User talk:Neitrāls vārds

Synthetic pronunciation

Hi. Please do not add synthetic pronunciation to more entries until the discussion in WT:BP is over. --Vahag (talk) 22:05, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

OK, no worries! :) It's not like I'm going to mass-add it, I do not operate a bot or anything. I do however think that in the worst case scenario it could be relegated to references section for IPA's because the speech synthesis is actually pretty good (aside from the fact that it ignores the so called "wide ⟨e⟩" (IPA^(key): /æ/), otherwise it's actually able to differentiate between "native" and "non-native" ⟨o⟩, for example pronouncing opera as IPA^(key): /oːpɛra/ but ola as IPA^(key): /ʊoɑla/. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 23:31, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

būts?

You said once that būt "to be" does have a past participle būts, used in cases like vai tu jau (esi) būts Amerikā? "have you already been to America?" But here's my question: isn't this be a case in which one should use bijis, i.e., vai tu (esi) bijis Amerikā?? In other words, for intransitive verbs, wouldn't the past passive (-ts) participle have the same meaning as the past active (-(j)is) participle? Or is there a difference between them in this particular ("have-you-ever-been-to...") usage? --Pereru (talk) 22:17, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

It's essentially passive voice (I think...) Since the words for "to be" in most all languages are the most intransitive that there can be, i.e., they don't have a "patient" only an "agent" it is a little weird. Although something similar could be constructed with other intransitive verbs, e.g., gulēt. Vai ir vispār gulēts šonakt which in English would then be translated "have I/you/he (the agent is omitted in passive voice so different persons could go there) slept at all tonight." Prob. different sentence would be needed to translate it 1:1 (using English's own passive voice) this could do: 10 stundas tiek gulētas katru nakti - "10 hours are being slept every night." And that leads to the question what is the difference between pass. voice with ir vs. tiek. Accord. to this [1] būt instead of tikt is used to make ciešamās kārtas saliktā tagadne which I speculate would be "present perfect of passive voice." So, ir gulēts denotes the action is complete but also leaves out the patient, what has been slept? - kas ir tas kas ir (ticis) gulēts? Laiks? Miegs? But then it's possible to construct it specifying what has been slept (out) specifically: dzērums ir izgulēts - "inebriation/drunkenness has been slept out." Although in this case gulēt takes on an object (dzērums) (iz)gulēt ko? - dzērumu. So, it's not 100% intransitive in this case. Or with būt - ilgs laiks ir būts (not super common but acceptable.)

My conclusion, būt can take on passive voice in a defective way. Only 3rd pers. and usually with the perfect ir instead of the indicative (or continuous or w/e it was called) tiek with elision of the patient. Confined to small number of expressions. In sent. vai tu esi būts Amerikā, tu would be the patient and that would mean that someone else (unspecified) "būted" them. So, imo, only 3rd pers. For regular (active voice) present perfect there would def. be bijis. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 08:41, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Actually ilgu laiku ir būts sounds better and the accusative is used for no other purpose than to "adverbialize" the ilgs laiks or so it appears. (Can't think of another reason why would it take on acc.?) ilgu laiku ir būts ~ īslaicīgi ir būts ~ ilglaicīgi ir būts - all sound equally adverbial. So būt passive constructions won't usually have a patient, I would speculate. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 08:56, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

nekustēts aliaque mirabilia

Indeed, that is a very interesting question. There always seem to be things in languages that are "sort-of OK" "in some contexts" "not very frequent" "sometimes maybe perhaps"... (In my experience, native speakers of a language can angrily disagree with each other about these things, one saying "yes you can say it like that" and the other saying "no you can't"...) Which begs the question of what to do in cases like that in a dictionary like this one, attempting to list all extant' words but not "theoretically existing but actually not used" words. Wiktionary would in principle like to be free of fringe phenomena like protologisms and suchlike. But it's not always clear which of the "iffy" words really exist (or really don't exist), so they go with attestations. Take intransitive passive particiles, like gulēts, dejots, etc. The cases you mention ("pseudo-passives", since intransitive verbs should in principle not have passives... the semantic import of the cases you mention is more like that of a subject-demoting structure, since in those cases the subject -- "who slept? what was slept?" -- is usually absent) are well attested, but not inflected forms. Yet you yourself mentioned a feminine plural form gulētas in an example; and, with a few Google searches, it is possible to find other forms (examples: pēc gulētām naktīm; patiecoties gulētajai naktij, etc.). So it seems OK to have the full declention for gulēt here at wiktionary. But, as you point out, this is not necessarily the case for kustēts or nekustēts. At some level this may be because of competition from other words (kustināt, kustēties... it seems kustēt by itself, in all its forms, is rather rare). So, what should one do in these cases? Only start pages for attested inflected forms? Ask a native speaker if s/he agrees that this or that inflected form "really exists"? (And what if the native speakers disagree?)... (To say nothing of the participles in -(j)ams, which are even more frequently absent...). I found one example with an inflected form of nekustēts, here (middle of the page): ja tev būt[s?] 2.93 tad tas auto nekustēto uz priekšu (but I'm afraid this may be a misspelled nekustētos, the conditional form of the reflexive nekustēties -- what do you think?)
In principle I the most prudent approach is to not give inflection tables for such participles unless we are more or less sure that the inflected forms exist (or could at least in principle exist...). Accordingly, I have marked them as non-existent in some cases. If you have some time, perhaps you could look at the verbs in Category:Latvian intransitive verbs and tell me which ones you think do have only the nominative ...ts participle form, which ones have more inflected forms, and which ones don't even have the ...ts' nominative participle form (including the negative forms)... I'd appreciate your input on that.
Perhaps there should be a three-way distinction: intransitive verbs with a full inflected participial paradigm (gulēt - gulēts), those with only the nominative singular (būt - būts), and those that don't have any past participle. What do you think? --Pereru (talk) 17:41, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Somehow, Twilight Zone intro started playing in my head [2] :D OK, jokes aside. First thing I noticed gulēt does not seem to be a true intransitive verb, it can take all kinds of objects (nakts, miegs, dzērums, etc.) in all cases: negulēta nakts, negulētu nakti, negulētā naktī. So it could just as well be reclassified as transitive (not sure what dict's say though, I suspect, though, that they unanimously classify it as intransitive, this would not be the first case where they're off though.) Let's hope this is an outlier and that it has somehow "mutated" due to being a very often used verb. As far as all the others - actual true intransitive verbs - all of them will be OK as long as they are not negative. A "usage notes" template could be created "rare, idiomatic, abstract, only in 3rd pers., doesn't take a patient, only perfect (with ir), only masculine, only singular, never declined for case." The non-existing ones, e.g., nekustēts, kustēta or similar could have usage notes that they "do not technically exist." But I wouldn't be too hasty with deleting or redirecting them. God knows what the nutty Latvian linguists could come up with next. There's a whole story about iegult, where they took a clearly intransitive verb (gult, although only used reflexively - gulties) to latvianize a clearly transitive English verb "to embed" (e.g., a video, etc.) And there you'd have it "video ir (ticis) iegults" - "video has been embedded." Although gult is truly intransitive (can't think of any object it could take.)

To summarize as long as they are masc. sing. nom. (ending in -ts) and not negative all of them should be OK. (P.S., you're right, nekustēto is a misspelling of reflexive nekustētos.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 19:32, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Template:Hidden begin

If this is only for your user page, it should be in your user namespace. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:25, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

It was intended for a general template but it doesn't appear to be working, perhaps Wikipedia javascript files are different, I'd say you can delete both {{Hidden begin}} and {{Hidden end}}. Thanks! Neitrāls vārds (talk) 20:38, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

be

Re "is there any reason why GenAm pronunciation wouldn't have a long vowel?": Vowel length is not phonemic in GenAm, so it is not marked in broad transcriptions. - -sche (discuss) 01:05, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Interesting... As far as phonemic... I got the impression that phonetic transcriptions are more "desirable." With "r-colored vowels," glottal stops/syllabic n in words like mountain, etc. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 22:41, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

/biː/ in General American

General American does not have a distinct /iː/; the FLEECE vowel is simply /i/. See Appendix:IPA chart for English, w:International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects. —Ruakh_TALK 01:21, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

If I say that bean and bin have different vowel quantity (aside from the vowel being slightly different) am I just projecting? :D Neitrāls vārds (talk) 22:42, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Nope, you're quite right about that. They absolutely have different vowel quantity. But we aim for a phonemic transcription: there is only a single /i/ phoneme in GenAm, so we don't need to write it as /iː/ just to emphasize that it's longer than /ɪ/. —Ruakh_TALK 23:52, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Templates

Please don't use {{t}} to link to other words, like at tas. That's only meant to be used for translation tables. You should use {{l}} in lists and {{term}} in running text. —CodeCat 22:28, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, I was actually wondering about whether putting t in italics is right, like an hour ago I finally stumbled on that term template which is what I needed apparently. I probably still need to go through all of them at some point, my LV etyms even moreso. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 22:45, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

There's a difference between {{term}} and {{term/t}} too. They do the same thing, but they take the language parameter differently. {{term/t}} works like {{t}} and {{l}}, it takes the language as the first parameter. {{term}} takes it with lang= instead. I know it's confusing... we were actually going to change that so there were just {{l}} (for lists) and {{m}} (for mentions), but then people started to oppose that, and it didn't get anywhere. So we're still stuck with the half-finished state. It's how things go sometimes on Wiktionary. :/ —CodeCat 23:11, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

You are right it is confusing! :D I guess I'll have to try to read up on the difference between the two. And thanks, for fixing the templates in some of those entries!

