User talk:Msh210

If you write me something here, I will respond here. If you specifically request a response elsewhere, I may (but may not) honor that request.

I do not archive every discussion this page. If you want a complete archive, see its history. Some discussions, however, are archived.

Please add each new topic to the bottom, under a new header.

Kham, efshar, kal, etc.

Hi msh210,

I've been thinking we should have a category for adjectives like (deprecated template usage) חם (kham), (deprecated template usage) אפשר (efshár) (sp?), (deprecated template usage) קל (kal), etc. that frequently lead off sentences. ("Kham bakhútz." "Efshár mei-ha'ugá?" "Kal l'havín otó.") Does that seem like a good idea to you? If so, what do you think of the name Category:Hebrew impersonal adjectives?

Thanks in advance,
—Ruakh_TALK 21:15, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I assume you mean "that frequently start sentences" as a handy description, not as the criterion for inclusion in the category. (Can any adjective start a sentence, somehow? I suspect so.) What is the criterion, then? Cham (and kar) seems different to me from kal and efshar (and naim (google:נעים-לפגוש) and kashe), in that the latter are followed by l'- verbs and the former not. But maybe that's incorrect. (I've never heard efshar mehauga, but assume it's an elision of leechol, yes?) Why do you want to call them "impersonal": is that what they're usually called?—msh210℠ 21:26, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Re: handy description vs. criterion: Er, I kind of did mean it as the criterion. :-/   It's true that any adjective can start a sentence, though with most I can only think of sentences that would sound either poetic ("Khakhamim hem she-yod'im l'sameakh et nashoteihem") or ridiculous ("U-m'fugarim hem she-lo"). These adjectives are notable in that it's normal for them to start a present-tense clause, and in other clauses for them to be preceded only by a form of hayá. (Not counting adverbs and such.) Though, they can be preceded by l'- phrases — basically subjects in the dative case, if Hebrew had cases — as in "Lama l'Yosi mutar v'lo li?" I'll grant that I haven't given a very formal criterion, but to me these words seem to form a natural class; do they not to you? (N.B. most of them also have non-sentence-starting uses — "Ein mayim khamim" — just as in English many adjectives are also nouns, etc. But, not all: I can't think of any sentence using "efshar" as a normal adjective; in all cases I'd prefer "efshari" for that.)

Re: infinitivity vs. not: Maybe. google:"חם לגעת" does get some hits, though admittedly it's not the most natural phrase in the world. BTW, I'd "translate" "Efshár mei-ha'ugá?" as either "Efshár l'kabél mei-ha'ugá?" or "Efshár lakákhat mei-ha'ugá?", depending on the situation, but I suppose "Efshár le'ekhól mei-ha'ugá?" is basically the same.

Re: "impersonal": *shrug* They're always masculine singular, and they seem analogous to the impersonal constructions in English ("it's hot outside", "it's easy to understand it/him"), though of course not every such Hebrew expression translates to such an English one and vice versa ("I'm hot" = "kham li", "Can I have some?" = "Efshar?"; conversely, "It's raining" = "yored geshem"). I don't know what the usual name for them is.

—Ruakh_TALK 23:48, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Re "I haven't given a very formal criterion, but to me these words seem to form a natural class; do they not to you": Well, yes and no, for two reasons. (Well, yes, for the reasons you state, and no, for two reasons.) (1) The "infinitivity" (?) business. It seems like two classes, not one. Note, though, that you can say google:זה-לא-אפשר also (although I think "bilti efshari" is more common now). So maybe it's just one class. (2) It seems (contradicting what you said above) that every one of these adjectives can also be used in the normal adjective fashion (can you find one that's not?), which kinda dilutes the strength of the category. Perhaps call it "Hebrew adjectives that can be impersonal" or something.—msh210℠ 17:38, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I'd be down with two categories, if you can clarify them well enough that I can apply them accurately. Re: "'infinitivity' (?)": It's not a real word, if that's what you're �ing. Re: normal adjective use: Yeah, maybe. I mean, they are adjectives, and I'm not suggesting otherwise. Re: "Hebrew adjectives that can be impersonal": That seems a bit wordy, and it also risks bringing in non-grammatical senses of "impersonal" (mechanical/robotic; distant/standoffish); are you saying that "Hebrew impersonal adjectives" would be misleading? —Ruakh_TALK 20:29, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Somewhat misleading, yes. No?—msh210℠ 21:01, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Or maybe not; we seem to have several such categories with such names; e.g., English uncountable nouns and English abstract nouns (which latter include fireside).—msh210℠ 21:16, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Did we reach a conclusion here? I can't tell. —Ruakh_TALK 19:07, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

