Template talk:my-noun
I don't think this template is really necessary. Burmese nouns don't have any inflection or any gender, so there's nothing for this template to show except the transliteration, and that is more thoroughly accomplished by Template:my-roman. —Angr 10:12, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
Same with {{vi-noun}}, {{vi-verb}}, {{vi-adj}}. Wyang (talk) 10:27, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
Well it depends whether you consider consistency important I suppose. The majority of well-entrenched languages all use ((xx-noun)) etc. It's much easier for people to just remember the language codes than to have to remember which languages have ((xx-noun) and which have something utterly different.
But there is one feature Burmese nouns have, to the best of my knowledge. I believe Burmese is a language which uses counters or classifiers. I can't recall which languages include this information but I have seen it here for some. We could definitely enhance this template to support a field to declare which classifier(s) to use with which noun. — hippietrail (talk) 11:41, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
The alternative for Burmese isn't something "utterly different", it's just {{head|my|noun}}, which doesn't really require remembering anything more than the language code either. Indicating which classifier to use could be interesting, but I don't know of any other dictionary that provides that information, which means we'd have to rely on native speakers' judgment to determine which classifier to use, and the native Burmese speakers who are registered at Wiktionary are not very active here. —Angr 12:17, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
Well it's a good goal to provide as good an environment for when they do come. The more entries we have the more Google searches will bring Burmese people here to our site and sooner or later one or more may stay and contribute. We've certainly gone long periods of time in the past without any native speakers for particular languages then finally getting some. I used to be the main Georgian contibutor but then a few years ago we attracted a native speaker who became a great contributor. — hippietrail (talk) 07:32, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
OK, then will you add a parameter for the classifier? There could also be 4 parameters for transliteration matching the 4 at {{my-roman}} so that the latter template is no longer needed when this one is used. If anyone knows how to write Luo modules (I don't) maybe the transliteration could even be automatic rather than having to be entered manually (though there should always be the option of a manual override for weird cases like ဘီး (bhi:, “wheel”) which is spelled bi: but pronounced bein:. —Angr 08:03, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
Yes I'd like to add those features to the ((my-noun)) template. Right now though I have very unreliable and limited internet. I haven't played with Lua for over a decade but I am interested in how it works here. I don't know how regular Burmese transliteration is either. For differences between spelling and romanization you may need to decide whether Burmese should use transliteration or transcription. — hippietrail (talk) 08:51, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
I think Burmese entries themselves should continue to display all four systems that {{my-roman}} displays; two of them are transliterations that are entirely predictable from the native orthography, and two are pronunciation-based transcriptions that are often predictable from the native orthography but are often subject to unpredictable exceptions (see Appendix:Burmese transliteration). When Burmese words are cited on other pages (i.e. apart from the pages on which the word in question is the lemma), I've been using just one of the systems, namely one of the pronunciation-based transcriptions. I would actually have preferred to use one of the spelling-based transliterations, but Stephen preferred the transcription, so we compromised by using the transcription when citing words on other words' pages and using all four romanizations on the main entry page. Since this template would only be used on main lemma pages, it should show all four systems. —Angr 19:28, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
I've always been in favour of using all established transcription/transliteration systems though formatting them has always had issues. For Chinese and Korean I think we use tables which I find much more clunky than right on the heading line, but then I also find how the Burmese ones look on the heading line currently to look quite ugly on my computer.
At any rate it seems we can automatically generate them from what you say, and for irregular ones we may be able to generate some from others, which may or may not be useful. Stephen usually makes pretty wise decisions here though we've all made compromises of course. — hippietrail (talk) 01:39, 8 April 2013 (UTC)
For Burmese, no romanization system can really be called "established". I don't think I've seen the same system used twice in two different publications. Even here, the system we use outside main entries, the BGN/PCGN system, is not the original BGN/PCGN system, but my own modification of it, because the original system doesn't even distinguish all the phonemes (it doesn't distinguish aspirated and unaspirated voiceless obstruents, nor does it distinguish three of the four tones). Its only advantage AFAICT is that it's closest to the way Burmese loanwords are spelled in English, so we can say that the English word kyat is derived from a Burmese word we romanize as kyat rather than as caʔ or as kyap, and longyi is a derived from a word we romanize as lon-gyi rather than as louñhci or lumhkyany. I know what you mean about {{my-roman}} looking ugly, but it used to look like this, which Ruakh objected to. I really don't know what else to do to make it look better while not losing any information. —Angr 18:46, 8 April 2013 (UTC)
@Hippietrail. Classifiers or measure words are used in the Mandarin noun template Template:cmn-noun, see trad./simpl. 拖拉機 / 拖拉机 (tuōlājī) / 拖拉机 (tuōlājī) (tractor), the classifier is 臺/台. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 23:57, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
Thanks Atitarev. I knew I'd seen them somewhere. — hippietrail (talk) 07:32, 6 April 2013 (UTC)