Wiktionary talk:About Egyptian

Noun 1

Headers like ===Noun 1=== or ===Verb 1=== should not be used. Instead, if two nouns are from different etymologies, the format is:

 ===Etymology 1===
 ====Noun====
 ...

 ===Etymology 2===
 ====Noun====
 ...

If the nouns are transliterations of different hieroglyphs, I expect that this counts as them being from different etymologies, unless it is known that both hierogylphs have the same etymology. In that case, and in any case where separate etymology headers cannot be used, the format is simply:

 ===Noun===
 ...

 ===Noun===
 ...

I.e., two noun headers one right after the other. - -sche (discuss) 16:53, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Regarding the point made by Furius on my talk page that not enough is known about Egyptian for us to decide which words are etymologically related and which are not: if you'd rather not sort things into separate etymologies, it is possible to just have four ===Noun=== headers in a row, but when we're dealing with entries like [[b3]] rather than hierogylph entries, I would argue that the first etymology is namely "transliteration of x", the second is "transliteration of y", and so on. - -sche (discuss) 16:58, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

While I find the multiple etymologies with a single POS a little cluttered, I accept your point. I also see that User:Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV has made a similar point on ˤ3. I suspect more editors will do likewise - so it seems best that they be ordered by the creator of the article, and save other editors the work. Furius (talk) 06:58, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Alternative forms

With regard to the placement of alternative forms: in most entries, alternative forms are given 'first' (in the place they now are in [[b3]]), but Egyptian isn't the only language for which this is sometimes considered inappropriate — and as Furius points out on my talk page, because the entries themselves aren't at hieroglyphic pagetitles, we're in the unusual position of presenting standard hieroglyphics after variant hieroglyphs this way. I think there is, therefore, a strong case for presenting alternative forms in a different place in Egyptian entries. Of course,

isn't really an alternative form of "b3", it's an alternative form of

... so perhaps the alternative forms should be presented in the ====Usage notes==== section, as "variant forms of the standard hieroglyphs"? That would allow us to present the standard glyphs first. - -sche (discuss) 17:06, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

I am happy to comply with this. Is it likely that other wiktionary users will consider this a correct usage of the "Usage notes" section (I've mostly seen it used for grammatical issues thus far)? Furius (talk) 19:33, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Now that WT:ELE allows ‘Alternative forms’ sections after the definitions (which wasn’t the case when this discussion took place), having such sections might be the best option. Putting alternative writings with the usage notes ends up cluttered when grammatical notes are also needed there, and readers would probably be more likely to look for alternative writings under an ‘Alternative forms’ header than a ‘Usage notes’ header. Moreover, the main reason for using ‘Usage notes’, being able to have the standard glyphs first, is no longer relevant after the changes to WT:ELE. If no one objects, I’d like to change the entries to consistently use a post-definition ‘Alternative forms’ section (as most already do). — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 00:43, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Seeing no objections so far and thinking them unlikely, I’ll go through and standardize on post-definition ‘Alternative forms’. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:16, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Alternative Transcriptions

There was some discussion on my talk page a while back about what to do about pre-existing articles with alternative transcriptions in the namespace.
It occurs to me that it is better for that info to be here:

We don't use redirects on Wktionary (see Wiktionary:Redirections for some of the reasons why). If a page has the wrong name, then it should be moved, not redirected. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:05, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

I think you're misrepresenting the policy - which as I read it is "alternate forms get entries, not redirects." However, the redirects which I produced were dealing with alternative transliteration systems - that is, both the new entry and the old one are different ways of reproducing the exact same Egyptian word in the Roman alphabet - they're not variants in any real sense - and the nature of Egyptian transliterations is that they're highly unlikely to be words in other languages, either.

The alternative to redirects in this instance is to duplicate all the content for each word across a great number of transliteration systems (an unintentional case of it can be seen in the Egyptian word for cat mjw, which now has entries at mı͗w, miw, and mỉw- which is messy as anything.

