Wiktionary:Information desk/2023/April

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← March 2023 · April 2023 · May 2023 → · (current)

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Confusing message about 咼

In https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%81%8E, I read:

Note that the box in the upper part of 咼 differs in simplified Chinese – in simplified Chinese fonts it is on the left, while in Japanese and traditional Chinese it is on the right (as seen in the Kangxi dictionary).

I do indeed see both versions in the wild: the regular traditional 咼 and the strange variation with the box on the left.

However, the explanation is not clear to me: the character 咼 in simplified Chinese does not have any box at all, since it looks like 过. So when exactly is 咼 printed with the box on the left?! 126.148.148.5 11:43, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Multiple Latin Nouns with Identical Spelling

I noticed that abluvio can either be the nominative singular form of abluvio or the dative/ablative singular of abluvium. Since they belong to the same part of speech and have the same spelling (including macrons), the convention seems to be splitting it into two etymology sections like in circa, which is what I did. However, no etymology text exists, which makes the section names "Etymology 1" and "Etymology 2" seem awkward. I'm not sure if this is the correct way to organize this entry, so it would be nice to hear from experienced editors. PetraMagna (talk) 07:06, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes, that is the correct and standard formatting. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 08:55, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll leave it like that then. PetraMagna (talk) 22:00, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Encyclopedia listed under words with 7 Syllables

I disagree with the Wiktionary listing of encyclopedia under words with 7 syllables. I must be missing something. Perhaps the list includes 6 syllable words also. Just curious.

Thank you! Two-elks (talk) 18:32, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

The culprit seems to be Module:syllables, which counts the number of syllables in an IPA transcription and whose results are used for automatically assigning categories to words based on the number of syllables.

The invocation {{#invoke:syllables|countVowels|/ənˌsəɪ.kləˈpi.di.ə/}} yield 7 syllables instead of 6, which is causing the incorrect category listing. Specifically, the module does not treat "əɪ" and "aɪ" as diphthongs because {{#invoke:syllables|countVowels|/əɪ/}} says there are 2 syllables, which seems wrong to me. (this paragraph contains incorrect information as Module:syllables should be invoked with "countVowelsDiphthongs" and a language argument; see the response below)

I suppose we can ask someone familiar with Modules to see if this can be fixed. PetraMagna (talk) 19:46, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Nevermind. Module:syllables is working fine. It disregards diphthongs by default unless a language is specified, in which case it uses the designated language's table of diphthongs in Module:IPA/data. We're seeing incorrect vowel counts possibly because "əɪ" is not added as an English diphthong in that table. PetraMagna (talk) 20:05, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

How to inherit an IP and its contributions

i finally made an account, but the contributions i made without an account (IP contributions) weren't linked to me when i created the account. is there any way to get those contributions linked to me? or i can't do that? thanks for all you do (wait is this even the place to put this in) - Rockragged (talk) 14:52, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

No. Would be complicated programming logics to alter edit history, as you might imagine. Fay Freak (talk) 14:58, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

That sucks. Still, thank you! - Rockragged (talk) 15:02, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

@Rockragged the best you can do is state on your user page what IP addresses you used. Of course, that means everyone will know where you were editing from. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:25, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

meh doesn't matter to me anyways, come at me, haha - Rockragged (talk) 15:31, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

One possibility that occurs to me is to add record your account name on the IP's user page and talk page. That way, anyone with questions about one of your edits can raise the matter with you. --RichardW57m (talk) 08:47, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Potential Copyright Issues in Quotations

Some entries such as iste are using quotations adopted from Wheelock's Latin. The sentence

"Iste," inquit, "sceleribus suis tollētur."

is an adaptation of an exercise sentence in chapter 22 of Wheelock, which reads

"Iste," inquit, "sceleribus suīs brevī tempore tollētur"

Other examples include versus, neglego, careo, poeta, hic, and littera, which all used the same sentence from Wheelock.

Wheelock's exercise sentences are constructed by the author, meaning that

1. Using them in wiktionary has potential copyright issues, though I'm not sure if this can be justified as fair use.
2. It goes against Wiktionary:About_Latin#Quotations because Wheelock sentences are made up for translation exercises.

