User talk:Dunav1918

Hello! I am an amateur linguist for almost 10 years. I am interested in many language families, namely Indo-European, Yeniseian and Uralic. If you have any suggestions or questions - feel free to ask me. Dunav1918 (talk) 20:37, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Ket entries

Hey! Nice to see someone work on Ket. I was wondering if I could ask you to add references to the entries you create? If you're not sure how to do that, just tell me, I'll try to help out. Thadh (talk) 13:05, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

All right. All of them are from Verner's 2002. dictionary, which is the only official dictionary of the Ket language. Dunav1918 (talk) 14:34, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Sorry I missed the reply. See {{R:ket:Verner:2002}}. You can just add * {{R:ket:Verner:2002}} under a "references" section on the bottom of an entry, and additionally specify the page by doing something like {{R:ket:Verner:2002|page=15}}. Thadh (talk) 21:08, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

Etymologies

When changing etymologies 1) please don't change an existing + template to a non-plus template, and vice-versa 2) please don't forget to use things lik {{surf}} and 3) you don't always need to full chain going all the way back, there are ways to deal with that. Vininn126 (talk) 18:15, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

To be clear, these is about specifically Slavic etymologies. Other languages may have other customs. Thadh (talk) 19:36, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Yes, each language has it's own customs. My comment is about existing customs or what is currently on a page. Vininn126 (talk) 19:37, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Sources, sources, sources!

I honestly don't get it. You're obviously not a speaker of Nganasan, or Ket, or Northern Selkup. So you must be using some source for these entries.

If the source is good - give it! Why make a bad-quality entry if you can make a good-quality entry with the same amount of work.

If the source is bad - don't use it!!

We're not in the business of cleaning up after you or making sure you don't add nonsence - if you don't start adding references to the entries you create,you will get blocked - simply because others don't have the time or knowledge to find those sources themselves. Thadh (talk) 16:55, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

I added source for Nganasan words. These 3 languages have (unfortunately) only one dictionary each, so for them it is obvious what is the source. Anyway, if you want to add another sources, you can freely do it. Dunav1918 (talk) 13:31, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Do you have any idea what you're doing?

Partly my fault, I should've led with that, but UEW isn't particularly the pinnacle of historical linguistics, many reconstructions are either ungrounded or grounded on garbage. For instance, *päkkɜ- is mentioned with a big question mark even in Lytkin's dictionary, which usually is rather quick to state a relation to another language. *u does not usually come from front vowels, and two cognates is very rarely enough to say with certainty two words can be reconstructed up. Thadh (talk) 12:34, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

All right. If you find any reconstruction questionable, you can freely write your comment, I don't mind it. Dunav1918 (talk) 13:33, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

I think you misunderstood my point. Using only UEW is not a good idea overall, not just for this one reconstruction. All in all historical linguistics, and working with reconstructed entries, is much more complicated than simple lexicography - you have to know exactly the language you're reconstructing, on the basis of which sound laws you do it, and make sure that alternative solutions are not satisfying.

Now, I would strongly suggest you do either of the following two things:

• Find a living language, and start editing it - create inflection tables, pronunciation templates, make its entries usable. After all, that is our main specialty - reconstructions are a bonus. That way you can actually get deep into the material of the language over time and understand some historical thingies related to it. Seeing your reply in a previous thread: Dictionaries are not the only source of information! There are articles, books, there is even a journal that publishes articles in Nganasan, for example! If you look through our Ingrian language entries, you'll see that (with extremely few exceptions) all our entries have one source or another, but many don't reference a dictionary at all. This is quite normal.
• Find a particular reconstructed language you are interested in, and really do the work of reading up on it, see what views there are, and decide the best way to apply this to Wiktionary. You may have noticed, our Proto-Permic entries, even though they follow Lytkin's dictionary, are not one-to-one copied over from there. We had to carefully sort out which reconstruction is most universal, most scientific, and then see which features to apply. Permic is a rather closely related group of languages, but even there reconstruction yielded some twenty vowels, even though all modern languages only have seven - and the optimisation of that original system is still being done to this day, so when we decided to follow Lytkin, we mostly based ourselves on being able to easily convert again of and when a better reconstruction appears.

Just copying over chunks from a different dictionary isn't really helpful - our readers could just as well go read that dictionary instead, why come to us? The whole point of Wiktionary is to combine sources, use them together to create a better entry than either one source could.

Hope this is clear. Thadh (talk) 15:08, 2 September 2024 (UTC)