Wiktionary talk:About Latin/Archive 2

Question on adverbs

Since {{la-adv}} seems to attract little attention, I'll repost my question here, hoping for an answer. What formatting is required to show that an adverb is missing the superlative form, whilst still showing it has a comparative and vice versa? An example of this would be ēlātē, which according to L&S and the OLD doesn't have the superlative ēlātissimē, and there is limited evidence on google books for any valuable citations for the superlative. Caladon 21:53, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Use a dash (-} for parameter 4. Note that L&S don't actually say there is no superlative; they just don't document it with a quotation like they do the comparitive. There is an Italian descendant of the superlative (spelled identically), so the superlative is at least theoretically possible in Latin of some age. --EncycloPetey 22:44, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I was reconsidering my wording afterwards. I have changed the entry for now until a citation is found for the superlative. The only thing, which is annoying, concerning the use of the dash, is that it links to -#Latin, which doesn't appear to be very useful to me. It may also be helpful in the future, if no dictionary explicitly says it is unattestable, to explain the fact that it is theoretically possible by use of some note or template, rather than either leave it showing that the superlative is not possible or that the superlative is possible but there's no citation provided for it. Caladon 23:03, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

True, but we have very little work being done on adverbs in any language. Also keep in mind that dictionaries don't attest every form of a verb's conjugation either. That's a project for a much, much later date. --EncycloPetey 23:12, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Bad example

Icelandic gala is an inherited word, not borrowed from Latin. This has already been corrected in the word's entry, but here it is mentioned as a descendant of Latin gallus. This erroneous information must be removed. Unfortunately, this makes gallus less useful as an example entry. Could someone pick another example word with borrowed descendants and change the section? – Krun 16:50, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

I and J

Do we want to keep this distinction here? It's generally unsupported by editors (AFAICT). For example {{la-categoryTOC}} doesn't include a 'j', but there are Latin entries starting with a 'j'. I'd very much compare this to vp where v & u are now considered separate letters, but may not have been at a previous time. Nobody's saying that Latin doesn't use a 'J' - I've seen it myself, anyone can, the theory has been that they're simply variants of the same letter in Latin. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:48, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

• Yes, "j" is just an "alternative-form-of" "i", and all our Latin terms containing a "j" should be of that format. So I don't suppose we need them separately indexed. SemperBlotto 16:55, 8 April 2011 (UTC) (p.s. My next Latin text to scour will be the w:Novum Organum, and it's got many "j" words (so I'll be adding them))

Latin -que compound words

Following up on the little discussion there was last year in RFV (when archived: Talk:fasque), I'd like to open a bigger discussion about our policy towards -que. To date, policy (reflected in the usage note on -que) has been not to include compound words like "populusque", "fasque", "sitisque"; I want to know if we should reconsider. An argument in favor of excluding the compounds is that they are SOP. An argument in favor of having them is that they're single words in post-Roman texts, i.e. texts that use spaces, and Latin isn't polysynthetic, so it makes as much sense to have them as to have the SOP English word chesspiece (or, arguably, unresolved or undress). A counter to that is that Latin was historically written without spaces, and "-que" was historically preserved in abbreviations like SPQR, making it hard to tell whether or not "SENATVSPOPVLVSQVEROMANVS" was originally three words or four. In case it wasn't clear, I personally am on the fence. If -que compounds are allowed, only attestable ones will be included. - -sche (discuss) 20:06, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

As with German "Nouncompounds" and Hebrew words with clitics, I think we should have these because an English speaker (English Wiktionary's audience) will not know where to break up the word so will look up the whole thing.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:35, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

If we do decide to have entries for Latin (deprecated template usage) -que words, how will they be defined? — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 20:56, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

I suppose something like the way (deprecated template usage) fasque (noun) is now.​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:15, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

That shouldn't be acceptable, in my opinion. See my proposed way of presenting these (deprecated template usage) que terms: I propose using only {{head|la}} (to prevent these entries from being categorised), using the Phrase header (because, if (deprecated template usage) que is indeed a clitic, that makes all these (deprecated template usage) que terms not words, but rather phrases; this means that (deprecated template usage) que terms which are attested in multiple parts of speech can be presented more compactly under only one POS header), and restricting these terms' definitions to just [X] + que (I assume that a very simple template can be used to ensure consistent presentation). I think that would strike the best balance between user-friendliness, accurate information, and the elimination of user-maintained datedata redundancy. What do you think? — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 23:36, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

(I don't know what you mean by "date redundancy". And I believe you're correct that "a very simple template can be used to ensure consistent presentation". Now to what I think are your main points.) There are several differences between the entry you link to (which I'll call "yours") and the one I do ("mine"). AFAICT they are: (1) Mine uses a Noun header; yours a Phrase. Phrase sounds more reasonable to me, but I don't know Latin, and I think this (like POS decisions in general) should be left up to those who do. (2) Mine includes a gloss ("and religion; and divine law"); yours does not. IMO yours is better in this regard, as (deprecated template usage) fas (for example) may have too many meanings to list in a short definition line. The only exception would be if (e.g.) (deprecated template usage) fasque can, for whatever reason, be used for only some of (deprecated template usage) fas's meanings — but even then, I might prefer a usage note at (deprecated template usage) fasque (and maybe one at (deprecated template usage) fas also) than a gloss on the definition line. (3) Mine uses a longer explanation of what (deprecated template usage) fasque is, on the definition line, than yours: mine says "form of fas with the conjuction que (“and”), suffixed to it", while yours says "fas + que". IMO a verbal explanation is better than a plus sign — but I don't know that "mine"'s explanation is the best possible, or even the correct, explanation. Any other differences? I note that both versions categorize as a noun. I'm not sure that's best — perhaps as a phrase or nothing is better — but would prefer to leave that decision, too, to the Latin editors, I think. I commented here merely for incusibility; it was not my intent to get involved in a discussion on formatting.​—msh210℠ (talk) 00:40, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, having entries and formatting them like {{&lit}} entries (templated information, rather than full definitions like this) seems like a good solution. The template text (I would prefer template text to a mere plus sign) can even explain the "-que" element, so users only have to click on the initial element to find out what it means. I'm blundering my way through a possible template as we speak. - -sche (discuss) 00:48, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

By "date redundancy", I meant "data redundancy" (which I've now corrected); i.e., redundant information in entries that are properly dependent for most of their meaning on some lemma of sorts. I agree that, on reflexion, the template we use should explain what the clitic (deprecated template usage) que is doing in the entries that use that template (let's call it {{que-def}} or something), rather than presenting the information as I first suggested (i.e., [X] + que). My version categorised the entry as a noun only because Category:Latin nouns was included at the bottom of the entry; had I noticed that, I would have removed it, and the entry would have remained uncategorised, as it ought to be. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 01:02, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

I think we should not have these, for the same reasons that we do not include English possessives or other words with enclitic particles. And almost any word in Latin can have this suffix form added. --EncycloPetey 04:33, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

FWIW, I agree with EP; however, from reading the RFV discussion about (deprecated template usage) fasque, I realise that some sort of compromise (as msh210, -sche, and I are working out above) is more likely to win general support. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 17:24, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I am willing to concede that we may end up with a few case-by-case exceptions, but we should be explicit about that if we come to such a decision. --EncycloPetey 03:59, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

I am ambivalent on this topic. I am a staunch supporter of "all words in all languages" and these certainly look like words to me - a concatenation of alphabetic characters with no spaces. Perhaps we should allow them if they are actually accompanied by three citations (not just three citations being possible), but state somewhere that we have better things to do with our time. SemperBlotto 08:31, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

p.s. And the same goes for -ne and a few others that I can't remember on the spur of the moment. SemperBlotto 08:32, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

I support Semperblotto's suggestion (I would adopt such a rule in some other cases, e.g. numbers, but this is another issue). Lmaltier 21:44, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

I can't support the idea that every "concatenation of alphabetic characters with no spaces" should be included, because ancient manuscripts often included no spaces between words. The oldest Biblical texts in Koine Greek were written without any spaces, so that the entire text of the Gospel according to Matthew could be included as a single "word" under this criterion. --EncycloPetey 03:26, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

I agree: we should not include all of Matthew as an entry. But no one will look it up: they'll see the text and realize it's not one word. On the other hand, anglophones (English Wiktionary's audience) who see Latin text with spaces between words and come across fasque in it will look that up.​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:28, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

How do you pronounce fasque anyway? Is it different to "fas que"? I'm no Latin expert, but seems to me that if fasque, or other such words, are written without a space in text that otherwise has spaces then they should be included. I think if we can handle the 100 inflections of each Latin verb, then we can handle a few unusual noun endings when they appear in text. (-ve might be another that hasn't been mentioned above) Pengo 04:39, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

(deprecated template usage) Que doesn't make much of a difference to the pronunciation of (deprecated template usage) fas in (deprecated template usage) fasque; however, in many cases, it does affect stress significantly, as in the case of (deprecated template usage) populus, pronounced /ˈpo.pu.lus/, which becomes (deprecated template usage) populusque, pronounced /po.puˈlus.kʷe/. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 14:54, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

macrons: only guesses?

Am I right in thinking macrons are always based on guessing? Scientific guessing I'm sure, but guessing nonetheless. Pronunciations by the same token, are always based on guessing too. Am I right? Mglovesfun (talk) 14:31, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

• Same as etymology !
• Actually, I think that you can study poetry and figure out if a vowel is longer or shorter than normal. But different people put macrons in different places - and I can't really summon up much enthusiasm for them at all. I wish we didn't show them - it would make all the templates a lot easier to use. SemperBlotto (talk) 14:45, 16 August 2012 (UTC)
  • Regarding "I think that you can study poetry and figure out if a vowel is longer or shorter than normal" that is indeed what my 'scientific guessing' referred to. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:48, 16 August 2012 (UTC)
    • There are some inscriptions that use an apex mark to indicate a long vowel, and some Latin grammarians (i.e. native speakers) say which vowels are long. Otherwise, vowel length can be determined by historical linguistics (both working up to Latin from Proto-Indo-European and working forward from Latin to the Romance languages as well as to Latin loanwords in Germanic and Celtic languages) and, as you mentioned, by scansion in poetic texts. So some knowledge of vowel length comes first-hand from native speakers, and the other is based on scientific evidence, which is rather more than "guessing". —Angr 18:31, 16 August 2012 (UTC)
      • I suppose hypothesis is a better word than guess. But it's very, very far from being fact. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:58, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
        • Our knowledge of what vowels are long in Latin is as close to being fact as our knowledge of the pronunciations of the individual letters. Like all widely accepted scientific theories, it's testable and is not contradicted by any known facts. —Angr 23:02, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
          • Which makes it a theory, which is stronger than a hypothesis. There is no such thing as a fact in science; everything is falsifiable. —CodeCat 23:03, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
            • Testable? How? Mglovesfun (talk) 23:05, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
              • I hate scansion with a vengeance, but I will admit it's pretty damn useful. Latin poetry is extremely regulated, so we can use it to figure out vowels that must be naturally long. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:07, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
              • In science, testing a theory means trying to find evidence that proves it false. As long as there is no such evidence, and the theory correctly accounts for the evidence that is present, it is considered valid. —CodeCat 23:09, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
                • No, no, no, you're really wrong there. What you're saying is that if something is not testable, it should be assumed that it is valid. Mglovesfun (talk) 23:12, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
                  • But the vowel length of Latin words is testable, because it is possible to find evidence that proves a hypothesis false. To give an example: assume two possible hypotheses, one that says "cantare" has a short vowel, and another that says it is "cantāre" instead. There will probably be evidence that is compatible with either hypothesis, but sooner or later you will come upon evidence that is not compatible with one of them, and therefore that hypothesis cannot be true. Therefore, the other must be true. That's how science works. —CodeCat 23:19, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
              • (ec) Against the scansion of poetry, the statements of the grammarians, the inscriptions that use the apex, and the developments of the sounds in the modern Romance languages and Welsh (which, unlike modern Romance languages, kept Latin short ă and long ā distinct). —Angr 23:10, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

macron redirects

The current policy reads:

...within the text of the page, macrons should be used wherever appropriate. For example:

==Latin==

===Adjective===

'''līber''' {{m}}, '''[[libera|lībera]]''' {{f}}, '''[[liberum|līberum]]''' {{n}}

This is needless and moronic make-work. The text should read

'''līber''' {{m}}, '''[[lībera]]''' {{f}}, '''[[līberum]]''' {{n}}

If the definitions are (per consensus) located at macronless namespaces, there should be redirects to point to the proper location from the macron-employing variant. There is no reason to require multiple piped forms of the same term in every instance where Latin appears on a page. However, attempts to create such redirects – necessary, as mentioned above, in order to use many templates – have been deleted, apparently following a separate policy that we must avoid redirects at all costs.

