User talk:-sche

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ubersexual / including non-durable citations

see User talk:-sche/Archive/2011

Translations of attributive use of nouns

see User talk:-sche/Archive/2011

Inscriptions and whatnot

Discussion moved to WT:T:ALA.

Re: jewing / using labels on inflected forms

see User talk:-sche/Archive/2014

Site for languages of hunter-gathers

You might like this: [1]. DCDuring (talk) 20:43, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Ooh! Thanks for alerting me to that. - -sche (discuss) 21:07, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Add replacements to edit summary

In AWB Options > Normal setting uncheck 'Add replacements to edit summary' and it'll make the edit summaries only what you put in the 'Default Summary' box. Makes edit summaries shorter and more 'human'. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:38, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Aha! Thanks for the tip. :) - -sche (discuss) 18:45, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Sadly this seems to no longer be possible. - -sche (discuss) 20:20, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

WOTD

I'd like to take over WOTD — at least for now. I've already set up new words for October 28-31 to get the ball rolling again. Looking over diffs to see what others had done allowed me to figure out the basics, but there's still many other things I need to know about the process, especially what I need to do to create an archive, set up a new month, and polish the entry pages for words before they appear. Thanks! Astral (talk) 00:43, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm glad you're interested!

The front-end part is simple—pick words and plug them into the templates. You're already doing a good job of that; I like your Halloween pick. As you seem to have gathered, the last definition doesn't end with a full stop/period (though if a word has multiple definitions, the preceding definitions do), because the template already adds one: double-dotted vs fixed. Featured words should have pronunciation info (either IPA or audio); the template will automatically notice and include an audio pronunciation if one is present.

The more additional info an entry has, like etymology, illustration or examples of usage, the more interesting it is likely to be to users who click through to it; on the other hand, trying to cite and find a picture for every word you feature on WOTD is a recipe for burning out. Strategise.

Once you've set a word, add the was-wotd template to the entry, so that it won't be featured again (mostly).

To create an archive, do what Ruakh did here, changing {{wotd archive|PREVIOUS|NEXT|YEAR|DAYS}} to the previous month, the next month, the year (four digits) and the number of days in the month (28, 29, 30, 31), and updating the pagename to the relevant month and year. An easy way of creating an archive is to copy-and-paste the relevant month's Recycled Page, e.g. Wiktionary:Word of the day/Recycled pages/October, simply changing {{wotd recycled}} to {{wotd archive}} and adding the YEAR and DAYS parameters.

At the end of the month, subst: all of the templates by changing each day's {{Wiktionary:Word of the day to {{subst:Wiktionary:Word of the day. The reason for not subst:ing a day before it's done is that someone might tweak the definition or fix a typo, etc.

- -sche (discuss) 04:41, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. This is very helpful. I've got a couple of questions. First, I'm not good with IPA, so is there a way I could arrange for someone who is to add pronunciation data to entries before they appear? Second, is it okay to occasionally select words I've nominated myself? I already did this with trainiac, because I wanted something "fun" between mulct and peri-urban, but I don't want to do it again if it's something that should be avoided. Astral (talk) 03:33, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Also, exactly how far back does the prohibition against using words featured as WOTDs on other sites go? It makes sense not to copy words other sites have featured recently, but three, four, five years back seems like a another matter. I need a verb, and wanted to use photobomb, but it was featured on Urban Dictionary in 2009, and more recently as a noun on September 28 of this year. Astral (talk) 03:49, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

So, I chose ambuscade instead, only to discover it was a Merriam Webster WOTD in 2010. Can't win. :( Astral (talk) 04:27, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Disclaimer: I'm not Sche (@Sche: feel free to correct me on anything I say). Anyway, I think that choosing words that you nominate is fine, and that if you find a concise way to list all the entries you want IPA for pronto (on a subpage, maybe?) I would be happy to help out, as would Sche, Angr, et al. (probably) given their past contributions in that regard (and they're probably more trustworthy than I am). —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 05:14, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, you can just comment that you'd like to feature a word but it lacks pronunciation info. Many users watch that page, and someone should take care of it. And yes, you can feature words you've nominated—at least, I did. It's probably best to let a couple days pass between when you nominate a word and when you use it, in case anyone comments with objections, but I doubt anything you nominate will be objectionable (you know not to nominate redlinks or offensive words). As for other sites' words of the day: personally, I never paid much attention to that rule; I checked if a word had been featured on another site in the past few months, and if not, looked no further. Sometimes, people would strike words that had been featured by other sites years ago, and in those cases, I respected the strikings and didn't use those words, but I didn't strike words that had been featured by other sites years ago myself. - -sche (discuss) 05:45, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

		Barnstar
		For your continuous work to improve coverage and consistency of languages, families and such. —CodeCat 03:16, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! :) - -sche (discuss) 06:29, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

fefine

You added the entry for "woman" here for Makalero, which is incorrect. Huber, the source you cited, simply states that it is Tongan, and that entry already existed there. I think that in your haste to create entries in a maximal number of languages, you may have made more errors that won't be caught for quite a while (you got lucky in that this one happened to turn up on my watchlist, and I felt it very unlikely that Makalero would borrow a vocabulary item like that from Polynesian, so I checked). In any case, I appreciate your project, but I think you need to take a lot more precaution to avoid these kinds of mistakes. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:51, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Oh, you're right about Huber; I'm glad you caught that. I've been going through and checking my previous additions ever since Chuck's caution in the previous section that the Comparative Austronesian Dictionary (which had been recommended to me as a valid reference on Talk:water, when I was trying to verify the translations people had added there) normalizes orthography and so has to be checked against other sources. So, I hope to uncover any other errors. - -sche (discuss) 16:42, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I see, Liliana should not have said that. Yeah, you can't really use Blust as a primary source for something serious, although the orthographic concerns run deeper; some of these languages are well nigh unwritten, and linguists might just put them in IPA. Thanks for going through them, anyhow. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:04, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Looking at diffs of all my edits to water and woman, and so checking not only anything I added but any word I changed the spelling of and any language I updated the name of, and sometimes spot-checking things I had nothing to do with, I've found other references for the translations of water and woman into Äiwoo, Aklanon, Alaba, Alune, Antillean Creole (and added Guianese Creole and a usex to Haitian Creole), Anuta[n] (and Tikopia), and Arosi, Batad Ifugao, [Palawan] Batak (which we should possibly rename to avoid confusion with the Batak languages like Karo Batak), Bauro, Biak, Biloxi, Binukid, Bontoc (we probably shouldn't have both the macrolanguage code and the dialect codes there), Bughotu, Buli, Casiguran Dumagat Agta, Cebuano, Chewong, Dobu, Dupaninan Agta, Futuna, Fuyug, Gapapaiwa, Gedaged, and Gilbertese (should that language be renamed?). I had to fix Blust's spelling of several things, and fix Arosi and Bauro where he had the 'wrong' word, but the only translations for which I couldn't find any more-reliable references are Bukitan, Embaloh or Ende.

Several days ago, I removed the Ajië and Amurdag translations (not added by me — removed as part of the original project of checking the translations at water) because I couldn't find any references for them.

Abua and Abung things would benefit from more references: the only ref I find for the Abua translation of water (added by someone long ago) and of woman is R. Blench's work on the Central Delta languages; I'd prefer if there were additional sources. The Abung translation of water (likewise added long ago) is only in the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database (and in placenames, but ABVD is the only reference to define it as a common noun); likewise the translation of woman.

That's all the languages that start with A through G; I'll be going through the rest.

PS other people long ago added translations into several of these languages to the tables of a handful of other entries such as dog, which it may also be useful to check (in case they were working from Blust).

- -sche (discuss) 08:13, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

I've found other references for Hiligaynon (in several spellings, some dated), Isnag, Itawit, Jarai, Jola-Fonyi; Kambera, Kankanaey and Kapampangan (both even with citations of use), Kala Lagaw Ya (the spellings are all attested in dead-tree references, but the division into different dialects is per WP), Kedang and Kumak, Lamaholot, Lamboya, Lavukaleve and Lou; likewise Wandamen, Waray, Waropean, Wedau, Western Bukidnon Manobo, Wogeo, Woleaian, Wuvulu-Aua, Yami, Zaghawa, Zangskari, Zangwal. The Kua-nsi and Kuamasi and Sonaga translations are from the scholar who recently documented those languages and sucessfully petitioned for them to have ISO codes.

The K. Blaan translation is in ABVD and the word itself is used in Kibo Kbulung dad Fdas, but not glossed there (it might mean "sister" in addition to "woman", like a few other languages' words do).

I can't find [better] references for Kanowit (not added to the table by me).

The Komodo translation I can find a reference for, but it's in Indonesian and only glosses the term as part of longer sentences; likewise Waropean; it would be nice to find a better reference than Blust confirming or denying the spelling. Li'o is only in ABVD. Lawangan and Loniu I find only general references mentioning.

That's all the languages H through L (postscript: through R) and U through Z. - -sche (discuss) 19:51, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

• You are so wonderfully diligent. If this were Wikipedia, I'd give you some annoying barnstar, but since it's here, you just get my gratitude. As for the points you've raised: the languages you've bolded are obscure enough that it may not be possible to do better for now; I see that Ende is discussed in a book called Deskripsi naskah dan sejarah perkembangan aksara Ende, Flores, Nusa Tenggara Timur, but finding that online appears to be no easy feat. As for the renames, it makes sense not to have a language called "Batak" alone. Google Ngrams show "speak Kiribati" as being insignificant as compared to "speak Gilbertese", but Google Books show more results for "speak Kiribati"; I for one have always called it Gilbertese, and it does seem that the switch has only happened in perhaps the last decade. On the whole, it doesn't seem worth changing. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:15, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
  • I'll second the gratitude. As for Kiribati, the name isn't any more aboriginal than Gilbertese- it actually is Gilbertese (or Gilbert, anyway) modified by the phonotactics of the language. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:49, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
    • :)
      I learned the other day about the etymology of Kiribati — it makes me wonder what the language was called before its speakers met Gilbert!
      Plain "Kiribati" is considerably more common than "Gilbertese", but I suppose that's due to the fact that the former is also an often-mentioned placename. I'm fine with leaving the language name as is. By the way, I didn't keep a count, but I think (ignoring the hyphens he adds) Blust's spellings turned out more often than not to be the spellings other scholars used. - -sche (discuss) 07:30, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

ik

Hello, -sche.

• Just removing ik from the "German Low German" section is not justified and not sufficient as long as there is ik#Plautdietsch. And the proper way to get that entry removed should be to use WT:RfV. Dit un jant opp Plautdietsch has the form ik (e.g. in "Ut de Nacht bün ik kamen") besides ekj. So maybe it's a valid Plautdietsch form.
  Please use WT:RfV if you think that it is not a Plautdietsch word.
• Wikipedia says that Plautdietsch is an East Low German dialect. So it should be a dialect and not "a separate language". As the German East isn't next to the Netherlands, it should rather be a German Low German dialect and not a Dutch Low German dialect. But well, as the dialect spread through the world, one maybe could argue that it's not German anymore but a (World) Low German dialect.

Greetings, Ikiaika (talk) 04:34, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

==Plautdietsch== (pdt) and ==German Low German== (nds-de) are currently treated as separate languages which are related, like Danish and Norwegian, and for that matter ==Norwegian== and ==Norwegian Nynorsk== and ==Norwegian Bokmal==. Separate languages are not obliged to be linked to each other, and are not supposed to be linked as ===Alternative forms===; they are often mentioned in etymology sections, and sometimes linked in ===See also===.

If you think Plautdietsch should not be considered a separate language, that's another matter; you can see my comments on WT:T:ANDS and Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2016/April#Let.27s_kill_nds-de.2Fnds-nl. about it.

If you can find Plautdietsch works which use ik, that's great, and means ik#Plautdietsch doesn't need to be RFVed.

