User talk:Hippietrail

Yiddish entries

Hey mate, I see you have added some Yiddish words here and there. Do you by any chance know any Yiddish speaker who knows the etymology of words? I’m not quite sure what’s the etymology of shkoyekh.

It's a colloquial way of saying יישר כּוח (yasher koyekh). —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:31, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Hey there. Usually when I make an entry for a language that's not one of my current main ones, it's just one that caught my eye as a redlink in a translation table, and usually I don't know any more about them. Occasionally I might get them from Wikipedia's links to other languages, but I'd typically only put those in a translation table rather than an entry. — hippietrail (talk) 00:31, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

“...a note as to which form they are”

<< inflected forms should have a note as to which form they are >>

Hi, Hippietrail,

While the verbs حسن ɧásuna and حسن ɧássana are inflected, they are actually the citation forms. Arabic, like Bulgarian and Greek, does not use infinitives (or rather, the Arabic infinitive functions only as a noun or adverb, and is a derived form). The citation form of an Arabic verb is usually the 3rd-person masculine singular perfective (which is the simplest form of any verb).

The listing for حسن (ɧ-s-n) already existed, and I just added to it. Its author had listed only the simple intransitive ɧásuna ("he/it was beautiful"), but the very same spelling (حسن) may be read with different vowel patterns for different meanings.

Classical Arabic has no verb tenses, but employs aspect instead (perfective and imperfective). The verb ɧásuna is a perfective of Stem I, and although the perfective is commonly considered the past tense, in fact it can translate to other tenses as well (such as the future perfective).

Most Arabic-English dictionaries give the English infinitive as the equivalent of these verbs, and that's what I would have done, too (to be beautiful, to be good, to improve), except that the original page used "has been beautiful" instead.

So my question is, what should be done with these Arabic verbs? Since Arabs rarely write the vowels or shaddas, the triliteral root حسن, depending on context, could be read as ɧásuna, ɧássana, ɧúsnun, ɧúsnu, ɧásan or ɧásanu (among others). I could simply list the English infinitive (حسن = ɧásuna = "to be good") as the meaning, or I could include all sorts of other information, such as:

1. . حَسُنَ (ɧásuna) v.i., Stem I, 3rd masc. sg. perfective, "was beautiful, was good"
2. . حَسَّنَ (ɧássana) v.t., Stem II, 3rd masc. sg. perfective, "improved"

--Stephen 10:21, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Hi Stephen. Thanks for such an informative response! I was aware of Arabic's aspects rather than our cases and I should've been prepared for the citation form being in the perfect but this fact I didn't remember. The translations into English past forms was what threw me. I think it's best to give the gloss in the English infinitive - all glosses should be in the natural citation form for each language. I don't know if it's worth stating for every single Arabic verb that it's the perfective but just as for English I include also the 3rd person present, the past (tense and participle if they differ), and present participle/gerund; we should also include the other forms of the Arabic verbs. Though if there are many forms it may become unweildy. I've never learned the forms of Arabic verbs though since Arabic teaching materials always seem to dive straight into derivation and leave inflection till later on. Putting all the words which differ only in vowels/shaddas/etc on the same page is the right thing to do. I think we should also include sukuns though.

Thanks again. I hope you can add more! — Hippietrail 13:34, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

/* Arabic forms */

Hi Hippietrail,

The Arabic verb is quite complex, with (minimally) over 120 forms. There are the active and the passive paradigms, which include the perfect, imperfect, subjunctive, jussive, energetic and (in the case of active verbs) the imperative (not to mention the infinitives, participles, and so on). There are different forms for masculine and feminine, as well as for singular, dual and plural. This alone amounts to some 120 verb forms.

Then there are the different form classes (Stems I through XI). Add to this the transitive and intransitive vowel patterns and the different kinds of verbs (such as weak verbs, hollow verbs middle W, hollow verbs middle Y, verbs first W and Y, doubled verbs, verbs first hamza, verbs middle hamza, verbs third hamza, verbs third W, verbs third Y, and so on) and they become a nightmare.

And that's not all...Arabic verbs also take direct and indirect object pronouns as suffixes, and conjunctions, prepositions and other particles as prefixes. For instance, كَتَبَ kátaba ("he wrote," 3rd masc. sg. perfective), but لِتَكْتُبَانِّهُولْهُمَا litaktubaannihúlhumaa ("you two [females] shall write it to those two [females]," 3rd feminine dual energetic, masc. sg. direct object, fem. dual indirect object). Most of this applies to the other stems, too, such as: خَلَفَ khálafa "remain behind" (stem I); خَلَّفَ khállafa "leave behind" (stem II); خَالَفَ kháalafa "oppose" (stem III); أخْلَفَ 'akhláfa "make lag behind" (stem IV); تَخَلَّفَ takhállafa "hold back from" (stem V); تَخَالَفَ takháalafa "disagree with" (stem VI); إنْخَلَفَ 'inkhálafa "be left behind" (stem VII); إخْتَلَفَ 'ikhtálafa "differ" (stem VIII); إسْتَخْلَفَ 'istákhlafa "take in exchange" (stem X).

As for sukun, yes, we should use it where appropriate. In fact, I did use it in حُسْنٌ (ɧúsnun...technically, this is the infinitive of the verb حَسُنَ ɧásuna, but most people don't recognize it as such, since it only functions as a noun, never as a verb). In the case of the adjective حَسَن (ɧásan), however, I didn't put a sukun over the final nun because in some environments a vowel will appear there... حسن الوجه ɧásanu l-wájih (pretty face, good-looking). So there are cases where a vowel may not exist (and these need sukun), and other cases where vowels seem to come and go.

--Stephen 12:54, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

---

Hi,

I've tried to disentangle US usage of youse as best I can, but I understand that Australian uses either youse, yous or both. Could you have a look and file off any septocentric rough edges? Thanks -dmh 05:54, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC) (-dmh)

---

Käse vs. Kas

Hello / Hallo / Grüezi, May I ask why you are so keen on keeping the Bavarian word "Kas" (cheese) in the list of translations? I hope you know that Bavarian is not a language on its own. No one in Germany claims that it'd be one, there's nothing like a standard way of writing Bavarian and you cannot find the word "Kas" in the dictionary. I therefore request the removal of the word "Kas", because it's just silly to keep it there. If it stays, we should also include the Swiss German "Kchääise", the Saxon "Gäse" and all the other subtle dialectal forms of the German language. What about other language? I bet there's an English dialect that says "Chayse" or something like that.

Kind regards, — André aka N-true 23:52, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The onus is on you to show that Bavarian is not a language since both Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=BAR) and Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro-Bavarian) hold that it is a language with dialects of its own. When you convince at least one of these sites that their view is "silly" and they remove their article, you will have convinced me.

We certainly do support English dialects. I have added quite a few Australian words and the odd New Zealand, South African, Canadian, Indian, British, and American word as well. If the spellings you cite for other German dialects are usual I agree they should also be included. English is a written language and has standardised spelling in which "cheese" is the recognised spelling no matter how it is pronounced. Most of the world's languages do not have standardised spelling, neither do many European "dialects", that does not mean they ought not be referenced in this dictionary. Quite an array of dialect dictionaries are published in Europe and, since Wiktionary aims to included all words of all languages, we must include those words too. — Hippietrail 11:45, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Independent of whether Bavarian is to be classified as a language or a dialect, it isn't codified, ie has no standard way of rendering words in (in this case) the Latin Alphabet. Besides "Kas" you will also find the versions "Kaas" and "Käs". A solution could be writing dialect words in IPA (would certainly require some discussion). Ncik 15 Mar 2005

Derived terms, Related terms, See also

After having seen your latest edit of datum I wondered once again what kind of terms go under which of the three headings "Derived terms", "Related terms", and "See also". I never managed to comprehend the underlying classification principle from the entries themselves, and Wiktionary:Layout_entry_explaind is not very helpful either. Ncik 05 Mar 2005

Hi Ncik. If you were brave enough to dig through archives Beer parlour stuff from ages ago - or possibly other places, you'd find this issue has come up a few times. I really don't like the current labels for these sections but nobody's come up with anything better. "Derived" is a bit ambiguous because it can be interpreted in an etymological sense or a morphological sense. Words such as "data" and "datum" are etymologically related. In Latin they are also morphologically related since Latin had a rule to turn "-um" singulars into "-a" plurals. English does not have this rule but merely borrowed both forms as-is from Latin.

The reason we have three sections ==Derived==, ==Related==, and ==See also== is for different relationships between words which are handy both for people browsing their own or a foreign language, and for the compilers of the dictionary trying to think of words which don't yet have entries.

We want a way to connect words which are derived by derivational morphemes. This means "drive" -> "driver", "correct" -> "correction", etc. In many print dictionaries this has been done by squeezing derived forms into the main entry, or by having them nearby due to alphabetisation and the fact that print dictionaries don't have one entry per page like we do. So for we've called this relationship ===Derived terms===

We want a way to connect words wich are related in other ways etymologically or historically. For instance, a derived form like "driver" should point back to "drive", "First World" and "Third World" were invented together under one principle and are hence related. Basically any way where two words or phrases share parts for some interesting reason under than plain old derivational morphology. The current name for such relationships is ===Related terms===

Finally, many words and phrases don't share any common parts or any etymology and may not be quite either synonyms or antonyms but still ought to be linked to each other. Examples might be "north", "south", "east", and "west"; or "rap" and "hip-hop". We're calling this relationship ===See also===

One other thing to think of is that usually for ===Derived=== and ===Related===, a derived term is derived from a specific sense. For example, "driver" is derived from the verb "to drive" and not the noun as in "to go for a drive". There must be much better examples though! Sometimes it's not so easy to figure out if a derived form came from a noun sense or verb sense etc. When we do know, we list the derived term under the correct sense. When we don't know, we put it in a level-3 heading below all the senses. For ===See also=== we've generally only used the level-3 heading at the bottom and things such as Wikipedia links and links to other websites go in there as well. Sometimes however it's pretty clear that a ===See also=== only related to one sense and in that case we can make a level-4 section under the given sense.

I hope this sheds some light and you can see some logic. The only reason I haven't written this in "Entry layout explained" is because I'm not satisfied with my writing. It tends to be a bit rambling. If you'd like to tidy up what I've said and add it to "Entry layout explained" that will surely be helpful to everybody. — Hippietrail 10:49, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

template:rfd

Hello Hippietrail,

A while back, I changed the request for deletion template, to add a link to the appropriate section of RFD. I also added a link on the period that follows it for helping create new rfd sections. When I made the change, it did not garner much discussion. But I seem to recall three or four newcomers now who were appreciative that the link took them to the correct place.

For that to work correctly though, changes like this could problably be broken on to separate lines instead?

---

Also, I would appreciate your comments on User: Connel MacKenzie/monobook.js which I modelled partially off your code, but mainly off the Russian Wikipedia's.

Thanks!

--Connel MacKenzie [+] (contribs) 23:58, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

IPA in US dictionaries

Hi again,

I was just reading your discussion with Primetime about IPA transcriptions and how US dictionaries do not use them. I was in a bookshop the other day and was browsing the latest version of Collins excellent French-English English-French dictionary and noticed that it now gives IPA transcriptions for both RP and US pronunciation. Recently I was at a friend's house and looked in his Webster's collegiate dictionary. In the extensive section on pronunciation, IPA equivalents of some of the symbols used by that dictionary are given.

While these are not American dictionaries, these do provide useful information, not least possible IPA equivalents of "AHD" (which I find ambiguous: sometimes IPA ɒ is equivalent to AHD's ŏ symbol and sometimes to IPA's ɑ, which would be equivalent to AHD's ä. For that reason, I tend to avoid adding US pronunciation's unless I'm quite sure they are correct or they are identical (barring accent and dialect) to the RP.

What I will do if I think of it is see whether Collins bilingual dictionary that I mentioned gives a table of RP/US equivalents in IPA, or derive these myself from a selection of pronunciations in the body of the dictionary. — Paul G 16:54, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Hi Paul. Sorry for not replying earlier. I too have seen several dictionaries which try to do both UK and US pronunciation. I think they are mostly made in Europe but I may be wrong. I have also seen this in Japanese electronic translators. My pocket Oxford English Spanish dictionary does it too but it's so quirky I'm almost certain it's been done by Brits without a complete understanind of American English. Hopefully some of the larger dictionaries do a better job. In one of my user subpages I started collecting the symbols used by various of my dictionaries. This was to get a better overview than just using one dictionary - but it's not fun work and much is missing. I guess my best advice is to check as thoroughly as you can to make sure it's a good quality and reliable source before using it. — Hippietrail 02:43, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

spanish articles requested

I've reviewed all the entries again and i've commented almost every one, without deleting as you wanted (in december), Please review it--62.175.97.149 23:44, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll start looking at it now but probably won't finish until I find a cheaper cybercafe. — Hippietrail 16:56, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Hey Hip help my enteries please asap ! thanks --130.111.98.244 21:40, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm working through the c's now but I'm in San Salvador so I can't stay here till it gets dark -- too dangerous! — Hippietrail 22:01, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

OK I've gone through all the comments in the Spanish requests now if there's any points you'd like to discuss. — Hippietrail 00:58, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Ok i'm teh same again. I've seen your corrections and i shall comment:

I'll just add a few comments as I've only just crossed the border from El Salvador to Honduras and have much to catch up with on the internet, also I don't have all of my material at hand to tell me where I found some of these odd words or spellings. — Hippietrail 21:36, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

• abejorro is OK, abejarrón NOT correct (when I say yes is to answer your question)

  I have to see where I got this from but I think I saw it again the other day.

well, i've never seen it but i'm from Spain so perhaps it's a dialectal form of abejorro

I just checked the RAE online. It says it is a synonym for abejorro but doesn't restrict it to any specific places.

• achaque(s) is correct, acheque NOT
• amañado has nothing to do with comfortable. For example, elections can be amañadas if president manipulates votes, ok?

