Wiktionary:Tea room/2023/March

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← February 2023 · March 2023 · April 2023 → · (current)

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Is Erse offensive?

I’d like to check if Erse is “sometimes offensive” as the entry claims. The word has been nominated for Saint Patrick’s Day this month (@Donnanz), but I don’t think it would be appropriate for this date if it is indeed offensive. — Sgconlaw (talk) 19:26, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

@Sgconlaw: Not that I'm aware of, the quote I added gave no hint of that, and Collins and Oxford don't mention that it's offensive. @Mahagaja added the "offensive" labels in 2021, hopefully he can explain why. DonnanZ (talk) 19:49, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Yup, I looked at the OED (and this entry was updated in June 2018) and it didn't mark the word in this way. — Sgconlaw (talk) 20:22, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

There are definitely people who find it offensive, especially in Scotland, where some people find it offensive to refer to Gaelic as "Erse" because it literally means "Irish". The fact that it's homophonous with the Scots word for "arse" definitely doesn't help. And, as with Negro, its sheer old-fashionedness itself can make it offensive. A few examples of people calling Erse derogatory can be found here, here and here. —Mahāgaja · talk 20:49, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

In Scotland, not Ireland? The term seems to be out of date anyway, replaced by Gaelic. DonnanZ (talk) 21:20, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: OK, thanks. In that case, @Donnanz, I don't think we should feature it on Saint Patrick's Day. It might not be a good idea to feature it at all. — Sgconlaw (talk) 21:27, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

The only time I've come across it is several times in cryptic crosswords. From memory, noone on the 'Fifteen squared' or 'Times for the Times' blogs ever complained and if it was highly offensive then the Times and Guardian editors probably wouldn't allow it. I suppose if we take an extremely cautious approach then we might not want to feature it though. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 21:29, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

@Overlordnat1: ha ha, that's where I've encountered the word too—on the NYT Crossword. — Sgconlaw (talk) 21:39, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

@Sgconlaw: I just remembered it also appears in the humorous song Plastic Paddy by the folk singer Eric Bogle, so I've added that to Erse. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 01:36, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

@Sgconlaw: OK, not on St Paddy's Day. The nomination was made in all innocence, maybe a less controversial date can be found (not St Andrew's Day!). DonnanZ (talk) 21:44, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

@Sgconlaw: I have moved it back to the nomination date: 7 July 2021. DonnanZ (talk) 22:01, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

@Donnanz: OK, thanks. Feel free to pick another term (especially one already nominated) for Saint Patrick’s Day. — Sgconlaw (talk) 22:04, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

rubric

I fail to see why, when a poorly-educated politician with less command of the English language than a street rapper employs a word incorrectly, it should be "enshrined" as a definition in one of the better dictionaries available on the web. GaryD144 (talk) 20:20, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, these common gutter scum should be exterminated and their inferior speech replaced by words approved by GaryD144. Equinox ◑ 20:23, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

What is this in reference to...? —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:33, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

draft and draught

Something that has been semi-discussed before at Talk:draught. Should we have a full set of definitions for draught? The reason I ask is when adding adding a quotation to draught I felt compelled to add a note Sense 7 of draft. DonnanZ (talk) 12:27, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

@Donnanz I don't speak British English, but if "draught" is equivalent to "draft" only in some of its senses, we should definitely list those senses somehow or other (either by enumerating them or by specifying the ones that don't match, if most of them match). If all senses of "draft" can be spelled "draught" then {{alt form}} is good enough IMO. Benwing2 (talk) 22:38, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2: It's a bit complex, I'm afraid. First of all, draught#Adjective was missing, so I added it.

Senses 1-7 of draft#Noun are also used in draught#Noun, senses 8-10 apply in both American and British English, senses 11-13 may all be American only, I'm unsure about 12, sense 11 is conscription in British English. Senses 14, 16-18 apply to both spellings, and I'm unsure about senses 15 and 19. What do you think? DonnanZ (talk) 11:18, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

@Donnanz Hmm, I see. My instinct is to tag all the senses of draft that are American-only or British-only as such, and also add something like (also (UK) draught) at the end of all senses that can be spelled draught in Britain. And also maybe add a note to the first sense of draught to see draft for additional details. That way, we avoid duplicating the definitions and associated quotations. Maybe we also need a Usage Note at the end of draft clarifying that it can also be spelled draught in Britain in some senses, as indicated. (This is already mentioned at the top under Alternative Forms but might be missed, not sure.) BTW I am guessing sense #12 is supposed to be American by analogy with the military draft, but I've never encountered this; maybe it should be challenged at RFVE. I'm not familiar with senses #15 or #19 either, but that could be because #15 is a technical term specific to sand casting, and guessing from the quotations, #19 is (a) British, (b) a technical usage, and (c) maybe archaic (the quotes from 1982 on all seem to be referencing occurrences in the 19th century). Benwing2 (talk) 23:01, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Yes, I'm looking at the possibility of usage notes for the nouns. I have already added one to draught#Verb, in that case draught is uncommon as a verb in British English. If we're not going to add more definitions to draught#Noun, I need to identify which sense of draft#Noun the quotations belong to. Anyway, it's bedtime, and it can wait till tomorrow. DonnanZ (talk) 23:57, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

@Donnanz For sense #12 see Draft (politics). Benwing2 (talk) 00:08, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Thanks for finding that. I resorted to adding both labels and a usage note for draft#Noun; the labels may look rather excessive, but I thought it was the clearest way of doing it. As for the quotes in draught#Noun, I added senses to them; it was difficult to do this precisely, so some are approximate with more than one sense added. DonnanZ (talk) 12:33, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

@Donnanz Sense #3 of draught#Noun ('an ale') seems a bit odd as it doesn't seem very different to sense #6 of draft#Noun ('beer drawn from a cast or keg') and so is covered by the generic sense #1 of draught#Noun, where a citation taken from The Moon and Sixpence is given as an example of such usage. Perhaps Australians use draught to refer even to bottles and cans of ale though? --Overlordnat1 (talk) 09:11, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

@Overlordnat1: What I remember about Aussie beer is that it's certainly on draught and chilled, and I couldn't drink it quickly. I think it was delivered in kegs from the brewery, so they must chill the kegs in the cellar. As to the technicalities, "a type of beer brewed using top-fermenting yeast", does that make it different from British draught? I don't know. DonnanZ (talk) 09:53, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

@Donnanz: Apparently all beers brewed using top-fermenting yeast are ales but most ales are bottom-fermented now since the shape of the brewing vats has changed. Ales still use 'top-fermenting yeast' though, as it's a different species that likes warmer temperatures and takes less time to ferment the mash, thus producing a different final product than bottom-fermenting yeast do (ie. lager) (at least according to Wikipedia's Brewing article). I also doubt that Somerset Maugham was writing about lager when he used the word 'draught' as that basically didn't exist in Britain before the 1960s. I suppose the fact that both lager and ale can be served either on draught/tap or in a can/bottle might complicate things but Somerset Maugham seems to be using a distinctly archaic expression that probably didn't survive into 60s Britain and get applied to lager in any case. I suspect the two terms have the same meaning and could be merged but if the usage is still current in Australia we could cover that with a label or usage note. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 13:02, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

@Overlordnat1: I rarely drink from one year end to the next nowadays, my Australian experiences were in 1970-71 when I lived in Sydney. I was introduced to Guinness (in bottles) at a Guinness and oyster evening after work once, but I have no idea about draught ale there. Experience in England - in a bar or pub if asking for ale (I was partial to IPA), I was presented with a bottle of the stuff. I think you can buy lager (and Guinness) out of a tap though. They could serve draught ale (unchilled?) in Australia, or just call it draught, but I just don't know, and I can't recommend a suitable label. DonnanZ (talk) 14:28, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Re alcohol, which sense/definition covers someone saying they have a particular drink on draft/draught, or they have draft/draught [liquid]? I'm guessing it's intended to be "(US spelling) Beer drawn from a cask or keg rather than a bottle or can."? It may be most common to talk about having beers on draft/draught, and hence to talk about draft/draught beers, but it needs to be worded broadly enough to cover the fact that you can serve anything that way: even though it apparently tastes bad(?), nothing about the word itself stops people from having google books:"wine on draft", google books:"wine on draught", and hence draught rather than bottled wine; you can have google books:"cider on draught", google books:"cider on draft", and hence draught cider / draft cider; you can talk about having google books:"milk on draught", google books:"milk on draft"; I see a few hits for google books:"soda on draught", one for google books:"soda on draft", likewise a few for "cola on draft/draught". - -sche (discuss) 20:17, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Should the phrases on draft, on draught have their own entries, like on tap? Like on tap, on draft seems to have acquired an idiomatic sense of being readily available. - -sche (discuss) 20:36, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

@-sche: Oh yes, I am in favour of creating them. My Oxford Dictionary of English lists on draught: "(of beer or cider) ready to be drawn from a barrel or tank; not bottled or canned". A barrel can also be a keg or cask, of course. DonnanZ (talk) 22:22, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Northern Kurdish -istan and the Proto-Indo-European root *steh₂-

