::Japanese "[[＝]]" has two usages "=" (equal sign) and "-" hyphen in some loanwords. I have added parameter セックス to [[SEX]] and rom=Bāden-Vyurutenberuk to [[バーデン＝ヴュルテンベルク]], it's still in "Japanese terms with romaji needing attention". Perhaps "＝" should be transliterated as "-"? --[[User:Atitarev|Anatoli]] <sup>([[User talk:Atitarev|обсудить]]</sup>/<sup>[[Special:Contributions/Atitarev|вклад]])</sup> 12:49, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
::Japanese "[[＝]]" has two usages "=" (equal sign) and "-" hyphen in some loanwords. I have added parameter セックス to [[SEX]] and rom=Bāden-Vyurutenberuk to [[バーデン＝ヴュルテンベルク]], it's still in "Japanese terms with romaji needing attention". Perhaps "＝" should be transliterated as "-"? --[[User:Atitarev|Anatoli]] <sup>([[User talk:Atitarev|обсудить]]</sup>/<sup>[[Special:Contributions/Atitarev|вклад]])</sup> 12:49, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
::: Yes, I think if [[＝]] is made to convert to a hyphen when romanized in Module:ja, it should romanize correctly and not show up in that category. If it's meant as an equal sign it would be a problem, but I think that would be limited to examples or quotes, and it would be a rare case. I can't think of a term that contains an equal sign (that is not a hyphen). [[User:Haplology|Haplogy]] ([[User talk:Haplology|話]]) 13:08, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
::: Yes, I think if [[＝]] is made to convert to a hyphen when romanized in Module:ja, it should romanize correctly and not show up in that category. If it's meant as an equal sign it would be a problem, but I think that would be limited to examples or quotes, and it would be a rare case. I can't think of a term that contains an equal sign (that is not a hyphen). [[User:Haplology|Haplogy]] ([[User talk:Haplology|話]]) 13:08, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
:::: Thanks, I was just about to save that edit when I discovered that somebody had done it already. The next step is to capitalize the first letter of romanizations following a period. Who will do that one? [[User:Haplology|Haplogy]] ([[User talk:Haplology|話]]) 13:20, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
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when using ja-noun (or another Japanese template) please don't specify the kanji when the entry itself is a kanji, or the hiragana when they entry itself is a hiragana (etc.) as this simply create a link from the entry directly to itself. Hence useless. Could you fix these please, or at least stop doing it so another editor can go back and fix them. Thanks. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:50, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, two more things I meant to say, see {{ja-def}}, and also when you leave the edit summary blank when creating an entry, it allows us to better see what you've created with the auto-edit summary. Only applies when creating an entry. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:55, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
They look good, thanks. I've read Wiktionary:About Japanese but I'm still uncertain about how to deal with alternate forms. Earlier today I made 助け平, which can be written with kanji as that or as 助平, and besides that issue, both of them can be pronounced as すけべ, すけべい, or すけべえ. I did the best I could with alternate forms but I'm not sure if I did it properly. I was also wondering about words like ダニ, which are nearly always written as katakana (I think most people wouldn't even recognize the kanji) but I'm not sure if the katakana form should be the lemma or how to do that if there are other words with the same pronunciation. Thanks Haplology16:35, 6 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry about that, I thought I had written the link that way myself, even though I wrote it myself a few minutes before that (my memory is pretty bad.) I wasn't sure myself if it met the inclusion criteria so I appreciate the feedback.
By the way have you seen the contributions from 90.209.77.78 recently? (notable contributor to 奈落) Interesting stuff lol Haplology14:52, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Hello. Could you please tell me where the guideline is? It is no problem to move yushutsusuru to yushutsu suru, but ai suru looks strange to me because 愛する is an undividable verb. For instance, the possible form of 輸出する is 輸出できる with the substitution form できる for する, while you can't say *愛できる. Verbs with a single on-reading kanji and する are all undividable. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 04:17, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, to be honest I didn't know about undividable verbs. I wasn't sure myself which is better, to have a space or no space. I was sure I saw an example with a space somewhere in About Japanese but I can't find it right now, but some other places in the guidelines they have no space. I could have sworn it was there. I asked about it on the talk page but there was no response. Perhaps ai suru should be moved back to aisuru. Sorry about that. I don't want to make a mess, on the contrary I was trying to make the entries consistent with the guidelines. I changed a lot of others--should I go ahead and undo all of those, or only the undividable ones? If you want to undo my changes that's OK, I'll defer to your judgement. Thanks for the feedback. I was wondering about suru verbs with a small tsu before the suru--it would be hard to know where to put the space. Haplology08:47, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
What do you mean by suru verbs with a small tsu before the suru? Verbs like 発するhassuru and 達するtassuru? They are also undividable. There is no noun like 発 or 達, so we should not have a space before suru. For verbs like 輸出する, a space may or may not be there, and I don't know which is better. Just like other Japanese, I Romanize Japanese words for the sake of foreigners, not for myself… — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 00:55, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Chiming in late here, and on Haplology's talk page, which might be a faux pas -- apologies if so. But I did want to offer that the guidelines I learned were to put a space where things can be divided. This is not to say that 愛する is a divisible verb -- instead, it's to point out that 愛 ai is a standalone word, as is suru, so this would be romanized as ai suru. However, while suru is standalone, 発 has is not standalone, so no space -- this would thus be romanized as hassuru. 口を挟んでどうも失礼致しました。 -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig04:07, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Not a faux pas at all as far as I'm concerned. Thanks for your help. That makes me feel better, as I had aggressively gone through a lot of entries and added spaces, honestly thinking that I saw a guideline for that somewhere, but when I looked for it again I couldn't find it. I guess I was thinking of the example of 勉強する that had been provided in the guidelines. Haplology04:18, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
No problem. It's definitely a common noun, and has the meaning that I added. I was about to say that it was not a proper noun but I discovered that it's also the Japanese alternative medicine called Reiki (capitalized on Wikipedia, lower case on Wiktionary.) Unless I'm mistaken the alternative medicine is a proper noun so it belongs there more or less as it was. I added hiragana to that one. The Wikipedia article has a good description of the history of the name which is an interesting read: Reiki
If I'm not mistaken and the alternative medicine is a proper noun (pretty sure but I have a nagging doubt) do you think the English definition should be moved to a capitalized Reiki page?
*a few minutes intervene*
I wrote a nice entry with all that information but another editor got to it first and created an edit conflict. Here's what my version looked like:
Thanks for your Japanese contributions so far! Please see my edit on Template:Jpan, I added the kyūjitai form. You can see the kyūjitai form on each individual kanji entry. (I am mainly busy with translations into Japanese and Chinese but occasionally work on entries). --Anatoli01:24, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the message. Actually kyujitai and shinjitai are a huge gap in my knowledge; I only know Japanese as it exists today, and I only encounter old kanji through books when the author uses them for literary effect. Are you asking me to add kyujitai forms to new entries? I'm not sure how to do that. Is that just a matter of looking up each kanji and substituting its corresponding kyujitai and forming a word with those? Thanks. Haplology13:04, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You're welcome. You're right, you can look up the traditional version but be careful not to pick a rare Chinese variant instead of kyujitai. Many Japanese entries lack kyujitai, no stress about it, don't do it if you're not sure. I only know some because I try to combine the knowledge of Chinese (simplified and traditional) with Japanese, I have good tools and Wiktionary already has lots of info on kanji. --Anatoli23:35, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Please don't remove these, the standard format has been to use ja-def in kana and romaji entries rather than put kanji in the ja-adj/noun/pos/etc template. One good reason of course is that some Japanese terms are (deprecated template usage)homophones and if we are to use the approach you were using the for such terms then we would need to use, ja-noun for example, multiple times in one entry. 50 Xylophone Playerstalk15:32, 18 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the message. I understand your point, and actually for a while I was wondering whether to put the kanji entry in ja-def or in the top, and I concluded that it should be at ja-def if the entry has homophones, but to put it at the top if there are no homophones. That has been my method recently--use ja-def if there are homophones, but leave it out if there are none. What do you think?
OK, thanks, I'll make the change unless you have or will -- haven't checked yet. I wondered about that myself, where the name comes from. So, it should say it comes from Latin?Haplology07:05, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Every Japanese dictionary I've ever used that sorts by Hiragana has ignored tenten, so the "|hidx=そうこさよう" isn't just for show. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 17:01, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Understood--I was thinking that dictionaries ignore tenten only for the first letter, but on further thought I guess the rest should be ignored too. Haplology17:06, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
On yet further thought I think the answer is more complicated--letters with tenten should be replaced with plain form plus apostrophe in every place, not just the first letter, and the same type of thing for pa/pu/pi/pe/po. The dictionaries can't literally ignore the tenten, or else there would be no way to order entries which are otherwise the same, for example くう and ぐう. My dictionary puts the tenten after the words with no tenten, if the words are otherwise identical. Putting a hyphen after the unvoiced consonant form would do the trick. It looks like the doc, e.g. Template:ja-noun, says only the first letter is important--but that is not how other dictionaries do it. This cries out for a bot. I made changes to that entry based on this conclusion. Let me know what you think. Thanks Haplology17:45, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
A bot would probably be the way to go. But I don't think the " is really necessary, wiktionary's software is smart enough to sort two ways at once. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 18:57, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, I had a look at the Japanese pages you made changes to recently. I don't know what category to put pages that are only kanji readings in, besides hiragana. If something is only a kanji reading, it isn't really a word, just a morpheme, and I don't think it has a part of speech. ひち and びち could go in the hiragana category, though. I noticed that ひち was a dialectical reading of しち, but there are a lot of dialects in Japan. I don't know if it's true but it's not very specific.
CD(CD) is a noun as well as an abbreviation (of konpakutodisuku, but shīdī is more common.) I asked a native speaker and they said PTA is everyday Japanese but most people don't know what it stands for, so I don't know if you could say it's really an abbreviation (I don't know.) They did not recognize MT as anything--so if it is a word in Japanese, it's rare, but actually a lot of the Japanese words on this website are like that; most native speakers have never seen them before. じょく could use some expansion I think, so I'll go ahead and do that.
In short, I don't know, but I would side with the template. Actually in the past I have made kanji reading sections on the romaji pages, thinking that if they were OK for hiragana pages that they would be OK for romaji pages, based on what I read at Wiktionary:About_Japanese#Hiragana_entries, which as far as I can see does not mention that template, until I discovered the template by accident and thought I might have been doing something wrong. Of course both hiragana and romaji are both phonetic scripts, but hiragana does a better job at matching Japanese, in particular for cases like voiced "tsu" which is sometimes romanized "dzu" but is romanized (properly I believe) as "zu" here. The problem is that "zu" could also be voiced "su," so if there were a page titled "zu" it would list voiced "su" and "tsu" together. The same type of problem occurs with "n," for example "てんえん" (ten-en) versus "てねん" (te-nen), which again are essentially different words, and work neatly with hiragana but get mixed together in romaji. So while I suppose there's nothing wrong with having a kanji reading section for romaji, it's a little messy. The format of the kanji entries does not seem to support having kanji readings in romaji either, since the hiragana readings are hyperlinked but the romanizations are not. In practice, hiragana is a sort of step between romaji and kanji for foreign learners, so if somebody is interested in kanji they ought to know how to read hiragana already. It's hard to say which way is wrong, but I'd lean toward not having kanji readings in romaji for that reason. Thanks Haplology16:01, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for asking me about that. I'd like to help but I'm afraid I'm no use when it comes to pitch accents. User:Vaste seems to know a lot about the subject and has put a lot of thought into it, and I like his choice of way of marking pitch accent aesthetically. I'd be fine with just taking his lead. Haplology14:45, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Current practise on categorising Romanji names
Hi. I am just wondering what's the current practice on categorising Romanji names (be it, people name or place names). Currently there is an inconsistency. Some entries are categorized based on the first Roman letter of the name (e.g. H in Hiroshi), but others are categorised based on the first syllable in its corresponding hiragana form. I am looking to clean this up, can you advise? thanks. Jamesjiao → T ◊ C04:15, 8 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Up till now I've been sorting everything by hiragana, even romaji entries, and I can't find a definitive answer from Wiktionary:About Japanese. The most relevant part I can find is Wiktionary:About_Japanese#Sorting, but on one hand it says
All categories should be sorted by hiragana except Category:Japanese kanji and Category:Japanese romaji. If the page title is not completely in hiragana, then put the hiragana version of the term as the sort key like this .
Then, it says
Romaji pages usually do not need a sort key, but if for some reason it begins with a capital letter, add a sort key with the lowercase version.
The second one does not make sense to me because the Category:Japanese romaji sorts uppercase entries like that automatically, and there is no need to add a lowercase sort key for that category. It seems like few people are working on Japanese these days and as far as I can tell nobody except me is doing very much, so I don't know if there is exactly a current practice. Most proper nouns are categorized by hiragana, and if names were to be different, they would clash with other entries in the category of proper nouns. So in short I prefer sorting by hiragana, but I can't cite anything official to support that. Haplology04:44, 8 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the response. Another question if you don't mind. What do you do when it comes to sorting when a Kanji name has more than one pronunciation (such as 大昌)? It seems to me that it only picks up the last Category entry. Jamesjiao → T ◊ C04:57, 8 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry to reply late. I noticed that too, I wish it wouldn't do that. Maybe somebody should bring that up in the Wiktionary:Grease Pit, and in the meantime I'd add the category link with the most common reading. Ideally, there should be kana pages for each name too, so somebody looking for a name in that area should be able to find where they would expect it in its kana form at least, but there is no need to do it right away. Thanks Haplology14:35, 8 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Redlinked category
You say in your userpage "if you see me making a mistake please correct me". OK, let me try:
When an entry has an appropriate but redlinked category, please either create the category or just ignore it. Deleting the category is actually a bad alternative; a redlink is better than nothing, and actually serves the purpose of displaying what categories should be created. And I created it today. --Daniel17:13, 16 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Oh ok, sorry. I didn't think that through. I figured it was superceded by something else, or was the same as another category that was there, but like I said I didn't think it through carefully. Thanks Haplology17:15, 16 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Just trying to understand this category--this is different from category "Japanese terms derived from English" I assume, so do you think it would be appropriate for to be continued? that is listed in "Japanese terms derived from English" but I don't think it really belongs there because I can't say it's exactly Japanese. In general is it for terms written in Japanese with the same spelling as in their source language? Thanks again Haplology17:30, 16 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If you think "to be continued" is not exactly Japanese, feel free to create a RFV for it. (to ask people to look for usage of it in Japanese running text, etc.)
Yes. Category:Japanese borrowed terms should, sooner or later, contain all Japanese borrowing terms. If to be continued, ジャンル (from French) and ナトリウム (from German) are Japanese borrowed terms, then they should be members of it.
Category:Japanese terms derived from English displays words derived from one language to another, regardless of how that derivation occured. (It could be a calque instead of a borrowing, for example.)
There are many Japanese loanwords from English; according to the current system, these categories, when properly filled with many entries, should overlap, yes. --Daniel17:58, 16 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the detailed explanation. I'll have to study this further. I'm not sure about to be continued, because I have seen it often on TV shows, but never heard it in conversation, and I doubt most people could even pronounce it the way it is pronounced in English, and given that, I wonder how it would be pronounced, what part of speech it is, if it would be romanized differently, and so on. But I think it belongs, just not sure how it should be treated. Anyway thanks Haplology18:26, 16 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I noticed you removed the JA WP link from 猟師 with the edit comment that the WP page doesn't exist; except the JA WP page does... I was under the impression that JA WP links were acceptable, provided the page exists? -- Curious, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig04:00, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sort of; it redirects to 狩猟, so I meant no page with that exact title exists. If you think it would be better with the WP link then feel free to undo my edit.
By the way, what do you make of 三重女神? I just checked it out and there is one result in google books, which refers to Artemis by that name, and Artemis is indeed a triple goddess. Like 猟師 the IP user provided a valid link but not to the title of an article, which in en wp is "Triple deity." The problem with 三重女神 is that it claims to be only one kind of triple goddess, but I think it should just be "triple goddess" in general. Thanks Haplology04:10, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
猟師 - gah, I'm a moron, I totally missed that the JA WP page was a different headword. Color me maroon (a la Bugs Bunny: "what a maroon!").
三重女神 - I think going general sounds good to me.
