User talk:J Milburn

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Old English

Hi. We do not use diacritical marks in OE page names. Please see Wiktionary:About Old English. Widsith 21:08, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

And BTW, please don't create redirect with diacritics linking onto entry names without diacritics. See WT:REDIR. Cheers! --Ivan Štambuk 15:14, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Placenames

"a place name" doesn't actually tell us very much. SemperBlotto 21:16, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Not that we're picking on you but...

Could you please use template {{given name}} for names, 'cos it does all the cateorising automagically ;) Conrad.Irwin 22:23, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

-ingtun, -tun

Can you check your source again please? -ing means "pertaining to", but the tun just means "town". Widsith 22:36, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Do you do requests?

Goosnargh Oakenclough Holleth Myerscough Catterall - just a few around Garstang for the time being. SemperBlotto 16:43, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Hi. I've taken the liberty of adjusting your place names entry template a bit. The {{en-proper noun}} template automatically uses the place name in bold and categorizes the entry. There is also a Category:Place names.

Note: If you're using Mills to get the information you add, then it would be courteous to say so in a ===References=== section (which could also be added to the template. If all the place names are in England, then adding that to the definition line of the template would also be helpful. --EncycloPetey 17:39, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, we always want citations, but if Mills is your source for the etymology of the name, then it really should be credited. --EncycloPetey 18:00, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Diacritic redirects

Well, as we don't create pages with definitions for words with diacritical marks, as per this guideline, what are we supposed to do if not create redirects? Leave them as permanent redlinks? That's a little counter-productive... J Milburn 16:04, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

No, diacritics were not part of standard orthography (though it's a bit silly to speak of "standard orthography" for extinct languages but anyway..), they were also not phonemic, ergo we shouldn't use them for entry names at all. Similarly for Latin - article is on alea but the headword says ālea. Paper dictionaries of lots of languages often use additional diacritics to mark things such as long/short vowels, stress/pitch accent - but that are (almost) never used in ordinary circumstances (i.e. actually written spoken language). Most people don't even know how to type them. You should link to articles without diacritics, but provide them as "alternate text", i.e. such as for above-mentioned alea: {{term|alea|ālea}} or [[alea|ālea]]--Ivan Štambuk 16:28, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Also: this - if it's an alternative spelling, it should be a full-blown entry by itself; either using an {{alternative spelling of}} in the definition line (if you don't want to duplicate data), or a duplicate with ===Alternative spellings=== header (see WT:ELE) --Ivan Štambuk 18:47, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Do note that in some languages, where the diacritics are part of the written language, we include them, such as in Latvian. As Ivan notes, we don't do this for Old English or Latin because they are not part of the everyday written language. --EncycloPetey 23:11, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

headland

Thanks for your contributions. I can see that you're getting a lot of, um, help. I often insert "morphological" etymologies. They are not always historically accurate. For example the word may have been borrowed whole from another language. In the case of headland, perhaps headland is a calque from the Old English. Does -fod serve as a common combining form in OE? What are its OE meanings?

You might want to familiarize yourself with the template {{term}} which gives us the maximimum usability of the etymological information you provide. I edited headland's etymology to show the use of that template. It allows for differences between entry name and displayed text, use of different scripts, inclusion of language codes for purposes of subsequent utilization by bots, transcriptions, and glosses. Also, {{etyl}} is a more general format that works for etymologies not just of English words (like the OE. and ME. templates), but for any language. Thus {{etyl|ang|enm}} indicates that the etymology is about the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) [ang] etymology of a Middle English [enm] word. That is what would appear in an etymology for a word under a "Middle English" language (Level 2) heading. The codes used are part of ISO standard system w:ISO 639. The OE. and ME. templates are fine. "Etyl" is not as important for English as use of the "term" for the words in an etymology. DCDuring TALK 16:29, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

citations, not references

Citations are meant to be dated and reference usage examples (see Citations:abiding-place as an example. What you are providing should go in the ===References=== section of the word. Cheers. SemperBlotto 14:03, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Tethera

Thanks for adding the excellent references for tethera, but its use is much more widespread than Borrowdale, and it was also used for counting knitting stitches (though I might struggle to find references for this). Best wishes to a fellow-Cumbrian. Dbfirs 09:34, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Do your references give 13 and 14 as "tethera-a-dick" and "methera-a-dick"? The more common forms are "tethera-dick" and "methera-dick" outside Borrowdale, but I'm not an expert on this (I learnt the numbers more than forty years ago), and the words have changed substantially over the centuries. Dbfirs 07:52, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Sheep counting

Hi, could you please correct the template you use for sheep counting entries? The Cardinal number should be at level 3 (===Cardinal number===) not at level four. I'd also appreaciate if you would go back to each number you created and correct the level. I've corrected two of them. The AutoFormat bot flags each entry because the structure is not correct. Thanks for your help. --Panda10 11:38, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for following up. Also, when you modify the entries, please remove the AutoFormat tag, the line starts with rfc-level. When you remove this line, the entry will also be removed from the category that lists entries with structure problems. Thanks. --Panda10 20:35, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, you're right. For multiple etymologies level 4 Cardinal number should be used. Apparently, the numbers I looked at had only one etymology... --Panda10 20:49, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Header level for "References" sections

Hello J Milburn -- I appreciate the interesting new entries you have been creating. Concerning this recent edit to yan-a-bumfit, the "References" section is generally treated as a Level 3 header (===References===). Level 4 is used when there are multiple "References" sections in an entry (a rare occurrence). -- WikiPedant 05:00, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

That's almost right: the L4 header is when it is specific to a POS, and listed under the POS as shown. (May or may not be more than one of them.) Robert Ullmann 11:27, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

And we do like the entries! Robert Ullmann 11:27, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I agree with what you say, Robert. Getting back to cases like yan-a-bumfit, where the entry only contains one part of speech, I believe it is standard practice to treat the "References" section as Level 3, since the references then necessarily pertain to the entire English-language entry. -- WikiPedant 14:41, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments and advice. After a reread of the layout guidelines, I'm going to fix those headings that need fixing. J Milburn 21:17, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Goosnargh

How do I pronounced Goosnargh? --Borganised 10:22, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

p. vs. pp.

Hi,

In case you're curious, the abbreviation for "page" is p., and that for "pages" is pp.; and likewise for "line(s)" = l(l)., "which [article(s)] see" = q(q).v., and so on.

But at Wiktionary, we don't use any of them (we just write the word), so you don't need to worry about it. :-)

—Ruakh_TALK 18:13, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

alet

I have undone your edits here, as Celtic is not a language, but rather a language family. If you happen to know which Celtic language this word is in, you're of course welcome to add the word in. Any questions feel free to ask. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 02:40, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

nata

Hello, a long time ago, you added Old Norse entry in nata article. DO you have any source to source this add? I ask you that becauise I do not find any attestation of this world in Old Norse. Thanks. Pamputt 09:58, 29 January 2011 (UTC)