User talk:Vorziblix

Archives
2012–2018 2019–2022

Hieroglyph help

Which crossed out hieroglyph is it that precedes in the first line of page 151? Antiquistik (talk) 11:28, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

Never mind, I managed to identify it. Antiquistik (talk) 19:44, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Although, could you please provide me with an Egyptian language in Roman alphabet transliteration of the sentence "Montu and Set are with him in every fray; Anat and Astarte are a shield to him" on plate 80 of this? Antiquistik (talk) 20:19, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Antiquistik: mnṯw stẖ ḥnꜥ.f m skyw nb ꜥnṯt ꜥsṯrṯt n.f m jkm. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:53, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! Antiquistik (talk) 09:22, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

Need your input on a policy impacting gadgets and UserJS

Dear interface administrator,

This is Samuel from the Security team and I hope my message finds you well.

There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed policy governing the use of external resources in gadgets and UserJS. The proposed Third-party resources policy aims at making the UserJS and Gadgets landscape a bit safer by encouraging best practices around external resources. After an initial non-public conversation with a small number of interface admins and staff, we've launched a much larger, public consultation to get a wider pool of feedback for improving the policy proposal. Based on the ideas received so far, the proposed policy now includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, best practices for gadgets and UserJS developers, and exemptions requirements such as code transparency and inspectability.

As an interface administrator, your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on the policy talk page.

Have a great day!

Samuel (WMF), on behalf of the Foundation's Security team 23:02, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

thanks

for your edit to Wiktionary:Community Portal. It's one of those things we look at every single day and get so used to clicking the same links that we forget to think it might be possible to improve. —Soap— 18:46, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

@Soap: Sure, glad I could do something helpful! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 01:51, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Verb conjugation under "declension" header

Hello, really glad you're back to editing Egyptian! I know I'm going to sound picky, but I've noticed that you put verb conjugation table for egy entries under "declension" header. I do realize that "declension" is a somewhat broader term, nontheless it seems to apply more to non-verbs' word changings, moreover other languages put declension under declension header and there is no dissonance, so to speak. Should we probably do something about it? Is it related to how grammarians view egyptian verbs as an enigmatic category? Nominkhana arslang (talk) 17:21, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

@Nominkhana arslang: Hi, and thanks! Sorry for the late reply; I was away traveling in October. To the best of my knowledge, I have never used the ‘Declension’ header with verbs, Egyptian or otherwise; if you could point out some examples, I’d be glad to fix them. I generally label the header ‘Inflection’, which is a broad term that subsumes both declension and conjugation under it. Let me know if I’ve missed something somewhere and accidentally labelled a verb with ‘Declension’—that really ought to be fixed! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 16:48, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, my bad. Didn't realize egy verb tables have conjugation as well. Nominkhana arslang (talk) 19:41, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

The article before gerund in English

Regarding recent edits. What has man missed? I knew well possessive determiners being used in the very context, though it be oftener in old-fashioned and more formal sources, correct for “the subject of a gerund construction”. One grammarian forms the example sentence: The having been accustomed ‘to an abundance’ renders poverty more inconvenient. But this was 1842, and was it too theoretically contrived not to be considered wrong? Fay Freak (talk) 15:46, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: Hello! Indeed, the usage with a possessive determiner is perfectly fine (if a bit formal), but at least to a contemporary-English-speaking ear the same construction with a definite article sounds very awkward at best and outright ungrammatical at worst. (Not all examples of definite article + gerund fall into the same case; as a rule, for instance, the + a bare gerund sounds perfectly fine.) That 1842 example you found is very interesting—perhaps this kind of construction did exist in earlier English, but if so, I’ve very rarely encountered it; or perhaps it is just contrived for the grammarian’s purposes. It’s hard to say without more examples to look at. On a cursory search, I was able to find a small handful of parallels in older texts, one from the 1600s and several from the 1800s. So maybe it isn’t contrived after all, just obsolete.

I did find a more detailed and somewhat more recent (1926) grammar of English that has this to say on the subject: ‘[…] constructions of this description in which the adnominal element is represented by either an article or a demonstrative pronoun, are clumsy and are, therefore, mostly avoided. Conversely those in which the complex gerund is preceded by a genitive or possessive pronoun, or by no, appear to be quite common, at least in literary English.’ This roughly tallies with my experience, though I think the ‘clumsy’ construction, which was already rare, has become even rarer to the point where (outside some specific contexts, perhaps) contemporary speakers would likely consider such phrasing highly confusing or simply erroneous. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 16:41, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

This is satisfying. Fay Freak (talk) 19:38, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