These three policies in tandem – employing macrons throughout the mainspace, avoiding macrons throughout the namespace, and avoiding redirects – are a disservice to the users and the editors. The proper solution isn't to remove the macrons throughout, but to use redirects where needed.

Are there any other talk pages necessary to get this conversation started? LlywelynII (talk) 22:08, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Redirects from titles with macrons are okay in cases where Latin is the only language with a word so spelled, but if some other language whose writing system uses macrons (like Latvian or Hawaiian or Romaji Japanese) has a homograph, then we can't make it a redirect. —Angr 22:40, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Is there consensus for allowing redirects at all, even if Latin is the only language? WT:REDIR says that redirects should not be used to link from forms without diacritics to forms with diacritics. Presumably the reverse is true too. —CodeCat 22:45, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

I will post there, but I don't see why the reverse would be true. The rationale for that policy has no bearing (in fact, completely fails to apply – the search does not automatically go to the non-accented version). The current Latin policy is creating needless busy work writing words twice (once as the macronic running text, once as the macronless link) and breaking some templates (which require the macronic form to display correctly but don't create the proper link). LlywelynII (talk) 22:53, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

(ec) Again, I think that rule is in place because of the possibility of a redirect getting in the way of a different language. For a relatively long Latin word with a distinctly Latin ending (e.g. conversābiminī redirecting to conversabimini) I think it's unproblematic because there's virtually no chance of a different language having its own conversābiminī. But I'd never support a redirect from amō to amo. I think we should be allowed to use common sense in our interpretation of the rules. —Angr 22:54, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

If amō has no homographs and is currently a redlink, why wouldn't you support a redirect?

Because there are dozens- if not hundreds- of underrepresented languages that use macrons, and we don't know enough about all of them to say for sure which spellings for simple VCV-structured words with macrons are never going to have an entry. Chuck Entz (talk) 18:34, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

LlywelynII (talk) 01:13, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

In response to Angr's example above where a macronic form would refer both to Latin and (e.g.) Hawaiian, I don't see the problem. The templates and uses would link to the page's Latin definition, which would list it as a variant form of the main entry.

The alternative there would be not listing the Latin at all which is far less helpful. LlywelynII (talk) 22:53, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

LlywelynII, could you please avoid inflammatory words like 'moronic'. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:50, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

I see your point w/r/t civility, but I'm not using inflammatory rhetoric w/r/t any other well-meaning editor but w/r/t a combination of three well-intentioned policies which (taken together) do in fact have a moronic effect. LlywelynII (talk) 22:53, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

w/r/t? Mglovesfun (talk) 22:55, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Sorry. "With regard to". Have been reading too much DFW lately. LlywelynII (talk) 22:56, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

We do have w/r/t. —Angr 22:57, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm sure this is a SNOOT haven. =D LlywelynII (talk) 22:59, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

SNOOT? Anyway, I doubt that people are searching for terms with macra, because almost no texts except dictionaries, grammars, and texts re-edited for beginners even use them. We couldn't ever write templates assuming there to be redirects, because I think many of us would oppose their creation en masse. Oh, and @Angr: isn't it a bit difficult to draw the line between amō and conversābiminī (I don't think I've ever even used the latter...)?—Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:03, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

It's difficult to define the line between them, but it's not difficult to use common sense at the extremes of the spectrum. —Angr 23:04, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

If being correct involves more work, I'd rather do the extra work and be correct. Is this a pro-laziness proposal? Even if it were, it would have the opposite effect; making a lot more work. So it would mean a lot of work to be less accurate, an all-round loss. Mglovesfun (talk) 23:07, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Lines like "needless and moronic make-work" suggest that Ll. thinks of this as essentially "pro-laziness", although with better connotations. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:09, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree that we should do more work (have the macronic forms in the running text) and be correct (have the main entries at the macronless forms). Making those work together is precisely what we're discussing. LlywelynII (talk) 23:51, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Consider also this situation. It is a given that not all forms with macrons will exist only in Latin, since some other languages also use them and can (and probably do) happen to have the same word. That implies that any link to a form with macrons could lead to a page that isn't a Latin entry, but rather a "macron spelling of" entry with yet another link. Such a situation is obviously not desirable. But if we allow links to macron spellings, then we cannot prevent at least a few links to such entries. —CodeCat 23:13, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

It's more desirable than the macronic entry not having any Latin or link to the Latin entry (e.g., amō not showing any Latin use whatever). Certainly another possibility would be to change the current Latin policy to make the macronic form the main entry for every single Latin word, but that would (a) involve much more work, (b) be rather anachronistic, and (c) be less helpful to the end users who will mostly type without the macrons. LlywelynII (talk) 23:51, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Oh, and Llywelynll, I think you're wrong about the templates being broken, because I've never seen it happen. Can you find even a single example of this? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:19, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Just want to point out that when Scribunto is deployed, we will be able to make templates that automatically remove the macrons in the link, effectively solving this problem. --WikiTiki89 23:26, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

So... for how many years have we been saying stuff like that? I can't wait, but personally it still doesn't seem anywhere near imminent. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:28, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Any template where the running text display is the same as the generated link. LlywelynII (talk) 23:51, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't think any exist. I have asked you to find just one example, and you can't. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:55, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

I mostly edit things that I notice are missing, rather than scripting bots or spending hours dumping dictionaries into approved templates. I'm sure there are (as I said, one of the other, more experienced editors complained about it in the discussion directly above this one) and that some of the other editors here can point them out to you. {continued below}

The thing is, you made this claim, so I'm asking for some evidence. Now you tell me you have no evidence. That's OK, but I just wanted to make sure. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:23, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

I think what he means is not exactly "broken" templates, but that you can't just do {{l|la|amō}}, and instead you have to duplicate the word as {{l|la|amo|amō}}. --WikiTiki89 00:26, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

I gave it in the paragraph immediately below, but you posted here and rewrote my comment to make it seem like it was a complete and non-responsive entry. I didn't unsign anything. Cease rewriting and editing my comments and respond to the points at hand. LlywelynII (talk) 00:30, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

It would be nice if you would stop accusing me of ridiculous crimes like "rewriting" your comments. As WikiTiki says, that's not "broken" (i.e. it works). (And unsigned just means that you forgot to leave your signature there.) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:33, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

I didn't forget: the bottom of my post was signed. You precisely rewrote my comment to make it seem like the midpoint was the end of my post and I had not answered your question, both of which were untrue. LlywelynII (talk) 00:40, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

You are repeating false statements, and this annoys me. I'm not intending to respond to any more comments here that are not specifically about the macra in question. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:45, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm fine with getting back to the topic, except the complaint is not false and you can review the history to see that. You created and then restored the misleading "signature" on my "post".

[My apologies to WikiTiki, who takes exception to my having moved his post to where it should have been had your edit been less deceptively placed. I wanted to keep the macron discussion honest and separate from this aside about you and your deceptive editing of my posts, but if I'd seen he was moving his comment – rather than you – I wouldn't've returned it a second time. I have no idea why he misleadingly added a timestamp to what was never my full post.] LlywelynII (talk) 01:10, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

In any case, very common templates such as {{term}} do create exactly such links; correcting the display requires filling in a second field with the same word as before. LlywelynII (talk) 00:19, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

Incidentally, I did a summary and clarification of my main points here at the Beer Parlor. Meta redirected the conversation there to here, but the summary is there if anyone was confused about how these three policies work together to create a bad effect for the users and editors. LlywelynII (talk) 23:53, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Emend.: The policies work together in a way that you and you alone feel is bad. You have not demonstrated any factual problem, but merely that your opinion about the issue differs from that of the community. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:15, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

Old Latin inscriptions

The following discussion has been moved from the page User talk:-sche.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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Inscriptions and whatnot

I'd like to add some Old Latin terms used in inscriptions, but I'm not really sure what format to use and how to do within the frame of Latin. For example, the Garigliano Bowl uses the word SOKIOIS, the ablative plural of *SOKIOS. Should I show this as {{Old Latin|lang=la}} {{obsolete form of|sociis|sociīs|lang=la}} or as an inflected form? What if the lemma isn't citable? Also, what about different readings of a mangled inscription? What if the same author reads it two different ways? What if the writing system used is not the Latin alphabet? TIA —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:57, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Also, should the pagename be sokiois or SOKIOIS? Only the latter is attested, of course, but WT:ALA would advise using the former. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:33, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

First, we need to answer the question: is Old Latin a form of Latin ({{la}}) or a separate language (in need of its own code)? What do you think? What do academic authorities think? That influences what to do with SOKIOIS et al:

No matter what we consider Old Latin, if a form is attested (e.g., if the ablative plural of *SOKIOS, SOKIOIS, is what's attested), that form should have an entry. But if Old Latin is a form of Latin, I see no reason not to follow WT:ALA in normalising its all-caps inscriptions the way we normalise newer Latin's all-caps inscriptions — whereas, if Old Latin is a separate language, there'd be a strong case for keeping it in the all-caps form it's attested in.

If OL is a form of Latin, sokiois could be listed as an obsolete ablative plural form of socius (the way hath is an archaic third-person singular of have), or, if we're confident the nominative would have looked like sokios, sokiois could be listed as the ablative plural of sokios, and sokios could be created as an obsolete/OL form of socius (read on for justification and precedent for that).

If OL is an independent language, and we're reasonably confident the nominative would have looked like SOKIOS, it should definitely have an entry (IMO), the justification being that the word is attested (in inflected forms), and a word's definition has to be stored somewhere (in one of the word's forms), and Wiktionary has decided to make the nominative singular that somewhere. Precedent for this is ample: I know we do it for Gothic, Old Norse, and sometimes even German, and I expect we already do it for Latin and Greek. - -sche (discuss) 22:03, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

If there are multiple readings of an inscription, I think we should have entries for all of the readings; that's how I've handled Pictish and Khazar.

If an inscription isn't in the Latin alphabet, I would enter it (in whatever alphabet it's in) all the same. I thought some other old languages already had entries in multiple script; I can't find any examples, but I know that e.g. Old Norse is attested in both the Runic and the Latin scripts, so it's only a matter of time before someone adds Runic Old Norse... - -sche (discuss) 22:28, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

That's a valid question. Wiktionary considers Old Latin to be Latin. The main problem is that there's some rather tame "Old Latin", which can be found in ample literature, and often survived as archaisms into Classical Latin. By tame "Old Latin" I mean spellings like quom and second declension genitive plural endings in -um instead of -orum. This is fully comprehensible if it is read by somebody as fluent in Classical Latin as I am.

