Wiktionary:Tea room/2020/December

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← November 2020 · December 2020 · January 2021 → · (current)

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virtue signalling in German

An IP just added a couple of translations for virtue signalling in German. The German Wiktionary states that there is no German translation, citing this as source. Have translations since emerged, or should the translations be removed from the box? Mölli-Möllerö (talk) 15:34, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

It seems like a fairly generic concept- I think it's unlikely that there would be absolutely no translation even if it wasn't literal. DTLHS (talk) 20:16, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

De.wikt says there's no "gängige" translation, meaning there isn't (yet) a commonly accepted/used one. The ones that were added are verbose but understandable. – Jberkel 23:09, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

варёный

The entry for варёный is interesting, as this is an adjective, not a participle, although the English phrase "a boiled egg" shows that this distinction is not important in English. Contrast варёное яйцо, a boiled egg (adjective) and варенное им яйцо, an egg boiled by him (participle). But if you look at the entry for варёный, you will see that it says that it can be confused with the participle варённый, but hold on, the participle isn't варённый, but ва́ренный.... I think there are participles that can be confused with adjectives (they have an extra н, but are normally pronounced with a single н), but варёный isn't one of them. — This unsigned comment was added by 81.141.8.102 (talk) at 22:06, 1 December 2020 (UTC).

It's a bit complicated. варённый (varjónnyj) (boiled, participle) with two н's is substandard but verifiable from which (now) adjective варёный (varjónyj) is derived. ва́ренный (várennyj) is a more correct and modern spelling for the participle.

Re: pronunciation: double -нн- in a position far away from stress (not pre-tonal) can be pronounced as geminated or a single [n]. In the pre-tonal positions, though, -нн- in adjectives and participles, the double [n] is geminated, so that варёный (varjónyj) and варённый (varjónnyj) have distinct pronunciations [vɐˈrʲɵnɨj] vs [vɐˈrʲɵnːɨj]. At ва́ренный (várennyj) the gemination is optional - [ˈvarʲɪn(ː)ɨj] because the stress is further from the suffix. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:27, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

BTW, if you include the stress marks in Russian terms, you have to use templates or link the following way: ва́ренный. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:29, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you. I see now that определённый in Wiktionary shows a geminate n. I'll try to remember how to tag up a stress mark in a Russian word. — This unsigned comment was added by 81.141.8.102 (talk) at 02:35, 2 December 2020 (UTC).

фотожаба

Is there an English equivalent of фотожа́ба (fotožába)? --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:18, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Well, Multitran has "doctored photograph". I wonder if the Russian word фотожаба is influenced by photoshop+awareness of Russian word жаба (toad). A translation could be "it's a photoshop", where "photoshop" is a slightly lazy truncation of "a photoshopped image".— This unsigned comment was added by 81.141.8.102 (talk) at 02:38, 2 December 2020 (UTC).

Thanks. фотожаба has a sense of parody or caricature, which "photoshop" may lack. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:39, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

There's the vaguely similar photoshat, but Urban Dictionary's entry suggests that the meaning might not fit the Russian term so well. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:34, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, User:Eirikr, the similarity is vague, as you said :) --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 23:27, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

этого in the pre-revolutionary script

I've started reading the pre-revolutionary spelling version of Crime and Punishment available as a free PDF from imwerden. Normally, I note that the gs of masculine adjectives is ого where stressed (большо́го) and аго where unstressed (ру́сскаго) in the old spelling. But э́того is an exception - this is found as этого throughout in that book, and I checked in a PDF of the collected works of Dostoyevsky in pre-revolutionary spelling, and yes it was этого. Yet Tolstoy (on Wikisource) has этаго in pre-revolutionary spelling. Is it possible that этого was preferred by Dostoyevsky because it preserved the link with того? Also I noticed молодаго in this book, which modern editions have changed to молодого, but I think they do so incorrectly, as Dahl's dictionary has both молодо́й and моло́дый as words, the latter an older variant probably, and it is likely that Dostoyevsky intended to show молодаго was not stressed on the ending, i.e. that this was the gs of моло́дый. Does anyone have a better explanation of why Dostoevsky spelt этого thus, despite the fact the ending was not under stress? — This unsigned comment was added by 81.141.8.102 (talk) at 02:48, 2 December 2020 (UTC).

I don't really have an advanced knowledge of the pre-revolutionary script, so I have to check spellings myself before posting an alternative form or inflection.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. We need to fix the inflection at э́тотъ (étot), which wasn't created by me.

You will notice that большо́й (bolʹšój) (pre- and post-1918 reform) and ру́сскій (rússkij) (pre-1918 form of ру́сский (rússkij) have declensions.

Modern gen. sg and acc. sg. (animate) of большо́й is большо́го and old больша́го.

Modern gen. sg and acc. sg. (animate) of ру́сский is ру́сского and old ру́сскаго.

The 1918 reform removed this discrepancy, since, it's больша́го was actually pronounced as большо́го (or rather большо́во").

In the pre-reform spellings, you will find a lot of variant spellings, so that both больша́го and большо́го were used, the latter being closer to the actual pronunciation. больша́го reflects the old pronunciation, which is still used ecclesiastically. In the old pronunciations "г" was always pronounced as expected [ɡ] (or [ɣ]), not [v], including the genitive/accusative adjective endings. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:20, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

In short, аго/ого were used interchangeably before the reform, which confused everyone. Dostoyevsky is no exception. The reprints normalised the spellings to remove аго/ого discrepancy.

Compare also with the word ея́ (jejá), which in modern Russian is only pronounced её (jejó) but it was spelled this way before 1918. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:25, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you. I see. So it's not surprising that Dostoevsky "mixed and matched" the spellings to an extent. Or possibly Dostoevsky's editor or printer or typesetter, as only an inspection of the manuscript, if it still exists, would tell us what Dostoevsky himself wrote. — This unsigned comment was added by 81.141.8.102 (talk) at 03:31, 2 December 2020 (UTC).

I have fixed the inflection of э́тотъ (étot) from the modern "э́того" to the pre-reform "э́таго". Even if you find -ого spellings in the pre-1918 literature, the classical spellings was considered to be -аго but misspellings were common because of the common (new) pronunciation. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:37, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

The misspellings or alternatives spellings sometimes help identify how authors pronounced or how they wanted to spell. There were many debates before 1918 regarding letter ё (jo) usage, which some viewed as "too colloquial" or illiterate to be used not only in writing but also in the pronunciation, which doesn't always make sense from the modern Russian perspective. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:50, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

You mean you could hazard a guess from the spelling as to what the author intended, but couldn't be sure. Eg. in Crime and Punishment, where Dostoyevsky has молодаго, he might have had молодый rather than молодой in the nominative, but you couldn't be sure purely from the spelling he used. Also in that book I found грошевыхъ (half-pennyworth), which might indicate he had грошевой and not грошовый (both are in Dahl's dictionary). Another interesting insight I have got from reading this is that Dostoyevsky had ужъ for уж, but Dahl had ужь with a soft sign (maybe on the analogy with words like рожь with a soft sign).81.141.8.102 10:37, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

@81.141.8.102: I don't want you to make wrong assumptions. -а́го, when the penultimate syllable was stressed (with -о́й-adjectives), was pronounced mostly -о́во but the older pronunciation -а́го was retained by priests. It is confusing, that's why the reform addressed this, which was especially helpful for this ending. "а" is never pronounced as "о" in stressed position in modern Russian.

User:Benwing2 has added an additional form on my request, so that pre-reform declensions contain both -а́го and -о́го with -о́й-adjectives. The gradual switch to -о́го for such adjectives happened BEFORE the 1918 reform.

грошо́вый (grošóvyj) is more modern than грошево́й (groševój)

As for ужь (užʹ) vs ужъ (už), the former is much older. Entries in V. Dahl's should be used with care, they contain a lot of obsolete forms and some are even dictionary-only words. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:14, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

For any reference, pls see w:ru:Реформа_русской_орфографии_1918_года#Содержание_реформы. It contains specifically: в родительном и винительном падежах прилагательных и причастий окончание -аго после шипящих заменялось на -его (лучшаго → лучшего), во всех остальных случаях -аго заменялось на -ого, а -яго на -его (например, новаго → нового, ранняго → раннего)... --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 05:29, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, Anatoli, for the reference. — This unsigned comment was added by 81.141.8.102 (talk) at 23:08, 2 December 2020 (UTC).

You're welcome. Don't forget to sign your posts with four tildes: ~~~~, so that it's clear who said what and when. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 23:27, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

neurodiversity

Why is this in the Cybernetics category? ---> Tooironic (talk) 04:29, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

The category was added presumably because the term occurs in the quotation of its coinage in the Etymology section. I am inclined to say this was misplaced; there is no direct connection with the term by itself.  --Lambiam 11:23, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

OK. I have removed it for now as it seems to be in error. ---> Tooironic (talk) 01:12, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

estar que...

Spanish question for @Friendly2Face, Vivaelcelta, Metaknowledge, Pablussky, Tanisds et al. I recently made a bunch of these - estar que se sube por las paredes, estar que se sale, estar que arde, estar que no está, and want to add more, like estar que se cae and estar que se caga. But I was having second thoughts, firstly about the lemma (it should probably be something like estar que caerse, although that looks pretty ugly), and secondly if we want this information at estar (or estar que?) and/or the relevant entries subirse, salirse, arder, caerse. Returning2stadia (talk) 14:05, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

I don't think there's one answer for all of those, and each case should be examined separately. For example, I think for the two first expressions, the main lemma should be subirse por las paredes and salirse, yet estar que arde seems fine as a main lemma for me. Something like estar que caerse just makes no sense in Spanish, so I'd leave it as estar que se cae, explaining on the entrance the different forms depending on the person (estoy que me caigo, estás que te caes, and so on). Same with estar que arde or estar que no está. And I think I would add these to the relevant entries, not to estar. But all of this is my opinion, and I don't really know much about the ways of Wiktionary in these whatabouts. Pablussky (talk) 14:17, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Pablussy (if I am understanding the first question correctly). Its being conjugated in the sort of third person singular/impersonal makes the most sense since estar que leads into a subordinate clause, which of course by definition, requires a subject and conjugated verb. In the cases of tener algo que ver con, qué tienen que ver los cojones con comer trigo however, that's fine because tener que doesn't induce a subordinate clause.

And I'm not the most well-versed in Wiktionary convention either. Like I read through the stuff, but I could be speaking in the wrong. But I agree with Pablussy that for the idiom "to be on fire" as in "doing really well", estar que arde makes the most sense because 3rd person singular is sort of the impersonal in this case.

For salirse, I would probably not create a separate entry for salir que/salirse que only because in the case of that idiomatic meaning of to get out that, there is not a standard verb I can think of that follows always in the dependent clause. But there are also several regional variant uses of salir que, so there could be a part of the Spanish speaking world where a specific verb always follows salir(se) que that I am not thinking of for a specific meaning. In that case, if it were super common and constitutes its own meaning to where salir(se) que + verb only has that meaning when that other verb follows it, then it would make sense for that to have its own entry. Estar que arde very much has a specific idiomatic meaning that really stands apart on its own, which is why it makes sense to have an entry for that. Hopefully, I understood the questions correctly. Friendly2Face (talk) — This unsigned comment was added at 18:26, 2 December 2020 (UTC).

Prepositional singular of рубль?

In my Russian textbook (Мост neu / Russisch für Anfänger / Übungsbuch, Klett 1. Auflage 2019) the prepositional singular of рубль is given in the table of the first declension on page 131 as рублях (as in the plural), disagreeing with рубле given here (and in Russian Wiktionary and implied by w:Russian_declension#Second_declension_–_masculine_nouns). The same table in that book also gives the prepositional singular of урок is given in the table on page 131 as уроках, again disagreeing with us. What is correct? PJTraill (talk) 14:30, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

@PJTraill: Our declension table is correct. рубля́х (rubljáx) can't possibly be prepositional singular, in any case. I don't see any discrepancy. Your textbook must have an error. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 22:56, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

@PJTraill: I missed the 2nd part of your question. It’s the same with уро́к (urók). I wonder if you misunderstood something. «На уроке» means “in the lesson”, «на уроках» means “in the lessons”. These are regular nouns. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 02:38, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Let me just add an example: сколько будет сто долларов в рублях? how much is $100 in roubles? That could be used as an example sentence in Wiktionary and uses the prepositional plural. новости о рубле, news about the rouble, illustrates the prepositional singular.81.141.8.102 03:41, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, and sorry to have troubled you. Our Russian teacher has now also said that it is an error, and in her (later) edition of the same textbook a different illustrative word is correctly declined. It was presumably a simple careless oversight. PJTraill (talk) 19:38, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@PJTraill: You haven't caused any trouble and you're welcome to ask any questions. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 10:37, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

"Anti-vaxxer" appears to be no longer slang

The article at "Prospect of a coronavirus vaccine unites anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and hippie moms in Germany", Washington Post, 3 July 2020 suggests to me that the term "anti-vaxxer" should no longer be designated as slang.--CRau080 (talk) 23:56, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Was it ever slang? Maybe informal. DCDuring (talk) 02:32, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree. I doubt it was ever slang. Mihia (talk) 23:49, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

The fact that it occurs in a newspaper does not mean the term is not slang. It is slang. There is no such word as "vax", or at least if someone said it it would seem to be a relaxed form of "vaccinate". Anti-vaxxer is slang - if this is not, then no word is.81.141.8.102 01:31, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

@81.141.8.102, how do you define slang? What specific definition are you using?

Looking at another dictionary as a comparison, I see that the Merriam-Webster entry anti-vaxxer is not marked as "slang". That dictionary does use "slang" labels, such as at their crapola entry, so the omission of any such label at anti-vaxxer is significant. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 05:21, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Eiríkr, there is no body that controls the English language like the French Académie. Anyone can publish a dictionary and write whatever he likes in the dictionary. For this reason, Noah Webster was able to publish a dictionary and list new spellings. I could publish a dictionary tomorrow. I assume you might be Icelandic, and maybe there is a body that regulates Icelandic? Merriam-Webster does not control the English language. At best, it is an educated America-centric view of what constitutes good English, with no likelihood that all dictionaries in the world will agree on everything. If you look at Lexico (https://www.lexico.com/definition/anti-vaxxer), you will see the word in question is listed on a site run by the OED as "informal". It will not be regarded by all native speakers as a "proper word". Some dictionaries may choose to regard it as so, or as slang, or to categorise it in some other way. The real authority of dictionaries lies in their use by the educated middle class in the absence of an Académie. Yes, newspapers do use this word, but the print media is a notable channel for the spread of slang or informal expressions in the modern day.81.141.8.102 02:49, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

I'd call it slang too. Certainly informal. Our citations do not seem to be from formal sources like scientific papers. As for the Washington Post, newspapers love to use slang, like "selfie" and "mompreneur" etc. Equinox ◑ 09:07, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

For me, "slang", in addition to being informal, should be limited in its use to a certain group or type of person. For example, just to give a random example, "hood" for "neighbourhood" would be "slang", because I would never say that, and would be surprised if a "general" person said that where I live, and (ordinary) newspapers would not use it except knowingly. OTOH, I would read and maybe even repeat "anti-vaxxer" without such feelings, so I would not call it "slang". Mihia (talk) 00:01, 12 December 2020 (UTC) (actually, "hood" may not be the greatest example for me to use at is more AmE anyway, but I don't have time to think of a better example right now!)

I think I would tend to agree. If I hear a bunch of teenagers calling each other "savage" or someone in their 30s calling something "gnarly", I would consider that slang, and it would strike me as odd if someone outside a given social group used the word. "Anti-vaxxer", on the other hand, is a bit more general, and just doesn't "feel" like slang. I think "informal" is a much better label. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 21:10, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

forward

I remember someone mentioned somewhere (forget where) that this word is often pronounced by USians as "fo-ward" (no 'R' in the middle). I have heard it many times. Can someone add this variant reading? Thank you. ---> Tooironic (talk) 01:14, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

I have made that change, hopefully in the right manner. 81.141.8.102 10:47, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you. ---> Tooironic (talk) 09:09, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

The prior discussion was ~2 weeks ago on this very page (WT:TR); at Wiktionary:Tea room/2020/November#US_pronunciation_of_forward. :) - -sche (discuss) 05:07, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

I see Mahajaga has already changed the forward page to state that the pronunciation without a medial r is "non-standard". Mahajaga had never heard this pronunciation - although it is very widespread indeed - and so chooses to regard it as non-standard. This misunderstands the meaning of "standard" in linguistics. A widespread pronunciation that is recognised and understood by all native speakers is simply not non-standard.81.141.8.102 02:54, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

If you are going to cast aspersions on @Mahagaja, you could at least notify him that you are doing so. Mahagaja is a respected editor here who has contributed to the project for a long time, so the least that you could do is not badmouth him behind his back. Tharthan (talk) 20:52, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

I labeled it nonstandard because in the November discussion, -sche recommended that it be labeled as such. If I had been following my own preferences, I would have labeled it "rare". As for the meaning of "standard", being recognized and understood by all native speakers is not sufficient. All sorts of things are recognized and understood by all native speakers but aren't considered standard, such as ain't or the zero copula or the pronunciation /ˈnukjəlɚ/. —Mahāgaja · talk 21:05, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

My point was that the pronunciation of forward as foe-ward is not non-standard or rare, and Mahagaja admitted he had never heard that pronunciation, despite its being a very common pronunciation in the US. It's not a "rare" pronunciation simply because he says it is. It's not rare at all. And it is not at all like saying "ain't". He is refusing to recognise that it is a common pronunciation in the US, as confirmed by multiple people in the tea room pages. 81.141.8.102 15:38, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

vogelvrij

According to the Dutch wiktionary, this word means only "outlaw," "outlawed," not "free as a bird." Online information sites seem to confirm that. Is the meaning "free as a bird" actually attested? Can someone confirm it (with sources or references)?--85.149.78.152 02:22, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Yes, it is attested, although it seems that it chiefly occurs in fiction and songs. The WNT has 19th-century cites. [1] ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 10:28, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@Lingo Bingo Dingo, 85.149.78.152: The link you have provided, only has definitions, no cites. If it really was calqued from German, then it may may have borrowed both senses. The German wiki on the equivalent/source de:vogelfrei provides some etymology and cites. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 11:17, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@Atitarev It does have a cite, click the arrow. It is possible that the less common was also calqued from German, but I don't think there are references supporting that and to be honest it is not very plausible. The use looks more like it developed from the native intensifying or simile-like typology of compound adjectives; I doubt early uses are especially linked to German. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 11:32, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@Lingo Bingo Dingo: Ah, yes, thanks. I didn't check that. This may be satisfactory, IMO, unless the sense is RFV'ed, then you would need two more. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 11:37, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@Atitarev I have already put two other cites in the entry and I could add another one from a song if that is desired. Though it is difficult to cite this from Google Books, because there are quite a few titles with vogelvrij. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 11:49, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

The Alex Cross cite does not work for this sense; the English original is: “Whatever you called it, Acadia truly loved feeling like this, an outlaw of the body and the mind.”^[2]  --Lambiam 20:48, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Well, that is a highly misleading mistranslation if I've seen one. Replaced it. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 08:42, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

As an aside, I doubt we need two etymologies here. Listing both under the same ety section and simply noting in that ety section that sense X is a calque would be preferable, IMO. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 14:14, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

神様

@Eirikr, TAKASUGI Shinji: 「神様」 is given as a Japanese term for God in the translation table for God, but our entry for 「神様」 does not have any sense for "God".

This is in contrast with most of the other terms in that table, which have "God" for at least one of the senses. In my limited experience with Japanese, I am pretty sure that I have heard 「神様」 used for/in reference to God.

I don't know what (if any) differences there are/might be in relative usage between the Japanese terms given in that translation table, so I don't know if one word is used more than another, or if some are situationally-limited. I would imagine that there is a possibility that 「神」 (by itself, without the 「様」) could come off as ambiguous if it were used in any and every situation to refer to God, so I would understand if that is situationally-limited.

Is it that 「神様」 is limited to just the sense "Lord God" (in other words, the manner of address to God)? Or is it indeed used to simply mean "God" (without the implication of a vocative)?

Tharthan (talk) — This unsigned comment was added at 05:07, 3 December 2020 (UTC).

@Tharthan: Are you confused between god#Translations and God#Translations? The definition #1 - "(honorific) an honorific reference to any god or deity" seems sufficient to me. 神様(かみさま) (kami-sama) can be used both to address the God or refer to the God. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 09:40, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

No, I wasn't confused. But most other language terms that are used for God have a specific sense to indicate as much. For example: भगवान, ღმერთი, దేవుడు. I think that it would probably make sense to have a similar sense in our entry for 「神様」. Tharthan (talk) 15:02, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Meh, I think the big-G "God" sense is already covered by sense #1. I see that some other languages' entries have a proper noun listed, but I don't think the Japanese term is ever treated as a proper noun, so that approach would be inappropriate here. Monolingual JA sources also don't split out the big-G "God" sense from the "honorific term for any god or deity" sense. A brief survey of bilingual dictionaries suggests a similar approach.

I personally don't see a need, but if others do, how about just adding big-G "God" to the line for sense #1, like this? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 18:14, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

@Eirikr: Thanks. That edit is probably enough, though I find the statement "I don't think the Japanese term is ever treated as a proper noun" curious. Are you saying that, in a sentence such as 「神様の王国では、貴方達は主を見付けるでしょう。」 (I'm not confident at all in my Japanese, so sorry if that was grammatically way off), 「神様」 would not be perceived/is not being treated as a proper noun? Tharthan (talk) 22:27, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

@Tharthan: What constitutes a "proper noun" per se in Japanese is something of a slippery concept. The language doesn't decline nouns, nor does it have any grammatical gender or number, nor are there any cases or conjugation specific to proper nouns. In our entries so far, just from my own subjective experience, it seems that "proper nouns" are mainly the names of specific singular things, where there's a strong sense of name-ness. Russian or Harold in English are identifiable as names of specific things, whereas country or dog are not. Big-G God is identifiable as a proper noun by its capitalization and its use as a name, with corresponding specific syntax that help distinguish it from small-g god (I think mostly differences in article usage). Japanese has neither capitalization nor differences in syntax to differentiate the two.

If others feel that the concept of the Abrahamic big-G "God" is sufficiently proper-noun-y across languages, I have no particular opposition to splitting the corresponding sense out to a ===Proper noun=== section in the Japanese 神様 entry. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 22:51, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

@Tharthan: There is no distinction between a god and God in Japanese. Do you want to know whether 神様(かみさま) (kami-sama) is a term of address other than a term of reference? It can be used in either way. 神(かみ) (kami) is almost always a term of reference. @Atitarev: Our entry is certainly unclear about that. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 10:40, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

@TAKASUGI Shinji, Tharthan: Both quotations provided are used to address the God and the English translation is capitalised in both cases. If you think it's important to add that to the definition, it can be even clearer. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 10:57, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

@TAKASUGI Shinji: That information is useful, thank you. If our entry could be improved, it probably ought to be. Tharthan (talk) 15:15, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

ça te dit de…

In Duo Lingo I've just been presented with the French sentence Ça te dit de regarder un film de science-fiction? (“Do you want to watch a science fiction movie?”). I've never encountered the construction ça te dit de… before, and our entry at dire doesn't have anything for it. Should it be a sense of dire or a separate entry? What would the ideal lemma be, and how should it be labeled? Colloquial? Informal? —Mahāgaja · talk 20:59, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

In more informal English, "What do you say to watching a science fiction movie?" We have what do you say. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 21:37, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

We only have one single sense for such a common verb. La honte. – Jberkel 22:15, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

TFLi says "Se dire de + inf. Projeter de." Vox Sciurorum (talk) 22:20, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

I've done Duolingo and, imo, yes some of their translations are, um, interesting. In other words try to confirm it through some other sources (Google Translate, DeepL, dict.cc, fr.wiktionary, another French language dictionary, etc.) before taking Duolingo's version too seriously. Not that Duo has more errors than most on-line language courses, but in my experience they don't always check translations with native speakers on both ends. Also, try the discussion page for the question; that's basically what it's for. --RDBury (talk) 04:18, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm not asking what it means; I figured out what it means. But if this is a real expression in French, I want Wiktionary to list it either at dire or at its own entry. —Mahāgaja · talk 07:14, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: It's real, and it's used with other pronouns and in other tenses too: "ça vous dit ?", "il m'a demandé si ça nous dirait de nous joindre à eux plus tard", "ça ne me dit trop rien d'y aller", "ça me disait trop rien d'y retourner", etc. It's (imo) synonymous with intéresser or tenter. It's indeed informal/colloquial (I've never been sure of the difference between these two labels, and I only use "informal" nowadays).

