User talk:I'm so meta even this acronym

shadows on the wall

Not sure if it would meet our criteria for inclusion. However, see w:Allegory of the Cave for background. SemperBlotto (talk) 17:11, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I figured it was an allusion to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. What are your criteria for inclusion? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 21:21, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

See Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion. SemperBlotto (talk) 21:23, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

That looks like a lot to take in. I'll get back to you once I've had time to look it over. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 21:29, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Nice username! --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 13:22, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, but I can't take the credit for it; I took it from xkcd 917. I would have taken the handle User:ISMETA, but someone somewhere'd already taken User:Ismeta, so the system wouldn't let me. :-( I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 23:07, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Having read every xkcd comic, including the hidden ones, I certainly recognized the reference. In this case, I find it somewhat humorous on another level, because I'm willing to bet that if you stick around, somebody will confuse us, or even accuse me of sockpuppeteering. Anyway, it's great to have you here! --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:08, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

verisome

Probably just running together "very same" (meaning something like "exact") ? SemperBlotto (talk) 15:39, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, yes; that makes a lot of sense. I took it to mean something like "true", formed from veri- (as in "verity" and "verisimilitude") + -some (as in "worrisome" and "flavoursome"), but I think you may be right that it's just "verisame" with a typo; Buckminster Fuller uses "verisame" (see Citations:verisame), which supports your interpretation. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 16:00, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

suffrutex

You are inventing Classical pronunciations for a word that did not exist in Classical Latin. If you do this, you need to mark the pronunciations as modern pronunciations based on Classical principles. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:31, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

OK, sorry. How do I do that? Does it have a different New Latin pronunciation? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 21:32, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

That's the problem. New Latin pronunciation differs enormously by country. I usually don't add pronunciations to New Latin terms because of that. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:34, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Hmm. How about a qualifier like "(pseudo-Classical)"? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 21:46, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Like this? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 22:09, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Possibly. It ought to use the {{a|}} template though, for formatting purposes. However, I'm not sure that "pseudo-Classical" will be clear enought for even the casual reader. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:41, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

OK. I've gone with "Classicistic" instead. Is that better? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 12:38, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

judenlaim

Thanks for starting the discussion. I'm curious about the outcome. Longtrend (talk) 19:34, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

My pleasure; I'm curious, too. I'm surprised this sort of issue hasn't come up before. CodeCat has pinpointed the issue, I think. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 20:51, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

Dude

Cool username. -- Cirt (talk) 04:49, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. :-) I got it from this. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 18:22, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Sweet, sweet. -- Cirt (talk) 05:17, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

hanshinron

Hi, really recently there was a discussion on how to treat romaji entries, and basically we decided to treat it as a soft link. All the information that would go on a romaji entry instead only goes on kana entries, which usually in turn link to kanji entries. I saw your edits on hanshinron (which were exactly the way to do it until a week ago, so no criticism there) and in the new format it would be like this:

==Japanese==

===Romanization===
{{ja-romaji|hira=はんしんろん}}

All the information that was on the previous romaji entry can be merged with the matching hiragana entry. Thanks for your help :) --Haplology (talk) 16:49, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

OK. Just to make sure I understand you, does that mean that ローマ字 entries don't get definition lines at all? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 17:18, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

They do get definition lines, but the lines are produced by {{ja-romaji}} and are basically soft redirects. Take a look for yourself. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:29, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

What he/she said. There was a debate over having complete definitions, abbreviated definitions, or none at all, but we went for option C, no definitions. The template produces a simple link to はんしんろん in this case. --Haplology (talk) 02:14, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Ah, 分かります。 :-) How elegantly parsimonious. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 16:18, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

dioecesim

We usually put quotes that use inflected forms on the entry for the lemma form. Thanks —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:50, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Forgive my boldness, but I've reverted your removal of the quotation. That entry's such a stubby thing that, surely, the quotation does some good by adding information, and at the very least certainly does no harm; also, n.b. that I'd also already added the quotation to the entry for the lemma at (deprecated template usage) dioecēsis. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 12:35, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

It's supposed to be stubby. The whole point of dioecesim is to give the bare minimum of information to clothe what is essentially a soft redirect to dioecesis, where the definitions ought to be. I agree that it probably does no harm, but keeping entries standardised is important in general around here. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:30, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Do you believe that all soft redirects should be stripped of quotations? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 21:27, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

You might be able to dredge up exceptions, but in general, yes. Not Wiktionary policy or anything, just personal belief. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:46, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Hmm. In my opinion, it can at times be helpful to include quotations in entries for inflected forms; for example, would it not be helpful if the four definitions in the Latin entry for (deprecated template usage) aulae were furnished with citations, demonstrating to the curious user the differences in usage between the genitive- and dative-singular and nominative- and vocative-plural forms? (I know this argument doesn't really apply to the particular case of (deprecated template usage) dioecēsim, but it had a bearing on the general principle you advocate, I should think.) I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 14:19, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

No, I don't think that would be helpful, because most users of our Latin entries know how the cases work already, and those who don't won't learn anything from the examples. (PS: It reduces template overhead if you just write ''dioecēsim'' instead of using {{term}} when you're not actually linking to a page. Not something that really matters much, but being details-oriented is part of my nature.) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 22:33, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

I must, respectfully, disagree with you; the "feel" of the usage of grammatical forms is, in my experience, learnt gradually — in part from the internalisation of grammatical descriptions, and in part from direct familiarity with examples of those grammatical forms. As for using and not using {{term}}, I've found that not using it (or using it without the appropriate sc= or lang= parameter) can lead to display problems; moreover, it had only been out of laziness that I didn't use it consistently. Be that as it may, I was unaware of the template-overhead problem, and in the light of that new knowledge, I shall in future use simple italics or other methods of presentation when I mention terms (without linking) in discussions, where assuring correct display is not as important as it is in entries. Is that OK? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 23:42, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

I can't remember how I learned the cases; it feels as if I always could feel the difference, although obviously that is far from the truth. I will have to say that we remain in disagreement, but this is such a pitifully unimportant issue that I'm not going to revert your revert for the sake of my views. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:00, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm glad that, even if we remain in disagreement, we're civil and amicable about it. :-) I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 16:00, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

ἀργία

Could you clarify what sort of etymological info you're looking for? -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 01:22, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Hello, Atelaes. I'm sorry to have wasted your time with my mistake; I meant to add {{rfp|lang=grc}}, like this. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 16:10, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Ah, that makes more sense. No worries.  :) -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 22:45, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

δικαιωσύνην

Could I ask where the quote is from? I can't find evidence of this word anywhere. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 17:08, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

It's from an early–eighteenth-century introductory text of Biblical exposition by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Is that any help? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 16:18, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, δικαιωσύνη (the lemma form of δικαιωσύνην) is a modern Greek word, not an ancient one. It might possibly be medieval, but I have an utter paucity of sources on medieval Greek. You might want to ask Flyax about it, as he is better versed in both periods than anyone else here, and would likely have more insight than anyone else. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 22:56, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion; I've done just that. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 00:02, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Flyax has concluded that δικαιωσύνην is a misspelling of δικαιοσύνην, which may explain the original source quotation "Τὴν δικαιοσύνην, id est κατά τὴν δικαιωσύνην." — (deprecated template usage) Κατά (Katá) can mean "badly" or "erroneously", right? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 23:20, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

I also can't find εὐφνία. I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist, as Google only returned nine results, and most of them were typos. Was the request misspelled? -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 08:40, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I'll recheck my source in a bit and then get back to you. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 12:40, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

I suppose the word you are referring to is εὐφυΐα. --flyax (talk) 22:21, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

Here's my source:

• 1978, W.F.R. Hardie, “‘Magnanimity’ in Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’” in Phronesis XXIII, № 1, page 74:

  The athlete needs the right sort of physical endowment, and similarly a man “must be born (phunai), with an eye, as it were, by which to judge rightly and choose what is truly good” (1114 b 5–8); this is the “perfect and true excellence of natural endowment”, εὐφυία (b 10–12).

So, yes, I misspelt the request (and the source omitted the diaeresis). I'm sorry to have wasted your time with that one.

BTW, you recently created an entry for (deprecated template usage) ἤθη (ḗthē) — thanks! — which is the etymon of the English (deprecated template usage) ethe, a plural form of (deprecated template usage) ethos. The entry for ethos also lists (deprecated template usage) ethea as a plural form of it — and I see that it's sufficiently attested — but does that plural form have an Ancient Greek etymon as a precedent? That is, I suppose I'm asking, does (deprecated template usage) ἦθος (êthos) have more than one pattern of declension? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 23:20, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

(deprecated template usage) Ἦθος (Êthos) does in fact have two forms of inflection. I have substituted a better inflection template, and created the entry in question. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 23:58, 6 May 2013 (UTC) — IFYPFY. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 10:05, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Excellent! You're a star. :-) I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 00:09, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

-uus

Complex explanations of pronunciation of suffixes in isolation tend to fall apart. The suffix -uus is a case in point. It appears to have originally been a primary suffix, and is present in words like equus (=equos), arvum and vacīvus. As you can see then, statements about the stress falling on the antepenult fall apart, because in these words the stress falls on the paenultimate syllable instead. See sxn 234, II, 8 of Allen & Greenough's New Latin Grammar. I usually find it best to keep explanations of the pronunciation of the suffix limited to the pronunciation of the suffix in isolation. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:20, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Addendum: Oh, and usually a request for etymology should be placed in an Etymology section. This (1) makes it easier to insert the requested information, (2) aids in removal of the request template, and (3) helps to ensure correct formatting by the next editor. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:22, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry to disagree, but your counterexamples don't contradict the pronunciation information I've given; equus is governed by the ⟨-quus⟩ exception already provided for, whereas arvum and vacīvus exhibit (deprecated template usage) -vus, not -uus.

Re requests for etymology, is this what you mean?

Finally, could you tell me what "trop." (as in Lewis's & Short's A Latin Dictionary, “equus”, II.C.2: "Trop., of a secret conspiracy…") means / is short for, please?

I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 12:47, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

-uus and -vus are orthographic variants of the same suffix.

Re: RQEs: Yes, that's one example of what I mean. Look at Portuguese (deprecated template usage) cromo for a more complex instance to see why this is usually preferred.

"Trop." is short for "Tropical", which is a word formerly used to mean "figurative". --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:33, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps, but because of the widespread orthographic conventions governing Latin spelling (and which are enforced in this dictionary), in the case of that suffix -uus always represents /u.us/ and -vus always represents /wus/. Strictly speaking, of course, -uus is just as much governed by the paenultima law as any other bit of Latin; however, because the first syllable of -uus will always be light (except for in the case of ⟨-quus⟩) — which means that any word it forms (other than those ending in ⟨-quus⟩, like oblīquus) will have a light penult — it can be stated that the stress of any given word formed with that suffix will fall on the antepenult, which is a helpful thing to note for our users.

FWIW, I already tended to add the separate headers when requesting etymologies for homographs; nevertheless, I now add the etymology header as a matter of course.

Thanks for the enlightening explanation of trop.; I have created (deprecated template usage) trop. and edited tropic, tropical, and fig. accordingly.

I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 19:09, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

體#Japanese

I noticed you re-added an rfe for this entry. It looks like you're asking for the etymology of the character, but that should be given in the ==Translingual== section. If you're asking about the etymology for karada, etc., that should be given in the lemma entry, which is 体. (Admittedly, that entry right now is a dog's breakfast, but it's on my to-do list.  :) ) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:29, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

{{rfe}}s for Japanese terms go in 新字体 entries and {{rfe}}s for character derivations go in Translingual sections; OK, gotcha. Sorry for inconveniencing you. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 09:59, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Annoying RFEs and RFPs

I for one find all those RFEs and RFPs you are adding pretty annoying. Luckily for you, there are quite a few editors who seems to support what you are doing. Do you have any evidence that the RFE requests and RFP requests actually get fulfilled at a significant rate? --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:26, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm not trying to be annoying. Some requests are fulfilled somewhat quickly (Ancient Greek, Japanese), whilst others aren't (obscure languages). There is a definite purpose to the {{rfe}}s: once they're answered, I link to that entry in its etymon's or etyma's, like I did in the case of the etyma of (deprecated template usage) requiebro (which was FWOTD yesterday): [1], [2], [3] (granted, that didn't involve {{rfe}}s, but that's the kind of thing that answered requests allow me to do). Since they annoy you, I shall cease to add those request templates to Czech entries. I added this pronunciation to rádio; please check that it is correct. Also, can you recommend a reliable source for Czech etymologies? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 17:14, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Do you have any evidence that the RFE requests and RFP requests actually get fulfilled at a significant rate? --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:34, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Define "significant rate". I can't really be bothered to look through my contributions for the evidence; they're open to you, too, so be my guest if you want to look yourself. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 17:37, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Is there a definition of "significant rate" for which you have evidence that RFE requests actually get fulfilled at a significant rate? (Above, you have provided links to edits that have no bearing to RFEs; I don't know why you did that.) --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:43, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

As I said, I can't be bothered to spend my time getting that evidence; I have better things to do with my time, but if you don't, you are free to peruse my list of contributions. Those links are there to demonstrate my explanation for why I add RFEs ("once [an RFE is] answered, I link to that entry in its etymon's or etyma's [entry or entries], like I did in the case of the etyma of (deprecated template usage) requiebro [recently]"). It was rather impolite of you to ignore almost all of the content of my above message (17:14, 16 September 2013). I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 21:21, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

I went through your contributions and did not find any edits of yours that serve RFEs placed in the pages, but I did not check every single edit. Can you point me to a couple of edits of yours that serve RFEs? You would understand that adding RFE is not serving it, and that editing an etymology section that does not have RFE is not serving RFE. So again, can you point me to a couple of edits of yours that serve RFEs? --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:04, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

IIRC, I have, in all my time here, served one (or maybe two) RFE(s). That may be to my discredit, admittedly, but that wasn't your original question; you originally asked whether the RFEs and RFPs that I add are served "at a significant rate".
For your interest, I recently added an RFE to the Afrikaans entry for koning, Metaknowledge served it twenty days later, which enabled me to add it as a descendant to the homographic Dutch entry the next day; presumably one example doesn't establish that my RFEs are "served 'at a significant rate'", but I certainly have no appetite for conducting a survey of all my RFEs.
What did you intend to accomplish by your interrogation of me? If it was to get me to stop adding RFEs and RFPs to Czech entries, a simple request would have sufficed. If it was to get me to serve others' RFEs, an appeal to the spirit of reciprocity would have done the trick. Template:l/en — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:47, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

I have warned Dan Polansky about this. Meta, feel free to continue adding requests to any entry if you need the etymology, pronunciation, etc. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 12:43, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Ungoliant. Valid requests shouldn't be removed. But you took away my nick... ;w; —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:23, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you both for reassuring me that I have not inadvertently been disruptive in my addition of requests. Metaknowledge, I have changed my signature, which I hope will discourage other editors from conflating us. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:47, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia link

Hi! You changed the link to Wikipedia on Bundesgrenzschutz from the {{wikipedia}} template at the top of the page to the {{pedia}} template in an "External links" section at the bottom. I'm wondering if there is any consensus how to deal with links to Wikipedia (as a third option, there's {{slim-wikipedia}}). So if you know of anything, please let me know too :) Thanks! Longtrend (talk) 10:19, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, but I don't know what the consensus is (if, indeed, there is one) regarding those templates; I'd assumed that, because all three template types exist, it's up to the individual editor's preference. Certainly, my preference is for using {{pedia}} in External links sections; this mirrors Wikipedia's usage (links to other projects go at the bottom of their articles), reduces horizontal compression and/or lopsided vertical lengthening of entries, and (less validly and somewhat hyperbolically) stops Wiktionary from looking like one big glorified redirect to Wikipedia. What's your preference? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:21, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't really have any preference :) I've always used {{wikipedia}} and never really thought about it. Your arguments sound fair, though. Longtrend (talk) 11:39, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

OK. Well, thanks for asking. Do you mind me making the change from {{wikipedia}} to {{pedia}} when I edit here? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:59, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

