Wiktionary:Tea room/2019/February

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← January 2019 · February 2019 · March 2019 → · (current)

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legitimize

The current definition of legitimize is "to make legitimate". I'm wondering about appropriate subjects for this verb. If a street gang attempts to transition into legal business, is it proper to say that it is legitimizing itself? Is legitimize about whether the activities of the subject are actually legitimate, or only about them being recognized as legitimate? In other words, is it up to a politician to legitimize the gang through public recognition? I tend to think of legitimize as referring to expanding the boundaries of social norms, as recognizing and accepting as legitimate what was formerly regarded as illegitimate, with no change in the subject itself. Daask (talk) 10:46, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

I think that legitimize refers to both a process and an achievement. An illlegitimate entity or an entity of uncertain legitimacy can be both the subject and the object of legitimize. I don't think that an entity that is legitimate can legitimize itself or be legitimized by another. The substance of the legitimacy achieved can include lots of things. The IRA could be said to have been a legitimate reflection of the goals of a population before it became a legitimate political party. DCDuring (talk) 13:21, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

One main use of the verb is for the recognition by the natural father of an illegitimate child, that is, one born out of wedlock. Then, I think, it can mean something like to confer legitimacy in the sense of being recognized and respected, thereby regularizing something that was irregular. Like for example when a squatter receives a deed of the squatted land, legitimizing his occupation. Legitimizing oneself would seem a bit difficult, but one can legitimize one’s business by getting all necessary permits and paying the requisite fees. Anyone can attempt to legitimize Hamas, but to pull this of will be a major accomplishment of international diplomacy.  --Lambiam 22:22, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

会 pronuciation "ēre"

In the entry for the traditional form of 会, a pronunciation is given for Min Nan as "ēre". In the expanded form, you see POJ ēre and Tai-lo erē. Are these all elaborate typos for "ēr" /ɤ²²/?

MGorrone (talk) 16:31, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

@MGorrone: No. It's meant to be something like /əe/, only used in the "Old Anxi" accent spoken in certain areas of New Taipei, such as Sanxia, as well as the "Old Nan'an" accent spoken in parts of Changhua and Yunlin. See this for details on these uncommon vowels/rimes. — justin(r)leung _{{ (t...) | c=› }} 17:32, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

@Justinrleung: Would that be stressed on the er or on the e? /ǝe̯/ or /ǝ̯e/? And what countour? Is it the 22 that MoE 台湾闽南语常用词辞典 associates to the tone marked by a macron? MGorrone (talk) 21:49, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

student, sense 2

Why do we need the sub-senses? They're essentially 2: someone who studies at an institution, 2.1: someone who studies at university, 2.2: someone who studies anywhere else. If it's about separating translation tables, sense 2.2 already lumps elementary and high school together, plus students of any other kind of institution. A search of "vocational student" turns up entries in several languages. We might as well have every level of education under one sense and in one table with qualifiers, rather than point people to schoolchild (and fail to point them to the hub high school student). Ultimateria (talk) 18:31, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

See Wiktionary:Tea room/2018/August#student. Some dialects only call a university-level studier a "student", and don't call a schoolchild a "student" (but rather a "pupil", etc), which is why the first subsense ("university enrollee") is there. I can't recall why the second subsense ("a schoolchild") was not folded into the super-sense (that encompasses both university- and school- enrollees). I seem to recall that there was some reason, but if not, subsense 2 (but not IMO subsense 1) could be folded up. - -sche (discuss) 19:35, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Someone can be a student of Sumerian while not studying at any kind of institution; for example, a retired professor who now finally has the time to write their magnum opus on the unrealised-volitive mood in Sumerian in the quiet of their study in the attic. Someone else can be enrolled at a prep school and thus be registered there as a student, while actually spending all their time on enjoying drinking beer and anything else that does not require one to take notes or open a textbook. These are truly different senses.  --Lambiam 22:38, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes, but this thread is about the subsenses of sense 2, I think. - -sche (discuss) 23:08, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Oops, my bad. Then the only reason I can think of are the in particular labels. However, I question that these are relevant. The term student is also used rather freely in the UK for sense 2.1, like here: “Third of students at many British boarding schools come from overseas”.  --Lambiam 03:35, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Judging from a quick search for "kindergarten students" site:.gov.uk, British English can also refer to schoolchildren / primary-/secondary-school pupils as "students"... still, the term is sometimes used 'restrictively' in sense 2.1, "university enrollee / studier", so I left that sense for now, for the reasons mentioned above and in the previous discussion. But I can't think of any time that "student" refers exclusively to a schoolchild and not a university student, so I merged that subsense into the main sense... - -sche (discuss) 05:40, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

turnout

The turnout of voters in an election isn't mentioned; it would come under sense 1, I think. DonnanZ (talk) 21:55, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Add some usex like “Bad weather has been often blamed for low voter turnout” [1]? (I would have written, “has often been blamed”.)  --Lambiam

Yeah, I have a translation for that, but I'm not sure what to do with it yet. DonnanZ (talk) 23:23, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Sense 1 was awkwardly worded; I tried to improve it, and added mention that it applies especially to elections. (But not just elections; a meeting can have good turnout, too.) If some translations are specific to election turnout, you could provide them with {{qualifier}}s (like some of the age-specific translations of brother). - -sche (discuss) 04:58, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes, that's a definite improvement and reads much better; and yes, I used a qualifier for the translation. Cheers. DonnanZ (talk) 09:59, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

"there's something serious wrong"

Are these mistakes for seriously, or is serious serious used as an adverb? Per utramque cavernam 16:54, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

(Some? Many?) adjectives can be pressed into service as adverbs in a pinch (awful, powerful,...); I don't know if we have any clear way of deciding when it's lexical (compare pressing adjectives into service as nouns: rich, deaf, Irish,...). However, the results I see for google books:"something serious wrong" are simply using the adjective "serious" to modify "something", in a way that's neither an error nor an adverb: they're saying that something serious (i.e. some serious, important/weighty thing) is wrong. - -sche (discuss) 17:18, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

how

Definition of adverb "how" from Oxford Dictionaries [2]:

"In what way or manner; by what means."

Examples: "he did not know how he ought to behave", "he showed me how to adjust the focus"

Definition of conjunction "how" from M-W [3]:

"the way or manner in which"

Example: "asked how they could help"

Our definition of conjunction "how":

"In which way; in such way"

Example: "I remember how to solve this puzzle"

Is there any logical basis on which "how" is classified as an adverb in the first two examples and a conjunction in the second two? Mihia (talk) 22:59, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Maybe Oxford is taking the position that what others call a subordinate clause is "really" a complement of the adverb how or that the clause/complement is an "adverbial clause". DCDuring (talk) 07:36, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Template problem showing components of 茭白

On the 茭白 page the box showing the division into words has markup in the column header for 茭. There are double square brackets around w:Zizania aquatica and w:Oenanthe javanica. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 23:21, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

I suppose recent changes to the definition section of 茭 (Chinese etymology 1 definitions 2 and 4) broke the expansion in the component character boxes. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 23:38, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Shāntián_Tàiláng https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Module:zh/data/glosses&diff=51268312&oldid=51167474

Thanks for tracking that down. I don't understand how that part of Wiktionary works. Can somebody revert the change if it ought to be reverted? Vox Sciurorum (talk) 10:51, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Aves

Is sense 2 a different sense/group, or is it just that the grouping "birds" is sometimes considered its own thing, and sometimes considered a subclass of Reptilia, in which case we only need one sense and no subsenses AFAICT? - -sche (discuss) 23:33, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

There are two approaches to taxonomy, the old-school Linnaean form of taxonomy, and the new-fangled cladistics. In general, taxa in the two approaches may not be comparable. For example, in the Linnaean system, the class Reptilia (the reptiles) does not include birds, while it does cladistically. However, as it is, the respective taxa in the two approaches that cover the birds are coextensive in the sense that they cover the same set of species. Moreover, the name of the Linnaean taxon has been retained for the clade. That is not a coincidence, of course, but it is also not a matter of course. So the term Aves is a term, shared between two taxonomic schools, for two conceptually different entities that happen to be coextensive.  --Lambiam 04:13, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

It so happens that the accepted membership in Aves is the same whether it is considered a subclass of Reptilia or a class more directly in Vertebrata, at least if one restricts oneself to extant species. We are also fortunate that there is an English vernacular name (birds) that corresponds to the taxon (Aves). Often there is no such name, in which case the definition of a genus might something lame like "certain molluscs" (molluscs constituting a phylum, several ranks above genus, in which case "certain' serves as a marker of a definition that could stand improvement. It is virtually impossible to provide definitions of taxa that are both useful to normal humans and complete, whether providing an intensional (hypernym and differentia) or an extensional (member taxa). At the species level one can provide useful ostensive definitions using pictures, at least sometimes for macro fauna and flora. Sometimes all one can usefully say is where on Earth members of the taxon can be found or why they might be of importance or interest. Sometimes it is just the taxonomic name itself that is of some interest (eg Han solo, Ba humbugi). But there are taxa that do not have well-known ranges; have no known use to mankind, no vernacular name, and uninteresting taxonomic names; have uncertain placement in the tree of life and uncertain membership, and are not photogenic.

IOW, definitions of taxa are challenging and cannot readily be reduced to formulas, much like definitions of ordinary words. DCDuring (talk) 07:07, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I took the liberty of adding some explanatory verbiage. The formatting was too close to the way we do subsenses everywhere else to avoid the implication that these were two separate taxa rather than separate ways of classifying the same one.

The table of hypernyms has problems with the hierarchy of the ranks, but I have yet to see a classification system with ranks that can deal with the way a whole huge hierarchy can arise from within the lower levels of another hierarchy: cladistically speaking, birds are dinosaurs, and tetrapods (including reptiles, birds and us) are lobe-finned fish. It does seem particularly strange, though, to have Aves as a class within the class Reptilia. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:24, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I'll try to remember to put something like your explanatory wording in similar cases. I have settled on using one comprehensive hierarchy, which has been accepted by a few of the comprehensive taxonomic databases (ITIS, WoRMS, IRMNG), as a standard or default (See {{R:Ruggiero}}) for all taxa except plants (APG system instead) and have downplayed unranked clades (except for plants) and older terms like division which are no longer fashionable. I simply accept that we will have taxonomic definitions whose defects are much more obvious, though not necessarily any worse, than those of normal words. The purpose of the reference sections is to aid users in finding more current and, possibly, more definitive sources for definitions. The reference databases may facilitate updating entries as well. DCDuring (talk) 17:51, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

The Hypernyms section for the class placement of Aves is an example of how hard it is to maintain a "complete" cladistic hierarchy. The terms used often have usage limited to a small number of taxonomists and a short useful life. They may be as worthy as any to be definienda but it is hard to justify their use in definiens. DCDuring (talk) 18:03, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! - -sche (discuss) 05:35, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

y avoir anguille sous roche

I don't think the cited English idiom with "similar syntax" in this entry it is particularly relevant or insightful. Instead it seems to me to imply that the French idiom might also have an offensive meaning/contain a slur. There is already limited value in including an English idiom in an entry to a French idiom which has no etymological connection to the English.

While I understand and believe that dictionaries must contain racial slurs as well as every other word in usage, it does not seem in this case that the slur adds any particular information to this entry, and instead is an unpleasant surprise for anyone who wants to understand the unrelated French idiom.

Agreed; removed. There are plenty of syntactically similar phrases, e.g. skeleton in the closet. Equinox ◑ 04:44, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Another sense for "wild"?

In the "making of" material for the "Runaway Jury" DVD, the set designers talk about "wild" elements of the scenery - i.e. elements that can be moved aside or away to allow or facilitate camera access. This sense is not covered in the entry for "wild". I am reluctant to add this sense to the page for "wild" because I don't know how widespread the term is. But someone else might have a better take on whether this would be a good thing to add. 92.232.224.153 22:31, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

"deep enough punk in turpitude"

1941, The Spectator - Volumes 166-167, page 228:

The general rule, I suppose, is that if the assassinee is deep enough punk in turpitude the assassin may secure an honourable place in history.

What does this mean? Is it one of our existing sense of punk? DTLHS (talk) 23:36, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Typo for sunk? Per utramque cavernam 23:39, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes, thanks... interestingly Google Books gives results for both "enough punk in turpitude" and "enough sunk in turpitude" for the same passage in the same book. DTLHS (talk) 23:40, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I've noticed that too. There seems to have been a problem at printing. Per utramque cavernam 23:47, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

truck

Two noun senses of truck (9 and 10) share the same quote:

10. (UK, rail transport) A flatbed railway car.

• 1913, D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, chapter 15

Far away he could hear the sharp clinking of the trucks on the railway.

11. A pivoting frame, one attached to the bottom of the bed of a railway car at each end, that rests on the axle and which swivels to allow the axle (at each end of which is a solid wheel) to turn with curves in the track. The axle on many types of railway car is not attached to the truck and relies on gravity to remain within the truck's brackets (on the truck's base) that hold the axle in place

• 1913, D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

Far away he could hear the sharp clinking of the trucks on the railway. No, it was not they that were far away. They were there in their places. But where was he himself?

Which sense does it belong with? At the very least, if it's ambiguous, it should be removed from under one sense, or possibly just removed to the Citations page. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 03:08, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

D.H. Lawrence probably didn't know much about railway terminology. Sense 10 is a flat wagon, and 11 a bogie. He probably meant wagons as a general term, they were normally four-wheel wagons without bogies in his day. I suggest removing the quote from what is now sense 10 (pivoting frame) at least. DonnanZ (talk) 10:51, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Why is sense 10 (former sense 11) so wordy (~80 words)? DCDuring (talk) 15:43, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

I simply deleted the sentence after the definition, which still seems too long. Also, def. 3 (nautical) is too long. DCDuring (talk) 15:46, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm sure Lawrence had a normal grasp of English English, in which a "truck" is what the Americans call a "wagon". It looks as though these definitions are being written in American, in which quite possibly "truck" has a technical meaning relating to parts of a (Am) wagon. I don't know exactly what the scope of (Am?) "flatbed railway car" is, but it sounds too specific for Lawrence's reference to ordinary (Br) "trucks" / (Am) "wagons". Imaginatorium (talk) 16:49, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

A "flatbed railway car" is called a flatcar in the US. I agree with Imaginatorium that such a sense is unlikely to be what Lawrence intended. However Americans call goods wagons freight cars, though goods wagon seems to specifically refer to what American call box cars. DCDuring (talk) 18:44, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

To be clear I've never heard or read of railroad freight-carrying vehicles being called wagons in the US. Perhaps in Canada. In the US they are (railroad) cars, flatcars, box cars, hopper cars, tank cars, refrigerator cars, cattle cars, trailer cars, container cars, etc. They almost always ride on trucks (def 11 above). DCDuring (talk) 18:55, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Well, first of all, any claim I make about American, is unreliable; I remember my childhood trainset was called "Transcontinental" (Triang), and the things for carrying goods were called (TTBOMR) "wagons", while we called normal (local, England) ones "trucks". (Lorries were never called "trucks" in those days...) I'm not clear quite what "flatbed" means: I think that generally all UK goods carrying vehicles were much shorter than corresponding NAm ones (going partly on the trainsets), with two fixed axles, no bogies. I am 95%+ certain that Lawrence was simply referring to the noise of a passing goods train, probably carrying coal in open trucks, in the Nottingham coalfields. Except that I don't understand the "flatbed", this more or less matches meaning 10.