I'm not sure how to lemmatize it. ça is a dummy subject, with the real subject following the verb: "ça vous dit d'aller voir un film ?", but I don't think one would ever not use it: "**aller voir un film vous dit ?". PUC – 12:57, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@PUC: Is the object pronoun direct or indirect? In other words, in the third person singular, would you say "ça lui dit de..." or "ça le dit de..."? And with a name would you say "ça dit à Marie de..." or "ça dit Marie de..."? I think the lemma should be either ça dit à quelqu'un de or ça dit quelqu'un de depending on your answer. —Mahāgaja · talk 17:46, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: Indirect. Maybe ça dit à quelqu’un de would work, but maybe simply adding a sense at dire would be enough.

In fact, I think we should treat it as an impersonal verb, like pleuvoir: imo, the only difference between the two is the dummy pronoun (il ~ ça). Notice that pleuvoir can also have what I would consider a real subject: pleuvoir des cordes, pleuvoir des hallebardes.  PUC – 18:32, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

I think it's idiomatic enough to warrant its own entry. As for pleuvoir des cordes and pleuvoir des hallebardes, I'd say those are objects, not subjects. You say "il pleut des cordes", right, not "des cordes pleuvent"? —Mahāgaja · talk 18:49, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@PUC: BTW, I'm also baffled by trop rien in your examples above. Does it mean "not too much"? So "ça ne me dit trop rien d'y aller" means "I don't much feel like going there" and "ça me disait trop rien d'y retourner" "I didn't much feel like going back"? —Mahāgaja · talk 18:54, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: Syntactically, they are objects (the syntactic subject being the dummy pronoun il), but semantically I think they are subjects: you indeed don't say "**des cordes pleuvent", but from a semantic standpoint "ropes are falling from the sky / raining" indeed. That's what I mean by "real subject", a term which is also used by the TLFi ("sujet réel"; see its entry for pleuvoir). In support of this idea is the fact that pleuvoir can be used non-impersonally (albeit with a figurative meaning): "Les balles pleuvent." (// "Il pleut des balles."); "Les diamants vont pleuvoir et les perles neiger."

About your second point: yes. See also "je n'en sais trop rien" = "I'm none too sure", "I'm not quite sure", "I don't know". I don't think trop rien is used outside of these two phrases, but it seems entryworthy. PUC – 20:26, 4 December 2020 (UTC) 

@PUC: It sounds like pleuvoir is a sort of ergative verb then, but so is to rain in English, e.g. "it's raining cats and dogs" or "It's Raining Men". —Mahāgaja · talk 21:32, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Here, the meaning of dire is: “to be of interest”, more commonly encountered in the slightly longer collocation si ça te dit (“if you are interested”), which even has an entry at the French Wiktionary. So the question ça te dit de regarder un film de science-fiction? (literally, “does it speak to you ...?”) means, “are you interested in watching a science-fiction film?”. In other contexts the meaning can be different; ça me dit rien means, ”it doesn’t mean anything to me”.  --Lambiam 20:09, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@Lambiam: So we should definitely add a sense or two to dire, possibly in addition to an entry for ça dit à quelqu'un de. The last sense you mention is shared by German sagen: "das sagt mir nichts" = "that means nothing to me", while the "to be of interest" sense is found in a different verb of speaking, ansprechen: "das spricht mir nicht an" = "that doesn't appeal to me". —Mahāgaja · talk 21:32, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

That seems right to me, but I’ll happily leave such idiomatic entries to fr-N editors; my idiomatic understanding is mainly passive and largely confined to a register in which ça me dit rien is ungrammatical.  --Lambiam 23:09, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

citrous

Presently we are lacking this word, but I can't quite get my head around whether it is purely an old or (now) rare spelling of "citrus", or whether there is any case where "citrous" could not be replaced by "citrus" in ordinary modern writing. Mihia (talk) 02:19, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

I would expect citrous to be used only as an adjective, cf. Latin citrosus, and the English pair mucus and mucous.--Urszag (talk) 03:14, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

That appears to be true; see [3]. --RDBury (talk) 04:21, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Yes indeed, but citrus is also an adjective (at least we list it as one, although very strictly speaking it may be debatable whether it is a true adjective or an attributive noun). In any case, it seems that any instance of "citrous X" may be replaceable with "citrus X", but this is the point I am seeking clarification about. Is there any case of "citrous X" where properly the word has to be "citrous", making a point of distinction, rather than the definition of "citrous" being "old or rare form of citrus (adj.)"? Or, if we do think that the adj. definition of "citrus" is wrong anyway, then I guess that would be a factor. Mihia (talk) 09:30, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Someone with an aversion to attributive use of nouns (perhaps an English learner) might intentionally use citrous, though I'd bet that citrusy is more common. We have no cites for citrus (adj.) let alone any that establish its adjectivity. I've RfVed it. DCDuring (talk) 14:49, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Wordnet 3.0 and MWOnline have entries for citrous as an adjective, not a noun. See “citrous”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. DCDuring (talk) 15:20, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Yes, the MW definition of "citrous", for instance, is hardly different from our definition of adj. "citrus", and their examples such as "citrous area" and "citrous trees" seem far commoner with "citrus". However, it is true that "citrous tree" would be clearly "adj + noun", whereas "citrus tree" is less clear (to me). Mihia (talk) 15:39, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

I suspect most attestations of "citrous trees" are probably simply misspellings, but that might be hard to prove. —Mahāgaja · talk 17:48, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

The Ngrams ratio of "citrous trees" to "citrus trees" [4] may be significant, assuming that the key part of it is not tiny numbers overwhelmed by scannos or other noise. From this evidence it looks as if "citrous trees" was the dominant form until around the end of C19, when it dramatically fell off in favour of "citrus trees", which may not be what we would expect for a misspelling. Mihia (talk) 18:48, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps dated would be an appropriate label. DCDuring (talk) 17:13, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

I wonder whether:

1. attributive use of nouns in general was less common before the 20th century
2. attributive use of taxonomic names specifically was less common before the 20th century.

Is there scholarly research on this? I'm not sure we can get a very good answer using Google NGrams. DCDuring (talk) 17:20, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

of#Usage_notes says something about noun adjuncts becoming more common, although I would probably drop the FBI vs CIA comparison which seems like mere happenstance / noise when one considers that e.g. "War Department" (with a noun adjunct) predates FBI. - -sche (discuss) 04:33, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the good idea about how to use Google NGrams: It looks like Department of War was much more common than War Department in the 19th century, remained more common in the early 20th century. War Department was much more common from the late '30s until about 1950 when both dwindled, with Defense Department being somewhat more common than Department of Defense. But Treasury Department being much more common than Department of the Treasury until 1980 with both being about equally common since. State Department was somewhat less common than Department of State until about 1910 when State Department become clearly more common.

IOW, the pattern is not perfectly clear from this convenience sample of collocations. DCDuring (talk) 04:53, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Anyway, this is a fine adjective to add. Suggestive evidence that something is not a misspelling could come in the form of books which use it multiple times and consistently (whereas, books that use citrous once and citrus the rest of the time would suggest a misspelling). Proof comes in the form of works specifically naming it as a standard spelling, such as other dictionaries including it as a headword, and in this case I see that the 1911 Webster's Third has "citrous [...] a, Pertaining to the genus Citrus; as, citrous fruits." followed by entries for Citrullus and then Citrus, and the 2011 Concise Oxford English Dictionary: Luxury Edition, in the entry for "citrus n", lists "citrous adj, citrusy adj" as derivatives. - -sche (discuss) 04:55, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

mamzer

Third definition at mamzer: "(Judaism) A child born to Jewish parents whose relationship is forbidden by Jewish law, such as an unmarried man and a married woman, or whose parent is a mamzer. The term is often mistranslated as bastard." The last part seems POV; MW and Collins do have "child born out of wedlock, bastard". 1: Shouldn't there be a single sense covering both children born out of wedlock and children born from disallowed relationships (presumably also including marriages)? 2: Should the first and third definitions be merged? ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 11:46, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

I would delete the last sentence and leave the definitions split. According to the definition (sense 3) the child of a mamzer is a mamzer. The child of a married bastard is not a bastard. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 15:01, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Can we avoid the circularity of defining a mamzer as "a child [who is X, or Y, or] whose parent is a mamzer"? If nothing else, changing "whose parent is a mamzer" or "whose parent is the product of such a relationship" [forbidden by Jewish law, as discussed earlier in the def] would help. - -sche (discuss) 04:26, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

The existence of the two 'illegitimate child' senses goes back to diff, and seems like a misunderstanding: in an admittedly brief search, I didn't spot evidence that mamzer is used of people other than the people who fit the Jewish religious definition (or that the speaker thinks fit that definition), except when the word is used in the 'generic insult' sense. I would therefore consolidate the two 'illegitimate child' senses. - -sche (discuss) 01:07, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Sate or tënde in the genitive/dative/ablative?

yt reports the genitive/etc form "sate", but when I asked a certain Albanian person on Quora if the "të jetës tënde" found in a song was a grammar error and should have been "të jetës sate", he replied «Tënde is standard. I thing “sate” is the same word in a dialect, central Albanian I thing.». What is going on here? Is the inflection table at yt giving me a dialectal genitive/etc? Is this Albanian person wrong? 151.68.71.220 — This unsigned comment was added at 14:21, 4 December 2020 (UTC).

Note: this was by me. MGorrone (talk) 17:16, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Pinging User:Etimo, a recently-active Albanian editor. - -sche (discuss) 04:22, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Quotation under nehmen (German)

The quotation "Hierauf nehmen sie des Getränks [...]," under definition one of nehmen seems problematic in a couple of ways. First, the full cite is 50 words long which seems excessive for a 5 word quote. I'm not sure that such a short, and not particularly memorable quote even needs a cite.

Second, but more importantly, the quote is from the 18th century and uses language that I would consider dated at best, possibly obsolete. (Perhaps a native speaker can confirm this.) My literal translation is something like "Hereupon they took of the drink", which sounds strange in English but I'm pretty certain that the German is just as odd to modern ears. (If you want to get into specifics, the "hierauf" (hereupon) is unusual but still normal in German, but the genitive "des Getränks" is simply not used in this way anymore.) I tempted to just remove it since it's not a good example of how you would use the word in the 21st century. But it might work as quotation for some obsolete/archaic meaning that I'm not qualified to add. That's assuming you don't care about the first issue.

Anyway, the entry is sort of a work in progress at the moment; I added about a dozen light verb constructions but I don't think there's a consensus on how to best handle them. (I mentioned this here about a week ago.) For now I'm (mis)using the uxi template to list the phrases and translations. I also added about a dozen possible idioms under Derived terms, but I'm leaving them red-linked for now pending more research. I'm still working on additional examples and meanings. --RDBury (talk) 18:12, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

I've deleted the quote, it's not helpful and doesn't make much sense without the full sentence (ironically, despite the extensive bibliographic data, it's hard to find the source). Regarding the "misuse" of ux, I don't think that's a problem, quite the opposite, it's a good way to get started. And even if you don't create entries for them, someone else might at a later point. – Jberkel 18:58, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, problem solved. --RDBury (talk) 19:30, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

The quotation was re-added (with more context incl. snarky summary) and is now less ambiguous. des Getränks is a partitive genetive here, in modern German you would say "Hierauf nehmen sie von dem Gertränk" (dative). – Jberkel 15:56, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

I would argue that it's not the same meaning so it doesn't belong under that definition at least. But I'm over making a fuss about it. To me the vast majority of quotations here are just a waste of bandwidth not worth the effort to takes to read them, much less argue about. They do get in the way when I'm editing an entry though, so it may be worth pointing out when they seem particularly egregious. --RDBury (talk) 17:26, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

That's sad to hear. To me quotations are one of the best aspects of this project, my reading habits have become more varied since I started editing, but I suppose it really depends on the languages you work in. Sometimes I wish we had more guidelines, but as it stands, once passed CFI anything goes. – Jberkel 18:05, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

hold in vain

Not 100% sure if this is the right place for such a question so if not I ask for leniency.
Does anybody know what it might mean to "hold in vain" something?
It appears in the lyrics of a song as "I lay down all [that] I hold in vain". And in a different song as "Blessed were the days we held in vain".
Apart from those two references it seems it's not really a phrase that exists.
Any guesses on the meaning? Thanks. 190.100.175.35 00:06, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

See in vain. Song lyrics are often quite meaningless. Equinox ◑ 00:20, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

I know the meaning of 'in vain' as such, but I can't seem to give it sense in the context of the lyrics. But thanks anyways. If anybody else has anything useful... I'm all ears. 190.100.175.35 00:55, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

I won't say you can't post this here, but another place you might have tried is W:Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language. Anyway, I think the first one is more like "I lay down all I hold, in vain". I'm not sure about the other one, but I don't think it's an idiom. Most of the song's lyrics are relatively easy to understand so that one line does stand out a bit. Not like "Sharp distance/How can the wind with so many around me", I'm pretty sure only Jon Anderson fully understands that one. --RDBury (talk) 01:47, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

By the literal meaning of in vain, something held in vain would be something held that does no good, that will ultimately lead to nothing. Either that, or it might mean something held to be in vain. There also might be an allusion to the biblical commandment: "Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain", and another biblical quote: "vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Perhaps the second example is meant to evoke a paradoxical combination of positive biblical sayings from the Beatitudes, with the moral condemnation of human failure implied by the two quotes I gave above.

At any rate, the phrase has a definite biblical feel to it, and was probably chosen for that reason. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:51, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

The original phrase means "I risk everything that I have... for nothing". "I throw my all into this enterprise, knowing that there is no reason to do so, and nothing will come of it".81.141.8.102 02:07, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

dada (ety. 2) and dadah

Is it same word with different spelling? or different word with similar meaning? ―Rex Aurōrum^{｢Disputātiō｣} 16:51, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

This is the same word, but it is not a real English word, but just a borrowing that will only be known to those who know the context.81.141.8.102 18:48, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

The term is found in the form डोडा in Hindi, seen here in the headline of a news article. (All uses I found were in the compound डोडा पोस्त (“dada pasta”).) If this has its source in common with the Malay term dadah, what is the common source?  --Lambiam 00:34, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

tight money/easy money

These two terms are listed as antonyms but have the same definition. I think this is because the definition of tight money is incorrect, but would appreciate someone more knowledgeable taking a look. Arms & Hearts (talk) 15:20, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

They are antonyms in their senses of monetary policies. Oxford dictionaries defines tight money as: “money or financing that is available only at high rates of interest”.^[5] This is presumably a copy-and-paste error, in which an editor forgot to modify an aspect of the the copied text.  --Lambiam 22:44, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

"Easy money" is much more frequently encountered than "tight money". 81.141.8.102 03:06, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Plurals of Gleiche

These are probably wrong, can someone have a look? —Rua (mew) 21:44, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

I changed the second meaning to match Duden, which only has a feminine definition. Somebody else will have to check the first. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 21:51, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Almost any German adjective can be used in its neuter form as a noun, meaning “that which is ⟨adjective⟩.” I think we should not include separate lemmas for German nouns used as adjectives with this completely predictable meaning. If we do, why include Gleiche but not Gleiches (as in ein Gleiches^[6])? Some examples. Goethe uses the noun das Rote in his Zur Farbenlehre, as in the phrase das Rote des Abendrots (“the red of the evening red”;^[7] this is not the German colour name, which is Rot without -e in any case. Another example, using the adjectives gut and böse: Das Gute – dieser Satz steht fest – ist stets das Böse, was man läßt.^[8] The -e comes from the weak declension (with a definite determiner); used in the strong declension the ending is -es. We can see both in es scheint das Selbe, ist aber ein wirklich Anderes.^[9] Adjectives used this way as nouns do not have plurals – the sense is already collective. In the unlikely case that an author chooses to use this in a plural form to achieve some particular effect, the usual plural suffix -en becomes -n after the reduced vowel. (The plural Roten exists, but in the sense of Reds, that is, communists.) In any case, Gleicheen is totally impossible. A plural form Gleichen with a noun sense is marginally conceivable but unlikely to be attestable.  --Lambiam 00:14, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

I changed the neuter noun to a neuter inflection of the adjective gleich. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 00:23, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

...but that's wrong, isn't it, because the adjective would be lower case. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 00:23, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

I made it a noun again for now using {{head|de|noun}}. The noun sense of a neuter adjective is a homophone but not a homograph, which argues for including attested forms as inflections the same as any other spelling change. We should have a template for this use if we want to include it. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 00:33, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

@Lambiam I think Gleichen is used in the sentence Sie waren nie wieder die Gleichen. -- "They were never the same again." More generally if the noun form of an adjective is used as a nominative object then its gender/number is changed to fit the subject. I don't have a reference for this, it's just my observation from the wonderful DWDS usage database and experimenting with DeepL. You're knowledge of German is better than mine though, so correct me if I've wrong. --RDBury (talk) 19:50, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

@RDB In sentences where gleich is used as the core of the complement of a copula, it agrees in number and gender with the subject. (The gender becomes indifferent in the plural.) Some examples for the plural:

• Ich hoffe wir werden ja in unserer Liebe die gleichen bleiben. (“I hope we will stay the same in our love.”)^[10]
• Die Fahrpreise sind die gleichen wie in der Metro (“Fares are the same as on the metro”)^[11]
• Meine Nächte werden nie mehr die gleichen sein. (“My nights will never be the same.”)^[12]

In these examples, the spelling of gleichen begins with a lowercase letter, which means that the authors did not consider it a noun. But sometimes we see die Gleichen, as if it is a noun. In most such cases the subject is a group of people. But here is an example of die Gleiche for a non-personal feminine subject: Die Vorgehensweise ist die Gleiche wie beim primären, konservativen Abstillen. (“The procedure is the same as for primary, conservative weaning.”)^[13] So there is some ambivalence about the grammatical classification among German speakers.  --Lambiam 20:57, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

I get the impression that there a difference between big G and little g that's difficult to translate because "the same" can have different meanings. Whatever the exact circumstances though, the point is that while not exactly common, "Gleichen" is attestable. DWDS seems much better at finding this type of thing than Googls; see for example their examples from Film subtitles, Die ZEIT, and Der Tagesspiegel. --RDBury (talk) 02:47, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Gleicheen should probably be moved somewhere, right? —Rua (mew) 11:06, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

@Rua: Yes, as Lambiam said: “Gleicheen is totally impossible.” Gleichen is a form. Also I think we would need to lemmatize at Gleicher, like Beamter – if we should have these nominalized forms at all, which I tend to reject like Lambiam. Fay Freak (talk) 11:28, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

It does seem odd to have so many separate entries when the meaning is implied by the root. In English there is tame (verb) -> taming (noun) -> tamings (plural). But the meaning of "tamings" is determined by the meaning of "tame". It's not so bad in English which isn't inflected that much, but in more highly inflected languages I can see where there could be an impractical number of entries for what amounts to a single morpheme. --RDBury (talk) 02:57, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Gleiche, f., is an obsolete noun that means "equality, evenness" (see [14], now replaced by Gleichheit); the "topping-out" sense is a specialised use of this term. The suffix is the same as in Größe from groß. You can find it as part of Tagundnachtgleiche (lit. "day-and-night-equality"), which has the plural -gleichen. This word should be kept apart from the nominalised forms of the adjective. Gleicheen is not German. --Akletos (talk) 20:08, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

The problem with das g/Gleiche" is that it is sometimes treated as a determiner (corresponding to dasselbe (which is (almost) never capitalised) and sometimes as an adjective. In Duden German these adjectives in indefinite usage are written in upper case because there isn't an antecedent. (e.g. "Das ist nicht das Schlechteste.", "Das ist doch das Gleiche.", but "Das ist doch dasselbe.") I think we should have these uppercase forms as "form of ..." entries. --Akletos (talk) 20:40, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

@Jberkel Would it be possible to create a head-de-template for nominalized adjective forms? These forms should not appear in noun cats as they do in this or in this case unless we want to end up with lemma entries of every German adjective in upper case (but we need these entries in my opinion because these forms are likely to be encountered in texts). These nominalisations are a special case of form-of entries, so the template wouldn't need and shouldn't require parameters for genitive and plural(as these forms inflect as adjectives), the def should be

{{nominalisation of|...}}

. Of course, this would not apply to lemmatized forms (das Böse/Gute/die Alte etc.). --Akletos (talk) 12:38, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Do we really need a new headword template for this? Maybe it's enough to treat it as noun with {{head|de|noun}} and have some option to skip the categories. I'm also a bit skeptical of the need to create all those extra noun forms, we'll end up with a lot of information-poor entries. Maybe we can focus on nominalized adjectives which have gained additional meanings first. – Jberkel 19:29, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

@Jberkel "treat it as noun with {{head|de|noun}} and have some option to skip the categories": I think that would be fine (although I don't know if these forms are really nouns, but at least it would be consistent with the way they are handled in orthography). "I'm also a bit skeptical of the need to create all those extra noun forms, we'll end up with a lot of information-poor entries": Me too. But we should have a guideline for those forms in case someone would try to add them; Vernünftiges, Vernünftige, Vernünftiger could all be entered as German lemmas with a full entry and a lot of redundant information (as is done on Große (which is, by the way, wrong in many respects)), and this could be done with all German adjectives (nominalized infinitives are similar). --Akletos (talk) 08:03, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

Chopol

A tea question for the tea room. Books about tea cultivation in India use a transliterated word chopol describing a tea plantation. I don't know the original language or script. Anybody recognize it? "Following the design of the older square blocks of tea, known as chopols, it is this mathematical work of planting that constructs the flat and even map of tea fields."[15] "Another morning to join the dol. We walk through the chopol, cutting a weave through the lines of bushes."[16] (Drinking some tea from Yunnan as I type this.) Vox Sciurorum (talk) 14:29, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

I haven't had time to hunt it down, but judging from the setting for the book, it's probably Bengali or Nepali. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:09, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Hmm, many of the words used alongside chopol ("tea block") in books I saw are Hindustani (although several are also Bengali), like sahib and izzat (and "she was not given kamjam [work stop]") in one, and didi, dafadar, bhagat, kathal (jackfruit) and memsahib in another. Piya Chatterjee's A Time for Tea offers the information that each block is approximately 4.5 hectares. I haven't spotted anything similar in the Hindi, Nepali and Bengali dictionaries I tried to check. User:AryamanA or User:Msasag might know. - -sche (discuss) 21:28, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

DWI is a verb but DUI is a noun; why?

There might be a case for adjective as POS, too! Equinox ◑ 15:13, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

• I consider both nouns. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 15:20, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

How can that work with e.g. "your husband was DUI"? Equinox ◑ 15:21, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

It's mostly used to refer to a conviction for driving under the influence: "A DUI can really jack up your insurance payments". — This unsigned comment was added by Chuck Entz (talk • contribs) at 16:06, 7 December 2020 (UTC).

Expanding DUI to driving while intoxicated makes "your husband was driving under the influence", ie, DUI is a participial phrase, under a perfectly reasonable reading. But I doubt that we would find any evidence of any other form of drive being represented by the D. DUI "feels" like an adjective, but probably meets no test of adjectivity other than predicate use. As to the "feeling" that it is an adjective, I think those who experience it should lie down until the feeling goes away. This is one of the (few) cases where it would be nice if we still accepted "Abbreviation" as a PoS header or had some other L3/4 header for things that don't fit under the standard PoS headers we accept.