I can find German Low German works from Oldenburg and Münsterland which use ik, so ik#German_Low_German is fine, too (and was never removed, despite your comment).

- -sche (discuss) 19:52, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

• So it rather was "is treated by the English Wiktionary as a separate language" than "is a separate language". Ok, that's a different thing.
  — Although, I have the impression that the German Low German label "in most dialects, including Low Prussian" includes Plautdietsch as a Low Prussian variety. But well, maybe there are no German Low German labels which clearly include Plautdietsch.
• In this edit you moved Plautdietsch from "Alternative forms" into "See also" (I don't object to this), and also removed the mentioning of the (purportedly) Plautdietsch form ik. But the removal is not justified and not sufficient as long as there is ik#Plautdietsch.
  Well, Dit un jant opp Plautdietsch is just one book, so it wouldn't give three cites which usually are needed to attest a word. Also I can't read the whole book, so the usages of ik could be dated or maybe aren't Plautdietsch as the book could also include German Low German. That is, I don't say Plautdietsch ik is attestable or exists. I'm just saying that it might exist and that Wiktionary says it exists (ik#Plautdietsch).
• ik occurs in many dialects. But I can't say in which dialects it is attestable for the English Wiktionary (three durably archived cites). For example, this poem has ik too and is from Ravensberg which is in the East of Westphalia. So ik should also appear in East Westphalian. "Niu lustert mol! Plattdeutsche Erzählungen und Anekdoten im Paderborner Dialekt" (1870) from ein Sohn der rothen Erde (a son of the red earth) has ik too, and maybe also ick. But it's just one book, which usually is not sufficient to attest the Paderbornish form.

Greetings, Ikiaika (talk) 00:59, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Minor note @Ikiaika: Some of this issue stems from your misunderstanding of CFI. We only need one cite to attest a word in a Low German lect, and it can be in a dictionary, not necessarily a use. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:05, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

"Low Prussian" is the variety which was spoken inside Prussia. (It seems to be mentioned frequently because comprehensive references on it are readily available, probably in turn because it had some prestige as the variety of a large leading state.) Plautdietsch is the variety developed outside Prussia among certain (largely Mennonite) emigrants. Wiktionary has tended to keep lects with such different geographic and hence historical development separate, especially among Germanic languages (as I note on WT:T:ANDS) — indeed, we even keep cases spoken in the same place separate (as we keep Nynorsk, Bokmal, Riksmal, and other rural dialects of Norwegian separate under three codes). Merger proposals often prove controversial and get squicky fast; e.g., what would be the rationale for merging the separate(d) lects of GLG and Plautdietsch, but keeping Luxembourgish and T Saxon separate from not only other Moselle Franconian but also all the other varied things we group under gmw-cfr? But what would be the rationale for merging Luxembourgish? The rationale for keeping them all separate is of course the separate geographic/national linguistic development. - -sche (discuss) 15:02, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: Yes, I didn't know how many cites where needed for Low German, and "usually" above refered to the practice of e.g. English and German, not to e.g. Latin and dead languages like Gothic and Old High German. Thanks for the info! That makes many things much easier.

@-sche: (1.) Well, I didn't have the impression that Low Prussian has any more prestige or was or is more common than other dialects (though that might be a wrong impression), and one one can find statements like this:

• lz.de: "Plautdietsch, das Niederdeutsch aus Westpreußen mit einer über 200 Jahre alten Migrationsgeschichte" (Plautdietsch, the Low German from West Prussia ...)
• hcjb.de: "Plautdietsch ist [...] eine niederpreußische Mundart" (Plautdietsch is [...] a Low Prussian dialect)
• German Wikipedia: "Plautdietsch ist [...] eine niederpreußische Varietät" (Plautdietsch is [...] a Low Prussian variety), "den ostniederdeutschen Dialekt Plautdietsch" (the East Low German dialect Plautdietsch)
• English Wikipedia: "Plautdietsch, a Low German variety, is included within Low Prussian by some observers"

That's why I (incorrectly) added Plautdietsch forms as German Low German alternative forms. Similary some sources or some user could have labeled Plautdietsch terms East Low German or Low Prussian. Here at Wiktionary this label would be incorrect as Plautdietsch is not treated as a part of German Low German or Low German (like you said, thanks for that!), but nevertheless it could be present in some entries. For me that seemed more plausible (again, it might just be a wrong impression).
Just for clarification: It might just a wrong impression, and I'm not saying that there is any error in an entry and I'm not saying that any or even all Low Prussian labels here should be checked.

(2.) Well, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian here are merged into Serbo-Croatian. The rationale for this surely was the linguistic similarity, even though there are different nations. So maybe for the same reason Plautdietsch could be merged into Low German as a Low German dialect. I don't have enough knowledge of Luxembourgish, Serbo-Croation, Low Prussian and Plautdietsch to argue for or against any of this, and I have no intention of making a split or merger proposal.

(3.) I re-added Plautdietsch ik next to the qualifier Plautdietsch in diff as there is the Plautdietsch entry ik (ik#Plautdietsch). I'm okay with a re-removal of it, but please use WT:RfV first. Than both, the mentiong next to the qualifier and the entry ik#Plautdietsch, can either stay or be removed.

Thanks, and greetings, Ikiaika (talk) 01:24, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Oh, yes, mislabelling certainly could be present in some entries. Ideally, all nds, nds-de and nds-nl entries' labels would be checked and expanded (and perhaps replaced with a table as discussed on WT:T:ANDS), because many are far too short even when they contain only correct things and no incorrect things: the people who added them apparently weren't sure which dialects besides their own a word or spelling was found in, and so only listed the few dialects they were sure of, which is not entirely unhelpful, but is insufficient.

It is possible that some Plautdietsch-only things have been entered under a wrong header; we've certainly had a few Kashubian words entered as Polish because older dictionaries treat Kashubian as Polish. And quite a few apparently Middle-English- and/or Scots-only words have been entered as English, because some dictionaries (including the OED) don't distinguish those three languages.

Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are copies of the same Eastern Herzegovinian subdialect of the same Shtokavian dialect, and are so identical that their mutual intelligibility "exceeds that between the standard variants of English, French, German, or Spanish" (per WP, quoting Paul-Louis Thomas). I don't think they provide an argument for merging anything else, heh. :-p

I'll assume that ik is used in Plautdietsch based on the book you found above. It'd be nice to figure out more specifically who uses it, because standard references all seem to have only ekj / etj, but it's not a pressing concern. - -sche (discuss) 19:06, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Well, I only saw a snippet of the book, and the book could have a Low German text in it (maybe similar to this, which has Plautdietsch with a Dutch translation) or an older Plautdietsch text, like from some kind of *Proto-Plautdietsch when Dutch and Low German where mixing and creating Plautdietsch.

In diff the Plautdietsch entry ik got extracted from the Low German entry. In older versions, like from 25th December 2010, there is no Low German entry but a Low Saxon entry. There it was "Ik kwam, ik zag, ik overwon (nl), Ik keem, ik keek, ik wun (pd)". In diff the nl example got replaced by nds. pd could have meant Low German (Plautdeutsch or Plattdütsch/Plattdüütsch), including both Dutch and German Low German. So it once could have been an Dutch or German Low German example, while later someone misinterpreted the abbreviation and it developed into an Plautdietsch entry. nl:ik#Nedersaksisch has the example as Nedersaksisch.

Based on this I'm using WT:RfV, see WT:RFV#ik.23Plautdietsch.

Greetings, Ikiaika (talk) 12:53, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Properly splitting topic and set categories

I would like to work on a proposal for this, but there's several issues to sort out first. I'm hoping you can help with this. There are two other issues which are also at play with these categories, which have come up before. First is the matter of naming the "by language" topical categories. They have literally no naming scheme, and we've occasionally run into naming conflicts with these, so adding something to the names so that they are clearly set apart as topic/set categories is useful. Second is the matter of the language codes in the names. All our other categories use language names, and people have complained about the presence of codes in user-facing parts of the dictionary before. If we're going to rename the categories, we might as well tackle all issues together, so that we don't have to rename the categories multiple times. —CodeCat 17:47, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, this is a tricky tangle of issues. I will look back over previous discussions to refresh myself on what potential problems have been pointed out with some of the previously-proposed solutions. I agree with you that it would be useful — necessary, really — to add something to the the names of both types of categories, so that they can finally be told apart, and so that we avoid naming conflicts. Maybe we could have a poll to gauge if people would prefer quick-to-type prefixes like "t:" and "s:"/"l:", or spelled-out prefixes "topic:" and "set:"/"list:", and also if they would prefer spelled-out language names or codes. I know some people dislike language codes, but other people dislike long names, and codes are shorter (and code-based categories don't have to be moved when we rename languages, a minor benefit). If we used spelled-out names, we should probably set them off by colons (maybe someone has already suggested this), because renaming CAT:en:Dogs to "Category:s:English dogs" or "Category:list:English dogs" or even "Category:English dogs" makes it seem like it's for England's breeds only. But should the subcategory of "Category:Dogs" be "set:English:Dogs" or "English:set:Dogs"? I guess the second one is maybe more logical from a sorting perspective?

- -sche (discuss) 03:00, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

I wouldn't like shortcuts like t: and s: because these categories are meant to be understandable for the average user. —CodeCat 15:20, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

@CodeCat Alright, but I expect some people to balk at lengthening the category names.

Where should the language name go, in your view? "CAT:topic:English:Dogs" or "CAT:English:topic:Dogs"? (Or something else?) I'm thinking "CAT:English:" may make more sense, matching "CAT:English nouns" etc and like the current "en:Foobar" scheme, grouping all the English categories together as having "English" at the start of their names. Is there anything else that needs to be worked out before bringing this up for general discussion?

- -sche (discuss) 18:35, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

Personally, I would prefer using full language names ("English", "Chinese" instead of "en", "zh") and writing categories as normal phrases, without the colon anywhere. For example:

• All dog breeds could be in Category:English names of dog breeds (or any other compatible name) instead of Category:en:Dogs.
• All terms relating to dogs that are not dog breeds — as well as the dog breed category itself — could be in Category:English terms relating to dogs (or any other compatible name), including kennel, doghouse, dognap, dogsicle and puppy.
• I don't think dog in the manger needs to be in any of these categories, because the meaning has nothing to do with dogs.

--Daniel Carrero (talk) 20:05, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

I know other people object to long names, however, especially for categories that are often added manually rather than automatically templates ({{rfi}}, etc). More people should use HotCat, obviously. Or {{C}} et al, which unfortunately don't play nice with HotCat. Someone should update HotCat...

"Names of" may sound off in some cases — would the "E numbers" discussed on RFM be "Translingual names of E numbers"? That's not awful, but it seems like calling "1" an "English name of a number", and/or a "Translingual name of a number". But "Translingual/English list" [of Foobars] doesn't sound great, either.

"Pertaining to" may be better than "relating to", since "related" in "Related terms" means etymologically related. - -sche (discuss) 18:49, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

"Pertaining to" sounds fine with me. Maybe "involving" can be considered too? Here are all the options:

• Category:English terms relating to dogs
• Category:English terms pertaining to dogs
• Category:English terms involving dogs

What do you think of using "names of" for proper nouns, including place names? I've been thinking this may be a good idea, but feel free to give other ideas. Examples:

• Category:en:Cities in Kyoto (Prefecture) → Category:English names of cities in Kyoto Prefecture, Honshu, Japan
• Category:en:Counties of Kansas → Category:English names of counties in Kansas, USA
• Category:en:Municipalities in São Paulo, Brazil → Category:English names of municipalities in São Paulo, Brazil
• Category:en:Towns in Ontario → Category:English names of cities in Ontario, Canada
• Category:en:Mountains → Category:English names of mountains
• Category:en:Oceans → Category:English names of oceans
• Category:en:Languages → Category:English names of languages
• Category:en:Continents → Category:English names of continents
• Category:en:Gods → Category:English names of gods
• Category:en:Individuals → Category:English names of individuals
• Category:en:Stars → Category:English names of stars (for Aldebaran, Pollux, etc. but not for hypergiant, supernova, etc.)

