User talk:I'm so meta even this acronym

shadows on the wall

Not sure if it would meet our criteria for inclusion. However, see w:Allegory of the Cave for background. SemperBlotto (talk) 17:11, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I figured it was an allusion to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. What are your criteria for inclusion? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 21:21, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

See Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion. SemperBlotto (talk) 21:23, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

That looks like a lot to take in. I'll get back to you once I've had time to look it over. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 21:29, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Nice username! --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 13:22, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, but I can't take the credit for it; I took it from xkcd 917. I would have taken the handle User:ISMETA, but someone somewhere'd already taken User:Ismeta, so the system wouldn't let me. :-( I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 23:07, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Having read every xkcd comic, including the hidden ones, I certainly recognized the reference. In this case, I find it somewhat humorous on another level, because I'm willing to bet that if you stick around, somebody will confuse us, or even accuse me of sockpuppeteering. Anyway, it's great to have you here! --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:08, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

verisome

Probably just running together "very same" (meaning something like "exact") ? SemperBlotto (talk) 15:39, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, yes; that makes a lot of sense. I took it to mean something like "true", formed from veri- (as in "verity" and "verisimilitude") + -some (as in "worrisome" and "flavoursome"), but I think you may be right that it's just "verisame" with a typo; Buckminster Fuller uses "verisame" (see Citations:verisame), which supports your interpretation. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 16:00, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

suffrutex

You are inventing Classical pronunciations for a word that did not exist in Classical Latin. If you do this, you need to mark the pronunciations as modern pronunciations based on Classical principles. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:31, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

OK, sorry. How do I do that? Does it have a different New Latin pronunciation? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 21:32, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

That's the problem. New Latin pronunciation differs enormously by country. I usually don't add pronunciations to New Latin terms because of that. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:34, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Hmm. How about a qualifier like "(pseudo-Classical)"? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 21:46, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Like this? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 22:09, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Possibly. It ought to use the {{a|}} template though, for formatting purposes. However, I'm not sure that "pseudo-Classical" will be clear enought for even the casual reader. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:41, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

OK. I've gone with "Classicistic" instead. Is that better? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 12:38, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

judenlaim

Thanks for starting the discussion. I'm curious about the outcome. Longtrend (talk) 19:34, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

My pleasure; I'm curious, too. I'm surprised this sort of issue hasn't come up before. CodeCat has pinpointed the issue, I think. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 20:51, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

Dude

Cool username. -- Cirt (talk) 04:49, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. :-) I got it from this. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 18:22, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Sweet, sweet. -- Cirt (talk) 05:17, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

hanshinron

Hi, really recently there was a discussion on how to treat romaji entries, and basically we decided to treat it as a soft link. All the information that would go on a romaji entry instead only goes on kana entries, which usually in turn link to kanji entries. I saw your edits on hanshinron (which were exactly the way to do it until a week ago, so no criticism there) and in the new format it would be like this:

==Japanese==

===Romanization===
{{ja-romaji|hira=はんしんろん}}

All the information that was on the previous romaji entry can be merged with the matching hiragana entry. Thanks for your help :) --Haplology (talk) 16:49, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

OK. Just to make sure I understand you, does that mean that ローマ字 entries don't get definition lines at all? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 17:18, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

They do get definition lines, but the lines are produced by {{ja-romaji}} and are basically soft redirects. Take a look for yourself. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:29, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

What he/she said. There was a debate over having complete definitions, abbreviated definitions, or none at all, but we went for option C, no definitions. The template produces a simple link to はんしんろん in this case. --Haplology (talk) 02:14, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Ah, 分かります。 :-) How elegantly parsimonious. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 16:18, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

dioecesim

We usually put quotes that use inflected forms on the entry for the lemma form. Thanks —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:50, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Forgive my boldness, but I've reverted your removal of the quotation. That entry's such a stubby thing that, surely, the quotation does some good by adding information, and at the very least certainly does no harm; also, n.b. that I'd also already added the quotation to the entry for the lemma at dioecēsis. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 12:35, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

It's supposed to be stubby. The whole point of dioecesim is to give the bare minimum of information to clothe what is essentially a soft redirect to dioecesis, where the definitions ought to be. I agree that it probably does no harm, but keeping entries standardised is important in general around here. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:30, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Do you believe that all soft redirects should be stripped of quotations? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 21:27, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

You might be able to dredge up exceptions, but in general, yes. Not Wiktionary policy or anything, just personal belief. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:46, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Hmm. In my opinion, it can at times be helpful to include quotations in entries for inflected forms; for example, would it not be helpful if the four definitions in the Latin entry for aulae were furnished with citations, demonstrating to the curious user the differences in usage between the genitive- and dative-singular and nominative- and vocative-plural forms? (I know this argument doesn't really apply to the particular case of dioecēsim, but it had a bearing on the general principle you advocate, I should think.) I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 14:19, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

No, I don't think that would be helpful, because most users of our Latin entries know how the cases work already, and those who don't won't learn anything from the examples. (PS: It reduces template overhead if you just write ''dioecēsim'' instead of using {{term}} when you're not actually linking to a page. Not something that really matters much, but being details-oriented is part of my nature.) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 22:33, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

I must, respectfully, disagree with you; the "feel" of the usage of grammatical forms is, in my experience, learnt gradually — in part from the internalisation of grammatical descriptions, and in part from direct familiarity with examples of those grammatical forms. As for using and not using {{term}}, I've found that not using it (or using it without the appropriate sc= or lang= parameter) can lead to display problems; moreover, it had only been out of laziness that I didn't use it consistently. Be that as it may, I was unaware of the template-overhead problem, and in the light of that new knowledge, I shall in future use simple italics or other methods of presentation when I mention terms (without linking) in discussions, where assuring correct display is not as important as it is in entries. Is that OK? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 23:42, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

I can't remember how I learned the cases; it feels as if I always could feel the difference, although obviously that is far from the truth. I will have to say that we remain in disagreement, but this is such a pitifully unimportant issue that I'm not going to revert your revert for the sake of my views. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:00, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm glad that, even if we remain in disagreement, we're civil and amicable about it. :-) I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 16:00, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

ἀργία

Could you clarify what sort of etymological info you're looking for? -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 01:22, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Hello, Atelaes. I'm sorry to have wasted your time with my mistake; I meant to add {{rfp|lang=grc}}, like this. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 16:10, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Ah, that makes more sense. No worries. :) -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 22:45, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

δικαιωσύνην

Could I ask where the quote is from? I can't find evidence of this word anywhere. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 17:08, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

It's from an early–eighteenth-century introductory text of Biblical exposition by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Is that any help? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 16:18, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, δικαιωσύνη (the lemma form of δικαιωσύνην) is a modern Greek word, not an ancient one. It might possibly be medieval, but I have an utter paucity of sources on medieval Greek. You might want to ask Flyax about it, as he is better versed in both periods than anyone else here, and would likely have more insight than anyone else. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 22:56, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion; I've done just that. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 00:02, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Flyax has concluded that δικαιωσύνην is a misspelling of δικαιοσύνην, which may explain the original source quotation "Τὴν δικαιοσύνην, id est κατά τὴν δικαιωσύνην." — Κατά (Katá) can mean "badly" or "erroneously", right? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 23:20, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

I also can't find εὐφνία. I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist, as Google only returned nine results, and most of them were typos. Was the request misspelled? -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 08:40, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I'll recheck my source in a bit and then get back to you. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 12:40, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

I suppose the word you are referring to is εὐφυΐα. --flyax (talk) 22:21, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

Here's my source:

• 1978, W.F.R. Hardie, “‘Magnanimity’ in Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’” in Phronesis XXIII, № 1, page 74:

  The athlete needs the right sort of physical endowment, and similarly a man “must be born (phunai), with an eye, as it were, by which to judge rightly and choose what is truly good” (1114 b 5–8); this is the “perfect and true excellence of natural endowment”, εὐφυία (b 10–12).

So, yes, I misspelt the request (and the source omitted the diaeresis). I'm sorry to have wasted your time with that one.

BTW, you recently created an entry for ἤθη (ḗthē) — thanks! — which is the etymon of the English ethe, a plural form of ethos. The entry for ethos also lists ethea as a plural form of it — and I see that it's sufficiently attested — but does that plural form have an Ancient Greek etymon as a precedent? That is, I suppose I'm asking, does ἦθος (êthos) have more than one pattern of declension? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 23:20, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Ἦθος (Êthos) does in fact have two forms of inflection. I have substituted a better inflection template, and created the entry in question. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 23:58, 6 May 2013 (UTC) — IFYPFY. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 10:05, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Excellent! You're a star. :-) I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 00:09, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

-uus

Complex explanations of pronunciation of suffixes in isolation tend to fall apart. The suffix -uus is a case in point. It appears to have originally been a primary suffix, and is present in words like equus (=equos), arvum and vacīvus. As you can see then, statements about the stress falling on the antepenult fall apart, because in these words the stress falls on the paenultimate syllable instead. See sxn 234, II, 8 of Allen & Greenough's New Latin Grammar. I usually find it best to keep explanations of the pronunciation of the suffix limited to the pronunciation of the suffix in isolation. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:20, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Addendum: Oh, and usually a request for etymology should be placed in an Etymology section. This (1) makes it easier to insert the requested information, (2) aids in removal of the request template, and (3) helps to ensure correct formatting by the next editor. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:22, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry to disagree, but your counterexamples don't contradict the pronunciation information I've given; equus is governed by the ⟨-quus⟩ exception already provided for, whereas arvum and vacīvus exhibit -vus, not -uus.

Re requests for etymology, is this what you mean?

Finally, could you tell me what "trop." (as in Lewis's & Short's A Latin Dictionary, “equus”, II.C.2: "Trop., of a secret conspiracy…") means / is short for, please?

I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 12:47, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

-uus and -vus are orthographic variants of the same suffix.

Re: RQEs: Yes, that's one example of what I mean. Look at Portuguese cromo for a more complex instance to see why this is usually preferred.

"Trop." is short for "Tropical", which is a word formerly used to mean "figurative". --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:33, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps, but because of the widespread orthographic conventions governing Latin spelling (and which are enforced in this dictionary), in the case of that suffix -uus always represents /u.us/ and -vus always represents /wus/. Strictly speaking, of course, -uus is just as much governed by the paenultima law as any other bit of Latin; however, because the first syllable of -uus will always be light (except for in the case of ⟨-quus⟩) — which means that any word it forms (other than those ending in ⟨-quus⟩, like oblīquus) will have a light penult — it can be stated that the stress of any given word formed with that suffix will fall on the antepenult, which is a helpful thing to note for our users.

FWIW, I already tended to add the separate headers when requesting etymologies for homographs; nevertheless, I now add the etymology header as a matter of course.

Thanks for the enlightening explanation of trop.; I have created trop. and edited tropic, tropical, and fig. accordingly.

I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 19:09, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

體#Japanese

I noticed you re-added an rfe for this entry. It looks like you're asking for the etymology of the character, but that should be given in the ==Translingual== section. If you're asking about the etymology for karada, etc., that should be given in the lemma entry, which is 体. (Admittedly, that entry right now is a dog's breakfast, but it's on my to-do list. :) ) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:29, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

{{rfe}}s for Japanese terms go in 新字体 entries and {{rfe}}s for character derivations go in Translingual sections; OK, gotcha. Sorry for inconveniencing you. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 09:59, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Annoying RFEs and RFPs

I for one find all those RFEs and RFPs you are adding pretty annoying. Luckily for you, there are quite a few editors who seems to support what you are doing. Do you have any evidence that the RFE requests and RFP requests actually get fulfilled at a significant rate? --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:26, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm not trying to be annoying. Some requests are fulfilled somewhat quickly (Ancient Greek, Japanese), whilst others aren't (obscure languages). There is a definite purpose to the {{rfe}}s: once they're answered, I link to that entry in its etymon's or etyma's, like I did in the case of the etyma of requiebro (which was FWOTD yesterday): [1], [2], [3] (granted, that didn't involve {{rfe}}s, but that's the kind of thing that answered requests allow me to do). Since they annoy you, I shall cease to add those request templates to Czech entries. I added this pronunciation to rádio; please check that it is correct. Also, can you recommend a reliable source for Czech etymologies? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 17:14, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Do you have any evidence that the RFE requests and RFP requests actually get fulfilled at a significant rate? --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:34, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Define "significant rate". I can't really be bothered to look through my contributions for the evidence; they're open to you, too, so be my guest if you want to look yourself. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 17:37, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Is there a definition of "significant rate" for which you have evidence that RFE requests actually get fulfilled at a significant rate? (Above, you have provided links to edits that have no bearing to RFEs; I don't know why you did that.) --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:43, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

As I said, I can't be bothered to spend my time getting that evidence; I have better things to do with my time, but if you don't, you are free to peruse my list of contributions. Those links are there to demonstrate my explanation for why I add RFEs ("once [an RFE is] answered, I link to that entry in its etymon's or etyma's [entry or entries], like I did in the case of the etyma of requiebro [recently]"). It was rather impolite of you to ignore almost all of the content of my above message (17:14, 16 September 2013). I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 21:21, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

I went through your contributions and did not find any edits of yours that serve RFEs placed in the pages, but I did not check every single edit. Can you point me to a couple of edits of yours that serve RFEs? You would understand that adding RFE is not serving it, and that editing an etymology section that does not have RFE is not serving RFE. So again, can you point me to a couple of edits of yours that serve RFEs? --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:04, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

IIRC, I have, in all my time here, served one (or maybe two) RFE(s). That may be to my discredit, admittedly, but that wasn't your original question; you originally asked whether the RFEs and RFPs that I add are served "at a significant rate".
For your interest, I recently added an RFE to the Afrikaans entry for koning, Metaknowledge served it twenty days later, which enabled me to add it as a descendant to the homographic Dutch entry the next day; presumably one example doesn't establish that my RFEs are "served 'at a significant rate'", but I certainly have no appetite for conducting a survey of all my RFEs.
What did you intend to accomplish by your interrogation of me? If it was to get me to stop adding RFEs and RFPs to Czech entries, a simple request would have sufficed. If it was to get me to serve others' RFEs, an appeal to the spirit of reciprocity would have done the trick. You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:47, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

I have warned Dan Polansky about this. Meta, feel free to continue adding requests to any entry if you need the etymology, pronunciation, etc. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 12:43, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Ungoliant. Valid requests shouldn't be removed. But you took away my nick... ;w; —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:23, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you both for reassuring me that I have not inadvertently been disruptive in my addition of requests. Metaknowledge, I have changed my signature, which I hope will discourage other editors from conflating us. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:47, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia link

Hi! You changed the link to Wikipedia on Bundesgrenzschutz from the {{wikipedia}} template at the top of the page to the {{pedia}} template in an "External links" section at the bottom. I'm wondering if there is any consensus how to deal with links to Wikipedia (as a third option, there's {{slim-wikipedia}}). So if you know of anything, please let me know too :) Thanks! Longtrend (talk) 10:19, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, but I don't know what the consensus is (if, indeed, there is one) regarding those templates; I'd assumed that, because all three template types exist, it's up to the individual editor's preference. Certainly, my preference is for using {{pedia}} in External links sections; this mirrors Wikipedia's usage (links to other projects go at the bottom of their articles), reduces horizontal compression and/or lopsided vertical lengthening of entries, and (less validly and somewhat hyperbolically) stops Wiktionary from looking like one big glorified redirect to Wikipedia. What's your preference? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:21, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't really have any preference :) I've always used {{wikipedia}} and never really thought about it. Your arguments sound fair, though. Longtrend (talk) 11:39, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

OK. Well, thanks for asking. Do you mind me making the change from {{wikipedia}} to {{pedia}} when I edit here? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:59, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

As long as that's not the only change you're doing on an entry, I think that's fine. Longtrend (talk) 10:41, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Good to know. And no, I wouldn't bother editing an entry just to change the style of link to Wikipedia; that would be far too petty a sole change to bother making an edit for. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:35, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Tibetan pic

Hi, [4] reads རྒྱལ་པོའི་སྲས་མོ། (rgyal po 'i sras mo .), i.e. the king's daughter. Wyang (talk) 01:25, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Ah, thank you! So it was pretty accurate, after all... I am grateful for your recent spate of Tibetan contributions, especially your edits to སྲས་མོ (sras mo). Additionally, would you mind adding a Tibetan Babelbox to your user page (I think only {{User bo-1}} currently exists, so if – as I assume – your proficiency in Tibetan surpasses level 1, you'd need to create the box template, too; it may just be easier to add [[Category:User bo-N]] – with whatever the appropriate number is – to your user page), so that users in need of Tibetan-related help can find you, and create an entry for སྲས (sras, “son”) please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:40, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, སྲས (sras) done. I don't know what my Tibetan level is... but I am happy to be of help when I could be. Wyang (talk) 08:00, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you very much. I added the Category:User bo category to your user page as I suggested above; I hope you don’t mind. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:43, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, no worries. Wyang (talk) 03:14, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

data from external dictionaries

Just saw your reply. Thanks! – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 13:42, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

You're very welcome. If you need any more information regarding the legal issues that can crop up whilst you edit here, I advise you to contact User:BD2412 — he's the resident expert, by all accounts. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:54, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

coctile

Nice job you have done expanding the W1913 stub! Equinox ◑ 20:26, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:37, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

anonymous

Hey,

removing the flame war at Wiktionary:Requests for verification#anonymous is a good idea, however I do think that the use of the word at wikipedia, wikitionary and so on, is not described by any of the 5 senses. Even people who know my name, can call me an anonymous user, who makes anonymous contributions. They can even refer to me as the anonymous, so there's even a noun sense. It may be hard to find citations, if wikipedia/wikitionary &c. aren't considered to be durably archived. --80.114.178.7 17:56, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Five senses, you say? I only see four. Anyway, you may have a point. Usenet might be a good place to look for examples of such usage. As for "the anonymous", I think that's an adjectival use, rather than a full-fledged noun; I would suppose that anon is the more likely word for the nominal sense you describe. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:54, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, five senses, including "without consideration of prestige or background", which doesn't have a definition, but a synonym ("on the merits") and six alleged translations. --80.114.178.7 21:22, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

On the noun sense, see Anonymous, and w:anonymous IV. --80.114.178.7 21:22, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Hello again. I'm sorry to have taken so long to get back to you. I must confess that I'd forgotten all about this until I renoticed this section when Hekaheka posted a message for me about Matth.
Take a look at google books:"anonymouses" — I am almost certain that you could find there the evidence you need for a robust noun section for anonymous. You may also find the two quotations I've added to Citations:anonymus useful. I hope this helps. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:38, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Matth.

I don't think the abbreviation Matth. is used in Finnish, because "Matthew" is Matteus in Finnish, and the Gospel of Mathew is abbreviated as Matt.. Where have you seen "Matth." in a Finnish text? --Hekaheka (talk) 13:52, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

It occurs after the Finnish translation in the translation table in the English entry for sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Perhaps some Finnish Biblical commentators use Book-name abbreviations deriving from their Latin names (cf. the English Luc. (“[Gospel of] Luke”), from the Latin Lūcās). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:16, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

It seems to be my own edit. It's an error, or at least a potentially misleading entry. I don't remember anymore, why I wrote "Matth.". Possibly I wanted to use the English abbreviation, because this is the English Wiktionary. I'll add the words "Finnish translation of" and then it will be clear to everyone that "Matth." is intended to be English. I did not want to make a Finnish entry of these words, because as far as I know, this particular sentence of the Bible is not used proverbially in Finnish. --Hekaheka (talk) 22:15, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Well, in that case, never mind; I'm sorry for wasting your time. Thanks, besides, for creating Matt. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:00, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Ancient Greek inflection headers

Could you please stop replacing inflection with declension? Ancient Greek has been doing "Inflection" for a long time, and there are a great many entries that have the header. Changing it in a handful of entries only serves to make things messy. If you think that it should be the standard going forward, then by all means propose such a change and interested parties can discuss it. Thanks. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 20:03, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes, certainly. Sorry; I didn't mean to ruffle anyone's feathers. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:52, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

ocris

Hi,

I'm not sure to understand why you removed the label archaic, but don't you think it would be useful to have a category that would collect all the ante-classical words altogether? And shouldn't we empty Category:Latin archaic terms then? --Fsojic (talk) 10:51, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, consider the generic preamble to Category:Latin archaic terms: "Latin terms that are no longer in general use but still encountered in older literature and still sometimes used for special effect." In belonging to a dead language, how are those archaic terms any different from the rest of the Latin lexicon, which are also "no longer in general use"? And do we have any evidence that they are "still sometimes used for special effect"?
That said, I can see what you were thinking: Everything Latin that's ante-Classical is Old Latin; synonyms of "Old Latin" include "Early Latin" and "Archaic Latin"; hence, "Latin archaic terms". However, for the reasons I gave above, and for the sake of consistency with the analogous categories (Category:Ecclesiastical Latin, Category:Post-classical Latin, Category:Vulgar Latin, Category:Late Latin, Category:Medieval Latin, Category:Renaissance Latin, and Category:New Latin), I assert that Category:Old Latin is a better category name for these terms. (Re the choice between "Old Latin" and its two synonyms that I listed: there is no language with an ISO code that is called "Archaic"-anything, and there is only one which is called "Early"-something (Early Tripuri, whose ISO code is xtr); by contrast, there are thirty-nine top-level categories for various languages called "Old"-something, from Old Armenian to Old Welsh.)
I have asked in Module talk:labels#Old Latin data for the necessary changes to the labelling infrastructure to be made. After they are instituted (which I hope they will be), we can go ahead and empty Category:Latin archaic terms into Category:Old Latin, as you suggest. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:12, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanking

I appreciate it, but I really don't need (or deserve) all those thanks for all my edits. :-) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:50, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, sorry; I think just the message on your talk page would've been a better idea. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:54, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Licensing

Wouldn't it be better if you could place, in your user page, where your username came from? Just a suggestion. --kc_kennylau (talk) 01:57, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

I don't think that opening up inside jokes to the out-group is necessarily a bad idea, but on the other hand, that renders them no longer inside jokes. If, as your title implies, you believe there is a legal problem with using this name sans citation, I urge Meta to ignore this at will. I am not a lawyer, but that seems ludicrous. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:06, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Right now, my user page is just a place for me to dump links that are useful to me. If and when I get round to writing an introduction for myself or something like that, I may indeed mention that my username is unscrupulously plagiarised from xkcd. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:26, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Historical hiragana

Heya, I just noticed in this edit diff that you added a request for だいくんゐ. That's an historical spelling that isn't used anymore following spelling reforms after WWII. I've been adding historical spellings to entries as I go (and when I remember, using the hhira parameter of the JA headword templates), but I don't think anyone has done any work on creating entries for historical hiragana. If you'd like JA editors to create those as a matter of course, I suggest you might want to bring it up in the Beer Parlour -- adding requests for the historical hiragana forms of each and every JA entry to the WT:WE list would quickly become ridiculous and tedious. :)

If you're at all interested in Japanese kana usage conventions, have a look at w:Kanazukai.

Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 05:46, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

I'd already looked into that topic before, but, looking into it again, I learned some new things, so thanks for the link. :-) Don't worry, I wasn't intending to add every historical-hiragana red link to WT:WE, and yes, it would be great if ja editors would "create those [entries] as a matter of course"; however, I don't really want to bring it up in the Beer Parlour until the discussion I started about Old Latin is resolved. Therefore, would you mind teaching me what I need to do to create entries for those historical hiragana, please? That way, I can help to tackle the workload, rather than adding to it. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:43, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

• Cheers, thanks for the explanation and offer of assistance. Part of why I suggested WT:BP is that I myself don't have any clear idea what would be best for hhira (historical hiragana) entries. That said, the circle of JA editors is (naturally) smaller than the whole BP audience, so perhaps I can kick things off here. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:58, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Proposal for creating historical hiragana entries

Pinging @TAKASUGI Shinji, @Haplology, @Atitarev, @Wyang, @Jamesjiao -- do you all have any strong feelings about the creation of entries using the historical hiragana (hhira) spellings?

I'd like to propose that we create hhira entries much like existing kana entries -- as soft redirects, just listing the relevant POS headers, with the relevant lemma terms listed underneath using {{ja-def}}. Example for なびかふ:

==Japanese== ===Verb=== {{ja-verb}} # {{ja-def|靡かう}} to be waving, streaming, or bending in the wind: to do so continuously

Would you all be amenable to this? Is there anything you'd like to do differently? For example, should we indicate on the page somewhere that this is an obsolete (or at least archaic) historical spelling? Should we categorize these entries differently? Please chime in.

Once we have a clear consensus, perhaps Haplology or one of the other code-y editors could update the accelerator scripts to make it easier to create such entries.

And for that matter, I was thinking this might be a minor enough issue to handle just among us JA editors (and please ping anyone I've missed). But perhaps this should be brought up in WT:BP or elsewhere? Let me know what you think.

Cheers all, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:58, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

@Atitarev, Haplology, Jamesjiao, TAKASUGI Shinji, Wyang, and of course @Eirikr: In the specific case of なびかふ (nabikafu), wouldn't it be more correct to say that なびかふ is actually the all-hiragana spelling of 靡かふ, rather than of 靡かう? I imagine that the form with kanji would be attestable, and indeed more readily so than the all-hiragana form. If that were to be decided as the way to treat these forms, then presumably 靡かふ would then get an entry, and would simply be defined as:

• {{archaic spelling of|靡かう|lang=ja}}

…or something similar. As for 大勲位 (だいくんい, だいくんゐ), that's a materially different case, because the two all-hiragana strings both pertain to the same with-kanji string; that is when, I think, what you propose above, Eiríkr, is pretty much the right thing to do. On top of that, it would probably useful to state somewhere in such an entry what the current all-hiragana form is (i.e., だいくんい in the case of だいくんゐ), and having a category of hhira forms would also be useful (which category would, I assume, need to be added manually to entries like なびかふ).

That's my input, for now, but I defer to you other editors, given the great yawning gap in my proficiency in Japanese. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:12, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

• They should be marked as obsolete if they are allowed to exist. I don't know if allowing old kanazukai to exist is really worth the trouble. Listing the old kanazukai in modern form headwords or making them hard redirects seems like the better option. There are too many of them, and besides rekishiteki kanazukai, there is also kan'yō kanazukai (w:ja:許容仮名遣) and possibly others. Another thing is about jōdai tokushu kanazukai, and whether they should be marked Old Japanese (or other) and not Japanese. The current Japanese header is actually (rulebreakingly) an amalgamation of everything Japanese, eg. 顔映し. Wyang (talk) 22:54, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

• I don't have hard dates at the moment for the particular entry at 顔映し, but insofar as the ISO lang codes go, we have JA for “Japanese”, and we have OJP for “Old Japanese” -- that's it for anything Japanese. OJP apparently has an upper bound of 794 CE, as at w:Old Japanese. That means anything attested between 794 and now can only really go under a “Japanese” header. My sense so far has been that we hew pretty closely to the ISO codes when it comes to language headings, so that's what I've been doing whenever I create or edit entries.

Re: obsolete kanazukai, we list obsolete spellings in other languages, even English, so I'm not sure why they would be verboten for Japanese, provided of course that they are marked as obsolete, with users clearly directed to the lemmata entries under the modern spellings. We (the JA editors) haven't been adding in entries for the obsolete spellings, but I've been poking around to re-check policy, and I'm not seeing anything saying we shouldn't. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 04:41, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Category:Entries with Pronunciation n headers

The template {{rfc-pron-n|Pronunciation 1|lang=la}} preempts the action of Kassadbot for Pronunciation n headers in Latin entries and now categorizes by language. 20 languages so far have such headers, Latin having more than any other language. See Category:la:Entries with Pronunciation n headers, the master category, and {{rfc-pron-n}}.

The template is better than hard categorization, because it is the standard. I've converted two or three of these that are probably yours. How many do you think you added? I assume they were all added after Dec 29 when we had our discussion. I'm happy to search myself if I know how many to look for. DCDuring TALK 01:22, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

I've just finished checking all my edits to pages with Latin sections since the 29th of December; I converted the one use of the hard category that remained to use {{rfc-pron-n|Pronunciation 1|lang=la}}. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:47, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't like these headers, but they seem indispensable in some cases, including many if not all of their uses in Latin. Having them sorted by language makes it a little easier to get folks with the right knowledge to take a look and either eliminate them or defend them and expand their use to all the relevant cases. DCDuring TALK 21:41, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

Osea...

I assume this is the Latin name of the prophet Hosea. But I'm not sure of the Lemma; it might even be "Osee" (from the Greek). SemperBlotto (talk) 12:45, 16 February 2014 (UTC) - p.s. Don't we put citations of inflected forms at the lemma citation page?

