Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Wiktionary - Recent changes [en]: User talk:-sche

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User talk:-sche
Jun 25th 2013, 23:27

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On November 4, 2012, you have removed this template from several entries but, contrary to your promise in the [[Wiktionary:Requests_for_deletion/Others#Template:biblical_character|deletion discussion]] ("As for the cleanup, it won't be hard; I'll do it"), you have not added {gloss|biblical figure} nor [Category:xx:Biblical characters]. So how do you propose to go on? Category:Biblical characters is not up to deletion. English John has 7 definitions, so the definition "John" is meaningless without a gloss. I have no time to clean up and check all your contributions. [[User:Makaokalani|Makaokalani]] ([[User talk:Makaokalani|talk]]) 11:11, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

  

On November 4, 2012, you have removed this template from several entries but, contrary to your promise in the [[Wiktionary:Requests_for_deletion/Others#Template:biblical_character|deletion discussion]] ("As for the cleanup, it won't be hard; I'll do it"), you have not added {gloss|biblical figure} nor [Category:xx:Biblical characters]. So how do you propose to go on? Category:Biblical characters is not up to deletion. English John has 7 definitions, so the definition "John" is meaningless without a gloss. I have no time to clean up and check all your contributions. [[User:Makaokalani|Makaokalani]] ([[User talk:Makaokalani|talk]]) 11:11, 15 June 2013 (UTC)
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== lorem ipsum ==
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Hi. May I ask you why you are inspecting so many entries with liggies in 'em? Curious. --[[User:Æ&Œ|Æ&Œ]] ([[User talk:Æ&Œ|talk]]) 23:27, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Latest revision as of 23:27, 25 June 2013

Contents

Archives[edit]

Welcome![edit]

Hello, and welcome to Wiktionary. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here! By the way, you can sign your comments on talk (discussion) pages using four tildes, like this: ~~~~, which automatically produces your name (or IP number if you're not signed in) and the current date and time. If you have any questions, then see the help pages, add a question to one of the discussion rooms or ask me on my talk page.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:55, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi -sche, Today I find abundant durably-archived attestations for mentulomania using Google Books. For example "(1918) The Urologic and Cutaneous Review - Volume 22, Issue 3 - Page 147", "(1898) An Illustrated Dictionary of Medicine, Biology and Allied Sciences - Page 746", "(1919) The American journal of surgery - Volume 33 - Page 193". Please undelete the page for this legitimate medical term. Keith Cascio (talk) 02:57, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

There's nothing wrong with including quotations from blogs and other informal sources though they wouldn't count for verification. Web pages and forums are fickle, and usually a paraphrased example sentence is better. The latter are the only quotations I would consider deleting.

In this case the durability of the quotation may be in question, but that does not mean deletion is acceptable. It was included with the hope of confirming the original source, one that other works we'd consider durable might choose to cite. It may be the case that confirmation will never be possible, but supposing it were, and that the quotation was still not considered durably archived, and then an author came along and put the quotation to print, does it make more sense to you to cite the original speaker indirectly just because the other source is durable?

I mean, any alleged significance of Rush aside, I'm sure there are many important speeches, by presidents, royalty and the like, that are only known from transcription. Do we not attribute these to that person directly, or do we always have to say it's according to such-and-such durable source? DAVilla 05:21, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Ah, I hadn't thought of that, but you're right, we can and should have illustrative quotations even if they do not count towards verification (whether because they're mentions and not uses of words, or because they're questionably archived). I don't understand how the quotation of Limbaugh helps confirm the original source (of the word?) — is he supposed to have coined it? As for comments by presidents and kings, I believe we do cite sources (recorded broadcasts, transcriptions, or published copies of speeches, for instance) even when quoting those. But you're right, we can keep the Limbaugh quotation as illustrative. - -sche (discuss) 20:59, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Translations of attributive use of nouns[edit]

What do you think of encouraging translations of nouns to, in principle, include also the adjectives that translate attributive use of the English noun? I expect that the need for and value of this differs by language, ranging from completely unnecessary through predictable to essential.

How much of this already occurs in translations?

If it makes sense to you in principle, how would it be implemented? Or is there an emerging standard where it already is occurring?

If it can be implemented, how should it be encouraged? DCDuring TALK 22:16, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Re: "what do you think", "how would it be implemented?": You commented in the RFV discussion of belt and suspenders that we could allow adjectives as translations of English nouns to address the fact that English uses nouns attributively where other languages use adjectives. I thought and think that a good idea. (I don't want to preach to the choir, but for anyone else reading this, my argument for it is: it seems already required by our policy of including all accurate translations; if brass can be used in two ways, "that metal is brass" and "the brass knob", but we only provide the translation that works in uses like "that metal is brass", we're missing an accurate translation. Also, it represents a smaller change to our current practices than allowing unjustified adjective sections for English words or allowing foreign language entries to have translations.) I used the RFV-failures of the adjective sections of cork and brass to try it: I moved the adjective translations into the noun section. I standardised my language in both entries (corresponding to English attributive use, meaning '...':), but I wouldn't call that an emerging standard; I'd like to shorten the language as much as possible. Do you have any preferred format / language?
Re: "How much of this already occurs in translations?": So far, I have only preserved existing information; I haven't added new information of this kind to any entry, nor have I seen it in other entries. However, I have seen the counterpart quite often — foreign language nouns in the translation sections of English adjectives (like Dutch: model- in model).
Re: "how should it be encouraged?": I don't know. How have we encouraged things like Dutch: model- (nouns in adjective sections)?
Do you think we should bring this up in the Beer Parlour? - -sche (discuss) 04:46, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
What is at [[cork]] and [[brass]] is very explicit but a bit long. Perhaps we should start with a template with that long explanation. Then we could shorten the explanation if folks object to the length and do so at once for all similar entries. The long text has value in publicizing the approach initially no matter what shortened text we might subsequently settle on.
As for encouragement: One approach might be to locate entries that have English noun and adjective sections with "noncomparable" adjectives and translation sections for the adjective. Those adjective sections could be RfVed where appropriate and the translations merged into the noun section with {{ttbc}}. Another possibility would be to insert {{trreq}} or a specialized version thereof ({{trreq-attr}} to explicitly request adjective translations. Or we could start discussions on Talk pages for one language at a time either at the "About XXX" pages or of leading contributors in language XXX.
Clearly this would need some discussion, certainly at BP. Do you have a sense for how many languages would require this kind of additional translation? This effort would presumably focus on common nouns first, but is the same thing required for proper nouns? What languages are you comfortable with? (Where's your Babel box?) To the extent we don't have comfort with a range of languages (I don't have much to contribute outside of English) we might want to test the idea with a range of languages: Germanic, Romance, Ugaritic, Slavic, CJKV, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, etc., wherever someone might be receptive to the issue. Or we could go straight to the Beer Parlor. DCDuring TALK 11:29, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
I like the idea of a template to introduce adjective translations; in addition to being modifiable, it would be subst:able if we ever decided we preferred raw text to the template. I also like the idea of a {{trreq-attr}} — and I think we would need such a separate template, at least at first, because users are used to {{trreq}} in a noun's translation section meaning only 'please add noun translations of this noun'. (Postscript: it occurs to me we could just modify the text of {{trreq}}.) As for how else to encourage translations: I'd rather approach contributors of foreign languages than seek out adjective sections to delete/'move'. We should probably raise the subject in the BP before creating too many test entries, though, if only to get others' feedback on format. Matthias Buchmeier just had an interesting idea here, of putting attributive-use translations in a separate trans-box. I'm not sure which style is better, but we should probably pick one or the other.
I can contribute German and to varying extents other Baltic-Sea-bordering languages, but the hard part is thinking of applicable words, words that are nouns in English and not also adjectives but that are nouns and adjectives in the other languages. Perhaps simply going through English nouns that are not also adjectives is a way to go, as it seems most English nouns can be used attributively. - -sche (discuss) 20:32, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
We could certainly have someone prepare a list of English entries that have noun sections and no adjective sections. Even better would be a similar list of English etymology sections with the same characteristics. Matthias's idea is more appealing the greater the share of languages that require an adjective translation. I suppose most inflected languages must need one.
I suppose we are as ready as it pays to be before bringing it to BP. My only question is whether to wait we have a large number of senior editors active: August is a slow month. DCDuring TALK 21:27, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
Is there a way to a way to prepare a list of common words that meet those criteria? I expect a complete list would be very long, tens of thousands of words. (We could always just flip through such a comprehensive list manually and pick out common words, of course.) Metals may be a good place to start, as many languages have adjectives for those, where English (to my surprise) often only has nouns. We can certainly wait until September to bring this up; perhaps I can create a few more trial/example entries in the interim. - -sche (discuss) 00:42, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
Spruce is now another test/trial/example entry, as a result of a failed RFV. - -sche (discuss) 22:22, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Where did you get this one from? I've just never seen it spelled that way. Ƿidsiþ 19:23, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

I spotted eglog as I cited pestre; at first I couldn't figure out what it meant (and was going to ask you! lol), but then I found w:Eglogue and w:Eclogue, which said the word was also spelt "eclog" in Middle English. However, Google Books seems to have enough hits (in reprints, etc) that it made more sense to me to make "eclog" a Modern English entry marked "archaic" — "no longer in general use, but still found in some contemporary texts". :) - -sche (discuss) 19:33, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Weird, I can't actually see any good hits for it on b.google (although it's quite hard to search, as Eclog. is a common scholarly abbreviation for eclogue). Ƿidsiþ 19:52, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Try searching for the plural, "eclogs". - -sche (discuss) 20:06, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Some Moldovoromanian things[edit]

So, Cyrillic entries shouldn't be tagged as "Moldovan" or Moldavian (or whatever it is that we stupidly use), for at least two reasons:

  1. Most of Moldova uses the Latin alphabet, only Transnistria requires Cyrillic. (As a sub-reason, there are actually at least two Cyrillic alphabets for Romanian: one that was used in Romania and one that was (and still is used) in Moldova).
  2. There is actually a Moldovan dialect of Romanian (I think there are like 5 major ones or something) where regional context labels would be appropriate, so I can see some confusion coming out of that.

So if we're going to be allowing Cyrillic entries for Romanian (which I think would be nifty), these things have to be taken into account when we bang out an ideal format. — [Ric Laurent] — 11:28, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

You're right, I just mixed up Moldav(i)an and Transnistria(n). As for the old Cyrillic spellings of Romania-Romanian, the BP discussion takes that into account; one suggestion is to format them like Arabic-script Turkish. How's this for a (not-old) Cyrillic spelling, and this for an old Cyrillic spelling (linked-to from here)? Again, Romanian editors should decide the format, I'm just making grob suggestions. - -sche (discuss) 20:14, 13 October 2011 (UTC)
I think on молдовенеск especially, the usage notes are a bit long. I know this, too, will probably invite confusion, but I'd like to see "Moldavian Cyrillic" and "Romanian Cyrillic" where they differ, and just "Cyrillic" where they're the same. Of course I have no idea how frequent that is. Anyway, we can have those things link to descriptions of the Cyrillic alphabets and their uses without having Usage notes on every Cyrillic-spelling entry. — [Ric Laurent] — 20:33, 13 October 2011 (UTC)
We need a section on WT:ARO about this. Then, as you say, we could specify on each entry "this is the form used in the Cyrillic alphabet used in Romania before 1860", "this is the form used in the Cyrillic alphabet used in Moldova before 1989 and still used in Transnistria", etc (or even shorter than that). Feel free to modify the entries as you see fit, and we'll discuss. Also, this vote only explicitly assures the Latin and Cyrillic forms entries (when attested), it does not specifically allow or forbid the transitional alphabet. Including it, words could have five or more ===Alternative forms===:
  1. pre-1860 Cyrillic (used to write Romanian; sometimes in use after 1860)
  2. 1860s transitional (part-Cyrillic, part-Latin alphabet, used to write Romanian)
  3. post-1860 Latin alphabet (used in Romania)
  4. 1900s Cyrillic alphabet (used in Moldova until 1989, still used in Transnistria)
  5. 1989-2010 Latin alphabet spelling (used in Moldova; not a different alphabet, but sometimes different from the spelling used in Romania)
- -sche (discuss) 20:52, 13 October 2011 (UTC)
What's that last one there? I think you might be referring to something caused by the spelling reforms. Not sure how Moldova feels about them... also not sure when they were passed. Hm. That's the less fun part of historical linguistics lol — [Ric Laurent] — 23:09, 13 October 2011 (UTC)
When Moldova switched from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin alphabet, it switched to the alphabet Romania was using. Romania, however, passed a spelling reform a few years later (screw you! we don't want to use the same orthography as you! we're getting a new orthography! — my interpretation, not historically accurate), which Moldova didn't get around to passing for another 15 years or so. Of course, that's the same orthography used in Romania from whenever (1870?) until 1993. I suppose we'll just treat those as dated forms, a bit like connexion#English. - -sche (discuss) 00:26, 14 October 2011 (UTC)
I think what German does for stuff like that is (pre-X year reform spelling) or something like that. I think I like that for Romanian. — [Ric Laurent] — 00:35, 14 October 2011 (UTC)
Good idea! - -sche (discuss) 05:28, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Nice work. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:43, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Care to create this entry? -- Liliana • 22:22, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Ein -sche-scher Eintrag. Erstellt. :) - -sche (discuss) 23:20, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

2 Fragen[edit]

Hallo,

Ich hoffe, dass es in Ordnung ist, wenn ich Dich auf Deutsch etwas frage. Denn mein Englisch ist nicht so gut, um mich adäquat auszudrücken.

  1. Bei der Benutzung des englischen Wiktionary ist mir etwas aufgefallen: unter Windows XP (Opera) erscheint bei Wörterbucheinträgen, die deutsche Übersetzung erhalten, in der obersten Zeile der eingeklappten Translation-Box die deutsche Übersetzung. Aber unter Windows 7 (Notebook, Opera) erscheint sie bei mir nicht. Gibt es da Probleme mit Windows 7 oder muss ich spezielle Änderungen vornehmen, damit ich die deutsche Übersetzung direkt bei eingeklappten Translation-Boxen sehe?
  2. Ist das Translationsscript, das Du für das deutsche Wiktionary löblicherweise erstellt hast, eigentlich einsatzfähig? Oder muss daran noch etwas repariert werden?

