User talk:Ruakh/2007

Note: In assembling this archive, I've reunited some conversations that were previously spread across multiple discussion pages. Comments in green (like this) are comments brought here from other users' talk-pages. (My apologies if your link colors are such that this makes links hard to read.)

January

Adding pronunciations

I see on your page for חשב that you have included pronunciations for all the related terms. While it is nice to have pronunciations, we only put the pronunciation of a word in the pronunciation section of that word's page. In translation tables or lists of related words, we may include Latinized transcriptions, but not pronunciations. --EncycloPetey 04:45, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Oh, thanks for the information. Tell me, does Wiktionary have a standard scheme for transcribing Hebrew into the Latin alphabet? Ruakh 18:17, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi,

Thanks for your comment on my talk-page.

What scheme do we use here for transcribing Hebrew?

Ruakh 13:09, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

P.S. Unrelated — I think it would be a good idea to define Hebrew roots separately (so e.g. שטח would have the sections "Root", "Noun", "Verb", and again "Verb", with "Root" having a definition along the lines of "Words formed from this root typically pertain to area, to spreading out, or to flatness"), but that seems like the kind of thing that should be discussed before I just go ahead and start adding such sections. Where could I start such a discussion? Thanks again, Ruakh 13:31, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't know that we have one selected yet. There is a partial scheme described on the w:Hebrew language article at Wikipedia, but I don;t know whether it's usable for our purposes. I recommend that you find a few other people working actively here on Hebrew and select one, then write up your transcription on a page titled Wiktionary:About Hebrew so that everyone can refer to it. We've already got similar pages started for Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and a few other languages]]. --EncycloPetey 23:42, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Will do, thanks again! :-) Ruakh 19:46, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Nice start on the Wiktionary:About Hebrew page. If you haven't already, you might advertise its existence and goal in the Beer Parlour. The posting will attract interested people who might drop in occasionally, but have some good suggestions. --EncycloPetey 20:20, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Hebrew proper nouns

Hey, I'd like to put in a work request with you (it seems like I've been putting in a lot of these with various people lately.....). If you ever get some time and motivation, it'd be awesome if you could beef up the proper noun section of Hebrew. I've been working on Category:Ancient Greek proper nouns lately, and most of them are biblical names. And it just doesn't seem right to have a Hellenized Hebrew name which doesn't go back to the Hebrew. Obviously you've got your hands full with other things right now, so don't consider this urgent by any stretch of the imagination. Bit if, in a perhaps a year or two, you get to a point where you're wondering, "what can I do now?" it'd be something. Thanks. Cerealkiller13 18:56, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

February

Renaming AHD?

As one of the people who voiced an opinion in the discussion, I thought you'd like to know that a VOTE has been initiated regarding the name of our "AHD" pronunciation system. --EncycloPetey 06:05, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up on the AHD vote.

One question, though: why is option 0 mutually exclusive with the other options? It seems that someone might like (for example) the names "AHD" and "EPR" but not the others; why make them choose one, when people who don't like "AHD" don't have to?

—Ruakh_TALK 22:29, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

P.S. I wish we'd had Keffy's clarification earlier, as we might have proposed versions with "IDR" or "TDR" (inter- or trans-dialectic representation) instead of "PR". Ah, well. —Ruakh_TALK 22:29, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

In any event, IDR has too many computer related meanings (including "internet domain registry") and TDR is a major global health branch of WHO. So don't feel too bad that we didn't include them as options. --EncycloPetey 01:50, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, I didn't mean just "IDR" or "TDR" any more than just "PR"; I meant "EIDR", "WTDR", etc. And you haven't answered my question as to why the "AHD" option is mutually exclusive with the others. Is there a WT:VOTE-wide policy against voting for both no-change and a specific change? —Ruakh_TALK 04:30, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure that voting policies have ever been fully laid out for Wiktionary. Previous "support" votes like this one have not had Oppose votes, but they're showing up anyway.

These clearly counter the indications. The "oppose" should be struck, leaving them as comments only. DAVilla 22:54, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I modelled this vote on previous ones, and see this as a dichotomy between "change" or "no change". The various options are simply a way of expressing the preferred form of the change. It just doesn't make sense to me that someone will vote to "not change" and then select a "change" option. --EncycloPetey 04:33, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure I agree with the dichotomy; there are a number of possible names, one of which happens to be the name we're currently using. Now, when it comes to implementing the result of the vote, I'll agree that there's a dichotomy; but in voting, someone might be O.K. with keeping the current name, but also O.K. with one or more of the alternatives (but not others), and I don't see why they should be prevented from voting in a way that accurately reflects exactly which alternatives they're O.K. with. (As for "oppose" votes, I don't think people are expecting their "oppose" votes to be counted as negative votes, or anything; they just want to register their opposition, and perhaps give reasons, in the hopes of swaying those who vote after them.) —Ruakh_TALK 08:38, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Smart-quote-ifying my comments

Hi, please feel free to fix obvious typos and errors in my comments, but please don't replace my apostrophes and quote marks and so on with their smart-quote counterparts; call me old-fashioned, but I prefer " and '. Thanks in advance! —Ruakh_TALK 19:46, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I have responded unto you on my talk page. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 20:59, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, since you asked specifically. Just so that you are aware ′ & ″ are actually a prime and a double prime, representing a foot and an inch, respectively (as in five feet and eleven inches = 5′11″, not 5’11” or 5‘11“) — they have a specific purpose and their use as apostrophes and quotation marks is therefore erroneous. Nonetheless, I have no right to implement them in your talk page comments, particularly if you ask me not to, so I won’t. Just for interest, also note that the twelve (or in some systems ten) divisons of an inch, lines, are denoted by a triple prime: ‴, and the further subdivided unit, the gry (¹/₁₀ of a line), is denoted by a quadruple prime: ⁗. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 20:52, 7 February 2007 (UTC) Postscriptum: TYVM?

Sorry to just barge in on this conversation, but I always wondered what you were changing in everyone's comments. I kept seeing apostrophes changed to apostrophes, and I was confused as to what was happening. I'm glad to finally have the answer. Anyway, I thought it might be worth mentioning that you may want to consider taking this as a general rule of thumb for everyone (not just for Ruakh). Obviously it's your fate, and thus your call, but I think that people usually don't appreciate their comments being edited at all, for any reason (it's sort of an unwritten Wiki rule). That being said, I'm curious how you get the "correct" apostrophes and quotation marks in (and furthermore, how you distinguish between the two, they look identical to me). Are you cutting and pasting from a character map of some kind, or is there a specific key sequence that accomplishes this? Thanks. Atelaes 21:43, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

That's not true; ' and " are multipurpose — they date from the days that ASCII unified characters with similar glyphs — and their Unicode names are APOSTROPHE (=apostrophe-quote, =APL quote) and QUOTATION MARK. Unicode has separate prime and double-prime characters. (Granted, Unicode does list other characters as being preferred for actual quotation-mark and apostrophe use, but for some reason I just don't like them in Web contexts. Maybe I should just get over it. I do support other forms of pedantry. :-P) —Ruakh_TALK 03:29, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Just so that you are aware, ' & " are actually different characters from ′ & ″. Cynewulf 13:54, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Doremítzwr: you have been warned about modifying other user's comments before. You will not do it again. Understand? Robert Ullmann 02:18, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Do not threaten or command me. Those who do not wish me to do so may ask, as Ruakh did above, for me to stop, and I will immediately comply. I only make minor changes, such as correcting typos and directing punctuation — things that exist 99>% of the time because of error (in the case of typos) or disinclination to expend time (in the case of directed punctuation). Ruakh seems to appreciate the former type of editing (“please feel free to fix obvious typos and errors in my comments”) — shall I nonetheless expect a typically heavy-handed block the next time that I correct one of his typos? As I explained here, the convention of not correcting others’ comments exists to prevent unscrupulous editors from putting words in others’ mouths. I never do that. Neither do I add diacritics or ligatures to others’ words. Neither do I switch alternative spellings (such as color → colour or vice versa). I only make changes that would universally be regarded as corrections. Furthermore, any objection from the individuals themselves whom I correct is immediately honoured by me. Stop championing this non-existent cause on behalf of a community of people who could not care less, just for a pathetic little excuse to unjustifiably browbeat me. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 02:53, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

It is never acceptable to change other people's comments in any way. It does not matter that you think the changes are "minor". Robert Ullmann 03:45, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

I assure you Doremitzwr, that Robert is not simply coming up with an excuse to bully you. It is, in fact, a very wide scale general consensus (on a number of wikis) that editing other people's comments on talk pages is not ok. While you are correct in that the primary motivation behind this (admittedly unwritten) policy is to prevent people from changing the meanings of people's comments, the fact remains that even minor changes, such as the ones you make, are generally frowned upon. Atelaes 04:14, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, good to know. I also sometimes fix people's typos (when I'm editing anyway, and it's clear that they're typos), but now I see that the English Wikipedia (where I spend most of my wikitime) has the same policy ("It is not necessary to bring talk pages to publishing standards, so there is no need to correct typing errors, grammar, etc. It tends to irritate the users whose comments you are correcting."^link). Hopefully I've never angered anyone by doing so … —Ruakh_TALK 05:06, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Even if Robert Ullmann’s motivations are entirely noble (which I seriously doubt that they are), he is going exactly the opposite of the right way to dealing with this. I refuse to obey dogma and rank-pulling. I do not listen to commands or threats. However, as I would hope is becoming abundantly clear, reasoning and respect works a treat. In an attempt to seek a resolution to this current dispute, I have organised a poll here. Ruakh, please bullet and sign this section. Thank you. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 13:48, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

#switch

Note the use of switch in {{t|}} is a really bad idea if you want to learn how to use it! It is used there in a devolved form only to check the gender argument.

The full form is #switch| arg| val1 = result1| val2 = result2| etc.

Since values that don't have an equals sign default to the next, I used it in t like this #switch| {g}| m| f| mf| n| c = {g}, so all of the valid values translate to themselves, and invalid ones to nothing.

If you use {{#switch|{{{g|}}}|m|f|c= {{{{{g}}}}}}} it will do what you want. The reason for checking is because users might use anything there by mistake, and calling random templates is not good. Cheers! Robert Ullmann 09:30, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your comment.

Don't worry, {{t}} wasn't leading me astray; I simply misremembered how {{#switch}} worked (I thought it used separate parameters for conditions as for values), and by the time I determined how it does in fact work (by reading m:ParserFunctions##switch:), I had realized that it was simpler to just do {{{g}}}.

That's a good point about users accidentally using the wrong template, but I thought more flexibility might be good. In a sense, it turns out I was right: I was unaware of {{mf}}, because WT:ELE doesn't mention it, and therefore wouldn't have supported it if I was trying to restrict things to the correct values.

Of course, it's all moot because I realized eventually that I was being stupid and there was no reason to incorporate these templates at all, since they come after the very end of the translation.

Thanks for checking up on me, though. :-)

—Ruakh 18:10, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Transliteration

I took the definition of Transliteration from Wiktionary:Transliteration and the OED has the following:

To replace (letters or characters of one language) by those of another used to represent the same sounds; to write (a word, etc.) in the characters of another alphabet.

So I will re-edit the glossary. Perhaps we can discuss if you disagree? —Saltmarsh 06:59, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

March

Biblical Hebrew

I didn't think it really merited a comment on the Hebrew talk page, but it seems to me that טלפנתני is not grammatical because the wrong preposition is being attached, rather than because modern Hebrew doesn't allow attaching particles to verbs. You're trying to attach the preposition אותי to the verb, rather than the preposition אלי. It's true that it's highly uncommon to attach particles to verbs, but I think it's just odd like in אהבתיך rather than flat out ungrammatical. AggyLlama 16:19, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Oh, good point! I was being stupid. But would you say that is grammatical? It still sounds more-than-strange to me; I don't think I've ever heard someone include a direct object in a verb unless they were making reference to something in the Bible or the liturgy. —Ruakh 16:29, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

I completely agree that it's something you would never hear. That's one reason I didn't think it merited being put in the discussion. Actually, I was thinking about it and I'm not even sure what I said before was correct. The form 'קראתיך' exists - 'I called to you' - and that is using the preposition אליך rather than אותך, so maybe there is no preposition distinction in the suffix forms. As for טלווזוה, I don't think that works because טלווז is not a verb in Hebrew; I think is grammatical, albeit quite odd and something I'd never use or expect to hear used.

Well, then, if direct-object-including verbs are grammatical in Modern Hebrew as well, then that solves that problem. Now comes the problem of figuring out the correct direct-object-including forms of verbs! ;-) —Ruakh 16:50, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

I personally don't think it's worth worrying about. It makes sense to just have a usage note in the entry if necessary, and perhaps a whole bunch of redirects. What have they done about it in the ויקימילון? AggyLlama 16:58, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Delinking words in form templates

Please do not remove wikilinks within form-templates. They are supposed to be there. --EncycloPetey 17:44, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Why's that? —Ruakh 17:47, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

For one, pages with no wikilinks are not counted as "good" pages, and therefore don't contribute towards the total number of entries on Wiktionary. We've therefore specifically set up the form-of templates to accomodate links and use them. I'm not sure whether this information was ever written down in a policy page, and I'm not even sure which policy page would be appropriate. But please don;t remove them. --EncycloPetey 17:52, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Oh, strange. Good to know, thanks. :-) —Ruakh 18:43, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Edits to apotreptic

You seem to be adding quotation marks, which is not the format for quotes interspersed in the definitions in Wiktionary:Quotations. By all means propose the change in BP (and use apotreptic as an example if you wish -- I'll leave it as is for a while), but meanwhile let's keep to the standard. --Enginear 20:03, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Wow, do I feel stupid. For some reason I really thought Wiktionary:Quotations did have quotation marks. Thanks for the notice. :-/ —Ruakh 20:04, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

No problem, and thanks for all the quotations you're adding. --Enginear 21:15, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

April

Please don't break numbering schemes!

Please stop making edits like those you made to take and off. It defeats the point of having numbered lists if the numbers restart halfway through. —Ruakh_TALK 13:22, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Hello, I didn't notice it. So well, I'll find a solution. 16@r 13:41, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

May

Muth-labben

Would you mind taking a look at the Hebrew (or Hebrew-derived) Muth-labben? There is also an entry Transwiki:Muth-labben which may or may not have additional salvageable material, if there is any. Thanks. Dmcdevit·t 09:50, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Darn, I was hoping no one would ask me to try to deal with that mess. :-P   It's kind of hard to define it, because it's essentially a nonce-word, where the nonce in question is translating a Hebrew phrase that not everyone agrees on the meaning of. But, since so many Bible translations use it (see http://bible.cc/psalms/9-1.htm), I guess we'd be remiss if we didn't try to explain it, and I've done my best with that. (Note that I'm not a Bible scholar or anything, so my best might not be worth that much. I relied heavily on the content of the previous version in determining what interpretations exist for the Hebrew phrase.) —Ruakh 18:10, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

;-) Actually I only came across it through the transwiki entry. One of my projects is to organize all the dump in that namespace so that people who have a certain knowledge know where to look to help coherently, instead of having to trudge through all the trash for the odd coin. I guess my post in the tea room didn't work out quite so well yet, but I'm going to organize it by language first anyway. I threw together a list of the Hebrew ones first, since yours was the only response; if you want to comb through them: User:Dmcdevit/Non-English. (If you do, remember to just delete the ones that are inappropriate or redundant, so someone else doesn't check them and double the work.) Dmcdevit·t 08:18, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't realize you're not an admin yet. Can you think of any good reason I shouldn't nominate you? Dmcdevit·t 23:23, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm flattered. I'm not sure I've been active here long enough, but if people are concerned, they can always vote against. :-) —Ruakh 23:27, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Go accept your nomination then: Wiktionary:Votes/sy-2007-04/User:Ruakh. Don't worry, it's no big deal. If I can be an admin, you definitely deserve it too. ;-) Dmcdevit·t 04:33, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

napkin

this is a WF/Newnoise "special". It is very wrong as well. Napkin in UK/Commonwealth means female sanitary pad ... and the diaper use is anything but archaic! (and he lives there, so it is an intentional "joke") Robert Ullmann 15:15, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

So strange. Thanks for the info. :-) —Ruakh 14:54, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Requests

Well done. But do you think it would be less confusing for our users to merge all the old entries into a number of sections at the end, one for each year? That way, there might be less chance of requests being added to the wrong section. Just a thought. SemperBlotto 21:40, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm down with that. (The main reason I did it this way was so I could edit one section at a time; I'm not particularly enamored of the specific results.) Thanks for the input. :-) —Ruakh 23:05, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

{{rfc-level}} tag

Code added to tag entries that exhibit structural problems that can't be fixed by AF. Code to change header levels disabled for now. Robert Ullmann 13:15, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. --Connel MacKenzie 14:03, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

I don't suppose you could adjust it so the tag is placed within the section headed by the marked heading? It's a bit annoying that we can't fix the problem and remove the tag just by editing the relevant section. —Ruakh_TALK 16:29, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Good idea, done. Robert Ullmann 14:17, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Good idea, done. Robert Ullmann 14:51, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. :-) —Ruakh_TALK 14:53, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

{{support}}

Hi,

Regarding the question you asked in your edit summary at Wiktionary:Votes/sy-2007-04/User:Beobach972: {{support}} is one of those templates that only works if it's subst'd. To use it, you type not {{support}}, but rather, {{subst:support}}. (This is because it includes ~~~~, which needs to be subst'd to a signature and timestamp.)

—Ruakh_TALK 01:03, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. Now I'll have the usage info the next time I don't remember how to use the template :-) ArielGlenn 16:50, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Admin

Ever wonder what Superman, the Flash and all those other superheroes felt like, to wake up one day and find yourself with super powers? Well, now you know. Take a look at Help:Sysop tools, if you haven't already for some info on your new powers/buttons. Congrats! Atelaes 05:33, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! :-) —Ruakh_TALK 05:44, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I have two questions, if you don't mind:

1. Help:Sysop tools and Help:Patrolled edits say that sysops should adjust their editing preferences to mark their own edits patrolled by default; but I don't see such a preference, and it seems like my edits are getting marked patrolled anyway. Are these pages just out-of-date, or is there something I'm missing?
2. When I'm patrolling recent edits, and come across a silly/vandalistic/test edit has since been undone, should I mark that edit patrolled so it disappears from the list? (That would seem natural, but Help:Patrolled edits seems to imply otherwise.)

Thanks again!

—Ruakh_TALK 20:25, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I do believe the page is out of date when it speaks of marking a preference to patrol your own edits. When I was first made admin, there was some confusion about that, but it seems that admins now patrol their own edits automatically, whether they like it or not. There is no preference to set. As for marking undone vandalism as patrolled, I guess I haven't seen a policy page or discussion specifically saying that this should be done, but I always do it myself. In addition, I also mark edits as patrolled if they've been brought to attention somewhere. For example, if someone creates a questionable entry, and someone else rfv's it, I mark it as patrolled, assuming that others will necessarily see it, as it's now listed on the rfv page. However, I must admit that I don't do a terribly large amount of patrolling (not as much as I really ought to). Semperblotto, Connel, and Stephen are (in my opinion) the big three patrollers, and you may want to ask them what their preferences and strategies are in this. They are certainly more experienced than I in this matter. Atelaes 20:51, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Also, you may want to take a look at WT:PREF. If you check the patrolling enhancements, patrol in expert mode, and Lupin's popups, then you can patrol far more efficiently, without ever leaving the "Recent Changes" page. There are drawbacks, to be sure (I positively despise popups in any context except patrolling), but it can be a real time-saver. Thought you should at least be informed of the option, if you haven't been already. Atelaes 21:20, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, congratulations! And thank you for your support of my own campaign! — Beobach972 20:33, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

You beat me to it

[…]

P.S. Please note that Wiktionary entry names are case-sensitive; for example, Associate should (and does) include a "see also" notice linking to associate, but should not attempt to duplicate its content. —Ruakh_TALK 06:59, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I was just going to revert myself, (eek) after noticing the lower case associate. Sorry. Jeeny 07:02, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

No worries. We all make mistakes. :-) —Ruakh_TALK 07:05, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

rfc-header

FYI: the multiple occurances of rfc-header was a bug fixed about 3 weeks ago ;-) Now it doesn't add an rfc* tag to any entry that already has any rfc* tag. Robert Ullmann 15:27, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Regarding your comment on my talk-page: Yeah, I figured as much. :-) —Ruakh_TALK 15:33, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I saw the "placate rfc-header" comment ;-). Btw, "Alternative forms" is now in the control table (so you can just rm the tag); it is used fairly frequently where "Alternative spellings" doesn't sound right; it probably ought to be an, um, alternative form of the header ... Robert Ullmann 15:39, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Oh, good. —Ruakh_TALK 15:43, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

You might look at the control table (User:AutoFormat/Headers), it is fine to add variants to be auto-corrected, additional headers to be treated as "standard" for now ... It is protected sysop/sysop, but that's just because a vandal could make the bot seriously mis-behave. Robert Ullmann 23:20, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Sysops and patrolled edits

Yes, the PREFS disappeared, sysops' edits are always patrolled; the pages need updating. See Connel's patrol list; you can remove yourself and add any user that appears with any frequency and isn't a vandal. Robert Ullmann 23:20, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Redirects (1)

Please avoid using redirects on Wiktionary; we do use them for some things, but not very much. (See the new version of fee-simple to see what we do instead.) Thanks! —Ruakh_TALK 01:42, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Sure thing. Thanks! Shoehorn 01:45, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Redirects (2)

Hi,

Thanks for your contributions. I just wanted to let you know that at Wiktionary, unlike at, say, Wikipedia, we avoid redirects in almost all cases. If something is a genuinely common misspelling, we can transclude the {{misspelling of}} template as the definition, but we never redirect random typos, because that would start interfering with our ability to include every word in every language.

—Ruakh_TALK 16:51, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Oops. I am a Wikipedian generally yes, that's probably why. I'm putting a lot of new Latin in this place though! :D Alakazam138 16:56, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

I've noticed, and it's appreciated. :-) —Ruakh_TALK 16:56, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

When I'm adding links to WikTionary, from Wiki or Wikibooks say, does that get logged too? Alakazam138 17:01, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, but I'm not quite sure what you mean about links getting logged. Are you asking whether Wiktionary keeps track of inbound links from other Wikimedia projects? I don't think so, no. —Ruakh_TALK 20:01, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Uppercase and lowercase entry names

I notice that you added content about etsi to ETSI. I'm guessing what happened is, you went to http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/etsi, it asked you if you meant "ETSI" and after a few seconds sent you to ETSI, and so you edited ETSI to add the info? (This is one frustrating thing about the didyoumean extension; sometimes that's really not what you mean.) As far as I know, the easiest way to work around this is to start by editing ETSI to add {{see|etsi}} to the top, and then using the redlink to edit etsi. (Annoying, I know, but I don't know of an easier way.) —Ruakh_TALK 18:02, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

By the way, you might want to look at Wiktionary talk:About Latin. This never got added to the policy page for some reason, but there seems to be consensus that entries for Latin verbs should be at the first principal part (the first-person singular active indicative), not at the second (the infinitive). (The infinitive would then be defined as "The infinitive form of ____".) You might want to discuss it there before adding too many Latin verb entries at the infinitive pages. —Ruakh_TALK 20:05, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't really know what you mean. I tried to get around the automatic sending to that page but yeah... I couldn't. And I don't really understand your instructions, sorry, I'm just a newbie lol. It probably won't happen again ever anyway. xD Alakazam138 19:34, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

My, it is complicated! I'm sure any mods or other Latin people can ammend it as they see fit, I'm providing the building base. :D Alakazam138 20:19, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Hebrew for parrot

Would you please check the Hebrew translation(s) for parrot, and could you create the entries? This is one of my selected model pages, to serve as an example of what a full page should look like. In other words, the entry and linked pages should be as fully done as possible to show others what we're trying to achieve. Thanks. --EncycloPetey 16:10, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

I've done the two senses I'd heard before. I've never heard the second noun sense (though it makes sense), so am not sure how to translate it. Specifically, I can't decide whether a literal translation (which anyone would probably understand, but probably wouldn't come naturally to anyone), or a translation along the lines of "a person who mimics like a parrot", would be preferable, or maybe both. Do you have any thoughts on the subject? —Ruakh_TALK 23:35, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't believe in forcing translations. So, if something doesn't come naturally, I'd say leave it out. --EncycloPetey 03:57, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

he.wikt

Note: This discussion was spread across several users' talk-pages, and forked into a few different discussions. Included here is only enough to give rough context for the one comment on my talk-page; for the rest of the discussion(s), see User talk:Atelaes or its archives, User talk:Shai or its archives, User talk:Paul G or its archives, and perhaps other users' talk pages or talk-page archives as well.

Hi Atelaes, I want to ask you somethig. I would very much like to contribute entries for English words to the Hebrew witktionary. Unfortunately, there is a strict prohibition on entring any non-Hebrew entries there. In the past, users who tried to contribute entries for German and English words were ordered to stop, and their contributions were deleted.
Yesterday I intiated a discussion, trying to convince my fellow users to change the policy. Unsuprisingly, the idea was rejected. However, I still want to contribute foreign words to a Hebrew dictionary. Can you think of any way I can do that without setting up a local wiktionary? Thanks, Shai 16:06, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Sadly, on a wiki you are always constrained by the tyranny of the majority, and so I would say there is little you can do. The only thing I can think of is to try and find out if there are others like you who feel the same way, and see if you can stage a revolt of sorts. However, it is my impression that, for whatever reason, this is a community agreed-upon standard of the Hebrew Wiktionary. I am curious what their reasons are for such a rigid approach. If you would enlighten me, if for no other reason than to satiate my curiousity, I would appreciate it (my Hebrew is far too poor to understand such a conversation). Atelaes 00:01, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

I too am astonished by this. I take it they have a good reason, otherwise it borders on the despotic. It seems misguided to me.

I note that they only have a few thousand entries so far, according to wiktionary.org. I wonder if they want to restrict themselves to Hebrew words first to avoid these being swamped by non-Hebrew content? — Paul G 09:39, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

The main reason is that they see he.witkt as a Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary only. I've translated the core two paragraphs of the Bureaucrat's position in the most elaborate discussion on this matter held in October 2006:

My opponents will ask, justly, “who does it bother [that someone will write foreign entries]?”. It bothers [me] when users who can contribute to Hebrew entries don’t do that because they invest time in foreign entries... I just want that we will decide what languages we deal with. Whoever wants to write foreign entries - let him do that in WiktionaryZ.

