User talk:Msh210

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Kham, efshar, kal, etc.

Hi msh210,

I've been thinking we should have a category for adjectives like (deprecated template usage) חם (kham), (deprecated template usage) אפשר (efshár) (sp?), (deprecated template usage) קל (kal), etc. that frequently lead off sentences. ("Kham bakhútz." "Efshár mei-ha'ugá?" "Kal l'havín otó.") Does that seem like a good idea to you? If so, what do you think of the name Category:Hebrew impersonal adjectives?

Thanks in advance,
—Ruakh_TALK 21:15, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I assume you mean "that frequently start sentences" as a handy description, not as the criterion for inclusion in the category. (Can any adjective start a sentence, somehow? I suspect so.) What is the criterion, then? Cham (and kar) seems different to me from kal and efshar (and naim (google:נעים-לפגוש) and kashe), in that the latter are followed by l'- verbs and the former not. But maybe that's incorrect. (I've never heard efshar mehauga, but assume it's an elision of leechol, yes?) Why do you want to call them "impersonal": is that what they're usually called?—msh210℠ 21:26, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Re: handy description vs. criterion: Er, I kind of did mean it as the criterion. :-/   It's true that any adjective can start a sentence, though with most I can only think of sentences that would sound either poetic ("Khakhamim hem she-yod'im l'sameakh et nashoteihem") or ridiculous ("U-m'fugarim hem she-lo"). These adjectives are notable in that it's normal for them to start a present-tense clause, and in other clauses for them to be preceded only by a form of hayá. (Not counting adverbs and such.) Though, they can be preceded by l'- phrases — basically subjects in the dative case, if Hebrew had cases — as in "Lama l'Yosi mutar v'lo li?" I'll grant that I haven't given a very formal criterion, but to me these words seem to form a natural class; do they not to you? (N.B. most of them also have non-sentence-starting uses — "Ein mayim khamim" — just as in English many adjectives are also nouns, etc. But, not all: I can't think of any sentence using "efshar" as a normal adjective; in all cases I'd prefer "efshari" for that.)

Re: infinitivity vs. not: Maybe. google:"חם לגעת" does get some hits, though admittedly it's not the most natural phrase in the world. BTW, I'd "translate" "Efshár mei-ha'ugá?" as either "Efshár l'kabél mei-ha'ugá?" or "Efshár lakákhat mei-ha'ugá?", depending on the situation, but I suppose "Efshár le'ekhól mei-ha'ugá?" is basically the same.

Re: "impersonal": *shrug* They're always masculine singular, and they seem analogous to the impersonal constructions in English ("it's hot outside", "it's easy to understand it/him"), though of course not every such Hebrew expression translates to such an English one and vice versa ("I'm hot" = "kham li", "Can I have some?" = "Efshar?"; conversely, "It's raining" = "yored geshem"). I don't know what the usual name for them is.

—Ruakh_TALK 23:48, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Re "I haven't given a very formal criterion, but to me these words seem to form a natural class; do they not to you": Well, yes and no, for two reasons. (Well, yes, for the reasons you state, and no, for two reasons.) (1) The "infinitivity" (?) business. It seems like two classes, not one. Note, though, that you can say זה-לא-אפשר also (although I think "bilti efshari" is more common now). So maybe it's just one class. (2) It seems (contradicting what you said above) that every one of these adjectives can also be used in the normal adjective fashion (can you find one that's not?), which kinda dilutes the strength of the category. Perhaps call it "Hebrew adjectives that can be impersonal" or something.—msh210℠ 17:38, 9 December 2008 (UTC) Small edit in light of Google's no longer supporting that syntax.​—msh210℠ 14:43, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I'd be down with two categories, if you can clarify them well enough that I can apply them accurately. Re: "'infinitivity' (?)": It's not a real word, if that's what you're �ing. Re: normal adjective use: Yeah, maybe. I mean, they are adjectives, and I'm not suggesting otherwise. Re: "Hebrew adjectives that can be impersonal": That seems a bit wordy, and it also risks bringing in non-grammatical senses of "impersonal" (mechanical/robotic; distant/standoffish); are you saying that "Hebrew impersonal adjectives" would be misleading? —Ruakh_TALK 20:29, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Somewhat misleading, yes. No?—msh210℠ 21:01, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Or maybe not; we seem to have several such categories with such names; e.g., English uncountable nouns and English abstract nouns (which latter include fireside).—msh210℠ 21:16, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Did we reach a conclusion here? I can't tell. —Ruakh_TALK 19:07, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

There were a few issues we discussed:

1. What words get included? Criteria? — This seems to be the (somewhat subjective, but that's okay) criterion that it's usual for such words to start sentences (preceded by "to be" in past and future).
2. Are there two categories: things followed by "to" verbs and things not? — You think not, and, even if yes, we can always fine-tune later.
3. What to call the category. — I have no objection to you original suggestion, Hebrew impersonal adjectives, if that's what they're called in English and they have no English name in Hebrew. (By that latter I mean, of course, that Anglophone grammarians/linguists have no name for this type of Hebrew adjective.)