Wäre schön im deutschen Wiktionary mal wieder etwas von Dir zu hören, ist in letzter Zeit ziemlich ruhig dort geworden. ;-) Abendliche Grüße --Yoursmile 19:29, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Gibt es schon etwas Neues, -sche? Schöne Grüße --Yoursmile 11:47, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Yeah! Clear out that bastard. I am perpetually alarmed by the length of the Request for pages. Thanks. Equinox ◑ 23:52, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

I agree with what Equinox said. (For some reason, all Wikimedia stuff has been relatively slow to access for the past few days here. It's making the big discussion pages quite painful.) Equinox ◑ 01:07, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
I know; it's odd...even small entries are slow sometimes, but other times, big pages load as quickly as ever. Maybe those expensive templates Ruakh warned everyone about are finally breaking things? Heh. Well, I'm about to pull WT:RFV back down under 200k bytes. - -sche (discuss) 02:03, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

I just thought I'd let you know that your use of the German term inspired me to add an entry for its English calque. :-)  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 17:19, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Oh, neat! I've just added another related term, overseeable. Now we can translate the German entry a bit more specifically than just "clear". :) - -sche (discuss) 21:52, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
Please forgive me for raining on this parade, but is it good lexicographic/educational practice to use in a definiens words like overseeable that don't occur in a large modern corpus like COCA ? DCDuring TALK 23:34, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
Well, I've removed oversightly from the definition, because it (as Raif found) has a specialized definition. "Overseeable" (in quotation marks) has 666 Books hits — 393 if you make a typo like I did initially and open with a single quotation mark; I don't understand why that causes 273 hits to disappear — so it's not totally unused. It's used alongside a more detailed explication, and it's hyperlinked, so people can click to see its definition. It is also, I would argue, the English word which most closely translates the German word. There should be (and is) a definiens using smaller/more common words, too; it would be unhelpful if "overseeable" were the only definition... but I think it is good to have it as part of the definition/translate. - -sche (discuss) 01:03, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
"allotriophagy" is even rarer than "overseeable", but were I to create "Allotriophagie", I would need to use the English word to translate/define the German word. - -sche (discuss) 01:03, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
When I search for "oversightly" in quotes at bgc I get no hits. "Overseeable" is not as bad, but it is sufficiently uncommon that it seem to have retained three meanings, "that can be supervised, supervisable", "that can be seen or commanded from higher locations", "that can be overlooked, missed, or ignored". Note that "supervise" and "overlook" (verb) are terms constructed in parallel but for which a single possible sense has won out over the others in contemporary usage. "Overlook" (noun) also has only one sense, "a scenic viewpoint". The related term "oversight" retains two meanings "omission" and "supervision".
I have long noted that many very uncommon and obsolete English words and senses are used to gloss non-English words. I think this runs the risk of encouraging stilted translations into English and English writings by non-native speakers of English. DCDuring TALK 04:00, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
As for our definition of oversightly, I suspect that two out of three are by non-native speakers of English and are calques, as the Cunningham cite clearly is. DCDuring TALK 04:07, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
I believe we accept (and mark) attested calques, and oversightly is marked, so it's OK as far as I can tell.
You have a good point about stilted translations. I've read that the DPRK's English-language press releases are sometimes stilted because they rely on (the only available) older translation dictionaries. On the other hand, I am loath to intentionally exclude such content. Having "overseeable" in "übersichtlich" is as helpful to someone comparing old German and English texts as it is unhelpful to sometime translating a German text into English now. Would it be a solution to use {{qualifier}} tags in the definition? Then [[übersichtlich]] would be "easily looked over and understood; clear; (dated or uncommon) overseeable", and [[Farbe]] would be "color (US), color (UK)". The obvious problem with that is that it implies to the uninitiated that "overseeable" is a different, dated meaning of "übersichtlich". - -sche (discuss) 07:01, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
You must have meant "colour (UK)". I don't know whether that particular one is worth doing, but I see what you mean.
The obsolete-dictionary problem is one I have seen in entries we have right here! Though in some cases an obsolete or archaic term is valuable, the most important thing is a translation in current English that can be understood by as many users as possible.
What you suggest would seem to work when one knows the answer. But often I don't, though I see a problem with the English. I wonder whether we should have a category and a marker template (({{stilted}}?) for translations or definitions. Or would it be better to use existing templates like {{attention|lang}} or {{rfc-def}}? Is there one specifically for usage example and quotation translations?
We might also benefit from having a list or category of words that have only obsolete senses and/or only obsolete or archaic senses. We could use an offline process to identify non-English sections that use such words and mark them. But clearly there are many cases where a word being used in a translation is being used in a sense which is obsolete or archaic though the word has other senses. For those manual marking is required. DCDuring TALK 16:11, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
┌─────────────────────────────────┘
Yes, "color (UK)" was a typo. I think having a separate template like {{stilted}} that categorized the same as {{attention}} would be preferable to only {{attention}}: Whatlinkshere would show us what used it specifically, and the usual category would show people who like the usual category to contain all problematic entries. We could search Wiktionary on- or off-line for dated words like "overseeable", but the problem you note about senses remains. I'm not yet happy with the appearance of "easily looked over and understood; clear; (dated or uncommon) overseeable", though.
It may amuse you to note that I debated the marking of stilted de→en translations with editors on de.Wikt. In one case, I argued that translating "der Ministerpräsident [[relativierte]] seine Äußerung, man müsse die Mauer wieder aufbauen" as "the prime minister [[relativized]] his statement that the wall should be rebuilt" rather than "[[qualified]] his statement" sounded entirely too philosophical and/or outdated... but "relativize" was in dictionaries, so others insisted it stay. - -sche (discuss) 20:18, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
Yes, FWIW, I think relativized in that context would be misunderstood; it's a bad translation. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 10:58, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

I've got to say, you're doing an incredible job with that page. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 10:51, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Thank you! I'm trying to clear it out before the world ends. (I make fun of the doomsayers. This does inspire me, however, to improve our baktun entry. Some sources say that word was invented by Europeans.) :P The bottom of the "oldest tagged RFVs" list is from October now, so...progress. - -sche (discuss) 21:02, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Wow. Congratulations and thanks. DCDuring TALK 01:23, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Word. It's especially incredible how long you've kept up with it; I've never seen an RFVican with your sticktoitiveness! —RuakhTALK 01:41, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
Further congratulations and thanks. DCDuring TALK 13:35, 19 March 2012 (UTC)
You're welcome. Now, once all the entries left over from last year are taken care of, we just have to stop letting things sit on the page indefinitely, and it won't balloon to such proportions again. :)

Citation formatting[edit]

Thank you for the corrections on the citations page. You said, "technically they're all supposed to be bulleted and unspaced, like Citations:parrot." This seems to be an unwritten rule as I do not see that at Wiktionary:Citations#Formatting. Is it okay to update that page to reflect this rule? BenjaminBarrett12 (talk) 08:00, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Certainly! I suppose the drafter of that page intended the example entries (Citations:trade and Citations:parrot) to show the format, but it is a better idea to explain the format on the page, rather than expecting users to intuit it. - -sche (discuss) 23:29, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Thank you also for the tip on italics as not very good for attestation and other comments and help. I always appreciate the thoughtful advice. BenjaminBarrett12 (talk) 21:47, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

there-words[edit]

Dutch has a category for such words: Category:Dutch pronominal adverbs. Maybe the same could be done for English? Then a template wouldn't be needed anymore. —CodeCat 19:59, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

English has a category, too, but See also sections are still helpful. (Compare the discussion of whether or not to do away with the "Coordinate terms" section just because there are categories, in which I agree with those who say categories don't obviate the need for Coordinate terms sections.) I modeled the there-, here-, where- templates on {{decimate equivalents}}. - -sche (discuss) 20:12, 8 April 2012 (UTC)
But because most there-words have an equivalent where-word and here-word, maybe a collapsible table with three columns would be better instead? —CodeCat 20:13, 8 April 2012 (UTC)
Good point. I'll see about combining them. - -sche (discuss) 22:17, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

I am not sure I agree with not utilizing the jurisdictional 12 weeks that I had. To better define it maybe adding a US context tag would make sense. Also, I don't know what the correct way on definitions is, but I was always taught to not define a word with a form of that same word. Doesn't this sentence seem weird to you? "The definition of abortion is an induced abortion." That is why I tried to pull the word or forms of it out of the definition. Now the 12 week thing, isn't a point worth arguing. I am not trying to politicize the definition, just utilizing my reference books, common sense, and throwing in a bit of my knowledge. Also, is the double "##" not accepted at all on this site? I saw someone else using it in a similar situation, and it looked and felt right. Speednat (talk) 06:29, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

re "12 weeks": Even in the US, a woman who aborts a fetus after 14 weeks is said to have had an abortion. It happens that some US jurisdictions have tried to ban abortion after 12 weeks, but that only means that abortion is only legal in the first 12 weeks, not that "the surgical or medicinal procedure that terminates a pregnancy by removing the fetus" ceases to be abortion after 12 weeks. We don't give jurisdiction-specific definitions anyway, because they are so numerous. Compare "mayor" or "defamation": what constitutes "defamation", or what power and responsibility a "mayor" has, varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but we only give the general definitions.
re "induced abortion": Wiktionary (like most dictionaries) tries to avoid duplication of content. One sense of "abortion" is exactly "induced abortion", so we simply direct users to click on "induced abortion" for that definition. If we gave the full definition in both entries ("abortion" and "induced abortion"), we'd have to keep them in sync, lest they fall out of sync and imply there was some difference in meaning.
re "##": Subsenses are used when appropriate, but in this case, I think it's easier to interpret the dated "miscarriage" sense and the "induced abortion" sense as separate senses. Listing "induced abortion" as a subsense of a dated sense could wrongly imply that the "induced abortion" sense itself was dated. Of course, this is a possibility with regard to subsenses; what do you think of it? - -sche (discuss) 07:16, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
re 12 weeks: It makes sense to not jurisdictionalize things, now that you have brought out the finer points.

re induced abortion: I guess it isn't as bad as I let on, as it is being defined as an induced abortion which can be clicked for a better explanation. Also I hadn't realized the ease in keeping thinks sync'ed up by what you have stated. It makes better sense once it was explained to me. Finally on the subsenses, I think that the subsense you used makes it look and read well. Thanks for explaining a few points to me. Speednat (talk) 17:58, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Hullo. You were correct that this term is used in the French tongue, but it does exist in English : 1, 2, 3. I also added an English citation in the entry to enforce this. I am not blaming you (since we all know that Google whips stolen orphans from Ukraine to develop their scanners, among other products), but I just thought that you should know. Ciao. --Æ&Œ (talk) 02:32, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Your changes[edit]

I like what you have done with your changes to my edits, and am currently discussing such with Ruakh.

I like what you did with the "see the "Hurry-furry" merger", but I would prefer if you marked the "merry, Mary, marry" merger pages with "see the "merry, Mary, marry" merger" instead of slight POV-ish "most dialects", "New England" and such. Tharthan (talk) 19:39, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Also, you missed "burrow‎", "flurry" and a few other pages, I believe. Tharthan (talk) 19:46, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Well, I put "see the hurry-fury merger" because I wasn't absolutely sure which was the merged pronunciation and which was the unmerged. I've currently asked for help sorting that out in the Tea Room. Where I could tell which accent had which pronunciation, I indicated that, because it helps our readers to know which pronunciation is used in which region. (Check out [[háček]], which lists 10 English accents.) "Most accents" could be POVish — I suppose slightly less brief wording would be "outside New England" or similar. As for "burrow" etc: thanks; I'm getting to them. :) - -sche (discuss) 19:49, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

No problem. And the pronunciation I gave was the unmerged.

In the unmerged pronunciation: "hurry" is /ˈhʌɹi/ "furry" is /fɝ.ɹi/

I hope that helps.

EDIT: I forgot the tilde, sorry. Tharthan (talk) 19:56, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Simplicity[edit]

I think I know an easier way of describing the vowels of the "hurry, furry" merger.

Though both spelt with "-urry", "furry" is derived from "fur", thus justifying the "ɝ"; which is also found in "hurt", "blur", "sure", etc. It is essentially the "er" of "derp."

Hurry, flurry, scurry etc. the other hand, all have a distinctive /ʌ/; the sound of the "u" in "dumb."

Does that help? Tharthan (talk) 20:23, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

You've got it; the changes you made to the hurry page are 100% correct. Tharthan (talk) 20:34, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Great. :) And thank you for adding the audio! - -sche (discuss) 20:36, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

No problem. =D

Now all that needs to be done is to apply that to flurry, scurry, furrow, borough, etc.

Thanks again. Tharthan (talk) 20:37, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Oh, one last thing.[edit]

I noted this on Ruakh's channel, but (for the "merry, Mary, marry" merger):

UNMERGED (FOUND IN NEW ENGLAND. ALSO OCCURS IN NEARLY ALL OTHER ENGLISH SPEAKING COUNTRIES; ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, NORTHERN IRELAND, AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, ETC.):

MERRY- /mɛri/ MARY- /mɛəri/ MARRY- /mærri/

PARTIAL MERGER (FOUND IN PARTS OF NEW YORK; POSSIBLY SOME MIDWESTERN AREAS?):

MERRY- /mɛri/ MARY- /mɛəri/ MARRY- /mɛəri/

FULL MERGER (QUITE WIDESPREAD [IN THE U.S.] OUTSIDE OF NEW ENGLAND):

MERRY- /mɛəri/ MARY- /mɛəri/ MARRY- /mɛəri/

And if you could reword the stuff on the "merry, Mary, marry" articles just a tad, that would be great.

