Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2021/June

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← May 2021 · June 2021 · July 2021 → · (current)

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Adding Sumerogram, Akkadogram and Determinative to standard POS

Hi! I've been working on Akkadian, Sumerian and Cuneiform Translingual entries recently. I've been using "Sumerogram", "Akkadogram" and "Determinative" as POS when needed, but I've been made aware those are not standard and could cause issues. (see 𒌉 for usage examples of Sumerograms, 𒀭 for Determinatives and 𒅆 for Akkadograms)

All three of them are necessary to structure Cuneiform entries for Akkadian and Sumerian (and Hittite, too) in a consistent way. Therefore, I'd like to propose adding them to the standard POS list. Do I have your vote? :D Sartma (talk) 09:08, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Support. Tied to this, could "phonogram" be recognized as a header? See e.g. Old Korean 只.--Tibidibi (talk) 09:20, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Per Fay Freak, revise vote to support "heterogram".--Tibidibi (talk) 16:51, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

On third thought, go back to supporting the original proposal. Oppose "logogram" because the category could lead to inconsistencies with other languages that use logograms, e.g. Japanese, and the existing POS setup should be preserved for those languages.--Tibidibi (talk) 17:49, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

@Tibidibi I was thinking last night that even if we end up choosing Logogram as POS, we would do so because it's the familiar term in Mesopotamian studies, in the same way Kanji is for Japanese, so it wouldn't really create any inconsistency with Japanese. Using Logogram for Akkadian/Hittite wouldn't necessarily mean we have to change POS for other languages. Sartma (talk) 18:05, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

@Sartma Sorry for the late response. I actually now fully agree with you, we can choose logogram as POS because these are just soft redirects where an orthographically worded header makes sense, which is not the case for the CJKV entries.--Tibidibi (talk) 07:22, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

Support. — Fenakhay ^{(تكلم معاي · ما ساهمت)} 15:41, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

uncertain - but could you at least add some actual definitions or translations to those entries. SemperBlotto (talk) 15:49, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Hi! Sumerogram, Akkadogram and Determinative are categories of a cuneiform sign, in the same way Noun, Verb or Adjective are categories of a word. They classify the sign and under them we give a link to all the different words that can be written with that sign, so you will not find any "actual" definition or translation there. You find all relevant information in the page of the words listed under each category. If you take a second to check the pages I linked above you can see what I mean. Try clicking on a couple of the words linked as "Sumerogram of" or "Akkadogram of" under Sumerogram/Akkadogram and you'll be redirected to those words' entries. Sartma (talk) 16:55, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

@SemperBlotto: So the Akkadian and Sumerian word mentioned at مَيْس (mays) uses the sign 𒄑 (GIŠ) which wasn’t pronounced, when used as a determinative, but indicated to the reader that now the name of a tree follows (you might discern that the sign looks like a tree if you have a font for it installed). For this reason one might not parse the whole cuneiform string as a word so that one seeks a separate entry for 𒄑 (GIŠ), and any such signs, categorizating them as so-called determinatives, or taxograms or semagrams.

A heterogram is when you write mlkʾ, from the Aramaic spelling of the Semitic term for “king” *malk-, but actually mean and say شاه (šāh). They did such things frequently in the Ancient Near East. Fay Freak (talk) 17:16, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Why not Heterogram? So one can use it later for Aramaeograms in Pahlavi etc. (@Victar) The definition line template {{sumerogram of}} already says “sumerogram”.

I guess Heterogram would work too, if you really are against Sumerogram/Akkadogram. It's just not a word you would find in Mesopotamian studies that much (I never saw it before now! XD), so it would be a bit confusing/alienating to people looking up Akkadian words. It says what it is, it just doesn't paint it a familiar colour. Like, when you study Akkadian you have glossaries and dictionaries with Akkadian words and then you have lists of "Sumerograms" (that unluckily never give the cuneiform, they're just like "A = water, A.BA = father, etc.) . I understand that Heterogram is more versatile, and I'm not against it in principle, but if there's no strong reason to change the labels, I would prefer to keep the more familiar ones. In the end, that's what they do in languages that use Han characters too (Japanese calling them Kanji, Korean Hanja, etc.). If we decide to go for Heterogram, then we should probably ask Japanese and Corean editors to change their entries accordingly too. Sartma (talk) 18:31, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Actually, there's another word that's widely use in Mesopotamian studies: Logogram. That would be generic like Heterogram, including both Sumerograms and Akkadograms. What about Logogram? Again, if we choose a more general name, then for consistency we need to change also Kanji and Hanja, since they both are just Logograms.Sartma (talk) 10:56, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

@Sartma Two points:

• There is a difference in that most people consulting Korean or Japanese entries are (hopefully) going to be casual learners, to whom "Hanja" and "Kanji" are the familiar terms, while most people consulting Akkadian entries will be people with at least some linguistics background who can be relied on to be more familiar with terms such as logogram, heterogram, etc.

@Tibidibi I don't think that we should base our decisions on the perceived or hypothetical readers of Wiktionary entries, arbitrarily discriminating by language (Japanese and Korean: ok; Akkadian: no, sorry): in other words, I'd like to be able to have a discussion based on facts and not personal feelings or perceptions. There will be a lot of casual learners of Akkadian and Sumerian consulting Wiktionary (judging by existing Akkadian and Sumerian entries, I can assure you that who wrote them was probably even more casually learning them than people using Wiktionary for Japanese and Korean...) to whom "Sumerogram", "Akkadogram" and "Determinative" are the most familiar terms (if not the only one they'll ever hear). I would like to write entries for the vastest possible public, but mainly for a public that's actually interested in Sumerian and Akkadian, not for general "people with some linguistics background". I'd like those entries to be useful to those who are studying those languages, not to "others" (what sense would it make to do otherwise?). Every language has its own "technical" terms. I'm not sure who we are pleasing by changing well established terms to favour others that would just make everything less clear, confusing and alienating. We don't do that with Latin, Ancient Greek or Sanscrit, were all traditional categories are maintained, whether they make "linguistically" sense or not. I'd like to see the same respect for Akkadian and Sumerian too. Sartma (talk) 15:58, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

@Sartma Okay, I take back the point about discriminating by langue. But we are not removing the "Sumerogram" and "Akkadogram" terms, and they are still displayed prominently in the page. They are still on the page due to {{sumerogram of}}, only the title of the header is "heterogram". So no information is lost, and if anything information is added; people will now know from the header that these are heterograms.--Tibidibi (talk) 16:10, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

• Logogram is an extremely broad term while, to the best of my knowledge, full-scale heterogramic systems are more-or-less exclusive to the Ancient Near East, Japanese (modern and historical), and Old Korean; Chữ Nôm does not really use Chinese characters in this way. And since heterogramic entries are not made for Old Korean (there is no point because the phonetic component is not known) while Japanese has its own system already, it seems better to use "heterogram", which would become a more precise category exclusively used for extinct languages of the Near East. Modern Hanja are not heterograms.--Tibidibi (talk) 15:18, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

@Tibidibi: Logogram is a hyperonym of heterogram. The choice between the two should therefore take relevance and pertinence into account. Is it necessary to use "heterogram" instead of its hyperonym "logogram"? Does "heterogram" add any relevant/pertinent information that "logogram" doesn't express already? I'd argue that for the use in Akkadian entries "logogram" is sufficiently clear and there's no need to choose its hyponym "heterogram". The indication of a "foreign origin of the sign" is implicit in the further indication of the logogram as a Sumerogram or Akkadogram. Moreover, "Logogram" has the advantage of also being a very familiar word for people studying Akkadian and Sumerian: that to me is one big point in favour of its use. Sartma (talk) 16:29, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

I can concur; I know next to nothing of Sumerian and that stuff, but having "Logogram" as the header tells us enough; having each definition preceded by label "sumerogram of" and "akkadogram of" is clear, since it informs me of what to look for to know more about it. I actually understand what you're talking about here, which is sufficient for an entry. "Determinative" really should be a possible header, since it's used everywhere in the past, though the explanation you give reminded me more of jukujikun and the like. Knowing that the words make intuitive sense to those unfamiliar with the standard lingo, and having them agree with the accepted in-field jargon makes for this proposed system sufficing in my eyes. 110521sgl (talk) 14:31, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

• I will also add here that the Korean hanja entries do not represent logograms (as in the glyphs themselves) but Sino-Korean morphemes, and most are closer to full lemmas than soft redirects. If anything the "Morpheme" header would be more appropriate, except that most Korean linguists agree that many Hanja used in modern Korean are not genuinely productive morphemes in modern Korean, especially given the decline of Literary Chinese education. So Hanja is really the only header that fits.--Tibidibi (talk) 16:10, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

@Tibidibi True, hanja in modern Korean are not logograms. They're just a different way to spell Sino-Korean morphemes, as you say. So, for example, 椅子 is just a different spelling of 의자. In modern Korean it's just a question of stylistic choice. Sartma (talk) 16:48, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

“determinative” should probably be added since taxogram and semagram are much less used and classifier seems restricted for a thing that is used with numerals, though determinative has another meaning we list and I personally prefer taxogram and semagram because these elite words are unambiguous and parallel to other -grams, and I see semagram is used with another meaning by word-gamesters (the one I knew first we don’t have yet, as with heterogram, I’m finna fix it). Fay Freak (talk) 16:47, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Here too, I'm not against it in principle, but for the same reasons I'd prefer to keep Sumerogram/Akkadogram, I'd prefer to keep Determinative too. This is the word used in every Akkadian and Sumerian reference material (Dictionaries, textbooks, essays...); it would be confusing/alienating if we used something unusual in the field. Sartma (talk) 19:22, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Support the original proposal. Nobody actually uses heterogram when working on these languages, so we'd just be causing confusion for no gain; it's not like we have a finite number of L3s we can use. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:46, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Support 110521sgl (talk) 19:52, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

definite/indefinite articles again

Hi @JoeyChen, I asked on your discussion page why you removed grammatical articles from glosses. You didn't answer and you insist on continuing to do it: Special:Diff/62639656. Then I raised the issue in BP last month and no opinions were offered in favour of your practice, but neither were any firm and clear guidelines offered against it. I think such a fundamental disagreement deserves a coherent discussion - perhaps even a vote? Surely it can't be that difficult to decide. Please engage. Brutal Russian (talk) 19:39, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

I can see why they're doing it. I'm quickly going to look at a physical dictionary for Latin real quick. Oh. I thought I remembered there being indefinite articles in it, but apparantly dictionaries don't give articles for Latin nouns. So JoeyChen's doing it right. (Woordenboek Latijn/Nederlands zevende herziene druk Amsterdam University Press, 2018) 110521sgl (talk) 14:35, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

@110521sgl:"Right" in the context of wiktionary is what corresponds to our editing policies/guidelines. These can be influenced by what other dictionaries are doing, but what other dictionaries are doing does not determine what we consider to be "right"; moreover, if one wants to determine what other dictionaries are doing, consulting just one isn't enough. {{R:OLD}} uses articles the way our English definitions use them, definite and indefinite; it does present its definitions as sentences finished by a stop. {{R:L&S}} seems to be inconsistent, but does use them in the same word; see further "FriezeDennisonVergil" on the same website (at the top, only for words used by Virgil). It seems to me that the way English speakers choose to present English definitions is a good guide to the natural way to present them, and this would make article-less glosses aberrant. In addition, translations in templates like {{m}} generally require the use of articles to distinguish parts of speech, and it's simply better when the definitions in these templates consistently reflect the definitions in the entires. Otherwise, why not gloss verbs without the to for ultimate confusion? Finally, do you really find it desirable to gloss eg. cantiō, pugna as "singing", "fighting"? If not, what's the point of making an exception for disambiguation instead of introducing a general rule? Brutal Russian (talk) 21:50, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

CFI for foreign languages should be spelt out

Hi. I think the CFI for foreign languages is not clearly spelt out. If I understand correctly, the present consensus followed is:

1. English Wiktionary should have entries for all foreign natural language words that exist in the foreign natural language. The definitions and descriptions should be given in English. Title should be in the foreign script.
   • Entry layout for foreign terms is identical except that it should not have Translations sections
2. Foreign translations of English words should be added to the translations section of English entries.

I had long time not contributed anything to Wiktionary as I was unsure to what extend can foreign languages be added. Note that English WT has very less Indic language content (only 14,000 Hindi entries and just 1,400 Malayalam entries) despite their respective language versions of WT have over hundred thousand entries. WT:Statistics. So, please clear out the inclusion criteria for non-English languages in the CFI and other policy pages. I wish that a WT:Foreign languages page will be created. Thank you! Vis M (talk) 22:43, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

The main blocker is the nominal policy that we shouldn't just include an alleged word because some other dictionary has the word. The other is that we need usable translations into English of these words. Strictly, for non-English words, we give translations rather than meanings, though I think a lot of editors go for meanings rather then translations. There's no policy reason why English Wiktionary shouldn't include most of those lemmas - the reason is shortage of labour. On the other hand, there can be policies excluding some very obvious inflections, as for English. --RichardW57 (talk) 05:49, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Ok, thank you very much! Vis M (talk) 00:24, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

The inclusion criteria for English are the same as for all other well-documented languages.__Gamren (talk) 23:32, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Multiple click policy for subordinate entry

There is a policy, though I don't know that it is documented, that the collection of meanings or translations for a word are kept at the main entry rather than duplicated across alternative forms or inflections. What, then, are the allowed uses of the gloss fields in many of the linking templates, such as {{inflection of}}, {{alternative form of}} and {{sa-sc}}, or indeed {{bor}}? --RichardW57 (talk) 05:35, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

One view, promulgated by Inqilābī, is that, "We provide the meaning in nonlemma entries only when there are multiple definitions in the entry", essentially that the purpose of these short glosses is to distinguish the lemmas. He's used this view to delete one of my brief gloss given for Pali သီလ (sīla, “habit”), which technically is a lemma, though some prefer to call it a soft redirect. (It actually stores script-specific information; by @AryamanA's rejection of the use of data-modules for word-specific information, irregular inflection can cause these subsidiary lemmas to involve a fair bit of work. Pali seems to have a host of irregularities.) --RichardW57 (talk) 05:35, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

I have been taking the view that these glosses can provide a one-stop service to the user who has temporarily forgotten the word; if he wants more meaning, he can click on, but if the reminder is enough, job done. So, may we attempt to be user-friendly by providing memory-jogging glosses? --RichardW57 (talk) 05:35, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

I also sometimes provide a brief gloss in non-lemma even when the lemma entry is unambiguous, especially if the main lemma is more than one click away (e.g. an alternative spelling of an inflected form or a mutation of an inflected form). —Mahāgaja · talk 15:08, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

User pages as self-contained lexicons

What do people think about User:Turkish Glossary of Untranslatable Expressions, and User:Términos de la psicología (earlier version User:Jimena rc)? While the subject matter is relevant to a dictionary, these are completely isolated from the rest of Wiktionary- none of these accounts have made any edits outside of their own user and user talk pages.

I'm probably going to delete the "psicologia" ones either way because the definitions are all in Spanish, but I think we need to discuss this- it's starting to look like a trend. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:19, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

I think they are in need of a kind of software for their vocabulary records, and are here because they have been conditioned to seek out a SaaSS. Fay Freak (talk) 02:24, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

This is an improper use of user names. As to the Turkish list: if attestable, why are these entries not simply terms/phrases in mainspace? (In fact, some are: (bacanak, cümbür cemaat, ellerine sağlık, kaçıncı, ulan/lan, üşenmek.) It is not at all unusual that some term has no direct equivalent in another language, or that some idiom does not make sense when translated word for word, or needs a usage note to explain when it can be used. The list has the appearance of having been copied from elsewhere, what with the remark “also seen in the photograph” while there is no photograph.  --Lambiam 17:13, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

My recent favourite "untranslatable" Spanish term is por el culo te la hinco. I was wondering how I'd translate that if it was in a film - probably have the character sing "Ah Ah Ah Ah Number Five Number Five" Beegees-style as a relatively humorous alternative. Indian subcontinent (talk) 20:52, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

...which probably explains why I'm not a film-script translator. Indian subcontinent (talk) 20:53, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

“In yer tewel I swive” Fay Freak (talk) 21:07, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

“In yo' mom's muff I dive” Indian subcontinent (talk) 22:54, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

English nouns lacking genitive form

The following pronouns have no genitive formː there & relative which. The following common nouns are not found with a genitive form eitherː umbrage, sake, dint, worth, behalf, lack, basis, extent, means, stead, shrift, spate, heed, & cusp. What's a good way to deal with this?--Brett (talk) 16:35, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Maybe I'm just dumb but how is umbrage any different from anger? I can't see how a possessive or genitive is acceptable for one but not the other. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:40, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

I don't see anything that need to be "dealt with", to be honest. Make a list in a subpage of your username, I guess Indian subcontinent (talk) 20:47, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Better corpuses? Better analysis? You ought to find that 'whose' does function as the possessive of 'which'. As a mathematician, I have no problem pondering a basis's cardinality. (It's in print as, "In fact, for any two vector spaces A and B, we can always find a vector space C, whose basis’s cardinality is big enough, such that A ⊕ C = B ⊕ C.") And googling quickly turned up, "Then we consider the case of unknown cusp's order and derive an adaptive wavelet estimator with the uniform rate slower only by a log n factor than the corresponding rate for known ffi." I also found, "Business Insider calculated that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made $160,000 per minute at his net worth's peak September 2018".

If such a lack were real and noteworthy, the 'Usage notes' seem a sensible place to mention such a lack. --RichardW57 (talk) 22:22, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

"the richness of sake's taste" FTW Indian subcontinent (talk) 22:59, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

That's just taunting. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:06, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

"If first extent's measurement in EAD = boxes, enter boxes in ASpace type." --RichardW57m (talk) 11:06, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

I suspect certain verb forms also happen not to have a 'genitive form', such as 'am'. Do clitic forms of verbs take the possessive clitic, or does it force the clitic to decliticise? This question seems to be more of an issue for a grammar rather than a dictionary. The clitic's realisation seems to be variable after 'is' and 'was', even amongst those who have mastered the apostrophe. (The question is whether the 'repeated morph constraint' gets applied.) --RichardW57m (talk) 11:06, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Template:P: for "pronunciation"

I asked for opinions on creating pronunciation usage templates back in March, but didn't receive any. Since then I've only created one ({{U:la:pron-dropvowel}}) because it rubs me the wrong way to create templates with monstruously long names. These result from the need to specify what type of usage template it is, for example. In my opinion the type is best distinguished by the capital-letter, and so I've just made {{P:la:4decl-neut}}, where P stands for "pronunciation". I'm not sure if Etymology needs its own letter, but no other sections that do come to mind, since the rest of the entry is basically treated as one section and the note generally appears under Usage notes. Do you think this is a good approach? Earlier-created pronunciation notes are often found in the Usage notes section, which I think is the wrong place for them, and I've been consistently putting them under Pronunciation. Brutal Russian (talk) 00:32, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

I'd go ahead and do it, and if it breaks anything someone will eventually realise. Also, don't worry about long names in templates - we have long-named stuff like Template:RQ:Chapman Mask of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn and Template:RQ:Denham On the Earl of Strafford's Tryal and Death Indian subcontinent (talk) 22:35, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Universal Code of Conduct News – Issue 1

Universal Code of Conduct News
Issue 1, June 2021Read the full newsletter

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Welcome to the first issue of Universal Code of Conduct News! This newsletter will help Wikimedians stay involved with the development of the new code, and will distribute relevant news, research, and upcoming events related to the UCoC.

