User talk:Doremítzwr/Archive/02

Welcome!

Hello, welcome to Wiktionary, and thank you for your contribution so far. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

• How to edit a page is a concise list of technical guidelines to the wiki format we use here: how to, for example, make text boldfaced or create hyperlinks. Feel free to practice in the sandbox. If you would like a slower introduction we have a short tutorial.
• Entry layout explained (ELE) is a detailed policy documenting how Wiktionary pages should be formatted. All entries should conform to this standard, the easiest way to do this is to copy exactly an existing page for a similar word.
• Our Criteria for inclusion (CFI) define exactly which words Wiktionary is interested in including. There is also a list of things that Wiktionary is not for a higher level overview.
• The FAQ aims to answer most of your remaining questions, and there are several help pages that you can browse for more information.
• We have discussion rooms in which you can ask any question about Wiktionary or its entries, a glossary of our technical jargon, and some hints for dealing with the more common communication issues.

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wiktionarian! If you have any questions, bring them to the Wiktionary:Information desk, or ask me on my talk page. If you do so, please sign your posts with four tildes: ~~~~ which automatically produces your username and the current date and time.

Again, welcome!

Template:palæontology

We already have it, take a look. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:01, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I knew about {{paleontology}}. I created {{palaeontology}} and {{palæontology}} to allow consistency of spelling in entries. Specifically, I created {{palæontology}} for archæopteryx (as you can see, it is the only entry that transcludes the template); accordingly, I envisioned {{paleontology}} for archeopteryx and {{palaeontology}} for archaeopteryx. (As for archaiopteryx, I don’t know; palaiontology sees some use, so {{palaiontology}} is doable, though I don’t really care either way. Also, the ‘ai’ parallel is only applicable to terms from Ancient Greek — Latin would only have ‘ae’, ‘æ’, and ‘e’, etymologically — so there is a potential problem with consistency if we allow {{palaiontology}} &c.) I kept the category at Category:Paleontology, however, since I do not consider it worth dividing a category’s content for the sake of spelling consistency (FWIW, I’d præfer the category to be at Category:Palaeontology, though I’m not too bothered). Can you think of a better way to allow such spelling consistency without nearly triplicating the template? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 19:55, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, use redirects like I've just done. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:22, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

That doesn’t work; see archæopteryx#Noun: it displays (paleontology) as the context tag. What’s important is the external display, not the name of the template used to display it. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 20:37, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Looks fine to me, bring it up on WT:GP#Template:palæontology if you like where I already brought this up. Mglovesfun (talk) 21:00, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

sea basses

Heya. I saw you created sea bass and while sea basses is a valid plural, could you somehow edit sea bass to reflect that sea bass is also used for plural, such as:
Sea bass are ...
Thanks much! --Neskaya kanetsv? 18:09, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Done. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 18:13, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Awesome, and thank you. --Neskaya kanetsv? 18:21, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

YW. BTW, would you say there is any difference in which plural form is used, depending whether the referent is:

1. Multiple specimina of individual fish;
2. Multiple species of fish; or,
3. The entire broad category of saltwater fish, taken collectively?

† ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 18:27, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Honestly, I'm not sure. I've actually never used sea basses myself, but it was a valid plural when I did a quick Google search, and I so created it rather than just getting rid of seemingly odd plural form. I think that sea basses was used, the few times I saw it, for your third example. —Neskaya kanetsv? 18:54, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

OK, thanks. I’ll look further into this myself, at some point. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 19:03, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Comparing [1] to [2], it looks to me like your cases 2 and 3 (though I'm not sure I understand the difference therebetween) account for most/all uses of sea basses. This is pretty much what one would have expected, I think. -- Visviva 04:39, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

OK, I’ll go with that. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 20:53, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Greek character transliteration

In 2007 (my apologies for not noticing) you contributed to discussion at Wiktionary talk:About Greek/Transliteration on that subject. Conrad.Irwin has asked me to look at a mapping file for automatic transliteration of Greek. I have done (am doing) this and have put a table of values at Wiktionary:About Greek/Transliteration-new.

I am not aware of any substantial differences between this table and the old one - except that the stressed vowels and combinations of them are now listed in full (I hope). You (along with User:Rodasmith) thought that η/ι and ω/ο should be differentiated. Now is a suitable time to address this. I sahll soon be absent until 22 Sept, so any answers will be delayed. Hopefully none of us think so strongly (I don't) about this that we cannot reach friendly agreement :) —Saltmarsh^{απάντηση} 14:06, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this to my attention; I’ve responded thereat. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 02:20, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Duplicating entries

Why are you doing this? Surely you must admit that Hephaestus is much more common spelling. Not only is it more common but Hephaestus was created before Hephæstus and our de facto policy is to admit the chronologically first entry as the base one (and add pronunciation, translations and other goodies there) and to define others as mere alternative spellings. I am going to return the Translations you moved away from Hephaestus. Also, don’t you think adding reference links to trivial undisputed stuff like context tags, pronunciation and definitions is redundant? I think mentioning OED in references section is enough; numbers like ^[1] are annoying and make it harder to read the article. --Vahagn Petrosyan 15:32, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Agree with Vahagn on all points. And I've taken the liberty of converting Hephæstus to its proper entry. Please Doremítzwr, while these esoteric spellings certainly merit a place in our dictionary, you must understand that that place is, and will continue to remain, secondary to the spellings actually used now. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 17:22, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, hitherto, I’d tended to make full entries for the ligated spellings of terms if the OED listed them at that spelling (as it does with Hephæstus). I shall consider mitigating this policy of mine. Vahagn — I’m now using in-line referencing a lot less, since I can see why it would be a little distracting; however, I’ve used it in hospiticide — is that use reasonable to you? Atelaes — I’ve accepted your change to (deprecated template usage) Hephæstus (bar one tiny detail), but I would ask you, if you intend to perform this kind of entry-consolidation, to ensure that no information is lost and that it is preserved in the new main entry (as I have now done to Hephaestus); in particular, the pronunciatory transcriptions I provided were lost in your revision. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 03:21, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, hospiticide is a very rare word present in only one of my many dictionaries. So, I guess it’s reasonable in this case to cite the definitions the way you did. --Vahagn Petrosyan 06:26, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Fair point. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 11:33, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

‛Sall good, then. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 15:09, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

What is the point of a link to something that requires a subscription like OED? Giving out passwords is both illegal and largely ineffective because they seem to match the password against IP address in some cases. I thought that was actually against WMF policy. Or is that just WP policy? I thought that it was deemed to be spam. (I doubt that this latter is your intent and that this kind of spam is rarely a problem at en.wikt in general.) DCDuring TALK 15:25, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

I very much doubt that I’ve done anything illegal, since I don’t pay and haven’t paid anything for the subscription, and I haven’t signed anything about it given to me by the local government authority that pays the institutional subscription I use. I am also oblivious to any policy — be it Wikipedia-specific or WMF-general — against this. If you think that the sharing of that password breaks a rule, then I advise you to take it off your user page. As for the idea that the links to the OED constitute spam — that’s codswallop. Without the links, the reference would look exactly the same, bar the fact that the text enclosed in quotation marks would be black instead of light blue. We don’t link to Google Book Search hit-pages to spam Wiktionary in favour of Google or any given book, we do it to facilitate the speedy verification of our content by our (rightfully, given the ephemerality of the wiki medium) more sceptical users. It is unfortunate that factors of cost will prevent most users from verifying content supported by the OED, but that is no reason for us to prevent all our users from doing so; do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Moreover, whilst the (Wikipedia?) policy is to favour free-to-access sources where such alternatives exist, in the case of the highly respected and authoritative prestige Oxford English Dictionary, no such alternative exists. It would only be to the detriment of the perceived reliability of Wiktionary to remove such links, since they act as a self-confident and easily investigated assertion of the veracity of the content of the entries in which they feature.

Further to the issue of entry duplication: I’ve been thinking about the wisdom of allowing full entries for alternative spellings, and have concluded that it is a folly. Much is made of the belief that we should minimise the number of clicks that a user must make before he reaches a considerable concentration of useful information, and this has been presented as an argument in favour of mass carbon-copying, transclusion, and other forms of redundancy. The downside of such an approach, when applied to the idea of maintaining parallel entries for each of a word’s alternative spellings, is that we do not manage entry synchrony at all well, especially when it comes to larger entries, such as those for greatly polysemic terms. This means that a user has to make many clicks, comparing the content of multiple entries in a tedious and time-consuming game of spot the difference, and in cases where the information presented conflicts, he has to guess which entry is correct and which erroneous; this is a disservice to our users, who become exasperated by our scattered lack of completion and our self-contradiction — such alienation can only harm Wiktionary’s credibility. This is a strong argument in favour of having only one main entry for the lemma of each term. However, it doesn’t matter so much which particular spelling houses the main entry, since that all-important “considerable concentration of useful information” is only ever a maximum of one click away, and if a person is so unreasonably and contemptibly lazy or impatient to make one click, then accommodating him cannot be a priority. Of course, to ensure that that maximum is only one click, then, as in the case of (deprecated template usage) Hephaestus, all alternative spellings should point toward the main entry. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 18:40, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

NB, hospiticide is in the OED1 as well as the OED2: specifically on page 407 of part I of volume 5. While that site I just linked to is unstable, citing archive.org should be fine. (I don't see anything wrong with citing the OED2 when appropriate, but when we can cite a freely-available version, all the better.) That said, although we do have 1 more citation of use than the OED's 0, I rather doubt if this word meets the letter of CFI. -- Visviva 19:06, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Great! I’ve added it and Blount’s Glossographia as supporting references to the entry. The useful thing about the OED1 is, since it’s out of copyright, I can copy the information thence verbatim et literatim, thereby making user-verification a yet-quicker process. It just so happens that, in the case of hospiticide, the OED1’s entry is identical with the OED2’s. I’ll keep the reference to the OED2 though, since it carries so much authority. I’m not really concerned with the letter of the CFI in this case; its primary purpose, AFAICT, is to formalise the process of sorting the wheat from the chaff, thus making decisions as to what stays and what goes subject to largely objective criteria. It can harm the project to follow that policy page (as important as it is) too strictly (as was argued when I requested verification of a sense of the Portuguese term cruz gamada). A good example of the CFI being applied to the detriment of the good of the project is encolden: It was on RfV for months, where it was insisted that the requisite three supporting citations be found (largely at the behest of Connel MacKenzie, who was pursuing a kind of vendetta against entries that supported the inclusion of the English circumfix en- -en and its variant em- -en), despite the fact that it’s listed in at least eighteen dictionaries; eventually, I found four supporting quotations for the term. Now, it would not have been the end of the world had (deprecated template usage) encolden failed RfV, and the entry is most certainly all the better for having four supporting quotations, but that kind of entry is not what the CFI were designed to keep out — rarities that have been consistently recorded in lexicographical works for centuries (which (deprecated template usage) encolden is) are wheat, not chaff. Google Book Search is not an exhaustive archive of everything written through the medium of English since 1470; whilst a term showing little or no evidence of use on the Internet is probably beyond our means to verify, this does not mean that the term does not exist, being used, by someone, somewhere; consequently, someone may still “run across it and want to know what it means”. What is often stated, and rightly so, is that inclusion as a headword in a dictionary does not constitute verification; however, when a word is included as a headword in several dictionaries, over centuries, then maybe it’s time we take the hint. Such argumenta ad verecundiam, used sparingly, will not harm our credibility (unless we do it wholesale, as was done with Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, which means of inflating our content still attracts occasional criticism); I’ve seen many an entry in the OED supported solely by a pithy abbreviation of the name of an antiquarian lexicon, yet it does their reputation no harm. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 21:33, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Commentary

• The admonishment that we retain terms with considerable lexicographical coverage was brought up again a few days later in the RfV discussion for abnodate; the issue was then raised in the Beer Parlour. After some discussion, creating an appendix of terms included in other dictionaries but that would not satisfy our criteria for inclusion was settled upon as a compromise proposal between deletion and inclusion, and so Appendix:Words found only in dictionaries was born. There was some initial opposition, but its existence seems to be uncontentious by now (26/IX/2009).

Your spelling.  :)

Seriously. I'm not trying to be a prick or anything, but could you please try not to use archaic spellings such as præface and all the other ones that I know you're fond of on talk pages such as the Beer Parlour? I have a processing disorder, as well as dyslexia. Such spellings are not common, and several of them sadly break my screen-reader, as well as overall making it harder for me to understand what is being communicated. It may take me several times to look at the words and figure out what the spelling is actually for. In any case, I'm sorry that I have to be so insistent about this, but I appreciate your help. --Neskaya kanetsv? 05:42, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Hi Neskaya. When you first raised this issue, I did partially eschew writing with those characters for a while (I don't know if you noticed). Gradually, I got back into using them, believing that the original complaint was entirely or at least essentially a hypothetical problem of accessibility unsupported by evidence that it actually bothered anyone. (This, rightly or wrongly, is often how I regard DCDuring's objections when they hinge on the assumption that our users have ADHD-level short attention spans &c.) I frequently find that concerns raised about cultural neutrality, accessibility, and "anti-oppression" go much too far and allow too little genuine, spontaneous expression (amongst other things). Of course, my attitude toward this issue differs now that I know that this is a problem in practice and for you in particular. I'm sorry if I've caused you problems; I hope you understand why and recognise that I wasn't intentionally disregarding your difficulties.

