Mnemosientje

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Hello Mnemosientje, I saw that you are a native Dutch speaker; could you help me with something? In the last full paragraph of this page, what do you understand by this sentence?

"De gemeene man maekt messen van zekeren steen, welke messen zy Ituque noemen: en ook van riet, die zy Taquoaquia heten. Anders gebruiken ook Hollantse messen."

More specifically, is it possible to unequivocally establish what "Ituque" refers to, whether it is the stone or the knife made from that stone? The same applies to "Taquoaquia": does it refer to the bamboo or the knife made from that bamboo?

Thank you! RodRabelo7 (talk) 23:00, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

@RodRabelo7 Hey! The translated passage reads:

The common man makes knives out of a certain [type of] stone, which knives they name Ituque; and [they] also [make knives] out of reed, which they call Taquoaquia. Otherwise they also use Hollandic knives.

It is possible to unequivocally establish that Ituque refers to the knives, not the stone: welke messen zy Ituque noemen is unambiguous, and explicitly states that it is the knives which are called Ituque.

It is also possible to unequivocally establish that Taquoaquia refers to the knives, not the reed of which they are made, as they are referred to with the relative pronoun die. That pronoun is used for masculine and feminine gender words in the singular, and in the plural it is used for all genders, which applies here as messen is plural. Whereas if the text were to refer to the material, the pronoun would have to have been the neuter singular relative pronoun dat, as riet is neuter singular, and not masculine or feminine or plural. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 13:36, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

OHG Given Names cleanup

Who is the best editor to help me out here - there have been a lot of spurious names in this category - Low German listed as High German because someone never checked Forstemann's citations for provenance, Bavarian place names from Schatz listed as given names, and a variant of the OHG precursor of Pferd "horse" listed as a given name with capitalisation (not always used for given names in OHG and not for nouns). and now someone is just adding made up names as roots of misspelled German surnames Griffon77 (talk) 15:45, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

"now someone is just adding made up names as roots of misspelled German surnames". @Juliusmborris, you need to stop doing this. We cannot have entries for words that haven't existed, and many of the forms you've added don't seem to be attested anywhere. Names like Oustih give no results anywhere on the internet except for Wiktionary. If not sourced they should all be deleted. ᛙᛆᚱᛐᛁᚿᛌᛆᛌ ᛭ Proto-Norsing ᛭ Ask me anything 21:31, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

It seems the problem has resolved itself; the editor in question has declared himself inactive as of the first of March. As for the affected entries, there is nothing to be done except fix them wherever we find them, I fear. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 13:46, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Regarding your comment on een

Hey Mnemosientje,

This is actually a problem that I've also been thinking about. I think this form should be listed under the Numeral section, as do the Dutch Wiktionary (although it is very inconsistent looking at the other numbers) and the WNT. Some time ago, I made a mockup of what I think a general number page should like, where I put this form in the headword line, together with the diminutive. However, I am not really sure how to present the usage of these forms.

Regarding usage, it seems that enen is only used for referencing the time, where the other inflected numerals are also used in other cases involving a preposition (e.g. met z'n drieën, de taart in vieren snijden) and also after a personal pronoun (wij tweeën). The diminutive eentje is also a special case compared to the other numbers.

We could perhaps link to an Appendix page that explains all this, or make a usage note template for use on every numeral page. What do you think?

Stujul (talk) 13:27, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

@Stujul: Good to hear I am not the only one confused by this! I took some time to look around and see if others had grappled with this before, and while it's difficult to find anything that deals with these specific issues I did come across this pdf on the IVDNT website. Section 2.4.1 here (pp. 32-33) deals with this issue. Two points stand out (also with regard to the mockup you made):

a) They analyze the -en ending of numerals in cases like na zessen to indicate time as an adverbial ending, corresponding to our Etymology 7 at -en, equating it to the adverbial -en also found in phrases like van voren, naar achteren, and so forth.

b) The -en ending in cases such as met z'n drieën is interpreted as a plural form of the numeral.

