This page is designed to discuss moves (renaming pages), mergers and splits. Its aim is to take the burden away from the Beer Parlour and Requests for Deletion where these issues were previously listed. Please note that uncontroversial page moves to correct typos, missing characters etc. should not be listed here, but moved directly using the move function.
Out of scope: Merging entries which are alternative forms or spellings or synonyms such as color/colour or traveled/travelled. Unlike Wikipedia, we don’t redirect in these sort of situations. Each spelling gets its own page, often employing the templates {{alternative spelling of}} or {{alternative form of}}.
Tagging pages: To tag a page, you can use the general template {{rfm}}, as well as one of the more specific templates {{move}}, {{merge}} and {{split}}.
Note that discussions for splitting, merging, and renaming languages, once held here, are now held at WT:Language treatment requests.
Latest comment: 12 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
This name is misleading. Based on how our categories are named, you would expect this to contain terms in the Arabic language, but it doesn't. It should probably be named something like Category:Hindu-Arabic numerals, or something else than 'numerals'. —CodeCat11:19, 30 July 2012 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 years ago12 comments5 people in discussion
As per the discussion in the Beer Parlor, I suggest that this category be reserved only for words that are not fully obsolete (i.e., that contain at least one current sense), and that all words that have only obsolete senses (i.e., fully obsolete words) be moved back to Category:English obsolete terms. (I think it would be better to, as CodeCat suggested, simply leave non-fully obsolete words uncategorized, which would imply eventually deleeting Category:English terms with obsolete senses, but I'm OK with leaving it there for partially obsolete words if others want that.) --Pereru (talk) 08:33, 19 December 2012 (UTC)Reply
I'd like to support it, but not if there is no implementation scheduled. I would not be happy if this was our policy and two months from now most of the terms that were supposed to be in it were not. We need a dump run to identity the L2 sections that need the categorization. And maintaining it really should be part of an AF-type bot. I do hope that this is intended to be applied to all living languages. Are all obsolete tags not in English marked with lang= tags? DCDuringTALK13:01, 21 December 2012 (UTC)Reply
I would also support requiring lang=en for these tags, because people constantly forget those tags and put entries in the English categories. In fact the whole "English as default" thing doesn't work too well... I've lost count of how many instances of {{term}} without a language I've had to fix... —CodeCat13:38, 21 December 2012 (UTC)Reply
Should {{obsolete}} be used for obsolete senses or obsolete terms? Using it for obsolete terms has one advantage: anyone can skim the list of obsolete terms and immediately spot a word they know is still in use. Trying to spot a completely-obsolete term among a list of terms with obsolete senses would be much harder. —CodeCat02:20, 22 December 2012 (UTC)Reply
On the other hand, people are more likely to use the shorter, generic name {{obsolete}} where it doesn't belong than to use the longer, explicit name {{obsolete term}} where it doesn't belong, so I think using {{obsolete}} only for obsolete terms and not for senses would be counter-intuitive and a bad idea. My preference would be to use {{obsolete}} for senses... but perhaps we should insist upon two explicitly named templates, {{obsolete term}} and {{obsolete sense}} (both with the display text "obsolete"?). Using two explicitly dedicated templates would make separate categorisation of entirely obsolete terms and of terms with obsolete senses practical, too. Btw, the "obsolete terms" category could be a subcategory of the "terms with obsolete senses" category, like "proper nouns" are a subcategory of "nouns". And we could keep {{obsolete}} (because new users and visitors from other projects may call it directly or in creative ways, like {{context|UK|obsolete|_|outside of|_|dialects}}), but treat its Whatlinkshere as a standing, self-updating cleanup list. - -sche(discuss)04:39, 22 December 2012 (UTC)Reply
I tend to agree with -sche above; {{obsolete sense}} would make, well, sense. But now there's one thing bugging me: shouldn't fully obsolete terms have the "obsolete" tag somewhere in their inflection line? Or else we'd have to add an {{obsolete term}} tag to every single sense, or else we imply that one of the obsolete senses is actually current... --Pereru (talk) 03:48, 23 December 2012 (UTC) By the way, in principle everything applies mutatis mutandis to the other Period labels (deprecated template usage)archaic and {{dated}}, right? --Pereru (talk) 03:50, 23 December 2012 (UTC)Reply
So you are saying that obsoleteness of a term is not a context? I suppose that is true, but we don't have any system currently in place for indicating term-wide contexts. This has been a problem in the past too... for example {{cardinal}} or {{personal}} shouldn't really be usage labels either. —CodeCat03:55, 23 December 2012 (UTC)Reply
We indicate obsolescence on the sense line when only one of several senses is obsolete, so I think obsolescence should also be indicated on the sense line when all senses are obsolete: indicating obsolescence on each sense line in all cases adds clarity. Meanwhile, we indicate on the inflection/headline line when certain inflected forms are obsolete (or dialectal, etc; see [[learn]], [[work#verb]], etc): so indicating the obsolescence of senses on the inflection line, when the inflected forms are not any more obsolete (or {{dated}}!) than the word itself, would be confusing. I expect some people wouldn't notice the tag on the inflection line, and would thus think that no sense was obsolete (not what you want), or would notice the tag but think (logically) than it applied to the inflections and again that the senses were not obsolete (again, not what you want)... I think it's better to indicate the obsolescence of the senses on the sense line. (How many highly polysemous obsolete words are there, anyway?) - -sche(discuss)05:09, 23 December 2012 (UTC)Reply
We don't do this for any other register or dialect: We don't have separate categories for US-only terms and for those with US-only senses, nor separate categories for math-specific terms and for those with math-specific senses. Why should obsolete be different?—msh210℠ (talk) 06:06, 23 December 2012 (UTC)Reply
For one thing, it would give us a list of terms which a bot could use to identify terms that should probably not be used in definitions. The same would be true in varying degrees for {{archaic}}, {{dated}}, {{rare}}, and possibly others. DCDuringTALK10:27, 23 December 2012 (UTC)Reply
2014
Category names containing "US"
Latest comment: 10 years ago11 comments4 people in discussion
I believe that the punctuated U.S. is the more formal usage, and has the advantage of not being mistaken for an all-caps instance of the word, "us". I therefore propose to move all categories containing "US" (e.g. Category:US State Capitals, Category:fr:US States, and Category:Southern US English) to titles containing "U.S.". By my count, this covers about 50 categories in total. If approved, I will be glad to do all of the renaming and recategorization. bd2412T21:29, 18 February 2014 (UTC)Reply
I would absolutely agree with that, as it eliminates all possible ambiguity. For states, we would have to change it to "States of the United States" to avoid the alliteration of "United States States". bd2412T22:06, 18 February 2014 (UTC)Reply
I disagree. At least part of the time, people have to type these category names by hand, and even a couple of extra characters every time can be a nuisance (I'm surprised you aren't going all the way and suggesting "the United States of America").
I fail to see how the "US" in category names could ever be mistaken for a pronoun- do you really think people are going to look at Category:US States and mistake it for a colloquial version of "we states"?
It looks very much to me like a solution in search of a problem, with no real benefit, unless you can call forcing people to do more typing a benefit. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:16, 19 February 2014 (UTC)Reply
Attributive US and noun United States. So US state capitals (caps sic) and Languages of the United States. —MichaelZ. 2014-03-16 04:11 z
Is that just an opinion on whether United States should be spelled out, or is it also addressed to the question of whether we should use a punctuated U.S.? bd2412T18:29, 17 March 2014 (UTC)Reply
Both. These are also the forms recommended by the Chicago Manual of Style. —MichaelZ. 2014-03-17 21:56 z
Latest comment: 9 years ago10 comments6 people in discussion
Finnish dialects
I think that linguists consider these to be dialects of Finnish, so that would make these pluricentric standards of a single language. I don't know if keeping them separate would hold any value? —CodeCat14:05, 15 March 2014 (UTC)Reply
The impression I get from the example at w:Meänkieli is that the differences are very minor, no more than there might be between Croatian and Serbian. I notice systematic loss of -d- and Finnish -ts- corresponds to -tt- in Meänkieli. They definitely look mutually intelligible. Kven looks a little more different, but it might also just be the spelling; I don't know how hard it would be to the average Finnish speaker. —CodeCat23:26, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply
I know maybe a dozen words of Finnish, so I can't judge for myself, but the impression I get from the Wikipedia articles is that there's an equal or greater range of variation between dialects in Finland as there is with these dialects- if these dialects were on the other side of the Finnish border, they would probably be considered just part of the normal dialectal variation (I'm sure there are some differences due to their isolation from the influence of standard Finnish, as well). They have special status because they're in Sweden and Norway surrounded by Swedish and Norwegian. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:53, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply
Finnish wasn't even a single language to begin with originally. There's several dialect groups that form a continuum, but it's not easy to draw clear lines. Savonian (eastern) dialects for example might well be closer to Karelian (considered a separate language) than they are to western Finnish. —CodeCat00:10, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply
My impression is the same as Chuck's, that these could be merged. By my (quick) count, we have 11 Meänkieli entries and 14 English entries with Meänkieli translations, and 19 Kven entries and 8 entries with Kven translations. - -sche(discuss)02:45, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply
Blue indicates areas where Finnish is spoken by the majority, and green indictes minority. Meänkieli and Kven are considered Finnish on this map
I somehow missed this discussion when it was active, but better later than never. I have the following comments:
The map is outdated. There's practically no Finnish-speaking population left in the areas which were annexed by the Soviet Union during and after the WWII. The map on the right is more up-to-date.
There's some Ingrian population left in the St. Petersburg area, but their number and share of population (less than 0,5‰ in Leningrad oblast) is drastically reduced due to 1) inflow of Russians to St. Petersburg, 2) Stalin's terror in the 1930's and 3) emigration to Finland between 1990 and 2011.
I'm not sure of Kven-speakers, but the speakers of Meänkieli tend to be quite strong in their opinion that they are not Finnish-speakers. It is probably true that if the border were in another place, Meänkieli would be considered a Finnish dialect. But then again, it would hardly be the same language as it is today - it would have preserved less archaic features and there would be much less Swedish influence in it. If ISO regards it a language, how could we be wiser?
Meänkieli is an official minority language in Sweden, and is regarded as distinct from Finnish which also has a (separate) minority language status there.
"Finnish wasn't even a single language to begin with originally." -- Show me one that was!
I noticed the nonexistent topical category Category:ja:Humble in Special:WantedCategories, and checked, as I often do, whether there was an existing category that already covered the subject. I found these two. The first one was created by User:Haplology, and has more information about Japanese culture, while the other one was created by User:Atitarev along with Category:Korean humble terms, and is more suited to a multi-language series of categories.
It seems to me that Category:Japanese humble terms fits our naming scheme better, so I propose we merge both into that one, and that we convert it and the Korean category to use {{lexiconcatboiler}}, which is designed for this kind of thing. That means creating a category called Category:Humble terms by language with a general description of humble language in its subtemplate. We can then add language-specific details to the Japanese and Korean categories.
I suspect that there aren't many languages that have such well-developed and institutionalized humble lexicons as these do, but I'm sure there are an awful lot of languages that have at least a few such terms- "your humble servant" comes to mind as an English example. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:13, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
It's only to do with two languages - Korean and Japanese. Note: some people mix "honorific" with "polite" or "formal" but the exact concept currently exists only in Japanese and Korean, even if other languages have similar ideas, "honorific" and "humble" are opposite and used in out- and in-group references.
I have posted on User:Haplology's page some time ago, which is now archived. You can see here: [1]. Haplology admitted that the structure wasn't perfect and needs fixing.
The suggested structure above (2) shows that honorific and humble terms are both part of the respectful formal language but honorific is used in reference to outgroup and humble - to ingroup. The concept and usage are critical in formal communication in Japanese and Korean languages. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)00:31, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
It's not the same, although if it's related. Category:Japanese honorifics should be a subcategory of Category:Japanese formal terms. "Formal" is opposed to "colloquial" but respectful language is a specific variety, which needs special training, including native Japanese students. E.g. おっしゃる (ossharu, honorific) shows respect to the 2nd/3rd person or outgroup and is never used in self-reference in the polite speech, whereas 申す (mōsu, humble) is used to self-reference or ingroup (even if one talks about own CEO!). Formal words are used regardless who/what they refer to in the formal language, like in any language. An interesting example might be that a person talking to an outsider about own general manager without polite "-san" (e.g. simply Yamada, not Yamada-san) and using humble terms. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)01:19, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
Category:Wiktionary:Foo → Category:Wiktionary foo
Latest comment: 6 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
If there is consensus to make these name changes, I also request someone with a bot to do it, because the move I did by hand wasn't particularly big, but it sure was tedious. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 14:28, 7 May 2014 (UTC)Reply
I believe that we are making a mistake to treat all of these in subcategories of parts of speech. We can be free of the tyranny of the word classes that users are familiar with for purposes of categories of this kind, though sadly not for headings. There are nominals that are not nouns, MWEs that are not phrases of any kind. Forcing a category structure to be hierarchical is convenient in a bureaucratic kind of way, but it does a great deal of violence to the reality of things. DCDuringTALK00:27, 20 September 2014 (UTC)Reply
There was Category:Latvian temporal adverbs, which I renamed to Category:Latvian time adverbs while also creating Category:English time adverbs. I did this because "temporal" seems like a higher-register word, which is like the distinction between "location" and "locative" - and we already had Category:English location adverbs as noted in the discussion below. So I figured that "time" was a better lexical counterpart to "location" than "temporal". Using "temporal location" is confusing as it gives the impression that these adverbs indicate a place, which they don't of course. But it also misses the point of the category. The defining characteristic is that these refer to punctual moments in time, analogous to adverbs which denote stationary position. They contrast with adverbs like "yearly" or "for a year" which denote frequency and duration respectively. These, of course, are also temporal location adverbs, but they don't belong in this category as they have their own categories (Category:English frequency adverbs and Category:English duration adverbs), so the suggested new name is an attempt to make this more explicit. —CodeCat21:01, 20 September 2014 (UTC)Reply
Note that the other categories both use nouns attributively instead of adjectives, eg, not "frequent adverbs", but "frequency adverbs". The nouns are chosen because they have a different meaning than the adjectives. "Punctuality" obviously doesn't cut it. Can you think of any other one- or two-word nominal that would be better than "temporal location"? DCDuringTALK14:04, 23 September 2014 (UTC)Reply
DCDuring is right that "temporal adverbs" is a lot more common than "punctual adverbs". The latter phrase gets only 50 non-redundant raw Google hits, and 47 Google Books hits; the former phrase gets at least 43 pages of Google Books hits (43x10 = 430 hits) before the hits stop actually containing the phrase. "Temporal location adverbs" is the least common of the bunch, getting only 6 Books hits, and it's a moronic / oxymoronic name, because it states that the adverbs refer to places, which they do not. So the question is whether it's sufficient to relabel these as "temporal adverbs", or necessary to give them the narrower label "punctual adverbs"? Are there enough of them that the narrow categorization is necessary? Is the narrow label one people will understand? - -sche(discuss)22:00, 20 September 2014 (UTC)Reply
Well, as it is now, we have Category:English time adverbs, but it's a parent category to various other types of adverbs with an aspect of time. The adverbs in question here are just one type. So it wouldn't make so much sense to have "temporal adverbs" as a subcategory of "time adverbs". But it also wouldn't make much sense to have "frequency adverbs" as a subcategory of "temporal adverbs" if the latter is meant to indicate points in time specifically. —CodeCat17:05, 23 September 2014 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
This poorly maintained category should be combined with Category:Taxonomy. The poor maintenance arises from the overlap conceptually as well as the poor choice of name for this category. In addition, for some undocumented and unfathomable reason Category:Taxonomy was made a subcategory of Category:Systematics. I think this is symptomatic of the unmaintainablity of the category. DCDuringTALK19:14, 20 September 2014 (UTC)Reply
I'm not sure if we should merge the two. In the English categories, at least, the members seem to be correctly apportioned between the two, with a handful of exceptions. I do think they should be made sister categories, rather than one being under the other. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:30, 20 September 2014 (UTC)Reply
What are the criteria that distinguish membership in the categories? Many dictionaries have them as synonyms in one or more of the variously defined senses and subsenses, two of which BTW systematics lacks. DCDuringTALK13:53, 23 September 2014 (UTC)Reply
Khanty words with /ɬ/
Latest comment: 8 years ago8 comments6 people in discussion
Requesting a move of a dozen Khanty words:
Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. → Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E.
Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. → Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E.
Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. → Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E.
Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. → Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E.
Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. → Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E.
Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. → Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E.
Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. → Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E.
Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. → Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E.
Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. → Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E.
Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. → Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E.
Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. → Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E.
Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. → Lua error in Module:parameters at line 360: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "kca" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E.
These have /ɬ/, which is however written ӆ and not ԓ (this is instead, I believe, /ɭ/). Quite a few current entries are sourced from a dictionary (Kononova 2002) which uses a rather ԓ-like but regardless clearly el-with-tail glyph. --Tropylium (talk) 13:24, 19 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
(Listed here in case anyone wants to argue that ԓ for /ɬ/ is actually a competing dialectal standard that should have precedence. --Tropylium (talk))
I would say just go ahead and move them yourself. Unless there's a chance that other languages will have terms using the original spellings, the redirects that you leave will actually be useful for those who make the same mistake when searching. Given the similarity of the characters, I have a hunch scannos from online books might be a major source of these. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:38, 19 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
Update: apparently the normative glyph is in fact ԯ (el with descender). However, this has not been widely available in fonts, so ӆ or ԓ have been used as workaround solutions in some materials. (Can anyone reading this actually see the first glyph?) --Tropylium (talk) 09:42, 12 March 2015 (UTC)Reply
They do, though we never did settle here if we should move them to use ԯ or ӆ. Since the latter is attestable as well, and seems to render better, I would be okay with it (even if we might be setting ourselves up for replacing these again with alternate-spelling soft-redirects some years down the line). --Tropylium (talk) 01:57, 1 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago13 comments4 people in discussion
The terminology of probability theory and statistics overlaps so much that there is little point in maintaining the two disciplines as separate topical categories.
I also cannot see the point of maintaining Category:Probability separately from Category:Probability theory — unless it is meant to contain terms used in informal discussions of probability (as opposed to mathematical formalisation thereof).
As far as I'm aware, w:vector algebra, q.v., and linear algebra are identical. Probability theory is a far cry, to my mind, from statistics. In particular, their uses are different: lots and lots of people use statistics, and the words that are relevant to statistics, without knowing or caring anything about probability theory. Perhaps one topcat for statistics and applied probability and another for probability theory? But they'll share quite a few words. Perhaps instead one for statistics and one for probability? They, too, will share quite a few words. So I don't know the best course of action. Maybe we should keep the three categories we have now, but rename "Probability" to "Applied probability". If we do decide to have separate topcats for applied probability and for probability theory, then perhaps merge the latter into category:Measure theory?—msh210℠ (talk) 03:35, 25 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
As for "lots of people use words relevant to statistics without caring about probability theory" — can you clarify that with an example? — Keφr18:32, 25 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
In that case, the question to ask is what terms are characteristic to "applied probability" as opposed to "pure" probability and statistics. Right now Category:en:Probability contains terms like mgf, stochastic matrix and evens — of which only the latter seems rather non-statistical. On the other hand, it would be awkward to find probability distribution in a category whose name does not mention probability. — Keφr15:23, 26 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
@Kephir I think you are wrong about no purely probabilistic terms existing. But, even if you are correct, that doesn't in and of itself mean that Category:Probability should be deleted. Msh and I have posited that statistics-only terms exist. Statistics-only terms shouldn't be in the same combination of categories as statistics-and-probability terms; probability could continue to exist as a subcategory of statistics even if no probability-only terms were found to exist. Purplebackpack8900:52, 26 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
In defense of the quote "lots of people use words relevant to statistics without caring about probability theory", there are lots of statistics that can be discerned without using probability. Rates, and to a certain extent averages, concern probability, but statistics is also enumerations and changes, which can be calculated without using probability. Purplebackpack8923:37, 25 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
KeepCategory:Statistics. Data visualization, exploratory data analysis, quality control, economic statistics, sabremetrics etc. are too far removed from probability theory to be in the same category. Some terms are in both statistics and probability, but the two categories should in general be linked by mutual "See also"s. DCDuring (talk) 14:00, 3 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
I've complained about this one before, back when it was a template: I would hazard a guess that there are very few in the US that even know what WC refers to. It's also odd to see it categorized under Category:Rooms, especially since it's the only subcategory under it. That means that Category:Feces is a sub-sub-sub-category of Category:Buildings and structures- counterintuitive, to say the least. The other subcategory of Category:WC, Category:Toiletry is another oddity, since it has nothing to do with water closets, and contains Category:Cosmetics
The problem is that all of the common English terms are euphemisms, and most have had considerable evolution in meaning, so there's nothing really clear and obvious worldwide. Strictly speaking, a water closet is the plumbing fixture, but has apparently come to mean the room that houses it. This is also true of toilet, and, I believe, loo, as well (our entry is ambiguous about that). At least water closet isn't ambiguous- toilet also refers to grooming, washing one's face, etc. Another US term, bathroom can refer to a room containing a bath, and lavatory can refer to a sink. Terms such as restroom, and ladies' room/men's room are vague enough that anyone who doesn't already know what they refer to will have no clue from the name. We need to figure out which term is most recognizable in all parts of the world.
As I mentioned above, we really need to rethink this part of the category tree: feces have little to do with buildings, and cosmetics have nothing to do with feces. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:29, 5 April 2015 (UTC)Reply
Sorry for redefining the meaning of "shortly"... I renamed the category in the first place in an effort to make it more accessible to general users: I remembered seeing the Passeriformes referred to in various encyclopedias and bird books over the years as the "Perching Birds", and I also wondered if anyone would be confused by the fact that "-ines" names for animals are usually reserved for subfamilies (which end in -inae). Given that most users of this dictionary are probably not "in the bird community" and probably have never heard of terms such as passerines or oscines before coming here, I'm not sure how important it is to reflect usage in this case. That said, there are probably only a handful of languages with enough bird names to even need an intermediate category like this, so it's not really that big a deal. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:44, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
"Passerines" is uncommon, but it's not some obscure technical term - turn on Springwatch and you can hear Chris Packham talking about passerines until your wings fall off. "Perching birds" is really no better - nobody actually says "perching birds" except to try and explain what "passerines" means, on top of which it's not SoP (lots of other birds perch) so people might think they understand it when they don't. tbh, I'd be happiest with just lumping all birds in Category:Birds, I think it's easy to overcategorize these things. Keith the Koala (talk) 14:42, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
"Passerines" remind me of the often-used fungus group, the LBMs (little brown mushrooms).
If we continue to develop vernacular names and taxonomic names in parallel (to the extent that they are parallel), we can have the luxury of different classifications in different languages, not to mention the structure that emerges from Derived terms and the semantic relations headings. The relationships among taxonomic names are likely to diverge increasingly from those among vernacular names.
Among bird names, though, there is a major effort to have vernacular language names that correspond to taxonomic names and relationships. (Similarly with mammals.) The IOC birdname website has English bird family names (sometimes in form like "Kites, hawks, and eagles" or "Pheasants and allies") that seem designed to be in one-to-one correspondence with taxonomic family names. There are frequent correspondences at genus and species level as well. I'm not sure about higher levels.
Birds (Aves) are a class (or a clade) that we have fairly well covered AFAICT. It affords us one of the best opportunities to have good vernacular categorization and naming. I don't see why we don't have categories that correspond to multiple levels of groups of birds, though I would prefer that "bird" be left to at least one of the definition, image, and Hypernyms in the entry to communicate.
Both 'Passerines' and 'Perching birds' seem like high levels of categorization that don't well correspond to words in vernacular language usage. The IOC doesn't help much with terms like 'Oscines' and 'Suboscines'. A vernacular type-based name like 'Sparrow-like birds' would be communicative, but has little else to recommend it. DCDuringTALK23:44, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Ethnologue has assigned codes to some but not all of the varieties of West African Pidgin English, and we in turn have incorporated some (e.g. pcm) but not all (e.g. not gpe) of those codes. As WP notes, the "contemporary English-based pidgin and creole languages are so similar that they are sometimes grouped together under the name 'West African Pidgin English'" (a name which also denotes their predecessor which developed in the 1700s). WP's examples are illustrative, particularly in that its Ghanaian and Nigerian Pidgin English examples are identical. I propose to merge at least the following three varieties into wes, renaming it "West African Pidgin English":
Ghanaian Pidgin English (gpe)
Nigerian Pidgin English (pcm)
Cameroonian Pidgin English (wes)
We could also discuss whether or not to merge Sierra Leone Krio (kri, which WP notes its often mistaken for English slang due to its similarity to English, but which has a somewhat distinct alphabet), Pichinglis / Fernando Po Creole (fpe), and Liberian Kreyol / Liberian Pidgin English (lir). - -sche(discuss)21:11, 11 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
The question is a very complex one. Firstly (but of least importance), scholars are divided on which lects have creolised and which have not, but it is generally agreed upon that at least some of the language you mentioned are not pidgins, which would make the name "West African Pidgin English" somewhat of a misnomer (the more neutral name "Wes-Kos" have been suggested as an alternative, but even linguists haven't fully adopted it). Secondly, all these lects are remarkably similar on a lexical level, but that's unsurprising; after all, they resulted from separate but very similar language contact events, and then probably modified each other (one scholar posits that Krio and Cameroonian Pidgin English relexified each other to some degree after pidginisation). The similarities are also obscured by the fact that there is nothing close to an agreed orthography for most of these, and pronunciation does differ a bit across West Africa. Linguistically, I'd probably merge them all, but practically that may not be the best decision. I know we have entries in pcm, but probably next to nothing for the rest, and if somebody wants to add them, given how each lect is very neatly assigned to a certain West African country, at least it won't be confusing for them to do so. Conclusion: the literature is schizophrenic, the lects mutually intelligible, and the existing situation remarkably unproblematic. Therefore I abstain. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds21:19, 16 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
(Appendix:English collective nouns is edit protected, so I can't place the template there, but I guess that would be the more sensible target location)
Most of these fancy collective nouns floating around the Internet are artificial words that amateur philologists pull out of their asses in order to look “cool”. Most of them have never been used and will probably never be used. If you think the ones listed at the page are bad, look at the edit histories. For this reason it is important that the validity of collectives added to these appendices (and to the mainspace) isn’t taken for granted.
Rationale: This makes these categories nominally consistent with all other categories that describe the words ("Category:English blablabla") rather than their meanings ("Category:en:blablabla"), such as all categories listed in Category:English terms by etymology.
Being an exonym is not a matter of how a word was created. In fact, terms often don't start off as exonyms, but become exonyms as the languages diverge and evolve. So it's not appropriate to put it under etymology. —CodeCat00:11, 12 October 2015 (UTC)Reply
I nominated specifically "Category:en:Exonyms -> Category:English exonyms", you mentioned "English exonyms should be […]", so I don't see how this would work as an oppose vote to my nomination. I don't suppose you wanted the category to remain named "Category:en:Exonyms", right?
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
Reviving the earlier discussion, I'm still bothered by the fact that we have two different categories for names. But the previous discussion also made it clear that it's not as easy as just merging them.
I think Category:en:Place names should probably be renamed to Category:en:Places, since it's really meant to contain terms for places. That is, since it's a topical/set-type category, the focus should be on the referent of the word, whereas part-of-speech categories like Category:English names focus on the word itself. A word is a name, and it refers to something bearing that name.
Category:en:Demonyms is a bit more problematic and I brought it up before, though I don't remember where. "Demonym", again, is a term focused on the word, not the referent. A word is a demonym. Perhaps this could be renamed to something else? Category:en:Peoples maybe?