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You can help us by translating the newsletter issues in your languages to spread the news and create awareness of the new conduct to keep our beloved community safe for all of us. Please add your name here if you want to be informed of the draft issue to translate beforehand. Your participation is valued and appreciated.

• Affiliate consultations – Wikimedia affiliates of all sizes and types were invited to participate in the UCoC affiliate consultation throughout March and April 2021. (continue reading)
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• Roundtable discussions – The UCoC facilitation team hosted two 90-minute-long public roundtable discussions in May 2021 to discuss UCoC key enforcement questions. More conversations are scheduled. (continue reading)
• Phase 2 drafting committee – The drafting committee for the phase 2 of the UCoC started their work on 12 May 2021. Read more about their work. (continue reading)
• Diff blogs – The UCoC facilitators wrote several blog posts based on interesting findings and insights from each community during local project consultation that took place in the 1st quarter of 2021. (continue reading)

placement of inline synonyms

Do inline synonyms/antonyms as specified using {{syn}}, {{ant}}, etc. go before or after usage examples? Benwing2 (talk) 01:39, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

Before, I think. Imetsia (talk) 02:19, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

It was left unregulated, I discovered shortly after the vote introducing them and you probably have read: But there one has argued for before. Which I now also prefer mostly because otherwise the quotes push away the semantic relations on expansion but you would like the synonyms and company near the definition to even understand the definition or you wonder where they went. Fay Freak (talk) 03:01, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

Given that almost everyone in that discussion wanted them placed before usage examples, and I agree, and WT:ELE agrees as well, I've changed the documentation of all inline *nyms to indicate that they go before usage examples. Benwing2 (talk) 04:23, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

Pinyin capitalization

@Justinrleung, Suzukaze-c, Tooironic, 沈澄心 Should the pinyin of the names of ethnic groups be capitalized here on Wiktionary? In 現代漢語詞典 they are capitalized even though they are classified as nouns. An example is Hànzú for 漢族. The same is true for 漢人, 漢語 and 漢字, but not 漢姓. RcAlex36 (talk) 11:25, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. I don't have an opinion on this matter. ---> Tooironic (talk) 11:33, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

Also @Frigoris, Bula Hailan. RcAlex36 (talk) 12:02, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

@RcAlex36 See this link 汉语拼音正字法基本规则, in section 6.3.2, the Pinyin transcription of 景頗族 is capitalized. Bula Hailan (talk) 12:10, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

I don't think 現代漢語詞典 has a separate label for proper nouns, but even so, I think these should be capitalized. — justin(r)leung _{{ (t...) | c=› }} 16:04, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

@Suzukaze-c, 沈澄心 Any opinion on this? RcAlex36 (talk) 05:28, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

I personally support capitalization but do not care if someone supports the opposite. —Suzukaze-c (talk) 05:31, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

With no editor opposing capitalization I will go ahead and capitalize the pinyin of words in question. RcAlex36 (talk) 09:24, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

@Atitarev made this change ([1]); I'm pinging that editor in case they have a comment. I don't have an opinion on it, but I will note that Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian has no capitalized pinyin forms, but Xiandai Hanyu Cidian does (as noted above). --Geographyinitiative (talk) 12:32, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Note section 6.3.3 in which the pinyin for 漢語 is written as Hànyǔ. Also, Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, being the primary prescriptive standard for Standard Chinese, should be considered more authoritative than Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian in my opinion. RcAlex36 (talk) 14:19, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

@RcAlex36: I failed to understand when to capitalize. 粤语 is transcribed as Yuèyǔ in 汉语拼音正字法基本规则 (2012) but yuèyǔ in Xiandai Hanyu Cidian (7th edition). --沈澄心✉ 09:10, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

Links to English should be preferred to links to page

WingerBot is making entries worse by changing {{l|en|a}} in definitions to [[a]]. The former is superior because it links to the intended definition, not to the top of a large page that happens to contain a definition. See Special:diff/62729111. Compare a to a. I have to scroll down 22 pages to reach the English section if I follow the page link. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 11:35, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure the first is superior, since it also uses Lua (which can be of significance in some pages). Also, the English section is always the first or second one on the page, so you can click it in the contents box. That said, I'm not sure machine-changing these is a good idea without consensus, since I can imagine some editors prefering the former style over the latter. pinging @Benwing2 Thadh (talk) 11:59, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

It may be tedious doing it by hand, but a bot should have no trouble using [[a#English|a]] to replace {{l|en|a}}. Chuck Entz (talk) 17:42, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

@Vox Sciurorum This has been discussed before and I think people were generally in favor of raw links for English. Generally this is how people enter the definitions anyway; it's annoying to enter templated links everywhere when creating definitions by hand (which is how it has to be done). The vast majority of pages for English words don't have large tables of contents at the top, and the English definition is almost always the top definition, so usually it's not an issue. If this is really an issue, we can use templated links only for the pages with large tables of contents. Furthermore, most of the time words like a aren't even linked in definitions; how many times do you need to check the definition of a word like this anyway? Benwing2 (talk) 18:01, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

I think plain wikilinks work in definitions, etymologies, etc, for Translingual terms as well, whether CJKV or taxonomic, except inside certain templates like those in the {{der}} family. DCDuring (talk) 18:32, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

Convert Italian noun plural forms to noun forms

Plurals are the only possible non-lemma forms of nouns in Italian, so there's really no point in having a category Category:Italian noun plural forms distinct from Category:Italian noun forms. For this reason, I plan to run a bot to convert all Italian 'noun plural forms' to plain 'noun forms' and remove the category Category:Italian noun plural forms. This would make Italian work like English and Spanish (which likewise have only plural non-lemma noun forms, which are placed in the 'noun forms' category directly). The same thing should be done in French. Benwing2 (talk) 01:31, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

Convert English proper noun plural forms to proper noun forms

Per above and Category talk:English noun plural forms § RFM discussion: March–May 2019. J3133 (talk) 01:45, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

How do we handle the interaction with the clitic -'s? In many ways, it still works like a case form. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:48, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

We only have a small handful of pages that are noun forms but not noun plural forms, and the change was already made for English; Italian doesn't have this issue. I support moving the Italian, French, and English proper noun categories. However there are still 179 categories in Category:Noun plural forms by language. Should they all be moved to "X noun forms" even if they have case systems? No one has complained so far about the 51,671 pages in Category:German noun forms versus the 174 in Category:German noun plural forms. Ultimateria (talk) 17:21, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

@Ultimateria I don't think there should be anything in Category:German noun plural forms. In general, "noun plural forms" doesn't really make sense for languages with case because there usually isn't a single plural noun form. German is a partial exception in that nouns with plurals in '-n' and '-s' have the same form for all cases, but I still don't see the point of a 'noun plural forms' category there. Benwing2 (talk) 04:03, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

@Ultimateria, Benwing2, J3133 It makes some sense when the plural has a separate stem, as most notably in Semitic languages. However, it is these stems that one would want to cpature. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:30, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

Dutch/Afrikaans noun plural forms

I'd like to make the same change to Dutch and Afrikaans noun plural forms. These languages are similar to English and Romance languages. Dutch does have some archaic case forms, but these are all segregated into CAT:Dutch noun case forms. Benwing2 (talk) 04:45, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Italian numbers as adjectives

It appears that all Italian cardinal numbers are listed as both numerals and adjectives. The way it seems to have gotten this way is that User:SemperBlotto made all Italian numbers be marked as both nouns and adjectives around 2008, and User:Ultimateria converted the nouns to numerals in 2020, leaving the adjectives. I don't believe "adjective" is a correct POS and am planning on deleting the adjective POS from all of the numbers. Benwing2 (talk) 00:57, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

By all means delete them. Ultimateria (talk) 01:14, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Agreed, although I wouldn't bother for some of the larger numbers. Many of the cardinal-number entries are in the process of being deleted outright (see the category talk page). So I don't think we should waste time first editing the categories for entries that will be deleted soon anyways. Although I do invite other admins to continue the work of deleting that large mass of cardinal numbers per our previous vote. Imetsia (talk) 01:21, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

numbers are considered adjectives in Italian though. Why would Adjective be wrong? Sartma (talk) 05:27, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Wikimania 2021: Individual Program Submissions

Dear all,

Wikimania 2021 will be hosted virtually for the first time in the event's 15-year history. Since there is no in-person host, the event is being organized by a diverse group of Wikimedia volunteers that form the Core Organizing Team (COT) for Wikimania 2021.

Event Program - Individuals or a group of individuals can submit their session proposals to be a part of the program. There will be translation support for sessions provided in a number of languages. See more information here.

Below are some links to guide you through;

• Program Submissions
• Session Submission Guidelines
• FAQ

Please note that the deadline for submission is 18th June 2021.

Announcements- To keep up to date with the developments around Wikimania, the COT sends out weekly updates. You can view them in the Announcement section here.

Office Hour - If you are left with questions, the COT will be hosting some office hours (in multiple languages), in multiple time-zones, to answer any programming questions that you might have. Details can be found here.

Best regards,

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:18, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

On behalf of Wikimania 2021 Core Organizing Team

Swedish common gender

Like the standard language, the swedish noun entries on wiktionary have two genders common/neuter. However, since almost every (traditional) dialect has the three masculine/feminine/neuter, it would be better to split the common gender template into something like c/f and c/m so both dialects and standard language would be accommodated equally in this aspect. There are also a few nouns that have different gender in different dialectareas. — This unsigned comment was added by ASkyr (talk • contribs) at 09:40, 18 June 2021 (UTC).

This is a good suggestion, and one that I myself have been thinking of making. There are still certain noun classes that have a strong connotation with feminine or masculine gender, for instance the nouns with -a in singular and -or in plural are historically feminine, and intuitively seen by natives as such, while the nouns with -e in singular and -ar in plural are likewise, but masculine.

Not to mention that the distinction between masculine and feminine was still largely existing in the written language of the 1600s and 1700s, which counts as Swedish and thus, being attested, should be included in the dictionary. I should add that SAOB, the Dictionary of the Swedish Academy, also lists nouns as "r. l. f." (common or feminine) and "r. l. m." (common or masculine), rather than only "r." (common) Mårtensås (talk) 18:58, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

I think this would be useful information, whether we put it in the headword line or at least in declension tables, and given what's been said above about how it's necessary for describing not only dialects but the early modern language, and how another major dictionary includes it, I'm inclined to include it. German entries sometimes mention a noun's varying gender in "dialects" via usage notes, but the number of Swedish nouns where this information would be applicable seems so high that it should go somewhere more "regular", like the headword line or declension table. (I suppose there may be some modern coinages/borrowings which don't have a traditional gender besides common, though, yeah?) - -sche (discuss) 21:16, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

I already added support for it so that it looks like how SAOB handles it, see jord (it reads like " jord c or f "). Mårtensås (talk) 12:06, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

{{bor+}} and {{inh+}}

Despite the failed vote, Creation of Template:inh+ and Template:bor+, @SodhakSH (and Brutal Russian) went ahead and created the templates {{bor+}} and {{inh+}}. They should be deleted and locked to prevent them from being recreated. @Metaknowledge, Thadh, Donnanz, Fenakhay, DannyS712, Fay Freak, -sche, Jberkel, Mahagaja --{{victar|talk}} 18:46, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

I agree, but this seems like a discussion for WT:RFDO, not the Beer Parlor. —Mahāgaja · talk 19:07, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

RFD created as well. --{{victar|talk}} 20:36, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

I think lengthy case presentings shouldn't be part of RFDs, so I'm going to give mine here, where it seems to be tolerated.

These templates' function is to make editing easier for a small number of editors (by name, mostly, but probably not exclusively, SodhakSH, Inqilābī and Brutal Russian), and arguably create a regular wording for etymology sections (although I, as well as others, dispute that). The necessity of the text that is now being displayed using these templates is very much disputed to a degree that a supermajority (13 to 5) has voted to abolish giving the text within the {{bor}} template. Of course, one could argue that adding the template {{bor+}} isn't contradictory to that vote, but seeing as the vote concerning adding bor+ also failed I wouldn't be so certain of that.

Some bring up the issue that AryamanA voted just past the time and thus failed to make the difference, but seeing as PUC was also going to vote oppose (mind you, an oppose vote is worth twice a support), the vote would have failed anyway.

Now, some have brought up that a new template's creation shouldn't need any vote, but I'd argue that since this template is one in a series of arguably most used templates (after {{head}}, {{l}} and {{m}}), any creation of a template that takes over a part of or even the whole function of {{bor}} or {{inh}} should get a vote, which it did in this case, and would have even without the initiative of the template's advocates.

So, to reiterate, the proposal to create these templates was turned down in a democratic process that is of the highest form we have. An RFD discussion is of no value, since it's not as important as a vote, and as such I, and anyone who agrees with me, plead to the administrators of this project to delete these templates, lock them and either create another vote (which I personally would find absurd, since we just finished this one, and we are currently not in the season where the majority of Wiktionary editors is regularly editing), or just ban the creation of such templates until a supermajority of Wiktionary editors actually agrees that this template should be created. I thank you for your time.@Victar, SodhakSH, Inqilābī, Brutal Russian, Mahagaja, Fenakhay, Imetsia, Benwing2, PUC, Lambiam, Andrew Sheedy, Bhagadatta, Chuck Entz Thadh (talk) 11:09, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

There’s no question of having them ‘deleted & locked’. From the vote it is clear that a supermajority was in favour of the templets, only Time kept the vote from officially passing. Many/Most of the supporters (and even an opposer, Metaknowledge) agree that this vote was not needed at all: and what’s more, especially because these are harmless templets with no differing functionality, they should be kept. As Lambiam rightly pointed out, we have lots of unnecessary templets but we keep em. Now, the reasoning that Canonicalization could have also cast his vote is not a whit a good justification for the claim that the vote would have anyway not passed, forasmuch as all editors were not aware of the vote, and if the vote were to be prolonged, more people would have cast their vote. Also, {{inh+}} & {{bor+}} are overlapping templets in the sense that they would only be used initially in the etymology section, but also generally and not always, depending upon the preference of the editor. It is in fact more democratic to have overlapping templets; to not let using them is authoritarian. All etymology templets (save {{com}}) not only produce the full wording but also have the keywords linked to Glossary, thus ’tis only natural that {{inh}} & {{bor}} should do likewise; but seeing as these two templets are used very often, two new templets had to be deviced (at first I was thinking of using parameters, but that idea was rejected owing to the perceived unwieldiness thereof, hence having the new templets is the best possible choice). Has any of the opposers a better solution to’t? ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 13:52, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

The difference between {{inh}}/{{bor}} and any other of the etymology templates is that "inherited", "borrowed" and "from" are pretty self-explanatory; calque, semantic loan and onomatopoeia not so much, and so the template provides the link, so that editors don't have to link to the glossary manually, and the readers don't have to know every lexicographical term to read the dictionary. For the two templates in question, it's simply not necessary, and the new templates don't even link to the glossary.

For what it's worth, it seems a little silly to have such a discussion over two templates, I give you that, but I think that templates that are used on a day-to-day basis in all languages in a certain way shouldn't be replaced by another template just like that, especially against a held vote. Also, about the supermajority: I have already adressed that, PUC said they would have voted against, making it again a non-supermajority. Thadh (talk) 14:30, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

No, they do, I already announced that before. I said that more people would have voted if the vote had lasted beyond a month, there would have been more supporters as well, please do not use Canonicalization as a distraction. In many language families, templets like {{lbor}} are used as often as {{bor}} & {{inh}}; so the needlessness of the etymological text is unjustified. Also, your claim that ‘The necessity of the text that is now being displayed using these templates is very much disputed to a degree that […] ’ is not any premise: during that time {{etyl}} reigned supreme, and people just wanted to have consistency in line with the few other existing/utilised templets. This time again, we are advocating consistency. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 15:00, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

The point is that we don't know what would have happened if the vote had lasted longer. Maybe people would have flocked to support it and it would have passed with flying colours, or maybe it would have failed miserably, or maybe the result would have been exactly the same: failing by a narrow margin. The same way that my non-casted vote is irrelevant, Aryaman's late vote is irrelevant. What matters is the actual result. So, by all means, make your case, but drop that argument, which weakens it. 212.224.224.150 15:12, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

You're right about the linking, I'm sorry, I vaguely remembered looking at the new templates and not seeing these, but it turns out I was wrong. I've slashed that comment. Thadh (talk) 15:41, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

@Thadh: I don't think you get it right when you say the utility of showing the text is disputed in the old vote. People voted to remove the text because it had to be constantly deleted using the parameter, because the templates are constantly used in other positions than line-initial, and this was cumbersome - not because the text was useless (ctrl+F only finds 1 'usef' and no 'util'). The two new templates have been created in order to make it less cumbersome to display full and unambiguous etymological statements line-initially, and because adding an optional parameter to {{inh}} and {{bor}} would have resulted in the same cumbersomness as the old vote had banished. Both votes were designed along the same goal of making life easier for everyone, and I find it difficult to understand the position of people who argue against making life easier on procedural grounds of a vote that didn't pass by 1 and that wasn't even required in the first place. This seems less like democracy and more like make-yourself-feel-good bureaucracy. I will also add that a precedent for these templates was already present as {{m+}}, which takes over the functionality of {{m}} and of very marginal utility indeed, albeit created full 4 years ago.—When you mention "a small number of editors", naming only three, are you doing it after having read through all the support votes? Brutal (talk) 00:01, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

@Brutal Russian: Not everyone that voted support is in favour of using these templates, they're - from my understanding - just not against the creation of the templates for the people that want to use them.

If showing the text wasn't the issue, then a creation of the parameter |t=1 would've done the trick, but the thing is that not everyone likes to write "Borrowed/Borrowing" (although I always do write it) before an etymology, and it seems like almost no-one wants to systematically put "Inherited from" before every inheritance. The vote has shifted a long time ago from "Should we actually create and use these specific templates?" to "Should everyone be able to create any template without a vote?". I personally believe that the creation of these templates will lead to the standardisation of their usage (since the community always strives to a unified style for as much as possible), and since I neither like them in action nor think them useful, I oppose this development.