List of hieratic glyphs

Is there anywhere on Wiktionary or Wikipedia—or failing that, anywhere else—that has a comprehensive table of hieratic glyphs? (Anything more comprehensive than Roberson's Very Brief Introduction?) I don't want to reinvent the wheel if someone's already done the work somewhere, but if no-one's done it I'm tempted to throw together ≈ a modified version of List of Egyptian hieroglyphs that adds another column for showing the corresponding hieratic glyph(s).
Also... since Unicode considers hieratic a font variant of hieroglyphs... if I upload a systematically-named set of hieratic glyphs, or if one already exists, can we expand {{character info}} or some other template to not only show an image of the hieroglyph, but also an image of the hieratic glyph? This would be particularly useful for glyphs like 𓆅 that only existed in hieratic (where we're currently not showing the form that actually existed), but would also be interesting in general IMO. - -sche (discuss) 15:23, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

@-sche: The standard work in the field for that is Möller’s Hieratische Paläographie in four volumes, available for instance here — unfortunately very old and quite cumbersome to work with, but still unsurpassed for what it is. There’s also a somewhat better organized/more searchable version digitized at [1], which might be easier to work with. (The original work is not organized according to Gardiner’s list but has its own idiosyncratic numbering scheme; the latter website lets you look up the snippets that correspond to each Gardiner number.)

I think your proposal would definitely be worthwhile, although I would note that hieratic writing was not a static thing but evolved through various stages itself, so choosing one particular hieratic form to represent a given glyph may not always be straightforward. Möller’s text, for instance, has a sequence of columns showing hieratic forms from different time periods chronologically. Maybe it would make more sense to do something like we do for Chinese character entries, where multiple forms of the character over time are displayed under the ‘Glyph origin’ header (see 風 for an example of what I mean). However, that would be a lot of work, and even displaying one hieratic image would be a great improvement over our present situation. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 23:07, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

Aha, thank you!
I mocked up a limited, squarish presentation at 𓁐 and 𓐍, but I agree showing a progression and using a layout more like Chinese would be ideal. Having gotten confirmation from Commons that I can do this, I hope to isolate the glyphs from Möller's text and upload them using some systematic naming scheme — I'm thinking something like "Hieratic Möller B1 Abusir" (using the Gardiner number where available, plus the column headers from Möller), "Hieratic Möller B1 Hatnub", "Hieratic Möller B1 Hatnub 2" (for the second of the Hatnub glyphs he provides, "3" for the third, etc), "Hieratic Möller B1 Ennene", etc, if that sounds reasonable to you? Then I think it should then be possible for an *{{Egy etym}} (or whatever) template to identify what hieroglyph/Gardiner number it's on (the same way {{character info}} does), check for the corresponding files by trying out all of the short list of possible column headers, and display the times/places for which files exist. Ideally, I'd like to also upload color images where possible; I named the two I uploaded to 𓁐 and 𓐍 using the names of the tombs they were in, but if I switch to naming them "12D", "18D", etc based on dynasty, that should also be something the template could make a check for (run through all the possible dynasties and display the ones for which images exist). Maybe I should check in the GP whether that would work.
For glyphs which don't have Gardiner numbers, do you know if there are agreed-upon pseudo-Gardinerian numbers? E.g. I haven't spotted Möller's glyph of the frontal view of a man standing with his arms and legs spread leaking fluid in Gardiner's list. (I see the .jp site has G. numbers for them; I will use those.) - -sche (discuss) 22:14, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

@-sche: Ah, that would be excellent! I think all of that sounds reasonable and well-conceived; I'd be very happy to see something like it implemented. (Though you crossed it out, there are indeed schemes for extending Gardiner numbers beyond the basic ones. Unfortunately several competing standards exist, but probably the most commonly used one, and the one that Wiktionary templates like {{egy-glyph}} follow, is the Hieroglyphica sign list. Luckily it seems that this is exactly the list that the .jp site follows in its numbering.) — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 20:25, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Are there Gardinerian numbers for Möller's 27, 28, 29, or 69? Those are the ones I've processed so far for which the .jp site didn't have a G-number.
Is there information out there about which hieratic and/or hieroglyphic signs (besides uniliterals) are most common, e.g. a concordance of any reasonably large/representative text or collection of texts, or failing that, is there any large text(s) in a machine-readable form that I/someone could make a concordance of? If not, I will ask in the GP if it is possible to make a concordance of the contents of wiki-hiero and egy-glyph tags/templates on Wiktionary. I'm thinking, given how much time scraping glyphs from Möller's text is taking, it'd be useful for me to prioritize the most common glyphs. So far, I have at least one image (usually from volume I, escalating to volumes II or III where things are not present in I) and sometimes the full suite of images, of Möller's 1-33, 45, 61-78, 91-100, 124-126, 169, 192, 196-200, 236-239, 250, 260-263, 282-283, 319, 331, 335, 342, 366, 388, 395-397, 403, 431-432, 511, 522-525, 528, and 574-575. - -sche (discuss) 00:17, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