To be honest, this particular IP user is getting right up my nose - they spew content across WT, and just enough of it is valid to require loads of mucking about to verify and clean everything. I've requested that they be blocked over at WT:VIP, but just this morning, and the admins aren't always same-day-response types. I've posted multiple requests and explanations on the IP user's talk page, to no avail -- my hope is that a block might finally prompt them to notice that they need to change what they're doing. Anyway, just venting, I suppose. :-/ -- Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig04:29, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Your "Unresolved questions" section
Had a look at your main user page out of curiosity, and thought I'd respond to your unresolved questions in the hope of being useful.
Should the romaji and hiragana forms be included in topical categories, like Medicine?
I generally won't bother, but I see no problem in them being added.
Should suru verbs have a space between the noun form and suru in their romaji forms?
Usually yes, as above in another thread on this page. :) I'm also a fan of adding a space before particles, including before the な on な adjectives. Some folks like leaving the space out, sometimes out of a purported belief that the particle is somehow inherent to the word, but I disagree from the perspective that the particles are essentially distinct (though purely grammatical) morphemes.
In general I get the impression that hyphens are discouraged in romanizations as bad style.
I'd agree, both from my own personal perspective and from what I've seen others say here on WT.
Is it a problem if the part of speech in the gloss does not match the part of speech of the section in which it is contained?
Not sure I follow you here -- do you mean for translations? If so, this is sometimes inevitable, as you are clearly aware. :) If it is avoidable, though, then sure, try to use a gloss that has the same POS format as the source term.
Should verb conjugations have their own pages?
I can't find where it actually states this as a policy or guideline, but I dimly recall seeing someone somewhere state that Wiktionary is happy to include all inflected forms of a word, with the main entry located under the uninflected (or least inflected) form. This seems to hold roughly true for the languages I'm familiar with; though inflected forms of a particular word might be missing, adding them is accepted by the community, provided you point to the main entry. See WT:ELE for more info; try searching the page for the word "inflect" for specific information.
Which entries should be lemma entries, and how should non-lemma entries be formatted?
Lemmata should be the uninflected forms, as noted above. See WT:AJA#Non-lemma_forms for an explanation of how to handle these for Japanese entries. In general, the rule of thumb is to use the most common form as the lemma, but, as you are again aware, this is a bit of a mess for Japanese -- sometimes the senses overlap, as with 付く・着く・就く・即く・憑く, yet here at WT, all are apparently supposed to be given their own individual pages. I quite dislike this, and have previously floated plans for partial transclusion or redirection to try to overcome this Wiktionary shortcoming, but such ideas not met with general approval. User:Yair_rand has some interesting ideas about using JavaScript tools to ensure consistency when multiple entries use the same content; while not an ideal solution, it certainly sounds better than trying to keep track of such things manually.
Something I just don't know: is the plain form of a verb, like 食べる, an infinitive? Which is to say, should it be glossed as "to eat" or just "eat"? It should only be glossed as "to eat" if there is an infinitive in Japanese just like in English which is 食べる.
Here you point out an interesting problem with grammars in general -- they are ultimately arbitrary. For that matter, one could easily enough argue that the "infinitive" doesn't really exist for English - in languages like Latin or German, the infinitive is a distinct form of the verb, whereas in English, it's just the uninflected form plus a "to" on the front, which isn't really a proper verb form, but more of a cludged construct to fit a grammatical concept imported from other languages. While Latin or German use the infinitive as the canonical or dictionary form, we certainly don't use it as such in English. There are other examples of imported grammatical ideas -- the dictum against using a "split infinitive", for instance, comes out of Latin - splitting an infinitive in Latin produces gibberish, and is thus to be avoided, but doing so in English is nothing more than a minor stylistic choice.
When it comes to glosses of individual verbs, though, I find it can be useful to include the "to" on the front to make it clear that we are talking about a verb. Glossing 滑る as "slide", for example, could confuse someone into thinking we're talking about a playground slide, but if we say "to slide", it is crystal clear that this is a verb. (Ignoring, of course, the POS information that would be present elsewhere on the page. :)
Note that glosses are simply for convenience -- given the incompatibility between grammars for different languages, no translation should be taken as any carved-in-stone rule, but rather as a general guideline. As you note, Japanese doesn't really have an infinitive.
Judging from the trouble that Japanese speakers have with using the infinitive case in English (I am an English teacher), I doubt that Japanese has the same infinitive that English does, but I don't know.
As a side note, "case" is a term generally reserved for the noun inflections, i.e. "declensions", such as the dative case in German or the ablative case in Latin; c.f. w:Grammatical_case for more there. Verb inflections are generally talked about in terms of "conjugations". The w:Inflection page does a good job of covering the phenomenon as a whole.
If it were the infinitive, then "今食べる" would be "To eat now", which is incorrect. I think that "to eat now" would be best translated as "今食べるの."
As another side note here, 今食べるの could just as easily be interpreted as a question, or perhaps as a feminine emphatic, rather than as an infinitive phrase. Beware the dangers of applying categories from one language to other languages.
Apologies if any of this seems overbearing or pedantic; it's certainly not intended as such. I just don't know what you know, so I figure it's better to explain too much than too little.
Whereabouts are you in Tōkai? I haven't spent any time there; I've lived in Tōhoku and Kantō, slowly working my way south and east. I started with a half-year homestay in Morioka, up in Iwate-ken (lovely area, highly recommended in fall), then two years doing the English teacher gig in Utsunomiya in Tochigi-ken (definitely go to Nikkō if you can, but Utsunomiya is sadly only worth a visit if you like gyōza), and then spent about 2.5 years in Tokyo as a translator. If you have the time and opportunity, I would strongly recommend trying to nail at least level 2 of the 日本語能力試験 while you're still in-country. :) Of course, any of my advice is only worth precisely what you've paid for it. :D -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig17:28, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the detailed answers, I think that answers my questions. I'll edit my page later to remove the questions parts.
I'm living in Nagoya, and I have lived in the city for three years and in a nearby city for one. Nagoya is a great place, so I recommend visiting the city if you have the chance someday. We have great food, a castle, and Atsuta Shrine among other things. I'm somewhere between JLPT L3 and L2, and I'm hoping to advance to L2 as soon as possible. 頑張ります!
Incidentally, I wonder if I could squeeze in one more question: recently I discovered that "w" can mean "double", because ダブリュー sounds like ダブル, but how could I add that to WT? A symbol? An initialism? A noun? None of them seem right somehow. I have no idea so I haven't tried to add it anywhere.
About "w" -- wow, I have no idea. I guess it'd go on the w page if you've seen it used that way in writing, with the POS I guess being "adjective" or maybe "verb" from what you describe. Maybe ask over at WT:TEA?
Because I thought counters do not have a hyphen. Earlier User:TAKASUGI Shinji moved some pages I was watching to forms without hyphens saying "You don't write a hyphen for Japanese counters." so I thought he knows what he's doing better than I do so I have been moving counters to pages with no hyphens. I seem to have forgotten to put it back at 匹--fixing that now. Unless he was wrong...is Shinji right about no hyphens? Haplology16:25, 24 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I have no idea, haha. When it comes to parts of speech in Japanese, I know next to nothing. I know that you express "inside" with a noun, but that's about all I've been able to wrap my head around so far. I trust Shinji's judgment. He knows what he's doing. Ultimateria16:44, 24 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Generally speaking, yes, Japanese dictionaries do not use hyphens of any sort for Japanese headwords. For instance, ちょ is marked as a suffix (接尾語) in dictionaries like Daijirin and Shogakukan, and is listed as-is without a hyphen. So Shinji's comment, You don't write a hyphen for Japanese counters, seems to be correct, for Japanese dictionaries.
But Wiktionary is *not* a Japanese dictionary. So the question becomes, how do we want to handle entries here in Wiktionary? Do we want to use prepended hyphens to indicate suffixes, regardless of the language? (And understanding in this specific case that 匹 as a standalone Japanese character is always a counter and is always a suffix.) (And this might be another matter to bring up at WT:BEER.) -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig17:16, 24 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It's over my head anyway. When I majored in linguistics several years ago I remember hearing something about bound morphemes, which would include affixes, and the fact that they are bound provides some justification for using hyphens with them, but I don't know if counters are bound morphemes, but I think so. Somebody ought to bring it up at WT:BEER so Wiktionary:About Japanese can be edited to make it more clear. It's a little discouraging to make a hundred or so of these and then find them all in doubt. I wanted the suffixes to have hyphens at least because the suffix template uses hyphens, and I wanted to add as many of those as I could. Now there is quite a collection of such words at Category:Japanese words by suffix--I made most of those too. The suffix mechanisms with those automatic categories were one of the more appealing features of WT over any other dictionary IMHO. There's no corresponding counter template (who wants a page for 犬三匹?) so that doesn't apply for counters. Haplology17:38, 24 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yah, a while back in a discussion about spaces before particles, I recall mention of the bound-morphemes argument. By that same token, though, English "a" and "the" should not have spaces -- which is where things fall apart a bit. ;) I think the spaces make it clear what is what, and besides, Japanese dictionaries don't list 犬は, they just list 犬 and は as separate entries, which I think makes it clear that these are distinct entities (morphemes, lexemes, what-have-you-emes) -- and adding the space in romanization makes this distinction clear, so you don't have folks trying to look up inuha or inuwa and wondering why they can never find anything.
Many thanks for your help in dealing with this sadly misguided buffoon. I do so hope they get a dictionary of their own some day; it would be so much more preferable if most of their edits here weren't complete rubbish. Anyway, thanks again! -- Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig23:34, 23 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You're welcome, just trying to help. I suppose that editor's work isn't pure vandalism but it's only 10% usable content and 90% work for the rest of us, if we're sharp enough to spot it. They're damaging to WT and they ought to be blocked. Haplogy10:48, 24 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I didn’t propose to remove the hyphen in -san, which is written with Latin letters. Personally it should remain with the hyphen, though I will follow a community decision here. In addition, a redirection works only if it is the sole content of a page. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 04:36, 7 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your contributions. Not sure if you're an administrator. Would like to become one? Please reply here, I will nominate you if you're not an administrator yet. --Anatoli00:59, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Forgot one thing, sorry, please indicate your time zone on the vote page. If your Babel box is incomplete, please complete it. --Anatoli11:13, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I just ran across this entry earlier today. I've never run across this particular reading as a given name before, so I wanted to touch base with you. FWIW, I've only ever seen Take, and possibly Akira, as the male given name readings for 斌. I've never heard of anyone with a given name of さかん, and it doesn't sound like a name at all to me, neither family nor given, but that said, I'm certainly aware of how odd Japanese name readings can be. Both Jisho.org nor Jim Breen list just the reading Take for 斌; do you have a source for さかん, or possibly a sample name of someone Google-able who uses this reading (much as you helpfully provided in the edit comments for 壮)? -- TIA, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig22:22, 25 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Awesome, thank you! Searching for single characters is sometimes not very productive, so I certainly appreciate the link. And as far as names go, I don't know if "obsolete" applies :), but "rare" could be the case. I'll dig around some and see what I can find -- I actually have a dictionary of Japanese names, but we moved not many months ago, and it's still in a box somewhere... -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig06:16, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This entry is definitely not a suffix, as you suspected -- it's a sum-of-parts entry for a full phrase, that could of itself be a complete sentence. I've flagged it for RFD and added it over at WT:RFD#okutoii. Thanks for posting it on your user page - I wandered by to see how the adminship thing was going and saw your probably needs attention section. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig23:26, 25 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yah, that looked quite fishy to me too. Given also that this is a romaji entry and thus only really for disambig, the etyl doesn't belong here anyway -- especially since the meaning depends on how it's spelled in kanji. I went ahead and just removed the etyl. (You might have already seen that in your watchlist, but I thought I should give my reasons. :) -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig15:35, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Just noticed you added an alt form at 魚釣り, おうつり -- is that spelled right? I'm not familiar with the う being there for the word having to do with fishing. If this is right, might it be a regionalism? I'm only aware of this as お移り, i.e. a trifle given back in the container of something received. Then again, おつり in my experience has just meant "change" like what you get back from the cashier after buying something with cash. -- Curious, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig00:41, 5 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not personally familiar with it either, not going fishing often, but Goo's 「デジタル大辞泉」 dictionary has it [2] and Jim Breen's as well. That's all I know about it. Haplology04:34, 5 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
When you move a page, there's an option "suppress redirect". This will save you from having to delete the resulting redirect, as it won't be created to begin with! -- Liliana•16:20, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Just saw this edit, and wanted to touch base with you -- when it comes to indexing, romaji entries should be indexed alphabetically, since the only reason they exist is to help users who can't read even kana. The hidx parameter ensures that an entry will be indexed kanically, so to speak, so adding it to romaji entries ultimately means that romaji entries get indexed where romaji-only readers won't find them. I just rolled back the edit above for this reason. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig17:10, 20 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Gah, thank you -- you're absolutely correct, and you've reminded me of a to-do that I forgot to add to my list -- tweaking the JA POS templates to properly handle romaji entries (i.e. to add a switch statement so if the type is "r" it won't use the hira param value for the indexing). I'll set to with that later today, must get some coffee first. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig18:04, 20 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Have another look at Category:Japanese nouns. I added a simple switch statement to {{ja-noun}} to just index all romaji entries under the pagename, so we don't even have to go through and manually (or bot-ably) fix any hidx or hira values -- the indexing part of the template just ignores these for romaji entries. Let me know what you think. If it looks good to you, I'll do the same for the other JA POS templates. -- Ta, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig18:24, 20 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, looks good. One editor messed it up with 道行 which lists hidx as a space and makes it sort on top, but that's easy to fix manually. Only one thing, {{categoryTOC-hiragana}} only makes a table of contents for hiragana. I added what I assume is the usual template {{betterTOC}} but it doesn't work.
If you're good with templates perhaps you could edit {{prefix}} to handle hyphens the way {{suffix}} has been changed to do? I left a note on the talk page but so far no reply. Haplology03:23, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, looks like {{betterTOC}} only works properly if all the letters are on the same page -- it uses links like [[#b|B]], basically just using in-page named-anchor jumps, whereas {{categoryTOC-hiragana}} uses links like [{{SERVER}}{{localurl:{{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAMEE}}|from=%E3%81%82}} あ], so the server pulls up entries starting from the indicated character. I just tried manually munging the URL, starting at http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Japanese_nouns&from=の and just changing the の on the end to P, and that works just fine.
I could just change {{categoryTOC-hiragana}} to add an alphabetical TOC ahead of the kana, but perhaps it's better to create or find a different TOC and add that to all the JA cat pages? What do you think? FWIW, it looks like {{categoryTOC}} implements proper links using the "from" syntax.
I just saw your recent addition of 摂取する, and realized that we never came to a real conclusion about [noun] + する entries over at Wiktionary_talk:About_Japanese#Work_Needed, where discussion focused more on -な adjectives. My sense is that in most cases [noun] + する entries are SOP, but as I recall Takasugi-san pointing out, some are inseparable, generally where there's some phonetic combination such as in 失する・しっする. Every two-kanji noun + する form that I can think of at the moment is listed just under the noun as the lemma, without the する, with the entry under that lemma including the する sense as a verb. I fell out of the loop for a while, so perhaps there was some further discussion that I missed? What do you think about such entries? -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig17:34, 7 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Eirikr, there hasn't been any discussion that I know of about noun+suru. On the other hand I haven't been that active recently and haven't been keeping a close watch on the discussion pages, but I think I'd notice any new discussion. I've been leaning toward listing -suru verbs separately. If a word like 摂取 has a verb section on the page titled "摂取", we have a page that seems to say that 摂取 is a verb, which is not true. As a user of the dictionary I'd like to see the -suru form defined somewhere as the meaning of the verb is not always obvious to me from the meaning of the noun, but I'm not sure having it on the noun's page is the right place. The current setup is a bit clumsy but works I think, but I'm open to ideas. Thanks Haplology (talk) 18:39, 7 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, okay. Yeah, I've been chewing on this for a while myself. One thing that bothers me about the current setup is that it seems to confuse the issue with regard to the structure of Japanese. For instance, while 摂取 itself isn't a verb, as you correctly note, having a 摂取する entry implies that 摂取する is a verb, when in fact only する is the verb here. English has a few such [noun] + [action verb] pairs, albeit far fewer than Japanese, such as sport or sports -- we can't say "he sports" in English to mean that he engages in sport activities, and instead we have to use some other construction like "he does sports" or some such. Similarly in Japanese, we've got a whole slew of nouns that can be "done" just by adding する.
More specifically, the current setup seems to fall short in these areas:
Usability: Splits out the verbal sense to a completely different page, making it slightly more difficult to find the information.
Usability, complexity: Adds tons of conjugation tables when basically the only verb is する, which already has a conjugation table.