For {{m+}} it's different, because the usage of the template is very marginal and mostly handy for the reason that some languages' names are just too darn difficult to remember (try typing out "Xârâcùù" or "Babine-Witsuwit'en" with a plain keyboard without copy-pasting in a casual mention), but I wouldn't be too sad if it were deleted because a majority of the community doesn't like it. Thadh (talk) 10:37, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

@Thadh: ‘Not everyone that voted support is in favour of using these templates, they're […] just not against the creation of the templates […] .’: That’s clearly a misrepresentation, just behold the support votes; what you said best describes the abstain votes. The issue with the vote was hardly the text in itself but the creation of new templets. The new templets would be very helpful for {{der}} cleanup: one would not have to see the wikitext or scroll down to the categories to check if {{inh}} or {{bor}} has been used. And the display of the keywords (they are linked to the glossary) is nothing wrong: all kinds of etymologies are equally significant. If you do not like the templets, do not use em, but please allow the templets’ backers to use them. Tolerance of harmless things is the best policy. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 11:44, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

You may still find it dangerous (healthwise) to 'clean up' "Inherited from {{der|pi|sa|...}}". There are quite a few words where there has been a morphological change between Sanskrit and Pali, but the relationship is not one of borrowing. --RichardW57m (talk) 15:38, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

@RichardW57: (1), (2). Nothing will be ‘dangerous’ as I am against a bot normalisation. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 11:59, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

@RichardW57: Could you explain your example? Is it appropriate that the template and category disagrees with the text? Which should be corrected to which, or how this should otherwise be resolved? Please give an actual example word or two if possible. Brutal Russian (talk) 19:52, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ I'm glad someone has noticed the clash between the wording and category. But we were assured above that everyone understands 'inherited'.

1. The example that set me thinking is the alleged inheritance of Pali candimā (“moon”) from Sanskrit चन्द्रमस् (candramas). Geiger sees the first components (candi- and candra-) as being different alternatives in the Caland system, so if the Pali descends from the Sanskrit form, there has been a morphological change. Given the characteristics of the Caland system, I'm now inclined to see the first element in Pali as more ancient, with a strong possibility of the Sanskrit form being the later formation, and reject the notion of the Pali form descending from the Sanskrit form, so this word might not actually be an example. If we ignore the discrepancy in the initial forms, we have the issue that apart from the nominative, the singular of the Pali word is now declined from the stem candima - it has been morphologically restructured to include a thematic vowel, rather than being a consonant stem. --RichardW57 (talk) 21:56, 26 June 2021 (UTC)
2. At first sight, a better example is the Pali doublet sumedha (“wise”) and sumedhasa, which are now thematic adjectives that Geiger derives from the consonant stem seen in Sanskrit सुमेधस् (sumedhas). The former Pali word is indistinguishable from a bahuvrihi on Pali medhā (“wisdom”), so is arguably a morphological restructuring, disqualifying the use of {{inh}}.
3. Another awkward case is the current etymology of Latin nurus - "From {{inh|la|itc-pro|*snuzos}}, from {{inh|la|ine-pro|*snusós}}". I'm not sure that the second 'inh' is valid in this sequence at all. The problem is that the Latin word is 4th declension, not 2nd declension. There's been some morphological restructuring there.
4. @Brutal Russian: A good example of arguable morphological change from Sanskrit to Pali is Pali ojā f from Sanskrit ओजस् n (ójas). --RichardW57m (talk) 13:09, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Categorization bot

I would like to create a bot to populate Category:English three-letter words (using the method outlined by User:Thryduulf) and Category:English terms with multiple etymologies (by checking for multiple etymology sections), and any other under-populated categories I find. Are these categories worth populating? Is there a better way to populate them than by using a bot?

I have experience with Python and from what I've seen I think I could make the bot using Pywikibot fairly easily. —TeragR ^disc./con. 02:01, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, this seems like it could be done relatively easily. Though I am no competent expert, I'd say populating the categories could well be worthwhile (there are all kinds of categories out there, after all, many of which have less utility than this proposal), and a bot would probably be the best way to do it. Moreover, this kind of edit should be minor and easy enough to achieve, right? Have you already begun working on it? Support your idea :) Kiril kovachev (talk) 16:42, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Yes, the edits would be simple and minor. I wanted to ensure there was consensus before writing the code, so I have not started that yet. —TeragR ^disc./con. 22:30, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Personally I don't think the categories are necessary, but I don't strongly oppose the idea. In other discussions, users have expressed concern about "category bloat", i.e., scrolling to the bottom of a page and seeing dozens and dozens of categories which make it hard to find what you're looking for. I'm surprised more active editors haven't responded here, but don't be surprised if you face some opposition after you start adding these categories. Ultimateria (talk) 01:25, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for mentioning that. IMO the difficulty in finding one category in a large block of categories sounds like a UI issue (though admittedly not one I'm volunteering to try to fix). I don't mind if consensus says the category is unuseful, but I would like to see it deleted in that case. —TeragR ^disc./con. 04:28, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

I'm surprised that "three-letter words" is manually populated, since it could be trivially added by {{head}} or the like (although I would also be wary of feature creep). —Suzukaze-c (talk) 02:43, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Good to know! In that case perhaps this is not a job for a bot (but rather for a template). —TeragR ^disc./con. 04:30, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

@TeragR User:Suzukaze-c is right, there is no point in using a bot to add categories like "N-letter words". Category:English terms with multiple etymologies is harder to do by template and involves an expensive operation (reading the page text), which isn't warranted on all English pages, although I'm not sure we'd want it auto-added by bot to all pages (that would require some consensus). Benwing2 (talk) 04:40, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Please provide input here or on Meta and during an upcoming Global Conversation on 26-27 June 2021 about the Movement Charter drafting committee

Hello, I'm one of the Movement Strategy and Governance facilitators working on community engagement for the Movement Charter initiative.

We're inviting input widely from users of many projects about the upcoming formation of the Movement Charter drafting committee. You can provide feedback here, at the central discussion on Meta, at other ongoing local conversations, and during a Global Conversation upcoming on 26 and 27 June 2021.

"The Movement Charter drafting committee is expected to work as a diverse and skilled team of about 15 members for several months. They should receive regular support from experts, regular community reviews, and opportunities for training and an allowance to offset costs. When the draft is completed, the committee will oversee a wide community ratification process." (Creating the drafting committee)

Further details and context about these questions is on Meta along with a recently-updated overview of the Movement Charter initiative. Feel free to ask questions, and add additional sub-sections as needed for other areas of interest about this topic.

If contributors are interested in participating in a call about these topics ahead of the Global Conversation on 26 and 27 June, please let me know. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 16:48, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

The three questions are:

1. What composition should the committee have in terms of movement roles, gender, regions, affiliations and other diversity factors?

2. What is the best process to select the committee members to form a competent and diverse team?

3. How much dedication is it reasonable to expect from committee members, in terms of hours per week and months of work?

Change "Korean Language Family" to "Koreanic Language Family"

As mentioned on the talk page Module talk:families/data a few months ago, in line with the current nomenclature, the canonical name of the language family that includes Korean, Jeju, and extinct languages from the Korean peninsula should be "Koreanic" and not "Korean." Glottolog, Wikipedia, Wikidata, recent literature & research, along with Wiktionary's own entry for Koreanic, list it as the title for the language family; thus, the change should be made officially in Module:families/data. AG202 (talk) 18:04, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Support--Tibidibi (talk) 13:59, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Pinging Korean editors. (Notifying TAKASUGI Shinji, Atitarev, HappyMidnight, Tibidibi, B2V22BHARAT, Quadmix77, Kaepoong, Omgtw15): — Fenakhay ^{(تكلم معاي · ما ساهمت)} 16:06, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Support, seems like there's no reason not to change this. Kiril kovachev (talk) 16:34, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Support — Omgtw15 (talk) 18:15, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Support: Koreanic is rare but established in the linguistic circle. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 02:31, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Pinging @幻光尘 since it was originally their suggestion in Module_talk:families/data that spurred this proposal here. Thank you! AG202 (talk) 07:48, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Not my area but having just had a little conversation with AG202: can this be implemented without a vote? Equinox ◑ 01:27, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

{{slim-wikipedia}}

I propose that only {{swp}} be used in dictionary entries to link to the corresponding Wikipedia page. Some editors do be converting instances of {{wp}} to {{pedia}}; but the problem therewith is that the latter templet is put beneath ===Further reading===: which is but a wrong practice! The heading is meant only for references (non-inline ones), while Wikipedia (or any other sister project) cannot technically be used as a reference. Therefor, {{pedia}} should be deprecated; and so should be {{wp}}, for it has fallen out of favour with many users. Thus, {{swp}} should be the only templet available for linking to encyclopedia articles. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 01:54, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Entry layout § Further reading (this was voted): “This section may be used to link to external dictionaries and encyclopedias, (for example, Wikipedia, or 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica) which may be available online or in print.” The claim it is wrong is a fallacy as you redefined it (“meant only for references”); rubbish from Inqilabi is not surprising. J3133 (talk) 02:43, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

I would further note that the following paragraph from there:

This section is not meant to prove the validity of what is being stated on the Wiktionary entries (the “References” section serves that purpose).

I have frequently put sources as to the gender of words under "References", though as I have been told (it felt more like an instruction) that 'we do not use inline references', I didn't even struggle to make the source of the gender explicit. It has annoyed me to see References changed to Further reading - I now learn that these changes were actually damage. --RichardW57 (talk) 13:51, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

I have personally never used {{swp}} and always use {{wp}}, and see it being used all the time, so I don't understand what you mean by it being "fallen out of favour". Thadh (talk) 11:17, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

@J3133: By encyclopedia I was referring to Wikipedia; WP cannot be used as a reference in dictionary entries, as it is only a sister project. That’s why we have the templets {{wp}} and {{swp}} to link to the WP page. (By the way, you can make personal attacks at me, but try to spell my name aright.) ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 14:45, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

@RichardW57: ===Reference=== is used only for inline sources, whilst ===Further reading=== for non-inline sources. Otherwise both are the same. (See this entry for an example of an approximate use of the headings.) ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 14:45, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

@Thadh: I myself have used* both {{wp}} and {{swp}}, but as I said, it has fallen out of favour with some editors (not I) as you saw in the diff. [* But lately I have been using only the slimmer version because some editors do be substituting {{wp}} with {{pedia}} (which I see as counterproductive).] ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 14:45, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

“WP cannot be used as a reference”: try to read again, “Further reading” is “not meant to prove the validity of what is being stated on the Wiktionary entries (the “References” section serves that purpose)” (thus “References” and “Further reading” are not “the same”). Also that was a note of you making your own rules (as when you thought you can add new templates and new parameters and insisted no one can delete them, as was proved otherwise, before your ad hominems). “It has fallen out of favour with some editors”: Irrelevant, as {{wp}} is used by more editors, thus the opposite can be argued. J3133 (talk) 14:48, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Here is point 5 (which passed) of the vote (Wiktionary:Votes/2016-12/"References" and "External sources") that implemented the difference between “References” and “Further reading” (then “External sources”, later renamed) before the naive Inqilabi^[sic] makes a fool of himself:

“Allowing the usage of "External sources" only in cases where other dictionaries and encyclopedias (including Wikipedia) are listed as suggestions of places to look, without serving as proof for specific statements in the entry.”

Wikipedia is explicitly mentioned as being allowed. J3133 (talk) 15:07, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

But in reality no one has objected to @Jberkel and others’ continual substitution of {{wp}} with {{pedia}} (I for one definitely think it’s counterproductive). You mostly edit English entries, so you may not be aware of the actual usage of ===References=== & ===Further reading===. And the vote mentions Wikipedia only because {{pedia}} was formerly used beneath ===External sources===; after this heading was renamed to ===Further reading===, the vote was not officially updated, but per our prevalent practice, WP cannot be used beneath ===Further reading===. (Note that our English entries, being the oldest ones here, are the least updated.) ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 15:18, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

“per our prevalent practice, WP cannot be used beneath ===Further reading===”: You mean your practice, as this is not our practice for most of us. Others do not support this new practice you and presumably some others use (and thus this proposal will likely fail). J3133 (talk) 15:20, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

New iOS app based on Wiktionary - Vedaist

Hello! I wanted to introduce a new iOS English dictionary app that is based on Wiktionary data. Please check http://www.vedaist.com/ if you're interested. I currently show a very minimal meaning of a word. Noun, verb, adjective or adverb sections for English meanings are shown. Over time I'll be adding more features.

I wanted to acknowledge the great work all of you have put into building Wiktionary, and making it possible for me to build on top of your work. If there is any feedback for me, please reach out. Thanks! — This unsigned comment was added by Toucanvs (talk • contribs) at 08:31, 20 June 2021 (UTC).

Shouldn't you acknowledge Wiktionary on the app pages, to conform to the CC BY-SA 3.0 License?  --Lambiam 11:29, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

I have an acknowledgement in the Settings > Dictionary section with license information there. Or did you mean something else @Lambiam. Toucanvs (talk) 00:18, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

@Lambiam the latest version of the app now credits wiktionary and has a cc license link on each word page. Toucanvs (talk) 10:59, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

ps, thanks for pointing this out @Lambiam. I think the current version I have meets the CC license requirements. The text is "Dictionary content from Wiktionary under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license" Toucanvs (talk) 11:13, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

I think that will do, but is it possible to hyperlink to the precise license, e.g. as follows: "Dictionary content from Wiktionary released under the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License</a>">?  --Lambiam 12:30, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Oh yes. That's been done. Both Wiktionary and the CC license are links. Toucanvs (talk) 12:58, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

I don't have iOS, so I can't give much feedback on that front, but indeed, it would be good to credit the Wiktionary authors for your uses. ^^ I am a big fan of the adless, trackerless paradigm, though, so I hope that's something you'll never change :) Kiril kovachev (talk) 16:31, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

@Kiril kovachev I updated the attribution to be per entry in addition to the settings. See the 3rd screenshot in https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vedaist-english-dictionary/id1572821331.

I would like to add user based features that would require login in the future, but that's different from tracking for ads. Toucanvs (talk) 11:05, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

@Toucanvs Looks good to me, good luck with your development! ^^

@Toucanvs: please add it to Wiktionary:Wiktionary-supported software (don't mind the deletion notice). – Jberkel 06:50, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

done @Jberkel Toucanvs (talk) 00:18, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

General question to all editors: how would your ideal attribution look like? As an example, when exporting a text from Wikisource, the generated document contain a list of contributors ordered by edits. – Jberkel 09:52, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

@Jberkel have a look at my replies on this thread for the changed attribution per entry. Toucanvs (talk) 11:10, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Yes, but that's the bare minimum, hence my asking what an "ideal" attribution could look like. – Jberkel 13:47, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Request for bot consensus

Hello, I have recently been in the process of developing a bot for the purposes of auto-generating derived form entries based on Bulgarian noun conjugation tables. To put it simply: the bot fishes for declension tables across all noun lemmas fed to it, takes note of what derived forms come from what lemmas, and creates definitions based on that data. Once generated, the definitions are either appended to existing entries, as long as they don't already have a Bulgarian section, or a new page is created containing the entry it just generated.

The edits I have already made under my own account using the bot can be viewed here: diff, diff, diff, diff, diff

(apologies, I don't know how to link these properly)

My GitHub repository is linked here - if you have Python knowledge, please run through if you're interested and see if you can spot any bugs. There are a few other resources in there, such as one to help to understand the program more clearly, and some sample output data to show what the edits the bot's making would look like. There are also instructions as to how to run the bot yourself if you wanna trial it out and look for problems.

I additionally wrote a few paragraphs describing the method on my bot's user page, which, if you have any objections to, please let me know once again. If all goes well, I'll post a vote to get the bot approved sometime soon.

If you have any questions or doubts, please ask me for answers, and I will do my best to respond well. One final thing - understandably, few people on here, if any, will have experience with both the Bulgarian language and Python, so - if no one cares, I'll just apply to votes within a few days. However, if there does happen to be anyone interested who could audit for any mistakes, I would be highly grateful for your help. Thanks for reading!

Kiril kovachev (talk) 16:28, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

@Kiril kovachev: I fixed your links for you. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:49, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz Thanks ^^ Kiril kovachev (talk) 17:07, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

I don't like new pages being created when there's no evidence that the word has existed in any language. Some inflected forms are best left hiding in the inflection tables. --RichardW57 (talk) 18:50, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

@RichardW57 Surely there's warrant enough in the fact that those forms theoretically can exist? If the lemmas exist in the first place, then the declension tables only show a specific use case of the word. I can guarantee you that if anyone's using the lemma, then they're surely also using the definite form (effectively the word "the"), or the plural form, or whatever. Admittedly, I have no way of gathering evidence for each form as to whether it 'exists' in the wild or not, but declension tables are created with the fact that not all words have a "vocative" or a "plural" in mind, so it won't be creating any purely theoretical forms. Though it makes no sense for completely ordinary words not to have an attested plural, no? The editors that created those tables exclude forms that are obviously non-existent by using the template.

@Kiril kovachev That should work for words that the authors know from their own experience, but I do note that телефон (telefon) is given as an example of a word without a vocative, only to find that its declension table gives it one.--RichardW57m (talk) 12:35, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

The rationale for having declined form entries at all is that it helps readers of a language discover a lemma without necessarily knowing how words in a language conjugate. They can look up an inflected form and wind up on the lemma straight away like that. I felt inspired to make this, by the way, because of Latin declension tables. Check out zodiacus, for example - surely you don't mean to tell me all of these forms have been individually sourced? Kiril kovachev (talk) 16:56, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

A great many Latin word forms actually have quotes. However, I do think that Latin forms are overdone, and to some extent are counter-productive. If one looks up an inflected form, and there is no entry for it, one may yet find it by looking for a word that links to it or even doing a complete text search. However, if languages A and B have it as an inflected form, and language A has had the equivalent of your bot run, but language B has not, one will be directed to the word in language A. This provokes an unproductive race between languages to create entries for their inflected forms. --RichardW57m (talk) 12:35, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Incidentally, does your bot handle the case of an inflected form being an inflected form of two different Bulgarian lemmas? --RichardW57m (talk) 12:35, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

@RichardW57m Now that you mention it, incidentally not really. As I wrote on the bot's userpage, the bot can trace multiple inflected forms from some given lemma, like if there are multiple senses of the same spelling of a word, but you're quite right in saying it wouldn't account for a totally different lemma declining in the same way as an existing one. It's not beyond implementation, but... would that case come up particularly often? I can't think of any cases off the top of my head where different words happen to decline to the same form like that - though I won't deny that's an oversight on my part. Do you know of any examples?