There almost certainly is another language, closely related to Latin, which I might call legitimate Old Latin, like the Carmen Saliare, which was difficult even for educated Classical Romans to read, and which I have been reading up on lately. Forms like FHEFHAKED (from the Praeneste Fibula) are nothing short of impossible for someone like me to read without specific study of Old Latin, and that's actually a transliteration. That brings me to another point, which is that truly Old Latin is often not in the Latin alphabet, but instead in the Etruscan alphabet. The corpus is tiny, because only inscriptions remain (manuscripts had their spellings and other features largely normalised). The real question is whether it's worth creating a language just for these inscriptions, when it can't really be named in a non-confusing way (I would prefer 'Primitive Latin', but I don't think that such a term is used academically) and is definitely mappable to Latin. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:11, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Post scriptum: LinguistList separates Old, Classical, and Vulgar Latin. We essentially already separate Vulgar by ignoring it when attested and adding it to the Appendix namespace when not attested. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:30, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Hello? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:53, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't realise I was supposed to reply to this; I'm sorry. I don't see a problem with mapping Old Latin to Latin. Considering FHEFHAKED and fecit to be the same language seems no harder than considering Middle English, in all its variation (might, mikte, misten, mauht...), to be a language. As you suggest, it doesn't seem worth it to create a new code/L2 for such a small corpus of terms that can be mapped to {{la}}. - -sche (discuss) 22:54, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

Sorry about that; I guess I was just relying on you to make a decision one way or another. {{la}} it is, then. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:06, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

On one hand I see value in treating Old Latin as a distinct language, because it simplifies the treatment of inflection tables. One of the main changes from Old to Classical was the reduction of vowels and diphthongs, so that makes our current set of tables pretty much useless for those old forms. We could, of course, add them to the normal Latin tables, but those would not be helpful for the majority of users and just clutter up the table. So in a sense, we'd consider Old Latin (as a language) to be a "dumping ground for archaic forms that are not found in classical texts", which keeps the classical Latin entries tidier. On the other hand, Old Latin only really ends a hundred years or so before the time where a lot of the classical literature was written. So Old Latin and Classical Latin really compare more to Middle and Early Modern English; from Plautus to Cicero is more or less the same as from Chaucer to Shakespeare, after all. —CodeCat 18:54, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

I wasn't really thinking of making Old Latin inflection tables. The language was far too irregular and unpredictable, even. The corpus is quite limited, too, so I fear we'd have to rely on guesswork or PIE far too much. Keeping Classical Latin tidy is important to me, but I think that we can preserve that with Old Latin forms marked with {{Old Latin}}. I really just want to get inscriptional forms recorded here. As a side note, in my schooling, Shakespeare was taught from the original, but Chaucer from a translation. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:06, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Even if some endings or some words are sufficiently well attested to merit being in tables, I don't think "considering them Latin" and "keeping them out of the Classical entries' tables" are contradictory. When the Classical Latin spelling and the Old Latin spelling of the citation form of the word differ, the tables have no reason to be mixed: sociis can be in a table at socius while sokiois can be in a table at sokios. - -sche (discuss) 15:10, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

/au.sum/ > /au.zum/ > /au.sum/

Discussion moved from User talk:Chuck Entz.

This is in reference a revert (diff) of changing the pronunciation in ausum to show intervocalic voicing of the s.

I thought intervocalic single-s in Latin was voiced as /z/ before it became /r/ or /ɾ/ in later Classical Latin. Is /au.zum/ not the older form of /au.rum/ before rhotacization? — This unsigned comment was added by 76.243.38.4 (talk) at 12:22, 15 February 2014 (UTC).

I could be wrong, but I believe that would be Old Latin, not Classical Latin. In cases such a honos/honor where the change was later, the intervocalic sound change happened first, then was later extended to the rest of the paradigm by analogy. Also, many sources attribute later ausum to the Sabines, who retained intervocalic s. I really don't know for sure, but I felt it was better not to change it without evidence or references. I wouldn't object to presenting both, but completely eliminating the usual interpretation without evidence didn't seem right. Maybe User:Fsojic might have more information. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:40, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

The consonant was certainly voiced in Old Latin, and was probably voiced since Proto-Italic times (it's the only way to account for changes like -sr- > -br-). But I don't know if the voicing was phonemic, it probably wasn't. Other Italic languages have similar allophony for "f" as well, which was voiceless initially but voiced medially. Latin had no medial "f" so it didn't occur there. —CodeCat 19:38, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

And although there isn't really any evidence for it, it's highly likely that /h/ was voiced word-medially in Latin as well. —CodeCat 21:04, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

In Phonetics and Philology: Sound Change in Italic Jane Stuart-Smith page 52 is written the following paragraph:

In Latin intervocalic *-s- became /r/ by the middle of the fourth century BC; for example, aurora 'dawn'<*ausōs, cf. Skt ușas- (Leumann 1977:178-80). We may assume that *-s- had become voiced [z] before this date (represented by S). We shall see that the intervocalic voicing of *-s- to [z] probably dates back to common Italic (cf. rhotacism in Umbrian; Meiser 1986: 38).— This unsigned comment was added by 76.243.38.4 (talk) at 20:53, 17 February 2014 (UTC).

It seems to me there are three issues:

1. Is this referring to Old Latin, Sabinian, or some combination of the two?
2. Based on the above, was this voiced in the Old Latin, but not in the Sabinian, or in all cases?
3. If it was voiced, but strictly due to a predictable rule, should z be used in a phonemic representation (I assume from the "/ /" that's what we have here).

In any case, I'm a little out of my depth, so I'll let others decide. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:15, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

It's both. The change [s] > [z] medially is Common Italic, and is parallelled by [ɸ] > [β], [θ] > [ð] and [x] > [ɣ]. Most of those sounds don't survive as such in Latin, but the voicing distinction is clear because it affects the outcome. Aside from [z] > [r], there's also [β] > [b], [ð] > [d] and sometimes also [ɣ] > [g], whereas [ɸ] and [θ] both develop into [f]. w:Proto-Italic has more about this. So [z] was the pronunciation of these occurrences in all Italic languages, including Old Latin and Sabine. The voicing was definitely allophonic to a large degree. In the Osco-Umbrian branch of Italic, [ɸ] and [β] (or [f] and [v], it's hard to tell) are both spelled as "f", just like [s] and [z] are both represented as "s" in those languages as well as Old Latin. So using /s/ for the phoneme would be correct, but it would be phonetically misleading, and it's only the [z] allophone that becomes [r]. —CodeCat 22:34, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

comparative & superlative adjective lemma dilemma

Do the root forms of an adjective's comparative and superlative inflections get lemma status?

for example:

virīlis, virīlior, virīlissimus

Shall these all be included in both "Latin adjectives" and "Latin lemmas"? Naturally, I'll eventually wonder this about adverbs, also. Charts of the appropriate linkage to appurtenant cumulative files for each POS would help tighten up these conventions; maybe someone can direct me to these. I'm new around here.

We actually have two different categories for comparatives and superlatives, depending on lemma status. Treated as a non-lemma, they go in "adjective comparative forms", while treated as a lemma, they go in "comparative adjectives". I don't know which one is used for Latin though. —CodeCat 19:55, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks CodeCat, very helpful. So, I guess I should have asked: do we consider the Latin comparative & superlative root (nom. masc. singular) forms to be lemmas, or just yet two more of the dozens of forms which result from Latin inflection. I'm a beginning Latin student, not any sort of lexicographer (other than the Wiki sort). Based on the templates that I've encountered, it appears that there might be two schools of thought. --Doebee (talk) 07:20, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

All right, I've convinced myself that each part of speech should only have one lemma, ergo: root comparatives & superlatives are just inflected forms, not lemmas. I bet I'll even stumble across a Latin comparative or superlative that has no positive root form, and thus might have to be considered a lemma. Ah, how about bonus -> melior -> optimus ! ...Doebee 17:57, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

There is already a headword template for Latin comparatives and superlatives: {{la-adj-comparative}} and {{la-adj-superlative}}. —CodeCat 19:22, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks CodeCat, got that. How can I determine which accumulation files a given template contributes too? Example: la-adj-3rd-2e contributes to "Latin Lemmas", and to "Latin Adjectives", but I can only discover that by executing code. Some of the templates that I have come across, apparently aren't documented (case in point: "Template:la-adj-comparative"). Anyway, thank you for directing me to sandbox, but I don't think the sandbox will help me understand where the templates are putting new entries... The take away is, thank you for keeping me from harming anything; I'm working on it. --Doebee 19:59, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

The categories (that's the official term) that a template adds a page to can change depending on the parameters given to the template, as well as the page the template is placed on. So there is no easy way to determine it other than actually adding it to a page and clicking "preview". You could also try Special:ExpandTemplates, which lets you see exactly what text is added by a template on a given page, including the categories. —CodeCat 20:23, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

problems and errors in Latin diphthong info

moved from WT:BP

Wiktionary's explanations of the pronunciations of Latin diphthongs are chaotic. Just looking at the first few words beginning with "ae", we find /ai/, /aɪ/, and /ae̯ / in addition to the English Wikipedia's (incorrect) "official" IPA transcription /aj/ and Wiktionary's (almost correct) official and confusing "official" IPA transcription, which gives both [ae] and [ai] without any clarification:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aestas, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aeternitas, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aetas, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aedificium

See this discussion for details. --Espoo (talk) 00:17, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

I hope you don't mind, but I've moved this discussion to WT:T:ALA, since the question is specific to Latin and is not really a general (multi-language) question. - -sche (discuss) 05:14, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Pinging some users who know Latin, in case they have input: User:Metaknowledge, User:EncycloPetey, User:Chuck Entz. - -sche (discuss) 05:15, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

A note: Our "official" page on Classical Latin IPA was copied over from a work-in-progress, and modified subsequently. Many of our entries have the same issue in that our understanding has changed over time. You will find that this is also true in the academic world outside Wiktionary: that the "correct" pronunciation differs by time and place as various scholars put forth new evidence, new arguments, and as the opinion of the academic community changes. Also note that not all pronunciations given for Latin words are for Classical words. Words given a pronunciation in the Late Latin or Neo-Latin periods will necessarily have some differences from Classical Latin, as pronunciation of the language has changed over time. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:14, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

We should always add qualifiers to pronunciations because of this. The new {{la-IPA}} template always puts (classical) before the pronunciation it generates. —CodeCat 18:25, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Nasal infix

A category that should be created under Category:Latin terms by etymology is Category:Latin words with nasal infix or something like it, for categorizing Latin words created by w:Nasal infix. This includes many present-tense stems like vinco, tango, linquo, fundo, and so on. Perhaps I will do this at some point. It probably needs a template that can be used in Etymology sections to make it easier to add. Eru·tuon 06:01, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

I discovered {{infix}} and tested it in vinco. It placed the entry in Category:Latin words infixed with -n-. The order of parameters is the opposite of that for {{prefix}}; first parameter in {{infix}} is base form and second is infix (this is from looking at the test case, since there's no documentation page), first parameter in {{prefix}} is prefix, second is root. Looks like {{infix}} needs some work, although I don't know how to look at its inner workings. The parameters should be reversed, and placing the infixes -n-, -m- in the template should make the template put pages in Category:Latin words with nasal infix, since this is the usual term for the morpheme in Proto-Indo-European studies. I'm not experienced in advanced template coding, so I can't do this. Eru·tuon 09:53, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

