User talk:Ruakh/2011

January 2011

Interwiki bots

Hi, Ruakh.

I replied to your comment on my bot's vote page. I thought I shouldn't pollute the page too much with extra comments so I left the essential there and I'm adding something else here.

You mentioned you believe interwikis are not up to date because of lack of recent database dumps. It's possible. I attributed Interwicket's lack of contributions since 8th November to Robert Ullmann's absence lately, and "normal" Pywikipedia bot operators (the ones that don't run away from en.wikt) are not enough to supply the same speed of update as Interwicket.

So, if you are right about the dumps being the reason for Interwicket having stopped, I will end up "abandoning" article interlinking for Interwicket's better suited operation. My purpose was to have the "authorization" to run it when needed (hopefully never again after the dumps are back :) ). Cheers, Malafaya 15:08, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

The dumps are back for some days now and still no Interwicket. It probably requires Robert Ullmann's intervention but he's been absent for some months now. Malafaya 22:47, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have voted "oppose" in your vote, but I think it's too late for me to change that vote. If you were to re-request permission, I would vote "support" this time. —Ruakh 05:01, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

No problem, Ruakh. No "offense" taken ;). I'll leave the re-request alone for a while. Take care. Malafaya 22:48, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

{{Xyzy}}

As you might have noticed, the discussion in the GP has essentially stopped. This suggests to me that no more input is required and that one of the options should be chosen. I was intending this as a solution to be made until another, maybe even a better one is chosen.

Since this template is at RFDO, another and a perfectly valid choice would be to delete the template as RFD failed. However, I think that would be a step backwards, as everyone would need to specify scripts again. -- Prince Kassad 17:01, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, what exactly are you replying to? Do you disagree with some part of my edit-summary? If so, which part? —Ruakh 20:39, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

You said it is "not ready", but except for the CSS part (which is a technical thing) you gave no reason. -- Prince Kassad 21:34, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

I don't see why "technical things" are irrelevant? But anyway, if you want additional reasons, here are two:

1. As I pointed out in my comment of 19:21, 3 January 2011 (UTC), a CSS-only approach won't support bidi properly. (You later posted a comment indented under mine, but so far as I can tell it wasn't actually a reply to mine.)
2. Your change applies the mention-Latn class to all {{term}}s, even ones that aren't in the Latin script.

BTW, I might as well mention: I disagree with your statement that "Since this template is at RFDO, another and a perfectly valid choice would be to delete the template as RFD failed." And the fact that discussion has stopped doesn't really mean that all proposed options are acceptable; in fact, it could mean the reverse, that no acceptable options were found.

—Ruakh 22:06, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Oh, and another problem — this one more easily addressed, but it nonetheless falls under the category of "reasons this solution isn't ready" — is that even aside from bidi stuff, existing script templates do have some material HTML differences that haven't been moved to CSS. That is to say: the bidi stuff is problematic in that it can't be moved to CSS; other HTML differences are problematic only in that they haven't been moved to CSS, but that problem still means that it's too early to change {{Xyzy}}. (For example: {{Hebr|…|face=head}} produces a <big> element; but the new version of {{Xyzy}} instead produces a <b> element. This isn't fatal — we could specify in CSS that b.lang-he results in a large size without actual bolding; but currently, what MediaWiki:Common.css does specify is only that no bolding occurs. And other templates may have much worse problems; I don't know. In the GP discussion, you wrote "No, all the script stuff is in the CSS", but that's not at all true. More accurate would be: "all CSS aspects of the script stuff are now in the shared MediaWiki:Common.css rather than in inline style="…" attributes like they used to be.") —Ruakh 22:37, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

As for bidi, I think CSS2 has direction, which should do the job (but I haven't tested it). You can make a script force right-to-left layout easily if you do direction: rtl;. The other stuff, like small tidbits from HTML which have not yet been merged into the CSS, obviously still need to be fixed. -- Prince Kassad 22:46, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Given the massive widespread use of Xyzy, I think we can almost not be too cautious. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:50, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree. —Ruakh 23:27, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

@Prince Kassad: Re: CSS2 direction: Ah, you're right. I'd thought that was a CSS3 thing, but now I see that CSS3 is just adding the vertical stuff; the bidi horizontal stuff was already in CSS2. And according to w3schools.com, all major browsers support it. So, thanks for the correction; I guess that falls under "small tidbits from HTML which have not yet been merged into the CSS", then. —Ruakh 23:27, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

escopateur

I just see that you delete the entry escopateur saying : If anyone comes across a use of this term, in this spelling, in Old French, please let me know and I can restore the entry. (talk:escopateur) There is two citation and a reference on fr.WT (fr:escopateur), isn’t it enough ? Cdlt, VIGNERON 22:11, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

I don't have enough information to judge. Those citations are both from 1888; they seem to be quoting Old French works, but nothing in the quotations makes it obvious (to me anyway) whether Carré has modernized the spellings. And the reference is meaningless, since I have no way of knowing what the reference actually says about the word. Though the sources of the quotations and reference all have pages on Wikisource, those Wikisource pages are incomplete, and missing the relevant parts. —Ruakh 23:08, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Sadly, those would only count as one quote towards the Modern French, as they're by the same author and in the same year. BTW this was the same citation I found when trying to cite the term (and the only one outside of dictionaries I could find). Mglovesfun (talk) 23:15, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure I'd count those toward Modern French, since Carré is quoting Old French sources. If he is quoting them accurately and precisely (specifically: if he is preserving the original spellings), then said sources are Old French citations; otherwise, the quotations fall into the same general gray area as, say, un-Englished romanizations of Greek and Hebrew. —Ruakh 23:19, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

« escopateur » according to the Godefroy

.

For the primary sources, it's nearly impossible to have it (because those archives are very old and fragile, plus the code number has changed since 1888 so i'm not 100% sure what is the new code). Even if I found the word in archives, won’t it be meaningless ? (because nobody could check it).

I'm pretty sure there is no modernization, what can let yout hink that the world is modernize ? A modern version of this world could be écopateur (like esconduire is now éconduire) but nothing in escopateur could let think that there is a modernization.

For the reference, just read the book !

Cdlt, VIGNERON 14:23, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

Redirects

I've had a look around Wiktionary:Redirections and it tells me that we generally should not have redirects from uppercase to lowercase words, which were generally created as a result of page moves. If you look at many of the pages I had tagged for deletion, such as Bait for example, you can see that the capitalized entry was meant to be a surname. Redirects can cause confusion between different entries, and people looking for one may accidentally get another as a result of that; the names, for one, can be fleshed out as a proper entry by someone knowledgeable if left blank, rather than left as a redirect that never gets noticed. If the result is that redlinks pop up on several pages, they might serve as an encouragement to a knowledgeable person to write his or her own entry into the previously deleted page, rather than mistaking it for the wrong one (i.e. bed instead of a certain Bed). TeleComNasSprVen 00:54, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Right — redlinks are great — but breaking redirects is not O.K. If we shouldn't have an explicit redirect, then it should be deleted, not broken. (If you want to request that a redirect be deleted, you should put {{delete}} below the redirection line, not above it.) And even deletion sometimes requires care: [[Beef]], for example, had an incoming link that needed to be changed to point to [[beef]]. —Ruakh 01:01, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Ah, thank you. I see the problem now; I was not aware of this new deletion method. I'll try to keep that in mind when I tag the redirects. Could you also help in deleting [[goose pimple]] and the [[OD's]] as well? I was prepping the former for a page move to the preferred singular form (you can see that I did the same to goose bumps), and accelerated editing would help with formatting the latter. TeleComNasSprVen 02:36, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

[[goose pimple]] actually seemed all right to me — we do allow redirects to the most common form of an idiom — but if you want to create full entries, I suppose that's fine. I've deleted it now. And [[OD's]] I changed to a full entry almost twelve hours ago. Which is, like, the Internet equivalent of a week. :-)   —Ruakh 03:26, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Anchors in a template?

Do you know if it is possible? I'm trying to add an anchor to {{proto index word line}} based on the {{{term}}} parameter but I can't get it to work. Nadando 02:49, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

 Done. The issue is that {{anchor}} uses a <span> element, so you can't put it between <tr> elements. One approach would be to put it inside one of the table-cells, but I think it's simpler to just not use that template here . . . —Ruakh 02:56, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Nadando 03:00, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

can you fix vandalism?

hello, it's not your problem but could you do me a favour please and fix Ivan Štambuk's vandalism on the 'feminism' page? he has put 'fellatio' as a related word and 'one who sucks' as etymology - (http://www.europaic.com/Etymology%20of%20L.%20femina%20and%20L.%20fellare.htm or even http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=feminine which states 'suckles'), despite it not being due to his own editor bias. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:feminism — This unsigned comment was added by 86.161.200.156 (talk) at 04:12, 19 January 2011 (UTC).

Dunno about "vandalism", but I've trimmed the etymology. Most of the content simply wasn't necessary or helpful. —Ruakh 13:01, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome, but...

You forgot to sign your welcome! Thank you, anyway! EthanL 01:25, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Islamic fascist

Why do you keep reverting the definition? The sense is in the citations at the end of definition including quotes, what more do you want or need? WritersCramp 22:10, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

What I want is that the entry remain tagged until such time as editors have had a chance to look at the quotations and decide whether they're satisfied that the sense meets our criteria for inclusion. —Ruakh 22:13, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

How's your Python?

See [[Wiktionary:Grease pit#Context labels needing a language]], if you please.​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:46, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

It's not great, and — more problematically — I don't even have it installed anywhere handy, so the "test" part of "test-driven development" would be totally absent. Sorry. (But if no one helps PK add it to KassadBot in the near future, I'll see about creating a separate bot in Perl to handle just that.) —Ruakh 19:54, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks!​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:58, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your entry in WOTD on dubitation

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

BTW, you might be interested in the § ==Hello, in french = I left on the P.D. of WOTD ding-dong ditch , that expression brought me back to old times ('50) when I was at the french school in Morocco a goï pal of some Abecassis, Benarosch, Aziza, Znaty etc. youths...Wonder what they did as adults, they were such an impish bunch...

And BTW do you know what has become of Encyclopetey ? I don't hear of him anymore, he used to keep a special eye in me, I miss him...T.y. , roh mha afiya Arapaima 07:37, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

February 2011

Thanks for the help and the welcome

Yes, a new set of rules. Sigh. 7&6=thirteen 19:22, 1 February 2011 (UTC) Stan

hosanna

Mate, could you cast a ‘ayin over the etymology here when you get a chance? Ƿidsiþ 11:44, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

I gave it a shot. There's something here a bit strange: the phrase hoshá na ("please save") fused into a single word both in Hebrew (hoshána) and in Greek, but the two fusings seem to have been independent, in that the Greek fusing seems to represent the original phrase, whereas the Hebrew fusing denotes a Sukkot-related things (since the phrase is used a lot in Sukkot-related liturgy). In Hebrew the phrase still exists; I mean, not that I could imagine anyone talking that way nowadays, but I mean, the phrase hasn't been replaced by the fused form, and if you wanted to translate "hosanna" to Hebrew, you'd use the phrase, not the fused form. —Ruakh 22:13, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

ſ

Hi. You mentioned on RFD that you made forms with ſ in them auto-redirect to forms with s. There's a bug, though: ſiſ redirects to SIS, not sis as expected. —Internoob (Disc•Cont) 03:21, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

It works if you use the URL [1], but not if you put it directly into the search. —Internoob (Disc•Cont) 03:23, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Search uses a separate system, one that I didn't (and can't) touch. —Ruakh 13:22, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

system of transliteration from Hebrew

Hi, I've revamped the transliteration section of WT:AHE to reflect what I believe is consensus among Hebrew editors (where such exists) or most common practices (otherwise). Please have a look and revise as needed. Also remove the caveat atop the section ("does not reflect consensus" or whatever its wording is) if you think that's appropriate. (I do.) Thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:05, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks!

There are a few discrepancies between that section and my own practice; for each discrepancy, I'm not sure if (1) I should change or (2) the text should change or (3) the discrepancy is too minor to worry about in a high-level document like this. I'd welcome your thoughts. To wit:

Re: "Wherever there is a link to a Hebrew entry, a romanization should be included, using the tr= or equivalent parameter of the link template (such as {{t}} or {{term}})": I haven't been doing this for alternative spellings whose transliterations would match the current page; and our headword-line templates don't support this at all. Also, should we mention that Hebrew entries themselves should include romanizations of the headword, or is that a given?

Re: א is "omitted (i.e., represented as [nothing]) when word-final, […] ": I also haven't been consistently romanizing א and ע when word-initial, at least for Modern words. And sometimes it's just indicating an /a/ (פלאפל (faláfel)), or seems to be silent even in the Masoretic Text (e.g. in forms like קוֹרֵאת (korét), which would presumably be קוֹרֶאֶת (koré'et) — or maybe קוֹרַאַת (korá'at)? — otherwise), in which case I drop it. Though I did include it in הומואיות (homo'iut), because I think homoiut would have been too confusing.

Re: gh, dh, ḥ: What about w for vav, q for kuf, doubling for dagesh?

In roots, I've been using ' b g d h/_ w z ḥ T y k l m n s ` p TS q r sh ś t. Maybe that's just a bad idea on my part? I don't know why that seems right to me.

—Ruakh 18:50, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Also, I've been using ei sometimes for tseirei, I don't know why. —Ruakh 18:51, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

I'll try to address your points in order:

Re "a romanization should be included": I don't do this at all, actually, except in translation tables. Perhaps I should. In any event, perhaps the line should be dropped, or, as you say, kept but with an exception included for forms listed in inflection lines. Whatever you prefer is fine by me. And yes: we should IMO mention that transliterations should be included for headwords. Good catch.

Re word-initial א and ע and other silent אs: right, good point: them, too. I personally use the second option listed in column 2 there (i.e., always transliterate it as [nothing]), so am perhaps not one to talk, but perhaps the best wording would be "omitted (i.e., represented as [nothing]) when word-initial or רפה, except as provided in footnote 1, below"?

Re w, q, and doubling: I omitted them because I haven't seen them used (or propounded) recently (on enwikt, I mean). Do people use/propound them? (I'm asking specifically about their use not in transliterations of roots. For roots, see immediately below.)

Re roots: Personally, I like using the 'normal' transliterations for roots also. If you don't, perhaps we should include these forms in a separate table rather than having a whole bunch of separate notes.

Thanks for your attention.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:02, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

(Wait... do I mean רפה or נחה? I forget the word for a 'silent' א (or ה‎).​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:04, 15 February 2011 (UTC))

I don't know which of those terms is right. Either one seems plausible. I only know rafe as the name of the diacritic in בֿ, but according to w:Rafe, that diacritic has sometimes been used to indicate (or emphasize) the absence of a mapik, and therefore an alef or hei's silence, so it would make sense to use rafe to refer to a silent alef or hei itself. I only know nakhei in reference to pa'al verbs where the first root letter is an alef that disappears in the prefix conjugation, but it would make sense if they're called that because that's the term for a silent alef. I really have no idea.

Re: roots: I'm O.K. with that. For ב כ פ, I assume you use b k p?

Re: w, q, etc.: Maybe we just shouldn't bother with this sort of detail at all. We can include a caveat that this transliteration system is mainly based on lowest-common-denominator Modern Israeli Hebrew, and that in special cases it may make sense to modify the system for other forms of Hebrew, without really specifying what sort of modifications might be entailed. That would also simplify the discussion of alef/ayin a bit.

—Ruakh 21:58, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

I took your "I'm O.K. with that" to be referring to "I like using the 'normal' transliterations for roots" and not to "a separate table". Was I correct to do so?

Yes, I use 'b' in roots.

I've made further changes to WT:AHE in light of our discussion here. Please emend/comment/revert ad lib.​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:16, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Perfect! :-D   —Ruakh 22:30, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

:-)  Glad we could finally clean up that section of AHE. Thanks much.​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:36, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2011-01/Final sections of the CFI

Just wondering whether you might want to add a note similar (or opposite) to mine for legislative intent purposes.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:40, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Hebrew Index Latin Letters?

Hi Ruakh, Index:Hebrew/j (Java), Index:Hebrew/m (Microsoft) and Index:Hebrew/s (SMS) should probably not be there — should I put Latin letters onto Index:Hebrew/0 too?