There were a few issues we discussed:

1. What words get included? Criteria? — This seems to be the (somewhat subjective, but that's okay) criterion that it's usual for such words to start sentences (preceded by "to be" in past and future).
2. Are there two categories: things followed by "to" verbs and things not? — You think not, and, even if yes, we can always fine-tune later.
3. What to call the category. — I have no objection to you original suggestion, Hebrew impersonal adjectives, if that's what they're called in English and they have no English name in Hebrew. (By that latter I mean, of course, that Anglophone grammarians/linguists have no name for this type of Hebrew adjective.)

So we seem to be good to go. I assume, incidentally, that yesh and en will be in this category (even though they aren't preceded by "to be" in past and future but are instead replaced by it)?—msh210℠ 19:19, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

So, we did decide to create at least one category?

1. Sounds good.
2. O.K.
3. I don't know if there's an English name for them, period, applied to either language. google:"impersonal adjective|adjectives" gets only 68 hits (257 raw), and most of them aren't in this sense (though some are). I'm suggesting this name because I don't have a better one; because these are adjectives; and because impersonal verb, impersonal expression, and impersonal construction are standard terms. (In a lot of languages, including at least English and French, you can't use an adjective like this on its own — you have to say something like "it is good/understood/obvious that […] " or "it is cold/hot/rainy in […] " or "it is easy/difficult/interesting to […] " — so it makes sense to view the construction or expression as a whole as impersonal. In Hebrew, you just say "tov/kamuvan/barur she […] " or "kar/kham/[n/a] b'- […] " or "kal/kashe/m'anyen l'- […] ", so it seems like the adjective itself is being used impersonally. And we're a dictionary, so it's more convenient for us to describe these as properties of individual words. (If this were standard category with a standard name — which it may well be, but if so I don't know it — then I don't think it would have occurred to me to ask anyone about it, I would have just created the category. I'd like your opinion because I'm not sure about this, it's just an idea I had. And I think it's a good idea, but maybe not, and anyway not all good ideas work out in practice.)

And I wasn't thinking that yesh and ein would be included, since they don't seem to be adjectives at all, but more like quasi-verbs. For example, they (especially ein) can function as copulas in formal Hebrew (as in Template:Hebr or Template:Hebr). Funnily enough, my Hebrew–English dictionaries all give yesh as an adverb, which I think they're using a catch-all POS, and my Hebrew dictionary seems to give it only as a noun, apparently on etymological grounds. (Speaking only of the grammatical/existential use here. Certainly it has lexical uses as a noun, as all dictionaries agree.)

—Ruakh_TALK 16:14, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Hm. I maintain that yesh and en are used the way adjectives are, and seem to be adjectives. But having thought about it some more, I suppose they're not adjectives of the sort we're discussing here. After all, yesh li sefer is like kasha li handasa=handasa kasha li: still an adjective, just not of the sort we're discussing. Or so it seems to me at the moment.