Now, obviously, I consider the fact that your screen reader is broken by these fairly minor spelling variants to be a shortcoming in the technology that ought to be rectified; even if spelling revisionists steeped in etymology like Bogorm and me agree to confine our writing to variants compatible with screen readers, the same concession cannot be exacted from old texts or from the myriads of internet users writing a plethora of abbreviated, phoneticised, and misspelt forms. Verily, if it can't handle what I write, then the screen reader really isn't doing well at all (cf. anything approaching Middle English). How does it work, exactly? Does it have a word list with preloaded pronunciations? (BTW, I presume that piped links like [[præload|preloaded]] and [[præsume|presume]] cause no such problems, right?) Or does it work by reading the English semi-phonetically? Do all spellings with (deprecated template usage) Æ, (deprecated template usage) æ, (deprecated template usage) Œ, or (deprecated template usage) œ break it, or just some? -For example, take a look at the massive list of terms deriving from the Ancient Greek word αἷμα (haîma, “blood”) that are thereby related to septicæmia. Almost all of these are listed in the OED as the primary (and sometimes only) spellings of those words, which, I should think, qualifies them to be called "standard"; what does you screen reader make of them?

If we can work out exactly what spellings are causing the problems, then we can work out a way to avoid this problem. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 21:58, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I did notice, actually, and now I understand why you ended up gradually used them again. As far as the screenreader, I've been trying to add additional words to it for quite some time, as I come across them -- unfortunately, it also does have a fair few bugs, and although those get fixed, accessibility usually isn't high on the to-do list for a lot of people, especially when it comes to misunderstood things such as processing disorders. Piped links are absolutely fine. Additionally, words that are very, very commonly typed with a ligature, such as pædiatrician, and encyclopædia, it recognises just fine -- perhaps because these are part of standard British English. Additionally, most of the words at septicæmia were fine, as was septicæmia. Yet it breaks promptly and spells out præloaded -- which is a word that I can type as well, as p-r-ash-l-o-a-d-e-d, which gets to be the most minor bit annoying.

Oddly, it also even has better support for foreign languages, Tagalog, French, and Hebrew to name a few that I have installed support for, than it has for some of the odder alternative spellings in English.

As for the corners of the internet where things are so often misspelled and used chatspeak, I primarily actually avoid them like the plague itself, because I find them to be more hassle than it's worth. With many places aside from here, if there are too many barriers to understanding a piece of text, I ignore it, or go somewhere else. In that fashion, this site and my editing here has become my primary hobby; I do very little else outside of the Wiki projects, my email, and my schoolwork.

Again, thank you very much for your willingness to work with me on this issue. I hope that we can figure it out. --Neskaya kanetsv? 19:05, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Phew; that's good. I was kinda dreading that it would be really useless when it comes to ligatures per se. There's a very good chance that it has a word list that contains every word with a ligature in the OED [2^nd Ed.]. Almost all the præ- spellings are archaic, but the OED has fifty-one entries which are prae- or (deprecated template usage) præ-initial; check out the following rel-table and let me know which (if any) your screen reader's OK with, and which break it:

terms in the OED that begin with prae- or præ-

• praecipe, præcipe
• praecipe in capite, præcipe in capite
• praecipe quod reddat, præcipe quod reddat
• praecognitum, præcognitum
• praecordia, præcordia
• præcordialgia
• praecornu, præcornu
• Praedesque (unrelated to Latin prae-; instead from Winthrop Mackworth Praed)
• Praedian (from WM Praed)
• Praedism (from WM Praed)
• praefericulum
• praefervid, præfervid
• praefiscinal, præfiscinal
• praelabour, prælabour
• praelector, prælector
• praelectorship
• praelectress
• praemetial, præmetial
• praemunientes, præmunientes
• praemunientes clause, præmunientes clause
• praemunientes writ, præmunientes writ
• praemunire, præmunire
• praemunireal, præmunireal
• praemunire facias, præmunire facias
• praemunirized, præmunirized
• Praenestine, Prænestine
• Praenestinian, Prænestinian
• praenomen, prænomen (it should definitely be able to read this one)
• praepositorship, præpositorship
• praepostor, præpostor
• præpostorial
• præpostorship
• Praesepe, Præsepe
• praeses, præses
• praetexta, prætexta
• praetextatian, prætextatian
• praetor, prætor (it should definitely be able to read this one)
• praetoral, prætoral
• praetorial, prætorial
• praetorian, prætorian (it should definitely be able to read this one)
• Praetorian Guard
• praetorianism, prætorianism
• Praetorian Prefect
• Praetorian prefecture
• praetorical, prætorical
• praetorium, prætorium
• praetorship, prætorship
• praetory, prætory
• praetory house
• praeturate, præturate
• writ of praemunire facias

Are you able to add classes of spellings to your screen reader's word list? If so, adding a (deprecated template usage) præ- form for every pre- word it has would be a good idea (not all of the ligated forms will be etymologically consistent, but I doubt that matters, since that simply means you will almost certainly never come across them).

What exactly is this processing disorder of yours (if you don't mind me asking), and how does it affect you? (I know about dyslexia already.) Also, since I'm generally pretty curious about the demographic make-up of the squad of regular contributors hereto, and since you mention schoolwork, may I ask how old are you? If you'd prefer not to disclose anything in public, feel free to e-mail me instead, or if you'd prefer not to disclose any such information, period, then feel just as free not to say.

You are more than welcome for my willingness. The way I see it, this is a legitimate (non-æsthetic (BTW, that one's OK, yeah?) or otherwise frivolous) complaint, and one I'd like to address in a way that causes you least disruption and allows me to write closest to how I please. Moreover, other people no doubt have similar problems and depend on similar technologies that you do, and whilst I would consider those hypothetical users a lower priority than someone manifest in the here and now, I should ideally like to avoid such disruption to them, too. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 04:35, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

So, some of them worked, and for those, oddly, the nonligature forms didn't break, but it produced what was essentially well ... garbled. The garbled forms were interesting, but definitely not enough to clue me in to what word was being read. The ones off hand that worked were præturate, præmunirized, Prænestine, Prænestinian, prænomen, præpositorship, præpostor, præpostorial, prætor. prætoral, prætorial, and prætorian. I'm actually in college. As for the rest, I will email you actually. The general rule for the screenreader though, is that the spelling of the word that is used more often with the ligature, if the ligature is a valid spelling, is fine. Words that aren't usually spelled with a ligature (ie præsumption or something) are going to break and it will choose between garbling it, and spelling it out. And yeah, æsthetic is okay though it gets said oddly and aesthetic doesn't get said oddly. --Neskaya kanetsv? 23:42, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Neskaya requæsted me too to refrain from using ſ, wherein I consented, since this is a typographical issue. But as the reasons for æ and œ are purely etymological, I præserved them in my comments (another reason is that I have a Danish keyboard installed next to another Europæan one and it is easy to type æ on it, whilst typing ſ is not). What do you think, Doremítzwr? The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 10:50, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

What I think has been explained to some extent above; the rest will depend on what I learn from Neskaya. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 21:58, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

ello

The note u left me was lovely. Valid points. The IPA was really just an example. I'm not married to that idea, it was the inclusive sentiment not the historical origins of the semiology that were key. What I do value in the logo is Multiculturalism, Pluralism and Unity-in-Diversity, Inclusion, etc. Hence, I really appreciate your suggestions. I love looking at all the scripts of the World. Just meditating on them fills me with wonder. Whenever I see those little abstract squares with the Unicode code on 'em I go hunting for the Unicode True Type Fonts and install them so that culture may be clearly represented in my online machinations. I love our scripts... some are squiggly, some are sharp, some are pictures some are abstractions, some like the Mayan script and Hieroglyphs use proxemics to convey meaning. I love Proxemics. Their breadth and diversity is wonderful and to be celebrated. I like the etymological reticulum theme, the foregrounded root of a tree with leaves with an inset blue circle delineated to be in keeping with the majority of the other logos and maybe little Wikipedia orb fruits in the canopy and leaves...but the roots should descent out by themselves somewhat and entwine and plait. The roots should be evocative of Source's iceberg. What are your projects currently? Though I have been an editor of Wikt for some time I have not been very active on this Project. That said, I am a newb and am going to be more active in this Project now and for quite some time into the future so I would appreciate it if you would be a mentor. Did u know that the Giant Panda has the digestive system of a carnivore but is now a vegetarian?
Respectfully
B9hummingbirdhoverin'^{æ•ω•ॐ} 12:37, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Whilst I would usually approach “Multiculturalism, Pluralism and Unity-in-Diversity, Inclusion, etc.”-style sentiments with a certain learnt scepticism, you seem to emphasise the valuing-all aspect of those things, rather than the curtail-the-élite aspect. Yeah, I quite like the tree metaphor, although there is a disanalogy that needs to be worked out, since linguistic roots diminish in number the further down you go, whereas arboreal ones proliferate. Virtually all my work with the WMF projects is on Wiktionary, but I intend (at some point) to use a scanner and an OCR program to add Owen Feltham’s Resolves Divine, Morall, Politicall (of which I have a copy) to Wikisource; but seriously don’t hold your breath for that one. I’d be happy to serve as a “mentor” ( :-S ) to you; I’ll answer (if I can) whatever questions you have for me. Yes, I knew that about the Panda; which is why people are often shocked to see one scavenging a carcass… † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 01:56, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

en-noun template info

Thanks! I don't generally initiate articles, in part because the templates have become so complex. But I appreciate opportunities to learn more. - Amgine/^talk 03:55, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

You’re welcome. Hopefully, this proposal will remove some of that complexity. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 15:06, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Commentary

• As a result of that proposal, the head= parameter (originally of {{infl}}) has become the institutionally preferred means of altering the headwords generated by templates, replacing sg= in {{en-noun}} and {{en-proper noun}}, pos= in {{en-adj}} and {{en-adv}}, inf= in {{en-verb}}, and so on.

drite

11th century is still Old English, not Middle. And be aware that up to the 2nd edition of the OED, they marked long vowels in OE with acute accents, so when they say drítan they mean what we would call {{term|dritan|drītan}}. If you look at the 11th century citations they have, you'll see there are no accents there. Ƿidsiþ 14:50, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Noted, thanks. (Lapsus mentis.) † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 14:54, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

embiggen

By the same token, I don't really understand the rationale here. It seems superfluous to have two quotes from one work, unless each of them is providing unique support for some aspect of the entry. That didn't seem to be the case to me, but maybe I'm missing something? -- Visviva 08:44, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

We just have so few cites that I thought it good to take advantage of what examples we do have. Also, the paper’s use is intransitive, in contrast with the previous transitive uses. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 21:26, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

done

Thanks for reminding me! :) L☺g☺maniac chat? 15:01, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for that; you’re welcome for the reminder, though I confess that I was selfishly motivated by my own lack of comprehension. Unfortunately, the only bit I had real problems decyphering was “its fonetik>noconfusion w/imview due spelinreforms”, which seems to have caused you difficulty, too. :-( Aah, well; thanks ne’ertheless. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 16:03, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

It's all right, reminders are appreciated - I just hadn't checked my watchlist in a while. I think his basic meaning there was that it was phonetic and didn't have to change due to spelling reforms. L☺g☺maniac chat? 16:27, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Does “it” refer to the IPA? If so, I think I understand him. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 17:04, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

AFAICT, yes. L☺g☺maniac chat? 17:56, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

estote

In fact, Latin has a "first imperative" and a "second imperative". I hadn't noticed the different terminology in the Latin conjugation tables, but both designations seem to be used in the literature. --EncycloPetey 00:18, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

How confusing. I thought you’d mistakenly added the “second-person” detail twice. On this topic, could you verify the entries I created for first imperative and second imperative please? BTW, thanks for answer many of my Latin requests lately (such as lūsus); and BT other W, why are the terms in the conjugation table for (deprecated template usage) volō not linked whilst the terms in the conjugation table for (deprecated template usage) volō are? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 19:06, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Re: imperatives. I've made some edits to (deprecated template usage) second imperative. I'm hesitant to do more because I know that Hebrew also has a first and second imperative (IIRC). Ruakh or someone may be able to generalize the definition or add the Hebrew grammar sense.

Re: volō. The "fly" sense is regular, while the "want" sense is irregular. The former was conjugated with template help. The irregular one will have to have its template done by hand, and that's the reason it has yet to be done. --EncycloPetey 00:59, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

IC × 2. What advantage over (deprecated template usage) present imperative and (deprecated template usage) future imperative do first imperative and second imperative have, exactly? It seems undesirable to have inconsistent terminology referring to the same thing in the same language… † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 01:08, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

I find that "future imperative" is misleading, since it starts now and continues. Were I allowed to revise the terminology, I would prefer "progressive imperative" or something like that. It really conveys a "now and hereafter" meaning. I'm debating whether to revise all the Latin conjugation table templates at some point to reflect this. However, that will be a major project, and will probably not even be considered until such time as I set all those templates into a standard master template, which will be no small feat. I'm also uncertain whether "present/future imperative" are used by any other languages. My impression has been that "first/second imperative" is the more general terminology among linguists. --EncycloPetey 01:16, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

OK, that’s something for the future, then; I shan’t bug you about it. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 01:26, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

talismen

Just curious - why is it not a back-formation? It's a replacement of an incorrectly perceived suffix (-man) with a pluralising form that would be correct for that suffix. bd2412 T 15:34, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

It’s a kind of hypercorrection, if anything. A back-formation is a word formed by removing an affix (or a word part interpreted as an affix) from a longer word; like preëmpt, back-formed from preëmption, and back-form, itself self-referentially back-formed from back-formation. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 20:12, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Ah, or burgle from burglar - I see. Ok, thanks for the explanation. bd2412 T 21:31, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

No problem. :-) † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 23:48, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

WOTD

Please don't alter WOTD templates that have already featured on the Main Page. There isn't any reason to do so, since we want to archive only what featured. --EncycloPetey 00:53, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

OK. I just thought it would be a useful thing to keep them up to date. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 00:54, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

intuïtion

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/intu%C3%AFtion

As flattering it may be to be cited there, I don't think one citation from a non-native at English justifies its existence. Still rather weird to come across a post one did on a childish forum a year back in a dictionary...

