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*: I think you did not read carefully what I have said. I never said its functionality has been taken over by {{tl|root}}, did I? <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">[[User talk:Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">·~</span>]] [[User:Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">dictátor</span>]]·[[Special:Contribs/Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">mundꟾ</span>]]</span> 10:23, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
*: I think you did not read carefully what I have said. I never said its functionality has been taken over by {{tl|root}}, did I? <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">[[User talk:Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">·~</span>]] [[User:Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">dictátor</span>]]·[[Special:Contribs/Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">mundꟾ</span>]]</span> 10:23, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
*:: I wasn't basing this on what you said, but simply pointing out that {{temp|PIE word}} should not be used for PIE words that have a root, as [[T:PIE word/documentation]] says now that I look at it: "entries for words deriving from the PIE word {{m|ine-pro|*ǵénh₁os}} should have {{temp|root|''lang''|ine-pro|*ǵenh₁-}}". — [[User:Erutuon|Eru]]·[[User talk:Erutuon|tuon]] 02:54, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
*:: I wasn't basing this on what you said, but simply pointing out that {{temp|PIE word}} should not be used for PIE words that have a root, as [[T:PIE word/documentation]] says now that I look at it: "entries for words deriving from the PIE word {{m|ine-pro|*ǵénh₁os}} should have {{temp|root|''lang''|ine-pro|*ǵenh₁-}}". — [[User:Erutuon|Eru]]·[[User talk:Erutuon|tuon]] 02:54, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
*::: {{re|Erutuon}} Templates like {{tl|der}} or {{tl|inh}} already generate the cat. Category:''Lang'' terms derived/inherited from other languages . Just check out. We should get rid of redundant templets. <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">[[User talk:Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">·~</span>]] [[User:Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">dictátor</span>]]·[[Special:Contribs/Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">mundꟾ</span>]]</span> 11:32, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

* ''' Keep ''' per Erutuon [[User:Kutchkutch|Kutchkutch]] ([[User talk:Kutchkutch|talk]]) 11:51, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
* ''' Keep ''' per Erutuon [[User:Kutchkutch|Kutchkutch]] ([[User talk:Kutchkutch|talk]]) 11:51, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
*: {{re|Kutchkutch}} Could you explain your reasoning? Erutuon’s understanding is flawed, because he thinks I want to replace {{tl|PIE word}} with {{tl|root}}, which is however ''not'' the case. To summarize my stand again: {{tl|PIE root}} has already been deprecated in favour of {{tl|root}}— certainly because a language-specific template bearing the same function is redundant. Likewise, {{tl|PIE word}} is redundant because {{tl|inh}} serves the same job. This reasoning by itself is convincing enough, but another drawback of the template is that this template is hardly used: we have failed to employ it extensively, and naturally because of the overlapping template {{tl|inh}}. I am yet to see any valid reason for keeping it. <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">[[User talk:Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">·~</span>]] [[User:Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">dictátor</span>]]·[[Special:Contribs/Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">mundꟾ</span>]]</span> 12:26, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
*: {{re|Kutchkutch}} Could you explain your reasoning? Erutuon’s understanding is flawed, because he thinks I want to replace {{tl|PIE word}} with {{tl|root}}, which is however ''not'' the case. To summarize my stand again: {{tl|PIE root}} has already been deprecated in favour of {{tl|root}}— certainly because a language-specific template bearing the same function is redundant. Likewise, {{tl|PIE word}} is redundant because {{tl|inh}} serves the same job. This reasoning by itself is convincing enough, but another drawback of the template is that this template is hardly used: we have failed to employ it extensively, and naturally because of the overlapping template {{tl|inh}}. I am yet to see any valid reason for keeping it. <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">[[User talk:Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">·~</span>]] [[User:Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">dictátor</span>]]·[[Special:Contribs/Inqilābī|<span style="color:#000">mundꟾ</span>]]</span> 12:26, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Revision as of 11:32, 17 September 2021

Wiktionary > Requests > Requests for deletion/Others

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{{attention}} • {{rfap}} • {{rfdate}} • {{rfquote}} • {{rfdef}} • {{rfeq}} • {{rfe}} • {{rfex}} • {{rfi}} • {{rfp}}

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2015

Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/bazovъ

Latest comment: 3 years ago9 comments6 people in discussion

This page was created on the basis of an entry in the Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Languages, which in turn was created to be the etymology of Lower Sorbian bazowy (“pertaining to elder trees”). Perhaps the authors of that dictionary are unaware that Proto-Slavic ъ can sometimes surface as a in Lower Sorbian, but it can, and the etymon of the word is actually *bъzovъ, which also has an entry in the same dictionary. Alternatively, bazowy may simply have been coined in Lower Sorbian as baz + -owy, but either way, it isn't from *bazovъ. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:21, 28 January 2015 (UTC)Reply

In *bazъ and *bъzъ you can find Lower Sorbian baz. *bazъ: Lower Sorbian baz (“бузина Sambucus nigra”); *bъzъ: Lower Sorbian dial. bez, baz. First entry also gives Russian dial. бас (bas, “бузина”), Ukrainian dial. базни́к (baznýk, “сирень”), базни́к (baznýk, “собачья бузина Sambucus ebulus L, сирень Syringa vulgaris”). —Игорь Телкачь 16:27, 28 January 2015 (UTC)Reply
I feel I would be more useful in interpreting this source if I could actually read any Slavic language. CodeCat? —JohnC5 05:07, 25 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
I guess my preferred resolution would be to move this to Appendix:Proto-Slavic/bъzovъ, but I don't know whether Useigor would agree to that. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 10:11, 25 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
I don't know Lower Sorbian but judging by Slavic cognates there could be *bezowy or *bzowy from *bъzovъ. The dictionary points to *bʰeh₂ǵos > *bazъ and *bʰu₂ǵos > *bъzъ. So *bazovъ could be an alternative etymology of Lower Sorbian bazowy. —Игорь Тълкачь (talk) 16:33, 26 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

Template:l/..., Template:link/...

Latest comment: 4 years ago19 comments8 people in discussion
Full list of templates or redirects named Template:l/... or Template:link/...

l/bg - l/bi - l/br - l/ca - l/cs - l/csb - l/cu - l/cu/Cyrl - l/cy - l/da - l/de - l/dsb - l/en - l/es - l/et - l/eu - l/fi - l/fo - l/fr - l/frm - l/fro - l/ga - l/gd - l/gl - l/got - l/grc - l/gv - l/haw - l/he - l/hsb - l/hu - l/it - l/ja - l/ja/Jpan - l/ja/Latn - l/jbo - l/km - l/ko - l/kw - l/la - l/lad - l/lv - l/mi - l/mk - l/mul - l/naq - l/nb - l/nds - l/nl - l/nn - l/no - l/oc - l/pkp - l/pl - l/pmt - l/pt - l/rap - l/ru - l/rue - l/sga - l/sh/Cyrl - l/sh/Latn - l/sk - l/sm - l/sv - l/te - l/to - l/tr - l/tvl - l/ty - l/vi/Hani - l/vi/Latn - l/wa - l/zza

link/bg - link/br - link/ca - link/cs - link/csb - link/cu - link/cu/Cyrl - link/cy - link/da - link/de - link/dsb - link/en - link/es - link/et - link/fi - link/fo - link/fr - link/frm - link/fro - link/ga - link/gd - link/gl - link/got - link/grc - link/gv - link/he - link/hsb - link/hu - link/it - link/ja - link/ja/Jpan - link/ja/Latn - link/jbo - link/ko - link/kw - link/la - link/lv - link/mk - link/mul - link/nb - link/nds - link/nl - link/nn - link/no - link/oc - link/pl - link/pt - link/ru - link/rue - link/sga - link/sh/Cyrl - link/sh/Latn - link/sk - link/sv - link/tr - link/vi/Hani - link/vi/Latn - link/wa - link/zza

Proposal: Delete {{l/pt}}, {{l/en}} and the others like those, or delete as many as possible if for some reason some of those should be kept. Full list is collapsed above this message. I did not take the trouble to tag all of those {{rfd}}, only German and Latin are tagged.

Rationale: Use | rather than /, that is, {{l|pt}} rather than {{l/pt}}. This assumes it does the same thing and that we don't need anymore {{l/pt}} or {{l/en}} or others to consume less resources on the server like we apparently needed pre-Lua or in case they do something that {{l}} can't or some other reason.

Current RFDO discussions:

Older discussion:

It's worth noting that in the current RFDO discussions some of these templates seem to be treated like obvious crap to be deleted by some people. Quoting Renard Migrant (talk • contribs) from the l/de discussion: "Somewhat hilariously, a lot of these templates call {{l}} directly (see {{l/ty}} for a specific example). So they now do the very thing they were created to avoid. Even worse, because they call l but don't allow all its parameters, so they're literally worse than useless." --Daniel 01:55, 5 June 2015 (UTC)Reply

Delete any of these that do not provide any features beyond those available in {{l}}. Keep any, such as {{l/he}}, that do provide special features. --WikiTiki89 16:09, 5 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
For those of us that don't edit Hebrew entries much, what are the special features of {{l/he}}? --Daniel 16:17, 5 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
{{l/he|חייל|dwv=חַיָּל}} produces חייל / חַיָּל. It is more convenient than redundantly typing {{l|he|חייל|חייל \ חַיָּל}}. --WikiTiki89 17:24, 5 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
I think that any that are kept should be renamed. Something like {{he-l}}. —CodeCat 16:41, 5 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
Why? --WikiTiki89 17:24, 5 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
I agree with CodeCat (talk • contribs). Because AFAIK this should start with he- like other Hebrew templates. Note we already have {{ja-l}} and {{ko-l}} with special behavior, namely showing multiple scripts in order and also the Korean one has an auto-transliteration module implemented. "l/" implies subpage of {{l}} so I'd argue we should only start a template name with that if its actually part of the system of {{l}}. --Daniel 11:36, 6 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
But it is part of the system of {{l}}. It is implemented with the same module and supports all of the parameters that {{l}} supports. --WikiTiki89 15:12, 8 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
That's OK. I have an idea: can't we nuke {{l/he}} with the others and make {{l}} support dmv= as an additional parameter? --Daniel 13:05, 9 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
dwv= makes sense only for Hebrew. DWV = "defective with vowels". It's silly to add language-specific features to a general template. --WikiTiki89 12:23, 15 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
I was thinking maybe we should really add language-specific features to a general template, but that's OK, maybe having the actual language-specific template is really better. --Daniel 23:01, 4 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I don't think that it's possible to orphan all these templates at the moment because they are many and while some people are converting from the format of "l/de" to "l|de" others still keep adding new instances in the format of "l/de". (Pending actual diffs, I can get those later.) I was thinking of creating a vote for the whole project of deleting all l/... templates, or at least a BP poll or something to let other people know what is going on and agree upon this. --Daniel 23:01, 4 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I've now deleted all the ones that had no transclusions. The remainder still needs to be orphaned. —Rua (mew) 17:16, 30 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

@Rua I have orhaned/deleted some more of these. Of the remainder:
  • {{l/fr}}, {{l/fro}}, {{l/gl}}, {{l/hu}} and {{l/io}} are used on one page (de) but may be there to prevent an error. I'm thinking of replacing them with a {{fastl}} template that generates the link purely in template code. But to do this, you need to convert the language code to a name. We have two choices: Either this must be passed in (e.g. {{fastl|fr|French|foobar}}) or we use a switch statement to hardcode a set of languages.
  • {{l/he}} is a redirect to {{he-l}}; I'll convert the uses.
  • {{l/ja}} is a redirect to {{l/ja/Jpan}}. User:Kevin Up, can these be converted to {{ja-l}}? If so, how?
  • {{l/vi/Hani}} and {{l/vi/Latn}} are called by {{vi-l}}. They do something script-specific but I'm not quite sure what. I'm thinking we can just inline the two of them into {{vi-l}}. Note, there's also {{vi-link}}, which from what is does should probably be called {{vi-m}}.
Benwing2 (talk) 15:28, 4 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
There's also {{l/sl-tonal}}, which I created awhile ago to indicate a Slovenian link that uses the tonal orthography. Maybe this should have a different name? Benwing2 (talk) 15:35, 4 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
I'm ok with renaming it. The additional text should probably also be removed, since Slovenian now officially uses tonal orthography on Wiktionary. However, the template should be kept for the moment because it assists in the effort of converting existing links to the tonal orthography, specifically in cases where the orthography is ambiguous. —Rua (mew) 16:05, 6 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
I orphaned {{l/fr}}, {{l/fro}}, {{l/gl}}, {{l/hu}}. It didn't break anything AFAICT. --ReloadtheMatrix (talk) 08:11, 22 December 2019 (UTC)Reply
Re-orphaned {{l/fro}} and {{l/gl}} Hal MMII (talk) 01:29, 28 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

Template:yi-conj-head

Latest comment: 3 years ago12 comments8 people in discussion

No longer needed --Type56op9 (talk) 12:04, 25 June 2015 (UTC)Reply

There are still two transclusions that the new template does not yet support. --WikiTiki89 15:06, 25 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
@Wikitiki89, your yearly (or whatever it is) reminder. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 05:08, 18 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
Yep. Haven't forgotten. I'll get to it. --WikiTiki89 15:24, 18 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Wikitiki89: Can you please fix these two? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:46, 12 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Koavf: Sorry, it's not a simple fix. I have to implement a whole new feature in Mod:yi-verb. I'll get around to it when I have time. Perhaps we should close this discussion as a keep and renominate it later? --WikiTiki89 14:39, 12 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
That seems sensible to me but it would be nice if we can ensure that it's on a to-do list somewhere. What is it about these two verbs that is so tricky? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:02, 12 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
They are phrasal verbs, which the conjugation template does not support yet. I've been planning to add it, as it would be useful in general (not just for these two verbs). --WikiTiki89 18:19, 12 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Wikitiki89 another reminder... --I learned some phrases (talk) 09:44, 2 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
It would be good to be able to mark the phrasal/periphrastic verbs as such, via a category or in the headword perhaps --Gausie (talk) 08:55, 3 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Metaknowledge, Wikitiki89 As a stop-gap solution, I replaced the two transclusions with a new template, {{yi-conj-see}}, based on how we handle similar cases in Dutch, where we have {{nl-conj-see}}. See for example ליב האָבן (lib hobn). What do you think? — Mnemosientje (t · c) 15:24, 21 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
Great, so delete the template already Yellow is the colour (talk) 22:00, 6 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

Appendix:Glossary of idioms – A et al.

Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments6 people in discussion

They are redundant to Category:Idioms by language, they present an editorial perspective (“Here are some editors' picks of popular and picturesque idioms in the English language”), and they are very Anglocentric (“albatross around one's neck — Global”). — Ungoliant (falai) 17:42, 2 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

I agree, categorization is much better in terms of better quality of definition (likely to be seen by more editors), alphabetized, divided by language, easier to navigate. Any genuine-looking red links can go on WT:RE:en (and so on) a few red links isn't enough to save it. Renard Migrant (talk) 18:02, 2 November 2015 (UTC)Reply
I can see some value in keeping them, or something like them, mainly for the convenience of people learning English as a second language. Setting out a list of the main cases where a meaning isn't the obvious one from the meanings of the individual words provides a better resource than simply listing them (along with a lot of rare idioms, without the meanings beside them). Maitchy (talk) 23:46, 13 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
Double agree. The category is just fine. Or put it in a user subpage. --Cien pies 6 (talk) 21:19, 26 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
Delete, if someone likes it a lot they can backup it somewhere but this is redundant to our more complete and more neutral categorization system. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 14:49, 23 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
Delete: we don't want to be having to repeat entire definitions and UK/US/... glosses in an appendix; and reducing it to a set of links would be redundant to simply categorising the entries. But someone might want to check whether any content needs merging into the entries, and create any red-linked phrases (there are some). Equinox ◑ 23:39, 30 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

2016

Template:nominative singular of, Template:accusative plural of, Template:vocative singular of, etc.

Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

These templates are currently used to some extent but they are minimal wrappers around {{inflection of}}. The latter is used more commonly and is more flexible. I'm thinking the case-specific templates should be bot-replaced by the appropriate invocation of {{inflection of}}, then orphaned and eventually deleted: e.g.

Benwing2 (talk) 04:04, 29 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

I think if people want to use these they should be allowed to. Not everyone will understand how to use {{inflection of}}, so people might just start just not using a template at all, and just writing it out. As you say bot replacements are very easy, so instead of deleting these, discourage their use (on documentation subpages) and replace them by bot. Renard Migrant (talk) 18:15, 29 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

Category:English terms with alpha privatives

Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

We're not in the habit of indicating which morphological elements are present in a term. Rather, we have categories based on the etymological construction of a term. We tried to make categories for words containing smaller words, but that never really got off the ground. —CodeCat 22:24, 25 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

No preference. Given a- has multiple etymologies, I wouldn't object to the categorization being split if someone wanted to. Renard Migrant (talk) 22:37, 25 August 2016 (UTC)Reply
We have infrastructure now that lets {{prefix}} etc more narrowly categorize terms which use only one of several possibly homographic prefixes, right? That infrastructure didn't exist when this category was created, but now, this category seems redundant to Category:English words prefixed with a- (not). (Am I mistaken; is there a different between them?) I suggest that someone could go through the entries in this category and update their etymology sections with whatever code is necessary to move them to the latter category, at which point this category can be deleted. - -sche (discuss) 23:45, 25 August 2016 (UTC)Reply
There is a difference. The prefixation category is for terms prefixed within English. But there's also terms that were borrowed with the prefix already attached. Indeed, that's probably how it became a prefix in English in the first place. —CodeCat 23:50, 25 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

Template:es-adj form of

Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments6 people in discussion

As above. No point in it. —CodeCat 19:30, 22 September 2016 (UTC)Reply

Deprecate and keep, preventing further use through abuse filters. - [The]DaveRoss 12:23, 28 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Keep. Categorisation of non-lemma forms is not without use. embryomystic (talk) 19:22, 29 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
Embryomystic always seems to break this template. Just so you know. --Gibraltar Rocks (talk) 17:41, 15 August 2019 (UTC)Reply

Category:Kangxi radicals

Latest comment: 5 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Redundant to Category:Kangxi Radicals block. Has a table that might be worth keeping. —suzukaze (t・c) 07:39, 25 September 2016 (UTC)Reply

Category:CJKV radicals

Redundant to Category:Han character radicals. —suzukaze (t・c) 07:39, 25 September 2016 (UTC)Reply

Category:Han rad sup

Redundant to Category:CJK Radicals Supplement block. Also it has a terrible name. Has a table that might be worth keeping. —suzukaze (t・c) 07:39, 25 September 2016 (UTC)Reply

Keep - not in itself a rational for deletion. also yourself: is the category useful? does it fit into a schema of categorisation? is it likely that we are goingto have things to vategorise into it, inm the future? if the answer to anty ofthese is "yes", then we should keep it, rather than have to repeat the work later. respectfully, Lx 121 (talk) 10:55, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Template:grc-cite-* templates

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

There are at least 146 of these (I found them here), but {{grc-cite}} is deprecated and now just a fancy redirect to {{Q}} which is based on a data module so they are all unneeded as far as I can tell.

The full list

—Enosh (talk) 10:54, 4 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

Orphan and delete. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 06:57, 24 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Category:Japanese-only CJKV Characters

Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Category:Japanese-coined CJKV characters used outside Japanese

Category:Korean-only CJKV Characters

Was this created to distinguish "exclusively" Japanese and Korean inventions from Chinese characters? The Chinese will use it anyway. —suzukaze (t・c) 04:10, 9 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

Delete. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 04:19, 9 October 2016 (UTC)Reply


I note that Japanese has Category:Japanese-coined CJKV characters is fine, but there is no Category:Korean-coined CJKV characters. As such, I propose moving Category:Korean-only CJKV Characters to Category:Korean-coined CJKV characters if this RFD fails. —suzukaze (t・c)

Category:Han characters from which kana were derived

Latest comment: 7 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Category:Han characters from which hiragana were derived

Category:Han characters from which katakana were derived

Trivia befitting of an appendix page. —suzukaze (t・c) 04:12, 9 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

I see no harm to these categories. Can you advance any reason to delete them? If not, keep. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 07:19, 20 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
IMO it is too specific for a category. It is also clumsy; sortkeys are used to display which kana each kanji gave rise to. If we want them, we can use an appendix page, like I mentioned in my original comment. —suzukaze (t・c) 06:30, 9 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Template:ja-kref

Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Template:JIS

Template:S-JIS

Template:EUC-JP

Not used as often as it theoretically could be. But why would anyone want this? Surely these dictionaries have their own indexes? And the encoding information is probably only useful to programmers (if at all in this Unicode-dominated day and age), who definitely wouldn't come to Wiktionary to find out. —suzukaze (t・c) 05:14, 9 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

If we really want this data we could centralize it in an Appendix. —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 08:42, 17 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

@KevinUp It hasn't been deprecated, just nominated for deletion because "I Don't Like It". —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 05:30, 25 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

I would support deleting these templates, because this information is more suitable for a database such as Wikidata:Q3595028. KevinUp (talk) 07:35, 25 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

Category:Japanese Asahi characters

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Underused with only two entries, and may be difficult to define, as some of them seem to have become unofficial "standard" forms according to Wikipedia. Maybe befitting of an appendix? —suzukaze (t・c) 06:36, 11 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

There's 5 entries now :) --Java Beauty (talk) 00:52, 31 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion

Appendix:English ergative verbs, Category:English ergative verbs - confusion with ambitransitive verbs (verbs that have both transitive and intransitive senses)

The explanation in the appendix of what an "English ergative verb" is doesn't jive with other explanations of ergativity, such as at w:Ergative–absolutive language. In the sentence, “The boat sank,” the boat is definitely not the PATIENT as the example at Appendix:English ergative verbs currently indicates -- it is instead the agent or actor doing the sinking, and sank in this instance is just a plain old intransitive verb. In the sentence, “This book reads well,” or in “These eggs eat well,” the book or the eggs are clearly not the actors -- semantically, they can't be, outside of very strange and possibly drug-induced circumstances. This is the closest to an actual ergative construction in English, where a semantic object is used in the syntactic subject position (and, when using pronouns that make case explicit like he - him or she - her, the pronoun would be in the nominative case). This matches the definition we currently give in our entry at ergative. This also appears to match what is described in the w:Ergative–absolutive language article, where the semantic object is treated grammatically with the same case and syntax as a subject. This is notably different from the content of the flawed and unsourced w:Ergative verb article, which appears to be rehashing a description of patientive ambitransitive verbs that is presented more clearly and with citations at w:Ambitransitive verb#Patientive.

Moreover, although ergative constructions would seem to exist in English, “ergative” as a label is just not very useful in describing English verbs: although generally only useful for describing the qualities of how the noun verbs, as in the examples above with books and eggs, basically any semantically transitive verb can be used in an ergative construction just by putting the object of the verb's action into the subject slot in the syntax of the sentence. Ergativity is not a feature of English verbs, so much as English syntax.

As such, I propose that we delete both Appendix:English ergative verbs and Category:English ergative verbs. We should probably also delete Category:Old English ergative verbs as well.

Looking at some of the other ergative categories, like Category:Low_German_ergative_verbs or Category:Mandarin ergative verbs, I find that they mostly have descriptions like “[LANGUAGE] intransitive verbs that become causatives when used transitively.” This does not agree with the sense of ergative that I'm familiar with, nor does it even always agree with the entries so labeled, giving me serious doubts about the validity of these categories. However, I will leave that to the respective editing communities. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 23:51, 30 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Gee, I thought the problem with the ergative label was just that normal users don't understand the word. Apparently some contributors who add the label to definitions don't either. DCDuring TALK 01:25, 1 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
Keep. Ergative verbs are a useful category, and can't simply be replaced by "transitive and intransitive" because they're not the same. Ergative verbs are passive or middle voice when used intransitively, but when used transitively the meaning flips to that of a causative, to make the object undergo the intransitive sense. For example, "the boat sinks" is intransitive and does not have a clear agent. But when you say "the storm sinks the boat", then the storm is acting as an agent on the boat. In Dutch, the intransitive use has a passive/stative perfect construction too, whereas the transitive use has an active construction. —CodeCat 18:33, 1 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • I'm fine with ergative as a label for other languages, provided those editors have a use for it.
My primary concerns are that 1) I don't see this as a useful label for English, and 2) this use of ergative to refer to a special kind of intransitive-and-causative verb usage does not agree with either our definitions at ergative, or the way the term is employed in other linguistic contexts (viz. the w:Ergative–absolutive language article). ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 21:53, 1 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
I think the single definition at ergative is meant to encompass both the ergative case and the ergative verb, though it is really not very clear. The specific meanings of the term when applied to nominals and when applied to verbs should be elaborated more. — Eru·tuon 03:01, 2 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • I always thought that ergative verbs (in English) were as defined here and here, which, as far as I have observed, is how the label is used (or intended to be used) at Wiktionary. Therefore, I don't see a problem, unless the label is seen as too technical for readers. I don't understand the comment above that "any semantically transitive verb can be used in an ergative construction just by putting the object of the verb's action into the subject slot in the syntax of the sentence". That would mean that "John loves Mary" should mean the same as "Mary loves (John)", wouldn't it? Mihia (talk)
@Mihia: -- The definitions you linked to provide senses that are indistinguishable from the more widely used descriptor, ambitransitive, or simply by stating that a given verb is both transitive and intransitive. For this sense, using the term ergative instead only invites confusion. As described by others at [[w:Talk:Ergative_verb#Not_standard_usage_in_linguistics]], this usage of ergative appears to have arisen out of confusion, and usage of this sense also appears to be limited to a narrow subset of fields that use the term (perhaps just ESL?). In light of these issues, I see no usefulness and too much potential for user confusion were we to use ergative as a label for any and all English verbs that are both transitive and intransitive, such as boil in “he boils the water” and “the water boils”.
Cases where ergative actually starts to make sense for English outside of the confused ambitransitive sense are cases where the verb itself is semantically transitive, and is used in an intransitive grammatical construction where the grammatical subject of the verb is also the semantic patient of the action, and the semantic agent is left unstated. Restating from a separate thread, over at [[User_talk:Eirikr#Discussion_of_ergatives_and_perfect_tense_in_Germanic]]:

<...snip...>

... 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 ... agent that is making this happen. The action in question "happens by itself". These words are fundamentally [semantically] 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 [CodeCat's] description and the description in the WP article [at w:Ergative_verb]. This could also be analyzed as a kind of passive construction where the actor carrying out the transitive action is left unstated.
However, this kind of ergative usage is mostly a matter of English syntax, which would further limit the usefulness of this term as a label. Per utramque cavernam had a good breakdown regarding transitivity, intransitivity, and ergativity in an English verb context over at [[User_talk:DCDuring#parse]].
HTH, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 19:51, 18 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • I object to the label, as it is not part of any US education other than some formal education in FLs and linguistics. If we had different labels for users of different preferences, I'd be down with "ergative" as a label, as long as it was not the default.
As to the category and appendices, I personally don't care, but they are probably useful to some. DCDuring TALK 22:27, 16 December 2016 (UTC)Reply

January 2017

Category:Languages by country

Latest comment: 5 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Upmerge If all of these subcategories were emptied, the parent category would only have a little over 200 entries, which is very navigable and also what one would expect from the name of the category itself. Categorizing by continent isn't really necessary (where does Russia go? Is France in five categories?) —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:57, 22 January 2017 (UTC)Reply

  • Support, straightforward enough. --Tropylium (talk) 16:27, 25 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • Support, the official languages could be categorized by country and continent on wikipedia (but it would not make sense on wiktionary), the categorization of languages independently by country and continent without other criteria, however, has no sense at all because they can be spoken in any nation of any continent, as well as in every ocean and even on the international space station (ISS), so a the category "Languages by country" (or more correctly "Languages by continent") have no sense to exist on wiktionary or other wiki-projects. --DelvecchioSimone12 5 96 (talk) 18:25, 1 January 2019 (UTC)Reply

February 2017

Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/mysljati

Latest comment: 5 years ago10 comments7 people in discussion

Apparently descendants are not real. I don't see reason why this entry should exist. —Игорь Тълкачь (talk) 12:58, 2 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

Presumably to explain prefixed forms in daughter languages, no idea how to handle it properly though. Crom daba (talk) 05:14, 3 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
Author could create entry with prefix (for example *orzmysljati, *otъmysljati). —Игорь Тълкачь (talk) 14:42, 3 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

As far as i understand, *mysliti is imperfective, so what is *mysljati? —Игорь Тълкачь (talk) 14:47, 3 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

  • @Useigor, CodeCat, Benwing2: What ought we to do with this? Edit: Sorry if that ping directed you to the wrong section; there was an edit conflict. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 20:13, 11 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
    • If *mysljati has no direct descendants, then we have to ask where the derived verbs that have it as a base came from. Could these derived verbs themselves be of Proto-Slavic origin? If so, then there should be a Proto-Slavic page for those, and the existence of *mysljati is only guaranteed for Pre-Slavic, not Proto-Slavic. If they can't be posited for PS, then is it possible/feasible that the languages created these -mysljati verbs independently? If so, then there's no merit for a PS page, but if not, then reconstructing *mysljati for Proto-Slavic seems warranted. —CodeCat 20:27, 11 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Neither of the above are the case. -jati, producing Russian -я́ть (-játʹ), is a common imperfectivizing prefix that is added to prefixed perfective verbs to form imperfectives. Hence *orzmysljati was formed directly from orzmysl(iti) + -jati, and similarly with *otъmysljati. This means there was never a *mysljati, and the entry should be deleted. Benwing2 (talk) 05:14, 12 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
@CodeCat, i don't see reason why it's guaranteed for Pre-Slavic, unless *mysliti originally was perfective (so *mysljati is imperf.) but it's just assumption. At this moment, it's better to delete. —Игорь Тълкачь (talk) 09:10, 14 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Moved to RFDO. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 15:03, 8 February 2019 (UTC)Reply

Delete if @Benwing2's reasoning is indeed correct. —Rua (mew) 17:24, 30 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Category:Reference templates

Latest comment: 4 years ago19 comments9 people in discussion

These should be placed in the appropriate language-specific categories. —CodeCat 15:24, 23 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

Yes, but the category shouldn't be deleted, as the lang-specific catgs should be kept here. Perhaps rename Cat:Reference templates by language if necessary. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:54, 23 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
Never mind, I didn't realize that's already a separate catg. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:55, 23 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
I presume that such templates are categorized by the target language, not the language in which they are written. Do we not care about the language in which the reference is written? What about a multilingual dictionary? (There are at least two such templates.) DCDuring TALK 16:15, 23 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
They're placed in whichever language they're relevant to as a reference. So the language it's written in is not taken into account, but they can be placed into more than one language category. —CodeCat 16:21, 23 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
Shouldn't this category be kept as a parent category for "Category:Reference templates by language"? Also, there may be translingual templates such as {{R:Reference-meta}} which I have been working on. — SMUconlaw (talk) 18:44, 23 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
Why should Category:Reference templates by language be placed in this category? It already has its own parent category. And translingual reference templates naturally go in Category:Translingual reference templates. —CodeCat 18:51, 23 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thanks, I didn't know "Category:Translingual reference templates" existed. However, isn't it usually the case that when there is a category in the form "X by Y", "X" exists as a parent category as well? At least that's what happens at the Wikimedia Commons. — SMUconlaw (talk) 18:59, 23 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
Not on Wiktionary. I can't imagine Category:Nouns being very useful as a parent of Category:Nouns by language. —CodeCat 19:01, 23 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ In that case, delete according to the reason provided by the nominator. — SMUconlaw (talk) 19:12, 23 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

Could some people help with clearing it out? —CodeCat 14:05, 26 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

@CodeCat: I'll do some work on it. — Eru·tuon 21:46, 26 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
When it's deleted, where shall we put Category:Quotation reference templates? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:50, 27 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
What about the templates not in another category, like Template:R:Wordorigins.org! Will they become orphant-templates upon deletion of Category:Reference templates? Thx, B Lemeukx (talk) 11:56, 21 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Keep - obviously useful as a meta-category. Lx 121 (talk) 14:19, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

