Wiktionary:Tea room/2023/September

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← August 2023 · September 2023 · October 2023 → · (current)

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Egyptian Y character

I recently realized that the article for ysri3r (ancient Egyptian word for “Israel”, as per the Merenptah stele) represents the Y character (the double reed leaf character 𓇌, Gardiner’s Sign List M17A) with two adjacent single reed leaf characters (𓇋 followed by another 𓇋), instead of the one separate character that is the double reed leaf. I later discovered that the cause of this was its template head having two I’s placed together. I considered two attempts to fix it, but went through with neither because the edit preview showed me that neither would produce my intended effect. Replacing the “i-i” with a “y” would instead result in the hieratic shorthand (the double slash character 𓏭, Gardiner’s Sign List Z4) and replacing it with a “j” would result in the Roman letter j. Primal Groudon (talk) 03:40, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

Are you asking about the transliteration or the actual hieroglyphs? Both look ok to me.

Re: The transliteration - y is correct. There have been various transliteration systems over the years, but I believe the one Wiktionary uses is that of Allen 2000. See here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Egyptian_transliteration_schemes (The double reed is y. The single reed is j. There is no i in this sytem, and the3 is actuall ꜣ.) The ysri3r page actually automatically redirects to the real entry ysrjꜣr, and there's also a manual redirect page for iizriAr (which is the MdC transliteration).

Re: The hieroglyphs - I think that's because WikiHiero (which renders the hieroglyphs) does not support the M17A glyph, probably because it's not needed since you get basically the same result by doing i-i (or, if you really wanted to, you could do i*i, which I think would probably be better but it's probably not worth changing it, and many other entries just use i-i too). 2603:8080:C6F0:48B0:0:0:0:1468 13:46, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

common sense (sense 2)

The entry isn't wrong but it's not quite right either. The phrase "common sense" is still used this way among neo-Thomistic philosophers and psychologists today, so it really isn't "obsolete", nor do I think "formerly believed" is an accurate description (as if to imply that the notion of a "common sense" is an outdated hypothesis or something). Also, I don't have a source off the top of my head, but I think this is also referred to as the collective sense (which might be good to list under synonyms). 2603:8080:C6F0:48B0:0:0:0:1468 14:06, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

I wrote up a different gloss for the same philosophical sense at Latin sensus communis a while ago fwiw (I didn't check the English entry at the time). —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 15:39, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

Technical note, someone may want to fix the quotation markup (", Book I, New York 2001, p.159: " is outside the template and so shunted onto a new line, which is not optimal behaviour for the template). - -sche (discuss) 19:06, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

I've just gone and edited the definition. I think it could still use some improvement though. 2603:8080:C6F0:48B0:0:0:0:1468 16:14, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

count 'em

I've just created this entry after reading the term in a book, but I'm not even sure which header fits best for this (phrase? interjection? else?). Could someone please add a proper definition? (It probably needs a {{n-g}}.) Thanks, Einstein2 (talk) 17:45, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

"Count them" is also attested. It seems more like a rhetorical device to emphasis the number by telling the audience to check it for themselves. There should be other expressions telling the audience to check various things in other ways- perhaps "look it up" might be analogous. I suspect this originated as a figure of speech used by barkers. Chuck Entz (talk) 18:04, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

"Concussion" term in meteorology, seismology, and volcanology

Hello, Is "concussion" term used in meteorology, seismology, and volcanology other than in neurology but different contexts? Please Yuliadhi (talk) 22:50, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

The following is copied from the Grease Pit discussion:

I can at least say that I've never heard it in meteorology. I've been out of the field for quite some time, but it seems to be a very slow-moving science, with people entering school these days using pretty much the same terms I remember learning when I was in school. —Soap— 13:52, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

The term has been and may still be used discussing phenomena in meteorology, seismology, and volcanology, but the meaning doesn't seem to be other than our definition 1. DCDuring (talk) 15:31, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

• This question should have been raised at the Tea Room or the Information Desk. This [WT:GP] is a forum for technical matters. DCDuring (talk) 15:57, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

consist

Why do we have entries for consist in, consist of, when consist#Verb already covers those senses ("intransitive with OF", "intransitive with IN")? Having both is highly redundant and makes it unclear where to put citations etc. Equinox ◑ 06:06, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

Because some believe that just about every verb + adverb/preposition combination is a phrasal verb. If there is no change in the base meaning of the verb in the combination with the adverb/preposition, but only in the nature of the relationship to a complement, I don't see why we would claim the combination to be a phrasal verb. DCDuring (talk) 14:14, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

Yeahhh. I'd say redirect them... - -sche (discuss) 18:47, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

more than C has had cooked dinners

Do we have a snowclone entry for this "I've Xed more Ys than Z has had cooked dinners" Jin and Tonik (talk) 17:47, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

more than someone has had hot dinners. Equinox ◑ 17:52, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

eat someone for breakfast

Chuck Entz moved this page from eat something for breakfast to eat someone for breakfast in 2016. In 2022 I moved it to eat for breakfast as it can also be used with non-human entities:

• As the world’s tech giants have discovered, in markets such as India — to adapt Peter Drucker’s dictum — context eats strategy for breakfast.
• The difference here is that the iPhone eats the G3 for breakfast in terms of performance, and I’ll have to trust the tests – it’s the iPhone for me.
• I called the parts manager and he said the auto start stop system eats batteries for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I just noticed Ioaxxere moved the page back last month to eat someone for breakfast without explanation. I suppose there's some anthropomorphism going on here, but should the title say "someone" for this entry? — Alexis Jazz (talk) 20:47, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

eat for breakfast is a suboptimal title since you can never say "I ate for breakfast." I don’t think we have a rule about using something versus someone but most dictionaries seem to be using the latter. Ioaxxere (talk) 04:57, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Ioaxxere, you can't say "I make mincemeat out of." either, yet that's the title. (now you will presumably move that article to make mincemeat out of someone, which I don't support as that one can also apply to non-human entities) — Alexis Jazz (talk) 11:26, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

The difference (and I think what Ioaxxere is saying) is that the object in "eat ... for breakfast" has to fall inside the phrase, there's no internal ellipsis in "make mincemeat out of". —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 11:43, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Al-Muqanna, true. What about call into question? I suppose that could occur as-is, but it usually doesn't. Or bring into line? There should be a placeholder that includes both human and non-human entities, I suppose there's "X" but we don't use that much here. — Alexis Jazz (talk) 13:04, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Well, there's nothing wrong with putting the object outside of those as long as it's not a pronoun, e.g. "I don't want to call into question your work for the firm" sounds just as good to me as "... call your work for the firm into question", maybe a bit more formal. The placement of "for breakfast" is much more fixed: "Their new car is going to eat for breakfast Tesla's strategy" sounds very strange. But I agree it's a bit difficult. IMO either "someone" or "something" is fine, with maybe a usage note to clear it up. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 13:14, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

We at Wiktionary seem to accept that something includes someone. I wonder whether most normal users do. Or do they think that something and someone are disjount? DCDuring (talk) 20:33, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

literary miniature

German Wikipedia describes Miniatur, an umbrella term containing short stories, novellas, flash fiction, etc. Is there an English equivalent term? Miniatur links to miniature in the gloss (which doesn't mention a literary miniature), so it's definitely missing the German Wikipedia's meaning. Azertus (talk) 11:19, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

The term literary miniature does get used, but I would say it's fairly academic and typically more restrictive than what you suggest, as a metaphorical reference to the small paintings that are usually called miniatures (our sense 3). I've not come across miniature used in a more general sense for short written pieces. Since German Miniatur can also refer to painted miniatures afaik it may be worth having separate definitions. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 12:01, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

Causative す・せる

The page for せる describes the origin as coming from classical Japanese す which follows 下二段 conjugation, however the corresponding entry (etym. 6) doesn't reflect this. Should a separate "classical conjugation" table be added to this entry, showing the bigrade conjugation pattern? Also, if this is considered to be related to the verb す (Etym. 5), is there any explanation for the difference in conjugation pattern? (下二段 vs サ変) Horse Battery (talk) 15:42, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

@Horse Battery --

There's classical causative ～す, and there's modern causative ～す. Modern ～す follows the 五段 conjugation pattern, basically the same as any other verb whose unchanging stem ends in a consonant -- if memory serves, English-language teaching materials might call these "type 1" verbs.

About the difference in conjugation patterns, note that classical サ変 is identical to 下二段 for all but the 連用形, which takes the stem form し～ instead of the 下二段 stem form せ～. Considering that 1) modern せ pronounced as se was previously affricated as she, and the shift from shemasu to shimasu is almost imperceptible in fast speech; and 2) this is probably the most commonly used verb in the entire language, so sound shifts and irregularities are probably inevitable, considering similar phenomena other languages (oft-used words accrue irregularities); well, ultimately, there isn't much of a difference there in the end, and what difference there is, isn't surprising.

All that said, we should probably update the causative ～す entry as you suggest, to include the classical 下二段 paradigm, and to mention and explain the conjugation differences. An overview of the history would be good in the regular-verb す entry too, indicating when various changes arose. (Or maybe those should go at する, not sure yet.) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:30, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Wording of trans woman definition

@-sche, GregKaye There seems to be some disagreement on how to word the definition of trans woman. The wording we've used for a long time reads "A transgender or transsexual woman; i.e., a woman who was assigned male at birth.", but GregKaye seems to've taken issue with this wording, substituting "A male-to-female transgender or transsexual person.", arguing that the longstanding wording is "problematic" or even "non sensical^[sic]" apparently on the basis of the primary definition of woman reading "An adult female human." (a definition that, as far as I can see, raises absolutely no issues with our longstanding definition of trans woman as "A transgender or transsexual woman; i.e., a woman who was assigned male at birth."). Do the objections to the longstanding wording have any merit?

(Disclaimer: as a trans woman myself, I might have a bit of a biased perspective, hence why I'm asking for input here.) Whoop whoop pull up ^{Bitching Betty ⚧️ Averted crashes} 18:54, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

This looks like the stock complaint the Wikipedia article also endures; I would simply revert it but I'm headed out the door so I'll leave it to someone else. (Certain people think that only cis women should be allowed to be "woman", that only cis females should be allowed to be "female", and that they can exclude trans women by defining "woman" as "adult human female" ... but I don't know any trans women who feel successfully excluded by that, do you? Since everyone I know, cis or trans, who'd consider herself covered by "woman" also considers herself covered by "female".) I will concede that the Wikipedia article has one benefit over us, which is that it goes on past its opening sentence ("A trans woman [...] is a woman who was assigned male at birth") for another few hundred sentences which further explain things, whereas our definition is just the one short line; it might make sense to add a few more words of explanation if people have (better) suggestions. - -sche (discuss) 19:16, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I kinda figured as much. Thanx for the confirmation! Whoop whoop pull up ^{Bitching Betty ⚧️ Averted crashes} 19:31, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

Agree with having the previous, longstanding definition. AG202 (talk) 15:11, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

The word woman is defined by wiktionary as:

1. An adult female human.
2. (collective) All female humans collectively; womankind.
3. A female person, usually an adult; a (generally adult) female sentient being, whether human, supernatural, elf, alien, etc. ...

The previous definition of trans woman reverted to read: "A male-to-female transgender or transsexual person."

I find it problematic when the definition "A transgender or transsexual woman" pushes a conclusion. People can declare themselves women and then claim access to environments like women's prisons, women's sports and, even if objections are raised, women's exclusive spaces. The term trans woman has been used to describe natal males who, in some cases, do little if anything more than to self-describe themselves as women. While people can certainly accept trans women for their identification as women, trans women and women are not the same. Why not leave readers with the option to take their own interpretation? GregKaye (talk) 10:33, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

Please take your transphobic canards and begone. Whoop whoop pull up ^{Bitching Betty ⚧️ Averted crashes} 15:04, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

We are supposed to define words according to usage, and some people, Greg, indeed agree with you, and use the word that way. Equinox ◑ 21:36, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

medium noun sections

At medium, we have "medium (plural media or mediums) 1. The material of the surrounding environment [...] 5. A substance, structure, or environment in which living organisms subsist, grow or are cultured [...]"
and
"medium (plural mediums or media) 1. A liquid base which carries pigment in paint... " as separate noun sections, under the same etymology. Isn't it odd for such semantically-adjacent senses with (apparently) the same ety, and same range of inflections, to be in separate sections? I was going to simply merge them, but I notice we also have spirit mediums and clothing-size mediums grouped together with each other as a third noun section. Normally these would all be in one noun section and the different plurals that the different senses take would be handled on the sense line like at staff, not by splitting them into separate noun sections, right? - -sche (discuss) 00:47, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

I think it makes some sense to have a separate section for the noun that is a nominalized use of the adjective, but not for the others, so I edited the entry accordingly. The OED says of the plural that "The plural form media is after the regular Latin plural. An anglicized plural mediums is attested from the 17th cent. and is particularly common for concrete entities: see especially senses A.II.6, A.II.5c, A.II.7, A.III.9, A.III.10. Free variation between these two forms is present in most of the senses in modern English with the exception of sense A.II.6b where the plural is almost always mediums". Sense A.II.6b is of course the "spirit medium" sense; the others are as follows: A.II.6.a: An intermediary agent; a mediator; A.II.5c: liquid substance with which pigment is mixed for use in painting; A.II.7: Theatre. A coloured filter in the form of a screen fixed in front of a light source which is directed at the stage; A.III.9, A person of middle rank or class (listed under deadjectival senses); A.III.10. A medium-dated security (listed under deadjectival senses).--Urszag (talk) 01:56, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

As I see it, there are definite semantic divisions:

1. The substance, environment or format in which something exists
2. Something between, as in:
   1. The means by which someone or something acts upon someone or something else
   2. Someone or something that is in contact with separate entities and conveys things between them.
3. Something intermediate between extremes, as in size, polarity or degree

It's not that simple, of course, but I think these would be helpful for overall organization. A spirit medium is someone in between. A medium clothing size and a happy medium are intermediate between extremes. The liquid that pigment is added to is a substance in which something exists, as is a nutrient medium.

The first division contains most of the senses with media as their plural, and there's a rough progression in countability from first to last as well.

It still needs fleshing out, but I hope it will be useful. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:34, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

put hair on your chest

I heard "This will put hair on your chest" in the movie "The Maze Runner" and I was wondering what it meant. I'm not a native so I don't feel legitimate to create the article. Thanks Jona (talk) 07:49, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Jona. "put hair(s) on your chest" is typically used to indicate that something about to be consumed, such as a strong alcoholic drink or hot chilis, will make you stronger or more masculine.

SimonWikt (talk) 09:23, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

The entry is at put hair on someone's chest (since it doesn't need to be "your"—I've made a redirect). —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 11:39, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks ! :-) Jona (talk) 10:48, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Do words for ‘sleep’ ever mean ‘energy’?

Looking at sleep#Translations I was surprised that not a single translation could also mean ‘energy’. Common semantic developments for ‘sleep’ include ‘dream’, ‘drowsiness’, ‘gound’, ‘death’, and most interestingly, ‘temple (of the head)’, but never ‘energy’. That strikes me as remarkable; it would be easy to reinterpret a statement like ‘I need more sleep’ to mean ‘I need more energy’, but so far I’ve never seen a word for ‘sleep’ develop this way. — (((Romanophile))) ♞ (contributions) 15:33, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

A low-energy/alertness state (sleep) might lead to a high-energy/alertness state, but it is a low-energy/alertness state itself. That must be too much of a cognitive barrier to overcome. DCDuring (talk) 16:43, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

Inderdaad. Also, see power nap PUC – 17:19, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

Further to what DCDuring pointed out, I'm not sure how cross-cultural this particular idea of energy as a kind of metric that's recharged by sleep is. Chinese has 精, for example, but I believe in the classical understanding it's more of a long-term thing that you would erode through poor sleep/seminal emissions/etc rather than simply spending it all in a day and regaining it by sleeping.

Obviously people need to sleep when they're tired. But one obvious problem with the recharging metaphor is that you don't become more energetic by sleeping a lot. Another, related point is that sleep tends to have inertia: it's not like drinking coffee, usually you'll be sleepy when you get up. Anybody sleeping on a military campaign will worry about being surprised during their sleep for a reason.

Looking at Herman Boerhaave's 18th-century discussion of sleep in his influential lectures on physiology, Boerhaave emphasises this: "the longer sleep is continued, so much the more is sleepiness increased, so that at length almost the whole life may be spent in sleeping". In fact Boerhaave seems to treat sleep as a kind of side-effect "occasioned" by weariness, food and drink, etc. He cites Hippocrates connecting drunkenness to deep sleep (and to death). For Boerhaave it seems sleep is something that needs to be overcome. And descriptions of sleep specifically in terms of things like "reinvigoration" apparently start in the 19th century. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 18:59, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

radiendocrinology

English. Definition:

• The study of radiative endocrine interactions and their effects upon vitality.

This was apparently made up a century ago to sell some kind of gizmo that irradiated people for allegedly miraculous benefits. Given that everybody knows better nowadays and that such a thing would be illegal today, I think we need to do better for a definition than parroting the glowing description from a century ago. I would have rfved this, but there seem to be just enough uses that aren't direct quotes of the title of the work that introduced the term. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:01, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

y (Spanish)

I think the pronunciation needs to be a little more nuanced. Right now it just says [ʝ] prevocalically but I have just checked with some Spanish speakers who say it is never pronounced as an affricate. Even if it were always pronounced [ʝ] prevocalically this would be an irregularity worthy of note because [ʝ] isn't allowed after /n/ or /l/. I'm gathering that it is just [i̯] in these situations but I'd like to see if anyone more knowledgeable has anything to add. Dngweh2s (talk) 02:26, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

• Just to clarify this is just about the conjunction Dngweh2s (talk) 15:14, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

• Wiktionary's Spanish pronunciation module is notoriously flawed. Lots of work is been put into it though. Jewle V (talk) 22:34, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

@Jewle V This word already has a manual pronunciation. I'm guessing it is [ʝ] intervocalically, [ i̯ ] after a consonant and before a vowel, and [i] before a consonant. Dngweh2s (talk) 01:01, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

No idea on the symbol. Jewle V (talk) 01:07, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

I doubt that y "and" is ever ʝ in any context. Per Wikipedia, "Bowen & Stockwell (1955:236) cite the minimal pair ya visto [(ɟ)ʝa ˈβisto] ('I already dress') vs y ha visto [ja ˈβisto] ('and he has seen')".--Urszag (talk) 01:09, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

@Urszag @Dngweh2s I have heard terms like treinta y ocho pronounced with /ʝ/. BTW @Jewle V what is "notoriously" flawed about the module? I would like to know so this can be corrected. Benwing2 (talk) 10:59, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

I see. It looks like I was wrong, then: I found a slideshow that says that just as the contrast is neutralized in word-initial position, Castilian speakers may neutralize the contrast between non-syllabic /i/ and /ʝ/ in favor of [ʝ] or [dʝ] when the conjunction y comes before a vowel (examples: [dʝ] un día, amigo [ʝ] amiga, [dʝ] una mierda voy a ser yo foca) (Glides on the syllable margins: strengthening and weakening fates; Jesús Jiménez, Maria-Rosa Lloret, Clàudia Pons-Moll). This forum post also says "This singer pronounces nearly all instances of /jV/ as either [dʒe] or [d̠ʑe] (with only a few exceptions, in which case she has [ʝ]). She even does this with the conjunction y, when it's followed by a vowel: y abre la puerta > [dʒaβ̞ɾe...], y es la verdad > [dʒes la...] (she does this twice), but then she says y hemos venido > [ʝemos...]." (UniLang) (the singer seems to be from Veracruz). So it seems this pronunciation can occur when "y" is followed by a vowel; I assume only in accents like Castilian where no systematic contrast is made between initial [j] as in "hi-" and initial [ʒ~ʃ] etc as in "y/ll-".--Urszag (talk) 20:00, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Regarding the affricate pronunciation someone from Spain said they had no idea what I was talking about and someone from Argentina said it was engolado. Dngweh2s (talk) 02:39, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

countable software

Currently software says "Software is a mass noun […] By non-native speakers it is sometimes erroneously treated as a countable noun (a software, some softwares). softwares also says "generally" by non-native speakers.