So we seem to be good to go. I assume, incidentally, that yesh and en will be in this category (even though they aren't preceded by "to be" in past and future but are instead replaced by it)?—msh210℠ 19:19, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

So, we did decide to create at least one category?

1. Sounds good.
2. O.K.
3. I don't know if there's an English name for them, period, applied to either language. google:"impersonal adjective|adjectives" gets only 68 hits (257 raw), and most of them aren't in this sense (though some are). I'm suggesting this name because I don't have a better one; because these are adjectives; and because impersonal verb, impersonal expression, and impersonal construction are standard terms. (In a lot of languages, including at least English and French, you can't use an adjective like this on its own — you have to say something like "it is good/understood/obvious that […] " or "it is cold/hot/rainy in […] " or "it is easy/difficult/interesting to […] " — so it makes sense to view the construction or expression as a whole as impersonal. In Hebrew, you just say "tov/kamuvan/barur she […] " or "kar/kham/[n/a] b'- […] " or "kal/kashe/m'anyen l'- […] ", so it seems like the adjective itself is being used impersonally. And we're a dictionary, so it's more convenient for us to describe these as properties of individual words. (If this were standard category with a standard name — which it may well be, but if so I don't know it — then I don't think it would have occurred to me to ask anyone about it, I would have just created the category. I'd like your opinion because I'm not sure about this, it's just an idea I had. And I think it's a good idea, but maybe not, and anyway not all good ideas work out in practice.)

And I wasn't thinking that yesh and ein would be included, since they don't seem to be adjectives at all, but more like quasi-verbs. For example, they (especially ein) can function as copulas in formal Hebrew (as in Template:Hebr or Template:Hebr). Funnily enough, my Hebrew–English dictionaries all give yesh as an adverb, which I think they're using a catch-all POS, and my Hebrew dictionary seems to give it only as a noun, apparently on etymological grounds. (Speaking only of the grammatical/existential use here. Certainly it has lexical uses as a noun, as all dictionaries agree.)

—Ruakh_TALK 16:14, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Hm. I maintain that yesh and en are used the way adjectives are, and seem to be adjectives. But having thought about it some more, I suppose they're not adjectives of the sort we're discussing here. After all, yesh li sefer is like kasha li handasa=handasa kasha li: still an adjective, just not of the sort we're discussing. Or so it seems to me at the moment.

More importantly: I suggest that the fact that these adjectives are "impersonal" is perfect material for a usage note; perhaps draft a usage-note template that can be included in all these pages and that categorizes.—msh210℠ 19:59, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for all your advice. I've gone ahead and created Category:Hebrew impersonal adjectives. I haven't written the usage-note template yet — I've thought a bit about what it should say, but it's still kind of vague in my head — so right now the category is still empty. I know how you like to keep your talk-page clean, but I'd kind of like to keep this conversation around. Is it all right if I copy it to the category's talk-page? Thanks again. —Ruakh_TALK 00:46, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

If you like, you certainly can, but it's unnecessary: I'll keep it as long as you like, and archive it thereafter. Nice explanation in the cat.—msh210℠ 15:48, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

If I may intervene, and I apologize for not reading the entire discussion, I might be able to contribute on certain points that I did read:

• The words yesh and eyn have been baffling Hebrew grammarians for a long time. In Hebrew they function like verbs with null subject. The ultra-conservative grammarians claim the thing stated as existent or non-existent is the sentence's subject (and there is the famous pseudo-philosophic mnemonic: ma she-yésh u-ma she-éyn hu ha-nosé). However, this theory doesn't hold much water for Modern Israeli Hebrew (I don't have enough information regarding Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew). First, since the unmarked word order in MIH is S-V-O, it is quite remarkable that yesh/eyn sentences are unmarkedly built as V-S and never have direct objects, according to the ultra-conservative theory. It would be more reasonable to assume that yesh marák ("there is soup") is analogous with holkhim habayta ("It's time to go home", lit. "going home"). Furthermore, native MIH-speakers insist (intuitively) on inserting the clitic et before the alleged subject in yesh/eyn sentence, when it is definite, e.g. kvar yésh li et ha-séfer hazé or kvar yésh li ta-sèfer-azé. Since in MIH et always introduces direct object (unlike Biblical Hebrew where et functions in a more complicated way), this implies that the thing stated as existent/non-existent is actually the object of the sentence. Of course teachers at school frown upon saying yesh li et ha-sefer and insist it should be yesh li ha-sefer, but even careful radio/TV announcers introduce et in this position when interviewing rather than reading from the teleprompter.
• Stepping up to a higher register of Modern Israeli Hebrew, yesh and eyn have nominal inflection (namely, yeshní, yeshkhá and the somewhat peculiar yeshnó; eyní/eynéni, eynkhá, eynó/eynéno). So we see here something that behave nominally but normally occupies the verb slut of the sentence.
• efshár has a nominal form (in Hebrew nouns and adjective are extremely similar morphologically, so nominal here refers to adjectives too). It seems to behave somewhat like a modal verb in English. It introduces a base-form verb, it has a special negation (namely, í-efshàr, just like you say "can't" and not "don't can"). You've noticed that efshár lagáat is grammatical while kham lagáat is not, because the adjective kham don't have the modality feature that efshár has.
• To sum it all up, the classification of these words to parts of speech is difficult, and even experienced grammarians differ on this issue. Perhaps a special category of "quasi-verbs" or "modals" or something similar would be a solution. Drork 17:56, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
  • Thanks for that. We (enwikt) seem to use (for any language) "Particle" as a catch-all header when we can't assign a POS. Not ideal, but.​—msh210℠ 18:01, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

That seems to be a common practice. They did the same in the company I used to work for as linguist. Drork 04:47, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

ASL index

I thought you might be interested in Tom's recommendation at User talk:Positivesigner, "... assign Sign Writing pictographs for each [symbol in his sign jotting system]. The lookup would be visual enough to not even need to know English and it would be general enough to isolate a group of similar signs in a few steps. My code would not be seen except by the computer programs we use to create the slightly-inaccurate Sign Writing indicies. Once the entry is located, you can have it translated from a video to Sign Writing, PSE, and English."

I'm excited about the possibility of creating a useable index, as the current system still doesn't seem terribly easy to maintain or even to navigate. Your feedback is welcome. —Rod (A. Smith) 18:41, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Why use the current system for the index? If we're switching to ASLSJ, do so for the index, too. Or am I missing something? In any event, I think that since SignWriting (the real thing, not our version) will, I hope, be Unicode characters, we'll be switching over anyway, so any current system is temporary and need not be ideal; so we might as well leave it the way it is for now even if we do think ASLSJ is better.—msh210℠ 18:47, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

No, I don't think a full conversion to ASLSJ (temporary or otherwise) is on the table, because it doesn't seem to solve any problems of the current transcription system. Tom's recommendation was to combine SignWriting symbols with ASLSJ just to organize (and automatically maintain) our sign language indices. I'm sketchy on the details, but presumably the reorganized index would make it easier for a reader to find the entry for a sign of unknown meaning. I told him to be bold with one or two of the existing Index:American Sign Language pages, so we can at least see how his vision might unfold.

Browsing around the Internet, I cannot find any new information on the integration of SignWriting into Unicode. The layout issues seem so much more complex than Unicode combining characters can accomodate, so I suspect it will be several years, at least. —Rod (A. Smith) 20:37, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

I have a working solution for encoding Binary SignWriting to Unicode. Binary SignWriting uses sequential 16 bit codes to represent the spatial information needed for SignWriting. You can read about the plane 4 solution. You can view the Hello world. page. You can view the BSW JavaScript library (see function char2unicode). I'm currently rewriting the SignWriting Image Server to use Binary SignWriting rather than comma delimited data. It should be ready next week. -Steve 12:49, 08 May 2009 (UTC)

SignWriting Image Server beta 5 has been released to view and download. Section 3 has the Binary SignWriting definition with ABNF for data and Regular Expressions for tokens. -Steve 19:35, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Morphology presentation template

I have prepared a first draft of a morpheme-presentation and -autocategorization template, {{morph}}. It is probably botched in its treatment of he|yi and lacks the categorization of the second morpheme, but its use is illustrated at referentiality. Like confix, from which this is derived, it is limited to three arguments. A variant (or a called subtemplate?), capable of handling more morphemes, at least six for normal English, more for Joycean terms, would be desirable.