Usability, confusion: A [noun] + [する] entry might be viewed as the only way to use a word if that's what a user searches for, when many of these can show up as bare nouns as well.
Validity: Introduces SOP entries.
By way of comparison, the Shōgakukan J->E entry for 摂取 looks a bit like:
There is no 摂取する headword anywhere in this dictionary, nor in the JA-JA versions I've got to hand. Searching for any two-kanji [noun] + [する] combo pulls up the [noun] entry, as above.
I see what you mean, but I still disagree. Point for point,
Usability: there should be a link to the other form right under the Language section name (in practice there is not always one, but that is because the entry does not conform to the guideline as it is written right now). "see also" link right under "Japanese" is the first thing someone sees so it is easy to find and easy to use.
Complexity: having tons of conjugation tables is a good thing in my opinion. other verbs have conjugation tables for each verb, and we don't make people go to a single conjugation table for every ichidan verb, unlike a paper dictionary, which makes WT more convenient. They're all really the same table in the server anyway, just served up with a template.
Confusion: a visible link that the top under "Japanese" indicates that there is another closely related way to use the word.
Validity: まあまあ。 There are grey areas. If we have go home or going then why not give -suru verbs their own pages.
Every J<->E dictionary has -suru verbs under their bare noun form, but JE dictionaries consolidate their entries in lots of ways, but this is an everything->E dictionary and we can't do that as much. --Haplology (talk) 06:36, 8 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
This would make it clear(er) what's going on, it would point towards the bare noun form, and it's easy to do. :) And it adds an etyl, which I personally like as it makes the entry look more complete. :D
The etymology thing is a good idea. Maybe there should be a template for that for convenience and consistency? Something like {{suru-etym}} to return exactly what you wrote above. In some pages it says "with -suru to verbalize it," which sounds strange to me if "verbalize" even has that meaning to begin with (nouns are unspoken?) I saw one page that called it a "subsidiary verb." Maybe nonstandard I think... Thanks
Huh, whaddaya know, there's already {{ja-suru etyl}} -- which is where that funny "verbalize" wording seems to come from.
Looking at the template code, it's a bit too simple -- no means of handling proper sorting for words where the first kana takes a ten-ten or maru, no means of handling hiragana-only entries, no use of {{Jpan}} or other templates that use proper font formatting for Japanese, no categories.
Before noticing that that even existed, I'd pulled together User:Eirikr/usr/ja-suru-etym. Would you be so kind as to have a look and let me know what you think? If you like it, I'd like to post to Wiktionary talk:About Japanese to see if anyone would object to me replacing the content of {{ja-suru etyl}} with my version, and fixing the 15 entries that currently use it (three of which are rom entries and two are hira entries that shouldn't even have etyls on them anyway).
Hi, sorry to reply late. It's been busy at work. I looked at your template and I like it. That's exactly the way I would write it. I think that your version should replace ja-suru-etym and that should be used in all -suru entries. Do you think that a -suru entry with an etymology section like that should omit the {{ja-see-also|noun}}? I think so since it becomes redundant. --Haplology (talk) 14:16, 20 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, yes, that "work" thing. :) (meant purely tongue-in-cheek, with a rueful awareness of how little free time I've got myself.)
About {{ja-see-also}}, ya, the etyl would seem to render that purely superfluous, so leaving it out would seem cleaner. That said, we should probably keep it on the base page (the page without the -する) if we're going to keep the two on separate pages.
One minor realization of mine about why splitting out the -する entries bothers me is that the bare form (without the する) does actually get used in a verb sense when used in kanji strings and in more 固い writing styles, often evidenced in headlines or titles or the like. Examples:
Template:Jpan -- the 検討 here seems to be used as a verb.
I.e., there's nothing intrinsically noun-y or verb-y about these -する base terms -- they're grammatically ambiguous. The -する is required by the grammatical structures of Japanese (the need for an inflectional ending), but otherwise the base term could serve as either noun or verb, depending on the context. In Japanese, there's no intrinsic meaning difference between 勉強 and 勉強する, or between 失礼 and 失礼する -- the big difference seems to come in translation, where for instance 失礼 is often glossed as the adjective rude and 失礼する as to be rude, such that the translation suggests that する means "to be", which -sche brings up as a concern over at Wiktionary_talk:About_Japanese#Work_Needed (scroll down to "Thanks for the clarifications!"). However, this "change" in meaning is purely an artifact of translating into English; a more literal translation of 失礼する could be to do (i.e. commit) a rudeness, preserving the "do" meaning of する and more closely (if less idiomatically) expressing the original meaning.
Takasugi-san is apparently in favor of separate pages (c.f. Wiktionary_talk:About_Japanese#-.E3.81.AA.2C_-.E3.81.AE_adjectives_-.E3.81.99.E3.82.8B_verbs), though I don't really agree with his argument; -sche meanwhile seems to support collapsing the two onto one page, FWIW. Collapsing the -する entries into the base term entries would also align with our handling of na- adjectives (in treating the -する as an inflection of sorts).
That minor realization sounds like a major realization to me. That and the fact that there is no difference between 勉強 and 勉強する in Japanese. Since we're concerned about parts of speech in the source language, that's a key point. Another thing that makes me unsure is that, as you mentioned, the glosses on the -suru page are not far removed in meaning from the glosses on the bare form page, but I would like to keep them somewhere since they can be hard to guess in the way that a crossword puzzle can be hard to solve even though you know the meaning of what you want. If 勉強 can be considered a base form of a verb, as 効果的 is the base form of an adjective, I'd feel comfortable with adding Verb to the page for 勉強. By the way I heard about that Shinkansen accident in one of those news stories. Some man just walked onto the tracks. Glad I didn't see that! --Haplology (talk) 04:32, 21 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I like your username
If I remember right when I first signed up a registered account on Wikipedia in 2006 I wanted the name Haplology, and it was taken, so I chose HaploLOLogy. I didnt like that name much either so after I found out I could change my username I took Soap instead. (I dont remember why I didnt go for "Haplogy".) I almost forgot about it until a few days ago I was browsing Wiktionary and saw what I thought was my name in the edit history. Glad to see youre getting better use of my originally desired username than I ever would have. Good day, Soap (talk) 02:05, 24 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I thought it was a nice username too. At one time I tried to use "haplology" to register a domain name but had a similar experience and found that it was taken. I majored in linguistics which is how I encountered the term. Until a couple of years ago I didn't do so many edits (or such good ones either) but I've been very active on Wiktionary since 2010. Unfortunately so far I haven't made any edits to any pages related to haplology itself however, but I suppose it's appropriate for an editor of a dictionary. "Soap" is a good find too. Why did you choose that username? --Haplology (talk) 14:35, 24 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It's ultimately a reference to a video game (w:H.U.R.L.) I was obsessed with as a young boy, although I didnt start using the name Soap until I was 18 or so. Soap (talk) 14:41, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I've taken recently to adding reading information to JA entries in the etyl section, but I'm not sure about the clearest way to go about it. I started doing this on kanji pages with multiple etyls, where the different possible readings of the term give different meanings -- that's what made me think that the yomi should be mentioned, at least for the sake of language learners. I'd appreciate it if you could have a look at 湯桶 and let me know what you think. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig21:01, 1 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It's readable and looks professional. When I add readings and glosses I use the parameters of {{l}} like that which produces a what I think is the received style, as opposed to, say, the magician's style. I suppose it matters where different readings have different meanings, but so far I haven't really been consistent about adding readings to links or leaving them out, and often I just leave them out, just out of laziness. I'm not sure which sections should have yomi and which don't need them. There's some inconsistency with that in the compounds sections. Let me know what you think about it. Thanks --Haplology (talk) 16:49, 2 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Should the yomi be added to the POS template as an optional field? It seems kinda like the sort of short info that could go in there. But then again, it is more etymological than grammatical. Hmm. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig16:40, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Um... I'm not really sure what you mean, what kind of readings or what words and such. If you think it's a good idea I have no objection. --Haplology (talk) 15:41, 5 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry I wasn't clear. Ultimately though, further thought suggested that the yomi should (duh) go in the Pronunciation section, so that's what I've been doing, as seen at 湯桶 and 重箱, among other places. :) -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig17:56, 10 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I just pulled together {{ja-verb-suru}}, intended for use in noun + suru verb entries. I included する in the headline, but in parens to try to indicate that it's not always present, but I'm not overly thrilled with how it looks. An alternative would be to add the する in without the parens, but then the verb headline doesn't match the page headline, which is kinda awkward. Have a look at 判断 and let me know what you think. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig23:14, 9 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for putting that template together. I was thinking that -suru sections should link to the headword minus -suru so we don't have entries like はんだんする. I like the concept but there are a lot of parentheses.. maybe just leaving them out for the hiragana link, having a space for the romaji link, and maybe keeping them for the headword? It's not obvious that there are two separate links without parentheses but I think it's enough for the reader to figure that out after clicking on one. --Haplology (talk) 16:25, 10 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
You're right, all those parens were a bit ugly. I've tried a different approach now, using a + symbol just once in the left-most portion to indicate that the する is additional, and then leaving out either the + or the parens in the rom/hira/kata bit in the parentheses, including the する but linking it separately from the rom/hira/kata links. So the verb at 判断 looks like:
Just saw you'd deleted these pages. I'd actually checked them before and deemed them valid -- this is a 慣用音 for 隠密, usually read onmitsu. Daijirin only gives 隠密 with both inmitsu and onmitsu readings, but the inmitsu reading can be spelled in kanji as either 隠密 or 陰密, according to Shogakukan, and meaning specifically the 動詞・形容動詞 part about "stealthy" -- 「物事をかくしておくこと。また、そのさま。」 The private eye / intelligence officer / undercover meaning is apparently reserved for 隠密(onmitsu).
Thanks for the cool head. I reacted emotionally to seeing what I'm pretty sure is the return of the IP user. I restored those pages. When I first looked at the user's contributions I saw 隠匿 which this user wrote with the wrong reading, following their pattern of learning the reading of a certain kanji in one case and applying the same reading to that kanji in every other word it appears in, or in combinations of 気 or whatever other kanji they learned recently. I blocked them for 6 months for that, which might be excessive, but it's not really one mistake, it's the latest of a year-long history of adding words without checking to see if they exist and if they do, what the correct readings are. But I'd be open to the block being shortened or removed if you think it should be. Personally I'm tired of checking the edits though.
As an aside, I noticed that the definitions were init-capped and ended with a period. Was there a decision about that? I saw something about that but I didn't read the discussion carefully. Personally I prefer no caps for non-sentences, but if there was a decision then I'll go along with it.
Re: the IP user, I've been mostly pleasantly surprised in how they seem to be getting up to speed, such as when I posted the RFV for 霊魔 and Benjamin Barrett helped clarify that this was actually a valid term and even had the proper def (Talk:霊魔). I've made a couple suggestions on the IP user's Talk page that they seem to have followed, and I noticed too that they had picked up on a formatting change I made to their entries (collapsing {{l|ja|kanji}} ({{l|ja|hira}}, ''[[rom]]'') to {{l|ja|kanji|tr=[[hira]], ''[[rom]]''}}, not much but it makes for visually cleaner code). Would you object to unblocking them for now? I've been keeping an eye on their contribs, and I'm happy to continue doing so.
Uniformity of appearance among definitions has been acknowledged by several in this discussion as a desideratum. The consequence of accepting these propositions is that, if there is to be a single standard appearance for English, it must have initial caps and final period.
... but re-reading the thread shows that what I thought was a conclusion was only one point of argument amidst what clearly never gelled as a proper consensus. Lack of consensus aside, I happen to agree with DCDuring that consistency looks better, and since some entries basically have to use sentence format due to length, init-caps and periods would be the way to go -- but I don't feel like it's all that worth arguing over.
(FWIW, I strongly oppose Lmaltier's argument about "encyclopedic" definitions, as some things just take more than one sentence [and heavens know more than one word] to properly define -- c.f. 桶 or 湯桶 or 重箱. I don't think Lmaltier has much experience outside of French and English, which are close enough that you can be that restrictive without causing too many problems. Japanese and English, on the other hand... :) </蛇足>) -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig17:52, 16 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Init caps in entry defs
Heya Haplology,
In the interests of consistency, I wanted to touch base about init caps in defs and hash things out a bit, as I realize I don't fully understand your views.
I agree that "# [[word|Word]]." all on its own lonesome is a bit inelegant as code, and I'm generally fine with going back to one-word defs as "# [[word]]" instead.
However:
When the same entry has other defs that are in sentence format, the visual inconsistency bugs me a bit. (That's probably my IRL editing work habits coming through.) What are your thoughts?
And what are your thoughts on inconsistency between entries, where one entry may have only single-word defs, but another may have sentence-format defs?
Until there's a definite decision somewhere (maybe there is one and I don't know), I want to capitalize words that begin sentences and add periods to the ends of sentences, and not capitalize words that do not begin sentences. If one entry has a sentence but another does not, it's fine if they don't both begin with caps, because one is a sentence and another is not. They're not inconsistent to my eyes because sentences and non-sentences are different things, so they deserve different formatting. It's not a big deal though and I'm not well acquainted with formatting norms IRL, but I like no-caps for non-sentences much better, as long as it's up to each editor. --Haplology (talk) 17:39, 28 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for explaining your position, I appreciate it.
FWIW, IRL standards are quite fluid from what I've seen, and a lot of it comes down to the style preferences of the individual publisher / organization. I'm not aware of any formal decision here on WT either, one way or the other, so I'm happy working on an ad hoc basis for now. :) -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig04:46, 29 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The upshot of this is that we can turn things like 勉強する into hard redirects to 勉強#Japanese (using code like "#REDIRECT [[勉強#Japanese]]" on the 勉強する page, and provided of course that we update the [noun] entries to include the ===Verb=== senses).
FWIW, I think #Japanese might be the best in-page anchor to point to, instead of #Verb, as it's possible that some other language listed on the page before Japanese might also have a verb heading.
There's always something to learn, that's what I'm learning. It makes one humble. :)
Revisiting this の adjective issue, I've been reading around different dictionaries, and revising my own sense of how to parse the language, and it appears that all such uses are either abbreviations with implied intermediate nouns, as for 同じ, or just plain nouns used in attributive ways. I just had a go at reworking the entry at リモート, and I'd appreciate it if you could take a look and see if it makes sense. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig16:32, 7 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I might have written too soon -- 恒・常 could be an exception. Shogakukan describes this as a 形容動詞 and has it consistently used with the の when used attributively. That said, this term also has historical usexes indicating strong noun characteristics, such as Template:Jpan in the 万葉集 and Template:Jpan in a source shorthanded to 枕 (probably 枕詞), and of the five defs given in Shogakukan, two are noun senses. The entry at Nihonjiten shows a noun sense, and Daijirin gives this as a noun only with no mention of 形容動詞. So it seems that there is some confusion about nouns-vs.-形容動詞 even among native Japanese lexicographers. Jim Breen's entry from EDICT (can't link directly, sorry) gives this both as a noun and as "adj-no", which may be where we first got this POS from here at EN WT.
Given that Shogakukan is the only one labeling this as an adjective, and that Daijirin and others only list this as a noun, I'm tempted to follow suit with the apparent majority, not least as 1) this is consistent with the ways in which の is used to make nouns attributive, and 2) this simplifies things for EN WT POS notation. Thoughts? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig17:04, 7 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I have to say I don't really know, but I'd say for now treat most "-no" forms as predictable sums of parts, but maybe a few exceptions like 恒・常 are unusually common so an entry like 恒の would be ok because it is used so frequently. Even so, until I see more evidence I'd feel better if there were not entries like that. I did a Google search for "一番常の" and got 5 results.
I actually asked Atitarev about the same thing at User_talk:Atitarev#Category:Japanese_.E3.81.AE-no_adjectives because I noticed last year he created the category for "-の adjectives". I stumbled upon it while looking for a category for "-tari" adjectives. Do you think that should be added?
Re: 常・恒 + の, given the underlying meaning of "always", the semantics suggest there wouldn't be much by way of comparative forms, so the lack of hits on 一番常の kinda makes sense. Even if we posit the existence of の adjectives, though, we should presumably handle them the same way as the な adjectives -- i.e., there should never be a lemma entry at [adj] + の. I think your edit summary says it best though -- barring advice to the contrary from native speakers, we should probably presume that の adjectives are not a real feature of the language, and that what we see are instead nouns being used attributively, or other constructions such as the 同じのタッチ phrase mentioned at Wiktionary:Requests_for_deletion#没収の.
