User talk:-sche/Archive/2013

Dates of the English language, in particular the word a

I am still learning all the nuances of this undertaking, and granted I am not as knowledgeable in the languages as I am in the Sciences, but I am learning as I go. After your deletion of the a definitions for she, he, it, they etc. I did a bit of research and I see where you are coming from. It would have helped if you or anyone could have just pointed some of these things out to some of us newcomers. I understand that people may not feel it is their job to train all the newbie's but a little advice and "training" would go a long way in saving both yours and others time later on down the road, especially to those of us that it appears apparent are not just entering the odd word, but are attempting to assist in this great undertaking in a meaningful way. First, I want to explain the way that I am/was wording things on the defdate template. If it is in current use I would say something like First attested around 1350 to 1470., meaning that is when it was first documented. If it is obsolete, I would say something like, Attested from around 1350 until 1470. or Attested from around 1350 to 1470 until the late 16^th century. In particular with the she, he, it variations of the word a, my sources stated obsolete except in Scottish and English dialectal form, which I took to mean it was still in limited modern usage. Now back to the research (quick) that I did, I see that the Modern English language is said to have "arrived" in the early to mid 15^th century, so I will keep that in mind when I am adding obsolete words that didn't go beyond those dates and then I will place them in their respective Middle or Old English areas. With all of this, there is a question that comes to light if a word is formed as my SOED say in the OE range of prior to 1150, but still persists into the modern English ranged of the 17^th century, does it get an entry in all three date ranges of the English language, Old, Middle, and plain English? Finally, as I have stated before on many of my posts, (not just to you, -sche, but to all, please correct me, guide me, or whatever you need to do, (in a pleasant manner :) please), as that will make your job's easier if I am making mistakes and it will make mine easier of I don't have to go back and clean up my own mistakes. Speednat (talk) 18:12, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

I am not too good at this finding and citing thing, but I did run across Shakespeare's Henry V, where he writes "a babbled of green fields" where a definitely is he. I don't know how I found that, it just kind of popped up while I was looking for something else. Anyway I am not losing too much sleep over this, I just want the product (WT) to be as good and comprehensive while accurate as possible. Speednat (talk) 03:56, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Hi! I didn't realise you were the one who added the [[a]] senses, or I would just have asked you what you meant by the dates; I'm sorry. (Sorry also that I and other Wiktionarians are so taciturn.) Regarding "obsolete except in Scottish and English dialectal form": in speech, I expect /ə/ or /ɑ/ is found (for "he", "it" and "they" if not for the others) in many dialects, as a reduction of /hi/, /ɪt/, etc... but I couldn't find anything in print. It's hard to search for, too (as you know)... I should probably scour a Shakespeare corpus to see if anything else like the "a babbled" you cite turns up for "she", "it" or "they".

Regarding words attested in multiple periods: if a word is attested in Old English, it should have an ==Old English== entry, yes. I think Wiktionary should also have Middle and Modern English sections for words attested in both those periods (because pronunciation and sometimes inflection differ), but I get the impression from some other editors that they don't think Middle English entries are necessary if a word is also attested in modern English. - -sche (discuss) 04:06, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

I believe I found two more to make it a threesome, is that is needed to qualify an entry? I believe I have read that as correct, so I will re-add the entry with the citations. Let me know what you think, please. Speednat (talk) 07:21, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Scratch that. I didn't realize that the senses in question were all but he, which is what all of my citations cover. So I guess that I will keep my eye open for other instances. Also, I didn't realize that me evolution was as drastic as it has been. Back when I started using the defdate template (like with the a entry), I was just writing in years. I have since added the more detailed words that I stated above. I may need to go back and expand all of those "poor" entries, as they aren't extremely clear. Speednat (talk) 07:31, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Formatierung

Hallo -sche,

Könntest du bitte meine Ergänzung an das übliche, englische Format anpassen? Ich danke dir! Schöne Grüße --Yoursmile (talk) 12:16, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Hallo Yoursmile! Das passte schon an einer der hier-üblichen Formate. :) Einige Benuzter leiten die Definitionen von englischen Wörtern mit Großschreibung ein (als pseudo-Sätze, die auch mit einem Punkt abgeschlossen werden), andere verwenden Kleinschreibung und keinen Punkt, besonders wenn es um einfache Glossierungen handelt. (Definitionen von anderssprachigen Wörtern sind in der Regel nur Glossierungen.) MfG, - -sche (discuss) 21:40, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Rhymes

I am starting to look at working on the Rhymes section and I noticed that there are missing templates. Who should I get with to make sure, that when I make these missing templates that I am doing so correctly? I have made a couple already and they seem to work fine, but I want to make sure that all my I's are dotted and T's crossed. The ones that I have done so far are Here and Here and I made some changes Here and Here. Speednat (talk) 17:23, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

eine Bitte zu Kurzweil

Hallo -sche!
Von Benutzer Metaknowledge wurde die Bitte geäußert, die Beispiele zu übersetzen. Ich habe versucht, ihm die Problematik von Übersetzungen klar zu machen. Zwei offizielle Übersetzungen habe ich gefunden, von denen eine das Lemma völlig ignoriert und die gegebene Übersetzung, wie mir scheint, auch dessen Bedeutung nicht konnotiert. Des Weiteren habe ich versucht, alle anderen Beispiele zu übersetzen. Nun meine Bitte: Wärst du so gut und schaust dir alles mal an und korrigierst sie. Ich denke, es ist wichtig, das genaue Register zu treffen, was mir leider nicht zu gelingen scheint. Vielen Dank dafür im Voraus. — Lieben Gruß dir und ein gesundes Neues Jahr, Caligari ^Ɔɐ^ƀïиϠ_Ⴕ 07:52, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Hier die Beispiele samt Übersetzungen:

1. • „Schiebt meine Vernunft nicht im Kurzweil herum.“
         —Friedrich Schiller: Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua. Ein republikanisches Trauerspiel. [1783] In: Schillers Sämtliche Werke. Erster Band, J. G. Cotta′sche Buchhandlung, Stuttgart 1879 (Projekt Gutenberg; retrieved January 3, 2013).

   "[…] mock not thus my reason."
       —Friedrich Schiller: Fiesco, or The Genoese Conspiracy. A Tragedy by Frederich Schiller. The Echo Library, Teddington 2006, →ISBN, p 16 (GoogleBooks; retrieved January 4, 2013).

   Do not mock my reason whilst amusing yourself.

   Do not push around my reason whilst amusing yourself.

   Do not trifle my reason whilst amusing yourself.

   • „Unter den nackten Göttern und Göttinnen, die sich dort bei Nektar und Ambrosia erlustigen, seht Ihr eine Göttin, die, obgleich umgeben von lauter Fröhlichkeit und Kurzweil, dennoch immer einen Panzer trägt und den Helm auf dem Kopf und den Speer in der Hand behält. Es ist die Göttin der Weisheit.“
         —Heinrich Heine: Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland. [1833/34] In: Der Salon. Band II, Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg 1835 (Projekt Gutenberg; retrieved January 3, 2013).

   Amongst the naked Gods and Godesses who disport themselves there with nectar and ambrosia, you see a Goddess who, although surrounded by nothing but/pure joyance and diversion, however always wears a cuirass and keeps her helmet on and her spear in the arm. It is the Goddess of Wisdom.

   • „Freilich, du willst sie bei Namen nennen und liebkosen; du willst sie am Ohre zupfen und Kurzweil mit ihr treiben.“
         —Friedrich Nietzsche: Von den Freuden- und Leidenschaften. In: Also sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen. Ernst Schmeitzner, Chemnitz 1883, p. 45 (DTA; retrieved January 3, 2013).

   "To be sure, thou wouldst call it by name and caress it; thou wouldst pull its ears and amuse thyself with it."
       —Friedrich Nietzsche: Joys and Passions. In: Thus Spake Zarathustra. A Book for All and None. The Modern Library, New York 1917, p. 34 (translated by Thomas Common; Wikisource; retrieved January 4, 2013).

   • „Und da gab’s in diesem vornehmen Kreise mancherlei Kurzweil.“
         —Rainer Maria Rilke: Mohn … [1895] In: Die Erzählungen. 1. Auflage, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997 (Projekt Gutenberg; retrieved January 3, 2013).

   And there was various amusement in this courtly circle.

   • „Indessen scheint es, daß sie keinerlei Neigung besitzt, unserer Schäferstunde den Verlauf bloßer Kurzweil zu geben.“
         —Kurt Tucholsky: Der Bär tanzt. [1928] In: Das Lächeln der Mona Lisa. 1. Auflage, Ernst Rowohlt, Berlin 1929, p. 222 (Wikisource; retrieved January 3, 2013).

   It seems however that she has no inclination to give our tryst the tenor of bare/mere/sheer amusement.

   • „Seien es nun landschaftliche, kulturelle oder tierische Attraktionen - der Ort samt Umland wartet mit jeder Menge touristischer Kurzweil auf.“
         —Eike Nienaber: Otjiwarongo hat viele Namen… In: Allgemeine Zeitung. Älteste Tageszeitung Namibias — Nachrichten von A bis Z auf gut Deutsch. August 7, 2008 (URL; retrieved January 3, 2013).

   Whether it be the scenic, cultural or animal attractions – the place, along with its hinterland, offers a lot of touristic pastime.

   • „Handwerksstände zum Mitmachen und ein attraktives Kinderprogramm bieten Kurzweil für Groß und Klein.“
         —Das Fabelhafte Weihnachts-Spektakulum. In: Tageblatt. Zeitung fir Lëtzebuerg. December 9, 2011 (URL; retrieved January 3, 2013).

   Craft stalls to join in and an attractive program for children offer pastime for young and old.