Yes indeed; see Ōsēe, Hōsēās, and User talk:Flyax#*Ὡσήᾱς (*Hōsēās) for context. Unfortunately, I'm not yet certain of those forms' lemmata, so I can't yet confidently "put [the] citations of inflected forms at the lemma citation page". — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:58, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

ÆØÅ

How would you pronounce ÆØÅ? I would pronounce it as /ɛːœːoː/ or Anglicized as /æːɜːɔː/ but that's just how I would pronounce it. In fact, I have never seen it before. --kc_kennylau (talk) 15:36, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

It seems unlikely to me that there would exist any standardly accepted naturalised/Anglicised pronunciation of this term. I've added the Danish and Norwegian pronunciations of the letters' names; presumably any pronunciation that deviates from them would be an approximation of one or both of them, anyway. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:24, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Actually I pronounced it as [ei.iː.əυ.ei] before I did some research. --kc_kennylau (talk) 09:20, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Fair enough; that refutes my presumption, then! :-) Do you think it's worth including pronunciations like your pre-research one (which looks like it's based on the English letter names for A, E, O, and A again)? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:57, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

But English is not my native language so I'm considered out of the sample space :) --kc_kennylau (talk) 12:45, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau An anonymous user has suggested at Talk:ÆØÅ#Adjective that the example sentences for the adjectival senses of ÆØÅ are just uses of the nominal sense. Do you have any citations of this term being used unambiguously as a true adjective, perchance? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:19, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

rfe: -σύνη

Hi - you rfe'd -σύνη, my Bambiniotis gives PIE *-tunā as predecessor to the ancient Greek. Would you know about formatting this? cheers Saltmarsh (talk) 06:41, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Saltmarsh. Is this what you meant? If so, it would probably be a good idea if you could flesh out the one-word citation of Bambiniotis that's in the References section. Thanks. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:18, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

oder noch

Hi! You added oder noch to Wiktionary:Wanted entries. What makes you think this is an idiomatic unit? I can't see that. Longtrend (talk) 16:34, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

@Longtrend: Well, I had the sentence fragment "danach alles gestr. oder noch 1–2 Wörter?", which I translated as "After that, everything is crossed out — perhaps 1–2 words?"; I couldn't see how oder noch (“perhaps”) could derive unidiomatically from oder + noch. Or have I mistranslated the sentence? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:02, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

You mistranslated it :) Actually it would be "Is everything after that crossed out or (= oder) are there one or two more (= noch) words?". So it's the normal conjunction oder with the adverb noch (sense 4). Longtrend (talk) 16:42, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

@Longtrend: I see; I apologise for the mistake. I've removed oder noch from WT:WE and I shall add "Danach alles gestr. oder noch 1–2 Wörter?" to oder and to noch as an example sentence. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:55, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

No problem! This is really a weird and unusual sentence, but it's better than no example at all, I guess. Longtrend (talk) 20:34, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

Indeed. No wonder I had trouble translating it! :-S  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:36, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

κορωνίς

Why would you list the current term as one of the related terms? —CodeCat 21:14, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

Not related; co-ordinate. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:15, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

So it's coordinate with itself? That doesn't make sense to me. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:03, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

@Eirikr: My thinking was that, given the {{sense}} preamble "Ancient Greek diacritical marks", the list should include the names of all the Ancient Greek diacritical marks. I suppose the preamble could be changed to "other Ancient Greek diacritical marks", but given that the diacritical definition of κορωνίς isn't very clearly presented, included as sense 2.2.2, I think it would be useful to retain κορωνίς in the list. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:23, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

大君#Japanese and alternate vs. alternative

FWIW, I don't particularly care one way or the other, beyond a preference for brevity. The terms alternate and alternative are synonymous in this context, making the change insubstantial and not particularly important. I reverted the anon for making a piddling unconstructive edit. Past experience has shown that this kind of niggling edit from certain IP ranges presages a crapflood of bad editing, hence my reflexive reversion. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:26, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

OK; well, I understand you reversion now. Re the synonymy of alternate and alternative in that sense, the OED (3rd ed., Nov. 2010) notes this in its etymology section for alternate, adj., adv., and n.:

• The semantic overlap with alternative adj. has been criticized by usage guides, and many British speakers consider the use of alternate in the senses of branch A. II. incorrect.

"Branch A. II." thereof is defined as "Senses equating to alternative adj.   Chiefly N. Amer.", and it has three senses (A. II. 7–9) which merely point to senses 3a, 3b, and 5 of the OED’s entry for alternative, respectively. Being a speaker of British English, I therefore agreed with the anon's change and, IMO, it is better (all other things being equal) to choose usage that is uncontentious. I hope that seems reasonable and that I didn’t irk you by reverting your reversion. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 02:43, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Cheers, I appreciate the additional information. I wasn't irked so much as puzzled, and felt the need to explain myself. That said, the background you provided helps clear up my puzzlement. Ta, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:39, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

No problem. I'm glad we could come better to understand each other. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:56, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

RE: German declension and Schmalz

Hey I.S.M.E.T.A.,
Happy I could help with your requests. Regarding the surname, I think Schmal(t)z is a transliteration of Smalc, which has probably been taken from the stem of the Latin name (Old Polish wasn’t familiar with the ‘ius’ sound). The same goes for his first name Valentinus > Valentin. The ‘C’ in Old Polish represented a ‘ts’ – or a German-pronounced ‘z’ – sound, which might be the reason for his German name (not etymologically related to lard :P).
Hopefully this helped you.
—Sean Clark (talk) 08:31, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

@Sean Clark: Thanks for the response and the plausible theory; unfortunately, the evidence I've found doesn't tend to support it. I've added the earliest citation of Smalcius (1598) I could find to that Latin entry. The German name is attested far earlier than that, however, and before Valentin Schmalz was even born — this occurrence of Schmalz in the name "Petrus Schmalz" dates from 1489 and this occurrence of Schmaltz is from 1508 (though I don't know whether that's a use of the surname or of something else). I haven't looked into the Polish Smalc yet, largely because I'm so unfamiliar with the language. The evidence so far suggests that Smalcius is a Latinisation of the German Schmal(t)z (and/or the Polish Smalc), and not that Smalcius is the etymon of the German and/or Polish surnames. Moreover, the fact that Valentin Schmalz was a German who only became Polonised later in life also makes it more plausible that he had a German surname that was itself Polonised later in his life as well (as for Smalcius, AFAICT pretty much every name at that time got Latinised in some way so that it could fit the Latin case system). I have created entries for the German and Polish forms of the surname at Schmalz and Smalc, respectively; would you mind adding information about their pronunciation and declension to those entries, please? Thanks for your time. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:13, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

Oh, and BTW, does pl:w:Walenty Smalc state that Smalcjusz and Szmalc are variant spellings of Smalc, or am I misinterpreting that leading sentence? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:18, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

No problem, it was just a theory I suppose. I added the pronunciation and declension to the Polish article, and the pronunciation to the German article. In German, names are generally not declined, it’s optional (e.g: Die Leiden des jungen Werther(s) by Goethe), so decide whether you’d want it added to the article. I’ve taken a look at the book from 1508, the passage describes a recipe of some sorts, so by Schmalz he means lard (“Nim Hundesschmalz, Berenschmalz, ?-Schmalz und Fuchsschmalz gleicher viele”). Lastly, the Polish article indeed states that Smalcjusz and Szmalc are variants (inne formy nazwiska = different forms of the name).
—Sean Clark (talk) 10:20, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

@Sean Clark: Thanks very much for that. I think it would indeed be desirable to have the German surname's declension added; it can be prefaced with a statement like "German names are generally not declined; nevertheless, if inflected, Schmalz declines as follows:" if you think that would be appropriate. Re the Polish Smalc: 1) The entry currently uses just {{head}} for the headword line; is there a more specific Polish proper-noun headword-line template that should be used instead? 2) Are you sure that its declension table should include forms for the plural number and the locative case? The locative case in particular seems conceptually unlikely. 3) Since Smalc is pronounced /ˈs̪malt͡s̪/, does that mean that Smalcjusz and Szmalc are pronounced something like /ˈs̪malt͡s̪juʃ/ and /ˈʃ̪malt͡s̪/, respectively? Thanks for all your help with these. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 02:10, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Well, I don’t mind adding the declension, but there isn’t really a template for German proper nouns, but that might be solvable. 1) I’ve added the gender to the headword template. 2) The locative should be there; no problem. When you talk about multiple ‘Smalces’, you’d need the plural number, it seems logical to me anyway. 3) The pronunciation you’ve given seems in order. No problem, I think helping one another out is essential for Wiktionary.
—Sean Clark (talk) 09:38, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

@Sean Clark: OK, great. I've created Smalcjusz and Szmalc. I couldn't really guess how the former declines, given its different ending, so I've added {{rfinfl|pl|proper noun}} to its declension section, which I'd greatly appreciate if you could answer; as for Szmalc, I assume it declines like Smalc, so I just copied the declension table from the latter to the former and added several zeds — is the result correct? Re the German Schmalz, if you could let me know how it declines, I'll have a look for a suitable template or, if there isn't one, have a go at creating one. Thanks again. If there's anything you need help with hereon in future, please don't hesitate to ask for it from me. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:26, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for your offer, I appreciate it. As for the Polish declensions, Smalcjusz is added, and Szmalc looked in order. Here is the declension for Schmalz – it technically has no gender, but I treated it as neuter (since Schmalz as noun is neuter):

n	singular	plural
nom.	Schmalz	(die) Schmalze
gen.	Schmalz, Schmalzes (archaic)	(der) Schmalze
dat.	Schmalz	(den) Schmalze
acc.	Schmalz	(die) Schmalze

—Sean Clark (talk) 18:52, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

@Sean Clark: Thanks again. I've added a declension table to Schmalz#Etymology 2 (I kinda cheated with the presentation of the archaic genitive singular form) and I've created an entry for Schmaltz. Does everything look in order with those two entries now? I assumed that Schmalz and Schmaltz are pronounced and declined identically. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:46, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Both entries look perfectly in order, nicely solved.
—Sean Clark (talk) 08:41, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

@Sean Clark: I am, I repeat, grateful for your assistance with these entries. If I can return the favour at any point, please don't hesitate to let me know. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:25, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Small request

Could you please do it like this instead? —CodeCat 20:53, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

Also, please don't abuse templates like you did here. You shouldn't try to "fake close" the opening quotes of the template like that. It's generally bad to assume that templates will ever display a certain way, because btuff like that would break if the display of the template is ever changed. —CodeCat 20:56, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

perfinition

Hello Lmaltier. Could you tell me whether this text is written in Middle French, please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:15, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it's (rather modern) Middle French. Lmaltier (talk) 18:02, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. I've added the ridiculously long sentence from that source to Citations:perfinition. Do you know enough Middle French to tell me what the word means? It may help to know that it very probably derives from the Mediaeval Latin perfīnītiō (“a decision”). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:58, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

You are right, it very probably derives from perfinitio. And I agree that perfinitio very probably derives from per + finitio. But I'm surprised by the definition provided here. Finitio may already indicate the termination, and per- still insists on the complete termination. This seems to be the meaning of perfinition: it seems to be a legal term, and is seems that perfinition de temps means when the time is 100% elapsed. But I don't know Middle French. Lmaltier (talk) 21:34, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Gaios

Perseus has this ([5]). Chuck Entz (talk) 18:25, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: Good catch. It's attested as a common noun, evidently. I've added a noun section to Gāius. That necessitated creating {{la-decl-Gaius}} because of the name's unusual dative and ablative plural forms. Thanks for doing legwork that I'd assumed was unnecessary. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:20, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

I'm not positive this needs its own declension template. Furthermore, I'm a bit skeptical about this source, though I am having trouble understanding it. I would love to see an attestation of Gāīs. —JohnC5 22:05, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Agreed; it's pretty much {{la-decl-2nd-ius}}, but with a few overrides. Here's another source, this time Anglicè. I don't know about direct attestation, however. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:12, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Ok, that's good enough to me. Change it over? —JohnC5 01:32, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: This OK? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:37, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Template:la-suffix-noun

Your most recent edit appears to have broken things: -astrum DTLHS (talk) 23:28, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

@DTLHS: Sorry about that. I think this change has fixed that now. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:38, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

οξύτονος

What was your concern about this etymology? I have changed the Ancient Greek to Koine/Hellenistic which is what my modern Greek dictionary says. Does that satisfy your query? — Saltmarsh^{απάντηση} 06:57, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: Yes; thank you for answering it. I always add Modern Greek etymologies using {{rfe|lang=el|From the [lang] [etymon]?}} because they're usually my own guesses and are unsourced, which means there's every chance that I'll get something wrong (the chronolect in the case of οξύτονος (oxýtonos), the etymon in the case of δικαίως (dikaíos)), and that I should not be overconfident with my guesses, leaving the decision about whether to remove the {{rfe}} to another editor who can check a source. Is that OK? BTW, I believe we should change the grc-koi language code to display Koine Greek instead of just Koine, since koine can qualify other language names as well; what do you say? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:33, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Koine Greek would be more accessible (don't think that it's used elsewhere), that would be a good idea. I'm not sure how grc-koi can be changed to produce the result we want! — Saltmarsh^{απάντηση} 13:38, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

I'll ask at the Grease Pit, I tried changing the appropriate line in Module:etymology language/data but this had a knock-on to the category name assigned, with ramifications beyond Greek words. — Saltmarsh^{απάντηση} 15:34, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: Thanks a lot for sorting that out. Things look better now. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:38, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Marking vowel length in Ancient Greek

I saw your edit on κλάζω. While this seems like an excellent idea, I would like to point out a couple things:

• I'm actually working right now on a Luacized conjugation table—an idea I proposed a while back, started work on, gave up, and just recently came back to. (And I'm planning using neither of my proposed options, and actually implementing it more like the Latin system. The point being that, if you were planning on adding the 1v, 2v, etc. arguments to the conjugation templates, don't do so quite yet.
• As I'm fairly sure this is not yet codified practice, we need to specify which of the diacritics should combine; especially given that it would be easier to generate page links (without having to enter two arguments for each word) if the breve/macron were combining, rather than the acute (or breath mark) as you have been doing. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 01:00, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

I was having a similar problem with Ancient Greek nouns. I seemed useful to add breves to nouns with ambiguous lengths, for example Γᾰ́δᾰρᾰ (Gádara). I am aware that, when generating links for entries with macrons, the macrons are automatically removed for the HTTP query text but still displayed on the page. Breves, on the other hand, are always preserved in the HTTP query text, causing the link to go to Γᾰ́δᾰρᾰ as opposed to Γάδαρα. You probably knew all this, but I really wish I could specify breves in declension tables without fear of having bad links. Is there any safe way to put breves in link text or declension tables without creating bad links or having to write my tables from the ground up? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 21:36, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

To change the automatic linking, an admin would have to change Module:languages/data3/g. I would do it myself, but (aside from the fact I've never worked with that part of the data modules) the fact that no one has implemented such an obvious feature makes me nervous. You could ask at Wiktionary Talk:About Ancient Greek to see if there's a consensus for doing so. Or you could ask at the Grease pit, and perhaps an admin who's more bold than I am (or who knows the issues involved better than I do) will make the change. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:45, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

JohnC5: Don't put breves on the ambiguous vowels, only the short vowels. Ambiguous vowels should be left blank. As for the entry titles, I asked Atelaes to add breves and the combining diacritics about a month ago; he said he'd try to find the time, which apparently he has not yet. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 18:42, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Sorry, all, for the delay in my response to you.

• @ObsequiousNewt: Per your request, I've left Ancient Greek conjugation tables entirely alone since your first posting above; do please keep me abreast of your progress with your Luacised conjugation table. Re "specify[ing] which of the diacritics should combine", the actual situation is diametrically opposed to what you suppose. Consider, for example, that Μεσσί̄ᾱς (Messí̄ās) ( Μ ε σ σ ί [U+0304 COMBINING MACRON] ᾱ ς ) generates a red link, whereas Μεσσῑ́ᾱς (Messī́ās) ( Μ ε σ σ ῑ [U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT] ᾱ ς ) is properly treated, has its macrae stripped from the link text, and generates a blue link. (Moreover, the string with the combining oxia generates both original Greek and transliterated Latin text that display properly, in contradistinction with the string with the combining macra.) If I understand this properly, it has to do with canonical equivalence. Everything (apart from four codepoints) in the Greek Extended character block (Precomposed polytonic Greek, U+1F00–U+1FFF) is canonically equivalent to something else. (The four codepoints in that block that aren't canonically equivalent are U+1FBD GREEK KORONIS, U+1FBF GREEK PSILI, U+1FC0 GREEK PERISPOMENI, and U+1FFE GREEK DASIA, and even they're noted as being approximately equivalent to U+0020 SPACE combined with U+0313 COMBINING COMMA ABOVE, 〃, U+0342 COMBINING GREEK PERISPOMENI, and U+0314 COMBINING REVERSED COMMA ABOVE, respectively. The Unicode Consortium uses ≡ (“identical to”) to denote canonical equivalence and ≈ (“almost equal to”) to denote this approximate equivalence.) Greek Extended includes ᾰ, ᾱ, Ᾰ, Ᾱ, ῐ, ῑ, Ῐ, Ῑ, ῠ, ῡ, Ῠ, and Ῡ at U+1FB0, U+1FB1, U+1FB8, U+1FB9, U+1FD0, U+1FD1, U+1FD8, U+1FD9, U+1FE0, U+1FE1, U+1FE8, and U+1FE9, respectively; they are all canonically equivalent to the relevant undiacriticked letter in the Greek and Coptic character block, combined with either U+0304 COMBINING MACRON or U+0306 COMBINING BREVE. That means that whatever character conversion the Lua languages module performs (in the case of ᾰ, be it U+1FB0 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH VRACHY → U+03B1 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA or U+03B1 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA + U+0306 COMBINING BREVE → U+03B1 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA), whether we use combining macrae and brachiae or precomposed polytonic Greek characters should make no difference. As Μεσσί̄ᾱς (Messí̄ās) vs. Μεσσῑ́ᾱς (Messī́ās) shows, however, the order of diacritics matters, both for display and software functionality. Let's take the more complex case of ἄβαξ (ábax). Let's say I wanted to add macrae to that word (I don't know whether its vowels are long, but that doesn't matter for the present purpose). I could just add U+0304 COMBINING MACRON after each alpha, to give ἄ̄βᾱξ (á̄bāx), but the Lua module fails to remove the macra from the first alpha for the link text (note, however, that it does remove the macra from the second alpha). If, however, I were to construct the string U+03B1 (GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA) + U+0304 (COMBINING MACRON) + U+0313 (COMBINING COMMA ABOVE) + U+0301 (COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT) + U+03B2 (GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA) + U+03B1 (GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA) + U+0304 (COMBINING MACRON) + U+03BE (GREEK SMALL LETTER XI) and then link to that, it would generate ᾱ̓́βᾱξ (ā́bāx), which works properly. Switching the composition order of the U+0313 COMBINING COMMA ABOVE and the U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT leads to an invalid result again, generating the red link ᾱ́̓βᾱξ (ā́bāx). So, basically, macrae and brachiae must come before the other diacritics, not after them.
  Anti-TL;DR version: Diacritics have to be added in a strict order, otherwise links don't work and display problems are generated. It just so happens that macrae and brachiae have to come before the other diacritics.
• @Chuck Entz: As far as I can tell, the only change to Module:languages/data3/g that's necessary is changing this:

m["grc"] = {

⋮

entry_name = {

from = {"ᾱ", "ῑ", "ῡ"},

to this:

m["grc"] = {

⋮

entry_name = {

from = {"ᾰᾱ", "ῐῑ", "ῠῡ"},

Given that Atelaes, JohnC5, ObsequiousNewt, and I all seem to be in favour of such a change, are you willing to tweak that data page? (Macra-stripping was added to grc by -sche in this revision; might it be worth asking him why he didn't enable brachia-stripping as well?)

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:09, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

What about the Grease Pit discussion? —CodeCat 00:11, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, I didn't see that. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:16, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

I was unaware that accents automatically combined; this is good news then. On the other hand, if we add both combining symbols the the ignore list, shouldn't both work? Anyway, my practices for marking vowel length are based on the Latin system: mark every vowel that doesn't have a diacritic on it already. If we do decide to mark *every* vowel, I'll start doing that—but there are a couple issues that need to be sorted out first.

And the Luacized conjugation table is complete; I posted that in Wiktionary talk:About Ancient Greek but you probably missed it. Anyway, the template is {{grc-conj}}; see me if you have any bugs or questions. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 02:25, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: Re "if we add both combining symbols the the ignore list, shouldn't both work?", I don't know what you mean. What two combining symbols are you refering to?
Re "If we do decide to mark *every* vowel, I'll start doing that—but there are a couple issues that need to be sorted out first.", sure; what are these issues?
You're right; I missed your elegant declaration. Well done. I look forward to familiarising myself with its use. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:59, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

The macron and breve combining symbols, I mean. And the main issue is that they don't render well (all the diacritics layer over each other making it impossible to tell which ones the vowel has.) ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 16:44, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: Yes, "add[ing] both…[t]he macron and breve combining symbols…[to] the ignore list" (as I described in my response to Chuck Entz in my post timestamped: 00:09, 16 September 2014) should indeed mean that any brachia used in a way that a macra can be used will lead to a correct result. I agree that there are display problems when a brachia or macra is used in conjunction with a psile or dasia. There are also display problems when a brachia or macra is combined with any diacriticked majuscule. Whilst these display problems could easily be corrected in the transliterations, I don't know whether or, if so, how they can be corrected in the original Greek script. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:15, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

perispomene and other matters

Lest you think me foolish, I am indeed aware that vowels with a perispomene are long. :) I guess I was just in a mood last night were it looked inconsistent not to make them all have macra, and I had a sneaking suspicion you might remove it (for which I am grateful). It certainly will not happen again, and I deeply appreciate your checking my edits to WT:WE, particularly in languages like AG, on which I have read up intently but which I have never technically studied. On a related topic: am I right in thinking that there is no explicit template for AG 3rd declension after a "strong"-υ stem, such as with νᾶπυ‎ (nâpu‎)? Is it just that such terms are so uncommon as to not need a separate template? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 21:32, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Lemmata in etymologies

Heya, thanks for your work on 女房詞. I thought it would be better to chat here rather than exclusively in the edit summaries. :)

My thought is that using the alt params in etymologies should be restricted to cases like verb forms, where you show the verb form (like 見て or 読め, etc.) and link to the lemma dictionary form (in these cases, 見る or 読む). This kind of gentle redirect is relatively transparent -- the kanji doesn't change, and users who click through wind up pretty much where they expect to be.

Meanwhile, showing one kanji spelling and linking through to another substantially raises the chances of user confusion and general unhappiness. We do have an entry for 詞, so showing that and linking to 言葉 instead feels unnecessarily misleading. The etymon kotoba has a lemma form of 言葉, so linking to 詞 is poor usability -- users have to click again through to the 言葉 entry to get the relevant details for that etymon. As such, showing 言葉 and linking to that in the etymology for 女房詞 seems the most straightforward to me. Japanese has maaaany cases of a single etymon being spelled multiple ways using different kanji, so this phenomenon we see in the 女房詞 entry is not unique.

I hope that explains my position clearly enough. :) Let me know your thoughts. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:15, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

@Eirikr: OK; I see where you're coming from. What do you make of this presentation, instead? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:22, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Still not ideal, in my eyes, in that this gives 詞 as the lemma used to form the compound. The underlying constituent terms here are nyōbō, which has the single kanji spelling 女房, and kotoba, which has multiple kanji spellings, of which 言葉 is the lemma, not 詞. Compounds presented in etymologies should use the lemmata where possible (verb forms as one clear exception, since that's not just a matter of spelling; c.f. the etymologies at 糞垂, 薺, 曝け出す). ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:17, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

@Eirikr: How about this presentation, then? That relegates 詞 to an afterthought. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:31, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

How about just bringing the usage notes up into the etym section? The details I'd added are really more about explaining the spelling, which could belong more in the etym section anyway. :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:18, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Awesome

Awesome username dude. -- Cirt (talk) 20:30, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

@Cirt: Thanks again. ;-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:32, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Ha! I'm really tired today. :P -- Cirt (talk) 20:36, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Who knows, maybe I'll compliment you again next year. :P -- Cirt (talk) 20:36, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Heh. I look forward to it. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:47, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

φωνήεις

I'm not positive (as I'm still very new to AG declension), but I think we'll need to create {{grc-adecl-1&3-ντ-prx}} (based on {{grc-adecl-1&3-ντ}}) in order to facilitate the inflection for φωνήεις. However, this is slightly out of my comfort zone for AG. Can you do this or do you know someone who can? I can certainly handle the template creation fine, but I'm not positive about the forms. Thanks in advance! —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 09:33, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

I can take this one (working on it right now), unless ISMETA wants to. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 17:56, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, ObsequiousNewt; please, be my guest.
@JohnC5: Sorry I haven't been very prompt with my responses lately. I'm quite busy right now, but I will get to your various messages once my present project is out of the way. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:34, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, ObsequiousNewt, I had to add another parameter to allow for the recessive accent in MVS, NNS, NAS, and NVS. Please fix my changes further if necessary. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 21:52, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5 According to Smyth 299, the accent doesn't recede there. Were you using a different source? ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 21:59, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Very intriguing, ObsequiousNewt. I was going off of this and also Perseus's declension tool. Then again, the Anthon & Kühner also seems to imply that the contracted form should be φωνῇς and not φωνῆς, which disagrees with LSJ (unless LSJ omits iota subscript, which it very well might). Again, I defer to greater AG expertise. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 22:46, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Perseus' declension tool is useful for looking up a lemma from the inflected form... but I've found that it tends to be a lot less reliable (particularly with accents—I've found some examples that defy Greek's rules for accent) with the reverse. As for the contracted form (which I hadn't coded yet)... η + ει can be either ῃ or η, and it essentially depends on whether the ει came from underlying *ey (this is called a genuine diphthong) or from (a) contraction of ε+ε or (b) lengthening of ε (this is called in either case a spurious diphthong.) See Smyth 6, 53, and 59. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 04:41, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

And what about the Anthon & Kühner for the recessive accent (i.e.should I change the template back?) —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 04:57, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Ah, so, okay, my mistake. I forgot that penult can mean properispomenon. So, your change was correct. On the other hand, I'm going to reorder the arguments because that's just kind of awkward IMO. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 13:56, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

I was hoping you would do that, as I was too lazy to reörder them myself. :) Thanks for making that change. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 21:50, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5 For you. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:32, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @I'm so meta even this acronym Thanks. I have always been a fan of diaereses for the purpose of disambiguation. For many years I pronounced reägent the same way as regent because I had misanalyzed its structure. :) —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 19:42, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I understand and have quite a lot of sympathy for that general principle. I thought reörder was kinda quirky, since I figured it's a word more-or-less immune from synaeretic mispronunciation; reägent, however, I agree with (when I first encountered the word on a game, I was also unsure about its pronunciation until I looked it up). Pleasingly, and unlike reörder, reägent has enough citations to warrant its inclusion, so I made an entry for it. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:47, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym Again, thank you! I do, of course, mostly use reörder in jest, but I will seriously go in for classics like reëlect or orthoëpy (the latter of which also makes my list of words that were almost certainly made out of spite for what they describe along with lisp and hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia). Out of curiosity, in which game did you encounter re(a|ä)gent? I first ran across it in the Might and Magic series of games. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 02:30, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Heh, ditto. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 02:50, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Slow down. And prioritise

If you keep adding requests at such rate, soon WT:WANTED shall become as overloaded as WT:RFD is. Also, many of these entries you add seem quite obscure and I doubt they are high priority: "Presentment of Englishry", seriously? WT:WANTED should be for more-or-less immediately needed terms. — Keφr 08:17, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

@Kephir: Yeah, OK, fair enough. Sorry about that. I'll add far fewer from now on, and I'll move terms from there to language-specific requests pages soon. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:24, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

@Kephir: It is not entirely I.S.M.E.T.A.'s fault, as I have been trying to add a couple wanted entries each day recently and I.S.M.E.T.A. has just been refilling the entries. I have wondered, however, whence the high priority terms are supposed to come; though I am perfectly happy to add random/obscure terms. Would you want the list to become shorter generally? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 09:09, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Based on my sample of one so far (Cechenodes) the taxonomic names are not well selected. There are millions of taxonomic names. It is neither realistic nor worthwhile to have them all. I am skeptical about the value to Wiktionary of taxon entries that are not linked to and do not have the prospect of being linked to by any vernacular name in any language. See the thousands of bird species entries for examples of mostly low-value entries. The whole point of {{taxlink}} (and {{vern}}) is to create "wanted" lists that reflect links. I have more or less abandoned Wiktionary:Requested entries (Scientific names) for that reason.

Further my process of adding taxonomic names includes making fairly full entries with links to external databases, removing {{taxlink}}s that point to the entry and adding wikilinks to unlinked uses of the taxon. Anything short of that is not as helpful as it might be. At least use {{taxon}} in the definition line. DCDuring TALK 12:37, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Looking at more of the taxon items confirms my fears. DCDuring TALK 12:43, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

@DCDuring: I'm sorry, I didn't know about the existence of Wiktionary:Requested entries (Scientific names); I shall add my requests for taxonomic entries thereto in future (rather than to WT:WE). (BTW, do you think it would be worth having a shortcut at WT:RE:taxa to redirect to Wiktionary:Requested entries (Scientific names)?) Re wantedness, I wouldn't be so sure that how many links pointing to it a term has is a reliable indicator of its "wantedness"; that a term has been added to a requests list by someone shows that at least one person actually wants an entry for that term… — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:21, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Sometimes the 'wanting' by an individual seems a flimsy basis for adding something. Adding an item to a requested entry list seems to be a bright shiny object. If a taxon serves to disambiguate vernacular names in a few different languages (indicated by its use in definitions), that seems to indicate that the languages themselves 'need' the taxon. Non-selective computer-generated lists also don't have the same force IMO. More selective computer-generated shortlists such as the ones Pengo has created are much more useful because they are more motivating.