  My Diccionario Oxoford Pocket Edición Latinoamericana →ISBN has: amañado adj comfortable amañador adj pleasant — how can you be sure these are "wrong" and not just extra senses used in the Americas?

perhaps yes

Online RAE's entry for amañar has sense #4 and #6 which might fit "comfortable"

• amarillento (new) means "a bit yellow", for example paper when is old
• apelontonado doesn't exist!
• I don't understand "asma" question of categories

  Wiktionary like Wikipedia uses categories for various things. A category for feminine Spanish nouns which use the masculine definite article would be a good use of them.

  great idea!

• did you understand bienaventuranza?

  No I'm afraid I didn't understand it. Could it be sermon?

  no, it's not a sermon. It's something Jesus said in the Mountain's Sermon, blessing good kind of people, he said "bienaventurados los pobres, los...." and that group of sentences are bienaventuranzas

  Perhaps it is beatitude? Well, we have also the word beatitud and it's not the same

• brasa is a kind of burning rock that remains afer fire and before ashes, it's red and really hot

  I understand. I'm just not sure if the best English translation is "coal", "hot coal", "ember", or all of them.

Ok

• carnoso is an adjective, comes from carne (flesh)

  Could it then be fleshy? Yes, i think so

• ciénaga is a place with mud, water, vegetation, dirty and foggy (where Shrek lives!)

  I understand. I think it's marsh or swamp or bog in English, or perhaps all three.

• I don't understand the question of cimientos
• colmillo is fang, yes

  But is it also tusk since in English elephants do not have fangs but dogs and vampires do.

OK

My pocket dictionary says it is also canine, a type of tooth people have besides molars and incisors. //We have also canino, it's the technical name for it, colmillo is the usual name

• cotilleo is something you gossip about

  Is it a synonym for chisme? yes more or less, but chisme is just what you say, cotilleo can be the thing said and the act of saying

• curtida is OK

  I can find this spelled in 3 or 4 ways on the Internet but this spelling seems to best match how I heard people saying it every day in El Salvador.

  curtida is fenminim form os curtido, they are adjectives

  I have also seen cortida and maybe even cortido. I understand that the ending can be either -a or -o when it's an adjective, but when it's a noun it is generally just one or the other.

• empecinarse is to try really hard even it's obvious that is nosense keep trying
• hava= i think it's a mistake

  I think so too but it can stay there until we can check it against another edition.

• lagaña/legaña = ypu were right, both correct but now lagaña less used
• lona, I don't understand what you mean
• llavero, yes a keyring (i learn, that's OK!)
• piadoso, yes, an adjective
• sede /sed, what do you mean?

  I don't mean the words are related in any way at all. But if the plural of sed is sedes and the plural of sede is sedes, that is an interesting point worth keeping in mind.

OK!!

Can you confirm that sedes is the plural of both words? YES!! but people don't say sedes /thristies/ much, as in English

I hope I've been helpful. You can communicate with me here or in discussion of requested spanish! Ty for your hard work!--62.175.97.149 20:39, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Yes you have! Thanks also for your hard work! — Hippietrail 21:36, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

we continue in touch...

well, perhaps we should do something...create entries, project or what? any suggestions?--62.175.97.149 18:44, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

again me and spanish

ok, commments for your nwew words:

• agobia is a verbal form, comes from agobiar, means to bother, to annoy, to overwhelm, it's colloquial but very used

  with ones like this where I haven't marked the word as another part-of-speech, it would be best just to change the word to its dictionary form. I don't do it myself because you never can guess when a new unfamiliar word turns out to be irregular. would you say it's a synonyms of molestar?

  yes, but more colloquial

• alcaldesa is feminin for alcalde, major

  I was surprised to see that the RAE has a separate entry rather than their usual "alcalde/-esa". (by the way, don't you mean mayor - or is there two meanings?)

  yes, mayor, sorry (who rules a town). It has separate entries because a question of masclism: before, an alcadesa was the wife of alcalde (there weren't ellected women). Now has two meanings, the more normal is alcaldesa as politician. There are a lot of old entries like this. It's a topic: mujer pública means prostitute, hombre público politician, without comments!! RAE is changing those entries, but they reflect still the dominant male view

• allanar is to make something plane and smooth, a verb

  to smoothe, to plane? i think smoothe

• almohadilla has two meanings: little almohada and the sign we use here to number definitions (altgraph +3)

  # also has different names in English. I think I read it in a discussion of words which differ between Spain and Venezuela.

• archivo is a file

  I know the words in Spain and parts of Latin America for "file" and "archive" differ and may even be ambiguous.

• aseo means toilet or what you do to wash yourself in morning

  Does it mean the room or the fixture? Which of these might be synonyms in various parts of the world: servicios, baño, etc?

  difficult question: baño, servicio, servicios, aseo, water, reservado, excusado, all them names for places, it depends on register and places. Aseo means both room and fixture

• azafata = hostess, in a plane she helps you serving food and so on. Old sense = in medieval ages, the woman who helped the queen, personal maid

  handmaid? that old, in planes I thinl is stewardess or something like this, no?

  stewardess on a plane, handmaid might be the right word for the woman who helped the queen

• buhonero kind of old job

  This is one of the interesting/wierd ones I mentioned. Is it related to buho, owl? yes

• calcomanía = what children stick on their hands, they get them from sweets and represents famous pictures or cartoons, it goes out wuth water

  words I can think of are sticker and decal but also temporary tattoo, but there might be something more specific

• casco = helmet, also the horse's feet

  hoof? yes

• catedráticos = major professors of university, plural

  this is one you could safely change to a singular. i didn't do it because for all I know it might've been like rascacielos and had the same form for singular and plural

  no it's catedrático and catedráticos

  in that case you should really just go ahead and change it to catedrático

• ciñe, form of verb ceñir, irregular

  in this case I would add the dictionary form but keep this one for two reasons: 1) it is irregular and 2) it needs a "disambig see also" added to its page and that of cine

  cine and ciñe nothing to do!!

  i didn't say they have anything to do with each other. at the top of pages for words which have near-homographs differing only in accents and diacritics we put a section at the top showing the other similarly spelled words to make it easier for people to find them who have difficulty typing those characters

• déficits = when state or companies owe money they have deficit, the opposite is superávit
• descastada, adjective, literally "out of casta" casta can mean family, social class etc. Used to talk about women who don't act as they are expected because of their education and money, very formal

  english has the word caste but not used the way you describe

• empeño many senses, form of empeñarse and also casa de empeño

  I think the english words would be pawn shop, to pawn, to hock, etc

• enfadado = angry, that's easy

  I think i've been using engañado in my travels. are they synonyms?

  not in normal conversation. engañar somebody means to trick, to say lies, to abuse...

• fichero = also file

  in the same sense as archivo? only on computers or also in an office? both

• forro = folder

  only on computers or also in an office? on a computer would it also cover directory? forro is just for clothes!!! perhaps folder isn't correct. forro it's the inside part of some clothes, like coats, hats. Its softer than the outside par

  ah, it's the lining

• francofonía = all the places where french is spoken

  how does this differ from francohablante?

francohablante is the person, francofonía refers to places. For example you can say "Camerún pertenece a la francofonía"

• frigorífico = fridge

  i'm used to refrigidor / refrigidora / refri

  synonims, thes more used in America, the other in Spain

• golosina is sweet but not pastel, they are lollypops, candies, mellows...

  so the same as dulces? RAE says "a sweet manjar". i've only seen this word used in honduras so far and i'm pretty sure those shops sell cakes and other treats but i haven't been into one yet

  golosinas can be dulces or not. Golosinas are something special, like for kids or adults who think they deserve a good moment

  treat might be a good translation then

• guisado = comes from guiso, kind of way of cooking

  is it a specific way? fried, boiled, baked, roasted, grilled, steamed, etc? yes, a specific way

  can you describe the specific way at all?

• habichuela = american form of judía blanca, bean

  i think it's a green bean rather than a frijol, right?

• Iberoamérica = american countires speaking Spanish or Portugueses, proper noun
• Latin America? Is it a synonym for latinoamerica? i saw it in a honduran newspaper where it began with a lowercase "i"

  well, thats politics: Iberomérica, Latinoamérica, Sudamérica, Hispanoamérica... different connotations, you can have big quarrels becsaue of this

  for instance, would French Guiana be included since it's in South America but the people there speak French?

• jalisciense = people from Jalisco
• liviano = light, not heavy, like feathers, formal

  Is ligero a synonym? yes but liviano more formal

• llantera = act of crying a lot

  here in honduras it seems to be a place that sells llantas. are you confusing llanto? llantera = act of llanto, yes, didn't know also place of llanta, may be just American

• rasca = verbal form of rascar
• récord = mark, record, same in english

  but not a vinyl record that you used to listen to on a record player right? no, that's a disco

• regidor = edile, political man of departamentos or towns

  I don't know edile - is it spanish? Regidor is under alcalde or the head of a departamento, it depends on the place, edile French origin, edil in Spanish, all politic honours

• repostería = the art of make cakes and so on

  here in honduras it seems to be also a place that sells them, though in mexico such a place would be called a pastelería

pastelería also in spanish

• trompa = 2 things, the nose of elephant and colloquially to be drunk
• a trunk? no idea

• It would be best if you could put such glosses or descriptions straight into the requests file, but try to leave out personal opinions that readers besides the two of us won't be able to follow (such as "never heard of it"). Thanks very much again though of course!

You mix very formal words with very common ones, perhaps we could start wuth basic words and then go ahead, what do you think? how could we work? i can explain words if you make entries--62.175.97.149 09:44, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

I add words as I find them. When I'm in a new (Spanish-speaking) place, I'm always looking for interesting new words, especially ones that might be local. I also look for nouns ending in -ería, and words for people from particular places ending in -(t)eco and -eño. I also browse both the English and Spanish sides of my pocket dictionary for words I don't know or words I know only in English. I also read in Spanish novels and newspapers, looking for words which look old-fashioned, slang, local, or just plain weird.

You may also like to look at the few words I just added to the Catalan requests page. They're all from one or two pages of one book - not very inspired. — Hippietrail 17:27, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

well, when do we start entries? i ll look for catalan now

"see" templates

For {{see}} and {{see2}} I understand their frequent use means they should be kept simple. But for multiples beyond that, perhaps we should have a single additional template that uses {{~if}} for the parameters 4-9? --Connel MacKenzie T C 20:27, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Hi Connel. I guess you a bit know more about templates than me. I'm only making the others so I can standardize any formatting/CSS stuff between them. I'll see if I have time to look at the ~if thing though. Thanks. — Hippietrail 20:31, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

e.g. {{see3}} might contain:

</nowiki>
:''See also: '' [[{{{1}}}]], or [[{{{2}}]], or [[{{{3}}}]]{{~if|{{{4}}}|, or [[{{{4}}}]]}}{{~if|{{{5}}}|, or [[{{{5}}}]]}}{{~if|{{{6}}}|, or [[{{{6}}}]]}}{{~if|{{{7}}}|, or [[{{{7}}}]]}}{{~if|{{{8}}}|, or [[{{{8}}}]]}}{{~if|{{{9}}}|, or [[{{{9}}}]]}}
</nowiki>

--Connel MacKenzie T C 21:08, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Aha I see how it works, but it would actually be too complicated to make a template that used both ~if and my fancy CSS optional serial comma )-: — Hippietrail 21:12, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree. Using ~if would be a step backwards, now that I've looked at what oyu've done. Have I mentioned that I hate seeing serial commas? --Connel MacKenzie T C 21:16, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Hehe. Then I was wise to make them turned off by default (-: By the way, are you aware of any people who really like working on our FAQs and such? I'd like to get some stuff on Wiktionary CSS into the FAQ but I won't do it myself. — Hippietrail 21:29, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

I am; I think I have loads of new FAQs. I'm also considering writing a small Wiktionary-specific CSS guide. — Vildricianus 21:36, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Also ask User:Itay. Confer WT:BP#a list of useful links. I am not good at generating documentation, nor am I good at css. --Connel MacKenzie T C 06:15, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Nice work but I think there is still a problem with the new smart code: 2-item lists have a different CSS class since the serial comma is forced into use as non-optional comma in this case. Also there seems to be extra space(s) between the final comma and final element - though this could be either a browser issue or a template compaction issue. Did you try it with all three see also list formatting options in your CSS? I'll try to do that but I'm in the middle of some other tricky things right now. Keep it up! — Hippietrail 01:45, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi. Thanks for your encouragement. I wasn't sure why this edit changed the class to "disambig-see-also-2" but see3 and others continued to use "disambig-see-also". Is it just a matter of wanting {{,}} and {{serial and}} to be italicized or is there some other reason to use the class "disambig-see-also-2" whenever there is more than one item? Rod (A. Smith) 02:05, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

No, the commas should never be italicized IMHO but even so that would be a separate and uninteresting discussion. The thing is that the semantics are slightly different for 2-element and 3+-element lists:

• 1, 2, 3; 1, 2 and 3; 1, 2, and 3
• 1, 2; 1 and 2; 1 and 2

I stated it wrong before - you'll see that whether or not serial commas are enabled, they are never used in a 2 element list so the custom CSS for that case forces the serial comma off when in the context of a disambig-see-also-2. That was the only way I could think of to do it. I tried another way and my brain melted. If you understand the problem now see what you can come up with. — Hippietrail 02:16, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Ok I got around to checking and the current see template does indeed result in "See also vän, and Van" - there should be no comma there. Try putting the CSS code for this format in your css. Maybe you can tweak see to output "disambig-see-also-2" in the 2-item case, or maybe you can find some other CSS logic that doesn't require two versions of the div class. — Hippietrail 03:43, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Now I see what you mean. Two item lists should never have commas. I don't know why I didn't understand that before. Removed the easy way. Please let me know if I've still misunderstood you. Rod (A. Smith) 03:51, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Wait. I see I still missed a case. Reworking.... Rod (A. Smith) 03:53, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

