User talk:Eirikr/2016

Special:Contributions/ВМНС

@Aryamanarora, Wyang: This Russian user has been creating a lot of Pali stubs, so this is a good place to look for entries that need cleanup. Somebody should tell him about how to format Pali entries here in case he enters more, but I don't have any languages in common with him, so I haven't tried. If any of you can manage it, that would probably be a good idea. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:48, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Yep, I saw his entry at khīra earlier. ruwikt is ahead of enwikt in Pali. —Aryamanarora ^{(मुझसे बात करो)} 02:50, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Rune etymology

Thanks for your recent edit on my talk page. You may be interested in this discussion on runes too. FYI, some Polish sources claim the word runes comes from digging, and in Polish we have rycina, ryt, ryj that may share the PIE root (as well as the meaning). Zezen (talk) 08:50, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

中（じゅう）？

Is じゅう a normal on-reading of 中? The Readings section that doesn't mention じゅう and usage notes that mention じゅう at 中 make it unclear to me. —suzukaze (t・c) 09:39, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

• It's a normal rendaku reading: ちゅう + rendaku = ぢゅう, realized in most modern Japanese dialects as じゅう. You'd never read 中 in isolation as じゅう. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 09:56, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Addendum: While this reading would never be used in isolation or at the start of a word, it appears that it has taken on an idiomatic sense. See also partway down the page here at Weblio: http://www.weblio.jp/content/じゅう. Perhaps this should be treated as a kan'yōyomi, derived from the rendaku? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 10:10, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Hmmm, are there any authorities that classify readings? —suzukaze (t・c) 10:29, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

• Yes, but I don't currently have easy access to them: monolingual JA kanji dictionaries often include this kind of information. Bilingual dictionaries often don't go any further than the basic on-kun categorization. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 10:32, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

:)

I appreciate your support and wish we had more overlap in this project during which we could collaborate. —JohnC5 07:15, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

• Sure, happy to pitch in.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 08:08, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Category:Japanese terms spelled with 心 read as ごこ

Should this category exist? It seems like the terms in there are derived from . —suzukaze (t・c) 08:10, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

• Ya, that looks like a mistake -- the ご is just こ + rendaku. I suspect all the entries need editing to specify rendaku, and to thereby change their categorization to something like [[Category:Japanese terms spelled with 心 read as ここ]]. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 08:56, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/90.12.49.204

This IP is pretty knowledgeable, but has a definite POV. We've had a constant battle with them over adding unattested Gothic terms, for instance. Could you look at their Japanese edits, including the translations, such as at farewell? Chuck Entz (talk) 14:04, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

• Thanks for the heads-up. Checked. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:40, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Re:The etymology of tempura

User Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV has just introduced new meanings for Portuguese Template:l/en, including that of "Ember days" (the Roman Catholic holidays). The connection between "fried food" and the said holidays, discussed here, was already explained in the etymology I wrote on my edits to replace the previous one. The idea that tempura comes from tempero/temperar (and declined forms) is a widespread popular belief, but Houaiss, a prestigious Portuguese language dictionary, notes that this etymology is unlikely. Then it is more expected, but not certain, that tempura comes from têmpora. Perhaps we should include both etymologies? - Alumnum (talk) 00:45, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

• Thank you, excellent additional information. Re: têmpora, is that strictly fasting, as in eating no food at all? Or was it more the common Catholic practice of avoiding red meat, and eating fish instead (often fried)? If the latter, the Portuguese entry could probably be clarified a bit.

Re: 天麩羅 and related entries, the tempera origin is so widely mentioned in Japanese, it makes me wonder if there might have been some kind of confusion early on among Japanese speakers, conflating the two Portuguese terms. I suspect we should probably mention both potential origins, with a note that têmpora is phonologically a better match.

(Also, I see that the cooking blog talks about Spanish origins -- but the Spanish were much less active in Japan than the Portuguese. I'm inclined to view the blog poster's text as mistaken.)

Thanks again for your help researching this. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 01:07, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, neither the blog text nor the entry I wrote imply that this Catholic practice consisted in eating no kind of food:

"But during the 40-day period of Lent (in Latin called quadragesima tempora), Japanese Christians had to give up eating meat. Instead they ate fried vegetables and seafood. And it's from that Latin phrase, referring to the Lenten period, that the dish got the name of tempura". [1]

"When Portuguese navigators [and missionaries] arrived in Japan, they abstained from eating beef, pork and poultry during the Ember days. Instead, they ate fried vegetables and fish". [2]

It seems the practice was introduced by European missionaries (chiefly the Portuguese, but also in significantly smaller number, the Spanish) and continued by the Christianized Japanese until the following strictly isolationist period, which expelled missionaries and banned almost all Western presence and influence in Japan. Therefore, it is also cogitable an origin from Spanish or even Latin, as the missionaries spoke the latter during their prayers and liturgy. (Anyway, têmpora undoubtedly comes from Latin tempora, then at least an indirect origin is deserved).

I came up with the notion that the tempera origin was probably wrong, but now I think that your suggestion that the Japanese mixed and confused the terms is more reasonable. It is still possible that they came from one, the other, or both origins. - Alumnum (talk) 02:51, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

• Ah, apologies for any confusion -- I did not mean that you yourself or the blog had implied that the Catholic practice involved eating no food at all. I mean instead that the Portuguese têmpora entry states mainly just a day of fasting, with no mention of meat or fish or fried foods. I think that should be clarified, if we are to point to the têmpora entry in reference to the Catholic practice of eating non-meat dishes.

Past there, the Catholic and ultimate Latin origins strike me as quite likely, in combination with an apparent conflation with tempera. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 06:50, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. - Alumnum (talk) 15:10, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

塔

There's a module error hidden inside a Derived terms box in Etymology 1. {{ja-r}} doesn't like the text you gave it. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:17, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

• Thanks! Looks like it's been dealt with. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:56, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Japanese pronunciation of 日本

Hello. Concerning your edit, I have some comment. As far as I know, the original pronunciation of 日 is /nit/ without a final vowel even in Japanese because the Japanese tried to pronounce Sino-Japanese words in the Chinese way. I doubt the existence of the /nitipoɴ/ stage. See w:ja:中世日本語#音節の構成. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 00:31, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

• @Shinji -- I agree that /nitihon/ likely never existed. Thank you for commenting, as I didn't realize that the etymology, as it is currently written, implies the existence of this reading -- that was unintended.