But this doesn't seem quite right because there are very many examples of softwares in writing by native speakers: "There are several different softwares out there that contain this type of technology" (Fox News), "softwares that collect documents for school assignments" (NY Post), "several impressive new generative AI softwares" (Yahoo News UK), all from the last few months, and spoken on YouTube e.g. [1], [2].

Softwares even appears in technical contexts, like here and here. So I wonder if this should even be considered "nonstandard" as opposed to just a "usually uncountable" situation (Ngrams has softwares at about 0.2% of the frequency of software, which is small but not stupidly so—communisms, an uncontroversial one, is about 0.1% the frequency of communism). —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 16:35, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

I suspect that it is historically (i.e. two decades ago) perceived more uncountable than today, so our entries is just outdated. Part of the reason are many derivative terms more inviting for counting. I don’t know which entry I copied for the term fleeceware that is like a decade old, if I have copied the countability from somewhere at all instead of adjusting it. Some native speakers might want to deny this because they are old. But firmware is obviously countable, no? 💩 definition for firmware by the way, congratulations. The definition of firmware has also changed in the last 1½ decade, as on smartphones or embedded systems this is like the bootloader elsewhere, if you ever got a custom one flashed. boot loader with space can also not be the main-entry unlike Thv believed in 2004, methinks. Fay Freak (talk) 00:22, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

But as an uncountable noun meaning 'X' can always be used as a countable noun meaning 'type of X', I am not persuading by these arguments. --RichardW57m (talk) 13:04, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

You're talking about the universal packager, by the way, which appropriately sounds like some sort of Java installer maker. Equinox ◑ 21:38, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

I think I wrote that note; "softwares" does still usually seem to indicate an NNES writing or speaking. Even more so with "codes" (meaning source code), very common among Indians. Equinox ◑ 13:10, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Also worth considering whether anybody says "hardwares" (perhaps we just talk about that less?), and the traditional uncountability of ceramic, glass, etc. "wares" in the mass ("I have obtained some beautiful silverware"). Anyway, I don't object to the usage note being modernised, but don't radicalise: "softwares" is still quite unusual to many people, including many English-speaking IT professionals. "A software" is particularly horrible to my ear, lol. It's a program (or application, app, applet, package, release...)! Equinox ◑ 21:34, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

There's probably contextual difference. Stuff like cyber (noun 2) meaning cybersecurity is still pretty grating to a lot of people but has become standard in specific contexts. In this case it seems like it doesn't occur much in e.g. technical books by native speakers, who are probably going to be professionals, but it does in news articles by native-speaker journalists (I was surprised to see it in a lot of recently written documentation, but it's very possible those cases are by non-natives). To me "codes" rings as much more nonstandard than "softwares", I wouldn't bat an eye in real life at the uses in the videos I linked above. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 21:39, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Maybe those journos aren't "native" in nerdspeak :) just like someone who isn't knowledgeable about Ancient Greece might write about "kalpises" and not kalpides. Equinox ◑ 21:43, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, that's what I mean, but ultimately, and perhaps unfortunately, software engineers don't get to control how other people write about software(s), especially when it's those guys who end up writing style guides... —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 21:46, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

@Al-Muqanna I am quite surprised to see those examples of "softwares"; I'm not even sure what is meant. But I am essentially a software engineer not a journalist. Benwing2 (talk) 23:21, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

How do I change page морозота to мразота?

морозота is not used in real life. The root of the word is not мороз but мразь. So I wander what's the process of renaming one page to another? BANO.notIT (talk) 22:06, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

@BANO.notIT: I have fixed this for you. I have kept the present page since I have actually heard it pronounced with that many syllables in a video (so repeatedly listened to instead of misheard) and there are examples of illiterate writing around the web making it useful to keep. Fay Freak (talk) 00:08, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Your fix seems incomprehensible as well as obscurantist. It actually looks like a nativisation of the word. --RichardW57m (talk) 13:12, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Additional definition of "edit"

The "edit" page is locked, but could someone add a definition to cover the retail/marketing use in (mainly) fashion to indicate a stylistically or thematically linked range of items, normally intended to indicate limited availability. eg. our stylish Oriental Edit, or the Spring Edit, etc. It's been pretty widespread for a couple of decades, so I was surprised not to see it there. Its derivation is presumably as a short form of edition (though without a ".", so not covered by the abbreviation page), so might need distinguished from the definitions grouped under the derivation as a back-formation from editor. 2A02:C7C:CBB4:2600:DD8C:6FFB:B349:F44E 09:08, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

I've added it with citations. The OED treats it as an extension of the standard noun edit, so I haven't made a separate etymology section, but there seems to be some disagreement about this (see the suggestion in this discussion that it actually comes from "editorial"). Might be worth further research. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 09:26, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

I didn't find the relevent article at the end of your NYT link, though I found the same press release here. I've been digging and haven't found anything definitive, but all the earliest examples seem to be linked to an editorial (eg. the above article refers to where the photos were shot) and many are "curating" pieces offered by a variety of designers/retailers. Over time the term may have been appropriated by retailers as a simple synonym for "range" or "collection", but its etymological root looks like "editorial".

For the NYT citation the quote is in the image caption under the fedora (see here for the full article). We're probably missing a sense at editorial. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 13:26, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Winkelwandel

Seems to be a word in German and/or Dutch but isn't listed here, nor on the de or nl Wiktionaries. Clearly a compound of Winkel and Wandel, but I don't know what the idiomatic meaning is. Any takers? -Stelio (talk) 12:23, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

No, it is a hapax legomenon of some preacher. Fay Freak (talk) 16:17, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Another use here (click “weiter lesen”). In this case the meaning is not idiomatic but purely literal: adjusting the angle of a solar panel.  --Lambiam 20:53, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

winkelwandel:

• https://stad.gent/sites/default/files/page/documents/Voetgangerskaart_final.pdf (title: "Winkelwandel:overzicht")

winkelwandelstraat:

• https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20220915_96327645
• https://www.vlaamswoordenboek.be/definities/term/winkelwandelstraat (dictionary entry)

winkelwandel-straat:

• https://www.nieuwsblad.be/cnt/dmf20140408_01059836
• https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=im8ANi8uhLsC&pg=PA67&lpg=PA67 (hyphen may be to break across lines)

winkelwandel straat:

• https://www.kotzoeker.be/listing/Sdk5U5HrIA/...slug?slug=gezellige-kamers-boven-lola-and-liza-winkel-in-diestsestraat-78-winkelwandel-straat
• https://www.zoominfo.com/c/hotel-du-parc/435644060

winkel-wandel-straat:

• https://www.dekust.be/hotel-cardiff-afternoon-tea-lounge
• https://www.trivago.nl/nl/oar/hotel-prado-oostende?search=100-149677

winkelwandelgebied:

• https://www.kortrijk.be/media/95296/download?attachment

winkelwandel-gebied:

• https://www.vanvulpenroozenburg.nl/data/brochbinnendoor.pdf (hyphen may be to break across lines)

winkelwandel gebied:

• https://www.polygon3d.be/nieuws/detail/central-park-een-hedendaags-en-tijdloos-icoon

winkel-wandel:

• https://www.handyman.be/fr-be/magasins/hasselt/

winkel-wandel-weg:

• https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IdkLVshs6v0C&pg=PA241&lpg=PA241

So, just a non-idiomatic combination of winkel and wandel to refer to a pedestrian shopping area.

That still leaves me unsure as to what "etymological winkelwandels" means. Perhaps that person meant it as a fancy word for doodads.

-Stelio (talk) 09:02, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

impinge

Sense 1 is listed as transitive, and senses 2 and 3 as intransitive, and we have a usage note saying transitive use is now rare. But the quotations and usexes under all of the senses are all of impinge on / impinge upon. I don't think impinge on X can be sometimes transitive and sometimes intransitive; surely it's one or the other. (I think the verb impinge in such a construction is technically intransitive, although the overall verb phrase impinge upon is semantically transitive? but hopefully our grammarians can weigh in...) PS if at least some senses must have the (up)on, should they be at impinge upon? It's probably more findable at impinge but that doesn't stop us from having lots of phrasal verb entries with particles included; compare Wiktionary:Requests_for_moves,_mergers_and_splits#hinge,_hinge_on. - -sche (discuss) 01:16, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

The citation under sense 1 is being read with "themselves" as the direct object. A less ambiguous, more recent example of transitivity is here: "to what extent is the new State's sovereignty, in fact, impinged under your theory?". The preposition point is an artifact of the citation selection. Intransitive use certainly isn't restricted to "on" or "upon" in modern usage, it's easy to find examples with other prepositions—"impinge into the area of civil law enforcement" [3], "impinging across the grain-rich distal areas" [4]—and without any—"regardless of the other complicated influences that might impinge" [5]—so it shouldn't be at impinge upon. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 01:38, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

I would hope that we can use hard and soft redirects from impinge on and impinge upon to impinge, but only if there is no dramatically different (not readily predictable from the meaning of the "particle") additional meaning. DCDuring (talk) 18:51, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks; the entry looks better now. I've added cites of transitive, particleless impinge X to the entry, and cites of impinge into/against to the citations page. - -sche (discuss) 20:15, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

rife#Adjective

I just had to tweak sense 2's usexes since they did not fit sense 2's definition, but rather sense 3's. Now I see that senses 1 and 2 are more or less the same: at least the cites/usexes seem interchangeable. Equinox ◑ 02:22, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree they should probably be merged, the OED does distinguish them but it seems to be on a vague basis of tangibility or quantifiability and I don't really buy that "divisions are rife" is particularly different to "rocks are rife", taking their own examples. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 02:40, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

chortle

The entry says: "Coined by Lewis Carroll in his poem Jabberwocky, first published in 1855 but only introduced to the public in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass." What does it mean? How can a poem be published without "introducing [the words in it] to the public"? Imaginatorium (talk) 09:41, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

The original edition was in a privately circulated family newsletter, which could probably be made clearer. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 09:50, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

 Done Equinox ◑ 11:43, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

play the something card

Not happy to see one of these entries back again, when we discussed the topic years ago (back when we used to use X in such entry titles) and agreed to remove them all. Equinox ◑ 17:09, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

See also WT:RFM#play_the_victim_card,_play_the_race_card,_play_the_gender_card. I'm not thrilled about the idea of having entries for every version, especially when not only the "something" but also "play" can be changed (to "use" etc); I wouldn't mind redirecting them to ... somewhere. But where? Our definition at card is currently unhelpful in understanding any of the longer phrases; maybe it can be improved. The definition in play the something card also leaves much to be desired. The snowclone appendix? Does anyone ever think to look there? (As far as the word something not being used in the phrase, that doesn't seem much different from the many tell someone where to shove it, see someone right entries we have.) - -sche (discuss) 20:07, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

The forms of this idea are very diverse: [syns. of play, bury, be, have] [DETs like the, a, this, that, my, your, etc] race card(s). As well as functional equivalents of race. We have race card. Play the race card could be a hard redirect or a usage example. Some other verbs might be good in citations or usage examples, as well as different determiners. If we have to have entries for other attestable X cards, so be it. BTW, I think a race card can be played by any side of a racial divide, either to make a white person feel guilty about racism or sympathetic to racial justice claims or to draw negative attention to someone's race. Our entry doesn't make that clear, I don't think. DCDuring (talk) 20:55, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

I think this is better treated as a snowclone. CitationsFreak (talk) 00:27, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, there is a difficulty. I see why the "something" entry was tempting to create. The snowclone appendix is mostly a morass of TVTropes-style pop culture: I don't see it as something we would want to direct human beings to. — The alternative might be to explain the idea under some sense of "card" and then furthermore explain at "play" that one can "play" a (race, etc.) card, i.e. use it. But that is an artificial partition. Actually this is the extended metaphor. A writer might easily say something like, "She played the race card until the deck was stolen from her", and we Get It because we know what cards and card games are. That goes beyond the purview of a dictionary eventually. Equinox ◑ 21:25, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Maybe have the "X cards" at card, as a subsense of the playing card sense? (Or just have metaphorical quotes under the playing card sense.) CitationsFreak (talk) 00:34, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

We do have a sense at card which was clearly aiming to cover this (and was even prior to my recent edit), I just don't think it currently does a very good job. - -sche (discuss) 01:26, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Alright. That's a good start. (Although I don't think it's a "resource". I think it's more like some heavily harping on a certain belief (eg antiracism or pro-independence) to make someone believe something. Like how if you play the racism card, you call something racist (generally without any good arguments) to make someone believe your ideology.) CitationsFreak (talk) 01:54, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

“You just activated my trap card!” can’t go to appendix.

We don’t know the original either, if it is supposed to be a snowclone.

The possibility to extend the metaphor in other sentences hardly has discernible bearing on the entry title nor inclusion at all (go to jail!), but indeed it should be on card as “a concept suggestive for framing a conversation” or similar, while the derivative metaphor deck should not have an additional place because it plays on the other metaphor without enjoying separate lexicalization. Fay Freak (talk) 02:01, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

... What? I'd only put entries like "play the * card" in there. CitationsFreak (talk) 02:12, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

I think part of the difficulty is that there's not just one sense here. "Play the race card", "play the gender card" et al seem to have started with the idea of someone bringing up their own race (or the way racism impacts it), their own gender, etc, to "win" or get "points" in some discussion. Some uses of "play the Muslim card" are in this sense, a person bringing up their own Muslimness, "well, as a Muslim, I...", but then there are also uses of that phrase in reference to non-Muslim politicians pandering to Muslim voters by e.g. introducing bills popular among Muslims, which seems like a separate thing. (I think a sign of it being a distinct sense is that people familiar with the first sense would misunderstand people who used the second sense, and would assume they were saying the politician was Muslim and had brought up their own Muslimness, when in fact the politician needn't be Muslim.) The same is true for some other versions, like "play the Hindu card". "Play the victim card" is just "play the victim" with "card" added to connect it to the card metaphor. I'm not sure all of these could be handled by one sense of card; we might need two. - -sche (discuss) 02:55, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

The concept is of taking something one "has or is", and cynically exploiting to gain an advantage. I say "cynically" because it isn't "playing the race card" to make a genuine race-based point. (Yeah, here we get into the whole fun of "woke isn't really a word, etc.".) But despite occasional sloppy usage, that's the idea. Very much like, in fact, holding a card back in a gambling game, to profit from it later. Equinox ◑ 03:08, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

• As to card, as -sche suggested, we may need two definitions, one for the general metaphorical sense, another (subsense?) for the more specific sociopolitical use. As Equinox observed elsewhere, the metaphor of a competitive card game must be understood for the expression to make any sense at all.

1. (figuratively) A ploy of potentially advantageous use in a situation viewed as analogous to a card game.

   The only card left for him to play was playing dumb.

   1. An invocation of an emotionally or politically charged issue or symbol, as in a political competition.

      race card, gender card

I think that the is often used with terms being used in familiar metaphors (eg, play the fool), similar to the use with familiar entities in daily life: (I went to the store.). DCDuring (talk) 08:45, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

-e suffix of majeur or mineur

According to their Wiktionary pages, the French adjectives majeur and mineur take the suffix -e when describing feminine nouns, and so does the French noun mineure (a person below the age of majority). Would i be correct to assume the French noun majeur does the same? The majeur page only lists the masculine French noun and the majeure page only lists the French adjective.

(Remind me: Is persona#Spanish always a feminine noun that takes feminine adjectives and articles even when it refers to someone male?)

Merci.

--173.67.42.107 18:39, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, the feminine form is "majeure". As far as I know, Spanish "persona" always takes feminine adjectives, but perhaps that's not always true of informal usage. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 04:32, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

see you there

A new "goodbye" synonym, but I think it's wrong, because "see you there" implies meeting later at a specific place, e.g. a party or nightclub. Equinox ◑ 01:58, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

I'd RFD it, personally Jewle V (talk) 07:22, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

I've heard small children say "like and subscribe!" as part of saying goodbye (in offline, in-person interactions) because it's what every youtuber they watch says when they end their 'conversations' (videos). I am sceptical of this, though. As you say, I don't see how it could be used without either a sincere or sarcastic implication to seeing the person somewhere. I'm going to boldly just delete it rather than going through RFD, because it's so implausible and the IP that created it has been blocked. - -sche (discuss) 21:53, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Alternative declensions for Latin Iudas and Simeon

In the Clementine Vulgate, I believe that "Iudas" is declined normally (i.e. not the Greek way). That's the Old Testament patriarch Judas at least. I haven't checked the New Testament.

Also, in the same Vulgate, I see that Simeon (Old Testament patriarch Simeon) is an indeclinable name. I haven't checked the New Testament.

I was going to change these but I will let somebody else do it as I'm not sure how Wiktionary deals with alternative declensions. 2603:8080:C6F0:48B0:0:0:0:1468 15:12, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Have added these, assuming you just mean Judam instead of Judan in the accusative. Simeonis does appear in the Clementine as well although it's usually indeclinable. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:26, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I meant. Thank you! 2603:8080:C6F0:48B0:0:0:0:1468 02:28, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Ancient Greek Ἰερουσαλήμ versus Ἱεροσόλυμα

I think these might be different enough to warrant each getting their own entry.

Ἰερουσαλήμ (Ierousalḗm) is loaned directly from the Hebrew (I think it means "city of peace").

Ἱεροσόλυμα (Hierosólyma) is loaned from the Hebrew but the spelling has been altered. It's pretty clear that the first part has been reinterpretted as the Greek word ἱερός (hierós) "sacred".

Additionally, (I do not have a scholarly source but I'm sure somebody can find one,) it is said that the latter (Ἱεροσόλυμα), at least in the Bible, only ever refers to the city of Jerusalem, whereas the former (Ἰερουσαλήμ) sometimes refers to the city of Jerusalem but other times refers to its eschatological antitype, the heavenly city called the "new Jerusalem". This may or may not be noteworthy.