No it's still wrong. This was the complexity. Now if you have "1, 2, 3" style you see "See also vän and Van" whereas you should see "See also vän, Van". See how tricky it is? — Hippietrail 03:53, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

(My "wait" post and your "no" post collided above.) I went back to your way of using the alternate css class for 2-item lists. I believe the behavior now matches the old see2 when there is a two-item list. Please let me know if I'm still mistaken. Rod (A. Smith) 04:13, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Something seems to be wrong though, I'm seeing "See also Basic, and BASIC" even though I'm set up for "1, 2" format. — Hippietrail 04:19, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

OK. Let me duplicate the issue you're seeing. What monobook block should I grab? Rod (A. Smith) 04:25, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Ah. The missing dash. Crossing my fingers.... Rod (A. Smith) 04:27, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Well it's definitely working right for my case now - best test the other two though. — Hippietrail 04:30, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi. I was just looking at how it all works because I was thinking of doing the same for {{italbrac}} and {{italbrac-colon}}. I noticed that you've got it set up to generate HTML with a lot of comments in it. This doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Isn't there a way to set it up so that people editing the template see it all but the generated HTML is kept clean clean clean? — Hippietrail 18:51, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Although they look like HTML comments, they are actually interpreted by MediaWiki servers on the server side and stripped before rendering. See "A", and view the source of the page to see that none of the comments from {{see}} make it to the resulting page. Rod (A. Smith) 19:50, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Aha! Thanks. — Hippietrail 19:52, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Noarticletext

So you know: I did some more work with the conditional "Did you mean?" alternate-capitalization hack, and I think I got it working as intended, so it only displays the meaningful one, so we don't need your valiant "CSS stuff to avoid asking 'did you mean' for self-links" after all. —Scs 05:30, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

WT:CUSTOM

All this stuff you did is magical, sure, but I'm requesting even more magic: can you think of a way to make these things more accessible? Is it possible for you or anyone else to fix something with javascript, something like Special:Preferences, or something that can be made via a small developer intervention? —Vildricianus 21:01, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Like, having separate skins?  :-) --Connel MacKenzie T C 21:16, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

For example. Anything that doesn't require fiddling with CSS or JS is fine, as a matter of user-friendliness. —Vildricianus 18:53, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

• Sorry, I was isolated on an island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua for a few days. Without opening a gateway between the Wiktionary hackers (Connel, myself, yourself, and others?) and the actual MediaWiki hackers, there is no way for us to add features or customize besides Javascript, CSS, templates, and connecting via those to offline sites such as Connel's site where the random code is. It's true this is not user-friendly for non-hackers but there are several things we can do:
  1. We can use JS to add extra prefs pages which generate the code which can then be copied and pasted into the users's CSS and JS pages.
  2. We can coordinate a group of JS/CSS/Template hackers, possibly some of us can start hacking MediaWiki on our own machines or on a public site with CVS access for us, with another group of nonhacker Wiktionarians who can use and promote our changes to the MediaWiki devs etc, thereby opening a dialog so that when we have patches we want added to just en.wiktionary.org that we won't be ignored and won't be just 2 or 3 lonely voices
  3. There may be a lot more we can do with JS if the devs give us just the power to define a few cookies of our own - that would make possible adding JS/CSS customization directly from a new prefs page to the user's custom JS and CSS pages, among many other things.
• I think we need to continue with what we're doing, provide much more documentation and encouragement for non-hacker Wiktionarians to use our work, accept it, get used to communicating with us on improving it, help them to understand how we are held back by not having developer access to our own project, and getting such users to support our efforts on the way to either some of us becoming MediaWiki devs, or sustaining a reliable open chanel with the MediaWiki devs, or getting MediaWiki to split off to a certain degree en.wiktionary.org in some way that allows some of us to be devs just on it so that we can develop it into a dictionary-specific MediaWiki with our own extensions, etc.
• I think that's the short-term and long-term visions. By the way, this type of conversation belongs on a page where we can all talk about it and find it more easily. — Hippietrail 00:14, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
  • I strongly agree this should be in a "dev-zone" area of some sort. Scs, Rodasmith, Patrik Strivall, \Mike, Dangherous and others should be encouraged to participate. --Connel MacKenzie T C 05:24, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

ARchar templates, etc

When I examined your templates, {{ARchar}}, {{THchar}}, {{RUchar}}, {{FAchar}}, {{URchar}}, I was surprised that they (partially) work. {{RUchar}} does cause OCS characters to display on my IE6, which do not display without the template. And the others do appear in a larger font. The reason that they should not work is that they contain "font-family :inherit" and "font-size :inherit". These specifications should cancel the preceding font list and font size specifications. After staring at the templates for a while, I realized that the reason they (partially) work is that in each template you inadvertently omitted the closing semicolon. This makes the last inherit specification invalid in each template.

When I created the first of these I knew little CSS so I copied and adapted them from the IPA and IPAchar, or possibly directly from Wikipedia's IPA template. Now my CSS knowledge is a little better but it sounds like you're an expert so it would be nice if you wanted to go ahead and fix them. — Hippietrail 17:44, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

I recommend that you delete that you delete all inherit specifications from these templates -- or better yet move the styles to Mediawiki:Common.css, including "font-family /**/:inherit;" (with the hack) and no "font-size :inherit".

Since there are some issues I don't really understand fully it might be better if an expert make the changes. — Hippietrail 17:44, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

BTW, the names (with "char") seem peculiar to me. {{IPAchar}} is named that way only because {{IPA}} contains the text "IPA: ". Just a thought. --teb728 05:00, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree. We originally had IPA just like on Wikipedia, then somebody added the "IPA: " stuff to it. Then somebody else created IPAchar without that stuff. I complained at the time but nobody was interested so I grudgingly went along with it. — Hippietrail 17:44, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

OK, I deleted the inherit specifications from these templates and also {{BNchar}}, {{KSchar}}, {{KUchar}}, and {{SDchar}}. I still think changes to Mediawiki:Common.css would be better, but since I am not an admin, I can't change that myself. When I get a chance, I'll add AR, BN, FA, KS, KU, RU, SD, TH, and UR classes to my proposal in the Grease pit. --teb728 06:07, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Sorry for being so lame right now, but if you can give me exact code and instructions I can cut and paste it into MediaWiki:Common.css — Hippietrail 13:37, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

OK, I put everything toward the bottom of Wiktionary:Grease pit#Classes for support of Unicode ranges. If you want to allow non-admins to be able to change the font-sizes, you could omit the font-size declarations. And the changes to Mediawiki:Edittools is a separate but related issue. --teb728 00:52, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

I tried removing the style specifications from {{ARchar}} etc, using only the new classes, but Steven objected. It appears that contrary to my assumption, IE6 is not the only browser that needs help with fonts for Arabic style script. Steven also said that my change broke {{RUchar}}, but I don't know yet in what way. I temporarily restored the style specifications in the templates for these classes (except BN and TH, which Steven found acceptable). So it looks like you should take out the font-family /**/:inherit; lines from classes AR, BN, FA, KS, KU, SD, UR and maybe RU and/or TH. It is important that styles be defined in CSS rather than in templates because the templates override styles that a user may put in his monobook.css. --teb728 08:40, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Commonwealth POV vandal

Looking at this, I'd say we have another UK/Commonwealth POV vandal. But in particular, could you please verify this edit? Thanks in advance. --Connel MacKenzie T C 07:13, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Bureaucrat?

Since I heard the end of your journey is in sight, I figured it should be a good moment to nominate you. I've already asked Dvortygirl, but there's no reason why I shouldn't ask you as well to become a bureaucrat. It'd be much more comfortable for the community to have twice as many crats than we currently have. Because at meta, bot requests are now being refused because we are said to have two local bureaucrats.

This may then be in addition to a CheckUser nomination which is still being considered to happen somewhere in the near future. Cheers, — Vildricianus 18:05, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

I'll accept a nomination but I can't promise that I'll be around enough or even know what to do at times. But if that's acceptable, nominate away! P.S. I'm supposed to fly home tomorrow but will probably postpone it four more days. — Hippietrail 18:25, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Mm, well, Dvortygirl answered more or less the same. The thing is, bureaucrats need to be around, even though the things they need to do don't take up much time. See for yourself at User_talk:Paul_G#bot_bits - the bot flags have still not been set. Whomever we elect as a third bureaucrat, he/she needs to be around to back up such situations. — Vildricianus 18:36, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

I've nominated Dvortygirl but also mentioned you, here. Please indicate whether you formally accept a re-nomination or not. — Vildricianus 11:03, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

User:Hippietrail/IPA/English

You probably know this, but there's a nice big list at w:Pronunciation respelling for English. (Though I think I've spotted at least one error in it.) —scs 15:52, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

No, that's one I hadn't spotted so thanks. Sadly it falls into the same trap of expecting that there is only one IPA scheme used by all dictionaries. My list on the other hand is specifically to list the varying ways in which IPA is used by various dictionaries. — Hippietrail 04:45, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Disambig see also

At too, I found ''See also [[to]]'', which I removed, thinking it was added by a newbie. Since I found out it was you, I should ask whether this is the correct kind of disambig-see-also. I'd say no because there are no diacritics or capitals or the like involved, merely a different orthography which happens to cause homonymy as well. What do you think? Should we extend the use of the see also's to these kind of cases? — Vildricianus 17:41, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes it was me and your analysis is correct as far as it goes. But why not analyse this way: "what are the kinds of detectable spelling or typing mistakes that might lead a user to a wrong word?". Since the real reason to have {{see}} is to help people find the right article when they're on the wrong article and the spelling is similar, this makes sense. In this light I have been adding word pairs from the same language that only differ by presence or absence of a double letter. I've added a few English and a few Spanish terms. Remember that this is not the first time {{see}}'s range has been extended--in the beginning it was just for variations in capitalization of the first letter, then capitalization of any letter, then diacritics, then ligatures too, then apostrophes and hyphens, then different characters and symbols with similar appearance. — Hippietrail 01:01, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough, not a bad idea. I just found necesitate. There should then be see also's exchange on this page and on necessitate I guess. Cheers, — Vildricianus 11:33, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

With the double letters thing I've restricted it to within the language. So far I've thought that makes more sense. — Hippietrail 11:41, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

weeny

Vandalism by User:203.166.99.246

Thanks. — Hippietrail 02:16, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Toolserveraccount

Hello Hippietrail,
please send your prefered login-name, your realname and the public part of your ssh-key to . We will then create your account soon. --DaB.

This is my key from puttygen:

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABJQAAAIEAqUymXzGjPO6TQn6/j+bH3+4O2ByJrWcY5YF2Nt66A8EwXxxFA2Ho7j/BFi89dJEEttwSmX5MMotRE8EYL0SDO3oK8Wh1zxiCFmnh7WnpxoMcNdIT3AMhZKqf3jb+vYZiXyXN8xofG4wrEW0zQ6ecP3zJO1k5jZSRoFpTooeDBNU=

— Hippietrail 15:27, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

starting entries

I don't start entries because I'm not english speaker and I don't know enough of the language. That's why my collaboration consists on comments to help native people to understand the uses of spanish words so they can make entries. Why people just add words? Why do'nt you help all those red links to become entries? That's a wiki, of course but I don't understand what's the point of collecting words, have comments ont hem and not create entries for the dicitonary. --80.224.247.234 11:13, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Because it's only one of several things I do. I have added a few. But even though I am a native English speaker I am not a good writer. I am better at research than at writing definitions. I am spending most of my time developing JavaScript extensions to Wiktionary to make it more usable as a dictionary since it uses software designed for an encyclopedia. For this I have to learn a lot about CSS, JavaScript, AJAX. I had to invest in a USB memory stick and set it up. I have to learn how to debug JavaScript on 3 different browsers. I have to re-learn tools I haven't used for over a year because I was travelling in Mexico and Central America collecting interesting words. I've forgotten things about Perl, about regular expressions, about w:Vim. Plus I have a full-time job now and had to work 50 hours last week. The requests page remains there for anybody who is good at writing definitions in English for Spanish words. I'm sorry I have so much to do. — Hippietrail 12:58, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

sidebar

Hi. I'm still seeing your version of the sidebar (even after Ctrl-Refresh). Is that the same for everyone? SemperBlotto 17:26, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes I'm sorry about that. I'm seeing it too even though I've reverted it and even gone into my browser options and emptied my whole cache. It was an accident due to it being the wee hours and me having the flu. I meant to edit User:Hippietrail/MediaWiki:Sidebar. I don't know why it's being so persistent )-: — Hippietrail 17:30, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

chupacabra, chupacabras

Hello, I've edited the two articles in question and I hope this clears things up a bit between the two words. I've also put some blurb on the RFV page. I'm sure you've had a look at my edits any way by now. What do you think?

I've read material on the chupacabra(s), the cryptid mentioned, in Fortean Times magazine and some books. Fortean Times has had a long running dicussion on the whole spelling of chupacabras for a while now. I'll dig out the reference from my collection at home and put into the articles to help clear up the confusion a bit.