Thanks for updating the index! Yes, that would work. —Ruakh 12:11, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

A little request

Hey I was just wondering since you have a decent level of French could you try to create an entry for (deprecated template usage) épiloguer? I came across while editing (deprecated template usage) épilogue and other entries. 50 Xylophone Players talk 20:20, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I've taken a stab at it, though I'm not actually sure how decent my French is anymore. :-(   —Ruakh 20:30, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Well, perhaps someone else can check it sometime. :) 50 Xylophone Players talk 19:16, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

O.K., there are some problems.

Care to elaborate? If there are any problems with the implementation, a buglist would be nice so as to be able to fix everything. -- Prince Kassad 21:44, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I did elaborate . . . —Ruakh 22:25, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Well you said some problems but only listed one. Are there any others? -- Prince Kassad 22:26, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

That's the main one. I was able to address other problems. There's still a problem, though, with the fundamental structure here: anything that applies to (say) .Hebr now has to apply to .lang-he, .lang-yi, and so on, and on the other side, anything that applies to (say) i has to apply to .mention-Latn, .mention, and so on. The result is an exploding number of different rules. I don't know how best to address it. CSS doesn't provide any way (so far as I know) to create a sort of "meta-selector" — some general way to indicate that .lang-he and .lang-yi and so on are all supposed to be the "same" in some respect. —Ruakh 23:14, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Category:en-verb with to

Um... this is empty, which can't be right. Your coding looks good to me, but, well, you're a better code reviewer than I, so perhaps you want to look it over?​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:15, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, it's interesting. It did have one entry earlier, [[rain cats and dogs]], which I took care of, but certainly there should be many more. Given how many entries contain this template, and given that, broadly speaking, that early contributors had created lots and lots and verb entries before they started creating idioms, I guess it's probably just that the job queue is taking an incredibly long time to clear? That's a bit worrisome, if so. :-/

(Shockingly, by the way, [[rain cats and dogs]] was actually the 55th page created on Wiktionary; see [2]. But it was clearly an outlier; if you go through Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:en-verb, you'll see that the earlier entries were all individual words.)

—Ruakh 12:24, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I asked in #wikimedia-tech and was told (by Reedy) "The job runners weren't running for a week or so\n That was fixed over the weekend/yesterday, so should slowly get back to normal" (though I didn't and don't know what a job runner is) and (by Shirley) "Wait a day or two? You can always null edit the pages with a script.".​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:27, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Gotcha. Thanks for the info! —Ruakh 18:29, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

syntheton

You may recollect that we were looking for a term to label lexical pairs, triplets, etc. You had suggested hendiadys. I recently found merism. The best I've found is syntheton. I have been working on more members for Category:Rhetoric, which has interesting overlaps with linguistics. DCDuring TALK 01:20, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Cool! —Ruakh 01:26, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Thoughts on suffixes

Okay, let's not flood RFD with these sort of thoughts.

Anyway I'm going to take the example of -eau#English which I created and subsequently it failed RFD. My definition "Suffix of a few French loanwords" is perfectly true. There are, as far as I can think of, no English words formed from the suffix. All of them are from French. Therefore the suffix has no English meaning; it's merely the final three letters of some words. Therefore it cannot be defined as it has no meaning.

An example in French would be agneau which cannot be analyzed as agne +‎ -eau as agne doesn't exist. Though, for example terms attested before 1600 like chapeau can still be analyzed as being suffixed with -eau as although the suffixing happened before Modern French it nevertheless did happen.

Hope this clarifies. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:25, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

What English words end in <-eau>? The only one I can think of is tableau. There doesn't seem to be anything to say about it that isn't already said by -eau#French, since the spelling and pronunciation both came directly from French. —Ruakh 01:25, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

re: importation par les bots (mg.wikipedia.org)

Bonsoir, רוּחַ

En effet, vous n'êtes pas le seul à m'avoir demandé de cesser mes importations par robot, et effectivement, j'ai cessé d'importer ces pages sans historique complets, qui seraient donc selon ous une violation des copyrights.

Etant pour l'instant incapable d'importer des pages avec leur historiques complets avec mon robot, j'ai importé, importé et encore importé, des dizaines de milliers de pages, sans leur historique complets mais juste avec un lien qui indique seulement leur provenance probables. Etant donné qu'ils sont distribués sous une même licence, la violation du copyright n'en est que partielle, mais ceci dit c'est quand même une violation, et je m'en excuse pour cela.

Alors, ce que je propose, en plus d'indiquer la provenance possible via le résumé de la modification, je vais ajouter des liens externes indiquant la provenance des articles (le nombre de wikis depuis lesquelles j'ai importé les pages est relativement réduit.). C'est déjà ça... Qu'en pensez-vous ?

Bien cordialement, Jagwar 21:30, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Pour les résumés particuliers indiquant la provenance de la page, c'est faisable : il me faudra juste insérer dix lignes dans le programme tout au plus.

Pour mes importations actuelles, je n'importe plus de pages ; et je crée mes entrées à partir d'une liste de mots. Cependant, le contenu de chacunes d'entre elles, c'est bien moi et moi seul qui l'ai écrit : donc sur ce plan, pas de problème de copyright.

j'ai cessé d'importer ces pages sans historique complets : cela signifie que j'ai totalement arrêté d'importer des pages non traduits et sans historique complets sur le Wikibolana (pardon si je me suis mal exprimé). Amicalement, Jagwar 12:49, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

question on a coupla templates, for their author

What do you think of switching template:he-form of prep, template:he-form of sing cons, template:he-form of pl cons, and any others that likewise have {{#switch:|{{{1|}}}|{{{tr|}}}=[[Category:Hebrew terms needing attention]]}} to have {{#if:{{{1|}}}||[[Category:Hebrew terms needing attention]]}}{{#if:{{{tr|}}}||[[Category:Entries missing romanizations of Hebrew]]}} instead? (Or keeping the first as a switch if there are more things in it than just {{{1}}} and {{{tr}}}, but taking {{{tr}}} out of it and dealing with it separately.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:02, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. —Ruakh 18:32, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

All right, thanks; done.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:22, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Help! What POS is this? (a Hebrew question)

Hi, hope you're well, blood pressure okay, despite mass.

I've just created entries for (deprecated template usage) זבת, defined under a "Noun" POS header as the construct of (deprecated template usage) זבה, and the latter, defined as a verb form. (I suppose it's a noun form, too, something along the lines of "(Judaism) someone having her period" (though that's not quite right), but that's another story: I'm first trying to deal with the sense found in (deprecated template usage) ארץ זבת חלב ודבש.) That seems very wrong, but I don't know what else to do. I'd appreciate your input.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:06, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm well. The blood pressure is fine, thanks. :-P

I have no idea. You've raised this general question before (Wiktionary talk:About Hebrew/archives/2010#present-tense verbs as nouns and as adjectives); I didn't know then, and I don't know now. But for any specific case, I can check how Even-Shoshan handles it. I'll get back to you on zavát either tonight after the break-fast, or else sometime this weekend.

—Ruakh 20:25, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Ah, yes, I'd forgotten that conversation. Thanks for the link. According to Glinert's view, quoted there, if the word takes a possessive suffix, like in זְקֵנינו, it's a noun. I don't know whether he'd say the same about a construct, though it seems to make sense. He's also dealing only with modern Hebrew, but, again, I'm not sure what the difference is. That makes zava at least a noun — if all those assumptions are warranted. I await your information from Even-Shoshan. Thank you.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:37, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Glinert's view quoted there is that adjectives don't take possessive suffixes, but he doesn't explicitly say that only nouns do; I haven't found anything one way or the other about verbs, but Glinert doesn't seem to consider "quantifiers" to be "nouns", and he gives rubam and shneinu as examples using the former. (BTW, the section that mentions zkenenu is really about adjectives as opposed to nouns and verbs, so I think it misses some details about nouns vs. verbs; I sent it for that discussion because I think it's a good general overview of all three contrasts, and because I haven't found anywhere else in the book that really details the distinctions between nouns and verbs.)

I e-mailed you the part of Glinert that deals directly with this construction (§6.20, page 49), as well as a part that's actually about a different construction (§6.10, pages 40–1), that you will probably also be interested in, though the main reason I sent it is that it says very explicitly there that this construction is not using the nismakh as a noun, but as a verbal participle.

(By the way, if you're really interested in Modern Hebrew grammar, I really recommend the book. I can send you interesting bits occasionally, but I can't even begin to capture the scope of it. For example, one part (§6.2, page 25) discusses the five types of "construct state" "construct phrase" (smikhut), including two types where "component A" (the nismakh) is an adjective: cases like k'tsar hasear "short-haired", and cases like mele'ei mayim karim "full of cold water".)

I also included a scan of Even-Shoshan's entry for ז־ב, which gives this quote, without comment, under the pa'al verb. Not much to say there. I also looked up a few cases where Glinert said a component-A present-tense-verb is a noun, and — as you can surely guess — Even-Shoshan didn't include a noun for them.

—Ruakh 00:30, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the reply and for the e-mail, which I've received. So zavat in "erets zavat chalav udvash" is "qualifying a noun (but not in itself a noun)" [emphasis removed], according to Glinert, but, were the sentence "... el zavat chalav udvash" (sans erets), zavat would be a noun. According to Glinert, then, our POS header for (deprecated template usage) זבת should be "Verb". Do you agree (that that's Glinert's view)? Do you agree (that the entry should have "Verb")? It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but who am I to disagree with Glinert.​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:40, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree that Glinert would presumably consider zavát to be a "verbal participle" here (at least, if this were Modern Hebrew). I don't know whether he would endorse ===Verb===; obviously his purpose as a grammarian is very different from our purpose as contributors to a dictionary that includes all forms of all words in all languages. (In fact, Glinert's Grammar, despite its name, is much more about syntax than about morphology, since he deems traditional dictionaries and grammars to do a decent enough job covering the inflectional paradigms.) Even-Shoshan obviously considers this to be a form of the verb, but Even-Shoshan doesn't even give entire verbs their own entries, so it's hard to guess what he would have made of our system.
Maybe we should consider adopting the ===Participle=== header used by editors for some languages? I hadn't really considered it previously, since passive past participles are just adjectives (there's nothing verb-y–seeming about them) and active present participles double as the present-tense (making them seem too verb-y), but using ===Participle=== might clarify things. Our definition lines would still have to acknowledge the use as a present tense, of course. I dunno. Does that seem too strange the other way?
—Ruakh 19:55, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

To clarify: That'd be for present-tense verbs in all binyanim, for words of the same mishkal as אהוב (ahúv), and for nothing else?​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:24, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

That's what I was thinking, yes; but it's not the only possibility. —Ruakh 20:31, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

That, or something like it, is "too strange", as you put it, but may be the smaller weevil. When you say ahúv has "nothing verb-y–seeming" about it, I disagree, and (so) I think "Participle" may be a good name for it. (Also, it'd solve the issue of how to classify the present-tense forms of pual verbs.) But: If we're doing this because we're (or I'm) bothered by construct forms, then things like k'tsar in k'tsar hasear ("short-haired") are of issue also, and should be dealt with at the same time. It seems a shame to take a big step with a purpose it doesn't fill. (Rome was built at night, of course, and if it comes to it then we can take half-measures. It's just a shame to do so if it's avoidable.) In any event, such a step should have wider input first, of course, if anyone is willing and able to provide it.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:43, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

For k'tsar, I am not bothered by labeling it an ===Adjective===. Until now I'd always thought of nouns as having three states and adjectives as having only two, but I'm happy to broaden my world with the possibility of some adjectives having three as well. (Previously I had been thinking of malé — the only example I remember consciously noticing before — as a weird cross between an adjective and a preposition, but Glinert's approach makes much more sense to me.)

And for zavát, too, actually, I'm not bothered by labeling it a ===Verb===; but ===Participle=== would also be fine by me. I'm more worried about how to design the "form of" template(s). :-P

By the way, returning to an earlier topic above, I'd really like to emphasize that I don't think we should follow Glinert slavishly. He really wasn't writing with lexicographers in mind. He's even worse than the CGEL, which at least takes pains to distinguish properties of words from properties of phrases. The CGEL would never describe something as applying to a noun, and then later add as an afterthought that it applies to noun phrases; rather, it would describe it as applying to noun phrases, with the understanding that a noun phrase can consist of a single noun. (Not that we should follow CGEL slavishly, either!)

—Ruakh 17:52, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks again for all your input. I've started a discussion at [[Wiktionary talk:About Hebrew#"Participle" as a part-of-speech header in entries]]. For forms like zavat, I've not been using templates, though I suppose it'd be good to have one. I've missed a template more (i.e., more badly) when authoring reversed-tense-due-to-prefixed-vav forms. Those it'd be nice to have a template for. :-)  (That was not a request. I know how to write one myself. I'm just too lazy.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:38, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Template:vote-generic

When I create a new vote, it contains no Category:Votes that have not been closed. This must have something to do with the template vote-generic. Do you perhaps have an idea how this could be fixed? (There is some magic with double include in the template that could have stopped working with an update of Mediawiki; just guessing.) Thanks! --Dan Polansky 16:24, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

I got it wrong, no "double include", just this: "<includeonly><noinclude>[[Category:Votes that have not been closed|{{subst:</includeonly><includeonly>SUBPAGENAME}}]]</noinclude></includeonly>". I am far from sure whether the nesting of the element tags is correct. I cannot edit the template, or else I would try to fix it myself. --Dan Polansky 16:27, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks. Yeah, it was a MediaWiki change: previously, template preloading discarded <includeonly> and </includeonly>, but left everything else alone. Now, as of mw:Special:Code/MediaWiki/63194, it also discards <noinclude>…</noinclude>. Which is a nice feature; but we may have to fix other preload templates, too, as a result. —Ruakh 11:46, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Discussion re wikilinking in quoted text

I recently contributed to a discussion to which you were party five months ago (at Wiktionary talk:Quotations#Links in the body of quoted text). I notify you in case you wish to respond. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:51, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Category of alt. spellings

שלום עליכם׃

¶ Why, if I may ask, did you re‐move a category in “œdema”? Is it against Wiktionary policy to add extra categories to alternative spellings or any type of dated spelling? 75.142.190.21 07:40, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

It doesn't make sense for a given word to appear in a category more than once. Someone going through Category:Pathology doesn't benefit from entries for oedema, oedemas, oedemata, edema, edemas, edemata, œdema, œdemas, and œdemata all being listed there. —Ruakh 11:30, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Ruakh, I disagree with you, for these reasons:

1. Apparently, both the presence and the absence of alternative forms in a topical category are common practice. In other words, there are people who categorize and who don't categorize alternative forms into topical categories. It may be wise to ask for consensus, eventually, to let people be aware of the issue and work together to control the population or depopulation of alternative forms in topical categories. If I missed any discussion that influenced your removal of œdema from Category:Pathology, I would appreciate very much to see it. This is separate from the issue of categorizing inflections such as oedemas and edemata. However, notably and perhaps usefully, Category:Vulgarities contains few inflected entries.
2. While one article of Wikipedia contains the text "Edema (American English) or oedema (British English; both words from the Greek οἴδημα, oídēma "swelling"), formerly known as dropsy or hydropsy, is an abnormal accumulation of fluid beneath the skin or in one or more cavities of the body.", Wiktionary has one definition per word, even if these words are synonyms; edema, oedema, œdema, dropsy and hydrops are words. All of them have their own merits, most certainly focused on present and future citations that would attest them.
3. I, personally, benefit from having multiple spellings of a word easily readable because I have the chance to learn about their existence.
4. People don't always go from categories to entries, but also from entries to categories. Someone reading œdema may be interested in going directly to a list of diseases (or of Ancient Greek derivations, or of English nouns, and maybe other lists.) The implied idea of "first, from œdema, click on oedema and then see the list of categories of the last entry" is not always obvious and doesn't always work.

For comparison, the presence of alternative forms in lexical categories is definitely common practice: notably, you didn't remove œdema from Category:English nouns. However, oddly, you did remove that entry from Category:Ancient Greek derivations. Your argument "It doesn't make sense for a given word to appear in a category more than once" is reasonable enough to start a discussion (like this one) about the merits of categorizing alternative forms. However, your actions were inconsistent. If I find edema, oedema and hydrops in Category:Pathology but can't find œdema, chances are the last entry doesn't exist or lacks categorization due to an error or oversight, rather than due to a conscious decision. It would be better to consistently keep all entries in that category, or remove many of them consistently, but this would lead back to my first item: people would want to know and give opinions on the proposal of removing alternative forms from categories. --Daniel. 12:44, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

The whole point of "alternative spelling" entries is that — since they're not separate words, but another way of spelling the same word — we give them a small "stub" entry that includes any spelling-specific information and that points readers at the entry for the word. Adding more information to these entries (including redundant categories) is counterproductive, because the more information there is at [[œdema]], the less obvious it is to readers that they should click through to [[oedema]]. —Ruakh 12:55, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

---

Rukhabot error

Hi there Ruakh!