It looks like {{infix}} works like {{suffix}}, then, where the first parameter is the root and the second is the suffix. However, {{infix}} is for truly morphological infixes (those that alter the meaning of a root, just like prefixes and suffixes do). If we do decide to have separate categories for words in IE languages with the nasal infix, we probably shouldn't be using {{infix}} to do it. I'm wondering how far we want to take this, though, especially since we're talking about daughter languages rather than PIE. The nasal infix is just one of many ways to form a present stem in PIE; if we're going to have categories for Latin/Greek/Sanskrit words with the nasal infix, do we want to have categories for Latin/Greek/Sanskrit words with the *-ye/yo- suffix, and with the *-sḱe/sḱo- suffix, and so on and so forth? And then what about words like iungō, where historically the -n- was the nasal infix, but it's spread beyond the present stem and synchronically in Latin is just part of the root? Does that go in the category or not? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 10:49, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree with Aɴɢʀ that we should not use {{infix}} due to both the lack of productivity of the nasal infix in the daughter languages and edge cases like iungō. If we pursue this idea, perhaps we make a special purpose template that categorizes PIE daughter language verbs by there verbal morphology (something like {{ine-morph}} with lang and type params?). This would merely represent verbs descended from a certain morphology type but make no claim about the funciton of the derived morphology within the language (That was a bad sentence; let me clarify.) So iungō would be included as a descendant of the -n- type morphology but with a note concerning the verbs further irregular development. Also, if we do choose to add these categories, the Wiktionary resources pertaining to PIE verbal morphology would need to be greatly increased. The Wiki page does an great job, but I'd love to have something closer to home. I admit to being very interested in this project, but, then again, I am overfond of affix-categorization. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 11:37, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

(To Angr. I was posting while JohnC5 was.) Thanks for the input. The nasal infix is quite different from existing affix-related categories such as Category:Latin words prefixed with in-, which was actually used synchronically in Latin to create new words with some known relation in meaning (although in this case, the word should have two subcategories for the two uses of in-). This would be a more diachronic category, you could say. I guess my thought process is, if in Etymology sections we describe the origin of the words with nasal infix and other Proto-Indo-European affixes — as would in my mind be the ideal, in some ways following the convention of the OED — then it would make sense to also create categories containing words with the same PIE affix. This is simply a possibility of the Wiktionary medium. It would increase the potential of exploring historical linguistics through Wiktionary. For me, I kind of want to be able to explore all the Latin verbs with the suffix -sc-, and even the Ancient Greek verbs, including πάσχω where the suffix has undergone an assimilatory sound change. It would be cool.

The question of what might be called "analogical forms": I'm not sure. It would be difficult to create categories for "things that are descended from things that had the nasal infix. Maybe there could be a category for verb forms with the nasal infix, and then a separate category for nominal forms containing an analogous form derived from a verb with an infix. That would be a second-level derivation. Then, I suppose, we could go farther to English forms derived from Latin verbs that have an infix, and English forms derived from Latin nominals deriving from Latin nouns that had an infix. But here I'm getting off track. This is all the logically possible derivative categories.

For Latin, I think what would be sufficient is a category of present-tense forms that come from a nasal-infixed PIE verb-stem. Going to the other logically possible categories is too much for now. The categories would be applied at the lemma (1st sg ind prs act of the affected verb stem). They would be inserted in the etymology section, next to the PIE derivation of the word. Thus for fingo we'd say *dʰeiǵʰ- with nasal infix. It would be awesomest to have it represented graphically by placing the infix inside angle brackets inside the root: thus, *dʰi⟨n⟩ǵʰ- (zero grade with nasal suffix), from the root *dʰeiǵʰ-. Perhaps this restricts the nasal-infix-categorized words to those with known PIE roots; and this would certainly exclude, say, coniunx, where the nasally infixed n was adopted into a form not descending from PIE. This is just brainstorming on how it should work. Let me know what you guys think. Eru·tuon 12:43, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

I suppose this idea also implies the possibility of categorizing words by ablaut: zero-grade, e-grade, long e–grade, etc. That's maybe not as easy to do, though. Not strictly relevant to what we're talking about here, but it is a probable logical consequence. Eru·tuon 12:58, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

After a little thought, I think this idea would work better as a general PIE morphology template that includes more than just nasal infix. I posted that idea in About Proto-Indo-European. Eru·tuon 18:10, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Alternative and syncopated verb forms

I was just curious whether there was a reason we don't include these verb forms. When I used to do a lot of translation, I remember running across them with some frequency, and I thought it might be nice to add them to module:la-verb. I can imagine people will say that these are rare forms and frequently unattested for a lot of verbs, but then again, we give full inflections to verbs that are hapax legomena; so I feel that the addition of a few extra putative forms would not be a problem. What are people's thoughts on this matter? I feel like we are omitting a large branch of Latin forms that could easily be add through changes with one module and bots. Also, I tried to see whether there was previous discussion on this matter, but I could not find any. If this has been vetoed before, just point me thither. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 23:01, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

I think they can be added, but I'd need a more precise description of what changes, and the conditions in which the change can occur. —CodeCat 23:05, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

I agree that they would be useful to add. —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 00:09, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

I'm trying to find really good sources for this one, but not doing staggeringly well. Here are some mentions. The forms I would think should be added are:

• All 2nd person passives: -ris → -re
• 3rd person plural perfect active indicative: -ērunt → -ēre
• Perfects in -āv^ē̆/_ĭ-, -ēv^ē̆/_ĭ-, -īv^ē̆/_ĭ-, and -ōv^ē̆/_ĭ- → -ā-, -ē-, -ī-, and -ō-

• Exception: -āvī, -ēvī, -īvī, and -ōvī → -aī, -eī, -iī, and -oī (I believe this is right)

—JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 00:32, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

I've added the two alternative endings, but I'm hesitant to make the other changes. All the module could do is see if the preceding stem ends with a long vowel + v, and remove the v and the vowel of the ending if it does to create the alternative form. But according to the sources you gave, there are some cases where that change would give the wrong result, like caveō (would give *cāstī etc.). —CodeCat 01:04, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

I see your point. Could you edit the get_regular_stems function to autogenerate a "sync_perf_stem" for 1st conjugation, add the syncopated endings, and add an extra param (something like "sync=") so I can manually input the "sync_perf_stem"? I'll go through and just add the params manually to the templates. I know this'd be a lot of work, so feel free to say no. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 05:00, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

What I'll do first is add a category for the different types of perfect stem, so something like Category:Latin 1st conjugation verbs with perfect in -āv-. This would be useful for general users. We can then use those categories to make an inventory of which perfect forms would be affected by this change. —CodeCat 15:13, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Sounds good to me! —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 16:52, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

I've created some of the categories now. I could create more, but recognising the perfect formations becomes more and more difficult as they become more irregular. I think the -s- perfect is probably the only one that could still be recognised somewhat easily. —CodeCat 17:01, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat Thanks so much! I've been having a blast looking through these list and finding errors (most verbs categorized as irregular that should not be). I think that, by inserting before the default irregular condition another condition for any verb with a perfect stem ending in -s- or -x-, we would catch all the -s- perfects. Might I also suggest the cross-conjugation groups Category:Latin verbs with perfect in -u/v- (or maybe Category:Latin verbs with perfect in -*w-) and Category:Latin verbs with perfect in -s-? Looking at these categories, it seems like the verbs in -āv-, -ēv-, and -īv- separate very nicely in groups and could have syncopated forms add. I now further support this point given the existence of verbs like saevio which appear to only have syncopated perfects. _{Again, thanks for all your work!} —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 00:41, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Checking for verbs with a perfect stem in -s or -x wouldn't work if the base verb already ended in that consonant. What typefies these verbs is that the -s- is added in the perfect, but this is complicated by cs/gs > x, ts/ds > s, and also sometimes loss of preceding consonants (I think I saw at least one example of rgs > rs). So such changes all need to be accounted for if we want to detect such perfects reliably.

I suppose having general categories for these would be ok, but the u and v types are definitely distinct so they shouldn't be merged. They were historically the same (-u- is really just the result of the loss of short unstressed vowels before -v-) but afterwards the two types were confused by speakers so it's no longer as neat in classical Latin, and they're better treated as separate types. —CodeCat 02:56, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Oh yes, I'm perfectly aware that the -s- perfects require the addition of an s. :) My reasoning for the for this is as follows:

What we are trying to avoid is false positive -s- stems from the "suffixless" and "irregular" categories:

In the case where a "suffixless" verb's present stem ends in an -s-/-x- (vīsō and incessō, once we've fixed the incessō's inflection), the -s- vs. stemless forms would be indistinguishable without etymological information and could not be determined by a template.

In the case where an "irregular" verb's present stem ends in an -s-/-x- (English Wiktionary has no verbs of this type currently) you would expect the change in stem to represent one of the following:

• Reduplication (I'm pretty sure there are no reduplicating stems in Latin that end in -s-/-x-)
• Proper -s- stems (-ts-/-ds- → -s-, -cs-/-gs- → -x-, -rgs- → -rs-, -ll- → -ls-, or -rr- → -rs-)
• Some mysterious other type of verb that I have not encountered or thought of that has present stem alteration and ends in -s-/-x-. Perhaps some sort of vowel ablaut or compensatory lengthening? I can't think of any, and as I say, we possess no such verbs on Wiktionary currently.

As such, I think adding this rule would be sufficient to find find all -s- stems. As form my -u/v- question, you make a good point. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 06:36, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Separate templates for taxonomic Latin

Modern taxonomic names only use the nominative and genitive cases of terms in nominal parts of speech. I would like to propose, therefore, that we use special versions of the declension templates for Latin found only in taxonomic names, that would mark the forms for cases other than nominative and genitive and provide a footnote that those forms aren't normally used for taxonomic names (I would suggest just not including them, but the taxonomic literature of former centuries was in Latin, so older taxonomic names often have other cases attested).

The reason I'm proposing this is that modern taxonomic Latin strikes me as not a full-fledged, living, breathing language, but as a morphology-only subset- a sort of Latin Lite™, and we should make our readers aware of the distinction. I should also ping User:DCDuring, who may not have this on his watchlist. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:13, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

I would welcome such templates, especially if there was also some JS to accelerate the creation of the inflected forms. DCDuring TALK 23:44, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

I have been helping User:Pengo add taxonomic epithets and have encountered similar problems. One is the appearance of ill-declined forms like Karsholtia marianii presumably from marianus. The addition of -ii stems to normal 1&2 adjectives happens from time to time from a poor understanding of declension. The more annoying problem is running across New Latin epithets with no discernible meaning. I could be in favor of something like {{NL-decl-1&2}}. —JohnC5 23:32, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

I think one will find that the double-"i" endings are single-"i" ending of something ending in -ius, eg, marianius. There are many doublets of the form marianus/marianius, which may (or may not) be alternative forms of the same underlying semantics. In the case you cite, it is possible that there are differences by Code, or that one is an honorific and the other a toponym derivation from Mariana Islands. I could form other hypotheses, too. DCDuring TALK 23:44, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

I should have focused on the main chance: an eponymic genitive for entomologist Mario Mariani. DCDuring TALK 23:49, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

It's not always misunderstanding of declension. Conversion of non-Latin personal names to Latin usually requires adding inflectional endings (examples: John Tucker > johntuckeri, Ellen Willmott > willmottae), which are generally done using one of two competing conventions: adding an inflected form of -us or -a (depending on the gender of the referent), or adding inflected forms of -ius or -ia. Since these names have no Latin inflectional endings to start with, the choice of endings is arbitrary, and thus no grammatical rules are violated. The extra "i" has gone out of fashion, but it was quite common in certain contexts. There's a discussion of this somewhere on the web, but I don't remember exactly where. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:13, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Re: templates: Perhaps instead of new templates, a parameter/tag could be added to existing templates. This would avoid massive duplication and maintenance of the many Latin templates. So, e.g. {{la-decl-1&2|mariān|cx=taxo}}, or something like that. Besides a footnote about usage, perhaps the bottom half of the table (with the lesser-used cases) could be given a lighter colour, to appear like they are greyed out (unless there's another non-taxonomic meaning of course). Adding such a feature might be a good excuse to get around to a second + third declension of the simplified Latin templates I started with {{la-decl-first}}.