There is the term 連濁 for compounds that produce nasalization. Is there a similar term for compounds that produce geminization instead? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 02:31, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

{{ja-pron}}

There's still some problems with this template, particularly as shown here. Could you fix them? ばかFumiko￥^talk 08:14, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

P/s: Also, in this case I had to add an unwanted space to make it work. ばかFumiko￥^talk 08:20, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

• Hmm, ya. I think Wyang is the one to help more -- he's been most active of late in working on {{ja-pron}}. @Wyang, could you have a look? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 22:31, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

@Kc_kennylau Could you please take a look at this case? Some part of the code was not referenced properly after your edits, for example the parameter mora_pos. Thanks! Wyang (talk) 11:33, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

_{@Wyang: I didn't even touch mora_pos. --kc_kennylau (talk) 12:24, 5 March 2016 (UTC)}

Oops sorry mate, for some reason I missed the first instance of mora_pos. Wyang (talk) 12:43, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

@Wyang, Eirikr: Would be so much better if you guys would point out the problem instead of having me find it myself. --kc_kennylau (talk) 11:42, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

My guess would be that the mora count was not working (j/u). Wyang (talk) 12:16, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

@Wyang It wasn't and and still isn't, particularly on katakana. Here's another example of this error; as you can see it's the second more pu that is supposed to be encircled, not the small kana ya. The mora count seems to work well on hiragana though. Could you make thorough fix? ばかFumiko￥^talk 02:49, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

I thought we were using kana, not morae. I've changed it to dev=3, which shows the right info now but change it back if the count will work differently.--Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:09, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Oh, so the acc parameter uses the number of the mora, but the dev paramter uses the number of the kana. Well that's kinda confusing. ばかFumiko￥^talk 03:21, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

In the doco it says: "Position of kana with devoiced vowel in the input kana string (not counting spaces)." --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:32, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

水銀

You left a module error in the derived terms section of Etymology 1. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:40, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

• Looks like Daniel Carrero beat me to it. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 05:55, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Examples at 旦那, オハイオ州

旦那

Arbeit is not English, I know that; I just wanted to add a little bit of a German taste since the heroine is German. Anyway, if "lack of punctuation makes for a terrible example", does that mean I can't take quotes from manga, cuz many manga don't use periods or commas for most of the time? ばかFumiko￥^talk 04:36, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

• Long passages without punctuation are difficult to read in running English text, and as such, they are not optimal illustrations of term use. A quick search of Google Books provides plenty of examples that are better suited to a text-only environment. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 06:35, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

オハイオ州

I'm sure your Japanese is superb, but are you sure you know what you did at オハイオ州? Did you really read the manga and know exactly the context? I for one despise literal translation and always go with something more natural-sounding (which may not be exactly correct word by word), and even though I've read the manga, I don't understand what you meant with "What's up with you.". I'd like to know what you had in mind. ばかFumiko￥^talk 04:55, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

• As presented on the entry, this appears to be a dialog between two people. The last quote then would be the same person who started the dialog, the one who already knows how to say "Ohio". As you'd previously translated, So dat's how ya say it, it sounded more like the "dumb" person than the "smart" one explaining the word. What's up with you is the kind of thing the "smart" one would say in a two-person manzai-esque routine in English, such as Laurel and Hardy, or Abbott and Costello.

That said, it appears that I confused you about as much as you confused me, suggesting that this whole example text should probably be either simplified or replaced. I've trimmed it for now to just the bit showing use of the headword term. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 06:35, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

"it sounded more like the "dumb" person" - Exactly the point of that conversation. After a few failed attempts at pronouncing the English name, he just goes with "Ohayo". He's not some sort of smart ass or anything, he's a funny man (and a little "dumb" of course) and his confusion is the whole point of the chapter. Anyway, I'd rather you removed it entirely than leave one out-of-place line like that. ばかFumiko￥^talk 11:27, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

• Interesting. If that last line was the "dumb" person again, it would have been clearer without the additional break -- so that the なーんちゃって would be on the same line as the preceding おはよ？. In any two-person dialog, breaks like that generally mean a switch to the other person.

And regarding quotes, the point is to show the headword term in use, and in that regard, the single line was not out of place. But this term is straightforward enough that there's no strong need for a quote or usage example. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 18:27, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Keep in mind that a conversation doesn't necessarily happen between two people. I said it's out of place because, come on, what would it "illustrate" on its own. ばかFumiko￥^talk 05:05, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

• a conversation doesn't necessarily happen between two people -- indeed, which is why earlier in this thread I explained that as presented on the entry, this appears to be a dialog between two people. If the quote was a dialog between more than two people, it should have been more specific. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 06:25, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
• what would it "illustrate" on its own -- usage of the term in a Japanese sentence. That's rather the point of quotes and usage examples. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 06:25, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

It's chiisana, not chīsana

Need proof? Here's some (I suppose we're using Hepburn, aren't we?). More proof? Just look for ちいさな in the Kenkyusha's dictionary. ばかFumiko￥^talk 12:35, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Okay, I just read an earlier discussion. Basically you guys are making rules that you're pleased with, rather than follow a standard. Whatever, I guess. ばかFumiko￥^talk 12:45, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

• If, in future, another long-standing editor makes a change that you don't understand, please ask before assuming incompetence. Chances are high that there's a good reason for the change.