I'm wondering about what to do with them. Should they be deleted outright or replaced when possible? PetraMagna (talk) 05:48, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

If Wiktionary were using them as cites/quotes to attest words, that'd be one thing (with various different considerations, like whether they're uses or just "made-up examples of how a word might be used"), but if entries are just using them as examples of the grammar (in usage notes), then it does seem like they should be replaced with other examples. - -sche (discuss) 05:16, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm not too worried about criteria for inclusion since words that appear in a textbook are likely to be attested in many classical Latin sources. Though no example exists in the entry, they can easily be added. The second issue does seem concerning. I'll try to replace these example sentences with ones written by classical authors instead. PetraMagna (talk) 19:37, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

literal

is Lychrel as in Lychrel number a homophone of literal an littoral? 122.59.183.243 09:42, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

well I played three short YouTube videos and each of them had a different pronunciation. In general, print-dominant words like this tend to have flexible pronunciations, but since it was coined from Cheryl, i would give the pronunciations with /ʃ/ more weight if we have to pick one as the standard. —Soap— 09:03, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

Are literal and littoral homphones? Their pronunciations overlap, but syncopation and frication are more frequent in the former. --RichardW57m (talk) 12:00, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

⌦

I was going through CAT:D and noticed that this entry, although it currently does (as the tag says) consist of nothing but the character name, is actually attestable (and even more surprisingly, searchable on Google Books). In some books, it's an OCR error where the actual book has a diamond bullet point or various other things, but some books do, upon inspection, use this character. Furthermore, several seem to use this character as a bullet (rather than for its Unicode-intended use); I've added two to illustrate this. Presumably the attested and unrelated bullet sense is includable (?); does it make the 'proper' Unicode use also includable or no...? - -sche (discuss) 17:48, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

Agreed that this is a valid entry and useful for documenting how this character is used in real life (to my dismay). —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:15, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes I'm from Wikipedia, and yes this is about transwiki

Related Beer parlour discussion: Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2022/June#Appendix:Numerals in various languages

Wiktionary has this page: Appendix:Numerals in various languages

English Wikipedia has this page: w:User:Abcormal/List of numbers in various languages (started in 2003, deleted last year due to Wikipedia not being a dictionary, but restored to userspace and worked on further)

The Wikipedia page (any and all copies thereof) is probably/hopefully going to get deleted for good so that it isn't accessible anywhere on Wikipedia.

The talk page of Appendix:Numerals in various languages says: "This appendix has been imported from w:User:Abcormal/List of numbers in various languages. Please see that page's history for attribution."

• It wasn't truly imported because the editor was unable to save the source code due to an edit filter triggering, but some prose was copied; so, yes, the Wiktionary page was started by copying a portion from said Wikipedia page, and possibly even multiple portions, in sequence.
• When the Wikipedia page is deleted, the "Please see that page's history for attribution" part will be false, because the history will no longer be accessible, and attribution will no longer effectively be provided.

I'll be honest and say that the page was heavily scrutinized on Wikipedia and problems with it were identified that will probably also be seen as relevant on Wiktionary. It was pointed out that it uses base-ten when it shouldn't; some characterized this as Eurocentric.

Should said Wikipedia page be transfered to Wiktionary? Certainly not to replace the existing page as the formatting, templates, etc. don't match but maybe simply to keep its source code here to be used as a draft for future list entries. Its page history can be copied in textual form to provide attribution.

@Chuck Entz: Pinging you as a participant in the previous discussion relating to this topic. Thank you for any help you can give.--Alalch E. (talk) 02:28, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

Sometimes, when I need to preserve the edit history of a page for attribution, but (hist-)merging the two pages would be messy, I move the page to be preserved to the talk page of the target page (then blank it and replace the content with a note saying to see the history). I suppose that could be done here: make a technical deletion of Appendix talk:Numerals in various languages, transwiki the Wikipedia page to there, and anyone who wants the contents for attribution or to improve the appendix can pull from the history there. - -sche (discuss) 05:12, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

That would be fantastic. Alalch E. (talk) 10:01, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