Diæreses, dashes, ligatures, classical plurals and tremata are of course the back-bone of the modern pædant (or pædagogant if you like). Rajakhr 09:33, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

You wouldn’t be the only one to use diæreses thus; cf. intuïtion, intuïtive, and intuïtively. Such diæretic spellings are more widespread than they seem, it’s just that Google Book Search’s OCR software is crap at picking up diacritics. BTW, thanks for teaching me about (deprecated template usage) pædagogant. :-) † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 02:47, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

nl/dutch-trema standard;)=wehav2write it(oficialy--史凡>voice-MSN/skypeme!RSI>typin=hard! 06:42, 30 September 2009 (UTC)+--史凡>voice-MSN/skypeme!RSI>typin=hard! 15:10, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, Dutch authors are often wont to apply the diæresis in English words as well; an example of this is vacuüm. However, I wouldn’t say that the diæresis is always unwarranted; on (deprecated template usage) vacuüm, it discourages the [ˈvækjuːm] mispronunciation. In theory, intuïtion, intuïtive, and intuïtively discourage the mispronunciations *[ɪnˈtwɪʃən], *[ɪnˈtwɪtɪv], and *[ɪnˈtwɪtɪvli], though I must confess to never having heard such utterances. (Etymologically, AFAIK, that would require a (deprecated template usage) -tv- consonantal cluster, but the only Latinate English word I could find that featured those two letters in uninterrupted succession was the obsolete and rare postvene (from Latin postveniō (“I come after”)); however, it isn’t a cluster, as evidenced by the OED2’s headword format for it, “†postˈvene, v.”, and since it occurs on a morphological boundary.) A better case could be made for the way that coïncide would discourage the mispronunciation *[ˈkɔɪnsaɪd]. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 00:22, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

ta4reply+longhnd!:)

--史凡>voice-MSN/skypeme!RSI>typin=hard! 06:37, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Are you referring to this and this? YW. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 13:54, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

2x y!

• only cos uaskd4a [del iirc]p.content2anotha regular,isaw uaint
• 100%acurate'tr-l'!:D--史凡>voice-MSN/skypeme!RSI>typin=hard! 15:53, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Actual probable absence (yeah, we’ll see…)

From 07:59am on the 15^th day of July in 2009 till the time of this posting, the following valedictory was emblazoned atop my talk page:

The time has come for me to take a break from editing Wiktionary and reïmmerse myself somewhat IRL. As is my wont, I offer the customary apologies to those parties adversely affected by my omissions: the tasks I have undertaken but left unfinished and the discussions to which I have contributed but left unconcluded. I intend to return in December, but I may end up doing so either earlier or later, or both; until that time, any contributions I make will be minor and erratic — the odd requæst or Welsh translation. (If I am tempted to produce anything more major, I’ll create it in a text file off-line.) In the meantime, cluttering my newly-archived talk page with comments that will remain unanswered for far longer than even my usual response rate is ill-advised; if you want to get in touch with me for any reason, e-mail me instead. May I convey my warm wishes and kindest regards to you all, as well as my hope that this project sees an industrious next five months. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 07:59, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

In the meantime (about two-and-a-half months), I made 1,691 contributions here. Obviously, I didn’t know myself at all well. This period of absence has probably been my most prolific ever here.

My situation is changing somewhat. From tomorrow, I shall no longer have access to my private computer, so if I want to edit here, I’ll be limited to frustratingly unreliable public computers that take ½–1 minute to load an editing screen; moreover, I really should be getting on with other stuff that has a greater impact on my life. Obv., I’m a wiki-addict (well, just a wikt-addict, really). (My name is Raifʻhār Doremítzwr, and I’m an…  :-D ) Since I’m a little sceptical of my capacity to go cold turkey, and going on past behaviour, I’ve decided not to post another <big>…</big> valedictory. Instead, consider this a warning/disclaimer that I’ll probably be less consistent in my quantity of input. Or something.

Of note, I leave half-baked (some more doughy than others) supplementing enPR, integrating {{citedterm}} into WT:QUOTE, making sure the spelling in Wiktionary’s entries “please all of the people, all of the time”, and disguising beefy entries as low in fat; there’s probably some other stuff, too, just that it doesn’t immediately come to mind. If any of that seems worth the investment of your effort to bring it to fruition, then please, be my guest.

So, see y’all. Probably sooner than I should. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 09:56, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Entries for combining diacritics

Hi, I know you're mostly away ATM, but I wanted to commend Appendix:Unicode/Combining Diacritical Marks to your attention -- specifically the entries (or at this writing, mostly non-entries) linked therein. This is more your bailiwick than mine (or anyone else's here, AFAIK). I have started a paradigm entry for COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT; if you have time, please edit that to include whatever information you think would be appropriate/useful. Cheers, -- Visviva 05:11, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, useful. This sort of thing will probably take a fair bit of time and consideration on my part. I’ll get to it, once I have time, and after I’ve finished bringing our entries for secret, secrete, &c. up to a respectable standard. Thanks for drawing my attention to this. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 12:02, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Etymologies

Hello. I hope you haven't used "A Smaller Latin–English Dictionary" as an etymological reference to any other entries besides fremo. (See [3] & [4].) The use of such obsolete sources when it comes to the etymology of a word is always risky :) --Omnipaedista 03:52, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

I might have used it in one or two other entries, but I can’t remember for sure. Anyway, the source’s unreliability is noted; I shall include its hypotheses on the entries’ talk pages in future. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 02:02, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Requests for verification#gẃraidd

Hi Doremítzwr,

How should I resolve Wiktionary:Requests for verification#gẃraidd? It has no cites and is apparently not in clearly widespread use, so the by-the-book thing would be to mark it RFV failed and delete it, but I'm not sure if that's right. In cases like this in the past, I've sometimes kept such words without actually passing them, noting that editors should feel free to re-RFV them, and replaced the {{rfv}} with an {{rfquote}}. Any preference/advice in this case?

Thanks in advance!
—Ruakh_TALK 14:13, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

The source Angr cited (in his post timestamped: 21:56, 7 February 2009) does indeed list the word (see page 599 of this .pdf). I think my university has a copy of the full GPC; could you hold off closing and archiving the discussion until I get a chance to have a look at it, please? I should get the chance to do so on Thursday… † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 18:47, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Certainly; it's not like there's a shortage of other discussions to try to close. :-P   Thanks again! —Ruakh_TALK 18:50, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

No problem. I’ll post my findings in the RfV discussion and then post notices in this section and on your talk page. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 18:53, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

*nudge* :-)   —Ruakh_TALK 20:26, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Are you still planning to look at this?

Thanks again.

—Ruakh_TALK 12:21, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

God, I am spectacularly useless! You can see the supporting evidence I've gathered at Citations:gẃraidd; there are a few more listed in the GPC entry. I'll finish adding them by the end of this weekend, I promise.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 14:54, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

As promised, I've finished adding the rest of those citations and I've posted my findings in the RFV discussion section. I'll leave it to you to close the discussion, for impartiality's sake, if that's OK with you.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:10, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Wow, so thorough … definitely worth waiting for. Thanks a bunch! :-D   —Ruakh_TALK 15:22, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks; I appreciate it.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:35, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

dirempt

This new entry needs cleanup, and it looks right up your alley (or Widsith's). Sadly, I don't own a copy of Holinshed. --EncycloPetey 03:21, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Done. Notâ bene that it calls for the addition of some Latin terms. :-) † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 10:40, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Re: The two etymologies. Actually, the double meaning exists in Latin as well, in a way. Latin participles have the meaning of the verb, but the form and inflection of an adjective. --EncycloPetey 16:09, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Should that fact be reflected in the revision of the second etymology I wrote? Also, regarding emō, does it not also have the meaning of “I take”? –I.e., is the OED’s translation of the word erroneous? Should that be reflected in the revision of the first etymology I wrote? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 15:47, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

obsolete or archaic spelling

Hello. I just detected the entry cœlestial where it is claimed as obsolete spelling. Similar cases like præcede were aptly denoted by you as archaic spelling so that the qualification in this recent entry by the IP raises considerable suspicions, whereupon I would suggest that a user conversant with these archaic spellings determine whether the spelling should be rated as archaic or obsolete, id est whether obsolete is far-fetched. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 13:45, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it’s archaic, rather than obsolete. I’ve changed the entry to reflect this. Note the quotation I added from the 1678 work whose spelling and typography have been modernised, but whose ligatures and capitalisation of nouns have been preserved; ligatures are often retained even when many other typographic variations are eschewed, this is because, whilst they convey an archaic sense, ligatures (where they stand in place of a modern ‘e’ monograph or a modern ‘ae’ or ‘oe’ digraph) are still accessible to the contemporary reader in a way that long esses and the vast majority of Middle-English and Early-Modern-English forms simply aren’t (see, for example, scion#Alternative spellings, of which only cyon, scioun, and scyon possess this accessible archaism). † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 18:40, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Great, I was leaning towards it, but without a source I refrained from editing it. Could you take a look at Wiktionary:Tea room#naïve, if you are as discontented as am I with the pitiable redirect which the English section of naïve repræsents... One IP tried to emend it according to English orthography, but was blocked unfortunately. Do you think that naive is that widespread among common-or-garden variety writers of English to deserve a full-fledged entry in lieu of the only justifiable naïve? The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 17:58, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Commentary

• Naïve remains listed as an alternative spelling of naive, and not vice versâ. The convention (current on the 1ˢᵗ day of April in 2011) of lemmatising the oldest entry of any set of alternative spellings favours (deprecated template usage) naive ((deprecated template usage) naive was created at 3:33am on the 7ᵗʰ day of May in 2005 whereas (deprecated template usage) naïve was created at 8:58am on the 14ᵗʰ day of July in 2005).

Talkback: “Surface” etymologies, Nils von Barth

(Reply to your reply.)

intempestivity

I have added the Latin entry you requested for intempestīvitās, but I have chosen a different etymology than the one on intempestivity; namely, that it is from intempestīvus, etc. as this is what L&S and the Oxford Latin Dictionary say. I'm not sure which one is correct, what do you think? Caladon 17:40, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

The etymology I gave for intempestivity is the one the OED [2^nd Ed.; 1989] gives (just reformatted to our standards and style). Since the difference is not philologically important, the best option is probably to give an either/or presentation of their etymologies. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 02:19, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Could you find a way to format their etymologies without repetition and correct them? See what I have just added to intempestīvitās. Caladon 08:11, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

I’ve reduced them both to their minima. The uncertainty is now a simple “or” in the etymology of intempestīvitās; the rest of the derivation is handled by intempestīvus and tempestīvitās. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 18:26, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

-logue#Etymology

Hello. I have a question: Does the Concise Oxford English Dictionary really give that etymology verbatim? If yes, it is wrong: the correct etymology is "from Ancient Greek {{term||[[-λόγος]]|tr=-logos|one who speaks (in a certain manner)|lang=grc}}." I am under the impression that several English language dictionaries etymologize -ogue from Gk. -logos, -logon, but the fact is that only -logos (-λόγος) exists in Ancient Greek and Greek in general. This -logon form does not make any sense. Shall I proceed in correcting the entry? --Omnipaedista 06:45, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

I no longer have access to the COED [11^th Ed.], so I can’t tell you. If you think it’s wrong and you want to correct it, then go for it. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 16:02, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Inflexion

Please note that only the names of the grc letters ending in μέγα, μικρόν, and ψιλόν are inflected; note also that even those letters are inflected only when they are written/pronounced as two words (eg: ἒ ψιλόν is inflected, while ἔψιλον is not). Letter names such as βῆτα or πεῖ are not inflected at all --Omnipaedista 07:03, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Noted; thanks. So only the names of Ε, ε, Ο, ο, Υ, υ, and Ω, ω are inflected, yes? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 16:07, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Exactly. These are the ones. --Omnipaedista 17:52, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Commentary

• Hence, we have epsila, omicra, upsila, and omegala.

Abbreviations

Do you have a good idea about how to lemmatize the multiple senses on Jan and Jan.? Thanks. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 19:13, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

non sequuntur vs. non sequiuntur

Hi Doremítzwr,

Could you take a look at the inflection line and the usage notes at non sequuntur? Taken together, they seem to suggest that the plurals non sequuntur and non sequiuntur both exist, but I suspect that the latter is supposed to be non sequuntur as well, and that the resulting contradiction (the usage notes' implication that the inflection line doesn't mention non sequuntur) is merely a result of different editors making different changes at different times. I know you're big on Latin-y plurals, so I thought I'd ask for your input before trying to dig into this myself. :-)

Thanks in advance!
—Ruakh_TALK 01:06, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Your hypothesis is correct. This usage note was added in these revisions, whereas I added the Classical plural in this revision (I must not have noticed the erroneous and contradictory usage note at the time). I’ve contacted Bill Poser (the author of the article which spawned this misinformation), asking that he correct the error. (I’ve copied you in on the e-message.) The usage note was crap, but I kept what was worth keeping. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
BTW, I’m off to Eire tomorrow, so I wish you a premature Happy New Year! :-) † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 03:09, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks; a happy New Year to you as well! —Ruakh_TALK 04:15, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

YW. BTW, if you can help here at all, I’d be most grateful. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 10:42, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Template:q

You might have a look at WT:RFDO#Template_talk:q. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 16:35, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up, Bequw. I’m too busy at the moment to reply fully; I shall do so in a few hours’ time. In the meantime, consider experimenting with {{q}}’s colour scheme to find something visible yet palatable — I’ve changed it to Naples yellow; let me know what you think. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 17:33, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Seeing as no-one is ever going to agree on a colour, I've put in a black border, feel free to revert. Conrad.Irwin 17:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

I certainly shan’t! :-) That looks perfect; you seemed to have fixed the problem of the box interrupting letters’ ascenders and descenders. Thanks a lot. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 19:31, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Commentary

• After much work and a very long time, {{q}} was eventually deleted.