You haven't read the discussion. There are currently two such categories. —Rua (mew) 14:20, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
I've seen both categories, & they seem to serve different purposes. this one is general-purpose (any template related to references), & the other one Wiktionary: Reference templates seems to be narrowly-defined (a list of dictionary-reference templates). So either merge or differentiate them better? & 'Reference Templates' is still the obvious meta-category for ALL reference templates. Lx 121 (talk) 15:28, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
After some more cleanup, the category now has only six members. —Rua (mew) 16:25, 30 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Template:grc-ipa-rows

Latest comment: 7 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion

We can put this to rest now that {{grc-IPA}} exists. The only issue is replacing it in all the entries that use it, and I don't know whether that can be automated, since ambiguous vowel length will have to be marked. Note to the closer of this discussion: there are a bunch of subtemplates that need to be deleted as well. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 02:29, 27 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

Delete on the condition that the new template is made to display like the old, keep otherwise. —CodeCat 02:30, 27 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
It already does display like the old. Maybe you didn't click 'Show more'. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 02:33, 27 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
I prefer it to be expanded by default. The collapsed display tells you so little, it's almost useless. If I'm looking for the Byzantine pronunciation, it doesn't help me at all. —CodeCat 02:37, 27 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
That's a perfectly valid personal preference, and you can make it show automatically for you by going to 'Visibility' at the lower left of your screen, on the sidebar, and clicking 'Show pronunciations'. In order to save space, the template autocollapses by default, but as you now can see, it displays just like the old one did. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 02:39, 27 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
{{grc-ipa-rows}} doesn't really have ambiguous vowel length, because |a|, |i|, |u| are always short, while |aa|, |ii|, |uu| are always long. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 13:02, 27 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

Before we completely eliminate {{grc-ipa-rows}}, though, I do hope someone will address the point I brought up last year at Template talk:grc-IPA#Possible fixes. As far as I know, the discrepancies still exist. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 13:10, 27 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

Keep until discrepancies between this and {{grc-IPA}} are ironed out. {{grc-IPA}} is currently riddled with errors. - Gilgamesh~enwiki (talk) 04:45, 24 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

June 2017

Appendix:X is a beautiful language

Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments6 people in discussion

They are present at the translation section of English is a beautiful language.--2001:DA8:201:3512:BCE6:D095:55F1:36DE 12:18, 6 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

Your logic would be flawed if English is a beautiful language is deleted. --WikiTiki89 21:46, 6 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
So maybe on hold until the discussion of the latter is closed.--115.27.203.95 10:55, 7 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
Delete. That RFD failed. I would have preferred to keep the entry, but I'm not comfortable with keeping the appendix either if the entry is unwanted. It makes it seem like the appendix namespace is a space for random trash. Either the phrase is good enough for the dictionary or it's not. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 03:51, 22 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
Delete. --Barytonesis (talk) 14:33, 1 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Please delete per above. --Soumyabrata (talk • subpages) 07:49, 8 March 2020 (UTC)Reply

Appendix:Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Latest comment: 6 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I don't think it's useful as it does not introduce any new words but names of individuals (which is cleatly not dictionary material - we don't have a list of US presidents and Appendix:Harry Potter/Characters does not include a list of individual names).--115.27.203.95 10:54, 7 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

Keep or move somewhere; it is useful as a link target for this Wikisource project. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 22:14, 25 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

July 2017

Appendix:English words with Greek and Latin roots

Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion

The first one has already been RFM'ed, to no avail for lack of participants. --Barytonesis (talk) 20:35, 20 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Category:Counters by language

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Possible duplicate with Category:Classifiers by language--222.29.114.71 20:04, 27 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

This page shouldn't be deleted as it is used as a reference. — This unsigned comment was added by 85.98.108.37 (talk) at 19:08, 1 August 2020 (UTC).Reply

Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/ḱlitós

Latest comment: 5 years ago12 comments7 people in discussion

Only one descendant given, which is not enough to reconstruct a PIE form. There used to be a Germanic descendant listed, but it was dubious as the accent didn't match, so I removed it. Even two descendants is not particularly strong evidence given that the *-tós suffix is very productive. Independent innovation is very possible. —CodeCat 13:38, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Victar has now put back the Germanic descendants that I removed. I removed them because they violate Verner's law. Are we allowed to ignore basic linguistics just because someone's source says so? —CodeCat 15:04, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

@JohnC5, stay or go? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 07:08, 29 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Metaknowledge: I think stay. —*i̯óh₁n̥C[5] 11:31, 29 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • Keep. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 14:33, 29 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • Keep - if it's properly sourced to credible material, we keep it. if there are conflicting opinions in sourced material, we include information about the conflict. we shouldn't be making the call on which is "right", that would be original research (though debating/arguing about it on talkpages is fun! ^__^). Lx 121 (talk) 13:06, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
    • Wiktionary doesn't disallow original research, that's a Wikipedia thing. It's part of how Wiktionary works in the first place. —Rua (mew) 13:09, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
      • Excuse me? since wheninthehell did that proposition get past the wmf? o__0 please show me where that policy is included in the project's rules & guidelines(!) Lx 121 (talk) 13:20, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
        • There is no policy that says anything about OR, so it's not disallowed, and given that things do not have to be explicitly allowed to be allowed, it is allowed. Our WT:OR points to a page explaining why Wiktionary doesn't have Wikipedia rules (which is not a policy page btw). We have WT:CFI, which is not an OR policy and is not intended to be one, because it fundamentally requires original research as part of the verification process. WT:CFI would be unenforceable if OR were banned. —Rua (mew) 13:31, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
        • You may find Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2018/September#What is Wiktionary's stance on reconstructions missing from sources? enlightening. —Rua (mew) 13:39, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
          • It's not quite that simple. It's true that it most of the content in entries is OR, but we tend to require something approaching Wikipedia-style sourcing for etymologies and reconstructions. Approaching- not identical. Where to draw the line is a matter of some debate. In this case, though, our practice is clear: there's no point in a dictionary providing a reconstruction that's not connected to attested words. That's not OR, that's editorial discretion. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:02, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
            • @Chuck Entz What do you think of this particular case. Keep in mind that the Germanic descendants still violate Verner's law and should not be there. That leaves the first entry with only Celtic as a descendant. —Rua (mew) 14:11, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/ḱlinéh₂ti

Latest comment: 5 years ago15 comments5 people in discussion

None of the formations in the descendants actually match the PIE form, so why does this exist? There was a Latin form listed before, but per De Vaan, it doesn't belong there. —CodeCat 14:04, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Beekes clearly cites *klin-je/o- as the root of the the Greek form, and that itself comes from an older nasal present. Kroonen cites the older original form as either *ḱli-neh₂- or *ḱli-neu-. That is what was reconstructed on this page. de Vann concurs and explains the long -ī- as being "introduced from the root aorist *klei- i *kli- (cf. cliēns)." --Victar (talk) 14:12, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
This doesn't address the main point at all, but merely confirms it. Why do we reconstruct this if there are zero forms which actually descend from it? —CodeCat 14:15, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
The Latin form is cited in sources as an example of this original form. Source add. --Victar (talk) 14:24, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
Perhaps, but the entry is now in conflict with the (also sourced) etymology given at clīnō and *ḱley-. We clearly cannot follow the sources here, as they contradict each other. This is an issue with a lot of your editing, Victar. You blindly go with sources which often posit very bold hypotheses that don't have widespread acceptance, you don't critically examine them. You also do not seek out consensus; whenever someone reverts your questionable additions, you ignore the fact that reverting an addition means no consensus, and repeatedly reinstate. When discussions finally start, you also refuse to wait for a consensus, but reinstate your edits as soon as you think you have proven your point, as on Reconstruction talk:Proto-Indo-European/ḱlitós. You need to stop hiding behind sources and start listening to editors. —CodeCat 14:27, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
If we're going to bring this to personal attacks simply because you disagree with the sources, let me say that your actions are very unbecoming of an editor. I attempt to start a dialog with you, as exampled here, and your solution every time is to simply assert you are correct and delete the entry. You were stripped of your adminship because of your uncooperative behavior which you continue to this day. --Victar (talk) 14:34, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
You attempted to start a dialog, then completely ignored it and put the content back anyway. Multiple times. Without consensus. And you still haven't given a good argument for keeping this entry, and you still continue to add content without consensus. —CodeCat 15:02, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
Ignored it? I put forth my thoughts, and your response was you're wrong, I'm deleting it again. That is not a dialog on your part. You are not one to talk at all about consensus. For example, there was a clear consensus that laryngeals existed in PII and many of its descendants, and despite that, you systematically deleted them, at which point @JohnC5 had to insist that you stop. This project is not a dictatorship for your ruling. --Victar (talk) 15:45, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
No person is correct in all decisions. CodeCat has made mistakes, as have I. Recently, Victar, you're been running roughshod across these entries, frequently ignoring language specific-considerations in favor of utopian reconstructionism. I've tried to be fairly conservative in the way I've edited on here, and CodeCat is very useful in reining in my reconstructive excesses. Similarly, sometimes she has personal opinions which need curtailing, but this is done in discussion with other editors. If there is no consensus, it is better to not add it all then to add highly speculative material. Again, I've made these mistakes many times, and indeed at one point CodeCat told me to go read a bunch of literature since I was adding so many bad reconstructions.
In this matter, I would agree with CodeCat that there seem to be several competing explanations or maybe several competing forms. This entry is at this point too speculative to merit its own entry. —JohnC5 17:57, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
I am completely open to being wrong and absolutely crave discussions so that I might learn from them. I do ping you and CodeCat on entries that I hope either of you can look over. I probably would have done the same once I finished working on the entries, like I did here.
My objection is in CodeCat's method of simply reverting someone with no explanation other than "you're wrong", if that much, which I find in bad form. We should be encouraging editors to go through the sources and add this information to the project, and, in turn, correcting mistakes, not disregarding them with reverts and throwing the baby out with the bath water.
You both know, I'm a clean and methodical sourcer (I added |passage= to many reference templates to improve them further), and I want to get these entries done by the books as much as anyone else. Three sources, Kroonen, de Van, and Beekes all suggest a nasal verb root, but if that's too speculative, lets have a conversation and come to some less speculative alternatives. I'm happy to see that CodeCat has now added some to the root entry, but this was only after my objections to the deletion of the entry. --Victar (talk) 18:27, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
I usually err on the side of caution, and I wouldn't even have created a PIE page in this instance. The descendants are too different to really pin them down onto a single form. Kroonen etc. may be right about the original -neh₂- suffix, but this is very speculative considering that it doesn't appear in that form in any language. It appears to me like they pulled it out of thin air. The nasal itself is plentifully attested, but its exact nature is too unclear. What I find especially telling is that Greek added an additional -ye- present suffix to it, as if it wasn't "present enough" in its old form. The Germanic form, with a stative formed, seemingly, from a characterised present, is even more puzzling. So my preferred option would be to just say "We don't know" and only list the forms without trying to pin a particular underlying formation on them, as Kroonen and De Vaan do. Note that Kroonen and De Vaan disagree on what they think the original form was, and I find neither of their proposals particularly compelling. De Vaan's proposal might work if the root had an additional final laryngeal, but that's ad hoc and only solves the puzzle for Latin, it makes it harder for all the others. —CodeCat 18:37, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Haha, "present enough" made me laugh. I can certainly see where you're coming from and Kroonen definitely phones it in at times. I think we can agree though that three independent innovations of *ḱli-n- seems highly unlikely. I've moved over the sources for to *ḱley-, so please feel free to delete *ḱlinéh₂ti. Also, please copy your comment regarding Germanic weak class 3 over, which I think is helpful. Thanks. --Victar (talk) 03:06, 1 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

Re CodeCat and "...personal attacks simply because you disagree with the sources...": +1 on the Uther-meter. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:59, 1 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Chuck Entz: That is not a helpful comment for dialog. --Victar (talk) 03:06, 1 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • Keep - again, if it's properly sourced to credible material, we keep it. if there are conflicting opinions in sourced material, we include information about the conflict. we shouldn't be making the call on which is "right", that is original research (though debating/arguing about it is fun! ^__^). our job on wiktionary, as with wikipedia, is to provide a compilation of the existing information. it's not our job (on here, in the article-space) to express our own ideas/opinions about the etymologies (or definitions, etc.) Lx 121 (talk) 13:18, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

August 2017

Reconstruction:Proto-Southwestern Tai/khaau

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
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Proto-Southwestern Tai is revised by Pittayawat Pittayaporn (page 125-149 of the PDF), same author of Proto-Tai. But it does not include any word list. I believe *khaau (rice) should exist in new spelling. I also have some words here but the rice is not stated. However, this is only one word in PSWT right now. --Octahedron80 (talk) 03:57, 3 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

Moved to RFDO. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 15:04, 8 February 2019 (UTC)Reply

October 2017

Category:English four-letter abbreviations

Latest comment: 3 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion

There are only two pages that are in this category right now and all of the edits of this page were by the same person, so it should probably either start being used or be deleted. 24.13.226.156 18:56, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

The page isn't showing up for some reason it's https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_four-letter_abbreviations never mind I figured it out 24.13.226.156 19:06, 14 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

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Delete - this category is not useful. - TheDaveRoss 13:15, 9 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
TIFLL (anyone guess the meaning of this?) --Java Beauty (talk) 01:00, 31 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Mild keep - can we just auto put in all four letter words that are all in uppercase letters? Facts707 (talk) 04:48, 12 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

November 2017

Template:table:days of the week/documentation

Latest comment: 6 years ago12 comments6 people in discussion

{{table:days of the week}} is redundant with {{list:days of the week/en}}, which is used by far more languages. One of the two has to go, but I'd rather keep {{table:days of the week}} to be honest. --Barytonesis (talk) 15:48, 21 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

{{list:days of the week/nb}}is in use. DonnanZ (talk) 19:43, 22 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

Pinging @Jonteemil, Daniel Carrero, who worked on {{table:days of the week}} --Barytonesis (talk) 11:05, 1 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

btw, this might be a good usecase for Wikidata, e.g. Q105 (Monday). – Jberkel (talk) 11:48, 1 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • Meh, I've just found out about {{list:seasons/el}} vs. {{table:seasons/el}}... Seriously? --Barytonesis (talk) 11:53, 1 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
    Thanks for the ping. I claim credit for inventing the system of "list:" and "table:"-prefixed templates that are repeated the same way over many languages. As a subjective, arguable rule of thumb, I usually prefer tables everywhere and would suggest deleting the lists. That's just my opinion, feel free to disagree.
    As suggested above, I would love to use Wikidata for all that stuff eventually. But I wonder if maybe using Wikidata here would be actually impossible because, say, we want to use some specific words and Wikidata would use other words. Maybe some language has a lot of synonyms for "Monday" and Wikidata would list them all but we wouldn't, or some other situation like this. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 02:00, 4 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
    @Daniel Carrero: I prefer the table as well, but I didn't feel like switching everything manually; the switch to list was out of convenience only. --Barytonesis (talk) 12:03, 4 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
    @Daniel Carrero: yes, there could be some cases where wikidata returns something incorrect, which we could either fix there (preferably), or override it locally (for that language). For most languages it should work fine. I checked a few samples (Ukrainian, Tagalog, Marathi) and the label data in WD for the language looked fine. Jberkel (talk) 17:41, 4 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • Oppose merger as the usage depends on the layout of the page. One could use one table on one place and the other in an Appendix, and in an other appendix the first one again. Except of course there is a more intelligent way like having one template with a parameter for layout switch. Or even one template for all languages where one has to specify the lang and the layout, the data being held elsewhere. Possibly something with Wikidata which I cannot imagine because I have not yet found out what Wikidata is for. Palaestrator verborum (loquier) 02:32, 4 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
    @Palaestrator verborum: "the usage depends on the layout of the page": if you're suggesting that we use one template for the main space, and another for the appendix space, I'm not opposed to it; if you're suggesting that one language can use the list template, and another language the table template because of different layouts, I disagree: we should aim at a consistent layout for all languages. I agree with the rest of your message. --Barytonesis (talk) 12:03, 4 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
    @Barytonesis:: Lol, actually I did not suggest one language can use the list template, and another language the table template because of different layouts. We surely aim at consistent layouts, though I cannot exclude the possibility that for some weird technical or aesthetical reason one has to deviate on one page. I mainly pointed out that there are all kinds of appendices, and these can indeed have varying layouts depending on what appendix it is.
Something with Appendix:Days of the week could be done too, so it does not have its data in cleartext but elsewhence. Palaestrator verborum (loquier) 15:48, 4 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

December 2017

Template:el-future-form

Latest comment: 6 years ago9 comments3 people in discussion

This template is used for definitions that should not exist, as they are simply showing how the particle θα (tha) can be used with verb forms to create other forms. It would be like having a template for showing a definition at come for will come. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 04:27, 4 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

  • Well, it is a definition, because that's just how Wiktionary works. But it obviously doesn't deserve to be one. And I don't think it's that useful, because learners will have to apply a little grammar in order to conjugate, that's just how it is. Our job is just to provide and document the words, which these are not. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 07:03, 5 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Now modified to give usage example - rfd removed. — Saltmarsh. 18:49, 6 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
That's a lot better, but I still think we'd be best off removing it altogether. I'm willing to accept this, but I'm reinstating the RFD because I'd prefer to let it run its course. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 20:02, 6 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Saltmarsh: I don't mean to hassle you, but why do you feel this is different from {{el-dep}}, which you agreed to see removed (as per the template talkpage linked above)? --Barytonesis (talk) 20:32, 6 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Barytonesis:My purpose was to illustrate a usage and its a shorter way of achieving this with resorting to {{ux}} which requires a translation. — Saltmarsh. 06:09, 7 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Not necessarily, you can use {{ux|el|xxx|t=-}} --Barytonesis (talk) 15:04, 8 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Template:el-model-page

Latest comment: 5 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

No other language has model pages, especially not with labels in the upper right-hand corner advertising them. I raised this before at Template talk:el-model-page, but now I'd like to see what others think. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 04:35, 4 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

  • keep — I would suggest that other languages should consider having model pages. (1) New editors find them a useful guide. (2) They form the basis for any discussions about page format. Does an unobtrusive note do any harm? — Saltmarsh. 07:45, 4 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • Delete, you know my stance on this. I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of "model pages", I'm just opposed to any kind of notice in the main space: this piece of information concerns the editors, not the viewers/readers. --Barytonesis (talk) 12:17, 4 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Category:English terms spelled with -

Latest comment: 3 years ago18 comments14 people in discussion

Previously deleted; manually re-introduced. —suzukaze (t・c) 08:55, 16 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

I am curious as to the intended use case for such categories. Equinox ◑ 09:21, 16 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
I think some people like the idea of using a dictionary to find lexicographical/orthographic oddities. We keep a category of English terms spelled with Ç for the same reason we list anagrams or keep a category of English palindromes. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 10:37, 16 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
The anagrams and palindromes are at least useful in solving word puzzles. Equinox ◑ 10:38, 16 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • Weak keep - We have a category for all plural forms even though most plurals are not at all unusual - I can't see why we cannot have a category for hyphenated terms. I do appreciate the point that hyphens are not unusual (hence the 'weak') but the use of punctuation within a word is somehow less standard than the use of the letters A to Z. John Cross (talk) 10:42, 17 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
If it's kept please edit Module:languages/data2 so people don't waste their time adding it manually. DTLHS (talk) 00:53, 26 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
It's a category that potentially has some use for less experienced users who are trying to search for a term beginning with "-". What would be more useful would be a category for terms beginning with "-". The problem that is addressed is the impossibility of finding such terms without using the relatively advanced "insource" feature of CirrusSearch. DCDuring (talk) 13:51, 26 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Are there any English entries beginning with "-" that aren't in CAT:English suffixes or CAT:English suffix forms? —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 16:10, 26 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Isn't that easy to determine using CirrusSearch, with "insource"? DCDuring (talk) 17:08, 26 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Delete, useless crap. --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 01:19, 10 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
Keep. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 01:34, 10 January 2018 (UTC)Reply


If this is kept, the code that prevents it from being added by automatically by the headword templates needs to be removed again. Please don't close this discussion (at least, in a way that keeps this) without fixing that. Weak keep, IMO. I sometimes want to check for words spelled with a certain character, and it's easier to check a category than to go to the bother of performing my own database dump search. - -sche (discuss) 16:31, 3 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Delete per Mahāgaja. – Julia (talk) • formerly Gormflaith • 18:10, 3 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Keep. I like it. Supevan (talk) 06:57, 5 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

January 2018

Template:ca-num-ord-note

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

I object to this kind of grammatical usage notes being repeated on dozen of entries. It's distracting, and belongs in an Appendix, not in individual entries. --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 00:58, 4 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Delete. Some templatised usage notes can be good; this one is simply so poorly written that it really reduces the quality of the entries. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 14:50, 6 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
Rah, reading so complicated an explanation of so trivial observations brucks the head. Who will give me back the five minutes of trying to understand this poor prose, and answering to how bad it is? Delete. Fay Freak (talk) 21:18, 13 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Template:script note

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Do we really need that? See its use at the top of the page at ја. {{also}} seems sufficient to me. --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 19:12, 4 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Abstain. Unlikely that someone would land on that page and get confused, but it might invite well-meaning vandalism if someone got linked to it. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 17:37, 5 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
Meh, weak keep; for something like this where the characters are graphically identical, it seems like a useful note for, as Meta says, anyone who follows a link to the page. - -sche (discuss) 20:06, 14 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Template:missing template and all redirects to the page

Latest comment: 5 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

I don't think how this template is useful. Module:category_tree already checks whether the template exists. — This unsigned comment was added by Zcreator (talk • contribs) at 21:16, 16 January 2018 (UTC).Reply

If used comprehensively, it could eliminate missing templates from inclusion in Special:WantedPages. For example: Template:Jpan‏‎ Template:ase-prod‏‎, Template:cardinal‏‎, Template:hbo‏‎, Template:italbrac-colon, Template:ordinal‏‎, Template:pluralonly‏‎, Template:zh-ts‏‎, all with 15 links. Removing items that will not be created from Special:WantedPages would make room for items that are truly "wanted". Another way, much better way would be to have Special:WantedPages count only links from principal namespace. And finally, best of all would be actually adding some of those "wanted" pages and not creating templates and modules that create spurious "wants". DCDuring (talk) 00:01, 20 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
DCDuring's suggestion is actually a useful way to clear out WantedPages. Whether it will work in practice I don't know, perhaps we should give it a try. —Rua (mew) 17:35, 30 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Special:PrefixIndex/Module:Unicode_data/yue-jyutping/

Latest comment: 6 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Unused.--Zcreator (talk) 21:03, 18 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Hmm, if you're talking about those data modules listed there, I can see how these can be useful for characters not already included in MOD:zh/data/yue-pron, but then again, Unicode data is riddled with errors. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 21:30, 18 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

February 2018

Category:Languages of the Caucasus

Latest comment: 6 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

Another one of these regional, rather than national, holding categories. See Category talk:Languages of the Middle East. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 05:29, 21 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

Delete --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 08:38, 27 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Metaknowledge: Couldn't you just speedy delete them at this point? --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 14:34, 5 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
Perhaps. I think they deserve due process. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 18:38, 5 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Unlike the Middle East, the Caucasus is close-knit linguistic area with many shared traits. This is why one hardly ever hears about the “Middle Eastern languages”, but the Caucasian languages are very often referred to as such in linguistic literature. Guldrelokk (talk) 09:39, 6 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

Wiktionary:Topics

Latest comment: 5 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion

Obsolete, useless. Has been RFD'd before, kept for lack of consensus. --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 22:05, 26 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 22:27, 16 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
I would say delete because it seems redundant to the new hierarchical category trees, and less powerful. How do you do the @ ping thing? Dan Polansky wanted to keep this last time. Equinox ◑ 22:32, 16 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
Where would one find are the current hierarchical category trees? Perhaps we could redirect from this page to the those locations. DCDuring (talk) 22:52, 16 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
I am talking about the Category namespace. For example, Category:en:Dogs. Equinox ◑ 02:29, 17 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
Where is the current hierarchy laid out? It isn't a simple hierarchy either, is it? We have graphics for etymologies; why not for categories? The page under challenge was an attempt to develop and present a category structure in a transparent way. Where was that attempt continued? DCDuring (talk) 03:02, 17 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
DC, there is certainly a case to say "let's take the content from the RFD-challenged page and build it into the existing category system" (I think that's always implicit; when we delete a page from RFV we may well move the stuff to a Citations page). But if you want to argue that you hate the Category namespace then please do it in a vote or somewhere, don't hijack this single-page RFD for it. — Yes, the catspace isn't a "simple hierarchy" because that isn't really possible: you can't arrange everything in a single stack in a way that everyone likes. We could use some Library Science input here. In any case it makes much more sense to have an expandable multilingual namespace than one random page hanging around on its own, like this challenged Topics page. Equinox ◑ 03:52, 17 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
Though I don't love our category structure, I mostly dislike how hard it is to understand the hierarchy and the necessary departures from a simple tree structure. The page under challenge, as it is now, doesn't do anything that other pages don't do, except for perhaps saving a single page load. However, in its history it attempted to lay out a hierarchy in a comprehensible manner. I miss that. But it didn't and doesn't connect very well to the hierarchy as actually implemented. We have had a similar problem with etymologies, which now can be addressed in great detail in a semi-graphical way, using indentation. I would like such a mapping for topical (and linguistic) categories. I raise the question here and now, because this page reminded me of something we need IMO. DCDuring (talk) 05:26, 17 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
It should be noted that this depends on <categorytree>, which is unable to handle any category that starts with "en:". This bug was reported years ago, but it resides in low-level code that I'm guessing they're reluctant to mess with, especially since <categorytree> is an optional add-on. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:08, 17 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
Is it possible to get the category tree without all the language subcategories? DCDuring (talk) 15:51, 17 July 2019 (UTC)Reply

March 2018

Appendix:Lingwa de Planeta Swadesh list

Latest comment: 5 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

Do we want this and Appendix:Lidepla? --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 19:04, 27 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

I see no reason to delete it. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 05:35, 28 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
I edited this list and it looks better now, doesn't it? Don't think this language is used often, but it is interesting, with some Mandarin and Sanskrit derived words. HansRompel (talk) 09:56, 8 October 2018 (UTC)Reply

June 2018

Category:Cold weapons

Latest comment: 6 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

Unsurprisingly barely used. The category in and of itself is not a terrible idea, but it's not something that I (or, it seems, most other native speakers) would think of as a natural conceptual category, and this we don't look to use it as a category on Wiktionary. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 00:22, 1 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

Delete. Not to sound like an idiot but I've never heard of "cold weapon" before seeing this. And Category:Spears, Category:Swords seem to cover them. – Julia (talk) • formerly Gormflaith • 18:17, 3 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Delete. I expected this to cover freeze-ray guns, and would not have considered spears to belong here. - -sche (discuss) 20:39, 4 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Just commenting: it does appear to be a term in use. If we had more non-firearm weapons in the category overall, it might be useful. Equinox ◑ 20:40, 4 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/(h₂)moldus

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Unsourced and grossly incorrect. --Victar (talk) 14:58, 16 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

I found *ml̥dus as a derived form of *mel(h1)- in "The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World", by J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, with similar reflexes listed. Don't see *moldus or any initial laryngeals in there, though. Topynate (talk) 03:29, 19 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Template:zh-lookup

Latest comment: 5 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Only used in a set of appendix pages that links to Special:PrefixIndex/<character> instead of <character> for some reason. —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 05:33, 24 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

@suzukaze-c, Justinrleung: What's the story here? Can we orphan this? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 17:54, 9 June 2019 (UTC)Reply
I believe we can replace it with plain links to a character. —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 19:11, 9 June 2019 (UTC)Reply

August 2018

Category:Templates using ParserFunctions

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Lots and lots of templates use parser functions. This category only has two templates in it, but even if it were complete, why would we want it? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 21:50, 18 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

Delete. If in two years noone asked to keep it then it is most probably useless to everyone. Dixtosa (talk) 22:45, 3 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

November 2018

Category:Netherlands English

Latest comment: 4 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion

Rather useless category with rather useless contents. Insofar English is natively spoken in the Netherlands, these varieties are going to align with any national variety of English with perhaps some interference from Dutch, Frisian or Low Saxon. ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 07:51, 26 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

See also Category talk:German English ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 12:53, 6 December 2018 (UTC)Reply
Keep. Why would there not be value in documenting what English subjected to interference from Dutch looks like, and categorising it as such? (Not that such interference would be the sole source of uniqueness; there do seem to at least be some acronyms that would not be understood outside of the Netherlands.) —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 21:44, 26 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
Keep Potentially useful per Metaknowledge. DCDuring (talk) 15:56, 27 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
Because we have no way of definitely establishing whether any such interference occurs among native speakers of English living in the Netherlands or (more likely) among foreign language speakers making typical mistakes. My guess is that a lot of the contents are (mis)spellings produced by non-native speakers, and would either fit in cat:Non-native_English or could be deleted as rare misspellings. This category is also unusual within cat:European_English, as the Netherlands don't have a large population of native speakers of English, speaking one coherent, dominant variety. And as far as I can tell there hasn't been any test at all whether these variants are exclusive to the Netherlands or whether they also occur in Flanders.
As for acronyms, I'm not convinced that it is useful to include Dutch acronyms used in English in this category, any more than it would be useful to categorise ACT as Australian Sotho or NYC as United States Norwegian Nynorsk. ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 15:32, 28 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
Why does the fact that a group of speakers is non-native make their usage less valid? Would you delete Category:Indian English and Category:Nigerian English, which are also produced by non-native speakers from countries without a "large population of native speakers of English, speaking one coherent, dominant variety"? Your acronyms, by the way, are straw men AFAICT, but I welcome serious examples. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 18:38, 2 December 2018 (UTC)Reply
Non-native speakers' usage isn't per se less valid, but I fail to see why a dictionary should include it if their usage violates native speakers' sense of orthography, morphology or syntax. Not to mention that plenty of their compatriots would consider this use of diaereses a misspelling.
Whether they are technically native speakers or not, English is an official language in both countries that is widely used in national discourse and from a young age many inhabitants speak varieties of English that aren't derivative of other varieties of English. Also, what you quoted was a description of what "Netherlands English" isn't, it wasn't a definition of any variety of English that is desirable to categorise. (The stress on "one" and "coherent" is only for the sake of categorisation, if having just one category isn't justifiable there is no reason there could not be more.)
"NPR" in the meaning "National Public Radio" seems citable in Norwegian - I wouldn't object to the creation of that, but a label "United States Norwegian Bokmål" seems a bit much for this kind of thing. [1] [2] [3] [4] ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 12:53, 6 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

December 2018

Appendix:Russian prefixes

Latest comment: 3 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion

(Notifying Atitarev, Benwing2, Cinemantique, Useigor, Wanjuscha, Wikitiki89, Stephen G. Brown, Guldrelokk, Fay Freak, Tetromino):

Obsolete, redundant with CAT:Russian prefixes. Per utramque cavernam 23:41, 17 December 2018 (UTC)Reply
OK to delete, IMO. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 23:51, 17 December 2018 (UTC)Reply
Completely redundant in this form. Delete. Guldrelokk (talk) 23:58, 17 December 2018 (UTC)Reply
Keep. Currently this page doesn't show any advantages (definitions, synonyms, antonyms, ...) but it can be improved.—Игорь Тълкачь (talk) 18:09, 21 December 2018 (UTC)Reply
Keep useful for new learners. Request for improvements. Useful since has links to other sites.-User:Tsar 2002 7:29, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Keep: does currently add something to the category (possibly Игорь Тълкачь's suggestions taken up), and could do even more. PJTraill (talk) 20:29, 27 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

Appendix:Goethe-Zertifkat A1/A2

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Is it a copyvio?