OK, further discussion is at: Wiktionary:Grease_pit/2024/February#Possible_for_template/module_to_check_for_and_display_systematically-named_files?. :) - -sche (discuss) 22:47, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

No pressure if not, but since your recent excellent work on improving display of hieroglyphs has been showing up in my watchlist, I thought I'd circle back to this and ask whether you thought it'd be possible to make a template/module (maybe something {{character info}} could deploy) that would check—for any given hieroglyph—whether an image(s) of its hieratic form(s) exists and display it if so. I uploaded about 2,700 images of ~175 hieratic glyphs to commons:Category:Hieratic glyphs (Georg Möller) using a systematic naming scheme described in the Grease pit section above. (I did all the uniliterals and various other characters, trying to prioritize the ones which became Demotic or Coptic glyphs; if any particularly important glyphs are missing, let me know and I can try to add them.) - -sche (discuss) 05:01, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

@-sche: Thanks, I’ll take a look and see if I can code something! Hopefully my Lua skills are up to the task. As far as important glyphs, the ones missing out of the highest-frequency signs (covering 80% of Egyptian text) are Z2, G7, N5, D2, V30, D4, D40, M23, N16, N33, F51, G41, Aa13, V20, F35, Y5, U1, and N23 (in order from most frequent to least), so those might be a place to start if you want to keep adding them. The page I linked has further signs by frequency as well, if that helps, although they're in Unicode rather than listed by Gardiner codes. Thanks for all your work on this! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 15:46, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for responding to my tea-room request!

Thanks for making this edit at cool! 166.181.88.109 03:57, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Sure thing! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 20:26, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Hieroglyphic entries

It seems that Unicode will be expanding the number of encoded Egyptian hieroglyphs to cover what seems to be all recorded signs in September. Assuming that support for the Egyptian hieroglyph format controls will also be available by then, would we be creating hieroglyphic entries on Wiktionary after this, or will we maintain the current scheme for covering Ancient Egyptian entries? Antiquistik (talk) 17:27, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

@Antiquistik: Hi, sorry to reply so many months late. For at least the time being, I think we ought to maintain the current scheme. Font support is still lacking (or, more bluntly, nonexistent) for the hieroglyph format controls, and I expect it will be a while yet before the broad use of Unicode hieroglyphs becomes supported. Even beyond that, I am not sure; all current scholarly dictionaries of Egyptian, even the handwritten ones, lemmatize by transliteration rather than by glyphs, and with good reason—everything from navigating the variability of spellings to showing inflections is made more convenient for the user this way. That said, it would be good to eventually phase out WikiHiero in favor of Unicode glyphs in headword lines, quotes, etc., even if we don’t move all our entries to hieroglyphic spellings. We’ll see how it goes with font support in the times to come! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 23:31, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

That's fair. Do you think the scheme currently used for Akkadian on Wiktionary, with Romanised lemmatisations accompanied by cuneiform entries, could eventually be replicated for Egyptian and hieroglyphs?

Additionally, I see that some dictionaries punctuate the inflections of Egyptian words, such as by writing nfr.w and nfr.t instead of nfrw and nfrt. Would this be better than the present format for Wiktionary Egyptian entries? Antiquistik (talk) 03:09, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

@Antiquistik: That punctuation style is more common in German-language Egyptology. Wiktionary currently follows the style more common in English-language Egyptology, in the tradition of Gardiner, Allen, and so forth. In the German style, all endings get dots before them; in the English style, dots are reserved for endings that are usually preceded rather than followed by determinatives. Unless there’s a compelling reason, I don’t really see why we ought to switch from one style to the other.

Something like the Akkadian scheme could certainly be used, but our current policy (where hieroglyphic spellings just hard-redirect to the main entry) also seems fine to me — no other language will ever need entries under the hieroglyphic spelling, so a hard redirect doesn’t pose any problems (unlike with Akkadian, where cuneiform pages could also have Sumerian entries, etc.). — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 04:44, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Template:cop-conj-table

I have converted Template:cop-conj-table to a module to deal with the massive loading time. (As a result, ⲱϣ which uses all five of the current supported dialects now loads in just 2.038 seconds!) I thought that I would notify you since you contributed greatly to the templates. Do you have more ways that it can be automated further? For example, I suppose you can derive each row with a single prefix by combining it with the personal prefixes? --kc_kennylau (talk) 01:06, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau: A very belated thank you for this work! I don’t know why I missed this message when you left it; sorry to take so many months to reply. There may indeed be further automations we can do, but unfortunately I doubt I’ll have the time to go deep into working on these modules in the immediate future. Life has been busier than I’d like. Many, many thanks again for your own work! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 23:34, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

psychobabbler

Hello Vorziblix,

You wrote: "What does this add to the definition? It just says the same thing, but less concisely."