Let me ask you: when you write an entry, what do you think of? What are you aspiring for? I always aspired for us to make together a Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary, and I think it is a very feasible aspiration. But aspiring to build a multilingual dictionary, here, in the Hebrew wiktionary, (we exist more than two years and we don’t even have 4,000 entries!) - is no more than a fantasy.

The irony is that the reason why there are never poeple to contribute foreign entries, is because whenever somebody tries, the Bureaucrat orders them to stop, so they leave...

I don't want to fight him, he's a friend of mine, but I'm frustrated by not being able to contribute English and other foreign words to a Hebrew speaking public. Shai 14:50, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

יש אנשים כמוני, שיש לנו מספיק עברית כדיי לעזור בלהוסיף אנפורמציה על מילים אנגלים, אבל פחות מדי בשביל לעזור עם עברית באמת. אצוב שלא מותר.

אים תכלית לעשות staging של revolt, כמו ש-Atelaes אומר, אני מוכן לנסות לעזור.

—Ruakh_TALK 00:40, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

תודה רבה, Ruakh, I really appriciate it! (and the HTML code for writing Hebrew with English; I always wondered how to do that...)

I'm now trying to see if I can stage a revolt (you guys here are corrupting me :)). It might just be possible, I've already contacted some people. Thanks again, Shai 17:43, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Note for anyone who's reading my talk-page archives, since you're obviously curious enough (for some reason) to care: My last comment there reads, "There are people like me, who have enough Hebrew in order to help add information on English words, but too little in order to really help with Hebrew. It's sad [except that I misspelled 'sad' — my Hebrew spelling is really crap] that it's not permitted. ¶ If you decide to do staging of a revolt, as Atelaes says, I'm willing to try to help. ¶ [signature]". And Shai's comment opens with "Thank you very much". —Ruakh_TALK 18:05, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

References at Tub frock

Hey there,

Thanks for your recent contributions to Tub frock. While they're of course welcome, I just thought I should let you know that that article is in danger of being deleted for lack of evidence that the term meets our criteria for inclusion; so, your time might be better spent finding such evidence. If you have any questions about this process, please feel free to ask them. Again, thanks.

—Ruakh_TALK 05:13, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your input. I've contributed many citations for the term, both dictionary definitions and use in print. Please help me, how do I ensure this article doesn't get deleted? What else must I do? I think it's well-researched, and deleting it is against Wiktionary policy (there seem to be people who want to delete any WP articles or Wiktionary entries that they didn't learn in school). Thanks again... Gekritzl 00:46, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Regarding your references: linguists (language scientists) distinguish between mentions of a term (e.g. "The noun 'tub frock' refers to a machine-washable dress") and uses of a term (e.g. "That's a beautiful tub frock you're wearing!"). When it comes to verifying that word meets our criteria for inclusion, we at Wiktionary only care about durably archived uses — not mentions. (Now, once we've recorded enough uses to confirm that the term merits inclusion here, mentions can be helpful for confirming that word does mean what we say it means.) Confusingly, we generally refer to permissible uses as "cites", even though the word "cite" should ordinarily refer to a mention rather than to a use. Wiktionary:Quotations describes the format for providing such cites. —Ruakh_TALK 02:01, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

I lost, the entry has been deleted. Yet, criteria for inclusion says Wiktionary is intended to include "all words in all languages" - any idea why an editor would remove an entry like this? Seems like that served to tear down the body of information that is Wiktionary, rather than build it up. Thanks! Gekritzl 00:08, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Hi, I saw your comment on my talk-page. While I'm not the administrator who deleted the entry, I support his action; the word was listed at Wiktionary:Requests for verification for a long time without being verified by Wiktionary's standards. (Please see Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion and Wiktionary:Quotations for guidance on verifying entries.) If you'd like to cite the entry properly, let me know and I can undelete it for you, but once I've done so, there's really only so long it can sit uncited before I or another administrator will just re-delete it. —Ruakh_TALK 02:53, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Adjectives and attributive nouns

I was going to put this in the Beer parlour, but I fear no one else would be terribly interested, so:

Adjectives have three main uses, as far as placement goes:

• attributive — "He drove off in his red car."
• predicative — "His car is red."
• absolute — "Red as a cherry, his car was the envy of the neighborhood."

(there are some exceptions — in particular, a few adjectives, such as lone/alone and my/mine, have one attributive version and one predicative/absolute version — but that's the general idea). In all three cases, the car is being described as red.

Now, nouns can generally be placed in all three ways as well, but:

• Plural nouns generally can't be used attributively; a tiger who eats men is "a man eater", not "a men eater". This rule does have exceptions, but it's generally pretty strict, to the point that pluralia tantum are often singularized for attributive use; hence "pant suit", "scissor kick", etc. So, plural nouns don't tend to become adjectives.
• Singular nouns generally require some sort of determiner in predicative and absolute uses; "It's a car". So, you can generally tell when a singular noun has become an adjective, because it stops needing the determiner in these uses. (Also, there's generally a semantic difference; "a city street" does not mean "a street that is [a] city".)
• Mass nouns do not have these restrictions; they can be used attributively, and do not need determiners in other uses. That said, there's generally a semantic difference to be found; "work clothes" are clothes for work, while in "singing is work, talking is fun", singing constitutes work. (Note the difference from adjectives in this regard.) But there can be a bit of shading; "a work obligation" is an obligation for work, but also itself constitutes work. Some mass nouns start to blur into adjectives, such as fun; "a fun day" originally would have been interpreted as "a day of/for fun", but many speakers are happy to treat fun as an adjective describing the day, to the extent that "very fun day" is acceptable for them (contrast *"very work obligation", *"very man eater"). At this point, it makes sense to view fun as an adjective (not exclusively, of course; "a lot of fun" is certainly a noun use); and this is why the OED describes it as "attrib., passing into adj.". (What I can't tell you is why the OED only labels it as a noun; why the small note in one sense?)

Does that make sense? (Sorry if it doesn't; I don't have a lot of experience explaining this stuff.)

—Ruakh_TALK 16:33, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Hello Ruakh -- Thank you very much for this explanation, which is very clear and helpful. I find these sorts of fine points intriguing. Continuing with your example of "red," please help me out a bit with the corresponding noun forms:

• Red is a lovely color. (noun, abs)
• The color for today is red. (noun, pred)
• That's a lovely red shade. (attributive noun or attributive adjective?)
• That's a lovely shade of red. (noun, but attributive or some other kind?)

PS - The OED also calls "home" an "attrib., passing into adj.", but, unlike the example of "fun," we'd never say "very home comfort" or "more home comfort". Are there too many shades of gray here?

PPS - Actually, I've heard "scissors kick" many times (but I'm not so sure about "scissor kick"), and "scissors kick" is in my Random House Dictionary and many others (10 hits on Onelook).

-- WikiPedant 15:04, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Hello Ruakh -- Thanks very much for the interesting note on my talk page. I like to keep discussion threads together, so I've posted a reply there. Best regards -- WikiPedant 15:08, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

You're welcome. :-)

Regarding your examples:

• Red is a lovely color. (noun, abs) ← Noun acting as a subject, so the attributive/predicative/absolute distinction doesn't apply (that distinction describes how it's connected to what it modifies, and here it isn't modifying anything).
• The color for today is red. (noun, pred) ← Yes, predicative noun, or predicate nominative. (Despite what I said before, predicative nouns are usually just called "predicate nominatives" and not treated as modifiers. The two viewpoints are essentially equivalent, though.)
• That's a lovely red shade. (attributive noun or attributive adjective?) ← To me this construction is impossible (unless we're using "shade" in one of its tangible senses), but if a speaker did produce it, I think both interpretations would be valid.
• That's a lovely shade of red. (noun, but attributive or some other kind?) ← Noun acting as the object of a preposition, so again, the attributive/predicative/absolute distinction doesn't apply. (The phrase "of red" is an attributive modifier, though.)

Regarding "home": The OED's rationale in that case is spread over two senses:

A. n. 15. attrib. and Comb. b. In relation to domestic economy: [series of examples]. (Nowadays indistinguishable from B1, since present-day hyphening cannot be assumed to be a reliable guide to grammatical function.)

B. attrib. passing into adj. These uses do not differ essentially from those treated under 15; but home, being here written separately, functions as an adjective used attributively; in sense 5 it is even used predicatively, and qualified by adverbs more, most, so, etc., like an ordinary adjective. In sense 1, the use is nowadays indistinguishable from 15.

So their specific rationale seems to be that historically, people would hyphenate something like "apple-pie" but not something like "good pie", so you could tell which part of speech they intended it as, but that people no longer do this reliably; I hadn't realized that. But, they still retain the general rationale that in one use home can be qualified by such adverbs, which I guess makes them more willing to acknowledge the other uses as potentially adjectival (albeit not as comparable adjectives).

Regarding "scissors kick": Sorry, I wasn't trying to say that "scissor kick" is the only correct form; I was simply pointing out the fact of its existence, which seeing as *"a scissor" is completely meaningless, is pretty strong evidence that English generally avoids using plural nouns attributively. (Another counter-example is the phrase "people eater" is a famous song.) Incidentally, even with its disadvantage, "scissor kick" is about twice as common on Google than "scissors kick" (though their relative frequency probably depends on dialect).

—Ruakh_TALK 17:21, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I'm learning things. But I'm having a hard time thinking up any examples of absolute or predicative placements of nouns used as modifiers. It seems to me that when a noun functions as a modifier it pretty much always has to be bumped up against the term being modified. Can you provide some examples? A couple of other threads:

• Concerning "That's a lovely red shade," which constructions are possible and which are impossible strikes me as a somewhat dicey call, since in the last analysis spelling, meaning, conventions of sentence structure, and even grammatical rules are all functions of the ongoing evolution of usage. (Not that I don't have a prescriptivist streak -- as a philosopher, it rankles me when people use "begs the question" in what I can only regard as the corrupt sense of "raises the question.") I would be OK with someone saying "That's a lovely red shade" in the context of a conversation in which shades of colors were being examined and discussed at some length.

• TRIVIAL HISTORICAL USAGE NOTE: "Scissors" is, I think, an ellipsis of "pair of scissors" and I'm sure there was a time when people (our great-grandparents maybe) routinely used to say "a scissor" for a what we now call "scissors." "Scissor" in the sense of "scissors" is in lots of dictionaries.

Enjoying this exchange, WikiPedant 13:54, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Hello again Ruakh -- I've just added a little more to our conversation at User_talk:WikiPedant#Adjectives_and_attributive_nouns. Regards -- WikiPedant 13:56, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, the point I was trying to make — I didn't do a very good job, sorry — but the point I was trying to make in talking about "predicative" and "absolute" nouns as "modifiers" was that semantically they're different from attributive nouns. If I say "That man is a jerk", a jerk is semantically acting as a modifier; this sentence has roughly the same meaning as "That man is unkind." (This is why linguists are wary of using semantics to define parts of speech.) If I say "That man is a jerk eater", I'm not saying he's an unkind eater, but rather that he eats jerk. Attributive nouns generally have a genitive sense, indicating the source/purpose/possessor/originator/recipient/substance/whatnot of the noun they modify, while "predicative nouns" (predicate nominatives) and "absolute nouns" (nominatives absolute) are generally marked as being equal/unequal to the noun they "modify". With some nouns, however, the semantic line can be blurry; for example, a thing both is the substance it's made of and is of the substance it's made of; you can say "a metal desk", and also "a desk that is metal". Some of these blurry nouns can evolve and become adjectives. —Ruakh_TALK 17:17, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Root header

I added this to "other headers in use" in WT:POS. Seems like a fine thing for a few languages (e.g. also Arabic). If the first kinda-formal policy vote on About Hebrew includes it, we can move it up (we need a table for standard but language specific headers).

Also added to User:AutoFormat/Headers. Robert Ullmann 14:43, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. :-)   —Ruakh_TALK 17:33, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

incertus

Are you sure that incertus is English? —Ruakh_TALK 19:02, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Ask User:Stephen G. Brown about incertus.Barbara Shack 16:15, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Roots in Hebrew

Hi Ran. I'd appreciate it if you could have a look at what I added to Wiktionary_talk:About_Hebrew#Root_format, and tell me what you think. Thanks, Shai 17:10, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Excellent, Thanks! Shai 17:49, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Afro-Argentinian

Can you explain to me what's going on with this entry? Is it more than meets the eye? --Connel MacKenzie 17:20, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure exactly. XGustaX seems to care very deeply that it be deleted, but I don't know why, and his edit pattern has been very strange — after I managed to convince him that no admin would speedy-delete a term that had passed RFV, and that he'd have to bring it to RFD for discussion, he started adding-and-then-removing the article from RFD (carrying on a little revert war with himself), and eventually grew impatient to the point of coming to your talk-page (and you know the rest). —Ruakh 17:54, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually thats not exactally what happened. What happened was yes, I reverted the page because according to the rules of Speedy deletion. Connel McKenzie also agreed with me here that it could possibly count as a speedy deletion , so I was unsure why you did so. This was until you showed me the RFV and that you suggested that I bring it to the RFD so I did but no one commented on it. After a while of no one commenting it I contacted Connel MacKenzie and he said he would help me out. So I am sorry if if it seemed like a revert war, but it was an honest mistake. =) XGustaX 18:00, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

domain

I am not sure which route you prefer. Sending this also. Thx for welcome msg. Could you please explain this: why did you revert my changes to domain (biology taxonomy) and then re-do them to exactly the important change I had made? I am reviewing all taxonomy rank definitions.IPH 20:06, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

I prefer messages on my talk-page, but really, either way is fine. As for my edits to domain: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cause offense. I reverted your changes because I thought they made the definition a lot more complicated than it needed to be; I then rewrote the definition incorporating information that you had contributed, as well as information from elsewhere, and putting main emphasis on the three-domain system, both because it's the most widely accepted, and because it's the main system that uses the term domain. —Ruakh 20:38, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

June

{{unsigned}}

Please do not subst: this template on Wiktionary. --Connel MacKenzie 07:05, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Good to know, thanks. I've fixed its documentation accordingly. —Ruakh 15:11, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

RfV archiving

When archiving, don't forget to remove the {{rfv}} tag from the article, or someone may just re-add the entry to the page. --EncycloPetey 18:40, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Oh, interesting. I always remove the {{rfv}} tag when I strike the section header (since the discussion isn't really resolved until the requisite actions are taken); it didn't occur to me to check when archiving to make sure that everyone else took the same approach. Thanks for the notice. :-) —Ruakh 18:59, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

ſ

With reference to Talk:puerile, thanks for adding the long s to the symbols lists. Would it be possible for you to add some other symbols thereto if I requested them? † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 18:51, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Certainly, assuming they're relatively common symbols and there aren't too many of them. (Paradoxically, the edit-tools become less useful if they have too many symbols, because it becomes harder to find the symbols one is looking for.) I added ſ because it's extremely common in older works, because Wiktionary:Quotations says that we want to include the oldest works we can, and because it's rather a unique character so doesn't cause thin-end-of-the-wedge problems. Since there doesn't seem to be a good place to discuss new additions, I'd generally like to be very cautious. —Ruakh 18:58, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

I didn't know it was possible to put it in myself. I'll have to go back a "fix" a couple of First Folio quotes from Shakespeare. Thanks! --EncycloPetey 19:06, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

If you could add...

To the Latin / Roman menu:

• «IJ»* — capital IJ ligature;
• «ij»* — lower case ij ligature;
• «LJ» — capital LJ ligature;
• «lj» — lower case lj ligature;
• «NJ» — capital NJ ligature; and,
• «nj» — lower case nj ligature;

To the IPA menu:

• «ˑ»* — IPA half-long marker (one half of «ː»);
• « ̆»* — combining breve (which indicates extra-short phones; the opposite of «ː»);
• «ʤ»* — dezh ligature (for transcribing “J” sounds); and,
• «ʧ»* — tesh ligature (for transcribing “Tch” sounds);

And to the Miscellaneous menu:

• «…» — ellipsis;
• «‛»* — opening apostrophe (as in ‛tis);
• «‽»* — interrobang;
• «‼» — single-character double exclamation mark;
• «№»* — numero;
• «∞»* — infinity;
• «♀» — female symbol;
• «♂» — male symbol;
• «‰»* — per mille;
• «‱»* — per myriade;
• « »* — no-breaking space;
• «‑»* — no-breaking hyphen;
• « »* — em space;
• «§»* — section sign;
• «′» — prime;
• «″» — double prime;
• «‴» — triple prime; and,
• «⁗» — quadruple prime;

I would be most grateful. If these are too many, the ones of greater importance are marked with asterisks. Thank you very much. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 14:21, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

If possible, could we create a separate section, 'Dutch', for the IJ ligature? — Beobach972 17:42, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

PS- if the LJ and NJ ligatures are restricted to a specific language, it would be expedient to place them in that section. — Beobach972 17:42, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

No. We've been through the ligature issue before and decided NOT to include them. Dijan provided information from the Bosnian and Croatian wikis as to the technical probelems they would introduce. This goes for Dutch, Croatian, Bosnian, and other languages with J-ligatures. If you want to overturn that decision, it would require a vote. We also no not use the dezh and tesh; they too are typed as individual characters. Just how often are the further additional characters actually needed? --EncycloPetey 00:57, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Many of the symbols which I have listed are more useful and more needed than a number of those that are already present in the symbol box (especially those in the Miscellaneous menu — the pair of brackets, the double pairs of brackets and braces, the tilde, and the vertical line can all be accessed from — and probably typed faster using — a normal keyboard). Keep in mind that the inclusion of these symbols per se would be a good thing, as long as the number thereof didn’t lead to the scenario which Ruakh warned me against (“the edit-tools become less useful if they have too many symbols, because it becomes harder to find the symbols one is looking for”). You are right that the ligatures are some of the least urgently needed symbols which could be included — the display differences between IJ & IJ, ij & ij, LJ & LJ, lj & lj, NJ & NJ, and nj & nj are negligible; however, the same cannot be said for tesh and dezh — /tʃ/ implies a syllabic split between the ‘t’ and the ‘ʃ’ (as in “hat-shop”) and /dʒ/ does the same for the ‘d’ and the ‘ʒ’ (as in “hard-genre”), whereas /ʧ/ and /ʤ/ leave you in no doubt that they represent the ‘tch’ and (“hard”) ‘j’ sounds. Other symbols which in display terms are negligibly different from a number of characters written in their stead are … (cf. ...), ‼ (cf. !!), ′ (cf. '), ″ (cf. ''), ‴ (cf. '''), and ⁗ (cf. ''''). The other two symbols which I have not marked with asterisks (♀ & ♂), although being unrepresentable through the use of a combination of other characters, are rare enough to be omitted from the symbols box (although their inclusion would still be a positive thing). Apart from IJ & ij, I’d say that all the symbols marked with asterisks are important, needed, and therefore ought to be added to the symbols box. On top of the ones I’ve listed, we could really do with the IPA tone diacritics and suprasegmentals; however, there are loads of them, so including them may swamp the symbols that are already there (although, on the other hand, they would all be restricted to the IPA category of the drop-down menu, and could be partitioned from the other IPA symbols by preceding them with “Suprasegmentals:” et cetera, as per “Vowels:”, “Other:”, and “Consonants:”, which already exist). By the way, please point me to the evidence provided by Dijan about the technical problems that ligatures would cause. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 03:41, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Regarding which ones of the rest are useful: the breve and the IPA half-long marker would be useful, and the Numero sign would be quite useful. The interrobang / exclarrogatif could be useful (indeed it would be demanded) if we had to include a quotation that used it; however, it could do without being added to the menu. Again: we ought to add the half-long and breve marks, and the Numero. — Beobach972 03:10, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Oh, and the infinity sign... I'm appalled that we don't have it already (it's quite necessary if we ever have to quote a sentence that involves formulae — see exoergicity for a rough example of quoting formulae). — Beobach972 03:13, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

For formulae, it's probably better to use MediaWiki's built-in mathematical markup language, which is a version of ΤΕΧ; see m:Help:Displaying a formula for documentation. For example, <math>\infty</math> would produce the infinity symbol: $\infty$. (That is, unless Wiktionary has a relevant policy against doing so? I've seen math-markup here in only two places: at Egyptian fraction, and at its RFV discussion.) —Ruakh 04:03, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Fair enough. I still need to differentiate between the Mixe pox /poʃ/ (guava), pox /poˑʃ/ (spider), and pox /poːʃ/ (knot)... — Beobach972 17:02, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

That Mathematical mark-up script looks really messy on Wiktionary; cf.: pous — which looks much better! † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 21:11, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Seriously though, the math mark-up script is only really appropriate when written separately from non-math text; for the sake of example, see Egyptian fraction, where the two types of text in the italicised example sentence don’t blend at all. The example should have been written as The fraction ³/₄ can be written as the Egyptian fraction ¹/₂+¹/₅+¹/₂₀ or as, see the example hereinafter where the fraction on the left can be represented as an Egyptian fraction as given on the right:

${\frac {3}{4}}={\frac {1}{2}}+{\frac {1}{5}}+{\frac {1}{20}}$

Furthermore, it looks like I’m not the only one who thinks this; in viewing the code for Egyptian fraction in order to copy the Math mark-up text, I came across this hidden editorial comment: “<!--The "for example" is aesthetic, because starting a line with a large fraction is unpleasing to the eyes. Really this is a problem with the way wikimedia in general parses math-- these fractions should be much smaller, so as to fit in more naturally. In any case, it's not good form to start a sentence with mathematical notation. - Agreed; I've put some text in front. Paul G-->”. Whereas on Wikipedia the weird parsing’s not too much of a big deal as the math language usually appears in the format “Line of math, short normal text explanation, line of math, short normal text explanation, et seqq.”, the same cannot be said of published works that we will need to cite; for the sake of example, consider a book explaing abstracted logic, wherein the author will spend a large amount of time gradually introducing the many symbols which such systems use, meaning that there will be long passages of text with symbols appearing frequently but individually, isolated from long formulae — in such a situation the use of math mark-up text is not satisfactory; compare these two Wikipedia articles: w:Method of analytic tableaux which uses math mark-up text throughtout but looks messy and w:First-order logic which uses congruous symbols in almost every case, and looks far better for it than if it used math mark-up text. Nota bene that a new “Maths/Science” category could be added to the drop-down menu in order to house ∞ and any other symbols that are deemed necessary to be included, which means that they won’t be in the way of the other, less specialist symbols. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 02:23, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

You know — sorry for not having said this earlier — but maybe we should be discussing this at MediaWiki talk:Edittools? —Ruakh 03:45, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

OK; I’ll post something there later (today or tomorrow, probably). By the way, you mentioned here that (concerning the OED’s treatment of the disputed en- -en circumfix) “in many cases it en- and -en seem to have been added simultaneously to the noun or adjective, rather than going through an intermediate -en-only verb state”. Could you please list those example words given by the OED — either here, on my talk page, at en- -en#Derived terms, or anywhere else that you think would be appropriate? Thanks. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 14:48, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, unfortunately, the OED doesn't separate those that came from verbs (in -en or not) from those that came directly from nouns or adjectives. Of the examples it gives, those that end in -en are as follows: enliven, enlighten, †encolden, endizen, enfasten, engladden, †enlengthen, †enlessen, †enmilden, †enquicken, †enweaken, enwiden, enwisen. —Ruakh 15:21, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. I’ll add them in the near future and research their etymologies. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 20:43, 8 June 2007 (UTC) ··· By the way, what do the superscribed crosses denote? † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 20:44, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

You're welcome. And the OED uses daggers to indicate obsolete words. (It actually doesn't superscribe them; I don't know why I did here. I guess it's because daggers usually indicate footnotes, so are superscribed.) —Ruakh 20:52, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

I personally think that the obeli looked better superscribed. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 13:58, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Alternative spellings

The standard header per the WT:ELE is ===Alternative spellings===, not Alternative forms. --EncycloPetey 07:24, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, you're right. I wonder why Robert added "Alternative forms" to User:AutoFormat/Headers#other L3 things? I'm sure there's something here I'm missing. —Ruakh 07:29, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

He's also got it listed as "NS" which means "non-standard". It's being used (rather a lot), but hasn't been accepted for use officially. At some point, it will either be accepted or discussed out of existence. --EncycloPetey 07:32, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Thankyou

Hi, User:Ruakh, have seen your handle round on WP, thanks for the links. I am wondering, regarding Wictionary article, Desert, should it point to w:desert, or to w:Desert (philosophy)? ie , the first derivation, or the second? or both?— Newbyguesses 06:37, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

It should actually link to the disambiguation page; I've edited the article accordingly, so you can see how that works. :-) —Ruakh 14:45, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

And I have added the sister-project-template to deserve now, (my first edit). Is that right, or duplication? Getting some Wiktionary:Policies on my reading list, so I can figure it out for myself, soon. Just an update FYI, (my first minor edit in Wiktionary). Thanks again for the welcome. — User:Newbyguesses 22:33, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

Re: Welcome

I suppose you are also ruakh from LJ then. Well it's nice to see some of the old-school LJers around (I am zach@lj). Thanks for the welcome. ZJH 10:09, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Old-school LJ for the win! :-D —Ruakh 15:40, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Redirect fuhrer

Hi, you deleted my redirect from fuhrer to Fuhrer, which I can understand, but now when I visit "http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fuhrer" I see the "Wiktionary does not have an entry for this exact word yet." template momentarily, and then the page automatically reloads into "Führer" redirected from "Fuhrer". Is this what should happen, if so, how is that effect achieved, otherwise do you know what causes it? Conrad.Irwin 18:16, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, that's what should happen; we call it our "did-you-mean" extension. (I think Hippietrail came up with it.) The way it works is, our no-article-content message (MediaWiki:Noarticletext) has a series of transclusions that ultimately produces markup that includes <span id='did-you-mean'>[[title]]</span>, where title is an alternatively capitalized version of the request page. (Four variants are tried: all-uppercase, all-lowercase, first-letter-uppercase, and first-letter-lowercase. The transclusions are such that only variants that exist are displayed, and identical variants are only displayed once; quite fancy.) Then, the client-side JScript/JavaScript at MediaWiki:Monobook.js#doRedirect redirects to Special:Search/title (or whatnot), which is then a server-side redirects to what's hopefully the intended page. —Ruakh 18:46, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Ok, thank you for clearing that up - I am not sure why it didn't do that in the first place, I wouldn't have felt the need for the redirect. Conrad.Irwin 21:01, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

alessandrina

Why is this a proper noun? waltz isn't. SemperBlotto 15:51, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, you're right. (I had in mind the hora, but I guess that's an atypical example.) I'll fix it, thanks. :-) —Ruakh 15:52, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

On second thought, I don't know how to identify with certainty the gender of an Italian noun, nor how to determine with certainty its plural. I don't suppose you could take a look at it, and at Transwiki:Italian music terminology? :-/ —Ruakh 15:56, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I have already added that page to my watchlist, and I'll get round to it in time. I didn't like to annoy you by saying that Italian words shouldn't really be added by someone with no Italian Babel entry in their User-page! SemperBlotto 16:03, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

That'd have been fine, you're really quite right. I'm sorry. —Ruakh 16:17, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

ANTIsymmetry

{{subst:welcome}}

—Ruakh_TALK 23:27, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

By the way, just so you know, your definition of partial order is mistaken; partial orders are antisymmetric. (The definition you gave would be a perfect definition of an equivalence relation, however.) —Ruakh_TALK 23:48, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Jeez, did I say symmetric? There is no excuse for me: I shall just go off into a corner now and die. I take VERY SERIOUSLY the responsibility—given that one is going to contribute to Wikimedia—that one's work should be CORRECT. And, right off the bat, I blow it. Oh, woe! PaulTanenbaum 03:40, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Heh, don't worry about it. The whole point of a wiki is for everyone to look over each other's work. :-) —Ruakh_TALK 03:41, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

under erasure

Whew, now that's a set of quotations! If we had medals over here, as they do in Wikipedia, I'd give you one. All the more helpful for me, since I had never been aware of this idiom before. Smartly done! -- WikiPedant 18:21, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

:-) —Ruakh 18:57, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Indeed! I've ‘trans-wikied’ one just for you : — Beobach972 20:22, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, though I really think you've done as much as I have with RFV. Collaborative efforts: the Wiki way. :-) —Ruakh 21:06, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

File:Detective barnstar.png		The Verifier's Barnstar
		I, User:Beobach972, do hereby award User:Ruakh the Verifier's Barnstar, for outstanding work in verifying under erasure and broom and generally helping to clear out the massive requests for verification page.