It is intended to facilitate the separation of morphology (aka "synchronic etymology") and etymology (aka "diachronic etymology") and complements DoremitzWR's ideas at WT:BP.

Please tell me what you think and fix what needs fixing. DCDuring TALK 15:06, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Hey, I've been away a little. It looks like this template has been worked on quite a bit since you've posted this request, which is therefore no longer relevant. Right? Thanks for seeking my input, though. — This comment was unsigned.

Hope you're relaxed.

I'm working up the courage and energy to present a proposal about the presentation of etymology, especially historical and morphological etymology using auocategorizing templates like, {{prefix}}, {{suffix}}, {{confix}}, and {{derv}} which requires some resolution of the confounding of historical and morphological derivation that now characterizes our Etymology section. Part of the problem is that different languages are at different levels of readiness for presenting etymology information of the two kinds. A bigger problem is that autocategorizing requires the creation of a lot of categories, even for a deployment limited to derivations within English. And the category-naming convention should be consistent with all-language deployment. DCDuring TALK 22:14, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

I've seen recent talk about categorizing by etymon, and don't quite see the point for the rarer etyma. As I mentioned elsewhere (though I'm darned if I know where now), how many descendants in English are there of Middle English withdrawen (verb)? Presumable just withdraw. Do we need or want an "English descendants of Middle English withdrawen" category? I say absolutely not. (OTOH, do we need or want an "English descendants of Latin canere/cano" category? That, yes, or at least maybe.) I am very much in favor of clearly marking morphological (or whatever it's called) etymology, where we have it, as such.​—msh210℠ 15:51, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

"Artistic works"

Thank you for reviewing categories of fiction, apparently to reflect the results of a recent poll. However, Asterix, Astro Boy and Care Bears are defined as works of fiction (among other definitions); so, in my opinion, your decision of removing them from Category:Artistic works is not constructive and should be reverted. If you don't mind, I would be happy to repopulate that specific category with these terms. --Daniel. 23:04, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

As Fiction is a subcategory of Artistic works, categorizing them as Artistic works is redundant and per that poll a Bad Thing.​—msh210℠ 23:11, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

"Fiction is a subcategory of Artistic works" is a complex concept, which I wasn't aware of and was implemented in the category tree minutes ago. Let me try to rationalize it.

As I see it, a title of a work of fiction is among the many terms that fit the umbrella of "fiction", so it may be categorized into Category:Fiction.

Similarly, a title of an artistic work is among the many terms that fit the umbrella of "art", so it may be categorized into Category:Art.

If we have Category:Works of fiction and/or Category:Artistic works, then a number of titles of works may be placed into these two categories and removed from Category:Art and/or Category:Fiction.

In short:

• Category:Art > Category:Fiction > Category:Works of fiction
• Category:Art > Category:Artistic works

There is not necessarily a relation between the concepts of "artistic works" and "fiction", so my initial opinion remains, and my request too. --Daniel. 23:32, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Huh? Isn't every work of fiction an artistic work? I do not understand your argument.​—msh210℠ 05:06, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh, wait, I do now. You're saying that the cat "Artistic works" is only for titles of artistic works, and is not a cat devoted to artistic works generally (despite its name). Recall that as a dictionary our entries are terms, not referents, so that Artistic works as the title of a category makes it sounds like either (1) the words in the category are artistic works, which doesn't make much sense, or (2) it's a topical category on the topic of artistic works generally, which would not restrict it to titles. A cat devoted to titles would not be a topical category but a lexical one (though IMO it shouldn't exist) and would be, according to our current naming scheme, named English titles of artistic works. So IMO either switch the current use of the category as now named to the more general one, delete it as overly specific, or rename it per above. Thoughts?​—msh210℠ 16:55, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I have been considering Category:Artistic works a good place to have only titles of artistic works. In fact, Category:Art serves well the different purpose of being devoted to art (including artistic works) generally.

As long as we have a certain number of entries defined as titles of artistic works, it seems natural to me having a category for them. (It's roughly like having both Category:Geography and Category:Place names.)

