Talk:witch

Etymological notes deleted

Etymological notes

As "Word and Object" (W.V.O. Quine's book title) alike, the witch has been cursed and persecuted in Europe for millenia, culminating in evil and cruel witch-hunts. They firmly believed in "word-magic," say, the magic of the word witch. The word has survived, and the object is reviving together with neopagagism.

Yet, most etymological discussions at present seem to shy away from even the likelihood that it may be cognate with wit, white, wise, wissen, vision, videre, and so on. (Therefore, the above quote is quite surprising and striking.) For the Slavic and Finno-Ugric, whiteness is the same as brightness, and ultimately light. Witch-hunt was light-hunt, as it were, hence the mark of the dark.

The emergence and evolution of the modern Enlightenment Movement and science in Europe simply may have been the radical reaction and revolution, to get back the light. So it was, and has remained to date, highly polytical from the beginning or by nature. This is the pathology Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault are talking about.

User:DCDuring behaved as the "bad guy" enough to delete the above from the main page witch. I reverted and he deleted again. I gave up re-reverting. Instead I copied and pasted it here. For this caused User:Atelaes to initiate the Wiktionary:Beer_parlour#Can_someone_else_please_be_the_bad_guy talk, which would make far less sense without this. Therefore this needs to be here or somewhere else for easy access.

To me, User:Atelaes appears instrumental in making me something like a witch or prey of witch-hunt. I am supposed to be "whitelisted" without being informed of the fact. To me, again, such whitelisting without notice seems to be unforgivably evil and cruel. But this is not my point.

Why do they mistake me for a witch or the like? They claim that I used to claim the Euro-Korean liguistic genetics, while "everyone else" unwarrants. I think "everyone else" is a gross exaggeration, as it is simply a version of w:Eurasiatic hypothesis, however minor. Personally I do believe it to be highly likely. But I have refrained from explicitly claiming it as such, especially under the Etymology section, with only a few exception.

From the w:Ural-Altaic perspective, I suggested the likely kinship of Korean 밝다 and 박쥐 to Estonian valge "white," Finnish valkea "fire," Hungarian világ "light," and Middle English bakke "bat." Perhaps, bakke was the only IE word whose kinship I suggested under Etymology. The two Finno-Ugric pages had included my etymological edits more than a year until yesterday when User:Ivan Štambuk cleaned up my edits but for the Estonian valge. I wonder why he left it. He also talked at the end of this section. The following are the two quotes:

• ``You cannot claim that obvious borrowings like word for gong and menu are cognates, or try to masquerade it under the "Euro-Korean" category.`` (my underline as a sheer nonsense.)

• ``I strongly advise you to abandon any kind of Uralo-Altaic speculations in etymologies, justifying them as "minority views that need attention". They're not some "minority views", they're complete 19th century rubbish...`` (You need not strongly advise me, bacause this thesis is highly polytically muddled, and because my main point or intention does not lie in linguistic kinship or etymology but in offering coincidental bonus information as will be detailed below.)

If I were really so rash or reckless as they recklessly claim, the above Etymological notes would have included the Korean cognates 빛 (bit, "light"), 비추다 (bichuda, "to shine"), 비치다 (bichida, "to look through, shine"), 보다 (boda, "to see"), etc. They were completely excluded even from pure comparison. Otherwise, User:Atelaes' initiation of the talk would have sounded understandable and reasonable (or far more so).

I strongly believe that the pure comparison of Korean words with the semantically and phonetically similar European words (but for obvious loanwords) is far more useful and pragmatic than Anagrams at least. I never understand why such additional comparative information should be definitely avoided, especially from the reader's perspective and curiosity. Yet no one has yet persuaded me as such.

I note that most cleanups of such data have been done by admins rather than neutral editors, who have only poor knowledge of Korean, if any. To me, their community looks like the wicked Wikt wick. (Note I make an original sense of "wicked," that is, "twisted." Historically, the Christians did, and possibly admins would, make an evil sense of it. I coin the term as a warning.) It seems to have made a decision that my contribution shall be discouraged as much as possible or entirely kept from Wiktionary. My past contribution seems to have been systematically regenerated, if not evilly degenerated. Lots of links and categories are found destroyed.

I created the following three categories mutually exclusively to cover most Korean words:

1. Category:Native Korean words
2. Category:Sino-Korean words
3. Category:Euro-Korean words

These are neutral indeed, and just too crude for good etymology, but perhaps were suspected of their motivation for "Euro-Korean" kinship. They talked about their abolishment, and decided to abolish the last without an alternative, just for one unreasonable, actually ridiculous reason, degenerating into no category for the loanwords of European origin, which appeal least to me while native words do most. User:Visviva was to keep; User:Rodasmith was to:

delete. Nobody uses that phrase except to try to demonstrate that Korean has roots in the Indo-European languages tree. If we want a third etymology category for Korean words, it should be more general, e.g. “Category:Korean loanwords”. Rod (A. Smith) (my underline)

The underlined is all absurdity. The likely kinship I mostly expect lies between native Korean words in the category (1) and European words out there, rather than the loanwords in the "Euro-Korean" category (3) (which may have been better reworded as "Korean loanwords of European origin, but was simply rhymed with the "Sino-Korean" category (2) for easy memory). Such an aburdity of one man User:Rodasmith, strongly preoccupied by the "Euro-Korean" kinship syndrome, was the decisive reason for that decision to degrade categorization.