And we are following a standard. It just happens to be a different standard than the one you're apparently used to. Modified Hepburn romanization itself is "made-up rules", and rather inconsistently made-up rules at that. After discussion here, we came to a consensus view that using macrons for all single-morpheme long vowels except i didn't make a lot of sense, so we opted to be more consistent and less idiosyncratic than Modified Hepburn. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:01, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Got it. It was baffling to me also, cuz I couldn't believe you of all people would have made such a simple mistake, which is why I then searched for related discussions on that. Not that I'm opposed to ī or anything, cuz I agree that making ii an exception doesn't make sense. ばかFumiko￥^talk 03:23, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Conjugation of verbs with する in page title

Is there anything one can do about pages like お辞儀をする? {{ja-suru|お辞儀を|おじぎを|ojigi o}} produces a monstrous "お辞儀をするする". —suzukaze (t・c) 05:31, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

• I'm not sure that page even merits existence -- 辞儀 is a noun and a する verb, and the お on front is just your basic honorific. The interstitial を shows that this is a phrase and not a verb, and given the semantics, and the fact that this is not idiomatic, not lexicalized, this is thus an SOP construction. I'd say delete, and ensure that the 辞儀 entry is correct and complete. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 06:11, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

I agree. But even so, there are other entries like 気がする (ki ga suru) and 目にする (me ni suru). 気にする (ki ni suru) seems to have the table as plain wikicode but this seems unsatisfactory to me. —suzukaze (t・c) 06:32, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Browsers and accelerator keys

Continuing from WT:GP:

• Yeah, Ctrl+W closes the current tab (or the entire app if only one tab is left, unlike the traditional MDI app, which would remain open with an empty workspace). Ctrl+Shift+W closes the whole thing, so is redundant to Alt+F4, and still accidentally hittable, especially if you're messing about with tabs at high speed. (I also use Ctrl+(Shift+)F4 a lot to flip around and revisit and close tabs, so that's probably where I slip up.)
• It's a while since I did proper Windows development but I am pretty certain that Ctrl+Q was never a standard quit/close key.
• Ctrl+R will reload the current page and wipe any form data. Alt+O doesn't seem to. When I press Alt+E it opens the standard Chrome menu (no doubt because of users who remember the shortcut for the Edit menu). Ctrl+E sets focus to the address bar (weird! why?).

Equinox ◑ 01:06, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

• Ctrl+E for me sets focus to the address bar, with a single ? to the left of the cursor. Quite odd indeed. In Firefox, it sets the focus to the separate Search text field, so perhaps this is just Chrome's analog for that behavior.

You probably already know this one, but just in case -- Ctrl+Shift+T re-opens the last-closed browser tab. That one's been a godsend for me.  :)

With your testing results, I'm left puzzled as to what combo has caused the reload. I know about F5, and that's far enough away from normally typed keys that I have trouble imagining that I'm hitting that one by accident. Ah, well. Thanks to Yair's snippet, I've disabled these accelerators anyway, so I'm spared the frustration of vanishing editor-box content. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 01:20, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

I found something about Ctrl+E here [3]. It seems to be "forcing a search" (not an in-page find!): I suppose this might be useful if you want to search for (say) the word "dog", without getting history suggestions for a previously visited site dog.com, or something? I'm too old... Equinox ◑ 01:45, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

• I'm too old... -- I can sympathize.  :) Thanks for the additional detail! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:00, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

megszámlál

Hi Eirikr, the verbal prefix meg- indicates perfective action in most of the cases. Since there are so many meg- verbs, it makes more sense to have the information at the verbal prefix entry. For example:

• számlálom a pénzt - I am counting the money (indicates the process, but not necessarily the completion)
• számláltam a pénzt - I was counting the money
• megszámlálom a pénzt - I count the money/I will count the money (indicates that the action will be completed)
• megszámláltam a pénzt - I'd counted the money (I completed the action)

Let me know if this answered your question. --Panda10 (talk) 16:33, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

• Thank you, Panda10. So the meg- prefix adds a sense of fully or completely? If so, something to this effect should probably be added to the English definition line. As it currently stands, számlál and megszámlál have identical definitions of to count, but it sounds like the meanings in Hungarian are not identical. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:48, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

I will work more on the definition. Take a look at this blog entry. It talks about verbal prefixes, including meg-: Hungarian Grammar for Beginners. --Panda10 (talk) 21:18, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

バイオリン

I won't argue with you about how "clearly common" it is. I just wanna say I was tryna be consistent as ヴァイオリン is the name of the Wikipedia article page. ばかFumiko￥^talk 04:00, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

• Wikipedia is happy to use neologisms in a way that we aren't. Wiktionary lemma forms thus not uncommonly deviate from Wikipedia page titles. A quick Google search of the entire web quickly shows which form is more common:

• google:"バイオリン": 1,320,000 hits
• google:"ヴァイオリン": 482,000 hits

‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 04:12, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

• • Again, I said I'm not concerned about how "clearly common" it is. If that's the way it should go, cool. ばかFumiko￥^talk 04:22, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

• To be more explicit, please check for usage patterns before changing one lemma form for another. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 04:52, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

ピアノ ‎

I'm confused now. So now Kokugo Dai Jiten is not enough for you? ばかFumiko￥^talk 04:20, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

• No, you were making a mess of the entry: the etymology was confusing and hard to read, and the "shortfor" piece is unnecessary and incorrect. Have a look at it now, I've folded in what I think you were trying to add. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 04:51, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

盲目

Module errors hidden by the Derived terms box. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:50, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Fixed. —suzukaze (t・c) 04:22, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

• Thank you both. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 16:10, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Wasei eigo template

I made it so the template doesn’t need to have a sort parameter (like when there is a {{DEFAULTSORT}} on the page. That’s why I changed the documentation. —britannic124 (talk) 23:06, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

• Aha, that's now more clear, thank you! However, {{DEFAULTSORT}} can only safely be used on pages that have non-kanji elements to the spelling -- kanji-only terms could also have Chinese etc., and {{DEFAULTSORT}} would screw those up. Perhaps you could rework the documentation to explain that? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:09, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

I'm wanting to talk about refferences

Hello, I'm IP user blocked and reverted by you because had original reserch on etymology. Please allow my awkwardness of English because I'm not native speaker, and ask you a question. Are requirements for secondary sources wanted to write a hypothesys in this wiki, same as Wikipedia's? Then I know some sources for some of written by me.--荒巻モロゾフ (talk) 19:47, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

• @荒巻モロゾフ I apologize for the inconvenience of blocking you. Please understand that Wiktionary has much fewer editors than Wikipedia, making it much more difficult to respond to edits that appear doubtful.

Thank you for writing here, and for creating an account. Communication is much easier with named accounts.

Regarding etymologies, sources can help. One additional consideration is how mainstream a theory is. I could say that Japanese 外人 (gaijin, “foreigner”) is possibly cognate with Hebrew גּוֹיִים (goyim, “non-Jew”), but this is not a mainstream theory, and thus other editors would be correct to remove such content.