I've often thought the taxonomic entries should only need to show the nominative and genitive cases. But Chuck Entz's point about "taxonomic literature of former centuries" is reasonable.

I can't come up with a great example, but there are cases where I feel like the only reason an entry is even classified as Latin (vs translingual) is that the giant Latin declension table wouldn't make sense in a "Translingual" entry, even though the term will only ever be used in "Latin Lite" ways, and only has a vague connection to Latin. I have dreams of a mini "Scientific Latin" declension table for use under the Translingual heading, if it would ever be considered acceptable. It seems that the deciding factor for which heading to put some entries under is whether they need a declension table.

But back to the point, anything to make the entry clearer is good. So yes, I like the idea of a modified declension templates which highlight which word forms are more likely to be encountered. Pengo (talk) 03:44, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Template:la-verb

@I'm so meta even this acronym, Metaknowledge, may I rewrite {{la-verb}} to use {{head}}. The current implementation is not great. I also do not like that the lemma is not the first word of the headword. Any objections? —JohnC5 08:03, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Yeah, it's pretty weird that {{la-verb}} doesn't take advantage of modular macron-stripping. I suspect that this really needs a fairly radical solution, because a template that makes use of parameters |2=, |4=, |6=, and |8= whilst ignoring parameters |1=, |3=, |5=, and |7= is not much better than one that uses all eight of those parameters. (BTW, check out how I wrote {{la-suffix-verb}} — which is a modification of {{la-verb}} — for comparison.) Re the lemma not being the first word in the headline, I personally don't mind the current display (at least it's clear), but I'm also not too attached to it; what kind of display did you have in mind? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:50, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

I don't have an opinion about how the template is implemented behind the scenes, but I think that the traditional order of the principal parts (e.g.: amo, amare, amavi, amatum) should be used, as it currently is. —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 16:26, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: Yes, It would be nice if we could rewrite {{la-noun}}, {{la-verb}}, {{la-adj-1&2}}, and most of the rest of the members of Category:Latin headword-line templates and then have a bot replace all fix all the headwords. @Kc kennylau, could I possibly convince you and your bot to help us nip this problem in the bud so we never have to deal with the redundant parameter fields again? @Mr. Granger: Of course the principal parts will stay in order. I just dislike that the first word on the line is not the lemma. I was thinking something like:

derpiō (present infinitive derpere, perfect active dederpsī, supine derpsum)

I know you lose the words present active, but even that is slightly misleading anyway if you don't realize that present active actually means present active indicative 1st person singular. The four principal parts are only really for people who already know the system. —JohnC5 00:25, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Ah, got it—I misunderstood the proposal. I think your suggestion for the headword line looks better than what we currently have. —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 00:54, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

I support this wholeheartedly. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 05:43, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

It would cause a huge chaos in the process. Please tell us how to overcome the chaos. --kc_kennylau (talk) 06:06, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

A safe, if slightly complicated, way would be to:

1. create {{la-verb-temp}} with the new format
2. use a bot to switch all the entries over to {{la-verb-temp}} with the new entry format
3. replace the code in {{la-verb}} with that of {{la-verb-temp}}
4. use the bot to replace {{la-verb-temp}} with {{la-verb}} in all the entries

It's a little awkward, but once {{la-verb-temp}} is written, it could all be done in one swoop...Then repeat for each of the templates we need to change. —JohnC5 06:33, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5 I think I have a method. It's similar to yours but it uses only one template. --kc_kennylau (talk) 06:44, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5 Testing the verb on concoquo. (I still haven't written it now, but you'll see it when I do) --kc_kennylau (talk) 07:03, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau Yes, that's a terrific method―much better than mine. Then once you are done, you will remove the |new=, I assume? Also, when programming the template could you add a switch in the |pattern= param which will use the same syntax as the Module:la-verb (|pattern=nopass, |pattern=noperf, etc.) and have it output no passive, no perfect, etc? —JohnC5 07:19, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Post–edit-conflict:

@JohnC5: Yeah, the new display looks great; I prefer it to what we currently have. How would the |pattern= parameter be displayed?

@kc_kennylau: Thanks for getting involved with this. You're a great help.

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 07:25, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: perhaps for deponents:

{{la-verb|hodor|hodārī|hodātus}}

hodor (present infinitive hodārī, perfect active hodātus sum, deponent)

Or no passive:

{{la-verb|frōdō|frōdere|frōssī|pattern=nopass}}

frōdō (present infinitive frōdere, perfect active frōssī, no passive)

Or no perfect:

{{la-verb|rōdeō|rōdēre|pattern=noperf}}

rōdeō (present infinitive rōdēre, no perfect)

Notice, @Kc kennylau, that you will have to strip the sum after the third principal part of deponent verbs. Also, logic will need to be added to auto-generate deponent when the supine and pattern are omitted. —JohnC5 08:10, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Looks good. One tiny thing: may I suggest that the principal parts be separated from the output of the |pattern= parameter by a semi-colon, rather than a comma? Also, is there any chance that the conjugation number can be given by the template, too? À la {{la-noun}} and the adjectival headword templates, I was thinking. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:16, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: I'm fine with those changes, though might I suggest having a |conj=1, 2, 3, io, 4, irreg parameter for that and have the module add every entry without the parameter to a category Category:Latin verbs without the conjugation in their headwords or something of the ilk? The outcome would appear as:

{{la-verb|hippī|hippisse|hipsus|conj=3|pattern=perf-as-pres}}

hippī (present infinitive hippisse, perfect active hipsus sum; defective) third conjugation

As seen above, something will need to be done for defective verbs like ōdī. Sorry for all the hassle, Kc kennylau. —JohnC5 08:36, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Yeah, that sounds great. One teensy thing: there should be another semi-colon after the closing parenthesis, per the display of {{la-noun}} etc. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:47, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: It's Kc kennylau we have to convince. :) —JohnC5 08:56, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I take it from that comment that you agree. :-) @kc_kennylau Are you happy with display like:

• hippī (present infinitive hippisse, perfect active hipsus sum; defective); third conjugation

⮴ this? Do you mind working that into the new template you're putting together? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:13, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5, I'm so meta even this acronym What was that? "Ribbon Arrow Left Up"? See hortor, there's no way to use the semi-colon while using the existing template (Module:headword), I apologize. --kc_kennylau (talk) 09:56, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@kc_kennylau: Yeah, sorry; I created an entry for it, in case the glyph caused display problems. No worries about the semi-colon; it's a pretty minor feature. Re hortor, isn't that supposed to autogenerate “deponent” as that verb's |pattern=? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:04, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @I'm so meta even this acronym Yes it did. --kc_kennylau (talk) 10:23, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@kc_kennylau: Yeah, cool; it's doing it now. ‛Slookin’ good! — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:42, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@kc_kennylau I'm really impressed that you're managing to add conjugation numbers with your bot. However, please note that the text generated by |conj=4 contains a typo. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:26, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym Thanks, fixed. --kc_kennylau (talk) 16:39, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@kc_kennylau: Thanks. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:44, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @I'm so meta even this acronym, JohnC5: Can I move the pattern descriptor out of the parentheses? --kc_kennylau (talk) 13:51, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

@kc_kennylau: By all means! I'd say, put it after the conjugation probably. —JohnC5 18:41, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Another problem. duco is both 3rd and irreg. --kc_kennylau (talk) 18:48, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

@kc_kennylau: Putting the pattern description after the conjugation number looks better; good call, kc_kennylau and JohnC5. Re dūcō, why not just specify |pattern=irregular short imperative, like the conjugation table? Also, could you add the parameter |c= ≡ |conj=, please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:33, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

@kc_kennylau For some reason, ; ' now occurs after the declension link in transclusions of {{la-noun}}; might that have something to do with one of your recent edits to Module:la-headword? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:56, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: Then when to use |conj=irreg? --kc_kennylau (talk) 06:18, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@kc_kennylau: On possum, nōlō, and in similar cases. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 06:25, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: i.e. -sum + -eo + volo? --kc_kennylau (talk) 06:27, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@kc_kennylau: Sure. There may be some other ones, too. But not dūcō and other verbs which have only a small number of irregular forms. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 06:38, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

I have been going through and slowly converting verbs to the new format if their headwords are just wrong. Right now all the remaining seem to be irregular or incorrect.

@kc kennylau could you add āiō and inquam to Module:la-verb?

I think I'm going to add |pattern=short-imp for dico and duco and |pattern=def for inquam and āiō. Also, what should we do about cedo#Etymology 2? —JohnC5 06:36, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: It's probably best to use {{head}} for a verb that only has imperative forms. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 06:43, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Also soleō (and all its derivatives in theory) have no future tenses. @Kc kennylau: Could you add it along with aio and inquam? Sorry for all the requests. —JohnC5 07:46, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: What should I do to them? --kc_kennylau (talk) 07:50, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @Kc kennylau: Sorry for the lack of clarity. I meant, could you add them to module:la-verb as irregular verbs because their current conjugation tables are implemented directly in the entries and make me sad. —JohnC5 08:02, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Adding. Cheer up! :-) --kc_kennylau (talk) 08:04, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: :P

PS: Are you ex[c]ited for when we fix all the other headword templates? —JohnC5 08:09, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I'm sorry, what does "exited for" mean? --kc_kennylau (talk) 08:12, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Oops, I get it now. Yes I'm excited! :D --kc_kennylau (talk) 08:24, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Did I miss anything? --kc_kennylau (talk) 08:41, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: I just looked in the OLD, and it seems we may need to add some aio forms. Lemme see if I can do it. *accidentally deletes Wiktionary* —JohnC5 08:54, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Don't worry, you can't delete any page. XD Learn by making errors! --kc_kennylau (talk) 08:55, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: addecet: [1] et [2] inquiunt ut perfectus indicativus suus est it. Habent[ne] errores? --kc_kennylau (talk) 09:22, 17 June 2015 (UTC) Me correxi. kc_kennylau (talk) 09:34, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: Ita habent. Coniugatio nostra vera est. —JohnC5 09:31, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Quomodo scis? --kc_kennylau (talk) 09:33, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: OLD inquit “addecet, ~ēre impers.”. Exempli radicis perfectae non exstant. Fortasse addecet radicem perfectam non habet, sed sola speculatio est nobis. Si vis, detrahe radicem perfectam. —JohnC5 09:45, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Tamen decet radicem perfectam (decuit) certe habet. —JohnC5 09:56, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Quoque coniugatio de assum non scio. [3] inquit ut "assum" non exstat. --kc_kennylau (talk) 10:03, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

In re addecet, vide quoque hos.