I know that some languages treat language names as common nouns, so I'm not sure this works in all cases. Days of the week also have that problem (Category:en:Days of the week → Category:English names of days of the week). --Daniel Carrero (talk) 22:43, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

I think "involving" is a bit weird. Anything can involve dogs in theory. The police trains dogs, so they are involved with dogs, but we don't want police in that category. Going back to the proposal of using a prefix to indicate the category type, we could use "related" instead of "topic", so Category:English:related:Dogs. Yet more possibilities are Category:English:Dogs (breeds), Category:topic:Dogs (English) and such. —CodeCat 20:40, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

Now that you said it, I think I agree with you in that "involving" is a bit weird. I'm not really sure I like any of the prefixes, but I'd be curious if other people want it. (any large scale category change would need a vote, so we're going to see what people think) I know we've been saying "topical categories" to refer to the categories starting with "en:" but I'm not sure I like it. Category:topic:Dogs (English) is short but is it clear enough? If we translated it to a phrase like Category:English terms in the topic of dogs would it make any sense? So far, I like Category:English terms relating to dogs the most. I think it's clear enough that it's related to the idea (the semantics), not the etymology. If it were Category:English terms relating to "dog", it would be the etymology. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 21:47, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

We could look to other Wiktionaries for inspiration. Dutch Wiktionary literally just has "Biology in English" with its parent "Topics in English". Their grammatical categories are named the same, "Words in English" (equivalent to our "English lemmas"; they had it before us!), also singular in "Verb in English", "Noun in English" etc. —CodeCat 22:01, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

For the record, the earlier incarnation of Category:English lemmas called Category:English parts of speech was created in 14 July 2004, so it apparently predated nl:Categorie:Woorden in het Engels by a few months! (I believe you can't see deleted page histories right now, so FWIW I support restoring your and Wyang's admin rights.)

Portuguese Wiktionary has pt:Categoria:!Entrada (Inglês) for Category:English lemmas. They basically always use the format "Stuff (Language)", sometimes starting with that exclamation point.

About "Biology in English". I would support creating separate categories for these two things: 1. Category:English biology jargon, Category:English medicine jargon, etc.; 2. Category:English terms relating to biology, Category:English terms relating to medicine, etc. (or "in the topic of" or "pertaining to"...) --Daniel Carrero (talk) 23:12, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

Schwa na

Well, I did send you an e-mail. Evertype (talk) 22:32, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

Are there any updates? --WikiTiki89 13:49, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

Hi! Thank you for that e-mail, @Evertype. I passed the contact information along to @Mahagaja, who I presumed would e-mail you and take it from there, because he is more familiar with the Hebrew script than I am. I should've e-mailed you to explain that's what I had done; I apologize. - -sche (discuss) 16:44, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

Hi, I had forgotten about this for a while, but I did eventually remember and e-mailed Evertype last night. My bad, sorry! —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 18:03, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

CFI for chemical formulae

We've had some spirited debates in the past (Talk:AsH₃, Talk:LiBr), but there's still no consensus for what to do with entries like MnS and H₂O₂ (note that the former is English, the latter Translingual). Any thoughts on what sort of proposal might meet with consensus? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 13:14, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

I'd appreciate others' input as it's not my area of expertise, but:

• It seems, including from the two discussions you link to, like there's more support for ones that look like they could be abbreviations (like LiBr) than ones that are obviously formulas (with numbers in them). And the longer a name gets, or the more obviously formulaic it is (e.g. having parentheses), the less accepted I would expect it to be. Maybe we could straw-poll and see if there'd be agreement for any cutoff "no formulae consisting of more than 3 parts" (or some other number), where "H₃" counts as one "part", and "no formulas with any parentheticals" (or "with more than 2", or something).
• There seems to be support for a few really common ones that are used in everyday speech like Talk:CO₂ and H₂O (which even passes the lemming test, being in Meriam-Webster, which doesn't include LiBr).
• Maybe, similar to how BRAND requires brand names to be attestable in places that don't clarify what the product is, we could require these to be attested in contexts that don't make clear that they're formulae by e.g. explicitly discussing chemical formulae or by listing their component parts. So, "AsH₃ is made up of an As and three H atoms" wouldn't support AsH₃, but a murder mystery saying "the air in his scuba tank had been replaced with CO2" could support CO₂.
• Some of the comments in the RFD discussions suggest there might be more support for ones that have "unpredictable" common names like alabandite than for ones that refer to also-formulaically-named chemicals like S4N4 being "tetrasulfur tetranitride", but maybe that wouldn't be a wise or widely accepted distinction, as there are some long formulas with short unformulaic names (fornacite's Pb2Cu(CrO4)(AsO4)(OH)), and conversely CO₂ is "carbon dioxide".
• Maybe for long chemical formulae that have short/unformulaic common names we include, we could redirect the formula to the common name, to satisfy people who want to be able to type the formula into the search box and get information. (We could have a redirect from the full chemical formula of titin...)
• We should include redirects from "normal" numbers to subscript numbers (or vice versa) for any that we include.

Incidentally, is our definition of MnS right? Alabandite and our entry alabandite suggest it's only one form of MnS. - -sche (discuss) 15:44, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

I like the BRANDy idea, because it limits us to ones in common use. I don't like that it means sending everything through RFV. A clear cutoff would make for a very straightforward rule, but is there anything it would exclude that we'd want to keep? Also, I fixed MnS. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:18, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Sorry to insert myself in a conversation where I may not be welcome (this page was on my watchlist from a past convo), but out of curiosity I began running our Category:mul:Chemical_formulae for BRANDesque-worthy citations, and all of the ones I've checked thus far pass. The complication I ran into is whether to count instances where a chemical is named with the formula in parenthesis (e.g. "carbonic acid (H₂CO₃)"), whereafter only the formula is used as shorthand--much like acronyms for things like companies, documents and organizations. --SanctMinimalicen (talk) 01:56, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

I think looking at spoken usage would help- we say "cee oh 2", but I don't think people say "em n ess". Of course that really doesn't fit into our current verification / deletion policies. DTLHS (talk) 18:27, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether that would work or not. On Talk:CO₂, Shinji mentions that idea, opining that we would naturally say "see-oh-two gas" but not "aitch-two gas"; OTOH, I think that many formulae would be read as letters, and indeed for more obscure ones, if a speaker doesn't know offhand what the letters stand for, they have no choice but to say "army scientists were working on an ay-ess-aitch-three gas", etc. - -sche (discuss) 18:59, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

I think a starting point would be treating chemical formulae as if they were spelled with spaces, so they would be considered SOP unless proven idiomatic. You would want evidence that a formula is a label for a concept, rather than simply an ingredient list (e.g. is H₂SO₄ sulfuric acid or is it whatever you get when you combine 2 hydrogens, a sulfur and 4 oxygens?). Chuck Entz (talk) 22:30, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

All formulae are "ingredient lists" by definition; some map to a single concept like H₂SO₄, some map to no concept because they're physically impossible, and some map to multiple concepts like MnS. What they map to is dependent on the physical laws of the universe, not anything linguistic. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:18, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

By "concept", I meant a lexically-significant concept, something that speakers have in mind beyond the mere chemical identification of the compound- somewhat like the difference between 10 Downing Street or 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and 1600 Main Street for street addresses. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:01, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

How we will see unregistered users

Hi!

You get this message because you are an admin on a Wikimedia wiki.

When someone edits a Wikimedia wiki without being logged in today, we show their IP address. As you may already know, we will not be able to do this in the future. This is a decision by the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department, because norms and regulations for privacy online have changed.

Instead of the IP we will show a masked identity. You as an admin will still be able to access the IP. There will also be a new user right for those who need to see the full IPs of unregistered users to fight vandalism, harassment and spam without being admins. Patrollers will also see part of the IP even without this user right. We are also working on better tools to help.

If you have not seen it before, you can read more on Meta. If you want to make sure you don’t miss technical changes on the Wikimedia wikis, you can subscribe to the weekly technical newsletter.

We have two suggested ways this identity could work. We would appreciate your feedback on which way you think would work best for you and your wiki, now and in the future. You can let us know on the talk page. You can write in your language. The suggestions were posted in October and we will decide after 17 January.

Thank you. /Johan (WMF)

18:14, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Anachronism

On what basis do you support assigning a pronunciation from the first century BCE to a slang term briefly attested about a millennium later in France? That seems about as philologically sound as assigning an RP pronunciation to Middle English terms, or a Koiné Greek pronunciation to modern slang from Athens. Nicodene (talk) 19:40, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

If you're this bothered about the word "classical", see if you can get people to change the module to display the label as "classicist" or something. It's the pronunciation people interested in pronouncing Latin today are looking for and (despite months of edit-warring) you haven't, AFAICT, gotten consensus to remove it. - -sche (discuss) 19:44, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

That would only work if people actually used this term in Modern Latin, which they do not. They use caseus for 'cheese'- not formaticus, a term lacking in any dictionary of Modern Latin (or for that matter Classical Latin), to the best of my knowledge, and I have looked through several. Nicodene (talk) 19:59, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

People nonetheless encounter the word when reading the documents it occurs in, like people encounter obsolete English terms when reading old works and pronounce those according to one of that language's many standards. (In English, while people sometimes produce e.g. a version of Shakespeare in what they assume his pronunciation to have been, they're usually producing works in their/a modern pronunciation, whether that's RP or GenAm, etc, and pronouncing whatever obsolete word according to that pronunciation standard's phonemes rather than deviating for just the one word back to whatever potentially-now-unused phonemes the obsolete word might've had "in its period".) If someone is reading one of the Latin texts this word occurs in, I doubt they're going to switch to Old French for just the one word; they lack your commitment to history.
(It may surprise you that, for example, all Old Norse entries are lemmatized at the normalized "anachronistic" spellings people look for them under, with manuscript spellings as soft redirects at best.) - -sche (discuss) 20:24, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

That anachronistic spellings are used on Wiktionary isn't news to me or objectionable, as that is the case for our Latin and medieval Romance entries- cf. the consistent distinction between the letters u and v. That follows the spellings found in the various sources that we cite, and it makes words more convenient to look up, as people are used to working with modern spelling conventions. An anachronistic phonetic transcription is another matter: it does not make anything easier to find, nor is it found in any scholarly source. It serves only to mislead.

The problem with the 'Shakespearian' line of reasoning is that it would have us accept modern pronunciations for any obsolete medieval term, so long as the language that it belongs to survives. That would mean accepting modern French pronunciations of 12th-century vocabulary (based entirely on spelling and gut feeling) or, indeed, RP pronunciations of Middle English terms found in Chaucer. Philologically speaking that is an exercise in fantasy- surely not the sort of thing that Wiktionary is meant for.

Shakespeare is, moreover, read to this day by students in any English-speaking country, his plays are often performed on stage, and his expressions are often quoted in day-to-day conversation. He constitutes, in other words, a living part of the English cultural milieu. I point all of this out to stress that none of it is true for the documents in which forms like formaticus (or wadius, or wapces) are found- namely obscure Merovingian-era inventories and the like. Their modern-day relevance is nil to anybody but a Romance philologist or a very specific type of historian- and these are precisely the people who would be the first to point out that a phonetic transcription reflecting the pronunciation of the first century BCE would be inaccurate for the terms in question.