I noticed that you added a link to James Patrie's paper on "The Genetic Relationship of the Ainu Language". I am now reading through that paper. I have run into a number of troubling issues with the paper; please see here for a discussion of some of them. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 16:54, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

PS: I wrote this last night, but I forgot to hit Save page -- apologies for the delay in replying. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 16:54, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank a lot for your reply. Don't mind for the forgetting to save(セーブミスなら仕方ないですよ). Relativeness of Goyim and Gaijin is nice joke. NYEH HEH HEH :)

About the words you written on User talk:Wyang, I'll try to find reliable souces as far as possible. If there aren't any sources writen or reviewed by the experts I found, then I can't write anything on the word's page, because of becoming original reserch to be forbidden.(可能な限り語源に関する説のソースを探しますが、見つけられない場合は独自研究なのでその単語については何もしないつもりです。)

And I understand your critique to Tyrone, 1978. IMO through there are some fallacies included, that doesn't mean always that all contents of the thesis are wrong. At least in the comparison of numerals in Ainu and Korean I refferred, there are 4 pairs of numerals in both language have correspondence in their places of articulation of consonants. (because 6-9 in Ainu are formed by the "subtraction method(減数法)", only 1-5 are virtually conparable) Being so hard to be a coincidence, I supposed to Ainu-Koreanic ethmological theory in numerals is at least worth introducing as an linguist's opinion. In addition, I found an another study about proximity between Ainu and Korean: [4] According to this reserch by Yasumoto, 1978, between Horobetsu dialect of Ainu and Middle Korean is closer than between both of them and Old Japanese. If they allow to write about etymological relationships between Japanese and Korean (plus Goguryeo and Baekje), also between Ainu and Korean is includible, isn't it?(日本語と朝鮮語（加えて高句麗語と百済語）の間の語源関係に関する説をこのウィキに記すことが許されるならそれよりも近いという研究のあるアイヌ語と朝鮮語の間に関しても記すべきです。)--荒巻モロゾフ (talk) 20:50, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

• Oo, very interesting.

One thought -- there is a lot of research into Japanese, Korean, and Ainu origins, but there is not a lot of consensus. Consequently, it can be difficult to find a theory that is mainstream enough to put on the main entry page. Perhaps we could use the Talk page for each entry as a place to put some of this research, and as we get more authors that agree with each other, we can "graduate" a theory to the main entry page? What do you think? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 22:33, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

That's great idea! To gather published theories in wiktionary pages, users can find etymological hypotheses about the word conviniently.(既存の仮説を一つのページにまとめておけるのなら調べる側として非常に便利になります。) Only because it's not Wiktionary's business to decide what is the true theory and the false if there are multiple theories.（注意したいのはどの説が真実かの軍配を上げる場所ではないということ。） I supposed to avoid stating of support specific viewpoints (e.g. "existence of Altaic language family", "one-sided propagation of the words" and "Argument of that Japanese is came from amalgamation of Altaic and Austronesian"). (特定の説（例えば「アルタイ語族の実在」「一方的な単語の伝播」「日本語はアルタイと南島のアマルガムだという主張」など）を支持する書き方は避けなければなりません。) Etymologial relationships between East Asian Languages are far more complicated than what researchers used to thought about.(実際の東アジア言語間の語源関係はかつて思われていたよりもずっと複雑です。) It's probably better way for NPOV to list the theories and leave judgments to them, to the readers.(諸説あればそれを書き連ね、判断は読者に任せるのが中立的な観点によいとおもいます。)

Well, do you know Sergei Starostin's databases?: [5] About Altaic theory, this will help us much.--荒巻モロゾフ (talk) 19:22, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

頂きます usage notes

{{ja-r}} is only meant to be used in lists, isn’t it? —britannic124 (talk) 14:24, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

• @britannic124 -- I'm not aware of any such restriction. So long as the template is useful, use it.  :)

The main distinction with {{l}} and {{m}} has to do with italicization of terms in scripts like Roman or Cyrillic. For Japanese, this is irrelevant, and {{ja-r}} is one step further away from {{l}}, with lots of useful extensions that are specifically helpful for Japanese terms.

(FWIW, the on-screen output of {{ja-r}} was pixel-perfect identical to what you'd replaced it with, and the replacement was much grottier wikicode, so {{ja-r}} is preferable.)

‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:51, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Etymologies

Hi Eirikr, when you add glosses to suffixes, I've noticed that instead of "noun suffix", "adjective suffix", and "verb suffix" you prefer to use "nominalizing suffix", "adjectivizing suffix", and "verbalizing suffix", respectively. A Google search returns more hits for the first set than the second. It would be best to keep the terminology the same between the actual suffix entry (they use the first set) and the suffix gloss in etymologies. Would you mind using the first set? Is there a reason you prefer the second set? --Panda10 (talk) 17:35, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

• Hello @Panda10:

Elsősorban, elnézést a késésért.  :)

I did some research of my own to try to figure out where I fell into this habit. I think it's more common usage in English discussions of Japanese morphology, but I could be wrong.

From my own subjective perspective, "noun suffix" sounds like a suffix for a noun, instead of a suffix that creates a noun. "Nominalizing suffix" makes the function clear in the label -- the suffix nominalizes, i.e. it creates a noun from the suffixed word. Likewise for the other labels -- -izing clarifies the function.

Google hits alone can be a bit misleading. There are tons of suffixes that can attach to nouns -- and suffixes that create verbs (in my usage at issue here, "verbalizing") or that create adjectives ("adjectivizing") are a subset of these, which are all collectively described by some authors as "noun suffixes" -- i.e., suffixes that attach to nouns. I personally find this confusing, and thus my bias is for the more-specific and less-ambiguous -izing labels.

All that said, if you (as one of the more senior Hungarian editors that I'm aware of) have a strong preference for "noun suffix" or some other label format, please let me know and I shall change my habits.

