User talk:Rua/Archive 2011

Appendix:Proto-Germanic *dailōn

Hi. I see where you had moved *dailô > *dailōn some time back. Was that before we worked out a method of showing forms in -ô? This term is a fem weak n-stem is it not? Leasnam 17:10, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Feminines have the final nasal vowel though. All daughter languages show it that way, and it makes sense that the -n would spread to the nominative since all other forms had it. —CodeCat 17:13, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

So this is the way we will show them for fems forward? in -ōn? Leasnam 17:21, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that does make sense to me. Ringe says we can't be sure, but since all daughters agree and it's such an obvious regularisation, I don't see anything against it. —CodeCat 17:26, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

ok. head= for *dailōn has dailǭ. Keep this? Leasnam 17:29, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

It's a long nasal o, which is what would've formed after the final -n was lost. —CodeCat 17:30, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

can you tell why *dailōn is not showing up under Category:Proto-Germanic ōn-stem nouns? Leasnam 18:23, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

The cache needs to be updated, and it's just taking a bit longer. If you edit the page but make no changes, it will recache the page and add it to the category. —CodeCat 18:29, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

PG adverbs

In PG, adverbs usually take an -o ending? or is it -a/-ō ? Leasnam 23:32, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

The vowel is reflected as -o in OHG and Gothic, and word-final -ô is the only vowel that does. So it would be -ô. I've no idea where that ending comes from though. —CodeCat 23:37, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

In Old English it is -a/-e, which makes sense. Looks analogously like the weak noun ending between the various langs. ok, I'll use the -ô. Thank you. Leasnam 19:48, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Gothic also has -aba/-iba. Any insights on this ending? Leasnam 19:51, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

PG -ô normally ends up as -a in OE, and that one does exist in a few words I think. But it can't be the source of OE -e. Gothic had an alternative ending -ē though, that one seems like a more plausible source for the OE suffix. Old Norse -a could go either way, since -ē and -ô both become -a in ON.

I don't really know about Gothic -ba, Ringe says that he thinks it was inherited but he can't say where it came from because only Gothic has it. —CodeCat 21:33, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Just out of curiosity, when we use -ô, what does the circumflex signify? Stress and length/nasalisation (like ǫ)/or other? Leasnam 18:23, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

It means an overlong vowel. I'm not really sure how it would be pronounced but supposedly it's pronounced as two separate syllables. There is also a distinct nasal overlong o in the genitive plural ending of nouns and adjectives, but no language actually distinguishes it from the non-nasal overlong o in its development, so it might have already been pronounced non-nasal in PG. —CodeCat 18:26, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Ringe gives a little table to show the developments of the different kinds of word-final o in the later languages:

* PG -ō > Got -a, NWGmc -u > ON -, OE -, OHG -

* PG -ǭ > Got -a, ON -a, OE -æ > -e, OHG -a

* PG -ōz > Got -os, ON -ar, OE -æ > -e, OHG -a

* PG -ô > Got -o, ON -a, OE -a, OHG -o

* PG -ǫ̂ > Got -o, ON -a, OE -a, OHG -o

* PG -ôz > Got -os, ON -ar, OE -a, OHG -o

—CodeCat 18:36, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Urgermanska

Hej, finns det något sätt jag kan sätta mig in i urgermanska? Jag är intresserad av etymologi och skulle kanske vilja hjälpa till med de urgermanska uppslagen, men jag kan inte så mycket om just urgermanska. Är de rekonstruerade formerna egen forskning eller har du någon typ av källa, och hur har du lärt dig böjningsmönstren och dylikt. Har du något tips? :) Lundgren8 23:22, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Jag har här en bok om urgermanska, den heter 'From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic' av Don Ringe. Den har nästan alla böjningsformer och förklarar också precis hur urindoeuropeiskan blev urgermanskan. Du borde verkligen köpa den, den är mycket bra. :) Det finns också 'Etymonline', en site med etymologier av engelska ord. Lingvisten Gerhard Koebler har sämmanställt ordbok av alla gamla germanska språk, men de är bara i tyska: se här. Jag hoppas att det hjälper dig (och också att min Svenska är riktig)!. —CodeCat 23:43, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Tack så mycket. Jag ska ta mig en titt på böckerna. Etymonline och Wiktionary visar ofta två olika rekonstruerade former. Vad beror det på och hur ska man veta vilken som bör användas på Wiktionary? Lundgren8 00:12, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Vantligen kommer de olika etymologierna bara från andra skeden av utvecklingen av urgermanska eller från skillnader i stavningen. Till exempel, i gammal urgermanska fanns det den a-stam akkusativendelse -am, som då blev -an och slutligen -ą (nasalvokal). Det finns ingen standard för det, några källor har formen med -am och några med -an. På Wiktionary:About Proto-Germanic har vi skrivit upp några anvisningar för en 'standardform' av urgermanskan som vi kan följa på Wiktionary. —CodeCat 01:20, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Tack för hjälpen, jag har med dina resurser försökt skapa *dailijanan. Jag hoppas att det blev bra. Jag vill bara tipsa dig om några resurser för svenska och fornsvenska som tack.

• Svensk Etymologisk Ordbok: En riktigt bra etymologisk ordbok som går tillbaka till fornsvenska, gutniska och urgermanska.
• Fornsvensk lexikalisk databas: En fornsvensk ordbok.

Lundgren8 02:05, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Ooh tack för länkarna! Jag har andrat några ting på dailijan. I fornsaksiska, j används inte vantligen, man bör skriva i. Och nederländska kommer inte från fornsaksiska utan från fornnederländska, den moderna avkomling av fornsaksiska är lågtyska (eller lågsaksiska). Vantligen är de detsamma men ibland inte (fornsaksiska har 'gōd', fornnederländska har 'guod' eller 'guot'). Men annars det ser ut bra. :) —CodeCat 11:06, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Okej tack, jag tog informationen från dælan. Jag visste inte vad den fornnedeländska formen var så jag lämnade den. Stämmer det att nästan alla transitiva verb som slutar på -janą är svaga verb klass 1? Jag tänkte på till exempel *dailijaną, *dōmijaną och *laizijaną. Lundgren8 12:20, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Inte alla. Det finns också 'j-presents', som är starka men har -j- i presens (t.ex. Template:termx). Och några svaga verb i klass 1 var starka förut men blev svaga. Man kan identifiera dem därför att imperfektformerna har inte -i- (t.ex. Template:termx). Och då finns det klass 3 svaga verb, som kan ha -(i)janą eller -āną. —CodeCat 12:42, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Hm, okej, tack för hjälpen. Det verkar vara ganska svårt att skapa nya uppslag eftersom man inte säkert kan veta vilken böjning de hade. :) Lundgren8 13:33, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Template talk:ang-conj

Hi CodeCat,

Do you do Old English? Mglovesfun said you might have some input about this.

Thanks in advance,
—Ruakh_TALK 19:01, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Old Swedish declination templates

What have you based these on? I have never been able to find a 100% perfect source to declination patterns. Have you based it on Altschwedische Grammatik? I have however never been able to find a reliable source for the definite article. Perhaps you could help me? Lundgren8 01:12, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Yes I based them on Altschwedische Grammatik. It actually mentions the definite article too, just in a rather roundabout and complicated way. It doesn't have a neat little table like you'd expect so it took me a while to find it. —CodeCat 10:08, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Ah, that have to be it. My German is not so good so I had a really hard time finding it. However I’m looking for a book in Swedish by the same author. Hope to get my hands on it. But would you mind telling me where exactly the definite article says? Because if you google you find a lot of variations of plural dative with definite article like -umin, -omon. You also find -inum in singular dative. I suppose it also had a lot of variations, but still. Lundgren8 13:23, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Yes there are a lot of different forms for the dative plural. I wasn't sure if I should list all of them so I just picked one. In general there seems to be a lot of variation between i/e and u/o. So you see -umum, -unum, -unom, -onum, and the same with m and n reversed. The oldest forms are -umnum and -ummum in any case. —CodeCat 14:15, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Yeh, U is older than O. In modern Swedish, the remains of the dative uses O. And the same with I and E (in the same order). I just thought that having M instead of N in -omom seemed weird. Compared to for example Icelandic -unum. Lundgren8 19:45, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

I think the grammar mentioned that -onom was rarer than -omon in most texts, but I'm not really sure I'm reading it right as German isn't my native language either. —CodeCat 20:53, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Finnish conjugation+declension template problem

Your recent changes to the Finnish templates seem to be going wrong with the consonant gradation examples in the declension+conjugation appendices (eg Appendix:Finnish declension/koira). Could you have a look into that? Thanks. --KJBracey 12:55, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing that issue with the declension tables for plural only words. It was irritating me a little. As KJBracey noted, all of the square brackets are showing up under Complete declension example with consonant gradation (t → d) in Appendix:Finnish declension/koira. ~ heyzeuss 19:27, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure how to fix it, really. I know how I could fix it, but there are several ways and I'm not sure what is the best way. My concern is mostly that the tables need a lot of extra code just to make the appendixes work again, but in the larger picture the appendixes are only a very small proportion of all the places where those tables are used. So I think it would be better to just replace the code on the appendix pages with the 'raw' template {{fi-conj-table}}, and fill in the forms along with the formatting there. —CodeCat 19:31, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Proto-Germanic *agaz

Hi. I think this entry needs to be looked at more closely. I find in PG two basic roots: *agiz (m/f) and *agisan (n)/agisô (m).

OE ege (m), ON agi (m), OHG egī, akī (m/f), and Got agei (f) belong to the first. Got agis (n), OE agesa (m), OHG agiso/egiso (m) belong to the latter. I have created a page for *agiz. Can you please verify? Leasnam 19:37, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

I don't think a word agiz ever existed. If you look at the declension for agaz you'll see it's a z-stem. Its stem is agaz in the nominative/accusative/vocative but agiz- in the others. I think it's quite easy to say the agis- forms come from the latter. —CodeCat 20:07, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

Oh, ok. Leasnam 20:12, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

Should we link the agiz form in the event that someone is looking for it--have it redirect to agaz? Leasnam 20:13, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

Do you think that *agiz may have been a late derivation within PG? the descendant forms are compelling. I just can't see so many daughters developing parallel forms so coincidentally, although it may be possible. Leasnam 20:19, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

I think what happened is that in early PG or late PIE, several words were derived from what was at the time still ághos, ághes-. Apparently these derivatives had the stress on the -es- syllable, so after Grimm's and Verner's laws, the original word remained as ágoz, ágez- but the derived forms had agés-. Analogical pressure during the late PG period might have then led to a parallel noun agis- being reinstated alongside the existing stem agiz-. After the innate 'intuition' for z-stems was lost (since there were so few of them and their nominatives looked like masculine a-stems), the pressure to generalise agis- must have been very great. This is what happened in Gothic. In OE, the non-nominative stem agiz- was generalised to the nominative, and this was then reinterpreted as an i-stem. The same happened in other languages as well. —CodeCat 20:37, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

I also believe that in the end we are still only dealing with two distinct stem formations. The first is agaz/agiz- and its regularisation as a neuter a-stem agis- in Gothic, and as an i-stem in OE. And the second is the formation of an abstract noun agīn- from the original stem ag- at some unknown time in history (possibly after PG). —CodeCat 20:45, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

Proto index

Should be finished- tell me if you find something wrong. Nadando 05:34, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Appendix:Proto-Germanic *luftuz

Hey! Did you want to include feminine and masculine genders on this page? I had initially left feminines off (which is why Dutch/NHD were wanting). PG usually only features masc *luftuz and neut *luftan, so I don't know if there was a *luftō. Leasnam 02:27, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

I didn't know there were several different forms. But I think in this case we should be careful. Words that become u-stems in Gothic are often old consonant stems. So it might have been *lufts. —CodeCat 10:19, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

outgrew

Can you do something with the translations given for outgrew, as i dont think we include past-tense translations:

• Dutch: ontgroeide, ontgroeiden --Downunder 22:27, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

fi-noun vs infl|fi|noun

You may want to provide input in a conversation regarding the Finnish part of speech templates. ~ heyzeuss 14:26, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

*kalzōnan

Hi CodeCat! Most sources I've seen show the root with lz (originally before a stressed syllable) or ls (after a stressed syllable). The lz would then of course become lr > ll, or so I like to reason it. There are also some roots that preserve the ls: Middle Low German kolsen ("to chat"), Old Norse kǫlsugr ("vicious, angry"). Leasnam 06:55, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

PG had some other words in that preserve lz: *talzijanan ("to tell, admonish, teach", cf Goth talzjan), *hailzan ("wholeness", cf. ON heill n.), *felzan ("rock", cf ON fjall, fell). Leasnam 07:03, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Gothic talzjan is just what I needed to see. That one proves that lz was kept in Germanic still. Thank you! —CodeCat 10:52, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

I also noticed you added kals- as a related term. Is that variety really attested in any language? —CodeCat 11:09, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it is the root of the GML verb kolsen ("to chat"). Leasnam 16:31, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Downunder

Maybe it is a strange question (and extra-Wiktionary), but what happened with Downunder? I feel happy about his blockage, he used to say strange things like all that stuff about Catalan cat food. You may delete this at will, just gossip, I know :P --Morkai5 21:55, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

It's a user that keeps getting banned and just makes a new account again. I'm not really involved in all the politics, I think it's kind of silly. —CodeCat 21:56, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

People's crazy... Thanks! --Morkai5 22:17, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

vós/vostè

Vós, as a pronoun for people that you know, has almost disappeared because tu is considered more friendly. Vós in reference to an undetermined audience (like in a book or in a commercial) is usually replaced by vosaltres, because verbs have the same conjugation and is also considered more friendly, but is still present in software and when addressing to a god. Vostè is reserved to more formal situations and therefore is not so "damaged" by the influence of friendly language. Nowadays vostè is more used than vós, because the latter has been "invaded" by tu, which is the most common 2nd. person pronoun. --SMP 18:43, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Finnish declension and PoS templates

I've been getting controversy for using {{infl}} and not {{fi-noun}}, and visa versa.

Can you change {{fi-noun}} and {{fi-adj}} so that they stop feeding Category:Finnish nominals that lack declension type? The template used to make a good to-do list, but not any more. The only relevant words left are some numerals and vaaher. The category is no longer useful as a to-do list, unless somebody wants to feed it manually.

If an adjective has a comparative form, then {{fi-adj}} shows a string of brackets. I can duct tape it by adding a blank first parameter. See aggressiivinen and passiivinen. Other than those two issues, we can put {{fi-noun}} and {{fi-adj}} back into general use. I have no preference between using those and {{infl}} but people are quite intent on each language using its own xx-noun template.