Regards--Williamsayers79 10:41, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes I've been watching. Keep up the good work and have fun (-: — Hippietrail 12:33, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

citetab.js

I don't, but would like to, have that script. My .js page is pretty empty at the moment :( - TheDaveRoss 16:17, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Would you like me to edit your User:TheDaveRoss/monobook.js for you or would you prefer to try to copy it from mine? I plan to make a way to opt in via the preferences but it's still in the works. — Hippietrail 00:01, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

I stole your monobook, and the cite tab is excellent, we ought to make a grease pit subpage with all of the useful js and css hacks people use to make wikt better for themselves. IRC scripts also are useful, they could find a home there as well. - TheDaveRoss 19:50, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

There's a bunch of experimental and disabled stuff in my Monobook.js so you probably don't want all of it but please give me feedback on anything you discover. — Hippietrail 23:35, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

If there is anything in there you definately feel needs to get tossed, feel free to edit mine, otherwise it seems to be working famously for me, the css and js links at the top are welcome also. I may fool around with it more when I get home, but for now I am happy as it is. Thanks - TheDaveRoss 01:46, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

CheckUser nominations

As of 31 August, 2006 the CheckUser status vote is beginning, you have been nominated and if you are so inclined please accept your nomination on the CheckUser page. Please also read the Meta Check User policy to be sure that the responsibilities are ones you would be interested in and willing to fulfill. Tentatively the end of the election will be one month from the beginning, but that is subject to change at any time, seeing as I just made that length up and a community consensus on duration will have to be established. Thank you and good luck! - TheDaveRoss 16:52, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

gender of Swedish words

Hi, I didn't know that one was supposed to add gender to each declination form of a given noun - but is that really necessary? Is there any noun in any language which doesn't keep its gender when declined? \Mike 09:33, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Sorry I didn't notice when I marked that one that it was an inflected form. I don't know whether we should or shouldn't mark gender on inflected forms but I think it's generally a good idea to mark it everywhere. I do so even in the Synonyms, Related terms, and See also sections. Gender is an essential part of a word that foreigners really need to see everywhere all the time for them to sink in. But I don't believe we have an actual policy. — Hippietrail 23:54, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

{nautical} et al.

The problem with those templates is that they place a page into corresponding categories regardless of the language. For example, Russian nautical terms ought to go to Category:ru:Nautical, not simply Category:Nautical. What if someone had adapted those templates for other languages? Say, {ru-nautical}, {ru-slang} and so on... --Dart evader 10:28, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes you make a good point and I have seen a couple of such templates. I think you should bring up the general topic in the Beer parlour. In the meantime I think it's not a bad idea for people to add the non-language-specific templates and editors more concerned with particular languages can change them to more specific templates as part of their general maintainence editing. — Hippietrail 23:56, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Laken

I always thought that Laken meant "lakes" - as in Interlaken the Swiss town between two lakes. Does it have that meaning as well? SemperBlotto 14:16, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

My German friend beside me says that Interlaken might be a special case because Laken means sheet or bedsheet and the German word for lake is See. — Hippietrail 00:28, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Expedited request

Hello,

Could you please attend to Wiktionary:Changing username#WOW. This user is a genuine contributor from the Serbian Wiktionary and had no idea how problematic a username that was. Even stopped in on IRC.

Thanks in advance, --Connel MacKenzie 10:15, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Done! — Hippietrail 10:17, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Thank you, speedy! (-: --Connel MacKenzie 10:17, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Also thanks from me, -- Laus 11:04, 6 October 2006 (UTC) (ex WOW)

Digging a little deeper, I see only a tiny handful of contribs for w:sr:User:WOW, and no user at sr:User:WOW. Perhaps someone was pulling my chain. --Connel MacKenzie 15:14, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

grommet

Yes, I'm pretty sure I've heard this as a surfboarding term too. I've never noticed the "grummet" spelling before - is it regional? --Connel MacKenzie 23:50, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah this is ages old in surfing. I remember hearing it in highschool or even primary school so that's over 25 years ago. "Grom" I just saw on a surf competition poster a few days ago and I thought of researching it for here. Both Collins and Encarta online list "grummet" and I assumed it's old and definitely won't apply to boards. I also don't know if it affects spelling so I left out those sections when I created grummet. Put them all on my watchlist though - interesting! — Hippietrail 23:54, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Cleanup request on ai

Hello Hippietrail. I noticed you added a request for cleanup tag on ai.

I'm not sure what you mean about see-also lines based on sound rather than spelling. The only see-also lines seem to contain diacritic and capitalization variants of ai, excepting one for eye for a language where ai means eye. If the latter is what you mean, that is easily corrected.

Yes I mean that eye does not belong in the {{see}} for ai. It belongs in the Homophones subsection of the Pronunciation section. It is my habit to find a theme and do many semiautomatic edits of a certain type and try not to get distracted by other odditties I might find along they way. In these cases I think it's a better idea to tag {{rfc}} or {{rfv}} than do nothing at all. One good thing is that it can bring certain trends under discussion. — Hippietrail 00:00, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Regarding 'interleaved etymologies', do you mean the fact that etymologies for each language are in one section with disambiguation rather than grouping sections by etymology? I've found that pages are much more readable in this format. If your cleanup request is related to any past discussion or guideline about disambiguation of multiple etymologies, please point me to the page if you know it. If not, perhaps we should discuss it. :) —{admin} Pathoschild 11:58, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes I mean pages that have a structure such as:

Etym1

Etym2

Etym3

All definitions

Our official structure is:

Etym1

Defs for etym 1

Synonyms for etym1 defs

Translations for etym1 defs

Etym2... etc

We do not bunch etymologies together for the same reason we try not to bunch together translations etc. If you feel it's time to change this I suggest you present your thoughts on the .

Thanks for the note. — Hippietrail 00:00, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll post on the Beer parlour, then. —{admin} Pathoschild 00:57, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Recent revert of coördinator

You wrote: “please be careful when reverting that you do not stomp on good faith changes” — I’m really sorry about that, I must not have noticed your edit; I’ll be more careful next time. Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 14:37, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

No problem. Thanks for the note. (-: — Hippietrail 14:38, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Good tidings to you

I didn't see anything from you on BP, TR or RfV, so I assumed you'd taken a break. But then I looked at your contribs and it appears you've been wisely just getting on with it and working on articles. So I thought I'd drop by and say "Hi".

One question, actually. I just looked at my old essay on tides. It still needs cleanup, and I was thinking of doing that. I remembered you, I think, pointing out that tide actually derives from Anglo-Saxon tīdan meaning, more or less, "happen". That ties together the existing senses nicely, I think, and I at least wanted to mention it. Does this ring any bells?

Checking dictionary.com, it appears that tide as in ocean is supposed to derive from OE tīd (to do with time, in line with my speculations in the essay), while tide as in betide is supposed to derive from tīdan. But surely these are the same word? -dmh 22:37, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

campi

Think you could add one of those Dictionary Notes to campi? I only have one or two applicable ones to hand (Swahili etc don't help much ;-) tx, Robert Ullmann 23:10, 21 January 2007 (UTC) I do see you used on-line sources for scenarii. Robert Ullmann 23:15, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Deep Thoughts from IRC

If you think you can accomplish the data-abstraction layer (to deal with each language and each sense separately) then I think I have only one major lingering concern: GIGO.

I do think that the idea of adding a [Check syntax] button (like [Check spelling],) would help tremendously. At some point in the future, perhaps such a thing could be made mandatory, before [Save page], or even as part of it.

Short list of things to be checked by such a mechanism: For NS:0 only, of course.

1. No section zero stuff.
2. Language headings are only from an approved list of languages.
3. Third-level headings are only from an approved list.
4. An approved inflection template is used for all POS headings. (Not possible right now, as our templates do not have 100% coverage of the POS types, particularly form-of.)
5. A "#" definition line exists in each POS section.
6. Synonym/Antonym/Translation/etc. sections have 'proper' "disambiguation" if more than one "#" line exists.

Whether the mechanism would simply pop-up warnings, or actually prevent saving would be a matter of policy debate/voting/re-voting/re-re-voting/flame-wars. I'm inclined to think you are right though, that warnings only would probably work better.

---

The "filtering" concepts are enticing, but on reflection can probably be accomplished trivially at the UI level. Much more important, is a mechanism for filtering search-engine pollution (that en.wiktionary currently contributes enormously, to.)

We probably should save/post that IRC conversation from this morning, somewhere, here.

--Connel MacKenzie 19:32, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

AHD name change

At long last I've started a VOTE with regard to changing the name of the "AHD" pronunciation system. Since you got that ball rolling, I thought you might like to know. --EncycloPetey 05:37, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Good idea and long overdue! Thanks for letting me know (-: — Hippietrail 05:47, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Sure. Oh, and histrionics is plurale tantum; I've made that change. --EncycloPetey 05:48, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

wiktionarylang

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~cmackenzie/wiktionarylang.tar.bz2 is where I dropped it, but I haven't had a chance to peruse it yet. Thanks again. --Connel MacKenzie 08:01, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikifying names of languages

I see that you wikified some of the language names under the entry "mole" (Some of which I had just removed - no hard feelings for that, I'm just curious). Could you explain, why? Why just a few, and not all? Is there a rule, as to which languages to wikify and which not? I remember having read that wikifying language names should be avoided, because excessive internal linkages cause unnecessary strain for the computer resources. Hekaheka 12:41, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

This is an old practice that has been discussed many times. Basically we do it to promote lesser known languages so that people browsing will have a slightly higher chance of looking them up. The rule of thumb is to link it if you think the language is so exotic that most typical users wouldn't have heard of it. We tend to link constructed languages and indigenous languages and not languages whose names are similar to a country - even if the country is not so famous. This linking overrides the general guideline of conserving resources. The links which need removing are usually uninteresting and unrelated words which are still linked in many definitions.

Thanks for asking! — Hippietrail 12:52, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

See also EncycloPetey's WT:TOP40. --Connel MacKenzie 18:54, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

fruitique

41 pages on google...[1] zigzig20s 11:40, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

All the pages I looked at just now were propreitry business names - I didn't see one which used it as a generic word. Also frootique gets quite a few more hits and also seems to be only used in names of companies and such. — Hippietrail 11:54, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2007-02/Trademark designations

Greetings! Since you participated in the discussion at Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Use of ® and ™ in entries, I thought you might want to cast a vote at Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2007-02/Trademark designations. Cheers! bd2412 T 04:07, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Words from Murakami

I noticed you requested several words from Murakami Haruki's 世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド; I've entered the easy transcriptions from English, but I'm not sure what ラクダ is. Could you give some context, or the chapter/page number where you saw it?

I'll be glad to! I'll bring the novel with me tomorrow unless I forget. I can't enter Japanese directly though so I might not be too successful. — Hippietrail 20:06, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Also, ぴかぴか and ぐるぐる are 擬態語 and not the easiest things to explain... Cynewulf 19:06, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't know. They just kind of looked fun and stood out. Jim Breen gives:

ぴかぴか (adj-na,adv-to,n) glitter; sparkle

ぐるぐる (adv,vs) turning round and round

— Hippietrail 20:06, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

• OK in my paperback copy of the 1st part of 世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド (ISBN4-10-100134-0) it is in chapter 1, page 12, line 3:

  ラクダを三頭と中型のやしの木を一本入れることだってできるかもしれない。

  Interestingly, this exact sentence is discussed online

  Eagerly awaiting your analysis! — Hippietrail 18:30, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

• Oh, haha, it's "camel". Added ラクダ. Writing things in only kana always confuses me.. The discussion is comparing the attitude of the main character in the "hard-boiled wonderland" chapters, who speaks using 私, to that of the character in the "end of the world" chapters, who speaks with 僕: At the outset of the work, the elevator that appears there is too big such that "you might even be able to put in a mid-size palm tree and three camels". "私" is a rather "hard-boiled" type who uses derisive humor to distance himself from the world. On the other hand "僕" is lost in illusions, with none of the bitterness and such with which "私" keeps things at a distance. (apologies for bad translation). Cynewulf 19:14, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

• Interesting. Jim Breen's site doesn't have an entry but it has one that starts with the same kana meaning some kind of camel bug or crab. I think the link I gave was to a discussion of Jay Rubin's "Haruki Murakami and the Magic of Words" which may be translated into Japanese now. The same site had another link containing this sentence and that page was on Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the Word itself. Thanks for chasing this up - it was fun! — Hippietrail 18:44, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

It's apparently a standard practice to write "difficult" animal names in katakana in most contexts, and all names in a scientific context. By the way, I've added a quote to メーカー which is probably where you saw that word. Cynewulf 23:29, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

adf

Is this meant to be a user subpage? SemperBlotto 16:20, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes! Thanks I just lost it because I've got too many windows open! I'll fix it (-:

Multiple requests

Hi there. I like to satisfy requests made at Wiktionary:Requested articles:English by plodding through the History changes. When a large number of requests are made to the entire page (rather than one letter at a time) it gets to be a bind having to scroll up and down a large page. So I will probably ignore your latest batch. Cheers. SemperBlotto 09:55, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

That's a shame. I love seeing you create entries for the words I find in my reading. Unfortunately since I'm travelling in the third world where internet connections and power can be unreliable and since I have to pay to use internet cafes I have no other choice than to enter my findings as quickly as I can. Less than a week ago I lost 2 hour's work when the power went off. I hope you get around to some of them sooner or later but cheers for the lowdown in any case. — Hippietrail 16:25, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

words from david malouf's "rememberig babylon") - bypassed - just too difficult with my eyesight. SemperBlotto 07:26, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if you'd be more or less interested but I have per-book interesting words listed on a subpage of my user page. But whether you get to them or not I'd still like to say how impressed I am with this type of work I've seen you doing so far. — Hippietrail 17:55, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Username Change

Since you are one of the 4 users on Wiktionary with bureaucrat privileges, I may as well ask you. Can you change my name from "Wiki_bean_dude7" to "Steptrip"? Wiki bean dude7 00:52, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Edit comments

Hi, Hippietrail. Where should I post my edit comments? Is it enough to leave a commentary on the discussion section of each entry? Thanks in advance for your answer. By the way, was it you who deleted "Spain" from my expression Spain's Canary Islands?. If so, why? Andresalvarez 16:14, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi Andresalvarez. When you make an edit you will see below the large text editing area that there is another only one line high. That is the place you make a brief note about what you're doing in your edit. For trivial edits it's fine to leave it blank.

Yes it was me who removed "Spain's" from "Canary Islands" to try to keep things simple as I didn't think there were any other Canary Islands but perhaps I'm wrong since I've never been there.