I think I agree with both analyses, although I am not entirely positive about it either.

As for case a), perhaps we could have adverb lemmata at tweeën, drieën, vieren, etc. all the way through to twaalven? They would mirror the entry voren, which is also never used without a preceding preposition (such as naar or van).

As for case b); this analysis does indicate that the dative interpretation in the mockup is incorrect. (The existence of forms like met z'n tweetjes also seems to point to this.) I think we could list a plural form for each numeral in the headword line of the numeral POS at the main lemma (e.g. at drie) to cover case b). — Mnemosientje (t · c) 09:40, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I agree to have this distinction of cases, as case b) seemingly only refers to people, where a) does not. Also, case b) can be replaced with the diminutive form, and case a) cannot. The pdf does not include my example of de taart in vieren snijden, but I suppose it would also fall under case a).

As for the analysis of the suffix, Taalportaal (also part of IVDNT) discusses case b) and agrees with the pdf in that it is the personal plural marker. It (together with ANS) cites a book by Geert Booij, of which I was not able to find a copy, but I did find an excerpt stating that "Dutch has lost the overt, morphological marking of dependency by means of morphological case markers. Yet, there are a number of remnants of the old case system that function as markers of specific constructions. [...] A third example is the re-use of the old dative suffix –en that has been reinterpreted as a plural suffix on numerals in constructions that express collective adverbials, as in met zijn vier-en ‘the four of us’", so seemingly it is both ;)

As for the etymology of case a), this pdf seems to be the only source analysing it as this adverbial suffix. Then again, it seems to be the only source analysing it at all, as the other sources just bunch it together with case b). I don't know if I agree with the analysis, as all the other uses seem to refer to directions, so I don't know why it would be used on numerals.

As for the lemmatization, am I correct in reading that we would have case a) as a full lemma, and b) as a nonlemma? And then on the main entry we would have

drie (plural drieën, diminutive drietjes),

with the adverb drieën in the derived terms? I don't know if I agree with this. Even though they are two separate cases, I would still see them both as nonlemma forms of the main numeral.

Stujul (talk) 13:01, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

@Stujul Good finds, thanks for sharing. I think I pretty much agree both regarding how to treat case B and regarding not having an adverb lemma.

I'd say that the safest approach here may be to simply treat entries for such cases (e.g. drieën) as a non-lemma inflected form entry with two POS headers for non-lemma forms: a Numeral and a Noun, both POS being defined both as 1. a plural form and 2. an archaic dative case form.

We can also create entries for genitive plurals by the way, drieër (as in drieërlei, der drieër steden). As with archaic adjective and noun case entries, we wouldn't list such forms in the headword template.

To illustrate the above I have edited drieën and also created drieër. I have furthermore illustrated the cases we discussed in usexes over at drie (I will add usexes at een through ten soon.). What do you think?

As for the headword template at the numeral lemma entries, I agree with your previous reply ("plural" and "diminutive" only; not "inflected" though probably, that would deviate from how we treat other POS headword templates). — Mnemosientje (t · c) 09:12, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

Hi, sorry for the late reply, I've been quite busy. I agree with the approach you've taken on the entries. You're right that we should put "plural" in the headword rather than "inflected". I do wonder for which numbers we should create these non-lemma forms (and thus put them in the headword line), especially the diminutive. The sources I provided say the diminutive is only really used up to 5, but I can find some hits for numbers slightly higher (though admittedly they are very rare). I think 10 is a good stopping point for the diminutive. The plural form seems to be used much more. I can easily find hits up to "met ons twintigen" and also every multiple of ten after that. Should we just include this form for every number up to 100? Also, ANS talks about forms like gedrieën used in Belgian Dutch. How do you think we should handle those?

Furthermore, I suppose we should also create the noun senses for each number, at least up to ten.

PS. you created the entry drieër as an adjective form, is that correct?

Stujul (talk) 10:17, 30 April 2025 (UTC)