Talk:little

Little as a noun

Little simply cannot be a noun in English. I've just deleted a section that looks like this:

===Noun===
little
#a small amount
#:Little did I know about mountain climbing before I set off.

====Translations====
*Finnish: vähäinen määrä
*Swedish: lite

This is in fact just the adjective being used without a noun, and the word lite in Swedish is also an adjective. --Krun 23:49, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

That example was indeed incorrect, but: He knows little about British history? Every little helps? These are either nouns, or maybe bare determiners (you can't say *my little, *one little, *two littles). In any case, the current entry doesn't account for them. CapnPrep 23:58, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Little as a determiner

The third adjective sense: trifling, negligable It's of little importance. is actually a determiner, not an adjective. However, when I tried to make that change, there were some issues WRT to the order of entries and an admin reverted the change.--BrettR 15:06, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Bug in SAMPA formatter

The SAMPA notation for syllabic 'l' is /l=/. When presented with a final syllabic 'l', as in "little" (/"lItl=/), Wiktionary's SAMPA formatter gets confused and displays "{{{l}}}". How do I fix this?

Use an escape sequence such as = or specify the parameter you're assigning, e.g. {{X-SAMPA|1=/"lItl=/}} → X-SAMPA: /"lItl=/. (It's not a bug per se. "=" has a special meaning in template calls; it tells it you're naming a parameter. You're telling the template to give the parameter /"litl the value /, but the template is not instructed how to display arbitrary parameters.) —Muke Tever 00:06, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! AndreasWittenstein 19:19, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

For future reference, escape sequences should generally not be used unless there is no alternative as they make the source text harder to read. Thryduulf 02:33, 4 June 2008 (UTC)