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Latest comment: 2 years ago54 comments25 people in discussion
Eye dialect spelling of dragon. We don't have twuck, twicycle, etc. and I don't think we ought to. I'd go further and say that having eye-dialect spellings of any kind are not really of value -- they are infinitely and arbitrarily constructible, and they are not words in their own right but transformations of words -- but I am guessing that is a fight I would lose. - TheDaveRoss13:47, 12 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete per TheDaveRoss. But I know others like to keep silly "transformations" of this kind, like the autological duuumb. Whyever doesn't the OED bother, I ask myself. Equinox◑18:48, 13 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Is this an argument that equally applies to all requests for deletion, or has it, in some way I was yet unable to detect, some more specific applicability to the present proposal? --Lambiam18:48, 14 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
CFI lists various things that aren't included, largely because they're more encyclopedic than dictionary. It is an argument against deleting things that are clearly lexical and not called out in CFI.--Prosfilaes (talk) 10:10, 16 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
With some exceptions on phonetic or orthogwaphic gwounds, "r" can be changed to "w" to suggest "a childish voice or a speech impediment" pretty much anywhere it occurs, in a wegular and pwedictable way. It is like dropping an "h" or the "g" of "ing", as in 'overcraft or 'appenin'. Do we want entries for all these regular "eye dialect" variants? I don't think so. Where the alteration is predictable and regular, I think we should include only examples that have some special usage or quality. So, absent any such rationale for dwagon, delete it. Mihia (talk) 20:41, 15 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
What we need here is a rule limiting usage to cases where a reader may actually reasonably need to look up a word. I would propose something along the lines of the rule we use for brand names: three independent citations in sources that do not otherwise provide the context for the word. For example, a book with a passage saying, "Bobby pointed at the dragon and said, 'look, a dwagon'" would be self defining, whereas a book containing such a "dwagon" reference with no proximate reference to the word "dragon" would not be, and would count as a cite. I would make this a presumptive rule so that the term could be sent to RfV, and deleted automatically if three such citations are not provided. I am fairly confident that such a rule would eliminate from inclusion variations such as "wegular" "pwedictable", "orthogwaphic" and "gwounds". bd2412T20:16, 16 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
How would you apply the rule about "not providing context" to a word such as "wegular"? What sort of context would you require (or not require)? Mihia (talk) 21:57, 16 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Much the same - are there sources that use "wegular" without some reasonably nearby use of the word "regular" to provide the sense that the eye-dialect version is a variation of the normal spelling? bd2412T23:07, 16 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
When I search e.g. Google Books, I see a few hits for "wegular", mostly in dialogue, few or none of which, as far as I can tell, have the word "regular" anywhere nearby, and nor would I expect them to. Mihia (talk) 23:58, 16 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
Barring those being typos or a different sense (apparently "Wegular" is also the name of a font), that might end up being a term that a reader could come across and want defined. I suppose it should also matter if it is part of a string of clearly eye-dialect text, so that even a reader unfamiliar with the language might realize that it is not the normal spelling. bd2412T04:54, 17 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
I’m afraid such a rule would not do much: agweeable, bwoken, celebwate, dweadful, ... The problem is that it is supposed to indicate a speaker’s slightly peculiar pronunciation of the ‹r›, which can affect the spelling of any word containing that letter. --Lambiam17:18, 17 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
(Keep) Meh. It's a grey area; one side of the spectrum has e.g. Winterpeg (changing the spelling to highlight Winnipeg's coldness) that are IMO clearly includable, the other side is baaaaaaad (chaning spelling to mark intensity, drawn-out pronunciation, or whatever), which we decided to make redirects. Is changing spelling to indicate childish, accented or speech-impaired speech includable? It's closer to baaaaaaad, I admit, but I still lean towards yes, keep, especially if we're just discussing one of the zillion eye-dialect spellings we've long included. (Also, and I'm surprised Mahagaja didn't raise this: is this really eye dialect, or a pronunciation respelling?) I get the idea of excluding eye dialect in general, but I worry that could have negative consequences (e.g., in the case where a word itself is limited to dialect, valid spellings might get suppressed), and (like Prosfilaes, I think) I don't really see a benefit to excluding such words. - -sche(discuss)07:41, 17 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
The "eye dialect" issue that you mention has been raised several times I think. As I understood it, we are now consensually using the term "eye dialect" to include words such as "dwagon", per sense #2 at eye dialect: "(more broadly) Nonstandard spelling which indicates nonstandard pronunciation." If we aren't then, as has been pointed out, large numbers of "eye dialect" words are incorrectly labelled. Mihia (talk) 17:58, 17 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
This strikes me as a stylistic device, rather than a lexical phenomenon. Ordinary language is distorted to evoke an image- the distinctiveness is in the pattern, not the words it's applied to. One may have a character saying "I'm fffreezing! It's cccold in here!", or "I habe a code in by dose", or "it maketh my tongue feel tho numb". Then there are all the ways of representing all the stereotyped accents that character actors and cartoon voice actors like to use. One character may go the "thee-yater", while another goes to the "theatuh". Think of all the "w" words that can be attested with "v" spellings in stereotypical German dialog, or all the "h" dropping in stereotypical Cockney dialog, or all the things that happen to vowels and syllable-final "r"s in stereotypical Southern dialog. We don't have snowclones in mainspace, and we shouldn't have this kind of thing, either. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:06, 24 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