Criterion for Determination of Protologism

I'm trying to understand how protologism is determined. I my attempt to add the entry 'ablutophiliac' to complete a reference in a Wikipedia article it was immediately deleted based on protologism. This was done although I had provided examples, references, etymology, and is used in Wikipedia itself. I can only assume that the Wiki glossary definition: "A word which has not yet been used widely enough to merit inclusion in a dictionary." is vague enough to allow arbitrary exclusion based on a whim rather than reason. A casual Google search of the base word 'ablutophilia' brings up 1990 entries most of which agree exactly to the meaning. Is this too few? ^(t): TW Burger ^(u): TW Burger 08:17, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

(deprecated template usage) Protologism is defined quite vaguely in the glossary, but that’s because it relies for its elaboration on WT:CFI, not because of a predilection toward obfuscation on our part. Google Web Hits, by themselves, are not very authoritative at all. The important consideration is criterion 4: “‘Attested means verified through’ [u]sage in permanently recorded media, conveying meaning, in at least three independent instances spanning at least a year.” The only usage of (deprecated template usage) ablutophiliac I could find in a durably archived medium was this one from a Google Group, but if you can find two more (and as long as they are spread over at least a year), the entry may stay. TBH, given the presence herein of (deprecated template usage) ablutophilia, I would not have deleted (deprecated template usage) ablutophiliac, but given the latter’s lack of independent attestability, it is the prerogative of the deleting admin to remove it if he sees fit. Let me know if you need any more help and/or exegesis regarding this. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 12:00, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

<butting in> ... and (deprecated template usage) usage here means natural use in a sentence, without the word being in quotes, or having to be defined. That also means that dictionary entries don't count. </butting in> SemperBlotto 12:03, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

That’s not strictly true; see WT:CFI#Conveying meaning: “[A] sentence like ‘They raised the jib (a small sail forward of the mainsail) in order to get the most out of the light wind,’ appearing in an account of a sailboat race, would be fine. It happens to contain a definition, but the word is also used for its meaning.”
TW Burger, see w:Use–mention distinction for an explanation. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 00:35, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Typographic variants

Continuation of RfV on socioeconomic

I'm not sure that I can be as constructive as I would like to be. I am reacting negatively to many of the contributions in this area that you make, but it is visceral. I usually check to see whether the spelling seems prima facie attestable, but would not lift a finger to attest such attestation myself under any circumstances.

Orthographic representation is a matter of convention. Most orthographic conventions that are not supported by the operating-system software we use seem of questionable value for full lexical treatment as, say, alternative spellings. This is largely driven by my belief that few users will ever find entries with characters that don't have direct keyboard support in the modern form of the language (or in character mapping in our search). I would favor the creation of a large number of appendices on typography to assist contributors and users on such matters. Such appendices would be useful for presenting any transliteration principles that we have in our software or other practices. If this is to be continued, it should be elsewhere. DCDuring TALK 18:06, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Template:Warning

Trust me it's someone having too much time in their hands. Why else would someone create an account and then immediately create a template that makes no sense (code's either copied and pasted from elsewhere - e.g. has no start tag). Maybe I will leave a note on his talk page, if he doesn't reply within the next hour or so, then we /delete/ it. Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 20:57, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Oh well, looks like conrad's already deleted it. Case closed :) Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 20:58, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

I daresay you're right. Seeing that its one use had been removed, I was about to reapply the {{delete}} tag, but by then it had already been deleted. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 21:09, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

eek

Hi Ƿidsiþ. Is this a good edit? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 20:40, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

No. It's an adverb, and can't be used as a conjunction (at least I've never seen it used that way – you can't connect clauses with it for example). Ƿidsiþ 07:48, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Reverted.  ※〖Raifʻhār Doremítzwr〗 〰 Ⓤ · Ⓣ 16:34, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Marking pages for deletion

When you mark pages for deletion, please keep the original content of the page so we can see why it needs to be deleted without looking at the page's history. In a couple weeks, you'll understand what I mean. Ultimateria 17:48, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Sure. Why, what happens in a couple of weeks? ※〖 Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 〗 〰 ⓤ · ⓣ · ⓒ 〰 17:50, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Uh, your nomination for adminship will pass (I assume). Ultimateria 17:57, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Aah, gotcha. :-) ※〖 Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 〗 〰 ⓤ · ⓣ · ⓒ 〰 18:00, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

s.n.

I'm a bit confused by your use s.n. in referencing quotations. I believe you're using it in the sense of "sub nomine" (under the name of). I believe this is mostly used in a legal context (example). Why are you adding it at the end of references? w:S.n. is more commonly used in references to mean "sine nomine" ("without a name"), but in an entry like æternal you listed the authors. Would you clarify how/why you use "s.n."? Thanks. --Bequw → τ 19:20, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Occasionally, snipet views yielded by Google Book Search specify the publisher as "s.n.". Before I found out what it meant, I ignorantly and dutifully copied it literatim to the parenthetic publication details I include when I write citations. Finally, I looked it up, at which point I found out it means (deprecated template usage) sub nomine. Thenceforth, I have been writing it as "(sub nomine sui)" in the relevant quotations. (The 1683 quotation for (deprecated template usage) æternal was added before I found out what it meant.)  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ ⓤ · ⓣ  · ⓒ ~ 23:17, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Can you help me with an example? I can't seem to find where Google puts "s.n.". Is it in a special viewing mode? Are you just copying it from Google or do you include for its own sake? For example, why on age of judgment did you include the "sine nomine sui" at the end of the cite when the author is already listed? Thanks. --Bequw → τ 01:19, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

I didn't write (deprecated template usage) sine nomine sui, I wrote (deprecated template usage) sub nomine sui — the former hardly makes sense. I included (deprecated template usage) sub nomine sui for the 1903 cite of (deprecated template usage) age of judgment because Google gives its author as “Anthony Jennings Bledsoe” and its publisher as “A.J. Bledsoe” — presumably the same person. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page to the section entitled “More book information” to see what I mean.) I've done the same with (deprecated template usage) off one's trolley and with (deprecated template usage) homoiophone. For some reason, all the b.g.c. hits for which the publisher is noted as "s.n." that I've tried to open keep giving me 404 reports; as, for example, with each of the links for the five dateless English cites of Þrymskviða. Weird.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ ⓤ · ⓣ  · ⓒ ~ 05:29, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Sorry for the typo. Thanks for explaining that it was the publisher you were specifying. I think the Latin phrase is both non-standard and abstruse for specifying self publishing. The APA style for this I believe is to put the individual in the publisher's slot with no other change. How about we just do that? --Bequw → τ 19:07, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

APA? The problem with that is that it frequently leads to awful-looking repetition, especially where a society collectively authors its journal of the same name and then publishes it itself. How about simply "self-published"? Technically, that could be interpreted as implying that the book published itself, but since that is a patent absurdity, I don't think we have to worry about someone thinking that. What do you think?  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ ⓤ · ⓣ  · ⓒ ~ 19:46, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Seems fine. BTW I was referring to w:APA style. --Bequw → τ 03:05, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Aah!, OK. Shall we move to get this codified in WT:QUOTE?  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ ⓤ · ⓣ  · ⓒ ~ 19:48, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

While I believe "self-published" is preferable to Latin I'm not versed in common styles. How about we post it to Wiktionary talk:Quotations first? --Bequw → τ 21:46, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Done.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ ⓤ · ⓣ  · ⓒ ~ 21:56, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

olisīpōnēnsis

I have just added it, though I don't feel particularly confident with it. Please check it through for errors. Caladon 10:41, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

The only error I could spot was in the formatting of the etymology. However, I am not fluent in Latin, so I don't think I can be relied upon to check for errors. Thanks for creating the entry, anyway; and so quickly, too.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 10:50, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't know what happened with that extra pipe and incorrect formatting with the etymology. Thanks for the corrections. Regarding one of your other requests, anencephalia, do you think this just means the state of having no brain or the absence of a brain? I was thinking of using [5] or [6] as a quotation. Caladon 10:56, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

The etymology suggests the meaning “the state of being without that which is within the head”, and since (the last time I checked) it is the brain that takes up most of the space within the head, your glosses of “the state of having no brain” and “the absence of a brain” sound pretty much right.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 12:10, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

This should be done now. Concerning the etymology I added, is this what you had in mind? Caladon 13:31, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Yup, that looks just right. The English anencephaly has a somewhat more restricted meaning, I think, but given the need for a one-word translation, its inclusion in the definition is a good idea.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 16:33, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Citations:feodatorius

Does this just translate as 'feudal lord', meaning feodatorius functions as an adjective here? I've added the rest, but we'll have to wait for EncycloPetey to check them, since he has a few Medieval Latin dictionaries, which may enhance the entries considerably. These were especially difficult for me to add as I had very little to work on, so they may be prone to errors. Caladon 17:24, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

I do think that (deprecated template usage) feodātōrius functions as an adjective in that 1560/1873 quotation; however, I'm unsure whether to gloss it as simply "feudal" is entirely correct. The meaning of the English feudatory, feodatory specifies a vassal lord, whereas feudal, feodal allows both superior and subordinate; might this distinction be reflected in the words' Latin etyma? In that case, perhaps "feudatory lord" is a better translation. Anyway, I've alerted EP to this section, as he may be able to help in some way. BTW, sorry for the delay in reply; I've been very busy of late.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 01:14, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Nierneyer's dictionary specifies "provided with a fief" and "vassal" as part of the definitions, so I think feudatory would indeed be a better translation. --EncycloPetey 00:51, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

Sysophood

Welcome to sysophood. Please add an entry at Wiktionary:Administrators.

May I ask that you always have a second session open on Recent Changes whenever you are editing Wiktionary. You may mark good edits as "patrolled", revert vandalism and stupidity by either deleting new entries or by using the "rollback" function. You may block vandals at your own discretion.

Note: As there are times when no sysop is active, it would be useful if you start your patrolling from the time you last left the system. Cheers. SemperBlotto 19:32, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Done. I've not used any of my admin tools yet, but when I do, I'll patrol regularly, as requested; ATM, I'm just here to answer messages that have been sent to me. I'll return to edit more regularly somewhen in the next couple of weeks, Deo volente.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 01:27, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Congratulations. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 21:41, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. :-)  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 01:27, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

scita + scienda

[Posted to User talk:Bogorm#scita and scienda, User talk:Caladon#scita and scienda, User talk:EncycloPetey#scita and scienda, and User talk:Stephen G. Brown‎#scita and scienda]:
Forgive the spam, but I need to know urgently what the two Latin words scita and scienda mean. My guess is that they're related to either sciō (“I can, know, understand, have knowledge”) or scītor (“I seek to know”, “I ask, enquire”) (which we don't have), or to both of them. They have a specialised use in English as terms of political science, as demonstrated by this quotation:

As modern life becomes increasingly complicated across many different sociopolitical levels, Kuehnelt-Leddihn submits that the Scita — the political, economic, technological, scientific, military, geographical, psychological knowledge of the masses and of their representatives — and the Scienda — the knowledge in these matters that is necessary to reach logical-rational-moral conclusions — are separated by an incessantly and cruelly widening gap and that democratic governments are totally inadequate for such undertakings." (taken from w:Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn#Work)

Any help you can give me with these words (the greatest being the creation of entries for them) would be very much appreciated. Thanks and regards.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:21, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Have you seen [7]? SemperBlotto 15:26, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

I had not seen that, and although helpful, it doesn't really tell me what the words mean in Latin. I'd guessed that (deprecated template usage) scienda means something like "things to be sought to be known", "things to be asked about", "things to be inquired into" — that sort of thing — and that, grammatically, it's a plural neuter future participle (or something) of a verb ((deprecated template usage) scitor?). As for (deprecated template usage) scita, I couldn't guess as to its grammar, but I take it to mean something like "things known" (it's not an inflexion of (deprecated template usage) scientia, that's for sure). Can you shed more learnèd light on their literal-grammatical meaning?  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:51, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

(deprecated template usage) scita could well be nominative, vocative or accusative plural of (the noun) (deprecated template usage) scitum - but my Latin is dreadful. SemperBlotto 15:54, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Do you mean a plural of the supine (since it is a verbal noun)?  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 16:01, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

The supine only appears in the accusative and the ablative (singular), and usually expresses purpose of motion. It seems to be more often a source of other forms, rather than used much in its own right. --EncycloPetey 00:56, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

Here are the responses from Bogorm's, Caladon's, EncycloPetey's, and Stephen G. Brown‎'s talk pages:

User talk:Bogorm#scita and scienda

Hi, Doremítzwr. No, it is not spam, for the application of Latin words in English texts always raises my inquisitiveness and is something I find intriguing. scitus is the past participle of sciō and means known. scita is either the nominative or ablative feminine singular form or the nominative or accusative neuter form. In our case I think it is the neuter nominative plural form, which means the known things. The past participle of scītor is scitatus, which is different from scita/scitus. scitus may be the past participle of the verb scisco (I investigate, seek to know) as well, but I would not bet that this is the meaning in this sentence. As for scienda, it is gerundivum or participium futuri passivi (in our case again neuter plural) and its translation into English would be the things which ought to be known or the things which one ought to know. In this case the only possible verb whence this form derives is sciō. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 17:01, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Thank you; that's very clear. I understand well now. I looked up scīscō in my Latin dictionary; it listed the senses "to seek to know; to search, inquire", "to learn, ascertain", and (of public procedure): "to assent to or approve after examination, to vote for, enact, ordain". I light of those senses I have no doubt that scīta is the nominative neuter plural form of the past participle of (deprecated template usage) scīscō — the intended meaning in English is clearly "those things that have been sought to be known and learned [by the people and their representatives] and [that they have] enacted by vote" (which is an excellent word for the job, I must say). As for scienda, your assessment makes sense and is intuitive to me; however, it is not reflected in the conjugation table given for (deprecated template usage) sciō (it says that that verb has no passive-voice forms). Moreover, my dictionary lists the verb as (deprecated template usage) sciŏ; is the final vowel indeed short, or is my dictionary incorrect in this assertion? Thanks very much for your help.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 18:47, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

