User talk:KYPark/屯

Location of sandboxed entries for creating / editing draft versions

Hello again --

I apologize for my previous confusion about Talk:屯/Korean, I didn't understand at the time what you intended. Now that I see that page, I think the content is mostly good, but that kind of drafting would be better done on a subpage of your own. I suggest using a page such as User:KYPark/Sandbox. I've set up my own group of sandbox pages, such as User:Eirikr/Sandbox, User:Eirikr/Sandbox2, User:Eirikr/Sandbox3, and even User:Eirikr/Scratchpad, for just such drafting and testing. Once I have finished creating or editing the content, I copy the source from my sandbox page and paste it into the intended destination page. Then (when I'm being smart) I delete the content from my sandbox page.

Recycling one's own user sandbox this way requires less resources on the server, and doesn't clutter up the server history and page indexing.

If you don't mind, I will move the Talk:屯/Korean page to User:KYPark/Sandbox. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:39, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

• It's always very hard in practice to give (you) all the background information. In retrospect, I felt a little guilty when I overcrowded the revision history of 城. So I wanted to draft or sandbox 屯#Korean on the Talk:屯/Korean which as a sandbox could be deleted someday. I could feel free to do it on my User:KYPark/屯 from the beginning. (No need to move it on User:KYPark/Sandbox.) But I just wanted it to be more public and talked to you. It should be alright, I guess!
• Wikis like users experimenting with new ways. Thus it would be unjust and even rude for Chuck Entz and Ruakh to have deleted Talk:屯/Korean of a provisional sandbox kind and Talk:屯, respectively, immediately without the RfD or Talk to me. On such occasions, I feel like being (treated like) a ruthless vandal. Don't you?
• Most vital and fatal, however, is Chuck Entz's reason for deletion reading "encyclopedic, better kept on user subpage" contrary to your view "the content is mostly good," hence an unbearable prejudice of his! He should talk how improperly "encyclopedic" it is at all. It's his duty of honor, I guess.
• BTW, to delete the used-up sandbox at last is more economical storage than to keep all the entry revision history as usual, isn't it?
• BTW again, from the quotation of Definition #2 of Talk:屯/Korean, I wonder if you have noted the "communal village meeting house (dinh)" perhaps worth comparison with thing and Ding. This might annoy some people!

--KYPark (talk) 01:31, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

• For my part, I do think that folks here sometimes rush to action without talking to others first, which is probably the biggest failing of the Wiktionary community in general. I can sympathize to some extent, as we are generally all quite particular about things (one must be particular, in order to enjoy working on a dictionary ^_^ ), and when we see something out of place, our first instinct is generally to fix it, to the best of our understanding of what "fix" means for that situation. However, impatience and haste can lead to unfortunate results; I know I've been hasty in the past, and it's something I must be aware of and careful of in my own actions.
• Thinking about Chuck's comment about "encyclopedic", I think that arose not because of any strong prejudice on his part, but probably for two other reasons -- 1) I don't think he's spent much time working with CJK language entries, and so is not familiar with the large numbers of synonyms, compounds, and senses that such entries often have; and 2) the quote about "The conquest of Champa" is out of place, as a) this is a quote in English, not Korean (example quotes must generally be in the language of the entry term), and b) this quote describes use of the term 屯 in Vietnamese. The quote is also quite long, and it does come across as a short encyclopedic entry about Vietnamese don dien.

To fix these issues, I would strongly suggest that you find a quote that is 1) in Korean, 2) shorter, and 3) uses the term 屯 in context, rather than just describing how the term is used. If you cannot find a suitable quote, it would be better to have no quote instead of the quote in English about usage in Vietnamese.

• About deleting sandboxes, once a page is created, that revision history and data is kept by the server, even if the page is deleted. I think deleting a page might also entail a heavier server load than just emptying the content. I'm no expert, but what I've read suggests that keeping one or a couple of sandbox pages and recycling them is less resource-intensive (for the server) than using individual sandbox pages and deleting them.
• About "crowded" revision histories, no worries -- I really don't think that's a problem.  :) If it still concerns you, one thing that I have sometimes done is to use a separate text editor on my PC to compose pages, and then I will copy from the text editor window into the Wiktionary edit screen.
• About Vietnamese dinh and German Ding and English thing, that's certainly interesting, but without knowing more about the etymologies of all three words and more about historical sound shifts in all three languages, I'm not sure how significant this is -- the human mouth can only make so many sounds, so it is inevitable that there will be some overlap.

Sometimes the overlap is for historical reasons of sound shift or word composition: for instance, modern Korean 팥소 (patso, “bean paste”) seems similar to modern English paste. However, 팥소 (patso) is a compound of 팥 (pat, “red bean”) + 소 (so, “stuffing?”), while paste ultimately derives from Greek παστός (pastós, “sprinkled with salt, salted”).

Sometimes the overlap is for biological reasons: for instance, a number of speech researchers have put forward the hypothesis that the physical constraints of a baby's mouth and the physical motions of a baby's mouth are a large part of why sounds like ma / mama / ama / ba / baba / aba / pa / papa / apa etc. are so common in words referring to mother and/or father or some other parental relation in various languages around the world.

Sometimes there is no overlap in the sounds of words in modern languages, even when the words come from the same original root. For instance, modern English wheel is cognate with (i.e. has the same ancient root as) the modern Greek κύκλος (kýklos) and the modern Hindi चक्र (cakra).