Also, this distinction is retained in the Latin, at least in the Clementine Vulgate. Ἰερουσαλήμ is consistently rendered "Jerusalem" (I believe indeclinable) while Ἱεροσόλυμα is consistently rendered as "Jerosolyma" (I believe first declension). 2603:8080:C6F0:48B0:0:0:0:1468 15:58, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

This is a traditional interpretation but is rejected in modern scholarship. In the received Septuagint Ἰερουσαλήμ is simply the standard form, and Ἱεροσόλυμα only appears inconsistently in the apocrypha. For the New Testament, see this short article, which comments that in general the likelihood is that Ἱεροσόλυμα is a term used for the benefit of Gentile readers and Ἰερουσαλήμ remained the typical Jewish term. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:10, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

That's interesting. Thank you! 2603:8080:C6F0:48B0:0:0:0:1468 02:30, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

substance, sense #6

I am no expert but I think the English philosophical and theological usage of the word "substance" is pretty much exactly the same the Latin philosophical and theological usage of the word substantia, which only sometimes means hypostasis (but other times means ousia, while the hypostasis would more typically be translated as 'person'). I think this really needs to be noted. 2603:8080:C6F0:48B0:0:0:0:1468 16:27, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Using it to mean hypostasis in a theological sense would be very unusual. It's easy to find the notion of God as "three substances" explicitly condemned as an error in a lot of Trinitarian works. I think this is a conflation of the philosophical sense of hypostasis, which can mean substance or essence, and the theological one referring to personhood. I've expanded the gloss to try to clear it up. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 17:15, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

classique

A French IP added a sense:

1. (mostly singular) a dump

I can see how this might be used ironically or sarcastically, but I'm not sure what sense of dump is meant. Perhaps a dilapidated old home? Chuck Entz (talk) 21:29, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Wiktionnaire does not have a corresponding sense. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 19:37, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

No idea what they mean by this. I'm inclined to remove it. PUC – 20:22, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

@PUC: The sense of dump I think they may have meant (Etymology 1, noun sense 7 at the moment) is perhaps translateable as French taudis. It would be like saying "it isn't old, it's a classic" as a euphemism. I was going to rfv it, but I figured we would want to know what we were verifying, since it's a common word. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:06, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Where y'all be at

As a well-respected an highly scholarly lexicographer, my slang is pretty crap. Can someone cast their eye over this slang phrase? Maybe it needs tagging as AAVE, or whatever Jewle V (talk) 13:26, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

It may well be that this would be SoP had we an Adverb PoS section (at#English) with a good definition. I think we need one (Where should this usage be at otherwise?). If we think be at is AAVE, we should would apply that label. (BTW, AAVE is not spoken only by African-Americans.) I think we have had some discussion of this use of be. DCDuring (talk) 15:01, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

This search at Google Books has some more usage. The WP article about AAVE doesn't cover all uses of copulative be though it does discuss auxiliary be. I hope there are some articles at Google Scholar. DCDuring (talk) 15:19, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't know if it's relevant, but I regularly use "where you at" in texting conversations with friends or "where are you at" in phone calls, and I'm fairly conservative with my use of slang. The use of at seems to me to be widespread among young people, used far beyond AAVE now (as is the case with a lot of North American slang/colloquialisms). Andrew Sheedy (talk) 16:33, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

I think the use of be instead of are (and other forms) is what is more characteristic of AAVE. What I'm calling adverbial at has, I think, a longer and wider history. I've looked to see whether any OneLook dictionaries have adverbial at, but haven't seen it yet. DCDuring (talk) 17:25, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Does this use of at occur without where, either interrogative or relative? It seems like an intensifier. DCDuring (talk) 18:21, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

I can't think of any cases off the top of my head, but then I'm not sure what they would be. I wonder if it's a reinterpretation of "where" at base. The answer to "Where are you?" often includes "at": "I'm at home," "I'm at the same place as before". "Where [are] you at" seems to shift the referent of the pronoun from a prepositional phrase (including "at" or "by", etc.) to a noun phrase ("Where are you" corresponding to "I am at home", "Where are you at" corresponding to "I am at home"). Andrew Sheedy (talk) 19:46, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

BTW, our entry for where it's at could us a little love. It is an entry where concealing the quotations seems counter-productive. DCDuring (talk) 23:17, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Serbo-Croatian grammars (including tones)

(Notifying Biblbroks, Vorziblix, Rua, Atitarev, Bezimenen, Jurischroeer, Useigor, Greenismean2016, PUC, Fay Freak, Vorziblix, ZomBear, Atitarev, Bogorm, Bezimenen, Nauka, Ted Masters, Kiril kovachev): Sorry for the wide ping. I'm looking for a good grammar of Serbo-Croatian that explains how the different accent classes work for nouns, verbs and adjectives, ideally online. Our current templates do a piss-poor job of representing the tones and macrons. Bonus points if it's in English or some other language I can read, but if it's in Serbo-Croatian I can get by with Google Translate. Along with that I'd need a dictionary that indicates the tones and the accent class of each word. Any suggestions? Benwing2 (talk) 07:02, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Probably accent classes of widely accepted names do not exist. As of 1971 “fehlt es noch an vollständigen Beschreibungen”. Part of the reason being that not every regiolect fully attests the tones and lengths as the centralized Russian language does with Moscow, like Belgrade speech is reported to lack unstressed lengths at the time. “Most speakers of Shtokavian, native or taught, from Serbia and Croatia do not distinguish between short rising and short falling tones. They also pronounce most unstressed long vowels as short, with some exceptions, such as genitive plural endings.” Shtokavian#Accentuation

With the political situation around the 1990s of course the calm endeavour of describing accentology could not be improved. To the disunity add the fatal circumstance that the language has like ⅛ of speakers Russian has and they were less relevant to be cared about by Western scholarship if only to improve foreign relations: So not a coincidence that apparently the GDR was spearheading its studies as an external observer, having exactly as large a population as BCS has speakers—but Eastern Germany was also a piss-poor provider of her subjects, restricting intellectual movement: This all may allow reasonable inference of the absence of the thing ideal for you; that indeed BCS is not completely described as the language of the Kremlin is, which was the language of a dreadening empire.

However as with Russian, you aren’t typically informed about classes from dictionaries anyway but they note inflected forms with stress in addition to the citation form with stress. What I use is Rečnik srpskohrvatskoga književnog jezika of which six volumes exist in one file: I give for an example vol. 5 p. 483 ре̑д, because its locative is ре́ду – I found about such locative changes while looking into Alois Schmaus Lehrbuch der serbokroatischen Sprache 1970 which is what I would use now if I were to learn Serbo-Croatian and you can surely get for few euros, containing remarks about accents also with respect to nouns, verbs and adjectives. In any case the different possibilities are less extreme than with Russian, though on the other hand, which should help your case, knowledge of Russian can be used analogically, like vòda mirrors вода́ (vodá)—some obvious logics with fewer irregularities in comparison to Russian. As you see from the 1971 journal article, one also likes to cite for accents the so-far unfinished Rečnik srpskohrvatskog

književnog i narodnog jezika, often relevant for its bulk as on that RFV, hence Wikipedia article. Kodifizierungsgeschichte with dictionary stories by Peter Redher. Fay Freak (talk) 11:47, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

For the record, you can access Rečnik srpskohrvatskoga književnog jezika at https://www.srpskirecnik.com/ quite conveniently. Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 11:53, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 Hi, I'm not myself familiar with Serbo-Croatian, but I'll do my best. I found a resource called Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, a Grammar: With Sociolinguistic Commentary, in English. Specifically, sections 165-166 describe accent and accent shifts, which may be of use to you; I don't know if it'll have the level of exhaustiveness that you need, because I don't see specific allusions to 'accent classes' in there, but it does cover adjectives, verbs, and nouns' shift in tone, it appears. I apologize if it doesn't suffice; it also isn't stricly 'online' and is also not cheap; would you be able to provision yourself a copy? Please contact me if not and I could share the contents that are of use.

In addition I don't know whether Rečnik srpskohrvatskoga književnog jezika displays the accent classes as you require, but it does show the lemmas' tone, at least.

I hope someone else is able to provide a more helpful resource, Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 12:00, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

@Fay Freak @Kiril kovachev It's rather surprising to me if there's really no good resource on Serbo-Croatian (or Serbian or Croatian) accent classes, since e.g. you can find online several dictionaries that list the full declensions of Ukrainian including the accents, and there's even one for Belarusian. I have somewhere in storage a book in English that gives detailed info on Chakavian accent differences, and you'd think standard Serbo-Croatian would be easier to find than that. Benwing2 (talk) 20:45, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 It may very well have the resources you need, but unfortunately I'm not sure if I can be of help in finding them... in fact, I couldn't see anything about accent classes when I looked on Wikipedia, might you be able to link to where they're described? Additionally, how have you tried searching so far? I just had a look using the usual search engine, but maybe Google Scholar or something of the sort would be better. Or a library index of some kind. At any rate, just thinking about it rationally there definitely should be a resource out there, like you said; there is even for Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian should be several times larger and more-studied. I hope you can find what you need, anyway; I'll look again if I can tomorrow in different places, but I'm sure others will have more valuable suggestions. Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 21:02, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

@Kiril kovachev Thanks! I don't know if Serbo-Croatian accent classes are properly described. However, if I have resources that give all the actual forms, I can figure out the accent classes by analogy to Russian; but maybe even those don't exist. Proto-Slavic supposedly had three main accent classes for each of nouns, verbs and adjectives; Zaliznyak's Russian classification has around 10 for nouns (a, b, b', b'', c, d, d', e, f, f'), 3 for verbs, 2 for long adjectives and 7 for short adjectives (a, a', b, b', c, c', c''). Some entries in Wiktionary e.g. voda have all the accents given, but most don't. Benwing2 (talk) 21:08, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

@Kiril kovachev The book Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, a Grammar: With Sociolinguistic Commentary is actually quite useful, although the information isn't always presented the way I'd like. For example, they mention the locative rȇd -> rédu shift and the accusative vòda -> vȍdu shift and mention that both are archaic. (Both have exact parallels in Russian, where it isn't archaic.) Речник српскохрватскога књижевног језика also mentions both shifts (e.g. the latter in the vòda entry and the former in the vȏd entry) as well as some others, e.g. vòda with dative vòdi or vȍdi; I assume the latter is also archaic (and even more so than vȍda). The former book also does something interesting which is to use an ad-hoc accent notation that separates the rising/falling accent from length, which makes it a lot easier to keep track of these accent shifts. I'm in the process of implementing a Serbo-Croatian adjective module to replace the current outdated templates and I think the way the accents will be implemented is (a) separate length from tone, (b) keep track of the underlying place of accent rather than surface one (i.e. rising accents have an underlying accent one syllable to to the right). If you do this, then it seems things get much easier: most adjectives are either type a (stem stress) or type b (ending stress), just like in Russian, and the type b adjectives have stem stress in the short masculine nominative singular (since there's no ending) and also (for whatever reason) in all long forms. So far the one adjective confusing me is bȅo "white", which looks like a type b adjective but has stem length everywhere but the lemma form (e.g. short nominative feminine béla = underlying bēlá with ending stress, long nominative masculine bȇlī = underlying bḗlī with stem stress). User:Fay Freak can you help me understand what is going on with this adjective? To make things even more confusing, the ijekavian equivalent of bȅo is bijȇl with a long vowel. Benwing2 (talk) 05:05, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Seems like you take the Ijekavian as basic then. This looks exactly like дра̑г, дра́га. Obviously the vocalization of /l/ is posterior to the ѣ-reflexes anyway, the Ijekavian ones of which depend on accentologic details and are thus not trivial to predict by Ekavian speakers, who share heaps of rules of thumb on forums about when one would write ⟨ije⟩ and when ⟨je⟩. That saying I don’t know to which extent in general the l-vocalization predicts accent change, сто̑л, со̑л and га̑о apparently don’t have it. It is difficult to find other examples or search discussions about where all three are true, historical ѣ, stress pattern b, l vocalization. Via Category:Serbo-Croatian terms inherited from Proto-Slavic I got це̏о, noun де̏о ~ ди̏о, and this one is completely off-the-wall: smèo, Croatian smìon. Fay Freak (talk) 15:41, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@Fay Freak Thank you! My current solution for bȅo is to have a <stem:...> modifier to specify the stem form 'bȇl'; along with type b, this changes to 'bél...' in the remaining short forms. Benwing2 (talk) 19:39, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2:

If you take a look at @https://hjp.znanje.hr/index.php?show=main and enter a word, for example vòda. You will see that it gives some additional grammar info: N. pl. vȍde, G. pl. vódā or rijéka, D. L. rijéka

This dictionary provides tones for lemmas and some forms.

If you Google for selected forms in quotes, e.g. "rijéka", "rijéci", the results also give you some titles of published books. (Try doing this for the Cyrillic version as well, maybe you can find books published in Serbia). It looks like very few are online. But if you find a book title you like, maybe you can find it cheap or a downloadable version? Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 06:43, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 Paradigms are described in some decent grammars (Maretić, Gramatika i stilistika..., Brabec-Hraste-Živković, Gramatika hrvatskosrpskoga...; Barić et al. Hrvatska gramatika; maybe Стевановић), dedicated accentological handbooks: Ђуро Даничић, Српски акценти; Klaić, Naglasni sustav standardnoga...; Vukušić et al. Naglasak u hrvatskome književnom jeziku (this is probably the most useful one because it classifies around 55k words into particular paradigms); Alić Akcenat u standardnom bosanskom..., and dictionaries will note any accent shifts, which you can then combine with the general rules (however, HJP, which is the most frequently used source, is not the most reliable, as Ivo Pranjković who marked the accents there relied a bit too much on his local dialect and wasn't very consistent in some cases, as was noted by Mate Kapović in his Povijest hrvatske akcentuacije; I notice he frequently skips the čelni accent in vocative, even though he applied it super rigidly in his grammar (with Josip Silić)).

There are no studies on this topic in English, to my knowledge. Some studies have been published in German (e.g. Matešić). But to deal with this topic you absolutely have to rely on Serbo-Croatian sources. Most problematically, the normative guides are frequently old and can demand conservative/unrealistic pronunciation, and they might vary depending on the period and location (e.g. modern Croatian sources won't mention the čòvjek-čovjèka shift, because it just doesn't exist in Croatia - to any notable degree, at least). — Phazd (talk|contribs) 19:28, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 (b) keep track of the underlying place of accent rather than surface one (i.e. rising accents have an underlying accent one syllable to to the right - for a good description this approach is not sufficient, as many words even in the strict Neo-Shtokavian areas can have non-initial falling tones. Whether they do or do not get retracted depends on the dialect, both forms may be widely in use. The more recent literature, even if normative and relatively traditionalist in approach, has started accepting this fact (Barić et al, Vukušić et al.).

bȅo - the yat is shortened because it's followed by a vowel (Kapović, Povijest... §364)

I'd also note that 'ije' yat reflex is problematic to describe because there are two possible ways to pronounce it: /je:/ and /ije/, as one or two syllables. This has been a significant problem that wasn't dealt with properly on Wiktionary, as the biggest contributor was a Croat who exclusively used /je:/ - but normative sources for Bosniak, Montenegrin and Serbian prescribe /ije/, which is in fact entirely realistic for contemporary Montenegrin and has historically been used elsewhere too. (I'm currently working on a re-write of the Serbo-Croatian Phonology article on Wikipedia, so I'll put some more details there.) — Phazd (talk|contribs) 19:28, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

be

I am having a great deal of trouble deciding how to organize the definitions in a sense/subsense structure. My inclination would be to group terms in function words like this first by the grammar, then by semantics. Definitions that are distinctly non-standard (ungrammatical) would also be grouped together unless there were a compelling reason not to. Within the groupings I would think that frequency would be an important ordering principle, but we do not have any fact base that would allow us cover all the senses definitively before the end of the decade.

Anyone who has the required self-confidence and/or expertise to tackle this should do so. Good advice as to how to do it practically would also be welcome. User talk:-sche#Your input for WT:Improving entries for the most common English words contains one tested approach. I doubt that there are more algorithmic approaches, but would welcome any such suggestions. DCDuring (talk) 22:09, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I have grouped the existing definitions into auxiliary, copulative, and intransitive non-copulative. I hope that makes it a bit easier to detect excessive overlap and missing definitions. DCDuring (talk) 17:08, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

be with it

We have the following definition at be:

• (with a dummy subject it) Used to indicate the time of day.

  It is almost eight (o’clock).

  It’s 8:30 [read eight-thirty] in Tokyo.

  What time is it there? It’s night.

We do not have a definition for the following usage examples:

It is May 1. (Does it just mean "today"?)

It is up to us to fix these entries. (Does it just refer to the infinitive "to fix these entries" and is therefore not a 'dummy'?)

Doesn't the second set of usage examples also have a dummy subject it? Are there other kinds of sentences with dummy it? Does each group need a definition? Should all such expressions with dummy it (only?) be covered by definitions at it? DCDuring (talk) 22:27, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't really understand why sense 18 ("used to indicate the time of day") has been distinguished from sense 21 ("used to indicate weather, air quality, or the like"). "It is" can indicate all kinds of states and conditions: "it's awkward in there", "it's dangerous outside", "it's lovely here with you around". The condition can also be temporal distance ("it's two days since I left home") or spatial ("it's a mile to the post office"). This doesn't need to be overcomplicated: in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language the whole thing is treated in three paragraphs at pages 1482–3. At the it entry, sense 6 ("used without referent as the subject of an impersonal verb or statement") seems to cover it sufficiently. Your second example, "it is up to us to fix these entries", is a different genre of construction termed extraposition since "it" can be swapped out for the part at the end of the sentence. This is very common (think of any sentence with "it is ... that", "it's surprising that he passed the test" ↔ "that he passed the test is surprising").

On the whole I'm not sure why this needs to be handled at be at all. The be is simply doing what it would normally do as a copula, see especially senses 8 (noun predication), 10 (adjective predication), and 16 (measurement). It's not the distinctive part of these constructions with "it"—that's the "it" itself—and conditions can also be expressed with other copulatives ("it gets stormy around this time", "it turned cold quickly yesterday", "it just turned 8 o'clock"). —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 00:35, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I am fairly sure that we can make our definitions of copulative be clearer by focusing first on grammar and using usage examples to help with the range of possible semantics. I think that is what needs to be done with some of our most basic English function-word entries. DCDuring (talk) 18:57, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree. Overly specific and artificial senses like these should probably be removed, however: we may as well have a sense for "indicating that an object is a cow" with various usage examples with "... is a cow". Part of the art of an entry on these terms will be in identifying what actual distinct senses there are, which technical resources like the CGEL can help with. Indistinct senses are a recurring problem at RFV. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 19:51, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Fortunately, I own three big modern English grammars (eg, both CGELs) and an older one, two print editions of MW, and two good learner's dictionaries. Sadly, no convenient access to the OED and no formal linguistic, let alone lexicographical, training.

My next step on be is to differentiate the various major distinct grammatical complement (and other?) structures used with copulative be.

Then, I think I will look for semantic/logical usage distinctions, like the difference between equivalence (Be is the most common English copulative verb.) and class membership (Be is a copulative verb.), unless that actually derives from the difference between definite and indefinite complements. This is on my brain because so many vernacular names of organisms are defined solely as "a species of […] (Taxa nomen)." rather than "a member of species Taxa nomen. DCDuring (talk) 21:26, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

banker as sure thing

banker is listed in Thesaurus:sure thing, but I don't see a definition entry on the banker page with such a meaning. Is Thesaurus:sure thing incorrect, or does a new sense need to be added to the banker page? Daask (talk) 15:20, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I believe a new sense needs to be added, this is a meaning that I a familiar with. The Google dictionary gives this sense: (BRITISH) a supposedly certain bet: "the horse should be a banker for him in the Members' race". See also, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/banker

SimonWikt (talk) 15:58, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

sheep driveway

Sheep driveway seems to be a well-attested term for a trail or network of trails along which bands of sheep are transported by shepherds on foot or horseback. Should we add a sense for driveway or create a new page? Multiple Mooses (talk) 23:41, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Interesting; I hadn't heard this compound before, but I'm not surprised to hear that driveway has been used to mean a droveway before — I would be more surprised if it never had. Howsoever sheep driveway ends up being entered, a link to droveway is apropos. Quercus solaris (talk) 00:50, 14 September 2023 (UTC) PS: This line of thought just prompted me to google "a driveway for cattle", and some attestations of that collocation popped up. Quercus solaris (talk) 00:52, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

PPS: I added the "droveway" sense of driveway to its entry, with citations. Quercus solaris (talk) 01:20, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, my first thought would be, is this just a sense of driveway usable with other nouns, not specific to sheep driveway? In which case, just covering it at driveway is best. - -sche (discuss) 02:14, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

hooptee

A "hooptee" is not merely an automobile. It's e.g. what you'd call a 20-year beat-up Toyota Camry, but not your neighbor's new BMW. Can someone (a) fix this, (b) check if the "automobile" sense is somehow used as well as an additional sense? Benwing2 (talk) 04:47, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

OK, we had three separate entries at hooptee, hooptie and hoopty, with three separate quotes, two of which had the right definition. I have consolidated at hooptie and added /hupti/ as the pronunciation (as I've heard it) with the existing /hʊpti/ as an alternative. Benwing2 (talk) 19:51, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

हिंदी

Term Hindi happened to be one of the earlier names of Urdu/Hindustani tongue. Moreover Hindi also means steel that was used to make sword. These terms should be on this page. Dictionary https://www.rekhtadictionary.com/meaning-of-hindi Rihantel (talk) 04:51, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

chastise

Definitions 1 and 3 of chastise appear to be just chastise plus an adjective. Shouldn’t these be removed? — This unsigned comment was added by Aaron Liu (talk • contribs) at 15:30, 13 September 2023 (UTC).