I further note that there are no citations for any definition or PoS on either page. DCDuring (talk) 22:10, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

be supposed to, page move

User:Bluesoju's move of supposed to to be supposed to means that meant to is no longer a direct synonym as claimed. Must we also move that latter entry to be meant to? Equinox ◑ 19:03, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

I think this can be decided by replacing "to be" with "to seem". The sentence "It is meant to make difference," "It seems meant to make a difference" both sound okay, so the "be" is not part of the "meant to" phrase (not really an idiom, I think). "It is supposed to make a difference" sounds right but "It seems supposed to make a difference" sounds off (imo). So the "be" is part of the "supposed to" phrase. I'm not convinced the original move was necessary, nor am I convinced that "meant to" isn't SOP, but whatever. I vote don't move "meant to". --RDBury (talk) 20:10, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

The said user, supposed to think through the possibilities of usage, left out the context of parenthesis wherein the be is left out, accordingly it seems to me that it should be moved back. The same applies to be bothered, be there, and likely some others I won’t find. The “other dictionaries” the user adduces do not support anything since they are not meaningful regarding the question of which Wiki pages should exist. Fay Freak (talk) 20:48, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

MWOnline has entries for both meant to and be supposed to and not for be meant to and supposed to (a redirect at Wiktionary). IOW, they are inconsistent, as we are. I have added a separately linked be to the synonym listing of meant to on the be supposed to page. This is quite like the approach I wish would be taken more often in translation tables when similar situations arise. DCDuring (talk) 22:04, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

@Fay Freak Hmm, I don't follow your reasoning on the "The said user ..." sentence. To me it sounds like "The said user, who was assumed to think through the possibilities of usage... ." That's a different meaning of "supposed to", the one where it's the passive form of "to suppose" in contrast to the idiomatic meaning. But I see your overall point, all we need is one instance of someone using "supposed to" with the idiomatic meaning and without the "be" and the move will be revealed to be premature. I agree with you on the "other dictionaries have entry X, therefore WT should have entry X" syllogism. Use other dictionaries as a reference for meanings, grammar, etc., but not as include/exclude criteria since we have our own. I gather the consensus is to not move meant to, with one vote to undo the original move, and half a vote (mine) to eliminate the meant to entry altogether, thus rendering the original question moot. --RDBury (talk) 01:39, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

IMO meant to was not a real synonym anyway; it implies an intention, whereas supposed to does not. But I think these uses of the form supposed to ... are adjectival phrases used as copular complements. Some examples of attributive uses, or in any case not needing be or any other copula: “a man, supposed to be dead, ...”,^[17] “a man, supposed to be a priest, ...”,^[18] and “jewellery and pawntickets, supposed to represent ...”.^[19] Other similar and rather synonymous collocations are believed to and thought to; there is also expected to.  --Lambiam 22:43, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Are you sure those are adjectival phrases? They all look like passive verbs, meaning "thought/assumed to" (rather than "expected to") to me... In my idiolect (and AFAIK, my dialect as a whole), they are pronounced differently, and the examples you mention sound quite odd to me with the pronunciation of the adjectival phrase in question. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 01:20, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree that Lambiam's examples probably illustrate a true or literal passive verbal sense, rather than the idiomatic sense in question (albeit the latter must derive from the former). However, examples of the latter type can surely be constructed along the same lines. E.g. "The train supposed to arrive at six o'clock never came". I'm not sure that this in itself is a compelling reason to move the entry to "supposed to", as this kind of ellipsis, in this case of "that was", is a regular feature of English, and you could say that the "be" verb is still "somehow present". Even so, I would support moving the entry back to "supposed to" on "aesthetic" grounds even if we can't find good non-"be" copular examples. Also noting that the move to "be supposed to" has not been properly completed, as most of the definitions, as well as the bold highlighting in the examples, do not include the "be" verb. Mihia (talk) 18:42, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Here I see we are entering into a realm of English grammar which many do not really understand nor appreciate. catenative verbs ( See:- Appendix:English catenative verbs). mean is a catenative verb which takes the "to" infinitive as the following verb for some senses, while it takes "-ing" on the following verb for other senses. There is no reason at all to support a separate entry for mean to if you understand the basics of this important structure. Check out all other verbs+to that some users have been entering simply because they do not understand this. -- ALGRIF talk 15:23, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

I suppose the justification for separate entries such as "(be) meant to" and "(be) supposed to" may be that the relevant idiomatic meanings exist only in these passive (or pseudo-passive) forms, not in the straight concatenative forms such as "I supposed/meant it to ~". Mihia (talk) 22:11, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Yes, and the fact that they are not necessarily analyzed/treated as verbs by some speakers. As I mentioned above, many people pronounce "be supposed to" differently from the verb form. "Supposed" as a past participle (such as in the passive form, like "He was supposed to be a man of great intellect") has a /z/ in it, whereas "supposed" in "He was supposed to take out the trash" does not. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 23:51, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

when words are interchangeable but senses are usually spelled one way or the other

1. Sometimes, similar words are confused often and either can be used to mean anything the other can, but certain senses are mostly spelled one way (the way they originally were), and others another. Egoism/egoist/etc vs egotism/egotist/etc may be examples of this.
2. Sometimes, one word is spelled various ways, and senses occur mostly or exclusively in one spelling: e.g. "whip" (n.) is more often blacksnake, and the verb is (almost?) exclusively blacksnake, but serpents are more often black snakes.
3. Relatedly, sometimes, a word splits into (partially) separate words: e.g. besagew refers to underarm armor, while besague refers to various kinds of armor, including underarm armor (as well as to a wide variety of weapons, the original sense).

How should this be handled? Currently, I left the different senses of egoism vs egotism (and the other pairs of words) on their different pages, with sense lines crosslinking the two, which is also how other e.g. Dictionary.com does it, but this has been pointed out to be confusing / circular-seeming. One alternative would be to consolidate all the senses on one page, and have a usage note explain that some are mostly and were originally spelled one way and some the other way, but this feels 'wrong', to conflate different words. Another idea would be to forgo having a definition-line convering the use of each one to mean the other, and just leave the "original" senses of each to their own spelling, and have usage notes say "Can also be used with all the senses of [the other word]"; but we normally cover senses via sense lines rather than usage notes. (For besagew, besides the approach the entries currently take, another idea would be to define besagew as "a besague protecting the underarm", but the current approach seems better.) - -sche (discuss) 05:06, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

I don't have anything to say about how to handle this, but examples include enquiry and inquiry, the latter in England being more an official inquiry. You could also bring in nought (= zero) and naught (=nothing), spellings that are frequently confused by native speakers. My sense from reading Tea room is that this dictionary is a descriptive and not a prescriptive dictionary, and so words confused by native speakers have to be accepted as such. There may be other words similarly confused. glister and glitter? These are etymologically identical, but all that glisters is not gold should have glister, although I hear younger native speakers saying glitter here as previous distinctions recede from the spoken language. *** Just had a thought: maybe these should be tagged as "doublets", if there is such a tag? Then someone could study the phenomenon of doublets in the English language.81.141.8.102 05:23, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps the most common example is effect vs. affect. I think the usage note under "affect" handles this kind of thing pretty well, though I would make it a bit more obvious in "effect" that the full explanation is given under "affect". (Perhaps template:affect-effect so the same note can be in both places at once.) There is something to be said for being non-prescriptive, but it should at least be noted which usage is considered standard. I'm pretty sure if someone used "affect" instead of "effect" in a resume for a management position it would get tossed right away, and I imagine a hapless job-seeker being confused why: "I looked up on Wiktionary and it said I could use either one." In the olden days, way back in the 20th century, copy editors would catch this kind of thing and fix it before it ever saw print. I guess nowadays automated grammar checkers can do that kind of thing, but they don't always get it right. --RDBury (talk) 06:22, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Another doublet is metal and mettle. I believe they are etymologically the same word, but they are not interchangeable. To "prove your mettle" - this phrase has to have the spelling mettle.81.141.8.102 06:57, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

This sort of thing exactly shows why "descriptivism" is a nonsense, or fig-leaf, that we are supposed to pay lip-service to, if you will forgive the mixed metaphor, but no one seriously believes in. Because a lot of people use "affect" when they mean "effect", and vice versa, we should not point out that actually this is incorrect? Of course we should. Mihia (talk) 23:25, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Mihia, the concept of "incorrectness" is no longer so firmly held in linguistics. At least in Western countries, I find that most academics no longer believe that the way that large numbers of native speakers speak or write can be regarded as arbitrarily incorrect. You have to at least say that the "standards" are arbitrary and are largely social/cultural constructs, but within the context of those, then certain spellings will be regarded by many/most as incorrect. This is not the same thing as saying they are incorrect as such, which is a metaphysical concept. Descriptivism isn't a nonsense: languages evolve, and even the prescriptive standards do eventually shift in line with the observed reality of the language as it is used. 81.141.8.102 01:04, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Of course, ultimately what is "correct" and "incorrect" in a language is an arbitrary convention. However, we are trying, I would hope, to produce a practically useful dictionary. If we took a purely descriptive approach then we would list "affect" as "Alternative form of effect" and vice versa, on the basis that lots of people use the words that way. I hope and trust that no one supports doing that. Descriptivism in dictionaries works fine until one hits a common usage that everyone knows is wrong, and then it is exposed. Mihia (talk) 22:15, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Descriptivism doesn't mean that you can't report how a word is used and perceived. It means if a word is used, then that is reported; if people have quibbles about how others use words, we can report that, too. And we can do that reporting even when the second group is fundamentally wrong.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:05, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Where there is legitimate debate, yes, it is fine to report that, but for cases that are definitely incorrect, reporting this as an opinion of other people would be tiresomely weasly and feeble. For example, if you look at effect, which presently reads "Do not confuse with affect", that would need to be changed to e.g. "Some commentators warn against confusing 'effect' with 'affect'", or something like that. And think what we would have to do with a word such as definately, currently labelled "misspelling". "Alternative spelling of 'definitely'. Note: some people think that this spelling is incorrect"? I sincerely hope not! Mihia (talk) 12:37, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Does anyone actively disagree with distinguishing affect and effect? The phrase "legitimate debate" hides the fact that there's literally nobody arguing about many of these cases. If (a significant number of) people think that definately, or -ise or color is spelled correctly, then we should note that fact. Note that given that we aren't a dictionary of just Standard English, we should be careful about noting dialects where affect and effect may not have the same distinction as in Standard English, something declaring "definitely incorrect" obstructs.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:20, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

No, I don't disagree with distinguishing affect and effect. I merely replied to the comment that "descriptivism is nonsense". Descriptivism is not nonsense, because prescribed standards cannot move too far out of synch with an evolving language or else they'd lose their authority. Prescriptive standards move more slowly, but they do move, because the language as it is observed in real life must win out in the end. If 99% of people no longer differentiated between affect and effect, you would have to accept the distinction had been lost. 81.141.8.102 09:12, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

First of all, you seem to not realise/recognise that prevailing shifts can be undone in certain rare circumstances. For example, if 99% of people didn't distinguish "whose" from "who's" in spelling, but the 1% that did comprised most of academia, and academia ended up having a potent influence on the following generation, then the shift could be undone/reversed. Same thing with sound mergers. There have been prevailing trends towards the merger of certain sounds (the nearest to this kind of thing that comes to mind with regard to English would be a once historical trend towards merging (what would now be pronounced) /ɔɪ/ with /aɪ/) in languages throughout history that have ended up being undone in the end, even though there would have been people like yourself saying at one point in that time "this is no longer nonstandard" or whatever. Fifty years later, lo and behold, the person claiming "this is no longer nonstandard" would be told by the young people of that time (just as he had been told by the old folks fifty years prior) that he is incorrect, and that it most certainly is nonstandard. So, word to wise, don't ever be so certain that just because 75% or 99% or anything less than 100% of people are moving in one trend that that necessarily means that a historical distinction no longer will exist going forward/be considered the correct understanding, or that a historically nonstandard pronunciation will for certain be considered quite standard in the future.

Moreover, there are can also come a point when a language has altered enough over time that the usage of one 'form' of a language cannot be properly considered usage of another. For instance, usage of Modern English could not be considered usage / neo-usage of Early Modern English unless it complied grammatically and spelling-wise with the standards of Early Modern English, in which case many may (consequently) not consider it an example of today's Modern English. Moreover, if 99% of people opted to spelt words completely phonetically, used an incredible basic almost creole or pidgin-like form of English grammar, and also had fifty different mergers that are not recognised as standard in today's Modern English, then a case might be able to be made that such individuals are not using the same English as we are, but instead are using something else that developed out of (today's) Modern English.

I would say that descriptivism is no more absurd than prescriptivism, but that the reverse is also true. Moreover, there are zealots of both schools of thought. With that said, Wiktionary is a descriptivistic dictionary, so we have to keep that in mind when we add usage notes/descriptor tags to entries/parts of entries. Tharthan (talk) 21:25, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

So, what should be done with situations like blacksnake vs black snake? Just divide the senses between spelligns based on which sense is most common in which spelling, and have each entry say it's an alternative spelling of the other? - -sche (discuss) 01:12, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

I think that's fine. It's no different in principle than having the alternative form redirect go only one way (as with broach, which can be an alternative spelling of brooch). Andrew Sheedy (talk) 22:57, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Other examples of this, btw: the morning meal is breakfast and so is an evening meal eaten after fasting, but the latter is also (more commonly) break-fast; and scare-line vs scare line, discussed at WT:RFM#scare_line,_scare-line right now. - -sche (discuss) 20:39, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

借りる (Is it "indebt self/make self owe (something)" instead of "borrow"?)

I've come across the example sentence 「彼にビデオを借りました。」 with the translation "I borrowed a video from him." for the verb 「借りる」 - "borrow".
(My first intuition a few months back was that something about that doesn't seem to make sense, but I'm better off not spending much time on this for now as there are many things about the grammar in Japanese I don't really understand yet, so maybe I'll just "get it" once I'm versed enough.)
But I'm still torn between (ordered by likeliness):

1. It's used in this kind of sentence similarly to 「返す」, giving the opposite effect. (And the idea is something like "I indebted myself to him (by) borrowing a video.")
2. I don't understand 「に」 (or something else in the syntax) and the grammar works differently to 「図書館に本を返した。」.
3. There's a mistake in the examples.

Is 「彼からビデオを借りました。」 broken grammar? ("I indebt myself from him..." (sic))

Another example sentence 「図書館で料理の本を借りた。」 - "I borrowed a cookbook from the library." didn't really help as there's no difference whether it's "indebt self" or "borrow". (I parse it something like "A cookbook was borrowed at the library (by [subject]).". But now I think it might as well be "[Subject] made self owe a cookbook by using the library.").

--Mossymountain (talk) 05:25, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Why are so many archaic quotations for German entries?

I posted a question, #Quotation under nehmen (German), about one example of this, but it seems to be a trend rather than an isolated case. Another one I've found is under glücklich (from 1761). A worse one is under mehr with one quotation from 1589 and two more apparently also from the 16th century. It seems clear that someone put some effort into them, so I'm hesitant to just remove them, but I have no clue what purpose they're supposed to serve. Maybe I'm confused about the purpose of quotations in general. --RDBury (talk) 17:45, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Quotations can serve many purposes. Illustrating archaic usage is one purpose, and no they shouldn't be removed. DTLHS (talk) 17:46, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

nehmen and glücklich are hardly archaic terms needing (just) archaic quotes. The ones under mehr are weird, it looks like they were added to document obsolete forms, perhaps better listed under the respective pages (mehrem etc), I've moved them. The one under glücklich looks fine, but the modern spelling is glückliches. – Jberkel 19:11, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm not against documenting archaic or obsolete usage. To me, though, a higher priority is to document current usage; I assume that most people visiting here are more interested in how to speak a language now than in how it was spoken a few hundred years ago. So it seems odd when there are no usage examples and the only quotes are from Shakespeare's time. --RDBury (talk) 03:40, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Always feel free to add more recent ones. The quotes should show how usage developed over time, so we include older ones, but ideally, we would like more recent ones as well. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 05:55, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

inshallah

Muslims sometimes use this sincerely. Muslims sometimes use it sarcastically. Non-Muslims sometimes use it sarcastically. Should this be covered via two separate definitions? I'm tentatively inclined to think not, but see this edit to do so, which I undid, which Assem Khidhr argues against at Talk:inshallah#Labels_and_sarcastic_sense. - -sche (discuss) 23:06, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

@-sche: {{lb|en|sometimes|ironically|or|sarcastically}}} would be sufficient, IMO. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 23:12, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Comparative quantification matters aside, so long as the two senses are semantically distinct and compliant with the inclusion criteria, I think we should list them both. Being a Muslim myself, I'd maybe just add that most, rather than some, Muslims mean it sincerely. In fact, the sarcastic sense is prescriptively proscribed and sometimes viewed as a socioreligious taboo. I tried to reconciliate both views here and here. Assem Khidhr (talk) 00:13, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

It makes sense to match yeah, right, which also has two senses. Assem's point also matches my experience. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:07, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

pub

Is it accurate to say "pub" (as in "public house") is chiefly Commonwealth English? ---> Tooironic (talk) 03:11, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

I think so. Americans say "bar", though I believe a pub and a bar are slightly different things. --RDBury (talk) 03:45, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Well, if you show me pictures of a lorry and a lift in England, I will call them a truck and an elevator. If you show me a picture of a pub in England, I'll call it a pub. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:01, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

In Australia both "bar" and "pub" are used, "bar" is more common, "lift" is both common and formal word but you can hardly hear "lorry". Everyone uses "truck. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 06:18, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

We have pubs as well here in America. There's one right down the road from where I live, and I would never refer to this place as a "bar" (although it has a bar). A pub offers more: you can eat there, alone or with friends, and hang out. A bar is usually where you go to drink and pick up people. Leasnam (talk) 07:21, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

To me (UK) "bar" usually refers to the actual fixture/counter where drinks are collected, but it can also be a drinking-place that isn't a traditional pub, such as a cocktail bar. Equinox ◑ 12:56, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

And in Canada, they're fairly interchangeable, but I think the nuances Leasnam mentions are generally applicable here. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 16:00, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Two comments: 1. Searching Yelp/Google/etc for "pubs near [big US city]" and "bars near [big UK city]" shows that the US has some pubs and the UK some bars with those words in their names. Then again, there are also, for example, Spanish/Mexican/etc restaurants with restaurante in the name, so this may not be evidence of anything one way or the other because it could just be borrowing of the other lect's word to signal association with that cuisine. 2. I'm unsure there's any firm distinction between the two words in their 'business that serves alcohol' senses (as distinct from use to refer to e.g. the counter inside), as far as one definitionally requiring some element the other cannot also have; there are certainly bars in America that you can eat at, and/or that have pool tables / seating / etc to hang out with friends around, although I suppose this may not be required the way it might be for a pub? Hmm. Some American bars that serve food have "bar and grill" in their names to signal this, but can still be referred to as "bars". - -sche (discuss) 19:06, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

I think it isn't that the word pub isn't American English, it's just that pubs aren't an American institution. There are pubs in the U.S., but they're kind of rare, and they strike Americans as being British/Irish. Kind of like fish and chips: we have it, and we don't call it anything else, but it isn't super common, and it's definitely marked [+British] in the minds of most Americans. —Mahāgaja · talk 19:14, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Fish and chips isn't a common order in most of the United States? Never knew that. I don't know about the rest of the country, but it is hardly uncommon here in coastal New England. Tharthan (talk) 20:42, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

It is exceptionally unusual for a pub in Britain to have "pub" in its actual name. Places in other countries that are trying to appear British or Irish might well do so. Equinox ◑ 19:12, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

It just occurred to me that some of the COVID restrictions of the past year could help us figure this out. I Googled "shut down pubs and restaurants" and "shut down bars and restaurants", and apart from local results (for Alberta, Canada), the "bar" search was dominated by pages discussing measures taken in the US and Eastern Canada, while the "pub" search was similarly dominated by results for the UK. So there certainly does seem to be a regional preference. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 23:49, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Keep in mind that the original post uses the word "chiefly" which softens it a lot. No one is saying that if you call your establishment a "pub" in the US then you'll be shut down and deported to England. But my impression is that if you're talking about a generic place where people can buy a drink and socialize, then you'd normally say "bar" in the US rather than "pub". In the US you'd say "Cheers is set in a bar," not "Cheers is set in a pub." --RDBury (talk) 17:35, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure if you're responding to me, but if you are, I certainly wasn't disputing that. I was responding to those emphasizing that there are in fact pubs in the US and bars in the UK, which seemed somewhat irrelevant to me. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 21:05, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusion, it was a general comment. --RDBury (talk) 16:59, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Would I be right to assume that if talking about the pub/bar-type establishments in, say, Sweden or Russia, Americans would mostly say bar and Britons mostly pub? Neither sense has a regional label, at present, but perhaps we should add usage notes, like that "pub" is chiefly used by Commonwealth speakers or else in reference to Commonwealth (or only British/Irish?) establishments, and "bar" is chiefly US—or in reference to US establishments? Would British tourists or watchers of TV and movies, etc, think of a bar in America (let's say, for sake of discussion, we're talking about one that does sell food and has e.g. pool tables, where you could "hang out") a "bar" or a "pub"? - -sche (discuss) 01:18, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the word "pub" derived from public house - which has a very specific definition which very specifically pertains to the UK? Isn't this the principal question posed by Tooironic? -- On a further note (which may not be pertinent), the Spanish (for example) use "pub" to mean a very specifically different sort of place. (If interested, you can check this out for yourself.) Makes the UK definition even more important IMHO. -- ALGRIF talk 15:07, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

P.S. -- As for "bar", in UK this means the actual piece of furniture in a pub where you go to request your favourite beverage from the barman? (See how the etymology supports this?) -- ALGRIF talk 15:09, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Second person imperative of entschuldigen (German)

The conjugation table under entschuldigen#Conjugation gives "entschuldig (du)" and "entschuldige (du)" as possible imperative forms. But my understanding is that the "-e" is required, as it is for any verb ending with "-igen". Is this true? And if so can the table be corrected? --RDBury (talk) 04:12, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

I don’t think it true that it is required (who says so?), I have never heard of such a rule, but that -e-less imperative is less often and at best less expected and hardly colloquial or poetic. You find high register religious uses “peinig mich”. Google results of “beleidig mich nicht” are about ⅕ to “beleidige mich nicht”. But somehow all verbs ending in -ige are rare in the imperative, e.g. “entschuldigen” would be used in polite situations so in the plural with Sie anyway. But it is not wrong to treat these verbs as exceptions. Other exceptions listed I do not grasp. “verbesser”, “fange”, “werd” are unauffällig, depending somewhat on the region or colloquialness but mostly altogether, “habe“ is well-known. Fay Freak (talk) 04:48, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm getting the -e required rule from A Review of German Grammar by Bruce Duncan. I'll try to check some other grammars, but the one you linked to has pretty much the same rule. (I not convinced that the site you linked to is correct about "verbessern" being an exception. The thing with "fangen" is that the "drop the -st" rule that they mention doesn't work when you add an umlaut in the second person present tense. So it's "Fang!" rather than "Fäng!" as you might think. A much more common application of this exception is "Lauf!" I hear this a lot in TV shows when something scary appears.) It doesn't say why in either place but I'm guessing the reasoning behind the rule is that ending in "-ig" would create a soft g (IPA ç) sound and make the word sound like an adjective. But perhaps that's not as much of a problem in some dialects. "Beleidigen mich nicht" is a good test case, but my Google results show 10,800 for “beleidige mich nicht” and 193 for “beleidig mich nicht” so I think the ratio is more like 1/50, which I think is small enough that random misspellings and people who aren't fluent in the language can account for it. --RDBury (talk) 14:18, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

I've checked a few more grammars and the exact rule seems to be a matter of opinion, so I guess it comes down to who you trust more. But most of then don't include the "-igen" rule, and Duden online lists "entschuldig" as an option, so I can't say the table is wrong. Perhaps a footnote to the effect "some authorities disallow 'entschuldig' ..."? --RDBury (talk) 15:21, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

@RDBury: For a historically correct view as well as in order to sort these verbs mentally more conveniently, you should see fahren, fangen, laufen, fallen and some others which now umlaut in the 2nd/3rd person present but not in the imperative as originally not having the umlaut but developing it secondarily. So in most dialects, e.g. Bavarian and Yiddish (→ פֿאָרן (forn)), or also the Berlin dialect (where the 3rd person singular is /loːft/), 2nd/3rd person singular do not umlaut these verbs. So Jewish jokes have sentences like “Wohin fahrst du?”, which is imho correct German, however marked. This development is the reason why these verbs may or may not have the -e in the imperative singular, pursuant to the general rule, but other verbs like helfen and essen must omit it. It is deplorable how many grammars, supposing that they thus load learners less, make things avoidably complicated by omitting the historical layers. The only good grammar is a historical grammar. And most schoolmasters are unjust because of ignoring these layers.