Galliot

{{subst:welcome}}

—Ruakh_TALK 05:40, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

P.S. I was wondering why you added Catalan and Spanish translations to galliot, but marked them as needing to be checked. Are you not sure if these are the correct words? —Ruakh_TALK 05:40, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Ops. I made a "copy and paste" and did not realize that {{ttbc|xx}} means to be checked (I thougth it just puts color on the translation...). I've changed it. Thank you very much for reviewing words! Aleator 21:32, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

No problem. :-)   {{ttbc}} does color the language name, but that's not its main purpose; its main purpose is to add the entry to a maintenance category, e.g. Category:Translations to be checked (Spanish), so people can check periodically for words they can help with. —Ruakh_TALK 00:58, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

IJ ligatures

Hi,

EncycloPetey has said that you've previously said that we shouldn't use characters like "ij" (a common Dutch ligature) because they mess with the search software. Do you remember the details at all? Because the search software is being redesigned (see Wiktionary:Beer parlour#New feature on development branch of Lucene search), so whatever the problem was, we might be able to have it fixed.

Thanks in advance!

—Ruakh_TALK 19:52, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure I remember anything about the Dutch ligatures. I was referring to the Serbo-Croatian lj, dj, dž and nj ligatures. I don't think that they should be used as ligatures in the namespaces simply because they're harder to type (and are not used as ligatures anywhere else online or on other Serbo-Croatian typing systems). They're not considered as ligatures in Serbo-Croatian. They are digraphs (as the shape does not change ..nor do the two letters "run" into each other) but are considered to be "one letter". The Dutch ligature, when capitalized both letters are in caps. In Serbo-Croatian, only the first letter is in caps. --Dijan 21:39, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

I use the Firefox browser and I have just now executed a search on this page for ij (i+j), and it found only the upper- and lowercase i+j instances. Then when I searched on the ij ligature, it found only the ij ligature. Neither finds the other. —Stephen 17:35, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

have got

My apologies. I wasn't too sure if these two entries for have got belonged with got. But there should be some kind of link to have got, or am I missing something? Algrif 11:12, 23 June 2007 (UTC)OK I've found it in Derived terms. Algrif 11:20, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Why the article partial ordering relation?

Hey, Ruakh, pls see my entry on the discussion page there. PaulTanenbaum 20:08, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the notice. I've replied there. —Ruakh 20:39, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Plurals

Is there a reason you refuse to follow Wiktionary format for entries like homeschoolings and Afro-Caribbeans? —Ruakh_TALK 16:43, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

What is your format for plurals?Barbara Shack 16:45, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

If you want to create the entry for a word like, say, Africans, your best bet is to go to the edit page, notice the bullet point that says, "If unsure, you can use the preload templates to help you get started", and click the link therein. Then, click the button that says "Plural". This will return you to the edit-page, but with the edit-box pre-filled-in. All you'll need to do at that point is replace {{{1}}} with the singular form of the word (in that case African), and click the "Save page" button. —Ruakh_TALK 17:23, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Why were the terms "anti-civil" and "pro-civil" deleted?

The deletion of the terms "anti-civil" and "pro-civil" was done in spite of proof from independent sources that the two adjectives exist in their own right. The terms are rarely used, but they do exist. Wiktionary says that at least three independent sources are required. — This unsigned comment was added by Richontaban (talk • contribs) at 19:36, 29 June 2007 (UTC).

Hi, thanks for your comment. In order to verify that a word meets our criteria for inclusion, we need to have three durably archived quotations of use in the sense we claim the word has. (When we claim the word has more than one sense, we actually three such quotations per sense.) We actually had no quotations at those entries; to your credit, you did provide links to some Web pages, but not all the Web pages actually used the phrases you claimed they used, not all that did use the phrases actually used them with the meaning you claimed, and none of them appeared to be durably archived. Sometimes, when a word hasn't been verified to our standards, I'll undertake to verify it myself; but in these cases, a quick Google Book Search suggested that these terms don't actually exist. (It seems like someone misunderstood expressions like "pro–civil rights" and "pro–civil liberties", thinking that the "pro-civil" by itself meant something.) —Ruakh 22:36, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

That's odd, I seem to remember finding one quotation for anti-civil... I must be confusing it with some other word...

Looking now, I can find one intelligible quotation (it's not the one I remember from before, if you were wondering) for it... in The Catholic World (date of publication variously given as 1938 or 1971, Paulist Fathers given as the author/editor of the lat[t]er version),

[...] and the Osservatore Romano said with him and for him: "Toward the Israelites we are not only extremely anti-Christian and anti-civil, but inhuman.

— Beobach972 02:30, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, looking further, I can find quotations for this... let me find the RFV or start a new one. :) — Beobach972 02:30, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Ah, I was thinking of anticivic... — Beobach972 02:33, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Wait a sec, it looks like only pro-civil actually went through RFV; I think I got confused when I was removing links to pro-civil after deleting it, and wrongly deleted anti-civil as well. I don't think anti-civil is a word, either, but it should have its own chance to go through RFV; I've restored it. Sorry about that! —Ruakh 02:49, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

July

Thanks

Thank you for the welcome message. And I saw your name on Daikon page. I added the Japanese kanji on Daikon. But I could not delete the Japanese needed category. It would be nice to tell me what to do. Oda Mari 15:35, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

I've removed the category; the diff of my edit is here if you want to see what I did. Thanks for adding the kanji. :-) —Ruakh 15:37, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

Wow. Thank you for the quick removing. When you need Japanese, just tell me. I'm a Japanese. Oda Mari 15:50, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

corgi and Mutations

Need to remember to complain to Connel; Mutation (apophony) is not conjugation. Might properly be under Pronunciation? But in any case, we can keep the "Mutations" header IMO; probably should be "Mutation" though. Robert Ullmann 18:27, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

glad rags

I'm not certain what weirdnesses you spotted in the 2002 cite (re your edit summary: "comment out 2002 cite, because it has a few weirdnesses, but b.g.c. doesn't have the book's content so I can't check if they're sic or not.") but b.g.c. does have the content - [1], it's at the bottom of page 41 and the top of page 42. It is quite possible that my typing introduced some weirdness. 21:28, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, for me that link doesn't pull up the content; for me it pulls up the "About this book" page. The weirdnesses are:

• That the whole thing is in quote marks, and additionally contains a quote. This seems quite possible, but unlikely. (Note that, per Wiktionary:Quotations, we rely on our formatting to indicate that a quote is a passage from a book, so we don't use quotation marks on top of that.)
• The use of straight quotes and apostrophes rather than curly ones. (This one isn't a big deal, and I wouldn't even have mentioned were it not for the other things, but if a book uses curly quotes and apostrophes, then we should use them in quoting it.)
• The spelling "dessed" for "dressed".
• The spelling "rememember" for "remember".
• The presence of a space before the closing quote mark. (This is only relevant if the quote mark is actually part of the quote, obviously, since otherwise we're getting rid of the quote mark.)
• The grammar is weird. It does seem vaguely plausible, but especially the two clauses linked by a semicolon seem very surprising, since it seems that the former is implicitly tied to the clauses before it, not to the clause it's actually attached to with a semicolon. (If it is actually like this, then what I do in cases like this is put something like <!-- [sic] weird punctuation --> after the weirdness so that other editors know it's not a mistake, and it's really that way in the book.)

Sorry I have all these complaints, and can't actually help … I'm guessing the contents of that page are only visible to UK IP addresses or something? Either way, thanks for looking at this. :-)

—Ruakh 22:19, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

I've not got time at the moment to fix these, so I'll just put comments here. I didn't realise that you can't see the content with the url, it works fine for me. Perhaps it is a UK-US thing?

• The double quote marks surounding the entire quote, and the spaces between the double and single quotes are my doing, I was wrong about the formatting conventions here (thanks for the link by the way)
• The book uses single curly quotes for quotations, and curly apostrophes.
• "dessed" and "rememember" are my typos, sorry.
• The semi-colon is in the original - this is an unusual usage. I'm guessing its meant to indicate a longer pause or something?

I might get chance to sort this tomorrow morning, but more likely in the evening (UK time), if you've not done so first. 23:09, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! I've fixed it now. By the way, your signature seems to be broken; you might want to visit Special:Preferences and see what's up. —Ruakh 03:01, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't think there is anything wrong with my signature; the problem is that I'm typing five tildes instead of four! Thryduulf 08:45, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Possessive forms exclusion WT:VOTE rewritten and restarted

I have rewritten and restarted the vote, having attempted to reword the proposal to address the issues that people have raised. You may want to reread the proposal and reconsider your vote. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 20:05, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. :-) —Ruakh 04:09, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

You suggested here that an exception in the proposal be made for the pronoun one’s. I’ve started a new section asking for reasons why such an exception ought to be made. Please give your reasons there. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 10:52, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

right .. adverb

Thanks for tidying that up for me. I'll get the hang of the format soon. :-) I'm not sure about not describing right as an emphatic form though. (?) It means very, very.Algrif 14:55, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Would you say it means extremely? (The problem with calling it an emphatic form of very is that it's not a form of very, emphatic or otherwise, but rather a completely different word with a similar meaning.) —Ruakh 15:59, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Point taken. Thanks. Algrif 17:48, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

incommunicado

Hello Ruakh -- Chatting with you earlier today reminded me of something concerning which I have been meaning to solicit your opinion. Please take a look at the example sentences I wrote for this entry and tell me if you find the adverbial examples credible. The ever-intriguing OED gives the POS for "incommunicado" as "a. (or adv.)" but does not give separate defns or quotations for the two parts of speech. In the Wiktionary entry, I think I came up with a pretty unambiguously adjectival usage in the news quotation, but the example sentences I wrote for the adverb leave me with mixed feelings: On the one hand, in either sentence "incommunicado" can be appropriately replaced with an expression beginning with "in a manner in which..." and the usage of "incommunicado" here does seem to answer the question "how," suggesting an adverb. On the other hand, in each of these sentences "incommunicado" might also, it seems to me, be replaced with the adjectival defn of "in a state or condition in which...". What do you think of this rather slippery word and of these examples? -- WikiPedant 17:39, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree that in the cite ("[…] living in the incommunicado world of […]"), it's unambiguously adjectival. I'd actually say that in the example sentences ("[…] remained incommunicado in his home" and "[…] kept her incommunicado […]"), it's adjectival as well; while I can see an adverbial parse (modifying the verb each time), my natural parse takes it as a predicative adjective. (Note that intransitive "remained" and transitive "kept" both can take adjectival or otherwise predicative complements: "It remained forgotten until […]", "He did his best to keep the kids calm", etc.)

I think the reason the OED doesn't separate the cites is that it doesn't have any unambiguous adverb cites; if it did, the part of speech would just be "a., adv."

I think a relatively unambiguous adverbial example would use a verb that can't normally take a predicate, like "travel": "We left our cell phones behind and traveled incommunicado."

—Ruakh 18:15, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes, indeedy, Algrif was just chatting with me about this over on my talk page and I said there that I couldn't think of a verb that worked with "incommunicado" and unambiguously always took an adverb, but you've come up with a nice one in "travel." I'll change the first example sentence in the "incommunicado" entry to yours. I feel the second sentence is easier to read with the adverbial interpretation, with the object "her" placed between the verb and "incommunicado". And I wanted 2 sentences, to illustrate being (a) voluntarily incommunicado and (b) involuntarily incommunicado. Unless, of course, you can think of another nice verb that unambiguously always takes an adverb, to replace the second sentence. Thanks for the consultation. Always edifying. -- WikiPedant 18:30, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Now that it has percolated in the back of my mind for a couple days, I'm starting to suspect that even "travel" (which remains the best verb I've seen for demonstrating adverbial usages of "incommunicado") may still leave the door open a crack for adjectival interpretations. Both your "cell phone" example and the long quotation you added to the incommunicado entry might be parallel to a sentence like this (where the usage clearly is adjectival): After leaving Bucharest, we traveled penniless and hungry.

BTW, it appears that there are some things wrong with your citation info for that quotation. The quote is from Nobel Laureate Thomas C. Schelling, but his c.v. (here) only shows 3 publications from 1965, none of them in the now-defunct The Public Interest (which came into existence in 1965). Schelling did have publications in The Public Interest, but the first was in 1967. Also although Freedom House is now perceived as neo-con, in earlier decades it appears to have leaned a little left of center, and I can find no formal association between it and the right-wing The Public Interest. Unfortunately, none of the periodical databases, to which my university subscribes, containing The Public Interest has full text from that far back, so I cannot check the exact source of the quotation. -- WikiPedant 15:09, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree — almost any intransitive verb can take an adjective modifying the verb's subject (even if the verb's subject is omitted, as in "Driving drunk is illegal and immoral"). That's why I described this as "a relatively unambiguous adverbial example"; it can still be read as an adjective, but the adverb reading is much more salient. (Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that "incommunicado" has an adverb reading, and our goal is just to exemplify it.) To be perfectly unambiguous, we'd need a case where it's clear that "incommunicado" is not modifying a nominal; say, where an action (expressed with a finite verb) is incommunicado and its doer is not. I couldn't think of any, so settled on "travel incommunicado" as a second-best.

As for the problems with the cite — eep. Thanks for the notice; I'll see what I can find out. It might be best to just remove the cite and find one we can attribute correctly.

—Ruakh 16:33, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

How does this quotation strike you as a possible replacement? It seems to me to be no more/no less ambiguous than the "travel" example (and it seems to suggest an adverbial interpretation, since, unlike "held" or "remained," "work" is a nice, strong action verb and I cannot think of a single example where it takes an adjective). I found it after Algrif suggested "work incommunicado" to me:

• 2004, Ben Westhoff, "Making Traks," Riverfront Times, St. Louis MO, 7 Apr,

  The Starz seem most comfortable when they're in the studio, where they can work incommunicado.

-- WikiPedant 17:38, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, we can say, "The Starz seem most comfortable when they're in the studio, where they can work undisturbed"; but yes, that cite is certainly at least as good as the travel example. :-) —Ruakh 17:43, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Right you are. I bet they could work there uninterrupted, unperturbed, and unheard too. Anyhow, I have swapped this quotation into the entry and removed the current quotation and example. This really is its own kind of fun. ;-) -- WikiPedant 17:58, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Policy vote on brand names of products

Hi, I've started a policy vote at Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2007-07/Brand names of products. Since you participated in the Beer Parlor discussion, you may wish to vote on the proposal. Cheers! bd2412 T 23:59, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

over to

Hi. I was looking through Wiktionary:Requested articles:English when I came across over to struck out (strikethroughed ? :-) ) and your reasoning. But I do not see anywhere the use of this in phrases such as Over to our correspondent in Iraq. Over to you, Bob.Etc. Should this use be in over or is it really a use of over to? - Algrif 12:00, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

That's a good point. I'm not sure which would be better; I can see an argument either way. Please, do what you think best. :-) —Ruakh 16:24, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm as flummoxed as you are with this one! All I can really see here is a general ellipsis of some subject + verb which is considered unnecessary for the meaning to be understood. (Let's go) over to our correspondent... (I'm passing this) over to you, Bob. None of this really helps though. Algrif 10:43, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

After reading through the Pawley List on Criteria for Inclusion, over to someone seems to fit with no way and easy does it etc in no.18 on the list. Algrif 12:13, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Thinking this over, I would like to put this in as an entry for over to but, what POS is it???? :-) Algrif 13:32, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, either it's an adverb that takes a nominal (noun-phrase-like) complement, or a compound preposition; there might well be solid linguistic grounds for preferring one or the other, but if so, I don't know them (despite WikiPedant's apparent faith in me, I'm just a computer engineer who fell in love with Language Log, and really not an expert in these things). So, lacking scientific reasons, I'll go with a pedagogical one: if you label it an adverb, it's not obvious that it takes a complement, or what type, but if you label it preposition, it's still obvious that it's a compound preposition; so, preposition seems the most helpful label to our readers. (That's just my opinion, though, and if you're quite concerned, you might want to bring it to Wiktionary:Tea room.) Thanks for your work on this, by the way. :-) —Ruakh 14:00, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

template for hebrew translation

May I ask the reason for the change in making the font size bigger? I tend to use the template as I'm doing the translation, and having the font size larger makes it look just slightly wrong ... it's almost twice as big as the English text in most cases here. Thank you. Neskaya 19:52, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

It was for readability with nikud. In my fonts, it comes out about the same size as all-caps English, which I figured was O.K.; if you want it to be a bit smaller, though, feel free to edit Template:HEchar. —Ruakh 19:56, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

Oh, okay ... that makes a lot of sense. I figure the best way of going about it, if that is the reason, is to simply take my font and make it a bit bigger. For a moment, I actually thought that my browser was having some odd glitch or something, because of that. But yeah. Thank you for the clarification. Neskaya 20:04, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

Comment to Connel on my talk page

Thank you for your comment in my defence on my talk page. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 17:32, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

buck

Questions about buck

• Sense 7: Is this saying that buck is another term for young buck, or is young buck just a derived term that uses buck?
• Sense 8: I'm not comfortable with the word 'hence' in a definition. Can this be reworded to avoid it?
• Sense 10: What is Truman doing here? Is it a quote by Truman, in which case it should be in quotation marks. If it isn't quoting Truman then why is it linking to it?

RJFJR 18:42, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Sense 7: It's certainly saying that young buck means "an adventurous or high-spirited young man"; I assumed it was saying, further, that buck could be elliptical for "young buck", and hence could be used with the same sense. On second glance, though, I might have misunderstood; most other dictionaries define such two-word phrases in the entry for one of their components, and sometimes people try to do that here. (For reference, that definition was added in this edit.) This might be worth asking at User talk:Quuxplusone (in which case we should leave a note at w:User talk:Quuxplusone to let him/her know we've done so, as (s)he hasn't contributed here for over a year, but is still quite active at Wikipedia).

Sense 8: What's wrong with hence? (I'm sure we can find a different way to phrase it, but without knowing what you dislike about the current phrasing, I can't guess what alternatives you'd be O.K. with.)

Sense 10: I take it to be a quote from Truman, yes. It should not be in quotation marks; please see Wiktionary:Quotations for information on how we format quotations. (Usually we have a bit more information about a quote than just its speaker or author's name, but we have to work with what we've got.)

—Ruakh 19:45, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

My objection to hence is that it makes sense 8 depend on sense 7. If I wanted to copy and paste it into a message to someone that this is a use of the word, it doesn't make sense unless I include sense 7.

I remembered reading not to use quotation marks around example sentences that are not direct quotes (which I now can't find any reference to), and took it to also mean to put marks around sentences that were direct (attributed) sentences. RJFJR 20:09, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

I think sense 8 would still make sense without sense 7; it would be obvious that the source you copy-​and-​pasted from had more information than just what you put in the message, but I don't think that's a bad thing. What's more, I don't see any way to make sense 8 not refer sense 7, short of just removing the information that the latter comes from the former, and I don't think better copy-​and-​paste-​ability is a reason to remove information. (Note: I think this connection is especially important to include, because fop is not a well-known word in the U.S. — at least, it's not a word I knew — and dandy has a number of different meanings; so making clear that this sense is related to the previous one gives people a better general idea of what this sense probably means.)

And it would definitely make sense to use quotation marks on direct quotes, but not doing so has several advantages: it reduces ambiguity over whether quotation marks were in the original (say, it's an utterance by a character); it lets us preserve the original formatting better (rather than forcing us to mess with internal quotation marks to match the nesting level); it carries over better to languages that don't use quotation marks or don't use the same kind of quotation marks (since it would be odd for the English Wiktionary to apply non-English quotation marks to quotations, but it would look jarring to apply English quotation marks to non-English text); and so on.

—Ruakh 20:39, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

I see all your points. My solution to eliminating 'hence' was to replace it with 'from young buck' (not perfect either).

I was going to argue that I knew what a fop was, but remembered I argued with a friend about what it meant in a song. (Debate over whether it would imply a good swordsman in context or just someone concerned with clothes and appearance). Now I'm going to go read the fop entry out of curiousity. <G> Thank you. RJFJR 16:04, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

ç'-

Does this need a hyphen? My impression was that for abbreviated prefixes followed by an apostrophe, the apostrophe did the job of the hyphen (see, e.g. m'. Should this just be another sense of ç'? Cheers! bd2412 T 00:46, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Weird. To me it seems that the hyphen is still necessary to distinguish from words like o' and 'tis that start or end with apostrophes but that do not attach to neighboring words, as well as possibly from infixes that have an apostrophe at only one end but attach at both (if such exist). (I realize that the hyphen is not an all-purpose disambiguate-er — after all, it doesn't distinguish between prefixes that aren't ordinarily hyphenated and those that are — but I prefer to hyphenate all combining forms, to make the attachment explicit.) I don't know if there's an established policy on this point. —Ruakh 01:49, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Note that we have 's, not -'s. Not exactly the same, but similar. But we should have a policy. bd2412 T 05:22, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Second-class alternatives

You articulated here the égalitarian ideal which is intended when using {{alternative spelling of}} entries. Although, alas! this is not an ideal which all our editors share. Therefore, presumably, it is not shared by all of our users / readers either. I discovered this when I added a diæretic spelling as the “primary” form (sometime last year), and was harshly rebuked because of it. It would seem, certain alternative spellings are more equal than others…

How do you suggest we go about mitigating this perceived derogation? Or, at least, how do we make the selection of the “primary” form less arbitrary and more rational? (For, as you and I both understand, we can’t very well do away with {{alternative spelling of}} entries altogether.) † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 14:08, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, from a pragmatic standpoint, we generally want to define the term at the spelling people are most likely to look up, not to deprecate the other spelling, but simply to minimize the number of times people need to click through. This generally means the form that people are most likely to encounter, i.e. the more common form — except that in the rare case where a diacriticked or ligated form is more common than an undiacriticked and unligated one, people still might be more likely to look up the latter, because they'll encounter the former and type it in as the latter. So while I don't think we should ever use "alternative" to mean "less important", I also don't think we should use it on more-important forms. —Ruakh 15:05, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

I don’t get what you mean by this: “while I don’t think we should ever use “alternative” to mean “less important”, I also don’t think we should use it on more-important forms” — please explain what you meant. I don’t think that the “fewest clicks” argument is at all significant (I mean, come on — how lazy do you have to be to be unwilling to click a hyperlink‽), as the maximum number of clicks in any case is one. Neither do I think that “most common = primary” is a good idea — consider that a rarer alternative form may be looked up more often than the most common “primary” form due to its being unfamiliar; furthermore, I’d imagine that most of our users look up words here which they found on the internet, which means that a great majority will copy & paste a word (diacritics, ligatures, and all) rather than retype it. To be honest, I disagree with the very premise of “most common = primary”. {{alternative spelling of}} entries, unfortunately, carry an inexorable implication of derogation, and whilst this should be kept to an absolute minimum, I don’t think it can ever be eliminated altogether; therefore, said alternative spelling entries should point towards the most correct form (which should be determined by rational, logical argument, and not by argumenta ad verecundiam and numerum), with the reasons clearly given in (the usage notes section of) the “primary” entry. Yes, this would probably be a flashpoint for conflict, but none more so than the occasional disputes concerning which spellings should be “primary” which already occur now; furthermore, this helps to cut down on the arbitrary element in Wiktionary.

By the way, you mentioned in the Grease pit the nodot=1 and nocap=1 optional parameters which both the {{plural of}} and the {{alternative spelling of}} templates have. This function should be available for all templates of that style (such as the {{misspelling of}} template). If possible and not too controversial, could you please make it so? † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 00:36, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Regarding where main (as opposed to "alternative") entries should be: As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm not usually one to shy away from discussions, but those are some arguments I don't think I'd touch with a ten-foot pole.

