are fed up with the community, so perhaps I should be concerned. With Ivan Stambuk I might hold that I should think of all the literature to read instead. ApisAzuli (talk) 23:49, 23 July 2022 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
You have been doing a great job of determining whether a given cite supports a challenged definition and, if it doesn't, of suggesting a rewording or alternative definition. I can occasionally do something similar, but you do it regularly and explain yourself well. It is particularly admirable that you take on terms that have meanings that I find personally objectionable or discomfiting. I hope that Wiktionary will benefit from your contributions and example for decades to come. DCDuring (talk) 14:53, 8 August 2022 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion
I worked on the tests section of this page. I am definitely not perfectly confident in the presentation of how the various tests do or do not serve to distinguish an adjective from other word classes. Please correct anything that seems clearly erroneous to you. Edit summaries containing, eg, counterexamples would probably be sufficient justification to convince me of my errors. It may well be that the tests should be on a separate page or subpage. It may also be that a table would be useful to present where each test is most useful, together with examples, including exceptions/counterexamples. DCDuring (talk) 18:13, 9 September 2022 (UTC)Reply
I hadn't realized how many of the tests were merely suggestive rather than qualifying as either absolutely necessary or sufficient for PoS distinctions. Nevertheless, I think it is a good idea to group the tests by their utility for certain PoS distinctions, even if some (few) exceptions exist. For example, maybe the predicate position test has more than suggestive value somewhere. DCDuring (talk) 18:27, 9 September 2022 (UTC)Reply
The only information I was able to find about how to pronounce it was in Century, which claims it's /s/, but since I notice even the French etymon has /z/ (and I too would say /z/) I'm inclined to agree /z/ is more likely. I'll change it. - -sche(discuss)23:00, 16 September 2022 (UTC)Reply
Beckett famously refused to allow a national representative from either Ireland or or France tot pick up his Nobel Prize[…]
I guess I'm just OCD on using review, but these entries will be read 100s more times than edited. It is good to check them as they will be seen. Shenme (talk) 21:23, 24 September 2022 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Yeah I was wondering about that eeeee pronunciation! But I strictly forbid myself from touching IPA outside of BrE. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our phonology. Equinox◑05:10, 6 October 2022 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 year ago15 comments7 people in discussion
Just a comment: while I do not oppose the block I feel that an infinite duration might be a tad excessive. My usual feeling regarding people who keep doing the same thing (as opposed to drive-by vandals, or spammers, etc.) is "keep doubling the block length". Like how you'd allocate memory, ya know? (He does seem to have been blocked in the past a rather large number of times, lol, but the lengths have been both short and arbitrary.) Equinox◑20:41, 11 November 2022 (UTC)Reply
I understand that feeling, and like I said in the BP, I'm loath to block anyone in the first place. But my thought process is: as you know, he's been like this for years; he went on (non-block-related) hiatus and didn't edit much for a couple years, but now upon resuming active editing he's right back to this, so it seems unlikely to me that it's going to change, so I'd rather bite the bullet and be done with it. But if you or another admin want to shorten the block duration, I won't stop you. - -sche(discuss)22:08, 11 November 2022 (UTC)Reply
When he came back from hiatus, there was a definite difference from his past behavior. He seemed to have decided to go all out and basically take over the project. The sheer volume of his actions and verbiage was enough to seriously disrupt things in a way that was far worse than before.
In the case of a productive editor, you have to weigh the benefits of their edits against the disruption and the time wasted by others in responding. After he came back from hiatus, the balance veered strongly toward the negative. I was reluctant to block him, but I think it was probably necessary- or would have been, sooner or later.
The POINTy mainspace reformatting edits and categories, as well as the systematic rehashing of closed rfds and rfvs, were bad enough, but he managed to turn pretty much all of the important discussions into tl;dr walls of pointless, repetitive sludge. Even when he was right or at least had a point it would have been better if he had left it to someone else. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:14, 11 November 2022 (UTC)Reply
After I already anticipated a block in view of a regular frequency of frivolous motions, which for all I know already allow the conclusion of malintent, I am also shocked about the duration of the block, but we are both European, and in endless controversions on the internet by Americans I well have observed a seemingly irrelievable lack of moderation that is unknown to us. Fay Freak (talk) 22:55, 11 November 2022 (UTC)Reply
I have reduced the block to one month, because although Dan has recently been pissing us all off, he is a long-term useful contributor (OUTSIDE of talk pages). If he comes back and does it again, then just make it two months, blah blah. Equinox◑02:04, 12 November 2022 (UTC)Reply
@Equinox There's also the possibility of only blocking him from specific namespaces such as Wiktionary and perhaps Talk and/or Module, etc. He might still do POINTy edits in mainspace and maybe ping people and haunt user talk pages, but it would keep him away from the places he's been abusing the most. It also would allow a much longer block without affecting his productivity in mainspace. An additional tool might be an abuse filter that only applies to him, with regex-based limits on the kinds of pages or edits he can do. As long as you have the username test first, it will have only minimal affects on the performance of the site for everyone else. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:47, 12 November 2022 (UTC)Reply