Meaning 11 on the other hand is suspect (engineering-wise). If you made a vehicle with one axle at each end, and let the axles pivot freely, the vehicle would immediately crash, because there is nothing to keep the axle perpendicular to the line of the tracks. This definition can only be a mangled attempt to describe a bogie, with at least two axles under the pivoting frame. Imaginatorium (talk) 15:47, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree with you about the bogey-truck definition.

In the US a flatbed is usually a truck ("lorry") or a semi-trailer. They transport logs, building materials, and heavy equipment of all kinds. Nowadays it often refers to the vehicles also called no-tows, roll-backs, or tilt-beds that transport disabled automobiles and vehicles too precious to move on their own over normal roads. In the rail context a flatbed is a flatcar, flatbed car, or flatbed railroad car.

Two-axle railroad cars were not at all common in the US as far back as the late 19th century, though there were some for special applications. I always took great pride that North American railroad locomotives and cars (and over-the-road trucks) were so massive compared to those in most other countries. It must mostly be attributable to the longer distances the average carload had to travel, eg, fruit from California to the East Coast cities. DCDuring (talk) 17:43, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and removed the quote from the "bogie" sense. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 03:07, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

bogey vs. bogie

Someone got bogey (sense 4) confused with sense 4 at bogie (now elevated to sense 1 as the main sense). The correct spelling is bogie. I have added references. DonnanZ (talk) 11:35, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

The translations in particular should be moved to bogie. DonnanZ (talk) 13:07, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

I fixed it myself. DonnanZ (talk) 16:36, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

novator

1. 1968, E. H. Cookridge, The Third Man: The Truth about 'Kim' Philby, Double Agent, page 2:

   A novator is the 'planner' who devises the operational plans in the 'target' country.

2. 1978, Rolfs Ekmanis, Latvian literature under the Soviets, 1940-1975, page 154:

   A novator not only aims at setting a good example, but also at educating up to his level the members of his family or his friends.

3. 1999, Glenn Horowitz, Véra's butterflies: first editions by Vladimir Nabokov inscribed to his wife:

   In modern Russian literature I occupy the particular position of a novator, of a writer whose work seems to stand totally apart from that of his contemporaries.

4. 2014, Ian S. MacNiven, "Literchoor Is My Beat": A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions:

   […] but, as he cautioned J, he was a “novator” in Russian literature whose works were banned in his homeland, read only by a handful of intellectual Russian expatriates.

5. 2017, Alexander M. Sidorkin, Reforms and Innovation in Education: Implications for the Quality of Human Capital:

   Teachers Gazette was instrumental in promoting national exposure for so-called novators (Novatory), a group of teachers who were especially successful in (re)inventing and applying allegedly innovative tools for class instruction.

There seem to be several senses here. How should this be defined in English? There are enough non-italicized uses that it seems to deserve an entry. (The current entry which is from Webster 1913 probably needs another etymology). DTLHS (talk) 20:36, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Do the three cites that are not mentions support any one specific meaning? The cites above don't give enough context to tell. DCDuring (talk) 21:49, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Can’t we just define it as a transliteration of Russian новатор (novator), meaning “innovator”? The Horowitz quote is actually taken from a letter by the hand of Nabokov written in January 1941, less than a year after he had arrived in the United States.  --Lambiam 09:10, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

That's the etymology, but "innovator" doesn't fit the 1968 cite, so we'd be lacking one. It would be a novation for us to allow non-gloss definitions like Used to translate Russian новатор (novator) when the translator can't find a better term. DCDuring (talk) 09:33, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

That one may have a different etymology: “NOVATOR — KGB term, an acronym of the Russian words novye, for new, and torit, to flatten. It referred to a newly recruited agent abroad: a novalor [sic] was newly flattened and owned by the KGB.”[4]. (The term acronym should have been blend or portmanteau, новые is actually a plural, and I don’t know what Russian word is being transliterated as torit.) That does not perfectly fit the 1968 cite either, but perhaps everyone thought it wiser not to tell Philby the unflattering ἔτυμον of his job title. I did not immediately find independent confirmation of this etymology and meaning.  --Lambiam 00:14, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

The verb referred to is presumably торить (toritʹ) “(literary) to tread, to clear (a path or road) (by frequent walking or traveling)”.  --Lambiam 14:02, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

The Russian term нова́тор (novátor, “innovator”) is derived from the Latin novātor (“innovator”) (currently missing gloss}}, defined e.g. in a Latin-French dictionary as "celui qui renouvelle" - "the one who innovates". I can't confirm the KGB sense. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:29, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

해초 and 海草

Can a Korean-language editor check these entries? I just found a mistake in the Chinese. It was previously defined as "seaweed" (海帶) which is incorrect, it is actually "seagrass". However, the Korean entry still says "seaweed". Presumably the Korean should mean the same as the Chinese and Japanese, but I thought I would check with someone who speaks the language well before changing anything. ---> Tooironic (talk) 07:25, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

The entry was created by Tbot, and has never been carefully edited by a Korean speaker. w:ko:해초 unambiguously refers to seagrass, so I have changed it accordingly. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 15:32, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Many thanks! ---> Tooironic (talk) 02:53, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

mocha: "strong Arabian coffee"

Does the definition "strong Arabian coffee" refer to the Mocha coffee bean or something else? ---> Tooironic (talk) 12:37, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

In modern uses is short for caffè mocha (Wikipedia: Caffè mocha), seen used e.g. here: [5], [6], [7]. So it refers to the beverage, which is made with any bean suitable for making espresso (usually not Mocha beans), but has some chocolate flavouring added to approximate the taste of Mocha coffee. In older uses it does refer to coffee made (or claimed to have been made) from Mocha beans, but then I expect the word to be capitalized, just like Java in the sense of a coffee beverage.  --Lambiam 14:27, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes, that modern use is not the problem; it corresponds to sense #1 "coffee drink with chocolate syrup added", right? But what about sense #4 "strong Arabian coffee"? There seems no mention of it on the Wikipedia page. ---> Tooironic (talk) 02:57, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

I wondered about this back when I edited the entry in December. The sense is in other dictionaries. Dictionary.com says only that such coffee is from Arabia, but Merriam-Webster says it's from "small green or yellowish beans", which suggests Mocha beans are indeed meant. I poked around for citations, by no means exhaustively, and couldn't find any that were clearly this sense with this capitalization, but the existence of the modern sense and of capitalized Mocha [coffee] made it hard to search, and the sense is plausible. Both dictionaries, incidentally, also have a leather sense we lack. - -sche (discuss) 03:28, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Mocha, Yemen, is an Arabian city, so Mocha coffee can reasonably be called “Arabian coffee”. Conversely, Yemen is the only country on the Arabian peninsula that is a significant exporter of coffee (or used to be before the Saudi/US war), which was naturally shipped from the port that was closest to the coffee-growing regions, Mocha.  --Lambiam 06:43, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Hmm, so I guess I will have to translate it literally as "Arabian coffee", since the Chinese word for "mocha" pretty much only refers to the first senses AFAIK. Thanks. ---> Tooironic (talk) 11:45, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

ibrik

The pronunciation is uncertain. This had the stress mark after the /b/, which certainly isn't valid. Collins [8] has the stress on the first syllable but Forvo's Turkish pronunciation [9] has it on the second. For now, I have moved the stress mark to match Collins' pronunciation. Can anyone confirm which pronunciation(s) we should give? — 85.211.41.59 07:47, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

I assume the enquiry is about the English pronunciation, which does not necessarily have the same stress pattern as the Turkish pronunciation. I bet that English speakers more or less randomly select where to put the stress, with a predilection of Britishers for the first syllable (like for borrowed words such as valet and buffet), while Americans, recognizing the foreignness of the word, may be open to putting the stress on the last syllable.  --Lambiam 22:48, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

heap big

I don't see any mention of the American English "heap big", meaning "very big" but you're trying to sound like an Indian in an old Western. Does it deserve a new page? A mention on heap? Vox Sciurorum (talk) 10:56, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Never heard of it. Examples? DTLHS (talk) 22:49, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

See https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-317323.html for example. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 12:49, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Reminds me of some "Red Indian" song in my sister's beginner piano book, which had a line something like "we eat um pig and big chow chow". It isn't necessarily the job of an English dictionary to cover deliberate brokenness that is explicitly supposed to suggest "bad English" — especially when that's grammatical rather than lexical. Equinox ◑ 23:07, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

This is a well-known expression supposedly stereotypically said by "Red Indians" back in a time before today's political correctness. It definitely deserves an entry, probably at "heap", since "heap" can potentially modify other words as well as "big". Mihia (talk) 18:26, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Hmm. I'm inclined towards Equinox's view that deliberately (or dialectally) broken grammar is generally not something to cover, and there's some precedent in that direction—we had a few entries that gave hate (et al) as a dialectal third-person singular and hates (et al) as a dialectal first-person singular ("I hates grammar, I hates it real bad"), and we decided to not have those. Of course, those phenomena apply to every verb in the dialects that have them, whereas "heap" is one of only a few words used this way (right?? or no??), so there's a stronger case for including it on the same basis as, say, real#Adverb. How would it be labelled? "(fictionalized American Indian speech)"? - -sche (discuss) 08:01, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

non-parental Papa, Mama, Daddy

Sometimes if someone is e.g. shaking dice hoping for a money-winning roll they might say "come on, Daddy needs a new car" or "Mama needs a new car", or they might guide something they want towards them by saying "come to Papa" ... even if they are not parents. Our entries don't seem to cover this kind of use at all, and I'm not sure how to word it. (It seems, to me at least, more idiomatic than the fictive kin of referring to a fellow connected by a common cause as a "brother", which we do have a separate sense for.) Any ideas? "An affectionate or jocular term for oneself."? And should it be at Mama, etc, or mama? - -sche (discuss) 17:06, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

In a sense it's the "informal term of address for a man" that we already have: perhaps sth for a usage note? Equinox ◑ 22:21, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

I suppose that sense could cover this usage, though it's only present at [[daddy]] at the moment and is labelled "dated". Can "mama" and "papa" also be used that way, of a third person? Could e.g. a waitress say to a single person, without assuming she was a parent, "what'll mama have tonight?"? If not, or if it's uncommon, then consistency between entries and Lambiam's phrase below may suggest that a first-person sense is still appropriate. (Probably at lowercase.) In any event, a sense to cover this is entirely missing from "mama" and "papa" right now. - -sche (discuss) 04:54, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

The quintessential use of the self-reference is found in the phrase “Ooh, daddy like.”  --Lambiam 22:57, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

if pigs had wings

Is the definition right? Compare the rather different definition of the longer phrase. - -sche (discuss) 23:02, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

No, it's not. If it began with when, it could, but that would still seem like a clumsy expression to me. Sometimes I wonder about our contributors. DCDuring (talk) 12:56, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

brood countability

We have a sense: "(uncountable) The young of any egg-laying creature, especially if produced at the same time." Is that really uncountable? The creature "laid some brood", or "laid brood"? Equinox ◑ 01:35, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Searching Books for '"much brood" -honey -bee -honeycomb' found ants, fish, lac-producing insects. Without preview the hit list included books with partridge, and more fish. I would delete any, possibly replacing it with certain, though I am actually uncertain about that. DCDuring (talk) 03:39, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) In this case, brood≠eggs, so "laid" isn't used. What does come to mind is "a hen and her brood". It's uncountable when referring to the chicks, but it seems like a hen could have multiple broods over her lifetime. I would compare the behavior of "brood" here to collection terms like crowd, herd, etc. (perhaps also batch?).Chuck Entz (talk) 03:47, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I will leave it to you biologists, but particularly please note that the en-noun template doesn't show uncountability (would require en-noun|-) yet some senses are uncountable. (Hey, imagine if the computer could tell you when data wasn't consistent! LOL just kidding, NoSQL...) Equinox ◑ 04:05, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm more nearly a grammarian than a biologist. Much is the determiner that best indicates uncountability, many, a, and pluralization being the indicators for countability. DCDuring (talk) 04:12, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

By the way, one of the examples for the other uncountable sense, sense 4, "The children in one family", is "Conte had arrived a week early despite spending his summer with Italy at the Euros. Exhausted, he went home during the international break to see his family and brood." I wonder whether the ambiguity about whether "brood" is a noun or verb is some intentional clever wordplay (wouldn't "family" include "brood" anyway?), but let's assume that it is a noun, then is there any reason to believe it is uncountable? Mihia (talk) 20:32, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Context could give hints. Does Conte have to much or too little brood? Is this just one of Conte's broods? DCDuring (talk) 21:50, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

The written context is there to click on, and I see nothing in it to dispel my doubt that this is uncountable. I have deleted this example. If anyone is sure that it is an example of an uncountable noun then please reinstate it, but I would be interested to know why. Mihia (talk) 01:48, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Here is a cite referring to Westmorland’s “second brood”. I think it is fine then to state that Westmorland, just like some birds, had several broods – not in a season, but in his lifetime. And this scientific book talks about “a set of children who are last-born in their respective broods”, where “brood” clearly means “a collection consisting of the children in one (nuclear) family”.  --Lambiam 14:36, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

OK, but this is the countable sense. The question here is about the uncountable sense. Searches for "much brood" show hits mainly for bees but also for some other creatures. Now that I have deleted the very doubtful "Conte" example, we have only an archaic citation for uncountable sense 4 "The children in one family" (presumably referring to a human family). I have not been able to find any modern examples of uncountable "brood" used for a human family. Mihia (talk) 20:22, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

... hmmm ... but having said that, the countable sense for humans does not actually seem to be mentioned, unless humans can be included in "certain animals". I think the "children in one family" sense should be labelled "countable and uncountable", which I will do, but a modern uncountable example would still be desirable if such exists. Mihia (talk) 20:36, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

The sense #2 of “young of a non-avian egg layer produced at the same time” can definitely also be countable: [10], [11], [12]; attesting unassailably uncountable uses is less easy. Likewise for human offspring. Ironically, it is much easier to find uncountable uses for sense #3 (like e.g. here) than countable ones, but this sense is not labelled at all.  --Lambiam 23:19, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Angels - 5's the same as 9?