If someone would like to 'perform' such a document out loud, like a play from Shakespeare- I really cannot stress enough how unlikely this is, but let's suppose it happens- then they would be better served by an Ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation, which would at least fit chronologically, if not in other ways. Nicodene (talk) 00:13, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

nothing

Thanks for caring about mediaeval armour! There shall be some Eq mess to clean up, only because of old imports. How do you feel about heraldry? Equinox ◑ 19:31, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm happy if you find it useful. :) I appreciate your longtime work importing Chambers (et al?), which I've noticed means we now have a lot of heraldry terms already. Trying to find translations for the Spanish heraldry words Wonderfool finds has piqued my interest in maybe adding any missing ones as a next project, though, so we'll see! - -sche (discuss) 04:39, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Do you still have 2022 nonsense on your talk page. Why don't you add bendy-wavy? It's not what you think! Or is it? Blessed if I know. Equinox ◑ 06:10, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Hmm, does it refer to something besides bendy + wavy? You can also have a shield google books:"barry wavy" or a "chevron wavy", etc.
Yep, I need to archive this page again... - -sche (discuss) 06:41, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Sani z

Hi, should Sani z be moved to the Yi script? ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 20:36, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

If you can figure out what the Yi script form is, feel free to move it; I only found it in Latin script forms (but I didn't search exhaustively for Yi script forms). - -sche (discuss) 02:09, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Category:Nicknames

This category is not in proper category format. Could you please make the effort to make it a proper category? On a different note, don’t you think we can make use of this to categorize nicknames like Mounties. CAT:en:Nicknames is presently a redlink. Thank you! ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 14:28, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

Hmm. We could add it to Module:category tree/topic cat/data/Names (or Module:category tree/poscatboiler/data/names) using the same format as the other stuff there, and that would solve the immediate issue. But it raises a question: the two subcategories are "City nicknames‎" and "Couple nicknames" (both already in the modules), and it would seem logical to also categorize nicknames like "Billy" / Category:English diminutives of male given names (etc for other languages and genders) into this category, but at present we seem to comprehensively separate place names from people's names; they have separate top level categories, "Names" vs "Names by language". So do we want this as a top-level category only for "Nicknames" of things excluding people (or even, of anything including couples and only excluding single people?), even though that is counterintuitive to what "nicknames" would usually entail (which is precisely: names of people, like "Ricky", "Meike", "Саша")?? Whereas, if we want this category to include place-nicknames, couple-nicknames, and people-nicknames, then it seems like we should also have a top-level category that contains both (the contents of) Category:Names and Category:Names by language, no? (I suppose this is another example of how it's hard to fit names into the rest of our category schemas.) - -sche (discuss) 06:55, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Upping My Hyphenation Game

Hey -sche, thanks for participating in the other discussion recently. I just noticed that someone has yet again changed Wade-Giles to Wade–Giles. I don't have a position on this issue because I have only had a very small amount of training on proper use of hyphen versus dash. Despite this, I do a lot of work with terms that have dashes in them (or are they hyphens?) and I really want to learn more about the appropriate use of the various forms of hyphens and dashes. Are there special rules for Wiktionary that mean that Wade-Giles is more appropriate than Wade–Giles? I've been very sloppy on these issues, but I'd like to tighten up. Thanks for any help. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 17:28, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

I moved it back and move-protected it. We've always kept these things at the forms with hyphens to keep things simple. Changing a single entry just makes it inconsistent with all the thousands of other entries. If we were to start allowing this, we would need consensus to do so, first. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:46, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

-man / -mate

You dun writ:

FWIW, the RFD which resulted in -man being kept due to "no consensus" from ~7 participants was over a decade ago, and rested partly on arguments about the pronunciation, which seem obviously misguided (*-berry sometimes has reduced pronunciation too, but...). Perhaps a new RFD is in order, unless there was a more recent discussion somewhere I'm forgetting about?

lol please... I can't stand the ceremonials and rituals... but it should be done. Equinox ◑ 03:49, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

OK. I'm ambivalent about the entry, so I thought it might be better if someone who could really articulate all the arguments for deleting them would start the RFD, but I've started it. - -sche (discuss) 00:05, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

testre

Hi -sche. I clicked on "testre" at tester expecting the link to lead to something to do with Old French, but the entry is on Hungarian. Because you have worked on this entry recently I thught you might know what is goung on. Thanks. Rui Gabriel Correia (talk) 11:42, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Hi. It's because no one has added an Old French section to testre yet. - -sche (discuss) 15:47, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks

...for catching that translation mistake. I must have misread some part of that definition horribly. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 23:02, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

No worries; it's a confusing word (not sure if it's obscure enough to call it {{lb|en|uncommon}}, but still). It took me a fair bit of digging, after I first saw it in some articles about "Transwar Japan" which didn't explain it at all, to find cites with enough detail to see what it meant! - -sche (discuss) 23:39, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

Blocking IPv6 addresses

When blocking IPv6's, you have to block the /64 range (2602:306:cec2:a3a0::/64). Blocking a single address is not usually enough. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 07:27, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

What to Call Them

I saw your edit summary at Greek yogurt. My suggestion would be to call such terms "geographical misnomers", though it might be more nationality or ethnicity than geography that's misattributed. Then there are things like all the "Dutch" and "Welsh" terms that are more an application of generic stereotypes or tropes. I also wonder about terms like "Indian giver" and "Moorish idol" that are based on historical misconceptions/lies. It just goes to show how many different ways human beings have come up with to be wrong... Chuck Entz (talk) 14:20, 14 July 2022 (UTC)

Thank you!

Thank you for the edits to quesadilla and quesadilla salvadoreña Thisisnotatest (talk) 03:12, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

{{lb|offensive}}

Since you blocked me from responding directly at WT:TR, I have to jump through the hoop and claim that, unless you have a medical degree and a crystal ball or other telemetric infrastructure, I shod like feel offended by your calling me neurodivergent. Not kidding, there's an indoeuropeanist active on reddit with a background in Sanskrit who changed course to became a professional psycho analyst, but not before doing work on transgender identities in Hindu scripture.

Anyway, I have looked into lible laws once and would try to consider these issues through that lense. There is, for one, the stance in US law that some words are inherently insulting. This looks to me like a typical short-circuited decision to simplify judgement, because it would certainly include the n-word (nigger toe) which is difficult to main if it is in common idiomatic use among PoCs. Anything else is more or less contextual and pragmatic (eg. "fascist" of certain politicians although the political party that popularized the name is defunct). Steven Pinker (if that name isn't itself taboo by now) has outlined a number of semantic fields that he deems most common among insults, which I understand to be inherent in human nature. Sexuality is certainly included in that list, disabilities as well. The interpretation, what to understand as a belonging to those fields, is nevertheless dependent on cultural context, so being gay for example has ceased to carry the overt connotation of homo-sexuality, in my experience; etymology and etymological fallacy notwithstanding. So it is the reference itself that may be offensive, which is why the euphemism treadmil works.

That's entirely pragmatic and out of scope of the lexical consideration unless it can be shown that the word is used with the express intent. You get the benefit of the doubt, of course, but edit warring doesn't. So the usual three citations requirement should apply, and subsenses may be necessary. I found subsenses categorically a good idea, but there's a slippery sloap to an infinitude of ideas and I find that there's enough resistance with a preference for succinct definitions. In that case, the question is simple with reslect to the informative stance in WT:SOP, "based on the determination of editors that inclusion of the term is likely to be useful to readers", as regards the label as well.

Everyone but the self-designated child-attracted will be able to figure out, sure enough. I am not entirely sure what other purpose is served by labels, but there is as of yet no label at pedophile even though anyone would take great offense at being labeled a child molester or anything like that. The idea as opined in the previous thread that it was coined as euphemism to advertise incestuous pedophilia strikes me as nonsense. By the sound of it, it stems from academic writing akin enslaved person instead of slave, coopted by activists because of this fairly neutral background. In context it would be SoP.

In the same vein, it does not matter if gibberish might derive from (offensive) gipsy, and it certainly does not matter if that's derived from Egypt as is sometimes claimed, or from RV. √yaj (ईजितुम् 'to worship, sacrifice', but ईजिप्तदेश "Egypt"), whatever. Although it's not an insult if it's true which is still kind of subjective. That's usually for the courts to decide, where expert witness may be disappointed if the court draws (wrong) conclusions from their testemony (as in the case of Washington Red Skins, cf. language log), if the judge ought to have the last word in judgement. nonsense on the other hand refers indirectly to fool, yet it is omiting the derogatory label. I'm pretty sure no judge would condemn that if they like to abuse the ambiguity no less than high profile wiktionary editors do. In fact, that's why I have taken to it myself. The disparity could be due to the nonexistance of label templates when the entry was created. Moreover, we have troll (verb sense 8-9, noun 2) defined leaning chiefly on "harrasing" although there's an entire line of trollface memes to prove that there is an understanding around the idea that trolling is a art. Hell, there is a defcon talk about that on youtube; that's literally a grey area. ("don' t feed the troll" does not refer to harrasment unless you play the victim card; personally I suspect that trell makes it an ethnic slur in origin, though I am in no position to judge this, duh).

Your background is in translation studies, I believe. Hence it is beyond me how you tread on me, who I fail to meet with fidelity and felicity at once, instead of pulling back Eirikr for typically passive agressive rhethorical questions. Of course I need to circumscribe at length if there's no common lingo. Perhaps H. H. Hock is correct in stating that "Linguists, by contrast, find lexical semantics extremely elusive and therefore difficult to deal with".

I understand you are busy. And I should appreciate the downtime, though the measures prove to be ineffective. That's no reason for you to deal out ad hominem attacks with considerations on-topic tacked on in a paranthetical as mere after thought and without any grounds. Upon inquiry with a friend, we found that auto tuning may as well refer to the sound, but I thought it was more obviously related to changing the pitch of the vehicle, if you'll excuse the pun. I have begun adding to the mainspace instead of discussing changes beforehand, but that's not going anywhere; see son of a bitch. The html comments that I add as red tape should be unacceptable.

Instead I feel like I have a whole lot of concessions to make. Like, I've got many an ask to grind and my puns are in poor taste, my formatting and orthography is full of typos and I like enumerations too much. I could, over all, care less, but I've seen prolific users abandon their accounts, some of them because they are fed up with the community, so perhaps I should be concerned. With Ivan Stambuk I might hold that I should think of all the literature to read instead. ApisAzuli (talk) 23:49, 23 July 2022 (UTC)

Parsing cites

You have been doing a great job of determining whether a given cite supports a challenged definition and, if it doesn't, of suggesting a rewording or alternative definition. I can occasionally do something similar, but you do it regularly and explain yourself well. It is particularly admirable that you take on terms that have meanings that I find personally objectionable or discomfiting. I hope that Wiktionary will benefit from your contributions and example for decades to come. DCDuring (talk) 14:53, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you; I appreciate you saying that. I hope Wiktionary continues to benefit from both of our efforts! - -sche (discuss) 03:00, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Wiktionary:English adjectives

I worked on the tests section of this page. I am definitely not perfectly confident in the presentation of how the various tests do or do not serve to distinguish an adjective from other word classes. Please correct anything that seems clearly erroneous to you. Edit summaries containing, eg, counterexamples would probably be sufficient justification to convince me of my errors. It may well be that the tests should be on a separate page or subpage. It may also be that a table would be useful to present where each test is most useful, together with examples, including exceptions/counterexamples. DCDuring (talk) 18:13, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

I hadn't realized how many of the tests were merely suggestive rather than qualifying as either absolutely necessary or sufficient for PoS distinctions. Nevertheless, I think it is a good idea to group the tests by their utility for certain PoS distinctions, even if some (few) exceptions exist. For example, maybe the predicate position test has more than suggestive value somewhere. DCDuring (talk) 18:27, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

Ypresian

I've never heard it aloud, but just to confirm: is it definitely /s/ and not /z/? I would expect the /z/ sound even in French. Equinox ◑ 22:36, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

The only information I was able to find about how to pronounce it was in Century, which claims it's /s/, but since I notice even the French etymon has /z/ (and I too would say /z/) I'm inclined to agree /z/ is more likely. I'll change it. - -sche (discuss) 23:00, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Too fast?