Regarding nocap=1 and nodot=1: That's the plan. The thing is, it's a pretty simple change to make for any given such template, but there are 333 of them (see Category:Form of templates), which makes it quite an undertaking. I can do it now for {{misspelling of}}, but I don't think I'm going to go through all of them and do it; in the future, when you need it done for a specific template, let me know and I can do it for you.

—Ruakh 00:48, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Black Forest gateau

I find your criticism of my comments to be irrational. Rather than raking User:Doremítzwr over the coals, I was inviting him to correct his mistakes without some absurd amount of drama. Instead, he is (in very bad faith) taking the opposite approach, again pushing his invalid POV in defense of "English diacritics" or something.

His bad faith edits have been not only permitted, but occasionally egged-on by WT:RFV loopholes. Early on, I hoped he would come around and apply his intelligence toward building a world-class dictionary. Such assumptions of good-faith have long since been exhausted. He has defended each absurdity with increasing circumlocution and increasing insults.

How dare you ask me to assume good faith, on his part, now?

--Connel MacKenzie 18:51, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

To be fair, the POV that diacritics don't exist in English isn't really supported by the facts, either. The two of you are flip sides of the same coin: him with an extreme "the way people speak and write is always fine, but etymological spellings and usages are even better" viewpoint, you with an extreme "there is exactly one correct way to say or write a given thing in (U.S.) English" viewpoint. I don't think either of your viewpoints is representative of the opinions of most Wiktionarians, or of most English speakers; certainly neither viewpoint is very conducive to much discussion.

Now, I think both of you are operating in good faith, and I don't think either of you is intentionally pushing your viewpoint; but it's not surprising that your viewpoints come across (especially as you each seem to be completely blind to your respective viewpoints), and it's not surprising that each of you constantly thinks the other is acting in bad faith. Certainly unfortunate, but not surprising.

—Ruakh 19:09, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

You know that is untrue. You are being blind to the fact that he is pushing his POV, while I am not pushing any. You are being blind to the fact that he is directly causing harm to the project. --Connel MacKenzie 19:33, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps I'm being blind. Certainly my own biases align more with his than with yours; I'm generally a descriptivist, but with an appreciation for etymologically-grounded and old-fashioned-ish pedantry. —Ruakh 19:53, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Pardon me, while I scoff at how absurd your prejudgment is. Another example, I suppose is WT:RFD#idiosyncracy. The point of bypassing misspelling/alternative spelling conventions is what? The point of POV pushing (when the discussion shows a nearly perfect 50/50 split) is what? And who was it you were saying is prescriptive? One-and-only-one spelling indeed. --Connel MacKenzie 00:30, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Let me put this in table form for you:

alternative spelling	misspelling
Thryduulf Connel MacKenzie	Paul G Doremítzwr EncycloPetey Widsith msh210

(comment continues below)

Correcting your table, without directly eding yours yields:

alternative spelling	misspelling
Thryduulf Connel MacKenzie EncycloPetey	Paul G Doremítzwr Widsith msh210

--Connel MacKenzie 19:13, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

(comment continued from above) Now, what is this "nearly perfect 50/50" split that you're referring to?

Also, it's not my understanding that we have any "misspelling/alternative spelling conventions", so I don't see how he could have bypassed them — and while it might have been nice if he'd let the discussion die down a bit more before deciding where consensus lay, he made a point of saying, "If the change is disagreeable to anyone, feel free to change it back and discuss why here" (emphasis mine). This is not the behavior of a POV pusher, but of someone trying to ascertain consensus by announcing an action and see who minds.

—Ruakh 00:58, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

The convention was started by User:Dmh two years ago, then restarted about one year ago. AFAIK, it has been followed without complaint (until now) since. --Connel MacKenzie 18:45, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't suppose you could link to it? I don't know what it consists of, and I assume Doremítzwr doesn't, either. (This might be a good topic for a vote, by the way, just to confirm that everyone still agrees with it.) —Ruakh 19:04, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

By the way, I'm not going to accuse you of intentional deceit here — I trust that as a person you're not one to lie intentionally, so I assume that you went based on your own impressions of the discussion without actually counting opinions, and anyway I trust that you're smarter than to lie about an easily checked fact — but given your recent accusations that Doremítzwr has intentionally deceived people, in cases where it's a lot easier to imagine how you and he could simply have interpreted the facts differently, I'd really have a hard time criticizing him if he came back and now accused you of intentional deceit. (After all, when you stop giving people the benefit of the doubt, you don't really have grounds for insisting they give it to you.) —Ruakh 14:07, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Oh goodie. How kind of you to not make the accusation explicit. Oh wait! Lookie there, how on earth did you put EP in the wrong column? Intentional deceit, indeed! --Connel MacKenzie 18:41, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Firstly, please don't edit my comments; replying to them is equally effective. (If you want, you can copy-and-paste my table code and make the relevant modifications to present your version.) Secondly, you seem to have misread EP's comment: he explicitly wrote of misspelling the word by using -cy instead of -sy. Thirdly, I'm genuinely not accusing you of intentional deceit; I'm just trying to show you that you're as capable of making mistakes and misjudgments as I am, as Doremítzwr is, and as everyone else is. —Ruakh 19:04, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Please re-read what he wrote: he said the exact opposite. --Connel MacKenzie 19:13, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

I did re-read it, and I maintain my view; he's saying that, before he read that discussion, he would have misspelled the word by using -cy instead of -sy. To be honest, I don't see how you can be interpreting it differently, but I invite your explanation. (I also invite his; I left him a message on his talk-page asking if he could comment here. If he has good sense, he'll ignore my message and stay out of this argument, but I'm hoping he doesn't. :-P) —Ruakh 19:25, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

He also linked the Google stats - he is familiar with the convention you seem to be ignoring! In that light, he most certainly is suggesting the "normal" way of handling it - list it as an alternate spelling, not a misspelling. This notion is reinforced by his statement that the "alternate spelling" is how he spells it. --Connel MacKenzie 00:09, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm not seeming to ignore a convention (unless you use a very obsolete sense of ignore), I'm explicitly stating my unfamiliarity with it and requesting a link to it. Your unwillingness to link to it? Completely understandable — it's a lot of effort to dig up an old discussion. Your refusal to say anything about its content besides that its conclusions supposedly support your viewpoint here, and that its conclusions somehow reverse the plain meaning of EncycloPetey's comment? Much harder to understand; I guess you're trying to keep your comments succinct so as to get your point across, but I wish you'd include supporting information. Your decision to pretend that I'm ignoring the convention instead of asking for information about it? Verging on the absurd; I'm sure there must be some explanation, and I look forward to hearing it, but from where I sit, it looks suspiciously like you might just be full of shit. —Ruakh 05:39, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Your (re-)interpretation of EP's comments to an inverted meaning is what seems to be "full of shit." But thank you for wearing your heart on your sleeve. I still don't see how you arrive at that misinterpretation. Doremitzwr has been trolling here for a long time, from his very first edit. He has been quite in the midst of many of those relevant conversations and knows better. Out of respect for his efforts towards citations, I never blocked him; his selection of what to cite however, is an indication that that was a horrible mistake. Your inexplicable support of his disruption and your very one sided comments make it clear that my words are wasted, here. --Connel MacKenzie 23:49, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

• The discussion is all about my generosity of making on over-the-top good-faith effort to reduce contention, despite his exhausting any conceivable patience. He met that good-faith effort with a belligerent denial of wrongdoing. And you stepped up to defend him? Sorry, but it remains inexplicable. --Connel MacKenzie 18:50, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

If this fits your definition of an "over-the-top good-faith effort to reduce contention", then your baseline levels of contention must be through the roof. I really hope you're on blood pressure medication and a low-sodium diet, else I fear you might not be with us much longer. —Ruakh 19:04, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Look at my original post there, and more importantly, the hostile responses. --Connel MacKenzie 19:13, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Verb patterns

Hi. You are good at this sort of question: Is there a special term for those verbs that can be followed directly by another verb in either infinitive or gerund form. E.g. want like afford promise try etc. The reason I ask is that I would like to set up an appendix table showing which are followed by to infinitive and which by -ing, as well as those few that can take both and the three(?) that take the bare infinitive. This kind of stuff is useful for en-L2 users, and wikt is just the ideal place for it. Algrif 11:18, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

I think they're sometimes called "semi-auxiliaries", but I'm not sure if that term has a standard meaning. Sorry. :-/ —Ruakh 16:07, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. You may be right, but I think there is another term. Who else could I ask? Algrif 17:02, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

As I recall, EncycloPetey is well-versed in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, which terminologically often deviates from the norm (since it chooses terminology that best reflects its analyses, rather than terminology that best matches everyone else's), but is better than making up our own terms. ;-) —Ruakh 19:21, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Concerning infinitive markers in verbal definitions

I’ve replied to you on my talk page. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 16:12, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

And again. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 17:04, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks!

Cheers for the help and welcome and what not.

Yes, it must seem a little confusing! Well I'm English. Half italian, so I can do an odd bit of that. Fluent in german. And my brain is filled with useless trivia that now I have a place to chuck it all! I'm also an avid musician so I'm sure you'll see a whole bunch of musical words pop up.

I'm rather enjoying myself :)

Jakeybean.

August

Citations subpages

I have, at long last, replied to you on my talk page. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 01:25, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Citing etymology of poontang

Hi, Thanks for sticking the unreferenced thing into the etymology of this. Could you point me towards the help pages that explain the criteria for citation and sourcing of etymologies please - I couldn't find them? I've actually got two possibles for this one and route via US slang and don't mind doing a bit of digging to get it into shape. Cheers. --Kylemew 22:17, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I really don't know what our criteria are. Supply what references you can, and you won't go amiss. If worse come to worst, we might have to say something like "The origin of this word is unclear; one theory is ____. This theory is espoused by ___, ___, and ___." —Ruakh 22:48, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

IW template links

Did you notice that the links show up on the talk page as in-text links, rather than side-bar IW links? --EncycloPetey 19:14, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Oh, no, I didn't; thanks for pointing that out. (Sorry; I was so concerned with making sure I didn't screw up the template that I didn't check to make sure I didn't screw up the talk-page.) Are talk-pages not able to have interwiki links? —Ruakh 21:07, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Whitelist

Simple instructions on how not to muck everything up wouldn't go amiss actually! I'm not at all confident editing javascript, etc., as despite living with computer scientists at university I'm really only comfortable with human languages. Thryduulf 21:35, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for that, I've added the two users I approved and I've not blown anything up yet (at least not that I know of...) Thryduulf 21:56, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

ought

Hi. As usual, I value your comments. Thanks. I have answered your queries about ought in my talk page. -- Algrif 17:37, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

-îrent

Fixed in all templates I could find it on. No verb, in any tense, takes a circumflex on third person plural that I know. -er verbs do take a grave though. Circeus 22:39, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

L4 headers and WT:ELE

Please enter your vote again; it was invalidated by improper edits by DAVilla. Tx, Robert Ullmann 23:35, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it seems like an over-reaction. But when someone can't just leave minor shit alone? The more important vote/poll on "basic headers" (ety and pron) has been totally trashed by adding/redefining options. And I'm sure DAVilla would have preferred a result; but now there can be none. Robert Ullmann 00:02, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Example sentence format for Japanese entries

Hi, Ruakh. Thanks again for your suggestions to improve the proposed changes to WT:AJ. Tohru notes at Wiktionary talk:About Japanese#Example sentence format that since we do not yet have a standard, tested Ruby solution, it is helpful to provide a hiragana-only version of example sentences (i.e. to transcribe kanji, katakana, roman numerals, etc. into hiragana). Please respond there if you have time. Rod (A. Smith) 17:34, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Latin comparative adjectives

I think Category:Latin comparative adjectives is the preferred category name. (regarding Wiktionary:Grease_pit#Comparative difficulties) --EncycloPetey 00:45, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! :-) —Ruakh 02:07, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

חנוכה

Thanks! I was actually interested in hearing the current pronunciation used by Jews, and Israelis, nowadays. Thanks again. Gbeebani 03:59, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Hollow are the Ori

Don't do that again without significant discussion and agreement with other sysops. --Connel MacKenzie 23:13, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

You're right; I shouldn't have, and won't again. (Though I also don't think it's reasonable to block someone permanently without significant discussion and agreement.) —Ruakh 23:16, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Odd ball space from template:term

Maybe ask Rodasmith (talk • contribs). He's the one who implemented the linkless format on the template. The syntax is really a bit too advanced for me. Circeus 19:23, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

There's a non-breaking space there that doesn,t belong. I'll ask him to see about it. Circeus 21:07, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Ethnic slurs

We do have that category, in ru: as well. To use it from a label requires the template. Are you planning on eliminating the categories?

And "highly offensive" isn't sufficient, it has to be "pejorative" (of which Category:Ethnic slurs is a subcat). Robert Ullmann 17:59, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Category:Ethnic slurs makes sense, but (ethnic slurs) does not, at least until we start defining multiple slurs at once. (I'm O.K. with a different approach, though; something like a {{ethnic slur}} that labels as (ethnic slur) but categorizes into Category:Ethnic slurs.) —Ruakh 18:09, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

So why not just change label= in the template, and perhaps move it to Template:ethnic slur, leaving the redirect? There are other cases like this, see Template:birds. Robert Ullmann 18:14, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Hebrew traslations

• he:template:Emergency-bot-shutoff
• he:template:bot

Would you mind translating these? --Cool Cat 19:04, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

I don't understand your request: those templates don't seem to exist? —Ruakh 19:08, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

I think he means w:he:template:Emergency-bot-shutoff and w:he:template:bot, which are currently in English. Dmcdevit·t 21:47, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Oh! Thanks. :-) —Ruakh 22:39, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

I've now translated {{w:he:תבנית:Bot}}. I'll have to think a bit about how to translate {{w:he:תבנית:Emergency-bot-shutoff}}. —Ruakh 00:25, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/2007-08/style for mentioned terms

Oops! I was working on this in parallel with your Wiktionary:Votes/2007-08/Formatting of mentioned terms. I suppose we should collaborate and merge? Rod (A. Smith) 22:13, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Oh, sorry! Feel free to remove my straw poll from the votes page, and integrate as much or as little of it as you like into your page. (I really don't have any strong feelings about how this should be structured. Every way seems problematic to me; I chose one that seemed comparatively non-problematic, but I'm not at all attached to it.) —Ruakh 22:24, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

No worries. I appreciate the help. When I first read your vote, I thought the flexible voting options would be helpful, but now I am not so sure. We've already received plenty of unstructured feedback. If this straw poll results in more unstructured feedback, I don't know how I would be able to integrate it into {{term}} and MediaWiki:Common.css. Mulling it over.... Rod (A. Smith) 22:28, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, that's the main trade-off; if the creator of a vote or straw poll imposes too many constraints, people complain (or simply violate them), but if (s)he doesn't impose enough, it can be hard to interpret the results. So, good luck with it! :-P —Ruakh 22:33, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Dutchtown High School

Hi. Would you mind cleaning this one out please? Many thanks. Algrif 17:34, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Already done. Wiktionary: fastest mods on the planet! Cheers! bd2412 T 17:41, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Can you take a look at this?

User:msh210 and I have been working on the edittools characters that should be included for Hebrew here. Can you by any chance take a look and see what we have possibly missed? Much appreciated. --Neskaya ^talk 18:13, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

IRC?

Do you use IRC? If so, would you like to discuss "proscribed" in real time? Rod (A. Smith) 23:59, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Well, I've already screwed up (forgetting to start a command with /), but I'm trying … AIM or MSN Messenger or Gmail-chat would work better for me, though, seeing as I know how to use them. If you're cool with one of those, please e-mail me. —Ruakh 00:39, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

connexion

Hi there,

I was just wondering why you removed {{alternative spelling of}} from connexion?

Thanks,
—Ruakh_TALK 15:30, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

The expression "Alternative spelling of" was still there. But I looked at it again after your message, and it seemed more appropriate to change it to "Out-of-fashion spelling". Eclecticology 20:06, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Isn't "Out-of-fashion spelling of connection" just another way of saying "(dated) Alternative spelling of connection.", except that the latter is formatted correctly, adds the right categories, and links to an explanation of the term "dated"? —Ruakh_TALK 20:52, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Hullo there. I wanted to point out that connexion is still used in writing by some people. Therefore out of fashion wouldn't be particularly appropriate, would it? Just my take, thanks.

--Neskaya ^talk 20:09, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

snickerdoodle

FYI: wikibooks:Cookbook:Snickerdoodle has a recipe from the Boston Globe from 1898 ;-) Robert Ullmann 04:19, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I realized afterward that b.g.c. hadn't included hits for "snickerdoodles" (for some reason I thought it did include regularly formed plurals of nouns that aren't in quotation marks, but apparently not). The quote I gave was the earliest for "snickerdoodle", and even that one was only singular in form because it was being used in "snickerdoodle cookie". I considered going back and finding earlier plural cites — b.g.c. shows 14 — but decided I was lazy. As long as no one decides that two of the quotes I gave are actually for "snickerdoodle cookie" and therefore don't count, I don't think I'll bother. ;-) —Ruakh 04:26, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

audiocassette and form vs. spelling

My understanding was that the combination of words happens much more readily here in America, than over the pond. For that reason, compound terms are usually indicated as alternative spellings, not alternative forms. For audiocassette, I think I'd consider it a misspelling of audio cassette, though, as the resultant compound word is simply too long. (Admittedly {{unreferenced}}.) Have you come up with a new, better distinction for what merits an alt spelling vs. alt form? --Connel MacKenzie 16:35, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your comment. Going by b.g.c., "audio cassette" is more popular in books — which is why I made it the main entry — but not by very much. (Surprisingly, the difference on normal Google is much greater.) As for "spelling" vs. "form": I take "form" to be a broader term — alternative spellings are a special case of alternative forms — where an alternative spelling is for the case where the difference is a matter of what letters to use (as in "defense" vs. "defence", or "color" vs. "colour", or "encyclopedia" vs. "encyclopaedia"), while an alternative form can encompass different spacing, capitalization, punctuation, ligation (or whatever it's called when you use a ligature instead of two separately written letters), etc. This isn't a result of discussion — as I recall, past discussion didn't result in a conclusion, or at least not one that I could figure out how to apply — but is just my own approach until we figure out a more consistent one. I don't actually understand your first two sentences: you're clearly working from a very different sense of what "alternative form" means (with "spelling" being for regional variations?). It might be time to bring this back up for discussion … —Ruakh 16:42, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Welcome message (:

Thank you for your kind message. If i had a problem, or a question, i'll tell you (: Best wishes, Sinek 16:43, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

The typo bandito

Ruakh - Sorry about that... you caught me red handed :) --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 22:47, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Heh, don't worry about it. I don't know quite how that happened, but I've seen much weirder typos … once an editor (solid admin, unassailable motives) accidentally inserted a long string of z's into a Polish translation! Given how many z's Polish tends to have anyway, it's amazing that it was ever noticed. :-) —Ruakh 22:55, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Hey, I thought everyone'd forgotten by now! ;-) Dmcdevit·t 08:34, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

September

Redirects

Thank you fot the information. I won't do it again (: Best wishes, Sinek 08:19, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

teraphim

Hiya, would be nice to have the Hebrew for this one.... Widsith 15:58, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! mercy seat could do with some help as well...all I know is it's something like kapporet..? Widsith 17:13, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with the term mercy seat, but w:Mercy seat says that the term does not come from Hebrew כפורת "atonement piece". So, I don't know how to edit that entry appropriately, but if you want to mention the Hebrew, the right way would probably be something like {{he-link|כפורת|wv=כַּפֹּרֶת|kappóreth}} “atonement piece” (that's not a great romanization — I romanized the consonants ancient-ly and the vowels modern-ly, because we don't have an ancient-ish romanization scheme established and I don't understand the ancient vowel system well enough to ad-hoc it — but I think it's good enough for our purposes).

By the way, you might want to pose these questions to msh210 as well; he seems to know more than I do about Biblical Hebrew.

—Ruakh 18:03, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks I will use that. As I read it, Wikipedia confirms what our entry says, which is that the English term is from the German, which itself was a rendering of the Hebrew. Widsith 10:35, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

O.K., cool. :-) —Ruakh 14:14, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

gerundio

Hi there. I wouldn't be surprised if that third Spanish definition shouldn't be gerundive rather than gerund. Or is there a Spanish version of Italian gerundivo? SemperBlotto 17:55, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

That's exactly what I was thinking when I wrote that edit summary, but then I looked into it, and it turns out that Spanish does indeed have a gerundivo referring to the gerundive, and w:es:Gramática latina lists gerundio and gerundivo as two of Latin's impersonal/nominal moods, so I guess that gerundio does indeed refer to the Latin gerund. :-) —Ruakh 18:23, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Please clarify you vote

For your vote on User:Neskaya for admin, I presume you meant to stike out your abstention? DAVilla 04:25, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

You presume correctly; now fixed. (I'm finding that vote difficult; it can be so hard to step back and decide whether you really think a friend is ready to be an admin.) —Ruakh 04:32, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

FYI

w:Wikipedia:Long term abuse#SpongeBob/The Shining vandal. --Connel MacKenzie 18:11, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I don't know why you're showing me that? :-/ —Ruakh 19:18, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Oh, never mind, I see now. —Ruakh 19:46, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

The verb forms template and substitution

Well... I'm stumped. I've been testing substitution on {{fr-def-verbform}}, but despite my effort so far, I have failed abysmally since the {{#switch:}} vanishes when subsituted, even though substitution is supposed to work with parser functions... Maybe I'm missing something there?

Also, on a marginally related issue, is there, or should there be a defined ordering for these definitions (since what I've seen for French, Spanish and Italian has been different)? And what about the "linking orgy" in the Italian version? Circeus 14:46, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

We can decide for ourselves what order we think the definitions should go in, and what links are useful.

Substitution does work with parser functions; for example, when you include {{ subst:#switch: A| B = C| A| D = E| G}} in a page, it will become E. One thing to be wary of, though: when you subst: something in a template, it gets substituted immediately. If your goal is for it to be substituted when you subst: the template, then you need to prevent this. There are a few ways, but the most intuitive is to write something like {{ <includeonly>subst:</includeonly>#switch: A| B = C| A| D = E| G}} so that the subst: only gets included in pages that you include the template in, not in the template itself.

—Ruakh 15:01, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

I should have known I was missing something obvious... But tat *still* won't fix the problem. The #ifeq substitute just fine, but the #switch keeps going AWOL... Trying to sustitute just the switch still fails:

{{subst:#switch: is<!--

Begin multi-possibilities endings.

-->
| is = {{form of|First- and second-person singular indicative present|{{{1}}}}}
# {{form of|First- and second-person singular indicative past historic|{{{1}}}}}
# {{form of|Second-person singular imperative present|{{{1}}}}}
# {{form of|Masculine plural past participle|{{{1}}}}}
| it = {{form of|Third-person singular indicative present|{{{1}}}}}
# {{form of|Third-person singular indicative past historic|{{{1}}}}}

| isse = {{form of|First- and third-person singular subjunctive present|{{{1}}}}}
# {{form of|First-person singular subjunctive past|{{{1}}}}}
| isses = {{form of|Second-person singular subjunctive present|{{{1}}}}}
# {{form of|Second-person singular subjunctive past|{{{1}}}}}
| issent = {{form of|Third-person plural indicative present|{{{1}}}}}
# {{form of|Third-person plural subjunctive present|{{{1}}}}}

| issions = {{form of|First-person plural indicative imperfect|{{{1}}}}}
# {{form of|First-person plural subjunctive present|{{{1}}}}}
# {{form of|First-person plural subjunctive past|{{{1}}}}}
| issiez = {{form of|Second-person plural indicative imperfect|{{{1}}}}}
# {{form of|Second-person plural subjunctive present|{{{1}}}}}
# {{form of|Second-person plural subjunctive past|{{{1}}}}}
| issez = {{form of|Second-person plural indicative present|{{{1}}}}}
# {{form of|Second-person plural imperative present|{{{1}}}}}
| issons = {{form of|First-person plural indicative present|{{{1}}}}}
# {{form of|First-person plural imperative present|{{{1}}}}}

| issais = {{form of|First- and second-person singular indicative imperfect|{{{1}}}}}
| irais = {{form of|First- and second-person singular conditional present|{{{1}}}}}
| irai = {{form of|First-person singular indicative future|{{{1}}}}}
| iras = {{form of|Second-person singular indicative future|{{{1}}}}}
| ira = {{form of|Third-person singular indicative future|{{{1}}}}}
| irons = {{form of|First-person plural indicative future|{{{1}}}}}
| irez = {{form of|Second-person plural indicative future|{{{1}}}}}
| iront = {{form of|Third-person plural indicative future|{{{1}}}}}<!--

Begin indicative endings.

