User talk:Mountebank1

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Obscure words

Hello. Please don't use obscure or archaic words like dern, hele, forcover, beguess, holen, etc. in definitions. Thanks. Benwing2 (talk) 16:01, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Similarly secrete, which normally means "to extrude secretions" and should not be used in a definition to mean "to hide, to conceal". Benwing2 (talk) 16:13, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, those are not obscure or archaic to me or at least in the part of England I used to live in. These are somewhat common there. By the way, I left out all the really obtuse words like: "hamly" for "secretive/surreptitious", "tect" for "covered/hidden" etc., all of the words I used are still pretty much in use (by older people, though)... Also, secrete is used often to mean hide/conceal in the place I come from.Mountebank1 (talk) 16:20, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

OK, but Wiktionary is supposed to be globally useful, not just beneficial to people from a particular region. All these words are dialectal, literary or archaic; use the most common synonym unless there's a really good reason not to. Benwing2 (talk) 16:25, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, It just felt to me, at the time, that using hide for скрывать and спрятать was wrong. secrete and dern seemed more appropriate to me: But, come to think of it, now hide is what is really appropriate. I mean, if I replace secrete and dern in the following sentences with hide their meaning will not change a whole lot: "they tried to secrete (pronounced siːkɹɪt, not sɪˈkɹiːt, as in to exude secretions) their money by using an offshore shell corporation" and "they tried to dern their money offshore through a dummy corporation". It is just that growing up I was not really exposed to the words like hide and conceal very much, people used dern, hele, swathe, bestick, behele, becover bedern, cloak something in secrecy, becloak, beshroud, beswathe, forcover,forhele, forstick, overcover instead, and in legal documents and on the local radio and TV it was secrete... of course, you could also hear old-timers, in the stell I grew up, use words like: takend, comen,bin/bist; gang instead of went; nim and hend instead of take; lake in stead of play; -and instead of -ing and so many other words which are now all but forlet and forgotten... it's a shame and a shand, actually, that in my 50 years I saw my true native leden die a slow death... oh sorry, mate, I got off on quite a tangent there.

Wow! Virtually unbelievable. Where did you grow up? What sort of school did you go to? Equinox ◑ 09:56, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

I went to an extremely rural school in a place where time has stopped a long, long throw ago and which is now all but dead and gone. I am one of the last few remnants of that place. And, at this point, it's not too much of a stretch to say that when I die, the rest of that place in the Scottish Highlands (its language and its soul) will die with me, and that is why I want to try to persevere as much of it as I can. I just do not wish to take all of it to the grave with me.

P.S. I have also had a grandmother who was a buff of the Scots Leid and Middle English, who read to me Chaucer's tales, the Chester Plays, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, the stories and poems of the great Scottish poets, Alexander Pope and many more others... Mountebank1 (talk) 12:13, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Sweet. I think I am a little envious. If you have any little bits of dialect that don't actually meet the WT:CFI rules, stick 'em on a user page or something, and maybe some day we can work with them. Equinox ◑ 12:33, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Actually, it is not that hard to find a lot of those words in advanced or specialized English dictionaries, especially words of Germanic origin. I also make a point of providing usage examples so that people could see how the words were used, but for now I am only just adding the words that I can find in other dictionaries. Mountebank1 (talk) 16:15, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Grammatical errors

You got one of them, but not the other. --WikiTiki89 00:36, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, I give up, what is the other one? Mountebank1 (talk) 17:58, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

The participle phrase "Having been thoroughly tortured ..." is modifying "my formal English grammar", but I was the one tortured, not my grammar. --WikiTiki89 19:56, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I see it... now that you've pointed it out. However, when I read it, for the first time, I had no trouble understanding that it was you and not "your formal English grammar" that'd been thoroughly tortured Mountebank1 (talk) 03:53, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, same with the other mistake ("my formal English grammar is better than most people"). That's why it's only a mistake in formal English, and not in colloquial English. --WikiTiki89 15:14, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

native tongue

Your native tongue is English IMO. You might have 3 first languages though. An extreme case: My aunt spoke only Hebrew till age 6 or 7, but now speaks only English and can't speak, read, write or understand a word of Hebrew. So her first language was Hebrew but her native language is English. Benwing2 (talk) 03:49, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

English is not my native tongue... well maybe it actually is. But the thing is, I was taken to a tiny village in England by my Scottish/Jewish grandmother at the tender age of 10 and before that I didn't really know any English. Also, I came to East Germany at 5 and lived in a part of the country where Plattdeutsch was a predominant form of German and I only really was exposed to Standard German at elementary school. And then to make matters worse, I was born in the southernmost part of the USSR where people didn't really speak much formal Russian, either, and thus I was very rarely exposed to "proper" Russian while living there, too.