In this edit we find

Beckett famously refused to allow a national representative from either Ireland or or France tot pick up his Nobel Prize […]

I guess I'm just OCD on using review, but these entries will be read 100s more times than edited. It is good to check them as they will be seen. Shenme (talk) 21:23, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for spotting that. - -sche (discuss) 23:02, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

counterfeit

Yeah I was wondering about that eeeee pronunciation! But I strictly forbid myself from touching IPA outside of BrE. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our phonology. Equinox ◑ 05:10, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

Dan block

Just a comment: while I do not oppose the block I feel that an infinite duration might be a tad excessive. My usual feeling regarding people who keep doing the same thing (as opposed to drive-by vandals, or spammers, etc.) is "keep doubling the block length". Like how you'd allocate memory, ya know? (He does seem to have been blocked in the past a rather large number of times, lol, but the lengths have been both short and arbitrary.) Equinox ◑ 20:41, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

I understand that feeling, and like I said in the BP, I'm loath to block anyone in the first place. But my thought process is: as you know, he's been like this for years; he went on (non-block-related) hiatus and didn't edit much for a couple years, but now upon resuming active editing he's right back to this, so it seems unlikely to me that it's going to change, so I'd rather bite the bullet and be done with it. But if you or another admin want to shorten the block duration, I won't stop you. - -sche (discuss) 22:08, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

When he came back from hiatus, there was a definite difference from his past behavior. He seemed to have decided to go all out and basically take over the project. The sheer volume of his actions and verbiage was enough to seriously disrupt things in a way that was far worse than before.

In the case of a productive editor, you have to weigh the benefits of their edits against the disruption and the time wasted by others in responding. After he came back from hiatus, the balance veered strongly toward the negative. I was reluctant to block him, but I think it was probably necessary- or would have been, sooner or later.

The POINTy mainspace reformatting edits and categories, as well as the systematic rehashing of closed rfds and rfvs, were bad enough, but he managed to turn pretty much all of the important discussions into tl;dr walls of pointless, repetitive sludge. Even when he was right or at least had a point it would have been better if he had left it to someone else. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:14, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

After I already anticipated a block in view of a regular frequency of frivolous motions, which for all I know already allow the conclusion of malintent, I am also shocked about the duration of the block, but we are both European, and in endless controversions on the internet by Americans I well have observed a seemingly irrelievable lack of moderation that is unknown to us. Fay Freak (talk) 22:55, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

• I think the block was brave and awesome. GreyishWorm (talk) 00:01, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

I have reduced the block to one month, because although Dan has recently been pissing us all off, he is a long-term useful contributor (OUTSIDE of talk pages). If he comes back and does it again, then just make it two months, blah blah. Equinox ◑ 02:04, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

@Equinox There's also the possibility of only blocking him from specific namespaces such as Wiktionary and perhaps Talk and/or Module, etc. He might still do POINTy edits in mainspace and maybe ping people and haunt user talk pages, but it would keep him away from the places he's been abusing the most. It also would allow a much longer block without affecting his productivity in mainspace. An additional tool might be an abuse filter that only applies to him, with regex-based limits on the kinds of pages or edits he can do. As long as you have the username test first, it will have only minimal affects on the performance of the site for everyone else. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:47, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

I don't really care what you do. I will bow to community consensus! I just feel infinite block is not fair to a legit contributor as opposed to a common-or-garden spammer. Thanks for listening. Equinox ◑ 04:38, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

@Equinox I wasn't planning to do this myself, just to give more options to consider. The goal isn't to punish him, but to stop/prevent the damaging behavior. These are some less draconian ways to accomplish that. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:01, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

FWIW, I considered a Wiktionary-namespace-only block, but part of the problem—the trigger of the most immediate discussion—is that the obstructionism includes edits in mainspace and other namespaces.
I think account-specific edit filters are in general a wrong move; filters are invaluable if an already-blocked editor is hopping IPs and changing usernames to keep editing, but when we're talking about one account, a filter would be admitting we can't rely on that user to stop doing x disruptive thing unless we physically stop them, but then why forgo stopping them with a block and instead commit techy editors' time to writing algorithms to try and detect disruptive edits better than the user can figure out how to rules-lawyer in ways that don't trigger the algorithms? - -sche (discuss) 10:57, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

Just a heads-up that Dan has decided to start pinging from his userpage because he can’t comment on things anymore. Theknightwho (talk) 21:02, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

@Theknightwho: This is of little concern. We already know that there is no enlightenment to expect from his messages, rather he obviously just finds new ways to abuse terminology, so the reader’s mental diversion is negligible. While of course due to this content the reading material is lamentable and justly lamented, the actual injury and offence lies in the recurring requirement to answer him, as writing uses to be much more exerting and depletive of precious time than reading, prompted by reason that otherwise the appearance of nobody disagreeing with his novel measures in the dictionary content could arise. Accusing him of “filibustering” is actually an understatement since for filibusters (or at least the famous ones I know of, since in my country even filibustering itself is illegal) the (effected or intended) reaction is not multiplying the verbosity. To this term he again he applied a very narrow definition, of “delaying decisions”, while he was delaying the whole project, which senior editors like me, possessing the big picture, follow to answer general questions even if complicated, but not fake questions like his who already knew beforehand that editors will not harmonize with his positions and won’t have bad reasons—but does not concede us having a honest and rational approach. An indisposition against long content in genere seems indefensible but must be contextualized by how engaging it is. Fay Freak (talk) 01:25, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

He should have received a permanent block at least one decade ago; he has repeatedly demonstrated over and over again that his diplomacy skills are abysmal and he has no business trying to negotiate with other users (especially new ones). He rarely admits to any serious mistakes (e.g. ‘most of the above is a baseless personal attack; there is very little that is accurate there’), though it is interesting that in 2012 he said ‘I definitely do not want to scare you off :)’ which suggests that had a modicum of self‐awareness.

Of all of the users that I have seen on this project, I’ve never seen any receive a request of ‘leave me alone’, or some variant thereof, more than D.P.:

‘I documented the quote. Leave me alone.’

‘I'd say that you were well on the way to being blocked for disruptive edits. LEAVE ME ALONE!’

‘I just wanted you to leave me alone to make some edits.’

‘Now please remove yourself from my talk.’

‘I said get off my case and stop posting on my talk page.’

‘And if there's no policy or rule, please leave and stop bothering me.’

‘Go to hell, you troll.’

(Normally I’d consider it poor taste to bring up old misdeeds, but if they’re consistent with somebody’s current misbehaviour then I don’t find it too unfair.)

Other tendencies, like his flair for the melodramatic (‘Down with all tyrants!’) and always creepily talking to himself on his talk page (seemingly treating it like a blog) may be worth mentioning, but his abysmal diplomacy is, by far, the most serious.

You people had your chances to expel him from the project and prevent further damage, and yet you always kept glossing over his misbehaviour and repeatedly giving him second chances anyway. He has had more than enough. Now I am going to hold you responsible for his misconduct, for as long as you keep giving him second chances. I trust that you won’t find my expectation too unreasonable. —(((Romanophile))) ♞ (contributions) 16:12, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

-sche, would you kindly explain to me why you hate open society, democracy, liberty, individualism, and freedom so much? Why is it that you want to destroy all of those great things so badly? What did they ever do to you?

Also, I have been getting reports from anonymous sources that your daily routine involves desecrating the works of Karl Popper and John Rawls shortly before strangling a puppy or kitten to death, and that you laugh maniacally while doing so. Can you confirm or deny those accusations, sir (or madam)? —(((Romanophile))) ♞ (contributions) 18:12, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

I heard you read Ayn Rand and took it seriously, can you confirm or deny Equinox ◑ 02:41, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

re 'Aus/NZ borrow/forest vowels'

Discussion moved to Appendix talk:English pronunciation.

alt-center

Hi, - -sche

I'm not sure if I completely understand your reversion: "partially undo, previous edits dropped the L2 header, and also these are just different (one of them inaccurately approbative and cover-running, and one perhaps overly negative) ways of trying to describe one thing".

Firstly, the L2 header (which I had added) was dropped because it's been over two-weeks and the de facto consensus is that the pejorative sense is in fact attestable (although it could be more precisely worded), and that a non-pejorative sense also exist. If I understand correctly, you're saying that there should not be two senses (one approbative, the other negative) to describe alt-center, but rather one sense, that being the current, negative definition. On 'Requests for verification', it was discovered that both of these senses are attested though. Furthermore, the sense I added, which you refer to as "approbative", does not express approval.

"Abbreviated from alternative-center; a centrist movement displaying controversial, novelty opinions distinct from the mainstream narrative."

• Alt-center is an abbreviation of alternative-center. • Alt-center is a centrist movement. • Alt-centrism does in fact display controversial, novelty opinions distinct from the mainstream (that's what makes it alternative). The aforementioned points are not inaccurate, nor opinionated, and do not express approval. These are merely facts which give alt-center its denotative meaning. For this reason, I kindly ask that you undo your rollback to my edits. If you believe the L2 header (which you did not rollback) should actually stay, feel free to put it back. Nevertheless, the sense above is valid and conforms to Wiktionary standards. —WbK Wordbookeeper Wordbookeeper (talk) 06:08, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

The "L2 header" just means the level two header, i.e. ==English==. 70.172.194.25 07:47, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

I misunderstood; thanks for the clarification.

Your input for WT:Improving entries for the most common English words

For the words that you have worked on:

1. which turned out to be the hardest?
2. what made them hard?

I've reviewed the 100 most common words and marked some as "hard", mostly because there are multiple PoSes, sometimes hard to separate, but also because of the lack of concreteness to many of the definitions, as well as the sheer number of definitions. Do you agree?

I'm thinking that nouns, verbs, and adjectives should be the easiest generally, but some function words should be much easier than others.

Also, the standards for a good entry seem very hard to meet, especially for the most common function words. Attestation for the often numerous senses seems difficult.

Can you provide any guidance for those who would tackle the hard entries.

It would be handy if you could post at Wiktionary talk:Improving entries for the most common English words or that project page. DCDuring (talk) 20:43, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

In your experience, would it help to have someone else do relatively routine formatting tasks before you tackle entry structure (Etys, PoSes) and definitions. I can imagine that those tasks can: 1., help familiarize one with the definitions, 2., sap one's energy, and, 3., distract one from the defining effort. DCDuring (talk) 22:13, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

When I go through and try to make sure that we're covering all the senses of a word, the more senses there are, the longer it takes... because I'm going through all of our definitions, and all the definitions in other usable/noncopyright reference works, and all the uses of the word I'm familiar with, and making sure we're not missing anything that's attested (have to check that all our senses, and any we seem to be missing, are attested), that we don't have redundant senses that would be better off combined, but also that we're not merging any senses that are better separate, while figuring out how to group all the senses so it's intelligible (if there are too many senses, without grouping them via subsensing, the entry becomes hard to practically use). If there are a lot of definitions, it's likely different people at different times will enter the same one twice (here's an example where the presence of multiple etymology sections meant someone didn't notice the definition was already in a lower section, but I've also seen duplication within the same ety section, same list of definitions). Conversely, in overhauling take, I had initially put these senses together as one sense, but a Tea Room discussion a few years later made me realize they were better as separate senses. When a word has senses that require some consideration as to what part of speech they are, that can cause difficulty, as various Tea Room discussions attest. I'm not sure how much work formatting is: there are times when I don't have time to format something (usually a quote) and so just offload it to the talk page (scissars), but if I were working on an entry, it wouldn't normally stop me from working on the entry. Another challenge is thinking through the exact scope of what is definitional to a particular sense, as with the discussion a while ago of the scope of merchandise. - -sche (discuss) 04:00, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for describing your process. That fits my limited experience.

You do seem to be saying that departures from ideal formatting for these high-frequency word entries don't make usually make much difference.