I have no idea why the past participle of scio is not visible in the entry, but Dvoreckij lists it, so it is undoubtedly attested. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 21:20, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Do you care to correct the entry?  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 22:38, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

I would like to, but after this objurgative discouragement from EncycloPetey I struggle to abstain from editing Latin entries contenting myself with fixing some blunders in the etymology sections of non-Latin entries which I spot. However, in this case, I shall be bold and risk another objurgation relying on your explicite exhortation :) The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 06:47, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

I was going to add the participle, but from all three templates for Latin 4th conjugation verbs (Template:la-conj-4th, Template:la-conj-4th-depon, Template:la-conj-4th-nopass) only the one for deponent verbs contains perfect participle and sciō is no deponent verb. Fixing templates is beyond my capabilities. If you addressed EncycloPetey on this issue, I am sure that he would respond more obligingly than if I did. But Dvoreckij and Korol'kov’s dictionary lists scitus as the perfect participle of sciō and scīscō. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 07:03, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

To interrupt, I can't see why a petty argument almost a year ago should stop you from editing more significantly in Latin. You yourself say you have a proficiency of 3 (able to contribute with an advanced level of Latin), and so it feels as if we are wasting a good opportunity for valuable edits, especially since there are so few contributors. Regarding the two requests, scita and scienda, I added them yesterday, with some of their related terms; if you see any errors, please correct them. Caladon 07:23, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

No, I do not see any errors. It is just that I cannot figure out how the perfect participle can appear on the entry sciō, if from the three templates for 4th conjugation Latin verbs only the template for deponent verbs allows perfect participles. If you can add the participle, please do so. I addressed the issue at Talk:scio as well. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 07:39, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

It is vital to link sciō to sciendus and scītus somehow. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 07:42, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

There is no perfect active participle, only the perfect passive participle; hence, why for the deponent template, it is listed under active, since it acts like an active participle. Unless you mean why someone has added the no passive template for sciō; this will need more investigation, and I am not sure as to the difference between (deprecated template usage) sciō's parts and (deprecated template usage) scīscō's parts as they appear to be share the third and fourth principal parts. For some inchoative verbs, we don't list the third and fourth parts anyway. Caladon 07:46, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I meant the perfect passive participle. The Template:la-conj-4th allows for it, so perhaps one ought to switch to this template. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 07:51, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks again, Bogorm, for your work on these Latin entries. I've now added entries for their English descendants. I needed this information for an academic paper I had been working on, and which had me rushed off my feet (hence my absence for the past several days). I'm pretty busy with things IRL ATM, so I shan't be editing much here for a while. BTW, thank you for congratulating me. :-)  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 00:42, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Permanent link

User talk:Caladon#scita and scienda

Thanks for your work on (deprecated template usage) scita. BTW, you may find User talk:Bogorm#scita and scienda and User talk:Stephen G. Brown#scita and scienda useful.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 18:53, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks again, Caladon. I've now added English entries for scita and for scienda, if you're interested.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 00:48, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

You're welcome. The English entries look good as with all of your contributions. Caladon 17:29, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Thank you; I appreciate the compliment.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 18:24, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Permanent link

User talk:EncycloPetey#scita and scienda

I'm away from my resources at the moment, so I can't be certain, but I suspect that scita is here derived as a plural neuter substantive use of the perfect passive participle scitus, from scio. It would thus mean "the things which are known". I'm less certain about scienda, but it seems to be a similar situation in a gerundive form. Latin gerundives are more difficult to translate accurately, but hey carry a present, active quality to them. --EncycloPetey 23:50, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

The best translation I can give for scienda is "that which is to be known" or "that which ought to be understood", in contrast to scita "that which is known / understood". --EncycloPetey 04:38, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your input, EP. And I'm sorry for not responding sooner; I've been extremely busy lately. Check out scita#English and scienda#English, if you're interested; BTW, would they make good WsOTD, do you think?  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 00:45, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Permanent link

User talk:Stephen G. Brown‎#scita and scienda

Scita is the feminine of scitus (knowing, shrewd, judicious), a participle of scisco, to investigate, to inquire. I believe scienda is from scio, to know, to understand (scire, scivi, scitum, sciens, scientis, scienter). Encyclopetey is better at Latin and I will leave their creation to him. —Stephen 17:00, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Stephen; that's very helpful. Also, it matches fairly well with Bogorm's reply (though, in this case, I think (deprecated template usage) scita is neuter plural, not feminine singular). Regarding entry-creation, Caladon's already made a start.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 18:51, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Just thought I should call by to thank you again after my absence. The prompt response I received was invaluable.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 00:49, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Permanent link

They are copied hereto for context.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 22:50, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Your template

This is just a small question concerning {{U:Latin stop+liquid poetic stress alteration}}; why is it 'occur' and not 'occurs' intervocalically? Also, do you think lūcubrō should use this template? I've already added it to pharetra. Caladon 09:58, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, my rationale for giving the verb plural number was that the stop and the liquid are two separate letters, rather than a single unit. Is (deprecated template usage) coöccur better? [b] is a stop and [r] is a liquid, so I don't see why (deprecated template usage) lūcubrō shouldn't use the template… I've asked EncycloPetey to comment.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:33, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

The choice of (deprecated template usage) coöccur is better, thanks; it was slightly confusing since one could easily read the 'tr' as one unit. The template is very useful, especially considering we don't seem to have a section yet on WT:ALA for pronunciation. It would be nice to see more of this sort of template, since often there seems to be a lack of standardisation of usage notes and inflectional notes from entry to entry. Caladon 17:20, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Agreed. I've taken it upon myself to use the U: template prefix for usage-notes templates, on the pattern of the R: prefix for referencing templates and the mothballed S: prefix for spelling-variant–display templates. Whilst all of this sort of information should be presented in a systematic manner in appendices, I see no reason why we can't also explain specific points of grammar, pronunciation, morphology, or whatever (where appropriate) in entries' Usage notes sections. BTW, do you think it would be useful to have an autocategory for entries that use {{U:Latin stop+liquid poetic stress alteration}}?  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 13:39, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

It may be quite useful in the future if the category becomes comprehensive; I'm not sure how many of these there are. If we don't opt for a category to put these in, I think eventually they should be sorted into some sort of appendix as well. Currently, I don't think anyone is thinking of appendices at the moment, since there seems to be so many other things to sort out. We should seek EncycloPetey's opinion as well on this.

Do you have any present or future plans to help edit Latin entries? You probably know quite a lot now about the templates and anything else that you need to know in order to create or expand entries; resources would never a problem. Caladon 14:13, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Done. It's a HIDDENCATegory, so it won't clutter the category list at the bottom of the page, but there's a link to it, so interested users can easily find it if they want. I may start editing Latin properly in a couple of months, but it really depends on what kind of foci I develop by the summer; I'm making no promises, but I'll see what I can do.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 14:40, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

homœophony

Thanks for causing an enormous mess for no other reason than your personal satisfaction. And read WT:NOT. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:15, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

What is wrong with you? —Ruakh_TALK 16:38, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

O.K., I'm sorry, that's too harsh. But seriously: Doremítzwr‎ added this word, together with all of its spellings; the word is rare, period, in any spelling; and the only cited spelling is the one that he chose to put the entry at. If it bothers you — if you think another spelling should be preferred — then cite your preferred spelling, and make the argument. But don't blame Doremítzwr‎ for "causing an enormous mess"; it's a mess only in that you wanted it done differently. —Ruakh_TALK 16:46, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

I'd have done some research. homœophony gets nine hits, homeophony gets 92 on Google Books. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:56, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

It's called making an effort, and neither of you two have done it. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:57, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

So doing a b.g.c. search and looking at the number on the first page is "making an effort", but thoroughly citing an entry is not? What nonsense. —Ruakh_TALK 21:26, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

And now I see that you abused your sysop tools to delete a valid entry? —Ruakh_TALK 21:28, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Yeah I was having a bad day, I apologize. But you could have consulted me before reverting. AFAICT our policy is to 'lemmatize' the most common spelling. I don't see how following written policy is POV pushing - I didn't even write the damned policy. Mglovesfun (talk) 08:51, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I apologize, too: I overreacted. Personally I do generally prefer to lemmatize the most common spelling, but so far as I know we've never made that a policy, because common-ness intersects with regional-ness (most U.S. spellings are more common than their U.K. counterparts) and we don't want to adopt a specific regional POV. If you can link to the written policy that you mention, I'd appreciate it.

If there's one spelling that's actually common and another one that's actually rare, then obviously we should prefer the common spelling, but when both spellings are rare, it doesn't seem so important to me. Regardless, if you had simply moved the pages around, I wouldn't have been so annoyed — though I find it odd at best to have an entry at [[homoeophony]] all of whose quotations are for the homœophony spelling — but you (1) left an angry and completely wrongheaded comment here, and (2) modified the OED reference so as to claim that the OED lists “homoeophony”, when in fact the only spelling it gives is “homœophony”. So it felt like violent POV-pushing, verging on vandalism.

—Ruakh_TALK 12:13, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I started writing this yesterday before Ruakh's intervention, but I was called away to do things IRL. Despite what has happened since, I think it's still worth posting. Unless otherwise stated, it is directed at Mglovesfun.

In my response, I intend to show that your recent actions and revisions are inappropriate for the following six reasons (which I shall number): 1) My contributions pertaining to (deprecated template usage) homœophony cannot legitimately be called "an enormous mess". 2) You have violated Wiktionary:Assume good faith. 3) You have violated community convention intended to preclude spell-warring. 4) You have made inaccurate assertions of fact. 5) You have misrepresented a referenced authority. 6) Wiktionary:What Wiktionary is not is not applicable in this case.

1. Before I created them, we didn't have entries for (deprecated template usage) homeophony, (deprecated template usage) homoeophony, (deprecated template usage) homœophony, or (deprecated template usage) homoiophony. Now we have correctly formatted entries; one contains alternative spellings, an etymology, pronunciatory transcriptions, a definition, exemplifying quotations, a related term, and a reference to a respected authority; the other three are soft redirects. This project is richer for them. In no way can they be called "an enormous mess".
2. In saying that I created these entries "for no other reason than [my] personal satisfaction", you are assuming bad faith. A reasonable interpretation of my actions would be that I saw that we lacked an entry for (deprecated template usage) homœophony (in any spelling) when I used the word in fairy snuff#Etymology, so I turned that red link blue. I think you'd agree that that is a perfectly good motive. I quite like editing here, and creating full, informative entries gives me a sense of personal satisfaction, but that certainly isn't the only reason I contribute to this project.
3. As Ruakh has already pointed out above (12:13, 13 April 2010; ¶ 1), "we don't want to adopt a specific regional POV", which is why we don't enforce the lemmatisation of the most common spelling of a word. Community convention is to preserve whichever spelling the first editor used. (This is expressed in Wiktionary:Grease pit archive/2009/August#Template:palæontology by Atelaes (00:28, 31 August 2009): "Wiktionary policy…is that whenever there's conflict between American and British spellings, the first editor to edit the thing in question uses whatever is most comfortable to them, and we stick with that" and by Ruakh (17:01, 31 August 2009): "so far, we've followed a 'keep-the-peace'–type practice of ignoring [the general predominance of American spellings], and instead treating American and British spellings as equally acceptable", and on this page in #Duplicating entries by Vahagn Petrosyan (15:32, 5 September 2009): "our de facto policy is to admit the chronologically first entry as the base one…and to define others as mere alternative spellings".) This convention exists to preëmpt editing wars over spelling (e.g., color–colour, façade–facade) and is the only really workable solution; the less popular and more problematic solution is duplicating content, giving each spelling full entries (which I criticise above in #Duplicating entries (18:40, 10 September 2009; ¶ 2)). The result of ignoring that convention is exemplified in this very section.
4. In this edit summary, you call (deprecated template usage) homœophony an archaic spelling. If we give (deprecated template usage) archaic the working definition of "not having been used in the past one hundred years", then your assertion is incorrect because both the 1945 Dictionary of World Literature and the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary list that and only that spelling; it would be a very unusual definition of (deprecated template usage) archaic if it encompassed a form that was primary as recently as 21 years ago. Of the accessible hits yielded by google books:"homoeophony", twenty are, quote, or are otherwise not independent of G.B. Caird's 1976 essay "Homoeophony in the Septuagint" and nine are, quote, or are otherwise not independent of J. Barr's 1985 essay "Doubts about Homoeophony in the Septuagint", so you need to remove at least 27 from the number of uses you think there are of (deprecated template usage) homoeophony. You also need to discount from those 62 hits all the inaccessible hits, the ones in other languages, and the ones that are actually scannos of (deprecated template usage) homœophony (because Google Books sucks at picking up ligatures and diacritics). (deprecated template usage) Homœophony has five citations; I seriously doubt that you could find considerably more of (deprecated template usage) homoeophony. As for (deprecated template usage) homeophony, there are perhaps eight or nine independent occurrences of that spelling that I can see in the 18 (not 92) hits yielded by google books:"homeophony". There are five for (deprecated template usage) homoiophony in the eight hits yielded by google books:"homoiophony". Notice that searching google books:"homœophony" yields no hits whatsoever (not 9), yet our entry for (deprecated template usage) homœophony has five independent citations of that spelling — every single instance of (deprecated template usage) homœophony catalogued by Google Book Search has been misscanned as something else; obviously, a quick glance at hit numbers will not suffice. (Consider, moreover, how many hits there may be out there for (deprecated template usage) homœophony but which have been misscanned as something other than (deprecated template usage) homoeophony.) (deprecated template usage) Homœophony is not nearly as comparatively rare as you first thought. It is you who has not made a sufficient effort.
5. As Ruakh said above (12:13, 13 April 2010; ¶ 2), "you…modified the OED reference so as to claim that the OED lists ‘homoeophony’, when in fact the only spelling it gives is ‘homœophony’". You clearly did so deliberately (in this revision). Misrepresenting referenced authorities is not acceptable in any way.
6. I assume that when you said "read WT:NOT", you were specifically thinking of numbers 2 and 4. Neither of them is applicable, since all four of the variant forms of (deprecated template usage) homœophony are listed as equally valid alternative spellings and the fact that I have provided five citations at (deprecated template usage) homœophony shows that the form is in use. The only point of that policy page that is applicable is number 7, which you should bear in mind.