As long as that's not the only change you're doing on an entry, I think that's fine. Longtrend (talk) 10:41, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Good to know. And no, I wouldn't bother editing an entry just to change the style of link to Wikipedia; that would be far too petty a sole change to bother making an edit for. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:35, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Tibetan pic

Hi, [4] reads རྒྱལ་པོའི་སྲས་མོ། (rgyal po 'i sras mo .), i.e. the king's daughter. Wyang (talk) 01:25, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Ah, thank you! So it was pretty accurate, after all... I am grateful for your recent spate of Tibetan contributions, especially your edits to སྲས་མོ (sras mo). Additionally, would you mind adding a Tibetan Babelbox to your user page (I think only {{User bo-1}} currently exists, so if – as I assume – your proficiency in Tibetan surpasses level 1, you'd need to create the box template, too; it may just be easier to add [[Category:User bo-N]] – with whatever the appropriate number is – to your user page), so that users in need of Tibetan-related help can find you, and create an entry for (deprecated template usage) སྲས (sras) please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:40, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, སྲས (sras) done. I don't know what my Tibetan level is... but I am happy to be of help when I could be. Wyang (talk) 08:00, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you very much. I added the Category:User bo category to your user page as I suggested above; I hope you don’t mind. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:43, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, no worries. Wyang (talk) 03:14, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

data from external dictionaries

Just saw your reply. Thanks! – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 13:42, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

You're very welcome. If you need any more information regarding the legal issues that can crop up whilst you edit here, I advise you to contact User:BD2412 — he's the resident expert, by all accounts. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:54, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

coctile

Nice job you have done expanding the W1913 stub! Equinox ◑ 20:26, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:37, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

anonymous

Hey,

removing the flame war at Wiktionary:Requests for verification#anonymous is a good idea, however I do think that the use of the word at wikipedia, wikitionary and so on, is not described by any of the 5 senses. Even people who know my name, can call me an anonymous user, who makes anonymous contributions. They can even refer to me as the anonymous, so there's even a noun sense. It may be hard to find citations, if wikipedia/wikitionary &c. aren't considered to be durably archived. --80.114.178.7 17:56, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Five senses, you say? I only see four. Anyway, you may have a point. Usenet might be a good place to look for examples of such usage. As for "the anonymous", I think that's an adjectival use, rather than a full-fledged noun; I would suppose that (deprecated template usage) anon is the more likely word for the nominal sense you describe. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:54, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, five senses, including "without consideration of prestige or background", which doesn't have a definition, but a synonym ("on the merits") and six alleged translations. --80.114.178.7 21:22, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

On the noun sense, see Anonymous, and w:anonymous IV. --80.114.178.7 21:22, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Hello again. I'm sorry to have taken so long to get back to you. I must confess that I'd forgotten all about this until I renoticed this section when Hekaheka posted a message for me about Matth.
Take a look at google books:"anonymouses" — I am almost certain that you could find there the evidence you need for a robust noun section for (deprecated template usage) anonymous. You may also find the two quotations I've added to Citations:anonymus useful. I hope this helps. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:38, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Matth.

I don't think the abbreviation Matth. is used in Finnish, because "Matthew" is Matteus in Finnish, and the Gospel of Mathew is abbreviated as Matt.. Where have you seen "Matth." in a Finnish text? --Hekaheka (talk) 13:52, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

It occurs after the Finnish translation in the translation table in the English entry for (deprecated template usage) sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Perhaps some Finnish Biblical commentators use Book-name abbreviations deriving from their Latin names (cf. the English (deprecated template usage) Luc., from the Latin (deprecated template usage) Lūcās). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:16, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

It seems to be my own edit. It's an error, or at least a potentially misleading entry. I don't remember anymore, why I wrote "Matth.". Possibly I wanted to use the English abbreviation, because this is the English Wiktionary. I'll add the words "Finnish translation of" and then it will be clear to everyone that "Matth." is intended to be English. I did not want to make a Finnish entry of these words, because as far as I know, this particular sentence of the Bible is not used proverbially in Finnish. --Hekaheka (talk) 22:15, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Well, in that case, never mind; I'm sorry for wasting your time. Thanks, besides, for creating (deprecated template usage) Matt. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:00, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Ancient Greek inflection headers

Could you please stop replacing inflection with declension? Ancient Greek has been doing "Inflection" for a long time, and there are a great many entries that have the header. Changing it in a handful of entries only serves to make things messy. If you think that it should be the standard going forward, then by all means propose such a change and interested parties can discuss it. Thanks. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 20:03, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes, certainly. Sorry; I didn't mean to ruffle anyone's feathers. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:52, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

ocris

Hi,

I'm not sure to understand why you removed the label archaic, but don't you think it would be useful to have a category that would collect all the ante-classical words altogether? And shouldn't we empty Category:Latin archaic terms then? --Fsojic (talk) 10:51, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, consider the generic preamble to Category:Latin archaic terms: "Latin terms that are no longer in general use but still encountered in older literature and still sometimes used for special effect." In belonging to a dead language, how are those archaic terms any different from the rest of the Latin lexicon, which are also "no longer in general use"? And do we have any evidence that they are "still sometimes used for special effect"?
That said, I can see what you were thinking: Everything Latin that's ante-Classical is Old Latin; synonyms of "Old Latin" include "Early Latin" and "Archaic Latin"; hence, "Latin archaic terms". However, for the reasons I gave above, and for the sake of consistency with the analogous categories (Category:Ecclesiastical Latin, Category:Post-classical Latin, Category:Vulgar Latin, Category:Late Latin, Category:Medieval Latin, Category:Renaissance Latin, and Category:New Latin), I assert that Category:Old Latin is a better category name for these terms. (Re the choice between "Old Latin" and its two synonyms that I listed: there is no language with an ISO code that is called "Archaic"-anything, and there is only one which is called "Early"-something (Template:l/en, whose ISO code is xtr); by contrast, there are thirty-nine top-level categories for various languages called "Old"-something, from Template:l/en to Template:l/en.)
I have asked in Module talk:labels#Old Latin data for the necessary changes to the labelling infrastructure to be made. After they are instituted (which I hope they will be), we can go ahead and empty Category:Latin archaic terms into Category:Old Latin, as you suggest. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:12, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanking

I appreciate it, but I really don't need (or deserve) all those thanks for all my edits. :-) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:50, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, sorry; I think just the message on your talk page would've been a better idea. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:54, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Licensing

Wouldn't it be better if you could place, in your user page, where your username came from? Just a suggestion. --kc_kennylau (talk) 01:57, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

I don't think that opening up inside jokes to the out-group is necessarily a bad idea, but on the other hand, that renders them no longer inside jokes. If, as your title implies, you believe there is a legal problem with using this name sans citation, I urge Meta to ignore this at will. I am not a lawyer, but that seems ludicrous. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:06, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Right now, my user page is just a place for me to dump links that are useful to me. If and when I get round to writing an introduction for myself or something like that, I may indeed mention that my username is unscrupulously plagiarised from xkcd. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:26, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Historical hiragana

Heya, I just noticed in this edit diff that you added a request for だいくんゐ. That's an historical spelling that isn't used anymore following spelling reforms after WWII. I've been adding historical spellings to entries as I go (and when I remember, using the hhira parameter of the JA headword templates), but I don't think anyone has done any work on creating entries for historical hiragana. If you'd like JA editors to create those as a matter of course, I suggest you might want to bring it up in the Beer Parlour -- adding requests for the historical hiragana forms of each and every JA entry to the WT:WE list would quickly become ridiculous and tedious.  :)

If you're at all interested in Japanese kana usage conventions, have a look at w:Kanazukai.

Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 05:46, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

I'd already looked into that topic before, but, looking into it again, I learned some new things, so thanks for the link. :-) Don't worry, I wasn't intending to add every historical-hiragana red link to WT:WE, and yes, it would be great if ja editors would "create those [entries] as a matter of course"; however, I don't really want to bring it up in the Beer Parlour until the discussion I started about Old Latin is resolved. Therefore, would you mind teaching me what I need to do to create entries for those historical hiragana, please? That way, I can help to tackle the workload, rather than adding to it. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:43, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

• Cheers, thanks for the explanation and offer of assistance. Part of why I suggested WT:BP is that I myself don't have any clear idea what would be best for hhira (historical hiragana) entries. That said, the circle of JA editors is (naturally) smaller than the whole BP audience, so perhaps I can kick things off here. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:58, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Proposal for creating historical hiragana entries

Pinging @TAKASUGI Shinji, @Haplology, @Atitarev, @Wyang, @Jamesjiao -- do you all have any strong feelings about the creation of entries using the historical hiragana (hhira) spellings?

I'd like to propose that we create hhira entries much like existing kana entries -- as soft redirects, just listing the relevant POS headers, with the relevant lemma terms listed underneath using {{ja-def}}. Example for なびかふ:

==Japanese== ===Verb=== {{ja-verb}} # {{ja-def|靡かう}} to be waving, streaming, or bending in the wind: to do so continuously

Would you all be amenable to this? Is there anything you'd like to do differently? For example, should we indicate on the page somewhere that this is an obsolete (or at least archaic) historical spelling? Should we categorize these entries differently? Please chime in.

Once we have a clear consensus, perhaps Haplology or one of the other code-y editors could update the accelerator scripts to make it easier to create such entries.

And for that matter, I was thinking this might be a minor enough issue to handle just among us JA editors (and please ping anyone I've missed). But perhaps this should be brought up in WT:BP or elsewhere? Let me know what you think.

Cheers all, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:58, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

@Atitarev, Haplology, Jamesjiao, TAKASUGI Shinji, Wyang, and of course @Eirikr: In the specific case of なびかふ (nabikafu), wouldn't it be more correct to say that なびかふ is actually the all-hiragana spelling of 靡かふ, rather than of 靡かう? I imagine that the form with kanji would be attestable, and indeed more readily so than the all-hiragana form. If that were to be decided as the way to treat these forms, then presumably 靡かふ would then get an entry, and would simply be defined as:

• {{archaic spelling of|靡かう|lang=ja}}

…or something similar. As for 大勲位 (だいくんい, だいくんゐ), that's a materially different case, because the two all-hiragana strings both pertain to the same with-kanji string; that is when, I think, what you propose above, Eiríkr, is pretty much the right thing to do. On top of that, it would probably useful to state somewhere in such an entry what the current all-hiragana form is (i.e., だいくんい in the case of だいくんゐ), and having a category of hhira forms would also be useful (which category would, I assume, need to be added manually to entries like なびかふ).

That's my input, for now, but I defer to you other editors, given the great yawning gap in my proficiency in Japanese. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:12, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

• They should be marked as obsolete if they are allowed to exist. I don't know if allowing old kanazukai to exist is really worth the trouble. Listing the old kanazukai in modern form headwords or making them hard redirects seems like the better option. There are too many of them, and besides rekishiteki kanazukai, there is also kan'yō kanazukai (w:ja:許容仮名遣) and possibly others. Another thing is about jōdai tokushu kanazukai, and whether they should be marked Old Japanese (or other) and not Japanese. The current Japanese header is actually (rulebreakingly) an amalgamation of everything Japanese, eg. 顔映し. Wyang (talk) 22:54, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

• I don't have hard dates at the moment for the particular entry at 顔映し, but insofar as the ISO lang codes go, we have JA for “Japanese”, and we have OJP for “Old Japanese” -- that's it for anything Japanese. OJP apparently has an upper bound of 794 CE, as at w:Old Japanese. That means anything attested between 794 and now can only really go under a “Japanese” header. My sense so far has been that we hew pretty closely to the ISO codes when it comes to language headings, so that's what I've been doing whenever I create or edit entries.

Re: obsolete kanazukai, we list obsolete spellings in other languages, even English, so I'm not sure why they would be verboten for Japanese, provided of course that they are marked as obsolete, with users clearly directed to the lemmata entries under the modern spellings. We (the JA editors) haven't been adding in entries for the obsolete spellings, but I've been poking around to re-check policy, and I'm not seeing anything saying we shouldn't. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 04:41, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Category:Entries with Pronunciation n headers

The template {{rfc-pron-n|Pronunciation 1|lang=la}} preempts the action of Kassadbot for Pronunciation n headers in Latin entries and now categorizes by language. 20 languages so far have such headers, Latin having more than any other language. See Category:la:Entries with Pronunciation n headers, the master category, and {{rfc-pron-n}}.

The template is better than hard categorization, because it is the standard. I've converted two or three of these that are probably yours. How many do you think you added? I assume they were all added after Dec 29 when we had our discussion. I'm happy to search myself if I know how many to look for. DCDuring TALK 01:22, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

I've just finished checking all my edits to pages with Latin sections since the 29th of December; I converted the one use of the hard category that remained to use {{rfc-pron-n|Pronunciation 1|lang=la}}. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:47, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't like these headers, but they seem indispensable in some cases, including many if not all of their uses in Latin. Having them sorted by language makes it a little easier to get folks with the right knowledge to take a look and either eliminate them or defend them and expand their use to all the relevant cases. DCDuring TALK 21:41, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

Osea...

I assume this is the Latin name of the prophet (deprecated template usage) Hosea. But I'm not sure of the Lemma; it might even be "Osee" (from the Greek). SemperBlotto (talk) 12:45, 16 February 2014 (UTC) - p.s. Don't we put citations of inflected forms at the lemma citation page?

Yes indeed; see (deprecated template usage) Ōsēe, (deprecated template usage) Hōsēās, and User talk:Flyax#*Ὡσήᾱς (*Hōsēās) for context. Unfortunately, I'm not yet certain of those forms' lemmata, so I can't yet confidently "put [the] citations of inflected forms at the lemma citation page". — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:58, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

ÆØÅ

How would you pronounce ÆØÅ? I would pronounce it as /ɛːœːoː/ or Anglicized as /æːɜːɔː/ but that's just how I would pronounce it. In fact, I have never seen it before. --kc_kennylau (talk) 15:36, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

It seems unlikely to me that there would exist any standardly accepted naturalised/Anglicised pronunciation of this term. I've added the Danish and Norwegian pronunciations of the letters' names; presumably any pronunciation that deviates from them would be an approximation of one or both of them, anyway. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:24, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Actually I pronounced it as [ei.iː.əυ.ei] before I did some research. --kc_kennylau (talk) 09:20, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Fair enough; that refutes my presumption, then! :-) Do you think it's worth including pronunciations like your pre-research one (which looks like it's based on the English letter names for A, E, O, and A again)? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:57, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

But English is not my native language so I'm considered out of the sample space :) --kc_kennylau (talk) 12:45, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

@Kc kennylau An anonymous user has suggested at Talk:ÆØÅ#Adjective that the example sentences for the adjectival senses of (deprecated template usage) ÆØÅ are just uses of the nominal sense. Do you have any citations of this term being used unambiguously as a true adjective, perchance? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:19, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

rfe: -σύνη

Hi - you rfe'd -σύνη, my Bambiniotis gives PIE *-tunā as predecessor to the ancient Greek. Would you know about formatting this? cheers Saltmarsh (talk) 06:41, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Saltmarsh. Is this what you meant? If so, it would probably be a good idea if you could flesh out the one-word citation of Bambiniotis that's in the References section. Thanks. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:18, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

oder noch

Hi! You added oder noch to Wiktionary:Wanted entries. What makes you think this is an idiomatic unit? I can't see that. Longtrend (talk) 16:34, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

@Longtrend: Well, I had the sentence fragment "danach alles gestr. oder noch 1–2 Wörter?", which I translated as "After that, everything is crossed out — perhaps 1–2 words?"; I couldn't see how (deprecated template usage) oder noch could derive unidiomatically from (deprecated template usage) oder + (deprecated template usage) noch. Or have I mistranslated the sentence? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:02, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

You mistranslated it :) Actually it would be "Is everything after that crossed out or (= oder) are there one or two more (= noch) words?". So it's the normal conjunction (deprecated template usage) oder with the adverb (deprecated template usage) noch (sense 4). Longtrend (talk) 16:42, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

@Longtrend: I see; I apologise for the mistake. I've removed oder noch from WT:WE and I shall add "Danach alles gestr. oder noch 1–2 Wörter?" to oder and to noch as an example sentence. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:55, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

No problem! This is really a weird and unusual sentence, but it's better than no example at all, I guess. Longtrend (talk) 20:34, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

Indeed. No wonder I had trouble translating it! :-S  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:36, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

κορωνίς

Why would you list the current term as one of the related terms? —CodeCat 21:14, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

Not related; co-ordinate. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:15, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

So it's coordinate with itself? That doesn't make sense to me. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:03, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

@Eirikr: My thinking was that, given the {{sense}} preamble "Ancient Greek diacritical marks", the list should include the names of all the Ancient Greek diacritical marks. I suppose the preamble could be changed to "other Ancient Greek diacritical marks", but given that the diacritical definition of κορωνίς isn't very clearly presented, included as sense 2.2.2, I think it would be useful to retain κορωνίς in the list. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:23, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

大君#Japanese and alternate vs. alternative

FWIW, I don't particularly care one way or the other, beyond a preference for brevity. The terms (deprecated template usage) alternate and (deprecated template usage) alternative are synonymous in this context, making the change insubstantial and not particularly important. I reverted the anon for making a piddling unconstructive edit. Past experience has shown that this kind of niggling edit from certain IP ranges presages a crapflood of bad editing, hence my reflexive reversion. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:26, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

OK; well, I understand you reversion now. Re the synonymy of alternate and alternative in that sense, the OED (3rd ed., Nov. 2010) notes this in its etymology section for alternate, adj., adv., and n.:

• The semantic overlap with alternative adj. has been criticized by usage guides, and many British speakers consider the use of alternate in the senses of branch A. II. incorrect.