I think meanings 5 and 9 for angels (An affluent individual who provides capital for a startup, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity) are the same. And, related to that, does "angel" especially mean a theatrical backer (perhaps in a British context)? Maitchy (talk) 03:28, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing the duplication and bringing it to our attention. I think the general venture capital sense is an extension of the theatrical finance sense.

And MWOnline seems to agree:

" : one (such as a backer of a theatrical venture) who aids or supports with money or influence // Angels funded the start-up company."

DCDuring (talk) 04:24, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

“angel”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC. has only "In modern theat. slang, one who advances money to put a new play on the boards: a financial backer."

DCDuring (talk) 04:26, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree that the venture capital sense is an extension of the older (but still common) sense of backer of a theatrical production or some other not-for-profit venture, a significant difference being that angels in the older sense will usually not expect anything of material value in exchange; an acknowledgement of their support in the back pages of the playbill will do.  --Lambiam

far along

Would this entry merit inclusion? As in "how far along are you?" = "how long have you been pregnant?" It seems idiomatic to me. ---> Tooironic (talk) 03:53, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

The lemmings don't agree: “far along”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. DCDuring (talk) 04:15, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Also, it's not limited to pregnancy. Any process or person undergoing a process can be far along. DCDuring (talk) 04:31, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I can't personally think of a way this could be used (and understood) without context—such as gesturing with one's eyes at someone's pregnant belly—establishing that it was ellipsis of "how far along are you in your pregnancy?", since if someone was writing a book, working on a project, etc, one could ask "how far along are you?" then too (eliding "...in your work?", etc). To me it doesn't seem entry-worthy, and as DCDuring says, other dictionaries don't have it either... but hopefully more people weigh in... - -sche (discuss) 04:43, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Whatever we do with this as an entry, it should be in a usage example, possibly even at both [[far#Adverb]] and [[along#Adverb]].

Cassell's Dictionary of Slang (2005) has an entry to which their 'entry' for far along refers "far gone 1. exhausted, worn-out. 2. mad, eccentric, insane. 3. (also far along) drunk or otherwise intoxicated."

I've not heard far along in that sense, but have heard far gone. It still seems like a simple ellipsis.

Search for far along in dictionaries I haven't found other entries, but many dictionaries use the term in definitions(!!!) and in usage examples. DCDuring (talk) 13:13, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Here are a few uses in the sense of referring to the degree of advancedness of a pregnancy: [13], [14], [15], [16], [17]. I tend to think this is idiomatic: one cannot say something like, *“She is along, but not far.” When referencing the advancedness of pregnancy, the combination with far is obligatory. As DCDuring noted, the use is not limited to pregnancy; you can also ask someone compiling a list of works containing the phrase “Beam me up, Scotty!” how far along they are. Also there, the answer cannot be, *“Well, I am along, but not very far yet.” Comparative and superlative would be further along and furthest along, as seen here and here. In these uses along is short for “along some (generally unspecified) path to some (likewise unspecified) completion or closure”. But used by itself, along does not carry that sense, so I feel there is a strong argument we have an idiomatic collocation here – and the specific use with respect to pregnancy may deserve a special mention, e.g. in a usex or cite.  --Lambiam 14:15, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

tarre

"(obsolete) To incite; to provoke; to spur on. (Can we find and add a quotation of Shakespeare to this entry?)"

Well, how about this, from Hamlet Act II sc ii:

"Faith, there has been much to do on both sides; and the nation holds it no sin to tarre them to controversy." (Rosencrantz)

92.232.224.153 10:50, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Older dictionaries accepted a single use of a word from a great work or great author as meriting inclusion, as we did for more than a decade. As a result printing errors etc. from Shakespeare et al. have entries. We require three if someone challenges a term or definition, so we are very gradually weeding out such entries. The question naturally arises whether your cite is the one that has justified inclusion in older dictionaries and whether there are other independent uses. DCDuring (talk) 13:22, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

When I created this entry a decade ago, I’m pretty sure that Shakespeare quote was the only basis I was working from. That said, there’s a few more citations in the OED that show the word is indeed attestable by our current standards. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:20, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

treason

The second definition given for treason is:

   2. (US, law) Waging war against the United States or providing aid and comfort to one of its enemies.

I wonder how truly appropriate is the inclusion of such an Americentric definition, at least to the level of specificity provided. It may very well be accurate that under US law, 'treason' is so defined, yet one could if so inclined provide equally-specific definitions of treason for nearly every country in the world. Should we likewise include the specific (Canada, law) definition of 'Using force or violence for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Canada or a province'? The specific (UK, law) definition of 'Compassing or imagining the death of our lord the King'? I use the logical extreme of including every specific national legal definition of the term by way of highlighting just how silly I find the inclusion of any specific national legal definition.

I should like to suggest this definition either be stripped entirely from the entry, or replaced with a more general gloss thereof, such as 'Waging war against one's own country, or providing aid and comfort to its enemies.' 192.252.229.119 17:04, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

It's undesirable to have definitions for every separate country, and it's also undesirable to include some countries but not others. From there it follows that the US definition shouldn't be included either. —Rua (mew) 17:12, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Let me confirm my understanding of this line of reasoning by applying it elsewhere:

1. Since we don't have all attestable regional or dated, archaic, or obsolete spellings of words, we should exclude the mainstream ones as well.
2. Since we don't include every term relating to political controversy in other countries comparable to the US-specific term like Elevatorgate or Watergate, we should not include them either.
3. If a term exists in English, but not in some other language, we should exclude it.

Please distinguish the case at hand from these other applications of the stated principle invoked. DCDuring (talk) 18:50, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

The sense given for (US, law) is not a general legal US definition of treason. It is, quite specifically, the definition of Treason against the United States given in the United States Constitution, Article III, Section 3. Should we decide that the term Treason against the United States is entry-worthy, that definition may be appropriate for that entry. For the entry treason it is not, in my opinion.  --Lambiam 20:01, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree with the IP here and have gone ahead and removed the sense since that seems like an obviously appropriate course of action. - -sche (discuss) 20:07, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

The definition was wrong, too, because e.g. the Axis waging the Second World War against the United States was not treason...because, as definition 1 says, for aggression against a country to be treason, it has to come from someone who belongs to that country. (Yes, a while back, some American conservatives accused Julian Assange of "treason" for supposedly harming the United States by leaking documents... but they got corrected on what was obviously a factual error; Assange is not American and so him harming the United States is not treason.) - -sche (discuss) 20:17, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

I think you are missing the point. Under US law, which can only speak meaningfully about treason against the US, treason is limited to waging war against the US and to giving aid and comfort to its enemies. There is no discussion of betrayal of trust or general disloyalty, which is the thrust of most general definitions of treason. It was the explicit intent of the US Constitution to define treason much more restrictively than British courts had defined it, which was and is AFAICT much more vague. DCDuring (talk) 05:12, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

specimen

I think there's a sense missing, of an organism collected/analyzed/experimented upon. But sense 2 is vague enough that it might include this sense? Still I think a lab rat and a urine sample are pretty distinct. Ultimateria (talk) 02:24, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Sense 2 covers it adequately, though what you're getting at is a real distinction that might be best suited for a usage note. In my experience, a lab rat is a always a "specimen", a stibnite crystal is a "specimen" or a "sample", and a millilitre of urine or a millibar of carbon dioxide is always a "sample". —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:46, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Category:English words prefixed with back-

Apparently somebody indiscriminately added all words beginning with "back" to this category, even ones like "backboneless" that clearly weren't formed with a back- prefix. I'm working my way through it but it's a big category and help would be nice. Equinox ◑ 09:14, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

There's plenty of back words with hyphens, e.g. back-formation, but they're all terms derived from back (and should be listed there as such), not prefixes. The category can be deleted when empty. DonnanZ (talk) 10:18, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Why do we have categories for words derived from prefixes and suffixes, but not for terms derived from other words by compounding? DCDuring (talk) 18:17, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

We already have ====Derived terms====, where terms are added manually. I'm not sure whether they can be added to a category automatically. Any system that gets rid of the current mess with {{der3}} etc. should be explored though. DonnanZ (talk) 19:15, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

• @Equinox: The category is now empty, so it can be deleted. The derived terms section at back is now twice the size. The prefix back- also needs deletion, I suppose it will have to go to RFD. DonnanZ (talk) 22:50, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

OK, I've deleted the category. - -sche (discuss) 23:27, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the help. I should add that I believed that only some words were wrongly in this category: "backache" is a simple compound "back" + "ache", but something like "backread" might perhaps be best interpreted with the prefix! In any case, this is something we should be doing with a template in the Etymology section and not with an additional category that might conflict with that. There's always more work to do... Equinox ◑ 02:14, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

In every case "back" is a separate or separable word, which I think is the key, and it doesn't appear to be a recognised prefix. One or two had suffixes: backie, backman, and backable (which I found). There could be different rules for prefixes and suffixes; -able and -man are both suffixes (when used in compounds) and standalone as able and man: a businessman, a man in business. Hmm. DonnanZ (talk) 10:59, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

I think "backable" is very important in terms of our idea of what a pre/suffix is. We have some weird things like -man that to me should be compounds, but apparently aren't. If these are hand-me-downs from Middle English then that isn't evidence of a Modern English -man suffix either! How do people feel about a deletionist rampage through the pre/suffixes. Oh you don't have time but I have. Equinox ◑ 14:02, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

I looked at the etymology given for piggyback, and thought for a while before adding it to derived terms for back. It is a ride on someone's back after all, and I think it's current usage that matters. DonnanZ (talk) 16:26, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

error on a page and I can't edit!

Hello, on this page https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/y%27a there is an error... The title page is totally wrong ! Y'a is an error, it should not be written with an apostrophe! "Y a" is a contraction of "il y a"... No apostrophe. Please, can you correct this? I know french orthographe is difficult, but if some pages like yours keep making errors, it is normal than people can't write well.

Thank you.

D in handsome: silent?

I'm pretty sure the audios at handsome have a d in them, contrary to the IPA which doesn't. So which one is right? Is that d silent or not? MGorrone (talk) 14:57, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

The stop is sometimes pronounced, and sometimes (usually?) not. Most old (Century) and modern dictionaries I checked which give any pronunciation information at all only give the -n.s- pronunciation, but Collins does include the variant pronunciation with d and Merriam-Webster has it as an optional t. - -sche (discuss) 15:59, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

I pronounce the "d" myself, but having listened to the audio on Oxford (silent d) I would say it's optional whether it's pronounced or not. DonnanZ (talk) 16:07, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

I also pronounce it with the "d". Well, to be more accurate, the ds in spelling becomes /ts/ in pronunciation in this case, so I would pronounce it /ˈhænt.səm/. Tharthan (talk) 19:05, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Same for me; I question whether it's optional or dialectic, however. For reference, my anecdotal concurrence with you is from Canadian English. 192.252.229.119 22:18, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Well, I don't know which part of Canada you are from, and I don't know how much of an overlap there is between my dialect (a dialect of Eastern New England English that does not have the cot-caught merger) and your dialect of Canadian English (my knowledge of Canadian English is limited, although I do know some things about it. Also, I am particularly fond of Canadian Maritime English and [to a lesser extent {although my saying this is by no means a knock on it at all}] Newfoundland English), but I wouldn't be particularly surprised if there were some minor relation. However, with that said, I must note that the pronunciation of handsome is far from constant here. Although I have never heard /ˈhænd.səm/ in everyday life (to my recollection), when I think about it, I know that I have heard /ˈhæn.səm/ before (but because I pronounce it as /ˈhænt.səm/, I never really thought about it). I also ought to note that I come from a generation that restored the /ð/ to clothes, pronounces forehead as /ˈfɔ(ɹ)ˌhɛd/, pronounces waistcoat as /ˈweɪst(.)koʊt/, and uses /ɔɹ/ where /ɑɹ/ (not the /ɑɹ/ written as ar. The /ɑɹ/ written with or and the like) / /ɒɹ/ was used in previous generations, in contrast to previous generations here (including my parents [to some extent. However, they pronounce forehead and waistcoat as I do], grandparents, and great-grandparents). Tharthan (talk) 23:31, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

The difference between the two is a very slight difference in timing of the end of the nasality/voicing and the beginning of the sibilance- I have my doubts as to whether it means anything in normal speech. Also, due to categorical perception, different people will hear it differently. That is, the division of a stream of sound into individual sounds is something our brain does, and different brains can do it quite differently depending on what they've been trained to expect by exposure to different speech over the years. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:44, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

FWIW, I pronounce "handsome" to exactly rhyme with "ransom", i.e. no "d". Mihia (talk) 20:29, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Quick help

How do I add a link to the RFE template on 𠄑𠄍? Johnny Shiz (talk) 15:33, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

The template does not allow adding a link. You could instead use something like

{{rfelite|zh}} ''(Related to ''[[孑孓]]''?)''.  --Lambiam 22:34, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

kin

Aren't sense 2 "(collectively) Persons of the same race or family; kindred." and sense 3 "One or more relatives, such as siblings or cousins, taken collectively." the same? Ultimateria (talk) 23:21, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

To me that sense 2 seems an ill-defined sense; there is a huge difference between “same race” and “same family”. The second usex is misplaced (octopuses are not people of the same race or family as ammonites). Also, the first usex does not make clear which sense of “kin” is involved (in the full sentence, of which only the tail is shown, it is clear that the addressee (George Villiers, soon to become Duke of Buckingham) is of kin with “some near in blood” to him.  --Lambiam 11:23, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

MWOnline has three current definitions with synonyms clan, kindred, and kinsman, all limited to people, which is clearly narrower than usage. Since we like to make explicit obvious extensions, MW's definition would need to be extended to include other living things, both as taxa and individuals. To me it seems natural to extend the term to non-living things like designs of devices (transportation equipment, computers, phones, tools, ideas, documents), but that doesn't seem to show up in print much. DCDuring (talk) 14:05, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

hatchling

We have two senses, one for a "bird, reptile, or other animal", and another sense for insects. These can be merged, right? Ultimateria (talk) 23:24, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

I've merged them. The sense was added by Fletcherjp, who was probably confused by the mangled translation section. (I removed the Bulgarian SOP translation that only refers to a bird.) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:32, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

using "the" before abbreviations of international organizations

Is there any reason why we say "the UN", "the EU", "the WTO" and "the IMF" but NOT "*the NATO" and "*the ASEAN", among others? Doesn't seem grammatical to me. ---> Tooironic (talk) 08:07, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

I think there is no particular reason; in the competition between two forms (with vs. without article) one of the two won out mostly by chance. In German it is die NATO, and in French l’OTAN. There are also English uses of the NATO, but this form is less common. Possibly the English-speaking communication officers at NATO in its early days preferred the shorter “NATO”, and this then spread through communiqués and press releases to the media.  --Lambiam 10:45, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

One difference I notice in the examples here is that those with the definite article are initialisms, while those without are acronyms. I can't think of enough examples off the top of my head to test whether that holds in general, though. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:58, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

At least for organizations and institutions, where the acronym can function as a proper noun, this seems to hold most of the time: just ACORN, PETA and SCOTUS, but the ASPCA, the NRA and the YMCA. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, as illustrated by, e.g., “it highlights what a terrible rule the NASCAR has when it comes to relief drivers”. For early computers like the ENIAC, EDVAC and EDSAC, there are plenty of uses either way. And IBM, not an acronym, is normally not used with an article. I see one (non-organization) exception: in the FANBOYS, the article is obligatory, but that one may be special because it functions as a plural. When the acronym functions as a countable noun, we can of course have both the definite and the indefinite article.  --Lambiam 23:33, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

"The FANBOYS" still seems to fit the general divide Chuck mentions; things pronounced as words have no "the", those pronounced as letters have one. "The NASCAR" sounds as stodgy/formal as "the NATO" to me. - -sche (discuss) 20:11, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

chosen people, Chosen People

Worth an entry? Per utramque cavernam 09:54, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I would agree to the former, which the latter would automatically redirect to. It is a biblical and/or religious term. DonnanZ (talk) 10:50, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree. I know that some would complain that it seems to be little more than a sum of its parts, but this particular phrase has particular religious significance, I think. Tharthan (talk) 18:19, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

picture postcard, picture-postard

Worth entries (especially the latter)? Other dictionaries have it. Per utramque cavernam 21:10, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

I would settle for the first one. The latter, which is misspelt by the way, is an attributive adjective. DonnanZ (talk) 10:32, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

čai/shej

Hello!