To make the objective of Category:Artistic works clearer, I would support it being renamed to Category:Titles of artistic works, but not Category:English titles of artistic works. It's a topical category to me, like Category:Languages and perhaps Category:Sex positions. --Daniel. 02:33, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Spelling the unspelled

You mentioned that someone who doesn't know how to correctly title a page may put it under the "sign gloss" namespace. I feel that I could create a title for a sign-word page. But that does not necessarily make my title "correct." Is it first come, first serve? If someone feels it doesn't match the existing pattern, does that make it wrong? If I feel the pattern is wrong, how would I get a change approved?

I currently don't see how the phoneme / hold-move structures are helping to accomplish the overall goal of being able to "lookup the correct spelling or meaning" of a sign-word in a two-dimensional medium. Indeed, the goal of an orthography is to ease the flow of thought from mind to paper and paper to mind. Does the entry "A@InsideShoulderhigh-PalmBack-FlatB@NearCenterChesthigh-PalmDown Frontandback" help anyone to do that? If a new signer sees a person speaking in ASL, is there any chance they could "sound out" the spelling to find the meaning if they don't understand about the spacial aspect of ASL grammar?

My biggest problem is that I don't know anyone to talk to about some different ideas I have for these issues, or to whom I can express my concerns. I was e-mailing Rodasmith regularly at the end of 2009, but he told me that he had some better things to do. So that's why I'm writing to you here. Thank you for your patience. - Positivesigner 03:06, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Regarding your first point, we need canonical page titles. There's some discussion about this at [[User talk:Rodasmith#another ase entry, and some ramblings about dimensionality]]: what directions can be assumed and not included in titles. If we're keeping our current page-title system, this should be codified.

By the way, as discussed in the past somewhere, if and when SignWriting is included in Unicode, all the entries should be moved to SignWriting titles.

You're 100% right that it's very hard to find an entry by looking it up directly; as you know better than I, [[Index:American Sign Language]] is meant to ease looking up entries. Note incidentally that the difficulty of looking up a word one hears is not limited to sign languages; a Soundex-like search mechanism would be a wonderful addition to this site.

No one to talk with is a function of there being no ASL (or other SL) editors. If you have a specific idea you want implemented, I suggest you raise it at [[Wiktionary talk:About sign languages]] and point to it with a heads-up at the talkpages of the various SL editors (Rodasmith, Di gama, ECUgrad96, Neskaya, me, perhaps others); even absent editors might have an e-mailed notification in place for edits to their talkpages. Seeing support there, implement it; or, seeing no opposition, bring it to the Beer parlour. I think that'd usually be a good way to do it. If what you have is not a specific idea to be implemented but a concern to be discussed, then, again, bring it to [[Wiktionary talk:About sign languages]] with links from editors' talkpages. I don't know what else to tell you, I'm afraid; there just isn't much of a community of SL editors here (to put it mildly).​—msh210℠ 08:07, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Or just being it straight to the BP, bypassing the SL talkpage, perhaps. Few people will care, and it will clutter up an already cluttered BP, but at least more people will notice it.​—msh210℠ 16:12, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Maths words

Hi there. I see you are a mathematician. There are lots of difficult maths words in Category:Citations of undefined terms - ((deprecated template usage) autoconvolution, (deprecated template usage) biorthonormal, (deprecated template usage) coinvariant and so on). It would be good if you could shed some light on any of them. Cheers. SemperBlotto (talk) 08:19, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

There are also a few mathematical terms to be found at User:Metaknowledge/Todo, like position vector and θ-intercept, although I daresay I could define those (but not without fear of having forgotten my geometry and thus of making a definitional error). —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:51, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

I know of an SOP meaning, and of no non-SOP meaning, of position vector; same for θ-intercept. I can look at the two lists mentioned; thanks for the links. Any way the math terms from the undefined-but-cited list can be listed separately? (Not sure how that can be done: is there some criterion that marks them, like a citation from the arXiv or a particular editor?)​—msh210℠ 06:24, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Well, we do have (deprecated template usage) x-intercept, you can RFD it if you like. Similarly, "position vector" is about as SOP as (deprecated template usage) unit vector, IMO. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:26, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, x-intercept is IMO SOP also. As for unit vector, that's a vector with unit length, not at all clear IMO from the parts; position vector OTOH is a vector that signifies/marks a position.​—msh210℠ 07:14, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

What, will they get it confused with all those vectors floating around with a direction of 1? What else could it be? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 07:21, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