Not sure what you mean by this. I can see the argument that senses 2 and 3 are indistinct, and the quotations under sense 3 all have adverbs restricting their meaning, but sense 1 seems obviously distinct to me (punishing vs. rebuking). (Btw OED claims the "rebuke" sense is obsolete, not sure what they're on about there.) —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 15:38, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

According to my iPad’s New Oxford American, the corporal punishment sense is dated, and at least in my life I see sense 2 used a lot more. The quotations for 1 also have restrictors: “chastised them with whips”, “Chastised in a physical way”. Is it allowed to import quotes from the OED? Aaron Liu (talk) 18:21, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

The entry in the OED itself hasn't been updated since the 1st edition, which may explain the odd "obsolete" label—from what I could find just now, the sense of scolding or rebuking without punishing seems to have basically disappeared until being revived in the early-to-mid-20th century. Their quotations would in principle be free to use since that edition is public domain, but since the coverage is out of date I've just added my own selection of citations. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 21:48, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! Aaron Liu (talk) 22:43, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Moldavia vs. Moldova

Can someone who knows Romanian help me sort out the categories Category:Moldovan Romanian and Category:Republic of Moldova Romanian? The former is categorized by the label 'Moldova', which confusingly displays as Moldavia (see Module:labels/data/regional), while the latter is categorized by the label 'Republic of Moldova', which even more confusingly displays as Moldova. Wikipedia has an article Moldavian dialect and a separate article Moldovan language, and says that the Moldavian dialect is a larger entity that includes Moldova but also the region of Western Moldavia in Romania. I take it whoever created these labels maybe intended to make this separation, but in practice the category Category:Moldovan Romanian contains a lot more terms than Category:Republic of Moldova Romanian, and I'm certain the former category contains a lot of Moldova-specific terms. IMO if we make this distinction we need to rename the labels and categories somehow so they're in harmony, but I'm not sure how, and I don't speak Romanian so I can't fix up the terms themselves. Maybe we should just merge them? Benwing2 (talk) 23:15, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Who created these labels, I still remember. The practice is because there is a region—even currently Romanian Moldavia—not necessarily identified with the modern state, although apparently the state-label could also apply to the Moldovan SSR, and you can’t just rename the category for it Moldovan Romanian since the part of the modern state of Romania called Western Moldavia is called in Romanian “Moldova” and we don’t want to confuse native speakers nor is any English distinction between various forms of the same word, say Moldavian and Moldovan, reliable. 😵‍💫 So unless explicitly specified we should assume that any form of these words means the region while the country must be specified as such, country, state, republic or the like. As a least invasive measure, you could make it also display this specification, then it shan’t be confusing, if one ignores a difference between the forms of the region name, as already happens anyway, because it is unreliable and would only confuse, as your example of someone who just looked at the system shows. Fay Freak (talk) 00:40, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: OK, thanks. I renamed Category:Moldovan Romanian -> Category:Moldavian Romanian, which should make it less likely to be interpreted as referring to the country of Moldova, and kept Category:Republic of Moldova Romanian, which I made a subcategory of the former. The labels 'Moldavia' (and 'Moldova') display as Moldavia (region) while the label 'Republic of Moldova' displays as Moldova (country). I'm not terribly happy that the label 'Moldova' refers to the region because I think most people associate Moldova in English with the country rather than the region, but at least it should be clear what is being referred to when it displays. I also changed the description of the two categories to make clear what is being referred to. Benwing2 (talk) 01:18, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

We probably need a Romanian-speaker to check that entries are correctly labelled, but this seems a case where we should avoid the ambiguous name entirely (even more so than with e.g. "Swiss German"). Could we take any entries which are labelled "Moldova" but which are supposed to be Moldavian-region rather than Moldovan-republic, and change them to "Moldavia" (ideally while checking that the labelling is correct), and then make "Moldova" put entries into e.g. a cleanup category if anyone adds new uses or use an edit filter to tell people to specify whether they mean the region or republic...? As you say, most people probably take "Moldova" to mean the republic, not the region... - -sche (discuss) 02:11, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@-sche Agreed. We need a Romanian speaker to check these entries. There are only 38 of them out of 173 in Category:Moldavian Romanian; the remainder use 'Moldavia' as the label. The list is here, along with the line containing the label: User:Benwing2/moldova-label. Once these are fixed, I can change the label to display a warning and add to a cleanup category and/or add an edit filter. Benwing2 (talk) 02:55, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Bogdan, Robbie SWE: hi, can you look through the entries and User:Benwing2/moldova-label and check whether they are specific to the region of Moldavia, or the republic of Moldova? Then we can retire the ambiguous "Moldova" label (which seems to have been used here as a synonym for Moldavia, but of course in English more frequently refers to, erm, Moldova). - -sche (discuss) 00:43, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I would if I could, but unfortunately, I know very little about regional Romanian. Even less so about Moldavian Romanian, if I’m completely honest. Bogdan on the other hand, is very knowledgeable and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he is willing to lend a helping hand. Robbie SWE (talk) 17:58, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Romani: language or family?

We have Category:Romani language but also Category:Romani languages, as well as Category:Balkan Romani language, Category:Baltic Romani language, Category:Caló language, Category:Carpathian Romani language, etc. etc. What is the deal? Is the "Romani language" similar to the "Chinese language" or is there a split in progress that was never completed? There isn't even a WT:About Romani nor WT:About Balkan Romani etc. to explain what's going on. Benwing2 (talk) 05:55, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

I think the only people who ever tried to sort the Romani situation out were me and Metaknowledge, and that was a decade ago... I had suggested we try the approach that was used for Arabic at that time (and still today?), where words common to various lects got the common header (Romani, Arabic) and only words specific to Calo (etc) got specific headers. In retrospect this may be unmaintainable because as long as the separate headers exist, people will assume our coverage of them is just incomplete, and not grok that variety-nonspecific terms are under the 'main' header. Possibly we should simply split the lects, the differences are sometimes claimed to be as great as between the Slavic languages; the difficulty is (or was, a decade ago) in getting references that detailed the lects individually and not as "Romani". - -sche (discuss) 16:00, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@-sche It doesn't appear to me that Arabic uses the approach you mentioned; rather, "Arabic" refers to Classical and/or Modern Standard, and individual lects refer to the spoken varieties. A word like كِتَاب (kitāb, “book”) will show up in many languages even though it's common to all Arabic varieties. I think either we should just split the lects and abolish the "Romani language", or make all the lects be etymology-only and use labels to identify lect-specific words (something like what is done in Chinese). The current situation is just confusing and IMO unmaintainable. Benwing2 (talk) 19:35, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Agreed, re your last sentence. I'm not sure which approach is best. A Chinese-style merger might be easiest. But while many varieties of Romani are mutually intelligible, others are said to be different enough to cause speakers difficulty in understanding one another, so a split might be most linguistically sound. It's not clear we need to split into as many varieties as Ethnologue/ISO does, but finding reliable information on which ones aren't intelligible with which other ones is difficult; e.g. some sources say the Balkan and Danube-area lects are mutually intelligible, but others say that not even the varieties spoken in the Balkans are intelligible with the varieties spoken in the Balkans (sic). Complicating matters, many reference works are either about "Romani" or about more (or occasionally less) specific subvarieties than Ethnologue has encoded, which may or may not be easily assignable to Ethnologue/ISO codes. Maybe we should attempt to disperse as many entries as possible from Category:Romani lemmas into more specific languages, and we how many we can disperse. We might need to retain "Romani" as an etymology language, or otherwise have some capacity to deal with cases where some word is said to come from "Romani" without further clarification (who knows, maybe we just say {{der|de|inc-rom}} ''foobar''). - -sche (discuss) 01:10, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Re Arabic, btw, it kind of does use the approach I mentioned, just inconsistently. جنازة has a pronunciation section with explicitly ary, aeb, and ayl-coded pronunciations in it, rather than having separate L2s. - -sche (discuss) 17:18, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Is Renaissance Latin "Medieval Latin" or "New Latin"?

Wikipedia says that Renaissance Latin (c. 1300 - 1500 AD) is the first period of New Latin, but we seem to treat it as the last period of Medieval Latin. If New Latin includes Renaissance Latin, then we need a separate term for the period c. 1500 AD - 1900 AD during which much scientific vocabulary was created. Thoughts? Benwing2 (talk) 08:38, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

It is (almost by definition—"New Latin" is the result of Renaissance humanism) New Latin. Where is it being treated as Medieval Latin? Why do we need a separate term given that the creation of modern scientific vocabulary started in the Renaissance (see psychology for an example)? Btw I have said before that Renaissance Latin, if we're including it as a category at all, ought to be treated as a period within New Latin and not a separate thing in between Medieval and New. Another issue is that "Renaissance Latin" properly speaking is not just a chronolect arbitrarily referring to Latin within a specific time boundary, it's the reformed style of Latin used by the humanists and so continued to coexist with Medieval Latin in other contexts. The overall transition to Neo-Latin is understood roughly as the time when this reformed, classicising Latinity came to dominate across Europe and distinctively medieval features were generally dropped. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 08:45, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Al-Muqanna in Module:etymology languages/data, New Latin indicates Renaissance Latin as an ancestor (and Renaissance Latin indicates Medieval Latin as an ancestor). The definition of New Latin in Category:New Latin is "Terms or senses in Latin as used in scholarly works since the Renaissance, also known as Neo-Latin", and consistent with this, terms tagged with the label "New Latin" (see the category indicated above) generally represent the period 1500-1900 AD; those from the Renaissance in Category:Renaissance Latin are tagged "Renaissance Latin". If New Latin can cover the period 1300-2000 AD, then we definitely need a way of indicating that a term was coined during the productive scientific period c. 1500-1900 AD, e.g. the names of elements and such. Effectively that is what the "New Latin" label is currently indicating, but either we need to canonize this or come up with a new term. Benwing2 (talk) 09:00, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2: I meant it inclusively when I added that definition to the category, lol. I also wanted Renaissance Latin to be a subcategory but when the categories were standardised recently that wasn't taken into account. It ought to be handled the same way Category:Early Medieval Latin is IMO. New Latin, productive scientific word-formation, etc., all of that is started in the Renaissance, and the peculiarity is just that the advent of "the Renaissance" was not evenly distributed across Europe in time or space. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 09:10, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Al-Muqanna You're not convincing me of the non-need for a term for the period 1500-1900 AD. Looking through the terms in Category:Renaissance Latin, there are only a few of them and they are mostly terms that look to me like Medieval philosophical terms. All the scientific stuff like species names, physics and chemistry terms, etc. came later. Failing to distinguish the two seems a huge problem given the large number of terms involved (> 2000 in Category:New Latin). Benwing2 (talk) 09:18, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2: I would approach it from the opposite direction and question what is supposed to be distinct about Renaissance Latin. There are only a small handful of terms at Category:Renaissance Latin and none of them can be described as specifically being medieval philosophy as far as I can see, they are pretty much just New Latin terms that happen to be coined in the Renaissance. nihilitas is the only philosophical one and the Renaissance label seems to just be chronological pedantry—despite lacking the "New Latin" label it's well-attested in the 17th c. on too. On the other hand acatalepsia, centraliter, dictionarium, laurocerasus, encyclopaedīa are obviously scholarly terms. There are also a decent number of terms coined in the Renaissance that are just listed as "New Latin" atm, so if you want to impose a rigorous chronological distinction and labels like "Renaissance Latin, New Latin" our work will be cut out for us. IMO that would be pointless. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 09:24, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Al-Muqanna My point is that people are effectively using a 1500 AD cutoff for New Latin, even if there are a few terms misclassified according to this standard. This is obvious from e.g. the encyclopaedīa entry, which has both a "Renaissance Latin" and a "New Latin" label. If whoever created that intended for New Latin to include Renaissance Latin, they wouldn't have added both. So it seems dumb (i.e. information-lossy) to redefine New Latin to a wider period. Benwing2 (talk) 09:36, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2: They aren't though. Plenty of terms in Category:Medieval Latin and not in Renaissance Latin are attested, and even only attested, in your suggested 1300–1500 period. Meanwhile the majority of the entries under Category:Renaissance Latin appear to be from the 16th century. As the entry itself says, encyclopaedia is first attested 1517, and 1559 under that spelling. The 10 or so cases where entries have combined "Medieval Latin, Renaissance Latin" or "Renaissance Latin, New Latin" labels, or extravagantly all three (I removed it previously in one case where someone had even listed Late Latin too) are precisely what I called chronological pedantry above—the label doesn't serve any linguistically useful purpose, hence why almost nobody uses it. Having gone through them just now I think a better approach might simply be to abolish the category and fold Renaissance Latin into New Latin. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 09:45, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @Benwing2: Here's my itemisation of every entry currently in "Renaissance Latin", with date of first attestation if known:

• abacula - 1551, acatalepsia - c. 1500, apogaeum - 16th c. apart from medieval hapax, clavichordium - 1404 but well-attested in late new latin, Copernicus - lived 1473-1543, dictionarium - 1481, encyclopaedia - 1517, Erasmianus - 16th c.?, lived 1466-1536, adjective seems to be on the later end, excommunicatorialis - 1541, florilegium - 16th c.?, fustaneum - 12th c., hallicunatio and hallucinor - medieval spellings that persisted for a bit, ianizarus - 16th c., inaptitudo - 16th c.
• Some that are also in earlier Medieval and late New Latin, so nothing notably "Renaissance" about them: centraliter, maternalis, nihilitas, sororitas, Judices (just a "j" spelling)
• 5 unclear (might need RFV): Chinae, fovealis, grupus, laurocerasus, tocco

Defining it as 1300–1500 would be very strange on this evidence. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 10:15, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

I note my position that I always understood it as a register going beyond 1500, ending perhaps with the Thirty Years' War, which is also the usual meaning of Renaissance in most art contexts, actually renaissance humanism. Medieval Latin cooccurred until the end of the same. In one play, such as Eccius dedolatus, a figure could speak bad Latin associated with the Middle Ages while others a more developed register.

Also Middle Persian was written till the 9th century while Neo-Persian began in the 7th, chronolects can overlap sharply, and there may also be “mixed languages” in this context. Like Sallust wrote a Latin as from one or two centuries ago, or Edmund Spenser enriched his language in the same fashion (as I said about checklaton, there is agreement that this term is not inherited but borrowed from old writings, even though we did not find the exact spelling in pure Middle English). Fay Freak (talk) 13:20, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, this was what I meant above about it properly referring to something more specific than a time period, i.e. to humanist Latinity. And you're correct that while some historians use "Renaissance" in a broad sense chronologically running back to the 13th (or even earlier) and forwards to the 17th centuries, the conventional sense is that it's the start of the early modern period and runs roughly from the early-to-mid 15th century (traditionally especially after the fall of Byzantium in 1453) until the later part of the 16th century. So the Italian Renaissance article on WP just says 15th and 16th. That's largely also how it's ended up being used in the existing category. In that light I would recommend treating it as early New Latin, either analogously to Early Medieval Latin or simply folding it in. The year 1500 in and of itself is not a significant landmark in the development of Latin: it's more helpful to see medieval and humanist registers overlapping in the 15th and 16th centuries, with the humanist eventually dominating. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 13:36, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Al-Muqanna If it really begins as late as 1453 then I am OK with just folding it into New Latin and cleaning up the entries appropriately. This is consistent with my preceding belief that Medieval Latin goes up through c. 1500 AD. I think it may be OK if there is some overlap between Medieval and New Latin but if so we need to make it very clear in the descriptions what the criteria are for putting something in the overlapping period in one or the other (so it might be simpler to establish hard cutoffs). Benwing2 (talk) 19:44, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

pseudovum

A tricky one.... Defined from Webster 1913 as "An egg-like germ produced by the agamic females of some insects and other animals, and by the larvae of certain insects. It is capable of development without fertilization." I suspect the biologists of the 19th century used this term as they didn't really understand the process. Is this an actual thing with a "proper" word that has since been understood??? Jewle V (talk) 19:01, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

M-W has "an egg capable of developing without fertilization: a parthenogenetic egg". Equinox ◑ 21:28, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

another Determiner sense 3

another Determiner sense 3 has a usage example that doesn't look like a determiner. I was going to delete it ("never known another like her" is already covered at Noun section anyway) but the Usage Notes confuse me. So not sure what to do. Equinox ◑ 21:28, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

This is another case of use covering a usage under both a Determiner and a Pronoun PoS (Noun doesn't seem right to me.). Same thing can happen between Determiner and Adjective. I'll be using up all my courage on the entries for the and be, so none will be available for trying to get agreement on eliminating the duplication. I don't think most normal folks over 50 on either side of the pond would know a determiner from a determined miner. I wonder about anyone other than linguists on the correct side of the pond. DCDuring (talk) 23:50, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

It isn't a determiner use, and it doesn't make sense to list that example there while simultaneously listing a separate pronoun POS. The concept of a "fused head construction" is an idea described in the Cambridge Grammar of the English language, which considers it more enlightening to treat words like "another" as having a single part of speech that covers both use in combination with another noun, and use without one. When used without a separate noun following it, words like "another" are analyzed as being a "fused determiner-head" (see this slideshow: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/NP,DP_sli.pdf) ; this is similar to how "rich" in "the rich" can be analyzed as an adjective used in a fused modifier-head construction, rather than as a noun with a separate part of speech from the modifier "rich". But in CamGEL's terminological system, the single part of speech that "another" belongs to is not called "determiner" but rather "determinative" ("determiner" is used in CamGEL not as a part-of-speech category but as a label for a grammatical function, like "modifier"). (Although apparently, and unfortunately, Quirk et al.'s Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language uses the same pair of terms with the opposite meanings.) In any case, I believe that all of the uses of "another" that would traditionally be described as having the "pronoun" POS would be categorized by CamGEL as fused-head uses of the determinative. So the current entry is just a confused muddle of the CamGEL analysis and traditional grammar terminology.--Urszag (talk) 00:25, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

At the time when we made determiner a valid PoS header, we decided(?) to allow or at least tolerate such duplication, much as we have both phrasal-verb entries and definitions of the component verb that cover the same usage. I suppose we could say that we take an eclectic, inclusive, big-tent approach to such matters. DCDuring (talk) 11:45, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I would guess you're talking about e.g. that having a determiner and a pronoun section; the sense discussed here isn't a determiner use under that categorisation as commonly understood. Hence Urszag's point that it makes no sense to have both this sense and a pronoun section. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 11:49, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Btw I noticed that we didn't have any entry for fused head, I've just created one. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 10:50, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Middle English "jugge"

I'm pretty new to anything wikimedia related but I noticed the page for "jugge" on wiktionary doesn't have any section for Middle English, even though the pages for Modern English "jug" and Old English "ċēac" both mention and contain directs to that page. Again, I'm new, so I don't know if I should add it myself, so I thought I'd ask here. cheers. Tempestate (talk) 04:40, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I've added it: jugge. A lot of etymologies point to missing entries, Middle English is less well-covered than modern English for more or less obvious reasons. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 11:36, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

low-dollar

In a video by The Math Sorceror, there is the term "low-dollar" in the sense of collecting items for little money or no money.