Čai is listed as an alternative form of shej but they have different definitions. How come?Jonteemil (talk) 01:33, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

About the ancient phoneme of 商(the ancient of Koeran)

Maybe I'm the world's only 甲骨音(B.C.17c Oracle phoneme) researcher. I've been looking for a researcher like myself all over the world, but I couldn't find one. It is already known that the Dongyi(東夷) people are the ancestors of Koreans. If people are equal, languages are the same. Therefore, the Chinese Shang(商) is Korean and Chinese characters are loaned to Korean. For example:

風(풍) bərə(ᄇᆞᄅᆞ)>bərəm(ᄇᆞᄅᆞᆷ)>bəram(ᄇᆞ람)>pəjam(ᄇᆞ얌/ᄇᆡ암)>pajam(배암)>pæm(뱀-蛇)

                     >baram(바람-風)
                     >brəm>prəm>pjəm>pi ̯um>piuN   
                                 >prum>pjum>pjuN
                           >bəm>pəm>pum>puN(風)
                           >rəm>ram(嵐)
         > bɯrɯ(브르)>buru(부루)>pur(불-吹)>fur(Japanese)
         > bara(바라)>bere(버러)>per(벌)>per+ej(벌+에-虫)>(벌레) 
                                         >perʔ(버ᇙ)>perk(벍어+기/지)>pergedzi(벌거지)
                                >pere ki(버러+기)>pere tsi(버러지-虫) 
                                               >per ki(벌기-虫)  

I am a Korean scholar. I can reach you through the publisher of my book <갑골음으로 잡는 식민사학 동북공정>. The publisher's name is BookLab in Koera.

hallow, Halloween, [possibly a small few other words]

I initially grew up using the /ɑ/ pronunciation of these words (which I think that I largely inherited from my mother, as well as my early childhood schoolmates), although I now use the /æ/ pronunciation (something that I started doing many years ago after noticing that my father [who is from a close, nearby state in the region] used the /æ/ pronunciation, and that it seemed to make more sense if one compared it to other words with similar spellings [even though in some cases I will readily opt for an /ɑ/ pronunciation for a word, justifying it by the argument that the word had an /ɑ/ in Proto-Germanic/its source language / the word's /a/ in its source language was closer in practice to /ɑ/ than /æ/ / whatever]. Mind you, my father also uses the /ˈt͡ʃɔklᵻt/ pronunciation of chocolate, and I don't [although I would definitely do so if I thought that I wouldn't get raised eyebrows when doing it], so it's not like his pronouncing of the words with /æ/ was the sole factor in me changing my pronunciation of those words). To be more specific, I was taught /ˈhɑloʊd/ in the Our Father in Catholic school [here in the area of Eastern New England that I live in] as a child, and said /ˌhɑloʊˈwiːn/ {yes, not /ˌhɑləˈwiːn/ or /ˌhɑloʊˈiːn/}] for Halloween from as long ago as I can remember until my early-mid teenage years.

My question is, though, why do some North American English dialects have this alternative pronunciation? From where did it arise? Tharthan (talk) 03:57, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

A variety of (h)al- and (h)ol- spellings in Middle English (with some forms identical to those of hollow, e.g. a past tense holowid attested for both per the MED) and in English (the EDD has a cite of Hollow-eve, besides cites in the other direction of hallow (“hollow”)) suggest that variation in the pronunciation may be old. Otherwise, I would speculate that perhaps speakers unfamiliar with the uncommon word just guess /ɑ/ based on the similar hollow, hall, etc or /æ/ based on hallelujah, ally, etc. - -sche (discuss) 07:54, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Well, I'm not sure what hall has to do with it, considering that (in my dialect), hall is /hɔl/. However, you may indeed be on to something with that, because swallow and wallow both have /ɑl/ in them in my dialect. The word want also has /ɑ/ in it (although I knew an older history teacher also native to my area in high school who still said /wɔnt/, showing signs of lot-cloth split influence [common to varying degrees in areas of New England that lost historical /ɒ/ after other dialects of English in the United States had, but that also didn't go through the cot-caught merger. /ɒ/ has been replaced by /ɑ/, /ʌ/, or /ɔ/ depending on the environment that it is in, although most people nowadays {and I am no exception, more or less} have adopted the general pattern found in other dialects in the country, even with words where the historical /ɒ/ preceded /ɹ/--that class of words kept a distinction from /ɔɹ/ words far longer than any of the other /ɒ/ distinctions lasted. But, yeah, traditionally speaking, I do know elderly ladies in my area who pronounce forgotten as /fəˈɡʌt.n̩/, and got and gotten as /ɡʌt/ and /ɡʌt.n̩/ in very rare instances as well, and my mother still says /ˈpʌp.aɪ/ like her mother and father did. If I didn't know better, I would have considered the possibility that these instances could have simply arisen from vowel reduction or something similar, but the history of the area--and both the fact that words that have traditionally been, and still are, both pronounced with /ɑ/ and written with a are not generally subject to having /ʌ/ in similar instances, and the fact that /ɒ/ disappeared from my area seemingly late--indicate otherwise} in that word that has been dropped by the younger generations. Keep in mind, however, that there is quite a bit of variance in minor colloquial pronunciations in my area--and I'm not talking about significantly General-American-influenced pronunciations used by the very young here, either. I mean, I've even heard /ˈkæfl̩/ for careful amongst less educated speakers here! Furthermore, the typical pronunciation of parent (with /ɛə/) can be heard amongst some older people {although there are those of the same age from other families that pronounce it with the /æ/ that I, my family, and [most of] my schoolmates have always known}, and vary and various can be either /ˈvɛəɹi/, /ˈvɛəɹi.əs/ OR /ˈvæɹi/, /ˈvæɹi.əs/ depending upon the generation of the speaker. Note that the General American /ˈvɛɹi.əs/ is not a pronunciation used {at least not before the adoption--more or less-- of General American by a number of the very young people in the area started}]). Tharthan (talk) 10:51, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Is it possible that the pronunciation with /ɑ/ is an older, more original one, that survived only in the US?  --Lambiam 14:01, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Possibly. I can find some evidence suggesting that, but it's inconsistent. David Crystal's 2016 Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation does give hallow as /ˈ(h)ɑlə/~/ˈ(h)ɑloː/, but contrasts it with hollow and follow (and folly) with /ɒ/ and e.g. dally and hammer with /a/. Whereas, Wilhelm Viëtor's 1906 Shakespeare's Pronunciation says "there are two rimes in the poems where the riming vowels are [æ] and [o], viz. dally : folly RL 554, and hallow v. : follow VA 973"; his notation isn't IPA but is still asserting the same vowel in hallow and dally, in contrast to Crystal. And Charles Jones' English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries mentions that John Jones' 1705 Alphabetical Spelling Dialogue records fallow/follow and hallow/hollow as homonyms (which would make Viëtor's rhyme work perfectly in contrast to what both Viëtor and Crystal think).
OTOH, by 1816 John Walker's Principles of English Pronunciation denounced pronouncing it like hollow, saying "this arises from not attending to the distinction made by a syllabication between the single and double l: the double l in the same syllable deepens the a to the broadest sound, as in tall; but when one of the liquids in carried off to the next syllable, the a has its short and slender sound, as in tallow; the same may be observed of hall and hallow." (I don't have time to look for possible counterexamples at the moment.) - -sche (discuss) 20:05, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Firstly, does this mean, then, that it is possible that at least some of the class of words belonging to the -allow category that are pronounced with /æloʊ/ nowadays were originally pronounced similarly (or identically) to those words in the -allow category that are pronounced with /ɒloʊ/ (intentionally broad transcription) nowadays? The first source that you referenced seems to indicate that one set (a set that today has /æl/) had /ɑl/, whereas the other set had /ɒl/, but that this was also distinct from the vowel used in other words not in the -allow category that have /æ/ today. The third source seems to indicate that they both may have had /ɒl/. I suppose that a third possibility (which looks more than just somewhat possible, I'd say) is that the exact pronunciation of the set (the /ɑl/ set) in question varied from dialect to dialect (and perhaps, dare I say, from speaker to speaker?), but then was largely made stable by some factor at a later point in time.

...Actually, that would make a lot of sense, considering that (from what I understand) Old English /æ/ and /ɑ/ (along with, in some instances, /æː/. [Also, there is that tricky diphthong that I think took part in some of this too, but I've always had some trouble fully understanding that one, so I won't try and go into that. Furthermore, I think that this may, in certain environments, have applied to /ɑː/ {which usually became /ɔː/ by the Middle English period, of course} as well]) merged to /a/ after the Old English period, but then split into multiple vowels again later. This would mean that, unless there was/were somehow some dialect(s) that had/have managed to elude linguists all of this time, of which there is/are no good written record(s), that never actually fully merged the Old English /æ/ and /ɑ/ (and the like) vowels (something which I think has pretty much no chance of having happened), the new /ɑ/ and /æ/ (by which I mean the ones that arose out of Middle English's /a/) may have had, at least in some cases, variable distribution at first.

Secondly, I have to thank you, -sche, for letting me know about that (relatively) recently published comprehensive Shakespearean English dictionary of pronunciation. I'll have a great time browsing through it! Tharthan (talk) 07:10, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Intriguingly, Crystal has almost all other -allow words (ballow, gallow, sallow, shallow, tallow) with /a/, modern /æ/. Only fallow joins hallow in having /ɑ/. I can't offhand see a reason for the split, since there's no clear split in their etyma, and any influence fall and hall (which Crystal says had /ɑ/) might've had on fallow and hallow, ball and gall et al (likewise /ɑ/) should've had on ballow, gallow etc. The only difference that comes to mind is that follow and hollow exist, and not *(b|g|s|sh|t)ollow, if -ollow words might've pulled their -allow friends back for some reason(??). The difference must've levelled out in most dialects, since all the words now usually have /æ/. How do you pronounce fallow, vs gallow, shallow, tallow? That might provide at least some clue as to whether dialects with /ɑ/ might be preservations, or modern changes. (Crystal also has swallow with /ɒ/, like Apollo and hollow, but that makes sense, coming from ME o instead of a.) - -sche (discuss) 09:43, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Well, unfortunately, I came to know the word fallow much later than I did hallow. I also do not recall how my parents pronounced it when I was a child (the word, although not particularly uncommon by any means, is not one that usually arose in everyday conversation), and I definitely do not recall ever hearing from my early schoolmates. So this is a bit of a roadblock, I am afraid. I suppose that I could ask my parents at least how they pronounce it/how they have pronounced it, but I am unable to do that at the moment. Tharthan (talk) 19:21, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

withers

A usage note at withers (noun) reads:

This noun refers to one object; there is no corresponding singular form *wither for this word, the singular form being obsolete.

While contemplating whether to add an entry for this meaning under "wither" labelled "obsolete", which is presently lacking, I did a Google Book Search for "the horse's wither". This retrieved about 20 hits, many from relatively recent publications, versus about 90 for "the horse's withers". It does seem to suggest that "wither" is in some kind of current usage, so perhaps the usage note is just wrong? Anyone know anything further about this word? I see that M-W has it [18]. Mihia (talk) 15:03, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, the usage note would seem to be mistaken, as the singular still exists. Even if it didn't still exist, previous existence would require some kind of entry on wither, even if just defined as {{singular of|withers||part of the back of a four-legged animal that is between the shoulder blades}}. I've added such an entry. - -sche (discuss) 15:46, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

@-sche: Thanks for doing that. Mihia (talk) 22:04, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

acontecer

acontecer (verb) in spanish has a regular conjugation table, even though it's only used forms are infinitive, gerund, participle and 3rd person. Is it possible to make an irregular conjugation template?

I am sure it is possible - @DTLHS? It is not the only verb that is defective this way; alborecer is another example. It appears to me, though, that the defectiveness is more semantic than grammatical. In English “I occur” or “you dawn” are also not used.  --Lambiam 11:00, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

bwrw hen wragedd â ffyn

This entry translates the above phrase as Welsh for "raining old ladies and sticks". ("bwrw" is literally "casting, throwing", though in this phrase it's conventionally translated as "raining".) A key sticking point is it should be "a ffyn", not "â ffyn". With the accent, the meaning becomes "it's casting old ladies with sticks", or even possibly "it's hitting old ladies with sticks". Cythraul (talk) 21:03, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Chinese Word- "Sandouping"

Today I made a page for 三斗坪, a town in Yiling, Yichang, Hubei, China. On the English Wikipedia page, we currently have the Mandarin pronunciation as Sāndòupíng and the traditional characters as 三鬥坪 (with a calligraphic jpg of the traditional form to boot), but I think it may be wrong- it could be Sāndǒupíng with the traditional and simplified forms both being 三斗坪. I probably need to find a pre-1956 book that talks about the area, and I'm looking on archive.org.

It sounds like it could be dǒu and not dòu, but I can't tell for sure because of the sandhi/变调 here: [19] [20]

If it is dǒu and not dòu, then 鬥 can't be the traditional form, and I will need to delete 三鬥坪.