Keep up your very interesting work! — Hippietrail 16:43, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

tapor

Hi mate, the theory that OE tapor comes from Latin papyrus has been floating around for ages. It was first suggested by Kluge but is also cited in the OED and the online Dictionary of Etymology. It's based on the fact that papyrus pith was used to make candle wicks and therefore the two words are the same in some languages (including late Latin). But it's just a theory: I tried to make that point in the taper entry (‘perhaps from...’), but in the OE tapor page I forgot. I've expanded the Etymology section there to try and make it clearer. Ta, Widsith 16:46, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for responding. It looked odd to me because it didn't look like a regular borrowing - the changes were just too great. Are you saying that it's a kind of translation borrowing or calque? — Hippietrail 16:49, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Latin papyrus would be expected to give OE *papur, and the theory is that this was ‘dissimilated’ into tapor (with p>t – this sometimes happened when there were two of the same consonants next to each other). The idea is hard to prove or disprove but no one has come up with anything better, so it gets repeated a lot. Widsith 16:54, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain this stuff to a mere mortal (-: — Hippietrail 17:06, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

subpages

Hi there. You can put {{subpages}} on your user page instead of a manually managed list (if you want). SemperBlotto 21:59, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

focuses

Yup. There are cases where the alt spelling/alt form has to go under a POS. And when there are multiple etys, cases where it can go at L3 at the top, and cases where it has to go at L4 under one ety, or L5 under an ety and a POS ... ;-) Robert Ullmann 17:19, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Dictionary notes

You state: DIFF what is the significance of this statment in a definition ? In addition, you might want to archive your talk page it is getting rather long. WritersCramp 14:33, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi WritersCramp. Dictionary notes is for comparing Wiktionary with other dictionaries. We can check dictionaries at our disposal and note if they have entries for the word, which if any alternative spellings or capitalization variations they include, and in which order of preference. Or anything else really. Wiktionary users can read this information to gain an idea of how widely accepted or how rare or new a term is.

Sorry about the long talk page. I'll try to do something about it when I get home from travelling and don't have to rely on internet cafes any more. — Hippietrail 15:35, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Hello, to balance your statement, you might want to comment on which dictionaries do recognize the word. thanks WritersCramp 15:40, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I check the dictionaries at my disposal when I'm writing. If none of my dictionaries have an entry that's what I write and I think it's significant and interesting. Remember that you and everybody else in the world are fully encouraged to add to the Dictionary notes sections just as with all other sections on Wiktionary. People have in fact added to them in the past. Wiktionary is a work in progress don't forget. — Hippietrail 15:48, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Random (lang)

I've tweaked my "random word in xxxxx" thing to use only entries > 150 bytes now, to get rid of most of the inflection stubs. Can you please try it out and let me know if that fixed it? TIA. --Connel MacKenzie 05:40, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Connel. There's still quit a few inflection only articles smaller than this size but the hit rate for genuine articles is much better. Sadly though, I'll now be missing out interesting small articles that are not inflections. But hey I know we can only do so much with what we have as a format )-: — Hippietrail 19:20, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, there is always Special:Shortpages that could use some lovin. From what I've seen, there aren't small entries in Spanish, that aren't form-of things. --Connel MacKenzie 18:38, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

The random entry for English predominantly gives results beginning with the letters 'ab'. --Adam

עזאזל

I did my best; feel free to take a look and request further clarification. There's really a lot of debate about what the term means, so I'm not sure how helpful it is (especially since I'm not a Bible scholar at all, so don't have the knowledge to evaluate the prevalence of the various theories). —Ruakh_TALK 03:01, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

parábola

Er...it is a borrowing. The inherited word is palabra. Widsith 15:00, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Oops sorry. I came to that decision since the RAE etymology didn't say anything special. But I guess the RAE etymologies are not so special either )-: — Hippietrail 15:35, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Citations subpages

Hi Hippietrail. I've brought up the topic of the Citations subpages you've been creating at Wiktionary:Information desk#Citation subpages if you'd like to comment. ~MDD4696 01:49, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

A method of ordering definitions

Hi Hippietrail. I suggest a method of ordering definitions here which may be of interest to you. How similar is my idea to yours? † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 13:41, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Без'Ятие

It is a nonce word. The intended meaning, I believe, was something like аbsence of yats. BTW, where did you meet it? :) Dart evader 05:52, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

I read about it on my favourite blog, languagehat: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002793.php The blog links to this site which I can't read. I hope you find something to enjoy there! — Hippietrail 10:18, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the amusing read. :) But does the word actually merit inclusion? Even in that compilation it's been used only twice, and in the second case it was even spelled differently: безъятие (I'd say this last spelling is more correct). Dart evader 14:47, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

I think it’s harmless to include it (безъятие, not "Без'Ятие"). This is a popular way of forming "-lessness" or "absense of" words in Russian and I think it’s useful to have a good collection of them: безбожие, безбрачие, безверие, безвкусие, безвластие, безводье, безволье, безвременье, бездействие, безделье, безденежье, бездождье, бездорожье, бездушие, беззаконие, безземелье, беззлобие, безлесье, безличие, безлюдье, безмолвие, безначалие, безобразие, безптичье, безразличие, безрыбье, безумие, безучастие. You can make up these words almost at will. —Stephen 20:07, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Done: безъятие. Couldn't resist the temptation. :) Dart evader 05:37, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

me and spanish again

Hi again. There is a project fo spanish with many words, some of them already in requested entries, i 'll add defintions over there, please review them , thanks for your work. I hope my help is useful --62.175.87.83 10:04, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Foreign language terms

Hi there. I can't help noticing that you are adding terms in languages for which you have not got a Babel entry. I don't think this is a good idea. I can only go by the Italian ones, which are minimal and don't use the standard templates - I imagine the others are similar. I have amended spillo as an example of what they should look like. Cheers. SemperBlotto 15:30, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes for the past few days I've been adding terms from the Translations sections of English entries to their own pages. And no I've never learned the templates even for English or Spanish. Not so long ago they used to change and compete so often they weren't worth learning. Generally I check "What links here" to find if there is more than one English translation as well as synonyms or related terms. Usually there are not. Anyway I am entrusting my colleagues to improve upon the stub articles I boldly create. — Hippietrail 22:18, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Hungarian entries

Are you checking these before you ad them? Most of the existing Hungarian translations and entries were added by Drago (aka WF), who botched many of them. Also, how are you determining the POS when you add these? The POS doesn't always match between languages. For instance, the Ojibwe word for "year" is a verb rather than a noun. Hungarian has occasional surprises like that. --EncycloPetey 17:50, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

No I don't have my Hungarian dictionary handy these days. I am creating the entries purely based on what I find in Translation sections and What links here. It is inevitable that some will be wrong and all will benefit from improvement. When the POS of a translation doesn't match the POS of the defined term it should be noted in the table. But don't worry I'm focusing on languages I know at least a little about. And doing this is helping me to learn more. There is way too much basic vocabulary missing for way to many major languages so until the mood passes I'll continue to do this and rely on my colleagues to improve upon any messes I boldly create.

No, that sort of information should never appear in a Translations table, and I can't say I've ever seen it happen. We deliberately limit which is included in Translation tables, otherwise they grow out of hand in weird and complex ways. Besides, it is often very difficult to communicate differences of POS succinctly. Consider the Latin word plus, which is a neuter noun when it appears in the singular, but is an adjective of all three genders when it appears in the plural. --EncycloPetey 21:14, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

By the way we should be encouraging people who specialize in certain languages to use Connel's "random page in a specific language" tool. It's great for people in the mood for spotting stuff to clean up. Loads of Hebrew pages are a mess I have found this way. Cheers! — Hippietrail 22:23, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with this tool. I can recommend it to people if you'll provide a link to its location. --EncycloPetey 21:14, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

угорь

I've tried, however convincingly, to answer your question about that word. :) --Dart evader 13:08, 17 July 2007 (UTC) P.S. Oh, when you are adding Russian words, please do not forget to supply them with proper categories, in order to make your new entries visible: Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Russian_nouns.

שם

Ordinarily I'm the last person to be commenting on someone's nikud, but — at שם, are you sure you vocalized "שם משפחה" correctly? I find it really hard to believe there's supposed to be a tzeirei under the mem. (Also, grammatically there should be a sh'va nakh under the second shin, though I'm guessing its omission was intended to distinguish it from a sh'va na?) —Ruakh_TALK 19:11, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

I copied and pasted it from somewhere. Almost certainly a translation table. I'll check "what links here". Of course I might've messed the nikkudim up in the move. — Hippietrail 22:24, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Hmm it looks like the first one done was "שֵׁם לווַאי" in September 2004 and the others were copied from there. That may have been when I was copying stuff from a Hebrew dictionary but I could've made a mistake. Go ahead and mark them with rfv if you can't verify them. — Hippietrail 22:42, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

IPA "r" symbol for the r sound

It has been a while since this has come up - looks to me like someone is pushing for the upside-down and backwards "r" again. Wiktionary:Beer parlour#French <r>. (How relevant is User:Hippietrail/IPA/English?) Your comments there would be appreciated. --Connel MacKenzie 21:09, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Of note, is this vandalism. --Connel MacKenzie 21:24, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't seem relevant for "r". I was apparently researching the vowel symbols at the time and all the dictionaries I had handy were smaller bilingual ones. I've still never seen any other symbol for English "r" either British or American or Australian in any print dictionary othat than simple basic "r" itself. The principle of romanicness dictates that you choose the symbol closest to one in the Roman alphabet. When you have multiple similar sounds then you choose a variant. The only tradition I've seen that doesn't use the basic "r" for a language with only one "r" sound is French. The people that push for the weird symbols are usually either Americans with no tradition of IPA or self-educated "linguists" who haven't learned enough to know when to use phonetic transcription and when to use phonemic transcription and tend to hypercorrection. When in doubt check a real dictionary like Oxford or Collins or Duden or Larousse. — Hippietrail 22:29, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Are we to adopt something like Daniel Jones's representation system, like other dictionaries you mentioned above? If so, shouldn't we do so in a consistent and explicit manner and label the transcriptions as such? For example, I'm afraid that using ɛ obeying our guideline (though not a policy) might also be controversial as I've never seen it being used in other established English dictionaries. Anyway, of course, I couldn't agree more with the point that we should use phonemic transcription and avoid hypercorrection. --Tohru 02:53, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree with you about "e" vs. "ɛ" but I lost that argument. I actually have seen dictionaries use it for English but from memory mostly English-French bilingual dictionaries where French already uses "ɛ". — Hippietrail 06:00, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary [11^th Ed.], for example, distinguishes [e] from [ɛ] (but not, strangely enough, [a] from [æ]). † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 14:29, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

It uses both symbols for English?? Is it an American Oxford? Maybe it's using them for "head" vs "hair". Can you give us the ISBN so I can try to locate a copy? — Hippietrail 22:16, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

It’s a CD, so it doesn’t have an ISBN; Amazon.co.uk stocks it, if you’re interested. It isn’t an “American Oxford”; it lemmatises the British spelling of a word (to quote the COED’s “About…” .pdf-file (§: Spelling and inflection; §§: Variant spellings): “The main form of each word given is the standard British spelling or form. Standard variants, e.g. standard US spellings, are indicated at the top of the entry and cross-referred if the alphabetical position is more than four entries distant from the main entry.”). Since “[p]ronunciations are not given for ordinary, everyday words such as bake, baby, beach, bewilder, boastful, or budget…”, I can’t give you their pronunciatory transcription for head; however, the COED does give bed, hair, and day (as examples for explaning IPA use) in the “Vowels” §§ of its “Pronunciations” § in its “About…” .pdf-file; the three pertinent fragments for quotation are: “ɛ bed”, “ɛː hair”, and “eɪ day”. However, the COED seems to have made some odd choices in choosing how to transcribe pronunciations; as I said, it represents both [a] and [æ] using [a] (despite the fact it distinguishes [ɛ] from [e]), also, to represent the French nasal vowels, it uses [ã], [ɒ̃], [ɑ̃], and [ɔ̃] — the second of which, according to Widsith, doesn’t even exist in French!

On a related issue, I agree with the anonymous editor in the Beer Parlour: “as the Wiktionary spans several (ideally, all) languages, one should go as close to phonetics as practically possible, to avoid unnecessary confussion across phonemic systems” — whereas the IPA convention of choosing the most orthographically similar character to represent a language’s phone, irrespective of the actual differences in sound between them, as long as the two are not distinct phonemes, may be of use to monolingual dictionaries, to such multilingual dictionaries as Wiktionary, a better practice would be to opt for the mean standard phone of a given region when representing its pronunciation of a given word. † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 15:40, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

light year

Ask Stephen. Most of the translations weren't in there until he added them. --EncycloPetey 23:18, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Just as with Latin, Old English is studied, spoken, and new terms are translated into it so that it may be used for modern subjects and technologies. See, for example, w:ang:Lēohtgēar. It’s Neo-Old English —Stephen 03:41, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Cool! Thanks Stephen (-: — Hippietrail 04:53, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

WT:BP#Grouping types of categories

Can you do this, on wiktionarydev? --Connel MacKenzie 03:24, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

élite, elite, and Elite

Hello Hippietrail -- Sorry, but I don't understand the See line which you added to elite and élite. The entry for "elite" already links to "élite" as an alternative spelling and the entry for "élite" already has a link to elite in the definition. And the entry for "Elite" (with a capital "E") is just the German term, which has no real relevance, as best I can see, to the English definitions. I've only been here a few months and don't know all the angles. Am I missing something? Respectfully -- WikiPedant 12:57, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes you're missing something. The "see" line is standard and independent of the other content. Those pages might be small but some pages are big and you don't want people having to read every section of every language to hunt for an alternative spelling or wikilinked word in a definition just because the got a wrong accent or capital letter. Sooner or later the "see" section will all be automatic anyway. It will always show all other pages with "similar" spelling where similar means different capitalisation or accents of hyphens or spacing or apostrophes and stuff like that. It's documented somewhere but I'm not an expert on the documentation. Have a good one! — Hippietrail 23:13, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Okay, thanks, I think I'm getting it. The "See" line in these entries seems to function a bit like a mini-version of a Wikipedia disambiguation page. I guess I was thrown off by the term "see," which I think of as a recommendation to consult other entries for additional information relating to this entry. -- WikiPedant 05:39, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes that's right. I also dislike it saying "See also" but others chose it. Keep up the good work. — Hippietrail 05:51, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

WT:MV

Could you please watchlist that page? --Connel MacKenzie 23:17, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

s-ro

The request for verification ask if s-ro is an abbreviation or a noun. I'm at a loss to respond as it's both. It's the Esperanto abbreviation for sinjoro. I listed it as a noun so that it would automatically inflect the forms. As Mr. is inflected in English for the plural Messrs. so too would one use all the Esperanto inflections for s-ro. I'm a new Wiktionary editor, so please advise. SonPraises 05:03, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Please use Orange

For the red/blue links thing of IRC yesterday, please use a shade of orange. Having thought about it more, it is a very different thing from a genuine redlink. --Connel MacKenzie 01:08, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Klingon

Interesting ;-) AF did simplify the link from the 'pedia to our own entry (which should exist), but at the time I hadn't thought about the case of trans-language == page-title ... ;-) Robert Ullmann 12:13, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

No worries. I only noticed it because my "orange links" extension broke on that page, which I only got to by hitting the random page button. (-: — Hippietrail 12:19, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Script requests

I answered on the AF talk page; do tell me what you think? Robert Ullmann 22:55, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Classical Arabic

I noticed you reverted a couple places where I had used {{Ar.}} for Classical Arabic derivations. What would you suggest as an alternative, since there isn't a category hierarchy for Category:Classical Arabic language? From the information at Wiktionary:About Arabic#Ar., it seems like my use of Classical {{Ar.|es}} makes sense in the absence of a more specific alternative. Mike Dillon 02:32, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Hi Mike. To me it is always wrong to make part of a language name plain text and part of it a template. I noticed that you didn't divide Hispano-Arabic in the same way. As for a solution I suppose you need to talk to the people who have built up those templates that are used in the etymology sections. I'm sure I've seen other languages that had to be handled specially also. Perhaps it was for Vulgar Latin or some other form of Latin that doesn't get its own ISO code, but perhaps it was for something else. In any case I think our Arabic experts and our etymology experts need to do some brainstorming and I'm sure a good solution will be found. — Hippietrail 19:23, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Welcome back!