I was wondering whether it would pay to have people work on any non-definitional matters before the definition work was complete. Would it help, be neutral, or potentially interfere? I could see how work to get three quotations for each definition might help even if the definitions weren't quite right. Also derived terms and collocations could possibly help in testing coverage of definitions. DCDuring (talk) 01:13, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

"categorize Christian terms as such"

Seeing this on my watchlist a lot. Thanks for cleanup. I did not broaden "Christianity" into "religion" out of any kind of Dawkinsian spite, etc., but because it's mostly outside my experience. We could subdivide a bunch of them further into "theology" versus... whatever word the churches use for pragmatics. P.S. If you're in the mood for religion Christianity, have a crack at anagignoskomena. WP mentions it in passing as a bunch of books that the Eastern Orthodox Church feels good about. Equinox ◑ 21:53, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

You're welcome / no problem. I've changed a few to more specific things like "Catholicism", but for the most part I figure going through the "Christianity" category and figuring out logical subcategories, whether that's "Catholicism"-vs-Lutheranism etc or "theology"-vs-pragmatics etc, may be a separate task. I've also noticed where people categorized Muslim, Hindu, etc terms as vague "religion" ... and a lot of cases where something doesn't seem to merit a label at all. Like: what do you make of e.g. "Calvinist"? To me, it doesn't seem like it needs any label, neither {{lb|en|religion}} nor {{lb|en|Christianity}}, just like foot isn't {{lb|en|biology}}, because everyone uses the word regardless of context, no? But we have a lot of labels that seem daft to me, like elbow is labelled "anatomy"... - -sche (discuss) 22:08, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

I am fascinated by Eastern Orthodoxy but that's a question for another time. Currently that damned newbie User:Blansheflur is whipping my experienced arse at Scrabble. I'll be happy if I come out 10 points ahead. Equinox ◑ 00:49, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Oh, regarding unnecessary glossing, I quite agree. I know, if somebody adds a gloss that isn't a "known" gloss (so it is plain text instead of a link), we could interpret that as "oh, we are missing a gloss then!". But often half the time they are pointless. We aren't going to gloss the main sense of "mango" as "fruits", right? Right??? Some people do. Equinox ◑ 01:12, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

"Stunning and brave"

I undid the edit because it was clearly biased to begin with, using buzzwords like "transphobic" when the phrase has nothing to do with that at all, it clearly pushes a certain narrative I just made it neutral. And I'm not sure how my edit made the entry less informative, it quite literally is used to mock that group of people, has nothing to do with trans people. Supreme5555 (talk) 05:59, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Lol, its use for vice-signalling 'anti-wokeness' (originally and especially transphobia) is the best known thing about it. But I have considered whether more of the wording of the usage note could be moved into the definition, or even, if there should be two definitions — the existing sense "used ... to suggest ... something has been promoted as good but is actually bad", covering what it means when people describe some actual thing or person as "stunning and brave" and intend those words to mean something about that thing, like in many of the examples noted on the talk page, and then maybe a second sense to cover what people mean when it's purely a catchphrase used to signal that the speaker is anti-woke, but it's (a) hard to think of good wording for that (we obviously can't use your loaded phrasing/framing in wikivoice, but "used to signal that the speaker is anti-woke" is also not ready for primetime), and (b) it's hard to find cases where it is purely a catchphrase, as even e.g. the Modest Pelican uses I pointed out on talk can be explained as "suggest[ing] ... something has been promoted as good but is actually bad", so it seems like there is just the one sense we have now, with its connotations that the usage note explains. - -sche (discuss) 08:51, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Concerning the baby page

Recently baby was edited to remove a longstanding phrase in English noun sense 1. I tried to revert it back to how it was for a long time beforehand but it was reverted. Mineben256 (talk) 22:48, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Hmm... on one hand, application to fetuses is already (longstandingly) covered by sense 3, and it shouldn't be in two places. OTOH, I am ambivalent about whether it'd be better to have separate senses or combine them into 1. It seems unlikely that anyone uses sense 3 contrastively with sense 1 (i.e. uses it only for a fetus and not a newborn), which might speak it favor of merging 3 into 1... - -sche (discuss) 22:58, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

As I pointed out on Surjection's talk page, this is part of a clause starting with "particularly", so it doesn't and shouldn't cover everything. An IP changed "birth" to "conception" a year ago, and Leasnam compromised by changing it to "conception or birth". This is all about framing things to make a point re: abortion. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:18, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Citations:subsemimodule

Just making sure you're aware of the module error there. It looks like the colons in the content got parsed as something they weren't. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:52, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Ah, an issue with either the } or the |. Thanks for alerting me. - -sche (discuss) 23:04, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

བཡ

I think you confused this sentence to be Kurtöp, whereas looking at the source it seems to have been Maaka. Could you fix it? I don't know anything about Maaka. Thadh (talk) 21:57, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Good catch! I will fix the header and move it to Latin script. - -sche (discuss) 23:02, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

fixes to Template:standard spelling of et al.

Hi. I added a section Module:labels/data#Label_usages listing all the places where labels are currently used. You might find this interesting. In this vein, I want to fix up the use of labels in {{standard spelling of}}, {{alternative form of}} etc. but I'm not quite sure what the issues are. Can you enumerate them and give me some examples of what things should look like vs. what they currently look like? Benwing2 (talk) 04:47, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

You might want to post in the Beer Parlour to get broader input, as I don't know if I know of all the possible issues, but the one issue which I mentioned in a prior discussion was:

• [What happens:] The "spelling" labels like {{lb|en|British spelling}} display "British spelling", which is reasonable for them to do in {{label}}s, but it means that when those labels are plugged in to {{standard spelling of|en|foobar|from=British spelling}}, the result is "British spelling standard spelling of foobar." and {{alternative spelling of|en|foobar|from=British spelling}} displays "British spelling spelling of foobar" (interesting that "standard spelling of" has a dot and "alt spelling of" doesn't...).
• [Kludge:] To kludgily fix this, because people were understandably complaining about it, I added the labels "British form", "American form", etc, which add the category that {{lb|en|British spelling}} adds but have the display (just "British") that {{lb|en|British}} has: {{standard spelling of|en|foobar|from=British form}} displays "British standard spelling of foobar." (But as with "orthographic borrowings", anything that exists and is not specifically limited to specific situations, people will try to use for other situations, so I've spotted an instance or two of it as a label...)
• [What should happen:] Ideally, when plugging any of the "spelling" labels like "British spelling", "American spelling", "Canadian spelling" etc into any of the spelling templates like "alternative spelling of", "standard spelling of" (and probably also "alternative form of", "standard form of", etc), the label would display "British" instead of "British spelling" (but it would still display "British spelling" if used in {{label}}): ideally {{standard spelling of|en|foobar|from=British spelling}} would display "British standard spelling of foobar." At that point, the "British form", "American form" etc labels could be removed or reduced to aliases of "British spelling".

- -sche (discuss) 06:01, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Girl citation

I'm guessing but unsure that "devalured" should be "devalued"? Thmazing (talk) 02:29, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes; good spot! Googling google books:"murdering of hundreds of thousands of economically", I notice that some editions have "de-valued" with a hyphen and put "girled" in quotation marks, but the edition we're citing has devalued girled. - -sche (discuss) 03:08, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Definitions of besides

There are two of interest:

1. In addition to.
2. Other than; except for; instead of.

The first is much more common, but is not substitutable in many expressions. I think that the second definition is for negative and irrealis constructions, but I feel I am getting out of my depth. Even if my view is correct, I am not sure that we can communicate it well to normal users and, therefore, that we would risk confusing many.

Irrealis constructions also come up with "negative polarity items", which would also benefit from an explanation of why those items occur without a negative.

Thoughts? DCDuring (talk) 20:36, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

I may be simply wrong about the 'irrealis' connection, except in the broadest possible definition, including 'habitual' mood. The second definition refers to situations that are future, counterfactual, habitual, etc., where the truth value of the utterance is not strictly determinable. Perhaps we just need (lots of?) usage examples. DCDuring (talk) 13:28, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Usage examples and notes on which uses are no longer common or likely to be understood (like "beeastes, besides asses", below) would be helpful. Other dictionaries agree with us as to what the senses are, and M-W, Dictionary.com and the OED all word the sense corresponding to our sense 2 the same way we do, "other than", and for the sense corresponding to our sense 1, the OED and Dictionary.com's definitions include "in addition to" like ours, whereas M-W has "together with". M-W's and Dictionary.com's examples for "other than" are 'negative' ("no one besides", "nothing besides"), but the 1933 OED says the "other than" sense is used "in negative and interrogative (formerly sometimes in affirmative) sentences", and has examples:

• 1534, tr. Pol. Verg. Eng. Hist., I, 22:

  England is well stored with all kinde of beeastes, besides asses, mules, camels, and elephants.

• 1716, South, 12 Serm. (1717), IV, 37:

  The Jews [...] for ever unsainting all the world besides themselves.

• 1758, Jortin, Erasm., I, 266:

  In the opinion of every one besides himself.

Other than the OED, it doesn't seem like anyone tries to spell out the restrictions on the "other than" sense in the definition itself. We could perhaps write a usage note. Otherwise, I agree with your idea of usexes showing the various ways it can be used and, with qualifiers, the ways it could formerly be used. - -sche (discuss) 04:41, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. Your effort and thought are appreciated, not just by me.

It's not at all surprising that no other dictionary goes very far in explaining the occasions of use, but OED 1933 confirms the general direction.

I think I'm getting my head around irrealis, but our definition and WP's use are different, ours being more limited, I think. I would not want to use irrealis in a definition or a usage note, but maybe on an entry talk page. It seems close to meaning non-indicative, but that makes it sound like a purely grammatical term, which it doesn't seem to be. If it hadn't come up before in connection with negative-polarity items (where 'irrealis' sentences can contain a negative polarity items that has no form of or derivative of 'not'), I would not have mentioned it. As an exercise, I'll try to use besides "other than" in as many of WP's types of irrealis as I can. When and if I get somewhere with that, I'll let you know. DCDuring (talk) 00:34, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

@DCDuring besides seems to have been much more common in Early Modern English. For example, see besides oneself, which is now exclusively used as beside oneself. (Note that the 18th century cite is probably referencing the Tyndale Bible, and was likely archaic even then.) Theknightwho (talk) 00:53, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

I wish i knew a good way of searching for besides ("other than") in sentences in indicative mood. All the uses of besides in indicative-mood sentences that I have seen in modern English seem to me to be the "in addition to" sense. That is in line with what -sche reports that OED 1933 said. DCDuring (talk) 04:25, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

Bad German ordinal abbreviation entries

Could you take a look at the "G" section at Wiktionary:Todo/Lists/Entries with no headword line? These are all deficient abbreviation entries for German ordinal numbers created by the same clueless user. I'm not sure what needs to be done to fix them, or even whether they're worth the effort. After all, they're basically just numbers with a dot at the end, and there are literally an infinite number of potential entries in this format.

Thanks!

