User talk:Mahagaja/Archive 17

Diacritics

Hi, was reading the page on Ancient Greek in Wiktionary and saw your name at the bottom. Maybe you can help me or point me to the right contact. I am not sure how to deal with some grc entries in Wiktionary. There are terms that differ only by a diacritic. See for example σέλῑνον (sélīnon, “celery”) in parsley and σέλινον (sélinon) in sedano. As I am extracting etymological data from Wiktionary, I would like to collapse those two entries into one entry only. Do you think I can use some kind of general rule, e.g., replace ῑ with ι? Or should I just keep both to represent data in Wiktionary? The link to the tool I am developing is etytree Epantaleo (talk) 15:49, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

As you might have noticed, both links go to the same entry; the macron is just extra information on vowel length that is usually not represented outside of headwords. You can find all the diacritical marks that are stripped for each language by looking at the subpages of Module:languages. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 15:52, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Ancient Greek entries never include the long and short marks, though they may be displayed. Thus the two links you provided above both point to the same page name, σέλινον. The long and short marks are always optional; if you aren't sure, you can leave them out. Other Ancient Greek diacritics, however, are not optional and are part of the page name: the acute and circumflex accents, the rough and smooth breathings, and the diaresis are all required parts of the page name. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:54, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

liu'unta, rei'ittäjä

Apostrophe happens to be the correct sign in the Finnish orthography. We use all sorts of language-specific signs, why not this?--Hekaheka (talk) 19:57, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't think any language distinguishes the typewriter apostrophe ' from the curly apostrophe ’. The choice between them is purely aesthetic. We have entries for don't, j’ai, Türkiye'yi, δ’ (d’), and so on, and many such entries have hard redirects from the spellings with the curly apostrophe. I don't see any reason to treat Finnish differently. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 08:28, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Here is a link to a very good source for correct Finnish[1]. Unfortunately it's written in Finnish. In it one can find this statement: "Merkki ' ei kuulu suomen kielen normaaliin kirjoitusjärjestelmään, joskin sitä merkistön rajoittuneisuuden vuoksi voidaan joutua käyttämään heittomerkin korvikkeena". When I drop this sentence to Google Translate I get this: "The character ' does not belong to the normal language system of Finnish, although it may have to be used as a substitute for a punctuation mark because of the limitation of the character set". GT translates heittomerkki (“apostrophe”) erroneously to "punctuation mark", but otherwise the translation is good. I don't see why we would not want to go by the book when we know what's written in it? --Hekaheka (talk) 15:11, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Maybe we should take it to the Beer Parlor so more people can discuss it than just you and me. I still feel that curly apostrophe and straight apostrophe are functionally equivalent in all languages and that Wiktionary's in-house style is to use the straight apostrophe. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:16, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

I agree on continuing in the Beer Parlor. --Hekaheka (talk) 15:24, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

etyl cleanup

If you want, you can also target af (Afrikaans), ht (Haitian Creole), id (Indonesian), ms (Malay), sk (Slovak), sl (Slovene), sq (Albanian), and tpi (Tok Pisin). I have cleaned up some entries in all of these, but there's bound to be more. DonnanZ (talk) 13:19, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

@Donnanz:  Done —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 13:49, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, I'm hoping other users will get the message... DonnanZ (talk) 14:05, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, I forgot to mention Turkish (tr). You can save it for another batch if you want. DonnanZ (talk) 15:38, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

It may be a good idea to add Old Norse (non) as well. Although many entries have been cleaned up, I keep finding entries that have only been half done. DonnanZ (talk) 22:34, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

And Vietnamese (vi) too. I had a cleanup on Vietnamese trong reverted, believe it or not, so that language needs targeting. DonnanZ (talk) 11:32, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Wyang has just added Vietnamese to the list of cleaned-up languages. Any attempt to use {{etyl}} for Vietnamese will cause a module error. —Mahāgaja (fomerly Angr) · talk 11:38, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Ah, OK, he must have read what I wrote on the user's talk page. Fantastic. DonnanZ (talk) 11:56, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

zombie language

Perhaps vampire language would work even better? "A language brought back from the dead that feeds upon living languages in order to keep going." ;-) And cislate is awesome. -Stelio (talk) 09:24, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

• Vampire language is good too! —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 10:30, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

Replacing etyl

I spotted a message you'd left for another user about the deprecation of Template:etyl. Is "Borrowed from..." the best alternative for an entry that is a transliteration of a personal name from Greek into English? -Stelio (talk) 15:45, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