Appreciate any help --Geographyinitiative (talk) 14:07, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

url=https://v.qq.com/x/page/a0314mssbf2.html |script-title=zh:三斗坪镇园艺村书记刘晓华|trans-title=Secretary Liu Xiaohua of Yuanyi Village in Sandouping Town|date=17 July 2016|quote=照片的主人公叫刘晓华,是三斗(dǒu)坪园艺村党支部书记(at 0:10){...}然后，又马不停蹄地赶到三斗(dǒu)坪镇中心幼儿园旁，组织人员(at 0:50)|accessdate=14 February 2019

url=https://v.qq.com/x/page/b0314muaygv.html |script-title=zh:三斗坪镇黄陵庙村书记杨年建|trans-title=Secretary Yang Nianjian of Huanglingmiao Village in Sandouping Town|date=17 July 2016|quote=在三斗(dǒu)坪镇(at 0:09){...}|accessdate=14 February 2019

If the pronunciation of the character '斗' were 'dǒu' here, it would be changed by tone sandhi with 坪 (píng) into a half-third tone (半上聲}. It definitely does not seem to be read with a fourth tone. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 10:50, 14 February 2019 (UTC) modified

TRANSTAINER

Dear Community, Please note that TRANSTAINER is a term invented by PACECO Corp. and is a registered trademark.

We would be greatful if the pages TRANSTAINER and TRANSTAINERS be adapted to reflect PACECO Corp. trademark rights.

Thank you for your collaboration. LDIPBrussels (talk) 14:08, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Hi! That might be true in some territories, and not in others. Do you own this trademark in every country in the world? Anyway, we define words by what they mean and not by what a lawyer says. If you have a serious problem with this and you want to put money and time into it then you should be suing the WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION. You might find better things to do. Equinox ◑ 14:12, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

If it can be reliably sourced that the word was invented by this company, that would be suitable for inclusion in an etymology section. The entry itself, of course, can not reflect the asserted trademark status of a term. bd2412 T 16:02, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

If it was a trademark it's clearly been genericized for several decades (see cites). DTLHS (talk) 16:12, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

• I have found a citation that satisfies the assertion that this was coined by the referenced corporation, and added that to the etymology. Cheers! bd2412 T 14:15, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

'Cunning Linguist'

The phrase "cunning linguist" is not equivalent to the term "cunnilingus".
They are not homophonous (sounding the same) or synonymous (meaning the same), and differ in spelling, punctuation, and meaning.
The improper usage of a word or phrase does not automatically modify the proper definition of said word or phrase; while words can indeed change in meaning over time, this is not the case in this instance. "Gay" historically meant "lighthearted and carefree", yet modern usage of the term is primarily in reference to and synonymous of "homosexual".
The usage of "gay", which has two meanings, is significantly different than the usage of "cunning linguist", because "gay" (lighthearted and carefree) and "gay" (homosexual) are homophonous and have identical spelling and punctuation, while "cunning linguist" and "cunnilingus" are not homophonous and have different spelling and punctuation, and are made up of different letters (none of which are silent). It is my belief that this definition be modified to include the proper definition of 'cunning linguist', instead of the improper, inapplicable sexual definition of 'cunnilingus'. Walterblue222 (talk) 17:32, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

The phrase is used humorously to refer to one who performs cunnilingus. (This has been explained when you also brought this up on PUC's talkpage and your talk page (not to mention the entry's talk page). Our sister project Wikipedia has a term for what you're doing: w:WP:IDHT. - -sche (discuss) 18:25, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Au contraire, -sche, I "get the point" - it's just not a good point. Just because someone uses a phrase humorously to refer to something else, does not mean that the definition of the phrase should be modified. Also, seeing as humor is subjective, basing an argument on a phrase being "used humorously" doesn't do much to support the argument.

People also occasionally use the term "pianist" (someone who plays the piano) to "humorously refer to" a "penis" (reproductive sexual organ) - this doesn't mean that the definition of the term "pianist" should be changed.

The fact remains that "cunning linguist" and "cunnilingus" are not synonymous, homophonous or homonymic, and differ in spelling, punctuation and meaning. Walterblue222 (talk) 20:54, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree that, for me, "cunning linguist" has not reached the threshold to become a word or phrase proper, even in slang English. But I am having difficulty imagining what the cut off point between 'commonly-seen pun' and 'colloquialism proper' would be. Am I understanding the issue correctly? --Geographyinitiative (talk) 21:03, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

I don't believe this is a 'commonly-seen pun' OR 'colloquialism proper'; it's a phrase with a literal meaning (not slang either). I see how one could consider it a pun if you make the case for it being a double-entendre (a word or phrase open to two interpretations, one of which is usually risqué or indecent); however, that would require 'cunning linguist' and 'cunnilingus' to be homophonic or homonymic, which they are neither. Basically: they don't sound the same, look the same, or mean the same thing, therefor it is inaccurate to conflate 'cunning linguist' and 'cunnilingus'... Walterblue222 (talk) 22:55, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

It's "cunning linguist" and "cunnilinguist" that are near-homopones, not "cunnilingus". I don't know what you mean by "mean the same"; as a descriptivist dictionary, as one bound by WT:CFI, the question is what the cites mean, and two of the cites on the page clearly use the phrase to mean cunnilinguist. You could take it to WT:RFV and see if people could find a third or believe the third is clear enough, but the question of meaning is all about cites.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:18, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

• Just to comment on the question of whether this has "reached the threshold to become a word or phrase proper", that would be an RfV question, except that there are already three citations in the entry. It would be easy to find dozens more if needed. Therefore, it certainly meets the CFI, and is clearly idiomatic, since neither cunning nor linguistics is a component of oral sex. bd2412 T 23:30, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

• I think it has two cites that are clear uses and one that's punny and at least somewhat debatable.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:58, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

• I have added two more cites, from 1968 and 1970, respectively, the two oldest cites that I could find that unequivocally seem to invoke the innuendo. There is a 1951 cite that seems to play it much straighter ("I had some difficulty translating, but after six weeks in the Brass Rail with Salvador Dali, I could speak the language like nothing on earth — and still do. But, then, I always was a cunning linguist"). bd2412 T 02:54, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

• It's worth reading the context before you put a quote in. That was from a humorous article and was anything but playing it straight. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 15:35, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Uh, "near-homopones"? Do you mean "near homopHones"? If something is 'nearly homophonic', it 'sounds kinda like', right? Do you really think something sounding 'kinda similar' to something else is reason enough to negate the definition in favor of defining it to match 'something that sounds kinda like it'? This entire debate is absurd. Cunning linguist is one thing, cunnilingus something else. They aren't homophonic, they aren't homonymic, they aren't synonyms. How is this even an issue? This is pretty absurd. Walterblue222 (talk) 02:39, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

"The definition"? This is a modern descriptivist dictionary, and going along with modern lexicography, words are defined to mean what people use them to mean.--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:00, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Its literal meaning is useless; I don't know if anyone has ever used "cunning linguist" to truly mean "cunning" + "linguist". In the cites in the article, the first two aren't really even puns; it's clear that they're using "cunning linguist" as a sort of euphemism, perhaps with an intent at humor. The third is a little more allusively, but if you demand one meaning, "one who engages in oral sex on a woman" makes more sense than "a sly or crafty person who studies linguistics".--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:18, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Who are you to say what phrases are useless? In a language spoken by billions of people, with millions of dialects and variations? This is just absurd. The cites given for 1844, 1968, 1970, 2005, and 2009 make no mention of "engaging in oral sex on a woman"; the only cite that says anything like this is the one from 2003. Walterblue222 (talk) 02:46, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

None of those cites make any mention of the people involved being sly or professors of the field of linguistics, either. I have to wonder about the meaning of the cite of 1894 (1844 was a typo), given that Martial was not a linguist in any sense we include.--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:00, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

I have gone ahead and added the 1951 cite referenced above to the second sense, as it expressly references learning a language. bd2412 T 03:24, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Woah, when was the criteria "professors of the field of linguistics"? EVERY cite could be considered to be from people who are linguists, considering that they are all authors; the only exception I can see for this is if someone was illiterate and had someone else write for them, but still, the person writing for them would be linguists... Walterblue222 (talk) 15:03, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

If there is a specific action you would like to propose with respect to this entry, why don't you propose it here, and the community can determine whether there is a consensus for it? bd2412 T 22:28, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

twelfe Obsolete form of twelfth

Why was the form twelfe used to represent the ordinal twelfth without adding the corresponding suffix? --Backinstadiums (talk) 17:52, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

I suspect that the suffix is present, as part of the f. /twɛlfθ/ can be tricky to pronounce, so it's sometimes simplified to /twɛlθ/ or (as twelfth mentions) /twɛlf/, which this spelling is a reasonable representation of. - -sche (discuss) 08:34, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

@-sche: I thought the purpose of the <e> was to mark the <f> as intervocalic, and therefore the sound allophone /v/ --Backinstadiums (talk) 14:27, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

The e is just a holdover from Middle English twelfthe, where it was pronounced as a vowel. The voicing of intervocalic f was an earlier process that occurred in Old English and Early Middle English, so it wouldn't have affected the ancestor word if th (or earlier t) was still present in the word at that time. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 15:12, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

first time as adverb meaning "for the first time"

Can first time be used as an adverb meaning "for the first time", e.g. when I met him first time (Confession Tapes, third episode, 02:40) --Backinstadiums (talk) 19:18, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Not in standard/native English, AFAIK. You can drop for ("when I met him the first time" is OK), but dropping the article makes it sound like the kind of dialogue that would be written for, or by, a non-fluent non-native-speaker. - -sche (discuss) 08:07, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

I think natives say this. I think I would/do. It's an ellipsis. It is true that dropped or inappropriate determiners are a pretty good indicator of non-native writing and speech. DCDuring (talk) 13:27, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

You can use first-time without article as an attribute, as in “first-time offender”, but also then it is not an adverb. (This is currently classified as an adjective; shouldn’t that be an (attributively used) noun?)  --Lambiam 18:29, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

There is also the use as in “I always brush my teeth first time in the morning”, which does not mean “for the first time”. Can this be explained as a SoP? If not, is this an idiomatic use of ”first time”, or is the idiom the whole phrase “first time in the morning”? (“First time in the afternoon” sounds silly, but ”first time tomorrow” is also OK.)  --Lambiam 18:41, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

After e/c:

Yes, if we should have an entry at all. The sole definition we have now seems to be the product of hormone-flooded youth, which endows any sex-related phrase with idiomaticity or, at least, entryworthiness. In context, many things can be referred to as being first time. There is nothing special about first time, last time, second time, next-to-last time, time before last, antepenultimate time, next time, etc. All of them can be used attributively, as temporal adverbs, as nominals, possibly in other ways. DCDuring (talk) 18:49, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

id cetera

Regarding this page, are id, ID, I'd, et cetera homonyms or anagrams? or both? neither? Note, for example, the section of id#Anagrams does not include ID and the rest, instead relying exclusively on the header's link to Appendix:Variations_of_"id".

i'm not looking up all of their pronunciations, but i know at least some of the listed forms are not (as the page says) homophones of I'd/eyed/ide. Should we remove that section from that page, or specify that it does not apply in all cases?

Thanks.

71.121.143.20 06:24, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

pbar = antiproton

Wy would pbar mean antiproton? --Pious Eterino (talk) 10:44, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

• Replied on its talk page. SemperBlotto (talk) 11:17, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

In the print version of the cited publication on arXiv, the authors use p. The only reason we see “pbar” on the web page is, apparently, that the authors who uploaded their paper to arXiv were unable to produce a p with an overbar, whether due to limitations in the site’s user interface or limitations in their knowledge of using css text-decoration options in html mark-up. (Based on perusing other pages on the website, I believe the problem is in limitations imposed by the site; for example, other authors use “+/-” and “10^-13” on the web page, but “±” and “10⁻¹³” in print.) My feeling is that such poor man’s approaches to getting around these limitations should not count for attestation purposes.  --Lambiam 14:48, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, the quote isn't real attestation, but the term is clearly attested in BGC. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 22:42, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

The wording of the definition is like that of an etymology. Can we revise the wording or find an image instead, to provide an ostensive definition? DCDuring (talk) 00:50, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the excellent replies, everyone. You're great! I put a link to p̄ in the entry, too, which somebody may like to create. --Pious Eterino (talk) 13:33, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

CIM

What part of speech would CIM (cum in mouth) be? --Pious Eterino (talk) 10:46, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

OPDrms

Definition given as root mean square Optical Path Difference. Surely the word order is not right? --Pious Eterino (talk) 10:48, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

This is similar to an earlier case regarding CESAT voltage (see Talk:CESAT voltage). The symbol OPD_rms (or OPD_RMS) is used as a symbolic abbreviation for the rms of the optical path difference, like e.g. here. The paper from which the figure is taken also uses OPD_Norm for “normalized OPD”. Possibly, OPD as an initialism of “optical path difference” is entry-worthy (it is listed as such on a Wikipedia dab page) , but OPDrms ain’t.  --Lambiam 15:09, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

UNEDIC

French. It looks like, and sounds like, an acronym more than an initialism, but I'm not savvy enough on French to confidently change it. --Pious Eterino (talk) 10:49, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

If it is pronounced as indicated (which looks very plausible), it is definitely an acronym. Pronounced as an initialism, we should see six syllables instead of three.  --Lambiam 15:15, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

I changed the entry. --Pious Eterino (talk) 13:27, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

mk

Why would this be an alternative form of OK? Mmm, okay??? --Pious Eterino (talk) 10:50, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

• Replied on its talk page. SemperBlotto (talk) 11:19, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

pronunciation of the pronoun ch

what is the pronunciation of the pronoun ch? --Backinstadiums (talk) 14:31, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

If it is an aphetic form of ich (possible only in unstressed positions), the pronunciation should be /tʃ/. Dutch has a similarly aphetized first-person pronoun 'k, pronounced /k/.  --Lambiam 15:26, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

This is confirmed here.  --Lambiam 10:21, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

noone Etymology 2 From Middle English nowne

noone "noon" From Middle English nowne, yet the entry for nowne only mentions noun --Backinstadiums (talk) 15:25, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

The electronic Middle English Dictionary has nọ̄n with several alternative spellings, which do not include “nowne”. That does not have to mean much; in early Modern English there was no fixed orthography and scribes used any spelling that when pronounced would sound right in their dialect.  --Lambiam 17:43, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

I've updated it to read noune, as that spelling does occur several times in Middle English texts. Leasnam (talk) 04:06, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

भोसड़ी

Can someone provide an etymology for this term? Could it perhaps be influenced by hi:झोपड़ी (Hindi term for hut). Also it would be great if the masculine form can be added as well. Thanks. Gotitbro (talk) 10:20, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

@AryamanA Per utramque cavernam 10:23, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Completely off the mark lol. You can't just pick random words and assume they're related because they rhyme. I'll look into the etymology but I doubt anything will be found since it's a vulgar word and those tend to have murky origins. —Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 16:42, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

middle voice vs mediopassive

What are the differences between middle voice vs mediopassive? It'd be clarifying to add a brief mention in the respective entries --Backinstadiums (talk) 11:04, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia at Mediopassive voice: The mediopassive voice is a grammatical voice that subsumes the meanings of both the middle voice and the passive voice.  --Lambiam 23:05, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

so, usage note

It says: "Though common for a long time, the 'sentence-initial so' became controversial in the mid-2010s". Did it? I've heard of people complaining about sentence-initial "and" since forever. Any recent "so" controversy has passed me by. Equinox ◑ 13:19, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia has an article on this, and there are a few references there. Per utramque cavernam 13:24, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Also, WF starts most of his posts with that word, so that obviously can't be a stylish thing to do. Per utramque cavernam 13:26, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

glaze vs glace vs glass

Wiktionary informs me that:

1. glass comes from PG *glasą, meaning "glass", which comes from PIE *gʰelh₃-, meaning "green, yellow" or "flourish";
2. glace comes from Latin glacies which comes from PIE *gel-, "cold";
3. glaze is "partially" a descendant of glace, fact stated in glace but not even mentioned at glaze where the word is said to come from glass (or the Middle English term for that anyway).