"Branch A. II." thereof is defined as "Senses equating to alternative adj.   Chiefly N. Amer.", and it has three senses (A. II. 7–9) which merely point to senses 3a, 3b, and 5 of the OED’s entry for alternative, respectively. Being a speaker of British English, I therefore agreed with the anon's change and, IMO, it is better (all other things being equal) to choose usage that is uncontentious. I hope that seems reasonable and that I didn’t irk you by reverting your reversion. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 02:43, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Cheers, I appreciate the additional information. I wasn't irked so much as puzzled, and felt the need to explain myself. That said, the background you provided helps clear up my puzzlement. Ta, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:39, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

No problem. I'm glad we could come better to understand each other. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:56, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

RE: German declension and Schmalz

Hey I.S.M.E.T.A.,
Happy I could help with your requests. Regarding the surname, I think Schmal(t)z is a transliteration of Smalc, which has probably been taken from the stem of the Latin name (Old Polish wasn’t familiar with the ‘ius’ sound). The same goes for his first name Valentinus > Valentin. The ‘C’ in Old Polish represented a ‘ts’ – or a German-pronounced ‘z’ – sound, which might be the reason for his German name (not etymologically related to lard :P).
Hopefully this helped you.
—Sean Clark (talk) 08:31, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

@Sean Clark: Thanks for the response and the plausible theory; unfortunately, the evidence I've found doesn't tend to support it. I've added the earliest citation of (deprecated template usage) Smalcius (1598) I could find to that Latin entry. The German name is attested far earlier than that, however, and before Valentin Schmalz was even born — this occurrence of (deprecated template usage) Schmalz in the name "Petrus Schmalz" dates from 1489 and this occurrence of (deprecated template usage) Schmaltz is from 1508 (though I don't know whether that's a use of the surname or of something else). I haven't looked into the Polish (deprecated template usage) Smalc yet, largely because I'm so unfamiliar with the language. The evidence so far suggests that Smalcius is a Latinisation of the German Schmal(t)z (and/or the Polish Smalc), and not that Smalcius is the etymon of the German and/or Polish surnames. Moreover, the fact that Valentin Schmalz was a German who only became Polonised later in life also makes it more plausible that he had a German surname that was itself Polonised later in his life as well (as for Smalcius, AFAICT pretty much every name at that time got Latinised in some way so that it could fit the Latin case system). I have created entries for the German and Polish forms of the surname at Schmalz and Smalc, respectively; would you mind adding information about their pronunciation and declension to those entries, please? Thanks for your time. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:13, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

Oh, and BTW, does pl:w:Walenty Smalc state that (deprecated template usage) Smalcjusz and (deprecated template usage) Szmalc are variant spellings of Smalc, or am I misinterpreting that leading sentence? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:18, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

No problem, it was just a theory I suppose. I added the pronunciation and declension to the Polish article, and the pronunciation to the German article. In German, names are generally not declined, it’s optional (e.g: Die Leiden des jungen Werther(s) by Goethe), so decide whether you’d want it added to the article. I’ve taken a look at the book from 1508, the passage describes a recipe of some sorts, so by Schmalz he means lard (“Nim Hundesschmalz, Berenschmalz, ?-Schmalz und Fuchsschmalz gleicher viele”). Lastly, the Polish article indeed states that Smalcjusz and Szmalc are variants (inne formy nazwiska = different forms of the name).
—Sean Clark (talk) 10:20, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

@Sean Clark: Thanks very much for that. I think it would indeed be desirable to have the German surname's declension added; it can be prefaced with a statement like "German names are generally not declined; nevertheless, if inflected, (deprecated template usage) Schmalz declines as follows:" if you think that would be appropriate. Re the Polish Smalc: 1) The entry currently uses just {{head}} for the headword line; is there a more specific Polish proper-noun headword-line template that should be used instead? 2) Are you sure that its declension table should include forms for the plural number and the locative case? The locative case in particular seems conceptually unlikely. 3) Since Smalc is pronounced /ˈs̪malt͡s̪/, does that mean that Smalcjusz and Szmalc are pronounced something like /ˈs̪malt͡s̪juʃ/ and /ˈʃ̪malt͡s̪/, respectively? Thanks for all your help with these. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 02:10, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Well, I don’t mind adding the declension, but there isn’t really a template for German proper nouns, but that might be solvable. 1) I’ve added the gender to the headword template. 2) The locative should be there; no problem. When you talk about multiple ‘Smalces’, you’d need the plural number, it seems logical to me anyway. 3) The pronunciation you’ve given seems in order. No problem, I think helping one another out is essential for Wiktionary.
—Sean Clark (talk) 09:38, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

@Sean Clark: OK, great. I've created Smalcjusz and Szmalc. I couldn't really guess how the former declines, given its different ending, so I've added {{rfinfl|pl|proper noun}} to its declension section, which I'd greatly appreciate if you could answer; as for Szmalc, I assume it declines like Smalc, so I just copied the declension table from the latter to the former and added several zeds — is the result correct? Re the German Schmalz, if you could let me know how it declines, I'll have a look for a suitable template or, if there isn't one, have a go at creating one. Thanks again. If there's anything you need help with hereon in future, please don't hesitate to ask for it from me. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:26, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for your offer, I appreciate it. As for the Polish declensions, Smalcjusz is added, and Szmalc looked in order. Here is the declension for Schmalz – it technically has no gender, but I treated it as neuter (since Schmalz as noun is neuter):

n	singular	plural
nom.	Schmalz	(die) Schmalze
gen.	Schmalz, Schmalzes (archaic)	(der) Schmalze
dat.	Schmalz	(den) Schmalze
acc.	Schmalz	(die) Schmalze

—Sean Clark (talk) 18:52, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

@Sean Clark: Thanks again. I've added a declension table to Schmalz#Etymology 2 (I kinda cheated with the presentation of the archaic genitive singular form) and I've created an entry for Schmaltz. Does everything look in order with those two entries now? I assumed that Schmalz and Schmaltz are pronounced and declined identically. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:46, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Both entries look perfectly in order, nicely solved.
—Sean Clark (talk) 08:41, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

@Sean Clark: I am, I repeat, grateful for your assistance with these entries. If I can return the favour at any point, please don't hesitate to let me know. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 10:25, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Small request

Could you please do it like this instead? —CodeCat 20:53, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

Also, please don't abuse templates like you did here. You shouldn't try to "fake close" the opening quotes of the template like that. It's generally bad to assume that templates will ever display a certain way, because btuff like that would break if the display of the template is ever changed. —CodeCat 20:56, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

perfinition

Hello Lmaltier. Could you tell me whether this text is written in Middle French, please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:15, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it's (rather modern) Middle French. Lmaltier (talk) 18:02, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. I've added the ridiculously long sentence from that source to Citations:perfinition. Do you know enough Middle French to tell me what the word means? It may help to know that it very probably derives from the Mediaeval Latin perfīnītiō (“a decision”). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:58, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

You are right, it very probably derives from perfinitio. And I agree that perfinitio very probably derives from per + finitio. But I'm surprised by the definition provided here. Finitio may already indicate the termination, and per- still insists on the complete termination. This seems to be the meaning of perfinition: it seems to be a legal term, and is seems that perfinition de temps means when the time is 100% elapsed. But I don't know Middle French. Lmaltier (talk) 21:34, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Gaios

Perseus has this ([5]). Chuck Entz (talk) 18:25, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: Good catch. It's attested as a common noun, evidently. I've added a noun section to Gāius. That necessitated creating {{la-decl-Gaius}} because of the name's unusual dative and ablative plural forms. Thanks for doing legwork that I'd assumed was unnecessary. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:20, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Template:la-suffix-noun

Your most recent edit appears to have broken things: -astrum DTLHS (talk) 23:28, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

@DTLHS: Sorry about that. I think this change has fixed that now. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:38, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

οξύτονος

What was your concern about this etymology? I have changed the Ancient Greek to Koine/Hellenistic which is what my modern Greek dictionary says. Does that satisfy your query? — Saltmarsh^{απάντηση} 06:57, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: Yes; thank you for answering it. I always add Modern Greek etymologies using {{rfe|lang=el|From the [lang] [etymon]?}} because they're usually my own guesses and are unsourced, which means there's every chance that I'll get something wrong (the Template:l/en in the case of οξύτονος (oxýtonos), the etymon in the case of δικαίως (dikaíos)), and that I should not be overconfident with my guesses, leaving the decision about whether to remove the {{rfe}} to another editor who can check a source. Is that OK? BTW, I believe we should change the grc-koi language code to display Koine Greek instead of just Koine, since koine can qualify other language names as well; what do you say? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:33, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Koine Greek would be more accessible (don't think that it's used elsewhere), that would be a good idea. I'm not sure how grc-koi can be changed to produce the result we want! — Saltmarsh^{απάντηση} 13:38, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

I'll ask at the Grease Pit, I tried changing the appropriate line in Module:etymology language/data but this had a knock-on to the category name assigned, with ramifications beyond Greek words. — Saltmarsh^{απάντηση} 15:34, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: Thanks a lot for sorting that out. Things look better now. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:38, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Marking vowel length in Ancient Greek

I saw your edit on κλάζω. While this seems like an excellent idea, I would like to point out a couple things:

• I'm actually working right now on a Luacized conjugation table—an idea I proposed a while back, started work on, gave up, and just recently came back to. (And I'm planning using neither of my proposed options, and actually implementing it more like the Latin system. The point being that, if you were planning on adding the 1v, 2v, etc. arguments to the conjugation templates, don't do so quite yet.
• As I'm fairly sure this is not yet codified practice, we need to specify which of the diacritics should combine; especially given that it would be easier to generate page links (without having to enter two arguments for each word) if the breve/macron were combining, rather than the acute (or breath mark) as you have been doing. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 01:00, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

I was having a similar problem with Ancient Greek nouns. I seemed useful to add breves to nouns with ambiguous lengths, for example Γᾰ́δᾰρᾰ (Gádara). I am aware that, when generating links for entries with macrons, the macrons are automatically removed for the HTTP query text but still displayed on the page. Breves, on the other hand, are always preserved in the HTTP query text, causing the link to go to Γᾰ́δᾰρᾰ as opposed to Γάδαρα. You probably knew all this, but I really wish I could specify breves in declension tables without fear of having bad links. Is there any safe way to put breves in link text or declension tables without creating bad links or having to write my tables from the ground up? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 21:36, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

To change the automatic linking, an admin would have to change Module:languages/data3/g. I would do it myself, but (aside from the fact I've never worked with that part of the data modules) the fact that no one has implemented such an obvious feature makes me nervous. You could ask at Wiktionary Talk:About Ancient Greek to see if there's a consensus for doing so. Or you could ask at the Grease pit, and perhaps an admin who's more bold than I am (or who knows the issues involved better than I do) will make the change. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:45, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

JohnC5: Don't put breves on the ambiguous vowels, only the short vowels. Ambiguous vowels should be left blank. As for the entry titles, I asked Atelaes to add breves and the combining diacritics about a month ago; he said he'd try to find the time, which apparently he has not yet. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 18:42, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Sorry, all, for the delay in my response to you.

• @ObsequiousNewt: Per your request, I've left Ancient Greek conjugation tables entirely alone since your first posting above; do please keep me abreast of your progress with your Luacised conjugation table. Re "specify[ing] which of the diacritics should combine", the actual situation is diametrically opposed to what you suppose. Consider, for example, that Μεσσί̄ᾱς (Messí̄ās) ( Μ ε σ σ ί [U+0304 COMBINING MACRON] ᾱ ς ) generates a red link, whereas Μεσσῑ́ᾱς (Messī́ās) ( Μ ε σ σ ῑ [U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT] ᾱ ς ) is properly treated, has its macrae stripped from the link text, and generates a blue link. (Moreover, the string with the combining oxia generates both original Greek and transliterated Latin text that display properly, in contradistinction with the string with the combining macra.) If I understand this properly, it has to do with canonical equivalence. Everything (apart from four codepoints) in the Greek Extended character block (Precomposed polytonic Greek, U+1F00–U+1FFF) is canonically equivalent to something else. (The four codepoints in that block that aren't canonically equivalent are U+1FBD GREEK KORONIS, U+1FBF GREEK PSILI, U+1FC0 GREEK PERISPOMENI, and U+1FFE GREEK DASIA, and even they're noted as being approximately equivalent to U+0020 SPACE combined with U+0313 COMBINING COMMA ABOVE, 〃, U+0342 COMBINING GREEK PERISPOMENI, and U+0314 COMBINING REVERSED COMMA ABOVE, respectively. The Unicode Consortium uses ≡ (“identical to”) to denote canonical equivalence and ≈ (“almost equal to”) to denote this approximate equivalence.) Greek Extended includes ᾰ, ᾱ, Ᾰ, Ᾱ, ῐ, ῑ, Ῐ, Ῑ, ῠ, ῡ, Ῠ, and Ῡ at U+1FB0, U+1FB1, U+1FB8, U+1FB9, U+1FD0, U+1FD1, U+1FD8, U+1FD9, U+1FE0, U+1FE1, U+1FE8, and U+1FE9, respectively; they are all canonically equivalent to the relevant undiacriticked letter in the Greek and Coptic character block, combined with either U+0304 COMBINING MACRON or U+0306 COMBINING BREVE. That means that whatever character conversion the Lua languages module performs (in the case of ᾰ, be it U+1FB0 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH VRACHY → U+03B1 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA or U+03B1 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA + U+0306 COMBINING BREVE → U+03B1 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA), whether we use combining macrae and brachiae or precomposed polytonic Greek characters should make no difference. As Μεσσί̄ᾱς (Messí̄ās) vs. Μεσσῑ́ᾱς (Messī́ās) shows, however, the order of diacritics matters, both for display and software functionality. Let's take the more complex case of ἄβαξ (ábax). Let's say I wanted to add macrae to that word (I don't know whether its vowels are long, but that doesn't matter for the present purpose). I could just add U+0304 COMBINING MACRON after each alpha, to give ἄ̄βᾱξ (á̄bāx), but the Lua module fails to remove the macra from the first alpha for the link text (note, however, that it does remove the macra from the second alpha). If, however, I were to construct the string U+03B1 (GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA) + U+0304 (COMBINING MACRON) + U+0313 (COMBINING COMMA ABOVE) + U+0301 (COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT) + U+03B2 (GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA) + U+03B1 (GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA) + U+0304 (COMBINING MACRON) + U+03BE (GREEK SMALL LETTER XI) and then link to that, it would generate ᾱ̓́βᾱξ (ā́bāx), which works properly. Switching the composition order of the U+0313 COMBINING COMMA ABOVE and the U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT leads to an invalid result again, generating the red link ᾱ́̓βᾱξ (ā́bāx). So, basically, macrae and brachiae must come before the other diacritics, not after them.
  Anti-TL;DR version: Diacritics have to be added in a strict order, otherwise links don't work and display problems are generated. It just so happens that macrae and brachiae have to come before the other diacritics.
• @Chuck Entz: As far as I can tell, the only change to Module:languages/data3/g that's necessary is changing this:

m["grc"] = {

⋮

entry_name = {

from = {"ᾱ", "ῑ", "ῡ"},

to this:

m["grc"] = {

⋮

entry_name = {

from = {"ᾰᾱ", "ῐῑ", "ῠῡ"},

Given that Atelaes, JohnC5, ObsequiousNewt, and I all seem to be in favour of such a change, are you willing to tweak that data page? (Macra-stripping was added to grc by -sche in this revision; might it be worth asking him why he didn't enable brachia-stripping as well?)

