Wiktionary:Tea room/2022/January

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← December 2021 · January 2022 · February 2022 → · (current)

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Need ideas to best represent the Japanese translation to ad hominem

The translation to "argumentum ad hominem" is "対人論証" with "ad hominem" corresponding perfectly word-for-word to "対人", but the word "対人" AFAICT is not by itself a good standalone Japanese translation in this context -- it could be confusing. What about writing the translation as "対人（論証）"？“論証” corresponds exactly to "argumentum". What about using "対人" as the translation but adding a note -- what's the Wikipedia syntax for that? -- and mention the phrase "argumentum ad hominem" is "対人論証"? Meng6 (talk) 02:54, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

@Meng6: Consider that the usage of ad hominem in English is, pretty much always that I can think of, an abbreviation of argumentum ad hominem. The argumentum portion is omitted, but semantically still present.

It would be incorrect in Japanese to use just 対人 (taijin) to try to convey the sense of English ad hominem. While the Japanese term exists, the basic meanings are "to, towards, or against some other person (not the speaker)", and "to, towards, or against a person or people (as in 'personal / bodily injury insurance')".

Separately, when adding Japanese translations of terms, please do not include kana in the tr= parameter. This is the English Wiktionary, intended for English-language readers. The kana strings are not transliterations that are legible to most English speakers, and thus these are inappropriate for translation tables. For similar reasons, we don't include the bopomofo renderings of Chinese terms in translation tables. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:27, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

ballerina "sometimes derogatory"?

"(less common, sometimes derogatory) A male ballet dancer." This seems strangely specific. Anyone got any examples of a male ballet dancer being deliberately insulted by being called a ballerina? Equinox ◑ 03:50, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I think this mainly occurs because the proper name for male ballet dancers isn't so widely known. That is, it is an error. I daresay it has been used as an insult, but mostly not to actual ballet dancers. One can use almost any female form (eg waitress) to insult a male, I don't think this one deserves a specific entry. The insult is more along the lines of an insult against male dancers in general and the grammatical gender error. I have an example of it being used about a male dog if that helps SpinningSpark 08:18, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

• Anna Kemp, Dogs Don't Do Ballet, Simon & Schuster, 2010 →ISBN

• Biff is not like other dogs. He doesn't chase sticks, he doesn't scratch and he doesn't pee on lamp posts! He thinks he is a ballerina

Here's an example of it being used erroneously, and definitely not as an insult.

• Vivienne Westwood, Get a Life: The Diaries of Vivienne Westwood, Serpent's Tail, 2016 →ISBN.

• Fernando is a wonderful personality because he is the loveliest person, but he deserves the award because he is a ballerina and in presenting him I'd like to acknowledge the others...

I think that's how the entry should describe the meaning, simply as an error for ballerino. SpinningSpark 08:34, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Compare masseuse:

2. (nonstandard) A masseur; a man who performs massage.

I prefer nonstandard to erroneous.  --Lambiam 20:51, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't dislike "nonstandard" quite as much as I used to, but I think we can and ought to make a distinction between words used non-standardly and words used incorrectly. Mihia (talk) 11:06, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

The meaning we give to the term is, “Not conforming to the language as accepted by the majority of its speakers.” That is a descriptivist way of labelling where a prescriptivist would use “erroneous”. More than a few terms that are now entirely and unreservedly standard were at some time blatantly “erroneous”. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but in language evolution a million wrongs do. Actually, as a condemnation nonstandard is stronger than proscribed, but I agree it has a weaker connotation, so perhaps there is a better term for the observation of a use generally being considered unacceptable.  --Lambiam 13:20, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

sarpat

From various sources this seems to be:

• Tripidium bengalense - [1] (syn. Saccharum sara - [2], Saccharum ciliare - [3])
• Tripidium arundinaceum (syn. Saccharum arundinaceum - [4])
• Tripidium procerum (syn. Saccharum procerum - [5] [6])
• Saccharum officinarum - [7]

Should it just be left at "Indian grass of the genus Saccharum"? 70.172.194.25 22:00, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Tripidium is considered another genus than Saccharum. The term Indian grass sounds like it is a common name for some species. What about: “Any of several species of sugarcane or sugarcane-like grasses found in India, of the genera Saccharum and Tripidium.” ?  --Lambiam 13:36, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

That sounds good to me. I have gone ahead and copied that. :) 70.172.194.25 11:26, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Countability of the grammatical cases

This is handled inconsistently at the moment. genitive is uncountable, nominative is countable, ergative case is usually uncountable. I think the countability should roughly be the same for all cases. Besides this, the case entries are also inconsistent in two other aspects: 1. whether there is a sense "a word in the X case" (there should be) and 2. whether the translations of the case are at "X" or "X case". Fytcha (talk) 05:17, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

You can talk about the genitive cases of different Indo-European languages, or maybe even some languages which have multiple genitive cases, like the Tsez language has. However, in most uses, it is singular. "Usually uncountable", or "countable and uncountable", make sense to me. 70.172.194.25 05:24, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, agreed, that would make the most sense to me too. BTW, are you 70.175.192.217? Fytcha (talk) 05:33, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

It's the genitive, so isn't it always countable? When would one ever speak uncountably about "some genitive" or "an amount of genitive"? Equinox ◑ 07:31, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Oh, yeah, you're right, it's not a mass noun, even if it's found in the singular in most contexts. 70.172.194.25 09:53, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

(e/c) The IP's first comment vs Equinox's get at something which has come up before, which is: do we need to change {{en-noun}} to stop treating "countable vs (usually) uncountable" and "pluralizes vs (usually) doesn't pluralize" as the same thing? There's currently no way to indicate that a word doesn't usually pluralize, except by generating "usually uncountable"; do we need a parameter for things that are countable but "usually not pluralized"? ...then again, are there such things? Genitives seems to be about 1/15th as common as genitive, which doesn't seem rare at all, it's about the same ratio as prime ministers to prime minister. - -sche (discuss) 09:57, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

I think one needs to distinguish between the two senses: "an inflection pattern ..." and "a word inflected ...". The second sense is clearly countable/pluralisable, so I suppose that the previous discussion is only about the first. Your Ngrams result would presumably include many plurals of the second sense. Mihia (talk) 10:56, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Good point. Genitive cases is about 1/30th as common as genitive case. OTOH, ablative cases is about 1/10th. Dative cases is about 1/20th. - -sche (discuss) 11:11, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm not convinced that even "genitive cases" would be limited to sense #1, "an inflection pattern". Nevertheless, it seems to me anyway that sense #1 is pluralisable. E.g. "That operation is clearly to be seen in the grammatical behavior and derivation of the two genitives of Basque, the en-genitive and the ko-genitive." Mihia (talk) 11:52, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

More examples: “English has two genitives”; “Khinalug has two genitives”.  --Lambiam 13:03, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

I maintain that the "inflection pattern" sense and the "word inflected" sense are both always countable! Equinox ◑ 12:06, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

I agree. Mihia (talk) 12:07, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Mandarin translation of public domain

@Meng6 recently added 共享 (gòngxiǎng) as a translation of public domain sense 1.1. However, I note that the Chinese term is a verb, not a noun. Can it be used as a noun? — SGconlaw (talk) 18:14, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

This is a weird one: there's no adjective POS for the English because what might be an adjective in other languages is obviously attributive use of the noun in English. In standard/Mandarin Chinese, "adjectives" are generally stative verbs. That means, if I understand it correctly (BIG if!), that there should be Chinese verb constructions that are equivalent to the non-existent adjective which is replaced by an SOP attributive-noun modifier construction in English. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:18, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

The Chinese translation of public domain is [[公有领域]]. 共享 is share. Betty (talk) 03:47, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Can anyone give some example English sentences that differentiate the two meanings -- (1) state of not being owned by anyone, and thus freely usable by everyone and (2) realm of intellectual property which is not or no longer protected by copyrights or patents? For the the second meaning, 公共领域, 公有领域 and similar are clearly good and literal translation that is well accepted. I've for now changed 共享 to 公有 (publicly owned; status of being publicly owned). If we want a manifestly noun phrase as a translation to 'public domain' for its first meaning which as stated is clearly a noun phrase, maybe even 公有属性 (?) Meng6 (talk) 04:56, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

An example of (1) that is not (2) might be "Even the staunchest of capitalists must admit that air is in the public domain, not owned by OxygenCorp." 70.172.194.25 05:17, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

To say 'air is in the public domain' naturally in Chinese, it will use a adjective phrase in the place of 'public domain': '空气是公有的'. So I've changed the Chinese translation to 'public domain' under its first meaning to '公有的'. That's the best I could come up with. Meng6 (talk) 06:05, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

@Meng6: OK, thanks. Generally, translations should be of the same part of speech as the entries being translated, which is why I asked the original question above. — SGconlaw (talk) 06:32, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Countability of niggerish

niggerishes was just created and I wondered why this is marked as countable. Languages are usually uncountable though this may be different as it's not a proper noun. Fytcha (talk) 04:18, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Changed to uncountable. Equinox ◑ 04:51, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Technically this should be "plural not attested" as it is possible to speak of multiple 'niggerishes' (just like there could be various different jibberishes, or different types of jibberish - e.g. English jibberish might adhere to English phonetic inventory and incorporate some English words whereas Chinese jibberish might sound and look very different). Leasnam (talk) 18:45, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

shine someone on

See the Terminator quote in hasta la vista: are we missing an entry for shine someone on, shine on, or a sense of shine? TheFreeDictionary has shine someone on defined as "deceive one or to tell one a lie", or "to insult, provoke, or aggravate". BTW, TFD also has the noun shine as a slur for a Black person, which I have also not heard before, and while I can find shine used to refer to some kind of person (Citations:shine), it's unclear to me what kind. - -sche (discuss) 11:21, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Looking for an English idiom

I recently created the entry katsoa kuin lehmä uutta porttia which I defined as "To give a bewildered or confused look." I couldn't find a fitting English idiom with a quick Google search, but I'd assume there must be one I can't think of. brittletheories (talk) 14:54, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Maybe look a proper Charlie? Fytcha (talk) 14:56, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

I wasn't familiar with that idiom, but I don't think it's quite the thing, as it would seem that in BrE Charlie is a general word for a fool. So, while the two idioms could certainly be used in similar contexts, the Finnish one only paints the other party as confused and not necessarily stupid. brittletheories (talk) 15:04, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

@Brittletheories Found this in the Urban Dictionary: you look like a cow looking at a new gate (a look of lost bewilderment). Panda10 (talk) 18:23, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

@Brittletheories: “Look like a deer in the headlights”? Don’t think it’s exactly the same as the Finnish expression, though. — SGconlaw (talk) 18:37, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Looked around but couldn't find anything in English. All I can think of is the Chinese neologism 黑人問號臉. ---> Tooironic (talk) 01:23, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Words used solely by non-native speakers

(moved from WT:GP#Words used solely by non-native speakers)

(moved from WT:BP#Words used solely by non-native speakers)

The adjective bietapic is attested in English with the meaning "two-stage", but seems to only ever appear in scholarly and technical works by Spanish L1 authors who have directly anglicized the word bietápico. (I wouldn't be surprised if some uses by Lusophone authors also existed, given the existence of a Portuguese equivalent.)

In another similar case I encountered recently, terophyte could be labelled as a misspelling of therophyte used by authors whose native-language orthography transliterates θ to t in Greek-derived words. However, as far as I know, there is no "regular" English word for which bietapic is a misspelling. Do we have a standard way of tagging or categorizing such terms? 70.172.194.25 19:38, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

{{lb|en|NNSE}} = (non-native speakers' English) perhaps? This, that and the other (talk) 00:20, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, like tecidual or precise#Verb. We might not want to fill the category with mere misspellings, though (it may be enough to just categorize those as misspellings). - -sche (discuss) 00:33, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

You can use NNES, as in biasness or vandalist. Equinox ◑ 01:47, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Does nervosity qualify as well? I don't think I've ever heard a native use it, compare also French nervosité, German Nervosität and others. Fytcha (talk) 01:55, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Seems like a good idea, but it belongs at BP, because not everyone with a worthwhile opinion watches this page. I shouldn't need a vote, IMHO. DCDuring (talk) 16:14, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

@DCDuring: You've moved it to the Tea room instead of the BP. Fytcha (talk) 16:24, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

D'oh. DCDuring (talk) 16:28, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Czechia for the Czech Republic is mainly used by non-native speakers. (And no, it's no Czech for the Czech Republic; the Czech word is Česko). This follows from the fact that many countries whose official language are not English claim the right to determine what their name is in English, because English is in some sense a global language. You can imagine, for comparison, Germany informing England that Germany will be known - in English - as Deutschland from now on. Czechia is just not used by native speakers of English. — This unsigned comment was added by 81.152.118.28 (talk) at 12:22, 4 January 2022.

I call it Czechia, for what it's worth. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:23, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Even if so, the label “non-native” is problematic in so far as non-native speakers may reckon it necessary to use particular terminology in spite of positively knowing of it being unnatural to native speakers: a frequent problem on the European Union level, you notice that many formulations for her politics can only be explained by someone being at home in continental law, a system which has no equal in English-native countries. Similarly due to geographical closeness and historical consciousness we may be more sensitive in naming countries. Americans usually do not even know most of the countries and “do not use” Latvia either: if you say that you are Latvian they ask “oh, you are Latin?” Nations and nationalities are not understood as a concept in a nation which only refers to itself as “this country” or by a state name (“United States”). Fay Freak (talk) 16:05, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Your reply was incoherent and rambling. I'm not American, but Americans do know of themselves as a country that is America. There is such a thing as the state name vs. country distinction. In England, the UK is a formal name for the country. But there are more and more countries trying to tell us - the English native speakers, if you please - what, not only the formal name of their state is, but what the informal name of the country MUST be in English. We have the Dutch government trying to say that Holland isn't called Holland as that is a pars pro toto (we don't tell the Chinese not to call Britain Yingguo - we let them call Britain what they like). Then there are the Czechs and the Ukrainians. I think "Ukraine" is catching on, in place of "the Ukraine", but has caught on much less in the US than in the UK, and - can you believe it? - the Ukrainian embassy in London actually employs a Ukrainian woman whose job is to write to people telling them that it is grammatically incorrect - in English - to refer to the Ukraine as the Ukraine -as if she had any locus standi or even any knowledge of English grammar to start with. This is all rudeness. 81.152.118.28 22:11, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Your reply is incoherent collectivist rambling. Of course a state does not have “standing” to select word usage. But essentialist categorizations of whether someone is native or non-native or a statist astroturfer do not exclude that people have their reasons to prefer a usage. Whether usage has “caught on” is irrelevant because language is not democracy (by which some local majority would decide what is “acceptable” or not “rude” but not outlanders). Fay Freak (talk) 00:19, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

I still say Burma and Zaire, not just Holland! Overlordnat1 (talk) 00:32, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

BTW, Czechia is an official short-form since 2016. – Jberkel 00:41, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Official, yes, as declared by the Czech government. But the Czech government is not a regulator of the English language, and it has nothing to do with the Czech government what the country is called in the English language. What if China informed us that from now on, when we speak English, we are to refer to China as Zhongguo? Does Britain tell the French to stop calling London Londres? Should we decree an "official" version of "London" to be used in the French language? Czechia means nothing. Now if English native speakers started using even a poorly drafted word, then it would be classed eventually as native English. By the way, Czechia is not the Czech word for the Czech Republic. It's actually, wait for it, drum roll.... the Russian word (Чехия). Quite literally, Prague expects all 300m native speakers of English to drop into Russian when referring to their country. 81.152.118.28 12:04, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Ironically, “English speakers” only call that country “Czech Republic” because it hasn’t declared a short form, so the traditional “Czechia” was kind of politically incorrect, so they did let themselves be regulated by the Czech government, and they even let themselves by regulated by a ghost from the past.

There is nothing wrong in “dropping into Russian” – again your tribalist rambling – because it is also English. -ia was convenient for the analogy in many other country names (as in Russian, a commonality between English and Russian rarely seen), while the endings of Česko or Czechy were not feasible in English. Fay Freak (talk) 12:52, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

"The Czech Republic" is a new state that was part of Czechslovakia. Has there ever been a state in these borders before in history? If not, there you have your reason why there is no proper English word. The most appropriate English term is "Bohemia and Moravia". You don't appear to know that there is a Czech word Čechy, which is why you quoted a Polish word. Čechy means Bohemia. It's not tribalism - which is just your attempt to substitute name-calling for discussion - but simply a fact that native speakers of a language own the language. I wouldn't tell the Chinese not to refer to Britain as Yingguo again (and to only use da buliedian - I know you don't know anything about these terms in Chinese). It's not a question of whether the ending of Česko or of Čechy could be used in English. Of course either of these words could be. But neither of these words is au courant in English as used by native speakers. It's not for the Czechs to determine what we call their country in our own language. Are you suggesting the French are being tribalist for calling Germany Allemagne? You don't seem to realise it, but that is what you would need to be arguing. 81.152.118.28 16:49, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

The Russian form, if borrowed into English, would be *Chehia.