"Category:en:Transliteration of personal names" could be renamed to "Category:English names transliterated from other languages", I suppose. What's the matter with the demonyms category? It contains demonyms, as expected. Would it be better titled "English demonyms", on the model of "English phrases"? - -sche(discuss)06:02, 10 November 2015 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago12 comments9 people in discussion
Both of these templates serve the same purpose, the only difference is in looks. So I think they should be merged. I have no particular preference for which we should keep, just that one of them should go. —CodeCat23:21, 9 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
They should either be merged (with one redirecting to the other), or kept. Since I generally don't like templates being needlessly consolidated, I'll say keepPurplebackpack8923:41, 9 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
Looks is a personal preference, so one of them should go. The "lite" one doesn't let an editor add reasoning (and I can only imagine reasoning awkwardly tacked onto the end of the notice), so I think that {{rfelite}} should be deleted. —suzukaze (t・c) 23:46, 9 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
@suzukaze-c Comments can always be added directly to the etymology section or as an unnamed parameter in any template that does not rely on such parameters for its functionality. DCDuringTALK00:35, 10 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
I don't see any particular benefit to tidying by combining them. The templates differ by their look. That is not an insignificant consideration to whatever normal users may use our work, should there be any.
I think all of the big-display-box templates are hideous and potentially distracting to normal users. I'd bet that most contributions of etymologies are generated by contributors (not normal users) who find the entries by means other than noticing {{rfe}} (or {{rfelite}}). The same is probably true of {{rfi}} and {{rfc}}. I'd further bet that the main function these boxes serve is to steer a contributor to the particular part of the entry that needs work. A big box seems unnecessary for that function. In contrast, in the cases of {{rfd}} and {{rfv}}, arguably the distraction is intentional and constructive, as it serves as a warning to users that there may be something wrong with the definitions or that they might want to participate in the discussion about them.
I'd love to hear the thoughts of others, 1., on the effect of the differing displays on different types of normal users and, 2., on whether we still have the prospect of gaining such users in sufficient numbers to be of any concern to us. DCDuringTALK00:35, 10 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
I think for clarity I'd merge {{etystub}} into {{rfelite}} rather than the other way around. But we should have both etystub and rfelite as they do the exact same job. {{rfe}} should really only be used when no etymology is present because it doesn't interact well with either text that's before it or after it. But it is more obviously visible, being in a box. Renard Migrant (talk) 20:11, 1 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
{{etystub}} has a different message. It allows for the possibility that the etymology exists but is incomplete. Neither of the other two do that. Perhaps at least one of the two others should have a switch that changed the display to indicate the etymology, though present, is incomplete. The problem with not having such wording is that some new contributor could view {{rfe}} or {{rfelite}} as not having been removed when the etymology was added. Converting {{etystub}} to have a more modest appearance like that of {{rfelite}} would be an improvement. The big-box look it now has is enough to make me occasionally miss the presence of the stub etymology that is there. DCDuringTALK22:41, 1 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
Checking in a month later, I noticed only two entries using the now-deprecated template, which I cleaned up. I suppose the intention is to delete it at some point? - -sche(discuss)05:03, 26 December 2019 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion
Move to hand in the cookie jar (now a redirect to this), which is included in many more expressions than this one, eg have one's hand in the cookie jar, to catch someone with their hand in the cookie jar. I would be happy to add redirects and for all possessive determiners and for the various verb forms of catch and have and usage examples for a selection of these and perhaps others, such as put and keep. DCDuringTALK21:35, 26 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
I didn't find any use at COCA of this except in in lieu of (1,045) and (Canada, legal) pay in lieu (2). There was one use of in lieu thereof. The other seven instances included the name of a band, an incomplete spoken utterance, and similar.
There are hits at Google Books for in lieu appointment]. Note that not all of them actually contain the phrase: some have "... in lieu. Appointment...". The same is true of in lieu payment], though it seems to be more common with a hyphen. It may not be that common, but in lieu does seem to be used as a legal/accounting term without any form of "of". Chuck Entz (talk) 06:33, 29 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
I see. That would merit a reworking of the entry for in lieu, which looks to be limited to legal contexts. It seems that in lieu is often an abbreviation of in lieu of (something obvious from the context). In its prepositive attributive use "substitute" seems like a synonym or definition. DCDuringTALK15:54, 29 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
To me it seems that the uses that are not in lieu of are derived from use of in lieu of in a legal context including labor law. They all seems to have become completely conventionalized in meaning – therefore dictionary-worthy – though sometimes the meaning might turn out to be restricted to a specific context. I think this might work presented as a non-gloss definition with each of the most typical applications illustrated with a usage example and possible with a subsense. DCDuringTALK17:12, 2 April 2016 (UTC)Reply
March 2016
Linear A
Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
Strangely enough we have a language code for Linear A [lab], even though Linear A is a writing system and not a language. I have no idea why it was encoded or why we have it. -- Liliana•15:01, 5 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
It's very odd. The script code for Linear A is "Lina"; the language code for Minoan is "omn"; but there's also a language code "lab" for a language called "Linear A". I have no idea what ISO and SIL were thinking, but I'm in favor of deleting "lab" from our modules. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:43, 5 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
I'll bet their thinking is that the language written in the script may be an unknown language, which would be consistent with w:Linear A. There do seem to be a large number of hypotheses about Linear A, nearly on the same order as the total number of recorded instances of the script. DCDuringTALK18:33, 5 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
I see. Reading Minoan language more carefully, I see that it's written in both Cretan hieroglyphs and Linear A, but since neither writing system has been deciphered, it isn't known whether it's the same language in two writing systems or two different languages. So maybe "omn" means Minoan in Cretan hieroglyphs and "lab" means Minoan in Linear A, and they may or may not refer to the same language. Given that the language is unknown and undeciphered, I wonder why we have one Minoan lemma: kuro. How do we know this word was pronounced "kuro" and that it means "total"? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 07:25, 6 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
It's in the wrong script anyway (it was added before Unicode covered Linear A), but afaik Linear A can be read simply by using the known values for Linear B syllables, which are visually similar. This word is always found at the end of lists, followed by a number, so the meaning was easy to figure out. -- Liliana•10:39, 6 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago9 comments5 people in discussion
I see no evidence that this exists as a separate language, and move that it be merged with tr. The literature which references it seems to describe the dialect of Turkish which may be spoken by Gagauz people in the Balkan Peninsula. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds20:17, 3 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
Wikipedia, citing Ethnologue, insists that Balkan Gagauz Turkish, Gagauz, and Turkish are all separate, and a few sources do seem to take that view, e.g. Cem Keskin, Subject agreement-dependency of accusative case in Turkish, or, Jump-starting grammatical machinery (2009) speaks of "Balkan Gagauz Turkish, Gagauz, Turkish, Iraqi Turkmen, North and South Azerbaijani, Salchuq, Aynallu, Qashqay, Khorasan Turkic, Turkmen, Oghuz Uzbek, Afshar, and possibly Crimean Tatar". Other references speak of Balkan Gagauz Turkish as a variety of Gagauz, e.g. James Minahan's Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations says "The Gagauz speak a Turkic language [...] also called Balkan Gagauz or Balkan Turkic, [which] is spoken in two major dialects, Central and Southern, with the former the basis of the literary language. Other dialects [include] Maritime Gagauz" (which comports with w:Gagauz's list of its dialects). Matthias Brenzinger's Language Diversity Endangered also treats Balkan Gagauz "or slightly misleading, Balkan Turkic" in his entry on Gagauz, but says it that the Balkan "varieties might deserve the status of outlying languages but very little information is available about them." (A few generalist references seem to subsume all gag into tr.) I would leave them all separate, pending more conclusive evidence that they should be merged. - -sche(discuss)23:58, 3 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
I think there's some confusion about what exactly we're talking about, and whether it's Gagauz or Turkish. Just because they use the term "Balkan Gagauz Turkish" doesn't mean that they're referring to the language with ISO 639-3 code bgx. When I look at who's citing the references listed for bgx at Glottolog, Manević (the reference for its classification) is cited in papers clearly talking about the dialects of tr. These are the only actual words attributed to this lect that I can find. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds00:33, 4 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Tropylium, on the subject of Turkic languages spoken in Europe, do you know anything about this one, and about its differences or similarity to Gagauz and standard Turkish? - -sche(discuss)01:08, 11 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
I'm not previously familiar with this dispute, but here are a few handbooks on the topic:
Menges in The Turkic Languages and Peoples has the following slightly complicated quote (p. 11): "The Turkic languages spoken farthest west are the Balkanic dialects of Osman and Gagauz in Bosnia, Bulgaria and Macedonia. These seem to form two groups, one of possibly pre-Osman origin, and a later Osman one. To the former belong the Gaǯaly in Deli-Orman (Eastern Bulgaria), who, according to V. A. Moškov, are descended from the Päčänäg, Uz, and Torci (?), the Surguč, numbering about 7000 people in the district (vilājät) of Edirnä, who call themselves Gagauz. In Moškov's opinion, they, too, go back to the Päčänägs (?) and the Macedonian Gagauz; they number ca. 4000 people in southeastern Macedonia." — It seems clear that some group(s) corresponding to "Balkan Gagauz" is being identified here, but I am not even sure how to parse the sentence structure; e.g. are "Uz" and "Torci" some of the pre-Osman Turkic groups, or some of the alleged ancestors of the Gaǯaly? ("Osman" is, of course, Turkish.)
Hendrik Boeschoten in a classificatory chapter in Routledge's The Turkic Languages mentions that "a few speakers [of Gagauz] in northern Bulgaria, Romania and Greece, adhere to the Orthodox faith, and have their own history." This again seems to refer to "Balkan Gagauz", but with no indication of being its own language.
So far I would gather from this that "Balkan Gagauz" is at most a sister language of "non-Balkan Gagauz", and perhaps indeed just a different dialect group (perhaps one whose features are not reflected in written standard Gagauz). But the Manević 1954 paper would be more informative on this topic, if anyone wants to hunt it down. --Tropylium (talk) 11:55, 11 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
I think Balkan Gagauz should be merged with gag, especially since it contains no entries. The few terms that would be specific for Gagauz spoken outside of the traditional Gagauz area in Moldova/Romania/Bulgaria can be dealt with within gag entries. The only thing is that some etymologies of other Turkic languages sometimes refer to Balkan Gagauz instead of Gagauz, because editors didn't know the difference between two. Otherwise I don't see any problems with merging them two.
@Metaknowledge This is a hard question, I can offer only guesswork.
I can't find any good maps for the distribution of Gagauz and (Muslim) Turks proper in the Balkans, most don't show Balkan Gagauz at all although we know they exist at least in Bulgaria and Macedonia.
It seems that they are not easily separated geographically from Muslim Turks although they presumably live in different localities. I'm guessing this means that their languages ("Balkan Gagauz Turkish" and "Rumelian Turkish") could be the same, although maybe only the latter call their language "Turkish", so I guess that they (would?) use Standard Turkish in education and administration.
This would be a good argument to merge Balkan Gagauz into Turkish, except that this paper shows that Balkan Turkic (if this really is a single language) is quite distinct from Anatolian Turkish and perhaps worth considering a different language. Baskakov also considers Balkan Turkish and (Moldovan) Gagauz to form a clade within Oghuz and Anatolian Turkish and Azerbaijani to form another. Crom daba (talk) 21:35, 30 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago12 comments3 people in discussion
This next batch is of languages from lists other than Ethnologue and LinguistList. As before, I've tried to vet them all beforehand, but I will have doubtlessly made some mistakes. NB if you want to find more: I've avoided dealing with most of the Loloish languages, because all the literature seems to be in Chinese. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds04:54, 6 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
Wikipedia (and Lyle Campbell, Anna Belew, Cataloguing the World's Endangered Languages, 2018) says this is dix "Dixon Reef". Is it not? (Or if it is, should the name associated with that code be changed?) - -sche(discuss)20:10, 1 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Based on feedback there, not added at this time, although I note that content in the language seems to exist, which suggests we would eventually need to figure out a header to include it under. - -sche(discuss)20:44, 2 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Perhaps better prm-kya? Also while I am not convinced treating the Komi varieties as separate languages altogether is the best solution, as long as we do so, we might moreover need Old Komi. --Tropylium (talk) 18:44, 11 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
I'm not sure... the very language is "reconstructed" by Bowern on the assumption that three wordlists (of which only two make it into the name) attest the same language, although apparently none of the three bothered to name the language. The chance of someone "would run across [a word in] it and want to know what it means" seems nonexistent. If we wanted to host the wordlists, we could do that in an appendix or on Wikisource. - -sche(discuss)16:09, 9 August 2016 (UTC)Reply
Bowern's methods are scientific; but I would feel better if more than one scholar was saying there was one language in this set of wordlists, the way that for e.g. Port Sorrell, Dixon & Crowley and Glottolog agree that there is a unit/lect there. - -sche(discuss)16:55, 4 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Maridan [zmd], Maridjabin [zmj], Marimanindji [zmm], Maringarr [zmt], Marithiel [mfr], Mariyedi [zmy], Marti Ke [zmg]: should these be merged? References speak of a singular Marrithiyel language. - -sche(discuss)21:30, 20 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
August 2016
Some more missing American languages
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Here are a few more North American languages for which we could add codes:
Akokisa (nai-ako). WP says it is attested certainly in two words in Spanish records (Yegsa "Spaniard[s]", which Swanton suggests is similar to Atakapa yik "trade" + ica[k] "people"; and the female name Quiselpoo), and possibly in more words in a wordlist by Jean Béranger in 1721 (if the wordlist is not some other language).
Labrador Inuit Pidgin French, less often called Belle-Isle Pidgin, was spoken in Labrador from the late 1600s (probably since before the 1660s, but first written down in 1694) until at least the mid 1760s, based on Inuktitut, French, Basque, Montagnais, and possibly Spanish and Breton. Louis-Jacques Dorais, An Inuit Pidgin around Belle-isle Strait (1996; with reference to "Clermont - Martijn 1980; Dorais 1980; Bakker 1988"), covers the records:
Louis Jolliet recorded words at Baie Saint-Louis in 1694, including the 'greeting' thou tcharacou, saying the latter word is "peace", which Dorais says is "corroborated by two other sources, from 1717 (characoua [...]) and 1720 (characo [...]). But a text from 1743 (Privy Council 1927: 3284), written by the French merchant Louis Fornel, gives to characo the meaning 'war'." Thou is probably from tu. The other would could be Basque txarrakoa "bad", thus "are you bad?".
Le Cour in 1742 records some more words: bons camaras "good comrades", tous camaras "all comrades", capitaine "captain", kellanoré (which Dorais says "seems to be Le Cour's [or the pidgin's?] rendering of Inuktitut kinaunali 'but who is he?'?), the personal name Amargo (a rendering of Amaqqut "Wolves"), rénombek "bead" (probably a loanword), maumek "file" (probably a loanword), monkoumek "knife" (probably a loanword from Montagnais mukuma:n, as spelled in Marguerite Ellen MacKenzie Towards a Dialectology of Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi).
Louis Fornel in 1743 recorded more: tout camara "all comrades", troquo balena "let us trade whale" (from French troquons!), non characo "no war" (sic, per Fornel).
Jens Haven wrote other words in 1764-5: makagua "peace" (perhaps from Basque bake[a] "peace" plus a suffix -koa), kutta (French couteau "knife"), memek "to drink" (from Inuktitut imiq "drinking water").
Few references discuss the lect and it is difficult to judge whether it is really a language or just something like broken French or like Spanglish (which I think we exclude), but the fact that the Inuit apparently changed the meaning and even part of speech of words in their own language when speaking pidgin suggests it is more on the pidgin-language side of that continuum than the code-switching side.
Algonquian–Basque pidgin (crp-abp). Wikipedia has a sample. The Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication, citing Bakker, says it was spoken from at least 1580 (and perhaps as early as 1530s) through 1635, and "only a few phrases and less than 30 words attributable to Basque were written down" (though apparently more words, attributable to other sources, were also recorded).
Guachichil (Cuauchichil, Quauhchichitl, Chichimeca) (nai-gch or, if Guachí is added as sai-gch, perhaps nai-gcl to prevent the two similarly-named lects from being mixed up by only typoing the initial n vs s), apparently sparsely attested.
Concho (nai-cnc). The Handbook of North American Indians, volume 10, says "three words of Concho [...] were recorded in 1581 [and] look like they may be [...] Uto-Aztecan".
Jumano (Humano, Jumana, Xumana, Chouman, Zumana, Zuma, Suma, and Yuma) (nai-jmn). The Handbook says "It has been established that the Jumano and Suma spoke the same language. Three words have been recorded" of it.
and from South America:
Peba / Peva (sai-peb), said by Erben to more properly by called Nijamvo, Nixamvo. Spoken in "the department of Loreto" in Peru. Attested in wordlists by Erben and Castelnau, which Loukotka provides, and which disagree with each other substantially: munyo (Erben) / money (Castelnau) "canoe, small boat"; nero (E) / yuna (C) "demon"; nebi (E) / nemey (C) "jaguar"; teki (E) / tomen-lay (C) "one", manaxo (E) / nomoira (C) "two"; etc. I would even consider that one might not be the same language as the other... what's with these languages that survive in disparate wordlists? lol.
possibly Saynáwa: fr.Wikt grants a code to this variety of Yaminawá language, described here (see also [3]).
Support all except possibly Akokisa. I think it's a dialect of Atakapa, and that the wordlist is very likely not being linked correctly. That said, it's so few words, that there's no real reason not to accept it as a separate language, just to be conservative about it. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds04:08, 16 August 2016 (UTC)Reply
Good point about Akokisa. (I am reminded that you had mentioned its dialectness earlier; sorry I forgot!) The wordlist, labelled only with a tribal name per WP, is possibly plain Atakapa, but Yegsa is supposedly recorded as specifically Akokisa; OTOH that doesn't rule out that Akokisa is a dialect. Indeed, M. Mithun's Languages of Native North America treats as dialects Akokisa, Eastern ("the most divergent, [...] known from a list of 287 entries") and Western ("the best documented. Gatschet recorded around 2000 words and sentences, as well as texts [...] Swanton recorded a few Western forms", all published in 1932 in a dictionary). I suppose the benefit to treating it as a dialect would be that we could context-label Yegsa and Quiselpoo as {{lb|aqp|Akokisa}} and then Béranger's forms as {{lb|aqp|possibly|Akokisa}} without needing to agonize over which header to put them under. - -sche(discuss)15:31, 16 August 2016 (UTC)Reply
Oh, that that four years ago, I think I have now a better understanding of how this thing works :) Still, these entries should probably be changed so that there is one main entry, with the remaining ones listed as alternative forms or synonyms, to avoid duplication. – Jberkel22:55, 26 February 2020 (UTC)Reply
Judeo-Arabic lects
Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion
We currently have Judeo-Arabic, but also Judeo-Tunisian Arabic (ajt) and Judeo-Moroccan Arabic (aju). The Arabic lects they draw from are all considered separate L2s, which perhaps supports this arrangement, but I don't know how different they all actually are, and it seems worth having a discussion on this. @Wikitiki89 —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds20:37, 11 September 2016 (UTC)Reply
I'm actually in favor of merging all of Arabic into one language. This would work similarly to how it works with Chinese. But in the past when I brought this up, there seemed to be too much opposition to the idea. As it is stands, the spoken Judeo-Arabic dialects deserve the same treatment as other spoken Arabic dialects. Judeo-Arabic (jrb) itself, however, can be merged with Arabic (ar), because it is essentially the same language as Classical Arabic expect for the fact that it is written in the Hebrew alphabet. But because of the difference in writing system, this merger would not really bring much benefit. --WikiTiki8923:00, 11 September 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Fay Freak mentions Judeo-Yemeni Arabic, [jye], and seems to support merger into the topolectal codes. I really don't know what the best solution is, and I await the day when we have Arabic contributors who want to take the lead on making Chinese-style tables and maps where we can list all known dialectal forms — but in the mean time, this is a festering mess. @פֿינצטערניש, Fenakhay, M. I. Wright may be interested as well. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds18:24, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
I did not notice this section; yes, I cannot oppose it. I just mentioned a priori concerns since I never specifically read or listened to Judeo-Arabic, and I thought “who could? would he even notice?”, which is why I said “The Jews might deal with it themselves”. Just on the other hand one might conclude something from the absence of information. “Pleading ignorance”, “to deny claims on the basis of lack of knowledge”. Fay Freak (talk) 18:37, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
In some places, they are very different: following the qeltu/gelet division, Muslim Baghdadi Arabic is a South Mesopotamian dialect, but Jewish and Christian Baghdadi Arabic are both North Mesopotamian dialects (though also distinct from the Jewish sociolects of North Mesopotamia). But this just underlines the need for a template that can show each city or oasis or religious group in a city alongside all the others. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds20:58, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Agreed that Judeo-Arabic is very often considerably different from the Muslim and Christian dialects. It's also typically written in the Hebrew alphabet, and it might be best to keep it separate, for now. It should be understood that Judeo-Arabic as a heading refers to literary Arabic with Hebrew letters, and it's probably not a bad idea to point Judeo-Arabic head words to their Arabic-letter equivalents.
Should we have more active Jewish contributors from Arabic-speaking communities in the future who contribute Judeo-Arabic entries, they can and should feel free to work out among themselves how to handle the many forms of Judeo-Arabic, and we should support their decision if and when this happens. IMO.
I'm not against collapsing literary Judeo-Arabic with our main Arabic entries, as long as the entries remain. But I will say that there is a unique vocabulary to Judaism that might still warrant keeping Judeo-Arabic separate until we have more competent Judeo-Arabic contributors. פֿינצטערניש (Fintsternish), she/her (talk) 22:37, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Ok, I looked a bit into it, having quoted a bit Lambourn, Elizabeth (2018) Abraham's Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World, Cambridge University Press, →DOI, →ISBN which contains an inventory of the Cairo Geniza in one column in the original Hebrew script and in the other transcribed or transliterated into Arabic – not translated as one would translate Serbo-Croatian into Macedonian –, which makes it look like a Standard Arabic text. Similarly it is with reading some of the quotes under Category:Judeo-Arabic lemmas. The transcription is as if from Arabic, and if you only read the transcriptions you don’t know it was written in Hebrew script or an alleged other language. So presuming this is the norm for written Arabic texts in Hebrew script I can definitely support merging the literary “Judeo-Arabic” with {{spelling of}} into Arabic and adding Hebrew script to the language data of Arabic. Fay Freak (talk) 13:44, 13 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Nkore-Kiga
Latest comment: 7 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
As can be seen at w:Nkore-Kiga language, Kiga [cgg] should definitely be merged into Nyankore [nyn]. Unfortunately, this might require a rename to something that is both hyphenated and considerably less common that just plain "Nyankore" (though that is, strictly speaking, merely the name of the main dialect). —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds05:21, 18 September 2016 (UTC)Reply
I'm not sure. WP suggests the merger was politically motivated, but many reference works do follow it. Ethnologue says there as "Lexical similarity [of] 78%–96% between Nyankore, Nyoro [nyo], and their dialects; 84%–94% with Chiga [cgg], [...and] 81% with Zinza [zin]" (Kiga, meanwhile, is said to be "77% [similar] with Nyoro [nyo]"), as if to suggest nyn is about as similar to cgg as to nyo, and indeed many early references treat Nkore-Nyoro like one language, where later references instead prefer to group Nkore with Kiga. Ethnologue mentions that some authorities merge all three into a "Standardized form of the western varieties (Nyankore-Chiga and Nyoro-Tooro) [...] called Runyakitara [...] taught at the University and used in internet browsing, but [it] is a hybrid language." (For comparison, Ethnologue says English has 60% lexical similarity to German.) - -sche(discuss)00:16, 2 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
Itneg lects
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
See w:Itneg language. All the dialects have different codes, but we really should give them a single code and unify them. I came across this problem with the entry balaua, which means "spirit house" (but I can't tell in which specific dialect). It's also known as Tinggian (with various different spellings), and this may be a better name for it than Itneg. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds02:09, 23 September 2016 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 7 years ago21 comments8 people in discussion
to something more sensible like "template:text"? lang could be used to display the language name from a language code whenever "there is no other template (like {{derived}} or {{cog}}) that can be used instead". --Giorgi Eufshi (talk) 14:09, 13 October 2016 (UTC)Reply
I was just making a point. hope no feelings were hurt )) My implicit question was: why do you feel lang suffix is necessary? It's not like this is the only template that can work with languages. --Dixtosa (talk) 16:59, 19 October 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Dixtosa: I just figured that it made its use clearer, that it's a template that marks the language of the text it encloses. But I really don't mind what it's called. — I.S.M.E.T.A.15:47, 6 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
Question: I have used {{lang}} on talk pages. Would a bot convert these instances to whatever template name is chosen as a replacement for {{lang}}? — Eru·tuon17:00, 19 October 2016 (UTC)Reply
We could also try orphaning it instead. I believe there are many uses that could be replaced with other templates. Try orphaning it and see how far we get. —CodeCat14:13, 13 October 2016 (UTC)Reply
Oppose: I use this template frequently for the text of quotations, which helps screen readers know what language the text is in; also, it's needed for display purposes sometimes, like wrapping text in {{lang|de|sc=Latf|…}} to display German text in Fraktur. — I.S.M.E.T.A.21:11, 13 October 2016 (UTC)Reply
And to mention a word without linking to it, you can put it in the 3rd positional parameter of {{l}} or {{m}}, thus: {{m|de||dass}}. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:53, 14 October 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Aɴɢʀ: Thanks; I was already aware of and do already use {{m}} and {{l}} like that. @CodeCat: I frequently find those templates to be flawed; they can't handle the quotation of works with unusual internal structure (Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with its hierarchically organised propositions, is a modern example). Unless there is something that can perform the function of {{lang}} without the problems of the quote- templates, I shall have to oppose this orphaning. — I.S.M.E.T.A.14:31, 19 October 2016 (UTC)Reply
@CodeCat: I confess to not being very experienced with those templates (the bad experiences I've had have been other editors trying to shoehorn existing, manually-written citations into them). Maybe one or another of those quote- templates could cope with the TLP; I wouldn't know. Could any of them cope with the modern translation of a scholion by one ancient author, commenting on the work of another ancient author, appearing in a volume of translated works of ancient authors (writing on a common theme), with the texts emended by different modern emendators, the volume as a whole edited by a modern editor, and that volume constituting one part of a series which itself has a different modern general editor? — I.S.M.E.T.A.15:12, 19 October 2016 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
It would be nice to have a name that makes it more obvious that this is a topical category. How about Category:English linguistics, and for the larger languages subcategories like Category:English grammar, Category:English orthography, etc.? I’m open to suggestions, as some people don’t like including things relating to writing or standardised language under linguistics. Another issue is that the hub categories (without language codes) would follow the same format as non-topical categories, but I still think it’s clearer than just English.
