Wiktionary talk:Reconstructed terms/Archive 2

Result of policy vote

Policy vote concluded 22 January 2006, confirming existing policy: terms in reconstructed languages do not meet CFI, may be entered in Appendicies. Robert Ullmann 12:03, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Requests for deletion/Others - kept

Kept. See archived discussion. 09:31, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Rollback

I've rolled back the most recent edit to this page. In that last section, it says the entries don't go in the main namespace (which that vote did conclude.) The added paragraph I think was intended to say that PIE is linked from entries in the main namespace (which is already obvious) but was mis-worded to say that those forms go in the main namespace (wrong.) --Connel MacKenzie 18:39, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Connel, you have utterly missed the difference between terms in reconstructed languages e.g. PIE, which is what the vote was about, and what goes in the appendix; and reconstructed terms in existing languages, which do *not* go in the appendix, such as an inferred Latin term. Which is what the added text was about.

Please go read it again, note that it does not say that PIE goes in the main namespace (which would be wrong), and put the text back. Robert Ullmann 08:37, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

I rephrased it a bit. --Connel MacKenzie 09:13, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Original discussion held here: User talk:Hippietrail#Links to reconstructed terms in non-proto languages.

Please read the very first sentence of this page:

Reconstructed terms are words, roots, and phrases which are not directly attested in their respective languages, but have been reconstructed by linguists through etymological evidence.

And now suddenly the distinction is made between the "terms of of reconstructed languages", and the "reconstructed terms of existing languages".

I repeat what I said on Hippietrail's talk page: reconstructed language = set of reconstructed terms. Set of terms reconstructed from the (Vulgar) Latin descendants by means of comparative method is a language, call it Proto-Romance or whatever.

By what criteria do reconstructed Proto-Romance terms merit inclusion in the main namespace, as opposed to other protolanguages? --Ivan Štambuk 14:20, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Well I agree with Ivan's comment on the HT's page that unattested terms can't pass RfV and therefore shouldn't appear in the main namespace. That being said the difference between Vulgar Latin and, say, Proto-Indo-European is that we do have writing samples of Vulgar Latin ("Proto-Romance" ≠ "Vulgar Latin"). Some terms can be attested and some can't. What do we do with a language with terms split across the two namespaces (NS:0 for the attested terms and Appendix: for the unattested/reconstructed terms)? Maybe that's ok, and Category:Late Latin will have NS:0 and Appendix: members.? --Bequw → ¢ • τ 22:08, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Encyclopædia Britannica says that "Vulgar Latin is also sometimes called Proto-Romance, although Proto-Romance most often refers to hypothetical reconstructions of the language ancestral to the modern Romance languages rather than to the Vulgar Latin", although the tables on this page make quite clear distinction between Proto-(Italo)-Western and Proto-Romance. There was a vote a while go that forbids adding all reconstructed terms into NS:0 (even with an asterisk, in which case they could collide with normal entries sucha as *nix), which is reasonable, becase reconstructed terms are usualy not definitely shaped, and could have several different forms depending on the author/notation.

And what category would reconstructed VL terms go into? Proto-Italo-Western Romance or Proto-Western Romance? Maybe puttting all of those into :Category:Proto-Romance language, and separating among individual dialects with title= parameter of {{proto}} and the appropriate subcategories of: :Category:Proto-Romance language?--Ivan Štambuk 17:28, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Etymology

(Not modifying main page, as it’s policy.)

Note that in etymologies, you can refer to earlier forms in the same or other languages can use {{proto}} to refer to these as usual; to categorize correctly when the earlier form is in a different (proto-)language, use the appropriate (Wiktionary-specific) language code (these are listed in Category:Appendix-only language templates), such as lang=gem-pro for Proto-Germanic. (This seems to be as of mid-2011.)

Cheers!

—Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 13:16, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Layout proposal

Entries in "bottom-level" proto-languages, and possibly in all reconstructed languages, should have their ===Etymology=== section replaced with a more general section such as ===Reconstruction notes===. Currently, Etymology sections are often used for discussing points of contention in how a reconstruction is established and how its descendants are derived, but this seems technically incorrect. This type of information, on the other hand, is vital for the ability for readers to assess the validity of any proposed reconstruction, and it needs an official place in a protolanguage entry. --Tropylium (talk) 04:46, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

I really don't see a problem with leaving this heading as ===Etymology===, even if it's not technically correct (although if you look at the etymology of etymology, you'll see that most of what we put in ===Etymology=== sections isn't technically "etymology"). --WikiTiki89 14:40, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

===Etymology=== sections contain much that is tangential to the etymology itself, but they do include an etymology somewhere in there. Reconstruction notes meanwhile do not guarantee any information about the origin of the entry at all. Also, conflating the two might encourage superfluously stuffing "Origin unknown" to bottom-level protolanguage entries.