In re assum, OLD atque L&S atque Gaffiot habent assum et affui. —JohnC5 10:09, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @Kc kennylau: Pro addecet et decet, formas plurales (addecent, decent, etc.) requirimus. OLD dicit usūs personales impersonalesque exstare. —JohnC5 10:28, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Da quaeso una coniugatio de assum ut potest habere. --kc_kennylau (talk) 10:31, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Non intellego? Sed nunc debeo indormire. Vale, fabimur cras! —JohnC5 10:46, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Potesne confirmare coicio? --kc_kennylau (talk) 15:40, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: In re assum, coniugatio esset usualis sed cum as- prae -s-, ad- prae vocalibus, et af- prae -f-.

In re coicio, cogitasne problemata esse? Nihil inveni.

@I'm so meta even this acronym: Quo vasisti? Quoque, quando corriges WT:ALA? —JohnC5 20:28, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Ad Johannem C. V: Aliquo non vasi… Ignosce sodes mihi moram emendationis. Partem primam semiperegi; de cetero cujus paginae, mox eam conabor. (Argumento verbi Anglici non-lemma soliti distractus eram.) — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:23, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Bene! Me paenitet te vexare. —JohnC5 01:53, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Dicit dictionario ut coniugatioes suae sunt coĭcio, -ere, coiēci, coiectum. --kc_kennylau (talk) 09:39, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: Vero! Dicit Gaffiot cŏĭcĭo et OLD cōiciō. Nescio quid faciamus. —JohnC5 09:55, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Normaliter, "co" est brevus aut longus? --kc_kennylau (talk) 10:03, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: L&S dicit cōiciō quoque, et ita nunc credo. —JohnC5 10:13, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Removi catenae (link) tuae quia coicio non conicio. --kc_kennylau (talk) 10:20, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: (English for clarity) both of those dictionaries support cōiciō over coiciō, but have the entries for coicio under conicio. —JohnC5 10:27, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Actually I'm thinking what if they're two words? con+iacio > conicio > cōicio, co+icio > cŏicio. --kc_kennylau (talk) 10:32, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @Kc kennylau: OLD, L&S, and Gaffiot all list coicio as a variant of conicio. I'm about to change coicio to show that (and add back in the references, because while they are not the same headword, they do contain the correct info). —JohnC5 10:35, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Sed in Category:Latin words prefixed with co- omnia non sunt longi. --kc_kennylau (talk) 10:37, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: Yeah, I think this isn't co- but instead either quantitative metathesis of between the o and i or compensatory lengthening due to the lost n followed by post-tonic shortening of the i. Either way, co- + iacio is not correct. —JohnC5 10:43, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: More importantly than all this, something you've done has made it so that macrons no longer appear on the first principal part of the headword. —JohnC5 10:52, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Oops, sorry :p --kc_kennylau (talk) 10:56, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: No prob, but sleep time for me. Also, I realize I hadn't taken into account all the redirects the {{a}} uses, which I'll need to add before it is done. —JohnC5 10:59, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Template:la-adj-1&2

@JohnC5 Should I perform the same action to this template? --kc_kennylau (talk) 02:17, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: yes please! —JohnC5 04:46, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: Potesne parametra |comp= et |sup= addere, quae formas comparativas superlativasque monstrant? ISMETA, cogitavi te his additionibus concursurus/a esse. —JohnC5 03:54, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Ad Johannem C. V: Ita, scilicet; cur? Ad rem aut concursūrus sive concursūra, vir sum. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:38, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Ad ESTMETA: te quaesivi quia opinionem tuam faciei (e.g. dīves, bonus) scire volui. Cogitavi quoque te virum fortasse esse, sed non memineram. —JohnC5 19:59, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Ad Johannem C. V: Facies decores formosissimaeque! :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:56, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Additi. --kc_kennylau (talk) 04:01, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: …et 3rd-1E et 3rd-2E, si tibi placet. —JohnC5 04:04, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Quaeso renova documentationes suae. --kc_kennylau (talk) 06:49, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: videaturne haec documentatio bona? —JohnC5 07:47, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Bona est. --kc_kennylau (talk) 13:34, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: Debeone alios scribere? —JohnC5 19:59, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Quaeso :D --kc_kennylau (talk) 00:44, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

RFV discussion: June 2015

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

Palatalisation in modern Latin

requiescat_in_pace#Latin shows the modern pronunciation with a change /kä/ > /cä/. I know this is a thing in some French, but is it a typo in this case? Korn [kʰʊ̃ːæ̯̃n] (talk) 17:49, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

It was a mistake. I've fixed it now. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 21:07, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

• Striking. In the future, please use the tea room for this type of question. —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 22:54, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

• I'm slightly confused. The tea room is about single entries, this is about a feature of a language. Korn [kʰʊ̃ːæ̯̃n] (talk) 11:02, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

• As it happens, this was about a single entry, but if it had been about a property of the language as a whole, then the Beer Parlor would have been the place for it. This page, RfV, is about verifying the attestability of words, not their pronunciation. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 13:51, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Discussion of allowing circumflexes, tremas

Two discussions about allowing circumflexes in pagenames, which led to (at the moment, merely are leading to) rewriting of WT:ALA, can be found on Talk:duûm. A discussion about allowing tremas can be found on Talk:onomatopoeïa (shortly; for now it is still on WT:RFD#onomatopoeïa). - -sche (discuss) 18:39, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

A note that we still haven't worked out a clear decision on this issue, as far as I can tell. User:DTLHS/cleanup/disallowed diacritics has all the entries with tremata (I deleted the ones with macra in their entry-titles, as they are clearly disallowed by consensus). —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 18:44, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

I may be wrong, but I doubt the Romans used these marks. My feeling is that these marks are attested later than what we allow for attestation of Latin words. --WikiTiki89 18:49, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

@Wikitiki89: Wha’?! Yes, all diacritics (except the apex) are post-Classical, but we allow for attestation of Latin terms sources from any time after 100 BC. Consider, for example, hamaxostichus (“a train”), which is a twentieth-century coinage, and whose supporting citations all date from 1994–9. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:07, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Then shouldn't we mark all spellings with these diacritics as "New Latin" spellings as well? --WikiTiki89 20:16, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

@Wikitiki89: It depends when they're from. Many diacriticked spellings will be attestable in Mediaeval sources, in which case they should be marked as Mediaeval spellings. And when the whole lexeme is already Mediaeval or New Latin, there is no need to mark its variant spellings as being from that era, too. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:23, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Adjective declension template naming conventions

@I'm so meta even this acronym, Metaknowledge, Kc kennylau, EncycloPetey, Esszet, I'm in the process of consolidating all the Latin declension templates to be controlled by module:la-noun and module:la-adj. The next step is adding the irregular nouns to module:la-noun, which I have done, and making a template to display them. The most obvious choice would be {{la-decl-irreg}}, but this is aready used for the display of irregular adjectives. This brought me to an idea I've been mulling over for a while. Could we move all the adjective templates to la-adecl and keep the noun templates at la-decl? AG does it this way, and it's just luck we've not had a naming collision yet. This way {{la-decl-irreg}} would be for irregular nouns and {{la-adecl-irreg}} for adjectives. To do this though, I'd like to have some consensus and also a bot to move all the adjective transclusions. Any thoughts? —JohnC5 00:47, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

My own preference is to not use "decl" and "conj" altogether since the distinction is not that important. We already use the "Inflection" header. —CodeCat 00:54, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Fair enough. What would your preferred format be? Also, we don't always use the “Inflection” header. I personally prefer “Declension” and “Conjugation.” —JohnC5 01:12, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

My preference is for "Inflection" because it's more general and applies to all cases. I'm thinking of something like {{la-infl-noun-irreg}} and {{la-infl-adj-irreg}}. Similarly, {{la-infl-noun-1st}} and {{la-infl-verb-1st}} and so on. —CodeCat 01:16, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

I had a sneaking suspicion you'd suggest that. It just makes me sad how long the names would become. —JohnC5 01:30, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

That's not actually a change. We already use "decl-adj" and "decl-noun" for lots of languages, changing that to "infl-adj" and "infl-noun" doesn't change the length at all. In fact, don't Latin templates already use "decl-noun" and "decl-adj"? How are they distinguished if not? —CodeCat 01:33, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

They currently all fall under -decl-, and by sheer providence none of their names have overlapped till now, which is why I suggested this change. Your proposal would increase la-decl-1st in length to la-infl-noun-1st. AG's system was grc-decl-..., grc-adecl-..., and grc-conj-...; though now all forms should use {{grc-decl}}, {{grc-adecl}}, and {{grc-conj}}. —JohnC5 01:43, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Those are exceptions, though. Most of them across languages use the "decl-adj" and "decl-noun" format. Look at the Slavic and Germanic languages for example. —CodeCat 01:48, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

I'd prefer {{la-decl-noun-irreg}} and {{la-decl-adj-irreg}}. We've made a distinction between declension and conjugation for Latin words here on Wiktionary for a long time, and although the distinction is indeed not that important (it's mainly a terminological one), it's not confusing or really otherwise detrimental in any appreciable way, and so there isn't much of a reason to get rid of it. As for the use of ‘noun’ and ‘adj’ in the templates' names, I suppose it would be best to include them simply for the sake of consistency with templates for other languages. Esszet (talk) 02:01, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

I like Esszet's suggestions best. We certainly should use 'declension' and 'conjugation' rather than 'inflection', because that is the standard in classical scholarship, and they are numbered and thought of as wholly independent systems. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:24, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

This already started to be discussed in Wiktionary:Tea room/2015/September#Latin noun inflection table templates. Like I wrote therein, and similar to what JohnC5 suggested above, I advocate naming these table templates {{la-decl-irr}} and {{la-adecl-irr}} (for nouns and adjectives, respectively). Re the declension–conjugation–inflection issue, like JohnC5, Esszet, and Μετάknowledge, I'd favour retaining the declension–conjugation distinction rather than lumping everything together under Inflection (pace CodeCat). Might it be worth having a little vote to codify the preference for Declension and Conjugation headers contra the Inflection header? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:28, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Nōn sciō, est sōlum ūna persōna quae prō eō est, nōs cogitō debēre plūrēs opīniōnēs assequī antequam vōtum habēmus (sorry if my Latin is atrocious). Esszet (talk) 16:22, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @I'm so meta even this acronym, Metaknowledge, EncycloPetey, Esszet: I tried to combine the two templates into one {{la-decl-irreg}} and have it specified using {{la-decl-irreg|noun=}}. How is this? --kc_kennylau (talk) 16:59, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym, Esszet (because @Kc kennylau, your pings won't work unless they're in the same edit as when you add your sig). —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:56, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Looks good to me, but can you make the hyphens in the declension table for plus unlinked? Esszet (talk) 19:12, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Hmmm, it seems that for some reason Code has added linking logic in module:la-adj/table despite the fact that it was already in the process() function of module:la-adj. I believe this was in an attempt to rewrite the wikicode in module:la-adj/table, but I'm not sure why it was necessary in the first place. As such, each link is being linked twice. Her logic is very good, though it does not take into account the footnote numbering, the capability of user specified forms, nor the checking for red links. We could switch over to it, but we'd need to do some finagling. —JohnC5 22:02, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