--Brown*Toad (talk) 08:09, 24 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

I spurn this legal opinion “Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich geschützt.” The list does not seem to be a persönliche geistige Schöpfung (the rather high threshold of originality requirement in the law of the FRG) nor can I characterize anything as Datenbank which would give it fiveteen years protection from publication. Fay Freak (talk) 12:25, 24 December 2018 (UTC)Reply
Why the weird spelling of Zertifikat? Why no links to it? Certainly seems sensible to scrap the misspelling, but what is the page for anyway? PJTraill (talk) 20:39, 27 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

February 2019

Russian prefixes better analyzed as containing an interfix -о- or -е-

Latest comment: 5 years ago12 comments4 people in discussion

(Notifying Atitarev, Cinemantique, Useigor, Wikitiki89, Stephen G. Brown, Guldrelokk, Fay Freak, Tetromino, Per utramque cavernam): I'd like to delete the following prefixes:

Prefix to delete Reanalyse as
английско- (anglijsko-) англи́йский (anglíjskij) + -о- (-o-)
арабо- (arabo-) ара́б (aráb) + -о- (-o-)
арабско- (arabsko-) ара́бский (arábskij) + -о- (-o-)
африканско- (afrikansko-) африка́нский (afrikánskij) + -о- (-o-)
бое- (boje-) бой (boj) + -е- (-e-)
водо- (vodo-) вода́ (vodá) + -о- (-o-)
двое- (dvoje-) дво́е (dvóje) + -е- (-e-)
звуко- (zvuko-) звук (zvuk) + -о- (-o-)
немецко- (nemecko-) неме́цкий (neméckij) + -о- (-o-)
ново- (novo-) но́вый (nóvyj) + -о- (-o-)
перво- (pervo-) пе́рвый (pérvyj) + -о- (-o-)
российско- (rossijsko-) росси́йский (rossíjskij) + -о- (-o-)
русско- (russko-) ру́сский (rússkij) + -о- (-o-)
maybe славяно- (slavjano-) славян(и́н) (slavjan(ín)) + -о- (-o-)
французско- (francuzsko-) францу́зский (francúzskij) + -о- (-o-)

The problem here is that such formations are productive in modern Russian: pretty much any noun or adjective can be made into a prefix by adding -о- (-o-) onto the end of the stem (or -е- (-e-) if the end of the stem is palatal). Otherwise we're going to end up with an indefinitely expanding set of such prefixes, cf. машинно- (mašinno-, “machine-”) in маши́нно-чита́емый (mašínno-čitájemyj, “machine-readable”), бомбо- (bombo-, “bomb-”) in бомбоубе́жище (bomboubéžišče, “bomb shelter”), etc. The case of славяно- (slavjano-) is a bit special as the corresponding lemma is славяни́н (slavjanín), but the stem of that lemma is actually славян- (slavjan-) as evidenced by plural forms such as славя́не (slavjáne) (nominative plural), славя́н (slavján) (genitive plural), etc. where the -ин (-in) singular suffix drops out. Benwing2 (talk) 00:42, 27 February 2019 (UTC)Reply

None of these is a prefix. Delete all ASAP. Guldrelokk (talk) 01:11, 27 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Guldrelokk What do you think of the following: благо- (blago-), много- (mnogo-), германо- (germano-), англо- (anglo-), одно- (odno-), фото- (foto-), энерго- (enɛ́rgo-)? благо- and много- are maybe not prefixes as they can be analyzed as благой + -о- and многий/мно́гое + -о-. германо- and англо- are *maybe* analyzable as А́нглия + -о- and Герма́ния + -о-, but this leads to the question of why not англе- etc. as well as the fact that in reality the prefixes англо- and германо- were probably borrowed as such (cf. франко-, which cannot be derived from any noun). одно- is maybe analyzable as the stem of оди́н but одно- does feel like a prefix to me. фото- is maybe derivable from the noun фо́то, but that seems questionable as фото- was probably borrowed as such (cf. аудио-, which cannot be derived from any noun). энерго- likewise feels like a borrowed prefix to me, although it's conceivably analyzable as эне́ргия + -о-. Benwing2 (talk) 02:37, 27 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
Deleted, along with военно- (vojenno-) and шести- (šesti-). Benwing2 (talk) 05:59, 27 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Benwing2: I think they were deleted prematurely. Although, I don't have a strong opinion about how we show the etymologies - interfixes or combining forms. The forms are useful, at least as hard-redirects as a minimum or, even better, some form of a soft-redirect with usage notes. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 21:59, 27 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Atitarev Which forms would you want put back? My concern is that the set of actual attested prefixes is a fairly random collection of potential prefixes, with no obvious reason why a given prefix is present or not. Maybe we should keep some extremely common prefixes like много- and благо- and maybe водо-, but I'd argue e.g. that арабско- and африканско- aren't terribly useful. Benwing2 (talk) 02:01, 28 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Benwing2: I suggest to make a soft redirect template, using an "adjective form" or "prefix" in the header. The definition line is up to you. E.g. something like in ру́сско- (rússko-): ру́сский (rússkij) + -о- (-o-) (a combining form). I would keep all the deleted ones, hopefully using the same template. You don't have to create new ones. As you said, they are very productive. Might as well help users understand their usage and how they are formed. Consider also back translations for such prefixes in English. What do you think? --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 02:50, 28 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Atitarev I don't really like the idea of keeping a random collection of such prefixes that happen to already be in the dictionary. I think if we keep some of them, we should be logical about what we keep. Note that information about formation of such prefixes could be included on the -о- (-o-) page (it already is, in fact), along with pronunciation of the most common prefixes (e.g. много- and благо- are never stressed, водо- is stressed in some words, etc.).
Another issue is, do we use them in etymologies? For example, do we etymologize водопрово́д (vodoprovód, “water pipe”) as вода́ (vodá) +‎ -о- (-o-) +‎ прово́д (provód) (as I would prefer) or as водо- (vodo-) +‎ прово́д (provód)? If we do it the former way, the connection to вода́ (vodá) is made clearer, and the word is automatically categorized into CAT:Russian compound words, which appears correct to me. If we do it the latter way, we'd have to manually add CAT:Russian compound words to all such words. OTOH, if we do it the former way, then there won't be any links to водо- (vodo-) (if we decide to keep it), so it's not obvious how a user would find it. Benwing2 (talk) 03:01, 28 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Benwing2: I see. OK, delete. I will convert the deleted forms to hard redirects. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 03:07, 28 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Atitarev If you'd rather have them exist as soft redirects, that is OK with me, as long as we don't have to use them in etymologies. Benwing2 (talk) 03:19, 28 February 2019 (UTC)Reply

-o- and -e- are not interfixes in Russian. They are just the endings of the preceding noun in a compound, and directly reflect the original thematic vowel that has been lost or modified in many other endings. See the discussion below for Latin, which concerns the same thing. —Rua (mew) 22:25, 8 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

This analysis, if it ever made sense, doesn't make sense for the vast majority of such compounds, which were formed when the thematic vowel was no longer transparent. Benwing2 (talk) 22:35, 17 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

Russian non-rhymes

Latest comment: 5 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion

(Notifying Atitarev, Benwing2, Cinemantique, Useigor, Wikitiki89, Stephen G. Brown, Guldrelokk, Fay Freak, Per utramque cavernam, Wittiami): Masculine rhymes in Russian require at least one consonant, either before or after the stressed vowel. In other words, вода́ (vodá) rhymes with когда́ (kogdá) (the rhyme is -dá) but not коса́ (kosá) (where the rhyme -sá; it would rhyme with небеса́ (nebesá)).

If the syllable ends in a consonant, the preceding consonant is not necessarily required: стол (stol) does rhyme with уко́л (ukól) (the rhyme is -ól; it's officially considered a "poor rhyme" (бедная рифма), but is nevertheless very widely used in poetry).

The following recently created non-rhymes need to be deleted and entries linking to them need to be cleaned up by a bot:

Rhymes:Russian/a, Rhymes:Russian/ɛ, Rhymes:Russian/i, Rhymes:Russian/o, Rhymes:Russian/u, Rhymes:Russian/e, Rhymes:Russian/ɨ, Rhymes:Russian/ɵ.

Tetromino (talk) 03:52, 27 February 2019 (UTC)Reply

@Tetromino OK. This isn't how things work in English but I'm completely ready to believe that Russian works differently. If others can confirm this, I'll do a bot run to fix things up. (The bot could handle the whole process of adding rhymes, potentially, if people think this is useful.) Benwing2 (talk) 04:04, 27 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
It's actually a little bit more complicated: the consonant doesn't need to match exactly: ловлю́ (lovljú) famously rhymes with на Ю (na Ju) because in this case a palatalized approximant [lʲ] in [lɐˈvlʲu] is "close enough" to the glide [j] in [nɐ‿ˈju]. But you need something consonant-ish there; -u by itself does not make a rhyme. Tetromino (talk) 04:26, 27 February 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Wittiami: Please note that your creations can be deleted. You should discuss these edits first. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 19:28, 2 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Tetromino, @Atitarev: OK. I can reorganize all rhymes into subcategories in order to arrange every ultimate syllable accordingly to their preceding consonant. Also I think it is a nice idea to combine rhymes like люблю and на Ю with similar preceding consonants in one entry. Additionally I have already combined entries for /æ/ and /a/ sounds in one, analogously /ɵ/ and /o/. If my work here still make sense, I'll continue adding more rhymes and entries. Wittiami (talk) 19:59, 2 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Wittiami Even after you said you'd stop creating entries with rhymes like /a/, you are still doing it with туда́ (tudá) and сюда́ (sjudá). Note that in any case, adding rhymes is better suited to a bot than a human. Benwing2 (talk) 08:53, 3 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

March 2019

Category:Proto-Nguni language

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I believe that this category should be deleted for a few reasons.

1. All reconstructions are unsourced. The only source I have found about Proto-Nguni is a book called Comparative Reconstruction of Proto-Nguni Phonology by Sambulo Ndlovu. However, in my opinion it is rather poorly done, making basic mistakes such as assuming Zulu <nhl> and Xhosa <ntl> represent sounds, when it is just an orthographical difference.

2. It is difficult to tell which words/features existed in Proto-Nguni, and which words/features spread among the Nguni languages at a later date. For example, the Zulu/Xhosa/Swati cognates iqaqa/iqaqa/licaca "polecat". This word was borrowed from a Khoisan language, but was it loaned into Proto-Nguni, or was it loaned across various Nguni languages?

3. The differences between Proto-Nguni and the modern Nguni languages are very minor. There are only a few systematic differences. Most differences are sporadic. A few systematic changes: Zulu: tʃʰ > ʃ; Swati: z > t, tʰ > ts/tf, d > dz/dv.

4. The current reconstructions on Wiktionary are not parsimonious. From Proto-Bantu to modern Nguni, there was a change CV́CV > CV́CV́ > CV̂CV. The reconstructions on Wiktionary have this as CV́CV́. However, there is no evidence that this was the form in Proto-Nguni, because no modern Nguni languages preserve that. It would be more parsimonious to say that Proto-Nguni already had CV̂CV, same as the modern Nguni languages. Actually, disregard this. I just found out Phuthi preserves CV́CV́.

5. Problems with the reconstruction arise when considering the Lala language. There was a sound change of labial palatalization (in which labials were palatalized in contact with /w/), which affected Nguni languages, Sotho-Tswana languages, and I believe some other Southern Bantu languages. However, the Lala language is the only Nguni language to not undergo labial palatalization. This would imply that Proto-Nguni did not have labial palatalization, so that a form such as *inja "dog" should be reconstructed as *imbwa (which is the form in Lala).

Smashhoof (talk) 19:25, 2 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for bringing this to the community's attention. I'd like to address the points you made in order:
1. All our Proto-Nguni entries are by @Rua, who IIRC believes that reconstructions need not be sourced so long as the individual sound changes at work can be sourced. I hope that Rua will contribute to this discussion further. For my own part, I had seen that book by Ndlovu online, and tried (and failed) to get my hands on a copy of it, but I am disappointed to hear that it isn't up to snuff.
2. This is a persistent problem in Bantu historical linguistics, and it's really the same for Proto-Bantu itself. BLR tries to avoid making a claim that their entries are in fact reconstructible to PB, because those with limited geographic distribution could equally well be innovations whose form was modified to make them seem like inheritances.
3. Minor differences are not of themselves a reason to avoid reconstructing a language, but I think you could argue that Proto-Bantu and Proto-Khoe entries can house all the information we need to present, and I would be amenable to that.
5. Lala is a very curious language, and I don't know of any consensus on it. The traditional Zunda-Tekela split would then mean that Tekela is paraphyletic if Lala is indeed preserving the original condition. I don't know why it couldn't be a contact language, however, in a similar manner to Phuthi, which was modified by contact with Sotho. Ownby views Lala as the basalmost Nguni language, producing very different reconstructions, but also employs suspect glottochronology.
Anyway, I've not studied Nguni as you have, but I am concerned by reconstructions unrestrained by complicated reality. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 20:37, 10 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

Category:Latin words interfixed with -i-

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

This isn't actually an interfix, but it's just the form that the thematic vowel of the preceding noun takes in a compound. i is the regular outcome of various Old Latin vowels in most positions. —Rua (mew) 22:22, 8 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

There actually are a few arguments for -i- being an interfix in Latin compound words. The many examples of words with short a e o u in non-final open syllables clearly show that weakening of short vowels to -i- was not a regular phonological process in Classical Latin. And it seems unlikely that Classical Latin had a productive morphophonological rule of vowel reduction to -i- either: in "Latin vowel reduction and the reality of phonological rules", Tore Janson says that Latin adjective and verb roots with short -o- never have alternative forms with -i- in compound words (e.g. potens forms impotens, not *impitens) (p. 5). Also, Old Latin vowel reduction didn't result in -i- in closed syllables or before r, and usually not before clusters of an obstruent and r, but linking -i- can be found in these contexts (compare lectisternium, quadriremis, herbigradus to incestus, onero, perpetro). In compounds, -i- was used even after consonant stems (such as dracōn- in the category's list of words).--Urszag (talk) 01:19, 20 October 2019 (UTC)Reply

Template:en-ing form of

Latest comment: 5 years ago14 comments6 people in discussion

@Dan Polansky, DCDuring, Purplebackpack89, Mahagaja, Erutuon, I'm so meta even this acronym I'd like to revisit this and propose deleting it. It was RFD'd previously Mar 2014 - Jan 2017, and the consensus was "keep" with low turnout and a split vote. In the intervening two years absolutely nothing has happened with this template and it's used on exactly ZERO mainspace pages. For that reason alone I feel I can probably just speedy-delete it, but since it passed a previous RFD I'd like to make sure others are OK with deleting it. It can trivially be recreated if needed. Benwing2 (talk) 04:12, 20 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

I probably would've ignored this discussion if not pinged, but I stand by the reasons younger me had for keeping it. At the very least it should be redirected to a template that does the same thing. Purplebackpack89 04:27, 20 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
I'd be interested to know how many 21st century entry-level grammars and ESL/EFL texts use participle, rather than merely mention the term and put it in a glossary.
The term participle gives short shrift to gerund use of the term formed by adding "ing" to the base form of the verb. Any -ing form can be used as adjective, uncountable noun, and a component of progressive/continuous aspect of verbs. (I don't think it is always possible to use an ing-form as a countable noun, eg, ?cookings, ?freezings, ?snowings, ?drivings, though such use may just be rare for some verbs.) CGEL argues forcefully that there is little to distinguish participle/adjectives and gerund/nouns, not only in form, but also in syntactic properties. (The argument is in the chapter "Non-finite and verbless clauses" §4.3. CGEL refers to the form as gerund-participle, which has the advantage of preserving the connection with the classically derived terms, but presupposes knowledge of those terms.
To me the question is when we should switch from displaying "present participle" to displaying "ing-form". DCDuring (talk) 12:59, 20 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
I don't know which CGEL you're talking about, but I'm astonished that they say there is little to distinguish present participles from gerunds "in syntactic properties". In Singing makes you happy, singing can only be a gerund, while in I gave the singing boy a dollar it can only be a participle. I'm not in favor of displaying "ing-form"; I prefer the current wording "present participle and gerund". It's really only an etymological coincidence that the two forms have become homonymous for all verbs in English. —Mahāgaja · talk 14:43, 20 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
There is no question but that there are functional differences at a gross level. It is in complement selection and structure that there is no difference in most cases. I leave it to them to try to convince you. The CGEL I always cite is the Cambridge one, more recent by 17 years than the Longman one. But the Longman CGEL doesn't make the distinction either.
I don't really see the point of entrenching word history when it is no longer relevant to English grammar and is unhelpful to most language learners. Those who like linguistic history or are interested in comparing English to other languages which have gerunds and/or participles and distinct forms thereof can surely manage to deal with the -ing-form display. I don't see why their views should be imposed on all language learners, including those whose first language doesn't have participles or gerunds or confusingly applies the terms to words or forms with different functions. DCDuring (talk) 15:13, 20 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
I don't much care whether we display only "present participle" or "present participle and gerund", but I don't much like "-ing form". Benwing2 (talk) 17:17, 20 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
How about gerund-participle (CambridgeGEL) or -ing participle (ComprehensiveGEL)? DCDuring (talk) 23:08, 20 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
I'd be OK with "gerund-participle" but "-ing participle" doesn't sound much better than "-ing form", and worse than "present participle". I actually think that "active participle" is significantly better than "present participle" because English has two simple participles, ending in -ing and -ed, which are both either present or tenseless participles but differ in being active vs. passive. They can both be made into specifically past participles viz. "having killed" (active), "having been killed" (passive). Benwing2 (talk) 05:14, 21 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
Passivization in English is attributable to the use of be. DCDuring (talk) 11:09, 21 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
In any event {{en-ing form}} is intended to be shorter for typing than what is displayed. Please give my arthitic fingers a break. DCDuring (talk) 11:57, 21 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
I like gerund–participle best. It provides a bridge from the older terminology ("this is a form that subsumes what is traditionally known as the gerund and the present participle") and suggests that there is similarity between some uses of the gerund–participle form and those of the past participle. -Ing participle seems like a misnomer because some uses of the gerund–participle are not participle-like at all, but nounlike. -Ing form would be my second choice. At least it describes the morphology of the form. — Eru·tuon 18:46, 2 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
I'm fine with gerund-participle as the display. What should the name of the template and, especially, its redirects be? I'd like one redirect to be [{temp|ing-form}} because its short.
That still leaves with with the not-so-appropriate PoS, to wit, "Verb". "Participle" would be more accurate and would also work for the -ed forms which can be both verbs and adjectives. DCDuring (talk) 21:06, 2 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Keep and use it instead of {{present participle of}} for all entries. English does have a gerund, that's a fact, and it is clearly distinct from the present participle in function. —Rua (mew) 13:20, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Template:liv-compound

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

@Neitrāls vārds Similar logic appears here as for Template:sv-compound above. The usage is a bit less random as it's mostly used specifically for some suffix-like words used as the second component of a compound, but it's still used only on about 80 pages for about 7 components. The documentation gives the example of mīez, which is supposed to be equivalent to compounds with English -man, except that the latter *is* analyzed as a suffix, and I don't see why the same can't be done for these Livonian components. Benwing2 (talk) 19:16, 20 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

Judging by talk:-man there isn't exactly a consensus... And they have a point. By that logic who is to hold someone back from creating Bundes- and -republik and hundreds of other "prefixes", "suffixes".
Latviešu valodas gramatika says that "a sign of a tendency towards grammaticalization is weakening of the initial meaning and strengthening of generalized character(?)" (I guess what is meant is that the affixoid yields uniform results?) and apparently grammaticalization is a sign of an affixoid...
Or we can go by Nordisk leksikografisk ordbok referenced in affixoid and consider this case solved with -mō and -mīez being postfixoids.
I only want to know how I can get the derived terms at mō#Derived terms and mīez#Derived terms (this is assuming you would replace the template to be deleted with {{af}})? It's possible to tell {{suffixsee}} to show -mō and not take the page name which would be mō, right? (I have no interest in making entries for the "postfixoids" I think they're completely redundant on an entry level.) Neitrāls vārds (talk) 06:56, 22 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Template:case-gov

Latest comment: 5 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Redundant to the much more widely used {{+obj}}. —Rua (mew) 17:06, 24 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

@Rua I am inclined to agree with you as it appears {{case-gov}} is used on < 10 pages and {{+obj}} is used on 300+ pages, but it's hard to tell for sure because {{+obj}} isn't properly documented. Can you fix this? Benwing2 (talk) 09:23, 25 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Rua It should be noted that we also have {{construed with}} (barely used) and {{indtr}} (used on over 500 pages, mostly Spanish and Portuguese) for the same purpose. Ideally we should have only one. Benwing2 (talk) 15:50, 31 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

Swedish inflectional templates

Latest comment: 5 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

@Patrik Stridvall, Vildricianus, Mike, Rua, LA2 There are 34 Swedish inflectional templates for different possible noun, verb, adjective and adverb forms. Most of them are equivalent to simple calls to {{form of}} or {{inflection of}}. None of them do any categorization except adding to CAT:Swedish noun forms, CAT:Swedish verb forms, CAT:Swedish adjective forms and/or CAT:Swedish adverb forms, which is already handled by the headword template on the same page. (Exceptions: (1) {{sv-verb-form-pastpart}}, which categorizes into CAT:Swedish past participles; (2) the obsolete-form templates, see below.) The following is the full list:

A slight complication is that a few of the templates have an extra parameter (usually |plural of=, in one case |obsoleted by=) for obsolete forms, which specifies the equivalent non-obsolete form. When this parameter is specified, the text changes to include the word "obsolete", and the category changes to CAT:Swedish obsolete noun forms and/or CAT:Swedish obsolete verb forms. This encompasses the following 5 templates:

Most other languages have a single template to handle all non-lemma forms, or at most one template per part of speech. I'd like to replace these templates with either (a) a single language-specific template, (b) calls to {{form of}} and/or {{inflection of}}, or (c) a combination of (a) and (b), depending on the template.

Note that 11 of the templates (not including any of the templates with obsolete-form support) are mentioned in Module:accel/sv, which will have to be changed accordingly (not hard).

Benwing2 (talk) 21:09, 30 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

Sure, go ahead. There's no real reason that these templates should exist when we have generic templates capable of doing the same thing. —Rua (mew) 21:37, 30 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
What is broken? Which problem are you trying to solve, except creating therapy work for yourself? These templates exist, they are used in hundreds of articles, and they work fine. By changing or renaming them, you will waste a lot of your own time, which you could have used to add new content. --LA2 (talk) 22:38, 30 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
@LA2 I am trying to clean up these various templates and make them properly documented and more consistent, and having so many inconsistent, badly documented and often poorly written templates is a maintenance headache. It also makes it more confusing for end users to have so many different ways of doing things. Also keep in mind that renaming templates with a bot is extremely easy; I'm not doing this by hand or anything. In a couple of hours, I can write and test a script that will rename all 34 templates; then I just let it run overnight and voilà. Benwing2 (talk) 01:13, 31 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

April 2019

Template:abstract noun of

Latest comment: 5 years ago8 comments5 people in discussion

This is used only in Thai, and seems to be used in addition to, but also instead of real definitions. Note diff: an editor has entirely removed the English definitions, replacing them with an incomprehensible "abstract noun" definition. The full definition is definitely preferable to this, so I think we should undo this and restore the original full definitions. —Rua (mew) 21:19, 1 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Pinging @Miwako Sato, who seems to be the editor who removed all the definitions. —Rua (mew) 17:27, 14 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

  1. There had long been people who manually defined abstract nouns as "abstract noun of xxx", and then I imported this template from the Thai Wiktionary because it would more helpful than inserting such kind of definition manually.
  2. In my opinion, using this template is more useful than putting actual definitions. For example, the verb ตะแบง (dtà-bɛɛng) is defined as "(1) to cross; to twist; to intertwine; to plait. (2) to make or express (a remark, argument, etc) obliquely, evasively, or distortedly.", and its abstract noun, การตะแบง (gaan-dtà-bɛɛng), would be defined as "(1) an act or instance of crossing; an act or instance of twisting; an act or instance of intertwining; an act or instance of plaiting. (2) an act or instance of making or expressing (a remark, argument, etc) obliquely, evasively, or distortedly." So, just defining it as "abstract noun of ตะแบง (dtà-bɛɛng)" would be more appropriate. Moreover, there are terms that have no directly corresponding terms in English and there abstract noun definitions would need long and redundant descriptions. For example, the verb เสียอาการ (sǐia-aa-gaan) is defined as "to lose control of oneself, lose one's mind, or go crazy because of shyness, excitement, surprise, etc.", and its abstract noun forms are ความเสียอาการ and การเสียอาการ, which would be defined as "the condition of losing control of oneself, lose one's mind, or go crazy because of shyness, excitement, surprise, etc." and "an act or instance of losing control of oneself, lose one's mind, or go crazy because of shyness, excitement, surprise, etc.", respectively. Wouldn't a mere definition like "Abstract noun of เสียอาการ (sǐia-aa-gaan)" be more suitable?
  3. Anyway, those who regularly participate in Thai entries might be able to give more beneficial opinions on this: @Alifshinobi, GinGlaep, Octahedron80, Wyang
--Miwako Sato (talk) 16:39, 17 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

In Thai, an abstract noun is merely formed by placing "การ" (for action) or "ความ" (for condition) before any verb, adverb, or adjective and just covers all the senses that the verb, adverb, or adjective has. There's no need to add something which the OP described as "real definitions". This is the same thing as defining "flied" as "a simple past tense of fly" instead of defining "fly" as "to move in the air" and defining "flied" as "moved in the air". The template is applicable to any languages of similar structures, including Asian languages like Khmer, Lao, etc. The fact that it is now used in Thai and has not yet been used in other languages doesn't constitute a reason for its deletion. So, keep it. --YURi (talk) 19:36, 17 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

RE: Definitions/translations vs "abstract noun of". Which one?
I probably need to think more about this, but my current view is that a simpler approach should be used primarily. I am not a fan of unnecessarily complex approaches. So, "abstract noun of" should be used mainly, and a definition/translation should be provided only if it is needed. Defining/translating words that are equivalent to -ing words (e.g., การพูด (gaan-pûut) and การเดิน (gaan-dəən) = speaking and walking respectively) does not add much. So, definitions/translations should be provided only for (a smaller set of) words that really do need them (e.g., ความรู้ (kwaam-rúu) is defined in the Thai Wiktionary. Other words that should be defined/translated are ความถ่วง (kwaam-tùuang) and ความเร่ง (kwaam-rêng) etc.). These words, for those who do not speak Thai, have to be defined because they do not simply mean "the state of -ing (something)", or they may have specialized meanings. For example, ความรู้ (kwaam-rúu) does not simply mean "knowing," or "the state of being aware or informed." It means "knowledge," or "facts, information, and skills acquired by a person." It also has other meanings. Anyway, I am open to other views. If you have a strong argument for eliminating "abstract noun of," please share it.
--A.S. (talk) 20:06, 17 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Other than Thai, this template was generally tended to serve many languages such as Northern Thai, Isan, Lao, Lü, etc, as it was used in Thai Wiktionary. (Indeed, they have all same abstract noun concept.) At the present, we made more specific templates for each language like "th-abstract noun of", "lo-abstract noun of", etc. For English Wiktionary, I suggest that the template could be renamed in same way (because it is just currently used with Thai entries).

It is not limited to have the "abstract noun of" only one line. More senses can be added. For example, th:ความเร็ว can have "abstract noun of" in meaning 1 and then scientific sense in meaning 2.

Additionally, use of template is beneficial for scripts and bots making more entries, as I do in Thai Wiktionary everyday. --Octahedron80 (talk) 01:53, 18 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

@Octahedron80, YURi, Miwako Sato The problem I have with these is that they are defined as lemmas. That means that they have the full status of independent word, and are not part of the inflection paradigm of another word. One expects lemmas to have proper definitions, and one would also expect to find lemmas in a typical dictionary with definitions given. If they were defined as non-lemmas, then it is understood that their meaning is tied to the meaning of the verb to which they belong, and that they generally are not given entries in the average dictionary but instead are grouped with the verb. A key in this question is also whether every verb has its own abstract noun. If there are many verbs that do not have abstract nouns, then they are better considered as lemmas as their existence is not predictable. They should have proper definitions then, rather than being labelled as "abstract noun". To say it another way, the treatment we give to them depends on whether we consider them a case of inflection or of derivation. Inflection is non-lemmas, derivation is lemmas. Inflection usually implies every verb has a fixed set of forms, while derivation is unpredictable and happens on a case-by-case basis.

If abstract nouns are inflectional, and thus non-lemmas and do not need a full definition, then it is still possible for them to have special senses. The same situation exists in English with participles and gerunds. On one side, they are verb forms, inflectional and thus non-lemmas, and their meaning is tied to that of the verb. But they can also sometimes "detach" from the verb and develop senses that are not shared with the verb. In these cases, the standard practice (that I have seen) has been to have Verb headings for the sense tied to the verb, and Noun or Adjective headings alongside it for senses that are separate from the verb. This practice could be applied to Thai too, then these abstract nouns could be defined simply as verb forms (non-lemma), with an additional Noun header (lemma) for cases where they have independent senses. Again, though, if abstract nouns are derivational, then they must have full definitions and should not use a template, as this is the standard for Wiktionary entries.