Declension of housut is showing up as Declension of housu. ~ heyzeuss 05:58, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

User talk:Lundgren8

I’ve replied you there. Lundgren8 23:27, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

And again. Lundgren8 08:58, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

borc#Old French

Could this be added to the PGmc appendix? I don't know if it should go as a 'direct' descendant or via the unattested Frankish. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:58, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Because of the c it looks like it might have come from High German instead, especially Swiss German. Do you know any more about that? —CodeCat 18:00, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Apparently it turned into bourg, from Latin burgus. The -c is normal Old French morphology, such as this sequence; longus → lonc → long. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:11, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Ahh I see now. I don't know much about Old French so I'll believe you! I think if it comes from a Latin word then there are probably other Romance languages with a descendant of it, too. —CodeCat 18:13, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

For bourg, you can read this if you have the patience to decipher seemingly infinite abbreviations. Another example of an 'unetymological' c would term sanc (Modern French sang). Mglovesfun (talk) 23:05, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

To do: {{fi-participle of}}

See lakkaamaton. I think it would be best that the template work either way: with or without brackets. Any time you can get around to it. Mmm, yeah, that'd be great.~ heyzeuss 20:36, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

But having brackets prevents the template from linking to the Finnish section on the page. It's not really something we should encourage... —CodeCat 20:59, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

It has been encouraged, in order to facilitate page count statistics. Without the string [[, a page is not included in {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}. AutoFormat will add add {{count page|[[Wiktionary:Page count]]}} to pages that do not have the double opening square brackets. In order to avoid that, editors have resorted to putting brackets inside form-of templates, and often without the language section. There are hundreds of thousands of this kind of form-of entry. If you are not going to fix all of those with a bot, then please, please fix the template so that they don't look ugly anymore. ~ heyzeuss 20:06, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Ok, sorry I hadn't considered that. It's fixed now. :) —CodeCat 20:21, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks :) ~ heyzeuss 17:50, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

inclòs

Thank you for fixing the inclòs thing. You are really fast! --SMP 15:17, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Hee, thank you for spotting it! —CodeCat 15:18, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Appendix:Proto-Germanic/manniskaz

Hi Codecat! How does Old Norse menska ("humanity") fit in? Was menska the intermediary step between the Old Saxon and Scandinavian forms? Leasnam 20:00, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Oh! I didn't know that one existed! It would probably be a direct descendant from the Germanic term. The modern Scandinavian words come from Low German though... except maybe Swedish mänska, because they preserve the extra -i- that Old Norse had already lost by that time. —CodeCat 20:03, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

OE verbs

About these category names...the problem is that we (ie I) have been using Roman numerals for the strong verbs (I, I, III...well you know what a Roman numeral is) and normal Arabic numerals for the weak ones. This follows practice in many of the published grammars. Ƿidsiþ 20:08, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Would you prefer to rename the categories then? I don't think it's a problem, I just prefer the Arabic numbers really. —CodeCat 20:09, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, it's usual – at least, it's usual to distinguish strong from weak (some sources do it the other way round). It would also then match the terminology used at Appendix:Old English verbs. Ƿidsiþ 20:11, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

snīþan Conjugation

Alright, all done. Leasnam 04:33, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you! —CodeCat 10:43, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

form of|lang=Italian

In your March 5 edits to {{form of}}, you introduced some calls to {{languagex}} which translates a language code to a language name. But in several instances, form of is called with lang=Italian instead of lang=it, as I have tried to document on Template talk:form of#Stats. This now appears to be broken. Fortunately, I have already changed a lot these {{form of|lang=Italian}} to {{conjugation of|lang=it}}. Those that remain can be fixed after the next XML dump (within a week, hopefully). The article allei was brought up as a broken example, which Mglovesfun fixed manually. --LA2 20:59, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

I've changed that to {{langnamex}} now, I hope that fixes it! :) —CodeCat 21:01, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

maalstroom or maelstroom

User talk:Leolaursen needs some input on the Dutch origin of maelstrom. --LA2 19:31, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Maelstroom is an older spelling that isn't used anymore. Maalstroom would be the way it's spelled nowadays. —CodeCat 19:32, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Vote on formatting of etymologies

There is the vote Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2011-02/Deprecating less-than symbol in etymologies, which would benefit from your participation, even if only in the role of an abstainer. Right now, the results of the vote do not quite mirror the results of the poll that has preceded the vote. There is a chance that the vote will not pass. The vote, which I thought would be a mere formality, has turned out to be a real issue. You have taken part on the poll that preceded the vote, which is why I have sent you this notification. --Dan Polansky 08:23, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Default language of templates

Didn't you want to start this vote? Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2011-03/Default language of templates that require a language. I am avoiding starting the vote just for the case you wanted to make more changes to the vote. By the way, I am likely to oppose, but there are other voters. --Dan Polansky 16:15, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Isn't it already started now? I've taken away the message, I hope that's enough... —CodeCat 16:16, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

That's it. The template "premature" has to be removed in order for the vote to be started. --Dan Polansky 16:17, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Appendix:Proto-Germanic/Rūmō

Hi there! Are you certain that the OE form was Rūm? I only know of Rōm. Leasnam 17:42, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Gerhard Koebler's dictionary has it, but maybe both forms existed just like in German. —CodeCat 17:44, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Ok. wasn't able to find it under the former, but if Koebler says it, then I'm good. Leasnam 17:47, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Hutspot

Dag Codecat, ik heb de etymologie van hutspot gewijzigd, volgens mij ligt een afleiding uit "hutsen" meer voor de hand. Ter controle heb ik "Van Dale Etymologisch Woordenboek" geraadpleegd, die is dat met me eens. --Erik Warmelink 19:23, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Transliterations

I wanted to bring this up here as the Beer Parlour is rather busy and sometimes topics can get ignored on there due to sheer mass. Yes transliterations are important, perhaps undervalued by the community for reason you've gone in to. Things we can definitely do include:

1. Having more template for non-Latin script languages
2. Equipping them with transliterations and categorizing [[Category:<langname> terms lacking transliteration]]

On this note, see {{ar-proper noun}} which I just created. I'm not sure, but is there any value in adding something like:

{{#if:{{{tr|}}}| <span class=transliteration>({{{tr}}})</span>|{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}||[[Category:Gothic terms lacking 
transliteration]]}}}}

Is there any way that this could be used to help searches? We have other 'classes' such as infl-form. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:08, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't really know much about those things I'm afraid. But I will add that category to the Gothic templates, thank you! —CodeCat 12:14, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

OK, finished the code above. Mglovesfun (talk) 21:27, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Appendix:Proto-Germanic/saiwalō

Hi. My etymology book has a somewhat confusing explanation regarding Danish sjæl (soul) (older sial, siæl), namely that it's derived from Old Saxon siala (or Old Frisian siele). Another old (800 – 1100) synonymous word sal is, like Old Norse sál, from Old English sāwol, sawl. An newer version (1100 – 1500) sæl is derived from Middle Low German sēle. That doesn't correspond to the list of descendants in Appendix:Proto-Germanic/saiwalō at all. Also it says that *saiwalō is derived from *saiwaz (sea) (Appendix:Proto-Germanic/saiwiz ?).I'm leaving it alone for now.--Leo Laursen – (talk · contribs) 23:08, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

*berilaz

Hi! So do you think there were 3 forms: *barilaz, *berilaz, and *bērilaz? I'm eager to create the others but wanted to check. Leasnam 15:26, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

• Oh, btw, I got your IM when I got home, I wasn't ignoring you...Yeah, I made that a while ago and may have referenced both þeowan to þywan and vice versa...Thanks for fixing it :) Leasnam 15:27, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm not really sure what the forms are. But there is one problem with *berilaz - it has an e before a following i, and that's impossible in Germanic because of umlaut. So I moved it to the closest possible form I thought would fit... I'm not sure if it's right or not, but it's a little better at least. :) —CodeCat 18:32, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, umlaut didn't come into effect until later, in the daughter languages in NW Gmc. So I would have simply seen it as ber- (stem from *beranan) + -ilaz, although in many instances, -ilaz was aded to the preterite (cf. OE crypel < *krupilaz, pret. of OE crēopan). But *barilaz is actually also cited as a form, especially in Finnish words from Gmc, so I am good with it. Leasnam 21:05, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

Oh, forgot to ask: where would you put the forms for OHG biril/birila; OE byrla/ Goth berils then? Leasnam 21:08, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

Proto-Germanic did have umlaut, but only from e to i, like you can see in many strong verbs (the 2nd and 3rd person forms). It didn't affect back vowels yet, or if it did, it was only allophonically. I'm not sure where to put those forms, they're rather diverse. biril would go back to *birilaz (with stem ber- rather than bar-), birila to *birilō or *birilōn, byrla to *burilô, and berils to *bērilaz. I can't think of any word that could be the ancestor of all of those! *tries to wrap her brain around it* —CodeCat 21:13, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

Not to pry (please forgive me if I seem to be), but <<*tries to wrap her brain around it*>> --is this correct :)? Leasnam 21:19, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

Why wouldn't it be? ;) —CodeCat 21:21, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

I always thought you were a male...becuase I had seen a photo online of a guy with a shoe resting on his head with the caption User:CodeCat and thought it was you. :) Leasnam 21:24, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree I need a kick in the head sometimes, though. —CodeCat 21:26, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

*pel-

Renegade5005 13:28, 15 April 2011 (UTC) Hey CodeCat , I am trying to put the Indo-European root of the Latin word pellis, however, it automatically goes to Proto-Indo-European *pel- (“gray”) when I want to connect it to *pel-3b which means 'to cover,wrap; skin'. You have told me to stop putting numbers in front of the IE roots. Could you explain other ways I can do this correctly please? Thanks.

I've added a small piece of the second root to Template:termx, so you can see how it's done. You can add the rest yourself. :) —CodeCat 13:32, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

CodeCat is right, for row, we don't have row 1 and row 2 because there are two different verbs. --Mglovesfun (talk) 13:37, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Renegade5005 13:42, 15 April 2011 (UTC) That's great! Thank you.

*smeit-

Hey, I have made a mistake in Proto-Indo-European *-smeit which I cannot fix. Would you please change it from -smeit to smeit- in the original Category: Proto-Indo-European_roots? Thanks.

Old English nouns

Hi, yes, I've noticed that a lot of Old English nouns seem to have declension patterns, so having templates calling on {{ang-decl-noun}} seems like a good idea. Mglovesfun (talk) 08:59, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean? Do you mean that you think the different templates I made are a good idea? —CodeCat 12:42, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes; good work, keep at it. It'll make my life easier for updating Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:ang-decl-noun now that is uses {{isValidPageName}}. --Mglovesfun (talk) 14:39, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Could you possibly write a documentation for isValidPageName? I can't find any volunteers. I know what it does, and how it does it, what I don't know is how to use it. Specifically, the way you've used it in {{ang-decl-noun}}, I can't figure out why that works. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:48, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

I didn't actually change how it's used in those templates, so I don't really know. I've been replacing most uses of that template with the more specific ones. —CodeCat 13:50, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Well you did, diff, I think the two might be equivalent, but honesty, I don't know. {{got-decl-noun}} also needs isValidPageName, IMO. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:57, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

The template is replaced by "valid" if the page is a valid page name, and nothing otherwise. What I changed is based on the idea that there is no need to check specifically whether the text is "valid" exactly - just that it's not empty. It's a bit faster that way. —CodeCat 13:59, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

That relies on mw:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions#.23if, which I didn't know about. Now I do, I get it. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:21, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Empty categories

Maybe you should get a flood flag or something when you delete empty categories en masse. It's killing RecentChanges. TeleComNasSprVen 19:50, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

I didn't know a flood flag would work for deleting as well? —CodeCat 19:51, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, yes, the flood flag can hide all sorts of logged actions as well (e.g. move, protect, delete, block) and I've had it work for me on a few other wikis (with +sysop). Have you tried giving yourself the flood flag yet to see if it works? TeleComNasSprVen 23:16, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Etymology problems

Wiktionary:Todo/etyl_problems has 12 Middle Dutch entries, for which you apparently added etymologies, that have problems. DCDuring TALK 00:47, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

About conversion

Here is a good advice about your current work. Converting any of the following templates without engaging in additional complex technical preparations would be a bad idea, because they have unique needs: {{scriptcatboiler}}, {{langcatboiler}}, {{topic cat}} many boilers of requests and maintenance (such as {{rfap category}}) and boilers of derivations of individual words and morphemes ({{suffixcat}}, {{dervcat}}, etc.)

Converting {{phrasecatboiler}} was nice of you. Thanks for that. --Daniel. 15:22, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes I had noticed that. It seems that the only ones I can easily convert are those that only have 'theList' as a subtemplate and nothing else. I am working on {{pbcatboiler}} now. —CodeCat 15:23, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't mention that {{pbcatboiler}} is another of these templates with special needs... I will keep the new subtemplates for future use, but I have to revert only your edits to "Template:pbcatboiler" for now. --Daniel. 15:39, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

languageshift

I think I understand why you would want to replace "langname/cat" by "languagex".

However, why did you replace "languageshift" by "languagex"? --Daniel. 17:22, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I did? Where? —CodeCat 17:22, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I took a while to understand what you did, and I meant something else a little different in the message above... You, actually, in this revision, replaced "languageshift" by the meaningless "languagexshift". --Daniel. 17:25, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Oh! I'm so sorry! I fixed it right away, thank you for telling me! —CodeCat 17:28, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

No problem now, thanks for fixing it. --Daniel. 17:29, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

About changing templates

You're right. Sorry, I misread the new paragraph about {{etyl}} and {{proto}}. In my opinion, it can surely stay. --Daniel. 18:49, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Old Danish

Hi CodeCat. I just saw Appendix:Proto-Germanic/giftiz used the term Old Danish. Do we have any formalized description as to what is meant by that. I think I introduced it in gift just meaning older (archaic) Danish. Looking at it now I can't help thinking olddansk; Danish "old-" is usually translated to "proto-", so it is actually Runic Danish (ca. 800 – 1100). I've seen the term in a few etymologies, and I afraid it is very inconsistent. Another possibility is gammeldansk or glda. which literally means old Danish, usually either 1100 or 1350 – 1500. Anyway the archaic gift is Danish (1700 – present).--Leo Laursen – (talk · contribs) 12:28, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

I found the term in Svensk Etymologisk Ordbok, which uses it to refer to the language of Denmark that was spoken at the same time as Old Swedish. —CodeCat 12:30, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

OK, if it is according to w:Old Swedish, it is similar to ODS's gammeldansk, glda. (1350 – 1500) + æda. (1275 – 1350) which is from the oldest Danish handwritings. My etymology book uses gammeldansk (1100 – 1500).--Leo Laursen – (talk · contribs) 12:43, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

The terms SEO uses are fornsvenska and forndanska, I'm not sure if there is any difference there between the Swedish and Danish words. Swedish Wikipedia says: Forndanska delas in i rundanska, klassisk forndanska och yngre forndanska. Rundanskan var i princip identisk med runsvenskan. Det danska och svenska språket började inte gå skilda vägar förrän vid inledningen av 1100-talet. —CodeCat 12:44, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

The meaning is the same, forn- means something like past- (in the past). So forndanska would be 800 – 1500, then. Maybe we should just pick our own definition, and document it somewhere.--Leo Laursen – (talk · contribs) 12:52, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Palindromes

I created yet another category tree, to replace and improve the old one that included various categories of spellings: you can just navigate Category:English characters to see it.

Can I ask you to help me on this additional project of categorization by using your bot to do a simple search-and-replace job on 104 categories? The task is, specifically:

• Replacing {{splcatboiler|en|palindrome}} by {{charcatboiler|en|palindrome}} in the code of Category:English palindromes, and repeating for all other categories that include "palindromes" in the title.

--Daniel. 04:45, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

I will see what I can do but I won't be home till later. And my 'bot' is actually just AutoWikiBrowser running as MewBot. If you ask for a bot account you could try it yourself, too. :) —CodeCat 11:12, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Allright. :p I never used AWB, but it does seem to be good for these repetitive things. I can try it eventually, for this or other tasks, if you don't beat me to it. --Daniel 00:24, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

qfa-pro

I don't think it was a good idea to use "Reconstructed languages are not a family" as a justification to delete the code "qfa-pro" and all its traces.

The problem with your argument is not the "reconstructed" part, it's just the "family" part. If everybody stops saying language families and starts saying language groups, then everything becomes fine. It's a problem of wording, not a practical problem.

Grouping languages by their characteristics is a GoodThing™. If we wanted to strictly group languages only by their families, we would have to delete mentions of sign languages, constructed languages, etc. too. I don't think other people would want that as well.