Tharthan (talk) 20:50, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi! I saw you added louver to the See also section at love. ?? I don't get it. Leasnam (talk) 03:32, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

It was a reference to a TV show, in which a character read the definition of love (but messed up and actually read the definition of louver). I'll undo the addition. (I would have undone it after a day or two anyway.) This does make me wonder if [[louver]] and [[lover]] should link to each other, though... - -sche (discuss) 04:11, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Category:!Kung nouns - if this is a "bad" title, what is "not bad"? Maro 23:03, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

Category:ǃKung nouns, which uses the Unicode click character rather than the ersatz exclamation mark. Note that a bot (or I) will move the entries shortly. See Wiktionary:RFM#Click_characters_in_language_names_and_2x_.21Kung. Cheers, - -sche (discuss) 23:15, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
Ok, I didn't know that this is not an exclamation mark. But they look the same, don't they? So why unicode needs another character for this? I wonder more why English uses in ENGLISH name of the language a character that is not a letter and is unpronouncable for an English speaker? Why not just "Kung"? The more sick, I think is ǃXóõ. Why is this called to be an English word? How to pronounce it? The pronunciation given in ǃXóõ is not English... Maro 23:39, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
Yes, it's definitely confusing that the two characters look the same. I should have left a link to the click-title in my deletion summary when I deleted the exclamation-mark-title; I'm sorry. As for the English names of the language: "Kung" is also attested as a name for ǃKung, but as Angr commented at WT:RFM, "ǃKung" is more common. I agree that most English-speakers wouldn't know how to pronounce the "ǃ", but most English-speakers don't write about "ǃKung" (or "Kung") at all, so the literature — since it's written mainly by specialists — tends to take the foreign spelling into English wholesale, and hence "ǃKung" is more common as the name of the language than "Kung". "ǃXóõ" is in a similar position, although I have proposed (at WT:RFM#Template:nmn) renaming it to the 'less foreign' and more pronounceable "Taa". - -sche (discuss) 00:52, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Reference section[edit]

I have started placing the reference section at the end of all languages as I ran across a situation with multiple references. So, it made better sense to place it at the end initially, instead of waiting for a possible similar situation to occur. Let me know what you think. Speednat (talk) 18:36, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

By "sitation with multiple references", do you mean an entry where there were <ref>-tags in multiple language sections? You can still add the <references/> tag to the right language section in those cases — the software can handle it (see, for example, [[dog]], where there are references at the very end of both the English and Mbabaram sections), and that way the references are always in the language section they're relevant to. :) - -sche (discuss) 19:00, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, I swear, on the "situation" that I was referring to (I am trying to find it), it didn't do that, but dog disproves that, so thanks. Also I notice on Abbe condenser, on the pronunciation, you worked the entire entry, I was under the impression that on entries with multple words, we only neede to specify the details of the "main" or "in-question" word. Hence, the missing condensor. I am trying to locate, why I thought that. Regardless, if you could help clarify/verify the need for that. I don't like not finishing an entry that I have been working on, and I even dislike more, having my hard work "undone" due to it being redundant or unnecessary. Let me know Speednat (talk) 23:31, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
Yeah, Wiktionary's software is odd sometimes, so it's entirely possible you found a page where multiple <references/>s didn't work at first. Another oddity is that if someone creates a new page with a link to itself in it, which happens for example if they create an entry for a word with a plural form that's identical to its singular form, the plural will often show up as a redlink, even though the page exists because it was just created. No-one is quite sure why that happens. A null-edit (click "history" and then change the bit of the URL that reads "&action=history" to "&action=purge") or the passing of a few days usually makes such oddities resolve themselves.
To the best of my knowledge, when we give pronunciations, we give the pronunciation of the entire term. A lot of print dictionaries will only give the pronunciation of the "in-question" parts, as you say: they go for brevity because they have a limited amount of space (lest they be too large to carry). Wiktionary goes for clarity, because space is practically unlimited. (Check out Appendix:Unsupported titles/Protein/pronunciation if you want to see the most extreme pronunciation we have... but save whatever you're doing first, in case the massive size of that page crashes your browser.) - -sche (discuss) 01:34, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I don't know if I should feel picked on by your following all my edits, but if I am learning I guess it doesn't matter. Do we not use the {{borrowed}} or {{borrowing}} templates anymore. In hindsight, I think the borrowing template would have been better, but you used neither, and that "seems" wrong. Speednat (talk) 23:35, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Try not to feel picked on... Wiktionary is just a lot more rigid than Wikipedia when it comes to formatting, and Wiktionary gets a smaller volume of edits, too, so I (and other editors) tend to 'bring entries up to speed' as I see them, rather than letting there be a backlog of unchecked diffs like Wikipedia and the German Wiktionary have. {{borrowed}} is a {{qualifier}}-like tag that's placed after words in certain circumstances, like lists of descendants (as in [[athleta]]). I was actually unaware of the existence of {{borrowing}} until you mentioned it just now, but it seems to be perfect for use in etymologies. :) - -sche (discuss) 01:46, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
Just changed abattoir using borrowing template. take a look, let me know Speednat (talk) 02:00, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
It looks good! :) - -sche (discuss) 00:58, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

What am I doing to anger Dan?[edit]

I am getting frustrated with the amount of negativity produced by Dan Polansky. I have crossed paths with him a couple of times and he seems to be getting personal with his attacks. I am not sure what to do. Obviously, I am trying to avoid any nasty confrontation and edit war, but I don't like being accused of copyright violations due to an odd "technical" definition that I have trouble rewording, so I enter the definition as a near-quote, WITH reference. I onlu do this on those technical ones that I have one example to work off of. Second, he is now going after my etymology entries, like those need to be originally created by us editors as well. Either Abbetdin comes from certain Hebrew words or it doesn't and either those words translate to certain English words or they don't. I understand the need for vigilance on the copyright front as that may cause system wide issues, which is why, I have restarted my editting order from A and am eliminating all of the quotes of entries that I can, of which the vast majority were there long before I started editting here. Please advise, and I apoligize for my rant, but you seem to be even-tempered and are an admin, and I respect your work and opinions thus far. Speednat (talk) 23:43, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

FWIW, DP made a nasty little snipe against me today, too, on my user page. When I pointed out that I had already called for the word in question to be deleted (I had created it), he made an incoherent follow-up that seemed to be an explanation or perhaps an apology. Then he placed a different entry I had created on RfV, which is strange because lots of Google Books citations are readily available. --BB12 (talk) 23:59, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
don't get me started. DCDuring TALK 00:04, 28 August 2012 (UTC)
Yeah, Dan snaps at people sometimes... he may just be having a bad day/week. It happens... one of our admins(!) snapped and deleted the Main Page not long ago. (Actually, snapping and deleting the Main Page seems to be an admin tradition haha...although mostly it's just one admin.) I would just let things go through the usual channels: if someone sends a word to RFV, there are plenty of people (myself included) who'll try to cite it (or in the case of Abbetdin/Abbethdin, move it to a more attested spelling). And if the two of you find yourselves in an edit war, let other users/admins intercede. - -sche (discuss) 00:08, 28 August 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for the perspective! --BB12 (talk) 01:07, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your involvement btw; however, in my reference Abderian and Abderite have two different and mutually exclusive definitions.

Abderian or abderian meaning having the qualities of Abdera, ie an item is Abderian, or that is an abderian person, whereas-

Abderite or abderite meaning from Abdera, ie. The Abderites attacked our village, or.. he was an abderite. Well that last one doesn't actually work out the way I thought it would in my head, but I think you get my point. You added under Abderian the definition, "An inhabitant or native of Abdera." Which I think is a definition for only Abderite. All this is of course moot, if while looking around google.book or wherever you look, you found more information that necessitates this new sense being added in. Thanks for your time and ear. Let me know. Speednat (talk) 00:58, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, there are a number of books that use Abderian(s) to mean inhabitant(s) of Abdera, e.g.
  • 1872, Stephen Smith, Doctor in Medicine: and Other Papers on Professional Subjects:
    "He regrets that his lines had not fallen in the pleasant places of the past — among the intelligent Abderians of whom it is said, when Hippocrates came to their city to cure Democritus of his madness, not only the men, but also the women and children […] went forth to meet him."
I'll look into Abderite.
Sometimes, dictionaries have terms or senses that are not actually attested (like Abbetdin, it seems, the "breath" sense that used to be in [[ψυχή]] until we discovered it wasn't attested); we put those in Appendix:English dictionary-only terms. Conversely, sometimes dictionaries don't have terms and senses that can nevertheless be found in books. - -sche (discuss) 01:46, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

"Wirksam" and alike words[edit]

Thanks. I've responded you on my talk page. One thing I don't know about - if <k p t> is followed, but not preceeded by a sibilant within the same morpheme, is it aspirated? Because I don't know how to transcribe it. The recording of wirksam on Forvo has a weakly or perhaps not at all aspirated <k>. But then... in "wirksam" it's not within the same morpheme (wirk-sam). Or am I wrong? I've always sucked at linguistic terminology. The guy from Forvo that recorded it is from near Leipzig, and I don't know about these dialects losing the aspiration... how is it then? You're a native interested in phonetics so... you ought to know! :P --89.79.88.109 02:34, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

That's an interesting question! I wrote a more detailed reply (and might still post it), but I think I should defer for the most part to the linguist Dr. Karl-Heinz Best. You can ask him on his talk page on de.Wikt, or I'll ask him when I get a chance.
Briefly, though, my feeling is that /k/ should be weakly aspirated in "wirksam", because the /z/ is separated from it across a syllabic and morphemic boundary... but the switch from voicelessness to voicing makes the sequence /k.z/ hard enough for many people that even the Duden's audio of wirksam and aufmerksam actually sound to me almost like /ɡ.z/ and /k.s/ ([k.z̥]?), respectively. Because even phonetic transcriptions which note instances of strong aspiration can omit weak aspiration, my instinct would be to omit the [ʰ]. - -sche (discuss) 12:06, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

McDonald's[edit]

"no-one has commented proposing that they don't meet CFI" — isn't that why they were put up for RFV though, to request citations that pass the BRAND rules? Equinox ◑ 00:02, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

The term itself is in clear widespread use, so any debate must (I presume) be over whether that common use passes BRAND or not. While in the first RFV Liliana thought there was "no chance" it did, and you seemed to also think it didn't, Purplebackpack thought it did, Mglovesfun thought it did, and Anatoli thought it did. Thus, a majority of voters thought it met the relevant CFI.
After the first RFV petered out, WT:BRAND changed, yet thereafter, no one — in the five months it sat at WT:RFV for its second RFV — made the slightest suggestion that it did not meet the new BRAND. Hence my comment "no-one has commented proposing that they don't meet CFI, so they're staying".
I would be sympathetic to a RFD of Amtrak and Citibank, if you open one (thought I expect a RFD of McDonald's itself would fail). - -sche (discuss) 00:15, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Would you be able to give a translation too? —CodeCat 10:32, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

I started to translate it when I added it, but I wasn't certain of the translation of fjǫld or frœða.
It's also worth noting that I used the Codex Regius version; the Hauksbók has (with spelling normalised):
Fram sé ek lengr[a], — For I see far [/much],
fjǫld kann ek segja, — [fjǫld] can I say,
The traditional translations are unhelpful when it comes to this verse: Thorpe doesn't even have it (that I can find); Bellows seems to be translating the R version, but changes the third person to the first:
Much do I know,
and more can see
Of the fate of the gods,
the mighty in fight.
Mundal and Wellendorf translate R:
She knows much of wisdom, / I see further ahead / to the strong victorious gods' / ragnarǫk.
and H:
I see further ahead / I can say much / to the strong victorious gods' / ragnarǫk.
Translating fjǫld "much" and frœða "knowledge" seems to be standard, so I've gone with that.
- -sche (discuss) 19:38, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
Fjǫld is properly a noun, and Gerhard Köbler gives it as: fjǫl-d, an., st. F. (ō): nhd. Menge
For frœða there is: frœð-a, an., sw. V. (1): nhd. klug machen.
So I would translate that sentence as something along the lines of she knows how to give knowledge/wisdom to many, or in the Codex Regius I can say a multitude. —CodeCat 20:02, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
I saw the verb frœða in Köbler, but oddly overlooked fjǫld, though I see it now (perception filter?!). I just checked Cleasby-Vigfússon; they have have fjǫl as "a deal" and "much", and that's also how I would interpret Köbler's gloss (as "amount" rather than "multitude"). Since a number of other translations have "much" rather than "to many", I think we should stick with "much", but I have changed the translation to treat frœða as a verb rather than a noun. - -sche (discuss) 20:46, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
The verb frœða is a class 1 weak verb derived from the adjective fróðr ("wise"). Verbs of this type have the general meaning "to make [someone, something] (adjective)", and that implies this verb means "to make wise". The most straightforward interpretation is then that fjǫld is the direct object of this verb, so that fjǫld frœða would mean literally "to make many/a multitude wise". The word fjǫld itself is presumably derived from a Germanic pre-form *felu-þō, and has the same suffix as the many English words in -th such as length, width, etc. That makes it clearly a noun. —CodeCat 21:03, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
I've switched to the Hauksbók version of the Norse as its grammar is easier to translate; I think this bypasses/obviates the issue. - -sche (discuss) 22:54, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Hi,

Sorry but I just feel like reverting your edits. The translations had glosses when you started adding your {{ttbc}}'s. Many translators won't come back. You know some of these languages. Why, why?! Even if you doubt some translations, why cast doubts on ALL of them? I don't think your "conversion" was justified. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 05:08, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

EncycloPetey cast doubt (rightly, IMO) over all of the translations years ago, by putting the {{rfc}} tag over the translations section and listed the entry at Wiktionary:Requests_for_cleanup#ghost. He did this because many were added by IPs and were quite suspect (e.g. obscure languages probably copied from some other site's listing of terms with no regard to accuracy). However, the RFC listing went unresolved, because no single person had the fluency in every language that would be necessary to check all of the translations at once. My edit, which converted the RFC into individual TTBCs, allows each translation to be checked individually, on its own time, until all have been checked. This way, it can eventually be determined which are valid and which are not. In the meantime, all of the translations are still in the entry, unmoved: I did not remove any information from the entry (except when I combined the Serbo-Croatian translations), and I barely altered the way the page looks: the only visible difference is that the language names now display highlighted in green. - -sche (discuss) 05:21, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
OK. I guess I have some work to do on this one. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 05:26, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
Sorry if I was harsh yesterday. You're trying to do the right thing. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 01:34, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
It's OK.
I've been checking as many of the translations as I can, and I see you've been checking a lot of them, too; I hope others will pitch in. I've already noticed and removed a few that were inaccurate (such as Old High German tiufal, which is actually "devil, demon" more than "spirit of a dead person"). - -sche (discuss) 01:41, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Barză and other terms[edit]

