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Hi Awesomemeeos again. Sorry to bother you, but just as a general question, what are some of the things you like about japan and its culture? – [[User:Awesomemeeos|'''AWESOME''' meeos '''!''']] * ([[User_talk:Awesomemeeos|「欺负」我]]) 08:17, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
Hi Awesomemeeos again. Sorry to bother you, but just as a general question, what are some of the things you like about japan and its culture? – [[User:Awesomemeeos|'''AWESOME''' meeos '''!''']] * ([[User_talk:Awesomemeeos|「欺负」我]]) 08:17, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
: He likes using modern kanji for 1600 year old words. [[User:UtherPendrogn|UtherPendrogn]] ([[User talk:UtherPendrogn|talk]]) 10:45, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Revision as of 10:48, 2 November 2016

Not much going on here at present. Feel free to drop a line. Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 16:41, 31 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

Archive
Archives

2006-2007
2011-2012


Between work, more work, and home life, I'm snowed under for the time being. (Please ignore the irony that it is now late spring / early summer in the northern hemisphere.) Prognosis remains unclear. Suffice it to say that I'm down, but not out. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:31, 28 May 2014 (UTC)Reply


humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa

I noticed that you speak some Hawaiian - could you fix my (probably faulty) translation of a quote here? (I had to reorder some words because Hawaiian uses demonstratives so strangely...) Thanks so much! --Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 19:47, 8 September 2012 (UTC)Reply

Heya, I'd be happy to help as best I can. My Hawaiian materials are actually in my cubicle at work, so it'll have to wait until Monday.  :) -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 07:31, 9 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
Great! I await your corrections. Thanks again! --Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 14:38, 9 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
Well, there's egg on my face, and not because I've been messy with my breakfast -- I seem to have misplaced my Hawaiian materials, as they're not here in my cubicle either. I'll give the page a shot, but I won't do too much at the moment, as my Hawaiian is limited and rusty enough that I don't feel all that confident without my books to hand.  :) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 15:25, 10 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
Well, really any help is appreciated. It's a little embarrassing around here when it comes to the point where I have to do Hawaiian translations :) --Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 01:12, 11 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
Took me blooming forwever, but I finally tweaked the etym. Only real changes were for the ā conjunction and then the expanded translation. C.f. the ā entry at Wehewehe.org, specifically sense #4. HTH, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:18, 11 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

巫毒教

Just letting you know that although you got rid of the Japanese entry here which you said was bogus, the Japanese translation given at voodoo still points to that entry. ---> Tooironic (talk) 11:06, 6 December 2012 (UTC)Reply

I have removed 巫毒教 and added ブードゥー教 as the Japanese translation for voodoo. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 11:32, 6 December 2012 (UTC)Reply
Thanks, guys. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:38, 25 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Welcome back!

RuakhTALK 06:34, 26 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

xml:lang unnecessary

Hi. I noticed you adding lang and xml:lang attributes to templates. Our pages now have the HTML5 doctype <!DOCTYPE html> and the root html tag has only the lang attribute, and no xml:lang. HTML5 says “The attribute in no namespace with no prefix and with the literal localname "xml:lang" has no effect on language processing” and other confusing things,[1] but I think the gist is that adding xml:lang is obsolete. Michael Z. 2013-01-31 20:42 z

I believe so. They are mainly harmless, but getting rid of extraneous code is helpful for editors and readers, in the long run. Michael Z. 2013-01-31 21:52 z

Icelandic/Old Norse

Do you actually know either of these? Your name kind of implies you do but your Babel doesn't say anything. Maybe non-0 or is-0 would be helpful to clarify? —CodeCat 23:09, 8 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

I'm afraid I'm only up on German and English of the northwestern tongues. Well, some Dutch too. I tried teaching myself Danish once, but the materials I had didn't explain the rules about glottal stops, which seemed to come and go in the same word depending on context, and I got frustrated and fed up with the books and turned my attention elsewhere.
Frankly, I never understood why the -0 templates exist -- my working assumption has always been that any language a user knows nothing about simply isn't listed. If we all spent our time attempting to exhaustively list everything we *don't* know, we'd never get any useful editing done.  :) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:18, 11 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

To followup on CodeCat’s question, per Wikipedia:Babel, the purpose for -0 templates is to assert that one does not know some language that one might be expected to know. As this is only semi-useful information, ’pedia now doesn’t have -0 categories – you probably aren’t interested in finding people who don’t know a language!

I’m using {{User Lua-0}} as a placeholder – I’m an experienced programmer, but I’m not yet familiar with Lua, and I expect to learn it in future. OTOH, I don’t expect to learn Chinese anytime soon, and despite having some grasp of Japanese I doubt anyone would expect me to know it, so I don’t see a reason to note that. (IRL people sometimes assume I speak German, due to name and accent, so {{User de-0}} would be useful, but no-one’s thought this online so there’s no need.)

—Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 05:53, 17 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

Re: Q about 鮟

You have new messages Hello, Eirikr. You have new messages at Nbarth's talk page.
Message added 07:11, 17 February 2013 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{talkback}} template.

Chechen language

Eirikr, you wrote: "... In other words, I don't think you'll encounter much opposition here at Wiktionary, if you decide to create a Swadesh list for Chechen that uses the Latin alphabet. Go right ahead." (then you deleted it!) / They are against everything! I already put a Chechen list in Latin alphabet on Appendix talk:Swadesh lists (but I found it, I didn't write it. I added a few things...) Chechen-Russian Dictionary in Cyrillic script: http://ingush.narod.ru/chech/dict.htm If they want, they can make a list. (but they are against this language!)They are saying: "We don't have volunteers for the Chechen language, so no one has created a Swadesh list for Chechen." /Do you believe it? The Chechens live in which conditions? Regards, Böri (talk) 09:03, 5 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Hello, Böri --
The reason I struck out my comment (which I didn't delete, i.e. I did not remove it from the page -- removing comments entirely is generally not considered a good thing) was that it was based on my initial misunderstanding about who "they" were. I thought at first that you were describing something that happened on Wikipedia, rather than on Wiktionary.
The concern about which script to use for any such Chechen-language list is because Wiktionary strives to be descriptive. We aim to describe how terms in a language are used. We do not take any position on how terms in any language _should_ be used -- that is being prescriptive, saying what _should be_, and Wiktionary does not do that. Entries can explain how other speakers of a language might view certain terms, such as the notes on the brung or taked entries, but again that is about describing.
So from a perspective of being descriptive, if Chechen is primarily written using the Cyrillic script, then Chechen entries on Wiktionary must include Cyrillic spellings. Those don't have to be the only spellings given, but they must be given. The key point here is: We don't care about the politics. We only care about how terms are actually used. Chechen is clearly used with the Cyrillic script, so we need to have Cyrillic spellings.
If you can show that Chechen is being written in the Roman script, and with consistent spellings, and in a way that meets our Criteria for Inclusion, then please bring up such criteria in the discussion in the Beer Parlor.
Kind regards, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 15:59, 5 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Anatoli made a list for the Chechen words (in Cyrillic script) Appendix talk:Swadesh lists and he said you can write them in Latin alphabet on Appendix:Chechen Swadesh list. I'll work on it. So everything is OK! Regards, Böri (talk) 08:09, 6 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Sorry but I didn't say "you can write them in the Latin alphabet". See Appendix talk:Swadesh lists for the clarification. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 11:09, 6 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
You wrote: "co" in Cyrillic, and "so" as the transliteration... Böri (talk) 11:41, 6 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

ありがとう

Hi. I'm undoing your edit to the etymology of ありがとう for now, because it isn't reflected in the cited source. If you think the source be wrong, can you find an reliable alternative that supports what you wrote? I was taught that these set forms were from the regular formal adjectival forms, as reflected in the current reference. I left the pronunciation addition alone.
Cheers, Ulmanor (talk) 00:24, 6 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

I described the historical sound shifts at Talk:ありがとう; let me know if that makes sense to you. The reference given was intended as a reference for hyper-formal forms, which purpose I think it serves; that was not intended to describe the etymology in any way, as that page doesn't mention historical derivations at all. Their explanations such as "change final ai to ou and add ございます (gozaimasu)" do not describe the historical development of the terms, but rather how to derive the hyper-formal forms from the modern adjectives -- i.e., instructions for the language learner, not etymologies.
FWIW, my copy of Shogakukan's 大国語辞典 has this as the intro for the ありがとう entry:
(形容詞「ありがたい」の連用形「ありがたく」のウ音便)
ウ音便 here refers to the missing /k/ from the Muromachi-era sound shift.
Hope that helps, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 01:11, 6 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Discussion of ergatives and perfect tense in Germanic

I would prefer to avoid derailing the discussion, but I also think it's interesting so I would like to continue it. If you prefer, we can continue it here, so could you cut it and paste it here? —CodeCat 00:22, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Sounds good -- I have things to do out this evening and must run, so feel free to cut-and-paste here and continue our talk.  :) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 02:01, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • I was going to post here, too — maybe I should make this a separate discussion — but Eiríkr, I think you're confused about the term "ergative". You are obviously aware it's used in reference to the ergative case found in ergative-absolutive and tripartite languages; what you seem to be missing is that it's also used, unfortunately and nigh-unrelatedly, in reference to verbs that are inchoative/mediopassive when intransitive and causative/active when transitive. Just as we don't need {{nominative}} for (say) Latin, we presumably wouldn't need {{ergative}} for (say) Basque, so the question is whether {{ergative}} is useful for ergative verbs. —RuakhTALK 02:47, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Wow. That *is* unfortunate.
One reason I never got into linguistics during my formal academic career was my discovery that theoretical linguists were, perhaps ironically given the subject matter of "language", often remarkably terrible at actually *using* language to communicate. I would hazard that this overlapping use of "ergative" might be one such example. Which use came first, I have no idea, but the latter party did the world a disservice by not avoiding this ambiguity by choosing or coining a different term.
CodeCat, if your use of "ergative" is in reference to the definition Ruakh gives here, I cede the point. My understanding of "ergative" is solely based on what little I've read of ergative-absolutive languages and the fundamentally different verbal deictics used therein.
More generally, I would be happier if we could ourselves, here at the EN WT, *avoid* such ambiguities. I personally don't find this description of English verbs as "ergative" to be terribly useful, and as this entire thread has hopefully illustrated, such nomenclature can be quite confusing on the one hand, and on the other, perhaps overly technical as DCDuring has posited. Many, many English verbs could meet this quite loose definition of "ergative" as given above. For most non-academic types, I argue that it's enough to say that such-and-such verb is *both* transitive and intransitive, and leave it at that as far as grammatical context labels go. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:03, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Yes, I was talking about ergative verbs, I think I explained that in the discussion too. They are distinct from the ergative case, although they are related. Both are about the identical treatment of intransitive subject and transitive object as patient: the ergative case is used as subject for intransitive verbs and as object for transitive verbs (which suggests that it originally indicated the patient), while ergative verbs treat their subject as patient when in transitive, but their object as patient when intransitive. The relationship becomes very clear in a language with an ergative case, if you suppose that the ergative case always indicates the patient, then all verbs are automatically ergative or "passive" in nature. There is actually a system that aligns both of these together into a system called active-stative, in which there actually is a single case for the agent and another for the patient. In such a language, verbs may take either the agent case (nominative/absolutive) or patient case (accusative/ergative) or both depending on their meaning. It is thought that the ancestor of Proto-Indo-European was such a language, and that our modern accusative case derives from the ancient patient case. That, in turn, might explain why neuter nouns don't have a distinct nominative case: in the old language, they were "inanimate" nouns that rarely acted as agent, and thus did not need a separate agent case. —CodeCat 14:31, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • Rather that I didn't know that "ergative" meant anything other than the senses used for Ergative-absolutive_language until Ruakh's note above, your distinction in the thread at Wiktionary:TEA#Template:ergative was lost on me. You mentioned "ergative verbs", but didn't explain that, likely on the assumption that everyone was talking about the same thing. My primary understanding of "ergative" was in regard to a verb paradigm where transitive verb objects and intransitive verb subjects are treated grammatically identically. This structure does not happen in any PIE-derived language that I'm aware of, and it certainly doesn't happen in English. That's probably simply a product of what I've been exposed to, but it's what I've got to work from.
  • The running example here of "to melt" strongly suggests that this working defintion of "ergative" is not a useful distinction in English. As you note, this label indicates "the identical treatment of intransitive subject and transitive object as patient", but as "to melt" functions in English, this doesn't happen -- objects are treated differently than subjects. Yes, superficially they appear to be treated the same, as in DCDuring's example of "the ice melts; he melts the ice". However, swapping the pronoun for the ice makes it clear that these two verb uses do not involve identical treatment of subject and object: "he melts; she melts him".
If the "ergative" label simply means that a verb can be used both transitively and intransitively, I don't think that's very useful as a distinction. Any English verb that does not semantically require an object can probably be used this way. For example, sit, stand, grow, reach...
Again with "to melt", if the etymology of the English term aligns with that of Dutch smelten, then we have a verb where an intransitive form melded with its causative/transitive counterpart to produce the modern word. That doesn't sound terribly "ergative" either, in terms of treating the "subject as patient when in transitive, but their object as patient when intransitive".
(Though presumably you meant that the other way round? "subject as patient when _intransitive_, but their object as patient when _transitive_"?)
Actually, the case of "he melts; she melts him" is precisely what makes ergative verbs distinct. Here, the case marking on the pronouns shows unambiguously which word is the subject and which is the object. Yet, in the first case the subject is the one being melted, while in the second it's the object. That is what ergative verbs are all about. Normal verbs don't behave that way, the subject is either always the agent (as in he cooked, he cooked food) or always the patient and the verb is intransitive (he fell). But in ergative verbs, the role of agent and patient depends on the presence or absence of an object, which is very different from the behaviour of other optionally-transitive verbs. In a sense, ergative verbs without an object are implicitly passive, so the passive formation is redundant: he melts is the same as he is melted. There is a slight distinction in meaning, though, which relates to the implication of an agent. In he is melted, there is the implication that something is melting him, even if that person is not explicitly mentioned. On the other hand he melts carries no such implication, it is as if the action occurred "by itself". Such an action that occurs by itself without a clear agent is called mediopassive or middle voice, and has a very strong connection with the reflexive. Many languages form a mediopassive through reflexivity (such that he melts is the same as he melts himself). This is common in the Romance and Slavic languages, and it's also the origin of the (medio)passive in the North Germanic languages. —CodeCat 15:35, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • Okay, I feel like we're getting somewhere that might resemble common ground or a shared frame of reference.  :) I need to chew on this some; I'll write more later once I have my thoughts in order. In the meantime, it looks like this bit of yours is key: "in ergative verbs, the role of agent and patient depends on the presence or absence of an object, which is very different from the behaviour of other optionally-transitive verbs." I don't suppose you could give a few examples of ergative verbs, and a few examples of non-ergative optionally-transitive verbs? I think I'd be able to grok this better if I had more text to work with.  :) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 16:44, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Some examples of verbs that are ergative in some or all senses: break, melt, sink, burst, starve, turn, float, explode, improve, heal, begin, bounce, turn, boil, fry, shrink, land. —CodeCat 18:21, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Do you have any instances of non-ergative optionally-transitive verbs for comparison purposes? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 00:30, 19 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
I would say that it includes most of the remaining transitive verbs, because you can often leave out the object with the implication that there is one. cook is a good example because it contrasts with boil, which is ergative. However, cook is ergative in the phrase What's cooking?, while it's implicitly transitive in I'm cooking.. That brings up an important point too: ergativeness is a property of specific senses or uses, that's why we use it as a context label. A verb that is passive when used intransitively in one sense may be active in another sense. heal in particular is a nice example because neither of the senses is really more frequent or more likely to be understood. I heal could plausibly mean both that your health is getting better, or that you're making someone else's health better. So in that case, the transitive and the ergative sense are more or less equally used. In the case of turn or land it's actually ambiguous whether the meaning is active or passive, because it's not really clear whether you're speaking of yourself or your vehicle. If you are a pilot who has just landed, is the implication that you landed your plane (transitive) or that you were landed yourself (ergative)? —CodeCat 00:41, 19 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Except "optionally-transitive" != "transitive with unstated object". A verb usage like "I eat" or "I cook" is transitive regardless of whether there is any explicit object. Depending on context, the object might be the "I" in a passive role with the agent left unstated, but the verb itself is inherently transitive.
Secondarily, you mention passivity, but in all of the putative ergative verbs listed above that have Germanic etymologies given here on the EN WT, what the etymologies show are examples of intransitive verbs (where the action occurred 'by itself') that have apparently merged with their causative forms. C.f. sink, fall, smelt (relevant etym found at smelten), even heal (which notably is traced to the proto-Germanic form *hailijanan, with the tell-tale causative infix -ij-, implying an intransitive form *hailanan). The verbs of Romance heritage are harder to parse, as Latin entries here don't mark transitivity, and the defs given are often ambiguous, such as "I parch" as the def for one of the senses of frigo, or "I turn" for torno. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 04:51, 19 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Actually the suffix -ij- had several different uses in Germanic. One was to derive causatives, but it was also widely used to create verbs from nouns or adjectives. *hailijanan is from *hailaz (whole). In Germanic, it was mostly likely a strictly transitive verb, though. In any case, there are plenty of verbs that didn't merge with their causatives. sink is a fairly certain example (it remains intransitive in Dutch, its causative is formed with the auxiliary doen), and in general any verb with either -i- or an original back vowel in the root can't be an original causative, because causatives normally had o-grade root and umlaut. —CodeCat 13:32, 19 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Ran across something the other day that brought this back to mind.
From your description above, and from the unclear article at w:Ergative_verb, it sounds like "ergative" is meant to describe a certain use of transitive verbs. Is this correct?
If so, then semantically and etymologically, words like melt and sink and grow cannot usefully or correctly be described as ergative. For a sentence like "the boat sinks, there is no actor, no agent that is making this happen. The action in question "happens by itself". These words are fundamentally intransitive, where the modern EN transitive uses have developed from a causative sense.
This is not to say that separate causative and passive constructions could not also exist. Compare:
  • The ice melts. -- intransitive
  • The ice is being melted by her. -- passive
  • She melts the ice. -- transitive
  • She makes the ice melt. -- causative
Semantically, in the kinds of environments that humans have historically found themselves, actions like melting and freezing are precisely the kinds of actions that "happen by themselves". There doesn't need to be any actor causing the action of "melting" to happen. Similarly for freeze, sink, grow, etc.
Meanwhile, the description of "ergative" could apply quite well to verbs that are semantically inherently transitive, such as cook. "Cooking" is not something that naturally happens by itself in the kinds of environments that humans have historically found themselves; this action requires an agent, an actor. This could be something inanimate, such as "heat", but the verb semantically requires someone or something to carry out the action. Note that there is no similar causative for such verbs, precisely because there is no semantically intransitive sense. When used causatively, the implication is that A causes B to do something transitively to C.
  • He cooks the eggs. -- transitive
  • *He makes the eggs cook. -- unnatural, incorrect causative
  • He makes him cook the eggs. -- causative, still transitive
  • The eggs are being cooked by him. -- passive
  • The eggs cook. -- ergative
This last instance is where the "ergative" label finally makes sense, as I've understood your description and the description in the WP article. This could also be analyzed as a kind of passive construction where the actor carrying out the transitive action is left unstated.
If my understanding of your explanation and the WP article's description of "ergative" is correct, then this label has been used incorrectly when applied to verbs that have intransitive senses (c.f. melt, sink, etc.).
If instead my understanding of your explanation and the WP article's description of "ergative" is incorrect, and "ergative" just means any old verb that can be used transitively with object A and intransitively with subject A, then this label does not convey anything meaningful in English grammar contexts that is not better and more commonly expressed by simply stating that the verb in question is both transitive and intransitive (c.f. melt, sink, etc.).
If there is some third interpretation that would resolve this apparent dichotomy, by all means please lay it out. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 16:43, 5 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

,

These two are listed on Wiktionary:Todo/unmatched table temps. Aside from the simple possibility of not putting the definitions in a box, you can use {{der-top}} and {{der-mid}}, or alternatively use |} instead of {{der-bottom}} and the page will no longer list them. Not sure how I feel about putting definitions in a collapsible box, even when there are lots of them. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:37, 13 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Started a thread at User_talk:Mglovesfun#Use_of_collapsible_divs_and_tables_at_.E6.84.9B.23Japanese_and_.E8.8A.9D.23Japanese. Apparently we were both typing messages to each other at the same time. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:42, 13 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Young and Morgan

Have you got a copy of Young and Morgan's Lexicon of Navajo? I found myself in a massive uni library recently and photographed chunks of several books I thought might be useful to people here, including that one. If you haven't got a copy, I can e-mail you the (~70) pages. - -sche (discuss) 00:10, 14 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Wow, that'd be awesome of you! Please email it whenever you have time. I have the book on my wishlist, but the prices folks are asking are just silly. Thanks for the offer! I'll look forward to perusing those images. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:49, 14 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

User talk:Chuck Entz#Revert?

Anon was reverted at katai, but I'm not sure how the formatting should be and what senses are missing. Can you help? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 15:50, 16 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Just nipping in for a bit, and about to crash for the night. I'm loath to dive in amidst the BP discussion on romaji entries, but I'll certainly give a look and rework as appropriate once there's an agreement on romanized entry format. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 07:32, 17 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Using {{ja-romaji}} with more than one hiragana/katakana

Hi,

I come across a problem with o#Japanese, e#Japanese and wa#Japanese where I put two ===Romanization=== headers for the moment. We need to cater for more than one romaji/kana match. What do you think? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 00:41, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Ah, yes, you're right. How about hira2 / kata2 params? Can you think of any situations where we'd need more than just two? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 02:53, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Good idea. I don't know from the top of my head but how about any words where long vowels are involved, especially ō - hiragana おう, おお, おー. We could also have ===Romanization 1===, ===Romanization 2===. I can't think of having more than three, theoretically. Perhaps hira2 / kata2 and hira3 / kata3 would cover all our needs. Are you able to add new optional parameters? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 03:04, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Adding the new params would not be a problem -- I don't know if I'll have time to do it tonight, though, so that might have to wait until tomorrow. I think I'd prefer to use multiple params, each generating its own entry line, instead of using ===Romanization 2=== etc. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 03:21, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
OK, no rush. When you finish, please test the result on the above entries and change as appropriate. I have already updated the "About Japanese" page, as per BP outcome. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 03:29, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Haplology suggested problems with small っ and has added new romanisation on wa#Japanese. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 04:30, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Have a look at wa#Japanese and let me know what you think. {{ja-romaji}} now handles up to three each of hira & kata values. One possible change is to list hira value 1, kata value 1, hira value 2, kata value 2, etc. It currently lists all the hira, then all the kata. I've provisionally tested with different params present or missing, and it seems to work well. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:03, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Looks good. Do we ever-ever need more than three? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 06:15, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Not that I can think of, but it wouldn't be that hard to add more slots if we need them. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:19, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
What do we do about romaji entries for mixed hiragana/katakana entries, like イギリスじん, ウーロンちゃ, ローマじ, むねチラ, etc? Another possibility is mixed hiragana/katakana + Latin letters or numbers (katakana or Roman letters), e.g. バイQ. サンQ, 3Q. Could you please add one more optional parameter for mixed script, kana with Roman letters, kana with numbers? Duplicated this question on Haplology's talk page. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 22:40, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Hi,

Could you please answer this question when you have time? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 22:03, 21 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Category:Japanese の-no adjectives

Hi, thanks for the explanation of older forms of Japanese. That made sense and I have a much better grasp of ancient Japanese now, although there's much more studying I need to do.

I wanted to give you a heads up on a request for deletion I made for Category:Japanese の-no adjectives here: Wiktionary:Requests_for_deletion/Others#Category:Japanese_.E3.81.AE-no_adjectives

I don't know if you saw the section above that on ghost kanji but if not I'm sure it would benefit from your input. --Haplology (talk) 14:58, 22 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Duly commented in both threads. Thanks for the ping! -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:13, 22 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
That leads me to another question: would you agree to the creation of a category for -tari adjectives? A number of the uncategorized terms in the parent category Category:Japanese adjectives are those. Unless I'm missing something, any term in that category should have a child category, and if it's there, why not put it there.
When I saw an entry that read ja-adj|decl=no I noticed that {{ja-adj}} still has a decl field. I was thinking the decl field should be obsoleted and replaced with an infl field, and behind the scenes there would be a line like decl = infl;. This is not to ask you to do it per se, more to make a proposal. It's been a while since I edited any templates so it's a little scary. It's not a big deal, maybe an issue for when the template gets converted to Lua, if it ever does. --Haplology (talk) 01:22, 23 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • Re: -taru adjectives, sure, I'd be very much up for the creation of such a category. I don't know much about how to create cats, but if you want to take a stab at that, or propose on one of the fora that someone else create it, I'd lend what support I can.
Relatedly, would it be worthwhile to also create a cat for -naru adjectives? Most of these evolved into modern -na adjectives, but I dimly recall that there might be a few rarely-used ones that still take -naru but not -na (while the modern ones that usually take -na can take -naru when being all fancified, like 静かなる風景 or something). Then again, I just re-read ja:w:形容動詞, particularly sections 4 口語形容動詞の活用 and 5 文語形容動詞の活用, and I realize I might be mis-remembering, and all the -naru adjectives might now count as -na adjectives.
  • Re: decl vs. infl, I'd be happy to add an infl param to the {{ja-adj}} template. Then once I figure out bots, I can have that go through and turn all the instances of decl into infl, and then remove decl from the template.
...and, actually, I just added infl to the template, and changed all text instances of "declension" to "inflection". There was also a line in there for -no adjectives, which I commented out in light of recent discussions.  :)
Cheers, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:18, 23 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Great. I just made an adjustment to the template myself. I replaced part that created the category for -no adjectives with one that creates a category for tari adjectives. That leads me to a question: Do you think the category should be like this: Category:Japanese たり-tari adjectives ? That's how I have it set up right now, because the template had already specified them as "たり-tari inflection" (now たり-tari inflection.) Otherwise I would have made it たる-taru... I don't know which is better. I haven't created the category yet. It's a red link e.g. at 堂堂.
Speaking of -tari (or -taru?) adjectives, and how many of them are composed of two identical kanji, just to check, do you think the lemma entry should be 堂々, rather than 堂堂? There was a discussion a while ago, I don't know where, and I think that that was the conclusion. I can see merits to either way.
As for -naru adjectives, I'm not familiar with them, but I'll look into them when I have the chance. This would be a good stage to consider them, before a whole bunch of entries have been made. --Haplology (talk) 12:05, 23 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • About ending in -i or -u, I think -i is actually the traditional lemma form in JA<>JA dictionaries, as the old 終止形. I picked up on the -u ending as that's the 連体形. Modern JA doesn't distinguish between these two for regular -い adjectives, hence my confusion. I suppose we should probably follow the convention for JA<>JA grammars and use -tari as the base form.
  • About doubled-kanji spellings and lemmata, I also dimly remember that there was a discussion, but I can't recall where. My recollection is that the rough consensus was to have the fully-spelled version like 堂堂 as the lemma, with the spelling that uses the kanji "ditto" mark like 堂々 as an alt form pointing to the full spelling. A quick look in my JA<>JA dictionaries to hand shows that this is how they do it; that's not the be-all-and-end-all of the matter for how we do it here, but it is perhaps a useful comparison.
  • About -naru adjectives, yes, taking our time would probably be good.  :) Manually reworking large data sets can be a little less than an efficient use of our resources, though sometimes that's the best we can do. (Providing me more incentive to figure out bots...)
Cheers, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:51, 23 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Great, in that case red linked category is fine the way it is. It feels a bit early to create it now but I'll create that category after a while if nobody else does.
I did have misgivings about treating 時々 as a lemma, because every other dictionary I have seen does not. It was indeed only a rough consensus, and I thought it was the other way. I must have misremembered. I'll have to dig it up and take a look. Either way I think it should be brought up again and settled for sure. Maybe a discussion for the BP? No other pages seem to get any attention. Thankfully at this stage, implementing a change is still not a huge task. --Haplology (talk) 02:31, 24 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Entries spelled with 々

(relevant text copied from above)

Speaking of -tari (or -taru?) adjectives, and how many of them are composed of two identical kanji, just to check, do you think the lemma entry should be 堂々, rather than 堂堂? There was a discussion a while ago, I don't know where, and I think that that was the conclusion. I can see merits to either way.