Rukhabot appears to be committing the following mistake: when it adds interwiki links to an article, it neglects to remove any Template:count page previously present in the article. Once interwiki links are added, the count page becomes superfluous. Could you correct this? —AugPi 19:54, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't at all agree that Rukhabot is "committing" a "mistake" that I need to "correct"; but sure, I can add "count page"-removal as a new feature. —Ruakh 20:01, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Okay, excuse my language: I don't meant to be accusatory: I think I was just mentally comparing it with the way good ol' AutoFormat [Interwicket]^AugPi used to work... —AugPi 20:32, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

And yes, I meant to just ask for you to add the new feature, not to backtrack through what has already done (I can do that manually whenever I encounter it). Thank you in advance... —AugPi

No worries. :-)   Until your comment, I didn't remember that Interwicket (talk • contribs) used to do that; and I'm almost positive that most interwiki-bots still don't do that; but it would be nice. —Ruakh 21:06, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

KassadBot doesn't, either, though I thought he did.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:32, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

AutoFormat used to do this. But the code I got is from pre-count page times, and I only hacked in the routine to add count page to entries. -- Prince Kassad 16:39, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Uncanny deletion

Hi there, the reason you gave for deleting entry Ọrunmila is without closure and i think you know this. Are you going to tell me you did not see the discussion already taken place on the request for verification page? Otelemuyen (talk) 22:50, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

שום

Hi. Would you mind looking at this where I've marked it for attention? — as well as anything else you see that needs emending, of course.​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:48, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

Will do . . . wow, Even-Shoshan has so much space dedicated to words of this spelling! —Ruakh 13:00, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Uh, sorry, I haven't gotten around to this yet, and now I'm going to Kalamazoo for Pesakh. Not taking Even-Shoshan with me. :-P   So, uh, it'll be a while, sorry. —Ruakh 15:33, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Not a problem. Have a safe trip and a happy פסח‎.​—msh210℠ (talk) 05:02, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Happy Pesakh! :-)   —Ruakh 15:31, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

I've taken a stab at it. I don't know if I did a very good job, but hey, it's a wiki, right? It'll improve over time. :-)   —Ruakh 01:29, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 15:50, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

feed back

yeah i am the user who was making a new language which you said was "UN usable" well of course it is non usable because it is a new "NEW WAY TO SPEAK" — This unsigned comment was added by Leehooper (talk • contribs).

Talk:gobby

Thanks for making it display properly! - -sche (discuss) 08:20, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

You're welcome! But this sort of problem has happened before, and I'm thinking maybe it would make sense to have {{rfv-archived-top}} and {{rfv-archived-bottom}} (and so on for other archive-box templates) rather than putting the entire discussion within the template call. ({{rfv-archived}} would still be available, of course: it would just use {{rfv-archived-top}} and {{rfv-archived-bottom}}. We wouldn't need to convert existing pages, or force anyone to switch who doesn't want to.) What do you think? —Ruakh 12:21, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

If we go that route (which sounds good to me FWIW), I think it would make more sense to make generic "archived-top" and "-bottom" templates, which "rfv-" et al. can then call. Cf. {{archive box}}, widely used by other templates.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:18, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes, definitely. I was figuring that {{archive box}} would be split into two: {{archive box top}}, to be called by {{rfv-archived-top}} & co., and {{archive box bottom}}, to be redirected to by {{rfv-archived-top}} & co. —Ruakh 17:51, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

I have often wondered whether any other template took such pages-long and complex calls, haha. Yeah, I think it would be a good idea to split it, as long as we do either keep the existing templates unaltered as legacies, or update them to use the new templates (so we can continue using them for short, simple RFVs?). - -sche (discuss) 18:17, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

May 2011

vav consecutive

Hi. I keep adding verb forms formed with the vav consecutive with some not very well worded sense lines. I'm getting tired of writing it out each time (and of using poor sense lines), so would like to templatify the sense line à la {{he-past of}}, without enshrining bad wording in a template, so seek your input, please, on good wording. Any suggestions? (What I've done in the past is at, e.g., [[וישב]], though my wording's been inconsistent from one entry to another.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:16, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

Trying likely possibilities on Google, the most popular succinct terminology for forms like vayéshev and ukh'tavtám seems to be "imperfect consecutive" and "perfect consecutive" (respectively), with "consecutive imperfect" and "consecutive perfect" being close seconds. Some sources use "future" and "past", but not so many as use "imperfect" and "perfect", and (more damningly, to my mind), not so consistently: some use "future" in reference to the imperfect consecutive (due to its form), others in reference to the perfect consecutive (due to its sense). But you might want to look through the Google-hits for yourself, and see if you draw the same conclusions. I didn't see anyone using "imperfect" and "perfect" in a way that aligned with the sense rather than the form, but another pair of eyes never hurts.

If you agree with my assessment, then I would suggest something like "Third-person masculine singular vav consecutive imperfect of ____." "Consecutive imperfect" is only slightly less popular than "imperfect consecutive", and I think the opportunity to smoothly include vav is too good to pass up.

—Ruakh 00:31, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your, as always, intelligent input. The problem with not including "past" or "future" in the sense is that anglophones not versed in linguistics or grammar will not know what the word means without referring to an appendix. Perhaps "Third-person masculine singular vav consecutive imperfect (hence past tense) of ____"? (Also, I guess there should be a hyphen after vav, both in the appendix title and in the displayed text.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:24, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Sure. I'm pretty sure that anyone not already familiar with vav hahipukh is going to need to consult the appendix anyway, but I don't see any harm in including a helpful reminder in the template text itself. —Ruakh 17:43, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks again. I've created {{he-vav-imperfect of}} (copying off of one of the form-of templates you wrote), fyi. I hope to write the other one (for future-tense perfect forms) soon.​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:34, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Batch delete

These have been superseded. Can you delete them? ~ heyzeuss 15:09, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

Can you list them at WT:RFDO, so there's a record of what superseded them, and why? —Ruakh 15:56, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

Already done. It was not any kind of a controversy. Wiktionary talk:Finnish inflection types/verbs/sanoa ~ heyzeuss 14:04, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

I've deleted the whole set. -- Prince Kassad 15:05, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

фраер, Freier, what's the Yiddish word?

Hi,

Do you know any Yiddish? I am trying to find anything in Yiddish derived from the German Freier for the etymology of the Russian фраер (frajer). I am pretty sure the word penetrated Russian from Yiddish, like a few criminal slang words, which were coined in Odessa. How would you write it in Yiddish? I could only find פרייער (freyer). --Anatoli 23:23, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

I might guess, based on your spelling and the pronunciation of the German word, that it might be "פֿרײַער", but I believe that could be the the adjective "free"... lol — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 00:41, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

I don't know Yiddish, no. This definitely is a Yiddish word — we've borrowed it into Hebrew, with the meaning roughly "sap, patsy, sucker" — but I can't help you spell it. Some discussion of various possible etymologies is here; it's not certain that it's actually from German Freier, but the pronunciation matches perfectly, so that's a typical explanation. Even-Shoshan (an authoritative Hebrew dictionary) lists it under פְרַיֶיר, and just says it's "from Yiddish", without specifically listing a Yiddish form; I infer that פרייר (freyr) is a valid Yiddish spelling, but I wouldn't swear to it. I put our Hebrew entry at פראייר, which is another common spelling, because it's the spelling that the Hebrew Wikipedia has (and some dictionaries do list it there); I don't know if that follows the Yiddish, though.
I'd say you should ask Msh210 (talk • contribs), because he surely knows better than I do; but I'm pretty sure he watches this page anyway, so you might as well just wait to see if he comments. :-P
—Ruakh 01:08, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Being nosy is lots of fun — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 01:41, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks so far, guys. There are multiple explanations of the origin of the Russian slang word фраер (frájer) too. They all seem to agree it's coming from German, some sources add that this is definitely Yiddish, again, no spelling for the Yiddish word. Well, Jews in Russia and Ukraine seldom wrote in the proper Yiddish script. I'll wait or ask as you suggested. --Anatoli 04:03, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

The Russian modern meaning may have affected the meaning in Hebrew, don't know, check this out. See the line "...Только фраер возьмет ее себе в жены...". --Anatoli 04:17, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

No, I don't know better than you, Ran. Well, not about this, anyway.  :-) ​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:30, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

"Don't categorise cases where the source and destination language are the same"

Why not? --Yair rand 12:37, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Good question. There used to already be such cases, and they didn't mean this — they were more things like "From {{etyl|fr}} [[stem]] + {{etyl|en}} [[-suffix]]" — but it looks like someone has done away with those now. I guess you can re-revert. —Ruakh 13:48, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

WT:RFDO#Template:onym

You might want to take a look at this RFDO. (I don't think I've actually ever seen anyone other than you use this template...) --Yair rand 23:45, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointer! —Ruakh 23:55, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

June 2011

The/THE/the

The rule of "The/THE/the", which you listed as an English rule, is basically panlingual. It works for all languages written in Latin script, doesn't it? I think it would be better listing this rule only at CFI as non-language-specific. Thoughts? --Daniel 23:27, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree that it's not language-specific. The thing is, I'm not sure that all the things at Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion/Language-specific are really "criteria for inclusion", exactly; a lot of them are more about the appropriate pagename to use for entries, than about whether the entries merit inclusion. I mean, I see the connection, but it feels like it's stretching things a bit. I don't know. —Ruakh 00:09, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

I see your point. "Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion/Language-specific" is not a bad title, but I'm open to suggestions. I appreciate the existence of a page for listing appropriate pagenames and scripts. I didn't know many of the practices listed before reading them there.

As of now, the second best idea I had for rationalizing the page was handwaving the list of inappropriate pagenames by thinking of them as "forbidden alternative spellings", but this reasoning seems to be a little impractical. I'll just keep with my best idea, which is waiting and observing the progress of that page. --Daniel 00:43, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

mezuzah

Hey Ran. Could you blue up the etymology for me? (Also check it -- it has no pointing at the moment.) Ƿidsiþ 08:16, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Done, please take a look. —Ruakh 12:14, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Great – thanks a lot. Ƿidsiþ 18:57, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Snowmageddon

I wanted to ask you about the change you made to snowmageddon, where you changed it to a "proper noun". Based on the fact that the term is used to describe any storm with certain characteristics ("A severe blizzard or series of blizzards affecting one locale."), I don't see how it can be considered a proper noun. Ohms law 18:28, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Because it's used as a proper noun — as a name. One of the quotations, for example, has "Snowmageddon was upon us"; none has anything like *"a snowmageddon was upon us". —Ruakh 18:44, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

What do you think of my original question at [[WT:TR#house]], and, likewise about (deprecated template usage) chess, (deprecated template usage) checkers, (deprecated template usage) Monopoly, etc.?​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:24, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

I think "house" is mostly a non-countable common noun. Likewise "chess" and "checkers". I think "Monopoly" is both a proper noun and a non-countable common noun, in the same way that "Kit Kat" is both a proper noun and a countable common noun. But it seems harder to distinguish proper nouns from non-countable common nouns than either of these from countable common nouns; the only reasonable-seeming test I've been able to think of is that clear-cut non-countable common nouns all seem to allow "much ____" but not *"much of ____", whereas clear-cut proper nouns all seem to allow "much of ____" but not *"much ____" ("we haven't seen much of/*Ø Canada yet"; "there's not very much Ø/*of milk left in the fridge", etc.), and similarly for more/most and little/less/least. By that test, I'd say "Canadians play more house than Americans do", not *"Canadians play more of house than Americans do", so I think it's mainly a non-countable common noun.

(But I came up with that test several years ago, before I caved and bought CGEL. Tonight I'll look and see if I can find what it has to say on the subject. It may give better tests.)

—Ruakh 19:42, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

O.K., CGEL doesn't seem to have anything for us. It defines a proper noun as a word whose primary function is as the head of a proper name; for example, "Zealand" is a proper noun, "New Zealand" is a proper name. Even accepting that ===Proper noun=== refers both to CGEL!proper-noun and CGEL!proper-name, it doesn't seem to give any tests. It doesn't give any non-capitalized examples of proper names at all; and most of its exposition of proper names is devoted to explaining their internal structure. —Ruakh 01:16, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, thanks for checking. Anyone keeping an eye on this have Fowler?​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:39, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

One example is enough to over ride the others? There are plenty of examples where it's used generically (in the "a snowmageddon was upon us" sense), and they're given in the entry. ? Ohms law 23:19, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

No, they're not. Not one quotation in the entry uses it with the indefinite article. —Ruakh 00:08, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Strange. I only read one example that uses it as a definite article. Even the referenced use seems to uses it as an indefinite article. Regardless, since I'm apparently "fool", and my concerns are being lumped in with something completely unrelated here for some reason, I'm a bit beyond caring any more. Ohms law 21:42, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Proto-language codes

Hi, Ruakh.

• I think "gem" should be the code for Germanic, and "gem-pro" should be the code for Proto-Germanic, because Germanic and Proto-Germanic are different things.
• The first code simply comes from ISO 639-5. The second one is "family code + hyphen + three arbitrary, or relatively arbitrary, letters", a format used by dozens of other codes: "cel-gau" (Gaulish), "aus-dar" (Darkinjung), "cpe-nor" (Norfuk), etc.

Do you have any question, or any objection? --Daniel 22:43, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree. I'd prefer gem-proto, but I'm O.K. with gem-pro. I greatly dislike the reasons that the change was proposed (at [[Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Renaming proto-language codes]]), but I think the change itself is a good one. —Ruakh 23:09, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Great. Then I think nobody objects the aforementioned existence of different codes for different things. Now let's talk about that discussion. Please say any questions or objections you may have about the system mentioned below.

• {{derivcatboiler|en|fr}} to fill "Category:English terms derived from French" with contents.
• {{derivcatboiler|en|gem-pro}} to fill "Category:English terms derived from Proto-Germanic" with contents.
• {{derivcatboiler|en|gem}} to fill "Category:English terms derived from Germanic languages" with contents.

