User talk:CodeCat
template:he-Jussive of
Hey. I assume you deleted template:he-Jussive of by accident. (Its title and content match those of the other Hebrew conjugated-form-of templates.) So I've restored it. If I'm mistaken and it really should be deleted, then why?—msh210℠ (talk) 16:42, 22 April 2013 (UTC)
- I deleted it because I assumed it was an old redirect. Only one entry transcluded it, which I fixed. —CodeCat 17:02, 22 April 2013 (UTC)
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- I don't really agree with keeping it if there is no reason to. And because it has no transclusions, I see no reason to. —CodeCat 18:04, 22 April 2013 (UTC)
- There is reason to: the template name is mnemonic and enables entries to be created with the proper definition lines. (Had you "fixed" the one transcluding entry correctly, you'd have added
cap=ucto it to retain its displayed copy, and that code is far less mnemonic. Since I needed to re-fix your fix anyway, I've simply reverted. So the template does have a transclusion, which I guess takes care of your concern.) In any event, all the Hebrew form-of templates use the same dual-title structure, so if you're going to start deleting the capitalized versions, please first raise the issue at Wiktionary talk:About Hebrew.—msh210℠ (talk) 18:21, 22 April 2013 (UTC)- I wasn't aware of that. What I noticed was a template which apparently had the same purpose as another template that had the same name, except with a lowercase letter. Since we don't normally use case distinctions as part of template names, I had assumed it was a leftover from a migration from the (incorrect) uppercase to the (correct) lowercase name ad some point in the past. —CodeCat 18:26, 22 April 2013 (UTC)
- There is reason to: the template name is mnemonic and enables entries to be created with the proper definition lines. (Had you "fixed" the one transcluding entry correctly, you'd have added
- I don't really agree with keeping it if there is no reason to. And because it has no transclusions, I see no reason to. —CodeCat 18:04, 22 April 2013 (UTC)
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Frankish vs Old Frankish
This has been a slight bother for me for some time: the nomenclature of Old Frankish as simply "Frankish". How do you feel about this? To me, Frankish languages are still modern, and what we've been describing as "Frankish" is actually "Old Frankish".
As far as I know, the modern languages are usually called "Franconian".
Frankish and Franconian are synonymous. So we have "Old Frankish" = "Old Franconian"; and (moden) "Frankish" = (modern) "Franconian". It's more a matter of preference: a native term vs a Latinised one. But what you say is rather true, usually they are used in that way, but not necessarily. "Old Frankish" fits more in line with other ancient languages like Old English, Old High German, Old French, etc.
I don't see anyone referring to any modern Franconian languages or dialects as "Frankish". That said, whatever you guys decide is fine with me.
P.S. I moved the Frankish threads on my talk to page to the Wiktionary talk:About Frankish page. Maybe we can do the same with the threads here.
Hi, How do you think the Proto-Indo-Europeans would have said, "yes" (i.e. affirmed a statement)? I know that no/not was *ne, but Germanic seems to show an innovation as does Latin. Could it have been *eh₃?
Most Indo-European languages use a word that originally meant "so" or "thus" to say yes. Germanic and Latin are both examples of that. In the Romance languages it's clear that there wasn't a single word that was used, and different words are found in different languages (French oui < hoc ille, Occitan òc < hoc, Spanish/Italian si < sic). But in the Slavic languages there is variety too: many use da but Polish and Ukrainian use tak and Czech and Slovak also have their own words. The Celtic languages don't have a single word at all, but repeat the question. So it seems to me that Indo-Europeans didn't have a single way to say "yes", but used a wide variety of phrasings to get the meaning across.
Words for 'no' actually show more variety as well. ne didn't really mean "no" but just "not" and was presumably used as a shorthand, in the same way that we say "I'm not" rather than the full phrase "I'm not going to see my friend". Many languages have later come up with their own words to reinforce the negation, often giving phrases like "not at all" or "not a thing". French in particular has a wide variety of negation words, but the Germanic languages also have several alternatives. English not, Dutch niet and German nicht come from a phrase meaning "not a thing", while English no comes from a phrase meaning "not ever" and Dutch nee(n) was originally "not one" (cognate to English none). In Old Norse meanwhile, something similar to French happened. Extra words were added to normal negative phrases to strengthen the meaning, but those words then came to be treated as negations in their own right.
