Linguoboy

Welcome

Hello, welcome to Wiktionary, and thank you for your contributions so far.

If you are unfamiliar with wiki-editing, take a look at Help:How to edit a page. It is a concise list of technical guidelines to the wiki format we use here: how to, for example, make text boldfaced or create hyperlinks. Feel free to practice in the sandbox. If you would like a slower introduction we have a short tutorial.

These links may help you familiarize yourself with Wiktionary:

• Entry layout (EL) is a detailed policy on Wiktionary's page formatting; all entries must conform to it. The easiest way to start off is to copy the contents of an existing same-language entry, and then adapt it to fit the entry you are creating.
• Check out Language considerations to find out more about how to edit for a particular language.
• Our Criteria for Inclusion (CFI) defines exactly which words can be added to Wiktionary; the most important part is that Wiktionary only accepts words that have been in somewhat widespread use over the course of at least a year, and citations that demonstrate usage can be asked for when there is doubt.
• If you already have some experience with editing our sister project Wikipedia, then you may find our guide for Wikipedia users useful.
• If you have any questions, bring them to Wiktionary:Information desk or ask me on my talk page.
• Whenever commenting on any discussion page, please sign your posts with four tildes (~~~~) which automatically produces your username and timestamp.
• You are encouraged to add a BabelBox to your userpage to indicate your self-assessed knowledge of languages.

Enjoy your stay at Wiktionary! Ultimateria (talk) 00:43, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

sentier

Are you sure these terms were borrowed from Old French? The Portuguese and Spanish at least were inherited directly from Latin. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 23:10, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

I only added the entries for Catalan. I had nothing to do with creating the rest of the list.Linguoboy (talk) 19:15, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

Community Insights Survey

Share your experience in this survey

Hi Linguoboy,

The Wikimedia Foundation is asking for your feedback in a survey about your experience with Wiktionary and Wikimedia. The purpose of this survey is to learn how well the Foundation is supporting your work on wiki and how we can change or improve things in the future. The opinions you share will directly affect the current and future work of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Please take 15 to 25 minutes to give your feedback through this survey. It is available in various languages.

This survey is hosted by a third-party and governed by this privacy statement (in English).

Find more information about this project. Email us if you have any questions, or if you don't want to receive future messages about taking this survey.

Sincerely,

RMaung (WMF) 14:32, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

Reminder: Community Insights Survey

Share your experience in this survey

Hi Linguoboy,

A couple of weeks ago, we invited you to take the Community Insights Survey. It is the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual survey of our global communities. We want to learn how well we support your work on wiki. We are 10% towards our goal for participation. If you have not already taken the survey, you can help us reach our goal! Your voice matters to us.

Please take 15 to 25 minutes to give your feedback through this survey. It is available in various languages.

This survey is hosted by a third-party and governed by this privacy statement (in English).

Find more information about this project. Email us if you have any questions, or if you don't want to receive future messages about taking this survey.

Sincerely,

RMaung (WMF) 19:13, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

isaf

Thanks for creating an entry for uchaf - please could I suggest that you create a similar one for isaf? --Dani di Neudo (talk) 21:25, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

P.S. isel#Welsh exists already and also is#Welsh.

Language codes

When you copy an etymology template from one language to another, make sure you change the language code(s). These templates aren't just for the text you read, they're also for putting entries in the correct etymology categories. At anticòs you copied {{calque|en|de|Antikörper|nocap=1}} from the English entry, but left "en" for English instead of "ca" for Catalan. That put the page in Category:English terms calqued from German instead of Category:Catalan terms calqued from German, and Category:English terms derived from German instead of Category:Catalan terms derived from German. A picky little detail, but in a dictionary picky little details matter. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:13, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for catching this. Linguoboy (talk) 16:35, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

{{desc}} parameters

Please place {{desc}} parameter at the end of the template. The first parameter should always be the language code, and the second the term. --{{victar|talk}} 05:56, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

Also {{topN}} should only be used in long lists of descendants. --{{victar|talk}} 05:58, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

How long is "long"? Linguoboy (talk) 18:58, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

If you have to ask, not long enough. Also try and pay attention to what other people do in that language family. --{{victar|talk}} 05:09, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