@Kiril kovachev I don't know Bulgarian, so even a single example is hard work. But, with a little effort, I see that the numerical plural of кос (kos, “blackbird”) is the same as the singular of коса (kosa, “scythe”). I noted a similar problem with the perfects of Latin circumsto and circumsisto. The bot creating entries for the perfect tenses didn't handle their sharing the perfect circumsteti. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:10, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

@RichardW57m I suppose this case isn't too much of a problem, since the behaviour of the bot would be to skip that inflection. There may still be problems on that front though, like that some inflections would only be generated for one of two different lemmas, but I believe that would also not be much of a concern. If some are left uncreated, they can be manually added. Still the problem that they could go unnoticed, I suppose.

As for your point on Latin being oversaturated with forms, I understand that is a very sensible concern. Before making this bot, I hadn't considered what effect that would have on users searching for other languages, nor perhaps the bloat it would generate across the wiki. Nevertheless, I find the convenience of being able to locate a term you're looking for directly rather than having to identify words that link to it a great utility. I would argue that the ease of simply entering a term and being directed to an entry linking to the lemma you're seeking is much more utilitarian than needing to scan through the search results or engage a full-text search. Perhaps it's just for me, but I find that navigating the search results and waiting for dead load-times to be the more arduous part of using Wiktionary. Maybe a minor gripe, but this is part of my motivation why I feel these would help.

Also, though it's correct to say this kind of editing can certainly start an 'arms race', if you will, I wouldn't call it unconstructive, personally: at any rate, it's adding to the dictionary's function at least somewhat, whilst equally not detracting from users-of-other-languages' ability to search in their own. That users may find a different language's entry when searching for their own is unfortunate, but wouldn't that incentivise more of such entries to be created for those languages, too? Rather than a race, wouldn't that make up healthy 'competition' instead? It would be nice to hear more people's opinions from the community about this other than just our own. If it's really the case that people don't want all these pages to be inundated with inflected forms, it isn't a big deal to scrap that idea, but I just thought it would be a constructive direction to go down. I was under the impression that Latin declined form entries were quite helpful.

I do occasionally worry about the sheer flooding of the system. With Pali, we have some significant degree of automated support for 14 writing systems across 10 scripts. A regular masculine noun of the commonest declension has 16 case and number forms, so that's 224 forms. (Inflection isn't yet supported for two of those systems - I want to see evidence for them first, but there are another two writing systems that depend on manual support, and there are several other writing systems or variants that need a small amount of manual support.) Waiting to take off, there's Sanskrit with thirty odd scripts and its large inflection tables, though at present only nominal inflection in Devanagari is productive. (I think it should also support significant sandhi variants.) When checking that Pali inflection tables direct only to Pali entries, I frequently find that the Roman script masculine/neuter genitive/dative singular points to a Finnish inessive. Of course, Swahili verbs do quite well with just a single script. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:10, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

14 writing systems! Out of interest, just what are the 4 not listed on Wiktionary:About Pali? In a similar vein to Pali entry flooding, though, Bulgarian nouns in particular can have at most 9 inflections (with vocative - 7 without), whilst most have between 5 and 7 (masculine 7-9, feminine/neuter 5-7). In comparison, it's not nearly as bad... but for a large number of entries, admittedly still a big footprint.

It lists 10 scripts, not 10 writing systems. The Thai script has two writing systems, one with implicit vowels (thus an abugida in Daniels' terminology) and one where the historical vowels are always explicit (thus an alphabet in Daniels' terminology). Both systems are alphasyllabaries in Bright's terminology. Both of these two writing systems are fully supported. Lao uses three quite different consonant complements - that of Lao, same again with nuktas, and the full set of consonants as extended by the Buddhist Institute. All three are used as alphabets, and the last one is also used as an abugida. Only the two systems using the extended range of consonants is fully automated, but inflection is also automated for the system with nuktas. For the most restricted set, the inflection of masculine and neuter nouns needs manual tuning. There is effectively an eleventh script, the Shan script. (Formally, it is part of the Burmese script.) That comes in two flavours - one with stacked consonant clusters and one where a vowel killer symbol is used. We generate both for lists of alternative spellings, but inflection tables are not yet generated for them.--RichardW57 (talk) 01:06, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

And, insofar as authors' entering the declension tables with maybe-dubious forms... that is another flaw, to be honest. I was planning, however, on using this bot in perhaps a different way than usual, i.e. looking at its output for each entry, at least for several hundred generations, to make sure that it's working as intended, before allowing it to make an edit. That would solve the problem of there being any bugs in the code, as well as correcting any questionable inflections like you mentioned. Maybe this would be more satisfactory? Sorry for the wall. Kiril kovachev (talk) 19:12, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Well, 'telephone' does have a vocative role in English, as in "Telephone, don't ring. I'm busy". Bulgarian may be different.

Theoretically it can happily exist in Bulgarian too, but one of the only dictionaries online refutes it. Kiril kovachev (talk) 20:29, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Support. The code looks well documented, but I have too little experience with Pywikibot to meaningfully review it. —TeragR ^disc./con. 18:42, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

