Talk:witenagemot

RFV discussion: May–July 2015

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witenagemot

Any proof of the first sense, at least in Modern English? Tharthan (talk) 21:16, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

It sounds very unlikely. Any parliament... so the French parliament could be called a witenagemot? Yeah... right. Renard Migrant (talk) 22:08, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Indeed. Hence why I brought it up here. I have never heard "witenagemot" used in any other way outside of its historical meaning. Tharthan (talk) 00:18, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, right. From the OED:

1614 J. Selden Titles of Honor 226 Their Wittenagemots or Mikel Synods.

1656 J. Harrington Common-wealth of Oceana 35 (margin) Weidenagamoots.

1660 E. Waterhouse Disc. Arms & Armory 181 The Wittena~gemote and great Councel of our wisdom, in the preamble to the Statute of 43 Eliz. c. 12. acknowledgeth it to have been the policy of this Realm.

1769 W. Blackstone Comm. Laws Eng. IV. xxxiii. 405 The wittena-gemote, or commune concilium of the antient Germans.

1785 W. Cowper Let. 22 Jan. (1981) II. 322 Shall I derive no other advantage from the great Wittena Gemot of the nation, than merely to read their debates..?

1827 R. Southey Select. Lett. (1856) IV. 348 Having occasion to write to Sir T. Acland while he is attending the Witena~gemot at Cambridge, I sent him a fact for the geologists.

1855 R. Browning Old Pictures in Florence xxxiii, A kind of sober Witana-gemot [rhyme bag 'em hot].

1899 M. Foster Presid. Addr. Brit. Assoc. 22 The first select Witena~gemote of the science of the world.

Ƿidsiþ 07:02, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Those are atypical uses of the term. I've looked on google and I cannot find any use of witenagemot other than the ancient English legislature.The dictionaries I've looked at only use the ancient English legislature sense, [.... redacted direct word-for-word quotations of definitions from 5 dictionaries --Dan Polansky (talk)] So all the definitions I've seen so far are restricted to the witengamot being the ancient Anglo-Saxon council, not allowing broad uses such as describing other parliaments. --PaulBustion88 (talk) 09:17, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

• This is a request for verification, and the definition in question has been verified. What dictionaries say is somewhat beside the point (although in fact the OED says ‘transf[eratively]. of modern parliaments or other deliberative assemblies’). Ƿidsiþ 09:41, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

We need to change the meaning though. "[a]ny assembly, parliament or discursive gathering" makes it sounds like it means, well, just that. Renard Migrant (talk) 09:43, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

I think it can mean just that, except that the usage should probably be marked as usually jocular (and probably now rare as well – but I haven't done enough research outside the OED to be very sure). Ƿidsiþ 14:02, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

In the Harry Potter series Dumbledore was a member of a council called the Wizengamot, maybe it comes from the second use of this term, that might tend to support widsith's argument that its jocular, if its true. --PaulBustion88 (talk) 17:36, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

• The quotations posted above (paragraph starting with "Yeah, right. From the OED") are of different spellings, e.g. "Wittenagemots" with double t, which does not count by my lights to attest "witenagemot" with single t. --Dan Polansky (talk) 06:27, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

I'll tweak per Widsith and the OED but leave it tagged. Renard Migrant (talk) 11:54, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Then you have a lot of tweaking to do, including to "Weidenagamoot", which differs from "witenagemot" rather significantly. What is the basis for the claim that "Weidenagamoot" and "witenagemot" should be considered same for the purpose of attestation; is the pronunciation assumed to be the same? --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:01, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Hence "leave it tagged". Renard Migrant (talk) 12:08, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

• We obviously differ on how to treat alternative forms. For me (and all other dictionaries…) all uses of alternative forms or spellings count as evidence for the headword. Ƿidsiþ 11:09, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

I'd accept them. Renard Migrant (talk) 20:41, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

As would I. Leasnam (talk) 21:46, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Seems fair enough. Tharthan (talk) 00:15, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

I would say that it is an overapplication of the rules to exclude a word solely because the citations have variant spellings. That might be a reason to not give every variant its own entry, but to have no entry at all is unhelpful to our readers. SpinningSpark 14:01, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Exactly. And we allow plural citations for singulars. WT:CFI#Attestation doesn't mention variant spellings so I think we're safe de jure as well. Renard Migrant (talk) 16:03, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

It's true I don't think we've ever really written it into the guidelines. The position agreed on aaages ago (with User:Eclecticology, if I remember rightly) was that a given citation can be used to support either the specific form used, or the original uninflected, lemmatised headword, or both. Ƿidsiþ 09:51, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