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:09, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

What about the Grease Pit discussion? —CodeCat 00:11, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, I didn't see that. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:16, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

I was unaware that accents automatically combined; this is good news then. On the other hand, if we add both combining symbols the the ignore list, shouldn't both work? Anyway, my practices for marking vowel length are based on the Latin system: mark every vowel that doesn't have a diacritic on it already. If we do decide to mark *every* vowel, I'll start doing that—but there are a couple issues that need to be sorted out first.

And the Luacized conjugation table is complete; I posted that in Wiktionary talk:About Ancient Greek but you probably missed it. Anyway, the template is {{grc-conj}}; see me if you have any bugs or questions. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 02:25, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: Re "if we add both combining symbols the the ignore list, shouldn't both work?", I don't know what you mean. What two combining symbols are you refering to?
Re "If we do decide to mark *every* vowel, I'll start doing that—but there are a couple issues that need to be sorted out first.", sure; what are these issues?
You're right; I missed your elegant declaration. Well done. I look forward to familiarising myself with its use. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:59, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

The macron and breve combining symbols, I mean. And the main issue is that they don't render well (all the diacritics layer over each other making it impossible to tell which ones the vowel has.) ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 16:44, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: Yes, "add[ing] both…[t]he macron and breve combining symbols…[to] the ignore list" (as I described in my response to Chuck Entz in my post timestamped: 00:09, 16 September 2014) should indeed mean that any brachia used in a way that a macra can be used will lead to a correct result. I agree that there are display problems when a brachia or macra is used in conjunction with a psile or dasia. There are also display problems when a brachia or macra is combined with any diacriticked majuscule. Whilst these display problems could easily be corrected in the transliterations, I don't know whether or, if so, how they can be corrected in the original Greek script. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:15, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

perispomene and other matters

Lest you think me foolish, I am indeed aware that vowels with a perispomene are long. :) I guess I was just in a mood last night were it looked inconsistent not to make them all have macra, and I had a sneaking suspicion you might remove it (for which I am grateful). It certainly will not happen again, and I deeply appreciate your checking my edits to WT:WE, particularly in languages like AG, on which I have read up intently but which I have never technically studied. On a related topic: am I right in thinking that there is no explicit template for AG 3rd declension after a "strong"-υ stem, such as with Template:l/grc? Is it just that such terms are so uncommon as to not need a separate template? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 21:32, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Lemmata in etymologies

Heya, thanks for your work on 女房詞. I thought it would be better to chat here rather than exclusively in the edit summaries.  :)

My thought is that using the alt params in etymologies should be restricted to cases like verb forms, where you show the verb form (like 見て or 読め, etc.) and link to the lemma dictionary form (in these cases, 見る or 読む). This kind of gentle redirect is relatively transparent -- the kanji doesn't change, and users who click through wind up pretty much where they expect to be.

Meanwhile, showing one kanji spelling and linking through to another substantially raises the chances of user confusion and general unhappiness. We do have an entry for 詞, so showing that and linking to 言葉 instead feels unnecessarily misleading. The etymon kotoba has a lemma form of 言葉, so linking to 詞 is poor usability -- users have to click again through to the 言葉 entry to get the relevant details for that etymon. As such, showing 言葉 and linking to that in the etymology for 女房詞 seems the most straightforward to me. Japanese has maaaany cases of a single etymon being spelled multiple ways using different kanji, so this phenomenon we see in the 女房詞 entry is not unique.

I hope that explains my position clearly enough.  :) Let me know your thoughts. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:15, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

@Eirikr: OK; I see where you're coming from. What do you make of this presentation, instead? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:22, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Still not ideal, in my eyes, in that this gives 詞 as the lemma used to form the compound. The underlying constituent terms here are nyōbō, which has the single kanji spelling 女房, and kotoba, which has multiple kanji spellings, of which 言葉 is the lemma, not 詞. Compounds presented in etymologies should use the lemmata where possible (verb forms as one clear exception, since that's not just a matter of spelling; c.f. the etymologies at 糞垂, 薺, 曝け出す). ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:17, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

@Eirikr: How about this presentation, then? That relegates 詞 to an afterthought. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:31, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

How about just bringing the usage notes up into the etym section? The details I'd added are really more about explaining the spelling, which could belong more in the etym section anyway.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:18, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Awesome

Awesome username dude. -- Cirt (talk) 20:30, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

@Cirt: Thanks again. ;-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:32, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Ha! I'm really tired today. :P -- Cirt (talk) 20:36, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Who knows, maybe I'll compliment you again next year. :P -- Cirt (talk) 20:36, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Heh. I look forward to it. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:47, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

φωνήεις

I'm not positive (as I'm still very new to AG declension), but I think we'll need to create {{grc-adecl-1&3-ντ-prx}} (based on {{grc-adecl-1&3-ντ}}) in order to facilitate the inflection for φωνήεις. However, this is slightly out of my comfort zone for AG. Can you do this or do you know someone who can? I can certainly handle the template creation fine, but I'm not positive about the forms. Thanks in advance! —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 09:33, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

I can take this one (working on it right now), unless ISMETA wants to. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 17:56, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, ObsequiousNewt; please, be my guest.
@JohnC5: Sorry I haven't been very prompt with my responses lately. I'm quite busy right now, but I will get to your various messages once my present project is out of the way. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:34, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, ObsequiousNewt, I had to add another parameter to allow for the recessive accent in MVS, NNS, NAS, and NVS. Please fix my changes further if necessary. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 21:52, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5 According to Smyth 299, the accent doesn't recede there. Were you using a different source? ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 21:59, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Very intriguing, ObsequiousNewt. I was going off of this and also Perseus's declension tool. Then again, the Anthon & Kühner also seems to imply that the contracted form should be φωνῇς and not φωνῆς, which disagrees with LSJ (unless LSJ omits iota subscript, which it very well might). Again, I defer to greater AG expertise. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 22:46, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Perseus' declension tool is useful for looking up a lemma from the inflected form... but I've found that it tends to be a lot less reliable (particularly with accents—I've found some examples that defy Greek's rules for accent) with the reverse. As for the contracted form (which I hadn't coded yet)... η + ει can be either ῃ or η, and it essentially depends on whether the ει came from underlying *ey (this is called a genuine diphthong) or from (a) contraction of ε+ε or (b) lengthening of ε (this is called in either case a spurious diphthong.) See Smyth 6, 53, and 59. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 04:41, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

And what about the Anthon & Kühner for the recessive accent (i.e.should I change the template back?) —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 04:57, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Ah, so, okay, my mistake. I forgot that penult can mean properispomenon. So, your change was correct. On the other hand, I'm going to reorder the arguments because that's just kind of awkward IMO. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 13:56, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

I was hoping you would do that, as I was too lazy to reörder them myself. :) Thanks for making that change. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 21:50, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5 For you. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:32, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @I'm so meta even this acronym Thanks. I have always been a fan of diaereses for the purpose of disambiguation. For many years I pronounced reägent the same way as regent because I had misanalyzed its structure. :) —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 19:42, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I understand and have quite a lot of sympathy for that general principle. I thought reörder was kinda quirky, since I figured it's a word more-or-less immune from synaeretic mispronunciation; reägent, however, I agree with (when I first encountered the word on a game, I was also unsure about its pronunciation until I looked it up). Pleasingly, and unlike reörder, reägent has enough citations to warrant its inclusion, so I made an entry for it. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:47, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym Again, thank you! I do, of course, mostly use reörder in jest, but I will seriously go in for classics like reëlect or orthoëpy (the latter of which also makes my list of words that were almost certainly made out of spite for what they describe along with lisp and hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia). Out of curiosity, in which game did you encounter re(a|ä)gent? I first ran across it in the Might and Magic series of games. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 02:30, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Heh, ditto. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 02:50, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Slow down. And prioritise

If you keep adding requests at such rate, soon WT:WANTED shall become as overloaded as WT:RFD is. Also, many of these entries you add seem quite obscure and I doubt they are high priority: "Presentment of Englishry", seriously? WT:WANTED should be for more-or-less immediately needed terms. — Keφr 08:17, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

@Kephir: Yeah, OK, fair enough. Sorry about that. I'll add far fewer from now on, and I'll move terms from there to language-specific requests pages soon. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:24, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

@Kephir: It is not entirely I.S.M.E.T.A.'s fault, as I have been trying to add a couple wanted entries each day recently and I.S.M.E.T.A. has just been refilling the entries. I have wondered, however, whence the high priority terms are supposed to come; though I am perfectly happy to add random/obscure terms. Would you want the list to become shorter generally? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 09:09, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Based on my sample of one so far (Cechenodes) the taxonomic names are not well selected. There are millions of taxonomic names. It is neither realistic nor worthwhile to have them all. I am skeptical about the value to Wiktionary of taxon entries that are not linked to and do not have the prospect of being linked to by any vernacular name in any language. See the thousands of bird species entries for examples of mostly low-value entries. The whole point of {{taxlink}} (and {{vern}}) is to create "wanted" lists that reflect links. I have more or less abandoned Wiktionary:Requested entries (Scientific names) for that reason.

Further my process of adding taxonomic names includes making fairly full entries with links to external databases, removing {{taxlink}}s that point to the entry and adding wikilinks to unlinked uses of the taxon. Anything short of that is not as helpful as it might be. At least use {{taxon}} in the definition line. DCDuring TALK 12:37, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Looking at more of the taxon items confirms my fears. DCDuring TALK 12:43, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

@DCDuring: I'm sorry, I didn't know about the existence of Wiktionary:Requested entries (Scientific names); I shall add my requests for taxonomic entries thereto in future (rather than to WT:WE). (BTW, do you think it would be worth having a shortcut at WT:RE:taxa to redirect to Wiktionary:Requested entries (Scientific names)?) Re wantedness, I wouldn't be so sure that how many links pointing to it a term has is a reliable indicator of its "wantedness"; that a term has been added to a requests list by someone shows that at least one person actually wants an entry for that term… — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:21, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Sometimes the 'wanting' by an individual seems a flimsy basis for adding something. Adding an item to a requested entry list seems to be a bright shiny object. If a taxon serves to disambiguate vernacular names in a few different languages (indicated by its use in definitions), that seems to indicate that the languages themselves 'need' the taxon. Non-selective computer-generated lists also don't have the same force IMO. More selective computer-generated shortlists such as the ones Pengo has created are much more useful because they are more motivating.

As I said above, I largely ignore Wiktionary:Requested entries (Scientific names), so names added there won't get much attention. Also, its subpage organization is not favorable for mass addition of items. Any taxon appearing more than once in principal namespace wrapped in {{taxlink}} will get more attention.

Appendix:English_terms_of_Native_North_American_origin caught my interest and was being actively worked by User:-sche, so I added {{taxlink}}s to it and added some taxon entries it 'wanted'. At some point I will add items taken from Appendices in Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists, also because it caught my interest. Both native and invasive plants from my neck of the woods will also get my special attention, just as Jyril and Hekeheka have done an outstanding job of covering the plants and animals of Finland. Almost any thematic list is more interesting than other kinds and can make it easier to add good entries due to whatever commonality exists. DCDuring TALK 17:52, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

@DCDuring: I take your well made point about languages themselves "wanting" such entries. For myself, there is usually some reason of etymological or other relation behind my requests (in the case of Cechenodes, because of its seeming relationship to the Ancient Greek κεχηνώδης (kekhēnṓdēs, “forming a hiatus”), and that because I've been searching for the Ancient Greek word for diaeresis).

Thanks for your recent help on Termes, Leontice (leontopetalum‎), and rosewoodēnsis. I admire your diligence on this project; focus on the things that interest you — you do a good job, but you might as well enjoy doing it (you are a volunteer, after all). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:38, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Cechenodes is a good indication of the problem that arises with taxonomic etymologies. It is surely the case that there is something in the appearance or behavior of the insect (or its describer) that accounts for the selection of the name. Unfortunately, it is often not at all easy to find out what the connection is, especially with insects, but also with many lower taxa of the less-popular limbs and branches of the tree of life, like liverworts. And there is the so-what problem after one does. One reason why I try to get pictures (or sound files or even videos) for species, especially the type species of genera, is to get some hint about why the name was selected. In the case of Cechenodes no picture is available at Commons and little information is available at all. If I had full access to all of the taxonomic literature, I could do a bit more, though there are many really annoying naming practices among species and genus describers, which have required the taxonomic name authorities to create rules to discourage some practices.

You also might find EtyFish amusing. DCDuring TALK 01:14, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

I've found that looking at the original description can be very helpful: you see what details the author included in the description, and there's often information about the other species the author was looking at at the same time. The vast majority of the taxonomic literature before 1922 is available online, but it's often hard to find. I've spent quite a bit of time building up a database of sources, so I may be able to help on selected names. As for Cechenodes, the news isn't good: first of all, it's in the w:Ichneumonoidea, which is a taxonomic morass. There are so many species, and the variation is so difficult to reduce into nice, neat dichotomous keys, that only a few specialists have gotten to the level where they can reliably tell if they have a new species. That means that very few authors have been describing huge numbers of species- and it's very hard to come up with unique names if you're describing dozens (or even hundreds) of species at a time. Under such circumstances, it's not unheard of for authors to leaf through an Ancient Greek dictionary and just randomly pick words. Also, it was published in 1971 and there are apparently no online sources for the journal it was published in. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:54, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

@DCDuring, Chuck Entz: I've managed to find Cechenodes’s original description (which I've copied to Citations:Cechenodes), wherein the describer is helpfully explicit about its etymology, stating that "[t]he generic name is from […] (making a yawn), referring to the wide base of the third cubital cell." Unfortunately, that salient passage was omitted from the available snippets, meaning that I had to copy it from Google Books' OCR transcription; apparently, Cechenodes derives from “xexevw6T)£”. Despite the thoroughly scanno'd etymon, I'm confident that H.K. Townes means κεχηνώδης (kekhēnṓdēs) here. The first six characters of gobbledygook very plausibly represent the Greek ϰεχενωδ (cf. xexevw6), assuming that the typeface used in The Genera of Ichneumonidae IV employs this sort of kappa: ϰ (a very common cursive variant of the prototypical form, κ) and that Townes erroneously substituted an epsilon for an eta; the last three characters are significantly more obscure, but I'd guess that they represent ης, ής, or ῆς (the first assuming Townes chose to omit diacritics, the latter two that he misplaced one). In terms of sense, although the recorded meaning of κεχηνώδης (kekhēnṓdēs) is the orthographico-grammatical sense "forming a hiatus", the word derives from the verb χάσκω (kháskō, “I yawn gape”), which accords with Townes' semantic analysis of the word. In the light of this, would you two agree that we are warranted in stating that Cechenodes derives from κεχηνώδης (kekhēnṓdēs)? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:51, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Congratulations. I hope we don't have too many etymologies of taxonomic names that require as much research. I think I've gotten most of the trivial morphological derivations out of Category:Translingual entries needing etymology. Only 2,400 remain. Oh, plus those that don't have an Etymology section and don't have {{rfe}}, not to mention the thousands used in Category:Entries using missing taxonomic names. DCDuring TALK 17:34, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