-->
| issait = {{form of|Third-person singular indicative imperfect|{{{1}}}}}
| issaient = {{form of|Third-person plural indicative imperfect|{{{1}}}}}
| îmes = {{form of|First-person plural indicative past historic|{{{1}}}}}
| îtes = {{form of|Second-person plural indicative past historic|{{{1}}}}}
| irent = {{form of|Third-person plural indicative past historic|{{{1}}}}}<!--

Begin conditional and subjunctive endings

-->
| irait = {{form of|Third-person singular conditional present|{{{1}}}}}
| irions = {{form of|First-person plural conditional present|{{{1}}}}}
| iriez = {{form of|Second-person plural conditional present|{{{1}}}}}
| iraient = {{form of|Third-person plural conditional present|{{{1}}}}}
| ît = {{form of|Third-person singular subjunctive past|{{{1}}}}}<!--

Other endings

-->
| issant = {{form of|Present participle|{{{1}}}}}
| i = {{form of|Neutral and masculine singular participle|{{{1}}}}}
|
}}

results in

(flashing lightbulb) Oh shit... Don't tell me the *comments* are causing substitution to fail? Let's test:

I'll go and submit a bug now. Circeus 15:53, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Template:es-form of (verb)

Hi. I see you are working on this template. As you know, I make a number of Spanish additions, so I would be interested in understanding more clearly how and where to use this. When you get a moment :-) -- Algrif 16:51, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

It's still in progress. Once it's ready, I'll post something at Wiktionary talk:About Spanish. —Ruakh 16:56, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Muchas thankyou's. -- Algrif 17:40, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

As you may have already noticed, WT:GP#Spanish noun templates includes discussion about parameter names. Your input would be much appreciated. Rod (A. Smith) 03:47, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the invitation, but I really don't have an opinion. It's kind of ugly, and hard to maintain, to support a bunch of different names for parameters, since templates don't have any good way to compute a value and store it (so you can't devote a block of code to normalizing parameter values and then get into the simply-coded heart of the template), but then at Template:es-verb form of I found a different way (normalizing parameters and passing them to a sub-template that doesn't need to worry about the variation), so I'm neutral. (Of course, then Dmcdevit posted an off-topic comment there that complains about how complex our templates are and uses as its examples a laundry list of every single thing I did in designing that template, so maybe I'm the only one who likes my approach.) —Ruakh 04:59, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Vandalism in progress

Hi Ruakh. Please block User:SpongeBob for vandalism. Thanks. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 21:03, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Done, thanks. (Just a one-week block for now; longer might be warranted, as Connel thinks he's the same person as a long-standing Wikipedia vandal. If he resumes his vandalism after the block expires I might just jump straight to an indefinite block.) —Ruakh 21:19, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Good idea. Although, in his defence, he did revert two instances of vandalism by another user. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 22:20, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm not convinced they're separate people. The vandal that Connel thinks he is was noted, among other things, for reverting some of his own vandalism. —Ruakh 03:34, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Ooh! What a devious little shit! Looks like I fell for it, to my discredit. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 22:56, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

use of {{t|ku|مه‌به‌س|sc=KUchar}} template

Hi! I noticed you changed some of my templates from {{KUchar|[[مه‌به‌س]]}} to {{t|ku|مه‌به‌س|sc=KUchar}} in my tranlsation to intention. Is that the preferred template to use? I will start using this new template. I am planning on entering a few thousand more translations as time allows, so feel free to point out anything else I should do differently. Gbeebani 01:21, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Oh, hi! I just left you a comment, actually. Actually, it looks like you left your comment first. But anyway, yes. Thanks for all your translations! :-) —Ruakh 02:56, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Hey Ran, I'm not sure why I didn't put any of the languages as native! After I was born here in Michigan we moved back to Iraq where the first language I spoke was Kurdish, then we moved to Libya where I learned Arabic, then moved back to Michigan where I learned English. So even though Kurdish should be my native language, as it was the first language I spoke, I am much more efficient in English and Arabic. So I guess I can pass as a native English speaker.

I will definitely start using the {{t}} template and add romanizations. Gbeebani 05:01, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Is there a standard romanization format that I can refer to? The following problems is what I can think of right now:

1. How to differentiate between and . The first is a light L as in , and the second is a thick L as in .
   

This also applies to and .

1. Many of the Kurdish letters don't have a corresponding Roman pronunciation. Shall I just go with my best guess? Gbeebani 05:22, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

In theory, the romanization should be a transliteration, that reflects the spelling, with each grapheme (letter or sequence of letters that forms a single unit, like <t> or <ch> in English) having a specific and distinct target-language string that it maps to. In practice, that's not how we've been doing it for Hebrew — where the writing system is at odds with pronunciation, we've been going with the pronunciation — and I don't think that's how they're doing it for Greek or Japanese, either. If there are no other Kurdish-speaking editors, you should probably just go with your best guess and document it at Wiktionary:About Kurdish. If there are others, or if you're not sure whether there are, you should probably start a discussion at Wiktionary talk:About Kurdish and link to it from Wiktionary:Beer parlour. —Ruakh 18:56, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! Gbeebani 21:23, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

The archival process

Hi Ruakh. If you have the time, could you leave a message on my talk page explaining the hows, whens, dos, and don’ts of archiving RFV, RFD, RFC (?), infodesk, tearoom, beerparlour, and greasepit discussions to me please? I’d like to help out by so doing, but I’m uncertain of all the ins and outs. (BTW, a criticism of our slow archival in the Grease pit is what prompted this request.) Thanks. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 02:24, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Phrasal verb demon

Hey, That's a great one!! Thanks. :-)) -- Algrif 13:16, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

{{es-form of (verb)}}

As you can see, I'm trying to make it so that this adds two categories: one for the verb form, and one for the verb ending, like we had at {{es-verbform}}, since they are not entirely related, and making such a specific category names means you won't be able to view all verbs of a particular form in a single category. But I think this just screwed it up [2]. Do you know how to fix it? Dmcdevit·t 19:24, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Mea culpa. Fixed now. —Ruakh 20:39, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure what's going on, but it's still not working correctly. Look what happens when I put it in estornudes. Dmcdevit·t 21:04, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, it's working now. Could you do that for all the moods? Dmcdevit·t 22:00, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Sure. Are you sure this is how we want to do it, though? It seems like maybe we should have a category for each kind of form (as you're saying), and within that a category for each ending (instead of having a category with something like 70 forms for each verb)? That's just a thought, though; I actually don't quite see the need for ending-specific verb-form categories at all — the ending-specific infinitive categories, plus the conjugation table at each infinitive's entry, should more than suffice for any use I can think of — so maybe I'm missing the idea. —Ruakh 22:40, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

The idea is that you can navigate up to all the infinitive "-ar"s (or whichever) without clogging the category of infinitives with all the forms, and also that the category label alerts the reader that it is that type of conjugation. Plus, it's just more information that we can easily supply, so I'd err on the side of inclusion. If we were to categorize based on verb forms and ending in the same category, we wouldn't eve be able to view, say, all "Spanish second-person singular present indicative forms," even though that's the relevant inflection, since they'd end up in three categories based on ending. Dmcdevit·t 22:52, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, there's no reason we can't put entries in both Category:Spanish informal second-person singular present indicative forms and Category:Spanish informal second-person singular present indicative forms of -er verbs. —Ruakh 00:21, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Sure, but there's no reason we'd want to do that, except because we can. It's just redundant, and probably looks funny and wrong, too. Dmcdevit·t 01:16, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

O.K. —Ruakh 01:38, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Also, (sorry for pinging you so much lately) the ustedes form is not what we hashed out. I put it in estornudan. It should appear as "Second-person plural present indicative form of X" always, and then the context tag will alert the reader that it's formal in Spain. But if I omit the "formal" parameter, which seems natural in that case, it thinks it is missing something and puts it in a cleanup category. Also, it puts a dangling "A(n)" at the front. But if I put "formal=yes," which seems plausible, i not my first instinct, it puts the "formal" in the text and category, even though it is only supposed to appear in the context tag. Basically, for second-person plural in all moods, we need "formal=no" to be vosotros, but "formal=yes" and "formal" omitted should both give a standard ustedes form which doesn't say it's formal at all. Dmcdevit·t 03:21, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Your last edit to the imperative template just caused it to break. Look at the strange stuff in estornuda. Honestly, I'm a bit afraid to touch the template because it's gotten too complex for me, I think. :-) But I'd just like these two fixes done (getting the second person plural working, too— take a look at estornudaban, still using the es-verbform template that's right, versus estornudaron, with es-verb form of, and which thhinks it is missing a parameter, ad outputs junk), and then I can start on the mass substitutions. Dmcdevit·t 20:52, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

O.K., I've fixed the typo that caused the problem at estornuda. I'm not sure I'm O.K. with the change you're suggesting be made for estornudaron: if formal is to be optional, then the default should be to assume the vosotro@s (true second-person) form is meant, not the ustedes (syntactically third-person) form. —Ruakh 21:04, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Why would that be? I've learned Latin American Spanish (in fact, vosotros forms still confuse me sometimes!) and in all forms but Spanish Spanish, ustedes signifies a neither-formal-nor-informal. It's just not specifies, like with non-third-person forms, so leaving it out seems natural for the majority of Spanish speakers. This is what makes sense to most people, I think: Spanish speakers will naturally put "formal=yes," and this outputs the correct form currently, but everyone else will naturally omit the parameter, ad this screws up the output currently, even though it should appear the same as "formal=yes." Dmcdevit·t 22:03, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Someone looking at this from the grammatical standpoint will likely omit the "formal" parameter in referring to the second-person verb forms (the “tú” and “vosotr@s” forms). We've decided to label these the "informal second-person" verb forms, and to give the third-person verb forms two lives, as both "formal second-person" and "third-person" verb forms; so, we've created the formal parameter. I'm O.K. with that; it's not my preference, but I understand the reasoning behind it, and it's a compromise I can live with. Further, we've made this parameter mandatory, in order to ensure that users of the template understand how it works (specifically, that they understand our aforementioned decision, and don't leave out the redundant “usted(es)” definitions). I see this mandatory-ness as part of the compromise; I'd consider unspecified formal to refer to the true second-person forms (the “tú” and “vosotr@s” forms), and you'd consider unspecified formal in the plural to refer to the “ustedes” forms since “vosotr@s” forms are obsolete for something like 80% of Spanish speakers. —Ruakh 23:51, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

My point is not just that vosotros is obsolete for so many, but that where it is obsolete, ustedes means an unspecified formality. So it would be incorrect for those speakers, myself included, to ever input a "formal" second-person plural; formal second-person plural and omission of the formality parameter should give the same out. And if we are making the formality a mandatory parameter for where it is specified, it should also be incorrect for someone wanting vosotros to not specify. We are just talking about the template parameters here, not the output text. Besides which, currently an omission defaults to garbled text, not vosotros. Dmcdevit·t 00:02, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, yes, that's what makes it a compromise; we could engage in a revert war over whether unspecified-formality means true-second-person or neutral-for-some-speakers, but I think it's better to avoid the revert war by simply requiring that formality always be specified. (You'll recall that I did suggest, in our discussion at Template talk:es-verbform, that we try to think of a better name than "formal", for exactly the reason you mention. If you have an alternative suggestion, I'm all ears.) —Ruakh 00:14, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

That's not a compromise, that's a Spanish POV, and it's completely bizarre to me why you are defending it so obstinately. I'm asking for the template to accept either Spanish form ("formal=yes") or Latin American form (unspecified) merely as a template parameter for the same output, and you are telling me that you will only accept the Spanish version. I'm not arguing over which one is right, I only want it to allow both options, and you are saying that "simply requiring that formality always be specified," when formality for the second-person plural is a Spanish-only form, is a compromise. Again, this isn't even an issue of the template output; we should be flexible with our parameters. Dmcdevit·t 01:20, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

It's a compromise between your Latin American POV and my grammatical POV. No one here is arguing for a Spanish POV. —Ruakh 01:35, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

No, seriously. It's not a compromise. If I enter my "Latin American POV," I get a garbled template output and told that the article needs to be cleaned up. It only works correctly if I enter a Spanish form and tell the template that it's formal. And that's counterintuitive even for Spanish Spanish, because the context tag covers the formality, and it's extraneous in this template. All I'm asking for us dual compatibility, instead of getting a broken template for entering a correct form into the template. Dmcdevit·t 01:43, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Are you not understanding my explanations, are you not trusting my motivations, or are you willfully ignoring my opinions? (I'm sure there must be some fourth theory that would explain your comment, but I'm having difficulty thinking what it might be.) —Ruakh 02:18, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

What, each theory of yours is a different way I am doing something wrong? It's not difficult to imagine the fourth theory: you won't even admit that the possibility that you are wrong exists? At the outset, all I wanted was a template to standardize the Spanish verb forms, and we're almost there, but now you are refusing to allow to users to enter what is the correct form for most Spanish speakers into the template without it outputting nonsense and putting it in a "cleanup" category. Apparently I and Latin America are ungrammatical. It's becoming maddening, to have spent dozens and dozens of kilobytes of dicsussion on this and still have a broken template. Dmcdevit·t 02:40, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Ah, apparently the correct theory was the first one, but that's not your fault: it's mine, for being unclear. I neither said nor meant to imply that you and the entire Spanish-speaking world are ungrammatical. As you'll recall from our earlier discussion, my opinion is that — let me use the present indicative of hablar to make my example — hablas and habláis are, grammatically speaking, the second-person forms, while habla and hablan are, grammatically speaking, the third-person forms. Now, throughout the Spanish-speaking world, there exist the special pronouns usted and ustedes that are semantically second-person but grammatically third-person: they use the third-person verb forms and the third-person object pronouns. (Indeed, in this they're like English "your Honor", "your Majesty", "my lady", and so on; they descend from an analogous noun phrase meaning "your Mercy".) It was my desire to use this grammatical description in naming and classifying the verb forms, with phrases like "formal second-person" being completely avoided, or (and in this I was already compromising a bit) incorporated into larger phrases like "third-person and formal second-person". You, however, felt that it would serve our readers better to describe second-person verb forms as "informal second-person", and to list third-person verb forms twice, once as third-person verb forms and once as "formal second-person" or "(Spain: formal) second-person" verb forms. I acquiesced; while I didn't agree with your viewpoint, I at least understood it and saw that you made a strong argument for it, and I saw no reason to push the point.

Now, apparently, you no longer consider that compromise sufficient, and reject the idea that this was even a compromise: in your view, not only must we list these supposedly second-person forms separately, making use of a special formal parameter, but we must assume that if someone omits this parameter, it's not because they agree with me that "second-person" does in fact refer to the second-person verb forms, but rather because they agree with you and wish to ignore Iberian Spanish. Well, I don't think that's a reasonable assumption, and I'm not on board with it, and I'm quite annoyed at your claim that I haven't compromised.

—Ruakh 03:10, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Ruakh, this is not about me not understanding. I'm sick of the endless discussion that goes nowhere. And it's clear to me that we're going in circles because you won't accept anything I say. Right now, if I put a valid (the only valid form in most Spanish-speaking places) form into the template, I get garbled text and told it needs to be cleaned up. According to you there is no second-person plural outside of Latin America, but that's absurd. I know you feel that you "acquiesced" by accepting what has been the status quo for a year now, but we're not playing tit-for-tat here, we're building a dictionary. I don't frankly care much for this agonizing over details anymore, and I don't like feeling like I'm being held hostage because you can create esoteric templates that others can't understand enough to modify without. And I find your attitude highly condescending. Dmcdevit·t 03:50, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry: I don't mean to be condescending, I don't mean to be holding you hostage, and I don't mean these templates to be esoteric (if only because I have no interest in being de facto responsible for making any needed edits in the future!). Can we find a different approach that we'll both be O.K. with? Something less fraught with agonizing-requiring details? Maybe instead of the whole person=first/second/third number=singular/plural formal=yes/no thing, we could have a single pronoun=yo/tu/usted/el/nosotros/vosotros/ustedes/ellos? Would you be O.K. with something like that? —Ruakh 04:13, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

By the way, to clarify the above: the reason none of my theories was my being wrong was not my certainty that I was right, but rather that my being wrong wouldn't explain your comments. Your comments said or implied that I had a Spanish-Spanish POV, which was certainly not the case. The possible explanations were therefore that you misunderstood my explanations of my actual POV, that you didn't believe my explanations of my actual POV, or that you hadn't bothered to read my explanations of my actual POV. (My being wrong would probably fall into either category #1 or category #2: either you misunderstood my explanations because, due to some error on my part, my explanations didn't agree with my stated POV, or you didn't believe my explanations, for the same reason.) —Ruakh 18:57, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm wondering if you are digesting any of what I am saying. As you can see, I tried disengaging, but I'm not sure if it helped. I complained about your discussion style (endless and agonizing, to be blunt), and you suggested in return to essentially start over with a completely new approach. That was frustrating, but I just bit my tongue. Then you went and made the change, but left what seemed to me like a petty remark in the edit summary that it was "at Dmcdevit's insistence" and that you "think this is clearly misguided for several reasons, but I don't want to keep arguing with him about it." Well, thanks, but the edit summary is not the place for a discussion, especially since there is no room for a response. In your next change, you remarked that it was "hopefully less "esoteric" now.", and in context, I think that your putting it in quotes sounds like you don't actually believe it. Believe me, I simply can't future out some of the stuff you put in templates. (Not everyone has had formal, or even any, computer science training. I suspect you've taken at least some. In fact, to someone with no computing experience, your edit to lengthen the template to dozens of lines makes it harder to figure out what's going on. Comments like <-- --> may seem natural to you, but to me, they are just more opaque characters in wikitext, clogging the actual template meaning, and creating irregular line breaks and indentation.)

Anyway, I just started working on the template anyway, since you made the small change I wanted. It was already a bit frustrating how you created that template in the first place, without any notice, and specifically incorporating some of the things you preferred, when we had already talked and compromised, into the new template. I thought we agreed that the gender and number of participles would go in the inflection line, like every other Spanish word. And just as you said you didn't want to be responsible for the sole maintenance of the template, I found someone else to help with an edit I could not figure out how to do, and then you questioned him on it anyway. Now, in an unrelated discussion above, you accused me personally of "post[ing] an off-topic comment" at GP using your templates as an example, when I did no such thing. We were having a discussion that addressed template complexity, and I replied. There was nothing off-topic about it, and nothing about you either, but your parenthetical side-swipe at me was much more so. I'm increasingly frustrated, even though I wanted to just drop it. Can we?

— This unsigned comment was added by Dmcdevit (talk • contribs).

I'm sorry. Despite my apologies above, I actually came out of the above discussion quite angry and taking-things-personally-itive, which I shouldn't have; that's purely my fault, and I'd appreciate it if you simply forgot about my petty edit summary. (I'd also like to remain on good terms with you, both for the obvious reason that we're both working on the same project with the same goal, and for the more specific reason that you and I often disagree, and you do a good job explaining your viewpoints and thereby helping me to understand a viewpoint other than my own. That's a rare thing.) Your comment expresses the desire to keep discussion brief, which I understand; but it also mentions something that you thought we agreed on, when I thought we actually agreed the opposite (sorry), and it mentions various things you dislike about the template, which I could have done differently had I known your preferences beforehand. (I understand the desire to keep discussion non-agonizing, but then, if there are lots of details we disagree about, it seems that either we have to discuss them, or we have to decide to let lots of things slide — which neither of us seems to have been managing.) As for creating Template:es-form of (verb) without telling you: that's my fault. I mentioned wanting to change the name and you O.K.'d that, and so I did. My error was that I didn't create the new template in the place I'd said I would! I don't know how I made that mistake, and I can assure you that it wasn't my goal to keep you in the dark. As soon as I realized that you were still editing the old one, I brought your attention to it. I'm sorry that took so long. If you'd like to just drop things — I'm O.K. with that. I actually don't contribute very much Spanish (my Hebrew and French are much better), and from the get-go I should have been willing to let you do things the way you'd been doing them. So, consider this dropped. :-) *removes those templates from my watch-list* —Ruakh 19:26, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks; I'm not trying to be thin-skinned, I just thought I'd err on the side of communication. Part of my frustration was that I just wanted a template that does what we already have now, but templated so we have a standard text, categories, and can identify missing entries. But in the course of making the template, which I assumed would make it easier to fix what we deemed needed fixing in the future with a single change to the template, anyway. But instead, I'm to fear that the way people wanted to perfect the template before it ever sees use, might end up in it never actually getting done. I didn't even plan on starting a policy discussion when I first got involved in this; I just wanted to fix what I saw as deficiencies in what we already had. I think I'll take a break from the template for a bit too, and see what direction it goes, if anywhere. Dmcdevit·t 04:26, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Mormon?

No, I most certainly am not Mormon. May I ask, where you got that impression? Up until today, only Primetime and ED have made that same incorrect assumption. --Connel MacKenzie 02:02, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

I think I found your name in some sort of "encyclopedia of notable members of online communities" or something like that. If that is where I got that from, then I guess I should have known better than to believe such a site. Again, I hope you're not offended. (I certainly didn't mean it offensively; I have a few Mormon friends, and while I hesitate to generalize, the ones I know are among the most service-dedicated people I've met.) —Ruakh 02:11, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Tea Room

We most certainly do have an archive; please read the top of the page? ;-) Robert Ullmann 16:11, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I looked in the box at the top of the page that links to the various discussion pages, including their archives, and it doesn't link to the Tea Room's archives. I'll move those discussions to the archives now. :-) —Ruakh 16:14, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

ephah etymology

Hi. You might find a moment to add correct etymologies to ephah, homer, and nº2 bath. ( Then again, you might not. Who knows? :-) ). -- Algrif 15:07, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Excellent stuff. Thanx. -- Algrif 15:49, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

No prob. :-) —Ruakh 15:50, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

L4 headers (Inflection vs Declension)

I noticed the change you made to ιστορία and just wanted to point out that, although it's not official policy, Greek entries, both Ancient and Modern, have the header "Inflection" for the various parts of speech; see Wiktionary:About Ancient Greek#Inflection for example. There's also a dicussion about it here: Wiktionary_talk:About_Ancient_Greek#Headings which I think is still current. Thanks! ArielGlenn 21:20, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Oh, sorry. That was after discussion at Wiktionary:Requests for cleanup#ιστορία. I really think it makes sense to distinguish between "conjugation" and "declension" for languages where those are the only forms of inflection (since these are more widely recognized term); but if there's a standard to the contrary, obviously that should be followed. Thanks for letting me know. :-) —Ruakh 21:52, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks

Whee, I feel really silly now. Thank you for pointing that out. I had all the stuff for date/time checked before and had then totally forgotten that the page even existed. --Neskaya ^talk 22:09, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Gaul.

I had no idea about that parameter to begin with. I'll keep it in mind in the future. On an unrelated topic, who do you think is best qualified to do some esoteric editing to a protected template? I think {{fr-noun}} could use a "uncountable" version (which I had to fake in acharnement). Circeus 21:48, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

That template is already quite complicated in terms of the various parameters it can take, and I don't see any easy way to insert countability into that; but I'll see what I can do. By the way, I'm not very far from having a working bot that can subst: the remaining uses of {{fr-def-verbform}}. :-) —Ruakh 01:42, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

POV pushing

Be advised that your recent edits to Islamo- and Islamofascism look like POV pushing. Your birthplace being Israel implies a developed cultural antagonism with Islam. Please avoid editing this article without sources that justify your edits.--Halliburton Shill 01:34, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Not at all; my birthplace being Israel implies that I know more about Islam, and feel a greater affinity with it, than most Americans. (Keep in mind that the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East are the result of dictators and fundamentalists who control certain Muslim countries — not the result of mainstream Muslim views in those countries.) —Ruakh 01:40, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

flatus - morbid swelling sense

I took this sense from the Oxford English Dictionary. The quote from Swift was there used as an example of this sense. Other senses recognized by OED are "blowing, blast, breath, puff of wind" and "accumulation or development of wind in the stomach". Hekaheka 07:11, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Oh! O.K. Sorry. I thought you added a new sense without noticing that it put the quote in the wrong place. I'll fix it back. —Ruakh 14:00, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

WT:RFV comment

I take it you've never played Fictionary? --Connel MacKenzie 04:26, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Ah! I had played it (as "Balderdash"), but didn't make the connection. Thanks for explaining. :-) —Ruakh 04:40, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

RFV feminazi

Hi there! Since you struck feminazi from RFV, do we also need to update a copy of that discussion to the feminazi talk page? (Question: do we always copy the complete discussion to the talk page after the RFV process?) If so, notice that the feminazi talk page has an incomplete copy of the discussion, as more "discussion" ensued after it was struck once from RFV and then "un-struck".
(I once tried to update the discussion to the talk page, but the template didn't seem to want to include all of it. A character limit?) -- Thisis0 20:21, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

A nitpick: I didn't strike feminazi from RFV, I struck it at RFV. Until it is actually removed from RFV, there's still the possibility of someone commenting there and even un-striking it, so we can't archive it to the talk-page. I'm generally loath to actually remove a discussion from RFV less than a week after striking it; people should have a chance to object to the way a discussion was resolved. That's especially true in a case like this, where there's already been some strife. As for the limits of template transclusion, I don't know, but I'm sure we can handle it acceptably when the time comes. —Ruakh 21:40, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

got it, thanks! -- Thisis0 19:04, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

French verbs, reloaded

Thanks a lot. Circeus 15:09, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Help?

Ruakh, I can use your help. I want to make a Wikipedia account. At my job, the IP is blocked and I can't make an account there, and my computer's down at home, as it has been for a couple of weeks. Is there anyway I can get an account there? Bakura 05:15, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Just out of curiosity, why did you revert my edits at Connel's talk page? Not that I'm offended or angry or anything, just curious. Bakura 05:23, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Ahh, nevermind. Bakura 05:26, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

That's odd. Usually when Wikipedia blocks an IP address belonging to a school, workplace, etc., it only prevents anonymous editing, not account creation. You might want to try e-mailing a Wikipedia admin (using the "e-mail this user" link in the sidebar at left of their user page), stating your workplace IP address and explaining the situation, and see what they have to say. —Ruakh 05:28, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

I've tried. It says it can only work if you have a logged-in account with an e-mail set in preferences. Bakura 05:31, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Really? Sorry, I didn't realize that. (That seems like the sort of thing I should know.) In that case, I recommend leaving a message at the talk-page of a Wiktionarian who's also a Wikipedia admin, such as Thryduulf or EncycloPetey. —Ruakh 05:35, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

☜

Hi, I made this page based on your comment in WT:TR, however, I am unsure that I used the correct terminology, can you go over it and clean it up a bit? Also, what are the three different binary codes? Where did you get the url-encoding? And can you add the decimal codepoint as well? Please get back to me on this, I plan to create a template that can be used to provide the basic information about Unicode symbols. H. (talk) 14:36, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

I got the URL-encoding by wikifying ([[☜]]) and clicking the link; my browser took care of the rest. The first binary code is just translating the URL-encoding to binary (from hexadecimal). The second binary code is just stripping out the leading — i.e. "most significant", as this is big-endian — 10, 110, 1110, or 11110 from each byte. (These bits are how UTF-8 organizes itself — each UTF-8 byte is either an ASCII character with a leading 0, or is a sequence of up to four bytes, having either the form 110_____ 10______ or 1110____ 10______ 10______ or 11110___ 10______ 10______ 10______ — technically it can be longer, but it's moot, as Unicode can never assign characters that big — where the _'s represent the value of the character.) The third binary code is the same as the second, but with spaces moved around so it's divided into nybbles, at which point I just translated it back into hexadecimal to get the U+____ format, and went to the Unicode code-charts page to get the name corresponding to that codepoint. If you want to be able to do this for yourself, e-mail me and I can make an HTML page that will do this for you, assuming you have a JavaScript-supporting browser. —Ruakh 16:36, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

ro-noun-def

You're my hero :D

The first (and probably most important) thing is that the ro-nounform has to change to 'ro-noun-def.' After that...