  • About doubled-kanji spellings and lemmata, I also dimly remember that there was a discussion, but I can't recall where. My recollection is that the rough consensus was to have the fully-spelled version like 堂堂 as the lemma, with the spelling that uses the kanji "ditto" mark like 堂々 as an alt form pointing to the full spelling. A quick look in my JA<>JA dictionaries to hand shows that this is how they do it; that's not the be-all-and-end-all of the matter for how we do it here, but it is perhaps a useful comparison.
I did have misgivings about treating 時々 as a lemma, because every other dictionary I have seen does not. It was indeed only a rough consensus, and I thought it was the other way. I must have misremembered. I'll have to dig it up and take a look. Either way I think it should be brought up again and settled for sure. Maybe a discussion for the BP? No other pages seem to get any attention. Thankfully at this stage, implementing a change is still not a huge task. --Haplology (talk) 02:31, 24 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

(new text)

This is the discussion, if it's long enough to be called a discussion, that I was thinking of: Wiktionary_talk:About_Japanese#.7E.E3.80.85. There may have been another one somewhere. How about calling those terms abbreviations, as in 隆々? I'm not sure if they're truly abbreviations or just alternative forms. There is also this category Category:Japanese terms spelled with 々 (I wrote the note at the top by the way), and while nothing is wrong with the category as far as I can tell, most of the members have 々 in {{ja-kanjitab}} which is not technically correct if I understand correctly that 々 is not a kanji. I'm thinking that at some point I will remove 々 from kanjitab and put in the category link so that the terms still appear in "Category:Japanese terms spelled with 々." --Haplology (talk) 06:27, 25 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • As best I understand it, is a ditto mark, but just for kanji. There's a different ditto mark for kana, , which can take the 濁点 as . More at ja:々.
I'm not really wedded to using either full spellings or dittoed spellings as the lemma, so long as both exist so users can at least get to the lemma regardless of which spelling they enter. If you have a definite opinion on the matter, I'm happy to defer to you.  :)
(FWIW, I don't think we should use the kana ditto mark in lemmata, as that seems to be much more rarely used in modern JA.) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:38, 25 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Hi,

Dan Polansky is initiating a vote on Japanese romaji. Wiktionary:Votes#Japanese_Romaji_romanization_-_format_and_content --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 21:27, 23 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, I see you already took an active part in the discussion. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 23:15, 23 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Follow-up

Your Wikipedia edit here caused me to ponder Wikipedia:Tsushima Island#Territorial claims and disputes. As you know, your Wikipedia talk page encouraged everyone to reach out to you in this venue.

Please take a look at Wikipedia:Talk:Tsushima Island#Due and undue weight. Do you have any comments? --Ansei (talk) 18:37, 2 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

My edit was just a maintenance reaction to what appeared to be POV-pushing vandalism, consisting of the blanking of that section by an editor with only that edit in their history. FWIW, I'd be fine with the creation of a separate "dispute" page. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:43, 2 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

Category:Japanese romaji without a main entry

Hi,

I have added some handling into Template:ja-romaji to add romanisation without a main entry into Category:Japanese romaji without a main entry. Wyang and Metaknowledge also joined in trying but it still doesn't work producing false positives, like -age. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 02:20, 4 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

Wyang has fixed it. The false positives include only those, which used deprecated parameters - hira, hira2, hira3, kata, kata2 and kata3. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 03:20, 4 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

Sequence of rendering of a page

In your discussion of {{ja-romaji}} you referred to the bot operating on page after the templates had been expanded. What is the sequence in which templates, Lua/Scribunto, HTML, CSS, and JS operate? It is easier for me to find out about anything that happens, say, within CSS (general vs. user CSS), than to get the big picture for this wiki. DCDuring TALK 00:02, 5 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

Yes, that post was mostly surmising ("a surmise"? "a surmisation"? "a surm"?), and not a definite statement; but I do remember reading something maybe on the meta site about how templates get expanded. I'll see if I can find that. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 16:55, 5 April 2013 (UTC)Reply
That said, the wikicode used when invoking {{ja-romaji}} does *not* include any # def numbers on individual lines. Since that's what KassadBot is looking for (as I understand it), and since KassadBot isn't flagging pages using {{ja-romaji}}, the only really likely explanation at this point is that KassadBot is seeing the page after template expansion.
I'm curious about this, though, so I'll keep looking. I'll post here if I find anything more.
HTH, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:05, 5 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

Template:ja-romaji/doc

Hi,

What do you think of the template documentation? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 01:42, 8 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

I think it's fine for now. I confess I'm loath to put much effort into the docs until the discussion about the template output format is resolved...  :-\ -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:39, 8 April 2013 (UTC)Reply
I thought it was important to document what the template is doing, synchronise with About Japanese page a bit, show how it creates the definition line, why and how it puts limitations on romaji entry structure. Well, you voted against the vote but we still have to "sell" the new solution somehow. The clearer the documentation is, the less assumptions and false accusations the project will cause. There's no going back, IMO, every single romaji entry has been converted to the new style, only some abbreviations are left (their structure can be discussed later) --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 23:41, 8 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

Template:ja new

Hi,

A great new tool for accelerated ja entry creation by User:Wyang. See also Haplology's talk page. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 05:34, 12 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

コギャル

The etymology section currently reflects what Wikipedia says, but kogal previously claimed it was "disputed" (I changed that one to match the Japanese entry) and Anatoli had put this etymology up, which I suppose is also possible. Do you have a reference work we can check to get a trustworthy opinion on which etymology is correct? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 05:35, 15 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

The JA WP article lists some sources and gives more background. It sounds like the etymology is unclear, as is often the case with slang, with multiple possible derivations. The gyaru part on the end is consistent, while the ko part on the front could be from at least three identifiable terms. I've updated the コギャル entry accordingly. Let me know what you think. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 21:23, 25 April 2013 (UTC)Reply
Looks good, but I edited the kogal page to point more clearly to the Japanese etymology and I added the gyaru part in because 1) it's known for sure and 2) it categorises the word as a twice-borrowed term, which is a category I'm trying to build up. Thanks! —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 22:52, 25 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

WT:RFV#ōritetanga

You have mi-1 on your user page, so could you have a look at this? —CodeCat 16:45, 17 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

Ta, looks like someone else pitched in. Just as well; work on my end has hotted up to where I can't contribute here as much as in the past, and my Māori skills are basic enough that I'm not sure how much I could have helped. I've also discovered that one of my prized Māori resources (the Te Matatiki dictionary) has gone missing, probably (hopefully?) just stuck in a box somewhere from the last time we moved. Anyway, cheers / kia ora! -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 21:27, 25 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

demo frequency list

Hi, I hope this message finds you well. I just wanted to show you the first presentable result of a project I've been working on, namely a frequency list drawn from Japanese Wikipedia. I used JUMAN as the morphological analyzer, and I believe that it does a pretty good job, although it stumbles sometimes (e.g. number 329, 他の). Fortunately it appears that WT has very good coverage of the top 1000 words, and with just a little more effort all of them will be covered. Let me know what you think. Thanks! --Haplology (talk) 10:05, 15 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • Interesting! And good to know some more about the deeper projects that other editors are working on.  :) I'll peruse that and see what I can add.
Odd about 他の. I thought maybe it showed up because of lots of links to that non-entry, but Special:WhatLinksHere/他の shows only five entries, and one is this page and another is your list. I'm now curious as to what algorithms JUMAN uses, and if you ran it against Wiktionary, or against something else? I'm completely ignorant as to what JUMAN is, so maybe that's the wrong question.  :)
Anyway, thank you, I'll definitely take a look. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 16:09, 15 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
I'm glad you like it. JUMAN apparently uses bigram Marcov models, but I don't understand what those are. All the heavy lifting was done by the Kurohashi-Kawahara lab at the U of Kyoto. I just fed it pages of plain text extracted from Wikipedia articles (that extractor was courtesy of a university in Italy btw.) If you're curious there's a comparison of JUMAN to three other morphological analyzers on the page of yet another analyzer called MeCab [[2]]
Thanks for calling attention to the duplicate entries. I think I had noticed that but forgotten or maybe subconsciously chosen to ignore them. Fortunately JUMAN can take a mix of hiragana and kanji and return a single lemma. E.g. given the sentence 他の人とつき合った, it returns
他の たの 他の 連体詞 11 * 0 * 0 * 0 "代表表記:他の/たの"
人 じん 人 名詞 6 普通名詞 1 * 0 * 0 "代表表記:人/じん 漢字読み:音 カテゴリ:人"
@ 人 ひと 人 名詞 6 普通名詞 1 * 0 * 0 "代表表記:人/ひと 漢字読み:訓 カテゴリ:人"
と と と 助詞 9 格助詞 1 * 0 * 0 NIL
つき合った つきあった つき合う 動詞 2 * 0 子音動詞ワ行 12 タ形 10 "代表表記:付き合う/つきあう"

That example also seems to show what happened with 他の. I'll investigate のだ. I don't know if there's a way to avoid misses like that, but on the next run I'll try to pull out the 代表表記, and that should reduce duplicated entries by quite a lot. --Haplology (talk) 17:12, 15 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

Small kana in historical spelling

I notice that you have used small kana (や, ゆ, よ) in the hhira parameter in several entries. In the dictionaries I use the historical spellings never have small kana, and from the Wikipedia article I also understand that the historical spellings did not make size distinctions. I just changed 凝集. Is there any particular reason you have put these in, or are these simply mistakes? – Krun (talk) 22:55, 21 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • Heh. I was just writing on your page.  :)
Nope, not mistakes, rather based on the historical spellings given in:
Shōgaku Tosho (1988) 国語大辞典(新装版) [Unabridged Dictionary of Japanese (Revised Edition)] (in Japanese), Tōkyō: Shogakukan, →ISBN
One of my other sources is Daijirin, and that gives historical usage in half-width katakana. I thought I remembered that half-width katakana fonts don't include the subscripted glyphs for combined forms (though checking just now, I realize I was wrong about that), so the lack of smaller kana never signified with me.
I'll hold off on adding any more hhira values for the time being. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:01, 21 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Yes, my source is the Sūpā-Daijirin (which uses hiragana; in my version, anyway). This and the Daijisen (which uses katakana) [3] both use only full size kana. I can see the practicality of the small kana, especially for clarity in long words, but they aren’t really necessary, and we should use the style which was actually used in the literature. So the question becomes: was there ever a time (before the 新仮名遣い) when these small kana were standard and widely used? If not, we should not use them. – Krun (talk) 23:24, 21 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Agreed. I just read through the EN WP articles about the subject, and other than stating that the orthography reform occurred in 1946, none of the related articles seemed to have anything to say about when the smaller-kana versions were first used. I'll poke around the JA WP and see what they have to say about it (I suspect more). -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:26, 21 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • Still not finding as much as I'd like. The JA WP pages specifically about w:ja:拗音 and w:ja:字音仮名遣い don't have much to say about the history of the small-kana spellings. w:ja:字音仮名遣い#.E5.86.85.E5.AE.B9 (sub-section titled 内容) even uses the small-kana spellings for historical forms, but then other spellings further down the page use the full-kana renderings.
w:ja:ゃ notes that the small-kana was used in Edo-period Japanese to spell the particle ya. w:ja:ゎ lists a few historical spellings using this small-kana variant. w:ja:っ gives the most information that I can find so far, noting that small was used 1904-1908 in primary school education, with school materials reverting to full-sized pretty much until the 1946 spelling reform.
w:ja:捨て仮名#.E6.AD.B4.E5.8F.B2 (歴史) states that small-kana variants have been used for quite some time (「送りがな・添え仮名としては古くから用いられた」), but that consistent use for 拗音 has only been since 1946, and with hiragana only since 1955.
I'll stop using the small variants for hhira values. I wonder why Shogakukan uses them? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 00:02, 22 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

Formatting Assist

Hello, Eirikr. Thank you for the minor formatting you performed on 女, which indicates how I should be formatting similar data for other characters. I've uploaded about 60 entries to this point, and am waiting to see what kind of feedback is generated. When I return to editing, I'll follow your example and amend the formatting of these 60 characters. Thanks again. Lawrence J. Howell (talk) 01:03, 4 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

No worries, happy to help. You seem to be working in earnest, which I can appreciate, and I'm aware of the challenges of getting up to speed with things here.  :)  Welcome, and good luck! -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 05:43, 4 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I'm positive there was a more efficient way to go about things, one that wouldn't force me to revisit and tidy up each entry, but offering for the community's critique a representative sample of raw data appealed to me as a straightforward, open, all-cards-on-the-table approach. I expect that, once the unsustainable portions of the data have been stripped away and a serviceable foundation for the remainder laid, input from Wikitionarians with a broad range of interests will produce fascinating results during the years to come. Thank you again. Lawrence J. Howell (talk) 08:51, 4 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

New appendix

As a participant in an associated discussion, you are invited to contribute to the list of terms and criteria at Appendix:Terms considered difficult or impossible to translate into English. Cheers,   — C M B J   10:46, 5 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Hey

You forgot to sign here. :) --Z 18:07, 5 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Merida (female given name)

Merida; See my source -- http://nameberry.com/babyname/Merida

  • Unfortunately, that site isn't a verifiable source, nor does it list its own sources. Websites generally aren't usable as sources. Do you have any dead-tree material confirming the name?
Then again, even the website you provide notes that Merida is the name of a Spanish city, and if that's the correct source, this name would have entered English from Spanish, not from Latin. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:31, 6 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Aizen Myoo

According to "Shinto/Buddhism - Angelfire", (http://otakuyume.angelfire.com/snb.html), the name for the Shinto deity of love is called "Aizen Myoo", but according to you that's wrong. Who is the Shinto deity of love?

90.196.37.150 01:22, 7 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • Hey, you respond! That's good.
The main problems there were ... well, let me just list the big ones.
  1. This isn't an English term.
  2. The name was spelled wrong.
  3. This isn't a love god, as in a god about falling in love and going gooey-eyed. Have you seen any pictures? This deity is commonly shown sitting on a lotus blossom, with many arms, with all-red skin, with bared fangs, carrying a bow and arrow, as male, and with a distinctly angry face. I can't think of much else that would be less like a Shintō love god and still humanoid.
  4. Even in terms of what the deity might be worshipped for, regardless of appearance, the closest I can get to finding anything about "love" per se is that one might pray to Aizen Myōō asking to be better liked and respected in the world. Other common objects of prayer were apparently health, wealth, and the capitulation of one's enemies. Again, not a love god.
  5. Granted, lust is part of his purview, but only in terms of going beyond earthly desires to reach spiritual enlightenment.
  6. Aizen Myōō (note the long ō’s) is a 明王 (みょうおう, ​myōō), a Buddhist deity deriving from Hindu roots. There's a hint right in the deity's title that this might not be Shintō.
In short, random sites on the internet are not a reliable source for information when attempting to study a foreign culture. By way of example, this site claims that Benzaiten is the Japanese goddess of love, with the implication being that she's Shintō. Benzaiten is female, but 1) she's originally a Hindu figure, Saraswati (see w:Benzaiten), then Buddhist, not really Shintō; and 2) she's the godess of music, wealth, and wisdom, not love. I also spot-checked the list on the Angelfire page. Amatsu Mikaboshi, for instance, isn't the god of evil; and his name means something more like “Heaven's Jug Star”. Amida is a Buddha, not a god of death; see w:Amitābha. Nikko-Bosatsu isn't a Buddhist god, but rather a w:Boddhisattva, i.e. someone who reached enlightenment and then hung around to help others. Etc.
Try to find something with references, something that at least lists its sources. And ask questions. Time allowing, I'm happy to answer questions or even create or add to entries. But don't just jump in with unconfirmed stuff you saw somewhere some time. Compared to Wikipedia, the Wiktionary editor community isn't anywhere near as forgiving of incorrect additions. Read around, get corroboration from multiple different sources, and multiple different kinds of sources.
If you're interested in Aizen Myōō the deity, have a look at the Wikipedia article, w:Rāgarāja. FWIW, I'm working on the etymology for 伊邪那美 (​Izanami) tonight (and probably tomorrow too).
Cheers, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:52, 7 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • Oh, and in answer to your question ("who is the Shinto deity of love"), I'm not sure there is one, per se. The Greek and Norse gods generally covered specific areas, but the Buddhist-Shintō syncretic pantheon isn't so narrowly focused. One deity can cover several areas, and share those with different gods. I'll keep my eyes and ears open though. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:56, 7 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

I will rephrase my earlier question; who are the Japanese deities of love?; (for example, I know that Benzaiten, as well as a goddess of luck, would be also be a goddess of luck in love, just as Bishamonten is a god of war, as well as luck.)

151.227.116.96 17:51, 10 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • Short answer: I don't know.
  • Longer answer: I'm no expert on Japanese mythology, but what I have read and heard about makes it sound like "love" as a concept doesn't work the same way in Japanese myths as it does in western myths.
  • Details: I just did a quick search of the electronic resources I have to hand for all entries containing the phrases 愛の神, 恋の神, or 恋愛の神, and didn't come up with much -- mostly just entries for the Greek and Roman gods.
FWIW, my JA-JA dictionaries describe the Saraswati-derived Benzaiten as having purview over eloquence, wealth, good luck, wisdom, and longevity, and mentions that one might pray to her in order to avoid misfortune or to achieve success. No mention of love here.
The description of the Benzaiten as one of the seven gods of good luck says that the Saraswati Benzaiten later became conflated with Kichijōten, a different goddess of good luck, and/or somewhat conflated with grain god Uga, and in this version, Benzaiten is a goddess who might grant good fortune and wealth. Again, though, no mention of love. I suppose finding love might be viewed as part of being lucky (compare the English phrase get lucky), but the various words for "love" are missing from this dictionary entry, suggesting that love isn't a very important part of Benzaiten's mythology.
The words for "love" are also missing from the JA Wikipedia article at ja:w:弁才天. The only on the page is for 愛知県 (​Aichi-ken), w:Aichi Prefecture, and is missing entirely.

つる (“crane”)

Could you please add the etymology of (tsuru, “crane”). Surely it must be related to Korean 두루미 (durumi)? – Krun (talk) 19:18, 7 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Cool, working on it now. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:56, 7 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I don't know how much you know about Korean etyms, so forgive me if I'm repeating stuff you're already aware of. Middle Korean of the mid-1400s is the oldest we can get, since Korean just wasn't a written language before then -- before the invention and promulgation of Hangul, Korean scholars wrote in Classical Chinese, much as happened in Japan until the popularization of kana. There are a few words here and there, and maybe even scraps of phrases, but since they're recorded in Chinese characters, the phonetics are pretty much lost to time. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 00:30, 8 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
Thanks a lot; you were very thorough! Keep up the good work. :D – Krun (talk) 10:24, 8 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

草薙の剣

草薙の剣 / Kusanagi no Tsurugi; why do you keep singleing this one out, it's one of THREE of Japan's Imperial Regalia. The entries for 八咫鏡 and 八尺瓊曲玉 both mention 草薙の剣, but for some reason, you keep removing them from 草薙の剣.

Why?

151.226.194.63 02:53, 10 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

  1. Because this entry has had a lot of encyclopedic information added to it. Wiktionary is not Wikipedia.
  2. Because a number of the additions have been incorrectly formatted, and / or incorrectly organized.
  3. Because your track record is, frankly, abysmal, and any additions by users in your IP address range are immediately suspect.
  • I'll grant you that the two other imperial treasures merit linking. I will format those appropriately.
However, ​Ama no Murakumo no Tsurugi is a synonym, not a coordinate term. I will move that link to the correct header.
Long term, please do more research before adding to Wiktionary. Roughly 80% of your edits are problematic at best, or just plain wrong at worst. If you intend to continue editing, I strongly recommend that you create an account. As it is, you've been editing under multiple IPs, with addresses sometimes changing within minutes. This is a big warning flag for admins, and is very likely to get your IP address blocked for a while. You seem to have little trouble changing addresses, but even so, we *do* have the facility to block IP address ranges. Your case is severe enough that we might consider doing so -- a high percentage of your edits require cleanup, revision, and / or outright deletion.
My personal ideal would be for you to 1) create an account, 2) engage the rest of the editors in conversation about meanings, content, and formatting, among other things, 3) get some Japanese-English dictionaries and other resources, 4) learn more about how to research terms, and 5) learn more about Wiktionary formatting and stylistic norms. I appreciate your interest and passion, but your energies are too often spent unproductively. I look forward to your becoming a more effective editor. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 03:10, 10 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

What about 八咫鏡 and 八尺瓊曲玉?

2.220.163.85 03:36, 10 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Synonyms for &

The Synonyms for & need sorting out, too. And 脇差 too.

151.227.116.96 17:55, 10 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

What about 手かぎ手虎 & 猫手 (see Tekagi-shuko & neko-te), and the tekko kagi / tekagi, (the weapon that Wolverine's claws were based off of)?

151.227.116.96 02:22, 11 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • I'll have to look into them.
  • Notably, neither 手かぎ手虎 nor 手鉤手虎 exist as a string anywhere in the JA WP, and the only hits for substring 手虎 were for place names. Moreover, the EN WP article at w:Tekagi-shuko is completely unsourced, so I can't even easily figure out where the article authors think they're getting their information. Also notably, I get zero hits at google books:"手鉤手虎" and only three hits for google:"手鉤手虎", with two of those being the same text where this string only appears as parts of three separate words, as 少林拳でいう月矛又手、鉤手、虎爪掌といった技で... (“In the techniques called, in Shaolin, the moon spear and hand, the hook hand, and the tiger claw...” -- bolded to match where the target JA phrase occurs). I strongly suspect that this is a bogus non-term, possibly the result of someone misunderstanding a Japanese (or even Chinese?) source text.
    • Even using hiragana for the kagi part doesn't produce anything any more promising -- google books:"手かぎ手虎" yields zero hits, and although google:手かぎ手虎" gives 37, most of these are Wiktionary or Wikipedia echoes -- google:"手かぎ手虎" -"were two of the many kakushi buki" (excluding a specific phrase used in the WP article) yields only 15 hits, of which 5 are definitely dupes, and many others may be dupes-in-translation. None of the hits are for pages actually written in Japanese, strongly suggesting that this isn't a real term.
    • 手虎 on its own doesn't generate much either: google books:"手虎" "は" (adding the は to filter for Japanese results) only nets 423 hits on the wider web, of which many appear to be either scannos or cases where the characters each belong to separate words. The few that look like possibly valid 手虎 appear to be parts of placenames. Searching google:"手虎" "は" on the wider web brings in 7,250, but many of these are again problematic -- excluding Twitter alone cuts the hits by 1.5K. Skimming through several pages of the remainder, I can't find anything relevant to any weapon called a 手虎.
    (I'm adding the above to the Talk page for the EN WP article, since it looks like that whole article might be wrong.)
  • Tekkō kagi would be spelled 手甲鉤. Note the long ō. 手甲 (てっこう, ​tekkō) == the back of the hand; (かぎ, ​kagi) here means hook. The text at w:ja:手甲鉤 mentions 手鉤 (てかぎ, ​tekagi) as an alt name.
  • There is a w:ja:猫手 page, but no images. Google searching so far produces mostly mentions and images of cat paws, since that's also what 猫手 could mean (though usually with a in the middle).

Cheers, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:52, 11 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

What about 脇差: I made the article and added to it, but it was reverted back again and again to when I added the picture to it.

90.196.37.185 06:01, 13 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • Hello again,
Yes, the 脇差 entry is on my list. The last additions included other problems, and the image didn't give a good sense of scale -- it's hard to tell anything about size when the wakizashi is just sitting in isolation on a stand -- so ultimately it was easier to back everything out. I'd intended to set directly to reworking the entry, but then real life intervened.  :) I'll get to it today or tomorrow, however. Cheers, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 15:26, 13 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

I've started the process of building up to the 脇差 entry. Working backwards into this term's constituent parts, I just finished a massive expansion of the entry; that still needs oodles of derived terms, and the on'yomi etymology and related sub-sections. Next I'll look at the verb 差す -- but probably not today, as I'm short on time. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 21:45, 17 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

短刀 plus

Speaking of blades; is 短刀 (tantō), right?

5.66.5.67 21:59, 16 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

What about (つるぎ, ​tsurugi), (かたな, katana), 小刀 (こがたな, kogatana; しょうとう, shōtō), 大刀 (だいとう, daitō), 木刀 (ぼくとう, bokutō), 短刀 (たんとう, tantō), 刀工 (とうこう, tōkō), 薙刀 (なぎなた, naginata), 直刀 (ちょくとう, chokutō), 日本刀 (にほんとう, nihontō), 太刀 (たち, tachi), 聖剣 (せいけん, seiken), 剣士 (けんし, kenshi), 剣術 (けんじゅつ, kenjutsu), 剣道 (けんどう, kendō), 木剣 (ぼっけん, bokken), 刀身 (とうしん, tōshin), 剣豪 (けんごう, kengō), 剣客 (けんかく, kenkaku), /, (な, na)?

5.66.96.86 04:11, 20 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

What about 鎧通し?

151.224.93.235 00:43, 27 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

What about ?