To put it another way, similarities in the sounds of modern languages can obscure different roots, or origins in biological processes. Meanwhile, differences in the sounds of modern languages can obscure identical roots. Without knowing the history of sound changes in a language, and without knowing more about the ancient forms of a word, the sound shifts involved, and the semantic history, we cannot tell whether a word in one language is related to a word in another language.

So for Vietnamese dinh and German Ding and English thing, that's interesting, and merits further research, but the resemblance alone is not enough to say anything definitive.

-- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:07, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Sorry to move leftmost...

"the biggest failing of the Wiktionary community"

Absolutely! It breaks the community and "drives out the good." Five years ago, I stopped contributing in Korean, as some pages I created were even deleted without any Talk. Who were "the bad money"? Conservatives of invested interests, I suspect. Those, if any, who blamed me for making my edits a "laughing stock" are to blame for making many Korean entries and translations afterwards as such in effect, I fear.

"Chuck's comment about "encyclopedic""

I wait for Chuck making clear "encyclopedic" comment for himself rather than any speculation. You see this is a mere draft, and if the very quotaion is not worth a proper quotation, it could be included either in Usage notes or Footnotes, and that in the Vietnamese entry. It is another matter of formality to add Korean quotations proper. I wonder why such a mere matter of formality matters seriously enough for a rude deletion.

I would respect whether your or Wiktionary's urge of formalism such that the quotation be in the entry language. In turn, I would ask you to respect my urge such that my edits be more informative anyway than as usual and the very Viet case in English be included either in Usage notes or Footnotes, if proper as a quotation in neither Korean nor Vietnamese entry. You see this information is for English readers as likely strangers to the historical oriental "frontier farm" (屯田).

Above all, to put another way, this quotation is vital or critical enough for English readers to understand 屯 well, definitely centering around the frontier farm (屯田) on the one hand and the rarely-documented assembly ("dinh") on the other. It is an assembly, colony, community, flock, folk, horde, troop or the like in itself!

"About deleting sandboxes"

Understood.

"About "crowded" revision histories, no worries"

Understood.

"About Vietnamese dinh and German Ding and English thing"

Now this has become an open question. Meanwhile, there appears an absolutely resolute will to deny all the open questions, say, all the East-West coincidences. Such appears absolutely overdone and ill done, I regret most. What looks like a tiger is likely to be a tiger, hence an open question that should remains so until fully falsified, whether in theory or in practice. This is a way to science proper!

English cycle and perhaps wheel via OE hweogol likely derived from Greek via Latin is said to be a frequentative such as Japanese ころころ from ころがる cognate to くるま and Korean 구르다 as well so that part if not all of these East-West words may be cognate, that is to say, worth an open doubt, no doubt!

What if it is or were not a frequentative at all? Then it may be seriously suspected of kinship to Korean (珥#Korean) that was so widespread in ancient Korea.

Honestly, I take 屯 specially seriously as likely cognate to:

• ang: dun "hill, mountain"
• eng: dune "hill, sand-dune"
• eng: down "hill"
• eng: town "fortified settlement"
• deu: Zaun "fence, hedge"
• dut: tuin "garden"
• non: tun "enclosure," etc., etc., ...

All these European senses happen to be those of 屯. The thing adds up to all these, hence such a great statistical consilience, as specially noted since Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge in 1998 after Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, the very year of World Brain Revolution, as it were, believe me or not! You'd better take it very seriously!

--KYPark (talk) 04:16, 11 July 2012 (UTC) --KYPark (talk) 08:00, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

I do take it seriously: I take it seriously enough to look at the histories of Vietnamese dinh and Chinese-derived 屯 and PIE-derived town / Zaun / tuin etc.

In looking into those histories, I see evidence of convergent semantic evolution, but divergent origins:

• I do not know any Vietnamese, and I do not know what diacritics might be needed to find the version of dinh that means "communal village meeting house". I do see that Vietnamese dinh is notably not listed as a reading for 屯, suggesting that these two words are unrelated. I also see that the EN WT is missing any Vietnamese noun entry with spelling similar to dinh (see Category:Vietnamese_nouns), whereas the ZH WT has a zh:dĩnh entry, linking to several different possible hanzi, none of which seem to have a meaning similar to "communal village meeting house".
• Chinese 屯 as a character was apparently composed from two elements, radical 屮 with a single additional stroke across the top. 屮 means sprout, and if I understand it correctly, the explanation at zh:𡳾 suggests that the character 屯 arose from the idea of sprouting together, perhaps from there leading to ideas of groups and grouping.
• European-language terms town / Zaun / tuin etc. apparently derive from the common root of Proto-Indo-European *dheuh₂, *dhuh₂ (“to finish, come full circle”), strongly implying the idea of "finished" rather than "sprouting > beginning".

Consequently, in the absence of new discoveries of older linguistic data, I am left with the conclusion that Chinese 屯 only resembles European-language terms town / Zaun / tuin etc. as the result of historical accident. -- Kind regards, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 21:53, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

"Communal house in the village" is đình, Sino-Vietnamese of 廷 ("court") and 庭 ("yard"), as in 조정(朝廷), 법정(法庭). Both go back to Old Chinese liquid consonant initials: *l̥ˁeŋ, *l̥ˁeŋs, not *d/t/tʰ-. 60.240.101.246 22:51, 26 December 2012 (UTC)