• In the first template, the 1st parameter was the basic form of the verb, but now it's the third. (So basically that just needs to be moved, no other change.)
• Under the second parameter should go the gender/number. In the old template this was done by "gend=m|num=s", but now it's just "2=ms". It's pretty basic, the two old ones combine into one. "gend=f|num=pl" would change to "2=fpl" and that kind of thing. There are 3 genders (m, f and n) and two numbers (s and pl) so 6 possible outcomes there.
• Third parameter is pretty simple, too... "case=na" would change to "3=na" and "case=gd" would change to "3=gd"

There was an old parameter "art=" but I realized that there was really only one thing that could go there, so that can just be removed. By the way, you're my hero. :) — [ ric| opiaterein ] — 20:42, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

O.K., I'll take care of that this evening. I'll let you know if I have any questions. —Ruakh 20:52, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Wait, this doesn't make sense. This isn't how it's supposed to work. I've edited carta#Romanian and cartă to show you how we handle this sort of entry. —Ruakh 21:51, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

I like entries that have definitions. *shrug* —

prietenului <-- that's why. You can see what the words mean and how to use them a lot more easily than running between two articles. To me it seems clean and logical. — [ ric| opiaterein ] — 22:02, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Please read (and participate in) WT:BP#Noting lemma forms in WT:ELE. Rod (A. Smith) 23:26, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

I much prefer "my" way of doing it. It provides all the same information and more. Like I said, it's clean and informative. For one thing, the definition is there, so a person reading it doesn't have to worry about how to translate something. Especially with verb forms. I just don't feel that simply listing what form a word is in does any good for anyone. The entries might as well not exist if that's all they're going to say. — [ ric| opiaterein ] — 05:44, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

The "form of" entries exist primarily so people can find the main entry for the word. Including full translations at each entry is a bad idea, because it discourages other editors from improving those translations: in order for their improvement to actually contribute something, they'd need to edit every single "form of" entry as well. —Ruakh 14:53, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

In that case, maybe we should just give the best definitions possible to begin with. The main entries are still the most important ones, but I still hold that not including the definitions is easy, but not particularly helpful. Including only the 'form of' means that whoever is reading it has to know all the grammatical terms, which some people just aren't good at. Even if they do know what the terms mean, you still have to know how to apply them. Including (good) definitions makes all that less necessary. Furthered by including example sentences, it's even better. — [ ric| opiaterein ] — 17:03, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

WT:BP#Noting lemma forms in WT:ELE. Rod (A. Smith) 17:24, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I read that yesterday and it didn't change my opinion at all. ;\ — [ ric| opiaterein ] — 17:39, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

He's not saying "read this discussion and be convinced by it", he's saying "don't give your explanations on Ran's talk-page, where few people will see them and they won't affect policy; give them in this ongoing, policy-shaping discussion." (At least, I assume that's what he's saying; I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong.) —Ruakh 17:43, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Yes, what Ran said.  :-) Rod (A. Smith) 17:51, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to throw a monkey wrench: the idea that we can't (or somehow shouldn't) have proper entries at "non-lemma" forms is bogus. They should have their inflection on the inflection line, a real English definition on the definition line; and should show the full conjugation (what is that? a header and one template call?). Ric is correct; and we have been taking a bad shortcut. (I'll take this up on a larger scale; but this has been something I've been thinking about for a year now ;-) And agian Ric is correct IMHO, and this isn't the place for the discussion ;-) Robert Ullmann 23:43, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

On topic: I've fixed most of them, but a number remain at Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:ro-nounform due to problems the bot didn't know how to handle (because I don't know how to handle them). Specifically, five noun forms (homosexualitatea, dragostea, dragostei, jalei, and jalea) are marked as invariable number, which the new template doesn't seem to support; three noun forms (Cataloniei, Sloveniei, iubirea) don't specify a number at all; and a whole bunch of noun forms (all the rest) don't specify a set of cases. If you'll tell me how these problems should be handled, I can get them as well. (Note: some early ones were marked with a cleanup tag, but as it seems to be a matter of genuine debate whether this form is O.K., I didn't do that for the later ones. Feel free to untag those early ones.) —Ruakh 06:18, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm still thinking about what to do with the invariable ones (I'll probably just add them into the new template) and the ones that don't specify case are all, if I'm not mistaken, nominative/accusative, but I should be able to take care of most of them. Thanks for your help =) — [ ric| opiaterein ] — 13:48, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

October

Quotation template

Do you know why I have to add &nbsp after the emboldenment for it to work? You can look at the examples here. :) Best regards Rhanyeia 07:42, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

I reduced it to this: "

Test test test

" (<table>Test <b>test</b> test</table>) and it still doesn't work. But it works on the ordinary html environment. What would be the best thing to do about it? Best regards Rhanyeia 10:14, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

I really have no idea, sorry. I'm quite as mystified as you are. —Ruakh 14:53, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

I got the template work by adding <div> in between. :) Best regards Rhanyeia♥♫ 07:35, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Hebrew

Hi Ruakh! It seems that you're the one to come to concerning Hebrew... while I was writing the entry "margaritomancy", I came across this:
"(ש"ע) נחש פנינים, נחש מרגליות (שיטת הגדת עתידות)"
Do you know whether it's just a definition of the word in Hebrew, or a translation of the word? Cheers, Jakeybean

Translation, mostly. Taken very literally, it means something like:

(noun) guess-by-of pearls, guess-by-of pearls (method-of tale-of fortunes)

So it looks like "נחש פנינים" and "נחש מרגליות" are their translations for margaritomancy. נחש usually means "snake", but I think here they're using the gerund of "guess"; it's very weird to me, as gerunds are quite rare in Hebrew, and you'd usually expect "ניחוש" (or "נחוש" in old-fashioned spelling), but whatever; pagans aren't known for their straightforward nomenclature. פנין and מרגלית both mean "pearl".

Then in parentheses they have a bit of clarification.

Regardless, even if Babylon translates margaritomancy this way, I note that the terms get no other hits on Google, so presumably don't meet CFI.

(We can add the relevant sense to נחש, though, as other terms containing it, such as נחש חלומות "guess-by-of dreams", i.e. "oneiromancy", do get at least a few hits.)

—Ruakh 14:38, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Oh, how very interesting. Thank you very much for the help. :) Jakeybean

{{fr-conj-er}}

I don't understand why you think the composed past participle in in fact a composed present participle. It is shown as the former at Le Conjugueur and at the Becherelle (which happens to be considered the leading authority on the conjugation of french verbs). So why do you think it is the latter??? ChrisDHDR 19:04, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't claim to understand the decision to name these table columns "simple" and "compound", and I'd support a move to fix that; but if you look at the forms that appear in these columns, it's obvious what is really meant: "form identified by row name" and "perfect-aspect form corresponding to form identified by row name". Thus the infinitif and infinitif passé share a row, the gérondif and gérondif passé share a row, the normal participe passé has a row all to itself (because constructs like "eu fait" aren't normally used), and the participe présent shares a row with what you might call the participe présent passé. —Ruakh 04:27, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Sicilian Wiktionary

Hello Ruakh. The page wiktionary is blocked. I can't modify it. Would you please change the Sicilian Wiktionary name "Wikizionariu" in "Wikizziunariu"? "The new name is the correct name ("wiki" + "dizziunariu" = "wikizziunariu"). The former name was wrong because it was written in italianized Sicilian. The former name had been choosen by a non-Sicilian person. But now it is written in real Sicilian language: wikizziunariu. Thanks in advance for changing this horrible italianism. Best regards. Sarvaturi (administrator and bureaucrat on Scn.wiktionary) — This unsigned comment was added by 82.228.198.161 (talk) at 02:49, 9 October 2007 (UTC).

Will do, thanks. —Ruakh 02:50, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Never mind, Kappa beat me to it. (By the way, it wasn't locked to administrators, but only to registered users. You should consider creating an account here for yourself, so you can edit such pages to add Sicilian translations.) —Ruakh 02:54, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

• Dear Ruakh, thank you for your response. yes, I have seen that User:Kappa has done the changes. Ok, in the future, I will create an account here to add some Sicilian translations. But for the moment I must work very much in the "Wikizziunariu" because it needs to be "made better". If you want, you can contact (on the Sicilian Wikipedia) the Sicilian-Australian administrator "Pippu d'Angelo" (he's an English-speaking and Sicilian-speaking man) who founded the Sicilian wikipedia project. I often work with him. He's a nice/friendly guy. I'm sure he will collaborate with you. Thank you and have a nice day! Good luck from the Sicilian Wiktionary. Best regards. Sarvaturi --82.228.198.161 03:03, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

bad beat(s)

You changed the template to include "|sg=bad beat", but I can't see any change in the appearance of the article.

Is this an indexing thing? Is it the correct way to handle all multi-word nouns?

(I can see that the change to the way "poker" is specified at the begining of the definition gets it into the catagory list.) 87.114.138.55 08:44, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your question!

There is a change; instead of this:

bad beat (plural bad beats)

we get this:

bad beat (plural bad beats)

which is to say, the words "bad" and "beat" get linkified.

In general, yes, multi-word entries should have all words linkified this way.

Thanks again, and welcome to Wiktionary!

—Ruakh 17:33, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

e.g. and i.e.

Ah, thank you. I do know the difference well, and thank you for correcting the error. (Like affect/effect, I cringe when I see the wrong one ;-) Robert Ullmann 14:19, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I figured. Heck, I can't say how many times I've been proofreading a comment and realized that I've somehow managed to type "it's" when I meant "its", even though it drives me batshit insane when other people do it. —Ruakh 14:43, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

reverting mammoon

--Waterfloepie 14:31, 11 October 2007 (UTC)Hi Ruakh,

You deleted mammoon and mammooning. Eu... what did I do wrong ?

Waterfloepie

Your edits looked like spam. —Ruakh 14:39, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

אחת שתים

Can you please check the Hebrew translation at one-two-three? I added it because I'm almost sure it's correct, but would appreciate the input of someone who knows Hebrew better than I. Thanks.—msh210℠ 17:12, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Done. :-) —Ruakh 17:22, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Common Categories

Before Connel can create "Opposition Momentum" like he usually does, please help create "Support Momentum" for my new vote!!! Wiktionary:Votes/The Joy of Categories Thanks!! :D Language Lover 06:00, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, LL, others beat me to the punch. I should try harder next time? --Connel MacKenzie 18:57, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Delete IBM

IBM is only a company — This unsigned comment was added by 17:44, 16 October 2007 (UTC) (talk • contribs) at 24.126.80.252.

No, it's not; please read the entry. —Ruakh 18:19, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

You are splitting hairs, if we are playing fair remove the entries about the company. 69.140.184.148

WT:RFV#shuttlecock

You comment makes me wonder anew, where you got such blindingly-strong British influences in your version of "American" English. Perhaps your parents influenced your vocabulary much more than you realize. It is very curious to have someone who has lived here most of their life, again be defending British-isms (as valid, or even recognizable, in GenAm.) --Connel MacKenzie 18:55, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, I am a big fan of Agatha Christie, and a lesser fan of Arthur C. Clarke. :-)   I've never played badminton with my parents; I played it in middle school gym (with American teachers and mostly American classmates), and I've played it with friends (mostly American). I don't know whether my parents even know what badminton is, and anyway, they're Israeli, not British. You seem to have a very strong belief that standard GenAm is your specific idiolect of English, and I'm not sure where you got this belief from. It's clearly been reinforced by your time here, where there are a number of active British editors and you've managed to convince yourself (and them) that when something isn't part of your idiolect, it must be UK-specific; unfortunately, there are also a number of active American editors, such as myself, and I for one don't much appreciate it when you declare my idiolect nonstandard just because it differs from yours. —Ruakh 19:11, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

I think you have monstrously misunderstood. You disagree with my math - well, fine. You arrived at the same conclusion though (I'm not sure if you realize what you said yet. On further review, I agree the sample size is far too small. More on that later.) The initial RFV was because I've never heard it outside of Wiktionary. So what? That doesn't mean it is invalid, that means I RFVed it.

Some close attention should be paid to sequence next. I indicated that the RFV was (more than) satisfied, but because of my lingering question, asked if it should be moved to RFC. You responded with an oblique slight and suggested the normal term "birdie" itself is only informal. I replied with more links that show where I got the impression that it was UK-centric, as opposed to just vandalism.

Returning to what I was doing before the routine-normal-troll-noise that is WT:RFV, I didn't stay hovering on top of the vandals. Nice. (I should have noticed the troll, with the beastiality reference.) Nor did I see your correction earlier (but, one that doesn't change the outcome, per se.) Indeed, the vandals would suggest that all these are merely fiction? No, being trolls, they engaged in an elaborate game of character assassination. Thank you for telling them to assume good faith. But, rest assured that I'd do more than that, if I saw them attacking you.

Reviewing more closely the news.google.com hits, I agree strongly with you, that the sample size is too small. The 100% UK preference of "shuttlecock" is only two items - not the majority that I thought it was at first (somehow.) Looking now, I'm half convinced the result set changed. But I'm at a loss to explain how that could be, as the results seem fairly stable now.

I'm also at a loss to explain how I can go so long never hearing the term "shuttlecock" if it is as common as you suggest. Granted, I don't play badminton; perhaps only a handful of games of badminton in my life. It seems to have a 47/53 split in some contexts [3] vs. [4] without the regional variation I thought I noticed at first. I don't know - maybe I was looking at Badminton earlier?

That aside, the content of say, badminton uses only the "weird" term. You disagree that it is weird at all - fine. It still is biased towards one terminology set - and pointlessly so.

Given that the first three years of Wiktionary (when it was predominantly English language terms,) had only one person in the top 10 from the US (me) I do have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to calling all foreign things British. Back then the focus was just on filling out all the basic English entries. I don't think I even noticed when Wiktionary crossed the line - but now almost all "normal" words are in. Much of the time, I have to catch myself, when acting (or reacting) as if it were still that early phase. Back then, as I was primarily entering missing terms, it was occasionally problematic being the only American around. For a very long time, the fact that most contributions did have a UK bias was undeniably true. As the composition of contributors is steadily changing, that is less true, now.

Please don't conflate an RFV with "deeming something to be invalid." You like to over-generalize every tiny little thing I do or say. I think you'd find your time better spent, if you spent less of it imagining horrible motives on my part. I honestly thought my comments at the beginning of this section could be helpful to you. I do wish I were able to read your moods better, to avoid offending you, as I apparently did. Well, sorry, for that offense.

--Connel MacKenzie 02:03, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your calm and well-reasoned reply. I think the reason you might not have heard "shuttlecock" before is that "birdie" is a more informal term, and people tend to discuss sports in informal terms, at least in the U.S. (In this case there's also the additional factor that people might have a reason to avoid the word "shuttlecock", given its last syllable.) Don't worry, I don't conflate an RFV with "deeming something to be invalid", but you frequently make statements about something existing or not in GenAm, and seem to base these statements solely on your familiarity with the term. When you deem something non-GenAm that to me is a normal word, it gets my hackles up; but in the future I'll try to be more calm about it.

Re: "Thank you for telling them to assume good faith. But, rest assured that I'd do more than that, if I saw them attacking you.": Thanks for the sentiment, but I'd rather you didn't. My comment to them is pretty much the same thing I'd want said in my defense if it were needed: an admonition to calm down, a link to WT:AGF, and a dispassionate evaluation of the claims being made. (That's assuming the claims being made are flawed, as they were in this case. Justified claims would be an entirely different bag of chips.) This is generally quite effective: either the other person calms down a bit and tries to respond to the dispassionate evaluation, or they go completely over the top and prove beyond reasonable doubt that they're a troll, completely unworth our time. (The only difficulty is that the evaluation really needs to be quite sound, because if it's not, they invariably pounce on the weak spot.)

—Ruakh 02:36, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

IBM = intercontinental ballistic missile?

Is this a British thing, or a dated thing, or something? I've only ever seen "intercontinental ballistic missile" abbreviated ICBM. —Ruakh_TALK 15:46, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

For a moment there I wondered if I am, in fact, going mad – but having checked I see that this is also listed at the OED, so I didn't make it up! Even to me, ICBM is commoner though, so maybe this is an older form. Widsith 12:07, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, O.K., then. :-) —Ruakh 14:41, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Adminship

You posted

Hi,

You've been around here for a while now, made a lot of good contributions, and contributed in an upbeat and helpful fashion to a lot of discussions. As you've probably noticed, we're perpetually seeking new admins here; are you interested in being nominated?

—Ruakh_TALK 18:10, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm interested. I have to tell you, I'm an admin over on Wikipedia and I'm not the most active admin, I usually just work on fixing up articles that have been tagged for cleanup (WP has a horrible backlog of them); but I am available if anyone ever has some admin work there that they need me to take over. The same would probably happen here: I'd be available but someone might have to point out things that need me. Thanks for the compliment. RJFJR 03:21, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

O.K. then, go here and accept the nomination. :-) —Ruakh 03:32, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

democracy

Do you have a specific reason to leave the link to WP disambig page containing irrelevent content? The two links on our democracy page look too similar to be effective, and additionally, it looks sloppy, like a redundancy error, because they are nearly identical. Why not just link to the only article of any relevance to our content, especially when the disamniguation page link is the first line of said page? -- Thisis0 02:52, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't notice that we had two 'pedia links. I've fixed that: now we only link to the disambig page. As for "Why not just link to the only article of any relevance to our content", the problem is that someone clicking the 'pedia link might well be doing so because our content didn't answer their question. Rather than assume that the sense they wanted is the sense we define (which would be a bit arrogant, if you think about it), we link to the most general page Wikipedia offers corresponding to the given word. —Ruakh 04:05, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

I disagree; you wouldn’t come to a dictionary looking for definitions for novels, a play, a song, an album, an Internet TV platform, a computer game, a journal, a record label, or a book. However, you might to look for a concise definition of “a political concept or form of government”. I’ll go change the link, if you don’t mind, as a link to the disambiguation page is given atop the Wikipedia democracy article anyway. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 14:16, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Roman numerals in ygo

You wrote: “nice thought, bad reality” — why so? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 22:30, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

The Roman numerals are somewhere between ugly and illegible, at least for me. I think it's because Firefox doesn't know that it can replace the Roman numerals with corresponding Latin character sequences, so it has to try to find a font with the Roman numerals, and chooses a font where the Roman numerals are somewhere between ugly and illegible. (I get the exact same thing in IE, though, so it's not like Firefox is being stupid. And I don't think my font set is particularly spare.) —Ruakh 22:35, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Huh? Weird. I use Firefox, and the Roman numerals appear perfectly fine in both Times New Roman and Lucida Sans Unicode. What font are you using? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 22:39, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I have Firefox set to use Times New Roman by default, but on Wiktionary I see some sort of sans-serif font. (Sorry, I'm not really in the mood to dig through the CSS files and figure out what font Wiktionary is specifying.) But even if we solved this problem on my system, I'd be opposed to using the Roman numeral characters, because I'm sure that for many people they'd show up as boxes or question marks, and there's simply no benefit to it. —Ruakh 22:48, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Again, weird. They look slightly “cleaner” on my PC, so I’m a bit miffed to hear about that problem. Could you take a screenshot or somesuch to show me what you see please? (By e-mail is probably best.) † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 23:11, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

insane-request, {{t}}

Heh it wasn't really that crazy. What would've been crazy, though... asking me to change all the ş, ţ, ă, î & â characters to those codes. I would have gone insane. =) Anyway, I fixed it, so it should be oki now.

Also, I guess while I'm here, I've recently taken a liking to the {{t}} template for translation tables. I shouldn't have people trying to crucify me for using that now, should I? — [ ric | opiaterein ] — 15:28, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! And no, not at all. If you do, send them to me and I'll thwack them for you. ;-) —Ruakh 16:08, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks in advance for the thwacking :-D — [ ric | opiaterein ] — 23:47, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

genuine issue of material fact

I went searching on Lexis for citations for this term. If you search for too common a term, Lexis gives you an error message like so: This search ("genuine issue of material fact") has been interrupted because it will return more than 3000 results. I got that message when I tried searching for that phrase for every individual year going back for decades, so there are probably a few hundred thousand reported decisions that use it (and millions more that simply went unreported). When I refined my search to return only decisions of state supreme courts (which make up less than 1% of all cases reported) I got over 1,700 hits for 2006-2007 alone. Cheers! bd2412 T 06:37, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I don't see why you're telling me this. As concerns that entry, my recent actions have been:

• marking it "RFV passed" due to the term's clearly widespread legal use — an action that you seem to agree with.
• adding an {{rfquote}} tag to request citations — an action that you seem to be O.K. with, at least, since you proceeded to add quotes. (Thanks for that, by the way.)

Your comment doesn't seem to make sense as a response to either of these actions. What am I missing?

Thanks,

—Ruakh 15:06, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, you just seemed rather dubious in your closing comments. I wanted to underscore that my assertion of clearly widespread use is not merely my opinion on the matter. Cheers! bd2412 T 15:46, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Oh, I see now; no worries. On my own I thought it fairly clear that it was in widespread use; but SemperBlotto suggested it might be sum-of-parts, and there didn't seem to be consensus one way or the other on this point. I wanted to clarify that my marking it "RFV passed" was not disregarding this suggestion, but simply taking it as irrelevant for purposes of RFV. —Ruakh 15:53, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

pudding-basin

Why did you make this change? Was something wrong with the entry as it was? While I agree that the information could be at pudding basin, it seems to defy En.Wiktionary convention to combine entries with a redirect when having separate entries is possible (especially when the second entry already existed).—msh210℠ 16:56, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

As far as I can discern, the entry was mistaken; "pudding-basin" does not seem to be an adjective. Neither *"very pudding-basin" nor *"was pudding-basin" gets any hits on Google, except for one fake, machine-generated, spam page. "Pudding-basin" does exist, but is simply a way to spell "pudding basin" in attributive use. If you'd like to give "pudding-basin" an actual entry as an attributive-use alternative spelling of "pudding basin", that would probably be an improvement over the redirect approach. —Ruakh 17:07, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

As an attributive term, pudding-pasin is an adjective. If it were noun, you couldn't say "pudding-basin haircut".—msh210℠ 18:22, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Nah, it's an attributive noun. Nearly any noun can be used attributively, but that doesn't make them all adjectives. —Ruakh 18:25, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Hm, that page agrees with you. Unfortunately, I've been adding a lot of these (see, e.g., blood-type and bet-exchange; or see User:Msh210/English nouns with spaces), and now I'm not sure whether I should be.—msh210℠ 18:56, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, in the interest of full disclosure, I should clarify that it's not totally shocking that that page agrees with me, seeing as almost that entire page is due to my rewriting of it this past May; the version before that said roughly the same thing, but with a bit of self-contradiction. This is really the standard approach, though. For example, The Columbia Guide to Standard American English distinguishes between attributive adjectives and noun adjuncts; the OED uses the phrase "attrib. passing into adj." in no fewer than 172 entries (describing nouns that are used attributively and seem to be veering toward adjectivality); and The American Heritage Book of English Usage distinguishes here between the adjective elder and the attributive use of the noun elder.

In general, you shouldn't be adding "adjective" sections for nouns just because those nouns are used attributively, but there are plenty of specific cases that are iffier, where a few people seem to be genuinely adjectivizing the noun — using it with "very" or "more", allowing adjectives to follow it, using it predicatively or absolute, etc. — but most people don't. In such cases, I think it's O.K. to add an adjective section, but it can be really subjective. Just use your best judgment. :-)

—Ruakh 19:35, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Humbug. Well, I don't know if the ones I've added should be reverted, but if so an admin might have to it, as there are a heck of a lot. But in any event I'll not add more (at least unless and until I find that people whom I respect disagree with you, which, based on your citations immediately above, seems unlikely). (That sentence should not be construed to mean that I don't respect you.)—msh210℠ 20:08, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Talk:feminazi

Did you notice how the page shows only a portion of the RFV discussion (which you recently updated inside the template)? Might be a character limit? Some other bug? -- Thisis0 23:48, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Whoops! No, I hadn't noticed that. Fixed now, thanks. :-) —Ruakh 01:09, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Oh, wow. I see what the problem was... Interesting. -- Thisis0 01:23, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank ‛ee v. much

Excellent; much better. Such suave coding can surely only inspire more fragments to be listed! † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 02:42, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Ducking stool

For my education, what was your thinking?