Welcome back!

There are lots of bureaucrat-y things for you to do, when you have a chance. For one thing, some newly elected administrators need to be given shiny buttons. :-)

—Ruakh_TALK 16:08, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Back? I'm in Hanoi, Vietnam... at least for the next few days (-: — Hippietrail 16:17, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, I meant "back to Wiktionary"; you seemed to be more active again, but I guess not. In that case, please continue to enjoy your travels. :-) —Ruakh_TALK 17:23, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Yeah I can come and go when I'm on the road depending on where I am and who I'm with and how much money I have and how easy it is to find internet etc etc. Right now I'm on my own and the hotel has free internet but even if the connection is fast the computer is old and slow. Keep an eye on Wiktionary for me while I'm away (-; — Hippietrail 15:24, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Vietnamese variations of 're'

Are all of those actual Vietnamese words? Also, ré and rè may be Vietnamese, but they are not exclusively so. We have no rules in place as to how exactly these appendices should be set up in such circumstances - I would presume the thing to do would be to pipe a link to, e.g. [[ré#Vietnamese|ré]], but that suggests we would do that for every language. Not that I'm oppose to that either, I just don't want to see this get out of hand. Cheers! bd2412 T 03:02, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I've always believed the "variations of ..." pages to be poorly thought out. Whenever I think a feature is poorly thought out I try to find edge cases. At the time I was arguing against these pages I could see potential problems but did not have enough specific examples. Now that I'm in Vietnam I just happen to be finding some. I don't know what the solution is. I was very happy with the old solution of just putting everything in the ((see)) template. Others thought that wasn't a good enough solution. I think the "variations" solution is not good enough. I cannot yet suggest a fix but I'm more than happy to find exceptions or bugs with it. None of the headings or subheadings say that entries must be or must not be exclusive. This is obviously a problem.

As for which are specific Vietnamese words, I will check in the next few hours but I expect to find most of them since Vietnamese is at heart a monosyllabic language. Keep up the good work. Let's solve all the problems! — Hippietrail 03:10, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I think putting everything in a "see" template is not a solution where there are so many variations of a term that a reader would not know where to start looking for something. At least a semblance of organization saves some potential time (and we could never get an agreement whether homophones should go in the "see" templates anyway). Cheers! bd2412 T 03:53, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

As homophones are language-dependent, they belong in the language section, not in the top-line navigation link. I actually don't recall that being raised as an issue. --Connel MacKenzie 08:03, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

• On a related note, were you going to vote (yourself) at WT:VOTE#Extension: DidYouMean? --Connel MacKenzie 08:03, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

knjižara vs. knjižnica

knjižnica is strictly a library - place where you can borrow books and/or read them. knjižara, on the other hand, is strictly a place where you buy books, ie. a bookshop.

That Lonely Planet Eastern Europe Phrasebook entry is wrong, trust me :) --Ivan Štambuk 11:17, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Yes I just did a little follow up myself and came to the same conclusion. It's always a good policy to make such a note in your edit comment when correcting something which is wrong. When just adding terms or fixing formatting you don't really need a comment. Keep up the good work though! — Hippietrail 11:29, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

OK, I'll make a mental note for the future :) --Ivan Štambuk 11:44, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Kuna entries

Did the Kuna words that you entered come from Panamanian Kuna (ISO cuk) or the rarer Colombian Kuna (kvn)? Do you remember? --EncycloPetey 04:00, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Well whether they are separate languages or dialects is very probably POV of the religious missionaries and bible translators who run Ethnologue. However, the words I entered came from a self-teaching guide I bought in Panama City so it's most probably ISO cuk (-: — Hippietrail 05:18, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I have set {{cuk}} to read as "Kuna" (without identifying the specific subgroup), since the kvn variety has only 750 speakers. --EncycloPetey 15:07, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Compounds

Compounds only go under the character (Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja).

It the term is derived from (e.g.) the noun, rather than being an unrelated use of the character, then it can go under the noun, but the head should then be Derived terms as usual.

And no, we haven't gotten all this written down in WT:AZH etc. as we should. :-( Robert Ullmann 14:04, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Japanese words for frog

かはづ is w:Historical kana usage (歴史的仮名遣) for かわず, which is just another word for "frog". They're all readings of the kanji 蛙. The literal romaji for かはづ is "kahadzu" but it feels weird to apply modern romanization to a pronunciation 1000 years out of date. We probably need to add support for this sort of thing to the header templates. I've tried to make things clear in frog and so on. (thanks for giving me an excuse to quote Basho ;)) Cynewulf 17:46, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Oops sorry about that. I found it in the famous haiku by Basho myself on http://languagehat.com - we should definitely support them but I'm not expert enough in the many intricacies of Japanese to know how is the best way. If it's really old it might be Old Japanese which would be another language. But if it's just an older way of writing what would still be considered modern Japanese then we need something like how we handle Shakespearian English or shinjitai vs kyujitai. Another challenge for us! — Hippietrail 02:49, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Gender templates

Hi, you created {{fm}} and {{nf}} ... is there some reason why {{mf}} and {{fn}} are not okay? I.e. is there a reason not to have them in the canonical order m, f, n, c? Robert Ullmann 14:20, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if there's a good reason or not. I just noticed that people already had multiple genders in multiple orders and didn't want to dumb down their work if they did in fact have a good reason. I thought there was the possibility that some nouns are feminine 90% of the time and masculine 10% of the time, or maybe the feminine is used in more countries than the masculine. It's probably a good Beer parlour issue and maybe it's a good policy to always have a Usage notes section for nouns with more than one gender. — Hippietrail 07:47, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

ענן

So, what do you suggest? Should we have a separate script template for headwords — {{Hebr-infl}} or something? —Ruakh_TALK 04:47, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

(I should clarify that I do agree that my approach wasn't really the right way to do it.) —Ruakh_TALK 04:59, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

If you mean my removal of the inline "big" tag you can do that with CSS either just for yourself or for the whole site. Let me know if you can't figure out how by reading around the Wiki, FAQs, and Googling. — Hippietrail 13:33, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

I can, and now have for myself, but it's pretty hackish (see User:Ruakh/monobook.css), and unless you have a better idea, it seems like it requires adding Hebrew-specific CSS for no real reason; I'd rather not add that to MediaWiki:Monobook.css unless there's no better way. (Actually, I now see that MediaWiki:Common.css already has script-specific stuff in it … is that how it's supposed to be? It seems strange to me.) —Ruakh_TALK 17:42, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes we designed the language templates especially to allow CSS for Arabic and Thai a couple of years ago because the fonts most people saw for those languages were much smaller than their Latin, Cyrillic, Greek etc fonts. It's not a hack at all. It's the best way to deal with the problem since CSS doesn't have script support (though it does have language support). Hebrew was given a script template just in the past couple of months I think. — Hippietrail 23:03, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Wiktionarydev

Hi there, I was browsing wiktionarydev, and the last 6 days of contributions have been anonymous linkspam - luckily they have only targeted two pages, but I don't have permission to delete them. So, next time you have a minute you might want to delete [창조] and [ü--üá-] from wiktionarydev. See you around Conrad.Irwin 15:42, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

geresh

You asked me a while back about geresh and gershayim, and I told you their uses. I forgot one use of geresh, and thought I should follow up with the addendum. In modern Hebrew, geresh is also used after certain letters as a diacritic, changing the sound of the letter to one foreign to Hebrew. Thus, tzadi-geresh has the sound of tʃ instead of ts; gimel-geresh has dʒ instead of g; and I think zayin-geresh has ʒ instead of z (but I'm not sure about that last). I think (but again am not sure) that those three (or two) are it. I hope that this helps.—msh210℠ 22:30, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, zayin-geresh is ʒ. There's also tav-geresh and dalet-geresh for th (thin) and th (this), though they're less common because Israelis frequently can't do those two sounds very well so don't generally bother to notate them. I've attempted to document the various uses at ׳; please help flesh it out further. :-) —Ruakh_TALK 23:05, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Please change my name

Hello, can you please come and handle my username change request? Thank you! --Edmundkh 18:01, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Done. Enjoy. — Hippietrail 22:45, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

לערי ריינהארט

Hi Hippietrail You are a « bureaucrat» at « wikt:en: » . Can you please rename my account clicking here. Thanks in advance! Best regards
‏‪‏‪·לערי ריינהארט·T‏·m‏:‏Th‏·‏T‏·‏email me·‏‬‏ 08:03, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Parser Wrapper

Hi Hippietrail, just to put this in writing, we should provide an interface that allows wiktionary js parsers to get a copy of the contents of the page, and switch between the output of other parsers seemlessly, my idea atm would be to build a file that provides the following functions.

parsers_getContentNode(); //gives a clone of document.getElementById('bodyContent');
parsers_registerOutput('title',output_div); //inserts the div into the dom and creates a new tab/toggle.

Would anything else need providing? Conrad.Irwin 11:13, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

BTW, have you considered archiving this page??

Language codes

You were complaining on IRC that we didn't have a better parser, and can't analyse the translations tables?

Look at User:Robert Ullmann/Language templates and User:Robert Ullmann/Trans languages.

We use the ISO 639-1 code if it exists, even if it is now considered a group. Except for Chinese, we do not use zh, we use cmn, nan, yue, etc. (see WT:AC) as there is no "Chinese language". (Unlike, for example, ar/Arabic, which is a primary language, even though there are useful ISO 639-3 codes for variants.)

The "wikicodes", like zh-min-nan, are avoided whenever possible. (I have to find out who invents these things and show him how to find the correct code; "nan" existed when they made that one up.) Robert Ullmann 04:33, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

quo vadis?

I was born and bred in Bristol - and there, everyone says "where are you going to?". Mind you, not many Bristolians speak Hebrew!. Cheers SemperBlotto 12:30, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

לאן

Really? It is pretty wide-spread, certainly at least some parts of the Commonwealth, and not specifically US. Not Australia?

Theme from Mahogany ...

Still, the change is good because the grammar is more standard. :-) Robert Ullmann 12:38, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

bugzilla:001629 Section edit links showing up in wrong place

Hi Hippietrail! Edit section seems to be broken at your user talk page. Just archive old issues. Best regards
‫·‏לערי ריינהארט‏·‏T‏·‏m‏:‏Th‏·‏T‏·‏email me‏·‏‬ 06:46, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Progress of WiktionaryLang Extension

Ran across your Extension:WiktionaryLang which would be very helpful for all sorts of analyses. How is the progress? Need any help? I code. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 04:15, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

I haven't worked on it for about a year. But have you also seen my WiktionaryHeadings extension which tracks not just the Language heading but all headings in the database? They're really good for making small numbers of queries from a shell login but for a large wiki the joins required make it no good for putting in a Special page or other real time in-wiki uses.

It could be improved by using cross reference tables in the database. MediaWiki already has some of these but it lacks infrastructure for easily creating new ones. It also lacks infrastructure for tracking all kinds of article edits and actions which are needed for such extensions which analyse the content of articles. If you like I can add both to svn. I am often available on IRC #wiktionary — Hippietrail 07:39, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Random in category

See svn:trunk/extensions/RandomInCategory — VasilievVV

German pre-reform spellings

Hi Hippietrail. Do you really think it is a good idea to add German pre-reform spellings in the way you did in Essstäbchen? The old spelling is officially obsolete and not used anymore by the majority of new publications. I can understand that it makes sense to add an article with the old spelling, because there are old (and a few new) publications that use that spelling, but calling it an alternative spelling in the main article or using it in the translation tables is misleading. BTW, your talk page is much too long, I had problems editing it with my browser. --Zeitlupe 16:24, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi Zeitlupe. This has been discussed several times and we cover all spellings. From what I have heard and read the spelling reform has received spotty acceptance at best which varies from country to country and from publisher to publisher. We do try to label variants such as Swiss spellings or pre/post spelling reform standards but I couldn't remember the labelling conventions at the time. Also, Due to how recent the spelling reform is, it is still extremely common to encounter the older spellings, and Wiktionary includes much older obsolete spellings from other languages. In fact it even includes entirely obsolete spellings.