Wow, du hast Recht, die offizielle englische Übersetzung der Verschwörung des Fiesco ist schlecht. Ich habe eine zweite Übersetzung gefunden, von George D'Aguilar: "Speak, I / Conjure you, speak, nor longer trifle with / A lover's tortures." Auch das gibt den Sinn nicht exakt wieder. I'll see what I can come up with, though. :) Liebe Grüße, - -sche (discuss) 21:36, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Kurzweil

I apologize for removing the L2 header from the entry. In regards to the actual content of my edit, why are you opposed to using "pages and pages of the edit window" when it makes the wikitext vastly more readable? I don't like guessing what part of the quotation is the publisher, what part is the chapter, what is the title, for each editor's personal formatting style. DTLHS (talk) 20:28, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm not the only one who thinks the templates, rather than making things "vastly more readable", have the opposite effect. Ruakh, too, has called them "a huge broken mess that should never be used". If quotations are formatted according to the standard format prescribed in WT:", chapter titles won't be confused with publishers. If quotations don't follow the standard format, it's no harder to convert them to it than to convert them to templates. (Well, someone used to the manual format might have to look at the template's documentation to remember its parameters, and someone used to the template might have to look at WT:" to remember the manual format, but that's a wash and goes away with exposure to the other format, anyway.)

I don't recall a discussion of the issue itself, though (only discussions like the one I link to that ended up touching on it tangentially). Perhaps we should start one... - -sche (discuss) 20:48, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Reference-book template

I am butting heads with my favorite antagonist Dan Polansky over the use of the reference-book template. I know you are familiar with my edits and I would appreciate your opinion on the matter. Normally I utilize the template to inline cite things like IPA or etymology information or if a really obscure definition is expanded on. I then use the <references/> command to document the inline ciations. Occasionally, I forego the inline because only one of my sources deals with the entry in question, see Abyssinian primrose, and place the reference-book template directly under the ===References=== header. Please weigh in as I value your opinion. Thanks Speednat (talk) 21:56, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

See also Wiktionary:BP#Abyssinian_primrose. --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:02, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

WT:RFM#Template:pml

Is it appropriate just to change this? I know I should wait for due process, but I am impatient to add entries in Sabir and I don't want to create a lot more work for no reason (i.e. deleting & recreating categories). —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:02, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

A couple weeks of silence usually means consent on RFM. In this case, I'm looking into it and will comment there soon. - -sche (discuss) 06:51, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Thankee! (Note: if you're planning to do any good research, it will soon be necessary to read French and Italian works... not much good scholarship on Sabir in English). —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:54, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Re: to Template:fact

Thanks for the heads up regarding using Template:rfv-sense instead of Template:fact. Much appreciated! :) Bumm13 (talk) 02:31, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Islamofascism

Your rollback was an error. My edit is legit.96.51.38.246 19:09, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

I disagree. The term is used almost exclusively by the right wing of the US political scene, and even there it is criticized as "inherently meaningless" by even some more mainstream conservatives. Says Daniel Benjamin, "there is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term". Our definition accurately summarises the context in which the term is used, and the meaning its users impart to it, without implying it's a general term.

I am not a right-winger and I fully recognize the closest political implementation Islam bears resemblence to is fascism as exemplified by their repressive social policy, disgusting misogyny and vehement anti-semitism. Read history and Wikipedia's own article on Islamofascism. Their historical imperialism of invading other nations and expelling or killing the indigenous people and replacing it with their own is a perfect portrait of the kind of violent nationalism practiced by the Nazis in WW2.96.51.38.246 00:10, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia's article calls it a neologism and gives examples of use by Mike Huckabee, Clifford May and George Bush. - -sche (discuss) 00:44, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

It also gives Christopher Hitchen's elucidation of the word. And I wouldn't consider George Bush to have the credibility to define apples and bananas let alone a "neological" word.

The current definition is way too vague, clarifies nothing about the "fascism" part and to say its "pejorative" and "offensive" to criticize a radical ideology is biased and idiotic. Any word can be a pejorative. I find it offensive to be called a Republican. :)96.51.38.246 01:29, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Holocaust denial

The request for deletion failed, so you delete the article, giving as a reason the fact that the request failed? How is that not ridiculous? kwami (talk) 01:21, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

If you look at WT:RFD#holocaust_survivor (and its subsections WT:RFD#Holocaust_denial and WT:RFD#Holocaust_denier), you'll see that the terms have failed RFD, per overwhelming consensus, in a new RFD which followed the one archived on Talk:Holocaust denial and addressed points which the archived discussion did not. In particular, the previous RFD proceeded under the assumption that Holocaust denial referred only to denial of the Shoah, and thus was not SOP, but RFV showed that assumption to be false. - -sche (discuss) 01:35, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

@Kwamikagami, "RFD failed" does not mean the request failed but that the entry failed the idiomacity test during RFD and therefore should be deleted. --WikiTiki89 13:14, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

whew

realise being away from wiktionary for a few years or more might be a culture shock, but interested to see at Java - the line - (computing, trademark) An object-oriented, garbage-collected computer programming language. surely that is deliberate vandalism? I find it astonishing someone hasnt picked up on it. cheers sats (talk) 07:49, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi! That wording threw me off at first, too, but it turns out "garbage collection" is a programming term. (If you don't think it's appropriate to say Java "garbage collects", I suggest you discuss that with our resident programmers by posting on Talk:Java.)

nah - thanks for the clearing the red link - it is now self explanatory, as a red link it was suspect - cheers. sats (talk) 08:20, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

User:Luciferwildcat

Two questions:

1. Is there a comprehensive list of his socks anywhere? Because User:LightningNightling, at least, has edited on other projects.
2. User:AVerSiMeDejan is quacking like he's Lucifer, i.e., editing articles that combine penises with other words. Do you think he might be a Lucifer sock?

I come to you because that's where I was sent when I brought these questions up on IRC Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 06:22, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

I don't know of a comprehensive list, but it might be worthwhile to compile one. Some other socks have been discussed here: WT:Beer parlour/2013/February#Lucifer_is_back. As for AVerSiMeDejan: yup, that's him (and I see Dvortygirl has now blocked him). - -sche (discuss) 06:33, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Definition vs etymology

Etymology does not belong on the definition line. That is my normative stance and that is the current practice in English Wiktionary. Hence my reverts at unschön. If you are saying that English Wiktionary often does place etymological and morphological information on the definition line, can you show me the evidence, ideally in the form of a significant number of entries that do that? --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:05, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

---

volvere

Your bot messed this up. Fixed. SemperBlotto (talk) 18:45, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing that. Though I was using AWB, I was making changes like that by hand, so there shouldn't be any other errors like that out there, unless I typoed the same word twice. - -sche (discuss) 19:07, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Template:twd

Hi -sche, is there a specific reason why you deleted Template:twd? --80.114.178.7 01:22, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

The Dutch sub-dialects of Dutch Low Saxon / Low German, including {{twd}}, were deleted following much discussion in the Beer Parlour in March and November (and on RFDO and even right here on my talk page), discussion which culminated in this RFM discussion. - -sche (discuss) 02:13, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll read those discussions. --80.114.178.7 17:11, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Citations:Srebrenica

In edit 19167247 on Citations:Srebrenica you added "bevolkering" (cf. nl:bevolking, de:Bevölkerung), are you sure? If you aren't sure please check the hyphen in "onuit-voerbaar" too. --80.114.178.7 23:40, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

logorrhea and logorrhoea

I one believes http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=logorrhea%2Clogorrhoea&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=, you should be making logorrhea the main entry rather than logorrhoea. The former seems to be slightly more common even for British English, as per http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=logorrhea%2Clogorrhoea&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:50, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Nice research! I've been merging duplicated entries two pairs at a time, centralising the content of one pair in the US spelling, and the other in the UK spelling. If logorrhea is more common in both places, though, it should certainly be the lemma. I'll make the switch. - -sche (discuss) 03:41, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Albanian translation of adjective

The noun sense used the code "als" which you deleted. I'm not sure what to do with it. Can you have a look? —CodeCat 01:24, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

The Albanian section at di also used it. There are probably more uses that are now causing script errors that will appear as the software updates it. —CodeCat 01:27, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

I have a hard time believing adjektiv is used in tosk but not standard Albanian; I'm looking into that.

I'm curious as to why these pages didn't show up as transcluding the template before. (I did check.) - -sche (discuss) 01:35, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

Possibly because the templates have already been partially migrated over to the module. As of right now, having no transclusions is no guarantee that a code is not used. —CodeCat 01:38, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

I found another: ka#Albanian. Strangely I've noticed a few pages that use "als" for Alemannic German instead, even though the code for that is "gsw"... —CodeCat 13:40, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, the Alemannic wikis use the code "als", so people just assume it's the ISO code. - -sche (discuss) 16:31, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

nds-de

In Hamburg scheint es un zu heißen, vgl. http://plantenunblomen.hamburg.de/. —Angr 20:08, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

Jup. Und wenn ich die Zeit (und das Buch) finde, kuck ich in ein schleswigsches Wörterbuch. - -sche (discuss) 20:27, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

Also ich würde fast schon un als Hauptform und on als Alternative bezeichnen. Was meinst du? —Angr 20:31, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

OK :) - -sche (discuss) 22:54, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

Appendix:English terms of Native North American origin

This page has some script errors since your last edit(s). I don't know if those edits caused it, but you seem to be the editor who has worked most on this page. Can you have a look? —CodeCat 21:19, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

Certainly. I switched it from directly calling language templates to using etyl, in preparation for the day the language templates are deleted... but it seems I made some typos in my regex (and/or some of the templates are unhappy about finding family codes where they expect language codes). - -sche (discuss) 21:38, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

Error

You made error at Christian--130.204.184.213 15:16, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

I don't think so. Isn't it straightforward that Greek 'Χριστιανός' is from Greek 'Χριστός' + Greek '-ιανός', not Greek 'Χριστός' plus a Latin suffix? The Latin term was probably respelled under the influence of Latin '-anus', but that's a rather different matter. In any case, I've posted in Wiktionary's etymology discussion room, so more people can comment.