What does anyone here think of the sense? -- Apisite (talk) 21:43, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

The counterpart, high-dollar meaning "expensive", came up back in February. We still don't have either entry (high dollar/high-dollar "expensive", low dollar/low-dollar "inexpensive"), we only have top dollar, but I think we should add them. - -sche (discuss) 21:51, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

@-sche: I added links to the unhyphenated words in the dollar entry. --Apisite (talk) 22:01, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Silesian German vs. Silesia German

@Linshee, -sche, Vininn126 We need to rename these categories. One of them is apparently a dialect of East Central German, the other one is a dialect of standard German, but no one is going to remember which is which. I suggest that we call the dialect of standard German 'Silesian German' and the other one 'Silesian East Central German', but I'm open to alternative suggestions. Benwing2 (talk) 01:07, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 Despite having that name, this is something I have little knowledge on. Vininn126 (talk) 07:06, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps we should keep calling the variety of de "Silesia German" (like "Swizerland German", as well as other things that use the noun even where the adjective wouldn't be ambiguous, like Category:Mississippi English), since "Silesian German" usually refers to the ECG language and using it for the opposite one seems liable to be confusing. In theory, the current distinction is perfectly (bot-)enforceable since which category a word is supposed to be in is determinable from its language code, right? No objection to renaming the other one "Silesian East Central German". - -sche (discuss) 13:34, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

@-sche I implemented your suggestion. Benwing2 (talk) 19:44, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

weird Proto-Slavic categories

@Bezimenen, Useigor, Vorziblix, ZomBear User:Sławobóg has made a mess of Proto-Slavic categories. You'd expect us to have categories for East, West and South, but we also have Category:North Proto-Slavic, Category:West and South Proto-Slavic and Category:East and South Proto-Slavic, and corresponding labels. Unless anyone thinks this is a good idea I am going to delete these latter three as well as the corresponding labels, and replace each label usage with two labels, corresponding to the two divisions referenced. Benwing2 (talk) 01:43, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 Where did you get the idea to remove them? These are dialects of Proto-Slavic. Do not remove them. Sławobóg (talk) 08:47, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

@Sławobóg "East and South Proto-Slavic" is not a dialect. It is two dialects. We don't create categories for combinations of dialects. Benwing2 (talk) 08:50, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 it is a dialect, there is just no separate name for it, like North Slavic which is West + East. Sławobóg (talk) 08:52, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

@Sławobóg It is impossible for there to simultaneously be a West + East dialect, an East + South dialect and a West + South dialect. This is something imaginary you've invented. Show me a source that contains such dialects. Benwing2 (talk) 08:54, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 There nothing impossible here, it is used by dictionaries, including our Proto-Slavic dictionary. Sławobóg (talk) 09:10, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

@Sławobóg I continue to be completely unconvinced; your dictionary you quoted does not say there is such a thing as "East and South Proto-Slavic", it merely says it's found only in the eastern and southern dialects. However, since others seem to think this sort of overlapping is OK, I have renamed the categories per Chuck's suggestion. Benwing2 (talk) 05:25, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

It has to do with Proto-Slavic being wavy - Some features are only distributed in two of the three branches; If only one branch had it, it wouldn't be Proto-Slavic, but some features are nevertheless limited. I would however expect better labels, maybe Southeast and Southwest instead of "West and South". Thadh (talk) 10:06, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

I think the problem is with fuzziness of terminology for the period before dialects fully solidified. As I understand it, any language without absolute internal barriers can have isoglosses that cross dialect boundaries. An innovation- wherever it begins- will tend to spread to neighboring areas and if some of those are in another dialect area the isoglosses won't match the dialect boundaries. Thus an innovation that arises in the west of the language area and spreads north and south will be in the western part of the dialects on both sides of an east-west boundary, and one that starts in the north and spreads east and west will be in the northern part of dialects on both sides of a north-south boundary. Eventually the accumulation of such innovations, combined with social/cultural and geographic factors, will cause the dialects to become more distinct and that will discourage cross-dialectal spread of innovations.

The problem with a proto-language is that all of our evidence comes to us from after this process has taken place, so we can't really see how things were distributed beforehand except through extrapolating backward from details of how things were distributed in the descendants. For all we know, there may have been dialects that formed and then broke up, to be replaced by other ones following different lines.

That means there would be isoglosses during the early period that are only vaguely correlated with later dialect boundaries. Innovations with a western distribution, for instance, may not be part of a western dialect, per se, but the pattern of their distribution is worthy of mention. I don't know if there's a technical term for these distribution patterns, but it would be nice if we could keep them separate from the dialects that gave rise to known divisions of the Slavic family.

Also, judging from Wikipedia, South Slavic seems to have split off before East and West Slavic diverged, in which case one could argue that something that could be called "North Slavic" existed for a while- so we may want to keep that even if we get rid of some of the others.

As for naming of divisions, I don't think "Southeast" and "Southwest" will work very well: that doesn't address the fact that some of the items in question could be found in the northeast and northwest as well. It also wouldn't surpise me if there were later innovations arising in the central area that were as distinct from the mainstream as those that arose in the periphery. Those would presumably have reached the southwest of Eastern Slavic, the southeast of Western Slavic and the north-central part of South Slavic.

Maybe I'm overthinking things, but it looked to me like people were unnecessarily arguing past each other due to looking at only parts of a bigger picture. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:03, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz Thanks. I still don't really see why we need to have a "Southeast Proto-Slavic" and "Southwest Proto-Slavic". For comparison, we have no such thing as "Gothonordic Proto-Germanic" or "Gothowestern Proto-Germanic" despite the existence of terms attested respectively only in the East and North branches and East and West branches. We simply place them in both branches, and that's what I think should be done here. Imagine we had 10 dialects with fuzzy boundaries; would we really create (10 choose 2) = 45 Foo-Bar combination dialects? That makes no sense. Benwing2 (talk) 23:11, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 As I see it, the real underlying problem is that the regional categories added by {{lb}} for Proto-Slavic are indistinguishable from those for the recognized dialects that gave rise to branching within the family. It would be nice to be able to say that a given Proto-Slavic term was only known from the western parts of the proto-language area without having it put in a category that makes it look like there was another entity of the same sort as the ancestral dialects of the East Slavic, West Slavic and South Slavic branches of the family. Maybe we could have something like "Western regional Proto-Slavic" as opposed to "West[ern] Proto-Slavic". Chuck Entz (talk) 00:05, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz That sort of naming is fine with me and easy to implement. Benwing2 (talk) 01:58, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Can you show me any category that contains "regional" in it's name? I don't see anything like that in Category:African English or Category:African French. You just changed category name to something non-standard and because single person wanted that but in practice it is the same thing. And in papers/books its always dialect. There is also dialectal difference in declension of some nouns (and probably verbs). Sławobóg (talk) 11:37, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

@Sławobóg We do have categories named Category:Regional French and such. As for the category renames, they were necessitated by your creation of intersection categories (East + South, East + West, West + East). No other Wiktionary languages have intersecting dialect categories. Benwing2 (talk) 19:46, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 but when region is specified category is Category:Luxembourgish French, not Category:Luxembourgish regional French. There is Category:Northwest Proto-Germanic which is much better than Category:Eastern and southern regional Proto-Slavic. Can you name categories so they are like in Germanic? That is fine middle ground for me. Sławobóg (talk) 09:16, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

@Sławobóg Northwest Germanic is a recognized clade. North Slavic is possibly a clade as well. West+South and East+South are not clades, hence my skepticism we need them at all (as I mentioned above, we have no East+West = "Gothowestern" Germanic or East+North = "Gothonordic" Germanic, and I'd oppose the creation of any such categories). Did you read my comment directly before yours (i.e. the one you responded to)? You seem to not be reading the comments you're responding to. Benwing2 (talk) 06:35, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

These are just isoglosses, not dialects. Independently from this essentialist question, the use of these random categories to readers and editors is microscopic. Even the labels are of dubious value since they seem to repeat the content of the descendant sections, but though I use them not I am hardly vexed by them.

Also Thadh is wrong to pretend that if only one branch has a word it is not Proto-Slavic; like presence in multiple branches does not necessarily indicate presence in the proto-language due to borrowing, so sometimes relations allow us to reconstruct a Proto-Slavic term if there is only a presence in one branch, or not rarely no branch if there are derived terms. A perfect example of this is мизги́рь (mizgírʹ). You must be able to ascribe satisfying likelihoods to the connections. In the case of дрын (dryn), Moscow professors reconstructed up to Proto-Indo-European and embarrassed themselves, following schematic application of linguistic methods, that is impressive just to the uninformed public and supervisory authorities. You won’t tell me there isn’t rationality behind reconstructing the former but rejecting the latter.

Chuck Entz wasn’t overthinking, some methodological rules of thumb and heuristic indicators, like common innovations between languages in this case, are essentialized and overvalued to simulate a model of reality, possibly a new paradigm, because the thought collectives in academia distinguish themselves by applying them, that’s how one writes scientific papers and gets away with it. Fay Freak (talk) 01:53, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

I didn't say anything about attestation, but *mězgirъ cannot be reconstructed as only having been part of the East Slavic area, it has to have been present in other branches and disappeared. That's not the case for some of these areal words. Thadh (talk) 09:21, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

I gave up arguing with User:Sławobóg. I suspect his brain goes into s/c every time when someone tells him that he is wrong. Безименен (talk) 09:05, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

ípsilones

Is ípsilones really the plural of Portuguese ípsilon? Syllables in Portuguese can't be stressed in that position, as far as I know. Shouldn't the right form be ipsílones and ípsilons? OweOwnAwe (talk) 04:29, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

pt.wikt agrees with you. just posting because no one else has so far. —Soap— 13:01, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Linking Constituent Parts

My instinct on São Lourenço is to link to São Lourenço from são and Lourenço. But there's no English language entry for those two terms, only Portuguese. Should I make English entries on those pages, like dom#Etymology_3? This is a recurring issue for me, as with Lop Nur & Sogo Nur, where I know nur is 'lake', and I would like to 'collect' all the Nurs in one Derived terms section on nur. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 12:58, 17 September 2023 (UTC) (Modified)

If they aren't English terms then you shouldn't make them just because of the phrase; use |head=São Lourenço, unlinked. In some situations it might be worth creating entries with {{only in}}, but probably not for proper nouns with foreign-language constituents. Compare Guugu Yimidhirr, Gitche Gumee, Khamnung Kikoi Louonbi, Keya Paha County, Kiên Giang, to pick some random examples. (The last case is comparable to your Nur example since giang is "river" 江 in Vietnamese—but not English.) In general "Derived terms" sections list other terms that are derived from that term within the same language, which isn't the case for the "nur" examples, i.e. they were not derived within English from an English word "nur". —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 15:33, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

If you want to avoid orange links appearing on the inflection line you should use {{l|pt}} around the constituent items. DCDuring (talk) 17:10, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

You can also use {{l}} for the parts, though it probably makes more sense to link to the pt section in this case. DCDuring (talk) 18:34, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

@Al-Muqanna, DCDuring Thanks for your explanations- please check my work here: diff. Al-Muqanna, is there a way to gather the nurs together somewhere?? --Geographyinitiative (talk) 17:40, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

One idea for the Nur issue might be to pick one of the most common Nurs and list all the others as ====Related terms====, and then in all the other entries just have a pointer like "see list in Foobar Nur" (or put the list in a template and transclude it into all the entries, if there are a lot). A small few of these components might be attested in enough fictional names (used to make the names sound Portuguese, Indian, etc) that a sense like "Used to create Portuguese-sounding place names." might be citable, but of course the real Sãos would not be "Derived terms" of that (maybe "Related terms" again). - -sche (discuss) 19:03, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Another idea is maybe put it in nur but in the "see also" section, because the terms aren't related by etymology but only by spelling so "related terms" doesn't apply. But that isn't a general solution because there's not always an etymologically unrelated English entry to tack the see also section on. For instance, there isn't a São#English entry to tack São Lourenço#English and Belém do São Francisco#English and the rest onto. You can find these by searching incategory:"English lemmas" intitle:"São", but no ordinary Wiktionary reader would ever do that. — Eru·tuon 21:51, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

• I sometimes do this too, like in these examples where I linked e.g. piet-my-vrou from piet, with the stupid tag "(etymologically unrelated, coincidentally also a bird!)" I assume linking this way is quite shabby lexicography, but I felt they "should" be linked. This method could probably be improved, which is partly why I provided the search results, so future users can cleanup any of my crap. Jewle V (talk) 22:06, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

يغور

يغور shows up in Category:English terms derived from Portuguese, which I assume is an error, but I'm not sure how to correct this. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 17:37, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Fixed. Fay Freak (talk) 18:40, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

indolylindoline and flavaniline

Apparently, these have the same chemical formula. As I know nothing about chemistry, I'd like a second opinion before linking them Jewle V (talk) 11:48, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

@Jewle V: Indolylindoline and flavaniline (both C₁₆H₁₄N₂) have little in common. The former has two double rings (6 members + 5 members) with nitrogen in the 5-member rings, whereas the latter has one double ring (both 6 members, but nitrogen in one ring) and a benzene ring with an amine group attached. --RichardW57m (talk) 13:32, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Is there a word (something like chemiformulanym) for these type of pairs? P. Sovjunk (talk) 17:58, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

isomer. RichardW57m (talk) 13:58, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Lexicographically, one could argue that the terms could appear as coordinate terms in each other's entries, possibly with the qualifier "isomer". DCDuring (talk) 14:19, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

com o passar do tempo

(Portuguese) Shouldn't com o passar do tempo be replaced by "com o passar de"? The latter is found in other common expressions, such as "com o passar dos anos", "com o passar dos dias", "com o passar das semanas" etc., and could be used in some other constructions (e.g. com o passar da noite). OweOwnAwe (talk) 23:35, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

@OweOwnAwe Yes. Benwing2 (talk) 09:09, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

guakong

Soliciting input on whether the distinction between sense 1 "maternal grandfather" and sense 2 "term of address for one's maternal grandfather" makes sense (and also whether it is supported by the cites given). Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you. Bro, sis, grandma, grandpa, boss, folks, fellow Wiktionarians, Romans, countrymen, Mr. President, members of parliament, distinguished guests, I have something to tell you, too: AFAICT any noun can be used this way. - -sche (discuss) 03:18, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

There mght be a contextual subtlety that a native speaker would more easily pick up on. in English, all of mother ~ mom ~ mama ~ mommy (and others) can be both common nouns and terms of address, but just I have never addressed my mother as "mother", I've never referred to her as my mommy either despite (I think) calling her Mommy when I was young. And yet, I distinctly remember a woman asking me "Is your mommy home?" when I answered the phone one day so I've grown up knowing it could be used as a common noun too.

I guess my point with this is that two separate senses can be justified if they are used in different contexts. On the other hand, admittedly we dont have mommy split that way and i wrote this without checking any of the entries. —Soap— 12:25, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

There is potential for such a distinction in native English - compare granddad. However, the quotation doesn't support it , but does suggest that to some grandfather has a tendency to mean 'paternal grandfather'. I think the editor has misread the sentence - Hilario Ong Tian Puy is 'guakong' to his daughters' children by definition, but now he's also going to be an 'angkong'. --RichardW57m (talk) 14:00, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

smuggling raisins

Probably not an adjective. And should be tagged slang/informal whatever P. Sovjunk (talk) 17:59, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

RfV? Is the lemma smuggle raisins#Verb> DCDuring (talk) 21:57, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, it should be {{infl of|en|smuggle raisins||ing-form}}. The quotations on the entry are consistent with this. Voltaigne (talk) 00:01, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I didn't find any support for the base form of such a verb or any other form other than the one we have. We don't often have this problem in English. "-ing form of unattested smuggle raisins." DCDuring (talk) 02:23, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

time as an adjective

we have time listed as a noun and a verb, but not an adjective. but there are example sentences given including

it’s time for bed; it’s time to sleep; it's time we were going

where it behaves like an adjective. Compare similar sentences after it’s or other equatives: it's ready to go, Im ready to quit, and so on. These are adjectives.

This is even more clear when we extend it with get: it's getting time to sleep, etc., where that construction only otherwise pairs with adjectives (getting late, getting tired, etc). Should we break this sense out as an adjective? Should some other senses also be classified as adjectives? Thanks, —Soap— 09:53, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

It's not an adjective, you can't say e.g. "it's very time" or predicate it generically ("it's time that he goes" → *"him going is time", compare "it's sad that he goes (there)" → "him going is sad"). Similarly "8 o'clock" isn't an adjective in "it's 8 o'clock", "it's getting 8 o'clock", etc., or "night" in "it's practically night". Largely this is just a copulative construction expressing a condition, though time predicates do have some peculiarities in English (like "getting"). —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 10:12, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Okay thanks, but I'm not convinced ... now and again aren't nouns, right? Can we agree that in the sentence The time is now, now is an adjective? (If it's an adverb, I can accept that, though it goes against my intuition since there's no transitive verb in the sentence.) If so, what would be the part of speech of time in the sentence Now is time? If not an adjective, what accounts for the asymmetry? —Soap— 13:40, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Note, I originally wrote now is the time up above, which mgiht contain the answer to my question ... if time is a noun when used as a whole predictate it could be seen as aphesis for the time, but i'd think this would need to be the case when the word time is used in other positions as well.—Soap— 13:43, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

No, "now" is a noun in that sentence, and you can't say "The time is again". See now#Noun. "now" can be other parts of speech, like an adverb in "it is now hot outside". Our entry does analyse "now" as an adjective in things like "the now prisoner" though that's maybe questionable (usually it's written with a hyphen or commas). —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 13:50, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

FWIW I agree with Al-Muqanna that time is a noun and not an adjective in these cases. (I would also add that "now is time"-type constructions don't seem to require symmetrical parts of speech anyway, compare "death is painless", or the phrase "to die is pain" that features in various Christian writings, where the copula joins different POS. And for "it's time for sleep", "it's punishment for stealing".) - -sche (discuss) 14:23, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

now is a noun in the time is now?? An uncountable noun I guess?? it isnt even like red where you can at least pluralize it. but OK, i see this is bigger than just my original question of how to categorize time so i will think on this some more. i might want to at least make a page for get time since its the only instance of get followed by a noun that i can come up with that is grammatical. Thanks, —Soap— 14:47, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

I can see why it's unintuitive; I find it similarly unintuitive to view here or there as sometimes being a noun (and might actually quibble over whether specific usexes were nouns or not); I think it's a case where speakers' initial intuitions — thinking of here, there or now as 'one word', and since that word is in most cases not a noun, feeling it's 'the same [non-noun] word' even in new grammatical roles, since it's still semantically intelligible in those new roles — don't line up with a rigorous grammatical classification, by which we're sometimes dealing with an adverb now, sometimes a noun now, etc. (But I can't explain thinking time is an adjective; to me time seems both intuitively still 'the same [nounal] word' and also grammatically nounal in time for bed etc.) - -sche (discuss) 15:53, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Re: "it isnt even like red where you can at least pluralize it.":

Can too pluralize it. (See too#Adverb sense 5.) Found at Google Books, among many others: "If all your nows are meaningful and fulfilling, all your todays will be beautiful." DCDuring (talk) 16:30, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

thanks but it would still be uncountable in the time is now. And not just uncountable, but also unmodifiable. you could argue "the time is really now" is modification, but really is usually analyzed as an adverb, so that's yet another argument that now is really an adjective. This would also apply to it's time. Seems simpler to me to just call these words adjectives than to call them unmodifiable uncountable nouns, but OK. if i were to make a page for get time, what part of speech would that be? just a verb? That's what we call get late. —Soap— 17:20, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

You can pluralise it easily: "There are times for working and for playing". Obviously after "It is" it will have to be singular. "Get time" is a verb, yeah. On "really", it's modifying "is" there; compare "it is really 3 miles", "it is really 8 o'clock", "I thought it was reform but it was really punishment" and so on. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 18:30, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

This makes sense. I still think it makes more sense to classify time as an adjective because we can't just drop the article with most nouns:

it's a time ~ it's the time ~ it's time, but

it's a boy ~ it's the boy ~ *it's boy.

However, unlike with "now" below, there are other nouns that can be used uncountably in some constructions but not others, for example it's school. —Soap—

Maybe, but is there any positive evidence for uncountability of now as noun? Modifiable by the uncountability determiners, like much? I can find countable usage like this from John Dewey: "Such truths get an "eternal" status-one irrespective of application just now and here, because there are so many nows and heres in which they are useful." DCDuring (talk) 00:18, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree and what you're writing underscores my point ... the countable and uncountable uses of now are identical in meaning. It'd be much simpler to just list the uncountable, unmodifiable sense of now as an adjective, since it behaves like other adjectives, rather than having two noun senses that mean the same thing or using clumsy labels like (sometimes uncountable, unmodifiable). Why all the struggle to re-define the adjectival use as a noun when we are seemingly okay with listing now also as an adverb, a conjunction, and even an interjection, all with the same meaning? —Soap—

The point's precisely that it doesn't behave like adjectives. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 09:09, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

My point is that it's counter-intuitive to list an adjectival sense under a noun header and then add labels like uncountable and unmodifiable when we could just list it under an adjective header. A reader can find it under the noun header too, and is likely to understand it just as well, but we lose information by grouping them together. —Soap— 09:15, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

If we are to leave now listed only as a noun, would it be better as you see it to list what I call the adjectival sense with labels like (uncountable, unmodifiable) or to not list that sense at all? Thanks, —Soap— 09:18, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

"Now" is not an adjective in "The time is now" any more than "yesterday" is an adjective in "The time was yesterday" or "Never" is an adjective in "It's now or never." You could call it an adverb; although that's arguably a fake part of speech that encompasses unalike things, it would be more consistent than categorizing it as an adjective (we do list yesterday separately as a noun and adverb).-Urszag (talk) 09:29, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

We have never listed as an adverb only, though, and not as a noun. —Soap— 09:39, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure what point you're getting at with this? My point is that "yesterday" and "never" aren't listed as adjectives, and I don't think "now" is an adjective when it is used similarly to these words. As for "time", it seems plausible to me that the noun analysis is best but I'm not sure yet.--Urszag (talk) 09:51, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

i believe if now is a noun then so too should never be when used in the construction now or never. i still believe it makes more sense to call them adjectives, but if we're not going to do that, i think we should at least be consistent with how we handle this.