Mainly though I am concerned here about preventing policy lawyering of the type "stop putting that information there, that's not what WT:EL says etymology sections are for". It has not been a problem so far, but as our Reconstruction namespace grows, at some point editing is going to need actual policies rather than simply editor consensus about good practices. --Tropylium (talk) 17:02, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

I feel like it would be more beneficial for these policies to clarify what is allowed in etymology sections, rather than to create a new name for the section to be used in special circumstances. Also, there are currently plenty of etymology sections that only list the tangential information (although this is usually because the actual etymological information is missing or unknown rather than non-existant). --WikiTiki89 17:53, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Alternative forms

Entries in protolanguages are commonly transcribed with numerous schemes. A few pages have included the "Alternative forms" header, but this seems to miss the point:

• Reconstructed terms are not attested. "Alternative forms" of reconstructed terms are not differences in spelling (= orthographic variation that is attestable), they are differences in transcription (= orthographic variation in mentions). If we would not create an English entry for ɪgˈzæmpəl and link it from example, or Romanized equivalents for arbitrary non-Latin-alphabet languages, there is no reason to create such alternate entries for reconstructions either.
• In the case of multiple forms, it will always have to be an editorial decision on Wiktionary's part whichever transcription scheme we support as the main entry.
• As long as we use the Reconstruction:Proto-Whatever/term notation, alternative reconstructions should probably be redirects rather than separate entries.

Additionally, there can be also disputes over the correct phonological reconstruction, which is a more substantial disagreement. To lump these together with mere transcription variants could muddle substantially the information about the shape of the proto-root.

We probably should have some systematic way for listing different transcriptions and reconstructions, and attribute these to various sources, but the regular alternative forms section layout does not really work for this. --Tropylium (talk) 08:55, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

We already do, except that it isn't documented. A fair number of entries have an "Alternative reconstructions" header, and the "Reconstruction" header is also used, but neither of these headers necessarily preclude "Alternative forms" or "Etymology". After all, if modern languages have different forms that are used interchangeably, then reconstructed languages will have them too, and in fact some of them are reconstructable. —CodeCat 12:54, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

The way I see it, there actually three types of "alternatives" (maybe there are more I haven't thought of): alternative transcriptions that represent the same reconstruction, alternative reconstructions that represent the same set of descendants, and alternative forms of the same word reconstructed to have existed in parallel or in different dialects and that would each have their own set of descendants. Each of these possibilities needs to be clearly distinguished. --WikiTiki89 14:37, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Good catch. Though the first two are not distinct in a clear-cut fashion. One reconstruction may posit *kara, phonemically /kara/; another might posit *qara, phonemically /kara/ but phonetically [qara]; a third might posit *qara, phonemically /qara/; a fourth might posit *Kara, with /K/ as the neutralization of /k/ and /q/. The first and the third are clearly alternate reconstructions from one another, but it is not clear if the second and fourth are transcription variants, or alternate reconstructions of their own. This will be the case whenever a dispute is over phonological analysis, rather than over "the reconstruction per se". And yet, "the reconstruction per se" isn't definable without reference to at least some phonological analyses…

The third possibility (two different possibilities 3a and 3b, actually) is there as well, though it does not strike me as "alternative forms" in a lexicographic sense. For 3a — reconstructable "variants" don't seem like anything other than synonymy to me. Of course closely morphologically related synonyms would probably benefit from being treated in a single entry.

As for 3b, reconstruction aims at crafting a single language variety, minimizing variation: if we can reconstruct two distinct forms in e.g. North Germanic and West Germanic, in a clear case we will either be able to further posit a single Proto-Germanic form behind both, or will have to leave the two of them without direct etymological relationship. (And often it will be unclear which is the case.) But yes: we may again often indeed want to treat them together. --Tropylium (talk) 17:27, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

More specifically, minimise dialectal variation. But alternative forms don't have to be dialectal, there can be free variation. Consider either in English for example. Slavic has several examples of this, such as *edinъ/*odinъ/*edьnъ and *pljuťe/*pluťe. —CodeCat 17:32, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

(e/c) By the first one, I meant something like (in Proto-Semitic) *ʾaḵaḏa vs. *ʾaḫaða, both of which represent /ʔaχaða/, in otherwords a purely orthographic difference. By the second one, I meant something like (also in Proto-Semitic) *tall- vs. *till-, where there is actual disagreement about which of the three vowel phonemes it was. Thus, I see the second one as potentially overlapping more with the third one than with the first one. Also, keep in mind for the third one that even if they are treated separately we would still have to decide whether they would link to each other from ===Alternative forms=== sections or from ===Synonyms=== sections, and I think there are many cases where the former makes more sense than the latter. --WikiTiki89 17:51, 22 April 2016 (UTC)