Latest comment: 7 years ago9 comments5 people in discussion
I just noticed that we have this for some reason. Guaraní is a dialect continuum that is quite extensive, both in inter-dialect differences and in geography, and certain varieties have been heavily influenced by Spanish or Portuguese. That said, our Guaraní [gn] content is, as far as I can tell, pretty much entirely on Paraguayan Guaraní, which for some reason has a different code, [gug]. My attention was brought to this by User:Guillermo2149 changing L2 headers (I have not reverted his edits, but they do cause header-code mismatch). We could try splitting up the Guaraní dialects, but it would hard to choose cutoffs and would definitely confuse potential editors, of which we have had more since Duolingo released a Guaraní course. I think the best choice is to merge [gug] into [gn] and mark words extensively for which dialects or countries they are used in. @-sche —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds01:29, 1 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
Support [gn] and [grn] are the codes of the macrolanguage, [gug] is the code for the specific dialect spoken in Paraguay, also, until now, I haven't found any [gn] lemma to be out of [gug]. --Guillermo2149 (talk) 01:52, 1 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Guillermo2149, Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV, -sche, Angr: I see now that there are three more Guaraní dialect codes that we have: Mbyá Guaraní [gun], Chiripá [nhd], and Western Bolivian Guaraní [gnw]. I presume that we should merge these into [gn] as well, but the case is arguably less clear given that in our current state, all our [gn] lemmas are really [gug]. What do you all think? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds22:51, 14 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
I think we should actually merge [gn] into [gug] and not viceversa. By the way, [gn] is the only one that should be merged, [gun] has similar and some equal words but the language is very different, and [nhd] is similar and very close to [gug] but it's slightly different and always confused with [gug] --Guillermo2149 (talk) 00:37, 7 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
User:Korn posted this to rfv as a way of requesting verification of all the Westrobothnian entries. The justification was that the orthography doesn't seem to be one that has been actually used for the language. Given that the terms seem, for the most part, to be real and added in good faith, I would like to see if we can figure out a way to move them to the appropriate spellings rather than deleting them as unattested. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:02, 5 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 7 years ago16 comments7 people in discussion
We don't recognize Finno-Ugric as a valid family; just Uralic. Hence urj is a valid code, but fiu isn't. Nevertheless, we're using fiu- as the prefix for four branches: fiu-fin for Finnic, fiu-mdv for Mordvinic, fiu-prm for Permic, and fiu-ugr for Ugric. I propose we use urj- for these instead, thus moving as follows:
fiu-fin → urj-fin
fiu-mdv → urj-mdv
fiu-prm → urj-prm
fiu-ugr → urj-ugr
At the same time, we should move the codes for the corresponding protolanguages:
fiu-fin-pro → urj-fin-pro
fiu-mdv-pro → urj-mdv-pro
fiu-prm-pro → urj-prm-pro
fiu-ugr-pro → urj-ugr-pro
as well as the code for the etymology-only lect Proto-Finno-Permic:
That seems like a lot of disruption for a small theoretical benefit: we've always used codes like aus, cau, nai and sai that we don't recognize as families for making exception codes, so it's not a huge violation of our naming logic. In this case, though, it looks to me like we don't recognize fiu more because it's too much like urj, not because it's invalid, per se (though I don't know a lot on the subject). We do have gmw-fri rather than gem-fri, for instance. Of course, I'd rather follow those who actually work in this area- especially @Tropylium. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:59, 23 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
I have no opinion on moving around family codes either way (it doesn't seem they actually come up much, whatever they are), but if we start moving around the proto-language codes, I would like to suggest simple two-part codes. Proto-Samic and Proto-Samoyedic are already smi-pro and syd-pro, so is there any reason we couldn't make do with e.g. fin-pro, fpr-pro, ugr-pro etc.?
Also, as long as we're on this topic, at some point we are going to need the following:
Proto-Mansi: (ugr-/urj-?)mns-pro
Proto-Khanty: (ugr-/urj-?)kca-pro
Proto-Selkup: (ugr-/urj-?)sel-pro
No rush though, since so far we do not even have separate codes for their subdivisions. The only distinction that comes up in practice is distinguishing Northern Khanty from Eastern Khanty (Mansi and Selkup only have one main variety that is not extinct or nearly extinct). --Tropylium (talk) 10:53, 24 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
There is, actually, a reason: our exception codes are designed to avoid conflict with the ISO 639 codes, so they start with an existing ISO 639 code or a code in the qaa-qtz range set aside by ISO 639 for private use. fin is one of the codes for the Finnish language. fpr and ugr are apparently unassigned- for now. As for the three proto-language codes, those don't need a family prefix because they already start with an ISO 639 code. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:06, 24 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
The only codes in the qaa-qtz range we actually use are qfa as a prefix for otherwise unclassified families and qot for Sahaptin (a macrolanguage that wasn't given an ISO code of its own), right? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 07:55, 26 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
Right. And I didn't notice that we used qot although it is not an ISO code; it seems we followed Linguist List in using it. For consistency, I suggest changing it to fit our usual scheme, so nai-spt or similar (nai-shp is already in use as the family code). - -sche(discuss)05:10, 27 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
Support, for consistency. fiu is different from nai, because fiu is [a supposedly genetic grouping which is] agreed to be encompassed by a higher-level genetic family which also has an ISO code (urj), and that code can be used if we drop fiu. nai and sai are placeholders rather than genetic groupings, and they're useful ones, because If we dropped them we'd had to recode everything as qfa- (and might conceivably run out of recognizable/mnemonic codes at that point). - -sche(discuss)05:10, 27 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
I've recoded Sahaptin and all the Finno-Ugric lects except fiu-fin / fiu-fin-pro which requires moving a lot of categories, which I will get to later. - -sche(discuss)17:20, 8 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Now there are lots of module errors in Cat:E as a result of these language code changes. It might be easiest to fix them by bot. @DTLHS, what do you think? — Eru·tuon22:45, 9 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
@DTLHS: Three incorrect language codes remain, I think: fiu-ugr, fiu-fpr-pro, urj-fin-pro. I couldn't figure out what fiu-fpr-pro should be; it seems to refer to Proto-Finno-Permic, but I searched various language data modules and didn't find a match. Is there someone who can look through and fix the remaining module errors that relate to incorrect language codes? @Tropylium, @Angr, @-sche? — Eru·tuon04:52, 11 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
The categories were easy to deal with: you just change the {{derivcatboiler}} to {{auto cat}} and the template plugs in the correct language code, if it exists. That also makes it a quick way to check whether there is a correct language code. by the time I finished that, there were only a dozen or so entries left in CAT:E due to everyone else's efforts, so I finished off the remainder by hand. It would have been easier if there hadn't been hundreds of other module errors cluttering up CAT:E- yet another reason for you to be more careful. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:10, 11 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I apologise for not catching and fixing those uses at the time I renamed the codes. I searched all pages on the site for each of the old codes, and some pages turned up [including pages where the codes were used inside some templates, and I fixed those pages], so I forgot to also do an "insource:" search to catch other uses inside templates like {{m}}. We so rarely change language codes compared to changing language names. - -sche(discuss)23:36, 11 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
to rubber chicken. Other dictionaries in OneLook have rubber chicken, not rubber-chicken dinner. There are abundant other collocations of rubber chicken both as a substantive and in attributive use. One common one is "rubber-chicken circuit". Examples of other nouns following rubber-chicken are lunch, banquet, affair, meal, fundraiser. Substantive use can be found in usages such as: Fortunately we'll spare everyone the rubber chicken and the speeches and simply acknowledge the guidance and vision of the world's best agent/coach/editor.
Rubber chicken is not identical to rubber(“rubbery”) + chicken either, though that is its origin. It specifically refers to the kind of organizational meals-with-speeches that crowd a politician's schedule, but also characterize conventions, off-site meetings, etc. DCDuringTALK13:39, 13 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
Merger into Scandoromani
Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I propose that the Para-Romani lects Traveller Norwegian, Traveller Danish and Tavringer Swedish (rmg, rmd and rmu) be merged into Scandoromani. TN, TD and TS are almost identical, mostly differing in spelling (e.g. tjuro (Sweden) vs. kjuro (Norway) meaning 'knife', gräj vs. grei 'horse' etc.). WP treats them as variants of Scandoromani. My langcode proposal could be rom-sca, or maybe we could just use rmg, which already has a category. --176.23.1.9520:19, 25 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
February 2017
Chinese Pidgin English [cpi]
Latest comment: 7 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
We did delete Hawaiian Pidgin English in the past though (see Template talk:hwc). I don't see how this case is any different. -- Pedrianaplant (talk)
I know we did, but I didn't participate in that discussion (only 3 people did), and I disagree with it too, probably even more strongly than I disagree with merging cpi. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:02, 8 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
Basically, this is a terminological problem. There may have been a true pidgin in each of these cases, but it has not been recorded. What is called a pidgin in many descriptive works is instead a dialect of English that is very easy to understand, nothing like the real English-based pidgins and creoles that I have studied. If you look at the actual quotations used to support lemmas in Chinese Pidgin English, you find that it is Chinese English. Support merge, but leave [cpi] as an etymology-only code. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds23:16, 8 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
At least some texts seem very distinct, to the point of unintelligibility; consider "Joss pidgin man chop chop begin" (Whedon's translator begins chopping things? or "god's businessman begins right away"?). On the other hand, other sentences given by Wikipedia are quite intelligible...and possibly not attestable under the stricter CFI to which English is subject. I'm not sure what to do. (Our short previous discussion also didn't reach a firm resolution.) - -sche(discuss)17:46, 8 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Nominated for merger into one-up by User:Ultimateria. I oppose this proposed merge, because I believe that the primary use of "one-up" is with respect to the concept of one-upmanship (which never uses the number "1"), while the primary means of referring to the video-game usage is with the number, not the letter. I see no advantage to merging if that leads to conflation of meanings, or leads to the lesser-used variation housing the meaning of a particular definition. bd2412T02:57, 5 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
You're right, but I nominated it because I saw the same sense across two entries. The translations need to be merged, and one has to be established as the alt spelling. Have I been using this category wrong? Ultimateria (talk) 10:16, 5 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
@-sche: Thanks for pointing those out. From a cursory glance, I would definitely support the merger of animals, body parts, clothing, food and drink, motoring, people, smoking, and the toilet, all into the main appendix. Do you agree? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds14:29, 27 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
The following languages have ISO codes, but those codes should be removed, as there is no linguistic material that can be added to Wiktionary. This list is taken from Wikipedia's list of unattested languages, but I have excluded languages which are not definitively extinct (and thus which may have material become available). If there was any reliable source I could find corroborating the WP article's claim of lack of attestation, it is given after the language. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds04:15, 4 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
Unclear if it even existed per The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide (Campbell and Grondona).
Barbacoas language [bpb] (the Wikipedia article has a discussion of the conflation of this unattested language with Pasto, which needs a code; for clarity, I think this [bpb] should be retired and an exceptional code made explicitly for Pasto)
AIATSIS has the following to say: "According to Ian Green (2007 p.c.), this language probably died before the 1920's and neighbouring groups in the Daly claim it was the language of Peron Island which was linguistically and perhaps culturally distinctive from the nearby mainland societies. Black & Walsh (1989) say that this may or may not have been a dialect of Wadiginy N31." —Μετάknowledge
The 1992 International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, v. 1, p. 337, says "Giyug: 2 speakers reported in 1981, in the Peron Islands in Anson Bay, southwest of Darwin." The 2003 edition repeats the claim that "2 speakers remain". Wikipedia says it's extinct and unattested, but Glottolog, although having no resources on it, suggests it's not extinct. Might be best to leave it alone for now. - -sche(discuss)01:13, 6 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Removed, and mcw renamed. Glottolog had only one reference to support the existence of Mawa, Temple (1922), which does not even include a section under that header. There may be confusion with the section on the "Marawa", but that does not even mention what language those people speak. (Temple also knows very little about linguistics; while skimming through, I found that Margi (a Chadic language) was said to be similar to the languages of South Africa. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds01:39, 6 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Appendix I in The Indo-Aryan Languages records this language as being a subdialect of Dhundari [dhd] and the 1901 Indian Census concurs; this is at odds with its description as an unattested Dravidian language, but the geographical specifications seem to match up.
AIATSIS says: "Harvey (PMS 5822) treats Ngomburr as a dialect of Umbukarla N43, but in Harvey (ASEDA 802), it is listed as a separate language." Nicholas Evans confirms in The Non-Pama-Nyungan Languages of Northern Australia that it is unattested.
Unclassified due to its absence of data per The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide (Campbell and Grondona).
Yenish
Latest comment: 7 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
The Yenish "language" (which we call Yeniche) was given the ISO code yec, despite being clearly not a separate language from German. Instead, it is a jargon which Wikipedia compares to Cockney (which has never had a code) and Polari (which had a code that we deleted in a mostly off-topic discussion). The case of Gayle, which is similar, is still under deliberation at RFM as of now. Most tellingly, German Wiktionary considers this to be German, and once we delete the code, we should make a dialect label for it and add the contents of de:Kategorie:Jenisch to English Wiktionary. @-sche —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds00:49, 7 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
I don't see how that's most tellingly; I don't know about the German Wiktionary, but major language works frequently treat things as dialects of their language that outsiders consider separate languages.--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:01, 10 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
The (linked) English Wikipedia article even says "It is a jargon rather than an actual language; meaning, it consists of a significant number of unique specialized words, but does not have its own grammar or its own basic vocabulary." Despite the citation needed that follows, that sentence is about accurate, as such this should be deleted. -- Pedrianaplant (talk) 10:53, 30 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
(If kept, it should be renamed.) There are those who argue that Yenish should have recognition (which it indeed gets, in Switzerland) as a separate language. And it can be quite divergent from Standard German, with forms that are as different as those of some of the regiolects we consider distinct. Many examples from Alemannic or Bavarian-speaking areas are better considered Alemannic or Bavarian than Standard German. But then, that's a sign that it is, as some put it, a cant overlaid onto the local grammar, rather than a language per se. Ehh... - -sche(discuss)03:22, 9 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
Apparently (Google n-grams) the term could be used with or without an object. The definition should be somewhat different. An example of use without a direct object is "to rake over the coals of failure". I don't know how to word this in a substitutable way. It seems to mean something like "to belabor (something negative (result, process), obvious from context) as if in reprimand". DCDuring (talk) 15:14, 3 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Merge senses “(Northern England) Same as -er in Standard English.” and “(Black English and slang) Used to replace -er in nouns.” Doesn’t this represent the same phenomenon? — Ungoliant(falai)21:36, 18 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
I would just delete both: spelling final -er as -a isn't specific to any morpheme- the sound it represents is from a general feature of the phonology. For instance mother/mutha has had that last syllable all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, and I can't imagine what the -er/-a would be attached to even if it didn't. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:22, 19 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
I'm a little confused about what's going on here. Are you RFV-ing every entry in this category? Or are you just looking for evidence that Khitan was written using this script? —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 12:45, 13 August 2016 (UTC)Reply
I understand that, but I don't understand what your goal is with this discussion. If you want to RFV every entry in the category, then I'd like to add {{rfv}} tags to alert anyone watching the entries. If you want to discuss what writing systems Khitan used, maybe with the goal of moving all of these entries to different titles, then I'm not sure RFV is the right place for the discussion. (Likewise with the Buyeo section below.) —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 17:55, 13 September 2016 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion
remove Adabe [adb]
Geoffrey Hull, director of research for the Instituto Nacional de Linguística in East Timor, notes (in a 2004 Tetum Reference Grammar, page 228) that "the alleged Atauran Papuan language called 'Adabe' is a case of the mistaken identity of Raklungu," a dialect (along with Rahesuk and Resuk) of Wetarese. He notes (in The Languages of East Timor, Some Basic Facts) that only Wetarese is spoken on the island, and Studies in Languages and Cultures of East Timor likewise says "The three Atauran dialects—with the northernmost of which the dialect of nearby Lirar is mutually intelligible—are unquestionably Wetarese, and not dialects of Galoli, as Fox and Wurm suggest for two of them (n. 32). The same authors refer (ibidem) to a supposedly Papuan language of Atauro, the existence of which appears to be entirely illusory." (The error appears to have originated not with Fox and Wurm but with Antonio de Almeida in 1966.) - -sche(discuss)01:45, 31 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
We could repurpose the code into one for those three Atauran varieties of Malayo-Polynesian Wetarese, Rahesuk, Resuk, and Raklu Un / Raklungu (the last of which Ethnologue does list as an alt name of adb, despite their erroneous family assignment of it), perhaps under the name "Atauran Wetarese" for clarity. - -sche(discuss)01:52, 31 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Arma (aoh) is also said to be "a possible but unattested extinct language"; I am trying to see if that means it is entirely unattested, or if there are personal/ethnic/place names, etc. - -sche(discuss)09:45, 3 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
The VU Amsterdam report linked to here seems to indicate that one lect has been given multiple codes, and that "Jair" at least is spurious. Further research wouldn't hurt. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds00:24, 3 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 7 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion
Apparently this is not a set category, despite its name seeming like one. User:Smuconlaw apparently intended it to be about things related to limbs. I think it should be renamed to more clearly reflect that. —CodeCat17:35, 17 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
{{jiajie}} should be merged with {{liushu}}, which could be renamed as {{Han liushu}}, following {{Han compound}} and {{Han etym}}. It might not be a good idea to use a particular language code because these templates are intended for use in multiple languages now. They used to be used under Translingual, but we have decided to move the glyph origin to their respective languages. — justin(r)leung{ (t...) | c=› }20:22, 17 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
Many Taos entries use curly apostrophes to represent glottal stops. They should either use the easy-to-type straight apostrophe ' that many other languages use, or the apostrophe letter ʼ that Navajo and a few other languages use. - -sche(discuss)21:36, 20 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
I agree. The headword template interprets the curly apostrophe as a punctuation mark (because it is), and automatically links words such as adùbi’íne as adùbi’íne. (Personally, I think the apostrophe letter looks better, but there may be other considerations.) — Eru·tuon21:45, 20 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Oh, and I just learned of the Unicode character ꞌ for the saltillo. But no entries use it, and I am averse to introducing yet another visually-almost-identical symbol to represent the glottal stop, next to the three (counting the curly apostrophe) mentioned above that are already in use, plus the ˀ that some entries use. - -sche(discuss)02:23, 21 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
I'm in favor of standardizing on U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE for any language that uses an apostrophe-looking thing as a letter. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 13:52, 21 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Probably reasonable for glottalizationy apostrophes. At least Skolt Sami uses ʹ U+02B9 MODIFIER LETTER PRIME for suprasegmental palatalization though, which should likely be kept separate. --Tropylium (talk) 16:55, 21 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 5 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion
The Category:E language surely has numbers, which would require this category to be used. Other suggestions for the food additive category name would be welcome. Maybe "List of E numbers"? DTLHS (talk) 16:31, 27 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
If we adopt a systematic naming scheme for topic and set categories as CodeCat and I have been discussing, then I guess it could be "Category:mul:set:E numbers" or "Category:Translingual:set:E numbers". However, independent of whether or not such prefixes ("Translingual:set:") come into use, a more intelligible name like the one you propose, replacing "E" with "European food additive", would be good. Other food-additive numbering schemes in use in Europe could also go in the same category. - -sche(discuss)18:48, 27 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
I think you may be implying that the category should be something like mul:E numbers just in case any of our users think E is a language. I wouldn't object to that. SemperBlotto (talk) 18:12, 28 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
To be clear: E is a language, spoken in China. CAT:E language. (And like CAT:English numbers, it will have a "numbers" category someday when our coverage of it improves.) Perhaps a move should be postponed for a little while, though, while we see if we can come up with a systematic naming scheme for topic and set categories (see my talk page). - -sche(discuss)18:33, 28 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Since there's been no progress towards systematically changing how topic and set categories are named, this one does need to be renamed, because it does conflict with the expected 'numbers' category of the existing E language. Does anyone else want to weigh in on whether the name should be "Category:European food additive numbers" or "Category:mul:E numbers"? - -sche(discuss)22:34, 18 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
There are plenty of instances that don't include adjacent not (eg, not anything (also nothing) like what it was cracked up to be) and others that have no not (or any other negative) at all (eg, to send Ray and Isaac up there to see if it was what it was 'cracked up to be'.). Note that the second example does not have is/'s and also omits all. It also could be in the plural.
@DCDuring: thanks for your input. You're one of the few contributors here interested in improving the English entries ahah.
Should we keep all it's cracked up to be as the lemma (and redirect the negative form to it), with notes explaining that it's often used in the negative (there's already one), and that it admits a fair amount of variation: "all" is not compulsory, there are instances of the active voice, the verb can be at a past tense, etc.?
I can't think of a better simple solution than what you propose. It has the disadvantage that there is no place other than usage notes to give usage example of the major possible variations. It would probably not be helpful to give usage examples for all the forms anywhere on the entry
Another approach would be to have redirects to a senseid for sense 4 of crack up from all of the versions of this with or without all, with the various pronouns (∅, what), all the person pronouns, and various tenses and aspects of crack up for hundreds of redirects. Probably some are very rare/unattestable and could be omitted with no harm at all, but many would remain. And there would still be no place at crack up for the numerous usage examples either.
Yes, what you (Barytonesis) propose sounds good. In general, I find it confusing when we take expressions that are usually negative and lemmatize and define them as positive expressions; if readers search for the negative form and don't notice they've been redirected, the risk that they'll think the phrase means the opposite of what it actually means seems high; but ah well. There should be redirects from not what it's cracked up to be, what it's cracked up to be, and probably even the forms with "be" (be all it's..., be what it's...) and "not be". - -sche(discuss)20:55, 25 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
I wonder where I can find the stop words (if the search engine even needs to have them) for search here. There might be some way to radically reduce the number of redirects. DCDuring (talk) 20:58, 25 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
I have added usage examples and expanded the usage label for crack up#Verb (sense 4). For me that would be sufficient. Redirects are fine, but usage examples for the common collocations should be enough. DCDuring (talk) 22:45, 6 June 2018 (UTC)!Reply
Thanks, I've somehow always overlooked this page. I don't think I've ever even been here before. I now notice it's in the bar at the top, but I guess I just always skimmed over it. This page move isn't going to be uncontroversial seeing that the dictionaries don't even agree, so this is the right place. I have a cheap paper dictionary, less than 10 years old that says "post-mortem". But I don't think we should blindly follow the dictionaries here. W3ird N3rd (talk) 01:16, 9 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
sense: Noun: "(aviation) A large multi-engined aircraft.
The term heavy normally follows the call-sign when used by air traffic controllers."
In the aviation usage AA21 heavy ("American Airline flight 21 heavy") the head of the NP is AA21, heavy being a qualifying adjective indicating a "wide-bodied", ergo "heavy", aircraft.
Latest comment: 6 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
We currently have it as "Hassaniya" (which we used to spell as Hassānīya; those macra were removed along the way, presumably by Liliana, although I don't see any discussion; MG deleted the old category once it was empty). To match the other colloquial Arabic languages, it should be "Hassaniya Arabic". (Note: if Arabic is merged, this will become moot.) —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds07:07, 16 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
This seems a bit different from most of the other forms of Arabic which are "[Adjective referring to a place] Arabic", where just calling the lect "Libyan" (etc) would be more awkward. Still, I have no objection to a rename, though I don't have time to rename all the categories right now. I also notice that, while Hassaniya is probably still the most common spelling overall, it seems like Hassaniyya started to become more common around 2003. - -sche(discuss)04:03, 29 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 7 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
An IP has been repeatedly tagging this for speedy deletion on the grounds that it's the wrong script and that they've created an entry with the right script. Since this was created by a veteran editor, I feel we should consider merging the two entries if we decide to delete the Latin-script version. At any rate, I don't feel comfortable just deleting this without input from editors familiar with the language. Chuck Entz (talk) 18:11, 21 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
@ZxxZxxZ created it, but I'm really not sure why. We have a longstanding standard that Aramaic entries should never be in Latin script. If there is an entry with the proper pagetitle and all the content, we can delete this. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds02:07, 27 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
That's what I figured. My main concern was with deleting the content without knowing anything about the replacement entry (𐣬𐣤𐣣𐣡𐣭𐣣𐣱). I just now compared the two, and it appears that the IP copypasted the entire contents of the entry (even the |sc=Latn) to the new page without attribution. I don't have a font that displays that script so I'm completely in the dark here, but I don't trust this IP to know what they're doing, especially after reading the discussion on your talk page. Given the blatant copyvio, I think we're best off deleting the replacement entry and moving the old entry to the correct spelling so we can keep the edit history. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:10, 27 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hi guys, I was the creator of mhrbndq. Note that the word is attested in Hatran Aramaic, which is written in Hatran alphabet (not in the more widely used Aramaic alphabet). I don't know if there had been any discussion regarding Hatran Aramaic entries. But scholarly works usually avoid using the original script for such ancient, difficult to read, or barely attested scripts. If I remember correctly, the practice in Wiktionary have been to use the original script as the title, but keeping the letter-by-letter transliterations (mhrbndq in this case) as alternative forms. --Z13:58, 28 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
Support. I oppose the existence of categories with language code like "en:" in the first place, but what is proposed here seems to be an improvement over the status quo. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 20:27, 20 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Rua It looks sane to me if politics are let out. But why is Abkhazia in Georgia though it is an independent state, statehood only depending on factual prerequisites and not on diplomatic recognition which has nothing to do with it? Where does the Crimea belong to? (article Sevastopol is only in Category:en:Ukraine because it has not really been edited since 2014.) I can think of two solutions: First possibility: We focus on geographical and cultural constants. Second possibility: We focus on the actual political power. I disprefer the second slightly because it can mean much work in cases of war (i.e. how much the Islamic state holds etc., or say the current factions in Libya). But in neither case Abkhazia is in Georgia. But the first possibility does not even answer what the Crimea belongs to, i.e. I am not sure if it is historically correct to speak of the Crimea as Ukraine. And geographical terms are often fuzzy and subject to editorial decisions. All seems so easy if you start your concepts from the United States, which do not even have a name for the region they are situated in. And even for the USA your idea is questionable because the constituent states of the United States are states in their own right (Teilstaat, Gliedstaat in German), as is also the case for the Federal Republic of Germany and the Russian Federation partially (according to the Russian constitution only those of the 85 subjects are states which are called Republic, not the Oblasti etc.). Is Tatarstan Russia? Not even Russians can agree with such a sentence, as in Russia one sharply distinguishs русские and россияне, Россия and Российская федерация. Technically Ceuta and Melilla are in Morocco because Spain is not in Africa. Also, Kosovo je Srbija, and it would become just a coincidence if a place important in Serbian history is listed as X, Kosovo or X, Serbia. Palaestrator verborum (loquier) 16:06, 14 November 2017 (UTC)Reply
Starting with the above, I don't know how the Tokyo ward system works, but I imagine it's a subdivision of the city. In England wards are subdivisions in cities, boroughs, local government districts, and possibly counties. "Wards in" is the natural usage.
Municipalities similarly. For example in Norway there are hundreds of municipalities (kommuner) which are subdivisions within counties (fylker). Some of these can be large, especially in the north, but so are the counties in the north. To me "municipalities in" is the natural wording.
States and provinces in the USA and Canada: In nearly all cases it is unnecessary to add the country name as the names are unambiguous. The only exception I can think of is Georgia, USA. This could also apply to prefectures in Japan and states in India (is there a Punjab in Pakistan?). DonnanZ (talk) 18:52, 14 November 2017 (UTC)Reply
Yes, there is, like there is in India. Maybe categorisations should be abundant? Cities can belong to Punjab as well as to Punjab, India, and the Crimea is part of administration of both the Russian Federation and the Republic Ukraine at least for some purposes in the Republic Ukraine. We can make the least thing wrong by adding Sheikh Zuweid (presuming it exists) as well to the Islamic State as to the Arab Republic of Egypt, because we do not want to judge morally and formally states and terror organizations are indistinguishable. On the other hand of course we need sufficient data to relate towns to administrative divisions and ISIS presumably does not publish organigrams. Palaestrator verborum (loquier) 19:44, 14 November 2017 (UTC)Reply
Our topical categories never contain "terminology" or "related" or anything like that. Such changes were rejected in the past. —Rua (mew) 22:23, 28 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
This is a newly created (September 2017) topical category. It should be renamed to something that does not imply that it contains expressions that are directive. It contains terms that relate to direction or, more frequently, terms that can be confused with direction. I recognize that Direction would not be a suitable category name. I don't have any suggestion. It may be that the category is ill-conceived. DCDuring (talk)
I see nothing wrong with it. If it contained directive expressions, it would be called Category:English directives or similar. We have voted in the past to keep topical category naming distinct from other categories, so the naming scheme is considered indicative of its use/meaning/function. —Rua (mew) 20:37, 22 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
I'm not surprised that you see nothing wrong, what with the cat scheme being otherwise so perfect.
I favor keeping topical categories as far way as possible from our other entry categories.
But, unlike other categories that have names that are plural in form, Category:en:Directives contains neither examples nor names of the referents of its category name, ie of directives. It contains a dog's breakfast of terms that the categorizer, User:51.9.55.214, thought to be connected to some sense of the noun(?) directive. One mistake was to pick as name for a concept/category a de-adjectival noun. Probably the name was made plural to avoid confusion with the adjective.