The reason I did it was that most other templates that I wrote work the same way: the process of generating the data is kept completely separate from the process that formats it. This is the same principle I use for template-code based inflection tables too, where I always make a separate table template which has parameters to supply the data. I have a special addition to User:CodeCat/common.css which highlights all text marked with a language, which lets me easily spot cases where our headword and linking templates haven't been used. I noticed that the language was missing for the terms in the Latin declension templates, so my edits were an attempt to correct that. I only later spotted that the links were also being added by language_link in the base module, which is problematic to begin with because that function should only be used in very specific circumstances, as it doesn't do the language tagging. full_link is what should normally be used. So the base module could be corrected to use full_link, but I would prefer it if some of the code were refactored so that the links are only generated once the table is being generated, and not in the data (inflected form) generating code. —CodeCat 22:10, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Also, another principle that I have stuck to with my own coding: the forms are not linkified in advance, but rather only when they are actually added into the table. Hence the repl and show_form functions I added. This means that forms that do not appear in the table are never linkified. I found that trying to link all forms in advance was problematic in the past so I abandoned that practice. —CodeCat 22:13, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Since you're here… Is there any way to recode the Latin inflection-table templates so that a form with an initial asterisk is left unlinked, rather than linking to Appendix:Latin/form? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:37, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

That's definitely possible. It's possible to do this by adding code for it to the Latin modules. But since this is probably something that would be needed for other languages anyway, it's better to add a parameter for full_link that tells it to do it this way. —CodeCat 23:04, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Excellent! Yes, I can't imagine we'll ever want appendix entries for non-lemmata in any language. Because I'm rubbish at Lua, would you be able to make the necessary change to full_link, please? There's no rush or anything, just whenever you've got the time. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:12, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Done. I don't know if it works though, you'll have to test it. —CodeCat 23:19, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Thank you. Unfortunately, judging by dulcamen#Declension, it doesn't seem to have worked… — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:29, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

I only added the parameter to the full_link function. The Latin modules still need to be edited so that they call that function with that parameter set to true. —CodeCat 23:31, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Sorry for being dense. Unfortunately, I don't even know what a Lua function's parameter looks like. :-S  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:39, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

No, it's fine. I was able to learn Lua quickly because I have programmed before. It's not so easy for everyone, I understand. I'd be glad to help you learn though, and there's Lua tutorials too. I'm not sure if there is a Lua tutorial for Wiktionary specifically though. Maybe we need one, but it'd be a lot of work to make, and I don't know if I'd be the best person to do it. I often go too fast when explaining things. —CodeCat 23:43, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Thank you; that would be very much appreciated. My learning Lua is long overdue. Please do point me in the direction of those tutorials. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:49, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Ok, let's switch it over! I was also unaware of this language_link/full_link distinction. We will have to rectify this issue in a few other places, I feel. Currently, the footnotes are stored under the data.notes array which has each note stored by the regular key with a number appended to show to which form within a cell it applied. The behavior is not currently optimal, as seen in the entry for augens, because you cannot tell it to reuse a footnote on other forms. If we would refactor and improve this functionality in the submodule, that would be terrific. Would you like me to do it, or would you like to do so? —JohnC5 22:47, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

The data.notes approach is not particularly good no. I do have an alternative approach that may work. Firstly, footnotes would be stored with the form; the form is replaced with a table containing an index form and another note. The show_form function must then, of course, check whether the form is a string or a table before formatting it. Secondly, the function for showing the table could create numbers for the notes as it encounters them among the forms, and remember notes it has already seen. When another form appears with the same note, it can then reuse the number. You'd have to make sure to get the spelling exactly right though, or they wouldn't match. —CodeCat 23:02, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

The approach which I had attempted (though which failed due to my inexperience with Lua) was to specify notes as data.notes["dat_sg_m"] = {note = "blah blah.", also = {"dat_sg_f", "dat_sg_n"}} so that when the note was encountered, it would be added and any other forms in "also" be put in a list with the index that used it. That seems easier to me. We could do data.forms["dat_sg_m"] = {form = {"foō", "quux"}, note = "blah blah.", also = {"dat_sg_f", "dat_sg_n"}}, if you'd like? —JohnC5 23:49, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Sorry to chime in so late, but I do have two points to consider that I haven't seen mentioned. We want to be sure that it's possible to display declension tables for nouns that occur with only singular or with only plural forms, which is especially the situation for proper nouns in Latin. This point was one of the big hurdles I was attempting to overcome when my regular time here ended. I'm also not sure whether we've already set up forms for the various Greek-inflectional endings, so that might be worth considering while all this energy is being expended. I'd offer to help, but (a) I'm very busy elsewhere, (b) I know nothing of Lua, and (c) it looks like matters are well in hand already. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:10, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey: Do you mean the |num=sg / |num=pl parameter in the templates? You can use {{la-decl-2nd-ius|Jul|num=sg}} to make the below. —JohnC5 03:20, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Template consolidation

@I'm so meta even this acronym, Metaknowledge, JohnC5, Kc kennylau, CodeCat, EncycloPetey, at the moment, we have a wide array of Latin noun declension templates, almost all of which consist of a single line of code each. Wouldn't it make sense to consolidate them into one big template with a |type= parameter (or something similar) to control what pattern is used? Esszet (talk) 20:47, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't see any drawbacks to doing that, but I also don't see any benefits. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:50, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

It just doesn't seem to make sense to have so many templates that consist of a single line of code each when they could all be easily consolidated. Esszet (talk) 20:52, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Why does the amount of code in the template matter? They invoke very different Lua functions. —CodeCat 21:09, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm thinking they could all be strung together with {{#if:}} arguments. The amount of code matters because the smaller the templates you're trying to consolidate, the easier it is to do so; if we tried consolidating the old pre-Lua templates, the resulting template would be very long and very difficult to work with. Since the templates are now much smaller, it's easier to combine them all into one. Esszet (talk) 21:36, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

So what? There's no inherent good to consolidation that I can think of. This seems like a pointless reform. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 21:43, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

@Esszet, Metaknowledge, CodeCat: I suppose there's a small benefit in that one wouldn't need to memorise a large number of template names. How would this consolidation affect editorial workload when it comes to creating entries? More concretely, how would this affect the number of keystrokes one would need to type when adding an inflection table to an entry? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:32, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

That actually wasn't what I was thinking at all; I was thinking it would be something like {{la-decl|1-abus|fīli}}, which isn't much different from {{la-decl-1st-abus|fīli}}, so even if you don't have to memorize a large number of template names, you'd still have to memorize the various subtypes if you wanted to commit the information to memory. I was thinking it would simply be easier to manage all the information in one place rather than in 15-20 (or more) different places, and by the way, Metaknowledge, please don't assume I have no idea what I'm talking about; I'm not an idiot, you know. Esszet (talk) 01:00, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm not assuming you're an idiot, Esszet. I simply find your idea, which as presented reduces the example by two keystrokes, to be wholly unnecessary. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:03, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

That wasn't what I had in mind when I first proposed it; the main reason I'd like to do this is to put everything in one place and thus make it easier to manage. That way, if we have to change something about the code currently in the templates, we'd only have to do it on one page (albeit numerous times) rather than on however many different template pages we have at the moment. Esszet (talk) 02:05, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

The only form of a unified template that I would support would be one similar to {{grc-decl}} which takes the nom.sg. and gen.sg. and deduces the declension when possible. —JohnC5 03:38, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ That would actually be a very good idea. A |type= parameter would still be necessary, but only for things like -ābus, "-3-N", "-3-I" (possibly), and -ūbus. Almost all of the other patterns can be deduced from the nominative and genitive singular alone. Esszet (talk) 18:08, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Any more thoughts on that? Esszet (talk) 17:23, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Not presently. I've been rather busy of late. Maybe someone else would be interested. —JohnC5 03:49, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

New Latin dialects module

@I'm so meta even this acronym, Metaknowledge, Esszet, Kc kennylau, CodeCat, EncycloPetey, hey super team! I created the Latin dialectal data module for use in {{alter}}, and I was wondering whether we should add/remove/rename any dialects. I'm aware that, for Latin, many of the “dialects” are actually just periods of Latin usage, but I thought they would be useful. I was also wondering whether we should get more fine-grained and add in linguistically important or innovative authors (e.g. “Plinian”, “Linnaean”) or works (e.g. “Vulgate”, “Patristic”). Tell me what you think! —JohnC5 03:28, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Nothing beyond Classical, Ecclesiastic, Vulgar, and Mediaeval will show much consistency. Even by the Late Mediaeval period the regional pronunciations had drifted very far apart. Modern scientific Latin has severe regional differences influenced by the local language, making modern dialect tracking nearly impossible. --EncycloPetey (talk) 06:01, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

I'd definitely like to keep one for New or Scientific Latin. —JohnC5 06:40, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Is there even a uniform pronunciation for New/Scientific Latin? I'm pretty sure that English speakers and German speakers pronounce Latin scientific terms differently, and I would be surprised if native speakers of other languages didn't have their own pronunciations as well. Even Ecclesiastical Latin is pronounced differently in different countries. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 08:46, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Looks good to me; perhaps a note that says something like "Pronunciation of [period] terms varies widely by region; [region] pronunciation is used here" can be added to terms from periods for which that's true? Esszet (talk) 15:40, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I strongly support having these {{alter}} abbreviations for the Latin chronolects, so thanks for instituting them. :-)
@EncycloPetey, Angr, Esszet: I think you misunderstand the purpose of John's work on Module:la:Dialects; AFAICT, it's for use with {{alter}} for labelling forms in Alternative forms sections, not for use with {{a}} for labelling different pronunciations in Pronunciation sections.
I have more to contribute on this, but little time at the moment. Stay tuned for more! — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:24, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks ISMETA. You are absolutely correct that this pertains to orthographic (or sometimes inflectional) differences and not pronunciation. —JohnC5 17:33, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Wow, yeah, I really should have realized that. As per this template, ‘post-classical’ and ‘post-Augustine’ should be merged into just 'Late’, and ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Contemporary’ periods should be added; I'll add the latter two now. Although pronunciation obviously won't be covered by this module, we should still come up with an accepted standard of pronunciation for the more phonologically diverse periods of Latin at some point lest people want to add pronunciations for them. It's obviously not that relevant here, but it is something we're going to have to decide on at some point. By the way, since the module only contains two (maybe three, not entirely sure if Vetus Latina is a dialect or not) real dialects (Vulgar and Ecclesiastical), can the module's name be changed to ‘Ages and Dialects’ or something like that? Esszet (talk) 22:06, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Latin doesn't have too much that falls under dialects that we know of besides Vulgar Latin, so I don't feel bad putting things under this module that are not exactly dialects. As for the module name, the path for placing the module is Module:<language code>:Dialects. We could maybe move it to Module:la:Varieties then leave a redirect at Module:la:Dialects, but I'm not sure that is necessary. —JohnC5 22:28, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Redirects don't work so well with modules. And I don't know whose idea it was for Module:<language code>:Dialects to be the naming convention, but it was very bad idea. Data modules should be subpages of the modules that use them, so in this case Module:Alternative forms/data/<language code> or Module:Alternative forms/<language code> would have been the right thing to do. Also Module:Alternative forms itself shouldn't have had a capital letter. --WikiTiki89 22:37, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

@Wikitiki89: I would be very pleased if you would move them. I believe you only need to change:

• Module:Alternative forms
• Module:grc-conj
• Module:grc-decl
• (Module:User:ObsequiousNewt/grc-conj)
• Module:he:Dialects
• Module:la:Dialects
• Module:grc:Dialects
• Module:hy:Dialects
• Module:sv:Dialects

We also should probably make one for English too... —JohnC5 00:07, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Though, to be honest, it might make sense to make a separate Module:dialects module which would be used outside of Module:Alternative forms and Module:grc-decl, etc. —JohnC5 00:58, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