I was also curious is there a reason why you removed the causative in pūt? Also the author of that book indicates it (pūt) as specifically from bat-pro, in turn listing cognates with Slavic languages in pūst (I guess there PBS would fit.) (OK, the question whether inflate and rot are related is kind of a big question for me right now, lol.) Anyways hope you don't mind if I edit it (this time with correct templates though!) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 23:22, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

I thought it was just another related form, so it didn't seem very relevant to the etymology. Etymologies tend to become overwhelming and confusing very quickly in my experience, especially when people want to list lots of related forms, cognates and other "interesting" information. It often obscures the basic point. So I usually try to trim these things down to the minimum that is needed to get the point across. —CodeCat 23:25, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

I kind of love detailed etyms though (unless they go on a rampage of listing countless forms in very similar languages). On *pū- I prob. need to inquire in the etym. portal I had this dream of promoting putra ("porridge", part of names of several nat. dishes) (supposedly from inflate) for WOTD if I could sneak a mention that it's cognate "with such words as foul, putrefacation, pus among others." Alas my dreams were shattered when I saw that pure is from another *pū- lol. Prob. needs more research. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 23:57, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

All those "forms" categories

Wow... isn't that a bit overboard? What are they all needed for? —CodeCat 22:46, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

I usually copy the way Latvian is managed on Wikt. Livonian grammar is a mess (to put it unceremoniously) those cats could actually be very useful. (The only thing I had doubts is whether two separate cardinal and ordinal numeral cats were really needed.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 22:51, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

I'm not really sure if everyone would agree with having a category for each combination of case, number and part of speech. I didn't really like the ones that were made for Latvian either. Maybe it should be brought up at the Beer Parlour... —CodeCat 00:40, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

I you would like that, sure! One thing I would propose would be leaving case+number categories but dropping part of speech (num, adj, noun). Unlike, e.g., lv (and probably many other Ide. languages), liv doesn't have any distinction among parts of speech in terms of how they are inflected, e.g., cat, ten and beautiful happen to be +/- of the same inflectional type (each with its irregularities of course).

Otherwise those cats are pretty much the only reason why create those form of pages, they could potentially be used to see for example which words end with -õ in partitive sg., which with -t or -da, which with -iž / -īž / -iz / -īz in plural illative, etc. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 01:00, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

If they're meant for analysing the forms, couldn't the nouns themselves be categorised that way, instead of their forms? That's how we normally do it with other languages. Maybe you could look at how it's done for Finnish or Estonian, the situation for Livonian is probably similar. Estonian for example has Category:Estonian nominals by declension, with subcategories for each type of noun. —CodeCat 01:02, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

I know that coverage of Estonian is in a pretty bad state... (although Dick L. has created some infrastructure.) OK, in Finnish this ajassa has just the top level category (no mention of the Finnish "diabolical k" lol.) Idk, creating form of pages this way seems a pretty futile endeavor because what do they have to offer then? Neitrāls vārds (talk) 01:11, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

About Category:Estonian nominals by declension I wish that was the case with liv – it has ~250 inflection types (thus liv version of that page would be 250 cats!) as opposed to circa 16 case+number cats like right now. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 01:14, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Why are there so many? —CodeCat 01:22, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

An agglutinative language compacting/"crunching" its inflection apparently doesn't lead to good results, lol! (Ironically the Latvian dialect spoken there has come to an almost complete collapse of inflection for example even the verb to be doesn't take person.) http://www.murre.ut.ee/liivi/noomenityybid.html there are some dupes but I doubt that it would be possible to get down that number to below 200. I've been contemplating somehow trying to "tie together" as many types as possible in "clusters" but I think I'm over it – just create a template where every case has to be entered manually (which would leave case cats as the only place where patterns could be observed.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 01:35, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

I think the main reason is that Livonian (like Estonian) has evolved in such a way that many inflection classes were created by crossing various different changes (phonological and otherwise) that occurred between Proto-Balto-Finnic and the present-day languages. So a certain change creates irregularities 1 and 2, and this definies 4 classes (words that have irregularity 1, words that have irregularity 2, words that have both, and words that have neither); and so on for each new irregularity. (Note also how Estonian often has more than one possibility for a certain form, e.g. the "short" vs. "long" illative (-sse vs. "strengthening" of the consonant in the final syllable, or genitive plurals with i or with te...). The result is a language in which it is surprisingly difficult to learn paradigms well: every new word may well belong to a new inflectional type... --

You're prob. right. The mixy-matchy, Venn diagram-like appearance seems to be a general characteristic of fen declension, in fact, many genuine simplifications have taken place in liv (i.e., simplifications that don't leave any artifacts behind.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 01:42, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Hej, Neitrals Vārds, labs darbs ar lībiešu valodu!! --Pereru (talk) 23:24, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Tencinu. :) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 01:42, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Your templates

Aside from using {{t}} instead of {{l}}, your templates currently make up 8 of the 17 members of Category:Pages with script errors. Neither of these has any effect on the actual entries, but the module errors do clutter up a category that should be kept free for the more serious problems.

It would be a good idea to figure out how to keep you modules from using the template(s) in question with empty input. I'm no expert on templates, so I'm not much help in fixing the problem, but you might get some ideas from the hundreds of other templates that do what yours do without script/module errors.

Even the t vs. l choice opens you up for problems if, somewhere down the line, a decision is made to change how translation tables look or work. That would be especially bad if you were gone on to other things by that time, and others had to pick up after you.

As I said, these aren't drop-dead emergencies, but they are somewhat annoying. Thanks. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:58, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

It's not such a good idea to duplicate all the code for the table in every template. It's much preferred, and easier to maintain, if you create one template that shows only the table, and has one parameter for each form that should be filled in. Other templates can then use that as their base, by supplying the forms that go in each of the table cells. Many existing inflection tables already work that way. Look at how it's done with Estonian for example: there is one template {{et-conj-table}} that has lots of parameters, and then all the other templates for the different conjugation types (like {{et-conj-nägema}}) will call that template and pass those parameters with the proper forms. It's much much neater that way, and much easier to work with.

I'm also not very happy that you are still using {{t}} to create links outside of translation tables. I asked you not to do this before. Please don't do it anymore, and fix any cases where you have already done this in the past. —CodeCat 00:58, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

Yes, Chuck Entz, that is something I noticed. An easy fix would be to get rid of {{t}} (for those cases that are empty before something is passed to them) and use a plain link instead. Only some of the cases need that (although it would probably be "nicer" to replace all t's in those templates that are intended to be used in mainspace.

CodeCat, yes, I noticed Latvian decl templates also use that format, however, that requires "uniformity" of unnamed/positional parameters among templates. It is not possible for the 3 verb templates because I made them to be as short as possible and what is {{{2}}} in one template is something different in another template. I think it is a really minor thing. (Btw, before I lurked talk page of About Estonian I had no idea that it's you who's making et templates!)

Also I had some questions (should this go in BP instead?)

• CodeCat suggested that there are too many form of cats for liv nominals, and I'm starting to think that maybe you're right (I still have some 32 cats to make). What sollution would you suggest, I'm thinking – ax them all and have just 16 cats "Livonian nominal forms ([number] [case])"
• Also I saw you editing a template, something internal-inflection something, is that a name for compounds where both parts are inflected (like nuoripari)? Right now there is Category:Livonian pseudo-compounds but I feel guilty about having made up that name. They have to be called something though.

There's probably more but I can't remember now. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 13:47, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

It's really not such a minor thing. I have worked with many templates in the past and I can tell from experience that it's a real pain to have to edit templates that duplicate everything. It could make the difference between having to make one edit and having to make dozens. So I do think that if you have a reason for not doing that way, it should be explained. I'm not really sure if I understand your reasoning about {{{2}}}, can you elaborate and give some examples?

It's better not to pay too much attention to the Finnish templates right now. I'm currently working on converting them to a Lua module, so they're not in their final state and there are many inconsistencies.

I think that one category for all forms is enough. There is no need for categories for each case and number. We do it this way for most other languages, why would Livonian be any different? —CodeCat 13:55, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

OK, this is me explaining. {{liv-verb-jellõ}} has to address a a long vowel appearing (and possible de-gemination) before personal ending in present this means that that is the 2nd param – |jellõ|jelā|. (That's from memory, could be imprecise.)

{{liv-verb-luggõ}} has to address the cons. being geminate in present but degeminating in past, for example. The second param is g as in |lug|g|.

Whole of Livonian is served by mere 4 templates (1 nominal, 3 verb) (or rather can be served, there are some "optional" templates) this means that if you want to make changes to the table you have to make 4 edits (not dozens). Ease of entering I think trumps potentially, hypothetically having to make 4 edits instead of 1 in event of wanting to change something in the appearance of the table. If you would attempt that it would mean "uniformizing" params among the three templates (am I getting that right?) which would lead to constant empty params or goodness forbid long unwieldy named params, something like jellõ-type-stem=, luggõ-type-stem= (because, e.g., infinitive stem is used to make different tenses/moods for those two types.) Correct me if I'm wrong.