Not merged, they serve different functions. Whether this is ideal and whether topic vs set/list categories overall need clearer names remains to be resolved. - -sche(discuss)17:30, 3 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
Rather than just jerking it (and the plural) back with a rude comment about how this isn't Wikipedia and how we're a descriptive dictionary, I thought I would bring it here so we can be sure we do it right. The problem is that determining relative usage of different case forms is rather difficult. Plus, there should be entries at both case forms, with one as the alt form. There are also other case-form entries such as zip code that were unaffected.
This slightly improved Google N-gram (1960-2008)] shows that, in order of frequency in the sampled books the frequency order is zip code, ZIP code, Zip Code, ZIP Code, Zip code, ZIP CODE, with zip code being about 10 times more common than ZIP CODE and about 5 times more common than ZIP Code post 2000. There are also some solid-spelled versions, but they are much less common, though the most common zipcode is about as common as ZIP CODE.
BTW, the collocation "international zip code" is suggestive that some English speakers think of zip code as including any post/postal code. DCDuring (talk) 03:18, 24 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
True, but that distinction seems a bit fuzzy; e.g., dominate is labelled an eggcorn (because it's homographic to a valid word?) while unfortunant is labelled a misconstruction. And evolutionary in evolutionary stable strategy is also a word. (But I'm not opposed to making a dinstinction; I'm just pointing out the issues with it, devil's-advocate-style.) - -sche(discuss)19:25, 19 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
@-sche: I agree that the distinction is fuzzy (in fact, I'd even say that the distinction between "misconstructed", "nonstandard" and "proscribed" is fuzzy: compare our treatment of developmentation, abortation and pronounciate). Still, I think it's not entirely without merit, although I would be hard pressed to give you a specific set of criteria.
I wouldn't call dominate an eggcorn, but without any quotation it's hard to judge anyway. In fact, I'm going to RFV it. not necessary: it's used indeed.
orange is a result of misconstruction of naranga, isn't it? But orange is certainly not nonstandard. (Other cases of loss of juncture are apron, newt, nickname) Though misconstructions may tend to be nonstandard (for all intensive purposes, at least), they can become standard over time, as with many "errors". DCDuring (talk) 20:09, 19 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
It's hard to find references rather than intuition to support classifying terms one way or another, but I suppose the difference between developmentation and pronounciate vs unfortunant and dominate is that I think the first two are intentional (jocular) errors and the second two are unintentional. If we keep the categories separate, should "eggcorns" be a subcategory of "misconstructions" or a "sibling category" on the same level (cross-linked)? - -sche(discuss)20:39, 19 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Why is this in the singular? It just looks weird in the case of a title like this. (Somewhat irrelevant, extra issue: the page needs a lede to explain what a shortcut is.) PseudoSkull (talk) 05:23, 21 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
Yes, it seems like {{rfm}} should default to "suggests that this ... be moved, merged or split" and should (does?) have a parameter to specify which one, and then {{merge}} and {{move}} and {{split}} should be shells that just consist of {{rfm|type=merge}} or the like. - -sche(discuss)17:30, 15 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
This should probably be done now, because I got confused looking at the template, not sure if what I was seeing was the output of the template, or an actual RFM message! —Rua (mew) 20:16, 14 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
The issue is that technically, any English entry with a translation section is a translation target. This category is for a very small subset of those entries that would not be kept otherwise. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds03:24, 15 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
The purpose of the category would be "terms which are mainly retained for the benefit of translation". However I am considered to launch a discussion to modify CFI to formally include these terms.--Zcreator alt (talk) 16:40, 15 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
I was under the impression that this category was supposed to correspond to the use of the "this entry is only here for translations" template, because an entry should only have a definition if it's idiomatic; and any entry with a definition is a normal entry (right?) and can have translations, either in the entry itself, or centralized in some synonym. I don't understand why this category seems to be used on pages that do have definitions; it seems like an error. Hence, it seems like we'd still have to make the same decision about idiomaticity, about whether or not to use that template. Hence, I see no benefit to the rename. (But Meta has pointed out a big drawback.) - -sche(discuss)17:22, 15 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
It may be a debate whether this category is useful at all - we don't have a categories for entries kept for COALMINE rule; and what the definition should be for entries kept as translation targets (imo we can alternatively treat them as normal entries and describe them literally e.g. cooked rice as "rice that is cooked" instead of using the translate only template, once we formally include them to CFI). Again, this should be discussed in a wider venue (like Beer parlour).--Zcreator alt (talk) 08:03, 17 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
A benefit to having it as a category is that theoretically it ought to be addable by the headword templates examining the pagename (like "English terms spelled with Œ"), which, if implemented (...if it could be implemented without excessive memory costs), would allow it to be kept up to date automatically. - -sche(discuss)17:16, 15 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The article name is "In the midst of", but the headword is "in the midst" (which redirects here when searched); usage notes states that "of" usually follows. It seems like the article is inconsistent with the title and should be moved to "in the midst". --SanctMinimalicen (talk) 22:57, 13 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
Renaming svm
Latest comment: 5 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
From ‘Molise Croatian’ to ‘Molise Slavic’. It seems most scholars in the field, excluding some in Croatia itself, have been switching to the latter name; see, for instance, the papers of Krzysztof Borowski or the more recent works of Walter Breu. The endonym is naš jezik(literally “our language”) or na-našo(literally “in our (manner)”), without any specific ethnonational designation; the other names are apparently recent impositions. For this see for instance Sujoldžić 2004:
Along with the institutional support provided by the Italian government and Croatian institutions based on bilateral agreements between the two states, the Slavic communities also received a new label for their language and a new ethnic identity — Croatian — and there have been increasing tendencies to standardize the spoken idiom on the basis of Standard Croatian. It should be stressed, however, that although they regarded their different language as a source of prestige and self-appreciation, these communities have always considered themselves to be Italians who in addition have Slavic origins and at best accept to be called Italo-Slavi, while the term »Molise Croatian« emerged recently as a general term in scientific and popular literature to describe the Croatian-speaking population living in the Molise.
Slavomolisano: […] In scientific work, this name is predominantly used, either in its Italian form or in translations. As the language is "genetically" affiliated to the Serbo-Croatian macrolanguage with its dialectal continuum and the problems of its segmentation, a denomination, referring to one of the individual Standard languages of this group, e.g. Croatian or Bosnian, should be avoided, the more so, as its individual character is mainly
due to the language contact with Italian and its dialects, especially that of Lower Molise.
Ethnologue, Glottolog, and SIL (as well as Wikipedia) all followed the ISO’s lead and list the language under ‘Slavomolisano’, the Italian form of ‘Molise Slavic’ (which would also be fine). AFAIK I’m the only contributor to Wiktionary in this language to date. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 19:57, 15 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
If most scholars as well as Ethnologue, Glottolog, SIL, and Wikipedia all call it Slavomolisano, shouldn't we do the same, rather than call it Molise Slavic? —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk11:46, 19 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
Sure, that would also be fine. The two are used pretty much interchangeably in scholarly publications (so the ISO note says ‘either in its Italian form or in translations’). It’s a bit of an odd situation, given the most prominent scholar in the field (Breu) submitted the language under ‘Slavomolisano’ to the ISO (hence the adoption by all the other organizations) but uses ‘Molise Slavic’ in his own recent English publications. But if you think it’s preferable to directly follow Ethnologue and the others I wouldn’t object. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 12:57, 21 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
Entries for Japanese prefecture names that end in 県(ken, “prefecture”)
Latest comment: 6 years ago11 comments6 people in discussion
I would like to request the move of the content of entries like 茨城県(Ibaraki-ken, literally “Ibaraki prefecture”) to simply 茨城(Ibaraki, “Ibaraki”), cf. Daijisen. 県 is not an essential part of the name.
(edit conflict) It seems like a two-word phrase to me. I am not a native speaker, but I think that if someone asked "水戸市は何県？" ((in) What prefecture is Mito?) then "茨城です。" (It's Ibaraki) would be a correct answer. Entries such as 奈良 and 広島 should have both the city and the prefecture. (I see that 奈良 currently does.) Cnilep (talk) 04:01, 19 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
Yes, 茨城県 is also correct. And if someone asked どこの出身？ (Where are you from?) the answer would probably be 奈良県 rather than 奈良, or else expect a follow-up question. But I don't think that is necessarily a matter of word boundaries. Compare Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, Kansas; the fact that it is usually necessary, and always acceptable to specify the latter doesn't mean that Pittsburgh on its own is not a proper noun. By same token, I think that 茨城 (et alia) is a word. That's the point I had in mind. I will say nothing about what is more common. I don't even have good intuitions about frequency in my native language. Cnilep (talk) 04:54, 19 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
I fully agree that 茨城 is a term worthy of inclusion. I also think that 茨城県 is a term worthy of inclusion. We have entries for both New York and New York City, and even New York State. Similarly, I think we should have entries for [PREFECTURE NAME], and also for [PREFECTURE NAME]県 and [PREFECTURE NAME]市 and [PREFECTURE NAME]郡, etc., as appropriate. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig05:03, 19 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
A lot (maybe all?) of the prefecture names minus the 県(-ken) suffix are polysemous. Listing a few from the north to the south, limiting just to geographical senses, and just in the same regions at that:
Generally support. Less duplication is good, and it is not much different from Chinese etc. for which we generally delemmatise, if not completely hard-redirect, these forms. Wyang (talk) 04:49, 19 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
Support. For a dictionary, I think we don't need to keep entries with both prefecture name and prefecture, despite the usage but it's always helpful to provide usage notes (e.g. normally used with 県: ~県) and usage examples, e.g. 奈良県(Nara ken, “Nara (prefecture)”). --Anatoli T.(обсудить/вклад)05:45, 19 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
The two links look identical on Wiktionary, but if you copy and paste the first link onto windows notepad, it is revealed that it contains a zero-width character. —This unsigned comment was added by RubixLang (talk • contribs).
Thanks. These creep in entry titles sometimes; I'm not sure why. I made an entry on WT:TODO a while ago advising periodic checks for them, which I try to carry out. I'll search a database dump for any more now. - -sche(discuss)17:24, 17 May 2018 (UTC)Reply
I found and moved one more entry with a soft hyphen in the title, and am fixing a few hundred with soft hyphens in their content, mostly in German and Georgian translations for some reason. - -sche(discuss)17:54, 17 May 2018 (UTC)Reply
Star Wars: Edge of the Empire (2013) roleplaying game
Star Trek Adventures Roleplaying Game (2017) roleplaying game
It's a somewhat arbitrary selection, but I mostly kept to major 21st century games. As you can see from http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?1984-Top-5-RPGs-Compiled-Charts-2008-Present , I got all five of the best selling games for the most recent quarter, and a good sample of the best selling games going back for years. (M:tA and C:tD are samples of the World of Darkness books.) Dungeons & Dragons is dominant in the industry, so that alone would be an argument for roleplaying game. Paranoia is produced by Mongoose, a British company, which may be why they use the hyphen; Modiphius Entertainment, the British producers of the Star Trek Adventures RPG, don't use a hyphen. In any case, it is overwhelmed by the mainstream usage of "roleplaying game".--Prosfilaes (talk) 18:42, 9 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Prosfilaes: I suppose you’re right and that it is not non-standard if the unhyphenated spelling is so common. I rarely see it myself, but it does seem more common than I thought. In that case, my apologies. However, since Wikipedia uses the hyphenated spelling, shouldn’t Wiktionary do too? Interqwarktalkcontribs19:12, 9 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
We're a group of individuals whose common decisions are usually not, and should not ever, be dependent on the decisions of another group of individuals. What should count here are other people's arguments, not their results. Korn [kʰũːɘ̃n] (talk) 19:34, 9 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
In the titles of RP content roleplaying seems common, but in edited content it seems almost non-existent with role-playing being the overwhelming choice. Other dictionaries seem to strongly favor role-playing, as do the NY Times, Washington Post, The Times, etc. While it is hard to determine, I am curious how often roleplaying is used outside of the titles of particular products, and if it is predominantly used there how we ought to handle that. Is it akin to a word like lite, which is extremely common in product names but much more rare as an independent adjective? - TheDaveRoss21:03, 9 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Actually, it does seem to distinguish them, as you can see if you compare all three spellings in the Viewer. The spaced spelling "role playing game" is the rarest of the bunch. - -sche(discuss)05:22, 17 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Most of those selections were not from titles, but were instead from body text. I object to "edited content"; all of those books are from professional multi-person publishers with editors on staff. It is not like "lite"; it's the normal spelling of the word in the tabletop RPG industry.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:39, 9 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
I was not contrasting "edited content" with the information you provided, but rather with things like Usenet usage etc. I don't disagree that all three variants are common within the community and associated materials (be they edited, user-created or otherwise). I think we ought to have all three variants represented and if there is a useful distinction to be made about where each of them is most commonly used or rarely used we should make note of that information. It does seem like the single-word variant is much more common within the industry than it is in other places, as is clear from the news reporting on the subject strongly preferring the hyphenated variant. - TheDaveRoss02:35, 10 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
After some discussion on Category talk:Baybayin script (that went a bit off-topic), some of the Indian language editors (@Bhagadatta, Msasag and myself) have agreed that this category should be renamed to Category:Eastern Nagari script, the reasons being (1) several languages other than Bengali use this script, and (2) the Bengali alphabet is just a subset of this script and lacks some of the glyphs used by other Bengali-script languages (most prominently Assamese which has a separate r-glyph). I want to make sure that there are no objections to this by editors who were not in the discussion. —AryamanA(मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)02:06, 20 July 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The two verb senses are bad IMHO. The first should be at busy oneself, I think, since it is always reflexive AFAIK. The second one doesn't sound right at all -- "He busied her" isn't something I've heard. Is that real at all? 69.255.250.21902:36, 29 July 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago7 comments2 people in discussion
Nahuatl is sometimes treated as a language, and sometimes as a family of languages. Right now, Wiktionary is treating it as both simultaneously, which doesn't make sense. "Nahuatl" should be removed as a language. --Lvovmauro (talk) 11:55, 30 August 2018 (UTC)Reply
I agree the current arrangement doesn't make sense; it is a relic of very early days on Wiktionary, and has persisted mostly because it's not entirely clear how intelligible the varieties are and hence whether it's better to lump them all into nah, or retire nah and separate everything. But enough varieties are not intelligible that I agree with retiring nah (or perhaps finally converting it to a family code). - -sche(discuss)20:34, 31 August 2018 (UTC)Reply
I think a family code for Nahuan languages is really needed since there are many cases where we don't know specifically which variety a word was borrowed from. --Lvovmauro (talk) 09:55, 9 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
A disturbingly large number of these translations are neologisms with no actual usage. Some of them don't even obey the rules of Nahuatl word formation. --Lvovmauro (talk) 11:03, 19 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Lvovmauro: Feel free to remove obvious errors / unattested neologisms. If a high proportion of the translations are bad, it might even be reasonable to start presuming they're bad and just removing them, since they already suffer from the problem of using an overbroad code. - -sche(discuss)00:28, 21 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
Someone with more time on their hands than me at the moment will need to delete all the subcategories of Category:Nahuatl language, and then the category itself, in preparation for moving 'nah' from the language-code module to the family-code module so the categories won't be recreated by careless misuse of 'nah' in the labels etc of 'nci' entries. - -sche(discuss)00:24, 21 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
Mecayapan Nahuatl saltillos
Latest comment: 6 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
A number of Mecayapan Nahuatl words are currently written with U+0027 APOSTROPHE, which is a punctuation mark and not a letter. And a couple are using U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE, which is the wrong shape for this language. They should all be written with U+A78C LATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO instead.
No objection to renaming Arawak, but I'm not sure about Kalhiphona, which seems to be quite rare even on a Google web search, and which seems to invite as much possible confusion (in its various spellings) with the various spellings of Garifuna as it avoids with other "Carib"s. - -sche(discuss)06:56, 19 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
willfulness wilfulness
Latest comment: 6 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
The old Chambers 1908 dictionary I've been going through has (under rope) the sub-entry give a person rope, "to allow a person full scope". In my personal experience (which may be inadequate, wrong, etc.) the metaphor is that if you give a person enough rope, they will hang themselves, i.e. the person is irresponsible or unwise. Equinox◑22:48, 9 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
The forms themselves aren't even missing, they are presumably given in an inflection table. Only the entries for those forms are missing. —Rua (mew) 14:07, 6 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
I feel determiner is the more common name for this in English; the different definitions of these terms across languages should not be a concern - e.g. we also use adjective differently for Korean. adnominal may be confused with the -eun, -neun, -eul, -deon forms of Korean verbs and adjectives. Wyang (talk) 03:57, 13 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
I ignored the page it was on. I thought it was a TR question.
I think Lambian suggested that someone is sometimes useful to distinguish an idiom from literal use (eg, of wipe/mop the floor with a sponge-mop) without some of the ambiguities of an entry without someone, even with {{&lit}}. DCDuring (talk) 14:33, 27 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I'm in a dispute with an editor over the exact meaning and differences between these two terms - are they the same or must we tell apart the order from the genus? Is there is a standard to follow? Дрейгорич (talk) 15:55, 27 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
Our entries for such (allomorphic and related) suffixes are a bit of a mess, it's true. (Compare the categories for the English suffixes -ian, -an, and -n.) IMO we should update the affix etymology-section templates so that they have access to lists of suffixes (etc) that are allomorphic in each language and which we want to merge, so people can input the suffix that's present (-ysko, etc) but have the entry categorize into (and potentially link to) the "lemma" suffix. Otherwise, categories like this will keep getting repopulated forever. - -sche(discuss)17:54, 14 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
November 2018
Language request: Old Cahita
Latest comment: 5 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Mayo and Yaqui are mutually intelligible and sometimes considered to be a single language called Cahita. But their speakers apparently consider them to be distinct languages, and they have distinct ISO codes (mfy and yaq) and are currently treated distinctly by Wiktionary.
I'm not requesting that they be merged, but separating them is a problem because an important early source, the Arte de la lengua cahita conforme à las reglas de muchos peritos en ella (published 1737 but written earlier) treats them as a single language, and also includes an extinct dialect called Tehueco. I'd like to add words from the Arte but I can't list them specifically as either Mayo or Yaqui.
One solution would be treat to the language of the Arte as a distinct historical language, "Old Cahita", which would then be the ancestor of Mayo and Yaqui. The downside is there only seems to be one linguist currently using this name. --Lvovmauro (talk) 11:32, 4 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
On linguistic grounds, it seems like we should merge Yaqui and Mayo. Jacqueline Lindenfeld's 1974 Yaqui Syntax says "Yaqui and Mayo are sufficiently similar to be mutually intelligible", the Handbook of Middle American Indians says "the modern known representatives of Cahitan—Yaqui and Mayo—are mutually intelligible", and various more general references say "Yaqui and Mayo are mutually intelligible dialects of the Cahitan language", "The Yaqui and Mayo speak mutually intelligible dialects of Cahita". (There are political considerations behind the split, which a merger might upset, so adding Old Cahita would also work, but we have tended to be lumpers...) - -sche(discuss)23:03, 18 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
Pray somebody add scripts = {"Narb"} to Module:languages/data3/x after line 1026 for xna. (Otherwise mentions of words in it are shown in slanted letters.)
Good catch. I've updated Common.css and Mobile.cc and set it to display rtl. Sadly, it seems there are no fonts that display it. If you or I could find a good image of what the letters are supposed to look like, I might have time to make a basic font iff the letters don't have to be joined the way they do in Arabic. - -sche(discuss)22:08, 18 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
I as an Archfag recently had a great update three weeks ago that adds displaying support for Old North Arabian, amongst other things like which improved Arabic and Syriac script rendering everywhere. gucharmap calls the name of the font by “Noto Sans Old North Arabian”, which I find in the filelist of the noto-fonts package. @-scheFay Freak (talk) 22:29, 18 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
I think everything under Category:Old North Arabian script languages should be “Ancient North Arabian” (xna), it is to wonder that Dadanitic (sem-dad), Hismaic (sem-his), Safaitic (sem-saf), Taymanitic (sem-tay), Dumaitic (sem-dum), Hasaitic (sem-has), Thamudic (sem-tha) are separate languages on Wiktionary (some also with no script assigned). (Prolly someone went through some lects and added all he found.) Those lects are at a level of attestion or study where it does not even matter whether they are dialects or languages, and “Thamudic” is even a collective term for any of the Ancient North Arabian lects not further classified. Many inscriptions cannot be classified unto more specific lects anyway (you know, people also were nomads and wrote graffiti here and there) and they can only be entered as “Ancient North Arabian”. With words being found randomly and in concise consonantal writing I don’t see why one would pursue separation other than by stating the find spot.
Also, “Qatabanian” (xqt), “Sabaean” (xsa), “Minaean” (inm), “Harami” (xha, redirects to “Minaean” on Wikipedia), Hadrami (xhd) – likewise otiose distinctions, regarding form and amount of attestion of Epigraphic South Arabian, as the name says only epigraphically attested, without any vowels –, have been unpopular in use already, entries and etymologies use the header “Old South Arabian” (sem-srb). I suggests to cross out those. Etymology-only is possible so one can use those in {{cog}} when in an individual case a word is known to be attested as of one of the dialects. North Arabian epigraphy categorization is more complex and it is better anyway to mention in each etymology where a lexeme has been encountered.
Himyaritic (sem-him), as an attested language, is rather mythical because the Ḥimyarites wrote Sabaean. Wikipedia mentions “three Himyaritic texts”, at the same time in the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Lingustics s.v. we read about two: “It is not even possible to establish whether they were written in the same language. The first text dates from around 100 C.E. and the second from around 300 C.E.” And about the secondary material from Early Medieval Arabs: “It is easy to see that quotations from Himyaritic offer very different readings according to the manuscripts.” Or according to others, mentioned in the EALL, Ḥimyarite is the same as Arabic, only with peculiar features (which might as well derive from Arabicized transmission, or later language fusion or whatever, much that could fool us). It could be grouped with those spurious languages if this category held languages from Antiquity.
Gurage is according to Wolf Leslau, it’s most eminent scholar, one language with twelve dialects; others share this view. The material for this language, particularly by Leslau across his works, only lists words as “Gurage”, without qualifying if they are “Inor”, “Mesqan” or some other Gurage, so on Wiktionary one cannot simply give “Gurage” words (which has recently been done in Semitic comparisons by abusing the code of the largest dialect Sebat Bet Gurage, in spite of the source saying “Gurage”). The following dialects I find on en.Wiktionary as languages: Kistane/Soddo (gru), Mesqan (mvz), Sebat Bet Gurage (sgw), Silt'e (stv), Inor (ior), Muher (sem-mhr), Mesmes (mys), Chaha (sem-cha), Wolane (wle), Zay (zwa); some of these are considered subdialects of Sebat Bet Gurage. There are more I don’t find on Wiktionary. It’s perhaps like with the Aramaic dialects yore or the Low German dialects today. People publish Westphalian dictionaries but it’s still Low German and so treated by Wiktionary. I suspect that instead of holding controversial subdivisions deriving from Ethnologue we should, holding to the sources, keep the Wiktionary-language level higher. The source for a certain word can be further qualified by labels as with Coptic. I mean that with language, unlike with biological taxonomy, one cannot simply assume that distinctiveness of a taxon is ascertained by experiments and then authoritatively published in some reference. As the individual forms are described in this dictionary, one must weigh if the data allows distinction at all. Currently it looks to me that hence Gurage must be lumped; I don’t know if, with new data or emerging different literary standards, separating the lects with separate codes will later be convenient (the increase in language material will be disappointing and unlikely someone will come and add Gurage in thousands of entries anyway, let’s be realistic), but I doubt that it would be comfortable. See also Why is Old Novgorodian a separate language in Wiktionary? This is the question: Is the difference in data enough to justify separation? The actual language-dialect distinction does not matter, it must be seen functionally, for dictionary purposes, for dictionary purposes. And if linguists publish material as “Gurage” the distinction is probably not good for Wiktionary headers. Isn’t it out of scope of Wiktionary to distinguish lect clusters when they are generally unwritten and chiefly written by and variously lumped and splitted by linguists? That’s a difficult question. Also I fear that such distinctions might be precisely the cause why nobody comes and pours out his rich Gurage knowledge. An adept would not be sure to distinguish, pendulating between two extremes, not witting if he should split as much as he can by all kinds of criteria or if to standardize and to abstract. To help though first all mentioned codes need the Ge'ez and Latin script both assigned, and the macrolanguage created. Maybe there will be late order from early ambiguity. Though I would perhaps do the order by lumping and labelling by location, were I that certain aficionado.
This discussion really belongs at rfm, because that's where we normally discuss changes to whether or how we recognize a language. The Grease pit is for discussing how to implement something along those lines- not whether it should be implemented. The other option would be at the Beer parlour, but this seems like something that would benefit from the more specialized focus of rfm. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:39, 14 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
Some prior discussion of Thamudic et al is on Category talk:Hismaic language; IIRC they were separated because literature does mention them as distinct entities, but if they were very similar or often treated as one language, and especially if there's difficulty in assigning specific texts to specific ones due to similarity, that would be an argument for reversing that decision and going back to the conservative approach of treating them all as one language with 'dialect'/'region' labels where appropriate. (As to the venue, yes, these discussions tend to happen on RFM for quirky historical reasons — originally the discussions entailed actually merging or splitting language templates — although some have proposed the Beer Parlour as a more logical venue. There are minor benefits and drawbacks to either venue; this venue does have the advantage that discussions stay on the page until resolved.) - -sche(discuss)17:20, 14 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
Who is likely to have access to resources on Africa's Semitic languages that could help judge what to do with Gurage? User:Metaknowledge, User:Wikitiki89? Wikipedia insists "The Gurage languages do not constitute a coherent linguistic grouping", which seems incompatible with merging them. William A. Shack, in his book on The Gurage, writes that "each Gurage dialect is usually understood only by its own speakers, and there is a rough correlation between the contiguity of dialect groups and the extent to which their dialects are mutually intelligible." (Steven Danver, in his (general-focus) encyclopedia, says "the languages of the different groups of Ethiopian Gurage are seldom mutually intelligible.") Marvin Lionel Bender, in his 1976 Language in Ethiopia, says "Although seventeen varieties of Gurage dialects are listed, mutual intelligibility reduces this to four languages and three dialect clusters as follows (Hetzron classification): Gogot, Misqan, Muxir, Soddo East Gurage (Inneqor, Silti, Urbareg, Weleni, Zway) Central West Gurage (Chaha, Gumer, Gura Izha) Peripheral West Gurage (Ener, Geto, Indegegn, Innemor)" However, his very next sentence is: "Gogot, Muxir, Soddo comprise a geographical (non-genetic) grouping of non-mutually-intelligible languages known as 'North Gurage'", all of which seeems to suggest that merging all of the Gurages would not be sound. - -sche(discuss)17:28, 14 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
The cited grouping of course adds to the confusion. Three languages, but four dialects clusters, not mentioning their intersections? Well, we will not find out how one should see them without deep-diving. But the question is which direction Wiktionary should go: likely the current division is not correct. Should Wiktionary just add all possible splits so they can be cleaned up later when someone would commit himself to add the whole Gurage and judge about which distinctions are most convenient or should we have one macro-code because distinction is hopeless? The reason why I have even mentioned Gurage is that for example Leslau’s Etymological Dictionary of Geʿez which I like to use just gives words as “Gurage”, which sounds like there is a common vocabulary. Fay Freak (talk) 14:43, 15 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
Perhaps you can deduce from Leslau's literature list which Gurage language he gets his data from? He seems to have written an etymological dictionary of Gurage as well, presumably its foreword could clear things up.
As a volunteer project (run on fancy), we really have no other choice than to wait for someone to investigate the matter deeply and order the languages in a manner that facilitates their lexicographical work.
