User:CosmicMuse

Hi there — I'm Nicola, a classicist and Indo-European linguistics and papyrology enthusiast. I'm a native English speaker and my languages (in descending order of ability), are as follows:

• Latin
• Ancient Greek (and some awfully pronounced Modern Greek)
• Sanskrit
• Gāndhārī
• Pali (and other Prakrits)
• Bactrian
• Old Persian

At present I hope to substantially improve Wiktionary's coverage of Bactrian terms (and greatly improve my knowledge of the language while doing so). I am beginning with simple Bactrian nouns, adverbs, particles, and prepositions, avoiding compound words (simple nouns first), verbs (conjugation complexities), and proper nouns (less importance; need to research contextual information).

Once this is done, I would like to work on the Old Persian, then Avestan dictionaries, cross-linking them to Bactrian. Then I would like to learn much more about Proto-Iranian and Proto-Indo-Iranian reconstruction (an infinitely fascinating topic, though my primary focus is extant languages).

My linguistic fantasies include learning Tocharian and Classical Chinese, fixing up my Modern Greek, coming to grips with Classical Persian and Pashto, and understanding the influence of Sanskrit and the Prakrits on South-East Asian languages (there is so much to do!).

I'm a novice with Wiktionary formatting, but I'm trying to include as much detail as possible in my entries. I hope to eventually create Bactrian modules for Template:Q. If you feel up for it, any formatting advice would be welcomed.

Bactrian Tools

• Bactrian Noun Entry Template (WIP): Template:User:CosmicMuse/xbc:noun-1

Bactrian Entry Approach (WIP)

As the Bactrian corpus is not large and there is no available dictionary, I'll be figuring out the best approach as I go. The current approach is as follows:

• No uncited word forms:
  • I'll only add noun and verb forms if they are actually extant in the corpus.
  • This will likely need to be reconsidered in the future regarding headwords.
• The oldest form of a word is the 'main form':
  • This approach makes the dictionary easier to approach for those coming to Bactrian from other Iranian or Indian languages, due to a smaller number of sound changes. It suits historical linguists generally (and me personally), and I anticipate there will be further finds of Bactrian texts from earlier periods (i.e. the Kushan Empire).
• Transliteration is currently a compromise, generally following Sims-Williams and Gholami. More details/chart to follow.
• Citation Script

Entry Style Approach (WIP)

• Alternative forms are written as stubs with pronunciation and quotations.
• Non-lemma forms are written as stubs with pronunciation only.
• Old Persian lemmas are transliterated.