The q about internal-inflection was rather a terminology one not about the template itself. I'm looking for a name for words of the type vīžkimdõ (nom.), vīdkimdõ (gen.) and I don't like having made up a word ("pseudo-compound") I was thinking "compounds with internal inflection" could be it? Maybe I could also ask User:Hekaheka whether they have seen an English term for nuoripari type compounds... Neitrāls vārds (talk) 14:34, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

I'm not aware of an English term for "internally inflected" compound terms. This term is actually used in linguistic texts but it seems to mean a slightly different thing, actually two things: a) inflection pattern in which the inflected form is indicated by an infix rather than suffix like viisitoista (“fifteen”) > viidentoista (“of fifteen”) in Finnish or b) a compound in which the modifier is inflected in nominative case like ruohonleikkuri (“of-grass-cutter”) in Finnish. In one article that I found in the net the term "doubly inflected" was used of Sicilian verb structures in which two verbs are combined and both are inflected in the same way. At least it would not seem awfully wrong to call "nuoripari" -type doubly inflected. --Hekaheka (talk) 17:57, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! Doubly inflected then could be another candidate. Technically pseudo-compound is a word too except used in relation to some phonetics phenomenon. Viisitoista scares me, lol. In liv of teens only ikštuoistõn is (indicated as) doubly inflected and my source only states that it's that type of compound and now I'm wondering what if only the first part is inflected, e.g., īdkõkstuoistõn and not īdkõkstuoistõnõks. If tuoistõn means "of the second" (kind of like a subordinate clause in a sentence) then that would only make sense. I guess I will have to somehow try to find that out. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 18:30, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

From what I can see, {{liv-verb-luggõ}} and {{liv-verb-jellõ}} have the same table. The forms that appear in the table are determined differently, yes, but the table structure itself is not different. So you can create {{liv-conj-table}}, which shows only the table, and has one named parameter for each form. The templates {{liv-verb-luggõ}} and {{liv-verb-jellõ}} would then call {{liv-conj-table}} and tell it which forms go in each of the table cells. So each separate template can have different parameters, but they all share the same template for creating the actual table. That way, if we ever want to change how the table looks, we don't need to edit every template, we can change just that one.

I don't think there is a name for such compounds. And it's really hard to handle them with templates, because you really need some way to "combine" different inflection types, and that's almost impossible to do with templates alone. In the past, this was solved for Finnish by creating a separate template for each combination, but that's obviously not workable because there are 48 types and therefore 48x48=2304 separate templates. It's one of the reasons why I'm working on converting the templates to Lua, it would be much easier to solve it nicely with that. —CodeCat 15:35, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

It is a matter of taste/preference and I know that I do not want named parameters when I can have just a 3 or 4 unnamed ones per every "cluster" of verb types. Case in point, I just had to spend good 15 minutes on something as inane as getting rid of the t-template where it's empty (obviously its going to be empty in nominative on the template page!) and replace it with good old plain links. IMO "cascading" transclusion is not always the best thing (as can be seen in this example.)

Also I had a question. All of my templates (for example, {{liv-noun-reg}}) have a stray </nowiki> closing tag (up where the NavFrame markup is) is it there for a reason? It was like that in the original. (If it shouldn't be there then I can edit all the 10 templates. And I doubt that it would take more than a couple minutes.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 16:39, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

I've created {{liv-conj-table}} and changed the existing verb templates to use it. It's much cleaner this way, less duplication and it's very easy to create new conjugation types when necessary. I also renamed the templates so that they match the names used for other languages. —CodeCat 18:25, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

Paldies! :)

Es vēlos pateikties par tavu darbu ar latviešu izrunām. Ļoti labi! Man tik patīk redzēt visus tos jaunus failus latviešu šķirkļos! (Esmu sācis domāt, ka varbūt man jādara kaut ko lidzīgs ar portugaļu valodu...) --Pereru (talk) 14:55, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Jā, es reāli gribu pievienot jau esošos failus (vismaz tos, kuri nav defektīvi) pēc iespējas ātrāk, paprasīju, lai mani pievieno AWB lietotājiem, cerams, ka tas varētu to paātrināt (arī tā iemesla dēļ, ka man ir nepabeigti lībiešu šķirkļi).

Es vienu laiku centos (manuāli) taisīt nelielu copyeditingu tiem, kuriem es pievienoju audio (teiksim, bolds nepareizajā vietā utt.), bet tagad es pārstāju, bet man ir reālas aizdomas, ka, piemēram, nenoslēgtus treknrakstus un slīprakstus (piem., '''vārds'') varētu ļoti lielos daudzumos izlabot ar AWB, tikai būtu jāizdomā kādi settingi tam būtu vajadzīgi.

Un es viennozīmīgi piekrītu, ka vairāk valodām ir vajadzīga izrunas coverage, avó un avô būtu prime candidates (tāpat jebkuri vārdi, kur ir ar cirkumfleksu akcentēti burti, it īpaši, ja viņiem ir minimālie pāri...) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 21:33, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Jau esmu pievienojis izrunu vārdiem avó un avô. Jāteic ka tas ir interesants darbs. Varbūt pievienošu vairākus izrunas failus citiem portugaļu vārdiem pēc nākamās nedēļas (es nebūšu kontaktā ar internetu līdz aprīlim)... --Pereru (talk) 22:53, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Damn, es tik un tā īsti nevaru pateikt atšķirību, laikam, kaut kas ar uzsvaru... (Bet no IPAs to ne tik nevarētu pateikt!) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 23:00, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Mans amerikāņu draugs šeit Brazīlijā saka to pašu :-)... Bet ja paskatās skaņas failus ar Audacity (vai ar citām skaņas analīzes programmām: Praat, CECIL, Sound Explorer...), tad redzēs ka ir atšķirības. Skaņas intensitāte ar "ô" ir vājāka (jo "ô" izruna ar lūpām ciešāk kopā), un patskaņu formanti arī atšķiras. Kā arī starp poço ("aka") ar "ô" un posso ("es varu") ar "ó"...

Attiecībā uz "vārds": tu varbūt varētu izdarīt jaunu izrunas failu? Man šķiet ka esošā faila kvalitāte nav pietiekami laba. --Pereru (talk) 23:42, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Šādiem minimālajiem pāriem visvairāk noder audio faili. Man vispār uzsvara jautājums aktuāls tagad, jo es pamanīju, ka es reālu papilduzsvaru lieku garākos siev. dz. vārdos, droši vien, tāpēc, lai man nebūtu vēlme pilnībā tikt vaļā no galotnes à la Igaunijs Republik (papilduzsvars gan ir pilnībā pieņemami, bet par es biju šokā, izklausās it kā uzsvars uz otrās vai pat pēdējās zilbes un to tā neizrunā, bet pašam likās, ka izrunāju normāli.) Un jā, Xil nebija tas labākais mikrofons, kad viņa tos dažus failus taisīja, varētu provizoriski pielikt {{rfap}} blakus esošajam failam... Neitrāls vārds (talk) 00:01, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Jā-ā-ā, man ir dažreiz gruti dzirdēt galotnes, kad klausos latviešu pārraides internetā... "Latvijas veselības ministre Baiba Rozentāle" izklausās kā "Latvijs veselībs ministre" u.t.t. Man reiz bija diskusija ar skaņas faila šķirklī "ēzelis" autoru (Xil varbūt?), vai ir tiešām patskanis "i" viņa izrunā: es dzirdēju tikai "ēzels", bet viņš garantēja ka izrunāja normālo latviešu "i".

Izrunāt "normāli" ir bieži ļoti grūti, jo situācija ir "svarīga" kā Wikivārdnīcā! :-)... --Pereru (talk) 02:19, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Tas, laikam, ir "Rīgas akcenta" iezīme salīdzinot ar centrālās Vidzemes 100% "pareizo" lv valodu – jo tālāk uz rietumiem, jo lielāka tendence mest nost galotnes. Bet tā kā es jau explicitly apzīmēju visus savus failus ar riga, domāju nākotnē varētu ļaut sev vaļu mest viņas nost pēc sirds patikas, lai nav jāsatraucas par dīvainiem sekundārajiem uzsvariem. Beigu beigās "Rīgas akcents" ir de facto standarts pat ja ne oficiālais/zinātniskais (kam vienīgais iemesls manuprāt ir centr. Vidz. trīsvirzienu diferenciācija intonācijā atšķirībā no Rīgas divvirzienu.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 02:46, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Livonian ab

There are two possible Proto-Finnic forms that this can be derived from, or . Do you know if it's possible to tell which one? Like, is there anything in the declension that gives it away? —CodeCat 15:37, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

You probably mean the -ūd plural?

Category:Livonian nominal forms (plural nominative) is useless right now as ab is the only one with that plural (kū plurals don't count as ū is part of the stem.) But in LĒL's table around 70th type you would find Estonian (and Finnish) equivalents with both "thematic" i and u, e.g., joug : jougūd – et jõgi but then vag : vagūd – et vagu, etc.

Viitso thinks that liv was the first to split off from Finnic unity with South Estonian next so if SE has i then liv would prob too (last link in Wiktionary:About Livonian#Sources, only in liv and lv but you prob. don't need that to get the tree.) He also mentions stuff like liv and Mordvinic languages being the only Finno-Permic languages having a dedicated dative, etc. not sure how that plays into that.