You see there is also a field of unregulated and controvertible questions or a grey area. Fay Freak (talk) 16:21, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Whatever the "rule" is, here are three cites of the second-person imperative entschuldig: [20], [21], [22] (line 5 on the page).  --Lambiam 17:28, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

@Lambiam: The scan of the second quote is cut off at the end. The other two quotes are very familiar speech. Fay Freak (talk) 17:57, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Isn't the "e"-dropping just part of colloquial speech? That's probably how this changed happened, speakers gradually dropping the final e and thereby making it more "regular" compared to the other imperative forms. – Jberkel 19:27, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

@Jberkel: It has translingual, acoustical dimensions – because it sounds more imperative, as in “male” rhymes –, that languages tend to use the mere stem of a verb for the imperative. This is what Latin does – notably extra-clipped in the three exceptions dīc, dūc and fac, which extra-drops were not generally adhered to in pre-Classical Latin –, Arabic, Turkic, etc. etc. For this very reason, I note, the clipping applies to the German -ige verbs less, because words ending in -ig tend to be pronounced varyingly and indistinctly in German so one has resisted the drop because a /ɡə/ sounds more forceful than either /ɪk/ or /ɪç/. Fay Freak (talk) 19:59, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

from me born (redux)

The Paderborn IP has placed an RFC for the Jamaican Creole entry on the talk page with the comment: "1. The language of the cites in the Jamaican Creole section are English and not Jamaican. 2. The 1975 cite of V. Rubin and L. Comitas (Jamaican Creole section) and the 1976 quote by the the same (English section) have a similar title ("Ganja in Jamaica") and similar strucutre, hence it's obviously the same language."
Disclosure: I've previously closed the RFV of from me born. I disagree with the IP's claim that both cites are exclusively in English, I would contend that the sentence in which the phrase is used is Jamaican Creole. But the second point is valid, Ganja in Jamaica by Vera D. Rubin, Lambros Comitas is cited twice in perhaps slightly different editions for different languages, which I didn't notice at the time. So it should probably be decided for which language this cite should be used.
Now my argument would be that the use of me as a subject pronoun and social as a predicate without a copula is more typical of Creole grammar, so that the quote is Jamaican Creole, even though the additional context before and after is without question English. I have added additional quotes from newspapers that I consider to mostly use English grammar to the English section so that its attestion is not in question; here is another (perhaps non-durable) use in an English context; if necessary additional Jamaican Creole quotations can. (@Dentonius, Equinox, Chuck Entz, DTLHS, -sche, Lambiam as entry creators, native speaker of Jamaican Creole, people previously involved with the IP and people with expertise in other Caribbean English-based creoles.) ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 16:48, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

All I know is that I came across the term in the OED's March 2020 update. The OED is a dictionary of English, but they gloss this term as "Jamaican". Equinox ◑ 16:56, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Are cites for this so rare that we need to use ones that are ambiguous as to which language they belong to? DCDuring (talk) 17:02, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

It depends on what you mean with "ambiguous". Like most English-based creoles that also have English as an official national language, Jamaican Creole has undergone a degree of decreolisation so there's a continuum between Jamaican Creole and a more standard variety of English, with a lot of code-switching and other forms of mutual influence between the two. So in that sense many cites are going to be ambiguous. But in this case the IP for instance seems to have a narrower conception of what I would consider Creole; I don't think the IP and I are going to agree on a working definition of what's unambiguously Jamaican Creole. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 20:14, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Given that Jamaican Creole exists on a continuum from speech/text that is "clearly" Creole to a Jamaican dialect/accent of English, parsing this out is going to be hard. The Vera D. Rubin cite in the English section uses the me-as-subject-pronoun feature that is argued above to be Creole, as does the Colin Channer cite. Given that Jamaican Creole is not a WDL, I think the citations in the Jamaican section are probably sufficient to verify it; it's the English section I'd be more sceptical of. - -sche (discuss) 19:24, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

I personally think the English entry is also cited, but I can see why someone would see differently. I think cites 2000 and 2017 are English and that 2018 is mostly English, but "in a" and "fi go" are influences from Jamaican Creole. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 20:14, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

As the Wikipedia article on Jamaican English observes, “A distinction exists between Jamaican English and Jamaican Patois (or Creole), though not entirely a sharp distinction so much as a gradual continuum between two extremes.^[1]” There will always be some ambiguity when classifying utterances that are not at, or very close to, one of the two extremes.  --Lambiam 22:08, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

LBD, I'll definitely give some feedback on this later. Right now, I'm trying to establish dialogue with the IP editor to determine how we can work together to resolve the matter. The IP editor posted some time ago here: Wiktionary:Requests_for_cleanup#from_me_born. — Dentonius 14:59, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

Surely the most famous example of ‘bad from me born’ is the following, which should be quoted as an example in the article: https://www.jah-lyrics.com/song/munga-bad-from-mi-born#:~:text=Me%20bad%20from%20me%20born%20and%20that%27s%20why,gangster%20Ras%27.%20Yes%2C%20yes%2C%20I%27m%20the%20gangsta%20Ras%27. (The singer (Munga) here pronounces ‘born’ as ‘baan’ or ‘bahn’ not ‘bawn’ to my English ears fwiw) Overlordnat1 (talk) 16:05, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

I’ve just added a link to the Munga song to the articleOverlordnat1 (talk) 05:16, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Early Christian virgin sense

As someone familiar with the early Christian usage, I'm not convinced that the definition "(early Christian Church) A woman noted for religious piety who has never been married." is accurate, or distinct from the main one. Perhaps it could be replaced with "Synonym of consecrated virgin", but I thought I'd mention it here before making the change, in case someone has other thoughts. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 23:42, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, what does a label (early Christian Church) even mean? In the early Christian Church the English language is not attested yet. Plus I highly doubt that virgin status is tied to marriage (and not intercourse connected with marriage) according to whichever dogmatics. At best it is again a metonymy to say virgin but mean a woman so far unmarried (“bachelorette” or however this has been called in England). Fay Freak (talk) 02:06, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Well, a young unmarried woman was presumed to be a virgin, so the two senses aren't really distinct. No one demanded a hymen test in such circumstances to be sure.81.141.8.102 08:49, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Added by @JudahH. I'd favour deletion, but would not contest replacement by "Synonym of consecrated virgin". ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 09:19, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Here's a direct quotation from the Oxford English Dictionary:

"Christian Church. An unmarried or chaste maiden or woman, distinguished for piety or steadfastness in religion, and regarded as having a special place among the members of the Christian church on account of these merits.

Chiefly used with reference to early Christian times."

The OED gives numerous citations (in recognizable English, of course), from the 13th century and onward. Does that not qualify as "early", @Fay Freak? The qualification is to distinguish it from the contemporary Church.

This definition differs from "consecrated virgin" insofar as it does not involve a rite of consecration. I might note that the OED does define "consecrated virgin" on its own, without calling it a synonym of this sense of "virgin".

Merriam Webster includes a similar, though shorter definition, which I can link to: "An unmarried woman devoted to religion".

As for distinctness from the main definition, for what it's worth, I originally tried to simply broaden the main definition to note that "virgin" often has the specific connotation of "female". An editor reverted me, so, not wanting to get into an extended argument, I instead added a more narrow sense where that connotation was a specific part of it.

I hope this helps convince people that this definition, or at least some form of it (identifying its specific associations with women, piety, and early Christianity) is worthy of note.JudahH (talk) 17:18, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

P.S. I forgot to mention this above, but I also felt it important to include in at least one definition how "virgin" can be used in connection with unmarriedness as opposed to specifically chastity, another point which could be included in the main definition, but currently isn't. That may not be the most contemporary usage, but it's brought up in most dictionaries (including, but certainly not limited to the two I mentioned above). JudahH (talk) 17:35, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

@JudahH: No, “early Christian Church” sounds like the Christians before Constantine, or even people who personally knew that crucified sophist the Christian religion derives from. So the English language could only posteriorly, in historical writing, refer to the early Christian Church, however defined. But, this OED entry is a whole lot of nonsense (even stranger the fact that the OED gives it is the first “meaning”!): in the quotes adduced in the OED I cannot read anything but the literal meaning. “unmarried” and “kind of pious because of being undeflowered and therefore given a special place” is not what “virgin” means. As we have recently discussed, a word cannot mean something and then also the opposite of itself irrespectively of what it means, unless perhaps it is an explicit political difference which is hardly the case here for this common word – words have denotations and connotations which latter do not constitute distinct sememes. The OED gloss contradicts itself moreover, saying “unmarried or chaste woman”, because that’s a difference that cannot be lumped together or if it isn’t according to the argumentation that “a young unmarried woman was presumed to be a virgin” then it is not a distinct sense from the literal sense. Fay Freak (talk) 17:49, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

@Fay Freak, is it really necessary to gratuitously insult people's religious beliefs ("crucified sophist") in a Wiktionary post?

@JudahH As far as whether or not it's accurate to reduce this to a synonym of "consecrated virgin," I think the historical evidence suggests that it is. The order of virgins in the early Christian Church developed from the practice of young women privately committing themselves to virginity, and sometimes suffering martyrdom as a direct or indirect result. The fact that they were often pious has little to do with the actual meaning of the word, and they were not virgins in a separate, "unmarried" sense, but simply in the ordinary sense. Being noted for piety was not what made them a virgin. Virginity, and the promise to keep that virginity, made them a virgin. The OED's inclusion of the "piety" and "steadfastness in religion" criteria doesn't mean much. Major reference works often misrepresent concepts in Christianity. Is there lexical evidence that being "unmarried" (apart from the question of sex) and "piety" have anything to do with the actual meaning of the word? Andrew Sheedy (talk) 21:02, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

After much internal debate, and Biblical consultation, here is my take: virgin applies equally to men as to women. This, for a start, nullifies most of the above discussion. Since the Greek word parthenos can include single men, I think I have to agree with Andrew Sheedy -- ALGRIF talk 14:59, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Tea room/2017/December § maidenhead, virginity. 2A02:2788:A6:935:D5F9:ADA4:5F31:C02F 15:30, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

I've finally gotten around to reworking the definition, with some cites. I decided "Synonym of consecrated virgin" was too simplistic. @JudahH Does the new definition seem alright to you? Andrew Sheedy (talk) 21:21, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

beith/bheith

The Irish verbal noun bheith is never delenited, at least in the modern language. There is no such word as beith (other than in the meaning of "birch tree"). But the Wiktionary page has a little table of consonant mutations, showing beith, with an odd note "Note: Some of these forms may be hypothetical. Not every possible mutated form of every word actually occurs". In which case, the forms that don't exist shouldn't be listed. The eclipsed form mbeith is also totally unattested.81.141.8.102 02:04, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Our entry for beith never says it's the verbal noun. We have an entry for the “birch tree” word and an entry for an obsolete (and clearly marked as such) form of the past subjunctive beadh. That form actually probably occurs most frequently lenited or eclipsed, since the most common context for the past subjunctive is after má (“if”) (which lenites) and dá (“if”) (which eclipses). —Mahāgaja · talk 19:37, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. I'm sorry I misinterpreted the table of mutations in the entry for bheith, and thought they applied to the verbal noun. I have now read your reply and realise the table of mutations only applies to the noun beith (“birch tree”). I'm sorry to have got you at it.81.141.8.102 00:38, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

What is the difference between "trust" and "trust in"?

The phrase "trust in" does not appear in trust, but it's a real phrase (w:In God We Trust). My gut says they are not interchangeable, but I can't seem to define the difference. Is it just a matter of register? --RDBury (talk) 18:17, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Not every preposition/adverb (eg, "in") following a verb (eg, "trust") makes the combination (eg, "trust in") a phrasal verb. I am not sure whether trust in should have its own entry or appear only in the entry for trust with a label such as "(with in)". I think trust in (someone/thing) implies a more nearly permanent trust relationship than trust (someone/thing). Other complements of trust limit the scope of the relationship: "I trust him for it." and "I trust him to pay it back." DCDuring (talk) 18:33, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

I think there is a futher semantic difference. To trust someone (or something) means not to doubt their (or its) veracity or authenticity – there is no ulterior hidden motive, no treacherous invisible defect. To trust in someone (or something) – which means the same as to have trust in, or put one’s trust in someone (or something) – is to believe that the entity in which one trusts will provide what is needed when it is needed. Compare the exhortation trust your feelings, which instructs one not to doubt what they tell, with trust in yourself, which instructs one to believe, “yes I can”.  --Lambiam 00:17, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

@DCDuring I agree that "trust in" is probably not entry-worthy, but a new definition having "(with in)", along with some sort of gloss explaining the difference, seems reasonable. @Lambiam My real motivation here is that there seems to be a similar difference in German between "vertrauen" and "vertrauen auf". DWDS has both versions under the same definition implying they're interchangeable, but I'm not convinced. Anyway, I'll go ahead and add another definition to "trust" and see what can be done with summarizing the difference. --RDBury (talk) 22:47, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Maybe it is entry-worthy. See “trust in”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. It would be good to have a definition at [[trust]] that included the meaning when collocated with in. But cites are the best way to start: it helps make us look almost professional! DCDuring (talk) 22:55, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Wiktionary seems inconsistent with respect to giving prepositional verbs their own entries, but I think I lean more toward not creating separate entries for them. You'll note that there was already a definition, but not a separate entry, for "trust to", which seems like a very similar situation. Anyway, I split the definitions, it's still kind of a work in progress though. --RDBury (talk) 23:22, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

I think I agree with the approach of listing "trust in" at "trust", with a label "with in". Mihia (talk) 00:07, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

As some are probably aware, I try to include almost every possibility of verb + particle as being a phrasal verb, if I can find a subtle difference in meaning. However, in this case I am with the "nay" sayers. -- ALGRIF talk 14:31, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

In fact, just for the record, the "in" in "trust in ~" is a preposition not a particle. I think many people do not include "verb + preposition" combinations within "phrasal verbs", but perhaps some do. Mihia (talk) 20:32, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

How does one distinguish a particle from a semantically related, identically spelled adverb or preposition? It seems to me only by first asserting that the verb + particle/preposition/adverb combination is a phrasal verb. DCDuring (talk) 21:39, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

I thought in this context that "particle = adverb"? One way to see that "in" is a preposition in "trust in" is to note that e.g. in "I trust in God", the phrase "in God" makes sense as a unit ("In God I trust"). Compare "I think I'll look up my ex-girlfriend", where "up my ex-girlfriend" does not make sense (ha-ha!). Mihia (talk) 22:22, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

learned borrowing (etymology/pronunciation)

(may or may not be a follow-up of sorts to October's learned borrowing (different definitions))

Is the original idea that of "scholarly borrowing" or that of "acquired borrowing"? Either might make sense, to my way of thinking. If the etymology linked to one of the subsections of learned#English specifically instead of to the entry generally, that would disambiguate it. As would the pronunciation, but none is indicated... ?

- 2A02:560:4219:2800:D599:1548:B49E:550E 19:51, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

I don’t understand your distinction, but the idea is that of a borrowing by someone writing in the armchair or ivory tower rather than in a business that requires him to go out (in a trade, into the field as a soldier – very important historically when war was a regular sport –, in the streets going on the game or slinging dope or whatever, all fields where until this day words pass from other languages without learning in the relevant sense). Which means of course the distinction becomes blurry as increasingly the whole populace lollygags behind closed doors due to overeducation and measures motivated by the CCP virus. Admittedly, personally I have used {{lbor}} about not at all, because I do not use to vividly imagine the dichotomy. Fay Freak (talk) 20:09, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

When spoken, is the final vowel in this "learned" silent or not? The distinction ultimately derives from the presence or absence of a causative suffix at the Proto-Germanic stage, apparently - teaching versus learning, essentially. Your "ivory tower" is on one side of that coin, your "overeducated" on the other. I'm not necessarily saying that this is relevant here, but in speech, we're forced to pick one or the other, so the entry should indicate which, no? :)

- 2A02:560:4225:B800:D599:1548:B49E:550E 20:52, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

It is the difference seen between learned treatise (/ˈlɜːnɪd/) and learned helplessness (/lɜːnd/).

I am pretty sure the meaning of learned in learned borrowing is “learnèd, erudite”.  --Lambiam 23:54, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree. It's an erudite borrowing, not one acquired through learning, so it has the disyllabic pronunciation. —Mahāgaja · talk 06:52, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree that there is difference between learnèd (/ˈlɜːnɪd/) and learnt. A learnt borrowing would be an odd concept. But not all dialects pronounce learnt /lɜːnd/. I say /lɜːnt/, which resolves the issue entirely. 81.141.8.102 00:54, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Do you then also lend orthographic support to this resolution by writing learnt ?  --Lambiam 18:17, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm not going to pretend that all English people agree as to usage. I write learnt. As for pronunciation, I pronounce it learnt whether written 'learned' or 'learnt', but I think younger speakers of British English are adopting a more mid-Atlantic approach that may be the kernel of a future more unified English language, and so some English people do have 'learned', even in pronunciation. I normally turn to Daniel Jones' Pronouncing Dictionary. He was a professor of English and a noted expert on pronunciation, especially of the RP variety, before WWII. His entry for learn (and I'm looking at a PDF of the 1917 edition) shows that learnt is pronounced 'learnt', and that the variant spelling learned may be pronounced either 'learned' or 'learnt'. So you can still pronounce it with a -t whatever the spelling. The same goes for dreamed/dreamt, leaned/leant, burned/burnt, spelled/spelt and basically any others. 81.141.8.102 16:59, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Tea room/2019/December § learned borrowing, educated guess. 2A02:2788:A6:935:D5F9:ADA4:5F31:C02F 15:34, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

staniel, stannel, stonegall

Our apparent 'main' entry for the forms of this term has no qualifiers. However, Collins English Dictionary marks this term as archaic (it also gives a second sense that we don't have). Our entry for stannel marks that word as obsolete.

Is any form of this word in current general use? Is it archaic, or perhaps now limited to only certain dialects? Tharthan (talk) 01:38, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Hi, I have never hard the word, and I doubt anyone not dealing regularly with kestrels has. The OED says under staniel/stannel:

staniel, stannel (ˈstænjəl, ˈstænəl)

OE. stáneᴁella, stánᴁella, lit. ‘stone-yeller’ f. stán stone n. + *ᴁella agent-n. f. ᴁellan to yell (in OE. poetry used of the cry of the hawk).

The corrupt form stallion (quot. 1601 in 1 α) may have had dialectal currency; cf. the converse mispronunciation staniel for stallion, which is common in rustic speech. The spurious forms standgale, -gall, given in some recent dictionaries, are evolved from the etymologizing conjecture ‘stand-in-gale’ (Swainson, Prov. Names of Birds). The alleged Ger. synonym steingall, commonly cited by etymologists as cognate, is of doubtful genuineness. The 19th c. lexicographers seem to have obtained it, directly or indirectly, from the Vocabula of Peucer and Eber (1549). But although in this glossary the word is treated as German, its source appears to be William Turner's Avium Historia (Cologne 1544), where steingall is said to be the English word for tinnunculus. Turner's steingall prob. represents *steinᴁall; Gesner (1555) says that it is northern English. The English ornithologists of the 17th c., following Gesner, give steingall as an English name of the bird; Willughby's stone-gall is an etymologizing alteration of this.] 81.141.8.102 13:43, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

block

Currently one of the definitions at block reads:

(nautical) A case with one or more sheaves/pulleys, used with ropes to increase or redirect force, for example, as part of the rigging of a sailing ship.