(... although that is somewhat moot of late, as I have been far too busy to be as active here as I'd like. :-/ )

Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 22:47, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Actually, I don't have a strong preference about which format to use. My preference is more about standardization: if we use format A at the definition, than let's use format A everywhere where the suffix is mentioned. That's all. As a non-native speaker, I needed a native speaker's help to determine which usage is more common or more correct. Based on your reasoning and explanation, using the -izing forms does make more sense. So keep doing that. Eventually, I will change the labels. Thank you for your detailed reply! --Panda10 (talk) 13:34, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

One more question: What do you think about the format "noun-forming suffix", "verb-forming suffix", "adjective-forming suffix"? Somewhat longer than the -izing format, but at least they have only one variant, while -izing has the -ising variant. --Panda10 (talk) 19:20, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

• I'm okay with that. As you note, it's a bit more of a mouthful, but it does nicely avoid any regional bias in the spelling.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:23, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Great, then let's go with that. The category names already use this format (e.g. Category:English noun-forming suffixes). Thanks again. --Panda10 (talk) 21:12, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Native Language?

hi @Eirikr, Your name sounds Icelandic. Why is it that, according to Babel, your native lang is English? It sounds a lot like you're a native Icelandic speaker. Awesomemeeos (talk) 01:31, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

No need to ping him on his own talk page. He has stretches where he only has time to come up for air and check his talk page once in a blue moon- I don't think he's ignoring you. As for his user name, we have Chinese and Vietnamese people with Japanese user names, and Americans with Old English user names. Only a few of us are boring enough to use our real names. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:22, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

That's true — "Chuck Entz" is an interesting choice of username for an Icelander like you. Contrast that with boring old me, Metaknowledge Smith. (My parents had a slightly unorthodox taste in names, but my sister Algorithm and I still love them just the same.) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 07:26, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, people who use their real names (or easily traceable versions thereof) are total schlubs. —JohnC5 13:58, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

• @Awesomemeeos I know smatterings of many languages, and more than many of Japanese, but precious little of Íslenska. Því miður, ég get ekki talað íslensku. Jeg kan ikke tale dansk heller, og dansk er en af mine nærmere forfædres sprog. Ah, well. As I told my family years ago, I responded to the dictum, "go west, young man!" -- and I just kept going, and wound up in Japan. o.O

Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:04, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Just a heads-up:

UtherPendrogn has started adding Old Japanese entries. He considers himself a quick study and isn't the best about attention to details. He also has an unfortunate tendency to come unglued when people correct his work. I haven't checked his work lately, so he may not be as bad as he was to start with, and I'm not qualified to judge anything to do with Old Japanese, anyway. If you have time, you might want to take a look. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 13:10, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz He seems to have taken this as "delete all UtherPendrogn's stuff". It's not even hilarious, since I'd LINKED to a PRIMARY SOURCE with the word attested directly in it and a SCHOLAR from the University of Oxford (maybe you've heard of it?)'s translation. If the words are wrong, I'll literally run naked in the streets of London. I'm perfectly calm, the caps are not me being angry. I'm just concerned that someone deleted something which was clearly directly sourced to one of the best Universities of the world's paper on the language, and also a primary source. The kanji and romaji are quite clear. The only reason I started adding them was since I needed them for something else, and decided I might as well. I'm not a scholar, let alone a Japonic one, so I just copied ad verbatim what I saw and had been written by the scholars. UtherPendrogn (talk) 20:34, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

• @UtherPendrogn: If the words are wrong, I'll literally run naked in the streets of London. -- Shall I bring the popcorn?

<facepalm/> <sigh./>

Let's start with 久毛 (kumo). This could mean spider, or cloud. You chose to define this as cloud -- such a word exists in Japanese, both the modern and the ancient language, but it is canonically spelled 雲. I'm not sure where you got the etymology; the reference you provided just shows these two characters 久 and 毛 used phonetically in context to spell the sounds ku + mo, it says nothing about the meaning or origin of this term. In addition, Proto-Japonic is an area that, to my understanding, is controversial enough that I do not feel comfortable adding such information to Wiktionary.

Then there was 夜 (ya). You chose to define this as eight -- canonically spelled 八.

Your OJP entry at 七 was mostly correct, which was a bit surprising by comparison.

Old Japanese is a very odd duck, and you should really know what you're doing before attempting to create dictionary entries for this language. One of the biggest hurdles for any student of OJP is the writing -- it was very much not systematic, in a way that makes Chaucer's wandering spelling look quite easy in comparison; it used a hodge-podge of multiple and varying Chinese characters to stand in for 1) the entire word's meaning, 2) the phonetic value based on the borrowed Chinese reading, or 3) the phonetic value based on the native Japanese pronunciation of the term with the same meaning as that Chinese character. This phenomenon is known as man'yōgana. If you don't know how to read OJP, you don't really have the prerequisite knowledge to be creating entries. There isn't anything surprising about other editors removing or reworking such entries. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 00:06, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Old Japanese is exclusively written phonetically. So 久毛 is the correct Old Japanese for the later cloud kumo. https://books.google.fr/books?id=1bp_AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=eight-cloud+old+japanese&source=bl&ots=GAh4C0hERP&sig=I8kBqUIRhKO1pjxM9Kxt48uDNws&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj4g5O454jQAhVLXBoKHaaUAA4Q6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&q=eight-cloud%20old%20japanese&f=false

Kumwo means cloud, ya-kumwo means eight-cloud. UtherPendrogn (talk) 00:23, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Also, your logic is just odd. You don't feel comfortable adding them yourself so you removed mine? Also, see here.

• http://vsarpj.orinst.ox.ac.uk/corpus/ojcorpus.html#Kojiki (The primary source I posted)
• Kumwo: 久毛 (cloud)
• Ya: 夜 (eight)
• Nana: 七 (seven)

UtherPendrogn (talk) 00:26, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Allow me to address several points here. I'm in a bit of a rush, so this post will be less well-structured than I'd like.

• I just did a quick-and-dirty survey of the text of the Man'yōshū, an OJP poetry collection compiled sometime around 759 CE. The two-character combination 久毛 to phonetically spell kumo is used most extensively in cases where the ku is the conjugated ending of the preceding word, and the mo is the particle も (mo). Next, it is used to spell kumo as in modern Japanese 雲 (kumo, “cloud”). I also see in poem #892 that 久毛 was used to spell kumo as in modern Japanese 蜘蛛 (kumo, “spider”).

