hello

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Hello, and welcome to Wiktionary!

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Wiktionary is run in a very different manner from Wikipedia and you will have a better experience if you do not assume the two are similar in culture. Please remember that despite your experience on Wikipedia, that experience may not always be applicable here. While you do not need to be an expert, or anything close to one, to contribute, please be as respectful of local policies and community practices as you can. Be aware that well-meaning Wikipedians have unfortunately found themselves blocked in the past for perceived disruption due to misunderstandings. To prevent a similar outcome, remember the maxim: be bold, but don't be reckless!
Having said that, we welcome Wikipedians, who have useful skills and experience to offer. The following are a couple of the most jarring differences between our projects that Wikipedians may want to learn up front, so things go smoothly for everyone. Changing policy pages on Wiktionary is very strongly discouraged. If you think something needs changing, please discuss it at the beer parlour, after which we may formally vote on the issue. You should also note that Wiktionary has very different user-space policies, we are here to build a dictionary and your user-page exists only to facilitate that. In particular we have voted to explicitly ban all userboxes with the exception of {{Babel}}; please do not create or use them.

We hope you enjoy editing Wiktionary and being a Wiktionarian. Conrad.Irwin 19:46, 15 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Welcome!

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Hi,

Good to see you over here on the dark side! :-)

RuakhTALK 22:27, 15 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

hi. it's not so dark Ishwar 21:40, 17 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Word list

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Hi, just as a nosy interferer, where did you get the list from? You may be interested in WT:EDH and WT:RAE. Conrad.Irwin 20:47, 9 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi. Yes, I'm just playing. I generated a list of the headwords from American Heritage Online (via: http://www.bartleby.com/61/s0.html). And I wanted to see how many "A" entries, etc. were not in wiktionary. Seems to be quite a bit. I'm just further my learning of Python and of programming in general. I am going (to try) to extract pronunciation info for each American Heritage entry that has pronunciation info and put into a database and then compare it with the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary to see what overlaps. I can donate the results to wiktionary assuming that I finish. Ishwar 04:57, 10 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Wiktionary:English pronunciation key

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I apologize for undoing more than I should have here. I saw an unknown username, and a change which went against our conventions, and I guess I got a bit trigger happy. However, I am reverting your switch from the upside down r to the right side up one. We had a vote a while back and it was decided that the usage of upside r was a good idea, since we are a multilingual dictionary, and thus should make the difference between the English r and.....everyone else's. Again, sorry about that. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 05:24, 15 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi. Well, that is unfortunate and not how the IPA is generally used, but that's what they do in wikipedia so I guess there is some influence from that over here. Maybe a note should mentioned about the vote on the talk page.
I'm adding the distinctions found in RP and some American dialects that are recorded in American dictionaries but are missing on wikitionary's pronun. key. Ishwar 05:30, 15 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Reverted you

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I reverted your edit removing Category:Amerindian languages from Category:Hopi language. Could you explain why you made that edit? __meco 08:16, 13 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yes, to make the categorizing consistent. When I looked at it, I found these types of categorizing (1) language listed both under Amerindian & its genetic family, (2) lang listed under Amerindian but not under its genetic family (usually because the family category did not exist), (3) lang not under Amerindian but listed only under its genetic family. This is somewhat confusing, so I choose one solution which was to list all langs under their genetic family which is then listed under Amerindian. Since Hopi is under Uto-Aztecan & Uto-Aztecan is under Amerindian, I then removed Hopi from being directly under Amerindian. Ishwar 08:32, 13 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
The problem which I saw, which must be a glitch of yours as you describe it differently here, is that Category:Uto-Aztecan languages has one parent category only which is Category:Language families. __meco 09:10, 13 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
I overlooked that. Actually, there were several other families not under Amerindian. But, I fixed that just now. Ishwar 09:18, 13 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

twf-noun

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Would you like a little help with this? The parameters are even confusing you. For example at kwìawíne, you put in 3 |'s to skip the gender and duoplural, but g= is a named parameter, so you don't need to skip it, so the sort key is landing in the "loc" field (parameter 3), where it is ignored. (!) If you like, this can all be made a bit simpler to use? Robert Ullmann 17:30, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Sure. I dont fully understand the parameters after reading the help pages. Ishwar 17:32, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
Okay, I made loc and sortkey (skey) named, since they occur some of the time. It does mean re-editing what you've done so far, but should be a lot easier. Also: it only categorizes in main namespace, so you can use examples in other places without getting stray categorizations; uses the sort key in all cats. I dropped the word "gender" becuase we don't use that in other languages, that is expected to be gender/number/class. Robert Ullmann 17:53, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:twf-noun is where you've already used it. Robert Ullmann 17:55, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
I see. That is better. Thank you for fixing it. Ishwar 18:00, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Um, you've managed to duplicate the local nouns cat (and a typo). For "uninflected", I'd suggest you just use g=inv (invariant, which is what it is). You have noticed that getting spaces in the start or end of a conditional is tricky? (;-) Robert Ullmann 16:12, 18 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