And I think the most important part “abi”, in [ETY] Eesti etümoloogiasõnaraamat [Estonian Etymological Dictionary] (in Estonian) (online version), Tallinn: Eesti Keele Sihtasutus (Estonian Language Foundation), 2012 points out abi as an Indo-Iranian borrowing which should prob. def. be on the Appendix page. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 08:44, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

So there's no way to tell? —CodeCat 16:08, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

If you do in fact mean the "thematic vowel," I would just go with what Võro has. And there really is no way, there are paradigms like Costa Rica, lilla, kaffe (which tend to be borrowings), OK, also pǟva (which isn't) where a nominative theme vowel remains a part of inflected endings but there are none (that I know of, anyhow) where a theme vowel would resurface after liv had gotten rid of it in nominative.

Also, if abi is from Indo-Iranian *avas- shouldn't it first be /b/ and only then /p/, I don't think I've seen a (European) language (obviously not counting something crazy like Hawaiian) that can shift /v/ to /p/, /v/ to /b/ (and then /b/ to /p/) is very common though.

I've been meaning to ask you to create a reference template for where these protoforms are from (is it the big Russian etymology site?) because, for example, in või#Noun the protoform is very different than what “või”, in [ETY] Eesti etümoloogiasõnaraamat [Estonian Etymological Dictionary] (in Estonian) (online version), Tallinn: Eesti Keele Sihtasutus (Estonian Language Foundation), 2012 gives.

Or given past discussions that I've seen, I would guess that these are your own reconstructions. Usually taking Finnish as the source (well Finnish kind of is among the more archaic fiu-fin langs, not sure how Veps' 23 cases play into that.) But for example in this case devoicing of the b to p I think clearly is a Finnish/NE fiu-fin innovation. It is extremely easy to screw up with etyms (the mess at pūte#Etymology is a nice example), in fact, I constantly sneer at Karulis grasping on straws that obvious borrowings are in fact native BS words (OK, he has a very pronounced pro-Balto-Slavic bias) but the difference is that he has published it in his name, he can be later held "accountable." Neitrāls vārds (talk) 18:23, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

I suppose by thematic vowel you mean the last vowel of the word. I'm not familiar with Livonian and how it developed, and how it inflects nowadays. I do know that final sounds were eroded rather severely. So I don't know if Livonian preserves the difference between nouns ending in -i and nouns ending in -u in some way. Estonian does, in the genitive, so that allows you to tell. But I don't know if there is any part of Livonian declensions that lets you "recover" the original vowel, or at least narrow it down some, so I thought you might know.

Proto-Uralic had no voiced stops at all, according to the general linguistic consensus. In Proto-Finnic, too, the consensus is that there was no phonemic contrast in voicing. Proto-Finnic b and p were allophones of the same phoneme, where b appeared at the start of a closed syllable or a non-initial odd-numbered syllable, and p elsewhere (which is why relates to ). In other words, they are related through consonant gradation. Proto-Finnic b was probably actually a fricative in most cases, too, although it became a stop in Livonian and Veps. So I'm not sure where you get the idea that there was any devoicing.

I'm not sure where you get the idea of "accountability" from either, or at least not in any sense that it's somehow different from Wiktionary. No single person on Wiktionary is strictly accountable for its content. However, because its content is licenced freely and can be modified and discussed by anyone else, there is still accountability, there's still peer review. If you disagree with some etymologies or reconstructions, discuss it in WT:ES. That's what it's there for. All of those discussion rooms (Tea Room, Etymology Scriptorium, RfV, RfD etc) are part of Wiktionary's accountability/peer review process.

Different Finnic languages show different types of archaisms, and are useful for reconstructing different parts of words:

• Finnish is archaic in some respects, but not so much in others. It preserves the original voicelessness of consonants well, and it also retains pretty much all final vowels. But it doesn't preserve weak consonant grades very well; weak-grade *g is almost completely lost for example, and *d also tends to disappear in many cases. It also loses *h a lot. Finnish also has vocalisation of consonants before sonorants, like in aura.
• Karelian on the other hand preserves *h pretty much everywhere. It also preserves the original consonants which vocalise in Finnish.
• Veps meanwhile also preserves *h, and it also preserves weak-grade *b, *d and *g intact, which makes it very useful. On the other hand, it doesn't preserve vowel length at all.
• Estonian preserves the three-way consonant length distinction, which was lost in Finnish and probably in many other northern languages as well. It also preserves long vowels intact very well in the first syllable, better than Finnish. But it's not as useful for reconstructing non-initial syllables.
• Võro is actually the most archaic Finnic language, at least if you go by historical development. It preserves final -h and -k (as -q) which makes it pretty much unique among Finnic languages. It's also the only Finnic language to preserve the distinction between -kt- and -ht-, which appear in Võro as -tt- and -ht- but merge as -ht- in all other Finnic languages. —CodeCat 19:04, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

OK, if voicedness wasn't phonemic then p would do, you are, however, going to mention its ultimate Indo-Iranian source, right? That's kind of the most important bit (imo, anyhow.) If you look at vag (vagu), sug (sugu), joug (jõgi), nim (nimi) here there doesn't appear to be any difference in their inflection. So I do not think there's a way to tell.

There's a reason why I put "accountable" in scare quotes. What I mean is simply that any genuinely novel content must be attributable to a name. A name with some credentials. Sadly our society has put up a system where to get your name to be "authoritative enough" 90% is circus poodle jumping through hoops and maybe 10% is actual research. I do believe that there are alternative avenues, however, I think one could self-publish an Amazon book without formal training in that particular field (in their real name, however) and people might actually buy it, hell, it might even get quoted. Such a book could be quoted on Wiktionary! Wiktionary's community consensus, however, is not a tool to arrive at something completely novel like undocumented, reconstructed protoforms, it's for discussing template appearance. WT is a secondary not a primary source. There are avenues that could be more rewarding to both the (original) researcher and the reader. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 19:51, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

I disagree. Wiktionary content is, by policy and through its licence, not owned by anyone. Attribution of every single edit is given through a page's history, which is required by the licence terms. Wiktionary's community consensus is definitely also for research; how else would you describe what goes on at WT:RFV? And do you think that the process of defining a word does not have a strong element of research in it? What RFV does, in a sense, is test a hypothesis (the entry with its definitions) against reality (attestations). That's clearly research as I see it. With reconstructions, there are no attestations, but they can still be tested. They can be tested against established sound changes, for example, which can be found and documented. So if you need any sense of accountability, then it is in that; reconstructions should adhere to established linguistic theories on language development.

"Citations" are Wiktionary's way of showing to the reader "we have tested our content against reality, we found it to pass the test, and this is the evidence we found". They demonstrate the validity of the claim (the definitions) and show that it wasn't made up out of thin air. The equivalent of citations for reconstructions would be to cite the sound changes by which they can be derived. So far not many of our entries have such information, but that's mainly because there hasn't been much demand for it. And because sound changes are systematic, there would be a lot of duplication if we had to include them in every entry. —CodeCat 20:06, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

RFV is exactly what I'm "advocating" for. For core vocabulary items even in the smallest culture languages (like lv, et or, say, Maltese) it won't be needed as it can instantly be proven that, say, māksla or või are in fact words. They are not novel.

Reverse engineering words by documented sound changes might be slightly pushing it but that could actually add value to the dictionary. Then the question is why don't "we" have, for example, an appendix page with referenced fiu-fin sound changes. What are the chances of getting one? It wouldn't need to be linked to in mainspace but only in the protoform appendix pages. Dressing it up something like "likely most recent common ancestor reconstructed through documented sound changes (see Appendix:fiu-fin sound changes)" would make one practically immune to any accusations of OR.

People like me, for example, who don't know that voicedness of stops was allophonic could then see for themselves the shifts involved instead scoffing at the (referenceless) page because v > p looks suspicious/doesn't make sense to them. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 20:59, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

We do have some pages with sound changes, but we've mainly avoided making huge pages with lots of details because that seems more like the domain of Wikipedia. Putting all of that here would lead to duplication of information, with maintenance problems to follow. —CodeCat 23:01, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

How do I find these pages if I'm interested how the protoform was derived? I'm used to seeing only language specific appendices linked to from About pages. On Wikipedia I remember seeing only a (not very exhausting) paragraph on Hungarian sound changes and why the words seem so different from other Ugric languages. Duplication seems like much less an issue than unreliability of Wikipedia and pretty much the main motivation behind a wiki project is that it should condense different sources in one place and make looking up a concept quick above anything else.

In-house reconstructed protoforms need a boilerplate providing links to any pages explaining the methodology, regardless whether these pages are on Wiktionary or not. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 20:45, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

{{reconstructed}}. —CodeCat 21:20, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Sweet! I never thought about looking at that nondescript template, I never imagined those are reconstructions and wondered what the asterisk is for all the time! (And also you apparently didn't read anything I wrote here.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 22:39, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Re: Creating lower case entries on Wiktionary

Hi Neitrāls vārds, I have left a message for your here. Ganeshk (talk) 19:40, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

papēt?

Does the verb papēt mean to explore, or am I just typing it wrong? --Lo Ximiendo (talk) 09:38, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

pētīt is "to explore," the prefix pa- may be added to mean "a little; for a short while" – papētīt "to examine a little, check out quickly." Neitrāls vārds (talk) 10:59, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply; I thought that something like *papēt came from the word papētīju. --Lo Ximiendo (talk) 11:26, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Audio

AFAIK entries usually do have "Audio" in front of audio files; changing that would probably need a discussion (or is there one I am not aware of?). PS, sorry for issuing a (15 minute) block; I wanted to be sure your semi-automated edits stopped until we could discuss this, but it occurs to me that just leaving a message on your talk page causes AWB to stop. - -sche (discuss) 19:35, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

Whoops, missed this. Would my and Pereru's agreement on a particular Latvian entry convention count as consensus? Neitrāls vārds (talk) 19:53, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

"Audio" and bullet points

@ User:-sche, User:Wikitiki89, Pereru doesn't like the "Audio" bit (and also the bullet point) and he has been sporadically/manually removing it so Latvian pron. sections look inconsistent.