Chuck Entz (talk) 23:36, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz I'll just delete those, per WT:CFI#Numbers,_numerals,_and_ordinals. I think they were created because the template in e.g. zehntausend (and outside German, also e.g. satatuhatta) creates links to them. We should find out how to suppress those links. - -sche (discuss) 00:49, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

The Page That Time Forgot

I thought you might be interested in ۱۰, which is in Wiktionary:Todo/Lists/Entries with no headword line because it hasn't been edited by humans since 2007, before headword templates were a thing. There was one edit in 2016 that added {{also}}- but that's it. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:19, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Looks like all the other Persian numerals need headword templates, too, like ۹ etc. Theknightwho (talk) 02:30, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Wow. How many such entries are there? So many that they should be cleaned up by bot, or few enough that we could tackle them by hand? BTW, there's a policy(!) that's been un-updated since 2006, which therefore mandates something chaotic which everyone fortunately ignores, which I need to post about in the BP soon... - -sche (discuss) 02:45, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

There are 11 pages in Category:Persian numeral symbols. All of them have the same problem, all but ۳ also have an Urdu entry with the same problem, and the same with a Pashto entry at ۶. That makes 22 language sections on 11 pages. There are Ottoman Turkish and Punjabi entries on all but ۱۰ that have headword templates, but those were added without touching the Persian or Urdu sections. Oddly enough, I went through all the Ottoman Turkish entries a month ago to change the "Ottoman numeral symbols" categories to "Ottoman Turkish numeral symbols" and didn't notice the problems elsewhere on those pages. A very quick spot check on the other languages in Category:Numeral symbols by language didn't turn up any others with this problem. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:18, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

I've wondered about how to create a way to automatically check for missing headword templates, but it's the same issue I ran into trying to find a way to check for categories missing {{auto cat}} which should have it, which is that if the template isn't there, there's no obvious way to run the check in the first place. Theknightwho (talk) 20:04, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Hmm. Spitballing: what if we mass-deployed an "empty" template (call it {{non auto cat}} or {{category tracking template}} or whatever, and have it display nothing) to every category page that currently doesn't use {{auto cat}} or another such template? Then we could use an edit filter to warn people that every category has to contain one of those templates. (And we could at least manually, and ideally more automatedly, track what pages used {{non auto cat}} to see which ones were supposed to be using {{auto cat}}.) - -sche (discuss) 15:31, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

Help please

Hey, -sche, I've sent you some emails in the past few weeks and you never replied. Could you please reply when you get a chance? I still have feelings of being picked on, by one editor in particular, and I'd like to discuss them with you. Purplebackpack89 00:06, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Table of sound shifts in Old Chinese

Hi, I have an update.

I have been working on my article in Old Chinese (I was rewriting it to improve it and enrich it), I have found some tables of sound shifts in Baxter-Sagart (2014)! It talks about regular shifts and put some clusters as well. The languages treated are Old Chinese, Early Middle Chinese (EMC), Proto-Min, Proto-Vietic and Proto-Hmong-Khmer. At least for initials and syllable codas, I can copy these tables and do what you suggested we could do. In this way, we can even identify multiple sources of a sound in EMC. I checked Proto-Hmong-Khmer, we have a table of 150 loans with Old Chinese (Baxter-Sagart, 2014) taken from a reconstruction published in 2010 and quoted by Baxter-Sagart. Many words in Proto-Min are already here in Wiktionary, though not every single word. We already have sourced reconstruction or lemmas of Proto-Vietic (I could try to create a list from papers talking about the Vietnamese substrate in Old Chinese, which is our interest). Early Middle Chinese reconstruction of lemmas by Baxter (2011) is already available as well as the reconstruction of 5000 lemmas in Old Chinese (2014). Only the glosses used by Weldon Coblin to reconstruct Eastern Han Chinese/Late Han Chinese are missing (they are over 400 and they let you spot multiple sources of a sound in EMC and dialectal variations in LHan); in this moment I can only copy some of them (I should buy his book to be able to read through the section of vowels in LHan). I could put some information about LHan Chinese as well, but again, I should buy Coblin's book (1983); moreover, his reconstruction is (nice but) old and based on Li's reconstruction of Old Chinese.

I think we have most material to use the table you want to create once it's done. At least, "I think", I am not sure. Then, somebody should be able to use it, analyse glosses etc. etc., again, I am not sure.

Damn, I was working by total chance on Old Chinese when I noticed your message again by total chance, I use the info desk only when I need. I should put the BabelBox stuff on my userpage to let users know what languages I work on. Cicognac (talk) 08:01, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

CFI for events

At some point, the community needs to craft a policy for CFI regarding events. Purplebackpack89 20:12, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Ideally, yes, and also for other "names of specific entities". I don't know how easy it would be to find agreement, though. - -sche (discuss) 21:16, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Thuja plicata for ~46 Native American names

See: Wiktionary:Todo/Lists/Wanted taxa (first item) or What links here.

I think these are entirely of western tribes because that where the species grows. DCDuring (talk) 20:04, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Neat that someone (and a few other users) has/have gathered so many. :) (Did you want me to do anything about it? Spot-checking a couple, they seem to be real.) - -sche (discuss) 22:16, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

I just thought you would be interested. Given the reference, they seem likely to be quite defensible. I like to think that taxonomic entries are useful for eliciting entries in the languages of peoples living close to nature. DCDuring (talk) 18:50, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

glownigger!

Since you have protected it, I now request you to undelete the entry based on this one-month discussion with no objections: Wiktionary:Requests_for_deletion/English#Undelete_glownigger. Pinging @Fay Freak, Someone-123-321... Regards, RodRabelo7 (talk) 06:58, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

you do realize i'm not a administrator

i can't "undelete" pages, nor can I protect them Someone-123-321 (talk) 08:05, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

He does, that’s why it is under a talk-page of an administrator. There is something else going on there with motions ignored. Neurotypicals have a devilish fear of violating some social convention and thereby sullying their name within their community—if they are even known—, whereas science, descriptive linguistics, is also relative, so they rather have nothing to do with loaded words! Such that they don’t even look into a matter, much less act! Fay Freak (talk) 12:38, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

verifying with quotes

Awesome work in the RFV. Perhaps you could just quote all of those entries in Category:Webster 1913, to get rid of that massive cleanup category, and I'll go for a holiday instead. Jin and Tonik (talk) 16:49, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

blocking MR

A 3 month block for adding a shitty quote to campfire cookie? Jeez, -sche, you must really hate Mysteryroom. Please consider either providing more evidence of the user's "recent trolling", or removing the block. Worm spail (talk) 23:35, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

As stated in the block log, the block was for a years-long pattern for which the user has been repeatedly warned and blocked, not for any one entry. You can review the summaries of the prior blocks, prior discussions on the user's talk page, and prior RFV/RFD and other discussions of the user's entries for more. - -sche (discuss) 01:12, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, I get it, but one shitty quote among hundreds of hours of hard work is a pretty good ratio. Much better than Wonderfool's workrate.... Worm spail (talk) 07:03, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

I get it and it is mistaken. It was not years long since he is around but one year, and in that you see a pattern but because of the density of contributions. If his offensive pattern were spread upon ten years you would not give that much weight on single violations, as to construct a concrete attitude he is charged with. The regulations are super convoluted and thus indistinct and reasonable attentive people can't get through them in that busy time, unlike Purplebackpack89 or Dan Polansky who were to blame for taking their time, making credible threats of systematically disbanding the inclusion criteria, and not desisting from demonstrating ideas recognized as wrongful.

Trolls don't have any arbitrary type of elaboration, instead there are more genuine communication problems: Hanlon's razor, but stupidity cannot be equated to malice if tends to be amendable. It has to be cautioned that no heavy editor in his first two years has not published, formatted, or formulated things he would later retract; usually not patterns but coverage gaps in the recognition of edge cases by all editors which are only filled by making analogies enabled by experience—no subjective fault here. Fay Freak (talk) 13:20, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

• Anyway, WF is tempted to go on another solidarity strike if Mysteryroom remains blocked. Worm spail (talk) 14:02, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

IDK what to say but this is the position where I probably agree with -sche. God bless him/her. Didn't hate Mysteryroom either, but I did hate the whole "you are attacking me for political reasons" when it was just for making [zippy (abuse filter)] entries. Merry Christmas. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:1D1B:AB3B:282E:BA18 09:02, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

Brittle: unfriendly

As in She had a brittle quality (to/about her) that I didn't like, that is lacking personal warmth. JMGN (talk) 05:45, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

Two new blocks in the last 72 hours

I've just been blocked from Talk pages and all Discussion rooms, referring to your last report.

However, that report was not about any fora of the community but main edits in entries.

Is this a misunderstanding? JMGN (talk) 19:19, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Re "referring to [my] report": you might already know this part, but in case you don't, I'll clarify that when an admin goes to block—or modify a block of—a user who is already blocked, the existing block summary is pre-filled into the 'block reason' field, and the admin can then add to (or remove) it if they want, so Benwing simply added his rationale to the end of the one I'd written (my block was based on my rationale, and his block was based on his rationale), and it looks like Fenakhay felt that at that point the expanded summary adequately explained the reason for his own further extension of the block to the Wiktionary namespace, particularly the part of the block summary that says "user is spamming existing talk pages and creating new talk pages with irrelevant info", since you also started making lots of questionable and questionably-placed posts to multiple Wiktionary:-namespace fora.

For my part, I've been reluctant to block you, because (as I said in the Tea Room) I do think you're trying to improve the dictionary, and your edits often do highlight things that need to be fixed, but your very numerous mainspace edits required a lot of monitoring and fixing up (or sometimes simply undoing), and your Talk: and Wiktionary: posts are very numerous and can be somewhat impenetrable (terse, vague, hard or time-consuming to make sense of), and are only sometimes correct/actionable. (You also sometimes get weirdly snarky at people who are taking the time to monitor your edits, for which reason I was considering making your block a total—rather than namespace-specific—block, by the way.) So while I've tried to be patient and make time to go through your contributions and work out what you were getting at (in the Tea Room, I mentioned the example that you added charged and tense as synonyms even though the senses in the entries at the time were not synonymous, and I had to take the time to work out that although the edit on its face—and when considered with regard to the state of the entries at the time—was wrong, both entries were missing senses; likewise, it took a bit but people worked out what you were trying to highlight here), I don't have that much time, and I do understand that other people find the volume and (sometimes) impenetrability of your posts annoying or spammy and don't feel that the (time-)cost is worth the benefit. I think you would benefit from working on social and communication skills, both getting better at identifying and communicating to other people what improvements are actually needed (e.g., if two entries are not listed as synonyms, and also don't currently list any senses by which they would be synonymous, then simply linking them as synonyms is not the right move; also, discerning that something like *vic- in the context of vice or *Michael- in the context of Michaels is not something we're going to add), but I know that's easier said than done; it might also be time to conclude that making so many posts clearly annoys people and you should make fewer. - -sche (discuss) 21:41, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Indeed, because you started making lots of posts to user talk pages as soon as you were restricted from Wiktionary: pages, I have simply raised the block to a full block. - -sche (discuss) 21:52, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Dead Man's SHoes

Hiya, how come you reversed my page move, please.Halbared (talk) 18:10, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

@Halbared: Wiktionary is a descriptive dictionary based on usage, so we use the spelling that is or has been in actual use. Unlike Wikipedia and many other dictionaries, we don't automatically capitalize our entry names: Polish isn't the same as polish. In general, it's not a good idea to "correct" things when you don't know the local rules and standards. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:39, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for the response. The question relates to the English idiom, 'Dead man's shoes.' Not 'Dead mens shoes.' Capitalisation was not my intent.Halbared (talk) 19:44, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

dead men's shoes seems to be overall more common, although dead man's shoes has lately almost matched it. The citation in the entry does not give the impression that this is a singular vs plural issue, either (where one such position would be "a dead man's shoes" and only multiple would be "dead men's shoes"; instead, it seems that dead man's shoes would be an alt form), but if there is evidence to suggest that it is usual to make such a distinction, it would be helpful to bring that evidence up for discussion. :) - -sche (discuss) 20:20, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

The point being that this is too complicated to justify a page move without discussion. That's why we have an entire forum (WT:RFM) for such things. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:39, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

dummy out

Re your edit summary from the 28th of November 2020 ("is this a calque rather than a borrowing? English has no problem borrowing Japanese words with the vowels intact, so the fact that this was re-rendered into the English word suggests calque...?")

No, I don't think so. When English words are recognised, it's not uncommon for that to be reflected in the forms of the words when they are borrowed (back) into English. See, for example, cosplay (rather than "kosupure"), kogal (rather than "kogyaru"—contrast with gyaru), galge (rather than "gyaruge"), bodycon (rather than "bodikon"), et cetera.