I'm unclear whether this truly is a separate nautical sense or is merely an application of the general sense that we find in e.g. block and tackle. If there is a separate nautical sense then we should add the general sense and also modify the nautical sense to show how it is special. If not, I will just generalise the one sense that we do have. Any ideas anyone? Mihia (talk) 18:20, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

As far as I can make out, a block and tackle always involves two blocks (or two sets of blocks): one fixed at the top, and the other moving with the load being lifted. These fixed and moving blocks appear to be called blocks also in non-nautical contexts,^[23][24][25] and we also find the term used other than as part of a block and tackle.^[26] A block is strictly speaking the (usually wooden) housing of the (usually metal) pulley wheel(s); it also has a hook or other fastener at the end opposite to where the rope runs. As far as I can tell, there is no difference with the nautical sense.  --Lambiam 23:34, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

• OK, in the absence of any information about a unique nautical sense, I have generalised the one sense, leaving ship's rigging as one example. Mihia (talk) 21:48, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

of color

In diff, User:Struthious Bandersnatch added "# {{lb|en|chiefly|US}} A [[mixed-race]] or [[multiheritage]] person" as a separate (and, as clarified on talk, modern / "2020") sense. I removed it for reasons given on talk, though in digging through other citations, dictionaries, encyclopedias and usage/history guides about the phrase (all of which give "nonwhite", "not white" or "not white-skinned" as the modern sense), I found and added a historical sense, tentatively worded as "# {{lb|en|historical}} Belonging to a category of people with mixed black and white ancestry in the Americas in the 18th and early 19th centuries", by which "of color" did describe mixed-race people in a way contrasted with other (non-mixed-race) nonwhite people.
However, Struthious has argued that a modern definition should also include "multi-racial Americans who consider themselves people of color, with white ancestry, and thus partly white". One thing I suggested that could accomplish this would be to change ~"nonwhite" to something along the lines of "nonwhite, or not entirely white", but I'm reluctant to do that because every other work I saw defines modern "of color" only as "nonwhite", and includes "partly white" people only implicitly / by considering them to be nonwhite (which seems to be the most common way that both those people themselves, and other people, consider them?).
(I also asked a few friends of color, including one who has one black and one white parent, who considers herself biracial and Black and a woman of color; they felt "nonwhite" was a sufficient definition. Naturally, that's only a few people's anecdotal opinions, but it adds to the absence of anything supporting a broader def.) I realize thorny racial questions are everyone's favourite (/s), but, what do you think? - -sche (discuss) 22:04, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Firstly, I feel that "of colour" is poor English, although from a descriptivist point of view has to be in a dictionary (i.e. that is how it is actually used). We don't call women "persons of gender", right? However, the Wiktionary entry does make clear that this usage may reflect French and/or Spanish influence on US English, thus explaining the origin of the phrase. As for the definition, the concept of someone being of colour implies that Western societies should, rightly or wrongly, be conceptualised as the whites vs. all the rest. For this reason, people of partial white ancestry are held (by the activists who promote the term) to fall on the non-white side of the barricades. (It's not really relevant whether or not it is right to do this to a society, or whether there are long-term consequences that flow from doing so.) The very concept instructs biracial people that they are non-white. In fact, Wiktionary's definition of non-white could even be amended to make clear that even marginal non-white ancestry is held to count. I think the Wiktionary definition of "of colour" is perfectly acceptable as it is.81.141.8.102 01:09, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

The one-drop rule was not created by the activists; it was created by people trying to define a line between the ruling white people and the people beneath them. This is a recognition of facts on the land more than any choice of themselves.--Prosfilaes (talk) 09:40, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

You are trying to introducing extremism into the Tea Room. The one-drop rule hasn't been in existence for a very long time indeed. And the Right today favours equality before the law. There is no way back to political stability if you believe there are racial groups in America that are inherently evil -- and this is what the BLM propaganda amounts to. You need to give your head a shake.81.141.8.102 10:18, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Let me add, that as a claimed dictionary, Wiktionary should be objective and neutral, and just report the meaning of words as they are used without trying to rule on the political motivations behind them. 81.141.8.102 10:20, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

of color is "attested since the late 1700s" according to our entry. w:Racial Integrity Act of 1924, a work that put the one-drop rule in Virginia law, was overturned in 1967, in the lifetime of some 90 million Americans. I didn't bring up "the Right today", just the simple facts involved in properly contextualizing the phrase "of color".--Prosfilaes (talk) 04:58, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

I understand of color to mean nonwhite with a hint of "I'm the kind of person who stays one step ahead on the euphemism treadmill." Of color and nonwhite (to me) don't imply any particular test of racial purity. Visibly dark-skinned descendants of American slaves with some white blood in them are considered nonwhite in America, despite being visibly paler than recent immigrants from Africa. At some level of dilution maybe they cease being nonwhite. Maybe. I have read stories about American women passing as or identifying as black without any drops of blood to support that identity. As I see it, their "of color-ness" stands or falls with their blackness rather than being based on a separate test. Maybe people who use those words regularly have a different sense. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 12:12, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

"[A]nd this is what the BLM propaganda amounts to" says everything I need to know about the true intentions of the anon and other named editors. IMO, this gives reason to pause and question the purported alterations, because they are not based on a neutral point of view. The only thing I'm seeing here, is an attempt to try and make the puzzle piece fit a narrative. I believe that -sche is trying to find common ground here and I suggest that the changes to colored are also scrutinised in this discussion. --Robbie SWE (talk) 16:50, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

And the statement that "the Right today favours equality before the law" is comical in a sad way.  --Lambiam 23:39, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Robbie SWE, I specifically stated a dictionary should be neutral and just list usages that are found in a non-judgemental fashion. You missed that. Of course, neither the BLM point of view (which you take) or the opposite (which I take) is a "neutral" point of view, but that's because that is politics. And Wiktionary is meant to be linguistics, not politics. Do you understand? 81.141.8.102 09:06, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

I didn't miss that – you were the one to make it political by bringing up BLM and "the Right today favours equality before the law". You have unlike -sche not engaged in a linguistic discussion by providing viable evidence to back you up. It never ceases to amaze me that the users invoking "Wiktionary is meant to be linguistics, not politics" are always the ones to make political edits. Especially entries like these, where conflicting opinions are a dime a dozen, we need to be extra mindful when making changes to senses or usage – your reasoning here is not only questionable, it also makes me want to disregard any point you were trying to make. I therefore recuse myself and will not make any changes to this entry. I do however encourage other users engaged in this matter to review the changes in light of this discussion. --Robbie SWE (talk) 13:54, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Robbie, I answered as I did as the OP queries on the use of this term are just pure SJWism. As far as the word is used - which is quite a lot - there is an objective discussion to be had about the use of it, but the word itself is just pure political propaganda. And obsessing about the intricacies of propaganda words is SJWism. In a few months' time, we will be told that use of the term "people of colour" is offensive, and sche will be onto his next word.... Maybe the Wiktionary entry should make clear that obsessing over such allegedly correct definitions and semantics is a niche concern of a tiny minority, a tiny minority who think they rule us? The real phrase you need here is "coloured people". I use it freely.81.141.8.102 18:45, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

So s:Author:Richard Allen, who wrote s:To The People Of Color, was just a SJW who should have shut up about how bad it was to be a slave? "a tiny minority who think they rule us" is openly conspiracy theory, and one that's basically anti-Semitic, even when that part isn't spoken out loud.--Prosfilaes (talk) 08:08, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

I shuddered to read the entry of color just now. Nothing to do with the word colour, but the use of the word partially. Since I read Fowler's The King's English as a child, I have never used partially to mean partly; I use it only in the sense of "not impartially". I can't deny that it is used by many to mean partly, so from a descriptivist point of view that meaning is attested. Attested, but not used by me.81.141.8.102 18:52, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Oof, yes, the split of the South African sense into two (and the changes to wording) need to be scrutinized indeed. - -sche (discuss) 22:52, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Vowel length of bædan (second sense)

The term is currently presented with a short vowel in the headword line, but a long vowel in the inflection table. If the verb is indeed weak class 1, then either the vowel or the consonant must be long in the present tense, due to the West Germanic gemination. —Rua (mew) 11:04, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Etymology 2 isn't even listed in Bosworth-Toller. I wonder where whoever added it got it from. —Mahāgaja · talk 11:12, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Added by @Leasnam in 2010. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 11:17, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

• John R. Clark Hall's 1916 Concise Anglo-Saxon dictionary has "bǣdan to urge on, impel, CP: solicit, require: afflict, oppress. | bædan to defile, EPs78¹." And a paper in Stanford University Publications: University series. Language and literature (1954), volumes 12-14, page 190, says:

  1. *bædan. At Ps. 78, 1 in the Canterbury Psalter coinquinaverunt is glossed bæddon. From this gloss HD enters bædan, 'to defile', and HEW enters bǣdan, 'beflecken', relating it to English bad and OE bǣddel, 'hermaphrodite'. It is true that the lemma calls for a meaning 'to defile'; but since the glosses in this Psalter show a notoriously free hand in the attempt to interpret the Latin it is a rather risky source from which to postulate a word not documented elsewhere.

This risk notwithstanding, the possibility of explaining otherwise more opaque words like bæddel (note the difference in length markers between our entry and the quote, in case that word also needs double-checking) has led some other authors to accept or at least mention the verb. - -sche (discuss) 22:45, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

• Astri Liedholm, A Phonological Study of the Middle English Romance Arthour and Merlin (ms. Auchinleck) (1941), page 63, discusses the Middle English "rhyme badde : pret. grade (=cry out; OE grǣdan (? ǣ*) of unknown etymology) 4851¹, both components of which are obscure, however. badde may here be a pp. form (grad (as in l. 3813): bad), meaning "oppressed", "overpowered" (< OE bǣdan), or possibly "defiled" (see Holthausen, bǣdan 2; CH gives a short vowel, bædan = defile), the preceding to being used as a mere intensive, meaning "greatly", "excessively". Here should also be noted the AM rhyme adj. badde : pret. hadde (OE hæfde) 1934. V. NED, bad a., […] ".
• A paper by Richard Coates in North-western European Language Evolution: NOWELE (1983), issues 11-12, page 100, says "this bædan, in the grammatical form bæddon, glosses coinquinaueri (Psalm 78, 1). This word stands in all MSS. with the text of Psalterium Romanum, where those derived from Psalterium Gallicanum have polluerunt. It may be that the verb coinquinare which we know to mean 'to defile' was not familiar to the scribe and that he played safe by substituting the relatively colourless term bædan 'to afflict'. The verb bædan with its short vowel may therefore be a ghost." - -sche (discuss) 00:40, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

So, it's a matter of deciding whose interpretation(s) of the single cite we find compelling... if we have reason to suspect the vowel is long in ety 2 like it is in ety 1, go for it, since there are references for it... - -sche (discuss) 10:09, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

@-sche: I think you're misinterpreting what Coates is saying: He's saying bædan in the sense 'to defile' could be a ghost word entirely, regardless of vowel length. Only the verb bǣdan 'to constrain, compel, urge, demand' is certain to have existed in Old English. The other sources at least don't contradict that possibility. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:36, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

@-sche: Sorry I botched the ping by misspelling your name above at first. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:43, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

passerby - passersby

I was thinking of adding passersby to WOTD because the unusual plural form. However, I see that passerby redirects to passer-by. I propose a change for this redirect, as "passerby" is much more correct AFAICS and more commonly used than the hyphenate form. I would be grateful to DCD @DCDuring or any other who enjoys statistical analysis to confirm or refute this, and support this proposal if in agreement. Thank you. -- ALGRIF talk 14:26, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

You would be on firmer ground if you said people frequently overlook hyphens (and confuse "lose" and "loose" and "their" and they're") in Internet postings without a copyedit. The OED entry is for "passer-by", and the plural you yourself cite suggests that this is the better form. I am happy to accept both, but the OED form is not wrong.81.141.8.102 15:48, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Why is it more correct? Perhaps just more modern. Hyphenated used to be more common, judging by the older books I've read. Equinox ◑ 15:49, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Who said I enjoy statistical analysis? I just get POed when others fail to get the basic numbers from Google NGrams. DCDuring (talk) 18:04, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Passers-by and passersby have been about equally common since after 1980. In the 19th century the hyphenated form was about 10 times more common. Similarly for the singular. DCDuring (talk) 18:08, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Note that it takes about 5 minutes to do two such comparisons. DCDuring (talk) 18:09, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Please DCD, accept my thanks for doing this. Personally I could easily have spent 5 hours just to get the wrong answer. -- ALGRIF talk 00:04, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

It is definitely empowering to spend a bit of time learning the most basic level of Google NGrams, the relative frequency of words. It is very straightforward. There are various complications which are not essential to its use, but may be worth learning when needed. DCDuring (talk) 05:13, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

passers-by looks much better, IMO. Ngram Viewer can be misleading. DonnanZ (talk) 17:11, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Order of adjectives

I was recently having a debate about adjective order in English: you know, it normally goes something like opinion-size-age-color-origin-material-attributive. Someone asked about sexuality, what's that classed as? We did some tests: Would one say, for example, a nice big gay young French man or a nice big young gay French man or a nice big young French gay man? We couldn't decide, and I volunteered to ask the experts. La más guay (talk) 01:05, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Seen Adjective#Order? Equinox ◑ 01:10, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Given your recent edit to it, I know you (OP) saw this already, but for anyone else curious about this, I documented adjective order locally at WT:English adjectives#Order_of_adjectives a while ago, following an earlier WT:ID discussion. :) Neat tidbits: the order of "age" vs "shape" is very flexible, and other exceptions also exist, often influenced by things like the preference for ordering from general to specific, and (rarely) certain sound-related considerations ("big bad wolf"). One could (and I probably will...) use Ngrams to test the commonness of various phrases to determine precisely where in the sequence an orientation usually falls... - -sche (discuss) 02:16, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

OK, Ngrams results: (1.) It comes after "Opinion", e.g. "good gay man", not *"gay good man" unless contrasting a non-gay good man (fronting it); "real gay man" not *"gay real man"; "beautiful gay man".

(2.) It comes after "Size": "big gay man"; "large gay men".

(3a.) It usually comes after "Age": "old gay man" outpaces "gay old man"; "young gay man" starts to outpace "gay young man" as the sexuality sense of "gay" starts to predominate. "Young homosexual men" outpaces "homosexual young men" even though "young men" is set-phrase-y (ditto the singular). (3b.) No "Shape" terms I tried were in Ngram Viewer, but anecdotally, "round bisexual man" and "swollen bisexual man" sound more fluent to me than "bisexual swollen man".

(4.) It often comes after "Color". To me, "pale gay man" sounds far more natural than "gay pale man". But when "color" denotes racial origin (category 5), "black gay man" is only slightly more common, ditto "white gay man", and "gay black woman" is actually more common.

(5.) It often comes after "Origin", but in Ngrams this may be an artifact of the circumstances the two are talked about side by side in; "American gay man" outpaces "gay American man", ditto "French gay man", ditto "African gay men", but this could be because one might write that mostly when contrasting (thus fronting) nationality? "Gay {American|African|black|white|etc) (man|woman|etc)" also sounds fluent to me.

(6.) Unsurprisingly, no "Material" terms I tried were common enough for Ngram Viewer to plot.

So, unless it's being fronted, it comes after "'Opinion", "Size", "Age", and "Shape". It often comes after "Color", and in practice often comes after "Origin". But some words don't fit in the categories above, and so exist outside of the rules of how to sequence those categories. Like, which of those categories is "genocidal"? There is a tendency that "any final limiter" goes last ("a heinous new vehicular homicide"), but frankly "an ugly, ancient genocidal French newscaster" sounds as good or better to me than "an ugly, ancient French genocidal newscaster", and ditto for "gay", so again, I think words that don't fit into the categories don't obey the rules of how those categories are sequenced or necessarily stick to one spot in the sequence... - -sche (discuss) 06:04, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Personally I'd say "nice big young gay French man" unless contrasting with his straight counterpart. I do wonder what the story is behind this "swollen bisexual man". Ultimateria (talk) 17:35, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

седок

Should this word be animate? A quote from Chekhov: Иона оглядывается на седока и шевелит губами... Jonah looks back at the passenger and moves his lips... (Тоска - Misery 1886) — This unsigned comment was added by Mustafa405 (talk • contribs) at 11:18, 14 December 2020 (UTC).

The Russian Wiktionary page should always be consulted - and it shows it is animate, as indeed your quotation shows. — This unsigned comment was added by 81.141.8.102 (talk) at 16:48, 15 December 2020 (UTC).

It could be added that this word is cognate with сесть and all related words to do with sitting down (a passenger travels sitting down, of course). i.e. probably connected to Old East Slavic сѣсти. 81.141.8.102 07:33, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

cat burglar, sneak thief

Our definition for the latter makes it seem near-synonymous (if not fully synonymous) with the former.

I notice, however, that slightly different definitions exist for the latter term in other sources. One such definition implies that the thief does not do anything to create a means of entrance for themselves (thus they, for example, do not pick locks, nor open unlocked windows). Tharthan (talk) 22:52, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

For me, the essential point of difference at cat burglar is the phrase "through the use of agility". A cat burglar, for me, is specifically one who climbs up drainpipes, across roofs, down through skylights, stuff like that. Mihia (talk) 21:04, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

In fact, I would be inclined to remove the "especially" qualification from that. Mihia (talk) 21:42, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

I've taken a shine to typically instead of especially for cases like this. DCDuring (talk) 03:28, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

For me, I don't think even "typically" is wanted here. The use of agility seems to me to be essential for the term "cat burglar" to apply. Mihia (talk) 10:57, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

whisk, beater, eggwhisk, eggbeater

1

2

3

4

need their translations merged. eggbeater already refers to the page eggwhisk, suggesting this is all indeed the same, but the glosses do not match. Evidently the gloss at eggbeater is wrong since it being used for “a kitchen utensil that uses rotating blades to beat eggs” derives from the fact of the item in question being inserted in a rotating machine, but the item is otherwise typically stored separately and separately called the same. I believe we need to unify translations for the depicted item and this is what most editors adding translations translated, but some native speakers need to assess the scopes of application of the terms and possibly redefine them. beater seems very weakly defined (“A kitchen implement for mixing.”) and particularly I ask whether this term is particularly restricted to the items under c:Category:Whisks; it is possible that it means all kinds of instruments used for beating in the kitchen and then still we have to separate a meaning for this particular kind. Wikimedia Commons sorts the depicted implement under c:Category:Balloon whisks distinguishing by form which also suggests we need hyponym entries if the category names aren’t completely made up as they sometimes are, Fay Freak (talk) 02:31, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

For me, an egg beater is hand-held implement that you insert into the mixture, with a crank on the side that makes the working parts spin while the implement as a whole remains stationary. A whisk is a hand-held implement with no moving parts that you move through the mixture, generally by rotating your hand at the wrist. The mechanics of the two are quite different. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:53, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

I found an image, but I'm surprised at how meager the selection is at Commons for an implement to be found in just about every kitchen in the US (in the second half of the twentieth century, at least). Chuck Entz (talk) 04:12, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I think there are differences between some of these. A whisk usually resembles the first image above, or another similar configuration of wires (slightly narrower, flatter, or rounder, as shown in this image). The image Chuck added is a manual egg beater, and the image I just added is an electric egg beater, and the parts on the bottom are the individual beaters. Electric egg beaters often come with both beater/mixer and whisk attachments (and a "bread hook"), which are distinct. "Eggwhisk / egg whisk" sounds like just a redundant way of saying "whisk"; Google Image search results for "egg whisk" mostly look the same as "whisk"; only when other words are added like "electric egg whisk" do I get images that look like electric egg beaters, but "electric egg whisk" is not a common name, too rarely for Ngrams to plot. I think eggwhisk could probably just be defined as a synonym of the kitchen-utensil sense of whisk, and those translations could be merged, unless I'm missing something. It and eggbeater should not be listed as synonyms (maybe coordinate terms?). - -sche (discuss) 04:57, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

For me, the bottom image is not an "electric egg beater" but an "electric mixer" (or just "mixer"), but I do agree that each of the parts on the bottom is a "beater". I also agree that the top image is a "whisk" and the middle image is an "egg beater". —Mahāgaja · talk 07:56, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Ah, you're right; that was a tunnel-vision moment on my part, ha. I was focused on "what objects could these words refer to", and Google Image search bears out that "electric egg beater" is a name for such a tool (as an electric analogue of the handheld thing), but it's indeed not the usual name. - -sche (discuss) 10:02, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

It occurs to me it can also be called a hand mixer/handmixer, especially to distinguish it from the stand mixer depicted in image 4. (And I should like to point out that I am sorely disappointed in the German language for not distinguishing stand mixers from food processors, referring to both indiscriminately as Küchenmaschine.) —Mahāgaja · talk 17:46, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: Why, one uses Standmixer. Opposed to Stabmixer. Fay Freak (talk) 19:06, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: Google Images suggests that a Standmixer is a blender, not a stand mixer. The two are false friends. —Mahāgaja · talk 19:10, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: And I always thought and still think that “to blend” and “to mix” are synonyms. Also in German Mischling and Blendling are synonyms, so I would need an explanation how this would be wrong. Fay Freak (talk) 19:13, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

They're synonyms in the broad sense of that term (two terms that cover roughly the same semantic field without necessarily having exactly the same meaning). I think they have different connotations; for me, blending is (or can be) gentler than mixing, and the result less homogeneous. Incidentally, w:de:Standmixer confirms that it's a blender, not a stand mixer. —Mahāgaja · talk 19:17, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: I see that your stand mixer is usually called Küchenmaschine and that there is a difference in the position of the beating implement to food processor. But you can also call the stand mixer Rührmaschine, and maybe also Knetmaschine (“kneading machine”), and Rühr-Knetmaschine, Rühr-/Knetmaschine (it depends on which hook and movement exactly is present). Fay Freak (talk) 19:25, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: OK, thanks! I looked into all of these terms recently when I decided to buy a stand mixer here in Berlin and wanted to make sure that if I had to ask someone at the store, they would understand unambiguously what I was looking for. (I failed in that when I tried to buy a double boiler at WMF a few years ago – not only had the employees never heard of a Bain-Marie, they still didn't know what it was even after I described it to them in detail.) However, once I saw the price of stand mixers, I decided I didn't need one that badly. —Mahāgaja · talk 19:32, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: I have never heard of these things either. You should try Dampfgartopf, Dampfkochtopf, Dampfgarer, Dampfkocher, many of which have such “double” look (the translation pressure cooker here for the second is just one of many), also it is like the ма́нтница which has even more layers and will be sold by the stores homines sovietici usually frequent; that is, I find that there is one Mix Markt in Berlin, but I cannot judge the surmountability of distances within Berlin and there should be other vendors out there and specialized web shops anyway unless you buy offline out of conviction (but many offline may be closed due to the bat soup croup? not so the said food shop). Fay Freak (talk) 19:53, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: Nah, I make do with a metal bowl on top of a normal saucepan. It's cheaper than buying another kitchen device. (But if I do want to go to Mix Markt, it's just a 24-minute tram ride from my house.) —Mahāgaja · talk 20:00, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

I edited the entries to no longer claim that eggbeater and eggwhisk are synonyms. We could probably drop the translations at eggwhisk, because they seem to all be for whisk or for whisk + for eggs, which seems SOPpy and also mistaken because the top Google Books results for "with an eggwhisk" and "with an egg whisk" are for whisking cream, sauces, etc, suggesting that eggwhisk just means whisk without even being specifically for eggs. (Egg whisk is also a more common spelling, if someone wants to move the entry.) I also updated whisk to mention that they were formerly (and marginally still are) made of twigs, not just wire. Regarding beater: it seems to be simultaneously too broad and too narrow; Dictionary.com has both an analogue of our sense 1 and a quasi-analogue of our sense 2, except that their usexes (about rug beaters) point out that it's not limited to kitchen implements; conversely, Merriam-Webster has very specific definitions of beater, and a curiously broad-seeming definition of eggbeater, saying "especially" a rotary device as if it actually could be also just a whisk(?)... - -sche (discuss) 10:05, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Upon further investigation, the occurrence of phrases like "wire eggbeater" suggests—an an image accompanying that phrase in a 1940s Popular Mechanics confirms—that for some speakers, seemingly chiefly in the period from 1900 to the 1920s, "eggbeater" actually could be used to mean whisk after all (although the cranked device discussed above seems to have also been called an eggbeater at the same time?). - -sche (discuss) 03:58, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

Did 18th century egg-beaters look like brooms, like brushes, or like forks? In what countries were beaten eggs part of the cuisine? Were they made of wood or metal? What words were used then? Whisk (verb) suggests a broom- or brush-like design might have been likely. DCDuring (talk) 04:35, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

"Idea" added to a certain "Talk:" page ... for a certain word

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:philander#%28possibly%29_finding_and_adding_a_quotation_of_Congreve --Mike Schwartz (talk) 06:15, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Context label for Malay (ms) word “bersalin”

“Bersalin” is one of the inflected forms of “salin”. In the Malay dictionary Kamus Dewan, the word “bersalin” when used to mean “to give birth to a child” is given the label ”bahasa halus”, which in Malay literally means “fine language”. I’ve sought the advice of several (admittedly assumed) Malay natives and they say that it means “with courtesy”, “the opposite of rude language”, “polite language”, “indirect (in the sense that it will not be thought offensive by others)”, etc. Any suggestions what context label I can use? Thanks. —Colathewikian (talk) 13:25, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

{{lb|ms|formal}} => (formal)? Not exactly the same. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 14:01, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

The term “refined language” is in use in this sense: [27], [28], [29].  --Lambiam 21:56, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestions, Vox Sciurorum and Lambiam. “Formal” isn’t quite it, as “bahasa halus” doesn’t mean it’s formal; it’s closer to “polite” or “courteous”. “Refined language” might work, but it sounds just a little bit weird to me. I just thought of “euphemistic”; would that work? I’m refraining from it though because “euphemistic” would suggest that “bersalin” (giving birth to a child) is offensive or vulgar, which in my opinion is absolutely not! Words like “meninggal dunia” (equivalent to “pass away” in English) could perhaps be labeled as euphemism.
For “bersalin” maybe I’ll just go with “polite” for now. Thanks again. -Colathewikian (talk) 07:38, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Some of our Japanese and Chinese entries use "polite" as a label, like 方, 是非 and 子, 辛苦, so that's an option, if "polite" is an accurate description of these terms. - -sche (discuss) 03:25, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

Diegesis - broader use?

"Diegesis" is defined on here only as a narrative story, in contrast to mimesis. The page for "diegetic" expands to also include its relation to film music (where "diegetic" refers to sound elements that characters in the story can hear), but I've heard it in much broader terms than that. Would it be apt to add a definition of "diegesis" to the effect of "the extent of elements of a story which directly affect the narrative, esp. when explicitly known by the characters"? That's about as well as I can put it into words, but if anyone can find a better, more reputable definition, it might be nice to add it there.