I can imagine that this topic was a great flamefest at the time, but nowadays the controversy has calmed a lot. For example, if you search today in German newspapers with Google news search, there are 5 hits for Essstäbchen, all of them using the new spelling. I don't mind adding obsolete spellings, but it is important information for the users that they are obsolete. If you think that the term obsolete will upset the spelling-traditionalists, why not use the term pre-reform. It is still less misleading than calling it an alternative spelling. --Zeitlupe 18:50, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

The phrase "Alternative spelling" is a standard section name on the English Wiktionary. It is acknowledged to be imperfect and is under discussion semiregularly. Suggestions for renaming the section include "Spelling", "Spellings", "Other spellings". We try to avoid a plethora of section types, preferring instead to add notes on the spellings.

Here are some links with other information or discussion on this theme where you will see the lack of uniformity in dealing with this situation. Feel free to contribute: w:German spelling reform of 1996; Category:German obsolete spellings, Category:German words affected by 1996 spelling reform, Template talk:de-usage obsolete spelling; dass, daß, Erdnuß, Erdnuss, miß, Rußland, Stengel — Hippietrail 19:06, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry about the length of my talk page. I'm trying to trim it but that is also a slow painful job )-: — Hippietrail 18:34, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

NavFrames

Hi ht, just to let you know that wikiPreview isn't in the DOM for me, check (wgAction=='edit' || wgAction=='submit') instead. I don't think you should limit it to translations sections, as many other sections are using the NavFrames, so just have them left open for any sectional edit (if you can tell when that it) or any edit if you can't. Conrad.Irwin 01:07, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Open requests at Wiktionary:Changing username

Hello, mine is one of several open requests currently at Wiktionary:Changing username. If you have a moment please have a look. Thanks. Jerry lavoie 03:20, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Pitjantjatjara Wiktionary request! please help

I see you have been adding Pitjantjatjara words to the English Wiktionary. Please help with my request for a Pitjantjatjara Wiktionary to add the other half of the words. CarlKenner 10:35, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Account rename

Hello, I have had a rename request at Wiktionary:Changing username for a few months now, and I'm just waiting for someone to actually do the rename. If you could do this for me, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance, —Zachary ^talk 17:48, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

yen

Circle character ety only applies to the currency sense. The others have a separate ety. I'm not sure how to do what you asked me to do with respect to other ety. DCDuring 01:38, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Oh you already had done it. You weren't asking me to do something. Cool. End of. DCDuring 01:51, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Reverting Category:Spanish nouns with irregular gender

HT, what was your reason for reverting my cleanup of the category? For all words listed in the Lacking articles section, I added the Spanish entries and the category. Why keep that section, if those articles aren't lacking anymore? Thanks. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 19:11, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi Bequw. I checked two of the articles at random and one didn't have a Spanish entry added and the other hadn't been added to the category. Or maybe I picked the only two that hadn't been updated. Or maybe I made a mistake and somehow failed to notice the changes. Please give it a check and de-revert if I was too hasty. — hippietrail 06:10, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Wow you must have some luck. I just rechecked and there were 2 I didn't add to the category. plasma because I forgot to add the Spanish entry (just did, so thanks), and rapiña which already had a Spanish entry but as far as I can tell doesn't have irregular gender so I didn't add it to the category. Does it look okay now, did you see something I didn't? --Bequw → ¢ • τ 17:17, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Amazing! Those were the exact two articles I checked - and though I did look at the gender for rapiña it didn't register that it wasn't irregular. Thanks for your good work! — hippietrail 20:46, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

De-reverted. Just don't you do it again or we invoke the dreaded 3R rule:) --Bequw → ¢ • τ 18:53, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Links to reconstructed terms in non-proto languages

I came across a couple of your Etymology sections that link to reconstructed Latin terms: pulga#Spanish, bóveda#Spanish, recado#Spanish, savia#Spanish, and ayo that references Gothic(which in retrospect I incorrectly fixed, but will go back to). Wiktionary:Reconstructed terms says we should be linking to these with {{proto}} but currently that template always prefixes "Proto-" before all links so it doesn't work well for reconstructions in existent languages. I assume that the links should be into the Appendix ns. Should we allow {{proto}} to optionally remove the "Proto-" prefix, or do something else? I haven't seen any reconstructed entries for real languages, so I don't know if there's a precedent out there. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 14:41, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

The {proto} template is specifically for terms in reconstructed languages, which must be in the Appendix namespace. Reconstructed terms in existent languages should just be in NS:0, and use {term} or whatever normally. (The vote on this and the documentation changes were all about PIE et al.) Wiktionary:Reconstructed terms might be a bit clearer. Sorry I didn't revise it further, but I was very fed up by that point! Robert Ullmann 15:00, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. I'll leave the links as [[*term]] to all non-proto languages (besides latin, I ran across, "Common Germanic", "West Germanic", "Gaulish", and "Gothic"). sorry I meant to say I'll use {term} for those with a '*' in front. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 16:20, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

And what exactly is "reconstructed term in existing language?" :) The term is either attested, or unattested; if it's unattested regardless of whether it can faithfully be reconstructed, it cannot possibly pass RfV (no usage), and shouldn't be in the main namespace. Methinks that "Vulgar Latin" forms that are generally scarcely attested and most of which can be reconstructed by comparative method on the basis of Romance languages should go to Appendix: namespace, under "Proto-Romance:" or something. Reconstructed language = set of reconstructed terms (+morphosyntax to bind them), nothing more or less. So far I've formatted a few of this I encountered as *{{term||proto-Romance||meaning}}, like all the other proto-terms that don't get their language listed in Category:Reconstructed languages --Ivan Štambuk 16:37, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Etymology of albus

If you can explain how to set up etymologies for words from PIE roots, I can add this etymology. However, I'm still not at all sure how we want PIE root entries and etymologies done. --EncycloPetey 00:02, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

I see that BiT has added the etymology verbatim from Lewis & Short. (Shouldn't that be credited?) Is that the kind of etymology you were looking for? Atelaes has suggested I ask Ivan about PIE formatting, so I'll try to do that it the next couple of days. --EncycloPetey 16:10, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm not an expert on PIE or the formatting of such etymologies. I've only noticed that there are already some here so I requested another. If Lewis & Short is under copyright we need to at least de-verbatim-ize it. The normal way to credit such things is to include a References section - another section of which I'm not an expert. But thanks for your interest and thanks also to BiT! — hippietrail 01:14, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

It's no longer under copyright, but it still seems lousy to take someone else's work and not credit it. --EncycloPetey 01:32, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

קורס

The thing is, I don't think קורס is grammatical Hebrew. We could put a dagesh in the vav and a sheva under the reish, but it would be kind of faking it. Grammatical Hebrew doesn't have final consonant clusters, I don't think (though I'm not sure how word-forms like "amart" and "dibart" are explained; perhaps msh210 could clarify). —Ruakh_TALK 03:39, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Ruakh. The word came from multiple Hebrew spams I've received recently. In today's spam there was also the plural form קורסים. I haven't received any Hebrew spams with nikud though (-; — hippietrail 04:55, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

To clarify: when I say "grammatical Hebrew", I don't mean "Hebrew according to a properly formulated descriptive grammar of Modern Israeli Hebrew", but rather "Hebrew according to a traditional understanding of grammar" — an understanding that excludes words like "faláfel" (the first [f] would be a [p]) and "télefon" (the stress would be on the last syllable) and "Spráit" (initial consonant clusters are impossible — we can fudge an initial cluster of two consonants by pretending there's a shva na between them, but that won't work for three; and also, the [p] would be an [f]) and "dóda" (this is an ancient word, but the pronunciation used to be "dodá"; today "dodá" is used for what used to be "dodáh", with an audible ה at the end). I certainly wouldn't recommend trying to speak "grammatical Hebrew" by this definition; I bring it up here only because it's the Hebrew for which the niqqud were created. —Ruakh_TALK 02:22, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

I see what you're saying. I wonder what Israeli Hebrew dictionaries do (mine are all in storage at the moment). My hunch is that they put aside the traditional rules in favour of being useful as a pronunciation guide and use a sheva to indicate the lack of a vowel. But it would be nice to check (-: — hippietrail 05:33, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Your hunch is correct, but IMHO that's irrelevant to us, because we include transliterations. (Incidentally, Hebrew dictionaries often take other liberties with niqqud as well; for example, the one I have handy omits sh'vaim nakhim, therefore writing things like צִלצֵל. It tries, with limited success, to balance traditionalism and modernism — something we can do easily by using traditional niqqud and modern transliteration.) —Ruakh_TALK 23:42, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Hmm I don't like to rely on transliteration on Wiktionary because there is no one standard, or there certainly appears not to be one. And I am not capable of distinguishing a "good" Hebrew transliteration here from a "bad" one. Plus it just seems right to do all we can with the native script apart from the transliterations. I had a similar debate with Stephen a couple of years ago re stress accents in Russian. I want them in the Cyrillic always and he wants them only in the transliteration. I hate having to look in two places in two scripts for the same information, especially when I can trust the former but not the latter. Also how can I be sure which Hebrew sound some transliterations map to? (a, e, o spring to mind as having two possible nikud representations each, let alone the sheva variants I still don't understand)

In any case it's a fascinating area (-: — hippietrail 00:50, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

But I'm not suggesting doing away with niqqud. I don't usually include them myself, because I don't usually know them, but I think your entries-needing-niqqud category is great. But in a word like קורס, I don't see the point of arbitrarily choosing certain niqqud to approximate the pronunciation. Yes, many English-letter representations correspond to multiple niqqud representations, because the niqqud were designed to reflect ancient (well, fairly ancient) vowel distinctions that don't apply to Modern Hebrew. (TBH, they didn't do a great job reflecting the ancient distinctions, either; they didn't distinguish between a schwa sound (shva na) and the total lack of a vowel (shva nakh), and they only partly reflected the phonemic vowel length system. But at least the pronunciation→niqqud mapping was unambiguous.) If you don't trust the transliterations for pronunciation information, I think it's better to add pronunciations than to add fake niqqud. —Ruakh_TALK 01:23, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

I think the term "fake nikud" is going too far. Something like "non traditional" might be more fair. I definitely don't think we should just make stuff up, but I do think following currect practices of Israeli Hebrew dictionaries is a good idea. Nikudot are actually used in modern Hebrew as a pronunciation aid and are more common than I was lead to believe before I started collected books in Hebrew. I don't have a single book without nikud. Even the books I've looked at by Israeli authors I can find nikud here and there. What I don't know is if there is any standard or logic when nikud are used for names or foreign terms or borrowings. Hebrew has a language academy - what do they have to say on this topic?

What I'd like to do is follow the Wikipedia standard of being a secondary source, which means saying what other dictionaries say. It would be very useful to have a "Dictionary notes" section for each Hebrew word with no traditional voweling where we state as much as well as adding "dictionary A does abc, dictionary B does xyz" — hippietrail 05:36, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Re: "Hebrew has a language academy - what do they have to say on this topic?": Wow. What an excellent point; I don't know why it never occurred to me to check. They do address this, at http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/decision3.html#milsh — it's the subsection headed "ניקודן של מילים לועזיות בלשוננו" ("loanwords' niqqud", literally "niqqud-of-them of words foreign in language-of-us"). It's not very long; I'll try to type up an English version tonight.

This completely changes my opinion; as I said, the niqqud weren't invented for Modern Hebrew, but if there's an Academy-sanctioned standard for how to apply them today, then I'm all up for doing that. (I mean, as with any regulated language, the Academy doesn't really control how Hebrew is actually used, but this is one of those cases where I think it makes sense to just follow the Academy unless and until we have a specific reason to doubt its validity.)

Thanks! :-) —Ruakh_TALK 22:57, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

O.K., so I've read through it, and I must say, I'm disappointed; a lot of things aren't specified. However, they use קורס as one of their examples, so that's covered, at least. :-)   Here's essentially what they say:

Niqqud for loanwords

(1) /i/ is written as khiriq+yud: הִידְרוֹדִינָמִי (hidrodinámi, “hydrodynamic”), הִיסְטוֹרְיָה (histórya, “history”), טִיפּוּס (tipús, “~norm — the noun counterpart to ‘typical’”), סִינְתֵּטִי (sintéti, “synthetic”).

(2) /o/ is written as vav+overdot: קוֹאוֹרְדִּינַצְיָה (ko'ordinátzya, “coordination”), , גֵּאוֹלוֹגְיָה (geológya, “geology”), אוֹפְּטִימָלִי (optimáli, “optimal”).

(3) /u/ is written as vav+inside-dot: מוֹלֵקוּלָה (molekúla?, “molecule”), מוּלְטִי- (múlti, “multi-”), טוּרְבִּינָה (turbína?, “turbine”), פוּנְקְצִיָּה (fúnktziya, “function”).

(4) /a/ is written as qamatz in an open syllable or in a closed, stressed syllable, and as patakh in a closed, unstressed syllable: קָטָלוֹג (kátalog, “catalog”), מָתֵמָטִיקָה (matemátika, “mathematics”), קְוַנְטִים (kvantím, “quanta”), אַמְפּוּלָה (ampúla, “ampoule”).

(5) "eu" is written as tzeirei+yud: אֵירוֹפָּה (eirópa, “Europe”), רֵימָטִיזְם (reimatízm, “rheumatism”), נֵירוֹלוֹגְיָה (neirológya, “neurology”), נֵיטְרָלִי (neitráli, “neutral”), אֵיקָלִיפְּטוּס (eikalíptus, “eucalyptus”). [This sounds crazy, but for many words Israelis really do pronounce "eu" this way — which I suppose is the reason they're written with yuds to begin with. Though I really thought people said /nuˈtʁa.li/; I'm not sure if that's the case, and due perhaps to the ongoing effect of English exposure, or if it's just me imagining Englishness where there is none, like how many Americans learning Spanish think they hear Spanish speakers pronouncing <b> and <v> as roughly [b] and [v].]