@DCDuring: Thank you. And re the rest, I've added a link to Category:Translingual entries needing etymology to my user page; I'll chip away at it from time to time. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:57, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

I agree with your analysis- a plain eta is quite consistent in shape with T}, and the last letter has to be a sigma. This shows how difficult it is to guess what the author had in mind without reading the description: the "cell" he was referring to is a shape delineated by veins in the insect's wings, which would not be obvious at all without the context(though vein morphology on wings is very important to taxonomy in much of the Hymenoptera, so a specialist might be able to guess). Chuck Entz (talk) 18:19, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: I'm glad you both think it's plausible. And yes, I must confess that "the wide base of the third cubital cell" doesn't mean very much to me. An annotated image would aid my comprehension immensely; it's unfortunate that there isn't one available. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:49, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Well, yes. I am considering putting a hard limit on WT:WANTED, after which requests would be liable for deletion at random. — Keφr 18:05, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

@Keφr: I hope you have noticed that my addition of terms to WT:WE has slowed considerably since your admonishment above. Do you have an ideal number for the WT:WE list in mind? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:21, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Honestly? Half the number it contains now. Maybe ⅗. (I still fail to get pings from you, Acronym, and I have no idea why. I suspect something about your signature). — Keφr 18:01, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

@User:Kephir: Do you get a ping when I don't pipe the link to your user page? If not, have you any idea what I could do to fix this problem of pinglessness? Re WT:WE, I aim to have the number on there reduced to under 250 by March/April; is that OK? (The positive that has come from your objection to my flurry of requests is that I have become a lot bolder at adding entries where I would previously have lacked the confidence to do so.) — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:38, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

μέλι καρύδι

Surely just some of parts - μέλι = honey, καρύδι = walnut ? — Saltmarsh^{απάντηση} 21:10, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: I figured honey-nut would be just one thing, but maybe not. If you don't detect any idiomaticity in the phrase μέλι καρύδι (méli karýdi), then you're probably right that it's no more than the sum of its parts. I've removed the request; sorry to waste your time. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 06:21, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

ἀμφίβραχυς

I believe this template, {{Template:grc-decl-3rd-weak-υ-prx}}, needs to be made in order to decline the substantive form of this entry. :) —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 04:48, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Noted. I'll get to it at some indefinite point in the future. Thanks for creating ἀμφίβραχυς (amphíbrakhus).
BTW, regarding this edit of yours, AFAICT, emys is only attested in the accusative plural form emydas in Classical Latin, a form which {{la-decl-3rd|emys|emyd}} doesn't generate. I'm not sure how we should present emys's declension, but I'm convinced we shouldn't obscure Classical usage by giving only the non-natively over-regularised New Latin declension. These sparsely attested terms are difficult cases; do you think it would be worthwhile having Category:Latin hapax legomena (I see we already have that one; I'd forgotten that I'd created it.), Category:Latin dis legomena, Category:Latin tris legomena, and Category:Latin tetrakis legomena for these Latin terms with very limited Classical attestation? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:55, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

That's a very fair point about emys. Maybe do something along the lines of what I did with chelys, perhaps? I agree that it deserves to have a hapax category slapped on it (along with a few other Plinian words I've added from WT:WE recently). I'm trying to decide, if it is a hapax, whether we ever keep the lemma form or change it to *emys and move it to the appendix. I am certainly not well enough versed in Wiktionary's policies (as people keep telling me :) ) to know what to do. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 09:06, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Emys is only a hapax legomenon (as emydas) in the Classical Latin corpus; it is plentifully attested in every case (except perhaps the vocative) and in both numbers in New Latin. We don't relegate to appendices Latin terms wholly restricted to the New Latin chronolect; a fortiori, we shouldn't relegate to appendices Latin terms whose lemmata are only found in New Latin, but which are attested in one or more oblique forms in the Classical chronolect. I like the accuracy of presentation in chelys (It's attested in the vocative‽), but I'd prefer to mark unattested forms with asterisks and without linking them (like this) rather than omitting them altogether, wherever that's possible (it may not be in the case of very impredictable declension). And yes, I've noticed that quite a lot of the more obscure Classical Latin vocabulary is only found in Naturali Historiâ C. Plinii Secundi and that he often remains faithful to his borrowings' original Greek patterns of declension; I don't suppose his practice is all that different from that of English authors that retain plural forms from the Classical languages when using terms derived thence in an English context. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:30, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

I quite like the method you've shown with chelys (also, yeah, it is weird that it is attested in the vocative). It gives us the pleasure of getting to reconstruct something without forcing us to claim attestation. For emys, we could use the "chelys method" for the Classical Latin and the standard declension method for New Latin. You should probably revert chelys to your asterisked version (at least, in my opinion); though, I notice something has changed since I first made chelys that obviates the need for links inside the table, as the table now appears to auto-generate links. Sorry for misinterpreting your previous point about hapaxes—it was a late night. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 15:02, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: At least two of emys's Graeciform inflections are attested in New Latin (viz. emydos and emyda) and New Latin only; accordingly, I think it would be best to present the whole range of forms in one table. I'm glad you also prefer the complete-but-asterisked version of chelys's declension table; however, the autogenerated appendical links for the unattested forms need to be removed before that page can be reverted to that version (we don't want entries in an appendix for mere unattested forms of otherwise attested words). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:46, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

If you think about it, there aren't that many Classical Latin terms attested in all of the forms our templates generate, so we're not all that strict about asterisking every form that's not attested. I would think one would only asterisk cases where the attested forms don't provide enough information to be reasonably sure about those parts of the paradigm. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:02, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: There are very many irregular forms attested in the Classical corpus; it is generally the case that the better attested a term is in the Classical corpus, the more irregular forms it will have (this is especially the case for verbs). Such irregularities are largely unpredictable, so reconstructions cannot hope to anticipate them. It is one thing to show (unattested) forms that would result according to the application of general patterns, and quite another to state that those forms actually occur. On the other hand, I'm not suggesting that we leave all inflection tables blank or full of asterisks until someone comes along to verify which forms actually occur; that would leave us with very few of those entries for Latin non-lemmata which are so useful to those less well-acquainted with Latin inflection. I propose an "innocent until proven guilty" approach (not vice versa) whereby we have entries for non-lemmata unless they have been shown, with reasonable reliability, not to exist. (After all, if the form does not exist, what would cause a person unfamiliar with Latin inflection to search for that form; i.e., where would that person find that form?) This approach yields results like those at emys (see {{la-decl-emys}}) and postrēmōgenitus; please let me know what you think of those results. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:28, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Regarding the template--you'll both want to look at this RFDO I made a while back. — This unsigned comment was added by ObsequiousNewt (talk • contribs) at 16:28, 13 November 2014‎.

@ObsequiousNewt: Oh, thanks for that. Are those seven deletions and one move going to happen, then? Would it be helpful for me to post a vote in that RFDO in support?

@JohnC5 I have added {{grc-decl-3rd-weak-υ-prp}} to the new noun section of ἀμφῐ́βρᾰχῠς (amphíbrakhus). Is the result what you were looking for? I'm uncertain, given the mismatch between the adjectival and nominal declension tables (the genitive masculine singular of the adjective is ἀμφῐβρᾰ́χεος (amphibrákheos), whereas the genitive singular of the noun is ἀμφῐβρᾰ́χεως (amphibrákheōs); the nominative, accusative, and vocative masculine dual of the adjective is ἀμφῐβρᾰ́χεε (amphibrákhee), whereas the nominative, accusative, and vocative dual of the noun is ἀμφῐβρᾰ́χει (amphibrákhei); and the genitive masculine plural of the adjective is ἀμφῐβρᾰχέων (amphibrakhéōn), whereas the genitive plural of the noun is ἀμφῐβρᾰ́χεων (amphibrákheōn)).

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:02, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Having actually looked at the LSJ entry, seeing as ἀμφίβραχυς is an adjective, you actually want {{grc-adecl-1&3-ups-prx}}. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 17:50, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: I think there's a consensus to delete... but they need to be orphaned first, which I had started doing before getting sidetracked. If you'd like to help fix them, that would be great (but don't feel obligated.) ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 17:53, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: I thought because there is a male substantive sense, we would need {{Template:grc-decl-3rd-weak-υ-prx}}. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 06:48, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

I'd figure that wouldn't be necessary; a substantive is still an adjective, and the inflection would be the masculine form of the adjective. But I defer opinion. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 14:43, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: I don't know if you noticed my comments in that RFDO, but {{grc-decl-1st-ala-prp}}, {{grc-decl-1st-ets-prp}}, {{grc-decl-3rd-N-ln-prp}}, and {{grc-decl-3rd-weak-υ-prp}} are all orphans and can, accordingly, be deleted.

@JohnC5 Just FYI, I agree with giving separate nominal declension tables for substantivised adjectives, as in the case of ᾰ̓μφῐ́βρᾰχῠς (amphíbrakhus).

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:12, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I noticed; I'm not an admin. I've been busy, so I haven't been able to work on the others either. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 13:51, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: Ah, OK; I just wanted to check. Re your not being an administrator; shall I nominate you for administratorship? It seems you could do with the tools. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:33, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ If you think it seems appropriate. I haven't gotten involved with policy debate yet, so I don't know if I'm qualified, but I do agree that we could use a dedicated admin for Greek given Atelaes' absence. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 19:18, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Aftermath

The vote to confer administratorship upon ObsequiousNewt passed unanimously with seven votes. The bureaucrat Stephen G. Brown accordingly changed ObsequiousNewt’s group membership from “autopatroller” to “administrator” at midnight on the 12th of December, 2014 (UTC). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:52, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

περισπωμένη

What dictionary gives you a noun-sense? LSJ doesn't have anything. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 21:59, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

@ObsequiousNewt: LSJ, περισπάω IV has “Gramm., pronounce a vowel or word with the circumflex…π. [προσῳδία] D.T.630.2, Ph.1.29; περισπώμενος [φθόγγος] ib.46”, which I took to mean that Dionysius Thrax and Philo Judaeus use περισπωμένη (perispōménē) as a noun in elliptical usage for περισπωμένη προσῳδία (perispōménē prosōidía) = ⟨ ⟩. I tracked down Dionysius' use, but I couldn't find Philo's; given the translations thereof at Citations:περισπωμένη, I'm no longer sure… — I.S.M.E.T.A. 03:14, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

salateen

Whence did you procure that pronunciation? Just curious. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 01:07, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I Anglicised the Arabic pronunciation given in سَلَاطِينُ (salāṭīnu). I think it's very unlikely that we'll find an IPA transcription in an authority that we can cite. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:23, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

Good enough for me. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 01:27, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

:-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:36, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

Ancient Greek prosody

No, only the length of the ult's vowel counts. An example where the penult's vowel is long (there are many cases like this): ἀγανάκτησις (aganáktēsis). --Fsojic (talk) 13:50, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

w:Ancient Greek accent has a shorthand explanation: the morae between the accented mora and the last mora can't be in separate syllables. This also explains the type of accent in the antepenult- you can never have a rising accent, with the accent on the first mora of the syllable, because that would put unaccented morae in both the antepenult and the penult. Chuck Entz (talk) 18:40, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

@Fsojic, Chuck Entz: Thank you both. That's helped explain things a lot. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:53, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Axiogenesis

Could you read the 3 page preface of this book and help me figure out what on earth the distinction between noophelia and axiogenesis is? I get optimalism, but the other two are so subtly different as to seem like not at all. Axiogenesis also appears to be an alternate form of axogenesis (creation of axons), but I don't want to add that until I have this philosophical meaning sorted out. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 08:28, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Well, as Classical compounds representing Greek roots, noöphelia represents *νοωφέλεια, *νοωφελία (*noōphéleia, *noōphelía, “the benefiting of reason intellect”), whereas axiogenesis represents *ἀξιογένεσις (*axiogénesis, “generation according to value”). Knowing that helps to elucidate what the author means by these words, especially in the light of the definitions he offers on page x. The axiological doctrine of noöphelia states that the measure of value is benificiality to the intellect (or, in Rescher's words, the extent of "best serving the interest of intelligent beings"), whereas axiogenesis, as a combination of noöphelia and optimalism, is an ontological doctrine that states that that which actually exists or comes into being is determined by what is beneficial to the intellect. That's my take on it, anyhow. Does that make matters any clearer to you? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:00, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

(Just to clarify, the roots involved here are νόος, ὠφέλεια/ὠφελία, ἀξία, and γένεσις. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:05, 3 December 2014 (UTC))

Thank you. This is in line with my reading but far better stated. I just couldn't figure out how to put it into words. So the real distinction is that in noöphelia intelligence determines all value of existing things and in axiogenesis the existence of all things is determined by what is optimally beneficial to intelligence? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 18:30, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

On second thought, do you want to write this entry? :) —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 23:28, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Sure. I've done some groundwork on the etyma; I'll create the actual entries later today. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:12, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5 Done and done. I hope the definitions I've written are comprehensible. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:48, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

Curious John is curious

Are you from a Commonwealth nation? I ask because I notice that you spelled/spelt the word favourable as opposed to favorable. Or is it that there is some heinous and despicable (just kidding (no, but really)) bylaw of Wiktionary that says we should prefer British English spellings over American ones? I have been curious ever since I noticed that the Wiktionary logo has the RP pronunciation and not the American. ramble, ramble, ramble, ... —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 08:23, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Yup, I'm a UK-ite. AFAIK, the practice is to adhere to the original spelling as used by the first editor; that convention is neutral regarding which spelling is to be used, but prevents edit wars over spelling. I don't know about the origin of the logo, but I note that [ˈwɪkʃənrɪ] violates our convention of using ⟨ɹ⟩ to represent both /ɹ/ and [ɹ] in English; also, the RP pronunciation is more like [ˈwɪkʃn̩ɹɪ] or [ˈwɪkʃn̩ɹi], really. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:36, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, I definitely say [ˈwɪkʃənɛɹi], and I'm baffled that the American pronunciation would not be favo(u)red as I imagine the plurality if not majority of en.wiktionary editors are American, though I have not confirmed this. And lest you think me an Anglophobe or America zealot, I am just poking fun. :) —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 08:50, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Also, you make a very good point about the ⟨ɹ⟩ in the logo—it sets a bad example! I would bring up changing it in WT:BP if I weren't so frightened of how violent arguments around here get sometimes. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 08:56, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Yes, I'd be interested to know the national make-up of the editing community here, although how we could gather reliable data on that is beyond me. WT:A lists administrators' time zones, so I suppose we can infer something from that, extrapolate to the general community, and then take the results with a small Siberian salt mine. ;-)

How would one even go about changing the logo? I don't know what determines it. I don't suppose it matters much, and at least the status quo has the advantage of "privileging" so marginal (or, perhaps, non-existent) a group of speakers that no one's likely to feel unduly and uniquely underrepresented.

I totally know what you mean about the arguments around here. I have no time for that kind of bullshit. Also, I'm not an Anglo, so I wouldn't be offended by your zeal, anyway. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:38, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

λελυκώς

Hmm, perhaps we can modify something so that last category line is added automatically by {{head|participle}}... ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 16:05, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

I think this calls for a {{grc-part}} template. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:18, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

It might. I created those entries mostly as an example. I think such a template would be useful if we do start adding conjugation pages, but we need to get a concrete proposal together first. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 00:01, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

(And very helpful λελυκώς was for me, too; thank you.) Agreed. Something like the treatment of Latin participles? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:45, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Good catch on καθέδρα's genitive

For you ædification, my normal order of operations (where possible) is:

1. Etymology
2. Pronunciation
3. Outline of headword excluding genitive(s)
4. Declension
5. Add genitive(s) to headword after I'd confirmed them
6. References
7. Definitions
8. Other stuff

Clearly I missed step five this passed time. Should probably just do the declension before the headword, eh? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 19:37, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Ah, I see. The omission makes sense, given that ordo operandi. Yeah, sorting a preliminary outline for the headword seems fairly unnecessary if you're going to back to it later, and that would probably preclude such errors in future. Thanks for the explanation. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:33, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

-tus, -sus, etc.