That's not a useful answer. I do pay attention and I've seen a huge range of variation in their use which is why I asked for specific guidelines. Linguoboy (talk) 20:10, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Then simply don't use it. --{{victar|talk}} 14:36, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

please be more careful with Catalan entries

I've caught quite a lot of entries where you used {{ca-noun}} or {{ca-adj}} without any parameters, with incorrect results. I just now encountered one, for example: coixí de monja, which wrongly displays a plural 'coixí de monges' due to you not including the plural explicitly. As it happens, I am about to push a change to Module:ca-headword that will handle cases like this automatically, but the principle remains: you need to check the inflections before saving. Benwing2 (talk) 01:12, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Some more nouns: griveta boscana, rata talpera, pebre de l'aigua, roure martinenc, rorqual blau, tot terreny. Benwing2 (talk) 01:31, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, but keep creating Catalan content. A small bit of incorrectness amid a bunch of correct stuff is always better than no stuff Zemely Nashka (talk) 22:47, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

@Zemely Nashka I completely disagree. If you can't bother to be careful in your edits, I would rather they not be made at all. Wiktionary is not like Wikipedia: It requires more specialized knowledge and doesn't have as many contributors. In particular there aren't enough contributors to Wiktionary to clean up after careless editors, and as a result there's a lot of junk here that shouldn't be. Benwing2 (talk) 22:52, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 I think your standards may be unreasonably high. In the thousands of Catalan entries I've created over the years, you managed to find a tiny handful of small, easily-corrected errors. That's a very good record (equal or better to my performance in my paid profession) and it doesn't even take into account the corrections I've made to existing entries. At any rate, I'm quite pleased with it and I'm sorry to see you're not satisfied with anything short of perfection.

Thanks for pushing out the new change. I was chuffed to see it applied to the plural forms for multiword entries I created today. Linguoboy (talk) 23:26, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Just FYI there were several other errors I ran into and corrected silently. I am glad you are taking an interest in minority languages like Catalan but we can't sacrifice quality in the interests of quantity. Also note that I changed the handling of feminine nouns so that certain endings are special-cased and made epicene automatically; this includes those in -ble, -ç, -ant, -ent, -il (except -fil), as well as -al and -ar in multisyllabic words that do not have an accented vowel in them (hence monosyllabic words like gal, car, clar, etc. as well as words like anòmal, èuscar and such will get a feminine in -a by default). I also improved the feminine algorithm of words in -VCi and -VCCi for any V = vowel and C = consonant, so now e.g. llegendari automatically gets 'llegendària' as the feminine, carolingi automatically gets 'carolíngia' as the feminine and malaisi automatically gets 'malàisia' as the feminine. I am going to change the feminine of words in -at, -it and -ut (under the same proviso as -al/-ar, i.e. multisyllabic without a written accent) to be -ada, -ida, -uda by default because most such words originate as past participles. All of these changes mean there are some adjectives that now need an explicit feminine that didn't before (which BTW can be written #a in most cases, because # stands for the lemma). Benwing2 (talk) 23:44, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Ben for the corrections. Please bear in mind that this is exactly what a wiki should be - some users dumping a load of content, others noticing it, correcting it and improving it, others standardizing entries, others botting to make others' work less monotonous, others bickering, others fighting vandalism and others causing vandalism, all the while mutually learning off of each other. We do the same with your many errors, Mr. Wing! But you are just as vital a cog as Linguoboy! Zemely Nashka (talk) 05:57, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

@Zemely Nashka With all due respect, you have no idea what you're talking about. You've only been around two days and you didn't even read what I said above about "Wiktionary is not like Wikipedia". Benwing2 (talk) 06:59, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

He's also added etymologies of Catalan words supposedly borrowed from Spanish. As if Spanish and Catalan didn't come from the same vulgar Latin!! I wonder if he does the same to Galician entries. 178.120.17.31 22:38, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

Who is "he" and can you give me examples? Spanish can definitely borrow from Catalan and vice-versa. Benwing2 (talk) 22:59, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2: The IP is probably referring to mestís, which was their last edit before coming here. I would note that there's at least one source linked to in the entry that says it's a borrowing from Spanish, and one that says "segurament per conducte del castellà mestizo". This IP has a history in a wide variety of completely different languages over several years of not thinking things through and of getting quite indignant over how wrong everyone else is. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:28, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

@Linguoboy you should really be more careful, you just create the pages and don't even put a dictionary as a reference Stríðsdrengur (talk) 22:22, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

@Stríðsdrengur Can you give me some examples? Benwing2 (talk) 04:24, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

pebràs lleter, cabra d'avet and several others Stríðsdrengur (talk) 11:19, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