...I know you wrote that years ago, but I thought that it might be worth responding to anyway. Tharthan (talk) 00:45, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Ah, but perhaps it is instead that those words too are calques: we define calque as a word or phrase in a language formed by word-for-word or morpheme-by-morpheme translation of a word in another language, and to me it seems that those words translate their morphemes, in direct contrast to e.g. kyabakura, which simply borrows the Japanese word. To me, borrowing kyabakura instead of calquing it [back] to cabaret club, and calquing light novel instead of borrowing *raito noberu, seem like distinct phenomena. (You and Meta and I briefly talked about this at the time.) Of course, there are always edge cases, like English borrowing Latin -us adjectives as -ous, as was discussed in the recent discussion about "adapted borrowing" vs "unadapted borrowing"; I suppose another possibility is that kyabakura vs light novel could be considered unadapted vs adapted borrowing. Should we raise this in the Beer parlour and see if anyone else wants to weigh in? - -sche (discuss) 02:16, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Yes. I've taken the liberty of doing so. Tharthan (talk) 22:00, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

derisory

I noticed that you removed a sense of derisory here: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=derisory&diff=prev&oldid=75653510 Was it done on purpose? If so, why? I note that Collins gives "1. subject to or worthy of derision, esp because of being ridiculously small or inadequate 2. another word for: derisive" where derisive is defined as "showing or characterized by derision; mocking; scornful" and the SOED gives "1. derisive..." where derisive is defined as "Scoffing, mocking". So I would expect the sense you removed to be considered fine. Lemme know if there's something I'm missing. I'm happy to re-add that sense if that helps. Cheers Tom dl (talk) 13:23, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Good catch: I merged the definition "derisive ("deserving or provoking derision or ridicule"); laughable; ridiculous" into "Laughably small or inadequate", because—like some of the dictionaries you quote—I didn't think "laughable, ridiculous" and "laughable because of being small or inadequate" seemed like distinct definitions — though I will now rewrite the definition to put the more general of those things, "laughable in general", first, ahead of "laughable because small", and if anyone things these should be split with "laughable because small" being a subsense of "laughable", that's another possibility which could be discussed. "Showing or characterized by derision; mocking; scornful" is a fundamentally different definition than "laughable; ridiculous". I had just happened upon the entry and saw that the two definitions present seemed redundant, and didn't check whether other definitions were missing. I'm glad you did! :) I've taken a stab at adding the "mocking" definition. Let me know or edit the entry if you identify anything that can be improved. - -sche (discuss) 17:54, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Nice! Nope, I don't think I can improve that. Thanks for addressing so quickly. Tom dl (talk) 22:54, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Tree

Referencing this edit tree is infact more common, based on the only survey on it as far as I know, but if there is another survey, I would like to see it. BirchTainer (talk) 05:29, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

Interesting; thank you; I'll look more into this when I can, with an eye to perhaps starting a BP discussion to see if there's appetite for changing anything. (I know that some of Lindsey's analyses have ... not met with acceptance here as changes to GenAm or RP, but one idea I've mulled, not just with regard to this but also ʌ vs ə, etc, is to make a sandbox copy of Appendix:English pronunciation and invite people to help mock up what a column for "New GenAm" [or whatever better name anyone can come up with] as contrasted with GenAm — a la SSBE as contrasted with RP — would look like.) - -sche (discuss) 08:11, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

secondary stress

Hi,

Re. this edit, the common convention is that US dictionaries mark words like 'mangosteen' and 'battleship' with secondary stress (e.g. MW, Random House) whereas UK dictionaries do not (e.g. OED, Cambridge). Thus whether Wiktionary show secondary stress or not depends on which dictionary we used -- there's no actual difference in pronunciation.

Also, when there are two stressed syllables in a word, the first is marked as having secondary stress in both US and UK dictionaries. I don't think I've ever seen a case where a full unstressed vowel is marked as having 2ary stress when it occurs before a stressed syllable. AFAIK the only time that occurs is when people distinguish four degrees of stress (in which case full unstressed vowels are marked as having 3ary stress), which AFAIK no popular dictionary does. kwami (talk) 00:09, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

AFAICT dictionaries mark battlefield as having secondary stress to mean it has secondary stress, not just to mean that it has a full vowel; I get this impression because AFAICT they do not mark non-stressed full vowels as having secondary stress. I am not sure if you and I are agreeing or disagreeing, because you seem to say the same thing, that you too have not seen a full unstressed vowel is marked as having secondary stress, at least in some environments. Merriam-Webster is the only dictionary I can find that sort-of marks the o of mango as having secondary stress, and they do so only in parentheses and somewhat irrelevantly in that they are not using IPA anyway; they do not mark the second /i/ in e.g. Luigi with a secondary stress marker. The academic discussion of whether English actually has secondary stress seems to exist at a level beyond what the appendix is concerned with, just explaining what the symbols are. - -sche (discuss) 04:27, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

Yes, but whether we mark 2ary stress in 'battleship' is arbitrary: It doesn't indicate a difference in pronunciation, which our key now claims it does. That is, /ˈbætəlˌʃɪp/ = /ˈbætəlʃɪp/, with just a different convention of notation, but according to our key, /ˈbætəlˌʃɪp/ != /ˈbætəlʃɪp/. There is no pattern to when we mark 2ary stress in such words and when we do not, and by pretending there's an actual phonetic or phonemic difference we're misleading the reader.

AFAICT 'Luigi' isn't marked for 2ary stress because you need a syllable in between to mark the imaginary 2ary stress -- though MW isn't entirely consistent, as you found with 'mango', unless maybe they're trying to indicate a difference in vowel reduction? Their key isn't very clear. kwami (talk) 06:54, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

Removing a language code

When you removed "slq" from Module:languages/data/3/s, this caused an error in the family trees. For future reference, you would have needed to search for "slq" in the module namespace and remove it from the other modules. When I did that, I got 23 results, but most of those were user modules and Module:data consistency check running on documentation pages (side note: if you see the code you just removed listed by the data consistency check, assume something is wrong). I ended up removing the code from Module:languages/data/3/s/extra, Module:languages/canonical names and Module:languages/code to canonical name, then running the app that updates the json modules.

Over a decade of patrolling CAT:E has taught me that I don't know how all the modules work (no one really does), and I use various indirect methods of checking and double-checking both before and after I do anything. The only way I figured out what was wrong in this case was by going through the transclusion list of a module documentation page that was in CAT:E and looking at the revision histories for the most recent edits. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:33, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

Error

Your rollback here appears to be an error and marked as a minor edit. Howardcorn33 (talk) 18:11, 17 December 2025 (UTC)

Hi. I have replied at your talk page. This does however make me wonder if the rollback function should — or even could, as I think it's a mediawiki function and not a local gadget (or at least, "rollbacker" is a mediawiki user group rather than something Wiktionarians created) — be tweaked to not mark rollbacks as minor edits. - -sche (discuss) 18:13, 17 December 2025 (UTC)

Re "theyfab"

Hi hi! I noticed you'd edited the main theyfab page recently and since there'd sorta been some dispute on that page (specifically related to the Citations page and its history), I figured I might gently ask your input / keeping an eye on as someone who edits far more frequently than I do and might find dealing with it less frustrating (totally optional on your part ofc, but just kind of a "I'm sorta burnt out with this stuff and think this would benefit from detailed outside look" statement). I've been sorting through a lot of LGBT term etymologies recently in an effort to improve our chronology of their origin (particularly re nonbinary pages, of the most immediate personal interest to me), but none have generated such intensity as this one (perhaps because other derogations like like transtrender have more straightforward origins) and I'm a bit at a loss re what to do as I'm unused to this.

Basically, as you noticed, there are uses of the post on other social media websites which seem to clearly predate its use on 4chan. However, because the term sounds vaguely 4chanesque, and bc 4chan does ofc get ahold of most bigoted terms eventually, a popular social media narrative has sprung up that it must have come from there, or for its use to essentially be attributable to it. This has resulted in a lot of drive-by editing visible in the page history where someone comes and deletes material re citations, e.g. from Citations:theyfab, because it's thought not to emphasize it's "a 4chan term" enough—which has currently affected that page. (I am choosing to chalk it up to coincidence and AGF but I find the similarity between the usernames Velvexations [previously Velvetvexation] and Redtreason rather puzzling and have wondered if there's some offsite place that's drawing people to the entry.) I obviously don't want to edit war over this stuff, and engaging the deleters thus far has felt fruitless to the point I'm not sure how useful it is. But I do think it is important we don't get people axing half the entry's contextualized quotes because not 4chan enough, and somewhat defer to other people who seem reasonable as to how to accomplish the specifics.

(For reference, since you were querying the relevance of "tafab" earlier I get into in this comment here, but basically if you look at the context of the first use of theyfab it does seem to strongly imply a specific person to my read. I have an informed guess as to who, and following that lead pointed me to a lot of instances of tafab, which I had been unfamiliar with prior, but seemed to be used in a very similar way. Given, that's all a bit in the weeds to the point I was inclined to be circumspect about relating it myself, so I leave how tafab material specifically is presented up to discussion. I'm generally cautious about creating new pages for internet terms unless I know a term to have entered print sources as well as net, but there were several other uses of tafab on social media like Twitter/FB post-first use of theyfab that might be useful if tafab were to be presented in a different separate entry as a alternate option to merged citations page.)

Thanks for any input/advice/monitoring and apologies for any longwindedness on my part.

(PS: I had a lot of fun scrolling through your user page and appreciate your extensive contributions to lexicography; perhaps I will collect my developing entry ideas on my page too. I rather like the amusingly dour sound of "morigerate"...) WeatherElectric (talk) 04:56, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

Please stop reverting

The article should have a real picture. The editor 2345 (talk) 03:41, 10 January 2026 (UTC)

I changed the picture at vulva to the same one as the one at w:Vulva. I think there’s a good (educational) reason the first picture at WP is of the real thing, which I bet that community has discussed extensively. — Polomo ⟨⁠ ⁠oi!⁠ ⁠⟩ · 19:22, 10 January 2026 (UTC)

OK. I was responding to the fact that the entry had had a diagram, The editor 2345 changed it a little while ago to a real picture, and another editor then removed the real picture (leaving no image), so I changed it back to the image it had had before all that back and forth. If y'all prefer a photo I will leave it be. - -sche (discuss) 01:35, 11 January 2026 (UTC)

him

Hi,

I wonder about your edit here. 'Him' isn't uncommon, except in writing: in speech, it's probably majority usage. Or at least where people use 'he', they tend to use it even in object position as a hypercorrection. We're starting to see it more in writing too, as people increasingly write the way they speak. kwami (talk) 06:13, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

In the corpora I have been able to find to check, like Ngrams, it seems to be downright rare. If it's secretly actually very common somewhere else, can we find evidence of that? It's believable, but since the evidence I can find points so strongly in the other direction, it's [citation needed] in my opinion. The pronoun itself is common, if this is a common use of it, maybe there are linguistics papers about how often it occurs in speech, that would let us write a usage note? - -sche (discuss) 06:29, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

I'm sure we can. Ngrams wouldn't help much because it's based on written language. In speech, I notice that very few people control case "correctly" when there's a conjunction (usually 'and'). Either they use the object case regardless of syntactic role, or they use the subject case regardless of syntactic role -- the latter is a hypercorrection. What they don't control is the distinction, which has been lost from spoken English at least in the US. It has to be taught in school because it's no longer natural for people, and even then it's only picked up by some. This isn't a recent phenomenon, but I don't know how old it is -- at least a century, maybe several. kwami (talk) 06:36, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

(There was a linguistics blog that used to cover stuff like this, but I've lost my bookmarks and forget what it was called.) kwami (talk) 06:40, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

Here's a posting on the nominative hypercorrection.[2] Linguist Arnold Zwicky has been writing on pronoun case with conjunctions for decades; some other posts are linked at bottom. But the reason for all the posts is from how extremely common using the "wrong" case is. kwami (talk) 07:15, 16 January 2026 (UTC)