I'm not asking you to undo what you did, and I understand the need to make "ine-pro" (Proto-Indo-European) be a member of the "ine" (Indo-European) family, not only of the "qfa-pro" (reconstructed language) group. If you don't mind, I'm going to make "ine-pro" be grouped under both "ine" and "qfa-pro"; just like "bew" (Betawi) is under both "crp" (a creole or pidgin) and "ms" (derived from Malay). --Daniel 18:39, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

The reason I removed qfa-pro and art-app is because they are not language families in the usual sense. Or even really in any sense for that matter. The problem is mainly that we want to treat for example Proto-Germanic as a Germanic language in templates like {{langfamily}}. And if the new subtemplate system passes, derivation categories will use the family subtemplate as a way of figuring out what the parent category should be. So, this means that Proto-Germanic necessarily is a 'Germanic language' and not a 'reconstructed language'. —CodeCat 18:41, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

What we call a family on Wiktionary isn't a group, really. You could best describe it as 'origin'. English is a West Germanic language because it originated from the West Germanic languages. In the same way, Esperanto is a constructed language because it is in origin a constructed language. Proto-Germanic, despite being constructed in our modern understanding of the language, is not a language that was thought up out of thin air but is actually the oldest Germanic language, and is therefore somewhere on the border between belonging to the Germanic languages and the Indo-European languages directly. —CodeCat 18:45, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

The concepts of "group" and "origin" are not mutually exclusive, and the latter is too wide and vague to be practical. If the exact meaning of words keeps being a point of disagreement between us, I would normally ask you to attest your beliefs say by filling Citations:family (or Citations:group, etc.) and I would do that as well, since it's a fine means of (hopefully) solving disputes over editing a descriptive dictionary.

However, for purposes of categorization, both of us agree that Proto-Germanic is a 'Germanic language' and a 'reconstructed language' as well, since you let Category:Proto-Germanic language be a member of both Category:Germanic languages and Category:Reconstructed languages. As a rule of thumb, "if the new subtemplate system passes" is not a good argument, because the proposed system didn't pass yet, but anyway that system does (as far as I can tell) allow this distinction because it involves not only {{xx/family}} but also {{xx/type}}.

Well, please don't delete any of the so-called family codes; I'm asking that because they are useful regardless of being families, for the reasons I explained above. In addition, codes for all these groups would be needed to make a catboiler for "Category:Romance languages" and other languages, that are still not templatized. --Daniel 19:36, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I won't delete any family codes. It was just about the difference between art-app and art, and between reconstructed and attested languages. It seemed like merely a technical difference, and not one that forms part of its 'family'. But you are right that the 'type' will include reconstructed as well as appendix-only. Maybe it should include sign languages as well, since sign languages can't be said to have families (yet... they might if they evolve and spread on their own). —CodeCat 19:39, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Don't worry, I can restore these codes easily, if you don't mind. Thanks for your cooperation; that said, feel free to continue discussing this and other subjects when you feel like. After all, you're part of the community that decides those things.

You may be interested in knowing (if you didn't already know) that the code "art-app" meaning "appendix-only constructed language" is actually an exact synonym of "minor constructed language" and "computer language".

• A "major constructed language" such as Esperanto is defined on the main namespace. Example: gepatro.
• A "minor constructed language" such as Klingon (which is minor according to consensus, because it is mainly used only by a number of fans of Star Trek) is defined on appendices. Example: Appendix:Klingon.
• A "computer language" such as COBOL is defined on appendices. Example: Appendix:COBOL.

(We probably should just have Category:Minor constructed languages and Category:Computer languages, rather than Category:Appendix-only constructed languages, but this split, if done early, could involve a number of big problems.)

In other words, "art-app" is a subgroup of "art"; so it's at least safe to assume that if one should stay, the other should stay too.

I'm going to adapt the system, probably today, to restore art-app and qfa-pro and use them where necessary. Renaming WT:Families to WT:Groups of languages, and renaming Category:Language families to Category:Groups of languages, are good ideas that may be implemented eventually if necessary; it probably is.

I too think that {{xx/type}}, if created, should include sign languages, because they do have trees of evolution. American Sign Language came from Old French Sign Language as part of the family of the French Sign Languages, but langcatboiler doesn't display this fact yet. --Daniel 20:06, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

I still wonder what the point of restoring them would be, though, if they are not used. Appendix-only artificial languages would be recognisable as such because their type indicates so, not their family. And the same applies to reconstructed languages, which can't even use the qfa-pro family because they already have families of their own (and why would a language have two families unless it's a creole?). —CodeCat 20:52, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

What are the possible types that you intend to list on {{lang/xx}}? The current version of the vote doesn't mention any. --Daniel 21:29, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Oh sorry, I removed that in case people would complain about specific details and vote against. I was thinking of something like the following types: regular languages (perhaps distinguish between alive and extinct?), reconstructed languages, mainspace constructed languages, appendix constructed languages, sign languages and maybe others. The aim of the type was primarily internal to Wiktionary, to keep track of different types of languages that we treat differently in some way (either by the way their entries are placed or by the way templates handle them). —CodeCat 21:34, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

I see. If American Sign Language is a sign language whose code is "ase", what will be the output of {{ase/type}}? If I type {{ase/type}}, will I see "sgn", "sign", "sign language" or something else? --Daniel 22:05, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Something like that. Again I removed the specifics so there was less people would complain about. Since the two of us will probably be the ones to make the templates work, I guess we can decide for ourselves what it would be, and then others will hopefully follow our example? —CodeCat 22:07, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

(unindenting) Yes, we'll probably be the only ones to make the templates work, and this fact will probably entitle us to decide these details for ourselves. And I think it was a good decision removing them from the vote for the reasons you gave.

I asked some specific questions, because, among other reasons...

• We naturally want Category:American Sign Language to be a member of Category:All sign languages (which is a bad category name, but it's the one we have)
• I assume {{ase/type}} will be used somewhere to make the categorization above possible by telling other templates that American Sign Language is, indeed, a sign language.
• If {{ase/type}} returns "All sign languages", then we won't need a page named Template:sgn or Template:etyl:sgn, because the categorization can be done directly.
• If {{ase/type}} returns "sgn", then some other template will have to do the additional work of converting "sgn" to "All sign languages", possibly Template:sgn or Template:etyl:sgn.

--Daniel 00:08, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

That may be true, but this new system of templates should probably be as general as it can be. After all, it would be our new 'language database' so to say. So I don't think we should be making any assumptions on how the information will be used. We should try to store it in such a way that it can be used for as many purposes as possible. Storing a literal category name would go against that. —CodeCat 00:21, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Currently though, we would use the type subtemplate for at least two things. We would use it in templates like {{lx}} and {{termx}}, which need the type of language to determine how to format links. And we would need it for {{langcatboiler}} (which currently uses {{langfamily}} and {{langprefix}} for that purpose). —CodeCat 00:23, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Since the outcome of that vote does seem to be an important point for making these decisions, I think it's better for me just waiting for it. If we can solve things without qfa-pro and art-app, good. If we ever, in the future, need codes for these things, they can be restored. --Daniel 00:19, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

stronk

You were one step ahead of me there (just me being distracted by all those pretty flowers). Edit conflict.. doh! :) Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 23:46, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Aww sorry! *geeft je een stronk met bloemetjes* —CodeCat 23:46, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Resources

I don't know if you noticed, but I replied to your message on my talk page, where I indicated some resources you can use for Icelandic and Faroese. I hope you find them useful. Anyway, I was wondering which resources you're using for Proto-Germanic (and PIE), because I really don't know where to look for those. – Krun 12:27, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

I have a book called 'From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic' by Don Ringe, which has a lot of information about grammar and such and also contains many words. —CodeCat 12:43, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Dutch metaphor

One of the definitions of beer#Dutch is:

1. (figurative) person who is physically impressive and/or crude

That context "metaphor" is extremely rare on Wiktionary. However, is it correct, in your opinion? Do you think we should have a Category:Dutch metaphors? Or, perhaps, do you think that entry fits betters one of our other lexicons, like Category:Dutch euphemisms? --Daniel 20:12, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

I don't really have an opinion one way or another, sorry. —CodeCat 20:14, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

OK. --Daniel 20:15, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

I personally wouldn't include any metaphors in a dictionary. It should usually be left to the reader to interpret a metaphor based on the context. Another option would be to include the most common metaphors of a word with the {{figurative}} template. After all, a metaphor is a figure of speech. I think only Verbo (talk • contribs) used this tag. I will have to somehow clean up all his entries, which in my opinion are usually quite verbosely messy. Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 21:08, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

English morphemes

I suggest creating "English morphemes" instead of "English morphology" or "English morphologies". --Daniel 18:37, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

na-apen

I added it to mewbot, but all the subordinate forms and the present participle will need to be moved to their correct spellings (with the hyphen) once the entries have been created. Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 03:58, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Actually this won't work because the links on the na-apen page will still be wrong. Hmm.. what to do. Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 04:02, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/-mn̥

hello,

I have added Latin and Greek to the descendents. It seems that those two languages show an heteroclite plural

1. Greek: -ma, -mata
2. Latin: -men, -mina, probably originally -men, -menta reshaped singular in -mentum

Please correct the page if you think I am wrong. --Diligent 05:13, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

definite article

Hi. Please tell me why you made this edit in particular: [1] --Daniel 15:47, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

The category was marked for deletion, so I emptied it. —CodeCat 15:47, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

OK; thanks. --Daniel 15:50, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Category:Indefinites by language

Hi CodeCat. Isn't indefinite as a noun a neologism. In Danish it is OK to use an adjective as a noun, but I was under the impression that English is different in that respect.--Leo Laursen – (talk · contribs) 19:37, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Indefinites are parallel to interrogatives and demonstratives in that respect. While interrogatives ask questions and demonstratives point out specific things, indefinites refer to unspecific or general things. —CodeCat 19:39, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

OK, I found a grammar page, using the term. I just couldn't find a dictionary with the noun. We should probably add it.--Leo Laursen – (talk · contribs) 19:47, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

{{Babel}}

I wonder if it would be better to just use {{GENDER}}. We could create a helper template, defined like this:

{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|User|{{GENDER:{{PAGENAME}}|m|f|-}}|-}}

which will produce m on the user-page of someone who's chosen to be identified as male, f on the user-page of someone who's chosen to be identified as female, and - in other cases.

(This could either be a Babel-specific helper template, {{Babel/gender}} or something, or else a more general {{current-gender}} template or something that could be used by other sorts of userboxes as well. In the latter case, we can extend it slightly to support the User talk namespace as well, since some sorts of user-boxes go there.)

What do you think?

—Ruakh_TALK 12:45, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

I didn't know there was such a thing. But I wonder if some users might not want to reveal their gender in that way? —CodeCat 12:46, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

{{GENDER}} only works for users who choose to reveal their gender in that way. (Special:Preferences describes the Gender field as "Optional: used for gender-correct addressing by the software. This information will be public.") And using only {{GENDER}}, rather than a variety of different ways for people to specify their gender in various places, makes it slightly easier for someone to de-publicize their gender should they ever decide to. —Ruakh_TALK 13:34, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Also, the problem with that approach is that it becomes impossible to override the default, in case you want to demonstrate it on a documentation page. So a g= parameter would still be a good thing to have. —CodeCat 12:51, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Good point. Probably g= should be available, and should supersede {{GENDER}} when provided. —Ruakh_TALK 13:34, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

thanks

thanks for doing my tidying up work for me --Pointon 22:40, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

catboiler and derivcatboiler

Are you trying to adapt {{catboiler}} to be the metatemplate of {{derivcatboiler}}? Why would you want to do that? --Daniel 22:57, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Why not? It works pretty well right now... —CodeCat 22:58, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

If it works well, no problem, we can just leave the templates this way. But that adaptation apparently was just a lot of unnecessary work, because {{derivcatboiler}} does not share its behavior with other templates, so it does not need a metatemplate. Depending on a number of factors, it also might make all templates that share {{catboiler}} just a little slower than necessary, because the software has to repeatedly test which of the systems is in use by each category. --Daniel 23:07, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

That's true, but there is a lot that can be reused, like {{catboiler crashtest}}. It seems like a waste to start from scratch. —CodeCat 23:09, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

OK. --Daniel 23:20, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Finnish phrasal verbs

I would want to change the Finnish verb conjugation templates so that they could be applied for phrasal verbs like (deprecated template usage) johtaa harhaan, in which the second word (determiner or whatever it is called) is not inflected at all. For example for muistaa-type verbs this could be done by adding seventh parameter and in my example case giving it the value "harhaan". I tested that this approach works fine with everything else but the first long infinitive, which gets the form johtaa harhaankseen where it should be johtaakseen harhaan. If I have figured it out correctly the template fi-conj should be changed so that the current line

-->|inf1_long=[[{{#if:{{{inf1|}}}|{{{inf1|}}}|{{PAGENAME}}}}kseen]]²<!--

would be replaced with something else so that e.g. this new definition

-->|inf1_longa={{{1}}}{{{2|}}}{{{4|a}}}{{{4|a}}}kseen {{{7}}}<!--

in template fi-conj-muistaa would produce the desired result (joh+t+a+a+kseen harhaan) and still work fine for ordinary verbs like (deprecated template usage) johtaa. In other words inf1_long should be primarily a function of inf1_longa and secondarily, in case inf1_longa is not defined, it should continue to be a function of inf1 and PAGENAME as it is now (I don't understand either why the PAGENAME is there, as inf1 will define inf1_long already). The problem is I don't know the programming language well enough to be able to figure out how to change fi-conj. I wonder if you can help me here? --Hekaheka 22:47, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

That should work, but I don't understand why the name of the parameter needs to change? —CodeCat 23:26, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I tried this already, but it did not work, see more detailed discussion a few lines down. To be honest, I don't know why the name should change. I just noticed that the names of all other parameters vary slightly between the interacting templates fi-conj-muistaa and fi-conj, and that fi-conj-table uses same parameter names as fi-conj. I assumed that this is for a reason, such as to avoid a loop. I apologize for being such simpleton as I am, but I have acquired all my limited knowledge of how the code works by reasoning backwards from the work others have done. --Hekaheka 05:10, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

This is like really easy to do in a very uncomplicated way. All you really have to do is have your named parameter with a pipe thinger. like {{{extra|}}}. If you say extra=word, then word will pop up. Look at {{fa-conj}} (where pre= the word and it comes before the conjugation verb in most cases).

Basically what you want is this:

-->|inf1_long={{{1}}}{{{2|}}}{{{4|a}}}{{{4|a}}}kseen {{{7|}}}<!--

Though I'd recommend using a named parameter instead of 7. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 23:50, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I tried to add this line to the template fi-conj-muistaa, but that produced the undesirable result described above. Therefore I thought that the template fi-conj must be changed so that it would use this line of fi-conj-muistaa (or more generally fi-conj-xxx) as source of information and not the previous line in fi-conj and the PAGENAME as it does now.

I would assume that using the similar approach that is used for the subsequent lines of fi-conj, i.e. writing:

-->|inf1_long=[[{{{inf1_longa}}}]]²{{#if:{{{inf1_longa_alt|}}}|<br/>[[{{{inf1_longa_alt}}}]]}}<!--

would work with the line you propose (with the "a" added), but this would disturb other fi-conj-xxx templates which do not (yet) have inf1_longa -line. Therefore we need a template that uses inf1_longa of fi-conj-xxx if it exists and if it does not, does exactly the same as it does now. All fi-conj-xxx templates interact with fi-conj and one must be quite careful here. One day, when all fi-conj-xxx templates have been changed, we can switch to inf1_longa as the sole source of data.