OK, I've deleted Appendix talk:Numerals in various languages; you can move the page to there and then we can see about updating the main appendix page with anything of value from the moved page.
Regarding the statement at AfD that Wiktionary has categorically refused to accept transwikis: OK, that's mostly true, but that's because it doesn't normally make any sense to transfer a Wikipedia encyclopedia article [even a short DICDEF one] to Wiktionary, because we usually already have an entry for that string [and merging histories would be confusing], and already have or could write a better dictionary definition (and have different requirements for verifying that the words are in use). And we don't want just any appendix or whatnot. But in this case, my 2c as an individual Wiktionarian is that since we already have the appendix, and Wikipedia has but doesn't want a more fleshed-out edition of it, I don't see harm in moving it here. Maybe other people will disagree and RfD the appendix here too, but that seems ... independent of whether we transwiki the fuller copy (since we already have a partial copy here, so if anyone here feels it needs to be deleted here, they'll need to RfD it here regardless of whether a fuller copy gets transwikied over). - -sche (discuss) 00:24, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

I would be quite surprised if it has anything to add to our coverage of well documented languages, but that leaves the vast majority of the languages of the world, which are limited documentation languages and for which our Criteria for inclusion have sourcing standards that are pretty close to Wikipedia's.

It would also be nice to create a template to integrate the Module:number list data submodules into the appendix, since we already have the data in a usable format, and merge the Wikipedia data into that where our coverage is lacking. That way we get the best of both worlds. To be safe, we should state in edit summaries where we're getting it from when we add the data to the submodules. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:18, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

This action has been automatically identified as harmful, and therefore disallowed. If you believe your action was constructive, please start a new Grease pit discussion and describe what you were trying to do. A brief description of the abuse rule which your action matched is: various specific spammer habits

Oh no.

This is what happened when I was trying to move the original source to the talk page and show it as pure code. 17lcxdudu (talk) 14:38, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

I thought the idea was to transwiki it to preserve the history, not to just manually copy the latest revision? - -sche (discuss) 16:33, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes, yes, that's certainly the idea; 17lcxdudu is another Wikipedia editor who is interested in this content being retained and further worked on, but probably doesn't know about proper importation. @17lcxdudu when the page is transwikied it will mean that its source code will be accessible from the talk page's history, and it will take a lot of work to expand the existing Wiktionary appendix with imported content. This is how it has to be. You don't need to do anything before importation. Alalch E. (talk) 17:00, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

The original user page has already been deleted 17lcxdudu (talk) 10:18, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Not cognate but ...

The etymology section of Turkish o (“he, she, it, that”) gives Chinese 兀 (“that”) as a cognate. However, Chinese is not a descendant of the Turkic language from which this was borrowed, so the term cognate is not applicable. Is there another term (less vague than related ) that covers this situation?  --Lambiam 21:03, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Sounds like someone is pushing Altaic theory (or similar). This is also mentioned at Karakhanid ال. @Surjection Theknightwho (talk) 22:32, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

See the glossary entries for cognate and Appendix:Glossary#descendants. As far as words are considered, Wiktionary does not require genetic continuity - borrowing is accepted. RichardW57m (talk) 13:40, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Foch in Polish

Hi!

The Polish language also contains the word "foch" (sulk) and I would like to add the definition to English Wiktionary. But... I do not really know linguistic and I do not know the technical aspects (templates etc.) used on this website.

Could somebody help me, please? ;-)

Best wishes! -- Kaworu1992 (talk) 10:39, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

@Kaworu1992 In the future, you should know about WT:RE:pl. Vininn126 (talk) 10:48, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Oh, thank you? ;-) It appeared by itself - what magic is that? :D --Kaworu1992 (talk) 11:44, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Check the history on foch, you'll see a familiar face ;) Vininn126 (talk) 11:45, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

User: Chuck Entz reverted 5 of my edits in toto

Well I'm a novice user here. I think it's too rough to revert my edits like that without explaining. I don't get what I did wrong nor does it encourage me to participate here. Shubjt (talk) 11:58, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Is copying quotes mentioned in books plagiarism?