Translingual translations

There is a case for them. For example, when there is no single English term that exactly corresponds, which is surprisingly often. If I can't find an English vernacular name for a taxon, I often add a translation table, especially if the taxon is not located in or near an English-speaking country. I sometimes add translation requests specific to the range of the taxon. DCDuring TALK 00:37, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

haram

I think this edit is problematic because it emphasises the legal system even though there are some denominations of Islam which do not have a legal system in that sense. Such as five percenters, Quranists, Sufis, liberal Muslims and others. Do you mind if i reinstate the previous def? I made a compromise entry you could check out. Pass a Method (talk) 09:26, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Other dictionaries (of English and of Arabic) tend to define the word as "forbidden", which is why I think that's a better definition than "sinful". Would "forbidden according to Islam" work? (Note also that one can speak of pork or adultery being forbidden by "Biblical law" even though not all Jews/Christians believe the Bible is "law".) - -sche (discuss) 20:24, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Some dictionary entries can be biased. The current definition is neutral. Forbidden is misleading because it negates the concept of mawazeen meaning weighing scales with which the word haram is often used in the Quran. The word forbidden makes less sense with that usage. Pass a Method (talk) 22:27, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Goddess

This edit of yours is also problematic since ditheism means the deities can be in conflict whereas this is not the case in major duotheitic faiths such as Wicca. Do you mind if i revert back to "bitheism"? Pass a Method (talk) 09:41, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Your comment prompted me to look into the meanings of "bitheism" and "ditheism", and although several of the general-purpose reference works I checked give them both the same short definition (belief in two deities), more detailed references do make a split. I learned something new today!

I've reverted to "bitheism", and tried to expand our entry on ditheism. (And then there's [[duotheism]]... what a curious web of superficially/etymologically synonymous but now specialised terms.) - -sche (discuss) 20:37, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

New appendix

As a participant in an associated discussion, you are invited to contribute to the list of terms and criteria at Appendix:Terms considered difficult or impossible to translate into English. Cheers,   — C M B J   10:46, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

board and labels

Though my German is not adequate to the task, I gather that you have sense developments under Herkunft at de.wikt's entry for board and that you include metonymy among the rationales. I personally find such an approach very interesting for many polysemic words, whether or not their ultimate etymology is as disputed as that or board. OTOH, I doubt that such information will help increase use of Wiktionary by normal people.

This is why I have been interested in whether we could both include that type of content and exclude it by default from what unregistered users see and allow registered users to see whichever layers of it they wanted. At the sense level this would involve allowing different types of labels to be optionally displayed as mentioned at Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2013/June#Lua-cising_Template:context. At the sense level I was thinking of some of the sense-level semantic-syntactic classification categories as examples of material to be invisible by default. Sense development has broader appeal and so might sometimes seem more worthy of display, but I doubt that it is usually of sufficient interest.

As to [[board]], why wouldn't we want to be splitters, not lumpers under our current format.

Though [[board]] makes a subordinated etymology header and an all-derivations listing of definitions seem advantageous, it does seem an exceptional case. DCDuring TALK 20:11, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Basically, the "plank of wood" sense of board derives from Proto-Germanic *burda, *burdam, from PIE *bʰrdʰo, while the "side of a ship" sense derives from PG *bordaz, from PIE *bʰordʰo. Though they're still separate in German, the two words merged so early in the history of Old English that I don't think it's wrong to combine them under one etymological header, especially given how many senses developed after the merger. I think it would be sufficient to explain the two roots in en:board’s single etymology section, collapsed under {{rel-top}} if desired. (OTOH, I'd certainly be willing to split the homographs, if desired.)

Yes, board is an exceptional case. European languages in general tend (fortunately?) not to have the sort of confusingly synonymous but etymologically unrelated and non-homophonous homographs that Japanese has. Most of the homographs English does have, like mole /ˈmoʊleɪ/ "sauce" and mole /ˈmoʊl/ "animal", are unambiguously separate words. - -sche (discuss) 21:03, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

I don't think there is really a separate Germanic etymology for the two words. The current one can't be correct in any case, because there was no short o in Proto-Germanic. So if they were indeed separate, then the gender (and corresponding ending) was the only difference: *burdą, *burdaz. Is this gender distinction really consistently applied in all Germanic languages to the point that it is reconstructable for Proto-Germanic? —CodeCat 21:12, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

shea

According to w:Vitellaria paradoxa, the word shea is not pronounced [ʃɛɪ] but [ʃiː], just like the pronoun she – and unlike the name Shea, which you may have been thinking of! – or also [ʃiː.ə], which makes sense given the origin in Bambara ʃi. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:37, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Template:biblical character

On November 4, 2012, you have removed this template from several entries but, contrary to your promise in the deletion discussion ("As for the cleanup, it won't be hard; I'll do it"), you have not added {gloss|biblical figure} nor [Category:xx:Biblical characters]. So how do you propose to go on? Category:Biblical characters is not up to deletion. English John has 7 definitions, so the definition "John" is meaningless without a gloss. I have no time to clean up and check all your contributions. Makaokalani (talk) 11:11, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

lorem ipsum

Hi. May I ask you why you are inspecting so many entries with liggies in ’em? Curious. --Æ&Œ (talk) 23:27, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

WT:BP#Griko

Did you notice this thread? I'd like your input as chief Wiktionary langcode-wrangler. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 21:58, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Wiktionary talk:Languages

I am not sure if that is the best place to put old deletion debates. I don't really know what would be either though. Module talk:languages might be better, but even so it might get flooded with archived debates unless we do something to manage them. —CodeCat 00:04, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

One of the shortcuts to WT:Languages, and one of the two big things that page deals with, is WT:LANGNAMES, so it makes more sense to me to put old discussions about renaming languages there than on a backend module's talkpage. But perhaps we should make a new page just for storing language rename discussions? We could then add a line to WT:LANGTREAT (and other pages) linking to it. - -sche (discuss) 00:14, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Maybe a subpage could be dedicated to archiving such discussions? Just to get them "out of the way"? It seems less related to WT:LANGNAMES because that page deals more with the general naming scheme and not with individual languages. That is more WT:LANGTREAT. At the same time, the actual change is effected on Module:languages, and this is reflected on WT:LANGLIST in turn. So it's not really straightforward where this "belongs". —CodeCat 00:25, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I like the idea of a subpage. How's Wiktionary:Language treatment/Renames sound? - -sche (discuss) 00:50, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

What about deletions? —CodeCat 00:52, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Hm, come to think of it, what about mergers? Perhaps we need subpages for each kind of change in language treatment. (Or one subpage for any kind of change — I'm sorry, btw, if that's what you were getting at above and I densely missed it — but I think such a page would become quite large quite fast.) Wiktionary:Language treatment/Renames, Wiktionary:Language treatment/Mergers, Wiktionary:Language treatment/Deletions (or "Exclusions"?), Wiktionary:Language treatment/Additions?

I've made Wiktionary:Language treatment/Discussions for now. - -sche (discuss) 04:13, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

XPQ language code

Which language code is XPQ? Just out of curiosity :) Cheers, Razorflame 02:55, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

It's the code of the Mohegan-Pequot language. If you're curious about any others, all 1000+ of them are listed in WT:LANGLIST. - -sche (discuss) 03:01, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the information! I greatly appreciate it! Razorflame 03:02, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

re: [1]

I don't think that's an insult at all. I was just commenting the fact that CodeCat built this Lua infrastructure that pretty much everything in Wiktionary depends on, and whenever a script error shows up anywhere, he's going to be blamed for it. Though he does seem to be a bit careless, because I see random script errors pop up and disappear everywhere these days. -- Liliana • 20:13, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

---

̶s̶̶c̶̶h̶̶r̶̶i̶̶e̶̶f̶̶s̶̶t̶̶a̶̶n̶, ̶s̶̶k̶̶r̶̶i̶̶if̶̶s̶̶t̶̶a̶,̶s̶̶c̶̶h̶̶r̶̶i̶̶e̶̶w̶̶s̶...Spelling standards for Low German.

Ahoy. Please refer to this, leave a comment and maybe distribute it to people you know might have an interest in this. We can do it!

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User_talk:Stardsen#Low_German Korn (talk) 19:14, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

ya'll

Regarding this edit [2]: you seem to be suggesting that the gloss on an alt form is additional to the gloss on the original form, e.g. if a word is glossed obsolete, and its alt form is glossed obsolete form of X, then you are saying that the alt form is even more obsolete than the main entry. That might be a good idea but I don't think that's how many entries have been done. Equinox ◑ 00:35, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

It is the usual practice that alternative forms, past tense forms, etc are not glossed as "rare", "obsolete", etc unless they are rarer / more obsolete than the lemma. "Adjuting", for example, is not marked {{obsolete}}, because it is no more obsolete than "adjute" as a whole is. I have found old (pre-2008) entries that deviate from that practice, but they're unusual and I've changed them as I've come across them.

That said, this brings the real problem with our [[ya'll]] entry into focus: it treats one dialect's word as an alternative form of another dialect's term rather than as a counterpart of a standard-language term. That is to say, "ya'll" is a word in AAVE, "y'all" is a word in white Southern US English, "you-uns" is a word in Appalachian, all are nonstandard counterparts of the standard language's plain plural "you", and we'd probably be better off treating each as its own entry rather than treating some as alt forms of others, even if that's etymologically how they came about. - -sche (discuss) 01:30, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

Help with an abnormal title

I need to know if it is possible to have A₂ as a title. See A2 (aortic second sound). As the abbreviation is with the subscript. Thanks Speednat (talk) 02:06, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

You can use the subscript-2 character (as in H₂O) but I'm not sure it's a good idea. Equinox ◑ 02:08, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

What Equinox said. "₂" exists, and Wiktionary sometimes uses it (and similar characters), but sometimes doesn't. I would point you to geological and musical terms that use (or don't use) underlines and overlines and tiny numbers, but I'm having a hard time finding any. (I know they exist, somewhere...) - -sche (discuss) 04:02, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

As of now, I will leave it as is w/o subscript except in the article I think I specify that the subscript is present Speednat (talk) 21:49, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

new German adjectives

Hi there. You don't need to add brand new German adjectives (or nouns) to the bot's feedme page. They will be actioned automatically (normally within a day). Cheers SemperBlotto (talk) 16:51, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Cool, thanks for the tip! - -sche (discuss) 16:53, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Talkback

On my page. Pass a Method (talk) 21:27, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

grammar

Is the following a grammatically correct sentence? Synonyms of heterosexual include straight, and hyponyms include heteroflexible.. Pass a Method (talk) 14:36, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

It's a grammatically correct sentence, yes. ([plural noun] [preposition] [variable (a)] [plural verb] [variable (b)] [conjunction] [plural noun] [implied but unstated clause: preposition + variable (a)] [plural verb] [variable (c)].) Whether it's logically/semantically correct is another question: it could be argued that "heteroflexible" is a hyponym of "bisexual" rather than of "heterosexual". - -sche (discuss) 19:59, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