My other problem is that I do not fully understand the current inf1_long -line in fi-conj. Like why does {{{inf1|}}} appear twice and why is the reference to PAGENAME there? I also tried to change the first {{{inf1|}}} in fi-conj to {{{inf1_longa|}}} but that did not change the output in any way. I thought that #if:{{{inf1|}}}|{{{inf1|}}}|{{PAGENAME}} represents an order of preference from first to last but that does not appear to be the case. --Hekaheka 05:10, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Formulating a question forces one to think. What I want the line in fi-conj to do is this: "Use inf1_longa, if it exists. If it does not, use inf1+kseen". I think we can drop PAGENAME, because the inf1 -line already takes care of it. Thus the line in fi-conj would look like this:

-->|inf1_long=[[{{#if:{{{inf1_longa|}}}|{{{inf1_longa|}}}|{{{inf1}}}kseen}}]]²<!--

Would that look like the right thing to do? --Hekaheka 05:31, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

I tried this approach and it appears to work. At least it behaves perfectly with the verb (deprecated template usage) johtaa harhaan. I'll wait before going ahead with other fi-conj-xxx -templates in order to see whether any unexpected complications arise. --Hekaheka 19:50, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

prefix sort

Hi there. Under your new scheme, some words seem to get sorted incorrectly. See, as an example, (deprecated template usage) dismetria - sorted under D rather than M. SemperBlotto 11:01, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

• p.s. Ah! They use confix, not prefix. SemperBlotto 11:02, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Proto-Germanic *kaup-

Do you think you could create a page if there’s more information about the Proto-Germanic word *kaup- (ON kaupa -> Icelandic kaupa, Swedish köpa, German kaufen, Dutch kopen) which probably was a loan from Latin caupo? It has an interesting etymology since it’s also strong in e.g. Icelandic. --Lundgren8 (t · c) 22:46, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

It looks weak in Icelandic judging by the entry, though. I think what's stranger is that the present tense has no umlaut while the past tense does. I know of no other verb that is like that... It almost appears as if the present was taken from weak class 3 while the past is from weak class 1. In OHG there are two verbs, one in class 1 and the other in class 2, but with almost identical meanings. —CodeCat 22:52, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, you’re right, it’s weak. What I meant to say was that it has a vowel shift, kaupa > keypti. Okay, that’s interesting, I’d love to hear find out some more about that. --Lundgren8 (t · c) 23:43, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Old English plurals

Category redirects are quite useful in some cases. If they're constantly empty, no, but if they are sometimes used like Category:Spanish plurals, when the category is not empty it appears in Category:Category redirects which are not empty. Dutch and Spanish plurals will definitely get used and will therefore be better off as category redirects, Old English, maybe not, but I'd tend to keep and category redirect when it has a chance of being useful. But delete everything apart from {{movecat}} like I've done for Spanish. --Mglovesfun (talk) 11:33, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I thought that if you deleted such a category, you would automatically be redirected to the right one after that. I don't know why, but I thought I had seen it work once... —CodeCat 11:36, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

The bot is huuuungry ...

Have you checked MewBot's feedme page recently? There's quite a little boatload to be processed, if you have the time ... I'm afraid to clog up the list too much if I add more. Thanks once again for volunteering to make an esperanto verb infection bot. Tempodivalse [talk] 15:56, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Gmc inflectional endings

This is just to address your most recent undo of my edits of Template:termx.

• You say that "contracted vowels didn't become long vowels in Gmc", but that's not possible. I don't know whether you're referring to contraction in general, or contraction in the sense of compensatory lengthening after laryngeal loss, but in both senses contraction occurred. For simple contraction, consider for instance that the nom.pl. ending of PIE o-stems (PGmc a-stems) would've produced a diff. outcome entirely were there no contraction: oes > aes > ais > ǣz > ēz (Antonsen); hiatus goes against the IE comparative evidence and would've led to far more trimoraic vowels in Gmc. As for laryngeal contraction, in absolute final position it took place across the board (ex: ePIE -eh₂> lPIE -ā > Gmc ō), but as for -VHV- > -V̄V, the comparative evidence points to this (Fortson; Beekes); otherwise, the exact outcome here is unrecoverable. The relative dating isn't all that important, but to be inclusive I presented both the later and earlier forms, so an undo seems uncalled for. Clearly, I'm not against showing forms with laryngeals.
• You also say contracted vowels don't "merge" with existing long vowels in Gmc, but in inflectional endings they do. Once again, the o-stem nom.pl. is only trimoraic because it was in final position, not because it was contracted, whereas the gen.pl. is trimoraic because it was contracted; no firm statement can be made about the ablative sg. (> Gmc adv. ending) which could be trimoraic either because of laryngeal contraction (-oh₁ad > ōad > ôt) or, more likely, from being in final position (-oh₁ad > lPIE -ōd > -ôt) (like its variant -ead > lPIE ēd > êt). Keep in mind that if contracted vowels "didn't become long vowels", the first scenario is impossible. In any case, the material presented on the PIE appendix pages is supposed to reflect the best compromise between all IE langs, and arguing on the basis of Gmc alone is inappropriate.
• Perhaps the main problem is that the PIE entries were all pulled directly from Ringe verbatim. The auto-declining script, for instance, uses Ringe's exact PIE declensional model. This makes for bad research since no single source is flawless or provides the whole picture. After all, absolutes are rare in PIE. Torvalu4 21:26, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

block

Give him a chance, that was his first edit since you posted on his talkpage -- he might only just have seen it. Ƿidsiþ 13:56, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I also disagree with this blocking. Nadando 13:56, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I have a sneaking suspicion about this user's intentions. Watch him like a hawk. A vicious cute-little-mouse-killing hawk. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 15:34, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Rawr! =^.^= —CodeCat 15:47, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

J'approuve. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 15:52, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I read that again and realised you weren't calling me cute. Now I'm disappointed. :p —CodeCat 15:55, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I approve of cuteness, but not quite as much as I approve of vicious... um nevermind lol. I'll keep my perverted vulgarities to my own page for now. So just add some fangs to the =^.^=, or you cuold be a bat ^*^ — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 16:04, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Singular parameters

If people approve that huge change from {{poscatboiler|en|noun}} to {{poscatboiler|en|nouns}}, {{poscatboiler|en|noun form}} to {{poscatboiler|en|noun forms}}, {{shortcatboiler|en|abbreviation}} to {{shortcatboiler|en|abbreviations}}, etc.

...will you volunteer to do that? --Daniel 16:31, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I could help, but there is no rush. We could create the subtemplates for the plural forms independently of the singular ones, and then we could change over gradually while both varieties exist side by side for a while. —CodeCat 16:43, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Either way it would be easy to do. Just find what links to {{poscatboiler}} and have a list of the switches to make. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 17:01, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

rollbacker/patroller

Would you like to be a rollbacker or a patroller. I'm going through unpatrolled edits from today, and you've already undone a lot of the vandalism, but you can't then mark them as 'patrolled'. NB reverting automatically marks all reverted edits as patrolled. Can I nominate you on the Beer Parlour for either of these? SemperBlotto's away this week, I'm going to be out a lot, so I'm afraid there's going to be a lot of reverting to be done. --Mglovesfun (talk) 15:30, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I don't think I can really do this on a regular basis. —CodeCat 15:31, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

She's already an admin, which includes the ability to roll back and to patrol. She just needs to start clicking "rollback" rather than "undo". :-)   —Ruakh_TALK 15:47, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm always afraid to click rollback though, I've often clicked it by accident and it doesn't ask if I'm sure! —CodeCat 15:48, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, you could always add something to User:CodeCat/common.js that would pop up a confirmation box; but also, there's not much harm in accidentally rolling something back, as long as you notice it immediately: you can just click "rollback" on your own rollback. —Ruakh_TALK 15:58, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

You can rollback your own rollback. I do from time to time, once every few weeks. --Mglovesfun (talk) 16:07, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

EO verbs without conj template

Thanks so much for compiling this list! I've been wanting such a page for a long time. Is there any way a bot could add the conjugation template itself, instead of me manually plugging it in each time? (I'll take a break now, I think the bot kitty must've had quite a workout.) Tempodivalse [talk] 18:19, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

The bot has no way of knowing whether a verb is transitive or intransitive, so it can't do that I'm afraid. —CodeCat 18:20, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

I was afraid of that. What if I separated the types and the bot would work solely on, say, transitive verbs? Tempodivalse [talk] 18:24, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

It would be more work to adapt the bot to do that than it would be to add the templates, though. Currently the bot is designed specifically to add information only at the end of the page, and it uses the autoformat bot to put it in the right place. But I don't think that can be done with conjugation tables. —CodeCat 18:26, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Okay, never mind then. Even as it is, the bot is of tremendous help. I'll see if I can round up some fellow Esperantists to help add the conjugation templates. Tempodivalse [talk] 18:33, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Do you use AutoWikiBrowser? It might be very useful for repetitive tasks like this. I used it to generate the list, as well. —CodeCat 18:35, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Does AWB work with Linux? I vaguely recall using it some years ago, and not understanding how to use it, but that was on Windows (bleh). Tempodivalse [talk] 18:38, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

I haven't tried, I'm afraid. —CodeCat 18:38, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Disiĝi or dirsiĝi? That's the question when MewBot makes the "dirsiĝi" verb conjugation for disiĝi. --Lo Ximiendo 05:13, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

The parameter of the template on disiĝi was wrong. It would need to be fixed and then all the wrong entries should be moved and fixed as well. —CodeCat 11:19, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

{{confix}}

Can you get {{confix}} to sort by the second parameter like you did for {{prefix}} and {{suffix}}? Ultimateria 22:14, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

The 'middle' parameter is optional, though. So it should sort as either the middle part or the suffix part? As whatever comes after the prefix? —CodeCat 22:20, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

I hadn't thought about that. I was thinking of bio- -logy which was sorted under B, which was correct in the suffix category but not for the prefix category. But sorting by the second parameter works. It makes more sense to me than sorting by the suffix. Thanks! Ultimateria 22:33, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

What will happen if there are only two parameters? DCDuring TALK 22:42, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Or if the second parameter (of three or more) is a suffix or infix? I'm not even sure what should happen. DCDuring TALK 22:43, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

I've made it so that regardless of the number of parameters that are given, it will always sort in the category 'words prefixed with' according to the second parameter. This is enough, because the sorting is only really needed to disambiguate the part of the word following the prefix. —CodeCat 22:45, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Derivation categories

Hi, CodeCat.

In order to facilitate keeping the interwiki links, and if it doesn't make things too complicated or slow for you, could you please copy interwiki links from the old category to the new one before deleting the old one? Thanks, Malafaya 18:31, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

{{l}}, {{lx}}

Both of these templates are built so that they are able to function even if {{{1}}} isn't specified. I don't know if that's actually used anywhere, but it would probably be better if it was still allowed. --Yair rand 22:42, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that would work, though. If you look in {{Xyzy}}, there is a part near the end where it says lang="{{{lang|}}}". Since the language has no default value in {{l}}, what will actually happen is that it gets replaced with the literal value lang="{{{1}}}". That's not something we really want, I think. —CodeCat 22:47, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

{{l||foo}} would make the lang parameter blank, setting 1 to be empty. --Yair rand 22:55, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Ok, but the question is then... what script do we want to use if no language is provided? —CodeCat 22:58, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

{{None}}, I think. msh210 created Template:/script, presumably for these kinds of situations, though transcluding a template beginning with a slash makes mediawiki assume that the intended template is a subpage of the page it's on... --Yair rand 23:04, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

"Modern English" cats

Hi. The "other languages" box needs update to the "Modern English" link (see Category:en:Zoology). It's still pointing to the base category "Zoology". Thanks, Malafaya 13:47, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Category:Terms derived from other languages

Re "Don't create this category yet, it probably needs a different name", if it's going to get a different name, it can be moved there when it does, so leaving around 250 redlinks probably isn't a good idea... --Yair rand 05:12, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Possible work for your bot

Bonmatenon! Since you're a bot operator, I'd like to bring to your attention to a little request I've made at the Grease pit. Maybe you'd like to have a go ? No pressure, if you're not interested. Tempodivalse [talk] 02:36, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Hi! You expressed interest in making this bot at the greasy pit, just wondering, are you still planning on making it ? Tempodivalse [talk] 21:13, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Template:proto

Hello! It seems you were the last user who has greatly contributed in editing of this template Template:proto, so I suppose you can help me. I just want to make the same template in the English Wikipedia. But creating the page w:Template:proto and copying the code did not make any sense. I tried editing it or copying from other templates but it also did not work. The template code is a little difficult for me (for now at least), I can’t get it. I just need {{proto|ISO 639 code or full name|word|meaning}}, it looks like {{lang}} and {{etymology}} templates. For example {{proto|sla|dva|two}} should make Proto-Slavic *dva'two'. I explain: the language name should be prefixed with Proto- and link to its wiki article if it exists; the word should be in italic, in unicode, have an asterisk before it, and link to its wiktionary article if it exists; the meaning should have the single quotes as it's accepted in linguistics for glosses. I will sincerely appreciate you if you make such a template and help me to create the similar one in the Russian Wikipedia. --Любослов Езыкин 05:03, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

The template on Wiktionary makes use of several other templates, which probably don't exist on Wikipedia. I'm not sure which as I'm not familiar with Wikipedia templates. Could you explain what goes wrong exactly? —CodeCat 10:35, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it does redirect to other templates making this chain Template:Proto > Template:Proto/lang > Template:languagex. The last two do not exist in Wikipedia, but it can be possible to create them in the future though. May be w:Template:proto can be rewritten or simplified without redirecting? I suppose Wikipedia and Wiktionary template codes are similar, but I'm not very familiar with both :( Любослов Езыкин 23:05, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Maybe it would be easier if you didn't use language codes at all. Then you could use the name of the proto-language, like {{proto|Germanic|gastiz}}. —CodeCat 23:09, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Category:Terms derived from Philippine languages

I was just wondering, since this doesn't seem to correspond to any language family we have, what is this supposed to represent? -- Prince Kassad 16:18, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

I don't really understand... it represents the Philippine languages. —CodeCat 16:22, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Hmm, it seems to use Template:etyl:phi, which I was previously unaware of. Now that you mentioned it... I forgot I have a language family tree right here.
It does have a Category:Philippine languages as a subcategory of the already existing Category:Borneo-Philippines languages (which is empty right now, and has no code on its own). I think I'll need to mess with the families a bit to repopulate everything. But at least now I know what this is. Sorry for the confusion. -- Prince Kassad 16:27, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

The Borneo-Philippine languages aren't really a family as far as I know. Wikipedia says it's paraphyletic. —CodeCat 16:29, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

I'd be happy if someone could come up with a better classification than the one we use currently. -- Prince Kassad 16:34, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Entry layout

Sorry, but you'll have to go into detail. I'm copying the existing entries as good as I can and cannot decipher from your message, where I have made mistakes - not even in what entry. But as I naturally want to cling to the wiktionary quality standard, please tell me more specific what I have improve/change.Dakhart 15:29, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

To use sæwen as an example: The templates in the etymology section are missing the language parameter nds, which I added now. The header 'Alternative forms and spellings' is not standard, it should not be used. Your entries are also missing a headword line, which KassadBot added now (the {{infl||numeral}} template) but which is still missing the language code (it should be {{infl|nds|numeral}}). —CodeCat 15:37, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

I see; I will try to adhere to this in the future. I was told that if I want to create Low German inflection templates (I did not know there were generic 'infl'-temps, hence they were missing), I had to copy existing ones (e.g. from German) for an easy start. Is there any guide on how to create a new template/template page or something?Dakhart 15:43, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

ps.: Since I do not want to create 50 pages for each of the different forms and their different spellings, what header should I use then? I'd find it impractical not to have all the forms of the word on the page.Dakhart 15:48, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

You can just use 'Alternative forms'. There isn't really a guide for templates, I think most people just try things out and look at other templates for examples. The MediaWiki site has some help though, especially 'parser functions' are useful to learn. —CodeCat 15:54, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Aaaa'right. Thx. again, hope I can contribute.Dakhart 15:58, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Proto-... language, Terms derived from ...

I was wondering if it's possible to add a sortkey to these so they sort at the very beginning. It bothers me a lot that these appear somewhere in the middle of language family categories, among all the normal languages that are also there. -- Prince Kassad 14:18, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

I've added it now. —CodeCat 14:21, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

{{famcatboiler}}

The edit link doesn't really make sense- it doesn't take you to anything that would let you change the code. Nadando 19:41, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

The link is added by the {{catboiler}} template, it does that for all categories that use it. I'm not sure how to fix that without removing it from the others as well. —CodeCat 19:43, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

{{catboiler}} is good for {{derivcatboiler}} and {{famcatboiler}} only to some extent, then everything becomes too obscure and complicated.