Ok, I'm getting closer to what we need for the t~s alternation. I realize I need to refine this a bit more by changing -g- to -rg- and add -ll- (pellō → pulsus) and -lce- (mulceō/mulgeō → mulsus). However there are all sorts of awkward outliers like (indulgeō → indultus) or 4th conjugation (ordior → orsus). I feel like there should be a more parsimonious solution to this problem. Can you find a source that discusses this topic? I would deeply appreciate that. I also need to update -ātus, -itus, -ītus, and -ūtus as extended forms of -tus —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 04:22, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Hi John. Sorry for taking a while to respond; as you might have noticed, I've been on a bit of a wikibreak since Christmas. Anyway, you asked for a pertinent reference; I think I've found you three:

1. The Eton Latin Grammar, Accented Edition (19th C.?), “As in Præsénti, or, The Rules for Verbs Construéd”, pages 202ff.; especially pages 209ff. (from “Nunc now díscas you may learn formáre to form supínum the súpine ex prætérito (témpore) from the preterpérfect tense.” onward)
2. The Bromsgrove Latin Grammar, third edition (1851), § 31: “Formation of Tenses” (pages 74ff.); especially § 31(c)–(d) (pages 78–9)
3. Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar, third edition (1903), §§ 9 (pages 5–6) and 135 (pages 94–5)

I hope they help. Let me know if you need anything else. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 02:14, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, these are very informative. I will update the articles soon. In a related note, WT:WE has a request for poenae servus, though as best I can tell, modern writers frequently quote it as servus poenae, (see here). Is there a policy for this and other compound lemmas for fusional languages wherein word order does not matter? I just feel weird if I am going to create it (and possibly also its inflected forms) if there is not prescribed order or method for prescribing it. Servus poenae appears to be the more standard for such NP's (namely nominative genitive), but poenae servus is widely attested (google books:"poenae servus"). —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 01:50, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

So create a lemma entry for servus poenae and an alt-form entry for poenae servus. Or the other way around if it looks like poenae servus is used more. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:14, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: Thanks. I had a feeling that was the case. Would I make inflected forms for one, both, or neither, do you think? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 03:28, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

I suppose you could, but the inflection table would be basically the inflection table for servus with poenae tacked on to the left or right of each form- maybe it would be better to just have a soft redirect to the servus entry for the inflection, and to forgo creating entries for all the forms that would have been in it. I do think that having entries for all the inflected forms of both the lemma and the alt-form would be overkill, since the search engine will find the same set of entries regardless of the word order entered in the search box. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:51, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: Makes sense. At this juncture I'm disinclined to make a full-fledged inflection table because, as you say, it's just poenae + servus's inflection. In the past, if the compound is weird, like Lūca bōs, where it is a proper noun and an irregular noun declined concurrently, I have opted for the full table.

This seems like something for which there should be a full write-up or policy (both the question of ordering and that of inflection). Is this a matter that is or ought be discussed elsewhere? Also, thanks again for giving advice. I always feel odd about my decisions because I'm still so new here (and people tend to be so opinionated). —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 04:22, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5, Chuck Entz: I agree that neither servus poenae nor poenae servus needs a declension table; the principle we can draw from this case, I think, is that Latin two-word phrases in which one word does not vary do not need declension tables (not, IMO, that they should be prohibited; it's just they're of little value, and needn't be added). Two-word phrases in which both words decline, however, should indeed have declension tables (even if it's just the declension of a regular noun with a regular adjective that merely declines in agreement with the noun it modifies). As for which ordering we should lemmatise, that matters little, but IMO we should lemmatise the order that was standard (or, at least, attested) in ancient sources; in the case of servus poenae vs. poenae servus, that would be whatever occurs in the Institutiones and Digesta Justiniani. But again, that doesn't really matter, and in the absence of compelling evidence either way, I think John is right to opt for the standard/unemphatic/unmarked/whatever order (i.e., nominative–genitive). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 05:36, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

A few things

Welcome back! I hope your wikibreak was wikipeutic. Thanks for the backlog of thanks and corrections.

• As per usual, I feel that I should apologize for my general carelessness, with particular regard to diff.
• Speaking of Cordubensis, the article -ēnsis lists -ensis as having a macron despite L&S, OLD, and every other dictionary I can find saying to the contrary. We may have to percolate this change throughout and remove all the macra.
• As for switching Inflection headers to Declension/Conjugation in Template:l/la and Template:l/la, WT:ALA#Inflection says we should only use Inflection. I'm inclined to use Declension and Conjugation, and we have disagreed with WT:ALA a few times previously, but for this one, I can understand the reasoning. What do you think?
• Also, you are killing me with these גָּדַר (gāḏar) descendants. :)

—JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 22:24, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

PS: Am I allowed to put ꝛc. in Fraktur in its headword and links as I have? It makes sense, right? —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 22:33, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

So for dibreve: You added this from reading L&S, right? The two entries that contain it are Mĕtăgōge͡us and Mo͞ysēs under Mōsēs. In the case of Mĕtăgōge͡us, that character is an combining inverted double breve, but in the case of Mo͞ysēs, that is a combining double macron, which I think the program that interpreted the text of the book mistook for o͡y. There does seem to be some Italian word dibreve (google books:"dibreve"), whose meaning here seems to be twice the length of a musical breve, but otherwise is either di breve or has an unknown meaning to me. The usage in L&S seems to be merely a placeholder in a computer program for the inverted double breve, and I have found little evidence that this is a broadly used descriptor. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 23:51, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Thanks for the welcome back. Sorry I'm so rubbish at responding. I'm not very productive right now; I'm a bit out of sorts lately, but hope to improve in both respects. To your points, questions, etc.:

1. Worry not about your "general carelessness". You do a lot of good work and you're very productive; a few errors are inevitable. (And you're not generally careless, anyway.)
2. I had believed our entry. Damn. I'll be sure to mark the e short in -ensis words henceforth.
3. "[A]lways us[ing] the Inflection header, and never the alternatives Declension or Conjugation…reduces the number of possible section names, and thus improves accessibility of Latin entries for learners of both Latin and English. It also sidesteps the problem created by participles, which are technically verbs but decline like adjectives.":
   1. The "number of possible section names" is a non-issue. We could, for the same reason, use only Affix or Combining form, but instead we use Prefix, Suffix, Circumfix, Infix, etc. Excessive parsimony vis-à-vis section headers is neither desirable nor Wiktionary-wide common practice. Also, I don't see how restricting ourselves to using only Inflection headers "improves accessibility of Latin entries" when above every conjugation table there is written "first/second/third/fourth conjugation" and above every declension table there is written "first/second/third/fourth/fifth declension"; that just means that inflection is another word that has to be learnt alongside conjugation and declension.
   2. There is no "problem created by participles, which are technically verbs but decline like adjectives". In Latin, conjugation is inflection for person, number, tense, voice, and mood; declension is inflection for case, number, and gender. Non-finite verb forms are defective, marking only tense and voice. Yes, participles are non-finite verb forms, but they're conjugated already, so of course they wouldn't conjugate further; as sublemmata, they quite unproblematically have declension tables.
4. Sorry about Γᾰ́δᾰρᾰ etc. There's a lot of confusion in Biblical sources between them. See w:Exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac#Divergence in versions for what I mean.
5. Ꝛc. is an interesting one. Does it ever occur as rc. (i.e., with a normal ar, rather than an r rotunda)? What about in Antiqua typefaces (as either ꝛc. or rc.)? If the answer to both those questions is "no", then you have a pretty solid case for having the headword in Fraktur; consider, for example, that the headwords in Translingual entries for generic and specific names are italicised as standard.
6. Sorry about *dibreve. Yes, I had indeed got the word from Perseus's scanno of Mo͞ysēs under Mōsēs. You're probably right that dibreve stands for double inverted breve (the Unicode name of  ͡   (U+0361) is COMBINING DOUBLE INVERTED BREVE). All the Italian uses I could find are scannos, mostly of di breve; could you link me to some legitimate uses, please? Alternatively, I could just delete dibreve from WT:ELE as added in error…

I hope my answers are satisfactory, even if they are belated. I know I've got a lot of other posts of yours scattered here and there to answer. Would you mind linking herein to the ones I have yet to answer, please? I'll get to them when I can. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:02, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

1. I think I'll go back to vascillating arbitrarily between Inflection and Conjugation/Declension. :)
2. For rc., I may delete that from WT:WE. If German Wikipedia is to believed, ꝛ was only used in Fraktur to replace the Tironian et.
3. For dibreve, this link (from before) was the only real one I could find.

I can't recall in which notes I've mentioned you, but all link them if I find them. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 22:44, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

I remembered one: At the end of the -phyte conversation I left you a list of words to move to the unattestable page. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 22:18, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5:

1. I hope you won't mind if I change Inflection to Conjugation or Declension if and when I come across the former. :-)
2. If I'm not mistaken:   ∃(ꝛ≘⁊) ∴ꝛ⊈r   — That is to say: There exists an ꝛ which corresponds to ⁊; therefore, ꝛ is neither a subset of nor equal to r. The upshot of that is that it should be OK to use ꝛ in page titles because ꝛ cannot in all cases be autoredirected to r without error.
3. That Google Book Search result page you linked to appears blank to me (there's no snippet or anything). What do you see?
4. Cool. I'll get to those -phyte words soon.

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:34, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

1. Have at it.
2. That argument plus that fact that I love Fraktur (see my new signature) has convinced me.
3. It is pg. 290 of L'Albania e l'opera di Girolamo de Rada By Michele Marchianò. You should be able to download the whole thing on Google Books. If not, tell me.
4. Thank you.

Also, as the person who will probably see the most of this new signature, do you think it is not too offensive to other people's eye/sensibilities/latent Germanophobia? —JohnC5 20:40, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Unfortunately, that b.g.c. result page doesn't give me a download link; could you either send me the downloaded PDF or add the citation yourself to Citations:dibreve, please? I like your new signature; however, unless a person has one of the specialist Fraktur fonts specified by MediaWiki:Common.css (viz. UnifrakturMaguntia, UnifrakturCook, or Unifraktur) installed, all he will see is ordinary sans serif text at 125% of normal font size (which doesn't look great, TBH). I recommend that you tweak your signature text to <span class="Latf"><font size="3">—[[User:JohnC5|John]][[User talk:JohnC5|C5]]</font></span>, which generates:

• —JohnC5

— That will keep the Fraktur text, but return the font size to its ordinary size, thereby ensuring that the display would break elegantly. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:39, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Here you are! —JohnC5 06:36, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Just in passing: a vowel before ns is always long in Latin. --Fsojic (talk) 20:20, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

@Fsojic: Does that mean that -ēnsis is definitely correct? Why would the OLD et al. omit the macron? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:24, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

In reality, -ens- was pronounced as [ẽːs], with a long nasal vowel and no nasal consonant. The length of the vowel is often indicated with a macron, but it's technically redundant because as Fsojic said, this change always happens before ns. —CodeCat 20:31, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Ah, of course that makes sense. So should we continue using it or not? —JohnC5 20:40, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: I second John's query. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:39, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

I would say keep using the macron. The vowel was pronounced as long, even if it wasn't a normal long vowel (just an allophone triggered by the following -ns-). Marking the vowel as long helps in understanding the Romance outcomes, as the Romance languages invariably show the outcome of a normal long vowel there. For example -ins- is reflected the same as -īs-. —CodeCat 19:30, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

δεσπότης

My Bambiniotis's etym agrees (I think) with that for the grc term, and its cognacy with Sanskrit "dámpati". There are another 10 lines under ETYM. I would have a problem if the text were in English (with the abbreviations etc) but would be bound to misinterpret if I tackled the Greek text. So I hope you'll be happy leaving it at that! :)   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 14:33, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

emys and aegis

Seems like we could combine these into a template {{la-decl-3rd-Greek-dn|emys|emy|d}}? Thoughts? —JohnC5 20:09, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Yes, I thought of that once I noticed how many Grecian forms of aegis I'd seen in use. If possible, I'd like to make {{la-decl-3rd-Greek}} instead, which could also be used for chelys etc. It may be best to wait till we have a bigger sample of words so that we know what declensions the template needs to be able to generate. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:53, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

So chelys would be of the form -ys, -yos (upsilon stem). This list contains both dental -ydis words (emys, aclys, chlamys, Iapys, pelamys, sagochlamys (I also found cassis)) and upsilon -yos words (all the rest on the list). I suspect we could also skim through the -is lists for obviously AG words or any word that contains y, ch, th, ph, z, ꝛc. Any other ideas? —JohnC5 22:34, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Nope, exactly my thoughts. :-) I'm going to sign off for the night now. If you want to speed up this process, I'd be most grateful if you could create entries for the Ancient Greek etyma of the Latin terms under consideration; I shall be happy to verify (over the next however-long-it'll-take) the attestability of the various Grecian declined forms in Latin. Are you up for creating those A.Gr. entries? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:42, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

I can certainly do my best. You may have noticed, I tend to be loath to add any entry for which I don't know the vowel lengths and etymologies (this is a bad habit, but whatever), but I'll break my rule, if it is necessary. —JohnC5 22:45, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Cool. And your dislike is understandable; it's frustrating to have to admit lacunae in our knowledge. Bambiotis and Beekes are apparently the go-to authorities for Greek etymology; IIRC, Saltmarsh has access to the former, whereas Vahag has the latter; they may be willing and able to help you with any A.Gr. etymologies you're stuck on.

Re those Latin words you linked to, cassis is not Grecian, Iāpys appears to be a hapax legomenon (in the form Iāpydis), and aclys doesn't seem to occur in any Grecian forms (though aclydas might exist as a varia lectio of aclydes in Virgil's Aeneid, book vii, line 730); emys has the full complement of Grecian forms (x/c probably the vocatives), and chlamys, pēlamys, and sagochlamys look promising. In this connection, could you create πηλαμύς (pēlamús) and σαγοχλαμύς (sagokhlamús), please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:24, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Bambiniotis often restricts itself to saying that the modern Green word comes from the Ancient greek/Koine/etc. But I'd be happy to help - just ask me on my talk page.   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 19:33, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

I'll get to it soon. —JohnC5 19:35, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh, JohnC5: Thank you both. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:47, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5 I've just created {{la-decl-3rd-Greek-s}} and used it in the declension section of chlamys. AFAICT, that template should work for all Grecian third-declension words ending -Vs (where V denotes any vowel) in the nominative singular, ending -V in the vocative singular, and with a long stem in the oblique forms. If you come across or can think of any cases where this template wouldn't work, please let me know, and I'll try to tweak the template accordingly. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:10, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

I very much enjoy that valign trick. I have implemented it in utervis. —JohnC5 22:15, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Utervīs looks good; very neat. I've edited {{la-decl-3rd-Greek-s}} again; it should now work for upsilon stems like botrys. I assume that the accusative plural *botrȳs wouldn't be retained in Latin, so I've made it botryes; if it turns out that *botrȳs is used, I can edit the template accordingly. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:05, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

This looks very nice to me. Also, for what does the -s stand in this template? —JohnC5 22:26, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @JohnC5: The final sigma→ess, which gets dropped in the vocative singular. If you can think of a better name, by all means please suggest it. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:33, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Nah, that makes sense. —JohnC5 23:06, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

So shall I request the deletion of {{la-decl-emys}}, {{la-decl-aegis}}, and their documentation? —JohnC5 23:42, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Not just yet. I want to finalise the template's scope and coding before we roll it out widely, if that's OK with you. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:11, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Cool, cool. —JohnC5 00:14, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

ISMETA

You're welcome! — LlywelynII 03:30, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

@LlywelynII: Is this in response to the thanks I sent you for the edits to cenobium etc.? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:27, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

admin

Hey. Fancy going for administrator? I'll nominate you if you like. --Type56op9 (talk) 12:31, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Sure, thanks. It would make it easier to stop the current torrent of vandalism, that's for sure. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:32, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Accept here please --Type56op9 (talk) 12:40, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

ISMETA you have to add your signature where it says “Acceptance:”. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 13:16, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

@Type56op9: Done. Thanks for sorting out the vote.

@Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV: Sorry about the delay; I didn't start devoting my attention to this until the vandal was blocked, and then it took me a while to sort out my user time zone and Babel boxes.

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:41, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Your vote has passed, you are an Admin. Please add your name to WT:Admin. Also, see Help:Sysop tools. —Stephen ^(Talk) 00:02, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

@Stephen G. Brown: Done. Thank you. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:02, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Cedretum et al

These are not taxonomic names. They are names of environments/habitats, not widely accepted AFAICT. I had looked at these and ran out of enthusiasm after creating -etum#Latin and linking any words we had in Latin that were suffixed by it. DCDuring TALK 01:41, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

@DCDuring I've done my best to add as many -ētum nouns as I could. Are there any others that you think are missing? Actually, based on this, there definitely are. I also wrote a speculative etymology. —JohnC5 06:23, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

@DCDuring: My bad. Given this, I'd assumed that *Cedretum was a generic name; I'd added what I could before removing your request (the only use of cedretus I could find that wasn't a scanno or actually the proper name Cedretus reads “In cedretus faucium Akka n’Duyad Atlantis Majoris 2000 m solo calcareo rupestri, 28 juin 1939. Maroc”). Shall I revert my addition to WT:RE:taxa? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:12, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Are there any taxonomic names based on words with the -etum suffix (presumably a subset of those ending in etum, ie, not acetum)? Semantically it seems unlikely, but linguistically unlikely things happen in taxonomic names. The instances of Cedretum that I found look like an (ill-considered?) attempt to formalize certain types of environments into explicit objects that would be of equivalent worth as objects of study to taxa, much as geologists have formalized formations. It doesn't seem to have taken off, but it is difficult to search the really large corpora for words ending in etum to be sure. OTOH, I'd expect some use of words ending in -etorum and -eti as specific epithets. They would be selected from Latin or possibly coined based on genus names. (Have you run across cedreti or cedretorum as specific epithets?) For example, I dimly recall that there is some species (of bacteria?) that depends on whales for its life cycle. This might be an occasion for cetetum to be coined and ceteti or cetetorum to be pressed into service as specific epithets.

Now that we've wandered into this little thicket, we may as well push to some kind of conclusion. DCDuring TALK 16:11, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Don't forget specific epithets that are nouns in apposition, e.g abietum (firwood), bucetum (cow pasture), and palmetum (type locality for Cydia palmetum is "Royal Palm State Park" in Florida- see [6]). As for your thicket, there's nothing for the nominatives, but dumetorum is not uncommon. I would guess that the genitive plural is the form of choice for these, though genitive singular can be found. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:19, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz I'm not convinced that abietum is actually a proper form of -ētum (as the correct form would be abietētum), but instead the genitive plural of abiēs. —JohnC5 00:22, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Well, it definitely is that, but- correctly or incorrectly- there are also examples of abietorum, which seem to be based on an *abiet- root. To be clear: I'm not saying that classical abietum is derived from the suffix, just that modern taxonomists seem to have reanalyzed it that way. Granted, taxonomists are rarely experts in Latin morphology, and it's easy for someone who doesn't know the differences between thematic and consonant stems to make mistakes- but such mistakes are what drives morphological reanalysis even in languages with lots of thoroughly-competent monolingual native speakers. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:34, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

I think of gotten all the remaining words for -ētum (You can argue about Argīlētum as being the place of the clay (argilla), but others have claimed different and probably erroneous etymologies). My tangential question is whether, given senticētum, būcētum, busticētum and olenticētum, we shouldn't add an alternative suffix form -cētum derived by reänalysis. —JohnC5 00:22, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

It's entirely possible- the substitution of busticētum for earlier bustum is very suggestive- but there do seem to be apparent cases of intrusive stem-final -c that I would like to see explanations for, as in senticosus and buculus. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:47, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz I agree with your alternate analysis too (as seen in bucetum#Etymology), which is why I was hesitant to make -cetum in the first place. The OLD (2nd Ed.) lists -cetum as an extension of -etum under the latter's entry, which is what put the idea in my mind initially. If we don't think there's enough evidence for a full second entry, I might add a usage note to -etum mentioning this phenomenon. —JohnC5 04:47, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

• Cool! Great stuff. If we keep this up we may be able to surpass the specialty specific epithet websites. DCDuring TALK 02:02, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

dēlēlicet

Where'd you find it? I can't find this form. —JohnC5 03:39, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

(And, unrelatedly, could you look at this template I made, {{R:DGEel}}, and tell me how we could make the citation better. I looks janky right now.) —JohnC5 10:23, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

I like the guillemets that you added (they look super classy), but is there a reason why? —JohnC5 21:27, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

[post-edit conflict]: @JohnC5: It was a word that I came up with and then did a quick Google Books search (q.v.) to verify that it existed. I've edited {{R:DGEel}}; to explain the changes I've made:

1. I substituted the “” quotation marks with guillemets because (Modern) Greek uses guillemets as its primary quotation marks and because there exists the potential for confusion between ⟨ “ ⟩ and ⟨  ⟩, especially where that diacritic (dasia-oxia) marks a capital letter.
2. I believe the link to http://dge.cchs.csic.es/xdge/ is unnecessary because the page is so easily accessed from the other link provided and because a wikilink to w:Diccionario Griego–Español already exists to provide general information about the cited authority.
3. The dictionary has a pretty sizeable group of editors, so I simply omitted their names (the OLD, with its nineteen editors, has been treated the same by {{R:OLD}}). If you think it would still be desirable to specify one or more editors, I would recommend changing the citation text from “…in the Diccionario Griego–Español en línea…” to “…in Francisco Rodríguez Adrados and others’ Diccionario Griego–Español en línea…”.
4. IMO, noting the publisher provides little benefit as is just unnecessary bloat. (Sorry.)
5. I'm not sure about the date. Where did you get 2008? I went with 2006–2024 because the CSIC "signed in 2006 the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" and because, as an on-line resource, additions and amendments will be ongoing and open-ended and therefore subject to later copyright dates. But if you got 2008 from somewhere authoritative, I'll change the date statement back to that.

I hope you're generally happy with what I've done to the template. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:57, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Oh, all your edits looks great. I just slapped some stuff in there because I couldn't figure out exactly what was necessary nor could I find a good source referencing the online DGE directly. I think I used scholar.google's citaiton tool (third one down, press cite). Actually, this says 2012 for some reason.

The other reference for which I have great avarice is the LBG, but currently there is no good way (that I know of) to auto-link to it. You can use the eid= input, but I wonder if there is a way to query it directly. I may dig around in the site's JS and see if I can't figure a way to query directly through HTML. —JohnC5 22:17, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I think the 2008 dating refers to the physical version of the authority and the 2012 dating of the en línea version is on account of the "accessioned" and available dates for the authority being the 4th of January 2013. Re the LBG, maybe the template for citing it will need to be coded in a similar way to {{R:NLW}} (with its specified "entry number"), but let me know if you find a way to query the source without an entry number. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:00, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

So, are we sticking with 2006 or going with 2012? —JohnC5 23:35, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I'm still inclined toward 2006–2024; 2012 is, unless I'm mistaken, just the date of first digital access. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:07, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Unless Wiktionary allows socket.http in Lua, we have to stick just adding the eid by hand, sadly. —JohnC5 00:54, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Ok, so I made {{R:LBG}}. Feel free to rewrite it as you see fit. Also, I previously had {{R:DGEel}} as {{R:DGE}} but changed it, thinking that someone might want to cite the original book. I'm not sure, however, that that is necessary, and I think I might want to switch it back to {{R:DGE}}. Thoughts? —JohnC5 05:55, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Well, the physical and en línea versions are discrete authorities, so yes, it can be expected that someone may want to cite the physical version rather than the en línea; however, I can't think of a situation where it wouldn't be desirable to replace any citation of the physical version with a citation of the en línea version (chiefly on account of the fact that the latter permits near-instant verification of content by users). So yes, I agree that {{R:DGE}} is preferable to {{R:DGEel}}. Regarding the coding of {{R:LBG}}: the &context=lsj&action=from-search bit of the URL is unnecessary and can be omitted; the first fascicle of the Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität was published in 1994, whilst the sixth fascicle (which is the latest one to have been digitised) was published in 2007, so we should date the LBG 1994–2007, IMO; and I don't think it's desirable to permit the omission of the first parameter. What do you say? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:27, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Again, this all sounds good to me. I will move the DGE back and make the appropriate changes to LBG. —JohnC5 19:33, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

OK, check out LBG now. I can't decide whether to end it at 2007 or at the current date since, in theory, further fascicles are in the process of being digitized. —JohnC5 20:29, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Good work, especially with the very eye-catching error text. I think we should stick to an end date of 2007; we can extend it to 2011 or 2016 as and when fascicles 7 and 8 are digitised, too. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:34, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Cool cool. I'm in the process of writing Gräzität. As for the translation, I was thinking Greekdom or Greekness are the closest in English. The literal Duden definition is "The character of Ancient Greek language, customs, and culture." It is very similar to the English Latinity, but no word Greecity/Greekity seems to exist. Maybe Hellenism would be more appropriate? —JohnC5 20:44, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Also, because I know it is your heart's desire to fiddle around with AG reference templates, could we fix up {{grc-wh-page}}? I've already edited it a bit, but I feel like we might add some documentation, reorder the format, or even rename it to something more sensible like {{R:Woodhouse}} (then ask someone to use a bot to change it over). @ObsequiousNewt do you think we should rename this? —JohnC5 23:00, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5 Yeah, I'd support moving it to {{R:Woodhouse}}, for consistency's sake. ObsequiousNewt (ἔβαζα|ἐτλέλεσα) 23:20, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

The reference template

I think referencing templates that you have created yourself as a model to follow is rather unconvincing. I mean {{R:du Cange}}, {{R:Gaffiot}}, {{R:OLD}}, {{R:Niermeyer}}, {{R:NLW}}. Every single template that you have mentioned in the edit summary were created by you. I really am at a loss about what you intended by mentioning these templates. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:47, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

That said, I have placed quotation marks into the disputed template, per status quo ante on the template level. --Dan Polansky (talk) 21:12, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

[post-edit conflict]: @Dan Polansky: JohnC5 and I make a lot of contributions to Latin entries; those five reference templates and {{R:L&S}} are the ones we use to support our entries; it is desirable for the authorities' citations to be consistently formatted, especially where they occur in the same list; those five templates are better-formatted than {{R:L&S}}. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:14, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

You do not support your claim that they are better formatted. --Dan Polansky (talk) 21:16, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

@Dan Polansky: I haven't here, no, but I believe I have done so elsewhere. BTW, thank you for this; I considered the lack of quotation marks in {{R:L&S}} to be its most unsightly presentational inconsistency with the other five templates. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:21, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

I don't think you have explained it well elsewhere. The elsewhere would be at Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2014/October#use.E2.80.93mention_distinction_in_reference_templates, I figure. Your use of typographic dash instead of minus in that section title alone suggests you are one of those folks who emphasize style over substance or function, and that is perfectly consistent with your preference of these quotation marks. Your explanation was wrongly based on use-mention distinction; that it was wrong was explained by Ruakh in that discussion. And even if this were about use-mention distiction (discussed e.g. by Hofstadter to whom you seem to owe your user name), the quotation marks are just typographical sugar, inessential to mark that distinction. The presentation we had in the disputed template and that we still have in couple other templates cannot leave anyone in doubt about whether we use the word to carry meaning or whether it is just a section title of a linked dictionary. The whole thing boils down largely to subjective preference, coupled with various ideological baggage that cannot be reduced to observable facts. As for inconsistency, that could have been easily solved by your removing the quotation marks from the templates you created. What I find most disclosing is this revision, which even links "New York"; that tells me that my percetion of good formatting and presentation and your perception are miles away. --Dan Polansky (talk) 21:39, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

@Dan Polansky: I'm sure we can come to some kind of resolution on this issue at some point, but I don't have the enthusiasm for it right now. I'll be sure to ping you when I do. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:17, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Αντίπας

I've removed the rfd from this redirect - now reinstated as a proper noun.   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 19:29, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: The way you've fixed it is far better than a deletion would've been. Thank you very much. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:41, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Paronymum/paronyma

Howdy! What brought about this edit? —JohnC5 14:04, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Of {{R:L&S}}, {{R:du Cange}}, {{R:Gaffiot}}, {{R:OLD}}, {{R:Niermeyer}}, and {{R:NLW}}, only Gaffiot has an entry, and it lists only the plurale tantum noun părōny̆ma (“paronyms”), which is supported by the Late Latin citation of Diomedes in that entry. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:58, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

The OED has the post-classical Latin parōnymum listed under its etymology for paronym, but of course no actual citation, so who knows. Then again Gaffiot translates părōny̆ma as paronyms, which implies to me that the singular exists but we merely lack attestation thereof. I don't know, to be honest. —JohnC5 20:24, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Searching google books:"paronymon" and/or google books:"paronymum" suggests that the word is not plurale tantum post Late Latin… — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:10, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

So... what is our verdict? —JohnC5 19:27, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Thanks for the reminder. I'll relemmatise that Latin term at parōnymon or parōnymum once I decide which is best. I'll ping you once I've done that. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:39, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

:) —JohnC5 19:40, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I've relemmatised the lexeme at parōnymon, following Calepinus' choice of lemma. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:58, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Etym requests

Hi,

Pls don't pepper the entries with etym requests. I don't think they are necessary for each and every term. I will add myself when they are not transparent. открытый is a participle and is self-explanatory. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 07:08, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

@Atitarev: Hi Anatoli. Sorry for causing you bother. My knowledge of Russian is extremely limited, so even the most transparent etymologies will not be apparent to me! That being said, I should've done more investigating in the case of откры́тый (otkrýtyj), given that the verb form is listed lower down on the same page, and considering that participial adjectives are a common feature of English grammar, too. I've added the etymology for that term myself; is what I've added correct?

Would you like me to desist from adding {{rfe}}s to any Russian entries whatsoever? (I already abstain from doing so to Czech entries, following Dan Polansky's voicing of his disapproval.) — I.S.M.E.T.A. 07:34, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes, please. While I do normally add pronunciations (except for prefixes and suffixes), which is now made easier thanks to Wyang's module (it needs to be used with care and knowledge, though), I don't always add etymologies. I don't completely disapprove etym. requests but it works discouragingly. It adds more work. For regular Russian learners, genuinely wanting to know etymologies, seeing words of their same stem should be sufficient. The entry открытый already says that it's both the adjective and the participle, just like English "tired", "bent", "open" (adj) or "opened" (participle). --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 07:44, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

@Atitarev: OK; no problem. Thank you for the civility of your request and, again, I'm sorry to have caused you bother. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:37, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Some advice please

What is the general policy concerning this sort of thing? I normally would be quite hesitant to wade into such treacherous waters. —JohnC5 09:30, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Well, we have several other Peoples’ Republics, so there would seem to be no policy bar against having entries for Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic… Shall I create them and then send them to WT:RFD to see what regulation coalesces there? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:31, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Nah, it's fine to just create them. I guess I'm hesitant because, from an American perspective, these “Republics” do not or should not exist, and so I feel like any definition I would give to the entry would not maintain a neuter viewpoint. —JohnC5 19:18, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I've created both entries, complete with quotations from news agencies reporting on the separatist states' proclamations at the time. Do they look OK to you? I've tried to be neutral. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:39, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Seems plausible enough. Thank you! —JohnC5 23:12, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: You're welcome. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 07:06, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

The only policy issue related to these terms is the fact that they aren't attested for a year. But I think we can all let it pass, because they'd qualify as hot words anyway and probably have citations spanning one year in less than a month. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:28, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

@Μετάknowledge: Donetsk People’s Republic is now CFI-compliant, even without “hot word” status. :-) The Luhansk People’s Republic was proclaimed a little later than the Donetsk People’s Republic (the 27th, vs. the 7th, of April last year), but were the term sent to WT:RFV today, it would very probably have a third and sufficiently recent citation before the discussion was closed (as long as the listing were given the guaranteed month). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 07:06, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Comparative adjective forms?