I was wondering whether "synonyms" should be singular instead of plural. Pass a Method (talk) 20:10, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

felsenfest

My first thought when I saw that word was "rock festival"... —CodeCat 03:07, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

lol! Whenever I see "Rockband" I think Rock (“skirt”) + Band (“band (of cloth)”). - -sche (discuss) 03:28, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

mentulomania

Hi -sche, Today I find abundant durably-archived attestations for mentulomania using Google Books. For example "(1918) The Urologic and Cutaneous Review - Volume 22, Issue 3 - Page 147", "(1898) An Illustrated Dictionary of Medicine, Biology and Allied Sciences - Page 746", "(1919) The American journal of surgery - Volume 33 - Page 193". Please undelete the page for this legitimate medical term. Keith Cascio (talk) 02:57, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

mittel

Hi there. Could you check the comparative and superlative in the headword and the declension table please. I'm getting a bit confused between different online sites. Thanks. SemperBlotto (talk) 16:50, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Oh, that's a tricky one. The positive form (mittel) used to inflect (in mittler Nacht/in mitteler Nacht), but fell out of (most) use before the modern era. The comparative and superlative forms remain in use, but the comparative is now often used as if it were the positive form (hence the book title Der mittlere Weg: Glaube und Vernunft in Harmonie). And the positive form is now in use again, but indeclinable(!). The headword line of "mittel" is correct (the comparative is "mittlerer", the lemma form of the superlative is "am mittelsten"), but the declension tables are wrong. I'll have to check how the templates work to fix them. - -sche (discuss) 22:08, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Trademarks

Hi. Please don't remove this info entirely. It can go into the Etymology section, to be dated later. Equinox ◑ 18:16, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Hm, what do you propose the etymology should say? "Was [and may still be] a trademark"? It would be unjustified (unverified) in some cases, and obviously incorrect in others, to say "originated as a trademark": "Doom" didn't, "Apple" didn't, "Peugeot" didn't—"Peugeot" was applied to people from a certain family long before it was applied to companies or cars. "Häagen-Dazs" is among the relatively few that I can tell at first glance did originate as a trademark. The mere fact that a string of letters may have been trademarked at some point is info the lawyers among us advised us to exclude, because we practically speaking cannot, and should not attempt to, render and publish a judgement on the validity of trademark claims about every word we have. ("Tide" is trademarked? "Water" might be trademarked in Nepal for all we know.) Hence my simple removal of the template in most cases... - -sche (discuss) 19:03, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Is a trade mark the same as a brand name? I think "brand name" is free of any legal implications so we can use that instead. —CodeCat 19:11, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

But what do you propose the etymology should say? "Was [and may still be] a brand name"? (That's hardly "information" at all... that's non-information, except to the extent that it's unverified, often-missing and other times perhaps erroneously/wrongly-included information.) It would be unjustified (unverified) in some cases, and obviously incorrect in others, to say "originated as a brand name": "Doom" didn't, "Apple" didn't, "Peugeot" didn't... - -sche (discuss) 19:21, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

If its definition is as a brand name, then I don't think that should really be in the etymology. If a word originated as a brand but isn't a brand anymore (like sellotape) then that should be in the etymology. Not all names of products are brand names though... is "iMac" a brand name? So maybe "brand name" isn't fitting. I'd still prefer to avoid "trade mark" at all though. —CodeCat 19:31, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

(after e/c, as an afterthought:) If anyone is proposing simply replacing {{trademark}} with {{brand name}}: no, all the reasons it was decided not to indicate the current or past trademark status of words are reasons we cannot and should not try to indicate the current or past status of words as brand names. - -sche (discuss) 19:38, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

WOTD again

We only have a couple more days of WOTD and no replacement for Astral, unless I missed something. Are you interested in taking it up again? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:10, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I don't have much time to give it, though I'll see if I can set a few more days. Fortunately, WOTD is fail-safe and keeps running even if no-one sets new words; we'll get complaints from a few astute observers that we're showing the same words as last year, but no breakdown. - -sche (discuss) 01:19, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

gender

I was thinking of creating "sexual apartheid" wit the noun "gender segregation". Its mentioned here. Would that be SOP? Pass a Method (talk) 18:08, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Good question! The term is on the border between idiomaticity and SOPness, but I think it is SOP in the end.

Our entry on [[apartheid]] does currently limit the term to race, but that's offensichtlich an error—there's e.g. google books:"sectarian apartheid", google books:"religious apartheid" and google books:"income apartheid" in addition to "gender apartheid" and "sexual apartheid".

Wikipedia and other references do define "gender apartheid" and "sex apartheid" as constituting discrimination against women (whereas our entry on apartheid defines it only as separation), but that's just another deficiency of our entry—all apartheids constitute discrimination against one of the separated groups (the original one constituted discrimination against blacks).

The large number of ways of referring to Islamic segregation of the genders (including google books:"female apartheid", google books:"male and female apartheid", google books:"sex apartheid", google books:"sexual apartheid" and google books:"gender apartheid") confirm, IMO, that it's SOP. - -sche (discuss) 19:23, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Great info. I like you :) Pass a Method (talk) 20:19, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

entry

The fourth entry in God does not make sense. "An omnipotent being, creator of the universe (as in deism)." Deists don't believe in an omnipotent deity. They simply see god as the initiator of the big bang. Pass a Method (talk) 20:41, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

Hi! sorry for not getting back to you about this sooner. I'm glad you've moved discussion to the Tea Room, because I don't know that much about the finer points of Deism. - -sche (discuss) 19:57, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

please return definition of attachment

I agree with your premise.... and the definition you modified it to which could be added as well... however it is a "proper noun" aka terminology specific to lightning and a specific process in an overall lightning event. This would be the same rational for including definition #6... "attachment" (computing) "file attached".

• Example 1

I can provide plenty more if need be.

Thank you! Borealdreams (talk) 05:30, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Ok. Thanks for providing that reference (wow, what a title! "attachment of lightning to trees"). - -sche (discuss) 05:59, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Appreciated. Borealdreams (talk) 16:03, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Hello -sche. I have provided the requested backing information regarding Wiktionary:Requests_for_verification#flash. I hope this meets your requirements to remove the "verify" request. Also you can see it hear Distribution_of_lightning, but I do need to do a few minor edits. In "Lightning: Physics & Effects" by Uman/Rakov [2003]... it is used in the first paragraph of Chapter 1.2 - Types of Lightning Discharge & Lightning Terminology, '"Lightning, or the lightning discharge, in its entirety, whether it strikes ground or not, is usually termed, a "lightning flash" or just a "flash"" Cheers Borealdreams (talk) 17:27, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

can

Can the word scissoring be a noun or adjective with the sexual definition? Pass a Method (talk) 14:47, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm sure it can be used as a noun, although I don't know if it's attested (in ways that make it clear its a noun rather than a gerund) in enough durable places to meet CFI. As for adjectival use: the closest thing to adjectival use I can find offhand is that several books use google books:"scissoring motion", one uses "scissoring action", and another uses "in a scissoring fashion"... but that's not very convincing. - -sche (discuss) 03:09, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

A guide to changes in lect treatment

I'd like to finish and archive a bunch of RFMs and RFDOs that pertain to language treatment, but I seriously still don't know everything I have to do. I know to deal with the langrev, the template, the category, entries, and translations, and Module:languages, but should I be adding notes to WT:LANGTREAT? And is there anything else I've forgotten? And with Lua, how do we find all the uses of the code - script errors alone?

So that you don't have to do all the future langcode work, perhaps you could write a guide on how to add a new language or delete an old one (covering both hyphenated and ISO codes, in each case). I suggest WT:Guide to lect treatment or WT:LANGTREAT/Guide or something similar. Thank you! —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:05, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

That's a great idea; I'll see what I can do; other knowledgeable people, like Liliana, can feel free to help out if they're reading this. :b

A few quick observations:

There is AFAIK no longer any easy way to find uses of language codes prior to deleting them, but one can search a database dump for them. I used (\|foo\||\=foo\|) to look for the Pashto codes, and then more elaborate regex for pst when I noticed that a lot of entries contained it not as an invocation of Pashto but as a parameter in Latvian inflection templates.

LANGTREAT should be updated whenever mergers or splits occur, yes. It's currently woefully incomplete. Updating it to cover the various dialect-continuum mergers and other changes that have already taken place over the last year or two is on my to-do list, but feel free to beat me to it. - -sche (discuss) 09:01, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, that's definitely annoying re eliminating code use. As for the rest, I await your instructions. :) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 15:15, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

I've put together Wiktionary:Guide to adding and removing languages. Let me know if anything seems to be missing from it. - -sche (discuss) 09:29, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

PS, I'm not really satisfied with the name I ended up using, but "Guide to lect treatment" sounded too similar to "Language treatment"... and the page seems to cover territory too different from WT:LANGTREAT's to just merge it into that page, which possibility I also entertained... - -sche (discuss) 09:55, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

It's not bad, but it could use clarifying, so that people other than me can use it. "Change the langrev" isn't a helpful phrase on its own; it should give an example of what to change it to. Similarly, if we create {{alv-foo}} and then decide to delete it we don't have to edit LANGTREAT, but if we do the same thing with {{foo}}, we do (because we're rejecting an ISO code). That kind of nuance should be detailed on the page. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 14:35, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Looks better, maybe something about adding and deleting langfamily codes as well... —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:49, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Native American translations of native American species

I was thinking of including some translation requests in entries for native American species. French and Spanish are of general value because there are populations of speakers. Native American languages would also seem reasonable to add. I would not want to have a vast number and I would want to try to limit the requests only to languages with some interest among contributors and where the pre-Columbian territory of the speakers OR their current location coincided with the range of the species.

Which languages do you think are worthwhile? I know that Stephen Brown does Navaho. Someone has been doing Cherokee. But I am interested in species and languages that are for the northeastern US and adjoining Canada. Virginia and Carolina would be as far south as I would wish to go and not west of Minnesota.