As I said above, I largely ignore Wiktionary:Requested entries (Scientific names), so names added there won't get much attention. Also, its subpage organization is not favorable for mass addition of items. Any taxon appearing more than once in principal namespace wrapped in {{taxlink}} will get more attention.

Appendix:English_terms_of_Native_North_American_origin caught my interest and was being actively worked by User:-sche, so I added {{taxlink}}s to it and added some taxon entries it 'wanted'. At some point I will add items taken from Appendices in Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists, also because it caught my interest. Both native and invasive plants from my neck of the woods will also get my special attention, just as Jyril and Hekeheka have done an outstanding job of covering the plants and animals of Finland. Almost any thematic list is more interesting than other kinds and can make it easier to add good entries due to whatever commonality exists. DCDuring TALK 17:52, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

@DCDuring: I take your well made point about languages themselves "wanting" such entries. For myself, there is usually some reason of etymological or other relation behind my requests (in the case of Cechenodes, because of its seeming relationship to the Ancient Greek κεχηνώδης (kekhēnṓdēs, “forming a hiatus”), and that because I've been searching for the Ancient Greek word for diaeresis).

Thanks for your recent help on Termes, Leontice (leontopetalum‎), and rosewoodēnsis. I admire your diligence on this project; focus on the things that interest you — you do a good job, but you might as well enjoy doing it (you are a volunteer, after all). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:38, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Cechenodes is a good indication of the problem that arises with taxonomic etymologies. It is surely the case that there is something in the appearance or behavior of the insect (or its describer) that accounts for the selection of the name. Unfortunately, it is often not at all easy to find out what the connection is, especially with insects, but also with many lower taxa of the less-popular limbs and branches of the tree of life, like liverworts. And there is the so-what problem after one does. One reason why I try to get pictures (or sound files or even videos) for species, especially the type species of genera, is to get some hint about why the name was selected. In the case of Cechenodes no picture is available at Commons and little information is available at all. If I had full access to all of the taxonomic literature, I could do a bit more, though there are many really annoying naming practices among species and genus describers, which have required the taxonomic name authorities to create rules to discourage some practices.

You also might find EtyFish amusing. DCDuring TALK 01:14, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

I've found that looking at the original description can be very helpful: you see what details the author included in the description, and there's often information about the other species the author was looking at at the same time. The vast majority of the taxonomic literature before 1922 is available online, but it's often hard to find. I've spent quite a bit of time building up a database of sources, so I may be able to help on selected names. As for Cechenodes, the news isn't good: first of all, it's in the w:Ichneumonoidea, which is a taxonomic morass. There are so many species, and the variation is so difficult to reduce into nice, neat dichotomous keys, that only a few specialists have gotten to the level where they can reliably tell if they have a new species. That means that very few authors have been describing huge numbers of species- and it's very hard to come up with unique names if you're describing dozens (or even hundreds) of species at a time. Under such circumstances, it's not unheard of for authors to leaf through an Ancient Greek dictionary and just randomly pick words. Also, it was published in 1971 and there are apparently no online sources for the journal it was published in. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:54, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

@DCDuring, Chuck Entz: I've managed to find Cechenodes’s original description (which I've copied to Citations:Cechenodes), wherein the describer is helpfully explicit about its etymology, stating that "[t]he generic name is from […] (making a yawn), referring to the wide base of the third cubital cell." Unfortunately, that salient passage was omitted from the available snippets, meaning that I had to copy it from Google Books' OCR transcription; apparently, Cechenodes derives from “xexevw6T)£”. Despite the thoroughly scanno'd etymon, I'm confident that H.K. Townes means κεχηνώδης (kekhēnṓdēs) here. The first six characters of gobbledygook very plausibly represent the Greek ϰεχενωδ (cf. xexevw6), assuming that the typeface used in The Genera of Ichneumonidae IV employs this sort of kappa: ϰ (a very common cursive variant of the prototypical form, κ) and that Townes erroneously substituted an epsilon for an eta; the last three characters are significantly more obscure, but I'd guess that they represent ης, ής, or ῆς (the first assuming Townes chose to omit diacritics, the latter two that he misplaced one). In terms of sense, although the recorded meaning of κεχηνώδης (kekhēnṓdēs) is the orthographico-grammatical sense "forming a hiatus", the word derives from the verb χάσκω (kháskō, “I yawn or gape”), which accords with Townes' semantic analysis of the word. In the light of this, would you two agree that we are warranted in stating that Cechenodes derives from κεχηνώδης (kekhēnṓdēs)? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:51, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Congratulations. I hope we don't have too many etymologies of taxonomic names that require as much research. I think I've gotten most of the trivial morphological derivations out of Category:Translingual entries needing etymology. Only 2,400 remain. Oh, plus those that don't have an Etymology section and don't have {{rfe}}, not to mention the thousands used in Category:Entries using missing taxonomic names. DCDuring TALK 17:34, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

@DCDuring: Thank you. And re the rest, I've added a link to Category:Translingual entries needing etymology to my user page; I'll chip away at it from time to time. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:57, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

I agree with your analysis- a plain eta is quite consistent in shape with T}, and the last letter has to be a sigma. This shows how difficult it is to guess what the author had in mind without reading the description: the "cell" he was referring to is a shape delineated by veins in the insect's wings, which would not be obvious at all without the context(though vein morphology on wings is very important to taxonomy in much of the Hymenoptera, so a specialist might be able to guess). Chuck Entz (talk) 18:19, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: I'm glad you both think it's plausible. And yes, I must confess that "the wide base of the third cubital cell" doesn't mean very much to me. An annotated image would aid my comprehension immensely; it's unfortunate that there isn't one available. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:49, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Well, yes. I am considering putting a hard limit on WT:WANTED, after which requests would be liable for deletion at random. — Keφr 18:05, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

@Keφr: I hope you have noticed that my addition of terms to WT:WE has slowed considerably since your admonishment above. Do you have an ideal number for the WT:WE list in mind? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:21, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Honestly? Half the number it contains now. Maybe ⅗. (I still fail to get pings from you, Acronym, and I have no idea why. I suspect something about your signature). — Keφr 18:01, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

@User:Kephir: Do you get a ping when I don't pipe the link to your user page? If not, have you any idea what I could do to fix this problem of pinglessness? Re WT:WE, I aim to have the number on there reduced to under 250 by March/April; is that OK? (The positive that has come from your objection to my flurry of requests is that I have become a lot bolder at adding entries where I would previously have lacked the confidence to do so.) — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:38, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

μέλι καρύδι

Surely just some of parts - μέλι = honey, καρύδι = walnut ? — Saltmarsh^{απάντηση} 21:10, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: I figured honey-nut would be just one thing, but maybe not. If you don't detect any idiomaticity in the phrase μέλι καρύδι (méli karýdi), then you're probably right that it's no more than the sum of its parts. I've removed the request; sorry to waste your time. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 06:21, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

ἀμφίβραχυς

I believe this template, {{Template:grc-decl-3rd-weak-υ-prx}}, needs to be made in order to decline the substantive form of this entry. :) —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 04:48, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Noted. I'll get to it at some indefinite point in the future. Thanks for creating ἀμφίβραχυς (amphíbrakhus).
BTW, regarding this edit of yours, AFAICT, emys is only attested in the accusative plural form emydas in Classical Latin, a form which {{la-decl-3rd|emys|emyd}} doesn't generate. I'm not sure how we should present emys's declension, but I'm convinced we shouldn't obscure Classical usage by giving only the non-natively over-regularised New Latin declension. These sparsely attested terms are difficult cases; do you think it would be worthwhile having Category:Latin hapax legomena (I see we already have that one; I'd forgotten that I'd created it.), Category:Latin dis legomena, Category:Latin tris legomena, and Category:Latin tetrakis legomena for these Latin terms with very limited Classical attestation? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:55, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

That's a very fair point about emys. Maybe do something along the lines of what I did with chelys, perhaps? I agree that it deserves to have a hapax category slapped on it (along with a few other Plinian words I've added from WT:WE recently). I'm trying to decide, if it is a hapax, whether we ever keep the lemma form or change it to *emys and move it to the appendix. I am certainly not well enough versed in Wiktionary's policies (as people keep telling me :) ) to know what to do. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 09:06, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Emys is only a hapax legomenon (as emydas) in the Classical Latin corpus; it is plentifully attested in every case (except perhaps the vocative) and in both numbers in New Latin. We don't relegate to appendices Latin terms wholly restricted to the New Latin chronolect; a fortiori, we shouldn't relegate to appendices Latin terms whose lemmata are only found in New Latin, but which are attested in one or more oblique forms in the Classical chronolect. I like the accuracy of presentation in chelys (It's attested in the vocative‽), but I'd prefer to mark unattested forms with asterisks and without linking them (like this) rather than omitting them altogether, wherever that's possible (it may not be in the case of very impredictable declension). And yes, I've noticed that quite a lot of the more obscure Classical Latin vocabulary is only found in Naturali Historiâ C. Plinii Secundi and that he often remains faithful to his borrowings' original Greek patterns of declension; I don't suppose his practice is all that different from that of English authors that retain plural forms from the Classical languages when using terms derived thence in an English context. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:30, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

I quite like the method you've shown with chelys (also, yeah, it is weird that it is attested in the vocative). It gives us the pleasure of getting to reconstruct something without forcing us to claim attestation. For emys, we could use the "chelys method" for the Classical Latin and the standard declension method for New Latin. You should probably revert chelys to your asterisked version (at least, in my opinion); though, I notice something has changed since I first made chelys that obviates the need for links inside the table, as the table now appears to auto-generate links. Sorry for misinterpreting your previous point about hapaxes—it was a late night. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 15:02, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: At least two of emys's Graeciform inflections are attested in New Latin (viz. emydos and emyda) and New Latin only; accordingly, I think it would be best to present the whole range of forms in one table. I'm glad you also prefer the complete-but-asterisked version of chelys's declension table; however, the autogenerated appendical links for the unattested forms need to be removed before that page can be reverted to that version (we don't want entries in an appendix for mere unattested forms of otherwise attested words). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:46, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

If you think about it, there aren't that many Classical Latin terms attested in all of the forms our templates generate, so we're not all that strict about asterisking every form that's not attested. I would think one would only asterisk cases where the attested forms don't provide enough information to be reasonably sure about those parts of the paradigm. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:02, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: There are very many irregular forms attested in the Classical corpus; it is generally the case that the better attested a term is in the Classical corpus, the more irregular forms it will have (this is especially the case for verbs). Such irregularities are largely unpredictable, so reconstructions cannot hope to anticipate them. It is one thing to show (unattested) forms that would result according to the application of general patterns, and quite another to state that those forms actually occur. On the other hand, I'm not suggesting that we leave all inflection tables blank or full of asterisks until someone comes along to verify which forms actually occur; that would leave us with very few of those entries for Latin non-lemmata which are so useful to those less well-acquainted with Latin inflection. I propose an "innocent until proven guilty" approach (not vice versa) whereby we have entries for non-lemmata unless they have been shown, with reasonable reliability, not to exist. (After all, if the form does not exist, what would cause a person unfamiliar with Latin inflection to search for that form; i.e., where would that person find that form?) This approach yields results like those at emys (see {{la-decl-emys}}) and postrēmōgenitus; please let me know what you think of those results. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:28, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Regarding the template--you'll both want to look at this RFDO I made a while back. — This unsigned comment was added by ObsequiousNewt (talk • contribs) at 16:28, 13 November 2014‎.

@ObsequiousNewt: Oh, thanks for that. Are those seven deletions and one move going to happen, then? Would it be helpful for me to post a vote in that RFDO in support?

@JohnC5 I have added {{grc-decl-3rd-weak-υ-prp}} to the new noun section of ἀμφῐ́βρᾰχῠς (amphíbrakhus). Is the result what you were looking for? I'm uncertain, given the mismatch between the adjectival and nominal declension tables (the genitive masculine singular of the adjective is ἀμφῐβρᾰ́χεος (amphibrákheos), whereas the genitive singular of the noun is ἀμφῐβρᾰ́χεως (amphibrákheōs); the nominative, accusative, and vocative masculine dual of the adjective is ἀμφῐβρᾰ́χεε (amphibrákhee), whereas the nominative, accusative, and vocative dual of the noun is ἀμφῐβρᾰ́χει (amphibrákhei); and the genitive masculine plural of the adjective is ἀμφῐβρᾰχέων (amphibrakhéōn), whereas the genitive plural of the noun is ἀμφῐβρᾰ́χεων (amphibrákheōn)).

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:02, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Having actually looked at the LSJ entry, seeing as ἀμφίβραχυς is an adjective, you actually want {{grc-adecl-1&3-ups-prx}}. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 17:50, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: I think there's a consensus to delete... but they need to be orphaned first, which I had started doing before getting sidetracked. If you'd like to help fix them, that would be great (but don't feel obligated.) ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 17:53, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: I thought because there is a male substantive sense, we would need {{Template:grc-decl-3rd-weak-υ-prx}}. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 06:48, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

I'd figure that wouldn't be necessary; a substantive is still an adjective, and the inflection would be the masculine form of the adjective. But I defer opinion. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 14:43, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: I don't know if you noticed my comments in that RFDO, but {{grc-decl-1st-ala-prp}}, {{grc-decl-1st-ets-prp}}, {{grc-decl-3rd-N-ln-prp}}, and {{grc-decl-3rd-weak-υ-prp}} are all orphans and can, accordingly, be deleted.

@JohnC5 Just FYI, I agree with giving separate nominal declension tables for substantivised adjectives, as in the case of ᾰ̓μφῐ́βρᾰχῠς (amphíbrakhus).

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:12, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I noticed; I'm not an admin. I've been busy, so I haven't been able to work on the others either. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 13:51, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: Ah, OK; I just wanted to check. Re your not being an administrator; shall I nominate you for administratorship? It seems you could do with the tools. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:33, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ If you think it seems appropriate. I haven't gotten involved with policy debate yet, so I don't know if I'm qualified, but I do agree that we could use a dedicated admin for Greek given Atelaes' absence. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 19:18, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Aftermath

The vote to confer administratorship upon ObsequiousNewt passed unanimously with seven votes. The bureaucrat Stephen G. Brown accordingly changed ObsequiousNewt’s group membership from “autopatroller” to “administrator” at midnight on the 12th of December, 2014 (UTC). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:52, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

περισπωμένη

What dictionary gives you a noun-sense? LSJ doesn't have anything. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 21:59, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: LSJ, περισπάω IV has “Gramm., pronounce a vowel or word with the circumflex…π. [προσῳδία] D.T.630.2, Ph.1.29; περισπώμενος [φθόγγος] ib.46”, which I took to mean that Dionysius Thrax and Philo Judaeus use περισπωμένη (perispōménē) as a noun in elliptical usage for περισπωμένη προσῳδία (perispōménē prosōidía) = ⟨ ῀ ⟩. I tracked down Dionysius' use, but I couldn't find Philo's; given the translations thereof at Citations:περισπωμένη, I'm no longer sure… — I.S.M.E.T.A. 03:14, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

salateen

Whence did you procure that pronunciation? Just curious. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 01:07, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I Anglicised the Arabic pronunciation given in سَلَاطِينُ (salāṭīnu). I think it's very unlikely that we'll find an IPA transcription in an authority that we can cite. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:23, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

Good enough for me. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 01:27, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

:-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:36, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

Ancient Greek prosody

No, only the length of the ult's vowel counts. An example where the penult's vowel is long (there are many cases like this): ἀγανάκτησις (aganáktēsis). --Fsojic (talk) 13:50, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

w:Ancient Greek accent has a shorthand explanation: the morae between the accented mora and the last mora can't be in separate syllables. This also explains the type of accent in the antepenult- you can never have a rising accent, with the accent on the first mora of the syllable, because that would put unaccented morae in both the antepenult and the penult. Chuck Entz (talk) 18:40, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

@Fsojic, Chuck Entz: Thank you both. That's helped explain things a lot. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:53, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Axiogenesis

Could you read the 3 page preface of this book and help me figure out what on earth the distinction between noophelia and axiogenesis is? I get optimalism, but the other two are so subtly different as to seem like not at all. Axiogenesis also appears to be an alternate form of axogenesis (creation of axons), but I don't want to add that until I have this philosophical meaning sorted out. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 08:28, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Well, as Classical compounds representing Greek roots, noöphelia represents *νοωφέλεια, *νοωφελία (*noōphéleia, *noōphelía, “the benefiting of reason or intellect”), whereas axiogenesis represents *ἀξιογένεσις (*axiogénesis, “generation according to value”). Knowing that helps to elucidate what the author means by these words, especially in the light of the definitions he offers on page x. The axiological doctrine of noöphelia states that the measure of value is benificiality to the intellect (or, in Rescher's words, the extent of "best serving the interest of intelligent beings"), whereas axiogenesis, as a combination of noöphelia and optimalism, is an ontological doctrine that states that that which actually exists or comes into being is determined by what is beneficial to the intellect. That's my take on it, anyhow. Does that make matters any clearer to you? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:00, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

(Just to clarify, the roots involved here are νόος, ὠφέλεια/ὠφελία, ἀξία, and γένεσις. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:05, 3 December 2014 (UTC))

Thank you. This is in line with my reading but far better stated. I just couldn't figure out how to put it into words. So the real distinction is that in noöphelia intelligence determines all value of existing things and in axiogenesis the existence of all things is determined by what is optimally beneficial to intelligence? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 18:30, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

On second thought, do you want to write this entry? :) —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 23:28, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Sure. I've done some groundwork on the etyma; I'll create the actual entries later today. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:12, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5 Done and done. I hope the definitions I've written are comprehensible. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:48, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

Curious John is curious

Are you from a Commonwealth nation? I ask because I notice that you spelled/spelt the word favourable as opposed to favorable. Or is it that there is some heinous and despicable (just kidding (no, but really)) bylaw of Wiktionary that says we should prefer British English spellings over American ones? I have been curious ever since I noticed that the Wiktionary logo has the RP pronunciation and not the American. ramble, ramble, ramble, ... —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 08:23, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Yup, I'm a UK-ite. AFAIK, the practice is to adhere to the original spelling as used by the first editor; that convention is neutral regarding which spelling is to be used, but prevents edit wars over spelling. I don't know about the origin of the logo, but I note that [ˈwɪkʃənrɪ] violates our convention of using ⟨ɹ⟩ to represent both /ɹ/ and [ɹ] in English; also, the RP pronunciation is more like [ˈwɪkʃn̩ɹɪ] or [ˈwɪkʃn̩ɹi], really. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:36, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, I definitely say [ˈwɪkʃənɛɹi], and I'm baffled that the American pronunciation would not be favo(u)red as I imagine the plurality if not majority of en.wiktionary editors are American, though I have not confirmed this. And lest you think me an Anglophobe or America zealot, I am just poking fun. :) —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 08:50, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Also, you make a very good point about the ⟨ɹ⟩ in the logo—it sets a bad example! I would bring up changing it in WT:BP if I weren't so frightened of how violent arguments around here get sometimes. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 08:56, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Yes, I'd be interested to know the national make-up of the editing community here, although how we could gather reliable data on that is beyond me. WT:A lists administrators' time zones, so I suppose we can infer something from that, extrapolate to the general community, and then take the results with a small Siberian salt mine. ;-)

How would one even go about changing the logo? I don't know what determines it. I don't suppose it matters much, and at least the status quo has the advantage of "privileging" so marginal (or, perhaps, non-existent) a group of speakers that no one's likely to feel unduly and uniquely underrepresented.

I totally know what you mean about the arguments around here. I have no time for that kind of bullshit. Also, I'm not an Anglo, so I wouldn't be offended by your zeal, anyway. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:38, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

λελυκώς

Hmm, perhaps we can modify something so that last category line is added automatically by {{head|participle}}... ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 16:05, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

I think this calls for a {{grc-part}} template. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:18, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

It might. I created those entries mostly as an example. I think such a template would be useful if we do start adding conjugation pages, but we need to get a concrete proposal together first. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 00:01, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

(And very helpful λελυκώς was for me, too; thank you.) Agreed. Something like the treatment of Latin participles? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:45, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Good catch on καθέδρα's genitive

For you ædification, my normal order of operations (where possible) is:

1. Etymology
2. Pronunciation
3. Outline of headword excluding genitive(s)
4. Declension
5. Add genitive(s) to headword after I'd confirmed them
6. References
7. Definitions
8. Other stuff

Clearly I missed step five this passed time. Should probably just do the declension before the headword, eh? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 19:37, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Ah, I see. The omission makes sense, given that ordo operandi. Yeah, sorting a preliminary outline for the headword seems fairly unnecessary if you're going to back to it later, and that would probably preclude such errors in future. Thanks for the explanation. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:33, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

-tus, -sus, etc.

Ok, I'm getting closer to what we need for the t~s alternation. I realize I need to refine this a bit more by changing -g- to -rg- and add -ll- (pellō → pulsus) and -lce- (mulceō/mulgeō → mulsus). However there are all sorts of awkward outliers like (indulgeō → indultus) or 4th conjugation (ordior → orsus). I feel like there should be a more parsimonious solution to this problem. Can you find a source that discusses this topic? I would deeply appreciate that. I also need to update -ātus, -itus, -ītus, and -ūtus as extended forms of -tus —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 04:22, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Hi John. Sorry for taking a while to respond; as you might have noticed, I've been on a bit of a wikibreak since Christmas. Anyway, you asked for a pertinent reference; I think I've found you three:

1. The Eton Latin Grammar, Accented Edition (19th C.?), “As in Præsénti, or, The Rules for Verbs Construéd”, pages 202ff.; especially pages 209ff. (from “Nunc now díscas you may learn formáre to form supínum the súpine ex prætérito (témpore) from the preterpérfect tense.” onward)
2. The Bromsgrove Latin Grammar, third edition (1851), § 31: “Formation of Tenses” (pages 74ff.); especially § 31(c)–(d) (pages 78–9)
3. Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar, third edition (1903), §§ 9 (pages 5–6) and 135 (pages 94–5)

I hope they help. Let me know if you need anything else. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 02:14, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, these are very informative. I will update the articles soon. In a related note, WT:WE has a request for poenae servus, though as best I can tell, modern writers frequently quote it as servus poenae, (see here). Is there a policy for this and other compound lemmas for fusional languages wherein word order does not matter? I just feel weird if I am going to create it (and possibly also its inflected forms) if there is not prescribed order or method for prescribing it. Servus poenae appears to be the more standard for such NP's (namely nominative genitive), but poenae servus is widely attested (google books:"poenae servus"). —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 01:50, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

So create a lemma entry for servus poenae and an alt-form entry for poenae servus. Or the other way around if it looks like poenae servus is used more. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:14, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: Thanks. I had a feeling that was the case. Would I make inflected forms for one, both, or neither, do you think? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 03:28, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

I suppose you could, but the inflection table would be basically the inflection table for servus with poenae tacked on to the left or right of each form- maybe it would be better to just have a soft redirect to the servus entry for the inflection, and to forgo creating entries for all the forms that would have been in it. I do think that having entries for all the inflected forms of both the lemma and the alt-form would be overkill, since the search engine will find the same set of entries regardless of the word order entered in the search box. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:51, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: Makes sense. At this juncture I'm disinclined to make a full-fledged inflection table because, as you say, it's just poenae + servus's inflection. In the past, if the compound is weird, like Lūca bōs, where it is a proper noun and an irregular noun declined concurrently, I have opted for the full table.

This seems like something for which there should be a full write-up or policy (both the question of ordering and that of inflection). Is this a matter that is or ought be discussed elsewhere? Also, thanks again for giving advice. I always feel odd about my decisions because I'm still so new here (and people tend to be so opinionated). —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 04:22, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5, Chuck Entz: I agree that neither servus poenae nor poenae servus needs a declension table; the principle we can draw from this case, I think, is that Latin two-word phrases in which one word does not vary do not need declension tables (not, IMO, that they should be prohibited; it's just they're of little value, and needn't be added). Two-word phrases in which both words decline, however, should indeed have declension tables (even if it's just the declension of a regular noun with a regular adjective that merely declines in agreement with the noun it modifies). As for which ordering we should lemmatise, that matters little, but IMO we should lemmatise the order that was standard (or, at least, attested) in ancient sources; in the case of servus poenae vs. poenae servus, that would be whatever occurs in the Institutiones and Digesta Justiniani. But again, that doesn't really matter, and in the absence of compelling evidence either way, I think John is right to opt for the standard/unemphatic/unmarked/whatever order (i.e., nominative–genitive). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 05:36, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

A few things

Welcome back! I hope your wikibreak was wikipeutic. Thanks for the backlog of thanks and corrections.

• As per usual, I feel that I should apologize for my general carelessness, with particular regard to diff.
• Speaking of Cordubensis, the article -ēnsis lists -ensis as having a macron despite L&S, OLD, and every other dictionary I can find saying to the contrary. We may have to percolate this change throughout and remove all the macra.
• As for switching Inflection headers to Declension/Conjugation in illābor and dividium, WT:ALA#Inflection says we should only use Inflection. I'm inclined to use Declension and Conjugation, and we have disagreed with WT:ALA a few times previously, but for this one, I can understand the reasoning. What do you think?
• Also, you are killing me with these גָּדַר (gāḏar) descendants. :)

—JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 22:24, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

PS: Am I allowed to put ꝛc. in Fraktur in its headword and links as I have? It makes sense, right? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 22:33, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

So for dibreve: You added this from reading L&S, right? The two entries that contain it are Mĕtăgōge͡us and Mo͞ysēs under Mōsēs. In the case of Mĕtăgōge͡us, that character is an combining inverted double breve, but in the case of Mo͞ysēs, that is a combining double macron, which I think the program that interpreted the text of the book mistook for o͡y. There does seem to be some Italian word dibreve (google books:"dibreve"), whose meaning here seems to be twice the length of a musical breve, but otherwise is either di breve or has an unknown meaning to me. The usage in L&S seems to be merely a placeholder in a computer program for the inverted double breve, and I have found little evidence that this is a broadly used descriptor. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 23:51, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Thanks for the welcome back. Sorry I'm so rubbish at responding. I'm not very productive right now; I'm a bit out of sorts lately, but hope to improve in both respects. To your points, questions, etc.:

1. Worry not about your "general carelessness". You do a lot of good work and you're very productive; a few errors are inevitable. (And you're not generally careless, anyway.)
2. I had believed our entry. Damn. I'll be sure to mark the e short in -ensis words henceforth.
3. "[A]lways us[ing] the Inflection header, and never the alternatives Declension or Conjugation…reduces the number of possible section names, and thus improves accessibility of Latin entries for learners of both Latin and English. It also sidesteps the problem created by participles, which are technically verbs but decline like adjectives.":
   1. The "number of possible section names" is a non-issue. We could, for the same reason, use only Affix or Combining form, but instead we use Prefix, Suffix, Circumfix, Infix, etc. Excessive parsimony vis-à-vis section headers is neither desirable nor Wiktionary-wide common practice. Also, I don't see how restricting ourselves to using only Inflection headers "improves accessibility of Latin entries" when above every conjugation table there is written "first/second/third/fourth conjugation" and above every declension table there is written "first/second/third/fourth/fifth declension"; that just means that inflection is another word that has to be learnt alongside conjugation and declension.
   2. There is no "problem created by participles, which are technically verbs but decline like adjectives". In Latin, conjugation is inflection for person, number, tense, voice, and mood; declension is inflection for case, number, and gender. Non-finite verb forms are defective, marking only tense and voice. Yes, participles are non-finite verb forms, but they're conjugated already, so of course they wouldn't conjugate further; as sublemmata, they quite unproblematically have declension tables.
4. Sorry about Γᾰ́δᾰρᾰ etc. There's a lot of confusion in Biblical sources between them. See w:Exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac#Divergence in versions for what I mean.
5. Ꝛc. is an interesting one. Does it ever occur as rc. (i.e., with a normal ar, rather than an r rotunda)? What about in Antiqua typefaces (as either ꝛc. or rc.)? If the answer to both those questions is "no", then you have a pretty solid case for having the headword in Fraktur; consider, for example, that the headwords in Translingual entries for generic and specific names are italicised as standard.
6. Sorry about *dibreve. Yes, I had indeed got the word from Perseus's scanno of Mo͞ysēs under Mōsēs. You're probably right that dibreve stands for double inverted breve (the Unicode name of  ͡   (U+0361) is COMBINING DOUBLE INVERTED BREVE). All the Italian uses I could find are scannos, mostly of di breve; could you link me to some legitimate uses, please? Alternatively, I could just delete dibreve from WT:ELE as added in error…

I hope my answers are satisfactory, even if they are belated. I know I've got a lot of other posts of yours scattered here and there to answer. Would you mind linking herein to the ones I have yet to answer, please? I'll get to them when I can. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:02, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

1. I think I'll go back to vascillating arbitrarily between Inflection and Conjugation/Declension. :)
2. For rc., I may delete that from WT:WE. If German Wikipedia is to believed, ꝛ was only used in Fraktur to replace the Tironian et.
3. For dibreve, this link (from before) was the only real one I could find.

I can't recall in which notes I've mentioned you, but all link them if I find them. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 22:44, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

I remembered one: At the end of the -phyte conversation I left you a list of words to move to the unattestable page. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 22:18, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5:

1. I hope you won't mind if I change Inflection to Conjugation or Declension if and when I come across the former. :-)
2. If I'm not mistaken:   ∃(ꝛ≘⁊) ∴ꝛ⊈r   — That is to say: There exists an ꝛ which corresponds to ⁊; therefore, ꝛ is neither a subset of nor equal to r. The upshot of that is that it should be OK to use ꝛ in page titles because ꝛ cannot in all cases be autoredirected to r without error.
3. That Google Book Search result page you linked to appears blank to me (there's no snippet or anything). What do you see?
4. Cool. I'll get to those -phyte words soon.