If someone started talking to me about a "2 vector", I'd have no idea what he meant, and would have to guess it were a vector all of whose components were 2.​—msh210℠ 07:26, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for going through my list! (octachoron too?) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 07:04, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Hm…. I see various online sources and just two bgc books are defining it as a hypercube in four dimensions, and I see no other definition for it, but I'm not sure it's attested. But if it means anything, then I suppose it means that  :-) .​—msh210℠ 07:10, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

(deprecated template usage) N-gon too, if you please. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 19:46, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Nah, it's SOP: see -gon.​—msh210℠ 00:42, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

But compare [[talk:n-tuple]] and [[talk:n-dimensional]].​—msh210℠ 02:51, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

You wouldn't happen to be able to define "pseudocodeword", would you? - -sche (discuss) 08:13, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm afraid not. It seems to be used in the mathematical theory of error detection/correction, and to be defined in terms of some sort of graph (in the graph-theory sense, not like the graph of a function from analytic geometry) — but that's about all I can say. (It's also sometimes spelled pseudo-codeword, unsurprisingly, and I didn't check which is more common, or was at various times.)​—msh210℠ 18:30, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Template:rfv-sense

I wasn't able to get the sense-id effect at all. I also tried inserting {{senseid|niggard#rfv-sense-notice-}} directly in the line which also failed.

I appreciate your giving this a try. If it can be made to work at the sense level it would be nice. My specific problem was with the WT:RFV#caudal, which rfv was for either Spanish or Portuguese. I'd be happy if it worked at the right L2 level, though getting these specific ids to work routinely would be nice. DCDuring TALK 22:36, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I think I found the problem. The header wants the span-id to "[PAGENAME]#rfv-sense-notice-", whereas the in-entry link is "[PAGENAME]#rfv-sense-notice--". I'll try to fix it. DCDuring TALK 22:48, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Both should be with -- (or -pt- if the language is specified). I don't know why the header would have only one hyphen after notice. This is very curious. The links for niggard seem to be working fine now: did, perhaps, the problem you noticed clear up somehow?​—msh210℠ 16:19, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

play the odds

The inf= parameter has been deprecated, could you please use head= instead? Thank you. —CodeCat 22:29, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

No problem. Hope I remember to.​—msh210℠ 03:44, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

WT:TR#vertical bar

This seems like something for which your thoughts would be quite valuable. DCDuring TALK 21:43, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure what I can contribute. Obviously, the senses for which | can be cited and vertical bar itself cannot should be moved. I agree completely with Choor that bracket (the bracket of or as a verb) and some other terms show up citeably, but that vertical bar most likely doesn't (and it seems you guys have already searched for it unsuccessfully). The further discussion in the TR about the language of mathematics more generally is not very practical.​—msh210℠ 06:28, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

מנין

The English word (deprecated template usage) minyan will go live as WotD later today, but I noticed that the Hebrew etymon has no entry. . . there's just Yiddish. Could you oblige? --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:02, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

I see Ruakh's added it. There's a homograph mináyin, too; I'll try and add it when I have a chance.​—msh210℠ 20:39, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

template grepping

see also

• https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/43652#c7
• http://lxml.de/tutorial.html#event-driven-parsing

-- Jeremyb (talk) 06:20, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Many thanks.​—msh210℠ 18:33, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

half a mind to

Have we now got three redirects (that I can't tell apart) that don't actually point to a real entry? SemperBlotto (talk) 16:27, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Just one redirect, to itself, due to my typo. I've fixed it now. Thanks for calling it to my attention.​—msh210℠ 16:34, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

nitpa'el

I've read a few actual adult books in Hebrew now (as opposed to just newspaper articles and whatnot), and I've found that a number of things I'd thought were archaic, because I only knew them from the liturgy, do actually occur in formal-but-not-archaizing Modern writing. For example, you asked about nitpa'el once, and I recently came across a real example, on page 173 of Memories After My Death, Yair Lapid's first-person biography of his father Tommy Lapid. After mentioning that Abba Eben was going to a secret meeting in Argentina, he explains why; he states that relations between Israel and Argentina were tense at the time, due to the abduction of Adolf Eichmann, and writes:

Template:Hebr

I do still think it must be pretty rare, though, firstly because I think this is the only Modern example I've come across, and secondly because after you brought up nitpa'el, I asked my father about it, giving some forms listed in my dictionaries, and he said that he would only understand those forms as 1p future, never as 3ms past. (I'm sure that he actually would have understood them in context, but he didn't recognize them on their own.)

—Ruakh_TALK 07:56, 25 February 2014 (UTC)