@Fay Freak, -sche: A bit late, but here are my responses to the three outstanding problems (your #2–4):
It is fairly evident that Ancient North Arabian is not a single language, and I advocate that sem-xna be abolished rather than the specific language codes; read Al-Jallad (2018), "What is Ancient North Arabian?". He sees Safaitic (which he has written a grammar of) and Hismaic as being of the same continuum as Old Arabic, but they are obviously too distinct from Classical Arabic for lexicographical purposes. He supports the distinctness of the others as languages, and of the various "Thamudic" lects. Based on Al-Jallad, I would prefer we split Thamudic B, C, D, etc as necessary; each language will have a very small corpus, but it seems like the most honest way to do it, and if more inscriptions are found, the lettered Thamudic wastebaskets will probably get their own names as the others did.
Old South Arabian is also not a single language, though Sabaean was the standard that the other lects imitated, and I advocated that sem-srb be abolished as well. Multhoff (2019) in The Semitic Languages makes the case for four distinct languages: Sabaean, Minaean, Qatabanian, and Hadrami. She makes no mention, however, of Harami. Macdonald (2000), "Reflections on the linguistic map of pre-Islamic Arabia" explains that "Harami" is a name given to a few Sabaean texts that seem to have been contaminated by other Semitic languages, which is not at all an unusual feature and not unique to that site, so I suggest we remove that code.
As for Himyaritic, I now think I was wrong to include it. There are three texts often attributed to it, but see Stein (2008), "The ‘Himyaritic’ Language in Pre-Islamic Yemen", which makes a strong argument to consider these as simply very late examples of Sabaean, which is indisputably the language of the other texts of the region in that script.
Finally, for Gurage, the chief problem is that some scholars follow Hetzron in saying that Gurage is polyphyletic, in which case lumping would be committing a grave error (and the same charge has been levelled for Aramaic, with perhaps more evidence). Meyer (2011) in the International Handbook does seem to support the unity of Gurage, and treats the lects together, which gives me hope for lumping, but he is unwilling to commit to whether they should be considered dialects or languages. I think your Gurage-adding genius is mythical, so we have to choose which is least bad: many languages with scanty coverage, because their forms may be similar to forms entered under a different L2 header; or one Gurage language with decent coverage, but many forms that are not marked for what dialect they belong to and therefore a poor resource. I hesitantly support merger, given those choices. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds03:13, 10 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
An addendum: "Hadrami" is a terrible name for xhd, and invites confusion with Hadrami Arabic. Wikipedia uses "Hadramautic", but N-grams and a quick literature review suggests that "Hadramitic" is more common. @Fay Freak, -sche again (yes, I know I'm pestering, but I don't want to move forward on all this alone, both because I am fallible and because some of these, particularly splitting OSA, would require a bit of work, although in that case there is an online corpus that will help immensely). —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds02:40, 17 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Re North Arabian: Many works I browsed through speak of Old North Arabian as a unit with dialects, but also carefully specify what lects (including Thamudic B vs C, etc) words are attested in. Some imply, in their presentations, that a large number of words are identical between dialects, at least in the sample of vocabulary that they're treating (e.g., the pronouns treated in Roger D. Woodard, The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia (2008), pages 197-198), though this seems to be because the authors are presenting 'normal', normalized and romanized forms, given Al-Jallad's evidence that words (even the supposedly distinctive definite article) varied not just among dialects but even within the writings of individual speakers. The native script also loses many possible differences in pronunciation, but then, we are a written, writing-based dictionary. I find slightly more works speaking of "Ancient North Arabian dialects" than "Ancient North Arabian languages", and the fact that some authors have argued the varieties are the same language not only as each other but even as Arabic itself does suggest a high degree of similarity (or that the scholars in question are lumpers). As we're dealing with small, extinct and apparently clearly delineated corpora, it seems like the conservative approach of treating each under its own L2 could be better, and we could retire xna ... unless we need it as a wastebasket for unsorted things, which Al-Jallad (and Fay Freak, above) suggests we would. (Bah, It's messy business, deciding what's a language and what's a dialect...) I will try to dig into the rest later. - -sche(discuss)04:10, 19 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Merging Classical Mongolian into Mongolian
Latest comment: 4 years ago12 comments6 people in discussion
"Classical Mongolian" refers to the literary language of Mongolia used from 17th to 19th century created through a language reform associated with increased Buddhist cultural production (this started in the 16th century, but language standardization took place later). In the 20th century, (outer) Mongolia became independent from China and later adopted a Cyrillic orthography based on the spoken language, while Inner Mongolia kept her Uyghur script.
The literary language of Inner Mongolia continues Classical Mongolian in terms of its orthography as well as most of its grammar (to an extent that Janhunen (?) calls the situation bilingual). Modern varieties, in both Outer and Inner Mongolia, have greatly expanded their lexicons through borrowing of modern terms, but they also both consider all of Classical Mongolian lexicon to be a part of their language, and will put it in their dictionaries, even transcribed into Cyrillic.
The actual problem I have with this division is that when it comes to borrowings from (Classical) Mongolian, we sometimes cannot ascertain whether they precede the 20th century or not, or more common still, we know they precede the 19th century (and post-date the 16th), but they obviously come from a spoken variety and not "Classical Mongolian" as a literary language. Crom daba (talk) 17:14, 15 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
Yes. I find it also strange that Wiktionary distinguishes Ottoman Turkish from Turkish, it’s like distinguishing pre-1918 Russian from “Russian”, or like one reads about “Ottoman Turks” instead of “Turks”. Also Kazakh and the other Turkic language do not get extra codes for Arabic spelling, this situation is even more comparable, innit. Kazakhs in China write in Arabic script, Mongols in China in Mongolian script, but the languages are two and not four. Or also it sounds as with Pali. Am I correct to assume that Classical Mongolian texts get reedited in Cyrillic script? Then you could base all on Cyrillic and make Mongolian script soft redirects, because even words died out before the introduction of Cyrillic can be found in Cyrillic. Fay Freak (talk) 15:23, 17 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Fay Freak, the situation is similar to Turkish, but it creates less problems there since the Arabic script Turkish is obsolete and most relevant loans are pre-Republican.
In principle it could be possible to collapse all of Mongolian into Cyrillic, but this would be extremely politically incorrect.
Collapsing everything (potentially even Buryat, Daur and Middle Mongolian) into Uyghur script, like we do with Chinese, would perhaps make more sense, but 1) it's a pain to enter 2) Cyrillic is generally more accessible and useful to our users and (Outer) Mongolians 3) most of my materials are in Cyrillic 4) it corresponds poorly to the spoken forms 5) its Unicode encoding corresponds poorly to its actual form 6) the encoding doesn't correspond that well to the spoken form either. Crom daba (talk) 16:50, 18 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
This is tricky, because as far as language headers and having entries for terms in the language, it seems like we could often resolve which language a word is in(?) by knowing the date of the texts it's attested in. It is, as you say, etymologies where it's hardest to ascertain dates. (Still, if we merged the lects, we could retain an "etymology only" code for borrowings that were clearly from Classical Mongolian, like is done for Classical Persian, etc.) I'm having a hard time finding any references on the mutual intelligibility of the two stages; most references are concerned with the intelligibility or non-intelligibility of modern Khalkha, Kalmyk, etc. If we kept the stages separate, etymologies could always say something like "from Mongolian foo, or a Classical Mongolian forerunner". - -sche(discuss)22:50, 18 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
@-sche, yes, the Persian model would be desirable.
It doesn't make much sense to speak of intelligibility between Classical and Modern Mongolian, Classical Mongolian is exclusively a written language, its spelling reflects the phonology of 13th-century Mongolian (early Middle Mongolian). The same spelling is used in Modern Mongolian as written in Uyghur script.
The biggest problem with Classical Mongolian is how redundant it is. For any word that is shared between modern and classical periods, and that is probably most of the lexicon, we would need to make two identical entries in Uyghur script for modern and classical Mongolian. Crom daba (talk) 11:18, 19 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
Not exactly; Serbo-Croatian and Hindi-Urdu have redundant entries in different scripts on different pages, while I understand Crom daba's point to be that we would need to have redundant ==Mongolian== and ==Classical Mongolian== entries on the same pages for most Mongolian/Uyghur script words, which would be more like having duplicate Bosnian and Croatian entries on the same pages, not our current system. And Serbo-Croats are testier about their language(s) being lumped than speakers of Classical Mongolian... ;) - -sche(discuss)17:29, 3 December 2018 (UTC)Reply
OK, does anyone object to the merge? If not, I can try to do it with AutoWikiBrowser later, or Crom or others could start reheadering our small number of Classical Mongolian entries, fixing any wayward translations, etc. For etymologies of terms that are known to derive from Classical Mongolian, we should be able to just move cmg over to Module:etymology languages/data. - -sche(discuss)17:29, 3 December 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Crom daba, Fay Freak I made the few ==Classical Mongolian== entries we had into ==Mongolian== entries (labelled "Classical Mongolian" unless there was already a modern Mongolian section on the same page), but many of the categories still need to be deleted, and one needs to check whther anything else is left that would break before "cmg" is moved from being a language code to being an etymology-only code. - -sche(discuss)02:46, 27 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
There's no full correspondence between different Mongolian scripts and none of the scripts is totally phonetic. It's not just the spelling, the phonologies are different but sometimes one script represents the true or historical pronunciation and it's not necessarily Cyrillic, which is strange. There are words that only exist on one or the other, which is quite understandable, cf. modern ᠱᠠᠹᠠ(šafa, “sofa”) in Inner Mongolia (from 沙發／沙发 (shāfā) and софа(sofa, “sofa”) in outer Mongolia (from софа́(sofá). I support the merge, though but I am curious if classical Mongolian terms are equally representable in Cyrillic and Arabic scripts. In other words, are there terms in classical Mongolian, which are different from modern and there's no Cyrillic form for them? I think I saw them.
Duplication of entries is a waste. You may think I am biased but I think Mongolian should be presented/lemmatised in Cyrillic (Uyghurjin should also be available in all entries where it can be found) - for which resources are much more accessible. (Serbo-Croatian should be lemmatised on the Roman alphabet, on the other hand, let's finish the senseless duplications of entries)
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
We currently call this "Aguacateca", but "Aguacateco" is much more common. (Wikipedia opts for "Awakatek", which is rapidly becoming more common but is probably not there yet — not that we can't be crystal-ballsy if we want to when it comes to names rather than entries.) —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds05:42, 19 December 2018 (UTC)Reply
You're right that several modern (and a few older) sources seem to use Awakatek. In turn, historically Aguacatec has been used in the titles of many reference works on it, and seems like it may be the most common name (ngrams), although it's also the name of the people-group. (Others: Awakateko, Awaketec, Qa'yol, Kayol, and variously spellings of Chalchitec sometimes considered a distinct lect.) - -sche(discuss)04:31, 19 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The page for the late kingdom Pharaoh is currently called "Tutankhamon". Tutankhamun is overwhelmingly the more common spelling, as evidenced by the title of the corresponding Wikipedia article about the same Pharaoh. I also feel compelled to point out that a google search of "Tutankhamon" results in did you mean Tutankhamun?
And arguably, neither spelling is particularly authentic to either the hieroglyphs nor conventional transcriptions, since, as Wiktionary page "Tutankhamon" admits, the vowel was not present in the original hieroglyphic spelling. Nevertheless, -amun is treated as an alternate spelling in spite of being just as valid a rendering and much more widely used.
I considered the possibility that this was for the sake of consistency; perhaps the creator god that makes up part of Tut's name was referred to as Amon on Wiktionary. But alas, no, he's called Amun here too.
Insisting on -amon, to me, smacks of running against the grain for it's own sake. I really think it ought to be moved to Tutankhamun.— This comment was unsigned.
Google N-Grams show that, since 1995 or so, Tutankhamun ("T.u") is a bit more popular than T.e, both which are much more popular than T.o, in turn more popular than T.a. But until 1980 or so, T.e was the most popular, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more. T.e is the spelling given by the most OneLook references, followed by T.u. Spellings with other vowels for the initial u and the as are non-starters.
From this I conclude that Tutankhamun and Tutankhamen are the only candidates for main entry, T.u looking like the winner going forward. DCDuring (talk) 18:32, 30 December 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 5 years ago22 comments3 people in discussion
Apparently there was a recent vote to remove the ambiguity of comparative and superlative categories. What I don't understand is why the name "comparative adjectives" was chosen, which suggests a lemma category, yet it's now being subcategorised under non-lemmas. Lemma subcategories are named "xxx POSs", as can be seen in Module:category tree/poscatboiler/data/lemmas. Non-lemma subcategories are named "POS xxx forms", visible in Module:category tree/poscatboiler/data/non-lemma forms. Therefore, the obvious place for comparative forms of adjectives is the "adjective comparative forms" category we used to have. The new name, although voted on, stands out as an exception among all of our existing categories and is inconsistent. It should therefore either be renamed back to reflect its non-lemma status, or it should be moved back under its original lemma parent category. —Rua (mew) 23:57, 10 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
Participles are not lemmas yet they are called "(language) participles", so it's not as if the comparatives/superlatives would exactly be exceptions of some kind. They even have their own "participle forms" categories! The former also applies to gerunds. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 09:13, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
And to make it clear, "adjective/adverb comparative/superlative forms" categories are to be made obsolete as a direct result of the vote. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 09:16, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
Yes, and that should be undone, because as I said, the name "comparative adjectives" suggests that they are lemmas because of our existing naming scheme. Participles are non-lemmas by virtue of being participles, but adjectives are lemmas, so "comparative adjectives" are also lemmas. Are you implicitly proposing to rename all non-lemma categories to this new scheme, e.g. "dual adjectives", "plural nouns", "possessive nouns", "feminine adjectives"? If the vote is upheld then I will propose this change to make things consistent again. —Rua (mew) 12:00, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
I certainly would not assume "comparative adjectives" refer to lemmas in any way as much as "participles" don't. If we go back to "adjective comparative forms", what do you suggest for the name of the category with inflected forms of such? And don't just say "put them in 'Adjective forms'", because that at the very least isn't consistent as I stated below. In the old system, there was no consistency at all - inflected forms of comparatives and superlatives went to either the same category as them or Adjective forms without any sort of rule. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 12:17, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
I would not even categorise inflected forms of comparatives in a special way. They are just adjective forms. I don't even think comparatives should be categorised separately at all, there is no obvious need to do so. The example of possessive forms is perhaps the best parallel, since they have inflection tables of their own in Northern Sami and many other languages. Do you propose renaming them to "possessive nouns" so that there can be a separate "possessive noun forms" category? —Rua (mew) 12:28, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
If you feel comparatives too don't need a special category, I'm personally fine with bunching all of them under "adjective forms", but that will too need wider consensus to implement. When it comes to those possessive nouns, I would argue comparatives and superlatives are closer to participles than to those possessive forms, which is why I believe they're not a good parallel and should be considered separately. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 12:40, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
Many participle forms develop into adjectives of their own right and some comparative/superlatives too have developed into their own forms. Possessive forms by comparison basically never have, showing that they are fundamentally different in some way. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 12:49, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
In fact, unlike this new system which has parallels, I'm fairly sure the old system of having "adjective comparative forms" but then the forms of comparatives under "adjective forms" is more of an exception. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 09:32, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
Not really. We don't have separate non-lemma categories for everything in Module:category tree/poscatboiler/data/lemmas and in fact we don't need to. Under the old system, all comparative forms could be categorised under "adjective comparative forms", so that includes all case forms of comparatives. There was never any need to separately categorise forms of comparatives. In fact I'm generally opposed to subcategorising non-lemmas, so that's why I moved everything in Dutch to just "adjective forms". We don't need a subcategory for every possible type of non-lemma form. However, if we do have them, then they should be named consistently. —Rua (mew) 12:00, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
We don't have separate non-lemma categories for the reason that many of them are simply not inflectable on and upon themselves. Again, participles have separate categories for the main participle and inflected forms of such - why should this not apply to comparative and superlative adjectives? — surjection ⟨?⟩ 12:17, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
What I get out of your argument is that you think "POS xxx forms" should become "xxx POSs" when the form has its own inflections. But then what about cases like English, where comparatives don't have their own forms and are simply adjective forms? Or cases like Dutch or Swedish, where there are multiple superlative forms but their inflections are shown on the lemma? How is an editor supposed to know what the name of the category for any particular adjective form is, when some of them are named differently from others? —Rua (mew) 12:28, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
That is indeed my argument for comparatives and superlatives due to their so far horridly inconsistent handling. In the case of English and all other languages, they will only have "comparative adjectives", no "comparative adjective forms", much like English would have "participles" that too aren't lemmas but would not have "participle forms". In cases like Dutch, Swedish and such where comparative/superlative forms are more numerous, those need to be handled on a language by language basis, ideally to choose one of the forms as the most lemma-esque (such as which form dictionaries primarily use to describe the comparative/superlative of an adjective), and if not one can be decided, it is more of a tricky situation (possibly all into "comparative/superlative adjective forms"?). Editors in turn can rely on other existing entries and eventually remember these entries much like the existing ones are, or use language-specific headword templates. Yes, the new system is by no means perfect, but I would argue it is miles better than what we had before. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 12:38, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
But again, how is an editor of these languages supposed to know that, while adjective forms normally go in "adjective xxx forms", it is somehow different for comparative and superlative forms? You still haven't answered this. Your argument is based on sublemma-ness, but this differs per language, not all languages treat comparatives and superlatives as sublemmas. The categorisation should allow for both treatments depending on the needs of the individual language, not force a particular treatment on all languages. The fact that you think it makes sense for Finnish doesn't mean it makes sense for English. Now we have Category:English comparative adjectives for an adjective form, but Category:English noun plural forms for a noun form. How is that consistent? —Rua (mew) 12:45, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
I did already answer that question - read the latter part of my previous response. Many a time has an editor checked an existing entry to see how something is formatted, and I doubt there would be a single editor that has never done that. Many of the languages with comparatives and superlatives set up have language-specific headword templates, and many of those too have ACCEL which can too give the correct headword category autom- oh wait, it can't anymore since someone removed that capability. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 12:49, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
You have not answered the question. An editor cannot, based on the rule that non-lemma categories are named "adjective xxx forms", guess the correct name of the category for comparative forms, whereas they could before. Instead, there is now a single exception that comparatives are named "comparative adjectives". Where are all the other "xxx POSs" categories for non-lemmas? Again, are you proposing that all non-lemmas be renamed to match this new scheme? If not, what justifies this single exception? —Rua (mew) 12:54, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Which question exactly have I not answered? The question was "how would an editor of these languages know the correct name for the categories?", which I have now answered not less than twice in my two previous responses. Instead, what it seems you are arguing is that the new scheme creates inconsistency in terms of the category names for non-lemma forms. Indeed, if other derivations are shown to be just like participles or comparative/superlatives, I'm happy to agree to move them under a similar scheme as well, but the possessive forms you brought up above are not an example of such. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 12:58, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
Since it seems that this is the new norm for naming categories, I have proposed to rename all existing categories to match the new naming scheme at WT:BP. —Rua (mew) 13:16, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Rua Given the edits you have made to the templates and modules are still in place, are you willing to revert those yourself or are you asserting that you are overriding the consensus established by the vote? — surjection ⟨?⟩ 21:10, 11 January 2019 (UTC)Reply
Right, we can say "good on him", "good on her", "good on them", "good on Mr Smith", and so on. In fact we can even say "good on someone" if the person is unknown (e.g. "Good on someone for fixing this"). Even so, to me "good on someone" seems a bit unexpected or unintuitive as the main entry. Having said that, I don't know what else to suggest. Mihia (talk) 23:35, 3 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
Unless the entry could be at "good on". I mean, we can say "good on the company", "good on parliament" etc. Although these nouns are still "people-related", they are getting further away from "someone". Mihia (talk) 01:19, 4 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
I wouldn't have any problem saying good on that toaster if a toaster did something remarkable. I think it can just be good on. 76.100.241.89
Some are for Latin entries; others Translingual. We've never had consensus. MWOnline would probably put then is "International Scientific Vocabulary". DCDuring (talk) 15:40, 2 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
As I said, some are condemned to be "Translingual" by our Latin contributors to preserve the purity of their domain. Some are Latin because they are identical to Latin words. Some may be from other languages altogether, in some cases "from a native Caribbean language", not identified and probably not identifiable. But they all function as specific epithets. DCDuring (talk) 00:37, 4 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Benwing2, Rua, DCDuring: I guess there is nothing to move here and this can be solved by an addition to module data so that we can auto-cat after adding {{cln|langcode|taxonomic eponyms}} in entries. I mean, in order to categorize the {{named-after}} stuff more specifically. Fay Freak (talk) 23:45, 7 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
I think all of these that are entire taxonomic names must be Translingual, by virtue of being taxonomic names. The ones that are specific epithets would have the same language code for the taxonomic eponyms as for the specific epithet. DCDuring (talk) 01:02, 8 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
@DCDuring: I am not exactly sure what you mean. I mean that “taxonomic eponyms” can be added to the topical data or to the etymological data (Category:Taxonomic names, the supercategory of Category:Taxonomic eponyms, resides in the former for some reason, but I devise the taxonomic eponym categories as motivated by etymological description, so the latter it should be), whereas Category:Taxonomic eponyms cannot because it cannot generally be applied onto all languages (only to Translingual and perhaps Latin words that also are epithets). @Rua mixed up different issues here, the reasoning “as above” is not comprehensible thus. Fay Freak (talk) 12:00, 9 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
The question then is whether Translingual appears as "Translingual " or "mul:"? I have thought that "specific epithets" is a category having to do with the usage of the term. Thus the categorization should be the result of a label or of a non-gloss definition.DCDuring (talk) 18:57, 9 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Since "Translingual" is a junk supercategory, not comparable to our language categories, based on an attribute of the usage of some terms. The category includes CJKV characters, airport ocdes, other international abbreviations, symbols, and codes, some non-taxonomic scientific terms, and who-knows-what-else, as well as taxonomic names. The effort to act as if every linguistic entity in Wiktionary fits into a relatively well-defined hierarchy of language families, languages, and dialects comes a-cropper with the entities thrown into Translingual, just as the taxonomic naming system has its troubles with hybridisation and trans-taxon gene transfer (eg, from viruses or from the assimilation of prokaryotes into eukaryotes as organelles).
Specific epithets have a function within taxonomic terms that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that taxonomic names are used translingually, but has everything to do with names in the taxonomic/biological "language". 'Specific epithet' is a grammatical role within certain classes of taxonomic names. DCDuring (talk) 22:02, 9 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
A lot of this is redundant to our suffix derivation categories. In many cases, the suffix used already determines what something is derived from. For example, -ness always forms deadjectival nouns, it can't really be anything else. —Rua (mew) 18:47, 25 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
However this does not work with non-catenative morphology thus far – you may link the previous discussions on those infix categorization matters here, but even if that pattern collecting is solved the derived terms listed at صَلِيب(ṣalīb, “cross”), for instance, would only be categorized by pattern but nothing would imply that the terms are denominal –, and the point I have made about the categorization and naming of these categories is still there. But I give you green light in any case, if you want to replace all those “[language] deverbals” and “[language] denominal verbs” categorizations by suffigation categories of the format “[language] words suffixed with -∅ [deverbal]”, as well if it concerns action towards categorization of noncatenative morphology language terms, since your idea of uniformity is correct. Fay Freak (talk) 19:49, 25 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
Nonconcatenative morphology is still an underexplored part of Wiktionary, which is kind of annoying. But quite often, we simply show the concatenative part as the affix, and then leave a usage note saying what other changes occur when this form of derivation is used. For example on Northern Sami-i and -hit. —Rua (mew) 20:40, 25 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
How to create an affix category with an id: add the id to the definition line in the affix's entry with {{senseid|language code|id}}, add {{affix|language code|affix|id1=id}} (at minimum) to the etymology section of a term that uses the affix, find the resulting red-linked category and create it with {{auto cat}}. — Eru·tuon20:51, 25 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
Thanks, this is easier than I imagined, so it takes the category name from {{senseid}}. I thought it is in some background module data. Now where to document it? Add it to the documentation of {{affix}} under |idN=? This is the main or even only use of this parameter in this template, right? Fay Freak (talk) 21:18, 25 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
It's not that {{senseid}} has any effect on the category name, but that a category with a parenthesis after it, such as Latin words suffixed with -tus (action noun), expects a matching {{senseid}} in the entry for -tus, in this case {{senseid|la|action noun}} because the link in the category description points to -tus#Latin-action_noun, which is the format of the anchor created by {{senseid}}. The |id= type parameters, including in {{affix}}, generally create a link of that type. In {{affix}}, the parameter also has the effect of changing the category name. Sorry, I am not sure if I am explaining this clearly. — Eru·tuon22:36, 25 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
You explain this clearly. I just rolled it up from that side that I need to choose the name in {{senseid}} that I want to have in the category name so later with affix I will categorize in a reasonably named category because in other cases the id can arbitrary – not that {{senseid}} has an effect on the category name. Fay Freak (talk) 22:53, 25 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
Our affix system is not sufficient to handle morphological derivation we have to deal with (unless you want us to introduce lambdas...) Serbo-Croatian hardly has the intricacy of Arabic conjugation, but there are plenty of nouns that are created from verbal roots through apophony, and this needs to be categorized somehow. Crom daba (talk) 17:24, 2 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Crom daba At least for Indo-European, we do have a system for handling combinations of affixation + ablaut, like on *-os (notice the parentheses showing the root grade) and -ος(-os). Our current system totally fails where there is no affix, though, a case which also exists in Indo-European. For example, there are some Indo-European forms of derivation, called "internal derivation", which are built entirely around changing ablaut grades and accents: *krótus(“strength”) > *krétus(“strong”) or τόμος(tómos, “slice”) > τομός(tomós, “sharp”). We have no systematic way to indicate this kind of derivation, but it is sorely needed. —Rua (mew) 23:42, 30 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
On Google Books, "Nama language" and "Khoekhoe language" are about equally common. This is misleading, however, because many of the hits refer one of multiple Khoekhoe languages, as the term is used somewhat more broadly by some authors. Further evidence of this is supplied by "speak Nama" being much more common than "speak Khoekhoe" on Google Books. If we restrict ourselves to linguistic literature, "Nama language" is significantly more common than "Khoekhoe language".
In short, we do sometimes use a less common name for a language in order to disambiguate or avoid a name widely considered offensive. The name "Nama" is less inclusive, but also slightly less ambiguous, and seems to be the most common name in usage, pace Wikipedia. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds18:52, 18 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
The native name is Khoekhoegowab (literally "Khoekhoe language"). "Nama language" may have been more common in the past, but the standardized language today is called "Khoekhoe" or "Khoekhoegowab". The dictionary I have says that "Khoekhoegowab is the Language of mainly the Damara, Haiǁom and Nama." In The Khoesan Languages (2013, Routledge Language Family series), they exclusively refer to the language as Khoekhoe; however, they distinguish between Namibian Khoekhoe (Nama/Damara) and Haiǁom/ǂĀkhoe. "Khoekhoe(gowab)" does seem to be a more accurate and preferred term to me. Smashhoof (talk) 21:43, 18 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
If you search a digital copy of The Khoesan Languages, you'll see that different authors use different terminology in the book. The sections concerning the language in question call it Khoekhoegowab [well, usually just Kh. for short], which is far less common than either Khoekhoe or Nama and little used in non-scholarly English. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds00:58, 19 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
Looking in my copy of The Khoesan Languages, I see a few usages of "Khoekhoegowab", but "Khoekhoe" seems to be used more. "Khoekhoe (N.Kh.) is strictly a suffixing language...", "Khoekhoe categorizes nouns according to ...". The whole morphology section on the language seems to use "Khoekhoe". The syntax section uses "N.Kh." for "Namibian Khoekhoe(gowab)". Regardless, since the standard language is called Khoekhoegowab, I think it would be best to call it Khoekhoe, as that seems to be equivalent and more common than the full Khoekhoegowab in English. Also, Wikipedia uses the term Khoekhoe (see Khoekhoe language), so it would also make sense to keep the same terminology between wikis. Though, that article does use the term "Nama" more often than "Khoekhoe", which is a bit odd given the title is "Khoekhoe language". Smashhoof (talk) 02:49, 19 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
I asked someone who knows more about this and they said that Khoekhoegowab is the standard language, taught in schools and used in media, but Nama/Damara is the colloquial spoken language. Locals refer to it as Damaranama, Namadamara, Namataal, or Namagowab. Smashhoof (talk) 23:06, 18 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
It's defined as "Used to stress the recentness or modernness of the year", so my take would be that it is sufficiently closely related to 年(nián). — SGconlaw (talk) 17:29, 31 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
I think it fits in the same idea as Category:en:Greetings, but with a different naming scheme. "Greetings" should probably not be a set category, because sets group words by semantics (i.e. what the words refer to), rather than by function. —Rua (mew) 21:16, 7 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
As above, these terms do not refer to farewells, they are farewells: the category name pertains to the word rather than the meaning. —Rua (mew) 21:27, 7 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
Some years ago, there was an RFM to rename all these pages, the discussion of which is archived at Wiktionary talk:English entry guidelines#RFM discussion: November 2015–August 2018. The original nomination mentions "and likewise for other languages", meaning that the intent was to rename these pages in parallel for every language. In the end, only the English page was moved, so that now the English page has a name different from all the others. User:Sgconlaw suggested starting a new discussion instead of moving the pages after the RFM has long been closed.