Hi, everybody
Should Northern Kurdish entries suffixed with -istan include (via the {{root}} template) a reference to the PIE root *steh₂- from which the suffix is derived, or is this a case akin to Italian -mente, wherein there's no need to reference the PIE root *men- of Latin mēns because of grammaticalization?
Does anyone have any input on this? — GianWiki (talk) 17:14, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

@GianWiki My instinct is not to mention the *steh₂- root, but I only slightly lean this way; I think either way is reasonable. Benwing2 (talk) 23:03, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

鄲 Handuo Xuebu

Was this one edit IP's diff right? It changed the definition, removed derived terms, and limited the pronunciation. Cihai 6th ed doesn't have a second pronunciation for 鄲 and only lists Dancheng. ctext.org does mention duo: [1]. Dancheng is in close proximity to Guoyang. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 18:06, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

ছাপান্ন and ছাপ্পান্ন

Are both of them correct? The one listed in Module:number list/data/bn does not link to any other wiktionaries. --TongcyDai (talk) 19:06, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Also, ঊনআশি and উনআশি, আটাশি and অষ্টাশি. --TongcyDai (talk) 20:30, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Well, this Bengali dictionary says ছাপান্ন (chapanno) is a variant of ছাপ্পান্ন (chappanno). The latter one seems to be more common, but I can find plenty of usage of both online, including when restricting search results to the .BD top-level domain. (I cannot personally vouch for the online usage being standard Bengali as I couldn’t tell it apart from Assamese, etc., but it seems likely.) 70.172.194.25 22:18, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Notable

why doesn't"Notable" have an "e" after the "a"? Asking for my son who has a spelling bee coming up. Miss Maisie123 (talk) 20:22, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

@Miss Maisie123: Do you mean before the "a"? The actual reason is the history of the word, which you can read about at the entry for notable, but if it helps it's also because otherwise people might assume it's pronounced with a long "ee" sound, like in tea. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:55, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Historically this is the same "a" as the "a" in notation. In the Latin words they derive from (notabilis and notatio), as well as in nota bene, they were pronounced the same way.  --Lambiam 23:27, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

the sky fell in

This phrase is included in wiktionary, but it isn't always in the past tense like this. It is pretty easy to find occurrences of "The sky falls in", "the sky is falling in" and "the sky had fallen in" as well, e.g.:

• 2020, Stewert James, The Penny:

  Oh June, I really want at least one more good year before the sky falls in.

• 1990, United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary, Review of the National Drug Control Strategy, page 87:

  Unless we, as a nation, States, cities—not pointing the finger at any one government structure—all of us—unless we are ready to finally look for meaningful, long-term salient, complex answers to a very complex problem, people are going to appear in front of your committee in 1992, and all of you are going to look back on the good old days of 1989, and we do think the sky is falling in today in New York.

• 2008, Annie Murray, The Bells of Bournville Green, page 87:

  Cup of tea? As usual! How could anything be usual when the sky had fallen in?

So how do we handle cases like this? Do we just put in separate lemmas for each form, or is there a way to treat these as all inflections of one main lemma? Kiwima (talk) 23:46, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

I wouldn't create entirely separate lemmas for all these, it'd be duplicative. Maybe just, as you say, define each as an {{inflection of}} the main form, unless someone has a better idea. A lot more phrases are inflectable than we currently show as such, and we'd benefit from going through the phrases category and applying whatever the solution is to other entries, e.g. a little goes a long way can also be google books:"a little had gone a long way", google books:"a little would go a long way", etc; and every king needs a queen → google books:"every king needed a queen". - -sche (discuss) 00:39, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

I encountered this situation with balloon goes up. I considered whether I should change it to a verb, but balloon go up, which would be the infinitive form, seems unnatural. In the end I left it as a phrase but added a usage note stating that the term is also used with other forms of the word go, like going and went. I didn’t create entries for the inflected forms, and would be interested to see what people think about this. — Sgconlaw (talk) 14:29, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree trying to lemmatize them as ===Verb===s doesn't seem right since "a little [to] go a long way" et al are not right or natural forms. Maybe leave them as Phrases rather than Verbs, don't necessarily try to add the inflected forms into the headword, but add a usage note as you did, and combine that with making entries for the inflected forms defining them as {{inflection of}}s? Since someone who doesn't already know the idiom has no way of knowing what form to look up, e.g. that every king needed a queen should be looked up in the present tense but the sky falls in needs to be converted in the exact opposite direction to past tense. - -sche (discuss) 16:25, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Which inflected forms should be created, though? In the balloon goes up example, I guess balloon went up is fine but what about balloon go up? Instead of balloon going up, should the inflected form be balloon is/was going up? — Sgconlaw (talk) 04:56, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Instinctively, I would say any attested forms, although I suppose forms that don't sound fluent on their own like balloon go up could just be (hard-)redirects. Actually, I don't know why this didn't occur to me earlier, but we could just hard-redirect all the inflected forms, couldn't we, and have a usage note mentioning that the verb inflects? Would that be better than {{inflection of}}s? - -sche (discuss) 17:35, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, maybe redirects would avoid the problem of deciding what forms the inflections should take. — Sgconlaw (talk) 18:12, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

OK. @Kiwima what do you think of these ideas? Hard-redirect the inflected forms? Or do you think it'd be better to have 'soft-redirect' entries defining them as variant or inflected forms? I recall from past RFMs that we already redirect a lot of other kinds of variation, e.g. when the object of an idiom can be either singular or plural, but there too we are inconsistent in whether we hard-redirect or soft-redirect using something like {{altform}}. - -sche (discuss) 18:20, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

I agree with hard-redirecting internal inflections of an idiom FWIW. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 18:50, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

I like the hard redirects to the most natural/common form of the phrase, with a usage note on the lemma. That seems the most succinct approach. Kiwima (talk) 19:26, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Hebrew: אך and אבל

אך and אבל can both mean but. Should we note them as synonyms? Or should we have usage notes clarifying the difference, e.g., if the but connects clauses as opposed to individual words. I am learning Hebrew and would find this information useful. Thanks. Peter Chastain (talk) 01:25, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

I would note that אך has quotations but אבל does not. I think that might clarify usage differences. Peter Chastain (talk) 01:45, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

The 1 Samuel 20:39 doesn't belong to that sense, which seems to be only in later Biblical Hebrew, like Proverbs. I don't know enough Biblical Hebrew, let alone Modern Hebrew, to answer your question, though. Given that the sense in question for אך evolved from something else, it's entirely possibly that there isn't a tidy division between the two. Basic function words like these can have all kinds of subtle (and not so subtle) variations in the semantics and syntax. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:36, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Hebrew: פאראך

I found this word in the Yes/Netflix series Shtisel (season 2, episode 1). The English subtitle shows it as frenk. From context, I am guessing it might be an ethnic slur for a Sephardic person, maybe. Or maybe Frenchman (cf. our frenk entry)? Peter Chastain (talk) 03:09, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Just guessing, but compare Persian فرنگ. In several languages this means a foreigner- often with a connotation of someone overbearing and uncouth. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:46, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

cut the ribbon

This is definitely idiomatic insofar as it's a collocation, I also feel like it's often used non-literally to mean to formally begin? It's not so easy finding quotes. Vininn126 (talk) 11:22, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

In my idiolect a ribbon-cutting is a ceremony marking to formal opening for use of something like a road segment, bridge, building (usually a public one), etc. The commencement of construction may be marked by a ground-breaking ceremony, usually involving a shovel. DCDuring (talk) 15:56, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, there is that literal usage, ribbon-cutting would be a derived noun frmo the verb, I suppose. That is my usage as well. I suppose people often do that without ribbons? Vininn126 (talk) 15:58, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Not every cutting of ribbon is a ribbon-cutting. I wonder whether every ceremony marking an achievement/completion and called a ribbon-cutting has to have a ribbon. Also cutting the ribbon, not ribbon-cutting is the inflected form of your proposed entry.

My main point is that, in my experience, a ribbon-cutting marks the achievement of completion of something at least as much as the commencement of its use. Still less do I see it as a commencement tout court. I do see that some dictionaries and some usages have or use such a definition. DCDuring (talk) 16:43, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

That would be the gerund, I meant the deverbal frmo it. Vininn126 (talk) 16:44, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

As I see the verb used in news items, often but not only in headlines, it tends to refer to a ribbon-cutting ceremony to inaugurate some functional space (an airport, a baggage claim area, a condo complex, ..., a zoo) in which an actual physical ribbon is cut with actual physical scissors. I am inclined to think that people may be unaware of the phenomenon of ribbon-cutting ceremonies and thus do not get the full meaning from considering just cut +‎ the +‎ ribbon. That the collocation can also be used in a pure SOP sense is irrelevant for applying the CFI. I don't know if the term is occasionally used fully figuratively for an inauguration without the ceremonial cutting, but that is of secondary importance.  --Lambiam 15:09, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

"I am inclined to think that people may be unaware of the phenomenon of ribbon-cutting ceremonies" - Yes, as this is a global dictionary, that will certainly be the case.