This kind of ambiguity is precisely why man'yōgana writing was abandoned in favor of canonical kanji and kana. Even if one were to insist on phonetic spellings as the lemma forms for OJP entries, romaji is vastly more preferable than man'yōgana.

• Notably, Volume 7 contains only one instance of 久毛, used in poem #1414 to spell the ending of yo no fukuraku mo. That same volume contains 21 different places where 雲 (kumo, “cloud”) is used in the OJP text, intended with the reading kumo and the meaning of cloud. OJP was demonstrably not exclusively written phonetically.
• Re: why remove yours but not add my own, it comes down to time and veracity. The information you added was incorrect in important ways, and it simply took less time to delete the evidentially incorrect entry than it would have taken to thoroughly research the term, move it to the correct lemma spelling, and rework the content. I am busy IRL, and that prevents me from participating here more fully. I am not alone in this -- in general, Wiktionary editors are quicker to remove incorrect information than they are to build out correct information. And, like me, the driving factor behind this is time, or rather, the lack thereof.

FWIW, I am not averse to working collaboratively to build out Wiktionary's OJP entries and template infrastructure, when and as time allows. This is something I've been slowly working towards for some time. That said, any such initiative must happen with the collaboration and cooperation of the other Wiktionary editors here who work on Japanese entries. The WT:Beer parlor is probably the best place to bring up relevant discussions. Other than myself, other editors to ping would be Anatoli, Haplology, Suzukaze, Takasugi Shinji, Wyang... I know I'm forgetting several others (申し訳なく、ご了承ください), but that's a start at least.

Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 05:01, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

(Edi conflict) Re: his logic- have you ever heard the expression fools rush in where angels fear to tread? If someone draws me a detailed topographic map of a planet in another solar system, that fact that no one knows enough about that planet to draw one of their own is reason enough to question where they got their information- whether or not I could draw one of my own. Eirikr is a professional translator who's read a lot on the etymology of Japanese, so I trust his judgment on this.

There's a huge amount of uncertainty and variability in ancient languages like Old Japanese. They didn't have dictionaries or classes in the subject: you learned from someone else, and if you ran into something that no one had taught you about, you did your best to make something up that seemed to work. Add to that the fact that the Chinese script has always been only partly phonetic, and that the system of phonetic writing in Japanese was still evolving, and you get something that takes a lot of extrapolation and guesswork to arrive at a sort of approximation. Sure, there are references with everything laid out neatly and systematically, but I'm sure other references have different interpretations of the same data. What little I've read on the subject is full of allusions to widespread disagreement about very basic concepts, so I wouldn't take any one source as the final word.

At any rate, I didn't give Eirikr that heads-up with the intent of inciting him to trash everything. It's just that Eirikr is one of maybe two or three people on Wiktionary that know enough about Old Japanese to have an opinion on it, and he doesn't have time to look through everything and come across them on his own. I just wanted to let him know so he could take a look for himself.

As for your behavior here: I have nothing much to complain about. You still approach things with the same naïve and reckless overconfidence, but that's not a matter of etiquette. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:10, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Why not just add alternative man'yogana forms on the page with the later generalised form? UtherPendrogn (talk) 10:50, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

• @UtherPendrogn: Man'yōgana spellings are so variant that there is little value in including this: readers of OJP are expected to be adequately familiar with kanji readings and with man'yōgana in general. For similar reasons of excess variation, Wiktionary does not include all divergent spellings of Middle English or Old English words -- we generally settle on one canonical spelling. So too with Japanese resources, which similarly use a canonical spelling as the headword. Quotes from ancient works may show different spellings, but the reader is assumed to understand that OJP writing conventions were irregular. For example, although a given OJP term might appear in Poem ABC in OJP compilation XYZ, it might appear in poem BCD in that same compilation XYZ with a completely different spelling. I'm pretty sure I've even seen the same word spelled multiple ways within a single poem (which again mirrors Chaucer and the fluid nature of Middle English orthography).

In your recent edit, you mentioned that “He likes using modern kanji for 1600 year old words.” This isn't just my own personal preference, which I came up with all on my own. But don't just take my word for it. There are online freely-available dictionaries that include OJP. For example, Weblio has this entry for tuma or this entry for kumo, which clearly list the words using the canonicalized kanji spellings. My dead-tree OJP dictionaries do the same. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:00, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Might it have crossed your mind that I deleted that edit for a reason? UtherPendrogn (talk) 17:13, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

• @UtherPendrogn: Might it have crossed your mind that I would still see it? And perhaps want to respond to it, to try to clear up what is clearly a misapprehension on your part? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:22, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz, Eirikr, UtherPendrogn: FWIW, Wiktionary does (in principle) "include all divergent spellings of Middle English [and] Old English words"; one form (a canonical spelling) is lemmatised, whilst every other spelling gets an {{alternative spelling of}} entry. It seems to me that there would be value in doing the same for Old Japanese man'yōgana; it may be that "readers of OJP are expected to be adequately familiar with kanji readings and with man'yōgana in general", but I don't see why the barrier to entry must be set so high here on Wiktionary. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:31, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

• I.S.M.E.T.A.: This is less a matter of barriers, than simple variance -- there are patterns, but the variety of man'yōgana spellings is greater than Middle or Old English. There also isn't much utility; by point of reference, no monolingual Japanese resource that I'm aware of includes man'yōgana spellings as headwords. I would be open to listing OJP entries at the corresponding kana spelling, but cataloging all of the man'yōgana spellings would approach a Sisyphean task. From a modern perspective, man'yōgana can be likened to misspellings, and there have been arguments here in the fora where the emerging consensus was to only bother with misspellings if they are relatively common, and even then it's only to include them as soft redirects. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:27, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz, Eirikr, UtherPendrogn: Re “the variety of man'yōgana spellings is greater than Middle or Old English”, are you sure about that? Check out the Middle English Dictionary’s forty listed variants of the Middle English nigromauncie (“necromancy”). Also see User:-sche/exceptional#Most spellings, which links to entries with dozens of variants (over a hundred in the case of the name Muhammad). Because of WT:NOTPAPER, there is no good reason to exclude the various man'yōgana spellings. I don't think the concept of misspelling really applies to Old Japanese — and that is because of its lack of standardisation (as is the case with Middle English). I believe that a person should be able to look up an Old Japanese term without having to know Modern Japanese; would you agree? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:52, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Why did you delete all my Old Japanese entries?