Separately from this, there is the question of whether abstract nouns need their own special template. We already have the {{inflection of}} template, which can easily handle any kind of inflection, making a separate template unnecessary. I also wonder if an abstract noun is not really just a verbal noun, for which a separate discussion exists below. It would be cleaner if we could make Thai use the verbal noun template instead of having its own separate one. But using {{inflection of}} would be even more preferable. —Rua (mew) 21:46, 24 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Abstract noun (อาการนาม) is a type of noun and is used in sentences as noun, equivalent to English -ing or -ness. It is the umbrella term for verbal noun, adjectival noun, and adverbial noun (other languages may have more kinds). Almost verbs/adjectives/adverbs could be fix with การ/ความ to make the abstract nouns, with some exceptions: (1) The rule can only be found in nowaday/modern use. Dated or obsolete words do not have it. (2) It seldom applies on peotic/galant terms or long idioms/proverbs. (3) Some terms actually never form the abstract noun. They might be considered as (sort of unpredictable) non-lemmas because they are likety not given in published dictionaries, but they should not also have misrepresenting header tag, they must have noun instead of verb/adjective/adverb that would become incorrect part of speech. (I also speak upto other languages in the region that have same concept.)
I see {{gerund of|walk|lang=en}} in walking as lemma under noun tag, that is really equivalent to the abstract noun of in การเดิน. Why the gerund of can exist while the abstract noun of cannot?
FYI: There are five types of Thai noun: common noun (สามานยนาม), proper noun (วิสามานยนาม), collective noun (สมุหนาม; BTW we do not separate this), classifier (ลักษณนาม; someone calls counter, it is same), and abstract noun (อาการนาม). --Octahedron80 (talk) 03:42, 25 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Template:agent noun of

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

This is used in several languages, but the motivation is the same. Again, this template is used either by itself or in combination with real definitions, and again, in diff a real definition was substituted for a meaningless "agent noun" definition. The original definitions should be restored where possible. —Rua (mew) 21:24, 1 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Ping @Lo Ximiendo who is the editor who added it to pages. —Rua (mew) 17:29, 14 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Template:verbal noun of

Latest comment: 5 years ago11 comments6 people in discussion

Again, like the above. "Verbal noun" is not a well-defined concept anyway, and we are not in the habit of defining nouns derived from verbs like in shortening. Instead, a full definition and etymology is provided since they are considered lemmas of their own. —Rua (mew) 21:31, 1 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Not all languages work like English. Several languages have forms conventionally called "verbal nouns". Arabic is an example; every verb has one or more associated verbal nouns, which function somewhat as infinitives (Arabic has no infinitives as such). These verbal nouns are listed in dictionaries next to the verb, because you need them in many syntactic constructions. I'm really not sure what you would replace them with if you removed this template. Benwing2 (talk) 07:05, 2 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Arabic rarely uses this template (see the census below), so it must use {{ar-verbal noun of}} almost exclusively. {{ar-verbal noun of}} has the |form= parameter, which makes it harder to convert to {{verbal noun of}}. — Eru·tuon 07:25, 2 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
I take it that, for English the idea of having "verbal noun" as a definition of an -ing-form of an English verb is that it thereby includes all current and future definitions of the verb lemma. As we put "present participle" alone as a definition under the Verb PoS, there is no explicit acknowledgment that -ing-forms can be used as nouns (eg, 'these belated shortenings of […] '). This notion applies to all English -ing-forms of verbs. In fact, the two English uses of the template in question also put shortening and blottoing in Category:English verbal nouns with some 90 members.
IMO, for English, the underlying issue would need to be addressed before we could take any action that would limit uses of this template and the category in English. If verbal noun is a term that is well defined as it applies in any language, as the census table below suggests that it does, then the template should be kept. Whether we should have the template throw an error message for languages for which we assert that the 'verbal noun' concept does not apply is a separate matter, linked to whether the corresponding categories should be deleted.
If this complicates our template/module practice, so much the worse for our uniformitarian template/module/category architecture. At least the module data tables allow for the complexity, though I wonder how much of the module's memory is consumed by invoking the tables. DCDuring (talk) 12:20, 2 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
If verbal nouns are a well-defined inflection of verbs in some languages, then it might be ok to keep it. However, I have noticed that many entries, even in Irish and Arabic, give additional idiomatic definitions alongside the verbal noun definition. They are also categorised as noun lemmas in those languages, not as verb forms. That suggests to me that they are still derivational rather than inflectional. The fact that Irish has more than 10 different ways to make a verbal noun again suggests that this is word derivation, not inflection. —Rua (mew) 21:05, 2 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
For all stems except the base stem, with rare exceptions that are still regular (I only know تَجْفَاف (tajfāf) from جَفَّفَ (jaffafa) and تَكْرَار (takrār) from كَرَّرَ (karrara), normally form II has the verbal noun taKLīM but a few geminate verbs deviate), all verbal nouns of the stems II and higher are utterly predictable. For base stems they are usually too depending on the meaning and the past vowel: transitive verbs with the pattern KaLaMa are likely to have the verbal noun of the pattern KaLM, even if other forms also exist (for example كِتَابَة (kitāba) is normally the verbal noun of كَتَبَ (kataba) but كَتْب (katb) is understood too), verbs of the pattern KaLiMa that have a meaning that would be or is the passive of a transitive verb with the measure KaLaMa are likely to have the verbal noun form KaLaM. But not even plurals are wholly predictable. This shows that the predictability or the different ways to form certain needed forms does not say anything about their categorization.
It does not need to be a “well-defined concept”. It is a lexicographical device to refer to “all current and future definitions of the verb lemma”, since that’s the point, that these forms stay linked to the verb meanings, may they have additional idiomatic meanings or not. The link is there in all the languages I know: Arabic with you know what, the forms that are given in the conjugation tables, German with -en or -ung (the former related to a more concrete or singular act and the latter to procedures), English with -ing, Latin with -tiō, its descendants also or by a clipping with a minor added vowel (Spanish rechazo for Spanish rechazar, Spanish toque for Spanish tocar), Slavic especially *-nьje and some specialized minor ones.
Grammatically Arabic verbal nouns accept accusative objects and genitivus objectivus, the analogous in English, while Slavic, Latin, German only take genitivus objectivus, by I don’t think this distinction is relevant here.
As a side note, the etymology is not relevant either for the categorization: The verbal noun may be formed from the verb or the verb be denominal.
I note a false dichotomy that being a “lemma” entails having own definitions, or in a compulsion to shed “derivation” and “inflection”. But it must not be like that we either attach forms like an appendage to “true, full” entries or cut any knot: this sacrifices reality for schematism, with little gain – not even for the dogmatics, for who told you that derivation and inflection aren’t ambiguous in languages? You see, it’s even in English ambiguous and at the same time something that one would not care about for anything.
Now I see why I {{perfective form of}}/{{imperfective form of}} has been deprecated, it is for the same reason while not being “not well-defined”, which I would have had difficulties to agree with. It would have been better to recognize that one item of such a pair is not “form of” but it still would be wise to refer from one to the other in the meaning. These forms live and die together, while they can as well live separately or only represent a part of the other (like пере́ть (perétʹ) which has different perfective forms according to sense). Fay Freak (talk) 22:20, 2 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Fay Freak It isn't a false dichotomy if you understand what the categories of "lemma" and "non-lemma" mean in the first place. A lemma is the kind of form you'd expect to find in the average dictionary, along with a definition. A non-lemma is a form that isn't given its own entry, but is instead grouped with the lemma it belongs to. Another way to see the split is between independent and dependent. An inflection can't exist without the verbal paradigm it belongs to, whereas a derivation can exist independent of other lemmas. If a verbal noun has a sense that it does not share with its verb, then that sense is its own noun, because it's independent from the verb. But the verbal noun itself is still dependent, attached to the verb, so the verb form and the noun are distinct. Moreover, a key difference between inflection and derivation is whether the category is optional or required.
@Rua This is exactly where the average dictionary is ambiguous, the nominalizations being mentioned in varying fashion, variously headword-like.
Be it so that a sense makes an own noun, it would mean that only because of this we would have two headers, two times “Noun“, from which the reader does not benefit. We might use a headword template that categorizes both as lemma and non-lemma. But this has nothing do with whether the definitions should have “verbal noun of”. The definitions and their organization shall not be based on how one will categorize them. So no, T:verbal noun of can’t be deleted. I disown the notion that because “a sense” “is a lemma” or “a non-lemma” we can’t refer to other senses to define it – {{synonym of}} is also handy, just by the way. You are committing a great paralogism here exemplified by your utterance “sense is its own noun”: Nay obviously, a sense is not a noun, this confuses subjects and predicates fundamentally. There are nouns and we see senses in them (hence their “senses”, because humans sense them), and the senses of one form might be either independent of another term, or wholly dependent on it as a mere inflexion, or loosely dependent on it. The lexicograph can tell people how usage is without deciding whether something is “derivation” or “inflexion“, or “enclitic” or whatever, however nice there is a distinction in principle. I don’t know or don’t think what a form like عَلَيْهِ (ʕalayhi, “to him, to it”) with so-called “pronominal suffix” is dogmatically but I know without this that nouns with these personal suffixes should not be included. For other things one knows that they should be included and how to gloss them but wits not how they should be classified or related to other terms: but one knows what is economical, knows a good effort-information ratio. The question for including or writing something is always: Will it provide essential information rather than just be expensive? Be it that the distinction is imprecise in this matter, so is language, and still if this is bad it does not follow that we can’t gloss this way. Semantics trumps grammar. The distinction has also nothing to do with predictability and lexicalization: it can vary by language and in a language what one has to memorize or if there are special forms that one has to know, with varying degrees of predictability. Fay Freak (talk) 00:03, 25 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Mahagaja Would a verb without a verbal noun in the Goidelic languages be considered defective, or is that a normal state of affairs? @Benwing2 The same question but for Arabic. That's not a rhetorical question, it's something I'd actually like to know because it's important in deciding whether to call these lemmas or non-lemmas. Based on the model of English gerunds, the standard treatment of such cases is to use the Verb heading for inflections, which are part of the verbal paradigm and whose sense is tied to the verb, and the Noun heading alongside that Verb heading for cases where a verb form has developed special senses that do not arise from the verb. If verbal nouns in these languages are inflectional, then this is the precedent we should follow for them. —Rua (mew) 22:10, 24 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Rua: Of the verbs in CAT:Irish defective verbs, only ar(sa) and feadair don't have verbal nouns; the others do. (The fact that Irish is doesn't have a verbal noun is one of the many reasons why syntacticians, unlike language teachers, consider it a particle and not a verb, not even a defective one.) So even defective verbs tend to have verbal nouns; and nondefective ones always do. On the other hand, there are some verbs, like caint and magadh, that exist only as verbal nouns and have no finite forms. I do agree that from a purely morphological point of view, Goidelic verbal nouns are probably derivational rather than inflectional, but for speakers (both L1 and L2) the verbal noun is still an essential part of the paradigm, so you might say that they are "semantically inflectional" while being morphologically derivational. If you want to delete {{verbal noun of}} to reduce the overall number of form-of templates, then that's okay, as long as I'm still allowed to use {{inflection of|...|verbal noun}}. (Incidentally, the verbal noun is just as essential in Brythonic languages as in Goidelic ones; the reason there are no Brythonic languages in the table below is that for Brythonic languages we use the verbal noun as the lemma.) Lower Sorbian is in the list too; in that language verbal nouns are definitely inflectional and clearly part of the paradigm. As for the other languages I know in the table below, we can IMO eliminate "verbal noun" as a category for German, English, and French. —Mahāgaja · talk 07:46, 25 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
We can keep the template if they are indeed a verb inflection for Goidelic. I'm not sure about the need for categorising them, though, but that is part of my suspicion of categorising non-lemmas in general. I don't find Category:Irish verbal nouns particularly useful, anymore than something like Category:Irish first-person singular present indicative forms would. More pressing, though, is that verbal nouns aren't in Category:Irish verb forms, when they clearly should be. I'm also not sure how to deal with an entry like atriail. Given a strict separation of lemmas and nonlemmas, there would not be a "verbal noun of" sense here at all, because the verbal noun would be treated as a verb form and thus gets a Verb header and not a Noun header. On the other hand, verbal nouns have noun inflections and even genders, and it would be somewhat redundant to have two sections with the same inflections, one for the verbal noun and one for the remaining senses. But it still does not sit right with me that we treat verbal nouns as lemmas, when they are also a part of the verbal paradigm. Looking at English participles gerunds as an example, we don't have nouns defined with {{gerund of}} either, nor do we have adjectives defined with {{past participle of}}. Instead, whenever there are senses that are separate from the verb, they receive their own header, while those belonging to the verb get Verb. But that doesn't work as neatly with languages where verbal inflections can have genders and inflections, not just Irish but also Dutch and German. I'm not sure what to do here, and the discussion in WT:BP about gerunds stalled with no useful conclusion. I would like situations like this to have a standard treatment that fits many languages. —Rua (mew) 10:30, 25 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
I think verbal nouns are similar to participles in being in sort of simultaneously lemmas and nonlemmas, and we do have categories like CAT:Dutch past participles and CAT:Dutch present participles, as well as CAT:Dutch participle forms, and I think we should keep them. So I don't think we can commit to "a strict separation of lemmas and nonlemmas" anyway. —Mahāgaja · talk 12:59, 25 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Census of language codes
in {{verbal noun of}}
language code count
ar 3
bg 5
de 4
dsb 18
en 2
fo 1
fr 1
ga 660
gd 506
gv 442
ha 2
he 3
jaa 1
ka 17
mga 4
oge 3
pl 1203
sga 63
sh 10
te 99
tr 9
xmf 1

Lesser used multicolumn templates

Latest comment: 5 years ago13 comments5 people in discussion

Now that {{ant2}}, {{coord2}}, {{der2}}, {{hyp2}}, {{rel2}}, and {{syn2}} are all aliases of {{col2}}, and similarly for other numbers of columns, I suggest eliminating the lesser-used aliases. Following is a table of all the aliases and their uses (note that the #uses for the main template includes uses of the aliases). I suggest replacing and deleting all aliases with #uses < 1000 (the threshold I've been using for the need for deprecation). By this measure, we should keep {{der2}}, {{der3}}, {{der4}}, {{rel2}}, {{rel3}}, {{rel4}} and rename/delete the rest.

Aliased template Canonical template #Uses Suggested disposition
Template:col1 Template:col1 21 Keep.
Template:der1 Template:col1 19 Replace with {{col1}} and delete.
Template:col2 Template:col2 4605 Keep.
Template:ant2 Template:col2 6 Replace with {{col2}} and delete.
Template:coord2 Template:col2 64 Replace with {{col2}} and delete.
Template:der2 Template:col2 3015 Keep.
Template:hyp2 Template:col2 53 Replace with {{col2}} and delete.
Template:rel2 Template:col2 1647 Keep.
Template:syn2 Template:col2 19 Replace with {{col2}} and delete.
Template:col3 Template:col3 10951 Keep.
Template:der3 Template:col3 8204 Keep.
Template:desc3 Template:col3 16 Replace with {{col3}} and delete.
Template:hyp3 Template:col3 96 Replace with {{col3}} and delete.
Template:rel3 Template:col3 3122 Keep.
Template:syn3 Template:col3 26 Replace with {{col3}} and delete.
Template:col4 Template:col4 4104 Keep.
Template:ant4 Template:col4 2 Replace with {{col4}} and delete.
Template:der4 Template:col4 2732 Keep.
Template:hyp4 Template:col4 416 Replace with {{col4}} and delete.
Template:rel4 Template:col4 1507 Keep.
Template:syn4 Template:col4 21 Replace with {{col4}} and delete.
Template:col5 Template:col5 108 Keep.
Template:der5 Template:col5 106 Replace with {{col5}} and delete.
Template:rel5 Template:col5 0 Delete.
Template:col2-u Template:col2-u 0 Keep.
Template:der2-u Template:col2-u 0 Delete.
Template:col3-u Template:col3-u 513 Keep.
Template:der3-u Template:col3-u 513 Replace with {{col3-u}} and delete.
Template:col4-u Template:col4-u 20 Keep.
Template:der4-u Template:col4-u 20 Replace with {{col4-u}} and delete.
Template:col5-u Template:col5-u 7 Keep.
Template:der5-u Template:col5-u 7 Replace with {{col5-u}} and delete.

Benwing2 (talk) 04:30, 3 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

I support merging all the column templates into a single one. There is no rule or even guideline for choosing how many columns to use, it's left entirely to the personal preference of the editor, which results in different entries having different numbers of columns for no apparent reason. We should pick a number and make everything use that. —Rua (mew) 15:18, 6 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Rua OK. For now I think I'll just orphan the less-used templates and we can figure out later how to choose the number of columns automatically. Benwing2 (talk) 15:30, 6 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
I guess we should delete {{col1}} because it doesn't make the 1000-uses threshold. DCDuring (talk) 16:01, 6 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
@DCDuring {{col1}} serves a specific purpose and isn't just an alias of something else. OTOH it's true that {{col1|LANG}} is replaceable with {{col|LANG|1|...}}, which is only one character more, so maybe we should in fact delete it. Benwing2 (talk) 02:49, 8 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
I'm sure there is a lot of arbitrary variation, but you're proposing to take away all flexibility so there's no way to deal with exceptional cases except by hard-coded kludges. There are factors in choosing a format such as the length of the terms (Chinese is very compact, an agglutinative language is going to be more diffuse), the number of the terms, the desired height and width to be occupied, and possibly others that neither you nor I is aware of. Sometimes two columns look fine and three look awful for no easily explainable reason. There's a fine line between a consistent "house style" and procrustean rigidity- "make everything use that" sounds a lot like the latter. Chuck Entz (talk) 18:35, 6 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
My point is that the need for such flexibility has never been explained, and the way that one should choose the number of columns has never been documented anywhere. Instead, it's arbitrary as you say. It is trivially easy to choose the number of columns based on the length of the terms, so that in itself is not a reason to favour manually choosing. It merely codifies and automates what we already did by hand before. But perhaps we are going a step too far, and should really codify the guidelines first. I invite you to participate. —Rua (mew) 18:46, 6 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
I think we should provide the capability of auto-choosing the number of columns (and probably encourage people to do so) but not force all users to use it. Benwing2 (talk) 02:47, 8 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Isn't the "right" number of columns substantially dependent on the effective width of the browser frame. I don't get the impression that we are very good at that kind of thing. I have a fairly wide monitor, but I like having at least two browser windows visible and I like to be able to easily read our content without spectacles. Sometime the high-column-count tables are unusable. Until such time as we can make the number of columns auto-adjust to browser frame width, this exercise could be a waste of time. DCDuring (talk) 03:32, 8 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Much of the unusability or ugliness in the high-column-count templates is due to the length of the longest word in a given table entry. If that length exceeds the available space, then the long word runs over into the next column, possibly overwriting format elements (eg, "*") or content. DCDuring (talk) 03:44, 8 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
@DCDuring Are you saying it's a waste of time to implement auto-choosing the number of columns? I guess I agree with you if we're doing it independently of the frame width, but maybe there's a way to make it dependent on the frame width using CSS. I know that other sites are able to do this. Maybe we could do something like create CSS classes "multicol-2-3-4" (which means "two columns with narrow frames, 3 columns with mid-width frames, 4 columns with wide frames"), "multicol-3-4-6" (similar), etc., and then have the module code compute the length of the longest word and choose the appropriate CSS class. Benwing2 (talk) 18:24, 13 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
You have obviously taken my concern on board. I appreciate that, but cannot be any help on technical aspects of implementation. Other sites, though not all of them, do seem to have resolved this kind of thing satisfactorily. The good news about solving this is that the solution will appear in many entries. The bad news is that it probably will take a while to address implementation issues, including interaction with things like the right-hand-side table of contents and other right-hand side elements. I expect that folks will have some different preferences about spacing between columns. DCDuring (talk) 20:40, 13 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Perhaps it would be a good idea to use the column-width CSS properties instead of the column-number properties, and choose a column width that displays most of the terms to good advantage. It would probably be better to do it by hand rather than by module, since optimum width depends on the fonts that browsers happen to choose (though they may be nudged towards certain fonts by MediaWiki:Common.css), and a module can't adequately determine the widths of characters. If this option were taken, all the numbered column templates could be deprecated in favor of a single one with a width parameter, or maybe they could be replaced by column templates for narrow, medium, and wide columns. I use column width in the table of contents of my possibly incorrect header page. (It may not display correctly in all browsers.) — Eru·tuon 21:11, 13 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Template:la-pronoun-form

Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

Does nothing useful and nothing Latin-specific. Can easily be replaced by {{head|la|pronoun form}}. —Rua (mew) 19:55, 7 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

In general things that save keystrokes should be kept, but in this case I agree with you because non-lemma pages should be generated by bot or gadget, not by hand. For Russian, for example, we have only {{ru-noun form}}, and use {{head|ru|...}} for everything else. Benwing2 (talk) 02:39, 8 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
There are more considerations than just saving keystrokes. If every language has its own copy of {{head|xx|whatever}} just for the sake of saving keystrokes, then something is wrong. They can just use the generic {{head}}, what else do we have it for? We shouldn't encourage laziness to the point that people find 24 characters too much but not 19. —Rua (mew) 17:25, 14 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Benwing2, could you take a look at handling this and the next few sections according to your plans? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 00:12, 27 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

Template:la-proper noun-form

Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

As above. This also requires a gender to be specified, which is wrong for non-lemmas. Non-lemmas do not require a gender, as it's just duplication of information from the lemma. —Rua (mew) 19:56, 7 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

I disagree that it's wrong to include gender in non-lemma forms. It's more a matter of preference on the part of the specific subcommunity handling that languages. We do include gender/number specs in bot-generated non-lemma noun forms in Russian, for example. Benwing2 (talk) 02:40, 8 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
I see it as unnecessary duplication of lemma information on non-lemma pages. Avoiding duplication is a basic principle, and is why we do not include inflection tables, etymologies and usage examples on nonlemmas either. —Rua (mew) 17:20, 14 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Indeed, gender is important for non-lemmas as well. The inflected forms Alten m. and Alten f. differ by gender, similar with Alte m. vs. f. and Alter m. vs. f. --Der Zeitmeister (talk) 05:00, 29 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

Template:la-noun-form

Latest comment: 5 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

As above. This one doesn't do anything with genders, so it's just straight up the same as {{head|la|noun form}}. —Rua (mew) 19:58, 7 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Agreed, see above with pronoun forms. Benwing2 (talk) 02:41, 8 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Please note, this template is used on well over 10,000 pages, so if obsoleted it should be deprecated rather than deleted outright. Benwing2 (talk) 02:45, 8 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
That goes without saying. It shouldn't be deleted until there are no more transclusions. —Rua (mew) 17:21, 14 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Template:la-verb-form

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

As above. —Rua (mew) 20:00, 7 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Template:lv-inflection of

Latest comment: 5 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

This is a duplicate of {{inflection of}} in terms of function and logic, except less capable. —Rua (mew) 17:12, 14 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

@Rua Don't worry, this is on my list. As it has > 106,000 uses, though, it's not high on the priority list, and some thought needs to go into whether we really want to deprecate such high-use templates. For references, here's a list of all the lang-specific form-of templates with >= 10,000 uses:
Aliased template Canonical template #Uses
Template:es-verb form of Template:es-verb form of 441646
Template:es-verb form of/subtense-pronoun Template:es-verb form of/subtense-pronoun 337361
Template:es-verb form of/subtense-name Template:es-verb form of/subtense-name 337360
Template:es-verb form of/indicative Template:es-verb form of/indicative 185279
Template:es-verb form of/subjunctive Template:es-verb form of/subjunctive 144578
Template:es-compound of Template:es-compound of 114260
Template:lv-inflection of Template:lv-inflection of 106703
Template:eo-form of Template:eo-form of 99100
Template:pt-verb-form-of Template:pt-verb-form-of 94585
Template:ca-verb form of Template:ca-verb form of 78144
Template:es-verb form of/adverbial Template:es-verb form of/adverbial 63386
Template:de-verb form of Template:de-verb form of 54762
Template:fi-form of Template:fi-form of 54262
Template:es-verb form of/imperative Template:es-verb form of/imperative 52546
Template:ru-participle of Template:ru-participle of 47321
Template:de-inflected form of Template:de-inflected form of 46670
Template:pinyin reading of Template:pinyin reading of 40032
Template:el-form-of-nounadj Template:el-form-of-nounadj 31509
Template:nl-verb form of Template:nl-verb form of 30619
Template:bg-verb form of Template:bg-verb form of 30114
Template:en-past of Template:en-past of 28731
Template:pt-verb form of Template:pt-verb form of 28730
Template:nl-noun form of Template:nl-noun form of 27827
Template:en-third-person singular of Template:en-third-person singular of 26977
Template:es-verb form of/participle Template:es-verb form of/participle 24257
Template:ja-romanization of Template:ja-romanization of 16472
Template:pt-adj form of Template:pt-adj form of 15455
Template:io-form of Template:io-form of 10429
Template:sv-noun-form-def Template:sv-noun-form-def 10063
Benwing2 (talk) 22:48, 14 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Ok, I'll leave them to you then. Thank you for the work! —Rua (mew) 22:50, 14 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Category:Translingual numerals or Category:Translingual numeral symbols

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

We currently have both Category:Translingual numerals and Category:Translingual numeral symbols. If there's a difference, I'm not sure what it is. If not, I'm assuming we should merge on into the other. -- Beland (talk) 21:22, 26 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Male and Female categories

Latest comment: 3 years ago10 comments8 people in discussion

Category:Female nationalities

Category:Male nationalities

Category:Female artists

Category:Male artists

Category:Female athletes

Category:Male athletes

Category:Female demonyms

Category:Male demonyms

Category:Female healthcare occupations

Category:Male healthcare occupations

Category:Female musicians

Category:Male musicians

Category:Female occupations

Category:Male occupations

Category:Female people

Category:Male people

Category:Female scientists

Category:Male scientists

Discussion

and a number of other "Male" and "Female" categories, apparently all created by User:Hergilei

These are misnamed: they're really masculine and feminine forms of various categories of nouns- there's really nothing in these that isn't covered by the corresponding categories without "Male" and "Female" in their names. In the languages I've looked at, the members for the "Male" category are the lemmas, and the members of the "Female" category are in the headword lines as feminine forms. These aren't anything lexically interesting like boar and sow or king and queen, just predictable products of their languages' gender morphology.

I think these have escaped notice because they have no English-specific categories, with the exception of Category:en:Female people, which only contains a single Old English entry. For some reason, the "Female" categories have been added to the modules, while the "Male" ones seem to all be in Category:Categories with invalid label. I'm sure there's a lesson in that about gender attitudes, but "Male" and "Female" are both equally useless and should both be deleted. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:21, 28 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

These two definitely need renaming at least, and maybe deletion as well, but there other Male/Female categories I do think are helpful, such as CAT:Male family members and CAT:Female family members. —Mahāgaja · talk 14:49, 28 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Point taken. I've now spelled out all of the ones I'm actually nominating. Also, there may be a few legitimate members in a couple of these, along the lines of king and queen, but they can be transferred to Category:Male and Category:Female. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:49, 28 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Delete. I don't think they should be named "masculine" and "feminine", because these are semantic categories and so they should be categorised by the referent rather than the word. If we really do consider these to be grammatical genders, there's nothing in principle against categories for neuter words in any of these categories, in languages that might have them. Consider that Category:ang:Neuter family members could contain at least wīf, after all. So it's better to consider them as natural genders and keep the names "male" and "female". —Rua (mew) 16:10, 28 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Delete per nom. Julia ☺ ☆ 02:08, 1 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
Delete. It's an unnecessary distinction. Ultimateria (talk) 00:12, 17 February 2020 (UTC)Reply
Keep, although perhaps not in the languages described, but in Ingrian, which I am working with right now, there is a clear difference between Male and Female nationalities, while grammatically there is no difference in gender. See for example ižoralain and ižorakkoi. Thadh (talk) 10:58, 19 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete Taylor 49 (talk) 18:41, 4 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete at least "female people" and "male people" (merge to "women" and "men"), IMO. - -sche (discuss) 05:19, 7 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
Although cf Wiktionary:Requests_for_cleanup#Category:en:Women, which is inclined to reach the opposite conclusion... - -sche (discuss) 23:08, 19 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

Category:Mongolian pronunciation spellings

Latest comment: 5 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Phonetic respellings should be handled differently. We normally don't have entries for words, which are phonetic representations of another word, unless they are attestable common respellings. It is useful to show them (unlinked), though, as in баярлалаа (bajarlalaa) (revision|52386186}}. If pronunciation module for Mongolian is eventually developed, these spellings can be used as parameters. Someone suggested displaying respellings in the headword, as in Nelai फूल (phūl), which says "pronounced फुल (phul)" --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 01:27, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

I'd RFV these individually; it's possible that the pronunciation spellings are actually used in writing as misspellings (though then they should be changed to {{misspelling of}} or {{alternative spelling of}} depending on how standardized Mongolian spelling is). —Mahāgaja · talk 05:35, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Oh, and I don't like the solution at Nepali फूल (phūl). That info belongs in the Pronunciation section, not the headword line. For Irish I do sometimes write "as if spelled XYZ" after the IPA in the pronunciation section. —Mahāgaja · talk 05:42, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

May 2019

Template:trans-mid

Latest comment: 3 years ago19 comments10 people in discussion

It may seem weird to nominate such a widely-used and critical template, but bear with me. Right now, we have templates that automatically split lists into columns, and as a result {{mid4}} and its cousins actually contain no template code at all, they're just kept for compatibility. So, why not do the same for translation tables? If {{trans-top}} is modified to use the automatic columns instead of the current table-based approach, then {{trans-mid}} becomes obsolete just like {{mid4}}. —Rua (mew) 13:55, 6 May 2019 (UTC)Reply

Seems reasonable, though we should ensure that the translation adding tool continues to work with whatever changes are made to the {{trans-}} templates. — SGconlaw (talk) 14:21, 6 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, I seem to remember asking about making our translation tables sort into two columns automatically instead of manually with {{trans-mid}} a few years ago, and was told that for now at least manual columns were necessary because otherwise the translation adding tool wouldn't work. If that's been fixed in the meantime, then by all means delete. But if not, first fix the tool. —Mahāgaja · talk 17:56, 6 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
Yes, the translation editor is the main roadblock in making this change. Which editor understands it the best right now? Do we have any kind of dedicated JS maintainers? User:Erutuon maybe? —Rua (mew) 14:26, 10 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
I've been doing some JavaScript maintenance, as well as User:Dixtosa, who now I think doesn't have as much time to do JavaScript stuff. There are a variety of changes that need to be made to the translation adder, and I've looked at it but not made enough headway in understanding it to implement them. It would at least be a good idea to list the desired changes on the MediaWiki:Gadget-TranslationAdder.js/documentation. — Eru·tuon 17:25, 10 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
I've added a "todo" item to the page. I really hope we can find someone to do this. If the gadget is so complicated that nobody can maintain it, then maybe that's a sign we should rewrite it from scratch in a form that we can maintain. —Rua (mew) 17:32, 10 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
I agree, this is a sign of bad code quality and/or missing documentation.--So9q (talk) 09:03, 31 August 2019 (UTC)Reply
FIX READY :) @Rua, Erutuon. I took a deep look at the code and removed the TranslationBalancer function which was the only relying on Template:trans-mid. This change needs to copied to MediaWiki:Gadget-TranslationAdder.js and then we can proceed.--So9q (talk) 19:47, 31 August 2019 (UTC)Reply
Note: Remember to edit Wiktionary:Entry_layout#Translations after the change.
But does that mean the TranslationBalancer function will no longer work? That's not a desirable outcome. — SGconlaw (talk) 11:21, 2 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
I've applied User:So9q's change to MediaWiki:Gadget-TranslationAdder.js. Now {{trans-top}}, {{trans-mid}}, and {{trans-bottom}} need to be edited so that translations use CSS columns. — Eru·tuon 18:21, 9 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
Reverted my edit because new versions of {{trans-top}}, {{trans-mid}}, {{trans-bottom}}, and a plan for implementing them, need to be worked out first. They should be tested using {{trans-top/new}}, {{trans-mid/new}}, {{trans-bottom/new}}. — Eru·tuon 18:39, 9 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
@erutuon: The new templates are now ready. Trans-mid/new is not needed. See example here. This CSS needs to go into MediaWiki:Common.css. I could not test if this breaks the TranlationAdder because it does not run on userpages.--So9q (talk) 07:30, 10 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
I now also altered the my ImprovedTranslationAdder.js to work when no tables are present in the translation sections by adding this code at line 1365: 
	function createTranslationAdderTable(li) {
		var $ul = $("<ul>").append(li);
		// TODO div instead?
		return $("<table>")
			.append($("<tr>"))
			.append($("<td>"))
			.append($("<td>"))
			.append($("<td>").css("text-align", "left").append($ul));
	}
	
	// main - this calls the three functions above.
	// Support divs
	$('div.translations').each(function () {
		// these divs have only one ul directly beneth them.
		if (util.getTransGloss(this) != 'Translations to be checked') {
			var ul = $(this).find("ul");
			if (ul) {
				var li = document.createElement('li');
				// place TA after the div to avoid ending up in between the 
				// translations
				$(this).parent().after(createTranslationAdderTable(li));
				new AdderWrapper(editor, new TranslationAdder(ul), li);
				var div = $(this).parent().parent().find('div.NavHead')[0];
				if (div) {
					new TranslationLabeller(div)
					}
				}
			}
		}
	); //close each function
This can be tested in User:So9q/sandbox by installing the User:So9q/ImprovedTranslationAdder.js to your commons.js. The TA code hiccups on the /new addition to the trans-top and -bottom and therefore cannot preview/save.--So9q (talk) 12:12, 27 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
It relies on "TD" being a parent element in at least one place. After having studied and tried and failed porting the code to jquery for many hours I have concluded that it is a terrible unmaintainable insufficiently commented kludge that would really benefit from a good rewrite in modern es6 with jquery, functional let-syntax and good inline documentation. The idea behind this add-on to mediawiki is really sound which is proven by the fact that it is in use in many wiktionaries by now. For the benefit of the whole community I hope someone will step up to this task.--So9q (talk) 04:00, 29 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
Yes, if the change is done then delete. It saves work for humans and bots. Fay Freak (talk) 15:09, 10 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
Deprecate or keep this wery widely used template: keep revision histories legible. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:10, 31 August 2019 (UTC)Reply
Keep this deprecated template in some form that minimizes impairment to legibility of edit history. By the same token, we should restore other common old templates, like {{context}} to support edit-history legibility. DCDuring (talk) 14:32, 29 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
Sure, keep for history legibility. Ultimateria (talk) 23:56, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
Deprecate. Imetsia (talk) 00:06, 14 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Category:English words suffixed with -est