"I don't know if the term is occasionally used fully figuratively for an inauguration without the ceremonial cutting" - I've encountered this usage here in Britain but am relying on anecdotal memory and no quote is available. 92.10.212.58 09:50, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

What about this link[2](p.167) - do people cut actual ribbons for ceremonies marking the launch of a new plane or tank? --Overlordnat1 (talk) 12:33, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

If the level of unfamiliarity with customs is to be an inclusion criterion then we would need entries for expressions like take communion/take Communion and for both of the senses of nail set, not just the carpentry sense. DCDuring (talk) 14:46, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

add amogthem as the plural for amogus

The plural for Among Us according to innersloth is Among Them, so Amogthem should be the plural for Amogus, not Amogi or Amoguses WohaoGaster (talk) 11:55, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

The phrase Among Us is already plural. In fact, us is actually the English oblique first-person plural pronoun, while them is the English oblique third-person plural pronoun. Definitely different, but not from plurality. Plus, this is ridiculous that you typed these words with such confidence. OsbertDanielson (talk) 14:40, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

The phrase "among us" cannot be plural. That is meaningless, since "among us" is not even a noun phrase. Equinox ◑ 14:42, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

More English Language Variant Pronounciation.

More Language Variant Pronounciation. Yes, there is a lot of English dialectal pronounciation showed in pages, but there is a problem where more isolated and/or distinct language variants of English aren't being represented. I wanna hear what a Latino man living in Queens who speaks language variants sounds like, I wanna hear what a Cajun woman living in Lafayette, L Louisiawho speaks language variants sounds like, I wanna hear what a white Chicagoan grandma who speaks language variants sounds like. Put all of your knowledge of dialects and/or accents of English to Wiktionary, please. Because I can't do it myself, I'm not a linguistic expert on English, I'm literally still learning some Chamic languages. How do anyone expect me to know the pronounciation of language variants of English. na OsbertDanielson (talk) 14:55, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Ain't the Latino men living in Queens talking with an accent, not with a dialect? Or is Latino Queens English a kind of dialect of English? Or do you mean the New York Latino English? Tollef Salemann (talk) 12:42, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

There is also a "Category:Regional English", with some examples of pronunciation templates. Stuff like this takes time yanno. But people are working with it :) Tollef Salemann (talk) 12:56, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

patenter and patentor

There seems to be confusion between the definitions for patenter and patentor and that for patentee. Two conflicting definitions are given for patentor, sense 2 should be the correct one, and I added a reference from Collins. A patenter/patentor gives/grants a patent, a patentee is granted/receives a patent from the patenter/patentor, surely? DonnanZ (talk) 21:42, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

According to the OED the existing setup is correct (patenter = patentee, patentor can be either the patentee or the one who grants it). —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 22:03, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

(e/c) Interesting. I've cited patenter to mean "one who patents" as in the person who invents and patents a new technology, receiving a patent on it, based on the usual pattern of -er words; if both senses exist for patentor (they probably do), then it's a contranym (like looker, etc). - -sche (discuss) 22:10, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Merriam-Webster says for patentor: "one that grants a patent". DonnanZ (talk) 22:24, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

They do, the OED has plenty of citations for both (apparently the 1890 Century Dictionary already gave patentor both senses). —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 22:25, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't have access to the OED. Do they give dates for their cites? DonnanZ (talk) 22:34, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

"one who grants a patent" 1890, 1984, 2000; "which takes out a patent" 1890, 1946, 1992, 2001 (the 1890 is the Century Dictionary I mentioned above, so my "plenty" is probably an exaggeration). From my own review of the material on Google Books, in practice the sense "grantor of a patent" seems to be rare. The OED notes in its etymology that Medieval Latin patentor is attested in Britain in 1432 referring to one who has been granted letters patent, i.e. a "patentee". In the earliest English sources for the word I can find, which are 19th-century, it usually also refers to a patentee, but occasionally the grantor of a land patent in court records. McCarthy's Desk Encyclopedia of Intellectual Property (1991) notes (p. 240) that in the US the federal government can be considered "patentor" as the opposite end of the transaction from the "patentee", but that the term is "never commonly used" in practice. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 22:49, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Very confusing. I wonder if there is another word for "one that grants a patent". DonnanZ (talk) 23:10, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

There are some scannos of patentor, where "patent or" is meant, but googling "patentor of" turns up people who have applied for and obtained patents. DonnanZ (talk) 10:52, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

coorie

What does the label "disputed" mean, and what would be a clearer thing to replace it with? That the etymology is disputed (as the wording of the definition might be taken to imply)? That the definition is disputed? That the existence of the referent is disputed? - -sche (discuss) 23:30, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

The Wikipedia page sheds some light on it. It probably needs a full usage note though, "disputed" by itself is opaque. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 00:08, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Frequency information

Discussion moved to Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2023/March.

Survey of British English

The results of a newish survey of British English are out that you might find interesting. See this link[3] Overlordnat1 (talk) 01:27, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

• Interesting stuff, thanks. Ƿidsiþ 05:47, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

My pleasure. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 08:29, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Esperanto translation of "cool"

The word "cool" is translated into Esperanto here in Wiktionary as "malvarmeta", "mojosa". The meaning is that of temperature. The first word, "malvarmeta" is correct, while the second one isn't. "Mojosa" means 'cool' in the sense of 'popular', 'fashionable', also indicating approval. The page is locked, so I can't change it myself. 177.248.156.62 09:46, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

 Done – Jberkel 10:16, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Apostrophe

I want to faithfully reproduce a quotation from a book in this diff, following Wiktionary guidelines. Should I then use this ‘ apostrophe or this ʻ apostrophe or some other? I might use a generic apostrophe, but I earnestly wish to be faithful to the author's/publisher's intent (if that is possible). Thanks, please ping me. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 15:05, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@Geographyinitiative: It is semantically ʻ (modifier letter turned comma, your second link), as also used in Wikipedia's Wade–Giles article. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 15:29, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@Al-Muqanna Thanks so much. If that's true, should Wiktionary have an 'English' header section for the modifier letter turned comma? UPDATE: This may be translingual, so: diff. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 15:33, 10 March 2023 (UTC) (Modified)

@Al-Muqanna: I doubt that it was differentiated from the left single quotation mark in 1898. What about the symbol used for Mac-/Mc-—I placed it at the quotation mark: should it be moved? J3133 (talk) 13:45, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

@J3133: That's why I said semantically, but 19th-century typographers did in fact also semantically (if not formally) distinguish the turned comma as used in Mc- from the single quotation mark (e.g.). I think it's less plausible to list the Mc- one under the Unicode modifier letter turned comma, though, given that it's not actually functioning as a modifier letter like the Wade–Giles one is; it's probably fine where it is. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 14:08, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

It would appear that the odd turned comma in M‘- is a typographic substitution for a superscript c as in M^c-. kwami (talk) 09:58, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Nail header

Can't find this word in any dictionary. Is it even a word or is it a compound term with a slightly new semantics? Is it more right to write it as "nailheader"? It it necessary to create a new page for this word? In Norwegian it calls spikarlo (see "lo"), and in Russian it calls гвоздильня (gvozdilʹnja), but im not familiar with the blacksmith-vocabulary situation in other countries. My South African blacksmith friend calls it "the nail thing", but he's not an English native speaker. If i should create a new page about this English word, does she need to have name "nail header" or "nailheader"? And which references should this page get obtaining? --Tollef Salemann (talk) 11:25, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

There are several hits for 'nail header' at Google Books you could use if you wanted to create this entry, including one which claims that the obscure blacksmiths tool known as an Oliver/oliver can be used as a nail header. I've just created Oliver as an alternative form of oliver but my understanding of blacksmithery is far too limited for me to create it myself. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 12:53, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Wow thanks! Yeah, i guess, an oliver can be used in many weird ways :) Tollef Salemann (talk) 13:01, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

There are also machines with production rates of ~500 pieces per minute, called nail headers (or nailheaders) that put heads on wire (or rod?) to make nails. DCDuring (talk) 17:55, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

i know this kind of machines existed before 1900 (at least, in Germany and Russia), but i don't know anything about industrial mettalurgy. Gonna check it out Tollef Salemann (talk) 18:07, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

You can see the 500/minute variety online. DCDuring (talk) 22:41, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, i found it on youtube. Guess, im done with this one then: nail header Tollef Salemann (talk) 22:49, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

alkaline

Do we need two senses? I don't really see a difference. PUC – 13:41, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

The only justification I can see is that clearly before the invention of the pH scale in the 20th century people wouldn't have been using it intentionally to mean "has a pH greater than 7". But since the referent is still the same this would probably be handled better by merging the two senses into one line (which is also what Merriam-Webster and the OED do). —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 14:07, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

Funnily enough, I was pondering about this issue earlier today when editing Latin hepar. I added the gloss "large organ in the body that stores and metabolizes nutrients, destroys toxins and produces bile", which I pulled from liver, but I doubt the Romans knew as much about the role of the liver as we do, so leaving aside the case of Contemporary Latin, I wonder if it's really appropriate to gloss it like that. At what point does a redefinition become a new definition, or a connotation a denotation? PUC – 14:40, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

An alkaline battery is one that contains a certain alkali to power it; the battery as a whole need not have a pH measurement above 7. —Soap— 19:23, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

Geschoß

Isn't this southern variant of Geschoss (with a long vowel) also a neuter noun like the standard variant, in all meanings? Neither German wiktionary nor any authoritative sources (Duden, DWDS...) suggest otherwise. 176.93.255.63 15:02, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

I’ve fixed that for you. Fay Freak (talk) 16:44, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

ubiquity, omnipresence

The Wikipedia article about omnipresence says that "The term omnipresence is most often used in a religious context as an attribute of a deity or supreme being, while the term ubiquity is generally used to describe something "existing or being everywhere at the same time, constantly encountered, widespread, common". Ubiquitous can also be used as a synonym for words like worldwide, universal, global, pervasive, all over the place."