Ok, thanks for the insight. I know that not is equivalent to no + wight and that both Latin nōn and English none are equivalent to *ne- + *óynos, "not one". But what I'm still wondering is this: if you went back in time and asked a Proto-Indo-European a question, and he/she wanted to affirm, what would probably be the most common response? For example:
"H₂óweyes wĺ̥kʷons h₂ḱh₂owsyónti?" Most likely response: "_________"
I really don't have an answer to that. I know that they could have said "ins h₂ḱh₂owsyónti" (they hear them) but that's only because that's all I can think of that would be sort-of-valid PIE. For all we know, they used a word that didn't survive in any of the descendants. That is not so surprising if you consider that Germanic *ne hasn't survived 2000 years into any modern Germanic language!
I'd have to agree with CodeCat here. In Latin (a fairly conservative IE language, so a good clue at least), we often say sic or ita (meaning "thus") or sometimes a construction like tali in modo ("in such a manner"), but the fallback is often the verb. The clearest way to answer a question like Timueruntne dictatorem? ("Were they afraid of the dictator?") is to respond with the verb, because the phrasing emphasises the verb by putting it first.
A wide variety of languages I've looked at, from Japanese to Swahili, have a habit of using "thus" or repeating the verb where English would say "yes", so I think it's actually more normal.
> Could it have been *eh₃?
Clearly, evidence that PIE was based on the speech of time-travelling Canadians.
Hello,
wherever λαλέω (laleo, “to talk”) comes from, it has some cognates widespread in Latin, Germanic, Celtic and Baltic. Do you think there is a cognate in Albanian?
I'm going to create a Babel template for Proto-Indo-European, but I don't know much about the inflection. Anyways I created a sentence without much knowledge how-to (...):
Manus (nom. sg., m.) oinos (nom. sg., m.) wéwkontes (pp. of wewk "to sound", acc. plural., m.) g̑erontes (pp. of ger "to be old", acc. plural., m.) bhlēu (bad) au̯edti (she, he, it speaks, primary active).
This human speaks the old spoken badly.
Could you be kind and correct it? The things I don't know are: the word order and the adverb forming of Proto-Indo-European.
We don't use ĝ or u̯ as letters, but ǵ and w, and diphthongs normally end in y or w as well.
I think a better term for language would be *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s (“tongue”), which is commonly used to mean language in many descendants (including Latin, Slavic and Germanic). The accusative is *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂m.
*wekʷ- means primarily "speak" or "sound out" so it's probably the best verb to use. Unfortunately, I don't know what its present tense is, which would be the tense to use for habitual statements like this. The only descendant that has a candidate for this is Sanskrit, which has two forms, vakti and vivakti. I don't know anything about Sanskrit but the first looks like an athematic present and the second like an i-reduplicated present (what the difference is between them I don't know). So I think we could have a wild guess and say it has an athematic present *wékʷti.
I don't think 'manus' was the IE word for human, and I'm not even sure it existed at all. But there is *dʰǵʰémō, which is the ancestor of Latin homo and Germanic *gumô.
The word for 'this' isn't *óynos, that word meant 'one'. For 'this' we can probably use *só.
For 'old' we can use *sénos.
So now we have:
- Só dʰǵʰémō séneh₂m dn̥ǵʰwéh₂m (badly) wékʷti.
- This human/person (NOM) old language (ACC) badly speaks.
But we can also try other phrases to suit our knowledge of PIE words. For example:
- Só dʰǵʰémō séneh₂m dn̥ǵʰwéh₂m (well) ne wékʷti.
- This person (NOM) old language (ACC) well not speaks.
Or:
- Só dʰǵʰémō séneh₂s dn̥ǵʰuh₂és (much) ne wékʷti/wóyde.
- This person (NOM) old language (GEN) much not speaks/knows. (This person does not speak much of the old language)
Or even:
- Tósmey dʰǵʰm̥éney/dʰǵʰm̥néy séneh₂s dn̥ǵʰuh₂és (much) ǵnéh₃tis ne ésti.