I suppose. If a Greek name is used in English, then it's a borrowing from Greek to English, same as any other loanword. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:56, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Great; thank you! :-) -Stelio (talk) 16:15, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

About {{cal}}

Okay, so I didn't get the news that some of the parameters of {{cal}} have been deprecated, fine. But I personally find it pretentious to assume pinyin as the default romanization for unspecified sources of borrowing or calquing of Vietnamese terms derived from Chinese, completely disregarding any other Sinitic languages, be it notable ones like Cantonese or less so like Min Nan, not to mention these terms might have been derived from something much older than modern Mandarin itself. Also, Sino-Vietnamese renditions are a lot more relevant to a Vietnamese entry than pinyin. ばかFumiko￥^talk 20:26, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

@Fumiko Take: If you want to use a different transliteration, that's fine. I only used pinyin because it seemed the least surprising way to transliterate Chinese to me, but I really don't care one way or the other; I don't have a dog in this fight. All that matters to me is getting rid of the deprecated parameters in {{calque}} so that they can be deleted from the template itself and from Module:etymology/templates. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:32, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

@Angr, where is the discussion on the deprecated parameters in {{calque}}? I don't see it on the pages of the module or template. --Victar (talk) 04:50, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

@Victar: They're listed as deprecated on {{calque}}'s documentation page. The reasoning is given there too: "it is recommended to use the appropriate morphology template ({{compound}}, {{affix}} etc.) which gives finer control and more options." Using {{af}} etc. also categorizes the word correctly into "XYZ words suffixed with -foo" or whatever, which the old parameters of {{calque}} don't. (Incidentally, there's no need to ping me on my own talk page: I get notified about edits to my talk page whether I get pung or not.) —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 07:57, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

Ah, OK, I thought maybe it was something new that I missed, like removing |notext=. Thanks, Angr. Yep, I know I don't need to "double-ping" you, but I do it anyway. --Victar (talk) 11:31, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

put-downable

hello. can this mean ascribable, imputable (derived from put down to instead of put down). thank you. --2A02:2788:A4:F44:F5B8:9EE5:6E7:2F25 11:57, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

I don't know; I don't think I've ever used or heard the word put-downable. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:14, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

hello. thank you. you don't like that word?

please, why do we say "do you remember that lovely necklace i gave you? i don't suppose you noticed that a stone was missing" and not "(...) i suppose you didn't notice that a stone was missing". thank you --2A02:2788:A4:F44:16D:6AEA:F4FA:76CB 20:00, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

I didn't say I don't like it, I merely said I don't know it. As for your second question, I don't know the answer to that either. But the two sentences are semantically virtually equivalent anyway. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:44, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Name

With hesitation, let me say this: I think your current user name is a case of poor branding. Whenever I see the signature, it activates the word "angry" in my mind. It would be worth considering a name change, to Andrew G. or whatever else you prefer. Obviously, my opinion on this is just a hint and nothing else. --Dan Polansky (talk) 14:27, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

Since my first name isn't Andrew, it wouldn't be Andrew G.! But you're not the first person to make the association with anger/angry, though that wasn't my intent when I picked the name. I'll think about changing my user name, but what holds me back is the fact that I've been using "Angr" now for 13 years on a large number of Wikimedia projects, including many where I'm an admin. People know me and trust me as Angr, and if I switch to something else, it will confuse people. I know I still think of CodeCat, for example, as CodeCat, and it will take me a long time to think of her as Rua. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:38, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

महत् (mahat) + गज (gaja)? --Barytonesis (talk) 15:25, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Yup! —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:17, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

@Dan Polansky: OK, I've taken your advice. —Mahāgaja (fomerly Angr) · talk 16:21, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Tangent: I briefly misparsed your new username to include an "N" in the third syllable. That was quite a different image.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 18:17, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Thank you. :). --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:15, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Sweet username!! —Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 10:25, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

I like your new name, but I liked your old name as well! It felt wonderfully Germanic to me. —JohnC5 09:59, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

What I dislike about my new username is that I keep almost typing "Maharaja" instead. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 10:12, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

I've been considering changing my signature recently. Any suggestions now that your mind is flush with fresh ideas? —JohnC5 10:19, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Not really. Your signature needs to reflect your personality; I can't tell you how to zhoosh it up. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 10:24, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

You make a good point! —*i̯óh₁nC₅ 10:55, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Well done! —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 11:07, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Oh my. I created my username and signature so many years ago that I'm not sure how well they reflect me any more, but I shall keep them the same just to defy all this zhooshing of late. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:56, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