/The term "dialects" refers mainly to regional variations in speech / pronunciation, so it would be best to avoid that term in any situations that deal exclusively with written forms. The use of the term "dialect" was what led to my confusion above. --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:51, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey: How about Module:language varieties? Or we could do Module:languages/data/<lang code> to keep everything centralized? —JohnC5 20:03, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

I support Module:language varieties. —CodeCat 20:07, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

How about the far terser Module:lects? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:26, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Ooh, I like that. Esszet (talk) 23:09, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I was going to say that Module:dialects is fine even if not all of them are technically "dialects", but I think Module:lects is even better. I will create sometime soon and move/modify the pages linked above accordingly. --WikiTiki89 16:55, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't like Module:lects. It's not an easily understood name, and it "language varieties" describes it more accurately. English is a lect, but we don't want it in that module. —CodeCat 16:59, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

"English" is not a lect, "Modern English" is a lect and we may in fact want it in this module. --WikiTiki89 18:24, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

…You do realize Module:lects was a joke, don't you? I agree with CodeCat; Module:language varieties is much better. Esszet (talk) 19:17, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Many real successful things start out as a joke. --WikiTiki89 19:25, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

I think this one should remain a joke; although ‘lect’ is apparently sometimes used, it would sound like a joke to most people who don't know that, and even if you do know that, ‘lect’ still sounds like a word that someone made up as a joke, quite like ‘gression’ (progression, regression, etc.) or ‘ject’ (reject, eject, etc.). For the sake of not appearing clownish, we shouldn't use it. Esszet (talk) 19:59, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

This is intriguing and will not be determined until ISMETA chimes in, but I get the impression that ISMETA was seriously suggesting Module:lects since it is mercifully shorter than Module:language varieties. I would prefer Module:language varieties as being broader and more accurate for this task. I might add in a redirect like APP:LV or something to ease access to the module, but otherwise, I'm fine with Module:language varieties. —JohnC5 21:25, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

If Module:lects is too technical and Module:language varieties is too many letters, how about Module:langvar? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 21:32, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

The problem with that is that "var" in programming contexts is too strongly associated with "variable", and the plural "vars" as well. --WikiTiki89 21:49, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Is there any particular reason why this shouldn't live with the Module:languages. Also, there seems to be some reduplication with Module:etymology languages. Do we want to catch all the etymology-only versions of a language first then add extras? —JohnC5 22:01, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't know exactly what ‘live with’ means in that context, but I guess they should be linked somehow. I also don't know exactly what an etymology-only language is; it appears to be something like a dialect, but I don't know what the difference is. Esszet (talk) 19:30, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

@Esszet: "Live with" means that the dialects should be included within Module:languages (and its submodules). --WikiTiki89 19:35, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Oh, then since dialects and other, er, ‘lects’ generally don't appear to be included in Module:languages, this shouldn't live with it. Esszet (talk) 21:32, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

I think John C. meant all the content of the current Module:<language code>:Dialects modules should live in Module:languages, not only the Latin ones. I am against that only because it would add too much content to the language data modules. --WikiTiki89 21:55, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

I agree with you; imagine if that were taken to its rational conclusion and every single dialect (or should it be ‘lect’?) of every single language were placed in one module? Each language should have its own ‘varieties’ module (by the way would you support Module:<language code>:Varieties as the naming convention? it's obviously not as long as ‘Module:language varieties’, and it's still pretty clear that that's what you're referring to). And do you know what an etymology-only language is? JohnC5 was saying something about it before, and I'm still not entirely sure what it is. Esszet (talk) 01:55, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Actually they would be in 28 data modules, but still that doesn't help too much. --WikiTiki89 16:10, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Nah, centralize them under Module:language varieties. That seems to be the best. —JohnC5 04:14, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Honestly, I prefer Module:dialects. It is shorter and easier to remember and I really don't see a problem with the fact that not everything in it can technically be called a "dialect". After all, not every use of {{link}} actually produces a link, and {{ux}} is used for both usage examples and quotations, and Microsoft Word deals with more than just words, and Kentucky Fried Chicken doesn't only serve chicken. --WikiTiki89 16:10, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, but in this case, it wouldn't be difficult to generalize it to ‘language varieties’, which is by no means bulky or verbose and would not be difficult to remember. If they are all centralized under that name, I suppose the best thing to do would be to create alphabetical sub-modules by 2- and 3-letter language codes. Esszet (talk) 21:57, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

I was thinking just language-specific submodules. I don't expect very many languages to actually use this. Currently only five do, but even if all the "major languages" use it, that wouldn't be too much. --WikiTiki89 22:00, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

I've deleted T:la-noun-multidecl

It's functionality has been subsumed under {{la-noun}} which now accepts multiple further decl= parameters. It also categorizes nouns under Cat:Latin nouns of multiple declensions when these parameters are used. —JohnC5 06:43, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Makes sense. Thanks for the heads-up. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:29, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: I find it funny, though, that these upgrades no longer apply to the entry (Acoetēs) for which I made them. :) —JohnC5 15:54, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Yeah, sorry about that… :-S  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:05, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @JohnC5, Re "variously declined", is there any chance you could change the template so that that only shows up when |decl2= is specified? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:28, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: I could. I was debating whether I should. —JohnC5 01:34, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

@JohnC5: With anyone else? Or just with yourself? My thinking was that such a statement is only really justified when both 1) the variation is not merely something that is a feature of the given declension; and, 2) the variation is rule-bound, and not a variation so extensive as to justify calling the noun "irregularly declined". What are your thoughts? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:41, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: I've made the change (among others). I was debating with myself when writing it. —JohnC5 01:44, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Cheers vee mooch. What were the other changes, might I ask? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:55, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: (here) Nouns without a genitive (e.g. fās) now says “no genitive” instead of “genitive ―”. Also all nouns go to a category according to their gender. —JohnC5 02:02, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Great work! That genitive change looks a lot better. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:19, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Anglo-Latin

I've used the label {{lb|la|England}} on a couple of entries (e.g. wargus), which wants to categorise such entries into CAT:English Latin (currently a redlink). I would prefer that CAT:Anglo-Latin be used instead. Any thoughts or complaints? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 18:34, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: Anglo-Latin is definitely better than English Latin. What about Category:British Latin, which may or may not be distinct? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:01, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

That would be acceptable, although if we ever find terms in Latin particular to mediaeval Scotland or Wales, we would presumably want to keep those separate. I think "Anglo-Latin" makes it clear that we're talking about Britons who were influenced by English and Anglo-Norman. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 19:05, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: Yes, I think it's worth while distinguishing the geographic British Latin (Latin forms peculiar to Britain, as in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources) from Latin linguistically influenced by English, Brythonic languages (Welsh, Cornish), and Goidelic languages (the three Gaelics). Note, however, that w:Anglo-Latin redirects to w:Anglo-Latin literature, whose preamble reads “Anglo-Latin literature is literature from Britain originally written in Latin. It is used to refer to literature written in Latin from parts of Britain which were not in England or English-speaking, because ‘Anglo-’ is used here as a prefix meaning British rather than English.” I'm not really sure what to make of it, because it seems to suggest that Anglo-Latin does not “refer to literature written in Latin from parts of Britain which were…in England or English-speaking”, which sounds very counter-intuitive to me; the preamble is not cited, so I call bullshit. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 04:24, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

If you look at the history, it was originally "British Latin literature", but was moved back in 2011 by someone who clearly didn't think things through. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:52, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: Oh, God, yeah: “can't really have that title [sc. British literature in Latin] as there was no british until 1707”; that one's a howler. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:31, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

British Latin refers to (Vulgar) Latin as spoken in Britain during the era of the Roman Empire. It's the source of the Latin loanwords in the Brythonic languages. If we want a CAT:British Latin, that's what we should use it for, not Medieval/Renaissance/New Latin as used in Great Britain. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 13:17, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

@Angr: What should the category name be for the sort of Latin that the DMLBS covers? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:08, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

I don't know, unless CAT:Medieval Latin is sufficient. Are there really that many Medieval Latin words used only in texts from Great Britain? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 14:11, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

@Angr: No idea, but I do know that etymologies traced to Latin in entries of the third-edition OED always make a big deal of etyma appearing in British sources (for fairly obvious reasons). I only learnt yesterday that the DMLBS is now available online, so I haven't had the time to find out how many terms it lists that are unique to Britain; I assume there must be a fair number (Wyclefiānus for example), otherwise why devote time and money to such a project? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:22, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Maybe "British Medieval Latin"? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 14:28, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

@Angr: That seems reasonable, as long as there's no need for a Category:British Late Latin, a Category:British Renaissance Latin, or a Category:British New Latin. We should probably have Category:British Vulgar Latin for “Vulgar Latin as spoken in Britain during the era of the Roman Empire”; Category:British Latin would be likely to cause confusion, I think. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:02, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

The problem is that there are indeed Late Latin, Medieval Latin, Renaissance Latin, and New Latin terms particular to Britain. I would like to have a geographical category name that is better than the current one for the situation that occurs when someone inputs England as a context label, which I have done. Angr, do you have a problem with my original suggestion of CAT:Anglo-Latin? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 18:49, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

@Angr, Metaknowledge: It would seem to me, then, that we need all of Category:British Vulgar Latin, Category:British Late Latin, Category:British Medieval Latin, Category:British Renaissance Latin, and Category:British New Latin; the obvious name for an umbrella category for those five is, of course, Category:British Latin. Can it really be anything else? (Also, do we need chronolect divisions for Category:Anglo-Latin?) — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:39, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

If we're going to use British Latin to mean all stages of Latin as used in Britain, and not just the earliest stage as per w:British Latin, then we don't also need "Anglo-Latin", do we? Or are there Latin terms used only in England and provably not in Scotland and Wales? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:48, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

@Angr: There will probably be some distinct usage before the late Middle Ages, but I expect there to be less and less from then on. I am not nearly well versed enough in these studies to prove that, however, but I can cite you some Saxonisms that are probably restricted to England. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:44, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

@Angr: These six w-initial words are probably England-only: wapentacum, werefactio, werelada, wereplegium, wita, wreccum. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:03, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Even so, there are probably few enough examples that we don't need to break British Latin down into the constituent countries. Having CAT:Anglo-Latin would only invite CAT:Cambro-Latin and CAT:Caledono-Latin, not to mention CAT:Hiberno-Latin (which exists, see Hiberno-Latin). I suspect CAT:British Latin would not be overlarge if it contains all of the former three. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:38, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

@Angr: Category:British Latin and Category:Hiberno-Latin should definitely be kept distinct (even just going on geography: the island of Great Britain does not include the island of Ireland). I wouldn't mind having distinct categories for Cambrian Latin and Caledonian Latin, but I'm not screaming out for them, either. @Metaknowledge: Would you be happy to see Category:Anglo-Latin subsumed under Category:British Latin? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:10, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

That would be fine — if we're not concerned about Angr's point of how "British Latin" generally refers to British Vulgar Latin. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 22:15, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: Great. And how ‛bout you, Aɴɢʀ, are you happy to see Category:British Latin used as the umbrella category for Category:British Vulgar Latin, Category:British Late Latin, Category:British Medieval Latin, Category:British Renaissance Latin, and Category:British New Latin, rather than as a synonym of Category:British Vulgar Latin? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:15, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

I don't know about happy, but I'll accept it. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 10:25, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

@Angr: OK. Do you want us to wait for you to design an alternative proposal, or are you fine with me making the changes to the module(s) behind {{lb}}? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:17, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Go right ahead. I have no alternative proposal. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 12:07, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

@Angr, Metaknowledge: Done, I think/hope. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:07, 30 December 2016 (UTC)