[That definition might sound a bit overly specific (and maybe it is), but on the Wikipedia page for Diegesis, there are examples of elements which are considered diegetic in that they affect the narrative storyline, but aren't explicitly known by the characters - for example, a video game could have diegetic music that the characters react to (making it, specifically, intra-diegetic); diegetic sound effects like an alarm which affects story elements but which the characters don't directly react to (the main thing I'm talking about, which is extra-diegesis); and non-diegetic elements like the control scheme for the actual controller. I feel like the clause after "especially" makes that distinction clear, but it might be unnecessary or better expressed some other way.] Etymographer (talk) 01:24, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Another tricky definition under sein (German)

I'm working on another definition for sein based in part on this SE answer. There are the same grammatical issues as with another definition, for which I added a long usage note a few months ago, so now there are two usage notes. (In both cases the grammatical subject is the impersonal pronoun es, usually omitted, while what would be the subject in English is in the dative case.) So I have two questions; first, what is the best way to handle these tricky grammar issues when they span multiple, but not all, definitions? Second, what can be done so that people can actually find this information? I'm sure that the last place I'd look when trying to decipher "Mir ist nicht danach" is under "sein", though after careful consideration I think that is really where it belongs. --RDBury (talk) 01:32, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

ndërroj has PIE root *an-2

I just looked at the etymmology of Albanian ndërroj "change", and the PIE root behind it appears to be *an-2. Now, I don't recall 2 being a valid PIE letter aside from subscript 2 in h₂, so… what was this 2 supposed to mean? *d^wóh₁ meaning "two"? Looking at the edit history, the first revision this *an-2 appears in is by MewBot on 28/5/14, but previous revisions back up to 3/8/13 (revision by MewBot again) had something hidden under a "Template:term/t" error, and all previous revisions up to the new entry creation on 6/2/13 had a "Template:recons" error, so I'm not sure if the bot added it or just fixed (perhaps incorrectly) some code flaw. MGorrone (talk) 17:38, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

@MGorrone: Those errors are caused because the templates {{term/t}} and {{recons}} have been deleted; at the time of the edits you're looking at they were being used correctly. So when you look at the older history of pages, you often have to click "Edit" to see the source code in order to bypass such template errors. In this case, we see that it was the first editor of the page, Etimo, who wrote From {{etyl|sqj-pro|sq}} {{recons|anteros|lang=sqj-pro}}, from {{etyl|ine-pro|sq}} {{recons|an-2|lang=ine-pro}} 'there, on the other side'. I suspect that this "an-2" comes from a dictionary (maybe Pokorny?) that has multiple entries for "an-", and it's entry number 2 that means "there, on the other side". Of course, that's not how we do things here. For one thing, we follow the laryngeal theory, so we translate "an-" into *h₂en-, and we use |id= and |t= to identify which sense of a polysemous root we're referring to. As it happens, we have only one sense for *h₂en-, and it doesn't mean "there, on the other side" anyway. But the listed cognates of ndërroj show that the most likely source is *h₂énteros (“other”), so maybe we should simply list that rather than "an-2". —Mahāgaja · talk 07:34, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

Is wokism synonymous with wokeness?

Thanks. Apokrif (talk) 13:38, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

Probably not, but I haven't heard or looked at actual usage of wokism. You can get an idea of the likely difference in meaning by looking at the entries -ism and -ness. Wokism would be something that the ideology of wokeness. It might be pejorative. Wokeness is the state of being woke, not typically pejorative AFAICT. DCDuring (talk) 17:19, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

As DCDuring said, it sounds more critical. Another critical variant would be wokery. These are all very new words.81.141.8.102 18:37, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

(geen) volle zalen trekken / nee, jij trekt volle zalen

In Dutch there is the expression volle zalen trekken that more or less means "to be popular, to be of outstanding quality (e.g. good-looking, a great performer, etc.)" but it is almost exclusively used either with a negation (geen volle zalen trekken) or sarcastically, as in the rejoinder nee, jij trekt volle zalen (see google books:nee, jij trekt volle zalen). I am inclined to lemmatise it at volle zalen trekken and indicate the way it is used via usage notes, but I thought I'd invite some input before creating it. I would specially like to know whether you think it is desirable to have hard redirects from geen volle zalen trekken and nee, jij trekt volle zalen or whether you would prefer a different definition. @Lambiam, Alexis Jazz, Rua, Thadh, Mnemosientje, Morgengave
Beside the above, volle zalen trekken is also used literally for attracting crowds so one performs for sold-out venues. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 18:09, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

• Category:English negative polarity items may provide some examples. For example can't put my finger on it redirects to put one's finger on. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 19:19, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

  @Vox Sciurorum Thank you for the input; a corresponding category could be created for equivalent Dutch terms. By the way, do you want me to ping you by default for questions like these? ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 21:40, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

    citations

2016, Marinus van den Berg, Levenspaden: over wandelen en onderweg zijn, VBK Media, →ISBN, page 104: In de jaren zeventig was er veel aandacht voor het werk van de Nijmeegse psychiater Anna Terruwe. Zij trok volle zalen als ze sprak over de waarde en de noodzaak van bevestiging. (please add an English translation of this quotation) 2005, Maarten Couttenier, Congo tentoongesteld: een geschiedenis van de Belgische antropologie en het museum van Tervuren (1882-1925), ACCO, →ISBN, page 51: Tijdens zijn act werd hij gevraagd te blaffen en te grommen als een hond. Hij trok volle zalen in Amerika, Australië en Europa. (please add an English translation of this quotation) 2015, Floris van den Berg, Beter weten: filosofie van het ecohumanisme, VBK - Houtekiet, →ISBN, page 59: Zijn retorische talenten zijn befaamd en hij trok volle zalen, maar hij leefde voor de techniek van het opnemen van beeld en geluid. (please add an English translation of this quotation) 2012, Meindert van der Kaaij, Een eenzaam staatsman: Dirk de Geer (1870-1960), Uitgeverij Verloren, →ISBN, page 185: Het tweede kabinet van Ruijs wilde beslist werk maken van de 'bestrijding van de zedelijke en maatschappelijke gevaren' van de bioscoop. Het bezoek daaraan maakte in die jaren daarvoor een explosieve groei door: de film kon zo slecht niet zijn of hij trok volle zalen. Kamerleden van christelijke zijde zagen die populariteit met lede ogen aan. (please add an English translation of this quotation) 2007, Henk Mak van Dijk, De oostenwind waait naar het westen: Indische componisten, Indische composities,, KITLV Press, →ISBN, page 41: Jodjana kreeg de meeste bekendheid, zowel nationaal als internationaal: hij trok volle zalen met zijn optredens waarbij hij aan de piano begeleid werd door zijn verloofde Elizabeth Pop, met wie hij in 1923 zou trouwen. (please add an English translation of this quotation) 2020, Thomas Rijsman, Marokkaanse trots: Smaakmakers in de Eredivisie, Atlas Contact, →ISBN, page 112: Hij trok volle zalen. Alle Nederlandse Marokkanen gingen naar zijn wedstrijden kijken. Hij heeft alleen nooit de profs gehaald, zoals zijn broer. (please add an English translation of this quotation) 1962, Willem Drees, Zestig jaar levenservaring, De Arbeiderspers, page 32: Hij werd een van de bekendste en populairste propagandisten van de partij. Hij trok volle zalen . Zijn redevoeringen waren niet van een vaste opbouw of een grootse welsprekendheid, maar hij wist de mensen te pakken. (please add an English translation of this quotation)

@Lingo Bingo Dingo I don't share your "almost exclusively used either with a negation or sarcastically" statement. Alexis Jazz (talk) 21:32, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

@Alexis Jazz I would say that in most of those citations the expression is "used literally for attracting crowds so one performs for sold-out venues". Or at least something is shown to sold-out venues. ;) ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 21:40, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

@Lingo Bingo Dingo Yes, but I think that kind of usage is substantial, so "almost exclusively" isn't true I think. And these cites also tend to say the subject was popular. Alexis Jazz (talk) 21:43, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

I suppose you could be right for a figurative sense though. Alexis Jazz (talk) 21:46, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

@Alexis Jazz Yes, that is what I meant with "expression" in the OP, but I can see why that is ambiguous (and I used it with a different meaning later on). ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 18:12, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

double and double as

Regarding sense 9 of double:

9. (intransitive) (often followed by as) To play a second part or serve a second role.

A spork is a kind of fork that doubles as a spoon.

I'm querying the word "often" in this definition. Can something "double as" something without the "as"? Are we then saying that the example could also work as:

A spork is a kind of fork that doubles a spoon.

I think the word the definition needs is "always". What do you think? — Dentonius 02:03, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

My feeling is that usage without as would've existed at least in the past, but it's hard to search for: there's too much chaff to easily search for examples of e.g. "which doubles a"; Century and Dictionary.com don't admit that any sense like this exists at all (with or without as); Merriam-Webster has "to serve an additional purpose or perform an additional duty" but without any usexes or indications about as; and the 1933 OED only has "To double a part: to act as the double of or substitute for (another player); to play two parts in the same piece; also fig." with cites like "she attempted to double the part of her mother" and "Laforêt [...] doubles Lainez". This last sense seems to be what our "(intransitive) (followed by for) To act as substitute" sense is aiming to cover(?), but it clearly isn't always followed by for. (That sense should be moved next to the "play a second part" sense, if not folded into it.) - -sche (discuss) 08:11, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

I would write (transitive with as) unless a counterexample is provided. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 11:00, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

Doubles a spoon doesn't mean anything in English. This dictionary should not be compiled according to people's feelings, but rather attested usage.81.141.8.102 11:53, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

Vox, if you say it's transitive + as, you're making the case that there should be double as. As far as I know, we have no policy against the existence of phrasal verbs here. — Dentonius 13:07, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

I see two types of phrasal verbs in a broad sense. Compare blow up, which need not have any grammatical object, with double as, which can be analyzed as an intransitive verb with a mandatory indirect object and a prescribed preposition. We customarily define the first kind as a separate term. The second kind can be defined as a verb sense using {{indtr}}. It's not mandatory in all cases, perhaps, but the template is there for a reason. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 15:16, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

What about put in, look after, run into, ...? There are phrasal verbs with adverbs and prepositions. Those arguing that double as is simply double + as are wrong because the meaning of double as exists neither in double nor in as. Combining the two gives rise to an idiomatic sense. Tucking away "double as" under "double" is dishonest. Whoever came up with the definition and put "often" was smart enough to know that indicating "always" would beg the question. — Dentonius 15:41, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps more pages need to be deleted in the name of consistency. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 16:32, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

There are several possibilities, with the above exhibiting most of them in different meanings.

1. The verb and preposition have their normal meanings and it's not a propositional verb at all. It seems these are sometimes included in the entry and sometimes not. In this case the direct object (if any) goes between the verb and the preposition and the preposition must be followed by a noun: "I put the food in my mouth." "He ran into the building."
2. The verb takes on a new meaning when combined with a prepositional phrase of a certain type. This has the same grammar as the previous case, just a different meaning, though you can often tell because the combination in question would not otherwise make sense: "He ran into a tree." "He ran the car into a tree."
3. The verb and preposition form a new verb. There doesn't have to be a noun after the preposition, but the preposition can move around within the clause: "Just put in the key." "Just put the key in."

There might be other possibilities as well but I think that covers the definitions in the three phrases given above. I don't think the first possibility requires a separate definition, much less a separate entry, but a definition might be useful for clarity if the entry already exists (as in "ran into") The second possibility should at least have a separate definition under the verb if not a separate entry. The third possibility should have a separate entry. By these criteria I think the original question should be into which category the phrase "double as" falls. The third one excluded because the preposition must come before the noun; "A spork is a kind of fork that doubles a spoon as," is incorrect grammar. The first possibility is eliminated because the the verb and proposition combination does not make sense otherwise (except in the theatrical sense). So it's the second possibilty and there is precedent both for keeping as a definition under "double", and for making it a separate entry. It looks to me like the issue can be resolved by removing "usually" from the label. I don't think a new entry is needed but I don't think it would do that much harm it someone created one. --RDBury (talk) 20:14, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

Here's a comment of mine from somewhere else on this site: If we had to choose one of those words to house the meaning of double as, I'd say as houses more of that meaning, and not double. There are a handful of verbs which can be used with as to render that meaning. The resulting phrasal verbs are idiomatic (and, of course, synonymous). — Dentonius 20:19, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

I see your point but there doesn't seem to a definition of "double" that would go with this this usage of "as". Outside some specialized uses, "double" means to increase in size or to form a duplicate somehow. So the literal meaning of the example would be that the spork gets twice as big when you think of it as a spoon. In contrast, in the phrase "act as", there is a meaning of act that can be put together with this usage of "as" so that together the meaning is close to the the meaning of the whole expression. I agree that in "double as", the "as" meaning is covered under "as", but the "double" part does change meaning in the combination. --RDBury (talk) 22:02, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

I entirely disagree that "as" houses the main meaning of "double as". "as" means something like "In the role of" (sense 2 of preposition "as"), which exists in numerous contexts that have nothing to do with "doubling". "double as X" should be understood as "double" + "as X", where "double" has its own meaning, and "as X" has its own meaning, which is in itself general in nature, only made specific by the meaning of "double". Mihia (talk) 22:12, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

If we add an entry do double duty (lemmingish at M–W), we can define this sense as “To do double duty [+ as (object)].”  --Lambiam 23:36, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

I would suggest putting any such entry at double duty, since use is not limited to the verb "do". E.g. one can also "perform double duty" or "serve double duty". Mihia (talk) 19:29, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

sign

We're missing a sense whereby a word or linguistic unit of written (or spoken?) language, and not just of signed language, can be a "sign": see Citations:sign#linguistic_unit. I'm not sure how to word it. MW has a sense which may be this (their sense covers both words and punctuation). - -sche (discuss) 02:22, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

The examples you pointed to would support that. I would define it something like a "signifier, a qualifying word that signifies something".81.141.8.102 11:55, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

Your definition covers the traditional concept of "sign", but not sign as a technical term. In (structuralist) linguistics, a sign consists of signifier + signified, so the definition should be something like "element of a semantic structure" (which sounds terrible) or "semantic unit consisting of signifier and signified". --Akletos (talk) 21:43, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

Yes, Akletos, good proposal.81.141.8.102 10:14, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Some strange chemical suffix categories

Category:English words suffixed with -ic acid, Category:English words suffixed with -dronic acid, possibly more by the same creator. I don't think these are suffixes. Equinox ◑ 06:18, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

Yeahhh, the first entry I looked at in the category was ioglycamic acid, which was analyzed as "io-" + "glycolamide" + "-ic acid", and categorizing etidronic acid as being suffixed with *-dronic acid but giving the ety as "ethyl" + "hydroxy" + "phosphonic acid" i.e. where even "-dronic" isn't even a unit, let alone "-dronic acid", is even weirder. I would have guessed that the user simply did not understand that the template categorized "-ic acid" as a unit, except that they added the "-dronic acid" category manually. "Acid" should definitely be linked separately. I'm tempted to just clean this up in AWB now... - -sche (discuss) 07:35, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

I removed one and the user readded it. Anyone else want to weigh in? - -sche (discuss) 22:03, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

Do have any other English suffixes with spaces or medial hyphens? This seems like an absurd stretch of the definition of affix. DCDuring (talk) 01:25, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

-it-all, -in-law, -a-palooza, -o-matic, -o-rama, -out-law; R Us

All of these look like mentally lazy ways of creating what looks like an etymology. This might be an explanation for the three categories in question here. How many votes to we need to justify a block if the user keeps restoring this silly categorization? DCDuring (talk) 01:48, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

They all look like rubbish to me. I would remove them all. SemperBlotto (talk) 06:50, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Delete, this is nonsense. 2A02:2788:A4:205:29FF:D95E:382C:FD20 16:19, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

User:陳弈豪 continues to create these categories with some rapidity. The latest "suffix" is -testosterone. Equinox ◑ 02:20, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

I've had fairly successful dealings with this user in the past when they were adding entries for pathogenic organisms. After some minor edit-warring, he came to add entries that looked pretty good to me and would have taken me a long time to get to.

I've looked through a few of the more recent entries and found some entries which I thought were problematic and changed, some that might be problematic but would require more understanding of chemical nomenclature and chemistry than I will ever have, others that seemed fine, and others that raise questions of how to present chemical-term derivation. An example of the last type is the creation of suffixes with a derivation of the form "-suffix 1 + -suffix 2". Based on my prior experience, I doubt that this user will engage in extended discussions in English. DCDuring (talk) 03:39, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

The most recent definitive work on organic chemistry nomenclature is Nomenclature of Organic Chemistry. IUPAC Recommendations and Preferred Name 2013, available in hardcover at about $850 or from Google Play for $200.

If we required chemical entries to have some kind of links (both to WP and to external sources) and/or minimal attestation (at least one cite), we might be able to enhance the usefulness of such entries and focus efforts on names of "important" chemicals. DCDuring (talk) 04:08, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't think the user should be blocked, because they're adding a lot of good content, and I can even see how they would think that something like etidronic acid, where AFAICT etidronic isn't attested in books except when followed by acid, meant the suffix included "acid", although this is clearly misguided: I see Chuck has explained the issue on their talk page (thanks, Chuck), and you've started an RFDO to take care of the categories. :) - -sche (discuss) 23:01, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Late to this party, but I would just like to point out here the following interesting facts related to this topic:

• This activity relates to the general pattern of pairs of [root] + -ic acid and [root] + -ate—the pattern by which weak acids are generally named, and because such an acid's conjugate acid and conjugate base always coexist in solution, the curious linguistic effect exists whereby the [root] + -ic acid and [root] + -ate terms are often viewed as "different names for the same thing" (in other words, synonymous), which is entirely reasonable/logical etically, even though from a certain other reasonable view, they are names for "different things" (an acid and a base, respectively). This is why biochemically knowledgeable people generally think "same difference" regarding, for example, folic acid and folate. For the same reason, it drives "same difference" correlations across INNs and USANs and BANs and JANs in drug nomenclature, whereby for example aledronate and aledronic acid = "same thing", zoledronate and zoledronic acid = "same thing", and so on.
• And therefore, it is natural that speakers of English can have the notion that "-ic acid is thus 'just as much a suffix as -ate is'", even though there is an (orthographically artifactual) barrier in English orthography to viewing it that way emically. But it must be pointed out that the artifactual emic barrier does not represent an etic barrier, just as the orthographic rules of noun compounding in (modern normative) English orthography differ from those in (modern normative) German orthography more than the corresponding morphologic rules differ. That difference-between-differences is artifactual albeit real, and real albeit artifactual. In other words, there are many compound nouns that are cognate across English and German that are "one word" in German but "not one word" in English, and this difference is artifactual albeit real, and real albeit artifactual.
• Relatedly, I will leave you with one last mind-bend: descriptively, it is a (corpus-attested) fact that hyperlacticacidemia, styled solid, is a "real word" in biomedical English even though hyperlacticemia is the orthographically acceptable/normative synonym thereof. What we see here is an exploration of the boundary cases of how orthography places bounds on morphology when a population of speakers has high literacy rates, even though morphology is an older, more powerful force in language that predates normative orthography.
• All of the above is NOT to say that -ic acid should be viewed as prescriptively acceptable as being a suffix in English metalanguage or in the emic views of how English speakers conceive that English morphology works. It is merely to say that there is a morphologic undertow in the common threads of Germanic-language compounding—with morphology predating normative orthography—that is trying to treat it as one, and that fact is interesting. A related corollary is that although many people are familiar with the theme that non-phonemic aspects of spelling are artifactual aspects of orthography, they are less often conscious of the way that word boundaries are themselves also to some extent artifactual aspects of orthography whose artifactual quirks can differ across various cognate languages' respective normative orthographies. Which is to say that our normal emic conceptions of where the word boundaries lie or don't lie in our own languages (perhaps more so in some languages than in others) are partially artifactual from a sharp-eyed etic viewpoint, although most of us are usually not consciously aware of that fact, but the fact is not surprising when one considers the widespread natural variation in how even standard varieties of English (let alone nonstandard ones) haphazardly decide when to solidify compound nouns or not, with coexisting acceptable alternative forms galore (for example, fish eye, fish-eye, fisheye; bull's eye, bull's-eye, bullseye; breast feeding, breastfeeding; child bearing, child-bearing, childbearing; water-borne, waterborne).

Quercus solaris (talk) 20:44, 25 January 2021 (UTC); coda, 30 April 2021 (UTC).

Manichaean

How are senses 1 and 2 measurably distinct ("Of or relating to Manichaeism", "Of or concerning a Manichaean")? Equinox ◑ 00:06, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Some books talk of things like "a phonetic characteristic of a Manichaean dialect" (that spoken by Manichaeans, rather than by Manichaeism), which might be the kind of thing the split was intended to cover, but I also see references to e.g. google books:"a Christian dialect of Aramaic" so this doesn't prove that a different sense is needed. It seems like they could be combined, like "Of or relating to Manichaeism or to Manichaeans", since Manichaeans do not seem to have been a distinct ethnic group(?) (in contrast to Jewish). - -sche (discuss) 02:23, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Polish pronoun "tamten" needs a correct template in Wiktionary

In https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tamten#Polish there is a table of declension for the polish demonstrative pronoun "tamten". However, the cells which shelter the declensions of the neuter gender are incorrect because the table is using a wrong template. I have searched for a proper template for edit myself but I could not find it. It is necessary to create one, specifically for polish demonstrative pronoun. — This unsigned comment was added by Monteirorogerio (talk • contribs) at 02:40, 21 December 2020 (UTC).

You can always use the template {{pl-decl-adj}} and fill out all forms by hand, something like {{pl-decl-adj |tamten |tamta |tamto |tamci |tamte |tamtego |tamtej |tamtych |tamtemu |tamtym |tamtą |tamtym |tamtymi}}. Are there other pronouns with an incorrectly presented declension?  --Lambiam 16:53, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Latin plus

Should this have an alternative neuter nominative plural form pluria? (I’m not sure of the vowel quantities.) There’s some discussion about it in Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 5.21 that suggests so. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 04:51, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Here are three uses, all post-Classical Latin: [30], [31], [32]. The form is not recognized by the Latin Word Study Tool hosted at the Perseus Project. One would expect plūria.  --Lambiam 15:12, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Predicative use of key?