I will let this go, though. it's clear the opinion of the community isn't what I'd expected it to be, and it does us no good for me to keep repeating myself. Best wishes, —Soap— 05:26, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘@Soap: I am not convinced, as a noun, the "unmodifiability" deserves special mention. Really they are not unmodifiable, although purely semantically it's odd to modify "now": "the glorious now", "the right time for ...", etc. The only peculiarity is the article being (optionally for "time", almost always for "now") dropped in specific contexts: "it is the time for"/"it is time for". So the entry for "now" seems fine as it is to me. For both "time" and "now", you're appealing a lot to what you find intuitive or counter-intuitive, but to me honest for me (and apparently some others) it's listing them as an adjective that would be bizarre. Like I mentioned, "It's time that he goes" can't be rearranged as "That he goes is time", which you would expect for an adjective. You can rearrange "time is short" to "a short time", but not "the time is now" to "the now time". You can't turn "it's about time" into an attributive like "the about-time event". These are all, I think, fairly intuitive features of adjectives and not abstruse. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 09:35, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

now in a phrase like the glorious now would be a noun, yes. i don't even think that's semantically odd ... it's just uncommon. but that does not count out the adjectival use anymore than the phrase bright green rules out the use of green as an adjective on its own. why such a fuss over this? —Soap— 09:45, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

You've got it twisted a bit: my point about "the glorious now" is that it's an example of modification, not that it's an adjective test. My latter points are the adjective tests, which I think are basically conclusive. Since you consider it to turn into an adjective when it doesn't have "the", but it needs "the" when it's modified, there's a circular argument concerning the modification. The fuss, I guess, is because most people who've commented don't actually find your point of view intuitive. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 09:48, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

@Soap I don't believe the examples given are actually of adjectival use, but I'm thinking of physics where we say we live in a word with thee space dimensions and one time dimension. I think in that case "space" and "time" are used as if they were "spatial' and "temporal". Maybe terms like "time zone" are also examples where "time" is more of an adjective. Merriam Webster lists an adjective sense: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/time#dictionary-entry-3. Chernorizets (talk) 08:41, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

@Chernorizets: The physics stuff is an attributive noun use. A true adjective needs to be predicable ("it is green") and capable of being modified by adverbs ("a very green car"). We have a guideline page listing noun vs. adjective tests at Wiktionary:English adjectives#Distinguishing adjectives from other parts of speech. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 08:53, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes I would consider these to be adjectives as well, but I wouldn't tie this example to the it's time example above, as they are adjectival in my mind for completely different reasons and because we've had arguments specifically over attributive uses of nouns before, and the tradition we've established, though not a hard and fast rule, has been to group such uses in with the nouns whenever possible, perhaps to simplify entry layout. —Soap— 09:01, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

MWOnline has three definitions of time being used attributively that might be considered adjectival because they are not 100% obvious attributive uses of one of their many noun definitions of time. IOW, they are relying on semantic novelty to justify the adjective PoS. I view their two more open-ended definitions as something like our use of {{&lit|en}}: they are directing users to the noun definitions of time. Maybe we need a template that similarly directs users to the noun definitions from an adjective section that exists only because of narrow semantically distinguishable definitions appropriate for certain attributive use of a word that is normally a noun. What we don't need is the task of rewording each noun definition of a word like time to make it substitutable when used attributively. — This unsigned comment was added by DCDuring (talk • contribs) at 08:43, 2023 September 21.

scrawling through

There are a good number of sources using "scrawl through" in a sense we don't have (all British, at least that I've found), for example:

• "he is just as exposed as anyone with a social media account as potential dates can scrawl through their posts to find out more" (Metro 2017)
• "We’ve scrawled through the fixtures and league tables on the Goals Football website to create a list" (GlasgowLive, 2017)
• "He used an iPad and a stick in his mouth to scrawl through apps that interested him" (Daily Mirror 2019)
• "He would also scrawl through his Twitter feed fretting over the opinions of strangers." (The Guardian 2020)

Is this simply a misspelling of scroll or an actual blend with trawl? Interestingly I can't find comparable cites for "scrawl down" which you would expect if it's just a misspelling, and all of these citations seem to carry the implication of both scrolling and trawling through. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 11:01, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Interesting, it does seem to carry implications of trawl. I almost wonder whether there's some kind of (?)sound symbolism(?) at work, that people think scrawl just sounds like a right word for this (perhaps because scroll and trawl are adjacent), because Wright's English Dialect Dictionary has a number of "general dialectal" senses of scrawl which also start off sounding like they could be adjacent to this, although they then veer off in a different direction: "1. v. To crawl, creep" seems like it would cover crawling someone's posts, except it means literally, as the definition continues "to move slowly or with difficulty; to hobble; to scramble", and then "2. To scrape up; to gather together" seems like it could've lent itself to this extension until you get to the second half of the definition, "to toss about in a confused, disorderly manner". (I'm checking to see whether I can cite and add those two to our own entry.) - -sche (discuss) 15:31, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

maybe scroll ~ crawl if not scroll ~ trawl. Only because Im not sure "trawl" is a widely used word these days, and it is itself already confused with troll. though i admit i didnt even think of scroll ~ crawl until you mentioned sound symbolism. —Soap— 17:15, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Somewhere between catachresis and eggcorniness? Some eggcorns are cornier than others. Quercus solaris (talk) 02:06, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Sentence ungrammatical?

At culture vulture, I had written "An artist who copies rather than creates original work". @Equinox changed this to "An artist who copies rather than creating original work" on the ground that the original sentence was ungrammatical. However, it seems quite grammatical to me, like "She prefers to act rather than sit around and fret about the problem." Who is right? If the original sense is in fact ungrammatical, could someone explain why? Thanks. — Sgconlaw (talk) 18:33, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Seems fine to me. (I guess the simple present becomes less and less natural after rather than as the clause gets longer—it's easy to find things like "exists rather than does not exist" but in an extended sentence like "he often goes to the kebab place down the street for dinner rather than eats at home" it almost certainly looks like an error. So YMMV.) —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 18:34, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

@Al-Muqanna: funny, even your longer sentence seems fine to me. — Sgconlaw (talk) 19:13, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

I think there's an issue with whose preferences 'rather' refers to. If it refers to the utters choice of description, it can work as a conjunction. If it refers to the grammatical subject's preferences, then it is more naturally some sort of preposition, and would naturally take a gerund or short infinitive. Thus in my idiolect, the kebab sentence would be, "He often goes to the kebab place down the street for dinner rather than eat at home". It's possible that eat is a present subjunctive rather than a short infinitive, but "He often went to the kebab place down the street for dinner rather than ate at home" doesn't feel natural to me. (Possibly my present subjunctives are just resistant to the rule of (attracted) sequence of tenses. --RichardW57m (talk) 12:43, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

rather than can function as either (A) a conjunction, or (B) a preposition.

(A) In "An artist who copies rather than creates original work", I parse it as rather than#Conjunction (co-ordinating conjunction). On that basis, I would say that its direct linkage of two finite verbs is grammatically correct, on the same basis as:

• "An artist who copies and creates original work"

or

• "An artist who copies or creates original work"

(B) In "An artist who copies rather than creating original work", I parse it as rather than#Preposition. This is also grammatically correct, on the same basis as:

• "An artist who copies instead of creating original work"

or

• "An artist who copies in addition to creating original work".

Voltaigne (talk) 20:54, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

@Sgconlaw: I don't think it was wrong, but merely ambiguous: we don't want to suggest this is someone who "[rather than XYZ] ... copies ... original work"... i.e. a pirate (I see my "correction" probably didn't fix this issue, but you see where I was aiming.) Equinox ◑ 03:09, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

For the future, I know everyone is scared of Eq's crazy temper, but when it's just a grammar tweak, you could drop this on my talk page. As long as you are willing to wait for 20 days. love, Equinox ◑ 03:12, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Consider the following sentences:

1. Are you going to eat or take out the trash?
2. Are you going to boil or bake the food?

In the first one, you have two independent things: either you eat (something or other), or you take out the trash (if you eat the trash, I don't want to know about it). In the second, you have two different actions applied to the same object: either you boil the food, or you bake the food (here again, if you're going to be sitting there boiling, I don't want to know about it).

Your sentence isn't clear about whether it's the first type or the second. You could be saying "an artist who copies (something or other) rather than creating original work". You could also be saying "an artist who copies original work rather than creating it".

Both those interpretations are a little odd: the first seems like it should have an object. If you ask the artist what they're doing, you wouldn't expect them to say "nothing much, just copying, like I usually do." The second implies that you have specific pieces of work in mind, and the artist could do one thing to them, but instead does something else. If they aren't being created, though, how can they be something specific that you have in mind?

I think what you really meant was "someone who copies the work of others, rather than creating their own original work." You don't see anything wrong with your version, because you know what you were referring to and are unconsciously filling in what others would need to make sense of it. They can deduce what you really meant, but they could probably do the same if you left out all the vowels... Chuck Entz (talk) 04:39, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for weighing in, everyone. I can see how the original definition was ambiguous, but even if it were recast along the lines suggested by @Chuck Entz, somehow “someone who copies the work of others, rather than creates their own original work” does not seem ungrammatical to me. — Sgconlaw (talk) 19:36, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

I fully agree with Voltaigne's analysis and conclude that it is grammatical, but the possible second ungrammatical reading is distracting. DCDuring (talk) 19:55, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Personally, I prefer some punctuation, which at the same time disarms the sentence’s garden path nature:

An artist who copies – rather than creates – original work.

You can commission a faithful copy of van Gogh’s Irises. Is the copyist a culture vulture? Or is it rather the imitation of someone else’s original style that makes one a culture vulture?  --Lambiam 14:58, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I think the dashes read better. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 15:17, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Boring chemistry

Is fluophosphate and fluorophosphate the same thing??? P. Sovjunk (talk) 19:10, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Hello, and welcome to the Tea room.

The two words may look alike but aren't the same. Fluorophosphate is formed by replacing one hydroxyl of a phosphate anion with a fluorine atom; any salt containing such an anion, and fluophosphate is a double salt of fluoric acid and phosphoric acid. Did this answer your question?♪Kiiroi Sora♪ ( 私とチャットしてくれ!) 00:27, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

According to Dictionary.com, they are, but that would not be a reliable source for chemistry info, IMHO. Nor would I be. The prefixes fluo- and fluoro- both mean "fluorine", so the terms are "related terms". Fluophosphate may just be an older term for fluorophosphate. The person who created many chemistry entries here is no longer active, AFAICT. DCDuring (talk) 00:36, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

@DCDuring, Kiiroi Sora, P. Sovjunk: I've found a quotation for diisopropyl fluophosphate, as an instance of the general formula (RO)₂POF, and a patent so we may have two distinct senses, and a patent for fluophosphate glass, which is a mix of fluorides and phosphates, and what looks like a pukka double salt at https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/598/1/012050/pdf. (The molar ratio looks right, but I haven't double checked it.) There's a nice mention of 'isopropyl fluophosphate' at https://www.drugfuture.com/chemdata/isoflurophate.html, but I'm not sure about durability.

I'm beginning to suspect we have different meanings for organic and inorganic chemistry. --RichardW57m (talk) 16:29, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Oh, and in French, fluorophosphate can mean the double salt. --RichardW57m (talk) 16:35, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your explanation. ♪Kiiroi Sora♪ ( 私とチャットしてくれ!) 16:20, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

De'kwana and Ye'kwana Maquiritari

@-sche, Vorziblix We call the language Maquiritari, while Wikipedia calls it Ye'kuana. Ethnologue calls it Maquiritari, while Glottolog calls it Ye'kwana but calls the larger family that contains it Maquiritari-Wayumara. (Per Glottolog, Wayumara is a related language, but per Wikipedia it's a dialect of Ye'kuana.) Glottolog says Ye'kuana has two dialects Maitsi and Mayongong, while User:Vorziblix says there are two dialects (possibly not the same ones) named De'kwana and Ye'kwana. Most resources I could find say that Maquiritari, De'kwana and Ye'kwana/Ye'kuana are all synonyms. The Wiktionary entry for Ye'kwana (created by Vorziblix) says it's the northeastern dialect of Maquiritari, and differs from De'kwana in (among other things), a phoneme y where De'kwana has d. I could easily believe there are different dialects of this language but I'm skeptical that De'kwana and Ye'kwana are the right terms, given that Ye'kwana is often used to refer to the tribe and language as a whole. Can we come up with less ambiguous terms? Maybe Northeastern = Ye'kwana and some other compass direction is De'kwana? Benwing2 (talk) 06:28, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Ye’kwana is the usual name of the language as a whole in current scholarly literature. Unfortunately, Ye’kwana is also the name of one of the dialects of this language, specifically the one that has a phoneme /j/ where De’kwana dialects have either /ð/ or /d/. The situation is made confusing because speakers of the Ye’kwana dialect(s) call the language as a whole Ye’kwana, while speakers of the De’kwana dialect(s) call the language as a whole De’kwana; it’s mostly only scholars writing about the language who have applied these terms to the two relevant dialects. See the notes at Wiktionary:About Maquiritari#Dialects for some further details.

In reality the dialect situation is more complicated than this twofold distinction, and while one can draw an isogloss between dialects that use /j/ versus those that use /ð/, there is also dialectal variation within each of these subgroups. For example, speakers in Brazil have a particular /ð/-dialect of their own that differs in some respects from the western dialects in Venezeula traditionally identified as De’kwana. The trouble is that there is not enough published research/data to clearly sort out these dialect distinctions and their exact geographical distribution, while on the other hand, it is fairly easy to make a broad distinction between sources from dialects that use /j/ and those that use /ð/. In light of this, selecting terminology with a geographical reference for these dialects/dialect groups is troublesome.

Glottolog is outright wrong about dialects; Maitsi and Mayongong are just different exonyms for the language, not separate dialects of any kind. As for Wayumara, it is an extinct lect that is so poorly attested it is impossible to tell if it is better considered a separate langauge or a Maquiritari dialect.

On the whole, ‘Maquiritari’ is not the ideal terminology — it is dated, and in modern materials the language is most often just called Ye’kwana. Unfortunately there is no other name used in scholarly literature for the dialect(s) that use /j/ as opposed to /ð/. I would be open to some solution with less ambiguous terms but am not sure whether a good solution of the kind currently exists. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 11:02, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Edit: to add to this, most of our entries currently labelled ‘Ye’kwana’ reflect the dialect spoken along the Caura river (as recorded in Natalia Cáceres’s papers), while our ‘De’kwana’ entries sourced to Katherine Hall’s work reflect the dialect spoken on the Cunucunuma River. (A few of our other De’kwana entries are instead sourced from the Brazilian dialect — the ones cited to {{R:mch:Japiim}} and {{R:mch:Gongora}}, for instance.) It would be possible to label the dialects correspondingly as Caura River dialect vs. Cunucunuma River dialect, etc., but this would also give a misleading impression that the words in question were limited to those areas, when this is generally probably not the case. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 11:12, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

@Vorziblix Thanks for the detailed response. I would argue tentatively we should rename Maquiritari -> Ye'kwana and use river names to identify the dialects. This has some precedent in that e.g. Khanty dialects are also named according to rivers while they certainly aren't spoken only along those rivers, but the river gives a general idea of which dialect is being referred to, which should be enough. This would avoid the problems with using terms that per speakers of this language are names for the whole language not for the dialects (with consequent confusion in the literature). If at some future point the literature settles on different names, we can rename appropriately, which isn't too hard by bot. Benwing2 (talk) 19:11, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2: OK, I would be fine with that solution. If you want to go ahead and start changing everything by bot, I can clean up the few outliers afterward by looking at which entries use the relevant reference templates. Thanks! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 20:27, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 Hi again! I would like to go ahead with these renames, if you’ve got the bandwidth to help out sometime. (Sorry to intrude on your time; I would do it myself, but 1700 entries is a bit daunting for a manual change.)

Fundamentally all we’d need bot-wise is (1) a change of each language heading from ‘Maquiritari’ to ‘Ye'kwana’ (and consequent re-alphabetizing of the entry involved, as needed); (2) a change of labels in {{lb|mch|}} and {{tlb|mch|}} from ‘Ye'kwana’ to ‘Caura River’ and from ‘De'kwana’ to ‘Cunucunuma River’; and (3) of labels in {{q|}} under the ‘Alternative forms’ header the same way (‘Ye'kwana’ -> ‘Caura River’; ‘De'kwana’ -> ‘Cunucunuma River’). I could handle the rest manually and verify that the results are as intended.

Let me know what you think, and if there’s any possibility of getting these renames botted and done with. In either case, thanks again! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 21:40, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

@Vorziblix OK this should be done. I needed to rename the categories as well, fix up the labels module, change references to Maquiritari in Translations sections (and then reorder them), etc. In the process I corrected most uses of {{q}} under ==Alternative forms== to use {{alt}} and changed all the references to Maquiritari as a language to "Ye'kwana". I didn't change places that refer to the Maquiritari people or Maquiritari mythology as I'm not sure what is correct here. The remaining pages containing the word "Maquiritari" are here: User:Benwing2/pages-containing-maquiritari You'll definitely have to e.g. rename WT:About Maquiritari and do some work on that page. Benwing2 (talk) 05:26, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Perfect, many thanks! I’ve gone through and fixed the remaining things that needed fixing. Thanks again! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 07:13, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

of#Verb

of#Verb is tagged with {{eye dialect of}} and the term eye dialect is described as A deliberate misspelling used in writing to indicate the speech of a poorly educated character; the spelling represents how they would spell the words if they were asked to write them down. As such, it is the functional opposite of pronunciation spelling. by Appendix:Glossary#eye dialect. My perception is that most instances of the spelling of instead of 've are not deliberate, rather totally indeliberate. Am I wrong here or should either the term be retagged or the definition of eye dialect be changed? Jonteemil (talk) 19:19, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

by deliberate we mean that it's used by authors when quoting the speech of an uneducated character. Assuming the author knows their grammar, the use of incorrect grammar would then be deliberate. if someone who doesnt know better uses the of spelling when 've is called for, that's not eye dialect, it's just a mistake ... sometimes we list common mistakes separately, but in this case we've so far chosen not to. —Soap— 20:05, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

@Soap This error is so common I think it deserves an entry. Benwing2 (talk) 20:07, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

I see, but the pronunciation of 've and of is the same, hence the occurrence of the nonstandard of spelling. So you wouldn't be able to quote an uneducated speech with either spelling. Jonteemil (talk) 20:09, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

@Jonteemil I think the definition of "eye dialect" is correct and we should change the label to simple "misspelling of". Benwing2 (talk) 20:06, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

p-adic and p-adic number

I don't speak Polish, but I just wondered why p-adic is not used in Polish (pinging @Vininn126: here and here)? See p-adic#Translations and p-adic_number#Translations. How would p-adic numbers be talked about in Polish if there is no translation in use, e.g., in the liczby p-adyczne article? See also n-adic#Translations and -adic#Translations. Thrasymedes (talk) 09:53, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

@Thrasymedes These articles are often protologisms and I have not seen papers using this suffix yet. Vininn126 (talk) 09:56, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

That said upon further research it seems like it would be attestable! Vininn126 (talk) 10:01, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. Yes, I have found a few Google Books hits, e.g., 1, 2, 3. Thrasymedes (talk) 10:06, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

These are all plurals, and also in English almost all uses are in the plural. But one can also find Google Book hits for the oblique singular form liczbę p-adyczną.  --Lambiam 15:16, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Regarding similar entries such as n-adic and -adic, I think it is perhaps a bit misleading to our readers to the use the {{not used}} template. According to the template's documentation, it should be used "to indicate the rare case that a language has no translation, not even an unidiomatic / sum-of-parts descriptive translation, for an English word". In this case, it is not that there is no translation in Polish, but that it might not be durably attested due to the topic being esoteric (and durable attestations may yet appear over time). The "not used" wording in this context may therefore be misleading, especially to a reader unfamiliar with Wiktionary's attestation policy, and I think it would be better simply not to translate the word into the language instead of having {{not used}}. If we applied the {{not used}} template consistently in entries where translations are not yet durably attested instead of simply leaving out the translation, would it not be used on many more entries? Thrasymedes (talk) 20:13, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

When one cannot find an equivalent, what should one do? I typically give even non-idiomatic translations when possible with the other countless requests for Polish translations that I get. Vininn126 (talk) 20:16, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

My question about the consistent use of {{not used}} was a general question about its use in translations for all entries, not just in response to translation requests. To rephrase: if not used simply means durable translation attestations not yet found, should {{not used}} not be added to many more entries where there is no durably attested translation for a given language, even if there is no translation request? Use of the {{not used}} template makes much more sense to me, say, for the Mandarin translation of the or the Dyirbal translation of she, given the template's description.

