Talk:𐤊𐤋𐤌

@Fay Freak Shouldn't this be lemmatized at χουλούμ? Catonif (talk) 14:42, 24 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

@Catonif: No, that’s why it is here, after weighing the factors of lemmatizing at various thinkable pages.

It’s a transcription after all and I have treated Punic like any language in targetting the native script, like Amharic or Armenian cannot just have Greek script entries, even if our source is a (reverse-)transcription, helped by understanding the phonology, morphology and etymological relations of the language.

The manuscript readings themselves contain some rationalizations anyway. Why not χουλουμ without tonos or the mere manuscript garbage behind Poenulus words like 𐤌𐤌 (mm), copied over centuries and corrupted every time? (Krahmalkov lists it with mm for simplicity. How the text looks like is given at Die phönizische sprache Paul Schröder Die phönizische Sprache pp. 285 seqq.) For 𐤒𐤔𐤀 (qiššūʾ) you see even more Greek variants presented. In the case of the Semitic consonant script my approach has also allowed to abstract from letter transpositions between the manuscript variants, since really only discerning the intended three consonants is most of the deal. On the other hand I of course I avoid reconstruction pages containing quotations, which should not exist. It would also be stupid to have Punic 𐤊𐤌𐤍 (kmn) in Greek script when the Phoenician is attested in a Phoenician-script inscription.

Otherwise, I principially distrust the Greek or Roman transcriptions of Punic, and Thracian, Moesian, Dacian whatever transcriptions for page creation. From the list of like eighty Punic plant names Imm. Löw gives in his Aramæische Pflanzennamen, it was like only eight I could create (as I remember, I have not counted for you specifically to give reasoning post factum), the rest is supported by nothing and could be garbage, corruptela, mere †…†, is not “knowledge”.

It means that mere unscholarly transcription, as universal for antiquity, does not allow us to have an entry at all, in the bulk of cases. If one were to create the better-supported entries under the transcription however, i.e. Greek transcriptions of Punic words, one would invite other people to add the rest too; I made sure it was not too easy to have Punic entry from mentions in Greek texts alone—it is appendix matter and not suitable for whole pages, the indiscriminate application of which would misrepresent the nature of the thin traces used for them, some odd copies over two millennia of dubiously motivated people who did not understand what they concoct, which totally constitutes guesswork, about the “original manuscript form”, more than just giving the language form we happen to grasp because in the 21st century we have it easier to acquire foreign languages. The abstraction here we can be more confident about.

Again it was never the script anyway that has to be attested but the word, and it entered in the best Unicode representation of it for its philological situation. (There are also words in German, English etc. of spelling you can choose only gathered from audio, and sign languages also have a peculiar way of lemmatization, which is not directly the way they are outside.) Fay Freak (talk) 15:50, 24 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

@Fay Freak I see, thank you for the explaination. I placed a {{normalized}}, hope you don't mind, I'll leave it up to you whether you want to place that in the other entries as well. I wonder whether we should create entries like χουλούμ as alternative forms, or create such forms under ==Ancient Greek==/==Latin== as soft redirects, i.e. having a definition line like "representation of Punic 𐤊𐤋𐤌" in order to make it easier for people to get to the entry they're looking for. Catonif (talk) 17:19, 24 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

@Catonif: The template makes sense here, although one could ask whether the wording “normalized” stretches its meaning—though it be still closer to truth than “reconstructed”, while maybe our scientific language does not have terms for edge cases on the spectrum one rarely sees. Some other day one may find a more creative formulation for the template or another template.

Since the spellings don’t occur anywhere other than for these words, people will find the entry anyway via the search function (I always argued however that the Appendix and Reconstruction pages should be searched by default, in case somebody makes a list of the rest with variants! Cf. Appendix:Aramaic terms only attested in borrowings, which is kind of a supplement to CAL, I even have a quite complete page for words, forms and meanings presupposed by borrowings and also mentioned the circumstance that there would have to be another list for words found in transcription, such as in the scorpion quote at جَرَّار (jarrār), “called in Nabataean gərōrā”). I don’t think people expect to have pages for Greek transcriptions of Punic words, rather than ocurrences inside of pages! It may be different for less attested languages like Dacian and Thracian where one cannot instantly name a native script. Fay Freak (talk) 18:06, 24 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

@Fay Freak I understand but I don't particularly like that people would have to find the word through in-content search, especially since cases of homography can occur. It would probably be best to discuss this on BP as it concerns also living and attestable languages (cf. the quote at cozudu), I'll do that in the future maybe. Catonif (talk) 20:38, 24 March 2023 (UTC)Reply