Then when I was in my mid 20s I came to be working alongside the Soviet fishermen for a number of years and this is where the bulk of my current Russian comes from. I also worked with German, Swedish and Norwegian fishermen, as well. And, as a matter of fact, the only Russian I can speak, to this very day, is the Russian of the fishermen and sailors with whom I worked for about 5 years, and let me just say that their Russian was far from being prefect, and the same goes for my German (in that the German of fishermen and sailors is the only German I can speak today, as well).

To cut it short, a lack of sustained exposure and formal education in both Russian and German really negatively affected my ability to write and speak both of them well. Add to that the fact I haven't used much of either Russian or German over the past 20 years and it's now plain to see that I can't really claim those languages as my first languages (first language, as in a person's native language). In fact, the only language I can speak and write well, nowadays, is the English language...

An interesting side note to this, when I first came to England I had a cousin (about my own age) who, upon learning that I could speak Russian and German, demanded that I teach her to speak both Russian and German, too ,which was the last thing I wanted to do at the time by the way, and despite her being a long way from being bossy she wouldn't take no for an answer, and due to this strange concatenation of circumstances I got to speak both Russian and German on almost a daily basis until I went off to college. Actually now that I think about it, if it wasn't for her I probably would have forgotten Russian and German altogether.

P.S. At the end of the day, Russian and German are just some languages I know and English is the language I use everyday. Mountebank1 (talk) 08:28, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments! Benwing2 (talk) 03:39, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

You might find that Wiktionary:Babel gives you a simpler way to show your language experience on your user page. Equinox ◑ 15:18, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

That may be, but, to tell you the truth, I am not a big fan of simpler ways... Mountebank1 (talk) 02:56, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

But I gave it a try, anyhow. Mountebank1 (talk) 03:39, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

I know it's sometimes annoying to try to simplify a complex life story of languages into a few boxes on a page. But it does generate some categories so that we can automatically search for people who speak language X to a certain level. Other than that, you are right, and it doesn't really matter. Hey-ho. Equinox ◑ 01:04, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

ake

Your edits there highlighted some things you need to work on:

1. Make sure you have the right language:

   You gave an etymology that said it came from Middle English, but then you gave a ton of quotes from the Middle English Dictionary, which were all, of course, Middle English and not English. If you had made that etymology section a Middle English entry, instead, no one would have challenged it.

2. Make sure your quotes match the entry.

   You included a number of quotes for ac, which would be fine for the ac entry, but not for ake. The only exception would be if ac were a form for which ake was the lemma. In this case, though, the MED gives ac as the lemma and ake as one of several variants. DTLHS correctly created a Middle English entry at ac based on your content, though he apparently didn't notice all the quotes for ake when he copied everything over. I've now added a Middle English alternative form entry at ake and moved the ake quotes there.

3. Preview often, and only submit when you've checked your edit.

   It took you 12 edits to get it to where you wanted it, and a lot of that was fussing around with things like minor details of spelling, punctuation, and wikisyntax. It's very easy to miss a detail or two, so one or two corrections isn't out of the ordinary. 12 is a sign that you're doing something wrong.

4. In general, think things through.

   As the saying goes, measure twice and cut once. Every morning, I take a shower, get dressed, grab my keys and head out the door. You frequently seem to be doing the equivalent of heading out the door, and then realizing after it locks behind you that you forgot to get dressed or pick up your keys. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:16, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

come

This isn't okay, without at least glossing as region or dialect. Remember that some foreigners come and learn English from our site. [1] Please address it. Equinox ◑ 03:20, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

1. Fine, I will move it to Usage Notes and provide more details there. Mountebank1 (talk) 03:31, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

ne

Why the rollback? I have reverted your rollback, and frankly I find it to be quite insulting that you did not venture to expend even 5 minutes of your time to do some research on ne. Mountebank1 (talk) 10:07, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Also a few recent usage examplesːNa micht I trive, Maigie; but I see a braw new hoos (1883) and There 'e sat an' suppit an' suppit an' better na suppit (1955). You can find other examples here . Please be more considerate in the future. See also this

• Goodness me. Perhaps it might have given you pause that the reference you are using, the DSL, is specifically of "the Scots language" and not of English. If you want to create a Scots section then please do so (I have spent a lot of time here on Scots entries myself) but you should not include this stuff under an English header as we treat the two languages separately here. Ƿidsiþ 12:18, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Yes, please, if the entry is Scots, please consider creating one, as we are in dire need of Scots entries ! Leasnam (talk) 02:27, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I will create a Scots entry for ne later on. I am really busy at the moment, but I will get back to it in a couple of days Mountebank1 (talk) 04:40, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you ! :) Leasnam (talk) 14:47, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

make

Hello ! You labelled make in the sense of "create" (religious) as obsolete. How did you ever arrive at that conclusion ? Leasnam (talk) 17:51, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