Hi -sche,

I'm contacting you about the advice you gave me in the Tea Room concerning Torvalu4 and his/her edits to Romanian entries. I've commenced the tedious process of going through the list of terms edited by him/her and I've begun to undo changes where it has been necessary. I've spent a considerable amount of time checking up etymologic information attributed to the terms and I've changed the etymologies so that they respect the NPOV guidelines of the Wiktionary project. Needless to say, I was more than frustrated when I discovered that he/she – again – expunged my edits early this morning. I will keep undoing his/her edits, but what's the point if he/she persists to exclude any other theory but the Albanian one? Please tell me what to do. Best regatds, --Robbie SWE (talk) 10:10, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

This is a difficult issue, because it seems like you and Torvalu are the only one(s) here who speak Romanian, and I'm hesitant to block a prolific contributor for edits in a language I don't speak. Having said that, I believe that the consensus reached in the Tea Room was that Torvalu is acting inappropriately by removing the non-Albanian theories, so I have issued a short block. If Torvalu continues to edit-war, longer blocks can be issued. (Another possibility is to protect the articles, but because this only involves one user, blocking that user seems more appropriate.) Keep me informed if he or she resumes edit-warring after the block expires, - -sche (discuss) 22:19, 18 September 2012 (UTC)
I understand the precarious situation and your hesitation to block users whose contributions to some degree are useful. However, I doubt that Torvalu4 has a substantial knowledge of the Romanian language. I've actually questioned his/her proficiency in the Tea Room discussion, without receiving an answer or denial – fact being that he/she doesn't use a Babel-template in their user page letting us know what their specialties are. He/she has made erroneous statements (e.g. "g" in lega, frig and înghiți showing a [ʤ] development – phonetically inaccurate), wrong translations (for chilblain, păducel was listed as the Romanian equivalent – I have changed it now) and ignorance to linguistic development of the language (statements issuing that a certain phenomenon is isolated when it in fact occurs in several well-known examples, e.g. "v < b" confusion in Latin to Romanian, present in words like bătrân, boace, bășică etc.). I really hate speculating, but I just don't see how somebody who "claims" to know a language can make such inaccurate statements. In conclusion, I will monitor words which have provoked this dispute and I'll go through the list of Romanian words edited by Torvalu4 and make sure that they respect NPOV. If you have any questions or if you oppose any of my changes – since I'm not entirely acquainted with Wiktionary's guidelines and formats – please let me know! Best regards, --Robbie SWE (talk) 09:37, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
Sorry to reopen this discussion, but I just had to ask. Torvalu4 has started editing again, only this time Spanish and Basque terms. I'm just wondering if the changes done to e.g. bruja are ok, since they pretty much resemble the changes he/she did to Romanian terms. I'm not contesting the information added to the etymology, but was it necessary to remove the "origin unknown" part since linguist still to this day discuss the origin of the term? Thanks, --Robbie SWE (talk) 09:05, 27 September 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. There are, fortunately, a lot of Spanish-speakers (and, relevantly, one or two Old Irish-knowers) on Wiktionary, so I'll bring this to everyone's attention in the Tea Room and it should be possible to get a lot of input. - -sche (discuss) 19:06, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

USRegionDisputed[edit]

I have created a template and a request category for items like gullywasher, which can reasonably be resolved only by consulting the Dictionary of American Regional English, whose fifth volume is now available in print. I should be able to consult it from time to time. Please add the template to any English entries that have such disputes so I work on those first. I intend to review all US terms that currently have regional distribution claims. At present those would be the ones in subcategories of Category:American English, perhaps 400. There must really be more entries and thousands more potential entries. DCDuring TALK 00:45, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't agree that the Dictionary of American Regional English is the only reference work which can resolve terms' regional distribution; I've just added a number of other references and citations to gullywasher. I will add that template to terms which disputed regional usage, though. - -sche (discuss) 00:50, 30 September 2012 (UTC)
It's the most definitive. I expect that the other sources rely on the volumes of it that were available at the time of their writing. The project is reaching an advanced stage of completeness: The fifth volume (through Z) has been published this year. A catch-up supplement volume is expected shortly, followed by some electronic publication.
What sources do you use? I consult Mencken, not for the scholarship, but the writing. DCDuring TALK 01:05, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Hi. I see that you reformed the headers at b3, which already confirmed to the standard currently set out at Wiktionary:About Egyptian. That standard is still in draft phase, so I was wondering whether you might want to offer some criticism of the policy as a whole - so that it can be brought more into line with wiktionary users' expectations (If so, you'll probably want to skip past the bits on hieroglyphs). Your changes were to divide each sub entry into its own etymology, and to shift the alternative forms out of the POS. With regards to the first change, I'm not sure whether enough is known about Egyptian etymology to do that - but I'm sure we can fudge it. With regards to the second, I'm less ambivalent, as on the one hand, Egyptian varient spellings tend to be specific to particular parts of speech (i.e. if there is an etymologically linked noun and verb, they'll still probably be written differently in hieroglyphs), while on the other, I want to have the standard hieroglyphs appear first, because otherwise they come awfully late in the entry (Since, unlike in normal entries, they aren't in the title space). Furius (talk) 09:17, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know about WT:AEGY; I've replied there. :) - -sche (discuss) 17:07, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for your rapid response! I will reply there, also. Furius (talk) 05:52, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi, -sche,

Could you explain why you expect Dutch in a Hanseatic colony? --129.125.102.126 20:47, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Considering your edit, do you think that komputa must be reconstructed as a pre-1885 word because it is found in Tok Pisin, Bislama and Pijin? --129.125.102.126 00:23, 7 October 2012 (UTC)
Computers were not known in the Pacific in 1885. In contrast, petrol and benzene were. - -sche (discuss) 02:00, 7 October 2012 (UTC)
Bensin isn't benzene. Depending on where you're from, it might be petrol, but that makes your "either German or English" somewhat shaky (benzene#English mentions that the 1st known mention of benzene (earlier benzine) is from 1872). --129.125.102.126 21:44, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
Could you please answer, or at least drop the pseudonym? --129.125.102.126 03:42, 27 October 2012 (UTC)
I thought we already went through this, at User talk:Metaknowledge#bensin. At this point, I honestly don't care what you do the etymology, but I think the most honest approach would be to admit that creole etymologies tend to be pretty unclear when not self-evident. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 04:12, 27 October 2012 (UTC)
Well, I think that "ultimately from German" is better for "pretty unclear" than an anachronistic choice excluding one of the languages which was used at that time at that place. --129.125.102.126 21:27, 8 November 2012 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you mean by your reference to pseudonyms. As for the etymology: the reference I supplied, which considers it to have derived from German or English, is the only one I can find. Are you advancing a different theory? If so, do you have any reference to support your theory? As for the meaning of "benzene", take a look at Crowley's comments, which I posted to Talk:bensin: he explains how the English word shifted in meaning such that benzene is no longer petrol (but was at the time it might have been borrowed). - -sche (discuss) 04:36, 27 October 2012 (UTC)
About my "reference to pseudonyms": you reverted another edits by me while ignoring my comments here. I'm quite sure you didn't intend to bully me, but several pseudonyms reverting my edits, and tag teaming at talk pages, is intimidating. You obviously are a serious editor, why do you feel the need to hide behind a pseudonym? --129.125.102.126 21:27, 8 November 2012 (UTC)
"-sche" isn't a pseudonym, it's a user name. It's quite normal on wiki sites to only use one's user name- I use my real name as my user name, but that's my own, idiosyncratic choice. Your remarks about pseudonyms might be taken more seriously if they were coming from someone other than an anonymous IP. Given the lack of non-verbal cues in written communication, reading ulterior motives into people's actions- or lack thereof- is a good way to get over-stressed about nothing.
Also characteristic of wikis is the tendency for people to participate in conversations they're interested in, regardless of who's talk page it's on- "tag teaming" implies some kind of coordination behind the scenes- there is none. Chuck Entz (talk) 08:45, 9 November 2012 (UTC)
I am, most of all, opposing the theory that the Hanseatic cities would only be speaking High German during the late 19th century. For that I offer the different theory that they (at least: also) spoke Low German. Perhaps I can even find sources, but stuff like "bears shit in the wood" and "the Pope is catholic" usually doesn't get explicit mentions. --129.125.102.126 21:27, 8 November 2012 (UTC)
For the etymology of bensin (as "pidgin English" for petrol) I also have a different theory: cognates of bensin were (and are) used in many languages for somewhat related chemical fluids. The invention of the w:Otto engine made many of those words to (also or mostly) mean "Otto engine fuel", my theory is that bensin#Indonesian, bensin#Norwegian, and bensin#Tok_Pisin are cognate words, but originally didn't mean "petrol"/"gasoline", simply because there wasn't a suitable engine when the words entered those languages. I don't have sources for that either, but I'm quite sure I can find old enough uses of bensin, benzine, бензин, benzina, benzene, Benzin, benzin &c. --129.125.102.126 21:27, 8 November 2012 (UTC)
I should apologize for answering so slowly. Your "according to..." is a superb solution, IMHO. --129.125.102.126 21:27, 8 November 2012 (UTC)
I'm glad that resolves this, then. I also apologise for answering slowly. - -sche (discuss) 22:49, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Noah is not only a Biblical character. He is also an Iqan (Baha'i scripture) character and Quran character. Pass a Method (talk) 18:42, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

We could always create categories like Category:en:Quranic characters in addition to Category:en:Biblical characters.
As for the template itself, you might like to comment here. Cheers, - -sche (discuss) 18:54, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

I noticed some of my inline citations have been deleted and am wondering why. Inline citations are a very accurate and precise way to point out specific pieces of information that was garnered from other sources. It does nothing to detract, only enhance it. I don't want to go change something back, if there is a valid reason, only if it was a mistake. Speednat (talk) 20:16, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Any chance we could keep this all on your talk page as I think you're talking about me, right? Mglovesfun (talk) 20:20, 7 October 2012 (UTC)
It actually was meant about -sche, as he and I were discussing this before you got involved, and this post was also before your involvement. Not trying an end-run, I just had this conversation already in progress before ours. Since you are watching this page now, I thought I had a ? unanswered back on my page about this subject-- inline citations. As always, thanks for guiding me to the Wiktionary way. Speednat (talk) 03:00, 8 October 2012 (UTC)
Not a question but an implied question.

So, what's the German translation, if not Laban? Labné must the dryer variety, so this must be a more correct translation, what's the gender of Labné? I heard from an Arabic speaker who was reading out vocabulary list complaining that ‏ is used incorrectly to mean milk, in his opinion it was yoghurt but this must be regional and both Laban and Labné may be coming from different variants of Arabic. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 04:26, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

There isn't one, as far as I can tell. "Das Labneh" is used on the web, but it doesn't meet CFI; indeed, it only gets 11 Google hits. Wikipedia uses "Labné", but that term seems to be just as rare (though the fact that it's also a common French word makes it hard to search for). It's so rare that I can't be sure of its gender... I would guess neuter, but really I'd never heard of food product before today. There doesn't seem to be a German word for it yet; "das Labneh" seems to be as close as it gets. - -sche (discuss) 05:06, 8 October 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. It's a rare or exotic product, so there may not be enough Google hits but it seems like a valid translation (transliteration), nevertheless. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 05:15, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for retaining citations pages[edit]

Hi there, -sche, I hope you're doing well. :) I just wanted to stop by and say thank you for retaining the citations pages I'd created, post RFVs. It's most helpful for future research and compilation purposes. I really appreciate it! Cheers, -- Cirt (talk) 05:16, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Botting.[edit]

I know you've been learning some Perl, for XML-dump analysis and such . . . do you feel up to running a bot yet?

I'm not prepared to distribute my bot code publically (e.g., to GPL it), but I've sent it in the past to a few different editors for their own bot runs (Equinox mass-uploading mineral entries, msh210 mass-delinkifying the lemma-form argument of {{es-verb form of}}, etc.), and if you like, I can send it to you as well, so you can perform tasks like the one you describe at Wiktionary:Grease pit/2012/October#Bot task: replace deprecated IPA characters.

—RuakhTALK 02:02, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

My Perl (and Javascript) knowledge is still sadly minimal, but it couldn't hurt to look at your code. If I could adapt it to change instances of foo to bar, I'd be able to do most of the cleanup tasks I find myself asking others to bot (like: update the deprecated IPA characters, orphan Template:ctlig per RFDO).
Perhaps what I should (also) do is download AWB. Wikipedia has a process for requesting approval to use AWB; do you know what I need to do to use it here on Wiktionary? - -sche (discuss) 02:38, 9 October 2012 (UTC)
Flood flag? DCDuring TALK 12:13, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
I've flagged myself during most of the things I've done. - -sche (discuss) 17:16, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
It didn't cover about a dozen items over the last 4 hours, but the problems was mostly 12 hours ago or so. DCDuring TALK 21:13, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
Yeah, oddly, at least one edit went through without the flag just 1 minute after I set the flag. I apologise if I've clogged anyone's watchlist. - -sche (discuss) 22:32, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
Argh. Flooded. Maybe 50? DCDuring TALK 09:54, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Maybe it would be better to set up a bot account for these edits? —RuakhTALK 13:23, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Ok. I am curious why setting the flood flag only intermittently works, though. I see it, too: even though I was flood-flagged during the edits, they still show up in my own watchlist even when I blend out bot edits. Actually, that makes me wonder if (and why) having a bot-flagged account would be any different... - -sche (discuss) 22:40, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Add replacements to edit summary[edit]

In AWB Options > Normal setting uncheck 'Add replacements to edit summary' and it'll make the edit summaries only what you put in the 'Default Summary' box. Makes edit summaries shorter and more 'human'. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:38, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Aha! Thanks for the tip. :) - -sche (discuss) 18:45, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Church Slavonic language code[edit]

Discussion moved to Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Church Slavonic language code.