I'm not quite sure what I'm doing wrong. As I understand it, this code
{{#if:{{NAMESPACE}}||{{#ifeq:{{{loc|}}}|loc|[[Category:Taos local gender nouns|{{{skey|{{PAGENAME}}}}}]]}}
means "if this page has a namespace prefix, then do nothing, else do conditional" and the next conditional is "if named parameter "loc" = string "loc" then create this category (with skey value for sorting). So, I dont understand why this code
{{#if:{{NAMESPACE}}||{{#ifeq:{{{uninf|}}}|infl|[[Category:Taos uninflected nouns|{{{skey|{{PAGENAME}}}}}]]}}
doesnt create Category:Taos uninflected nouns with the skey value for sorting (at, for example, lúnąsi).
Noticed a whitespace issue? Umm, I guess not?
Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong? Ishwar 18:56, 18 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Cat:Languages of New Mexico

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The result of a protracted discussion some time ago was that Hawaii is the only US state for which we allow a regional languages category. --EncycloPetey 05:01, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

I see. So Hawaii's special because it's an island? Ishwar 05:03, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
Yes, physically far removed. Normally, we otherwise have no geographic divisions below the level of country, and even for some removed island regions people object (like the Virgin Islands). --EncycloPetey 05:07, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
And that includes cultural areas which are sometimes thousands of years older than these countries? Ishwar 05:15, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
Yes, which is why we have no Cat:Languages of the Roman Empire or Cat:Languages of the Inca Empire. All geography is by current national boundaries. That's not to say the situation is entirely satisfactory. I have long wanted to improve how we group Ameridian languages, but am out of my depth doing more than the basics. --EncycloPetey 05:27, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
Could you link to the discussion EncycloPetey? Nadando 05:17, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
It seems I may have remembered more from the discussions than was actually said. I've looked back at the relevant discussions, and while they tend to lean that way, the subject of subnational geographic divisions was not explicitly discussed (though one person declared that all the geographic categories were useless). The discussions were on the Category:Utah and Category:Languages of the United States Virgin Islands. You can get to the discussions using "what links here".
Because this is something so new, it might be best to discuss it in the Beer Parlour, but in the meantime I'll restore the category for discussion purposes. --EncycloPetey 05:27, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

apostrophes

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We don't use curly apostrophes, and haven't for a long time, especially not for appearance. Pagenames should use straight apostrophes, since that is what most computers will type. --EncycloPetey 23:43, 26 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi.
Who made that terrible editorial choice? I mean you could create a bot that automatically redirected everything.... Oh well.
And it doesnt matter if the "apostrophe" symbol is an apostrophe in function or an alphabetical letter?
This does mean that all my contributions for the Taos language needs to be adjusted. But, I'll probably leave this to the editors who created this editorial choice....
On a different note, I noticed that the {term} template uses curly apostrophes. Somewhat inconsistent, no? My question: how do I turn off the quotes when I want cite a grammatical gloss and not a definitional gloss. For example, {term|-na||singular|lang=twf} gives -na (singular). Usually grammatical glosses are not enclosed in apostrophes in linguistic work. So, is there a way to do this? Ishwar 23:53, 26 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
Fortunately, the restriction only applies to the typography in pagename titles. Although this causes some hassle with templates, this can be remedied in a manner similar to that employed in shouldn’t’ve and ha’porth.  (u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 00:30, 27 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
The term template adjusts font, not characters. I recommend raising the issue in the Grease Pit, since others know far more about the technical issues behind the decision than I do. --EncycloPetey 23:55, 26 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
Re: {{term}}: That's come up a few times at Template talk:term, and I've been thinking about it. I think the best (read: least bad) solution is to add a comment= parameter, that would appear in a Roman font, within the parentheses, after the gloss. This would also allow the ugly-but-useful {{term|yeux|comment=plural of {{term|œil||eye}}}}, which would look something like (deprecated template usage) yeux (plural of (deprecated template usage) œil). But we should discuss this at Template talk:term. —RuakhTALK 01:07, 27 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Jesse

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We no longer use "X" forms of entries. I'd suggest the alternative, but I honestly can't remember myself how we decided to handle these constructions. --EncycloPetey 07:23, 19 January 2009 (UTC)Reply

So, that is not a solution.
Does wiktionary not have a list of conventions?
The X is a variable. Perhaps you can be more explicit: give (pronoun) Jesse. If this is disallowed for whatever reason, it does defeat the purpose of having abstract lexical entries (like un-, etc.). I guess you can treat a phrasal entry like affixes (so, give- -Jesse), but that seems weird. I suppose that some idiom dictionaries would list this as give him Jesse in effect choosing the masculine to represent the paradigm, and plenty dictionaries of more inflected languages arbitrarily choose one member of the paradigm as the lemma. I would guess that this how wiktionary would handle these. Ishwar 07:21, 20 January 2009 (UTC)Reply