Moreover, glace seems to only mean "ice" in OF, while in Modern French it also means "mirror". So I have the following questions:

1. When is glace first attested as meaning "mirror"? Could this meaning be a semi-semantic loan from glass meaning the material? Also, is the fact that verre means both glass the material and glass the drinking vessel an English influence, or English influenced by French in this?
2. Is there any known fact that suggests the two PIE roots may somehow be related?
3. Do we have any clue as to how the PIE root evolved into PG *glasą semantically speaking?
4. Where does glaze fit into all this? What is its relation to glace?

MGorrone (talk) 16:12, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

The Manufacture royale de glaces de miroirs was founded in 1665, so the French term used in the sense of “mirror” is at least that old. It is in fact already found almost five centuries earlier in the medieval poem Cligès (Que nule rien n’i feroit glace / Ne esmeraude ne topace ?); the sense derives from the polish of ice, at least according to the entry “glace”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

It is implausible that the two PIE roots are related, so this is one of these incredible coincidences that are bound to happen occasionally: two etymologically unrelated words (in this case verbs; French glacer and English glaze) mean the same and happen to look very similar. We see the ice of glacer back in the icing on the cake.  --Lambiam 22:47, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

So is the "glass" sense of glace, and subsequently the "mirror" sense, perhaps adopted from or influenced by some Germanic source related to English glass ? It seems unusual to refer to glass (the substance) as "ice" as that would not only be ambiguous but ice normally melts at room temperature; glass doesn't. Leasnam (talk) 04:48, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

@Lambiam: So to summarize what we've gotten so far about my questions:

1. The "glass" sense of glace is attested as far back as a medieval poem which, I read here, dates ~1176. The question of glass influencing glace was reposed by @Leasnam:'s comment above. From "ice" to "glass", the path is that both are polished. As for «is the fact that verre means both glass the material and glass the drinking vessel an English influence, or English influenced by French in this», it hasn't been touched on yet.
2. The roots' relatedness is implausible, which I take to mean nothing points to it, and in fact things exist which point against it. Correct?
3. The evolution of the sense of *gʰelh₃- ("green, yellow" or "flourish") into *glasą ("glass") wasn't touched on.
4. If, as you seem to say, glass and glace being semantically related and looking similar is just a random coincidence, why does glaze appear as a descendant of glace with the tag "partially"? Should it be removed from there?

MGorrone (talk) 14:40, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

The idea of there being a relationship is enticing; in particular, it is hard not to think that glace de miroir is somehow half a loan, half a calque of German Spiegelglas. Yet etymologists have not succumbed to its seduction. The following observation argues against the idea. Looking at uses of the French term glace in the mirror or glass sense, it appears to mean, specifically, a pane of glass. It is most of the time unambigously a count noun, as seen for example in its plural form in the name Manufacture royale de glaces de miroirs. The company was not manufacturing glass but glass panes. For window panes, we often see glace de verre, that is, a “glass pane”, e.g. in one 17th-century book and another 17th-century encyclopedic dictionary, the latter in defining miroir as a glass pane plated at its backside. It does not refer to the material; fait(e) de glace invariably means “made out of ice”.

Apart from the observation about the French term being a count noun, I am mainly reporting what etymological sources are saying. One place where (reportedly) the two came together is in the French term glaçure: an adaptation of German Glasur reusing the earlier glace(r) as applied to cakes. The ceramic sense of English glaze likewise reused the earlier verb for a culinary technique for what in German is called glasieren. The terms glaçure and Glasur are not used for the icing of a cake. While French glacer can be used for the ceramic technique, it is attested much later in this sense than the noun glaçure, so this may be (semantically) a back-formation. It looks as if the cooking-technique sense then was copied from French as an additional meaning of German glasieren.  --Lambiam 20:16, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Appendix:88 modern constellations in different languages

Back in WP, the article "88 modern constellations in different languages" was deleted a while ago. I would like the contents transferred to an appendix here since the content is more suitable here on Wiktionary. FoxyGrampa75 (talk) 01:26, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

The problem with importing Wikipedia articles like this that the content is geared towards Wikipedia's standards, which are different from Wiktionary's. Also, they're redundant to our own content: we already have Category:Constellations and, more importantly, the translation tables in all the entries in Category:en:Constellations.

A multilingual list article like this tends to be the work of a small number of contributors looking things up in dictionaries for languages they mostly don't know, with very little information about the individual terms. Our entries and translation tables tend to be the work of a much larger number of contributors working in languages they know, and have much more information. Add to that the interwiki links to entries in other Wiktionaries and you have a much more comprehensive and reliable resource, albeit a bit less tidy and centralized. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:14, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

institutionalist

This Christian Science Monitor article, cited in the New York Times today, defines an institutionalist as "a veteran member of Congress who fervently believes in upholding its traditions and customs, even at the risk of alienating younger colleagues and outsiders clamoring for drastic change". Should this meaning be added to institutionalism? Or does it fall under the first definition, "Adherence to ... established codes of conduct"? Arms & Hearts (talk) 16:31, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

My feeling is that it is covered by the first definition. Curiously enough, the disambiguation page Institutionalism on Wikipedia lists eight senses but has no overlap with the senses given here on Wikitionary.  --Lambiam 00:33, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

"side length" versus "sidelength"

If the correct form is "side length", then the entry about "sidelength" should be edited.

But maybe both are “correct” forms.  --Lambiam 20:31, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

I would imagine sidelength instead of side length is an attempt to avoid SoP policy, which is all too prevalent. DonnanZ (talk) 11:07, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

What do you mean by SoP?  --anonymously. 15:52, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

The term "side length" seems to be correct as it has more than 100k hits in Google Books whereas "sidelength" has only about 5k. Therefore I propose to add an entry about "side length" and add a cross-reference to "sidelength". Secondly, "sidelength" might be incorrect: When searching for it in Google Books, it often appears only as some variable name in programming language source codes. But there are also cases where it appears as a proper word in some books. Therefore, I propose to check carefully whether "sidelength" is a correct form and if not, delete the entry.  --anonymously. 15:52, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree. There seem to be nominally sufficient book hits for "sidelength" attestation, but it is not clear whether these are errors in which a variable-name style has been inappropriately used in ordinary language. Mihia (talk) 01:17, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

pronunciation of creetur

Was the pronunciation of creetur the same of the current one of creature? --Backinstadiums (talk) 00:17, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Possibly in some instances, where it is just eye dialect (as labelled). But I can also find it in books on some dialects (e.g. Sussex) and in Webster and in the English Dialect Dictionary as a dialectal variant of creature with the pronunciation given as (what amounts to) /ˈkɹi.təɹ/. (The EDD gives other spellings, which have the same pronunciation or /ˈkɹiə.təɹ/, /kɹeɪ.təɹ/, etc: Lancastrian craiter, Scottish and Irish cratur, Scottish critur, Irish craythur, Northamptonshire crettur, Devonian creytur, and Lincolnshire [and many other dialects!] critter.) Incidentally, I can find uses from as late as the 1960s; more recent uses—even in newspapers indexed on Issuu—seem to mostly be reprints of older works, though it wouldn't surprise me if there were some actual recent uses somewhere. Creetshur also exists as a more unambiguously eye dialect spelling of the modern pronunciation. I'll update the entry. - -sche (discuss) 20:16, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

@-sche: Generally, the problem with the label eye dialect is its two meanings, i.e. "(non)standard pronunciation". creture shows "/kɹiːˈeɪtjʊə/ (archaic)", so I thought creetur was rather archaic than eye dialectal --Backinstadiums (talk) 20:29, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

The spelling of creetur suggests, and Merriam-Webster and the EDD say, the first part is /kɹit-/, so I don't think it's connected to /kɹiːˈeɪtjʊə/. As a dialectal variant pronunciation, it apparently goes back quite a ways, like critter, but I don't think it's archaic (I don't think people write creetur to try to seem old-timey, but rather as dialect). I suppose "or sometimes eye dialect" could be removed on the grounds that it's hard to prove it's not being pronounced /ˈkɹi.təɹ/ when it occurs. (This narrator pronounces it /ˈkɹi.təɹ/, I notice.) - -sche (discuss) 20:59, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

@-sche: I've just learned that in Appendix:Glossary archaic does not mean dated but archaizing; do you know which of the two terms, archai{c/zing}, is the most used in academic literature? --Backinstadiums (talk) 23:03, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

investment

What does sense 3 refer to? "That with which anyone is invested; a vestment." Which sense of invest? The translation table's gloss is "that with which anyone is invested", and the existing translations to Mandarin and Finnish look like the financial sense, unrelated to clothing. Ultimateria (talk) 18:43, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Based on the Shakespeare quote, it is the dated sense 2, “To clothe or wrap (with garments)”. So these translations are misplaced. A better gloss (easier to understand) would be vestment.  --Lambiam 00:09, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

So it's an obsolete synonym of vestment? I don't see this sense in the few modern dictionaries I use. If it is, I'd remove the table altogether. Ultimateria (talk) 02:59, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Definition replaced with vestment; translation table replaced with {{trans-see|vestment}}; additional archaic definition added at vestment. DCDuring (talk) 04:04, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

sound

Are noun senses 1 and 2 distinct? They're "A sensation perceived by the ear caused by the vibration of air or some other medium." and "A vibration capable of causing such sensations." If someone or something makes a sound, it seems irrelevant to me that its perception may vary (I guess you could hear something that isn't there?), but either way the usage examples refer to the same thing: "the sound of footsteps" in 1 and "the sound of the tower guns" in 2. Ultimateria (talk) 18:52, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

I think the point of the "tower guns" example is meant to be that "the sound of the Tower guns smote again on the ear", while a "sensation" cannot itself smite on the ear. It is kind of a hair-splitting point though. Mihia (talk) 21:57, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

If we are into splitting hairs, the sensation is not perceived by the ear, but by the owner of the ear – unless “by means of” is meant, but then the definition is phrased ambiguously. Sense 1 fails in the common combinations “to make a sound” and “to hear a sound”, used in the two usexes for sense 1; it is weird to say that one makes (or hears) a sensation. This shows that senses 1 and 2 are indeed distinct. Conversely, replacing the term ”sound” by the definition of sense 2 in the noun phrase “a plaintive sound” results in “a plaintive vibration”. But, clearly, vibrations are not plaintive by themselves.  --Lambiam 23:49, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

That said, in the sentence “The poor creature uttered a plaintive sound” neither sense 1 nor sense 2 works; the meaning is an amalgamation of the two. So would this amalgamated definition work:

1. A vibration of air or some other medium, in particular when perceived through the ear.

?  --Lambiam 00:00, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

I think our definitions should remain as close as possible to the direct experience of ordinary humans (not scientists or poets). "Vibrations" is not a word that comes to mind in the usual experience of sound. The "caused by" clause in def. 1 is a bit outside ordinary human experience but points to the physics of it, for those Wiktionary not satisfied with definitions based on ordinary human experience. We have WP links for just this purpose. DCDuring (talk) 04:19, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Compare our 4 definitions with the 12 senses and subsenses at MWOnline. DCDuring (talk) 04:25, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Sounds to me like the definitions here may be deficient. I don't know what the "experience of ordinary humans" has to do with anything, unless you are just saying to keep the language at an 8th grade level. As to these two definitions, they could either be kept separate or combined in a semicoloned fashion, but they should not be mashed together as if it were the same thing. -Mike (talk) 18:16, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

@Moverton Many of our users are literally 8th graders. Even more are 8th graders with respect to physics. In, say, Torres Strait Creole do they have a lot of scientific discussions of acoustics? I would not ban scientific definitions, of course, but we need to extirpate elitism in our definitions, whether intentional or accidental. Implying that one needs to know physics to properly use the word sound would seem the wrong way to go. DCDuring (talk) 12:55, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

They potentially give different answers to the question "if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?". Of course, that's a pseudo-philosophical cliché, so the difference may not mean anything for our purposes. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:33, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

It does, IMO. It is now part of ordinary human experience that we can record a sound without hearing it. And we have always been able to make a sound, where our hearing it is not what is salient. DCDuring (talk) 12:53, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

I believe that sound can exist without anyone hearing it, but I don't think it's worth making two definitions, one for the heard type and one for the unheard. Mihia (talk) 20:24, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Don't tell Merriam-Webster. If they find out, we'll lose our edge. DCDuring (talk) 20:54, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Ah, but that's the rub. When the word is used, is the speaker/writer referring to the perceived sound or to the physical waves? It is perfectly valid to write about "an inaudible sound"[21] which can't be perceived. -Mike (talk) 18:16, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Are there cases in which "sound" unambiguously refers to the perception and cannot refer to the physical sound waves? Mihia (talk) 01:12, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Epilepsy and hallucinogenesis would be the topics to check here. Equinox ◑ 01:16, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

The center of any definition of any is NOT science unless the definition is of a word's use in a scientific context. Given the paucity of our definitions of sound, I hardly think that a specialized scientific definition is our top priority for this entry. We have WP if someone wants basic physics, acoustics, otic anatomy, neuroscience, etc. DCDuring (talk) 02:56, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes, when one refers to "the sound of" something, the perception of that thing is the sound. What is perceived may be caused by the physical sound waves, but it doesn't have to be. (One may also be talking about the perceived absence of it, as in "There was no sound of thunder, only the stillness.") "The sound of a ringing in the ears" might just be a medical problem, and likewise, a "hallucinatory sound". -Mike (talk) 18:31, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

evidentiary pronounced /-tri/

I've realized most Americans pronounce the final syllable /-tri/, not /ʃri/ or even /t͡ʃri/ with intrusive /t/; is it lexicalized? --Backinstadiums (talk) 01:52, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Really? Most?  --Lambiam 23:48, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I've never heard this, so I'm sceptical of it being "most". - -sche (discuss) 01:35, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

The only pronunciations that I can think of off of the top of my head for this word would be: the likely North American (and note that the precise pronunciation used for the -ary suffix varies from speaker to speaker, even in dialects like my own that lack the Mary-marry-merry merger. Now I personally use an unorthodox pronunciation not really used much elsewhere, but there are [generally speaking] at least a couple of different ways of pronouncing the suffix in North America. But for the sake of brevity, I will use the more traditional pronunciation here) /ɛ.vɪˈdɛn.ʃiɛəɹi/, and (I guess) /ɛ.vɪˈdɛn.tiɛəɹi/, and the more British /ɛ.vɪˈdɛn.ʃ(iə)ɹi/, and (I guess) /ɛ.vɪˈdɛn.t(iə)ɹi/. I've never heard it pronounced with /t͡ʃ/. Tharthan (talk) 02:42, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

New usage notes on 江 (jiāng) page need more work

I started doing some clean up on the new usage notes on the 江 (jiāng) page, but it needs more work. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 12:35, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

@Geographyinitiative: 川 (chuān) could really use some usage notes too. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 18:49, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge The reason I made this post in the tea room was because I feel that there are some ephemeral cultural attitudes about the differences between these terms that are somewhat of interest. I did a thorough change to the original usage note just now, but I still don't think that it is really finished or good yet. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 01:04, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

What is the proper romanization of "植う"?