They were correct, sourced, and linked to their current Japanese forms and older Proto-Japonic forms. UtherPendrogn (talk) 20:33, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

• @UtherPendrogn, see fuller reply above. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 00:08, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Mistakes that native people make themselves

Hi Eirikr, I wonder if there are any mistakes that native Japanese speakers make when speaking their own language, Japanese (in terms of grammar, spelling, word usage etc.). For example, native English speakers may use gone and went incorrectly. Thanks! – AWESOME meeos ！ ＊ （「欺负」我） 23:56, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

• @Awesomemeeos: One easy one is the use of adjective すごい (sugoi, “terrible; terrific; awful; awesome”) as an adverb, without conjugating it into the adverbial -ku form of すごく (sugoku). This could be argued to be an instance of lexicalization, I'm not sure. I'll see what other examples I can think of. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 00:08, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Does ra-nuki count? Also 雰囲気(ふいんき) (fuinki). —suzukaze (t・c) 02:07, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi

Are you good enough at Japanese to tell if things are correct in OJ at a glance? I'd happily collect the Old Japanese words, find possible Proto-Japonic forms and descendants, then show them to you and post the articles if you don't want to. I would appreciate you reviewing them though, I don't speak a word of Japanese. As I said, I added these because I found they weren't on here.

A few:

Kamwi: 迦微 (God/Spirit, Kami)
Tuma: 都麻 (Wife, Tsuma)
So: 曾 (That, So)
Kwo: 兒 (Child, Ko)
UtherPendrogn (talk) 00:39, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

I'd also appreciate being contacted before you just delete an etymology. I have the source, you only need to ask. Now the etymology is lost. UtherPendrogn (talk) 00:52, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

• Re: deletions, nothing on Wiktionary is lost -- just look at the page history, the tabbed link right at the top of the page.

Looking at the individual terms, most of those are man'yōgana spellings and thus you generally won't find them in any modern dictionary references. The canonical forms and modern JA entries are:

• 神 (kami) -- likely arising from an older pronunciation kamu, which persists in certain old compounds.
• 妻 (tsuma, “wife”), 夫 (tsuma, “husband”, obsolete now) -- notably, OJP tuma originally meant spouse, regardless of gender, and arose from the word 端 (tsuma, ancient tuma, “edge, side”), from the idea of someone being at one's side.
• そ (so)
• 子 (ko)

Any OJP entries should likely be created under those headings. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 05:13, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

PS: It looks like you're saving the page on each iteration when you are composing your posts on my Talk page -- this causes me to get multiple email notifications in quick succession, which is a bit annoying. Please use the Show preview button instead, and click Save changes only once you're done drafting your text. TIA, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 05:28, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Don't be condescending. I know how to edit, I just often have things to add a few hours later. UtherPendrogn (talk) 10:44, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

• @UtherPendrogn: No condescension meant. A few hours later is no issue. I was referring to yesterday, when you made five edits between 1:33 and 1:40 PM my time, and later that evening, when you made another five edits to the same section between 5:23 and 5:26 PM. On a regular page, that just makes for a messy page history. On user talk pages, though, you should be aware that you are effectively spamming that user, as for most of us, each user talk page edit generates an email notification to that user. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 16:33, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

What do you do like about Japan?

Hi Awesomemeeos again. Sorry to bother you, but just as a general question, what are some of the things you like about japan and its culture? – AWESOME meeos ！ ＊ （「欺负」我） 08:17, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

• @Awesomemeeos: I like the people here. The food is pretty good too.  :)

One big thing that Japan has going for it, as a place to live, is that it's very safe: violent crime is pretty darn rare, and even petty property crime is unusual. Case in point: my wife and I have both left our phones on the bullet train by accident at different times, and have recovered the phones within a couple days for less than JPY ¥1,000 / USD $10.00 in shipping charges. Once, my wife left her *purse* on the train, and we got it back in a few hours with nothing missing. This is hard to imagine in the US.

Like anywhere, it has its problems. From my personal perspective, those problems are less uncomfortable than the problems I've encountered in many other places where I've lived.

YMMV, and all the usual caveats for any subjective statement of opinion.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 15:31, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Romanji

Hi, I wonder if Japanese people are aware of Romanji and know how to use it. Do they learn at school? Also, do they use keyboards based on Romanji or use a kana-arranged keyboard? Thanks again! – AWESOME meeos ！ ＊ （「欺负」我） 10:46, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

• @Awesomemeeos: In Japanese, it's called ローマ字 (rōma-ji, literally “Roma characters”), and in English, it's usually called romaji. This is taught in school. The most common romaji spelling convention taught in Japan is Kunreishiki. This doesn't map very well to the pronunciations expected by English speakers, such as しゃ rendered as sya in Kunreishiki, where the pronunciation is closer to sha. Kunreishiki also has some important failings, such as the impossibility of rendering the sound ファン (fan, “a fan”) -- this becomes han in Kunreishiki, same as はん. Another impossibility in Kunreishiki is spelling パーティ (pāti, “a party”) in a clear and unambiguous fashion: this becomes pāti, but the final ti in Kunreishiki is indistinguishable from ち, which is pronounced closer to chi.

Another system that is taught in many materials for English-language learners of Japanese is Hepburn romanization. We use a modified version of Hepburn for JA entries here at Wiktionary.

For Japanese input on keyboards, a couple options are available. Historically, the first Japanese typewriters had enormous keyboards, supporting all ~100 kana glyphs and around 2,400 kanji as well. Have a look at some of the images on Wikimedia Commons. The advent of computers greatly simplified things, with the ability to define software-based conversions of character sequences into other characters (such as romaji to kana, kana to kanji, romaji to kanji). Here are some Japanese computer keyboard layouts. You might also be interested in the Japanese input methods article on Wikipedia.