Latest comment: 3 years ago14 comments7 people in discussion

Category:English words suffixed with -eth

This contains non-lemmas, and we do not categorise nonlemmas by etymology. Compare Category:English words suffixed with -s, which does not contain all plurals and third-person singular forms, and Category:English words suffixed with -er, which does not contain all comparatives. —Rua (mew) 19:34, 10 May 2019 (UTC)Reply

Delete. It's not really accurate to say they're suffixed anyway. Ultimateria (talk) 21:12, 29 June 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Ultimateria: oh? Do explain – I’m intrigued. — SGconlaw (talk) 04:56, 12 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Sgconlaw: I believe the point I wanted to make but failed to elaborate was that if we're not going to provide etymologies for most non-lemma forms, it doesn't make sense to categorize them by etymology. Ultimateria (talk) 06:35, 12 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Ultimateria: righto. — SGconlaw (talk) 07:47, 12 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
As an aside, the Category:English words suffixed with -s category mentioned above also has some simple plurals in it which need to be gone over, if they are not supposed to be there... - -sche (discuss) 23:37, 19 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
@-sche: a bot has created “Category:English words suffixed with -s (regular plural)” … — SGconlaw (talk) 04:54, 12 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
I guess if the -eth and -est categories fail, that one should also be RFDed. - -sche (discuss) 00:22, 13 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
No opinion - but I would like to see Category:English plurals not ending in s, now that would be useful for both newbies and veterans of the language. Cheers! Facts707 (talk) 04:35, 12 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Facts707: we have “Category:English irregular plurals”. — SGconlaw (talk) 04:52, 12 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Thanks SGconlaw! I wonder why I have't come across this before. Can you set me straight though - these are plurals of English words that don't make a "regular" plural? So plurals ending in ... would be a different category? Also it seems there are a lot of terms that are in both e.g. "Category:English irregular plurals ending in "-i"‎" and in the base category “Category:English irregular plurals” such as abaci and abaculi. Is this intended? Cheers, Facts707 (talk) 05:34, 12 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Facts707: Note that this category (and its subcategories) are very incomplete (hundreds are missing) as they have to added manually. J3133 (talk) 05:41, 12 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
The problem is that the template for creating irregular plural forms dumps all of them into the parent category. What is needed is an "ending=" parameter for that template to indicate specific common irregular ending cases, and categorize terms accordingly. bd2412 T 03:23, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Note: I have proposed this at Template talk:en-irregular plural of#Add a parameter to subcategorize?. bd2412 T 03:36, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

Template:feminine equivalent of

Latest comment: 4 years ago10 comments4 people in discussion

Redundant to {{female equivalent of}}. It is not at all clear what a "feminine equivalent" is. If it refers to grammatical gender, then what distinguishes a "feminine equivalent" from a general alternative form whose grammatical gender is feminine? —Rua (mew) 19:00, 30 May 2019 (UTC)Reply

Also @Fay Freak who was previously engaged with this user. —Rua (mew) 19:01, 30 May 2019 (UTC)Reply

Judging from the two uses of this template, the intent is not grammatical gender. What would be a suitable alternative name for referring what is often referred to as natural gender? DCDuring (talk) 20:43, 31 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
It's not redundant at all as there is a huge difference between gender (of words) and sex (of things and living beings).
English actress (no gender; refering to someone with female sex) is the female equivalent of actor (no gender),
while German terms in (...-er)-in (feminine gender; female or no sex at all) are the feminine equivalent of terms in -er (masculine gender; male, female, unknown or no gender). Real-life examples:
  • "Lenin sah in der Partei die Führerin und Lehrerin der Massen" - Führerin and Lehrerin are feminine but here refer to a sexless thing.
  • "ein weiblicher Lehrer" (sg.), "weibliche Lehrer" (pl.) - Lehrer is masculine but here refers to female beings.
  • "männliche und weibliche Lehrer", "Lehrer beiderlei Geschlechts" - Lehrer is masculine but here refers to male and female beings.
  • "der Glaub ist der Führer der Hofnung" - Führer is masculine but here refers to a sexless abstract thing.
--B-Fahrer (talk) 19:00, 6 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
@B-Fahrer, Fay Freak, DCDuring, Rua I don't really see the point of having separate templates {{feminine equivalent of}}/{{female equivalent of}} and {{feminine noun of}}. All the templates are in practice used equivalently. The three examples above of Lehrer/Führer are irrelevant as they refer to the masculine form, which in many languages can also be used of female beings. The feminine form Lehrerin, as far as I can tell, does normally refer to female beings. All examples on Glosbe of Führerin [5], for example, refer to women. It seems clear to me that the above example where Lehrerin and Führerin are used to refer to a political party is a marginal case as well as a clear example of personification. It is comparable to the use of she in English to refer to boats, airplanes, countries, etc. and he to occasionally refer to various programming language constructs; this does not change the fact that he and she are natural-gender pronouns. As a result I am planning on merging these templates. Benwing2 (talk) 03:25, 1 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
BTW I thought about this a bit more. There are cases in German like Herstellerin (“manufacturer”) that are often used of non-human entities (in this case, companies) and cannot be called personifications. (Sammlerin (“collector”) is claimed to be another instance, although the examples in Glosbe [6] all appear to refer to women.) This situation appears to be specific to German, and exceptional even in that language, where most words in -erin do appear to refer primarily to women. In my opinion, words like Herstellerin should not use {{female equivalent of}} or any other similar variant, but should simply be defined as "manufacturer", possibly with a usage note indicating that they are normally used only to refer to feminine nouns (if that is indeed the case). If Sammlerin can equally refer to a woman who is a collector or to a non-human feminine-gender collecting object, it should have two definitions, one with {{female equivalent of}} and the other defined as [[collector]] {{gloss|object that collects}} or similar, with a usage note. Benwing2 (talk) 04:48, 3 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
glosbe doesn't matter in any way; and as for Sammlerin it has examples not refering to women but to forager bees:
  • Wenn eine Sammlerin eine neue Nektarquelle findet, kehrt sie zum Bienenstock zurück, um die gute Nachricht zu übermitteln.
    Mockingly ]The duck may swim on the lake, but my daddy owns the lake [this english text is no translation]
  • Andere Arbeiterinnen, gleich welchen Alters, unternahmen vergleichsweise wenige Sammelflüge, solange eine aktive Sammlerin vorhanden war.
    It was great [this english text is no translation]
BTW some entries with good examples that show that it is about gender (masculine/feminine) and not sex (male/female):
Also related: Blaue
--B-Fahrer (talk) 07:32, 3 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@B-Fahrer You are 100% not listening to what I'm saying. Since the predominant usage of {{feminine noun of}}, {{female equivalent of}} and {{feminine equivalent of}} is to refer to female beings (which BTW includes bees), they should be used for this purpose and not distorted due to vagaries of German. Wiktionary needs to cater to all languages, not just to German. Please reread what I said about (a) masculine nouns referring to female humans (irrelevant for this discussion as they don't use {{female equivalent of}}), (b) feminine and neuter nouns referring to male humans (similarly irrelevant), (c) personification, (d) nouns in -in that refer to things other than female beings (which should do something else than use {{female equivalent of}}). BTW feel free to use {{feminine of}} if the primary meaning of a given word does *not* refer to female beings. Benwing2 (talk) 16:42, 3 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
Also, normal practice when giving quotes or usage examples is to include a translation into English; please do so in the future, thanks! Benwing2 (talk) 17:02, 3 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
Well, for different languages there can be different templates or approaches if the languages are different.
(a) & (b) It's relevant for the related issue with {{de-noun}} and its incorrect text for the parameters m= and f=.
(c) "and cannot be called personifications" - indeed.
(d) "which should do something else than use {{female equivalent of}}" - indeed, as that's incorrect as shown by the examples.
(Quotes) It's also normal practice to not provide translations (whatever the reasons may be, like lazyness or lack of time, lack of translation skills or vocabulary), although it's indeed nice to have them. --B-Fahrer (talk) 09:41, 5 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

September 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago14 comments6 people in discussion

Hi, now that we got the {{der3}} and {{rel3}} working on the mobile frontend I suggest we retire the box-templates for derived and related terms that is not supported by a majority of users according to the vote in BP in 2018. If we need a new vote, please state so and I will create a proper one.

The following templates are proposed deleted:

The consequences of this will be:

  1. We will only have boxes left on the translations
  2. We will have to convert from the old box-templates to the supported rel3/col3 ones. This might be possible with a clever bot.

WDYT?--So9q (talk) 22:11, 14 September 2019 (UTC)Reply

This does need a vote, because the BP discussion wasn't about getting rid of these templates. I would be against, because these templates have capabilities that {{col3}} and its sisters don't (nested lists for instance), and it's good to keep histories readable. — Eru·tuon 22:30, 14 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
Oh, I had not thought about historyreadablility. Could you give an example of a nested list - I don't think I encountered one yet?--So9q (talk) 22:33, 14 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
A nested list: σέβομαι (sébomai). Another thing, lists with interspersed headings: λύω (lúō), πλέω (pléō). Though they don't all look great, they convey extra information that a simple list of links does not. Perhaps there wouldn't be loss of information from the ones with interspersed headings if they were converted to {{col3}} by splitting them into separate lists with a header (|title=), but I kind of like the more compact format. — Eru·tuon 06:36, 15 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
Currently, {{der-top}} and {{der-bottom}} is being used in Han character entries for Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese compounds, so it is not possible to delete these two templates. The reason for using {{der-top}} is because {{der3}} consumes Lua memory whereas {{der-top}} does not. See CAT:E for Han character entries that have already exceeded default Lua memory despite using {{der-top}}.
As for {{der-mid}} and {{rel-top}}, {{rel-mid}}, {{rel-bottom}}, these templates can be kept for historical reasons or deleted altogether. KevinUp (talk) 15:47, 15 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
Ok, I understand.--So9q (talk) 18:27, 15 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
Actually, I think the benefit of the top, mid, bottom templates in some of the Han character entries is that you can put anything inside them, including a linking template that invokes Lua only once (for instance, {{ja-r/multi}} in 月#Japanese). But they may be less memory-efficient than {{col3}} if they contain many instances of templates that invoke Lua (for instance, {{ko-l}} in 學#Korean). In general the fewer Lua invocations, the less memory. — Eru·tuon 20:30, 15 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't realize {{der-top}} could be less memory-efficient if it contains a large number of Lua-invoking templates. When I tried to use {{der3}} instead of {{der-top}} for 學#Korean I found that {{der-top}} used 4.04 MB compared to 4.49MB used by {{der3}}. Since it is possible to further reduce memory for {{der-top}} by using linking templates such as {{ja-r/multi}}, it would not be wise to delete {{der-top}} and {{der-bottom}}.
As for {{der-mid}} and {{rel-mid}}, these two templates can be removed, because they currently do not work as a divider, unlike {{trans-mid}}. KevinUp (talk) 23:14, 15 September 2019 (UTC)Reply
If I understood correctly we are now ready to vote about deleting {{der-mid}}, {{rel-top}}, {{rel-mid}} and {{rel-bottom}}. Additionally I would like to get rid of {{rel-top3}} and {{rel-top4}}. {{rel-top}} and {{rel-top3}} is used in about 4000 pages that will need to be (bot) edited and converted to e.g. col3 when there are more than a few terms. Anyone against deleting any of these?--So9q (talk) 11:18, 9 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
Strong keep - we should deprecate templates which have been heavily used in the past rather than deleting them. It is very inconvenient when viewing a historical version of a page if you can't see any of the content because the previous version had used old templates. If we want to prevent people from using a certain template going forward we can orphan it and then add an abuse filter which prevents it from being added back. - TheDaveRoss 12:16, 9 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
Yes, keep, there are times when you can't use {{col3}} or whatever. Anyway, I hate the terrible presentation given by {{col3}}, and now prefer to use {{der-top3}} etc. DonnanZ (talk) 14:23, 9 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
Keep, per above keeps. I don't see any good in deleting these. Deprecation, filtering out new usage, redirecting maybe. DCDuring (talk) 00:58, 10 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for chiming in. I agree with the deprecation in favor of deletion argument. The argument of Donnanz about col3 being ugly has already been voiced during the vote mentioned above.
I then propose to delete {{rel-mid}} and {{der-mid}} as they have no function whatsoever (since {{der-top}} and {{rel-top}} use CSS columns now) and deprecate the others ({{rel-top}}, {{rel-bottom}}, {{rel-top3}} and {{rel-top4}}). WDYT?--So9q (talk) 07:54, 10 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
{{rel-mid}} and {{der-mid}} were necessary once, but are now redundant. I remove them when I come across them without any ill effects. So they probably can be deleted, but keep the others. DonnanZ (talk) 09:18, 10 October 2019 (UTC)Reply

October 2019

Category:English Minecraft slang

Latest comment: 3 years ago14 comments9 people in discussion

This issue is moot now that Category:English Minecraft slang has been moved to Category:en:Minecraft. --Numberguy6 (talk) 22:25, 18 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

What makes this so different from just "English slang" or something like "en:Gaming"? — surjection ⟨?⟩ 09:17, 12 October 2019 (UTC)Reply

@Numberguy6 seeing they created this category. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 09:18, 12 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
Delete: only being in one video game (or game series) or only in one sci-fi universe etc. should make something ineligible for inclusion. Words that are used in multiple games for the same thing are a different matter. Equinox ◑ 12:44, 12 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
The category's two members, lapis and obby, should IMO be deleted for the same reason. Equinox ◑ 12:46, 12 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
They should probably both be RFV'ed. I wouldn't be surprised if lapis as short for lapis lazuli was much more widespread than just this game. —Mahāgaja · talk 13:33, 12 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
Keep:I created this because:
* Category:English 4chan slang exists
* I couldn't find any other contexts in which the words were used
* Minecraft is an extremely popular game, which a lot of people say has fundamentally changed the gaming industry, so it isn't just "one video game".
--Numberguy6 (talk) 13:22, 12 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
I'm opposed to the idea of that category existing too, but the two are not comparable - one is a site that has developed its own entire subculture, while one is an entertainment product and we don't have "... slang" categories for any other examples of those either. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 17:00, 12 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
What is the definition of "subculture" here? I would say that any video game or website has developed its own subculture, it's just that some are bigger than others. But what is the cutoff point? Also, according to the WP article on 4chan, it has 22 million active monthly users. However, according to the Official Minecraft Wiki, Minecraft has 112 million active monthly players. This means that Minecraft has over 5 times more active users than 4chan. --Numberguy6 (talk) 20:07, 16 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
Obby in any case is in broader use than just Minecraft and indeed precedes the game altogether, compare e.g. RuneScape's obby maul which is attested as far back as 2007 on Google Groups. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 12:29, 13 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
Delete "I created this because 'category 4Chan slang' exists" is not a great reason. – Jberkel 19:27, 4 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete PseudoSkull (talk) 02:50, 8 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete; I removed lapis (someone else removed obby) as it is certainly not limited to Minecraft, leaving only two entries, "Minecrafter" and "Minecrafty". This does not a category make, IMO. - -sche (discuss) 23:47, 19 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

Category:Entries needing topical attention, Wiktionary:Entries needing topical attention

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

The theory behind this category and Wiktionary page is that several request templates take a |topic= parameter, which if used places the page in Category:Entries needing topical attention. Then, the page is added (by bot, ideally) to Wiktionary:Entries needing topical attention, and is eventually supposed to be processed and removed. In practice, however, this mechanism is quite dormant. There are only 23 pages in Category:Entries needing topical attention, and Wiktionary:Entries needing topical attention hasn't been updated in 5 years (it was formerly updated by the bot of User:msh210, who is now mostly inactive). I'm not sure if this mechanism ever worked well, and no one seems to care about it anymore, so I suggest removing it (i.e. delete the category and Wiktionary page, as well as the code in the various request templates that place pages in the category; see Category:Request templates). Benwing2 (talk) 22:20, 20 October 2019 (UTC)Reply

Since we haven't attracted very many topical experts in the 10 years since the template and categories were introduced, we can reasonably expect not get any in the next ten years either. I suppose pinging individuals is likely to be more effective for those of use who know about the specific interests of some of our active contributors. And if we do attract some expertise, they can help by reviewing all the entries in our topical categories, rather than a select few. DCDuring (talk) 00:44, 21 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
I must confess to not having run that bot in approximately forever; not do I plan to do so. If anyone wishes to take it over, the bot code is ready available (linked to from that project page). I recommend the project page remain, with a notice atop it indicating its dormancy and that anyone is invited to revive it. Unless and until that happens, the category should probably be depopulated: it's pretty useless without the project page. (Not necessarily deleted, though. Again, a note on it indicating its dormancy and how to revive it should suffice.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:34, 21 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
Delete. It's not used and it doesn't have much potential for use. In almost two years, no one has come to its defense. Ultimateria (talk) 23:44, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Category:English derived terms and all categories under it, Template:dervcat

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

@DCDuring, -sche, Rua, Renard Migrant Almost all categories under Category:English derived terms are empty. The ones that aren't empty are populated manually, as there are no (remaining?) templates to populate those categories automatically. The idea appears to be to create categories for terms derived from common English words like "cat" and "load". This is potentially a good idea but doesn't seem to have worked out in practice. If we are to implement something like this it should probably be done either through {{affix}} or {{compound}} or through a mechanism similar to {{desctree}}, which would automatically scrape a specified pages for derived terms. Rather than have what's essentially dead weight at this point hanging around, I propose deleting all the individual categories and the top-level category, removing the few manual invocations of those categories and removing the category boiler {{dervcat}}. Benwing2 (talk) 05:15, 21 October 2019 (UTC)Reply

The idea of autopopulated categories which would enable automagical displays under Derived terms headers is perfectly consistent with what we do under Descendants, but the polylingual lobby for doing so for Descendants has proven more powerful than the monolingual lobby for doing so under Derived terms. I suppose reminders of the loss should be razed. DCDuring (talk) 10:30, 21 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
@DCDuring I could definitely implement something that works like {{desctree}} and pulls from Derived terms, but I don't think it can populate a category. The problem here is that the only way I know of to get a page in a category is to link to the category on the page itself. What could be done however is create pages in some namespace whose contents are auto-generated, consisting of a table of links in some format, and which pull from Derived terms on a specified page. E.g. it could be called Derived terms:English/cat (with a short-form prefix "DT:"?) and have a simple page definition {{deriv cat}} (or even just {{auto cat}}). Or this could go into the Appendix or wherever. We have namespaces for rhymes, reconstructions, etc. so there is precedent. IMO this is more likely to work than going through {{affix}} or {{compound}} (which in the case of cat means that 118 pages must all have etymologies that mention the word "cat", vs. a single page that lists 118 derived terms, like we already have). Benwing2 (talk) 01:11, 22 October 2019 (UTC)Reply

Delete unless someone automates the process. Ultimateria (talk) 22:52, 7 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

November 2019

Category:pt:Transnistria

Latest comment: 3 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion

Not a widely recognised country, and the category doesn't seem to serve much purpose. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 04:00, 10 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

Pretty real and bulky country. Recognition is irrelevant, as I have explained also with the example of Artsakh. Don’t exactly know why it must serve less purpose than say Category:pt:Moldova. Fay Freak (talk) 22:08, 11 November 2019 (UTC)Reply
Kept. Although the category is really lame with just one entry, that's not an RFD issue. --ReloadtheMatrix (talk) 08:40, 20 December 2019 (UTC)Reply
Struck that, as nobody has even made a proper vote and you didn't bother to remove the tag. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 07:56, 11 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete, un-useful topic. Across 6 languages, only one category has a member and it's the translation for Transnistria. Ultimateria (talk) 23:41, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Delete "Category:English verbs with base form identical to past participle"

Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Similarly as the appendix. Not particularly useful - especially as the content does not reflect the title. From the title we would expect to see many more entries. Further more, it mixes patterns such as run - ran - run with the majority of the verbs with verb pattern hit - hit - hit. Thank you. -- ALGRIF talk 21:52, 12 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

December 2019

Category:Japanese English

Latest comment: 3 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion

There is no such thing as Japanese English. The entries herein should mostly be in Category:en:Japan or an etymology category. --ReloadtheMatrix (talk) 22:08, 30 December 2019 (UTC)Reply

Ah yeah, this is probably the fault of {{lb|en|Japan}}. There's also Category:Japanese Korean (via this search), which seems to actually be Korean words used in Japan. So English and Korean want different categories for {{lb|en|Japan}}. That's not currently possible; it would require changes to the structure of Module:labels's data modules. — Eru·tuon 22:27, 30 December 2019 (UTC)Reply
Well, at least we can blame the overcomplicated Module. --ReloadtheMatrix (talk) 22:39, 30 December 2019 (UTC)Reply
I've been too lazy to figure out how to add the feature of different label data per language, as User:Rua suggested once. In this case maybe "Japanese" could be a separate label from "Japan" (with the former having the "Japanese Korean" category and the latter the "en:Japan" category), but that would probably be so confusing that nobody'd get it right. — Eru·tuon 20:20, 1 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete. HeliosX (talk) 20:15, 1 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
This seems to be the result of misuse of labels: labels that indicate regional restriction in where a word is used being misused to indicate topical categorization and what subjects are word is related to. We formerly had e.g. Category talk:German English for the same reason. The solution is generally to move "Japan(ese)" into the definition. - -sche (discuss) 17:29, 17 February 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete. I agree with -sche. Ultimateria (talk) 23:35, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

January 2020

Category:Requests for unblock

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

I sent this to RFD and WF closed it somewhat prematurely, so I'm sending it back. My argument: I don't see the point of this category. We should just modify the template so it doesn't categorise. It already has a |nocat= parameter that is rarely used, and I understand why — it's a waste of time to go around adding that when nobody looks at the category in the first place. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 07:52, 11 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

Delete, you can just go to Special:WhatLinksHere for this. I also noticed that at least one of the unblock requests I've checked has been resolved already. Not a particularly useful category, then. PseudoSkull (talk) 02:21, 8 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Comment: I think this (or at least, some other parts of our unblock-request infrastructure) were created to appease global admins/crats who didn't know what to do when one particular blocked editor (Gtroy? or a certain one who has since been unblocked?) pestered them because admins here had blocked him, and they found that we didn't have a real request-for-unblock infrastructure. - -sche (discuss) 02:45, 8 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete, not useful. Ultimateria (talk) 23:38, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

February 2020

Category:Terms with multiple etymologies by language

Latest comment: 3 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion

(And all the language subcategories.) This is an abandoned project from 2011, with only a tiny fraction of multiple-etymology entries in the categories. They could be added by bot, but that seems like a lot of work for a category that doesn't even serve a lexicographical function. And even if it did, the idea of "terms with multiple etymologies" doesn't make sense the way it's being applied — really, these are different terms with different etymologies that happen to be written the same way. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 18:23, 9 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

Delete. Even if automated, such a category would be useless as long as Rua continues insisting that each part of speech should be given a separate etymology section. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 21:28, 9 February 2020 (UTC)Reply
Pinging @Hergilei who added most of the categorizations under it. I have rarely added this category, only half a dozen of times when the amount of different etymologies seemed particularly remarkable for me. But it appeals more to me to forgo it. Fay Freak (talk) 20:40, 11 February 2020 (UTC)Reply
I am planning to make a bot to populate categories like this, so it's good to know that this one is considered unuseful. —TeragR disc./con. 00:10, 22 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete per Meta; the premise is flawed. Ultimateria (talk) 22:03, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Category:fa:Ismailism

Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Potentially useful, but I suppose the test is whether we have enough entries to make e.g. Category:en:Ismailism reasonably sized. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 06:06, 24 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 17:07, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Template:zh-obsolete

Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion

Like anything using title text, this is really awful from a usability perspective. It also stands out from normal Wiktionary practice, which is to use context labels. A context label would make it immediately clear what it means. —Rua (mew) 10:01, 29 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

I support making it more "standard" and less awful UX-wise, but how? It is a long tooltip. —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 19:50, 9 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Labels commonly link to a glossary. Couldn't that be done here too? It doesn't have to be Appendix:Glossary, language-specific pages can be a thing too. —Rua (mew) 19:52, 9 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
I guess we can also do {{lb|zh|literary|or|Cantonese|...}}. —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 19:51, 9 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
If that conveys the same thing, then I think it's fine. —Rua (mew) 19:53, 9 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Could something be added to the section that the references template or something else that us used on most or all pages that identifies what the template means? I saw both this template and the "††" symbol for the "zh-hg" template on the page 我#Chinese, and had no idea what they meant. Jimw338 (talk) 23:06, 7 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

March 2020

Template:ja-decl-na

Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Probably a deprecated template under Category:Japanese adjective inflection-table templates alongside {{ja-adjdecl}}. ～ POKéTalker（═◉═） 11:56, 1 March 2020 (UTC)Reply

Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 17:06, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Rhymes:Spanish/ismo

Latest comment: 3 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion

I created this Rhymes page a while ago not realising that the letter s in Spanish becomes IPA z when it comes before a voiced consonant, such as m. Therefore, the correct rhyme page is Rhymes:Spanish/izmo. Sorry for that. Pablussky (talk) 09:15, 3 March 2020 (UTC)Reply

Not all accents of Spanish pronounce "sm" as [zm], and in any case, the voicing of /s/ to [z] here is only an allophonic detail: /sm/ is still fine as a representation of the phonemes in the consonant cluster.--Urszag (talk) 09:18, 3 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
But note that there is already a page for the /izmo/ pronunciation, and it is more complete. So I say merge to /izmo/. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 21:45, 3 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
I particularly don't like using phonetic details for rhymes... @Ultimateria, what do you think? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 19:06, 31 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Metaknowledge: Neither do I, especially because of dialectal variation as Urszag points out. I think we should move Rhymes:Spanish/að et al. Ultimateria (talk) 19:17, 31 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Ultimateria, I'll leave it in your hands: as far as I'm concerned, you can either create a discussion about it, or just do the move (because I don't anticipate any opposition). But after the move, it would be good for someone with a bot to update the links. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 19:21, 31 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

April 2020

Certain talk pages (reopening)

Latest comment: 4 years ago17 comments10 people in discussion

Restoring from [7], as no action was actually taken, and to provide context for a new request. —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 19:30, 2 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

Certain talk pages

Most of thesethese. IMO it's spam made in good faith. —suzukaze (t・c) 05:12, 29 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

These relatively few pages seem pretty harmless really. However, it might be good for somebody to talk to the creator next time and point out that Wiktionary is far from "complete". The more extreme case of this was when somebody was disruptively adding Etymology requests to every ety-less entry. Equinox ◑ 16:29, 6 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
This same IP has been adding "can it be added" requests to a great number of Chinese character talk pages for years: try this for the more common variant. As for talking to them, I believe @Atitarev has had discussions with them on other issues (they make lots of several types of requests relating to several languages) without much cooperation. Chuck Entz (talk) 17:04, 6 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
I am annoyed with these numerous questions with no answers in talk pages and the usage of {{attention}} but what can I do? Some people just pepper entries with requests, genuine and not, ignoring if we have any resources or interest to fill them. The situation would only be slightly better if those unanswered requests were in the Tea room or similar.--Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 21:02, 6 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
I think if we delete these, we have to delete all talk pages with information in them relevant to the entry they pertain to. Renard Migrant (talk) 23:07, 6 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
I agree. This is part of what talk pages are meant for. Keep.​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:23, 22 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
I agree. Keep. --WikiTiki89 18:26, 22 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
Many of these cases of multiple readings is because the initial data was imported from a shitty database, and
  1. many of the entries have been cleaned up since
  2. the ones that aren't are likely to be obscure dead characters no-one cares about
  3. when someone does get around to cleaning up the page for the character no-one cares about, the wrong reading will be removed in the process if the one who cleans up the page has the common sense to check other dictionaries
FWIW there are currently 1,128 items in Category:Mandarin terms needing attention. —suzukaze (t・c) 07:14, 10 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
Delete all the relevant sections. If nothing is left, delete the talk page. Wyang (talk) 12:13, 28 October 2016 (UTC)Reply
Keep (including those listed below). How do these discussions sit for so long? This has been here for over three years...! — Mnemosientje (t · c) 14:47, 23 February 2019 (UTC)Reply

These too

Asking "is this traditional, simplified, or both" is like asking "can <noun> have a plural form". Additionally, I am confident that 99% of those pages already mention a character's simplified/traditional equivalent, and if it doesn't have one it can be logically inferred from the lack of a simplified/traditional equivalent on the page that it is "both", which will be true in 99% of the cases. —suzukaze (t・c) 07:14, 10 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

TBH another reason I want these gone is that the formatting of pages like Talk:苦 really ticks me off. When I see that there's a talk page, I expect a meaningful question or note, not this trash. It's like a child whining. —suzukaze (t・c) 07:21, 10 January 2016 (UTC), edited 06:25, 14 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
Delete all the relevant sections. If nothing is left, delete the talk page. Wyang (talk) 12:13, 28 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

(I really think usage of the proper request templates should be enforced. —suzukaze (t・c) 23:26, 19 July 2017 (UTC))Reply

This isn't a request to delete a specific page that can be fulfilled or not, but an ongoing process. I'm closing the discussion here so that it can be archived. —Rua (mew) 17:18, 30 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Requests to translate definitions

Definitions mindlessly plagiarized without attribution from zdic.net. —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 19:31, 2 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

Category:Languages of California

Latest comment: 4 years ago13 comments5 people in discussion

I don't think we need to be any level lower than countries... Ultimateria (talk) 02:37, 13 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

California at one time probably had about a hundred indigenous languages and represented the intersection of the Algic languages (which extend to the east coast), the Athabascan languages (which extend from Alaska to northern Mexico), the Uto-Aztecan languages, (which extend to Central America), a few still-to-be-proven language families like Hokan and Penutian, and a few probable isolates like the Chimariko language and the Karuk language, with a very high percentage endemic to the state. Right now the category contains only one language which was added by a clueless editor based on a bogus etymology, but we already have hundreds of entries in upwards of 5 dozen indigenous languages- about a fifth of Category:Languages of the United States. I should also mention that we have Category:Languages of Hawaii, among others. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:04, 13 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Make that over a thousand lemmas. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:26, 13 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
I've now added 58 indigenous languages to the category, which I will, of course, remove if we decide to delete. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:20, 13 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
What about nonindigenous languages? Besides English and Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Tagalog are all widely spoken in California. —Mahāgaja · talk 08:16, 13 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Yes, and I've been to stores with signs in Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Russian and Thai, and I've met people from Greek, Malagasy, Samoan and Tongan communities as well. The Los Angeles County election websites can be viewed in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Hindi, Khmer, Korean, Vietnamese and Thai, and American Sign Language interpreters are in considerable demand. I understand that we have lots of people speaking American Indian languages from the rest of the US and from other parts of the Americas. I've even heard of a radio station somewhere in the Central Valley broadcasting in Assyrian Aramaic. I should add that I know there are lots of people speaking other South Asian languages than Hindi and other Chinese languages than Mandarin, but I don't know which ones. Chuck Entz (talk) 10:16, 13 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
So how do we decide what to include and what not to? And really, that question applies not only to this category but also to country-level categories like CAT:Languages of the United States. —Mahāgaja · talk 10:51, 13 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
I don't know, but I disagree with categorizing Category:American Sign Language into Languages of California. ASL is used in all 50 states. I don't think it needs to be in potentially 51 location categories when 1 covers that same information. Leave the demographic specifics to Wikipedia. Ultimateria (talk) 01:41, 16 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
English and Spanish are spoken in all 50 states too. And they're spoken in other countries as well; does that mean they shouldn't be in CAT:Languages of the United States? —Mahāgaja · talk 05:47, 16 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
That's what I'm arguing for, rather than put e.g. Spanish in 300 categories for all the states of the US and South American countries. Ultimateria (talk) 16:21, 17 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete because it is ambiguous. If we talk about native languages we go also beyond the current state borders and might think about the California of the now United Mexican States. Fay Freak (talk) 15:14, 13 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Deletion for the reason given immediately above is completely inappropriate. The rationale would suggest renaming. "Early languages...", "Pre-Columbian languages..." might work for the instant case.
We use current governmental borders for categories such as this because of the administrative processes that govern almost all the research on such matters and because that is how most of our users would approach the subject matter. California may secede after the coming election so it would seem prudent to wait before any rash deletion or renaming. DCDuring (talk) 17:13, 13 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
California might secede? Even then there is still a different California. I am not sure that we use governmental borders. Many who use these categories think that. Fay Freak (talk) 20:58, 13 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