Why on earth would we need a category for forms of specifically comparative adjectives? —CodeCat 16:18, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Please see User talk:Chuck Entz#Latin -ior comparatives. I'm trying to fix that categorisation problem which he drew my attention to. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:20, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: My intention is to recategorise the members of the ambiguously-named Category:Latin adjective comparative forms into Category:Latin comparative adjectives (for lemmata) and Category:Latin comparative-adjective forms (for non-lemmata). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:26, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

I think that the inflected forms of comparatives can just go in Category:Latin adjective forms. There's no need for a separate category. —CodeCat 16:42, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: I respectfully disagree. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:47, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Why? What is the value in it? —CodeCat 17:00, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Well, Latin adjectives' absolute, comparative, and superlative degrees are all lemmata, and rightly so; comparatives and superlatives can develop nuances not shared by their absolute degrees (e.g. esculentus (“good to eat”, “delicious”) → esculentior (“more delicate”)). Different lemmata should, in principle, have their respective non-lemmata categorised separately from other non-lemmata; there is a practical benefit to this because forms that occur in particular declensions and conjugations are thereby grouped separately, allowing a reader to get an impression at a glance of which forms belong to which parts of speech (in the case of Latin comparative-adjective forms, they tend to belong to a specific comparative variant of the adjectival paradigm of the third declension). If this benefit appears marginal to you, ask yourself whether the benefit produced by distinguishing Latin absolute-adjective forms from Latin comparative-adjective forms is really any less than the benefit produced by distinguishing Latin adjective forms from Latin noun forms. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:55, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

What you seem to be arguing, then, is to separate forms by their inflectional classes, not by comparativeness. So you want Category:Latin first declension adjective forms and such? —CodeCat 17:59, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@CodeCat: No, that isn't what I'm arguing. I argued in favour of lemmatising Latin adjectives' absolute, comparative, and superlative degrees and in favour of the principle of categorising the inflected forms of any given class of lemmata separately from the inflected forms of other classes of lemmata. I suggested a practical benefit to doing this which leaves distinguishing Latin absolute-adjective forms from Latin comparative-adjective forms on all fours with distinguishing Latin adjective forms from Latin noun forms. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:46, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Hello :)

I am a Pashto professor the word is spelt wrongly see: http://dsalsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.0:1:776.raverty Adjutor101 (talk) 18:55, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@Adjutor101: OK. Could you create a Pashto entry at آيات, please? Then I'll delete ايات. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:01, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym:  Done = https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%A2%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%AA#Pashto Adjutor101 (talk) 19:09, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@Adjutor101: Thank you. I've now deleted the offending page. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:23, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

No, thank you. My goal is to promote Pashto here and you have helped me in that, so I owe you big time. Thank you so much @I'm so meta even this acronym: Adjutor101 (talk) 19:25, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@Adjutor101: I'm happy to help where I can. In this specific case, I just didn't want to see valid content lost when it was merely misplaced. Please, keep up the good work with Pashto; if there's any way I can help in future, please don't hesitate to ask. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:34, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Citations:Pädophilie

I apologize. What I changed was to an earlier source, 1834 not your later 1835, which was a conflicting edit at the time. I think the earlier is better, as it seems to be the earliest. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 15:15, 30 April 2015 (UTC) modified 15:18, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

@BoBoMisiu: I certainly agree with the principle that, given two identical passages of text, the earlier text should be favoured for citation. Be that as it may, you, in this case, fell foul of a trap I avoided: The Google book with the ID xLsqAAAAMAAJ, which you cited, consists of the eleventh volume (Horn–Hultschin) of the second section of Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste immediately followed by the twelfth volume thereof (Hum–Hypexodon); go here and scroll up six pages, and you'll see the twelfth volume's frontispiece, which bears the publication date 1835. Anyway, apology accepted; my edit summary was a bit harsh, for which I apologise, too. I confess that I really dislike {{quote-book}} and the way that it tries to cram all sorts of bibliographical information into one template, with its resultant loss of information. Bitching aside, thank you for responding to the {{rfquote}} I added; I appreciate it. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:45, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

I hate those multiple volumes combined into one. I didn't look. I like {{quote-book}} because it adds the metadata that only the machines see into the HTML. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 19:05, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

@BoBoMisiu: What kind of metadata are you referring to? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:03, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

For example, if you look at the source code Citations:Pädophilie, you will see the citations I added have:

<li>
<div class="citation-whole"><span class="cited-source"><span class="book">...

Yours does not, it has:

<li><b>1835</b>, Johann Christian Gotthelf Schincke...

—BoBoMisiu (talk) 20:38, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

Excelsior!

And you're welcome. — LlywelynII 16:31, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

:-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:07, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

Suffix linking

I have certainly seen the pos linking used for -ō in PIE but never in Latin. May we split -tus up similarly (perhaps participle, abstract noun, and action noun)? Also, can we split -ātus into only the adjective category and move all the participial forms to -tus? —JohnC5 19:47, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I'll follow your lead re -tus; I ask only that you amend -tus in a similar manner to -ō and Category:Latin words suffixed with -tus in a similar manner to Category:Latin words suffixed with -o. As for -ātus, I suppose that all the adjectives should simply remain in Category:Latin words suffixed with -atus, whereas all the participles should be moved to Category:Latin participles suffixed with -tus; is that right, or do I misunderstand you? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:52, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

That is right. So, I should create those category pages? —JohnC5 23:23, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Go f’rit! — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:35, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Could you check out the changes I've made? And should we add a new Participle section to -tus? —JohnC5 19:30, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Your changes look good; I amended -tus slightly, but everything was good with that, anyway. I don't think it would be desirable to add a Participle section to -tus, no, since the section would be virtually indentical to the one for the adjectival suffix. Thanks. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:36, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Ceste (venetian)

Perhaps the pronunciation is /'t͡ʃɛste/, but i'm not sure. It's a slang term and it is used only in the city of Vicenza (not only when they speak in venetian, but also when they speak in italian). I'll try to ask a user from Vicenza.--GatoSelvadego (talk) 15:53, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

@GatoSelvadego: That's good to know; thank you for getting back to me. Let me know once you've received confirmation from your Vicentine. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:43, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

User Davy1509 told me that the correct pronunciation is /'tʃeste/, with /e/ not /ɛ/.--GatoSelvadego (talk) 13:47, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

@GatoSelvadego: Thanks very much. I've added that information to the entry. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 13:32, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

επιμόνως

Thanks for noting (and correcting) my error - I have been away.   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 05:36, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

@Saltmarsh: No problem; I like to keep Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as empty as is feasible. Welcome back! — I.S.M.E.T.A. 08:47, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Capio - qapi

Hi, I had read in an etymology book that the Persian predecessor of the root *keh₂p- is the verb 'qapidan' (present stem: 'qapi-', past stem: 'qapid') literally meaning 'to grab', 'to gasp' or 'to catch'. I had added it to etymology of the Latin verb 'capio' but it is now removed. Would you please reconsider it? Or maybe it belongs to a more proper place. Nonetheless I'm new to editing on Wikipedia. If possible, would you then add it to the same Indo-European root's page? Thank you! :) — This unsigned comment was added by 87.184.207.126 (talk) at 19:53, 10 May 2015.

@87.184.207.126: I assume you're referring to these edits which I reverted. I'm sorry if I was too summary in my reversion, but the claim seemed implausible to me; moreover, the claim you're making now is inconsistent with, and even less plausible than, your earlier claim. Nevertheless, I've brought this up in Wiktionary:Tea room/2015/May#Is the Persian قاپیدن (qapidan) a cognate of the Latin capiō? to seek the advice of editors conversant with Persian. By the way, this project is Wiktionary, not Wikipedia. Also, to get the term display you were trying for, the template format needs to be {{m|fa|قاپیدن||tr=qapidan|snap”, “snatch}} or {{term|قاپیدن||tr=qapidan|snap”, “snatch|lang=fa}} — note the oh-so-important empty parameter between the term (قاپیدن) and the gloss (“snap”, “snatch”), as well as the way that the transliteration is provided by specifying the |tr= parameter. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:22, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

@87.184.207.126: Statements by Chuck Entz in Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2015/May#Is the Persian قاپیدن (qapidan) a cognate of the Latin capiō? suggest that your etymology book is mistaken, as I suspected. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:01, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Should we ask for the R:Urban template to be removed?

The on fleek entry was recently edited to contain a reference to Urban Dictionary; so, I went to investigate whether there was a preëxisting template, which there was. I made some updates to the template's appearance, functionality, and documentation (including some very strongly worded warnings about the template). Do you think these restrictions on the template a strong enough, or should we bring it up for deletion? I'm sure there is useful information to be gleaned from UD, but it seems hard to find. I bring this up here because I am loath to get into a pitched battle over whether UD is a source worth banning, but by the same token I don't feel like we can just remove it without asking. What do you think? —JohnC5 07:46, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

<butting in> The updates to the template documentation are good. The edit to (deprecated template usage) on fleek looks dodgy to me, but I didn't have time to investigate. </butting in> SemperBlotto (talk) 07:51, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I agree with SemperBlotto's "butting in" (which is always welcome, SB). Anything UD asserts we need to verify independently. Citing UD never adds to the credibility of an entry; on the contrary, it may well detract from it. Accordingly, I would support deleting {{R:Urban}}; should we bring this up in the Beer Parlour or at RFDO? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:28, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

The real question is whether we should ban UD references outright. The only situation in which we should remove the template is when we agree that UD should not be allowed. Otherwise, I'd prefer to have the template for indexing and standardization purposes. If we want to remove it, we would probably have to have a vote of some sort to ban UD and then remove the template contingent on that outcome. —JohnC5 20:44, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Yes, I agree, of course. I'd vote to ban references to UD. Do you feel like tackling this now, or do you want to leave it for a later date? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:03, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

I am...hesitant...to draft such a vote as I have never done so before. Also, in the case of the CFI demotion argument going on, it was mentioned that discussion should occur before putting issues to a policy vote. This could merely be a parliamentary formality meant to postpone/prevent that vote in the first place, but if people actually care about this, maybe we should start in the Beer Parlor? —JohnC5 21:08, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I think we should indeed start this off in the Beer Parlour, but I think that the BP is too busy at the moment; the section would more than likely end up being ignored. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:41, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Ok, let's put this on hold then. —JohnC5 21:58, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Sure. Perhaps after the RFV of that suspect sense of on fleek is concluded. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:02, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

FWIW, I think it's fine to have and use {{R:Urban}}, but not to rely on it or encourage users to rely on it. Perhaps we could could place some recommendations on use in its documentation and a warning that displays (optionally?, but by default?). DCDuring TALK 02:26, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

<butting in summary="oppose">I also think R:urban is useful. Wikipedia is also edited by anyone and is not credible but we still put links to them.</butting in>--DixtosaBOT (talk) 10:27, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Oh well, that scuppers that idea, then! @DixtosaBOT: The distinction is that we never cite Wikipedia as a reference; links to Wikipedia are generally there just to provide further reading, especially in entries for nouns. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:28, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

We put links to OneLook, our sister projects, and the various dictionaries under External links much more often than we put them under References. I've never thought that footnotes made much sense or looked good in our entries. They may be justified for etymologies, but they still don't look good. DCDuring TALK 16:33, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @DCDuring: I for one almost never use in-line superscript citations. However, when I create Latin entries, I add {{R:Smith's DGRG}}, {{R:L&S}}, {{R:du Cange}}, {{R:Gaffiot}}, {{R:OLD}}, {{R:Niermeyer}}, and/or {{R:NLW}} in References sections because they support the content of the entry, whereas I add {{pedia}} and the like in External links sections because they provide opportunities for further reading, but which give details that would be excessively encyclopaedic were they to be included in the content of the entry; I think that's a worthwhile distinction to make. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:55, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

WP, Wikispecies, and Commons all support the content of the entry in one way or another, but they are nevertheless relegated to External links by vote. The rationale used in that vote would apply to anything so linked, not that I supported or support that rationale. Perhaps we could take advantage of the two headers and forbid using {{R:Urban}} under the References header, relegating it to External links, which eventually users would come to associate with second-class references. DCDuring TALK 19:06, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

I would be fine will keeping UD references if there is agreement, but I am still interested in maybe having a vote about it. Having it as an acceptable source allows for new/one-time editors to hold it over our heads as I seen done a few times. —JohnC5 19:53, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

@DCDuring: That sounds like a reasonable middle ground. Having a UD link in an External links section makes it look like we're saying "BTW, UD also has an entry for this term." rather than "We're taking UD's word for it that the content of their entry is legit."

@JohnC5: What do you mean by "hold it over our heads"? Can you give some examples, please?

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:35, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: This particular gem comes to mind. —JohnC5 20:43, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I don't think we need to worry about "UD has an entry for this, so why don't you?"-type complaints. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:15, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

I don't view a UD definition as anything more than a hypothesis about a possible definition for us. It isn't attestation; it isn't an authority; at its best it is a window into slangy usage, especially valuable for usage that doesn't have a UseNet community behind it. DCDuring TALK 23:10, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

@DCDuring: Yes, I'd say that that view of UD is the right one to hold. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:41, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

-rhexis / -rrhexis / -orrhexis

I noticed you removed these from the wanted entries page, but these were intended to be English suffixes. --WikiWinters (talk) 21:27, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

The question of whether it should be -rrhexis or -orrhexis is also (approximately) being discussed in this discussion. —JohnC5 21:50, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

@WikiWinters, JohnC5: There isn't an English suffix involved here; there is just the English noun rhexis, which has been around since the Middle English rixis. The corresponding word rhaphy doesn't may exist, but definitely doesn't go back as far as 1835 (the first recorded English formation with -rrhaphy, viz. staphylorrhaphy). I'll add an English entry for rhexis once I've dug out my copy of the 1933 A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles: Introduction, Supplement, and Bibliography. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 22:40, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Categories to (keep) empty

If you have them in your userpage in order to often look after them then you might find catwatch useful. The documentation is here and the source here. --Dixtosa (talk) 19:28, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Better still, make a single parent category for them. Then everyone can use and monitor it. —CodeCat 19:32, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Latin months

I was working on Māius and I noticed EncycloPetey had made all the months lowercase. Can you think of why this would be, even if they are normally adjectives? —JohnC5 23:14, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: He seemed to think that all words which aren't proper nouns should have an initial minuscule. That kind of lemmatisation policy is at odds with actual Latin usage, however. Please do feel free to move all the entries for the month adjectives from their minuscule-initial page titles to majuscule-initial ones. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:17, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

After beginning the extremely arduous task of trying to move a single month (Aprilis), I find this, which still does not convince me. Though, if I am to continue the ~300 edits that will be necessary to move all the months, I need to be slightly more confident that I won't have to change it back later. Should we move this to a broader forum? —JohnC5 10:18, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Well, Lewis & Short, Gaffiot, and the OLD (1st ed., page 154/3) all capitalise both the proper noun and the adjective; I find it especially authoritative that the Latin–French Gaffiot capitalises the word, even though the month's name in French, avril, is minuscule-initial. Be that as it may, would you like me to bring this up in the Tea Room? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:05, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

That would be great. What impresses me most about EncycloPetey is when (s)he makes a decision, it is very consistently applied, and fixing this will take a deal of effort. —JohnC5 19:25, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Butting in. What about collecting some evidence of use? Dictionaries are not evidence. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:14, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Done. I assume that EncycloPetey is male.

@Dan Polansky: How about google books:"Aprilis", google books:"Aprili", google books:"Aprilem", google books:"Apriles", google books:"Aprilium", and google books:"Aprilibus"? Only four of the Latin hits out of the first sixty hits (the first ten of each search query) are minuscule-initial.

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:32, 1 June 2015 (UTC)