"ū", "uu", "u'u" or "uwu"? -- Huhu9001 (talk) 13:06, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

It should be uu. —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 18:01, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

@Suzukaze-c: What's the source? -- Huhu9001 (talk) 08:19, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

ū isn't logical because the verb ending (u) gets mixed up with the verb root (u). u'u is not a romanization style I have ever encountered. The only time I have seen apostrophes used is to distinguish e.g. n'a (んあ) from na (な). wu does not exist in modern Japanese (but I seem to remember reading somewhere that the "w" in e.g. negatives あう -> あわない does stem from an original conception that the verb ended -wu). Mihia (talk) 15:04, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Related: Inexorable spread of Japanese ou --Backinstadiums (talk) 18:57, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Another related question. It is said that in Old Japanese vowel sequences were not permitted. But are ワ下二 verbs an exception? In man'yoshu 3746, we have "人の植うる 田は植ゑまさず". -- Huhu9001 (talk) 13:29, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

@Huhu9001: Yes, ultimately the ワ行 verbs would be exceptions to the vowel sequences restriction. While this might be interpreted to suggest the existence of a /wu/ sound in ancient Japanese, I haven't found any sources that state this -- rather, the opposite, that there was no /wu/ ↔ /u/ distinction, even if it does surface in conjugated forms.

(FWIW, many modern instances of /-w-/ appearing in negatives, as with あう → あわない, are from older あふ → あはない and the associated sound shifts affecting word-medial /f/ sounds in Middle Japanese.)

‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:30, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Rewording of the usage note of -fold

Don't the two examples given mean the same? --Backinstadiums (talk) 18:53, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

They have the same meaning, but the threefold is an adjective in the first example (modifying the noun increase) and an adverb in the second (modifying the verb increased). Ultimateria (talk) 21:31, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Is the question about the usage notes or the usexes? Does “inflation saw an increase by twofold” mean the same as “inflation has increased threefold” (that is, an increase by 200% to three times the original value)? There is also the threefold path, which does not mean a path by a factor of three. And a “threefold insult” means something that is an insult in three ways.  --Lambiam 21:48, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

@Lambiam: Could you add a numerical example in the usage notes? That would clarify it --Backinstadiums (talk) 14:37, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

elvan: voicing of final /f/ or plural <elves> as base for the adjectival suffix?

Which alternative is the correct? in elvan, is there voicing of final /f/ or rather the plural <elves> is taken as the base for the adjectival suffix -an? --Backinstadiums (talk) 11:10, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

I guess that this is a term (there is enough sourcing for it), but... where did you come upon this? I have never seen this term before in my life. At first glance, it looks like a folk etymological alteration of elven (which, in a way, was itself a [since Tolkien popularised its general adjectival use, perhaps intentional] more modern interpretation of the word usually represented now as elfin [or at least closely related to that word, anyway] [which was historically spelt in various ways], which was [historically] a noun meaning "elf or fairy", but usually in practice "pixie, female fairy", which was also used as a quasi-adjective as well) by someone more accustomed to the -an suffix than the longer established, native suffix -en (which, admittedly, is [in practice] more oftentimes used for materials than it is for anything else). But I am utterly baffled as to why anyone would misinterpret (or misremember) elven as elvan, so perhaps it was intentional after all.

...As for the question at hand, if we assume that elvan is just an alteration of elven, then isn't the answer neither of the ones that you suggested? Wouldn't it just be because of the same process that has wolf, wolven, for instance? Tharthan (talk) 20:20, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

@Tharthan: check here --Backinstadiums (talk) 20:29, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Looking at elfin and elven and the Middle English Dictionary's entries on elf and elve(n), I get the impression that elf comes from Middle English /ɛlf/ with final and thus voiceless /f/, while the various elv(V)n words come from attributive use of the Middle English noun /ɛlvən/, with medial and thus voiced /v/, being at least partially re-interpreted as an adjective with an adjectival suffix: -en in the case of elven, and apparently -an in the case of elvan (like sylvan? would it be too fanciful to suggest that the association of elves with woods might have influenced a few writers?). Elfin apparently took this a step further and switched to f and /f/ based on elf. - -sche (discuss) 05:37, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Reason for the deletion of /v/ in e'er

It'd improve its entry just to explain how the deletion of /v/ in e'er came about --Backinstadiums (talk) 00:35, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

It might be done for the sake of the meter or rhyme in poems. Mihia (talk) 02:31, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

@Mihia Are you sure that that is the most likely explanation? Considering that, for instance, modern head came about during Middle English through something like: *heavèd (I would guess [forgive my poor Middle English pronunciation approximations] /heːv[e/ə]d/) → *hea'ed (I would guess /heːd/) -> head, why wouldn't you reckon that this was a somewhat "normal" change (at least in colloquial or poetic speech), in the English of particularly older eras? Tharthan (talk) 03:04, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Another case with elision of v is Old English hlāford /ˈhlɑːford/ (< hlāfweard) > Middle English loverd /ˈlɔːvərd/ > lord, pronounced something like /lɔrd/ in Middle and Early Modern English. — Eru·tuon 05:51, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

had from haved and e'en from even are some others...however, I wouldn't call it "regular" but "occasionally featured", because in the vast majority of cases the v remained: ME haver "oats" features only a one-off hawer, but never a *har and we never see *lid for lived. Leasnam (talk) 19:06, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

All of these seem to me to be due to loss of the second vowel, causing loss of the v. There's apparently some kind of phonotactic restriction on having a cluster of v with a following consonant in the same syllable (the past ending seems not to count most of the time- perhaps the restriction sees it as a separate syllable). What's irregular is the loss of the vowel, not the loss of the v. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:41, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

The Middle English Dictionary suggests monosyllabic forms (er, ar) are attested in Middle English, which would support that idea, although their sourcing seems weak (AFAICT they list only a single work with "Wepen he mohte / Er his lyf syþ", where I'd be wary of mere scribal abbreviation unless there are more examples). - -sche (discuss) 05:54, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Btw, if the loss of the v is indeed regular and occurs the same way in other words (never/ne'er also seems to have some monosyllablic forms in Middle English; what about over/o'er?), and that is something we deem worth explaining in the etymology section, perhaps it could be templatized, in the manner of Template:-a-o-x (incidentally there may be a better name for that template). - -sche (discuss) 06:08, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

And even/e'en. It seems to have been more regular (and persistent) in Scots and some English dialects. If I had to guess, I would say the only reason more words didn't permanently lose their V's was because of their persistence in writing. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 20:02, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

I also think that that is the most likely explanation, myself. Before this discussion began, that was what I assumed was the reason. Tharthan (talk) 20:06, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

an Uber, an Uzi,... /u:/

I've just realized about this pattern, an Uber/Uzi, without /j/, but does it apply to any native word as well? --Backinstadiums (talk) 13:24, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

If by "Uber", you mean that dreadful service that seeks to replace the taxicab industry, then I ought to point out something:

"Uber" is a shortening of the earlier "UberCab", which seems to be derived from über- + cab. Since über- itself has a few different pronunciations (which one is used truly does seem to vary from speaker to speaker. I know of no "regional" pronunciations of über-: they all seem to have to do with personal preference, and/or one's familiarity with German pronunciation), I wouldn't rely on it for evidence of a pattern. Furthermore, I daresay that the service has now surpassed the prefix in popular knowledge, and that more people are aware of the service than are aware of the prefix (or, rather, the prefix's use in English).

Regarding uzi, that is a special case, because it is a derivative of a foreign name. Similarly, when the name Yotam is used in English, it is (at least in my experience) usually fairly faithfully realised as something along the lines of /joʊˈtɑm/. On the other hand, the much longer established Jotham, which is (to all intents and purposes) the exact same name, has a Anglicised pronunciation: /ˈdʒoʊθəm/. So, again, not the best example for use as evidence for a pattern. Tharthan (talk) 14:09, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Am I missing something, or isn't "an" the expected form before a vowel, which /u/ is? Yes, it applies to other words; "an oopsie", for example, like (with other vowels) "an aardvark", "an ugly person". It's "an" before a /j/ that would be weird (hence "a yew tree" exists, while hits for google books:"an yew tree" are mostly calling it out as an error). As the usage notes at an indicate, one can also find bare "a" before a vowel sometimes, but that's not the expected/standard article. - -sche (discuss) 16:51, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

@-sche: the phoneme u does not show the possibility of /j/ before some contextual high-back allophones, even in a brief note, which I would add --Backinstadiums (talk) 19:29, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Hm, true, the letter u can sometimes represent /ju/... but I kinda think the solution might be to remove the "phoneme pronunciation" section from [[u]] entirely, rather than add to it. (Hopefully more people will weigh in on that question...) I mean, consider what such a section at [[o]] would look like, since it can famously be pronounced like everything from /ɪ/ to /u/ to /wʌ/. (I don't think /ju/ and /u/ are allophones, btw, if you were saying that—or perhaps I am misunderstanding you?—because they're contrastive in minimal pairs like use (verb)~ooze.) - -sche (discuss) 21:00, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

@-sche: It's a problem of "directionality", so that one /wʌ/ has come to be represented by <o> in <one>, not the other way round--Backinstadiums (talk) 21:28, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

The thing is, I really do think that a fairly large percentage of the general populace has at least some vague understanding that English spelling is generally historical and (quite often) etymological [I'm not saying that they necessarily fully understand, but I do think that they have at least some vague notion of the fact]. Yes, I have heard people say things like "Well, the reason why we pronounce ‘right’ as /ɹʌɪt/, but ‘ride’ as /ɹaɪd/ is because of the ‘gh’ in ‘right’", and nonsense of that sort (I've actually heard that particular one from two different people, of very different generations, of absolutely no relation). Nevertheless, it has been my experience that people that have received at least some level of formal education tend to realise that there is more than meets the eye about the spelling system used for the English language. They don't assume that it is purely arbitrary, or that is intended to cause unneeded strife for speakers attempting to put their thoughts into writing. I know that this isn't true everywhere in the English-speaking world, but I think that it likelily holds true generally amongst those that, again, have at least some level of formal education. Tharthan (talk) 01:47, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

What is the differences between immediate and prompt?

According to the Oxford dictionary, they share the meaning "done without delay". I am wondering is there any difference between them when using them. If you can replace one with the other, then why should there be two words which have the same meaning?

Usually "immediate" means right now, with no delay at all; "prompt" means fast/soon but perhaps a little later than now. Also you can say somebody is always prompt (i.e. they habitually do not delay things), but you can't use "immediate" that way. Equinox ◑ 13:26, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

You might weaken the Oxford definition of prompt to “done without undue delay”. I may add that the observation that something (e.g. a response) is immediate is merely a factual, objective statement. To say that something was prompt involves a value judgement (as expressed by the qualification “no undue”).  --Lambiam 00:51, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Sanskrit verb भरति (bharati) has no conjugation table

If anyone here has it please add it. I've been googling a bit trying to find one but I haven't. Maybe it's in some grammar book?

career changer

What does this word actually mean? It was added in 2016 as a translation hub. ---> Tooironic (talk) 12:20, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Someone who changes their career, e.g. a coal miner who becomes a programmer. Equinox ◑ 22:17, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Well, that usage would be unexceptional, but IMO the combination much more often refers to an event that does, or especially should provoke a change in the career one pursues: e.g. R

recognition that advancement is rare, that one lacks a status, talent, or disposition that favors advancement, or that conditions have changed in a field, creating a new option or foreclosing a former one. Or embarrassing a boss or influential colleague, or the enterprise, by uncovering incompetence or malfeasance to the detriment of the wrong person or without foresight. One might e.g. thereby leave engineering, and become a chauffeur.
--Jerzy•t 11:03, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

duodecad

According to the wikipedia entry for twelve, "a group of twelve things is usually a "dozen" but may also be referred to as a "duodecad""; should the term be added? --Backinstadiums (talk) 13:48, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Sure, thanks for spotting it. I've added it, although apparently (as with other duodeca- vs dodeca- words) the form dodecad is more common. Also, judging by ngrams, somewhere near half the uses of it (in either spelling) are capitalized in reference to various specific groups of twelve...which may mean we should have {{altcaps}} entries at Dodecad and Duodecad. (I know we wouldn't normally create e.g. Government just because government is sometimes capitalized, but if half the uses are capitalized, that might meet the threshold...) - -sche (discuss) 17:01, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

@-sche: Thanks. It'd be great to add a bit of etymology as well if possible. --Backinstadiums (talk) 23:00, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

distributive adjective of ten

According to the wikipedia enry for ten, "The ordinal adjective is decimal; the distributive adjective is DENARY"; what does it exactly mean? should it be added? --Backinstadiums (talk) 17:35, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

My best guess is that the editor who added this at Wikipedia meant the sense of “containing ten parts”.  --Lambiam 10:57, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

duodenary 2. "Of the twelfth order"

An example would clarify what sense of order is intended in duodenary 2. "Of the twelfth order" --Backinstadiums (talk) 13:18, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

The quotation on the "or" page.