Pacifying User:The Nicodene

quarrel

This started when I fixed the entry capus that was a mix of mainspace Latin and Reconstructed, and that this user had edited under a fundamental misconception of how wiktionary entries operate. This user chose to conduct a discussion via an edit war and aggressively dismissive comments to their reverts. I started a discussion which I was forced to abandon when their replies turned into accusations, rudeness and rants in reply to what an imaginary me inside their head said to them. —Then the same repeated for fōrmāticus. This time they supplied the Latin entry with an Old French pronunciation, changed the etymology in contradiction to all the etymological references, and even redirected the attested variant form as if it wasn't attested. They replaced a conjecture that the word represents an ellipsis, suppored by numerous references (#1, #2, #3) as if it was pure nonsense. They further replaced "Gaul" with "France" on the grounds that its "entirely anachronistic" because of a single period gloss. I again took this to a discussion. In it the user show their lack of understanding of historical linguistics, including but not limited to the difference between date of attestation and date origination, and conflating attested evidence and conjectured forms as if they had the same strength; the concept of anachronism in adducing a single period gloss in order to condemn modern usage anachronistic, and in appealing to nothing but the linguistic intuition of medieval Franks to define what is and isn't Latin even when specifically warned agains doing so, because they're forced to in order to avoid admitting that they have no familiarity with the modern linguistic side of the question. As well as lack of knowledge of history and of any awareness of the socio-political implications that Francia and other words used to describe these territories is/was fraught with (#1, #2; finally only a complete ignornace of the fact that the word Gallia continued to be used throughout the Middle Ages and even up to today (Gallomania, Gallo-Romance etc) can explain the categorical statements that it's anachronistic for the period. —Now I'm perfectly aware how petty and ridiculous these matters are, and it's all the more frustrating to me something like this regularly results in a shit-storm when interacting with this user. The reason for these squabbles is obvious to me. The user in question is in the habit of making rash edits and statements, and they have an extremely vulnerable ego. This creates an unfortunate feedback loop of constantly being open to criticism that they can't take, and of having to hide their own droppings. For example, here they they directly accuse me of ignornace - spoiling the well - for revealing to them information they were ignorant of, and when they realise their folly they try to remove my replies: #1, #2. The same combination of ignorance and lack of foresight can be seen in the amusing quip "Romanistics isn't even the name of the field" - in fact, is exactly the same thing as with Gallia and cāseus, only in the latter cases the quip is effected by editing the page, and protests are countered with a shit-storm over nothing and an edit war. This user is a core example of the "argument is war" metaphor run out of control and into pathology. He's reasonably informed, but in his world-view "knowledge is ammunition", and he uses it to demolish the enemy's "arguments are soldiers". This person equates his own ego to the country being defended, and his persona to the commander in chief, and so the very act of challenging him is perceived to be aggression. This is that unfortunate cases where the more the person knows, the worse they are to interact with. The ego in question is highly vulnerable and I have good reasons to believe is highly narcissistic - something they themselves realise. It is also highly inflated due to overestimating the degree of their knowledge. The net result of the above is that they see people who possess enough knowledge to question their own conclusions and undermine their imaginary authority as highly threatening and need to be proactively destroyed, humiliated and otherwise neutralised before they're able to deal damage to the vulnerable ego; and if the ego has suffered for whatever reason, revenge is exacted on the culprit. I've had quite a bit of experience dealing with and circumventing the "argument is war" metaphor, and I have enough of an understanding of the narcissist's mindest to be confident in my observations. Their impulsiveness is exemplified by their editing habits which are disruptive to the website. In conversation this same emotional instability surfaces in knee-jerk spiteful replies followed by several hours of editing, often so that by the time you reply they'll have changed half of it. Take notice of the timestamps, as well as here from June 2 - this person's brain locks in a 9 hour-long pathological obsessive feedback loop and by the end of it is so fried that they cannot tell whether they're replying to your actual words, or to a strawmen figure of you. This obviously makes a conversation difficult if not impossible. Another part of this is replacing offensive words with a set of less offensive expressions that are still clearly fighting words. For example, when you read "mildly absurd", understand "moronic". This is often combined with externalising misattribution: "you vehemently deny" means "I'm furious about the fact that you deny", and "apopletic rage" means they're currently experiencing just that (this expression they changed three times). They went on to continually fixate on me confusing the names of two languages (Breton and Welsh) with no relevant consequences - they were annoyed that I wouldn't verbally admit that I confused them - and further to attribute to me a ridiculous strawman position (#1, #2) to argue against while completely ignoring my protests that this isn't my position, if not being further incited by them. This was done as a thought-blocker designed to prevent understanding what I'm saying, which was that the word's form presents no evidence to the time of borrowing. And the nature of their last edits can be perfectly described by the expression "apopletic rage" and an all-out assault on my person, calling me a beginner in Romance linguistics and trying to discourage me from ever disagreeing or challeninging them ever again, in fact threatening to humiliate me if I do. Overall, to me they seem to possess enough knowledge to reach correct conclusions, but not to possess enough humility to continually question their intermediate conclusions or even suspend them. Indeed, they possess the opposite trait that encourages them to hang onto their intermediate conclusions with utmost conviction and to dismiss anybody questioning them as both ignorant and an aggressor. Their behaviour of correcting themselves 30 times in a row is a manifestation of the same pattern as that which forces them to impulsively "correct" others - I know because I suffer from a milder variant of the same thought pattern. The difference in the outcome seems to be rooted in my constant self-doubt, factual self-checking and a much higher associated standard of certainty. And of course, my ego can take a far bigger beating. — My only other previous interaction with this user on this website also ended badly, although the start was promising of a fruitful exchange. Unfortunately I quickly understood that their purpose was to disrupt and win points against me. They tried to argue that the existence of one allophone justifies not phonetically transcribing allphony as a whole for a singular case where we have overt descriptions of Latin allophony by native speakers. Towards the end of it they resorted to using the fact that a rare, impressionistic, essentially phonemic and phonetically vacuous IPA symbol [l͈] for the "fortis L" can barely be found in some linguistics handbooks should be interpreted as it being appropriate to use this symbol in an actual phonetic transcription of a dead language which hasn't been shown to possess fortis/lenis consonants even phonemically; as well as to misinterpreting a super-detailed table because its author unfortunately chose to call an 'unspecified for backness' non-velarised L - IPA [l] - "dark", with a palatalised one to the left and full two further degrees of velarisation to the right, the proper IPA [ɫ] being called "darkest". They claimed that the author calling it "dark" overrules the author's actual articulatory description and entire discussion, and the fact the author chose to use a non-IPA diacritic to mark the vowel quality associated with it ([o]) was claimed to be incompatible with simply transcribing it as IPA [l], which stands for the non-velarised (neither palatalised) lateral approximant, is therefore wrong and therefore this user is right and has won and why won't I admit it already by submitting to their reverts. This user uses references as binary crutches that either justify or disprove everything or nothing because they lack the tools to comprehend the matter in evidential terms and use the references to update their degree of certainty. From what I've seen they lack proper awareness of the distinction between phonological and narrow phonetic transcription. They tried "disproving" the detailed phonological study (and several specialised references) I provided in support of my transcription by citing a 3-line unsourced note on the matter in Sihler 1995's comparative grammar. This is bad enough, but the main reason I chose not to continue that discussion was because they became visibly pissed off ("brazenly denied", "recant your vehement rants") at their own inability to argue coherently and my ability to do so, and because they had clearly revealed their squabbling winner-loser mentality instead of that of a mutual search for truth, and so any willingness for a civil discussion was clearly gone. I also left their reverts in place. — In a following act of aggression in Module:la-pronunc, they replaced my Campanian reconstruction of a historical pronunciation with their Russell's teapot, which is another variation on what my reconstruction had replaced after several prior discussions. They did this despite being aware of at least some these discussions and participating in them under the name Excelsius, and despite knowing that I've been editing the module in a different direction. Again, they feel that having condenced a number of works into a wikipedia article justifies this behaviour - "I have the references, you lose". I don't object to having a purely phonemic proto-Romance reconstruction (lend a hand if you can), but a phonetic proto-Romance reconstruction makes even less sense than phonetic Old or Middle English. They argue that proto-Romance represents a concrete spoken prestiege variety that was common to everywhere; they believe it to have been significantly later than Classical Latin. Yet those reconstructions that use Sardinian evidence to reconstruct proto-Romance, as I understand it, are forced to postulate the break-up of the PRmc. unity no later than the 3d (preferrably 2nd) century CE, which is to say it's post-Augustan Latin, but comparatively reconstructed; and the phonological difference between attested Classical Latin and the reconstructions are of the same nature as syntactic differences (the future tense or the full system of cases cannot be reconstructed). I see no way to postulate a prestige language variety common to the whole of the empire but dating to the 5th century, for example, and nor have I seen it postulated. The loss of Dacia in the 3d century alone precludes this, with Rumanian being intermediate between Sardinian and the rest in its conservativsm. This paradox - that what you get comparatively isn't what you see attested and thoroughly described by language standardizers - has been known for as long as the Romanistics has existed but is felt especially sharply today (Wright R. in Clackson J. 2011 p.64). It's understood comapartive evidence needs to be synthesized with attested Latin to arrive at likely reality, and this is what my Campanian transcription aims to do; this user mistakes pure reconstruction for a complete linguistic system that actually existed, a claim that most Romanists don't subscribe to. In essence it's an offshoot of Vulgar Latin, which was nebulous enough but at least inextricably linked with written attestations; the reconstruction they use is an excercise in purely comparative reconstruction and makes no claim at being a language in the sense of a sociolinguistic system, even less so at having a single supra-regional standard phonology that they're attempting to imbue it with. In any case I'm sure I could have worked out these differences with a reasonable person - there are many things that could be fruitfully discussed. But this person is not reasonable, and is not interested in working out differences. They're interested in winning and in humiliating me personally. They take rash one-sided initiative in completely undoing other people's work, and they take being challenged on it as personal offense. They will edit-war you in an attempt to defeat you, to have you give up. I'm a relatively chill person averse to conflict, and so you'll notice that in every single one of those instances I simply bail out of the discussion when I see that reason and civility no longer reigns supreme (although sometimes I do loiter too long). But I cannot do this continuously because this user interprets this as a victory and they proceed to do whatever they like. The other options are to continue feeding oxygen to the fire, which is stupid, or to silently edit-war them, which is wrong. Therefore it seems to me the optimal solution is to simply ban them. To summarize, never before have I been in conflict with anyone at all on this website, and I enjoy it for this reason among others. I don't ever participate in website drama, here or elsewhere. I do seem to be able to magically pop over-inflated egos with a few words, but most of the time I only slightly prick them to achieve silent deflation. This is because I highly value open-mindendess, civility and consensus as conductive to the acquisition of knowledge, something which an inflated narcissistic ego opposes by nature, being a priori right. For a full disclosure, I might have ended popping this person's ego 3 years ago or so when they stormed into our chatroom fresh from a notorious edgy meme- and teenager-infested place and tried to bring that attitude with them. It might have rendered them permanently jarred ever since: first they've tried trolling me into another conflict (the "go Skype" revenge tactic) before reappearing under several different aliases, all with the same result - roughly how this went can be gleaned from the pronunciation discussion referenced above (the last time I interacted with them anywhere must have been close to a year ago). I say nothing offensive, but merely show them that their pretences at being a Romance language authority are unfounded, and a wiser person would have learned humility from this, but at some level of volatile narcissism this seems to be ruled out. I don't hold grudges and have genuinely attempted to resolve disagreements with this user and show them where their reasoning was flawed. What I got in response was immediate aggression, deeply-rooted bad faith and general verbal military action - fully conscious, as his repeated abusive narcissist's clichés of "you made me do it" and "you started first" testify - until I too dropped any attempts to assume good faith. At the end of that discussion they've clearly demonstrated that they aren't interested in calm and reasoned discussions, that they don't even consider me worthy of being listened to, and to but it bluntly that they're emotionally disturbed. Personally speaking, engaging with them feels like being attacked by a rabid canine. If I seem like a reasonable person to you, if you don't believe I'm simply delusional, I would ask the admins to consider taking some action to prevent The Nicodene from causing further strife on this website. If I know anything about appropriate human conduct (and Wikipedia Etiquette), I believe their combination of traits results in unique toxicity that is detrimental to this website as well as to the atmosphere on it. Mentioning @-sche, Mahagaja, Imetsia, Metaknowledge as admins I've recently interacted with - hopefully this is appropriate. It's taken me a while to decide to write this because I don't believe in heavy-handed moderation and would hate to be seen as settling a personal matter via that route, but I don't see another choice. Brutal Russian (talk) 17:25, 20 June 2021 (UTC) I am a user given to writing long comments. I have to try to be more concise. I want to reach out and suggest to you that you that a comment of this length is not consistent with the mission of a volunteer dictionary website. The very length of the comment is 'detrimental to the atmosphere' of the website. That's my comment and suggestion. Thanks for your time. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 18:29, 20 June 2021 (UTC) Imagine what it's like being the one to have to reply and address all parts of it. Gets exhausting, frankly. The Nicodene (talk) 18:32, 20 June 2021 (UTC) Nitpick: Doesn't Daco-Romance come from Moesia? --RichardW57 (talk) 18:40, 20 June 2021 (UTC) Yes that is one of many issues with the above. It is assumed that Romanian must have originated north of the Danube even though there exists a considerable body of evidence to the contrary. Even if it had, though, that does not mean that linguistic contact between the ancestors of the Romanians and other Latin speakers had to cease the moment that Aurelian abandoned the province: the Danube is not going to prevent ongoing trade, proselytism, etc. The collapse of Roman rule throughout the interior of the Balkans in the early seventh century, in the face of the Slavic-Avar invasion, appears to be the turning point. The Nicodene (talk) 18:53, 20 June 2021 (UTC) @RichardW57: I'm not informed on that question, although I'm currently reading something that mentions it, at it looks to be a distinct possibility. I'm very cursorily familiar with Rumanian. If I decided to take Geographyinitiative's advice, I might have substituted that whole part with: "Hadrian (76–138 CE) is reported to have had a Spanish accent and Septimius Severus (145–211 CE) a distinct African accent (his sister couldn't even speak Latin so was sent away from Rome as a disgraziata). Clearly no supra-regional prestige proto-Romance phonology gave rise to Ibero-Romance, nor to African Romance. Augustine was mocked for his accent when in Italy, presumably in early 5th century Milan, to no surprise of mine. One possibility is that somewhere between the early 5th century and the break up of the empire, a supra-regional prestige proto-Romance phonology took root across the whole of the empire. The other is that there never existed a supra-regional prestige phonology save for the upper-class Roman speech of the 1st century BCE, aka Classical Latin." Russell's teapot continues to elude us. Brutal Russian (talk) 19:58, 20 June 2021 (UTC) It is rather that by the fifth century at least two clear regional differences had developed in the pronunciation of Latin, as demonstrated by Adams (namely the extent of betacism and treatment of the original Latin /ĭ/). That much is not controversial. The phonological system reconstructed by modern scholarship (and labelled as 'Proto-Romance') existed prior to that. The Nicodene (talk) 20:27, 20 June 2021 (UTC) Septimius Severus lived in the 2nd century and had an African accent. Hadrian had a Spanish accent in the first century even despite being from a patrician Roman family settled in Iberia shortly after Scipio Africanus' conquest of Italica (206 BCE). There already existed a distinct Spanish Latin in the 1st century CE, and nothing seems to show that it ever went away. The sociolinguistic situation in the Roman empire seems to have been highly complex at every single point in time, and this clashes with notion of a single supra-regional Late Latin/proto-Romance in much the same way it clashes with traditional Vulgar Latin. Brutal Russian (talk) 21:35, 20 June 2021 (UTC) Variation in regional accents certainly existed at all periods, as in any sufficiently widespread language, including in the Classical period. That does not prevent linguists from reconstructing a relatively 'Late' pronunciation any more than it prevents them from reconstructing a coherent Classical pronunciation, which you have never once questioned. Note that the pronunciation of Rome was prestigious in the Late period, as Adams (2008: chapter III § 1.2) demonstrates, just as it had been in Classical times. The same author also debunks claims of an early distinctive 'Spanish Latin' (pp. 370–431), among numerous other topics relevant to this discussion. The Nicodene (talk) 23:08, 20 June 2021 (UTC) @The Nicodene: The volatile narcissist is lying as usual. Adams debunks no such thing. There's a whole section with testimonies on "an identifiable Spanish accent" as well as vocabulary . It's only possible to disprove these testimonies by demonstrating that they're not authentic; disproving bronze tables from the 2nd c. CE would prove even more difficult, and the volatile narcissist will not succeed in recruiting Adams as a useful idiot to do their narcissistic bidding. There is no question that there existed a regional Spanish variety of Latin, complete with its own phonology, vocabulary and surely other differences as well that have left few if any attested traces. As the volatile narcissist themselves admit before getting entangled in their own lies, variation certainly existed at all periods. The raving narcissist has not shown me any linguists that claim a universal Late pronunciation. The Classical pronunciation was not universal by any means, but it has a time and place where it existed. If you spoke in the high-class Roman accent anywhere in the Empire, it would have commanded prestige. No such time or place has been demonstrated for the renamed Vulgar Latin that the volatile narcissist is attempting to promulgate. When the volatile narcissist appeals to Classical Latin to justify their folly, they're appealing to a registered satellite to claim the existence of Russell's teapot. The whole idea of proto-Romance is precisely the opposite of a local, let alone presitigious pronunciation.—Adams 2007 Regional Diversification... chapter III is "Explicit evidence for regional variation: the Republic" and has no § 1.2. What book and page? Brutal Russian (talk) 08:23, 23 June 2021 (UTC) @Brutal Russian As someone who has tried to read through all of the megabytes of text and hundreds of edits in multiple discussions and still doesn't know who's right, I have to say that this is a new low in an already awful exchange. Please stop the gratuitous name-calling- the only damage it does is to your credibility. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:10, 23 June 2021 (UTC) Once again I will ask you to tone down the edgy insults before you get yourself banned from this website. All of the references below will be to Adams’ Regional Diversification of Latin. On pages 429–431, Adams begins by speaking out against the notion of an Oscan-influenced distinctive ‘Spanish Latin’ pronunciation. He continues by mentioning that there are “no genuine regionalisms” to be found in it other than a few terms related to mining and the single word paramus. The earlier section about a ‘Spanish accent’ simply recounts some scattered comments by Roman authors: it does not argue, contrary to Adams’ own later conclusions, that there really existed a distinctive native Latin that characterized the Iberian Peninsula and set it against the Latin spoken anywhere else. This can be seen on page 724, where he says that “the observations [of Roman authors] about the usage of Italians, Gauls, and so on are not to be taken as establishing that there were already standard varieties of Italian, Gallic, and African Latin [and so on], but as reflecting the perceived separate identities, easily defined in geographical terms, of the major regions of the Roman Empire […] it is an absurdity to attempt to trace the origins of the Romance languages back to the date of foundation of the provinces of the Roman world.” The section containing testimonies from the Empire, both the earlier and later periods, about the prestige of the Roman accent are to be found in chapter four, section 1.2. (I miswrote '3' for '4'.) In any case I am not arguing for a “universal Late pronunciation”. What I am saying is that what scholars such as the members of the DÉRom team, Thaddeus Ferguson, Robert Hall, etc. have been working on all these years is a reconstruction of a real pronunciation. The Nicodene (talk) 16:04, 23 June 2021 (UTC) @The Nicodene: You have not cited the book and page that demonstratstes "that the pronunciation of Rome was prestigious in the Late period". What is this that you continue referring to as "a real pronunciation"? What time and place is it reconstructed for? How is it that a universal, purely comparative reconstruction divorced from any attested Latin data which doesn't posit a sociolinguistic system, is given a non-universal, sociolinguistically-limited pronunciation? Cite the DÉRom publication that defines and describes it. Cite the DÉRom publication that posits its proto-Romance as an on-the-ground sociolinguistic system. Brutal Russian (talk) 17:41, 23 June 2021 (UTC) @Brutal Russian: I have cited the book ("All of the references below will be to Adams’ Regional Diversification of Latin") and I have cited the specific section (chapter 4, §1.2). Please read pages 188–202. From page five of Dworkin's article on the DÉRom: "“[Written] Latin and Proto-Romance (in essence, spoken Latin as reconstructed through the comparative method) are in reality two different registers of the same linguistic system.” The reconstruction is not 'purely comparative', to the point of rejecting attested data; it is actually informed by a thorough consideration of the latter. Since the reconstruction is, inherently, synchronic, the DÉRom does not commit to dating it to a specific year. Éva Buchi, the head of the project, comments in her article Sept malentendus dans la perception du DÉRom par Alberto Vàrvaro: "...le DÉRom ne postule nullement que la Sardaigne ait été isolée linguistiquement de manière précoce [...] autant nous n’avons pas d’idée préconçue sur le processus de fragmentation de la Romania, autant nous avons l’espoir que lorsque plusieurs centaines d’articles du DÉRom seront disponibles, il deviendra possible d’en exploiter les résultats dans le but de contribuer – modestement – à l’élucidation de ce processus." Translation: "... the DÉRom in no ways postulates that Sardinia was linguistically isolated from early on [...] Just as we have no preconcieved notions about the [chronology of the] process of fragmentation of Romania, we hope that once hundreds of DÉRom articles will be available, it will become possible to use their results to contribute, modestly, to the elucidation of this process." Romania (also spelled Romània) refers to the entirety of the Romance-speaking world. Later, in the same article, she comments: "le DÉRom s’oppose à l’hypothèse du latin vulgaire en tant qu’état de langue indépendant, et c’est bien pour cela qu’il nomme son objet protoroman, signifiant ainsi que c’est par le moyen d’accès à la réalité linguistique qu’il se distingue du latin connu par le corpus littéraire, et non comme un état de langue essentiellement différent." Translation: "The DÉRom is against the hypothesis of 'Vulgar Latin' as an independent language, and it is for this reason that it names its subject of focus 'Proto-Romance', referring to the means of accessing the linguistic reality beneath the literary corpus of Latin, and not an essentially different language." The Nicodene (talk) 18:16, 23 June 2021 (UTC) When you said that ‘there already existed a distinct Spanish Latin in the 1st century CE, and nothing seems to show that it ever went away’, I took it to be a claim that: 1) There existed a Latin dialect encompassing most or all of Iberia which can be shown to have been distinct from the Latin spoken anywhere else. 2) That this dialect evolved linearly from early Roman times into Ibero-Romance. (I do not know if this is, in fact, what you thought, but this is how I understood it.) To recapitulate Adams' comments from page 724, quoted above, he warns against using impressionistic (a word he uses elsewhere, repeatedly, in reference to them) Roman-era testimonia regarding local practices as evidence—in the absence of any ‘real’ linguistic evidence—for the existence of a distinct dialect covering an entire region like Gaul or Italy (I take his ‘standard’ to mean ‘relatively homogenous’). In the latter part of the quote he speaks out against notions along the lines of #2, listed above. All that is, at least, how I understand what he is saying. Nowhere in the book does he mention a phonological (or grammatical or syntactic) feature that can be described as proof of such a distinct dialect covering Iberia. To recapitulate some of the conclusions he makes (pp. 428–431), after examining what evidence there exists, there are ‘no genuine regionalisms’ characterizing the Latin of the peninsula other than a few metallurgical terms or the word paramus. He also casts doubt on theories of a distinct archaic or Oscan-influenced character for the Latin spoken there. Regarding the unreliability of testimonia (again, in the absence of other evidence) about regional usages or linguistic practices, he comments, on pg. 5: ”There is often a rhetoric to ancient observations, and such evidence cannot be used uncritically. In a recent book on regional variation in contemporary British English based on the BBC’s nationwide Voices survey it is remarked (Elmes 2005: 97–8) that people in the regions today like to claim words as their own regionalisms when in reality such terms may be scattered much more widely, even across the whole country. This is an observation that should be kept in mind as one assesses ancient testimonia. Communications were poor in the ancient world, and there is no necessary reason why someone asserting the regional character of a usage should have had any knowledge of linguistic practices much beyond his own patria.” ——————— I reiterate that I do not mean to make a strawman (in #1 and #2) of what you were saying, if it was not that. I understood it the way I did and responded accordingly. ——————— I say all this not because I want to have a discussion about whether Adams’ views are true or not, but because I am tired of being accused of lying—of even using scholars as ‘useful idiots’ to do my bidding. I have not once done that, and I am sick of the slander. The Nicodene (talk) 18:04, 25 June 2021 (UTC) I am pinging you here, @Brutal Russian:, because I suspect you have not seen the above comment and will think I have just left this unaddressed. (And then you will, in a week or two, post another 'manifesto' somewhere on Wiktionary claiming that I lied to you about this, etc.) I want to get this over with right now. To summarize, Adams very much does debunk "claims of an early distinctive Spanish Latin" in the cited section; the claims are those expressed by certain scholars that Spanish Latin was distinctly Oscanized or distinctly archaic relative to the Latin of other regions, and that this carried over into Ibero-Romance. I suspected that you may have had something like that in mind, especially since the latter part of your comment seemed to imply continuity of features into Ibero-Romance. What you actually had in mind, judging by your virulent reply to that comment, was apparently two things: 1) ancient testimonia, and 2) distinct local vocabulary. For #1, see the above reply citing Adams' own warnings against the unreliability of vague Roman-era testimonia without corroborating linguistic evidence. For the unreliability of 'Spanish accent' testimonia in particular, note Adams' comment on p. 231 that 'details are never given' in them. People from, say, Corduba in the first century could easily have had some local twang or other, and that could have been dubbed by a speaker from Rome as a 'Spanish accent'–falsely attributing to an entire region a localized feature. The problem is extrapolating from vague Roman-era comments to this effect into an entire distinct Spanish Latin phonological system, as opposed to simply, e.g., some oddity in cadence found in one part of the peninsula. (And the idea that that carried over linearly into Ibero-Romance is an assumption even more fraught with problems.) See Adams' comments, quoted above, that warn against assuming relatively uniform (internally) but still distinct (from those of other regions) dialects for large regions like Gaul or Italy–or, in this case, Spain–on the basis of vague testimonia regarding accents, and see also the comment quoted above where he warns that testimonia can easily attribute to one particular region a feature that is also found outside the region (and, I will add, may not even be found in the entirety of the region mentioned). That is why concrete linguistic evidence is needed, and that is why I cited the section where Adams discusses what evidence there exists (pp. 370–431)–including that from the bronze tablets–and dismisses it all, except for a few mining terms and paramus. So much for #2. I reiterate that I do not want to discuss right now whether what Adams says is valid. I write all this in response to your claim that I was a liar for citing him. By the way, I have looked through "Madeline 2016: 197+" and found in it no comment whatsoever about "modern English scholarly usage" of Gaul versus France. I will be nice enough not to reverse your own accusation or conclude that it was out of projection. The Nicodene (talk) 00:15, 27 June 2021 (UTC) @Brutal Russian This will come as no surprise to you, but I disagree with every last paragraph of your gargantuan rant. I do not, however, want to spend the rest of the day systematically dissecting the entirety of it and citing all the contradictory evidence. I have other things to do in life as well. I suggest you pick a specific section of it, and we can start from there. Once that is done, give it at least a few days, and we can move on to the next part. By the way, if you want to claim that someone is bullying you, it doesn't help your case when you're the one constantly writing new rants like these in 'public' discussion venues and calling the other person ignorant, a narcissist, etc. and even trying to get them banned. The Nicodene (talk) 18:43, 20 June 2021 (UTC) @Brutal Russian Here is what I would like to say in your response to your 'rabid dog' comparison. You were toxic to me in the very first discussion we had on this website, without the slightest reason to be, and you have never stopped being so since that moment. (You even continue to insult me on this page.) How is it that you cannot see that you, the one regularly attacking me on new discussion pages and now even attempting to ban me, are the bully? I barely have the energy to do even a quarter of the work I used to do on this website, thanks entirely to you. You have succeeded in turning my experience here into a living misery. I hate logging on here now, because I have to constantly deal with the nauseating feeling that you are about to launch yet another tirade against me in some new corner of the website. Let me be even more honest (at the very real risk of you using this as ammo to ridicule me): I suspect I am developing a form of PTSD from your constant attacks. If I put on a façade of unaffected bravado, that is entirely for the benefit of the discussion. The Nicodene (talk) 09:57, 21 June 2021 (UTC) @The Nicodene: I don't know what you're talking about with "have never stopped since that moment". Since that moment - which was a screaming 1.5 YEARS ago - we had had no discussions on the website until you started those edit wars full of open aggression, rudeness, fighting words and outright accusations of ignorance, undermining all my efforts to foolishly convince myself - as I constantly try to do - that whatever it looks like, the other party must have good faith and will take my cues to improve their behaviour, because most people are reasonable and mostly end up being mean without intending to. This works 95% of the time, but with you it fails miserably. You're under complete misapprehension of how reasonable people work out their differences in general or on this website. They do so by starting discussions, which they don't call tirades. Tirades is what you end up writing when you lock yourself in a 9 hour-long imaginary mental battle with a distorted image of me. You couldn't be farther from the truth in considering that that's what your interlocutors do - this is called externalization or projection (psychology).—You conduct discussions in comments to your edit wars. This is against the website's code of conduct. You become infuriated and use the most dishonest of argument tactics in response to other editors engaging with you. You attack and abuse me and try to make it look like I'm too ignorant to be worth talking to, and you threaten me with further verbal violence if I continue to engage in discussion. This is absolutely despicable behaviour that should and will not be tolerated on this website. It destroys the atmosphere of help and cooperation for the benefit of all. You reject civil dialogue in favour of outright war. I'm convinced that the reason for your inability to maintain civility for any amount of time is as I describe in the longread. I think it would be better for everyone if you found a different place to implement the results of your proto-Romance reconstruction efforts, one where you're the only and unquestionable authority. Brutal Russian (talk) 00:37, 22 June 2021 (UTC) @Brutal Russian: That discussion ended eight months ago, not 'a screaming 1.5 years ago'. Our next contact came on May 15th of this year when you reverted my edits on a page that you had literally never touched up until that moment. What happened when I tried to re-institute my original edits, while providing my reasoning? You accused me (yes, me!) of "inconsiderately reverting [your] edits" on the Beer Parlour. Apparently when you wander onto a page and start reverting people's edits, it's fine, but God help them if they try to reinstate their edit! You even had the audacity to describe this as me "aggressively rever[t]ing an informed user's edits without any attempts to contact them and reach consensus first", as if you had not started exactly that yourself. (Or are you, in your mind, the only "informed user" on this website? I wouldn't be surprised.) At times I am genuinely dumbfounded at your ability to see yourself as a victim even when you are, objectively, the aggressor. Leaving aside personal matters—which we will quite literally never agree on—we are clearly going to have to come to a sort of modus vivendi. I have already proposed a solution below. To recap, it's this: If you make a separate sub-module for your experimental 'Campanian Latin', and if you correctly source all of the features that distinguish it from the existing Classical Latin, then you have my word that I will leave it alone. And yes, you need to make a separate sub-module for it, because at the moment the 'vulgar' transcriptions are used primarily for reconstructed Proto-Romance lemmas. It is quite clear that a reconstructed Proto-Romance pronunciation is what is most appropriate for reconstructed Proto-Romance lemmas, rather than a (so far still incorrect) approximation of Pompeiian speech. If you really are even a third as reasonable as you proclaimed yourself to be in the middle of your latest hate-filled tirade then you will see the fairness in this. And no, I most certainly do not regard myself as an "undisputed authority on Proto-Romance". If someone came along who was actually informed on the subject and disagreed with me on something, and they actually presented sources supporting their view, I would be happy to discuss the matter with them and potentially learn something new. The Nicodene (talk) 01:22, 22 June 2021 (UTC) @The Nicodene: Right, so for real: if I never made this edit to capus, would all of this never have happened? Would you not have decided to edit fōrmāticus and the pronunciation module? Would peace and prosperity continue to reign on this website if I never made that fateful edit? Brutal Russian (talk) 15:09, 23 June 2021 (UTC) @Brutal Russian: no, that is not the case. I already had the intention of editing the pronunciation module long before that (already by October of last year), and I have been working on individual entries related to Latin or Romance Linguistics longer than that. The Nicodene (talk) 16:18, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Regarding an old discussion about allophones of /ll/