I find Czechia intuitive and use it regularly. It is more convenient to say than 'Czech Republic'- in a normal conversation, one would use, for instance, France, Russia, and Morocco rather than French Republic, Russian Federation, and Kingdom of Morocco. Nicodene (talk) 03:36, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

But the utility of the word, if it existed in English, is a separate question from whether the word actually exists in native English. There is no such word as Czechia, and I doubt you could argue that you have found it in natural widespread use among native speakers of English. If you had to pick a word, Bohemia would be more intuitive. This would be a pars pro toto, but then so is Čechy, which means Bohemia, but can be used in Czech as a pars pro toto for the Czech lands as a whole. We constantly talk at cross purposes here - a fundamental problem produced by the education system. 2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:D522:F7F1:A016:3968 23:47, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Native English speakers confirming that they use it and you arguing that that still doesn't count as native English is getting into the No true Scotsman fallacy. - -sche (discuss) 00:48, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

No. There are more than 300m native speakers of English. To say that "not one native speaker of English" uses a word would be an adventurous claim, and I would need to interview all 300m to be sure of it. But it is not a widely accepted form and even if Nicodene claims he uses it, he cannot claim he hears it in widespread usage. It is an awkward form that has not caught on. But to say that not one of the 300m native speakers of English uses it would be a different claim entirely. Nicodene simply hasn't considered the matter in detail.31.51.190.242 17:45, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

There are a number of phrases that are exclusively or mainly found in Chinese government pronouncements. China condemns "splittism", not "separatism", and I think in Chinese there is a difference between 分开 (fēnkāi), separating things that are separable, and 分裂 (fēnliè) , splitting apart something that is a logical whole. China argues that Tibetans and Uighurs are "splittists", but the English word "separatist" doesn't really take a stance on whether the country is naturally divisible or not. I think a brief search shows that nearly all instances of this word are Chinese government-derived. I don't like "procuratorate" (Chinese people's procuratorate), for what is more naturally "the Prosecution Office" in English. Most usages are by official Chinese sources. This word is also difficult to say if you use the traditional English stress pattern /'pʰɹɐkjʊɹətɹət/ or /'pʰɹɐkjʊɹəˀtɹəʔ/ (it's easier to say in an American accent). Another one is "informationalization". Most uses of this are foreigner's English, including Chinese and other government sources. Some websites say this is a variant of "informatization". Neither word is in the OED on CD-Rom, but lexico has "informatization", listed as a word borrowed from the French "informatisation", and meaning "computerization". The Chinese government uses this as "informationalized warfare", i.e. forms of warfare that are IT-enabled. The British National Corpus now wants to charge people for access, but I suspect that all of these words would be found at very low frequencies in native English.2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:35AE:CC96:D533:3F60 22:46, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

vinculariiform

"Having the form of a vinculum." What form is that? Our definitions of vinculum are mostly nonspecific as to shape, apart from the apparently inapplicable math sense. The shape of chain links (which is what google images suggests)? - -sche (discuss) 03:10, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Seems to be used only to describe a type of zoarium, if that helps. Equinox ◑ 04:26, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

There seems to be a lot of esoteric (and missing) vocabulary in this realm. DTLHS (talk) 04:31, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

And I think this is a misconstruction of vinculariform, as also the cellariiform given in the synonym section of cellariform. In the former case by reason that there is just the adjective vinculāris and not vinculārius (neither in antiquity, the former only after antiquity) and in the latter case, where both cellāris and cellārius are attested in antiquity but with quite specific meanings, because -āris and -ārius have a meaning distinction which recommends the former. And this is in spite of vinculariiform and cellariiform apparently being oftener: this is as with those words which are only attested in misspellings, -sche will remember which I mean. There is no rule that a misspelling/misconstruction cannot be oftener than the correct form, right? Fay Freak (talk) 20:48, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

@-sche: This is from the dense literature of bryozoology. I have had the pleasure of the acquaintance of some people who work in this subfield, and if you come up with a list of the undefined or underdefined words, I'm sure I could define them all or point you to a resource so you could do it yourself. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 07:33, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: There is now a list of red links at vinculariiform. Equinox ◑ 05:34, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Harvard format

Vague definition: "A standard format for citing information from any source." What is it, though? I can't find any style guide for this, like APA. Wikipedia suggests that it just means parenthetical referencing, in which case it isn't exactly a "standard format". Anyway, I think the entry needs clarification. Equinox ◑ 05:59, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

There is a Harvard format for citing references in the bibliography section. It goes something like this:

Surname, Christian name. Name of the book in italics, Place of publication: publishing company, year of publication. An example would be:

Smith, John. Hiking in the Amazon, New York: Travel books publishing, 1998.

Harvard also has detailed rules for citing journals and articles in journals, etc. 81.152.118.28 12:25, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

The Wikipedia mention concerns only the appearance of the citations in the running text, which is what I think most people mean when they say ”Harvard style”. The Harvard style also concerns the format of the bibliography. One aspect, more or less dictated by this citation style, is that the entries are ordered alphabetically by the last name of the author, and that that name is the first element of each entry. I think that the year of publication should immediately follow the author’s name, and that several publications by the same author in the same year are disambiguated by using 1998a, 1998b, ... . Since I never use this style, I don”t know the details, which are encyclopedic and not lexicographic information anyway, so giving an {{examples}} and a link to Wikipedia should suffice.  --Lambiam 21:31, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

mendicament

For medicament. A reasonable number of GBS hits, mostly in old books, + a mention at https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/dost/mendicament. Can't find it in any other online dictionaries. Is this merely a misspelling (influenced by "mend"?) or something more? Mihia (talk) 12:49, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

It looks like a misspelling to me, perhaps also influenced by amend and mendicant. There is an Italian adverb mendicamente (“imploringly”), but I don’t think it has played a role here.  --Lambiam 20:48, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

keep, love

Intransitive sense of keep:

To continue.

I keep taking the tablets, but to no avail.

Transitive sense of love:

To be strongly inclined towards something; an emphatic form of like.

I love walking barefoot on wet grass.

Are these cases transitive or intransitive? In the test case of keep, e.g. M-W calls this type of usage intransitive, while e.g. Macmillan calls it transitive. Some people call the second part of a catenative construction a "complement" of the first, specifically distinguishing it from a direct object, while at Appendix:English_catenative_verbs we say "Commonly the second verb (along with any clause it might introduce) serves as the direct object of the first verb" (without explaining why "commonly", as far as I can see). What do you think? Mihia (talk) 18:44, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

In the second case we have a verbal noun, the English gerund; you can replace it by the other verbal noun, to + inf: I love to walk barefoot on wet grass. You can also topicalize the object: Walking barefoot on wet grass is what I like. You can do neither with the first case: ^✽I keep to take the tablets; ^✽Taking the tablets is what I keep. One might instead say: Taking the tablets is what I keep doing, which only underscores that taking the tablets is not a noun phrase here and that taking is not the gerund but the participle.  --Lambiam 21:02, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

It's a good point about the fronting of the object. I wonder, then, whether "keep taking the tablets" is fundamentally a different kind of grammar than "love walking barefoot"? Presently we lump these types together, without distinction, at Appendix:English_catenative_verbs. I think the possibility of also using "to + infinitive" is unrelated, since one can "continue to do X" and also "continue doing X", yet "to do X" and "doing X" can't be what one "continues", or hardly. Anyway, what you're saying is that you think the categorisation of the "keep" example above as intransitive and the "love" example as transitive is correct, right? Mihia (talk) 22:53, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Evidence of love being transitive is that the object can be an ordinary noun, "I love grass, and walking barefoot on it". I don't know that keep can take a noun in the same way: you can say e.g. "I keep the tablets coming, taking one every day" but the meaning may be a little different(?). Our entries are indeed pretty often inconsistent in whether things like keep where the "object" is a verb form get labelled transitive or intransitive; I recall this coming up before. It'd be good to explain the difference in how they function/ can be rephrased in the appendix and anywhere else it comes up, regardless of how we decide to label them. - -sche (discuss) 01:02, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

@Lambiam I'm not so sure that the substitution method using to is an adequate method to test whether it's a gerund or a participle. The -ing verb after 'keep' exhibits no other participle-like attributes. A participle can modify a noun, as in "the falling leaves" = "the leaves that fall/are falling". One cannot say "the keep taking tablets" for "the tablets I keep taking". I believe that the x-ing PoS is still a gerund. I think it's simply a matter of usage. No, one doesn't usually hear "I keep to take the tablets", but if you substitute continue for keep the construct becomes possible: "I continue taking the tablets" = "I continue to take the tablets". So 'taking the tablets' is indeed a noun (i.e. "tablet-taking") Leasnam (talk) 15:53, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

I did not suggest that keep taking together was a participle, but just taking. You can replace “patients taking tablets” by “tablet-taking patients”.  --Lambiam 16:27, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Correct, you didn't suggest that. Ok. Yes, taking is a participle in "patients taking tablets” and “tablet-taking patients”. But we still haven't sorted out how it can be a participle in a construct like keep taking. I still see 'taking' as something being 'kept' (in its antiquated sense of "to follow, observe, maintain, continue with") Leasnam (talk) 16:47, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

It's generally worthwhile to keep (heh) in mind that "[t]he distinction between gerund and present participles is not recognised in modern reference grammars, since many uses are ambiguous." (W:Gerund#Distinction from other uses of the -ing form)

- 2A02:560:424C:4B00:AD11:C025:FC19:BE56 17:40, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

They're not ambiguous to me. We need educators to get a hold of this ( - if I can learn it, it isn't hard.) and teach it confidently. Dumbing something down and mixing it all up so that it's all blended will only make English seem more confusing in the future when someone asks "why is it like this ?", imho. Leasnam (talk) 18:23, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

CGEL (2002) has some 50 pages on catenative verb constructions. That should make it easy to sort this out. DCDuring (talk) 18:42, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

I agree that the distinction between present participle and gerund is generally quite clear and that throwing this distinction out the window is indeed a form of "dumbing down". This doesn't rule out, however, that there may be ambiguous cases. I can see that "keep doing" could be considered such an ambiguous case, because it might be interpreted as "continue the doing" (gerund) or "stay a doer" (participle). 2.203.201.113 00:59, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't quite understand: keep doing meaning "stay a doer" - are you suggesting that keep doing here means keep (being) a doing (one/individual)? (?) Leasnam (talk) 02:43, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes. "Keep being (i.e. stay) a doing one (i.e a doer)". I'm sure it's not the original interpretation, but I can see that it might be reinterpreted that way. Because you also say things like "keep calm", which perhaps originally meant "keep (i.e. preserve) your calm", but in the end is equivalent to "stay calm", right? So the reinterpretation is possible in this case. Whether speakers actually do so, I don't know. 2.203.201.113 01:58, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Keep doing would never be interpreted as "stay a doer", although the two sentences mean basically the same. -ing endings do not denote agents in English. In keep calm, keep quiet, keep clean, etc., I believe the original had a reflexive pronoun before the adjective (e.g. keep thee calm; keep thyself quiet, keep yourself clean). But this construction doesn't work for all adjectives: one doesn't normally say "keep young" for 'stay young', or "keep good" for 'stay good/keep being good' without an intermediary pronoun - in most cases it's obligatory (keep yourself young, keep me good), etc. Interesting... Leasnam (talk) 06:47, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

I think a better way of looking at it is as a state of doing or being something: "keep taking the tablets" means "maintain yourself in the state of tablet-taking". The difference from the "doer" analysis is that "being a doer" implies that it's a characteristic of the person: they are "a person who does". It reminds me of the ser vs. estar (Spanish) / bēon vs. wesan (Old English) distinctions. Chuck Entz (talk) 07:32, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

That's exactly what I meant. Sorry if the word "doer" confused you all so much. In my mind "a doer" and "a doing one" are the same; for example, someone who swims thereby automatically becomes a "swimmer". But that's really beside the point, so let's focus. What I meant was that the construction "keep doing" could (!) be interpreted as involving a present participle. Chuck Entz seems to confirm this. And regarding the "keep calm" construction: I know that it can't be used with all adjectives, but what does that matter? I simply suggested that this construction, in which simple "keep" means "stay", could (!) serve as a bridge for the reinterpretation of "keep doing" as "keep" + present participle. Please remember that I'm not and haven't been talking about historic development, but only about how contemporary speakers may understand the construction. 2.203.201.113 13:08, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, yes, that's what this whole discussion is about - it's about how contemporary speakers think it's participle or maybe gerund, but aren't sure. I've demonstrated clearly (I hope) that with -ing verbs that it's the latter. Just because someone interprets something doesn't mean it's correct, or true. Our job as a dictionary is to help point out what is true, even if it confronts a commonly held paradigm. Historical analysis is one tool that helps us to do so. Leasnam (talk) 14:38, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

"Keep taking the tablets" to mean "maintain yourself in the state of tablet-taking" I think is a just a tad bit beyond stretchy..."keep taking the tablets" really means "Don't stop taking the tablets". In don't stop taking the tablets again it is clear 'taking the tablets' is an activity rather than a state, and doesn't imply anything about the condition of the taker. Leasnam (talk) 15:20, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't understand what you think you've demonstrated clearly. "That with -ing verbs that it's the latter" (??) They're all -ing verbs... Sometimes these are participles, sometimes gerunds. Our discussion is about what they are in "keep doing". And if native speakers -- especially, but not exclusively, educated native speakers -- interpret this construction in a certain fashion, that to me is nothing less relevant than where the construction historically comes from. And who said it implies something "about the condition of the taker"? The person addressed currently takes the pills, they're currently a "pill-taker", they are in a state/condition/habit (call it what you will) of taking the pills. Now I recommend to them to "keep themself that way", to "stay that way". That is the possible analysis that I've proposed and which Chuck Entz (if I don't misunderstand him) agrees with. -- I feel I have to stress again that I actually agree that "keep doing" is "keep" + gerund! I never said otherwise. All I've been saying is that I can see how speakers might reinterpret the gerund as a participle in this particular construction. 2.203.201.113 17:37, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

"That with -ing verbs that it's the latter" - I'm talking about the latter between the aforementioned "participle" and "gerund" I wrote in the previous sentence (i.e. I'm saying I've demonstrated that it's a gerund.) My first "paragraph" is in reply to what you wrote; my second was in reply to what Chuck said. Sorry if that was not clear. "I feel I have to stress again that I actually agree that "keep doing" is "keep" + gerund! I never said otherwise. All I've been saying is that I can see how speakers might reinterpret the gerund as a participle in this particular construction." - yes, I'm in agreement with you :) Leasnam (talk) 20:56, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Norwegian (Bokmål) word kjele: kettle or saucepan?

https://www.google.com/search?q=kjele

https://www.google.com/search?q=kettle

https://www.google.com/search?q=saucepan

The current Wiktionary page says kjele is kettle. However, based on the Google search results for these words, kjele is more saucepan than kettle. Duolingo's Norwegian course also says kjele is a pot or pan. I know it's not the most reliable source, but that's what got me here. I hope qualified people with better sources can clarify this. — This unsigned comment was added by Betty (talk • contribs) at 04:02, 5 January 2022 (UTC).

The Norwegian Wikipedia has a disambiguation page, stating the term can refer to (a) a steam boiler; (b) a pot (cooking vessel with ear handles); (c) a saucepan; (d) a pressure cooker. A Google image search shows that the term has indeed a broad sense, including some vessels that are definitely “kettles” in common English. — This unsigned comment was added by Lambiam (talk • contribs) at 16:55, 6 January 2022.

ahold: Noun or adverb?

This looks like it's been discussed before, but apparently no conclusion was reached.

We list the colloquial word ahold (as in "get ahold of") as a noun, but many dictionaries say it's an adverb. A quick sampling of various online dictionaries:

• Merriam-Webster: ahold: noun
• Dictionary.com: ahold: noun (also lists the nautical sense as an adjective, which is not directly related)
• Cambridge: ahold: adverb
• Collins: ahold: both – adverb in the British English dictionary, noun in the American English one (which is actually Webster New World, a publication unrelated to Merriam)
• Macmillan: ahold: adverb in both US and UK localizations
• Lexico (Oxford): ahold: adverb in both US and UK localizations

Split consensus, but note that the ones saying noun are US-based, and the ones saying adverb are UK-based – and crucially it seems to be mostly used in American English, so that may tip the balance in favour of the US lexicographers.

My take – with the caveat that the word isn't a part of my dialect so I'm not basing this on personal usage – is this:

Although it does seem to have arisen as a misconstruing of the nounal "a hold" (by analogy with other adjectives beginning with a-, particularly ahead and abreast which appear in exactly the same "get ... of sth" constructions as ahold), that very act of reanalysis means it has become an adverb. When people write "ahold" instead of "a hold" it's because they perceive it to be an adverb.