Furius (talk) 00:57, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

No, I am not misrepresenting policy. Please read past the first section; the policy also covers alternative spellings and forms with/without diacriticals. If you'd care to discuss this in the Beer Parlour, you'd see a strong backing of why main namespace redirects are strongly, strongly discouraged, even in the sort of cases you mention. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:19, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

EncycloPetey, this is one of the cases where pragmatism trumps rules. What Furius is doing is something that we should encourage. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:01, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Only so long as the page redirected can never, ever be an entry in any language or system of communication. If the page title could be a word or entry in another language, then the redirect becomes lost when an entry is created. That's the point of avoiding redirects in the main namespace. Yes, this can mean some form of duplication, but usually in the form of "alternative form" entries. We can't assume that miw won't exist in any other language, and so it can't be a redirect. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:17, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Miw might be worth using {{alternative form of}} for, but if you've ever studied Egyptian you'll know that transliteration looks pretty unlikely, between the special characters and the crazy consonant clusters (Egyptologists usually pronounce them as if they had /e/ or /ə/ between them; they probably had the former). --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:22, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm aware of the "crazy" consonant clusters, and Egyptian is not the only langauge to have them. Serbian words often appear to have no vowels as well (e.g. srp). --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:27, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

I don't have much of an opinion, but Berber is well known to have words with consonants as the syllable nucleus (i.e., no vowel). --BB12 (talk) 02:31, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Your point makes sense with regard to miw (It would also be an issue with consonant clusters (e.g. qbb), but the different transliteration systems generally agree there, so that's less of an issue). I don't see it being an issue with cases using yogh (ȝ) for aleph (3), which is otherwise only used for Old English, where vowel-less consonant clusters are not going to occur. Not to put words into your mouth, but I suspect that you'll suggest that those duplicates simply be deleted under the diacritic policy. If so, then ok.

The one instance that remains is the Burman-Grimal system, which is quite popular, and uses a combination of upper and lower case characters to transliterate without diacritics (e.g. XArt for ẖ3rt). In most cases, these upper case/lower case combinations seem extremely unlikely to refer to words in any language - and they're sufficiently different that people might search for them (and putting XArt into the search toolbar is obviously not going to return ẖ3rt). Might redirection be a suitable solution in regard to these? I suppose that I ought to take the issue to the Beer parlour to find out? Furius (talk) 14:09, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

B-G has been traditionally used for computers (and originally typewriters, I think), so it would be logical that somebody might search using it. Again, only Romanized Klingon shares that kind of CamelCase mixing, and Klingon of any kind is not allowed outside of the appendix. We can always take it to the BP, although consensus is often painfully unclear. I personally continue to support maximal redirection.--Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 14:17, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Whereas policy has been to suppress the creation of redirects. The yogh also appears in Scots, and there are at least a few Bantu languages that have odd capitalizations. My best suggestion is to create the entries at page names which reflect a preferred system of transliteration. Alternative transliteration systems will be used for "soft redirects". This is, they will have an entry, but with no information other than the language name, a statement about "alternative transliteration of X", and possibly identification of which system of transliteration it is. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:05, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

But the yogh is rare in Scots, and Bantu languages can only have w:open syllables, so again coincidence will be rare. Again, policy vs pragmatism. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:09, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

I think if you lists the alternative forms as links so they redirect to the main entry (even better, with qualifiers which say what the transliteration system is), that's ok. We've done that before. It tackles some (or all?) of the ambiguity problems listed in WT:REDIR. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:22, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

(End quotation) It further occurs to me to emphasise that there are different levels of transcription variant. There are alternative systems (which are listed at w:Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian and are mostly similar) - most of which are variants on the original Erman & Grapow system as used by some particularly influential scholar/work. The major outliers are the Buurman Grimal system, which avoids special characters and is used for entering Egyptian electronically, and Schneider's system, which is used by no one.

There are also alternative orthographic representations of the same transcription system: e.g.

is represented in the Erman & Grapow system by two backwards "c"s on top of each other, which has variously been represented by ȝ or 3 - both are different typographical representations of the Gardiner transcription. Likewise

is represented by an apostrophe of some sort: ' ‘ and ˤ have all been used - again they represent the same transcription system.