quarrel

Today I will be focusing on one topic out of the lengthy rant that @Brutal Russian has posted above. It relates to an old discussion we had about the topic mentioned in the title of this post, which was also the first contact that this user and I had ever had on Wiktionary. As you can see, the discussion was civilized until he said “[you’re] simply muddying the waters while milking me for knowledge/conviction points” and “In fact, let me ask you directly: had you read anything on the topic besides Vox Latina before starting this exchange?” He insinuated, in that paragraph, that I was ignorant, and that he, the all-knowing one, was annoyed by my having a discussion with him. I had done nothing to deserve this behaviour from him, yet he threw it at me anyway, in the process rendering void any future claims of innocence and victimhood. This attitude of his might have been, at least, slightly less egregious if he had been right about what he was saying, but in the end he was not. He appears to challenge the basic fact, which any linguist is aware of, that narrow transcriptions vary in their degree of precision. Moreover, few such transcriptions attempt to exhaustively transcribe all of the allophonic features of a given segment; that is especially so for reconstructions of extinct pronunciations, where doing so becomes exponentially more complicated. He claims that that Classical Latin /l/ before /e/ was “non-velarised”, yet his own source (Sihler) clearly states that it was, just to a lesser degree than before /a/ or back vowels. (Just because a feature is underspecified does not mean that it does not actually exist.) This is supported by the scholars Scen and Weiss, who, like Sihler, out that /l/ was ‘pinguis’ in the environment in question. The Nicodene (talk) 19:54, 20 June 2021 (UTC) I said: "When you're suggesting transcriptions devoid of meaning, arguing that we shouldn't aim for precision because some transcriptions are just wrong, to me it seems like simply muddying the waters while milking me for knowledge/conviction points". You're chopping my words to misrepresent my tone and intentions. With the full quote it's obvious that I'm being duly polite and circumspect. I'm politely but firmly letting you know that your behaviour is inconsistent with what I understand to be a bona-fide discussion with the aim to reach consensus, but that you seem to have a pre-conceived agenda to disagree with me. It's silly to pretend now that I wasn't right, and that I didn't burst your pretence bubble with that remark, which made your blood boil. Nothing stings one's ego more than truth, and the sting is felt even by those who lie to themselves about what they're doing. Your next-to-last paragraph is precisely what I call muddying the waters and milking me for conviction points. There is no facts in that paragraph - the is only whataboutism of a somewhat higher level as "nobody has heard recordings of Classical Latin so we don't know cēna wasn't pronounced as in Roman Ecclesiastical - at least have the humility of not claiming that it wasn't!" or "you haven't seen the Earth from space so it's difficult for you to claim it's oval - at least have the humility of not claiming that it's not flat!" - you get the gist. People who use that tactic aren't people I want to have a discussion with. I have provided you with a detailed phonological study right from the very start - Sen 2015. I did not speicifally expect you to understand it without prior training in autosegmental phonology - but I did expect you to not argue about something you don't understand, a reasonable expectation I and other reasonable people apply to myself and everyone else. Sihler can state anything he likes, but his statements cannot possibly disprove the study I cited. His statements don't have magical powers to disprove a phonological paper. Weiss treats the question of its quality before /e/ in a footnote - and that footnote doesn't disprove anything in Sen's 2015 study, the screenshot of which you took yourself. Weiss offers different conclusions that he borrowed from earlier non-phonologica studies. Is Sen the same person as your Scen? If so, then one and a half year ago you continue talk about the very study from where you took the screenshot that says what I say it says, and claim that it contradicts what I say it says. This is what made me decide you were one of several things neither of which I wanted to have anything to do with, and I continue to see confirmations for this. Why are you saying that what's written is not what's written? How is one supposed to discuss such intricate matters with a person who is either unable to understand even an illustrated phonological description, to agree even about what the English text says? If the situation has improved since, and you instead mean Cser, in his 2020 book he writes "it was velarised before consonants, velar vowels and possibly [e]", presumably basing this on the same Sen 2015 which he cites elsewhere albeit not for this statement; and again his is not a phonological study of the Latin /l/ and does not disprove anything. The bottom line is that you're throwing generic references at me that make generic statements based on generic musings instead of providing anything relevant to the specialised phonological study that I cite. You provide no evidence - your own or external - that questions Sen 2015's scholarship or conclusions in any way. You seem to not understand how a scholarly exchange of knowledge works. This is what I call throwing references at people, muddying the waters, whataboutism, having no knowledge or understanding but still disagreeing. Why? Why, to disagree of course! Once you've started a war, you don't want to just stop the barrage just because your missiles hit a brick wall, right? This is what I mean when I say that you use references as binary crutches regardless of whether or not you understand anything written inside. It's like a soldier not looking inside the rocket in their rocket launcher - as long as it destroys the opponent, it's all good and fair. Fire away and don't worry about it. And in that discussion you continued doing exactly the same with the fortis [l͈]. This is when I concluded I wasn't taking part in a discussion between two intelligent people. As is obvious by the fact that I didn't know who I was conversing with, I did that purely on the merits of your conduct, without any personal preconceptions against you, and the same happened on previous occasions with you using different aliases. Do you still, despite my explanations on the talk page and in the longread above, not understand that the sound Sen 2015 puts between the patalatised [lʲ] and the velarised [ɫ] is good old IPA [l]? Do you not understand that its understanding the phonological description that allows one to conclude what the author is talking about, and that once you have the phonological entity, it's irrelevant to you whether calls that entity "dark", or comes up with adventurous transcriptions like [l°] (which I probably would have used it was standard IPA)? Brutal Russian (talk) 21:07, 20 June 2021 (UTC) @Brutal Russian The fact that you interlaced your rudeness and insults with polite-sounding language does not suddenly mean that they did not exist. The fact remains that you were toxic to me without the slightest provocation, and anyone reading this will be able to see that. The fact that you continue to insult me in this most recent comment by calling my ego fragile and calling me ignorant for the umpteenth time ("having no knowledge or understanding") is just further confirmation that you are incorrigibly toxic. (I do not understand your preoccupation with my 'aliases', by the way. Previously I, like many people, perhaps most people, had different usernames on different websites. Recently I decided to harmonize them all to Nicodene. For Wikipedia that name was already taken, so I had to add 'The' before it. None of this has anything to do with you.) Back to the matter at hand: if you believe that narrow linguistic transcriptions all must transcribe every single allophonic feature then, I am sorry, but you are simply mistaken about this. Look at any narrow phonetic transcription of any word in any source, particularly ones of dead languages, and you will see that they only transcribe a certain number of features. If they covered everything, they would have to always specify tone (even for non-tonal languages), secondary/tertiary stress, minute degrees of asperation/palatalizion/velarization/retraction/nasalization, etc. The resulting transcriptions would be, to put it simply, absolutely chock-full of diacritics: at least one on every single symbol. Such exhaustive transcriptions are occasionally done, but they are the exception, not the rule. In point of fact, extremely narrow transcriptions are often given in double square brackets, rather than single ones. Please enlighten me about how this would be possible if all narrow transcriptions must be maximally precise. According to the ‘super-detailed table’ that you reposted, Sen (2015: 33) is quite clearly and unambiguously saying that /l/ before long or short /e/ was “dark” and “underspecified for back”, just like /l/ was before long or short /a/ or /o/ (which you yourself had transcribed as [ɫ]), just to a lesser degree. Meanwhile you transcribed /l/ before /e/ as a simple [l], which is in direct contradiction to what Sen is saying. Before you attempt to claim that I am misreading the table, refer to the following comment he makes on page 28: "To conclude, /l/ before /e:/ was dark enough to trigger backing to /o/, whereas /l/ before /e/ was darker, triggering backing to /u/", and on page 16 he adds that "Traditional grammars disagree as to which variant appeared before /e/, but colouring indicates that /l/ was relatively dark in this environment.” Sihler (1995: 174) says that “The distribution was as follows: l exilis was found before the vowels -i- and -ī-, and before another -l-; l pinguis occurred before any other vowel; before any consonant EXCEPT l; and in word-final position.” On page 41, in a parenthetical comment, he specifies that what he means by l pinguis is, in fact, velarized l: "Before a velarized l (that is, l pinguis, 176a)". Weiss (2009: 82) specifically says “In Latin, l developed two allophones: a non-velar (possibly palatal) allophone called exīlis be­fore i and when geminate […] and a velar allophone called l pinguis elsewhere […] The one slight surprise in this distribution is the fact that l is pinguis even before e, e.g., Herculēs < Hercolēs". There is no ambiguity here. The sources directly contradict your transcription [l]. The Nicodene (talk) 22:18, 20 June 2021 (UTC) To be even more explicit on the last point: [l] specifically refers to clear l, not to dark l. The latter is defined as being, to a greater or lesser degree, +back/'dark'/velarized. This can be seen by looking up the definitions or even just descriptions of clear l and dark l in any scholarly work. The Nicodene (talk) 02:58, 21 June 2021 (UTC) This, dear readers, is what I'm talking about. 1st degree: "clear" = palatalised IPA [lʲ]. 4th degree: "darkes" = [+back] velarised IPA [ɫ]. There are two degrees in-between, lacking IPA letters. 3d degree: "darker" - contextually velarized but not [ɫ] - I chose to transcribe that as [ɫ] because [ɫ] subsumes a number of different degrees of velarisation and pharyngealisation. This leaves us with the 2nd degree: "dark", immediately to the right of [lʲ] and two degrees less velarized than [ɫ]. What is that in IPA? Oh, I think I know, it's IPA recant your vehement rant. Brutal Russian (talk) 00:55, 22 June 2021 (UTC) Let me break this down for you in simple terms, since you still fail to grasp the point. The sources agree that /l/ before /ē̆/ was dark. Your attempted precise transcription claimed it was clear. You were demonstrably, and unambiguously, wrong here. And guess what the IPA representation of dark l is? It is [ɫ]. (Please open any linguistics textbook if you disagree with that.) It is unfortunate that there is no official way to represent degrees of 'darkness' in IPA, but c'est la vie. The Nicodene (talk) 01:39, 22 June 2021 (UTC) It just occurred to me what the source of the problem may be here. You are, somehow (I assume from just glancing at Sen's chart, which admittedly might be misleading to a beginner), under the false impression that dark l and velarized l are two different things. The terms are literally synonyms, and anyone informed on basic linguistics would be aware of that. The Nicodene (talk) 02:08, 22 June 2021 (UTC) "Dark" and "clear" are not phonological terms or descriptions, they're sounds you make with your mouth - quack-quack. Same sounds can have different meanings for different people, or for one person in different contexts, moods or just times. Sounds do not overrule the results of a phonological study, which is as I described above. "Velarized" is a sound you make with your mouth that underlies a phonetic/phonological description. The relevant phonetic/phonological statement is "/l/ before /e/ was intermediate, darker than the palatalised [lʲ] but two degrees clearer than the velarized (I think more properly called pharyngealised) [ɫ]". Such phonetic/phonological descriptions are commonly expressed in short-hand using the IPA alphabet. This particular phonetic/phonological description is best conveyed by IPA symbol [l], and is poorly conveyed by IPA [ɫ], which is the symbol that best conveys the phonetic entity that has two degrees higher velarisation. It's also poorly conveyed by [lʲ], which refers to the same phonetic entity only characterised by palatalisation. You're incapable of understanding the phonological study, or what I'm wrighing, so you resort to substituting the label for the meaning. You're arguing from definitions by substituting sounds you make with your mouth for the understanding of factual phonological statements. You're attaching an all-or-nothing category lable to something and proceeding to triumphantly proclaim that it doesn't possess the qualities that your conception of that category excludes. You need to be right and you need me to be wrong. My eyes are currently at the back of my head. This conversation is over. Brutal Russian (talk) 02:15, 22 June 2021 (UTC) Sorry, but no. Dark (l) is a synonym for 'velarized (l)' and so it is, in fact, a phonological term. The fact remains, despite your attempts to 'muddy the waters', that the sources say that /l/ before /ē̆/ was dark, and that your old transcription claimed it was clear. ([l] cannot stand, in a precise phonetic transcription, like the one you had attempted, for 'somewhat dark/velarized l'. It is specifically clear l, i.e. non-dark/non-velarized.) The Nicodene (talk) 02:28, 22 June 2021 (UTC) This is precisely what I mean when I say that you have an exasperating habit of never admitting you were wrong about anything. You apparently did not even know that dark l and velarized l are the same thing, and now you're grasping for straws by arguing that the two synonyms 'dark' and 'velarized' have different meanings (one being, according to you, a phonological term and the other not... a completely fictional difference that you just invented), and also claiming that I "didn't understand" Sen's study. I understand it perfectly: he is saying, exactly like Weiss and Sihler, that /l/ before /ē̆/ was dark/velarized. He just provides more detail than the latter two about different degrees of velarization before different vowels. He says absolutely nothing, by the way, to support your claim that [ɫ] can only stand for the most velarized l: the transcription he uses for the latter is in fact [lˠ]. You have completely invented this notion out of thin air. I have noticed that the moment I catch a serious and unambiguous mistake on your part, which can be fixed by a Google search, you have a habit of suddenly ending the conversation. The Nicodene (talk) 02:41, 22 June 2021 (UTC) @The Nicodene: Yes, and "darker" is the synonym of "velarizeder" and "darkest" of "velarizedest". But the volatile narcissist cannot give up now. Never give up! Bite the leg! Bite and don't let go even if they wrench away your jaw together with it! Woof! Bark! Aaa-whoooo! Brutal Russian (talk) 08:38, 23 June 2021 (UTC) @Brutal Russian: If you do not tone it down with the edgy insults, you are going to get yourself banned from Wiktionary with comments like this. This one might actually have crossed the line already. Perhaps I should link it to an administrator? In any case, yes, dark l and velarized l are very much synonyms. See the below: From Jakielski et al. 2017: Phonetic Science for Clinical Practice (pp. 49, 199): "Production of a postvocalic l is called dark-l or velarized-l. [...] Hopefully you remember from Chapter 2 that a velarized-l also is called dark-l." From Burgess 1992: A Mouthful of Air: Language, Languages-- Especially English (p. 80): "dark l is velarized". From Robinett et al. 1983: Second Language Learning: Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis, and Related Aspects (p. 48): The voiced alveolar velarized lateral consonant [ɫ] and the voiced mid central retroflex vowel [ɚ] are phones which occur in English but not in Greek. The velarized or "dark l" is allophonic, while the retroflex vowel is phonemic in English." From Rubach 1982: Analysis of Phonological Structures (p. 31): "In British English there are two further variants of /l/ : the so-called 'clear l' and the 'dark l' (velarized)". From Sawaie 1994: Linguistic Variation and Speakers' Attitudes: A Sociolinguistic Study of Some Arabic Dialects (p. 39): "While Transjordanian dialects tend to use velarized L (i.e. "dark" l) [...]" From Proceedings of the Second International Hindukush Cultural Conference (p. 168) "...except in the case of < L > , which represents the velarized or 'dark l' sound of Khowar." From Jannedy et al. 1994: Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language & Linguistics (p. 61): "The l in bowl is velarized (or "dark") while the [l] of lobe is "clear"." From Benware 1986: Phonetics and Phonology of Modern German (p. 29): "...results in a so-called 'dark l' or velarized l which is foreign to standard German, but common in English." From Jones & Laver 1973: Phonetics in Linguistics: A Book of Readings (p. 175): "Those who know that language will remember that when l terminates a word it has a 'dark' or velarized value." From Dickey 1997: The Phonology of Liquids (p. 49): "In a 'dark' or velarized [ɫ], the tongue body lowering extremum occurs before tongue tip extremum." From MacKay 1978: Introducing Practical Phonetics (p. 180): "[ɫ] 'dark' (velarized) /l/". From Wayland 2018: Phonetics: A Practical Introduction (p. 85): "Velarization is the addition of tongue back raising toward the velum. When preceded by a vowel, the English 'l' sound is often produced with this secondary gesture, and is referred to as a 'dark l'. [...] The 'dark l' also occurs when it precedes another consonant, as in field [fiɫd], film [fɪɫm], false [fɔɫs], etc. Velarization is represented by the diacritic [~] through the symbol for [l]." (All of that, though, is technically besides the point. Sen indicates that /l/ before long or short /e/ was dark, and dark l is transcribed in IPA as [ɫ], which is exactly what I have done. [ɫ] is used in Linguistics for 'dark l'; it is not restricted to 'maximally dark l'.) Sen is using the transcriptions [lo] and [lu] to indicate different levels of dark resonance. In a comment on page 23, he specifically equates dark resonance with velarization: "As dark resonance (velarization in articulatory terms) is correlated with backness in vowels..." In other words, Sen's ad-hoc transcription [lo] does, in fact, represent (a specific grade of) [ɫ]. It is labelled as having dark resonance, which, according to Sen himself, means it is velarized. That is also consistent with what Weiss and Sihler say in the quotes provided earlier. The Nicodene (talk) 22:05, 23 June 2021 (UTC) Hi again @Brutal Russian:. I decided to e-mail Sen about this and he just got back to me. In his response he confirms what I said: the allophones he refers to as 'dark' and 'darker' are, in fact, velarized allophones of /l/. The difference between the two, and also between them and the 'darkest' allophone is simply one of degree (of velarization). If you wish to contact him yourself, his e-mail can be seen in this screenshot or found on this page. Now, keeping in mind that I was right about this the whole time, I want you to re-read the following comment you made to me: "Yes, and 'darker' is the synonym of 'velarizeder' and 'darkest' of 'velarizedest'. But the volatile narcissist cannot give up now. Never give up! Bite the leg! Bite and don't let go even if they wrench away your jaw together with it! Woof! Bark! Aaa-whoooo!" I have nothing more to say to you. The Nicodene (talk) 09:43, 24 June 2021 (UTC) @The Nicodene: Whoo-hoo, this might be the first time The N's thought process coincided with mine. Luckily I postponed writing my own letter, otherwise this would have been awkward, and the author would have understood that their replies are being used to settle an argument. So I have to ask that The N sends my questions to the author in a follow-up letter as if they're their own, asking whether their analysis only applies to Archaic Latin or also the time of Pliny; whether they think that Pliny distinguished his three types of L on phonological intuition according to feature specification, and if so why did he distinguish the exilis L before /i/ when it's also underspecified, and only contextually palatalised - in this case how would they transcribe the underspecified allophones in standard IPA? or if Pliny distinguished it on perceptual basis, and in this case what would be the optimal way to capture the contrast between all three in standard IPA? Would it make sense to transcribe both the [+back] and the contextually velarized allophones with the same [lˠ] or [ɫ] - if so why would Pliny perceptually distinguish what even the IPA doesn't? Or would it be more appropiate to transcribe some or all of the underspecified allophones with IPA [l]? In other words, how can Pliny's description - and their study's conclusions - be best translated into IPA in order to be reproduced by other people. Again, it would be highly desirable that the author doesn't learn that stakes are being placed on their answer, both for moral reasons and in order for the answer to be unvitiated and unbiased. Brutal Russian (talk) 23:17, 24 June 2021 (UTC) Your message should have begun with "Alright, I was wrong about this, and I apologize for ridiculing you". You have his e-mail, so contact him yourself. Pretend this was a civilized conversation, leaving out the fact that you called me a dog. The Nicodene (talk) 03:13, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Regarding formaticus