When I added the pron files I "blindly" followed some other example I saw but later I realized that I actually agree to Pereru that the "Audio" remark doesn't add anything of value. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 19:41, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

I would agree with removing the text "audio", but I do think we should keep the bullet point. I think this should be a WT:BP discussion, though. It impacts a lot of articles and languages. --WikiTiki89 19:44, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

The general practice AFAIK across all languages is to include the word "Audio", and we should be consistent between languages (not remove it from just one language). And I agree with Wikitiki that we should keep the bullet point. - -sche (discuss) 19:48, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

Oh well, in that case BP it is. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 19:55, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

Language header

You've been creating a lot of entries without the ===Moksha=== header. Can you fix them please? —CodeCat 23:08, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Oops! Thanks for reminding! Neitrāls vārds (talk) 23:10, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

"Usage note: the indefinite elative is…"

You seem to have been adding info such as this or this under ===Usage notes===. Surely this kind of info should be a part of the Declension section, though? --Tropylium (talk) 17:17, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

I think that's kind of a matter of personal preference but you can def edit them. I would be a little afraid that they wouldn't format correctly if they are right under the table. I'm actually thinking that perhaps sticking them in the usexes could be better even though it's just a single word, it could go something like this:

• Oahpa
  • kalsta – from a fish
  • ved'ftoma – without water, etc. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 17:46, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

Can't they go in the inflection table? —CodeCat 18:03, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

@CC, well, that's the idea, thing is, there does not appear to be a comprehensive source on mdf morphology, so, whatever attested forms there are, I want to keep track of them. I'm debating maybe drafting my own ad hoc "declension" types (officially there don't seem to be any) in an appendix and hoarding quotations there. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 18:22, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

For now, I would recommend making a template that has one parameter for each form. That way you can give the forms that are known. —CodeCat 18:33, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

I was planning to make a "manual" template (also that would probably be the only way to deal with pronouns, etc.) where every form is entered manually, otherwise I have a bunch of full paradigms attested that can then be extrapolated to other words with similar makeup, if it's done correctly Google gives results (like from Mokšen' Pravda.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 19:32, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

there does not appear to be a comprehensive source on mdf morphology

How comprehensive do you want? Raija Bartens in Mordvalaiskielten rakenne ja kehitys fairly clearly lists the following nominal declension categories for Moksha:

1. number: singular (-∅) / plural (-t/ť); not distinguished for any indefinite cases other than the nominative
2. definiteness: indefinite / definite; fewer cases are distinguished for definite nominals (ela/abl and ill/all contrasts are collapsed, lat, trans and "caselikes" are absent)
3. case: (subgrouping mine)
   • core cases: nominative (-∅), accusative-genitive (-ń)
   • local cases ("concrete"): inessive (-sa), elative (-sta), illative (-s), prolative (-va/ga), lative (-v/u/j/i)
   • local cases ("abstract"): ablative (-da/-ta), allative (-ńďi)
     (despite the names, this is not a contrast of inner versus outer local cases as in Finnic or Permic or Hungarian; the latter two could perhaps be also called partitive and dative)
   • other: translative (-ks)
   • case-like derivatives: abessive (-ftəma), comitative (-ńək), causative (-nksa), comparative (-ška), vocative (-j/kaj)
     (the abessive is formally equivalent to caritive adjectives, and the comparative to similative adjectives, which can be then inflected in other cases; the vocative is not productive, being applied only to terms for relatives)
4. possession:
   • person of possessor
   • number of possessor
   • number of possessed (only distinguished for singular possessor, and only in the nominative, genitive and allative)

If we ignore the comparative (Bartens suggests analyzing the non-adjectival uses as adverbial) and the vocative, this would add up to a total of 13 singular indefinite case forms; 9 singular definite and plural definite case forms; and the indefinite nominative plural. --Tropylium (talk) 13:35, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

One of her example paradigms: мода (moda) 'earth' (without possession):

	indef.		def.
	sing.	plur.	sing.	plur.
nom	moda-∅	moda-t	moda-ś	moda-ťńä
acc-gen	moda-ń		moda-ť	moda-ťńəń
iness	moda-sa		moda-ť esa	moda-ťńəń esa
ela	moda-sta		moda-ť ezda	moda-ťńəń ezda
abl	moda-da
ill	moda-s		moda-ťi	moda-ťńəńďi
all	moda-ńďi
pro	moda-va		moda-ť ezga	moda-ťńəń ezga
lat	moda-v
trans	moda-ks
abe	moda-ftəma
caus	moda-nksa
comp	moda-ška
comit	moda-ńək

(She is not very clear on if the definite abessive/comitative/causative exist.) --Tropylium (talk) 13:50, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! Extra references always help. This person has made an error in def. pl. nom. though – it should be -ťńə not -ťńä. One thing, I think, I want to borrow from them is calling genitive "genitive-accusative" because gen. appears to be the object case universally (there doesn't appear to be a full/partial object distinction on the object.)

There is, as far as I know, a universal phonological process //Cə Ćə// > /Ca Ćä/ in word-final position in Moksha, so an ending -ťńə should not be possible.

From a practical point of view there are issues such as inexplicable theme vowel change in vowel stems, compare ава, цёра (ava , ćora) and акша, уша (akša , uša) – ava, avan', avat, cjora, cjoran', cjorat vs. akša, akšen', akšet, uša, ušen', ušet or веле (veľe) and сельме (śeľme) – vele, velen', velet vs. sel'me, sel'mon', sel'mot. Based on the above ava-type declension can be safely added to a pssible Moksha entry for moda. Thankfully these theme vowel changes can be deduced from the plural form but then there's the curiosity that the mini-dictionaries at the end of Poljakov's books are the only that show the plural and word stress (there are quite many words with non-initial stress.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 15:53, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

The "inexplicable" changes are based on my above-noted vowel change as well. Bartens distinguishes a-stems, ə-stems and consonant stems as the three main inflection classes; however back-vocalic ə-stems end in -a in the nom.sg., and so the inflection class cannot be fully distinguished just on the basis of the lemma.

These imply further differences especially in the lative form: a-stems take -v, consonant and ə-stems take -i (if front-vocalic) or -u (if back-vocalic), monosyllabic front-vocalic vowel stems take -j. In ə-stems there's also syncope in certain case forms before certain consonants or consonant clusters, e.g.

• piľgä : piľgə- 'foot' : nom. pl. piľk-ť, illat. piľk-s, iness. piľk-sa, ablat. piľk-ťä
• kenžä : kenžə- 'nail' : nom. pl.ablat. kenš-ťä (but regular illat. kenžə-s, iness. kenžə-sa)

Also note that Moksha does not have /e o/ in unstressed positions. Unstressed е о in the Cyrillic script stand for /ʲə ə/, or word-finally е for /ä/. So e.g. 'eye' has the stem /śeľmə-/, which becomes /śeľmä/ in the nominative. Since the schwa in the stem follows unpalatalized /m/, it's written о in inflected forms. --Tropylium (talk) 17:07, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

Should Module:mdf-translit be updated then? —CodeCat 17:22, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ There is, as far as I know, a universal phonological process //Cə Ćə// > /Ca Ćä/ in word-final position in Moksha, so an ending -ťńə should not be possible – so the "palatalizing schwa" (as I call it) is a schwa only word-medially (on an unstressed syl.) and becomes a (palatalizing) /æ/ word-finally? But how does it relate to веле (veľe) not changing its "theme vowel" in its paradigm...? (It's one of the words whose paradigm is attested.)

Conversely, if there is a shift (orthographically) to a front vowel in the paradigm, can it be concluded that the final -a stood for /ʲæ/ instead of /ɑ/: akša – akšet would imply that the lemma is /ɑkʃʲæ/ not /ɑkʃɑ/ but why wouldn't they spell it *акшя (*akšja) then to reflect low front vowel?

Curiously Poljakov claims that ш (š) is "always hard" (not sure if he can be trusted) – both my examples with vowels "inexplicably" (orthographically) fronting in paradigm (which would require preceding palatalization) are with an š(!) I tried to condense some (Russian) sources in Appendix:Moksha pronunciation by the way.

веле retains its theme vowel since the medial consonant is palatalized: nom.sg. /velʲä/, oblique stem /velʲə-/. Phonologically, there are no "palatalizing vowels" in Moksha, only palatalized consonants.

Also note that in Cyrillic unstressed /ä/ is most of the time spelled е, not я. (Even as in /śäpä/ 'gall', spelled сяпе (śape).) So yes, акша (akša, “white”) is indeed /akša/ (or /ɑkʃɑ/, if you will). The stem /akšə-/ could be perhaps spelled with е to indicate the front allophone of /ə/, which sometimes occurs also before palatalized consonants (e.g. in the nom. pl. /akšə-ť/ [ɑkʃə̟tʲ], or acc-gen. /akšə-ń/ [ɑkʃə̟nʲ])? But I'd expect о at least in cases like the illative /akšə-s/, where there's no reason to use a palatalized allophone. --Tropylium (talk) 15:33, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat my personal preference would be to limit translit to literal transliteration (as it is right now) and try to provide phonological information in the Pron. sections.