In the light of your actions, I'd like an apology, and I'm pretty certain I deserve one. Thank you for intervening so promptly, Ruakh.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 16:26, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Mglovesfun's Apology  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 00:45, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Quotations

What do you think of the quotations I listed here for key? Are any of them usable? Caladon 09:44, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

It looks like you've pretty much verified that sense. I've responded therein.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 12:09, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your help. I've added two from the list; tell me if they aren't suitable for the required sense. Caladon 14:42, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

You're welcome. The 1976 and 2006 quotations pretty unambiguously support the seventh sense; however, the 1960 quotation could be taken as a citation of the eighth sense.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 22:32, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Vote - his or her

Hi, I too have noticed that the wording of the vote on voting uses "their", discouraged by many guidebooks to good style. But this seems wholly tangential to the subject matter of the vote. How should the apparently conditional support that you have given be interpreted by the counting admin? Should it be interpreted as that you do not support, given the wording of the vote is already fixed?

You have written:

1. Support if requirement 1 is changed to "Their His or her account’s first edit to the English Wiktionary (made locally rather than transwikied from another project) must predate the start time of the vote by at least 1 week." and requirement 2 is changed to "Their His or her account must have at least 50 edits in total to the main, Citations, Appendix, Rhymes, Wikisaurus, or Concordance namespaces on English Wiktionary by the start time of the vote."

I think it should read as follows, or along similar lines:

1. Support. However, I would like to see the requirement 1 is changed to "Their His or her account’s first edit to the English Wiktionary (made locally rather than transwikied from another project) must predate the start time of the vote by at least 1 week." and requirement 2 is changed to "Their His or her account must have at least 50 edits in total to the main, Citations, Appendix, Rhymes, Wikisaurus, or Concordance namespaces on English Wiktionary by the start time of the vote."

The point is that you should make it clear that your support is actually an unconditional one. If the vote passes, which is not yet certain, you can start another vote that modifies the grammar. It would be really a pity if the vote failed because of "their" vs "his or her". --Dan Polansky 07:29, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

God, do you really think I'm that petty? Will this clarification do? Now the overwhelming 26–7 (>78%) supermajority is an overwhelming 27–7 (>81%) supermajority. Whatever happened to that "we don't need a vote to make trivial changes (i.e., spelling, grammar, and typographical corrections) to policy pages" vote?  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 09:38, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

I certainly do not think you are in fact that petty. But you can easily avoid the conditional to prevent any misunderstanding, right? The conditional does not do anything good, as far as I can see. --Dan Polansky 12:11, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

And on the result of the vote, don't count your chickens before they're hatched. --Dan Polansky 12:13, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Forgive my curt response. I don't really know why I was so irritable. You're right, of course.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:51, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Keep in mind that majorities don't win votes. A vote's safely passed only at 80% or so. Oh, and that other vote you mentioned? It failed.....more or less. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 12:42, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Hmmm. Shame about that. That was certainly, in spirit, a good proposal. Also, I think that ⅘ is definitely too high a threshold — ⅔ or, at the most, ¾ seems more reasonable to me.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:51, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

A question about IPA

Hello. I wonder if you could tell me how should the word "Swadesh" be pronounced? Is it /'swɛdɪʃ/ or /'swɔdɪʃ/? The exact IPA transcript is not necessary, I only would like to know whether "a" is pronounced /ɛ/ or /ɔ/. Thank you in advance. --Viskonsas 11:54, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't know. I've hitherto used the spelling pronunciation /ˈswadɛʃ/. To know for sure, we'd need to know whence the surname derives. I've asked for an etymology and a pronunciatory transcription to be added to the entry. Morris Swadesh's ancestry may help us find the surname's origins.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 13:10, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Unmentionable BP topic

I've gone ahead and removed it, including your comment, as I think that absolutely nothing good can come from it (the thread, not your comment). I sincerely hope that you can understand my motivation and will take no offense, as absolutely none was intended. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 13:32, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Of course. I figured that I'd try (almost certainly in vain) to keep the discussion concerned with Abstandsprachen, rather than Ausbausprachen, to avoid the crap about ISO codes, officialdom, and genocide. However, that probably wouldn't have lasted at all long, so your solution, whilst technically censorship, was far wiser than my attempts at preventing a flame war. So yes, I agree with your actions and take no offence.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 20:12, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

You made the right decision. (BTW, the hideable quotes thing is wonderful!) —Ruakh_TALK 20:49, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Labour government

What's the point of creating something you are nominating for deletion? We can discuss these ideas perfectly well with red links. Ƿidsiþ 12:46, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

To resolve the discussion at User talk:Rising Sun#coalition government.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 12:53, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Deletion

Hi, Doremitzwr.
Why have you deleted Sokac121's userpage [8] (21:56, 18 May 2010 Doremítzwr (Talk | contribs) deleted "User:Sokac121" ‎ (No usable content given: Blank). Has Sokac121 required that? If so, can you give me a diff in which he required that? Kubura 04:06, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

But his user page was blank. What is the use of maintaining blank user pages? If he had condescended to providing it with at least one simple babel box, this would not have happened. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 08:08, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Well, it was blank, and therefore useless, and it contained an offending article in its history which I thought, all other things being equal, would be best made inaccessible.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 12:49, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Beer parlour#New and improved hideable quotes

Just a note to let you know that I've responded to your comments. If you have nothing more to say, that's ok; I just wanted to make sure you were aware. BP threads are so easy to lose track of. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 01:39, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

I'd noticed, thanks. I'll respond soon, and then post a note to your talk page to let you know that I have.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 01:41, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

I've responded.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 12:58, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll try to address it reasonably soon. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 13:06, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

So, I've finally responded, even though I rather doubt my comments are going to be worth the wait..... Sorry it took so long. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 15:21, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Don't worry about it; I've no right to complain, given the frequent delays in my responses. I've replied, FYI.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 17:13, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

burst–brast or barst

Hi, Doremítzwr. Is the archaic past tense form indeed brast or barst? The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 17:10, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, my giving brast was not a mistake. (deprecated template usage) Burst and its conjugated forms have undergone a number of convoluted changes over time: West Germanic (metathesis)→ Old English berst- (“partly perh. under Norse influence”)→ Middle English brest (“changed by the disturbing influence of r”)→ English berst, burst. There was little conjugational stability until the end of the sixteenth century, at which time "burst (for all the parts) began to gain the ascendancy which it has since maintained, though the pa. tense was frequently brast in 17th and the pa. pple. bursten till 18th c.". The OED also states in its spellings section for its entry for burst, v. that barst saw use in the past tense in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries only, whereas (deprecated template usage) brast saw use in the thirteenth–seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. I'll send you a screen-capture of the pronunciation, spelling, and etymology sections of the OED's entry, so you can get the whole picture.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:38, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

kunstetc

The usage note is just so anal and unnecessary. You don't need to point out when things are inconsistent with a word's etymology -- that's why it's called the Etymological fallacy (I know, not quite the same thing). I could just as easily add a note to Kunstlerromane saying "This form is inconsistent with the word's language, English, which forms plurals by adding an -s". Both forms are perfectly acceptable and both should pass without comment. And the whole "the" thing in etymologies is inconsistent with what's presented in Wiktionary:Etymology, I'm not removing it out of caprice. Ƿidsiþ 15:20, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

What harm does it do? People may want to know that. If you want to add a usage note of the form "The plural form (deprecated template usage) Künstlerromane is an irregular formation in English. The Anglicised plural is Künstlerromans. [In German, Künstlerromans is the genitive singular form, grammatically equivalent to the English (deprecated template usage) Künstlerroman’s or ‘of [a] Künstlerroman’.]" to Künstlerromane, then I'd have no objection. I add (deprecated template usage) the in etymologies to help their quasi-sentential flow; without the (deprecated template usage) the, it sounds as if the referrent is a mass or plural noun. I don't care enough about this right now to argue for revision of Wiktionary:Etymology; I may do so at some other time.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:44, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Please don't add that! I want less usage notes (fewer, if you prefer), not more. My point is that there are any number of things we could point out about words' forms, but constructing usage notes just to do so looks a bit twee and obsessive-compulsive. Most of our vocab is from Old English, which formed most plurals by adding "-as" rather than "-s", but we don't say that "dogs" is etymologically unjustified. Ƿidsiþ 15:52, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

I shan't. I just said I wouldn't mind it being there. It doesn't strike me as OCD. People usually want informative usage notes (in my experience), even if you dislike them. Again, what harm does the usage note do in (deprecated template usage) Künstlerromans? — All that page has are two soft redirects, a fairly pointless etymology (not really sure why I added it), and four quotations that are usually hidden. — How does a two-line usage note detract from any of that? The Old-English-descended-forms argument is a false analogy.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 16:00, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

amnicolist

Yeah I did see those citations too, but...they're a bit weird, aren't they? The first two are obviously just trying to string as many obscure words together as possible, and the last one...well...it's just a very strange thing to say if the word means what it apparently means. Ƿidsiþ 14:15, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

I've added two more. The 1782 and 1920 citations are fine (see Talk:adolescentilism#Request for verification for why we shouldn't expect a term's meaning to be transparent in any given supporting quotation), even if the other three are a bit dodgy; I've added a {{formal}} tag, given the three sesquipedalian usages and its general register. Are you of the opinion that we shouldn't have an entry for this word?  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 17:53, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

No, not necessarily, I just wouldn't have been brave enough to put it in myself with the citations on offer. That Johnson quote is a good find though. Ƿidsiþ 04:05, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. In that case, I'll go ahead and nominate it as a WOTD. :-)  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 22:20, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Hecate

The previous pronunciation was correct, according to the Cambridge Pronouncing Dictionary. The "odd" pronunciation is archaic/poetic, but still valid. --EncycloPetey 22:45, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Hmmm. Perhaps we should mark it as such, then. The OED's entry's etymology section has "Always disyllabic, like Fr. Hécate, in Shakes., exc. in one passage (see 1d); so also once in Milton.", which explains the seventeenth-century spellings which omit the final (deprecated template usage) e. (This citation that it gives is noteworthy: "1634 Milton Comus 135 Stay thy cloudy ebon chair, Wherein thou ridest with Hecat’, and befriend Us thy vowed priests. Ibid. 535 Doing abhorred rites to Hecate In their obscured haunts." — Therein, the variation in pronunciation is reflected in variation in spelling.) I would interpret the spelling (deprecated template usage) Hecat(’) and the pronunciation /ˈhɛkət/ as an Anglicisation of Ἑκάτη (Hekátē), omitting the -η (-ē) case ending as Ἑκάτ- (Hekát-), whereas the trisyllabic pronunciation represents Ἑκάτη (Hekátē) proper. What do you say?  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 23:37, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Citations:Isländerinen

Hi, Doremítzwr. Why did you write erdrü>enden in lieu of erdrückenden? Was that an effort to render the ligature ck? Also, Ross was a misspelling back in 1973 (although it is the præferred spelling to-day, after that reform from 1998). What kind of sources are these, where peculiar spellings such as vile and erzälen(instead of erzählen, viele) are being used? I have seen such spellings only in the Deutsches Wörterbuch, in quotations from the 16th ot 17th century, but these two date from the 20th century. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 09:36, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Well, the older citation is from 1880. The 1973 citation is inaccessible to me viâ its Google Books link any more. The 1880 citation is written in Fraktur. The > was indeed to render the ck ligature: >. See Wiktionary:Information desk/Archive_2008/July-December#Forcing the display of the Fraktur script for an explanation of this peculiar approach; you'll need to have this font installed. FWIW, judging from the thumbnail given of the 1973 source's title page, I think the source did indeed use the (deprecated template usage) Ross spelling, rather than the ligated (deprecated template usage) Roß form; also, IIRC, Swiss Germans stopped using the eszett long before the 1996 Rechtschreibreform. The advent of the typewriters which the whole of Switzerland's trilingual population would share required that non-essential letters be omitted from the keyboard; one of the casualties was the eszett. It is my belief that the obsolescence of the æsc and œthel in English was caused by the twin inconveniences of ligature-less typewriters and basic ASCII.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 10:34, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

PAGENAME

Please "subst:" this on an inflection line. --EncycloPetey 00:47, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

OK.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 00:48, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

sinfonietta etymology

Hi there.

From "Grove Music Online" - The word is not genuine Italian and has been little used by Italian composers. It was apparently coined by Joachim Raff, whose Sinfonietta in F for ten wind instruments, op.188, was published in 1874.

From "The Oxford Companion to Music" - Since the early 20th century the Italian form ‘sinfonietta’ has been preferred (the word is not genuinely Italian, however).