--Daniel 23:30, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

"gem" should use a different template, that says different things. For example, it should explain why there are some entries directly in the category, and some only in subcategories. "gem-pro" can probably be the same template as "fr", but there should be a special parameter to indicate that it's a proto-language; or maybe the syntax should be {{derivcatboiler|en|proto|gem}}. Either way, Wiktionary has a policy of distinguishing very fundamentally between attested languages and unattested proto-languages — to the point that unattested proto-languages aren't even allowed in the main namespace — and templates shouldn't be in the business of papering over that distinction. If an editor doesn't know whether a language is an unattested proto-language or not, then they obviously they have no reason to be calling templates that refer to it. —Ruakh 23:36, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Why there are some entries directly in "Category:English terms derived from Germanic languages", and some only in subcategories? In my experience, that happens because it is unclear from what Germanic language the term comes. --Daniel 00:48, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that's my experience as well. (To clarify: I wasn't asking you why that happens; I was just saying that the category text should explain it, because I don't think it's necessarily obvious to someone navigating the categories. When you look at an entry and see "From Germanic", I think that's intuitive, but when you look at a category with a list of subcategories, it becomes unintuitive, I think.) —Ruakh 01:20, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

I made an explanation appear automatically at Category:English terms derived from Germanic languages, and all other "[language] terms derived from [family] languages" categories. I did not create any new template for that, however. --Daniel 22:21, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Needless to say, I think it should be a new template; but I don't think this discussion is going to go anywhere. —Ruakh 22:32, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

It seems strange to restrict users using templates, when other kinds of inappropriate behaviour are enforced with policy and practice alone. The distinction is entirely artificial and doesn't seem to serve a purpose but to make templates harder to write. I agree that it's good to make sure templates aren't used in the wrong way, but I don't see how adding prefixes to codes prevents that, nor how it prevents all such abuses. An example of something that the current template structure allows, is using codes such as eng which redirect to the proper code. But this doesn't work and may in fact silently break things, such as creating Category:eng:All topics. In the same way, a user could believe that the prefixes are part of the code, and type {{l|proto:gem-pro|Appendix:Proto-Germanic/ek|*ek}} and it will appear to work. I agree that there should be a way to distinguish them, but so far, our practice has always been dictated by policy and existing practice, not by adding restrictions to templates. —CodeCat 00:57, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree that we shouldn't add restrictions to templates, but I disagree with your implication that that's what I'm suggesting. We draw a huge distinction between attested languages and unattested proto-languages; I'm not saying that templates should enforce that distinction — a user who seeks to violate it will certainly have no difficulty doing so, regardless of how we code our templates — merely that they shouldn't paper over it. When two things are fundamentally different, we don't a single template to handle both. As Perlers like to say, similar things should look similar, different things should look different. —Ruakh 01:20, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

But if two slightly different things are similar enough that they have more in common than not, then I think that's a reason to remove the remaining differences. The need for two linking templates is a good example of that. Links to mainspace entries are almost the same as links to appendix entries. Why have two templates that are almost the same? And please don't say those templates were a bad idea; you haven't mentioned how we should link to appendix pages, then. We can't do it with {{proto}} alone, because that is meant to be used in etymologies, not anywhere else. —CodeCat 10:09, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Feel free to change the idea

You said you like the idea but not the way I phrased it. Feel free to modify it to your liking. -- Avanu 11:27, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

The issue isn't so much the specific phrasing, as the entire notion that we'll put capitalized words at capitalized entries unless the lowercase entry exists; it's too complicated. I don't think it's workable. If this vote fails, but with other voters also indicating that they like the idea of case-insensitivity, then in a few months I'll re-raise the issue, and see if we can figure out an approach that people like. (A big part of the problem is that the vote page was created way too early, while discussion and idea-generation was still ongoing, and then discussion never got directed toward improving the vote.) —Ruakh 11:33, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Well honestly, the way Wiktionary works is a puzzle to me. Instead of a Policy page, we have a Beer Parlour, and I have no idea why this has to be done with such utter formality in this vote instead of just people talking it over and getting some consensus. The Beer Parlour is an absolute mess of too many things being discussed at once, instead of being sensibly broken into categories, and I'm coming into this with what seems to me to be the way pretty much every online dictionary on the planet does it (or should do it), compare http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Brook

My 2.5 cents. -- Avanu 11:44, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

The talking-it-over-and-getting-some-consensus should have happened first. Votes should ideally be just a formality — a way of confirming that it was talked over and some consensus was gotten. (In practice there's some back-and-forth, with votes shaping discussion as well, and that's perfectly fine; but in this case the vote was created very prematurely IMHO.) —Ruakh 12:43, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

I guess things just work entirely differently over here in Wiktionary. -- Avanu 16:01, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

I withdrew the vote because if we're going to have a decision, I think its atrocious that there's no debate or attempt at coming to consensus and addressing issues. This is not intuitive or in my opinion friendly to newcomers. -- Avanu 23:08, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

What happened to the discussion at Equinox's page? It seems to have been tossed down a memory hole. Not in the page history, just vaporized. -- Avanu 03:33, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Equinox grew annoyed with the argument taking place on his talk-page — an argument he wasn't part of — and deleted the page. Which you're not really supposed to do (since that means non-admins can't see the page history), but whatever. I understand why he did it. —Ruakh 11:17, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Spetchel - Inquiry

You had stated that it had a "High ratio of references to claims." and referred it to discussion, but there isn't a discussion there. What exactly would I need to do in order to clean it up? Are there simply too many references on the page? --Marmoset Marmalade 21:12, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for asking.

It's just that it seems very strange for a single brief definition ("A levee or dike made from stones laid in horizontal rows with a bed of thin turf between each of them") to require so many references. Is there some reason that someone would doubt that this word exists, or that it means this? There's nothing inherently wrong with references, but when I see this many references on a new entry, it makes me suspicious.

(Also, unlike our sister project Wikipedia, we're not so hung up on references here. Here we're generally more interested in durably archived quotations, showing that people have actually used the word. Whereas Wikipedia is mainly a tertiary source, and likes it when contributors cite secondary sources as evidence, we're mainly a secondary source, and like it when contributors cite primary sources as evidence.)

—Ruakh 21:18, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay in my response. I put in so many references due to some of the problems I had the last time around. I did the same thing with spetchell. --Marmoset Marmalade 20:19, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

{{he-wv}}

This look good?​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:47, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Yup! But I've made a few tweaks, I hope you don't mind. —Ruakh 17:34, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't mind at all. I didn't realize we had template:he-infinitive of (which needs documentation, which I can't add well, not knowing how to best describe 1=abs and 1=bare), and didn't know you've already added {{{context|defective|lang=und}}} to {{he-present of}}. Have you done the latter to all the other sense-line he- templates?​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:52, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

...and {{{excessive}}}?​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:57, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't know if I've done all of them. I think so, but I'll have to go through them all (tonight or tomorrow) and see if I missed any. (And any that has defective= also has excessive=. I added them together.) —Ruakh 19:52, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the documentation on {{he-infinitive of}}.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:38, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

I note you transliterated פְּקֹד as p'kód. I know you used not to mark stress when a word had only one vowel plus a sh'va na: have you changed your practice, or was this a typo? (I've followed you in that regard, incidentally, and have also not marked stress on such words.) Also, what do you do on words that have but one vowel and one chataf-vowel? I've been marking stress.​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:55, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

With shva — I've probably changed my practice, or maybe I'm just inconsistent? (There are some things I've noticed I'm inconsistent about; I hadn't noticed this one, but maybe it should join the list.) I dunno. Do you have a preference one way or the other? With a khataf vowel — I would definitely mark the stress. —Ruakh 19:52, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I think if one-vowel words lack stress marks, so should those with one vowel and sh'va na.​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:49, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

O.K., sounds good. Should this be mentioned at Wiktionary:About Hebrew#Romanizations? —Ruakh 22:03, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Sure. But note my "if". I'm not convinced monosyllabics should lack stress marks. IMO that makes sense (i.e., they don't need stress marks), and it looks (slightly) better when they're in isolation, but it looks (perhaps more than slightly) worse when they're in phrases with polysyllabics. But this is a weak feeling on my part (my "I'm not convinced" meant what it said and no more), so if you think it best then I'm perfectly willing to continue transliterating monosyllabics the way we have been. Do you?—msh210℠ on a public computer 06:54, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Y'know, maybe it's better to always indicate stress. When presented with something like , it's so easy to misread "bad" as being either the English word "bad", or at least "bad" as pronounced in English. Something like reinforces that this is part of a transliteration scheme. —Ruakh 14:14, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Such a change requires IMO a larger official group of opiners (though the de facto group may be the same), so I've brought it to [[Wiktionary talk:About Hebrew#marking stress in monosyllabic words' transliterations]].​—msh210℠ (talk) 15:56, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

July 2011

თათბირი

It is your problem if you don't know who chubinashvili is . And also it is your problem that you can't google грузинско-русско-французский словарь. :). Also, it is just interesting that someone had researched and found out that it is derived from arabian, but we are not sure whether he is correct or not.:)Dixtosa 13:05, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

User:Yair rand/uncategorized language sections/English

Would you please re-generate this list? A ton of entries have been fixed and they're mixed in with entries that need editing. Ultimateria 15:46, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Ooh! Can you do that for other languages as well? Specifically Latin and Spanish? --EncycloPetey 16:03, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

@Ultimateria: I could, but the list goes by the database dumps, and the last dump was 19 June (before the recent changes to {{etyl}}), so I think that would be as much hindrance as help. I'll regenerate it after the next dump, which will probably be about a week from now.

@EncycloPetey: Technically yes, it does all languages at once — the non-English ones are at User:Yair rand/uncategorized language sections/Not English (though it looks like Mglovesfun (talk • contribs) and others have already cleared out Latin and Spanish) — but this list is very rough, and TabbedLanguages-oriented. It just wants ==Latin== to have some category named [[Category:Latin ...]]. I imagine that you have higher standards for Latin entries, and probably want every Latin section to have appropriate part-of-speech categories, not just Category:Latin terms with rare senses or whatnot. So, if you can give me some relatively simple rules for what categories to expect a Latin entry to be in based on its POS headers, I can probably give you something more useful for that. (And, similarly for Spanish.)

—Ruakh 13:59, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

I just posted on User talk:Yair rand/uncategorized language sections/Not English asking how the pages should look -- the Norwegian pages appear to have correct language headers with tabbed languages turned on. Banaticus 08:49, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Hebrew construct nouns without possessive suffixes

Hi. I hope you're well.

I'm thinking of editing template:he-form of sing cons (and the corresponding "pl" template) as follows to allow for construct nouns sans possessor. The current text

) including {{#switch:{{{p}}}|1=first-person|2=second-person|3=third-person}} {{#switch:{{{g}}}|m=masculine|f=feminine}} {{#switch:{{{n}}}|s=singular|p=plural}} personal pronoun as possessor{{{.|}}}

would become

){{{suffix| including {{#switch:{{{p}}}|1=first-person|2=second-person|3=third-person}} {{#switch:{{{g}}}|m=masculine|f=feminine}} {{#switch:{{{n}}}|s=singular|p=plural}} personal pronoun as possessor}}}{{{.|}}}

with the intent being that people use suffix=|. I think this'd work, but am wondering whether there's a better way in your opinion. (I currently use template:inflection of, which lacks support for script and transliteration.)

(Also, if this is a good way, and you can think of a better name for the parameter, that'd be great, too.)

Thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:14, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Y'know, I've been thinking about those templates recently. There are only ten possible possessors, so maybe rather than specifying p=2, g=m, n=s separately, we could have a single p=2ms parameter, with ten recognized values? That's no more verbose code, IMHO, than the code to handle three separate parameters. The downside is that then the user has to remember the order (e.g. "ms2" or "2sm" wouldn't work), but the advantage is that then it's easier to incorporate into a single {{he-form of noun}}: for example, we might write something like {{he-Form of noun|בן|tr=bén|n=p|p=2ms|.=.}} to get Plural form of בן (bén) with second-person masculine singular possessor., and {{he-Form of noun|בן|tr=bén|n=p|s=c|.=.}} to get Plural construct form of בן (bén). (You'll notice that this suggestion treats pronoun-suffixed nouns as not having a state: you would specify either s= or p=, and p= would just say "plural form", not "plural construct form". Personally I think of pronoun-suffixed forms as being in the construct state, with the pronoun being the somekh, but I've found that a few sources regard them differently, hence the state-neutral suggestion. If you prefer to continue to treat them as the construct state, I'm totally on board with that; in that case p= could just be optional when s=c is provided and forbidden otherwise.) —Ruakh 18:15, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

I don't like the p=2ms idea for the very reason you mention (the need to remember the order in which to write them); OTOH, since the template will be using a #switch anyway to choose among the various values of p, forty-two more such values can be thrown in (the five permutations of 2ms, etc.). Would that be costly? Would it be worth doing even if so?

I do like the idea of combining the forms of nouns into one template.

I don't mind not calling them "construct": I don't know standards on that, and will gladly go with whatever you say. In any event, s can simply be ignored when p is provided.​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:49, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Also: Are we including definite forms as entries? If so, that'd be another parameter for such a template.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:08, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Re: other permutations: We can do that. It's not too costly IMHO, given that the template will appear only once, or only a few times, on a given page. Another option is to use pp=2, pg=m, pn=s. (I think that no matter what naming system we use, we'll have to consult the documentation a lot until we get very used to it.) BTW, one thing I've started doing on new templates, such as {{he-form of adj}} is including stuff like {{#switch:{{{s|}}}|d|i|c=|#default={{attention|he|this template requires s=d (definite), s=i (indefinite), or s=c (construct)}}}}. That's not so useful for most editors, but at least you and I will get useful error messages on hover. :-)

Re: standards: I'm not aware of any standards, either. But, for example, in the treebank thing that OrenBochman (talk • contribs) linked to at Wiktionary talk:About Hebrew, they treat these forms as specifically non-construct nouns, because their grammar treats construct forms as being followed by additional words. (In that respect tikvateinu is more like tikva than like tikvat-: the former two both stand alone, while the latter requires an additional word.) They have a specific purpose, one that differs from ours, but since reading that, I've noticed that other sources also sometimes seem to talk about pronominal forms as though they were a separate thing. I'm not sure. I certainly haven't kept track of how common each approach is.

Re: definite forms: I was assuming that definite forms would have s=d, as opposed to s=i and s=c. While most Modern speakers will happily say things like habeit-sefer and hamigrash-khaniya, I'm not sure there's value in having senses for habeit- and hamigrash-, since I think such forms result from adding ha- as a clitic to what are perceived as multiword nouns: it's ha{{beit-}sefer}, not {ha{beit-}}sefer. (We have [[בית ספר]], and could well have [[מגרש חניה]] and [[מגרש חנייה]].) Even if we do decide we want things like habeit- and hamigrash-, I think s=dc would work well, and would let us link to an appendix or something that is specifically about that phenomenon.

—Ruakh 20:53, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

The permutations solution or the pp one sounds good. If you're writing this template, do what you will. If you'd like, I'll write it, and I'll pick one way of parametrizing possessors.

No, I didn't mean definite construct forms, just definite forms; d sounds good. Thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:09, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

 Done I don't expect to start using it until next week, though, so feel free to make any sorts of changes in the next few days. —Ruakh 19:04, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Nice! Thanks. I've tweaked it slightly. Revert if you think doing so appropriate. Replacing the content of {{he-form of sing cons}} and the corresponding pl and Form templates by calls to the new template will enforce uniformity and allow but-substing, so I'll do that. Any objection, voice it (and revert me if needed), natch.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:33, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

The reason I prefer <b class="mention"> in form-of's is that .use-with-mention .mention already causes bolding (per MediaWiki:Common.css), and this way any special b .Hebr CSS will work there as well. I've just moved some such code from User:Ruakh/vector.css to MediaWiki:Common.css; revert if you dislike. I don't think this is a good use for face=head, since face=head is what's used in inflection lines instead of bolding, whereas here it's inside the bolding caused by .use-with-mention .mention. Unless I'm misunderstanding something? (BTW, I'm leaving right now to go spend Shabbat with some shom'rei shabat, so pardon any delayed replies. Shabbat shalom!) —Ruakh 21:02, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

You know a lot more about this style stuff than I, so I'll just pretend to nod wisely (in fact just nod) and revert my edit to the template. Have a good שבת!​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:11, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Two other things: One, fyi, I've added categorization as an excessive/defective spelling into the template when called for by the corresponding parameter; I guess that should be uncontroversial (modulo the following). Two, consider my recent edits to [[אבתיכם]]: because the template allows for "defective spelling", I added that parameter, which made the {{defective spelling of|...}} earlier on the line superfluous, so I removed it, which means I had to add it in as an alternative form. The better thing to do probably is to keep the {{defective spelling of|...}} and follow it by the new template, but without defective=1 — which means that that parameter should ideally never be used so shouldn't exist. What do you think?​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:28, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I thought the reason for the defective=1 and excessive=1 parameters was to remove the need for a defectively-spelled inflected form to link to the regular spelling and belong in Category:Hebrew defective spellings, and to promote linking directly to the lemma form instead. If you don't agree with that goal, then yeah, there's no reason for those parameters. —Ruakh 18:50, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

I don't know. Keep it, I guess.​—msh210℠ (talk) 15:29, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

A usage note

Sir,

¶ May I please be intitled to an explanation as to why exactly you included that note in this edition of yours? Considering that this form is perfectly consistent with its Latin counter‐part, I do not see how it is any more controversial than something like larvae. --Pilcrow 13:54, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

If you read the usage note, then you know why I included it. I don't know where you got the idea that "this form is perfectly consistent with its Latin counter‐part"; the English singular agenda comes from the Latin neuter plural agenda, which (needless to say) did not have any sort of re-plural *agendae. But even if it had, the fact would remain that in English, agendae is usually considered incorrect, while larvae is not. All the whining in the world won't turn English into the language you wish it were. —Ruakh 14:04, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Are you accusing me of ‘whining’? --Pilcrow 14:16, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

I agree with the idea that we should included words are they are, and not 'hypothetically correct' words. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:17, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm not accusing you of anything; but you seemed to be whining, yes, about what you had perceived as an idiosyncrasy of English usage. Students of a language frequently whine about its idiosyncrasies; there's nothing wrong with that. (At least, until they turn around and become idiosyncrasy denialists, trying to convince native speakers that the language is how it supposedly should be instead of how it actually is. That, there's something wrong with!) —Ruakh 15:00, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