Re: a cat for -tari adjectives, sure, that sounds like a fine idea to me. I think User:Bendono was the most active fellow for a while for Old Japanese (or at least older Japanese) entries, but he's been mostly absent for a while, and I don't see much sign of him reappearing, so it's probably safe to assume that work on older constructions like -tari just won't happen unless we take it on ourselves. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig06:21, 9 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Heya, thanks for jumping on that. Just to be clear, my mention of "lexicographer's error" at RFV wasn't pointed at you -- tamerai suru shows up in a number of online dictionaries. My concern is that many of these seem to reference each other, and all are J-E (or J-something). My J-J dictionaries to hand don't have any mention of tamerai suru, but I did find a few (albeit just a few) actual uses of it by what appear to be native J writers, such as here and here for the kanji form, or here and here for the kana form. The native-J uses might qualify as uneducated or dialectical uses, though, maybe like English (deprecated template usage)brang or (deprecated template usage)taked, and I'm not qualified to tell quite what's going on.
... Then again, I just tweaked my search to look just at Google Books, and I get zero hits for either form, so maybe this variation wouldn't pass CFI anyway. Whatever the case, thanks for making the change at tamerai. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig16:00, 16 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for pointing out the error, and I'm glad I didn't act too hastily in removing the tag. I just checked goo and saw that it didn't mention スル and concluded from that that EDICT was mistaken. A second search with Google gave a page with WT at the top followed by WT knockoffs, which is usually a bad sign. --Haplology (talk) 16:08, 16 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
suru verbs
Hi,
I have been romanising suru verbs with a dash (e.g. hantai-suru) since I started adding translations into Japanese but I see that you and Eirikr romanise them with a space (e.g. hantai suru). Is there a rule or do we have a convention here? --Anatoli(обсудить)03:22, 26 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Atitarev, basically it's a convention. When I started, the About Japanese page gave examples without hyphens, and the transliteration page said that hyphens should not be used, with a few exceptions for readability when it is one word with discrete parts. However, Eirikr and I lean towards treating suru verbs as two words. The template ja-suru also does not have hyphens, and when Eirikr made the template ja-verb-suru for suru verbs' headwords, he left out hyphens there too. On the other hand, a lot of pages were written with hyphens before I started. The About Japanese pages are not actual guidelines though so there's no rule, just Eirikr's and my way of doing it. --Haplology (talk) 16:00, 26 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Another 2p here :). Hyphenation obscures the fact that these are two separate words in Japanese -- hantai, and suru. Much as, in English, one "goes bowling" and not "goes-bowling", or one "does taxes" and not "does-taxes", so too in romanized Japanese one "hantai suru" and not "hantai-suru". する is a standalone verb; 反対 is a standalone noun/verb. する is often added to supply tense and social context information, but as with most (all?) other [kanji term] + する uses, the kanji term portion can be used as a verb on its own, albeit only in very limited and specific contexts such as headlines. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig17:20, 26 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I guess I will have to change my habits. I have only been following what seemed to be the convention here, also many didn't have a space or hyphen, just solid. It's all arguable. Just a thought - like with -na adjectives (even -no adjectives, denied existence by others), a large portion of suru verbs are considered single words (but not when it is "STEM o suru") and "hantai-suru" (hantai suru) and "hantai" could be considered different forms of the same word like samui/samuku/samukereba, etc. but I will follow the convention, so that we have consistency. It's all about conventions, yes, e.g. if you write "benkyō-suru" then it's not "to do the studies" but "to study" as most dictionaries also list suru verbs, not just the noun part, even if many linguists consider them separate words. As I said, happy to change my habits, somewhat reluctantly. --Anatoli(обсудить)23:01, 26 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, as you note, many JA-(something else) dictionaries treat [kanji compound] + する as a single term, and indeed, [kanji compound] + する and [kanji compound] + を + する have different connotations and emphases. I wonder if this might be comparable in functional terms to the difference in emphasis and connotation from saying things in English such as "I do taxes" vs. "I do the taxes" vs. "I do my taxes" etc.
Previously, [kanji compound] + する was treated here at EN WT as an integral term and a lemma. I really do not agree with that approach, in part as the Wiktionary lemma-per-page visual layout completely hid the fact that this is essentially [kanji compound] + する, whereas a paper dictionary would at least show the [kanji compound] in close visual proximity to any such [kanji compound] + する entry. Moreover, the bare [kanji compound] term can be used as a verb in certain contexts, and having separate verb senses for [kanji compound] and [kanji compound] + する does not make sense when the only additional information supplied by する is tense and social context, which may be superfluous anyway depending on the overall context of the utterance.
I also noted that every JA-JA dictionary I've looked at treats [kanji compound] as the lemma, and has no [kanji compound] + する entry, opting instead to note (and sometimes not explicitly) that said [kanji compound] can be used with する. For example, the third sense listed for 勉強 in my copy of Shogakukan's Dai Kokugo Jiten appears as:
The hint here that this [kanji compound] can be used as a verb is the phrasing 学ぶこと・覚えること・積むこと. Nowhere in the entry is there any mention that this is a 動詞. Nor is there any entry for 勉強する, only separate individual entries for 勉強 and する. This is the same for Daijirin (and if memory serves, for Kojien, though I do not have that here at the moment), with the difference that Daijirin explicitly marks 勉強 as a noun and does note in the headline that this can be used with する. Likewise for other [kanji compound] words.
I also had a look at JA WT conventions. Their entry for 勉強 at ja:勉強 keeps both noun and verb senses on the same page, and notes that the verb sense is conjugated with する. In drafting the {{ja-verb-suru}} template, I tried to convey the same sort of information, to allow us to keep noun and verb senses of [kanji compound] terms on the same page, which I feel is important for usability and for more clearly explaining how Japanese terms work.
Anyway, I hope this explains the background for my reasoning, and makes clear that treating する separately is not by analogy from English, and is instead grounded in how Japanese dictionary editors have consistently treated [kanji compound] + する verbs. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig17:00, 27 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the lengthy explanations but it wasn't necessary because I have already agreed. Old habits die hard but I can reform :). It doesn't really matter so much for people familiar with the Japanese grammar but for beginners "denwa-suru" (with a dash) is easier to digest that this a translation of the English verb "to call", a single verb vs "denwa o kakeru" (verb plus object) but that's IMHO. I still prefer to consider "denwa suru" as one word but I will use spaces from now on. --Anatoli(обсудить)01:22, 28 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, I think it's unusual too. It brings up an old issue of how to romanize いい, and I go by Eirikr's opinion under "For Vowels:" here and according to that, since the two いい are part of different kanji, it should be romanized as ii, so it should be yuiitsu.
Recently I've been using {{ja-altread}} to add alternative pronunciations because it looks neater to my eyes than adding it under the "Alternative forms" section. For a long time I was putting them under "Alternative forms" but then discovered that template and thought it would make entries look better. What do you think?
Thanks, I think you're right, basically the definition is wrong. Maybe in some senses it's means "comparable" but basically it should be "rival" or "compete with." Goo jisho defines it as "勢力などがほぼ同等のものどうしが、互いに張り合って優劣のないこと。" which I would translate to "being almost equal in power and so on but each competing and having no superiority or inferiority." I suppose it's bad form to pick on other editors but the creator of 拮抗 tends to add a lot of definitions that I find peripheral or just wrong, and the glosses have grammatical mistakes that sound like those a non-native speaker of English would make. --Haplology (talk) 06:27, 26 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, sorry for the delay. I use the templates for the word ending the expression in a case of something like お世話になる. I don't think there's a special template for をする or になる, just ja-suru or ja-go-ru respectively. As far as I know, ～をする is the same as ～する although one form may be more common than the other, so in general they would both go under the entry minus する as the ～する form, but since お世話をする is a fixed expression and very common, I think it's good for it to have an entry. I plan to work on that one soon. Thanks --Haplology (talk) 16:10, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, thanks for your edit. It looks like a good attempt. My helpfulness is limited by the fact that I don't know the first thing about Mandarin. I can give a couple basic tips though: Wiktionary divides sections from different languages with four hyphens like this ----, and every entry must have a level 3 part of speech header, which in the case of a surname is Proper noun. I made those changes but I don't know how to complete the entry. I would ask a veteran Mandarin editor like User:Tooironic. I hope that helps -- Haplology (talk) 16:11, 21 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I see that you blocked this editor for bad edits. Could you take a few minutes and look through his/her remaining unpatrolled contributions, and:
for any bad pages, delete them.
for any bad edits, fix/revert them and mark them as patrolled.
for any good pages or edits, mark them as patrolled.
?
There are only six new pages and eleven other edits, so it shouldn't take very long. Edited to add: Actually, there are also a few from the 11th, but still, not too many.
Sure thing. I'm almost done. This user is very prolific. The edits on certain individual characters like 空 are very numerous and difficult to isolate, and are more than I up to checking by myself. The same user has had many IPs and started editing a couple of years ago. --Haplology (talk) 15:05, 23 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Those are all correct but are forms that Eirikr and I decided were sums of their parts. In that case, should the translation link to the lemma? For example イスラム教の, "Islamic," is one word meaning "Islam" plus the genitive particle の. Actually Japanese doesn't have just one word for "Islamic," but イスラム教の is a fine translation. Should the translation template show the SOP word but link to the lemma without the particle, or should there be no link at all? Thanks for your help. --Haplology (talk) 16:50, 2 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I've seen you're in the edit history for this entry. So I guess it is legitimate? If so, can we create the kanji and the hiragana please. Is this perhaps an English word too? Mglovesfun (talk) 23:45, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
If you're wondering how I found this, I was going through all the urbandictionary.com links in the main namespace to remove them, the two other links are dead so I removed them too. The UD link may be useful to establish the actual meaning (but probably not, since the whole idea of UD is to invent clever meanings equivalent to our WT:LOP). Mglovesfun (talk) 00:13, 21 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
That's right (my first assumption), confirmed. The antonym is Template:Jpan (そとだし, sotodashi) "extravaginal ejaculation". Both terms don't use the words vagina or ejaculation, so potentially may also mean something innocent. Will change the wrong translation first. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)00:17, 21 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry to reply late, time zone difference. I can't cite anything except EDICT, but if you search the Internet, the definition as it is now matches what you will see. I'll get beck to this soon --Haplology (talk) 03:10, 21 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Accelerated entry creation from Japanese translations
Hi,
Do you think it's possible for Japanese? I can see problem with katakana, kanji and hiragana differences, requirements to have {{ja-kanjitab}} but I think it's possible to make life easier for most of types of entries. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)04:40, 14 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi,
Honestly, I don't know enough about how it works to say, but it sounds like a good idea, and I'd be willing to give it a try, but I'd need somebody else to set it up or help me with it. Speaking of translations, is there a special page with all the translations into Japanese listed together? There are a lot of Japanese translations so I get the impression that accelerating creation of translations would bring in more editors to Japanese in an indirect way, which would be nice. I foresee a lot of tweaking of those entries because of inconsistencies in how various editors entered words, for example "-na" adjectives with the "-na" intact, or "-suru" verbs with the "suru" intact, and a lot of adjectives which are translated as nouns plus the genitive particle "-no", which is sometimes considered an adjective but usually not. The idea sounds good to me though. --Haplology (talk) 06:15, 14 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
See User:Matthias Buchmeier, scroll down to English-Japanese. I was thinking of the most common template used for entries. Part of speech, transliteration and the English meaning could be taken from the English translation, an empty {{ja-kanjitab}}. All deviations from a standard template could be done manually.
Something like is possible as a default but to tweak the default template we need to check with User:Ruakh
==Japanese==
===Noun===
{{ja-noun|tr=おうぼ, ōbo}}
# A written request for employment
The default looks very helpful. It would take a few tweaks to make it consistent with the regular entries, such as by changing tr=おうぼ, ōbo to hira=おうぼ|rom=ōbo, and adding |k| after ja-noun (for kanji terms.) I'd be happy to work with the default and do the tweaks manually though. Would it be possible to add something to flag accelerated entries so that they can be checked? --Haplology (talk) 07:24, 14 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't have to worry about flags because the template works quite well with Russian and entry creation is in the hands of editors, it's not automatic, you need to click and then save (with or without editing first). For Japanese it makes sense to add flags. Please join the discussion here. For the setup, please talk at User talk:Ruakh/Tbot.js. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)07:32, 14 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As in baking and other similar nouns I used "焼くこと" linking to 焼く when there's no Japanese equivalent noun. The やるする-verbs I will link to the stem, as usual. Do you agree with this practice? --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)23:45, 29 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, and thank you for your words of encouragement! I added transcriptions to the quotation. You mentioned using {{usex}}, but the template says it should only be used for usage examples, like invented ones, and not for quotations. I was working on documenting {{ja-noun}}, but I am now confused by the hidx parameter. Most of the words I found that use katakana or kanji seem to specify the hidx parameter. Is this correct usage? The wording of the hidx documentation says "only", which to me implied it should only be used for those two edge cases and never for katakana or kanji entries. But it seems like it should be used always whenever hira is not specified, and then for those two edge cases the apostrophe accommodation should be made. Should it always be used, and added to e.g. セロハン and シート? --Odie5533 (talk) 10:10, 3 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That's right about usex, I realized that I was wrong after posting on your talk page. As for hidx, (it stands for hiragana index, at least I assume so) it's used to override the default sort behavior, which is by hira or the entry title if there is no hira. So it's necessary for all entries except romaji entries when (1) there is no hira parameter, or (2) the value for hira begins with 濁点 or 半濁点. The reason to alter sorting behavior with hidx is that the server will sort by hira or the entry title if there is no hira, but we want to sort by hiragana in the way Japanese dictionaries sort, so words like ドキドキ or どきどき should go under と, etc, and in such cases hidx is necessary to override hira so that there is no section of words starting with ど or ド for example. If it sorts fine with hira, no hidx is necessary. It wouldn't hurt, but it would be redundant. Romaji entries are sorted alphabetically with or without hira so they never need hidx, and in fact if it were present it would override the alphabetical sort which would sort them incorrectly. So to answer your question about セロハン and シート, it should be used for in those entries because for example currently セロハン shows up in a セ section at the end of the "Japanese nouns" category (see [[3]]) but it should be under せ, which admittedly only matters if you are looking at that category. --Haplology (talk) 11:09, 3 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
No, but I will anyway. I made 言うまでも無い the lemma and wanted to include 言う迄も無い. linking with ja-def suggests "see this entry" which I didn't want, and "kanji" to me suggest "more kanji than the way it is usually written" which is accurate, and it's a convenient place to put forms with the full kanji for entries where there's no ambiguity. That's the way I've settled on after writing a few entries. In any case it was not some kind of typo or careless accident. Such a dismissive "fix" is patronizing and disrespectful.
Sorry I got your goat; I do apologize. I hadn't checked the page history, and assumed it was old leftovers, as many old entries used the kanji param instead of {{ja-def}}, most often incorrectly in cases where there are multiple possible kanji spellings, often with different meanings. See dani for one such example -- the headline only gives 壁蝨, but dani could also be 蜱, 蟎, 駄荷, or particle combo だに (alt for でも). Given the prevalent misuse of this param, I assumed I was looking at either an old entry, or something from a newbie. Had I known it was you, I would have pinged you first to find out what was up.
Incidentally, why did you choose the 無い kanji form for the lemma in this phrase? That's not used too often in common writing from what I've seen, so when I saw this entry, I assumed the kanji had been left off the まで accidentally. By way of comparison:
If you were shooting for the most common spelling, that'd seem to be kana-only いうまでもない. If you were going for unambiguous kanji-based jisho forms like some other JA lemmata, that'd be the mostly-kanji 言う迄も無い. If you were going for the form most commonly used in other dictionaries, that'd be 言うまでもない.
FWIW, I think the kanji param in the headline gives the same signal that {{ja-def}} does -- that the kanji form thus shown is what the user should look to. Given the alternate spellings that are possible, and citable, perhaps a list of alternative forms would be more appropriate? Or perhaps a usage note? I'd think those would be preferable to using the headline, given the authoritative "see here" impression that the headline gives. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig06:07, 18 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I apologize for overreacting. As for the individual entry I've personally lost interest in how it should be done. If anyone knows a good way to write it that's fine. --Haplology (talk) 17:01, 22 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Another item I'd appreciate your input on is the thread at WT:RFDO#Template:ja-kanji reading. As best I can tell, the template was intended for use before a large number of WT conventions had been settled, such as what the WT community thinks of as "standard" formatting, per WT:ELE and the like. Given my understanding of what all EN WT entries should look like, {{ja-kanji reading}} and the associated headers have no place in our entries. Would you object to orphaning this template and reformatting the entries for all affected terms to instead place these terms under the appropriate POS header? On'yomi kanji that are only used in compounds would ostensibly go under an ===Affix=== header, as I've done at いく. Anyway, I'm interested in your thoughts on this. Cheers, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig23:39, 17 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'd appreciate it if you could chime in on the above thread. I've run into a number of grave reservations about Anatoli's proposal, and 大笑い is an example of one of these -- reducing romanized entries so severely results in a substantial loss of information, particularly POS information, that is probably useful and worth keeping. I'm not really clear on what Anatoli's mania for stripping things down is based on, but it strikes me increasingly as making WT difficult to use, which I'm not a big fan of.