If I, you, or someone else has the energy and savviness to adapt that metatemplate even more, to cover its flaws — such as its poor documentation; its futile "edit" button, which should be useful for someone who wants to edit the multiple descriptions; its complexity that makes it rather impossible to be copied to other Wiktionaries; and the fact that Category:English male given names from French can't use {{derivcatboiler}} — then it would be better, and even easier, to start {{derivcatboiler}} and {{famcatboiler}} from scratch. --Daniel 20:04, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

I think that would be a bit much. A lot of the things in {{catboiler}} work equally well for other categories. The {{catboiler crashtest}} subtemplate and the principle behind {{catboiler format}} for example. Instead of starting from scratch, we could simply separate the parts that are generally useful from those that are only useful for most templates, so that as much as possible can be reused. —CodeCat 20:10, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

{{catboiler crashtest}} is just "Check if the name is right; if it is not, then display an error." It can be placed anywhere, just like {{prefixcat}} checks for errors. Surely we wouldn't want to adapt {{catboiler}} to use it as a metatemplate of {{prefixcat}}... --Daniel 20:14, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

No, not in that case, but {{prefixcat}} is different because it doesn't have a closed set of possibilities, and there is no tree structure. {{derivcatboiler}} and {{poscatboiler}} are much more alike because both share the notion of a 'current language', a 'current label' and a 'parent label', even if they have different ways of determining how to show each label. The difference between the labels is handled by the {{derivcatboiler/ALL}} template. —CodeCat 20:22, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Both {{prefixcat}} and {{derivcatboiler}} have open (that is, huge and essentially always subject to change) sets of possibilities. The "different ways of determining" the values for each template is what makes me think {{derivcatboiler}} and {{famcatboiler}} should be independent eventually, if we want to fix their problems that I mentioned. --Daniel 20:58, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Chemical elements and other categories

Now бор belongs to Category:en:Chemical elements (among others like this). --flyax 15:50, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

It's the template {{elements}} which needs a language code. To be honest, a template like that probably shouldn't categorize at all. --Mglovesfun (talk) 15:55, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Not entirely the same topic, but in working with elementary particles recently I've noticed that a lot of entries use {{particles}} which automatically categorize to "Elementary particles", which in a lot of cases is... wrong. Then a lot use {{physics}} which categorizes to Physics, of course, though they should be in more specific categories. Maybe (probably) some context labels shouldn't categorize automatically, or else we'll have weird points where some entries will only be in their proper categories, while others will be in extra parent categories which...irritates me of course :D — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 17:38, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

See also Category:Books of the Bible. --flyax 18:24, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Category:en:Ngarrindjeri birds has been deleted but I saw it too late. Something else has to be done, maybe create it as XX:Birds, where XX is the code for Ngarrindjeri? --flyax 19:44, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

 Done -- Liliana • 19:49, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Problem in Category:Latin letter names. Also, could you please tell me what to do with "derivation" categories? Should I have my bot do them too? I asked a relevant question on BP. --flyax 08:02, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

About Low German

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Low_German
I'm not quite sure, whether this is what you had in mind. Tell me whether it's fit. I also could work out guidelines on how to deal with several forms in articles and the necessity of templates. This, though, would be just a guideline made up by me upon common sense and might be a political issue. It's always a political issue with Low German.Dakhart 18:50, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

It's a very good start, well done and thank you! :) —CodeCat 18:52, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Hey, thanks

I seem to be making an uncharacteristically high number of typos recently, thanks for cleanin' up my mess. I've gotta try to watch myself more closely. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 14:20, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Luxembourgish

Hi there, thanks for helping out with the Luxembourgish words over the last couple of days. I couldn't believe how little vocab there was on here, so I've been trying my best to add a few words. Thanks for adding and fixing etymologies and things when I miss them out too. Cheers, BigDom 12:46, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

You're welcome! I always like to help out with 'smaller' languages, and I've been to Luxembourg several times so I even remember a few words. I noticed you've been using {{l|en|...}} to add links to the English translations. That's not common practice on Wiktionary, but there is now a discussion in the Beer Parlour about it. Maybe you would like to take a look. —CodeCat 12:54, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing me to that discussion. It was just because the first entry I looked at before I started creating things used the same format, so I thought it must have been common practice. Apparently not though! BigDom 13:05, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Request

Would you be able to get the template {{lb-noun}} to add the word to Category:Luxembourgish uncountable nouns when there is no plural? I had a go, but can't seem to work out how to do it. Thanks, BigDom 18:08, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

I've made the change now, please let me know if there any problems. :) —CodeCat 18:26, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Cheers, that's great. BigDom 21:08, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Stupid thing

Tooironic said that your work is a "stupid thing" (Please see here). Engirst 23:39, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Ok? —CodeCat 23:58, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Not OK. It is not a "stupid thing" but a good thing indeed. It is beneficial to users especially for learners. Engirst 00:04, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

That's your opinion. —CodeCat 10:32, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Do you think that your work is a "stupid thing"? 2.25.213.130 10:14, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Does it matter what I think? —CodeCat 10:31, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Of course. 2.25.213.130 10:35, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

I don't see how. It's obvious what the community consensus is, so I'm sticking with that no matter what I personally think. But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you? —CodeCat 11:22, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

So, you should get rid of your "stupid thing". 2.27.73.38 13:12, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

I will gladly help if the community agrees that they should be deleted. In the meantime I'm not going to create any more. —CodeCat 13:29, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

It is not necessary if your work not against the rules of Wiktionary. However some administrators delete others but not themselves. 2.27.73.120 17:42, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Dear sir,

I take issue with your claims and believe you are a knob. Kindest regards. 60.241.159.81 09:44, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Dear sir, I'm not a sir. Thank you. —CodeCat 11:24, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Gothic in Latin script

Assuming all of these are attested, should these use something like {{Latin spelling of}}, similar to the functions of {{sh-noun}} (and other sh- templates) and {{pinyin reading of}}? --Mglovesfun (talk) 14:01, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

They would be attested. In fact they are probably attested more than the Gothic script entries. But I'm not sure what you mean. {{Latin spelling of}} doesn't exist? —CodeCat 14:05, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

I mean we should create it first, then use it in these entries. --Mglovesfun (talk) 14:32, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

A template with composed forms (for Dutch entries)

Is it available anywhere? You can see it in a lot German entries, (machen for example), so why not in Dutch? I'm just curious, cheers.

--84.10.140.247 22:27, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

It's not really necessary, because the forms are always predictable by using a conjugated form of an auxiliary verb with the infinitive or the past participle. In theory we could add it but it's kind of redundant if you know Dutch grammar. —CodeCat 22:37, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Try to think of the beginners. I'm about to do this for Slovene. And I think there might have been something else, but I can't remember. — [Ric Laurent] — 23:29, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

The question is which forms to include. There are a lot of different combinations, far more than can fit into a simple table... —CodeCat 23:50, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

aperitiu

As I'm already on my aperitiu, can you check out aperitiu please. is probs wrong --78.146.3.196 18:30, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't see anything wrong with it, but I'm not sure about the meaning because I don't know this word yet. —CodeCat 18:31, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

IEC gives "Que afavoreix una millor digestió dels aliments.", could be translated poorly as "good for digestion"

lb-conj

I've been thinking. Creating the family of lb-conj templates has taken me quite a while, and there are still many more that could be created. The thing is, what with all the different permutations of auxiliary verbs (especially with the Eifeler Regel affecting -n and -nn endings), the number of parameters each template needs is getting out of hand. I think it might be best to convert them into something like the Dutch conjugation tables and just show the actual conjugated forms and to get rid of the compound tenses. What do you think? BigDom 19:21, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

That may be ok, but someone suggested the exact opposite to me a few days ago. To add compound tenses to the Dutch template. So I'm not sure what's better... —CodeCat 20:07, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Oh yeah, just seen that above. I understand what they're saying about helping beginners, but like you say - how do you choose which of the compound tenses to include? For example in the lb templates I could have included the passive compound tenses, imagine the size they would be if I had! I suppose I might be better off asking at the Beer Parlour instead and see what others think. BigDom 20:15, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Rhymes

I notice in edits like this one that you're adding Rhymes to the top of the Pronunciation sections, but by convention this information should come after any IPA or audio information. The reational is that the IPA and audio apply to the current entry specifically, while the Rhymes link applies to a larger set of words beyond the current one. --EncycloPetey 23:57, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

I never made those edits, they were made by the script that adds them to pages. —CodeCat 23:58, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

The edit was made through your account, so I assume you are running the script, yes? --EncycloPetey 00:03, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

No it's on Wiktionary somewhere. If you go to a rhymes page and fill in one of the boxes, and then save, it adds the rhyme to that page and also to the entry itself. I have no control over that. —CodeCat 00:04, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for that explanation. I was unaware of the script, but it explains a number of odd edits I've seen elsewhere. --EncycloPetey 00:36, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

dente

Why are you favoring the accusative? As far as I am aware, most Iberian language nouns derive from the ablative, including Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician. Some modern dictionaries will list the genitive or accusative, but isn't it the ablative (rather than accusative) that merged with the nominative? --EncycloPetey 00:35, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

The accusative and ablative of many nouns were identical in late Latin because final -m had been lost. The two cases didn't actually merge until the breakup into dialects. Old French still distinguished the nominative from the accusative, so by looking at how it developed you can see what happened in other Romance languages earlier. In French, the nominative was largely dropped in favour of the accusative, except for a few nouns. —CodeCat 00:42, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Old French distinguishes the nominative from oblique, which was a result of the merger of non-nominative cases in Vulgar Latin. Banniard and others put the merger of the non-nominative cases in Vulgar Latin itself, with the genitive and dative merging by the 6th century. The accusative was the last of these to merge, and so more often differs from the oblique forms used. For this reason (and others) I'd recommend against using the accusative in etymologies except where there is clear evidence that the peculiar accusative form was involved. --EncycloPetey 00:49, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

番鬼

How is one supposed to categorise a pejorative term in both traditional and simplified scripts? I only remember the old way. By the way, "Simplified Chinese pejoratives" doesn't make sense; it should read "Mandarin pejoratives in simplified Chinese script". ---> Tooironic 14:48, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't know if there is a way to do that yet. The {{context}} template would need to be fixed. —CodeCat 14:51, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Going sure

The freeze of the er-Article has ceased and another day has passed. No other arguments have been brought forth and I would take it as a sign that my points were valid and as a permission to erase the note in question from every article which has it. Yet I'm still new to Wiktionary and just out of caution want to ask you as an admin whether this would be deemed rude or vandalism or something alike.Dakhart 01:42, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I think the note itself is valid but it's not complete. There is a clear difference between the genitive form of the pronoun 'meiner' and the possessive 'mein', and that should be explained so that someone doesn't end up using 'meiner Freund' when they mean 'mein Freund' for example. —CodeCat 12:52, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Wonderfool and Catalan

Hi! I noticed you're ca-2. I wondered if you could have a look at special:contributions/Change of lung (another sock of wonderfool) and make sure all the Catalan entries are okay? Cheers Tempodivalse [talk] 14:37, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Wonderfool's always been a good editor, til some twat twats him off and he poops on the front page lol. Trăiască Wonderfool. — [Ric Laurent] — 16:09, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

He did make a mistake in an Esperanto entry, at eltrovo, that I had to correct, plus he made some unattestable English words, which makes me a little suspicious. Tempodivalse [talk] 16:14, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Lol, if razorflame ever comes back, I want you to do what I used to do and review all of his edits. — [Ric Laurent] — 16:35, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Funny you should say that. I thought change of lung (talk • contribs) was Razorflame at first, until he started doing Catalan. Tempodivalse [talk] 21:08, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Well, Wonderfool did nominate me for administrator, so he can't be all bad. :) —CodeCat 19:27, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

He used to run a bot for French verb-forms. Then he started Romanian, which as the person who wrote most of the Romanian templates and worked on Romanian for a long time, I found fucking fantastic. I should start a WF fanclub. lol — [Ric Laurent] — 19:40, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

I wonder if I could join that. :] --Lo Ximiendo 20:12, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

You have a Stockholm syndrome. By the way, Lo Ximiendo is Wonderfool. Somebody should nominate him for an admin. --Vahag 20:32, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

He nominates everyone for administrator! Equinox ◑ 20:15, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Looking at the 19 most recent admin nominations... 9 were nominated by WF, 2 of which were nominating WF himself. --Yair rand 20:34, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

MewBot, redirecting some script subtemplate

Such as {{eng/script}} to {{en/script}}. Non-primary language codes are sometimes used (lit and san in particular have a lot of transclusions). Could MewBot create a series of simple redirects for them? Mglovesfun (talk) 13:38, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Participles and kinds of verbs

Hello CodeCat, I ran across the following musing of yours when I read through Wiktionary:Beer_parlour#How_to_treat_participles_on_Wiktionary, and wanted to respond.

I wonder why 'cried child' is strange but 'fallen child' is fine, especially since both cry and fall are intransitive. There must be something inherent in the meanings of these participles that makes them different somehow. Maybe some participles like fall are active by nature while cried is passive?

The key here is something called (deprecated template usage) telicity. I wasn't really aware of it until I started studying Navajo, which explicitly marks atelicity with the prefix na- (which we're missing at the moment, but which is used in naané). Telicity basically concerns whether an action has a defined endpoint or end state. For instance, you can play for however long, or cry for however long -- there's no defined endpoint -- and when you stop, there's no real change in state. Meanwhile, if you cut something out of a magazine, you stop cutting once you've cut out the bit of paper because there's nothing left to do -- there is a defined endpoint -- and when you stop, you've now got two things, the magazine and the bit you cut out.

Some verbs can have telic and atelic senses at the same time. For instance, you can eat atelically as a general non-specific activity -- I was eating when the phone rang -- or you can eat something specific telically -- I ate the cupcake. This may touch upon your question about how the differences in use as participial adjectives might have had to do with transitivity, in that many transitive verbs are inherently telic.

On a tangent -- Incidentally, I find the whole grammar and POS question to be quite an issue, touching upon many aspects of semantics and grammar that are seldom fully articulated, quite likely because folks aren't consciously and explicitly aware of them (much as I was previously unaware of telicity). Current grammars for English appear woefully anachronistic and inadequate as a result. The present participle in English, for instance, like (deprecated template usage) playing, seems to really describe an imperfective state, in some contexts as a deverbalized noun, while the past participle describes a perfective state -- yet aspect is something that is seldom talked about with regard to English grammar, since so much of the mechanics of aspect are subsumed into tense in this language. Or take the dictum against split infinitives, such a necessity for Latin and such an irrelevancy for English... Suffice it to say that I found the Wiktionary:Beer_parlour#How_to_treat_participles_on_Wiktionary discussion quite interesting.