Please don't hesitate to say if you think the whole idea is wrong-headed. DCDuring TALK 00:42, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

I think that's a great idea. I have access to materials on most of the Algonquian languages and on many Siouan-Catawban languages, in particular Abenaki, Cree, Ojibwe (which Stephen is also knowledgeable of—much more than I am), Lenape, Malecite-Passamaquoddy, Mi'kmaq, Catawba, and Sioux/Lakota/Dakota (which I think Stephen is also knowledgeable of). The area you're interested in the species of is basically the same area I'm interested in the languages of, so I should be able to fulfil most requests for translations. :) - -sche (discuss) 02:47, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, I will get some idea of their geography and go from there. I am going to do it for English vernacular names for species, but that might lead to genus other level names if they use compounds to name more specific things. DCDuring TALK 00:30, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Looking at Roger William's Key to Narragensett, it seems likely that we could get some words for plants, animals and seafood, but I'm not sure about the level of specificity. We can make some conjectures. I'm not sure that translation requests would be the right tool for the job. DCDuring TALK 01:47, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Do you think it'd be better to just make a userspace list of words you'd like translated? It'd be easier for me to find all the requests that way...but harder to keep track of which terms had already been translated into which languages. So requests may be better after all. - -sche (discuss) 01:58, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I think I just have to adjust my expectations to the likely low level of precision and low coverage in our knowledge of the names of plants and animals in these languages. If the languages of the native peoples of the northeastern US have 10,000 or even 50,000 known words, then the chance that the word for American winterberry or any of its synonyms will be knowable will be low. Though one might think that there might have been a great deal of detailed knowledge about flora and fauna, it couldn't possibly be Linnean in quantity and probably not in the degree of differentiation among species. DCDuring TALK 08:42, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I imagine Native American languages distinguish species about as often as English (which calls several things "oak" and several things "pine") or French (which calls several things "cytise"), but you're probably right that the number of words in the references we have access to will be small. I checked dictionaries of Abenaki, Ojibwe, Cree, Lenape and Catawba for the plant you named and a sample of states' official plants; here are the results:

Only Abenaki has a word for the common/American winterberry aka the black alder: chegwalimenakwam.

Maine's white pine is goa in Abenaki, zhingwaak in Ojibwe; Cree, Lenape and Catawba have words for 'pine' but I can't work out if they distinguish species.

NH's purple lilac is ᓃᐱᓰᓴ ᑲ ᐋᐧᐱᑲᐧᓀᑭᕀ (nîpisîsa ka wâpikwanekiy) according to Alberta Elders' Cree Dictionary; other languages lack words for it, likely because it isn't native.

MA's mayflower, CT's+PA's mountain laurel, MD's black-eyed susan and WV's rhododendron aren't in any of the dictionaries I checked.

RI's "violet" is an example of an English word that doesn't differentiate species; Lenape, too, has a generic word kishkikwentis (“violet”); Abenaki calls the dogtooth violet minôbowigek (“(that which) is purple”).

New York's "rose" is another example of indistinct English; nonetheless, I can't find a word for any of the species in any of the dictionaries I checked.

DE's peach is not native; Abenaki calls a peach (fruit) by the English loanword biches and calls a peach tree bichesakwam; Ojibwe miishijiimin is sometimes said to refer to a peach, other times to refer to other small, reddish berries/fruits; I suspect ᒥᐢᑕᐦᐃᒥᓂᐢ (mistahiminis) is similarly vague; Lenape uses pilkësh; Catawba uses ye (“peach tree”), tri ye, turi ye (“peach (fruit)”).

VA's and NC's plant is the Cornus florida dogwood; Abenaki has a word makwakwsek (“little red stick/tree”) for the Cornus sericea dogwood; Ojibwe likewise has a word for the sericea, miskwaabiimizh/miskwaabiimag, but not the florida; Lenape has tuwchalakw (“dogwood”).

SC has both the goldenrod and the yellow jessamine/jasmine; Lenape has wisaòtaèk (“Solidago canadensis”).

So, yeah, there are a lot of lacunae. - -sche (discuss) 23:13, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

That's a bit better than I thought. BTW, the most common English vernacular name for Cornus sericea is the red osier dogwood, soon to be planted on my property. See osier. Domestic American roses would not have been more striking than a number of other flowers and have few practical uses. persimmon, pawpaw, squash, walnut, hickory, acorn, maize, perhaps blackberry, raspberry, huckleberry, and blueberry; clam, oyster, shad, several kinds or furry animals, many kinds of birds, and many kinds of trees would have possibly been more significant. I think I will do a little research on the uses native Americans made of the plants and limit my requests to those. I'll try to get distribution maps, a good picture, and some information about use, if appropriate, onto the page. The WP articles, already linked, usually have some mention of such use. It might give someone familiar with contemporaneous reports a clue about possible modern names for the plants that were being used.

BTW, there is a recent history book of the Munsees which I will be borrowing and a brand-new book by the same author about toponyms in the NY metropolitan area, which I discovered as I began to populate Category:Native American toponyms (New York). WP has w:Toponymy of New Netherland. I am not sure about how anyone can reconcile these etymologies, of varying quality, with the best current linguistic work. DCDuring TALK 01:51, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I've started fleshing some of those entries out. Abenaki has different words for "red/black oak acorns" vs "white oak acorns". Acorns were quite significant; acorn flour was a staple food/ingredient. I made some, once... it took a lot of work to crack all the acorns open, grind them up and leach out the tannins, and the end result was altogether bland. - -sche (discuss) 04:05, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Squirrels prefer white-oak acorns, resorting to the others as necessary. I assume there is a reason applicable to humans as well. That is the kind of distinction I would expect would be made, whether or not we have a record. Is it possible to infer different words for the trees from the acorn words? For the languages with living speakers they might at least have kept a broad brush version of their traditional way of living off the land and the vocabulary required. They must have eaten some leaves too. I wonder from what plants. DCDuring TALK 04:29, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

BTW, white oak and red oak are also families, so there will necessarily be some ambiguity as to whether the species Quercus alba or the subgenus or section was intended, as is often the case with the English white oak. DCDuring TALK 04:32, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

• This book looks like exactly what I am looking for, at least for plants. DCDuring TALK 21:53, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

  It does look like a great reference! PS, if you're interested in placenames, this site has a pamphlet on Mohegan placenames in CT. - -sche (discuss) 22:05, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

• on Ojibway plant taxonomy at Lac Seul First Nation is available as a pdf. DCDuring TALK 20:10, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

  Oh, that's useful, thanks! - -sche (discuss) 01:27, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

• You will have noticed that I have substituted {{taxlink}} and {{vern}} for plain redlinks and linkified unlinked English vernacular names and taxa at Appendix:English terms of Native North American origin. I will attempt to resolve the taxonomic names to the current ones, insert some redirects in WP and some lines in our dab pages for English vernacular names and in WP dab pages, and eventually add some taxonomic name entries with pictures and links to commons. Let me know if there is anything specific I can help on. DCDuring TALK 21:57, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

  To clarify, is the eventual aim that Wiktionary will have entries for all these vernacular names, at which point the links can point to the Wiktionary entries rather than Wikipedia? If so, neat.

  I was working on some Algic plant and animal names recently and found a mention of "Leptitimia californica", which not even Google has heard of — I assume it's a typo of something. It's a plant found in northern California. Any idea what it might be? If not, no worries. If not, no worries — the reference I was looking at unusually glossed it only as that species name (she usually used common names for glosses), suggesting even she didn't know what it was. - -sche (discuss) 22:14, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

  Yes, of course. I realized that it would take quite some time to do all of these, so replacing WP links with redlinks seemed a bit of a reversion. Hence the new, improved {{vern}}, which links to WP and categorizes the entry as needed. I have been processing each dump to extract a list of the entries using {{taxlink}} and add the taxonomic names most "wanted". I will be doing the same with vernacular names.

There are also many un{{taxlink}}ed taxonomic names, so I look at lists of taxonomic names of interest to me or that I suspect have some unlinked use and add taxlink to those entries, also adding other templates and correcting the entries as I go. I have also started mining derived terms sections of entries for words like moss, leaf, and gold for names of living things.

I'll snoop around for Leptitimia californica. DCDuring TALK 23:29, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm about to throw in the towel on L. californica. I tried my plant sources, Century, my print Webster's 2nd Intl. One tantalizing, but probably misleading, lead is λεπτίτιδες (leptítides), a kind of fine barley. I couldn't find evidence of it being used as a taxonomic name in plausible variations. I also tried to find timia or itimia as taxa. Maybe lightning will strike and I'll have a new idea. DCDuring TALK 00:31, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for trying. (λεπτίτιδες is tantalizing indeed!) I looked through calflora.org's list of all plants native to California that have "californica" in their name, and found nothing plausible there. The original name (if it was ever valid) may have been mangled enough by Reichard or her informant as to be unrecoverable. Perhaps if I find more resources on Wiyot, I'll find the Wiyot word (tso'm) glossed differently in a different resource and find the answer that way. - -sche (discuss) 01:06, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

It's Leptotaenia californica, which is an old synonym for w:Lomatium californicum, an important food and medicinal plant. If you ever have questions about the ethnobotany of California native plants, I may be able to help: it's one of my main interests, and I've spent quite a bit of time reading through the literature and tracking down botanical identities/synonymy. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:36, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Of course. I'd forgotten that you were from California. Cool. DCDuring TALK 02:43, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

And Leptot* at The Plant List should have narrowed the search to find it. DCDuring TALK 02:48, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Ah, thank you! I will be glad to have your insight when I start adding more Wiyot and Yurok plant names. - -sche (discuss) 05:16, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

I think I overstated things when I said Lomatium californica was an important plant: the root was used medicinally by several cultures, especially the Chumash, and the greens were eaten, but it wasn't generally among the most important for either purpose. It was actually pretty important as a magical/ritual plant: for the Kawaiisu and the Kashaya, among others, the smoke from burning the root was supposed to protect against evil spirits/ghosts and the root was kept with one for good luck. The Chumash used it to protect specifically against rattlesnakes. Two of its common names, chuchupate and angelica, may have caused it to be confused with other plants in the literature.

As for Wiyot and Yurok: I find C. Hart Merriam's work very useful for plant and animal names. He was totally inept at phonetic transcription, but he was an expert naturalist who went through a list of native plant and animal species for which he had either accurate pictures or specimens that he showed to the people who were giving him the words. I like to use comparison with Merriam for clearing up problematic or vague names in more linguistically-accurate sources. Harrington would be the gold standard, since he was such a good linguist and took voucher specimens, but there's so much material and so little of it is accessible. Merriam's papers on California Indians are available at the Internet Archive here, and here are his schedules for Wiyot and Yurok.