I don't know if that's true, but if there's a distinction to be made, it should be better reflected in our entries; at the moment the two terms are more or less treated as synonyms. PUC – 17:06, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

Well, the core fallacy of religions is that they abuse terms like “existence” and ”to be” and “to be present” that are designed to relate to actual businesses (Sprachspiel), so I don’t expect consistent usage—their use likely always is motte and bailey, some kind of “there” and “not there” in reality at the same time, strongly correlating with lacking experience regarding the occurrences of the world that would hint that definitely no one is there (otherwise it would have been leaked, isn’t it). Fay Freak (talk) 17:28, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

Checking collocations on COCA, it seems to be used with plenty of things before religion, i.e. omnipresent media. (granted that's the adjective, but hey) Vininn126 (talk) 17:38, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

-nil-

Should this entry be at nil- instead? It's used to mean zero in systematic names for chemical elements that don't have "real" names yet, e.g. "binilunium" would be an element 201. Yet we don't have -bi- for two, even though that can occur in mid-word too. We'd probably just say that bi- already covers it. The only reason that nil- never begins a chemical element name is a mathematical reason, not a morphological one: no element number will ever begin with zero, since prepending zeros to a number doesn't affect its value. Equinox ◑ 17:59, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

@Equinox (a) probably yes, (b) it wouldn't be an infix in any case but an interfix; infixes are inserted in the middle of a morpheme, while interfixes are inserted between morphemes. Benwing2 (talk) 23:06, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

I am a poor politician and should have said "WHO WILL DENY the proposed move to nil-?". Who will deny it? (Surah ar-Rahman) Equinox ◑ 03:04, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Hmm, this is a hard case, isn't it, since will someone think to look up the nil in binilunium as nil-? (Maybe, IDK. Maybe we just solve that by having a hard, or more likely soft, redirect from -nil-?) It's tricky when something logically would be X but is only attested as Y. (Navajo has some interesting affixes in this regard: things like -ba and -d- are prefixes despite where the hyphens are.) - -sche (discuss) 04:41, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Well, if someone sees "biopsychology" are they going to look up "-psycho-" because it's in the middle? I doubt it my friend. Equinox ◑ 04:43, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I suppose the number of people who'd see binilium and look up nil in any form at all is probably ... well, not nil, but not large, ha. (To be clear, I'm fine with putting it at nil-.) - -sche (discuss) 04:52, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

@Equinox I think that's a perfect analogy. We shouldn't have redundant infix entries for prefixes just because those prefixes happen to appear in words which have an additional prefix tacked onto them. – Guitarmankev1 ^(talk) 19:46, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

IIRC (it's been a few years since I've worked with these), agglutinative languages tend to have a canonical order of affixes, so there are "slots" for specific types of prefixes and suffixes: for Cahuilla verbs, the subject pronoun is always first, followed by the object; for non-possessed nouns, the absolutive suffix always comes last. The other prefixes and suffixes for things like syntactic features such as aspect and voice and case are in different slots from derivational suffixes like nominalizers as well as -ma[l] (for little things) and -we[t] (for big ones). They're all easier to deal with as prefixes and suffixes, even if some of them follow or are followed by slots that are never empty. I don't think there are any instances where an affix can be used both before and after the main part of the word. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:42, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

(Only semi-related: are there words not about chemical elements that use a nil- prefix? As it happens, apparently yes, like nilpotent and nilmanifold, which we would definitely analyse with a prefix if it was mono-, uni-, bi-, di- or what not. Do their etymologies link to a nil- page? No. Does the wiki drive the etymology? Oh hell yes.) Equinox ◑ 04:46, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Definitely agree with this, we should have consistency between nil-, uni-, etc. Ioaxxere (talk) 04:56, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

These are prefixes in origin but used here as (compound) roots, and so are not really any kind of affix. But that's sophistry; for our purposes, counting them as prefixes is probably good enough. I suppose we could argue that they're prefixes followed by a suffix without any root. kwami (talk) 05:19, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Not very much feedback, but I'm going to shift things to nil- and leave the redirect from -nil-. I believe it's sensible. Thanks. Equinox ◑ 09:57, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Worth mentioning that we do atm have nilium listed as a synonym of neutronium (which in its original definition has atomic number 0 by definition and occasionally crops up in old periodic tables—hard to find examples online but I remember seeing the neutron listed with atomic number 0 in school and this journal article discusses it). Unfortunately "nilium" doesn't look particularly attestable apart from a few online references. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 14:18, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

tomorrow

We say the pronunciation with the final syllable as a schwa is "dialectal" in the UK and NYC- and Philly-specific in the US. I think this is not the whole picture: doesn't it also exist as a common colloquial variant (not dialect-specific)? - -sche (discuss) 04:59, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

I wouldn't say that that schwa-final pronunciation is limited to NYC and Philly (imagine how a Bostionian would pronounce it), but it's not a universal colloquial pronunciation either. Even between the cities of NYC and Boston it might sound out of place, and I would imagine that out in the western US it might sound strange too. Just my 2¢. – Guitarmankev1 ^(talk) 13:22, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

I'd definitely say that it's a colloquial rather than a dialectal pronunciation in Britain but the final vowel can get reduced in certain phrases like 'tomorrow night' and 'tomorrow morning' by speakers from all over the world. Perhaps outside of such phrases it could be labelled as dialectal in America, I'm not sure. It's hard to find people with particularly broad regional American accents saying the word 'tomorrow' on YouGlish to check. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 14:20, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

The unstressed /o/ > /ə/ shift is characteristic of Appalachian English but has spread outside its home area in words such as fella. Its possible that tomorrow is another one of these words; I've definitely heard this pronunciation, but i've never associated it with cities. Somewhat related, the Appalachian shift also encompasses /ə/ > /i/ ... i wonder if colloquial pronunciations like "yesterdy", "Tuesdy", etc might correlate with /o/>/ə/, if we assume tentatively that the relatively rare unstressed /ei/ was scooped up by the shift, perhaps if we mentally parsed it as /əi/? I suspect not, though, as we have no indication of the -/i/ pronunciations being regional. —Soap— 09:38, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't think it's possible that the use of a schwa in tomorrow is spreading out of Appalachia (by which I mean, I think it clearly isn't limited to nor originating from there), if the places our entry acknowledges it so far are the big cities of NYC and Philly and then the UK. I couldn't think of a concise way to include this in my original post, but use of a schwa may not represent any shift of /o/ by anyone at all, but mere preservation of the schwa that was present at the end of (some pronunciations of) the Middle English word. It's /o/ which is the recent development; the Old English ancestor of tomorrow ended in /e/. I'm inclined to label it something like "colloquial or dialectal". - -sche (discuss) 10:37, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

That sounds like a good label. There's also the fact that many people in Scotland (and I think from memory also Geordies) say 'the morrow' for 'tomorrow' and 'the day' for 'today'. I'd say these are set phrases that deserve there own entries, though possibly as Scots instead of or as well as English. If someone said 'see you the morrow' then it would mean the same as 'see you IN the morning' (or 'see you ON the morrow' in standard archaic English), the preposition is always elided. 'see youse the morrow' yields a couple of Northern Irish uses on GoogleBooks and 'ra morra', broad Glaswegian for 'the morrow' has the full three hits. 'the day', 'the morrow' and 'ra' also appear in the DSL. We should probably create 'the morrow', 'the day', 'the night' (for 'tonight'), 'ra' for 'the' and 'morra' for 'morrow' at some point. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 12:28, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

tomorrow's, yesterday's, and today's

Do these fit the Criteria for Inclusion? I suppose that yesterday's might have a unique sense of outdated, but I'm thinking it's only like that in select phrases like yesterday's news and in general the term yesterday's doesn't really differ from yesterday + 's... – Guitarmankev1 ^(talk) 19:43, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Probably not. They are possessive forms, aren't they? Otherwise we would have these for every noun. DonnanZ (talk) 00:27, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

There do exist a few other possessive form entries, but I think they're all possessive pronouns one's or somebody's. The deciding factor to include it would be if the possessive form conveys any additional meaning (like a figurative or idiomatic meaning) other than only "the possessive form of X". Fowler's, people's, and butcher's are all possessive=form entries, although the full list of words like that is very small. For example, one of the definitions under today's is "Relating to, or produced in, the current historical period", and similar definitions could be written for the other two, but I think these are piggybacking on existing definitions of the non-possessive forms, such as the definition under today, "In the current era; nowadays". I'm going to go ahead and put {{rfd}} tags on those pages to question if they qualify under the CFI. Reading around, that appears to be the proper procedure... – Guitarmankev1 ^(talk) 18:27, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

nuclide

The current definition of "nuclide" associates it an element's the "atomic mass", but more accurate would be with the "mass number". Also, the current entry for "atomic mass" has a usage note saying "or, commonly, as a sum of the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus", but it would be more accurate to say this produces an approximation (which is the "mass number"). I suspect in the wild, these two terms are sometimes used as the current entries state, a "justification by usage", and the term "mass number" has come into use to avoid the ambiguities of the terms "atomic mass" and "atomic weight". In other words, within technical fields, more precise meanings have been adopted. 74.69.160.254 19:47, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

A Dutch IPA Converter ?