I don't really care what you do. I will bow to community consensus! I just feel infinite block is not fair to a legit contributor as opposed to a common-or-garden spammer. Thanks for listening. Equinox◑04:38, 12 November 2022 (UTC)Reply
@Equinox I wasn't planning to do this myself, just to give more options to consider. The goal isn't to punish him, but to stop/prevent the damaging behavior. These are some less draconian ways to accomplish that. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:01, 12 November 2022 (UTC)Reply
FWIW, I considered a Wiktionary-namespace-only block, but part of the problem—the trigger of the most immediate discussion—is that the obstructionism includes edits in mainspace and other namespaces. I think account-specific edit filters are in general a wrong move; filters are invaluable if an already-blocked editor is hopping IPs and changing usernames to keep editing, but when we're talking about one account, a filter would be admitting we can't rely on that user to stop doing x disruptive thing unless we physically stop them, but then why forgo stopping them with a block and instead commit techy editors' time to writing algorithms to try and detect disruptive edits better than the user can figure out how to rules-lawyer in ways that don't trigger the algorithms? - -sche(discuss)10:57, 12 November 2022 (UTC)Reply
@Theknightwho: This is of little concern. We already know that there is no enlightenment to expect from his messages, rather he obviously just finds new ways to abuse terminology, so the reader’s mental diversion is negligible. While of course due to this content the reading material is lamentable and justly lamented, the actual injury and offence lies in the recurring requirement to answer him, as writing uses to be much more exerting and depletive of precious time than reading, prompted by reason that otherwise the appearance of nobody disagreeing with his novel measures in the dictionary content could arise. Accusing him of “filibustering” is actually an understatement since for filibusters (or at least the famous ones I know of, since in my country even filibustering itself is illegal) the (effected or intended) reaction is not multiplying the verbosity. To this term he again he applied a very narrow definition, of “delaying decisions”, while he was delaying the whole project, which senior editors like me, possessing the big picture, follow to answer general questions even if complicated, but not fake questions like his who already knew beforehand that editors will not harmonize with his positions and won’t have bad reasons—but does not concede us having a honest and rational approach. An indisposition against long content in genere seems indefensible but must be contextualized by how engaging it is. Fay Freak (talk) 01:25, 13 November 2022 (UTC)Reply
Of all of the users that I have seen on this project, I’ve never seen any receive a request of ‘leave me alone’, or some variant thereof, more than D.P.:
(Normally I’d consider it poor taste to bring up old misdeeds, but if they’re consistent with somebody’s current misbehaviour then I don’t find it too unfair.)
Other tendencies, like his flair for the melodramatic (‘Down with all tyrants!’) and always creepily talking to himself on his talk page (seemingly treating it like a blog) may be worth mentioning, but his abysmal diplomacy is, by far, the most serious.
You people had your chances to expel him from the project and prevent further damage, and yet you always kept glossing over his misbehaviour and repeatedly giving him second chances anyway. He has had more than enough. Now I am going to hold you responsible for his misconduct, for as long as you keep giving him second chances. I trust that you won’t find my expectation too unreasonable. —(((Romanophile))) ♞ (contributions) 16:12, 6 December 2022 (UTC)Reply
-sche, would you kindly explain to me why you hate open society, democracy, liberty, individualism, and freedom so much? Why is it that you want to destroy all of those great things so badly? What did they ever do to you?
Also, I have been getting reports from anonymous sources that your daily routine involves desecrating the works of Karl Popper and John Rawls shortly before strangling a puppy or kitten to death, and that you laugh maniacally while doing so. Can you confirm or deny those accusations, sir (or madam)? —(((Romanophile))) ♞ (contributions) 18:12, 15 January 2023 (UTC)Reply
I'm not sure if I completely understand your reversion:
"partially undo, previous edits dropped the L2 header, and also these are just different (one of them inaccurately approbative and cover-running, and one perhaps overly negative) ways of trying to describe one thing".
Firstly, the L2 header (which I had added) was dropped because it's been over two-weeks and the de facto consensus is that the pejorative sense is in fact attestable (although it could be more precisely worded), and that a non-pejorative sense also exist. If I understand correctly, you're saying that there should not be two senses (one approbative, the other negative) to describe alt-center, but rather one sense, that being the current, negative definition. On 'Requests for verification', it was discovered that both of these senses are attested though. Furthermore, the sense I added, which you refer to as "approbative", does not express approval.
"Abbreviated from alternative-center; a centrist movement displaying controversial, novelty opinions distinct from the mainstream narrative."
• Alt-center is an abbreviation of alternative-center.
• Alt-center is a centrist movement.
• Alt-centrism does in fact display controversial, novelty opinions distinct from the mainstream (that's what makes it alternative).