“Whining” is quite obviously a pejorative term! I was allowed to be insulted again! Additionally: you have not provided any resources where you obtained the perception that the term is considered incorrect, which is why I inquire. --Pilcrow 15:08, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

· Whining is indeed a pejorative term, but I did not mean it as (much of) an insult. Language-learning is a frustrating thing, and it brings out the whining in people. I can't tell you how many times I've whined about some idiosyncrasy of a language I was trying to learn. Nonetheless, it's clear that I offended you, and I'm sorry for that.
· Re: resources: you didn't ask for any! And I don't remember if there were any resources where I did obtain that perception; but here are two where I could have, and where you can: [3] [4].
· Does that address your concerns?
—Ruakh 15:44, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I think that is satisfactory. --Pilcrow 23:18, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

¶ I detest resurrecting old topics, but I think I did not clarify. ‘agendae’ is entered in Latin here and that is why I thought it was still consistent. I thought you noticed that, but I am confused why say it is still inconsistent, unless you dispute that Latin entry. I hope this makes sense. --Pilcrow 07:18, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

· I'll grant that in Latin, agenda is, among other things, the nominative feminine singular gerundive of agō (see agendus), and agendae is, among other things, the nominative feminine plural gerundive of agō, such that in Latin, under the category of {nominative feminine gerundives of agō}, agenda is the singular and agendae is the plural. But that has very little to do with the history of the English word. The English word agenda comes from the nominative neuter plural gerundive of Latin agō; originally in English it was a plural for agend (which comes from the nominative neuter singular gerundive of Latin agō, viz. agendum, and which has a now-obsolete alternative regular plural agends alongside agenda), though in current use the singular agend is rare, and agenda (“a list of (pl.) agenda”) is usually construed as a countable singular, with its plural being agendas (“lists of (pl.) agenda”) (though it's sometimes still treated as plural, and — rarely — given the Latinate singular agendum). Does that make sense?
· I should mention that I don't set much store by etymological consistency. Speakers who say agendae are presumably unfamiliar with the details of the Latin derivation of agenda, and either are specifically reanalyzing agenda as coming from the nominative feminine singular gerundive of agō, or else are applying a rather vague -a → -ae rule for Latin-y nouns. Either of these is fine by me; the former is semantically a bit strange (that a word meaning roughly "a woman to be done" should come to mean roughly "a list of things to be done"), and the latter seems suspiciously like a hypercorrection (the vast majority of English singulars in -a form their plurals with -as, so -a → -ae would be a bizarre rule for a speaker to accidentally generalize), but I don't get worked up about such things. Still, we would do our readers a disservice if we included agendae without pointing out that it "is quite rare, and usually considered incorrect."
—Ruakh 15:03, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

User:123abc's sockpuppets User:Ddpy and User:Engirst

So, err, is anyone actually going to help me with this or...? ---> Tooironic 23:38, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Since the topic moved to the Beer parlour, and various proposals were set forth with an implication that actual votes would be set up, I was just going to wait until an actual decision had been made on what should be done. Most of the more recent entries did genuinely have at least two b.g.c. hits, so I didn't feel comfortable speedy-deleting them without some sort of mandate from the community. Help create an actual policy on toned pinyin entries, and I'll do what I can to help you enforce it. —Ruakh 00:20, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I noticed that the discussion moved right on to toneless pinyin entry rules. But actually that's not the point: the point is, this user has continued to create hundreds of totally unattestable entries over the past six months, creating a huge mess in Wiktionary. The longer he is allowed to continue contributing the bigger the mess will get. And veteran Mandarin contributors like myself are getting sick of it, because we know we'll be the ones doing the cleaning up. Unless admins like yourself can intervene. ---> Tooironic 03:08, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I don't know what you're referring to. Take a look at these discussions:

• Wiktionary:Beer parlour#toned pinyin entries - hanzi redirects (permalink), where you made a decent proposal, and I created a template for it. Jamesjiao (talk • contribs) liked the template, and suggested that a vote be started; you did not deign to reply, and after three weeks, still no vote-page has been created so far as I can tell.
• Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Pinyin entries (do we want them and how should they look?) (permalink), where BD2412 (talk • contribs) advocated keeping attested toned pinyin, and Vaste (talk • contribs) commented, "Actually, though [123abc]'s being a total ass about it, some of what he does is useful" (and Mglovesfun (talk • contribs) agreed); that discussion went downhill after 123abc started with his usual unproductive stupidity, but it did at least demonstrate that there's no consensus for simply deleting all toned-pinyin entries.
• Wiktionary:Beer parlour#User:123abc's sockpuppets User:Ddpy and User:Engirst (permalink), which at least suggests that there's some support for deleting all of 123abc's entries, but did not really demonstrate consensus (especially given the other discussions above and below), and certainly did not provide any reliable way for non-Mandarin-speaking editors to identify whether a given anonymous editor is 123abc.
• Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Pinyin entries (permalink), where Vaste (talk • contribs) advocated having only-slightly-second-class pinyin entries (they would use a ===Pinyin=== header and link prominently to characters — but they would include (brief) definitions/translations/glosses), and A-cai (talk • contribs) advocated having pinyin entries that were absolutely equivalent to hanzi entries (which I think means that A-cai (talk • contribs) is probably O.K. with 123abc's way of doing things).

So, I don't know what you expect me to do. I'm not going to help you delete entries for hundreds of attested words unless you can show me that there's really consensus for that; and if all you can show me is that there's consensus for deleting 123abc's entries, but not other toned-pinyin entries, then there's only so much I can do to help, because I have a limited ability to even identify those entries. (I can certainly offer some sorts of help — for example, lists of editors who created Pinyin entries during a certain time-period — but a lot of the burden will still be on you.)

If you want my help, figure out something that (1) you want, (2) the community will accept, and (3) can actually be implemented. Then create a vote page; advertise it and solicit input for a week or so; and start the vote. If/when the vote passes, I'll do what I can to help you implement it.

Also, I really have to counsel patience and calmness. I know that that's easier advice to give than to take, but I really think your annoyance at 123abc is leading you to take some unproductive steps. You seem to be much more interested in banning him/her and quashing all of his/her work than in seeing if (s)he can be channeled into something productive; and that's understandable, but since the former isn't working out, you might as well try the latter. He or she has been very intransigent, but then, so have we.

—Ruakh 04:07, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

You raise fair points, but don't you think if I knew how to create vote pages, gain community consensus and implement the changes I'm proposing I would have done so already? The reason I'm going to you is precisely because I don't know how to do these things. At any rate, User:123abc's entries are vandalism, pure and simple, and should be treated as such. ---> Tooironic 10:45, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, it didn't even occur to me that you didn't know how to do those things. I am excessively active on discussion pages, I forget that not everyone else is. I've made a proposal at Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Mandarin pinyin entries — problems and proposal; if it gets decent feedback, I'll start a vote. I'm actually not terribly optimistic that people will support it — the above-linked discussions seem to suggest that people's opinions are all over the place on this — but it's worth a try. I don't see another way. By the way, the top half of User talk:Ddpy seems to call into question the claim that all of his entries are vandalism . . . —Ruakh 15:48, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

¶ I am sorry if this sounds hostile, but it appears to me that you are only doing this because you are exhausted with this guy’s stubborn persistence, as if he is somehow bringing this project to its knees and you must sacrifice to appease him. I may disagree with a lot of conventions here, but even I still make some attempts to coöperate; why is that person bothering with this place? If ‘Engirst’ genuinely cares and wants to assist, why is ‘he’ not waiting until the situations are resolved and why is ‘he’ not rebutting the rest of your objections (such as a translation not being well‐known)? Please correct me if I am wrong. --Pilcrow 18:19, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Don't worry, that doesn't sound hostile. :-)   This guy clearly is not respecting community norms, but I think that we probably do want some coverage of toned pinyin. In fact, it would be a lot easier to deal with him if we simply decided to delete all toned pinyin, because then we could unleash not-very-sophisticated automated tools to do so; so, I don't think we are "sacrific[ing] to appease him". Nonetheless, yes, his refusal to respect community norms is shaping my proposal, because we don't have any illusions that he will abide by whatever proposal the community decides on, so ease of enforceability is a huge consideration. —Ruakh 19:04, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

• He's now even created his own part of speech - Category:Mandarin Pinyin_words. Still think it's not vandalism? ---> Tooironic 21:53, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

• That is not vandalism, no. The category description page for Category:Mandarin pinyin states, and has always stated, that it's for transliterations of characters, so (s)he's creating a separate category for transliterations of entire words. There are a lot of problematic details (the inconsistency of writing "Pinyin" rather than "pinyin", the redundancy of including single-character words, the category-description's insistence that entries include brief English definitions), and of course you may feel that a different approach entirely would be better; but I don't think the category is just vandalism from start to finish. —Ruakh 13:54, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

RSVP

I've responded to your comments at the Beer Parlour. :) -- PoliMaster ^talk/_spy 20:09, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I'm aware. —Ruakh 20:10, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Do you not plan on replying? :) -- PoliMaster ^talk/_spy 10:23, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Correct, I do not. —Ruakh 11:19, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Well thank you for your contribution anyway. :-) -- PoliMaster ^talk/_spy 13:19, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Yah, it's Navajo

I've never done anything this ambitious with templates before, so I'm certain there's plenty of code cleanup that could happen to make things saner / more elegant. But for a first go at it, I've gotten some of the basic formatting done for a possible Navajo verb conjugation template:

• User:Eirikr/Template_Tests/Sample - Samples of what it'd look like
• User:Eirikr/Template_Tests/Template:nv-verbconj-experimental - What's intended as the top-level template that users would call; args and whatnot still need some hashing out
• Sub-templates for each of the main modes, called by the top-level template:
  • User:Eirikr/Template_Tests/nv-imperfective
  • User:Eirikr/Template_Tests/nv-perfective
  • User:Eirikr/Template_Tests/nv-future
  • User:Eirikr/Template_Tests/nv-iterative
  • User:Eirikr/Template_Tests/nv-optative

Since not all verbs implement all modes, I thought it made sense to split things out. The conjugation rules are also different for each mode, depending further on things like whether there are disjunct and/or conjunct prefixes, which vowels are happening where, which consonants are happening where, etc. etc. Some of the tests are easy enough (did the caller supply argument X?), but the sound shift rules are very context dependent and require the ability to check first and last characters.

For instance, the verb form for "we two play" in imperfective mode would be na (disjunct prefix marking atelicity) + iid (dual first-person infix for this kind of verb) + (classifier, which for this verb is nothing) + né (imperfective verb stem). But naiidné is incorrect:

• If a disjunct prefix ends in a and is immediately followed by an i, it changes to an e.
• If a d is immediately followed by an n, it changes to a ʼ glottal stop.

So "we two play" would be neiiʼné instead.

Most of the code would just be a lot of if-then style branching, with some decisions based on argument presence and some based on the first or last characters of particular argument values.

Hopefully this gives a better background to the coding requirements for what I'm trying to do.  :) Cheers, -- Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 02:55, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Wow. Complicated. I wonder if it would be better to just have the conjugation template take a separate parameter for every form (or for almost every form: some groups of forms may be manageable as units), and use automated tools (JavaScript or a bot or whatnot) to help add the conjugation template to pages. Automated tools, of course, are not bound by the limitations of MediaWiki markup: JavaScript is Turing-complete, as is any language you might conceivably write a bot in. —Ruakh 03:14, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

more 123abc / Engirst shenanigans

I suppose you've noticed all the mass-changes the user is making with derived categories. What are we supposed to do about this? It's getting beyond ridiculous; currently, leave somebody holding the bag is categorised as deriving from English words derived from: leave | English words derived from: somebody | English words derived from: hold | English words derived from: bag. It's not classed as a verb though. :o ---> Tooironic 01:17, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

We also have I lost my bag categorised as English words derived from: I | English words derived from: lost | English words derived from: my | English words derived from: bag. So... he's still not a vandal? ---> Tooironic 01:20, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

*sigh* Yeah, he's probably a vandal. I don't know. —Ruakh 04:58, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

sjoen

Hi there, I saw you tagged sjoen as needing attention. I can confirm that it is not a Luxembourgish word; I can't say for sure that it's Limburgish but I would imagine that it is. Just leaving a message here because I'm not sure how to fix the entry myself. Cheers, BigDom 15:51, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Digging further, I see that AugPi (talk • contribs) originally created the entry saying it was Limburgish, but an anonymous editor changed it to say "Luxemburgish" (which is what led me to see it: it didn't have any "Luxemburgish" categories, so I ran across it while generating User:Yair rand/uncategorized language sections/Not English). I've changed it back now . . . but I wish I knew what the anon had had in mind! 16:27, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

minor notice

Somebody is probably evading its blocks again. --Pilcrow 18:37, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

I know. It's annoying that people keep blocking him; that doesn't even slow him down, but it does make it much harder to keep track of his edits and deal with them. —Ruakh 18:39, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

¶ How did this person manage to obtain an army of I.P. addresses‽ I was willing to give the benefit of doubt that this person was simply confused, but its persistent ignorance, poor communication and frequent, stubborn attempts of evasion are making it look like a vandal. Is there no way to permanently block that thing? --Pilcrow 18:46, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

He clearly "does not play well with others", as they say. I continue to think that his goals are not fundamentally opposed to ours — he seems to genuinely want to expand our coverage of pinyin — but to the extent that other contributors disagree with some of his views, he simply has no interest in engaging meaningfully with them, or in abiding by such community norms as exist. While he has initiated several discussions and participated in several others, I have seen no indications that he's open to being convinced, even partially, by anyone else's arguments. I hesitate to use nouns like "vandal" or "troll"; he has engaged in some vandalism, and in some trolling behavior, but I still do not believe those to be his primary motivations. —Ruakh 18:59, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

I have ranged blocked him (2.25.0.0/16) for 7 days according to Range Block Rules for sockpuppetry, counterproductive editing, refusal of team work and repeat offence. Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 01:14, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't doubt that his intentions were benign, but the execution leaves much to be desired. His single objective is to do things his way and everyone else should just mind their own business. Unfortunately that doesn't work here. Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 01:18, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

August 2011

Translations

I'm loathe to carry on debating at the Grease Pit so thought I'd leave a message here instead. Maybe I'm just being dim - could you please explain to me the problems with using a translation dictionary to add words if you know the translations to be accurate. I can't find anything online that shows that one can copyright translations of individual words, so would you know where to find such a document that could prove or disprove this claim? Thanks, BigDom 18:03, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

If you know the translations to be accurate, then what do you need the dictionary for? And it's obvious that a translation of an individual word is sometimes copyrightable, even if it isn't always copyrightable; consider "get a stone tomahawk and bring it down on a rotten log so that the blade is embedded in the log, then pick up both tomahawk and log by the handle of the tomahawk and bash the log against a tree so that the log splits open and the ripe grubs inside it can be extracted and eaten", which (according to Stephen Dodson, a.k.a. Language Hat) is R. M. W. Dixon's translation of the Dyirbal verb banyin. (I believe we could borrow that translation under "fair use", for such reasons as the fact that his book is not a dictionary; but obviously the copyright would still be his.) So if the question is really just, "can one copyright translations of individual words?", then the answer is obviously "yes". Translations are not facts, but expressions of facts, and therefore, in general, copyrightable. If we're just stealing one definition — which we never are, but speaking hypothetically here — and that definition is just the one word "stone", then copyright-wise (i.e., legally) we may be in the clear (I'm really not sure that we are, but whatever, I'm willing to stipulate this for argument's sake), but plagiarism-wise (i.e., morally) there are unanswered questions. Why did the translator choose "stone" rather than (say) "rock"? That translator may well have put thought into that distinction, thinking about the different ways the words are used in their respective languages, and the different connotations they tend to have, and making a well-considered choice. He or she may not have any legal protection, but that hardly makes it O.K. for us to still his or her work with no attribution whatsoever. —Ruakh 18:56, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation, it does make more sense to me now. Earlier I thought you were trying to say that all translations of words were copyrightable, but I agree with you there are some occasions when translating does involve considerable creativity, and plagiarism includes the moral side which I had neglected before. I think dictionaries can still be useful though even if you know a language well; there are always some words that you omit or forget and looking through the dictionary reminds you to add the entry here. Cheers again for the helpful reply, BigDom 22:47, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/2011-07/Categories of names

The vote Categories of names is going to end soon, after receiving contributions of only a few people. (it proposes a number of renamings, in this pattern: Category:en:Rivers to Category:English names of rivers)

It would benefit very much from your vote, even one of abstention.