[4]https://github.com/Ascor8522/dutch-ipa running at [5]https://dutch-ipa.deno.dev/ isn't well trained.
Any such tool at ( CLARIAH for academic research in Humanities and Social Sciences ) ? [6]https://www.clariah.nl/clariah-resources-overview or elsewhere?
Thanks Flāvidus (talk) 22:45, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

飾 A request & a suggestion

1) Can we add or use "embellish" (To make something sound or look better or more acceptable than it is in reality; to distort, to embroider.) for the sense to cover up; to deceive
2) I am having a hard time with the tone numbers of "sik" in Cantonese, particularly "sik1" Is it like " seek ; basic" or "second" ?

By the way, it is on Forvo.com now. Flāvidus (talk) 03:52, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

On 2): The seek/second distinction you're talking about is a distinction of vowel quality, not of tone. There are phonetic tables at Wiktionary:About Chinese/Cantonese if you want more info. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 12:42, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

rumped

and other words used in combination. I don't know whether it is attestable apart from use in combinations. We show many derived terms there, but some of them are like bright-rumped attila, bright-rumped tanager, and bright-rumped yellow finch, which are vernacular names for species of bird. We deem such names to not be SoP.

1. Should the derived terms at rumped include such terms or only include terms like bright-rumped?
2. Are terms like bright-rumped SoP? (It seems possibly attestable as a hyphenated compound adjective apart from those vernacular names.)

Derived terms at bright-rumped could include terms like bright-rumped attila. DCDuring (talk) 17:00, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

• bright-rumped is SOP, so just link them from rumped, as you have been doing. Jin and Tonik (talk) 13:27, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

Greek calque?

Gothic 𐌿𐍆𐌰𐍂𐌷𐌰𐌿𐍃𐌴𐌹𐌽𐍃 (ufarhauseins) and Russian непослушание (neposlušanije) - they must be some sort of calques from the Bible, amirite? Where is best to search the Bible Greek stuff like that? Or is it a native concept (compare to Norwegian Nynorsk høyra etter, Russian слушаться (slušatʹsja))? --Tollef Salemann (talk) 11:35, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

Calques on what? AFAIK the NT Greek terms for "disobedience" are παρακοή (parakoḗ), see παρα- (para-, “by; besides”) + ἀκούω (akoúō, “hear, obey”), and ἀπείθεια (apeítheia), see ἀ- (a-, “not”) + πείθομαι (peíthomai, “believe, obey”). The Gothic and Russian terms both reflect "hearing" etymologically but they don't look like obvious calques since the prefixes are semantically different from παρα—Gothic 𐌿𐍆𐌰𐍂 (ufar) is "over", Russian не- (ne-) is just "not". At most they might derive from terms originally coined for Bible translations, but it looks more like standard internal word-formation than calquing in a strict sense. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 11:50, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

Ok so you mean it might be just a common human concept to mix between "obey" and "listen", like Sumerian 𒄑𒌇? Thanks, im gonna agree on it, altough it seems contra-intuitive for me, thats why i asked, since i cant find any information on this subject. Tollef Salemann (talk) 12:13, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

The hear -> obey semantic development is fairly cross-linguistic, Sanskrit श्रुष्टि (śruṣṭi) also means "obedience" and is related to श्रुति (śruti, “hearing”), themselves cognate with the Russian word. See Khmer ស្ដាប់ (sdap) for a completely unrelated example. The other common one is follow (physically) -> obey. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 12:29, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

всьому́ vs. всьо́му

I'm hoping some fluent speakers can chime in on this one. We have the declension table for Ukrainian весь showing всьому́ (dat.sg.), всьо́му (loc.sg.) (with the same stress contrast also used at увес and ввесь). But is this right? So far as I can tell from the page history, the original editor used всьому́ for both forms, which was then changed at some stage (perhaps by a bot when the a template got updated) to the current one. However, Horoh shows both as всьо́му. Which is it to be? Or should we accept both?

Edit: there's also a similar thing with Русь. This time, there are four variants for the gen.sg.: Ру́сі, Русі́, Ру́си, Руси́. Horoh has Ру́сі, Ру́си; while the Kyiv Dictionary has Русі́. But I cannot find a source for Руси́. And what are the stylistic or other differences between -и and -і?

Edit 2: C.f. свій: своєму́ (dat.sg.) vs своє́му (loc.sg.), again manual declension table not supported by Horoh] or the Kiev dictionary. Helrasincke (talk) 10:32, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

всьому́ (dative) and всьо́му (locative) are correct according to official Ukrainian orthography: § 113 of Українська національна комісія з питань правопису (2019 May 22) Український правопис 2019 року [Ukrainian orthography of 2019], Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, →ISBN, page 143. However своє́му is both dative and locative (see § 110 on page 142 of ibid.) so the table at свій may need to be changed accordingly. Voltaigne (talk) 10:55, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

@Voltaigne: Thank you for this. A very useful resource. Helrasincke (talk) 03:20, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Jitsuyo Nihongo Hyogen Jiten and 糞餓鬼

I think the recent series of reverts at 糞餓鬼 warrants a discussion. [7][8][9][10] @Fish bowl, Eirikr The main issue is how to treat the dictionary/website called 実用日本語表現辞典 (Jitsuyo Nihongo Hyogen Jiten), as a reference or a further reading.

To be honest, I'm not sure if we really need a reference or a further reading on this. This is a colloquial curse word, and I think that's why we don't find many trusted reference materials that describe it, despite its widespread use. (At least I couldn't find one quickly.) To be clear, there is no problem with attestation. I'm sure some of the examples found in NDL are usable [11], and that might be good enough for us. I'm not sure if there is more to say about the word than what the gloss currently says - the meaning seems to be fairly straightforward.

Our English gloss in the first version appears very close to what Jitsuyo says in Japanese. The redundancy and the lack of additional description makes it a poor further reading material, in my opinion. If we want to have it as a reference to back up the gloss, I guess we could do that, but I would still caution against relying on the anonymous source - we don't know who writes Jitsuyo and their level of expertise. Whym (talk) 12:25, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

in limbo — bị tù (senses)

• in limbo — bị tù mentioned at vi.wiktionary.org [12] Which senses do apply ?
  1) Any in-between place, state or condition of neglect or oblivion 2 ) (slang, archaic ? ) A lockup or jail cell.
  Thanks.

Flāvidus (talk) 19:05, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Request for merge to: Pied Piper

As per Wiktionary:Tea room/2019/August#pied piper, uppercase Pied Piper should not redirect to lowercase pied piper. Both pages currently exist without redirect to each other (except for Template:also). As the entry is about a specific character, capitalized as a proper noun (also at Wikipedia), I propose that the lowercase entry is an incorrect duplication of the uppercase entry, and should be merged/deleted with redirect to the uppercase entry. — CJDOS, Sheridan, OR (talk) 21:13, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

@CJDOS: Wiktionary is a dictionary, not an encyclopedia, so we can afford to have both uppercase and lowercase entries. The proper noun and the common noun are completely different as lexical items, even though they share the same history. People write all the time about (metaphorically) hearing the call of a pied piper without thinking about a man in a story who plays a flute. They almost always spell it as lower case. People who write about the character generally spell it capitalized. Redirecting one to the other would just muddle things. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:37, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Pajeet isn’t necessarily a slur or derogatory

I’ve heard it being used neutrally, more like a nickname, jokingly. — This unsigned comment was added by 2001:56B:DD17:5C00:5085:E715:4BDD:B7A9 (talk) at 02:32, 20 March 2023 (UTC).

That’s its meme origin. They always joke on those internet boards like 4chan. Fay Freak (talk) 02:58, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Use of Pajeet as an adjective.

I’ve seen it being used as an adjective, to refer to things relating to India, Pakistanis or Indo-Aryans and Dravidians in general. Maybe we should add it? — This unsigned comment was added by 2001:56B:DD17:5C00:5085:E715:4BDD:B7A9 (talk) at 02:34, 20 March 2023 (UTC).

I think it is just attributive use of the noun, or compounding. Any noun can be an adjective on occasion if one really wants too. Fay Freak (talk) 02:57, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

𠵇𠺫

Discussion moved from WT:RFVCJK.