Earlier there was discussion regarding Moerman's work on American Indian Ethnobotany. It's available in database format here. It can be very useful, but it doesn't pay much attention to the reliability of its sources: my favorite example is The Botanical Lore of the California Indians, a self-published book by a Cahuilla named John Bruno Romero. The database follows his lead in using "Mahuna" instead of "Cahuilla" as the name of his people, and gives his book the same treatment as sources published in journals, even though it's an amateurish compendium of real information, incredibly inept misuse of general references and quite a bit that seems just made up. If you search "Rosa gallica" you'll find uses listed for what has to be w:Lavatera assurgentifolia from the details in the book, and which seem to be made up. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:19, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

abe-noun, unm-noun, etc

Do you want me to create these? If nothing else, they can greenlink plurals for you, and also we can do things like categorising entries which do not give their animacy, etc. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 18:35, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

That'd be great! I'll get back to you on how they should function. - -sche (discuss) 19:17, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

An Abenaki template should handle a noun's animacy and its plural. (It might be worth adding support for diminutives later, but at the moment I expect it'd be too much bother.)

Animacy could be the first unnamed parameter, with five possible states: a (animate), i (inanimate), a-i (animate and inanimate), - (for words that have no in/animacy), and ? (for cases where animacy isn't clear). IMO, nothing should be displayed if one of the last two settings is used.

Pluralisation is more complex. Animate nouns form their plurals by adding one of four suffixes; inanimate nouns add one of four different suffixes, as explained in [[-ak]]. Words that end in w sometimes have this w suppressed by some of the suffixes. Perhaps the most sensible thing to do is have the template accept the word's stem (which will be either the singular form or the singular form minus w) as the second unnamed parameter, and the suffix as the third unnamed parameter, so that words can be categorised by which suffix they use. If the second unnamed parameter is set to - or ?, my preference would be that all mention of pluralisation be suppressed. If you're feeling industrious, you could make it so that if the second parameter is blank and the third is filled in with a suffix, the template understands that the stem is (as it will be in most cases) the singular form, i.e. the pagename. If something other than - or ? is set as the second parameter and nothing it set as the third parameter, the template should ideally add the entry to a cleanup category.

If it helps you to know this: it's never possible to know a word's plural but not its animacy (though it is possible to know its animacy but be uncertain of which plural suffix it takes), so any time the plural is set to ?, the animacy will likewise have been set to ?.

Putting animacy and pluralisation together,

on [[sips]], {{abe-noun|a|sips|ak}} and {{abe-noun|a||ak}} should display something like sips (animate, plural sipsak) or sips a (plural sipsak) or something similar, depending on whether or not animacy should be inside or outside the parentheses, and whether it should be abbreviated or spelt out

on [[sôglamalsowôgan]], {{abe-noun|-|-}} should display sôglamalsowôgan

on [[chôls]], {{abe-noun|a|?}} should display chôls animate or chôls (a) or however un/parenthetically and/or un/abbreviatedly we decide to display animacy (the same as sips, in any case)

on [[foobar]], {{abe-noun|?|?}} should display foobar

If all of this sounds too complex (especially the {{en-noun|?}}-like suppression of everything but the bold headword), don't feel like you have to do it. I can probably adapt {{de-noun}} (which seems structurally quite similar) sometime when I have time. - -sche (discuss) 20:12, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

PS If you think the template should function/display differently, let me know... - -sche (discuss) 20:13, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like fun! Two things I disagree with: Why are we supplying both animacy and plural if one can be predicted from the other? That seems stupid. Secondly: Why supply it with the stem? The stem is always predictable, right? So I don't see a reason to type it in. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 21:13, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

The stem is usually the singular form, i.e. the pagename, but if the singular ends in w, the -o(k|l) suffixes unpredictably (sometimes, but not always) suppress the w. Also, if a word ends in d/t, -ik changes it to j. There may be a few other cases where the stem also changes. Perhaps the stem should be a named parameter, with the template assuming that the stem is the pagename unless it's been explicitly set to something else. The stem will be identical to the singular ~6/8ths of the time.

If a plural is specified, animacy can be determined from it. But it's possible to know the animacy of something (e.g. because it refers to an animal) and yet be unsure which plural suffix it takes. If you want to make it possible to leave the animacy field blank when a plural suffix has been supplied, OK. - -sche (discuss) 21:52, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

OK. But it really doesn't matter how often stem = singular, but how often the stem can be predicted based on its morphology and the plural suffix being used. Remember, with Lua, predictable stuff like blah(d|t) + ik = blahjik is something that we can do automagically. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 22:06, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Another way of doing things would be: have the module handle regular plurals as described above (pagename + the supplied suffix, with the changes like d+ik = jik), and then instead of allowing a stem different from the pageame to be set and combined with a suffix, allow for the entire irregular plural to be specified. This would be similar to {{en-noun}} (which can handle either {{en-noun|es}} or {{en-noun|irregular-plural-specified-in-full}}) or {{en-verb}}, which processed e.g. {{en-verb|mak|ing}}, but also allows {{en-verb|irregulars|irregularing|irregulared}}. - -sche (discuss) 05:25, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

• Ach, I forgot about this. I was looking it over again, and to be honest it looks like a horribly complex operation in a language that I know nothing about. I feel like you would be better off getting somebody else to do it. (Although, if nobody does it in a little while, I'll try to attack it, since it is indeed within my abilities AFAIK, just barely though.) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:23, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

I'll see if I can just adapt code from the English and German noun templates. - -sche (discuss) 21:41, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Multi-line quotations

re diff

Do you really format verse quotes with a separate #*s per line? If so, we've been silently editwarring, because I've always been doing it with <br /> and have been changing it if I find it - <br /> seems a lot more streamlined to me. WT:QUOTE is moot on the subject, though. Hyarmendacil (talk) 01:01, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

I've been under the impression that wiki markup was preferred to HTML markup, though they do seem to produce the same results. We could see if anyone else has an opinion in the BP? Note that there's at least one other format:

• Breaking the / poem's lines / with slashes,
• while still sometimes / breaking / multiple verses / onto multiple lines...

- -sche (discuss) 01:10, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Yeah I dislike that one the most, and it doesn't work for Egyptian anyhow. We might as well ask at the BP, though we might not get a consensus out of it. Hyarmendacil (talk) 01:18, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Allah

If it helps, I pronounce /ˈælə/, I can probably find something on YouTube with the same pronunciation if you really want me to. Mglovesfun (talk) 23:43, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Huh, wow. Dictionary.com lists that pronunciation, too. I've re-reworded the qualifiers accordingly... though it still sounds weird to me... "Ally, don't worship Allah in the alley!" - -sche (discuss) 00:16, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Individuals

Since all biblical characters are individuals, isn't it simpler to make Category:Biblical characters a subcategory of Category:Individuals? That will save you from editing 1400 entries.--Makaokalani (talk) 13:24, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

We could do that. It's worth noting that some of the entries in Category:Biblical characters refer to gods, which should IMO go in Category:Gods instead, though. (I did put them into Category:Gods when I edited them, but left them in Category:Biblical characters...) - -sche (discuss) 02:48, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

God of this world

Hi, where is the RFD discussion for the idiom "God of this world"? Please post it on my talk page. Thank you WritersCramp (talk) 22:11, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

nonsense

[3]

[4]

Care to explain? --Æ&Œ (talk) 16:36, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

When deciding how æ-terms should be classified, I try to check Google Books for evidence of modern usage. I may have made a mistake here, or Google may have digitized more books in the time since I checked (this has happened before). In this case, I probably noticed that many of the 'modern' hits were actually unupdated reprints, or quotations, of older works. But there is enough modern usage that you were right to switch the entry back to {{alternative spelling of}}. - -sche (discuss) 18:23, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Unusual entries

Hi, I know you 'collect' unusual entries. Here's one thing I've not seen before, putting 'etc.' inside a derived terms and a related terms section. Super weird, like putting 'you already know what this means' as a definition. Here's the diff. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:55, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Poor behavior

Your flippant edit summary in diff made after you have proceeded without consensus is no more appreciated than you elementary lack of understanding of copyright law (diff) or your creation of himand to prove a point for the purpose of Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2012-03/Overturning_COALMINE; indeed, "himand", deleted later, was fallaciously used by another user to create a false alarm in that vote. --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:31, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

I for one find your hounding of -sche over his/her generally excellent editing history far more troubling than -sche's dry sense of humour. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:54, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi, both of you. Sorry for not seeing this sooner. I've been busy in real life and over on Wikipedia. PS (this is, I suppose, mostly a note-to-self) our LOP-list of made-up pronouns is missing "v" and "he/r". - -sche (discuss) 04:42, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

3.5M

How did you determine the date for this milestone announcement? Because according to on-wiki stats, it was on the 11th or 12th. - dcljr (talk) 03:32, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Well, first of all, I dyslexified the date. :b I was using the date SemperBlotto listed here, but as you can see, he actually calculated that it was the 11th day of the 9th month, rather than the 9th day. I'm going to switch that page to use month names! When I ran my own calculations I found a very different entry as the 3,500,000th, though: obaemulabimini, created on the 16th of September. I calculated it by noting the NUMBEROFARTICLES some time after we passed the milestone (when the count was 3,513,686), then going to Special:NewPages and counting 13,686 pages backwards (using &limit= to speed things up). In general, if some pages were deleted between when one person counted and when another counted, that could explain a discrepancy, but I'm not sure that's a sufficient explanation for the large discrepancy in calculations seen here. Hm... - -sche (discuss) 04:50, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, the NewPages technique only works well very soon after a milestone is reached. Not only page deletions but also adding a wikilink (internal, of course) on a page that doesn't have one or removing the only wikilink on a page also changes the article count. (For that matter, not all "new pages" in the main namespace automatically increase the article count, since they have to have at least one wikilink to do so.) Unfortunately, it's so hard to "synthesize" all that info into a correct date that I never really try that hard. When in doubt, I just opt for the later end of the possible date range, since it's better to be a bit late than too early. I would have reported the 12th if I had changed the page myself. But since SB reported the milestone 3 minutes after his bot created the entry in question, I'll assume he knew what he was doing. [g] Thanks for making the change at Wikimedia News. - dcljr (talk) 07:03, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

User:-sche/ru

This is showing in Category:Russian headword-line templates. Are you still planning to use it? Or can it go? —CodeCat 21:26, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

It can go, I think. Its purpose was explained here. - -sche (discuss) 01:16, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

icitte

Re: "it's not eye dialect if it's pronounced differently, now is it?" Even if the original word (ici) is also sometimes pronounced like that? --WikiTiki89 16:56, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Is the pronunciation [isit] used in standard French, or only (as fr.Wikt seems to think) in the same dialects that also use the written form icitte? If the latter, it seems like we'd be going around in a circle to say the spelling is based on the pronunciation that follows from the spelling (that follows from the pronunciation that follows from...). Maybe it's better to describe it simply as a variant of ici? - -sche (discuss) 17:19, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

It's not used in "standard French" (French French), and probably not used in standard Quebec French, but it is common colloquially. I think it's similar to English contractions in the sense that very often when we read aloud a sentence containing "do not", we read it as "don't". Also, I think it's very rare for the spelling to come before the pronunciation, so I don't see any circular logic anywhere. --WikiTiki89 17:46, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

How's this?
By the way, many of our entries that describe something as "eye dialect" (including, apparently, this entry) use a sense of that term that failed RFV, which strikes me as another reason to avoid the term. - -sche (discuss) 20:51, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

I guess you're right. I basically learned the term "eye dialect" by reading our etymologies.