@Stríðsdrengur Is it mostly the lack of references or are there other issues? Benwing2 (talk) 11:39, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Missing references is the thing, but there could also be at least one detail about etymology or adding terms derived from the words, etc. Stríðsdrengur (talk) 11:41, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

@Stríðsdrengur OK. I think it's not a blockable offense to create relatively spare entries like this as long as all the info in the entries is correct. I've warned this user previously about mistakes they've made (and not just "a tiny handful of small, easily-corrected errors" as the user claims, but for example hundreds and hundreds of wrong pronunciations; basically the user was using a new entry creator wizard and blindly adding or accepting {{ca-IPA}} without params just because it didn't throw an error, which led to hundreds of mistakes). If they continue creating entries with mistakes in them, I will block them, but I don't think it's reasonable to do this just for spare newly created entries. Benwing2 (talk) 11:51, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

I have intermediate knowledge of Catalan and I'm friends with native speakers, I can help correct at least a third of it Stríðsdrengur (talk) 11:54, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

But, then, there's really no excuse for creating paó de dia with a Korean L2 header. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:31, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

yeah Stríðsdrengur (talk) 22:15, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Hello @Chuck Entz and thanks for joining the discussion here. I confess I'm not sure I understand the meaning of this statement. If a cooperative database is constructed to allow certain errors, then--given enough contributions--the database will eventually contain these errors. The best we can hope to do is minimise them, not eliminate them completely. For more than 20 years I've been helping maintain a local bibliographic database of over 11 million records (and regularly using an international database containing more than 540 million records). Just when I think I've seen every possible error, I run across a new one. It's simply inevitable given the limitations of the procedures and routines used to validate the data.

I apologise for letting this one slip through. I do preview all my entries multiple times before publishing them and then go back and double-check for errors, but I'm fallible and some do make it in. That's not an "excuse", that's simply the nature of this sort of work. I hope you understand I'm doing my best. Linguoboy (talk) 22:55, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

@Linguoboy It may be a sign you're editing too fast. I definitely get that feeling. Benwing2 (talk) 00:06, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Igbo contributions

Hi! Thank you for your contributions to Igbo. Please make sure to review WT:About Igbo when creating entries. This includes taking note of words that have a downstep and marking those syllables with a macron accent, as I've since done in nkịtā. Also when listing cognates, please try to see if you're able to find the correct orthography for them. The cognates listed at that page just obviously aren't what the people speaking those languages would use, nor would we create entries in those formats. AG202 (talk) 04:15, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

@AG202 Thank you very much for reaching out to me! What resource(s) do you use to determine which words contain a downstep? My primary reference is Echeruo which AFAICT doesn't indicate it, only patterns of high and low tones. As for cognates, I'm not sure what you mean. I didn't edit the Etymology section of that page at all (all I really did was add a Category and a couple of Derived Terms) so any cognates listed there must be the work of another contributor. Linguoboy (talk) 14:15, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

@Linguoboy Oops that's my bad, I misread the edits, sorry about that. @Hk5183 please see the above section about etymology sections. In terms of resources, I'd point to the dictionary written by Kay Williamson found here; it's technically a dialectal dictionary but has many standard terms with proper tone marking. AG202 (talk) 19:30, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice.

I added cognate terms in other Igboid languages in the linguistic orthography used in dictionaries. I will try to find other resources, but I figure that a temporary orthography is better than none, even if they are only used until a better one is found.

I'm trying to find something along the lines of a "request for orthography" template, but I don't know if that exists. I will look into finding other resources.

Hk5183 (talk) 20:44, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Catalan verbs

Hi, just FYI as you've been creating Catalan verb entries lately: the Catalan conjugation templates have been revamped so that there is now only one, {{ca-conj}}. In almost all cases it needs no parameters and will conjugate both regular and irregular verbs correctly. See the documentation if you have any questions. Benwing2 (talk) 06:14, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Catalan pronunciations

Please be aware that Catalan adjectives in -ar are not pronounced the same as Catalan verbs in -ar. Hence e.g. your addition of {{ca-IPA}} to laminar without arguments is mistaken. I am cleaning all these up now but please be aware of this for the future, thanks! Benwing2 (talk) 03:59, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Catalan pronunciations again