The aforementioned points are not inaccurate, nor opinionated, and do not express approval. These are merely facts which give alt-center its denotative meaning. For this reason, I kindly ask that you undo your rollback to my edits. If you believe the L2 header (which you did not rollback) should actually stay, feel free to put it back. Nevertheless, the sense above is valid and conforms to Wiktionary standards. —WbK WordbookeeperWordbookeeper (talk) 06:08, 21 December 2022 (UTC)Reply
Ok, I've combined the senses there, too. If a person's parents are one black person (i.e., in the old racial classification system being discussed here, someone with two black parents and hence four black grandparents) and one "griffe" (someone with one black parent and one "mulatto" parent, i.e. two black grandparents on one side, and one black and one white grandparent on the other side), that's . . . 7 out of the person's 8 great-grandparents being black and 1 white. - -sche(discuss)23:52, 2 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I believe that your reason for blocking the user is not true. Everyone can react and no one has the right to prohibit it. I also don't see personal attacks there. Erect your Bastille in another place. Gnosandes ❀ (talk) 05:55, 9 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
You can safely ignore Gnosandes, who has a history of being a contrarian for being a contrarian's sake. Shum has a history of showing up, editing for a while, exploding, and getting blocked, just for it to repeat. Vininn126 (talk) 07:22, 11 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Thanks for removing the |year= parameter from the first cited reference of Mexican standoff (which already had the |date= parameter). In the process of performing my edit, I realized that I had logged myself out, and thus I forgot to remove the parameter after logging back in because I was concentrating on other concerns. — CJDOS, Sheridan, OR (talk) 21:21, 19 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
You're welcome; I've run into that issue before (sometimes due to = or | in a work title, rather than a redundant parameter), so I knew what to look for. :) - -sche(discuss)21:41, 19 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 year ago4 comments3 people in discussion
I feel like a block may be in order if they're gonna keep warring and not discussing, like how they don't seem to have paid attention to the archived RFV discussion you pointed to on their talk page. Acolyte of Ice (talk) 10:40, 28 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
@Vininn126 Pinging you here since you are also an admin, so you can maybe give your two cents on the matter and block if necessary since -sche does not seem to be around to see this right now. Acolyte of Ice (talk) 10:55, 28 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
Thanks. I note that this isn't the first IP to remove that sense; I'll autoconfirmed-protect the page. (All the editing reminds me that it'd be good to discuss the exact scope of the sense soon, though, since as discussed on the talk page, it seems broader than the current wording.) - -sche(discuss)17:52, 28 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
I feel that this is egregiously excessive and unfair considering that I have made over 15,000 edits and contributions on Wiktionary.
Initially, I was banned for a total of 3 months, but then this ban was increased to a year for very petty and silly reasons.
Would it be possible to kindly remove this ban, as it has already been six months? I would greatly appreciate your support and assistance in this matter.
I humbly apologize for breaking or violating any rules and regulations that went against the rules of Wiktionary.
I feel that this is egregiously excessive and unfair considering that I have made over 15,000 edits and contributions on Wiktionary.
Initially, I was banned for a total of 3 months, which I feel was fair, legitimate, and justifiable, but then this ban was increased to a year for very petty and silly reasons.
Would it be possible to kindly remove this ban, as it has already been six months? I would greatly appreciate your support and assistance in this matter.
I humbly apologize for breaking or violating any rules and regulations that went against the rules and regulations of Wiktionary.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi,
I reverted the edit on a-spec with my reasoning that (unless wiktionary follows a different standard to wikipedia) it is explicitly against the wiki policies to have unsubstantiated rumors w:en:WP:RUMOR on the site, which this appears to amount to. So I believe it should not even have a mention unless an actual reliable source w:en:WP:RS exists for it, of which I could find none.
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi. Your change to this topic resulted in errors. You mention an RFM discussion but I couldn't find it. Can you point me to this discussion and let me know what the intent of the change was? Thanks! Benwing2 (talk) 17:34, 5 May 2023 (UTC)Reply
OK, I think I found the discussion. I think what we need to do is temporarily undo your changes, then come up with a plan to fix everything, then implement it. Can you lay out what your vision of the end state is? That way I can help come up with a plan. Benwing2 (talk) 17:39, 5 May 2023 (UTC)Reply
Ah, I'm sorry it caused errors; making the switch turned out to be more complicated than I thought; please do feel free to revert while we work out the right way to do it. As you likely noticed, there was a remarkable lack of interest in the RFM discussion (even when I tried to draw attention to it in the BP) beyond the few people over nearly a decade supporting the general idea and one recent opposer, so if people suddenly start expressing interest in what to name the moved/merged categories, we could hear that input, but in the absence of such input, my thought would be to rename "en:Russian male given names" to "English transliterations of Russian male given names" (etc for other languages). (There is a whole separate can of worms which is the fact that most such names can also be found "natively", e.g. Vladimir and Alexandra transliterate Russian/Ancient Greek names and exist as English names, but on Vladimir both have definitions, in Vadim this is handled by having only the English name in the definitions and the former in the etymology, and in Alexandra the use as a transliteration when writing about some ancient Greek Ἀλεξάνδρᾱ is not acknowledged at all.) There is a broader issue that it would make sense to recategorize the top-level category of some other things, too, e.g. Exonyms, as discussed _Category:English_exonyms" class="mw-redirect" title="Wiktionary:RFM">in the RFM section above the Names RFM. - -sche(discuss)18:03, 5 May 2023 (UTC)Reply