I really wish zhooshery were a word. —*i̯óh₁nC^[5] 19:11, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

As for "Your signature needs to reflect your personality", I believe the opposite: signatures should be simple and have good readability and such. JohnC5 is a good signature, easy to remember; *i̯óh₁nC is hard to remember, and thus has poor usability. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:17, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Doctor aware; no action taken. —*i̯óh₁nC^[5] 10:27, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Unlenited adjectives in Irish

Hello Mr. Elephant, I was wondering if unlenited genitive masculine singular forms like móir and caoil ever actually occurred in practice, and it appears they don't. {{ga-decl-adj-1}} and a bunch of the other adjective declension templates, however, make it sound as though they do, and since I see that you seem to prefer {{ga-decl-adj}} anyway, should we just get rid of those footnotes and perhaps consolidate the templates as well? Esszet (talk) 22:38, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Well, we shouldn't get rid of the footnotes in {{ga-decl-adj-1}}, though I am in favor of moving over to {{ga-decl-adj}}. I do want to keep unlenited entries like móir and caoil, though, because learners who encounter mhóir and chaoil may well look them up under the unlenited forms. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 10:37, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I'm a bit confused, do you want to keep {{ga-decl-adj-1}} at all? Esszet (talk) 12:45, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I guess not. I can't think of anything that it does that {{ga-decl-adj}} doesn't do just as well. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 12:57, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Alright, then the only issue is {{ga-decl-adj-2}}, should we try to incorporate it into {{ga-decl-adj}}? Esszet (talk) 01:16, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Except for the fact that {{ga-decl-adj}} doesn't show the archaic gen.sg.masc. of adjectives in -úil (which doesn't strike me as critical), it already works for 2nd-declension adjectives just fine: diff, diff. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 09:55, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps we should have an entry for unlenited. bd2412 T 14:40, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Well, someone just created it, and I guess we just have to have a bot migrate existing entries to {{ga-decl-adj}}, but it does seem like it would be a pretty complicated procedure. We're going to have to explain a lot to them in order for them to know exactly what to do; I'll try to get around to it sometime in the next few days. Esszet (talk) 15:14, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Or we could do it manually. Takes longer, but it might be easier in the long run. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 15:20, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Corpas Stairiúil na Gaeilge

An raibh a fhios agat faoi Corpas Stairiúil na Gaeilge? Chuala mé faoi i mBlas, agus tá alt ar Tuairisc.ie. Tugann sé don focal "badhbh", mar shampla, é seo. -- Catsidhe ^{(verba, facta)} 03:03, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

No, I hadn't heard of it. That's wonderful! Pity it only goes back to 1600, though; I wish there was an easy way to discover which words were first attested in Old Irish and which weren't attested until Middle Irish. DIL only gives the names of the works without dates, so unless it's a work you're familiar with you don't know how old it is. My only other complaint with CSnaG is that it doesn't have an English-language interface, at least none that I can find, and it still takes me a long time to puzzle out Irish sentences. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 07:10, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

There's a button at the top-right of the page, being medium gray on medium gray on medium gray, which says "English/Irish". Click on that, and you get the English version, and the button changes to "Gaeilge/Béarla". --Catsidhe ^{(verba, facta)} 23:29, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Wow, they really don't want you to find that, do they? —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 23:41, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Reformatted derived terms in Japanese entries

Hello Mahāgaja, I was curious about this edit, where you commented out all of the readings and glosses for the Japanese derived terms. The prior formatting was outdated, but the practice was still valid: where possible, we provide readers with the readings and glosses even in derived lists. Is this commenting-out something I could dissuade you from? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:26, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

I guess, but I always comment glosses out in the languages I work on. I feel like it's distracting to put that much info into a derived-terms list. I can see leaving in the transliterations, but the glosses seem unnecessary, especially for blue links. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 23:29, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Japanese historical pronunciations -- shift from IPAchar to l|und?

I don't understand the purpose of this change. Is this in response to the entry's inclusion in Category:IPA pronunciations with invalid IPA characters?

If so, I'd rather that the module be reworked, as this is not a helpful distinction. Notably, the IPA standard includes the angle brackets ⟨⟩ as notation to represent the original orthography. I've wondered if we should be using that rather than slash notation for the ancient subscripted readings, but even then, the IPA module is excessively aggressive and doesn't appear to respect the angle brackets:

• {{IPAchar|⟨pi<sub>1</sub> karu⟩}}: ⟨pi₁ karu⟩ -- still complaining of invalid characters, even though the presence of the ⟨⟩ should disable this check.