To your question, for translation requests, would deleting the {{t-needed}} with an edit summary explaining that no durably attested translation could be found be a solution? For example, it follows from the discussion above that n-adic has a Polish translation analogous to p-adic, even if we cannot provide it due to lack of attestations. This is quite a different situation to the Mandarin and Dyirbal examples above. Thrasymedes (talk) 07:43, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

This is a discussion better held probably at the beer parlor or something. Vininn126 (talk) 09:00, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

shadowing

At this entry we have six noun definitions (as well as the verb definition of the -ing form). The six seem to me to imperfectly mirror definitions of shadow#Verb as indicated by the def. numbers in parentheses. We have no significant evidence that compels us to show shadowing as a noun any more than any other -ing-form. Do we want this duplication? If so, how can we get noun PoS sections for all comparable -ing-forms?

Note also that noun def. 2 has no counterpart in the verb, which seems implausible.

Noun: shadowing

1. (2) The effect of being shadowed (in the sense of blocked), as from a light source or radio transmission.
2. The situation where an individual repeats speech immediately as they hear it (usually through earphones).
3. (3) (espionage) Secretly or discreetly tracking or following someone, keeping under surveillance.
4. (4) A faint representation; an adumbration.
5. (7,8) (computing) The technique of copying ROM contents to RAM to allow for shorter access times. The ROM chip is then disabled while the initialized memory locations are switched in on the same block of addresses.
6. (6) (education) A work experience option where students learn about a job by walking through the work day as a shadow to a competent worker.

Verb: shadow

1. (transitive) To shade, cloud or darken.
2. (1) (transitive) To block light or radio transmission from. [Should this be a subsense of 1?]
3. (3) (particularly espionage) To secretly or discreetly track or follow another, to keep under surveillance.
4. (4) (transitive) To represent faintly and imperfectly.
5. (transitive) To hide; to conceal.
6. (6) (transitive) To accompany (a professional) during the working day, so as to learn about an occupation one intends to take up.
7. (5) (transitive, programming) To make (an identifier, usually a variable) inaccessible by declaring another of the same name within the scope of the first.
8. (5) (transitive, computing) To apply the shadowing process to (the contents of ROM).

Most other dictionaries don't have an entry for shadowing. The few that do have only highly specialized senses that differ from ours.

Do contributors find defining a noun easier than defining a verb? If they do, we should inspect -ing-form entries to discover missing verb senses. DCDuring (talk) 12:43, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Seconded, it’s unnecessary repetition. I know situation where an individual repeats speech immediately as they hear it only as parroting. It’s an exercise for novice interpreters. I’m not sure whether all potential ing-form-entries are derived from an actual verb (I mean that is indeed used as a verb). Sometimes ‑ing is suffixed just to make it sound like an act. -- Kai Burghardt (talk) 16:44, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

clbuttic — noun?

Our clbuttic entry as two POS headings -- the expected adjective, but also a noun heading.

I've never seen this used as a noun, and indeed all three of the current usexes use the word attributively, never substantively.

Can anyone confirm a cromulent and unambiguous usex of this word as a noun? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 22:41, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

@Eirikr I see quite a few uses of the plural clbuttics on Google, despite our claim that it's unattested. This entry seems to have been a magnet for misconceived attempts to compromise on the issue, with it first being labelled "uncountable" and now "plural not attested". Both are wrong. Theknightwho (talk) 23:48, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

I think people assumed from the citations it was only used attributively (which is apparently wrong anyway) and couldn't figure out how to reflect that in the entry. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 08:40, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Right, even contributors have trouble with the idea of attributive use of nouns. Do we need some kind of dummy adjective definition in an Adjective section that refers users to the noun section and to an appendix (heading) that explains attributive use? It would probably have great benefit where the noun section has many definitions, but educational value even in simple cases. DCDuring (talk) 13:32, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

In this case, clbuttic arose from a mangling of classic, with the clbuttic usexes currently under the noun POS more closely aligning with classic as an adjective. I was curious if there were also any clear evidence of clbuttic as a noun, which apparently there is, but our usexes don't reflect that just yet. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:29, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Right. The purported cites for the noun all seem more like mentions of the word cibuttic, but without the typography to make that clear. The instance I found for the plural might be evidence, but we would need two more, probably from non-durably archived sources. DCDuring (talk) 23:37, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Multitude of (European?) terms meaning "while" and "until" in the negative

There are quite a number of (I believe mostly) European languages that have a word meaning "as long as, while" that can mean "until" when in a negated sentence, such as Polish dopóki and Italian finché. I'm wondering what the best way to handle these definitions is. Should there be a separate sense for the negated use? Should It be a subsense? Should it be a usage note? Vininn126 (talk) 17:26, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Certainly not in the misleading way now at dopóki. (used with nie) should be in the beginning, or a {{n-g}} to say that this is lexically usual in the negative. The main information there is not sufficiently marked, for something that is unintuitive from an English perspective. Cf. чуть не. Fay Freak (talk) 17:49, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree it should be a label like {{lb|pl|in the negative}}, or rather using {{q}}, or even an entry, not with the qualifier and bare link. Notable WSJP has a separate entry for dopóki nie. Vininn126 (talk) 17:51, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Despite Treccani also separating the negative use, in my opinion the example finché vivo = "until I'm dead" clarifies it isn't finché non meaning "until", but rather there being an inversion of condition, be it with non or in any other way. I don't see the two senses any more separate than "to eat" and "not to eat" would. The Polish situation isn't clear for me. Catonif (talk) 18:40, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

right-minded

Are the two senses really distinct? PUC – 19:47, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

How would a definition that spanned the moral and logical/rational senses read? DCDuring (talk) 20:07, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Oxford Learner's has "having beliefs and opinions that most people approve of", a third take, that fits much contemporary usage, some of which is derogatory, implying conformity to societal norms that the speaker deems oppressive or wrong-headed. DCDuring (talk) 20:10, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

First, we will probably agree that the sense of this entry in the English lexicon is not separated by majority brains from that of in one's right mind, which we define with but one sense, rather it is its attributive form.

Secondly, I have recently been driven into doubts, to say it mildly, that people are regularly clear-thinking. You are, DCDuring is, I am, by all reasonable measures, when assessing our entries, with no little an effort, that by practice we taught ourselves to apply, and random people cannot just begin to apply the same lexicographic insight from the first day they have decided so. People need framing to believe things, to perceptively achieve a surplus in adherence to societal norms. Is–ought distinction must be quite differently mentalized when applied to introspective facts. Which is rarely framed like this by anyone, so I am idiosyncratic here again. But the insight is here that one may be neither sane nor clear-thinking nor decent nor morally upright nor right-minded, if this still means something different – the equation with near-synonyms is bad definition, as always – and still be right. The most common judgment on whether one is right in one’s mind won’t exclusively depend on either, which are all only contextual abstractions, so yes, we have only one sense here, which can be and is used with a center of gravity. Senses can have periphery, remember, it is just shocking to embrace the evil in the idea that decency, moral uprightness, clear thinking and sanity belong into this category—which is why I had to frame circumstantially to get across this point.

But I also have double empathy problem, so my opinion might not matter to most dictionary users, and I could only provide limited moral or intellectual support for someone rewriting the definition, who would find it hard to agree to hint at so obscure insights. Nobody really claims that there are uninterconnected intellectual and moral faculties in the mind however, and could successfully contend that there is an essential distinction reflecting in senses of this word, without resorting to religious red herrings. Nobody provided us with morals or will preceding sane thinking, thinking rather determines what is morally sane (morally sane is also a well-attested phrasing), and then moral considerations how much and how far we will think, at some point learned by help of other humans. The right mind is a feedback loop. We exert our mind on purpose, at least this is virtually the only context where one considers someone’s being in his right mind, otherwise the proposition would have no purpose, so primarily intersubjectively controllable concepts formed to pursue a goal, of no viable formulation without a point of view about society. There is an implicit prosocial assumption about anyone whose “right mind” is confirmed or (usually) denied. You might say, a certain speech act, which is not verbalized in our definition at all. Of course we can only do so much to describe how loaded loaded language is.

Multiple aspects and inviting arguments here now however why the rough binary representation is untruthful, PUC’s inquiry and DCDuring’s curiosity is totally right-minded. Fay Freak (talk) 21:49, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

I am surprised at how much variety there is in definitions. WordNet has "disposed toward or having views based on what is right." This spans the logical/rational and moral aspects, but does not explicitly reflect the conformity element. Maybe the evaluative element should just be left to the word right as WordNet has. If so, their definition is a model for what ours should be. I don't know that we can capture the the conformity element in usage examples. Anyway, it would be confusing to users just trying to get the more straightforward elements of meaning. The WordNet def. connotes to me a greater emphasis on the moral than on the rational.

In the expression in one's right mind, right seems to mean "sane, rational". DCDuring (talk) 23:05, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Canada, US

See busker, bogie and built like a brick shithouse. Wouldn't it be more helpful to list where the term isn't used, perhaps in a usage note? (Gibraltar? India?) While looking for more instances of this I also found rotonda and Kreisel, I'm not sure listing territories is really needed within senses. — Alexis Jazz (talk) 21:59, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree. Often, the issue is that someone initially added it with an erroneous restriction (e.g. claiming it was British-only) and then an American editor added that it was also American, and an Australian added it was also Australian, etc, with no-one realizing that meant the restriction was just wrong. In the case of built like a brick shithouse, the original editor claimed "Exceptionally well constructed" was "Australia|Canada|US" but not British (in contrast to "Having a muscular body" which was labelled as "Australia|Canada|British|US"), but now someone's added that it is also used in Britain ... and a cursory search turns up Irish examples, too ... so it's probably more helpful to drop the labels and add a usage note documenting any noticeable sense omissions (e.g. "Sense N is unlikely to be understood in Wales, where senses X and Y are more common").
Labels like on rotonda are just confusing (making it seem like the Spanish word rotonda means different things in American Spanish vs in the Spanish of Spaniards living in Britain); I removed it... - -sche (discuss) 01:24, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

garbanço

This Old Spanish entry has a quote from the 1600s, which wouldn't be Old Spanish, but Early Modern Spanish (called "Español Medio" in Spanish-language sources). Rodrigo5260 (talk) 02:06, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Actually, Methodo y orden de curar las enfermedades de los niños is from 1600. Whether or not that means it is Old Spanish by en.wikt standards is another matter. We don't accept "Early Modern Spanish" as a language here, gracias a Dios. We should probably include a cut-off point at Wiktionary:About Spanish anyway P. Sovjunk (talk) 02:39, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Old Spanish is from 1100s-1200s to late 1400s as far as I know. Rodrigo5260 (talk) 03:09, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

So change the damn entry already! P. Sovjunk (talk) 03:23, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Done, I just listed it as an obsolete form. Rodrigo5260 (talk) 13:01, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

what is "Classical Indonesian"?

It seems that Indonesian as a language separate from Malay only dates to c. 1900 AD. Therefore, what does "Clasical Indonesian" refer to? I can find nothing in a Google search. The examples in Category:Classical Indonesian appear to be superseded Persian-origin words; maybe these are properly Classical Malay? Benwing2 (talk) 06:31, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

BTW as with the case below, this is entries created by User:Xbypass with category help from User:Koavf. Benwing2 (talk) 10:41, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

I have no clue: I just turned red links blue. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:43, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

I suppose it means Malay as used in Indonesia. Like “Galician Old Galician-Portuguese”. Which for geographic considerations does not make as much sense. But this is only charitable interpretation. It could also mean that Indonesian dictionaries carry on general Malay words used back in the days due to inertia, but historical corpora cannot always be checked by editors. Fay Freak (talk) 11:12, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

what is "Classical Javanese"?

@Koavf, Xbypass User:Xbypass added the 'classical' tag to durjana leading to it getting added to CAT:Classical Javanese, which User:Koavf then created despite I suspect no knowledge of what it is. Wikipedia says there's no such thing as Classical Javanese outside of Old Javanese, and I suspect this is not an Old Javanese term. Benwing2 (talk) 10:39, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

I have no clue: I just turned red links blue. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:43, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

@Koavf As I suspected. Please don't do this in the future, thanks. Benwing2 (talk) 10:44, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Why is it better to have more wanted categories? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:45, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

@Koavf Because in cases like this the category may be bogus and should be removed from the entry instead of created. We should not be in the habit of creating bogus categories, esp. when not using {{auto cat}}. Benwing2 (talk) 10:46, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

@Koavf Also in many cases you manual category definitions were wrong and I'm having to clean them up. Benwing2 (talk) 10:49, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

E.g.? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:49, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

E.g. Category:Yogyakarta Javanese should be under Category:Indonesian Javanese not Category:Regional Javanese, and should have used {{dialectboiler}} (now {{auto cat|dialect=1}}). Benwing2 (talk) 10:52, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=Category%3AYogyakarta+Javanese ??? I am not Praqimu and I don't see this category on my watchlist, edit history, logged actions, or the trash in my email. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:55, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

@Koavf OK, my apologies, but you've created other categories in a similar fashion. Benwing2 (talk) 11:00, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm trying to help you here. If you want my help, let me know. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:01, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

@Koavf The Classical categories you created are misspecified; they should use {{dialectboiler}} (now {{auto cat|dialect=1}}) and not be children of CAT:Regional Javanese etc. since they're not regional. Benwing2 (talk) 11:04, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Same with all the other categories you created without using {{dialectboiler}}. Benwing2 (talk) 11:05, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

If the category is bogus, it should be removed from the entry, whether it's blue or red. How is red better is my question. I didn't add the (evidently) bogus information: it had the category either way, it's just that the category didn't exist. If there's anyone somehow auditing wanted categories, that's another story. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:49, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

@Koavf Bingo. I audit Special:WantedCategories. Benwing2 (talk) 10:51, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

How did you find these categories to ask about them here? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:58, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

@Koavf Because I happened to do a one-time run looking for descendant categories of Category:Regionalisms that don't use {{auto cat}}. I don't do such things regularly. Benwing2 (talk) 11:02, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

بكتر (baktar) and बख़्तर (baxtar)

Hello masters, is बख़्तर (baxtar) also from persian بكتر (baktar) like बकतर (baktar) is. कालमैत्री (talk) कालमैत्री (talk) 15:38, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, this was borrowed into Turkic, and probably sometimes from Persian via Chagatay in Indian languages. Doerfer, Gerhard (1965) Türkische und mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur: Veröffentlichungen der Orientalischen Kommission)‎^[6] (in German), volume 2, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, pages 308–309 Nr. 768, without the Indian languages, and also claiming it is not attested in Turkic beside Chagatay. Fay Freak (talk) 17:16, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

virtuoso and virtù

The English definition at virtuoso#Noun says "An expert in virtù or art objects and antiquities". However, there is no English definition at virtù. I presume one of two things should happen:

1. virtuoso#Noun is modified to remove this non-English word from its definition
2. An English definition is added to virtù.

I would appreciate the assistance of other editors in choosing which course of action to take, and especially for rewriting the definition of virtuoso. Daask (talk) 19:19, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

@Daask: the relevant definition is at vertu. I suggest changing the definition at virtuoso to refer to vertu rather than virtù. Alternatively, as you suggest, an English sense could be added to virtù ({{alternative spelling of|en|vertu}}), but it would be best to first check if the spelling virtù is used in English. — Sgconlaw (talk) 19:50, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

butt

Perhaps we’re missing a US slang meaning here as apparently some people use butt as an abbreviation for butter, according to yesterday’s Guardian crossword blog (comment number 89 here[7]). It’s hard to search for and I can’t find any uses though. Has anyone come across this? Overlordnat1 (talk) 09:19, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

In books, can find a single extremely terse recipe which abbreviates butter to but. (Citations:but.), but not butt. Online, searches like google:"tbsp. butt." "tsp." turns up a small number of hits for "butt." but it doesn't seem to be common. - -sche (discuss) 16:16, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

Clive Upton, David Parry, J. D. A. Widdowson, Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar (1994): “n bread and butt a PIECE OF BREAD AND BUTTER V.6.11(a). ə bɹɛd ən bʊt Y”. J3133 (talk) 16:26, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps the comment just suggests that if an abbreviation of butter existed, it would probably be butt since margarine turns into marge. There's also butty, but this word is primarily used in the UK and isn't an abbreviation of butter but rather something like buttered sandwich. —Soap— 11:32, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Good detective work everyone. It has now been confirmed at the blog itself that it was a joke but I've added a single mention of the Yorkshire dialect use at the citation page I've just created in any case (citations:butt). --Overlordnat1 (talk) 13:29, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

aurantium

Our entry for orange lists aurantium as the Latin translation for the fruit, but our entry for aurantium gives no such definition. Which one is right, orange or aurantium? Nosferattus (talk) 18:46, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

I wonder in what vintage of Latin aurantius came into use (Late, Medieval, New). DCDuring (talk) 18:23, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

ultrasound

Isn't that used colloquially to also refer to the echograph device itself? Chernorizets (talk) 00:49, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

out of pocket (part of speech)

The definitions and examples/quotations in the Adverb section all seem like they could be adjectives instead. Sense 1 = broke, which we have only as an adjective, not an adverb; sense 2 = unavailable, ditto. Sense 3 seems like someone didn't realize the sense was already present as Adjective sense 2. Dictionary.com has "out of pocket" as an adjective. OTOH, Merriam-Webster does have being out of pocket (broke) as an adverb, and also has "pay out of pocket" as an adverb whereas we say it's a prepositional phrase. - -sche (discuss) 01:49, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

We decided a few years ago to address the adverb-adjective definition duplication in prepositional phrases like this by permitting "Prepositional phrase" as a PoS header. Definitions under that heading would best be worded as prepositional phrases themselves so that they would more likely substitutable into both adjective and adverb uses of the prepositional phrase. Full conversion to the "Prepositional phrase" header (at least where there are now both Adverb and Adjective PoS headers and definitions), merging the adverb and adjective definitions, and converting the wording to prepositional phrases would be a useful project. DCDuring (talk) 18:21, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

I think it is a long run for a short slide to try to attest each prepositional phrase definition as both an adverb and an adjective. DCDuring (talk) 18:28, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Can the senses which are currently listed as adverbial be attested adverbially? If they're only adjectival, then we can just say "Adjective" with no "Adverb" POS and no need for a "multi-POS header" like Prepositional phrase. Or is it better to label all Prepositional phrases as such regardless of whether they're attested in only one of {adjective, adverb}? - -sche (discuss) 21:38, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

I never discount the likelihood that a prepositional phrase used "only" as adjective or adverb will eventually migrate to the other PoS. A qualifying label would be more to my taste than a separate header, but I'm ignoring implications for translations (though both an adjective and an adverb could be shown as translations of a single prepositional phrase definition). DCDuring (talk) 22:36, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

cut short

I have a similar question about adjectives used after certain verbs, such as short in cut short. In sentences like

He cut me short repeatedly in the meeting.