Ah, OK! Some years ago, it was one of the most "wanted" entries because its inflections had been created but not the main entry, so I had put it into my own tracking list, and noticed it when cleaning out that list this week. I saw nothing linked to it anymore, but because of that, I couldn't easily find the entries that formerly linked to it to see whether they'd been deleted "for cause" or just because the lemma didn't exist, and I saw that it got Google Books hits, including dictionaries, so I added it to the Requested Entries page. Looking more closely, I see now that many of those hits are compounds like za- [line break] przęgać or od [slightly too-large kerning which OCR read as a space] przęgać where the OCR missed the diacritic; the rest must be typos, as you say. Thanks for the explanation! :) - -sche(discuss)19:31, 7 May 2023 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
-sche, since you had worked on transgender before, I was wondering what you think of the set up at atheist in comparison to transgender. Is the atheist entry done right? If so, is there room for more subsenses beneath the strict subsense on transgender, like those at atheist? Check out what I've added on transgender, and please check out the array of perspectives I have collected at Citations:transgender- and the ones I've added are just the ones that I felt I could easily put in a category, but it seems like there's more out there. I think there is a broader subsense for transgender, kind of analogous to the ones we see atheist. I feel that some people are just using transgender in a way that has no comment on the gender binary in any way just "different", while some people are definitely using transgender to mean something specific about the gender binary. Thanks for any comment! --Geographyinitiative (talk) 14:16, 10 June 2023 (UTC)(Modified)Reply
IMO, 1.0 (having a gender different from one's assigned sex) and 1.2 (having a gender not the same as one's assigned sex) do not seem like different senses(?); as it stands, I would (re)merge them. Like: it's trivial to find references to cake which was made with one egg, other references to cake which was made with multiple eggs, and other references to cake which was made with no eggs, but these are not three different senses of cake; one must consider what definitions are treated by language-users as contrastive with other definitions—a burger made with beef and a burger made with veggies are considered two different things; cake made with one vs multiple eggs not so much. As written, the only difference the definitions 1.0 vs 1.2 seem to draw is that someone who identifies with multiple genders would be explicitly covered by by 1.2 and not explicitly covered by 1.0, but I don't think anyone contrasts "transgender as in either a trans man, a trans woman, or nonbinary (agender, bigender, etc)" with "transgender as in either a trans man, a trans woman, nonbinary (agender, etc), or bigender"; AFAICT this seems like it would be better handled by tweaking 1.0 to better spell out its broad scope. Is there a(nother) contrast you perceive? (I wonder how much of the issue is unclarity in the wording of 1.0.) - -sche(discuss)18:57, 10 June 2023 (UTC)Reply
I understand your concerns. I really feel that there is a group of usages in which it is the author's intent to go beyond the "different" of 1.0 into something like 1.2 or more. So the question is not ultimately the difference of the final referrant in reality, but that the more vague 1.0 sense that you might see in a journalistic article isn't meant by the author to include the whole scope of gender theory possibilities that the 1.2 sense might include when that category of authors would use it. My view is that there are some authors cited on that page would want a broader subsense like 1.2. How does that view interact with your thought process? I think there are some authors trying to create or use a 1.2 sense that is different from a more basic 1.0, not just distinguishing 1.0 from 1.1. Which is why I bring up atheist: you can mean 'atheist' in like five different ways, but then there's the general sense of "they don't believe", which I'm thinking of as analogous to the 1.0 of transgender. The journalist at WaPo is not going into the nitty-gritty of what kind of atheist Richard Dawkins is (unless they specifically go there). Similarly, I see room for a vauge or more open-ended sense on transgender, and then the more specific theories used in specialized literature. Thanks for any help. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 21:52, 10 June 2023 (UTC)(Modified)Reply
Need your input on a policy impacting gadgets and UserJS
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Dear interface administrator,
This is Samuel from the Security team and I hope my message finds you well.
There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed policy governing the use of external resources in gadgets and UserJS. The proposed Third-party resources policy aims at making the UserJS and Gadgets landscape a bit safer by encouraging best practices around external resources. After an initial non-public conversation with a small number of interface admins and staff, we've launched a much larger, public consultation to get a wider pool of feedback for improving the policy proposal. Based on the ideas received so far, the proposed policy now includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, best practices for gadgets and UserJS developers, and exemptions requirements such as code transparency and inspectability.
As an interface administrator, your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on the policy talk page.
Latest comment: 1 year ago8 comments4 people in discussion
Has it been determined whether or not the old Southern US pronunciation, /bɑɹ/, was caused by a regional extension of the same shift that impacted the standard pronunciation of words such as heart and hearken; older /-ɛəɹ-/ shifting to /-ɑɹ-/? Tharthan (talk) 10:44, 25 August 2023 (UTC)Reply
I'm not sure; my edit actually commented it out because I wasn't sure whether it was typical enough to include: I've heard Southerners (?jocularly?) say a number of words, not just /bɛɚ/ but also e.g. /kwɪɚ/(“strange”) (!), as /-ɑɹ/, but I'm not sure whether that's a {{a|Southern US}} pronunciation per se, or even a {{a|Southern US|colloquial}} pronunciation per se as the label in bear has it, or just jocularly intentionally altering the pronunciation (it seems like the main Southern realization of the vowel in /ɛɹ/ words is still in the vicinity of [ɛ ~ e]). User:Mahagaja, do you have any familiarity with this phenomenon? (It's a pity Stephen Brown isn't here to give his input too.) - -sche(discuss)17:28, 25 August 2023 (UTC)Reply