Generally, BTW, if I'm not helping, please let me know. I am very amateur, I know, and don't want to add work. DCDuring 04:11, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

As I said in my 2:55 AM (UTC) edit summary, the "related terms" section is for etymologically related terms — terms that come from the same root — and not for semantically related terms — terms that identify related concepts. I mean, the section might end up containing semantically related terms, just because etymologically related terms usually have a semantic relationship, but that's incidental. And don't be so hard on yourself; I think you're doing a fine job learning the ropes here and figuring out how things work. Given how inconsistent we can be here sometimes, that's no mean feat. ;-) —Ruakh 04:22, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry. I realize that you, especially, have helpful edit summaries. Thanks for the kind words. I still find the differences between here and WP hard. DCDuring 05:45, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

person of color

isn't specific to African-American or Black; random example Robert Ullmann 18:00, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

O.K., thanks. :-) —Ruakh 18:36, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

November

opisthokont etymological derivation

In re your revision: The Wikipedia article said Greek, not Ancient Greek. However, I can’t usually tell the difference. I used the sc=polytonic parameter because I thought it was meant for both Greek and Ancient Greek; is this not so? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 17:55, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
It would make sense if it isn’t, seeing as Modern Greek uses monotonic, rather than polytonic orthography. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 17:59, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, for Modern Greek we dispense with {{polytonic}} and use {{Grek}}. (If we used the same template for both, than we'd simply call it {{Grek}}.) —Ruakh 18:01, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

And that’s a sc= parameter too, yeah? OK, I’ll make the proper distinction in future. So, the original issue, is opisthokont a Grecian or Hellenic derivation? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 18:03, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Judging from the fact that el:κοντός only has senses that it translates to English as “small”, “low”, and “short”, I must assume that the κοντός we mention is an Ancient Greek word. Also, Ancient Greek derivations outnumber Modern Greek derivations by Carl-Sagan-like-numbers to one, especially with scientific nomenclature, so probability is on the side of {{AGr.}}. If you're concerned, though, we can consult someone with genuine knowledge of Greek, of whom we have plenty here. —Ruakh 18:11, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Nah. I have no difficulty believing in the unreliability of Wikipedia. ;) † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 14:40, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't call Wikipedia "unreliable", at least on this point; here at Wiktionary, we've decided to use "Greek" for Modern Greek and "Ancient Greek" for Ancient Greek, but an English-only resource has different needs. The AHD uses "Greek" for Ancient Greek and "Modern Greek" for Modern Greek, to the point that its etymology of "gyro" is "From Modern Greek guros, a turning, from Greek gūros, circle (from the turning of the meat on a spit)."^[5] —Ruakh 17:18, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Hmm… I suppose. It’s sure as hell counter-intuitive though (for me at least). Is it worth noting the distinction by wholly unambiguously referring to “Greek” as “Modern Greek”, do you think? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 17:11, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes. We actually already have {{MGr.}}; I think {{Gr.}} should be deprecated, with Category:Greek derivations essentially being a cleanup category (except insofar as it contains the subcategories Category:Ancient Greek derivations and Category:Modern Greek derivations). Beer parlour? —Ruakh 17:20, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Go for it. I don’t have the time at the moment, but I’d support the proposed change. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 17:25, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

troll

I was wondering why you reverted my change to troll? I was cleaning up some the the cruft and broken links from the transwiki of en:List of Internet slang phrases / Appendix:Internet_slang since it seems when it got brought over here a bunch of the links got broken. Rather then link everything back to wikipedia, I try to fix some of the red by linking to the other definitions here. One of the broken links was "Troll (internet)". And it seemed to me that it would be useful to link that particular definition back to wikipedia. PaleAqua 20:20, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Your edit broke the numbering of definitions. I've now fixed our entry to link to w:Troll (disambiguation). —Ruakh 20:28, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Ah I see that now. Guess I'm not used to the auto-numbered list. Thanks. PaleAqua 20:38, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

No prob. Sorry for not having left a more helpful edit summary; it's just so tempting to click the "rollback" link and hope the editor can figure out why. :-P —Ruakh 20:40, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

&ctlig; in the archaic alternative spelling of distinction

Regarding this revision of yours and the deletion of the alternative spelling’s entry: I do wish you’d asked me about this first. The “U+0188 LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH HOOK”, when followed by a ‘t’ (as: “ƈt”), looks more like the archaic ‘ct’ ligature than anything else I can find. (If you check the linked source, you’ll see its use in words with the ‘ct’ pair therein.) Unicode doesn’t have a ‘ct’ ligature, although it does have the ‘st’, ‘ſt’, ‘ff’, ‘ffi’, ‘ffl’, ‘fi’, and ‘fl’ archaic and typographical ligatures. If you can think of a better way to represent the missing ‘ct’ ligature, I’d very much like to hear it. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 17:19, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

The best way to represent the missing “ct” ligature is “ct”. It's not actually a spelling difference; it's just a different glyph. It's not like printers asked manuscript-submitters to identify which “ct”-s were to be ligated and which not. If you'd like to use “ƈ” in quotations to simulate the left half of a “ct” ligature, I think that's silly, but I won't stop you; but giving separate entries for the same word spelled the same way, and — to boot! — using an inaccurate character to do so, well, that's just ridiculous. I suppose next you'll create separate entries for words in serif fonts and words in sans-serif fonts? —Ruakh 17:38, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

BTW, so your work doesn't go to waste, the quotation you had was:

• 1784: William Jones, The Description and Use of a New Portable Orrery, &c., PREFACE

  THE favourable reception the Orrery has met with from Perſons of the firſt diſtinƈtion, and from Gentlemen and Ladies in general, has induced me to add to it ſeveral new improvements in order to give it a degree of Perfeƈtion; and diſtinguiſh it from others ; which by Piracy, or Imitation, may be introduced to the Public.

And now I see the hidden comments, which make this absolutely ridiculous — the original source didn't actually use a ligature, but you're counting it as a quotation for such?

BTW, instead of T<small>HE</small>, it's more accurate to type <span style="font-variant:small-caps">The</span> (but, this isn't a huge deal).

—Ruakh 17:42, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Why the sarky belittling of my work? Remember that you once complained that “Unicode offers no way to include old-fashioned ct and st ligatures with the swoopy top-thing”. Note, BTW, that it does offer a way to include the ‘st’ ligature: <st> (if ever you need it in future) — just not the ‘ct’ ligature. It’s not ridiculous that I try to accurately represent these older spellings; if you thought that the makeshift ‘ƈt’ digraph was unsuitable, you could’ve just told me so, rather than go ahead and delete the entry. I do accept that perhaps giving entries for the &ctlig; spellings is inappropriate (though I shall still use the ‘ƈt’ digraph in transcribed texts) — however deletion of diſtinƈtion would still not be on — it ought to be moved to diſtinction, as the ‘ſt’ is still retained, making it a different spelling. (BTW, you’ll want to delete perfeƈtion and perfeƈtions — I moved the quotation from the former to perfection.) As a final point on this topic, yes the ‘ct’ ligature wasn’t actually used in the printing, but that is only because the word was coïncidentally hyphenated as “diſtinc-tion” because of a line break — considering the ‘ct’ ligature occurs in five other words (inſpeƈtion, Charaƈters, faƈt, introduƈtion, and conſtruƈted) on the same page, it is only reasonable to assume that the occurrence of diſtinction would have appeared with a ‘ct’ ligature had the paper or font size been any different (it was reasoned and agreed to in the above-linked discussion that such variables were irrelevant for our citing purposes).

Disagreements aside, thanks for the small-caps code; I’ll add it to my code fragments list. Having reread a little of that discussion, I see that spacing was what started the whole thing. You may be interested in the various typographical spaces I keep here (in the “Punctuation” rel-table); the ones of most use are »[[ ]]« (the em space), »[[ ]]« (the en space), »[[ ]]« (the punctuation space), and »[[ ]]« (the thin space). The em space is for the “double spaces” between sentences; the punctuation space is the space used to separate quotation marks from the words they encompass (when a period, comma, or other piece of punctuation appreas at the end of the quotation but before the closing quotation mark, the space is supplanted by the punct), and to separate colons, semi-colons, erotemes, and exclaimation marks from the words which they follow; en spaces pair up with punctuation spaces by being used after the colon, semi-colon, eroteme, or exclaimation mark (for the last two puncts, the en space is only used for non-sentence-terminal erotemes or exclaimation marks — for sentence-terminal ones, an em space is used thereafter); thin spaces are useful for æsthetic purposes: consider the difference between 28^th, wherein no thin space is used, and 28 ^th, wherein one is. (BTW, the uses of the thin space ought really to be uses of the hair space, but that space, at least on my computer, inexplicitly alternates between its correct hair’s-breadth width and a width wider than an em space every few weeks; for this reason I tend to forbear pedantry and use the thin space instead.) Clear as mud? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 01:16, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I was too harsh. I think it would be great if Wiktionary had all the benefits of a print work — ability to control fonts and glyphs and spacing and whatnot — together with all the benefits we derive from not being a print work, but unfortunately, that's not the case. We should be using Unicode characters as intended, and treating them as characters, because we can't predict how unintended glyphic uses will behave for all our users. Perhaps in a handwriting-style font, the ƈ will look completely different, maybe with the hook wrapping further or not as far or in a different direction. Even as it is, the ƈt doesn't really look right — it's just close.

I appreciate linguistic pedantry, but technical pedantry has value as well. ;-)

Thanks for the information about the different kinds of spaces, and for the correction regarding the existence of st.

BTW, this isn't terribly valuable right now, because most people's fonts aren't equal to it, but Unicode offers a ZERO WIDTH JOINER character, U+200D (‍); good fonts will apparently render c‍t with the swoopy thing, and hopefully going into the future we can expect more fonts to be good fonts in this regard. (In my fonts it looks the same as "ct"; in your fonts it looks like "c‍t".) The Best Practice would probably be to use this to transcribe c-t ligatures, and to redirect from entry titles using ligatures to normal entry titles. (Actually, maybe we should get the "did-you-mean" thing that JavaScript-redirects from e.g. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frankenstein to Frankenstein to handle this as well.)

Well, that was a long and rambly comment; hopefully you're still awake. :-)

—Ruakh 03:09, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Re: -ja and -jä

Hi, good you asked since it looks like you misunderstood how the suffix is used. The example apparently was very misleading, since "-ja" can be applied only to verb whereas "-er" has wider use (in the example, "vanha ~" meant "vanha tekijä"; I really wonder why that had to be mentioned at all). Anyway, looks like someone has already fixed it. :) --Jyril 19:25, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

O.K., thanks! :-) —Ruakh 19:33, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Quote-tables innovation

Thanks for holding on. I’ve replied to you on my talk page. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 23:34, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

I’ve just finished my second reply. Sorry to keep you waiting. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 01:14, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Selectable display of the quotations would be wonderful. Great job preparing something to react to. I wonder how to make the best use of the bar itself, if it must run across the whole page. (Must it?) I know that the bar is used in translations to convey a summary of the specific sense for which the translations "hidden under" the bar are intended. Would it make sense to put the best short made-up usage example or summary information about the quote (number, years, both automagically generated) there? Given the work-in-process nature of Wiktionary and also the uneven quality of definitions, wouldn't it make sense to select a layout that makes it easy for an editor to evaluate the definition in light of the quotations? That would seem to be one that kept the quotations close to (visible on the same screen as) the definitions, ot in a separate quotations section, although that could be made to work using much of the bar to contain the "summary" definition. Can these hide/show bars be nested? That would afford more possibilities for different views of the entry and its elements and might reconcile some conflicts over format. Whatever is done, it is important that it solves existing user and editor problems rather than fit some more abstract conceptual framework (especially any such framework at which I am not an adept!!!). — This unsigned comment was added by DCDuring (talk • contribs) at 02:01, 6 November 2007 (UTC).

The bar doesn't have to run across the whole page, but I don't see what we'd want to put next to it, so it seems like it might as well. The bar in the translations section just describes the sense, but that's because it's in a section called "translations"; with stuff directly under the definition line, it needs to specify that it holds example sentences/quotations because otherwise that won't be obvious until you open it. These hide/show bars can indeed be nested — Doremítzwr has some examples of such on his user-page — but I'm not sure what you're suggesting that could be used for. I think that user interface, like other elements of application design, necessarily fits some abstract conceptual framework, and either this is done intentionally or it happens haphazardly. The former isn't always great, and the latter isn't always bad, but the former tends to have better chances. —Ruakh 04:40, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

• Having a button only, say, an inch long on the right would mean that it could occupy the white space to the right of most definitions, facilitating my underlying objective of getting as much as possible onto a single screen.
• My thought about the empty space on a long bar is to put a short, uncited (made-up by Wiktionarian) quotation so that the quotation list didn't have to be expanded to give someone an idea of usage and, once again, getting as much as possible on a single screen. Such usge examples are almost always brief enough not to overfill the bar space.
• As to nested show/hide bars, I am thinking in terms of hiding, by default or, better, user preference, whole sections which themselves have bars within them. For example: ALL translations for single-language users. ALL material beneath a given PoS for some long pages. If we are not to have a right-floating Table of Contents to provide an entry overview, them the bars could provide it. DCDuring 15:37, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Wikilove?

Yet you left the BUTTHURT? Was that to more clearly identify Ric's comment as a troll, perhaps? --Connel MacKenzie 19:12, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Note: rephrased. Break you your electronic eraser... --Connel MacKenzie 19:24, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, sorry, I just didn't see how to redact his comment to leave his point while removing his dickishness, besides a total rewrite (which would be beyond the scope of WikiLove). I've now attempted something less drastic … —Ruakh 19:33, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Spectacular timing, there. Bravo. --Connel MacKenzie 05:17, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! :-) —Ruakh 06:10, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Translation tweak that may be vandalism

Please note this revision to the Hebrew translation for where by the anonymous editor User:62.128.42.30, summarised by: “Fakatzas should not have access to Wiki!” — is this vandalism, or is it a genuine correction? If the former, you may want to check through his contributions. Thanks. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 13:50, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

It's a genuine correction. (The edit summary is like saying “Blondes should not be allowed to edit!” when fixing a rather silly error — not very polite, but not necessarily a sign of vandalism, at least not in this case.) Thanks for your vigilance. :-) —Ruakh 14:39, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

That’s OK. I need to get into the habit of patrolling recent changes — what’s the link? (–Stupid question, perhaps.) † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 15:10, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, to "patrol" recent changes one must be an admin (see Help:Patrolled edits); but you can examine/view/look-over the recent changes via Special:Recentchanges. —Ruakh 15:14, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Oh, I wasn’t aware of the difference. I’ve added the link to my user page. Definitely a stupid question. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 15:22, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

No, not at all; every time a new feature is added MediaWiki, a general-purpose term takes on a very specific technical meaning. It can be hard to keep up. (Granted, patrolled edits aren't a terribly new feature, but they're not on non-admins' radar at all, so are perpetually new. :-P) —Ruakh 15:26, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your generosity, but I’ve been around here long enough now to make such a slip-up inexcusable. ;-) † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 15:42, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Life of Riley/Reilly

How can this be a proper noun? It doesn't come close to only referring to a unique properly namable entity. Many people can live this life. We just had a BP (?) discussion which made me see the error of my ways. Are you wanting me to change my mind back? DCDuring 03:12, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Going by b.g.c. hits, there's only one of it; many people can live it, but you usually say, "they all live the life of Riley/Reilly" (=there exists one life of Riley/Reilly, and they all live it), not, "they all live lives of Riley/Reilly" (=there exist many lives of Riley/Reilly, and each of them lives one). So, it seems like it's usually used a proper noun — specifically, a "weak" (=(deprecated template usage) the-requiring) proper noun. —Ruakh 03:45, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

It makes no sense to me. There is/was only one "wrath of Achilles".

No caps required for "Life" in LoR, proper noun sense ?

How about: "This is the life!"? Is life proper? In that sense, it needs a "the". You aren't going to tell me it depends on capitalization, are you?

How about: "The car of Reilly" ?

How about: "The Hummer of Reilly" ?

If there is a proper noun sense, what would be the ordinary noun sense? Just the ordinary life of anyone who has the name of R.?

Does any singular thing that a singular person owns or experiences become a proper noun ?

DCDuring 04:23, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

I think you're looking at this the wrong way; "common noun" vs. "proper noun" is a property of a word itself, not of the concept to which it refers. The common-noun and proper-noun senses of "life of Riley/Reilly" are synonymous; they differ not in their meaning, but in the way they're used. For most speakers who use this expression, it seems to be a proper noun; abstractly, you can say that for these speakers, there's only one "life of Reilly", and many people who live it. Conversely, for a few speakers who use this expression, it seems to be a common noun; abstractly, you can say that for these speakers, there are potentially many "lives of Reilly", and many people who live them. Now, these abstract conceptualizations are a bit misleading, because for all speakers, the expression has the same meaning; the only difference is in the syntax they use for it. There might even be speakers who use the expression both ways without realizing it (most likely, using a proper-noun singular and a common-noun plural); and b.g.c gives a few examples of people who use a halfway-in-between version whose plural is "the lives of Reilly/Riley".

The line between a proper noun and a common noun can be very iffy sometimes; it might be worth getting other editors' opinions, at the Tea room or someplace.

—Ruakh 04:51, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps, I will. I am only a bit frustrated at not being able to reliably complete an entry. I am not really very sure that I understand what the point of differentiating a proper noun from a common noun is. What orthographic or other consequences follow from being a proper nount in English?

Is the "lap of luxury" a proper noun? My concept may differ from yours? So may my cocept of LoR. Eugene O'Neill's certainly isn't mine.

A final question: By your reasoning, is there not just one "Hummer of Reilly" if I am referring to the the Hummer of the Mr. Reilly of my acquiantance who lives .... All speakers can only refer to that one Hummer of Reilly, though many may drive it. If they didn't know what brand of car he drove, it would then be the "car of Reilly", which anyone of them could drive. It is the same car for all. So then "the car of Reilly" is a proper noun, as is the "car of that other guy whose name I forgot (but which you may remember and which either of us could determine) who lives across the street from Reilly". If so, this takes a lot of practical value out of the concept. It also would make it much more useful to declare Social Security Numbers, automobile VINs, street addresses, and IP addresses proper nouns, than many of the other things like the word "John" or most other given and surnames in Wiktionary. And, of course, this definition of proper noun probably has no connection with the way most folks use the term. DCDuring 05:43, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

— This unsigned comment was added by DCDuring (talk • contribs) at 05:34, 8 November 2007 (UTC).

You raise good questions, and I'm not sure. "Hummer of Reilly" isn't a set phrase, so while maybe it's a proper noun (?!), I don't see that it's pointful to apply that term to it. As for "I am only a bit frustrated at not being able to reliably complete an entry", you should keep in mind that this is a wiki; it's a feature that no entry is ever complete. :-) —Ruakh 05:46, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

font

My basis for tagging the sense (archaic) is Dictionary.com, and my 1966 Encyclopedia Dictionary which reads "5. Archaic A fountain.", as well as your very first comment on that RFV: "Font definitely has an archaic sense of fountain...". Incidentally, I also think it can be worked in under the first etymology. They really dip from the same well.

It's funny; when I saw that you archived the font RFV, I was totally planning to add, tag, and source that disputed sense (that never was fully resolved, as is usually the case) but you beat me to the punch! you did it very well, too :) What is notable is that you've beaten my punch twice this week (Quotations dropboxes). Did you notice my asking Connel and Doremitzr about it just days before you went to town with it? -- Thisis0 03:23, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the "fountain" sense is archaic, but that sense failed RFV, unfortunately. The sense that's currently in the entry is not at all archaic, as you can see by Googling phrases like "a veritable font of" and "he's a font of". (You're quite welcome to re-add the sense that failed RFV, if you can dig up two more cites in addition to the one on the talk-page.) —Ruakh 03:38, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Yea, I just realized it's a totally different sense - I jumped the gun in tagging what I thought was you being bold and sourcing the "failed" sense. What you truly were doing was adding the missing sense that came up in the course of the RFV. And I was admiring the cites i thought you dug up. :) Also, it seems to me that the RFV didn't fail, it just kind of flickered out. That's what happens to many or most of them. Shame.

Anyhoo... here's what I think should go down: 1) separate the senses for "holy water receptacle (a stoup)" and "basin of varying size for baptism (by immersion or sprinkling); a baptismal font" 2) move the metaphorical sense to etymology 1, even if a little finesse is required; and 3) cite (archaic, poetic) A fountain. What of those 5 cites in the OED? I've never ...actually... seen a copy. Is it online? How do I get those cites? -- Thisis0 03:56, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

No worries, I don't mind getting compliments I don't deserve. ;-) The OED is online at http://dictionary.oed.com/, but you need a subscription. (My school has one, which is how I have access.) I don't know if IP law would be O.K. with our ripping quotations wholesale from the OED; bd2412 would be the one to ask. If we can, that would be a serious boon to RFV. —Ruakh 04:14, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

How can they have a monopoly on citing others' work? Maybe... we just put 'em in a different order or somethin'. And also our differing citation format should cover us.

I'm still interested to know if my independent interest in quotations dropboxes spurred you on, or was merely coincidental to your work in progress? -- Thisis0 17:02, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

About copying quotes, I really have no idea. About quotations drop-boxes, I'm not sure; the topic has come up many times, and it was a very easy problem to solve, since whoever made the collapsing translations tables — Robert, I think — already did all the work. All I needed to do was remove the parts of that template that caused it not to work within lists. I'm not sure what finally spurred me to actually do this; I probably saw some comment about it, perhaps yours. (I do watch User talk:Doremítzwr, so that's not unlikely, but I just don't remember.) —Ruakh 22:33, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

creations edit

I was looking at the new-en-plural template when I was trying to decide what to do here. I have done what you did on other pages. This time I wanted to know a bit more about what I consider the less obvious template stuff.

• '''{{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>PAGENAME}}''', which translates to {{creations}} on the creations page.
  • Question: What is the point of the "subst" hidden inside the includeonly?
• [[<includeonly>{{{1}}}</includeonly>]], which translates to [[creations]].
  • Question: What is the point of the 1 inside all those brackets?

My next question is, do we expect a novice user to understand such cryptic stuff? If so, I need to reset my personal assessment of my skill level, which currently I've set at novice+.Makearney 14:35, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

You don't need to worry about that stuff if you don't want; the whole point of having those templates is so people don't need to understand them. :-P

On any page, if you put {{subst:PAGENAME}} in the wiki-code, it gets replaced with the page's name when you save your edits. In a template, if you put {{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>PAGENAME}}, this prevents the replacement from happening when you save the template; rather, {{subst:PAGENAME}} will end up in any page that subst:-s the template, and gets replaced with that page's name when you save your edits.

In a template, {{{1}}} refers to its first unnamed parameter.

See m:Help:Template.

—Ruakh 21:26, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Say what?

Comments like this make me wonder what planet you live on. What about the statement you removed isn't self-evident? --22:23, 10 November 2007 (UTC) — This unsigned comment was added by Connel MacKenzie (talk • contribs).

*shrug* To me it's not obvious that advertisers even use such negative terms — they don't talk about deception and fraud and trickery, why would they talk about façades? — nor that a cedilla conveys "exoticness", nor, to be honest, that anyone misuses this term — I mean, every word is misused by someone, but not every word warrants a note — nor that one spelling would be more liable to misuse than the other. Also, NASA hasn't made very much progress bringing the Internet to space (I mean, lots of theoretical progress, but little practical deployment yet), so you can be reasonably certain that I'm on Earth, in Earth orbit, or somewhere in between. —Ruakh 22:43, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Are you near a grocery store or a mall? What do you call the store-fronts? What do sign-makers/advertisers call them? When an interior decorator, building contractor, store architect or Feng Shui consultant adds $40-250k onto their bill, do they call it a "store front" or a facade? No, they use an exotic spelling, instead of the correct term, precisely because they want to convey a sense of being exotic.

Are you sure you're on the same planet? If you are not bombarded daily by a million different types of advertising, then I must confess I am jealous (and curious as to how you accomplished such a feat.) --Connel MacKenzie 00:55, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Oh, the architectural/literal kind of façade. For me that sense of "façade" is not quite synonymous with "storefront", and doesn't actually come up all that often. Not being in retail myself, I don't generally have interior decorators, building contractors, store architects, or Feng Shui consultants coming after me trying to secure my business (not that interior decoration and Feng Shui have much to do with façades anyway), so am not in a position to know how they spell things. Anyway, I'm going to have to go back to my shrug; if you want to add this claim, find a reputable source for it, simple as that. (Even then, we'll add it as a usage note, saying that such-and-such authority claims such-and-such; there's no reason to pollute the "synonyms" list with such a long and debatable comment. Though I kind of have to wonder why an alternative spelling is in the synonyms list at all.) You're not going to win me over by repeatedly insinuating that the spelling I use is incorrect. (In fact, you're not going to win me over, period, unless there's some convincing bit of evidence you've been holding till the right moment; but you might as well be civil.) —Ruakh 01:14, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

I said nothing above that was not civil. You seem to be behaving bizarrely, again. --Connel MacKenzie 22:11, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Hee! *is amused* :-D —Ruakh 22:12, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

You know, once I had your bot stopped (and then unblocked) I came here searching for hints at where you had a back-room conversation about incorrectly mangling {{pedialite}}. Instead, I find only more of your paranoia-driven personal attacks. You vandalized this particular entry because you doubt basic facts of reality - fine, I'll dig up evidence of that, I suppose. But your declining attitude remains unhelpful. --Connel MacKenzie 22:20, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

O.K., first of all, there was no “back-room conversation”; I advertised the fact on the Beer parlour and asked for input a few days before doing it. (You participated in that conversation, by the way.) No one objected, but Dmcdevit pointed out that it might be a waste, since he thinks {{pedialite}} should eventually be deprecated anyway. I understood his point, but as some of the problems were rather immediate (specifically, (1) the lack of sc was causing parentheses to show up in the wrong place in some entries, and (2) a lot of entries contained the wikicode * {{pedialite}}, which clashed with the existing template implementation), I felt that eventual deprecation would not come soon enough, if you see what I mean. (There was then disagreement over the nature of what would eventually replace {{pedialite}}, which I figured didn't affect the current fix at all.)

Second of all, if it makes you feel any better, my "declining attitude" is really just toward you, not toward Wiktionary as a whole or to any editors besides you. You're continually obnoxious to me and to other editors, and I just can't put up with it. If you consider my attitude unhelpful, change yours, and you'll be amazed how quickly mine changes to match.

—Ruakh 22:30, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Tbot and Hebrew

I added Category:Tbot entries (Hebrew), but I don't think it will get very much:

• Tbot won't in general add a {t} template, because the transliteration is (almost always) present; it needs to identify the transliteration as such, and not other text. It does this by generating its own transliteration and comparing. For (say) Cyrillic or Katakana, this works well, for Hebrew it doesn't have the vowels.
• Tbot does not have regex for the {he-translation} template (yet, should it?)

Since {he-translation} doesn't include the gender in the template, which should Tbot be looking for? (If it is to be done at all.) Robert Ullmann 10:02, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Added one line of regex (;-). Tell me if it is mapping the parameters properly (if it creates any at all)? Robert Ullmann 10:21, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm sure it's fine, but I'll keep an eye out and let you know if I see any problems. Thanks tons for this whole thing; it's oodles better than trying to comb wantedpages. :-)

As for {{m}} and {{f}}, I didn't put those in {{he-translation}} because it seemed to me that they'd go after the transliteration, so didn't need to be supported in the template. (At the time I wasn't aware of {{t}} — had I been, I wouldn't have created {{he-translation}} at all — so didn't have a model for what order things should go.) Don't take that decision as normative; for consistency's sake, gender should probably be incorporated into the {{t}} when translating.