One template question I had: can {{inflection of}} accommodate "verbal inflection of nominals" (my ad hoc name), it's def and indef (cjoran "I'm a guy"; vasencesjan "I'm the first", vasencesjatama "we're the first", etc.) and I suspect that it might have full verb paradigm but I wouldn't want to go further than past. Does the template have a param for this?

Also, does object marking on the verb have a param in that template (as in the second table in кундамс (kundams))? Neitrāls vārds (talk) 18:54, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

I think a good term for such a form would be "copulative" or "copular", since it incorporates a form of a copula into the word. I'm not sure if {{inflection of}} needs any special treatment for it though. Are these full verbs, having different tenses, moods and even infinitives and participles? Like, is there an infinitive meaning "to be the first"? If so, then it would make sense to treat these as sub-lemmas, like comparatives or participles might be, since both inflect in their own right. If not, then which verb forms can be created like this? —CodeCat 20:05, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

So

Noun

цёран

indefinite first person singular indicative present of цёра (ćora)

...will work? If so, that's great, is there a param for object marking on the verb?

кундасамак

second person singular present with first person singular object(?) of кундамс (kundams)

When I glossed over the available params of that template I couldn't pick out one that would acommodate this, what do you think? (Ideally I would like to avoid creating a dedicated form-of template.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 21:00, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

{{inflection of}} allows tags it doesn't recognise, just like {{label}} does. But I think there would need to be some discussion on how to label these forms. Firstly, I think that the definition should be split so that it says something like "(verb form) of the copular form of" or perhaps without "of the". I think "copular" or some equivalent should be in the definition. And if I understand this correctly, the indefinite is a property of the noun itself, not of the verbal inflection, correct? If so, then that term should be close to "copular", so like "(verb form) [of the] indefinite copular form of"? —CodeCat 21:11, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

Can you give an example of copular forms in some other languages? Not sure I understand "verb form of copular form" because there is no such an intermediate, it's a nominal that takes verbal endings. You're right that definiteness is a property of the nominal. Does this mean that sg. nom. definite forms should be lemmas? (So vasencesjatama vasencetnetama could be classified as a form of vasences' vasencetne [it attaches to plural in plural verbal infl.] and not vasence.) One thing I notice that Moksha (and Erzya) books often use the definite form as their title, for example, this little dictionary – {{R:mdf:B}} – gives all its Moksha entries in the definite.

Should the question of terminology be brought to BP? (I'm not exactly sure that that would lead to anything/that anyone would be interested...) Otherwise labels solve this problem.

Also: I do not understand why this category doesn't populate, it's been a day already – Category:Erzya noun inflection-table templates?

Tropylium, it appears you have a point with //Cə Ćə// > /Ca Ćä/ – Heikki Paasonen's dictionary is in this (UPA?) transcription and I don't see any words that would have a word-final schwa, also I've noticed that mdf words never have a word-final hard schwa (/Cə/) – orthographically -o. I guess I need to fix the pron. of сельме (śeľme). However, I fail to draw any conclusions as to how this relates to the theme vowel change in the paradigm, a term's plural needs to be known at the very least. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 12:36, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

I did note that maybe it could be shown without "of the". If there is no actual "copulative form" then it's better without it, so just {{inflection of|...||1|s|pres|indc|indef|copulative}}? How is that? —CodeCat 17:32, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

I guess, I'm fine with that, I'm just concerned whether it's actually called that, does it really join or "copulate" anything? Wouldn't "verbal inflection" be a more neutral name...? Neitrāls vārds (talk) 18:11, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

See w:Copula (linguistics). It describes the nature of the form better than "verbal inflection" does. The form means "is ..." or "are ..." and not any other form like "eats ..." or "massages ...". There's also Appendix:Zulu copulatives, but in Zulu it's actually a separate form that verb inflections are then added onto, and it can be used with no further inflection as the page notes. I'm not sure if it's the best term for it, but there's a clear lack of anything better, and I have seen it described as the copulative form at least for Zulu. —CodeCat 18:20, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

Looks good. I think we can settle on that then. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 18:26, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

čoms

Piemēram šajā lappusē ir vārds "čomiņs" -- vai ir labs piemērs ar vārdu "čoms"? --Pereru (talk) 03:56, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

Pieliku vēlvienu (tas, kas bija, bija pirmais dokumentētais lietojums, tāpēc domāju, ka vajag "iešmaukt" viņu tur, kaut arī neatbilst lemmai). Neitrāls vārds (talk) 11:44, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

Un tāpēc, ka vārds "šmaukt" bija man nepazīstams, esmu izveidojis jaunu šķirkļu šmaukt, cerams, bez kļūdām... :-) --Pereru (talk) 20:56, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Man patīk etimoloģija :D (slimy, slippery, etc.) Neredzu nekādas kļūdas, vienīgi cheat nozīmē, manuprāt ,viņš kļūst transitīvs. Starp citu, tajā augstākajā teikumā es, manuprāt, viņu diezgan nepareizi lietoju to sneak nozīmē viņš, šķiet, vienmēr ir intransitīvs, bet man vajadzēja nokalkēt to sneak something in. :D Neitrāls vārds (talk) 21:07, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

erzya declension

hi! hope my table with declension was useful, but those indefinite forms should be expanded, because endings differ in some cases depending on the previous vowel, I hope I could update them for futher correct templates. also I hope to make up the tables with conjugations and personal and negative forms, it'd be great if you can make the templates out of them too

Hi, Mrvonungan, yes, it would be great if you added sub-types to those four main types, maybe they could be called something like Type 1 (back vowel stem), sub-type 1b, sub-type 1c. I could add some simple switches to the existing templates (but I can't promise.)

Here are the templates: {{myv-noun-1}}, {{myv-noun-def-1}}, {{myv-noun-2}}, {{myv-noun-3}}, {{myv-noun-4}}.

Some entries that I added them to келее, туво, тулго, ош, пичемарь, вирь (keľeje , tuvo , tulgo , oš , pičemaŕ , viŕ)

I suspect some of them might have errors, for example, oš (I suspect that the ablative could be ošto not ošdo) Also, in 1st type definite declension illative is the same as dative is that correct? Please, let me know if there are any errors.

And, yes, it would be great if an appendix Appendix:Erzya conjugation was made, here is a verbal inflection table that can be reused (if you delete the template syntax in curly braces): {{mdf-conj-table}}

It would be ideal if at some point in the future you (or someone else?) could add references in published literature to Appendix:Erzya declension for verifiability. There are ways to quickly (semi-automatically) create inflected forms, see here – minā, jellõ, etc. – where all the links in the table are blue, however, it needs to be verified that the inflection is indeed correct, however, this is nothing urgent. (By the way, it is possible to sign one's posts on talk pages by typing four tildes: ~~~~) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 13:52, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

I'd definitely prefer descriptive names instead of just class 1, 2 and so on. Unless the numbers are already established in existing grammatical descriptions. —CodeCat 17:35, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

pasts

Šodien esmu izveidojis šķirkli "pasts" ar fotogrāfiju, kurā (ceru) redzama pasta ēka Rīgā (Brīvības bulvarī), tomēr, jo fotogrāfijai nav apraksta, neesmu pārliecināts, vai tā ir tiešām patiesība... Ja tu dzīvo Rīgā, varbūt tu zini? --Pereru (talk) 19:55, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Jap, bija tāda lieta, tika viņiem tur filiāle atvērta kaut kad, bijušās "Saktas" vietā (kaut kāds PSRS laiku veikals), es tikai nezinu, vai viņa nav sarukusi tagad, man liekas, ka tur pat, tajā stūrī atvērās arī kaut kādas bankas vai tml.

Bet tā vai savādāk, tas ir Brīvības bulvāris. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 20:06, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Avotu vētra ir sākusies...

Varbūt tu gribi palīdzēt?

• Wiktionary:Requests_for_deletion/Others#Template:needsources

Uralic etym references

Feel free to ask if there are any reconstructed Uralic terms you'd especially like references for. I'm planning on saving some efforts by being somewhat systematic in building up the appendices (currently I am little by little datamining a Proto-Finnic root list from SSA and similar sources, although I've been adding individual entries here and there too), but adding some standard references on pages we already have would not be too much work. --Tropylium (talk) 18:33, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! Right now I'm hoping of maybe approaching 200 entries in mdf (that hold up to some standard) and then hopefully I could revisit some of the "finer details" and perhaps make a small list of unclear cases.

And automation sounds like a good approach. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 07:59, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

šķērslis

Neesmu atradis labu tā vārda trēšās nozīmes tulkojumu; patiesībā neesmu vēl pārliecināts, ka saprotu trēšo nozīmi pareizi. Varbūt tu vari paskatīties un palīdzēt man? Paldies! --Pereru (talk) 07:17, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Izskatās pēc visatbilstošākā tulkojuma, manuprāt. Man drīzāk šaubas par pastalās ieautās kājas, "pastala-clad feet"? Neitrāls vārds (talk) 07:23, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Ko darīt? Kas darāms?