We all speak different types of English - our idiolects -- and I think the fact that there are generational changes in English is also relevant. I'm always surprised to see key used predicatively. "It will be a key issue in the election campaign" sounds fine to me. "This issue will be key in the election" does not. I wonder if there are regional/social or other variations in use of this word. I think there are many people in English who prefer to use this adjective attributively only. 81.141.8.102 10:13, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

The predicative use sounds completely normal to me. —Mahāgaja · talk 12:57, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

The attributive use is definitely more popular, but both are about equally trite and jarring jargon to me.  --Lambiam 14:55, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

IP, a similar case has cropped up before: see Talk:cookie-cutter. SanctMinimalicen wrote: "I would never use "cookie-cutter" as a predicate adjective--it sounds at the least very nonstandard, like saying something like "That statement is very blanket." (2014 doge anyone? Wow. Much adjective.)", but other native speakers (among whom Mahagaja) said it sounds fine to them. 2A02:2788:A4:205:29FF:D95E:382C:FD20 15:29, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Nouns (eg, key, cookie-cutter, blanket) used attributively sufficiently often are likely to come to be used as predicates. I suspect that predicate use makes users want to make the words gradable and comparable. (Even so-called "absolute" adjectives (eg,impossible) can be found in comparative and other graded usage.) I think these changes often take place in a single generation or less, even for relatively high-frequency words. DCDuring (talk) 15:42, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Speaking anecdotally, I like all three in attributive use, balk at predicate use, and gag at comparability/gradability. I don't find my reactions differ much among those three; they all seem equally objectionable in predicate and comparative/gradable use. DCDuring (talk) 15:49, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

It definitely seems to be generational- predicative use sounds wrong to me, but I hear it in use all the time. It also seems to be one of those expressions like utilize and prioritize that are used make one sound professional and like an expert. I would expect to hear it used by consultants, paid speakers and people in various sorts of committees. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:07, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree it's probably generational, but don't forget @Mahagaja is no spring chicken (no offense). 2A02:2788:A4:205:29FF:D95E:382C:FD20 16:13, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

No, I'm not; perhaps it's regional. But although predicative use of key sounds fine to me, predicative use of cookie-cutter and blanket doesn't. —Mahāgaja · talk 17:55, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Predicate use of "key" sounds OK to me too (in the UK). Maybe once it was jargony or journalese or something, but to me it no longer seems so, or only very faintly. Mihia (talk) 19:09, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Ngrams suggests predicative use started to take off in 60s into the 70s. (It also suggests that a limited amount of earlier use existed, but when I search for it, it seems like it's just scannos where their OCR combined fragments of multiple columns of text.) - -sche (discuss) 23:42, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Ngrams suggests both uses took off at the same time.  --Lambiam 16:20, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

@-sche: could you do the same search for cookie-cutter, please? I'm curious whether the results will bear out this. 2A02:2788:A4:205:29FF:D95E:382C:FD20 23:53, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

What phrases could we search for (that are common enough to meet Ngrams' threshold for plotting) to find only predicative uses of cookie-cutter? When something is key, you can often enough say it's key to something else that phrases like "which are key to" (which I used above) can be used to find only predicative use. (Just searching for "which are key" without "to" would also match "which are key issues".) I tried "are cookie-cutter in" (thinking of e.g. "the houses are cookie-cutter in style") but it's too rare, ditto "is cookie-cutter in". The documentation says Ngram Viewer supports searching for the end of a sentence (_END_), but I either did it wrong or "is cookie-cutter _END_" is too rare to be plotted. The Ngrams of "is cookie-cutter" and "are cookie-cutter" look like this, but this could conceivably also be matching non-predicative use like "his proposal is cookie-cutter houses for the poor". - -sche (discuss) 01:14, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Sche, if you choose American English or British English from the drop down Ngram menu, you see that predicative use of key took off in America as you said in the 1960s-1970s, and in the UK in the 1990s-2000s. So it seems younger native speakers of British English are speaking a more mid-Atlantic dialect. When I worked as a subeditor for a publishing house (publishing on global politics and economics), the house style was to strip out predicative key, but it seemed to become harder and harder for the company to hire young subeditors who grasped the house style quickly.86.144.23.105 11:05, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Only one of the 4 citations in [[key#Adjective]] has it used after a copula. But key seems well on the way to being used gradably/comparatively as well as in predicates. ("A very key zone in the chart", "one very key aspect", "identifying information gaps has never been more key", “This has given me a position at the table for very key decision making within our party and the parliament”). These usages still seem uncommon in print and don't appear in Google N-Grams at all. But the writing is on the web. DCDuring (talk) 18:02, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Blanket: "By contrast, any emotional or motivational explanation of autism would seem to predict too blanket a degree of social disinterest", "the anger that long propelled research into those who stood by as Europe's Jews were assaulted has given way to a more nuanced, less blanket assessment of actions and decisions", "you often get into very blanket approach".

Cookie-cutter: "the project is more specialized and less cookie cutter", "We are very cookie-cutter", "Everything was very cookie cutter, down to the houses and lawns."

Note that some of these examples also show predicate use. DCDuring (talk) 18:21, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

DCDuring, I started the thread by admitting that there were generational differences in British English, so from the very start I acknowledged that some native speakers do use all such words predicatively. You have done assiduous research to prove.... da daa.... drum roll.... that some native speaker do use all such words predicatively. Which I knew. As I have stated in other threads in the December Tea Room, descriptivism is valid, and will eventually drive the development of the language, although for social and cultural reasons (and given our ageing demographic profile where relatively large numbers of people are still alive who don't accept all the new usages), companies, including publishing houses, may wish to maintain more conservative house styles, prescribing some less progressive uses for use in their publications. I think for foreign learners of English, the debate is uninteresting, as they will simply prefer to learn the way younger people speak and the way most native speakers speak, which means in most instances learning US English, or mid-Atlantic forms of British English. But it is worth noting with words like key that there is a debate over correct usage, as people over 40 aren't dead yet. 86.144.23.105 19:02, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

I prefer that our discussions have some basis other than one's idiolect. Also, it would be nice if we had citations in support of, say, the adjectivity of blanket, which had erroneously claimed that it was not comparable. DCDuring (talk) 21:18, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

I don't see any way of explaining this kind of thing in a useful way in entries. Consequently, I don't see this discussion bearing much fruit.

BTW, it would be easier to follow your contribution to the discussion if you registered and thereby had a username instead of going by two (or more?) IP addresses. DCDuring (talk) 22:24, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Is there a debate? Debate is stronger than disagreement, and should be citable. If some guide says not to do this, we could use that as a justification for explaining what's going on.--Prosfilaes (talk) 06:56, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

DCDuring, the OP (me) didn't refer to blanket. I started by saying that some native speakers use key predicatively. Your discovery, in NGrams, that some native speakers use key predicatively proves this, but are you also seeking to reinvent the wheel? You know, the round things that support wheelbarrows? I argued that there might be a regional or sociolectal aspect to use of key as a predicate, and that could be noted. But as use of key as a predicate is widely attested, it wouldn't need to be either. I see no reason to register on a Far Left website and will not do so. I should add that I did not actively change my IP address, but my router played up yesterday and I rebooted the router and I was automatically assigned a new IP address. This could happen from time to time. I'm the same person in England who sent you an email giving you a quotation from the OED on CD Rom.86.144.23.105 12:38, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

How does the original question and the continuing discussion build Wiktionary? DCDuring (talk) 15:48, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm not seeking to build Wiktionary. Once I realised Wiktionary was controlled by SJW Central out of Silicon Valley, I decided not to assist the project. I was in the middle of uploading a book by Peadar Ua Laoghaire in Wikisource, and stopped immediately once I clocked the far-left extremism here and left Maharagaja or whatever silly name he calls himself now to complete that project. I regularly spot serious errors in the Russian vocabulary on Wiktionary. I noticed one today. And left it there, wrong in all its glory. I just wish Metapedia or Infogalactic would create a Wiktionary-equivalent away from the sticky hands of the SJWs, so that I could contribute there. 86.144.23.105 19:20, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

Then hit the road Jack – who's making you contribute here if this "leftist" project is keeping you up at night? Honestly, I've never been even remotely interested in venturing off to right-wing sites to participate or complain about them, but we're like catnip to you – you just can't stay away even though it apparently causes you irreparable harm. Keep the discussion strictly about words, attestation and linguistics or just give it a rest and go drink some eggnog. Wish you a pleasant journey elsewhere and please don't send us a postcard. --Robbie SWE (talk) 20:53, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

Since the OP freely admits he's "not seeking to build Wiktionary", I've blocked him so he doesn't waste our time any further. —Mahāgaja · talk 22:44, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

Ties (linking) in Dutch IPA

An editor recently added baat het niet, dan schaadt het niet with IPA containing IPA^(key): /ni‿tɑn/. The "‿" shows as red because it is not currently valid for Dutch. What should be done here? Change the term or change the module? Vox Sciurorum (talk) 16:09, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

I'd change the term. I see no use for a tie in that transcription. —Mahāgaja · talk 17:58, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

I didn't see this discussion, but I've just changed it to /(t) d/. Saying the /t/ in 'niet isn't mandatory. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 19:55, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

I suspect the point of that addition was that with some speakers the /d/ of /dɑn/ may become voiceless by assimilation to the preceding /t/, instead of the more usual anticipatory assimilation. (But compare the lag assimilation /t s/ < /t z/ seen in bij nacht zijn alle katten grauw.) I don’t know if we should record all such occasional alternative alterations; otherwise, we should also add a pronunciation to uit de kluiten gewassen.  --Lambiam 16:10, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

crystal ball

2. (by extension, used mostly in the negative form) A way of seeing into the future.

What is the "negative form" of "crystal ball"? "not a crystal ball"? Is "used mostly in the negative form" true for some meaning of "negative form"? Anyone understand this? Mihia (talk) 18:57, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Probably uses like "I don't have a crystal ball" are intended, but that can hardly be called the negative form of crystal ball. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 19:55, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

The intention may be to signal that this is a negative polarity item. The link to the glossary is automagically inserted when using chiefly in the negative as one of the context labels of {{label}}.  --Lambiam 15:47, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

• The negative polarity item categorization seems wrong. Casual perusal of instances of usage, even recent usage, at Google Books does not support predominant usage in negative-polarity constructions. The mere fact that attestation of usage like "I don't have a crystal ball" is abundant doesn't warrant the categorization and label. We wouldn't say attestation of "I'm not an open book" makes open book a negative polarity item. Similarly for expressions like mind-reader, Einstein. DCDuring (talk) 18:41, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree. I don't think that "negative" usage predominates enough to justify the present "chiefly in the negative" label. Mihia (talk) 20:24, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

I went ahead and removed the polarity note since there seems to be a consensus here. "Not having a crystal ball" is a figure of speech, probably overused to the point of being a collocation, but even if it were the "chief" use then it still seems to be a misapplication of the negative polarity idea. --RDBury (talk) 21:46, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

OK, thanks. Mihia (talk) 22:17, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

I have long suspected that we have some overuse/misapplication of the negative-polarity idea. I don't think it's too bad. There are certainly indisputable members of the category, but once some take an interest in such an idea, more and more items are included that are, at best, marginal. CGEL (2002) has some 17 pages on polarity-sensitive items in the chapter on negation. DCDuring (talk) 23:18, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

a gentleman never tells, a lady never tells

Worth entries? 2A02:2788:A4:205:C912:C449:79E7:64F 22:53, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

I don't think so. The first one is a gentleman never asks, anyway. —Mahāgaja · talk 07:59, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

meiner Meinung nach

Shouldn’t the main entry be at jemandes Meinung nach? An opinion can also be seiner Meinung nach,^[33] or unserer Meinung nach.^[34]  --Lambiam 16:03, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

What’s with in my opinion? Also seines Erachtens is unheard. Fay Freak (talk) 16:22, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

In my opinion seems like it should also be moved, no? (Again because "in his opinion", "in the Prime Minister's opinion", etc, etc, etc also exist.) Unless it has so many translations that would be bothersome to update that we'd rather just let these be phrasebook entries and create the generic forms separately... - -sche (discuss) 19:51, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

@Lambiam: The wonderful DWDS usage database lists many examples showing any possessive pronoun is possible. It's not so clear that any noun can be used though; when I tried to use a name instead, DeepL kept trying to put the nach first where it belongs. (I'm unclear on what's the deal with moving nach to the end btw. It seems like nach meiner Meinung would mean exactly the same thing except it's grammatically correct.) On the other issue, I vote in ones opinion in someone's opinion. --RDBury (talk) 21:13, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Proper nouns for the opinions's possessor are not impossible: “Boccalis Meinung nach”, “G.’s Meinung nach”, “Scherer’s Meinung nach”, "Merkel’s Meinung nach".

By WT:CFI#Pronouns, we prefer one as a reflexive placeholder, and otherwise someone (for a person), so it should become in someone's opinion. But should it, or should it actually be in the opinion of? See the discussion about in someone's eyes; IMO this should redirect to in the eyes of. See also in the name of and in the shoes of.  --Lambiam 22:07, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Yes, in someone's opinion does fit the policy better; I'll change my vote. I don't think "in the opinion of" works; though you're right that there is precedent, I'm not convinced it entirely works in those cases either. First, note there is a separate entry for in someone's shoes since I think that's the preferred phrase; you'd say "You wouldn't do that if you were in George's shoes," not "In the shoes of George's you wouldn't do that." At least "in the name of" in preferred in some contexts, but it would become awkward for something like: "Go ahead and start in my name; I'll support whatever you decide." It can't be rephrased as "Go ahead and start in the name of me(?); ... . ." I'm thinking both entries should exist if "in X of" is preferred in some contexts (which should be explained in a gloss btw): "in the eyes of the law," "in the name of God," otherwise have the main entry at "in someone's X" with a redirect at "in X of". By that criterion there should be both in the opinion of (from "in the opinion of the court") and in someone's opinion. This approach does create somewhat redundent entries, but the different formulations are not interchangeable even it they have about the same meaning, and I think it's a good idea to explain the differences.

Anyway, on the original question, given the evidence you found, a move to jemandes Meinung nach seems like a good idea, so I'll change my vote to Yes on that one. --RDBury (talk) 04:22, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

One would normally also prefer “Have you seen George’s new shoes?” to “Have you seen the new shoes of George?” The possessive form instead of the analytic construction with of is generally preferred with simple possessors, such as pronouns or simple common or proper nouns. But one would not say, “imagine yourself in a community health worker in Bangladesh’s shoes”, but, “imagine yourself in the shoes of a community health worker in Bangladesh”.^[35]  --Lambiam 04:59, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the Bangladesh example is an instance of w:Shifting_(syntax), in other words, the weight of the longer noun phrase causes it to be moved later in the sentence than where it normally go. In any case, perhaps both versions of the phrase should be listed as definitions under shoes, as my paper dictionary (American Heritage) does. I'm starting to wonder if any of these phrases is entryworthy given that the are not idioms and there is no fixed word order. --RDBury (talk) 19:07, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

@Lambiam: Postpositive nach is used predominantly with possessive pronouns in this idiom, originally this contrasted with the usage with terms other than pronouns: nach Xs Meinung; that the postpositive use has spread to this cases is a secondary analogical development and therefore still unusual in many cases. With personal names it's almost standard (Herrn Cifcis Meinung nach, Charlies Meinung nach, although nach Xs Meinung, nach Meinung Xs are still possible), but jemandes Meinung nach sounds wrong to my ears (the wording nach jemandes Meinung sounds smoother) and it would imply that every term in the genitive could be used which is not the case (expressions as **der Kanzlerin Meinung nach, **des/eines Lehrers Meinung nach aren't in use, it would almost always be nach Meinung des/der/eines/einer X). Besides, in the expression meines, deines, seines Erachtens you can't fill in other terms than possessive pronouns, I can't imagine that searching for jemandes Erachtens vel sim would yield any results. The best way to lemmatise this is indeed as is done here meines Erachtens for various reasons (gender, first person, usage), but a usage note should explain that meines can be replaced by the other possessive pronouns. And if we need an entry meines Erachtens, meiner Meinung nach could follow this precedent. --Akletos (talk) 07:51, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

It will not normally be used in that form; jemand is merely a placeholder. In an English text one won’t find up someone’s alley either, except as a mention in lists of idioms. But note that Hebrew בעיני-, occurring in Modern Hebrew in the expression מצא חן בעיני, is glossed here in a German scholarly text as “,jemandes Meinung nach‘”. And here, on the Redensarten-Index website, a German online dictionary of idioms, in jemandes Augen ... is glossed as “nach jemandes Ansicht ...; jemandes Meinung nach ...”. I am not advocating that we delete meiner Meinung nach, but instead of having a slew of entries meiner Meinung nach, deiner Meinung nach, seiner Meinung nach, ihrer Meinung nach, unserer Meinung nach, and so on, these should (meiner Meinung nach) all redirect to a central lemma where the Usage notes document restrictions on the distribution of the idiom. I did not readily spot many durably archived contemporary uses with common nouns, but in the (Berliner) Zeit Online I find seiner und anderer vorausschauender Leute Meinung nach, and in Welt meiner und vieler anderer Leute Meinung nach; also, in a judicial verdict, seiner, des Arztes, Meinung nach. In blog posts and such it is not hard to find uses such as meiner Ärzte Meinung nach or unserer Arztes Meinung nach. In older texts, however, this seems to be not that uncommon; here is an 18th-century use of des Schiffers und der Steuer-Leute Meinung nach, here of verschiedener Gelehrten Meinung nach, and this shows one of several uses of aller Gelehrten Meinung nach.  --Lambiam 12:20, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

Purported Proto-Austronesian term Səmay?

I was exploring some of w:Martine Robbeets' claims mentioned over at w:Altaic_languages#Shared_lexicon. She derives Japanese 米 (kome, “uncooked rice”) from Proto-Austronesian Semay. This seems extremely unlikely to me, and I was curious about this, so I had a look at rice#Translations, and ... found no apparent cognates in any of the daughter languages. Most have some variant of nasi for "cooked rice", and beras, begas, bugas for "uncooked rice". I found our entry at Reconstruction:Proto-Austronesian/Səmay, which has zero descendants.

That entry was created by Malay speaker Amir Hamzah 2008 (talk • contribs) in 2012, and basically left untouched since (one move, one bot, no substantive edits to the entry).

Reconstructions of proto forms that have no descendants seem ... of dubious utility, at best. Is this a valid reconstruction, or a phantom that we should delete? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:33, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

politicker

Before today, this entry did not mention or link to politick#Verb or politicking, an obvious oversight. Initially, I just added "one who politicks" to the existing "a politician" definition, but then I split it off because I found plenty of citations where the "politicker" in question was not a politician in the primary senses of that word (1 and 2 in our entry). Does that seem right, or what could be done better? - -sche (discuss) 20:00, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Someone who politicks is, by the definition of the verb politick, someone who engages in political activity. The verb is a synonym of the older politic, so why not use “one who politics”? Perhaps I do not understand the issue. Most politicians are known to engage or have engaged in political activity. But political moves are found everywhere where people are jockeying to gain advantage over others, in business, in academia, in the art world; they may not be politicians, but still, they are politicking. So why is it an issue that they are not politicians?  --Lambiam 22:26, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

I guess what I'm getting at is, it seemed overly narrow to me to define politicker solely as "politician" (or even "politician, one who employs politics"), but it also seems unclear for the second definition to be just "one who politicks", with politick defined the way it is : one entry or the other should make clearer that the activities need not be related to positions in governments or even in political parties (which campaign for positions in governments, or to pressure governments), which is what I think most(?) people would take politician to refer to (a person who has or campaigns for those positions or to pressure those people for legislation, etc), but can involve jockeying for statue in the medical profession or inside a bank hierarchy or the like. A person who jockeys for higher position inside a bank, without ever running for political office, would not normally be called a "politician" AFAIK, but can apparently be a politicker. - -sche (discuss) 22:52, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Another difference is that "politicker" as the agent noun associated with politicking is not dated, unlike [apparently] the "politician" sense. Maybe this? - -sche (discuss) 22:55, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Here is a theory of what happened. In a distant past the verb politic had a neutral meaning of to engage in politics – as politicians are supposed to do, and in a democracy perhaps all citizens of the body politic. The corresponding action noun politicker and verbal noun politicking acquired a pejorative sense which displaced the older neutral sense. The verb politick arose as a backformation, now exclusively with the negative sense. The original verb politic essentially fell into disuse; people still using it basically mean politick in the negative sense but use an archaic spelling of the verb. (Disclosure and disclaimer: I have done no diligent research – even no research at all – to find evidentiary support for this theory.)  --Lambiam 04:40, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

-ulent

Related to the discussion above about -dronic acid, but from a different(?) editor: analysis of cromulent as crom#Irish + -ulent, and similar for turbulent and several other entries. Is this right? In cromulent it seems entirely wrong (Equinox rightly removed it which is what alerted me to this); in turbulent it seems to add nothing over the existing, more correct derivation "from Latin turbulentus, from turba". - -sche (discuss) 20:22, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

“Equivalent to turb +‎ -ulent ” also seems plainly wrong to me; or in any case not better than “tur +‎ -bulent ”.  --Lambiam 22:35, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Now at Wiktionary:Requests for deletion/Others#Category:English_words_suffixed_with_-ulent. - -sche (discuss) 19:53, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

unitaire

Does this also have a religious meaning like the English adjective Unitarian? I'm looking at a text which says the following:

Le mouvement rationaliste, dont je parle ici, se rattache directement aux manifestations unitaires, déistes, saint-simonistes et positivistes, qui se font abondamment en Hollande, depuis 1850 — (Le Testament de Jean Meslier, 1864 edition, this taken from the preface by Rudolf Charles).

I feel like it implies use as an adjective meaning "Unitarian", seeing as déiste, positiviste correlate with theological definitions, and Saint-Simonist is an adj in English. I'm not confident enough in French to add new definitions without some confirmation from better speakers. —Jakeybean^TALK 01:25, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

I can't say whether unitaire can have that meaning or not, but the usual adjective for Unitarian is unitarien. —Mahāgaja · talk 10:06, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Maybe unitaire as Unitarian is an outdated usage. The text is from 1864, so I have found other examples of archaic usages and spellings. I'll add unitarien to the translations for Unitarian (adj). (Happy holidays by the way - hope you're safe and well) —Jakeybean^TALK 12:18, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

TLFi has a noun sense for Unitarian, "Hérétiques qui nient le dogme de la Sainte Trinité, ne reconnaissant qu'une Personne en Dieu, ou niant l'égalité du Fils et de l'Esprit avec le Père" ("heretics who deny the dogma of the Holy Trinity, do not recognise more than one Person in God, or deny the equality of the Son and the Spirit with the Father"; what a quote to use as a definition, love you too, TLFi...), but it does not have a corresponding sense in the adjective section. But perhaps that does not matter, I do not know the TLFi's policy on the subject. It adds that it is usually used in the plural and that unitariens is the more common synonym. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 20:10, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Wait, I was raised Unitarian, "heretics"? (Actually in the US the Unitarians merged with Universalists to become Unitarian Universalists. No one uses the official name though because it's too long.) Unitarians are a bit more inclusive than other denominations, but there's no need to call in the Inquistion :) --RDBury (talk) 20:57, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

I think it must be a dated meaning, replaced by unitarien. Further examples of its use around the same time as the first text I mentioned:

Dès la première réunion tenue à Boston , en 1867 , non seulement un nombre considérable de ministres et de laïques appartenant à des congrégations unitaires ont répondu à l'appel des chefs du mouvement, mais encore quantité de personnages connus... (1892)

Voici donc ce qu'il nous faut actuellement examiner: comment le génie anglo-saxon s'est-il assimilé la doctrine unitaire, cette conception toute latine, et puis comment l'a-t-il appliquée sur le terrain pratique de l'Eglise? (1881)

Do we add potentially obsolete definitions to entries if there's some uncertainty whether it is still used in that sense? RDBury, I can see how "Unitarian Universalists" doesn't particularly roll off the tongue :') —Jakeybean^TALK 00:58, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

Part of the confusion may be that there are actually two different words here. Small-u, unitarian describes a Christian doctrine that rejects the Trinity, as opposed to trinitarian for doctrines that accept the Trinity. Big-U Unitarian describe a specific denomination that was originally founded on, and takes it's name from, unitarian doctrine. (At least that's my understanding, I'm not a minister.) Compare unitarian def. 1 with Unitarian def. 2. And yes, many of these definitions are dated now, especially with the Universalist merger. --RDBury (talk) 01:42, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

That case-based distinction is not widespread (and it also reeks of second-hand prescription), upper-case "Trinitarian" and "Unitarian" are both more common in the theological meaning than their lower-case variants. Certainly Biblical Unitarians don't refer to themselves as "unitarians". ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 09:52, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

Re: "Do we add potentially obsolete definitions to entries if there's some uncertainty whether it is still used in that sense?" Certainly, although if it's not still used, then label it {{label|fr|obsolete}} or {{lb|fr|dated}} or whatever. (Anyway, based on the available evidence, it does seem like unitaire did at least formerly mean unitarian.) Our colleagues at fr.Wikt have the sense without any label, as if to suggest it's still current, if perhaps less common. Anyone want to try searching some more recent books (e.g. tell Google books to only return results from post-1950 or something) for unitaire + other religion words, and see if recent use turns up? - -sche (discuss) 02:49, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

In theology, the term can be used as an attribute for a God in one piece: [36], [37], [38]. Unitarianism teaches a unitary God.  --Lambiam 04:21, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

rever(s)

1. Is the pronunciation /rɪˈvɪər/^[39] for English revers common? Another case of /ˌlɑn.(d)ʒəˈɹeɪ/?
2. We list the singular form rever. Is this not simply a misspelling? Is it even a common misspelling?
 --Lambiam 03:58, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

1. That's the pronunciation that I know. 2. May be a faulty back-formation? Mihia (talk) 22:29, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

Btw, shouldn't we label /ˌlɑn.(d)ʒəˈɹeɪ/ as a common mispronunciation? And also btw, even in this mispronunciation, isn't the primary stress usually on the first syllable? Mihia (talk) 22:38, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

In the US it's so common that I suspect most who don't speak French don't even know there's another way to pronounce it. Etymologically, it's totally wrong, but who says language always has to make sense?. As for the stress, the /ˌlɑn.(d)ʒəˈɹeɪ/ pronunciation definitely has final stress. I suspect that the stereotype of French pronunciation that assumes everything ends in eɪ also assumes that it can't be French if it's not accented on the last syllable. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:13, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

I think it may different in the US then. In the UK, I think the situation is as I described. Mihia (talk) 11:10, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

Although a less spectacular fail, /rɪˈvɪər/ could as well be characterized as a mispronunciation. The pronunciation /ɹəˈvɛəɹ/ fits within English phonology and is a much better approximation of the French.  --Lambiam 13:20, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm not 100% certain about this case, but generally speaking I don't think we can necessarily deem an English pronunciation of a borrowed word a mispronunciation just because it doesn't agree with the pronunciation in the original language. There must surely be many cases of English pronunciations being generally accepted as correct in English, even though they are different from the source language pronunciations, and indeed are not even the closest approximation to the source pronunciations using native sounds of the English language. Mihia (talk) 14:50, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

Sure, what started out as a mis-anything may eventually become accepted common practice, even to the extent that what originally was the correct way is generally felt to be weird or wrong; deciding on when exactly something ceases to be a misspelling or mispronunciation (or both: mischievious) and becomes accepted will always be a tough judgement call. In general, the modified pronunciation of a loanword tends in the direction of how one would expect the word to be pronounced if it was not borrowed, like how the loanword garage rhymes (in RP) with carriage, inherited from Middle English. An English speaker not familiar with the word lingerie but having to read it aloud might come up with /ˈlɪŋ.ɡə.ɹi/ or /ˈlɪn.dʒə.ɹi/, or perhaps /lɪnˈdʒɪə.ɹi/, but not /lɒŋ.ɡə.ˈɹuː/ or /lɑn.dʒəˈɹeɪ/.  --Lambiam 11:10, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

blue

Adj. sense:

(Australia, politics) Supportive of or related to the Liberal Party.