I only know it from "There's gold in them thar hills!" But to turn scholarly about it, the only dialect atlas of English that I have is The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States by Hans Kurath and Raven I. McDavid Jr. (PEAS), which reports (p. 119) that "the folk speech of the piedmont of Virginia and adjoining parts of North Carolina have a low vowel [a ~ ɐ̞] in stairs, theirs (rarely in chair), which is partly merged with the /ɑ/ of barn, partly in contrast with it. All three folk pronunciations are clearly losing ground." —Mahāgaja · talk22:24, 25 August 2023 (UTC)Reply
That's useful; thank you. I'll un-comment it out. My impression is that it's perceived as more 'country', which aligns with PEAS calling it a 'folk pronunciation'. Should we label it "Southern US, folk pronunciation, dated"? Or — it would be helpful, not just for this, if we could make {{a}} accept a few of the things {{lb}} does, like "_" to suppress a comma — {{a|dated|_|Southern US|_|folk pronunciation}}? - -sche(discuss)22:34, 25 August 2023 (UTC)Reply
It's dated for sure; ANAE makes no reference to it AFAICT. And of course the PEAS data show it wasn't general in the South, just in the Virginia and North Carolina Piedmont. I did notice that a very open [æə̯ ~ æɹ] was a common realization of square throughout the South, but not a merger with start. Incidentally, this is unrelated to the shift found in heart and hearken, which is a shift of old short [ɛɹ] to [ɑɹ] instead of expected [ɝ], seen also in sergeant, the British pronunciations of Derby and Berkeley, and the dialectal "I'll larn him!". In parson it served to distinguish one sense from another and caused a split, and in star it happened early to enough to be acknowledged in the standard spelling. But this merger of square to start is a different thing. To your question, {{a}} is really supposed to be just for accent labels, and "dated" isn't an accent; it should probably go in |qual= of {{IPA}} instead. —Mahāgaja · talk08:44, 26 August 2023 (UTC)Reply
Hmm, I don't agree on the last point. T:a says to put non-accent things like "noun" vs "verb" in a {{qualifier}} template unless there's already an {{a}} with other content, in which case the additional content can go in the {{a}} (presumably to avoid back-to-back parentheticals each with part of the label in it). But I'm not sure something like "obsolete" or "dated" is 'non-accent' information anyway; which stage of an accent we're talking about seems like accent information as much as saying it applies only to parts of the accent area ("UK, regional" or the like, notwithstanding that I think "regional" is dumb and should be replaced with specificity...). Putting it in {{IPA}} seems like it would also create issues (or require duplicating the rest of the accent label content) in cases where a pronunciation is used in multiple accents but dated in one. But putting it in the label can also be unclear if there are multiple accents in the label and 'dated' only applies to one (as I have now raised in the Grease Pit). Meh. - -sche(discuss)22:19, 28 August 2023 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 year ago4 comments2 people in discussion
For the words that you have worked on:
which turned out to be the hardest?
what made them hard?
I've reviewed the 100 most common words and marked some as "hard", mostly because there are multiple PoSes, sometimes hard to separate, but also because of the lack of concreteness to many of the definitions, as well as the sheer number of definitions. Do you agree?
I'm thinking that nouns, verbs, and adjectives should be the easiest generally, but some function words should be much easier than others.
Also, the standards for a good entry seem very hard to meet, especially for the most common function words. Attestation for the often numerous senses seems difficult.
Can you provide any guidance for those who would tackle the hard entries.
In your experience, would it help to have someone else do relatively routine formatting tasks before you tackle entry structure (Etys, PoSes) and definitions. I can imagine that those tasks can: 1., help familiarize one with the definitions, 2., sap one's energy, and, 3., distract one from the defining effort. DCDuring (talk) 22:13, 28 August 2023 (UTC)Reply
When I go through and try to make sure that we're covering all the senses of a word, the more senses there are, the longer it takes... because I'm going through all of our definitions, and all the definitions in other usable/noncopyright reference works, and all the uses of the word I'm familiar with, and making sure we're not missing anything that's attested (have to check that all our senses, and any we seem to be missing, are attested), that we don't have redundant senses that would be better off combined, but also that we're not merging any senses that are better separate, while figuring out how to group all the senses so it's intelligible (if there are too many senses, without grouping them via subsensing, the entry becomes hard to practically use). If there are a lot of definitions, it's likely different people at different times will enter the same one twice (here's an example where the presence of multiple etymology sections meant someone didn't notice the definition was already in a lower section, but I've also seen duplication within the same ety section, same list of definitions). Conversely, in overhauling take, I had initially put these senses together as one sense, but a Tea Room discussion a few years later made me realize they were better as separate senses. When a word has senses that require some consideration as to what part of speech they are, that can cause difficulty, as various Tea Room discussions attest. I'm not sure how much work formatting is: there are times when I don't have time to format something (usually a quote) and so just offload it to the talk page (scissars), but if I were working on an entry, it wouldn't normally stop me from working on the entry. Another challenge is thinking through the exact scope of what is definitional to a particular sense, as with the discussion a while ago of the scope of merchandise. - -sche(discuss)04:00, 29 August 2023 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for describing your process. That fits my limited experience.
You do seem to be saying that departures from ideal formatting for these high-frequency word entries don't make usually make much difference.