Visually, {{l|und}} renders at 14pt, while {{IPAchar}} renders at 15.4pt. This isn't wildly different, but it is noticeable, and a bit distracting.

In addition, the subscript numbers are a common and accepted practice for differentiating vowels that had clearly different orthographies in Old Japanese, but for which the exact vowel qualities are not known. See Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai (i.e. "Ancient Special Spellings"). The emerging consensus (missing from the WP article) is that the differences between the ₁ and ₂ varieties probably had to do with the presence or absence of glides, either /w/ or /j/; c.f. 神#Japanese, where /mi₂/ likely represented /mwi/ from /kamu/ + /i/.

Chinese also makes use of non-IPA characters in IPA representations, such as the superscript ^X and ^H used to indicate tonality in Middle Chinese. See the Middle Chinese item at 光#zhpron for an example.

Would you be supportive of disabling character validity checks in {{IPAchar}} for strings bracketed with ⟨⟩? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 18:31, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I made the change because I'm trying slowly but surely to empty Category:IPA pronunciations with invalid IPA characters. I don't like the idea of using angled brackets to switch off character validity recognition, because if a transcription is in angled brackets, then it isn't in IPA, so we shouldn't be using {{IPA}} or {{IPAchar}} on it. Using subscripts in reconstructions is well established—PIE has h₁ h₂ h₃ and Proto-Germanic has ē₂—but we don't use {{IPAchar}} to mark them. No doubt there's some other, better solution than {{l|und}}, but I don't think using {{IPAchar}} on non-IPA transcriptions is it. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 21:27, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Re: {{IPAchar}}, understood. Do you have a suggestion for another template that would apply the same font formatting? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:34, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

No currently existing one comes to mind. Maybe ask at WT:BP since it's a wider issue that affects more than just this word and more users than just thee and me. And maybe someone else there has an idea as to what template to use, or will be inspired to start a new template to accommodate things like Old Japanese and Old/Middle Chinese reconstructions. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 21:45, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Sounds good. Thank you! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:55, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Formatting request

Hello Mahāgaja --

When reworking {{IPAchar}} calls to remove asterisks to outside the template call, would you be amenable to not adding a "From"? I had started adding the asterisks inside the template call (well before {{IPAchar}} was refactored to do string validation) in order to avoid the annoyance of getting wikicode bullets instead of the desired asterisk to show reconstructed forms, when those asterisks appeared as the first character on the line. I tweaked your change to the モズ entry to use the HTML asterisk entity * instead, to avoid that bulletization.

TIA, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 18:28, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

PS: I'm working on a template and module to generate these phonetic-development lines, along with links and explanatory labels to help users understand what the subscript numbers mean, and what the text represents. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 18:30, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

OK, I'll try to remember. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 19:16, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Lehnübertragung, loan-rendition

Hello. I've discovered the German term above, and just next to it a translation into English. Is that English word a real thing? --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 22:55, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

I think an L1 English speaker would prefer to shy away from the hyphen, but loan rendition is hardly a common term. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:21, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

I can't say I've ever heard "loan rendition" either, but it gets almost 900 hits on b.g.c (sometimes with a hyphen, more often without), so it seems to be real. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 10:03, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Ok, thanks! Another question: I'm looking for the German translation of virtuous circle; Engelskreis exists, but this article says that "das Wort hat sich, bislang jedenfalls, noch nicht in der Alltagssprache durchgesetzt." Is there a more common term, or is it simply due to the fact that the idea of "vicious circle" is much more widespread than that of "virtuous circle"? --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 14:24, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

I think the fact that the idea of a vicious circle is much more widespread is what makes finding a German term for virtuous circle difficult. Linguee.com has several options that people have tried in the past, but Engelskreis isn't one of them: some people use the Latin circulus virtuosus when writing in German; some people use the calque Tugendkreis; some people use Verbesserungskreislauf or just paraphrase it completely with things like positive Entwicklung or the adjective selbst verstärkend. The Latin seems to be the most common solution. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 14:44, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

All right, in light of this I've removed Teufelskreis from the translation table; I won't add any German translation for now. Last thing: Glückwunsch is given as a translation of congratulations (the interjection), but is it really used alone ("Glückwunsch!", "Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag!") like this? Doesn't it have to be qualified by herzlich? --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 15:02, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

I've heard it used on its own, though it's more common with herzlich. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 15:10, 21 December 2017 (UTC)