Chinese. Rfv-pronunciation: kiu4 liu1. This pronunciation was not found in sources like [13] and [14] Mahogany115 (talk) 02:52, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

@Mahogany115: This is not an RFV issue, but RFV-pron, which belongs in WT:TR. — justin(r)leung _{{ (t...) | c=› }} 02:59, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

@Mahogany115: 廣州方言詞典 p. 263 喬敹 k‘iu˨˩ liu˨˩꜒, 廣州話方言詞典 p. 118 喬溜 kiu⁴ liu¹. — justin(r)leung _{{ (t...) | c=› }} 03:39, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Hyphenation of Cebuano ll in Spanish loans

I cleaned up some very obvious typos at User:Tbm/QA/Hyphenation, but noticed that we have inconsistent hyphenation of ll in Cebuano surnames of Spanish origin. See Category:Cebuano surnames from Spanish (and possibly more at Category:Cebuano terms borrowed from Spanish unless they are all respelled to have -ly-). Basically my question is .... should we write -ll or l-l? Can it be both? I couldnt find anything easily accessible online that explained the pattern, nor at our own pages such as Wiktionary:About Cebuano. I came here because this involves names and words that were never listed on the Hyphenation task page. Thanks, —Soap— 08:28, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

uphill

Looking at the comparatives for the adverb and adjective, it seems to me that they are the wrong way round, and should be swapped around. If that's the case, I think the usage note for the adjective would then be superfluous. DonnanZ (talk) 17:06, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Adding just to note that downhill is patterned the same way. I wonder if it's better to just say that the adjective is noncomparable in these senses and that the far/further/furthest is a separate word. But I'll leave that to others to figure out ... classifying parts of speech has never been my strong point. —Soap— 21:19, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

hay loft, and other phrases that happen to exist in two languages

When I was living in Spain, I'd often see "hay pan" (there is bread) on shop signs. And I'd always chuckle as in English it would mean a pan for hay. Today I came across hay loft too (I shouldn't have added a Spanish section to that, BTW...). These "false friend sentences", or false friendtences as I'm coining them are probably about as a rare as palindromic phrases, so are there any other good ones out there where a combination of words have completely different meanings? Van Man Fan (talk) 21:43, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

soy sauce is another goodie. It means "I am willow" in Spanish. Van Man Fan (talk) 21:46, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

Not quite the same thing but I once thought a sign in France that read 'On peut pas battre nos prix' meant 'One can't batter our prizes' rather than 'One can't beat our prices.' --Overlordnat1 (talk) 00:34, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

I see no soy a lot on food packages, sometimes before the product name. For example, no soy teriyaki sauce. Well ... what is it then? —Soap— 08:31, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

The best one I've come up with so far is "quince pies", which is fairly ordinary in both languages, but completely different. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:17, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

There's a comedy bit from somewhere, forget the source -- "What if 'soy milk' is just introducing itself in Spanish?" ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 20:47, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

date rape is a good one my colleague suggested. Give yourself monkfish. Van Man Fan (talk) 21:15, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Part of speech of possessive -'s

It was a suffix from 29 September 2005 to 28 April 2009; since then until 9 August 2022 a particle; and since then (changed by Dylanvt) until 2 March 2023 (changed by Tc14Hd to a suffix) an enclitic. Note that we currently call the similar -' a particle. J3133 (talk) 16:52, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

IMO "Suffix" is best for both since it's by far the most comprehensible option for readers (and our glossary definition of suffix adequately covers enclitics too: "A morpheme added to the end of a word to modify its meaning"). "Enclitic" isn't a generally valid POS header per WT:POS and I'm not sure what benefit we really get from listing them as particles or a more exotic POS instead of suffixes. In principle the dividing line between a suffix and a particle, as defined at the moment, is that particles are "words", and I imagine most readers will find it less intuitive to treat -'s/-' as a word. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 17:16, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

The thing is, -’s is not a suffix, and doesn't behave like actual suffixes. If you compare it to the suffix -s, it clearly patterns differently, and this is important to note in a dictionary:

The dog that I found (is very friendly) → The dogs that I found (are very friendly)

The dog that I found (has matted fur) → The dog that I found’s (fur is matted).

If we call it a suffix a non-native speaker viewing the entry would have no way of knowing that it patterns differently, being appended not to the head noun, but to the last word in the noun phrase (in the above example, to found). Dylanvt (talk) 06:01, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

They would know that from the (existing) usage notes. They certainly aren't going to figure it out based on whether it's called "suffix" or "particle". —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 11:16, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

No, I would never call 's a suffix. It's (it is) a possessive form, and a movable one, e.g. woman's handbag, womens' handbags (women's handbags may be preferable), and also used in contractions like it's (which shouldn't be confused with its). DonnanZ (talk) 10:34, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I should add that our glossary definition of suffix does not adequately cover clitics: "A morpheme added to the end of a word to modify its meaning". Whereas -’s isn't added to the end of a word to modify its (the word's) meaning; it's added to the end of a noun phrase to modify its (the entire phrase's) meaning. And most sources, as well as most linguists, consider -’s to be a clitic, not an affix. I do see that 'clitic' is not considered a valid POS category per WT:POS, but I'm not sure why that's the case; seems a bit arbitrary to me. I suppose, though, that as long as the usage notes adequately explain these complexities, it's not the end of the world to label it a suffix. In any case, -' should have the same POS header as -’s. Dylanvt (talk) 12:17, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't object to making clitic a generally valid POS header. It's currently "explicitly disallowed", but there was no real reasoning advanced for it at the vote that decided this (in fact it's only brought up almost tangentially there that the vote would have the effect of making it explicitly disallowed when it wasn't before). There'd need to be a new vote to overturn this, though. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 12:40, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I agree. It seems like a strange decision. Theknightwho (talk) 12:50, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I think the spirit of the vote was to limit PoS headers to those least likely to be discourage normal users. We could accommodate the needs and preferences of those more committed to other, possibly technically superior classifications by labels, categories, and perhaps usage notes. DCDuring (talk) 13:58, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I would like to emphasize the point that DCDuring makes here -- a POS header of "enclitic" is completely opaque to most of the English-reading audience. I'm reasonably well educated, and I had no idea what this was until I'd spent some time here on Wiktionary and kept running into this strange word.

For that matter, the WP article at Clitic includes this bit, which seems to argue against classing possessive [['s]] as a "clitic":

In morphology and syntax, a clitic (/ˈklɪtᵻk/, backformed from Greek ἐγκλιτικός (enklitikós) "leaning" or "enclitic") is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host.

The possessive [['s]] does not have "syntactic characteristics of a word". It is a suffix, historically deriving from a case ending that could itself be viewed as a specific kind of suffix.

By the definition given above, the English articles a and the are much more clitics than the possessive [['s]]. I would argue quite strongly that we should not use any "enclitic" POS for these words either.

Let's avoid specialist terminology in POS headers, and keep to terminology that is both descriptive and unconfusing. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 20:59, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

I always find these convoluted edit histories amusing.

In any case, I agree with Dylanvt that it's a clitic. I'm surprised 'clitic' hasn't been allowed as a header for all these years. Nicodene (talk) 23:31, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

@Theknightwho, Dylanvt, J3133: Actually I also found while searching for previous discussions that Wiktionary:English entry guidelines currently states that "While entries should note that they are clitics, the POS header used is Suffix for enclitics, prefix for proclitics, etc." Again, this seems basically arbitrary to me, though it's been there since the earliest version of the page (in the form "clitic ('s, 'd) - While entries should note that they are clitics, the POS header used is Suffix."). At any rate I've created a draft vote on allowing "Clitic" as a POS at Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2023-03/Allow "Clitic" as a POS header, do comment if there's anything else to mention there. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 14:02, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Lots of aspects of Wiktionary content are "arbitrary", representing an effort to balance considerations such as the need to win the loyalty of normal users and the practice of specialist linguists. The important thing is not to get too invested in the metaphysical reality of technical entities, categories, etc. DCDuring (talk) 14:24, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Of course, which is why I support deciding on it case by case. Ultimately, from searching prior discussions, I can't find any reason that has ever been advanced to justify the existing blanket-ban on the use of "Clitic" as POS in any entry. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 15:40, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Interesting. Without expressing an opinion on what part of speech possessive 's is, I will note that both the statement that "clitic" is not used as a POS header and the statement that "enclitic" is not used are de facto not followed by entries (clitics: -s, -kaa, -e, etc; fewer enclitics: -li, -mo, etc). Possibly the guidance was intended to be English-specific, and/or editors of other languages unaware of it simply moved past it. (If we formally allow "clitic", do we still need "enclitic", or can enclitics be headered as ===Clitic===s at that point?) - -sche (discuss) 16:49, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

We still have nearly 800 entries that have {{pedia}} under the See Also heading. That's not a justification for the legitimacy of the practice. DCDuring (talk) 23:59, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

@-sche: I hadn't noticed that entries like that already exist. It's worth noting that the vote disallowing these POS's was justified at the time primarily as just codifying existing practice, so if practice has shifted since then, or if it never actually reflected the practice for some languages, then that's a good reason in and of itself to review it. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 00:05, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

To be clear, an enclitic is just a clitic that goes after its "host". So, "enclitic" is to "clitic" as "suffix" is to "affix".

One solution would be: since we have the headers "prefix" and "suffix", we should also have the headers "proclitic" and "enclitic".

Another solution would be: since clitics are less widespread and less widely known by the general readership than affixes, it might be best to avoid the headers "proclitic" and "enclitic" in favor of the overarching "clitic". Dylanvt (talk) 06:15, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Yet, "clitic" is also not widespread, and is also likely to confuse much of our readership...?? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:01, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Confusingly, the descriptive sections in the Finnish entry at -kaan describe this variously as a "suffix" or a "particle", and the "Derived terms" section in the Ingrian entry at -kaa says "Ingrian terms suffixed with -kaa".

→ If it's a particle, call it a particle.

→ If it's a suffix, call it a suffix.