- This person (DAT) old language (ACC)) (much) knowledge (NOM) not is. (PIE had no word for 'have', instead the dative was used with 'is', so read it as This person does not have much knowledge of the old language)
There are several different ways to phrase things like 'well', too. For example it could be translated at 'with ease' using an instrumental. 'badly' could be phrased as 'with difficulty'. We could also choose to use *wiHrós and *gʷḗn as terms for the user, or something else if we can find a PIE term for 'use' and 'user'.
Thanks for this certain answer! The term Proto-Indo-European *neud means to "to make use of", whence German "nutzen" descended, I guess. Anyhow I think it wouldn't fit it, because it'd sound like someone sells Wiktionary entries...
1: Só dʰǵʰémō apo séneh₂y dn̥ǵʰwéh₂y ad nū meg ne prepe. This human hasn't learnt much of the old language yet.
2: Tósmey dʰǵʰm̥éney séneh₂s dn̥ǵʰuh₂és sem ǵnéh₃tis ésti. This human knows some about the old language.
3: I dʰǵʰémō peri séneh₂y dn̥ǵʰwéh₂y ano suy keleuy wóyde. This human knows about the old language in a good way.
The 4 is for you, I think we can enhance with every number the sentence complexity.
Uh... well I think it may be better to use simple phrases, that will probably reduce the chance of errors. After all neither of us really know how they spoke PIE, and although presumably the oldest IE languages are closest to it, I don't know any old languages fluently either. It was already hard enough for me to create these templates for the old Germanic languages, and those are actually attested!
I have some questions and comments about the sentences you created as well.
- What does 'apo' mean in the first sentence? And what about 'meg', I can't recall seeing that pronoun before. The dative of 'old tongue' is séneh₂ey dn̥ǵʰuh₂éy. Sénos is a thematic adjective and so it does not ablaut, its feminine form is séneh₂ and consequently the dative is made by adding the dative ending -ey to it. Meanwhile, dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s is athematic (hysterokinetic) so its stem shifts from dn̥ǵʰwéh₂- to dn̥ǵʰuh₂´- in the oblique cases, hence dn̥ǵʰuh₂éy. Finally, what is 'prepe'?
- Does 'sem' mean 'some'? If so, then it ought to be an adjective or a pronoun and should have a case ending. Do you know which descendants have such a pronoun?
- What is 'I'? I also think that knowing 'about' is the same as knowing 'of' and hence would simply use the genitive case, so an adverb like 'peri' would not be necessary (and in its spatial sense, it would take the locative case most likely). I also have no idea what 'ano suy keleuy' is... those last two words don't even seem possible in PIE, my guess is they ought to have been 'swi' and 'kelewi' instead.
Thanks for the response!
- With "apo" I meant "of", but you maybe know the more correct phrase. Alternatively we can use "aw", btw so I'd have to move the entry "au" I created... The term "prepe" should be the perfect indicative of "prep" ("to catch sight of"). Of "prep" English furbish descended.
- Yes, I meant "some" with "sem", I just forgot to decline it... So it'd be "semtis"? Of course, I think all the Germanic with *samaz, as example English "some" or German "-sam".
- With "i" I meant the pronoun whence English "yon", Dutch "geen" and German "jene" descended. With "swi" I meant "good" and "kelewi" "way" and "ano" "on". Of "sw" Hindi सुख (sukh) ("delight") comes from. Of “kelew" Lithuanian keliáuju descended.
I'm glad that you analyize my sentences very certain.
I get the feeling you don't really understand all that much about Indo-European grammar and how the cases work. Prepositions really weren't very common in Indo-European because of the case system; the usage was probably similar to that of Finnish. A case was used whenever possible, and prepositions and adverbs were used only to specify the meaning further.
Another thing about PIE that is very important to understand is roots and ablaut. Without knowing how that works you can't really go into the depth of the grammar. To give a very short introduction, every root has a consonantal base consisting of one syllable where a single ablaut vowel e is inserted. That e can be replaced with o, or lengthened to ē and ō, or removed entirely. So, in a root like *bʰer- (“to carry”), the root itself is really *bʰ_r-, where the _ stands for the ablaut vowel. That means the root can take the forms *bʰer- (e-grade or 'full grade'), bʰor-, bʰr̥-, and also the lengthened grades bʰēr- and bʰōr-, although those are rare (if they occur at all). Suffixes also have ablaut vowels, and the same rules apply. Which grade a syllable has depends on the grammar: some cases have one ablaut pattern and other cases have others, and similarly for verbs. Changes in ablaut vowels are often accompanied by a change in accent as well. Roots are normally cited in the full grade (e-grade), so a root's entry on Wiktionary will always contain e. There are a few roots that apparently did not have any ablaut, but those are very rare. So a root with no e is suspicious.