Cheers. SemperBlotto 13:37, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

I and the entry stand corrected. Could you furnish us with publication information and/or links for those two authorities, please?  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 14:06, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Well - I access them through my local library's "Online Reference Library". This supposedly needs a library card number to obtain access - but, in fact, the websites only seem to check the format of the number supplied. Herts library card numbers have the format B123456789 (that information is not secret as far as I know). SemperBlotto 14:37, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

I've added that information. The sources seem to contradict each other, however, with Grove saying that it is the German-Swiss composer Joachim Raff's coinage (though in which form it does not specify) from 1874, and the OCM saying that it is the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's French coinage from 1880–7. Do you know of a list of cognates and calques? Wikipedia has w:de:Sinfonietta, w:ja:シンフォニエッタ (shinfonietta), and w:sv:Sinfonietta. To ensure a correct etymology, we need to know which language first spawned this term, and what form the term took (French? Italian? Something else?)…  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 16:03, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

This seems to be a use of the French symphoniette (in French) from 1872, which is two years before Raff's composition. I have not been able to find any pre-1874 uses of (deprecated template usage) sinfonietta in any language. That said, there were so many incorrectly-dated pre-1874 hits for (deprecated template usage) sinfonietta that I'm reluctant to take that single hit as conclusive until I've seen clearly the date of publication on its title page.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 16:16, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

OK, this confirms that that French source is from 1872.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 16:28, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

This is outside of my comfort zone - I have always assumed that etymology was just guesswork! However, in my Italian dictionaries are - sinfonia, sinfoniale, sinfonicamente, sinfonico, sinfonismo, sinfonista - and even sinfonietta in one of them. The only Italian etymology website that I know of has sinfonia only.SemperBlotto 16:18, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for creating the Italian entry. I've asked Mglovesfun to create an entry for the French symphoniette. The Italian sinfonietta and its plural sinfoniette are both attested from 1884, if you trust these two; I'll attempt to verify their publication dates soon. I'll also try to find the earliest attestion date for the English sinfonietta; if it is prior to the first attestion date of the Italian term, then it's very unlikely that the former derives from the latter. Could you add those two 1884 citations (with translations) to the Italian entry please? I'm especially curious to know why the citation of the singular italicises the term. Right now, I need to give Wiktionary a rest and go off to do some IRL work.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 17:26, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

I've now collected citations of the earliest instances of sinfonietta and its plurals in English (see Citations:sinfonietta). The dates of first attestation in four languages are:

1. French (as symphoniette) — 1872
2. German — 1874
3. English — 1881
4. Italian — 1884

I conclude that it is very unlikely that the English (deprecated template usage) sinfonietta derives from the Italian. AFAICT, the French citation from 1872 looks like a non-technical use — perhaps a belittling diminutive — but I'll wait until I get a translation of the quotation before making a decision either way. ATM, my best guess is that the English term was adopted from the German; however, both of the 1881 English citations treat the word as a novel coinage. Knowing more about Mr. F.H. Cowen's biography would help, I think. I'll search for the first technical use of the French (deprecated template usage) symphoniette in due course (The Oxford Companion to Music asserts that it was Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1880 Symphoniette sur des thèmes russes, but since it wasn't published until 1887, that makes (deprecated template usage) symphoniette an extremely unlikely candidate for etymonship if Rimsky-Korsakov’s is the first technical use of the term in French).  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 23:16, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Feel free to add the Italian citations. I'll then follow on with a translation. SemperBlotto 06:55, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

I've added them to the citations page.

AFAICT, the 1884 citation of (deprecated template usage) sinfonietta (italicised) is a personal letter from 1810. The source is here. The headings to the first few letters (up to the one quoted) in that part VI (if that's what it is) are "Benedetto Giovio al cav. Ugo Brunetti da Milano", "Il conte Giov. Battista Giovio da Como al cav. Brunetti", followed by six headings which are identically "Lo stesso da Como", in case they're important. This is interesting in that it drags the first attestation date back 74 years; however, since the letter was not published until 1884, it could not have been an influence upon other languages before that date. Pertinently, I need you to tell me whether it seems like a technical or non-technical use to you, which is why I included so much context.

I could not verify the date of the 1884? citation of (deprecated template usage) sinfoniette; however, that isn't much of a problem, given that that is also the publication date of the verified 1810 citation of (deprecated template usage) sinfonietta. I may need to gather more citations for the Italian term. Any context you can give me on this one would be much appreciated.

Let me know what you make of those. I didn't add them to the entry because they need to presented in an abbreviated form in the entry itself, and since I don't speak Italian, I reckoned that you'd do a better job of that than I would.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:00, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

I've added (not without some difficulty) an attempt at a translation. Barmar would do better but she's offline this week. The first text uses informal, almost playful language - sinfonietta is in italics to emphasise this playful use of language. In that last short quotation, I'm not at sure of how to translate (deprecated template usage) ordinario. It can mean (deprecated template usage) ordinary (as a noun) but also (deprecated template usage) professor (at a university). SemperBlotto 19:40, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for your efforts.

1. Are you sure that the (deprecated template usage) sinfonietta of the Italian 1810 citation should remain (deprecated template usage) sinfonietta in the translation? In English, (deprecated template usage) sinfonietta is a technical term only, and doesn't have a playful or diminutive usage as it might have in Italian. English doesn't form diminutives nearly as easily as other languages (such as Dutch); instead, the diminished noun tends to be prepended with an adjective, usually (deprecated template usage) little. That said, "little symphony" sounds a bit strange (probably because it, too, is a technical term). Am I correct in thinking that the use of (deprecated template usage) sinfonietta in that letter is meant to have a diminutive quality similar to that which the English ditty might have?
2. I've added more context to that 1884? Italian citation, in case that helps. Moreover, please note this exciting find, which I think is the same source; am I right in concluding that the source is a letter written on the 15ᵗʰ of February in 1620 from Claudio Monteverdi to Count Allessandro Striggio qua advisor to H.S.H. Duke Ferdinand I Gonzaga of Mantua?

Thanks again for your help.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 17:25, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Hi SB. Are you able to verify the context of that 1620 cite?  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 09:57, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

Far too much talk about a little word - I've moved on. SemperBlotto 10:00, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

No problem; thanks for letting me know. (Now I can take your talk page off my watchlist.) I'll copy this discussion to Talk:sinfonietta where it can serve as a basis for future research.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 11:19, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

cacuminous

I'm tentatively setting this as WOTD for the 21st, but only if a third (independent) quote is added to the entry. Right now, two quotes are from the same author. --EncycloPetey 04:59, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

I've cited a 1597 use by John Hoskyns; is that OK? There are some more available from google books:+cacuminous, if need be. (deprecated template usage) Cacuminous seems to refer to mountains as often as it does to trees, so the OED's contag "of a tree" would appear to be unfounded. Moreover, its gloss of cacūmen as "tree-top" is not supported by what our entry says; does (deprecated template usage) cacūmen ever mean, specifically, the top of a tree?  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 13:37, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

It'll have to do. I've been off-line for the past few days because of a move, and just now had internet service activated at my new address. The Latin entry for cacūmen is not specific to trees, as far as I can tell. However, it may be another day or two before my Latin references are all found and unpacked. I still have to get a bed and move into my kitchen. --EncycloPetey 19:32, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Of course, take whatever time you need; this issue is hardly a pressing one. That 1597 citation is the earliest I could find, which is pretty good considering that it is 274 years older than the OED entry's first supporting citation. If I get round to it at some point, I'll furnish our entry with a more comprehensive collection of quotations.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 23:54, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

sophy

I think you've done a great job with this page, but why do you insist on using characters which don't display properly on most computers?? Surely "th" is a lot more useful and readable and no less accurate. (By the way, what is that character in the 1440 citation?– I can't get it to display on any machine I own.) Ƿidsiþ 16:17, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Thank you. Unsuperscribed ordinals look sloppy and using ^… tags causes whitespacing problems and is incompatible with some other forms of formatting (also, the superscribed letters appear higher than they should be). The character in the c. 1440 John Capgrave citation is Unicode's MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL A; you can see what it's meant to look like here and what it's meant to reproduce here. Presumably, ''a'' will do, so I'll change it to that instead.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 21:15, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Firstly — Unicode characters have actual semantics, and using the wrong character is, well, wrong. Using a mathematical character for build-in italics may mean that the text's appearance on your screen more closely resembles the EETS printing, but it also means it will less closely resemble that printing for other readers (those with different fonts, those using screen-readers, and so on), and anyway, who cares what the EETS printing looks like? Even in the rare case that superficial appearance is more important than semantic content (e.g., when the topic of discussion is actually appearance), we shouldn't use characters with wrong semantics: in such a case, we'd be better off using semantics-free image, so as to be sure that the appearance will be reflected faithfully.

Secondly — for our purposes, perhaps "þ[a]t" would make more sense than "þat"? (I assume that the EETS is using "þat" to indicate that the actual manuscript had "þt"?)

—Ruakh_TALK 21:55, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Re 1: If we can't rely on consistent appearance across fonts, then I agree with you.
Re 2: I don't know why they use an italicised character, but that sounds plausible.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 22:08, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

The EETS's Guidelines for Editors may shed some light on this issue. Note, however, that from the skimming I did of their PDF, I conclude that they too use brackets to indicate omissions, so that that is unlikely to be the function of italicising individual letters.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 22:22, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Well, their guidelines have clearly changed a great deal, so I don't know if that says very much. I'm pretty sure that the italics mean what I said, firstly because it's hard to imagine what other use they could have (which is why I suspected that to begin with), and secondly because a quick Google pulls up statements like these:

• All the ten emendations of the second class, which propose the insertion of entire words into the text (קרי ולא כתיב), are adopted in the A. V. without the slightest indication by the usual italics that they are not in the text. {link}
• [in reference to a 1971 EETS text:] Abbreviations are expanded without italics. {link}

which I think makes clear that there is, or used to be, a tradition of using italics in exactly this way.

Regardless, I suppose if we have any doubts about it, then we're better off preserving EETS's italics than trying to improve it in a way that could be completely wrong.

—Ruakh_TALK 01:35, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Personally, I don't think that we're justified in reinterpreting their italics as noting omissions s̄ an explicit statement that that's what they're for; however, if you're feeling confident about it, feel free to substitute the ''a'' with [a].  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 10:25, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Th·is is interesting: an 1865 EETS printing that uses italics where the manuscript has signs of contraction, and brackets where the manuscript does not. So you're right: unless we know what the sign of contraction looked like, we're best off sticking with the EETS' italicized rendering. —Ruakh_TALK 13:37, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

OK. Thanks for your research.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 17:24, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

twenty-five/eight

Hi there. Do you think we also need an entry for "a hundred and one percent"? There are probably several forms of the expression. SemperBlotto 10:36, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, probably; that one is far more common a cliché than 25/8. However, all other things being equal, I'd lemmatise the phrase as hundred and ten percent, since that form is the most common and because idiom titles are supposed to be written without initial articles.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 10:59, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Year numbering system

They seemed like very advanced IP edits! I should have a PREF up soon for switching to AD/BC. Cheers. --Bequw → τ 00:04, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusion. I reverted your substitution of AD with {{C.E.}} in Byzantine Greek before reading that you were working on a fix of some kind. I also note that you've been "templatiz[ing the] year-numbering system" elsewhere, though it looks like they were all previously AD or BC (and not CE or BCE), except for half of this one ([9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32], [33], [34], [35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41], [42], [43], [44], [45], [46], [47], [48], [49], [50], [51], [52], [53], [54], [55], [56], [57], [58], [59], [60], [61], [62], [63], [64], [65], [66], [67], [68], and [69]); with all due respect, that looks like POV-pushing to me. Nevertheless, iff we shall soon have an easily-accessed toggle for AD vs. CE and BC vs. BCE, I can't imagine that it matters very much. Good luck with it.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 00:36, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

I was going to templatize the BCE/CE ones as well. I just happened to have the search list already at hand for AD/BC. --Bequw → τ 01:00, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Fair enough. BTW, I didn't mean the above to be an accusation; I was just saying what your actions looked like, prima facie.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 01:03, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

There's now a WT:PREFS for switching from BCE/CE → AD/BC. Let me know if you see any problems. I tested it in the latest IE/FF/Chrome. If no problems, I'll post more widely. I'll start templatizing the BCE/CE stuff. --Bequw → τ 02:53, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

BCE/CE now templatized as well (to the best of my searching abilities). --Bequw → τ 04:05, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

It seems to work just fine. However, the fact that the toggle is just a PREF makes it inaccessible to the vast majority of our users; it needs to be a toggle of the sort in the visibility box in the left-hand side of our interface.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 20:52, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Edittools

Why did you add − × ÷? --Bequw → τ 02:40, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Because they're used not-infrequently. (The −, BTW, is a proper minus sign, as opposed to the hyphen-minus (-), the en dash (–), &c.) — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 02:52, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

They're pretty infrequent. I think that within a group of symbols we should strive for reasonable completeness (we should include all Georgian letters if any). But when deciding whether to include a group of symbols I think usage frequency should be the overriding concern (we can't include all of Unicode). This criticism is not just aimed at your edit of course. Edittools is too large, and it's very tempting to just a few more characters here and there:) It should be paired down, especially since the new editor header contains much of the same content. We should aid users in finding the symbols via our entries (so they can copy and paste) and if editors want extra ones they should add them via their own skin files (which we could possibly make standard versions of). --Bequw → τ 23:02, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

I agree. (Actually, I think maybe we should include all of Unicode, but for that we need a radically different approach, both for technical reasons — obviously opening an edit-page shouldn't involve downloading all of Unicode — and for reasons of usability — it's already impossible for an inexperienced user to find the characters they might want.) —Ruakh_TALK 23:19, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

OK; I've removed them. Now, could someone please explain to me why the Misc. symbols section includes brackets, double brackets, double braces, the octothorpe, the greater- and less-than signs, the tilde, and the vertical bar (pipe), when they are all present on a standard QWERTY keyboard? — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 12:13, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, on a standard QWERTY keyboard. But there are other keyboard layouts which do not have them, which is why they need to be there. -- Prince Kassad 12:27, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Surely those layouts are rare… Even if that is the case, why do we have the redundancy of both single and double brackets? And why do we list a single tilde by itself, when it is almost always used four-at-a-time, to create signatures? — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 12:47, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Low level: We don't need the brackets, because the enhanced toolbar has a linker already (for internal and external links). I don't think we need both the pair of directional single quotes, and then each individual one. Also, why have the hyphenation point when we're supposed to use {{hyphenation}}?