I was wondering whether it would pay to have people work on any non-definitional matters before the definition work was complete. Would it help, be neutral, or potentially interfere? I could see how work to get three quotations for each definition might help even if the definitions weren't quite right. Also derived terms and collocations could possibly help in testing coverage of definitions. DCDuring (talk) 01:13, 30 August 2023 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people in discussion
The quotes you added to take have the wrong year, often obviously so (e.g., claiming that Silvertip's Trap was written in 2012 when author Max Brand died in 1944). Keep in mind that Google Books's metadata shows the date of publication (the |year_published parameter), not the date of composition. If you can't figure out the exact year you could use {{c.}} or {{a.}} as well. Ioaxxere (talk) 22:50, 29 August 2023 (UTC)Reply
I'm glad you noticed the issues—if I'm unfamiliar with an author, I have no way to know the date assigned to them is wrong. (If I am familiar, I mark the issue in some way so I or someone else can fix it later, as with Tolkien.) Thanks for fixing them up! - -sche(discuss)00:26, 30 August 2023 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
You know you can archive multiple discussions at once with aWa? :P It's very useful and also very nice for those with certain talk pages on their watchlist. Vininn126 (talk) 08:19, 7 September 2023 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, but in this case there's no obvious set of adjacent closed discussions I could just select all at once; I'm crawling down the page, leaving comments here or there that I'm about to archive something as stale, and then doing that. Trying to get RFM down under 500,000 bytes. - -sche(discuss)08:31, 7 September 2023 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 year ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Seeing this on my watchlist a lot. Thanks for cleanup. I did not broaden "Christianity" into "religion" out of any kind of Dawkinsian spite, etc., but because it's mostly outside my experience. We could subdivide a bunch of them further into "theology" versus... whatever word the churches use for pragmatics. P.S. If you're in the mood for religion Christianity, have a crack at anagignoskomena. WP mentions it in passing as a bunch of books that the Eastern Orthodox Church feels good about. Equinox◑21:53, 7 September 2023 (UTC)Reply
You're welcome / no problem. I've changed a few to more specific things like "Catholicism", but for the most part I figure going through the "Christianity" category and figuring out logical subcategories, whether that's "Catholicism"-vs-Lutheranism etc or "theology"-vs-pragmatics etc, may be a separate task. I've also noticed where people categorized Muslim, Hindu, etc terms as vague "religion" ... and a lot of cases where something doesn't seem to merit a label at all. Like: what do you make of e.g. "Calvinist"? To me, it doesn't seem like it needs any label, neither {{lb|en|religion}} nor {{lb|en|Christianity}}, just like foot isn't {{lb|en|biology}}, because everyone uses the word regardless of context, no? But we have a lot of labels that seem daft to me, like elbowis labelled "anatomy"... - -sche(discuss)22:08, 7 September 2023 (UTC)Reply
I am fascinated by Eastern Orthodoxy but that's a question for another time. Currently that damned newbie User:Blansheflur is whipping my experienced arse at Scrabble. I'll be happy if I come out 10 points ahead. Equinox◑00:49, 8 September 2023 (UTC)Reply
Oh, regarding unnecessary glossing, I quite agree. I know, if somebody adds a gloss that isn't a "known" gloss (so it is plain text instead of a link), we could interpret that as "oh, we are missing a gloss then!". But often half the time they are pointless. We aren't going to gloss the main sense of "mango" as "fruits", right? Right??? Some people do. Equinox◑01:12, 8 September 2023 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I undid the edit because it was clearly biased to begin with, using buzzwords like "transphobic" when the phrase has nothing to do with that at all, it clearly pushes a certain narrative I just made it neutral. And I'm not sure how my edit made the entry less informative, it quite literally is used to mock that group of people, has nothing to do with trans people. Supreme5555 (talk) 05:59, 9 October 2023 (UTC)Reply
Lol, its use for vice-signalling 'anti-wokeness' (originally and especially transphobia) is the best known thing about it. But I have considered whether more of the wording of the usage note could be moved into the definition, or even, if there should be two definitions — the existing sense "used ... to suggest ... something has been promoted as good but is actually bad", covering what it means when people describe some actual thing or person as "stunning and brave" and intend those words to mean something about that thing, like in many of the examples noted on the talk page, and then maybe a second sense to cover what people mean when it's purely a catchphrase used to signal that the speaker is anti-woke, but it's (a) hard to think of good wording for that (we obviously can't use your loaded phrasing/framing in wikivoice, but "used to signal that the speaker is anti-woke" is also not ready for primetime), and (b) it's hard to find cases where it is purely a catchphrase, as even e.g. the Modest Pelican uses I pointed out on talk can be explained as "suggest[ing] ... something has been promoted as good but is actually bad", so it seems like there is just the one sense we have now, with its connotations that the usage note explains. - -sche(discuss)08:51, 9 October 2023 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, I wonder if you have any source for the pronunciations /fʌŋ/ and /ʃweɪ/ that they are used for this word, since it seems they approximate the pronunciation in Mandarin and likely influenced by feng shui. Note that shui is spelt the same in Mandarin but represents a different phoneme to that in Cantonese. – wpi (talk) 04:32, 10 November 2023 (UTC)Reply
I trawled for examples online and found myriad possibilities, including where people (ignorantly?) assume it's pronounced as that other word they're familiar with; I don't know if I saved the videos/URLs. One could argue that whenever anyone reads fung shui as /-ʃweɪ/ they're e.g. mentally switching to feng shui (or misspelling feng shui); I don't know whether it makes sense to go down that road or not. For /ʌ/, feel free to change to /ə/; I went with /ʌ/ partly due to opposition in the BP to writing /ə/-that-could've-been-/ʌ/ as /ə/, but as it's the approximation of (Taishanese, Taicheng) Cantonese /ɵ/, /ə/ is the closer representation. I mean, feel free to remove any pronunciations that you don't think should be on this spelling; I'm not hung up on an alternative-form-of entry having an exhaustive pronunciation section. - -sche(discuss)06:12, 10 November 2023 (UTC)Reply
Thanks. In that case I would remove the Mandarin-like ones. I'm also not sure about putting the Taishanese-like pronunciation here, since that's not actually Cantonese (but rather a lect that is parallel to Cantonese) and had a limited presence in Hong Kong (now basically nonexistent) - it's mostly spoken in its homeland and in some disaporan communities mostly in West Coast NA.