151.226.231.242 16:17, 1 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

Others

What would the kanji spelling be for a "shigehto yumi"; a unity bow; one of the sacred bows of Japan, (see http://www.zenko.org/bows.htm/ )

5.66.96.86 17:55, 20 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • There isn't a kanji spelling. No Japanese word I can find would be romanized as shigehto, and there is no such sacred bow.
There *is* a kind of regular, non-sacred bow called a shigedō, spelled as 重籐, 滋籐, or 繁籐, covered in black lacquer and wrapped in rattan. However, there are many different kinds of wrapping, each with different stylistic significance. This kind of bow manufacture was first applied to single-piece wooden bows to help prevent breakage, then later to composite wood and bamboo bows. More recently, the rattan is often wrapped in 36 bands above the grip and 28 bands below the grip. Shogakukan's Kokugo Dai Jiten describes the 36 bands as representing (tori, chickens), and the 28 bands as representing 宿 (yado, inns), but I'm baffled as to what that's supposed to signify.
The JA WP article at w:ja:弓_(武器) has a section on 和弓 that mentions the 重籐の弓, but it makes zero mention of "sacred", zero mention of Oda Nobunaga, and zero mention of anything about "unity".
I'm calling "bullshit" on that website. They've gotten something wrong. It's entirely possible that there was such a tradition in the past, but it's certainly not current from what I can find. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:19, 20 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

It looks like the kun-reading of might be かけねをする (掛け値をする) rather than かけねおする with an お. Is this correct? I think there are several entries with some errors in their readings. I believe I came across one with a reading ending in the particle は, but romanized as ha, and without spaces. Then there is the case of , where the reading じっ is romanized as JITSU in the Unihan database, although it is < *jip, and only occurs in gemination. There might be other such cases. I have also come across historical readings without a modern equivalent listed, e.g. in , , , . I wonder if we could bot-generate a list of kanji to take a look at. It could include kanji with:

  • Long readings (5+ kana) which have お, を, え, へ, は, or わ in them
  • Any on-readings with we, wo, kw, gw, au, eu, iu in them
  • Any readings ending in -fu
  • Both an on-reading ending in -ū or -ō and one ending in -tsu

Any suggestions? – Krun (talk) 20:34, 12 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • I can't find any JA-JA resources that list with anything other than the readings provided by KANJIDIC, which I've learned myself can include errors, as you note. That said, ya, I think you're right. The Mandarin Tools entry gives a meaning of "fraudulent price", which would be more like 掛け値する, as you also note. Ostensibly, then, this reading should still have 送り仮名 (okurigana) of at least at the bare minimum to show the verbal inflection -- 傿る (かけねをす.る, kakeneosu.ru).
FWIW, this is one of those vanishingly unusual readings that I mentioned before -- this should be clearly marked as very rare to avoid confusing users.
I don’t think we need worry about okurigana, especially if there is no source with info on that. If we don’t have more information, I think it is enough to list the reading without a break. It also remains to be seen whether this character was ever really used to write that phrase. As I understand it, many kun-readings are mainly, or even only, a sort of official gloss for a Chinese character, i.e. only a traditional translation of the Chinese word or morpheme represented by the character and its on-yomi, and never actually used in text to represent that native word. (Compare the Korean eumhun (音訓), where the hun is always only a gloss, as Chinese characters are only used with their eum (音), for their Chinese meaning or as some sort of ateji, whereas their corresponding native Korean words are written with hangul.) In such cases I think we must point users to the most usual kanji spelling(s) of the word or phrase in question. – Krun (talk) 09:57, 13 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • Yes, certainly, okurigana only if we can find instances of it. You remind me that the kun readings in kanbun often don't have any okurigana, which certainly makes reading the Man'yōshū an interesting challenge, even after folks have been kind enough to render the text in modern fonts instead of the earliest extant forms written in ancient cursive.  :)
I've tweaked the entry based in part on your suggestion here. Have a look and adjust as you deem fit. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 15:24, 13 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Ippon-Datara

What about Ippon-Datara?; I never seem to find a straight answer as to the spelling in Kanji.

5.66.5.67 21:54, 15 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • Hmm. Well, in the absence of any context, ippon would presumably be 一本 (​ippon), i.e. “one straight slender long thing”. But then the only term I can find that might be romanized as datara or tatara (assuming rendaku) would be 蹈鞴, , (tatara, foot bellows; a furnace using a foot bellows), but then I don't think these would be counted using the (​hon) counter, since they aren't long and skinny. Googling for google:"一本蹈鞴" turns up 82 hits for me at the moment, the first page of which don't seem to have anything to do with foot bellows, but do all seem to be in Chinese, and mostly related to some sort of manga.
一本だたら: Ippon-Datara, “One-legged Smith”
... One of the links is to the ZH WP, w:zh:日本妖怪列表, a loooong table which lists 一本蹈鞴 through to the JA WP article at w:ja:一本だたら. That article makes it clear that the ippon part refers to “one foot” as a property of this particular monster, while the tatara portion refers to the process of making steel, as some legends state that this monster lives in or near iron ore mines, and / or as an allusion to the somewhat mangled appearance of many smiths after a hard working life, and / or as an allusion to the one-eyed and crippled appearance of the forge god Kagutsuchi. So the monster's name might be parsed as something like “One-legged Smith”.
The JA article also lists an alternate kanji spelling of 一本踏鞴, adding 踏鞴 to the list of possible spellings for tatara. However, the JA WP article mostly just spells the tatara part in kana, with the rendaku, for 一本だたら.
So the answer about the kanji spelling is that the lemma form would probably be 一本だたら, with alternate spelling entries at 一本踏鞴 and 一本蹈鞴. It appears that the theoretically possible spellings of 一本炉 and 一本鑪 don't actually get much use.
HTH, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:19, 16 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Um, Ippon-Datara is most definitely *not* a synonym for Kagutsuchi etc. This is a kind of 妖怪 (yōkai, traditional Japanese monster). -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:27, 17 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

That's Amanomahitotsu, not Kagutsuchi.

5.66.5.67 00:41, 18 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • Where are you getting your information for Ippon-Datara?
Ippon-Datara is *not* a kami of any sort. Ippon-Datara is a yōkai, i.e. a monster / bogeyman / goblin / thingie. Here is a decent explanation in English that matches what I've read in Japanese.
There is no EN Wikipedia article for w:Ippon-Datara. Stop adding WP links to non-existent articles.
Amanomahitotsu == Amatsumara == Kajishin. I got Kajishin and Kagutsuchi crossed in my head; apologies for that confusion. One means "forge god" and the other is a god of the forge, but Kagutsuchi doesn't appear to be identified with Amamnomahitotsu / Amatsumara. Regardless, none of these four names or titles is a synonym for Ippon-Datara. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:33, 18 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

See http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Ten-Tails#Trivia

I keep getting mixed answers, all I want is a straight answer, please-&-thank-you

5.66.96.86 17:46, 20 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Oh my...
Never, and I mean never, take anything from a manga-related source at face value for etymological purposes.
Some of the issues with the information in that Trivia section:
  • Deidarabotchi is an alternate for Daidarabotchi, but does *not* mean giant at all -- it's a name. The dai at the front is probably (dai, big). The dara in the middle is probably related to だれる (dareru, to be dull, to become uninteresting) and だらだら (daradara, bumping, thumping; dragging along). The botchi on the end shows up in various places, and is probably a diminutive corruption of 坊ちゃん (botchan, boy; son, sonny). The name could thus be parsed as “big oaf boy”. Meanwhile, giant in Japanese is 巨人 (​kyojin).
Daidarabotchi is a kind of giant in various tales, and these giants have been responsible for creating different landscape features. This might be a mythological recollection of old creation gods. See ja:w:ダイダラボッチ for more detail, and w:Daidarabotchi for an English version, but the EN WP article is way too short, and is incorrect in some ways (describes this as "a gigantic yōkai ... his size", while the JA WP article makes it clear that this was many different giant myths, often with different names).
  • Ippon-Datara is a yōkai, not a kami. I haven't run into any legend stating that Ippon-Datara *is* Amanomahitotsu, though there are references to broad similarities in being one-eyed. I have trouble imagining a major god like Amanomahitotsu being reduced so much in common myth, without there being some massive upheaval in the culture, such as an invasion by a different ethnicity that brought their own myths which replaced the older ones. Since Japan has no such history, I find it very unlikely that Ippon-Datara could be Amanomahitotsu.
  • "Datara" is not a Japanese term. The closest would be tatara as described further above. This would never appear on its own with the first consonant voiced as "d" -- that only happens in rendaku, i.e. in compounds.
What manga writers do is what many writers do -- they trawl the older tales for ideas, and then mix and match and synthesize to come up with something new and original, and ideally interesting. But in the process, much of the origins of their ideas get obscured.
I'm not sure what you mean by mixed answers. If you're referring to the kanji spelling for Ippon-Datara, I laid it all out for you above. To recap, there are multiple possible spellings, of which 一本だたら should be the main entry, and 一本踏鞴 and 一本蹈鞴 should be stub entries using {{alternative spelling of}} to point back to 一本だたら.
If you're referring to something else, could you be more explicit? What mixed answers are you getting? And what question are you asking? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:53, 20 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

青金石

What do you think of 青金石 (せいきんせき, seikinseki) -- lapis lazuli? 5.66.5.67 23:23, 17 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Sounds about right to me. JamesjiaoTC 23:30, 17 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
Also, in Japanese, 青金石 means lazurite, i.e. one of the main constituent minerals that make up lapis lazuli. The Japanese for lapis lazuli is given in Shogakukan as 瑠璃, 琉璃 (​ruri). -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:44, 17 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Readings

I just want to ask you a few things about readings. I saw a strange thing on ja.wikt about ; it said: 呉音 : キョウ(キャウ)(古代音:クヰャウ). This last one really surprised me, so I googled and found this elsewhere as well as others like クヰャク. Are these legitimate readings or just some transcription of what it originally might have sounded like in Japanese or even in the Chinese dialect from which the reading was borrowed? I also want to ask about presumably one-mora readings with kw-/gw-, like クヱ, グヰ; are these possible, or only hypothetical? I ask, because I often see ki and/or ke listed alongside a kwai, so it looks as if the w was never included in the shorter readings. The last question is about Chinese -m; on I copied historical readings ending in -む from the ja.wikt, but I am having doubts about them. I had always understood that before the Meiji era there was no spelling distinction between mu and moraic N anyway. Some of the -n endings come from Chinese -m, some from Chinese -n, and others from native ni, mi, mu, bu, etc., but was there ever a distinction in spelling (or pronunciation, for that matter)? – Krun (talk) 19:19, 19 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Wow, that's a lot.  :)
I've got to shift gears here shortly, so I don't have a lot of time at the mo', but looking into , that *is* weird. That would presumably have to be a transcription of the pre-borrowed Chinese pronunciation, as the historical goon and kan'on are the furthest back we get for a given reading in Japanese, as far as I've understood things.
Exploring the zh:兄 entry shows a Middle Chinese reading of xjwæng and a reconstructed Old Chinese reading of /*m̥raŋ/, nothing even vaguely resembling クヰャウ /kwjau/. I'd be tempted to just flat-out call "bullshit" on the JA WT entry, as none of these even have a /k/ sound, but then I also see that the zh:兄 entry lists an alternate reading of kuàng -- but with no explanation of where this came from or what historical provenance it might have. I suppose it's possible that an initial sound of /kju/ could have palatalized further in some dialect into modern xio- and un-palatalized (if that's a word) into ku- in another dialect.
But this is only speculation, and with no sources I can find to back this up, and none given for the JA WT entry reading, I don't feel comfortable including that anywhere in our entry. I'll look more into this later as time allows.
And I'll address your other points later too, and sooner than the above.  :) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:41, 19 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
Back to it for a bit.
  • I also want to ask about presumably one-mora readings with kw-/gw-, like クヱ, グヰ; are these possible, or only hypothetical? I ask, because I often see ki and/or ke listed alongside a kwai, so it looks as if the w was never included in the shorter readings.
I think these are actual historical readings. The JA WP article on ja:w:拗音 (yōon palatalized or labio-velarized sound, like nya or kwa) has a section called 合拗音, describing how the /kwi/, /kwe/, /gwi/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g), /gwe/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g) (/kʷi/, /kʷe/, /gʷi/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g), /ɡʷe/) sounds all existed in Japanese, but that the /kwa/, /gwa/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g) (/kʷa/, /gʷa/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g)) pair was the only one that lasted for long past the initial borrowing stage. These apparently finally converged with /ka/, /ga/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g) some time during the Edo and Meiji periods, relatively recently.
The header paragraph on ja:w:拗音 also explains that these combinations were still counted as one mora.
  • The last question is about Chinese -m; on I copied historical readings ending in -む from the ja.wikt, but I am having doubts about them. I had always understood that before the Meiji era there was no spelling distinction between mu and moraic N anyway. Some of the -n endings come from Chinese -m, some from Chinese -n, and others from native ni, mi, mu, bu, etc., but was there ever a distinction in spelling (or pronunciation, for that matter)?
I'll have to read up on this a bit. I dimly recall that む was read mostly as /mu/, with the /ɴ/ pronunciation developing later. I'm not familiar with any other kana being read as /ɴ/, so any change like /ni/ > /ɴ/ or /bu/ > /ɴ/ would be new to me. There are some clear cases of abbreviation or contraction, like の turning into ん, such as in 桜ん坊 or 赤ん坊, or み turning into ん over time, such as in the derivation of modern (​fuda) from earlier uncontracted 文板 (​fumiita) (/fumiita/ > /fumita/ > /funda/ > /fuda/), but these are cases of phonetic changes eventually being represented in the spelling, not of the kana actually being read that way.
But maybe that kind of gradual contraction is what you meant?
Suffice to say, historical spellings that include む did, as best I know so far, actually use a pronunciation of /mu/, at least in formal, non-contracted speech. (Compare ending す in modern Japanese -- this often contracts to /s/, but in formal or careful speech, you will hear speakers actually enunciate this as /su/.) In fact, the hiragana ん evolved from a cursive form of , an alternate character (変体仮名 (​hentaigana)) for む. The ja:w:ん article has a section titled 「ん」が日本語に現れる時期, stating that the ん kana and /ɴ/ reading only appear in the Muromachi period, and that /mu/ was probably read as-is before this.
Anyway, let me know if that answers your questions, and if not, I'll have another excuse to study.  :) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:55, 19 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

The kuang4 reading of 兄 (< xjwæng < *m̥raŋ, "elder brother") comes from its derivative glyph (< xjwangH < *m̥aŋ-s, "situation; to compare; more; besides"). MC x- corresponds regularly to Japanese k- (eg. ). I guess kwjau represents a moderately early stage of borrowing, after MC x- and -aŋ were approximated with native k- and -au, but before the Japanese finally gave up on pronouncing this too-difficult double glide + diphthong. Wyang (talk) 13:51, 15 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

and

There is something fishy about the historical readings of じょう (“lock”). Daijirin lists this as one entry, but gives ぢやう as the historical reading for the spelling , but じやう for /. You have given じやう for 錠, of which it can hardly be an authentic on-reading, since Chinese has d- and other Japanese readings also have t-. The じょう readign of 鎖, however, you give as ぢやう, which is plausible since it is a kan’yōon reading anyway, but still, Daijirin gives じやう, so I don’t know what to make of it. – Krun (talk) 11:08, 21 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • Yes, Daijirin I've found useful as a general reference, but they're pretty lean on etymological details. Shogakukan has more information on that score. To quote:

補注 「錠」の字には元来、「じょうまえ」の意はない。「鎖(鏁)」をサウとよんだ例があるところから、ジャウはこのサウの変化かといわれる。

Looking further at , the right-hand element on its own () also has the on'yomi of じょう < ぢやう, same as for , so the change for from ​ to ​ was probably the influence of this other character of similar meaning. I'll reword the etym at accordingly, and make sure the hhira values are consistent. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:58, 22 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

変身

What about 変身?

90.196.37.154 00:31, 28 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Gawdawful is the word that comes to mind. Dog's breakfast is another possible descriptor. I've just added the etym & pronunciation and fixed the defs. Usexes still needed, する verb still needed, coords needs substantial trimming & formatting, etc. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 01:05, 28 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

竹蜻蛉 plus

What about 竹蜻蛉?

2.126.227.233 17:59, 28 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • Updated. Have a look at the wikicode -- I notice that you have a habit of adding "lit.: xxx" to etym lines, but that's not actually how we do etymologies here. I updated the entry to use the fully-templatized formatting that's standard for Japanese compounds. Cheers, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:46, 28 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

What about 斬馬刀, 経絡系, (and 点穴 (てんけつ, tenketsu), 急所 (きゅうしょ, kyūsho), 穴位 (けつい, ketsui)), and 羅針盤?

151.226.231.242 16:02, 1 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

短刀 plus

What about 短刀 &:

  • (つるぎ, ​tsurugi)
  • 小刀 (こがたな, kogatana; しょうとう, shōtō)
  • 大刀 (だいとう, daitō)
  • 木刀 (ぼくとう, bokutō)
  • 短刀 (たんとう, tantō)
  • 刀工 (とうこう, tōkō)
  • 直刀 (ちょくとう, chokutō)
  • 日本刀 (にほんとう, nihontō)
  • 太刀 (たち, tachi)
  • 聖剣 (せいけん, seiken)
  • 剣士 (けんし, kenshi)
  • 剣術 (けんじゅつ, kenjutsu)
  • 剣道 (けんどう, kendō)
  • 木剣 (ぼっけん, bokken)
  • 刀身 (とうしん, tōshin)
  • 剣豪 (けんごう, kengō)
  • 剣客 (けんかく, kenkaku)
  • /
  • (な, na)

?

2.126.227.233 01:08, 29 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Any chance you might register and use an account? Not being able to communicate with you was the main reason we started blocking you every time we saw your edits. I can give you our standard welcome, which has a lot of links explaining how to do things. If you have problems about getting emails, you can set up a gmail or hotmail account to set as your user email address (I have my account set up that way, but mostly because hotmail is what I use for email most of the time), or change your settings so you only receive a couple of emails to get the account started, and to reset your password (if needed). Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 00:02, 30 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

I have tried, but for some reason it won't work. I cannot get Hoymail, either. Also, I cannot get software to see the characters, (Kanji etc), on my laptop, all I see are squares. I've just been trying to bring the articles to you attention. I apologise if any of my information was bad.

151.226.231.242 15:56, 1 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

What about 短刀 (tantō)?

2.222.211.75 23:37, 11 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

Five Dhyani Buddhas

What about 観音菩薩 (Kannon Bosatsu), and the other four of the Five Dhyani Buddhas:

90.205.15.146 15:15, 8 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

I'll have a look.
FWIW, 観音 is much more commonly read as かんのん (Kannon) due to a phenomenon known as 連声 (​renjō). It's a bit similar to how a turns into an before words that start with vowels, or how did you turns into didja in running speech.
Also, I created {{ja-five-dhyani}} for inclusion in the ====Coordinate terms==== sections of the relevant entries. Have a look at the wikicode for 大日如来 for an example of use.
Cheers, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:03, 8 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
PS -- Are you the same user having trouble displaying Japanese on your laptop? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:03, 8 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

Yes.

2.222.211.75 22:32, 11 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

Monkey

? What is the kanji spelling for "Bakuyohsaku"? (See Monkey 2nd season ep., "The Land With Two Suns") I think that the hiragana spelling is "ばくよいさく".

2.222.211.75 23:25, 11 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • Assuming that the romaji here is representative, the kana would most likely be ばくようさく. And as for the kanji, I haven't the foggiest. Titles can be based on very non-standard spellings. If I were forced to guess, it might be 博奕 (bakuyō, gambling, obsolete, non-standard) + (saku, creation, title, episode). Amusingly, it might also be (baku, explosion, explosive) + 傭作 (yōsaku, employment, rare).
But probably both guesses are wrong. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 00:04, 12 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
FWIW, the Japanese title of that episode is 妖異 太陽が二つの国 (Yōi: Taiyō ga Futatsu no Kuni, “Mystery: The Land with Two Suns”). Still not sure where bakuyōsaku fits into this. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 01:23, 12 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

If you've watched the episode, (see also; http://www.greatsage.net/monkey/series_two.php) you'll know that it is the name of a weapon that even Monkey admits rivals his "Magic Wishing Staff". Whilst the subtitles say that "Bakuyohsaku" is a arrow, the characters always seem to be refering to the great red and gold war bow.

5.66.13.55 15:27, 12 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

categories for kanji readings

Hi, I wanted to get your feedback on an idea I had for new categories. As an example, I added what I had in mind to 念力, and I was thinking that those would go into two parent categories each, the preexisting one for the kanji, such as Category:Japanese terms spelled with 念, and another one for the reading, like Category:Japanese terms spelled with kanji read as ねん which would in turn go in Category:Japanese_kanji_readings. Note that the two categories at 念力 are formatted differently (with or without "spelled") to compare them side by side. Sometimes readings cannot be easily segmented into kanji, but they can in the majority of cases, and I think grouping terms together that way would be very helpful for learners to get a handle on readings. BTW I pinged CodeCat about it here thinking that it would be a good idea to use ja-kanjitab to do it automatically, but I'm starting to think it would be too hairy. In that post I introduced my proposal with some background on how kanji readings have been handled up till now, but I was thinking categories would supplement rather than necessarily replace content on the entries, as complementary approaches to the same thing. --Haplology (talk) 15:16, 19 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • I think leveraging {{ja-kanjitab}} might be a good idea, even so -- simply add optional params for the kana reading, and add the appropriate categories if these params have values, or ignore them if they're empty.
As you noted in the message to CodeCat, some multi-kanji terms also have multiple readings. In such cases, unfortunately, we're just shit out of luck, if you'll pardon the expression -- the MediaWiki software is completely incapable of adding the same index item (the term) to the same category with multiple collations (the readings). I posted on Meta about this issue here, but no one has responded. I also recall that someone here at EN WT might have posted a specific bug number for this issue, but I can't find it. Anyway, the requirements for a Japanese dictionary are just not met by the MediaWiki back-end, and there's not much we can do about that in the short term.
By way of example, our entry for has nine readings, all using the appropriate format of the JA POS header template ({{ja-pos}} for pronouns, in this case). Any comprehensive Japanese dictionary should list this single-kanji term under each reading. However, our index of pronouns at Category:Japanese_pronouns only lists under (​na), for the last reading given on the page -- なんじ (​nanji). The kanji is not listed under any of the other readings, which is a rather grave shortcoming.
For that matter, categories for kanji-spelled Japanese terms should ideally list the kanji under the expected first kana -- and also give the full reading in hiragana. So the kanji should be listed under (​na) in the category listing, as it currently is, and it should also ideally have the full reading なんじ either preceding the kanji or following it.
Again, I'm not really sure how to proceed with regard to this MW categorization failure. The workaround mentioned before of creating an entry with a non-displaying character to use as a redirect *does* work, but it's not very scalable -- manually creating and maintaining so many redirect entries is a daunting tedium. I can't think of anything other than a bot approach that could begin to work acceptably. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:21, 19 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
What about creating a dummy subpage for each reading, consisting of categories and a redirect to the lemma: kanji/reading1, kanji/reading2, kanji/reading3... If you could get someone to write a JavaScript app to add these, analogous to the accelerated entry-creator, it might not be that much more work. You would have to get consensus for adding this new type of structure, but if it works well enough, it might be worth it. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:41, 20 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Aside from what can be done with ja-kanjitab, first I was hoping for some sort of approval for a new set of categories like the ones at 念力 and a new parent category for those. I wanted to get agreement from any interested editors before creating a whole bunch of categories. --Haplology (talk) 02:45, 21 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • Ah, apologies -- I'm perfectly fine with the creation of such new categories: Support. As you noted, I think these could be a help to learners of Japanese, since learning kanji readings is a big part of gaining functional literacy in the language. Just so long as we editors are aware of the limitations of how categories work, when dealing with multi-reading entries. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:33, 22 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
That's good. I've gone ahead and added a number of pages, such as in Category:Japanese_terms_spelled_with_物. I was wondering if I could trouble you for your judgement in one area where I'm not sure how to proceed: for a term like 物質, would you say that 物 is read as ぶつ or ぶっ? I was a little unsure about cases of rendaku as well, which I encountered with ぢから in 底力. Thanks! --Haplology (talk) 11:48, 23 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • Well, technically, the sokuon and rendaku readings are based on the underlying readings of ぶつ and ちから in your two examples, and both compounds should ideally be listed under the ====Derived terms==== headers for the relevant readings on the and pages. I think JA-JA materials handle it this way, and I don't think I've ever seen reference books that list kanji by the sokuon or rendaku readings. However, all the references I've worked with have been intended for JA speakers, which is quite frustrating if you don't already know the language, so for non-JA-speaking learners, who might not know about sokuon or rendaku or the mechanisms by which these things happen, having the sokuon and rendaku readings might be a good idea. Perhaps sokuon and rendaku readings should be in addition to the "regular" readings? So your examples would add cats for both ぶつ and ぶっ, and for both ちから and ぢから. That way, you get the "regular" reading as the kanji would be listed in native JA-JA materials, and the modified actual in-context reading, which is all the learner has to go on. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:05, 23 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Ah, thanks. I understand now, and that puts the question in context. After digesting that information, at the risk of making very long category names I'm thinking of adding the qualifier "with sokuon" or "with rendaku," producing e.g. Category:Japanese terms spelled with 物 read as ぶつ with sokuon for 物質, and that would be a subcategory of Category:Japanese terms spelled with 物 read as ぶつ. Maybe those subcategories should have a category boiler template that produces a short blurb includes a link to a definition of sokuon or rendaku. I'm not completely sure about the names. Maybe "ぶっ following sokuon" or something else would be better, or maybe just leaving out a qualifier and making it a subcategory is enough, but that would be less informative. --Haplology (talk) 03:25, 24 July 2013 (UTC)Reply

被爆者 (Japanese)

Has been FWOTD nominated specifically for the 6th August. Could you see if you could get it some citations and a pronunciation? - I don't know any Japanese. Cheers. Hyarmendacil (talk) 09:45, 1 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

Pardon me for jumping in, but I saw this and added one citation. Wikisource has three others, but they are all about the same thing (the law) so I didn't see much point in adding them. As for the pronunciation, I can't help much there. --Haplology (talk) 15:18, 1 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Cool! We actually only need one cite to be able to feature it, so that should be fine. A pronunciation is also necessary, though. Hyarmendacil (talk) 22:29, 1 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • Heya folks, was out of town & out of email contact for a much-needed two-week mental reset (a.k.a. vacation :). It's too late for the 6 August listing, but I'll have a look at the entry all the same.
Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:31, 14 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

Japanese entries iroiro

Hi Eirikr, welcome back from your vacation. A week or two ago I tried making a ja-kanjitab that displayed reading info and added links to the categories I was talking about, and it looked good so I went with that and since then I've been busy in the past couple of weeks mainly with converting ja-kanjitab to {{kanji readings tab}} where possible, but also:

  • I ja-noun, ja-adj, ja-pos, ja-verb, and ja-verb-suru all call a new function in Module:ja called jsort which generates the type of sort key used for hidx etc. Therefore hidx is now completely automatic. As long as there is a hira, kata, or if the page name is any mix of kana, it works fine. In fact those templates completely ignore hidx now and probably it should be removed with AWB or something so as not to confuse newbies.
  • ja-adj actually generates romaji automatically if it is not supplied in the rom parameter. I am thinking of adding the same feature to the other templates.
  • I've been making those categories for "(specific kanji) read as (reading)" using {{ja-readingcat}}, and "all kanji read as (reading)" using {{ja-readascat}}. A new parent category for the second type is Category:Japanese terms by kanji readings
  • The new category Category:Japanese terms by reading pattern which includes Category:Japanese terms read with jūbakoyomi and Category:Japanese terms read with yutōyomi, and I was thinking of creating ones for on'yomi and kun'yomi terms. I added a yomi parameter to {{kanji readings tab}} to put a term in them, which takes yomi=o (on'yomi) k (kun'yomi) ko (yutōyomi) or ok (jūbakoyomi)
  • ja-noun, ja-verb, ja-verb-suru, and ja-adj (but not yet ja-pos) check the supplied romanization with the romanization that Module:ja would have produced, and when they don't match, it puts the term in the hidden maintenance category Category:Japanese terms with unexpected Romanizations
  • There are several new nominations of Japanese terms in RFD.
  • I'm thinking that a {{kanji readings tab}} can or should be added under every etymology, since the readings are usually different so the tabs present different information as opposed to ja-kanjitab which is the same for every etymology on an entry.