Very few of our general English-language readership will have any idea what "clitic" means. Meanwhile, anyone who has been educated on the basics of English grammar will be at least passingly familiar with the terms "prefix" and "suffix". "Particle" is a little more fringe (in terms of English-language grammar terminology), but arguably less so than "clitic".

I really cannot support us using "clitic" as a POS header, certainly not for English.

The definitions for "clitic" rely heavily on the phonological environment. As a label, this tells us more about how this morpheme links up phonologically within its immediately phonological surroundings -- it does not tell us anything useful about how it functions. Even for non-English languages, I am not a fan of this as a POS: this is specialized jargon that is both difficult to understand and insufficiently descriptive. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:15, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

• I agree that possessive 's is a clitic. User:Dylanvt's example, which applies a standard test for clitichood, is a good piece of evidence for this. It's been a while since I took a linguistics class, but if I remember correctly, the behavior of clitics is analyzed as part of syntax (not morphology), so theoretically I would think they should have a part of speech like any other word. But clitics often have special meanings and unusual syntax – I suspect for a lot of them, we wouldn't be able to find a better POS header than the catchall "Particle". And at that point it's more informative and intuitive to use "Clitic" instead. I don't really see any benefit to using the POS header "Suffix" instead of "Clitic" when clitic is more accurate, except I guess that the word "suffix" is more familiar to some of our readers. —Granger (talk · contribs) 23:08, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I think "suffix" is fine. One thing to note is that there is not consensus among linguists that '-s is a clitic: the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language argues that it is an inflectional suffix and not a clitic, based on how it interacts differently with words ending in the plural suffix -s and singular words that end in /s/ or /z/ (Chapter 5, pages 480-481 ("The realisation of the genitive is crucially bound up, therefore, with the inflectional formation of the noun, and this - like the suppletive genitives of the personal pronouns - rules out an analysis where the genitive is formed by the addition of a separate word cliticised to the noun").--Urszag (talk) 06:42, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

This is true. There are also analyses (vid. Lowe 2016) that it is simultaneously a suffix and a clitic. I think it would be fine to label it a suffix here, but in the usage notes explain the dispute, and that (syntactically) it patterns more like a clitic.Dylanvt (talk) 07:11, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

@Urszag, Dylanvt: The more I think about it, though, the point about phrasal scope strikes me as a much stronger argument (especially given how we've defined suffixes) than the Cambridge Grammar's argument from internal morphology, so if it's allowed perhaps it would actually be better to go the other way and list it as a clitic in the first instance and say it may also be analysed as a suffix? From a reader perspective a "Clitic" header would also encourage reading the notes for an explanation.

I also wondered whether the Cambridge argument is depending a bit too much on prescription rather than practice. Spencer and Luís, Clitics: An Introduction, point out that in practice at the phrasal level something like "one of my students'(s) assignment" can be pronounced both with and without the extra syllable, and indeed Googling "one of my students's" turns up various examples of people writing it as such informally apart from a few quoting that book. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 12:16, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

The main argument I've seen in favor of affixhood relies on the fact that the clitic is not always pronounced: cases like ducks’ (not pronounced after regular plurals), geese’s (pronounced after some irregular plurals), species’ (not pronounced after other irregular plurals), and James’ ~ James’s (optionally pronounced after proper names ending in [s] or [z]). The argument is that a clitic shouldn't exhibit lexical irregularities, since it's a syntactic unit. It seems that only regular plurals, optionally proper names, and the words species and series (which have so-called "zero-plurals") have a "silent" possessive (the last two in both singular and plural). This could probably be explained through some morphophonological rule(s), though, rather than through lexical irregularity.

I personally find the clitic analysis more convincing, and it certainly seems that a majority of linguists agree; but there are still adherents to the affix analysis (as well as to the affix+clitic analysis). Dylanvt (talk) 15:48, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

There is no phonological/morphological difference between a clitic and an affix. The difference is purely syntactic. The basic def of a clitic is that it looks like an affix, but its location is governed by syntax.

-'s is clearly not a particle, since it isn't a word: you can't use it on its own, for example. It must be docked to something.

However, while -'s is clearly an enclitic, and a prototypical example of one, I think "suffix" is the best POS header on Wikt. First of all, it's not a POS, so the fact that we label it as a POS already makes us technically wrong. Second, as noted, it's linguistic jargon and will make Wikt less accessible. Third, this will open a can of worms with the pronominal "clitics" of the Romance languages -- a terminology that is well established in Romance linguistics -- that are actually suffixes. (There's a similar problem in Bantu linguistics, where internal prefixes and suffixes are traditionally called "infixes"; AFAIK Bantu languages do not actually have any infixes. But that's not as contentious as the Romance problem.) kwami (talk) 01:23, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

I just checked, and someone turned the Swahili prefixes into "infixes". I'm changing them back, but expect there might be an edit war over it, since Bantuist lit does indeed call them "infixes". I suspect that splitting clitics from affixes would create a worse problem, and soak up a lot of time for little benefit. kwami (talk) 05:38, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

I would say -'s is a clitic because of its phonological behavior, but "clitic" isn't a part of speech. I would say its part of speech is postposition, just like Japanese の, which is syntactically nearly identical to -'s. —Mahāgaja · talk 07:44, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

dove of peace

No other OneLook reference apart from WP has this. WP redirects to an article Doves as symbols on Wikipedia.Wikipedia . We have had a discussion of a definition of bald eagle as a symbol of the United States. We have nearly 7,000 entries that have Symbol as PoS. We have small number of items under Category:Symbols. We have many definitions of other terms that include "a|an|the symbol of|for". I am quite confused about what makes some items includable and others not.

This particular one seems lame and there are no lexicographic lemmings. I haven't looked at OED. DCDuring (talk) 19:53, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Did Picasso have something to do with it? With dove#Noun sense 2 compared to hawk, both Collins and Oxford have this. The dove with olive branch is a well-known bible story from the Hebrew Scriptures. DonnanZ (talk) 10:06, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Yunan^{[sic – meaning Yunnan]}

Hey all, please ping me if you have a comment on this: I'm just wondering if the 'Yunan' spelling for 'Yunnan' (see my cites at Citations:Yunnan under the heading "Yunnan as 'Yunan'") might constitute a common misspelling or a typo or perhaps a variant form. Different cites seem to point in different directions: it seems to be a variant (acceptable with three cites), a misspelling (acceptable if common) and a typo (not allowed) all at once, with it being a typo in modern texts, a misspelling in 20th century and a variant in the 19th century. I concluded this was primarily a typo and hence not worthy of its own sense at Yunan, but I did add 'Yunnan' at the top of the 'Yunan' page (see diff). I found all these high-level NYT, WaPo, AP News, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 19th century materials, etc etc cites because I knew from personal experience that this spelling would be pervasive if I lifted a finger to look for any. I've dealt with other variants, misspellings and typos, but this one is a little confusing because it (a) could not be right, ever (b) might have been semi-normalized at one point in the 19th century (c) now exists and will exist likely forever as a pervasive typo. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 14:56, 25 March 2023 (UTC) (Modified)

I ultimately decided (diff) that this was a misspelling within the meaning of Wiktionary. See Yunan#Etymology_2 and the 25 'Yunan' cites at Citations:Yunnan. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 18:42, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

lleísmo

Could someone add an IPA pronunciation guide for the Spanish word lleísmo, please? This word is about a pronunciation phenomenon and if you mispronounce it, you might end up saying a word with the exact opposite meaning. Mölli-Möllerö (talk) 16:06, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

 Done Note that {{es-IPA}} is not perfect, but it's pretty reliable. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:30, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

@Koavf: I think Mölli's point was that lleísmo is inherently pronounced with [ʎ] in contrast to yeísmo, which is not reflected in the automatically generated pronunciation. See the intro at Wikipedia yeísmo. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 19:43, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Oh, yeah, that does make a lot more sense. :/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:46, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, that's my point. I removed the es-IPA template as some of the pronunciations it generates are almost certainly wrong. Mölli-Möllerö (talk) 15:26, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I've added the pronunciation with ʎ manually, do you think more explanation is needed? This is also what the French Wiktionary does for the term. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 16:31, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

No, that is sufficient for the page lleísmo, but now I noticed that a pronunciation template (es-pr) has been used in yeísmo as well! So that needs to be manually added too. I've removed the current pronunciation and replaced it with "(pronunciation needed)." Mölli-Möllerö (talk) 20:19, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Now that I look, I'm not actually sure if the pronunciations generated by the es-pr template were wrong as /ʎeˈismo/ was not one of them. Feel free to undo my edit if this is the case. Mölli-Möllerö (talk) 20:21, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I undid it for now, but I'm not confident about the regional variants since sheísmo and zheísmo are also attested for those specifically. I've tagged it for attention. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:48, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

powersport, powersports

The two definitions are currently subtly different; should they not be merged, or made synonyms? Equinox ◑ 16:29, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, the only distinction I would expect to exist is singular vs plural, and the US/UK national difference in whether the singular or plural is used for the collective. I'll merge the content a la motorsport vs motorsports. The topic is little-discussed outside of being a buzzword in advertisements, though, so it's hard for me to tell whether the requirement for handlebars is definitional. - -sche (discuss) 23:28, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

"used horses" as an Old English translation of car ("automobile")