"keenness"? "ardent desire"? "strong proclivity"? You choose. My intended meaning was "strong desire that seems excessive and that I don't understand" -- "mania" seemed to fit that bill at the time I was writing. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig17:48, 13 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
deleted user page
Huh? Why did you delete your user page? Are you resigning? I dun think that anybody here would be glad to see you go. --Æ&Œ (talk) 02:58, 22 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your concern. Maybe not resigning but taking a step back for a while anyway. The red link is a bit dramatic so I'll put something back. --Haplology (talk) 03:33, 22 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Using {{ja-romaji}} with more than one hiragana/katakana
Is it ok to have the same header twice? Honestly I don't know if it's better sometimes to do that, to split them into two Etymology sections, or to have two or more headword templates under one section.
I don't think those types of problems will come up often because not many entries include を or へ. A similar and also relatively rare problem might come up with words that end in a small tsu like わっ because the small tsu just disappears when the word is romanized like this: wa. So I guess that go in a third header in wa#Japanese above? I'll go ahead and add it. --Haplology (talk) 04:19, 20 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Long vowels and small っ will certainly add some headache. Eirikr suggested to add multiple hira/kata params. Will threee be enough? Let's continue the discussion there, on Eirikr's talk page. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)04:30, 20 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Ok. That's all I can think of to add at this point.
Heya, I've expanded {{ja-romaji}} to handle up to three each of hira & kata values. It wouldn't be that hard to add more if we need them. Have a look at wa#Japanese and let me know what you think. One possible change is to list hira value 1, kata value 1, hira value 2, kata value 2, etc. It currently lists all the hira, then all the kata. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig06:21, 20 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Mixed hiragana/katakana, Latin letter, numbers
Hi Jesse,
What do we do about romaji entries for mixed hiragana/katakana entries, like イギリスじん, ウーロンちゃ, ローマじ, むねチラ, etc? Another possibility is mixed hiragana/katakana + Latin letters or numbers (katakana or Roman letters), e.g. バイQ. サンQ, 3Q. Will duplicate the question on Eirikr's talk page. Please reply there.
I'll have to think about it, but I can say now that I have been treating mixed hiragana/katakana entries as "hiragana" forms (even though they are not 100% hiragana) because when words are simplified into hiragana, usually the katakana or numbers remain intact. Except for texts for first month Japanese students or kids under 5, I'm used to seeing a word like アメ車 being written as アメしゃ when there's a need to write it in hiragana. Probably an entry like
===Romanization===
{{ja-romaji|hira=アメしゃ}}
would not lead to any amibuities. If there were a word like 雨者 that is read あめしゃ, I would put that into hira2. Of course 雨者 is made-up, and I can't think of any real cases like that.
I'm a man. I've always wondered about the IP user who makes contribs related to magic and religion. I'm 99% sure it's a boy between 8 and 14 but I suppose it will forever be a mystery.--Haplology (talk) 02:07, 21 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm waiting for Eirikr to respond or change the template. I know multiple spellings of the same word will only create more confusion but we do have entries like イギリスじん. You know, if I add to igirisujin or ūroncha the following: See hiragana:イギリスじん or See hiragana:ウーロンちゃ, that would be misleading because it's only partially hiragana (the last two characters) and someone will try to "fix" it. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)02:19, 21 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This way we simply sidestep the issue of hira or kata. For entries that have romaji in them, maybe we just say "See:"? Would that work for you all? For that matter, maybe we should simplify this and just say "See:" for all the lines, and not specify in the user-facing text whether the spelling is hira, kata, or whatever? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig05:29, 21 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That looks interesting. We have nearly 500 entries using Template:ja-romaji, all converted (see converted rōmaji entries). I suggest not to change the existing one but add new lines with 1) # See kana:アメしゃ and 2) # See:ABCじゅん (or サンQ, 3キュー, whatever, potential examples only). I don't want to break the template, I would add myself. Can we have two more parameters, please, so that we have 3 hiragana, 3 katakana, 1 kana, 1 (empty)? --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)05:44, 21 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As the variations increase in number, this starts to look increasingly unwieldy, not just in terms of template code but also in terms of what the user sees. Does it really matter if we include hiragana, katakana, etc. in the "see this other term" line? The lemma page ultimately explains what scripts are used.
I'd like to propose a change to the template to simply allow for calls like:
{{ja-romaji|ひら１|かた１|ひら２|mixed 1|etc.|etc.}}
This uses simple unnamed positional params. The output would be as above, just a simple # See: and a link.
Agreed! I have removed words "hiragana" and "katakana" from the template to allow mixed scripts (kana + Latin or numbers). For situations above, we can just use any of the six parameters. Thanks! --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)22:20, 21 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
{{ja-romaji}} now supports up to 6 positional params. It still supports hira and kata 1 through 3 for now, but these are deprecated (i.e. -- don't use them in any new edits, and please remove them if you edit a page that already has them). When all the calls using these params have been converted from:
I've read the discussion on this section and new method is fine by me too. I would make a bot but I have no idea how to do that. I know a little programming such as making simple Python scripts but I don't know how the bots work. --Haplology (talk) 04:45, 22 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Handling readings and meanings for kanji that might be deemed to be "affixes"
I just finished a massive expansion of the 凹 entry, which happens to illustrate one way we could go when dealing with single-kanji entries. The on'yomi is (so far as I know) only used in compounds, so I put that as the first etym and listed all compounds I could find using the kanji, compounds starting with it on the left of the table and compounds ending with it on the right. See if that works for you; if so, I guess we can start using that format going forward. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig23:14, 20 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for telling me about that entry. It is massive as you say. I don't know enough to judge such an entry, but it feels right at least. I think I'm getting a feel for how that type of entry looks, although I'm not sure I can write one myself. In particular, I don't know where to start with the etymologies. I take it that some of the senses that have been going directly under ===Kanji=== would instead go under a headword with a specific reading which is in turn under a part of speech header including Affix for cases when it is only found in compounds. --Haplology (talk) 14:57, 21 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Quotes and language stages
By the way, I have noticed that many entries which are written with only a single kanji have quotations from way, way back. Isn't that Classical Japanese, and isn't that much different from modern Japanese? I have never seen a distinction made on WT, except for the section on "templates that need to be created" on About Japanese. Is there one on WT, or should there be? "Modern" English starts with Shakespeare even though Shakespearean English is nearly impossible to understand. Does Japanese have a specific time frame like that? Just guessing based on Classical Japanese, but is anything from year 900 onward acceptable for quotations? --Haplology (talk) 14:57, 21 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That's a really good question. I've found in my studies that Japanese over the ages represents a much gentler gradation of language changes than what is found in English, probably a reflection of how Japan has not seen any massive influx of people speaking other languages since around the time of the fall of Baekje (and I think I remember reading that some scholars take the view that the Baekje weren't all that far removed, linguistically speaking). Meanwhile, "English" first appears as a continental European language of the northern Germanic grouping, which then gets whalloped with a sizable dose of Romance influences when all those guys named Norman decided that they'd gotten tired of living in France. :) English then undergoes a multi-century process of rejiggering, notably marked by the major sound shifts that occurred between Chaucer's time and Shakespeare's. (Reading Chaucer in a German accent, for instance, makes the poems work better in terms of rhyme and meter -- words like (deprecated template usage)knight still had all their letters pronounced.) Lots of words disappear from the language entirely, such that no modern English speaker uses terms like (deprecated template usage)æþeling anymore. Even letters have fallen out of disuse -- I dimly remember one kid seeing (deprecated template usage)æþeling on paper and reading it as (deprecated template usage)ape + (deprecated template usage)-ling and wondering what gorillas had to do with Beowulf...
Japanese, though, hasn't gone through any such massive disruption like that, and as a consequence, I find that I can still make quite a bit of sense out of very-old Japanese texts, at least once spelled in characters that I can parse. :) The oldest extant examples of anything written in Japanese are probably on the w:Eta_Funayama_Sword and the w:Inariyama_Sword, but as shown at ja:w:金錯銘鉄剣 in the Template:Jpan section, these were written in kanbun and the only real Japanese words in use are the names. The oldest examples of written Japanese that's really Japanese and not Chinese read with a funny accent would probably be the w:Kojiki and the w:Man'yōshū, and these both demonstrate uses of terms that can still be recognized as Japanese, often identical to the modern forms, allowing for some pronunciation drift as indicated by historical kana spellings (things like afu becoming au, then becoming ō for some terms).
The biggest morphological changes that I've seen myself (and the scope of what I've seen is limited as I haven't had the time yet to really get into kobun studies) have to do with particle usage and verb endings (hence the need for specific inflection templates for classical Japanese), while semantic changes have generally been more limited, excluding taboo-laden areas like personal pronouns.
For instance, the Template:Jpan quote at 火鼠 is almost entirely understandable from a modern JA standpoint, once the kanji are deciphered:
Modern JA doesn't use Morokoshi all that often anymore, nor does the term 給う (tamau) see much use. However, the rest of it is pretty clear, and the context makes it clear that Morokoshi is a place, while we can be pretty sure that tamae is a verb in the imperative form. And that said, I find that my copies of modern JA<>JA dictionaries Kokugo Dai Jiten, Daijirin, and even the Shin Meikai Kokugo Jiten (a smaller printed version intended to be handy, and thus not including the level of detail in the OED, for instance), all have entries for 唐土 / 唐, and even for 給う, suggesting that modern speakers of Japanese might be expected to know these words, or at least to have heard them at some point and to want to look them up.
Looking back another 200-300 years into the Kojiki, we have this quote from the 鶏 entry, demonstrating use of the kake reading:
The only real changes from modern Japanese here are the particle つ, replaced over the years by the particle の, and the noun reading of kake to mean "chicken".
Meanwhile, although w:Beowulf is from a similar time period, modern English speakers are completely at a loss when trying to read it:
Looking again at Japanese, I've noticed that the language periods seem to broadly align with certain identifiable changes in the language. Notably, these changes are much more minor than what's seen in English, such as in the "middle" period for Japanese that seems to line up with the w:Kamakura_period and the w:Muromachi_period, where the medial -k- in Template:Jpan attributive forms drops out, changing words like よき to what we recognize as modern よい. Given that yoki is still floating around in the modern language as a deliberately archaic or poetic form, we can't even say that yoki vanished.
Anyway, I realize suddenly how long-winded this post is -- apologies for that. Suffice it to say that:
I don't think it's a problem to include the oldest extant use we can find for a term. The OED does that for English, I think, so doing that here for Japanese shouldn't be a problem.
That said, your question implies a suggestion, and I think it's a good one -- that we should probably also include a quote or usex demonstrating modern usage, at least in cases where the historical quote demonstrates a meaning or inflection not used much in the modern language.
Another possible suggestion is to also include a modern kanji spelling for ancient texts. Looking around while I wrote this thread, I found that the 魚 entry, for instance, has quotes from the w:Man'yōshū that only gave the original source-text ancient kanji and then kana and romaji. I just fixed that, adding modern kanji usage and an attempt at a translation.
Please stop mass removing of definitions from Romaji entries. I do not see evidence of consensus among Wiktionary editors. In Beer parlour, Liliana pointed out that the entries should better contain "#", like Mandarin Pinyin entries do. --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:57, 23 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
There was a discussion, and there was a consensus. I made most of those entries, and I saw firsthand how unnecessary and unwieldy they become. Perhaps they make sense in theory. In practice they are a mess and totally unnecessary. You were absent from the discussion, and you have been absent from activity related to Japanese, at least as far as I can tell. I do not think I should stop. --Haplology (talk) 13:03, 23 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I monitor above all votes, not BP discussions. However, I am present in the most recent discussion on Beer parlour, where I have opposed performing the change without a vote. In that discussion, Liliana opposed the particular implementation in which there is no "#" in the entry; I oppose this as well. Whether I have been editing Japanese entries is immaterial. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:09, 23 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I was wrong; the most recent discussion is not in Beer parlour but rather in Grease pit, as I have linked to. On another note, the discussion starts with "Like Mandarin pinyin at some stage, Japanese rōmaji entries need to be converted ...", yet Mandarin entries customarily do contain definitions, even now. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:16, 23 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
... and I did not see the Grease Pit discussion until now as I do not monitor that forum.
@Dan Polansky, I have replied to your objections in GP and your assumptions that pinyin entries should contain definitions ("yánlì" is the model entry), no they shouldn't, the vote specifically said so, the "#" issue is also addressed by the template itself, so pinyin entries look almost identical to romaji entries. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)13:27, 23 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Responding to Haplology above:
You see, I usually do not monitor Grease pit either; it is a horrible forum for making this kind of proposal. I did not know that you have missed the GP discussion. Anyway, I think you should put this to vote. In the vote, you should clarify:
Whether part of speech headings are allowed to contain part of speech (probably not)
Whether definitions are going to be allowed in Romaji entries (I don't know; they seem to be allowed in Pinyin by common practice)
Whether the wiki format is going to closely follow the one for Pinyin and Gothin romanizations, both of which include a line for "#".
Whether the definition line should start with "Romanization of" rather than "See also"; you may also leave this undecided by stipulating a template to be used.
@Anatoli: Well, the Pinyin vote implied that definitions are to be omitted without bothering to say so explicitly, but that is not what editors are going. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:32, 23 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I was just trying to advance the project in line with the discussions, and I thought the BP agreement was enough. At any rate I'll stop with romaji until this is settled. I honestly think a soft redirect to a kana page is the best method for the user after making a fair number of them myself and thinking about it. Shall I draft a vote here? (to be posted elsewhere of course) --Haplology (talk) 13:38, 23 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
and by the way, please stop undoing my edits, at least until I am proven wrong? Thanks
Tell me the name of the vote and I will draft the vote for you, then you can edit it to your liking. The name could be "Making Romaji mere romanization entries"; what do you think? --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:41, 23 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I am not really the leader here, although I do tend to do most of the work. Anatoli or Eirikr should be informed first and then probably one of them would want to do it. At any rate I would prefer something that does not use the word "mere" because that has negative connotations. --Haplology (talk) 13:48, 23 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Did I? If I did I must have done it by accident. I prefer your way too. I think "dannen" is better. Actually I don't like using apostrophes in romaji at all, but when other editors use them, I usually leave them in. As you know the purpose is to tell readers where the syllable breaks are, to distinguish dan-en from dan-nen, but for dannen there is no ambiguity so I don't use an apostrophe. --Haplology (talk)
Thanks (an'nai is another one, will rename them). Do you use apostrophes or dashes to break up syllables? I think "dan'en" would be more standard, like ban'yū. I would use "-" when it's a mixed script (prefer "Igirisu-jin" to igirisujin) or a compound word, like deddo-supēsu (deddosupēsu is OK too). --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)01:33, 26 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It gets hairy with hyphens. I prefer to use spaces to break up big compounds like 悪因悪果, or words and particles or other words in phrases as we do with -suru verbs and -na adjectives, but hyphens are pretty common with prefixes or suffixes. Maybe I use spaces too often. Come to think of it, probably it should be akuin-akka. I'm not sure if it matters if the term is mixed-script. It's ultimately a matter of taste and readability, since the purpose of romaji is to present Japanese to people who can't read kana, so I'll defer to your judgement. --Haplology (talk) 01:51, 26 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, thanks for pointing that out. I saw it a little while ago and tried a few links but they were all false positives. So far I've mostly been ignoring entries that don't have a kana page with the intention of moving them later. --Haplology (talk) 02:25, 4 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You propably need Help:Gadget-HotCat for quickly adding categories. I don't like the way it works on entries with multiple languages because it adds to the bottom of the page, ignoring language sections. So if sorting is not a big deal, it's in preferences, gadgets - (HotCat, easily add / remove / change a category on a page, with name suggestion). --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)03:49, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I'll take a look at that. "Category:1000 Japanese basic words" currently has 538...I can imagine the impression that makes on users. --Haplology (talk) 03:53, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
True, I forgot about that. I notice that all of the lemma forms are added now, but it still only comes to 600+ words. I guess "1000 words" includes the hiragana forms on the appendix? --Haplology (talk) 04:34, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I haven't created the appendix, don't know the source and haven't checked the number of words, not sure. I think there could be a similar list on the web. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)04:39, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I see... thanks for the links. I'm not sure if it's better to add the category link to just one form of a word or just the kanji form (or hiragana form if the kanji form is very uncommon.) Probably something to leave for another day. --Haplology (talk) 04:50, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It's absolutely not clear what was meant by "1000 words". If it's a made up list, then it could be filled from the frequency list to make a 1000. I would choose the most common spelling, not both (which would be just boosting numbers). --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)04:59, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think I read somewhere that it's a list of basic concepts, not the most statistically common words. I have seen a few words on that list that seemed very uncommon statistically but represent some basic ideas. Conversely, there are a lot of essential Japanese words that never made it on the list. I think you're right about only including one form. My policy is that hiragana pages should be treated as disambiguation pages and generally not have categories unless they are bona fide lemmas themselves, that is if they are commonly used in place of a form with kanji, or if there is no form with kanji. There's a big grey zone there though. --Haplology (talk) 05:06, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Very true about the grey zone. It's sometime hard to decide, whether へび, 蛇 or ヘビ should be given the status of e.g. a reptile. Glad we stripped romaji of the status of Japanese nouns, verbs, etc but we may have to come across some hurdles in that area.