Cheers from a fellow 言語のオタク (gengo no otaku, i.e. "language geek"), -- Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 20:40, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your explanation. It does help a little and it reminds me of something I learned in Finnish. Finnish has a similar distinction, but the distinction is not in the verb but in the object and is called 'partitive'. Söin kakun means "I ate the cake" and it uses the accusative for cake which implies I ate all of it. But söin kakkua uses the partitive, which means I ate 'of the cake' or 'some cake' or just 'cake' without finishing it. —CodeCat 20:57, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/2011-10/Categories of names 3

Because you voted in Wiktionary:Votes/2011-07/Categories of names, I'm informing you of this new vote.​—msh210℠ (talk) 01:53, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Special:WantedCategories

How able would you/MewBot be to create something like Category:cmn:Plants in simplified script using {{topic cat|cmn|Plats|sc=Hans}}? There are way too many categories for a human to do it. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:41, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

The problem is that the template Hans expands to 'Simplified Han script', so it marks the category for attention because its name is wrong. This problem was discussed before but never solved. —CodeCat 15:45, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

flood flag

I don't know whether you watchlist the page, so am pointing out that you might be interested in [[Wiktionary talk:Requests for flood flag#procedure]].​—msh210℠ (talk) 00:11, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Template:got-romanization of

I propose to drop the bolding from this template, bolded Gothic script looks a bit 'fury' 'furry' to me. --Mglovesfun (talk) 11:02, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

The bolding isn't done by that template but by {{form of}}, which it transcludes. So any changes would need to be made there. —CodeCat 12:28, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

It is possible to bypass form of all together. So I think the wider question is should Gothic be bolded at all? Does bolding help or hinder reading? --Mglovesfun (talk) 17:09, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

The script template {{Goth}} is set to make bolded text bigger instead. But it seems that {{form of}} ignores that altogether. I don't know why. —CodeCat 17:10, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Form of completely bypasses {{Latn|face=head}} (or whatever the script template is) and just bolds everything, with no option to remove the bolding. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:13, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

For some reason <span class='use-with-mention'><span class='mention'>[[word]]</span></span> produces word. But only with both span tags at once. So it should be possible to fix it in MediaWiki:Common.css. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:19, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Low German

I don't know who else to ask about this so I'm turning to you. I have absolutely no idea whether or not to capitalize Low German nouns. Currently, there isn't a standard, and you can see them both lowercase and uppercase at Wiktionary, which is a big inconsistency. I'd like to standardize it if possible. -- Liliana • 13:42, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

If there is no standard, it's hard to standardise it. There is also the issue of different spelling systems and rules, some more like Dutch and others more like German. It may be better to ask User:Dakhart, who is our most active editor for Low German. And there is Wiktionary:About Low German. —CodeCat 14:11, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Soundlong

Thanks. I seem to lose my ability to put words right when working on Wiktionary.Dakhart 20:06, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

transliterations in Gothic headword-line templates

The Gothic headword-line templates (or at least the few I've checked) link to the translitration using ({{l|got|sc=Latn|{{{tr}}}|{{{tralt|{{{tr}}}}}}}}). Since the transliteration doesn't actually contain any information at all (but, rather, merely links back to the Gothic-script page), that link is useless to someone already at the Gothic-script page. Might I suggest that that code be replaced by ({{{tralt|{{{tr}}}}}})?

On a somewhat related note, if tr isn't supplied, then the template displays {{{tr}}}, but doesn't categorize the entry as needing attention, so it might sit like that. What we've done in Hebrew is either (rarely) to not demand that tr be supplied (e.g., {{#if:{{{tralt|{{{tr|}}}}}}| ({{{tralt|{{{tr}}}}}})}}) or (more often) categorize if tr isn't supplied (e.g., <includeonly>{{#if:{{{tr|}}}||{{attention|got|needs transliteration|id=got-noun-form}}}}</includeonly>. You may possibly wish to consider something along either of those lines.

All the best.​—msh210℠ (talk) 00:25, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

It does categorise the entry as far as I know, at least I did make it that way. And the linking is done so that you can easily see whether the romanized entry is still missing. It's very useful and I've already used it many times since I added it. —CodeCat 00:35, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

It does categorize! I looked at the template code, looked for that, and somehow didn't see it. Sorry. But it's a shame to link for all users when the link is useful to editors only. Perhaps something along the lines of [[user:msh210/hyphenate.js]]?​—msh210℠ (talk) 01:00, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

I don't really understand what that does. Could you explain it? —CodeCat 01:10, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

It looks up, on the server, whether a certain page exists, and, if not, generates a link to it.​—msh210℠ (talk) 01:19, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

Over de Oergermaanse taal.

CodeCat,

Het werk van de Oergemaanse taal gezien hebbende, en niet wetende waar te beginnen, want ik werd getroffen door de pracht der werken (beowulf in proto-germanic & word list of the modern germanic language), daar het gebruik van zulk een oude taal door jou zo springlevend gemaakt wordt. Net als jij, vind ik het een genot te werken aan de Oergemaanse taal, en gaarne draag ik voor de gemene zaak mijn werken bij. Voor de gemene kennis van mensen wil ik jou erop wijzen, dat het een grote bijdrage is, dat jij meer vertaalt van de oude woorden van Bēowulf, waardoor jij dus blijdschap geeft aan mensen, en een doorzettingsvermogen om meer te leren over de Oergermaanse taal. Niet vergetende, dat het zo mooi is om te zien, hoe jij de woorden des hedens met zulk een kunst omgezet hebt naar de Oergermaanse taal. Ik had gewild, dat onze vaderlandse taal zuiver was, als jij in de vertalingen van het Germaans laat zien, dan geeft het leren der wetenschappelijken zaken veel meer blijdschap, en leert men de zaken sneller, het gezien hebbende in het IJslands. Voor het helpen bij het toevoegen van zaken voor het Oergermaans heb ik enkele vragen, zijnde een beginnende in zulke, en ik wil even een kleine veelheid uitleg, welke mij bij het werk van het blad www.wiktionary.org zal helpen.

1. Middels welke handelingen voeg ik woorden toe op de wenselijke wijze?
2. Welke bronnen beveel jij mij aan voor het uitbreiden des woordenschats van de Oergermaanse taal? Hoofdzakelijk gebruik ik mijn etymologische kennis van de Germaanse talen, zoals het IJslands, Duits, Engels, Oudnoords, Gotisch, Fries, en Nederlands. Ik gebruik ter vergelijking het blad www.etymologiebank.nl, en http://www.etymonline.com/, ik wil echter meer hebben om een goede hulp te wezen, want ik voeg gaarne juiste zaken toe, daar onjuistheden mij "gansch" niet bevallen. Ik zag alvast een bron voor het Oergermaans op jouw bladzijde.

Mijn dank voor al jouw gedane werk, en neem mij niet kwalijk voor het gebruik van het woord jij, daar het misschien niet gepast zijnde.

Met vriendelijke groeten,

Dyami Millarson

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User_talk:Dyami_Millarson

Wat leuk dat er toch mensen zijn die zulke dingen boeiend vinden! En je mag me gerust 'jij' noemen, ik vind het zo raar dat je opeens een ander voornaamwoord zou moeten gebruiken. Wat mij betreft mag iedereen gelijkwaardig zijn. :)

Als je woorden in het Oergermaans wilt toevoegen, gelden daarvoor dezelfde voorschriften als bij woorden in andere talen. Om te weten hoe dat ongeveer in zijn werk gaat, kun je bij Help:Starting a new page beginnen. Het is ook handig om eens te kijken naar woorden die er al zijn. Veel mensen beginnen bij bestaande woorden en nemen daarvan de tekst over (door op 'edit' te klikken zie je die, de opmaak en dergelijke erbij), en veranderen wat nodig is. Je kunt dus zo uitgaan van wat er al is, en dat trachten na te bootsen.

Wat ook belangrijk is, is dat de woorden die je toevoegt ook bestaan. Daarvoor hebben we de Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion. In het algemeen geldt dat een woord in meerdere lopende teksten onafhankelijk te vinden moet zijn. Voor oudere talen zijn de regels iets losser, omdat er doorgaans weinig van over is. Voor niet-overgeleverde talen zoals het Oergermaans is het iets lastiger, omdat er helemaal geen lopende teksten zijn. Voor het Oergermaans is het belangrijk dat er een zinnige afleiding van het woord bestaat, afgaand op onze kennis van het Oergermaans en de latere talen en hoe die zich ontwikkeld hebben. Er moet in beginsel ook altijd tenminste één woord in een Germaanse dochtertaal genoemd worden onder 'descendants', om de herkomst te bekrachtigen. Het is ook zeker zinnig als er een (redelijk betrouwbare) bron is die het woord noemt. Wat betreft de naamgeving van woorden op Wiktionary, gelden voor niet-overgeleverde talen andere regels. De naam wordt dan namelijk voorafgegaan door Appendix:Proto-Germanic/. Voer dus niet zomaar de naam van een Oergermaans woord in, maar zet dat er altijd voor, voor je een nieuwe ingang aanmaakt! Tenslotte is er ook nog Wiktionary:About Proto-Germanic, waar een aantal belangrijke punten staan.

Wat bronnen betreft is wat je hebt genoemd zeker goed. Ik heb ook een boek dat 'From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic' heet, geschreven door Don Ringe, een onderwijzer in de Indo-Europese taalkunde. Daar staat heel veel in over het Oergermaans, de ontwikkeling vanaf het Oerindoeuropees, en de spraakleer. Aan de hand van de kennis in dat boek kun je eventueel zelf ook herkomsten afleiden, en die woorden zelf weer toevoegen. Maar dat is altijd een beetje twijfelachtiger dan woorden rechtstreeks uit een bron overnemen, en je hebt er veel voorkennis over de onderlinge ontwikkelingen en verschillen van de dochtertalen voor nodig.

In elk geval vind ik het leuk dat het je boeit en ik hoop dat je nog veel leuks vindt op Wiktionary! —CodeCat 14:58, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Een gelukkig kerstmis CodeCat!

Het was verademend om te vernemen dat jij er net zo over denkt met het gebruik van je en u. De uitleg die jij mij trouwens gaf is zeer verhelderend, niet over het hoofd ziende de links, en ik zal het er soms nog even bijpakken als iets niet zo goed herinner. Ik heb trouwens het boek bij google books gevonden, en daar kan ik het, geloof ik, volledig doorkijken, en lezen. Ik heb alvast wat zaken om met jou te overleggen over het Oergermaans.

In het Gotisch is het woord voor beiden het woord 'bai', dus vermoedelijk is het 'bai' in het Oergermaans. Ik vermoed, dat het woord zich verbuigt net als ambo, en duo, waarin de sporen van een dualis terug te vinden zijn, vergelijk bijvoorbeeld de Oudnoordse verbuiging van het woord báðir, en tveir, en zo het Gotische woord twai, en bai. Hoe kunnen wij hieruit te weten komen welke vormen er in het Oergermaans voorkwamen, want ten eerste weten wij, dat het woord voor beiden en twee waarschijnlijk een gelijkende verbuiging hadden, en dat zij de vormen van een dualis weergeven. Wellicht moeten wij hiervoor naar een andere Indo-Europese taal kijken met dualisvormen om dit te weten te komen. Ik hoor graag jouw bevindingen hierin.

Os. bēthia ‘beide’; ohd. beide (nhd. beide); ofri. bēthe, beithe (nfri. beide); me. (< on.) bothe (ne. both); on. báðir (nzw. båda). De Germaanse vormen zijn ofwel meervoudsvormen in overeenstemming met het aanwijzend vnw. þai, ofwel oorspr. een onzijdige dualisvorm *bhoi ‘beide’ bij een wortel pie. *bhoH-. De niet-samengestelde vorm vindt men in: oe. bēgen, bā, bū ‘beide’; got. bai ‘beide’; on. beggja (genitief mv.) ‘van beiden’ (< *baiiē) (nzw. bägge). Van de website [2].

Het bevalt mij zeer dat jij het Oergermaans ook zo leuk vind, en dat jij er ook zoveel vanaf weet! ;-)

Prettige feestdagen!

De verbuiging van 'twee' en 'beide' is inderdaad hetzelfde, maar over de verbuiging zelf is nog veel overleg. Ringe zegt dat de Gotische en Oudnoorse vormen namelijk niet oorspronkelijk zijn, maar latere aanpassingen gegrond in de verbuiging van bijvoeglijke naamwoorden. Dat is vooral bij tveir goed te zien, want dat heeft een -r waar het Gotische twai die mist. Op Template:termx staat het een en ander uitgelegd over de verbuiging van de woorden. —CodeCat 10:54, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Ik had daar nog niet aan gedacht, en ik had ook even bij Template:termx moeten kijken. Wil jij later dan even het woord Template:termx toevoegen? Op het ogenblik lees ik op elke dag enkele bladzijden van het boek van Don Ringe. Ik vind zijn werk vrij overzichtelijk, dus redelijk snel te lezen. Neem mij trouwens niet kwalijk dat ik zolang niet een antwoord gaf, want ik had het zeer druk met school. Beste wensen! —Dyami Millarson|User talk:Dyami Millarson 17:19, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Nouns and proper nouns

Hi. I just started a discussion on BP and would really like to know your thoughts on the matter. Thanks. – Krun 18:01, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Beer parlour

Hey, could you take another look at my Chinese category section? In my latest post, just to make things clear and plain to see, I "drew up" how the structure of the categories should be. 50 Xylophone Players talk 00:51, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

proto and conlang language codes

I think the proto and conlang codes, like {{proto:gem-pro}} should not have links. Believe it or not, the only purpose of the links in language templates is in case someone decides to subst: them in translation tables, and that is not an issue for these kinds of languages, so they do not need a link. This could potentially save us a lot of code, since other templates will no longer need to cater for this. -- Liliana • 18:38, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

If that is the only reason for having them, maybe we could make a case for removing the linking of all the templates? —CodeCat 18:51, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

If we got a consensus to no longer link language names in translation tables, we could rid ourselves of the links entirely. As long as things are as is, they're still needed though at least for regular templates (non-proto/conlang). -- Liliana • 18:54, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Then I think it's ok to remove the linking for those templates. —CodeCat 18:57, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Category:Gaelic languages

Is this still needed? -- Liliana • 17:39, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't think so. —CodeCat 20:18, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Ancient Korean languages

If you want to categorize these, you should probably use something like w:Buyeo languages. Their relationship with the Korean language proper as well as any other languages of the near vicinity are highly disputed, so categorizing them is a bit dangerous. -- Liliana • 17:08, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I noticed this later. I assumed they were Korean dialects but then I looked on Wikipedia. —CodeCat 17:09, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Creating pages from stuff I find on the web

While looking for mentionings of orlog, I found this: http://www.heinrich-tischner.de/22-sp/2wo/wort/idg/deutsch/l/luegen.htm
For one thing I cannot make out how -leugja leads to -loge, but my actual question is: Can I take such sites as sources for the creation of PGM-entries or is that problematic? (Validity, reliability)
Also: You don't happen to have a source for PG/Old [Insert Language] week-, month-, Mythic-names? Like Ostermanoth, Ymir etc.Dakhart 09:51, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

I think you're right, liugija- can't become loge. A lot of these sites get their etymologies from other sources, often very old ones. The etymologies may be reasonably valid, but they are often not precise enough. For example the word 'leugja' can't exist in Proto-Germanic, but 'liugiją', 'liugijaz' or 'liugijō' can. And as for the names, there aren't PG etymologies for many of them because they are often actually newer than PG. The weekdays are calques from Latin, and the months are Germanic but differ between languages so there is no way to tell which was the original one. Perhaps it's safest to say that if the months had names in PG, there was neither a clear boundary between months, nor a single name for each month. Some months may have had several names. —CodeCat 09:58, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

surmata

Can you check/fix/format this edit of mine? — Jeraphine Gryphon 19:38, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

I've fixed it now, using two templates I just created. :) —CodeCat 20:00, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. You removed the actual translations though? I think for most people the linguistics jargon doesn't really say anything; it'd be way more helpful to say that surmata means "without death" rather than "Abessive singular form of surm" and have them click the link and still be puzzled as to what it actually means. Even if that's the standard here, I think it shouldn't be that way. — Jeraphine Gryphon 20:09, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

This is the general practice on Wiktionary, mainly because most of those form entries are created automatically. But of course if you want to provide translations in addition to the standard template, you can. It would probably just take a lot of work to do that for every word... @.@ —CodeCat 20:11, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

o_O I'll think about that for a bit... — Jeraphine Gryphon 20:14, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

In surmama there's a typo in the conjugation table and I can't find the actual page to edit to fix it. There's "ärä surma", ärä should be ära. — Jeraphine Gryphon 20:14, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

I've fixed it. The mistake was in Template:et-conj. —CodeCat 20:20, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

What's the difference between using

• Template:et-form of and
• Template:et-verb form of or Template:et-nom form of

? — Jeraphine Gryphon 20:25, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

I just created the second two, I don't really know what the first one is for. It seems like it was made for both verbs and nouns, which seemed a little overcomplicated to me... —CodeCat 20:29, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

The first one is, er, actually used. Should it be replaced with the new ones since they're more specific? — Jeraphine Gryphon 20:36, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

If you want to, you can. Sometimes people create some templates but later on people realise the templates aren't very useful and instead create their own. And then there are two different templates that do the same thing. This is also what happened with {{et-verb}} and {{et-verb (old)}} —CodeCat 20:37, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

*twitch* But what if I want to do things in a well-organized manner?