In addition, it really doesn't behave as a noun, the fossilized article in there blocks any kind of determiner or adjective from qualifying it (**"this ahold", **"my ahold", **"a strong ahold" etc). On the other hand I can't pin down a definitely adverbial use of it, e.g. following a verb that isn't transitive: can one say something like "I was ahold of the situation" (= I had taken hold of it)? It sounds valid to my non-American ear, but that's probably because I'm equating it with words that are native to me such as abreast or astride; I don't know if it's actually idiomatically correct or not.

Complicating this is the other nautical sense, which definitely is an adverb (formed with the same a- meaning "in"/"on"/"at") and is essentially the same formation, even if its precise meaning is different; though it's likely too obscure or archaic to have directly influenced the word we're talking about. 86.145.57.229 15:31, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

You may have noticed that Lexico affirms this is non-standard English. The UK English is "get hold of". 81.152.118.28 22:15, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

I have noticed before that Americans are prone to do this, with a phrase beginnIng with "a". God knows why. DonnanZ (talk) 17:14, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, but my point is that it should be tagged as a certain form of English. Wiktionary often specifies. 81.152.118.28 18:11, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

momentary

I fail to see how "Ephemeral or relatively short-lived." is not a sub-sense of "Lasting for only a moment." Fytcha (talk) 02:19, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Most dictionaries have 3 senses like ours. Some dictionaries show defs. 1 and 3 to be closer in meaning to each other than to our definition 2. It is normal for definitions to have overlap, just as it seems to be normal for some to try to make our definitions more orthogonal to each other while others treasure and try to memorialize relatively subtle differences in and specializations of meaning that arise in different contexts. DCDuring (talk) 17:47, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

I, on the other hand, fail to see how “lasting for only a moment” is not a sub-sense of “ephemeral or relatively short-lived”. So are these two synonymous?  --Lambiam 21:32, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

I would support merging them. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 16:14, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

It sounds like the two senses are intended to distinguish between something that literally lasts for a moment, and something that does so figuratively (hence “relatively short-lived”—which could mean lasting from a few hours to a few months). Understood thus, perhaps the senses should be kept separate, with the figurative sense clearly marked. — SGconlaw (talk) 19:24, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

“He come tell ’bout I’m gonna take the TV”

Should the dialectal usage mentioned in this Atlantic article and more fully described for instance here be added to "come"? I never know how to go about stuff this tricky to pin down.

- 2A02:560:424C:4B00:AD11:C025:FC19:BE56 16:59, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

The Atlantic article contains a link to a scholarly article on the use of come to be found here. If you have the time, you could try to boil it down to a definition and/or usage labels and notes. DCDuring (talk) 18:31, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

The link is paywalled for me, and when I tried googling a random snippet to find a public-access full-text version, I came up blank. That's why I put the google books result (which cites the same article) instead.

- 2A02:560:424C:4B00:AD11:C025:FC19:BE56 19:15, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

This is arguably still transparent. For another example, when I wondered whether German will shows a future aspect in certain phrases I was told off, for it is the usual sense of wollen ("to want", cp. last will), which it is unless supposing common drift in comparison to the English modal will. And I'd argue without reading the Atlantic that the case is in the same wise transparent, here, unless *kwem- (come) was conflated with *kweþ- (quoth, besides chat, Ger. quasseln, quackeln, quaddeln, quatschen), *wen-, or *gawahwan or the like. Compare German dative jemandem Dumm kommen (somebody.DAT blunt.ADJ come.VB – "to be insolent [or [Br.] cheeky] to sb." pons.de), komm mir nicht so (don't be [blunt] like that) indicating possibly a clitic -mir (viz. me, to me) to explain the -m, which might seem unnessecary. See also come correct. ApisAzuli (talk) 09:17, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

boarded

Boarded is sometimes shorthand for storyboarded. See "Storyboarding Apes" search "boarded". Google "boarded" site:hollywoodreporter.com. I'm not competent to add this to Wiktionary correctly will leave it to others who might have an interest. Also, storyboard can be "story board" (space) or "story-board" (dash). -- GreenC (talk) 04:20, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

quotey stuff at bodybuilder

One of the quotes at bodybuilder contains (Dec.) 20 (2): 148, and I don't really know what that means. I left the information hidden on the page, so if anyone cares, could they explain what that means? I'm probably not gonna follow it up... Br00pVain (talk) 13:09, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

They're citing a journal. I think "(Dec.) 20 (2): 148" means it was published in December as volume 20, issue 2, page 148. Equinox ◑ 13:11, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Yup, it definitely means that. — SGconlaw (talk) 19:19, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks - made changes Br00pVain (talk) 14:38, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Pronunciations of year and any

Listening to the most recent YouTube video by the English amateur linguist Simon Roper called ‘A Northern U.S Accent from the 18th to the 21st centuries’ (I can no longer provide YT links here because of a WT spam filter but this excellent site enables me to basically post what I want [8] - see the 02:30 mark), he depicts someone who he imagines being born in Kent in 1696 and speaking in the New World in 1766 as saying ‘any’ in an Irish way (‘anny’). In the comments section of this video there are links to other videos posted on YT of recordings of Americans who were between 70 and just over 100 years old between the 1900s and 1920s saying ‘year’ in the Welsh and Brummie fashion - in other words as if one were to say ‘yearn’ without the final ‘n’. Could anyone shed any further light on these unusual pronunciations - I notice that we have the ‘anny’ pronunciation listed as possible in U.K dialect at our any entry but I’ve never personally heard this myself (I’ve just brought this up at the talk pages for year and any too). Overlordnat1 (talk) 13:48, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

We have anny listed as a pronunciation spelling of any, which is true. This does however gloss over the fact that it represents a pronunciation that can be one of three things: Firstly, a historical standard pronunciation; secondly, a pronunciation in historical dialects; thirdly, a pronunciation in one/two current dialects (Irish and Newfoundland). This can be proven by the fact that the author of this 1813 book [9] uses anny to represent a phonetic spelling of any (proving that the word wasn’t spelt anny but nevertheless pronounced in the modern fashion as enny at the time) but by 1897 the pronunciation anny was considered to be part of the Worcestershire dialect, proving that enny had taken over as the standard pronunciation by then. (See this quote [10] which I have added to the anny page.). I’m convinced, however, that the anny pronunciation of any is currently obsolete in the U.K, which isn’t made clear at the any page. How should we best address this in our any and anny entries? Overlordnat1 (talk) 12:26, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I’ve created an eye dialect yur (year) sense and improved the any page to reflect all this. Overlordnat1 (talk) 21:34, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

echochemiluminescence

I don't know much about biochemical lab procedures, but I'm leaning toward thinking this term is a (surprisingly common) error for enhanced chemiluminescence. There is also a small possibility that some uses could be errors for electrochemiluminescence, and this is what I initially thought based on reading the previous deletion summary which mentioned "an error of prefixes", although I haven't actually found any uses that obviously meant this sense. For example, there are a lot of co-occurrences with the term and "HRP" and none on Google Scholar with "Ruthenium" (compare that with the two real procedures).

I'm also not sure whether there's any chance this is a real distinct thing, since it seems so common. In particular, this use perplexes me, although it could still be due to confusion: "Blots were visualized by enhanced chemiluminescence with echochemiluminescence and quantified by Kodak Image Station." [11] That said, luminescence is light and echo- is sound, so a priori it seems pretty unlikely.

I guess I'm just looking for someone to confirm that my interpretation makes sense, because I feel uncertain. 70.172.194.25 05:19, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

There are too many hits ([12]) for this to plausibly be an error. It may have been a name given to a proprietary assay technique of subsidiaries of the former corporation Amersham plc.  --Lambiam 21:15, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

I guess the main reason I assumed it was an error was because of the previous speedy deletion rationale, along with the fact that there were no articles or webpages describing the method, e.g. search for "echochemiluminescence is" and there's nada, and that a lot of the authors are non-native speakers. I (or someone else) could email Amersham and ask for clarification. Oh wait, it doesn't exist, although GE Healthcare Systems may still have someone on staff with knowledge. Not sure how to proceed. 70.172.194.25 00:44, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

By the way, GE Healthcare's site seemingly makes no mention of an "echo" chemiluminescence system: [13], [14], [15], [16], and none on the Cytiva website (another spinoff) either. The archived Amersham product catalog includes lots of mentions of ECL but no "echo" as far as I can see: [17], [18], etc. There are no trademarks registered with the USPTO found by searching the intersection of "echo" with "Amersham" or "chemiluminescence", either. The Amersham trademark registrations for ECL that do exist make no mention of it: [19], [20]. Quite perplexing. 70.172.194.25 01:16, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Turkish “dark l” between front vowels

In Turkish phonology, the “dark l” phoneme, denoted with the IPA symbol “ɫ”, is an allophone of the /l/ realized next to the central and back vowels /a, ɯ, o, u/. Some Turkish terms with IPA pronunciation here have a narrow transcription with an “ɫ” between front vowels. For example, at ertelenebilir we see IPA^(key): [eɾteɫenebiˈɫiɾ]. (In narrow transcription I’d also expect some “ɛ”s here.) This can even be found in some broad transcriptions, such as for dizeler: IPA^(key): /diˈzeɫeɾ/. Is there any reason for these uses of “ɫ”, or are these just mistakes? @Djkcel, MhmtÖ  --Lambiam 12:09, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

There does exist a phonemic distinction between /l/ and /ɫ/, but to my knowledge only in such a way that the "clear L" can occur next back vowels, specifically /a/ and /u/. I'm positive that "dark L" next to front vowels is impossible (though I'm ready to have myself corrected by someone more knowledgeable). 2.203.201.113 00:49, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

I believe it is phonetic. You'd get corrected for saying /meʃɡuɫ/. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 00:53, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

So do you agree these uses of “ɫ” are simply incorrect?  --Lambiam 10:31, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm personally tempted to say so but I still want to hear the natives chime in. Pinging also @İtidal. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 12:02, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for pinging out. Usage of circumflexes before L is not practised anymore, now it’s usage is reduced to be used with <k> and <g>. So clear L can be seen before or later back wovels (except “ı”, laik - /laˈic/, loş - /lɔʃ/),, but vice versa (dark L near front vowels) cannot. “ertelenebilir” should’ve been /ɛɾtelenebiliɾ/, not /eɾteɫenebiˈɫiɾ/ which is obviously incorrect. İtidal (talk) 16:50, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks all. So when I see a twiddled “dark l” near front vowels, I’ll fix it.  --Lambiam 23:04, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

I would like to see transcriptions distinguishing the velar consonants, the variations in i and e, and possibly the unvoiced r. See Wiktionary:Tea_room/2021/March#Turkish_pronunciation for past discussion. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 10:54, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

As I wrote in that discussion, “I actually prefer a broad transcription – in particular when (not contrastive) realizations are entirely predictable”. I do make exceptions, in particular for velarization, which I also denote between /.../, as I did when creating the page mübarek. But when exactly is /e/ lowered to [ɛ]? Turkish phonology § Vowels says, ‘in environments variously described as "final open syllable of a phrase" and "word-final"’. But then, how to explain IPA^(key): [cɛpɛc] for kepek?  --Lambiam 23:29, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Missing macrons on xochitl

The page history shows that someone removed the macrons in last year, presumably in error. Someone who is knowledgeable in Nāhuatl should probably have a look, maybe other pages were also edited this way. —Rua (mew) 18:35, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

iatrogenic

There's also some random quotey stuff at iatrogenic, some dates etc. Again, I aint gonna follow this up. Br00pVain (talk) 19:30, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't know what sort of reply if any you were seeking. I didn't previously know this word, but suddenly this word is being used in the newspapers to talk of Covid caught in hospital, and so more recent quotes from 2022 newspapers could be given if needed. 2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:A98E:9D09:FB2F:5BCB 07:34, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

recipe

Is the IPA correct, i.e. the syllable break? Isn't it simply /ˈrɛ.sɪ.pi/? 2.203.201.113 00:42, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Syllables aren't understood/defined well enough to say what is "correct". The transcription /ˈɹɛs.ɪ.pi/ is based on the theory that short (also called "lax") vowels cannot end a stressed syllable in English: supporting evidence for this is the absence of /ɛ/ word-finally or before another vowel. Your proposed transcription is based on the theory that intervocalic consonants are syllabified with the following vowel (sometimes called the principle of "maximizing onsets", although that is more general). I don't think there is a consensus either among linguists or among Wiktionary editors for one theory of English syllabification vs. the other.--Urszag (talk) 12:08, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. So there's neither a mistake, nor anything special about the word "recipe". I just wanted to be sure of that, especially the latter. I think it's a weird way of syllabifying, but as long as it's not a personal whim and there's a principle behind it, all right :) 2.203.201.113 20:26, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

See also the paragraph in the section English phonology § Syllable structure in Wikipedia that starts with “In some cases, no solution is completely satisfactory” and refers the reader to Ambisyllabicity.  --Lambiam 22:48, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

fid

This quote is from a British Antarctic Survey report of 1988 describing the manual moving of stores off a beach to a base in the 1940s,

This took four days, and Robin estimated that over two million foot pounds of manual labour was done – a great tribute to 'Fid power'.

None of the meanings at fid seem to cover this. Surely the author did not mean Penis power? Not in an official report! SpinningSpark 16:11, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Found the answer myself in The Antarctic Dictionary: A Complete Guide to Antarctic English. It means a British antarctic worker with the BAS. SpinningSpark 16:39, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

FID = Falkland Islands Dependencies. DonnanZ (talk) 17:33, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Already made the entry at Fid. There may be grounds for an all caps entry too, but I think that is more general than just the FIDS workers which this cite means. SpinningSpark 17:39, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

An entry for FID for the dependencies themselves, perhaps. DonnanZ (talk) 17:52, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

scant#Determiner

I'm sceptical, what real evidence is there? The noun went through RFV, and survived. DonnanZ (talk) 16:51, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Are you suggesting that scant evidence exists this is a determiner? The absence of an article is a giveaway. Same for ample; compare “he will have ample opportunity to reexamine the witness”^[21] with “they will have an ample water supply”.^[22] IMO the two 2018 quotations for the adjective are actually uses of scant as a determiner.  --Lambiam 22:39, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

I am suggesting there is no evidence. I checked four other dictionaries, and none of them mention scant as a determiner. I have added them as references, so you can check them out if you want. DonnanZ (talk) 00:16, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Per CGEL (2003), among the sufficient tests to discriminate adjective (ADJ) and determiner (DET) are:

1. DET can't combine with the articles a and the
2. DET can make an NP with a singular count noun
3. DET (quantifier-type) can be a fused determiner-head in partitive constructions

I don't think scant and ample qualify. For example, one can find "scant/ample inch/foot/yard/mile/minute/hour/day/week/month/year), but almost always with a preceding article. DCDuring (talk) 01:39, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

• In the meantime I have placed it below the adjective. DonnanZ (talk) 11:26, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
• Now labelled "proscribed", if anyone disagrees they can remove it. DonnanZ (talk) 07:04, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

  If an entry is labelled (proscribed), it means there are authorities or commentators warning against the listed usage. Where do we find such warnings?  --Lambiam 14:31, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

If we want to do something meaningful to the Determiner section, it should go to RfV or RfD. In either forum we would look for usage evidence that it met determiner criteria, the legitimacy of which we could debate there. DCDuring (talk) 22:22, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, if that's the only way forward. The question is: RFV or RFD, which one? DonnanZ (talk) 09:36, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

สา

Thai word borrowed from English sa, definition "sa". ??? Ultimateria (talk) 01:47, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

The same "definition" was in the entry as created by a Philadelphia IP. After it was tagged with rfdef and then replaced with a real definition, another (?) Philadelphia IP added it back as Etymology 2, this time with the "English" etymology. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:36, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

și

Can somebody explain to me how a word goes from meaning ‘thus’ to ‘and’? Is this something attested in Medieval Latin? I can understand the transition from ‘thus’ to ‘yes’ in Romanian’s sibling languages, but in this case, I just don’t get it. —(((Romanophile))) ♞ (contributions) 13:18, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, DEX mentions that older meanings were "in addition to, also, thus" so maybe the leap might not be that big. --Robbie SWE (talk) 15:17, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Cf. the usage of si (also from Latin sīc) in Old French:

Marie ai nun, si sui de France

'My name is Marie, [and] I am from France.'

Nicodene (talk) 02:52, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Error in illustration of bowline

The "bowline" entry shows an incorrectly tied knot. It looks much like a bowline, but the loop is backward (compare to Wikipedia or any other reputable source). Please replace image!