Roots themselves always begin and end with a consonant. There are some words that begin with a vowel but they are not 'real' roots, usually they form adverbs and particles rather than nouns, adjectives and verbs. So the same applies here: a root beginning or ending with a vowel is suspicious and probably wrong.
One thing I haven't mentioned yet is the vowel a. That is a rather strange vowel in PIE. Several linguists believe it didn't even exist in PIE, while others believe it was very limited. In any case, it is a very rare vowel in PIE, so any word that contains it is again very suspicious and probably needs some close examination.
I looked at the entry 'au' you created. It uses indo-european.info as a reference. Please don't use that site as it is not a reliable source for PIE. The people of that site are creating a conlang out of reconstructions for PIE, but what they have created is not PIE at all. On Wiktionary we follow the scientific reconstruction of PIE only. In particular, their conlang does not have laryngeals, which are a standard feature of reconstructed PIE. The root 'au' that you added probably should be h₂ew- (because a is suspicious, most cases for it really come from h₂e), but I can't be sure.
Now about your new sentences...
- I am not familiar with the root *prep-, but judging from its meaning I don't see how it can mean 'learn'. But anyway, we should probably use a simpler word like 'know' or 'speak'.
- Instead of saying 'has knowledge' why not just say 'knows'?
- I believe the normal term for 'this' was *ki(s) or *kos, but it's uncertain and I don't know its inflection. But even then, the 'general' pronoun *só suffices in this case, there is no need for anything else. 'In a good way' seems unnecessarily complicated when 'well' works too.
Personally I would like to keep the sentences as similar as possible, so we don't need to write three completely different sentences (with more chance of errors).
It's interesting that that dative-"to be" construct for "to have" is also used in Finnish and Hungarian, and therefore most likely in Proto-Uralic as well.
Also, do you know if the presence of the PIE accent on a given symbol directly affects its reflexes? For example, if the first person plural pronoun was **wey rather than *wéy, would there be any difference in the derivatives?
That depends on the language. Aside from languages that preserve the accent placement itself, there are also languages that preserve indirect traces of the accent. Verner's Law in Germanic is a good example of that.
Ok. Do you have any idea how PIE *méme ~ moy reflexed into PG *mīnaz?
I don't think they did. *mīnaz probably goes back to an earlier *meynos, but I don't know where that came from.
Hi! I was wondering if you might be able to help me in finding some fonts...I haven't had luck on Google yet. I would like to be able to see all characters of various alphabets instead of boxes. :) Specifically atm, I am looking for fonts for Glagolitic and Old Persian script.
I don't really know how I could help with that.
Ahh, oh well. I was just wondering if you might know (for glagolitic at least) since you were doing cleanup on those letters...or do you have no font for them either? Actually...I found a Glagolitic font now ([1])
I do, but it's just the standard font.
I'm not necessarily looking for anything fancy, but yeah. Although now I'm have a different problem; I previously found a font or two supporting old persian and now that Glagolitic one. I have dragged them into my font folder on Windows and they don't show up in Chrome still :/ Whereas when I did the same kinda thing for with a font that apparently supports Old Cyrillic (which I mistook for glagolitic) it worked. And idea what could be wrong? Hope I'm not bothering you too much.
Hi,
I hope this is easy for you - Template_talk:t#Adding_automatic_transliteration_-_part_2. Could you help please?
I'm not sure what the locative is there for. It barely even survived into classical Latin. Did it survive into Vulgar Latin? Also, why not use a module?
No, that’s just a relic that I di’n’t know what to do with. Not sure what you mean by module. Since case functions were shared variously in different conjugations, I would rather not make a mother template; my template knowledge is still rather crude.
I meant a Lua module. That way, there wouldn't need to be two parameters, just one would be enough.