I don't know, maybe it's not really obsolete in the south of England or some other place like that, but in the place where I grew up people mostly used the words create and fashion in religious contexts. The word shape, in the sense of "create", was also sometimes used by rustics, but they, rarely if ever, used the word make in the sense of "create" in religious contexts. I heard more than once a sort of rural tent-revival preacher sayː Earth was shapen by God for God's folk. I don't think I have oft heard people use make in the sense of "create" in sermons or homilies, though, and I went to church every other day as a boy. I don't know, I might be wrong about it, you know, for other places. Maybe, people in the US still use it in religious contexts and maybe people in the south of the UK still do, as well. I also used to write my own sermons in my late teens, and I rarely used make in various religious contexts, because folks didn't take kindly to make in religious contexts there. Come to think of it, it's probably just some sort of regional oddity or something.

P.S. I am just incredibly tired right now, and I think that I just reverted, for a second, to my good old dialectal thinking where make is mostly a lewd term. Anyways thanks for catching my mistake. Mountebank1 (talk) 18:39, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

rit

Hi ! Old High German rizzen comes from PGmc *writjaną. I am not sure there was a *ritjaną. If rit and ritzen are cognates, then it follows that the English word must also be from the same parent word *writjaną Leasnam (talk) 19:23, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Where did the w- go? Middle English preserves it in other words. —CodeCat 19:40, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

True, it most often does preserve wr- (but not wl-, which becomes l-). Could the ME word be a borrowing then, perhaps from Middle Dutch or Scandinavian? There's Middle Dutch riten... If rit can be traced to PGmc *ritjaną, is there a PIE root that can support it ? Leasnam (talk) 20:42, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Dutch also preserves wr-, and it is still pronounced today, see wrijten. So riten must have another source. —CodeCat 20:48, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Okay, here's the evidence I have collected so farː there probably was a long, long time ago a PIE root that looked something this *re(h₁)d- (“to scratch”). Then from that root verbs like ritzen (to scratch, score, carve, engrave, inscribe) and rit were derived and, somewhere along the line, nouns like German Riss, Dialectal German Rass and English rat sprang. Then those nouns gave rise to the verbs rat, rijten and reißen from which the verbs to-rat, terijten, zerreißen eventfully descended. Now leaving the Germanic languages altogether, there are also Slavic verbs with prefixes like these разрезать to slive, порезать to cut etc., and from these verbs the following nouns разрез (gash), порез (cut) are derived. There is also Latin rodo (to gnaw, nibble, bite; eat or waste away, corrode, consume; erode) and Scottish Gaelic riach (to score, scratch) and there are also some forms with a "t" in them in Scottish Gaelic. Then there is also Welsh rhathu (to file, scratch the surface of, rasp). I also heard Lithuanians say this raižyti (to score, scratch) and this rėžti (to cut, slash, slit). I would not be surprised if there were related words in other Indo-European languages. Mountebank1 (talk) 21:16, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

If that's the root, then the -i- in the forms must be from e>i umlaut in Proto-Germanic already: *ritjaną, the same present tense as in the rhyming *sitjaną. Connection with Latin rodō seems plausible. I don't see rijten or reißen coming from that root, however, as the ablaut is wrong: Dutch ij derives from an earlier long ī which must derive from PIE ey or iH. Since there is no y in this root, it can't be the origin. —CodeCat 21:23, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

De Vaan gives quite a different etymology for rōdō than what we currently have, so let's ignore that one for now. —CodeCat 21:27, 25 August 2016 (UTC) Mountebank1 (talk) 22:24, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

I am not sure where the English noun rat and the regional German noun Rass came from, all I am saying is that it would be a pretty fierce coincidence if both terms did not have a common ancestor way down the line (maybe 4 or even 5 thousand years ago). What that common ancestor might have looked like I do not know, but I am sure there was one. Mountebank1 (talk) 22:00, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Hmm, okay Leasnam (talk) 22:13, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

These two terms, at least, appear related. They can even be plausibly related to rit and ritzen. But beyond that, it's too speculative. —CodeCat 22:12, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Where (if anywhere) might *hrītaną fit in? Could rit be an ablautative (coined a new word) of it ? :D Leasnam (talk) 22:15, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