I'm wondering if we can't find some alternative solution that allows us to record evidence of citations for these forms without specifically having entries for them. bd2412T04:00, 27 March 2020 (UTC)Reply
When any "r" in any word (subject to certain phonetic or orthographic restrictions) can be changed to "w" to indicate defective pronunciation, and thus any example can created in an ad hoc manner at any time according to an author's choosing, does evidence of citations actually matter? Does it actually matter whether or not someone so far ever wrote "orthogwaphic" or "cowonaviwus" or any other? I say no. Mihia (talk) 01:51, 4 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Wiktionary isn't just for people who know the phonetic or orthographic restrictions. It is also a resource for language learners and foreign readers who may come here because they come across "dwagon" or the like in print, and are genuinely unclear as to its meaning. bd2412T03:02, 4 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
I think some wires have got slightly crossed. The issue of being able to look it up is one thing, but you were talking about recording citations without having an entry that people could look up. That is the suggestion that I was specifically responding to. Mihia (talk) 10:24, 4 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
I would presume that any system we set up to maintain such citations would note in some way that they reference an intentional misspelling, with the correct spelling being referenced (and linked) in some way. bd2412T03:35, 10 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
On the other hand, the CFI is not absolute but is a work in progress, and it is with the aid of investigations such as this that it may be developed. Mihia (talk) 23:22, 9 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
If you propose a workable principle, we can add it to CFI or even use it as a CFI override. "What is rule-based is excluded" is not a workable principle, as per prefer → preferred or red → redness. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:11, 10 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete this particular usage of the "w" for "r" replacement, but I'm for waycism because it is (apparently) commonly used by adults for mockery. Note the distinction between this and adult eye dialect terms like cunnel (for colonel) and yeah#Etymology 2 (for year). Eye dialect forms in other cases are not easily predictable, and can therefore in many cases be mistaken for something else. There is no one rule for these. However, there is only one rule for this: replace the "r" in any term, except the "r" at the end, with "w".
By the way, has anyone thought of creating an entry for -w-? This would allow Wiktionary to explain how this phenomenon works, and having an entry like that would be more useful and concise than having thousands upon thousands of "w forms" of words. It might also be useful to have an appendix page for childish dialect in English. PseudoSkull (talk) 06:20, 3 July 2020 (UTC)Reply
It's not -w- because it can occur at the start or end of a word, not only as an interfix. It's simply replacing one letter (or sound) with another. Equinox◑19:40, 3 July 2020 (UTC)Reply
Delete. Such can be done with any "r" word to indicate a childish or speech impediment pronunciation. Unless they have taken on a life of their own like wabbit has they shouldn't be included. 172.58.171.15117:38, 13 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
wabbit has another meaning. A computing word that comes from that pronunciation of the word rabbit. Therefore wabbit has taken on a life of its own. This has not happened with dwagon which has no meaning other than referring to dragons in a childish or speech impediment way. 172.58.171.3221:31, 21 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Dewete. Weally. Sewiously. "A dwagon?" said the Prince as if he had never heard the word before. "A howwible dwagon? Me kill a dwagon? Widiculous!" And he pulled himself up to his full height in dignified disgust , while his skin-tight suit creaked and strained in ... Facts707 (talk) 13:37, 5 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Comment: at this point, I count thirteen votes to delete, six votes to keep, and two votes that are Abstain/Undecided. I have not voted, but have expressed a preference for establishing some system of recording words like this without necessarily having entries for them. Barring that, I would likely keep this as well. The votes to this point are as follows:
Please let me know if I have missed or misinterpreted the positions of anyone above, or if anyone has changed their position in either direction. Cheers! bd2412T06:07, 18 April 2021 (UTC)Reply
Delete. Dan is mostly correct that there's no CFI provision that would disqualify this, but I would defer to the golden rule at the very top of CFI: A term should be included if it's likely that someone would run across it and want to know what it means. I don't think this (or any other marginal 'baby-fied' spellings) satisfy that. I think that anywhere this spelling would be used, it will be possible to infer the intended meaning of 'dragon' either from the semantic context, or because the dialogue that contains it consistently applies the "replace r with w" respelling rule. But I do think CFI could do with some more guidance on negative criteria for terms like this which are attestable but not worthy of inclusion. (Some other examples I'd like to target would be predictable, ad-hoc morphological transformations like plant-like, plantish, plantlover, midplanting, etc.) Colin M (talk) 21:42, 28 April 2021 (UTC)Reply
No consensus. Extending the discussion pursuant to the vote count yielded no further clarity; rather, we had two new "keep" votes added and one "delete", keeping the discussion just below the line for consensus. As such there is no consensus, but I would propose that the community consider some alternative means (such as an appendix) for collecting forms and their citations for attested de-rhotacized variants. bd2412T05:27, 5 May 2021 (UTC)Template:archive bottomReply