I think that's everything. As always feedback etc. is welcome. Unfortunately so far it seems like nobody else is really interested in any of the things above. Even the items in RFD are being largely ignored. --Haplology (talk) 04:20, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • Wow, looks like you've been busy!  :) A quick off-the-cuff suggestion might be to include y and j as alternate argument values for yutōyomi and yutōyomi . Past there, I had noticed that you were adding {{kanji readings tab}}, but I hadn't looked into what all that template does. I think what you've described here is a whole collection of good ideas. Thank you for all of this! I think this should improve WT's usability for Japanese terms.
My WT time is more limited than it used to be, but I think I can at least look at RFD later today.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 16:13, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
I'm very glad to hear that. It has been unnerving working alone so far, especially as this project will change the face of Japanese entries when completed. Until I started all of this I didn't know that kan'on readings existed, let alone what they were, nor yutōyomi or jūbakoyomi, so to present all of that information to the world accurately has been stressful, and any corrections or suggestions are greatly appreciated. In particular I'm uncertain about the wordings of the categories, so I'm open to suggestions about that. Out of uncertainty I haven't created "Japanese terms read with on'yomi" yet or its kun'yomi counterpart. In the meantime I've added y and j, as well as on and kun. --Haplology (talk) 16:46, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Minor note: don't think that your efforts are being ignored; people are scared to comment in RFD about entries in languages they don't know. When I post Swahili ones, they get even less attention than Japanese. But I for one do use Wiktionary for all my Japanese dictionary needs (comes up more often than you'd think when you watch this much anime), so I can definitely tell you I appreciate the work. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 16:50, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Thanks, that's reassuring--I was a little taken aback by the lack of responses in RFD. To me, a question about whether the name of a castle meets CFI is a question about CFI (to take the request about 伏見城 as an example), but I suppose most people see the kanji and scroll past. --Haplology (talk) 17:21, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • Yeah, all the different types of readings -- whee! I've learned a lot myself in the past year or two as I really dig into Japanese etymologies, which revolve around the readings. The ways in which a single "spelling" (as a single string of kanji) can wind up with multiple readings and multiple derivations is both fascinating and daunting. But hey, if you really want to tsukaikonasu (tsukaikonasu) your Japanese, you've gotta go deep.  :)
FWIW, I've generally omitted reading type information for compound terms unless they're consistent -- things like 手刀打ち or フランス語 where the constituent parts use different reading types. If the whole compound is on or kun, I'll say as much, but otherwise I leave that out. Perhaps there's a better way of proceeding?
  • Also, it might be a good idea to further leverage Module:ja to generate proper romaji for kana-only entries like フランス, so we could just add {{ja-noun}} / {{ja-verb}} / etc. without any arguments, and have the template actually do all the work, as was originally envisioned (and now, with Lua for the funky string processing bits, is *finally* possible :).
Food for thought, perhaps. Cheers! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:26, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • Leaving reading type information for consistent compounds sounds like the best approach. In addition I have noticed that given names and family names sometimes have mixes of readings, and as I understand, the kanji selected for given names are highly variable and more or less arbitrary, so classifying those according to reading might not be helpful.
  • The code that I added in ja-adj should do that with katakana entries as-is, and Module:ja has the code to make argument-less entries like that possible. I was pondering a universal template for every pos (ja-term?) that would assume noun with nothing, would deduce verb given a conjugation type or transitivity, would deduce adjective given inflection type, and would accept other parts of speech with flags as ja-pos does. --Haplology (talk) 18:07, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
  • Cool about {{ja-adj}} -- I'll have to look at that later.
  • About a possible {{ja-term}}, I would caution against overgeneralization -- editors are already very used to the paradigm of {{[LANG]-[POS]}} for headword templates for one, and making things too general can obfuscate what they're for and how they're used. There are many reasons that single-celled organisms aren't the only life form, for instance.  :)
That said, it might make sense to have a common back end, where {{ja-noun}}, {{ja-verb}}, etc. all wind up serving as wrappers and just passing along arguments to a back-end template or module. But in doing so, I would strongly recommend that the formatting side, at least, be as clear as possible -- some recent changes to {{compound}} have changed appearances in unexpected and unwelcome ways, and now that {{compound}} is Luafied, it's not at all clear how to go about changing the formatting. (For that matter, I need to check that GP or BP thread to see if anyone's replied...)
Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:19, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
I see what you mean about over-generalizing. Probably it would be better and easier to keep the existing headword templates and it tweak the code at each one to use the new features available through Module:ja. I suppose that a backend would be possible but it would only save one or two steps, and it would add some complexity at the same time. I added automatic script detection to ja-adj, so it's fully automatic now, and for katakana or hiragana entries, all one needs to do is specify the inflection type. I updated the documentation as well. I'm planning to add the same changes to the other templates soon. --Haplology (talk) 02:40, 17 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

ブルマ#Etymology 2

Is this word also, perchance, written *ブルーマ, reflecting the long 'ū' of its Latin etymon? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 18:43, 28 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

Hmm. Does google books:ブルーマ yield anything relevant? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 10:48, 29 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Ah, OK. Well, I've added those two synonyms to the entry and have mentioned ブルーマ in the RFV thread. That's as much as I can contribute, I'm afraid. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 22:02, 1 September 2013 (UTC)Reply

ろうまじ and nichiyōbi

Hi, I came across ろうまじ and afaict it's flat-out wrong and should be deleted on sight, moved to ろおまじ, or labelled as a misspelling, but the first two options are little drastic so I wanted to check with you first, especially given that the creator is a legendary admin. Also, recently I reverted your move of Nichiyōbi to nichiyōbi, but if you're sure it's a proper noun I'll take your word for it and revert it back or let it be reverted back. My thinking was that the main entry calls it a noun, as it did in your last edit to 日曜日, so maybe capitalizing it was sort of accidental. Speaking of init caps for proper nouns, ja-pos now automatically generates init-capped romanizations when set to "proper," so an entry like けんいちろう need only {{ja-pos|proper}}. --Haplology (talk) 15:30, 1 September 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • Heya, things on my end have gotten extremely busy -- I'm now head of a complicated long-term project at work, and it's eating up all my time.
    • Re: ろうまじ, I'm not entirely opposed to such pages existing as redirection stubs, as users could conceivably try to look up the term that way -- and given Wiktionary's appallingly bad search feature, having actual pages for redirects is about the only way to ensure that users still find what they're looking for. That might have been what Ullmann intended in creating the page.
    • Re: [N|n]ichiyōbi, fine. I had assumed (apparently erroneously) that days of the week were proper nouns.
    • Re: {{ja-pos}} and all your other JA template streamlining, **thank you** many times over! Your work has made the templates much easier to use, and has removed a lot of the why-the-heck-doesn't-this-work-automatically, numblingly-dull tedium and redundancy required of our pre-Lua templates.
Back to the grindstone for me -- I initially hopped over here this morning to see why spellcheck was giving me grief.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:06, 17 September 2013 (UTC)Reply

深層

What about 深層?

94.10.201.169 00:41, 6 September 2013 (UTC)Reply

I've edited that just now. Please note that 深 means deep, not "heart". "shin" means heart but it's a different kanji: 心. --Haplology (talk) 03:58, 6 September 2013 (UTC)Reply

剣 again

You still havent done anything about yet.  :(

94.15.131.247 23:00, 28 September 2013 (UTC)Reply

Entry reworked to incorporate my research on the term to date. This is a one-off, as I'm still eyeballs deep in other projects.  ;) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:05, 2 December 2013 (UTC)Reply

結びの神

What about 結びの神?

151.226.228.106 19:39, 9 October 2013 (UTC)Reply

I've blocked this user for abusing multiple IPs and adding generally rubbish entries to the dictionary, especially Mandarin ones. JamesjiaoTC 22:32, 9 October 2013 (UTC)Reply

What about 結びの神?

2.125.190.160 17:10, 10 October 2013 (UTC)Reply

Blocked. JamesjiaoTC 21:17, 10 October 2013 (UTC)Reply

Eirikr can't answer right away because he is very busy right now. To check a word, a good way is to look it up on Jim Breen's online dictionary [4]. If a word is on there, it's probably OK. Haplology (talk) 03:54, 11 October 2013 (UTC)Reply

  • Thanks, guys. I'm still way busy with other stuff right now IRL and expect to remain so for months yet. I had a moment of rare downtime today and redid the entry for , but that's probably all you'll see of me in the near term.  :( Hope those of you in the States (or at least of a USian persuasion) had a good Thanksgiving last week! :D ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:08, 2 December 2013 (UTC)Reply
And for all others, I hope last week went well anyway -- though likely sans turkey.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:17, 2 December 2013 (UTC)Reply


  • Another one-off. That was ... a bit different from what actual researched sources had to say. But admittedly not as far off-base as some entries have been.  :)
Cheers, all, and Happy New Year! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 00:18, 14 January 2014 (UTC)Reply

Korean 하다-verbs

There was a discussion a few weeks ago about treating Korean 하다-verbs like Japanese する verbs, and unfortunately it stalled but if you have the time, your input might help move it forward and maybe toward an agreement of some sort. Haplogy () 01:42, 29 January 2014 (UTC)Reply

I second the request. The more I see hada-verbs (하다-verbs), the more I'm convinced that they are identical to suru-verbs in Japanese and similarly, they may not be separable. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 01:48, 29 January 2014 (UTC)Reply
  • Hmm. I'm not up on Korean anywhere near as much as I want to be. As such, I'm reticent to weigh in on either side of the argument. I *can* say definitively that I think any user searching for a [noun]+hada term should be able to find it, and that this entry should at least link to (if not wholly redirect to) the root [noun] term.
It would also seem to make the most sense to create one verb conjugation table for hada, and just import that statically ... but then again, maybe not.
I'll think about it over the next few days, and (time allowing) maybe try to see what KO dictionaries do. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:57, 29 January 2014 (UTC)Reply
Re: any user searching for a [noun]+hada term should be able to find it. Absolutely, that should be the case for Japanese [noun]+suru terms as well. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 23:24, 29 January 2014 (UTC)Reply

大君

Hi Eirikr. Thank you for creating 大君 (たいくん, ​taikun): that is excellent work; very detailed. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 18:44, 4 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Cheers! My time is still more limited than I'd like (sometimes I daydream about being paid to build and maintain the JA entries here :) ), but I've got some leeway to get my feet back into the water, at least. Now to have a look at creating 可愛がる... ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:05, 4 February 2014 (UTC)Reply
Very good again. :-) I hope you don't mind that I have added the other two terms for which たいくん is also the hiragana to WT:WE. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:21, 7 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

definiens

I think there might be some distinction between definition and definiens, though it would not much matter in 99+% of usage. Taking AHD's definition of definition: "A statement of the meaning of a word, phrase, or term, as in a dictionary entry", a definition is a full statement, which I take to be a sentence with a subject and a predicate. If so, the definiendum is the subject and the definiens the predicate (or part of the predicate) of the definition sentence. AHD's definition of definiens is "The word or words serving to define another word or expression, as in a dictionary entry", ie, NOT a statement.

Now AHD's is not my everyday understanding of the meaning of definition, but it might account for the specific technical terms. DCDuring TALK 01:45, 7 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

了𠄏

Hi. I am concerned about this entry with Japanese header created by an IP. Since the second sign is unprocessable by search and it appears as a square to me, I considered deleting it, but I deemed it suitable to theretofore refer it to a more conversant user. Does it look like a hoax to you?
P.S. Your answer in the RfV section about ‎奇人 addresses fully my concerns (to use the opportunity to reply here). The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 10:40, 15 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

  • Looks like pure tosh. The "reference" site they gave lists completely unlikely kanji, including one that looks like cursive Devanagari with a stated definition of "we have no idea what this means". Other listed characters are regular kanji written upside down and given apparently arbitrary readings and meanings. My take: some oddball or manga might conceivably use these, but unless they are citable, they have no business here.
I'll look into it. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 02:49, 16 March 2014 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, that was rubbish. Deleted. Zero hits on Google for google:"了𠄏" "は", which is particularly damning. Not in any other resources I have to hand either, and after 25 years studying the language, I've never run across the second "kanji" here (looks like turned upside-down), nor indeed any of the bizarre variants listed at http://www.geocities.jp/f9305710/henkanji.html. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 04:49, 16 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

するverbs

Hi,

Do we still allow するverbs? See 愛する or the new one: 恋する. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 09:06, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, the latter one is not new but badly formatted こいする. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 09:08, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply
  • Found it. Took some digging around in memory and then my archive.
Some of us discussed this briefly over here: User_talk:Eirikr/Archive_2011-2012#.E9.BC.BB.E6.B1.97 Scroll down to (or search for) the text reading:

Hello. I would write kansuru for 関する...

Takasugi-san made a good case for indivisible -suru verbs, which consist (I think) entirely of single kanji + する, based in large part on 1) their historical development from kanji + , and also on their resultant different conjugations -- these generally do not take -dekiru and instead take -seru for the potential form, for instance. That said, there are some changes underway in modern Japanese, and it seems can now take -dekiru instead, with google:"恋せる" getting 38K hits and google:"恋できる" getting 44K. However, other single-kanji -suru verbs like cannot (yet?) take -dekiru.
I haven't spent a lot of time working on or thinking about these single-kanji + -suru verbs, but we should probably have a separate template for them, given the differences in conjugation.
Does that explanation answer your question? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 00:16, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply
Thanks. So, 恋する should use {{ja-suru-i-ku}}? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 02:08, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Moving counters to classifiers

Hi,

Is there a quick way to move Category:Japanese counters to Category:Japanese classifiers as in Category:Classifiers by language? What needs to change? @TAKASUGI_Shinji has already expressed his support. See WT:Beer parlour/2014/April#Measure word, continued from WT:Beer parlour/2013/November#Measure word. I tried to do but something goes wrong. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 06:11, 3 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Never mind the problem. @Wyang helped me fix it. There 128 pages, though, in Category:Japanese counters. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 06:28, 3 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
Why are you doing this? No one seriously discussed changing Japanese- a single comment by one Japanese editor does NOT constitute the consensus of the whole Japanese community. STOP!!! Chuck Entz (talk) 13:56, 3 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
Hi. @Eirikr. I will undo the changes but it may take some time. See BP discussion for more. @Chuck Entz, no need to yell in multiple places, I can understand normal language and you should understand that people may not always be able to answer immediately, there's also time difference. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 20:39, 3 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

honorific forms

Hi,

What's the policy on Japanese honorific nouns, if there is any? Do we redirect, ignore them, make alternative forms and is there a template for it? See diff. I've made an entry for 知らせ, do we need one for お知らせ? And is it a good idea to display them as alternative forms on the lemma entry? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 21:15, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

  • Hmm, good question. I don't know of any specific policy. My gut feeling is that commonly occurring honorifics should perhaps be included, with simple etyms using {{prefix}}, and sense lines basically directing the reader to the lemma entry.
Listing as alternative forms might make sense for very common forms, like oshirase or ocha. But that seems more like a subjective judgment call. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 21:21, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
Thanks. I ended up making six(!) entries, please check (starting at) 知らせ. I wish there could be a better way :). Apart from etymology, I labeled honorific terms accordingly. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 23:19, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Etyl and Cognates

Don't forget that when you put "cognate with {{etyl|ojp|ams}}" you're actually categorizing it in Category:Southern Amami-Oshima terms derived from Old Japanese, which is wrong. When you say they're cognates, you're really saying they come from a common source, presumable Proto-Japonic (jpx-pro). I'm sure you were aware of this and just forgot, but in case you weren't, that would mean you would do something more like "cognate with {{etyl|ojp|-}}" or from "{{etyl|jpx-pro|ams}}, cognate with {{etyl|ojp|-}}". Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 03:47, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hello Jagwar --

I noticed recently that one of our newer users on the English Wiktionary (User:LalalalaSta) wants to use Template:User mg-1 to state that they understand a basic level of Malagasy. However, that template doesn't exist yet. I have the technical ability to create such a template, but I know almost nothing about Malagasy aside from that it's spoken in Madagascar and that it's a cousin to Polynesian languages like Hawaiian or Māori.

So far, the only Malagasy user language template we have is for native speakers, Template:User mg. Would you be able to create the templates Template:User mg-1, Template:User mg-2, Template:User mg-3, and Template:User mg-4? If you're not comfortable creating the templates, I could do that part -- except the templates would require the following statements translated into Malagasy:

I would greatly appreciate it if you could either create the templates, or translate the above.

Thank you! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20 Aprily 2014 à 01:38 (UTC)

Hello Eiríkr,
As far as I can see, the Babel extension has been implemented into the English Wiktionary. Malagasy is supported in it from level 0 to N. Thus I strongly recommend you to use the Babel extension as this one is supported, for as many languages as possible, in every Wikimedia wiki.
Invoke the babel extension by this syntax {{#babel: de | mg-1 | ... }}
The use of this extension also allows the user to be automatically put into the right language level category. I hope this helps :) Best regards, — Jagwargrr... mailaka 20 Aprily 2014 à 09:46 (UTC)
Hello Jagwar --
Thank you for replying. I'm afraid I wasn't clear in my initial message to you. Yes, we have {{Babel}}, which works for many things. However, the {{Babel}} template itself does, in turn, use various {{User [lang]-[number]}} templates to populate the Babel table. If any of those templates are missing, the call to the Babel template doesn't produce the desired results. I've knocked up a sample of this at [[User:Eirikr/Scratchpad]], illustrating how Babel calls other templates, and what happens if those other templates are missing. I'd appreciate it if you could have a look.
Thanks again, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:39, 20 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
Hello Eiríkr,
I've created the templates, and you can now use them as you wish. Best regards, Jagwar (talk) 23:55, 21 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
  • Brilliant, thank you very much! In Hawaiian at least, mahalo nui loa!

水戸

Hi,

Could you fix the kanji-tab, please? I'm not sure about the reading "み". I'd like to go through place names in Appendix:Mandarin_exonyms_for_Japanese_placenames and also make Chinese entries. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 02:41, 23 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thank you. BTW, what is your source (which dictionaries) you use for Japanese pronunciations? I'd like to update mine. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 03:10, 23 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
Sorry to be a pain. In 埼玉, what's the resulting reading of nanori + kun'yomi? Can I mark it as yomi=kun, still? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 03:47, 23 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
  • Heya, no worries, was offline overnight as I slept.  :)   Well, mostly slept -- our foster puppy crapped herself twice during the night, making things a bit less restful than one would hope...
Anyway, ya, I actually responded about pitch dictionaries over at [[Talk:계속]], so have a look there.
As for what kind of reading a given character has (i.e. 呉音 (goon), 漢音 (kan'on), 唐音 (tōon), etc.), I no longer have the dead-tree dictionary that I used to use for that, and it's been so long all I can remember is the sleeve color, not even the title.  :(
That said, Daijisen (大辞泉) tends to list that kind of info for single kanji, and Kotobank's Digital Daijisen entries include this. They don't have every kanji, but a lot of them. See http://kotobank.jp/word/%E9%A2%A8 and scroll down to the Daijisen entry for an example of their entry, clearly differentiating the 呉音 (goon) and 漢音 (kan'on).
Weblio also provides some info on individual kanji, but generally without differentiating kinds of on'yomi. See http://www.weblio.jp/content/%E9%A2%A8 for their entry.
Meanwhile, Weblio's entry for at http://www.weblio.jp/content/%E5%9F%BC does clearly show that sai is regarded as kun'yomi, not just nanori.  I'll fix our entry in a moment.
HTH, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:41, 23 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
Thank you. Could you check 宇都宮, in particular, the appearance of "の" between つ and みや? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад)
  • Yeah, that's one of those implied の instances, as in old personal names like Fujiwara no Yoritomo, where the の isn't spelled out and actually doesn't belong to any of the kanji.
(I used to live in Utsunomiya. Odd town, at least when I was there -- the yaks ran the city government, and the expats all called it Utsunomi iya da for the somewhat scary right-winger "kick out the barbarians" buses that would drive around with blacked out windows, playing WWII propaganda music at full blast. Good gyoza, though.)
Interesting, I wish I could spend more time in Japan.
Can we have |yomi=irregular in such cases, also when okurigana is implied but not written? I'd like to see a more comprehensive list of yomi's but that may be a hard thing to do. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 06:34, 24 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
  • I've been thinking about that, and our current yomi classification system is a good beginning, but it does have a lot of gaps -- just using irreg for everything makes it not so useful. In this case, the Utsu part is on'yomi (goon), but the no is indeed implied, and the miya is kun'yomi. In this case, I don't think the no even counts as okurigana, since okurigana are the kana bits on the end of a verb or adjective, not the particles.
I'm not sure how best to proceed. One thought is to allow kanji within a term to be grouped and given a group reading type, so a single term might have multiple reading types. Not sure how that would be implemented, though. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:41, 24 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
I know it's not okurigana in this case, I meant missing also missing okurigana or implied "の", any type of irregular shortening a longer reading? If it's too complex "irregular" is an umbrella for such cases (it could also be wikified with a brief description of possible irregularities). --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 06:57, 24 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

romaji

Hi. I doubt with this: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=%E3%8C%9A&oldid=prev&diff=26609069 Since 'ou' is usually represented in 'ō', but why 'ei' is not replaced into 'ē' in the same way? --Octahedron80 (talk) 03:41, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Katakana terms, when they are borrowed terms, sometimes behave differently. The term is explicitly spelled with the ゼイ, where a simple long ē would be spelled ゼー. You'll note that even the Unicode Consortium uses the KURUZEIRO romanization in their label for this symbol. I suspect the イ is intended to convey that this term does actually have a diphthong /ei/ instead of just a monophthong /eː/, probably in reflection of the pronunciation of cruzeiro in Portuguese. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 03:47, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
エイ is always romanized to ei, no matter how it is pronounced. 時計 is tokei, not tokē. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 01:14, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

Japanese editing

Hi,

Don't tell me you burned out as well! Who's gonna edit Japanese? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 01:24, 22 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

Eirikr has never had enough free time to spend on this for him to get burnt out. Long periods of absence are quite normal. Unless you know something I don't, I wouldn't worry. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:45, 22 May 2014 (UTC)Reply
  • Cheers, sorry for the long absence.  :)   Chuck has the right of it -- I haven't gotten burned out so much as buried under. I've got multiple projects at work that have me waaay further behind the eight ball than is comfortable, and a handful of projects in my own business that take up still more time, and then family stuff on top of that. I'm not gone -- just misplaced.  :-P
(I should put a note at the top here...)
Ta for the note, and TTFN ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:29, 28 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

Japanese pitch accent resources again

Hi,

Sorry to ask you the same question again but I couldn't find an affordable dictionary (app) or a web-site, which uses the same notations as ours, which shows Japanese pitch accent, can I ask you again? Worst case scenario, I'll order a dictionary from Amazon or something. Do you understand the conversion if numbers are used instead, e.g 0 = 平板型, 1 = 頭高型, etc.?--Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 06:19, 17 June 2014 (UTC)Reply

  • Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. Daijirin is one of the common sources when searching the 国語辞典 at Weblio, as at the entry for 傾向 here. This is free, so as long as you have web access, you're good to go.  :)   Daijirin uses the numbering notation, which marks the mora on which the pitch accent drops (i.e. right after that number of morae there is a downstep). So a number of 0 means there is no downstep -- the pitch rises on the second mora, then slowly drops until the next rise, i.e. heiban. A number of 1 means that the pitch starts high on the first mora, after which there is an immediate downstep, i.e. atamadaka. Etc.
One of the best dictionaries for pitch accent information for Tokyo-dialect 標準語 is NHK's 日本語発音アクセント辞典. Main page here on NHK's site, Amazon.co.jp listing here. It's also available for Android and iOS for ¥3,100, for use in a free-download dictionary app called Dejizo (デ辞蔵). NHK's dictionary also has information on when が is /ga/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g) and when it's /ŋa/ instead, among other bits and bobs, which is quite useful. This dictionary lists the pitch accents approved for use by NHK newscasters, so it's just about the closest thing to "official" pronunciation as you're going to get for 標準語.
HTH! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 21:06, 18 June 2014 (UTC)Reply
Thank you! Yes, it does. Any other number is Nakadaka with the number showing the last mora before the pitch accent drops? I actually ended up buying NHK 日本語発音アクセント辞典 (quite large and expensive) for my ASUS Padfone Infinity phone (it has a station, so it's better than iPad). --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 03:19, 19 June 2014 (UTC)Reply
  • Re: number, nakadaka is any case where ([number of morae] > 2) && ([pitch number] > 1) && ([pitch number] < [number of morae]). You can only have nakadaka on words with at least three morae, which makes sense, since you need to have a middle mora.  :)
Odaka is any case where [pitch number] == [number of morae]. This means it's possible to have single-mora odaka words, such as () (hi), contrasting with heiban () (hi).
Does that make sense? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:50, 19 June 2014 (UTC)Reply
Yes, it does, thank you. It would be good if we displayed the numbers next to pitch accent names. That way it would be easier to cross-reference resources like Weblio with Wiktionary.
Do you mind checking if I'm right in my assumptions on Shinji's talk page? Re: 朝鮮 that notation "ちょ↗ーせ↘ん" is the same as [3] and that ソウル is pronounced as [so̞ɯᵝɾ̠ɯᵝ], not [so̞ːɾ̠ɯᵝ]. What's the pitch accent pattern on ソウル? I couldn't find anything on pronunciation of these, apart from "ちょ↗ーせ↘ん" in the Japanese Wiktionary. Last question, again Korea-related - are 韓国 and 勧告 full homophones? To my ear, they are. Cheers. :) --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 23:41, 19 June 2014 (UTC)Reply
  • Re: showing pitch accent numbers, probably a good idea. Should only need a tweak to {{ja-pron}} to display that.
Re: 朝鮮, Daijirin doesn't show any pitch. I suspect the NHK dictionary might, but I no longer have regular access to my copy of the NHK accent dictionary, as it's on an Android phone that has half-died and I leave it at home as a result. Likewise for ソウル. I suspect the JA WT entry for 朝鮮 is correct about pitch, but they don't have pitch either for ソウル.  :( ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 00:29, 20 June 2014 (UTC)Reply
Thanks. The app version of NHK doesn't have these words but it has 勧告, which sounds exactly as 韓国. I have already added pronunciation on both. Will add for 朝鮮, thanks for the confirmation. If you find out anything about ソウル, pls let me know. It may belong to Category:Japanese words with nonphonetic spellings, right, if pronunciation is confirmed as [so̞ɯᵝɾ̠ɯᵝ]? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 01:02, 20 June 2014 (UTC)Reply

No explanation given: reverted edit at

I'm curious as to why you reverted my edit at . English Wiktionary is in the process of unifying the separate Chinese topolect sections (Mandarin, Cantonese, Min Nan, Hakka, etc.) into single "Chinese" sections using Template:zh-pron. Thanks, Bumm13 (talk) 21:41, 8 July 2014 (UTC)Reply

  • @Bumm13 Sorry for the trouble, I was trying to hit a different link on my watchlist, and as the javascript and other parts of the page loaded, the list jumped right as I clicked. I reverted my reversion as soon as I noticed what had happened though, so the entry should be back to the state you left it in. I realized only after reverting my reversion that I probably should have used Undo instead so I could leave an explanation. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 21:53, 8 July 2014 (UTC)Reply
Okie, no problem, I just thought it was odd. Keep up the good work here! :) Regards, Bumm13 (talk) 21:57, 8 July 2014 (UTC)Reply

Welsh cwm

Hi, sorry, but your edits for Welsh cwm are way off base. I'm not sure you understand how all the words relate to each other. To begin with, French is a Romance language, which means that - whatever the source of combe - we agree it's not from Latin, which means it was borrowed at some point, not inherited. It therefore can't be a cognate and shouldn't be listed as if it were one. As for Dutch kom, it comes from MDu combe, which is plainly a loan from Old French. Likewise, Old English cumb (mod. comb (coomb is less common)) was borrowed from British Celtic; hump is the correct cognate. Indo-European k- and -b normally give h- and -p in Germanic, which is why the correct cognate is hump. So, you've jumbled superfluous loans in with cognates.