One cannot speak psychobabble, since it is a kind of a jargon, or a set of jargon, and not a language. Hence, the reason for my edit. Even OED defines psychobabbler as a user of psychobabble, implying that a person uses it in a speech or conversation, and does not speak it. newfiles (talk) 06:25, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

@Mynewfiles: Hi. What makes you think the object of the word ‘speak’ is restricted to languages? This does not conform to the actual use of the word ‘speak’ by English speakers; see, for instance, Google Books searches for phrases like ‘speak the jargon’, ‘speak words’, and, indeed, ‘speak psychobabble’, all of which turn up plenty of results written by native speakers, and none of which use a language as the object of ‘speak’. Descriptively speaking, one certainly can speak psychobabble, and many other things that are not languages. I don’t see how the OED definition either says or implies the contrary. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 06:44, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

krape

Hello there, thanks for your good work on Sranan Tongo etymologies! Could you kindly help with krape? It's likely of Amerindian origin, do your sources give any clue as to a more precise origin? Appolodorus1 (talk) 11:22, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

@Appolodorus1: Hello! It doesn’t seem to be Cariban (no particularly similar words for turtles or tortoises in Kari’na, Wayana, Ye’kwana, or Trio as far as I can tell). I can’t find anything relevant in Lokono (Arawak) either. However, some Tupian languages have what looks like similar or related words for turtles/tortoises: Old Tupi karambé, Aché krẽbe, Guaraní karumbe. Most likely Sranan Tongo krape ultimately comes from the Old Tupi term, but I am no expert in Tupian languages, so I can’t say with certainty. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 13:47, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into it! Donselaar also lists calapé, calpé and kalpee as Dutch forms, would that yield any leads perhaps? Appolodorus1 (talk) 14:12, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

@Appolodorus1: In my view that only further supports a Tupian origin. The r/l alternation tells us nothing—neither Lokono, nor most Cariban languages, nor Old Tupi distinguish between l-like and r-like sounds—but the presence of another syllable before the r/l matches well with the hypothesis of Old Tupi karambé or some cognate term as an etymon. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:07, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! I added this to the etymology section of both lemmas. Can I tag you in Sranan Tongo lemmas where the Kali'na/Lokono etymologies need checking/cleaning up? Appolodorus1 (talk) 07:42, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

@Appolodorus1: Sure! I’ve only really studied and become familiar with the relevant literature for Cariban languages like Kali’na; by contrast, I may not be very useful for Lokono, since I have only a passing familiarity with it (and other Arawakan languages). But I’d be glad to help where I can! Sorry for the late reply. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 15:20, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

mšddt > mꜥšꜣdjdjt

Hello @Vorziblix; let me start from the begining:
a few (or many?) years ago i was trying to find an online egyptian dictionary so I could compare the entries with the coptic ones from the wonderful Marcion Coptic dictionary, basically trying to do my own research on the fonetic evolution of the egyptian language - without much luck. But I did find a really cool app for android (the one I linked to under "references" in the page under discussion - don't know if I should use dictionaries as references) that allows many different ways of searching and many useful features. Unfortunately it doesnt provide much details, like when first attested, which could give clues as to it being a borrowing. I remember when I saw the entry for "snow" and got all excited thinking it was a cognate with semitic, only to find out later it was simply a borrowing. Anyway that was the dictionary where i took both the hieroglyphs and transliteration from, wasn't aware that it was in group writing, my knowlege of hieroglyphic being the bare minimum. By the way, do you have more information about that word, it always looked to me suspiciously similar to the semitic equivalents, and, i only noticed that now, it cant be derived from any egyptian verb with the meaning "to comb". Anyhoo, sorry for the long-winded post, I seem to be unable keep them short. Sérgio R R Santos (talk) 18:55, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

@Sérgio R R Santos: No worries about the long posts! The Egyptian word is indeed a borrowing from Semitic; see Hoch, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period, page 164. It is only attested a handful of times in the entire corpus of Egyptian texts, perhaps as little as twice, and (as far as I can gather) both attestations are very late.

As for Egyptian dictionaries… citing dictionaries is fine, but preferably they should be reliable, scholarly sources, or at least based on them. Unfortunately the dictionary app you linked doesn’t give any indication of what its sources are or where its information is coming from, so it’s difficult to judge its reliability. Based on my own research, it seem to be based on Mark Vygus’s pdf Egyptian dictionary, which itself is an automated compliation of a bunch of separate Egyptian wordlists. On the whole it’s not a terrible source (the entires are usually not outright wrong), but it’s more of a glossary than a proper dictionary—it has no details, citations, or attestations, its definitions are extremely oversimplified, and none of it has been checked over by humans.