Category:Scots verb simple past forms

Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Per Category talk:English verb simple past forms. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 00:01, 27 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 18:28, 2 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

June 2020

Template:zh-idiom

Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

Tagged by @恨国党非蠢即坏 but not listed. --沈澄心✉ 14:02, 22 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

It's in use on many entries, so it's not exactly clear why it's tagged as {{deprecated}}. Unless we're removing the Idiom header in Chinese, we should keep this template. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 18:22, 22 June 2020 (UTC)Reply
Although I think this template should be deprecated and t:zh-phrase, t:zh-proverb, t:zh-noun, etc. should be used instead. There are indeed too many usage of this template on Wiktionary. Replacing them may take a long time and the template is not going to be deleted very soon. 恨国党非蠢即坏 (talk) 02:38, 24 June 2020 (UTC)Reply
Related arguments: Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2020/March#Part_of_speech_"idiom". 恨国党非蠢即坏 (talk) 02:44, 24 June 2020 (UTC)Reply
It should not be tagged as deprecated without consensus, though. It's not about what you think, but what the community thinks. I don't think this has been discussed enough. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 03:45, 24 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

July 2020

Template:en-conj

Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments6 people in discussion

Nomination per Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2020/June#Conjugation_table_for_English_verbs. Mihia (talk) 22:45, 9 July 2020 (UTC)Reply

Delete, I see no value in having a conjugation table that only contains periphrastic forms; this makes English conjugation look needlessly complicated. PUC – 12:05, 10 July 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 16:27, 16 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 04:00, 17 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
I think we should have English verb conjugation tables; it's bizarre that the English Wiktionary has tables for French and German (which contain plenty of multiple-word inflected forms that could be seen as making the conjugation look complicated) and not English, while the French and German Wiktionaries do show how English verbs conjugate. Perhaps we should have a much simpler table than this (and indeed, we do have some simpler conjugation tables, so I'm fine with deleting this particular one), and ones that list archaic forms with appropriate tags, but we should have something. - -sche (discuss) 22:35, 24 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
One already kind of exists: {{en-conj-simple}}. Hazarasp (parlement · werkis) 06:12, 17 February 2021 (UTC)Reply

Category:Japanese countable nouns

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Category:Japanese uncountable nouns

Category:Japanese collective nouns

Japanese doesn't have concept of countable/uncountable/collective noun. 片割れ靴下 (talk) 14:34, 17 July 2020 (UTC)Reply

(I know no Japanese.) Not having a concept of them doesn't mean it doesn't have them. I mean: The fact that Japanese grammarians and grammar-school teachers don't divide nouns into these three categories doesn't mean that it's impossible to do so. Did you mean only (a) that it has no concept of them, or did you really mean (b) that the division is nonexistent, and the existing categorization into these categories of several entries is baseless nonsense? If you meant only (a) and are correct, then I think we should keep the categories; if you meant (b) and are correct, I think we should delete them.​—msh210℠ (talk) 13:29, 21 July 2020 (UTC)Reply

August 2020

Template:sla-pro-root-h₁rewdʰ

Latest comment: 3 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion

@Useigor, this looks like an aborted experiment? PUC – 11:02, 19 August 2020 (UTC)Reply

Boo. You can use {{root}}. --{{victar|talk}} 03:32, 20 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
The deletion notice shows up in the pages transcluding the template. This is very confusing. I think that the deletion template should be wrapped in a noinclude tag. 217.197.198.196 08:08, 8 April 2021 (UTC)Reply
As it now is. DCDuring (talk) 15:05, 8 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

October 2020

All templates in Category:Chinese headword-line templates except Template:zh-noun

Latest comment: 4 years ago21 comments6 people in discussion

@Atitarev, Rua, Suzukaze-c With the exception of {{zh-noun}} and {{zh-punctuation mark}}, every one of these is a trivial wrapper around {{head}}. {{zh-verb}}, for example, is defined simply as follows: 

{{head|zh|verb}}<noinclude>{{documentation}}</noinclude>

This proliferation of trivial templates doesn't accomplish anything, so I think they should all be orphaned and deleted/deprecated. From the history, they were all created by User:Atitarev, and at the time they seem to have done something useful using {{zh-pos}}. However, this is no longer the case, and {{zh-pos}} itself no longer exists. Note that {{zh-punctuation mark}} is defined in terms of {{meta-punctuation mark}}, but doesn't appear to do anything that couldn't be accomplished just as easily using {{head|zh|punctuation mark}}.

Specifically, using the "rule of 1000" that I normally follow, I propose to orphan and delete the templates with fewer than 1000 uses, and orphan and deprecate (using {{deprecated code}}) the ones with 1000 or more uses. Benwing2 (talk) 06:21, 2 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Benwing2: I have no objection to orphaning and deleting. @Justinrleung, Suzukaze-c. -- User:Atitarev 06:49, 2 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
I'm down with deleting them. I personally don't like these functionally 'neutered' headword templates either. —Suzukaze-c (talk) 07:09, 2 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
In addition, the parameters of {{zh-noun}} are actually deprecated, and the content should be moved to {{zh-mw}}, which is more flexible. —Suzukaze-c (talk) 07:40, 2 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
Making sure other Chinese editors are aware of this potential change (because I somehow didn't get @Atitarev's ping above until @Tooironic told me about it): @Mar vin kaiser, Geographyinitiative, RcAlex36, The dog2, Frigoris, Apisite. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 04:47, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
I support deleting all templates in Category:Chinese headword-line templates except Template:zh-verb (see Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2020/July#Inner structure of a Chinese verb - not supported now, but may be supported in the future). --沈澄心✉ 10:17, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@沈澄心: Apologies for forgetting you above. You do bring up a good point. I do wonder if it may be better for us to do it on a definition-by-definition basis, like we do with {{zh-mw}}, though. Is it possible for a verb to be more than one type? This reminds me that I forgot about @恨国党非蠢即坏, Thedarkknightli, Michael Ly. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 12:17, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Justinrleung: 出櫃 seems to be both. —Suzukaze-c (talk) 12:27, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Suzukaze-c: Exactly what I'm looking for. The first sense is separable (verb-object specifically), but the second sense is not. I think this is a good case for having it in {{lb}} rather than {{zh-verb}}. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 12:31, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Justinrleung: No. This is another Chinese grammar phenomenon. When a "verb-object" verb is followed by another object, it becomes unseparable. This rule applies to all transitive senses of all "verb-object" verbs, including 加速 mentioned below. There is no point to repeat stating a general rule in every definition. Also, this does not change the "verb-object" nature of the verb and it becomes separable again if the the object is omitted, regardless of the sense used. Thus I oppose the definition-by-definition format. 恨国党非蠢即坏 (talk) 13:42, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
... although there is also the issue of using a dot or slashes to demarcate where we can separate the verb. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 12:34, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Justinrleung: Another example is 加速 (per Xiandai Hanyu Cidian). Also, 糊口 is separable in Classical Chinese (Zuozhuan: “寡人有弟，不能和協，而使餬其口於四方。”, Shiji: “伍子胥橐載而出昭關，夜行晝伏，至於陵水，無以糊其口……”), but in Modern Standard Chinese, it's not. --沈澄心✉ 13:13, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@沈澄心: 糊口 is in fact separable. The reason why we rarely see expressions like 糊了口 is a semantical one, not a grammatical one. 糊口 describes a habitual and ongoing action, thus there is usually no need to attach tense/aspect particle to it, which is the most frequent case of a modern Chinese verb to separate. 恨国党非蠢即坏 (talk) 13:42, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@恨国党非蠢即坏: Yeah, there seem to be some ghits for 糊著口, so it is separable. I guess there are grammatical restrictions that make verb-object constructions inseparable if it takes an object, but when that happens, I don't know if we should still treat it a verb-object construction. It's not like 出 is ditransitive in transitive 出櫃, nor is transitive 出櫃 functioning as verb + object anymore from how I see it. I'm not familiar with how people have dealt with these, but I think we probably need some scholarly sources to back up our decisions. I still think definition-by-definition is a safer way to go in case there are cases where a compound could be both separable and inseparable. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 16:52, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Justinrleung: It is very evident in the 把 structure and the passive voice that they are still verb-objects and separable.
我曝光了他们干的事。
我把他们干的事曝了光。
他们干的事被我曝了光。
The only key point is whether they are directly followed by another object. Of course they are not ditransitives. They simply don't work that way. 恨国党非蠢即坏 (talk) 17:53, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@恨国党非蠢即坏: Okay, that makes sense. I can also find some ghits for google:"把*加了速". Then we should keep {{zh-verb}} and implement the verb compound categorization soon. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 03:17, 5 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Justinrleung, 恨国党非蠢即坏 We also have {{tlb}} for adding a label after a headword to indicate that it applies to all definitions. That could potentially be used here, and has the advantage that {{lb}} could be used if there are cases where the compound verb has different structures per-definition. OTOH this doesn't allow for adding a dot or slash to indicate where the separation point is. Benwing2 (talk) 04:40, 5 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Benwing2: Yes, thanks for bringing that up. I thought of it but forgot to mention it. We could use the |head= to show where the separation point is, but it'd be nice to have a template so that the formatting could be more easily standardized. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 04:49, 5 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Justinrleung: This is fine with me. Benwing2 (talk) 04:51, 5 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
I am not familiar with the coding so I don't have any particular opinions now. 恨国党非蠢即坏 (talk) 07:35, 5 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ I obsoleted/orphaned all except {{zh-noun}}, {{zh-verb}} and {{zh-hanzi}}. Maybe {{zh-hanzi}} should go as well; I figured it might be marginally easier to remember {{zh-hanzi}} than {{head|zh|Han character}}. I deleted all the ones with < 1000 uses, and deprecated the remainder (which includes only {{zh-adj}}, {{zh-adv}}, {{zh-idiom}} and {{zh-proper noun}}). Benwing2 (talk) 21:29, 10 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

Category:English words not following the I before E except after C rule

Latest comment: 3 years ago35 comments19 people in discussion

Based on this discussion, there seem to be serious doubts about the proper scope of this and, especially, whether there is any practical way of automatically populating it in a way that seems appropriate. The non-category content (the text at the top) might make a good appendix. i before e except after c might make a good "proverb" which could link to said appendix. DCDuring (talk) 18:40, 30 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

Keep - Rule is still being taught as mentioned at wikipedia:en:I before E except after C. As creator of the category, my thought was just to list all the exceptions to the rule, mostly to show how ridiculously many there are. I don't endorse trying to decide which terms are "junk", e.g. should glycophosphoprotein be listed or not? If this category is useful and not hurting, why delete? Facts707 (talk) 06:11, 31 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
The main reason to delete it is that we can't get contributors to agree what should and what should not be in the category. We do not spend any resources on debunking, which seems to be the sole intent of the category. In any event the rule has a certain amount of utility in everyday English and the Wikipedia article covers the various versions of the rule and the exceptions to each. DCDuring (talk) 00:37, 1 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
It seems a few users have stumbled across this category and suggest various programming hacks because apparently they think the list is too long for their liking. Seems like a poor reason to delete. If the list is too long for someone, they should probably move along to a shorter category such as Category:Gestures. It doesn't take long to browse this category and obtain a good general idea of the exceptions. Just because the list is too long for most people to memorize does not mean it is not useful. Cheers, Facts707 (talk) 03:25, 1 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete this category and "Category:English words following the I before E except after C rule". There are so many exceptions to the rule, and so much difficulty deciding whether it is appropriate for a word to be in the categories or not, that I doubt the categories serve much purpose. — SGconlaw (talk) 10:14, 31 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
This category would be useful if it only included words in which the "ie" was pronounced /i/, which is the only time there is an actual difficulty in figuring out the spelling. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:40, 1 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Andrew Sheedy I wonder how that can be done. It would seem to mean that both the pronunciation, presumably in the one or more IPA templates (if they exist}, and the spelling (in the headword template} would have to be read for the categorization work as you would wish it. I don't think things work that way, certainly not without a lot more resource use on each loading of the entry. If the bit of irrelevancy is to be kept, wouldn't it make more sense for this to be hard-coded once in a while (once a year, once a quarter, once a month) as the result of an analysis by an offline Python or Perl program? I don't think it would be too hard to find recent new entries that had "ie" or "ei" in them so the hard categorization could be added for new entries manually, online, should a user want the categories to be more up to date than would they would be with only a periodic offline run against the XML dump. DCDuring (talk) 05:06, 1 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
I think hardcoding it once and then adding entries manually thereafter would be good enough. I can't imagine there are that many words that are exceptions to the more narrow rule. The category could have a note at the top explaining the more general exceptions (ei spelling when pronounced /eɪ/, order remaining the same when crossing morpheme boundaries, etc.). So many people learn this rule that I do think it has a use, just not in its current form (note that the category currently contains "words" like percieve!!). Andrew Sheedy (talk) 06:16, 1 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
  • If kept it should absolutely be purged of all multi-word combinations. It makes some sense to include "science", "deficiency", and "ancient", but none at all to include Academy of Sciences, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or Ancient Church of the East. I would perhaps split out the words which disobey the rule for having an "ei" from those that disobey it by having an "ie after c". Also, I recall that the full rule says "or when sounding like A, as in neighbor or weigh", which also seems like a basis for excluding from this category (but perhaps for having a category for "words with an 'ei' pronounced as a long 'a'". bd2412 T 06:05, 1 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
  • While I 99% agree with this, there are occasional multi-word phrases where the words do not exist alone (e.g. various whatever-ic acids. Technically we might want those to categorise. Rather unimportant though. Equinox ◑ 22:09, 17 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Not only that, any word included in the categories by manual editing could be easily removed if another editor disagrees with its inclusion. DonnanZ (talk) 12:23, 1 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Changed to delete, see 2 Jan 2021. DonnanZ (talk) 18:46, 2 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
Oh, are there many cases like that? I can't say I noticed any, though I have by no means read the whole list, life being of limited duration. Mihia (talk) 17:55, 1 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
11 votes to delete, about 2.5 to keep (I count User:BD2412's vote as a half-vote to keep since it's conditional). If no objections, I will delete this in a few days. Benwing2 (talk) 21:45, 20 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
OK, I now see User:Soumyabrata's keep vote on one of the two, but 10 to 3.5 is still above the 2/3 criterion. Benwing2 (talk) 21:46, 20 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
I will not lose a wink of sleep if the category is deleted. bd2412 T 00:15, 21 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • Keep (but already voted) - I wonder if we can somehow mark certain words as "base words" for this purpose and then list derivatives of that word in a subcategory? E.g. ancient, science, weight, being, protein, seism each have dozens of derivatives. Other words are proper nouns, e.g. Einstein, and they could be listed in a subcategory accordingly. That would cut the list down substantially. After a second look, I really don't think it's that bad. Cheers, Facts707 (talk) 03:26, 11 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • Delete IMO the rule does not exist. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 03:37, 19 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • Keep From Wikipedia: "The rule is very well known; Edward Carney calls it "this supreme, and for many people solitary, spelling rule"." You can not underestimate the degree of awareness of this rule among native English speakers. It will of course seem childish and silly to the big boys with their fancy pants elite educations and leisure time to write a dictionary, but to many of our fellows, this is one of the main things learned about the spelling of English language words. When you encounter the exceptions, the rule confuses you. Therefore, a category listing where we directly acknowledge: "hey sister, that word you are trying to spell does not conform to the rule every man woman and child has repeated to you" is helpful to the less educated reaches of the audience of Wiktionary- it serves to help them understand that someone has checked and this non-conformity to the rule is indeed the official spelling. Only the snootiest of the snooty will say "Oh dearest me, Wiktionary is above such a non-scientific listing dealing with a folk rhyme about spelling. Words are spelled as they are and deal with it- let them eat cake." There is an element of classism in it. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 00:56, 8 May 2021 (UTC), the People's EditorReply
    There are at least two problems, though. (1) There are so many exceptions that it’s not much of a rule. (2) Our categories are filled with entries that the rule is arguably not supposed to apply to anyway, and so they are unhelpful to the “less educated”. — SGconlaw (talk) 08:28, 8 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
    Thanks for your reply. (1) "There are so many exceptions that it’s not much of a rule." Sure, that's correct. But the point is not whether the rhyme is true. This is not Wiktionary's Mythbusters-style attempt to bust the rhyme and bring down the feudal patriarchy under the blinding light of science and reason. The point is that the rhyme is a significant cultural-linguistic touchstone and that it is inherently valuable for English speakers to be made aware that a word in this category is violating the rhyme. When I spell the word 'weird' I have sometimes been tempted to spell the word as 'wierd', but then I remember that the word is 'odd' in that it doesn't follow the rhyme's suggested spelling rule. The rule is a cultural-linguistic artifact which it is interesting to examine and explore the literal implications of. (2) "Our categories are filled with entries that the rule is arguably not supposed to apply to". Those words referred to should be removed if the rhyme isn't supposed to apply to it. A descriptivist dictionary of 21st century English and an ancient rhyme will naturally have a different idea of which words really constitute bona fide English language words . --Geographyinitiative (talk) 20:33, 11 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
In my daily life, I just organically used the rule in the rhyme to correct a misspelling I had made- 'recieved' for 'received'. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 17:15, 17 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

Retain. I disagree with the proposal to remove this category, and believe that this is a useful category that should be retained. —DIV (1.145.62.202 13:01, 15 August 2021 (UTC))Reply

December 2020

Category:Sunda-Sulawesi languages and Category:Borneo-Philippines languages

Latest comment: 3 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion

Just stumbled upon their WP articles which has been removed from mainspace as spurious (and the original retained for historical reference), so it's time to delete their language family category, including the Category:Proto-Sunda-Sulawesi language, and rearrange the Malayo-Polynesian family tree.-TagaSanPedroAko (talk) 07:27, 1 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Metaknowledge, Fay Freak, SemperBlotto, DTLHS: Can you take a look on this? -TagaSanPedroAko (talk) 04:13, 2 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
My understanding is that the Malayo-Polynesian family tree is more like a lawn. Aside from Oceanic, there are lots of smaller local groups and there's Malayo-Polynesian, but no real structure in between. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:35, 2 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Chuck Entz: There 's a Western Malayo-Polynesian family (and a Proto-Western-Malayo-Polynesian protolanguage) proposed by Blust that lumps all those currently grouped under Borneo-Philippines and Sunda-Sulawesi here into a single family, but it's mostly geographical and discredited. I agree with your point. --TagaSanPedroAko (talk) 05:30, 2 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
  • If the scholarly consensus is that these nodes are invalid, then I agree we should delete them and associate their daughters directly with Malayo-Polynesian, but there will be widespread consequences, including deleting all of the Proto-Sunda-Sulawesi lemmas. —Mahāgaja · talk 09:12, 2 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
    • Most of those are only present due to their easy availability via Blust's Austronesian Comparative Dictionary. I use that a lot for data on languages, but I don't trust its reconstructions unless I can find confirmation elsewhere. Blust is notorious for using software designed for cladistics in biology on lexicostatic data.
    • As you know, it's possible to reconstruct a protolanguage for any assortment of languages that are related at all, and coincidental patterns of presence or absence of reflexes as well as borrowing can make these reconstructions different for different arbitrary groupings even though they share the same latest common ancestor. I'm sure Proto-English-Italian-Romanian and Proto-Engliah-French-Spanish would look different, even though the only common ancestor for both is Proto-Indo-European. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:39, 3 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
Looking over our PSuSw lemmas, most of them are just trivial rewritings of PMP lemmas anyway, and the sole exception is actually continued solely in Malayo-Chamic *bagus. I don't know what has motivated creating Sunda-Sulawesi and also intermediate Malayo-Sumbawan entries for this, did someone perhaps originally miss Blust's note that the reflex in Rembong (spoken on Flores) should be considered a loan from Malayic rather than inherited? --Tropylium (talk) 18:29, 3 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Chuck Entz, Mahagaja, Tropylium I've been fixing Austronesian reconstructions to get rid of Borneo-Philippines and PSuSw, and some IP working on the same area reverted my change for *buʀuk. I think there should be already be a resolution here.
In addition to Borneo-Philippines and Sunda-Sulawesi, should we also delete these families as well?
  • Malayo-Sumbawan (proposed by K. Adelaar. Includes Malayic and Chamic, Bali-Sasak-Sumbawa, Sundanese and Madurese)
    • Malayo-Chamic (rather two separate families directly grouped with MP)
--TagaSanPedroAko (talk) 01:49, 19 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

Category:English words suffixed with -ulent

Latest comment: 3 years ago9 comments6 people in discussion

See Wiktionary:Tea room/2020/December#-ulent. This is not a suffix; all the examples are taken intact from Latin words in -ulentus, and in almost all cases there is no English word X for X + -ulent to make sense as a superficial analysis. (The entry -ulentus lists -ulent as a descendant and so would also need to be updated.) - -sche (discuss) 23:07, 24 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

See -ulent at Affixes: The building blocks of English, Michael Quinton. I agree that most English terms ending in ulent are derived directly from Latin words ending in ulentus and that "equivalent to X + -ulent" is not right if X does not exist in English. I took two entries from this category by removing such "equivalent to" language. But the remaining item in this category: puberulent (listed in Century 1911) does not an obvious Latin direct antecedent ending in ulentus. I have no idea whether other English terms exist that arguably have -ulent as a suffix. DCDuring (talk) 22:46, 26 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
Why was "fraudulent" removed? "Fraud" exists as a stand-alone word in English, and ordinary English speakers will be more familiar with the word's relationship to English fraud than its relationship to French fraudulent and Latin fraudulentus.--Urszag (talk) 00:44, 27 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
It really depends on whether -ulent is actually an English morpheme. If the only English terms ening in ulent correspond semantically to Latin terms ending in ulentus, then ulent cannot really be said to be an English morpheme. As it stands we don't even have attestation for the one word with a Wiktionary entry that does not have a corresponding Latin etymon listed in Lewis and Sullivan's dictionary of Classical Latin: puberulent. For all we know there might be a puberulentus attested in Medieval or other later Latin. DCDuring (talk) 05:34, 27 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
The Latin term would be puberulens, which does, indeed, have a few hits in botanical Latin texts. I'm not really sure why puberulus isn't used instead, since there doesn't seem to be a verb that the participle could be derived from. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:47, 27 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
And in case you're wondering why Latin -ulentus isn't involved: puberulent is semantically a diminutive. Something that's puberulent has shorter and finer hairs than something that's pubescent. The -ulentus suffix is the opposite of a diminutive- "abounding in, full of". Besides which, there's no English word puber. The Latin word is pūbes, which alternates with "puber-" because of phenomena that didn't make it past the end of Latin. Chuck Entz (talk) 07:35, 27 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
But, if -ulent is not an English morpheme, then David X. Cohen could not have created cromulent, whether or not he got the "crom" part from "Cromwell". Shāntián Tàiláng (talk) 21:33, 15 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
Individual invention doesn't need shared meaning of component morphemes. A dictionary entry for a morpheme does. I doubt that anyone inferred the meaning of cromulent from its morphology. "Ulent" may have suggested that cromulent was an adjective, but "ent" might have as well. DCDuring (talk) 22:57, 15 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete, not an English suffix. Ultimateria (talk) 17:00, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Category:English words interfixed with -gest-

Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

See Wiktionary:Requests for deletion/English#-gest-. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 16:52, 26 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

Interfix has failed RFD, so delete. Ultimateria (talk) 16:58, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Category:Korean etymologies with first attestations that need to be moved to Middle Korean entries

Latest comment: 3 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion

Created after this discussion to abandon the functionalities of {{ko-etym-native}} and move to {{inh|ko|okm}} instead, which I can't really agree with. First attestations are given in the standard Korean dictionaries, and there are a number of benefits to Wiktionary doing so as well:

  • It's more detail we won't be providing, which I think is a bad thing.
  • There are important differences between fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Middle Korean, and this is obscured by using {{inh|ko|okm}} only. I would also add that specifying the source immediately allows a knowledgeable reader to understand the nature of the word, e.g. a Middle Korean word first attested in Childae manbeop is highly likely to be southeastern dialectal, and a word first attested in personal letters is likely to be a colloquial form. This is all valuable information lost.
  • {{inh}} will not work at all for Early Modern Korean because {{inh|ko|ko-ear}} causes a module error (a language cannot inherit from a variant of itself).
  • {{defdate}} (suggested in the discussion) won't normally work without a specific academic source because many Middle Korean and Early Modern Korean ancestors of contemporary Korean words had different meanings (cf. 착하다 (chakhada)), but these are not provided in the standard generalist sources which largely ignore semantic shifts.
  • In practice, all editors working in Korean have continued to put in first attestations, so this hasn't really been working out anyways and the category doesn't really do anything.

Also, it includes entries that do have Middle Korean entries now, e.g. 가랑비 (garangbi).--Karaeng Matoaya (talk) 15:30, 30 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

Module:ko-etym would need to be edited to remove autogeneration of this category, of course.--Karaeng Matoaya (talk) 15:34, 30 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Karaeng Matoaya I am fine with deleting this and fixing the module accordingly. Are there any other people working on Middle Korean? If so maybe we can get them to weigh in, and delete the category. Benwing2 (talk) 21:41, 20 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Benwing2, AFAIK the only other people who have been creating entries are @LoutK, Quadmix77.--Tibidibi (talk) 12:21, 24 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete — LoutK (talk) 12:44, 24 February 2021 (UTC)Reply

February 2021

Wiktionary:Etymology

Latest comment: 3 years ago9 comments8 people in discussion

Redundant. To Appendix:Glossary and the dictionary itself. It tries to give an introduction into historical linguistics, or give an overview of common types of etymological relations. But the only specific information is constituted by the links to Category:Etymology templates on how to express etymological relations with Wikicode, which would be the punctum saliens. In reality one cannot deduct from this page how to write etymologies, one has to have seen inductively how etymology is done, in this dictionary and elsewhere, and be informed about the particular word and semantic field and participating languages to write one, and if one writes etymologies repeatedly then one seeks how one can adorn or accelerate this practice with templates. But inheritance and borrowing, blends and affixations, and what not, happen in the field and are recognized without Wiktionary:Etymology telling about it.

What this page does is to waste potential editors’ precious time apart from leading them into more doubts and insecurity about correct approaches owing to outdated or otherwise false statements, as evidenced by Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2021/February#Cognates for borrowings, and perchance scare them away utterly, which is known from the magnitude of Wikipedia’s policy forest. Tellingly the page was started by literally Wonderfool and it has been expanded like a meme that has went out of hand …

I think the page was in the past a kind of pinboard where editors noted their insights as things were new and Wiktionary didn’t have the template and language module data and category structure and lots of good examples availing us now. Let’s get rid of it to see the trees through the forest.

Lots of incoming links and views from for example Template:rfe for such a bad page. And people are discouraged instead of encouraged by this page to fill the requests. Fay Freak (talk) 22:17, 19 February 2021 (UTC)Reply

I think we need to have a page by this title. Etymology templates are numerous and I am not aware of any other reference resource to help find the right one. Whether this page is deleted and started again from scratch, or just cleaned up drastically to remove the editorialisation and strip it back to a "cheat sheet", I don't really mind. This, that and the other (talk) 06:32, 20 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
That’s what I also thought. Maybe delete almost everything in it, preserving its history, and keep a link farm to templates and similar with concise descriptions. So also Lambiam suggested at Wiktionary:Information desk/2021/February#Difference of {{der}} and {{bor}} Fay Freak (talk) 17:06, 20 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
I agree that it would make sense to slim up the entry to mostly focus on a brief explanation of template usage. Wiktionary:Semantic relations is a good example of what such a "cheat sheet" could look like. Looking over the page, it seems that there is also some general style guide and community standard information on topics such as the use of "<" v.s. "from", the extent to which folk etymologies are included, and which entries deserve "Etymology" sections (ex. acronyms, compound with hyphens or spaces). It might not make sense to include that information on this page, but I do think it should be described somewhere. —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 04:44, 25 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep. I don't see this being at all redundant with "Appendix:Glossary and the dictionary itself". Those are intended for readers, whereas this page is clearly aimed at editors, hence the extensive advice about the layout and content of Etymology sections on Wiktionary and about template usage, all of which would be inappropriate for the Glossary or anywhere in mainspace. If example code or advice is out of date, then fix it. The project absolutely needs documentation on this topic. As someone who had a fair amount of experience on Wikipedia before joining here, I've been disappointed by the lack of policy/guidelines/documentation coverage compared to WP. I often find myself confused about how to approach some problem. Absent any policy guidance, I'll start researching similar entries to see how it's handled there, or search through the archives of discussion boards like the Beer Parlour, but a) this is significantly more work than reading a policy page, and b) the research often ends in my finding conflicting approaches/opinions, and a lack of clear consensus. Deleting documentation (even if it's imperfect and hasn't passed into the status of official consensus-backed policy), is absolutely going in the wrong direction IMO. And I'm highly dubious of the idea that the current content of the page is so deeply flawed that the best solution is to TNT it and start over. Colin M (talk) 21:45, 26 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep per Colin M. It is absurd to think that would-be contributors to etymology could quickly learn our somewhat arcane etymology practices from the dispersed other bits of information. For those who have learned or invented our current practices, deleting this is something like pulling up the drawbridge once one is in the castle. It seems to be based on the idea that would-be contributors should face some kind of initiation rite that involves testing their strength of character (patience, search fu, willingness to bow and scrape for help un user talk pages, etc.). DCDuring (talk) 14:37, 27 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep. Mybe we need a spring cleaning ritual to keep essential documentation pages from getting stale. – Jberkel 13:25, 26 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep, but cleanup. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 09:41, 29 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep and clean up. Ultimateria (talk) 16:55, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

March 2021

Wiktionary:Wiktionary-supported software

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

Pretty crappy, IMHO. Passed RFD in 2008. Oxlade2000 (talk) 22:59, 11 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

And if we do stupidly keep it, it should be lowercase, of course Oxlade2000 (talk) 23:28, 11 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
(I've fixed the capitalisation.) Equinox ◑ 12:39, 26 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep. Needs updating. Wasn't aware this existed. Is RFD the new RFC? – Jberkel 13:51, 26 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

Wiktionary:Word of the day/Archive/Alphabetic

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

Since we've got Category:Word of the day archive, this page isn't so useful anymore. Do people care which date a particular word was WOTD? Probably not... Oxlade2000 (talk) 18:52, 14 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

Also Wiktionary:Word of the day/FAQ has a grand total of 1 FAQ. This could probably be absorbed into Wiktionary:Word of the day, if anyone cares enough about it. Oxlade2000 (talk) 18:54, 14 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
The intention is to add additional FAQs there if any arise, to avoid cluttering up the main WOTD page. — SGconlaw (talk) 03:28, 22 April 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete subpage "Alphabetic". Ultimateria (talk) 16:54, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Category:Conspiracy theories

Latest comment: 3 years ago23 comments12 people in discussion

Hardcore POV categorization. One could understand this category as containing all terms denoting a concept of a conspiracy, but he who devised this name is decided to insert encyclopedic stances with this category. “There's a difference between real and fake.” Another frequent editor removed the category in a term denoting an alleged phenomenon where promotion or progression of a demographic is excluded in a way of a hidden barrier by another demographic, to promote the view that “gender discrimination is real”. What does it even mean that gender discrimination is real? Even if it is, and I will concede that much (probably considering it just; depends also on what discrimination even is), it does not mean that every use of this term glass ceiling refers to a real thing; this a priori clear from its character as a metaphor for sundry purposes, and sure feminists are unable to form conspiracy theories? Aren’t feminist theory and gender studies the foremost source to find crackpottery in it, centered around blaming patriarchy in various imaginations?