I don't see anything wrong with the illustration...what exactly doesn't look right ? Leasnam (talk) 21:29, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

(Not the same person.) It's in c:Category:Left hand bowlines, which is connected to the Wikipedia article cowboy bowline. In other words, the knot displayed is a bowline (sensu lato) but not a bowline (sensu stricto). Perhaps we should replace it with a more archetypal image. 70.172.194.25 00:17, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Better yet, just add a more typical image without removing the old one, but add captions clarifying the distinction, so that users can be made aware that it has a sensu lato and sensu stricto. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 15:39, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

broccoli rabe and rape

Further to the RFV conversations which resulted in the passing of rabe, I’ve spotted a related potential issue with our definitions of these two words. We correctly give the main definition of broccoli rabe as rapini (Brassica Rapa - subspecies Rapa) but a secondary definition is given as rape(Brassica Napus), supported by a quote from an Appalachian cookery book referring to rape - might this cite not instead actually refer to Brassica Rapus (Ruvo Group)instead, which is also known as rape according to the first link at the Wikipedia article for Rapini[23] (which is itself another name for broccoli rabe according to both our main definition and a Wikipedia redirect from broccoli rabe)? It seems to me as though the subspecies Rapa of Brassica Rapa is in the Ruvo group and that the second sense in our broccoli rabe entry doesn’t exist. Does anyone think that we should first create a new sense of rape (namely ‘broccoli rabe/rapini/brassica rapa - subspecies Rapa of the Ruvo group’) and then move the quote from the Appalachian cookbook there? The North Carolina State University link could be added as a reference and the term could be labelled as Southern American dialect if applicable. Overlordnat1 (talk) 00:11, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

In actual fact, on further examination there’s another problem: we define broccoli rabe as rapini, which would be fine apart from the fact we define rapini as brassica rapa rapa, which is in fact a turnip (of the standard white variety). We should instead define rapini as brassica rapa ruvo. A related problem is that we define rapini as being turnip greens/tops and even link to turnip greens for translation purposes but this possibly refers to the edible leaves of brassica rapa rapa not brassica rapa ruvo. We then, perhaps following the lead of Wikipedia which lists the Italian term cime di rapa as being equivalent to rapini, add cime do rapa as a translation for turnip greens, but as pointed out on the Wikipedia talk page for rapini, Italian Wikipedia has cime di rapa as a synonym for broccoli rapa sylvestris var. esculenta, not broccoli rapa ruvo. Input from experts on vegetables and the Italian language would be welcome to sort this out. Overlordnat1 (talk) 00:44, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

An older revision of w:Rapini said "Rapini is classified scientifically as Brassica rapa subspecies rapa, in the same subspecies as the turnip, but has also been treated as Brassica rapa ruvo, Brassica rapa rapifera, Brassica ruvo, and Brassica campestris ruvo.". Perhaps the entry was based on that. – Jberkel 02:48, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Well spotted, the version of the page that claimed that as of 06/10/2020 was revised on 22/10/2020 as the claim was incorrect and unsourced. The revision in question not only changed the passage to claim that rapini Is a synonym of brassica rapa ruvo and not brassica rapa rapa but added a cite proving it, so I’ll change the definition.

It appears that rapini isn’t a synonym for rape in the usual botanical sense (broccoli napus) and so only the first sense of our definition is valid. I’m not sure whether to just remove the second sense and quote wholesale from our rapini entry and transfer it to our rape entry by adding a new sense there (which would be defined to claim that rape can mean rapini, or equivalently broccoli rapa ruvo) or to just RFV the second sense of rapini for now though.

The other issue is that w:Rapini claims that ‘ The young leaves of these plants as used in cooking are either the same as or the South European equivalent of turnip tops or turnip greens.’ This slightly unclear sentence seems to be referring to the previous part of the Wikipedia article and should probably be interpreted as meaning ‘the young leaves of plants in the mustard family are used in Mediterranean cuisine, when they are the leaves of turnips (white turnips, scientific name: ‘brassica rapa rapa’) they are known as turnip tops or turnip greens’, meaning that our definitions of turnip tops and turnip greens are correct but that we’re wrong both in listing rapini as a synonym and in listing cime di rapa as a synonym. Overlordnat1 (talk) 13:10, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Cooking terminology is often tricky and ambiguous, and sometimes hard to pin to a single species, or can depend on the region where it is used etc. So using/adding these terms as synonyms will always be a bit problematic. – Jberkel 14:14, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

It's not so much cooking terminology, but confusion with botanical classifications. There have been any number of ways that botanists have tried to make sense out of the cultivars of the genus Brassica, with subspecies, varieties and groups among the taxonomic categories used. The problem is that there are multiple domestications and a lot of tinkering with characteristics by selective breeding. That means that someone in one region may take a given variety and develop it into something resembling another unrelated variety somewhere else. For instance, the east Asian cabbages are developed from Brassica rapa while the European cabbages are from Brassica oleracea. It's very confusing, and the fact that rape is Brassica napus, not Brassica rapa, as one would expect from the spelling, muddles things up more. And referring to one of these varieties as the "equivalent" of one of the others isn't helpful at all. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:08, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

The Italian Wikipedia page for Cima di rapa addresses some of the confusion and links to the following publication by the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew [24] which explains that Sylvestris is accepted as a variety (subspecies?) of brassica rapa by them (it appears in both Kew’s Plants Of the World Online (POWO) and International Plant Names Index (IPNI)) but it isn’t accepted by the World Checklist of Vernacular Plants (WCVP). Turnip greens only appears on Wikipedia in the Turnip article, which specifically describes brassica rapa rapa. I suppose it is conceivable that both cima di rapa in Italian and turnip greens/tops in English-speaking countries could be equivalent, or at least sometimes substitutable, if either they are both sometimes used to describe leaves of the brassica rapa rapa plant (the (white) turnip) or to describe leaves of plants in the brassica rapa species more generally.

I think we should probably label rapini and turnip greens as something along the lines of ‘related terms’ or ‘coordinate terms’ rather than synonyms and also remove the translation section for rapini that says ‘for brassica rapa - see turnip greens’, replacing it with a translation section headed ‘brassica rapa ruvo’ with ‘rapini, cima di rapa’ (or just ‘rapini’?) listed as an Italian translation. Any thoughts on those particular suggestions? Also, I’ve redefined ‘rapini’ as broccoli rapa ruvo (instead of broccoli rapa rapa) like I said I would and shall now RFV the second sense of broccoli rabe (i.e. rape AKA brassica napus) as I suggested earlier. Overlordnat1 (talk) 11:16, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

tabbed

The entries for tab and/or tabbed are incomplete for a verb sense. Another dictionary has the sought-for meaning for "tabbed": "to name or designate." I came here because of the usage in w:Battle of Arkansas Post (1863)

Grant, who had a rocky relationship with McClernand, tabbed Major General William T. Sherman to lead Halleck's proposed maneuver downriver.

that is, he selected someone to lead. I have heard this usage at one time or another, but not often or recently. I would have used "selected" instead, certainly. Shenme (talk) 00:55, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

This sense is definitely attestable: e.g., see [25]. 70.172.194.25 00:58, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

"To single out; designate" (MWOnline). I thinks it comes from the notion of tab (noun) "A projection, flap, or short strip attached to an object to facilitate opening, handling, or identification" (AHD). DCDuring (talk) 23:45, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

German past subjunctive in e.g. bleiben

The new German conjugation template calls a lot of past subjunctive forms "rare except in very formal contexts". As such, I don't have a problem with that. But at times this note is absolutely unjustified as e.g. in "bleiben", whose subjunctive is certainly not restricted to such contexts. It is entirely normal to say, for example, "Das bliebe dann dir überlassen." (That would be left up to you.) The correct note would be that at "kommen", namely "this form and alternatively 'würde' both found". Could someone explain to me how the template can be edited accordingly? The note seems to be automatic somehow. Thank you. 2.203.201.113 03:17, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

There's a look-up table incorporated into the module: Module:de-verb#L-66 — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 03:21, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, I warned @Benwing2 at Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2021/January § German 2nd person past subjunctives. As one year ago: “The synthetic forms are just rare and formal when they are identical to the preterite forms, that is in all weak verbs.” Fay Freak (talk) 04:22, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

"Blieb" may be tending to become rarer, so it'd be fair to rate it relatively rare. In particular, the dann can convey a sense of futur, so "das bleibt dann dir überlassen" is informally acceptable and your variant subjectively redundant. From there, it's not far to using the present tense throughout.

This is a loss because I would consider bliebe correct and possibly a form of belieben, "wie (es) euch beliebt". Catch-22 what is the desiderative (what a better name) of belieben? I can't read the historic cites in the DWDS corpus that was recommended months ago: "Sy mugen auch hart lang an einer stat beleiben." must mean "remain", filed under belieben [26], yet one might gloss 'Vorlieb nehmen'. This shouldn't be a surprise, as mögen for example has developed similarly. ApisAzuli (talk) 22:24, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

nonzero

The senses are the very same thing. What is distinguishing them? The label? We don't usually copy-paste a sense just because of different labeling. I also disagree with the "positive" part; I think the implied positivity in the provided ux comes indeed from "chance" as chances (probabilities) are inherently nonnegative. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 16:31, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

It seems to me that this word is primarily an adjective but if it were only an adjective that can appear as a noun, then we’d have a situation analogous to how ‘poor people’ becomes ‘the poor’ which our policies say should be discounted and that isn’t the case here as ‘nonzero numbers’ becomes ‘the nonzeros’ not ‘the nonzero’. The need to pluralise it should surely make it a noun too? I agree that the second adjectival sense is more of a subsense, at best, of the first one and should probably be removed (and the usex transferred to the first sense). Overlordnat1 (talk) 13:23, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

On second thoughts the second adjectival sense is probably valid but could do with rewording as even though it could refer to something large and positive and therefore be the same as the first definition, like you say, it has a more idiomatic meaning: ‘small and positive/close to zero’. Overlordnat1 (talk) 10:25, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Headword lines that don't match the POS or language

I made a list of entries where the headword line doesn't match the POS or the language. It's grouped per-language, so check out your favorite language and help fix some headwords! As of the 2022-01-01 export, there are 12,500+ entries in need of attention. I've reviewed the languages with the most errors, but I'm sure there are some false positives further down the list in languages that use nonstandard template names. Please let me know if you find any particularly egregious entries in the list that should be omitted from the next report. JeffDoozan (talk) 00:45, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Some language-specific templates have erroniously been included, off the top of my head {{grk-ita-head}}, {{sid-npf}}, {{sid-apf}}, {{olo-affix}}, but I'm sure there's more. Thadh (talk) 02:49, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Catalan has some headword templates which are reused for different POS, for example {{ca-adj|mf|suff=1}} (suffix). – Jberkel 14:39, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Ottoman Turkish is fixed. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 14:54, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Most of the Middle French reports are for {{frm-present participle}} under a Verb header. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 16:20, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the list. I fixed most of the Hungarian words but I don't know what to do with the nonstandard forms. The POS can be Noun, Adjective, etc., the headword line is always {{head|hu|nonstandard form}}. So there is always a mismatch. Panda10 (talk) 19:37, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! I updated most of the Polish ones except the "combined forms". Is combined form an acceptable L3, or should I change the header to match the L3? Vininn126 (talk) 20:00, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Should be resolved now. Vininn126 (talk) 22:30, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for all the feedback. I've incorporated fixes for everything mentioned above. When the next data export is available, I'll rebuild the list. JeffDoozan (talk) 20:51, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

The new data is live. With the additional exclusions, it dropped from 12,581 to 8,356 mismatched entries. With all the manual cleanup since the first version, it's down to just 7,465 entries needing attention. JeffDoozan (talk) 16:07, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Fixed the Polish and Old Polish ones, so only 5. Vininn126 (talk) 16:20, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Heraldry term again

What is a lunel in English? On w:es:Escudo de Mieres there are six red ones, those bulged crosses. Nothing in Wikipedia looks like to those guys. Br00pVain (talk) 22:16, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

OED says it is "a figure formed by four crescents appointé resembling a rose with four leaves". The sole reference given is William Berry's Encyclopaedia Heraldica (with no quotation). — SGconlaw (talk) 12:43, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I added an rfdef and translation Br00pVain (talk) 13:04, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Uses of the heraldic sense that are not mentions will not clarify the sense (argent a lunel gules), so we are dependent on illustrations (the Commons has a Category:Lunel in heraldry) or definitions (Lunel is the term applied in French blazon to a bearing composed of four crescents arranged in cross with their points turned inwards towards the centre of the shield;^[27] Lunel, four crescents in cross, which ... should all have their horns turned in towards each other^[28]).  --Lambiam 18:14, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for adding a definition. — SGconlaw (talk) 18:52, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Amt cognate with ombudsman ?

These words are related according to the source quoted in the article https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Amt Our entries on these words disagree. --Espoo (talk) 00:00, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

@Espoo: Yes, I have noticed that too. This is the Tea-Room, so what is your question? ApisAzuli (talk) 08:27, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

They are not related. Old Norse umboð looks like Old Norse ambátt, ambótt, but umboð is from um + boð. Leasnam (talk) 15:32, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Japanese pronoun あたい

I have seen and heard the pronoun あたい in some old Japanese video games. It seems to basically be the feminine equivalent of おれ. Is this accurate? — This unsigned comment was added by 2601:18a:c500:c00:8c15:ab32:1fde:6bc7 (talk) at 10:14, 14 January 2022 (UTC).

Doubt it. We have an entry for あたい (atai). It's a slang contraction of あたし (atashi), which is itself a feminine contraction of the standardly known 私 (watashi), which is itself already pretty feminine. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 03:37, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

@Mellohi!: Well, your answer seems "yes" to the question asked. If おれ is a colloquial masculine, then "あたい" a colloquial feminine, i.e. a feminine equivalent. I would say あたし (atashi) is the equivalent (not assertive, like おれ) and this feminine form is less crude. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 07:33, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

• Depends on what you mean by equivalent.  :) A male using the Japanese term おれ (ore) in certain social contexts could be prelude to, or cause for, a fight, whereas I am not aware of any such potentially aggressive overtones for あたい (atai) as used by females. That element aside, both terms are informal and intimate (indicating use among friends or other "in-group" people, not necessarily lovers). ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:28, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

  @Eirikr: Thanks for your 2p! Japanese pronouns can be described for ever and still not have enough info for a non-speaker, LOL. As for the "cause for a fight", the tones women can use あんた (anta) towards men can be very condescending, so a hen-pecked would more likely hear あんた (anta) ("you", not "I"), rather than あなた (anata) from his wife. We describe it just as an alternative form, though. I know it's not always so but that's what I get from shows and anime. There's probably no aggressive "I" in a female speech (unless they choose to use おれ). --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 23:46, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Ashes

Hi. Any cricket buffs out there want to enter a decent cricket referenced definition for the (or The) Ashes? I know next to nothing, but was quite surprised by the paucity of this entry. -- ALGRIF talk 12:48, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

@SemperBlotto Br00pVain (talk) 13:05, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

@Algrif: The proper entry is the Ashes. Equinox ◑ 20:50, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll add a "See Also" to make the link clear. -- ALGRIF talk 08:33, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Added an etymology for the term. --Rishabhbhat (talk) 04:35, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

French "communautarisme"

(Notifying PUC, Jberkel, Nicodene): A post at Talk:communautarisme and what I find in some other sources suggests that French communautarisme is at least in part a false friend of English communitarianism, despite what we currently have at the entry. Is anyone willing to take a stab at writing a more accurate entry? —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 00:50, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Should be somewhat better now. Nicodene (talk) 02:46, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

German nudeln

(Notifying Matthias Buchmeier, -sche, Atitarev, Jberkel, Mahagaja, Fay Freak): Let's be the first dictionary that properly defines this word! Just look at those embarrassments under further reading. However, the exact senses seem to be really hard to pin down. Writers use it very creatively. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 02:42, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Tue es! Leasnam (talk) 18:01, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

which is something quite else than tue-le.  --Lambiam 20:41, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

haha yes :) Leasnam (talk) 20:46, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Good one :) — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 23:18, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

"To move like a noodle"... erm! Does it mean flop? Equinox ◑ 20:51, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

I wasn't familiar with this sense and only inferred it from the quote but if I had to go for a single English word, I'd rather go with twirl, snake (1), or perhaps meander (1). I glossed it like that because of etymological reasons; will improve it now though. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 23:18, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

@Equinox, Fytcha: this is a rather uncommon sense that I could barely infer from the self-explanatory quotation, which is difficult to translate: ... she furrows her brows [and/as] her right index finger [noodles] around a light strand of [her] hair, that forms into a long curly tuft.