High level: See WT:BP#Edittools. --Bequw → τ 19:21, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Shall I be bold and remove the brackets? — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 21:44, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

amnicolist 2

I'm confused by your most recent edits here. You removed translations saying that they were "alredy there", but the ones already there were listed as "to be checked". Also, we do not use "cf." in Etymologies. We had to go through recently and replace all the instances of "cf." in etymologies; we now use "compare". --EncycloPetey 22:02, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

The translations were added by the same person who suggested them on the talk page, a person who has been wrong before (see Talk:question the question), and whose competence I cannot in all honesty say I trust (he seems to confuse a translation with a cognate, for example); therefore, I want to leave those {{ttbc}} translations where they are, so that other editors can verify their accuracy. Where is the policy page or expression of consensus for changing (deprecated template usage) cf. to (deprecated template usage) compare? I can see how that would be appropriate in etymologies where everything is written out like a quasi-sentence, but for etymologies of the kind "X + Y; cf. Z", the abbreviated form looks more congruent. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 23:38, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

The last main discussion was at Wiktionary:Beer parlour archive/2010/February#Obtuse abbreviations (where most everyone called for the full expansion). It's also been talked about at Wiktionary:Todo since January and at Wiktionary:Requests for flood flag/Archive 1#Little known abbreviations. Think of the 4 extra characters as a bit of finger exercise:) --Bequw → τ 04:27, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Meh. Fair enough. I still say that (deprecated template usage) cf. looks better in "X + Y; cf. Z"-style etymologies, but if the community has decided elsewise, I shall not gainsay it in this instance. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 11:30, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

colon-itis

Hello Raif -- The citation lines of quotations are supposed to end with colons now. That's the current standard. -- Ghost of WikiPedant 04:01, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

It was never discussed to consensus. Two or three people liked colons, and wrote it into that draft. Others (like myself) severely dislike ending a citation line with a colon, in part because it looks weird after citations of religion texts that contain a colon. --EncycloPetey 04:10, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't like those terminal cola either. I prefer them after the quotations' dates, but I decided to drop that objection. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 18:33, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

tripūs

For the Latin word tripūs, I know that you asked for expansion of adjectival uses on the attention tag, but what exactly did you have in mind? It looks like the tag is ready to be removed? Caladon 17:17, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

That was long ago (or at least feels like it), so my memory of this is poor. IIRC, I got the impression from [[τρίπους#Ancient Greek|the development of (deprecated template usage) tripūs's etymon τρίπους]] and from a discussion with EP that the noun was a later substantive development of an earlier adjective (probably meaning "measuring three feet", "walking on three feet", &c. like the Greek). If that's true, then that's what the attention tag was about; if it's not, then I was mistaken, and the tag can be removed. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 22:16, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your to-day WOTD entry of dubitation

specially the french § , & about the rhetoric figure. Seems this english meaning does not exist ?

Do you know what's happening to Encyclopetey ? I didn't see any of his edits lately, & I lack his fatherly scoldings...Wish he is all right...T.y. Arapaima 08:48, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

You're welcome, but it was Ruakh, and not I, who added the French section. Also, our WsOTD are English-only, so there's not a lot you have to thank me for, I'm afraid. The rhetoric sense may exist in English, but I haven't found it, and the OED doesn't list that sense. I have no idea what's going on with EP; he's not contributed here since the 15ᵗʰ of December, according to Special:Contributions/EncycloPetey. Try e-mailing him if you want to find out. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:39, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

pabulation

Thanks! The OED seems to have found the one etymology that none of the dictionaries on b.g.c. gives, but I guess it's O.K. :-P   —Ruakh_TALK 21:50, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Poll on formatting of etymologies

I would like to know your preference as regards the use of "<" vs "from" in the formatting of etymologies in Wiktionary, whatever that preference is. Even explicit statement of indifference would be nice. You can state your preference in the currently running poll: WT:BP#Poll: Etymology and the use of less-than symbol. I am sending you this notification, as you took part on some of the recent votes, so chances are you could be interested in the poll. The poll benefits from having as many participants as possible, to be as representative as possible. Feel free to ignore this notification. --Dan Polansky 10:47, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Vote on formatting of etymologies

There is the vote Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2011-02/Deprecating less-than symbol in etymologies, which would benefit from your participation, even if only in the role of an abstainer. Right now, the results of the vote do not quite mirror the results of the poll that has preceded the vote. There is a chance that the vote will not pass. The vote, which I thought would be a mere formality, has turned out to be a real issue. You have taken part on the poll that preceded the vote, which is why I have sent you this notification. --Dan Polansky 08:24, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

coen- and coeno-

Er well yes, obviously they are formally slightly different, but doesn't it make sense to group all words under this prefix together? Rather than haveing separate lists at Category:English words prefixed with coen- and Category:English words prefixed with coeno-? Also, on a separate but related issue, I can't help feeling we have them the wrong way round, since all other dictionaries lemmatise the combining forms with linking vowels. Basically, what's really happening is not that coen- is adding -o- before consonants, but that coeno- (which comes straight from Greek) drops its o before vowels. Ƿidsiþ 11:40, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I agree with your principle; however, in this specific case, cœn- is the lemma, so all derivations with this prefix should use (deprecated template usage) cœn-, using the alt1= parameter for any formal variants. Dictionaries, I think, treat affixes quite inconsistently — for example, why have entries (as the OED has) for the interfixes (deprecated template usage) -i- and (deprecated template usage) -o- for the supposed elided terminal vowel of most Latinate and Grecian prefixes (respectively), but lack one for (deprecated template usage) -a- for the elided vowel of the short forms of meta-, para-, tetra-, &c. (viz. met-, par-, tetr-, &c.)? Writing, for example "(deprecated template usage) coen(o)- + …" is utterly redundant. For cases where the interfix is involved, we can always write, for example {{prefix|cœn|alt1=cœno|…}} in place of {{prefix|cœn|-o-}} + …, if you dislike the presentation "cœn- + -o- + …". — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 12:24, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

That would be fine, I think the main issue is that they should be collated and not kept separate. (Although, on a point of fact, I personally think it should be the other way round, with cœno- as the lemma.) Ƿidsiþ 12:55, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that that's the most important thing for those categories (and the category name has to match the lemma's spelling, otherwise {{prefixsee}} &c. won't work). I don't see what criterion we could have for deciding between (deprecated template usage) cœn- and (deprecated template usage) cœno- (and this holds for all other prefix pairs of that form) other than analytical parsimony: Assuming the existence of English interfixes of this kind (viz. (deprecated template usage) -i- and (deprecated template usage) -o-), which we and other dictionaries certainly do, (deprecated template usage) cœno- is just (deprecated template usage) cœn- + (deprecated template usage) -o-; consequently, writing "(deprecated template usage) cœn(o)- + …" is equivalent to writing "(deprecated template usage) cœn- + (deprecated template usage) -o- − (deprecated template usage) -o- + …", where "+ (deprecated template usage) -o- − (deprecated template usage) -o-" is clearly a pointless and disposable addition. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 14:05, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

There is a difference between something like (deprecated template usage) myo-, which truly uses an English(ish) connective (deprecated template usage) -o- of the same kind as seen in something like "politico-environmental", and (deprecated template usage) cœno-, where the O comes directly from the Greek. That said, I wouldn't want (deprecated template usage) myo- listed at my- so I don't really know where I'm going with this. I think ultimately I just like the convention of including the combining vowel with the prefix, so that you know which one it takes. Ƿidsiþ 14:18, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't see how (deprecated template usage) myo- is different, personally; myal, myalgia, and myasthenia, as English coinages, all justify my-. The (deprecated template usage) -o- in (deprecated template usage) politico-environmental is different from the one in (deprecated template usage) myo-, in that it is not an empty morpheme; (deprecated template usage) politico- means "political and —" (compare the entry I created, Berkeleio-). I always include a usage note of the kind "When combined with a word or another affix which begins with a consonant, this prefix concatenates with -o- (as cœno-)." when I create entries for prefixes sans their associated interfixes, so that lets "you know which one it takes"; conversely, I like the convention of excluding the combining vowel with the prefix, because it makes it clear that the interfix ought not to be there when the prefix combines with a vowel-inital word element. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:13, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

But with cœno- (unlike (deprecated template usage) myo-), it isn't an interfix. As I said, the O comes straight from the Greek (deprecated template usage) κοινό(ς) --> coeno-. The O is not added; but it can be dropped. Ƿidsiþ 15:18, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

The entry for “-o-, connective” [draft revision, June 2009] states, in its etymology section, "< post-classical Latin -o-, a connecting vowel occurring in compounds formed by analogy with Greek compounds (and classical Latin compounds borrowed from them) in which the first element ended in -ο; this was originally the nominal stem of the first element (as in δημοκρατία democracy n.) and was later added to other first elements by analogy (as in μητρόπολις metropolis n.)"; i.e., e.g., metro- (which = metr- + -o-) ← μητρο- ← μητρ- + -ο. That a prefix with an oft-elided terminal (deprecated template usage) -o has a Classical precedent formed by interfixation in Greek makes it no less true that it is merely a base prefix concatenated with an interfix in English. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 19:27, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Confused about linking.

Hullo Mister Doremítzwr. (דורמיצור؟)

¶ On my discussion page, you requested that I do not add “wikilinks” inside quotations (unless they originally had them), however Ruakh permitted me to add them. Here. I detect a contradiction. 75.142.190.21 19:14, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

See WT:QUOTE#Between the definitions, "please note" point 10: "Generally, the quoted text itself should not contain links. In fact, some/many/most editors think that the quoted text, like example sentences devised by editors, should never contain links. (Note: This is currently under discussion on this page's talk page.)" The discussion is at Wiktionary talk:Quotations#Links in the body of quoted text. Until right this moment, I thought this was cast-iron consensus. I haven't the time to read that discussion now; let me know what you make of it. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 19:33, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Reverting instead of helping

Thanks for the tip, but it seems a bit against the spirit of Wiki for you to respond to my mistake by reverting the page to the state it shouldn't be in. You could have just finished the job and struck the header. Rspeer 18:01, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

It's not just striking the header. It's the decisionmaking that that implies. It means someone looked at the RFV discussion and the citations, determined that they are okay (or that he trusts someone else who said "cited") and closed the discussion (generally with a "passed" or "kept"). That decision is what has to be made by someone who strikes the RFV header and detags the entry. I agree with your decision re epizootic, but you should be aware that such actions are effective rather than trivial. (Also that some might not appreciate a Wiktionary newcomer's closing discussions.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:13, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

@ Rspeer: I understand your point, but I reasoned that what I did was the best way to draw your attention to proper procedure, and that it was quite unlikely that you'd be monitoring the RFV discussion after removing the {{rfv-sense}} tag. Unless RFV discussions are closed properly, they can stay on WT:RFV for months or even years longer than they need to be thereon; given the huge backlog on that page, I hope you can appreciate my strictness in enforcing that procedure. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 11:50, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Sursurunga

Hey Doremítzwr, would you mind creating Category:Sursurunga language if you know how? I just think it'd nice to have it in existence ASAP but I'm not really familiar with making the "top level" language categories and I presume for it to be as informative as all other similar categories I would have to know things such as the family it belongs to an so on. 50 Xylophone Players talk 12:49, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I would've done, but Prince Kassad beat me to it! — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 13:08, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Template:appendixonly

This template was created by me to allow navigation between a small number of appendices. Today, this list is huge, and contains terms unrelated to each other, causing the navigation to be difficult. It is also deprecated and incomplete. If the list were complete, it would be much bigger. For that reason, that was already stated at Template talk:appendixonly, I would like very much to replace this template by stricter versions, such as {{unattested}} in Appendix:English dictionary-only terms. --Daniel. 17:19, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Fair enough. Reverted. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 18:00, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Adding “see also”…

Hullo Mister Doremítzwr.

¶ Could I please know why you include a ‘see also’ in -pnœa? It looks redundant, since -pnoea is also seen in the ‘Alternative forms’. Pilcrow 19:10, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

{{also}} is for terms (irrespective of language) whose visual forms are similar, whereas Alternative forms sections are for links to entries (within the same language) which are etymologically identical or near-identical to the lemma. I hope that explains it clearly enough, but if not, please let me know, and I'll try to express it better. I understand that it looks redundant, but {{also}} has the added utility of being very clear with emboldenment and by the fact that it precedes the table of contents. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 19:19, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

amnicolist and derv

Entry "amnicolist" is already in "Category:English words suffixed with -ist", a standard category for suffixes. Your addition of {{derv}} to the entry places the entry to "Category:English words derived from: -ist". I do not see how this is a good thing. Were you planning to make "Category:English words suffixed with -ist" obsolete?

If you agree that "Category:English words suffixed with -ist" is the right category for the term, I would ask you to remove {{derv}} from the entry. Me and you have had a revert war in that entry, which DCDuring joined; I do not feel like continuing the revert war. --Dan Polansky 15:50, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

IMO, it would be better for all derivations categories (both those for affixes and those for nonaffixes) to have the same nomenclature, viz. "[Language] terms/words derived from [etymon]", rather than have variants like "[Language] words suffix with [suffix]"; however, this is not a position I'm pushing at the moment. I shall not revert you if you remove it from the entry again; however, I don't speak for DCDuring. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 18:31, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Term of address

I cannot figure out how to address you and how to refer to you. I cannot type "Raifʻhār"; I cannot remember "Doremítzwr". What would be the term of address? Would you be okay with "Raifhar"? Are there other terms of address that you are okay with?

On a related note, is there perhaps an etymology of that name that you would like to post to your user page? Etymology could make the name much more memorable. Is it a Welsh name? --Dan Polansky 08:38, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

¶ Have you tried alt+number‐pad combinations, such as alt+257 and alt+8216? Alternatively: I could offer some silly mnemonic. --Pilcrow 09:13, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

@ Dan Polansky: As I said to Atelaes, you can call me "Raif". I don't know the etymology, but I know it's not Welsh; standard Welsh has neither the ʻokina nor the letter zed, and the orthography uses the circumflex for vowel lengthening, rather than the macron. I'll post an IPA transcription on my user page. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 18:19, 29 March 2011 (UTC)