I've been bothering you too much, I think I'll lurk a little more and try to get the hang of things myself. (Maybe.) — Jeraphine Gryphon 20:45, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

*giggles* It's ok, I don't mind helping. I like to do things in a well-organised manner as well, but there are also other people who like to do things that way. Onl ysometimes people disagree on what way is best. Luckily, once one way becomes the most common and accepted way to do things, other people usually adapt to it. —CodeCat 20:48, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Can you edit the Template:et-noun to include a parameter for plurals? — Jeraphine Gryphon 20:55, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Is that really necessary if the inflection tables already contain all the forms? —CodeCat 21:01, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Then what do I do with ananass and poomissurm? And all the others that don't have the tables (yet)? All English words show the plurals, I thought it was the standard thing to do. — Jeraphine Gryphon 21:05, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

It depends on the language. Usually, the forms that are listed in the headword line are the 'principal parts'. They are the forms that allow you to easily guess all the other forms, and those are the forms that ÕS lists as well. English nouns only have two principal parts, the singular and the plural, because there are no cases. Usually the plural can be predicted from the singular as well, but not always. Latin nouns often have two principal parts, but the second principal part is the genitive singular, like in domus, or for adjectives the three genders, like in bonus. Latin verbs have four principal parts, like at habeo. I don't know what would be best to show for Estonian nouns, but we could follow ÕS. The only problem is that ÕS lists a lot of principal parts, too many to fit on one line easily, so it might be better to choose just a few. Maybe just the genitive and partitive singular? Or maybe we could list no principal parts at all instead, and rely on the tables entirely. —CodeCat 21:13, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

So basically there is no standard? I'll try to remember if I learned anything in school about this... A lot of the time, to form a plural you just add a "d" to the end, so that's fairly simple, the genitives and partitives are more complex. But also a lot of the time, forming the plural is complicated as well. ... I think I'm remembering something important, about stems or something... With a word like kuusk, the genitive is kuuse, and you form a plural by adding a "d" to the genitive. With a word like ananass, the genitive is ananassi, and the plural is ananassid. Okay, everything makes sense now. The genitive and partitive are more important (than the plural). — Jeraphine Gryphon 21:33, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Usually if the form is more complex, it's more useful to list it as a principal part, because it's something our users will have more trouble guessing. The template {{et-noun}} already allows you to list the genitive and partitive, like this for kuusk: {{et-noun|kuuse|kuuske}} —CodeCat 21:39, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Got it, edited a few words accordingly. About the first part though, I don't think I get what you're saying. — Jeraphine Gryphon 21:44, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

It's like what you explained. If you want to guess the plural form, you first need to know the genitive singular and then add -d to it. But there is no easy way to guess the genitive, it has to be remembered. So that means the genitive is more 'basic', it's harder to guess. —CodeCat 21:50, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

pool

Right, right. Is there a template for adverbs? Here: pool#Adverb, do I just repeat the word pool under the "Adverb" title in bold? (The adverbs tend to not change at all or have a limited variety of, er, variants, so they probably don't need separate templates. But an adverb like pool has a couple of variants, should they be mentioned there?) — Jeraphine Gryphon 21:57, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Which varieties can an adverb have? And are they really forms of the adverb, or are they separate adverbs? —CodeCat 21:58, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Well, there's also poole (tule minu poole -- "come over to my place") and poolt (tule minu poolt läbi -- "drop by at my place"; mine sealt poolt -- "go from over there"). I think that's it, three variants. An adverb like siin ("here") has variants siia ("to here") and siit ("from here"). — Jeraphine Gryphon 22:08, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Oh I see. They are also postpositions then. A postposition in Finnish has a noun in the genitive form before it, is it the same in Estonian? And it looks like these forms are really different cases of some base form. Sometimes the base form is an actual word, sometimes it's just a stem that is not used on its own. At least in Finnish it's shown in this way. Look at ala- or ylä- in Finnish; there is a declension table there with the different forms. Could the forms be shown the same way in Estonian? Is poole the allative form of a stem poo-? —CodeCat 22:18, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

I think not. It just absolutely doesn't register as a real word or a stem of one. Though, according to a material I kept from schooldays and just found, there are certain adverbs that (only) change within the three "place cases" -- allative, adessive and ablative. Examples:

• poole (allative), pool (adessive), poolt (ablative) -- nothing else exists, no nominative, no stem, nothing
• alla (allative), all (adessive), alt (ablative) -- (all means "under")

I'm pretty sure siia, siin and siit are in those cases as well (but I'm unconvinced because of the lack of Ls), but I don't have the expertise to state so. Anyway, there's a bunch of other words, adverbs, as well that only exist in those three cases. — Jeraphine Gryphon 23:13, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Ohh, maybe the other three "place cases" are relevant as well -- illative, inessive and elative. Examples:

• sisse (illative), sees (inessive), seest (elative) -- sees means inside, the others are to inside and from inside
• välja (illative), väljas (inessive), väljast (elative) -- väljas means outside

And then there's a word like taga (behind) whose other forms are taha and tagant, I'm not sure if it's in the allative-adessive-ablative cases or the illative-inessive-elative cases... I probably sound like an idiot but thankfully there are no experts here to notice... — Jeraphine Gryphon 23:26, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Maybe looking at Finnish can help here. Finnish has a pronoun se which means 'it', and siitä is the elative case, siinä the inessive, and siihen the illative, but there are also sillä, sille and siltä for the 'outside' case forms. I think the Estonian forms probably have the same origin, but I don't know if the word 'se' still exists there. I think poole, pool and poolt also come from a base word that no longer exists; you can see that they have the endings of the allative, adessive, and ablative cases. I'm not sure what that base word was, though. —CodeCat 23:30, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

And I think siitä is actually the original partitive case, which used to be an 'away' case as well before it took the present meaning. siinä is the essive case, which developed in the same way. siihen is the normal illative form. —CodeCat 23:32, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Finnish makes no sense, looking at it will only confuse me! I feel dumb though, I'm not very good with the terminology of linguistics in English. When I've been saying "adverb" I think I meant "postposition". Maybe. There's an article on Estonian grammar in Wikipedia, if it makes more sense to you than it does to me. — Jeraphine Gryphon 23:37, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

OHHHHHHHH. "See" is "it", "seest" (see + -st) is "from inside (it)", that's the base word there. Still no idea about pool though. The other definition of the word is "half" though... — Jeraphine Gryphon 23:41, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Finnish has that word as well, puoli which also means 'half'. But I don't know if 'half' can mean 'place'... that doesn't really make sense to me. On the other hand, puoli means 'side' it says... that could also become 'place' maybe...? —CodeCat 23:51, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

An adverb is a word that describes the circumstances of doing something, such as where, when, how, why and so on. Prepositions and postpositions are words that are combined with words before or after them, and this combination forms an 'adverbial phrase', a group of words that acts like an adverb together. If you look at the sentences 'I sleep here' and 'I sleep in my house' then 'here' and 'in my house' both have similar purposes in the sentence, they both describe the place where I sleep. 'here' is an adverb, 'in' is a preposition, and the part that follows it 'my house' is called its antecedent. English has almost only prepositions ('in' comes before 'my house') but in Finnish (and probably Estonian), there are both types. Prepositions come before a word in the partitive case, and postpositions come after a word in the genitive case. —CodeCat 23:51, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

And another thing... all entries must have a headword template, but if there is no template for that language, there is a generic template that you can use for anything: {{head|et|adverb}} (this template used to be called 'infl' and you may see that in some entries still, but it's just a redirect). —CodeCat 22:00, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

I was wondering what the infl thing was for. Does the temp template put the words in a category? — Jeraphine Gryphon 22:08, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Template:temp is to make it easy for people to link to templates easily and to display how to use a template. {{temp|et-noun|kuuse|kuuske}} will show: {{et-noun|kuuse|kuuske}}. It shouldn't really be used on entries at all, just on discussion and appendix pages and such. —CodeCat 22:12, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

D'oh, I meant to ask about the head template. When I use it, does it automatically put the page in the right category? — Jeraphine Gryphon 23:13, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Oh, yes it does. If the language code and the part of speech are given, it will put the page in the right category. —CodeCat 23:30, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Continued

Pool as a postposition is used in a term like vasakul pool (on the left side). Do you see the connection here? A half --> a side --> this place as opposed to the other place. But I think I've gone totally off the topic of improving Wiktionary... I think my initial point was that there should maybe be a standardized way of displaying such words that aren't nouns but change in a limited variety of cases. If someone is looking up a word like that, they're not going to automatically know that there are other variants of the word. — Jeraphine Gryphon 00:04, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

The etymology of the word could explain that. But I wonder about something. Could 'pool' be the adessive case of 'pool'? Shouldn't it be 'poolel' or something similar? —CodeCat 00:21, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't think the adessive case is ever the same as the nominative. With the word pool as "half", the adessive case is indeed poolel. (Like "there's no paint on half of this wall" -- poolel [on half] sellest seinast [of this wall] ei ole [is no] värvi [paint].)

...Oh hold on. I think that's a third definition. "Side". *so confused* Is "side" a noun or what? I gave a bad example above (with vasakul pool). I think. Maybe. ... I think I should stick to more simpler things, like translating nouns. x_x — Jeraphine Gryphon 00:37, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Postpositions are adverbs, at least in Estonian. — Jeraphine Gryphon 00:59, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

A lot of the "locative adverbs" (inside, outside, behind, beside, on top of, etc) form series (like alla-all-alt) that give an impression of belonging to the illative-inessive-elative or allative-adessive-ablative cases but don't actually have a full set of cases. — Jeraphine Gryphon 01:07, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Shouldn't Template:et-nom form of be Template:et-noun form of instead? — Jeraphine Gryphon 02:54, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Nevermind, I get it. — Jeraphine Gryphon 02:56, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Help, I've no idea how to use this thing: Template:et-verb form of. (On tule#Verb.) — Jeraphine Gryphon 03:04, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Verb conjugations

The conjugation tables on words in here Category:Estonian tulema-type verbs are... horrifying. Completely. I hope no one has seen or used those... Can I remove the table from minema entirely? That one is (should be but currently isn't) full of exceptions and irregularities, for example no word like "minen" exists at all and instead of that we use "lähen". — Jeraphine Gryphon 03:16, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I'll try to fix minema but it seems that it is just irregular so it will need its own conjugation table. Are tulema and surema still correct? —CodeCat 11:28, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I've added a new table to minema and olema but can you please check it to make sure it's right? I sort of understand Estonian verbs but these are a mystery to me... x.x —CodeCat 11:39, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

These ones should be fixed now. — Jeraphine Gryphon 15:06, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you! I hope minema is right because I am so confused... I noticed that you added -d- back in some forms. Is there a reason why it contracts in the present passive but not in any of the other passive forms? I may have made that mistake in other tables as well. —CodeCat 15:11, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you're asking. (There's a lot of present passives in the tables, and what qualifies as "contracting" here?) — Jeraphine Gryphon 15:21, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Contract means that two sounds that are next to each other 'merge' into one, like ld becoming ll. I think the proper term is assimilation. I wonder why tullakse has ll, while tuldaks keeps ld. Is there just a rule that if the da-infinitive have ll then the present passive form has it too, while the other passive forms have ld? —CodeCat 15:25, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't know about the rules, I just speak the language. (And I don't recall a specific rule about this. In school I was really good with grammar and actually remembering the rules, but it's been a couple of years...) Funny, they're obviously very common words but I can't figure out right now if "minnakse" or "mindakse", or "tullakse" or "tuldakse" are correct for the present passive... It's possible that people actually use either one when they speak, though my ÕS says it's correct as it is in the table right now. I don't think I know what's up with that. Maybe I'll have something smarter to say later; I'll have a look at the other verb tables too. — Jeraphine Gryphon 15:45, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

pluperfect

Can we change "pluperfect" in the verb tables to "past perfect"? — Jeraphine Gryphon 15:22, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes I think that's a good idea. —CodeCat 15:25, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Apparently past perfect and pluperfect are different things... Can I change "perfect" to "past perfect"? It was confusing me earlier. — Jeraphine Gryphon 16:09, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

They are the same things... but it's a bit confusing because 'perfect' seems like something that happens in the past. But what perfect really refers to is something that is complete. And if it's complete, then obviously something must have happened in the past. But it can be complete at different times... it may be complete now (present perfect) or in the past (past perfect, pluperfect). For example, you can say 'I do', 'I did', which is present and past imperfect (you don't know if it's finished). But you can also say 'I have done', 'I had done', that is present and past perfect (you know that it's finished). —CodeCat 16:13, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

In Estonian we have two tenses: present and past. Past has three forms: (1) past (lihtminevik, labelled "past" in the tables), (2) past perfect (täisminevik, labelled "perfect" in the tables), and (3) pluperfect (enneminevik, labelled "pluperfect" in the tables). — Jeraphine Gryphon 16:19, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

If you say 'olen tulnud' "I have come" then that means two things. It means that, sometime in the past, 'tulin' "I came", but that I am now 'tulnud' ("having come", I may not have been finished coming in the past). In the same way, 'olin tulnud' "I had come" means that sometime in the past 'tulin' "I came"... but... it also means that in the past I was already 'tulnud' ("having come", I finished coming in the past). The difference between olen and olin is the time at which the word 'tulnud' describes your state of being, you can either be "having come" now, or in the past. In both cases, the action of coming took place in the past, but if you came in the past ('tulin') and you are still coming, then you are not 'tulnud' yet. —CodeCat 16:25, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

You're talking about something unrelated here. I'm saying that particular tense is "officially" classified as being a past tense (täisminevik, minevik = past, täis = full, complete, "perfect"), whether it makes sense or not; and dictionaries tell me that "täisminevik" translates to "past perfect", so that's what we should be using -- instead of simply "perfect", I don't think that's clear enough.

Enneminevik ("olin tulnud") is pluperfect, so, at least here, past perfect and pluperfect are different things. — Jeraphine Gryphon 16:42, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

I understand, but calling 'olen tulnud' the past perfect will confuse many people, because in English, past perfect and pluperfect mean the same. It is explained more at w:Pluperfect. —CodeCat 16:46, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

orgasm, purse, suu, keep, auto

Can I ask why you removed the declension from these? — [Ric Laurent] — 13:07, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

The declension tables in those entries are old and we're in the process of replacing them. —CodeCat 13:07, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Don't remove them unless you're replacing them now. Removing content is bad. And the templates aren't that old lol. Who are "we"? — [Ric Laurent] — 13:28, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

-k suffix in Estonian

It doesn't exist. There's "-ik" and "-lik". I think the -ik words tend to be nouns and -lik words tend to be adjectives. With the nouns it's usually not easy to tell what the stem is or was, or maybe it's just a coincidence that the word end with -ik and it isn't a suffix at all. There's a word like hommik (morning), I really... I was going to say I really doubt "homm" means something, then remembered homme means "tomorrow". Well, in any case, some nouns like to end with -ik, but it's probably difficult to determine the stem for most of them. — Jeraphine Gryphon 15:30, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

The suffix seems to mean the same as -kko in Finnish so they are probably related. I think what happens when the suffix is added is that the -i at the end of the stem gets added back again. Are there any words ending in -uk or -ak? —CodeCat 15:35, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

There are words like väljak (a large outdoors area, for example Vabaduse väljak; "väljas" means outside), rünnak (an attack, verb ründama, to attack), hõljuk (a floating machine or something, verb hõljuma, to float).