My own opinion on this is to rename the pages in other languages to match the English one. That was the original intent of the first RFM, and the new name better describes what these pages are for. The name "about" instead suggests something like a Wikipedia page where you can write any interesting fact about the language, which is of course not what they're actually for. Some discussion may be needed regarding the shortcuts of all these pages. They currently follow the format of WT:A(language code), so e.g. WT:AEN but also WT:ACEL-BRY with hyphens in the name. The original shortcuts should probably be kept, at least for a while, but we may want to think of something to match the new page name as well. —Rua (mew) 13:00, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Globins Wiktionary's category structure only follows the first definition, which is the more common meaning. We shouldn't mix up the two definitions. —Rua (mew) 17:52, 13 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
Not really. An eponym is derived from a name. A toponym is a name. So a term derived from a toponym is derived from a name, but a term derived from an eponym is derived from another word that is then derived from a name. They're not equivalent. —Rua (mew) 21:18, 14 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
I think "eponymic terms" would be better if you want to preserve the "name that a term is derived from" sense of eponym (as opposed to the "term derived from a name" sense). "Terms derived from eponyms" seems odd, maybe tautological, to me because a name is not inherently an eponym, but only when we are discussing the fact that a term is derived from it. — Eru·tuon21:35, 14 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
And likewise for other languages. Why "forms"? This makes it look like they are non-lemma forms of some other words, which is definitely not the case for most of the words in the category. I decided to propose "words" because haplology is an intra-word process, not something that applies to multiword terms as far as I know. If people prefer Category:English haplological terms I'm ok with that too. —Rua (mew) 11:41, 9 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Right now, this contains a mess of various languages, mostly English but also some others. Thesaurus pages have distinct level 2 language sections just like regular entries do. Thus, we should treat thesaurus pages like we do regular entries and split them by language. The topical categories pose a problem, as they also need to be language-specific, but there is no naming scheme for them yet and no category tree. I propose moving their contents into our regular topical and set categories, to avoid creating a parallel tree of topical thesaurus categories. —Rua (mew) 17:48, 13 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
I don't mind one way or another, but the whole category tree then needs to be renamed for consistency. (@Donnanz: how is car ambiguous? Do you mean it could be confused for, say, a train carriage or something?) — SGconlaw (talk) 10:34, 3 June 2019 (UTC)Reply
Well, car is used especially in US English for a railroad car (either freight or passenger), and can be used in BrE for a railway passenger carriage. I feel the word auto can be ambiguous as well; "auto parts" can be used in the UK, but "car parts" is preferred. The word "auto" isn't used for a motor car in the UK. There is another category, Category:Automotive, so Category:Automotive parts may be a solution. DonnanZ (talk) 13:52, 3 June 2019 (UTC)Reply
As I see it, have isn't part of the metaphor, but it is part of an expression that is not in turn a form of tie someone's hands. The passive (one's) hands are/were/being/been tied are such forms, though none make for a good lemma entry or likely searches. DCDuring (talk) 13:38, 25 June 2019 (UTC)Reply
Indeed. Unless the active form is very uncommon, I'd prefer it as the lemma. I don't think that we would be wrong have both the active-voice expression and the have and/or get expressions, even though we could argue that it is a matter of grammar that one can transform certain expressions in the way Lambian describes. DCDuring (talk) 22:31, 25 June 2019 (UTC)Reply
Request to merge Haitian Vodoun Culture language [hvc] into Haitian Creole language [ht]
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
According to Wikipedia and Ethnology, hvc "appears to not be an actual language, but rather an assortment of words, songs, and incantations – some secret – from various languages once used in Haitian Vodoun ceremonies". Our only entries for it are Langaj and Langay, i.e. the two forms of the lect's name for itself. I suggest we consider it a variety of ht instead. Thoughts? Pinging @EncycloPetey as the creator of the two entries, although he hasn't been around for over a month. —Mahāgaja · talk12:00, 28 June 2019 (UTC)Reply
Although Ethnologue says it is "probably not a separate language", it does not say which language to which it might belong. So merging it into another language would be original research, unless a source documents its inclusion in Haitian Creole. Nota bene: at the time I created the entries, neither WP nor ethnologue expressed doubts about the distinctness of Haitian Vodoun Culture language. I am aware of its current doubtfulness, but it could also be considered a liturgical language in its own right. Without some authoritative statement, I'd hesitate to merge it into another language. There is more than one language spoken in Haiti. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:28, 28 June 2019 (UTC)Reply
Support. Hebblethwaite says in the excellent Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English that this is not only not a language, but that "[t]he words and chunks have mostly become incomprehensible to Vodouists and have a ritual or mystical purpose." Apparently the langaj used with different loa can be from entirely different languages from different parts of Africa. The entries we have are indisputably Haitian Creole (and which I think should not be capitalised according to orthographic rules). —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds04:44, 31 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
I can find little about this apart from the references mentioned already. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics says it is "used as a second language only", as does Toyin Falola, Niyi Afolabi, and Adérónké Adésolá Adésànyà's Migrations and Creative Expressions in Africa... (2008), which says on page 157 "Langay, also referred to by linguists as “Haitian Vodoun Culture Language” (Gordon 2005), is used in Haiti as a second language for religion, song, and dance. Although it clearly has some Haitian Creole words, it is assumed that some of its vocabulary may be African.", as if they aren't even familiar enough with it to be sure what its vocabulary is. Interestingly, Jeffrey E. Anderson's article on it in The Voodoo Encyclopedia (2015), says that some pieces of it are attested from speakers/songs in the Mississippi Valley and its Voodoo tradition, outside Haiti / Vodou, which suggests the ISO's awkward FYROM-esque designation is, well, awkward. (Anderson does caution that "most [records] show little sign of langaj apart from a few words and some personal names of spirits", and "the origin of those that do appear to incorporate langaj is often unclear; the tendency of early authors to uncritically assume that Haitian Vodou and Mississippi Valley Voodoo were essentially the same thing renders it possible that some songs reportedly belonging to the Mississippi Valley may actually have been Haitian".) From what little I could find, it seems like a set of vocabulary (rather than a language per se) that might be compared to e.g. pandanus-avoidance vocabulary or Polari. (Procedurally, it will be subject to the same attestation requirements either way, and can be labelled and categorized.) - -sche(discuss)07:54, 2 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I request that someone renames the entry devil a bit to devil a, because in practice "devil a" can be followed by any noun phrase, and it is neither practical nor desirable to have a headword for every combination. I then would also add divil a as a separate headword with no more content than referring it to "devil a" as a dialect variant. JonRichfield (talk) 08:13, 18 August 2019 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
We say ourselves in the entry for oxymoron that its use to mean "contradiction in terms" is loose and sometimes proscribed (despite the fact that many people use it this way nowadays). We say much the same thing at contradiction in terms as well.
The so-called oxymorons in this category are all or almost all contradictions in terms, where the contradiction is accidental or comes about only by interpreting the component words in a different way from their actual meanings in the phrase. An oxymoron in the strict sense has an intentional contradiction. I think we should be more precise about this, in the same way as we already are with using the term "blend" instead of "portmanteau", which has a narrower meaning. I therefore suggest we move this page to "Category:English contradictions in terms" (but see my second comment below). Likewise for any corresponding categories for other languages. — Paul G (talk) 06:51, 25 August 2019 (UTC)Reply
On second thoughts, I think this category should be retained but restricted to true oxymorons, such as "bittersweet" and "deafening silence". Ones such as "man-child" and "pianoforte" are not intended to be oxymoronic and are only accidentally contradictions in terms. — Paul G (talk) 17:18, 26 August 2019 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Tagged but not listed. Since most words ending on “-ismus” are loanwords, the “ending in” category seems the better merge target. --Lambiam16:15, 3 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
Church Slavonic from Old Church Slavonic
Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Three L2 sections for New World languages have diacritics that would seem to require that they be moved. I have no familiarity with these languages. DCDuring (talk) 04:24, 23 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
If the diacritics are like macrons in Latin, only aiding in pronouncing the term or the like, they may be fine where they are. I don't have time at this moment to check. - -sche(discuss)15:38, 24 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
October 2019
Canonical name of "fan"
Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments2 people in discussion
Our canonical name for fan is "Fang (Guinea)", which is unfortunate since it isn't spoken in Guinea. It's spoken primarily in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. I'd recommend calling it "Fang (Gabon)" since there seem to be more speakers in Gabon than in Eq.G. and since the name of Gabon is shorter. —Mahāgaja · talk 11:53, 17 October 2019 (UTC) I'd recommend calling it "Fang (Equatorial Guinea)" since according to Ethnologue there are more speakers in that country than in Gabon. —Mahāgaja · talk12:09, 22 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
The fact that there are even some speakers in Cameroon (according to Wikipedia) but it's not the same as "Fang (Cameroon)" is icing on the confusion-cake... and they're both Bantoid languages, so disambiguating by family doesn't help, and both spoken in Central Africa, so we can't disambiguate by mere region as we sometimes do. - -sche(discuss)16:00, 24 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
Ah, true; I saw that Wikipedia classified Fang language (Cameroon) as "Western Beboid" but caveated that it was not necessarily a valid family, but if Beboid overall is valid, then that works and is clearer (IMO) than picking just one of the countries to list. I would support renaming them in that way. The only other languages that come to mind which are disambiguated by family are "Austronesian Mor" and "Papuan Mor" both spoken in West Papua), which are mentioned on WT:LANG; probably we should change those to "Mor (Austronesian)" and "Mor (Papuan)" for consistency. - -sche(discuss)18:00, 25 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
I was going to rename Austronesian and Papuan Mor to use the 'parenthetical, postpositive' naming format for consistency with the Fangs and with how languages with country-name disambiguators are named, but I notice we also have e.g. Austronesian and Papuan Gimi, Austronesian and Sepik Mari (and some other Maris), and several other such languages, and I don't have time to rename all of those, so consistency will have to wait. (There is also "Sepik Iwam", but it appears to actually get called that, to distinguish it from the other Sepik language called Iwam which is spoken in the same place and belongs to the same Iwam subfamily of Upper Sepik. Confusing!) - -sche(discuss)08:41, 28 November 2019 (UTC)Reply
The reason I haven't archived this is that several other languages, mentioned above, still need to be renamed to fit the format of the other languages. I or someone else just need(s) to find the time... - -sche(discuss)01:48, 6 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago8 comments7 people in discussion
@Donnanz, Fay Freak, Rua I'm not sure what the real difference is between a city and a town, and I suspect most people don't know either. For this reason I think we should maybe merge the two into a single 'Cities and towns in Foo' category. Benwing2 (talk) 03:54, 17 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
I oppose this merger. I would not think to look for a category with such an unintuitive name, and I do not know of any examples where this is problematic. Wikipedia seems to be able to choose which word to use without trouble, so why can't we? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds05:36, 17 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
Eliminating one of them is a good idea where there is no meaningful distinction between cities and towns. But that's going to be a country-specific decision: England makes the decision, the Netherlands does not. I think in cases without a distinction, we should keep "cities" and eliminate "towns". —Rua (mew) 10:15, 17 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
I wouldn't recommend merging them. It's a complex subject though, and the rules defining cities and towns can differ from country to country, and from state to state in the USA; I have come across "cities" with a population of less than 1,000 in the USA, sometimes around 50, but apparently they have that status. Cities in the UK have that status as granted by a monarch, towns can be harder to define in metropolitan areas, and villages can call themselves towns if they have a town council. Some villages large enough to be towns prefer to keep the village title. DonnanZ (talk) 10:34, 17 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
The odds that editors will accurately/consistently distinguish these categories when adding (the template that generate) them ... seems low. However, even if the categories are merged, that problem will remain on the level of the displayed definitions. And, apparently some users above want to keep them distinct. So, meh. - -sche(discuss)05:36, 18 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
I can see arguments for both sides, actually. The idea needs a lot more thought, as you would probably have to drag in villages etc. as well. DonnanZ (talk) 14:15, 19 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
Could merge them into Municipalities in Foo and have the various alternatives point to that category. Of course there are some "cities" which contain several municipalities, but I don't think there is a word which comprises every form of village/town/hamlet/city/urban area. - TheDaveRoss12:47, 21 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
In New York State alone, we have cities, towns, villages (which are subdivisions of towns), and unincorporated places, all of which exist within counties, except NY City, which is coextensive with 5 counties, each of which is coextensive with a borough of the City. The identities and borders of these places in NYS are generally fairly stable, though subject to occasional revision. Legislative and judicial districts are separate, with legislative districts changing after each decennial census. Census-designated places form a parallel structure with relationships to the state systems. The census system has the virtue of being uniform for the entire US, but the borders of many census places do not necessarily correspond to the borders of larger governmental units such as states and counties. Within New York State there are lists of each type of jurisdiction. In principle each US state has its own names for classes of jurisdictions. Finally, in popular practice, place names for inhabited place can differ from the names of governmental units and tend to have different boundaries even when the names are the same.
In light of the lack of homogeneity even within the US, let alone between countries, I think we need to respect national and state and provincial naming systems. If there is a worldwide system for categorizing places, we could also follow that, but I have not heard of such a system. Does the EU have some uniform system?
In the absence of any generally accepted uniform universal or near-universal system for categorizing places, I think we need to accept the fact that nations and semi-sovereign parts of nations (eg, US states, Canadian provinces) each have their own naming systems, which are accepted within their boundaries. I think it would be foolish for us to attempt to have our own system for categorizing places and derelict for us to fail to use the various national and subnational categories.
Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
This has both a Jamaican Creole section and an English section labeled as "Jamaican". I undid the removal of the English section by an IP before I realized what they were doing, but I don't want to revert myself and take it off the radar before someone else has a look at it to make sure the English section really is unnecessary. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:39, 23 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
Agreed. Where I'm from, y'all is either slang, or has the connotation of being something a hic redneck from the Southern States would say. You guys is the more normal way to express it, or in more formal contexts, you all or you folks. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 01:29, 27 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
I propose to rename red cunt hair to cunt hair, which can certainly cover red cunt hair as a more specific version of the slang term. The common abbreviation is even "CH," not "rch," at least in North America, as it refers to a very fine, albeit it specifically undefined, unit of measurement.
Alternatively, I propose to create a separate entry for cunt hair. Nevertheless, one of these two proposals needs to occur.
There is a slight loss of precision in the synonymy from merging, but I have made funny paper the lemma, without (yet) deleting funny papers, which should, IMO, be just the plural of funny paper. If someone thinks the possibility of lost precision outweighs the more straightforward presentation for normal users, please discuss. DCDuring (talk) 14:53, 15 February 2020 (UTC)Reply
L.S., LS, lectori salutem, locus sigilli
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
The only related wiktionary entry that now appears is that of L.S.; no entries appear for the terms being abbreviated (!), and search of the full terms does not even currently link to the abbreviation/initialism page. (Nor does a seach of LS bring one to a disambiguation of L.S. and LS!) All of these issues can be rectified easily by any registered editor with a reasonable understanding of disambiguation and markup (e.g., through creation of disambiguating tags and pages, and through duplication of relevant content for new definitions pages based on the abbreviation page).
Note, as an academic, I will not regulary or traceably work on Wiktionary, because of its lack of sourcing requirements for entry and note content. This leaves it with no basis for veracity, its persistent state, and a poor state indeed. (This weakness is more significant than that of Wikipedia, which is weak in largest part for its failure to adhere to its own rules and guidelines regarding sourcing.) Cheers. 2601:246:C700:19D:49BF:AECD:6AA6:2E3416:26, 25 February 2020 (UTC)Reply
I just don't understand what you're after. I reverted your edit because it radically changed what seemed to be an ok entry. We don't have disambiguation pages on Wiktionary and I suggest you read up on our rules and guidelines before you start deleting info again. --Robbie SWE (talk) 18:11, 25 February 2020 (UTC)Reply
It cannot have been formed in Proto-West Germanic, as there was no productive means to do so. Therefore, it must have existed in Proto-Germanic. —Rua (mew) 20:26, 16 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Ablaut was still very productive in Proto-West Germanic, as it is still today in Germanic languages. One might claim there is no productive means to form dove as the past tense of dive or snuck as the past tense of sneak in modern English, and yet they exist. —Mahāgaja · talk20:31, 16 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
I'm not convinced that ablaut was productive even in the most recent stage of Proto-Germanic, let alone Proto-West Germanic. What evidence do we have that it was? —Rua (mew) 20:39, 16 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
I just said: we still use it in modern English to form past tenses. And often in ways that don't even have parallels, so it can't be simply analogy. Dive/dove can be formed from drive/drove, but sneak/snuck and drag/drug don't have direct parallels that allow us to call them simple analogy, because there aren't any other verbs in /iːk/ → /ʌk/ or /æɡ/ → /ʌɡ/, so the only way speakers can have created them is by knowing that the language has a general process of ablaut. And even in Proto-Germanic *smultą/*smaltą isn't exactly a productive pattern: PG didn't generally create exact synonyms of nouns by changing their ablaut grade without any other affixation. So this derivation is just as irregular in PG as it is in PWG, so why not call it PWG since it doesn't exist outside of West Germanic? —Mahāgaja · talk11:37, 17 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Mahagaja: Englishdrag derives from a strong verb, and was influenced by Old Norsedraga with its indicative past "dró-". Englishsneak could also be derived from a strong verb but why its has snuck is beyond me, possibly by analogy. dove comes from a strong verb Proto-Germanic*dūbaną and dive from *dūbijaną. Englishdrive has as its past participle "drove, drave, driv" with driv being the original, drove possible from *draib and drave possibly from before Middle English? "draib" (PG) -> "drāf" (OE) -> "drove" (E). None of this points towards productivity of ablaut or of the -an suffix but that English can reshape strong verbs by merging weak verbs or reshaping their pattern through analogy. 𐌷𐌻𐌿𐌳𐌰𐍅𐌹𐌲𐍃 𐌰𐌻𐌰𐍂𐌴𐌹𐌺𐌹𐌲𐌲𐍃 (talk) 21:13, 20 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Consider also yeet, which is a running joke among young people online. They've decided that the past tense form is yote, which, given that it's completely made up, has no historical process to explain it whatsoever. That means that whoever made this up was aware of ablaut and (sort of) how it works.
Besides, this wouldn't be the first case of a form appearing to be in complete violation of all the rules of historical linguistics. It's always been a matter of probability, with the occasional exception proving the rule. Those poor early Germanic people didn't have access to the Neo-Grammarian literature, so they can be excused for getting it wrong now and then... Chuck Entz (talk) 06:13, 21 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
I agree ablaut is still (marginally / semi)productive in modern English (this, page 59 from the 1973 Meeting Handbook of the Linguistic Society of America, says "It is also reasonably clear that semiproductive processes like English ablaut are the subject of general rules. For example, new items like snuck, dove, and drug attest to the viability of the ablaut M - rules."). I lack enthusiasm for figuring out whether this is PWGmc or PGmc. - -sche(discuss)04:30, 18 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Ah, fair enough then. I do wonder if there are attested cases of derivations without *ga-, that we know are of post-PWG date. —Rua (mew) 10:22, 17 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
We renamed this code from "Standard Moroccan Amazigh" to "Moroccan Amazigh", but failed to note that the "standard" part was key. This is a standardised register of the dialect continuum of Berber languages in Morocco, promoted by the Moroccan government since 2011 as an official language. Marijn van Putten says this is essentially Central Atlas Tamazight [tzm], but most of the people producing texts in it are native speakers of Tashelhit [shi], so there is a bit of re-koineisation. However, if we move forward with good coverage of the Berber languages, every entry in [zgh] will be a duplicate of [tzm] or else a duplicate of [shi] marked with some sort of dialectal context label. By the way, the fact that there is an ISO code seems to be a political consideration rather than a linguistic one; compare the case of "Filipino", which we merged into Tagalog, or "Standard Estonian", which we merged into Estonian. @Fenakhay, -sche —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds21:31, 16 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Hmm, I see it's a rather recent attempt at standardization, too. I don't feel like I know enough about Tamazight to be confident about what to do, but it does seem like, if this is based on tzm, it could be handled as tzm (perhaps even, instead of putting "non-[ordinary-]tzm" entries at shi+label, they could be tzm+label, unless they're obviously shi words). - -sche(discuss)15:44, 19 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Generally, it seems the [shi] words are quite obvious; the main differences between [tzm] and [shi] are lexical (as far as I can tell, [tzm] has more internal diversity w/r/t phonology than differences with [shi]). But they're in a continuum anyway, and WP claims that there's debate on where to draw the dividing line. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds16:35, 19 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
And “Moroccan Amazigh” does not sound like a language name anyway if you have not been told it is one, it seems like “Berber as spoken in Morocco”, another reason to remove it. Fay Freak (talk) 15:59, 21 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Module:es-conj/data/-ar/-izar
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
If I'm posting this on the wrong request page, I'd greatly appreciate redirection.
Ideally, this module should split into three: -izar, -aizar, and -eizar. As it is currently, this module generates orthographically incorrect conjugations for three verbs.
This module is currently used for five verbs: academizar, enraizar, europeizar, plurinacionalizar, and tematizar. But it is fully correct for only two of them: enraizar and europeizar. For the other three verbs (academizar, plurinacionalizar, and tematizar), it generates incorrect "í"s where "i"s are warranted. This stems from the rules of stress placement in Spanish, which hold that an "i" immediately after a vowel does not receive stress unless expressly indicated with an acute accent; for the three incorrectly-conjugated verbs, this results in unnecessary acute accents.
Put another way:
this module generates the two correct conjugations: enraízo and europeízo;
and three incorrect conjugations: academízo, plurinacionalízo, and tematízo;
the three incorrect ones should read: academizo, plurinacionalizo, and tematizo
As a solution, I propose that enraizar link to a new module, -aizar; and that europeizar link to a new module, -eizar; both of which will retain the acute accents. -izar, in turn, will have extraneous acute accents removed, and will remain the linked module for academizar, plurinacionalizar, and tematizar.