More importantly: I suggest that the fact that these adjectives are "impersonal" is perfect material for a usage note; perhaps draft a usage-note template that can be included in all these pages and that categorizes.—msh210℠ 19:59, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for all your advice. I've gone ahead and created Category:Hebrew impersonal adjectives. I haven't written the usage-note template yet — I've thought a bit about what it should say, but it's still kind of vague in my head — so right now the category is still empty. I know how you like to keep your talk-page clean, but I'd kind of like to keep this conversation around. Is it all right if I copy it to the category's talk-page? Thanks again. —Ruakh_TALK 00:46, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

If you like, you certainly can, but it's unnecessary: I'll keep it as long as you like, and archive it thereafter. Nice explanation in the cat.—msh210℠ 15:48, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

If I may intervene, and I apologize for not reading the entire discussion, I might be able to contribute on certain points that I did read:

• The words yesh and eyn have been baffling Hebrew grammarians for a long time. In Hebrew they function like verbs with null subject. The ultra-conservative grammarians claim the thing stated as existent or non-existent is the sentence's subject (and there is the famous pseudo-philosophic mnemonic: ma she-yésh u-ma she-éyn hu ha-nosé). However, this theory doesn't hold much water for Modern Israeli Hebrew (I don't have enough information regarding Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew). First, since the unmarked word order in MIH is S-V-O, it is quite remarkable that yesh/eyn sentences are unmarkedly built as V-S and never have direct objects, according to the ultra-conservative theory. It would be more reasonable to assume that yesh marák ("there is soup") is analogous with holkhim habayta ("It's time to go home", lit. "going home"). Furthermore, native MIH-speakers insist (intuitively) on inserting the clitic et before the alleged subject in yesh/eyn sentence, when it is definite, e.g. kvar yésh li et ha-séfer hazé or kvar yésh li ta-sèfer-azé. Since in MIH et always introduces direct object (unlike Biblical Hebrew where et functions in a more complicated way), this implies that the thing stated as existent/non-existent is actually the object of the sentence. Of course teachers at school frown upon saying yesh li et ha-sefer and insist it should be yesh li ha-sefer, but even careful radio/TV announcers introduce et in this position when interviewing rather than reading from the teleprompter.
• Stepping up to a higher register of Modern Israeli Hebrew, yesh and eyn have nominal inflection (namely, yeshní, yeshkhá and the somewhat peculiar yeshnó; eyní/eynéni, eynkhá, eynó/eynéno). So we see here something that behave nominally but normally occupies the verb slut of the sentence.
• efshár has a nominal form (in Hebrew nouns and adjective are extremely similar morphologically, so nominal here refers to adjectives too). It seems to behave somewhat like a modal verb in English. It introduces a base-form verb, it has a special negation (namely, í-efshàr, just like you say "can't" and not "don't can"). You've noticed that efshár lagáat is grammatical while kham lagáat is not, because the adjective kham don't have the modality feature that efshár has.
• To sum it all up, the classification of these words to parts of speech is difficult, and even experienced grammarians differ on this issue. Perhaps a special category of "quasi-verbs" or "modals" or something similar would be a solution. Drork 17:56, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
  • Thanks for that. We (enwikt) seem to use (for any language) "Particle" as a catch-all header when we can't assign a POS. Not ideal, but.​—msh210℠ 18:01, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

That seems to be a common practice. They did the same in the company I used to work for as linguist. Drork 04:47, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

ASL index

I thought you might be interested in Tom's recommendation at User talk:Positivesigner, "... assign Sign Writing pictographs for each [symbol in his sign jotting system]. The lookup would be visual enough to not even need to know English and it would be general enough to isolate a group of similar signs in a few steps. My code would not be seen except by the computer programs we use to create the slightly-inaccurate Sign Writing indicies. Once the entry is located, you can have it translated from a video to Sign Writing, PSE, and English."

I'm excited about the possibility of creating a useable index, as the current system still doesn't seem terribly easy to maintain or even to navigate. Your feedback is welcome. —Rod (A. Smith) 18:41, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Why use the current system for the index? If we're switching to ASLSJ, do so for the index, too. Or am I missing something? In any event, I think that since SignWriting (the real thing, not our version) will, I hope, be Unicode characters, we'll be switching over anyway, so any current system is temporary and need not be ideal; so we might as well leave it the way it is for now even if we do think ASLSJ is better.—msh210℠ 18:47, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

No, I don't think a full conversion to ASLSJ (temporary or otherwise) is on the table, because it doesn't seem to solve any problems of the current transcription system. Tom's recommendation was to combine SignWriting symbols with ASLSJ just to organize (and automatically maintain) our sign language indices. I'm sketchy on the details, but presumably the reorganized index would make it easier for a reader to find the entry for a sign of unknown meaning. I told him to be bold with one or two of the existing Index:American Sign Language pages, so we can at least see how his vision might unfold.