{{etyl}} is supposed to not have a second parameter for English entries. It says so in the documentation, and has been the common practice ever since the template was created.
Yes, but it's not wrong to specify it anyway, and it does no harm. I've always added it. But I believe that it will reduce errors when people copy etymologies into other languages, because they often do not realise that a second code is needed. If it's already there in the code, it will be more obvious. So again I am not changing any standard practice, just clarifying what is already there.
Common practice is to leave it out. Your setting of the template to add cleanup categories to entries using the prescribed format was done without discussion or consensus. Additionally, setting {{head}} to actually break when using the normal format (which is, by the way, added by numerous scripts) was also done without consensus. Forcing through these non-consensus-backed disputed breaking changes to templates that are among the most used on Wiktionary is completely inappropriate.
I don't think it's any more appropriate that you simply revert my changes without any discussion. I don't need to be educated. The normal format of {{head}} has never included leaving out the language code. In fact, after I made the change, I went and fixed the few entries that were missing one (there were less than a hundred). So your argument that things are broken by the change is completely unfounded, it seems like you're just being obstructive for the sake of it.
And adding tracking categories to entries is not something that needs consensus. Nor does it need consensus to change one valid format to another; people do it all the time when they convert, say, {{head}} into a language-specific template. Since having no source language on {{etyl}} and having "en" are both equally valid, there is nothing wrong with replacing one with the other since they are both equivalent. The only thing that would need consensus is to change the behaviour of the template so that the original practice no longer works, and while I do intend to suggest that at some point, I am not changing it yet.
Hoi! Weet jij toevallig wat een gravekrabber is? Ik heb het gegoogled, maar daar kwamen alleen maar Noorse hits uit. Ik las het wel in het Nederlands: 'Liefdevol boek voor gravenkrabbers.', dat is dan ook de enige Nederlandse hit geloof ik. Vreemd.
Ik ken dat woord ook niet...
Literally, the word means "grave scratcher" in Dutch, like someone who scratches the places people are buried in. I'm not sure what to make of that.
Module:si-translit for Sinhalese, please?
Can I push my luck and ask for more help? I've asked User:ZxxZxxZ who made Module:hi-translit to work better but he is unavailable. I actually built this module based on the Hindi module but I only understand what it does (roughly), not how it works.
Anyway, the design doesn't have to be the same as long as it works. Consonants are transliterated as they are in the table but add an "a" if they are not followed by a diacritic, so, 'ක' + 'ා' = කා (kā). "a" is an inherent vowel like in Hindi but the rules also apply for the end of the word, කන්ද (kanda) = 'ක' + 'න' + '්' + 'ද'.
I will add any missing symbols. Will test on conjucts. This may not be perfect but even Google can't handle Sinhalese script, would be great if you could have a simple tool like this one.
Hi CodeCat. Did you have a discussion before switching {{nl-noun}} to Lua? I ask this because I’m working on Module:pt-noun.
Hoe gaat het?
Could you help me with this, please - Template_talk:t#Adding missing transliterations to categories (experiment)?
You deleted my entry on this alternative form of geoluread (including the -h-), but this is the same attestation on the Wiktionary entry for "orange", and Wikipedia redirects "Geoluhread" to "Orange". I have no Old English attestations, but both wikis are cited.
If you have no objections, I will attempt to create the page again. I have seen it spelled both ways, but like I said before, I cannot find any attestations at the moment.
Then I ask you not to create it. I would submit it for verification, which means that it will require citations or be deleted.
There's no reason for an h to be there, since read doesn't have it, nor does geolo/geolu. Old English h isn't just random- it almost always comes from a specific Proto-Germanic sound, which itself is usually from a specific Proto-Indo-European sound. None of the cognates for either of the members of the compound have anything corresponding to an h. Both of the wiki references cite the same source, which is probably mistaken or misquoted. I changed the Wiktionary one to geoluread because *geoluhread is at best a very rare variant of the actal word misplaced. We don't count wikis as sources for WT:CFI, so the one usable hit in Google Books is suspect, as it seems to get it from Wikipedia. By the way: Bosworth-Toller only have geoloread, so we might want to add that spelling. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:59, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
Should we correct the other pages then?