An editor will see that I began this process, but reverted my edits because I ran into difficulties correctly formatting the new Module:es-conj/data/-ar/-eizar module. For a more capable and savvy editor, however, this will likely be fairly simple. --Zhanmusi (talk) 21:28, 19 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
{{R:egy:EDE}} (vol. 3, p. 201) has a whole page dedicated to this complex in Chadic, and concludes that two separate roots have been conflated by Jungraithmayr & Shimizu. Takács reconstructs the form given by the A languages as *h-m (comparing Egyptianhmh(“saliva”), Iraqwhamee(“sweat”), etc), and the form given by the B languages as *y-m (comparing Proto-Semitic*yamm-(“sea”)). He is not a Chadicist, to be sure, but his collation of sources is very comprehensive, and avoids the otherwise awkward *y > *h that this reconstruction demands. (As an aside, where the hell did they get the third consonant of *y-m-n from when none of the descendants seem to have it?) @Allahverdi Verdizade —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds06:22, 20 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Emoticons that use a low line
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
These emoticons should be moved to "Unsupported titles/" because they use a low line (which is not a supported character in titles):
Latest comment: 4 years ago9 comments3 people in discussion
Van de Velde et al. (ch.2, by Hammarström) report that confusion over the name "Ngongo" led to Maho (2009) and other references as claiming this to be a language in zone H, which does not actually exist (or if it did, it is extinct and unattested, because those Ngongo people speak Bushoong). There is another Ngongo language that does exist and needs a code, in zone B, which WP refers to as "West Ngongo" (not sure why). I think we should retire this code and create a new exceptional code; both peoples are in the DRC and both languages were claimed to be Bantu, so there is no effective parenthetical we can apply, but a new code might reduce confusion. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds01:07, 1 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
@-sche, Mahagaja: In this (probably overwhelming) flood of discussions, this is the one least based on linguistic criteria and on which I am most uncertain on how to proceed, so I'd really like to hear some opinions. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds18:36, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Mahagaja: Maybe I wasn't clear — the putative zone H language doesn't exist, so it can be considered merged into [yaf], but the question is whether to use this code for the real language of the same name in zone B as some references now do. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds20:43, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Oh, OK. In that case I suppose if there is a precedent for using [noq] for the Zone B language, we can do the same. We should have a WT:ANOQ page explaining what we're doing, though. —Mahāgaja · talk05:25, 6 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
We could optimistically hope that, somewhat like with vmf, Ethnologue/SIL will one day "re-scope" the code to refer to the real language... or they might reitre it and grant a new code. Eh. I think there's a case for either course of action. How much content are we anticipating having in this language? If it's not much (where a shorter code would be easier to remember and type), a new code would be clearer, IMO. - -sche(discuss)06:13, 6 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
@-sche: Yeah, I have no idea what Ethnologue will do — or if they even notice for a while. As for content, there won't be much for a long time; I searched a PhD thesis and a couple papers on that group, but I can't even find the word for "water" in Ngongo. Anyway, Mahagaja's inclination and yours seem to be in opposite directions, and I still feel undecided... —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds06:47, 6 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
If there's not going to be much (any??) content, then I would argue clarity is more important than brevity; a new code would be unique to this language, and could be changed later as needed, whereas re-using the code for the spurious language makes for unclarity about whether we also mean the spurious language, especially if anyone were to use it for the spurious language, or in a way where we couldn't tell whether it was for the spurious (but ISO-intended) language or our intended language, e.g. in adding a word that someone (mis)recorded or that or even just mentioning it in an etymology as "a cognate may exist in [x]" or the like. If the two are not related, then my guess is Ethnologue will eventually catch and retire rather than reassign the spurious code... in the case of vmf, it was apparent what language was most likely intended and they just scoped/definend it wrong, so it makes sense that they later fixed it rather than retired it. - -sche(discuss)17:09, 24 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Unattestable or SOP language name fudged by the for-profit language database Ethnologue; the linked Wikipedia pages will always stay stubs. The Verkehrsanschauung sorts this under Algerian Arabic. There is a continuum with Moroccan Arabic. Pinging @Fenakhay following our considerations at Talk:زرودية; nobody has ever thought such a category. One can attest the term “Saharan Arabic” but this is of course not meant to denote one language. As distinguished from Hassānīya Arabic one could need codes eastwards for some dialects spoken in the Sahara and Sahel, like for Malian and Nigerien Arabic – Chadian Arabicwe have as shu. Fay Freak (talk) 13:31, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
I think the idea here is that Algerian Arabic as spoken in Algiers belongs on a continuum that speakers in the southern and western desert of Algeria (inclusing many who are not ethnically Arab) do not belong on. I don't see the use of this code, though, because that speech definitely counts as Hassaniya. (As for the other countries on the fringe, we seem to count Nigeria and Cameroon under Chadian Arabic, which is less than ideal, but then again, I think that our whole system needs to be more like Chinese to be functional at all.) —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds18:18, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hardly attestable language name. Occurrences for it turn out as “Saʿiidi Arabic” for example. “Upper Egyptian Arabic” (I don’t see use of “Upper Egypt Arabic”, but this is a detail) is sometimes posited, variously ill-defined because of superstratum influence from the Nile Delta, but this is usually not accepted as distinct language and can well be an sum-of-parts term; Arabic Wikipedia clearly says Ṣaʿīdīy Arabic is “within the Egyptian Arabic dialects”. There are but some isoglosses dividing Arabic-speaking Egypt latitudinally, but so one can shed urban and bedouin speech and Muslim and Christian speech. English Wikipedia says “the realisation of /q/ as [ɡ] is retained (normally realised in Egyptian Arabic as [ʔ]” but this is the speech of the desert vs. the speech in the largest cities and [ɡ] for ق(q) can be found in northern Egyptian bedouins. Most natives of Upper Egypt would use the code for Egyptian Arabic, and I would too sometimes with label “Upper Egypt” or more specific labels. I have created the single entry in “Saidi Arabic” and only because there was this code. Fay Freak (talk) 13:54, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Merge [ayn] “Sanaani Arabic”, [acq] “Ta'izzi-Adeni Arabic”, [ayh] “Hadrami Arabic” into a new “Yemeni Arabic”
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
The categories are ill-defined; the second one is unattestable. Yemen is a dialectologically complicated area – the material is even partially collected outside of Yemen, as for instance the Dictionary of Post-Classical Yemeni Arabic 1990 is surveyed in Israel – with many isoglosses and the number of distinct languages is multiplied at will if one is oblivious of SOP designations of lects so for this reason, apart from nobody being able to safely use these categories, it is not wise to distinguish at the L2 level already. If you look into the Dialect Atlas of North Yemen and Adjacent Areas published by Brill four years ago and probably also Saint Elbakyan you will forget those categories and won’t be able to map content onto the codes. Apart from that the distinction is inconsistent with the fact that we have a code for “Judeo-Yemeni Arabic” jye – as if Jewish speech in Yemen were one language while Muslim speech were three! I just mention here that I find “Judeo-Arabic” and its sub-languages suspicious, it could all be only Classical Arabic or Arabic dialects with some peculiarities written in Hebrew script, remaining from a time when Wiktionary did not use {{spelling of}} for this purpose. The Jews might deal with it themselves. Fay Freak (talk) 14:23, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
I pinged you in a separate discussion above about Judeo-Arabic. As for Yemen... it is true that the codes are oversplit, but it is also true that the WAD attests to the fact that when Hejazi and Omani speakers disagree about a word, chances are that North Yemen agrees with the Hejaz or Egypt, and that South Yemen agrees with Oman. The existence of Piamenta's dictionary gives me hope for treating Yemen as a unit, but I don't know how he does it (do you have a PDF?). —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds18:33, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
I find this “South Yemen” and “North Yemen” part difficult and think that one needs an elevation profile of Southwest Arabia to dissect the Arabic dialects of and close to Yemen. Fay Freak (talk) 18:41, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
"Eggcorn" is a lovely term for our own amusement, but it is an inside joke that makes Wiktionary more closed to normal users. I believe that a term like misconstruction is more understandable to normal people and includes all eggcorns, mondegreens, etc. DCDuring (talk) 19:52, 9 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
A Google search for eggcorn brings up Wikipedia for the first entry. A Google search for misconstruction brings up "is misconstruction a real word" and dictionaries. Eggcorn might be slightly whimsical, but misconstruction is not a word used by normal people.--Prosfilaes (talk) 04:59, 22 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Well, the whole concept is not discussed by "normal people". Misconstruction is immediately understandable to the average educated English speaker, even if they've never heard the term before; eggcorn isn't. —Mahāgaja · talk08:14, 22 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Keep as is. It links to the entry eggcorn, so users are never more than a click away from comprehension. If you think it's an inside joke, then the in-group is all of linguistics, and we might apply the same logic to eliminating the word illative from our entries — only linguists know what it means, and why should we use the most exact word when a vaguer one might do? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds18:17, 23 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Keep. I don't like dumbing things down to appeal to the broadest population possible. What about the people who want more precise information, or who want to learn whimsical words to describe things? I'm quite happy with us filling a niche that other dictionaries don't fill, since that's why I use Wiktionary in the first place. Besides, the kind of people who aren't interested in expanding their vocabulary tend not to look up words in the dictionary very much anyway. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 16:02, 24 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
In addition of all the tense, person, and number variants (also contractions) of the current entry one can find variants omitting the pronoun, adding adverbs, using till or 'til instead of until; [VERB] oneself blue in the face; go|become|turn blue in the face; and blue-in-the-face and blue in the face as adjectives outside any of these expressions. The unchanging core of these is the set phrase blue in the face. It also has medical use (synonym cyanotic), which renders the figurative sense evolution and meaning obvious. DCDuring (talk) 17:39, 15 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Sense 3 of state should cover it. I think if 3(a) doesn't cover it, then "Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it." is not an appropriate citation thereof; I think Einstein would consider national, state, and city governments all part of "the state".--Prosfilaes (talk) 07:04, 17 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Should be moved to in grado, since sentences like "sei in grado?" ("are you up to it/are you able?") are completely possible. In other words, the "di" at the end is not strictly necessary. Imetsia (talk) 00:15, 14 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I wonder if these all ought to be merged into some entry akin to "play the ____ card" or something. There appear to be other words substituted aside from victim, race, and gender. Tharthan (talk) 22:09, 21 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
I lament that our way of handling snowclones is not optimal, banishing them to appendix-space, such that the choices here amount to 'have these multiple similar entries in the mainspace where users find them' or 'banish them to a tidy but less-findable appendix'. However, I see that we have a sense at card for this (although the definition could use some work), and between putting a link there and redirects from these entries, I suppose we could get by with migrating these to the snowclone appendix. Centralizing them does seem sensible since there are so many. ("Play the religion card" also exists.) - -sche(discuss)23:56, 21 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
I don't think this is a special phrase with "you're", it sounds like a phrasal verb be on. They want a fight? They're on! She issued a challenge, so she's on!. You can also use it in reference to the fight itself, e.g. the fight is on. 76.100.241.8918:51, 23 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
Hmm, perhaps. But the IP is right that "on" can be used with other pronouns. I suppose the question is whether this is better viewed as someone is on, be on, or just on: we already have a sense for this at on, "(informal) Destined, normally in the context of a challenge being accepted; involved, doomed. "Five bucks says the Cavs win tonight." ―"You're on!"Mike just threw coffee onto Paul's lap. It's on now." - -sche(discuss)04:25, 1 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The given reconstruction *h₃nobʰilos makes no sense phonetically nor morphologically. It seems to be an attempt to reconcile the original stem in *-l- with a thematic form given that the descendants are all thematized. Rather, the "descendants", i.e. derivatives, listed point to an original (neuter) l-stem noun *h₃nóbʰl̥, though this original morphological form is not preserved in any of its attested reflexes (c.f. the situation with *dʰógʷʰr̥ under *dʰegʷʰ-). For reference, Beekes 2010:1080 notes that it was an “originally athematic l-stem”; Kroonen 2013:380 gives Germanic *nablan- (= *nabəlan-) as deriving from *h₃mbʰ-l̥- (and in fact throughout the book refers to *nablan- as the typical example of a formation in *-l-); Matasović 2009:33 gives the Celtic form *ambliyon- (attested only in Old Irish) as deriving from *h₃nobʰ-li-; De Vaan 2008:639 gives Latin umbilīcus as from Italic *omb-(e/o)l- from IE *h₃nbʰ-(e/o)l- and explains, exactly as I would have, that:
“Latin umbilīcus has a complex suffix, which in theory can be explained in several ways. In view of the l-suffixes in Celtic, Greek and Gm., it seems likely that umbilīcus too contains an original l-stem. This was then thematized to *-(e)lo-, after which the suffix *-īko- was added.”
The suffix *-l- has been explained as either a sort of diminutive noun-deriver or as a variant of *-r-, but regardless of its function it is securely reconstructible. Like nouns in *-r-, *-n- or *-u-, the original morphology of l-stems is often obscured by subsequent thematization as per de Vaan's description. Compare the derivatives of the phonetically similar *h₃nógʰl̥ (given as acrostatic) as on the page *h₃nṓgʰs (which for some reason covers the root *h₃negʰ- in general), of which the only morphologically intact ones appear to be in Iranian; the "descendants" listed at *h₁óngʷl̥; and the various descendants and derivatives at *sóh₂wl̥.
It's evident from earlier stages of this page that it was originally used as a cover entry for all derivatives of the root *h₃nebʰ- without regard for formalism. (It was created in 2011, five years before the page *h₃nebʰ- even existed. Until the present time the page had been sorely neglected and several clearly non-descended forms were left there. The page's creator has been known for questionable PIE reconstructions, though in fairness Wiktionary's standards for formal reconstruction nine years ago were not what they are today.) Though not as important, my point here is that this page should never have existed with this title in the first place, as its original purpose was to be virtually synonymous with the root *h₃nebʰ-, and it has managed to continue to overlap with it even after the page for the root has been created.
Finally I wish to remark that this is related to the broader issue of inconsistency in the organization of descendants and derived terms on entries for proto-languages, especially PIE, in the case (1) where varying derivations from a common root are incorrectly listed as descended or derived from the same word, or the more general case (2) in which derived terms are listed as descendants, without any indication of the derivation(s) that took place between the proto-language and its daughter stage(s). But fortunately they are rarely as obviously problematic as the page in question; others tend to be more subtle, and the line between "descended" and "derived" is not always made clear—not to say that this distinction was ever defined precisely, nor that the derivational chronology is always known. — 69.120.69.25202:22, 24 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Should be moved to a causa. The di is not strictly necessary for this locution, because constructions like "a causa sua" ("because of him") are completely possible (and very common). Imetsia (talk) 15:58, 14 June 2020 (UTC)Reply
On second thought, I withdraw this request for moving the page. There are many Italian entries (as well as many English ones) that attach the di (or, in the case of English, "of") even when not strictly necessary. (This occurs in cases, like this one, where one could use a possessive pronoun instead). Many Italian dictionaries do the same, so there's no need to move this entry. Imetsia (talk) 00:16, 28 June 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Imetsia: Yes, I would keep this as is, though not for the same reason. In French, I always lemmatize such cases with the preposition de, even though when the object of the preposition is a personal pronoun, the prepositional phrase de + pronoun automatically switches to a possessive determiner: "à l'intention de quelqu'un" becomes "à mon intention" if that quelqu'un is moi. To me, the preposition de is "absorbed" in the possessive determiner mon, but it's still there in a way: both the possessive determiner and the prepositional phrase introduced by de function as genitives.
I think it's because "de" can be both a preposition meaning "of/from" and a genitive marker. When it's purely a preposition, it can't be turned into a possessive. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 03:11, 27 July 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
This entry needs to be split into two separate entries. The original maajii- can remain as a preverb, but what here falls under the Verb headword should be moved to the maad- namespace. I can do the editing and necessary clean-up, but i need help making sure the history isn't lost. SteveGat (talk) 18:07, 18 June 2020 (UTC)Reply
A common/easy way to do this is:
If most of the content, or the content that was present through most of the entry's history, is going to stay at maajii-, then just copy ("move") whatever content is supposed to be at maad- over to that entry with an edit summary saying that you're copying it from maajii- and "see maajii- for edit history for attribution" or the like.
If most of the content should be at maad-, then move the page and copy what needs to be at maajii- back over to maajii-, with the same kind of edit summary as above.
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
This lemma does not fit the criteria for inclusion. It is two morphemes that often appear together (-and and -ge), but each of which can appear in many other contexts. I have edited what little was there to fit under the final (morpheme) -and. It just needs to be merged into -and to save the history. SteveGat (talk) 19:53, 19 June 2020 (UTC)Reply
Rather than intersperse its revisions into -and's, I used the method of moving it to its own talk page (which will be kept to, among other things, host this very discussion when it's archived), and linking to that in the edit summary when I moved the content. - -sche(discuss)07:16, 6 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Thanks! That is a great solution i didn't know existed. I have gone back through and ensured that the derived terms exist somewhere, and boiled them down as much as possible. Ironically, i found one example: anishinaabewanjige (to eat Native) which quite possibly is a neologism based on the erroneous morphology that led to the original entry. anishinaabewandan (to eat "it" the Native way) doesn't exist, and adding -ge (a morpheme used to detransitivize transitive verbs) wouldn't give us the final term. As speakers try to translate eat X-ly back into Ojibwe from English, this creative morpheme may eventually come into existence...SteveGat (talk) 14:22, 6 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
@PUC: I have no objections to the move, however, I'm not entirely sure that *vьlkodlakъ was the primary form. Semantically, it makes sense to analyze the lemma as Proto-Slavic*vьlkodolkъ = *vьlkъ(“wolf”) + *dolka(“skin”) + *-ъ with -ol- > -la- metathesis or possible *vьlkodьlakъ (less likely in view of East Slavic forms with *-olo-, e.g. Russianвурдала́к(vurdalák, “vampire”)[1] /first recorded in written form in 18-19 cent./). You should consult with User:Rua in regard to which form should be created - *vьlkodlakъ or *vьlkodolkъ. I'm not so familiar with the style that Wiktionary likes to follows. Безименен (talk) 12:25, 10 July 2020 (UTC)Reply
If the original form had -dl-, why do we not see it in the other languages that preserve it, such as Polish? —Rua (mew) 13:25, 10 July 2020 (UTC)Reply
Not sure, but looking again at the entry, it seems not only Czech but also Serbo-Croatian and Slovene preserve the -dl- as well. --108.20.184.1916:51, 10 July 2020 (UTC)Reply
Isn't the pigeons category intended to reflect the breeds of domesticated doves? The categories would be as different as dog/cat/cattle breeds and canid/felid/bovid vernacular names. I could see making the domesticated breed-name categories subcategories of the appropriate vernacular-name-of-taxon categories. Of course it is not always known whether one or more hybrid species are the appropriate parents. DCDuring (talk) 13:35, 9 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
An example of w:U and non-U English, which probably should be decided for the latter. While “scent” can possibly be broader, this category also has the danger of just about including anything that has a strong odour naturally. Hence I included بَارْزَد(bārzad, “galbanum”) and جُنْدُبَادَسْتَر(jundubādastar, “castoreum”). The English category has a weak six entries since created in 2011. But even Category:en:Perfumes includes dubious things. I doubt perfumes are something that can be categorized well – it’s basically anything smelly? –, maybe delete all? Fay Freak (talk) 01:09, 27 July 2020 (UTC)Reply
I think a case could be made for "scent" being not something that smells, but smell itself (like musk and maybe putridity). I don't see any reason why perfumes can't be categorized. I don't think it's meant to include anything that could be used as the scent of a perfume, but words that specifically describe perfumes. For instance, cologne isn't "cologne-scented", it's the name of a type of perfume; jasmine is a plant, but it is also used as the word for a perfume, not just to describe a perfume (you could say, "She always wore a liberal quantity of jasmine" and not just "She always wore a liberal quantity of jasmine-scented perfume". Of course, you could also say "She always wore a liberal quantity of Autumn Breeze" because it's a proper noun, but I don't think you could say "She always wore a liberal quantity of lilac". Instead you would say "lilac perfume".) Andrew Sheedy (talk) 03:07, 27 July 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Imetsia In cases like these it's not controversial to move the page yourself and tag the redirect for speedy deletion. Same with your other nominations on this page. I'd move this one myself, but I'm not sure if it's an adjective, an adverb, or both. Ultimateria (talk) 22:38, 15 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
It's time to start chipping away at the mess that is our Berber codes. Wikipedia considers the Sokna language to be spoken in three oases: Sokna, Fogaha, and Tmessa. According to van Putten, the claim of any Berber variety spoken in Tmessa is wholly unsubstantiated. That leaves Sokna and Fogaha, which were each documented by different Italian scholars using their problematic style of notation, but do seem to be significantly different nonetheless. I suggest that we add a code ber-fog for Fogaha (variously spelled "Fuqaha", "Foqaha"; the definite article is often tacked on, including by its only documenter Paradisi, who wrote "El-Fogaha", but this seems contrary to one's expectations when it comes to alphabetisation). —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds07:39, 10 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Support. (I can even find such spellings as "Fojaha", "Al-Fojaha", "Fodjaha",...) Off of the immediate topic, but re Tmessa: I can find quite a few overviews which mention Tmessa, but AFAICT none provide detail about it. The Oxford Handbook of African Languages (Rainer Vossen, Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, 2020), page 285, says it is merely undocumented, not nonexistent, as part of a lengthy lament about Berber ("an unconvincing classification has been provided by Aikhenvald and Militarev (1991), [...] at many points this classification seems to be arbitrary. Moreover, at points it classifies dialects which are fully undocumented (e.g. Tmessa in Libya) or which are not Berber at all (e.g. Tadaksahak, which is Northern Songhay, and the Kufra oases, which are Teda-speaking). Unfortunately, some of the main lines of this classification have been taken over by the Ethnologue"). I reckon these changes are fine, though, since if any documentation subsequently emerges attesting Tmessa, it'll either show that it should be (re)included in an existing code or given its own. - -sche(discuss)21:28, 11 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Here's a blogpost that explains the deal with Tmessa. As for the spellings with (d)j, they merely betray people who have made a faulty transcriptional assumption because they can't actually read the Arabic script... —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds22:17, 11 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
To be fair, the problem at at Abegg's rule is due to the template being told that it is a single word. I suspect that having multi-word terms in these categories is at least party the result of implementing syllable counting in the IPA template without addressing the issue of how to divide an utterance into words- in some languages, that's not a simple task. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:55, 3 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Sgconlaw, Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV, Chuck EntzAbegg's rule had two issues: its pronunciation was indicated as if the term were just "Abegg's", and Module:IPA adds terms to "LANG #-syllable words" even if there are spaces or liaison marks (‿) in the pronunciation. I fixed both issues. As Chuck notes, checking for spaces won't work in languages like Thai that don't put spaces between words (or conversely, in Vietnamese, which puts spaces between all syllables). For these languages, either we can disable the categories or rename them (for these languages only) to "LANG #-syllable terms". Benwing2 (talk) 00:01, 11 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
Overhaul of Berber language codes
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
The current state of our Berber (Amazigh) codes is the ISO codes without any modifications made to their scheme, depsite its many problems. The Berber languages have comparable diversity to Romance, but specialists are distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of dividing up what is mostly a dialect continuum into over 25 languages, as Ethnologue does, despite the fact that nobody disputes this practice for Romance (even though on grounds of mutual intelligibility, it's hard to say why, say, Galician and Portuguese should be considered separate). For the most part, I think we should follow the Romance practice and be (mild) splitters; in cases like Tashelhit and Central Atlas Tamazight, you wouldn't gain much by merging (as most entries would still be on separate pages), and the remarkable internal dialectal diversity in these "languages" means that good coverage will still require a great deal of dialect-tagging. I have worked through the Berber classification used by Kossmann (2013) below, using his numbered "blocks", with my notes on changes to our scheme that I recommend.
Two languages, Zenaga [zen] and Tetserret [tez], both separate from the continuum and each other. No changes needed.
The Tuareg group, which has a macrolanguage code [tmh], but also codes for Tahaggart [thv], Tawallammat [ttq], Tayart [thz], Tamasheq [thq]. Tamasheq is meant to encompass both Adagh and Taneslemt, and the sole sedentary Tuareg lect, Ghat (spoken in Libya) is missing a code. I struggled to find data on mutual intelligibility; Adam (2017) indicated that speakers from Ghat had a lot of trouble understanding non-Libyan dialects, but that this might be a recent phenomenon. There is a written Tuareg standard using Tifinagh, although it does not indicate vowels and does not seem widely used any more. Clearly, the current state is redundant, and I think collapsing into a single "Tuareg" would be workable, but perhaps not ideal.
South-Central Moroccan group, Tashelhit [shi] and Central Atlas Tamazight [tzm], both written in Tifinagh. There is also a poorly defined Judeo-Berber [jbe], which I don't want to get into (but reminds me of the issues with Judeo-Arabic). These are all fine, but ISO also gave a politically-motivated code for "Standard Moroccan Tamazight" [zgh], which is a redundant literary koiné that I have already posted a request to delete above.
Northwestern Moroccan group, Ghomara [gho] and Senhaja de Srair [sjs]. No changes needed.
The Zenatic group, and here is where things get messy.
The existing codes in the West are Tarifit [rif], Chenoua [cnu], Tachawit [shy]. Missing are Iznasen (sometimes considered "Eastern Riffian", so presumably merged under [rif]) and Eastern Central Atlas Tamazight (a kind of contact language between [tzm] and [rif], presumably merged under [tzm]).
In the Moroccan and Algerian oases, Tagargrent [oua], Tugurt/Temacine [tjo], Taznatit [grr], Tumzabt [mzb], and Tidikelt [tia] (which is almost undocumented!) all have codes, thus excluding Sud-oranais (principally the Figuig dialect, which has a grammar). Mutual intelligibility in this cluster of dialects is known to be high, and this seems ridiculously oversplit; I would recommend one code, although I'm not sure what to call it. Ethnologue calls it "Mzab–Wargla", which are only two of the dialects and is obviously not great, while Kossmann calls it "Northern Saharan oasis" Berber, which is highly clunky, and my "North Saharan Berber" is a protologism.
In the East, there is a single code for Sened [sds], an extinct dialect in Tunisia, and no codes for the extant Tunisian varieties (principally Djerbi), nor for the closely related Zuwara dialect over the border in Libya. I recommend that [sds] be repurposed as "Tunisian Berber", and a new code be added for Zuwara (also known as "Zuaran"), which has a grammar by Mitchell; this could be considered oversplitting, but it would be odder for "Tunisian Berber" to have entries that are almost all from Libya.
The remaining languages of the East belong to various blocks, and are mostly covered appropriately: Kabyle [kab], Nafusi [jbn], Siwi [siz], Sokna [swn], Ghadames [gha], and Awjila [auj]. The only one missing is (the presumably extinct, and thus finite) Fogaha, which I recommended for a new code in its own section above.
Feedback would be appreciated, especially on the naming of North Saharan Berber. Note that I intend to give etymology-only codes for all the dialects that end up getting merged. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds22:04, 10 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Re North Saharan Berber: I think naming it "Northern Saharan Berber" is OK; we're not inventing the grouping, it's a descriptive name, and it's similar to and simply trims an excess word off of an existing name used in literature. - -sche(discuss)21:06, 11 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Reviewing Tuareg further, I see that Heath (2005) refuses to take a stand: "it is very difficult to decide whether we are dealing with a single "Tuareg" language (with many dialects), or two or more languages (each with some internal dialectal variation)." That said, he endorses the four-way distinction (where "Tahaggart" should be renamed to "Tamahaq" to include the Kel Ajjer), supports the bundling of Tamasheq, and makes no mention of Ghat, presumably lumping it into Tamahaq as well. The 4 lects with codes all have good dictionaries (ttq and thz share a dictionary, but all forms are marked for which lect they belong to), and 3 of the 4 have grammars, so they won't be hard to sort out or attest. As a result, I now definitively lean toward retiring the macrolanguage and keeping the split codes. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds06:26, 26 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago12 comments8 people in discussion
Just added by someone who knows nothing about our category infrastructure. Not sure where this should go in the category tree, but right now it's a dead end. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:54, 17 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Chuck Entz, Dixtosa: I hope we can keep this category, I would like to reference it in the future. However, I have zero experience with categories on Wiktionary. Is there anything I can do to help improve it? Like adding more words to it? Amin (talk) 19:35, 20 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
For at least the last few days, it's had only four entries in it, one of which (cope) I finally just removed because I didn't spot anything in the entry which suggests the word has a distinct meaning in or specific to incels. (The others are roastie, chad and incel.) If this is to be kept, it should have more than three entries, no? - -sche(discuss)07:36, 31 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
If you wanted to know where it should go: Technically as topical category to the data of Module:category tree/topic cat to have language suffixes, but: I am not aware of “incel communities” outside English-speaking countries. Image-board slang exists in German, but not incel slang, I believe, and I have observed many ghey things on the internet. It appears to be an outgrowth of American exceptionalism and corresponding oversexualization, primitive materialism that is so peculiar to the Usonian. That is, abstinence does not raise eyebrows in Europe; the opposite in the consumeristic USA. The people in Japan exhibit very different behaviour, too, though celibacy be more frequent. Fay Freak (talk) 14:21, 31 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Move to Category:Incel subculture slang, Category:Incel subculture, or Category:Incel slang, any of which I think would be more appropriate, and move all the entries to their language-specific topical subcategories, most or all of which I'd presume would be English. Although apparently incels are most commonly found in English-speaking countries, apparently there are a few in other countries too (I've heard of some in Germany) who have picked up on the fad, though in much smaller numbers, so the possibility still exists that incel slang terms may see attestable equivalents in other languages than English. It is less a "community" of people than an Internet subculture with members who may or may not necessarily associate with one another based on the label alone, and with several separate communities within...as far as I know anyway. However, there are enough entries at this point, and the potential for more related entries, for this to be a valid category. Some more words to categorize here that I've found are looksmaxx, Trixie, Stacy, incelosphere, volcel, femcel, fakecel, truecel, and ricecel. There are probably a few I'm missing. Also, there are some other neologisms that seem not to be attested by our standards at this time, but will probably be attested later if the popularity of this fad continues, like heightcel, incelism, fatcel, gymcel, turbomanlet, escortcel, etc. And if all those words don't give you an idea of how laughably ridiculous this whole pseudoscientific incel fad is I don't know what will... As a matter of fact, this whole thing inspired me to create the entry pseudobiology. PseudoSkull (talk) 18:47, 31 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
I don't quite see what's pseudoscientific about an online community of violent misogynists. They don't actually pretend there's a medical or biological reason why they can't get laid, do they? —Mahāgaja · talk19:00, 31 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Mahagaja They indeed do...or at least most of them do. They believe things like that they can't get laid, by any "femoid", ever, because of their skull shape being disproportionate. Furthermore, only the Chads get the girls, ever, according to their ideology. Except that incels don't account for genetic mutations or cultural differences at all which might explain how human beings have...different...preferences from one another?! And women don't all monolithically like the same type of man (if they even like men at all)?!!!! That's some SHOCKING stuff!!!! I guess maybe one could argue that not every incel believes these things, but in my experience a majority of them do, especially the more "community-oriented" ones. They will base their entire inceldom purely on these specific ideas. Hey, this might have seemed like an off-topic rant, but I just came up with two more links for our category: femoid, inceldom! PseudoSkull (talk) 19:23, 31 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
I deleted the category because it had only three words in it, and when I went to take chad (an alt form) out and categorize the lemma Chad, I realized the category is badly named because it was holding English terms but nothing in the name indicated restriction to "en:" or "English". By all means, continue discussion about what a properly-named category would be named, but in the mean time I deleted this misnamed stub. - -sche(discuss)02:25, 27 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion
The names of most languages which belong to the Northern branch of the Jê family as they are now are not the ones actually in use (either by linguists or by their speakers), and for a couple of languages even Glottolog (let alone Ethnologue) gets it right. I suggest:
renaming Suyá (suy) as Kĩsêdjê (of which Suyá should be an alias);
renaming Kayapó (txu) as Mẽbêngôkre (of which Kayapó and Xikrin are two dialects) — if this is deemed too diacritic-heavy, Mẽbengokre is also acceptable, but Mẽbêngôkre is the standard in the field nowadays;
creating a code for Proto-Northern Jê, which would be a daughter of Proto-Jê and an ancestor of all the aforementioned languages as well as Krahô and Canela.