Browsing around the Internet, I cannot find any new information on the integration of SignWriting into Unicode. The layout issues seem so much more complex than Unicode combining characters can accomodate, so I suspect it will be several years, at least. —Rod (A. Smith) 20:37, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

I have a working solution for encoding Binary SignWriting to Unicode. Binary SignWriting uses sequential 16 bit codes to represent the spatial information needed for SignWriting. You can read about the plane 4 solution. You can view the Hello world. page. You can view the BSW JavaScript library (see function char2unicode). I'm currently rewriting the SignWriting Image Server to use Binary SignWriting rather than comma delimited data. It should be ready next week. -Steve 12:49, 08 May 2009 (UTC)

SignWriting Image Server beta 5 has been released to view and download. Section 3 has the Binary SignWriting definition with ABNF for data and Regular Expressions for tokens. -Steve 19:35, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

User:Mglovesfun/vector.js

I'd like to to bypass the redirects from ISO 639-3 codes to ISO 639-1 codes. For example {{ara}} → {{ar}} (list) could you do this, please? PS, open request, if anyone else wants to do it, feel free. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:59, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

To snap the redirects à la diff? First of all, if you're going to do that, you may want to (a) be careful that you only actually do the language codes and not other things that look like them (like lit, which may well be used for other things) and (b) also allow for an equal sign (not just an open brace and pipe) before the code. That said, are those pure synonyms? Or is it possible someone might add, e.g., {{etyl|nld}} to mean something more specific than {{etyl|nl}}?​—msh210℠ 15:22, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Actually the redirects don't hurt, apart from in certain templates like {{t}} and {{context}}. I take your point about lang= parameters and lit. Hmm. Maybe not bother then. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:15, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Redirects never hurt. The only reason I change them via my .js is to save the server from doing so on each pageload (or whenever). I only do so when I'm editing the page anyway (i.e., I never edit a page to snap a redirect, unless, of course, the redirect is about to be deleted or reredirected or something).​—msh210℠ 16:18, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Well using something like {{etyl|la|nld}} puts things in the category Category:nld:Latin derivations instead of nl. Ok so moving on, IPA now seems to be appearing bold, is that from the site default or from one of the scripts I'm using? Either way I'd like to go back to non-bold. PS thanks for all your help. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:35, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

I don't see it in boldface. It's class 'IPA', but that's not defined in the server-imposed or mediawiki-namspace monobook or vector CSS, and its style in [[mediawiki:Common.css]] hasn't changed recently AFAICT. So, in short, I have no idea. Sorry. Try the Grease pit, maybe. Re nld vs. nl, good point. But I don't have the patience/time (now at least) to code specifically for the second parameter of etyl, and don't want to mess with the first (right?). So I'll not add it right now.​—msh210℠ 17:42, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Just so you know, it tries to subst: {{pf}}, presumably because it's a two letter template, where it should convert it to {{pf.}}. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:57, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Oh, the IPA issue isn't due to my vector, I know this because it displays the same on the French Wiktionary. Therefore, I guess it's my browser setting. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:08, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up re pf. I've now added pf→pf. to my JS. (It's executed before the langcode substs.) I'm not sure why it affected pf, though: pf has wikilinks (brackets) in it, and the JS depends on isValidPageName.​—msh210℠ 16:02, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, the same thought occurred to me too. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:03, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

For some reason the changes you've made don't work for me. Also, it subst:ed {{art}} which looks like this

{{context |label=art|topcat=Art
|sub=|lang=|skey=|||||||||}}

I can't understand why the simple changes you've made aren't working for me, see diff. Mglovesfun (talk) 08:56, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Hm, actually, my superAutoFormat is seemingly currently not working at all. I don't know why. I'll try and see.​—msh210℠ 19:30, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

D'oh!​—msh210℠ 20:37, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

If you could fix mine in the same way, I'd be very grateful. Mglovesfun (talk) 19:00, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

diff​—msh210℠ 19:34, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

subst'd he-link

Hi msh210,

L'shana tova!