I don't believe in barnstars, but I do believe in thank-yous, so — thank you. Your work is appreciated. :-)   —RuakhTALK 02:05, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

  • You are a true Stakhanovite. I am virtually always happy with your judgment. I don't have such good judgment myself, so even when I am not happy with a decision, I have the feeling you might be right. DCDuring TALK 02:42, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
Thank you two. It is nice to know that my work is not unnoticed. I decided after I wrote that that what I really deserved was a wikibreak... and yet here I am again. Hmm... I think I may need to import Wikipedia's break enforcement js ;) lol. (Nah.) - -sche (discuss) 22:08, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Language template protection[edit]

I had a different idea for these. Instead of having one subpage for each type of template we want to protect, we list them all together and split the pages by first letter. So 'e' would have {{en}}, {{en/script}}, {{en/family}}, {{langprefix/en}} etc. all together. This would hopefully keep the pages from getting too big and slow. —CodeCat 00:21, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Sounds like a great idea! I split the pages the way I did only because I found that to be the easiest way of setting the system up, and I didn't realise the pages would need to be modified very much. If you want to organise things more neatly, I'm all for it. :) - -sche (discuss) 00:30, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Both links in my edit summary don't use saksanheisi as a genus from the family Viburnum, but for the family Sambucus. Both Viburnum and Sambucus are Adoxaceae.

Http://runeberg.org/pieni/4/0054.html (lemma selja) "redirect"s to saksanheisi, but it is somewhat dated.

What are your sources? --129.125.102.126 02:16, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Sorry to butt in on someone else's talk page, but it does look to me like saksanheisi is indeed a term for elderberry (genus- not family- Sambucus). While heisi may mean Viburnum, that's no guarantee that saksanheisi is going to mean the same. One thing I've learned from decades of following common names around the languages of the world is that one should never expect them to make sense in such an SOP-ish way (though they do, often enough). Finnish Wikipedia uses seljat for Sambucus, but also has a page of synonyms (w:fi:Luettelo kasvien synonyyminimistä#S) that lists saksanheisi as a synonym for it. That still doesn't mean that it's common enough to have as the only translation for elder, though. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:35, 27 October 2012 (UTC)
I reverted your change because I checked the relative frequency of saksanheisi and selja on Google and Google Books and found saksanheisi seemed less common than selja, I noticed that your IP was from the Netherlands, and I misinterpreted your edit summary to mean you were adding it because it was the name of a tree in one city's coat of arms. I wasn't reverting your change because I had evidence that saksanheisi was wrong, beyond the Googling that implied it was viburnum, but because I figured someone adding an apparently less-common might-be-synonym of a word in a language not spoken where they lived, possibly based on a specific use (in a coat of arms) rather than general use, was more likely wrong that right. Wiktionary's terrible patroller-to-edit ratio means that many an edit can only be given that sort of eyeball treatment—but I don't condone that and I do apologise to you. I hadn't noticed you were the same person who had commented on Tok Pisin and Srebrenica. Since there isn't consensus on whether to include synonyms in translations tables, and your Runeberg reference checks out, I've undid my revert. - -sche (discuss) 05:07, 27 October 2012 (UTC)
@Chuck_Entz & @-sche: To be honest, I did add saksanheisi because the shrub is in the coat of arms (CoA) of a certain city/town/village. That said, I did spend some time to find two different (but I can't vouch for them to be totally independent) reliable sources. I did the same research for the animal in the CoA, only to see that saksanhirvi was there already.
Obviously, the Finns didn't choose their words as saksan* because a far-away village chose a CoA. Choosing the animal and plant based on Finnish words isn't as unlikely as it may seem. Heldern is around 10 miles from Vjenne, which traded extensively with Санкт-Петербург, which was close to Suomen suuriruhtinaskunta. The etymology of saksan (Saxon instead of German) might have helped. --129.125.102.126 10:39, 28 October 2012 (UTC)
@-sche: There's no need to apologise: you correctly spotted an edit which needs discussion. --129.125.102.126 10:39, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I'd like to take over WOTD — at least for now. I've already set up new words for October 28-31 to get the ball rolling again. Looking over diffs to see what others had done allowed me to figure out the basics, but there's still many other things I need to know about the process, especially what I need to do to create an archive, set up a new month, and polish the entry pages for words before they appear. Thanks! Astral (talk) 00:43, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm glad you're interested!
The front-end part is simple—pick words and plug them into the templates. You're already doing a good job of that; I like your Halloween pick. As you seem to have gathered, the last definition doesn't end with a full stop/period (though if a word has multiple definitions, the preceding definitions do), because the template already adds one: double-dotted vs fixed. Featured words should have pronunciation info (either IPA or audio); the template will automatically notice and include an audio pronunciation if one is present.
The more additional info an entry has, like etymology, illustration or examples of usage, the more interesting it is likely to be to users who click through to it; on the other hand, trying to cite and find a picture for every word you feature on WOTD is a recipe for burning out. Strategise.
Once you've set a word, add the was-wotd template to the entry, so that it won't be featured again (mostly).
To create an archive, do what Ruakh did here, changing {{wotd archive|PREVIOUS|NEXT|YEAR|DAYS}} to the previous month, the next month, the year (four digits) and the number of days in the month (28, 29, 30, 31), and updating the pagename to the relevant month and year. An easy way of creating an archive is to copy-and-paste the relevant month's Recycled Page, e.g. Wiktionary:Word of the day/Recycled pages/October, simply changing {{wotd recycled}} to {{wotd archive}} and adding the YEAR and DAYS parameters.
At the end of the month, subst: all of the templates by changing each day's {{Wiktionary:Word of the day to {{subst:Wiktionary:Word of the day. The reason for not subst:ing a day before it's done is that someone might tweak the definition or fix a typo, etc.
- -sche (discuss) 04:41, 28 October 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. This is very helpful. I've got a couple of questions. First, I'm not good with IPA, so is there a way I could arrange for someone who is to add pronunciation data to entries before they appear? Second, is it okay to occasionally select words I've nominated myself? I already did this with trainiac, because I wanted something "fun" between mulct and peri-urban, but I don't want to do it again if it's something that should be avoided. Astral (talk) 03:33, 30 October 2012 (UTC)
Also, exactly how far back does the prohibition against using words featured as WOTDs on other sites go? It makes sense not to copy words other sites have featured recently, but three, four, five years back seems like a another matter. I need a verb, and wanted to use photobomb, but it was featured on Urban Dictionary in 2009, and more recently as a noun on September 28 of this year. Astral (talk) 03:49, 30 October 2012 (UTC)
So, I chose ambuscade instead, only to discover it was a Merriam Webster WOTD in 2010. Can't win. :( Astral (talk) 04:27, 30 October 2012 (UTC)
Disclaimer: I'm not Sche (@Sche: feel free to correct me on anything I say). Anyway, I think that choosing words that you nominate is fine, and that if you find a concise way to list all the entries you want IPA for pronto (on a subpage, maybe?) I would be happy to help out, as would Sche, Angr, et al. (probably) given their past contributions in that regard (and they're probably more trustworthy than I am). —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 05:14, 30 October 2012 (UTC)
Yes, you can just comment that you'd like to feature a word but it lacks pronunciation info. Many users watch that page, and someone should take care of it. And yes, you can feature words you've nominated—at least, I did. It's probably best to let a couple days pass between when you nominate a word and when you use it, in case anyone comments with objections, but I doubt anything you nominate will be objectionable (you know not to nominate redlinks or offensive words). As for other sites' words of the day: personally, I never paid much attention to that rule; I checked if a word had been featured on another site in the past few months, and if not, looked no further. Sometimes, people would strike words that had been featured by other sites years ago, and in those cases, I respected the strikings and didn't use those words, but I didn't strike words that had been featured by other sites years ago myself. - -sche (discuss) 05:45, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Coordinate[edit]

I'll read up on that, at first glance I'm thinking "is that like synonyms?" so I'd better make sure I understand what is included under that label.

I definitely had a more inclusive idea of what 'related' means. Presumably etymological ancestors go under the 'etymology' section and etymological descendants go under the 'derived terms' section, so would 'related terms' be for sibling/cousin type words descended from common ancestors?

So for some stuff, if it doesn't fit under coordinate, a generic 'see also' is good?

Also do you know if we could possibly add a link to template:rfv on both the template:fact and template:unreferenced see also sections? Both are locked so I can't but I think they would be very useful. It is difficult for me to remember this initialism so being able to see it clearly when visiting the more memorable word-based templates would be helpful. Etym (talk) 04:09, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Many gay newspapers use marriage equality instead of gay marriage or same-sex marriage. [1], [[2]. I think those cites have a gay marriage context. Do you mind if i revert you? Pass a Method (talk) 05:29, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

In the first of those links, it seems to me that "Minnesota group to push for marriage equality" still means "Minnesota group to push for (legal) acceptance of gay marriage alongside straight marriage", which isn't synonymous with "gay marriage", though it's semantically related. Compare "Obama tries to give up smoking" and "Obama tries to give up cigarettes"—they're semantically related, but not synonymous.
Complicating matters, "gay marriage" is, I know, often used semi-figuratively—a headline like "Minnesota group to push for gay marriage" usually means that the group is pushing for the legalisation of gay marriage, not that they're literally pushing for gay couples to take the plunge and get married. I'm going to ask in the Tea Room for broader input on whether it should be noted in the entry.
The second link is very cool; its use of "marriage equality" does seem to be figurative for "gay marriage, the union of two people of the same sex". It's still possible to interpret "Australia's laws banning marriage equality" as banning "acceptance of both gay and straight unions", but it's odd—does anyone speak of apartheid-era South Africa as "banning racial equality" rather than "discriminating against blacks"? I've tentatively undone my edits and added a sense to [[marriage equality]], since I assume that usage is attested...but I await others' feedback in the Tea Room on whether we're correctly interpreting the usage. - -sche (discuss) 06:17, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
See Wiktionary:Tea_room#gay_marriage.2C_marriage_equality. - -sche (discuss) 06:52, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Hallo -sche!
Vielen Dank für die formale Überarbeitung des oben genannten Eintrags. Ich bin mit den hiesigen Regeln einfach noch nicht sehr vertraut. Lieben Gruß dir, Caligari ƆɐƀïиϠႵ 16:49, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Kein problem. Vielen Dank für deine Arbeit, und frohes neues Jahr! :) - -sche (discuss) 04:55, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

The language is called Asu but the code for it is asa. That could be confusing... I wonder why they didn't make a bit of effort at ISO to make sure that all languages with 3 letter names would have codes identical to their names. —CodeCat 19:58, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

I've wondered that myself. They did give a few languages homographic codes, like Aja and Adi, and sometimes codes are based on different names, like {{ado}}, which we and they call "Abu" but which is distinguished from several other "Abu"s as "Adjora". But other times, it looks the task of assigning unique codes to several thousand different things got the better of them... "Ali" is {{aiy}} because {{ali}} is "Amaimon", which doesn't even have an "l" in its name! - -sche (discuss) 21:19, 30 December 2012 (UTC)
PS I may request to rename "Asu" soon, as it may be more commonly, unambiguously and autonymically called "Chasu". - -sche (discuss) 21:19, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Dates of the English language, in particular the word a[edit]

I am still learning all the nuances of this undertaking, and granted I am not as knowledgeable in the languages as I am in the Sciences, but I am learning as I go. After your deletion of the a definitions for she, he, it, they etc. I did a bit of research and I see where you are coming from. It would have helped if you or anyone could have just pointed some of these things out to some of us newcomers. I understand that people may not feel it is their job to train all the newbie's but a little advice and "training" would go a long way in saving both yours and others time later on down the road, especially to those of us that it appears apparent are not just entering the odd word, but are attempting to assist in this great undertaking in a meaningful way. First, I want to explain the way that I am/was wording things on the defdate template. If it is in current use I would say something like First attested around 1350 to 1470., meaning that is when it was first documented. If it is obsolete, I would say something like, Attested from around 1350 until 1470. or Attested from around 1350 to 1470 until the late 16th century. In particular with the she, he, it variations of the word a, my sources stated obsolete except in Scottish and English dialectal form, which I took to mean it was still in limited modern usage. Now back to the research (quick) that I did, I see that the Modern English language is said to have "arrived" in the early to mid 15th century, so I will keep that in mind when I am adding obsolete words that didn't go beyond those dates and then I will place them in their respective Middle or Old English areas. With all of this, there is a question that comes to light if a word is formed as my SOED say in the OE range of prior to 1150, but still persists into the modern English ranged of the 17th century, does it get an entry in all three date ranges of the English language, Old, Middle, and plain English? Finally, as I have stated before on many of my posts, (not just to you, -sche, but to all, please correct me, guide me, or whatever you need to do, (in a pleasant manner :) please), as that will make your job's easier if I am making mistakes and it will make mine easier of I don't have to go back and clean up my own mistakes. Speednat (talk) 18:12, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