It’s better to use good scholarly sources, like

• the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (which has attestations, citations, and links to other good dictionaries and sources)
• the Wörterbuch der Ägyptischen Sprache (which has detailed definitions, dates of attestation, alternative writings, and much more; this is the dictionary of Egyptian to use, but unfortunately it’s difficult to browse and written in German)
• Faulkner’s Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian (the best Egyptian-to-English dictionary, with citations, detailed definitions, alternative writings, etc.; you can find it in modernized typography here, for instance).

— Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 21:02, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

The over head slash in coptic (like in ϣⲙ̅ϣⲉ)

I don't think this is the right place to clarify a particular doubt about coptic spelling, but since I would have no navegate in endless boring searches, that I really dont feel like to, I decided to come straight to you. As you alredy figured out from the title my current problem/doubt is this: I was adding content to the Bohairic page on this word (ϣⲉⲙϣⲓ) and was going to create the pages on the alternative forms but I see that the redlink for the Sahidic version contains that "overhead slash" (I dont remember what the usual term used is). The thing is, none of the dictionaries I have access to indicate that mark (neither the bohairic one, the djinkim - this one I remember!). So do I create the page and apply that mark to all verb variants, or just ignore it, and leave it to someone else later improve? And did Akhmimic and Lycopolitan also used that mark, because if not then we'd have to create a different page for them because the spelling is the same other than that slash thingy. Sérgio R R Santos (talk) 22:02, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

@Sérgio R R Santos: Hi, when you link to a Coptic word using a linking template (like {{m}} or {{l}} or {{alt}}), the template will automatically strip away the supralinear stroke or djinkim from the Coptic word. So ϣⲙ̅ϣⲉ (šm̅še) automatically links to ϣⲙϣⲉ, and not ϣⲙ̅ϣⲉ, as you can see. Our policy is this: we do not use that mark in page titles (so the word is at the page title ϣⲙϣⲉ), but we do indicate it in links to particular dialect forms whenever possible, and we also do indicate it in the headword line of the entry (as you have correctly done at the entry for ϣⲙϣⲉ). However, note that the correct Unicode character to represent the supralinear stroke is the combining macron (U+0304), not the combining overline (U+0305). So it should be ϣⲙ̄ϣⲉ, not ϣⲙ̅ϣⲉ. The combining overline (U+0305) is only used when marking abbreviations and nomina sacra. Other dialects also used the supralinear stroke, but if you don’t know whether to include it or not, feel free to just leave it out and someone else can improve it later. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 21:15, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Vorziblix, first of all, I'd like to appologise for dragging you into my problems, I really thought I was 100% right at the time but have since changed my view on it. In fact, one of my first actions after being blocked was to revert the deletions of Coptic pronunciations I had been doing for thinking they were too speculative; I realized it's not my business to be removing content added by other users, especially ones who are much more knowlegeable than me on the matter and have been here for years before I arrived. I even dared to add reconstructed pronunciations to the entries rswt and mtwt, but only because they are relatively easy to reconstruct based on the consistency of the descendants; feel free to correct them if you find any mistake. That being said, I'd like to clarify a doubt regarding the order of the descendants: do you prefer alphabetical order or by geography (north to south)? Because I think you sent me a thank you note after I re-arranged them by geography in a page, but then I saw that in rswt you re-arranged them alphabetically.

Regarding the supralinear stroke I thought I just had copied the red link, but when I went back to the page I had copied it from, it had the correct stroke, even earlier versions of the page, so I don't know how the hell that happened! Maybe I took it from another page. Sérgio R R Santos (talk) 15:15, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

@Sérgio R R Santos: Hi! No worries, it’s not a problem. My apologies for taking so long to reply to you. For Coptic dialects, for the time being, they should be arranged alphabetically, following the policy at Wiktionary:Entry_layout#Descendants — however, it might be nice to eventually make a template that displays only Bohairic and Sahidic by default, but can be expanded to show all the other dialects. This might go some way toward making the display less messy when there are many dialects, but still allow them to all be seen and referred to as needed. The pronunciations at rswt and mtwt look good. Thanks for your work! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 14:45, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

No problem for taking time to answer, people are busy. So I guess for now I'll stop arranging them by dialect; when you first told me to arrange them separately instead of the more compact way I was doing (which you were right, I was aiming for compactness), I initially disagreed, but eventually it made more sense me, and, it naturally follows that if the purpose is to have a rapid way of comparing the diferent characteristics of the dialects, it just made even more sense to display them from north to south, but I'll just stick to the rules instead. Regarding the pronunciation of mtwt, I wasn't sure if we're indicating aspiration or not; and by the way I just wanna say that I was slightly amused at the label "latest Late Egyptian".