While I can see some need for differences between alternative systems to be noted on wiktionary , there seems no need for to note duplicates in the second category. Furius (talk) 07:27, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Inline hieroglyphs

It used to work with

<div>...<div style="display:inline;"> <hiero> hiero-code </hiero> </div>...</div>

trick but it doesn't seem to work anymore, neither here nor on Wikipedia. I must say that the auto-inserted newline is quite annoying when appearing in running text. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 21:15, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Hieroglyphs vs Transcription in the main namespace

There are a growing minority of entries Egyptian hieroglyphs in unicode as their namespace rather than a transliteration (e.g. 𓃮𓏤 vs 3by). I think that transliteration and unicode entries are incompatible. Perhaps I'm biased because I've gotten used to adding transliteration entries, but I think that the unicode entries are the less useful for a number of reasons:

1. They display properly for only the very few people who have an ancient Egyptian font (Usually Aegyptus) installed
2. In the Aegyptus font, their lines are so thin that they are difficult to read (especially when they are hyperlink blue),
3. If someone is searching wiktionary for a word they have seen, they are extremely difficult to enter
4. They can't be stacked like real hieroglyphs, with the result that they look nothing like the actual hieroglyphic words that they are supposed to more accurately represent.

Furius (talk) 11:23, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Should we add a guideline that hieroglyphic entries be redirects to the transliterated entries? - -sche (discuss) 07:07, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

@-sche While I normally support the use of Unicode for things like Sumerian, I think that the positional nature of Hieroglyphs makes transcription better, and I would support redirects. —JohnC5 14:41, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

OK. I presume links should also be to transliterations? See [1]. - -sche (discuss) 19:39, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Transcriptions are easier to work with at the very least because most words can be actually spelled in many different ways with glyphs corresponding to just one transcription. It's also the status quo. Other than that, using Unicode glyphs is not actually any worse than using transcriptions, since we would still be able to use <hiero> tags to arrange the glyphs on the page itself. --WikiTiki89 18:09, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Well, with thanks for the work you've put in, at this point the policy is patently mistaken.

We needed to use transcription when there were no unicode points. They exist now and should be used for Egyptian-language entries. Pinyin is completely standard around the world for Chinese these days and we don't place our Chinese entries using it. We have pinyin entries that link to the properly-encoded format. Exactly the same should happen here: e.g., n should have an ==Egyptian== header with an entry romanization of 𓈖; ditto wn et al. Yes, it's extra work for the entries already made but it'll have to happen sooner or later and whining about the deficiencies of any particular font or even the need to get one to see a foreign language displayed are laughable on a dictionary where we have entries for ግዕዝ and مُحَمَّد and ཁོ་ཕི and အင်းဆက် and 𒅇𒆪𒊒𒌝. The current policy of deleting alternate romanizations instead of linking from them just underlines how wrong-headed the entire approach is.

Displaying the stacked characters in the title is just a coding issue, not an excuse to avoid the transition. — LlywelynII 03:43, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Relevant: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15069-egyptian-plain.pdf , http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16018r-three-for-egyptian.pdf —suzukaze (t・c) 03:52, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure

I'm not sure where to move 𓐍𓈖𓊃𓇓𓅴𓅆 to. - -sche (discuss) 21:33, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Use of 3 for Ꜣ

I guess at this point, it's obvious that it will take quite a bit of grunt-work to change all the transliterations—but why was a nonstandard usage of the digit three used instead of Ꜣ (U+A723 LATIN SMALL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL ALEF)? Thanks, Jchthys (talk) 16:23, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

It's a common substitute and my thought was that it was slightly friendlier to typist and reader, since Ꜣ tends not to be included in character sets. Furius (talk) 12:19, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Again, a reason to include redirects or {{alt form of}} entries and not a reason to avoid putting the entries at the right place. — LlywelynII 03:54, 17 October 2016 (UTC)