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:34, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

1. Have at it.
2. That argument plus that fact that I love Fraktur (see my new signature) has convinced me.
3. It is pg. 290 of L'Albania e l'opera di Girolamo de Rada By Michele Marchianò. You should be able to download the whole thing on Google Books. If not, tell me.
4. Thank you.

Also, as the person who will probably see the most of this new signature, do you think it is not too offensive to other people's eye/sensibilities/latent Germanophobia? —JohnC5 20:40, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Unfortunately, that b.g.c. result page doesn't give me a download link; could you either send me the downloaded PDF or add the citation yourself to Citations:dibreve, please? I like your new signature; however, unless a person has one of the specialist Fraktur fonts specified by MediaWiki:Common.css (viz. UnifrakturMaguntia, UnifrakturCook, or Unifraktur) installed, all he will see is ordinary sans serif text at 125% of normal font size (which doesn't look great, TBH). I recommend that you tweak your signature text to <span class="Latf"><font size="3">—[[User:JohnC5|John]][[User talk:JohnC5|C5]]</font></span>, which generates:

• —JohnC5

— That will keep the Fraktur text, but return the font size to its ordinary size, thereby ensuring that the display would break elegantly. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:39, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Here you are! —JohnC5 06:36, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Just in passing: a vowel before ns is always long in Latin. --Fsojic (talk) 20:20, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

@Fsojic: Does that mean that -ēnsis is definitely correct? Why would the OLD et al. omit the macron? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:24, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

In reality, -ens- was pronounced as [ẽːs], with a long nasal vowel and no nasal consonant. The length of the vowel is often indicated with a macron, but it's technically redundant because as Fsojic said, this change always happens before ns. —CodeCat 20:31, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Ah, of course that makes sense. So should we continue using it or not? —JohnC5 20:40, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: I second John's query. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:39, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

I would say keep using the macron. The vowel was pronounced as long, even if it wasn't a normal long vowel (just an allophone triggered by the following -ns-). Marking the vowel as long helps in understanding the Romance outcomes, as the Romance languages invariably show the outcome of a normal long vowel there. For example -ins- is reflected the same as -īs-. —CodeCat 19:30, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

δεσπότης

My Bambiniotis's etym agrees (I think) with that for the grc term, and its cognacy with Sanskrit "dámpati". There are another 10 lines under ETYM. I would have a problem if the text were in English (with the abbreviations etc) but would be bound to misinterpret if I tackled the Greek text. So I hope you'll be happy leaving it at that! :)   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 14:33, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

emys and aegis

Seems like we could combine these into a template {{la-decl-3rd-Greek-dn|emys|emy|d}}? Thoughts? —JohnC5 20:09, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Yes, I thought of that once I noticed how many Grecian forms of aegis I'd seen in use. If possible, I'd like to make {{la-decl-3rd-Greek}} instead, which could also be used for chelys etc. It may be best to wait till we have a bigger sample of words so that we know what declensions the template needs to be able to generate. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:53, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

So chelys would be of the form -ys, -yos (upsilon stem). This list contains both dental -ydis words (emys, aclys, chlamys, Iapys, pelamys, sagochlamys (I also found cassis)) and upsilon -yos words (all the rest on the list). I suspect we could also skim through the -is lists for obviously AG words or any word that contains y, ch, th, ph, z, ꝛc. Any other ideas? —JohnC5 22:34, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Nope, exactly my thoughts. :-) I'm going to sign off for the night now. If you want to speed up this process, I'd be most grateful if you could create entries for the Ancient Greek etyma of the Latin terms under consideration; I shall be happy to verify (over the next however-long-it'll-take) the attestability of the various Grecian declined forms in Latin. Are you up for creating those A.Gr. entries? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:42, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

I can certainly do my best. You may have noticed, I tend to be loath to add any entry for which I don't know the vowel lengths and etymologies (this is a bad habit, but whatever), but I'll break my rule, if it is necessary. —JohnC5 22:45, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Cool. And your dislike is understandable; it's frustrating to have to admit lacunae in our knowledge. Bambiotis and Beekes are apparently the go-to authorities for Greek etymology; IIRC, Saltmarsh has access to the former, whereas Vahag has the latter; they may be willing and able to help you with any A.Gr. etymologies you're stuck on.

Re those Latin words you linked to, cassis is not Grecian, Iāpys appears to be a hapax legomenon (in the form Iāpydis), and aclys doesn't seem to occur in any Grecian forms (though aclydas might exist as a varia lectio of aclydes in Virgil's Aeneid, book vii, line 730); emys has the full complement of Grecian forms (x/c probably the vocatives), and chlamys, pēlamys, and sagochlamys look promising. In this connection, could you create πηλαμύς (pēlamús) and σαγοχλαμύς (sagokhlamús), please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:24, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Bambiniotis often restricts itself to saying that the modern Green word comes from the Ancient greek/Koine/etc. But I'd be happy to help - just ask me on my talk page.   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 19:33, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

I'll get to it soon. —JohnC5 19:35, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh, JohnC5: Thank you both. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:47, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5 I've just created {{la-decl-3rd-Greek-s}} and used it in the declension section of chlamys. AFAICT, that template should work for all Grecian third-declension words ending -Vs (where V denotes any vowel) in the nominative singular, ending -V in the vocative singular, and with a long stem in the oblique forms. If you come across or can think of any cases where this template wouldn't work, please let me know, and I'll try to tweak the template accordingly. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:10, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

I very much enjoy that valign trick. I have implemented it in utervis. —JohnC5 22:15, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Utervīs looks good; very neat. I've edited {{la-decl-3rd-Greek-s}} again; it should now work for upsilon stems like botrys. I assume that the accusative plural *botrȳs wouldn't be retained in Latin, so I've made it botryes; if it turns out that *botrȳs is used, I can edit the template accordingly. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:05, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

This looks very nice to me. Also, for what does the -s stand in this template? —JohnC5 22:26, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @JohnC5: The final sigma→ess, which gets dropped in the vocative singular. If you can think of a better name, by all means please suggest it. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:33, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Nah, that makes sense. —JohnC5 23:06, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

So shall I request the deletion of {{la-decl-emys}}, {{la-decl-aegis}}, and their documentation? —JohnC5 23:42, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Not just yet. I want to finalise the template's scope and coding before we roll it out widely, if that's OK with you. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:11, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Cool, cool. —JohnC5 00:14, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

ISMETA

You're welcome! — LlywelynII 03:30, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

@LlywelynII: Is this in response to the thanks I sent you for the edits to cenobium etc.? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:27, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

admin

Hey. Fancy going for administrator? I'll nominate you if you like. --Type56op9 (talk) 12:31, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Sure, thanks. It would make it easier to stop the current torrent of vandalism, that's for sure. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:32, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Accept here please --Type56op9 (talk) 12:40, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

ISMETA you have to add your signature where it says “Acceptance:”. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 13:16, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

@Type56op9: Done. Thanks for sorting out the vote.

@Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV: Sorry about the delay; I didn't start devoting my attention to this until the vandal was blocked, and then it took me a while to sort out my user time zone and Babel boxes.

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:41, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Your vote has passed, you are an Admin. Please add your name to WT:Admin. Also, see Help:Sysop tools. —Stephen ^(Talk) 00:02, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

@Stephen G. Brown: Done. Thank you. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:02, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Cedretum et al

These are not taxonomic names. They are names of environments/habitats, not widely accepted AFAICT. I had looked at these and ran out of enthusiasm after creating -etum#Latin and linking any words we had in Latin that were suffixed by it. DCDuring TALK 01:41, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

@DCDuring I've done my best to add as many -ētum nouns as I could. Are there any others that you think are missing? Actually, based on this, there definitely are. I also wrote a speculative etymology. —JohnC5 06:23, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

@DCDuring: My bad. Given this, I'd assumed that *Cedretum was a generic name; I'd added what I could before removing your request (the only use of cedretus I could find that wasn't a scanno or actually the proper name Cedretus reads “In cedretus faucium Akka n’Duyad Atlantis Majoris 2000 m solo calcareo rupestri, 28 juin 1939. Maroc”). Shall I revert my addition to WT:RE:taxa? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:12, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Are there any taxonomic names based on words with the -etum suffix (presumably a subset of those ending in etum, ie, not acetum)? Semantically it seems unlikely, but linguistically unlikely things happen in taxonomic names. The instances of Cedretum that I found look like an (ill-considered?) attempt to formalize certain types of environments into explicit objects that would be of equivalent worth as objects of study to taxa, much as geologists have formalized formations. It doesn't seem to have taken off, but it is difficult to search the really large corpora for words ending in etum to be sure. OTOH, I'd expect some use of words ending in -etorum and -eti as specific epithets. They would be selected from Latin or possibly coined based on genus names. (Have you run across cedreti or cedretorum as specific epithets?) For example, I dimly recall that there is some species (of bacteria?) that depends on whales for its life cycle. This might be an occasion for cetetum to be coined and ceteti or cetetorum to be pressed into service as specific epithets.

Now that we've wandered into this little thicket, we may as well push to some kind of conclusion. DCDuring TALK 16:11, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Don't forget specific epithets that are nouns in apposition, e.g abietum (firwood), bucetum (cow pasture), and palmetum (type locality for Cydia palmetum is "Royal Palm State Park" in Florida- see [6]). As for your thicket, there's nothing for the nominatives, but dumetorum is not uncommon. I would guess that the genitive plural is the form of choice for these, though genitive singular can be found. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:19, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz I'm not convinced that abietum is actually a proper form of -ētum (as the correct form would be abietētum), but instead the genitive plural of abiēs. —JohnC5 00:22, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Well, it definitely is that, but- correctly or incorrectly- there are also examples of abietorum, which seem to be based on an *abiet- root. To be clear: I'm not saying that classical abietum is derived from the suffix, just that modern taxonomists seem to have reanalyzed it that way. Granted, taxonomists are rarely experts in Latin morphology, and it's easy for someone who doesn't know the differences between thematic and consonant stems to make mistakes- but such mistakes are what drives morphological reanalysis even in languages with lots of thoroughly-competent monolingual native speakers. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:34, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

I think of gotten all the remaining words for -ētum (You can argue about Argīlētum as being the place of the clay (argilla), but others have claimed different and probably erroneous etymologies). My tangential question is whether, given senticētum, būcētum, busticētum and olenticētum, we shouldn't add an alternative suffix form -cētum derived by reänalysis. —JohnC5 00:22, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

It's entirely possible- the substitution of busticētum for earlier bustum is very suggestive- but there do seem to be apparent cases of intrusive stem-final -c that I would like to see explanations for, as in senticosus and buculus. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:47, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz I agree with your alternate analysis too (as seen in bucetum#Etymology), which is why I was hesitant to make -cetum in the first place. The OLD (2nd Ed.) lists -cetum as an extension of -etum under the latter's entry, which is what put the idea in my mind initially. If we don't think there's enough evidence for a full second entry, I might add a usage note to -etum mentioning this phenomenon. —JohnC5 04:47, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

• Cool! Great stuff. If we keep this up we may be able to surpass the specialty specific epithet websites. DCDuring TALK 02:02, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

• Iris cedreti appears to have been named because of its association with cedars: cedrus > cedretum > cedreti meaning "of the cedretum". "Pinetum" is used, in the UK anyway, for a collection of pines and other conifers. See w:Arboretum for some more examples of -etum. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:20, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

dēlēlicet

Where'd you find it? I can't find this form. —JohnC5 03:39, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

(And, unrelatedly, could you look at this template I made, {{R:DGEel}}, and tell me how we could make the citation better. I looks janky right now.) —JohnC5 10:23, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

I like the guillemets that you added (they look super classy), but is there a reason why? —JohnC5 21:27, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

[post-edit conflict]: @JohnC5: It was a word that I came up with and then did a quick Google Books search (q.v.) to verify that it existed. I've edited {{R:DGEel}}; to explain the changes I've made:

1. I substituted the “” quotation marks with guillemets because (Modern) Greek uses guillemets as its primary quotation marks and because there exists the potential for confusion between ⟨ “ ⟩ and ⟨ ῞ ⟩, especially where that diacritic (dasia-oxia) marks a capital letter.
2. I believe the link to http://dge.cchs.csic.es/xdge/ is unnecessary because the page is so easily accessed from the other link provided and because a wikilink to w:Diccionario Griego–Español already exists to provide general information about the cited authority.
3. The dictionary has a pretty sizeable group of editors, so I simply omitted their names (the OLD, with its nineteen editors, has been treated the same by {{R:OLD}}). If you think it would still be desirable to specify one or more editors, I would recommend changing the citation text from “…in the Diccionario Griego–Español en línea…” to “…in Francisco Rodríguez Adrados and others’ Diccionario Griego–Español en línea…”.
4. IMO, noting the publisher provides little benefit as is just unnecessary bloat. (Sorry.)
5. I'm not sure about the date. Where did you get 2008? I went with 2006–2024 because the CSIC "signed in 2006 the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" and because, as an on-line resource, additions and amendments will be ongoing and open-ended and therefore subject to later copyright dates. But if you got 2008 from somewhere authoritative, I'll change the date statement back to that.

I hope you're generally happy with what I've done to the template. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:57, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Oh, all your edits looks great. I just slapped some stuff in there because I couldn't figure out exactly what was necessary nor could I find a good source referencing the online DGE directly. I think I used scholar.google's citaiton tool (third one down, press cite). Actually, this says 2012 for some reason.

The other reference for which I have great avarice is the LBG, but currently there is no good way (that I know of) to auto-link to it. You can use the eid= input, but I wonder if there is a way to query it directly. I may dig around in the site's JS and see if I can't figure a way to query directly through HTML. —JohnC5 22:17, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I think the 2008 dating refers to the physical version of the authority and the 2012 dating of the en línea version is on account of the "accessioned" and available dates for the authority being the 4th of January 2013. Re the LBG, maybe the template for citing it will need to be coded in a similar way to {{R:NLW}} (with its specified "entry number"), but let me know if you find a way to query the source without an entry number. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:00, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

So, are we sticking with 2006 or going with 2012? —JohnC5 23:35, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I'm still inclined toward 2006–2024; 2012 is, unless I'm mistaken, just the date of first digital access. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:07, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Unless Wiktionary allows socket.http in Lua, we have to stick just adding the eid by hand, sadly. —JohnC5 00:54, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Ok, so I made {{R:LBG}}. Feel free to rewrite it as you see fit. Also, I previously had {{R:DGEel}} as {{R:DGE}} but changed it, thinking that someone might want to cite the original book. I'm not sure, however, that that is necessary, and I think I might want to switch it back to {{R:DGE}}. Thoughts? —JohnC5 05:55, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Well, the physical and en línea versions are discrete authorities, so yes, it can be expected that someone may want to cite the physical version rather than the en línea; however, I can't think of a situation where it wouldn't be desirable to replace any citation of the physical version with a citation of the en línea version (chiefly on account of the fact that the latter permits near-instant verification of content by users). So yes, I agree that {{R:DGE}} is preferable to {{R:DGEel}}. Regarding the coding of {{R:LBG}}: the &context=lsj&action=from-search bit of the URL is unnecessary and can be omitted; the first fascicle of the Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität was published in 1994, whilst the sixth fascicle (which is the latest one to have been digitised) was published in 2007, so we should date the LBG 1994–2007, IMO; and I don't think it's desirable to permit the omission of the first parameter. What do you say? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:27, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Again, this all sounds good to me. I will move the DGE back and make the appropriate changes to LBG. —JohnC5 19:33, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

OK, check out LBG now. I can't decide whether to end it at 2007 or at the current date since, in theory, further fascicles are in the process of being digitized. —JohnC5 20:29, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Good work, especially with the very eye-catching error text. I think we should stick to an end date of 2007; we can extend it to 2011 or 2016 as and when fascicles 7 and 8 are digitised, too. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:34, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Cool cool. I'm in the process of writing Gräzität. As for the translation, I was thinking Greekdom or Greekness are the closest in English. The literal Duden definition is "The character of Ancient Greek language, customs, and culture." It is very similar to the English Latinity, but no word Greecity/Greekity seems to exist. Maybe Hellenism would be more appropriate? —JohnC5 20:44, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Also, because I know it is your heart's desire to fiddle around with AG reference templates, could we fix up {{grc-wh-page}}? I've already edited it a bit, but I feel like we might add some documentation, reorder the format, or even rename it to something more sensible like {{R:Woodhouse}} (then ask someone to use a bot to change it over). @ObsequiousNewt do you think we should rename this? —JohnC5 23:00, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5 Yeah, I'd support moving it to {{R:Woodhouse}}, for consistency's sake. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 23:20, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

The reference template

I think referencing templates that you have created yourself as a model to follow is rather unconvincing. I mean {{R:du Cange}}, {{R:Gaffiot}}, {{R:OLD}}, {{R:Niermeyer}}, {{R:NLW}}. Every single template that you have mentioned in the edit summary were created by you. I really am at a loss about what you intended by mentioning these templates. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:47, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

That said, I have placed quotation marks into the disputed template, per status quo ante on the template level. --Dan Polansky (talk) 21:12, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

[post-edit conflict]: @Dan Polansky: JohnC5 and I make a lot of contributions to Latin entries; those five reference templates and {{R:L&S}} are the ones we use to support our entries; it is desirable for the authorities' citations to be consistently formatted, especially where they occur in the same list; those five templates are better-formatted than {{R:L&S}}. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:14, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

You do not support your claim that they are better formatted. --Dan Polansky (talk) 21:16, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

@Dan Polansky: I haven't here, no, but I believe I have done so elsewhere. BTW, thank you for this; I considered the lack of quotation marks in {{R:L&S}} to be its most unsightly presentational inconsistency with the other five templates. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:21, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

I don't think you have explained it well elsewhere. The elsewhere would be at Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2014/October#use.E2.80.93mention_distinction_in_reference_templates, I figure. Your use of typographic dash instead of minus in that section title alone suggests you are one of those folks who emphasize style over substance or function, and that is perfectly consistent with your preference of these quotation marks. Your explanation was wrongly based on use-mention distinction; that it was wrong was explained by Ruakh in that discussion. And even if this were about use-mention distiction (discussed e.g. by Hofstadter to whom you seem to owe your user name), the quotation marks are just typographical sugar, inessential to mark that distinction. The presentation we had in the disputed template and that we still have in couple other templates cannot leave anyone in doubt about whether we use the word to carry meaning or whether it is just a section title of a linked dictionary. The whole thing boils down largely to subjective preference, coupled with various ideological baggage that cannot be reduced to observable facts. As for inconsistency, that could have been easily solved by your removing the quotation marks from the templates you created. What I find most disclosing is this revision, which even links "New York"; that tells me that my percetion of good formatting and presentation and your perception are miles away. --Dan Polansky (talk) 21:39, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

@Dan Polansky: I'm sure we can come to some kind of resolution on this issue at some point, but I don't have the enthusiasm for it right now. I'll be sure to ping you when I do. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:17, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Αντίπας

I've removed the rfd from this redirect - now reinstated as a proper noun.   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 19:29, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: The way you've fixed it is far better than a deletion would've been. Thank you very much. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:41, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Paronymum/paronyma

Howdy! What brought about this edit? —JohnC5 14:04, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Of {{R:L&S}}, {{R:du Cange}}, {{R:Gaffiot}}, {{R:OLD}}, {{R:Niermeyer}}, and {{R:NLW}}, only Gaffiot has an entry, and it lists only the plurale tantum noun părōny̆ma (“paronyms”), which is supported by the Late Latin citation of Diomedes in that entry. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:58, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

The OED has the post-classical Latin parōnymum listed under its etymology for paronym, but of course no actual citation, so who knows. Then again Gaffiot translates părōny̆ma as paronyms, which implies to me that the singular exists but we merely lack attestation thereof. I don't know, to be honest. —JohnC5 20:24, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Searching google books:"paronymon" and/or google books:"paronymum" suggests that the word is not plurale tantum post Late Latin… — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:10, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

So... what is our verdict? —JohnC5 19:27, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Thanks for the reminder. I'll relemmatise that Latin term at parōnymon or parōnymum once I decide which is best. I'll ping you once I've done that. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:39, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

:) —JohnC5 19:40, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I've relemmatised the lexeme at parōnymon, following Calepinus' choice of lemma. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:58, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Etym requests

Hi,

Pls don't pepper the entries with etym requests. I don't think they are necessary for each and every term. I will add myself when they are not transparent. открытый is a participle and is self-explanatory. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 07:08, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

@Atitarev: Hi Anatoli. Sorry for causing you bother. My knowledge of Russian is extremely limited, so even the most transparent etymologies will not be apparent to me! That being said, I should've done more investigating in the case of откры́тый (otkrýtyj), given that the past passive participle of откры́ть (otkrýtʹ) verb form is listed lower down on the same page, and considering that participial adjectives are a common feature of English grammar, too. I've added the etymology for that term myself; is what I've added correct?

Would you like me to desist from adding {{rfe}}s to any Russian entries whatsoever? (I already abstain from doing so to Czech entries, following Dan Polansky's voicing of his disapproval.) — I.S.M.E.T.A. 07:34, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes, please. While I do normally add pronunciations (except for prefixes and suffixes), which is now made easier thanks to Wyang's module (it needs to be used with care and knowledge, though), I don't always add etymologies. I don't completely disapprove etym. requests but it works discouragingly. It adds more work. For regular Russian learners, genuinely wanting to know etymologies, seeing words of their same stem should be sufficient. The entry открытый already says that it's both the adjective and the participle, just like English "tired", "bent", "open" (adj) or "opened" (participle). --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 07:44, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

@Atitarev: OK; no problem. Thank you for the civility of your request and, again, I'm sorry to have caused you bother. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:37, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Some advice please

What is the general policy concerning this sort of thing? I normally would be quite hesitant to wade into such treacherous waters. —JohnC5 09:30, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Well, we have several other Peoples’ Republics, so there would seem to be no policy bar against having entries for Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic… Shall I create them and then send them to WT:RFD to see what regulation coalesces there? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:31, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Nah, it's fine to just create them. I guess I'm hesitant because, from an American perspective, these “Republics” do not or should not exist, and so I feel like any definition I would give to the entry would not maintain a neuter viewpoint. —JohnC5 19:18, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I've created both entries, complete with quotations from news agencies reporting on the separatist states' proclamations at the time. Do they look OK to you? I've tried to be neutral. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:39, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Seems plausible enough. Thank you! —JohnC5 23:12, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: You're welcome. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 07:06, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

The only policy issue related to these terms is the fact that they aren't attested for a year. But I think we can all let it pass, because they'd qualify as hot words anyway and probably have citations spanning one year in less than a month. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:28, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

@Μετάknowledge: Donetsk People’s Republic is now CFI-compliant, even without “hot word” status. :-) The Luhansk People’s Republic was proclaimed a little later than the Donetsk People’s Republic (the 27th, vs. the 7th, of April last year), but were the term sent to WT:RFV today, it would very probably have a third and sufficiently recent citation before the discussion was closed (as long as the listing were given the guaranteed month). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 07:06, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Comparative adjective forms?

Why on earth would we need a category for forms of specifically comparative adjectives? —CodeCat 16:18, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Please see User talk:Chuck Entz#Latin -ior comparatives. I'm trying to fix that categorisation problem which he drew my attention to. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:20, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: My intention is to recategorise the members of the ambiguously-named Category:Latin adjective comparative forms into Category:Latin comparative adjectives (for lemmata) and Category:Latin comparative-adjective forms (for non-lemmata). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:26, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

I think that the inflected forms of comparatives can just go in Category:Latin adjective forms. There's no need for a separate category. —CodeCat 16:42, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: I respectfully disagree. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:47, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Why? What is the value in it? —CodeCat 17:00, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Well, Latin adjectives' absolute, comparative, and superlative degrees are all lemmata, and rightly so; comparatives and superlatives can develop nuances not shared by their absolute degrees (e.g. esculentus (“good to eat”, “delicious”) → esculentior (“more delicate”)). Different lemmata should, in principle, have their respective non-lemmata categorised separately from other non-lemmata; there is a practical benefit to this because forms that occur in particular declensions and conjugations are thereby grouped separately, allowing a reader to get an impression at a glance of which forms belong to which parts of speech (in the case of Latin comparative-adjective forms, they tend to belong to a specific comparative variant of the adjectival paradigm of the third declension). If this benefit appears marginal to you, ask yourself whether the benefit produced by distinguishing Latin absolute-adjective forms from Latin comparative-adjective forms is really any less than the benefit produced by distinguishing Latin adjective forms from Latin noun forms. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:55, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

What you seem to be arguing, then, is to separate forms by their inflectional classes, not by comparativeness. So you want Category:Latin first declension adjective forms and such? —CodeCat 17:59, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: No, that isn't what I'm arguing. I argued in favour of lemmatising Latin adjectives' absolute, comparative, and superlative degrees and in favour of the principle of categorising the inflected forms of any given class of lemmata separately from the inflected forms of other classes of lemmata. I suggested a practical benefit to doing this which leaves distinguishing Latin absolute-adjective forms from Latin comparative-adjective forms on all fours with distinguishing Latin adjective forms from Latin noun forms. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:46, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Hello :)

I am a Pashto professor the word is spelt wrongly see: http://dsalsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.0:1:776.raverty Adjutor101 (talk) 18:55, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@Adjutor101: OK. Could you create a Pashto entry at آيات, please? Then I'll delete ايات. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:01, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym:  Done = https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%A2%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%AA#Pashto Adjutor101 (talk) 19:09, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@Adjutor101: Thank you. I've now deleted the offending page. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:23, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

No, thank you. My goal is to promote Pashto here and you have helped me in that, so I owe you big time. Thank you so much @I'm so meta even this acronym: Adjutor101 (talk) 19:25, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@Adjutor101: I'm happy to help where I can. In this specific case, I just didn't want to see valid content lost when it was merely misplaced. Please, keep up the good work with Pashto; if there's any way I can help in future, please don't hesitate to ask. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:34, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Citations:Pädophilie

I apologize. What I changed was to an earlier source, 1834 not your later 1835, which was a conflicting edit at the time. I think the earlier is better, as it seems to be the earliest. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 15:15, 30 April 2015 (UTC) modified 15:18, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

@BoBoMisiu: I certainly agree with the principle that, given two identical passages of text, the earlier text should be favoured for citation. Be that as it may, you, in this case, fell foul of a trap I avoided: The Google book with the ID xLsqAAAAMAAJ, which you cited, consists of the eleventh volume (Horn–Hultschin) of the second section of Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste immediately followed by the twelfth volume thereof (Hum–Hypexodon); go here and scroll up six pages, and you'll see the twelfth volume's frontispiece, which bears the publication date 1835. Anyway, apology accepted; my edit summary was a bit harsh, for which I apologise, too. I confess that I really dislike {{quote-book}} and the way that it tries to cram all sorts of bibliographical information into one template, with its resultant loss of information. Bitching aside, thank you for responding to the {{rfquote}} I added; I appreciate it. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:45, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

I hate those multiple volumes combined into one. I didn't look. I like {{quote-book}} because it adds the metadata that only the machines see into the HTML. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 19:05, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

@BoBoMisiu: What kind of metadata are you referring to? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:03, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

For example, if you look at the source code Citations:Pädophilie, you will see the citations I added have:

<li>
<div class="citation-whole"><span class="cited-source"><span class="book">...

Yours does not, it has:

<li><b>1835</b>, Johann Christian Gotthelf Schincke...

—BoBoMisiu (talk) 20:38, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

Excelsior!

And you're welcome. — LlywelynII 16:31, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

:-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:07, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

Suffix linking

I have certainly seen the pos linking used for -ō in PIE but never in Latin. May we split -tus up similarly (perhaps participle, abstract noun, and action noun)? Also, can we split -ātus into only the adjective category and move all the participial forms to -tus? —JohnC5 19:47, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I'll follow your lead re -tus; I ask only that you amend -tus in a similar manner to -ō and Category:Latin words suffixed with -tus in a similar manner to Category:Latin words suffixed with -o. As for -ātus, I suppose that all the adjectives should simply remain in Category:Latin words suffixed with -atus, whereas all the participles should be moved to Category:Latin participles suffixed with -tus; is that right, or do I misunderstand you? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:52, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

That is right. So, I should create those category pages? —JohnC5 23:23, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Go f’rit! — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:35, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Could you check out the changes I've made? And should we add a new Participle section to -tus? —JohnC5 19:30, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Your changes look good; I amended -tus slightly, but everything was good with that, anyway. I don't think it would be desirable to add a Participle section to -tus, no, since the section would be virtually indentical to the one for the adjectival suffix. Thanks. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:36, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Ceste (venetian)

Perhaps the pronunciation is /'t͡ʃɛste/, but i'm not sure. It's a slang term and it is used only in the city of Vicenza (not only when they speak in venetian, but also when they speak in italian). I'll try to ask a user from Vicenza.--GatoSelvadego (talk) 15:53, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

@GatoSelvadego: That's good to know; thank you for getting back to me. Let me know once you've received confirmation from your Vicentine. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:43, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

User Davy1509 told me that the correct pronunciation is /'tʃeste/, with /e/ not /ɛ/.--GatoSelvadego (talk) 13:47, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

@GatoSelvadego: Thanks very much. I've added that information to the entry. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:32, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

επιμόνως

Thanks for noting (and correcting) my error - I have been away.   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 05:36, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: No problem; I like to keep Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as empty as is feasible. Welcome back! — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:47, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Capio - qapi

Hi, I had read in an etymology book that the Persian predecessor of the root *keh₂p- is the verb 'qapidan' (present stem: 'qapi-', past stem: 'qapid') literally meaning 'to grab', 'to gasp' or 'to catch'. I had added it to etymology of the Latin verb 'capio' but it is now removed. Would you please reconsider it? Or maybe it belongs to a more proper place. Nonetheless I'm new to editing on Wikipedia. If possible, would you then add it to the same Indo-European root's page? Thank you! :) — This unsigned comment was added by 87.184.207.126 (talk) at 19:53, 10 May 2015.