And feel free to correct any mistakes orr errors I might end up doing - I myself am correcting some mistakes I did in my early entries, mainly some small formatting errors and such, when I still didn't know quite well what I was doing. Of course I should've read all the instructions before starting editing, but who the hell reads the full instruction manual in real life, right? Anyway thanks for your reply. Sérgio R R Santos (talk) 15:08, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Old Coptic ⲙⲟⲩⲣ

Hiǃ Under Middle Egyptian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mr, sense 4, it currently has ⲙⲟⲩⲣ "pain" as a descendant in Old Coptic. It's been a long time since you added it, but could you identify the source for that? Preservation of -r that late would require some kind of final vowel (= earlier final consonant after mr) to protect it, so I am wondering how firm that identification is. Thanks in advanceǃ --MikuChan39 (talk) 23:53, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

@MikuChan39: Hi! The source I used was Gábor Takács, Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian, volume 3, page 361, and Takács himself cites a number of other sources (among them, I checked Westendorf’s Koptisches Handwörterbuch and confirmed that it also gives this Old Coptic descendant). Here is what Takács says:

mr “1. körperlich krank sein, leiden, 2. schmerzhaft, schlimm” (PT, Wb II 95) = “1. sick, ill, diseased, 2. painful” (FD 110) = “1. schmerzen, krank sein, Schmerzen haben, 2. schmerzen, schmerzhaft sein, 3. krank sein, 4. seelisch, schlimm sein, 6. *schwierig, mühsam sein” (GHWb 344) = “schlimm, schmerzhaft” (FÄW 184) > Dem. mr “to be anxious, grieve” (Smith & Hughes 1980, 142, n. p pace Glanville) = “betrübt sein” (Thissen 1984, 76, cf. Vittmann, Enchoria 10, 1980, 136; Smith, Serapis 6, 142) > OCpt. (Pap. BM 10808) ⲙⲟⲩⲣ “krank, schmerzhaft, schlimm” (Osing 1976, 109; NBÄ 188) = “krank sein” (KHW 520).

The identification seems probable enough, but I agree that the reconstructed pronunciation given here is problematic (indeed, I list it on my page of Egyptian reconstructed pronunciations with issues). Perhaps the -r was restored by analogy with other word forms; otherwise, I’m at a loss for how to explain the descendant term. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 09:14, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Could't you just add a vowel to the ending - *māra? That would also make the first syllable open, accounting for the long vowel. Unless you're a proponent of the theory that all egyptian words ended in a consonant (if I'm remembering correctly the theories on egyptian syllable structure; I just recently got re-interested in Coptic and have some re-reading to do in order to to revive my memory on some of the details). Sérgio R R Santos (talk) 20:36, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

@Vorziblix: Thank you, that's very helpfulǃ I did peel the onion back a little, and all three references are actually the same thingː BM 10808 which has two instances of the word ⲙⲟⲩⲣ (lines 8 and 23). Westendorf KHW 520 cites Osing who has (NBÄ 188 = Nominalbildung, 8 saDāmuw, 8.3 adjectives)ː 8.31 Zweirad. Verben mār˘(y) "krank (spät̠)" > Späg. ⲙⲟⲩⲣ "dto" with a reference to p. Ox., Z.23. That cite is JEA 28 (Crum, p. 20 ff.), a publication of BM 10808. Crum thinks it's "bind" in line 8 and does not comment on line 23. I don't have Osing's 1976 translation of BM 10808, but looking at the Val Hinckley Sederholm 2006 translation, it's translated as "bind" in both instances. There is also a commentː “Bind” best matches the spelling mour. “Bind” is glossed as mwl in the Tebtynis Onomasticon, Osing, Tebtunis I, I, 216; “afflict” (mr) as mhl (in ibid, section Z. 2-17)." In other words, if I see it right, all those references go back to one particular interpretation of the same papyrus where the word appears twice and the translation is uncertain.

Honestly, for my taste this is all too uncertain to come to any conclusion, but I generally like to err on the "less is more" side. MikuChan39 (talk) 03:24, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

@Sérgio R R Santos:You certainly could for Late Egyptian where final -r and -t are already gone and a vowel would be all that's left. But for earlier Middle Egyptian the standard assumption is that there would have to be a final consonant. I am conflicted on this, tbh ... MikuChan39 (talk) 03:29, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

tḫtḫ

hi User:Sérgio R R Santos – you don't need to manually copy in links to Faulkner or Černý; the templates do it for you if you provide the page numbers
- I know, but using just the template directs you to Internet Archive with 2-page view and... whatever the opposite of full screen is, while by copying the link you get directed to full screen, single page view - thats just my personal preference, since it seems more user friendly, but if you find it redundant and/or unnecessary then I'll stop doing it.
Also, I've noticed you've been deleting the <hiero> tag from entries - I assume there's been some update to the module and they're no longer necessary, and I was gonna start removing the one's I encountered too, but wanted to check with you first; although, isn't that a simple task for a bot instead of doing it manually? I don't mind doing bot's work though, I've been doing quite a bit with ones that have the "attention" "sticker", or whatever it's called. Sérgio R R Santos (talk) 13:56, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

@Sérgio R R Santos: I've changed both of those templates to use the single-page view; I agree that it makes more sense, since we're only linking to one page. I think full-screen vs. non-full-screen is more of a personal preference, so I've left that alone. Linking with a template is always better than putting in a bare link because links frequently change; if you put in bare links, then you have to manually change them all at every page whenever the url changes, whereas if you use a template, you only have to make a single change (editing the template).

