Talk:שמש

• Why is :Template:wlink (hishtamésh) defined here? Especially, why is it defined here without any link to the actual entry for it?
• Why aren't vowels and/or a romanization given for :Template:wlink (shamásh)?
• Why is :Template:wlink (shamásh) taken as belonging to the root, and :Template:wlink (shémesh) not?
• Why doesn't :Template:wlink (sh-m-sh) mention the word :Template:wlink (shimúsh), which is formed from it?
• Why aren't archaic senses labeled as such?
• More generally, what's supposed to be the benefit of this hierarchical organization?

—Ruakh_TALK 20:14, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

• Why is :Template:wlink (hishtamésh) defined here? I wrote this as a page for two things spelled the same way: the word for 'sun' and a triliteral root. The latter includes השתמש (inter alia).

• Especially, why is it defined here without any link to the actual entry for it? Mistake. I'm leaving it for now so as not to change the entry too much while it's under discussion.

• Why aren't vowels and/or a romanization given for :Template:wlink (shamásh)? Mistake. I'm leaving it for now so as not to change the entry too much while it's under discussion.

• Why is :Template:wlink (shamásh) taken as belonging to the root, and :Template:wlink (shémesh) not? Well, shamash is of the same form as ganav, sapar, davar (דור), etc. -- it's clearly from the root שמש. If you know that shemesh is, too, then by all means put it there. I, for one, do not know that.

• Why doesn't :Template:wlink (sh-m-sh) mention the word :Template:wlink (shimúsh), which is formed from it? It should. I neglected to add it. It should be under the Piel section, of course.

• Why aren't archaic senses labeled as such? I don't know of any archaic senses listed. If you mean the religious senses of shamash, noun, then they are in current use in a small community: orthodox Jews. They should have a {{Judaism}} tag, which I'll add after I finish this response. (I actually do know of an archaic sense which is not listed, which I'll also add and tag.)

• More generally, what's supposed to be the benefit of this hierarchical organization? It's an entry for the root. I think you yourself, Ruakh, recommended having entries for roots (though with hyphens or dashes in the entry title), so I'm not sure why you're asking this. But someone wanting to know what לכששמשתני means would likely look here, not at that page, I assume.

—msh210℠ 22:27, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

By no means do I object to having an entry for the root; and while I prefer using hyphenated entry names for roots, by no means do I feel strongly about this. (Obviously consistency is important, but as long as we have a standard one way or the other, that's not a problem.) My objection is to the root entry containing sub-entries for many different words that should all have their own entries. Some dictionaries do structure things something like this; for example, the OED defines "to make a woman of" at its entry for woman. (Even the OED, however, has a separate entry for womandom.) That's not how this dictionary is structured, however, and I don't think it will work here. What, should use link here instead of to השתמש? Also, MediaWiki only allows six heading levels. (More broadly — HTML only allows six heading levels.) The current version of this entry uses five; you'd like to add :Template:wlink (shimúsh) under :Template:wlink (shimésh), which would make it six; this would prevent us from having usage notes, pronunciations, etymologies, declensions, or derived terms. —Ruakh_TALK 23:51, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I guess I really hadn't thought it through: you're right (largely). More precisely, I have thought this over, and concluded that you're right if you mean the folllowing.  :-)  השתמש should have its own entry as an infinitive. So should other senses of השתמש (as a past-tense and as a command) and נשתמש (as a future tense) and so on; these would be conjugated forms of the infinitive, and the definition would be "future tense masculine plural third-person [or whatever order you write those modifiers in] of infinitive השתמש". The entry for the infinitive in each binyan/construction would have definition "to make use" and somewhere (the etymology section?) would list the root and the binyan. Since the root has no definition on its own (compare the hif'il of שבר (which means "sell food") with all the other binyanim of that root, for example), there shouldn't be a definition listed for the root, just a list of binyanim. Thus, approximately:

Hebrew

Root

שמש

• פעל (piel) construction: [[#Piel construction]] (serve)
• התפעל (hitpael) construction: [[השתמש]] (make use of)

Verb

שמש [this line will be vowelized shamesh, the infinitive; I can't do it now], piel construction

1. whatever

Conjugation [4th level heading]

Chart, with every form a link to the entry page

Note that there are verbs spelled שמש that I'm not listing here; these include the past-tense third-person singular masculine of the piel and the command singular masculine of the piel. These will be listed in the conjugation chart, so we don't need a sense for them on the same page (though other things in the chart, which will have separate pages, do need senses, as I mentioned above). For the sake of explanation of my intent, I'll assume shemash is a word:

Verb

שמש [this line will be vowelized shemash], piel construction

1. that he moved (or whatever)

Noun

שמש [this line will be vowelized shamash]

1. servant
2. etc.

Noun

שמש [this line will be vowelized shemesh]

1. sun

Is this what you were thinking?—msh210℠ 21:38, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

That was the rough idea, except it's the tradition for Hebrew dictionaries to index verbs by their masculine third-person singular past-tense (suffix conjugation) forms (like halakh); therefore, those are the forms that should have full definitions, and the gerunds (infinitive constructs, like lekhet), to-infinitives (like lalekhet), infinitives absolute (like halokh), and all other forms should be defined as "blah-blah-blah form of blah-blah". (Incidentally, this tradition is how the binyanim got their names; note that they're called pa'al, nif'al, pi'el, pu'al, hif'il, huf'al, and hitpa'el, not p'al, hipa'el, pa'el, [unnamed], haf'il, [unnamed], and hitpa'el. Well, hitpa'el would be the same either way, but you get the idea.)

Also, while it was my original thought that roots would appear at hyphen-less entry titles, like שמש, Shai pointed out that roots are usually written either like ש-מ-ש or like שמ״ש, and since gershayim have the complication of looking like quotation marks, we decided to go with ש-מ-ש. I'm very much O.K. with re-evaluating that decision and possibly changing it, but I really think that should be discussed at Wiktionary talk:About Hebrew.

Finally, your method has the complication that while verbs belong to exactly one of the seven binyanim (usually, anyway; we can save for another day our discussions of nigash and any other such straddlers), it's not always so trivial to describe what construction a noun belongs to. I notice that you sidestep this above by simply not mentioning nouns in the root entry, but I don't really think that's a solution.

—Ruakh_TALK 23:01, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Fine (to all those points). Re your last point: Where I listed the various binyanim under the root's entry, add a line for shamash (noun), et al., perhaps.—msh210℠ 07:55, 16 September 2007 (UTC)