Language learning books and dictionaries often explain terms using quotes from newspapers, magazines, old books (old enough to copyright-free) etc. The quotes of course could prove that people are / were using the certain term in the certain way. However, if once I read such kind of language learning books and dictionaries and copying the quotes mentioned to Wiktionary, would it be considered as plagiarism? Or should the copyright issues judged by the quotes themselves? Beefwiki (talk) 11:02, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

The current general practice is that it is frowned upon and we should find other quotes, but for some rare terms/LDL's those often are the only quotes that exist. I do not believe it is plagiarism, we have the right to quotes just as any other dictionary. A bigger problem is copying definitions word for word. Vininn126 (talk) 11:23, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Madecase

I came across this word at Wiktionary:Requested entries (French)/M-Z and fished around for sources for it. It does seem to be a now-unused word for Madagascar, as said at its line on Requested Entries, but it does not seem to be from French. One source [1], quoting an earlier (1661) work, states that while the island is known as Madagascar by cartographers, it is known by the indigenous peoples there as "Madecase" and describes Madecase as the island's "true name". This is repeated, in some variations by other sources, probably all deriving from the 1661 source by Flacourt. If the word is worthy of an entry, what language should be classified under? Edward-Woodrow (talk) 18:35, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Where should I put quotes with the word fits multiple meanings?

If a word appears multiple times in a same quote, but in different meanings, which definiton should I put it under?

For example: (Chinese 之)

曾子之妻之市，其子隨之而泣。 [Classical Chinese, trad.]
曾子之妻之市，其子随之而泣。 [Classical Chinese, simp.]

From: Warring States period, 韓非 (Han Fei),《韓非子．外儲說左上》

Zēngzǐ zhī qī zhī shì, qí zǐ suí zhī ér qì. [Pinyin]

Zengzi's wife goes to market, her son follows her and cries.

And they fits these definitions:

1. (literary) Indicates that the previous word has possession of the next one.
2. Indicates that the previous word modifies the next one.
3. particle indicating that the preceding element is specialised or qualified by the next
4. (archaic) Particle infixed in a subject-predicate construct indicating a subordinate clause.
5. (obsolete) this; these
6. (obsolete) to sprout; to come about
7. (literary) to go
8. (literary) The third-person pronoun: him, her, it, them, when it appears in a non-subject position in the sentence.

Beefwiki (talk) 16:40, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

@Beefwiki: short answer- put it where it will do the most good. If it were just there to give evidence of usage for CFI, it could just as easily be relegated to the Citations tab. Presumably, you're trying to tell the reader something about the way the term is used by showing how someone has used it in context. Choose the sense where the reader would benefit most from that. If there's more than one sense that seriously needs it you could even have it under more than one sense, though that generally isn't a good idea. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:49, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

You can also just put it on the citations page and use clearer sentences for the main page. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 04:37, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

However, according to the logic of "unclear citations to citations page", since "之" appears almost in every Classical Chinese texts, I would literally have to copy the texts from thousands of years in Chinese History... Beefwiki (talk) 13:00, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean or why it's a problem.... Andrew Sheedy (talk) 22:58, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

@Beefwiki: there are two reasons to include quotes: 1) to provide evidence that the term or sense has been used in order to meet the requirements of WT:CFI, and 2) to illustrate usage of the term or sense in order to give a better understanding of the term or sense. Neither of those purposes requires texts from thousands of years of usage. The choice of whether to put particular quotes in the entry or in the citations page makes no difference in the number or type of quotes. If the nature of any specific quote or the sheer volume of text detracts from the usability of the entry, some or all of the quotes can be moved to the citations page- but it's merely a matter of where to include them, not whether to include them. Chuck Entz (talk) 07:22, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

There's also 3) to show when a sense was in use, especially the earliest usage. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:22, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Criteria for inclusion - date of most recent attestation

How old can the most recent attestation of a word be for inclusion in Modern English wiktionary? Presumably a word that only appears in Beowulf would not be included, but how about Chaucer? Where is the cutoff? JohnRBoersma (talk) 19:52, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Our motto is "All words in all languages". We would include words from Beowulf as Old English, and Chaucer as Middle English. Our (arbitrary) cutoff for modern English is 1500. Anything before that is Middle English. See WT:AEN, WT:AENM and WT:AANG for how we treat all historical stages of English. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:04, 30 April 2023 (UTC)