There seems to be a problem with this. Look at Appendix:Proto-Germanic/reukaną: the conjugation table somehow covers a bit of the content below it. I don’t really know how this module stuff works.
It looks normal to me...
Are you using Firefox? I just checked, and it seems to look fine there. This problem seems to only affect Safari and Chrome. Is there anything different about the resulting HTML from what it was with the regular template?
I did change some things but I actually just changed them back to what it was before Stardsen messed things up a little bit. I don't know what could be causing it.
Sorry, no.
So, we have Category:Wemba-Wemba language (note hyphen). That's fine but see Category:Wemba Wemba nouns...how the heck are those entries being put THERE by {{head}}? :/
Template:xww shows "Wemba-Wemba" as the language, but Module:languages shows "Wemba Wemba" for xww, and "Wemba-Wemba" for aus-wem.
So what is the solution? An edit to the module?
Or the template, depending on which is correct. It has been hard to keep the two synchronised, some solution should be found for that...
We do plan to delete the templates in favour of the module someday, right?
If not (unless we plan to delete the module), that's bad; two massive, complex records will never stay synced without a very smart bot watching them.
But if so, I suggest that when that day comes, we have someone (I volunteer) go through the module and the templates by hand, deleting templates one by one after checking that they are correctly in the module, and reviewing any codes that the module contains that templates don't. If possible, we speed up the process by having a bot make a list of all codes which are in the module but not the Template: namespace, or vice versa, or which are in both places but with unidentical contents, and by having the bot delete all the templates are not on the list (i.e., which are in the module), before the human reviewers come in.
aus-wem shouldn't exist in the module (and doesn't exist any longer in the template namespace). As for whether to use a hyphen or a space: I changed xww to use a hyphen, so I must have looked into it and found that it was more commonly hyphenated than not, as part of my long-term effort to ensure Wiktionary calls each language by its most common distinct English name (or makes exceptions consciously, rather than by bot-copypasting SIL errors).
I've just started learning a little Afrikaans, which is a lot of fun (like Dutch but easier!) and reminds me Yinglish in an alternate universe, for some reason. (Maybe all West Germanic languages do that when they lose their conjugations and declensions.)
Anyway, the reason I brought this up is because you seem to have added some Afrikaans in Arabic script, and I have no idea why. Sure, a lot of languages have been written in other scripts, but most of them not often enough to merit adding entries in it. I had never seen this phenomenon before, and I don't think we should have entries for it. What do you think?
If it's attestable, then it can be included, right? CFI doesn't say anything about scripts.
My implication is that it's not attestable. Afrikaans needs three uses. But I'd rather just have a policy, just like our policy of keeping Yiddish terms in their Hebrew script forms only, even though Yiddish is written in Latin as well. As WT:AYI says, Latin script can be used to attest to the existence of a word, but the entry should always be in the Hebrew script.
The difference is that Afrikaans was at one point legitimately written in Arabic script: w:Arabic Afrikaans. From Wiktionary's point of view it's a dead language, really, so it kind of qualifies for LDL because there is so little of it. But it's definitely more than just "oh let's write it in Arabic for the fun of it". The Afrikaans Wiktionary itself also includes it in its entries.
Thanks for the link. Might still be easier to call it a separate L2, because a Serbo-Croatian-esque solution will look stupid here, giving way too much precedence to a basically extinct sublect. {{gem-afa}}?
That's why there were separate categories for it, but you deleted them. I would compare it more to Old Church Slavonic in Glagolitic. It was never as common as Cyrillic (except in Croatia) and most textbooks on OCS consider only the Cyrillic variety. But we still consider them one language.
So you may or may not have noticed I have been archiving closed rfd discussions...I came across a little problem though :/ See Talk:too much; the second discussion isn't displaying properly within the template. Any chance you could tell me what's going on? Thanks. It seems to be because of a "wikitable" made by "raw code" is in the text, but other than that I don't know.
Yes it was something like that. The problem is that the parser doesn't know how to tell whether the | in the table are intended to mark up the table, or meant to separate parameters to the rfd-passed template. I've fixed it now.
Ah, thanks. :)
This does occasionally happen. You can use <nowiki>|</nowiki> or {{!}}
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