Illawarra turns blue in Liberal washout

The usex puzzles me. For me, "Liberal washout" would mean a very poor performance by the Liberal party, whereas here it seems to be intended in the sense of "landslide", AFAICG. Perhaps the example is just faulty/confusing, and I intend to change it anyway for clarity, but I'm also raising it here in case there is a sense of washout meaning "overwhelming victory", or something like that -- perhaps an Australian sense? -- that we are presently lacking. Anyone know it? Mihia (talk) 20:51, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

@Mihia: I guess this is supposed to mean that although the Liberal Party lost all over the country they won in Illawara. --Akletos (talk) 21:29, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, yes, of course it could mean that, but on reading that sentence, with no other information, I would assume that "blue" was the colour of the party opposing the Liberals. Thus it seems an almost wilfully confusing usage example, to the point that I wondered if in fact "washout" is used in a sense like "the Liberals washed out (washed away) the opposition." Mihia (talk) 22:22, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

Duh, it has only just occurred to me that of course this may be a real news story, and indeed it is [40], and indeed it does seem to be referring to an overall Liberal victory? Mihia (talk) 22:32, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm thinking "washout" means "landslide" in Australian. Apparently it's also used when an event is called off due to rain, see [41]. Afaik neither of these meanings exist in American English. --RDBury (talk) 18:12, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Interestingly, I later also found "Biden failed to flip crucial toss-up states such as Florida and Ohio and pull off the blue washout his supporters had been touting" in a British newspapert [42], where "washout" seems to be used in the same sense again, i.e. of a landslide victory -- completely the opposite meaning to what I would naturally understand. Anyway, on the basis of the evidence that we have, I think I'll add this sense to "washout". The separate "called off due to rain" meaning, by the way, is well known to me here in the UK. Mihia (talk) 20:25, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

have one's day in court

Should this be moved to one's day in court, or to day in court? “your day in court”, in Collins English Dictionary. gives some examples without have:

• "He knew that this would be his day in court–his last chance to explain why he acted as he did."
• "We knew it was a question of freedom of speech. All we wanted was our day in court."

See also Daniel Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, p. 38: "memes have not been shown to be a bad idea, and they will get their day in court in this book." PUC – 13:17, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

• Move to day in court. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 13:20, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
• Move, keeping the redirect. DCDuring (talk) 03:26, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
• @DCDuring, Vox Sciurorum: Done. Please check that the new definition is correct. 212.224.235.168 13:36, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

in the hot seat

Should we just redirect it to hot seat, and expand the gloss of the latter? While this prepositional phrase is common, various kinds of “hot seat practice” are common where people “take the hot seat”. Fay Freak (talk) 15:30, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

Redirect per nom, but this should be an RfD to get the appropriate aggreeing indications. DCDuring (talk) 03:30, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I didn’t want to start a contradictory procedure (RfD) because it is so borderline, “idiomatic” but still totally treatable as still sum of parts, so any side is arguable and it would be a weak delete for me as a proposer, or I didn’t even think of hard-redirecting as a delete but as incorporating the content on the hot seat page which then should have at least one example of this prepositional phrase; thinking it is more cleanly and synoptic to have a consolidated page than different entry titles. But this may still be RfD so if anyone agrees he may create one … Fay Freak (talk) 13:35, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

It seems to me that there is some idiomaticity in the use of the definite article. The definition of hot seat presently reads "Any stressful situation", by which token one might expect that one could be "in a hot seat", yet we don't (normally) say this. However, the article is not unique to the phrase with "in", so presumably should be explained at hot seat. Mihia (talk) 17:42, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

What about attributive use of hot-seat? We could address the favored use of the with redirects and usage examples and/or citations. DCDuring (talk) 23:18, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

I think this is similar to in the long term, which for attributive use morphs into long-term. Are there non-attributive uses of hot seat in the sense of a stressful situation other than in the prepositional-phrase idiom?  --Lambiam 04:33, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

donor fatigue

The current definition seems insufficiently specific: "A phenomenon in which people no longer give to charities, although they have [done so/given to them] in the past." Lexico adds "resulting from the frequency of such appeals", but perhaps the exhaustion of compassion or empathy is more important to mention. Checking on Google Books suggests that this term does not only apply to people giving to charities but also to donor countries giving to charities, projects, relief efforts or directly to developing countries. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 18:30, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

Agreed, the present definition does not capture the sense of "fatigue". The present definition would also fit the case where people no longer give because they cannot afford to, but that would not be "donor fatigue". Mihia (talk) 20:33, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

Are we sure this is not SoP? One can find empathy fatigue, generosity fatigue, sympathy fatigue, charity fatigue, COVID fatigue, social(-)media fatigue, election fatigue, Trump fatigue, Bush fatigue, Obama fatigue, Christmas fatigue. If we are looking for expressions involving the fatigued rather than the fatiguing, one can find volunteer fatigue, voter fatigue, reader fatigue, driver fatigue, player fatigue. Some of these involve physical fatigue, some mental fatigue. We may need definitions of fatigue that cover such senses, but I don't see how we need entries for the collocations. DCDuring (talk) 21:04, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

@DCDuring I am quite certain that this is SOP. Your examples volunteer fatigue, voter fatigue, etc. are particularly topical. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 10:39, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

hit the tape

Read here: "Mating successfully is not an optional adventure in life; it’s the finish line, the goal, and whatever it takes to hit the tape is functional whatever cost or burden it places on its bearer."

Is it an idiom? Is it synonymous with breast the tape? PUC – 20:57, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

• Apparently it refers to breaking through the ribbon across the finish line of a footrace. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 21:06, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

breast the tape

@PUC: Yes, I know the phrase "breast the tape" in the sense given at [43], both literally and in straightforward extended figurative uses. Strictly speaking it seems SoP to me, but I suppose it could be hard for someone to figure out, so I guess it's OK to keep. Mihia (talk) 21:50, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

@Mihia: Ok, thanks! PUC – 22:31, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Sectionals, regionals, nationals, championships

In America, I often hear sectionals and regionals being used to refer to competitions as in, "She won first place at regionals, so she'll be going to sectionals!" I do not think that this sense is adequately covered in the entries for sectionals and regionals, which simply state "plural of (regional or sectional)". Certainly, the entries for the singular sectional and regional cover the sense of "A tournament or match held at the ... level" (though regional does this in a roundabout - should a more specific sense be added?), but "sectionals" and "regionals" do not always refer to multiple competitions. If I say "Our team swept at regionals.", I am not saying "Our team swept at the regional competitions." but "Our team swept at the regional competition." Perhaps an argument could be made that since there are typically multiple regionals/sectionals, this plural form is being used to express several separate competitions that form a level of competition. However, you also must contend with the adjacent forms "nationals" and "championships"; saying "She is a qualifier for nationals" cannot refer to multiple competitions in any sense because there is almost always only one competition at the national level (same thing goes with "championships"). I suggest that regionals, sectionals, championships, and nationals be updated to reflect this usage of the plural form to refer to single events.  Mysterymanblue  03:04, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

In the case of "regional(s)", I'm not entirely convinced that this sense isn't already covered in the existing definition: "An entity or event with scope limited to a single region." A competition is an event and the a regional would be limited to a single region. Instead of adding a new definition I'd vote for adding example sentences with this and other possible usages. Note that different types of competitions are organized in different ways, and the corresponding governing bodies may use different terminology, or the same terminology may be used to refer to different things. I'm not sure "sectional" is used in thus way, see [44]. --RDBury (talk) 17:23, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Pronunciation of brevet

Listen to this:

Audio US (1)

(file)

. Does this sound like an acceptable pronunciation of brevet? We currently list two US pronunciations, but no RP:

1. (US) IPA^(key): /bɹəˈvɛt/
2. (US) IPA^(key): /ˈbɹɛ.vɪt/

I think the latter is also RP, but I furthermore expect (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /brəˈvɛt/.  --Lambiam 11:26, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

First of all, that audio sounds like /ˈbɹʌvɪt/ to me. This is not a word I know, so I don't have an intuition as to its pronunciation, but I just checked nine different dictionaries, four British and five American, and they all agree that while the US pronunciation can be stressed on either syllable (perhaps with some preference for the second), the UK pronunciation can be stressed only on the first. I'll edit the page accordingly; if other disagree, they can change it. —Mahāgaja · talk 12:40, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

down with

Interjection senses:

1. Expressing disapproval of or encouraging actions against a person, organization, practice, belief, etc., typically in a public protest.

   Down with the government!

2. Away with...!, cease! (Can we add an example for this sense?)

   Down with that noise!

Don't really understand usex #2. To me it seems an odd thing to say, and the only way I would interpret it is as "Turn/Keep the noise down!", which seems broadly analogous to saying e.g. "Down with the flag!" meaning "Lower the flag!", i.e. open-ended SoP and hardly deserving of an entry. Does anyone else see something else in it? Or, alternatively, can anyone come up with a better example for #2 (that is clearly distinct from #1)? Also not convinced about the PoS, btw. Mihia (talk) 11:27, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

• The other three definitions of down with are familiar but that one is not. I interpret "down with that noise" as "turn that noise down", a meaning that does not generalize. I wouldn't say "down with walking on my lawn" as a command. If I said it, it would be in the first sense. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 11:38, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

There seems to be agreement, and I couldn't find any supporting evidence that this meaning actually exists (see, for example, [45]), so I went ahead and removed the definition. --RDBury (talk) 15:56, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Istanbul

Discussion moved to Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2020/December.

ELI5

Netspeak for "explain like I'm five" (years old), i.e. explain something to me very simply. Famously the name of a subreddit where people request simple explanations of difficult concepts. Our entry says it's a noun, but how is this true? I've never seen anyone say e.g. "can you put that explanation into ELI5?". I always saw it as an imperative verb phrase. Equinox ◑ 10:57, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree, I don't see how it's a noun (perhaps the creator thought it was a noun because if used to denote the subreddit it would be a noun). it's ether a ===Verb=== or a ===Phrase===. - -sche (discuss) 11:45, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

Okay, I am going to change it to Phrase. Some day hopefully we will get citations that will prove it one way or the other. Equinox ◑ 12:41, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

I found a single use (at Google Groups, not? Usenet) of ELI5ing, but many more on the web in general. Also ELI5ed and an ELI5 and both the verb and noun ELI5s. So it would seem to be both a verb and a noun. The imperative interpretation would apply to any English predicate, but we usually call them verbs. I don't see it in "durably archived" sources. DCDuring (talk) 18:55, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

@Equinox: I have added three citations. J3133 (talk) 20:41, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

@J3133: Thanks. The part of speech is still not clear to me. Equinox ◑ 14:38, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

a God's name

The entry was created last month with an {{rfdef}} and two citations. Some editions of the Kemp cite have "dance a' God's name" with an apostrophe as if the a is not an indefinite article but rather a rendering of "in" or something, and we document that sense at [[a]], too. I also see an occurrence of these words in The Shoemaker's Holiday in Elizabethan Drama: Eight Plays, page 492 (published 1990), where "a" also makes sense as rendering "in": "Will I, quotha? At whoe suit? By my troth, yes, I'll go. A cambric apron, gloves, [...] I'll sweat in purple, mistress, for you; I'll take anything that comes a God's name."; other editions of that work have "a'" with an apostrophe. Should the {{rfdef}} be replaced with something like {{altform|en|in God's name}}? - -sche (discuss) 11:59, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

Sounds right to me. DCDuring (talk) 18:56, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

fai pure

Italian interjections like this have different forms depending on who the listener is or the number of listeners (fai pure for the informal "tu", faccia pure for the more formal "lei", fate pure for the plural "voi", and so on). As it happens, we have quite a few of these in Category:Italian interjections. Take as a sampling: beato te, che ti è preso, chi ti credi di essere. How should we treat this - by making separate entries for each, deleting them all, adding a usage note, etc.? And what should we regard as the "base form" - the more formal version or the informal one? Imetsia (talk) 17:02, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

• The first two Treccani entries I checked (beato and prendere) use the tu forms in derived expressions so I weakly vote for that. Some of these are more likely to be used in contexts where I expect familiarity. (Disclaimer: My native language lacks a T-V distinction and I'm sure I didn't recognize all the subtleties of tu vs. vous in the French literature I studied any more than I got Shakespeare's use of thou.) Vox Sciurorum (talk) 17:32, 29 December 2020 (UTC)
• Does it have to be in the imperative mood? Is something wrong with the use seen here: “Si, te l’ho chiesto, ricordi, mi hai detto di fare pure.”?^[46]  --Lambiam 03:38, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

  It definitely seems more natural to use it as an imperative. While I can't say with certainty that your example sentence is ungrammatical, it sounds awkward. Italian dictionaries seem to include it only as an imperative (Zingarelli has "fai pure" while Oxford Italian has both "fa' pure" and "fate pure"). Imetsia (talk) 21:57, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

ride the crest of the wave

Does this entry make sense to people? I tried to improve it but was reverted; see its talk page. Equinox ◑ 18:30, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree that it does not make sense to talk about the purpose of a success. A success is the result of an effort. An effort can have a purpose, but success is not an effort. Success as the result of an effort means that its purpose, or a stepping stone towards this purpose, has been reached. The idiom under discussion has two variants: ride the crest and ride the wave. The former has been riding the crest in the seventies and eighties, but has been overtaken by the latter.^[47] I think all mean the same and have basically just one sense: to experience an extended period of excellent fortune (and not what is says at ride the wave – any such taking advantage is incidental to the fortune befallen the wave rider). No purpose was harmed in this formulation.  --Lambiam 04:03, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

franc-maçons

Hi, I've been using this site almost daily for a few years but this is my first post. I don't know if this is the right place to put this so please tell me if it's not.

I don't think this word exists. I've edited pages before but I've not come across the situation where I don't think the word exists. I think the right spelling is francs-maçons. I don't know how to go about correcting it.

Thanks. — This unsigned comment was added by Can't Spell Won't Spell (talk • contribs) at 17:52, 30 December 2020 (UTC).

• TLFi confirms francs-maçons and also gives franc-maçonnes as a plural. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 18:00, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

  The plural franc-maçonnes is used for female Freemasons.^[48]

• Fixed. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 18:01, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

syne pronunciation

TLDR: Is /səin/ a possible English pronunciation?

I resolved an rfp by copying pronunciation from NED (OED first edition published 1919) to syne. User:Kilo Lima Mike thinks /səin/ looks weird. The NED is older than the IPA so it may use symbols differently. A comment in the dictionary notes of syne, hyne, thyne, and whyne, "The northern-English spellings with -ei- (-ey-), riming with ī, are common to all four words; their phonological significance is obscure." The more modern Dictionary of the Scots language has the same səin, with sin in the northeast. How would you spell the pronunciation using IPA? Vox Sciurorum (talk) 22:16, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

/səin/ is the correct pronunciation for both Scots and Scottish English, where /əi/ and /aɪ/ are separate phonemes. For RP and General American, which do not have two separate phonemes in this area, I would prefer the transcription /saɪn/. I think in all accents of English it's a homophone of sign at any rate, and how to transcribe the vowel phoneme is a matter of preference and convention. Some dictionaries write it /sʌɪn/; other possibilities include /sain/ and /sajn/ as well as various non-IPA conventions like /sayn/ or /sīn/. —Mahāgaja · talk 22:50, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

As a pronunciation with a 'z' is given for 'auld lang syne', surely we should have this pronunciation listed in the 'syne' article?Overlordnat1 (talk) 14:40, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

"gay for"

We have these two senses at gay:

• "(slang, with for) Homosexually in love with someone." with cites of the form "pirates [...] are obviously totally gay for each other" and "paint the US and Russian presidents as being gay for each other"
• "(slang, with for) In love with something, usually as a homosexual", with a cite of "I'm totally gay for musical theater"

Should these be merged? I'm not sure, but it feels like the existing citations (and definitions!) could all be covered by "homosexually in love with" or "in love with in a gay way". Or am I missing something? (Incidentally, is gayly ever used to mean "in a gay (homosexual) way"?) - -sche (discuss) 07:13, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

• The quotation "gay for musical theater" is playing on the stereotype of homosexual men liking musicals. I think the two senses are really a single sense meaning acting like a gay person in various ways. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 12:36, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

  I'm trying to imagine a straight guy saying "I'm totally gay for monster truck rallies". I do wonder whether uses can be found where someone is "gay for" something that isn't stereotypically gay. —Mahāgaja · talk 12:42, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

  I know it is from LGBT creators, but I instantly recalled this podcast episode, where they joke about the term "gay for" being applicable to anything (doesn't have to be sexual or LGBT-themed). The podcast title is even "Gay for Thai food". It reminds me of when people use the word "fetish" in the same way... like "Thai food is my fetish", with no actual sexual meaning behind it. —Jakeybean^TALK 13:23, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

To Vox's point, I did wonder a little bit whether this was even a separate sense from the main sexual-orientation sense... I suppose it is, but I can also find "queer for", and one citation of "bi for", though they both seem to be rare compared to "gay for". (Straying off topic, I see "kink" used in the way Jakeybean has seen "fetish" used.) - -sche (discuss) 15:23, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

@-sche: The way I thought of it, one represents homosexual romantic love, and the other represents a non-romantic infatuation that humorously aligns with homosexuality. —Suzukaze-c (talk) 23:36, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Gotcha!

Etymology 2 of gotcha, for the noun sense, says: “Direct acquisition of gotcha, the contraction of got you.“ What does this mean? Who acquired what? Are there examples of indirect acquisitions?  --Lambiam 13:54, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

AFAICT it seems to be trying to convey that "the noun is derived from the verb", which AFAIK we usually say more along those lines and under one etymology header. E.g. fuck you#Noun is derived from the verbal phrase, and doesn't have its own etymology section. - -sche (discuss) 15:27, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

I've merged the etymologies. —Mahāgaja · talk 16:38, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

fall sick, fall ill, sicken, get sick, be taken sick, etc.

I've started centralising the translations for these at fall ill. Is it the most common variant, though? This Ngram indicates that get sick has become vastly more common than the rest. Should the translations be moved there? PUC – 16:58, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

• Fall ill sounds more formal. Normal people say get sick. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 17:00, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
• Looks like it. "sicken" seems to mean "about to become ill" these days. SemperBlotto (talk) 17:02, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
• I think there's a dialectal difference though: in en-US, "get sick" means "become ill", while in en-GB it means "become nauseous", doesn't it? —Mahāgaja · talk 17:12, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
  • If that's the case, it would be good to document it at get sick. @Mihia, Equinox? PUC – 17:30, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
    • There is a regional component though, I (from the US) never use the "fall" variants, but I've heard them used by people not from the US. I'm not that certain that NGrams includes enough representation from non-US/GB English to be an unbiased sample. --RDBury (talk) 02:23, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
    • The primary meaning of sick in BrE is "vomit", not "ill", but I don't recognise it with get. I would say feel sick for "feel nauseous", and be sick for "vomit". If I hear get sick I always assume its the AmE meaning of sick. --ColinFine (talk) 22:59, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

@Mahagaja, Vox Sciurorum, Mahagaja: Relatedly: what about fall pregnant / get pregnant? See this Ngram. PUC – 18:02, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

(And somewhat relatedly, see Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2020/December § fall pregnant.) PUC – 18:02, 31 December 2020 (UTC).

Synonym: become pregnant. ^[49]  --Lambiam 23:32, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

I would understand "get sick" (from a British speaker) as vomiting, not as general illness. Equinox ◑ 23:01, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

No, in British English "he was sick" e.g. "he was sick in the toilet" refers to vomiting. "To get sick" doesn't refer to vomiting, but rather to falling ill. 81.141.8.40 06:56, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

I agree entirely with Colin Fine's analysisOverlordnat1 (talk) 13:49, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Jew ("use...depends on the speaker's opinions")

One of the usage notes is: "[T]here are some religious groups that identify themselves as part of Judaism, but that other Jewish groups might not; hence, use of the term Jew often depends on the speaker's opinions." I want to know what other people think about whether or not it makes sense to bother saying that. It's not wrong, it's just...true of any religious or ethnic group big enough to have factions, isn't it? Should we mention in Christian and Muslim that some groups like Mormons identify themselves as Christians but other Christian groups historically have not, and that some groups like Ahmadis consider themselves Muslims but other Muslims often don't? - -sche (discuss) 00:16, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

I do not know whether it is true of any sufficiently large ethnic or religious group, but it is indeed true to varying degrees for each of the big five. But to be a devil's advocate for the usage note: Jew is prominently used in both a religious and an ethnic/cultural sense so that both a non-practicing Jewish atheist and a convert without any Jewish ancestry can lay claim to the term; in the West it is rather unusual to have such a distinct ethnic/cultural/demographic component: even if a religion had a sharply defined subculture, if one leaves a religion you also leave the demographic/subculture. The question of who is a Jew is historically important and much discussed in Judaism; in some religions the analogous question is considered close to pointless. Then you have edge cases like Ethiopean Jews (MacCulloch considers them to be an Ethiopean development without Jewish ancestry), Messianic Jews (often groups mostly made up of gentiles with a naff fascination with Judaism who were already Evangelical before 'converting'), Hispanics with possible but often nebulous Jewish ancestry reclaiming their Jewishness (potentially in ways quite distinct from any conventionally Jewish group). I think there is a justification for having a usage note addressing this, despite the shortcomings of the current one. I'm not really sure how to improve it.

I don't think the need for usage notes at the other entries is justified to the same degree. If you wanted to add a usage note to Christian I would simply add that Trinitarianism is often considered an essential doctrine by the uninitiated, but I note that historically non-Trinitarian groups were regarded as heretics (therefore they could be legally burned at the stake), not infidels: at least socially they were regarded as Christians of some kind. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 15:33, 2 January 2021 (UTC)