Paldies par tavu atbalstu. Tagad nezinu, vai izturos pareizi vai nepareizi par CodeCat-a lietu. Pēc tam, kad viņ(š/a) bloķēja mani, es patiešām kļuvu dusmīgs... Tas nav mans normālais garastavoklis, un tas man nepatīk. Varbūt man jānogaida pāri nedēļu, vai līdz balsošanai. Ceros, ka mums izdosies apstiprināt "politku" par etimoloģiskiem atsaucēm. --Pereru (talk) 14:04, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

...viena lieta, ko es domāju, es nekad neietu tālāk par vienu revertu, es postotu pieprasījumu pēc mediācijas Beer parlourā. Un ja vajadzētu, postotu tādus kaut vai 12 :D Manuprāt, visam šim jābūt ļoti vienkārši atrisināmam. :) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 23:09, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Moksha conjugation template needs a correction

I wish to call your attention to an error in Template:mdf-conj-2. Under the Compound future heading, while the correctly conjugated forms are OK, the label and pronoun display wrongly for 3rd person plural. The label "2nd plural" and the pronoun "тинь ‎(tinʹ)" are repeated in place of the correct "3rd plural — синь ‎(sinʹ)."

I wanted to correct it myself, but I cannot understand how. The coding of the compound future part of this template is utterly opaque to me:

-->|f={{{1}}}{{{2}}}{{#switch: {{{3}}} | емс = е |о}}ма<!--

and I can make nothing at all of this. So I'm appealing to you as its creator to make the correction. Thanks. Johanna-Hypatia (talk) 15:28, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for notifying of this error! I have corrected it. This template uses a "wrapper" template ({{mdf-conj-table-2}}) that's located in a different place, where the appearance information is stored, keeping them separate has some advantages but also drawbacks, I myself often have to check a template's beginning to see which "wrapper" table is being called. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 21:31, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Nice to see your work

Hi. Nice to see your good work on Livonian and Moksha vocabulary here. I have recently managed to create a few entries on the Livonian Wikipedia incubator (in case you might still be slightly interested in that project) and strayed here to create kaimkuodā (embassy). I might try to add other Livonian words in the future (my activity here so far has been mainly limited to adding Inari Saami and Skolt Saami words). Best regards and keep up the good work. -- Ohpuu (talk) 07:30, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, Ohpuu! I guess I never updated people on Incubator how the email sending went (trying to find an expert to "greenlight" the project) – it was kind of a complete fiasco, out of approx. 7 emails I sent out the only ones to reply were Latviešu valodas aģentūra wishing me luck and saying that they do not have a Livonian specialist/Finnicist on their books (they only engage as a partner or something along those lines.)

Thank you for that effort. I guess I could try to lobby the project in the "liivi" in the University of Tartu server that mostly carries messages by Estonian researchers. Currently the project in the Incubator is only half alive as some contributors have been absent for a while (me) and others have disappeared. I will try to keep up some activity every month now and maybe recruit more contributors yet again if they do not automagically appear out of the pool of Incubator activists. -- Ohpuu (talk) 07:57, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I guess, this can be relayed to anyone else editing the liv incubator. And then there's of course the question of things such as country names, for example, in Estonian it can be Kambodža and Costa Rica (both transliterated and original), until they publish something like "The World Atlas in Livonian" it wouldn't be possible to know. Vepsians also wanted to transliterate all geographic names, although Livonian orthography mandates using the original orthography in foreign proper names (per Viitso in LVVK), then of course there are exceptions, like Brissõl, in short, publication of some reference works would be needed in my personal opinion.

I agree. The Viitso/Ernštreit dictionary has a few geographical names; then there is Vaalgamaa's translation of the New Testament which has a lot of geographical names (although a fair share do not comply with later Livonian orthography). -- Ohpuu (talk) 07:57, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Some prescriptivism would be needed in terms of grammar as well, e.g., native speaker samples can have very inconsistent use of numerals (many cases where the grammatical constructions remind Latvian, although one that looks like Estonian or Finnish should probably be preferred.)

So, at this moment it looks like liv is confined to be some type of an "artistic language" (like for composing poetry, that probably gets proofread by someone in TÜ before publishing and the like.)

Another niche is being a hobby language (like Esperanto) that is learnt by some people with no strictly artistic objectives. The potential for use as a civic ritual language (a public speech now and then) is also there, but actual use is rarer (e.g Davis Stalts in his ad before the language referendum in Latvia). -- Ohpuu (talk) 07:57, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

In terms of Wiktionary I would like to diversify my quote sources, for example, I have this Ežmi lugdõbrōntõz (originally published before USSR but recently republished and edited to be in accordance with the most modern orthography standard) that I want to scan and OCR because I want to lessen my reliance on LĒL for quotations and introduce other sources.

I have Vaalgamaa's translation of the New Testament on my shelf at home (the orthography is of course 1942). But reading your passage, I think I will not use it before I have created a digital copy of it for myself so that I can use it in the office. I will try to think how to schedule that work sometime. -- Ohpuu (talk) 08:03, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Improving coverage of Sami languages is great, Mordvinic words can have Sami cognates quite often, usually I specify Northern Sami but I will try to make a note of including Inari and Skolt as well (though I'm not familiar with how UPA transcriptions convert to their orthographies, so I'm often passing only the tr= param so they would show up in a category similar to Category:Northern Sami term requests where someone more knowledgeable could check them and add the standard orthography.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 17:19, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

I guess I could try to lobby the project in the "liivi" in the University of Tartu server that mostly carries messages by Estonian researchers – I would be interested in how this goes, Ohpuu. Most of the emails I sent were in Latvian (and a couple in English), so, that would be a different avenue. I wonder if there's a possibility of persuading them to add words like Costa Rica, etc., to LĒL just for reference? (I actually created an entry quite a while ago (Costa Rica) just for fun but I need to delete it because there is no proof that this is, in fact, the name for the country and not, say, Kostarik or Kōstarik, or Kostarīk, etc.)

I agree about the hobby/ceremonial language aspects (the official translation of Latvian Constitution into Livonian would be a good example of the latter.) In addition (at least for Latvians) I think it has the appeal of being a very "Latvian-friendly" introduction/"entry point" to Uralic languages, despite being completely alien (as it's a different language family) there are familiar aspects which make it much less overwhelming. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 05:31, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Latvian and Estonian dictionaries

Hi @Neitrāls vārds, have you got dictionaries for the pronunciation for Latvian and Estonian, like the different tones for Latvian and the stressed and overlong syllables that can occur in Estonian? Thanks! – AWESOME meeos ！ ＊ （「欺负」我） 10:59, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

AWESOME meeos ！, yes, I have Karulis' Etimoloģijas vārdnīca which lists tones. There must be an early 20th century dictionary which should be in the public domain indicating tones, it might involve character by the name Endzelīns, I'm too lazy to look right now. I'm not sure about Estonian I think that one of EKI's sõnaraamats had at least stress (because CodeCat was including it in Estonian pronunciations) but I'm not sure, try asking User:CodeCat or User:Tropylium about Estonian stress and overlength. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 22:34, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

@Neitrāls vārds Thanks! I've already know for Estonian; the website is [3]. – AWESOME meeos ！ * (chōmtī hao /t͡ɕoːm˩˧.tiː˩˧ haw˦˥/) 22:44, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

blenstei

I still don't know what the bit in the square brackets is supposed to mean. Can you elaborate? —Rua (mew) 23:56, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

They're different tonal patterns that blenst can take. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:08, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

As stated above, when there is variance in intonation that a word can take, they just pull out the vowel/diphthong and show it with all the possible tones as to avoid repeating the whole word...

Anyways, now that this is cleared up, I have a completely unrelated question, why did you remove the Accel spans from this template: diff? I was completely puzzled (still am.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 01:05, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

All the accel tags were the same, which isn't particularly informative. —Rua (mew) 11:33, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Slavic *bel(e)nъ < *bʰel-

I saw that you separated *bel(e)nъ (“henbane”) in an independent section of *bʰel-. There is no need to do that. Derksen, Vasmer, and ESSJa reconstruct primary meaning henbane because that's what the lemma means in Russian, Polish, and other major Slavic languages, but this probably was not the original meaning of the proto-Slavic etymon. If we focus on OCS (the oldest attested Slavic language) and modern Bulgarian/Macedonian, we will see that the original meaning of *bel(e)nъ > Old Church Slavonic блѣнъ (blěnŭ, “day-dream, reverie”) is day-dreaming. This meaning is supported by the verb блънѫвати (blŭnǫvati, “to hallucinate”), which is derived through metonymy from to babble, to talk non-sense.

I'll also point that there are several other terms for hallucinogenic herbs which all descend from *bʰel- (“to babble, to talk”). In South Slavic, we have Bulgarian бленика (blenika) [see бленика], Serbo-Croatian буника, Macedonian буника (bunika) < *bʰl̥-n-éye-keh₂ /one that causes hallucinations/; again in Slavic, there is the term Bulgarian блек (blek), Polish blekot < *bʰle(h₁)-kos /one that causes babbling/; and also Spanish belesa (ultimately from Germanic) < *bʰel-es-os... It's not just *bel(e)nъ that descend from *bʰel-. I think it's safe to derive these from the primary meaning to talk, to babble. Of course, if you insist, keep the meaning henbane (or better hallucinogenic herb in general), but it should be mentioned that it was secondary. Bezimenen (talk) 11:11, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Bezimenen, yes, we should try to separate unique senses as much as possible if for no other reason than readability. Though that definitely is not the only reason, given PIE's restrictions on root structure, homonymy of what likely where different words is inevitable. As an analogy mean "evil", mean "average" and mean "intend" are completely different words, the fact that they look and sound the same is irrelevant, we can, however, start to see their differences in terms of what suffixes they are able to take on, e.g., the third can take on -ing and -t with a type of "ablaut" /mi:n/ > /ment/ while the first 2 cannot - this is one of the things that the derivations list below each root is trying to achieve.