Please stop adding Catalan pronunciations. You seem to have no idea what you're doing. pendeloc, for example, has ò not ó per the DNV [1]. I am still correcting older mistakes you've made, e.g. nouns in -ir do not have the same pronunciation as verbs in -ir (the -r is pronounced in nouns). You seem to be guessing randomly in many cases. Please confirm this message, as you haven't confirmed my previous messages. Benwing2 (talk) 06:03, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

I didn't consult the DNV for that pronunciation; as noted below, I consulted the DCVB which quite clearly gives /pəndəlók/. Linguoboy (talk) 15:45, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

The DCVB is 100 years out of date, and they give the pronunciation of /pəndəlók/ only for a single village. You should not generalize to everywhere. In general, DNV and GDLC are much more current, and /ɔ/ in Valencian almost always indicates /ɔ/ in Central Catalan as well. Benwing2 (talk) 23:16, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

I have redone the handling of final -r in {{ca-IPA}} and removed many of the defaults (because they're often wrong). This is all documented in Template:ca-IPA/documentation, including how to correctly specify the respelling. I am also in the process of removing a lot of other defaults, for similar reasons. I have also added a section on the main sources of pronunciation for Catalan, and another section on how the mid vowels line up between dialects. Please pay close attention to this; I don't want to have to continue cleaning up after you. Benwing2 (talk) 04:58, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

@Linguoboy pls use "from" in the beginning of etym. Stríðsdrengur (talk) 19:16, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

@Linguoboy @Benwing2 Please stop! You keep jumping from language to language, now you're in French, you clearly have no affinity with these languages, try studying them! Stríðsdrengur (talk) 12:09, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

@Stríðsdrengur I don't understand how you assess something as nebulous as "affinity". If, like @Benwing2, you have well-founded criticisms of specific edits, please share those with me. Linguoboy (talk) 14:51, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

houri#French lack of pronunciation, no etymology template was used, the page is incomplete as there is also a masculine noun for this same entry, etc. Stríðsdrengur (talk) 17:03, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

@Stríðsdrengur None of those are required fields. If you look at other French entries, you'll see that hundreds if not thousands lack etymologies, pronunciations, attested definitions, etc. So your criticisms basically amount too "This entry isn't as complete as it could have been." But this is a wiki. If you find an entry inadequate, you can further edit it--as you in fact did. So what exactly is the issue here? Linguoboy (talk) 18:04, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

It would be nice if that was the only problem here, and it's not cool to try to justify your mistakes by pointing to others' mistakes. And one more thing, this "someone can fix it later" argument doesn't make sense, why don't you do it yourself? It's nice to do something that doesn't give other people headaches. Stríðsdrengur (talk) 18:39, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

@Stríðsdrengur These aren't "mistakes"; these are choices. They are simply different choices than the ones you would make. Linguoboy (talk) 19:06, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

So don't make these choices, we already have enough mess to be organized. Stríðsdrengur (talk) 19:07, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

You have very strong opinions about what Wiktionary entries should look like and that's fine. I encourage you to advocate for those opinions in the appropriate fora. In the meantime, why don't you get back to doing your work and I'll get back to doing mine. Linguoboy (talk) 19:14, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Irish definitions

Hi, please do not copy and paste Ó Dónaill's definitions into our entries. That's a copyright violation and also risks perpetuating errors that may exist in his dictionary. Thanks! —Mahāgaja · talk 07:56, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Tá sorry orm, a chairde. I've seen this done so routinely here (to the point of faithfully reproducing the internal formatting of entries) I'd assumed we had the blessing of the copyright holders (who I presume are the Government of Ireland?).

I'd be interested in hearing more about the known errors in it sometime, as I rely on heavily for reading and writing Irish.Linguoboy (talk) 16:37, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

I'd like to say the same regarding the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru for Welsh entries, which is also in copyright.

Btw, as an etymological dictionary the GPC is more concerned with the written record over the centuries than the usual or standard senses of words in Welsh, so entries cleaving to the GPC are particularly obvious for Welsh biological taxonomy, the main thing I deal with on Wiktionary!

Fairly often the GPC has content from 18th and 19th century dictionaries and works, complete with idiosyncratic English names in the glosses that can be misleading when the same name is used in 21st century English for a different species.

If you're interested in a decent modern resource for biological taxonomy, try checking out the Cyfres Enwau Creaduriaid a Phanhigion book series, the contents of which can also be found at Y Bywiadur. Arafsymudwr (talk) 18:55, 24 February 2024 (UTC)