I assume you would be interested in this subject, as I am sending this message to everyone who didn't vote yet, but participated in the discussion that introduced the vote, and/or in this poll, which received far more attention than the vote, and is closely related to the proposal in question.

Thank you. --Daniel 16:43, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Discussion about Chinese entries

Please see here, here and here. Engirst 04:20, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

poecilonym

After some wondering, I've figured out what I did at poecilonym: tried a Google Books Search for "poecilinymic", saw that it returned no results, went to delete it from the Related Terms, started hitting backspace, and removed the "y]]" of "poecilonymy" (thinking I'd only removed the "]]"). I then thought I should search for it, too, to be sure it was also unused, and saw that it was the same as the headword (as I didn't realise I'd removed the "y"). Oops! Glad you caught that! Are you sure you're seeing Google Books hits for "poecilinymic", though? I'm not seeing any Books or Usenet hits for it. - -sche (discuss) 20:35, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Ah, I've just figured that out, too: you're probably typing in "poecilonymic", which is presumably the correct spelling — but is not the one in the entry. - -sche (discuss) 20:35, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Oops, right you are! I've fixed the entry now. —Ruakh 22:27, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

gay

Sorry, thought you were done editing it. Thanks for improving the senses; I had wondered if we weren't conflating too much by trying to have "gay bars" and "gay marriage" under the same sense. (Actually, first I was surprised it took us until yesterday to have a sense for "gay marriage".) (Note to anyone thinking of remerging them: how about ## subsenses? In fact, Ruakh, do you think it would be helpful to go ahead and group the senses as subsenses?) - -sche (discuss) 01:14, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

I think subsenses are a good idea. I didn't use them because the number of senses kind of snuck up on me. It wasn't until I was done with my changes, and ready to type the edit summary, that I realized how many "homosexual" senses I'd created. That said, the current version has some problems that might be exacerbated by subsenses; for example:

• I used the main gloss "homosexual" for all five senses, but in point of fact the term homosexual is not commonly used in all of those ways. (I believe they're all at least marginally citeable per WT:CFI, but the "exhibiting appearance or behavior […] " sense in particular is infinitely more "gay" than "homosexual".)
• I didn't include any sense that would cover "gay panic" or other non-predicating uses of "gay" ("gay panic" does not mean "panic that is gay"). These can still be replaced with "homosexual" (as in "homosexual panic"), but that'd be a very awkward gloss, because any sort of substitutable gloss makes them sound predicating. (Actually, come to think of it, even the sense as in "gay bar" or "gay movie" is relatively non-predicating; it's possible to find predicative uses, e.g. a few at google books:"bars are gay", but these are in the minority, and I think they're generalized from "gay bar" and so on. I think that "a gay bar" originated as, and is still taken as, "a bar for gays", rather than as a synonymous "a bar that is gay". I suppose that DCDuring (talk • contribs) would consider all of these senses to actually be attributive uses of the noun "gay", rather than of the adjective.)

—Ruakh 01:55, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Ah, good point, regarding the problem of grouping. Regarding gay bars: I am in favour of considering (attributively-used) nouns nouns, but I'd sooner parse "gay bar"/"gay porn" as use of a generic adjective (also how I would parse "straight" in "straight porn") than as a noun sense. Fortunately, as you say, there are enough examples of "bars are gay", "porn was gay" that I think it's safe to call it an adjective. (I just found a book with the line "many North Beach bars were gay and lesbian as well as bohemian", and another with "these clubs were not lesbian".)

Is "gay panic" really a sense of [[gay]] + [[panic]], or is it [[gay panic]]? - -sche (discuss) 22:52, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't really want to get into yet another argument about these issues. Suffice it to say that while I agree with most of the explicit claims in your comment, I disagree with many of its assumptions and implications.

Gay panic quite likely does warrant an entry (someone who is familiar with all senses of gay and all senses of panic, and with the concept of gay panic but not with this term for it, might well have difficulty recognizing this term as identifying that concept), but yes, I think it really is just a specific application of gay panic. Specifically, I think gay is serving as the complement of panic, like legal in legal adviser or criminal in criminal lawyer; compare "homosexual panic", "gay scare", "homosexual scare", "Red Scare", "gay card", etc.

—Ruakh 00:53, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

Italian categories

In response to "to what categories should all Italian entries belong to at least one of", you could make a few arguments, essentially any of the following:

Category Italian parts of speech not found

From that list, I'd definitely discount "Italian nouns lacking gender" and personally "... nouns with irregular gender", "... defective verbs" and "... impersonal verbs", as all such entries should be in "... Italian nouns" and "... Italian verbs" respectively. I hope this is an adequate answer. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:47, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, that was a really good starting-point. I did some tweaking based on the results of the first few passes. By my reckoning, all of our Italian entries either belong directly to one of these categories:

categories

• Category:Italian abbreviations
• Category:Italian adjective forms
• Category:Italian adjective superlative forms
• Category:Italian adjectives
• Category:Italian adverb forms
• Category:Italian adverb superlative forms
• Category:Italian adverbs
• Category:Italian articles
• Category:Italian cardinal numbers
• Category:Italian combined forms
• Category:Italian conjunctions
• Category:Italian contractions
• Category:Italian gerunds
• Category:Italian idioms
• Category:Italian initialisms
• Category:Italian interjections
• Category:Italian letters
• Category:Italian misspellings
• Category:Italian nouns
• Category:Italian numerals
• Category:Italian ordinal numbers
• Category:Italian participles
• Category:Italian past participle forms
• Category:Italian past participles
• Category:Italian phrases
• Category:Italian pluralia tantum
• Category:Italian plurals
• Category:Italian prefixes
• Category:Italian preposition forms
• Category:Italian prepositions
• Category:Italian present participles
• Category:Italian pronouns
• Category:Italian proper nouns
• Category:Italian proverbs
• Category:Italian suffixes
• Category:Italian verb forms
• Category:Italian verbs

or else appear in this list:

entries

• -un-
• `
• alza le mani
• antemarcia
• apriorità
• buon Natale
• Buon Natale e felice Anno Nuovo
• buona Pasqua
• Callipigia
• Camilla
• catalisi
• centrosud
• che figata
• che sarà, sarà
• chilovattora
• ci penso io
• come sta
• come stai
• coprostasi
• da dove viene
• da dove vieni
• daccordo
• dici nove
• Disdero
• dolce far niente
• dott.
• dubitabilità
• ecco là
• ecco qui
• Europa Centrale
• felice anno nuovo
• fiordilatte
• freno-motore
• fuori di sé
• gigabit
• gigahertz
• gigajoule
• gigametro
• gigawatt
• gigawattora
• idrotassi
• Internet
• Intranet
• linfocitosi
• Margherita
• mendicità
• metanolisi
• microbar
• microvolt
• monokini
• niuno
• non c'è trippa per gatti
• non lo so
• nostra
• oligodendrocito
• parcità
• parla inglese
• parli inglese
• per non dimenticare
• perspicuità
• portare nottole ad Atene
• pravità
• propinquità
• punto di vista
• risotto nero di seppie
• Rocca
• salsicce e fagioli
• se Dio vuole
• sedulità
• sette peccati capitali
• sordini levati
• superconduttività
• Ti amo
• ti voglio bene
• tonno e fagioli
• tortellini in brodo
• vespri siciliani
• ´
• ×

and not both. Let me know if you see any changes I should make to the list of categories. (In particular — is it O.K. if an entry is in Category:Italian phrasebook and no other categories? Or should it be in Category:Italian phrases or whatnot as well?)

Feel free to copy the list elsewhere, if you plan to clean it out gradually.

—Ruakh 01:07, 28 August 2011 (UTC)

I'd say that anything that's in the phrasebook should be in the phrase category as well. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:59, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

So, are you all set? (This was a lot of work, I don't want it to have been pointless . . .) —Ruakh 13:39, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

@Both of you: I went ahead and fixed propinquità, pravità, perspicuità, parcità, mendicità, dubitabilità, apriorità, superconduttività, sedulità to use {{infl|it|noun}}, as {{it-noun}} advises; they're now in Category:Italian nouns. - -sche (discuss) 19:03, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm glad you included abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms and I meant to mention them and didn't. In relation to User:Yair rand/uncategorized language sections, it might be possible to get all the uncategorized entries on to one page now. Having said that, I'd like to try and clear the current English list first; with some luck, I reckon it can be done in about two weeks. Then there are things like Category:English alternative forms that I'd also like to do, though I should try and maintain some sort of life outside Wiktionary at the same time. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:53, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

September 2011

Nominations for administrators

Hi Ruakh,

How do you nominate a person for an administrator role, please? Do you create a vote page and advise a nominee only? Anything else needs to be done? Could you give me a couple of steps, please or point to the page where it's described? --Anatoli 02:59, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

I always discuss it with the potential nominee first, at their talk-page. Sometimes they say they're not interested, or they have concerns that need to be addressed first, so I wouldn't want to create the vote-page without doing that first. But yeah, after that, you just create a vote page (go to Wiktionary:Votes, expand the "Start a new vote on this page" box, change Wiktionary:Votes/sy-2011-09/User: for admin to Wiktionary:Votes/sy-2011-09/User:Username for admin, click the button, follow the instructions), notify the nominee they can go accept the nomination now, and edit Wiktionary:Votes and Wiktionary:Administrators to transclude the vote. —Ruakh 16:28, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

Thank you! --Anatoli 11:21, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

Babel boxes

Hey there Ruakh --

I noticed some confusion about your Babel boxes, and saw that you just bumped your Hebrew level from 2 to 3, while keeping another listing as Hebrew 4. Reading your main User page bio, I suspect you want to use {{User_he-4}} and {{User_Hebr-3}}, the former marking your language level (near-native), and the latter explicitly marking your literacy level / comfort level with the Hebrew script. That might resolve the confusion. -- HTH, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 06:50, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, never mind, just saw Wiktionary:Grease_pit#A_language_with_lots_of_scripts. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 07:03, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

טרקלין

Bit of confusion over this; it initially said salmon, then someone changed it to salon. Was it just an initial typo? Mglovesfun (talk) 11:19, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Presumably a typo, yes. (Or possibly a read-o or something.) "Salmon" is completely wrong. "Salon" would probably not be my own translation, but it's pretty close. —Ruakh 12:28, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

The translation of (deprecated template usage) salmon was therefore also wrong. I made an attempt at a correction - but it is a red link, so I'm not sure. SemperBlotto 12:31, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

You had it right, except the position of the stress: it's /ˈsal.mon/, not /salˈmon/. I've created the entry now. —Ruakh 14:40, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

יהי and similar

I wanted to create a definition-line template for things like יהי when I realized I don't know what it's properly called: jussive? mandative subjunctive? plain old subjunctive? two of those? something else? Do you know? Thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 23:22, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

The reason I went with "jussive (subjunctive)" was that AFAIK the usual term is "jussive", but IMHO "subjunctive" is the closest term likely to be recognized by a significant number of English speakers. I wouldn't recommend "mandative subjunctive", firstly because SFAICT it's never applied to Hebrew, and secondly because as applied to English and various other languages it refers specifically to the use of the subjunctive in certain types of subordinate clauses (e.g., "She asked that he calm down"), not its use in any main clauses (e.g., "Long live the king"). I think it's actually closer to some uses of the Hebrew future tense (e.g., hí bik'shá sheyakúm), though sadly, neither "mandative future" nor "mandative imperfect" seems to have any uptake, either. :-P   —Ruakh 00:12, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Hm, I see our entry for [[cohortative] says the cohortative is "present in Hebrew": I assume it's referring to these forms. Do you know whether that, perhaps, is a term used for them? More or less commonly than jussive?

In any event, if jussive (or cohortative) is used more often than subjunctive, I say just use the former in the template (linking to a definition, I suppose). That's partially because (I suspect, baselessly, that) the recognizability of subjunctive doesn't help, inasmuch in English subjunctive is used for things like "I wish it were", and not for "let it be" (יהי). (Granted, יהי is also used for "that it be", which is also a common use of subjunctive, but I suspect that's the less-common use of both יהי (at least in Biblical H.) and subjunctive.) I may have rambled a bit. If you don't respond to this, I'll assume it was incomprehensible, and and try to clean it up when I'm less tired. (I may also be wrong on several points.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 00:33, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

IME, as applied to Hebrew, "jussive" is used for the typically third-person forms that typically shorten the ending (and often (usually? always?) for the negative imperative), "cohortative" for the typically first-person forms that typically append /a/. (Googling finds all sorts of interesting variations, though. For example, many sources seem to include e.g. lo tignóv as jussive. Other sources abandon these terms altogether; for example, some use the terms "paragogic future" and "apocopated future".)

In English, constructions like "long live the king", "so be it", and "be it resolved that […] " all use the subjunctive. It's sometimes called the "formulaic subjunctive". It seems pretty close to me. But Googling Hebrew + subjunctive shows a division between those who do refer to the Hebrew jussive as a "subjunctive" and those who explicitly note that Hebrew, despite its jussive and cohortative, lacks a subjunctive or optative. I'm fine with taking out the "subjunctive" if you think we should.

—Ruakh 01:22, 13 September 2011 (UTC) edited 01:27, 13 September 2011 (UTC) after a bit more Googling

I've made {{he-jussive of}}, calling it just "jussive". The (or a) beauty of templates is, of course, that we can always change it later.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:21, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

indenting

sure thing, I thought I was already doing it, was there somewhere I did not or did it wrong that comes to mind?Gtroy 20:04, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

Why did you put those comments back? I don't want his insults on my talk page. No one was talking to him he just jumped into the conversation and many other editors remove comments here routinely?Gtroy 05:49, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry that you don't want his insults on that talk page, but you don't exactly own the page. If you really think the comments have no value and should be removed, I think you should ask a trusted, disinterested party — where by "trusted" I mean an admin — to handle the redaction for you. As for "many other editors remove comments here routinely" — can you substantiate that claim? I'm certainly not aware of such a thing. A few editors will remove old conversations from their talk-page without moving them to archives, but that's hardly the same thing as removing live discussions, or (worse yet) individual comments from live discussions. (There are a few other situations where editors remove comments, but "routinely"??) —Ruakh 06:00, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

The guy who said so on my talk page and semperblotto come to mind. Also "is usually frowned upon" doesn't sound like a policy to me. When you reverted my edits I just thought you were friends with the offender or thought it was wrong for me to just remove his dialogue when I had gone back and forth with him a bit. So I removed both his and my comments, also I had not yet had a chance to review this message. Please as much as I "trust myself" (kidding) would you redact all his comments on my page, Ideally the whole conversation or possibly archive everything because I dislike having to gaze people's dialogue on my page that isn't even with me but about me, its a demotivational. It just annoys me so how can I best procede?Gtroy 06:40, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

For clarity, Ruakh and I are friends like oil and water are friends. But like oil and water, we coexist. Usually peacefully. — [Ric Laurent] — 10:48, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't feel up to that particular redaction. (I used to try to redact comments from an admin, no longer around, who was frequently a dick, but it didn't turn out well.) But I hereby invite any admin reading this page to do so. That's probably a solid ten or fifteen, so it's got O.K. chances. :-P   —Ruakh 13:31, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

It's against my religion to modify the context of a discussion, so I'll stick to full sections. I think =Imminent block= can be removed if Dbfirs doesn't object, and since I doubt WF would mind, =It might be your talk page...= can also go if you agree. I still think your logic in that one isn't perfect, but I just don't have the energy to argue with you today. :p — [Ric Laurent] — 13:51, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

question about template:he-lemma

Thanks again for making this and editing {{he-form of noun}} to use it. I plan to edit the other Hebrew definition-line templates accordingly, but wonder: As far as I can tell by inspection of the code, {{he-lemma|{{{1}}}|named parameters}} and {{he-lemma|named parameters}} are exactly the same (when used in a template that's then transcluded). Is that right?​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:43, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

If I'm understanding your question correctly, then no, that's not right. For example, {{he-lemma|ONE|wv=WV|dwv=DWV|tr=TR}} produces WV / DWV (TR) (with a link to [[ONE]]), while {{he-lemma|wv=WV|dwv=DWV|tr=TR}} produces WV / DWV (TR) (no link). —Ruakh 19:07, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Right, of course; I mistyped what I meant, though. I meant: As far as I can tell by inspection of the code, {{he-lemma|{{{1}}}|named parameters}} and {{he-lemma|{{{1|}}}|named parameters}} are exactly the same (when used in a template that's then transcluded). Is that right?​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:20, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that's right. :-)   —Ruakh 19:59, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Okay, thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:35, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

ה׳ המגמה

Do you agree the ה׳ המגמה-form of nouns (like ימינה) merit entries? If so, any idea what they're called in English? Finally, assuming your answer to my first question is "yes", any objection to my adding support for them to {{he-form of noun}} (if I can figure out how to do so)?​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:20, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm pretty clueless about it; in colloquial Modern Hebrew it's rather uncommon outside of a fairly limited range of expressions like yamína and habáita. I know it occurs in the liturgy in forms like mitsráyima (e.g. in Genesis 46:8) and ♪ yáma, vakédma, tsafóna, vanégba ♪ and so on, but I don't have a good grasp on its grammar. For example:

• Is it normally considered a suffix, or how does that work? It seems like, if we consider it to be part of the preceding word, then when you attach it to a word that's stressed on the penultimate syllable (mil'él), you end up with a word that's stressed on the antepenultimate syllable, which I thought was supposed to be impossible in Biblical Hebrew? Or in Biblical Hebrew did it trigger a stress shift that in Modern Hebrew it does not? (I notice that Genesis 46:8, at least, actually has מִצְרַ֔יְמָה, which I guess means it's mitsráima, mil'él . . . I'm not sure if this is because mitsráim is the underlying form, becoming mitsráyim in standalone form because an epenthetic vowel is inserted, or what . . .)
• How does it work when a noun is modified by an adjective? Can you say something like ha'ír hayafá'a, or ha'íra hayafá, or are both of these forbidden? How about smikhút: érets-mitsráyima?
• How well is it understood what the resulting form will look like? Like, is there a straightforward reason we say ár'tsa rather than éretsa?