I don't see how the OCS words that you posted support a connection with the lexeme "to make a sound"? If anything they lend even more support to a separate lexeme along the lines of "a hallucinogenic plant" (I presume "day-dream" would be how people would conceptualize hallucinations back in those days.)

I read the entry for blek dial. "henbane" in that Bulgarian dictionary that you linked (I can kind of get a gist of any Slavic language based on my intermediary Russian, though possibly with errors) and, yes, it says that in Bulg. Rus. Ukr. and Pol. blek arose secondarily from bleja (which I assume means to bleat), this is the closest I came to babble/bleat > henbane in what you posted. It doesn't mention such a connection in the main entry (bljan). Plus, suppose the dictionary stated clearly that bljan is secondary from bleja in Bulg. and related languages, what happens with the Germanic and Celtic cognates?

TL;DR I see a nice word family along the lines of "a hallucinogenic plant" even more than before, which occasionally might have been conflated with similar sounding words for bleating (things like that happen all the time, e.g., Latvian mundrs (“lively, alert”) etymologically has nothing to do with German munter or Proto-Germanic *mundraz (“awake, lively, brisk”) although the German term might have influenced it.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 00:13, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

@Neitrāls vārds: The main entry of блян does connect it to блѣнѫвати (blěnǫvati, “to long for, to sign”) / блънѫвати (blŭnǫvati, “to hallucinate”) [0-grade of *beln-]. And бълнувам may have had an onomatopoeic origin - except to hallucinate, it also means to sleep talk. For this reason, I associate it with babbling and non-sense talking. I suppose a similar logic can be applied for the Germanic and Celtic cognates, but indeed this is a far-fetched speculation. In ESSJa (by Trubachyev), *belnъ is derived from the meaning bright, white, so there is no consensus on the issue.

Anyways, I think we should add the Germanic cognate of Proto-Slavic *bel(e)nъ. It is given in two different forms in the literature: Kroonen, Guus (2013) “*belunō-/bulmōn-”, in Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 11), Leiden, Boston: Brill, →ISBN, page 59 and Orel, Vladimir (2003) “*ƀelnōn”, in A Handbook of Germanic Etymology‎^[4], Leiden: Brill, →ISBN, page 41. Do you know what these correspond to in Wiktionary notation? Also, there is evidence for a s-stem in Proto-Celtic *belisa < *bʰel-es-eh₂. It is mentioned in the discussion of *belunō-/bulmōn- in Kroonen. Bezimenen (talk) 18:45, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi, Bezimenen, yes, if you have time, Germanic and Celtic cognates to Slavic "henbane" should definitely be added (I didn't get that far...)

I'm not familiar with Orel's notation but a quick look at WT:AGEM-PRO suggests that *ƀelnōn > belnǭ. Kroonen's notation for PGmc seems pretty consistent with Wiktionary (unlike Derksen's PBSl which has a ton of quirks). Also, unless you're adding hundreds of them, I don't think it's a big deal if you add derivations in non-standard notation (esp. if a reference is provided) someone could correct at a later date, the worst is when there exists a nice reconstruction page but someone adds non-standard notation in an entry's etymology (e.g., copying Derksen's PBS directly) making a redlink when there could be a nice blue link but this doesn't apply to the derived terms lists on PIE reconstruction pages. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 19:28, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Latvian usage examples

Hi "Neitrāls vārds" (and any other Latvian speakers who might be lurking here!). I've recently been adding some Latvian vocab - I was in Latvia earlier this year and picked up a few leaflets and such, and am trying to add any words I find that are missing. I've tried to add some usage examples too where possible, although I don't really speak the language so I wondered if you'd mind checking they're correct? Examples include attieksme, cieņa, izrādīt and a few more. If they look OK, I'll carry on doing what I'm doing; if not, I'll stop before I cause too much damage! BigDom 17:45, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

Hello, BigDom, sorry for late reply, yes, the usexes in the entries that you linked to look A-OK 👌 I hope you enjoyed your trip! Neitrāls vārds (talk) 04:19, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Latvian Tones in Riga

Hi! I greatly appreciate your contribution to Latvian audio, but I am confused about the way tones merge in Riga. You say that you contrast "logs" with "loks" and the other "loks," meaning that the falling tone is pronounced as a level tone. However, Wikipedia says the following:

"Speakers of Rīga Latvian and other more westward varieties differentiate only between level and broken pitches with the falling pitch being merged with the broken one. Thus the Standard Latvian 'minimal triplet' or 'minimal set' of [zāːle] (hall), [zâːle] (grass) and [zàːles] (medicine) in Rīga Latvian would be reduced to 'hall' (level pitch) and 'grass' (broken pitch) and 'medicine' would be pronounced with a broken pitch just like 'grass.'"

I imagine that perhaps this was an error, but it seems that the words on the falling tone page are all pronounced with a falling pitch contour, like how the words on the broken tone page are pronounced.

What confuses me more is that on the minimal pairs page, the word "aušana," as in "putting on shoes," is "àušana" in the literary language and merges to "aûšana," as Wikipedia says. Also "zāles." Your recordings support this pattern. On the chart, there are also examples of the contrary: "aust" with a falling tone gets a level tone pronunciation. Same with "tā" and "loks." So is it that the falling tone can merge into either the level tone or the broken tone, with one direction being the exception? Wikipedia suggests that merging with level tone is the exception, as do your recordings on the falling tone page, but what you said, plus some examples from the chart, hint that merging with broken tone might be the exception.

It would be greatly helpful if you could explain the general pattern of tone merging, stating which direction is the exception and whether the recordings on the falling tone page actually reflect how you would pronounce those words.

--Chaojidage (talk) 05:57, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Hello, Chaojidage, sorry for the late reply. If I understand you correctly, what is going on is that I feel an urge to introduce a contrast: the broken tone is already taken by au[šš]ana "weaving" that had broken tone to begin with, so it makes sense to realize au[šš]ana "sunrise" (originally falling) with a level tone because now I have a contrast.

This is just me, so, you should take it with a grain of salt but I'm pretty sure other people do similar things.

As you've perhaps heard, level tone is supposed to be default in a sense (one paper mentioned this tangentially), foreign borrowings (assuming the syllable can carry tone) are supposed to take level, yet I feel the need to assign broken tone to the word "laiks" 'social media like', why I don't know, but I'd guess it's because the level tone is already taken by "laiks" 'time; whather', just to illustrate my point.

English stress derived nouns is the best analogy in my opinion: PRUH-cess (noun) vs pro-CESS (action). Not everyone uses it but I think most everyone is aware of it even if they don't know what it's called. Introducing contrast with whatever means possible, while maintaining the status quo of the more established member of the doublet (whichever that might be).

Latvian "normative" linguistics can be very overbearing. Unfortunately there is complete radio silence on tones. I think there is an unspoken rule not to alienate Latgallians where all of this is irrelevant (more on that later). I have never ever heard of Latgale actually wanting to secede so this is silly, but I digress.

The above English example is also good because I suspect there might actually be no broken tone in Latvian. This is not without precedent - there is a minority opinion in Latvian linguistics juxtaposing a stieptā and nestieptā (I suppose they stop just shy of admitting that there is only a suprasegmental overlength...)

Sergejs Seržants (don't remember the name of the paper) noted that (the elusive) falling is the only contour tone, level is suprasegmental overlength and broken is suprasegmental glotalization.

Juris Grigorjevs in the authoritative new edition of Latviešu Valodas Gramatika, did roughly the same: level [za::le] "hall" overlong; broken [za:?le] "grass" glotalized; falling [za:les] "medicine" unmarked - taking an agnostic approach on the whole falling tone issue.

(A very welcome development was that Grigorjevs used IPA consistently. An earlier Wiktionary editor who made majority of Latvian entries used an ad hoc system devised by the German balticist Nicole Nau in her book "Latvian" where ad hoc diacritics ar put on vowels, unfortunately they're not part of IPA and don't reveal what's actually going on.)

Depending how you read it, taking into account the "falling merges with broken" rule, you could take this as Grigorjevs' tacit endorsement of the stieptā-nestieptā position that I mentioned earlier.

I probably made it even more confusing than before although my aim was the opposite, I suspect that Latvian has a privative overlength same as Estonian, privative meaning, something either is or isn't overlong, there is no broken or falling or whatever. Due to reasons (which I can only speculate about) a pretty straightforward suprasegmental (overlength) has accumulated all this "mythology" around it. Otherwise overbearing normative linguistics' refusal to go anywhere near it doesn't exactly help either.

P.s. Estonian linguist Ilse Lehiste posited this theory (don't remember the paper) that Estonian is moving towards a tonal system similar to Latvian or Serbo-Croatian, I find this amusing, as I think the opposite is the case and I can't help but wonder did she accidentally get it completely backwards. (Like, perhaps, noticing some similarities in real life and then projecting the overwrought Latvian rules about all these tones and mergers and whatnot back towards Estonian.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 04:33, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Variety of written Livonian texts

What is your experience on which variety is Livonian is most often written nowadays? Right now some entries here have been split between Courland and Salaca (like pa'llõ vs. pall). I was thinking of using one of these as the main variety (probably Courland Livonian) and making the Salaca forms soft redirects (i.e. making them simply read "Salaca form of ..." or something like that). What do you think? — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 07:18, 20 January 2023 (UTC)