So maybe wind, wiggle, twirl, curl or perhaps fidget? to snake, sure! The description should recall a fairly common image of a long haired person fingering their hair, which might be too specific to define the proposed sense. The use of dabei strikes me as ungrammatical and untranslatable, though unobjectionable at first. Also, the anaphor "sich" could refer self-reflexively to the finger, or to herself in a more pragmatic sense, hence "[her]", which I find preferable just to get a corresponding pronoun into the translation. "long curly tuft" might be infelicit (lengthening implies pulling after the curling, in the common image). ApisAzuli (talk) 07:01, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

@ApisAzuli: I actually think the dabei is strictly necessary for it to be grammatical. Compare: *“Sie kräuselt die Stirn, nudelt sich ihr Finger.” / “Sie kräuselt die Stirn, dabei nudelt sich ihr Finger.” There is a comma missing there in the original quote and I also wrote so in the source code of nudeln, but we don't have a good way to use ^[sic] for missing commas I don't think. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 12:48, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

"Twirl" works best for what a finger does around hair. Equinox ◑ 17:26, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

It should need more quotations. ausgenudelt etc. don't belong with it, if those were imitative to abnutzen etc. (cp. ausgenuddelt). ApisAzuli (talk) 07:01, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Based on uses, one of the senses seems to be to roll out (in its literal meaning).  --Lambiam 21:44, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Which one exactly? Based on the uses, I would have inferred (roughly): 6. (Tauben) either sense 1 literally or verpflegen/versorgen; 7. (Haare) wischen (1); 8. (mit Unverschämtheit) perhaps sense 1 figuratively; 9. (Ball) kullern (1). Duden actually has roll out as a dated sense but I didn't come across any uses of it as such. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 23:18, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

For instance Das Lochband nudelt sich in einen Computer.^[29]  --Lambiam 12:44, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

I think the ball (#9) is spiralling down in an irregular trajectory/with low energy; kullern implies rolling on the ground. #8 seems to be = #1, with metaphorical meaning of "fatten". #7 is similar to wursteln; it's possible Haare hochzuwursteln, i.e. to fix long(er) hair in a sloppy way with hairpins and the like; I'm sure there is an idiomatic expression for this in English which I don't know. Akletos (talk) 10:34, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

"to spiral (like certain sorts of pasta)" could be made the underlying sense of ##4,7,9, Lambiams quote, and perhaps #5 (the "spiralling" sound of a dying engine?) . Then there must be soemthing at work like "to knead (noodle dough)" (missing) > "to squeeze" > "to cuddle" (#10) > "to fuck" (#11) Akletos (talk) 10:54, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Quote under #6=#1 "Il doit gaver ses pigeons..." [30] Akletos (talk) 21:15, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

I was pinged but I am sorry to inform you that I abstain to ponder about the senses of the word. I am not Alman enough to choose to prepare or eat noodles or ever use the verb in any of its senses. Pastaphobia (real word, but within the broader ballpark of healthy eating). For some matters, one needs to eat certain things to understand them. Fat people don’t completely understand either how /fit/ people conceptualize the world. Obviously the dictionary authors didn’t eat in the same fashions as the word’s users, who have been varying groups too that employ various contradictory subsets of vocabulary of the German language! Every language can be a foreign language to someone. Fay Freak (talk) 18:55, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: as I have indicated above, I wouldn't be too sure that it refered to pasta, initially. I'm less sure now about the comparison, as it could belong with a broad cluster of what has been described by the likes of John Lawler and Anatoli Liberman as some kind of phonesthetic initial cluster (*kn, cp. knacken, knicken, knüllen, knock, and perhaps gnocchi if your phobia allows). Therefore, and taking further spurious sound changes into consideration, the range of possible comparands is immense (say kringeln, if that's not too cringy; also Bolle, Ballen, Zwiebel, Knoblauch, clover, root beet, ... ancor if you should feel so inclined) and pasta may be an accidental by-sense! Well, at least you didn't say kraut (which might in view of the aforesaid belong here as well; cp. crowd, Dutch, throng, "to swell"; grow, Salatkopf, horn, lettuce, from lac "milk", I mean obviously, etc., etc.). ApisAzuli (talk) 10:40, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

How to make Latin suffix categories for -tas and -itas consistent

Currently, there are two separate pages for Category:Latin words suffixed with -tas and Category:Latin words suffixed with -itas, but there isn't consistency in how they are used: Category:Latin words suffixed with -tas contains brevitas from brevis and captīvitās from captīvus, but Category:Latin words suffixed with -itas contains cīvīlitās from cīvīlis and paucitās from paucus.

In most cases, the suffix appears with a preceding -i-, which is not originally part of the suffix, but a weakened stem vowel (or what could be thought of as a "linking vowel"). A minority of words show no preceding vowel, such as difficultās and paupertās. And a third allorph -etās is used after i, but has no separate category.

To me, it seems most sensible to take one of the following options:

• Get rid of Category:Latin words suffixed with -itas and put words with all three allomorphs of the suffix in Category:Latin words suffixed with -tas. Comparable categories exist for words ending in -(i)gena, -(i)ger, -(i)fer, -(i)fex, -(i)formis. I think I prefer this.
• Add Category:Latin words suffixed with -etas and move all of the words ending in -itās to Category:Latin words suffixed with -itas, leaving only the words ending in a consonant + -tās in Category:Latin words suffixed with -tas.

Before emptying Category:Latin words suffixed with -itas, I wanted to see if anyone strongly prefers the second option.--Urszag (talk) 02:51, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

FWIW, a similar issue also affects other languages, e.g. Category:English words suffixed with -cide vs Category:English words suffixed with -icide, if we want to consider what our approach should be in general. Or look at the distribution of words ending in ...an between CAT:English words suffixed with -n and with -an, some even in CAT:English words suffixed with -ian or -ean). Merging would let users find the full set of terms in one place, but splitting by surface form would reflect how we split so much else including the entries for the suffixes themselves(!) according to written form. (Indeed, whichever approach we pick, cleaning up uses of the other one by new users who find it intuitive will probably be a recurring cleanup task.) I'm on the fence, but I guess the second option could lead to categories for a bunch of redundant obsolete/uncommon written forms (e.g. besides -cide and -icide I spot google books:adultacide, besides -ian I spot historyans, etc), so maybe merging is better. - -sche (discuss) 17:46, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Right, I believe it is -tas with a prop vowel (why have you man not created it?), or say regular epenthesis, or interfix, for which us man have an entry: -i-. Fay Freak (talk) 17:56, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

English/New Latin "mens. et del."

This phrase appears on maps and the like, used after the creator of a map or before the date of creation. I'm pretty confident this means "measured and drawn", and thus stands for "mensura(tio) et delineatio", "mensurator et delineator", "mensuratum et delineatum", or something like that, but I'm not sure which exact form of the words to use. There are already citations at Citations:mens et del (added by someone else in 2018 who didn't know what the words stood for). Can anyone provide some input here? Also, should this be under English or Latin? 70.172.194.25 05:53, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

I currently think the main intended form is "mensuravit et delineavit". But now I'm wondering whether this could be SOP, since there are uses of del. (also delt.) on its own to refer to illustrators. 70.172.194.25 07:30, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Surely SOP. Fay Freak (talk) 18:35, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

On the other hand:

• It is always "mens. et del[t]." (periods optional), never the other way around.
• The set phrase is extremely common on architectural schematics, etc.
• While del. can occur on its own, I'm not sure mens. can (and this would be hard to search for and find attestations because it is masked by other meanings of "mens")
• It's currently extremely hard for laypeople to figure out the correct meaning if they encountered this on a map. As of writing, searching ["mens et del" "mensuravit et delineavit"] on Google yields no results explaining that this is the meaning of the phrase, except for this discussion right here, even though I'm >90% sure this exact form is the intended expansion of the abbreviation.

Thoughts? 70.172.194.25 18:46, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

“Set order” is an extremely poor argument. All kinds of SOP collocations have this feature, usually for hard-to-describe euphonic reasons. I wouldn’t create German übergeben und übereignen which occurs in this order obviously because it is referred to in this order in § 433 I BGB. It is also to utter satisfaction if you merely include the separate words so people figure out the meanings thereby.

And Google is demonstrably a slanted garbage bin, this year we have found that it has not hits for Macedonian северномакедонски (severnomakedonski) despite of that European state bearing this epithet four years now, neither in the official nor the dialectological sense. Fay Freak (talk) 19:06, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Fair points. I do think the Google search is relevant from an end-user's perspective, since that's perhaps the most likely resource a layperson would consult if they wanted to figure out the meaning of a random abbreviation. Maybe there's some obscure book of Latin architectural abbreviations that defines this term, but if it isn't findable via search then very few people will know where to look.

Anyway, if treated as English rather than (or in addition to) New Latin—which is how we label et al., meum et tuum, hic et nunc, and various other Latin-derived phrases—this can't be SOP since *et (“and”) isn't an English word. Also, I'm still not sure mens. (mensuravit, “measured”) exists in either Latin or English outside of this phrase. Do you think it's justified to create it solely based on its use in this collocation? 70.172.194.25 19:18, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, if somebody said “English citations” in Citations:mens et del it may but mean that there are citations occurring in English texts. Sometimes one would like to distinguish texts by language under translingual headers. Or, as discussed at other occasions, if people only know English then they don’t get the idea of “translingual” (or they are not used to applying it) so they add translingual phrases as English. I rather believe the polyglots. Quot linguas calles, tot homines vales.

Principally, there are cranberry morphemes, morphemes occurring only in very particular contexts, which one includes separately. With abbreviations it can be just like that. You still have to think if it is likely that somebody puts in a whole phrase into the dictionary. I added شَجَر الْبَقّ (šajar al-baqq, “elm”) to بَقّ (baqq) in spite of not believing بَقّ (baqq) to be used separately in this sense, but with particular labels, because one is not likely to search anything with شَجَر (šajar) as it is kind of like the Chinese classifiers, or the Akkadian 𒄑 (GIŠ) sign preceding many tree names, of varying requiredness.

Or see also حَلّ (ḥall, “sesame”) in دُهْن الحَلّ (duhn al-ḥall) apparently (I can’t know for sure) only occurring with this classifier in Arabic but more broadly in the Akkadian sources, and easily confusable with homonyms, thus having two other reasons of being more practically included separatim. Fay Freak (talk) 19:48, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Hotmail

add this word pls 207.81.187.41 14:52, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

It's a brand name. See Hotmail article at Wikipedia instead. Equinox ◑ 17:27, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

fork computing verb senses: overlap?

• (computer science) To split a (software) project into several projects.
• (computer science) To split a (software) distributed version control repository.

Unclear wording. Can this be merged into one sense? I don't perceive much difference, though of course a repository can contain other things than software (e.g. just the graphics, or documentation). Equinox ◑ 17:29, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

They are similar and perhaps mergeable, although I do see some subtle differences. The first one would be captured by, for example, the fork of Emacs into the GNU Emacs and XEmacs projects, with competing communities. The second one does not necessarily imply that the forker intends to start a separate breakaway project; you can fork a repo on GitHub, make some changes, and then make a pull request and have your modifications merged back upstream. 70.172.194.25 17:34, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes. First, it is not “split” because you make a copy, as copying is not theft or robbery. Confusion of course arises from whether there will be a new “project”. Maybe you make a backup clone, maybe you have a “project” of merely proposing pull requests to the original project, after modifying your own version, and it will often be left open and indistinguishable what the end result will be, so indeed as a mere formality you should combine both in a narrower denotation. Fay Freak (talk) 17:43, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Two senses. OmegaWiki is a fork of Wiktionary, but that's unrelated to version control. – Jberkel 17:58, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

No, we both have version control, it is just rarely talked about for Wikis, surely because one cannot mess around with that many things as one could do in a terminal using git etc. Fay Freak (talk) 18:02, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

If we only had the fork feature for entries. We'd get a parallel reality wiki. Maybe that's more fitting for our times. – Jberkel 18:19, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Those spammers and mirrors “fork” our pages with various tools, but is Transwiki not a fork feature? Fay Freak (talk) 18:33, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Seen that way, mg.wiktionary.org would also qualify as (perma-)fork. – Jberkel 18:37, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

No, if one adds a translation to a project this is not a fork. Having its own subdomain does not make it a separate project. Fay Freak (talk) 18:42, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Bots automatically copying data into another wiki is conceptually more of a fork than the various mirrors and spammers (as they are non-editable and don't diverge). – Jberkel 19:00, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Only those people whom I allow so (whom I invite as contributors) can contribute to my fork. It is obviously wrong to define a fork by editability, or visibility of the contributions since there are closed repositories, even if the contributions were visible initially and then, against licence requirements, omitted in the copy. Fay Freak (talk) 19:09, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Are the three verb computing sense supposed to be transitive or intransitive? They are worded as intransitive by including the object in the definition, but that doesn't fit the usage. I observe transitive use above ("you can fork a repo on GitHub." from anon 1 above; "Those spammers and mirrors “fork” our pages" from FayFreak 3 above). There is also an intransitive usage I have observed ("The project forked when XX and his followers left to form YYY."). I assume the "spawn" sense is intransitive and the "split" senses are transitive.

Is fork used outside the open-source software world? Couldn't it be used about, say, a given language WP project declaring its independence of the rest of the wiki community?

Even if limited to the world of software, is this really "computer science" rather than "computing"?

Don't all of these computing-related senses derive from the Unix system call "fork"?

Can anyone more familiar with the usage than I propose a single definition for these transitive uses and also an appropriate label?

I note that other dictionaries rely on their users' ability to apply more abstract definitions to specifics by their presumed natural skill at metonymy. DCDuring (talk) 20:02, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

The fork system call is very old and probably inspired the naming of the other concepts. Superficially they are similar, something gets copied and work continues on that copy. But I think it's still worth separating them out: process forking is done on the operating system level, version control forking is done on the code/data level, and project forking also happens on a social level (sometimes involving drama, with license changes etc.). – Jberkel 23:54, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

This is a level of loving attention to nuance that we rarely apply outside of computing and linguistics. Why not leave it more to WP and our users' ability to recognize the range of coverage possible by metaphor/analogy? DCDuring (talk) 00:33, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Because it is “a sense”, and Wikipedia is also not terribly good at getting senses across, only as tangents, so defines them often at a hard-to-spot place and in an inaccurate way, also as a function of its relying on secondary sources to describe usage, which systematically opaques the senses.

I don’t know though what mode or extent of glossing you try to argue for from here. Of course we aspire to keep the number of definition lines low to decrease their impertinent demand on the reader, so we try to abstract a common denominator from the various senses, after which we can then be more specific if that abstraction, combining the senses to decrease demand on the reader, is too obscure in application to be well digested by the reader and would conversely not suit his demand. Fay Freak (talk) 02:12, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ If this is only used in the open-source software world or if it is just a question of what kind of entity (project, repository, process, block of code, or version of code) is forked (or forks itself) then we are lavishing loving care and elaboration of detail far beyond what we do with entries from fields we are not engaged in ourselves. This looks to me like self-indulgence. We don't accept it from outsiders. DCDuring (talk) 02:44, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Merging the "fork a project (social level, diverging long-term)" and "fork a repo (version control level, possibly but not necessarily diverging long-term)" senses could be okay (although I don't know if it is ideal). Those are similar actions, even if the implications are not identical. I'm strongly against merging the "fork a process" sense to either of those, however. I don't think we should be willing to accept conflation of such distinct senses, and if Wiktionary's coverage of other semantic fields is doing that, I'd consider that a problem to solve rather than an example to follow. 70.172.194.25 02:50, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

It's not always restricted to the software world (but usually close to it). Cryptocurrencies can fork, and Everipedia has been described as a fork of Wikipedia (of the data, not the code). Perhaps it'll get broader usage one day (a fork of the Republican party etc.) – Jberkel 10:32, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

период

This is shown in both English and Russian Wiktionaries with the accent on the i, but isn't it on the o? Listening to the audio file and the file at forvo, it seems the io is a rising vowel combination with the o as the centre?2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:9965:787D:B1A1:EA2 21:47, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

The audio file in our entry has the accent very strongly on the first syllable. Of course, a lot depends on who recorded the audio, and there's no information about that whatsoever at Commons. At forvo, you can find audio with the accent in all three of the possible positions, as well as at least one with all three syllables equally accented. In other words, the audio evidence is decidedly mixed. Looking at the edit history, the accent in the headword template was added by someone who appears not to be a fluent speaker, but there were already declension and IPA templates in the entry with the current accentuation, and those were added by a native speaker. Speaking of native speakers: pinging @Atitarev. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:20, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

@2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:9965:787D:B1A1:EA2, 2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:9965:787D:B1A1:EA2, Chuck Entz: In Russian, the stress is on "и" (i) (the 2nd syllable). That's what the entry says (both English and Russian Wiktionaries) and that's what the audio file is. I don't see any discrepancy in Forvo either but you have to make sure you search for the Russian pronunciation, not e.g. Bulgarian or Macedonian, etc, where the stress is on the final "о". The only variation in pronunciation in Russian is that the final syllable "-од" can be reduced [pʲɪˈrʲiət] (as expected), unexpectedly not reduced [pʲɪˈrʲiot] and even pronounced as [pʲɪˈrʲiʊt] "пери́уд").