While listing the loans is not wrong per se, not explaining they're loans and not setting them apart from the cognates certainly is. No average reader can be expected to tell one from the other. Torvalu4 (talk) 00:01, 23 July 2014 (UTC)Reply

  • @Torvalu4 -- Thank you for the additional detail. I had viewed the origin of French combe from Transalpine Gaulish as an inheritance rather than borrowing, since the Gauls became the French, broadly speaking, but reading around some more, it sounds like the consensus view may be more that Gaulish was wholly replaced by Latin, making any residual Gaulish terms borrowings instead. Past there, your post also makes it clear that you're operating from a sound basis, which is both happy news, and a prompt for me to bow out where I'm out of my depth.  :)
FWIW, you might consider adding some more languages to your userpage, since you clearly know more than just English and French.
Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:36, 31 July 2014 (UTC)Reply

Japanese for disc 1, … 2, … 3, etc.

Hello Eiríkr. I was wondering, what with you being listed in Category:User ja-4, whether you could help me with a short English-to-Japanese translation that's stumped me. You know how, in a multi-disc music album, each disc can be entitled "[album title]: disc №"? Well, how would that be written in Japanese? Would it be simply "[album title] 〜 ディスク 一" (for disc one), or is there a way to write it which avoids the gairaigo? Any help you can give would be most appreciated. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:39, 31 July 2014 (UTC)Reply

If you're trying to find a way specifically to avoid 外来語, regardless of how commonly used the term might be, you could use 1 , 2 instead. (まい) (mai) is the counter for flat things like discs, and () (me) is the ordinal suffix, so 1 means first flat thing [i.e. disc]. A quick Google search for this usage shows some examples, so I think it's safe to say that folks would understand this wording too.
HTH, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:49, 31 July 2014 (UTC)Reply
That helps very much, thank you. :-) I've gone with "[album title]〜一枚目", "[album title]〜二枚目", "[album title]〜三枚目", etc. Is that acceptable presentation, in your opinion? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 19:01, 31 July 2014 (UTC)Reply
Great. Thanks for your help with this. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:25, 31 July 2014 (UTC)Reply

Category:Japanese terms spelled with 尻 read as けつ

I saw this in Special:WantedCategories and created it (the only member: 尻もどき), but it looks like it got its reading from . Should I label it as kan'on after that entry, or is there some other way to deal with it? Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 00:33, 4 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

Does that answer meet your needs? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 01:13, 4 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
Yes, but (sorry for the pun): adding "kan" adds it to Category:Japanese terms read with kan'yōon, which is another item in Special:WantedCategories that I'm not sure what to do with (I added "kan" to {{ja-readingcat}} for Category:Japanese terms spelled with 尻 read as けつ, but that created a bogus redlinked category, which I was going to ask you about, but I finally figured out that "kan'yōon" was the correct value). Any suggestions on how to deal with Category:Japanese terms read with kan'yōon and its sister Category:Japanese terms spelled with ateji‏‎? Chuck Entz (talk) 01:51, 4 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
I asked User:TAKASUGI Shinji, but they seem to have forgotten about it again. —CodeCat 02:17, 4 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
I went ahead and created them, but I'm sure they can use some correction and/or tweaking based on a better knowledge of the language and of the practices among the editors who edit in it. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:23, 4 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
I think it is better categorize けつ as a kun because it has nothing to with the real on きゅう. In the case of , the common reading しゃく, which is from , is treated as a kun. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 05:03, 4 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
I made the change in both Category:Japanese terms spelled with 尻 read as けつ and in 尻もどき). Could you check Category:Japanese terms read with kan'yōon and Category:Japanese terms spelled with ateji‏‎ to make sure I didn't make any serious errors? Chuck Entz (talk) 06:05, 4 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

道路

Module error bad! You fix? ;) Chuck Entz (talk) 02:46, 7 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

Consensus on transliteration of headword inflections?

Hi,

I don't know how to phrase it, so that everyone understands. If you're still not sure about what I meant, you can ask me. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 00:36, 13 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

  • My main concern is usability. With regard to the issues you have raised, I see two parts to this:
    1. Script legibility (perhaps the main stream of the BP thread)
      As noted elsewhere, as the EN WT, we can only safely assume that users can read the Latin alphabet. Consequently, any content not written in the Latin alphabet represents an impediment to usability. Adding parenthesized romanizations to already-cluttered headlines would just make things worse.
    2. Clutter in the headline
      As you and others brought up, the headlines of some entries can become very cluttered, even without adding in romanizations. Clutter presents another usability issue, in that cluttered content is harder to read and understand.
Does that accurately summarize your understanding of where things stand? I really don't want to be contrarian, my goal here is to make the EN WT as easy to use as possible -- and not just for me!  :) I'm aware that my own thinking sure isn't the only way to see things, and I also know that I often don't see other people's perspectives very well. Restating and asking others if the restatement matches their understanding can be one way to approach common ground.
  • In terms of finding a workable solution, Chuck Entz pointed out that the inflections given in the headline are really only usable to people who already know the basics of inflection patterns for that language. However, as CodeCat and Benwing noted, entries in some languages don't usually have inflection tables at all, so the headline is currently the only place where inflected forms can be presented.
My suggestion, perhaps similar to Benwing's:
  • Give romanizations for everything, but only present them as pop-up tooltips for inflected forms in headlines, to avoid visual clutter. Perhaps add some symbol or icon to hint to users that they should mouse-over, maybe like the (key) prompt for IPA transcriptions.
Would that work for you? If not, what changes would you suggest? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:46, 13 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
Clutteredness is not such a big deal as the problem with transliterations themselves. E.g., the term ле́карь (lékarʹ) would work OK, if users/editors are happy with wide headwords (or pop-ups). It will just make the headword very wide but there won't be discrepancies but a term, such as {[l|ru|кагебе́шник|tr=kagɛbɛ́šnik}} (phonetic respelling: кагэбэ́шник) with an irregular transliteration would require manual transliteration for each form - kagɛbɛ́šnika, kagɛbɛ́šniki, kagɛbɛ́šnica. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 03:57, 14 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
  • I'm not sure I understand -- do you mean you're concerned about irregularities in transcription, such as the こんにちは > *konnichi ha vs. konnichi wa, or the -ого > *-ogo vs. -ovo examples you gave in the BP thread?
If so, that seems surmountable, either by manual overrides, or by deriving the phonetic rules by which such irregularities occur, and then coding those rules into a module.
Also, romanization would conceivably be most useful to our user base if it were to use the Latin alphabet, of which the IPA vowel ɛ is not a member. Would you be amenable to spelling your examples as kagebéšnika, kagebéšniki, kagebéšnica, etc. instead?
‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:47, 14 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
Hi. I'm sorry, I never got back to you on this. The Russian transliteration debate is not my favourite topic and has caused me a lot of stress and frustration in the past. If you're still interested, I can explain the situation in details. Pls, let me know. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 00:10, 6 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
  • I can sympathize. Sorry to hear it's been stressful, but don't worry about leaving things to sit for a while.  :)
Re: transliteration, my main perspective is one of usability for readers. As such, my ideal would be for every non-Latin-alphabet entry to include romanization for as much non-Latin-alphabet text as is feasible. I'm fine with things being manual if needed; I place no requirement for this all to happen immediately. So far as we know, Wiktionary isn't disappearing or closing down anytime soon, so we can take our time.
Coding in automated solutions could be a good way to save time and work, but then we'd have to make sure that the algorithm fully accounted for all corner cases. Is there any automated IPA generation for Russian entries? Could that code be leveraged for transliteration?
(I ask out of curiosity, not urgency. :) ) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 00:19, 6 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
There are already automated modules for Russian transliterations and pronunciations. The trouble is with exceptions.
Russian is 95-99% phonetic. Cyrillic letter "е" is transliterated as "je" (word initial, between vowels and after ь and ъ. It's "e" after all consonants. Consonants, which can have palatalised equivalents - b,p,v,f,d,t,z,s,g,k,l,m,n,r are NORMALLY softened/palatalised in front of "е" (and have no effect on other consonants (soft or hard)), e.g. небо is /ˈnʲebə/. It would be cumbersome to transliterate each occurrence of "е" as "'e" or "je" and also rare, e.g. "n'ébo" or "njébo". A number of loanwords (far from all, it's quite unpredictable) have no palatalisation, e.g. стенд, which is pronounced as "стэнд" ([stɛnt]), pls. see the entry. No other symbol fits this situation, so ɛ is used in such cases. Few dictionaries describe hard pronunciations of "е". Russian textbooks/dictionaries sometimes respell words with "э" (e). Russian dictionaries don't use transliterations, since Cyrillic is considered easy to learn, so an in-house method is used here. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 02:15, 6 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
Modules already cater for adjective, pronouns, numeral endings -ogo as -ovo. To work with e/je problem module data would be required with lists of words with exceptions but it's complicated, since there are derivations and inflected forms. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 02:20, 6 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
WT:RU TR describes this well (heavily criticised). I don't see any problem with usability, as the info is available. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 02:27, 6 November 2014 (UTC)Reply

A couple of templates to try

I've had the idea for these for a while, but only just now took the time to reverse-engineer User:Wyang's version of a similar template and make them for myself. You subst: them, and they basically fill out the {{ja-readingcat}} and {{ja-readascat}} templates for you with information that's in the category name. The one for {{ja-readingcat}} ({{jrcez}}) takes up to 2 optional parameters for the reading type, but the one for {{ja-readascat}} ({{jraez}}) doesn't need anything. I hope you find them useful. Chuck Entz (talk) 07:45, 13 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

Something you did caused this entry to appear in Category:Japanese, an invalid category. Could you fix it if possible, or notify someone who can? —CodeCat 22:58, 13 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

  • It was this POS: 幸#Adverb. I'd used the abbreviation adv, which apparently the template didn't recognize. Odd that the non-recognition should cause the page to be added to such a category. I added adv as a valid abbreviation in this edit to the {{ja-pos}} template, and now it appears to be working correctly -- 幸#Japanese is no longer categorizing oddly.
Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 00:07, 14 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

Sort order on こうせつ

Hello, Eirikr. I was wondering about the logic underlying the order of entries on こうせつ. It doesn't appear to be by radical or stroke count, and obviously it can't be by pronunciation. In terms of frequency, it seems to me that 公設 and 交接 are more frequent than any of the other uses, but that's just an impression; it doesn't reflect careful measurement nor reliable sources. My own logic in sorting was to put the words that have existing Wiktionary entries first, and the red links later. Is there some other preferred or commonly used sort order for such pages? (If you respond, you can do so here, since I don't really use my Wiktionary talk page.) Thanks, and happy editing, Cnilep (talk) 23:27, 15 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

  • Hi, sorry for any confusion. I generally order according to the search results in my e-copy of Daijirin, since that's one of my resources to hand that tends to have pretty comprehensive lists of kanji compounds, and it orders by radical. Partway through creating the list in the wikitext editing pane, I ran across some other compounds with the こうせつ reading that weren't in the main list in Daijirin, and I added those into the editing pane (currently items 7-10) -- but I realize now that I didn't put them into the list in any sensible sort order. I apologize for that. I'll re-sort momentarily. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:54, 15 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
PS: I've just spent some time looking more into how Daijirin orders entries -- apparently their collation is by gross character stroke count, not radical, such that comes after but before . I've followed suit for now on the こうせつ page, since I've historically mostly used Daijirin's ordering. Let me know if that's a problem in any way. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:54, 15 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

@Cnilep Also (on the theory you might see this here quickest), where are you getting the "copula" sense for 交接? That's not listed in either Daijirin or Shogakukan. Nor, indeed, in my dead-tree copy of Shinmeikai. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:57, 15 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the explanation of Daijirin's sort order. Regarding 交接 as "copula", my immediate source is Kenkyusha's リーダーズ+プラスV3 (Reader's Plus Dictionary). I also have vague memories of seeing it in some works of grammar, but other words such as 繋辞 or コプラ may be more common. Cnilep (talk) 00:21, 16 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
Going back to it a third time, it appears that I was somehow mixing the (文法) and (法) lines. Hmm, now I begin to doubt those hazy memories of my own reading – never the best source for information about one's second language. Cnilep (talk) 00:50, 16 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
No worries. I've been a professional translator for a while now, and that kind of visual parsing hiccup is quite common. Cheers! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 01:46, 16 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

貪り食う

This shows as having 貪 read as むさぼ, but I notice that gives its only kun reading as むさぼる. Is this むさぼ + り or むさぼる that has り merging with る? Chuck Entz (talk) 00:12, 18 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

Japanese categorisations

Hi,

Do you think it's possible to make a Japanese version of Module:zh-cat? I find it time-consuming having to add hiragana to each category, so I often omit adding cats. If there is an automatic categorisation, then {{ja-new}} and {{ja new}} could use a |cat= parameter for accelerated entry creations. Also, do you think it's OK to add {{ja-pron}} (with kana params) by default? These templates could use enhancements - synonyms, alternative forms, multiple parts of speech, verb/adjective inflections (with verb types).--Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 04:43, 12 November 2014 (UTC)Reply

  • I have no idea what either Module:zh-cat or Template:zh-cat do, so I really couldn't say anything about the feasibility of an analog for Japanese.
  • I've never used either {{ja-new}} or {{ja new}}, and I'm afraid I'm not familiar with what they do or how they work.
  • I think {{ja-pron}} should probably be added to every entry that isn't a soft redirect.
‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 08:25, 12 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
Module:zh-cat uses selected sort keys, currently sorting entries by radicals. If a Japanese equivalent would be smart to always use kana, not kanji and convert katakana to hiragana - that's all, that would be great. The {{ja-new}} and {{ja new}} are accelerated entry creation templates. I am able to produce a lot of East Asian entries thanks to them - they are great time savers and are easy to use. I forgot to say, I meant inserting {{ja-pron}} in any new entry, even if they don't contain the pitch accent, by default, would that still be a good idea? --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 12:37, 12 November 2014 (UTC)Reply

hyprocide

Regarding this addition of yours to WT:WE, it appears to be a proprietary name, Hyprocide™, which is an alternative trade name for Endo-Spor Plus™. According to this 510(k) Summary, it is a "liquid chemical germicide contain[ing] 7.35% hydrogen peroxide and 0.23% peracetic acid" as its active ingredients, and is intended for use as "a chemical disinfecting and sterilization solution for use on flexible lensed endoscopy instruments, inhalation therapy equipment and instruments and materials that cannot be heat sterilized." As for the name's etymology, the closest precedent in terms of spelling that I can find is the Ancient Greek Template:l/grc (Romanised hyppro), which is a Thessalian variant of ὑποπρό (hupopró) or ὑπὸ πρό (hupò pró), a compound preposition meaning "just before"; the sense doesn't really fit, so the first element is more probably an informal contraction-cum-blend of hyper- + pro-, used as more-or-less generic intensifiers; the second element is, of course, just -cide (killer), as in germicide, biocide, etc. I don't think the trade name meets CFI, so it probably won't be added; still, I hope this information tells you what you wanted to know. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 11:40, 16 November 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thank you! It's mentioned in one of the IT Crowd episodes, specifically episode 12 of season 2. I hadn't heard the term before and was curious about its origins. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:26, 16 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
You're welcome. Something about a muffin, right? I've seen them all but don't really remember that bit. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 23:39, 16 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
Ya, Moss smells a muffin and goes off on a litany of the chemicals he smells. "Hyprocide! And it's not even listed in the table of contents!" It sets up the scene towards the end where he smells Jen's tea and asks why it has Rohypnol in it. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 05:43, 17 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
I decided to quote the scene; I cited it at Citations:Jolly Roger. According to Springfield! Springfield!, what we've thought is hyprocide is actually hyperoside, but I'm sceptical that S!S! is right, given that the -e- definitely gets dropped in Moss's pronunciation and S!S! has "You won't believe what happened last night. // Wait till I tell you what happened to me." where the episode clearly has "Wait until I tell you what happened to me last night… // Well, wait till I tell you what’s just happened to me…". Also, I have no idea what [ˈiːbɹɪəm] ("ebrium") is; the most pertinent-seeming hit I got was this typo for erbium (forms of the Latin ēbrius predominate on Google Books). It could all be down to mispronunciation and/or fanciful nonce coinages. I don't know. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:12, 17 November 2014 (UTC)Reply

Fundamental theorem of Wiktionary

You have expressed interest in my Fundamental theorem of Wiktionary. I have laid it out at User:Purplebackpack89#Fundamental theorem of Wiktionary Purplebackpack89 21:21, 3 December 2014 (UTC)Reply

Okurigana in Kanji readings sections

I've noticed that some pages have readings which show okurigana following periods and other pages don't show any periods to separate the okurigana. I have seen yet other pages which in place of periods show the kanji with okurigana in parenthesis after the complete reading. Which do you feel is the most appropriate?馬太阿房 (talk) 09:44, 1 January 2015 (UTC)Reply

I haven't forgotten you. I've been super busy on the one hand, and chewing on this issue on the other. Hmm, sounds like I'm chewing my hands. Anyway. Okurigana in readings for single-kanji entries is something that we haven't had any good guidelines for. Pages that have no indication of where the kanji reading ends and the okurigana begin are generally older, and are pages that I probably haven't edited, since I'm pretty keen on being clear about okurigana. How best to be clear, however, is something that I've tried a couple different ways over the years, which is some of what you note.
For sake of example, let's consider the kun'yomi list at . Should it be:
or:
or:
or...?
I've used all of these at some point. Over time, I've gravitated towards the formatting at the bottom of the list (these are roughly chronological as I've experimented over time), as this strikes me as possibly the visually cleanest and clearest. It's also roughly what Jim Breen uses in his online dictionary (click through to http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1B and enter 出 in the search box to see this example). But if you have any other ideas, I'm all ears.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:52, 22 January 2015 (UTC)Reply

가 /ka/ vs が /ga/

Hi there.

A few days ago I edited the Korean page on that particle, but you removed everything, although I used a really reliable source, and what I wrote was not stupid or far-fetched. Could I ask to have that content published, even though you would prefer me to reword it? Thank you. — This unsigned comment was added by 122.17.81.57 (talk) at 04:46, 2015 January 4‎.

  • The main issue was that the content you added would be more suited for inclusion in an encyclopedia. A comparison of the modern uses of Korean (ga) and Japanese (ga) is simply not appropriate for a Korean-to-English dictionary entry, regardless of accuracy or reliable sourcing. That explanation would conceivably be good to have in the Korean-to-Japanese entry at ja:가, or in the Japanese-to-Korean entry at ko:が. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:39, 22 January 2015 (UTC)Reply

User translations badly formatted

Hi,

If you have some time, there are quite a few badly formatted translations here: Special:Contributions/Somnipathy. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 03:06, 7 January 2015 (UTC)Reply

Jeju

Just so you know, the ISO recently gave Jeju a code, jje. I have added it to Wiktionary and switched our Jeju content to use that code rather than the bulky exceptional code we had used before, qfa-kor-jjm. However, I notice that entries like this have been switched to use ko... - -sche (discuss) 21:08, 21 January 2015 (UTC)Reply

  • Thank you, -sche.
@Wyang What can you say about Jeju? Is this close enough to mainland Korean to count as a dialect? I've run across sources suggesting that perhaps it should be considered separately, but I don't know enough to really tell. At the bare minimum, shouldn't entries like 갈옷 (garot) or 자륜거 (jaryun'geo) include usage notes or some other means of indicating that this is a dialect word? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 21:37, 21 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • Jeju is considered a Korean dialect in Korean linguistics. Here is an excerpt from Korean Dialectal Dictionary: [5][6], and it can be seen that Jeju is just one of the many varieties of Korean (although I failed to find jaryungeo there). Regarding garot - this is a standard Korean word [7] and should not be marked as Jeju dialect-only. Wyang (talk) 01:21, 22 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • @Wyang What chance might there be that チャリンコ (charinko) is instead from Chinese, particularly Taiwanese? I note that the 自輪車自轮车 (zìlúnchē) entry indicates that this term is mostly used in Taiwan, but the pronunciation section only lists Mandarin. Given the connections between Taiwan and Japan over the years, this might make a more likely source, especially if you can't find anything backing up the Jeju angle. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 07:06, 22 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • I tried to find 19th century or early 20th century attestations of 自輪車 on Google Books, Chinese Wikisource and corpora, but this word seems to be so rarely used in Chinese that virtually no useful attestations could be found. There are some interesting ones (Dialectal Chinese: [8]; Japanese: [9]; Taiwanese: [10]), but unfortunately none of them is viewable. My impression is that this word was used at a very low frequency in Japanese and then in Taiwanese (when it was under Japanese rule), and that it pretty much died out not long after that. The hypothesis that charinko might be directly of Chinese origin, to me, sounds unlikely. An interesting thing to note is the "ko" sound here. "" in Middle Chinese had two pronunciations tsyhae and kjo, however the second k- reading had essentially vanished in modern independent usage and compounding - except, in Korean (), where it is preserved in many compounds (such as 자전거) which would normally be read with the other tsyhae reading in other languages. The word charinko, if Sino-Japanese in origin, would definitely be more likely to have been borrowed from some Korean (dialectal) source, than either directly borrowed from Chinese or wasei kango in origin. There is also a possibility of this being derived from 자행거 (自行車, jahaenggeo, “old name for bicycle”) [11], which is the source of many dialectal forms of jajeongeo in the dictionary (via lenition of -h-). I think it may have been the Jeju form of this word [t͡ʃɐjəŋgɛ, t͡ʃɐjəŋgə] replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (gg), which spread to Japan by the Zainichi Koreans, that gave rise to charinko. Wyang (talk) 03:03, 27 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
So, should we make jje an etymology-only code (like frc, "Cajun French")? (Should we open a BP discussion for that?) - -sche (discuss) 20:36, 23 January 2015 (UTC)Reply

Translation of snore

Hi,

Thanks for splitting the translation. It is achieved with much simpler coding:

かく (いびきをかく, ibiki o kaku), 立てる (いびきをたてる, ibiki o tateru).

Pls note how components are still linked to the right language. :) --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 21:59, 5 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

  • Cool, thank you! I dimly remembered that something like this was possible, but I couldn't remember the specifics, so I just hammered out what worked.  :) Cheers!
As a side issue, is there any value in including kana representations in translation tables? We don't include bopomofo for Chinese translations, for example, and the kana don't link anywhere either. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:22, 5 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
I usually include kana for various reasons - it's often the alternative spelling (you can just write "いびきをかく"), it's educational - shows the right hiragana spelling. Bopomofo is restricted to Taiwan but we do provide Arabic and Hebrew vocalisation (diacritics, normally unwritten in a running Arabic or Hebrew text), which is the phonetic aid for these languages (dictionary style) and provide stress marks for Russian, etc. I think it's a long standing convention for Japanese to provide kana, although Shinji doesn't like it. Well, published dictionaries use either kana or romaji and sometimes both.
I don't think we need to link kana transliterations, let alone rōmaji (I'm very annoyed when it is). --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 22:32, 5 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

The {{ja-readings}} template in this entry is adding the redlinked Category:Japanese kanji needing attention, apparently due to being fed katakana instead of hiragana. I'm not sure how to fix it, but I thought you might be. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:29, 12 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

While you're at it, I've been holding off on creating Category:Japanese terms spelled with 貴 read as あて‏‎ because I can't seem to reconcile the reading for at 貴人 with any of the readings at itself. Could you see if it's a problem at , at 貴人, or in my meager understanding of Japanese? Chuck Entz (talk) 02:54, 12 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
Absolutely. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 04:05, 13 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

Elderly

You correctly note that 'elderly people' is common as a noun, but 'elderly' used alone is not a noun, it's an adjective, as you surely know. This is my first attempt at editing wiktionary, I think, so maybe I don't understand the usage there. But to my nascent understanding of Chinese, the noun form of a word is, in fact, a noun, just like in English. So, shouldn't it be defined using an actual English noun, and not an adjective? If a Chinese speaker wants to know the English noun form of 老, they will read elderly, and be misled into sounding like a stereotype, which is unfortunate. 'Elder' may not be the precise meaning, but it is a noun. Wouldn't it at least be better to put the phrase 'elderly person' under the noun definition? Eaglizard (talk) 18:39, 17 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

Thank you very much for your reply. Yes, that is exactly what I was in the middle of suggesting here, when I got an edit conflict. :) (Although I was going with '[the] elderly', I'm sure you know formatting styes here better than I.) Although, in the long run I had decided perhaps this issue is too wide for the medium at hand -- there are a lot variations on plurality in English that clearly cause great difficulties for those raised without the need for them. But I'll leave it to wiktionary editors to decide how far to go with that problem. Is wiktionary really the place for a person to learn a foreign language? I don't know, but I'm certainly trying to use it to study the ideograms. In any case, I think I'll focus more on the easy job of linktext'ing Chinese chars over where I live, on en:wp. Thanks again. Eaglizard (talk) 19:08, 17 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

龙龟

What about 龙龟?