With this level of cluelessness, I can't have much of an opinion, sorry. :-P

—Ruakh 19:57, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Well, to address some of your specific questions:

• I don't know whether it's normally considered a suffix. Remember, I'm the guy who kept (keeps) calling ל־ a prefix, so I may not be the one to ask. I honestly have no idea, still, what the difference is between an affix and a clitic.
• In every example I can think of offhand, a מלעיל word with the ה appended has its last vowel become a שוא. Thus with segolate nouns (ארצה), thus with dual-style nouns (מצרימה), thus with בית. That it's universal among examples I can think of doesn't, of course, mean that it's universal. If the last vowel doesn't become a שוא, then perhaps the stress would shift to the penult: I can imagine a word (deprecated template usage) לַיְלָתָה (layláta) (in other words, it sounds right — though I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist!), though I can also imagine (deprecated template usage) לַיְלְתָה (láyl'ta). (The former sounds more right to me for some reason.)
• I don't know how it works when the noun is modified by an adjective. As for construct forms, the construct noun gets the ה:‎ (deprecated template usage) בֵּיתָה פרעה (béta par'ó), (deprecated template usage) ארצה כנען.
• I don't know the rules of what the resulting form will look like, but I strongly suspect they exist.

If this helps you, great, and perhaps you can answer my first question above (do you agree they merit entries). If not, then I hope it was of independent interest; and perhaps you know the answer to second question (what they're called in English) anyway?​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:24, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

If it triggers those sound changes, and attaches to the nismákh rather than the somékh, then yeah, it sure seems like a suffix to me. I think such forms warrant entries. (By the way, I'm guessing that bayít and dual-style nouns are probably the same sort of thing as segolates: I think an epenthetic khirík got added instead of an epenthetic segól because of the yúd. So it's not surprising that both would behave the same way, changing that vowel (back?) to a sh'vá in this case.)

I should also have checked Gesenius before asking my questions, because when I looked now to see what he calls the form, I see that he answers several of them. Sorry. :-/   Gesenius on the subject is here: s:Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar/90. Real and Supposed Remains of Early Case-endings. He doesn't really give it a name, but if we can't find a name somewhere, then one of his descriptions can probably be pressed into service as a name. For example, he describes the ending as locative, so we could perhaps write of a "locative form".

Re: "I honestly have no idea, still, what the difference is between an affix and a clitic": Broadly speaking: a clitic behaves phonologically like an affix, but syntactically like a separate word. For example, ל־ attaches to the following word, and its exact form (l'- vs. li-, for example) depends on the sounds at the beginning of that word, but syntactically ל־ plus that word is not a constituent: לשני ילדים is li{sh'néi y'ladím}, not {lishnéi} y'ladím. The canonical example is English -'s, which phonologically attaches to the preceding word, and its exact form (/s/ vs. /z/ vs. /əz/, for example) depends on the sounds at the end of that word, but syntactically that word plus -'s is not a constituent: the Queen of England's mother is {the Queen of England}'s mother, not the Queen of {England's} mother.

I should mention that some linguists have argued that -'s, despite its being the canonical example of a clitic, is actually not a clitic at all, but rather a "phrasal affix", because its form can depend not only on the phonology of the preceding word (i.e., its sounds) but also its morphology (i.e., how it's constructed): we can say things like "Katz's cats' kittens", where /kæts/ + -'s is pronounced differently when /kæts/ is a person's name vs. when it's a common noun with the plural suffix -s. And I think that the same argument would probably apply to ל־, since l'- + harím is pronounced differently if harím means "mountains" (l'harím) than if it means "the rím" (larím). I'm not sure how meaningful that distinction is, and I'm not sure what would be an example of a true clitic by that definition (nor of how to distinguish a phrasal affix from a clitic in cases where the morpheme only has one pronunciation); but I don't think it really matters for our purposes, since no matter what you call it, the problem of not-being-a-constituent is the same.

—Ruakh 21:43, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Re Gesenius, it's quite all right: I should have looked there, myself, before asking you what the form's called. Re difference between affix and clitic: thank you!! Now I hope I remember that. (I should.) Re what to call it: Googling locative with Hebrew shows that while people do call this the locative, they also call other things the locative (specifically, forms with מ־ and forms with ל־). (People may also call the ־ה form something else, but any search term I've thought of has turned up nothing) Not knowing what else to call it, though, we can call it that, I suppose, or do so while also saying something clarifying; perhaps "...with locative suffix ־ה". Whaddaya think?​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:33, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

I think I really need to get cracking on Hebrew grammar appendices. :-P   —Ruakh 02:42, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

 :-) ​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:57, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

I've effected the change to {{he-form of noun}} I'd described. Please tweak ad lib.​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:07, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Hello

Could you explain this? My question got deleted because of that edit. 22:18, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi.

You inappropriately removed one of Mglovesfun's signatures; when I rolled that back, I saw that you had made two other edits that I'd accidentally rolled back with it. Of these, one (the addition of the month header) was good, but not worth re-rolling-back and trying to manually undo your bad edit for; the other was acceptable, but it (1) came off as imperious, and therefore rather rude even despite the "please" and "thanks"; (2) sounded like cheating on a school assignment or something (since I couldn't imagine any other reason that someone would ask that); and (3) wasn't signed properly (for some reason you keep signing your comments with ~~~~~ rather than ~~~~, so that there's no link to yourself). I certainly wouldn't have rolled back your comment intentionally, but once I'd rolled it back accidentally, I just did not feel motivated to sort out the acceptable from the not. Your comment provoked an "ugh" reaction that I couldn't overcome.

If you weren't cheating a school assignment, and — tone being hard to convey online — you didn't mean for your comment to sound imperious, then I'm sorry.

—Ruakh 02:31, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

"Cheating a school assignment"? Really? Never hoid of it. And we don't have it. Googling.... Hm, barely three.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:57, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Heh, typo. Hence typing "cheating on a school assignment" in one place and "cheating a school assignment" in the other. —Ruakh 11:26, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Good point: hadn't noticed.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:32, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Typo: "Never "hoid" of it." "Hoid" is a word? Oh, never mind. 75.6.243.251 01:36, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

How did it "come off as imperious"? No, it was not a "school assignment", and you deleted my comment because I didn't sign it "properly"? I didn't know you were supposed to sign with four tildes, and to make it right, I will. And, you "just did not feel motivated to sort out the acceptable from the not"? You inconvenienced me by deleting my question, and my comment apparently provoked an "'ugh'" reaction? You're sorry, you say? Why don't you restore my question? It has been now a full week, and my question isn't even there. Please restore it for me. 75.6.243.251 23:47, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Re: "How did it 'come off as imperious'?": "At least two" and "as soon as possible". Also, to a lesser extent, "provide".

Re: "No, it was not a 'school assignment', […] ": Then, I'm sorry I accused you of cheating.

Re: "Please restore [my question] for me": Will do.

—Ruakh 02:39, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

1. I still don't get it.
2. It's all right.
3. Thank you.
4. 75.6.243.251 00:16, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Following up on number three above, I just wanted to personally thank you for restoring and answering my question. I really appreciate it and look forward to seeing more polite users such as yourself in contributing to Wiktionary. 00:24, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

You're welcome! Thanks for being so gracious after I started us off on the wrong foot. —Ruakh 00:48, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

שנה טובה

​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:52, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

October 2011

request a bureaucracy

Hello
I am a Persian wiktionary users
No bureaucratic Persian wiktionary
I have a Persian wiktionary
Ido request a bureaucracy
Please help me

Where do I apply ????????

Thank you Ali ringo 14:20, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I don't understand your question. You can ask in Persian, if you prefer. —Ruakh 18:19, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Maybe Ali is asking where to apply to become fa.Wikt's bureaucrat (or admin)? That would be Meta, I guess. - -sche (discuss) 01:30, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

מטה

Last sense, the máta one meaning something like "low". I put it under a "Noun" header even though in Deut. 28:43 it means "downward" (adv.), as it seems to be a noun in other places (and I've added usexes indicating as much). The questions then are whether it's also an adverb, or just a noun; and, if it's just a noun, then how we parse Deut. 28:43. I have a suspicion that it's just a noun, lacks a dagesh, and the dagesh in Deut. is in lieu of a ת because the word should be מטתה = "to מטה". But that's just a suspicion, with no real basis. I'd appreciate any light you can shed on this.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:55, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Even-Shoshan gives it only as an adverb, spelled מַטָּה; but his only quotation for the word itself is Deuteronomy 28:43. Underneath that, he has half a dozen sub-entries for things like לְמַטָּה and הֶחָתוּם מַטָּה and בֵּית־דִּין שֶׁל מַטָּה, with separate quotations for those. (Always with a dagésh, by the way.) He doesn't have the liturgical quotation you added, nor any examples of his own where máta is a somékh.
I haven't spent much time thinking about it, but it seems on the face of it that Hebrew doesn't have very many adverbs; so even if máta is used in a lot of constructions where a noun could be used, such as after a preposition, I can't say whether they aren't perfectly normal ways for an adverb to be able to be used, too. מְהֵרָה, for example, typically shows up in בִּמְהֵרָה. And לְ־ can definitely have an adverbial as its complement, at least, as in לְבַסּוֹף. If מַטָּה is never used as a subject or direct object, and doesn't have any inflected forms, then "adverb" probably makes sense. (I suspect, incidentally, that the lack of inflected forms is a big part of why Even-Shoshan calls it an adverb.)
—Ruakh 00:08, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable. Thanks. But I'm very confused. If it's an adverb, then what does it mean? Not in Deut.: there it's "downward", I suppose. But what does it mean in phrases where it looks like a noun, such as after a preposition or a construct noun? How on earth should I (one) rewrite the current "Earth" sense?​—msh210℠ (talk) 00:37, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't know. I guess I'd say it means "below". It's not so hard to find cites for uses like "of below" or "of the below", though admittedly they're both pretty marginal. Even-Shoshan sidesteps the issue by having all the subentries right there (and even including a note along the lines of "also see compounds below" in the main part of the entry); my Hebrew-English dictionaries all just give it as an adverb, translated as "down, downwards" or "below, down", or "downward, down", or the like, without worrying about whether that works for all of its uses, though several of them do have a subentry or two (mostly for לְמַטָּה, some also for מִלְּמַטָּה). —Ruakh 02:44, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks again for your input. I've emended it to my satisfaction, I suppose, but you might deem further editing necessary.​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:25, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Deletion reason:

On Special:RecentChanges I now have a red delete button next to a white bar that goes approximately half way along the page. What does this do? Should it be as large as that? Mglovesfun (talk) 14:44, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm currently typing up an explanation in the BP. But to answer briefly: the "white bar" is a text field. You can type in it. I suck at UI design. :-/   —Ruakh 14:46, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

How do I get rid of it. It is as ugly as sin and rather distracting. SemperBlotto 14:51, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Sorry. :-(

Please see Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Patrolling enhancements now on by default, and now include deletion.

—Ruakh 14:53, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

stipulate

I set the botanic adjective as the WOTD, thinking most people would be familiar with the verb. If you wanted the verb to be the WOTD, please feel free to change it. :) - -sche (discuss) 02:56, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Mirandize

Hi would you care to look over the quotes you removed from Mirandize I believe you have done so in error.71.142.74.66 21:20, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/2011-10/Categories of names 3

Because you voted in Wiktionary:Votes/2011-07/Categories of names, I'm informing you of this new vote.​—msh210℠ (talk) 01:54, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

pimp out

Would you mind explaining to me what still needs to be done at pimp out? As far as I know it was the formatting of the quotes and their layout, but I have already fixed that and brought it up to par. I checked in with another user, Rockpilot and he confirmed that it has been fixed. And I noted on the edit summary to please check in with me if anything was the matter. Maybe you did not notice the updates or I am missing something, would you please explain so that I can learn to correct this mistake and not repeat it and be able to identify it please? Thank you in advance.Acdcrocks 09:50, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for asking!

The remaining problems are:

• I fixed up 2000 cite and did very basic cleanup of the other cites, but since then you've added a few more cites, which you did not format correctly. Even the ones that I did basic cleanup of still need more work: I just formatted what was there, but there's still too much information missing. Every cite should look more or less like the 2000 cite.
• Example sentences must precede quotations.
• I think that the literal sexual sense and the general "exploit" sense should be separated, but if you disagree, I'm all ears.

—Ruakh 11:38, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't think usexs should precede quotes, that makes the little quotations look very ugly and I almost exclusively see it done the way I do. I don't think putting the issue in parentheses is standard either. Also asking for the ISBN/ISSN number is rather excessive and unnecessary. I add as much information as I have on hand. But I can't be looking up ISSM numbers just to please you. Also your 2000 version of the cite is one of half a dozen ways of entering the url. I am not persisting in doing anything wrong. Lack of information does not equate doing it incorrect. Using<!---[]---> for urls appears standard and accepted. Is there a particular page that deals exclusively with cites as they are typically entered here? Or just a page that is incredibly convoluted that gangbangs every conceivable type of cite into a huge pickyourpart onesizefitsall impossible to understand unless you wrote it guideline?Acdcrocks 23:31, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Quotations. And I'm not saying that every cite needs to look exactly like the 2000 cite — my exact words were "more or less" — but you're often leaving out author or title, you're italicizing the quoted text, and you're using bizarre punctuation and capitalization. And — quite damningly, in my opinion — for many of your quotations I can't even tell whether they're durably archived. Re: "I almost exclusively see it done the way I do": Sorry, but I find that hard to believe. —Ruakh 00:58, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Well more or less is rather subjective and I believe they do. Would you show me where I have left out the title? The author is not always available unfortunately. Every other editor and quote I have seen italicizes the quotes, it brings attention to the definition and makes it an easier read. What bizarre punctuation and capitalization? If it's within quotes, I can't change them to your liking, they are quotes and grammar good or not has to be left alone. What do you mean by durably archived? Your 2000 quote is the only one I have formatted that way. Many other editors have told me to do it the way I currently am. I have been told by several that there is no hard standard. I will review wikt:quotations though. Are you a admin?Acdcrocks 01:22, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Re: "Would you show me where I have left out the title?": One example is at [[pimp out]]; there is a quotation just attributed to "David Meerman Scott".

Re: "Every other editor and quote I have seen italicizes the quotes": I find that hard to believe. We use italics for example sentences, not for quotations.

Re: "What bizarre punctuation and capitalization?": In the metadata; things like capitalizing "Page".

Re: "What do you mean by durably archived?": See [[Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion#Attestation]].