Please let me know if you really hear something different in

Audio:

(file)

or https://forvo.com/word/период/ (under период pronunciation in Russian), as I don't see see or hear any inconsistency. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 06:39, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

To my ear, the first syllable is much louder than the rest of the word. Granted, I'm not a trained phonetician, and it's been well over three decades since my last class in either phonetics or Russian. As I understand it, English uses a rise in pitch and a increase in length as well as loudness to indicate stress, so I can see how my ear could be fooled by either of those. Chuck Entz (talk) 07:16, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: Yes, the first syllable in our audio file sounds louder but the stress is still on the 2nd syllable. At Forvo, try the Russian recordings #2 to #5. At #3 the stressed syllable is louder, I think. From w:Russian_phonology#Stress: "Pitch accent has only a minimal role in indicating stress... ". Also from there: "Phonologically, stressed syllables are mostly realised not only by the lack of aforementioned vowel reduction, but also by a somewhat longer duration than unstressed syllables." --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 07:26, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

@Atitarev Forvo also has an audio file for the prepositional периоде. Maybe you can see why the stress on the word is hard for a foreigner to work out. I'll have to train my ear, but it sounds to me like периОде. I think the failure to reduce the o - possibly because this is a loan word? - is what is confusing me. 2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:A98E:9D09:FB2F:5BCB 18:40, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

To the original poster: there you have it. What we hear is very strongly influenced by the rules our brains taught themselves when we were babies trying to make sense out of the noises people were making. Each of us, listening to the same audio, heard something completely different. There's a reason I keep mentioning "native speakers": there's a lot more to learning a language than getting the vocabulary and the formal grammar straight, and we won't know what we don't know until we learn to unlearn what we think we know. It's as simple as that... Chuck Entz (talk) 15:28, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I have only ever heard or pronounced it [pʲɪˈrʲiʊt] (although maybe with a slight voicing on the final [-t]). Thadh (talk) 15:38, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

@Thadh: I've listed all standard pronunciations. The "у" in "пери́уд" must be a result of exaggerated unreduced "о". @Benwing2: Hi. Are you able to check anything on standard pronunciations of пери́од (períod)? Avanesov just gives the stress, no further comment.

@Thadh: As for voicing, I can't agree with you but people tend pronounce what they don't normally pronounce in a regular fluent speech when they are asked to pronounce. Half of Russians will fail to devoice the final consonants in гриб (grib) or код (kod) just to highlight they don't mean грипп (gripp) or кот (kot) when they are asked to articulate. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 22:54, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

@Atitarev Ivanova, who is generally trustworthy, just says пери́од without any further marks (not even underlining any part of the word, which is often done to call attention to pronouncing that part of the word standardly). Reznichenko doesn't have this word at all in her dictionary. Benwing2 (talk) 02:40, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Thanks, it confirms the predictable regular pronunciation [pʲɪˈrʲiət] is right. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 02:45, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you every one for all the information on this. I was led astray by the fact that the stressed syllable can sometimes see a fall in the voice in Russian. It's not the first time I've been led astray by that. I'm listing to a book with an audio file, and the author says период with a non-reduced /o/ in the final syllable, and this is what confused me, but it does match one of the transcriptions given in Wiktionary. 2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:A98E:9D09:FB2F:5BCB 07:32, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

マミる

I heard about a neologism called マミる was created by fandom, based on the tragic experience of Mami Tomoe in Gen Urobuchi's Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which means "beheading" or " miserable death". According to the corresponding Japanese Wikipedia article, the term itself was even included in the 2012 version of 現代用語の基礎知識. Can some more experienced users determine if these entry is eligible at here? Many thanks.廣九直通車 (talk) 08:28, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

end up

This is a tough one (and/or I'm stupid and/or slightly drunk but not much). There are three senses (ignore the totally different sense 4) and the semantics are similar but perhaps the transitivity, subject possibility, etc. are not. I feel that at least #1 and #3 might be merged, but it's quite hard, since we can nail a resultative on there ("I ended up lost") or various other things... What do the real brains of Wiktionary think? Equinox ◑ 15:02, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

BTW, why is sense 1 transitive anyway? Is "I ended up going there" transitive? Surely not? Equinox ◑ 15:03, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Until the real brains arrive, consider: There is a transitive usage definable as "to bring to a conclusion" as in The chairman ended up the meeting by announcing his resignation and promptly leaving the room. (It's not part of my idiolect.) The corresponding intransitive sense also occurs: The meeting ended up with the chairman announcing his resignation and promptly leaving the room. [I have added those two definitions.]

MWOnline makes do with a single definition (but five usage examples), but others have multiple definitions. I think there are a number of complements possible: adjectives, locatives, stative nouns, non-locative prepositional phrases headed by as, with or by, or a non-finite clause with a participle, past or present, (catenative construction?). There is often an element of unexpectedness, randomness, or accident to the resulting state or condition.

In our entry the idiomatic labels are worse than uninformative. Arguably all of the definitions are idiomatic, but we select two of our four to bear the label. I don't think "copulative" is very helpful as a label compared to a usage example with an adjective complement.

Of the three usage examples we have for the three definitions 1 and 3 have non-finite verb clauses as complement and are hard to distinguish semantically.

Maybe the best thing is to generate or find at least one usage example for each of the possible complement types and then find the smallest number of definitions that cover them all. DCDuring (talk) 16:26, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for good comments. You've made me start to think about the difference between end and end up, but I won't try digging into that here, since it isn't the point. (I also hate the "idiomatic" label and will remove it from all entries some day when you're all sleeping.) I see you have taken some of these senses to WT:RFD so, that's progress. Equinox ◑ 17:26, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

article of clothing

Would this be SOP? Hardly anyone would think to use "article" with "clothing" if it weren't a set phrase, and it's such a common expression. We already have piece of clothing which is at the same level on the SOP scale. 70.175.192.217 18:27, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

My 2c. Here we are dealing with making a countable unit from an uncountable noun. So, yes, it would be SoP. Just like "tube of toothpaste", for example would be SoP, as we are using "tube" to make a countable unit from an uncountable noun. -- ALGRIF talk 20:41, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Forming a countable noun is indeed the purpose of the phrase. And I agree, tube of toothpaste is very SoPpy. Toothpaste is just like any other substance, so you could have a cup, bucket, or barrel of toothpaste (even if it is usually sold in tubes in practice). And you could similarly have a tube of molasses or whatever other material. It's definitely tube + of + toothpaste. So I guess article of clothing should be similar, although it seemed less clear to me as the choice of the word article is pretty unusual for such a construction. (Then again, "article of equipment" has some Google hits, as does "article of ammunition". Comparatively few for "article of medicine", but that makes sense since there are more specific terms.)

Anyway, we do have work of art, piece of furniture, and pair of scissors, which by your argument I suppose we should exclude. And even item of clothing, piece of clothing. So I guess other editors either aren't following the SoP policy, or there is a good reason for having those. 70.175.192.217 21:09, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Having had more than enough of my own entries SoPped out of Wikt, I am not at all active in trying to remove anything other than vandalism and pure rubbish. I would raise these examples you give onto RfD if I could be bothered with the hassle that follows. Raise them yourself, if you like. I would agree they are all very SoPpy, except for "pair of scissors" -- "work of art" would almost certainly give you months of argument in the forum, if you enjoy that sort of thing. Have fun. -- ALGRIF talk 21:31, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Actually, it's the other way around. I was thinking of creating article of clothing but didn't want it to be insta-tagged. Now I guess I'll just leave things as-is (as-are? as they are). 70.175.192.217 21:57, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

• One uncontroversial - and helpful-to-some-language-learners - thing to do is add a usage example to [[clothing#Noun]] that included the expression article of clothing. The entry article of clothing isn't valuable in itself to someone who might be looking to make a countable NP out of clothing: they would have to know where to look. If article of clothing were in derived terms at [[clothing]] it might be buried in a list of other derived terms. DCDuring (talk) 22:52, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

  Okay, I tried. Feel free to rewrite. 70.175.192.217 00:25, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

  And, as a bonus, if one searches for "article of clothing", even without surrounding quotes, one finds the clothing entry with the expression partially highlighted.

  Looking at Google Books (first 200 items appearing in search for "article of"), clothing was not the term most used with article of. More common were food, manufacture, commerce, merchandise. There were some twelve other terms. BTW, item of clothing has become as common as article of clothing. DCDuring (talk) 01:19, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

  We probably should have [[article of manufacture]] as it is a specific term in US patent law and not SOP. The others are probably sums of parts. I'm surprised about the relative frequencies of "article of clothing" and "item of clothing", as I've almost always heard article, but I guess my experience must not be representative. Perhaps it is a regional or generational thing. 70.175.192.217 02:15, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

  Looking at Google N-grams, the rise of item of vs article of has been steady and dramatic. Item has a one syllable advantage over article. DCDuring (talk) 02:24, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

  My favorite illustrative quote is this one from "Roughing It" by Mark Twain.

  My take on this is that "article of clothing" is half-fossilized SOP: people don't use article in this sense nearly as much as they used to, so someone unfamiliar with older usage might think it can only be used in a few set phrases. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:44, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

  If they are decoding, they can look up article. If they are encoding, they can use piece, or item, piece of clothing being even more common in modern times than either of the others. I don't see what the practical value of memorializing a term that was and is SoP for decoding-using-the-dictionary, but was once more common than the modern alternatives. If we had a collocation space that was usable by casual users, that might make a nice home for such an expression. As it is a usage example is almost as good. DCDuring (talk) 14:57, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

  I don't disagree. As long as it's only half-fossilized, I don't see the point of an entry. There are all kinds of famous quotes from the King James Version of the Bible and from Shakespeare that aren't obvious to someone who hasn't studied either. Would we need an entry for "I am a man of unclean lips", for instance? A lot of people wouldn't be able to decipher it, but they should look that up in a bible commentary, not a dictionary. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:31, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Hello,

Is there a practical use to the word: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? Thanks, -internet person — This unsigned comment was added by 216.200.134.71 (talk) at 15:48, 2022 January 19.

• Yes. It is useful for reminding people of the film Mary Poppins. DCDuring (talk) 22:55, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

  And it rhymes with atrocious and precocious, already useful by itself, but its use moreover got Mary Poppins’ father reportedly invited out to tea with dukes and maharajas.^[31] I have not yet had occasion to test if that also works for me.  --Lambiam 00:11, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

• Dear internet person, I used it and got invited out to tea with a maharaja (just the one, though) but there were no dukes around. I'll keep you, and other internet persons posted about the social experiment. Br00pVain (talk) 21:59, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Red_link that isn't redux

Did anything come of the suggested fix from last July? I've just hit another case ({{m|mga|brecht|t=variegated, multicolored}}, in brechdan), and I remembered that I had raised it before, but not what the outcome had been. --ColinFine (talk) 13:56, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

You go to Special:Preferences, or Wiktionary:Preferences/V2 if you are browsing logged-out, and check the "OrangeLinks" option. Works for me, including on the page you mentioned. 70.175.192.217 03:11, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

German durchschneiden, literal senses

(Notifying Matthias Buchmeier, -sche, Atitarev, Jberkel, Mahagaja, Fay Freak): I've just created this entry. DWDS and Duden don't seem to make a distinction between the two literal senses but I personally feel as though it is clearly there. Compare how "Ich durchschneide das Papier." and "Ich schneide durch das Papier." sound; or even more clearly: "Ich durchschneide die Kehle." and "Ich schneide durch die Kehle.". I hope this isn't some kind of idiolect, input welcome! — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 17:18, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Is there a difference in meaning between Agamemnon durchschneidet dem Eber die Kehle and Agamemnon schneidet dem Eber die Kehle durch?  --Lambiam 13:49, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't think there's a difference. To me, "Ich schneide das Papier durch" sounds like the most natural/common variant. – Jberkel 20:09, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

I agree that "Ich durchschneide das Papier." is quite uncommon. I would also say that the separable and non-separable version have a slightly different meaning: "Ich schneide das Papier durch" means I cut the paper into two pieces while "Ich durchschneide das Papier." means more like I cut through the paper not necessarily separating it. Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 06:47, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Does anybody pronounce pizza as /ˈpɪt.sə/?

There is a British character in Mystery of the Druids who pronounces the noun this way. I am guessing that this pronunciation was standard in the neighbourhood where the actor, Roger A. Graves, grew up, but I can’t trace that and I can’t really specify his accent either. Unless the German dialogue supervisor or the Hamburg recording studio somehow influenced his pronunciation—and I can’t imagine why or how—I don’t know what’s going on here. —(((Romanophile))) ♞ (contributions) 19:07, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

No, I would say that it's someone who knows [a little] about Italian pronunciation trying to apply the length of the Italian consonant to the lax vowel one would expect in a closed syllable in English, as in wizard or pit- sort of a collision between /ˈpɪz.ə/ and /ˈpit.t͡sa/. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:46, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Did you mean to include the length marker after the vowel in your transcription /ˈpɪːt.sə/? The only thing I've seen /ɪː/ used for in English is the non-rhotic pronunciation of the vowel of "peer" or "pierce". What I hear in the linked video is simply /ˈpɪtsə/, with /ɪ/ as in "pit".--Urszag (talk) 19:56, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

No. —(((Romanophile))) ♞ (contributions) 20:12, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

I like narrow transcriptions and I would transcribe as /ˈpʰiːˀt͡sə/. As many learners of English don't bother with the non-optional aspiration of an initial p, I think it is important to show that (although I can understand a dictionary like Wiktionary not going into all the minor details). Another point is that pre-glottalisation is spreading in English. My grandfather didn't have it. Before the /ts/, most people in England have a fleeting glottal stop, although this is not normally remarked upon or even noticed by non-linguists. I am also not sure about marking a syllabic division between t and s here - I think it more accurate to transcribe the ts as a single conjoined sound. Some people have /ˈpʰiːʔsə/, where there is no /t/ at all, and instead of a fleeting glottal stop, a full glottal stop replaces the /t/. 2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:30CD:E132:4857:B87B 23:52, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

The accent sounds slightly off, like someone who’s probably English (but may just be Welsh) trying to put on a posher voice than their natural speaking one. It sounds like they’re trying to produce the famous ‘clipped vowels’ of old-fashioned RP and getting it wrong to me. The only other time I’ve heard something similar is when the Venga Boys (who are Dutch) sing about ‘Ibiza’[32], saying at 0:09 and throughout ‘ibitsa’ rather than the correct Spanish ‘eebeetha’ or ‘eebeesa’ (or even the widespread British alternatives ‘I-beetha’ and ‘I-beefa’) Overlordnat1 (talk) 02:32, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

In fact the pronunciation of ‘Ibiza’ that we’re discussing seems remarkably similar to the Dutch and German pronunciations of ‘pizza/Pizza’ given here on WT and also to the German pronunciations given for ‘Ibiza’ (we have no Dutch pronunciation currently listed). It seems odd that the ‘z’ is pronounced ‘ts’ here in English by the Vengaboys too (though I’ve heard ‘chorizo’ said as ‘choritso’ along the lines of ‘pizza’, so I wouldn’t be that surprised to hear some English people say ‘ibitsa’ like the Vengaboys do.). Overlordnat1 (talk) 10:19, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

So I wasn't the only person who always heard the lyrics Hey, we're going to eat pizza Br00pVain (talk) 14:34, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

I didn’t exactly hear that but I’ve had a false memory that ‘pizza’ appears, mispronounced to rhyme with a mispronounced ‘Ibiza’, somewhere in the song for many years - it was only through listening to it again today that I realised that the word ‘pizza’ doesn’t in fact appear. Overlordnat1 (talk) 14:57, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

The Vengaboys say [iˈbitsa], however, not *[iˈbɪtsa]. They use the short tense vowel corresponding to Dutch "ie", not the lax one corresponding to "i". How Dutch people normally say it, I don't know. In German it's almost always stressed on the first syllable, which has a long tense [iː]. The second "i" is then in an open unstressed syllable, which is a position where most speakers don't distinguish between [i] and [ɪ]. 178.7.217.119 20:12, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. I don’t think I’ve ever heard ‘pizza’ or ‘Ibiza’ said with ANY short form of the ‘i’ vowel for the penultimate syllable in spoken English though outside of the two isolated examples mentioned in this thread. Overlordnat1 (talk) 13:54, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, Pizza and Ibiza have a long vowel, but pizzicato doesn't. 2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:A179:DD66:273B:E529 08:09, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

That’s definitely true for all but the most pretentious speakers. By the way, does anyone think we should include ‘choritso’ as a pronunciation at our chorizo entry? Overlordnat1 (talk) 12:43, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

well (noun ?)