Re: Frequency and basic words. That list may be made up by users and may not have any scientific grounds. You can use your judgement and add words from JLPT. I find the words in basic levels useful, common and basic (if it's important to make that category complete with 1000 words, that is). --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)05:21, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The code has been changed. The second parameter should be the PoS (empty = noun). So the code should be {{subst:ja new|こうとくしん||a [[sense]] of [[public]] [[spirit]]}} at 公徳心. Wyang (talk) 05:19, 12 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
A vandal was successful in misleading you to assume the vanalism was done by me. Please check the log of User talk:Denniss to see who was the real vandal. This vandal creates multiple accounts per day to attack multiple users at Commons and on other wikis. Identifies itself as a radical jew with a hate obsession against Carlos Latuff and everyone involved in Vandal reverts on Latuff-related pages. --89.182.32.14323:09, 18 April 2013 (UTC) AKA User:Denniss[reply]
As if you have little to do I'm adding you another burden, LOL. Anyway, this category contains English entries with Japanese translations, which don't have tr (no transliteration) - if you get bored :). --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)04:56, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I'll spend some time on that soon. By the way, I've been working on another project, which is a frequency list of Japanese words, and I was hoping to add it to this site but I'm not sure what page name(s) to give it or how to introduce it. I made it with the dump of the entire Japanese Wikipedia using a splitting tool called JUMAN made by the University of Kyoto. JUMAN gives you the inflected forms and the lemma forms, so I could add either type of list, but the page Wiktionary:Frequency lists says "The following frequency lists count distinct orthographic words, including inflected forms" so I guess the authorities of Wiktionary only want a list of inflected forms. With this list it only matters for verbs. For example, して appeared pretty high. So far, not many Japanese entries have been inflected forms, but if they appear on that list I was planning to add them using {{conjugation_of}}. --Haplology (talk) 05:28, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I've converted a user's dump into Appendix:Russian_Frequency_lists (the user is no longer active). The pages contain only lemma forms. This could give you and idea - just about how to split the first thousands of words. I can't generate inflected forms, I wish I knew a method. User:Pereru manages to generate Latvian inflected forms somehow. Each language seems to be different (depends on entry and inflection templates). I noticed that's what users do - convert inflected forms to lemma forms first and then make appendices/frequency lists. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)05:40, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I see, so far I hadn't been saving the PoS in my database although JUMAN provides it. It actually provides a lot of information, including the form in hiragana and even the domain (such as 料理). I can't post anything for a couple of days at least, but soon I'll put something in my user space and I can make adjustments if anyone has any feedback. --Haplology (talk) 06:01, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm actually confused about the spelling, it seems that "木花之開耶姫" is used on Chinese sites and the pronunciation is both "-bime" and "-hime" or just "-bime". --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)02:57, 15 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, I just got back. Probably a block would be appropriate. I looked through the first few of their entries, saw no serious problems and marked them as patrolled, but it sounds like this editor then quickly veered off into dubious and uncitable entries as usual. I was hoping that they had become a little more careful. I should have checked the rest but couldn't muster the energy. Also I don't know if obscure mythological figures satisfy the criteria for inclusion. Those mythological figures are not very significant even in their home country, and as for their names as English words, it seems strange to call them part of the English vocabulary. In the meantime I think the editor has finished for the night--It's 4 AM in London now. In addition the editor switches IPs regularly and apparently at will. Once I blocked them and they reappeared moments later with a different IP. So a block might not have much practical effect, although the editor might deserve it.
About pronunciation-- True, JA WP lists Konohananosakuya-bime in the article title, and mentions Konohanasakuya-hime as a common form. Mythology is very unfamiliar territory for me though. --Haplology (talk) 03:10, 15 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
In which senses does this mean "field"? Land area? Physical phenomenon? Algebraic structure? A designated place in computer memory? Please disambiguate. Keφr11:27, 2 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You're welcome. Do Karelian nouns conjugate decline? Actually I'm not familiar with Karelian so I don't know. Would you like to create a declension table? --Haplology (talk) 01:25, 28 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Entries are okay without declension tables or conjugation tables, but if you want to help add a declension table that would be great. Usually those tables are made with templates, but if you want to get started right away you could use a wiki table (w:Help:Table), which could then be put into a template later. In that case I would recommend contacting an editor knowledgeable in this area, maybe User:Hekaheka, and registering a username on this site. It helps the other editors a lot with dealing with new contributions and communication, since IP addresses often change. --Haplology (talk) 02:07, 28 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Speaking of which, I did make an account just now, and I suppose I can make a table, however, the issue is, Karelian nouns undergo consonant gradation (i.e. in Finnish, poika (nominative) changes to poijat (nominative plural)), so I would have to create an entire declension system. Which is, of course, a lot for one human being. In Finnish, there are about 40 different declension patterns for nouns. Porokello (talk) 02:12, 28 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That does sound difficult. It's up to you if you want to try to go forward with declension or conjugation tables, in full or abbreviated form. Now that you have a user page, you can use subpages to experiment if you want. Wiktionary also allows pages for declensions of words, so poijat can have its own page with a link to poika. Creating those or not is also entirely up to you.--Haplology (talk) 02:26, 28 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I saw your edit to 寿司 etc. appear on my watchlist, and curiosity led me to look at our various sushi entries. I noticed an enormous amount of redundancy, so I just finished reworking the entries as a group. I arbitrarily chose 寿司 as the main lemma entry for all the detail, and turned 鮨 and 鮓 into {{alternative spelling of}} stub entries pointing to 寿司. I'm not sure if that's the best approach though, since the kanji spellings are all ateji anyway. Maybe the full details should be at すし instead?
I also found a ref explaining that use of 貫 to count sushi is 1) ateji (chefs just used the kana spellings, though possibly that comes from 巻?) and 2) quite recent, so I added a usage note and moved the counter details there.
Ah, I see. My subjective impression is that 寿司 is indeed the most common form. Putting the main entry at すし does make sense, but I don't object to having it on 寿司. Was there any reason for choosing alternative spelling rather than alternative form? I'm not sure if there's any reason to prefer one or the other, and usually use "alternative form." --Haplology (talk) 14:45, 9 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Re: where to keep the lemma, sounds fine by me to leave it at 寿司. That said, if Anatoli or some other editor has strong feelings otherwise, I certainly won't object to moving. :)
Re: which "alt" template to use, poking around shows that {{alternative spelling of}} and {{alternative form of}} both add entries to [[Category:Japanese alternative forms]], so which one to use has no effect on categorization. I guess I wound up using {{alternative spelling of}} in cases where the same reading (pronunciation) can be written ("spelled") in different ways, whereas {{alternative form of}} to me seems more appropriate for cases where the reading is different but the meaning is the same, such as どうも versus ども or さようなら versus さよなら. I suppose it doesn't really matter much past stylistic differences, since these two templates ultimately function the same way -- both add entries to the same cat, and both refer users to some other entry. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig17:18, 9 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The senseid template takes the language as its first parameter, not with lang=. It was causing a script error. —CodeCat13:22, 21 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Greetings, Hap. I have recently proposed in the Beer parlour that since WT:RFD and WT:RFV are perpetually backlogged with discussions that should have been closed long ago, it would be nice if editors adding a new section to one of these pages would find one of the many old sections ready for closure and close it, or a closed section ready for archiving, and archive it. Since you have added a new RfV section, please consider closing or archiving an old one. Cheers! bd2412T12:45, 9 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, I looked through RFD and RFV and closed one request on each. Usually I only get involved with Japanese entries so I'm a little hesitant to close requests related to entries in other languages. When any other Japanese requests get old I'll close them at that time. --Haplology (talk) 14:17, 9 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
SOP? It's just a straight verb conjugation. I'm not familiar with this term being all that idiomatic, but maybe it's just that I haven't run into it. FWIW, neither Shogakukan nor Daijirin list this as a lemma.
Yes, actually that's exactly how it works. If sort is omitted, it puts together all of the kana bits and sends that to Module:ja:jsort to make the sort key. I haven't yet amended the doc to mention that. One other change is in how the kana is displayed below. I'm still not sure how to display those or whether to display them at all. A second one is that it categorizes terms by number of morae, which may or may not be useful. It's useful to haiku poets at least. --Haplology (talk) 16:53, 23 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
FWIW, I think displaying the kana below seems potentially quite helpful to learners, and it doesn't hurt anything, so best to show them, no? Mora counts might also be good for learners, among others. :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig18:38, 23 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm glad you think so. Earlier I had it in a table format, but I thought that users might interpret that as something like furigana and be misled about the pronunciation of the term, for example that users would see ぶつ しつ in the entry 物質 and think it's read ぶつしつ. I experimented with displaying them before and after like ぶつ > ぶっ , しつ > しつ but it's hard to romanize ぶっ. Then I tried ぶつ > ぶ, しつ > っしつ which romanizes nicely but gave that up following this discussion. I'm not really sure which division is more correct. The current setup looks strange when the term contains kana, such as 逃げ込む which would display な+こ (なこ?) so for those I added the onlykanji parameter which hides the kana.
Since you support categorizing by morae, I've put that feature into all of the headword templates except ja-verb-suru (because those entries always have a noun section too, or at least I think so.) It's done through a call to {{ja-countmorae}}. --Haplology (talk) 05:09, 24 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Re: layout of kana for kanji, I'd noticed the table layout previously. I think that might actually be a somewhat cleaner visual look, especially for longer kanji strings where the underlying kana no longer line up very well with the kanji in the upper part. But I understand your comment about not wanting to be misleading, and about romanizing. Hmm.
Re: onlykanji, I ran into that earlier today with 立ち聞き, and experimented with removing that param to see what changed. I agree that having only the kana for the kanji doesn't work very well when there are intervening okurigana. I wonder about including okurigana, but in kakko? See User:Eirikr/Sandbox for an example. I played around with links in the second one, so た(ち) correctly links to たち instead of the non-existent た(ち) page. Not sure if it would make sense to rework the template to handle this semi-automatically, or if it makes more sense to just manually enter the wikicode for the links as in that example (i.e. as [[たち|た(ち)]]).
Re: categories for terms by mora count -- super cool, I like that! I think we don't have nearly enough of that kind of additional metadata and categorization for our entries. I would *love* to be able to see a list of all JA terms that end in -u, for instance, or all JA terms that show evidence of vowel fronting in bound vs. unbound forms (such as 目, appearing as ma in OJP-derived bound forms and as me on its own; or 口, appearing as kutsu bound vs. kuchi unbound; or 神, kamu vs. kami... etc etc). We have all this data sitting here, and the potential is amazing -- but our data organization kinda sucks, really. That's partly the fault of the MW back-end, and the (quite frankly, head-shakingly horrid) data model where all data for all languages for one spelling goes in one big bucket -- we can't really do anything about that part. <...sigh...> But part of that is up to us editors adding in that metadata -- and I wholly support what you're doing here, I think it's potentially very valuable. Thank you! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig05:50, 24 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The format for including okurigana looks good. I'm not sure how to handle it on the data end. Maybe something like alt1 which would be set to た(ち)? Without something like that, it will make a link like Category:Japanese terms spelled with 立 read as た(ち). If you want to make any edits to any of these templates of course feel free. I agree that the table layout does look cleaner, even though they usually match up fairly well. Earlier there was a second title row that said "Readings" but maybe "Kanji readings" or "Original readings" would be clear enough. The only problem was that four rows made the tab jut into Mandarin or the next etymology, but ideally there would be enough content that it would have enough room.
I was also concerned that absolute beginners would think that the kana were also kanji. A title might help with that.
Some of that kind of data aggregation should be handle-able on the database end, by means of a simple query. However, I don't know how that would be implemented in MW. I'd like to avoid creating additional templates unless needed; I'm worried about clutter -- I'm pretty familiar with things around here (or at least think I am), and I still get confused with some regularity and have to go look up documentation again. I'd hate to add to that load unnecessarily.
Re: kana, I just saw your addition of the k1...k7 params. Do those do anything aside from helping generate the sort key? If not, I'm happier just adding sort -- fewer key strokes, and easier-to-read wikicode.
FWIW, Shogakukan's Kokugo Dai Jiten doesn't collate small-つ any differently than regular-つ -- ぶっしき is followed by ぶじゅじくようもふせしだい is followed by ぶっしつ, for instance. Or ぶっこむ > ふつころ > ぶっころす ... ふっこん > ぶつごん > ぶつざ > フッサール. Thinking it through more, I realize that this is irrelevant for many sokuon entries, however (those that don't already have the つ in them)... ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig17:45, 24 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I have actually already written a function (at the bottom of Module:ja) which matches any term ending in any one of うくすつぬふむゆる, or their corresponding katakana, or the long vowel mark when read as う. That could be called by a single line of code in ja-noun etc. so the average user wouldn't need to worry about it, and the bulk of the code would be in Module:ja, which is fairly easy to read. Anyway it's there if you're interested in putting it into service.
At the moment k1-k7 only help generate the sort key, but I think they could be extremely helpful for development later on when doing analysis. Otherwise it would be difficult to impossible to make queries like "whenever A changes to B" or "when A changes to B followed by C", but those become trivial when k1...k7 are present. Another reason is to display them on the tab like ひょう>ぴょう, but I'm not sure if that's wise.
I've agonized over how to make the sort key. If you know what the sort key should best be, please let me know and I can edit the code to generate it, or if you prefer to edit the function yourself that's fine too. I deleted it today, but there was a function called defaultsort to generate a key like はつひよう from はっぴょう, for example. Maybe that one was right? --Haplology (talk) 18:11, 24 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Re k1 etc -- your point makes great sense, and was a facepalm moment for me -- that's exactly the kind of mostly-behind-the-scenes metadata that could be leveraged into something very useful. Point taken.
Re sort keys -- I've looked around at the dictionaries I have to hand, and it looks like Shogakukan has the most confusing collation, ignoring dakuten and small-tsu and sorting as if ぶ == ふ and っ == つ.
The Shinmeikai and Daijirin consistently put dakuten after seion, so じっか always comes after しっか, while Shogakukan confusingly seems to list by kanji stroke order (膝下 (shikka) comes after 実貨 (jikka) comes after 湿果 (shikka)).
The SMK and DJR put small-つ before regular-つ, so じっき comes before じつき. The SMK and DJR also sort the small Y kana after the full-sized ones, so ひよう comes before ひょう. Shogakukan is willy-nilly in both these regards, maybe again using stroke count.
If you have a copy of Daijirin or the Shinmeikai, their collation makes more sense to me than Shogakukan's.
(I'm off WT for the rest of the day -- some work just came in. :)
Have a look at かんようおん. Delete the rom param from the {{ja-noun}} wikitext and preview, and you'll see that the autogenerated romaji it gives is incorrect, as kanyōon -- there needs to be an apostrophe after the "n". It seems that the module gives correct romaji for ん + [あ行], as seen at へんい. Could you look into this? I've got a super-busy afternoon and evening, so I'm out pretty much for the rest of today, and tomorrow's looking busy too. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig19:31, 26 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I noticed that actually when going through the maintenance category Category:Japanese terms with unexpected Romanizations which turns out to be maintenance for both human-entered romanizations and the machine's auto-generated romanizations. It's fixed now, hopefully. As it turns out, it only required one character, a 'y' in a certain pattern which previously only contained vowels (Lua doesn't have regular expressions but instead has relatively weaker "patterns") but I took the time to comment the function, which is kana_to_romaji, if you're interested in having a look.