The boss got a message and cut the meeting short.

The recent developments at work caught them short.

Is the word short functioning as an adverb, or an adjective? We have them listed as adverbs, but replacing the word short with an adverb of similar meaning would lead to sentences like He cut me briefly repeatedly in the meeting. Put another way, short isn't describing the verb cut, it's describing the thing or person who is being cut. This seems straightforward to me, but having started a thread just a week ago on a very similar subject I want to make sure Im not missing something important.

I also think the stop short sample sentence, while it is adverbial, doesn't really illustrate the claimed sense and that perhaps sense 1 should be removed altogether, but these two points are not tied to each other. —Soap— 21:37, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

I think that kind of usage is usually considered adjectival in the modern grammars I look at. DCDuring (talk) 22:42, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

It's similar to a phrasal verb in that 'cut (something) short' is a unit, so 'short' in this case is an adjective. Leasnam (talk) 02:05, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't get the reasoning. Is up an adjective in 'cut (something) up'? DCDuring (talk) 14:12, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I see your point. Not exactly like phrasal verbs. Leasnam (talk) 14:46, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

adjective for '(in which it is) hard to keep one's head above water'

Is there an adjective for this? For example, if the issue with a particular line of work is that there's a lot of fierce competition, you could say it's a "cutthroat" or "dog-eat-dog" industry. But if the issue is not competition but just the fact that profits are never much above expenses so it's easy to go under, then it's a field in which it's hard to keep your head above water: a ____ field. ("Unprofitable" happens to be an applicable word, but it doesn't capture the 'likely to pull you under' sense I'm looking for.) - -sche (discuss) 21:47, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Would sink-or-swim work? It seems that's not the original meaning, but the metaphors both involving water may influence how people understand them. That said, before looking it up I'd have said sink or swim mostly means intensely competitive to me, as well. —Soap— 22:14, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Don't know exactly what the water metaphor is intended to delineate, but maybe: strenuous, gruelling; risky; a losing game; a minefield. Equinox ◑ 22:40, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

For keep one's head above water, Spears' idioms dictionary has an {{&lit|en}} definition, one like ours, and a third like "keep up with one's work", ie, not strictly financial, and not necessarily competitive either. Also, survive in our definiens seems to terribly, awfully, horrifically inflate the import of "failure" in most usage. DCDuring (talk) 23:01, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

regular coffee

There is a translation for "coffee with milk and two sugars", but no such definition line. Equinox ◑ 22:38, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Tbh this is just all SOP with a vague term, but I am probably not going to convince most people of it. The circumstance that the probable meaning is region-dependent does not detract from this conclusion. As above right-minded this is one lump of a sense with varying emphasis. Are we gonna create regular crisps now because according to surveys these are of salt and vinegar flavour in one corner of the UK and in another cheese and onion and in another sour cream and onion, and in Germany paprika? The last one is what you will get if you ask in English in Germany for regular crisps, and surely you get the regular German coffee (probably some disgusting filter coffee) if you ask for regular coffee. The more particular meaning is regional, but not part of the language’s lexicon. And what is American coffee блядь? I could not find it to find a distinct sense as for American cheese. It clearly shows that the entry is based on shoddy thinking, not to say made-up. Fay Freak (talk) 11:51, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Fay Freak. — Sgconlaw (talk) 12:36, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree, it’s very vague. If you nominated it for RFD then I’d vote to delete it but I don’t feel strongly enough to nominate it myself. I just say ‘black coffee’ or ‘Americano’ when ordering but if I were to ever say ‘regular coffee’ or if anyone asked what it meant to me then it would refer to black coffee FWIW. Overlordnat1 (talk) 12:38, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

It certainly isn't vague when coffee is ordered in New York. The number of teaspoons of sugar is not standard, but the counterman either adds milk (not cream: too expensive) or "leaves room for the milk". Customers would normally add sugar from a sugar dispenser on the counter or at a table. Now sweeteners are in packets on a counter or at one's table. Nowadays, customers of inexpensive coffee are often expected to customize their own (amount & species of sweetener, amount of milk/cream/half and half). At expensive-coffee places more customization is done by the barista, but not the choice of sweetener. I am pretty sure that the NY definition is attestable. It certainly is part of the local lexicon. I apologize if the entry would be too much for Wiktionary contributors to maintain. DCDuring (talk) 14:26, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Reminds me that in some (European) countries you simply order a coffee/café to get a plain espresso, whereas in others they'll look puzzled, and you have to do the full spiel of "espresso", single/double etc. Jberkel 18:17, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

We do not have a definition of cream that includes milk (various fat levels) and half and half, let alone non-dairy creamer (We do have creamer.). We might need one if the definitions of regular coffee are not to further proliferate or at least get more complicated.

What would a definition of regular look like that eliminated the need for so many definitions of regular coffee? I think the definition would have to include words like "standard", "local custom", or "local expectations" and we would need to find other expressions of the form regular [NP] that had the same sense of regular. DCDuring (talk) 19:08, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

galeteria

No entry in any language. I came across it in English text: "It now hosts a coffee shop and galeteria, employing six local people and situated within a community space that is available for local groups to use." DonnanZ (talk) 09:16, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Might be a misspelling of galletería, which seems to be a normal Spanish word. However, context matters ... my first thought was that it was an art gallery that also housed a restaurant, which would also work well given a two-L spelling. —Soap— 10:24, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Is it an article about Shawford station café, by any chance? The quoted text appears to come from an article in Rail magazine about Hampshire Community Rail Partnership's win at the National Rail Awards. The café serves gelato, so presumably *galeteria is a misspelling of gelateria. Voltaigne (talk) 11:07, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Good detective work! It may be a misspelling, but it could be a Portuguese word instead of Spanish. DonnanZ (talk) 11:22, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I've created an entry for galeteria#Portuguese. It is: "(Brazil) A restaurant that specializes in serving galetos (young chicken, generally spit-roasted over coals)." I think we can safely eliminate this from our enquiries as regards the food offerings at the Shawford station café in Hampshire. The aforelinked article does however show the gelato delights to be had there. Voltaigne (talk) 12:50, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. Recognising misspellings is a continual problem for us. DonnanZ (talk) 13:34, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Laurentian Divide

Grammar error needs fixing, if anyone understands it. The bit about "to the west of which" does not make sense. Equinox ◑ 12:32, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

This is one example where I think a picture is better than a thousand words. Both this page and Continental Divide seem to be trying to cram an entire Wikipedia article into a definition, and yet at the same time we're not linking to Wikipedia nor displaying a map. I've added a map, but I agree the text is confusing and perhaps that the text of both definitions could benefit by deletion of the later parts of the sentences rather than merely rewording them .... why would we need to tell readers about the Continental Divide on the definition page for the Laurentian Divide? I do appreciate the hard work of the author though .... this page was created by someone who's been creating and editing at a fairly good rate, which I would not be able to keep up. —Soap— 12:46, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I’ve tried my hand at cleaning up both this definition and the one at Continental Divide. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 19:32, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Rus

User:Daniel Poirot is engaging in unproductive edit warring, so I am following procedure and starting a discussion here. Input is needed from more editors, please see the history of the page. Also @Surjection as another admin engaged in this. Vininn126 (talk) 15:17, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

@Vininn126: What is counterproductive is keeping wrong or unsubstantiated data. Daniel Poirot (talk) 15:22, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

@Daniel Poirot Edit warring is the act of undoing an edit multiple times to force something through. Are you new to WikiMedia culture? Vininn126 (talk) 15:24, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

@Vininn126 Isn't it what you did? Why did you revert the change? Daniel Poirot (talk)

You undid Surjection first. Clearly at that stage a discussion should have been started. That is standard here. Vininn126 (talk) 15:33, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

@Daniel Poirot, is your geographical sense so bad that you do not know that Novgorod is nowhere close to Ukraine? — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 15:31, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

@Surjection Novgorod was never part of Rus if you didn't know that. Before the 13-14th century, it was never called Rus. This is a known matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novgorod_Republic#Novgorod_Republic — This unsigned comment was added by Daniel Poirot (talk • contribs) at 15:40, 28 September 2023 (UTC).

No, it's not a "known matter". Read about the history of Novgorod on literally any source and the founders of the city will be called the "Rus". That is to say, you have no idea what you are talking about. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 15:42, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

@Surjection That's a known matter to scholars. And this is somewhat reflected on Wikipedia. I understand what I'm talking about. The Novgorodians didn't call themselves Rus (at least before the 13-14th century). The historical record confirms my point. — This unsigned comment was added by Daniel Poirot (talk • contribs) at 15:52, 28 September 2023 (UTC).

It's not reflected anywhere, because you're making it up. I suspect you're wrong on that last part too, but I'd have to actually check the sources myself, and it's irrelevant because what they called themselves doesn't matter in the slightest, only what they're called in English now. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 15:53, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

@Surjection It doesn't matter whether Novgorod is part of the Russian Federation or not now since what was before and what is now are two different things and since the RF has nothing to do with Rus except for being its colony in some geographical area of its. Here is the article on Russian Wikipedia, https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Киевская_Русь . And here is the quote, "В узком смысле под Русью, Русской землёй понималась территория Киевской (за исключением древлянской и дреговичской земель), Чернигово-Северской (за исключением радимичских и вятичских земель) и Переяславской земель; именно в таком значении термин «Русь» вплоть до XIII века употребляется, например, в новгородских источниках." Daniel Poirot (talk) 16:04, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

There's no point for me to argue with you when you're not even reading what I'm writing. Rest assured, nobody here will let your edits on the page in question stand. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 16:38, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Surjection, what should I see in the section you refer to? I'm saying that Novgorod is not part of Rus. But you answer some other question. What will you do if others disagree with you? Daniel Poirot (talk) 16:53, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Novgorod is definitely Rus. It just wasn't Kievan Rus (at first, anyway). Why do you think the Kievan Rus are called the Kievan Rus and not just the "Rus"? Could it be because one needs to distinguish between the Kievan Rus and other Rus, say, the Rus that settled Novgorod? — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 16:57, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Surjection, it's fairly a nonsense. "Kyivan Rus" was never called "Kyivan Rus". It's an artificial term invented by Mikhail Pogodin to claim the existence of other Rus'es which never existed (like "Moscow Rus", "Purgasova Rus", "Ussuriyskaya Rus" etc.). The one who needed to "distinguish between the Kievan Rus and other Rus" is him. There was only one Rus (which is referred to as "Kyivan Rus'" today), and it was simply called "Rus" - without any adjective. No other Rus ever existed. Rus is a Ukrainian medieval state - that's how some modern scholars describe it. Could you name a primary source where such a term as "Kyivan Rus" is mentioned? Could you name a primary source where Novgorod is claimed to be part of Rus? Daniel Poirot (talk) 17:16, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Of course, according to you everyone else is wrong and only you are correct. I think we're done here - it's fairly obvious what you are here to do, and nobody is going to fall for it. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 17:20, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Surjection, it's not according to me. It's according to historians. If you disagree with them, argue with them. Daniel Poirot (talk) 17:32, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

The discussion is about the uses of the word Rus in English across time. Rus has clearly been used in English-language historiography to denote the Rus people and the various successor "Rus principalities", not just the united polity governed from Kyiv (see for example w:Category:Rus' principalities, w:List_of_tribes_and_states_in_Belarus,_Russia_and_Ukraine#Overview and w:Armies_of_the_Rus'_principalities#Military_of_Novgorod). The usage note correctly indicates that the term has become preferred to "(medieval) Russia" in order to avoid the implication that modern Russia is the exclusive inheritor of the Rus "heritage". Voltaigne (talk) 17:11, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Voltaigne, the discussion is not about that. The discussion is about why the article reads about the sharing of the heritage of Rus between the three peoples. From the historical perspective, the only main inheritor of Rus' is Ukraine. "Ethnic Rus" was always located on the territory of Ukraine - it's the so-called "Rus in the narrow sense". That's how Rus was understood by people before the 13th century - as Rus in the narrow sense. Everything outside can be viewed as colonies or territories controlled by Rus in some way, even ecclesiastically. "Rus in the broad sense" is territories of the spread of Christianity. Did you ever hear that somebody say that Great Britain and Africa share the heritage of Great Britain? Daniel Poirot (talk) 17:28, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I have certainly heard that various states and peoples on the territory formerly part of the Roman Empire share the heritage of Rome. In any event, the current discussion is not about this analogy or your Great Britain/Africa one. It is about the attested meanings of the word Rus in English. Voltaigne (talk) 17:37, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Voltaigne, don't invent the topic of the discussion because this discussion was initiated by me or because of me. How can the discussion of this line - "acknowledging that the Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian people share the heritage of Rus" - be about the attested meanings of the word? In your view, "peoples" are "attested meanings", aren't they? Are you serious? Daniel Poirot (talk) 17:42, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

WT:CFI indicates that if any meaning or sense has quotes, it should be listed. Therefor is "Rus" in that meaning is attested, it should be listed, obsolete or not (it clearly is not). You very clearly have no idea how a dictionary works nor any idea about our policy, let alone historical facts. Vininn126 (talk) 17:57, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Vininn126, first, do you understand that the discussion about the Usage notes section? Second, heritage is about history, not linguistics. A dictionary that misleads a reader is a bad dictionary. An entry that misleads a reader is a bad entry. What is not clear? You are writing a line about history in the dictionary. Such things exist, but you believe that such data are allowed to be wrong. I think it's you who don't understand how dictionaries work. By the way, dictionaries mark obsolete meanings with "(obsolete)", "(outdated)", etc. We currently are not speaking about the meanings, but ... as these meanings depends on historians' interpretation, they will be changed in new dictionaries without any mention of the misleading meanings invented by historians by their mistake in the past. The terminology in every dictionary has to be accurate. It's not about meanings, it's about inaccuracy. Daniel Poirot (talk) 18:11, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

This conversation is clearly a waste of time. Vininn126 (talk) 18:12, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Am I wrong, Vininn126? Don't manipulate, and the conversation will be going in good faith. Daniel Poirot (talk) 18:24, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

@Vininn126, by the way, none of you said since when it became a standard to put unsourced records on Wiktionary? Daniel Poirot (talk) 21:35, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Voltaigne, if "various states and peoples on the territory formerly part of the Roman Empire share the heritage of Rome", by this logic, the "Britains" share the heritage of Rome, and thus, the Americans share the heritage of Rome because the "Britains" share the heritage of Rome. Does the UK citizens learn their history starting from Rome? Daniel Poirot (talk) 17:48, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

@Voltaigne, heritage is something built, invented, created by a group of people in the past that is related to a group of people living in our times. I hardly imagine what Roman heritage non-Romans may have if they were not involved in producing it. And conversely, what Romans adopted from other peoples is not their heritage if they only "consumed" that. Daniel Poirot (talk) 21:35, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

@Surjection, @Vininn126 later this section will be removed as controversial. If you don't know the topic, you should not write anything. Also, I will put update the Talk page of this article. Daniel Poirot (talk) 16:21, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

@Daniel Poirot What the hell is this message supposed to mean? Who said anything about removing this conversation? Why are you assuming that? Do you have any idea what you're doing or do you just think you do? Vininn126 (talk) 16:25, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm not speaking of this conversation. @Surjection doesn't want to admit that that section in the respecting Wiktionary article has wrong data. I've updated the Discussion page of that article so someone else may make necessary changes. Currently, the article "Rus" only shows that some of its editors are incompetent. Daniel Poirot (talk) 16:44, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Ῥῶς

Related to the discussion above, can someone who knows Ancient Greek look into this? It was formerly defined as having two senses, "Rus" and "Russians", but was changed so both senses are now "Rus" (if the only sense is "Rus", that doesn't need two separate sense-lines...). I suspect the actual distinction may be between the original Norse vs the Slavic Rus...? - -sche (discuss) 18:50, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

The one is supposed to be the name of the country, the other - of the people. The etymology of the term "Rus" remains disputable. Not necessarily it has the Norse origin. Daniel Poirot (talk) 18:57, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

alone (contradictory)

I've noticed a use of 'alone' that's immediately contradicted by mentioning who one lives with (ergo, not alone). From the citations I provide below — which appear to give this "alone" a sense of "single" or "childless" — is this a new sense(s) that isn't covered by any of our (nor OED's, nor M-W's) existing definitions?

Single?

• 1936, Agar Herbert, What is America?, page 31:

  The other night, when I stayed at my friend’s house, we drank whisky after dinner. At bedtime my host looked nervously round him and said, “ We've got to clean this up.” Since he lives alone, with three servants, I wondered why.

• 1980, Mabel Louise Nassau, Old age poverty in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood study, page 22:

  Her husband died fifteen years ago, leaving nothing but burial insurance. Her son left her some savings. She has a sister and two nieces, but they can't help her, and she lives alone with two lodgers, whose payments cover the rent and leave a little over.

• 1995, Amelia Autin, Gideon's Bride, page 306:

  Just yesterday, it seemed, Gideon Lowell was a contented family man. Now he was alone, with three children to raise and a ranch to run.

Childless?

• 1869, Joseph Eastburn Winner (lyrics and music), “Little Brown Jug”:

  My wife and I live all alone,
  In a little log hut, we called our own.

• 1910, Lora Altine Woodbury Underhill, Descendants of Edward Small of New England, and the allied families, with tracings of English ancestry, page 817:

  Their married life, extending over a period of sixty-eight years, was ideal; after the children had left home, they lived alone for many years, declining either assistance or company.

• 2017, Maureen Jennings, Let Darkness Bury The Dead, page 92:

  “There’s nobody here by that name. My husband is Isaac Freedman. I’m Miriam. We live alone.”
  “Is the name familiar to you at all, Mrs. Freedman?”
  “No. Our only son was named Moishe, but he is long gone.”

–Vuccala (talk) 19:24, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

It certainly could be worth a sense, but to me these uses of "alone" don't feel particularly novel or contradictory with the established sense. "Alone" means "without others, unaccompanied by others, by themselves" in contexts like "they lived alone". I think in some of these it's more a matter of "live" rather than "alone" having a specialized meaning: "to live (with someone)" can refer to a particular type of relationship (e.g. that between sexual or romantic partners) rather than literally including anybody who lives under the same roof.--Urszag (talk) 23:20, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, your Usage Notes additions have cleared things up for me. –Vuccala (talk) 18:50, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Macmillan has more definitions of current application than we do, including one for couples living alone together. In the the usage "I feel so alone" alone means "lonely". The 1936 usage shows that the servants were not considered on a par with the master or formed a group opposed to his interests. One could stand alone in opposition to one's friends, say, when they were bullying someone. Our entry seems a little weak on the range of possible meanings, IMHO. DCDuring (talk) 23:46, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Citations:hot hold

Is this idiomatic? The meaning is relatively straightforward, but the grammar seems odd. - -sche (discuss) 20:40, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Grammatically, it reminds me of cut short, but with order inverted, like cold roll (steel). In context both of these seem fairly transparent, too. DCDuring (talk) 23:14, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

grind the corn

Not sure of the right tag for this new sexy entry. vulgar/slang/colloquial? P. Sovjunk (talk) 08:10, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

gramophone and record player

I merged the translation tables on these two entries under record player, given that the definition on gramophone claims to be a dated synonym of the former, although @Surjection rightly observed there might be a difference in the two terms, I assume that being gramophone would be used to refer to older variants of the device, e.g. the ones with the big horn, whereas record player would refer to the modern electrically amplified one. However I suspect this distinction is only present in non-English cognates of the word grammophone, which may have led to the confusion. In this case these cognates would be perhaps best kept as translations under record player, with a qualifier "ancient" or similar. Wanted to confirm with the English editing community. Catonif (talk) 12:25, 30 September 2023 (UTC)