Re: Quebec pronunciation of icitte. The /ɪ/ in closed syllables is one of the most distinctive features of Quebec French phonology. If you'd been there, you would have heard it. --WikiTiki89 22:44, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Coriandrum sativum

At [[Coriandrum sativum]] I have put (temporarily) both the translation table from coriander and a copy of the "vernacular names" table from Wikispecies. Our translation table includes more languages, theirs has more terms per language, even having Chinese parsley, the redlink for which I just blued.

The language with by far the greatest number of vernacular names is German. Could you give me your assessment of these? Are they valid? common? specialized?

I am considering bringing over many of their vernacular-name tables to enrich our coverage of taxa. They have nearly 61,000 of them. I also expect that the entries with these tables that we don't have are probably the most desirable of the taxon entries that we could add from their million entries. DCDuring TALK 19:19, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

The general term is Koriander. Echter Koriander is an unambiguous designation, used in reference works. Gartenkoriander is another disambiguator; to me, it seems less formal (and therefore more common) than Echter Koriander. Those three are the only translations I would include in a trans-table.

Gewürzkoriander is another disambiguator. Arabische, Asiatische and Chinesische Petersilie are about as uncommon relative to Koriander as the circumlocution Chinese parsley is to coriander in English. Indische Petersilie is a variant I hadn't heard before.

I hadn't heard Gebauter Koriander before; it seems to be an obsolete technical term. Wanzendill could be rendered into English as "bug-dill" (a reference to the foul smell of unripe coriander; cf. the suggestion that coriander itself derives from a Greek word for bedbug), for which reason I expect it was a general term (and may still exist in some dialects), even though the only place I can find it used is in reference works from two- and three-hundred years ago.

Kaliander is a southwestern Upper German dialectal variant of Koriander; Koliander is another Upper German dialectal variant. Kalanner and Klanner are northeastern (Low) German dialectal variants.

Wanzenkraut, Wanzenkümmel, Schwindelkorn and Schwindelkraut often (and in some cases primarily) refer(red) to other plants, when used at all. - -sche (discuss) 22:58, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

I conclude that the yield of valid terms is relatively high, but not suitable for fully automated population of a translation table.

This raises the question of whether we have a suitable home for the large-scale import of these tables or their data. The table template could be Luacized to conform to our language-name display and the terms should be wrapped in {{t}} or {{l}}. The talk page for the Translingual entry is a possibility. Another approach would be for me to process the table into language-specific lists of vernacular names with the associated taxonomic name and English name(s) (if any) for each non-English language. Each such list would make a subpage (possibly with subpages) of the corresponding requested entries page.

It is a shame that we do not allow translation tables on Translingual entries as they would be a resource to both Wikispecies and Wikipedia. Both of them are a greater linguistic resource (ie, etymologies from WP; translations from both, but esp Wikispecies) to us than we are to them. DCDuring TALK 23:47, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Translations tables exist in translingual entries (de facto), whether they're supposed to be there or not (de jure).

I wouldn't (automatedly) populate translations tables with vernacular names from Wikispecies; too many of the vernacular names Wikispecies provides are too obsolete or rare to merit mention in a trans table, IMO; others are polysemous and more often reference another plant; others are limited to "dialects" (which we sometimes treat as separate languages, as in the case of Alemannic German and Low German); others don't meet CFI.

Automatedly importing the data into the Transwiki namespace or onto talk pages seems like a reasonable idea. - -sche (discuss) 00:02, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't think this entry is at all typical, especially the German section, which contained more terms in one language than I'd ever seen in a Wikispecies entry. But I thought it might illustrate in a compact form some of the range of problems that we might face in trying to use this.

That a term doesn't make a good translation doesn't mean we shouldn't have it (Remember our slogan!).

I don't think the transwiki process is right because we are only interested in a portion of the entries. The transwikied pages would languish, each page typically needing attention from multiple translators. I was thinking of using Perl or Python to extract from the wikispecies XML dump (smaller than enwikt's) just the page name and the table of vernacular names. That in turn could be processed into lists by language or language code. {{VN}} has fewer than 400 of them, some of which may not be used in entries. Then I could eliminate the names that already have definitions in the appropriate L2 that contain the taxonomic name. That would leave two lists: redlinked vernacular names and blue-linked ones that didn't include the taxonomic name.

I suppose that I could just put the language lists in my own user space. That won't risk upsetting anyone. And I could have links to the language-specific redlink pages from the entry request pages. The blue-linked ones raise definition style questions.

Thanks especially for the specific analysis of the German terms. Any further thoughts would be appreciated. I will move this to my own talk page unless you object.

Also, I have not forgotten about the US native species-native languages notion, but I don't have any good lists. I was a little disappointed in the ethnobotany works that I found. I was also unaware of how many of the languages are extinct and have insufficient records to support species/genus-specific translations. And there are the migrations that have moved tribes into environments with a completely different set of species. DCDuring TALK 01:32, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

re "Remember our slogan": Of course; to be clear, I agree that we should have entries for any of the terms which are attested. In this case, that's many of them, though the dialectal terms and the various parsley circumlocutions are iffy, and one would have to do a careful search to see which senses of the polysemous terms meet CFI.

I should work some more on Native American plant names myself. I started adding some terms for Novemberish plants about a week ago, but quickly got distracted.

You could ask in the BP (or GP?) whether others would mind the vernacular name data being imported onto terms' talk pages. Wherever the info ends up, I do think it'll be useful. - -sche (discuss) 02:45, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

I can follow the example of others who have pages and pages of such lists in user pages. If it subsequently seems there should be another location, that'll be fine. For now, I will keep the one example in principal namespace and see if it gets any comments while I work on the technical side. At least there can be a home for whatever I'm able to extract. Some of Pengo's somewhat similar subpages (specific epithets) have been around for years already.

Thanks again. DCDuring TALK 03:36, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Special:AbuseLog

Hi -sche, at Wiktionary:Feedback#Special:AbuseLog I'm dissing one of your filters. I would appreciate it, if you would defend it. Testing it in tag-mode for a while, would have shown you how it failed. Your filter had tens of false hits a day on a new "archiver" (User:Rotlink, but your filter would block any new global archiver). It blocked me and other non-pseudonyms, it broke {{unblock}}. --80.114.178.7 22:21, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

retoromaani

I reverted your edition Romansh > Romansch, because Romansh is the form used in ISO 693-3. It is also more popular in Google search and is the one used in English Wikipedia as the preferred one. Perhaps en.Wikt should reconsider its practice of preferring the term "Romansch"? I also added a usage note explaining why retoromaani should not be translated as "Rhaeto-Romance" into English. ---Hekaheka (talk) 05:53, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

I like to see Wiktionary use languages' most common names... in this case, though, I'm not sure which one is more common. Raw Google counts are notoriously unreliable (WP has a decent explanation of how/why). The story on Google Books is more complex; the raw (unsmoothed) data suggests that the two spellings are about as common, except that Romansch enjoyed an ~80 year period of higher popularity, whereas Romansh spiked a couple of times (once in 1860, once in 1980). (Smoothing the data makes more apparent their waveform-like tendency to alternate which one is on top.) Given that, I wouldn't go to the bother of changing the names.
At [[retoromaani]] the question is then, what is best?: To link to an alternative-form-entry, so a reader clicks on it, and then clicks again to get to the English entry where the content is? To link directly to the entry with the content? To link to several entries, one of which has the content and the rest of which are soft-redirects? Option 2 gets the reader to the English entry the quickest... - -sche (discuss) 07:30, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

I agree on the principle of using the most common term. I also admit that there's uncertainty about Google's reliability, but the ratio "Romansh language" to "Romansch language" is pretty convincing 15 to 1. Also, I would not belittle the fact that ISO uses the form Romansh. The fact that en.Wikt currently uses Romansch may be based on only one person's preference. It should also be noticed that the Swiss use Romansh, at least on this official site [5]. Probably the best place to solve the preference between Romansh/Romansch would be the Tea room. --Hekaheka (talk) 12:29, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Ok, I've started Wiktionary:Tea room#Romansch.2C_Romansh. - -sche (discuss) 15:52, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

When you removed the commas . . .