In phrases like I wish you well and Thank you for all the well-wishes, what PoS is 'well' (is looks like a noun, but is it) ? Leasnam (talk) 08:16, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Looks like an adjective to me. — SGconlaw (talk) 09:05, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Merriam–Webster thinks it is an adverb.^[33] This being a petrified idiom (one cannot say ^✽I wish you very well, ^✽I pray you well, ^✽I hope you well, ^✽I wish you happy or ^✽I wish you happily ), we need to find expressions from which this originated from before it petrified; they may help to assign a part of speech. If variations like I wish you much well and I wish you all the well in the world once were common (compare German ich wünsche dir alles gute der Welt ), it was originally a noun.  --Lambiam 14:18, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Other collocations: wish sb dead/ill/gone. There are some older usages of the form wish sb to be ADJ, though wish sb to be PastPart is much more common. I think wish sb well can easily be interpreted as an ellipsis of wish sb to be well, which would leave us well#Adjective, which is semantically right as well. DCDuring (talk) 15:02, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't understand the question. There is no such noun well in common use, nor in the entry (other than "hole in the ground"). On the other hand if it were adverbial it should be omissable '? I wish you', which is not entirely absurd seeing phrases like I greet thee. In effect, it could be from anumber of confluences and it would be ultimately funny if a cognate to valr was one of them, which is again not entirely absurd if death in battle was valued.

I wish you best of luck with that one. ApisAzuli (talk) 21:34, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

English thiefed

Inflected form without lemma entry, there's however no failed RFV/RFD on Talk:thief. Maybe thieve was meant? — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 17:08, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

We have an entry for the variant teef with a quote using the past tense teefed. We have it correctly labelled as MLE but it’s also (in fact originally and mainly) West Indian/Carribean. teefed could arguably be thought of as the same as thiefed with a variant pronunciation and spelling but I’m not so sure thiefed with its expected pronunciation and spelling is well-attested (it’s clearly non-standard). Overlordnat1 (talk) 18:19, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

In fact we don’t need to rely on that argument, there are many example of instances of thiefed being used in the speech of Africans, West Indians and African-Americans, or at least in stereotypical representations of their speech. There are even examples of thiefed being used in archaic/obsolete English and in representations of both Southern American English and the English of non-native speakers - probably enough instances to justify this word being listed as ‘non-native and dialect’ rather than just ‘non-native’ in fact. Interestingly, it is also a technical term used in the oil industry. See [34].Also interesting is that teefed appears to be a technical term related to sailing that we are missing [35][[[User:Overlordnat1|Overlordnat1]] (talk) 20:00, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Attestability of mb/MB

I don't have time to look into it much right now but I'm wondering if we should include the meaning of "my bad" for these. Should likely be labelled as internet slang and possibly for texting too if we do. I've seen a few people use it online in recent times. User: The Ice Mage ^{talk to meh} 17:41, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Er... this alleged phrase "my bad" is listed as "idiomatic", when it is decidedly non-idiomatic. It also states that this derives from a basketball player. It seems to be that it is actually a foreigner's-English version of "mea culpa" that has been around for longer than this basketball player. It is in the category of other foreigner's-English phrases like "no can do" and "long time, no see". I'm not saying that uses that are attested shouldn't be listed, but this is a deprecated usage.2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:35AE:CC96:D533:3F60 22:29, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Deprecated by who? This is very informal, but ubiquitous in modern US English- it's not perceived as foreign at all. "No can do" isn't as common, but it's not perceived as foreign, either. As for "long time, no see", most people who haven't looked up the etymology would have no clue that it's foreign. These are all used by native speakers as ordinary, everyday, informal, mildly jocular English. And like most set phrases, people use them without analyzing their grammar. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:49, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

"Deprecated by who?">> "deprecated by whom?" In case you haven't noticed, Chuck Entz, the word "proscribed" is liberally used in Wiktionary to flag non-recommended forms, although "proscription" seems too strong a word for linguistics, where no-one has the ability to proscribe anything. "My bad" is not correct English, because "bad" is an adjective. True, there are native speakers, many of them, who content themselves with such forms, but in my former occupation as a copy-editor, this phrase would have been ditched within seconds . You are pointing out that language operates "in the wild" without rules--or without the rules laid down by prescriptivists, although probably still retaining coherence in terms of having some underlying rules that are naturally adhered by nearly all native speakers. The maximum I can read into your reply is that, from a descriptivist point of view, the phrase exists in the mouths of native speakers--but I did not deny that and do not deny it. "Long time no see" is Bamboo English, 好久不见 in drag.2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:C59C:76F5:CB32:EE1D 04:18, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

If you admit that "the phrase exists in the mouths of native speakers" then what are you complaining about here? Equinox ◑ 04:24, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

An awful lot of things are found "in the mouths of native speakers". Why do you think Wiktionary labels so many phrases "proscribed"? Crack that nut!2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:C59C:76F5:CB32:EE1D 08:02, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, this has definitely existed online for a long time now. Kind of curious that we don't already have an entry. I'll try to attest it. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 23:51, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Very hard to cite; I found one for mb (Citations:mb) (in the same time I created three new senses for MB). mb is btw also used for maybe in Internet slang / texting. Perhaps someone else is better at searching Usenet than I am and can attest these two obviously correct definitions. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 04:48, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

MB is used in Chinese (the Western letters are used in the middle of a Chinese sentence) to mean a male prostitute or hustler. The letters stand for the English words "money boy".2A00:23C8:A7A1:9A00:C59C:76F5:CB32:EE1D 15:36, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I saw that at MB#Chinese. ApisAzuli (talk) 07:47, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Plural English proper nouns

I'm sure it's included in Template:en-proper noun, but it wasn't in the documentation. How do we show (should we show [yes, probably]) plural proper nouns like for Beatles, Three Lions and Indomitable Lions? Br00pVain (talk) 19:49, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

We have {{en-plural proper noun}}. J3133 (talk) 19:56, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Of course. Thanks Br00pVain (talk) 20:36, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

IMO, the only important thing for our normal users to know about English "plural-only" nouns (whether proper or common) is what number they have for purposes of verb agreement and replacement by a pronoun in English speech and writing. Trinidad and Tobago IS a country. Trinidad and Tobago looks plural in form to me. I don't know about Great Lakes without going to Google N-Grams. Whether something is plural in form is mostly self-evident. The exceptions are borrowings that are plural in form in the "lender" language. But, again, what matters is number agreement in English. Our "plural-only" inflection-line notation and definition line label don't really speak to the question of number agreement. I think it is at best worthless, but more likely misleading and damaging to our credibility. DCDuring (talk) 21:02, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Trinidad and Tobago is an island nation consisting of numerous islands; the main ones, Trinidad and Tobago, are separated by a wide channel.  --Lambiam 16:10, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

I can't see how saying Three Lions is plural is misleading. How about Poconos? It looks kinda Greek so people might think it is a singular word. Br00pVain (talk) 21:08, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

What is Three Lions? Whether it is a pub, a village, a title of a work, or an American sports team, it is singular in construction. If it is a UK sports team it is plural in construction. If you mean the royal arms of England, that might be plural in construction, but how is the term actually used? DCDuring (talk) 00:03, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Place-name SOPs

How do we handle cases like East African Rift? 70.175.192.217 21:08, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

See Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion#Place_names Br00pVain (talk) 21:55, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

East African Rift would be included as Geological landforms and regions: mountains, hills, deserts, tectonic plates, etc. Br00pVain (talk) 21:56, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

In addition, it is not just any old rift in East Africa, it is THE East African Rift System. That is, East African Rift is also a misnomer as what the experts mean by the term is a system of rifts not a single rift. Misnomers are definitely not SoP. DCDuring (talk) 23:54, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

core

I have now read the definitions multiple. I believe the definition of anatomical core, muscles which bridge abdomen and thorax, as is my definition I hereby suggest, for a sense of utmost frequency as of now, is curiously lacking in the entry. Oddly the OED has the sense only as draft additions from 2016.

Etymologically, this seems odd as this directly relates to the corpus meaning—is it a recent a sense, or a sense only with recently idiomatic “definition“, from 20th century fitness affluency? (As of the 1940s muscular practice was uncouth and understudied. The Golden Age of Bodybuilding came later, a bit like classical Greek art gave a new understanding after the inexact usage of archaic Greek art.)

Etymologically, our sense “a miner’s underground shift” which we put at chore is as well put to the corps one “a body of individuals; an assemblage”, because OED knows it to mean a company of miners and not just a shift, and we deffo have to add the labels “Cornwall” and probably “dated” or “archaic” to both senses, while OED there also knows a particular sense of team or company in curling. Fay Freak (talk) 23:12, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

I’m afraid that I’m not sure what you mean, as I’m not subscribed to the OED and can’t follow your link. Are you saying that the OED defines core (rather than corps or chore) as a body of miners or curlers? If so then perhaps you could add the relevant quotations from there to our existing archaic sense of core (an alternative form of corps), or add new senses if the usages in the OED aren’t archaic? I agree that it does seem odd that we say that core (as in a miner’s shift) comes from chore rather than corps, surely the only way we can know that to be true is if we can find examples of chore being itself used to mean a miner’s shift? Overlordnat1 (talk) 12:39, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

 @Overlordnat1: I am saying two things: Firstly I pointed out the lack of the anatomical sense, as in exercises for your core, and raised the question about the recency of this sense. Secondly while looking at the entry to check for gaps, and quite unrelated, I additionally raised attention to the disagreement of our treatment of that peripheral word with that of OED. Fay Freak (talk) 17:37, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: In which case I agree that we should probably include a group of miners and a group of curlers to our definitions at core. The sense of abdominal core perhaps could and should be included too but arguably that comes under sense 2 the heart or inner part of a physical thing (though it’s not ideal to include heart in a definition for a word describing the centre of the body which isn’t necessarily actually referring to the blood-pumping organ, so perhaps it might be better if we did add a new sense like you suggest.). Overlordnat1 (talk) 20:08, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

@Overlordnat1 it may be a subsense, but it's definitely separate: for one thing, it's used by a particular community of people- bodybuilders and people who are into exercise- and when used among those people without qualifiers, it's understood to have a very specific technical sense- a certain set of abdominal muscles.Chuck Entz (talk) 05:13, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

That’s true, I was slightly leaning towards treating that sense as separate, rather than dealing with it using a quotation or usex. Overlordnat1 (talk) 11:20, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Too specific to be covered by one of the old glosses. It has been better to structure the whole noun section by a rational order like field so all are derivative from an idea, which I have just done.

The mining issue I leave to those Anglicists. Fay Freak (talk) 20:49, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Looks good now. Overlordnat1 (talk) 11:20, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Norwegian (Bokmål) word brille: glass or glasses?

In German, Brille means a pair of glasses (a frame bearing two lenses), so you use Brille with the singular form if you are referring to a pair of glasses.

In Norwegian (Bokmål), however, if I understand correctly, "brille" seems to mean one lense only, so a pair of glasses would be "briller" in the plural form, similar to English.

If this is the case, then the current definition on the page brille should change. Betty (talk) 04:33, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

In this optician's ad the singular form clearly refers each time to a pair of glasses. Interestingly, here the claim is made that opticians tend to use the singular while everyone else uses the plural. A lens appears to be referred to as brilleglass, or for short just glass.  --Lambiam 16:01, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

I'd say it's more complicated in German, because compounds are underspecified. A Brillengestell cannot be constructed from the singular cases. ApisAzuli (talk) 20:11, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

range (verb)

What sense best fits this quote? "In a Category 1 hurricane, winds range from 74 to 95 mph." I'm not really satisfied by the intransitive senses. Ultimateria (talk) 19:56, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

I would say: "Of a variable, to be able to take any of the values in a specified range." But the use of "variable" and the maths/computing glosses seem to be overspecific. Equinox ◑ 02:11, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

As does the bit “followed by over ”.  --Lambiam 11:24, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Oh, no wonder I kept missing it. I've removed all the labels except intransitive. Ultimateria (talk) 05:21, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

@Ultimateria: erm, why have you done that? — SGconlaw (talk) 19:29, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Because the hurricane example shows the labels were wrong...? I suppose if, in maths and computing, range must be followed by "over", then we might be dealing with two senses (the general sense exemplified by the hurricane usex above, and a maths subsense), but this doesn't seem(?) to be the case, since I can find e.g. "The transform variable x ranges from minus infinity to plus infinity." - -sche (discuss) 00:04, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

slam, slammed

Two issues:

1. We list the card-game verb under two etymology sections. Which one is right?
2. We don't seem to cover the sense used in these cites, being "slammed" (over-busied / over-occupied). Perhaps those could be just an adjective slammed, but other tenses sometimes occur, e.g. "slamming someone with work".

- -sche (discuss) 02:05, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Then put it at the verb, but with North America label according to the cites and because I haven’t found this sense on UK websites when searching, and there you can be “busy getting slammed”, and this means, as I now have to remark, a well-known concept we have failed to mention under the verb—why? Fay Freak (talk) 14:40, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

I’ve had difficulty finding cites on GoogleBooks proving that slam means have sex with due to the wide variety of other uses of the word but I did discover a few instances of slamkin and slammerkin, obsolete terms meaning slut, it seems likely that they derived from this meaning of slam, if so then slam has been used to mean have sex with in British English, at least in some circles, for over a century. Overlordnat1 (talk) 19:26, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the attempt. I was kind of sure that it it is a well-known term amongst the uncouth people of the British Isles. I have now tried to find it on lyrics sites fast but did not succeed fast, but possible found another meaning. What does Tremz mean here: »They want me nicked, they want me slammed / Fuckin' snitch had me on remand«? Even if it is a figurative usage of our included senses then it has an implied result not covered by them, some further detail that we need to add. Generalized from “to defeat by cards” to “to defeat in general”, recurring to the card-game verb? Fay Freak (talk) 19:53, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

It almost certainly means that the snitch wants him to be banged up in the slammer. In other words it means ‘imprisoned’ rather than ‘defeated’, though I suppose it could be argued that it means ‘defeated’ - it seems to be most closely related to sense 1 of slam to me but it’s clearly a different sense with a different meaning (that we’re missing - much like we’re missing a sense meaning ‘defeat’ in fact). Overlordnat1 (talk) 20:27, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

I would've guessed "beaten up" or "killed", in the same vein as hit. "Beat, hit forcefully (head-slam, slam into the ground, etc)" is how these books about gangstas seem to use it (in Keith's case I checked other uses of the word throughout the work moreso than just that one quote), though I suppose that's a literal sense and doesn't rule out that it also has a more idiomatic sense in other cases. This one seems to escalate to meaning "kill", coordinate with take out: “you would've taken out the Teacher?” Gil nodded [...] “I would've slammed that bitch!”. I'd take the reference to be to slamming Tremz to the ground or slamming fists, bullets, etc into him (google books:"slamming bullets", etc), ultimately going back (like also the work sense) to an image of hitting someone with something. Urban Dictionary has "To beat someone down. (Usually involved in which the victim gets beat senseless.) Bro 1: Bro! did you see Porter get slammed in that bar fight?!" They also have the work sense, with their typical disregard for matching the POS and tense of a definition to its definiendum ("Having an insane amount of work dumped on you that leaves ya winded and overwhelmed."), and a few other senses I think I've heard, including slammed defined as "1. To have your car very low to the ground. Tucking tires, and minimal clearance between the ground and frame are a must. Lips, body kits, etc, don't count. 2. To be very drunk. 3. To get fucked very hard.", and a noun and verb slam meaning "shit, dump". - -sche (discuss) 20:58, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

You’re probably right actually, though I did find a few mentions of slam as a noun meaning prison on Urban Dicktionary. ‘Portuguese Codfish Slam Dunk Chocolate Soup’ is one of the most funny and insane definitions I’ve heard in a long time, I’m not even sure what ‘slam’ refers to in that entry, ‘to get fucked very hard’ or ‘to shit/dump’. Overlordnat1 (talk) 03:33, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Something else has occurred to me, alongside our definitions at slam and grand slam of ‘(sports) The winning of all available, major or specified events in a given year or sports season.’ we should surely have ‘a major or specified event in a given year or sports season’ as a related but separate definition. For example ‘Grand slam final’ [36] unsurprisingly gets hits referring to the finals of Wimbledon and the U.S/Aus./French opens. Overlordnat1 (talk) 10:40, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

As I suspected there are other senses meaning ‘to defeat’ other than ‘defeat in a game of cards’ (perhaps especially football/soccer?) that I found via Google searches for slammed them 5-0,slammed them 6-0 and slammed them 7-0, though the examples are rare and not durably attested: [37] and [38] and [39]. Overlordnat1 (talk) 11:31, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

2. Has to be akin lähmen, i.e. "perplexed", cp. schlaff, limb. The "literal" sense is far away from literacy though, it amounts to guesswork, because if all you have is a hammer ... ApisAzuli (talk) 05:40, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