There is a difference of true and false, I am even a particular fan of it and not someone who tries to deconstruct it, but this cannot be the basis for categorization. Not only is it contentious, and surely we have no interest in discussing which is real, but the term is independent of that.

What we categorize by a category of a dictionary entry is the concept behind the term, what people thought when saying a word and not what really happened, not the noumenon behind the phenomenon, so here is the transgression, here lies the fallacy in ascribing the additional value of truth to these concepts, or assuming of a dictionary editor that he does so by his categorizations.

So you may suppose I deem the Meds Yeghern real. Yet I have no reservation to speak of a conspiracy theory here. Obviously conspiracies can be true and are commonly accepted as true; if what is called conspiracy theory then is not, or even “implied” not to be, if the term is used and interpreted in partisan modes in disregard of its signification, to prove with its imagined but uncertain idiomatic meaning one’s weltanschauung, why should we use this term? It is too Janus-faced. If the editors, the more so the foremost ones, cannot apply this term in a waterproof way, and readers fail to reap the benefits from it due to not finding it in a reasonable compass and inclining towards argument in consequence of equivocal wording, it should be cast out of the categories – whether somehow replaced or not. Fay Freak (talk) 02:23, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

Can you please downgrade your "en-4: This user has near native speaker knowledge of English"? You are near-incomprehensible. Equinox ◑ 07:30, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Yes please. Fay, your English is objectively speaking not native level. You say a lot of weird stuff that clearly gives away that, in addition to your strange affectations, you are not a native speaker. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 05:06, 22 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep, as the person who distinguished "real and fake", and who continues to do so despite efforts to mix the two. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 08:10, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Related: Category:en:Pseudoscience. I have sometimes wondered about this one because it feels like doing a public duty to indicate that something like reiki is just feel-good nonsense, but I suppose there is a real question around how far we categorise without making "value judgements". Equinox ◑ 08:14, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
I don't know what the intention of this category was; if it's just to laundry-list conspiracy theories, we're better served with w:List_of_conspiracy_theories. If it's used to describe subtle language changes employed by promoters of such theories it might be more interesting. Regardless, we'll end up with time-wasting WT:POINTy discussions like this one. – Jberkel 09:29, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep: We shouldn't be afraid to make epistemic judgements while categorising. WT:NPOV exists, but it lacks real teeth outside of a few topics (language definition, usage notes, headwords, and regional spelling/lexical differences). Instead, our present system of categorisation makes epistemological demarcations that go far above and beyond "some people think that it ought to be in there", even if only by implicit consensus. For instance, many creationists would love to have flood geology in Category:en:Geology and baraminology in Category:en:Taxonomy. That's just as well; even creationists would be loath to let the imbecile who thinks that an owl is a kind of fish or that Rwanda is a city steer the course of categorisation.
By refusing to lay down boundaries dealing with what's real and what just ain't, we are seen by our users as believing that judgements are superfluous and that anyone's half-formed conceits are a fine substitute for the truth. We may recognise that that isn't what we're doing, but the average user won't; no matter what we do, we can't but judge. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be hesitant to veer into idiosyncrasy when a category has a definition "understanded of the people", or that we should stir up needless controversy with little relation to building a dictionary. We just mustn't let the fear of Scylla drive us into the waiting maw of Charybdis. Hazarasp (parlement · werkis) 10:31, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
As for the definition of conspiracy theory, most people understand the term to exclude conspiracies which are widely accepted to exist. Our definition only alludes to this indirectly, by beginning with 'A hypothesis... (rather than, say, A theory...); it should probably be clearer. Hazarasp (parlement · werkis) 10:31, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete: The category includes both Area 51 and QAnon, and yet the current definition of the former reads almost like a description of the meme, not some belief in classified contact between alien-carrying UFOs and the US government.
There seems to me to be no consistently followed application of the word conspiracy here, but rather a collection of names for various accusations of "secrecy" or "concealment" (like Area 51), and in particular "secretly planned harm" (like red mercury and plandemic), or, alternatively, hostility toward Jews in general (like blood libel). The latter type, if applied to other religions or ethnicities, would turn the category into a list of racist branding and allegations, at least insofar as these allegations involve an element of "scheming to cause large-scale damage".
I personally recommend splitting the items that are currently in this category. Blood libel, for example, could be moved to a category for antisemitism instead of one for a "conspiracy theory", while Area 51 and QAnon could be moved to categories somehow related to aliens and Satanism respectively.
Also, the definition of "Area 51" probably needs to be changed. Roger.M.Williams (talk) 13:16, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete and split. The current category appears to be a mishmash of classic urban legends (man in black, Illuminatus), 21st century U.S. politics (birther, deather, QAnon), pseudoscience (coronasceptic, flat-earthism), and widely believed and probably real phenomena which cannot be scientifically proven to the critics' satisfaction (bamboo ceiling, deep state); in other words, the current category is useless. I would suggest moving the current entries to Category:Pseudoscience, Category:Politics, Category:Racism, Category:Antisemitism etc., and maybe introduce Category:Urban legends for the remainder. Tetromino (talk) 14:59, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
To clarify my suggestion, I'll try to exemplify it using the five entries I have mentioned that are currently in this category. In addition to what Tetromino has said, the Italicized words in my definitions below are, to me, a useful guide that may help categorize the entries so that, on their model, all the entries that are currently labeled what roughly signifies "a scheme done by a number of people to cause damage, usually on a large scale" may instead be moved to more meaningful categories (that is, ones that may be adequately linked to each of them).
Area 51: a US facility in Nevada whose name has become associated with classified undertakings with extraterrestrials. It is a "theory" (that is, a view, perhaps held assertively) about surreptitious operations related to aliens, in particular UFOs.
Suggestion: adding it to a category about "extraterrestrials", "aliens", "UFOs", "the United States of America", and/or "Nevada"
QAnon: the "theory" (that is, the idea, the attitude) that a Satanistic, cannibalistic, and/or pedophilic cabal is in control of the US government and possibly other governments too and that Donald Trump has been working to expose this and to thwart the cabal's efforts. The name of this "theory" derives from an anonymous poster on 4chan who later moved to 8chan.
Suggestion: adding it to a category about "Satanism", "cannibalism", "pedophilia", "cabals", "the United States of America", "Donald Trump", "4chan", and/or "8chan"
red mercury: the name of a red-colored chemical substances that purportedly plays a central role in the manufacturing of nuclear weapons
Suggestion: adding it to a category about "nuclear weapons"
plandemic: the "theory" (that is, the idea, the attitude) that some pandemic is humanly made (that is, manufactured), planned, or orchestrated
Suggestion: adding it to a category about "pandemics" and/or "diseases" (through extraction from the italicized word "pandemic" above)
blood libel: the accusation that Jews may abduct the children of non-Jews to murder them in their secretive religious rituals
Suggestion: adding it to a category about "Judaism", "antisemitism" (through extraction from the italicized words "abduct", "children", and "murder" above), and/or "cabals" (through extraction from the italicized phrase "secretive religious rituals").
As for the other entries, some terms may warrant having their own categories (for example, Illuminati), while others may be added to the entry conspiracy theory itself in the "See also" section (for example, truther), and yet a number of terms currently in the category (such as flat-earthism) do not even include an element of "scheming to cause damage" at all (unlike, for example, blood libel or even Pizzagate). Roger.M.Williams (talk) 15:18, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Roger.M.Williams: I conclude from this that you have some misunderstandings about how our categorisation system works. The idea is that if someone is interested in a topic, they should be presented with a list of terms directly relating to that topic. Let's just take QAnon as an example. It is a theory about the US government, but it does not directly relate to the US as a nation. If we put anything that tenuously related to the US in Category:en:United States, it would be a useless category. Similarly, the theory claims that paedophilia is going on, but its claims are false and aren't central to its political narrative; if someone goes to Category:en:Pedophilia, they are looking for terms relating to actual paedophiles, not conspiracy theories that incorporate the idea of pedophilia. But what if someone is interested in conspiracy theories? In that case, QAnon is exactly the sort of entry they're looking for. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 21:29, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Metaknowledge: I meant my suggestions about the five terms above as possibilities. Tetromino, for example, suggested moving it to Category:en:Politics. But either way, I feel that both are more "meaningful", at least since they somehow relate to how one would define it in a way that one can coherently group it with other entries (whether they are about politics, the US, or US politics). I think the only suggestion I actually personally favor is Category:Antisemitism. "Antipathy toward Jews" is much more differentiable, and I imagine that Jews and maybe even antisemites would eagerly verify whether a term warrants inclusion.
Regardless, focusing on discreditedness or the falsity of its claims does not seem to pertain to the compound "conspiracy theory", which I have tried to define above as clandestinity with harmful intentions, a label that is so broad that following whatever seems to "fit" it would result in adding so many disparate and contrasting terms: QAnon may have been falsified, but what about red mercury or even Area 51? That Area 51 is classified renders any "theory" about it virtually unfalsifiable. Would a Cartesian evil genius or even solipsism be "conspiracy theories"? Colin seems to lean toward describing application only, but I personally doubt that they would not be called so when explained to non-philosophers, and they would most likely be called so if you somehow add "the government" or even "aliens" to the mix. But these are just my own speculations. Application of the compound would probably vary a lot regardless, and perceived credibility or falsity seems to play a very little role, if any.
In short, many of the so-called "conspiracy theories" are unverifiable and/or unfalsifiable, thus taking away even further from the value of a category about defamatory accusations. That is, there is no "truth" to defend in these cases since the whole thing is an accusation and roughly amounts to libel or slandering or is comparable to it (unlike, for example, Category:en:Pseudoscience, which is to me more distinguishable because it pertains to science). And so, at least to me, it appears to me to be more convenient to split the charges, allegations, and propaganda into seemingly relevant "types" (for instance, blaming Jews for this, charging the US government with that, accusing NASA of such and such) instead of lumping them all together because they "may" be named "conspiracy theories" or because they are concern a concealed or distorted operation or "plot". And as for falsity, this can be marked in the definition instead of the category. But of course, however you do any of this is another matter. Roger.M.Williams (talk) 00:01, 16 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Metaknowledge: It is a crude way of thinking that terms could be “directly related to a topic”. Why wouldn’t your favourite genocide (forgive the term!) be directly related to the topic? It depends on your subjective definition of your topic again. But a definition which also includes commonly accepted conspiracies is not unlikely for other subjects that browse the dictionary, for why would it only be the most unlikely ones? And why wouldn’t Bielefeld be related to the topic of conspiracy theories? It’s strongly related to it, for for bare people in the South of Germany and in the United States the only thing they know is that it is a sham city (unlike in the apparently smarter Iran where man at least knows Arminia Bielefeld). How often have I read from people on the internet: “You are from Bielefeld? Sure you are trying to impose upon me!” “Bielefeld doesn’t exist!” (Same people also contended that I can’t be native German but “more like from Minnesota”, “an American larping as German” because I speak too artificial and dialect-free German; apparently I am a native speaker of nothing, @Equinox; it appears that languages are also conspiracies to which I am not privy, and for every country the other half of the country is perceived as a conspiracy. Kosovo is a conspiracy.) Fay Freak (talk) 15:00, 16 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
I would appeal here to Wikipedia's concept of "verifiability, not truth". Or, since we're on Wiktionary, it might be more apt to call it "descriptivism, not truth". So, for example, it's not our place to analyse the studies and statistics that have been published around the compensation and promotion of women in the workplace to determine whether the glass ceiling is real or false (and therefore a conspiracy theory). Rather, it's a conspiracy theory if people commonly describe it as such. ("commonly" is important here. It's not sufficient that there's a small fringe that uses the label.) All of the terms currently in Category:en:Conspiracy theories seem to satisfy this criterion (or are terms that are commonly used in relation to conspiracy theories, e.g. tinfoil hatter). Colin M (talk) 17:29, 15 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Which sounds like work and would introduce popularity bias. I wouldn’t be that sure either that one couldn’t verify by publications from the environs of Vrij Historisch Onderzoek that Shoah is called a conspiracy theory. Then one would start classifying and excluding sources based on reputability etc. what we so far wanted to avoid on Wiktionary, as this is all remote from dictionary interest. Fay Freak (talk) 15:00, 16 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
I don't think it's as difficult as you're making it sound. If I take something like "Area 51", and look up articles about it in mainstream sources (Encyclopedia Britannica, The New York Times, Fox News, whatever) they more-often-than-not use the term 'conspiracy theory' in relation to it. If I repeat this exercise for "glass ceiling" or "shoah", none of them use that term. I see no ambiguity in these cases. For cases where there is any ambiguity, they should not go in the category. death panel is such an example - many sources describe it as false or discredited (even a "myth"), but few describe it as a "conspiracy theory". It should go to Category:en:US politics (deep state probably should as well). I was going to suggest a subcat for contentious US political terms, but looking at the US politics cat, maybe that's almost redundant... Colin M (talk) 20:14, 16 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
IMO we should distinguish in our category system between
  • terms for conspiracy narratives
  • terms that describe (aspects of) conspiracy narratives
  • terms that have specific meanings, or are exclusively used, in the context of specific conspiracy narratives
Lumping all this together in one category isn't helpful and blurs the lines between the description of lunatic thinking and lunatic thinking itself. --Akletos (talk) 07:04, 16 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
This is not an unreasonable idea, but it's swimming against the current of how categorization is currently done on Wiktionary. Basically all of our topic categories suffer from this kind of conflation. For example, Category:en:Prison includes 1) terms for prisons 2) terms that describe aspects/features of prisons and imprisonment, and 3) terms used within prisons. A little while back I did some work to try to migrate most of the terms in the third group to Category:English prison slang. You could try to do something similar for "Conspiracy theorist slang", but I'm not sure it would be useful, especially since the conspiracy theory category is currently not very big. I would say Wiktionary focuses more on categorizing by 'metadata' (part of speech, register, region, countability, transitivity...) rather than meaning, and I think that's a good thing. Colin M (talk) 19:49, 16 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep. Yes, maintaining the category is going to involve a regrettable degree of political judgement, but it is in principle a useful dictinction to make. That said, there is merit to Akletos' proposal for splitting. The question is whether there will be agreement on appropriate and practical category names and whether there should be a single overarching category. ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 13:46, 21 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
The general issue of our categorization system not always distinguishing different, erm, categories of things—terms about X vs terms for X, etc—is probably due for another discussion in the BP; I will start one shortly. One proposal in the past was to use names like "Category:en:Topic:Prison" for terms relating to the topic of prison vs "Category:en:Set:Prison" for a set of names of prisons like Alcatraz and Rikers Island and Sing Sing (and then something like Colin's "Category:English prison slang" for terms used chiefly in prisons). As for this specific category, I guess it's a reasonable category, even if it's a bit fuzzy as to when something is a conspiracy theory vs (e.g.) just an urban legend or "just" an antisemitic lie. If Nazis try to add the Holocaust or other real phenomena to it, we can just block them. - -sche (discuss) 01:48, 29 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
It's worth noting that attempts to use categories to group together terms that have similar referents will probably end up having significant overlap with WT:Thesaurus. Colin M (talk) 02:44, 29 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

Wiktionary:Project - Multilingual translations

Latest comment: 3 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion

I pretty much think anything tagged as inactive for 10 years can go down the toilet Yellow is the colour (talk) 23:36, 28 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

Delete. If there's a new translation project, nothing here will be useful. Ultimateria (talk) 18:26, 16 April 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 15:37, 26 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

Wiktionary:PMT language list

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

Tagged for speedy deletion by WF. Should be discussed first I suppose. Looks rather ancient. Equinox ◑ 15:02, 30 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 18:24, 16 April 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 15:47, 26 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

April 2021

Appendix:Place names in *

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

Mostly superseded by place categories, but might be worth keeping for redlinks? A few haven't had edits since 2006.

– Jberkel 21:21, 21 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

Delete. If we want to create the red links later, we can reference for example Wikipedia's List of cities and towns in Egypt. —TeragR disc./con. 22:41, 21 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 15:50, 26 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 22:42, 23 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Module:template utilities

Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Unused. Created by @Kephir in 2014 and enlarged this year by @Huhu9001 with some potentially useful stuff, but is it actually useful enough that anyone is going to bother using it? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 00:06, 27 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

Abstain. -- Huhu9001 (talk) 10:20, 27 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

May 2021

Appendix:Official English Scrabble 2-letter words

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

As discussed on my talk page, having official Scrabble word lists included in the Wiktionary could potentially cause copyright issues, so I'm flagging this page for a review, as it also contains two official Scrabble word lists (albeit smaller lists taken from a larger one). The wider context here is that I was importing the larger Scrabble word lists into Wiktionary so the gaps in definitions could be more easily browsed, and surjection wisely noted that this could cause license problems for the project. Screbbla (talk) 20:08, 4 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

Delete for the reason given by Mahāgaja. —TeragR disc./con. 22:19, 21 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

June 2021

Template:hak-pron

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

Not used, and will not be used because all Hakka pronunciations are housed in {{zh-pron}}. The creation of the template was experimental. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 06:39, 1 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

Delete. Wiikipedian (talk) 07:12, 1 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete. Does not even need any approval; such things can be speedy-deleted. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 06:18, 19 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

Template:bor+ and Template:inh+

Latest comment: 3 years ago69 comments23 people in discussion

Should be deleted per Creation of Template:inh+ and Template:bor+. See Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2021/June#{{bor+}}_and_{{inh+}}. --{{victar|talk}} 20:35, 18 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

  • Keep. As Benwing2 and Lambiam pointed out on that vote, there was no reason to hold a vote in the first place. "New templates that add additional functionality without changing existing functionality shouldn't need a vote." And the vote just barely failed - it would have passed if the deadline were just a few hours later. There's certainly consensus if we go by the spirit, rather than the most strict reading of, our voting policies. Imetsia (talk) 22:00, 18 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
    If they created the templates without a vote, myself or someone else would have created a vote to delete them and we would have ended up in the same place. --{{victar|talk}} 22:57, 18 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
    I don't think that's quite true, though. If the vote hadn't taken place and the templates had been created straightaway, there would need to be a consensus for their deletion here. But given the results of the vote, there clearly is no such consensus. PUC ~ 212.224.238.99 11:20, 19 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
    The status quo is that they aren't in use, so the vote would have been for their usage, not their deletion. --{{victar|talk}} 13:16, 19 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • Keep. At User talk:Benwing2 § Ongoing vote, @Benwing2 said: “if everyone needed a vote to do add any new feature, nothing would get done”. This is exactly what is happening now —— this is a simple and harmless new feature but it is causelessly being opposed by so many. Those who oppose {{inh+}}: why? A "+" sign is easier than "From" also. The vote was unnecessary so we shouldn't really count that. @AryamanA did vote after the vote ended; that makes it 20-10-2. It doesn't make the vote pass, but shows that majority is, at least okay with this. 🔥शब्दशोधक🔥 05:07, 19 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
    See above, but to repeat, if you didn't create the vote, I would have, and it would have been the same outcome: {{bor+}} and {{inh+}} are banned. Period. --{{victar|talk}} 05:26, 19 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
    @Victar: See the outcome of this first then say. If these pass here, you are requested not to create another vote just to waste people's time. 🔥शब्दशोधक🔥 05:32, 19 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
    This isn't a vote -- the vote already happened -- this is simply a formality and a request that those pages be admin-locked. If it was up to me, I would have you blocked for a week as well for disruptive edits. --{{victar|talk}} 05:36, 19 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • Keep. It was a mistaking on my part to have started a vote for this; such minor changes do not need a vote in the first place, and I was misled by Victar & Co.’s contention into creating the vote. Since this was nothing more than an opinion poll, the vote’s result is null and void. There’s no question of deleting these new templets, at the very most a BP discussion ’bout th’ templets may ensue instead. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 06:13, 19 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
    Just forget about the vote, if someone had created these templets earlier, there would have been no vote. Now these templets display the etymological text with the words “inherited” & ”borrowed” linked to Glossary, so I think there’s no reason we should miss the benefit of having the keywords hyperlinked (being consistent with other etymology templets). Plainly writing ’from’ not only seems to be discriminating against inheritances and loanwords, but also is confusing for those who clean up etymologies ({{der}}, {{inh}}, and {{bor}} all currently use a plain ‘from’), not to mention it is irksome for our readers likewise; whilst advocating against the usage of the new templets seems ridiculous: why would two templets (with just an additional plus sign) beget confusion?—wikis are full of templets that are meant to further consistency. Instead of complaining about having additional templets, the opposers should accept the fact that we are solving some real issue. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 14:12, 19 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • Keep because I don't think a precedent should be established that new templates need a supermajority to be created. There are templates that Victar created that I don't like, e.g. {{dercat}}, but I would not think to require a vote before allowing them to be created. Benwing2 (talk) 07:44, 19 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
    If you're of the opinion that any templates I've created should be deleted, feel free to start a vote. Having lead text in derivational templates has been a long contended issue, which is why a vote was especially needed in this case. --{{victar|talk}} 09:02, 19 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
    I feel like we're doing the same thing over and over again. We have already voted on the creation of these templates, the outcome was no consensus, hence the templates shouldn't be created. It's as simple as that: if we can't hold ourselves to the outcome of a vote, then we can't keep any order and everyone is free to do whatever they want. Even if I personally weren't against these specific templates (which, suffice to say, I am), it sets a very dangerous precedent to ignore the outcome of a vote. Thadh (talk) 09:30, 19 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • While I do agree with the template creators that "a reader should be able to read what the exact mode of derivation of a word is instead of having to see the wikitext or check the categories" (which is why I always - manually - add "borrowed from" or "inherited from", and why I oppose the removal of these specifications in diff or diff), I think these templates are unnecessary (per Mahagaja: "If you want to say "Borrowed from" or "Inherited from", just write it in. No reason to complicate things by adding two new templates"), and I would prefer that they be deleted (per Jberkel: "We are creating a culture in which redundant/overlapping templates are added because no consensus can be found on the existing ones"), though I won't insist too much.
What I do oppose strongly is any kind of template substitution such as this one. If the goal of the template creators is simply to save keystrokes (a feeble argument if you ask me, but whatever), let them use the templates in new entries / new etymology sections, but I see absolutely no reason for them to go around replacing plain text with templatized text, thereby making things harder to edit. There's a reason why I pushed for removing the text from {{bor}}: it's more flexible that way, as I don't have to use the pesky |notext= / |nocap= parameters. I certainly don't want to go back to that.
In my opinion, if these templates are kept, there should be a motion that they can only be used in new entries/sections/instances, that they cannot be used to replace plain text that's already there, and on the contrary that they can be replaced with plain text by anyone who should wish to do so. Otherwise we will have an inconsistent mess.
Also I deliberately ignored the vote, but had I taken part in it (which I would have if I'd seen it was going to pass), I would have voted weak oppose, per Mahagaja, Jberkel and -sche (see Beer Parlour), so I'm not so sure the 2/3 threshold would have been reached (see, however, my response to Victar above). PUC ~ 212.224.238.99 09:27, 19 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
See also Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2021/June § Consensus on adding |withtext=1 parameters to {{bor}} and {{inh}}. J3133 (talk) 05:39, 28 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep, no cogent reason for deletion, that vote does not carry force to disallow the creation or existence of these templates anyway. The bloody sodding thing almost passed with 2/3s anyway, it is utterly ridiculous to read that vote as a consensus for deletion of the templates. ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 16:28, 14 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • Done RFDs-Kept (9 keeps — 6 deletes); it has been one month since these were nominated for deletion. Since these are kept, here's what I'll add:
    1. Replacing "Inherited/Borrowed from" or "From" (like diff) with the new templates is fine as it adds a glossary link.
    2. Replacing the new templates with the full text along with glossary link (like diff) is fine, as it removes nothing from the entry. However replacing these with "Inherited/Borrowed from" (without glossary link) or "From" (like diff) should not be done. 🔥शब्दशोधक🔥 07:44, 19 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
    I'm sorry, that's not something you can just decide like that. For example, if you change an Ingrian etymology from "From" to "Inherited from" I will personally undo that edit because it's wholly rediculous. If someone doesn't know Ingrian inherits from Proto-Finnic and wants it typed out, maybe they shouldn't be using our etymology sections for that language. Moreover, I'm skeptical this discussion can be closed. Thadh (talk) 14:00, 19 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
    What harm does {{glossary|Inherited}} do? Why can't it be up to the editor who's creating the entry to decide whether or not they want to use {{glossary|Inherited}}? @Victar is now claiming that the term "inherited" shouldn't be used in the etymology sections because inheritance is implied (diff). I think @Benwing2, Kutchkutch should be asked about their opinion on this too. -- 𝓑𝓱𝓪𝓰𝓪𝓭𝓪𝓽𝓽𝓪(𝓽𝓪𝓵𝓴) 08:34, 20 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
    • @Thadh, I must vehemently disagree with your apparent contention that a user who is ignorant of the relationship between Ingrian and Proto-Finnic is somehow not worthy of having things clearly explained. How else would anyone learn these things? If I, as someone ignorant of both Ingrian and Proto-Finnic, were to land on the entry for an Ingrian term, how would I understand that "from" means explicitly "inherited from"? There are many mechanisms whereby a term from language (or proto-language) A makes its way into language B. Simply saying "from" with no further explanation is insufficiently clear.
    As the English Wiktionary, we can only safely assume that our readers can read English. We cannot assume that our readers know everything what we know. Excessive abbreviation and omission creates unnecessary barriers to understanding. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 21:48, 13 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
    @Eirikr: A user should only use the tools they are capable of using. That is why we don't link every IPA character, why we don't link every name of a grammatical case or verbal aspect and why we don't explain the entirety of grammar to the reader: we are not an encyclopedia. If a user doesn't know what Ingrian is, they either don't use that section in our dictionary, or they go to the Wikipedia article or just google it. If they don't know what Proto-Finnic is, ditto. It doesn't take a lot of understanding to get our etymology sections without the linked "inherited" or "borrowed", but those do make it sound like we think of our readers as of idiots. They aren't, and I have yet to see a feedback that concerns this. And for the record, if you're ignorant of both Ingrian and Proto-Finnic, see the terms *kakci and kaks, and don't know it's inherited, you probably don't need that distinction made, because you don't know the difference. This is all trying to please a group of people that doesn't exist. Thadh (talk) 09:15, 14 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
    • @Thadh: Even if I have a rough understanding of the relationship between Ingrian and Finnic, such as might be gleaned from a Wikipedia article, where do we (Wiktionary in general) explain what the default meaning of "from" is in etymology sections? I'm not aware of any reason for a user to assume that "from" consistently means "inherited from".
    The entire purpose of an etymology section is to explain the derivation of a term. I am honestly confused at your apparent opposition to explaining derivations clearly -- even to the point of undoing anyone else's addition of the word "inherited". If another editor has gone to the effort of inserting this additional detail, presumably they thought this was useful; why remove it if it is correct?
    You mention linking to IPA or labels for cases or aspects. We do link to the Wikipedia page for IPA in our pronunciation templates for Japanese, as you can see at 膨れる#Pronunciation. This is a simple and unobtrusive measure to improve usability and discoverability -- if a user is curious what IPA is, they only have to click the link to find out.
    I strongly feel we should do the same for case and aspect labels. English readers can be assumed to understand basic grammatical vocabulary used to describe English, such as verb or adjective. But what is adessive, as used for Hungarian nouns such as hal#Hungarian? Hungarian templates link through to the appropriate entries. This is a simple and unobtrusive measure to improve usability and discoverability -- if a user is curious what adessive means in the context of Hungarian inflection tables, they only have to click the link to find out.
    By contrast, we have the -TʼEʼ#Navajo entry. The tables here have opaque and unclear labels, and tables have unexplained variations in the labels, such as MOM, NEUT, ABS, COMP for the first table, or MOM, CONT, REP, SEM for the second. From other studies, I think MOM means momentaneous, and NEUT means neuter (indicating a particular kind of defective verb inflection paradigm). But I'm not entirely sure what the other labels expand to. Nor do I have a full understanding what momentaneous and neuter mean in the context of Navajo verbs. Adding links from these labels through to pages that explain them would be a simple and unobtrusive measure to improve usability and discoverability.
    Your position seems very dismissive and hostile towards learners. I hope I am merely misunderstanding you. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 18:55, 16 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
    @Eirikr: Every language has its own basic set of vocabulary a learner ought to know before being able to use a dictionary. That's been the case in any print dictionary as well: A native monolingual speaker of Afar won't know what an adjective is, or a numeral, or even an article for that matter, and to use an English-Afar dictionary he would need to. An English reader may not know the concept of a grammatical case, or alienability. So it is for our dictionary, too: You are expected to know the basics of the grammar and history of the language you want to read the entry for, and that's true for beginners and advanced learners alike.
    Now, I believe that an etymology is the study of the origin of the word, so if an etymology says "From Fooish bar", it seems reasonable that it means "[This term comes] [f]rom Fooish bar". Ask yourself this: How many of our readers that don't know anything about historical linguistics and wouldn't be able to understand what this sequence of words implies would actually bother to try and understand the etymology sections, even if they were expanded this way? Thadh (talk) 21:14, 16 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
    @Thadh: I think your operating assumptions are setting too high a bar. As I stated above, we can only assume familiarity with English. We need not, and should not, cater to Afar speakers, any more than we cater to Ingrian speakers, or Klingon speakers. We need, and should, cater to English speakers. In that, I must disagree with your contention that "You are expected to know the basics of the grammar and history of the language you want to read the entry for" -- our audience is readers of English, not readers of the target language. While there is inevitably some specialized terminology used to describe any language, that terminology should be explained somewhere, and that explanation should be discoverable with minimal effort from the entry page for any given term in that language, as I tried to illustrate above with examples from Japanese, Hungarian, and Navajo.
    Regarding your etymology example, if an etymology section merely says "From Fooish bar", this does not provide the level of detail required to understand clearly what the actual relationship is -- was this term borrowed? Calqued? Inherited? Otherwise influenced or inspired? The addition of a mere word or two could easily clarify this unnecessary ambiguity.
    I don't understand your apparent demand that users arrive here already equipped with specialized knowledge, and your seeming insistence that we not provide simple and unobtrusive aids to the learner. I argue that omitting such aids is harmful in that it makes Wiktionary harder to use, for no benefit I can see. What harm is there in adding the word "inherited" to clarify that certain Ingrian terms are inherited from Proto-Finnic? What harm is there in linking grammatical terms in inflection tables to their respective entries here or on Wikipedia?
    If you can explain what harm you see from measures such as these, I would appreciate an explanation of your viewpoint. Honestly and sincerely, I do not understand where you're coming from. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 04:27, 17 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
    LMFAO! --{{victar|talk}} 19:41, 20 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Thadh It may be "rediculous" to you to specify explicitly whether a term is inherited or borrowed in a language like Ingrian vs. Proto-Finnic, but it's far from ridiculous in a language like Italian vs. Latin or Hindi vs. Sanskrit, where terms can be both borrowed and inherited from the same language and it's often far from obvious even to an expert which one is the case. I see no harm, and a lot of good, in using these templates in cases like this. Benwing2 (talk) 05:07, 21 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Benwing2: Your comment is proof that one should never put something off until tomorrow what they can do today; I wanted to comment this as a reply to Bhagadatta, but I put it off to today :/. Anyway, while I can indeed see the benefit for a handful of mother-daughter language relations, I think what Sodhak is proposing is absurd and harmful for the majority of languages. They propose to standardise the usage of these templates for ALL languages, irrespective of the community's choice. And, on the whole, I believe that normalising the usage of "Borrowed from" and reserving "From" either for inheritances or obvious (from context) derivations is a far more effective way to deal with these language relations. Thadh (talk) 05:47, 21 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
And yet, Italian has managed to not write "inherited from" in their etymologies. I do absolutely agree that "borrowed from" should also be written out when applicible. --{{victar|talk}} 06:15, 21 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Proposing to standardise the usage of these templates for ALL languages may be a step too far. @Bhagadatta, Victar, Thadh: When Sanskrit is involved in the etymologies of Indo-Aryan languages, "From" can be ambiguous, so explicitly indicating which process occurred at which stage is more helpful than trying to eliminate any possible redundancies. In addition, there are cases in which Indo-Aryan terms can be inherited from borrowed terms. Kutchkutch (talk) 12:37, 22 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
I'm not familiar enough with Indo-Aryan languages to be able to either support or oppose this. I've only ever edited Garhwali, but I don't have any particular opinion on this matter. For Romance languages, however, I think "inherited from" is overkill, because most words are inherited, while the borrowed words are in my experience mostly either scientific, religious or some other way not part of the day-to-day vocabulary. Not to mention the fact we already distinguish Latin, Vulgar Latin, Late Latin, Medieval Latin and Ecclesiastical Latin exactly for the purpose of dating the borrowings/inheritances. Thadh (talk) 14:23, 22 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Tatsamas from Sanskrit aren't any different than learned borrowings in Romance languages from Latin. They don't require any special treatment. --{{victar|talk}} 20:36, 22 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
That's not how this works. PUC was active during the time of the vote, and following it closely, and according to him, he would vote if Aryaman weren't too late as well, so his vote is symbolic for the fact that Aryaman's vote can't be used as an excuse. None of the users you just pinged were part of the discussion (either then or even now) and as such don't prove anything. Thadh (talk) 10:32, 13 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
I have already said that PUC was editing as an IP during those days, and so it’s wellnigh impossible for him to have cast his vote. AryamanA’s vote matters; and of the users I have pinged, Taimoorahmed11 has voted keep above. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 12:47, 13 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Thadh, Inqilābī I did cast my vote at the time, was I late in casting my vote?
-Taimoor Ahmed(گل بات؟) 12:39, 13 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Taimoorahmed11: Was not talking of this RFDO vote, but the original vote where PUC belatedly cast his vote. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 12:47, 13 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep, templates are harmless and useful at least in languages I edit (Sanskrit, Kashmiri). Not that my vote carries any meaning :(. Rishabhbhat (talk) 05:12, 19 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep, if votes are still counted, This template is incredibly useful for me, as an Urdu contributor.
-Taimoor Ahmed(گل بات؟) 15:37, 19 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Delete. It links to lame texts in the glossary which should also be deleted. If somebody didn’t have an idea that words can either be inherited or borrowed, as two main ways words pass into a language, he will not learn it from there. Which leaves us only the argument that these templates save keystrokes. But editors can add every nonsense to their interfaces (on Wiktionary and the software whereby the access it) to save keystrokes—this should be supported, not cluttering other peoples' editing windows with ever new templates. As a reminder, my main reason for voting oppose on these templates is a concern with the source code readability, its elements becoming less distinctive by templates looking so similar in the source but so distinct on the reader’s side. This may appear to some as an obscure argument but in the event if we have these templates then there are tons of cases where one also has to correct instances of {{bor+}} and {{inh+}} attempted to be used where perhaps something will have to be done about |nocap=1 or other parameters etc. Beware of making it complicated, the temptation for infinite expansion is great. Our editing windows are not Emacs or Vim to have a power-user combination or template for every repetitive text. Like with those who first encounter vim, the prime question of editors will be “how to quit” this straining website. Fay Freak (talk) 01:10, 20 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Wiktionary:Protologisms