90.219.200.199 14:01, 27 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

I have deleted this crap. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 18:10, 27 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
(After edit conflict)
  • What about it? I don't know what you're asking.
Just off the bat, I can say that this isn't Japanese. Both constituent characters are Chinese simplified forms that aren't used in Japanese. ja:龙 has no Japanese entry, only Chinese. ja:龟 doesn't even exist, and was previously deleted. Meanwhile, http://www.weblio.jp/content/%E9%BE%99 and http://www.weblio.jp/content/%E9%BE%9F both clearly state that 「※日本語ではあまり使用されない漢字です。」 → i.e., “This kanji is not really used in Japanese.”
If you'd like help with Chinese terms, I suggest you contact Wyang or Anatoli. I think they're currently the most-active editors of Chinese. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:08, 27 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
Since the IP doesn't seem to have a clue about the Japanese writing system, I didn't bother checking it or too long. In Japanese the term, if it exists and would pass CFI, would be along the lines of "". --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 19:15, 27 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
(After another edit conflict)
Aaaand, looking at the deleted content, a big thank you to Anatoli! Anon, PLEASE use a dictionary before entering terms here. ESPECIALLY when those terms are in languages that you clearly don't know.
The deleted entry was not even wrong. I.e., it was so far off base that it's in a different ballpark altogether.
  1. The purported reading of ryūkame isn't a Japanese word as best I can tell, outside of a placename (apparently a neighborhood in Yao City [12]).
  2. The characters aren't even used in Japanese.
Again, please look things up and determine whether or not something is complete rubbish, before trying to add entries to this site. There are numerous online resources for Japanese<>English dictionaries, many of which are even free, like Weblio or Eijiro. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 21:12, 27 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

kyūjitai

Hi,

I saw your edit on 韓國#Japanese and other kyūjitai. Would you support soft redirects with usage notes for kyūjitai, similar to {{zh-see}} for simplified Chinese, e.g. 韩国? (this adds to PoS and simplified Chinese categories)? Also: Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2014/December#Demoting_ky.C5.ABjitai_to_stubs.2Fsoft-redirects --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 00:05, 6 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Hi,

Do you mind improving the Japanese section a bit? TIA :) --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 03:48, 10 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Actually, I confused the character with and was surprised it had so little info, so I'll leave it up to you. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 04:19, 10 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

ゲット

Hi,

Would you like to have a go at this term? I find the usage interesting. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 00:03, 19 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

A couple of problematic Wanted Categories

I try to create as many of the redlinked entries in Special:WantedCategories as I can, but there are always one or two that don't seem to add up, mostly because there's nothing in the kanji entry's readings that seems to match the readings in the other entry's kanjitab. If the kanjitab was edited by someone whom I can trust knows what they're doing, and I can guess at the yomi, I may create it anyway, but after a while the clinkers start to build up.

Here are two of them that I'd appreciate your looking at:

Category:Japanese terms spelled with 封 read as ぷう, which was from an entry added by a US IPv6. The entry itself seems to check out ok with wwwjdic, but I don't know Japanese morphophonology well enough to figure out if the kanjitab is right. A change from ふう to ぷう is plausible- but I don't know if Japanese works that way. There could also be a reading missing from the kanji entry, and I would have no way to know it.

Category:Japanese terms spelled with 手 read as ず was the result of an edit by Kc kennylau, and the looks like it might be a variant of the goon reading of しゅ- but what do I know? Would the yomi be goon, or just on? Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 00:15, 23 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

I've added another wanted category today: Category:Japanese terms spelled with 鏡 read as がね today. Not sure if "がね" is a true kun'yomi reading for . --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 00:26, 23 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Heya folks, thank you for keeping on top of that. I don't look at categories much, and I definitely appreciate the help. Some quick thoughts:

  • Of the three categories, the one for is the only valid one. (zu) is the kan'yōon for this character.
  • ぷう (), and indeed any of the p- readings, is not a "standard" reading for any kanji. The p- sounds only occur in compounds, similar to rendaku. I don't recall what this phenomenon is called, and I'm reading around the JA webspace to try to remind myself. Once I find out, I'll create a template similar to {{rendaku2}} that we can use on entries that have these p- readings.
  • がね (gane) is a rendaku-ed reading.

So the Category:Japanese terms spelled with 封 read as ぷう and Category:Japanese terms spelled with 鏡 read as がね cats need to be deleted, and the entries linking through to them need fixing. I might have time for that later today, but my schedule is way tight.

Thanks again! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 16:29,れ 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Re: rendaku on 色眼鏡. Thanks. I would format it so (like you did) but I couldn't confirm "かね" reading for - I only have "かがみ" and 眼鏡 would need that too. Category:Japanese terms spelled with 鏡 read as かね is the new wanted cat.--Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 21:24, 23 March 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • The term megane always uses the character, and that character is always read as if it were the character instead, so I think you'd have to parse the kane reading here as a non-Jōyō kun'yomi for . From my quick searches of my electronic dictionaries, it looks like 眼鏡 (megane) is the only word where is read as if it were (kane). Does that agree with what you're finding?
Not sure what you mean by “I only have "かがみ" and 眼鏡 would need that too” -- the only readings I can find for 眼鏡 are the kun'yomi megane and the on'yomi gankyō (archaic, military).
I also just realized that these categories hadn't actually been "created" yet (with header info, etc), they were just auto-generated by the MW software, so there's nothing to delete. I struck through my mistaken comment above. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:33, 23 March 2015 (UTC)Reply
Would you consider non-Jōyō readings as irregular? If that's the case, instead of kun'yomi, the entries (眼鏡 and 色眼鏡) and should say "irregular" (not kun'yomi, IMO) and no autogenerated (wanted) red-linked categories would appear. I meant that the only kun'yomi reading for 鏡 I can find is "かがみ". If "かね" is also valid (even if rare), it should be added to . --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 22:40, 23 March 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • Where to draw the line between irregular versus just non-Jōyō -- my personal thought is that a spelling is entirely irregular if the individual phonemes cannot be attached reliably to any one kanji. Things like 蝦夷 / / (ebisu, the Ainu people, according to Shogakukan, presumably from Ainu term emchiu or enchu meaning "person", but Batchelor's AIN-EN-JA dictionary doesn't contain any such term; the closest match is probably Ainu エムㇱ (emush) or エムシ (emushi, sword), possibly adopted into Japanese to mean "person" due to the politics of Yamato expansion and repression of the Ainu, and the inevitable armed resistance by the Ainu) or 天鵞絨 (birōdo, velvet, from Portuguese veludo) or 麺麭 (pan, bread, from Portuguese pão) are definitely irregular. Things like 眼鏡, though, look instead to be very regular, if perhaps non-Jōyō: this is simply a matter of ateji of a sort, swapping (metal, probably in reference to the eyeglass frame) for (mirror, probably from its Chinese meaning of lens).
The kane reading for is definitely be valid, as it is the only kun'yomi reading for this character (albeit with rendaku) in the everyday term 眼鏡 (megane). That said, 眼鏡 is also the only word I can find that uses this reading for this kanji, so there wouldn't be much use in having the category. Maybe "irregular" makes the most sense here? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:15, 23 March 2015 (UTC)Reply
I think we should make the readings "irregular", rather than adding rare, non-productive (and confusing) readings. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 23:49, 23 March 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • Sounds good to me.  :)
One thought for future -- I think it might be useful to be able to show readings both for the whole term, and by individual character. So for things like 眼鏡, we could show that the whole word is regarded as kun'yomi, while the me is regular kun'yomi, and the kane is irregular. Or say, in 上手, we could indicate that the whole word is on'yomi, the is goon, and the zu is kan'yōon.
Maybe even add in functionality to allow specification of separate words, so when {{ja-kanjitab}} is used on phrase entries, we could break the whole phrase down by word, and then by character.
But that's for later.  :) Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 00:00, 24 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Etymology of

Some reference.

《说文解字》字本义错误举隅

Huhu9001 (talk) 02:14, 31 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

  • Hi. I can't get that site to load, but the core issue I had was that 止 definitely includes a "stop" meaning. Your previous edit removed the "stop" meaning entirely, even though the the body of the etymology just below describes this character as meaning "stop". I see now that the entry lists both meanings, which is fine by me. I've tweaked it to use the {{Han compound}} template again, since the template adds some useful links and categories.
Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 15:34, 31 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

googly moogly (was: Removal of item from Wiktionary:Requested entries (English))

(moved from User talk:Kiwima)

Hello, I recently discovered that my request for googly moogly was missing from the Wiktionary:Requested entries (English) page. The removal of entries from requested entry pages usually means that the entry has been created, but googly moogly is still missing, and apparently has never existed.

Did you intend to create this entry? Or did you remove the listing for some other reason? Curious, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 16:01, 31 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

I created googly-moogly, because when I looked for usages, that is what I found. If you can find enough instances of googly moogly without the hyphen, I will gladly add that as an alternate form. Kiwima (talk) 18:13, 31 March 2015 (UTC)Reply
For that matter, NGrams also fails on alternate spellings googaly moogaly / googaly-moogaly, regardless of capitalization. But again, google books:"googaly moogaly" finds enough hits to meet CFI.
Given the complete failure of NGrams to find usage that's already in Google's corpus, I'm not sure how to judge which form is more common, but it does look like these might all merit entries. (Though it bears noting that I am no power user of NGrams, and it's entirely possible that I'm doing something wrong.)
Thank you for your help! I've removed my now-redundant request from Wiktionary:Requested entries (English). ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:02, 31 March 2015 (UTC)Reply
Just to add one suggestion: if you create an entry that's different than the one requested or if there's a reason not to create it at all, it's best to leave a note right next to the request, so the requester knows what happened. You can show that you've taken care of the request by surrounding it in strikeout tags, with <s> before the text and </s> after it, so that it appears as being struck out. Later on, once everything is sorted out, the request can be removed. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:43, 1 April 2015 (UTC)Reply

カーゲーベー

Hi,

Sorry for the confusion on カーゲーベー. I just thought that we over-capitalise Japanese (also Chinese and Korean) transliterations. The choice between proper and common nouns is not always straightforward. "KGB" may merit proper noun status in Japanese as the name of an organisation but will you agree that language names, demonyms should be common nouns? Japanese shouldn't always follow English rules when deciding what is a proper noun or a common noun. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 23:20, 7 April 2015 (UTC)Reply

  • Heya, no worries. I've spent a little time looking into the Japanese perspective on proper nouns. There does appear to be a trend among Japanese writers / lexicographers / etc. to use initial capitalization for things deemed to be proper nouns, when writing in romaji. Here's a corroborating entry from Shogakukan's Kokugo Dai Jiten:

こゆうめいし(コイウ‥)【固有名詞】
(英proper nounの訳語)ある類に属する個物に与えられた名称を表す語。人名、地名、国名のほか、書名、会社名、学校名、年号、商号、商品名、器物・家畜の呼び名など。ローマ字つづりでは、頭文字を大文字にする習慣がある。⇔普通名詞

That's broadly the guideline I've been following with romanized entries here. The enumeration of 地名、国名 and the like leads me to think that demonyms and language names would be similarly treated as proper nouns. Briefly googling around suggests that this is the case.
Does that answer your question? (honest question on my part, no snark. :) ) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:53, 8 April 2015 (UTC)Reply
Thanks but what leads you to think that demonyms and language names should be proper nouns as well? In the (vast) majority of languages country names doesn't make demonyms and language names capitalised - Italia/italiano, Suomi/suomi/suomalainen, Россия/русский, etc., etc. In other words, "Nihon" (countries, place names, company names) - yes but "nihongo" and "nihonjin" should be lower case and the kanji terms - common nouns. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 22:45, 8 April 2015 (UTC)Reply
My personal experience led me think that demonyms and language names are generally capitalized. Digging around just now, Google NGrams seems to back this up:
The init-capped forms are more common, where they appear at all.
Ultimately, though, this exercise is a bit academic, since Japanese usually isn't written in romaji at all. When it is, it's generally for teaching purposes, in which case, the romaji text is often written to conform to the orthographical conventions of the targeted audience.
From that perspective, inasmuch as this is the English Wiktionary, I think it makes sense to follow English conventions in cases where there isn't any clear Japanese convention. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 23:33, 8 April 2015 (UTC)Reply
Thank you. I would put this to a vote. Haplology did agree on having them in lower case, which is also reflected in many of our entries. Shinji is of the same opinion as you, I think. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 00:42, 9 April 2015 (UTC)Reply
Sounds good. I'm open to discussion. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 01:30, 9 April 2015 (UTC)Reply

This rollback is in error (in case of point 2).

  1. "Katze" commonly refers to small cats, i.e. house cats or German "Hauskatzen". As it shouldn't be like "first cat refered to all cats, then in colloquial speech it often became restricted to house cats", it should make more sense to list the common meaning first.
  2. Simple google book seach quite often has "Kätzin" in books like "Verhaltenstherapie der Katze" (behaviour therapy of cats), "Krankheiten der Katze" (illnesses of cats), "Katzen gesund ernähren" (To feed cats healthly). So, it's obviously technical -- to differ between cats (Katze), female cats (Kätzin) and male cats (Kater) --, and not "jocular" or "hypercorrect". Many Germans - especially cat owners and educated persons - shouldn't have any problem with "Kätzin".

-IP, 17:03, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Two issues with Japanese entries

Hi,

I got two issues with Japanese entries today

  1. 十七 doesn't display additional reading - "じゅうなな"
  2. 稟告's kanji categories are not correctly generated. I made manual ones but they are empty - Category:Japanese terms spelled with 稟 read as ひん and Category:Japanese terms spelled with 稟 read as りん. Any help is appreciated. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 11:55, 2 May 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • FWIW, I really don't like this use of alternative readings -- different readings have their own independent etymologies, and should be listed separately. That said, I'll have a look.
Oh, and the readings for 稟 aren't showing up in the cats because it's not a Jōyō character -- the cat generator for {{ja-kanjitab}} only includes readings for Jōyō kanji. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 07:05, 3 May 2015 (UTC)Reply
  1. Thanks. Fixed by User:Umbreon126, which was just an extra white space. One way or another, both readings should be displayed, whether the etymology is present or not. I always think that etymologies are of lower priorities and are "nice to haves", not mandatory attributes of the entries. Alternative readings as parameters are just a simple way to add those readings without having to add etymologies but can be changed on expanded entries. Well, hiragana and katakana readings on the same headword don't need additional etymologies.
  2. I see. Thanks. Should I delete Category:Japanese terms spelled with 稟 read as ひん and Category:Japanese terms spelled with 稟 read as りん then? I probably will. (BTW, I duplicated the question in the Grease pit.) --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 07:15, 3 May 2015 (UTC)Reply
    • Re: the categories, I have no strong feelings. It might be nice to have readings even for non-Jōyō kanji, but the coding required for the module might be too cumbersome -- both to develop, and possibly to run. A grease pit discussion is probably merited. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 07:42, 3 May 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • Anatoli, I reworked the 稟告 entry. Upon looking into this term, it became clear that the hinkoku reading is dying out, and that the hinkoku and rinkoku readings have somewhat different senses.
I know it's a bit more work, but I strongly recommend that you add in separate ===Etymology=== headers for separate readings in future. Doing so makes it much clearer that the readings are separate. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:06, 4 May 2015 (UTC)Reply

Your revert

Hello, your revert here:

http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=%E7%B6%A0&action=historysubmit&type=revision&diff=32791177&oldid=32791174

was incorrect -- consulting a reliable online Chinese dictionary such as Zdic DOT net will show the "lu4" reading for this character, which was lacking from the entry. Thank you for checking before reverting in the future. 173.89.236.187 23:27, 4 May 2015 (UTC)Reply

フランス

Look at these:

Daijirin Kokugo Daijiten

I wonder how "clearly" the dictionaries indicate as such as you say. ばかFumikotalk 08:06, 9 June 2015 (UTC)Reply

  • I'm guessing that 1) you're not familiar with the notation conventions of these dictionaries, and 2) you've been unaware that only English and French spell the name of the country as France. I just checked my dead-tree copy of the 新明解国語辞典 in addition to your screenshots and my own digital copies, and these all list the etymon as France. That's pretty clear. So it's got to be from either English or French. Either way, the ultimate source is French, it's just a question of whether the term came into Japanese directly from French speakers, or indirectly via English speakers. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 09:14, 9 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
Exactly my point. You don't know whether it's from French or English, and the dictionaries don't tell you anything about that. ばかFumikotalk 15:18, 9 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
Dude, that's what you say, not the dictionaries. Can you point out exactly the part of the Kokugo Daijiten or Daijirin that specifically says what you say? ばかFumikotalk 02:32, 10 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
I am with Eirikr on this one. The above dictionaries are not our only sources. "France" is the word "フランス" is derived from. As Eirikr said, the spelling "France" is only used in two languages - French and English, so logically, the etymology has only two possible sources - French and English, ultimately French, anyway. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 08:21, 10 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
Let me make it clear again: Kokugo Daijiten and Daijirin are not our only sources, no, but they are the only sources used for this one entry, フランス. I wasn't sure if the spelling "France" are exclusive to English and French (I did think so) until both of you confirmed that for me. Consider sources of borrowing of Japanese (usally English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Italian, Chinese), that sounds fair enough. The thing is none of the dictionaries above, our only sources used for this one entry (フランス) states that the term derives from French or English. If the spelling were unique to French, or English, alone, that would be no problem (where else could the term comes from?). But it is not. And the dictionaries don't tell us anything about the term derives from French, or from English, or from French via English. The statement in the etymology section is merely arbitrary (it does sound reasonable though), not on the account of both dictionaries, which are the only sources used for this one entry. Both dictionaries do not say "this word is from French", "this word is from English", or "this word is from French, via English". No. So I think the dictionaries should not be cited there. We should at least include another source that states that very statement ("From French France, possibly via English.") or at least something similar. ばかFumikotalk 13:45, 10 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • All of the dictionaries consulted so far do state that フランス comes from the term France. As you note, none explicitly state the source language. However, *only* English and French have any term spelled France that refers to the country. Ergo, by logical reasoning, the source language for Japanese フランス *must* be either English or French. Given that the term France itself originated from French, the ultimate source must be French.
This is what the etymology at フランス currently states: this term is from French. The etymology also mentions the possibility that the term made it into Japanese via English, allowing for the present ambiguity in how the term entered Japanese.
This is in accordance with what the sources say. By logical reasoning, this is the only possible meaning that the sources could be intending by listing France as the etymon of フランス.
Is your concern instead that the etymology wording should be changed to clarify the limitations of what the sources say? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 16:10, 10 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
My concern is about the citation. You said that the spelling was only either French or English, I got it. But the etymology, as you said, was inferred by logical reasoning, not actually confirmed by the dictionaries themselves. And I think that makes them not good enough to be cited in the etymology section. Say I had no idea where the term comes from at first, I looked for it on Wiktionary, I found the etymology which said it came from French (via English?), and the etymology came with such citation sources as Kokugo Daijiten and Daijirin. I then looked for the term on Kokugo Daijiten and Daijirin which only gave the spelling "France", and absolutely nothing else. Surely "France" could ony be either French or English, but I would wonder why the dictionaries were cited in the etymology section. They just gave the spelling, the didn't explicitly say the term was directly from French, or from French via English. If the spelling were only French, then it would be damn fine. But it could also be English, and no one was sure about that. Then why are they cited in the first place when they explain absolutely nothing about the spelling being from French or English? By logical reasoning, you think that the word must be from French and possibly via English. But that is not what Kokugo Daijiten and Daijirin say (because it is by your logical reasoning), then why do you cite them? A dictionary that says "This term is from French, possibly via English" would be way more worth citing.
P/s: I'd like you to take a look at 屈狸. Here I put the citation number right after the word "Nivkh", since the first part is taken from Kojien which says "This term is from Nivkh". I didn't put the citation number after the spelling "к’узр", because Kojien says nothing about the spelling which can be attested just by logical reasoning (if "屈狸" is from Nivkh, "к’узр" must be the Nivkh spelling needed, right?) Isn't that better? ばかFumikotalk 03:11, 11 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • Fumiko, it appears that you don't understand the etymological notation conventions of these dictionaries. The listing of France in the Daijirin and Kokugo Dai Jiten entries, for instance, is a listing of the etymon, i.e. the source term. By way of comparison, please have a look at the respective entries for ベルギー: both list the etymon as België, and in both cases the entries do not explicitly list a source language. This is quite common in Japanese dictionaries. Looking up the etymon België shows that this term is Dutch, and as such, we can state in the ベルギー entry that the Japanese term comes from Dutch. We can even say that Daijirin and the Kokugo Dai Jiten both list the source as Dutch België, as there is no other possible source language for the given etymon.
If the Kojien entry for 屈狸 lists к’узр (kʼuzr) in the etymology, then it would be correct to put the Kojien citation marker after the Cyrillic. If the Kojien entry only says that 屈狸 is from Nivkh, but does not give the etymon, then it would be more correct to put the Kojien citation marker before the Cyrillic, and then add a "probably" before the Cyrillic.
I am puzzled by your abusive tone. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 05:27, 11 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
I apologize if what I said (wrote) make you feel abused. I tried pretty hard (maybe a little too hard) to make myself as clear as possible by using a lot of bold words. But you said it yourself: "France" is either French or English, while "België" is only Dutch. If "France" were only French, or only English, I wouldn't make such a "abusive tone" here. ばかFumikotalk 05:54, 11 June 2015 (UTC)Reply

ドイツ

Kokugo Daijiten lists "Deutschland", not "deutsch" or "Deutsch". That suggests the dictionary gives the name of the country in its own language, not the etymology. In fact, Daijirin, Daijisen and Kojien all do so, but they do give the etymology that ドイツ is from Dutch. By logical reasoning I can tell you that. ばかFumikotalk 04:09, 11 June 2015 (UTC)Reply

Under the readings, the ばば reading is listed as Kan’yōon, but under Etymology 3, it's supposed to be kun. Which is it? — This unsigned comment was added by Chuck Entz (talkcontribs) at 19:00, 12 June 2015‎.

水面

今晩は。 In a song I was listening to (captivating 秋冬 by Hiyashi Asami-san, 0:40-0:45 in the video), this word has the pronunciation (and explicit furigana spelling) みずも. However, here the extant Hiragana spellings are すいめん and みなも, whilst the other resource I am using to extend my Japanese vocabulary (和独辞典) lists those two and みのも , but not みずも. Do you deem it worth being added as a spelling and have you encountered this spelling/pronunciation in speech or in a written resource? Is this a non-standard, an obsolete or poetic spelling? Regards, The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 09:21, 13 June 2015 (UTC)Reply

蜜柑

This entry divides the みかん reading up as =み + =かん, but doesn't list み as a reading, and lists みかん as well as かん. I'm guessing there's more to this than meets the eye, and I don't want to create Category:Japanese terms spelled with 蜜 read as み until I know what's going on. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:17, 13 June 2015 (UTC)Reply

I just wanted to note that 日本(にほん) (nihon) is listed as regular via a sound-change (in derived terms, inconsistently as either a sound-change (e.g. 日本語) or direct reading (e.g. 日本人)). Sometimes ateji do this e.g. 阿弗利加(アフリカ) (afurika), 倶楽部(くらぶ) (kurabu), 滅茶(めちゃ) (mecha). Nibiko (talk) 01:34, 25 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • Good points. @Nibiko, the (ni) reading for isn't listed as either on'yomi or kun'yomi, though, is it? The JA wikt entry at ja:日 doesn't include just (ni).
(I ask, because part of Chuck's initial concern had to do with how readings are categorized.) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 20:34, 25 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, that's true, it isn't listed as either. I wanted to bring this up for consistency across these readings, with the three ways of going about it (irregular, regular as sound-change, regular as direct reading). Nibiko (talk) 19:37, 28 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
Since 日 is read に only in 日本, it should be treated rather as an irregular reading. The sound change is reasonable but it doesn’t follow the regular sound rule of sino-japanese words. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 00:05, 29 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
I think it's a good idea. Re: "it doesn’t follow the regular sound rule of Sino-Japanese words". I invite you guys to take a look at the Wu (Shanghainese) pronunciation of , it's [ȵi̯ɪʔ¹²]. It's not the only case when Wu matches closer than other Chinese dialects the modern Japanese pronunciation, e.g. - [ȵɪɲ²³]. These Japanese readings must have been borrowed from a version of Middle Chinese from which Wu came.
How would you categorise/display readings like ひと (as opposed to ひとり) for in 独りぼっち (sorry Chuck, I have reverted your edit)? Or た reading (as opposed to たて) for in 建物. Various forms of okurigana usage makes the choice not straightforward. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 11:59, 29 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
Of course. That’s why they are called 呉音: is Wu. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 16:08, 1 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Nivkh к’узр

Are these sources good enough? ばかFumikotalk 09:05, 2 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

  • Hi, yes, I am satisfied that the term exists. However, for purposes of the RFV, the required threshold for limited-documentation languages (WT:LDL) like Nivkh is at least one quote, showing the term used in running text (i.e. not just in a dictionary, and not just where the term itself is mentioned or talked about), with the stated meaning. My own remaining question at this point is the spelling, since the one Nivkh dictionary I have access to (the one linked by Liliana earlier) includes the caron over the final р. I just commented over on the RFV thread. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 18:30, 2 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

2 problem users and a new entry

First of all, there's you know who(90.216.74.231 (talkcontribswhoisdeleted contribsnukeabuse filter logblockblock logactive blocksglobal blocks) I blocked him and reverted some of his edits, but I wasn't sure about a few of them. Then there's 75.134.129.118- definitely not a vandal, but I reverted most of his Japanese translations and left him a note about the difference between translations and transliterations. If you have time, you might want to look over my reverts and see if I overdid it on a few.

Finally, I created myoga, and put the kanji that I found at WWWJDIC in the etymology, though we have an entry at that suggests otherwise... sort of. I'd appreciate it if you could verify my Japanese (I'm not sure exactly why I put hiragana along with the romaji, but I did...), and maybe even add an entry for whichever Japanese spelling is correct (I won't say if you've got the time, because I know you don't). Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 00:07, 13 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

  • (I won't say if you've got the time, because I know you don't) -- Heh. Right on that count -- a big project at work is heating up, which is great because it means progress, but it also means that I have even less time. Mixed feelings about that.  :)
I'll have a look at myoga and the related entries, probably this weekend. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 06:05, 22 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Why no use of citations for etymologies and archaic readings not glossed as archaic in the reading section?

I saw the etymology provided for the Japanese word いのち and wonder what reference work that was derived from. The chi referred to in the いのち etymology is the Chinese word (chi) which would be in Chinese and not . It would make sense if ち was an ancient Japanese transliteration of the Chinese word () that was used in ancient Japan to form the word いのち, and then it later got associated with because of it's similar meaning. Is that what is supposed to have happened? To me this seems doubtful for some reasons, but I am wondering what your thoughts are on this (or just to know the reference work).

Shouldn't the etymologies and archaic readings be footnoted to the appropriate reference work (at least the ones that are ancient Japanese) or shouldn't they at least be labeled archaic? み is another reading given for which only appears as 名乗り in printed reference works I have access to, but I understand why it is there, given the etymology under . Incidentally, these readings (ち and み) are not shown under but only under . Shouldn't both pages contain the same information?

A couple more things I found curious... (1) Is there a Japanese reference work that can be cited to support the supposition that the Ainu word kamuy was derived from ancient Japanese, as suggested under the headword, kamuy. This seems doubtful to me for various reasons as well, but I am interested to hear your thoughts on this (or just to know the reference). I've noticed that the Japanese wiktionary page for kamuy says the same, but also gives no reference. I've seen kamuy written in Japanese as 神居 and 神威 which seems to go against what the etymology says under the headword Kamuy (or were 居 and 威 used for the emphatic particle, i). Also, (2) what is the point of rendering Ainu words with Japanese kana on English wiktionary pages? Is it because the majority of Ainu are in Japan where modern Ainu may learn to read and write that way as they assimilate Japanese culture? For indigenous people, like Native Americans, who never developed their own script, wouldn't it make more sense to just use Latin-based script? Isn't that a standard practice? I've noticed on Japanese wiktionary pages, they don't use kana to spell Ainu headwords, but it is understandable that they do use it to transcribe them into Japanese script on the page. As for English headwords, they don't use kana to spell them anywhere on the page, and that can be done just as easy (I have some older Japanese dictionaries that do this using a mixture of large and small kana in exactly the same way as has been done to represent Ainu words). I perused an old Ainu dictionary online in which kana had been used, but in his preamble, the linguist stated how using Japanese script was not his intention. Although he had been opposed to it, the Japanese was added because he had yielded to the will of Japanese friends who wanted to make it user friendly to Japanese. It therefore became an Ainu-Japanese-English dictionary. I'm interested to know your thoughts on this as well.