Would it be in-scope for Tbot to add sc= parameters when appropriate? (In the general case this will be a function of the language and script, but even going just by script would be a huge improvement.) It might also be good to add a "requests for transliteration" category of some sort when the translation isn't in the Latin script and Tbot can tell that there's no transliteration at all. (No help in cases where it can't tell, obviously, but it would still be very useful.)

Thanks again! Between your skill with creating bots and A-cai's skill with practically being a bot, soon Wiktionary will be a two-man job. ;-)

—Ruakh 20:18, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

אסלה is pretty funny ;-) I guess throne was added to the database before toilet?

I do intend to add the sc= parameter, it would be dependent on observed script and language. (e.g. we use {{ur-Arab}} and {{fa-Arab}} following the ISO codes for language specific script.) I just haven't written it yet. AF has a (very) simple version for when it is generating an {{infl}} line, but it needs work, it assumes for example that anything on planes 1-2 is Han Extension B. (User:AutoFormat/code at "def infline") Robert Ullmann 04:30, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Thought: it might be a fine idea to have the infl template itself add a category request for transliteration (language) if not tr= and sc= and sc not (Latn, Latinx)? Robert Ullmann 09:23, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. :-) —Ruakh 16:05, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

I added most of the usual scripts, where we have templates. (i.e. not Telu and Cher yet ;-) And after watching it not work correctly, remembered to add sc=Hebr explicitly if from he-translation; so any Hebrew entries you see should have that in the infl template. It recognizes Greek, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Bengali, and all the CJKV variants. Robert Ullmann 15:35, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! —Ruakh 18:41, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

פלפל

Do you think you could check the usage note at פלפל for accuracy when you have a chance? Thanks.—msh210℠ 15:22, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

It's definitely pronounced with the stress on the first syllable; I didn't know it was supposed to be pronounced with the stress on the second, but given that it has the same niqqud as the verb (which certainly has second-syllable stress), that makes sense (since I think grammatically, the stress placement is determined by the positions of long and short vowels according to some set of rules I never learned, and I think that tzeirei is always long and khirik khaser is always short).

Incidentally, do you think usage notes are the best way to handle such cases? I did something a bit different at לכאן, but I'm not sure I like how I did it. The usage note thing is probably better.

—Ruakh 16:01, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for checking. I like the method you used at לכאן better than the one I used at פלפל.—msh210℠ 16:48, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, O.K., then. :-)   —Ruakh 17:57, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

My page

Hello, you know the page flightsuit attitude, I misspelled it. It's actually "flight suit attitude". It's OK, see google. Cheers, JetLover 23:43, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

חינם

I keep asking you to check my Hebrew work: I hope you don't mind. I've done some work on חינם and want to make sure that the part-of-speech information and use-example are correct. Would you mind?—msh210℠ 19:03, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

(1) I don't mind at all; it's way easier to work on an existing entry than to try to start one from scratch, and I have no objection whatsoever to you doing the hard work. ;-)   (2) As far as I can think off the top of my head, it's usually used in one of a few ways:

• As a predicate non-count noun corresponding to the English adjective "free [as in beer]" and therefore meaning something like "free stuff". Semantically you could really consider it an adjective, but it doesn't agree with its subject in gender or number. And sometimes it does stand alone as a subject or object (though true adjectives can do that, too, so by alone that doesn't say much).
• As the object of a noun in the construct state, in which case it corresponds either to the English adjective "free [as in beer]" or to the English adjective "pointless, vain". טיפולי חינם are free medical care, and שנאת חינם is baseless hatred. In this sense I guess I'd translate it as either "freeness" or "pointlessness". (Well, in a real translation I'd just use the appropriate English adjective; but you know what I mean.)
• As the object of the preposition (deprecated template usage) ב-; בחינם is an adverbial meaning "(for) free". (It might also be an adjectival sometimes, but I don't think so. I'll try to think of adjectival examples that sound O.K., and let you know if I come up with any.) In this sense, again, I'd guess I'd translate it as "freeness".
• As the object of the preposition (deprecated template usage) ל-; לחינם is an adverbial meaning "(in) vain, for naught, pointlessly". (This one can also be an adjectival sometimes, but its adverbial use is definitely the primary one.) In this sense, again, I guess I'd translate it as "pointlessness".

So, I think you're right that it's a noun, but it's not so simple to translate; I think we need three senses, one for "free stuff", one for "freeness" (which you already have), and one for "pointlessness". And each of the three needs a few example sentences.

—Ruakh 20:02, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

P.S. My Hebrew-English dictionary labels it a (deprecated template usage) תה״פ and translates it "free of charge". It also lists בחינם, which it labels a תה״פ synonymous with חינם and translates as "free, gratis"; it does not, however, list לחינם. All told, I think it's fair to say that this is a difficult question, and my dictionary got it wrong. :-P   —Ruakh 20:02, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed response. I'm not sure I see the difference s between the various parts of speech you say חינם has: they all look like nouns to me. (Not all with the same definition, though, as you noted.) Re "the hard work", I just added a quick definition as I saw fit; you thought it through. Who did the work?  ;-) —msh210℠ 20:19, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I think all are noun senses in Hebrew, though some correspond to English non-nouns ("free", "pointless") in terms of how you'd translate a sentence that used them. (Sorry if I implied otherwise.) —Ruakh 20:37, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

template:he-conj-pa'al-'ef'ol-sh'leimim

I see you made template:he-conj-pa'al-'ef'ol-sh'leimim, which is a great resource, one that we need for more binyanim. (That was not a demand, just a comment.) Just fyi, note that we have the older templates Hebrew piel shelemim, Hebrew qal shelemim ef'al, Hebrew qal shelemim ef'ol, and Hebrew qal lamed-ayin ef'al, which I made. None of my four is as good looking as yours, though. And none of them uses {{he-dagesh-kal}}, {{he-ot-sofit}}, or {{he-ot-lo-sofit}}, but neither does he-conj-pa'al-'ef'ol-sh'leimim; it ought, to automate the use of the template, of course. (I'm just writing to let you know of the existence of the older templates, is all.) Incidentally, excellent work on those three templates: dagesh-kal, et al.!!—msh210℠ 20:19, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, those are just so tiring to create. I got lazy. :-P —Ruakh 20:38, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

klezmer

This one could do with some Hebrew attention... Widsith 09:04, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Nice. Ta. Widsith 19:24, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

No prob. :-) —Ruakh 19:25, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

template:he-adjective

Just fyi, I've added template:he-adjective (documentation and talk), copied nearly wholesale from he-noun. It probably needs help. I've used it so far at קל and קלה (only).—msh210℠ 19:45, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Same for he-plural-noun‎.—msh210℠ 16:02, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

I'll take a look, thanks. :-) —Ruakh 18:07, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

To be honest, I'm not quite sure what to do with these, what with the lemma/non-lemma debate that doesn't seem to have any specific consensus. Until we have a reasonably firm guideline, I think {{he-adjective}} (or perhaps {{he-adj}}) should only be for the masculine singular indefinite form (the word's lemma), and there should be a {{he-adj-form}} or something for any other form, that identifies the form and indicates what it's a form of? This seems to me to be the most popular viewpoint — allowing a normal translation rather than a "form-of" definition by putting form-of information in the inflection line, but still identifying lemma forms. Even if we don't go that route, I have to admit that I don't understand the rationale behind a {{he-adjective}} that's intended for exactly two forms (masculine singular indefinite and feminine singular indefinite) and no others? :-/ —Ruakh 01:04, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Even if we only use {{he-adjective}} for the masculine singular indefinite, it's still useful, so I'm not sure what your last question is. Perhaps I shouldn't have jumped the gun, creating these while the lemma/non-lemma debate is still taking place, though, as you note.—msh210℠ 17:51, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, someone has to jump the gun sometimes, or nothing ever gets done. You just have to be O.K. with people getting pissy because they don't like change. :-P   What I think I'll do (assuming you're O.K. with it) is this:

• Create {{he-adj}} for masculine-singular-indefinite forms; it will take tr, fsg, mpl, and fpl, and optionally head/wv, fsgwv, mplwv, and fplwv.
• Create {{he-infl-adj-form}} for all other forms; it will take tr, main (for the link to the main entry), g, num, and def (default no), and optionally head/wv and mainwv.
• Migrate the current {{he-adjective}} to {{he-adj}} or {{he-infl-adj-form}}, as appropriate.

Does that sound reasonable?

—Ruakh 20:45, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't know what the def parameter is meant to be. I also don't know how you'll determine what's "appropriate" (as used in your penultimate sentence), unless you mean post-vote. Finally, I think "he-adj-form" instead of "he-infl-adj-form" would save typing and not be worse. Otherwise, it seems eminently reasonable. For the mean while, I'll hold off using he-adjective further (although I have already used for several entries).—msh210℠ 20:50, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

def for definiteness; by "appropriate" I mean, as described in the previous bullets: {{he-adj}} for masculine-singular-indefinite forms, {{he-infl-adj-form}} for others. In the meanwhile, feel free to keep using {{he-adjective}} for masculine ones, as it should be fairly easy to migrate from that to {{he-adj}}. Thanks again, BTW. :-) —Ruakh 21:04, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

moribOund

definately a typo judging by the whole sentence-but what is B.G.C. hits it gets a decent amount of? — This unsigned comment was added by 87.203.24.59 (talk) at 17:15, 20 November 2007 (UTC).

books.google.com. (You might be interested in Wiktionary:Glossary, which defines a lot of common Wiktionary jargon.) —Ruakh 18:01, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

arno-

Can you help with the Greek source for this one? I am kind of making it up. I can't work out where the accent fell in AGr... Widsith 11:42, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't know any Ancient Greek. I usually take such questions to Stephen G. Brown, but if we all do that he'll be overloaded. ;-)   I think ArielGlenn and Medellia both know some Ancient Greek. As does Atelaes, who hasn't contributed in a while but who I think might still keep tabs on his talk-page. Anyway, good luck! :-) —Ruakh 06:39, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm going mad, I in fact meant to message Atalaes about it.....I think I am just used to coming to you with stupid questions.. Widsith 08:17, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Move to WT:-).—msh210℠ 08:15, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Note that Widsith never actually did contact me about this. I only saw it and added the Greek spelling because I read this archive, a full year later. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 08:35, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

ruakh

what can i help you with? --TheRaccoon 18:21, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Me, specifically? No clue. But if you're looking for stuff to do here, you can:

• Help find durably archived uses of words listed at Wiktionary:Requests for verification.
• Help fulfill article requests at Wiktionary:Requested articles:English (and the corresponding request pages for any other languages you speak).
• Help clean up articles listed at Wiktionary:Requests for cleanup (though I don't recommend this one for newbies).

There are other possibilities as well. If none of these appeals to you, let me know and I'll suggest something else. :-)

—Ruakh 18:29, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Hebrew verbs' lemma forms' definitions

Hi! I see you're defining Hebrew past tense masculine singular third-person verbs as, e.g., "to choke". While the consensus seems to be that those forms are the lemmas, so should have the main entries (so have a conjugation table, etc.), I strongly object to defining them as "to [whatever]". Lachanok means "to choke"; chanak means "(he) choked" or "choked[-third-person-masc.-sing.]" only.—msh210℠ 07:45, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

And I strongly object to defining them as "(he) choked" or "choked[-third-person-masc.-sing.]" or whatever. I think we are at an impasse on this one. :-/   For now, I suggest we each do things our own way — not ideal, obviously, but IMHO better than having a big argument that might be rendered irrelevant by a future decision on the lemma/non-lemma front. And we're already each doing things our own way as concerns ktiv khaser vs. ktiv normali, so this isn't new for us. :-P   —Ruakh 08:00, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Okay. But a comment about matres lectionis: I've sort of compromised: I edit entries that are spelled wrong  :-)  (i.e., with k'tiv male); and I haven't added any k'tiv chaser entries without also adding the k'tiv male counterparts. The only thing I'm doing k'tiv chaser-only is the inflection lines (because those are m'nukadim).—msh210℠ 08:12, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Actually, not really "okay". I'm curious to hear your rationale for why you want to define ganav as to steal rather than as (he) stole. I mean, fine, we've settled (to my chagrin) on using ganav as the main entry, with a conjugation table, etc., but that doesn't change the meaning of the word. The meaning is clearly (he) stole. There's no sentence (that I can think of) in which ganav translates into to steal — and even if there is, it's certainly not the most general translation. What's your rationale, please?—msh210℠ 20:42, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

My rationale is that the translations/definitions of a word (lexeme) don't depend on the lemma form we use to represent that word. The word ganav translates to “(to) steal”, even though we use the third-person masculine singular suffix-y form to represent the former and the infinitive to represent the latter. (The only reason I'm offering not to interfere with your doing things your way is that a lot of editors think we should eliminate the lemma/non-lemma distinction, and if we do that then I guess we'll be translating/defining word-forms rather than words-as-a-whole.) —Ruakh 22:09, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Can you give me a sentence in which ganav translates as to steal?—msh210℠ 22:14, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

"Makhar ani v'hu nignov et ze" ↔ "Tomorrow he and I will steal it." ;-) —Ruakh 22:22, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Cute. But, as you know, I disagree. I'm just writing to let you know that EncycloPetey seems to, too: see [6], where he says that translating the lemma form claudo as to shut would be "wrong... only the infinitive has that meaning", and calls I shut the "lemma meaning".—msh210℠ 17:17, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I know you disagree, but you weren't asking yourself, you were asking me, and I answered with my own opinion. :-)   —Ruakh 00:47, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Greek font size

Hi, is there a chance that you could have a look at {{Grek}} please? I have tried adding font-size: 1.15em; as you suggested - with no noticeable effect. I know much too little about html to try anything else. Thanks —Saltmarsh^Talk 07:25, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, keep in mind that {{Grek}} is very widely transcluded, so changes to it won't have immediate effect on all pages transcluding it (since the server needs to go through and update each page separately, apparently). What you should do is copy {{Grek}} to User:Saltmarsh/template (for example), play around with it — test by using {{User:Saltmarsh/template|φύμβαρ}} or the like — and then copy the final version you're happy with back into {{Grek}} and wait for the change to propagate. Oh, and then make sure User:Saltmarsh/template doesn't appear in any categories, e.g. by blanking or deleting it. —Ruakh 08:00, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

P.S. If you can't get User:Saltmarsh/template to do what you want, either, then let me know and I can take a look; I'm assuming you'll find it easier to experiment with it yourself than to cycle back-and-forth with me making different changes and you seeing how they look, but if that's not the case, obviously I'm O.K. with the cycling. —Ruakh 08:00, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks muchly for those suggestions - I had never been sure about how to test templates, without doing it live. It is a while since I looked for Help but I guess I couldn't find it or found it unhelpful! Is there any guidance on propagation times for transcluded material - are we talking about minutes or hours? —Saltmarsh^Talk 06:03, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

No prob. My impression is that it can be anywhere from a few seconds to several hours, depending on server load, how many entries the template is transcluded in, how many entries are already in the job queue, and probably other things, but don't quote me on that. —Ruakh 08:42, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks again for your help - —Saltmarsh^Talk 07:12, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

No prob. :-) —Ruakh 14:22, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

dotless shin

Just a courtesy for-your-information: I've created {{he-dotless-shin}}, which removes the dot from any shin or sin. It does nothing to any other character. It does nothing, even, to a shin (or sin) that has a dagesh and/or other n'kuda: it just acts on the bare shin/sin. It useful in templates like he-conj-pa'al-'ef'ol-sh'leimim (q.v.).—msh210℠ 17:33, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I saw that, thanks. Major thumbs-up; that case hadn't occurred to me until I saw your edit to {{he-conj-pa'al-'ef'ol-sh'leimim}}. —Ruakh 17:36, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Western Europe

From User:Opiaterein

When you have some time, I just got the translation table sorted out today and the Hebrew translation could use a transileration :D Thanks — [ ric | opiaterein ] — 04:20, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Done. :-) —Ruakh 08:34, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

From User:Doremítzwr

Yeesh. You really cut Western Europe down to size. When we decide just what map(s) should be there, I’m sure that it/they will be re-added. I thought the See also was useful (though should have been labelled as “List of countries which compose Western Europe”, or something); I’ll probably add something similar when we get a clear idea of how this term is used. How come you took out the rel-table? BTW, you may want to contribute to sorting out this entry here. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 20:16, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm sure there will be one or more maps there eventually, but it's misleading to have just the map that gives only an incredibly narrow specification that no one ever uses. The See-also (1) wasn't even a list of entries and (2) reflected the same oddly specific specification as the map. At any rate, if we're going to list various definitions of Western Europe, most of the entries for relevant countries will be linked in the sense lines themselves. The rel-table was odd, because it had a one-line bar that expanded to show you one line of links; if you'd like the links to be table-ized, that's fine, but collapsing it? —Ruakh 21:32, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

truncation

Re geresh's edit-summary comment, a truncation is a lopping off of the end (see truncate) whereas an abbreviation is anything that makes the word shorter, including, say, omitting the middle. See my edit summary there re ד״ר. Hope this helps.—msh210℠ 23:18, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Oh! You know, I never really understood why some (like mispar) used geresh-es and others (like kilometer) used gershayim-s. Thanks for explaining! :-) —Ruakh 23:24, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

December

Wiktionary:Votes/2007-11/Lemma entries 2

I haven't made much progress swaying naysayers, so I don't feel ready to let the vote open. Do you have any suggestions? Rod (A. Smith) 23:27, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

I suspect that we and the naysayers might simply have a rather fundamental disagreement, and though we argue till we be blue in the face, yet should we not overcome it. It's odd, because it's just so obvious that we're right, but I guess they must feel the reverse. —Ruakh 00:53, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Transfix

Nounal sense. I thought you might be interested by this — looks like the vocalic counterpart to the consonantal roots in Hebrew et cetera. (I imagine that you know about it already, though.) † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 13:57, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for that link, but — while I hate to suggest that Wikipedians might sometimes make up terminology — I can't find any evidence for the real-world existence of that term. The more usual term, at least in my experience, is (deprecated template usage) pattern, though it's not nearly so common as (deprecated template usage) root is. —Ruakh 05:07, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Hebrew question

You may or may not be interested in my question in the Tea room about ambiguity in Hebrew morphological analysis. — Hippietrail 06:19, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

I am indeed interested, and will reply there; thanks for the notice. :-) —Ruakh 05:08, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

You spend some time away

...so you can jump right back in with misplaced character assassination? For what, running a bot? It wasn't like the bot was never requested - in fact, 'pedians and Wiktinarians spent an astronomical amount of time trying to find something to get that job done. At least three previous incarnations proved inadequate. So, running just that (a heavily requested, beneficial tool) is a point of criticism now? Does the rest of the world have infinite time to respond to your disruptive trolls and format manglings - but only you have "limited time" on Wiktionary? Go back to hell. --Connel MacKenzie 21:21, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I wasn't talking about you at all, and I wasn't trying to criticize the admin that I was thinking of. (I meant my comment quite seriously; one of our sysops, at the time he was made a sysop, had hardly participated at all in any discussion pages, and was made a sysop primarily because he was cleaning so many transwiki pages that it simply made sense for him to be able to delete them. We trusted that he wouldn't use the sysop tools in ways he shouldn't, and lo and behold, he's lived up to that trust. In fact, that's true of all our admins; none of us pays attention to everything that goes on in Wiktionary, and we all have to tread lightly when dealing with things we haven't been following.) I'm sorry you were hurt by my comment, but I have to ask that in future, you please try to assume good faith on my part. And, I'll try to do the same for you. —Ruakh 21:53, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Apology accepted. I will try harder to AGF on your part. FWIW, I did re-read your comments several times, unable to find a kind or innocent interpretation (such as the twist you explained above.) I am relieved your intent was not nefarious, despite appearing that way at first. --Connel MacKenzie 18:46, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I think the issue might be a difference in how we use the verb "transwiki"; for me transwiki-ing is the whole process of taking a Wikipedia article and turning it into a Wiktionary entry (a process that often takes months or more), but for some editors it seems to mean just that step of the process that involves the history-bringing-over tool? —Ruakh 20:15, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

It absolutely renews my faith in humanity to watch you respond with such disarming compusure to such virulence brought into your home(page). You should be beatified or nirvana-achieve-ized, really. How in the world do you do it? -- Thisis0 18:25, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm flattered, but you overestimate me; I managed this once to retain (or feign) composure, but your use of the present tense implies this is something I'm more generally capable of, and I make no such claim. ;-)   Thanks for your comment, though; it made me happy. :-)   —Ruakh 01:12, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, does it help to know I've started to compose and preview similar comments at least twice before in the past 6 months? If you really need to know how good you are at peacekeeping, I could easily find examples. Totally not joking: shining example of humanity (well, at least of WikiLove). -- Thisis0 01:43, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

That's an interesting perspective on the verb "transwiki," but rather hard to believe. The Transwiki activity of the past couple years has been a routine discussion point, it has generated constant noise in Special:RC (causing further enhancements such as patrolling and whitelisting,) as well as acting as the cause for direct MediaWiki development, such as the rewrite of Special:Import; yet the person you say you were talking about rarely appeared un-patrolled (and not for quite a while, when you made your comment.) I must note that had you intended to say something nice about him, you probably wouldn't have called him "completely out of touch." But thanks for reminding me about this particular conversation, recently on RFD. It is good to be aware of how subtle your tactics can be. It makes it much harder for me to AGF on your part, though. --Connel MacKenzie 11:15, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Sometimes I think you're a fucktard, a dick, and a troll, and sometimes I just think you're intensely paranoid. I suppose the truth is probably somewhere in between. —Ruakh 12:19, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Just thought I'd drop a quick note to say that not everyone here thinks you so malicious and evil-hearted Ruakh. Connel's way out of line here. Atelaes 18:48, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. —Ruakh 02:07, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

edittools

I've suggested something at MediaWiki talk:Edittools#Hebrew; you might wish to have a look-see. It's not the best solution, but it's better than what we have (imo).—msh210℠ 21:33, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Oh, oops, I see that my last comment in that conversation made a promise I never fulfilled. :-/

Fortunately, the edit-tools aren't transcluded the same way a template is; a change to them can be instantly undone if it turns out to cause problems for people. Unfortunately, I don't have Internet at home at the moment, so I wouldn't be quick to undo a change in that case, and therefore don't feel comfortable making the change; but your suggestion seems like a big improvement if it works properly, and you should feel free to badger another admin (at WT:GP, maybe?) to make the change and test it out. :-)

—Ruakh 01:19, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I shall.—msh210℠ 06:40, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Template:he-begedkefet

I wrote Template:he-begedkefet, to be transcluded as an item in the ====Usage notes==== section of, well, lotsa words. What do you think?—msh210℠ 06:40, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

It looks good. :-)   It's probably better without the bullet, though, as that should be in the actual wiki-text (or else it will be confusing to edit pages with multiple usage notes, of which this is one). Also, if we're going to talk about dropping the dagesh due to a preceding em kria, shouldn't we also mention the much more common case of a preceding clitic b'-/bi-, l'-/li-, k'-/ki-, or v'-/u-/va-? And if you don't think it's too wordy, I think it might make sense to mention how the pronunciation is affected by this in certain registers. —Ruakh 20:34, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, I was thinking of adding a note about the pronunciation, but the text for that would depend on the letter in question. So I just took for granted that everyone knows that gimel with a dagesh is pronounced differently from gimel without.  ;-)  But you're right, I think, about adding a note about prefixes. I haven't time now, though.—msh210℠ 02:46, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

You wink, but there are dialects that distinguish gimel from jimel or some such. (And that's ignoring historical dialects — after all, the entire reason for begedkefet is to reflect Masoretic pronunciation.) —Ruakh 00:42, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks

Thank you for your message. So what should I write instead? What about: Chinese (traditional/simplified) or should I just ignore it?Chloejr 19:14, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Just write "Chinese". The translation table in the English entry doesn't replace the entry for the foreign-language word; people wanting more information will click the link. :-)   —Ruakh 19:16, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

keep it real

I noted that you were the one to fully inflect this as a verb. I had been doing so also with verb phrases (or whatever their current name is) like this, but soon realized that they were not likely to get each form added and that little, from a user perspective, would be gained if we did. I have taken to inflecting only verbs that seem to qualify as phrasal verbs {just a preposition added to basic verb), verb phrases where the participles are in common use, and sometimes tricky irregular inflections. Otherwise I use infl. What do you think? DCDuring 21:17, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

I think {{en-verb}} should allow a nolinks=1 parameter that would prevent those inflections from being links; but I think redlinks (or pointless links that redirect to the main entry) are better than not listing inflections at all. —Ruakh 00:24, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

1. How broad is the consensus among admins on this nolinks idea?
2. Do you feel the same way about regular English plurals {ending in -s or, possibly, -es)? They don't seem to add much value. I find it hard to picture whom they would help and how. DCDuring 01:26, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

1. There's no such thing as "consensus among admins"; admins are here to implement community consensi. In this case, I don't think anyone's ever objected when I've suggested it, but no one's ever gone "Yes, please make that change!", either.
2. It's not always obvious how a plural is formed, even if it's a regular plural; consider "attorneys general", "comrades-in-arms", and so on. In the specific instance of "keep it real", I think the inflected forms are fairly obvious — by which I mean, it's fairly obvious that "keep" is the actual verb, and it's not inflected any differently in this expression from how it usually is — but I don't see the point in trying to decide for every single entry whether the inflections are obvious or not. If we give the plural for every single countable noun ending in -ment or -ation, I don't see why we shouldn't give the plural for every single countable multi-word noun.

—Ruakh 02:44, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

I should have said consensus among the hard-core. I vote for the no-links option and will consider going back to inflect the verb phrases. The trouble is that there is a lot of extra baggage, even in something like "keep it real". Why not just inflect the verb and have the unchanging balance of the phrase at the end? DCDuring 02:59, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

You mean, like {{en-verb|inf=to [[keep]] [[it]] [[real]]|keeps …|keeping …|kept …|nolinks=1}}? I'd be down with that. —Ruakh 05:32, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

You bad. Ya, or even even with one additional repetition of "it real" at the end, though that wouldn't necessarily work for every possible situation. I also haven't thought through how it might fail to work for the various "one's" phrasal verbs. "to keep one's cool" would work, but maybe there are some that won't. Happy New Year. DCDuring 06:18, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Happy New Year. :-) —Ruakh 06:37, 1 January 2008 (UTC)