I am not too good at this finding and citing thing, but I did run across Shakespeare's Henry V, where he writes "a babbled of green fields" where a definitely is he. I don't know how I found that, it just kind of popped up while I was looking for something else. Anyway I am not losing too much sleep over this, I just want the product (WT) to be as good and comprehensive while accurate as possible. Speednat (talk) 03:56, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Hi! I didn't realise you were the one who added the [[a]] senses, or I would just have asked you what you meant by the dates; I'm sorry. (Sorry also that I and other Wiktionarians are so taciturn.) Regarding "obsolete except in Scottish and English dialectal form": in speech, I expect /ə/ or /ɑ/ is found (for "he", "it" and "they" if not for the others) in many dialects, as a reduction of /hi/, /ɪt/, etc... but I couldn't find anything in print. It's hard to search for, too (as you know)... I should probably scour a Shakespeare corpus to see if anything else like the "a babbled" you cite turns up for "she", "it" or "they".
Regarding words attested in multiple periods: if a word is attested in Old English, it should have an ==Old English== entry, yes. I think Wiktionary should also have Middle and Modern English sections for words attested in both those periods (because pronunciation and sometimes inflection differ), but I get the impression from some other editors that they don't think Middle English entries are necessary if a word is also attested in modern English. - -sche (discuss) 04:06, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
I believe I found two more to make it a threesome, is that is needed to qualify an entry? I believe I have read that as correct, so I will re-add the entry with the citations. Let me know what you think, please. Speednat (talk) 07:21, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Scratch that. I didn't realize that the senses in question were all but he, which is what all of my citations cover. So I guess that I will keep my eye open for other instances. Also, I didn't realize that me evolution was as drastic as it has been. Back when I started using the defdate template (like with the a entry), I was just writing in years. I have since added the more detailed words that I stated above. I may need to go back and expand all of those "poor" entries, as they aren't extremely clear. Speednat (talk) 07:31, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Formatierung[edit]

Hallo -sche,

Könntest du bitte meine Ergänzung an das übliche, englische Format anpassen? Ich danke dir! Schöne Grüße --Yoursmile (talk) 12:16, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Hallo Yoursmile! Das passte schon an einer der hier-üblichen Formate. :) Einige Benuzter leiten die Definitionen von englischen Wörtern mit Großschreibung ein (als pseudo-Sätze, die auch mit einem Punkt abgeschlossen werden), andere verwenden Kleinschreibung und keinen Punkt, besonders wenn es um einfache Glossierungen handelt. (Definitionen von anderssprachigen Wörtern sind in der Regel nur Glossierungen.) MfG, - -sche (discuss) 21:40, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Hi there. Could you check the comparative and superlative in the headword and the declension table please. I'm getting a bit confused between different online sites. Thanks. SemperBlotto (talk) 16:50, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Oh, that's a tricky one. The positive form (mittel) used to inflect (in mittler Nacht/in mitteler Nacht), but fell out of (most) use before the modern era. The comparative and superlative forms remain in use, but the comparative is now often used as if it were the positive form (hence the book title Der mittlere Weg: Glaube und Vernunft in Harmonie). And the positive form is now in use again, but indeclinable(!). The headword line of "mittel" is correct (the comparative is "mittlerer", the lemma form of the superlative is "am mittelsten"), but the declension tables are wrong. I'll have to check how the templates work to fix them. - -sche (discuss) 22:08, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

I am starting to look at working on the Rhymes section and I noticed that there are missing templates. Who should I get with to make sure, that when I make these missing templates that I am doing so correctly? I have made a couple already and they seem to work fine, but I want to make sure that all my I's are dotted and T's crossed. The ones that I have done so far are Here and Here and I made some changes Here and Here. Speednat (talk) 17:23, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Hallo -sche!
Von Benutzer Metaknowledge wurde die Bitte geäußert, die Beispiele zu übersetzen. Ich habe versucht, ihm die Problematik von Übersetzungen klar zu machen. Zwei offizielle Übersetzungen habe ich gefunden, von denen eine das Lemma völlig ignoriert und die gegebene Übersetzung, wie mir scheint, auch dessen Bedeutung nicht konnotiert. Des Weiteren habe ich versucht, alle anderen Beispiele zu übersetzen. Nun meine Bitte: Wärst du so gut und schaust dir alles mal an und korrigierst sie. Ich denke, es ist wichtig, das genaue Register zu treffen, was mir leider nicht zu gelingen scheint. Vielen Dank dafür im Voraus. — Lieben Gruß dir und ein gesundes Neues Jahr, Caligari ƆɐƀïиϠႵ 07:52, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Hier die Beispiele samt Übersetzungen:
  1. "[…] mock not thus my reason."
        —Friedrich Schiller: Fiesco, or The Genoese Conspiracy. A Tragedy by Frederich Schiller. The Echo Library, Teddington 2006, ISBN 1-4068-2052-0, p 16 (GoogleBooks; retrieved January 4, 2013).
    Do not mock my reason whilst amusing yourself.
    Do not push around my reason whilst amusing yourself.
    Do not trifle my reason whilst amusing yourself.
    Amongst the naked Gods and Godesses who disport themselves there with nectar and ambrosia, you see a Goddess who, although surrounded by nothing but/pure joyance and diversion, however always wears a cuirass and keeps her helmet on and her spear in the arm. It is the Goddess of Wisdom.
    "To be sure, thou wouldst call it by name and caress it; thou wouldst pull its ears and amuse thyself with it."
        —Friedrich Nietzsche: Joys and Passions. In: Thus Spake Zarathustra. A Book for All and None. The Modern Library, New York 1917, p. 34 (translated by Thomas Common; Wikisource; retrieved January 4, 2013).
    And there was various amusement in this courtly circle.
    • „Indessen scheint es, daß sie keinerlei Neigung besitzt, unserer Schäferstunde den Verlauf bloßer Kurzweil zu geben."
          —Kurt Tucholsky: Der Bär tanzt. [1928] In: Das Lächeln der Mona Lisa. 1. Auflage, Ernst Rowohlt, Berlin 1929, p. 222 (Wikisource; retrieved January 3, 2013).
    It seems however that she has no inclination to give our tryst the tenor of bare/mere/sheer amusement.
    Whether it be the scenic, cultural or animal attractions – the place, along with its hinterland, offers a lot of touristic pastime.
    Craft stalls to join in and an attractive program for children offer pastime for young and old.
Wow, du hast Recht, die offizielle englische Übersetzung der Verschwörung des Fiesco ist schlecht. Ich habe eine zweite Übersetzung gefunden, von George D'Aguilar: "Speak, I / Conjure you, speak, nor longer trifle with / A lover's tortures." Auch das gibt den Sinn nicht exakt wieder. I'll see what I can come up with, though. :) Liebe Grüße, - -sche (discuss) 21:36, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

I apologize for removing the L2 header from the entry. In regards to the actual content of my edit, why are you opposed to using "pages and pages of the edit window" when it makes the wikitext vastly more readable? I don't like guessing what part of the quotation is the publisher, what part is the chapter, what is the title, for each editor's personal formatting style. DTLHS (talk) 20:28, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm not the only one who thinks the templates, rather than making things "vastly more readable", have the opposite effect. Ruakh, too, has called them "a huge broken mess that should never be used". If quotations are formatted according to the standard format prescribed in WT:", chapter titles won't be confused with publishers. If quotations don't follow the standard format, it's no harder to convert them to it than to convert them to templates. (Well, someone used to the manual format might have to look at the template's documentation to remember its parameters, and someone used to the template might have to look at WT:" to remember the manual format, but that's a wash and goes away with exposure to the other format, anyway.)
I don't recall a discussion of the issue itself, though (only discussions like the one I link to that ended up touching on it tangentially). Perhaps we should start one... - -sche (discuss) 20:48, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Reference-book template[edit]

I am butting heads with my favorite antagonist Dan Polansky over the use of the reference-book template. I know you are familiar with my edits and I would appreciate your opinion on the matter. Normally I utilize the template to inline cite things like IPA or etymology information or if a really obscure definition is expanded on. I then use the <references/> command to document the inline ciations. Occasionally, I forego the inline because only one of my sources deals with the entry in question, see Abyssinian primrose, and place the reference-book template directly under the ===References=== header. Please weigh in as I value your opinion. Thanks Speednat (talk) 21:56, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

See also Wiktionary:BP#Abyssinian_primrose. --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:02, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Is it appropriate just to change this? I know I should wait for due process, but I am impatient to add entries in Sabir and I don't want to create a lot more work for no reason (i.e. deleting & recreating categories). —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 00:02, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

A couple weeks of silence usually means consent on RFM. In this case, I'm looking into it and will comment there soon. - -sche (discuss) 06:51, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Thankee! (Note: if you're planning to do any good research, it will soon be necessary to read French and Italian works... not much good scholarship on Sabir in English). —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 06:54, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Re: to Template:fact[edit]

Thanks for the heads up regarding using Template:rfv-sense instead of Template:fact. Much appreciated! :) Bumm13 (talk) 02:31, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Your rollback was an error. My edit is legit.96.51.38.246 19:09, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

I disagree. The term is used almost exclusively by the right wing of the US political scene, and even there it is criticized as "inherently meaningless" by even some more mainstream conservatives. Says Daniel Benjamin, "there is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term". Our definition accurately summarises the context in which the term is used, and the meaning its users impart to it, without implying it's a general term.
I am not a right-winger and I fully recognize the closest political implementation Islam bears resemblence to is fascism as exemplified by their repressive social policy, disgusting misogyny and vehement anti-semitism. Read history and Wikipedia's own article on Islamofascism. Their historical imperialism of invading other nations and expelling or killing the indigenous people and replacing it with their own is a perfect portrait of the kind of violent nationalism practiced by the Nazis in WW2.96.51.38.246 00:10, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Wikipedia's article calls it a neologism and gives examples of use by Mike Huckabee, Clifford May and George Bush. - -sche (discuss) 00:44, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
It also gives Christopher Hitchen's elucidation of the word. And I wouldn't consider George Bush to have the credibility to define apples and bananas let alone a "neological" word.
The current definition is way too vague, clarifies nothing about the "fascism" part and to say its "pejorative" and "offensive" to criticize a radical ideology is biased and idiotic. Any word can be a pejorative. I find it offensive to be called a Republican. :)96.51.38.246 01:29, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Holocaust denial[edit]

The request for deletion failed, so you delete the article, giving as a reason the fact that the request failed? How is that not ridiculous? kwami (talk) 01:21, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

If you look at WT:RFD#holocaust_survivor (and its subsections WT:RFD#Holocaust_denial and WT:RFD#Holocaust_denier), you'll see that the terms have failed RFD, per overwhelming consensus, in a new RFD which followed the one archived on Talk:Holocaust denial and addressed points which the archived discussion did not. In particular, the previous RFD proceeded under the assumption that Holocaust denial referred only to denial of the Shoah, and thus was not SOP, but RFV showed that assumption to be false. - -sche (discuss) 01:35, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
@Kwamikagami, "RFD failed" does not mean the request failed but that the entry failed the idiomacity test during RFD and therefore should be deleted. --WikiTiki89 13:14, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Not really sure what to do here, so some help would be great. Thanks —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 02:48, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

I appreciate the amount of work that went into building the index, but it'd be harder to manually split it than to just delete it and let bots create separate nds-de and nds-nl indices. The category shouldn't be listed, because it is being phased out as its entries are moved into the DLS and GLG cats. That whole row in the table should just point to separate DLS and GLG rows, I suppose. - -sche (discuss) 05:41, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
Bots? What bots? I wish there were, but there are really no regular indexing bots. I think you should do whatever you think best on the meta-index page, and leave the LG index alone until somebody volunteers a bot. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 06:52, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

realise being away from wiktionary for a few years or more might be a culture shock, but interested to see at Java - the line - (computing, trademark) An object-oriented, garbage-collected computer programming language. surely that is deliberate vandalism? I find it astonishing someone hasnt picked up on it. cheers sats (talk) 07:49, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi! That wording threw me off at first, too, but it turns out "garbage collection" is a programming term. (If you don't think it's appropriate to say Java "garbage collects", I suggest you discuss that with our resident programmers by posting on Talk:Java.)
nah - thanks for the clearing the red link - it is now self explanatory, as a red link it was suspect - cheers. sats (talk) 08:20, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

User:Luciferwildcat[edit]

Two questions:

  1. Is there a comprehensive list of his socks anywhere? Because User:LightningNightling, at least, has edited on other projects.
  2. User:AVerSiMeDejan is quacking like he's Lucifer, i.e., editing articles that combine penises with other words. Do you think he might be a Lucifer sock?

I come to you because that's where I was sent when I brought these questions up on IRC Purplebackpack89 (Notes Taken) (Locker) 06:22, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

I don't know of a comprehensive list, but it might be worthwhile to compile one. Some other socks have been discussed here: WT:Beer parlour/2013/February#Lucifer_is_back. As for AVerSiMeDejan: yup, that's him (and I see Dvortygirl has now blocked him). - -sche (discuss) 06:33, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Definition vs etymology[edit]

Etymology does not belong on the definition line. That is my normative stance and that is the current practice in English Wiktionary. Hence my reverts at unschön. If you are saying that English Wiktionary often does place etymological and morphological information on the definition line, can you show me the evidence, ideally in the form of a significant number of entries that do that? --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:05, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Trademarks[edit]

Hi. Please don't remove this info entirely. It can go into the Etymology section, to be dated later. Equinox ◑ 18:16, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Hm, what do you propose the etymology should say? "Was [and may still be] a trademark"? It would be unjustified (unverified) in some cases, and obviously incorrect in others, to say "originated as a trademark": "Doom" didn't, "Apple" didn't, "Peugeot" didn't—"Peugeot" was applied to people from a certain family long before it was applied to companies or cars. "Häagen-Dazs" is among the relatively few that I can tell at first glance did originate as a trademark. The mere fact that a string of letters may have been trademarked at some point is info the lawyers among us advised us to exclude, because we practically speaking cannot, and should not attempt to, render and publish a judgement on the validity of trademark claims about every word we have. ("Tide" is trademarked? "Water" might be trademarked in Nepal for all we know.) Hence my simple removal of the template in most cases... - -sche (discuss) 19:03, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
Is a trade mark the same as a brand name? I think "brand name" is free of any legal implications so we can use that instead. —CodeCat 19:11, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
But what do you propose the etymology should say? "Was [and may still be] a brand name"? (That's hardly "information" at all... that's non-information, except to the extent that it's unverified, often-missing and other times perhaps erroneously/wrongly-included information.) It would be unjustified (unverified) in some cases, and obviously incorrect in others, to say "originated as a brand name": "Doom" didn't, "Apple" didn't, "Peugeot" didn't... - -sche (discuss) 19:21, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
If its definition is as a brand name, then I don't think that should really be in the etymology. If a word originated as a brand but isn't a brand anymore (like sellotape) then that should be in the etymology. Not all names of products are brand names though... is "iMac" a brand name? So maybe "brand name" isn't fitting. I'd still prefer to avoid "trade mark" at all though. —CodeCat 19:31, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
(after e/c, as an afterthought:) If anyone is proposing simply replacing {{trademark}} with {{brand name}}: no, all the reasons it was decided not to indicate the current or past trademark status of words are reasons we cannot and should not try to indicate the current or past status of words as brand names. - -sche (discuss) 19:38, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