@87.184.207.126: I assume you're referring to these edits which I reverted. I'm sorry if I was too summary in my reversion, but the claim seemed implausible to me; moreover, the claim you're making now is inconsistent with, and even less plausible than, your earlier claim. Nevertheless, I've brought this up in Wiktionary:Tea room/2015/May#Is the Persian قاپیدن (qapidan) a cognate of the Latin capiō? to seek the advice of editors conversant with Persian. By the way, this project is Wiktionary, not Wikipedia. Also, to get the term display you were trying for, the template format needs to be {{m|fa|قاپیدن||tr=qapidan|snap”, “snatch}} or {{term|قاپیدن||tr=qapidan|snap”, “snatch|lang=fa}} — note the oh-so-important empty parameter between the term (قاپیدن) and the gloss (“snap”, “snatch”), as well as the way that the transliteration is provided by specifying the |tr= parameter. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:22, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

@87.184.207.126: Statements by Chuck Entz in Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2015/May#Is the Persian قاپیدن (qapidan) a cognate of the Latin capiō? suggest that your etymology book is mistaken, as I suspected. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:01, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Should we ask for the R:Urban template to be removed?

The on fleek entry was recently edited to contain a reference to Urban Dictionary; so, I went to investigate whether there was a preëxisting template, which there was. I made some updates to the template's appearance, functionality, and documentation (including some very strongly worded warnings about the template). Do you think these restrictions on the template a strong enough, or should we bring it up for deletion? I'm sure there is useful information to be gleaned from UD, but it seems hard to find. I bring this up here because I am loath to get into a pitched battle over whether UD is a source worth banning, but by the same token I don't feel like we can just remove it without asking. What do you think? —JohnC5 07:46, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

<butting in> The updates to the template documentation are good. The edit to on fleek looks dodgy to me, but I didn't have time to investigate. </butting in> SemperBlotto (talk) 07:51, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I agree with SemperBlotto's "butting in" (which is always welcome, SB). Anything UD asserts we need to verify independently. Citing UD never adds to the credibility of an entry; on the contrary, it may well detract from it. Accordingly, I would support deleting {{R:Urban}}; should we bring this up in the Beer Parlour or at RFDO? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:28, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

The real question is whether we should ban UD references outright. The only situation in which we should remove the template is when we agree that UD should not be allowed. Otherwise, I'd prefer to have the template for indexing and standardization purposes. If we want to remove it, we would probably have to have a vote of some sort to ban UD and then remove the template contingent on that outcome. —JohnC5 20:44, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Yes, I agree, of course. I'd vote to ban references to UD. Do you feel like tackling this now, or do you want to leave it for a later date? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:03, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

I am...hesitant...to draft such a vote as I have never done so before. Also, in the case of the CFI demotion argument going on, it was mentioned that discussion should occur before putting issues to a policy vote. This could merely be a parliamentary formality meant to postpone/prevent that vote in the first place, but if people actually care about this, maybe we should start in the Beer Parlor? —JohnC5 21:08, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I think we should indeed start this off in the Beer Parlour, but I think that the BP is too busy at the moment; the section would more than likely end up being ignored. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:41, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Ok, let's put this on hold then. —JohnC5 21:58, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Sure. Perhaps after the RFV of that suspect sense of on fleek is concluded. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:02, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

FWIW, I think it's fine to have and use {{R:Urban}}, but not to rely on it or encourage users to rely on it. Perhaps we could could place some recommendations on use in its documentation and a warning that displays (optionally?, but by default?). DCDuring TALK 02:26, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

<butting in summary="oppose">I also think R:urban is useful. Wikipedia is also edited by anyone and is not credible but we still put links to them.</butting in>--DixtosaBOT (talk) 10:27, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Oh well, that scuppers that idea, then! @DixtosaBOT: The distinction is that we never cite Wikipedia as a reference; links to Wikipedia are generally there just to provide further reading, especially in entries for nouns. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:28, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

We put links to OneLook, our sister projects, and the various dictionaries under External links much more often than we put them under References. I've never thought that footnotes made much sense or looked good in our entries. They may be justified for etymologies, but they still don't look good. DCDuring TALK 16:33, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @DCDuring: I for one almost never use in-line superscript citations. However, when I create Latin entries, I add {{R:Smith's DGRG}}, {{R:L&S}}, {{R:du Cange}}, {{R:Gaffiot}}, {{R:OLD}}, {{R:Niermeyer}}, and/or {{R:NLW}} in References sections because they support the content of the entry, whereas I add {{pedia}} and the like in External links sections because they provide opportunities for further reading, but which give details that would be excessively encyclopaedic were they to be included in the content of the entry; I think that's a worthwhile distinction to make. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:55, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

WP, Wikispecies, and Commons all support the content of the entry in one way or another, but they are nevertheless relegated to External links by vote. The rationale used in that vote would apply to anything so linked, not that I supported or support that rationale. Perhaps we could take advantage of the two headers and forbid using {{R:Urban}} under the References header, relegating it to External links, which eventually users would come to associate with second-class references. DCDuring TALK 19:06, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

I would be fine will keeping UD references if there is agreement, but I am still interested in maybe having a vote about it. Having it as an acceptable source allows for new/one-time editors to hold it over our heads as I seen done a few times. —JohnC5 19:53, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

@DCDuring: That sounds like a reasonable middle ground. Having a UD link in an External links section makes it look like we're saying "BTW, UD also has an entry for this term." rather than "We're taking UD's word for it that the content of their entry is legit."

@JohnC5: What do you mean by "hold it over our heads"? Can you give some examples, please?

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:35, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: This particular gem comes to mind. —JohnC5 20:43, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I don't think we need to worry about "UD has an entry for this, so why don't you?"-type complaints. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:15, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

I don't view a UD definition as anything more than a hypothesis about a possible definition for us. It isn't attestation; it isn't an authority; at its best it is a window into slangy usage, especially valuable for usage that doesn't have a UseNet community behind it. DCDuring TALK 23:10, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

@DCDuring: Yes, I'd say that that view of UD is the right one to hold. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:41, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

-rhexis / -rrhexis / -orrhexis

I noticed you removed these from the wanted entries page, but these were intended to be English suffixes. --WikiWinters (talk) 21:27, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

The question of whether it should be -rrhexis or -orrhexis is also (approximately) being discussed in this discussion. —JohnC5 21:50, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

@WikiWinters, JohnC5: There isn't an English suffix involved here; there is just the English noun rhexis, which has been around since the Middle English rixis. The corresponding word rhaphy doesn't may exist, but definitely doesn't go back as far as 1835 (the first recorded English formation with -rrhaphy, viz. staphylorrhaphy). I'll add an English entry for rhexis once I've dug out my copy of the 1933 A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles: Introduction, Supplement, and Bibliography. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:40, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Categories to (keep) empty

If you have them in your userpage in order to often look after them then you might find catwatch useful. The documentation is here and the source here. --Dixtosa (talk) 19:28, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Better still, make a single parent category for them. Then everyone can use and monitor it. —CodeCat 19:32, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Latin months

I was working on Māius and I noticed EncycloPetey had made all the months lowercase. Can you think of why this would be, even if they are normally adjectives? —JohnC5 23:14, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: He seemed to think that all words which aren't proper nouns should have an initial minuscule. That kind of lemmatisation policy is at odds with actual Latin usage, however. Please do feel free to move all the entries for the month adjectives from their minuscule-initial page titles to majuscule-initial ones. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:17, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

After beginning the extremely arduous task of trying to move a single month (Aprilis), I find this, which still does not convince me. Though, if I am to continue the ~300 edits that will be necessary to move all the months, I need to be slightly more confident that I won't have to change it back later. Should we move this to a broader forum? —JohnC5 10:18, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Well, Lewis & Short, Gaffiot, and the OLD (1st ed., page 154/3) all capitalise both the proper noun and the adjective; I find it especially authoritative that the Latin–French Gaffiot capitalises the word, even though the month's name in French, avril, is minuscule-initial. Be that as it may, would you like me to bring this up in the Tea Room? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:05, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

That would be great. What impresses me most about EncycloPetey is when (s)he makes a decision, it is very consistently applied, and fixing this will take a deal of effort. —JohnC5 19:25, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Butting in. What about collecting some evidence of use? Dictionaries are not evidence. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:14, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Done. I assume that EncycloPetey is male.

@Dan Polansky: How about google books:"Aprilis", google books:"Aprili", google books:"Aprilem", google books:"Apriles", google books:"Aprilium", and google books:"Aprilibus"? Only four of the Latin hits out of the first sixty hits (the first ten of each search query) are minuscule-initial.

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:32, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. That's pretty conclusive, isn't it? Note that the Google books search is not case sensitive, which helps your case. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:35, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

@Dan Polansky: No problem. Re case-insensitivity, yes; I meant no deception by writing initial majuscules in the search queries. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:40, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

barba

That one Latin citation at Citations:barba is too long with its 10,389 bytes, it violates point 1 from WT:Quotations: "Ideally, quotations should: 1. Illustrate the meaning by surrounding context, but without being too long — quotations where that word is the "star" of the sentence serve the reader better than lengthy passages which have the word incidentally buried in it;" It looks like it can be trimmed to just the sentence where the word appears (has quoque mollis protegit barba, sed putamini nucleisque solida rotunditas inest.), would you agree to that? As an aside, I can probably find at least 1 good Portuguese quotation to add to that page. --Daniel 08:22, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

@Daniel Carrero: Yeah, it's a bit long, I know. I'll split off various bits of it today and tomorrow, leaving lots of short, scattered quotations. That OK? Also, please do add that Portuguese quotation. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:02, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

Your plans sound good; thanks! Ok, done; after you replied I found a nice quotation in the book I was reading and added it. --Daniel 09:17, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

@Daniel Carrero: Great! Thanks. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:21, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

WT:WE editing

I was reading WT:DW#In progress, and it seems to imply that the WT:WE should be rotated daily. That seems a little crazy to me, but do you think we should start doing that? —JohnC5 20:02, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Even better would be a moving crawl with a word taking about a minute to go from one side of the screen to the other. DCDuring TALK 23:51, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

@DCDuring: Who could perform such wizardry? —JohnC5 00:20, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

We need both willingness and ability. I was only half in jest, because it would convey a sense of dynamism that might be somewhat invigorating to some newbies. It would also have to be coupled with some tools to facilitate making somewhat acceptable entries, which are arguably of higher priority anyway. DCDuring TALK 01:51, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

@DCDuring: Fair enough. Though, even if we do not get a scrolling list, I'm sure we could create a module that would wrap the main list and auto-rotate the display every day, thus obviating the need for direct administration. —JohnC5 03:02, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

I doubt that it makes any difference at all to users what we do with a static list. DCDuring TALK 09:32, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5, DCDuring: I think daily rotation is a little OTT, but I suppose the active list needs refreshing rather more often than it has been in its recent history. I would have no idea how to institute such a scrolling list; if such a thing were even possible, the Grease Pit would be the place to ask about it. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:13, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Module:la-verb

Why did you revert this? —CodeCat 12:30, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

(For the benefit of others reading this, I note that CodeCat refers to my rollback of her edits to Module:la-verb.)
I reverted your changes because I disagreed with the visible changes they introduced: 1) Giving the four principal parts introduces a redundancy vis-à-vis the headword line (which leads to wasted vertical screen space when the table is collapsed); 2) Your changes made the table wider than the page width (on my computer, in any case); 3) Centre-alignment of conjugated forms looks a lot better than left-alignment thereof (IMO); and, 4) Their increased font size makes many of the row headings for the time and voice groupings look "squeezed" in their fields.
I felt justified in reverting your changes because I saw no evidence of prior discussion instigated by you to establish consensus in favour of making what was a pretty major change. It was necessary that I roll back your edits because I was in a rush when I noticed them (hence the lack of explanation). I meant no offence, but I do object to the changes you made. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:56, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Ok, I've taken your comments into account, but I can't say I agree with them all. In particular I don't think centre-alignment looks better, and it makes it a lot harder to compare forms because they don't line up together. I also think that we should not be using the headword line to show grammatical information that should go in the inflection section. The idea of my change in that respect was to keep inflection under inflection, while also giving the principal parts without having to expand the table. I've done this for Dutch and it works well. —CodeCat 18:33, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Thank you. The results of your new changes look a lot better than those of your old ones. One thing: could you indent the conjugation table's leading title in line with other collapsible tables like {{der3}}, {{rel3}}, etc., please? Re "keep[ing] inflection under inflection", that contravenes universal practice for Latin, which was recently reaffirmed in changes to the presentation of {{la-verb}} (see Wiktionary talk:About Latin#Template:la-verb). I have no involvement with Dutch (of which I note you are a native speaker), so I don't object to the changes you've instituted in the presentation of that language's entries; however, I'm unconvinced that we should omit from Latin headword lines those snippets of key grammatical information that all other dictionaries worth their salt include (at the very least, the space taken up thereby is otherwise wasted and left blank). As for "centre-alignment…mak[ing] it a lot harder to compare forms because they don't line up together", comparing forms is only helpful when one is learning conjugational paradigms, which is best done with reference to conjugational appendices and/or conjugation tables like:

for verbal suffixes (in this case -ō). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:14, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: BTW, given your knowledge of Dutch, can you answer the {{rfe}} at Bergen op Zoom, please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:25, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

The etymology is more or less what is suggested, but nothing is known about why it's called that, at least according to the Dutch Wikipedia. —CodeCat 14:23, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Do you know the antecedent Middle Dutch and/or Old Dutch forms? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:34, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

No, but presumably it's just the ancestors of the three words. —CodeCat 15:45, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Searching for google books:"Berghen op Soom" yields a fair few Dutch results from the seventeenth century; however, since I know very little about any of the Dutch chronolects, we have no Middle Dutch entries for berch, op, or soom, the Old Dutch entry for berg doesn't give the word's plural, and we have no Old Dutch entries for up or *sōm, I can do no better than that. Can you help me to do better? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:21, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Our coverage of Middle Dutch is pretty bad in general. I've tried to improve things but it's all me really. —CodeCat 16:27, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

I did come across this, though: [7] —CodeCat 16:38, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Thank you for your efforts generally, and for creating Middle Dutch entries for berch and soom specifically. Also, well done in finding Berghen op den Soom; I hope you're OK with my tweak to the etymology you inserted. BTW, I found this little gem whilst searching for "berghen vp den zoem"; is that a list of (all?) the attested forms of the toponym in Middle Dutch? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:36, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

I've undone some of your tweaks, mainly the spelling of Middle Dutch. According to WT:ADUM, all DUM spellings should be normalised. And the capitalisation doesn't make sense either, they didn't use capitals back then the way we do now. —CodeCat 17:42, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Yeah, that's fine; I tweaked the Middle Dutch spelling because most of the Google Book Search hits for "bergen op den soom" were capitalised Berghen op den Soom, with a couple capitalised Berghen op den soom; however, I defer to you and to WT:ADUM (even if the uncapitalised proper noun looks a bit strange to me).
Is there any chance you can add that indent to the leading titles of Latin conjugation tables? Also, what's your interpretation of that snippet from Oorkondenboek van Noord-Brabant tot 1312 II? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:01, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

It does look to be a list of all attestations, or at least attestations in deeds. —CodeCat 18:04, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Excellent! I've created an entry for the Middle Dutch toponym at bergen op den soom; should all those alternative forms be all-lowercase? and will its gender also be neuter, like its Modern Dutch descendant? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:50, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

I really doubt that any of them were actually capitalised in their original attestation. But I should note that quite a lot of them are Latin. Mons super Zoma is certainly not Dutch! I have no idea about the gender, gender of names is always hard to judge. In Dutch (and Middle Dutch), you can only determine the gender by looking at adjectives and especially determiners. In Dutch, you would say "het mooie Bergen op Zoom", with a neuter article. But it's very rare to see a place name with an adjective or determiner, so it may well not be possible to know the gender as we have no Middle Dutch natives to tell us. —CodeCat 20:16, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: You seem to have been right to remove those probably-Latin names; at least Bergen super Zoem and Mōns super Zōmā are Latin, not (Middle) Dutch. (I may try to add more of those Latin names in the future.) However, why did you remove the form Soem? That looks like Dutch to me… Re gender, capisco. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:45, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure if Soem even refers to the same place. It might be a misreading. —CodeCat 22:57, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: OK; I don't suppose it matters very much anyway. To return to the issue of indenting the leading titles of Latin conjugation tables, for the sake of consistency, could you do that, please? That would merely restore the indentation that was there before you eliminated it in your changes. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:24, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @kc_kennylau: As one of our coding wizards, would you mind restoring the abovementioned indentation, please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:25, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

Eh... what indentation? --kc_kennylau (talk) 00:46, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

@kc_kennylau: That did it. :-) Thank you very much. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 07:03, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

A wee favor

Hey there. I'm still afar and don't have the requisite time to look into this, but could you go through and check out this user's contribs and fix the etymologies? The user seems to have good intentions but subpar understanding of the template system and etymology style. KTHXBAI. —JohnC5 09:47, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: No problem. I've looked over (and, where necessary, corrected) his contributions from June and July this year, but the user has a little under 250 contributions going back to September 2009. How far back do you want me to go? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:16, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I've spruced up all his contributions that were marked "(current)" that needed it. Any other errors are fairly likely to have been caught already. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:15, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Danke, danke. —JohnC5 08:34, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Bitte, bitte. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:23, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

Hello, what JohnC5 says above is right: I occasionnally do my best to contribute by fixing etymologies (and many other points), without knowing the right templates. (One reason is that I have real memory problems: cannot remember things by rote. Despite also being a programmer ;-)). The intention is that, once the "material" is there (hopefully better information), if needed someone can fix the template without having to search elsewhere for said information. Now that, thank to you, my attention has been drawn on this, I will try to find time and motivation to learn at least the right template(s) for etymology sections. Denispir (talk)

@Denispir: {{etyl}}, {{m}}, {{prefix}}, {{suffix}}, {{confix}}, and {{compound}} are the main ones. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:17, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

Wanted words

Hi there. There are now 4 words that display as little square boxes. Do you think that some of them ought to be moved back down the list a bit? SemperBlotto (talk) 15:03, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

@SemperBlotto: I assume you're referring to four of ꝰ (U+A770 MODIFIER LETTER US), ꝫ (U+A76B LATIN SMALL LETTER ET), Ꝛ (U+A75A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R ROTUNDA), ⸿ (U+2E3F CAPITULUM), and ʾ (U+02BE MODIFIER LETTER RIGHT HALF RING). Which of those are you having trouble seeing? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:13, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

All of them. (Google Chrome under Windows 8) SemperBlotto (talk) 17:39, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

@SemperBlotto: :-S I recommend you install the free font Quivira; it provides font support for all those codepoints. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:47, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

That's good for us, but I think SB may be wondering whether it will make our site look amateurish to normal users unaware of the possibility of non-Roman scripts. I share that concern DCDuring TALK 19:13, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

@DCDuring: The first three are part of the Latin script. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:23, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

The point is that many users with installations that don't include every possible character set are going to see us as either amateurish or as too "foreign" for them. Most commercial websites try to avoid confronting their users with such matters. If we can't individualize our presentation to users in such a way as to avoid such things, we will have to go for the lowest common denominator. I hereby nominate myself as lowest common denominator pro tem. (LCD) As such, be hereby informed that I find that about a dozen items on WT:Wanted entries appear as little boxes and therefore should be removed in the interests of the LCDs. DCDuring TALK 19:56, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

@DCDuring: Sure, so let's relemmatise Chinese entries at pagetitles like shen2feng1, since the LCD will lack font support for hanzi and characters like ǚ, right? And even if you agree with that, WT:WE is for editors, not users qua readers; only people with watchlists will see the active list, boxes or no boxes. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:14, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

Hunnnh? WT:WE is imposed on all users who have a watchlist, whatever their level of activity. Maybe what I need is just some custom JS to suppress its display and close up the space. Come to think of it I wonder how much screen real estate I could reclaim by suppressing some displayed lines. DCDuring TALK 20:32, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

What I actually meant was - I don't think we should have four similar entries in the visible wanted list. I feel the list out to have some variety, so there is a better chance of a random person being able to contribute.SemperBlotto (talk) 20:36, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

@SemperBlotto: Oh, I see; that makes sense. I've scattered the five you had trouble with, eighty terms apart. That should prevent them appearing too close together again. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:49, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

Speaking of wanted words, did you add -αστής? This looks like -άζω + -τής to me. —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 15:19, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: Do you mean -ᾰ́στης (-ástēs)? If so, then, IIRC, yes, I did. The following words end in -άστης (-ástēs): ἀνδριαντοπλάστης (andriantoplástēs, “modeller of statues”), ἀνδροκτάστης (androktástēs), ἀνθρωποπλάστης (anthrōpoplástēs, “fashioner of men”), βουπλάστης (bouplástēs, “cowmodeller”), βράστης (brástēs, “upheaving the earth verlically”, of an earthquake), δημοσιομάστης (dēmosiomástēs, “an officer appointed to ascertain and get possession of the assets of public debtors and exiles at Athens”), δράστης (drástēs, “labourer”, “working man”), δῠνάστης (dunástēs, “lord”, “master”, “ruler”), ἐμβρῠοθλάστης (embruothlástēs, “instrument to extract a fetus”), φουρνοπλάστης (phournoplástēs, “potter”), φράστης (phrástēs, “ēloquēns”), ἰνδικοπλάστης (indikoplástēs, “dyer”), καταπλάστης (kataplástēs, “one who plasters”), κεφᾰλοκλάστης (kephaloklástēs, “a surgical instrument”), κερᾰμῐδοπλάστης (keramidoplástēs, “tile-maker”), κερᾰμοπλάστης (keramoplástēs, “potter”), κεράστης (kerástēs, “horned”), κεροπλάστης (keroplástēs, “arranging the hair in horns or queues”, as a noun “a hairdresser”), κηροπλάστης (kēroplástēs, “modeller in wax”), κλάστης (klástēs, “vine-dresser”), κοραλλιοπλάστης (korallioplástēs, “one who makes images of coral”), κοσμοπλάστης (kosmoplástēs, “framer of the world”), κωλοπλάστης (kōloplástēs, “manufacturer of artificial limbs [as votive offerings]”), μετανάστης (metanástēs, “one who has left his home”, “a wanderer”, “a migrant”), μῡθοπλάστης (mūthoplástēs, “coiner of legends”), νάστης (nástēs, “inhabitant”), Νάστης (Nástēs, “son of Nomion, leader of the Carians, slain by Achilles”), νευροσπάστης (neurospástēs, “puppet-show man”), ὀβρῐμοδῠνάστης (obrimodunástēs, “powerful potentate”), ὀστοκλάστης (ostoklástēs, “ossifrage”, “lammergeier”), παντοδῠνάστης (pantodunástēs, “all-powerful”), πλάστης (plástēs, “moulder”, “modeller”; “creator”), πυρσοδῠνάστης (pursodunástēs, “ignipotēns”), θεοπλάστης (theoplástēs, “maker of gods”), θλάστης (thlástēs, “instrument to extract a fetus”), σειρομάστης (seiromástēs), σῑρομάστης (sīromástēs, “pit-searcher”), σκινδᾰλᾰμοφράστης (skindalamophrástēs, “straw-splitter”), σχάστης (skhástēs), τῡφοπλάστης (tūphoplástēs, “inventor of falsehood”), ὑπερανάστης (huperanástēs, “one who has left his home”, “a wanderer”, “a migrant”), χαλκοπλάστης (khalkoplástēs, “bronze-worker”), χοοπλάστης (khooplástēs, “one who forms of earth”), ψευδοπλάστης (pseudoplástēs, “forger of lies”), ζῳοπλάστης (zōioplástēs, “the Creator”; “a moulder of creatures”, “a sculptor, etc.”). I infer from all that that there isn't really an -ᾰ́στης (-ástēs) suffix, so I shall remove that from WT:WE. I don't know about -αστής (-astḗs), however; are you sure that for every noun ending in -αστής (-astḗs), there exists a corresponding verb ending in -άζω (-ázō)? Whether -αστής (-astḗs) is an independent suffix or not, we need entries for its constituent suffixes, -άζω (-ázō) and -τής (-tḗs); would you be willing and able to create entries for them, please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:58, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, but not until John finishes checking the declension module. I'm doing adverbs in the meantime. —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 19:55, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: Cool, cool. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:13, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

кхъохь

Yes I believe кхъохь should be deleted. In Standard Adyghe it's spelled къухьэ and in Kabardian it's spelled кхъухь.--Adamʂa123 (talk) 16:07, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

@Adamʂa123: OK, I've deleted it now. In future, please include a reason when you add {{delete}} to an entry (in the case of кхъохь, something like {{delete|misspelling of къухьэ/кхъухь}} would've been sufficient), otherwise I have no idea why it should be deleted, and it looks like you've just blanked the page for no reason. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:18, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

пчын

Hello. пчын is a misspelled of пчъын. I apologize i should have used {{delete|misspelling of пчъын}} like you suggested previously. Actually пчын can be an alternative form of пчъын if you consider the different dialects, but i think пчъын is enough because that's how it's spelled in standard Adyghe.--Adamʂa123 (talk) 12:00, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

@Adamʂa123: No problem. Thanks for the explanation. Rather than deleting it, how do you feel about this treatment of пчын (pčən)? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:28, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Great.--Adamʂa123 (talk) 17:27, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

@Adamʂa123: Oh, good. And what about my changes to пчъын (pĉən)? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:08, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Yea it's fine, i done that myself many times.--Adamʂa123 (talk) 19:54, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

@Adamʂa123: Cool, thanks. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:59, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

ancient Greek vs. Ancient Greek

Should LlywelynII have moved ancient Greek from Ancient Greek? I'm unsure whether this is worth RFVing. —JohnC5 22:10, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: He certainly should not have. It's a specific language (or, if you like, a specific chronolect of a language) called Ancient Greek, not just Greek that happens to be ancient. Consider, for example, that Hamlet is written in old English, whereas Beowulf is written in Old English. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:03, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

I guessed as much. Would you care to fix 'er up for me? I'm in the midst of a battle with a PIE noun, on which I've finally gained some traction. Also, given previous evidence, I find it likely that one or both of us is about to be called "wrongheaded" by LlywelynII. —JohnC5 23:06, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I've kept most of what he wrote, but not the relemmatisation. He'll have to provide some pretty decent evidence to back up his claim in Talk:ancient Greek#Not a mistaken form if he wants the entry moved back. BTW, "a battle with a PIE noun"? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:19, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

The reconstruction of *wéh₁itis (in progress) poses serious problems and several theories exist. It tends to be the case that when I do these things, I will have many tabs (15), books (3), and PDFs (6) open concurrently, and thus making complex changes to other entries can be confusing to me. —JohnC5 23:28, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Aah, I see. Anytime. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:39, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

This is what I was doing. —JohnC5 02:10, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: That's amazing! I wish I understood P.I.E. studies, like, at all. How do you have access to all those resources? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:28, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

The move to ancient Greek was out-of-process, since the form had been deleted once or twice before per consensus on WT:RFD that the lemma entry should be Ancient Greek. However, an Ngram comparison of the two capitalizations is interesting. (I added "language" to that Ngram because I figure the numbers without it are probably skewed by phrases like "X was an ancient Greek philosopher".) - -sche (discuss) 23:22, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

@-sche: That is very interesting.... I have rarely, if ever, noticed that capitalization. —JohnC5 23:28, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

@-sche: Ditto. I wonder why that is. That Ngram makes the initial-minuscule form seem far more common than my experience would suggest. Surely, however, use of the initial-minuscule form for the language/chronolect is straightforwardly ungrammatical. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:39, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

I don't know about "ungrammatical", but it's probably SOP (as discussed in the RFDs). A comparison of Old vs old French confirms what I've found to be the case in perusing old books, which is that people in the past seem to have conceptualized "French", "Greek" etc as single languages which varied greatly over time (so that "old French" x might be different from modern French y), whereas we now conceptualize their various temporal stages as distinct lects ("Old French", etc). Compare sense 2 of Old English. - -sche (discuss) 23:58, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

@-sche: Yes, you're probably right with that one. It is common to hear and read Ancient Greek referred to as "Greek" simpliciter even today. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:13, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Ainu translit

Hi, I replied at Talk:コッ and my provisional draft is complete at User:Neitrāls vārds/sandbox.

Not implying that anyone should "get to it" right away, but I'm afraid I might need to go on a wikt. hiatus and I'm wondering what could be a good place to advertise this thing, so someone with some Lua knowledge (and some interest in Asian langs) could perhaps pick it up, so the whole deal doesn't "slide into oblivion."