This has been added by Hundwine and removed by Anthologetes a couple times (see edit history). I am also inclined to remove it, but I guess we could replace it with {{not used}}, so I'm bringing it here to get more input. My initial reaction is (1) of course Old English didn't have a word for modern automobiles, and Egyptian didn't either, and they didn't have words for ICBM or Arizona either, but normal practice seems to be to just not include translations in such cases (it doesn't even seem to rise to the level of using {{not used}}), and (2) if the note is meant to be about the more general sense "a vehicle steered by a driver" / sense 2 "a wheeled vehicle, drawn by a horse or other animal; a chariot", then the note is wrong, Old English had words for that. - -sche (discuss) 17:07, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Everything about having any sort of translation there is wrong and disingenuous. Vininn126 (talk) 17:13, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

It should definitely be removed. A horse isn't a car; you could just as well say "used feet"! It's not linguistic. Equinox ◑ 17:15, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Agreed with all of the above. I noticed Hundwine justified this in their last edit summary by comparison with Latin, but there's nothing surprising about a Latin word existing for a distinctively modern concept when Latin is still used in the real world, as it were—check out the citations for pyrobolus atomicus (atomic bomb), which I made recently. This doesn't apply to Old English so there's no basis on which to expect it to have a word for "automobile". —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 23:21, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

dispatch

I put this on the discussion page of "dispatch", leaving it also here:

It seems dispatch and dispatchable may also mean to control and respectively being controllable or something like that (I'm not a native English speaker!) as in this extract from IEA report [15]Projected Costs of Generating Electricity 2020:

"Nuclear thus remains the dispatchable low-carbon technology with the lowest expected costs in 2025." Sivullinen (talk) 19:58, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

@Sivullinen: Wikipedia has an article on Dispatchable generation, and Google has references to dispatchable energy or power. It does seem to mean power sources that are controllable according to demand for power. DonnanZ (talk) 12:29, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Pronunciation of upazila

Is it "a upazila" (you-pazila) or "an upazila" (up-azila)? DonnanZ (talk) 22:46, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia it’s neither. The first syllable is apparently “oo”. I haven’t checked the OED to see if it has an entry. — Sgconlaw (talk) 22:50, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Ah, I forgot to look there, "an upazila", "an oo-pazila". It could do with IPA. Cheers! DonnanZ (talk) 22:58, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

I had a go at the IPA, using Wikipedia as a guide; it's more than likely wrong, so feel free to change it. DonnanZ (talk) 23:21, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

P.S. The OED doesn't have an entry for this word. — Sgconlaw (talk) 21:12, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Surely the pronunciation given there is the pronunciation of the Bengali word. I'm minded to delete it as unreliable. I'm also wondering if the word should be qualified as Bangladeshi English. I suspect both the Bengali and English words were coined in 1982. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:46, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

If you want to record the form of the indefinite article, I suggest you use a quotation such as "Gopalganj Sadar thana was turned into an upazila in 1984". That was the first decent example that Quiet Quentin gave me, and that was a fair few pages down the list of quotations. (The very first example read like a definition of 'Upazila Health Complex'.) --RichardW57m (talk) 11:46, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

There is an example of Bangladeshi English pronunciation @ 0:50 here which is something like /uːˈpɒdʒɪlə/. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 15:30, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

@RichardW57m I changed the pronunciation to the above, but feel free to remove or change again if unconvinced. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 16:07, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Thesaurus:person of color

Having this basically be a big list of slurs under "hyponyms" seems a bit questionable to me. I'm not totally convinced that it's semantically accurate to treat slurs as hyponyms of neutral terms like this—compare Thesaurus:European and Thesaurus:Asian—but, either way, it might make sense to separate them into a subsection? —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 17:39, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, seems reasonable to at least split the list, neutral terms first, then slurs. (And having them in the thesaurus is an improvement over previously having them in the mainspace entries for neutral terms!) On Talk:black man, BD2412 and I discussed the idea of picking one slur for X and offloading all the other slurs for X to that entry, so n*gcel would be listed as a hyponym of n*gger, not person of color nor Thesaurus:person of color nor black man etc. BD even had the idea of moving all slurs to a single appendix of all slurs, though that'd probably attract more attention to them. BTW I trust we're only moving slurs for people/groups, and don't mind listing derogatory synonyms for e.g. die, as discussed halfway down this discussion. - -sche (discuss) 18:37, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

The appendix is so well-hidden and orphaned from the mainspace that even with an obvious title like "list of all slurs" I'd think not too many people would stumble upon it. And we could also choose a different title. That said, I dont think the appendix is such a good idea either since existing appendix pages tend to be almost wholly ungoverned. —Soap— 12:47, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

*Sigh* Or at least put all the derogatory terms in a collapsed section. — Sgconlaw (talk) 19:39, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

@Sgconlaw: Yeah, I've gone with this as the most obvious minimum solution for now. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:35, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

That sounds like a very good idea, -sche. CitationsFreak: Accessed 2023/01/01 (talk) 19:55, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

@-sche: From an end-user perspective the idea of moving the slurs to separate pages probably does make sense: if you're looking up synonyms of racial slurs you know what you're in for but I'm not sure it would be expected to see them lavishly listed under neutral terms. I think the current situation attracts more attention in that they appear in places where they're not necessarily expected. My concern about the semantic relationship is a bit more general—derogatory synonyms are of course still synonyms but I'm not sure to what extent it makes sense to list them as hyponyms and hypernyms. The inverse relationships, listing a slur as a hypernym of a neutral term and listing a neutral term as a hyponym of a slur, seem obviously tendentious to me. In a semantic map it might make more sense to group like with like and treat only neutral terms as direct hyponyms of neutral terms, and their derogatory equivalents as synonyms branching off from them at one remove. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:19, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I think that's a good metric, that someone should only be presented with these slurs if they're seeking to find slurs. (Obviously, we have to be prepared to deal with bad-faith or even good-faith trolling, like when some users recently argued white/whiteness was a slur/derogatory, but we already/always have to be prepared to deal with that.) When you say move them to separate pages, which of the various ideas discussed here do you mean? Offload all slurs for X to one slur for X (e.g. move all slurs for Black people to n*gger), or offload them to a central Appendix of All Slurs? Or offload them to, say, Thesaurus:person of color (derogatory terms) or some other title in that vein? That last one would do a good job of allowing e.g. Thesaurus:person of color to link to it in such a way that the link simultaneously is not a slur and yet clarifies for anyone seeing it just what they'd find if they clicked it. - -sche (discuss) 21:06, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

@-sche: yes, if it is decided that a separate thesaurus page should be created, I agree that a neutral description like "Thesaurus:person of color (derogatory terms)" should be used. — Sgconlaw (talk) 21:11, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

I think a separate thesaurus page in cases like slurs were there are often so many derogatory terms makes the most sense. Specifically, something like Thesaurus:person of color (derogatory terms) makes sense, but should probably mainly act as a hub to link to more specific derogatory thesaurus pages, like Thesaurus:Chinese person (derogatory terms) expect for terms that are used more broadly/as an umbrella slur. Otherwise Thesaurus:person of color (derogatory terms) would probably become bloated. —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 02:03, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

I think we should also strictly enforce a rule that such a thesaurus page can only contain existing entries, to prevent it from being filled with nonsense entries that people have made up. Red links can be nuked on sight. — Sgconlaw (talk) 04:49, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

@-sche: regarding "I trust we're only moving slurs for people/groups, and don't mind listing derogatory synonyms for e.g. die", isn't it discriminatory towards mortal beings? PUC – 10:57, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Multiple language codes for the same language

Hindko has two language codes, since it has different dialects – hnd and hno. What language code should be primarily used on Wiktionary? From what I know they're not that distinct from each other, so it would make sense to have it categorised under one language. نعم البدل (talk) 20:00, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Both codes stand for groups of dialects. The Wikipedia article states that the southern dialects are more widely understood throughout the Hindko area than are the northern ones, which form a “separate group” also referred to as Hazara Hindko. This suggests that (in the absence of further discriminating dialectal information) hnd is more likely to be an appropriate choice.  --Lambiam 13:04, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

mañegu

o#Fala includes the template

{{lb|fax|Mañegu}}

which links to

wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Martín_de_Trevejo

where CTRL+F finds 0 matches for "mañegu" or "manegu".

Maybe a link to Wiktionary's mañegu page would be more useful? but what else does that template do? Would the below work?

{{lb|fax|[[mañegu|Mañegu]]}}

becomes

(Mañegu)

If that's an improvement, could someone program a bot to replace any instances of {{lb|fax|Mañegu}} with {{lb|fax|[[mañegu|Mañegu]]}}? 173.67.42.107 08:26, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

I've added the term to the Wikipedia article.  --Lambiam 13:14, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Kukudh

The entry is capitalized and the header says it's a proper noun, but the definitions look like common-noun definitions and most uses I see on Google Books, in a variety if languages, are lowercase. Anyone with knowledge of Albanian (maybe User:ArbDardh or User:Etimo) know if this can be moved to lowercase and listed as a common noun? - -sche (discuss) 02:45, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

octopoda (Spanish)

Is this a Wonderfool error for octópoda? Equinox ◑ 23:44, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Wouldn't this be better in WT:RFVN? Vininn126 (talk) 06:26, 31 March 2023 (UTC)