This would be in line with slam § 3, "a shambling fellow", also she's a real stunner. ApisAzuli (talk) 06:06, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

fiduciary

There is a usage note on this word which implies that using it in the sense of "fiduciary point" is an error for "fiducial point". There is a similar note at fiducial. This ngram shows that fiducial point is certainly much more common, but gbook results for "fiduciary points still has a lot of results, mostly technical works. So on what basis is this declared to be an error? SpinningSpark 18:18, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Because of the distinction between -ārius and -āris, -ālis. “fiduciary” is just “relating to trust(s)”, “fiducial”, as its definition says, is a thing having trust as an essential part, such that it is based on trust or has it as a fixed reference. Fay Freak (talk) 18:29, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Ok, but English isn't Latin. If usage is actually showing something different, should we not include that as a sense at fiduciary. SpinningSpark 19:08, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

No, English is Latin, partially, it continues its distinctions. This argument I previsioned and it is very lame. If you learn English grammar you have to learn parts of Latin grammar; if English grammars and teachers don’t explain Latin parts though they be parts of English as well go complain to the authors of the English grammars and the teachers (there are multiple ways to introduce to languages differing by whether previous knowledge of certain languages is supposed). You asked for the reason and my interpretation of it is that the reason is not a peculiar development of English but it still mirrors Latin. Usage does not show something different, it exposes a mere application of the grammar rules. In general, meaning follows derivation types, otherwise you run into fallacy of induction if you try to construct meanings from mere usage—usage may gainsay derivation types, but the empirical evidence from usage must be regularly occurring and exclusive enough to be indicative of a breakthrough of the grammar rule. Man complained why I defined عَصَّارَة (ʕaṣṣāra) in an “etymological fashion”, as it would be “just a juicer”, but the etymological form as a tool noun holds true as it is also a rug wringer, it contains the transfix for tools applied onto the verb عَصَرَ (ʕaṣara, “to press (out)”), that simple. In reality usage, in its mass, is only understood by being schematized into grammar. By not referring to Latin you make English more complicated than it is, not me. Fay Freak (talk) 19:46, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

If it's attested often enough that we're confident it's not just a rare misspelling/thinko, especially if works use it repeatedly, then we should have some kind of definition-line coverage of it, labelled "nonstandard" or (if we can find sources for this) "proscribed" or something. Compare, say, egoist or Java. - -sche (discuss) 21:03, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

It can certainly be attested. I've now found several hundred sources, many of which use it repeatedly. SpinningSpark 14:21, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Are those recent by any means? Seeing Javascript called Java is already outdated – the quotations are over 20 years old, which is ancient in the programming world. ApisAzuli (talk) 13:36, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

I put some cites on the citation page stretching from 1948 to 2021 with the majority in the 2000s and 2010s. This word first came up with me concerning the fiduciary points of a temperature scale. The most common usages seem to be anatomical fiduciary points used in medicine and fiduciary markers (as used on crash test dummies for instance). None of those have anything to do with the rapidly changing world of computing so I don't see how Java is very relevant here. SpinningSpark 14:03, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

is savssat a real word?

One can find scattered mentions of savssat, such as this paper, saying that it's a Greenlandic term for whales trapped in a hole in sea ice. But the consonant cluster vss is not permissible in any known present-day Greenlandic language. We do have an entry for šávššat, the plural of šákša, a fish found in arctic Norway. Is it possible the paper confused this with that? Basically I see several possibilities:

1. Savssat is a fish found in arctic Norway, and the author of the 1918 paper did not have the resources necessary to detect and correct his mistake.
2. Savssat is a mistyped form of a valid Greenlandic word, and it is mere happenstance that a similarly spelled word exists in the Sámi language.
3. Savssat is a real Greenlandic word, but the spelling of the language has changed in the past hundred years.
4. Savssat is a real Greenlandic word, even today, and our own resources are inadequate for not knowing that the consonant cluster /vss/ exists.

Whatever the case may be, it seems it would be useful for us to have a term for the event of whales being trapped by sea ice. If that term is not savssat, perhaps we can track down what it is.

Thoughts?

—Soap— 21:37, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

The pronunciation given in the paper, s’set, does not fit the expected pronunciation of the Sami word. It is also hard to imagine that someone would confuse narwhals with capelins. Here are three uses/mentions that are unambigously related to Greenland, with two referencing Disko Bay: [40], [41], [42].  --Lambiam 17:27, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Okay thank you. I found this dictionary, which reveals that savssat is an archaic spelling of the modern Greenlandic word sassat, with the precise meaning that scientific papers attribute to it. To be honest, it's my fault for not finding that ahead of time, because I'm pretty sure I've looked at that very same dictionary before, but it didn't occur to me to search the text for whatever reason ... I just looked in alphabetical order and didn't find it because it's not the modern spelling.

That said, I still doubt that the pronunciation of the word is anything that we could reasonably represent as /s'set/. I was so skeptical of this that it made me doubt the author's claim about the word itself and that's why I came up with the idea that it was a misplaced word for fish. Anyway, I plan to make an entry for the word and to assume that it follows the normal pronunciation rules of the Greenlandic language. I believe that the dictionary is referring to West Greenlandic, which is the main dialect of the language. Although I want to hold off on creating the page just for now, to see if I can piece out an etymology. —Soap— 00:09, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

lærbrynje

"a coat of armour made of leather, particularly chain mail". What does this mean? Chain mail is not normally made of leather, but metal rings. Is this a leather coat covered with chain mail? - -sche (discuss) 23:54, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

@Ofkosinn, Donnanz - -sche (discuss) 03:44, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Bring in @Supevan too, the entry's creator. DonnanZ (talk) 09:34, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Egyptian šspw and šzp (etymology 2)

I'll leave this to somebody else to deal with, but I think these are just two spellings of the same word. 73.133.224.40 05:04, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

rhubarb

I bring this to TR because I have read the archived rfv discussion, and find it quite impossible that "rhubarb = nonsense" as either a noun or an interjection has been discarded. I was prompted to check this entry after reading how PM Johnson was quoted as saying that recent allegations were "utter rhubarb". I understand what he said because it is far from being the first time I have heard the word "rhubarb" to men "nonsense". I request that this definition be restored, given that it is super easy to find thousands of quote examples, other the those of Mr. Johnson PM. -- ALGRIF talk 14:14, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

If the "nonsense" sense was removed, restore it. This sense appears in Lexico, where it's regarded as British. Johnson, of course, is prone to talk rhubarb himself. DonnanZ (talk) 10:34, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

OK. Done with quote. I only ask because of the archived rfd. Thanks for input. -- ALGRIF talk 11:18, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

[Edit conflict.] If that sense was in the entry, it must have been removed a long time ago. It wasn’t in the entry when I edited it for WOTD back in 2017. Anyway, certainly add it to the entry if it is verifiable by three independent durably archived quotations. — SGconlaw (talk) 11:22, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

@Algrif: please check the quotation you added. The date looks wrong (it is dated “1 day ago” and not 2002) and you’ve misspelled “Independent”. I can’t see the full article as it requires an account. — SGconlaw (talk) 11:28, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

2002 is definitely wrong on the quote, since Boris Johnson wasn't even Mayor of London back then. As for the etymology: I wouldn't call "rubbish" an oath, but this has all the hallmarks of a minced oath: the substitution of an undesired word with a totally unrelated one that happens to start out sounding similar. The vowel is a bit off, but the consonants are identical. Chuck Entz (talk) 12:17, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

I’ve looked at the link to the Independent and reformatted the quote slightly (date, spelling, added an extra use of the word rhubarb in the article to it). Where does it say that rubbish and rhubarb are oaths, minced or otherwise, and what are they meant to sound like? Overlordnat1 (talk) 13:02, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

@Overlordnat1 It doesn't. That was me making an unrelated aside about the entry saying this is derived from the rhubarb rhubarb sense. Chuck Entz (talk) 18:04, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Maybe Independent requires account in your country. An "always a problem" problem nowadays. Sorry about the date typo, but I'm no longer as sharp as I used to be. Do whatever you guys think appropriate. However, B.J. would not use this expression if he did not think it would be understood by most people in UK. -- ALGRIF talk 14:41, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

It’s definitely a saying that’s familiar to me pre-Boris, though I haven’t heard it often. It can be found here [43],[44] and oddly enough used by Jonathan Aitken here [45]. Overlordnat1 (talk) 15:07, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

I’ve now added all the GoogleBook hits that as found above to the article. Overlordnat1 (talk) 09:46, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

humiliate

The definition is a bit old-fashioned, Webstery, if anyone fancies modernizing it Notusbutthem (talk) 11:25, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Hyphenate children

What's the hyphenation of “children” in English? I find contradictory information. Some online sources say it's “chil-dren”, while our article currently says “child-ren”, introduced by this edit from 2006. Normally I would trust my Longman dictionary, but it doesn't have “children” as a headword, lists it only in the entry for “child”, and so does not give the hyphenation. – b_jonas 12:37, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

I would say chil'dren. Children has a different pronunciation of the first syllable than child does. DonnanZ (talk) 13:51, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

I'd say chil-dren, too. Vininn126 (talk) 13:54, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't think you mean "the hyphenation of children", as this word has no hyphen in it. You mean the division into syllables for the purpose of hyphenation where a word has to be split in word processing. 2A00:23C8:A7A3:4801:2979:99AF:118:FDC8 14:32, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Merriam-Webster, Cambridge and other dictionaries break the pronunciation up into syllables as chil-dren, agreeing with what others said about the pronunciation above, but AFAICT they don't indicate where the written word would be hyphenated when split across lines in writing, which does not always match where spoken syllable breaks are. In practice, both chil-dren and child-ren can be found; this Bible (in e.g. Nehemiah and elsewhere) often splits the word across a line break as child-ren, although it does also split it chil-dren in 1 Chronicles and some other places, so we should probably list both. (BTW, searching for this led me to discover that some Christian texts use c-ren as an abbreviation of children.) - -sche (discuss) 20:44, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the replies. So probably neither chil-dren nor child-ren are mistakes. – b_jonas 08:54, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

@-sche: My Longman dictionary indicates that the hyphenation dots in a headword give both the division of pronounced syllables and the hyphenation at the end of a line. “The syllable dots have one further use. They show where a word can be broken up (hyphenated) if you do not have enough room at the end of a line. […] It is not considered correct to separate only one letter from the beginning or end of a word. […] The possible end-of-line divisions we show are not the only acceptable ones. You will often find words broken up differently. But it is not practical, in the limited space we have, to show all the possibilities. If you follow the ones we show, you will not go wrong.” – b_jonas 09:06, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

This seems to be an ancient problem as OE shows two inflection paradigms, one without r. ApisAzuli (talk) 14:10, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

are these letters 𐬀𐬯𐬞𐬀 for aspa or is there a error from browsers not loading in letters

I have been pretty confused and don't have the knowledge to verify that the script is meant to look that way — This unsigned comment was added by 102.182.112.144 (talk) at 18:10, 29 January 2022 (UTC).

Thatever these characters are supposed to be, my browser can't read them. DonnanZ (talk) 18:25, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

It's impossible to answer your question completely because everyone sees what their system is configured to see. I see letters, because I installed Google's Noto Sans Avestan font. You may see tofu if you don't have a font installed. A separate issue is that written Avestan has no gaps between letters, but the version I see on my system doesn't connect the individual letters into an unbroken line of text, like one would see for Arabic-script languages, for instance. The Wikipedia article on the Avestan alphabet has more information. Chuck Entz (talk) 18:55, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

An argument meaning a collision

"D5131 has received extensive cab damage, having been in an argument with Class 37 D6855 at Inverness in August 1971 -"

No sense of argument we have seems to cover what is an accident involving a collision, which in this case led to the loco being scrapped. I think I have encountered this sense before - what definition is most suitable? DonnanZ (talk) 18:19, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

I vaguely recall hearing "argument" as a euphemism for a train crash myself, although googling "argument" + "train crash", "wreck", "accident" and other likely phrases sadly finds me no confirmation of that, and very few uses (like this), which could just be seen as a more general figurative sense along the lines of "any dispute or altercation" (extended from our current definition of "a verbal dispute"). (I can find at least one reference to a man having an google books:"altercation with a train" i.e. it slamming into him, and a vehicle having an google books:"unsuccessful altercation with a locomotive", so there's precedent for figuratively referring to a crash as a kind of altercation.) That (non-train-specific) sense of argument is easier to attest, e.g. from euphemistic references to "physical arguments" like this. - -sche (discuss) 03:02, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Ah, citations. I added the quote there. Cheers! DonnanZ (talk) 10:09, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

I think it's humorous. I remember a kid at school explaining an injury by saying he'd "had an argument with the pavement" or similar (fell off his bike?). Equinox ◑ 03:04, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

It could be a way of passing off something that obviously hurt light-heartedly. DonnanZ (talk) 10:09, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

At what point does a metaphor become a figure of speech, or a new definition? (i feel like what i just wrote comes off as sarcastic, but actually i'm genuinely curious.) --96.244.220.178 10:16, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

• His own aircraft had an argument with the ground
• I feel like I had an argument with a wall and lost
• shortly after Christmas, Hawking "had an argument with a wall," and not unexpectedly, the wall won
• Stansfield had had an argument with a bus and broken his leg in Italy.

SpinningSpark 10:44, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

I added a sense, please revise it as needed. - -sche (discuss) 22:30, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Great. I guess citations can be transferred. DonnanZ (talk) 23:44, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

hyphenate#Adjective

The heading "Hyphenate children" raised the question as to whether hyphenate is used as an adjective. hyphenate#Noun has two senses, so with those senses it can be used attributively. But hyphenate also has the meaning "hyphenated" as in a hyphenate name and seems to have meanings in other collocations for which the noun definitions we have are not appropriate.

The Australian model (Elle Macpherson) and multi-hyphenate married real estate developer Jeffrey Soffer in Fiji. I am not sure what multi-hyphenate (noun?, adjective?) means ("having many jobs or roles"? "having a multi-ethnic genetic and.or cultural background"?), but it comes up in celebrity marriage announcements.

Also see Citations:hyphenate, which has three cites that show signs that hyphenate is treated as a true adjective, though the three cites seem to span at least two definitions. DCDuring (talk) 00:00, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

I think the Macpherson example refers to having multiple talents/job descriptions ("model, businesswoman, television host, and actress"). I can't find anything about her ethnicity other than just Scottish (and she is from Australia, so that's pretty typical), so I'm guessing it is not that. 70.172.194.25 00:10, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Ah. I misconstrued it (ignoring the fact that my construction had no verb) as modifying developer or Jeffrey Soffer, though possibly with the same meaning. DCDuring (talk) 00:15, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Other sources also refer to her as "multi-hyphenate" ([46] [47] [48]), so I do think it was intended to refer to her. 70.172.194.25 00:20, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

well doing

-ig#German says forms adjectives from verbs, well doing

i suspect those last two words don't belong there. If they do, could someone clarify what they mean? Thanks. --96.244.220.178 10:00, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

I suppose the intention was that if V is the verb stem, then V + -ig means: “doing the action of V ”, typically habitually/regularly. For example, abhäng +‎ -en = “to depend”; abhäng +‎ -ig = “dependent”.  --Lambiam 12:30, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Couldn't the semantic content of -ig#German for each of the three uses shown be illustrated with examples under each non-gloss definition? The derived terms list of 866 items doesn't differentiate by def. Can't we find English suffixes that are roughly equivalent, eg -ish? DCDuring (talk) 12:52, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Suppose "well doing" could also mean it's productive, something we don't usually add. ApisAzuli (talk) 14:25, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

... and would belong in a label, if anyplace. DCDuring (talk) 15:46, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

dogter should be the word I want

...for perrija in Spanish. Does English have a word for this? A dog you get as a pet that you love like it was your own child Notusbutthem (talk) 18:02, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

dogter is clever, you should start using it and in a few years we can cite this in the etymology. I think furbaby may be what you're looking for? JeffDoozan (talk) 20:33, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

It's been around for a while, added to the requested words list in 2020 and with some dog-ters at Citations:dogter. The uses I have seen spelled dogter have been non-durable. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 20:41, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Bergtürken

Bergtürken needs attention from a German-speaking admin related to politics, formatting, and a sense that failed RFV.Vox Sciurorum (talk) 12:51, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Should be moved to "Bergtürke". It's not a plurale tantum. If the use for "Albanian" cannot be sourced anywhere outside that one Spiegel article, that should all go. The stuff about "Turkalbaner" and the Greek source appear entirely irrelevant in any case. Everything else should probably be handled at Dağ Türkleri, which also needs attention. 84.57.154.13 21:15, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I cleaned up Dağ Türkleri but it needs attention from a Turk who understands the connotations and history. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 23:54, 31 January 2022 (UTC)