I think a good half of the conditions can be copied pretty much verbatim from the ja module. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 21:50, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

@Neitrāls vārds: I'll reply at Talk:コッ. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:37, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

reverts

Hello, notifications tell me that you have reverted a series of 5 changes by me. Is there a particular reason? Were all of these changes wrong in your view? Is it an issue of no usage or wrong usage of templates? Am I doing something else wrong, in general? or what? Denispir (talk)

Hi, Denispir. This was a while ago, so I don't know what reversions you're referring to. Please post the links herein; I'd be happy to explain the reasons for my reversions once I know what I need to explain. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:12, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

Quid agis?

Colloquium tuum mihi dēfuit. —JohnC5 16:38, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Ad Johannem C. V: Incuriam tui meam doleo. Te esse editorem optimum arbitror. Me excusa, te quaeso. ¿Quid agis? Nuper natinatus sum, rerum ceterarum ergo; nunc ad Victionarium Anglicum recurri! Tibi cooperari gaudebo. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:12, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Tibi ago gratias pro verbis tuis peramicis, at mihi placet tuum reventum comperire. Nuper itidem coepi novae professionis causā natinari; nihil ita excusationis tuae requiro. Habesne ullum negotium Victionariale, quod me agere velis? —JohnC5 13:41, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Alba Longa

I haven't really added much in the way of Latin content in a while, and I was thinking I'd do geographical terms, but I don't really know how all of the templates work now. How do I get to make this headword not show redlinks? (head= didn't work.) And how should I set up the declension table for it, considering that both words decline? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 22:49, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

@Μετάknowledge: Parameter |1= modifies the headword; see my changes. Unfortunately, Latin declension tables can’t yet handle phrases (they can handle invariant enclitics thanks to kc_kennylau); that is a project I intend to commit myself to at some unspecified point in the future. If you’re going to work on geographical terms (that would be great, by the way), you may find William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography and Johann Georg Theodor Grässe’s Orbis Latinus useful. I hope that helps! — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:40, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

@Μετάknowledge: I've just created {{la-decl-1st-1st-loc}} and added it to Alba Longa; it will work for two-word placenames comprising two regular first-declension nominal and/or adjectival elements. Of course, creating separate templates for every combination isn't practical, but this sort of solution will have to do for now, I'm afraid. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:49, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Re multiword declensional problems: Thanks for the template. Perhaps one should be created for the likes of rēspūblica and other entries that are currently untemplatised; as for cases like pater familiās, are you comfortable with the status quo of lacking a declension table?

Re geography: I haven't used DGRG before, thanks for the recommendation! It's a vague plan, as I'm getting busier IRL and I do need to get back to working on Swahili when I feel up to making conjugation templates, which I'm rather scared of doing.

Oh, and on another note, I'm not sure which template to use for zootrophion. I haven't studied enough Greek to make it easy for me to figure out declensional templates for Greek words in Latin. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:46, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

@Μετάknowledge: I've added declension tables to pater familiās and zōotrophīon. I'm reluctant to create something like {{la-decl-5th+1st}}, since I don't think it will be needed very often; I think rēspūblica should remain untemplatised until {{la-decl-phrase}} is created. Good luck with editing. Let me know if there's anything else I can help you with. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:06, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

I'm still inept... struggling with {{la-decl-3rd-Greek}} and the declension of Neāpolis at the moment. I see that the grc entry has two different paradigms, and it looks like both have contributed to usage in Latin, but I really don't know quite how to handle it. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:29, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps similar to what I just did at Propontis? (Assuming that one passes muster, of course.) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 05:26, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

@Μετάknowledge: Your solution is the right one; I tweaked Propontis (both paradigms are variants of the third declension, so there's no need for -multidecl; locatives were needed, although {{la-decl-3rd-Greek-loc}} didn't exist until I created it just now; and, I placed the two tables side by side for aesthetic reasons and to make comparison of forms easier). Neāpolis is more difficult: It looks like we'd need something like {{la-decl-3rd-Greek-is-loc}} (compare {{la-decl-3rd-Greek-s}}, which has -os instead of -ios in the genitive singular and -i instead of -ī in the dative singular), but I haven't the time to research which forms are valid right now. I shall be without computer access until the day after tomorrow; would you be able to collect citations of the attestable forms of Neāpolis in the meantime, please? I shall then create the table etc. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:15, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

Is the locative really used for the Propontis? (Just thinking of the old "towns, cities, and small islands" rule that was ingrained into my memory, although I've seen exceptions since.) More technical issues: the templates {{la-decl-2nd-N-Greek-loc}} and {{la-decl-1st-Greek-loc}} are needed, if you would be so kind as to create them. On a more difficult level, I've run into the problem that {{la-proper noun}} doesn't support gen3= (which gives you an idea of how messy it is). —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:01, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5 and of course Meta, all the issues listed above are still, well, issues. I am probably capable of dealing with them myself, but having stepped away from templating (which I was never especially good at to begin with) to focus more on entry creation/upkeep, I'm hoping someone else will help me out. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:23, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge Hey there. Sorry for the delay. The real issue preventing the upgrade of {{la-proper noun}} is that Kenny and his most excellent bot were helping a while ago to remove all the extra parameters from the Latin headword templates but seemed to get stalled at {{la-noun}}. I'm hesitant to make updates to the existing {{la-proper noun}} template because, in future, the templates should be changed over to the Module:la-headword anyway.

For the new declension templates, I say again that they should be added to the new Module:la-noun, which currently only supports 3rd declension nouns. I could see whether I can add the other declensions, but it will take me a while. —JohnC5 14:49, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5, Kc kennylau I would of course be happier if everything were Luacised, but in the mean time, there are entries with these issues out there. But you guys handle that side of things, so I'll leave it to your judgement (I just hope it's all solved soonish). Also, IFYPFY. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 18:06, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @Metaknowledge: Is there anything else you need me to edit and/or create? Something to do with Neāpolis, perhaps? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:12, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

We have {{la-decl-3rd-polis}} for that now thanks to Kenny. My only other issue (that I can think of at the moment) is one I just raised over at John's talkpage. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:06, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: Oh, good. Re the other issue, hopefully one of our Luists can fix that issue with {{la-noun}}. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:31, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Updates to the Word of the Day

Hi, thanks for making this edit. However, I've just noticed that you didn't actually update the individual pages "Wiktionary:Word of the day/August 29", "Wiktionary:Word of the day/August 30" and "Wiktionary:Word of the day/August 31", which means that the words didn't actually get showcased. Oops! Why don't you set those words for 15, 16 and 17 September instead? Smuconlaw (talk) 09:24, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

I felt energetic so I did the updating for you. :-) Smuconlaw (talk) 17:47, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

@Smuconlaw: I'm sorry for the mistake, and I thank you for clearing up my mess. That was the first time I'd tried to set a word of the day, so please put it down to the incompetence of a novice! Thanks for your understanding. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:17, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

No worries. Please help out more! Smuconlaw (talk) 09:54, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@Smuconlaw: I'll try to follow the policy of setting one or more WOTDs for each word I nominate. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:37, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

That would be a great help. Smuconlaw (talk) 10:51, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

triale tantum

Hi there. This seems to be a plurale tantum of the third order. Italian seems to have the rare noun triale to cover it. The Italian Wikipedia entry Numero (linguistica) also mentions the terms quartale (4) and paucale (few). I had difficulties translating that citation into natural-sounding English, but have done my best (too much wine with my dinner). SemperBlotto (talk) 20:27, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

@SemperBlotto: Thanks very much for that. Yes, I'd figured that triale tantum carried the meaning “trial only”, but I couldn't tell whether it was an adjective with the sense “trial only” or a noun with the sense “a noun that is trial only”. Do you mean that Italian has the terms triale, quartale, and paucale that are synonymous with the English terms trial number, quadral number, and paucal number? Your translation read perfectly; I tweaked it slightly, which I hope you don't mind. BTW, duale tantum is plentifully attested in English, though I found no sign of *quadrale tantum or *paucale tantum, and that Italian citation of triale tantum is the only citation of the phrase in any language I found anywhere. Also, interestingly enough, I have yet to find a Latin dictionary that lists triālis (though trīnālis exists), quadrālis (the noun quadrāle and the adjective quartālis both exist), or paucālis, though I suspect they're all attestable; hits for the German nouns Trialis and Paucalis render a prima facie glance inconclusive, however. Again, thanks for your help with this. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:52, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Multiple declension tables for the same usage of the same word in Latin

Is there an accepted standard for how to organize multiple declension tables for the same usage of the same word in Latin? You seem to prefer arranging them horizontally, but other pages (vesper and tigris, for example; in the case of the latter the page looks much worse with them arranged horizontally because the note at the top of the first declension table prevents the second one from getting any closer to it than the end of the note) have them arranged vertically. Is one method preferred over the other by the Wiktionary community, or is there not a standard that has its general support? Esszet (talk) 22:52, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@Esszet: As you'd guessed, there isn't any policy governing this. It's difficult to tell (without a poll) which presentation is preferred, but I'd guess from the fact that I'd never seen horizontal presentation changed to verical before your two edits that horizontal presentation would be preferred generally for nominal declension tables and perhaps some adjectival declension tables, but vertical presentation preferred for conjugation tables. (I can't Lua, but if I could, I'd add line breaks to the titular descriptions atop declension tables, which would fix the problem with horizontal presentation of the tables in tīgris.) I wonder if I'm right about what presentation is preferred generally… @Angr, JohnC5, kc_kennylau, Metaknowledge? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:30, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm lazy about it, but I'd say side-by-side is usually better. Anyway, does this mean that all my declensional woes are going to be solved by Luacisation? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:36, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

I recently incorporated most of Module:la-utilities into Module:la-noun and added support for fourth and fifth declension nouns, but most of the templates haven't been migrated to it yet. I suppose that is the next step; I'll try it with fourth and fifth declension nouns first and then take it from there. Esszet (talk) 23:43, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your work, Esszet. @Μετάknowledge: Lua will improve matters, though it isn't yet clear to me how well phrases can be handled without further developments in the Template: namespace. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:28, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm okay with that, since I can at least use {{la-decl-see}}. But I still need to be able to specify alternative forms and show locatives for Greek 1st and 2nd declensions. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:31, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: Yeah, sorry; I'll get to those by the end of today. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:43, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: Done, done, and done. Let me know if any of the locatives are wrong. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:08, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Thank you so much! This is excellent. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:01, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: I'm sorry I took so long to get it done. Re the two templates that got deleted, apparently {{la-decl-1st-Greek|loc=yes}} and {{la-decl-2nd-N-Greek|loc=yes}} have their functionality. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:35, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

tisique and the others

I think that all these are old forms of French, Norman and the like. But as Mglovesfun isn't contributing anymore, I don't know who is going to sort them out - certainly not me. SemperBlotto (talk) 14:12, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

@SemperBlotto: Renard Migrant? That's his account now. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:34, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

@SemperBlotto: Thanks so much for creating tezic, tesic, thisique, tesicque, ptisique, tysike, and tisik. I've done the lemmatisation and added presumed etymologies. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 07:29, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

syphilis#Latin

@JohnC5: If you guys are interested, I thought we might try to collect all the attestable Latin names for syphilis. (I was spurred on by a medical book that claims that there are more than 100 terms for it in Latin; I've only come up with 15 so far.) Feel free to ignore this, just a little project I wanted to inform you of. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 19:53, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

Αρβανιτόπουλος

The normal "definition" of a foreign word is its translation - ie the English form of the name. For the example of I used a derived form of the word - to show where the name "Αρβανιτόπουλος" might be found. As regards the words derived from the surname: they are not found in dictionaries, and I dont know what part of speech they are. But - quite honestly - there are more important things for all of us to spend our time on than foreign surnames.   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 15:07, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: I'm sorry to have irked you. Re the translation/English form, I've now added an |eq= parameter to {{surname}}, which can be used to specify the English equivalent, which Αρβανιτόπουλος now does. I'm afraid that Αθανασάκειο (Athanasákeio) is a derived form of Αθανασάκης (Athanasákis), not Αρβανιτόπουλος (Arvanitópoulos). I am pretty certain that Αθανασάκειος (Athanasákeios) is an adjective (like the English Shavian and Platonic). The reason I've requested these things is because I want to add the PDF of the 1909 Θεσσαλικὰ μνημεῖα. Ἀθανασάκειον Μουσεῖον ἐν Βόλῳ that I have to the Internet Archive, and I don't want to add any incorrect information in doing so. Again, I'm sorry to have irked you. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:38, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Fine - as you say it's probably an adjective, as in "Guggenheim Museum", etc. But I was unirked :)   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 15:43, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: Not exactly. In Guggenheim Museum, Guggenheim is a proper noun used attributively, which certainly makes it look like an adjective, but considering the museum's full name, viz. the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum should make it clearer that Solomon R. Guggenheim isn't an adjective; were it called the Guggenheimean Museum, the Guggenheimian Museum, or the Guggenheimlich Museum, then the name would indeed use an adjective. Analogically, Αθανασάκειο Μουσείο Βόλου uses an adjective, whereas Αθανασάκης Μουσείο Βόλου uses a proper noun attributively (though it's probably ungrammatical Greek). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:54, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

"proper noun used attributively" yes - but in another language an adjective may be available. (answer not needed!)   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 15:51, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Reversal

Why aren’t arrows better than inequality signs clearer or better, in your opinion? Your reversal seemed overzealous and discouraging, and your edit summary was really unhelpful. —Born2bgratis (talk) 14:18, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

@Born2bgratis: Whilst your edit was indubitably one made in good faith, I reverted it because 2 is greater than 1 and 2 is less than 3. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:07, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

This “explanation” would lead me to think that the real reason is that you have a hard time accepting other’s improvements. The template is for NAVIGATION, it has nothing to do with the mathematical concept of inequality. But it’s okay with me; I’m not interested in engaging in idiotic edit wars – otherwise I could get blocked. —Born2bgratis (talk) 15:15, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

And what other evidence, pray tell, led you to such a judgment? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:20, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

dog-bread

Not totally clear, but I found something about "dog's-bread": a kind of mushroom that grows near the mandrake. It looks like breadcrumbs, and in Arabic is called khubz al-kalb (dog's bread). Equinox ◑ 21:48, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

@Equinox: Thanks. I somewhat suspect that the definition was a sort of nihilartikel to catch out copyright infringers, especially given that the Greek etymon is supposedly the name for one of these. Gaffiot, meanwhile, defines it (rather uselessly) as just "plante". — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:55, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

When dealing with ancient references to plants, it's a miracle that we have any botanical identifications at all. I find it entirely plausible that a hapax legomenon might have insufficient context to enable anything much in the way of a definition. On top of that, it's entirely possible that an author in one language might be just repeating what they've read in another language and have no clue what they're writing about. It would be interesting to track down the passage, though that may not be easy: the Apuleius Herbarium (actually w:Pseudo-Apuleius) was a very popular work in the Middle Ages, so there are a number of editions/manuscripts. As for "dog-bread", it's obviously a literal translation of the parts of the Ancient Greek word, rather than a reference to a known plant by that name.

Equinox's reference is talking about an 8th-century Arabic translation from Syriac, so it doesn't really have much to do with anything in Latin.

There is something called "dog's-bread, though: it was a term for a kind of very low-quality bread given to poor people before the French Revolution. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:11, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: Aah, I see! I didn't know μᾶζα (mâza), but I should've made the connection with κύων (kúōn). Thanks for that. Should I change the definition of cynomazon to "a plant, perhaps Cardopatium corymbosum", per κυνόμαζον (kunómazon)? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:28, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Speaking of requested entries, why are you requesting specific forms like ἡπατίζον, ἀναγιγνωσκόμενα, κατεσκευασμένων... and not the lemmas thereof? —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 22:36, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: They occurred in something I was trying to translate, and I couldn't work out the lemma from the non-lemma. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:05, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: Re ἡπατίζον, I requested that in preparation for creating hēpatizon. As for κατεσκευασμένων, that was for the quotation from Xenophon's Λακεδαιμονίων Πολιτεία in Citations:μόρα. I got ἀναγιγνωσκόμενα from reading about the Old Testament; see google books:"anagignoskomena". — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:55–12:40, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

διδ. φιλ.

a number of possibilities (uninflected):

• PhD διδακτορία/φιλοσοφία
• moral phylosophy δίδαγμα/φιλοσοφία

and probably others. Do you have a context?   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 15:46, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: It's from the same text as all my recent requests. That one, specifically, is from the frontispiece, which describes its author thus:

• ΥΠΟ
  Α. Σ. ΑΡΒΑΝΙΤΟΠΟΥΛΛΟΥ
  ΔΙΔ. ΦΙΛ., ΕΦΟΡΟΥ ΤΩΝ ΑΡΧΑΙΟΤΗΤΩΝ ΘΕΣΣΑΛΙΑΣ

or, not in all-caps, I think:

• ὑπὸ
  Ἀ. Σ. Ἀρβανιτοπούλλου
  Διδ. Φιλ., ἐφόρου τῶν ἀρχαιοτήτων Θεσσαλίας

which I, with your insight of "PhD διδακτορία/φιλοσοφία", translate as:

• by
  A. S. Arvanitopoulos​
  Ph.D., guardian of the antiquities of Thessaly

So, I'm guessing διδ. φιλ. (did. fil.), in that context, expands to Διδάκτορα Φιλοσοφίας (Didáktora Filosofías), the genitive of διδάκτορας φιλοσοφίας (didáktoras filosofías, “doctor of philosophy”). Is that right? Or does διδάκτορας (didáktoras) have a different genitive in Katharevousa? Or am I further off than that? :-S  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:13, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: Actually, it looks like διδάκτωρ φιλοσοφίας (didáktor filosofías) is considerably more common: google books:"διδάκτορας φιλοσοφίας" (36) vs. google books:"διδάκτωρ φιλοσοφίας" (264). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:29, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

That seems quite likely - Katharevousa again!   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 06:07, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: Thanks. Is your expertise restricted to Demotic forms? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:22, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Yes - I have never studied Ancient Greek and for a book on Katharevousa grammar (I've found next to nothing on the net) you'd probably have to search 2nd hand bookshops in Athens - and they'd probably be written in Katharevousa!   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 05:17, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: Damn. :-S Well, thanks for the help, anyway. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:24, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

sto

@JohnC5, Metaknowledge, does sto mean ‘to [currently] be’ in Medieval Latin? --Romanophile ♞ (contributions) 11:23, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

@Romanophile: Well, 1. STARE in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887) has the definiens “Esse, permanere.”, Anglicè “To be, to remain in existence or in such-and-such a condition.”, so pretty much, yeah. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:47, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

So does Vulgar Latin, incidentally. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 14:27, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: That would explain that sense persisting into Italian, Tarantino, etc. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:34, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

…and Spanish and French. —JohnC5 14:03, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

As estar and être, yes. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:24, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

Does testa mean caput in Medieval Latin? (Presumably not in Classical.) --Romanophile ♞ (contributions) 05:31, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

@Romanophile: Yes! It's also in Niermeyer. —JohnC5 05:54, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

@JohnC5: it seems like a lot of innovations that occurred in Romance also existed in Medieval Latin. homo may warrant a pronoun section, but I’ve been told that it’s been used pronominally since the Classic era. --Romanophile ♞ (contributions) 06:05, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for deleting all those templates

@Equinox Thanks to you too for the earlier round!

Benwing2 (talk) 21:49, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

@Benwing2: No problem. All the templates are deleted now; only the documentation subpages remain. I'll delete them at some point, too, unless someone else beats me to them. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:18, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks again for deleting the remaining template doc pages. Benwing2 (talk) 13:34, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Post-edit conflict: @Benwing2: I've just deleted the sixty-five documentation subpages, so all the candidates for speedy deletion are gone, now. This spate of deletions generated a number of orphans in the Template talk: namespace; feel free to tag them for speedy deletion if you want them gone, too; I'd be happy to delete them for you. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:35, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

OK cool. I'll go find them. Benwing2 (talk) 14:21, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

形聲

I don't think you can refer to Chinese 形聲 and Japanese 形声 as cognates: that would imply that they were inherited from a common source, but inheritance by Japanese from anything other than earlier stages of Japanese has never been proven. The Japanese is borrowed from Chinese at some stage, both the the characters (in Chinese, 形声 is an alternative form of 形聲), and the spoken words that the characters represent (that's what an on (on) yomi/reading is). Now, Japanese borrowed from Chinese at different stages of its history, and from different dialects, so the spoken Japanese may be said to have been borrowed from a term in one Chinese regional lect that is cognate to the term in other regional lects, but it's not cognate to the term in Chinese as a whole. An analogy might be asking whether castle is cognate to château. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:37, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: I figured that the Chinese 形聲 / 形声 (xíngshēng) and the Japanese 形声 might both descend from a Middle Chinese etymon. I'd call the English castle and the French château cognates because they both descend from the Latin castellum; is this incorrect for some reason? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:49, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Strictly speaking, they're not, because English didn't inherit it from Latin. It was borrowed, both directly into Old English and indirectly into Middle English from Old Northern French. The reason I chose that example is because you can tell from the form that castle and château came ultimately from the same source, but were the result of borrowing at different times from different regions.

The Chinese writing system complicates things quite a lot, because written Chinese is a single language, but spoken Chinese is a family of related languages. Likewise, Japanese, when written in kanji, is, with rare exceptions, always a sort of borrowing from Chinese- if not the phrase, at least the components.

Spoken Japanese (referred to as the readings when the written form is made up of kanji) can be either a borrowing or native Japanese. If it's native Japanese, the reading is classified as a kun reading. If it's from Chinese, it's classified as an on reading (there are several kinds of on readings, classified according to the timeand or regional lect from which the original borrowing came). Not uncommonly, a given kanji term will have both kun and on readings, with the kun reading being completely unrelated to the on reading (except for sometimes being a calque).

So 形声 is, almost by definition, a Chinese borrowing. If it had a kun reading, the reading would be unrelated to Chinese. The on reading by definition, again, would have to be descended from a Chinese loanword. In other words, you asked a question which was self-evidently unnecessary to anyone familiar with Japanese: the writing was obviously a borrowing and the on reading, by definition, was descended from a borrowing. There are no doubt interesting details to the etymology, but the overall question was already answered before you asked it. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:08, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: Eiríkr's addition of "From Middle Chinese compound 形聲 / 形声 (heng syeng, literally “form, shape + sound”)." was the kind of thing I was thinking of. TBH, I don't really see the great importance of the borrowing–inheritance distinction vis-à-vis cognacy — surely two terms in separate languages both derived howsoever from a term in a third language are ipso facto cognates…? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 02:12, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

• The details are much as Chuck explained them: any Japanese on'yomi term is an old borrowing from Middle Chinese. The variation in the kinds of on'yomi are due to 1) differences in when a term was borrowed, as the dialects of Chinese themselves have undergone substantial phonetic shifts over the years; and 2) differences in where a term was borrowed from, as the dialects of Chinese can have very different readings. Hence, for Japanese 行, we have the on'yomi readings gyō, gō, kō, and an, all from Chinese 行. However, also note that the kun'yomi readings i(ku), yu(ku), and oko(nau) or okona(u) all derive from Old Japanese.

I've added an etymology for Japanese 形声. I'll defer to the Chinese editors to add an etymology for 形聲 / 形声 (xíngshēng). ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:47, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

@Eirikr: Thanks for answering the {{rfe}}. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 02:12, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: This is a bit late, but is it really the case that "written Chinese is a single language"? I've always thought that this must be a misconception, because e.g. Cantonese has thousands of Cantonese-specific characters and definitely isn't written the same as Mandarin. Similarly, Shanghainese if written down would not look like Mandarin because many or most of its function words are etymologically unrelated to the corresponding Mandarin ones, and it certainly must have other grammatical differences, differences in meaning, lack of many Mandarin-created compounds, etc. Benwing2 (talk) 02:22, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Well, I only speak and read a little Mandarin, and I oversimplified quite a bit, but my non-expert impression is that the written topolects are close enough that monolectic readers and writers of each can sort of figure out the others. They're definitely not the same, by any means, but the majority of the vocabulary overlaps (for that matter, even the kanji-based part of Japanese writing is somewhat intelligible to Chinese readers, and Japanese can read some Chinese). Now, of course, the education system on the mainland is pushing Mandarin really hard, so those who speak the non-Mandarin lects may start to understand more just by virtue of their having been taught Mandarin in school. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:48, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

στοιχειολογία

Where did you find the citation for this term? It is not in LSJ (although it might be in the supplement, which I don't have a copy of.) —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 00:19, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: It is used by three different authors (viz. Ludwig Lucius, Emmanuel Stupanus, and Johann Müller), who are cited by Johann Ramminger in his Neulateinische Wortliste. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 02:10, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

All three works postdate the fall of Constantinople; thus, by our criteria—unless it is attested in an earlier work—the word is Modern Greek. I was unable to produce any Byzantine citation through a Google search, and it does not appear in Sophocles' Byzantine dictionary. —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 03:47, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: Hmm, so maybe this word deserves a Modern Greek entry; what do you think, Saltmarsh and Ilias Iliadis? Also, @CodeCat, might this be relevant to *ὑποθερμία (*hupothermía)? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:49, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Created - my Bambiniotis dates it to the 1850s   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 06:48, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

It dates back farther than that (Acronym's citations were from the 1600s) but not far enough to be considered Ancient. —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 12:54, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for creating the entry, Saltmarsh. I've added a few examples of the Katharevousa accusative, στοιχειολογίαν (stoicheiologían), to Citations:στοιχειολογία; is there a way to add it to the declension table in the entry for στοιχειολογία (stoicheiología)? Google Books Search does a poor job of OCRing polytonic Greek, so I haven't bothered trying to find examples of the Katharevousa dative, στοιχειολογίᾳ (stoikheiologíāi). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:12, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Done - the parameter "note" is used. It is largely undecided how to deal with Katharevousa forms - other than "Katharevousa form of … ". I have been meaning to have a look at other diglossias to see how this might be handled.   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 12:27, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: Thank you. Why not just integrate Katharevousa forms into the usual (currently Demotic) inflection tables, with the Katharevousa forms marked with obeli, referring to a footnote that states that they are Katharevousa-only? The forms are regular, as far as I can tell. Are you happy with how I've formatted στοιχειολογίαν (stoicheiologían)? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:02, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘It may be more complicated than that - according to the latest Greek Grammar (Holton et al Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar …) Demotic and Katharevousa are evolving into SMG (Standard Modern Greek). We need a wider discussion (my time is short a present - so please feel free to take over) with some wiki-active native speakers involved @Eipnvn, Xoristzatziki, Rossyxan (there must be others).   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 12:29, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

{{ja-noun|k}}

|k isn't needed/doesn't do anything anymore BTW. —suzukaze (t・c) 03:09, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

@suzukaze-c: OK, thanks. I'll omit it in future. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 03:11, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

You just deleted my user talk page!

After you delete my userpage in my request, it seems you unexpectedly deleted my user talk page. Eyesnore (talk) 11:09, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

@Eyesnore: I'm very sorry; I misunderstood what you wanted. Chuck Entz has since restored it (thanks, Chuck). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:38, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Deletion of "Template:reference-book"

Thanks for deleting the template. I'm afraid I couldn't tag the template page as it was protected. That's why I tagged the template talk page. — SMUconlaw (talk) 19:53, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

@Smuconlaw: Oh, sorry; I didn't realise. That makes sense. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:05, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, I didn't know we generally keep the talk pages of deleted templates. — SMUconlaw (talk) 15:57, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

cometes

Hello. Regarding your revert, please see Wiktionary:Tea_room/2016/April#Latin:_cometes. The accusative "cometem" is still missing in the entry. -Ikiaika (talk) 17:15, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

@Ikiaika: Done. I had no way of knowing (unless I did a What-links-here, which is only common practice with deletions) that the problem with the table was the missing alternative accusative singular form. In future, if you're discussing an entry in the Tea Room, please tag that entry with {{tea room}} and, if possible, include an editorial note (using <!-- NOTE -->) in the entry near the {{rfinfl}} to explain what the problem is. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:15, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

If I remember those templates, I will do.

Are you sure about the length of the e, i.e. that it is "comētem"? It could be a third decension form, but couldn't it also be a different ending? Like by analogy with the ending -an or -am (incorrectly) using -m instead of -n, without changing the e. So maybe there should be a note that it is a Late Latin form and that the length is unknown, maybe also mentioning the possibility that it could be a third declension ending. -Ikiaika (talk) 17:52, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

@Ikiaika: Unless you can present evidence (from an authority or, better, scansion) that the alternative accusative singular form is or can be *comētēm, as opposed to comētem, then Occam's razor dictates that we treat the form as just a normal third-declension ending. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:24, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

@Ikiaika: Also consider the existence of comētibus (occurring, for example, here). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:33, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

σεβαστοκράτωρ/Σεβαστοκρᾰτέω

hey, I noticed your edit on σεβαστοκράτωρ and have kept it up for now, but it seems to me like Σεβαστοκρᾰτέω - the verb to rule as sebastokrator - would be derived from σεβαστοκράτωρ and not the reverse. LSJ tells me the only use was in Joannes Tzetzes - who lived after the title was created, see w:Sebastokrator Rathersilly (talk) 16:11, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Caland systems don't easily lend themselves to a clear tree of derivation. If there were an adjective σεβαστόκρατος I might say both are derived from that, but as it is I'd rather simply say both are σεβαστος + κρατος + (suffix). —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 17:28, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

I edited it according to your suggestion. Rathersilly (talk) 17:54, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

@Rathersilly, ObsequiousNewt: Cool, thanks. And sorry for the unwarranted change. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:54, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Wanted entries/grc

Disclaimer: I don't know how many of the Ancient Greek you've actually added to WT:WE; this is partly a request for citations and partly a request for help finding citations.