Do you by any chance have a handy list of entries that you subst'd {{he-link}} in? I ask because I'd like to go through them and change them to {{onym}} or {{term}}: the subst'd template code is a bit of an ugly mess. :-P

(If not, I imagine I can track it down from Special:Contributions/Msh210 and/or Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:romanization of Hebrew, but I thought I'd ask.)

Thanks in advance!
—Ruakh_TALK 00:46, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Shana tova to you, too. No, I don't have such a list. I can build it from special:contributions also, though, and if you want, I'll gladly do so (as I'll better recognize which edits to look at than will you). Let me know.​—msh210℠ 16:06, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

diff MediaWiki:Blockipsuccesstext

How can an IP address possibly have a gender? Nadando 22:26, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Although the page is called "Blockipsuccesstext", it's applied to registered users also. (For IPs, "their" will appear.)​—msh210℠ 16:08, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Ok- but 'his' is currently appearing, not 'their'. Nadando 17:15, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Weird. I wonder why. I'll revert.​—msh210℠ 17:40, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

[1]

Does clicking on a spot to place the definition not do anything, or is the way to add definitions not clear enough? --Yair rand (talk) 21:30, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, both: I thought that clicking on spot was the thing to do, but that wasn't quite clear enough — and then it didn't work. (In fact, I couldn't do anything on that page except click a link, and the address bar had 'died' too. I had to follow a link to get rid of the definition adder.)​—msh210℠ 19:21, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

What browser? --Yair rand (talk) 03:07, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Firefox 3.6.9.​—msh210℠ 19:08, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Strange, I checked that browser a number of times and it worked. --Yair rand (talk) 18:15, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

I believe that most of that is the intended behavior; that is, the intended behavior is a bit broken. Once you've clicked "Add definition", you can't close the definition-box or move the focus away from it (even to the address bar) until you click on an ordered-list. This should be fixed. But the only part of your description that seems like unintended behavior is the implication that it doesn't even work to click on an ordered list? —Ruakh_TALK 03:30, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

I thought the intended behavior was okay. How would you have it? --Yair rand (talk) 03:52, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

The intended behavior isn't bad, but the problem is that not everyone who clicks on "add definition" will actually mean to add a definition; they may have thought it would open the edit-page, or they may have meant to click on a different link, or they're just curious what it is, or maybe they really did mean to use it but then they change their minds (for whatever reason). But after you click "add definition", you can't do anything until you tell it where you want the definition to go, after which point you can choose to undo. I think it would be much better if, when the definition-box loses the focus, it simply disappeared. Any text in there should still be remembered (in a JS variable or the like), and restored if the user then clicks "add definition" again. —Ruakh_TALK 19:02, 16 September 2010 (UTC) Update: Yair has made the change I described, and it seems to work perfectly. Thanks, Yair! —Ruakh_TALK 15:24, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

By the way, I think the interface is really cool when it is what the user wants. I hope the problems do get resolved, so the script can be restored. :-)   —Ruakh_TALK 19:04, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