馬太阿房 (talk) 00:39, 20 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

  • Wow, that's a lot. I don't have a lot of time, so I will have to respond to your queries in stages.
Oh, and in future, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could edit your messages more comprehensively before clicking Save page -- I got thirty-odd email notifications, all about your post here, which was a bit of a nuisance.
Anyway, on to the answering part.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 07:07, 22 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

About Japanese chi

The chi in (inochi) is not the same as Chinese (). The modern Mandarin pronunciation is [t͡ɕʰi⁵¹], which is very close to the Japanese [t͡ɕi] pronunciation for this chi in (inochi). However, the modern Mandarin comes from an older Middle Chinese pronunciation of /khjɨjH/ replace H with ʜ, invalid IPA characters (H) -- this was the pronunciation when the term was borrowed into Japanese, and the modern Japanese on'yomi of /ki/ is from this older Chinese pronunciation.

The term chi appears to be very old within Japanese, and is most likely native. Consider also (chikara, strength, power, from chi “mystical power” + kara “inherent quality”), 大蛇 (Orochi, name of a mythical serpent; from o “ridge; hump?” + ro (possible particle) + chi “mystical power”), (ikazuchi, thunder, from ika “terrible, imposing” + tsu possessive particle + chi “mystical power”), or on its own as (chi, mystical power or force).

Remember that kanji spellings can be widely variant -- kanji are not native to Japanese, so which kanji get applied to which kun'yomi has historically been a fascinating and sometimes seemingly arbitrary process. Even now we see wide-ranging innovation, such as 騎士 (kishi, mounted warrior) instead being used with the reading naito borrowed from English knight. Looking at the Japanese root word chi, the base meaning appears to be something like “mystical inner power or essence”. From a certain perspective, blood also fits this meaning, as does milk, raising the distinct possibility that (chi, blood) and (chi, breastmilk) were originally the same word as this (chi, mystic power or essence), differentiated now by kanji spelling.

For sources, my dead-tree version of 国語大辞典(新装版) (Kokugo Dai Jiten, Revised Edition) provides a definition for chi spelled with the kanji that basically translates out to “mystical power or force”. You can also read more online (in Japanese) at the Kotobank entry for . Granted, our entry here at is in need of expansion and footnoting, as you point out.

I'll respond to your other paragraphs at a later date. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 07:07, 22 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Very interesting, Eirikr. Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions thoroughly. It's interesting to consider that Japanese had a native word meaning the same as the similar sounding Chinese word, but if I understand you correctly, that is just because of changes over time to the pronunciation of the Chinese word I thought the etymology of えのち was referring to. It looks like much of what I am asking can be answered by that Kotobank web site. Thanks for pointing me to that! I'll have to refer to that regularly from now on. Oh, and sorry about all the edits which resulted in flooding your inbox. I'll need to be more considerate about that in the future.馬太阿房 (talk) 01:23, 23 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
Another good resource aggregator site is Weblio: http://www.weblio.jp/ They also have a 古語辞典 accessible from that same page, which can be fun to poke around in. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 21:44, 29 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

About archaic readings and kyūjitai

Shouldn't the etymologies and archaic readings be footnoted to the appropriate reference work (at least the ones that are ancient Japanese) or shouldn't they at least be labeled archaic?

Ideally, yes, archaic readings should be marked as such. One of the challenges there is that Japanese references themselves often lack such detail.

About the discrepancies between and , the former is the 旧字体 (kyūjitai) or obsolete character form of the latter, which is the 新字体 (shinjitai) or new character form. I think these were mostly codified in the Japanese spelling reforms of the mid-to-late 1940s. For Wiktionary purposes, all kyūjitai entries should be stubs pointing to the shinjitai entries, and all of the meaty details should be in the shinjitai entries. If you run into cases where the kyūjitai entry is more than just a stub, please move the details to the lemma entry (the shinjitai form) and stubbify the kyūjitai one. I think the current standard is to use {{alternative form of}} on the definition line. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 21:41, 29 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for clarifying that the kyūjitai entries should be treated as stubs pointing to the shinjitai entries. Now that I think of it that way, it makes more sense than duplicating information needlessly, and it moreover points those who don't know any better to the modern form where the full information can be found. So, I'll not worry about the discrepancies in readings between the old and new forms, and will do as you suggest and use {{alternative form of X}} on the definition line in the Japanese section of the kyūjitai entry pages. 馬太阿房 (talk) 20:30, 30 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

人材 vs. 人才

While checking to see if I should create Category:Japanese terms spelled with 才 read as ざい‏‎, I discovered that User:Tooironic had moved 人材 to 人才 and replaced it with a soft redirect to 人才, but without making any changes to the Japanese section or to the Japanese pages that linked to it. Out of an abundance of caution, I moved the Japanese content back to 人材 until I could get a Japanese editor to look at it. The two spellings do seem to be variants in Japanese as well as in Chinese, but subtle things like differences in the readings between and led me to the conclusion that the Japanese section shouldn't have been moved without a Japanese editor checking for and fixing any side-effects from the move. I don't know enough to judge which entry should house the Japanese content, so I won't mind if you undo what I did- just check it and make any changes you feel necessary. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 02:45, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Both are variants of both Chinese and Japanese. The Chinese lean more on using 人才 (mainland China) and Taiwanese on 人材 (it's also Min Nan). Japanese dictionaries use mainly 人材 and "人才" is referred to as "same as 人材". Korean dictionaries use hanja 人材 for hangeul 인재. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 09:43, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
Some dictionaries only use one spelling (which is no suprise). So I could find the pronunciation of 人材/人才 only using 人材 in NHK dictionary of pronunciation. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 09:48, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
Note that is quite often used in Japanese in place of a more complicated character , Chinese doesn't have this sense, it has a different simplified character: (suì) (and a different traditional). The meaning of [材]] is more obvious to me - wood radical (meaning "aptitude" here) + cai (phonetic). --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 09:55, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
In Japanese 人材 is considered standard: [13], [14]. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 03:35, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
Yes, that was what I meant, if it wasn't clear. 人才 is also acceptable, marked with 「人材」に同じ (i.e. same as "人材"). --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 13:07, 28 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

bogus etymologies

Eiríkr, speaking of bogus etymologies (continuing a discussion begun on my discussion page), see Etymologies 2, 4 and 5 in the Japanese section for the entry 上下, which are Sino-Japanese words. I think I had inappropriately patterned a couple of entries I had made after samples like this, which, as you pointed out, lead one to believe that the word was coined in Japan. Thought you would probably want these brought to your attention so that you could fix them. 馬太阿房 (talk) 01:50, 18 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Wow!! Very nicely done! It's entries like this which make wiktionary great. I'll let you know if I see others like that.馬太阿房 (talk) 17:18, 22 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Special:Contributions/202.94.136.55

Is this the same person as the untrustworthy anon that you recently blocked? —suzukaze (tc) 22:11, 29 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Possibly. However, although their wording is a bit odd, their content seems to be less wholly incorrect than the 110 anon. That said, I'll keep a close eye on them. Thank you! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 04:29, 30 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
Special:Contributions/124.35.40.222? —suzukaze (tc) 02:52, 20 December 2015 (UTC)Reply

Talk:host_country

>If someone is so clueless about English that they cannot string together words, then a dictionary is not the resource they need.

So, which resource do they need? --Romanophile (talk) 03:14, 31 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Talk:mote#Etymology

Thank you for your edit; I have adjusted my etymology connections accordingly; but have included the etymology of MAD here, as from the origin of the Old English word being connected with MAIDIJANAi, because it is just ludicrous. The root of MAD does not seem to be related to Greek METHU (wine, any strong drink) at all. The analogy with 'cripple' is way out here; because there is no semantic evidence with the Gothic word that certainly derives from the second Germanic root. Andrew H. Gray 19:25, 21 September 2015 (UTC)Andrew

From the etymologies given, there is no evidence of any connection; but the idea that I read as to Wiktionary's policy is not to just compare what a certain dictionary presents for two related/unrelated words, but to be able to pioneer origins based upon the rules bearing upon etymological paths and the Sounds Laws, being essential. The first Germanic root is totally logical! The Irish AMAD, however, has also been presented in Ogilvie's dictionary, but that is in 1870. Pre-20th century dictionaries are, on the whole, not reliable enough for Wiktionary's contributions. There really needs to be an intermediate meaning connection for users to accept any analogy between the meaning of 'mad' and that of an unattested root or meaning of 'cripple'. Andrew H. Gray 20:11, 21 September 2015 (UTC)Andrew
  • Even just working from sound changes, it is hard to see how Old English gemād could be derived from the same root as Old English medu. If you can find a watertight explanation, more power to you.
FWIW, Irish amadán appears to derive ultimately from Old Irish ammait (supernaturally powerful woman, witch; foolish woman). Wiktionary itself doesn't show any further derivation of the (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Old Irish term, but so far, there's no mention of drunk or related senses. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 20:42, 21 September 2015 (UTC)Reply
This site suggests that Old Irish ammait is cognate with Latin amita (paternal aunt), source of English aunt. This other document appears to corroborate this derivation. I'm not sure of the scholarly value of either web page, however. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 21:30, 21 September 2015 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for all your research on this; I really appreciate it. Currently, I cannot remember nor find the source of the connection between the origin of 'mad' and 'being drunk', so shall condemn that idea to a figment of the imagination for now. However, I should need to be in full-time employment if you wanted me to buy a copy of your talk page! It is probably the task of a Celtic etymology genius to trace the Old Irish word back to its real origin. Andrew H. Gray 22:01, 21 September 2015 (UTC)Andrew

Previous edits and info regarding

You added the "tra=姬" data to the separate Cantonese and Mandarin sections a while ago but it appears that this isn't quite accurate. It looks like the character is simply the Japanese shinjitai variant of and is not used in China. It's probably partially my fault by having added the Cantonese section in the first place (adding to the confusion). Cheers! Bumm13 (talk) 16:10, 26 October 2015 (UTC)Reply

電子

Something's wrong with the last of the terms in the "Compounds" collapsible box, resulting in a module error. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:06, 17 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Fixed. Wyang (talk) 04:13, 17 November 2015 (UTC)Reply
Thank you both. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 06:13, 17 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Taíno language

Hi, Eirikr. On Wikipedia, on Talk:Taíno language, you wrote:

Renard, I appreciate that you're trying to make a point, but this is trolling, and unhelpful.
For others, please refer to the ongoing discussion at Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2015/January#Ta.C3.ADno_vs_Taino. User Victar makes essentially the opposite point there, that most academic papers written in English use the spelling Taíno, with the accented í.

Unfortunately, there's no such section at Wiktionary as Beer_parlour/2015/January#Ta.C3.ADno_vs_Taino, and I haven't been able to reconstruct whatever address you might have meant. -- Thnidu (talk) 00:06, 23 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Actually, there is: in the link above, the "í" in "Taíno" has been encoded for html as two bytes of hexadecimal. The system treats Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2015/January#Ta.C3.ADno_vs_Taino and Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2015/January#Taíno_vs_Taino as the same thing, converting both to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2015/January#Ta.C3.ADno_vs_Taino. In fact, if you click on the link in Eirikr's text (or on any of the three links in my post), it will take you to the correct section. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:25, 23 November 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • @Thnidu, I realized that the issue was a missing wikt: prefix in the link on the Wikipedia page. I have since fixed that.
@Chuck, thank you for chiming in.  :)
‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 18:40, 23 November 2015 (UTC)Reply
@Eirikr Thanks for the fix. @Chuck Entz Thanks. For whatever reason, though, my smartphone was failing to find it. I'm on laptop now, and hope that our host's prefix-fix has fixed it completely. --Thnidu (talk) 19:35, 24 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Ainu

Hello, thank you for your corrections on オウペカ. I derived the small Kana from a section in the Ainu language article. — Ivadon (talk) 10:32, 4 December 2015 (UTC)Reply

I note that the second link doesn't consistently use the small kana specific to Ainu spellings, rendering that a less-than-wholly-useful reference. However, the former link does seem to use the small kana, including small-ゥ to spell トゥ tu, suggesting that the lack of small-ゥ to spell owpeka is a deliberate choice. But then again, Ainu orthography is somewhat ... unsettled, and regarding the page move, as my wife often tells me, I reserve the right to be wrong.  :)
If folks can find any evidence of the small-ゥ spelling, we should certainly have such an entry. I just couldn't find any sign that this spelling gets any actual use out in the wild. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 18:12, 4 December 2015 (UTC)Reply

ぐわいでん

Hi Eiríkr. Could you take a look at ぐわいでん for my idea of how to format historical-hiragana entries, please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:51, 12 December 2015 (UTC)Reply

Heya. In general, that looks pretty good. One serious issue, though -- the automatic romanization code will need a new mode for historical spellings. These did not use small kana, so single-mora 拗音 (yōon, palatalized or labialized vowel, literally bent sound), like gwa or myo, were spelled with two full-sized kana, as ぐわ and みよ respectively. I haven't done enough research into historical kana spellings to know if any [KANA] + [Y- or W- KANA] combination was always a 拗音; if it is, then this should be relatively easy to code for, but if it isn't, then things get complicated. Either way, the current automatic romanization doesn't work for historical spellings with 拗音. For the specific example at ぐわいでん, the romanization should be gwaiden (gwaiden) instead, without the u after the g.
@Wyang, @Anatoli, @Keφr, @Shinji, do any of you know more about historical spellings and how to rework the romanization code for these? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 20:21, 12 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for pinging but I don't think I can help here. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 06:19, 13 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
ぐわ may be guwa or gwa. You cannot decide which without knowing the word. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 12:53, 15 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
@Eiríkr Útlendi, Anatoli, Shinji: I might be being simplistic, but would simply moving this entry to ぐゎいでん (gwaiden) not solve this problem? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:52, 15 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • @Shinji, thank you for confirming. It sounds like we'll need to override the automatic romanization in these cases.
  • @I.S.M.E.T.A., The small kana are a relatively modern innovation to avoid exactly this ambiguity.
But that's also the rub -- they're relatively modern, only used consistently since the mid-20th century, and thus they are not, strictly speaking, the historical kana spellings.
Given the ambiguity in the spelling, the best way forward that I can see is to 1) use the regular-sized kana, since those are what were actually used historically, and 2) simply supply the romanization manually with the rom= template parameter.
‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 17:08, 15 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
When did the わ/ゐ/ゑ/を yōon become obsolete? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:22, 16 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • The various /w-/ varieties of yōon only appeared in borrowings from Chinese. These are called 合拗音 (gō yōon) in Japanese. See ja:w:拗音#合拗音 for more details. In a nutshell, the /wa/ yōon after /k-/ and /g-/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g) became obsolete only relatively recently, in the Edo and Meiji periods, and some dialects might still have these. The other /w-/ yōon disappeared earlier, possibly as early as the later Muromachi period, but I haven't seen anything yet to pin this down.
For more detail about the 捨て仮名 (sutegana, the little kana used to spell the non-moraic vowel in modern yōon), see ja:w:捨て仮名#歴史. These only became standard starting from around WWII.
‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 20:01, 16 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
I see this situation with the sutegana as relevantly analogous with the development of the letter-casing distinction in the Latin and Greek scripts. Consider this first-century Roman mosaic and this copy of a fourth-century bust. The characters actually used in the mosaic read ΓΝꞶϴΙ·ϹΑΥΤΟΝ, but we'd still give the words entries under the headwords γνῶθι (gnôthi) and σαυτόν (sautón), and the closest I can get to representing the characters on the bust stroke-for-stroke is with ΠΕΡΙΑΝΔΡΟΣ ΚϒΨΕΛΟΥ ΚΟΡΙΝΘΙΟΣ, but those three words' entries would be listed under the headwords Περίανδρος (Períandros), Κυψέλου (Kupsélou), and Κορίνθιος (Korínthios); in both those cases, we disregard the fact that only the ALLCAPS forms actually occurred, since the different uses of the two letter cases were merged into the upper case because the distinction had not yet developed. From what you describe, it sounds as if the sutegana simply had not developed as distinct kana from their normal-sized counterparts by the time that the gō yōon became obsolete in standard Japanese. Therefore, in the same way that we make use of the letter-casing distinction in Ancient Greek and Classical Latin entries, I believe we should use sutegana in Japanese historical hiragana (and katakana) readings. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:50, 22 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • One key, and very serious, difference is that different capitalization has never indicated differences in phonetic values. However, large kana versus sutegana do indicate different phonetic values in modern Japanese, and the large kana can indicate multiple phonetic values historically, depending on context.
In addition, many monolingual Japanese sources only list historical spellings in all-large-kana. Users are less likely to encounter the sutegana spellings, even in dictionaries. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 04:26, 22 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
Perhaps the situation is more closely analogous with the application of the I–J and/or U–V distinction to Latin-script texts from the Mediaeval period or earlier, even though neither of those distinctions really started to develop until the Renaissance. What is the purpose of Unicode's encoding of separate codepoints for the and sutegana, if not this? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:55, 26 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • Apologies for the delay in replying.
The Latin-alphabet historical shifts in the I-J and U-V distinction do seem like a somewhat closer analogue, but I'm not sure if they speak much to historical yōon spellings in Japanese: for instance, equus only ever indicates the one term, and is unambiguous even when spelled as eqvvs or mixed eqvus; meanwhile, the historical Japanese kana spellings are often inherently ambiguous, and could indicate multiple terms depending on whether they are read as full-value non-yōon phonetic values, or as digraph yōon values. One quick example is くわいし. Read with the full phonetic values, this would indicate 桑石 (kuwaishi, kun'yomi, a stone with a grain pattern similar to mulberry wood, compound of kuwa “mulberry” + ishi “stone”), but read as a yōon, with くわ instead serving as a digraph for kwa, this would instead indicate any of several other on'yomi compounds, including 会誌 (kwaishi, historical, modern kaishi, company magazine), 怪死 (kwaishi, historical, modern kaishi, mysterious death), 回視 (kwaishi, historical, modern kaishi, recollection; looking around), etc.
Sutegana are a modern invention, and their inclusion in Unicode is part of modern character encoding standards. Historical spellings, as they appear in historical records, and indeed as they are given even in many modern resources that provide historical spellings, do not use sutegana. Shogakukan's Kokugo Dai Jiten does use sutegana when showing historical readings, but Daijirin, Daijisen, and Shinmeikai do not.
I would be open to the idea of including both, as the small-kana spellings more clearly indicate the yōon and thus make the readings unambiguous -- and the big-kana spellings and romaji could both be derived programmatically from the small-kana spellings. That said, I'm not sure of the best means of including all of this information without making things too cluttered. Perhaps have the historical hiragana data on a separate line, that appears collapsed by default (similar to derived terms)? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 01:07, 12 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
Re the delay, I apologise for my being guilty of the same.
Well, there's Māius (L&S) and mājus (L&S), which mean “[of] May” and “great”, respectively, but which would've both been spelt maivs in Roman square capitals. Despite the orthographic ambiguities of source texts (with regard to letter-casing and the I–J distinction), L&S and we still determine page titles according to grammatical and phonetic considerations; those two words don't both come under MAIVS (or whatever). Perhaps Shogakukan's Kokugo Dai Jiten determine their historical readings according to such grammatical and phonetic considerations, too; but even if they don't, I still believe that we should.
"Sutegana are a modern invention, and their inclusion in Unicode is part of modern character encoding standards." doesn't apply to and , because "the /wa/ yōon after /k-/ and /g-/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g) became obsolete only relatively recently, in the Edo and Meiji periods" (as you wrote above in your post timestamped: 20:01, 16 December 2015), so and couldn't have application in contemporary Japanese, because the phonetic phenomenon they represent became extinct before sutegana were invented. (Unless, of course, you're right that "some dialects might still have these", but we'd need proof, not only of that, but also that those dialects use and/or for yōon in their writings.)
Re including both, I would recommend showing only the historical-hiragana reading that includes sutegana in the headword line; in the same way that the headword line does not include the Rōmaji reading of the historical-hiragana reading, neither should it include a non-primary historical-hiragana reading (i.e., one that eschews sutegana). If we have both historical-hiragana readings, that is; I can see the merit of having both, though I'm not hugely enthusiastic for it.
I recognise that I'm rather peripheral to the Japanese editing community, so if you think I speak out of turn, please say so and I'll butt out. :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:22, 31 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Leaving aside that contentious issue, what else do you make of the presentation of ぐわいでん (​gwaiden)? If everything else is OK with it, should we make {{lb|ja|historical hiragana}} autocategorise into Category:Japanese historical hiragana? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:26, 24 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

I'm sorry to have annoyed you with this issue. I'll drop it now. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:38, 18 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

  • Heya, no annoyance on my part -- this just fell off my radar.  :)
Aside from the sutegana issue, the ぐわいでん entry looks mostly good. The romaji string needs a tweak, and we probably want to create a new category for historical spellings -- with relevant logic added to the {{lb}} infrastructure. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 21:54, 18 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

Special:Contributions/ВМНС

@Aryamanarora, Wyang: This Russian user has been creating a lot of Pali stubs, so this is a good place to look for entries that need cleanup. Somebody should tell him about how to format Pali entries here in case he enters more, but I don't have any languages in common with him, so I haven't tried. If any of you can manage it, that would probably be a good idea. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 02:48, 2 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

Yep, I saw his entry at khīra earlier. ruwikt is ahead of enwikt in Pali. —Aryamanarora (मुझसे बात करो) 02:50, 2 January 2016 (UTC)Reply


Rune etymology

Thanks for your recent edit on my talk page. You may be interested in this discussion on runes too. FYI, some Polish sources claim the word runes comes from digging, and in Polish we have rycina, ryt, ryj that may share the PIE root (as well as the meaning). Zezen (talk) 08:50, 11 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

中(じゅう)?

Is じゅう a normal on-reading of 中? The Readings section that doesn't mention じゅう and usage notes that mention じゅう at make it unclear to me. —suzukaze (tc) 09:39, 17 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

Addendum: While this reading would never be used in isolation or at the start of a word, it appears that it has taken on an idiomatic sense. See also partway down the page here at Weblio: http://www.weblio.jp/content/じゅう. Perhaps this should be treated as a kan'yōyomi, derived from the rendaku? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 10:10, 17 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
Hmmm, are there any authorities that classify readings? —suzukaze (tc) 10:29, 17 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

:)

I appreciate your support and wish we had more overlap in this project during which we could collaborate. —JohnC5 07:15, 31 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

Category:Japanese terms spelled with 心 read as ごこ

Should this category exist? It seems like the terms in there are derived from Lua error in Module:ja-ruby at line 628: Can not match " 地" and "ここち". —suzukaze (tc) 08:10, 31 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

Special:Contributions/90.12.49.204

This IP is pretty knowledgeable, but has a definite POV. We've had a constant battle with them over adding unattested Gothic terms, for instance. Could you look at their Japanese edits, including the translations, such as at farewell? Chuck Entz (talk) 14:04, 8 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Re:The etymology of tempura

User Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV has just introduced new meanings for Portuguese Template:l/en, including that of "Ember days" (the Roman Catholic holidays). The connection between "fried food" and the said holidays, discussed here, was already explained in the etymology I wrote on my edits to replace the previous one. The idea that tempura comes from tempero/temperar (and declined forms) is a widespread popular belief, but Houaiss, a prestigious Portuguese language dictionary, notes that this etymology is unlikely. Then it is more expected, but not certain, that tempura comes from têmpora. Perhaps we should include both etymologies? - Alumnum (talk) 00:45, 16 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

  • Thank you, excellent additional information. Re: têmpora, is that strictly fasting, as in eating no food at all? Or was it more the common Catholic practice of avoiding red meat, and eating fish instead (often fried)? If the latter, the Portuguese entry could probably be clarified a bit.
Re: 天麩羅 and related entries, the tempera origin is so widely mentioned in Japanese, it makes me wonder if there might have been some kind of confusion early on among Japanese speakers, conflating the two Portuguese terms. I suspect we should probably mention both potential origins, with a note that têmpora is phonologically a better match.
(Also, I see that the cooking blog talks about Spanish origins -- but the Spanish were much less active in Japan than the Portuguese. I'm inclined to view the blog poster's text as mistaken.)
Thanks again for your help researching this. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 01:07, 16 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Well, neither the blog text nor the entry I wrote imply that this Catholic practice consisted in eating no kind of food:
"But during the 40-day period of Lent (in Latin called quadragesima tempora), Japanese Christians had to give up eating meat. Instead they ate fried vegetables and seafood. And it's from that Latin phrase, referring to the Lenten period, that the dish got the name of tempura". [15]
"When Portuguese navigators [and missionaries] arrived in Japan, they abstained from eating beef, pork and poultry during the Ember days. Instead, they ate fried vegetables and fish". [16]
It seems the practice was introduced by European missionaries (chiefly the Portuguese, but also in significantly smaller number, the Spanish) and continued by the Christianized Japanese until the following strictly isolationist period, which expelled missionaries and banned almost all Western presence and influence in Japan. Therefore, it is also cogitable an origin from Spanish or even Latin, as the missionaries spoke the latter during their prayers and liturgy. (Anyway, têmpora undoubtedly comes from Latin tempora, then at least an indirect origin is deserved).
I came up with the notion that the tempera origin was probably wrong, but now I think that your suggestion that the Japanese mixed and confused the terms is more reasonable. It is still possible that they came from one, the other, or both origins. - Alumnum (talk) 02:51, 16 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Ah, apologies for any confusion -- I did not mean that you yourself or the blog had implied that the Catholic practice involved eating no food at all. I mean instead that the Portuguese têmpora entry states mainly just a day of fasting, with no mention of meat or fish or fried foods. I think that should be clarified, if we are to point to the têmpora entry in reference to the Catholic practice of eating non-meat dishes.
Past there, the Catholic and ultimate Latin origins strike me as quite likely, in combination with an apparent conflation with tempera. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 06:50, 16 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Agreed. - Alumnum (talk) 15:10, 16 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

There's a module error hidden inside a Derived terms box in Etymology 1. {{ja-r}} doesn't like the text you gave it. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:17, 18 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Japanese pronunciation of 日本

Hello. Concerning your edit, I have some comment. As far as I know, the original pronunciation of 日 is /nit/ without a final vowel even in Japanese because the Japanese tried to pronounce Sino-Japanese words in the Chinese way. I doubt the existence of the /nitipoɴ/ stage. See w:ja:中世日本語#音節の構成. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 00:31, 19 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

  • @Shinji -- I agree that /nitihon/ likely never existed. Thank you for commenting, as I didn't realize that the etymology, as it is currently written, implies the existence of this reading -- that was unintended.
There is the term 連濁 for compounds that produce nasalization. Is there a similar term for compounds that produce geminization instead? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 02:31, 19 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

{{ja-pron}}

There's still some problems with this template, particularly as shown here. Could you fix them? ばかFumikotalk 08:14, 3 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