I was quite sure of the mischief and aware the wrong-doer was User:Dmcdevit who I never knew! On page User_talk:Dmcdevit#Deleted_Category:Euro-Korean_words, I harshly asked to undo what he did, while not noticing he is also known as User:Conrad.Irwin against whom I butted on page Talk:못하다 a few days ago. He used to attack on me in group with Atelaes. They seem to do in group as if doing a witch-hunt. They seem to dictate rather than talk as if I were a witch. This is quite harassing style, isn't it?

When User:Rodasmith was little aware what Korean adjectives look and behave like, I talked to him quite a lot about them as well as parts of speech. There you may note particularly my last reply including a vital reference, a link to a 6000-vacabulary excel file and my collaboration proposal. No reply, no thanks for my help. He or someone else must have used the file, contributing definitely to making such a large vocabulary as we have now.

When I started editing, it counted just a few hundred pages. Most of them appear to have been appropriated from the Translations section of the English Wikt, as are most of the foreign. I have contributed nearly a thousand pages in quite detail. I am supposed to have laid the foundation. I met few native Korean speakers. so I also served as a proof reader. Then, my bona fide bonus edits began to be deleted. I grew sick and tired, and almost stopped editing any more. They must have thought Wikt could do without my contribution. It certainly could if it had nothing to do with quality. A bot or young teen could edit guided by Translations.

For what was I aiming in particular? Let's take, for example, Korean 만지-다 (manji-da) and esp. its archaic 마니-다 (mani-da) "to handle" and French mani-er "to handle," not to mention manage, hence exact equivalence. The most critical point is that I have never understood why the former should never be compared with the latter, so as to serve for motivation, memory or curiosity, just for fun or whatever. (In contrast, I have no idea what is the virtue of Anagrams otherwise than mostly for fun.) To serve for Eurasiatic students would be additional. The reader's uses may be rather undefinable.

I am mainly interested in talking to them rather than admins. BP appears to be a place for admins hence not for me in general. So I prefer to talk here. Thanks. --KYPark 12:52, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Eurasiatic is as controversial as Ural-Altaic (though much more probable), and as such hardly merits mentioning in etymologies. Altaic comparative list could be added to appendix though (with the appropriate warnings that the Altaic hypothesis is still not generally accepted). Stuff like comparing the Korean mani-da to the offspring of Latin manus is just nonsense that will be deleted on sight, and would give you progressively increased blocks (you sound just like Dušan when he compares modern Serbian words with those of Akkadian or Ancient Egyptian). There's absolutely no reason whatsoever that Korean alone would follow different categorization scheme by means of Category:Euro-Korean words as opposed to all the other languages here that use the usual "xx:<language name> derivations" category.

I'm sure that there are many areas here in which person like yourself can fruitfully contribute to, and I suggest that you find them ASAP. --Ivan Štambuk 14:59, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Bewitch

Defining witching as bewitching is like defining witching as make witching-you're not defining, merely coming up with another way of saying the same thing. Not only that if someone were to witch you (casts a spell), then they don't bewitch (i.e. fascinate) you. Witching an object or person is covered in to practise witchcraft (since this comes from witch the noun it is acceptable in the dictionary.) — This comment was unsigned.

• The sense comes from the definition in the OED - I think they know what they are talking about. SemperBlotto 10:37, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

'witch' as specifically male?

I disagree with the following entry:

(archaic or dialectal) A man who practises witchcraft.

I don't believe there is any evidence that witch has ever been used exclusively for males. The term applies to both women and men, and in certain contexts and historical periods it has been especially applied to women. But never, to my knowledge, especially or exclusively to men. Fuzzypeg (talk) 04:47, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Right. I've edited the entry. - -sche (discuss) 17:02, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Pretty sure the intended implication here is that it is considered archaic or dialectal usage in contemporary English to refer to a man as a witch. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 13:22, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

Possibly also a type of tree

Chambers 1908 suggests that witch can be short for witch-elm, i.e. wych elm tree. Equinox ◑ 18:35, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

@Equinox: Rather than that, it might also be a spray of one of the trees called witch hazel (an entry you have not touched yet, only known now for plants not naturally occurring in Britain), for example due to its connection with witchcraft. OED indeed has lot of Neo-English quotes for a tree, the last 1861 in this exact spelling reading “mountain-ash, rown, or witch”, where only in context it shows me that it isn’t Sorbus aucuparia now called rowan, both mountain-ash and rowan could refer to an Ulmus and there in that footnote Daniel Henry Haigh speaks about witchcraft; also one seems to agree that in Edmund Spenser winding witche means wych-elm. Fay Freak (talk) 03:23, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

hutch

Note also obsolete form of hutch 'box, crate' in the end only used in Herefordshire, in the 16th c. in Oxford; for etymological reasons probably only wh- spelling is correct, wytche and wytch there are mentions. Fay Freak (talk) 03:23, 13 November 2023 (UTC)