It fits in with Old Saxon hrītan and Welsh rhathu and some Scottish Gaelic forms of riach like rhiech. Maybe it was a borrowing from the Celtic languages, who knows. Mountebank1 (talk) 22:24, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

rit fits as a zero grade of the root *hrītaną, but rat is not obviously derivable from that root. An o-grade *hrait- would give Old English *hrāt-, evolving into Middle English *rote. If we posit it to derive from this root, we must explain why the a remained as well as why it's short. —CodeCat 22:31, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

OE ā remaining as a is not hard. Only Southern dialects of Middle English changed long a to o. In the north it remained a . We have doublets today: whole/hale for instance Leasnam (talk) 22:34, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

By the way, rit has some strong forms in northern rural dialects where rat is the simple past form and ritten is the past participle. These forms are non-existent in southern dialects. Mountebank1 (talk) 22:39, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

As far as the vowel length, Scots often has hat for "hot" (Ane hat cole of brynand fyre and Hat irne til his sydis lay), beside expected hate and hait, so shortening is not out of the realm of poss Leasnam (talk) 22:43, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

To make myself perfectly clear, the reason why I am so sure that rat, rijten and reißen are related is the fact that all three of them have a form prefixed with their own variant of the prefix *twiz-. It would be quite a coincidence if such a form could exist in Middle and Modern English and not be related to Dutch terijten and German zerreißen, when English words like tobreak, totear, tosplit, toburst, todrive, tofall, tosmelt, toslit, tostick, todraw, toslay, tocleave, togo all have Germanic cognates. Oh, and by the way, neither English rit nor German ritzen have a form prefixed with their own variant of *twiz-. Mountebank1 (talk) 23:07, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

That prefix was productive, being added to many base verbs. You may feel like it's proof, but we need hard evidence (attestations, sound changes, etc.) Leasnam (talk) 23:31, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Oops, it turns out that there is a form zerritzen in German after all. Maybe I am not so sure anymore. And yeah, it would be nice to have hard evidence, but the thing with the evidence is that there is only the circumstantial kind of it available. And how do we deal with that? Mountebank1 (talk) 23:44, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

You just say what it is, present all the available evidence, and let the user decide Leasnam (talk) 00:33, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I think I am going to add a shortened version of this discussion to the etymology section of rat, but don't you find it quite striking that there should be such words as Tocharian rässāre (to tear off/out), dialectal Norwegian rosa (to scratch), Old Church Slavonic рѣзати (rězati, “to cut, carve”), Welsh rhathu (to file, scratch the surface of, rasp), Scottish Gaelic riach(t) (to score, scratch), Lithuanian raižyti (to score, scratch), English rat, rote, rawt, rait and dialectal German Rass?

Some you list I might consider at first glance to be related, though others I might be inclined to believe are mere coincidences. I haven't really had much occasion to study this particular word much though since it's rather rare Leasnam (talk) 05:21, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Well, maybe these are just a bunch of random coincidences, or maybe they are much more than that.. maybe, just maybe, these are what can take us one step closer to the language our forebears and forefathers used to speak thousands of years ago. At this point, however, it is very hard to tell whither this might take us. Mountebank1 (talk) 06:39, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

I just noticed another remarkable thing which is the English word rase (“to graze, scratch out, scrape”) and guess whither tracing its etymology led me, hm? Well it led me straight to Latin rado (“to graze, scrape, shave, scratch”) and now I feel like we are finally getting somewhere. What do you make of this turn of events? Mountebank1 (talk) 11:23, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

P.S. Check out the etymology for rado (“to graze, scrape, shave, scratch”), it's really edifying. Mountebank1 (talk) 11:32, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

shiver

Hello. Why did you move shiver to Wiktionary:shiver and then re-create it? It erased all the history. --Octahedron80 (talk) 07:30, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

By accident. And the history is not gone it's all here (talk) 07:44, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

When you move a page, the history moves with it. Recreating it makes it impossible to move the original page back without admin privileges to delete the recreated page. When you make a mistake like this, please ask an admin for help, because you don't know what you're doing. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:45, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

aik

Hi there ! You added aik to English, and used a Scots dictionary as your reference. I cannot find the quote you used. Can you please provide at least 3 durably archived citations for the English entry ? Leasnam (talk) 05:18, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

That was not a quote but a usage example. There are no quotes for this word as far as I know (outside the DSL), despite the word in question still being used by rustics in Scotland and Northern England. This word was only attested in oral form by the creators of the Dictionary of the Scots Language. Mountebank1 (talk) 06:04, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

There is also this word which, the DSL says, is derived from the same Old Norse root as aik. I have never heard it used myself, though and that's why I am not going to add it. Mountebank1 (talk) 06:22, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

It needs 3 English attestations... Leasnam (talk) 23:35, 29 August 2016 (UTC)