I had decided to create entries for σχηματομετρία and βαλλίξω, but I couldn't find them in LSJ. I suspect the latter is a scanno for βαλλίζω, although I'm not sure of this. In any case I decided to go through WE and list all of the Ancient Greek words (excluding proper names) for which I could not find a citation in LSJ:

• σχηματομετρία
• βαλλίξω - scanno for βαλλίζω?
• καδμῖλος - should apparently be capitalized.
• ζάβολος - obviously Aeolic for διάβολος, but LSJ doesn't mention it, and it'd be nice if we had a citation in Sappho/Alcaeus/whoever.
• -ῑτικός - example?
• διαιτεῶν - is this supposed to be an Ionic form of δίαιτα?
• βατραχοφάγος
• προλόγιον
• ἀρχοντολογία
• ναφθώδης
• ναζίρ - mentioned as a v.l. of ναζιραῖος by Sophocles
• μιξόγλωττος - which you provided a 1698 citation for. Under the criterion of time alone, this falls under Modern Greek.
• διοπετής - should be capitalized as well, being a derivative of Ζεύς.
• σαγματοπασμαγάδια
• πολυχρονικός
• -ας - example?

If you could offer a citation for any of these, that'd be great. Thanks! —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 18:56, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: I just linked all your terms for my own investigative convenience. I hope you don't mind. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:49, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

OK:

• Σχηματομετρία (Skhēmatometría) is the etymon of the Latin schēmatometria.
• Perseus's digitisation of the L&S entry for ballistĭa, (balist-) includes the etymology "βαλλίξω, to dance". Consulting Archive.org's scan of the relevant page of Lewis & Short's Latin Dictionary, however, shows that Perseus's digitisation has a scanno there. Moreover, Gaffiot also spells the etymon βαλλίζω (ballízō). Good catch. I've corrected our entry for ballistia.
• The Oxford Latin Dictionary gives the etymology "cf. Gk. καδμῖλος" for the Latin noun camillus (“1. (app.) A boy-attendant of a priest.   2. (See quot.; ? or neut.).”). The "quot." under sense 2 is:
  • 1839 [8th century CE], Paulus Diaconus, edited by Karl Otfried Müller, Excerpta ex libris Pompeii Festi De significatione verborum, page 63:

    cumeram uocabant antiqui uas quoddam quod opertum in nuptiis ferebant, in quo erant nubentis utensilia, quod et camillum dicebant

• Ζάβολος (Zábolos) is given as the etymon of the Latin zabolus by Lewis & Short, du Cange, and Gaffiot.

That's all I have time for right now. I'll get to the others as soon as I can. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:17, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for helping! I suspect that schēmatometria was formed as a compound within Latin, the same way English forms compounds like e.g. cryophysics. It doesn't seem to ever have been attested in Greek (it's not in LSJ or Sophocles' lexicon, and a Google search reveals nothing.) I checked LSJ's entry for Καδμῖλος and it does mention camillus. Wikipedia also says: "The name of Kadmilus (Καδμῖλος), or Kasmilos, one of the Cabeiri who was usually depicted as a young boy, was linked even in antiquity to camillus, an old Latin word for a boy-attendant in a cult[.]" I can only suppose OLD didn't capitalize Greek words. ζάβολος certainly appears to exist, on this evidence—but a Google search doesn't actually yield any useful results. Neither does a search of Packhum. I'm honestly wondering if it was in fact never attested—and, if so, we should create Reconstruction:Ancient Greek/ζάβολος. —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 17:11, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Bot-reverted Welsh edit on Wikipedia

Hi, somebody added "allwch chi ddim cadw torth a’i bwyta hi - you can’t keep a loaf and eat it" as the Welsh equivalent on Wikipedia's page for "you can't have your cake and eat it", but ClueBot reverted this as suspected vandalism [8]. It doesn't look like vandalism to me, but being cy-0 I thought I'd ask you if you could have a look and if appropriate revert ClueBot. Thanks, Droigheann (talk) 13:40, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

@Droigheann: Well, it's grammatically correct (albeit colloquial) apart from the fact that the allwch should be gallwch. It makes perfect sense, but I don't know whether it's actually used as a proverb in Welsh, or if it's just a near-calque of the English proverb — substitute torth (“loaf”) with teisen (“cake”) and you've got a precise calque. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:54, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

In that case I'll let it be, Google search (with galwch) having returned zero results, I just didn't want to let the editor down if they were obviously correct. Cheers mate! --Droigheann (talk) 18:20, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

@Droigheann: You're welcome. Please note, however, that google:"allwch chi ddim cadw torth a'i bwyta hi" also gets zero hits. N.b. that page 191 of Bruce Griffiths' Geiriadur yr Academi looks like it might be relevant. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:45, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Actually I didn't even try to google the sentence with "allwch", just took your word for it. The Welsh dictionary you link to unfortunately doesn't open any preview for me. Anyway, looking at the editor's contribs again I daresay they're not a newbie who might be discouraged by the revert from becoming a prolific contributor or something like that. --Droigheann (talk) 18:18, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

@Droigheann: The Google Books Search result page to which I linked doesn’t show me a preview either. I’m currently in a public library which has a hard copy of the dictionary in question. The relevant bit is this (transcribed verbatim et litteratim):

• 1995, Bruce Griffiths and Dafydd Glyn Jones, Geiriadur yr Academi: The Welsh Academy English–Welsh Dictionary, Cardiff: University of Wales Press (sixth impression, 2006), →ISBN, page 191 s.v. “cake¹”:

  […] you can’t have your ⁓ and eat it, allwch chi mo’i chael hi bob ffordd; allwch chi ddim cadw torth a’i bwyta hi; F: chewch chi mo’ch afal i chwarae ac i’w fwyta. […]

Secundum opus citatum (§ “Abbreviations and field markers used in the Dictionary”, page xvi/2), ⟨ F: ⟩ denotes “Familiar, colloquial”. So that dictionary gives allwch chi mo’i chael hi bob ffordd (literally “you can’t have it every way”), allwch chi ddim cadw torth a’i bwyta hi (literally “you can’t keep a loaf and eat it”), and chewch chi mo’ch afal i chwarae ac i’w fwyta (familiar, colloquial, literally “you shan’t have your apple to play and to eat [?!]”) as Welsh translations of the English you can’t have your cake and eat it, which vindicates Growdigital. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:38, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Splendid, I returned it to the article together with the first translation they give [9]. Thanks for the time you spend on this! --Droigheann (talk) 02:16, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

@Droigheann: You're very welcome. I'm glad I could help. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:54, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Soft mutation of the verb in a negative sentence is very common in colloquial Welsh, so allwch is correct. And the Geiriadur yr Academi is available online at [10]. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:05, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

@Aɴɢʀ: Yes, where it's elliptical for ni allwch, as in the formal construction ni allwch gadw torth a’i bwyta; I wouldn't say that that's correct in writing anything but dialogue, however (for one thing, that elliptical construction makes the sentence's negativity ambiguous without ddim for speakers who use the positive markers fe and/or mi). It's good to know that Geiriadur yr Academi is available online; thanks for the link. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:26, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

I think ddim (or its derivative mo) is pretty much obligatory in colloquial usage unless there's some other negative polarity item present. It's sort of like French, where the normal language uses ne...pas, highly literary language can eliminate pas and use just ne, highly colloquial language can eliminate ne and use just pas, but you can't eliminate both ne and pas. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 14:32, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

@Aɴɢʀ: I can see the analogy, and you may be right, but I stick to saying "that that's [not] correct in writing anything but dialogue". — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:47, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

The UK Electoral Commission uses it, so does Citizens Advice, so does Mental Health Matters. It seems to be OK to drop the ni (but not the ddim) in any sort of more colloquial, less literary register. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:46, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

@Aɴɢʀ: Maybe I'm just too conservative for the likes of those writers. Still, many of those just don't seem right to me. *shrugs*  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:21, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

R:LSJ and the Perseus Resolve Form

Hello ISMETA, you thanked me for an edit which I had rescinded, and I felt I should never have made. Did you mean to thank me for rescinding it? I felt it was useful but bibliographically inappropriate. I'm writing because if you did like the functionality I could implement it in a better way. Isomorphyc (talk) 13:16, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

@Isomorphyc: I was thanking you for the functionality it introduced. Perhaps, if the resolve form is called, the template can add that page to a category of entries that need to be made more bibliographically accurate; what do you say to that? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:11, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi ISMETA, in that case, you are welcome. Would you like to make this change? I am still not very good with categories and templates. Additionally, maybe the better thing for me to do would be to update the module with a headword list rather than just a collision list. This way, the resolve redirection can take place automatically for LSJ misses, and not just collisions. In this case, I could invoke your category of bibliographical corrigenda only for misses, while providing the same resolve link either way. I am trying to avoid the need for too many arguments for these templates; I feel it is hard enough for editors to make Greek entries with the macron-and-breve augmented polytonic and all the principal parts as it is. I appreciate your pointing out this is helpful; you are right that it is, since in fact I do not believe we have proper Slater and Autenrieth reference templates at all at this point. Isomorphyc (talk) 19:30, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

@Isomorphyc: Unfortunately, my knowledge of Lua is very poor, so I could do nothing more intelligent than revert your self-reversion. (I can do wikitext-coding, but that skill is rather passé on the English Wiktionary nowadays.) It would be a trivial matter to create {{R:Autenrieth}} and {{R:Slater}}; they'd both use a backend like Module:R:LSJ (I'm thinking of the polytonic_to_perseus_beta, format_perseus_url, and format_perseus_wikilink functions), with {{R:Autenrieth}}'s URL being http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0073:entry= and its bibliographical citation being Autenrieth, Georg, ''A Homeric Dictionary for Schools and Colleges'', New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891 and with {{R:Slater}}'s URL being http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0072:entry= and its bibliographical citation being Slater, William J., ''Lexicon to Pindar'', Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969. Would you be able to make Module:R:LSJ flexible enough to function as a backend for {{R:Autenrieth}} and {{R:Slater}}? (We can discuss the module's renaming to a better title — perhaps Module:grc authorities via Perseus — at Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits‎ later.) If you can, that would be great. Also, would it be possible to enclose the cited headword in guillemets: « » per the practice of Modern Greek punctuation, per {{R:DGE}}, and per the citations of those two authorities at Ἀριστοφάνης, Ἰφιγένεια, Πόλυβος, Ἀντίκλεια, ὄσσε, Εὐρύκλεια, ἠριγένεια, Ἠριγένεια, and κεχηνώς, please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:15, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

I will make these changes soon. I had actually assumed the guillemets were used for DGE according to the Spanish convention. I am about to go through the Greek entries with a robot for adding references. At present the consensus seems to be that people want LSJ, DGE, Strong's, and Woodhouse, in this order, followed by anything else already extant in the References section. I wish I knew more Greek editors to canvass for opinions. Do you have anything else you would like to see on the list (when the headword is available). Other options are Cunliffe (for Homer), LBG (for Byzantine Greek), Slater and Autenrieth. For Latin, I believe I am only adding L&S and the Meissner and Auden phrasebook, though I would welcome further suggestions here too. Thanks. Isomorphyc (talk) 15:45, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

@Isomorphyc: I agree with ISMETA that having {{R:Autenrieth}} and {{R:Slater}} would be quite nice. Why not add them now if your going to do a bot run anyway. —JohnC5 16:14, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

@Isomorphyc: Yes, I second John's suggestion. Adding Cunliffe and the Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität whenever they have relevant content would also be desireable. Basically, the more references you add, the more comprehensive our content can be, so I'm in favour of you adding everything with relevant content. For Latin, {{R:du Cange}}, {{R:Gaffiot}}, and {{R:NLW}} all link to online content, as does {{R:Smith's DGRG}} in the case of toponyms; {{R:OLD}} and {{R:Niermeyer}} also exist, but neither of those are legally available online for linking (AFAIK). Keep up the excellent work! — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:24, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Boy, I also wish there were a good, digitized version of le Grand Bailly online that we could query, but I certainly can't find it. —JohnC5 16:33, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you! The more of a paper trail I have for inclusion the better-- especially with the non-English dictionaries I didn't want to run the risk of seeming obtrusive unless I felt others used them. As soon as someone closes out the vote I will start with this-- feel free to ping me with further suggestions or if you see anything that can be improved. @JohnC5: By digitised, you mean not images? I assume one could link the digitised images here: [11] if one wanted; it would look a bit like the Woodhouse template, without the one-to-many problem. Isomorphyc (talk) 16:41, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

@Isomorphyc: As with Gaffiot and Woodhouse, images would be fine. My main issues with that version stem from my inability to query the page directly (I haven't dug around in the JS, but there might be a way hidden somewhere). Also, it seems like pages are missing. This may be a failing of the interface itself, and that the pages are uploaded and query-able, just not listed. If we can figure out how to query it, we can determine whether it's just the interface's fault. —JohnC5 16:50, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

@Isomorphyc, JohnC5: Well, this is all quite exciting. Re further suggestions, does either of you know how to get a complete list of the resources that have been digitised by Perseus? Guessing resource numbers like "1999.04.0072" doesn't sound very promising. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:01, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Ecce! —JohnC5 17:08, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Tibi gratias ago! I'll look through that list for citanda when I have more time. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:25, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @JohnC5, Isomorphyc: These are the additional ones for which it might be worth having reference templates:

• Perseus Encyclopedia [1999.04.0004] = PersEnc.
• The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites (1976) = PECS [1999.04.0006]
• Samuel Ball Platner & Thomas Ashby, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929) [1999.04.0054]
• Henry George Liddell & Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon (1889) [1999.04.0058]
• Charlton T. Lewis, An Elementary Latin Dictionary (1890) [1999.04.0060]
• Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898) [1999.04.0062]
• William Smith et al., A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890) [1999.04.0063]
• William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology (1848/1873) [1999.04.0104]
• Valerius Harpocration, Lexicon in decem oratores Atticos (ed. Wilhelm Dindorf, 1853) [2013.01.0002]

What do you guys think? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:58, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

These seem reasonable to me, though I can't say I've used any besides Lewis' An Elementary Latin Dictionary. —JohnC5 18:21, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: I am not familiar with most except by name through Perseus. What stood out to you in this list? For those which I know, in fact, I think LSJ and L&S are quite forbidding. While Elementary Lewis is too basic for a primary dictionary, Middle Liddell strikes a great balance, and it would be my recommendation to almost anyone for this. I never seem to use it much on Perseus, though feel I would find what I am looking for faster if I used it more, having used the paper edition more than regularly in the past.

I am not familiar with the other resources, but they are easy enough to link. It is beginning to concern me that we are building a bit of wall of references at this point, especially in Greek. Unless somebody currently uses any of these often, I would prefer to offer a curated collection, at least at a first glance. It might be possible to make a template with a name such as R:Perseus and link everything out of a list which will be initially collapsed? Isomorphyc (talk) 23:07, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: I finally have been able to look through these in more depth. They are all very lovely. Excluding the abridged dictionaries (Elementary Lewis and Middle Liddell), since mostly the others link proper names or exotic common ones, it would not be very obtrusive to link them all where available, but probably complementary. There are two issues: all of these books have Latin based headings, but some also include Greek spellings in addition. One would have to extract both separately. Secondly, we probably need entries for a great many of the headwords, especially in Greek, so I think building the modules will only solve half the problems. Nevertheless, thank you for finding these. I really like them, and at a minimum I'm going to make the modules. I will probably do it after linking the initial set of resources because these are slightly orthogonal problems. Isomorphyc (talk) 20:18, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Hi I'm so meta even this acronym is meta, and pinging @JohnC5, I hope you all y'all don't mind, but I edited the R:NLW citation a little bit. I was trying to be consistent with the other templates, but I also tried to retain the features in yours, as NLW does indeed change quite quickly. Please feel free to edit my somewhat inconsistent date format (or anything else) as you see fit. I'm afraid my new citation style is substantially uglier than yours. I temporarily included the subtitle, though perhaps this much detail it is not necessary or desirable. I put your old template on this sandbox page: User:IsomorphycSandbox/SandboxT and all of the transclusions in both the new style and the old style are included here for comparison: User:IsomorphycSandbox/Sandbox3. Thanks for making the initial template; I really enjoyed reading through some of it as I worked on this. As things look currently, I think Du Cange, Middle Liddell, and Elementary Lewis will get added in a second round of revisions, when the extra data will allow the unindexed links to be included or excluded slightly more accurately. The remaining works will be added after that, as they are not structurally straightforward dictionaries. Isomorphyc (talk) 16:52, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

@Isomorphyc: I'm very pleased with your edits to this template. Do we know if there's a way to get around NLW's "long url" dialog? —JohnC5 17:46, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I don't really see a way, but perhaps there is someone who will understand the web UI better than I do. It is quite strange, but the AJAX implementation is very fast once one is actually using it. Isomorphyc (talk) 18:06, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Weird. It's not super important. —JohnC5 18:16, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @JohnC5, Isomorphyc: To be honest, I just listed everything lexicographic I could find; I was limited for time, so I was unable to review them before posting that list. I am glad to hear that they met with approval (Valerius Harpocration's Lexicon in decem oratores Atticos was the one that I felt most enthusiastic about, primâ facie). I included Liddell & Scott's Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon and Lewis's Elementary Latin Dictionary in the list, despite their seeming redundancy and inferiority to LSJ and L&S, because their more basic presentation and restriction to main senses might make the core meanings of terms easier to grasp. Re "we probably need entries for a great many of the headwords, especially in Greek", would it be possible to create lists of those headwords on subpages of WT:RE:grc, in the style of WT:RE:la/L&S? Re {{R:NLW}}, I reluctantly support the uniformity of citation style that your (Isomorphyc's) changes introduce; however, I feel that including the subtitle ("Ein Wörterbuch des Lateinischen von Petrarca bis 1700") adds unnecessary clutter and giving the "accessed" date is certainly inferior to the former practice of including the revision date, but noting that we're linking to the pre-publication website is valuable and a laudable addition. Re User:IsomorphycSandbox/Sandbox3, I note that the argument-free transclusion for aromellinus doesn't actually link to the NLW entry, but instead just says "(must link: aromellinus)" — why is that?
Thanks to you both for keeping me in the loop; it is appreciated. Please note that I no longer have Internet access at home, which is why I'm on here far less regularly than I used to be. I hope that, someday, this inconvenient situation can be ameliorated. In the meantime, I apologise that I can't be on here more, and ask for your patience and understanding. I wish you all the best with your work on this project. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:45, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

@JohnC5, I'm so meta even this acronym: Your involvement is especially valued, and moreso for your willingness to devote time to this given the inconvenience. Let me answer these items in order for the time being. 1) I agree with you about the smaller dictionaries, and I also feel their formatting is substantially better on Perseus. 2) It would be easy to create these missing-words lists. (The full headwords lists already exist in machine-readable form on the OrphicBot userpage.) I would suggest, however, instead a format such as this one: User:Isomorphyc/Latin_Wiktionary_Misses. Conversely, I have been thinking of putting the above type of information into stub-articles, if this seems wanted by Greek users in general. (JohnC5 and I have discussed this a little in the past.) I would suggest the following procedure: a) import all the LSJ words appearing in The Republic; b) Homer; c) New Testament; d) anything occurring more than 10x in the Attic corpus. I still have a bit of work to do to make sure I can do this without mistakes. But the benefit is that we would be initially importing only important words from books which many people have read, so that it can be done more comfortably and with fewer mistakes. Obviously suggestions or other favourite works would be appreciated. 3) I don't like the length of the NLW subtitle either, but it does explain the purpose of the work, and since it is not famous I thought it added some value. I'm happy to remove it if everyone else is ambivalent. 4) The reason for the separate treatment of aromellinus is that I believe you manually linked the aromellinus Wiktionary entry to the NLW entry for ermina. I was only pointing out that this will obviously not work on an argument-free basis. For the dates: I seem to be unable to locate the current revision date, though I have seen it before. Do you feel I should replace the accessed-date with the most recent revision date? I can certainly do that. Isomorphyc (talk) 22:13, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

edited: or before The Republic, I would probably make a core vocabulary list of 2000 words by sampling a variety of works; I suspect we'd be missing somewhere in the mid hundreds of these, particularly verbs. Hesiod would be a lot of fun too. Isomorphyc (talk) 23:45, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Greetings @I'm so meta even this acronym, JohnC5: I think everything on this list is preliminarily implemented, with the partial exception of Harpocration, which will need a Greek lexical analyser to be useful, and probably would end up looking a little bit more like R:M&A and R:Woodhouse than the Perseus resources. I have a more immediate question, however. Before entering templates mechanically, do either of you have preferences for final names? I'm not very excited about either my long names or the short names, unfortunately.

current (long) name	possible short name
Template:R:Elementary Lewis	(same)
Template:R:Middle Liddell	(same)
Template:R:Perseus Encyclopedia	Template:R:PersEnc
Template:R:Harper's Dictionary of Classical Antiquities	Template:R:HDCA
Template:R:Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome	Template:R:TDAR
Template:R:Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites	Template:R:PECS
Template:R:Smith's Classical Biography & Mythology	Template:R:SDGRBM
Template:R:Smith's Classical Antiquities	Template:R:SDGRA
Template:R:Smith's Classical Geography	Template:R:SDGRG

Any better suggestions would be very welcome. Thanks, Isomorphyc (talk) 13:22, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

Vowel length in Septuagint names

Just curious, how do we know about vowel length in Septuagint names (such as the α in Ῥᾱχήλ)? Especially since according to our pronunciation module, vowel length disappeared before the Septuagint was written. --WikiTiki89 15:36, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt, JohnC5 --WikiTiki89 15:55, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

@Wikitiki89: This is an interesting question. We tend to add anachronistic length marks in Latin, especially New Latin terms that contain Classical Latin suffixes like -īnus. This is, to a great extent, false, but it makes Latin editors so sad otherwise. This seems to be a similar situation. There was no length in Koine, but the basic assumption made by Classicists is that Latin, AG, and Hebrew all preserve each other's vowel lengths. So I dunno. —JohnC5 16:04, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

But we don't even really know the vowel length situation in Hebrew at that time. At some point between proto-Hebrew and the time Hebrew was vocalized (c. 750 CE), some short vowels were lengthened, the newly lengthened vowels shifted in quality, and then the phonemic length distinction was (or may have been) lost again. The problem is we don't know when these things happened or exactly what stage Hebrew was in at the time the Septuagint was written. In fact the reason I'm asking this question in the first place is to see if I can learn anything about Hebrew vowels at the time of the Septuagint. --WikiTiki89 17:10, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

@Wikitiki89, JohnC5: There's also the evidence of descendant languages. The Arabic رَاحِيل (rāḥīl), Estonian Raahel, Finnish Raakel, Hungarian Ráchel, and Maori Rāhera all suggest a long a in the etymon. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:48, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

Why the eta (and not an epsilon)? Also— User:Isomorphyc's bot added a reference to Bailly, which is not only on the wrong page alphabetically but does not in fact appear to exist in that dictionary. —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 00:43, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi @ObsequiousNewt: Module:grc-accent.strip_accent() seemed to have an issue removing the rough breathing over the rho, creating the wrong link. I have temporarily fixed this by bringing back the original diacritics removal code, but will look into Module:grc-accent soon. The inclusion of Bailly is another issue: this dictionary, along with Gaffiot in Latin, is not indexed. I have followed the policy of including the non-indexed dictionary links for any lemma which appears in any other dictionary, with some caveats about eras. In this case, the Bailly link exists because the name appears in Strong's. I don't really like this behavior. Here are a few options 1) remove all machine-generated links to non-indexed dictionaries; 2) require multiple (perhaps all) indexed dictionaries to include a word in order to add a non-indexed dictionary link; 3) status quo: require only one indexed dictionary to include the word. What do you think? For what it's worth, I was also wondering about the eta when I saw this discussion. Thanks, Isomorphyc (talk) 02:40, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

@Isomorphyc: I would prefer option 1, viz. "remove all machine-generated links to non-indexed dictionaries". False positives significantly harm entry credibility. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:48, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym:, pinging @JohnC5, ObsequiousNewt, my experience is that 98%-99% of these links are valid, and that human users typically add Gaffiot (but not Bailly) to new entries, in my experience without always checking link validity. Since these are unabridged dictionaries, misses are as informative as valid entries, and users who follow the links often enough to find an error will be aware of the limitations of scanned dictionaries. My suggestion is to add a subsection to About Ancient Greek and About Latin describing the policy for automatic links to unindexed unabridged dictionaries (viz., currently, if and only if another indexed dictionary for the same time period also has a headword, correcting for spelling conventions). If this seems too loose, I'll go ahead an remove the automatically generated Gaffiot and Bailly entries. Isomorphyc (talk) 16:04, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

@Isomorphyc: I can't speak as to Gaffiot or, frankly, Bailly. I do know that LSJ only tends to show a few proper names (usually gods or places) and Beekes doesn't show any (despite seeming to refer to them). I think Autenrieth, Slater and Thayer show every word in their respective corpora. I would guess that Bailly and Gaffiot don't, since they're general lexica, but I only have one data point to support that. —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 17:16, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

strip_accent('Ῥάχηλ') works, and I think I actually remember fixing the error in question—so ideally that can be fixed. I would personally just turn off automatic citation of proper names, seeing as those are the only things that tend to not (consistently) be in dictionaries. —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 02:49, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

I will turn off automatic citations for proper names; the next iteration will be in a few days. strip_accent('Ῥάχηλ') is not working for me, and I do not see rho in the list of vowels. I will try to fix this tomorrow, but I may ask you for help. Thanks, Isomorphyc (talk) 03:13, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

@Isomorphyc Yeah, you're right, I wasn't paying attention. I think it's fixed now. —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 07:20, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: In any case, I could have tested it more in R:Bailly when it was added. At this time, I have removed all R:Bailly links to proper names which I had previously added. However, I did not remove any other unindexed dictionaries because Gaffiot and DGE seem to have quite a few, Gaffiot usually more than L&S. I'll make further changes if anything comes up. Thanks for pointing these things out. Edit: oops; thanks for the fix. I forgot they were regular expressions halfway through. Isomorphyc (talk) 12:08, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: The eta could easily be due to vowel quality rather than quantity. Don't forget that in proto-Hebrew, רחל was pronounced */raχil/ with short vowels and we don't know exactly what intermediate stage Hebrew was in at the time the Septuagint was written. --WikiTiki89 15:17, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Do we know for sure that Koine had no vowel length? We only claim no vowel length for 1st-century BC Egyptian, and keep in mind that (a) Egyptian Koine might have been more advanced than elsewhere; (b) the Septuagint was written 300-200BC, i.e. 200 years before 1st-century BC Egyptian. I think I remember reading that vowel length was still present significantly later in some areas. Benwing2 (talk) 17:57, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Note BTW that Gothic, which borrows 4th-century-AD Greek spelling, distinguishes i = short /i/ from ei = long /iː/, which suggests that some variants at least of Greek as late as then still had vowel length. Benwing2 (talk) 17:59, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

@Benwing2: The Pentateuch of the Septuagint, according to Wikipedia, was written in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 3rd century BCE. According to Wikipedia's entry on Koine Greek phonology, Egyptian Greek of the mid-2nd century BCE had already lost vowel length (before that it talks about 4th century BCE Attic Greek, which still had vowel length). But don't forget that my original question was about how we know whether the alpha is meant to be long or short. Keeping in mind that we don't even know the vowel length situation in Hebrew at the time; it could very well have even been that the first vowel in רחל was still short while the second was already lengthened, so the eta doesn't tell us much about the alpha. --WikiTiki89 18:12, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

It's been a long time since I studied Hebrew diachronic phonology and I don't remember it very well but I think the lengthening of vowels occurred quite early, before many other changes. AFAIK lengthening occurred in all unstressed open syllables but not necessarily in stressed open syllables. But you're right that unless we have direct vowel-length evidence we don't know for sure which vowels were short and which ones long (or even if vowel length existed in the Greek of the time). Benwing2 (talk) 18:50, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

But what does "early" mean? Without a point of reference, it's a meaningless word. It was a whole millennium later that the Hebrew texts were fully vocalized; that's plenty of time for any number of phonological changes. --WikiTiki89 19:02, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Early means, I think, before loss of case endings, which occurred c. 1300-1000 BC AFAIK. Benwing2 (talk) 19:18, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Three things: (1) The disappearance of the case system did not necessarily happen at the same time as the loss of final short vowels (and I believe the loss of the case system, as evidenced by the spelling of masculine plurals and the constructs of nouns like אב, is actually what your date represents). (2) Final short vowels are not the only way to explain the lengthened vowels in final closed syllables. (3) On the total contrary, the phonemic vowel length distinction could have already disappeared by the time of the Septuagint. The point is, we don't know nearly as much as we'd like to think we do. --WikiTiki89 21:21, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

You always have to have the last word, evidently. Benwing2 (talk) 01:59, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