BTW this isn't an alternative-form-of entry but a full entry that is reduced to a synonym entry because it's better to not duplicate the definitions. – wpi (talk) 09:52, 10 November 2023 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 months ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Recently baby was edited to remove a longstanding phrase in English noun sense 1. I tried to revert it back to how it was for a long time beforehand but it was reverted. Mineben256 (talk) 22:48, 15 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
Hmm... on one hand, application to fetuses is already (longstandingly) covered by sense 3, and it shouldn't be in two places. OTOH, I am ambivalent about whether it'd be better to have separate senses or combine them into 1. It seems unlikely that anyone uses sense 3 contrastively with sense 1 (i.e. uses it only for a fetus and not a newborn), which might speak it favor of merging 3 into 1... - -sche(discuss)22:58, 15 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
As I pointed out on Surjection's talk page, this is part of a clause starting with "particularly", so it doesn't and shouldn't cover everything. An IP changed "birth" to "conception" a year ago, and Leasnam compromised by changing it to "conception or birth". This is all about framing things to make a point re: abortion. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:18, 15 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 9 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I think you confused this sentence to be Kurtöp, whereas looking at the source it seems to have been Maaka. Could you fix it? I don't know anything about Maaka. Thadh (talk) 21:57, 18 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 7 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi. I added a section Module:labels/data#Label_usages listing all the places where labels are currently used. You might find this interesting. In this vein, I want to fix up the use of labels in {{standard spelling of}}, {{alternative form of}} etc. but I'm not quite sure what the issues are. Can you enumerate them and give me some examples of what things should look like vs. what they currently look like? Benwing2 (talk) 04:47, 16 April 2024 (UTC)Reply
You might want to post in the Beer Parlour to get broader input, as I don't know if I know of all the possible issues, but the one issue which I mentioned in a prior discussion was:
[What happens:] The "spelling" labels like {{lb|en|British spelling}} display "British spelling", which is reasonable for them to do in {{label}}s, but it means that when those labels are plugged in to {{standard spelling of|en|foobar|from=British spelling}}, the result is "British spelling standard spelling offoobar." and {{alternative spelling of|en|foobar|from=British spelling}} displays "British spelling spelling offoobar" (interesting that "standard spelling of" has a dot and "alt spelling of" doesn't...).
[Kludge:] To kludgily fix this, because people were understandably complaining about it, I added the labels "British form", "American form", etc, which add the category that {{lb|en|British spelling}} adds but have the display (just "British") that {{lb|en|British}} has: {{standard spelling of|en|foobar|from=British form}} displays "British standard spelling offoobar." (But as with "orthographic borrowings", anything that exists and is not specifically limited to specific situations, people will try to use for other situations, so I've spotted an instance or two of it as a label...)
[What should happen:] Ideally, when plugging any of the "spelling" labels like "British spelling", "American spelling", "Canadian spelling" etc into any of the spelling templates like "alternative spelling of", "standard spelling of" (and probably also "alternative form of", "standard form of", etc), the label would display "British" instead of "British spelling" (but it would still display "British spelling" if used in {{label}}): ideally {{standard spelling of|en|foobar|from=British spelling}} would display "British standard spelling offoobar." At that point, the "British form", "American form" etc labels could be removed or reduced to aliases of "British spelling".
Latest comment: 4 months ago6 comments3 people in discussion
There are two of interest:
In addition to.
Other than; except for; instead of.
The first is much more common, but is not substitutable in many expressions. I think that the second definition is for negative and irrealis constructions, but I feel I am getting out of my depth. Even if my view is correct, I am not sure that we can communicate it well to normal users and, therefore, that we would risk confusing many.
Irrealis constructions also come up with "negative polarity items", which would also benefit from an explanation of why those items occur without a negative.
I may be simply wrong about the 'irrealis' connection, except in the broadest possible definition, including 'habitual' mood. The second definition refers to situations that are future, counterfactual, habitual, etc., where the truth value of the utterance is not strictly determinable. Perhaps we just need (lots of?) usage examples. DCDuring (talk) 13:28, 22 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
Usage examples and notes on which uses are no longer common or likely to be understood (like "beeastes, besides asses", below) would be helpful. Other dictionaries agree with us as to what the senses are, and M-W, Dictionary.com and the OED all word the sense corresponding to our sense 2 the same way we do, "other than", and for the sense corresponding to our sense 1, the OED and Dictionary.com's definitions include "in addition to" like ours, whereas M-W has "together with". M-W's and Dictionary.com's examples for "other than" are 'negative' ("no one besides", "nothing besides"), but the 1933 OED says the "other than" sense is used "in negative and interrogative (formerly sometimes in affirmative) sentences", and has examples:
1534, tr. Pol. Verg. Eng. Hist., I, 22:
England is well stored with all kinde of beeastes, besides asses, mules, camels, and elephants.
1716, South, 12 Serm. (1717), IV, 37:
The Jews [...] for ever unsainting all the world besides themselves.
1758, Jortin, Erasm., I, 266:
In the opinion of every one besides himself.
Other than the OED, it doesn't seem like anyone tries to spell out the restrictions on the "other than" sense in the definition itself. We could perhaps write a usage note. Otherwise, I agree with your idea of usexes showing the various ways it can be used and, with qualifiers, the ways it could formerly be used. - -sche(discuss)04:41, 24 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
Thanks. Your effort and thought are appreciated, not just by me.