HTH, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:36, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

I am interested by the seventh row of katakana in this image, which features ㇷ, ㇹ, ㇺ, and a sutegana for ヰ; the image's description notes that “Small フ (HU), ホ (HO), ヰ (WI), and ム (MU) are not used in today's Japanese orthography”, but presumably they were at the time that the font was devised in 1925. Can you tell me what these sutegana were used for, please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:25, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Testing of Ainu transliteration code

I tried making a module that can transliterate Ainu from kana into the Latin alphabet. It's probably far from perfect since I actually have no idea what I'm doing, and cross-referencing its output with existing entries seems to find a lot of inconsistencies. It seems like you're knowledgeable in Ainu, could you help check it at Module:ain-translit/testcases? Thanks. —suzukaze (t・c) 09:53, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

• @Suzukaze: Interesting! I see too that you're running into some of the tough challenges -- like オッタ = orta, or アッペ = akpe. I'm afraid I haven't spent enough time digging around in Ainu orthography to be able to help too much; my Ainu vocabulary is also probably too small for this. That said, I'm happy to have a look and see what I can contribute, if anything.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:40, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

hózhóní

Hi Eric, I wanted to discuss here about the reverts on hózhóní.

You said :“nothing here says that "hózhóní" is not a primary verb". I'm sorry for my bad wording, but by “not primary”, I meant that hózhóní as it stands here, is qualified as a verb form (it's nizhóní conjugated / infected for the 3s person), so is not a "primary" verb in that sense. I don't believe it is desirable that all verbs forms appear in the prefix or root categories, as opposed to just verb lemmata. Of course, this can be discussed as this is a communitary work, but there are so many inflected forms that this would totally blur the structure of the lexicon. And there already are so many forms just with the verb lemmata...

Then, “or on cat page to say that verb forms aren't allowed”: yes, I can change that to make it more clear. If you want, I can also make categories for all non verbal lemmata, keeping the verb lemmata separate.

I actually just finished going over all the verb entries yesterday, placing all of them into categories for prefixes, stem, root, aspect and paradigm. I'm now going to tackle prefixes, making one page entry for each of them. There I can make some arrangement for pointing to categories for both verb lemmata and non verb lemmata.

What do you think? Julien Daux (talk) 00:26, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Also... I don't know if it's me, but I feel like a little of animosity on your end towards me. Rest assured that I'm not there to aggress, vandalize or destroy anyone's work, and I would greatly appreciate if you could come to me before reverting one of my edits? I actually just came across one from back in October that I hadn't seen, and I'm totally open for discussion. The edit I reverted this morning was from an anon user, so I hadn't a way to discuss the matter with him or her, otherwise I would have. Thank you! Julien Daux (talk) 01:53, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• Heya Julien, no animosity at all. I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I greatly appreciate your work in building out Navajo. A little disagreement is probably inevitable in any project this big and with this many people involved. I recognize that you are working in good faith and making a positive contribution. Please don't take any input from me as animosity.

Re: categories, thank you for explaining where you're coming from on hózhóní. I confess that I don't agree here that this is purely a verb form; I would be more apt to view naołnish as a verb form of naalnish. At the crux, I don't quite agree that this derives directly as a form of nizhóní. The root verb stem for both hózhóní and nizhóní is -zhǫ́, and we still have hózhǫ́ in the modern language, from which hózhóní would clearly derive as the regular result of adding nominalizing suffix -í. From there, since etymologically this should be a noun, but it's used lexically as a verb, that would appear to qualify it as a lemma unto itself, independent of hózhǫ́. If hózhóní instead comes directly from nizhóní (subtract the ni- and add the hó-), then where does hózhǫ́ come from? I'm not aware of any corresponding nizhǫ́ still extant in Navajo, and back-formation from nominalized forms suffixed with -í to forms without the suffix doesn't seem to be a regular process of word formation in the language.

That's my 2p, anyway: hózhóní looks to me like a lemma, and thus deserving of categorization. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:52, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Happy to see we're in good terms.

Letting aside the -zhǫ́ vs. -zhóní issue for the moment and focusing on hózhóní with regard to nízhóní, all I can say is that both Young and Morgan volumes (the Navajo Language, 1987, and the Analytical Lexicon, 1992) consider the former to be an inflected form of the latter (namely, the 3s). (disclaimer: this is not an argument of authority because there are MANY things I'm left unsatisfied with in these two dictionaries, it is just to show some other opinions). YM1992 is even weirder because it lists hózhóní both as a an inflected form of nizhóní (which is weird because YM1992 never displays conjugation paradigms and always sends the reader back to the YM1987 volume), and as a standalone entry under the NEUTER ni-Ø theme.

Prefixes fall in two broad categories, derivational/thematic or inflectional/paradigmatic. The difficulty with the spatial ho- prefix is that it falls in both categories depending on the situation. Usually, the thematic use of it is easy to spot because:

1. it is present in all persons (for instance the 1st person forms: bóhoosh'aah, hashneʼ,...),
2. the meaning is rarely related to space, area or things in an obvious fashion (I learn, I tell,...).

The paradigmatic ho- on the other hand disappears in non-3s persons (hóteel but nishteel, niteel...) and the meaning is predictable and unambiguously related to space (area is wide = there are plains).

Ambiguous cases arise when the verb is only used in the 3rd person and doesn't alternate with 1st or 2nd person, it is difficult to really ascertain if ho- is thematic or paradigmatic.

Back to the case of hózhóní, ho- appears to satisfy here both criteria: it alternates with 1st and 2nd persons (hózhóní but nishzhóní, nizhóní) and meaning is clearly related to space. So ho- seems very likely to be a conjugated form and not a main form under a separate verb theme.

Now, hózhǫ́ is one of those cases where classification is more peculiar. Meaning is related to space, but it misses alternating forms... In absence of more evidence, it is as a default classified as its own "primary" entry in synchronic dictionaries, even if there are grounds to suspect it was formerly the ho- conjugated form of a hypothetical *nizhǫ́ verb.

海豹

Wiktionary:Votes/2016-07/Using template l to link to English entries and Wiktionary:Votes/2016-07/Placing English definitions in def template or similar may be relevant... —suzukaze (t・c) 03:30, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

@suzukaze-c: Those votes to impose their respective regulations failed, but that does not mean that the contrary of those regulations is thereby imposed. FWIW, I approve of Eiríkr's edit and would've voted support in both those votes you link to; somehow, I missed them. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:39, 29 December 2016 (UTC)