I agree completely with Ruakh (19:02, 16 September 2010 (UTC)).​—msh210℠ 19:08, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, except his first six words.​—msh210℠ 19:09, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Re the "Update" (Ruakh, 15:24, 17 September 2010 (UTC)): Yes, thanks for fixing that. Some points: (1) The definition must be placed after it's typed. Allowing either first would be nice. (That's a feature request, not a bug report.) (2) Allowing the definition to be placed anywhere in the list, not just last, would be helpful. (That's also a feature request, but one which is more important IMO.) (3) I didn't try it with sub-<ol>s, which a number of our entries have; does it work? (4) If you choose to (or, for some reason, must necessarily) ignore #2, so the definition can only be added to the end of the list, can, at least, clicking anywhere in the list put it at the list's end? Currently, there's a very small area of screen that will allow the definition to be placed, and the little line that appears when that area is mousovered is hard to see, so it's very hard to see where to place the definition. (5) Perhaps there should be a little note "Type in your definition, drag it to where it should be placed, and click there to place it." or something, to clarify. OTOH maybe most users are savvier than I. (6) IMO when adding a new sense of an existing word-POS combination, one should pretty much always add a usex, so as to distinguish the sense from existing senses. (Technical definitions like the topological sense of foliation may be an exception.) This feature should thus allow the addition of usexes also.(Again, that's just a feature request, but I think it's an important one. Note that someone who wants to add a usex needs to re-edit the page, wasting an edit and making the script as it is now useless (for him).)​—msh210℠ 16:27, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

(1) I'm not sure how that would be workable, since something needs to activate the preview, and I'd rather not require an extra click if avoidable. (3) It can't insert definitions into sub-<ol>s, and I'm not even sure if it's necessary that it does. (I'm pretty sure that's not even allowed by policy, and I don't think we have more than a couple entries with them.) (4) That's actually been there since the beginning. (5) That's a good idea, but I'm not sure where it could be placed. Maybe above or below the input box? (6) If User:Yair rand/editor.js ("Add expandable editing options side box next to definitions" in PREFS) is enabled at the same time as adddefinition.js, it does add the definition side box that can be used to add usexes to the newly added definition. I don't expect it to be on by default anytime soon, but it makes it seem rather redundant to specifically add a usex adder to adddefinition.js. --Yair rand (talk) 18:15, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

(4) Didn't work for me. (5) That's what I was thinking. That's one line of text, not a lot of space. (6) Good point.​—msh210℠ 14:50, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

The Words of Mathematics: An Etymological Dictionary of Mathematical Terms Used in English

Had you seen this 1994 work ? It seems useful in explaining the nature of the metaphors underlying mathematical senses of common terms. DCDuring TALK 19:54, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

No; thanks for the pointer. It's published by the MAA, so should be reputable; OTOH the MAA is math (and math pedagogy) experts, not etymology experts, so who knows. I've never heard of the author or the book, and there's no review of it in MathSciNet. I can get a copy from a local library, but don't know whether I should use it as a source. You think?​—msh210℠ 20:04, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

For etymology per se, I would think we have plentiful sources for most of the components of mathematical terms. It is mostly for the sense development, the metaphor, especially in an area that you were not too familiar with. I borrowed it from my local library, but I am unlikely to be the right person for the job, whereas you are. DCDuring TALK 21:48, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

The most interesting aspect of sense development is probably the date of first use, which this book — I've borrowed it now — lacks for most entries. (Really, what else is there to say about, for example, snowflake curve, other than that it comes from snowflake and was coined by someone at some point?) But I'll see what I can do.​—msh210℠ 14:26, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

I've looked at the book. for most words, the book gives the original root in Latin or wherever, with no indication of how it came to English. This is, as you mention above, better covered elsewhere. It often explains why a, for example, sheaf (mathematical object) is called that (because it resembles in some way a sheaf (real-world object)), but I think that for the most part these are pretty obvious, and, in any event, they are uninteresting to me, so I don't want to copy the information over, though I'll grant that it is suitable info for enwikt and someone may wish to do so. What it does not explain, which is most interesting to me personally, are two things: (1) when a word was first used in its mathematical sense. (2) Often, a word was used in French or German in a mathematical sense as an extension of the standard French or German word, and then the English term was calqued/borrowed from the French or German to acquire its math sense. I suspect that that happened with differentiation, for example. It would be nice to have such indication in an etymology, but this book makes no mention of such things, instead saying things like "Leibniz was the first to use this term" (in fact Leibniz did not write in English). So I'll not be using the book as an enwikt source.​—msh210℠ 16:52, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree with your assessment. I was a bit disappointed in the shallowness. It seems more useful as a checklist of basic terms and a quick source for etymology-section starter information than anything else. The kind of information that you seek is fairly elusive for many terms. Do you think there is any single source that has such information for more than a handful of math terms? DCDuring TALK 22:20, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't know of any, but I wouldn't necessarily if there were such. Sometimes, at least for newer terms, research can be done online to discover who was the first to use a term in print. For example, [[w:Casson handle]] claims that a certain 1982 paper was the first to use Casson handle, and that information is probably findable by researching the relevant papers, all of which are probably on MathSciNet. But that's term by term, not the single source for many terms that you mention. I'll do so for any term that interests me (and feel free to ask me to do so for any term that interests you), if it's in a field where I'll be able to identify the relevant papers. But I certainly won't do so en masse. (Incidentally, the way math collaboration works, likely the term was used for a while, years possibly, before that 1982 paper was published, possibly even in non-durably-archived print (on blackboards and in handwritten notes of talks) and possibly, even, was not invented by the paper's author at all.)​—msh210℠ 15:42, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Template:term