It's not at all surprising that no other dictionary goes very far in explaining the occasions of use, but OED 1933 confirms the general direction.
I think I'm getting my head around irrealis, but our definition and WP's use are different, ours being more limited, I think. I would not want to use irrealis in a definition or a usage note, but maybe on an entry talk page. It seems close to meaning non-indicative, but that makes it sound like a purely grammatical term, which it doesn't seem to be. If it hadn't come up before in connection with negative-polarity items (where 'irrealis' sentences can contain a negative polarity items that has no form of or derivative of 'not'), I would not have mentioned it. As an exercise, I'll try to use besides "other than" in as many of WP's types of irrealis as I can. When and if I get somewhere with that, I'll let you know. DCDuring (talk) 00:34, 25 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
I wish i knew a good way of searching for besides ("other than") in sentences in indicative mood. All the uses of besides in indicative-mood sentences that I have seen in modern English seem to me to be the "in addition to" sense. That is in line with what -sche reports that OED 1933 said. DCDuring (talk) 04:25, 25 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Could you take a look at the "G" section at Wiktionary:Todo/Lists/Entries with no headword line? These are all deficient abbreviation entries for German ordinal numbers created by the same clueless user. I'm not sure what needs to be done to fix them, or even whether they're worth the effort. After all, they're basically just numbers with a dot at the end, and there are literally an infinite number of potential entries in this format.
Wow. How many such entries are there? So many that they should be cleaned up by bot, or few enough that we could tackle them by hand? BTW, there's a policy(!) that's been un-updated since 2006, which therefore mandates something chaotic which everyone fortunately ignores, which I need to post about in the BP soon... - -sche(discuss)02:45, 8 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
There are 11 pages in Category:Persian numeral symbols. All of them have the same problem, all but ۳ also have an Urdu entry with the same problem, and the same with a Pashto entry at ۶. That makes 22 language sections on 11 pages. There are Ottoman Turkish and Punjabi entries on all but ۱۰ that have headword templates, but those were added without touching the Persian or Urdu sections. Oddly enough, I went through all the Ottoman Turkish entries a month ago to change the "Ottoman numeral symbols" categories to "Ottoman Turkish numeral symbols" and didn't notice the problems elsewhere on those pages. A very quick spot check on the other languages in Category:Numeral symbols by language didn't turn up any others with this problem. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:18, 8 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
I've wondered about how to create a way to automatically check for missing headword templates, but it's the same issue I ran into trying to find a way to check for categories missing {{auto cat}} which should have it, which is that if the template isn't there, there's no obvious way to run the check in the first place. Theknightwho (talk) 20:04, 8 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
Hmm. Spitballing: what if we mass-deployed an "empty" template (call it {{non auto cat}} or {{category tracking template}} or whatever, and have it display nothing) to every category page that currently doesn't use {{auto cat}} or another such template? Then we could use an edit filter to warn people that every category has to contain one of those templates. (And we could at least manually, and ideally more automatedly, track what pages used {{non auto cat}} to see which ones were supposed to be using {{auto cat}}.) - -sche(discuss)15:31, 9 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hey, -sche, I've sent you some emails in the past few weeks and you never replied. Could you please reply when you get a chance? I still have feelings of being picked on, by one editor in particular, and I'd like to discuss them with you. Purplebackpack8900:06, 11 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi, I have an update.
I have been working on my article in Old Chinese (I was rewriting it to improve it and enrich it), I have found some tables of sound shifts in Baxter-Sagart (2014)! It talks about regular shifts and put some clusters as well. The languages treated are Old Chinese, Early Middle Chinese (EMC), Proto-Min, Proto-Vietic and Proto-Hmong-Khmer. At least for initials and syllable codas, I can copy these tables and do what you suggested we could do. In this way, we can even identify multiple sources of a sound in EMC. I checked Proto-Hmong-Khmer, we have a table of 150 loans with Old Chinese (Baxter-Sagart, 2014) taken from a reconstruction published in 2010 and quoted by Baxter-Sagart. Many words in Proto-Min are already here in Wiktionary, though not every single word. We already have sourced reconstruction or lemmas of Proto-Vietic (I could try to create a list from papers talking about the Vietnamese substrate in Old Chinese, which is our interest). Early Middle Chinese reconstruction of lemmas by Baxter (2011) is already available as well as the reconstruction of 5000 lemmas in Old Chinese (2014). Only the glosses used by Weldon Coblin to reconstruct Eastern Han Chinese/Late Han Chinese are missing (they are over 400 and they let you spot multiple sources of a sound in EMC and dialectal variations in LHan); in this moment I can only copy some of them (I should buy his book to be able to read through the section of vowels in LHan). I could put some information about LHan Chinese as well, but again, I should buy Coblin's book (1983); moreover, his reconstruction is (nice but) old and based on Li's reconstruction of Old Chinese.
I think we have most material to use the table you want to create once it's done. At least, "I think", I am not sure. Then, somebody should be able to use it, analyse glosses etc. etc., again, I am not sure.
Damn, I was working by total chance on Old Chinese when I noticed your message again by total chance, I use the info desk only when I need. I should put the BabelBox stuff on my userpage to let users know what languages I work on. Cicognac (talk) 08:01, 30 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
