User talk:KYPark/城

Long lists of synonyms -- help differentiating

Hello KYPark --

I've noticed your changes to the 城 entry, thank you for your work there! One request I'd like to make of you is, when adding a list of synonyms where there is more than one synonym for a single sense, that you add a gloss after the term to help differentiate. For instance, I can tell from the list you gave that 堡 (보, bo), 壘 (루, ru), 堡壘 (보루, boru), 塞 (새, sae), 要塞 (요새, yosae), and 砦 (채, chae) all mean fort, but I have no way of telling these terms apart without clicking through to each individual page. This is not terribly difficult, but it is less than optimal for usability. Something like the following would be very helpful. I'm not sure if I have the meanings correct, but hopefully this illustrates the format:

• (fort): 堡 (보, bo): a fortified town
• (fort): 壘 (루, ru): a military wall

-- TIA (thanks in advance), Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 16:11, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Hi Eirikr! In principle, I agree on your "request" for the semantic as well as genetic (e.g., "Derived" and "Related") relations to be "optimal for usability" or for the cross-references to be as informative as possible. In practice, however, such may not be the case here in general, I fear.

• The idea of {{sense}} sounds plausible and well founded according to the senses enumerated in the Definition.
• Hanja has lots of synonyms which are mostly hard to be made different. I at least have little idea how to explicate them, say, 堡 and 壘 in 堡壘 and 宇 and 宙 in 宇宙 in preciser terms than "fort" and "house" respectively.
• Such compounds as 堡壘 and 宇宙 are done so often tautologically in synonymic pair perhaps to avoid homonymic rather than synonymic confusions, I suspect.
• English serves as a metalanguage here in explaining and making different the hanja ideograms. Thus, such numerous synonymous ideograms for "moat" as 垓, 垓字, 壕, 濠, 城濠, 池, 城池, 城下池, etc., could be done so in no better than English terms of moat, ditch and fosse, which in turn make little difference, however different the former may be.

--KYPark (talk) 04:22, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Understood, thank you. Perhaps you could mark the most common Korean term for the listed sense, then?

For instance, English fosse is only very rarely used, and in fact I'd never heard the word before; meanwhile, moat is restricted to meaning "a wide and deeply dug barrier, usually filled with water, that surrounds a fortification", and ditch generally means something smaller than a moat, and could be something dug by a single person and only 30cm across.

So for an entry related to castles and fortifications, the moat entry would be the most commonly used term, and should probably come first; the fosse entry would be possibly the least commonly used term, and should probably come last.

Would it be possible to reorder the KO synonyms in a similar fashion? -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 20:07, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I mostly agree with your so-called first things first principle, though views may diverge diverse as to which come first and next. In the beginning, I followed my dictionary's order of senses in Definition as "1. inner wall..., 2. outer wall...," etc.

1. Then I've reordered them so as to begin with the generic perspective or overview, say, "defensive wall" which serves as the core or common factor among the many senses that follows.
2. The second one may not accord with the Korean but Western and Japanese perspective!
3. The third may be worth the second in Korea, but ...

Priority ordering of terms within a sense in Synonyms and the like appears so complicated and perplexing, at least to me. I'm not so finely tuned, I'm afraid. It varies from case to case anyway, as suggested there from section to section. I'd say it's art! (^^)

BTW, I do wonder how well the three Etymologies of wall are founded and ordered from the first things first perspective. For me, the last be the first, and the three may better merge into one or two from the Occam's razor perspective. Please take care of it.

BTW again, do you like or mind me sandboxing 屯#Korean on the subpage Talk:屯/Korean?

--KYPark (talk) 03:07, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

• No trouble at all with transcluding this thread. Though I suspect you mean that you've transcluded onto Talk:城? The Talk:屯/Korean page doesn't seem to exist. Also, I changed the technical details of partial transclusion to use mw:Extension:Labeled_Section_Transclusion instead -- using <onlyinclude> breaks subsection editing, so the only way to edit this "Long list of syns" section was by editing the preceding "x-templates" section. And one last issue, if you ever archive your Talk page, it would probably be best if you simply copied (i.e. copy-paste, not transclude) this thread directly onto the Talk:城 page. Otherwise, the link on the Talk:城 page won't work anymore, and this thread will seem to vanish.
• I'll have a look at wall#English, though I confess I'm less certain about lexicographic standards for English entries here at EN WT, simply because I've spent most of my time so far working with and on JA entries.
• And understood about how you're ordering the KO syns. Thank you for the explanation.

-- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:42, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your extra trouble with the sectional transclusion. Yet your change strangely doesn't work. To avoid such transclusion along with the links likely broken by archiving, I'd get this section transcluded from the steady, stationary, archival subpage User talk:KYPark/城. Quite happily, I've tested this way of getting the section Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium #Copenhagen and many others transcluded from the steady subpage Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/Copenhagen. (BTW, I miss your talks there, for the agenda yet to be agreed or concluded!) How glad I am that everything is a holon, that is, part-cum-whole, 一部兼全部, confusingly, concurrently, cooccurrently! This is also where I wish to use the stationary subpage Talk:屯/Korean "camp, station" as the sandbox-cum-source (of transclusion) for Talk:屯#Korean. Lastly, thank you for taking my reasons for the synonymic disorder for granted.

Cheers --KYPark (talk) 05:43, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

• I am utterly baffled by what's going on with labeled-section transclusion (LST) on your Talk page. It worked just fine earlier today when I made the change, and then checked at Talk:城, but it's not working now.

I quite like the idea of using sub-pages for more stable linking and to obviate the need for archiving. If you do use sub-pages of entry Talk pages, I only request that you transclude the subpages into the main Talk page, a bit like how Wiktionary:Requested_entries:Japanese transcludes sub-pages. That way, everyone can see the sub-page content (and edit it) on the regular Talk page. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 08:06, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

PS -- I may chime in at Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/Copenhagen later; I'm a bit busy with other things at the moment.  :)

Agreed. Cheers! --KYPark (talk) 09:11, 7 July 2012 (UTC)