quarrel

I did say that I wanted to leave 'at least a few days' between such discussions, but I will contradict this, for the moment. The user @Brutal Russian posted a rant above in which he alludes to a discussion we recently had about the word formaticus. In his recent comments, as well as his older ones, he repeatedly claims that using the term France for the late eighth century is against ‘scientific usage’. This claim is simply not true: modern scholarship prefers the term France, as can be seen by the fact that Google results for "Carolingian France" outnumber those for "Carolingian Gaul" by a ratio over six-to-one, as of right now (searching both terms with the surrounding quotation marks). I did, perhaps, overstate the case, but the basic point I was making remains true. Nevertheless I decided to go with the phrasing "what is now France" in the end in order to avoid a continuation of this frankly pointless argument over labels. Apparently, though, he cannot bring himself to let go of it. He insults me, in the rant above, by saying that I show a ‘complete ignorance’ (I have lost track of the number of times he has called me 'ignorant') of the fact that the Latin word Gallia never truly died out, even in the early Medieval Ages, in the most polished, classicizing varieties of Latin, and that modern linguists use such terms as Gallo-Romance to describe the language family that includes modern French, Occitan, and Arpitan. I am well aware of both facts: neither contradict the fact that modern historians prefer to speak of Carolingian France. (Not to mention, of course, contemporaries.) He mentions that I removed the caseus formaticus conjecture. That is true, I did, but I eventually came around to including it, this time clearly wording it as a conjecture rather than an indisputable fact, since caseus formaticus is not actually attested, nor is the fact that formaticus shows up as a masculine proof of such an ellipsis, cf. the dozens of Merovingian and Carolingian-era coinages ending in -aticus, many examples of which I provide in the discussion, none of which are the products of an attested ellipsis. Speaking of the latter, he claims that I "conflat[ed] attested evidence and conjectured forms". That is not true: he simply misread what I really said. I quite clearly described coraticus, etc. as the etyma of various Old French words in the original comment. The fact that he apparently understood etyma to mean 'attested written forms in Latin' is his own fault, not mine. I did, by the way, provide a total of nineteen unambiguous attestations of such masculine forms (with -aticus/os/i), and I linked a page on which Du Cange lists several more. I could, if needed, expand the total to, say, sixty with a few more hours of research, and perhaps a hundred given an entire day to do it, but this would be a waste of time on my part: no amount of evidence would ever lead 'brutal russian' to concede the point. Nineteen sourced attestations, plus a link to about a dozen additional attestations by Du Cange, is plenty for any remotely reasonable person. In response to my pointing out that nobody prior to the ninth century distinguished Latin and Romance as separate languages, he says that I am “appealing to nothing but the linguistic intuition of medieval Franks to define what is and isn't Latin”. This is not the case: it was, as I pointed out in the discussion, not just ‘medieval Franks’: nobody, no matter whether they were a native speaker or not, no matter which century they lived in (as long as it was prior to the ninth) ever referred to Latin and Romance as separate languages. As elsewhere, 'brutal russian' is twisting my words here. He implies that I “have no familiarity with the modern linguistic side of the question”. This is just more toxic slander on his part: I am perfectly aware of the numerous opinions and arguments both in favour of the old diglossic model (which is very much becoming a minority view in the latest scholarship) as well as arguments against it. He says that he revealed “information [that I was] ignorant of” in reference to his claim that spoken Latin lacked a nominative case in inanimate nouns. The source he cited, Ledgeway, says absolutely nothing of the sort, nor does any other source, and furthermore the fact that Old French and Old Occitan both had nominative forms of inanimate nouns is in direct contradiction to that claim. (Here 'brutal russian' thinks that I intentionally deleted his comment. I did not: I simply replied to it, then sighed at the thought of developing yet another branch of an already massive and over-complicated discussion, and decided to delete my own comment. It seems I deleted his comment together with my reply. That was not intentional on my part whatsoever. Nor is it an example of him actually being right about the topic that was being discussed: as I have explained here, and as I explained in more detail on the discussion page for formaticus, he has completely misread Ledgeway, who in no way makes the unusual claim that 'brutal russian' somehow divined from his work.) As for ‘Romanistics’ it is, at best, an extremely obscure term. Moreover, even when it is used it seems to often refer to the study of Roman culture, law, or other such topics. In the work titled Lesser-used Languages and Romance Linguistics (which is, incidentally, the very first result on Google Books when one searches ‘romanistics’) it is quite plainly stated that ‘the word Romanistics is regrettably not current in English’. Many, perhaps nearly all, of the ‘linguistic’ results seem to just be used in reference to German or Iberian scholars as a literal translation of terms found in their native languages. Neither Merriam-Webster nor the Oxford English Dictionary, moreover, even mention that the word exists in English. If one searches for “romanistics” on Google (with the quotation marks) one is met with less than six thousand results, versus two hundred twenty thousand for “Romance Linguistics”, a ratio of of more than thirty six to one. The field is most certainly not called ‘Romanistics’ with any frequency at all by British or American scholars; the term which does not appear in any standard reference work written by them, such as the Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages or either volume of the Cambridge History of the Romance Languages. ‘Brutal russian’ accuses me of narcissism, which is an odd claim. I have no problem with admitting when someone else is right about something, and have done so, whenever it was actually the case, in my discussions with him. By contrast he refuses to concede any point, no matter how many sources are arrayed against him. I have never once heard him say anything to the effect of ‘Alright, that was true. I was mistaken about that.’ Refusal to admit any wrong is a major highlight of narcissism; so, incidentally, is wanting attention and pinging half of Wiktionary to witness your attempted ‘epic beatdown’ of somebody. So is being rude and toxic without the slightest provocation, as he was to me the very first time we ran into each other on Wiktionary. One valid criticism he has made in this latest discussion (note how I, unlike him, admit when what the other person says is actually true) is that I have a habit of hitting ‘submit’ too early and then seeing numerous things that I want to revise in my comment. I will make an attempt to do that less. 'Brutal russian' claims that I am making a strawman when I point out that he believes formaticus existed in the Classical period. I will concede that it is true that he never explicitly said it did. If he truly never believed that it did (I continue to have my doubts), then good: I no longer have to spend energy arguing for the obvious. I did point out, multiple times, and citing several elementary mistakes he has made, that he is a beginner in Romance Linguistics. It is strange to me that he would complain about this for two reasons: 1) That is objectively true. Nobody informed about Romance Linguistics would fail to know where the rusticam romanam linguam quote is from, nor would they claim that inanimates lacked a nominative in the sixth century, nor would they claim that a complete merger of /b/ and /w/ took place in Pompeii, and so on. 2) The comment in question came a full two days after he claimed that I was ignorant of Latin, during a bizarre rant about Nazis, “peeing on scooters”, and “meme-shitters”. (Yes, he really said all that. In the Tea Room, no less.) The quote in question was “[you can’t] assert your authority in matters of a language you can't even speak”, although even prior this he had repeatedly insinuated that I do not even know Latin. Needless to say, I can speak Latin: I have studied it for over fifteen years. Relative validity of the comments aside, one should not complain when they slander someone and the other later returns precisely the same favour. The Nicodene (talk) 02:25, 21 June 2021 (UTC) @Brutal Russian: When I read over the FEW's 'gallischen latein' I took that to mean what is called Proto-Gallo-Romance today. If the FEW does have a separate term for Proto-Gallo-Romance (not just Gallo-Romance, which refers to later stages), then let me know. Elcock's work is not cited on the Wiktionary entry, so I did not have that quote to consider. I should say, though, that I am no longer opposed to saying the term Gaul, and have not been for a while now. All I am contesting as of late is the notion that saying France is either 'absurd' or 'scientifically inaccurate'. —————————— In a now-deleted comment you cite "Madeline 2016: 197+" as describing "the medieval Latin or modern English scholarly usage of these terms". I assume you mean this: "Before moving further, it is necessary to consider the issue of nomenclature. Of course today’s France is not the French kingdom of the Middle Ages, and the term “Francia” does not in every time period refer to the kingdom, which was still in the process of creating a territory and an identity at the end of the Middle Ages. Depending upon the time period, the author, and the genre, the use of “Francia” or “Gallia” has implications that I do not propose to study in detail here. Yet, at the end of the Middle Ages, two tendencies can be observed: the term “Gallia” is very often used in texts of descriptive geography, while in historic texts “Francia” is more often employed. It is therefore hardly possible to trace a simple straight line which would see “Gallia” erased in favor of “Francia,” also because Humanism gave a new impetus to “Gallia” as suitable for designating both antique Gaul as well as new “Gallia,” even in the historic texts." This quote discusses the usages of medieval, or pre-modern, scholars writing in Latin. It does not mention the usages of modern scholars writing in English. (If you had some other quote in mind, provide it.) —————————— I should mention here that the term France is also used in modern English-speaking scholarship for the Merovingian period (c. 450–751). Several publications use the phrase "Merovingian France", and search results indicate that it actually occurs more frequently than "Merovingian Gaul" (by ~10%). That is simply to say, again, that it is neither 'absurd' nor 'scientifically incorrect' to use France. —————————— I would also like to reiterate the fact that I, nearly two weeks ago, replaced the phrase with 'what is now France', purely to avoid a resurfacing of this controversy. The Nicodene (talk) 18:43, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Regarding 'Campanian Latin'

quarrel

Now I would like to address the matter of ‘Campanian Latin’. Ah, where to begin. The first draft ‘brutal russian’ made of this ‘Campanian Latin’ (which is apparently meant to reflect the speech of Pompeii, so up to the year 79 A.D.) included such adventurous features as a complete, universal lowering of Latin short /i/ to [e], a complete merger of /w/ and /b/ in all positions into the voiced bilabial fricative, and a nasalization of every vowel before a nasal consonant in syllable coda position (not just word-finally). The only source he provided for these, or any other feature since (that was not already found in the Classical module) was a single citation of Adams, regarding the single matter of Latin short /i/, in which he apparently missed the point that the phenomenon in question only occurred with any regularity in final syllables, generally in verbs. I think this is about the fourth or fifth time I am explaining this (see Adams 2013: 58-61), but I don’t see any sign that he has actually understood it. In his most recent edit to the pronunciation model, he attempted to resurrect the feature exactly as he had tried to implement it originally. If he really wants this ‘Campanian Latin’ to happen, he needs to provide sources that actually support all of the non-CL features that he wants to assign to it. So far he has not done so, apart from the one mistaken example I have mentioned. Not only that, but in this latest rant of his (which can be seen above) he even ridicules the idea of backing up one's arguments with sources. He apparently thinks the fact that every single feature that I have added to my Late/‘Vulgar’ transcriptions is thoroughly cited, according to two or more reliable sources (all the features in question are sourced here and here) is some sort of childish debate tactic rather than a legitimate argument in favour of the transcription. Moreover, he has not explained why his 'Campanian Latin' is in any way appropriate for reconstructed Proto-Romance lemmas on Wiktionary, which is what the 'vulgar' module is used for. Needless to say, a reconstructed Proto-Romance pronunciation is what is most appropriate for reconstructed Proto-Romance words. The Nicodene (talk) 06:42, 21 June 2021 (UTC) In fact, let me propose a solution for this, @Brutal Russian. If you make a separate sub-module for your experiment (leaving alone the 'vulgar' one that is primarily used for reconstructed Proto-Romance lemmas), and if you correctly* cite all the features you want to put in your ‘Campanian Latin’, I promise to never touch it. *Not like that mis-citation of Adams (2013). The sources need to actually support what you’re saying. The Nicodene (talk) 07:50, 21 June 2021 (UTC) You're proposing this to me? This was what I immediatley proposed to you. We will do this when we figure out a way to add a new transcription. You rejected my proposal by continuing your one-sided military crusade. Then you continued to abuse and insult me in hour-long fits of rage and told me you would rather eat glass than talk to me and called me an ignorant beginner and promised me to abuse me more if I continued trying to do what normal people do, that is talk. We will not lose sight of the fact that I shouldn't be talking to you at all. You will not bully your way around here by edit warring until the other party gives up, and will not appropriate any transcriptions. Everyone will be able to discuss and improve any transcription on this website. My transcription was not designed for reconstructed pages, but it might as well have appeared there alongside Classical. There is no place for a phonetic transcription for proto-Romance because proto-Romance is not a sociolinguistic variety. It's not a language anyone ever spoke and it cannot have an associated phonology. If you wish to postulate a specific Late Latin pronunciation for a given time and place like I'm doing with Campanian, I'm open to it. It will borrow the phonetic discussions of proto-Romance reconstructions just like Classical and Campanian do. The Campanian [e] was reflecting the pholonogy of Oscan. There occurred a synchronic vowel reshuffling: /ae/ in this variety was the length pair to /e/, both spelled AE or E and with the value of [ɛ(:)]. Correspondingly, /i/ started pairing with /ē/ and both could be spelled E or I, with the value of [e(:)]. This exactly parallels the vowel system of Oscan, where /ē~e/ was spelled Í and is evidenced by Pompeiian spellings like veces = vicēs, menus = minus. The final syllable phenomenon is not specific to Pompeii, and consists in a complete merger of /ē, e, i/ in the final syllable. It's present in Sardinian in the verbal inflection (cantades = cantātis) but seemingly not in nouns (sitis = sitis) - can't think of other examples. Oscan had a separate short /ɛ/ that could contrast with /e/, so in Pompeii no merger between them occurred. The merger in the verbal declension probably originates in Roman Latin from the shortening of the verbal -ēt, which coincided in quality with -it because it postdated the raising of /ē/ from Plautine [ɛ:]. Non-urban Latin had no such raising, and might not have had the shortening either. The speech of Pompeii imported this from Roman Latin. Brutal Russian (talk) 01:40, 22 June 2021 (UTC) Again (I am tired of explaining this), Adams exhaustively analyzes the data not only from Pompeii but also a variety of other sites and concludes (2013: 60) that the phenomenon you describe was limited to final unstressed syllables, isolated spellings like ⟨ueces⟩ notwithstanding. Clackson, on page 7 of the Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, comments: "there are hardly any good examples of mis-spellings of the expected type within accented syllables". If you have a (purely personal) problem with the notion of reconstructing allophonic features of Proto-Romance, please take it up with the entire DÉRom team, not to mention the myriad other scholars whose works I have cited on the relevant Wiki pages. The Nicodene (talk) 08:03, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

Marriage counseling

Can we set aside the equivalent of an (alcohol-free) marriage counseling facility?  --Lambiam 11:54, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

I have put the discussions in collapsing boxes. 212.224.224.150 15:36, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Fandom-made terms

As revealed on current RFVs for FemShep, the current wording of WT:FICTION only covers terms originating in the universe. I propose it be expanded with something like "Terms originating in, or which refer to specific entities within, fictional universes...". Examples of affected entries:

1. FemShep, BroShep
2. Supes, Spidey
3. Ship names

As I've said on the RFV for Charizard, I feel that the purpose of the fiction clause is to avoid terms that only make sense in the context of a work of fiction. To be included, it needs to somehow transcend that setting, which in practise means acquiring a more generic meaning than it had on inception. Much like BRAND and genericized brand names, really. In fact, with modern copyright law, a work of fiction is a brand, now that I think about it.__Gamren (talk) 23:41, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Support — surjection ⟨??⟩ 17:22, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Tentatively Support; I think the proposed wording is good, though hopefully with more input we can be more certain this doesn't accidentally cover anything we don't want it to. All the things I can think of where I'm not sure whether they should actually be excluded are things which are not affected by the change; for example, Whovian was coined outside but also refers to something outside the specific Doctor Who universe (namely, a real-world fan of that universe), so it's unaffected by either the current or the proposed rule (👍), and a transmat#Noun can transmat#Verb things in 3+ unrelated fictional universes (the cites for the verb are Star Trek, Doctor Who and Supergirl), so AFAICT it's also unaffected...? It seems like this change would also affirm our previous deletion of Talk:MissingNo.. - -sche (discuss) 23:54, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Vote is up.__Gamren (talk) 15:39, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

DerbethBot reboot

See also: Beer_parlour/2020/November and Tea_room/2021/May

What's the current state of DerbethBot and audio? LinguaLibre data is currently not used, and as someone has just remarked, it's tedious to add audio files manually. Metaknowledge (talk • contribs) has started User:Metaknowledge/audiowhitelist, but this is not used yet? Reading some recent discussions with Derbeth (talk • contribs), they seem to be reluctant to make modifications to the bot. Perhaps we should consider a fork of it? – Jberkel 13:55, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

I thought the plan was that Derbeth would use the whitelist, but I haven't checked in for a while. A fork might be a good idea, but whatever we do, I think we need to use whitelisting instead of blacklisting to avoid the crap that has accumulated unnoticed in the past. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:30, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

I had some doubts about the whitelist, mainly because some people act as native speakers of multiple languages. I know it's possible if you are raised bilingual, but what about the person speaking Delhi dialect of Hindi and US dialect of English? Are both dialects spoken on the native level? I am not able to judge that, I'm not a native speaker of either. I haven't spoken about my doubts loudly, sorry for this. I became more engaged in linking CJK strokes and feature requests from de.wiktionary. I can apply the whitelist for the most obvious cases (one person-one language) and we can discuss the harder cases. --Derbeth ^talk 16:54, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Ideally the bot would read the whitelist configuration from the page, and assume it's correct, otherwise it'll be a lot of back-and-forth. – Jberkel 17:18, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

@Derbeth: Yes, that person is native in both. Why are you troubled by native bilingualism? That whitelist was composed carefully, so you don't need to second-guess it. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:29, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

@Derbeth I am in agreement with the idea of a whitelist. I could potentially fork the code and add a whitelist although it might be easier for me to rewrite it in Python using pywikibot as I haven't done much Perl hacking in a long while. Benwing2 (talk) 03:01, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Ok, I implemented support for all whitelist entries. Please take a look at Occitan changes, as Occitan has particularly chaotic organization of files on Commons. I hope I matched dialects correctly. --Derbeth ^talk 06:50, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Thanks! I checked some Catalan and French entries, all good. – Jberkel 15:07, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Blacklist

Users whose contributions should not be added.

Username	Language	Location (if relevant)	Reason	Example
Jjackoti	FR	France	Speech defect: lisp	seconde, /sə.ɡɔ̃d/: (file)

— This unsigned comment was added by 212.224.226.27 (talk) at 17:24, 23 June 2021 (UTC).