WOTD again[edit]

We only have a couple more days of WOTD and no replacement for Astral, unless I missed something. Are you interested in taking it up again? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 01:10, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I don't have much time to give it, though I'll see if I can set a few more days. Fortunately, WOTD is fail-safe and keeps running even if no-one sets new words; we'll get complaints from a few astute observers that we're showing the same words as last year, but no breakdown. - -sche (discuss) 01:19, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Regarding this edit [3]: you seem to be suggesting that the gloss on an alt form is additional to the gloss on the original form, e.g. if a word is glossed obsolete, and its alt form is glossed obsolete form of X, then you are saying that the alt form is even more obsolete than the main entry. That might be a good idea but I don't think that's how many entries have been done. Equinox ◑ 00:35, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

It is the usual practice that alternative forms, past tense forms, etc are not glossed as "rare", "obsolete", etc unless they are rarer / more obsolete than the lemma. "Adjuting", for example, is not marked {{obsolete}}, because it is no more obsolete than "adjute" as a whole is. I have found old (pre-2008) entries that deviate from that practice, but they're unusual and I've changed them as I've come across them.
That said, this brings the real problem with our [[ya'll]] entry into focus: it treats one dialect's word as an alternative form of another dialect's term rather than as a counterpart of a standard-language term. That is to say, "ya'll" is a word in AAVE, "y'all" is a word in white Southern US English, "you-uns" is a word in Appalachian, all are nonstandard counterparts of the standard language's plain plural "you", and we'd probably be better off treating each as its own entry rather than treating some as alt forms of others, even if that's etymologically how they came about. - -sche (discuss) 01:30, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

Help with an abnormal title[edit]

I need to know if it is possible to have A2 as a title. See A2 (aortic second sound). As the abbreviation is with the subscript. Thanks Speednat (talk) 02:06, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

You can use the subscript-2 character (as in H₂O) but I'm not sure it's a good idea. Equinox ◑ 02:08, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
What Equinox said. "₂" exists, and Wiktionary sometimes uses it (and similar characters), but sometimes doesn't. I would point you to geological and musical terms that use (or don't use) underlines and overlines and tiny numbers, but I'm having a hard time finding any. (I know they exist, somewhere...) - -sche (discuss) 04:02, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
As of now, I will leave it as is w/o subscript except in the article I think I specify that the subscript is present Speednat (talk) 21:49, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

Deletion of catvertising[edit]

Discussion moved to WT:RFV.
(from there it will likely be archived to Talk:catvertising)

new German adjectives[edit]

Hi there. You don't need to add brand new German adjectives (or nouns) to the bot's feedme page. They will be actioned automatically (normally within a day). Cheers SemperBlotto (talk) 16:51, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Cool, thanks for the tip! - -sche (discuss) 16:53, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

German Low German[edit]

That sounds idiotic. Who came up with this name? It isn't called Low German for no reason. -- Liliana • 17:34, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Oh boy, here we go. Liliana, I thought you were in on all this... there was a whole lot of hocus-pocus and somehow the nds-de/nds-nl solution was born. On a semi-related topic, does anyone want to try cleaning up 'n Appel und 'n Ei? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 17:40, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
The decision to deprecate nds and ==Low German== and introduce nds-de and ==German Low German== was made after ~8 months of discussion (culminating in posts in the BP, my talk page and RFM) and the realisation that as long as there existed a code and header with a name that by all indications applied to both GLG and DLS at once, and a separate header for DLS only, people were going to "misuse" nds and ==Low German== to apply to DLS, rather than to GLG only — if such intuitively and "nominally" (to use that word literally) correct use could even be called "misuse" of the code and header by the newcomers and average users who would perpetrate it, as opposed to quixotism by those who would have knowingly retained the ambiguous "Low German". - -sche (discuss) 19:15, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Talkback[edit]

On my page. Pass a Method (talk) 21:27, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

grammar[edit]

Is the following a grammatically correct sentence? Synonyms of heterosexual include straight, and hyponyms include heteroflexible.. Pass a Method (talk) 14:36, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

It's a grammatically correct sentence, yes. ([plural noun] [preposition] [variable (a)] [plural verb] [variable (b)] [conjunction] [plural noun] [implied but unstated clause: preposition + variable (a)] [plural verb] [variable (c)].) Whether it's logically/semantically correct is another question: it could be argued that "heteroflexible" is a hyponym of "bisexual" rather than of "heterosexual". - -sche (discuss) 19:59, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
I was wondering whether "synonyms" should be singular instead of plural. Pass a Method (talk) 20:10, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

My first thought when I saw that word was "rock festival"... —CodeCat 03:07, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

lol! Whenever I see "Rockband" I think Rock ("skirt") + Band ("band (of cloth)"). - -sche (discuss) 03:28, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

I was thinking of creating "sexual apartheid" wit the noun "gender segregation". Its mentioned here. Would that be SOP? Pass a Method (talk) 18:08, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Good question! The term is on the border between idiomaticity and SOPness, but I think it is SOP in the end.
Our entry on [[apartheid]] does currently limit the term to race, but that's offensichtlich an error—there's e.g. google books:"sectarian apartheid", google books:"religious apartheid" and google books:"income apartheid" in addition to "gender apartheid" and "sexual apartheid".
Wikipedia and other references do define "gender apartheid" and "sex apartheid" as constituting discrimination against women (whereas our entry on apartheid defines it only as separation), but that's just another deficiency of our entry—all apartheids constitute discrimination against one of the separated groups (the original one constituted discrimination against blacks).
The large number of ways of referring to Islamic segregation of the genders (including google books:"female apartheid", google books:"male and female apartheid", google books:"sex apartheid", google books:"sexual apartheid" and google books:"gender apartheid") confirm, IMO, that it's SOP. - -sche (discuss) 19:23, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
Great info. I like you :) Pass a Method (talk) 20:19, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

The fourth entry in God does not make sense. "An omnipotent being, creator of the universe (as in deism)." Deists don't believe in an omnipotent deity. They simply see god as the initiator of the big bang. Pass a Method (talk) 20:41, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

Hi! sorry for not getting back to you about this sooner. I'm glad you've moved discussion to the Tea Room, because I don't know that much about the finer points of Deism. - -sche (discuss) 19:57, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Inscriptions and whatnot[edit]

I'd like to add some Old Latin terms used in inscriptions, but I'm not really sure what format to use and how to do within the frame of Latin. For example, the Garigliano Bowl uses the word SOKIOIS, the ablative plural of *SOKIOS. Should I show this as {{Old Latin|lang=la}} {{obsolete form of|sociis|sociīs|lang=la}} or as an inflected form? What if the lemma isn't citable? Also, what about different readings of a mangled inscription? What if the same author reads it two different ways? What if the writing system used is not the Latin alphabet? TIA —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 17:57, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Also, should the pagename be sokiois or SOKIOIS? Only the latter is attested, of course, but WT:ALA would advise using the former. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 20:33, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
First, we need to answer the question: is Old Latin a form of Latin ({{la}}) or a separate language (in need of its own code)? What do you think? What do academic authorities think? That influences what to do with SOKIOIS et al:
No matter what we consider Old Latin, if a form is attested (e.g., if the ablative plural of *SOKIOS, SOKIOIS, is what's attested), that form should have an entry. But if Old Latin is a form of Latin, I see no reason not to follow WT:ALA in normalising its all-caps inscriptions the way we normalise newer Latin's all-caps inscriptions — whereas, if Old Latin is a separate language, there'd be a strong case for keeping it in the all-caps form it's attested in.
If OL is a form of Latin, sokiois could be listed as an obsolete ablative plural form of socius (the way hath is an archaic third-person singular of have), or, if we're confident the nominative would have looked like sokios, sokiois could be listed as the ablative plural of sokios, and sokios could be created as an obsolete/OL form of socius (read on for justification and precedent for that).
If OL is an independent language, and we're reasonably confident the nominative would have looked like SOKIOS, it should definitely have an entry (IMO), the justification being that the word is attested (in inflected forms), and a word's definition has to be stored somewhere (in one of the word's forms), and Wiktionary has decided to make the nominative singular that somewhere. Precedent for this is ample: I know we do it for Gothic, Old Norse, and sometimes even German, and I expect we already do it for Latin and Greek. - -sche (discuss) 22:03, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
If there are multiple readings of an inscription, I think we should have entries for all of the readings; that's how I've handled Pictish and Khazar.
If an inscription isn't in the Latin alphabet, I would enter it (in whatever alphabet it's in) all the same. I thought some other old languages already had entries in multiple script; I can't find any examples, but I know that e.g. Old Norse is attested in both the Runic and the Latin scripts, so it's only a matter of time before someone adds Runic Old Norse... - -sche (discuss) 22:28, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
That's a valid question. Wiktionary considers Old Latin to be Latin. The main problem is that there's some rather tame "Old Latin", which can be found in ample literature, and often survived as archaisms into Classical Latin. By tame "Old Latin" I mean spellings like quom and second declension genitive plural endings in -um instead of -orum. This is fully comprehensible if it is read by somebody as fluent in Classical Latin as I am.
There almost certainly is another language, closely related to Latin, which I might call legitimate Old Latin, like the Carmen Saliare, which was difficult even for educated Classical Romans to read, and which I have been reading up on lately. Forms like FHEFHAKED (from the Praeneste Fibula) are nothing short of impossible for someone like me to read without specific study of Old Latin, and that's actually a transliteration. That brings me to another point, which is that truly Old Latin is often not in the Latin alphabet, but instead in the Etruscan alphabet. The corpus is tiny, because only inscriptions remain (manuscripts had their spellings and other features largely normalised). The real question is whether it's worth creating a language just for these inscriptions, when it can't really be named in a non-confusing way (I would prefer 'Primitive Latin', but I don't think that such a term is used academically) and is definitely mappable to Latin. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 01:11, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Post scriptum: LinguistList separates Old, Classical, and Vulgar Latin. We essentially already separate Vulgar by ignoring it when attested and adding it to the Appendix namespace when not attested. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 01:30, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Hello? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 16:53, 24 March 2013 (UTC)
Oh, I didn't realise I was supposed to reply to this; I'm sorry. I don't see a problem with mapping Old Latin to Latin. Considering FHEFHAKED and fecit to be the same language seems no harder than considering Middle English, in all its variation (might, mikte, misten, mauht...), to be a language. As you suggest, it doesn't seem worth it to create a new code/L2 for such a small corpus of terms that can be mapped to {{la}}. - -sche (discuss) 22:54, 24 March 2013 (UTC)
Sorry about that; I guess I was just relying on you to make a decision one way or another. {{la}} it is, then. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 23:06, 24 March 2013 (UTC)
On one hand I see value in treating Old Latin as a distinct language, because it simplifies the treatment of inflection tables. One of the main changes from Old to Classical was the reduction of vowels and diphthongs, so that makes our current set of tables pretty much useless for those old forms. We could, of course, add them to the normal Latin tables, but those would not be helpful for the majority of users and just clutter up the table. So in a sense, we'd consider Old Latin (as a language) to be a "dumping ground for archaic forms that are not found in classical texts", which keeps the classical Latin entries tidier. On the other hand, Old Latin only really ends a hundred years or so before the time where a lot of the classical literature was written. So Old Latin and Classical Latin really compare more to Middle and Early Modern English; from Plautus to Cicero is more or less the same as from Chaucer to Shakespeare, after all. —CodeCat 18:54, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
I wasn't really thinking of making Old Latin inflection tables. The language was far too irregular and unpredictable, even. The corpus is quite limited, too, so I fear we'd have to rely on guesswork or PIE far too much. Keeping Classical Latin tidy is important to me, but I think that we can preserve that with Old Latin forms marked with {{Old Latin}}. I really just want to get inscriptional forms recorded here. As a side note, in my schooling, Shakespeare was taught from the original, but Chaucer from a translation. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 20:06, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
Even if some endings or some words are sufficiently well attested to merit being in tables, I don't think "considering them Latin" and "keeping them out of the Classical entries' tables" are contradictory. When the Classical Latin spelling and the Old Latin spelling of the citation form of the word differ, the tables have no reason to be mixed: sociis can be in a table at socius while sokiois can be in a table at sokios. - -sche (discuss) 15:10, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

please return definition of attachment[edit]

I agree with your premise.... and the definition you modified it to which could be added as well... however it is a "proper noun" aka terminology specific to lightning and a specific process in an overall lightning event. This would be the same rational for including definition #6... "attachment" (computing) "file attached".

I can provide plenty more if need be.