In other coding news, I wrote a little template called {{ja-put-in-scriptcat}} which replaces several identical lines of code in ja-noun etc. which now just call that function. It adds the new feature of sorting the entries in Category:Japanese katakana with the same sort key that other entries use but converted into katakana, whereas it was left up to the MW software before and there were sections of katakana starting with ズ for example. I thought that was how it is usually done but if that's not the usual practice I can turn it off.--Haplology (talk) 03:11, 27 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Autogen rom & multi-word compound terms
I just tweaked ぐんばいうちわ and いしゅかくとうぎせん to re-add manual rom values, since the autogen code (reasonably enough) can't tell where the divisions are between the constituent words.
Hi, as for the romanization, I believe that kwīn is the correct Hepburn romanization for that term (WP gives the same romanization here w:Hepburn_romanization#For_extended_katakana) kuin would be correct for a term with a big "i", that is クイン. The entry was created by the long-time IP user and he/she was going through a royal figures phase, and at the time he/she romanized it incorrectly and nobody else caught it.
Hi, I've made the headword templates work automatically without a few fields. I wasn't sure if posting it on "News for editors" would be appropriate. "Deprecated" might be too strong, because the old format works fine, but it's possible to abbreviate the headwords quite a bit. The doc is still spotty but {{ja-noun}} has some information. These are the basic changes:
the first unnamed parameter (h, ka, k, kk, etc.) is unnecessary (the module, which is ja-headword, figures out the script by itself)
the first unnamed param can be replaced by a kana reading, and the script figures out what script it is, so for example {{ja-noun|くるま|kata=クルマ}} works on 車.
hidx is done automatically
there is automatic romanization, which is correct in 99% of cases but can be overridden with manual, but for the sake of isolating them I've made the "deprecated formatting" category, but actually the old way still works. "deprecated" might be too negative, but I think that if most entries are moved to a simpler format, we might get more editors to work on Japanese who would have been turned off by the complexity and hassle. If all of the entries were moved over, it would make the code a little simpler, but probably the speedup would be imperceptible. --Haplology (talk) 05:35, 4 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I'm glad you like them. A few weeks ago I was going through the cases where automatic trans did not equal manual, and in most cases they were errors but in a few cases it was は read as "wa" which the automatic transliteration has no way of guessing. It works if は is separated by a space character though. The module checks auto against manual and puts those that differ in the category Category:Japanese terms with romaji needing attention. Most cases were where the romanization depended on where the morpheme boundries lay, for example not using a macron to spell Masaaki, or adding spaces or hyphens to the romanization. To deal with those cases, I added an optional feature which is a markup for the kana in the first unnamed parameter. For example, {{ja-pos|まさ.あき|proper}} shows up as ''hiragana'' まさあき, ''romaji'' Masaaki (without a macron) or <nowiki>{{ja-noun|き.いろり リンゴ}} shows up as hiragana and katakana きいろりリンゴ romaji kiirori ringo. It can be used in the inflection and conjugation tables too, so if Masaaki became famous and his name became an adjective he could be {{ja-na|正明|まさ.あき}}. I'm confident that the markup covers every case for the inflection and conjugation tables, so there's no manual override for those right now. Technically that's not a change I made, since several months ago Wyang made the romanization automatic. Those are currently handled by {{ja-verbconj-auto}} and {{ja-adj-infl}}.
I'm thinking of abandoning {{kanji readings tab}} actually.. I wish I had written Module:ja-kanjitab before adding kanji readings tab to several thousand pages. Kanji readings tab requires the kanji to be entered, but ja-kanjitab does the same thing without requiring kanji, so it's much easier to use. ja-kanjitab expects the first unnamed parameter to be the reading of the first kanji in the term, the second parameter to be the second kanji, etc. So for the entry 外来語, you could enter {{ja-kanjitab|がい|らい|ご|yomi=on}} or just {{ja-kanjitab}} to default to kanji only (although it would be nice to add a sort key with {{ja-kanjitab|sort=がいらいご}}). Old-style entries like {{ja-kanjitab|外|来|語}} still work of course, but actually the module ignores the fields because it only accepts hiragana in the unnamed parameters. --Haplology (talk) 06:19, 4 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
On creating adjectival noun entries
Do I need to create the noun section when there is already an adjectival noun section? Seems rather redundant to me, but I created it anyway - 怯懦. I just would like to know what's the de facto practice among the regular ja editors? ありがとう :). Jamesjiao → T ◊ C22:54, 9 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi there! The practice is to create both. There are some exceptions where a word is an adjectival noun but not a noun, famously any word ending in 的, as well as rare cases like 綺麗. Japanese dictionaries that list part of speech abbreviate it as （名・形動） which is short for 名詞 and 形容動詞. By the way I notice you've seen the abbreviated formatting style for the headword templates. I'm glad it's catching on. By the way {{ja-kanjitab}} is also automatic now, so just entering {{ja-kanjitab}} works too. Haplology (talk) 05:42, 10 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Haha.. yes, I do pay attention to existing entries. Categories help a lot in this case. Didn't know about the new {{ja-kanjitab}}feature. I did discover that you no longer needed to add pipes (|) between characters, but this is even better. Thanks :). Jamesjiao → T ◊ C20:38, 10 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that would be a better option, although there's a slight formatting issue now that the headword has a larger font than ja-altread. How about splitting it into three etymologies, or four including the proper noun? Looking back in the history, I did split it into 3 headwords, but I was being lazy and didn't want to write 3 etymologies. Before that, the editor forced three readings into one headword by manually linking three in the same fields, and that broke when I was updating the template. I think the sort of official way is to make separate etymologies for each reading, but sometimes it's hard to produce each etymology at the time. --Haplology (talk) 05:20, 18 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
What would you put down for each etymology? I thought they were just different combinations of 音読み and 訓読み pronunciations? Or is there any more historical significance to each? I also noticed the enlargement of fonts in the ja header templates. Maybe we could do the same for ja-altread? Jamesjiao → T ◊ C20:36, 20 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think the etymology is the least important part of the entry for 99% of users, and it's at best a curiosity and more often visual clutter, but the main entry layout policies seem to regard it as essential, so it must be there eventually for every word in every entry. Etymology is a weak area for me, so I can't write most etymologies myself, but why the word has on'yomi or kun'yomi would be explained there. Eirikr was good at writing those (for example the one at 浪人) but he's been absent recently. When applicable I put a different kanji tab with readings included in each etymology section, but there should ideally be a written explanation there too.
I'll take a look at enlarging the text of alt-read. The fonts of the headwords are larger because Module:ja-headword calls Module:headword, incidentally. I agree that if ja-altread is smaller it's visually jarring. Haplology (talk) 04:53, 21 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Heya folks, I just substantially expanded that entry, adding in etymologies and lots more detail. Please have a look and let me know what you think.
@Haplology, you've been quite active in Luafication and general template creation and cleanup. I'd appreciate if you could:
check that the 麻布 entry template usage is correct;
add in the reading templates for all four readings;
create a template and category for irregular readings (where the reading isn't quite kun or on as in Azabu, or where the reading is just wacky, like when a place gets renamed, but the old reading ultimately replaces the "regular" reading for the new kanji spelling).
It looks correct. I would be happy to work on adding some behavior to ja-kanjitab, but I'm not sure what the specific changes should be. I would hesitate to have it make a new category for every irregular reading of a kanji, because that would create lots of categories with only one member, and I'm worried about the overabundance of categories already. Maybe it could have an option for irregular readings, like "yomi=irreg" or something, and put all of them in Category:Japanese terms with irregular kanji readings. Maybe also some more specific ones like ateji readings? Maybe that's what you meant. Haplogy (話) 00:29, 31 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, sorry I was unclear -- yes, I was thinking one blanket category for all kanji spellings with irregular readings. Aza for 麻 is irregular, as is bu for 布 (or even for the actual etymon生 (fu)). Perhaps ateji could be a subcategory of irregular readings, if folks think that would be useful. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig01:05, 31 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I would be interested in that. I'd never heard of that page before. If there's a policy about how long a talk page can be unanswered before being considered abandoned, please let me know where I could read about that, but I assume it's left to the editor's common sense. This also gives me a chance to try out the brand new "thank" feature, which I've been wanting to do since it appeared a few days ago. Haplogy (話) 11:48, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanx reciprocated. Well, if the page just contains our standard welcomeip template, it doesn't do any harm to leave it alone. If it contains a warning about a specific edit, it can probably be deleted after a month or so. If it has been created by Æ&Œ then I would delete it immediately (I was thinking of blocking him as my last action before resigning sysophood, but never got around to it). SemperBlotto (talk) 11:55, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hey, just doing my part for the community. You lot feel free to block me at any time if it makes you happy. I’ll be at Wikcionario, being productive. --Æ&Œ (talk) 12:01, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure--what do you mean by "this"? You mean sending messages to new IP users? I agree that is probably more stressful than welcoming. I was deleting old IP talk pages because I'm afraid that somebody might browse Wiktionary in 2013 and accidentally get a message intended for somebody in 2009 and might get confused or even upset. I figure that if the IP user didn't reply within a few days, no reply will ever come, but to be safe I only delete pages from 2012 or earlier. Thanks for the tip about searching, I'll start looking there now. Haplogy (話) 03:14, 20 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Comment from an IP user
Kino Page
Bias
I'm partially sorry for not going by your guidelines.
Anyway...
I don't know how to leave a comment here, but I was shocked to see that no one knew the genitive for the German word "das Kino". One does not even need to know German to consult the Duden Dictionary, to see that everything that I posted is a fact, in-line with the currently accepted German grammar rules. I apologize if I did not edit "EXACTLY" the way that is accepted on Wiktionary, but I was just trying to provide information that someone might later put in the appropriate format for this site. The partative IS only expressed though the genitive in German. I have the physical dictionary in front of me. I'm sure that internet links can be found on the internet, but I want to just give you the facts. How can you prove or disprove them if you erase them immediately?
This seems very bias. :(
Hello, Haplology. I don't quite understand why you reverted my edits on the うん page. I believe it might be a good idea to change the "Noun" section into a "Kanji reading" list, in order to include a list of the kanji that share that particular reading (I mean, the hiragana combination "うん" can represent more than just an interjection or the on'yomi reading of 運), just like other pages of hiragana combinations.
GianWiki (talk) 17:25, 9 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, sorry, that was a bit harsh. The main issue was removing the noun section. Maybe there can be a kanji readings section, but there was a discussion earlier where it was agreed to remove them. (Granted, it was not very conclusive.) There should definitely be a noun section however, which is where 運 belongs. Kanji readings are an anomaly on this site because the basic structure is Language at L2 and part of speech at L3, and a reading is not a part of speech. Some editors added kanji readings several years ago in addition to the parts of speech sections, but they stopped at 100 some readings and there hasn't been any work on them since. The issue of having kanji reading sections could be brought up again at the beer parlour since it's in limbo now, but in any case there must be a noun section at うん. Haplogy (話) 17:38, 9 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As you've noticed, I've been creating categories for all the template-generated redlinks. These have basically flooded the Special:WantedCategories pages, so I thought I would clear them out before the page gets updated in a month or two (I was procrastinating on doing housecleaning, which usually gives me a great deal of motivation to be real industrious on everything else but that...). I've forgotten what little I learned of the kanas, but it was a simple matter to copy the category names into a text file, do a few simple find and replace steps on them to transform them into the wikitext to put the categories being created. I noticed though, that you've been tweaking the sort parameters. The last thing I want to do is force you to drop your regular tasks to deal with back-burner issues that you were going to get to sometime in the next millenium or so. Would you like me to continue with what I've been doing, and is there anything I can do differently to keep from sucking you into it unnecessarily? Chuck Entz (talk) 07:42, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi there, thanks for creating all of those categories. I didn't know about Special:WantedCategories or that the uncreated categories would flood the page, and I didn't know that it would cause a problem on another page to have all of those uncreated categories left. The reason I edited the sort keys of those was to sort them by the gojūon sorting style that is used elsewhere. To make that style of sorting work on this site, a word that begins with a kana with dakuon, also known as "ten ten", is replaced with its counterpart without dakuon, and an apostrophe is placed at the end. Words that start with a kana with handakuon or the little circle get two apostrophes. So for example, ばん -> はん', ぱん -> はん'', and はん is okay the way it is. There's a function in Module:ja that does this, so I think it would be possible to call it from the category like this [[Category:Japanese kanji read as ばん|{{#invoke:ja|jsort|ばん}}]]. I think I read somewhere that people are not supposed to call modules directly, but it seems to work. It would be easy to make a template to do the same thing if that's better. Haplogy (話) 08:25, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If that doesn’t make sense to you then you wouldn’t understand any further explanation perhaps. Another reason is that これら cannot refer to people while これらの can, just like これ cannot refer to a person while この can. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 00:17, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for writing off my intellect entirely. Since you know so much about this, why don't you create the entry yourself? What part of speech is これらの? Please educate us. Haplogy (話) 00:23, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I’m just disappointed that we don’t share the same view, and I’m not insulting or underestimating you at all. From my point of view, これらの is quite grammaticalized and not a simple sum of parts. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 02:10, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
No hard feelings then. I am serious though about asking what the part of speech of this term is, and for an entry for これらの and any related terms, because it's a mystery to me at least. You say it is grammaticalized. Grammaticalized into what? 此の is 連体詞 or adnominal, 此れ is a pronoun, これら is a pronoun with the suffix 等, and it looks to me like これらの is a pronoun with a suffix and the genitive particle の. Is これらの a pronoun? It seems unlikely that これらの is an undiscovered adnominal. Haplogy (話) 02:37, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It is an adnominal just like この, more precisely a demonstrative determiner. In computer linguistics, it is common to treat it so, though you might say it is for usefulness and not for correctness. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 04:48, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I just tried analyzing これらの問題 with JUMAN and mecab and they both broke it down into これ+ら+の+問題. They call これ a 名詞形態指示詞 which I guess translates to nominal demonstrative. Who are these people who treat これらの as a single adnominal? Besides that, it's my understanding that Japanese does not have determiners of any kind. その may correspond to a determiner conceptually, but it's 連体詞 and no analysis of Japanese grammar that I know of includes 限定詞. If there is one, please tell me about it. Adnominals are a very limited group of words. With such a tight focus of attention, why is it that nobody else has discovered this one? This makes me skeptical. If これらの is idiomatic, the editors of 広辞苑 etc. would be very interested in hearing about it. Haplogy (話) 05:56, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Dictionaries don’t even mention its use in これらの人々, though they may have a definition of the archaic use of これら without の for people. Whether you analyze これらの人々 to これ+ら+の+人々 or not, you need to explain the fact that これらの can refer to people while これ and これら can’t. Some computer dictionary data have これらの explicitly as an adnominal, such as Chasen. Anyway, I know you don’t agree with me, and I will let the template as it is. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 04:40, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hey Haplology, I just noticed that you made this edit to the accelerated creation script which has made the Romanization process for me faster and I really appreciated that. But now that I think about it, when I left there was no set policy for Wiktionary on how to exactly handle the many Romanization systems out there, and while I did read over Wiktionary:Transliteration and romanization I noted it was still just a draft. Was there some sort of vote held to determine what Romanization system we would use while I was gone since 2011? Anyway, there was a template out there called {{ja-rom}} that acknowledged the different romanization systems which were unique to the Japanese language, and I want to know if we can nominate that for deletion if it's deprecated, or whether we should keep it. Regards, TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 05:44, 21 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know about any votes, but there's this: Wiktionary:About Japanese/Transliteration. I think the issue of displaying different romanization systems came up about a year ago in BP but nothing came of it. I would have no problem nominating {{ja-rom}} for deletion. It might be worth bringing up again. With Lua it's easy to display different possible romanizations, and displaying unlinked romanizations seems fine but I would strongly oppose actually making entries out of them, like Katoh for example. Haplogy (話) 05:53, 21 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. One thing I'm a bit confused on is the difference in long vowel o-macron and o-u in Hepburn Romanization. Could you please clarify this part for me? TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 10:52, 21 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
ō, or any vowels with macrons, are for long vowels unless they are part of different morphemes or one part conjugates or inflects. You would only find ou in cases like 問う where the う conjugates or 小売 where they are part of different morphemes.