(6) /e/ is written as consistently-with-Hebrew-niqqud as possible. [Total punt. Not even any examples here, though some of the examples for other points do apply.]

(7) Dagesh khazaq is normally not used, but it's permitted to use it if there's seen to be a need. Double-letters are not used. [This is somewhat of a punt. Certainly this would include words with intervocalic /b/ and /p/ — we can see that in a few of the examples above — though "dagesh khazaq" might be the wrong word for that — but other cases are left to the imagination. I notice that the yud near the end of funktzia above has a dagesh khazaq, but I can't offer a convincing explanation.]

(8) Gimel, dalet, and tav are given inside-dots or not in accordance with the rules of Hebrew. [This may sound like a punt, but it isn't one; the relevant rule is straightforward, even in dealing with loanwords, given the next point down.]

(9) Shva is indicated in loanwords. Shva is not indicated at the end of a word, even if before it is another shva, as in קוּרְס (kurs, “course”), סֵקְס (seks, “sex”). Every shva in a loanword is a silent shva. Khatafs are not used. Vowels in loanwords are preserved in inflected forms: סָלָט (salát, “salad”) — סָלָטִים (salátim) — ‎ סָלָטֵי- (salatéi-), בָּלוֹן (balón, “balloon”) — בָּלוֹנִים (balónim), דּוֹלָר (dólar, “dollar”) — דּוֹלָרִים (dolárim) — ‎ דּוֹלָרֵי- (dolaréi-), טֵלֵפוֹן (télefon) — טֵלֵפוֹנִים (telefónim).

(Note: the above isn't a strict translation — think of it as an English paraphrase of the Hebrew text. If there's any part you'd like a stricter translation for, let me know.)

—Ruakh_TALK 00:28, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

• Fascinating stuff - toda rabah! Would you like to write this up in Wiktionary:About Hebrew?

  I can see three approaches to nikud:

  1. Traditional (for native words)
  2. Official (academy rules)
  3. Cited (found in use)

  The first two fit in fine with the Wikipedia tenet of no original research. I think it might be nice to have a usage note for all words in the 2nd category. The third fits in with the Wiktionary tenet of basing everything on citations. For these including quotes in the articles and usage notes saying such as "the academy does not mandate which nikud is used for /e/.

  I wonder though if there are differences between sephardi and ashkenazi use. Officially modern Israeli pronunciation isn't really supposed to have this split anymore but my last Hebrew teacher who was a 22 year old Israeli insisted that all the consonants at least had different sounds. I never asked her about the vowels. I also wonder about loans from more exotic languages with different sound systems. And I wonder about ancient borrowings, versus borrowing from hundreds of years ago, versus modern borrowings. — hippietrail 00:52, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Tz'utujil

You added these five words as Tz'utujil: us, way, ja, ma, jar. However, SIL identifies two languages: Eastern and Western Tz'utujil, so I was thinking that these words should be specified into one of those. Would that be possible? Thanks. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 21:00, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Hmm I don't know. They are from a grammar of Tz'utujiil that I bought from the publisher's storefront in Guatemala City. In the introduction the author states:

Describe detalladamente la fonología, la morfología y la sintaxis de la variante dialectal del autor San Pedro La Laguna y se tomó las variantes de San Juan La Laguna y Santiago Atitlán.

I'm not sure how to translate "se tomó" but let me take a guess:

(This book) describes in detail the phonology, the morphology and the syntax of the dialectal variant of the author, San Pedro La Laguna and (takes into account?) the variants of San Juan La Laguna and Santiago Atitlán

Based on this and what I can read on Ethnologue, the author does not seem to agree that there are two languages but two variants of a single language, it also seems that San Pedro La Laguna is in the area that Ethnologue claims for Western Tz'utujiil. Good luck. — hippietrail 03:31, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, I posted the same question on Ptcamn's page. He must be getting really sick of me, I've asked him half a dozen questions about esoteric languages in the past couple of days, and I have another half dozen more. If he has no opinions, I'll switch them to Western Tz'utujil. Thanks. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 03:36, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Alternate forms are not synonyms

With respect to your edits of rora and rorene, these are not synonyms but alternative ways of declining the same word. I think that distinction is significant. __meco 14:23, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

If you can think of a more appropriate section to put them in then please go ahead. They certainly need to be linked in some way. I do the same thing for English words which have more than one possible plural form. — hippietrail 14:28, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Usurpation

Hi, I'm Jack Merridew at en.wiki and I just created this account. It seems someone has taken my preferred user name; User:Jack Merridew. They've not edited. This is likely some vandal I've pissed-off at en; I have not configured this account much and want to usurp the name, but don't know just how that might work here. Could you contact me at talk:Jack Merridew to sort this? I will do whatever to prove that it's me. If you'd rather, I'll enable email on this account (right after I save this; assuming it works as on en). Cheers, JackMerridew TEMP 13:43, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

kidnap

Sorry, you are right. I had not consulted a dictionary, but relied on the overwhelming ratio of "pp" to "p" forms in news.google.com. I had doubted that it is particularly US as had been indicated. I am shocked to see that my MW3 does not show it as non-standard, only as the 2nd form. I wonder whether it appears in OED as acceptable outside US. DCDuring TALK 14:09, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

I was a bit surprised too but I'd seen the single-p version in print somewhere and checked. The only British dictionaries I have handy are Collins bilinguals and I did just find in there "kidnaping" marked as US. — hippietrail 14:15, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

To atone and take advantage of this accidental learning, I have made alt sp entries for the participles and noun with usage notes. I'll confirm when I next look at an OED, then consider kidnapee and kidnaper. I hate to even type these forms, but facts is facts. DCDuring TALK 14:29, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Sometimes the truth is unappealing (-: — hippietrail 14:34, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Dutch gender

If you need Dutch gender an easy way to find it is the official woordenlijst. See e.g. here for wound. There are four possibilities:

het -> neuter

de -> common (m/f)

de [v] --> feminine only

de [m] --> masculine only

Jcwf 13:55, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I haven't seen that site before. So is common gender officially part of Dutch since 2005 everywhere it is spoken. In the past few years a few people have vigorously tried to convince me that Dutch nouns are still masculine, feminine, or neuter even if many speakers in some areas no longer distinguish masculine and feminine. — hippietrail 14:10, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

We have a serious problem, particularly with objects: the South still uses three genders in its dialects and therefore when people speak the standard language they will still refer to a clock as 'she'. In the North we can say 'he' (not: it!!) but usually resort to the demonstrative 'die'. Thus the North is basically two-gender common/neuter unless referring to people. Yet words on -ing, -te, -heid etc are still known to be feminine even in the North, which can be seen in things like ter gelegenheid and not ten gelegenheid. Other than that the f/m distinction is pretty irrelevant now that the case endings have finally been buried. The four possiblities 'solution' is a North/South compromise to accomodate both North and South.

I might add that this has official status in that this received the blessing of the Taalunie , hte intergouvernmental body that regulates spelling etc.

Basically the compormise is that all words that the South recognizes as feminine but do not belong to the -ing,-te,-heid etc. group may be treated as masculine (in the North) and that is still considered 'standard Dutch'.

Jcwf 14:41, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Username rename

I would like my username User:Cool Cat be renamed to User:White Cat. It is vital this rename happens before the SUL is put into action. Thanks. -- Cat ^chi? 08:57, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Be cool, Cool Cat ... SUL handles this just fine. You could get it renamed later and merge it in. For now, you should add the request to WT:CHU; note it says that accounts with < 250 edits won't renamed, but I imagine we have some flexibility with this. Robert Ullmann 09:12, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

I have done as you asked. Thanks. -- Cat ^chi? 09:55, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

t template customization

might want to look at WT:GP ;-) Robert Ullmann 09:12, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Dictionary notes

I was wondering if this was an ongoing thing, and if not what we ought to do about them. - [The]DaveRoss 20:39, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

We should keep contributing them. They're very useful when when POV or original research starts to creep into articles or when we're testing or stretching the boundaries of the inclusion policy. This is one place where users can see the difference between what is here and what is in real dictionaries made by real lexicographers. — hippietrail 00:51, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Hungarian entries

Hi Hippietrail, I've noticed that you've been adding Hungarian entries - thank you. I've also read on your user page that you are interested in standardization. To keep Hungarian entries standard, please add at least the POS category next time - or ask me and I'd be glad to help - otherwise the entries will end up on the uncategorized list. Thank you in advance! --Panda10 21:16, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

delatar

The 'See also' section- I'm just wondering why you put it in (to betray, to inform, to impregnate, to report). The 2nd and 4th have some kind of relation, but why impregnate? Nadando 02:10, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi nadando. It looks like I made that edit a year ago and I can't remember now why. I can only guess I found some connection in one of my dictionaries, or that I had impregnar confused with another word. It certainly looks wrong so please go ahead and fix it. I think your Spanish may be better than mine (-: — hippietrail 15:10, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

hysteresis

Hi,

You added hysteresis to Wiktionary:Requested entries:English, but we already have an entry for it. Are you looking for something specific that we're missing?

Thanks,
—Ruakh_TALK
01:43, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

No I just haven't perfected my system for checking all items in my list before posting to the request page. Sorry that one slipped through! — hippietrail 17:51, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

User:HippieBot

Hi, I stumbled across a number of old maintenance pages,

• User:HippieBot:all_headings
• User:HippieBot:level_one
• User:HippieBot:level_zero
• User:HippieBot:uneven_equals
• User:HippieBot/top_interwikis_cats
• User:HippieBot:roman_no_native
• User:HippieBot:all_macros_sorted
• User:HippieBot:all_entities
• User:HippieBot:all_langs_sorted

Most of them appear to have a bad title (with colon instead of slash), two are blank (for different reasons) and at least three are full of links to bad redirects (bad in terms of capitalization, which is why I found them). Most of these pages have been lying dormant for about two years. Maybe you would like to have a look at them? Thanks. -- Gauss 16:10, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for reminding me. I'll try to get around to deleting them soon. — hippietrail 14:16, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

I felt that renaming the erroneous subpage titles (with colons instead of slashes) should not be contentious and that it would be faster and easier to do it myself rather than pointing you at it. I hope this was fine with you and you forgive my intrusion into your user space. -- Gauss 23:34, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

User:Hippietrail/Hvis en reisende en vinternatt

Hi there! I've now tried to cover all the Norwegian words that were missing on that list :) Unfortunately I don't think lesepulf is a Norwegian word. Most likely they meant lesepuff or lesepult. --Eivind (t) 18:00, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. My copy of Hvis en reisende en vinternatt is at home while I'm traveling in Mexico so I can't check it right now but I'll try to remember to do so when I get back home in a few months. — hippietrail 21:15, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Bluelinks

Hi, could you help remove some of the bluelinks at Wiktionary:Requested entries:Hebrew? I don't have enough expertise in the language to see if the bluelinks have been entirely fulfilled, and many of them seem to be requests that you made. I think it would do the page some good for it to be thinned out, with fulfilled requests removed to make way for more requests. Thanks and best, 24.29.228.33 23:30, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Kanji clusters

Hi Hippietrail, Browsing Category:Grade 1 kanji, I noticed that the Kanji appear to be clustered or grouped together according to some kind of system: Can you shed any light on that? Thanks! -- Shunpiker 11:32, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi Shunpiker. The characters are grouped by radical which is a reasonable analogy to grouping by first letter in English. — hippietrail 18:52, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply! Is there a good list of the radicals to be found somewhere? I've searched around on Wikipedia to no avail. -- Shunpiker 14:37, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Index:Chinese radical would be a good place to look. Robert Ullmann 09:03, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Grease_pit#Template:see

The last time this issue was discussed you had something to say, and I wonder if you'd be willing to revisit this. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 18:45, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

rock

hippietrail you rock ass man --Mallerd 00:04, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Jepang

I have answer it, sorry for a long time reason Azmi1995 09:52, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Victor Frankenstein (talk • contribs • page moves • block user • block log • active blocks)

Could you please take a second to block this guy who vandalises your userpage and mine? Thanks. -- Gauss 18:34, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Changing username

Hi,

When you have a chance, could you take a look at [[Wiktionary:Changing username]]? None of the bureaucrats has touched it since 3 October, and bit of a backlog has developed. (I'll also mention it to SemperBlotto.)

Thanks!
—Ruakh_TALK 18:32, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

saudade and hiraeth

Hey Hippietrail, I was checking out FL entries that had Translations sections in them (which they shouldn't), and came across these two entries you created. You claimed (in HTML comments) that they are the only equivalent words for each other in any language. While interesting information, is there a way you'd like to show that without using a Translation section? --Bequw → ¢ • τ 09:40, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

I can't think of a way. They were also examples of why the "no translations in non english entries" rule was too strict or short sighted. If I put them in each other's "See also" section I would be breaking a similar rule. The only sections that allow links to words in other languages are "Etymology", "Translations", and "Descendants, none of which are capable of containing this information.

Since you are interested in policing this rule perhaps you have an idea where this useful information belongs. It's not usage information but I've noticed a lack of similar hard line rules or policing of the "Usage notes" section. Would you recommend putting the information there? — hippietrail 10:32, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

I took a stab at putting the info in a usage note section (with a ref from wikipedia). I think that'll do. Thanks for telling me about some of my header mistakes. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 20:29, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Ah I see what you mean with the "Orphaned info" header. I agree that it's preferrable to not lose valuable info, so what about an idea I just thought up and put in at civet#French. Since the French Wikt entry has a translation table we just link to it from the Usage notes section. Does that work? That was an easy fix since it already had the Ido word listed. It's a bit difficult to move translations over to FL wikts (which we could do with saudade and hiraeth). --Bequw → ¢ • τ 21:18, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

As an aside to this discussion: I would consider (being a native speaker of Welsh) that Sehnsucht and longing are perfectly adæquate translations of hiraeth. Just FYI. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 19:15, 25 November 2008 (UTC)