Re: "Many other editors have told me to do it the way I currently am": I doubt that very much, but if you have, then you now have a convenient list of editors whose advice you should take with a grain of salt. ;-)

Re: "I have been told by several that there is no hard standard": That's true, but there is a rough standard, outlined at Wiktionary:Quotations.

Re: "Are you a admin?": Yes . . . but I don't know if that's relevant.

—Ruakh 01:44, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Ivegotta say that I have "Year, Author, Source title, Publisher, pages #–#: " in every entry, except publisher which I seldom am able to find either to enter or in other people's quotations too. I think you are being pedantic and it seems your only focusing on my quotations and not those of others, why is that?Acdcrocks 01:41, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Again, see [[pimp out]]. Why ask what needs to be done, if you refuse to listen? —Ruakh 01:44, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Oh and rackpilots totally my husband on here so you needn't not criticism him, he is too cute for that.Acdcrocks 09:22, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

@Indeed I am cute. I wanna help you out, I have a feeling you'll go on to be a great contributor here. Maybe even one day you can join the bastard club --Rockpilot 11:02, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

Eww not with a Dick in the room.Acdcrocks 22:28, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

he-future of

Thanks. Any other tweaks? Any reason you can think of that I shouldn't do the same for the other finite verb forms? (I'll skip {{he-infinitive of}}, as I'm not sure which values of the first parameter object-suffixes exist for.) As always, thanks for your input, which I value.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:16, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't know. Possible tweaks:

• Wording tweak — does the suffix indicate the object, or is the subject itself the object?
• Parameter-name tweak — for both prepositions and nouns, we use pg= ("pronoun gender"), etc., rather than og= ("object gender"), etc. — for nouns, of course, og= wouldn't make sense — so for consistency and rememberability it might be better to do the same here?
• Wording tweak — is it always a direct object? I know I've seen cases of verbs-with-object-suffixes where Modern Hebrew would use a preposition (and not ét), but I can't think of a specific example right now, and I don't know how to interpret it.
• This seems to work for past, future, and imperative, but I'm not sure about the present tense. Can you give some present-tense examples?

but I'm not sure about any of those. The overall concept is certainly good, and none of the above concerns would prevent me from supporting this.

I think you're right to skip infinitives for now, since those seem to behave differently; in particular, when an infinitive construct has a pronominal suffix, it seems to function as a possessor rather than an object: sometimes it corresponds semantically to the object, but it often (usually?) corresponds semantically to the subject (uv'lekht'kha vaderekh; boakhem l'shalom ... tseit'khem l'shalom).

—Ruakh 20:11, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the input. I'll address your points out of order (for a reason that will become apparent).

• Re wording: The suffix indicates the object if the object is the referent. Is object is the word, then the suffix is the object. If you think the latter is more common, then of course it should be switched.
• Re prepositions, I think of it as a (syntactically) direct object; if Modern Hebrew uses a preposition (and I, too, can't think of any examples, but don't doubt that they exist), then I'd probably think of that as a change in use of the verb. Not sure, though.
• Re present: E.g. ויקרא יט ח (first word).
• Re parameter names and infinitives: I'm confused. I started off thinking that both object and possessor suffixes exist for infinitives, and that's why I thought to name them o (object) and p (possessor). Then my thinking got muddled, and I wound up concentrating on only the object suffixes. Now I'm not sure those exist for infinitives at all. The examples you give (boachem etc.) are certainly possessors. So yes, I think omit the object suffixes form he-infinitive of. In that case, as you note, p works in the parameter name for object suffixes — but OTOH p for "possessor" and o for "object" works, too, in case a verb form turns up that has both.

I don't have time now to change the wording, and await your reply re the other points. Thanks again.—msh210℠ on a public computer 02:20, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Hm, actually, ויקרא יט ח is not a good example of a present-tense form with object. But here are some: [5], [6], [7].​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:29, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Re: phrase vs. referent: Direct object usually refers to the phrase. It often refers to the phrase's referent, but that's an extended use, and I think it's less common.

Re: prepositions: Yeah, maybe we need to table that question until I can provide an example. Given a specific example, we can seek cites to determine how the the verb construes a non-pronominal object in the same form of Hebrew. In the meantime, it can certainly say "direct object", since we'd be adding these by hand, and we'd notice if that label didn't fit.

Re: present tense: Embarrassingly, I can't read ktav Rashi, so your first and third examples leave me more bewildered than enlightened. :-/   But from your second example . . . interesting. I guess that makes sense; Biblical Hebrew doesn't generally use what we now think of as the present tense, and Modern Hebrew doesn't generally use direct-object suffixes, but it makes sense that some intermediate forms of Hebrew had the present tense but also direct-object suffixes. But if I infer correctly from your comment that you take the Leviticus 19:8 example to be using a possessive suffix rather than a direct-object suffix, then that points up another reason to be cautious about doing this for present-tense forms. (Unless you just mean that the Leviticus 19:8 example is a bad example because it could be read as a possessive suffix, even though you think it isn't one?) But thinking about it, the present-tense case is complicated by its use as a nismákh, which implies that we need to support state in general, not just pronoun endings. (We've discussed that use previously, but I don't think we'd reached any conclusions, or if we did, then I don't remember what they were.)

Re: parameter-names: O.K. If we want to introduce a distinction between pg= and og=, redefining the former, then we can easily enough change {{he-form of prep}} and {{he-Form of prep}}. They're only used on a few dozen pages.

—Ruakh 22:22, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Re referent: Okay, then.

Re present tense: my first link is to text with שאוכלו, e.g. (deprecated template usage) שאוכלו בלא פת, and my third is to text with (deprecated template usage) שהיבם מקדשה בכסף או בשטר. You infer correctly that I take Lev. 19:8 to use a possessive suffix, and, yes, I agree: my initial error about it is a reminder to take care. I don't recall any past conclusions about present-tense-as-nouny-thing except that IIRC we agreed that the plain (not construct) form be listed as a verb only. (I don't think we discussed what the construct form be listed as. As a noun form? It seems odd to list (deprecated template usage) אוֹכְלֵי (och'lé) as a verb form, but maybe that's best.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 08:13, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Re: "I don't think we discussed what the construct form be listed as": I remember now, we discussed érets zavát khaláv ud'vásh. Even-Shoshan considered it a verb form, and Glinert seemed to as well. I sent you a bunch of scans. —Ruakh 11:50, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, just above, at [[#Help! What POS is this? (a Hebrew question)]]. Still not clear on what we should be doing about those; I'll continue to do nothing about them, and, if I add them, add them under whatever POS strikes my fancy at the time.  :-)  Anyway, thanks again for your input. I'll do the past, future, imperative, and present templates. I'll leave the preposition-form template with p,g,n, and won't mind if you change it. As for infinitives, I wasn't crazy: object suffixes do exist. E.g., ללמדו at [8] (first paragraph). So I guess {{he-infinitive of}} should have both the 'o' and the 'p' parameters. I'm adding neither, though, for now, not sure which parameters can exist for which values of the first parameter of that template.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:01, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Re: infinitives: I'm not sure. Above, I wrote that "when an infinitive construct has a pronominal suffix, it seems to function as a possessor rather than an object: sometimes it corresponds semantically to the object, but it often (usually?) corresponds semantically to the subject"; I suppose you would say instead that if it corresponds to the subject, then it's a possessor, and if it corresponds to the object, then it's an object? I don't know. But either way, it's the same form, isn't it? I mean, lam'dó is laméd + -ó whether -ó be object or possessor. It's just a pronominal suffix, regardless of whether we call it a "possessive suffix" or an "object suffix" in a given instance.   Similarly, re: present tense: I think I'd rather we figured out how to handle both types of suffix before we implemented either one, since the handling of one might affect the other. (If they are, in fact, two distinct types of suffix to begin with.)   —Ruakh 17:00, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

(Sigh.) I think of them as separate because they're different in meaning (and, in the case of present tense, because the possessve one seems to apply to the verb-as-noun while the object one seems to apply to the verb-as-verb), but you may well be right that they're inherently the same. (And who knows: maybe possessive suffixes exist, somehow, for the past and future too.) Very well: I'll undo my addition of the parameters to the present-tense template, leaving them in the past, future, imperative, and vav-hahipuch ones.​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:07, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Change Template

I answered your question. Check it out at WT:BP Alex.deWitte 07:33, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

Template:str index1

Hello, this is used in other templates: eg. Template:py-to-ipa (as in 明白). Hbrug 22:02, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that's what brought it to my notice. You shouldn't have done that. —Ruakh 22:03, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Are these templates by default forbidden here? Because if that's the case, please delete Template:bo-transli too. Hbrug 22:05, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

The expensive ones are; see Template talk:str index. —Ruakh 22:06, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

I've posted at Template talk:str index#Deletion and I would like to request a review of the deletion decision. Hbrug 22:21, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

May I please have your opinion at Template talk:str index#Deletion and Wiktionary:Requests for deletion/Others#Template:py-to-ipa? I was about to test the Tibetan autotransliterator I just wrote and create some Tibetan entries when you deleted the template, and therefore would appreciate it if someone could restore the template even if temporarily, just so that creation of new entries is not hindered and pages linking to that template can be viewed as desired. I don't know how long this is going to take, but judging from the size of the RfD page it doesn't seem to be very short (perhaps years even). Hbrug 09:57, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Could I please ask you to continue participating in that discussion? Hbrug 00:28, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't really have any further input. I've said what I have to say. —Ruakh 00:56, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Does this mean you don't support the restoration of the template or support the restoration but are unwilling to do so? Because the templates were deleted by you both times, I have no one but you to turn to when it comes to reviewing those decisions, and you don't seem very happy talking about it, which is blocking this path completely. Hbrug 01:03, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

It's misleading to say that the templates were deleted by me. They were deleted by community decision; I supported that decision, and I implemented it, but that doesn't give me the authority to reverse it. If there's consensus to restore the template, then I or another admin will restore it. —Ruakh 02:21, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Granted, there isn't really a way to gain consensus to undelete a page, since we totally lack some kind of "Requests for undeletion" page, which is a major obstacle in this case. -- Liliana • 02:28, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

RFDO would seem to be it.​—msh210℠ (talk) 05:59, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

November 2011

Re-deletion of Template:str index1

What are you doing? Your previous irresponsible deletion of this template has made > 50 entries incorrectly display their contents for several weeks, and now your persistent antagonism and unfriendliness, exemplified by your unexplained redeletion of this template, are just making it worse. While you are monitoring RecentChanges - how about you use your energy to participate in the discussion I posted at Beer Parlour (which you apparently ignored) to help establish a concensus, or correct existing links to the old template, which resulted from you blocking the recreation of the main template, before you silently and disgustingly abuse your administrative rights like this? Hbrug 22:42, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

What the hell is your problem? It's obvious that you created {{str index1}} in an attempt to circumvent the previous deletion of {{str index}}. {{str index}} has now been restored, so use it. You don't need to leave a mess all across our template namespace, and you certainly don't need to leave obnoxious comments on my talk-page. —Ruakh 22:57, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Don't you know that this template had been in use for several weeks before you irresponsibly deleted them? And don't you know that your deletion has caused all the linked pages to incorrectly display their contents? Your deletion amounted to directly vandalising those pages, and you should be held accountable for that. What should have been displayed was made undisplayed, due to your irresponsible deletion. I say they are irresponsible because that's exactly the reason the deletion decisions were overturned - you didn't know the circumstances that these templates were used in at that time and you obviously didn't care about the consequences of deleting the templates. Your redeletion was simply revandalising those pages. Enough of these disgusting abuses of administrator rights. The whole idea of people contributing in an environment where some have subjective control of what you can and can't do is a joke. I'll no longer edit here. Hbrug 23:14, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Sheesh, chill out young lad. -- Liliana • 23:28, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

template:defective spelling of

Since your March edit to this template, it's been opaque (to me) and undocumented. (And it now uses {{makelink}}, which uses {{Xyzy}}, which doesn't help matters any.) For instance, I can't figure out how to make Hebrew lemmata display in face=head (as they do in the he- form-of templates). (Not that your March edit wasn't warranted: if nothing else, it allowed for more consistency with other translingual templates. But the resulting template was, nonetheless, opaque.) Also, it used to categorize as Hebrew by default, and now requires lang=he — which would make a lot of sense, except that AFAIK no one's proposed using this (or used it) for anything but Hebrew. Given all that, do you have any objection to my emending the template to something like its pre-March state, renaming it he-defective spelling of or the like, and then bringing it in line with, not other translingual templates, but other Hebrew form-of templates? (Likewise, any objection to my moving template:excessive spelling of to he-... and updating it to be like the other Hebrew form-of templates?)​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:28, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Honestly, I don't understand it, either: {{deftempboiler}} is indeed opaque and undocumented! I have no objection to any sort of emendations you might come up with; in particular, I'm definitely on board with making it Hebrew-specific. —Ruakh 20:22, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. FYI, I've effected the moves (and documented at WT:RFM#template:defective spelling of) and am working on emending the templates.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:41, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Image at "medal"

I'm fairly new to Wiktionary. Can I ask why the image I added to "medal" keeps getting removed? What policy is it violating, if any? — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 20:02, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

It is not getting removed, it is being moved into the Polish section. --Yair rand 20:13, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Not that there's anything wrong with that picture for the English section, but (besides the fact that you didn't put it in the English section) the English section already has a picture to which the one you added is superfluous.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:18, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Oh, are images not supposed to be placed in the "lead section" space? — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 18:09, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Correct, they're not. [[medal]] is a single wiki page, but it contains several separate entries for several different words spelled <medal> in various languages. Each image should go in a specific entry. —Ruakh 18:45, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

OK, gotcha. Thanks for the explanation. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 07:56, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

December 2011

Digital Dead Sea Scrolls

I just stumbled across the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israeli Museum, Jerusalem, while looking for images of 1QpHab. Wasn't sure if you'd seen this, but it's very cool. Now if only there was an image of 1QpHab (or part of it) on Commons, that would be even cooler. --EncycloPetey 03:08, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

I had seen it, but as you say, it's very cool, so I certainly don't mind seeing it again. Thank you. :-)   Having been to the Shrine of the Book, I have to say, the Web-site is actually preferable to it in some respects. The lighting in-person is very dim, presumably to help preserve the scrolls better.   Re: Commons: I don't know enough about copyright law. I believe that WMF has a policy to regard photographs of two-dimensional public-domain works to be in the public domain (and to defend that view in court, if need be), and am reasonably certain that the Dead Sea Scrolls are in the public domain; but it's probably best to ask at Commons about it. Note that Israel, unlike the U.S., does not automatically and immediately release all government-created works into the public domain, though it does provide that "The copying of a work that is accessible to the public by law is permitted if consistent with the purpose for which the work was made accessible, and to a justifiable extent taking into consideration the purpose of the said use", which may cover this? (I'm not clear to what extent Israeli law is relevant here. I imagine that the Israeli government's own copyright claims would be upheld in the U.S., just as an individual person's claims would be; but the details of Israeli law probably aren't relevant except to the extent that a treaty with the U.S. endorses them?) —Ruakh 03:43, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

On a related note, I've just added (deprecated template usage) pesher, but the etymology section could use a double-check. Also, the Hebrew entry from which it derives does not exist (the link is blue from the Aramaic). --EncycloPetey 03:38, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

I've added the Hebrew entry. The etymology for pesher looks fine to me. —Ruakh 04:32, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/sy-2011-12/User:Robin Lionheart for admin

Am I to gather you think Robin Lionheart and Wonderfool are two avatars for the same physical object?​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:46, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Simplus2 is obviously Wonderfool, but I don't think that Robin Lionheart is. Or at least, it hadn't occurred to me that (s)he might be Wonderfool until I saw Simplus2 ask him/her if (s)he wanted a nomination. Maybe I should re-evaluate my not-thinking-Robin-Lionheart-is-Wonderfool. (Do you think (s)he is?) —Ruakh 19:57, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I have no reason to think RL=WF besides your comment on the talkpage (and the fact that WF nominated RL, which is a weak reason. Or I hope it's weak, since we have several admins nominated by WF).​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:56, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

I didn't mean my comment to imply that RL=WF. I said that I don't trust WF because VP said that he did (the nominator being WF), and I said that I do trust RL because RL was the actual nominee, which is what's relevant. The part about RL being WF was just acknowledging that, given the nature of WF, the first two parts of my comment might be contradicting each other . . . —Ruakh 19:04, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Got it. Thanks for the clarification.​—msh210℠ (talk) 00:44, 30 December 2011 (UTC)