I have no problem with linking rōmaji in {{ja-romanization of}} but it might be better to ask User:Atitarev because he also wrote it. In the headword templates, it's possible to indicate a morpheme boundary with a period such as {{ja-noun|こ.うり}} and the templates romanize automatically properly in other cases. Haplogy (話) 00:03, 22 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
勉 vs 勉
Hey Haplology, sorry to bother you again but I brought up a dispute on the tea room a short while ago, about the use and distinction of these two Kanji on the English Wikipedia, specifically usage on the Jinmeiyō kanji list. I'm wondering how best to include this on the entry for 勉 or split off into a separate page, but unfortunately the template used to designate these kanji {{ja-kanji}} doesn't seem to recognize the difference either. Can you help resolve this dilemma? TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 05:39, 22 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
For now, I would put the information about the kyujitai version in a usage note and add your concerns in {{attention|ja|...}}. I've gone ahead and set ja-kanji with style=s to make users aware that it's shinjitai at least. Haplogy (話) 23:58, 24 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
X
Our Japanese translation for ex (the letter) is エクス, but エックス seems more natural to me. What do you think? Also, any other comments on these letter names? Ultimateria (talk) 05:01, 28 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
エックス is definitely better. Four of my dictionaries list エックス and zero list エクス, and エックス is in "X Window System", "XHTML", "XMS", "XML", X-day (wasei eigo), X脚, X軸, and others. I couldn't find any loanwords whose origin contains x written with エクス. It looks like エクス is simply incorrect, but maybe it's just a rare form. It's probably too rare to be appropriate for a translation, if correct at all.
Thanks for categorizing the letter names. I don't have any comments on the letter names, but they could probably use more attention once they are created. Haplogy (話) 05:18, 28 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Kanji-tab for mixed on'yomi and kun'yomi
Hi,
How do you format {{ja-kanjitab}} when there's a mixture of readings - on'yomi and kun'yomi, as in 野菜畑? Also, how you do categorise/format kanji when there's a phonetic change, such as voicing - hatake -> batake or merger of consonants - ichi + hai -> ippai? --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)05:53, 3 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
For 野菜畑 it would be yomi=ok (on-kun) or yomi=j (jūbakoyomi), and for the opposite case like 豚肉 it would be yomi=ko or yomi=y. It can't handle more complicated combinations right now. The reading of a kanji after a phonetic change goes in k1 (first kanji), k2 (second kanji), k3, ... k7, so for 野菜畑 it would be や|さい|はたけ|k3=ばたけ, and in this case there's rendaku so you can use r=y to put it in Category:Rendaku. In that case it would be categorized as a term with 畑 read as はたけ (not read as ばたけ) because having separate categories for terms with rendaku readings would become unwieldy. Haplogy (話) 06:10, 3 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Another 2 yen -- for longer compounds of otherwise-discrete words, I'm hesitant to call them jūbakoyomi / yutōyomi. What about things like 蟻の塔草 (ari no tō-gusa)? That's kun-kun-on-kun, but since it's also a compound, I think it's better to omit reading categorization. Or, if such info is to be included (since it's ostensibly useful to learners), include it on a per-kanji basis, and don't go so far as to call the whole compound jūbakoyomi / yutōyomi unless JA sources do likewise (since calling something by a label that no one else uses could wind up confusing those same learners).
Thanks. In particular, I'm interested in the implementation of {{ja-verb-suru}} and handling in Module:ja-headword, so that this can be done with Korean, if approved. I just need some help with the module/templates. I will convert the verbs myself, if no one else does.
BTW, I'm still interested in accelerated Russian forms but I will post about it in GP, so that others could join as well. Russian grammar and templates are much more complicated than Mandarin pinyin - there are also many inflection types, need to remove stress marks and other complexities. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)00:08, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
There's not too much different about suru verbs from the code point of view. {{ja-verb-suru}} consists of just a one-line call to Module:ja-headword with the flag "suru verbs" and it passes along everything in the page like hira=ひらがな etc. Inside the module it does the same thing as it does for other parts of speech but tacks [[する]] at the end of the kana link when it's -suru. That step makes the code less elegant but it's not very complicated actually. I'd be happy to help out with that in any way. I've been meaning to learn Korean for some time.
Thanks for keeping me up to date about accelerating creation of Russian entry forms. I agree it's best to get as many people involved as possible for a complicated task like this. Speaking of accelerated forms, I've been thinking that 2014 would be a good time to focus on forms of Japanese entries, and your help would be essential for a productive discussion about that. The border between "form" and "construction" like on the inflection templates might be controversial--such as whether to include 食べます which most learners treat as a basic form but which could technically be broken into 食べ + ます, or 食べて+いる, or 美味しかった+ら. I'm leaning toward including most. Anyway that's for later on. Haplogy (話) 00:34, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Korean doesn't even have any basic modules to work with, e.g. there is no Module:ko-headword. It looks like a big job. I'm not sure where to start. Perhaps I should use old style templates and add handling of {{ko-verb}} to the old version of {{ja-verb}} or wait when Korean is Lua'ised? Otherwise, how do I convert {{ko-verb}} to
If Korean is anything like Japanese, it would be ten times easier to Lua-ize it all before doing anything else. I struggled with editing the old Japanese headword templates for weeks but it took me just a day to write the whole ja-headword module. Haplogy (話) 05:25, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I've made the beginning of ko-headword which is still limited but seems not to have any (serious) bugs at least. Adding features should be a matter of expanding that--it's the skeleton and basic structure of the finished module. Haplogy (話) 07:19, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like there was an error in the logic of my code. It should be fixed now. At the same time I made the romanization section a little tighter (so the if ... then ... end fits on one line) but that's just a matter of taste, so if you hate it feel free to put it back to the way it was. I've stopped working on the Korean code because other more knowledgeable editors seemed to have taken over, but if there's anything I can do I'd be more than happy to continue coding. Haplogy (話) 02:13, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Grammatically, Korean and Japanese are very similar and I think it's possible to make analogous setup in many cases. Nobody has really taken over Korean yet, so your assistance will be still required :). --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)06:01, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
It works now. The problem was that the 2nd parameter, the kana form, used Japanese spaces instead of ASCII spaces. I suppose that's a bug and I should fix ja-usex so that it supports either one. In the case of the example at はず, the automatic placement of furigana failed so I had to add spaces to the kanji version as well. That only happens in 1% of cases though and it's noted in the documentation. Haplogy (話) 13:23, 12 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Proper nouns
Hi,
Have Japanese proper nouns been simplified the way common nouns are? I was getting weird results when trying to edit 北朝鮮. In particular, is there automatic capitalisation, spacing in generated romaji (if param #2 = "きた ちょうせん" (with a space)? --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)23:38, 13 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, for proper nouns it's set to capitalize the first letter of each word separated by a space. Otherwise it's the same as it is with common nouns. Haplogy (話) 00:02, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
It should work if the kana comes first, like ja-pos|きた ちょうせん|proper or ja-pos|にほん|proper. Maybe it should be made to work no matter where the kana comes. Haplogy (話) 00:51, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, people don't delete entries by asking other users on their talk pages. I don't know Turkish, but four other Wiktionaries have sınalgı as a Turkish term, so I think you're wrong, but if you're sure, post {{rfv}} on sınalgı and then explain at WT:RFV. Haplogy (話) 01:13, 14 January 2014 (UTC) The entry had been deleted previously because it failed the RFV process, so I've deleted it.Haplogy (話) 01:16, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, it's being discussed at RFV right now because the IP claims they have enough cites. I'm not sure exactly what the status is, but your deletion was probably out of process. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:47, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, ok. Thanks for pointing that out. The talk page looked like it was settled. I've restored it. Probably an {{rfv}} should be on there until it's settled. Haplogy (話) 02:52, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
urawaza
I had considered nominating this myself as a hoax, but I wonder, is the 'wa' pronunciation used for anything else other than a particle, like in say ancient Japanese texts? TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 09:35, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
It might be historical hiragana. If somebody wants to recreate the entry as historical hiragana that's ok. I don't know a lot about historical Japanese, but I think that's historical kana work would be. As for modern Japanese, a very small number of terms have は pronounced as "wa", the most famous being こんにちは, but those are all cases of compounds that include the particle は. Previously people would say こんにちはいい天気ですね or something like that as a greeting, and it was shortened to its current form and became a single word.
There are only a handful of entries composed of historical hiragana, and it's not really certain how they should be handled. One that I can think of off hand is かはづ. Haplogy (話) 12:25, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Poking around, I can't find any evidence that 業, 技 (waza) was ever spelled with a は. Shogakukan is really good about indicating historical kana usage, and their entry only shows わざ. So うらはざ looks like pure tosh. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig00:48, 28 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, that settles it then. It was added by the infamous IP user so I deleted it on sight, thinking that it was a beginner's kana error. Haplogy (話) 00:57, 28 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Could you please have a look at the Japanese sections of 北京 and 台北, specifically ja-kanjitab? I made them both "on'yomi" but I know it's probably incorrect. Also, how would restructure ja-kanjitab for 大和 or similar where the readings are completely unpredictable? --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)23:04, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Irregular readings can use ja-kanjitab without any parameters, so 大和 would have {{ja-kanjitab}} and that would have the same behavior as the old version of ja-kanjitab, that is, just links to the kanji. I only designed the new features of ja-kanjitab to be used with kanji with regular readings, thinking that the other terms could use kanjitab without any extra features, those entries would be the same as before. I suppose some extra functions could be added for a term like 北京 to display the readings but not categorize the kanji by readings. That might also be useful for kun'yomi terms where the kanji only has that kun'yomi for one or two terms and category for those one or two terms would be too much categorization. You could also do {{ja-kanjitab|yomi=on}} to make it display as on'yomi and be categorized as on'yomi without displaying the readings. Haplogy (話) 00:47, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
honorific/respectful language, humble/humble language categorisation, naming and structure
Hi,
I wanted to create such categories for Korean and Japanese but there are already such categories for Japanese. The context label "honorific" was also used but there were no categories. I'd like to merge for consistency and have aliases.
Just letting you know that a recent edit to Template:ko-hanja has caused it to break a little bit. Instead of putting a "Korean hanja" link at the bottom of a particular article page, it is now putting (example) "[[Category:Korean hanja|한, 간]]" text (where 한, 간 are the associated hangeul characters and no actual linking to that category occurs) between the CJKV/hanja character in question in "Korean" (L2) sections and the "(hangeul" entry text. Not sure if the recent edits that broke it are by you or CodeCat but it'd be nice to get it fixed. Bumm13 (talk) 23:43, 24 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I was aware of that issue and brought it up with Codecat earlier hoping for some suggestions or help, but little was forthcoming. This bug was as a result of trying to sort hanja by their hangeul. Codecat seems to have fixed it this time. Haplogy (話) 00:31, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Could you work your magic and make では be transliterated as "dewa", please? See also 現有 where I used it. I think as a conjuction and interjection it should be "dewa", not "de wa"? --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)05:13, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure either, but so far I've been using a space and "de wa". I saw Eirikr (talk • contribs) do that at one point and did it that way thereafter. I could program in some exceptions, or you could use {{furigana}} and add the romaji manually if you prefer. {{furigana}} just adds the furigana and doesn't attempt to do any romanization or anything else. Haplogy (話) 05:25, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'd like "では" to become "dewa" in any case. Definitely as an interjection. I'll observe your edit, when you have a chance. Thanks for {{furigana}}, I might use it as well, I like {{ja-usex}} more, though. They both don't capitalise some words I'd prefer to be capitalised, though. Maybe a parameter for sentence start to be in capital or something to make names stand out? Just a suggestion, I don't want to complicate things. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)05:40, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
BTW, do you know that furigana on both templates appears on top only on some systems? On my desktop - Windows 7, Firefox, furigana appears in brackets on the right side, not on the top but it looks very good on my iPad. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)05:42, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'll work on dewa soon. I know about the issue with Firefox, and actually it's only with Firefox, which for some reason doesn't support furigana natively, but there's an add-on to support it. Every other browser supports furigana natively. Haplogy (話) 05:57, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Heya folks. FWIW, I think the space is more appropriate -- one can have それで, and one can have それでは, and one can have それでも. The latter two cases are just the particles は or も tacked onto the end. Even when used without the それ and at the beginning of an utterance as a kind of conjunction to whatever came before, one can similarly have just で, or では, or でも. Daijirin consistently describes it as で arising from various processes + は. Daijisen does the same, and even puts a hyphen between the two in the headword to emphasize the separate nature of these two particles. Both the Daijirin and Daijisen entries should be visible here: http://kotobank.jp/word/%E3%81%A7%E3%81%AF
Thanks. Sorry, I got a bit lost in your explanation. Do you think では, as an interjection and conjunction should be spelled with a space in romaji? I've seen "dewa" many times in dictionaries and textbooks, although my current dictionaries don't use romaji? --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)00:42, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Apologies for the confusion. I meant, I think de wa would be more appropriate. で alone can be an interjection and conjunction, and では is just で + は, much as でも is just で + も. Sometimes, as speakers think while talking, you might even hear someone start to speak by saying sore de ... wa ..., adding the wa on after a brief pause for thought. That kind of construction makes it clear to me that では is two separate words, even if they do get contracted sometimes into just じゃ.
That said, my feelings on this aren't set in granite, insofar as I consider that English itself has numerous examples of munged-together words, albeit that some examples have other minor spelling alterations. :) Though I admit that the spaceless romaji rendering does make me wince a bit. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig01:21, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Well, since Japanese has no spaces, romaji can go either way, so I have added a Japanese dewa section. It doesn't hurt to have both versions, since spaceless "dewa" is used quite a lot in published works. @Haplology, thanks for the plug-in link, I'm using it now, pity Firefox hasn't made it a default feature. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)01:31, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I tried using {{ja-r}} in this edit, and discovered that the hyphen came through in both the kana and the rom. I assumed from the behavior of {{ja-noun}} that the hyphen would only appear in the rom.
I don't suppose you could update {{ja-r}} to match the behavior of {{ja-noun}} with respect to hyphens?
I don't think it was wonky yesterday when I created that (I mean, the hhira correctly showed just かはいがる, and didn't add the mistaken する). I popped over to 老師 and found that the hhira there, using {{ja-noun}}, was also adding the する. ... !?
I tried removing the legacy (and now extraneous) params in {{ja-noun}} there, and hit Preview, and got a Module error, with the following details found when using Inspect element in Chrome:
<p>
<strong class="error">
<span class="scribunto-error" id="mw-scribunto-error-0">Module error
<!--Lua error: bad argument #1 to 'gsub' (string expected, got nil)--></span>
</strong>
</p>
Yesterday I edited ja-headword mainly to make the code more elegant compartmentalized but also to make it a little more flexible with input. Besides the bug, I suppose the main change in behavior is that the second unnamed parameter can be kana too, so that for example {{ja-noun|ひらがな|カタカナ}} or {{ja-pos|proper|だいすけ}} work now. That bug got introduced in the process, and I think I've fixed it but let me know if it malfunctions any more. I can't think of any -suru verbs with historical hiragana so I can't check those right now, but 老師 and 可愛がる seem to work. Haplogy (話) 00:10, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
SEX violates the assumption that every page is either kana itself or has kana in the headword, and this diff should fix the problem with バーデン＝ヴュルテンベルク, and adding the katakana form セックス to the headword would the problem with SEX. I think it's reasonable to expect there to be kana on pages whose page name is not entirely kana or associated symbols like ＝. Haplogy (話) 12:25, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Japanese "＝" has two usages "=" (equal sign) and "-" hyphen in some loanwords. I have added parameter セックス to SEX and rom=Bāden-Vyurutenberuk to バーデン＝ヴュルテンベルク, it's still in "Japanese terms with romaji needing attention". Perhaps "＝" should be transliterated as "-"? --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)12:49, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I think if ＝ is made to convert to a hyphen when romanized in Module:ja, it should romanize correctly and not show up in that category. If it's meant as an equal sign it would be a problem, but I think that would be limited to examples or quotes, and it would be a rare case. I can't think of a term that contains an equal sign (that is not a hyphen). Haplogy (話) 13:08, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I was just about to save that edit when I discovered that somebody had done it already. The next step is to capitalize the first letter of romanizations following a period. Who will do that one? Haplogy (話) 13:20, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
One minor realization of mine about why splitting out the -する entries bothers me is that the bare form (without the する) does actually get used in a verb sense when used in kanji strings and in more 固い writing styles, often evidenced in headlines or titles or the like. Examples:
Anyway, I realize suddenly how long-winded this post is -- apologies for that. Suffice it to say that:
Actually, never mind about the 