Unless I'm mistaken (quite possible) this is the change that has led to entries being categorized in Category:Entries which need Xyzy script, and a few other ones, all equally silly. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:34, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

I believe you're right. Sorry,. Better now?​—msh210℠ 16:42, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Morphology presentation template

I have prepared a first draft of a morpheme-presentation and -autocategorization template, {{morph}}. It is probably botched in its treatment of he|yi and lacks the categorization of the second morpheme, but its use is illustrated at referentiality. Like confix, from which this is derived, it is limited to three arguments. A variant (or a called subtemplate?), capable of handling more morphemes, at least six for normal English, more for Joycean terms, would be desirable.

It is intended to facilitate the separation of morphology (aka "synchronic etymology") and etymology (aka "diachronic etymology") and complements DoremitzWR's ideas at WT:BP.

Please tell me what you think and fix what needs fixing. DCDuring TALK 15:06, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Hey, I've been away a little. It looks like this template has been worked on quite a bit since you've posted this request, which is therefore no longer relevant. Right? Thanks for seeking my input, though. — This comment was unsigned.

Hope you're relaxed.

I'm working up the courage and energy to present a proposal about the presentation of etymology, especially historical and morphological etymology using auocategorizing templates like, {{prefix}}, {{suffix}}, {{confix}}, and {{derv}} which requires some resolution of the confounding of historical and morphological derivation that now characterizes our Etymology section. Part of the problem is that different languages are at different levels of readiness for presenting etymology information of the two kinds. A bigger problem is that autocategorizing requires the creation of a lot of categories, even for a deployment limited to derivations within English. And the category-naming convention should be consistent with all-language deployment. DCDuring TALK 22:14, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

I've seen recent talk about categorizing by etymon, and don't quite see the point for the rarer etyma. As I mentioned elsewhere (though I'm darned if I know where now), how many descendants in English are there of Middle English withdrawen (verb)? Presumable just withdraw. Do we need or want an "English descendants of Middle English withdrawen" category? I say absolutely not. (OTOH, do we need or want an "English descendants of Latin canere/cano" category? That, yes, or at least maybe.) I am very much in favor of clearly marking morphological (or whatever it's called) etymology, where we have it, as such.​—msh210℠ 15:51, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Deletion requests#Wikiquote

Hello. Since you participated in the deletion discussion above, I thought I might like to hear some input from you regarding this one. Thanks. TeleComNasSprVen 12:32, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up. I suppose most of the terms will be gone sooner or later, so I don't see the rush to delete the category. I won't be commenting at RFDO.​—msh210℠ 16:36, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

WT:RFV#on the spectrum

You objected to some of the first batch of cites, so I just wanted to make sure you were O.K. with the new ones before I mark this "passed" . . .

(I'm actually not sure that your initial objections are really RFV-ish — they dispute the idiomaticity rather than the attestation — but I think it makes sense to try to address them as part of the current discussion, if we can.)

Thanks in advance!
—Ruakh_TALK 17:40, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

I've passed it.​—msh210℠ 16:39, 11 October 2010 (UTC)