You're right about the module changes for <hiero>; all hiero tags inside headword templates and {{egy-hieroforms}} can now be deleted, and hiero tags outside those templates should be changed to invocations of {{egy-h|}}. See the discussion here if you're interested. Yes, ultimately this should probably be done by bot, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. Just leave the hiero tags out whenever possible if you're making new pages (as you've been doing). Thanks! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 14:11, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

I've changed both of those templates to use the single-page view - wow, you did that already? I guess when you're good at coding that's a simple task. I was a bit weary of creating an Egyptian entry, but as one keeps contributing and learning in the process one becomes more confident in what you can and can't do; I sure did take my time in creating that page checking lots of sources (including that android app for the hieroglyphs; it has its usefullness) to make sure I kept potencial errors to a minimum, althugh the one handwritten in German was almost useless to me (but not completely) - my German doesn't go beyond the few Rammstein lyrics I've memorized, and being handwritten you cant use the Google Translate phone app on it. I ended up creating it as a consequence of creating the one for the coptic descendents of this word (ⲧⲱϩ (tōh) and ⲧⲁϩⲧϩ (tahth)), thinking the second to be a reduplication of the first, a hunch which was confirmed by Černý, even though egyptian and demotic only attest the duplicated form, and then apparently the Bohairic form seems to be a mixture of two different etymologies. One last thing, I put the noun before the verb because I checked other Egytian pages for comparison, and it seemed the usual order, even though in Coptic I tend to put the verb first since the homograph noun is probably derived from the verb. Thanks for the encouraging! Sérgio R R Santos (talk) 15:20, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

@Sérgio R R Santos: Noun vs. verb order isn’t all that important, and our entries are not always consistent, but what you say for Coptic is also true for Egyptian – usually the noun derives from the verb, so it should come afterward. This isn’t always the case (and sometimes we just don’t know), but on tḫtḫ the noun is very rare, so it’s more likely secondary. This isn’t something I’d worry about too much, either, though. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 15:37, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

psšt and psš

...should'nt instead be spelled pzšt and pzš? (only etym 1 in both cases) Sérgio Santos (talk) 16:44, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

@Sérgio R R Santos: Hi! In both of these cases the Old Kingdom spelling was indeed with s rather than z; it’s only since the Middle Kingdom that the z spelling arises. So they should be at psš and psšt, but we should find a different hieroglyphic spelling with to use as the ‘main’ spelling given at each entry instead of the current ones that use the glyph. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 17:10, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Got it. Sérgio Santos (talk) 17:15, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Revamping Egyptian declension templates

Hi Vorziblix! As you appear to be the only active Egyptian-language editor, I wanted to run something past you.

I've noticed some visual issues regarding the templates {{egy-decl-noun}}, {{egy-decl-adj}}, {{egy-decl-num}}:

• The templates have a poor look in dark mode
• The templates have a fixed width, creating empty space within the template
• There's a lack of padding (internal spacing) on the left and right of cells, meaning that the text is able to hit the very edge of the cell
• The noun and numeral templates (at least) are inside collapsible boxes even though the templates are very compact and take up little space

Some of these issues were identified in the discussion at Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2024/October#Towards a Standardization of Inflection Tables.

I'd like to implement a revamp of these templates to address these visual flaws.

Compare the existing {{egy-decl-noun}} template:

Declension of pr-ꜥꜣ (masculine)

singular	pr-ꜥꜣ
dual	prwj-ꜥꜣwj
plural	prw-ꜥꜣw

With a revamped version (gender info is lost, but this is already shown in the entry's headword line):

singular	pr-ꜥꜣ
dual	prwj-ꜥꜣwj
plural	prw-ꜥꜣw

Or one could even flip the template on its side, allowing for better use of horizontal and vertical space - for me, this is a preferred option:

singular	dual	plural
pr-ꜥꜣ	prwj-ꜥꜣwj	prw-ꜥꜣw

Similar for {{egy-decl-num}}:

	masculine	feminine
singular	ḫmnw	ḫmnt

(I confess to knowing little about Egyptian, but is it important to have the "singular" label there? It's not immediately obvious to me how the number eight could be considered "singular".)