When I'm editing a module, I see a little checkbox that says "Allow saving code with errors", and unless I check that, it won't let me save the module with script errors. (I still have the "Save page" button, but when I click it, it won't save.) Do you not have that checkbox, or did you click it by mistake, or did it not detect the issue, or . . . ? —Ruakh_TALK 07:12, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

I clicked "save", and it said the code was not saved because it had an error, which it identified as there not being as many closing brackets on line 13019 as were expected to correspond to the opening brackets on line 13017. I may be misremembering the exact numbers, but at the time I checked the lines it mentioned, and found that there were in fact sufficient brackets present: as many }s as {s in that particular m["foo"] = section. So, I told it to save the code even with the 'error'. (I shouldn't have done that.)
I then checked the diff, at which point I saw the commas go missing, and re-added them. (How they went missing in the first place is a mystery.) I hadn't previewed the diff before saving that because that operation is prohibitively slow on my computer, since it combines the already slow operations of loading the page in the edit window and checking the difference between two revisions (see Wikitiki's GP post).
I didn't notice any outbreak of script errors, because I continued adding family info to various languages, and so didn't open any page besides Module:languages until much later (whereas I fixed the problem within five minutes). I'm actually slightly put off by that; if I broke as many pages as the GP implies, I'd like to have noticed. - -sche (discuss) 15:27, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Slight objection to "can do without"

I responded to the discussion, with a slight objection. Please respond. Tharthan (talk) 17:09, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Etymology of 'Vampire'

I saw you reverted my edit on the possibility that the origin of the word 'vampire' might actually be Albanian 'dhampir'. I think this is a very real possibility, considering: 1) the Albanian-Romanian historical proximity, 2)Abanian-Romanian common words and phonetic rules in loanwords, 3)the very detailed and thorough etymology 'dhampir'. Robert Elsie is not a linguist and what he thinks about the etymology of dhampir is frankly irrelevant. In fact, it is phonetically impossible for dhampir to be derived from Slavic *ypir (what does this word mean in Slavic anyway?), while the term was spreaded in the world through Romanian vampir, which reflects perfectly Albanian dhampir (Alb. th/dh>Rom.f/v-z, cf. Alb. thërrime 'crumb>Rom.farima 'id' etc)Etimo (talk) 21:50, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Mono

I saw this edit and I think that it is a bad idea to use names of political entities in language names. Could we not have called them "Mono (America)" and "Mono (Congo)"? --WikiTiki89 22:01, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

This is a thought-provoking question.
I don't agree that using country names is a bad idea, or more accurately, I don't think using "Congo" would be better. And FWIW, using country names has been an en.Wikt practice (copied, it seems, from Ethnologue) for a long time — since before I started editing language names. We have other lects disambiguated as "(Ghana)", "(Central African Republic)", etc, and I documented the practice in WT:LANG.
It's not the first choice, of course: that's "use an alternative name, if one is attested".
But it's also not the last line of defence against having two languages with the same name: if, as sometimes happens in Indonesia and in Africa, two lects share both a name and a home country, they can be disambiguated by their respective families.
You've prompted me to wonder if we shouldn't make "disambiguate by family membership" our second go-to (and use "disambiguate by home country" third, i.e. swap the order of the two). In fact, we could even consider whether or not using family disambiguation would be preferable to using alternate names as a first go-to. (Maybe not, since it would mean a lot of languages would have trailing parentheticals.)
Even if we don't decide to make family membership our second go-to, we should decide how we want to present it. We currently have an "Austronesian Mor" (contrasted with a "Sepik Mor"), but also a "Mari (Austronesian)" contrasted with a "Mari (Sepik)". Both are my doing (whoops!), because I had forgot about the Mors when I named the Maris, and was following the model of the parenthetical country names. - -sche (discuss) 23:00, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

I do like the idea of using names like "Austronesian Mor" instead of "Mari (Austronesian)", so maybe we should do that more often. But I still think that if family names are not enough, we should not use country names for diambiguation at all, but rather the name of the region. Countries change all the time, while regions stay where they are. I certainly hope that "United States of America" won't change any time soon, but if it does, the name "Mono (America)" would still be valid. As for the Congolese one, maybe it could be "Mono (Africa)". Do you think this would be a WT:BP discussion? If so, I will probably wait until after Thanksgiving before bringing it up there. --WikiTiki89 23:15, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

OK, I've started Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2013/November#Distinguishing_languages_which_have_identical_names:_first_by_country.3F_by_region.3F_or_by_family.3F. I apologise if you had been planning to and I pre-empted you. - -sche (discuss) 23:21, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

No, it makes no difference who starts it. --WikiTiki89 01:31, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Bahnaric

What is this? I have never heard of that family before. -- Liliana • 10:23, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

And I don't know why my recent edit removed them. I must have accidentally edited an old revision. -- Liliana • 10:26, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Bahnaric is a family of Afroasiatic Austroasiatic languages; overviews of it can be found in the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (volume 1, starting on page 487) and Wikipedia. Information on North Bahnaric and on the classification of Hre (hre being the language that brought the family to my attention) can be found Edmondson, Gregerson and Sidwell 2011 and Smith 1972. I hadn't heard of the family, either, till yesterday. :b

As for Ubangian, I didn't affiliate it with Niger-Congo because the scholarship cited by WP (even, notably, the scholarship that classifies it as Niger-Congo) suggests that no evidence to support Greenberg's initial placement of it in Niger-Congo has actually "ever be[en] produced" and it (per Dimmendaal) "probably constitutes an independent language family that cannot or can no longer be shown to be related to Niger–Congo (or any other family)." If it is to be reclassified as nic-, we'll need to move it into alphabetical order in Module:families and update the various languages in Module:languages that call on it under its old (qfa-) code. - -sche (discuss) 18:36, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

I think you're confusing Afro-Asiatic and Austro-Asiatic. -- Liliana • 15:53, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Oops, dyslexia strikes again! Thanks for pointing that out. - -sche (discuss) 15:57, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Protocol-relative URLs.

Re: "the software knows which prefix to provide based on whether the user is browsing securely (https) or not (http), right?": Right, though to be clear, the "the software" in question is the Web browser or other user agent. If you view the HTML source, you'll see that the MediaWiki software just passes through the //... unscathed. (Sorry if you already understood that. To me "the software" sounds like MediaWiki software, but maybe that's just me.) —Ruakh_TALK 05:08, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for the clarification. :) - -sche (discuss) 05:58, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Use of /e/ where /ɛ/ would be more appropriate

I've always considered these to be quite different phonemes. /e/ is like a monophthong version of /ɛi/, whilst /ɛ/ is... erm... /ɛ/.

Yet I've seen quite a few times where /e/ has been used where /ɛ/ would have been more appropriate. I can't recall any off the top of my head, but I am certain I've seen instances.

These weren't at the end of a word either, so I don't think it's a dialectual (yeah, I know it's "dialectal"; it's a habit) thing.

Any ideas? Tharthan (talk) 01:58, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, could you give me some context? What language are you talking about — English? In standard US and UK English, the closest thing to /e/ is /eɪ/ (which some sub-varieties realise as [e]), the vowel of "play" and "made". I'm not familiar with /ɛi̯/ in English, but it does exist in Dutch. Some varieties of English use /e/ where other varieties use /ɛ/, even in the middle of words; for example, the Australians pronounce "bed" /bed/ while the Brits and Americans say /bɛd/. Lastly, the 'e'-like vowel that occurs before the 'r' of words like "air" (and some or all of "Mary", "marry" and "merry", depending on the speaker) is difficult if not impossible to transcribe precisely using the IPA, for which reason you'll find all of /e/, /eɪ/, /ɛ/, /ɛə/ or /ɛː/ (and perhaps other things) in broad transcriptions of it (e.g. in [[air]], [[dairy]] and [[dare]]). - -sche (discuss) 02:52, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't think it's merry, Mary, marry merger related, (though I did indeed notice the odd transcription style of those words and was going to eventually ask about that.)

In actuality, I think it's the instances of words like /bed/ where I would have expected /ɛ/. Actually, I had thought only dialects of Northern England and Scotland would use /e/ in such a situation. Tharthan (talk) 12:58, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Categories for rhymes

I think Wiktionary:Grease pit/2013/December#Rhymes categories again could benefit from your input. —CodeCat 18:08, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Slovincian

WT:LANGTREAT doesn't mention Slovincian. I was wondering whether we made the decision not to treat it as a dialect of Kashubian, or whether it just happened that way. I have no preference one way or the other, since I don't know much about it anyway. --WikiTiki89 16:04, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

It looks like it just happened that way. I mean, both Slovincian and Pomeranian have exceptional codes, so someone made the conscious decision to treat them, Kashubian, and Polish as distinct from each other. But both codes were created by the same user who also created separate exceptional codes for the Pitcairn and the Norfolk varieties of Pitcairn-Norfolk, which subsequent discussions all agreed to re-merge, so it's possible (and indeed, apparently the case) that it was just that one use who got the idea that they should be split. There does not seem to have been any community discussion of Slovencian, Kashubian or Pomeranian, but Wiktionary:About Slovincian has been created. I have updated LANGTREAT to note that "in practice,..." they are currently distinct. - -sche (discuss) 18:50, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Babel-autocreate-text-main

Can you rewrite it as: Users in this category indicate they have knowledge of the language $1. {{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|MediaWiki|| [[Category:$1 language]] [[Category:User languages|$2]] }}

This is probably what was troubling the constant recreation of Category:$1 language because it appears nonempty in Special:Categories. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 11:52, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

 Done; thanks for pointing that out! - -sche (discuss) 22:47, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Removing scripts

Some entries may specify a script with sc= even if no language has that script specified. When you remove the scripts, those entries will eventually trigger script errors. —CodeCat 14:44, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

I checked for such entries. When they existed, I added the script code to the relevant language code rather than removing it. - -sche (discuss) 20:06, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Dard etymology

I thought it was a bit odd to offload this to the talk page. As with any part of an entry, we sometimes have incomplete data that needs further massaging. In this case I imagine I had copied the root word(s) from Wikipedia. I'm doing it again right now with kachori; surely it's better to have something than nothing, and to put it in the right place where it will be seen? Equinox ◑ 23:27, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

On kachori, the etymology gives several words in specific languages, which it implies are etyma. (I say "implies" because it doesn't say "from Hindi..." so they might be cognates.) That's not problematic. On Dard, the "etymology" consisted of dard spelled in two different scripts, each of which is used by numerous (sometimes unrelated) languages... that's not helpful, IMO, because it's not even verifiable/falsifiable. Is the implication that Dard derives from Sanskrit, which is written in Devanagari? Modern Hindi/Urdu, which is written in both scripts? Persian? Konkani? Talysh? Or that it's cognate or related to a word in those languages? - -sche (discuss) 02:36, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

I've re-added it, but with languages specified. (Can't be sure it's from either the Hind or the Persian word, but it's clearly related to them, so I've said that.) How's it look? - -sche (discuss) 02:50, 28 December 2013 (UTC)