• If quotations of "Witana-gemot" are supposed to support "witenagemot", then I figure that quotations of "coal-mine" can be used to support "coalmine". By that logic, an attestation of <noun>-<noun> hyphenated compound would automatically attest non-hyphenated <noun><noun> compound. Is this what you intend? On this very RFV page, there is a nomination of "skinnymalinky" for which only quotations of "skinny-malinky" with dash have been found; should these quotations be used to claim attestation of non-hyphenated "skinnymalinky"? --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:09, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

  Yes, basically. You collect a series of citations that are all obviously of the same ‘word’, and then at the end you make a decision on what the best lemma form is, either based on frequency or on some kind of etymological rationale. I don't care what the lemma should be in this case, but it's very clear that all these citations are using the same basic lexical unit with the same basic meaning, which is the whole point of what the entry is trying to show. Ƿidsiþ 17:10, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

We're different from paper dictionaries in that we have separate entries for cleanup and clean-up. For me, the only time cites for one wouldn't count for the other is if specifically a hyphenated or hyphenless form were being challenged, while the other form was unchallenged. In reply, if only citations for skinny-malinky have been found, have the entry at skinny-malinky and delete skinnymalinky as unattested. Renard Migrant (talk) 17:23, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

What I find most curious is that a set of quotations is presented to support a sense of "witenagemot", yet "witenagemot", in this precise spelling, does not occur even once in the set. My preferred attestation approach is per particular spelling, but even if we relax that to pool variant spellings, the spelling for which an entry is being made should have at least one attesting quotation; if the particular spelling has zero of attesting quotations, then I really do not see what makes it attested. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:06, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

I agree with Dan on this. I also dispute the claim that accepting citations of one spelling as evidence of another spelling is an established practice. I would also point out that in several of the citations, it's not at all clear than the generic sense is being used; e.g., how can anyone tall what sense the 1614 citation is using? However, let's sort out what spellings we're dealing with:

• Weidenagamoot(s): 1656 (nothing about this citation gives indication that it's a use rather than a mention)
• Wittenagemot(s), Wittena Gemot: 1614 (nothing about this citation gives indication that it's using the sense in question), 1785 (possibly a use of this sense)
• Wittena-gemote, wittena-gemote: 1660 (seems like a good use), 1769 (seems like a good use)
• Witena-gemote: 1899
• Witena-gemot: 1827 (seems like a good use)
• Witana-gemot: 1855

When we consider that Capitalization in the Old Days was frequently applied to all nouns or to all important nouns, without lexical significance, the best-attested spelling in this sample is Wittena-gemote (attested 2x). I will see if I can find other citations. - -sche (discuss) 03:52, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Ngram data

(Note: ngrams does not plot sense data, so this only reveals which form of the lexeme is most common.) After comparing every capitalization and variation of wit(t)ena(-)gemot(e), I determined that the following forms were most common: [wittena-gemote]+[Wittena-gemote],[wittenagemote]+[Wittenagemote],[wittena-gemot]+[Wittena-gemot],[wittenagemot]+[Wittenagemot],[witenagemot]+[Witenagemot]. (Type that string into Ngram Viewer; I can't link it because Mediawiki can't handle links that contain brackets, and Google problematically drops the brackets if I URLencode them.) Comparing those forms reveals that our chosen lemma, witenagemot, is clearly the most common form in recent history (from 1850 to the present). Historically, the most common form was wittenagemot, followed by wittenagemote (then by wittena-gemote and then wittena-gemot). It is unsurprising that the RFVed sense (which is obsolete) was most commonly spelled one of the ways that the word overall (in all its meanings) was most commonly spelled at the time it still had that meaning. I will create some alt forms, move the sense and draft a usage note. - -sche (discuss) 05:27, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

What do you think of what I've done? See witenagemot and wittena-gemote. We could even delete the rare "any assembly" sense from wittena-gemote and limit it to the usage note that would explain that it's not actually attested in any spelling enough times to meet CFI... or we could try to track down more citations. - -sche (discuss) 05:42, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

witenagemote

@-sche The form witenagemote is not listed, however, I do not know how common it is (as the forms are listed by frequency and that string is too long for the Ngram viewer). J3133 (talk) 22:00, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

I've trimmed some of the detail out of the usage notes and just made the list of alt forms into ... a list of alt forms, so that witenagemote can be added without having to judge its commonness relative to all the other forms. - -sche (discuss) 01:59, 12 May 2021 (UTC)