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

Protologisms are no longer listed in Wiktionary. This page should therefore be deleted. It discussed the criteria of listing protologisms however it no longer applies. 2600:1700:E660:9D60:A4EB:25A6:EE10:55C6 18:38, 25 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

Sure. Also Appendix:Protologisms/Long words/* DAVilla 10:51, 26 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

The page isn't useful as is. Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 22:40, 23 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Category:English terms derived from Star Trek

Latest comment: 3 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion

Merge with Category:en:Star Trek. DAVilla 09:35, 26 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

I don't know about that particular category, but do note that Category:English terms derived from the Bible and Category:en:Bible are not the same thing and should not be merged. 85.201.169.175 09:49, 26 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
I have raised this before too. We have a number of these overlapping categories relating to fictional universes. For example, I think there are two such categories relating to Star Wars too. I’m thinking we should retain the “Terms derived from” categories and delete the ones which just have the name of the franchise, to emphasize that the category is not supposed to contain all sorts of franchise-related terms that don’t satisfy CFI. — SGconlaw (talk) 05:35, 27 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
Oppose merger. These are obviously different; mind meld is a term derived from Star Trek (but used in other contexts!), but Trekfic is a term about Star Trek (but not a term used by the franchise itself!). —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 23:52, 21 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Metaknowledge: I see your point. In that case, the categories should have clear usage notes explaining their scope. (There still remains the difficulty of people not seeing the notes, but at least the difference between the categories should be stated explicitly.) — SGconlaw (talk) 19:42, 20 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Appendix:English portmanteaux

Latest comment: 3 years ago8 comments6 people in discussion

(Kept before in a RFD in 2007)

Even if this page were cleaned up, it would be redundant to Category:English blends, but in its current form it's worse, as it's filled with terms that aren't attestable per the criteria for inclusion, and contained (and probably still contains) complete nonsense (such as compounds and utter folk etymology trash for words that aren't even close to being blends) for quite a long time and is presently only edited by a small group of editors who are obsessed with the idea (and are also active on List of portmanteaus on en.wp) but who really do not know the idea of quality control and don't care if the stuff they add is wrong. My point is that right now the list is filled with crud and even if cleaned up wouldn't serve much of a purpose. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 18:24, 27 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

Some parallels to this vote (at least in my view): Appendix talk:English idioms (likewise a list redundant to a category), Appendix talk:Fictional characters (open-ended list appendix that developed into a shambles), Appendix talk:Palindromic words (list appendix with unattestable terms). — surjection ⟨??⟩ 18:29, 27 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 03:29, 28 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • Keep. There are quite a few red links that definitely need cleaned up, but the list still serves a purpose. Most people don't want to look through all of Category:English blends and see every possible case and alternative spelling. Also, some of the blends are less obvious, so simply seeing it listed in the category doesn't help with knowing the etymology. Enix150 (talk) 04:12, 29 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
The vast majority of the redlinks aren't worth pursuing, and that isn't even addressing the straight up wikilinks and other issues (folk etymologies etc.) I talked about. For some context, Enix150 belongs to that "small group of editors" I was talking about in my original message. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 12:04, 30 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • Keep. If you look back to 2007 when the RFD decided the page was to be kept it didn't have any redlinks, however many of those words were present although unlinked. At some point links were added. I'm not sure which looks neater, but I agree that many if not all of the redlinked words need to go. Also, if a word is linked to the title of a Wikipedia article, then that means the word is in common use and probably needs a Wiktionary article too. 2600:387:6:807:0:0:0:BB 01:18, 7 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep. 73.157.135.57 00:44, 18 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
All the stricken votes are by the same person, whose main account is now permanently blocked for abusing multiple accounts. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:36, 28 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

July 2021

Template:example needed

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Unused, perhaps just redirect to {{rfex}}. See Wiktionary:Information desk/2021/July#"example needed" template. – Jberkel 14:39, 12 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Delete. No need for a redirect if it's unused. Ultimateria (talk) 18:54, 22 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Template:nickname

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

{{nickname}} should be deleted because the name is inconsistent with its use. It is a redirect to {{city nickname}}, yet nicknames are not restricted to cities. Many other things have nicknames, from people, companies, families, government leadership positions, states, provinces, countries, etc. Either the redirect needs to be converted to allow the selection of what kind of nickname it is being used for, or it should be deleted. -- 65.93.183.191 23:54, 16 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

ie. : —
{{#if:{{#expr: {{{1|}}}&{{{2|}}} }}|{{non-gloss definition|A [[nickname]] for [[{{{2|}}}]]{{#if:{{{eq|}}}|, equivalent to English {{l|en|{{{eq|}}}}}|}}.}}[[Category:{{{1|}}}:{{#if:{{{type|}}}|{{{type}}} nicknames|Nicknames}}]]|<span class="color:black; background:pink;">ERROR: {{if:{{{1|}}}||Missing parameter 1 language code.}} {{if:{{{2|}}}||Missing parameter 2, the subject of the nickname.}}</span>}}
would introduce a "type" parameter for selection of what kind of nickname is being described.
-- 65.93.183.191 23:54, 16 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Appendix:Place names in Croatia

Latest comment: 3 years ago7 comments6 people in discussion

Who would want this? The redlinks are all just missing diacritics; I haven't created them as alt spellings because I'm not even sure they can be attested! —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 23:09, 21 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Delete. Category:en:Counties of Croatia and Category:en:Places in Croatia now cover it. Ultimateria (talk) 03:06, 22 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 10:57, 22 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete. Fay Freak (talk) 12:30, 22 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete. (+ the others) – Jberkel 19:11, 22 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Jberkel: I missed that! I think both of these can be closed right now if you want to do the honours. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 19:30, 22 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Don't forget to delete the incoming links too Queenofnortheast (talk) 00:51, 26 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Category:Protologisms

Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Category whose only page is also nominated for deletion. Ultimateria (talk) 22:41, 23 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Speedied as empty category. —Mahāgaja · talk 12:54, 25 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Category:English words suffixed with -ka

Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion

This is not an English-language suffix, it is a Japanese-language suffix, 家. There is no entry for -ko under the header "English". The English words using this "suffix" are all loanwords from Japanese. -- 65.93.183.191 08:56, 24 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Appendix:Finnish/elä-

Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Appendix:Finnish/ole-

Appendix:Finnish/tuo-

These appear to be little more than failed experiments. They're not strictly "roots"; they are the same word as the corresponding verbs (elää, olla, tuoda). The derived terms could just be listed under those entries. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 17:14, 25 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

August 2021

Template:ja-rendakuincompounds

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

布団:

{{ja-rendakuincompounds|ぶとん|buton}}

↓

  • In compounds, pronounced as ぶとん (-buton) as an instance of 連濁 (rendaku).

Rendaku, how totally not unremarkable. —Suzukaze-c (talk) 03:13, 2 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

  • Delete. Rendaku is something that should be mentioned in the entry for any compound that exhibits rendaku, not in the entry for a compound component.
It's also used incorrectly, as at 提灯 -- the reading chōchin does not uniformly undergo rendaku in compounds, as we see in 赤提灯 (aka-chōchin, “red lantern”), 籠提灯 (kago-chōchin, “basket lantern”), 河豚提灯 (fugu-chōchin, “blowfish lantern”), among others. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 09:45, 11 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

कदेभिः

Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

It is alleged at Wiktionary:Requests_for_deletion/Non-English#कदाय,_कदासः,_कदेभिः,_कदेभ्यः,_कदेभ्यस्,_खेदासः,_खेदेभिः,_राज्ञीभ्याम्,_राज्ञ्याम्,_राज्ञ्यौ,_शुख that the Classical Sanskrit forms कदेभिः (kadebhiḥ), कदेभ्यस् (kadebhyas), राज्ञीभ्याम् (rājñībhyām), राज्ञ्याम् (rājñyām) and राज्ञ्यौ (rājñyau) are so rare that they are not attested and therefore do not meet the criterion for inclusion. On the other hand it has been argued that regular inflections of acceptable lemmas should themselves be valid as entries. --RichardW57 (talk) 18:57, 3 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Appendix:Gestures/give cards to dealer

Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I don't think this is a "gesture". It's rather an in-game action: there are all kinds of ways in which you could convey your cards to the dealer (perhaps amusingly throwing them packed into a tennis ball) but they would all result in an act of "giving" taking place. Equinox ◑ 19:31, 5 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Wiktionary:Chinese characters commonly used in Cantonese

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

This page doesn't seem to be useful. It seems to be an arbitrary list of characters that just so happen to not be encoded in Big-5, but support for these characters shouldn't be a problem on most modern devices. Pinging @Benlisquare, the creator of the page. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 22:17, 5 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

There can be Wiktionary:Chinese characters mainly used in Cantonese. There's no category for this. EdwardAlexanderCrowley (talk) 12:23, 6 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 16:46, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Module:Cite item, Template:cite item

Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion

@Zolo, Module:Wikidata which is needed by Module:Cite item, is already deleted by accident, but no one complains about it. EdwardAlexanderCrowley (talk) 06:06, 6 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

@EdwardAlexanderCrowley, it wasn't "by accident", but after being posted here, and you need to tag pages with {{rfd}} when you post them here. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 02:35, 8 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
The reason of deletion is "unused", so the procedure contained flaw. EdwardAlexanderCrowley (talk) 04:17, 8 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Nope. You should try reading the rules around here, you might learn something... —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 05:54, 8 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 16:40, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Category:Hangul syllabic blocks

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

This appears to perform the same function as Category:Hangul Syllables block. Many of its pages are in both categories anyway. Ultimateria (talk) 23:19, 7 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

“Hangul syllabic blocks” seems more grammatical and doesn’t have that strange capitalization of syllables. — SGconlaw (talk) 07:07, 8 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Category:Hangul Syllables block is named after Hangul Syllables (Unicode block). —Suzukaze-c (talk) 07:09, 8 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Ah, I see. OK then. — SGconlaw (talk) 08:43, 8 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Template:note

Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Template:ref was once deleted, and now Template:ref works without Template:note. So Template:note should be deleted. EdwardAlexanderCrowley (talk) 15:03, 14 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 16:39, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Template:t-ws

Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion

Not a good idea. Why couldn't translation tables just have the most common word or words and leave the less common synonyms into being linked from the translation entries? — surjection ⟨??⟩ 10:50, 15 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

The example for this template being Sanskrit, perhaps it is devised for dead language, where frequently you don’t know too much about commonness and/or it isn’t important either, or perhaps it depends heavily on chronolect and register, further expounded at a Thesaurus page, and the editor refrains from repeating himself, also for synchronization. I have one case where I have only linked a Thesaurus entry, cyclamen for Arabic. Arabic being a multicentric language, there isn’t any common word you can rely upon. Although the cases being so rare that one can do with plain links, one can say similar about {{no equivalent translation}} or {{not used}}. To compare with these two templates, {{t-ws}} is for cases where there are equivalents, but there is no equivalent in the language having a single term. Fay Freak (talk) 02:29, 20 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
You already have to pick a form in order to come up with a title for the Thesaurus page. Just link that same term as a translation. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 16:38, 22 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep. This was created per Module_talk:translations#thesaurus and the new template was suggested by Benwing2. And this is really a harmless template; if you don't like it, don't use it. —Svārtava2 • 06:10, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep wholeheartedly. This template fixes a problem I've had for a long time. While editing translation sections I've many a time thought "If only there were a way we could add a link to a thesaurus entry!" But I never actually took the initiative of creating a template to fix that problem. So this template serves a quite useful purpose, and I definitely support it.
I would note that the argument that it's "really a harmless template" is not as strong here as it was for the bor+ and inh+ templates. This template would actually change something from the user-side. But, if anything, it would add useful information and condense long lists of translations into one convenient link. So rather than littering the translation section with extra text/formatting, it actually makes it tidier. Imetsia (talk) 15:21, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Template:rasm spelling of, اٮرهىم

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

Created by an anon to represent the skeleton-only orthography used in early Arabic. No works have been written this way for a very long time, and those that were are consistently published with modernised orthography. It is essentially impossible that someone could come across this and want to know what it means. This template is only used at one entry (اٮرهىم), which should also be deleted. @Fenakhay, Fay Freak —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 00:06, 20 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Theoretically, one could add a word where the pointing is uncertain. Sometimes unresolvable rasm words end up in editions. On the other hand, even then one would rather just guess non-rasm spelling (what’s the antonym of رَسْم (rasm)? إِعْجَام (ʔiʕjām) or is it the name of the dots themselves respectively using them or both? @Roger.M.Williams—so we have it clear in the future) by any means, and perhaps admit in the entry that the word is half reconstructed (yeah, I think reconstructedness is divisible). The potential of abuse, or annoyance more than avail, is greater. If it weren’t such an open-for-all website, it could be kept for the outlined academic cases, but in view of the wrong example, delete.
I oppose the deletion of {{unhamzated spelling of}} created by presumably the same individual, if you considered that, for there are bare editions omitting every hamza. Fay Freak (talk) 00:47, 20 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
That's why I didn't nominate that one. Arabic writers are notoriously lax about proper hamza usage (and hypercorrection is common as well). This, however, is a writing style that has been extinct for over a millennium. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 19:17, 20 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Fay Freak, رَسْم (rasm) could variously denote drawing, sketching, painting, writing, inscribing, describing or picturing vividly or in detail (as if graphically in a tangible, concrete image), transcribing, delineating, making animations, among other meanings. أَعْجَمَ (ʔaʕjama) could morphologically mean "to Ajam-ize" (that is, to muddy, to obscure, to make cryptic, to make βαρβαρικός (barbarikós, “foreign”)) or "to de-Ajam-ize" (that is, to clarify, to elucidate, to make intelligible, to strip the foreign character of). From the latter sense, an extended use marks out the letters that have been "clarified" with diacritics (each of which is called dot), as against those letters that have been passed over. The antonym of أَعْجَمَ (ʔaʕjama) in this sense is أَهْمَلَ (ʔahmala), from the image of these letters being "overlooked" or "neglected", as in the difference between the "clarified" غ (ḡ) and the "overlooked" ع (ʕ). I do not recall an antonym of رَسْم (rasm) in any of its graphic senses, although one could speak of the رَسْم (rasm) of the Quran, variously meaning the script or the spelling. The root overall largely overlaps with γράφω (gráphō) and scrībō. Roger.M.Williams (talk) 02:34, 22 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Template:mnw+pi-noun and Category:Mon pali nouns

Latest comment: 3 years ago9 comments5 people in discussion

We have Pali entries in Mon script, and we should not put them under Mon headers. This user's messy experiment should be deleted. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 18:24, 25 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Just speedy-delete em. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 14:11, 26 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • @RichardW57: How would you deal with this mess of ‘Mon Pali’? ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 14:57, 11 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
    @Metaknowledge, Inqilābī, 咽頭べさ: I interpret "Mon Pali" as "Pali as used by Mons" and correct the entry accordingly. I am open to the possibility that the lexicon of the Mon variety is not closed. If I think a word is wrong, I'll raise an RfV. Someone needs to delete the claimed Mon word သရီရံ; it has clearly failed RfV. I've never implemented such a deletion, and I can't find adequate instructions on how to terminate the RfV process. I wish we could train Dr Intobesa to provide sourced quotations - he's added some otherwise useful 'examples'. --RichardW57 (talk) 16:22, 11 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
    There's a cluster of translations into 'Mon Pali', which I notice use the nominative singular as citation form. I'll convert them into explicit Pali, and leave an HTML comment 'Mon Pali' if I see any problems with them. Most will be normalised to stem form in Roman script. There are also some audio recordings tagged as 'Mon Pali'. I'll move them to the Roman script form of Pali if not already there, and leave that tagging until we decide what to do about Pali recordings. (They will have the same issues as modern Latin recordings would have. The accent is very different from a Sri Lankan or Californian accent.) The key trick is to search for insource:"Mon Pali". --RichardW57 (talk) 16:22, 11 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
    I didn't find any "Mon Pali" L2 headings. Either they've recently been cleaned up, or Dr Intobesa has learnt not to create them. --RichardW57 (talk) 16:22, 11 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Inqilābī, Mon Pali is an actual existing language in Burma, Mon Pali was very little known because it was the language used by the Mon Monk. I can say with certainty that the Burmese consonant 33 currently used by the Burmese people is derived from the Mon Pali consonant 33. The languages currently used by the Mon people are also based on the language of the Mon Pali, the names of the current Mon people are also in the Mon Pali language, now my name Intobesa is also in the Mon Pali language. I think the Mon Pali language was not included in the English language list because it was so little known, I tried to express the Mon Pali language but was unsuccessful. The Mon Pali language has been used by a Mon Monk named ဗုဒ္ဓဃောသာ Buddhayeosā from the fourth century AD to the present day, Mon Pali language and Pali language are different alphabets, due to differences in pronunciation, it needs to be classified as Mon Pali, English Pali, Thai Pali, Burmese Pali, although I cannot say for sure what the original Pali history is, I can say for sure the true history of Mon Pali. There are two types of consonants of Mon people, the consonants of Mon people are Mon consonant 35 and Mon Pali consonant 33. In this English Wiktionary, I tried to include a specific Mon Pali language, but my attempts failed because there was no language code for Mon Pali language, if possible, I would like to get a language code for Mon Pali language, I do not know how to request a language code for Mon Pali language, thanks.--Music writer Dr.Intobesa of Japanese idol NMB48 and BNK48. (talk) 21:43, 11 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Metaknowledge, Inqilābī, 咽頭べさ: The samples of 'Mon Pali' that you have provided do not persuade me that Mon Pali is a different language from Pali. The differences in alphabet are not sufficient to treat the local variants as different languages - several languages are written in different scripts. The differences in pronunciation are not reason enough either. Where there are differences between the varieties, we can mark them up as dialect differences, as we do for differences between British and American English. The usual place to request a language code is the Beer Parlour. --RichardW57 (talk) 07:59, 12 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Tamilism

Latest comment: 3 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion

Category:Tamilism

Category:en:Tamilism

Not in the category structure. But do we actually think there are enough entries to make keeping this worthwhile? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 19:14, 25 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Such things created by non-longstanding editors should be deleted on sight. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 14:14, 26 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Or should the erstwhile Category:en:Tamilism be repurposed for with entries related to Dravidian folk religion, Dravidian studies or Tamilology such as:
Dravidian. Dravidianism, Dravidianist, Proto-Dravidian, etc.
? Kutchkutch (talk) 13:06, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Kutchkutch: Tamil Tiger is a thing related to Ceylon, not Indian Tamil. Tamilian is no different from Kannadiga or Goan or Talaing or Manchurian or Hindian or what not; we have no precedence for having ethnic-based categories, as we are not a database site, we keep categories as long as they are linguistically significant. Note that Tamil ≠ Dravidian. Would you seriously consider classifying Brahui under the ‘Tamil’ banner? Tamil Nationalism is as dangerous as Hindi Nationalism or Bengali Nationalism, and you will often see illiterates hailing from these dominant cultures trying to further their nationalistic cause. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 14:32, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Inqilābī: Thanks for the elaborate response here and at WT:Requests_for_deletion/English#Tamil_religion. User:VelKadamban also created Category:Tamilism (without en) and added Tamilism to Template:list:religions/en. Kutchkutch (talk) 03:11, 7 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
Keep deleted. Ultimateria (talk) 16:45, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Proto-Dardic entries

Latest comment: 3 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion

Currently there are 2, but none are sourced. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 19:03, 26 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

That alone is not a reason to delete them. Perhaps @Victar will comment. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 03:30, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
So long as the child entries are on the Sanskrit entry, I don't mind if they're deleted, not because they're unsourced, but because Proto-Dardic is controversial. --{{victar|talk}} 06:33, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete per
Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2020/August#Unsourced_and_poorly_formatted_Proto-Dardic_entries_by_2401:4900:448F:3291:0:3F:8DB4:7F01_(talk)
Also, Reconstruction:Proto-Dardic/múkʰa- is poorly formatted. Kutchkutch (talk) 11:25, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
To clarify, I did not nominate them for deletion simply because of them being unsourced, but because of the language: seeing that some Proto-Indo-Aryan entries have also been deleted lately. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 06:56, 7 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Category:Tbot entries

Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion

Well, I emptied out all the Tbot (talk • contribs) entries after 14 years. Any remaining were sent to RFV. We can probably delete any other Tbot maintenance stuff Wubble You (talk) 12:40, 29 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

Actually, there's one remaining at ھەردەم. I'll leave that Wubble You (talk) 12:43, 29 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Metaknowledge Yes, perhaps WF’s speedy deletion requests should have been changed to RFDs. If there are categories that were deleted and are still needed for checking and detaging, feel free to undelete them. Category:Tbot entries January 2008 and Category:Tbot entries (Northern Kurdish) may require further attention. Kutchkutch (talk) 04:00, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • @Metaknowledge: Although the following categories appeared to be empty when nominated for speedy deletion, they have been undeleted for now as they are not empty:
Category:Tbot_entries
Category:Tbot_entries_February_2008
Category:Tbot_entries_April_2008
Category:Tbot_entries_December_2008
Category:Tbot entries_January 2009
Category:Tbot entries_May 2009
Category:Tbot_entries_December_2009
Category:Tbot_entries_July_2010
Category:Tbot_entries_(Northern Kurdish) was recreated by WF. Template:tbotcatboiler has been restored since it is still being transcluded. Kutchkutch (talk) 12:45, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
I am adding apparent Arabic sources to some of these Kurdish words. I do not know Kurdish so I can not vouch for the existence of the words. But they are plausible given that the Ottomans and others spread words with similar sound and meaning around the region. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 15:35, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

September 2021

Template:he-wv

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

This template pushes headword-line information off the headword, which makes entries unnecessarily messy, and is a practice seen nowhere else in the dictionary (and certainly not in other Semitic languages, like Arabic). As an example, take a look at how the entry מודה changed from a messy version using {{he-wv}} to its current, neater state with the structure standardly found on Wiktionary. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 03:22, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

In your example the template was in the definition line, however it is used in pronunciation sections: isn’t the usage in pronunciation sections as on מלך about the thing we need for Arabic entries presenting multiple vocalizations from the same root, to avoid structuring around pronunciation headers? Fay Freak (talk) 03:38, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Fay Freak: I'm actually fine with its use in pronunciation headers; it's the use everywhere else that I find to be a problem. Perhaps instead of deleting it, the solution is to change its usage? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 04:01, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
Yea. Though it may be deleted if a template working for more languages is created. Fay Freak (talk) 04:08, 6 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Template:ar-welcome + any redirects

Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion

As questioned before, why do we need a non-English message? ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 11:00, 8 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Delete —Svārtava2 • 15:32, 11 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • @Inqilābī: While having such a template may be alienating for those who are unfamiliar with Arabic, there’s no rule against having discussions in other languages on pages such as:
Help:Talk pages
Help:Interacting with other users
Help:Welcoming
Kutchkutch (talk) 12:07, 12 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Kutchkutch: It’s not about ‘alienation’, we do not have any other non-English messages. Do we have any rule that allows the creation of such templates? It’s easiest to do away with the only exception. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 12:13, 12 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Template:PIE word

Latest comment: 3 years ago24 comments6 people in discussion

This template is hardly used. While it’s been very common to categorize terms by their PIE roots, categorization by PIE word is very rare. And worse, Category:Terms derived from Proto-Indo-European words hosts an embarrassingly inexhaustive list of terms. And in general, we seem to be focusing too much on PIE by way of such a template. Categorization by roots should be more than enough. It should be noted that we already categorize inherited terms using {{inh}}, thereby making it redundant. I see no convincing reason to have this one and the unnecessary category the templet generates. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 14:46, 11 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Also note that @Erutuon had created this templet as an ’alternative to Template:PIE root’— but Template:PIE root itself is deprecated, having been superseded by {{root}}. Thus this justifies why this templet should be deprecated as well, in favour of {{inh}}. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 20:08, 11 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
  • Keep per Erutuon Kutchkutch (talk) 11:51, 12 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
    @Kutchkutch: Could you explain your reasoning? Erutuon’s understanding is flawed, because he thinks I want to replace {{PIE word}} with {{root}}, which is however not the case. To summarize my stand again: {{PIE root}} has already been deprecated in favour of {{root}}— certainly because a language-specific template bearing the same function is redundant. Likewise, {{PIE word}} is redundant because {{inh}} serves the same job. This reasoning by itself is convincing enough, but another drawback of the template is that this template is hardly used: we have failed to employ it extensively, and naturally because of the overlapping template {{inh}}. I am yet to see any valid reason for keeping it. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 12:26, 12 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Inqilābī: When there’s no PIE root for a term but there‘s a word, the word could function as a root. This is perhaps what Erutuon meant by:
The template was created to categorize words derived from small PIE words that aren't currently described as deriving from a root…{{root}} doesn't serve that purpose
There’s probably not much in CAT:Terms by Proto-Indo-European word by language because there appear to be very few PIE words of this kind leading to a lack of awareness regarding the template’s existence. {{PIE word}} differs from {{inh}} / {{der}} in that it creates categories by PIE word such as
CAT:Terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European word *méǵh₂s
rather than simply
CAT:Terms derived from Proto-Indo-European
@Erutuon Is there a way that the template could be generalised for languages other than PIE and categorise without displaying a box like {{root}}? Kutchkutch (talk) 02:02, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
It can certainly be changed to not show a box. I don't know about generalization: whether it's necessary (do other languages that use {{root}} have short words that don't derive from a root?) and exactly the steps required because other people did more of the work on {{root}}. — Eru·tuon 02:49, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
IMO categorisation by words is kinda too much. Svārtava2 • 03:34, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
Care to expand on "kinda too much"? What about words without roots, like *swé, shall we have no categories for words derived from them? — Eru·tuon 03:41, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
I don't think we should have categories for words derived from them. "kinda too much [for PIE alone]": I'd be fine if T:word is created for all languages and is used like {{word|LANG|ine-pro|*swé}}; either do it for all languages or for none. Other languages also have such words, not necessarily short. Like Sanskrit नक्र —Svārtava2 • 03:52, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
It's not "kinda too much" to do a perfectly sensible thing for just one language. We have plenty of things that are done for only some languages because people haven't gotten around to doing it for other languages. If we couldn't do anything unless it has already been done or been made easy to do for all languages, we wouldn't get anything done. I've got no objection to a template doing the {{PIE word}} thing but for non-PIE.
Could you give some examples of such rootless words in non-PIE languages that currently use {{root}}? — Eru·tuon 04:35, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
I don't really have examples rootless words in non-PIE languages that currently use {{root}}. It's wrong, isn't it? {{PIE word}} should be replaced by something like {{word}} (for all languages) like {{PIE root}}. Svārtava2 • 05:20, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
Sorry, my syntax wasn't clear. My question was, in languages that use {{root}}, can you think of examples of rootless words where you'd use a non-language-specific version of {{PIE word}}? — Eru·tuon 07:34, 14 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @Erutuon: sorry for the late reply (plz ping me in the next reply). Yes, there are really a lots of such words in Sanskrit; like चिक्कण, नक्र, इन्दु, कमल, कर्पूर, लंपट, कपोल (cikkaṇa, nakra, indu, kamala, karpūra, laṃpaṭa, kapola). for there descendants, i would like to use a non-language-specific version of {{PIE word}}. Svārtava2 • 05:49, 17 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Would not support that usage. That's like asking for Category:English terms derived from the Old English word wæter. --{{victar|talk}} 06:49, 17 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
What do you even support, sarvavirodhī? Svārtava2 • 06:51, 17 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
No not like Category:English terms derived from the Old English word wæter because it does derive ultimately from *wed- which is root. We will exclude such terms which ultimately derive from any root in any language. Svārtava2 • 07:12, 17 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
Sure, Category:English terms derived from the Old English word docga. --{{victar|talk}} 07:29, 17 September 2021 (UTC)Reply
Category:English terms derived from the Old English word docga doesn't look illogical, either. To further reduce repetition and redundancy, my proposal is that we categorise only when the given term is the last — i.e. beyond that we do not have any root or any term in any language. For example Assamese পৈ (poi) be categorised only by Proto-Indo-European *pótis since that is the last word we know, and not by Proto-Indo-Iranian *pátiš or Sanskrit páti. It does seem unusual, being unprecedented, but is there any strong argument against this? Svārtava2 • 09:13, 17 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Template:word

Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Like Template:PIE word & Template:PIE root, also redundant. Why the hell do we need such specific templates when {{der}}, {{root}}, {{inh}} serve the same job? ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 11:28, 17 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

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