I really hate when people say that. I really don't "have to have the last word"; if you or anyone else has a response that can debunk my points without leaving any holes (or even just a reference to another source), I'd be happy to hear it. I brought up this topic because I want to get to the bottom of it. If you give me a response and I see some flaws in it (or at least what seem like flaws to me), I'm going to point them out, regardless of whether I even believe my own argument or am just playing devil's advocate. What would you do in my situation, just accept a flawed answer? And anyway, it's nothing personal. I'm not saying that you're flawed, but that the theories you are referencing are flawed (or seem flawed to me). And I'm not even saying that these are bad theories, just that any theory on the subject is bound to be flawed due to the scarcity of evidence. --WikiTiki89 12:46, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, I wrote that out of frustration. It can be difficult to carry on a discussion with you because you seem (in my view) to treat discussions as arguments to be won rather than discussions per se (proverbially speaking, you'd rather be right than happy). I know this about you, and usually let you get the last word because I get tired of arguing with you, and otherwise you won't let the discussion die; but sometimes this is frustrating. Benwing2 (talk) 18:39, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

I realize that I can be difficult sometimes, but I hope you realize that I'm not trying to be. Also, I would actually prefer to be wrong with an adequate explanation than to be right and not learn anything new. What frustrates me most is when I'm told that I'm wrong, but the reason is not adequately explained, which makes me want to press for more information. So ironically, when someone "lets me get the last word", it is actually very frustrating for me (but I have no choice but to hold it in at that point). I'd much prefer if that person told me outright that they don't want to take the discussion any further, because at least that doesn't leave me waiting for a response. And by the way, right now I'm just trying to share my feelings and not to argue with your previous post, even though it might come off that way. --WikiTiki89 19:01, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

I don't remember the timing, but eta is the Attic reflex of an original long a, and seems to have been distinct in quality as well as quantity from epsilon. It wouldn't surprise me if it continued to be distinctive somehow as it converged towards the iota sound it has in modern Greek. Perhaps the key to figuring this out is to look at pre-Christian references to historical Hebrew people and places in other languages to see if there are differences in representation of vowels that might correlate to length distinctions. Notice I said "correlate": it's entirely possible that the phonemic distinctions might have persisted after they ceased to be a matter of actual length, as can be seen, for instance, with the transition of the Middle English vowels into their modern English descendants. Someone must have done studies on this, though I haven't read enough of the literature to even guess where to look for them. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:07, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

Thanks

You don't need to thank me for creating entries. It's just one more button to click on. SemperBlotto (talk) 08:22, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

@SemperBlotto: It's just to show my appreciation for your answering requests. Do you find it spammy? If so, I shall stop thanking you. Is that what you mean? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:24, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

It's just that, when you do it, the "alerts" thingy at the top of the screen goes blue and I have to click on it. Thanks anyway. SemperBlotto (talk) 08:26, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

@SemperBlotto: Fair enough; I can see how that would be annoying. I shall be far more sparing in thanking you in future! Do know, however, that I shall continue to notice and appreciate your work. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:29, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

You can turn it off in the settings somewhere... Equinox ◑ 13:44, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

re-examine çimerlik

çimerlik isn't Turkish, it is Azeri. Citations aren't valid. "çimerlik" have to re-examine. Also look here https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Requests_for_verification#estelik --123snake45 (talk) 08:55, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

@123snake45: Are you saying that the citations at Citations:çimerlik are written in Azeri, rather than Turkish? I cannot read either language, but I note that none of the citations at Citations:çimerlik feature any of the three letters ə, x, q — those Azeri additions to the Latin Turkish alphabet which Turkish does not use — so, orthographically, they certainly look more Turkish than Azeri. Or do you mean that the word is Azeri, rather than Turkish, even though we have evidence of the word's use in Turkish running text? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:33, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Citations aren't truth, they may fake. Also "çimerlik"'s meaning is false as grammar. Çimer is taking who bath, or bathes, also çimerlik is batherness... You can look here: [12], [13]. Beach is "plaj" or "kumsal" in the Turkish: [14]. There is no "çimerlik" in the Turkish. That word is Azeri. --123snake45 (talk) 21:33, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

@123snake45: Do you believe that the citations at Citations:çimerlik have been fabricated? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:33, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I believe.--123snake45 (talk) 17:50, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

@123snake45: I've started another RFV discussion about çimerlik; please see WT:RFV#çimerlik. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:17, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. I see it. --123snake45 (talk) 20:07, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

autowikibrowser

Hi,

I would like to be added to this list. By using the AWB I am going to add Kurdish prons to the entries (by using ku-IPA-template) For example. Thanks in advance ---George^Animal. 19:56, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

@George Animal: I see SemperBlotto got there before me. Have fun with it. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:45, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

mvi

You really think that this meets WT:ATTEST? I somewhat doubt it. There's a similar case at Talk:de, by the way. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:23, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: Hmm, maybe not. Though, with effort, I would imagine that de would actually pass. By comparison, how many of the members of Category:ISO 3166-1 and Category:ISO 4217 code would pass, do you think? What should we do with all these? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:50, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Well, if you think it probably couldn't be cited, you shouldn't create it (and now that you have, you should RFV it). I'm not sure about 3166, but I see 4217 codes in print all the time. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:14, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: I won't waste people's time. I've deleted the entry. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:51, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

Miyako spellings

I saw recently that you'd added several Miyako terms to the Wiktionary:Wanted entries list. I was puzzled to see you were using single-byte (skinny) katakana to indicate consonant-only sounds. Where did you get this notation? Half-width kana mixed in with full-width is very unusual, and this sometimes even suggests mojibake, so this caught my eye.

Poking around in what I can find, I'm not seeing anyone else do that. The Miyako Dialect Dictionary, for instance, apparently uses katakana to spell CV morae like グ /gu/, and hiragana to spell either moraic consonants like む /m/ or vowel sounds that don't exist in mainland five-vowel Japanese like い /y/. (Moraic /s/ may be an exception, appearing as ス.)

By way of example, I notice you added a request for Miyako term かいｽ (kais). The Miyako Dialect Dictionary has two entries with readings of kais, both spelled カイス in kana (the verb and the noun). Or the requested term がざﾑ (gazam), rendered in the dictionary entry as ガザむ /gazam/.

You also added a request for Miyako term つｽくｽ (tskɿ). The final glyph there in the reading appears to be an obsolete IPA character; I'm not sure what sound that's intended to represent. I see that the w:Obsolete and nonstandard symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet article describes this /ɿ/ in use by researchers of Miyako, but the sound it represents is (I think) more commonly rendered in Miyako contexts as /y/ or /ɨ/ instead. FWIW, I can't find anything resembling つｽくｽ (tskɿ) in the term list here, but the closest might be ツスクー /cyskuː/.

I'm worried that the half-width single-byte kana representations you've included in your term requests are not actually used in the wild. Would you be amenable to different renderings? (FWIW, I'm certainly interested in the Japonic languages and I'd love to see our coverage expand in this area.) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 06:32, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

There is a relevant comment at Wiktionary:Votes/2016-10/Redirect_fullwidth_and_halfwidth_characters#Oppose. —suzukaze (t・c) 15:55, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

@Eirikr: The comment suzukaze refers to is this one by Nibiko, and that is indeed what prompted me to add a Miyako section to ɿ (ɿ) and to request those nine Miyako terms. These halfwidth katakana are used by that website I linked to from Wiktionary:Wanted entries; see [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], and [23]. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:03, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

• Interesting. I can't find anything about who runs the site, or where they source their information, or what their spellings are based on, or what symbols they use and to what purpose. I'm not favorably impressed by JLect; it looks more hobbyist than serious.

Also, FWIW, looking at the JLect entries and cross-checking in the Miyako Dialect Dictionary (MDD), I find odd discrepancies -- JLect あふつｽ (afutsɿ) corresponds to MDD アフキィ (/afky/), and JLect つｽくｽ (tskɿ) corresponds to MDD ツキィシュ (/cykysju/).

In further searching, I see that the half-width katakana spelling also appears to be unique to JLect. JLect itself is inconsistent in its kana use, such as the alternating ぬﾑ・ぬん・ぬむ spellings in the entry for flea.

Given the indeterminate provenance of the JLect dataset, that it's apparently run and maintained by native-English speakers, and that the kana spellings there sometimes have a tenuous relationship to the given phonetics, I'm inclined to discount JLect's validity as a source for Miyako terms. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:29, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

@Eirikr: I have emailed the site owner, Zachary Read, to see if he can elucidate these matters for us. As far as I'm concerned, please feel free to correct my additions/requests as you judge best. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 04:09, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi everyone,

I.S.M.E.T.A brought this thread to my attention so I thought I would respond to a few of the concerns raised here.

To start, Eirikr is right in that users here shouldn't use JLect as a sole authoritative source. For one, I don't openly expose the references that JLect uses effectively to stop sites like Wiktionary and a few others from simply scraping the data. Secondly, JLect has a much broader scope than typical dictionaries, in that it documents all of the Japonic languages and their dialects, though it tends to focus on the most common forms across varieties (unless otherwise indicated at the top of an entry). In comparison, the Ryukyu Language Phonetic Database (RLPD) has a one-dialect focus, and for Miyako, that's the Shimozato dialect.

As a result of this, the RLPD records the word "moon" as /cyskuː/** for Shimozato, while JLect records /t͡sɿkɿ ~ t͡sks̩/, which is the form used in these areas: Shimajiri, Oura, Karimata, Sunagawa, Bora and Yonaha (source: Comprehensive research for investigation and preservation of annihilation crisis dialect – Survey report on the Southern Ryukyu Miyako dialects, page 155).

** Note: The /c/ represents [t͡s] in this instance and /y/ is used as an alternative for /ɿ/ due to the fact that Unicode wasn't prevalent when that database was created and they were limited to ASCII characters. As for what the non-standard symbol ⟨ɿ⟩ represents, it's a sound varying between a fricative, like [z̩] or [s̩], to a high central or high back vowel like [ɨ] or [ɯ] with heavy frication. It's especially noticeable in some clips like this one: http://133.13.160.25/rlang/myk/details.php?ID=MY16446.

That said, since you guys have shown an interest, I thought I would entertain you. Here's the full transcription system used by JLect with details on (1) why a good number of entries have multiple spellings (hint: the languages and dialects aren't standardized in writing), (2) why JLect uses different spellings from the RLPD for certain sounds (hint: the RLPD does not use a unified spelling across varieties) and (3) comparisons to other known orthographies : https://www.jlect.com/downloads/transcription-japonic-languages-dialects.pdf. Have fun. -- Zachary Read -- 192.171.49.220 22:45, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the response, Zachary Read. @Eirikr, have you read this explanation? Any thoughts? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 03:03, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

• A few ideas.

• @Zachary, if you happen to read this, I note that ⟨ɿ⟩ is currently not listed as an IPA symbol. If one attempts to browse the Wikipedia page for this glyph, the site redirects to the Obsolete and nonstandard symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet page, where ⟨ɿ⟩ is listed as a non-standard variation of ⟨͡ɯ⟩ (high back unrounded vowel with frication from preceding consonant). It sounds like this phonetic value is not correct for some dialects. Given the apparent room for confusion, is there any reason to use ⟨ɿ⟩ instead of standard IPA glyphs?
• The PDFs that Zachary kindly linked show how these terms are transcribed phonetically and in the Latin alphabet for various dialects. However, it doesn't seem to address the question of how these terms in these dialects are spelled by people actually using these dialects. There is mention of how different dictionaries list their terms, but it isn't clear if these kana spellings are dictionary conventions for sake of convenience, or if these are kana spellings in actual use. The Proposal to add Kana small letters dated 2016-11-07 appears to show some examples of small-kana spellings for Ryukyuan terms, but the context and provenance are unclear.

Are there any websites using these dialects, possibly similar to the Ainu Times' use of Ainu in running text?

Curious, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 18:34, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi Eirikr, to answer your questions:

1. Yes, I'm aware it's non-standard. However, (1) the symbol is pervasively used in Miyako linguistics and (2) it's a convenient umbrella symbol for representing all the phonetic variations. That said, in JLect's database, all entries that feature the sound include the symbol as well as the nearest generic IPA equivalent, which is typically [s̩] or [z̩]. See ぴづｽﾞ for example. I also suggest reading this section on the symbol's use in Mandarin and its various IPA representations: Syllabic fricatives in Mandarin.
2. I think you're missing the point. At the current time, with the exception of Okinawan (more or less), there simply is no writing system for any of the Ryukyuan languages. Most native speakers of these varieties are over 75 years old and they themselves never wrote in their language, so you won't find a book or a website or anything like the Ainu Times. Instead, what you have currently are a number of very competing transcription methods and proposals (written by non-native linguists and enthusiasts), with no accepted standards. To add, from a historical perspective, they're all very recent transcription schemes because the languages were historically banned from school and the government, they were perceived as mere dialects of Japanese, and it's only very recently that people started documenting them in writing and linguistics works.
3. The Proposal to add Kana small letters references the transcription method proposed by the work A unified writing system for the Ryukyuan languages (琉球諸語統一的表記法). You can actually access part of it online at [24]. However, like absolutely all other transcriptions, it's used mainly only by that author.

With all this said, if you guys are serious about incorporating words from the Ryukyuan languages into the Wiktionary, then I suggest you start an official Wiki project to evaluate all of the existing transcription methods and adopt a standard Romanization scheme and a standard Kana system for either the whole of Ryukyuan, or for each individual language. It's the only way to proceed, short of waiting some 50 years for a Ryukyuan body (or multiple ones) to accept a written standard. -- Zachary Read -- 104.247.239.165 03:27, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

@Eirikr, 104.247.239.165: How should we proceed, especially in the light of our criteria for inclusion? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:22, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

• As CFI currently stands, the Attestation criteria include the singular item, "clearly widespread use". Although the speech communities of the various forms of Ryukyuan are limited in size, simply the fact that speech communities exist is probably sufficient for our purposes.

That said, we must consider that 1) these dialects are primarily spoken and not written, and 2) no clear orthographic standard exists for any of these dialects in any script, and even further 3) that the very language labels can be confusing -- such as "Miyako" apparently referring to multiple dialects, possibly in the neighborhood of some 30 or 40 (per page 13 of the survey PDF that Zachary linked earlier), with a single word having sometimes quite divergent realizations. We must also bear in mind that Wiktionary is intended to be descriptive, recording what is actually used (both now and historically).

In light of the situation, I'm personally uncomfortable trying to include Miyako content: there's just too much unsettled at present. At a bare minimum, we (the Wiktionary editor community, which could include Zachary if he wants to participate) would need to come up with clear conventions for scripts, spellings, and labels (is "Miyako" the L2 language header? Or should it be "Shimozato", or "Oura", or "Yonaha", or...?), and all of this would need to be documented at the corresponding [[Wiktionary:About [LANGNAME]]] page.

That's my position. I am certainly open to having Miyako, etc. content -- so long as it's done carefully and consistently.

There is probably value in bringing this up at the Wiktionary:Beer parlor: what to do with languages that 1) clearly exist, but 2) might have indeterminate boundaries ("Miyako" vs. "Shimozato" etc.), and 3) have no clear orthography, not because there isn't any at all, but because the many researchers all seem to come up with their own approaches. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:58, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

@Eirikr: I feel hugely out of my depth on this issue. Would you mind taking the lead with the Beer parlour discussion? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:14, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Make sure you're up to speed on the whole Westrobothnian mess at rfv (with discussion on Angr's talk page). The issues were very similar, and the deletion of our entire Westrobothnian corpus may have set a precedent that could make this very problematic. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:10, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Pachyptilus

What I have found on this genus does not agree with what the entry shows. One source (CoL) has Pachyptilus being a synonym of Pseudhaloptilus; another (WoRMS) has a completely different set of species.
I'm happy to track this down. From where did you get the information you have, especially about the species? DCDuring TALK 18:01, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

@DCDuring: Just google books:"Pachyptilus". See also google books:"Pachyptilus abbreviatus", google books:"Pachyptilus eurygnathus", google books:"Pachyptilus lobatus", google books:"Pachyptilus migratorius", and google books:"Pachyptilus pacificus". — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:00, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

The BGC cites make it look like P. migratorius is a kind of locust, which implies that Pachyptilus would need another definition. Apparently in this use, Pachyptilus is a misspelling (alt. spelling?) of Pachytylus (P. migratorius), Linnaeus's Gryllus migratorius, now Locusta migratoria.

P. lobatus seems not to be too useful to contemporary biologists and is not found in Google Scholar,

Is your process to begin with the etymology or with one of DTLHS's lists and go where your efforts take you? DCDuring TALK 11:26, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

@DCDuring: Jeez, I wish I could make a claim to being at all systematic. This all started with me correcting pachyptila, which involved verifying that it isn't a Latin adjective, which led me to find those three other genera, amongst other things. Re Pachytylus, the -tyl- element is probably from τύλη (túlē) or τύλος (túlos) (LSJ: [25], [26]), both meaning “callus”, whereas the common -ptil- element of these genera is from πτίλον (ptílon, “feather”, “wing”); I'll leave you to decide whether those elements are legitimately interchangeable in the generic name of those locusts. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:16, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Taxonomic names are both prescribed and subject to more normal evolutionary processes. Prescription would argue for misspelling. Viewing Taxo-Latin as a more normal language would possibly argue for alt. spelling.

About {{taxlink}}: I use counts of its occurrence to indicate missing taxonomic names. That's why I remove the template when the name gets an entry. Keeping the template messes up the process. I have a hard enough time getting my regular expressions to approximately yield what I want, without having to exclude those that have pedia=1. A possible solution would be to use an alternative name for the uses of the template for names for which we already have an entry. The alternative name, say, {{tax2link}}, could simply call {{taxlink}} and pass its parameters to that template. (The extra character is in the middle to make the regex simpler.) DCDuring TALK 13:36, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

@DCDuring: I think that suggests regarding Pachyptilus quâ Pachytylus as a misspelling. I'm trying to understand you counting process; I thought that instituting the |entry=1 parameter had fixed all that. Is it that you want to avoid pages ending up in Category:Entries with redundant template: taxlink? Or are you counting pages somewhere else? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:36, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

I do a run against the XML dump to generate lists like User:DCDuring/MissingTaxa. The run counts uses of taxlink that enclose each taxonomic name. I try to add the most common taxa, missing orders and higher taxa, and missing English vernacular names. DCDuring TALK 20:01, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

@DCDuring: OK, I see how you do things now. I'll see if I can up with a better way of doing that. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:34, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

@DCDuring: See Wiktionary:Information desk/2016/December#Displaying Special:WhatLinksHere/ numbers for a relevant discussion. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:24, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Korean character boxes

In case you are interested, see these Korean hangul letters: ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅇ. I'm redirecting the alternative codepoints for choseong, jongseong and halfwidth forms of the same hangul letters, (I'm using {{R character variation}} in the redirected entries) and adding the respective character boxes in the "main" entries.

I'm doing this because the halfwidth -> normal redirects were voted and approved, and a number of choseong/jongseong already existed anyway as redirects, but the main entries didn't have multiple character boxes. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 08:51, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

@Daniel Carrero: Thanks for the heads-up. Adding the multiple character boxes is doubleplusgood. {{R character variation}} is also positive, but it is rather unlikely that many people will see it (the URL for a redirect page has to contain &redirect=no for a user to see the page itself); far more important, I think, is the kind of feature I proposed in Wiktionary:Votes/2016-10/Redirect fullwidth and halfwidth characters#Discussion, where certain codepoints autodisplay a message explaining their redirection. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:11, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

When you sent the message above, I was typing my reply about the feature you proposed there; please see it. Yes, I believe you are right: it is rather unlikely that many people will visit the redirected entries and see {{R character variation}}. In case we want to know what are the current character redirects, the template also populates Category:Character variation redirects, which I believe is a good thing. In the future, we might want to create a new module to make {{R character variation}} recognize the current Unicode block automatically, so it might be able to populate new categories named like this: Category:Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block character variation redirects, Category:Dingbats block character variation redirects. I don't think we need these new categories right now because Category:Character variation redirects has only 355 entries, (and from few blocks) but if this number increases too much, this is an idea that could be implemented. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 09:29, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

@Daniel Carrero: Please forgive my impetuosity. I agree with you re Category:Character variation redirects and re using Lua to “recognize the current Unicode block automatically” (which would also be labour-saving in the case of those autodisplayed messages). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:35, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

It's allright. :) Great, thanks. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 10:00, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Request for 読み切り - SOP

Hello ISMETA, I was having a look at the generic requested entries list and I saw that you added a request for this a while ago.

This is SOP. Just about any verb stem can be suffixed with 切る (kiru, literally “to cut”) to mean that the preceding verb action is fully completed, with an implication that there is no more of the object (if there is one) or that it has been fully consumed.

For instance:

• すしを食(た)べきりました。

  Sushi o tabekirimashita.

  [I] have fully / completely eaten the sushi [and there isn't any more].

• あの人気(にんき)あるシリーズを読(よ)みきった。

  Ano ninki aru shirīzu o yomikitta.

  [I] finished reading that popular series [and there aren't any left that I haven't read].”

• ホットドッグはよく売(う)り切(き)る。

  Hottodoggu wa yoku urikiru.

  [I] often sell out of hot dogs.

Consequently, I don't think 読み切り justifies an entry of its own. I'll see if the 切る entry needs updating. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:55, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

@Eirikr: I don't remember why I added that, but thank you for taking the time to explain it to me. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 03:10, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

@Eirikr: Wyang created an entry for 読み切り (“novel or comic book published as a single, standalone issue”), which helped to jog my memory: I got the term from the cover of a manga. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:22, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

• Aha, thank you I.S.M.E.T.A. for the ping, and thank you Wyang for the entry, I was not familiar with that usage. 勉強になりました。 (I've learned something new today.)  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 18:54, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

• No worries. I wasn't aware of this discussion - glad it was helpful! Wyang (talk) 22:05, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

• @Eirikr, Wyang: Thank you both. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:44, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Place names

I hope you don't mind me messaging you to say that voting is open on Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2017-01/Policy on place names. John Cross (talk) 13:40, 21 January 2017 (UTC)

@John Cross: Thanks for notifying me. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:41, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

@John Cross: Just an FYI, and I don't meant to impugn you, but this could be interpreted as canvassing. I do not believe canvassing is expressly forbidden on Wiktionary, but I'd advise caution. —JohnC5 17:51, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for the FYI. Like you, I cannot find anything to say canvassing is forbidden here. Following your message, I looked at the policy on Wikipedia and I can see why you are advising caution. John Cross (talk) 04:42, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

People have mentioned it recently on here as well for other votes, which is why I brought it up. Cheers! —JohnC5 06:16, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

@John Cross: Here are my two cents. IMO it's alright, I don't mind that you notified a few people about the vote this time, but I'd prefer if you used the WT:BP in the future, which would serve to notify everyone at once. It's correct that you didn't break any written rule, but if more people make an habit of sending a few vote notifications on talk pages, I'm afraid this might affect the vote results at least a little (or even too much), as opposed to showing community consensus equally. I'm thinking of maybe suggesting the addition an anti-canvassing rule in WT:VP eventually. That said, I would also be fine with creating a BP discussion about a vote and using {{ping}} to notify some people about the BP discussion, because the BP is highly visible to everyone anyway. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 06:39, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Pinging everyone: @John Cross, JohnC5. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 06:40, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

There's something so funny to me about people potentially canvassing for or against your proposed vote banning canvassing. —JohnC5 07:26, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

LOL, now that you mentioned it, I find the idea funny too. Maybe we should create a preemptive vote with the proposal of banning canvassing for or against the main vote about canvassing! --Daniel Carrero (talk) 07:30, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

@Daniel Carrero, JohnC5, John Cross: I don't think "canvassing" is really a problem now that we have Wiktionary:Votes/Active transcluded on everyone's watchlist. Indeed, that's how I find out about new votes; I don't really keep track of events in the Beer parlour. I would prefer not to see a vote about canvassing being created; that smacks of unnecessary hyperregulation. I would, however, be in favour of a vote explicitly requiring any and every vote be listed at Wiktionary:Votes/Active for the whole time that a given vote is open for that vote to be valid. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:59, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

It was my recollection that there have been complaints about canvassing since the transclusion of Wiktionary:Votes/Active, but I can't find them at the moment. Again, I'm just mentioning that it still can be misconstrued and should be avoided. —JohnC5 16:18, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Yes, I think you're probably right. I just want to avoid the informal disapproval from being turned into a formal ban. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:22, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Your reverts

I have no problem with the reverts you just did, but I thought I would explain why I did those edits in the first place: at the time there were dozens of module errors because the module wasn't detecting those, and what I did fixed the problem. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:14, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: Fair enough. I assume that the module error has been fixed by now, yes? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:19, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Cosmetic edits breaking screen readers

Edits like this which insert line breaks in conversations make it harder for screen readers to convert these into conversations. Also, I'd suggest that you consider archiving this page, as it's 400kb. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:34, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf: How does a screen reader convert text into a conversation? It just reads out the text, right? What's the audible difference between a conversation with comments separated by line breaks and one not thus separated? (FWIW, such edits aren't cosmetic; they make the text a lot more readable for me, making it clear which interlocutor says what in a given conversation.) Re archiving my talk page, OK; I'll stick it on my to-do list. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:23, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

I'm not very familiar with screen readers--I've never used one and I've certainly never done anything with programming or writing one. All I can say is what I understand to be the best practice to make WMF wikis accessible to as many users as possible. Per w:en:MOS:INDENTGAP, these line breaks that you are adding end and create new lists (you can see this yourself if you check the HTML). I guess you have to choose between making these edits easier for you to parse out or for others who are blind to have read to them. w:en:Wikipedia:Indentation and w:en:WP:THREAD discuss this further. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:36, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf: Without anything concrete to go on, I will therefore choose to make these edits easier for myself to parse out. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:45, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Korcz

I am not familiar with this surname. Did you mean Koncz? --Panda10 (talk) 18:51, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

@Panda10: No, Korcz. It's the surname of a guy on YouTube, who explained in a video that his surname is Hungarian. That was all in an English conversation, however, so maybe the correct Hungarian spelling is *Kórcz, *Körcz, or *Kőrcz — are any of those familiar to you? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:50, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Unfortunately, none of these are familiar. The Hungarian Wikipedia does not contain any entries for persons with these surnames. However, Wikidata does refer to people with this surname (Korcz) but they are all Polish. So I'm not sure how to prove that there is such a Hungarian surname. --Panda10 (talk) 16:07, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

@Panda10: Maybe the guy was simply wrong about the origins of his surname. Would you mind creating an entry for the Polish surname, please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:17, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

I think a Polish editor would be more qualified to create this entry. I am not familiar with their templates. Sorry. --Panda10 (talk) 13:18, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

@Panda10: No problem. I've added requests for it to both WT:RE:pl (diff) and WT:WE (diff). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:45, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Discussion about creating entries for unattested symbols

In case you are interested, I created this discussion today:

• Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2017/April#Proposal: Create entries for all unattested Unicode symbols but without "real" definitions

--Daniel Carrero (talk) 18:11, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

@Daniel Carrero: Yes, that interested me. I made two comments. Thanks for drawing my attention to the discussion. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:53, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Great, thanks. I'll remember to tell you when I suggest new stuff about our character entries in the future. :) As I said before, most of my "new" proposals existed in my mind and my PC for a few years, but I'd rather not dump a lot of proposals here at once. (I tried before, people didn't like it.)

I realize it's not up to me, but I hope the proposal of creating entries for unattested symbols without real senses passes at some point (it's "no consensus" in the BP discussion currently, I believe). When I proposed creating the Description section, the matched-pair entries like ( ) and the lots of character redirects, I've been trying to figure out ways to organize the normal citable symbols that we have, in a descriptive manner, and eventually "make way" for the unattestable symbol entries (that should also be descriptive), if that makes sense.

I wouldn't mind doing the complete opposite and deleting all the unattestable symbols, probably in normal RFVs, if other people want, even though that's not what I'd prefer. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 06:39, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

@Daniel Carrero: The way I see it, people are going to use Wiktionary to look up random codepoints, especially if they lack the character support to display them. We should, in some way, facilitate that, even if that function is judged to be outside the scope of a dictionary. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:24, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

I agree with you. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 00:38, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

efflower

What's your source for the "shed its blossoms" sense? (The odd italicisation reminds me of the KJV, btw.) I recently added all of the citations I could find, and they were of the graze/scrape sense, or scannos (or in one case dialect) for "flower". The only other citation I found was "instead of [a] head, lotus leaves with stem are delineated on the neck [of the woman], as if it is efflowering from it" in the Orissa Review, by two Indians, where it seems (from the picture) like it is an error for "flowering". - -sche (discuss) 03:54, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

@-sche: A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles lists the entry “†Efflow·er, v.¹” (see the bottom of the middle column) with the definition “intr[ansitive] Of a plant: To go out of bloom.”, supported by the single quotation “c1420 Pallad. on Husb. iii. 82 This meene [kynde] effloureth [L. deflorescit] sone.” I considered the definition “go out of bloom” rather unclear; so, because effloureth translates dēflōrēscit in the cited quotation, I based my revised definiens on the Oxford Latin Dictionary’s definitions of dēflōreō and dēflōrēscō, which both bear the sense “To shed blossom”. Since “to shed blossom” is ambiguous as to transitivity, I added the “its” to make the verb’s intransitivity explicit. Finally, because the pronoun may vary when the word is substituted by its definition, I italicised it to indicate that fact. Irrespective of all that, I trust that you’re right that the Middle English efflouren did not survive as the English efflower. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:15, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Whatever...

...happened to you? I kinda missed seeing you around Indian subcontinent (talk) 22:14, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

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