Thank you! Borealdreams (talk) 05:30, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Ok. Thanks for providing that reference (wow, what a title! "attachment of lightning to trees"). - -sche (discuss) 05:59, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Appreciated. Borealdreams (talk) 16:03, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Hello -sche. I have provided the requested backing information regarding Wiktionary:Requests_for_verification#flash. I hope this meets your requirements to remove the "verify" request. Also you can see it hear Distribution_of_lightning, but I do need to do a few minor edits. In "Lightning: Physics & Effects" by Uman/Rakov [2003]... it is used in the first paragraph of Chapter 1.2 - Types of Lightning Discharge & Lightning Terminology, '"Lightning, or the lightning discharge, in its entirety, whether it strikes ground or not, is usually termed, a "lightning flash" or just a "flash"" Cheers Borealdreams (talk) 17:27, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Restore catvertising?[edit]

Discussion moved to WT:RFV.
(from there it will likely be archived to Talk:catvertising)

Can the word scissoring be a noun or adjective with the sexual definition? Pass a Method (talk) 14:47, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm sure it can be used as a noun, although I don't know if it's attested (in ways that make it clear its a noun rather than a gerund) in enough durable places to meet CFI. As for adjectival use: the closest thing to adjectival use I can find offhand is that several books use google books:"scissoring motion", one uses "scissoring action", and another uses "in a scissoring fashion"... but that's not very convincing. - -sche (discuss) 03:09, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

This user has been adding Low German words and translations. Since you've been working on it as well, I thought you might be able to help them out. I've tried to explain the difference between nds-de and nds-nl but I'm not sure if I'm getting the point across. —CodeCat 17:03, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know; I'll talk to them when I get a chance.
I have (like you, I think) been going through all the transclusions of {{nds}} and replacing them with {{nds-de}} and/or {{nds-nl}} (and/or even sometimes {{pdt}}!), whichever turn(s) out to be applicable... creation of new {{nds}} transclusions is very unhelpful.
I have been tempted to bot-move all transclusions of {{nds}} to e.g. {{nds-xx}} or such just so {{nds}} can be deleted sooner (immediately, with nds-xx left to keep words that haven't specified a dialect yet working until we can review and update them) rather than later (after we finish the long process of reviewing and updating each entry by hand).
Once {{nds}} is unavailable to newcomers, I expect it will be easier to maintain the GLG / DLS distinction. That expectation, the separate existences of nds.WP and nds-nl.WP, and my conviction that it is linguistically better for Wiktionary to distinguish the lects than to conflate them, keep me from being discouraged by the amount of work that has to be done.
I know Wiktionary struggles to keep en and sco separate, and en and enm, but in those cases, the code people want to use to stand for both lects (en) still exists.
I know those who are used to nds.Wiktionary, which prominently merges GLG and DLS, may be unwilling to split them here... but Wikipedia's split of the two proves it is tenable, while nds.Wiktionary's policy of rolling even Plautdietsch into nds is simply untenable. - -sche (discuss) 03:32, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

nds.wiktionary[edit]

Ich weiß nicht, was ihr hier treibt, aber inzwischen wird das hochgestellt (nds) nicht mehr angezeigt, so dass Nutzer keinen Link zum nds.witionary haben. Vielleicht sorgst du einmal dafür, dass die Links wieder funktionieren bei deinem absolut unnötigen Umbau. Im übrigen darf ich dich darauf hinweisen, das nds die Sprache ist und nds-nl einer der Dialekte im Plattdeutschen und keine eigenständige Sprache. Im Plattdüütsch gibt es nämlich auch jede Menge Dialekte und so etwas ähnliches wie eine Hochsprache, zwar keine echte, aber eine, die zumindest in großen Teilen des plattdeutschen Sprachraums gesprochen wird. Und davon weichen einige kleinere Beriche ab. Wenn schon, dann muss du nicht nds-de kreiieren, sondern nds-sleswig, nds-meklenborg, nds-oostfreesland etc. Bei manchen Leuten kann ich nur den Kopf schütteln. Sorg also dringend dafür, dass die Links wieder funktionieren oder ich werde einmal den englischen Admins ein paar nette Zeilen schreiben. --Joachim Mos (talk) 00:59, 15 April 2013 (UTC)--Joachim Mos (talk) 00:59, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Moin Joachim! Öck frei mi, een Mönsch der ok platt snackst to drepen.
Mir ist klar, dass die plattdeutsche Sprache (wie die hochdeutsche) nur als eine Vereinigung von Dialekten greifbar ist. Mir ist doch auch klar dass es zwei ‚Hochsprachen' gibt: die in Deutschland auf dem Hochdeutschen basierte nds-de und die in den Niederlanden auf dem Niederländischen basierte nds-nl.
ISO 639 enthält Codes für die meisten niederländische Varietäten (sdz, twd, usw.), und für 1–2 deutsche Varietäten (wep und vll. frs).
Es gab und gibt auch ein Code for die in den Niederlanden gesprochene und geschriebene Hochsprache, nds-nl... und dazu auch die mehrdeutige Code nds. (Das ist alles ganz abgesehen davon, dass es auch pdt gibt.)
Das englische Wiktionary traf die Entscheidung, sdz, twd usw. zu löschen, die niederländische Varietäten mit nds-nl zu kennzeichnen (nicht duplierend mit sdz usw. und nds-nl), und — um Verwirrung zu vermeiden — die deutsche Varietäten mit nds-de zu kennzeichnen. nds ist verwirrend, mehrdeutig: das nds.WP steht als ‚deutsch'-plattdeutsches WP im Gegensatz zum nds-nl.WP; nds.Wiktionary bündelt hingegen nicht nur die ‚deutsche' und ‚niederändische' sondern auch die plautdietsche Varietäten zusammen.
If you think the various Low German varieties should be handled another way, you are free to contact my fellow administrators or to start another discussion in the Beer Parlour (we've only had four already).
I will advise you that nds.Wikt's way of doing things — conflating even pdt into nds-de and nds-nl — is unlikely to get any traction here.
As for the links: if {{t|nds-de|foo}} and {{t|nds-nl|foo}} have stopped linking to nds.Wiktionary, that is a bug, and will be fixed.
- -sche (discuss) 18:45, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Your bot messed this up. Fixed. SemperBlotto (talk) 18:45, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing that. Though I was using AWB, I was making changes like that by hand, so there shouldn't be any other errors like that out there, unless I typoed the same word twice. - -sche (discuss) 19:07, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Template:twd[edit]

Hi -sche, is there a specific reason why you deleted Template:twd? --80.114.178.7 01:22, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

The Dutch sub-dialects of Dutch Low Saxon / Low German, including {{twd}}, were deleted following much discussion in the Beer Parlour in March and November (and on RFDO and even right here on my talk page), discussion which culminated in this RFM discussion. - -sche (discuss) 02:13, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll read those discussions. --80.114.178.7 17:11, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Citations:Srebrenica[edit]

In edit 19167247 on Citations:Srebrenica you added "bevolkering" (cf. nl:bevolking, de:Bevölkerung), are you sure? If you aren't sure please check the hyphen in "onuit-voerbaar" too. --80.114.178.7 23:40, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

there is no word luna in serbo/croatian language "moon or month" in SC is mesec or mjesec.many croats come here to create non-existing words (and mark them exclusively as croatian) in order to show how croatian is a separate language and how different from serbian it is.it is part of their anti/serb propaganda I think you should know that.you can check google translate if you don't trust me .24.135.76.120 06:59, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

logorrhea and logorrhoea[edit]

I one believes http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=logorrhea%2Clogorrhoea&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=, you should be making logorrhea the main entry rather than logorrhoea. The former seems to be slightly more common even for British English, as per http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=logorrhea%2Clogorrhoea&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:50, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Nice research! I've been merging duplicated entries two pairs at a time, centralising the content of one pair in the US spelling, and the other in the UK spelling. If logorrhea is more common in both places, though, it should certainly be the lemma. I'll make the switch. - -sche (discuss) 03:41, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

The noun sense used the code "als" which you deleted. I'm not sure what to do with it. Can you have a look? —CodeCat 01:24, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

The Albanian section at di also used it. There are probably more uses that are now causing script errors that will appear as the software updates it. —CodeCat 01:27, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

I have a hard time believing adjektiv is used in tosk but not standard Albanian; I'm looking into that.
I'm curious as to why these pages didn't show up as transcluding the template before. (I did check.) - -sche (discuss) 01:35, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
Possibly because the templates have already been partially migrated over to the module. As of right now, having no transclusions is no guarantee that a code is not used. —CodeCat 01:38, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
I found another: ka#Albanian. Strangely I've noticed a few pages that use "als" for Alemannic German instead, even though the code for that is "gsw"... —CodeCat 13:40, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
Yeah, the Alemannic wikis use the code "als", so people just assume it's the ISO code. - -sche (discuss) 16:31, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

In Hamburg scheint es un zu heißen, vgl. http://plantenunblomen.hamburg.de/. —Angr 20:08, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

Jup. Und wenn ich die Zeit (und das Buch) finde, kuck ich in ein schleswigsches Wörterbuch. - -sche (discuss) 20:27, 26 May 2013 (UTC)
Also ich würde fast schon un als Hauptform und on als Alternative bezeichnen. Was meinst du? —Angr 20:31, 26 May 2013 (UTC)
OK :) - -sche (discuss) 22:54, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

This page has some script errors since your last edit(s). I don't know if those edits caused it, but you seem to be the editor who has worked most on this page. Can you have a look? —CodeCat 21:19, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

Certainly. I switched it from directly calling language templates to using etyl, in preparation for the day the language templates are deleted... but it seems I made some typos in my regex (and/or some of the templates are unhappy about finding family codes where they expect language codes). - -sche (discuss) 21:38, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

You made error at Christian--130.204.184.213 15:16, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

I don't think so. Isn't it straightforward that Greek 'Χριστιανός' is from Greek 'Χριστός' + Greek '-ιανός', not Greek 'Χριστός' plus a Latin suffix? The Latin term was probably respelled under the influence of Latin '-anus', but that's a rather different matter. In any case, I've posted in Wiktionary's etymology discussion room, so more people can comment.

Translingual translations[edit]

There is a case for them. For example, when there is no single English term that exactly corresponds, which is surprisingly often. If I can't find an English vernacular name for a taxon, I often add a translation table, especially if the taxon is not located in or near an English-speaking country. I sometimes add translation requests specific to the range of the taxon. DCDuring TALK 00:37, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

I think this edit is problematic because it emphasises the legal system even though there are some denominations of Islam which do not have a legal system in that sense. Such as five percenters, Quranists, Sufis, liberal Muslims and others. Do you mind if i reinstate the previous def? I made a compromise entry you could check out. Pass a Method (talk) 09:26, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Other dictionaries (of English and of Arabic) tend to define the word as "forbidden", which is why I think that's a better definition than "sinful". Would "forbidden according to Islam" work? (Note also that one can speak of pork or adultery being forbidden by "Biblical law" even though not all Jews/Christians believe the Bible is "law".) - -sche (discuss) 20:24, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
Some dictionary entries can be biased. The current definition is neutral. Forbidden is misleading because it negates the concept of mawazeen meaning weighing scales with which the word haram is often used in the Quran. The word forbidden makes less sense with that usage. Pass a Method (talk) 22:27, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

This edit of yours is also problematic since ditheism means the deities can be in conflict whereas this is not the case in major duotheitic faiths such as Wicca. Do you mind if i revert back to "bitheism"? Pass a Method (talk) 09:41, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Your comment prompted me to look into the meanings of "bitheism" and "ditheism", and although several of the general-purpose reference works I checked give them both the same short definition (belief in two deities), more detailed references do make a split. I learned something new today!
I've reverted to "bitheism", and tried to expand our entry on ditheism. (And then there's [[duotheism]]... what a curious web of superficially/etymologically synonymous but now specialised terms.) - -sche (discuss) 20:37, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

New appendix[edit]

As a participant in an associated discussion, you are invited to contribute to the list of terms and criteria at Appendix:Terms considered difficult or impossible to translate into English. Cheers,   — C M B J   10:46, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Though my German is not adequate to the task, I gather that you have sense developments under Herkunft at de.wikt's entry for board and that you include metonymy among the rationales. I personally find such an approach very interesting for many polysemic words, whether or not their ultimate etymology is as disputed as that or board. OTOH, I doubt that such information will help increase use of Wiktionary by normal people.

This is why I have been interested in whether we could both include that type of content and exclude it by default from what unregistered users see and allow registered users to see whichever layers of it they wanted. At the sense level this would involve allowing different types of labels to be optionally displayed as mentioned at Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2013/June#Lua-cising_Template:context. At the sense level I was thinking of some of the sense-level semantic-syntactic classification categories as examples of material to be invisible by default. Sense development has broader appeal and so might sometimes seem more worthy of display, but I doubt that it is usually of sufficient interest.

As to [[board]], why wouldn't we want to be splitters, not lumpers under our current format.

Though [[board]] makes a subordinated etymology header and an all-derivations listing of definitions seem advantageous, it does seem an exceptional case. DCDuring TALK 20:11, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Basically, the "plank of wood" sense of board derives from Proto-Germanic *burda, *burdam, from PIE *bʰrdʰo, while the "side of a ship" sense derives from PG *bordaz, from PIE *bʰordʰo. Though they're still separate in German, the two words merged so early in the history of Old English that I don't think it's wrong to combine them under one etymological header, especially given how many senses developed after the merger. I think it would be sufficient to explain the two roots in en:board's single etymology section, collapsed under {{rel-top}} if desired. (OTOH, I'd certainly be willing to split the homographs, if desired.)
Yes, board is an exceptional case. European languages in general tend (fortunately?) not to have the sort of confusingly synonymous but etymologically unrelated and non-homophonous homographs that Japanese has. Most of the homographs English does have, like mole /ˈmoʊleɪ/ "sauce" and mole /ˈmoʊl/ "animal", are unambiguously separate words. - -sche (discuss) 21:03, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
I don't think there is really a separate Germanic etymology for the two words. The current one can't be correct in any case, because there was no short o in Proto-Germanic. So if they were indeed separate, then the gender (and corresponding ending) was the only difference: *burdą, *burdaz. Is this gender distinction really consistently applied in all Germanic languages to the point that it is reconstructable for Proto-Germanic? —CodeCat 21:12, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

According to w:Vitellaria paradoxa, the word shea is not pronounced [ʃɛɪ] but [ʃiː], just like the pronoun she – and unlike the name Shea, which you may have been thinking of! – or also [ʃiː.ə], which makes sense given the origin in Bambara ʃi. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:37, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

On November 4, 2012, you have removed this template from several entries but, contrary to your promise in the deletion discussion ("As for the cleanup, it won't be hard; I'll do it"), you have not added {gloss|biblical figure} nor [Category:xx:Biblical characters]. So how do you propose to go on? Category:Biblical characters is not up to deletion. English John has 7 definitions, so the definition "John" is meaningless without a gloss. I have no time to clean up and check all your contributions. Makaokalani (talk) 11:11, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

lorem ipsum[edit]

Hi. May I ask you why you are inspecting so many entries with liggies in 'em? Curious. --Æ&Œ (talk) 23:27, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
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