And {{egy-decl-adj}} (obviously the logic of the template would be maintained, this is just a visual example):

nisba adjective	masculine	feminine
singular	, nj, n	nt
dual	njwj, nwj	ntj
plural	, njw, nw	nwt1, nt2

¹ Archaic in Middle Egyptian when modifying a noun.
² From Middle Egyptian, this feminine singular form was generally used for the plural. In Late Egyptian, the masculine singular form was used with all nouns.

Or if you want to keep this template collapsible, the page will look tidier, but the width issues persist because of the notes:

Declension of nj (nisba adjective)

	masculine	feminine
singular	, nj, n	nt
dual	njwj, nwj	ntj
plural	, njw, nw	nwt1, nt2

¹ Archaic in Middle Egyptian when modifying a noun.
² From Middle Egyptian, this feminine singular form was generally used for the plural.
In Late Egyptian, the masculine singular form was used with all nouns.

Finally, I am conscious that these changes would create visual inconsistency with the verb conjugation template – that could be dealt with in a Stage 2.

Anyway, sorry for the very long message - thank you for reading all the way here! I'm keen to hear any feedback you may have. This, that and the other (talk) 00:33, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

@This, that and the other: Hi! Sorry to take so long to get back to you. I agree that these templates should be fixed to look better in dark mode, to have padding, and to not have a fixed width. However, at least to my eyes, the proposed revamped version looks a bit ugly and provides a worse user experience — it’s much harder at a glance to pick out the inflection in an entry and differentiate it from other elements. Would it be possible to keep something similar to the original styling in light mode and just use different colors for dark mode, while fixing the issues above? Otherwise, I do generally agree that those issues ought to be fixed.

Your fourth point, that these templates should be uncollapsed, is the only one I disagree with in the abstract. A long time ago, before these templates were created, Egyptian used similar uncollapsed inflection tables, and the result tended to look messy, much harder to pick out the headwords and so forth — compare diff for a version without hieroglyphs (inflection tables with glyphs would be even messier). The main trouble, I think, is that a number of common Egyptian entries have many lemmata/etymologies/parts of speech on a single page, and so having such expanded templates gets very messy quickly. For the numeral templates this might not be a problem — they are both simpler than the noun templates and rarely share a page with other lemmata — so I have less of an objection there and wouldn’t mind uncollapsing those.

As for flipping the noun template on its side, that would work well in a vacuum, but unfortunately it would make the noun template inconsistent with the adjective template, as well as other Egyptian inflection templates like {{Egyptian personal pronouns}}. Given that the inflections of these various categories are in many ways closely related, I think it would be preferable to maintain the same table orientation throughout. I suppose we could alternatively rotate them all, but that’s a bigger project if we choose to do it.

Regarding the numeral template: Egyptian numerals three and higher were originally singular nouns (so, for example, ‘three loaves’ would literally be expressed as ‘a three of loaves’) and still behave as grammatically singular in some ways even though in historic times they can be analyzed as a separate part of speech, hence the ‘singular’ label in the inflection template. (The words for one and two were adjectives instead and behaved differently.) Having the label may be more confusing than helpful, however, and I wouldn’t mind getting rid of it.

Thanks for looking into these template issues! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 23:07, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

@Vorziblix thanks for getting back to me! I know it was a bit of a lengthy message out of the blue.

I'm glad you're on board with solving some of these issues. As far as ugliness is concerned - if you're talking about the background colours, there isn't a lot that can be done about this, as colours have to be defined in global CSS in order to have proper dark mode support, so we are limited to what is in the palette. It's not feasible to add new colours to match every existing colour choice in every template. If you're talking about the dark grey borders, I agree these aren't the best look - the palette does limit the options somewhat, but given how widely used these borders are, it might be possible to add another global colour swatch to the palette for this.

In this context, is there anything you would rather see done to minimise ugliness and improve user experience in the following example?

Declension of pr-ꜥꜣ (masculine)

singular	pr-ꜥꜣ
dual	prwj-ꜥꜣwj
plural	prw-ꜥꜣw

If you would prefer the tables to be collapsed, let's leave them collapsed. I can see the clutter in the example entry you linked. Another way to address the clutter issue, besides using collapsible templates, would be to display the dual and plural in the headword line, similar to what English entries do. If there are only one or two inflected forms, there is really no need for a separate declension table at all. But Egyptian, with its gigantic glyphs, is rather special and perhaps using the headword line would look worse.

As for transposition of the templates, I would say that the Egyptian personal pronouns template is an "odd one out" in placing person across the top and number down the side. (There has traditionally not been a category for personal pronouns templates, but I am starting to group them at Cat:Personal pronoun boxes.) There is a case to be made for swapping rows and columns in all the Egyptian tables, in my view. This, that and the other (talk) 04:52, 3 December 2024 (UTC)