Apostropheless older English genitives like Godes, mans

Should we have sense lines (and, in the event we wouldn't otherwise have an entry, entire entries) at pages like Godes, mans, kings/kinges, etc for their use as genitives/possessives, especially in early modern English works before the use of the apostrophe was standardized? (E.g. "by godes grace, I meane not to infringe his directions, for any mans pleasure" in a 1612 text at Google Books.) By vote, we don't include God's, man's, king's, etc as genitives because they're transparently separable into God+-'s, etc; OTOH, we include gods and kings as plurals although they're fairly transparent. So which side of the line is mans on? (As an interesting case, I can find at least one citation of the Latinate genitive Jesu for Jesus; that kind of thing, irregular genitives à la irregular plurals, I certainly would be inclined to include if I could only find enough citations.) - -sche (discuss) 15:47, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

@-sche: I believe we already discussed this. J3133 (talk) 17:26, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for that link! I was trying to find that thread before I posted this, because I recalled discussing this briefly with someone. Since it really was "we" who discussed it (the two of us, and one comment from a single other user), I hope this thread attracts more input. As I said in that thread, AFAICT and AFAIK we don't currently have entries/sense-lines for genitives of this type, but... ever since you brought it up, I've been thinking there should be some kind of community consensus (ideally consisting of more than three users) on whether we should or not... - -sche (discuss) 23:18, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

@-sche: I have mentioned contractions below; e.g., mans (“man is”). Should we also include them? J3133 (talk) 11:31, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

@-sche: I created kingis. J3133 (talk) 16:20, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Seems reasonable to me to add such genitives. As @Vox Sciurorum pointed out on the previous discussion, this is already a regular feature of other languages', even if their genitives are transparent, and I see no harm in adding reasonable genitives like that... my only concern being, could this call into question what else we should include from pre-standardized orthography? From your quote: should 'meane' also be entered as an archaic variant of 'mean'? If not, why is it different from 'kings' or 'kinges', effectively just obsolete spellings of now-standardized inflections? At any rate, though, definite support for forms like 'Jesu'; if they're attested, then they're legitimate and should be added. Kiril kovachev (talk) 09:38, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

I am in favor of adding archaic genitives like Godes, mans, etc. They should just say {{obsolete spelling of|en|God's}}, {{obsolete spelling of|en|man's}} etc. And yes, meane should be added as an {{obsolete spelling of}} too. —Mahāgaja · talk 11:47, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: [[-'s|'s]], unless also used for contractions, then would need two senses (if we also want those forms). J3133 (talk) 19:19, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Re Kiril: yeah, we definitely already include (and should include) a lot of entries like meane (e.g,, thinke); it's just obsolete genitives/possessives which, as I said in the previous thread, I'm not aware of any examples of us including before now (presumably because we don't include the corresponding modern possessives). - -sche (discuss) 21:30, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Follow-up question: do we want to link to these obsolete possessive forms from the lemma entries, and if so, how? I think there's generally a benefit to lemma entries containing links to all their inflected forms so those forms are findable (and so erroneous ones can be fixed), but I'm guessing we don't want to change the headword line of king to

"king (plural kings or (obsolete) kinges or (obsolete) kingis or (obsolete) kingys, possessive king's or (obsolete) kings or (obsolete) kinges or (obsolete) kingis or (obsolete) kingys)"

because then it's really long and we're making obsolete forms excessively prominent. We could list kinges et al as alt forms in [[kings]], but we don't have entries like [[king's]] to shunt mention of the obsolete alt forms to. (In this case, you could say "put the alternative possessives also on [[kings]] and let the link in "plural kings" be enough, but that doesn't work when the plural isn't of the same form as the obsolete possessives, like with child.) - -sche (discuss) 02:37, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Tone Indicators

Is there a consensus on tone indicators here? I've created a list of the commons ones at User:AntisocialRyan/Tone_indicators. We already have "/s", and others have exploded in online use over the past couple years. See Google Trends for "tone indicators" and "gen meaning". I think the majority of them should be included, or at least on an Appendix page. AntisocialRyan (talk) 20:22, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

I'd say if they meet attestation requirements, include them. Perhaps we could discuss whether /fake and /safe and other regular words like /comment or /wondering would be better handled under /fake, /comment, etc or just by a sense at Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2021/June/ — for comparison, we don't have entries for most parenthetical things like (not really) or (joking), only a few like (!). But the bulk of them, like /s, are as opaque and "idiomatic" as abbreviations like S. and p. which we include, so AFAICT the only hurdle is whether they're attested to the usual standards. - -sche (discuss) 23:30, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Not sure how many strong sources would include these, but searching something like "genq" on Twitter and going to Latest shows how frequent these are used. Just /genq alone is said multiple times a minute, and that form isn't as common as /gen (harder to search for, though). After studying these a lot I can confirm they're all used often. Is this ok? I will wait for more feedback anyway before creating them all. AntisocialRyan (talk) 23:48, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

• I'd like to request a different name for these than "tone indicators" -- in a multilingual project such as this, "tone" has too many ambiguous meanings (perhaps ironically, given the subject of this thread :) ). For me personally, I first thought from the title that this thread would be about notation conventions for Chinese or Navajo or Igbo or some other tonal language.

As a proposal, how about "intent indicators"? I believe that this is less ambiguous. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 18:27, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

I like it, but do we decide the names for things or do we use what is widely used already? "Tone indicators" is what they're referred to as generally, I put some sources on that page if you'd like to learn more! :) AntisocialRyan (talk) 19:57, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Ahh, good point, I agree "tone indicator" wouldn't be a great name as it refers to too many other things, so if both kinds of tone indicator exist in some languages (e.g. if there is a Chinese analogue of /s exists), the contents of the category will be a muddle. We're talking about what to call the category they'd be in, right? Because I assume the part of speech header will just be one of the existing/usual ones, like Interjection (a la "psych!"), or the ol' catch-all header Particle, or perhaps the Symbol header /:s uses. Perhaps we could add a qualifier like "discursive tone indicator", although that gets no google hits. I also see the phrase "tone tags" used, which seems a little less ambiguous: a tone marker in the languages Eirikr mentions could be called a tone indicator, but would someone call it a tone tag? If not, maybe that'd work? - -sche (discuss) 21:24, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

1. Ah right, people do refer to them as "tone tags" as well sometimes, although "tone indicator" is more common. That could work.

2. I have yet to see variants for other languages, I feel like I would notice but I probably don't pay as much attention to posts using non-Latin scripts.

3. "/s" uses the Symbol part of speech header and I think that fits well since its only in written text. AntisocialRyan (talk) 21:54, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Editing news 2021 #2

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When newcomers had the Reply tool and tried to post on a talk page, they were more successful at posting a comment. (Source)

Earlier this year, the Editing team ran a large study of the Reply Tool. The main goal was to find out whether the Reply Tool helped newer editors communicate on wiki. The second goal was to see whether the comments that newer editors made using the tool needed to be reverted more frequently than comments newer editors made with the existing wikitext page editor.

The key results were:

• Newer editors who had automatic ("default on") access to the Reply tool were more likely to post a comment on a talk page.
• The comments that newer editors made with the Reply Tool were also less likely to be reverted than the comments that newer editors made with page editing.

These results give the Editing team confidence that the tool is helpful.

Looking ahead

The team is planning to make the Reply tool available to everyone as an opt-out preference in the coming months. This has already happened at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.

The next step is to resolve a technical challenge. Then, they will deploy the Reply tool first to the Wikipedias that participated in the study. After that, they will deploy it, in stages, to the other Wikipedias and all WMF-hosted wikis.

You can turn on "Discussion tools" in Beta Features now. After you get the Reply tool, you can change your preferences at any time in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

14:15, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

• Hmm. I'm curious about this. I've been working on metrics and quantification in my day job, and struggling with the problem of metrics that don't actually measure what people think they measure.

• Newer editors who had automatic ("default on") access to the Reply tool were more likely to post a comment on a talk page.
• The comments that newer editors made with the Reply Tool were also less likely to be reverted than the comments that newer editors made with page editing.

A follow-up question comes immediately to mind. Granted, these comments weren't reverted, so they're probably not just vandalism. But were those comments themselves worthwhile? Did they add to the discussion in constructive ways? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 18:31, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

They didn’t measure how many editors were scared away by it. Like I haven’t edited once on Arabic Wikipedia, could mend no obvious mistake, because they have enabled Visual Editing by default (for surely, editing source-code bidirectionally provokes mistakes of newbs), but I did not discover how to get out of the angry fruit salad. Fay Freak (talk) 23:00, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: What a wonderful turn of phrase, angry fruit salad. Thank you for expanding my vocabulary!  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 18:14, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Something something part of speech

something-something can mean so-and-so, but one of the cites is "You're nothing but a something-something bookworm." in which it's not obvious if it's a noun or an adjective. Another example:

2005, “Hi, Mr. Horned One” (5:00 from the start), in Two and a Half Men, season 3, episode 6:

Yeah, well... I'm rubber, you're glue. Something, something, something, you.

In Japanese it's supposedly うんたらかんたら or うんたら. It's also in the title of Family Guy: Something, Something, Something, Dark Side. What to do with this? It's a stand-in word with no obvious PoS. Alexis Jazz (talk) 15:27, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

"A something-something bookworm" is attributive use: in English, all nouns are happy to function as adjectives, no need for a separate PoS header. And to me it doesn't feel like something-something is the same as something, something, something. MuDavid 栘𩿠 (talk) 07:28, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Romagnol language

Is it possible to create a Template:rgn-adj etc. for my term?--BandiniRaffaele2 (talk) 23:28, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Server switch

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The Wikimedia Foundation tests the switch between its first and secondary data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

• You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, 29 June 2021. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (07:00 PDT, 10:00 EDT, 15:00 WEST/BST, 16:00 CEST, 19:30 IST, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Wednesday 30 June).
• If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

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• Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
• There will be code freezes for the week of June 28. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes before this operation happens. Please share this information with your community.

SGrabarczuk (WMF) 01:19, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

A Primer on Proper Pinging

Defective pings are by far the most common technical error here in the forums. Every day I see several attempts to correct posts where pings failed due to misspelling of user names or missing signatures. Sad to say, these attempts almost never work. Instead, they make it look after the fact like the pings were done correctly, but without actually pinging anyone.

Here's what you need to do make a ping (I'm using my own name to avoid hitting anyone with stray pings):

1. Create a new post that includes a ping, and sign it.

   A ping happens when a link to the user's user page appears in a new message that is signed in the same edit. I don't know the details of what the system requires to see a message as new, but at the very least it can't be an edited version of something that was already there. If you misspelled something so it didn't link properly or even left the ping out entirely, simply correcting the error accomplishes nothing- you're correcting an old edit, not making a new one. I usually format the new message as a reply to the first one, with a note that I made a mistake in the first ping, and including the ping in the new message- making sure it's correct and that I sign it correctly.

2. Make an edit and include a ping in the edit summary

   Any link to a user's user page in an edit summary triggers a ping, whether there's a signature or not. The only trick is that templates don't work in edit summaries. Instead you have to link to it the old-fashioned way, in double square brackets: [[User:Chuck Entz]]. If you you want to correct your old edit so it looks right, you can redo the failed ping at the same time in the summary for that edit, as in: "[[User:Chuck Entz]]: fixing my ping".

A couple of other points:

1. There's no need to ping anyone on their own talk page. I've never checked whether it actually creates a notification, because the notification that someone has edited one's talk page is of much higher priority than a mere ping. The only thing such an attempted ping accomplishes is that the kind of people who are picky enough to edit dictionaries tend to find it annoying.
2. It's easy to check your pings in preview: all you have to do is open the link in another tab or another window. This won't affect your edit window. If they don't have a user page yet, you can at least tell from the text on the page you go to whether you're at the non-existent page for an existing user or for one that isn't registered

   If you have a multi-button mouse, right-click on the link. Otherwise (on a Mac, anyway) shift-click. This gives you a menu from which you can select the option to open the link in a new tab or a new window. It's probably not as easy in the mobile version, but I've never used it.

   When you preview your edit, a preview of the edit summary should also show in the same window. You should be able to follow that link the same as you would the one in the text.

I hope you find this helpful. If anyone knows more, feel free to chime in with an addition or correction. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:16, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Do pings register from e.g. a page creation, page deletion, move, etc? Or just edit summaries? Ultimateria (talk) 03:34, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

A page creation is an edit that has an edit summary, pinging from a page creation should work. As for the others: I have no idea, though they do seem different to me. As a test, I just deleted one of my user subpages and linked to your user page in the deletion reason- did you get a ping? Chuck Entz (talk) 03:48, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

I did not. Ultimateria (talk) 03:53, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

To make it easier: activate beta feature "discussion tools". It adds a reply link, it is autosigned, and it has an icon for pinging participants. Vriullop (talk) 06:54, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Hello. I mostly don't use this, partly because I doubt the mechanism (maybe merely mentioning a user should "ping" them; cf. subtweet), also because I tend to assume people watch their discussions (but I often ignore my watchlist for weeks too, and then stuff scrolls off the available history). Maybe we should have an info page like WT:PING. It could even redirect to whatever actual help page exists for this feature (on 'pedia or WMF), since that stuff is never easy to find. If you create one here, remember to indicate how to block pings, and warn people that pings may be blocked, and aren't guaranteed to get through. love, Equinox ◑ 00:13, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

Consensus on adding |withtext=1 parameters to {{bor}} and {{inh}}

Inqilabi is trying to add |withtext=1 parameters to {{bor}} and {{inh}} instead of these templates. This subsection is for reaching consensus (i.e., support or oppose; as an extension of the vote above), which Inqilabi should have created instead of secretly adding them (the parameters were not mentioned above), as this is clearly controversial (especially “Inherited from”; or writing it manually instead). J3133 (talk) 16:33, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

Inqilabi has removed this discussion, which I moved from WT:RFDO, as I am not fussy about where it is placed. J3133 (talk) 05:31, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

I think it is not worth fighting over. There is no clear notion of what changes need a vote or even an advance public notice. In this edit I "secretly" added a |nodot=1 parameter to {{R:TLFi}}. IMO, changes that do not affect users who are not aware of them do not need a vote.  --Lambiam 12:46, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Lambiam. The addition of an optional parameter is harmless and @Inqilābī's request was not at all problematic IMHO.--Tibidibi (talk) 13:51, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Given what a contentious issue this has been, he really should have let things cool down before trying to push for a |withtext= parameter. I'm against adding "Inherited from" to all inherited derivations carte blanche, and don't think "inherited" needs explaining with a link, nor does "borrowed". I'm pretty tired arguing about this issue though and would like a temporary cease fire. --{{victar|talk}} 18:41, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

IMO this whole controversy is pointless, and I agree with Lambiam and Tibidibi. Benwing2 (talk) 02:57, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

Your vote expressed that, so no surprise. --{{victar|talk}} 03:17, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

@Victar: What? I requested for the parameter just 2 hours after the vote had ended, while the recent contention (which was begun by SodhakSH; and for which he’s still fighting) originated 3 weeks later. And, I will not permit any bot-operation for standardising the etymologies, so what is really your concern? Also, having ‘Inherited from’ would help to distinguish inheritances from the plain ’from’ as used with {{der}}. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 23:19, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose this; I want any short parameter like |wt=1 or |tx=1, that too only if the new templates are deleted. Better to type "from" than these lengthy parameters. 🔥शब्दशोधक🔥 04:55, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

  Lengthy? Sure, you would want to manually link the keywords to the glossary while other editors would benefit from the parameter. The shorter form |wt= was my idea, anyway. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 23:19, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

  Mr. Dictātor, when the fuck did I say |wt= was not your suggestion? Even |tx= was somebody else's. These are way easier to type than |withtext=. Asking [w]ould any of you mind if I replace "Inherited" with "{{glossary|Inherited}}" (and same for borrowed) does not mean that I'm going to that: until the new templates exist, I'll use them only in new entries. Answer this one for me: what is value of so many Keep votes at RFDO? 🔥शब्दशोधक🔥 09:28, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

• @Erutuon: Hi. For a long time I have been asking @Benwing2 to add the parameter |withtext= to {{inh}} & {{bor}}, but he’s been sore busy these days— so could you please do the job. As you can see in this discussion, this change would be noncontroversial (4-2-1). Thanks. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 20:24, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

  "Noncontroversial"? --{{victar|talk}} 20:49, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

  Yes. You did not say anything ’gainst it, did you? You were only talking ‘cooling down’ things. And SodhakSH was just being faddy, while J3133 was just being agnostic. So no real opposition. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 21:33, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

  I am against adding "Inherited from" to etymologies, be it automated or not. If the guideline put forth at Wiktionary:Beer parlour § Stipulation on the templates vote is equally adhered to here as well, I have no issue with the parameter being added to {{bor}}, though preferably without a glossary link, which is unnecessary for a simple term like borrowed. --{{victar|talk}} 21:46, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

  Don't think after this long time you can just do it. I still oppose. {{inh+}} and {{bor+}} do the job nicely enough, I won't opt for the long withtext=1, rather I'll go for +. Svārtava² • 03:51, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

  Svārtava, so did you not notice that people were going to make a compromise? inh+ is going to die— so the parameter proposal is much, much better as the etymological wording would be displayed. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 06:35, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

  Inqilābī, inh+ won't die. It may not be used, but no one has the right to kill it as it passed RFDO along with bor+. I'd rather put from with inh than go for |withtext=1. By the way, note I'm not opposing this because you are the proposer; so please don't accuse me falsely of that :) —Svārtava² • 08:19, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

  I think you already asked me to add |withtext=1 and I said I think it's a bad idea because it's less clear and possibly uses more characters than writing the text out, and less convenient than {{inh+}} and {{bor+}}. And furthermore, the opposition to {{inh+}} isn't really about it being another template, but about whether we want to write "inherited from" in etymologies at all or in which cases. So I'm not willing to do this. — Eru·tuon 21:39, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

Use of borrowed template in etymologies

As per the policy on the use of the borrowed template here https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Template:borrowed/documentation#When_to_use we are supposed to only use it for the borrowing languages spoken at the time of the borrowing. For example, English wouldn't use "borrowed" for a borrowing that happened during Middle or Old English. However, this is only good for languages that we have delineated into different stages, like English (modern, Middle, New), French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Irish, etc. But what about the many languages that don't have that breakdown? That makes things inconsistent. Like Italian, Albanian, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, etc. These terms are meant to cover over 1000 years of history in some cases, while Middle English is a specific period in time of 400 years or less. This is a problem both across languages and within them as well. For example, some etymologies might not necessarily explicitly include the "Old" version of the language. Like in French, Spanish, or Portuguese, something may be borrowed from Latin but they don't include the Old French, Old Spanish, Old Portuguese form necessarily, even if it was borrowed during the time that language was spoken. It's also harder in cases like Welsh where the exact time of a word's introduction is not always clear. It helps to know a detailed etymology and history of the word. But for example, some French terms may be listed as "borrowed" from Latin, while others (where Old French is listed as an intermediate) are simply listed as being "derived" from Latin. I do agree that the ultimate goal of this idea is good, and it will be good once everything is actually done, but until then it can be messy, disorganized, and inconsistent. Guess we just gotta work with it. Word dewd544 (talk) 22:24, 30 June 2021 (UTC)