Okay, I get it. -k is a suffix for nouns, -lik is a (separate) suffix for adjectives. — Jeraphine Gryphon 16:05, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Er, lapsik must be an exception. It's an adjective but doesn't end with -lik, just -ik. -lik is still a real suffix though. — Jeraphine Gryphon 16:10, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Is it possible that -lik comes from the Germanic suffix, like in Dutch -lijk, German -lich or Swedish -lig? In those languages the suffix derives adjectives, and it's known that Estonian borrowed heavily from those languages. —CodeCat 17:53, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I guess. :x *has no idea* — Jeraphine Gryphon 18:03, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

If I might ask

What's the benefit of the changes to {{et-verb}}? — [Ric Laurent] — 23:16, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Which changes do you mean exactly? I made the template display more like other templates, with the da-infinitive listed between brackets. —CodeCat 23:17, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Well, you broke it for närida, sadada, jääda, puhuda. — [Ric Laurent] — 23:26, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I'm getting to that... —CodeCat 23:27, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

It's good to have a plan. — [Ric Laurent] — 23:29, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

For the record I made {{et-verb}} the way it was because I've seen as many Estonian dictionaries list the -ma infinitive as the -da as the "main" form. — [Ric Laurent] — 23:34, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

So far the dictionaries I've seen all use the ma-infinitive as the lemma, including the one at Eesti Keele Instituut, which I think has official status in at least some way. I understand that it can be useful to treat both equally, but it leads to problems similar to color and colour, there will be a lot of duplication of effort and a lack of synchronisation. For a few English words this isn't so bad, but when we duplicate every single Estonian verb it's going to go very wrong... —CodeCat 23:37, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

*butts in* The -ma infinitive is considered the main/default form. — Jeraphine Gryphon 23:42, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I actually misspoke, the -ma infinitive was more common, but I remember a few that treated -da as the main form. And code-cat, I wasn't talking about duplicating. Not exactly. — [Ric Laurent] — 23:48, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

kõik

Is kõik a singulare tantum? — Jeraphine Gryphon 00:16, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Not really... but I suppose if you look at the two different meanings as if they are two different words, then 'everything' is a singulare tantum, and 'everyone' is a plurale tantum. —CodeCat 00:18, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Should the Noun section be removed from there? — Jeraphine Gryphon 00:21, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

I think so, unless you think it can be a noun as well. Could you use it for things like 'oled mu kõik', 'you are my everything'? —CodeCat 00:24, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

I think not. Though I was reminded of "sa tähendad mulle kõik" ("you mean everything to me"); it doesn't sound grammatically correct but I think I've heard it being used like that. Though I googled the phrase and found copies of two or three different amateurish love-poems. I think it might be an incorrect carryover from English, to use the word like that. So I'm pretty sure it's not a noun at all. — Jeraphine Gryphon 00:46, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

I'd say you can add at least et-1 to your Babel box, you have a pretty impressive understanding of how Estonian works. — Jeraphine Gryphon 00:51, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you! :) Most of what I know about Estonian is really what I know about Finnish. The languages are very similar and if you learn one, then the other, it's easy to compare the two and see where the differences are. —CodeCat 00:54, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Finnish texts read really bulky and weird, it's like Finnish is the retarded cousin of Estonian. >_> Though I'm sure Finns see it the opposite way... I own eleven textbooks on Finnish (compare: six on English, three on Russian, two on German) but I haven't seriously tried to study it. It's just weird. Though I'm a bit impressed by how they've created their own words for some things where we loaned the words from English or such, for example our word for telephone is telefon while theirs is puhelin (which sounds like a derivation from their word for "speak"?), and our word for electricity is elekter while theirs is sähkö (which sounds like onomatopoeia, doesn't it? or am I imagining it?). — Jeraphine Gryphon 01:25, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Finnish is more puristic than Estonian, but it also has less different sounds so it seems a bit simplistic when you read it. On the other hand, Finnish keeps many older forms where Estonian has developed further. For example, if you look at the word koira you see the genitive is koiran and the partitive is koiraa. In Estonian these have been reduced to koer, koera and koera... the last vowel and the -n disappeared. So in a sense, Finnish is more 'original', closer to the ancient language than Estonian. Puhelin is derived from the verb puhella (in Finnish, the da-infinitive is the form used in dictionaries), with the suffix -in added. —CodeCat 01:36, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

...can we put sähkö in the onomatopoeia category? (Does Wiktionary have a policy about "original research" like Wikipedia does?) — Jeraphine Gryphon 01:31, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't think so. It might be onomatopoeia but the etymology on the page says something else, that it was based on other words. —CodeCat 01:36, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

et-nom

What's the difference between {{et-nom}}, and {{et-noun}} and {{et-adj}}? — Jeraphine Gryphon 02:39, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

{{et-nom}} is meant to be used for declined words that don't really need a different template, such as pronouns and determiners. Otherwise there would be lots of templates that were almost the same, that seemed like a waste... —CodeCat 12:15, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

saada

In saada, there's given two pronunciations and two verbs, though I think it should be pointed out somehow that the long pronunciation applies to the form of saatma, while the overlong pronunciation applies to the form of saama. Is there a formatting standard for that? — Jeraphine Gryphon 15:29, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

I changed it now, is that ok? —CodeCat 15:39, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Yup! — Jeraphine Gryphon 15:56, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

nytt

Hello CodeCat! While looking at the declension table for Old English nytt (f), I observed that it is using the i-declension where it should be using a ja-declension. However, there is no template made for feminine ja-stems, only masc & neut. Could you create one please? Leasnam 16:55, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Do feminine jō-stems (I think that's what you meant) inflect differently from regular ō-stems in Old English? If not, you can just use {{ang-decl-noun-o-f}}. —CodeCat 16:57, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Ahh, I see. I tried it as jo- (sans macron) that's why. Thank you! Leasnam 17:03, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

*poke*

Wiktionary talk:About Estonian. — Jeraphine Gryphon 18:51, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

otherkin

Is Middle English a separate language? Can we add the Middle English def of otherkin to the entry? link (If yes, could you add it?) — Jeraphine Gryphon 02:06, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Yep it's a language too, and it has its own code (enm) and its own category Category:Middle English language. But are you sure that word was actually used in Middle English, or is it a modern invention? I expect that if you add this word, it will be submitted for verification quite quickly... —CodeCat 02:13, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Click the link I added! — Jeraphine Gryphon 02:22, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

I read it but... the rules are slightly different on Wiktionary. Wikipedia is a 'tertiary source' for information, which means that information needs to be verified by citing reliable sources that say the same thing. Wiktionary is a 'secondary source', and our 'verification' is not by citing what someone else says about the subject, but the actual subject itself. So to cite a source for 'otherkin', you would have to actually find a Middle English text that uses the word with the meaning that you give in the entry. That's why our rules for original research are not strict (I'm not sure they even exist)... if you are going to try to extract meaning from words, it's not really possible to rely on other sources that describe the meaning, so Wiktionary users actively research and record words themselves. We have the page WT:RFV for words where we're not sure if the meaning given is right, or if we're not sure the word exists at all. A request for verification is our equivalent of 'citation needed'. —CodeCat 02:28, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

The reference is given there, between the ref tags. (The Middle English Dictionary, the book even has its own Wikipedia article.) — Jeraphine Gryphon 02:32, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Here's the dictionary page: link to google books. — Jeraphine Gryphon 02:38, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

I know what you mean, but a Middle English dictionary is not actually a valid reference for definitions of Middle English words. That's what I tried to explain. For Wiktionary it's not enough that someone else says that 'otherkin' is a Middle English word, there needs to be enough evidence that it really is a Middle English word. This is done by finding and citing pieces of texts that are in the language: a short quote from an actual text written in Middle English, where the word is actually used with that meaning. This is called the use-mention distinction and it's part of the Criteria For Inclusion for terms on Wiktionary. —CodeCat 02:39, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

...being listed in a published dictionary isn't sufficient cause for inclusion? That's absurd! — Jeraphine Gryphon 02:41, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

One of the reasons we have that rule is because some dictionaries include words that nobody uses, and we want to avoid just copying from them. And there are also real words that are not in any dictionaries, that we do want to include, such as many internet slang terms. But I'm sorry I didn't make up the rules... you could ask at the Information desk if you want to know more about how to do this. —CodeCat 02:44, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

problem

tapp isn't an actual word on its own (unless it means something else, unconnected to the root of tapma), though it's used in several compound words -- enesetapp (suicide), vennatapp (fratricide), lapsetapp (infanticide), härjatapp (tauricide), karutapp (ursicide), naisetapp (uxoricide), etc etc. Wat do? Maybe list it as -tapp?

Also, problem: there doesn't seem to exist a nominative case of enese (enese is in the genitive case). It's a strange word. What would the default form for it be if the nominative doesn't exist? — Jeraphine Gryphon 03:01, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

I looked up tapp on ÕS and there were actually several words with different inflections: tapp/tapa, tapp/tapu and tapp/tapi. Unfortunately I don't know enough Estonian to understand the definitions they gave...

It also lists enese in the same way, but again I don't really know if there is anything special about the word. —CodeCat 11:52, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

küülik

Your new template is missing alternate plural forms. — [Ric Laurent] — 22:51, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Which forms are they exactly? ÕS doesn't list any. —CodeCat 22:55, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Unrelated, but, in the tables, where there's two words in a cell, like "X or Y", it links to an entry called "X or Y", not "X" and "Y" separately. (Hope that made sense. It's a problem.) — Jeraphine Gryphon 23:03, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

I'll try to fix that soon but it's not an immediate problem as long as the correct forms are listed. —CodeCat 23:05, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

You could have just as easily used my old templates (which display alternates just fine) for the frame of a new system, but instead you decided to make your own, which I'm sorry to say are...wildly inferior. Mine functioned oddly, but at least they worked.

If you want to know which forms are missing, just look at previous versions of the page. — [Ric Laurent] — 23:26, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

...thanks? —CodeCat 23:28, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

You're so not welcome. I like when people make templates better. You're making the declension tables worse. Sorry, just a fact. — [Ric Laurent] — 23:30, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

itzessin

Hi, CodeCat. I noticed that your bot made mistakes for the Catalan verb vigoritzar, such as itzessin. Can they be transferred? --Lo Ximiendo 22:51, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

The bot didn't really make a mistake, but yes, the old entries should be moved to the proper names. Can you help? —CodeCat 22:53, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

At least I have to know to to suppress the redirects, just like SemperBlotto sometimes does. --Lo Ximiendo 22:56, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

There is a checkbox for that when you go to the move option, you'll see it there. —CodeCat 22:58, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, at least we worked together in the correction/clean-up. --Lo Ximiendo 23:16, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for letting me know and helping! —CodeCat 23:18, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

missing French verb forms

Hi Cat. I like what you did with {{ca-conj}}. Can you do the same for {{fr-conj}}, perhaps by adding <includeonly>{{#ifexist:{{{ind.f.1p}}}||[[Category:Simplus's test category]]}}</includeonly> somewhere in there. --Simplus2 19:18, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Ok I've added it. I hope it works. —CodeCat 22:12, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks so much. I've been wanting a list like that for ages, but never knew it. They're all lined up at Category:Simplus's test category, waiting for SB's blot to process them (I'd do them all myself, but since SB's now taken over bot control, it frees me up to do other stuff). I'm quite surprised at how many of them there actually are here. Anyway, keep on trucking, my feline friend. --Simplus2 08:55, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Nyan~ :3 Just make sure to remove it again when you're finished... it's not really something that should be in there... —CodeCat 12:35, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

-k

this isn't (always) right. Words like õpik or kirik do change like that (kirik, kiriku, kirikut), but a lot of others don't (tõstuk, tõstuki, tõstukit; söök, söögi, sööki). — Jeraphine Gryphon 20:36, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

I noticed that too. I think there may actually be several different suffixes that just happen to look the same in the nominative singular... —CodeCat 22:11, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't think so. Maybe we should just remove the declension table from that page? — Jeraphine Gryphon 22:29, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Most Estonian words that look the same but have different inflections, have become that way because the final sounds of the word were lost. So what used to be the old nominative õpiku and genitive õpikun have now become õpik and õpiku, while the old forms sööki and söögin have become söök and söögi. This is especially apparent if you compare Estonian words with Finnish ones (which didn't lose the final sounds). Words don't just get different inflections because people feel like changing it (otherwise, why were some changed but not others?), so I think the -k in the words you mentioned have different origins. I just don't know what that origin is, but so far there seems to be one group of words with -ku/kut, another with -ki/kit, and yet another with -gi/gi. The -ku group clearly corresponds to the Finnish suffix -kko (I noticed that o and u in endings often match in Finnish and Estonian), so that leaves two other kinds unaccounted for. —CodeCat 22:37, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

I asked User:Hekaheka about this and he confirms that there are two suffixes in Finnish, -kko and -kki. I presume that these correspond to the Estonian suffixes -k(u) and -k(i). He also gave some definitions for the suffixes, and said that -kki was defined as a "deverbal suffix used to produce names of results or objects of actions", while -kko was defined as a "deverbal suffix forming nouns denoting activities or tools for an activity". Do you think those definitions can apply to the two Estonian suffixes as well? —CodeCat 12:51, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

I looked at the definitions for the words and it seems that there are some words that appear in both Finnish and Estonian with the same suffix. For example, Finnish has rynnäkkö which is the same as rünnak(u) and there is ajokki (“vehicle”) which comes from ajaa (“to drive”) just like sõiduk(i) comes from sõitma. —CodeCat 13:12, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

jääk, saak, söök and jook are still under the "wrong" section (jääk, jäägi, jääki); at least according to the inflection endings you arbitrarily imposed. I really don't appreciate the original research you're doing here; Estonian isn't Finnish. :( -k is a singular suffix, and it just so happens to change in three or more different ways, depending on the actual words. I don't see how a single-letter suffix could possibly have one standard way of inflecting. — Jeraphine Gryphon 17:07, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Estonian may not be Finnish but they are still closely related and share a lot of common history. At one point long ago, they were the same language, but because they were separated, they developed differently. This implies that there will be many features that they have in common, features that they had at the time the split happened. There are many words in Estonian and Finnish that clearly have a common origin, such as päev and päivä. And in the same way, some suffixes can be very old too, and date back to before the split. The suffix -lane is an example of that, which corresponds to Finnish -lainen. I understand that you don't like the idea of comparing Estonian and Finnish, but the fact is that they are so similar, it's almost impossible to understand Estonian grammar fully without looking at Finnish or vice versa. And in the same way, some words in English seem unexplainable until you compare them to a related language such as German.

And I just thought of a related example from my own language, Dutch. Dutch doesn't have declension in the same way that Estonian has, but it does have gender for nouns and suffixes that create nouns. And there is one suffix, -te, which can occur in both the female gender and neuter gender. This seems strange if you look at it, but these two different genders also have a very different meaning, and they have different origins as well as the page shows. So it makes no sense to treat them as the same, even though they still look the same. —CodeCat 17:16, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Sure, whatever -- but what are you going to do with those words I mentioned? They shouldn't be under the -ki, -kit heading or whichever it was. — Jeraphine Gryphon 17:42, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

I'm still working with Hekaheka to see if we can find out where they belong... —CodeCat 17:43, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

two words one link

This really needs to be fixed. — [Ric Laurent] — 21:20, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

fell, foul

Any link between fell#Etymology 4 and foul? The roots and meanings are similar. But I don't know, hence I'm asking you. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:09, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't know, foul seems to mean more generally 'bad' or 'wrong' while fell has the meaning 'fierce' or 'threatening'. They could be related but I can't say for sure. —CodeCat 15:21, 31 December 2011 (UTC)