I would also be happy to know if I can make any of the above changes myself without being an admin (I am new to Wiktionary so not everything is clear to me yet). Degoiabeira (talk) 01:19, 23 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
In answer to the last question, on a technical level you can't make these changes without being an admin or Template Editor, since they require changing Module:languages. But at least three admins have eyes on this now (User:Mahagaja, User:Metaknowledge, and me) so any changes that need to be made will get made after discussion here. :)
As for the suggested renames: AFAICT Suyá is much more common than Kĩsêdjê (or Kisedje) overall, though most occurrences refer to the tribe, and many of the occurrences which refer to the language are from 25+ years ago, as you brought up on Mahagaja's talk page. Even then, judging by google books:Suyá OR Kĩsêdjê OR Kisedje language, the two names seem roughly equally(?) common in books from the last 25 years. On one hand, Kĩsêdjê being the autonym speaks in favor of it; on the other hand, Suyá being historically more common speaks in favor of it. (From the perspective of ease of input, both names contain diacritics, so neither is per se easy to type.) The situation with Kayapó / Mẽbêngôkre is much the same.
For Parkatêjê, it seems like that name might indeed be most common, aided by the fact that there are so many alternatives ("Gavião Perkatêjê", bare "Gavião", "Gavião do Pará", etc) that no one name is that common AFAICT.
For Apinayé, judging by both books and scholarly journal articles, Apinayé seems to be the most common name even in recent sources, and it is also most common among the sources Glottolog lists which are specifically about the language and which use one spelling or the other in their names, so that is fine as-is and should not be renamed.
I will look into Pykobjê and Tapayuna.
Creating a code for Proto-Northern Jê seems like a good idea (there are reconstructions of it), especially if you will be adding entries in it or mentioning it in etymologies of other words. :)
I assume the other admins I mentioned above are following this, having participated in it when it was on the user talk page of one of them, but I'm going to re-ping User:Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV because I recall that pings must(?) be added in the same line as signatures in order to work. - -sche(discuss)07:48, 29 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Not much more than what you’ve researched yourself. Ultimately each language will have to be researched individually to find its ideal canonical name. I do recall reading that our canonical name of a native Brazilian language was considered an ethnic slur by the people who speak it. I think it was one with a bird’s name, maybe Gavião or Urubu Kaapor.
I’ll add that I believe the main criterion in choosing a canonical name should be the name used in English-language media only. If multiple English-language names exhibit roughly the same amount of use, only then should its status as an autonym or not be considered as a “tiebreaker” (as should practical concerns such as the non-use of diacritics). — Ungoliant(falai)22:21, 29 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for looking into it. The situation with Kayapó vs. Mẽbêngôkre is arguably not the same, however: the label Kayapó has been ambiguously used for designating both (i) a specific Mẽbêngôkre-speaking people (that is, to the exclusion of the Xikrin) as well as the dialect they speak and (ii) as a synonym of Mẽbêngôkre (that is, encompassing both the Kayapó and the Xikrin). In this sense, Mẽbêngôkre is preferrable because it helps avoid this ambiguity. Kayapó and Xikrin could be listed as varieties of Mẽbêngôkre (perhaps as different between each other as are Quebec French and Hexagonal French). Regarding the remaining comments, I realize I might be an interested party (I've been doing comparative and some descriptive work on Northern Jê for ~6 years and I've heard too many linguists' and native speakers' comments regarding their preferred ways to spell the names of these languages), so I guess I'll just wait for a consensus among unbiased Wiktionarians to form. I can also confirm that the Proto-Northern Jê reconstructions you might have seen out there are most probably mine and yes, I would be willing to add the respective entries (guess it's not a problem as long as the reconstructions are published in peer-reviewed outlets). Degoiabeira (talk) 18:43, 4 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Degoiabeira I got a bit distracted, but returning to this, I added a code for the family Northern Jê, sai-nje, and a code for the reconstructed language Proto-Northern Jê, sai-nje-pro. You may already be familiar with how to use them, I don't know, but if not: reconstructions in it would go the Reconstruction namespace (Reconstruction:Proto-Algonquian/askyi is an example entry in that language), and are mentioned in etymologies in the way you see in e.g. hàki, while the family could can be used if you don't know the precise language (as in sagamité). - -sche(discuss)10:12, 12 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Adjective section should be merged into noun section.
I do not believe that the adjective shows a word that is truly an adjective, rather than a noun used attributively. Moreover, the noun section lacks a definition like "an organism or object with a blue tail", which is precisely the sense claimed by the adjective section.
Latest comment: 3 years ago15 comments5 people in discussion
I would like to propose splitting HWC (Hawaiian Pidgin) off of EN (English) due to the following reasons:
1. The discussion in Template talk:hwc is outdated. It took place back in 2012/2013. This is before the US Census recognized Pidgin as a separate language in 2015 (2-3 years later). As such, the general linguistic view of HWC's status may have changed as a result of federal recognition.
2. Many of the arguments these people used were flawed (at least in my opinion).
- They implied Hawaiian Pidgin shouldn't be classified as a creole due to its high levels of mutual intelligibility with Standard English, even going as far as to compare it with "gangsta slang" from NYC or LA. The problem with this argument is that intelligibility doesn't define a creole. Creoles are naturalized pidgins, and pidgins are: "an amalgamation of two disparate languages, used by two populations having no common language as a lingua franca to communicate with each other, lacking formalized grammar and having a small, utilitarian vocabulary and no native speakers". That perfectly defines the origins of Hawaiian Pidgin. It formed as a result of many immigrant groups learning English. In fact, Tok Pisin has a very similar origin.
- The central claim that Hawaiian Pidgin can be understood by English speakers is only a half-truth to begin with. Many English speakers say they understand "Pidgin", but that's because the majority of Pidgin speakers mix a lot of their speech with Standard English, even more so in formal contexts. Full-on Pidgin can be a tough nut to crack. Furthermore, it's interesting that they use the argument of mutual intelligibility on Wiktionary, the same website that lists Bulgarian and Macedonian as separate languages. Those two languages are more similar to each other than Standard English is to Hawaiian Pidgin, yet for some reason, the BUL-MAC languages are separated meanwhile HWC is listed as dialect of EN.
3. Even in Wiktionary, it gets referred to as a "creole language". In the page Hawaiian Pidgin, it literally says "A creole language based in part on English used by most "local" residents of Hawaii. It's kind of odd that Wiktionary defines it as a creole language, but doesn't actually list it as one.
I started that discussion in 2012, and I don't really agree with how I approached it then. Hopefully I can do a better job now. Your first and third points aren't really relevant here: the political status of hwc doesn't have any practical bearing on its linguistic status, and our entry has no authority over our language treatment; it could well be changed. But your second point gets to the crux of the matter, and I am no longer certain how to proceed. Ultimately, we need to identify texts or recordings that we can agree are "pure" hwc, as opposed to being mixed with (colloquial) English. You mention Bulgarian and Macedonian; one reason it's easy to separate them is that there are lots of texts in each, clearly belonging to one or the other. Mutual intelligibility may be one of our best guides if we can't even decide what to put in which category. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds02:45, 11 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
My point wasn’t that the political status changes the linguistic status. I tried to say that federal recognition was a result of linguists changing their attitudes towards HWC, since the government wouldn’t randomly recognize it out of nowhere if it weren’t for linguistic perception. That’s why I thought the discussion needed to be revamped because there’s likely been a change in linguistic consensus from 2012 to 2020, if we’re seeing different developments like this.
And fair point about the third argument. But regarding the second one, I do think there are texts that are in pure hwc, such as the Hawaiian Pidgin Bible (Da Jesus Book). The book “Pidgin Grammar: An Introduction to the Creole English of Hawaii” also showcases pure Pidgin (although the explanations are in English). — Coastaline (talk) 04:27, 11 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Just to clarify: even if there's consensus to reinstate Hawaiian Pidgin as a separate language, the template {{hwc}} will not be recreated, because that's not how we work with languages anymore. Rather, an entry for hwc will be added to Module:languages/data3/h. I don't know anything about HP beyond what Wikipedia tells me, but if the entire Bible is written in the language illustrated by File:Hawaii Pidgin crop.jpg, then I do think it's appropriate to call that a separate language rather than a variety of English. It may not be as different from standard English as Bislama is (as Meta said 8 years ago), but I do get the impression that it's about as different from it as Jamaican Creole is, one big difference being that Jamaican spells things phonetically while Hawaiian sticks closer to standard English orthography (Jamaican Creole fuud vs. HP food), which makes HP easier to read for English speakers. —Mahāgaja · talk15:24, 11 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Poking around the copy Google Books has snippets of, it does seem to all be like that, including e.g. "But wen da police guys wen come to da jail, dey neva find Jesus guys ova dea. So da police guys wen go back an tell da leadas: 'we wen find da jail door still yet stay lock, an da security guard standing by da doors, but wen we wen open um, nobody stay inside.' Wen da leada guys hear dat, da captain fo da temple guard an da main priest guys wen come mix up, an dey wen tink plenny wat goin happen." (I also found a book called "Pidgin to Da Max" which mentions a number of loanwords from Samoan, etc, and has its own usexes like "aalas dollahs means no mo' kala", and suggests the pronunciation of some words differs from English even when the spelling does not.) On one hand, it seems mostly intelligible, and there are substantially less intelligible dialects of English that we clearly treat as such; on the other hand, I see the argument above that it has a different origin. I have no strong opinion, but will say that on a practical level we do a poor job of covering most things we've merged into English, often having only a little vocabulary, little information on e.g. how verbs conjugate, and few usexes, since putting "wen da police guys wen come to da jail, dey neva find peopo" as a usex under police#English (as long as Hawaiian Pidgin is considered English) would probably be frowned on as inappropriately niche. - -sche(discuss)09:42, 12 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I’d just like to mention that earlier, Metaknowledge said Bulgarian and Macedonian are separate languages since both lects can be easily identified in writing. But I do in fact believe Pidgin can be identified as well. Sure, not all Pidgin books spell things the same way but it generally keeps basic rules (such as “where” being “wea” and “the kind” being “da kine”). Pidgin writing as a result should be easily identifiable from American English. It’s kind of like Neapolitan, since it’s easy to identify it from Standard Italian but not everyone spells its words the same way, even among those who speak the same dialect of Neapolitan. Much like Pidgin, it’s not standardized but it still can be differentiated. — Coastaline (talk) 01:06, 13 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
HWC Recognition (take 2)
@Mahagaja, @-sche In September, I requested that Wiktionary should add hwc as a language. However, the discussion died down and the status quo continued. Once again, I'd like to propose recognizing hwc as a separate code from en. The main counter-argument to my first post was that there's no agreed-upon way of separating pure Pidgin from Standard English. I actually disagree with this claim, because material in pure Pidgin does exist. The entire new testament was translated into Hawaiian Pidgin, and they're actually close to finishing the old testament. If you go to a Hawaii bookstore or search in Google Books, you can find more literature in pure Pidgin. The spelling tends to be uniform for most common words, with "where" being "wea" or "the" being "da". "Hamajang" and "da kine" are also uniform, and so are most Pidgin-exclusive terms. Spelling variations may occur but I don't think it stops it from being listed as a language. Wiktionary lists Neapolitan as one, yet spelling in that language is not standardized and many variations of the same word/pronounciation occur.
So what are your thoughts? Also, in case there's any confusion, Coastaline was my previous account. I switched to this current one since I recently recovered it. ― Haimounten (talk) 21:15, 16 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Haimounten: These discussions can sometimes take a while. I'd encourage you to merge this into the original conversation and ping people who contributed, rather than creating a new section, which may confuse people new to this conversation. I think I now lean toward reinstating the code, but I still want to hear others' positions. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds21:44, 16 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
It's a grey area: much of the vocabulary is either identical to, or readily intelligible to a speaker of, standard English, and because Wiktionary is a dictionary (with entries for individual words) rather than a collection of long texts written in the lect (the way a hwc.Wikisource or even hwc.Wikipedia would be), differences in things other than vocabulary (such as grammar) are relatively less prominent / significant. However, I'm inclined to treat it as its own language (a) because of the argument that its origin suggests it's a distinct lect rather than a variant of English, and because treating it as its own thing would be consistent with how we treat Jamaican Creole or West African pidgin(s) as their own lects, and (b) because we're not meaningfully covering it as English, and I can't see us starting to: I can't see anyone putting up with wen da police guys wen come to da jail, dey neva find peopo as a usex on police, and we don't do a good job of indicating when a "general English" word is also used in a dialect, so while peopo might have its own entry with {{lb|en|Hawaiian Pidgin}}, it's unclear how anyone would know that e.g. police was used in Pidgin, since we wouldn't label it {{lb|en|US|ncluding|Hawaiian Pidgin|and|Midwest|and|NYC|and|New England|and|Southern US|and|AAVE|Canada|UK|Ireland|Australia|NZ|India}}. And we have someone who wants to add content in it and it does have its own ISO code, which we're no longer sure of our decision to retire. - -sche(discuss)05:26, 3 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
I'm still in favor of including hwc as a separate language, if for no other reason than that "wen da police guys wen come to da jail, dey neva find peopo" is not a sentence of English, not even a nonstandard variety. —Mahāgaja · talk12:48, 4 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
OK, I restored it, under code hwc and name "Hawaiian Creole" (since Ngrams suggests that's more common, and WP suggests it's also more correct, than Hawaiian Pidgin). I will say, though, there are things less "English" than "wen da police..." which we treat as en, like various dialects of England. (To pluck two examples out of the texts in the EDD, "A dooat like t'thowts a bin ower gyversum an hankeran eftre it", "Lükee zee tü 'er, 'er'th agot a rat! My eymers, 'ow 'er shak'th 'n!" These are far from the most extreme examples, just two examples I found in a quick search.) - -sche(discuss)17:57, 4 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
I would not necessarily be opposed to creating language codes for some traditional dialects of England as they are certainly as different from standard English as Scots and Yola are. —Mahāgaja · talk19:22, 4 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Is it really the case that speakers distinguish these as separate words by capitalization? The dictionaries linked in each entry's "further reading" suggest it is not, and that all the senses should be moved to murzyn. (Probably the occasional capitalization of the term is like with English a black man vs a Black man, where we centralize the content at black with Black as an alt form.) (The debate over how offensive the term is is a separate matter.) - -sche(discuss)03:32, 11 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
This currently exists in the usage notes of mood and a non-English quotation under its last sense-line. If this phrase is attested, it should have its own entry; if it's not attested three times, it's not worth a usage note IMO, we can just put any cites that do exist under that last sense-line. - -sche(discuss)08:57, 12 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Category:Albanian terms derived from the PIE root *h₁rewdʰ-- to a new Category:Albanian terms derived from the PIE root *h₁rewdʰ-
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Another user (thank you Lumbardhia) noticed that delmë doesn't actually exist, the proper form being delme. They've accordingly copied the contents onto delme. All that is needed is a final move now. ArbDardh (talk) 17:09, 13 September 2020 (UTC)ArbDardhReply
Since delme also has a Catalan definition, it isn't really possible to merge the page histories without losing the history of the Catalan portion. At the same time, we shouldn't lose the history of delmë. For that reason, I'm making delmë a hard redirect to delme even though we normally wouldn't have a hard redirect in a case like this. —Mahāgaja · talk07:12, 20 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
If I'm not mistaken, you got this term from my word list. I was able to find the original citations that prompted me to add it, and neither of them are with "go". So I think it can stay where it is. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 19:45, 22 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
IMO it does not make sense to have some terms categorized directly into Category:Regional English (not its subcategories) and other terms categorized directly into Category:English dialectal terms, because in practice no-one seems to be maintaining a distinction as far as putting one kind of entry in one and another in the other, it seems haphazard as to whether an entry uses e.g. {{lb|en|US|regional}} / {{lb|en|UK|regional}} like pope, mercury, jack, snap, wedge, phosphate, tab, or gob, or else uses {{lb|en|US|dialectal}} / {{lb|en|UK|dialectal}} like pope (!), admire, haunt, on, sook, book, yinz, and gon. Many of the {{lb|en|US|dialectal}} / {{lb|en|UK|dialectal}} terms go on to specify which regions they're used in, like "Pittsburgh and Appalachia" or "Northern England" or "Scotland". And we put every more specific dialect category as a subcat of "Regional", not of "Dialectal". I'm not entirely sure which category the entries in the two top-level categories should be consolidated into, but I'm inclined to think they should go in one or the other. Or do we want to try to implement some distinction? (At the very least, entries that use "regional" but then go on to specify the regions, like "US, regional, Pittsburgh", can drop the unnecessary "regional".) The one situation I can think of where simply changing "regional" to "dialectal" would not work is that some entries are labelled "regional AAVE". Thoughts? - -sche(discuss)01:06, 10 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
I personally think that dialectal and regional terms should be separated. Since a term for something in a region from an out-of-region dialect should be categorize into both regional dialects. -- 65.92.244.14716:29, 22 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
That doesn't make sense. It's not the thing referred to that makes it regional or dialectal, it's the term itself. Do you have an example in mind? Chuck Entz (talk) 18:21, 22 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
I think the real problem is that it's not clear what we mean when we say something is dialectal. Linguistically, a dialect can be any speech variety that is separate from the rest of the language. With a language such as English that has multiple standards, you could say that much of the language is dialectal, though no one uses the term that way. I suspect there may be a value judgment involved: dialectal English is the way local people talk when they're not using proper English. Regional has less of that: I say potayto and you say potahto, but that's just a matter of geography. Theoretically, sociolects like AAVE and Cockney would be better described as dialectal than regional, but I'm not sure whether they're described as either. For a lot of people, though, it's probably whatever it's called in the references they check (or copy from). Chuck Entz (talk) 18:21, 22 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
"dialectal English is the way local people talk when they're not using proper English".
What, pray tell, is proper English? General Australian? Standard Canadian English? General American (*had trouble including that as a suggestion with a straight face*)? Standard Indian English?
If someone were to suggest that whatever is arbitrarily declared to be the 'standard' dialect of the English in their country is thus "proper English", and every other dialect is not, then that is obvious nonsense. I get that that is the reason why you used the phrasing value judgement, but if what you suggest to be going on is actually going on, then that is a problem.
Wiktionary aims to be descriptive, not prescriptive. So if the category "Regional English" is being used to suggest that certain dialectal terms are more "proper" than others, then we need to get rid of one category or the other. Tharthan (talk) 18:42, 22 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
I'm not agreeing with the value judgment. I was too lazy this morning to put everything in quotation marks. The basic problem is that this terminology goes back to earlier academic standards and it's hard to tell what it means in a more modern context. A dialectologist or other linguist would probably have a more rigorous definition, but we don't seem to. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:36, 22 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
There was a discussion about this in 2014 which was closed (in 2016) after little input, but: should this be -trix? The only word listed as a derivative of this which is not -trix is ambassadrix, and viewing it as containing a suffix *"-rix" while simultaneously viewing ambassadress as containing "-ess" is not consistent anyway (why not view it as -ix, at that point? or more compellingly, as a blend influenced by -trix?). Perhaps if there were two more "-rix"es, it could suggest "-rix" had become an alternative form derived from -trix (although again, the lack of a verb *ambassade makes viewing ambassadrix as *ambassade suffixed with -rix rather than ambassador blended with -trix questionable), but the main form appears to be -trix. (Or, actually, the main process by which English acquires -(t)rix words appears to be borrowing directly from Latin without the application of any suffix in English in the first place.) No? - -sche(discuss)03:00, 10 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
Comment: If we are trying to make a distinction, one category should be referring to Shanghainese Wu, and another should be referring to any variety spoken in Shanghai (i.e. both Shanghainese Wu and Mandarin). I don't know if this distinction should/can be made, though. — justin(r)leung{ (t...) | c=› }04:06, 11 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
I guess the issue then is, do we have native Shanghainese speakers here who can make this distinction? It looks to me like most entries in both categories are Wu terms. Benwing2 (talk) 22:05, 11 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
If we have any entries that make this distinction (and one such entry has been convincingly adduced above), then merger would result in losing information. Do you want Shanghai-specific Mandarin terms to go uncategorised as such? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds03:26, 12 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Benwing2, Metaknowledge: @Thedarkknightli probably knows the Mandarin terms and may know some of the Wu terms. For Shanghainese, we have some resources we can consult, so it's the Mandarin terms that are more difficult to figure out. The terms that are in CAT:Shanghainese are Wu for sure (and I would prefer to call the category "Shanghainese Wu" to make it clear). We would need to sift through the CAT:Shanghainese Chinese category to check what's actually Wu and relabel them with "Shanghainese Wu" or just "Wu". BTW, there might be some need to revamp other labels/categories, like "Sichuan" displaying as "Sichuanese" and categorizing to CAT:Sichuanese Mandarin, which could be confusing when we introduce terms in Sichuanese Hakka or Xiang (which we might have some already). — justin(r)leung{ (t...) | c=› }03:40, 12 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
(edit conflict) A native Shanghainese speaker would be User:辛时雨 but he is not very active.
What we lack with regional labels, which is specific to Chinese since the merger needs to work for varieties and subvarieties is the ability to add variety specific categories, {{lb|zh|Shanghai|Wu}} is meant to not only label a term but also categorise it as Shanghainese Wu but {{lb|zh|Shanghai}} is for general Chinese, esp. Mandarin. --Anatoli T.(обсудить/вклад)03:43, 12 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
I think you would need to use {{lb|zh|Shanghai Wu}} or something, not {{lb|zh|Shanghai|Wu}}, since I don't think the same label ("Shanghai") can categorize into two categories. Anyway, add my voice to those saying that if there is intended to be a distinction here, the category names (and, probably, boilerplate texts) should be made clearer. We could also consider "see also"-style crossreferencing them, like Category:Louisiana French and Category:Louisiana Creole French language. - -sche(discuss)17:26, 13 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
I knew this language name/code seemed vaguely familiar to me, and after poking around I find that it's because I noticed we were missing it a few years ago, but I didn't have time/resources to look into whether we should add it (which isn't a helpful comment, I realize). Wikipedia has little to say about it; the one innovation they mention it has is shared with several other Subanens. What little I see on Google Books suggests Eastern Subanun is a more common spelling for the ethnic group; I see little mention of the lect under any spelling. It's hard to draw firm conclusions, but on the face of it I don't see why we're missing the code (it indeed seems to be one of the major dialects / dialect clusters). - -sche(discuss)08:06, 27 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
Fascinating. I suppose it should at a minimum be capitalized ("ar:Sisters [...]"), since I believe that is the standard practice (compare "en:Types of plants", "en:Named roads", etc). - -sche(discuss)21:31, 27 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Metaknowledge, Sgconlaw, -sche This category IMO should not exist as a topic category as it is specific to Arabic. The commonality between all these particles is that they govern the accusative case so maybe the category should be called 'Arabic particles governing the accusative case'. Benwing2 (talk) 02:32, 8 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Changing the name of the category will lead to greater consistency with Category:Conlanging, putting the contrast between the purpose of each category (names of constructed languages vs. conlanging terminology) in sharper relief.
The odd choice of wording was intended to avoid the topical category conflicting with Category:Constructed languages, which is a holding category for those languages. Given that our MediaWiki trappings make it impossible to resolve this conflict, I support this proposal as a better compromise. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds06:16, 8 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
sic – I do not accept this as English, Dutch, French, Portuguese. Why would sic be as English as sick? Its use is restricted to certain contexts, which suggests its not being English just like the abbreviations employed for apothecary use are not English.
etc. – merge all sections into translingual, or some troll will execute the idea of creating fifty other individual language sections so we have a Lua memory error from the midriff of the page.
et alii, et alia, et aliae, et alios, et alibi, et passim, et seq., et seqq., et cetera, ad loc., vel sim. – this is entered as English, but the fact that it is even declined shows it is Latin or translingual. I parallely move to delete these phrases because they are SOP, even as English, since we even have et in addition to seqq., seq. and so on which should also be moved. I make only the first motion for s.v., v.s. and s.p. – absurdly this is presented as English while s.n. is entered as Latin. And v. a. is “epigraphy, obsolete” – how English is that?
brevic. – breviculum is not created, but the natural assumption is that it is Latin and not English. If I search “the breviculum” I only get results for particular books. This demonstrates well how people bad at foreign languages try to sneak in foreign words as English without duly assessing the language; for the translingual nature of terms not using a standard format like taxa and anatomical terms have is only apperceived when actually checking many languages.
Anticipating a popular argumentation that XYZ cannot be Latin because it is used by people who do not know a sod of Latin, I note that I have already disproven this line of argumentation at Wiktionary:Requests for verification/Non-English § de gustibus non est disputandum concerning de gustibus non est disputandum (which the undersigned links both as the discussion in the former page tend to by archived at the talk pages of the individual entries), namely expounding that the objective lexicographic nature of terms cannot depend on the incidental language proficiencies of their users, their expectations about the language proficiencies of their recipients, or the language proficiencies of their recipients. I also note that such couldn’t exclude the categorization as translingual, I have not stated a preference of whether one should move to Latin or translingual.
Fay Freak (talk) 20:20, 26 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
and its abbreviation v.s. This is Italian or translingual. As I understand the intended use of such terms is in note sheets which do not even contain linguistic content. There are a lot of similar terms missing from Wiktionary by the way if somebody is interested in music and wants to expand, and there may be other terms already entered but likewise under the wrong language. Fay Freak (talk) 20:23, 26 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
The fact that e.g., i.e. and viz. are generally not pronounced as English shows they are not English and should be moved to translingual. (These exact abbreviations are also used in Latin, amongst other languages.) One could imagine these terms to redirect to their pronunciations by a template {{heterogram of}}, literally like in Pahlavi or cuneiform (what’s Category:Translingual logograms for? there is only one translingual entry in it as I am speaking), but I see no reason why they couldn’t be translingual terms in the stead of any individual language entry. Having them as English is just motivated by the natural bias of monolingual English speakers. The entries v.g. (and alternative forms) and vid. I am not well acquainted with are probably like cases. Fay Freak (talk) 20:35, 26 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
I completely disagree with most of these, although a case can be made for some. In my opinion, when a word enters the spoken language with a pronunciation adapted to that language, it can be considered a borrowed word. I think you either betray the fact that you're not a native English speaker or we are familiar with different varieties of English. I hear "e.g." and "i.e." pronounced all the time (as /iˈd͡ʒi/ and /aɪˈi/ respectively). And "etc." is most certainly English and French, etc. People use it all the time in speech, pronunciation varies by language (no one tries to use a more "correct" pronunciation and say /et ˈkeː.te.ra/), and it can be translated into different languages. For instance, German uses usw. instead. To say that it is Translingual is also extremely Euro-centric, because I doubt many African or Native American or Asian languages use it. Just take a look at the translation section....
I'm more open to moving the other terms, but I also hesitate to label words "Translingual" when they are only used in certain languages that happen to all be related.... Andrew Sheedy (talk) 21:22, 26 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
How recent is the phenomenon of pronouncing these abbreviations though? I know about these spelling pronunciations (!), but how much do we have to imagine thereof in the colloquials of various classes in say late 19th-century English, I mean when people were more into natural language and less bookish? In total it seems that it has been more often spelt abbreviated than pronounced so, and that the pronunciation as written is an exception. And in November 2020 everything is an exception and unnatural; it will become unclear how much we can rely on the current language.
I have begun, of course, merely with one argument for the translingual nature of these abbreviations. One may deem them translingual for various other considerations. The “nativized pronunciation” arguments always seem weak to me, since people just pronounce anything in native accents, including undisputably translingual terms like Rubus idaeus. Fay Freak (talk) 22:16, 26 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
I have no idea why you'd say "generally not pronounced ... shows they are not English". I have said "ie" and "eg" for decades now, with no difficulties making myself understood. In fact, I'm surprised that some entries say things like "Usually read out as namely, to wit, or occasionally videlicet. Otherwise pronounced as follows: IPA(key): /vɪz/" Of course, that some entries do invalidates the tag someone put on viz. and 21 others, showing they didn't really consult the entries? Slapping the tag on 22 entries at once seems more like enthusiasm than understanding. Anyway, perhaps this again demonstrates there are multiple Englishes, as in academic English? Shenme (talk) 06:32, 27 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Shenme: I added the tags (because Fay Freak did not) which is customary for discussions of entries and does not mean it was done enthusiastically or with agreement. J3133 (talk) 17:56, 27 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Support. We could well treat these as Finnish dialects, though I think to account for any local neologisms and such, they would deserve categories of their own under Category:Regional Finnish. --Tropylium (talk) 19:55, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
Done