P/s: Also, in this case I had to add an unwanted space to make it work. ばかFumikotalk 08:20, 3 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Kc_kennylau Could you please take a look at this case? Some part of the code was not referenced properly after your edits, for example the parameter mora_pos. Thanks! Wyang (talk) 11:33, 5 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Wyang: I didn't even touch mora_pos. --kc_kennylau (talk) 12:24, 5 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
Oops sorry mate, for some reason I missed the first instance of mora_pos. Wyang (talk) 12:43, 5 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Wyang, Eirikr: Would be so much better if you guys would point out the problem instead of having me find it myself. --kc_kennylau (talk) 11:42, 5 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
My guess would be that the mora count was not working (j/u). Wyang (talk) 12:16, 5 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Wyang It wasn't and and still isn't, particularly on katakana. Here's another example of this error; as you can see it's the second more pu that is supposed to be encircled, not the small kana ya. The mora count seems to work well on hiragana though. Could you make thorough fix? ばかFumikotalk 02:49, 9 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
I thought we were using kana, not morae. I've changed it to dev=3, which shows the right info now but change it back if the count will work differently.--Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 03:09, 9 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
Oh, so the acc parameter uses the number of the mora, but the dev paramter uses the number of the kana. Well that's kinda confusing. ばかFumikotalk 03:21, 9 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
In the doco it says: "Position of kana with devoiced vowel in the input kana string (not counting spaces)." --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 03:32, 9 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

水銀

You left a module error in the derived terms section of Etymology 1. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:40, 9 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

Examples at 旦那, オハイオ州

旦那

Arbeit is not English, I know that; I just wanted to add a little bit of a German taste since the heroine is German. Anyway, if "lack of punctuation makes for a terrible example", does that mean I can't take quotes from manga, cuz many manga don't use periods or commas for most of the time? ばかFumikotalk 04:36, 25 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

  • Long passages without punctuation are difficult to read in running English text, and as such, they are not optimal illustrations of term use. A quick search of Google Books provides plenty of examples that are better suited to a text-only environment. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 06:35, 25 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

オハイオ州

I'm sure your Japanese is superb, but are you sure you know what you did at オハイオ州? Did you really read the manga and know exactly the context? I for one despise literal translation and always go with something more natural-sounding (which may not be exactly correct word by word), and even though I've read the manga, I don't understand what you meant with "What's up with you.". I'd like to know what you had in mind. ばかFumikotalk 04:55, 25 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

  • As presented on the entry, this appears to be a dialog between two people. The last quote then would be the same person who started the dialog, the one who already knows how to say "Ohio". As you'd previously translated, So dat's how ya say it, it sounded more like the "dumb" person than the "smart" one explaining the word. What's up with you is the kind of thing the "smart" one would say in a two-person manzai-esque routine in English, such as Laurel and Hardy, or Abbott and Costello.
That said, it appears that I confused you about as much as you confused me, suggesting that this whole example text should probably be either simplified or replaced. I've trimmed it for now to just the bit showing use of the headword term. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 06:35, 25 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
"it sounded more like the "dumb" person" - Exactly the point of that conversation. After a few failed attempts at pronouncing the English name, he just goes with "Ohayo". He's not some sort of smart ass or anything, he's a funny man (and a little "dumb" of course) and his confusion is the whole point of the chapter. Anyway, I'd rather you removed it entirely than leave one out-of-place line like that. ばかFumikotalk 11:27, 25 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Interesting. If that last line was the "dumb" person again, it would have been clearer without the additional break -- so that the なーんちゃって would be on the same line as the preceding おはよ?. In any two-person dialog, breaks like that generally mean a switch to the other person.
And regarding quotes, the point is to show the headword term in use, and in that regard, the single line was not out of place. But this term is straightforward enough that there's no strong need for a quote or usage example. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 18:27, 25 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
Keep in mind that a conversation doesn't necessarily happen between two people. I said it's out of place because, come on, what would it "illustrate" on its own. ばかFumikotalk 05:05, 26 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

It's chiisana, not chīsana

Need proof? Here's some (I suppose we're using Hepburn, aren't we?). More proof? Just look for ちいさな in the Kenkyusha's dictionary. ばかFumikotalk 12:35, 28 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

Okay, I just read an earlier discussion. Basically you guys are making rules that you're pleased with, rather than follow a standard. Whatever, I guess. ばかFumikotalk 12:45, 28 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • If, in future, another long-standing editor makes a change that you don't understand, please ask before assuming incompetence. Chances are high that there's a good reason for the change.
And we are following a standard. It just happens to be a different standard than the one you're apparently used to. Modified Hepburn romanization itself is "made-up rules", and rather inconsistently made-up rules at that. After discussion here, we came to a consensus view that using macrons for all single-morpheme long vowels except i didn't make a lot of sense, so we opted to be more consistent and less idiosyncratic than Modified Hepburn. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 19:01, 28 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
Got it. It was baffling to me also, cuz I couldn't believe you of all people would have made such a simple mistake, which is why I then searched for related discussions on that. Not that I'm opposed to ī or anything, cuz I agree that making ii an exception doesn't make sense. ばかFumikotalk 03:23, 30 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

Conjugation of verbs with する in page title

Is there anything one can do about pages like お辞儀をする? {{ja-suru|お辞儀を|おじぎを|ojigi o}} produces a monstrous "お辞儀をするする". —suzukaze (tc) 05:31, 29 April 2016 (UTC)Reply

  • I'm not sure that page even merits existence -- 辞儀 is a noun and a する verb, and the お on front is just your basic honorific. The interstitial を shows that this is a phrase and not a verb, and given the semantics, and the fact that this is not idiomatic, not lexicalized, this is thus an SOP construction. I'd say delete, and ensure that the 辞儀 entry is correct and complete. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 06:11, 29 April 2016 (UTC)Reply
I agree. But even so, there are other entries like 気がする (ki ga suru) and 目にする (me ni suru). 気にする (ki ni suru) seems to have the table as plain wikicode but this seems unsatisfactory to me. —suzukaze (tc) 06:32, 29 April 2016 (UTC)Reply

Browsers and accelerator keys

Continuing from WT:GP:

  • Yeah, Ctrl+W closes the current tab (or the entire app if only one tab is left, unlike the traditional MDI app, which would remain open with an empty workspace). Ctrl+Shift+W closes the whole thing, so is redundant to Alt+F4, and still accidentally hittable, especially if you're messing about with tabs at high speed. (I also use Ctrl+(Shift+)F4 a lot to flip around and revisit and close tabs, so that's probably where I slip up.)
  • It's a while since I did proper Windows development but I am pretty certain that Ctrl+Q was never a standard quit/close key.
  • Ctrl+R will reload the current page and wipe any form data. Alt+O doesn't seem to. When I press Alt+E it opens the standard Chrome menu (no doubt because of users who remember the shortcut for the Edit menu). Ctrl+E sets focus to the address bar (weird! why?).

Equinox 01:06, 5 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

  • Ctrl+E for me sets focus to the address bar, with a single ? to the left of the cursor. Quite odd indeed. In Firefox, it sets the focus to the separate Search text field, so perhaps this is just Chrome's analog for that behavior.
You probably already know this one, but just in case -- Ctrl+Shift+T re-opens the last-closed browser tab. That one's been a godsend for me.  :)
With your testing results, I'm left puzzled as to what combo has caused the reload. I know about F5, and that's far enough away from normally typed keys that I have trouble imagining that I'm hitting that one by accident. Ah, well. Thanks to Yair's snippet, I've disabled these accelerators anyway, so I'm spared the frustration of vanishing editor-box content. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 01:20, 5 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
I found something about Ctrl+E here [17]. It seems to be "forcing a search" (not an in-page find!): I suppose this might be useful if you want to search for (say) the word "dog", without getting history suggestions for a previously visited site dog.com, or something? I'm too old... Equinox 01:45, 5 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

megszámlál

Hi Eirikr, the verbal prefix meg- indicates perfective action in most of the cases. Since there are so many meg- verbs, it makes more sense to have the information at the verbal prefix entry. For example:

  • számlálom a pénzt - I am counting the money (indicates the process, but not necessarily the completion)
  • számláltam a pénzt - I was counting the money
  • megszámlálom a pénzt - I count the money/I will count the money (indicates that the action will be completed)
  • megszámláltam a pénzt - I'd counted the money (I completed the action)

Let me know if this answered your question. --Panda10 (talk) 16:33, 10 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

I will work more on the definition. Take a look at this blog entry. It talks about verbal prefixes, including meg-: Hungarian Grammar for Beginners. --Panda10 (talk) 21:18, 13 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

バイオリン

I won't argue with you about how "clearly common" it is. I just wanna say I was tryna be consistent as ヴァイオリン is the name of the Wikipedia article page. ばかFumikotalk 04:00, 12 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

  • Wikipedia is happy to use neologisms in a way that we aren't. Wiktionary lemma forms thus not uncommonly deviate from Wikipedia page titles. A quick Google search of the entire web quickly shows which form is more common:
‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 04:12, 12 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

ピアノ ‎

I'm confused now. So now Kokugo Dai Jiten is not enough for you? ばかFumikotalk 04:20, 12 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

盲目

Module errors hidden by the Derived terms box. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:50, 22 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

Fixed. —suzukaze (tc) 04:22, 22 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

Wasei eigo template

I made it so the template doesn’t need to have a sort parameter (like when there is a {{DEFAULTSORT}} on the page. That’s why I changed the documentation. —britannic124 (talk) 23:06, 12 July 2016 (UTC)Reply

  • Aha, that's now more clear, thank you! However, {{DEFAULTSORT}} can only safely be used on pages that have non-kanji elements to the spelling -- kanji-only terms could also have Chinese etc., and {{DEFAULTSORT}} would screw those up. Perhaps you could rework the documentation to explain that? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 23:09, 12 July 2016 (UTC)Reply

I'm wanting to talk about refferences

Hello, I'm IP user blocked and reverted by you because had original reserch on etymology. Please allow my awkwardness of English because I'm not native speaker, and ask you a question. Are requirements for secondary sources wanted to write a hypothesys in this wiki, same as Wikipedia's? Then I know some sources for some of written by me.--荒巻モロゾフ (talk) 19:47, 18 July 2016 (UTC)Reply

  • @荒巻モロゾフ I apologize for the inconvenience of blocking you. Please understand that Wiktionary has much fewer editors than Wikipedia, making it much more difficult to respond to edits that appear doubtful.
Thank you for writing here, and for creating an account. Communication is much easier with named accounts.
Regarding etymologies, sources can help. One additional consideration is how mainstream a theory is. I could say that Japanese 外人 (gaijin, foreigner) is possibly cognate with Hebrew גּוֹיִים (goyim, non-Jew), but this is not a mainstream theory, and thus other editors would be correct to remove such content.
I noticed that you added a link to James Patrie's paper on "The Genetic Relationship of the Ainu Language". I am now reading through that paper. I have run into a number of troubling issues with the paper; please see here for a discussion of some of them. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 16:54, 21 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
PS: I wrote this last night, but I forgot to hit Save page -- apologies for the delay in replying. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 16:54, 21 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
Thank a lot for your reply. Don't mind for the forgetting to save(セーブミスなら仕方ないですよ). Relativeness of Goyim and Gaijin is nice joke. NYEH HEH HEH :)
About the words you written on User talk:Wyang, I'll try to find reliable souces as far as possible. If there aren't any sources writen or reviewed by the experts I found, then I can't write anything on the word's page, because of becoming original reserch to be forbidden.(可能な限り語源に関する説のソースを探しますが、見つけられない場合は独自研究なのでその単語については何もしないつもりです。)
And I understand your critique to Tyrone, 1978. IMO through there are some fallacies included, that doesn't mean always that all contents of the thesis are wrong. At least in the comparison of numerals in Ainu and Korean I refferred, there are 4 pairs of numerals in both language have correspondence in their places of articulation of consonants. (because 6-9 in Ainu are formed by the "subtraction method(減数法)", only 1-5 are virtually conparable) Being so hard to be a coincidence, I supposed to Ainu-Koreanic ethmological theory in numerals is at least worth introducing as an linguist's opinion. In addition, I found an another study about proximity between Ainu and Korean: [18] According to this reserch by Yasumoto, 1978, between Horobetsu dialect of Ainu and Middle Korean is closer than between both of them and Old Japanese. If they allow to write about etymological relationships between Japanese and Korean (plus Goguryeo and Baekje), also between Ainu and Korean is includible, isn't it?(日本語と朝鮮語(加えて高句麗語と百済語)の間の語源関係に関する説をこのウィキに記すことが許されるならそれよりも近いという研究のあるアイヌ語と朝鮮語の間に関しても記すべきです。)--荒巻モロゾフ (talk) 20:50, 21 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Oo, very interesting.
One thought -- there is a lot of research into Japanese, Korean, and Ainu origins, but there is not a lot of consensus. Consequently, it can be difficult to find a theory that is mainstream enough to put on the main entry page. Perhaps we could use the Talk page for each entry as a place to put some of this research, and as we get more authors that agree with each other, we can "graduate" a theory to the main entry page? What do you think? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 22:33, 21 July 2016 (UTC)Reply
That's great idea! To gather published theories in wiktionary pages, users can find etymological hypotheses about the word conviniently.(既存の仮説を一つのページにまとめておけるのなら調べる側として非常に便利になります。) Only because it's not Wiktionary's business to decide what is the true theory and the false if there are multiple theories.(注意したいのはどの説が真実かの軍配を上げる場所ではないということ。) I supposed to avoid stating of support specific viewpoints (e.g. "existence of Altaic language family", "one-sided propagation of the words" and "Argument of that Japanese is came from amalgamation of Altaic and Austronesian"). (特定の説(例えば「アルタイ語族の実在」「一方的な単語の伝播」「日本語はアルタイと南島のアマルガムだという主張」など)を支持する書き方は避けなければなりません。) Etymologial relationships between East Asian Languages are far more complicated than what researchers used to thought about.(実際の東アジア言語間の語源関係はかつて思われていたよりもずっと複雑です。) It's probably better way for NPOV to list the theories and leave judgments to them, to the readers.(諸説あればそれを書き連ね、判断は読者に任せるのが中立的な観点によいとおもいます。)
Well, do you know Sergei Starostin's databases?: [19] About Altaic theory, this will help us much.--荒巻モロゾフ (talk) 19:22, 24 July 2016 (UTC)Reply

頂きます usage notes

{{ja-r}} is only meant to be used in lists, isn’t it? —britannic124 (talk) 14:24, 17 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

  • @britannic124 -- I'm not aware of any such restriction. So long as the template is useful, use it.  :)
The main distinction with {{l}} and {{m}} has to do with italicization of terms in scripts like Roman or Cyrillic. For Japanese, this is irrelevant, and {{ja-r}} is one step further away from {{l}}, with lots of useful extensions that are specifically helpful for Japanese terms.
(FWIW, the on-screen output of {{ja-r}} was pixel-perfect identical to what you'd replaced it with, and the replacement was much grottier wikicode, so {{ja-r}} is preferable.)
‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 17:51, 17 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

Etymologies

Hi Eirikr, when you add glosses to suffixes, I've noticed that instead of "noun suffix", "adjective suffix", and "verb suffix" you prefer to use "nominalizing suffix", "adjectivizing suffix", and "verbalizing suffix", respectively. A Google search returns more hits for the first set than the second. It would be best to keep the terminology the same between the actual suffix entry (they use the first set) and the suffix gloss in etymologies. Would you mind using the first set? Is there a reason you prefer the second set? --Panda10 (talk) 17:35, 27 September 2016 (UTC)Reply

Elsősorban, elnézést a késésért.  :)
I did some research of my own to try to figure out where I fell into this habit. I think it's more common usage in English discussions of Japanese morphology, but I could be wrong.
From my own subjective perspective, "noun suffix" sounds like a suffix for a noun, instead of a suffix that creates a noun. "Nominalizing suffix" makes the function clear in the label -- the suffix nominalizes, i.e. it creates a noun from the suffixed word. Likewise for the other labels -- -izing clarifies the function.
Google hits alone can be a bit misleading. There are tons of suffixes that can attach to nouns -- and suffixes that create verbs (in my usage at issue here, "verbalizing") or that create adjectives ("adjectivizing") are a subset of these, which are all collectively described by some authors as "noun suffixes" -- i.e., suffixes that attach to nouns. I personally find this confusing, and thus my bias is for the more-specific and less-ambiguous -izing labels.
All that said, if you (as one of the more senior Hungarian editors that I'm aware of) have a strong preference for "noun suffix" or some other label format, please let me know and I shall change my habits.
(... although that is somewhat moot of late, as I have been far too busy to be as active here as I'd like. :-/ )
Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 22:47, 1 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Native Language?

hi @Eirikr, Your name sounds Icelandic. Why is it that, according to Babel, your native lang is English? It sounds a lot like you're a native Icelandic speaker. Awesomemeeos (talk) 01:31, 6 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

No need to ping him on his own talk page. He has stretches where he only has time to come up for air and check his talk page once in a blue moon- I don't think he's ignoring you. As for his user name, we have Chinese and Vietnamese people with Japanese user names, and Americans with Old English user names. Only a few of us are boring enough to use our real names. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:22, 11 October 2016 (UTC)Reply
That's true — "Chuck Entz" is an interesting choice of username for an Icelander like you. Contrast that with boring old me, Metaknowledge Smith. (My parents had a slightly unorthodox taste in names, but my sister Algorithm and I still love them just the same.) —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 07:26, 11 October 2016 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, people who use their real names (or easily traceable versions thereof) are total schlubs. —JohnC5 13:58, 11 October 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • @Awesomemeeos I know smatterings of many languages, and more than many of Japanese, but precious little of Íslenska. Því miður, ég get ekki talað íslensku. Jeg kan ikke tale dansk heller, og dansk er en af mine nærmere forfædres sprog. Ah, well. As I told my family years ago, I responded to the dictum, "go west, young man!" -- and I just kept going, and wound up in Japan. o.O
Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 23:04, 1 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Just a heads-up:

UtherPendrogn has started adding Old Japanese entries. He considers himself a quick study and isn't the best about attention to details. He also has an unfortunate tendency to come unglued when people correct his work. I haven't checked his work lately, so he may not be as bad as he was to start with, and I'm not qualified to judge anything to do with Old Japanese, anyway. If you have time, you might want to take a look. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 13:10, 26 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Chuck Entz He seems to have taken this as "delete all UtherPendrogn's stuff". It's not even hilarious, since I'd LINKED to a PRIMARY SOURCE with the word attested directly in it and a SCHOLAR from the University of Oxford (maybe you've heard of it?)'s translation. If the words are wrong, I'll literally run naked in the streets of London. I'm perfectly calm, the caps are not me being angry. I'm just concerned that someone deleted something which was clearly directly sourced to one of the best Universities of the world's paper on the language, and also a primary source. The kanji and romaji are quite clear. The only reason I started adding them was since I needed them for something else, and decided I might as well. I'm not a scholar, let alone a Japonic one, so I just copied ad verbatim what I saw and had been written by the scholars. UtherPendrogn (talk) 20:34, 1 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • @UtherPendrogn: If the words are wrong, I'll literally run naked in the streets of London. -- Shall I bring the popcorn?
<facepalm/> <sigh./>
Let's start with 久毛 (kumo). This could mean spider, or cloud. You chose to define this as cloud -- such a word exists in Japanese, both the modern and the ancient language, but it is canonically spelled . I'm not sure where you got the etymology; the reference you provided just shows these two characters and used phonetically in context to spell the sounds ku + mo, it says nothing about the meaning or origin of this term. In addition, Proto-Japonic is an area that, to my understanding, is controversial enough that I do not feel comfortable adding such information to Wiktionary.
Then there was (ya). You chose to define this as eight -- canonically spelled .
Your OJP entry at was mostly correct, which was a bit surprising by comparison.
Old Japanese is a very odd duck, and you should really know what you're doing before attempting to create dictionary entries for this language. One of the biggest hurdles for any student of OJP is the writing -- it was very much not systematic, in a way that makes Chaucer's wandering spelling look quite easy in comparison; it used a hodge-podge of multiple and varying Chinese characters to stand in for 1) the entire word's meaning, 2) the phonetic value based on the borrowed Chinese reading, or 3) the phonetic value based on the native Japanese pronunciation of the term with the same meaning as that Chinese character. This phenomenon is known as man'yōgana. If you don't know how to read OJP, you don't really have the prerequisite knowledge to be creating entries. There isn't anything surprising about other editors removing or reworking such entries. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 00:06, 2 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
Old Japanese is exclusively written phonetically. So is the correct Old Japanese for the later cloud kumo. https://books.google.fr/books?id=1bp_AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=eight-cloud+old+japanese&source=bl&ots=GAh4C0hERP&sig=I8kBqUIRhKO1pjxM9Kxt48uDNws&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj4g5O454jQAhVLXBoKHaaUAA4Q6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&q=eight-cloud%20old%20japanese&f=false
Kumwo means cloud, ya-kumwo means eight-cloud. UtherPendrogn (talk) 00:23, 2 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
Also, your logic is just odd. You don't feel comfortable adding them yourself so you removed mine? Also, see here.
UtherPendrogn (talk) 00:26, 2 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
Allow me to address several points here. I'm in a bit of a rush, so this post will be less well-structured than I'd like.
  • I just did a quick-and-dirty survey of the text of the Man'yōshū, an OJP poetry collection compiled sometime around 759 CE. The two-character combination 久毛 to phonetically spell kumo is used most extensively in cases where the ku is the conjugated ending of the preceding word, and the mo is the particle (mo). Next, it is used to spell kumo as in modern Japanese (kumo, cloud). I also see in poem #892 that 久毛 was used to spell kumo as in modern Japanese 蜘蛛 (kumo, spider).
This kind of ambiguity is precisely why man'yōgana writing was abandoned in favor of canonical kanji and kana. Even if one were to insist on phonetic spellings as the lemma forms for OJP entries, romaji is vastly more preferable than man'yōgana.
  • Notably, Volume 7 contains only one instance of 久毛, used in poem #1414 to spell the ending of yo no fukuraku mo. That same volume contains 21 different places where (kumo, cloud) is used in the OJP text, intended with the reading kumo and the meaning of cloud. OJP was demonstrably not exclusively written phonetically.
  • Re: why remove yours but not add my own, it comes down to time and veracity. The information you added was incorrect in important ways, and it simply took less time to delete the evidentially incorrect entry than it would have taken to thoroughly research the term, move it to the correct lemma spelling, and rework the content. I am busy IRL, and that prevents me from participating here more fully. I am not alone in this -- in general, Wiktionary editors are quicker to remove incorrect information than they are to build out correct information. And, like me, the driving factor behind this is time, or rather, the lack thereof.
FWIW, I am not averse to working collaboratively to build out Wiktionary's OJP entries and template infrastructure, when and as time allows. This is something I've been slowly working towards for some time. That said, any such initiative must happen with the collaboration and cooperation of the other Wiktionary editors here who work on Japanese entries. The WT:Beer parlor is probably the best place to bring up relevant discussions. Other than myself, other editors to ping would be Anatoli, Haplology, Suzukaze, Takasugi Shinji, Wyang... I know I'm forgetting several others (申し訳なく、ご了承ください), but that's a start at least.
Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 05:01, 2 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
(Edi conflict) Re: his logic- have you ever heard the expression fools rush in where angels fear to tread? If someone draws me a detailed topographic map of a planet in another solar system, that fact that no one knows enough about that planet to draw one of their own is reason enough to question where they got their information- whether or not I could draw one of my own. Eirikr is a professional translator who's read a lot on the etymology of Japanese, so I trust his judgment on this.
There's a huge amount of uncertainty and variability in ancient languages like Old Japanese. They didn't have dictionaries or classes in the subject: you learned from someone else, and if you ran into something that no one had taught you about, you did your best to make something up that seemed to work. Add to that the fact that the Chinese script has always been only partly phonetic, and that the system of phonetic writing in Japanese was still evolving, and you get something that takes a lot of extrapolation and guesswork to arrive at a sort of approximation. Sure, there are references with everything laid out neatly and systematically, but I'm sure other references have different interpretations of the same data. What little I've read on the subject is full of allusions to widespread disagreement about very basic concepts, so I wouldn't take any one source as the final word.
At any rate, I didn't give Eirikr that heads-up with the intent of inciting him to trash everything. It's just that Eirikr is one of maybe two or three people on Wiktionary that know enough about Old Japanese to have an opinion on it, and he doesn't have time to look through everything and come across them on his own. I just wanted to let him know so he could take a look for himself.
As for your behavior here: I have nothing much to complain about. You still approach things with the same naïve and reckless overconfidence, but that's not a matter of etiquette. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:10, 2 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Why did you delete all my Old Japanese entries?

They were correct, sourced, and linked to their current Japanese forms and older Proto-Japonic forms. UtherPendrogn (talk) 20:33, 1 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Mistakes that native people make themselves

Hi Eirikr, I wonder if there are any mistakes that native Japanese speakers make when speaking their own language, Japanese (in terms of grammar, spelling, word usage etc.). For example, native English speakers may use gone and went incorrectly. Thanks! – AWESOME meeos * (「欺负」我23:56, 1 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Does ra-nuki count? Also 雰囲気(ふいんき) (fuinki). —suzukaze (tc) 02:07, 2 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Hi

Are you good enough at Japanese to tell if things are correct in OJ at a glance? I'd happily collect the Old Japanese words, find possible Proto-Japonic forms and descendants, then show them to you and post the articles if you don't want to. I would appreciate you reviewing them though, I don't speak a word of Japanese. As I said, I added these because I found they weren't on here.

A few:

Kamwi: 迦微 (God/Spirit, Kami)
Tuma: 都麻 (Wife, Tsuma)
So: 曾 (That, So)
Kwo: 兒 (Child, Ko)
UtherPendrogn (talk) 00:39, 2 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

I'd also appreciate being contacted before you just delete an etymology. I have the source, you only need to ask. Now the etymology is lost. UtherPendrogn (talk) 00:52, 2 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Re: deletions, nothing on Wiktionary is lost -- just look at the page history, the tabbed link right at the top of the page.
Looking at the individual terms, most of those are man'yōgana spellings and thus you generally won't find them in any modern dictionary references. The canonical forms and modern JA entries are:
  • (kami) -- likely arising from an older pronunciation kamu, which persists in certain old compounds.
  • (tsuma, wife), (tsuma, husband, obsolete now) -- notably, OJP tuma originally meant spouse, regardless of gender, and arose from the word (tsuma, ancient tuma, edge, side), from the idea of someone being at one's side.
  • (so)
  • (ko)
Any OJP entries should likely be created under those headings. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 05:13, 2 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
PS: It looks like you're saving the page on each iteration when you are composing your posts on my Talk page -- this causes me to get multiple email notifications in quick succession, which is a bit annoying. Please use the Show preview button instead, and click Save changes only once you're done drafting your text. TIA, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 05:28, 2 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
Don't be condescending. And those forms are false, those characters weren't used. You're using false, unnattested characters. UtherPendrogn (talk) 10:44, 2 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

What do you do like about Japan?

Hi Awesomemeeos again. Sorry to bother you, but just as a general question, what are some of the things you like about japan and its culture? – AWESOME meeos * (「欺负」我08:17, 2 November 2016 (UTC)Reply