Hi! The quotation used as an example for the usage of the word "or" is utterly incomprehensible. Here it is:

The sporophyte foot is also characteristic: it is very broad and more or less lenticular or disciform, as broad or broader than the calyptra stalk […] , and is sessile on the calyptra base […]

It contains an another occurence of the word in the phrase more or less. For a non-native speaker it might not be obvious that it's a part of the idiom. Also, the sentence is grammatically too complicated, and when it comes to vocabulary used, even for me (and I consider myself a fairly good non-native English speaker) it's full of words I've never heard or read in my life: sporophyte, lenticular, disciform, calyptra, stalk, sessile... "Or" is one of the most used words in the English language. Surely there must be a simpler quote to describe its meaning. Uostofchuodnego (talk) 18:12, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

This is so over the top that it becomes funny. I have replaced the quotation by two examples of use that are, hopefully, more friendly to native and non-native English speakers alike. (The noun stalk is actually a fairly common word, but most are not. I have to look up what calyptra means.)  --Lambiam 00:41, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you! I have to admit that despite using "or" for so many years, the old quote made me quite confused regarding its meaning and usage. --Uostofchuodnego (talk) 17:23, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

a day late and a dollar short

Entered as a noun; defined as "action that was taken too late and is too feeble to be of any use". This should be improved somehow. The day and dollar are not, in themselves, the action: "his work was a day late" isn't like saying "his work was a piece of jewellery". Should it perhaps be an adverb? Equinox ◑ 22:16, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

@Equinox: Wiktionary:Tea_room/2019/January#a_day_late_and_a_dollar_short_part_of_speech. Per utramque cavernam 23:01, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

I have now defined it as both an adjective and an adverb. It would be nice to have a joint PoS like “Adjective/Adverb”; in many languages there are many words that can assume either role.  --Lambiam 00:05, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

It's a PP with a null preposition. :trollface: Equinox ◑ 00:16, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Are you fishing for a complement?  --Lambiam 01:06, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Good fun, guys, and even admirably clever, but I'm willing to be the wet blanket who spoils the fun (or even the goat): there's also work being done here, and some jokes, like those, need to be spoiled by labeling them as puns or otherwise jokes, for the sake of those who might otherwise be confused, and thus discouraged from learning or contributing.
--Jerzy•t 11:43, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

See also day late, dollar short. I still wonder if these should be defined as ==Phrase==s, on the grounds that they function the same way as "his apology was a week late", "help arrived a week late". - -sche (discuss) 19:19, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Sadly, I can find next to no grammar books discussing this phrase. Sherwin Cody's old (1903) Grammar & punctuation says: "Many nouns signifying time, place, etc., are used in an adverbial sense without prepositions. To all intents and purposes they are adverbs; yet they retain the powers of nouns. Examples: 'I am going home;' 'He arrived a day late,' or 'a day later;' [...]." That's all I can see; Kumar E. Suresh's 2010 Communication Skills And Soft Skills only calls it an "idiom", and likewise Cambridge and McGraw-Hill's dictionaries of American idioms contain it but without any indication of POS. - -sche (discuss) 19:31, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

I find it very hard to accept Cody's treating home and day as similar. Consider home. In "They went home" there is not even a preposition that can precede home unless it has a determiner, in which case "They went [DET] home" is not acceptable. This and other non-nounish behavior strongly supports having an adverb PoS section for home, as most dictionaries, including Wiktionary do.

This is completely different from day and dollar. The phrases that use these nouns separately also work with many other quantified nouns that are units of measurement. These quantified nouns could be augmented by prepositions like by, which IMO confirms their adverbial nature, modifying late and short. It would also be perfectly acceptable to say "They came up late and short." (adverbial) "The profits were late and short (of expectations) (adjectival).

To me this behavior of the component terms with these modifications would seem to warrant having adjective and adverb sections in the case of this phrase and any closely parallel cases. DCDuring (talk) 20:16, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Counts the elements before and after as two possibilities.

The heading is one of the definitions given for the English conjunction or. I cannot figure out what this means. Is the conjunction doing the counting? Before and after in a temporal sense, or in the textual order? What meaning of elements is intended? Examples?  --Lambiam 00:59, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

It must mean textual order. The elements must be linguistic constituents (from clause down to morpheme ("pre- or post-(mortem)"). The definition is formatted with {{non-gloss definition}}, yielding italics, but is not worded in a way that makes it perfectly clear that it is not to be read as a gloss. Maybe Used to indicate that the items preceding and following or in the text are possibilities, not the only ones. DCDuring (talk) 20:28, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Top 20 scientific name entries with redlinked epithets

Anyone feel like adding some more Latin bits of scientific names?

1. perfoliatum/perfoliatus adj (Eupatorium perfoliatum)
2. pseudoacacia n (Robinia pseudoacacia)
3. balsamea/balsameus adj (Abies balsamea)
4. leucocephala/leucocephalus adj (Leucaena leucocephala)
5. stercoralis adj (Strongyloides stercoralis)
6. pentandra/pentandrus adj (Ceiba pentandra)
7. phalloides adj (Amanita phalloides)
8. mydas n (Chelonia mydas)
9. macrochirus adj (Lepomis macrochirus)
10. aucuparia n? (Sorbus aucuparia)
11. sciureus adj (Saimiri sciureus)
12. platanoides adj (Acer platanoides)
13. haliaetus (Pandion haliaetus)
14. vitulina/vitulinus adj (Phoca vitulina)
15. guajava n (Psidium guajava)
16. hippocastanum n (Aesculus hippocastanum)
17. idaeus adj (Rubus idaeus)
18. oceanicus adj (Oceanites oceanicus)
19. hederacea/hederaceus adj (Glechoma hederacea)
20. monogyna/monogynus adj (Crataegus monogyna)

In case someone happened to feel like adding some Latin entries. This list includes a monkey, osprey and raspberry. Based on the list of missing common epithets I made a few years back. Ranked by how often the word and its variations appear within known scientific names in the google book corpus. —Pengo (talk) 01:17, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

I have added my evidence-based, but not definitive beliefs as to the PoS of the missing items, some of which are feminine inflected forms of 1st/2nd declension adjectives. DCDuring (talk) 02:48, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Some of these simply shouldn't have entries (e.g. the guajava of Psidium guajava). I'll try to deal with the legitimate ones, however. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:41, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks guys for having a look. Pengo (talk) 06:51, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

mydas appears to be related to emydas (ref ctrl-f: Geminus) —Pengo (talk) 07:30, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

guajava could perhaps have an {{only in}}, couldn't it? Like e.g. rimiculus (User talk:DCDuring#rimiculus). - -sche (discuss) 19:34, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

1 / 20. —Pengo (talk) 23:57, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

"ledge": rock formation and quarry product

   I tore an ad out of a placemat in a New England diner's placemat, that includes:

All Ledge, Gravel and Sand Products

...

Portable Crushing Services & Trucking is available

All your site work needs, excavating, bulldozing, etc.

(Sic as to what is ungrammatical, either by conjoining unlike components or subject/verb disagreement "Ledge" refers to sedimentary rock, but I can't tell whether to the consumer use of polished or cleaved stone for door-steps, shelves, or other surfaces, or to the source of that raw material from the horizontal formations that are excavated, and sawn parallel to the strata or cleaved along the weak layers that reflect temporal variations in deposition rate or composition.    Is this seemingly ambiguous usage likely to be intentional, and in any case, is the ambiguity worthy of lexicographic mention? (Any interested colleague should take it and run with it.) Hmm, does my wording hint that all the above was worded while watching Antiques Road Show?)
-- Oops, belated sig! Jerzy•t 02:00, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

big-boy pants, big-girl pants

Might it be able to be accurately said that there is a nuance (albeit only slightly) to these words, of "slight mockery" or at least of "making a slight jab at one's masculinity/femininity", oftentimes when it is used? I am not saying that this is always the case, but I am saying that it seems to be the case in many instances of its use (and, I believe, intentionally so by those who are using it that way).

I mean, I have always taken it as a given that there is a difference between "Man up, Hal. We have a tough job to do!", and "Alright, Hal, it's time to put on your big-boy pants, now. We have real work to do." The first is merely reminding Hal (albeit with a good bit of force) that he is a grown man, and that (given such) he ought to act that way (especially given the current situation). The latter seems to be implying that Hal is usually not masculine or mature, and that he needs to "grow up", because this is not something some small child can do.

Again, the nuance is not there in the minds of every speaker, but I know for sure that at least some people are using this word with such a nuance, and I am pretty sure that they are intentionally using it in a way that one is supposed to interpret it understanding the nuance. The reason that I bring this up here is because I really do think that it is used widely enough with that nuance that it is significant enough to warrant the inclusion of a short usage note mentioning it in the entries for big-boy pants and big-girl pants.

Thoughts? Tharthan (talk) 04:14, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

It's making a jab at maturity. I don't see how it's making a jab at masculinity/femininity, unless you were to say "big-girl pants" to a man (or, less probably, vice versa?). Equinox ◑ 04:25, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

production

"1. The act of producing. The widget making machine is being used for production now. 3. The act of being produced. The widgets are coming out of production now." Are these really distinct senses or should they be merged? It seems to me that the act of production is the act of being produced; you can't have one without the other. Equinox ◑ 20:29, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

You are talking about concepts, not words.

In "The [Edsel/movie] was still in production." production would seem to have a passive meaning, though "the act of being produced" should probably be replaced by something like "a state of being produced". You could not substitute "the act of producing":

*The [Edsel|movie] was still in the act of producing.

DCDuring (talk) 20:39, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

BTW, it would be a service to the project to review all 96 instances in principal namespace of "act of being […] " and replace it with something at least as good as "state or condition of being […] ". DCDuring (talk) 20:42, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

festum

I'm new here so forgive me if I'm doing this wrong, but regarding the page for the Latin word 'festum', I'm wondering whether instead of "fēstum" with a long 'e' it should be "festum" with a short 'e'. Indeed this is how it appears on the pages in other languages, and since it diphthongises in the Spanish to 'fiesta', I believe this means the vowel must have been short in the Latin? PaterAeneas (talk) 22:24, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

ballenspel

Defined as "a ballgame played with multiple balls, notably billiards". This doesn't seem strongly linked with billiards or similar games at all in the results on Google Books. Does anyone know of an association like this? ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 12:57, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

The term is used for the game of billiards in the Camera Obscura, and the popularity of the book may have contributed at some time far in the past to such an association. Koenen does not have an entry for the term but uses it in the definition of the word biljart in the sense of a table. We see the term used in the billiards sense also here, but I think “notably” is far too strong. Historically the term appears to refer to all kinds of games involving balls: boules (like here), some game I don’t know but definitely not billiards here, the Aztec ballgame (like here), and so on.  --Lambiam 00:49, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

sang

For the same reason as thang, should sang be added? --Backinstadiums (talk) 13:38, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Related discussion: [22]. Equinox ◑ 13:42, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

salle from the Spanish verb salir

The orthographic form salle from the Spanish verb salir does not exist --Backinstadiums (talk) 18:36, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

I thought this change might do the trick, but I see no effect. Does the same issue not also apply to salles?  --Lambiam 00:09, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

we're

Some clarification is needed regarding what is meant by "(Some southern English accents)" in the pronunciation section. Is this referring to dialects in Southern England, to dialects in, say, the Southern United States, or to something else?

The transcription /wɜː(ɹ)/ would almost seem to imply that it is referring to some dialects in Southern England. I cannot speak at all to the veracity of that (with my fairly limited knowledge of British English dialectal pronunciation, the only thing that I can think of off hand that would seem to potentially fit with that [if we are limiting this to Southern England] would be some kind of West Country dialectal pronunciation. But what do I know?).

I can say, however, that I have heard /wɝ/ used for we're by speakers of broad, Newer Southern American English (as opposed to Older Southern American English) plenty of times (unfortunately).

Would someone with more knowledge on the matter mind clarifying what is meant by "(Some southern English accents)" in the pronunciation section of the entry?

Thanks in advance! Tharthan (talk) 22:42, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

God's are be hard to find

Is be in God's are be hard to find "habitual aspect"? --Backinstadiums (talk) 23:30, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

I don't understand the sentence; the grammar seems entirely wrong. Equinox ◑ 00:46, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Does anyone actually say that? I suspect those example sentences simply ought to be removed. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:58, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Firstly, I think it should say "gods" (plural) not "God's" (possessive); secondly, unless there is very strong evidence for these wildly non-standard sentences then, yes, we should kill them. We need to explain widespread anomalies but not promote rare ones. Equinox ◑ 01:02, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

I think there may be some misunderstanding about the parsing of this. In this example, "are" is allegedly a noun, meaning "grace" or "mercy", so the sentence allegedly means "God's grace/mercy be hard to find", which, I suppose, may be a dialect form of "God's grace/mercy is hard to find". Mihia (talk) 01:30, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

According to the link Back provided are#Noun is a noun. In AAVE and probably in some other varieties of English spoken in the southern US, be can represent habitual aspect. See W:AAVE for more. DCDuring (talk) 01:32, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

I removed the "crazy, messed up world" and "suicide vest" usexes, which didn't seem to add anything beyond what the first part of the usage note says, that are#noun is used mostly in the phrase "God's are". As to "be", it's probably dialectal (AAVE etc as DCDuring says) if not just an error. - -sche (discuss) 06:15, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

what is the meaning of "seech"? --Backinstadiums (talk) 11:08, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Nothing in OneLook, Century, MED, Scots dictionary. Maybe a full text search at Google Books. These usexes should probably be replaced by actual citations. Also I can't find are#Noun in dictionaries. DCDuring (talk) 13:28, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

It's an alternative form / phonetic development (possibly not actually attested past Middle English) of Old English sēċan, whence also the usual form seek. (Beseech, btw, did survive with this pronunciation.) I suspect this entry was taken from either a dictionary of Middle English like the MED, or one that conflates Middle and modern English like the OED. - -sche (discuss) 18:17, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

@-sche, DCDuring: seech --Backinstadiums (talk) 18:34, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

There are many thousands of words mentioned in regional dictionaries of English. The hard part is finding uses. DCDuring (talk) 18:50, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

OK, I managed to cite seech. Curiously, all the sources I found and all the citations in the EDD of this form are from Lancashire. - -sche (discuss) 19:47, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

sonsabitches

The theoretical singular form for sonsabitches is lacking, or not attested? --Backinstadiums (talk) 23:36, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Neither. The entry itself is telling you what the singular form is. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:59, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Right. If you're wondering why there's no *sonsabitch, it's because the singular wouldn't start with the plural sons-. - -sche (discuss) 06:21, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge, -sche: I meant singular -of- is represented in the plural as -a- --Backinstadiums (talk) 10:04, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

@Backinstadiums: It's because of is followed by a consonant in the plural but a vowel in the singular; the final /v/ is usually only elided before consonants. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 16:20, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists this as one of several variants of sonofabitch.  --Lambiam 12:34, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

The corresponding singular is sonabitch, phonetically deleting the second schwa and then /v.b/ not even regressively geminated, but simple /b/, yet my fav is sonuvabitches --Backinstadiums (talk) 16:48, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Sonuva bitches wear Bulova watches.  --Lambiam 22:44, 1 March 2019 (UTC)