User talk:Atelaes/2006

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It's good to see more people taking an active interest in ancient Greek; I'm working more with scientific and Latin words myself. I can answer some of your questions, but some of the concerns you have do not have a fixed answer yet, and I am wrestling with some of the same issues in the Latin entries.

• How do I put breathing marks at the beginning of words?

  These must be copied and pasted in, in most cases. You can find a collection of all the ancient Greek characters I've collected in my Laboratorium. If the characters in the Greek section do not display properly, then your computer or browser is not equipped to deal with them. There are work-around fixes for this, but I don't know how to implement them for Greek characters. Do note that we try to limit the use of diacritics in some situations, but that's easier to pick up as you go. (As an example, the macrons used in Latin dictionaries do not appear in the Wiktionary page names for Latin words, but do appear in the subsequent tables and sections.)

• It seems that the general rule of thumb is that only proper nouns should be capitalized and the rest lower-case. Is that what we’re doing with Greek, or is there some other standard?

  It's the standard for all languages, and if a word exists in both a proper form and a common form, it will have two pages (cross-linked). See Augustus and augustus for a Latin example.

• Is there a standard concerning conjugation? For example, would it be useful to put nominative, genitive, plural, etc, forms in an article? Could we make a table with all the forms for each word?

  This issue is not settled. We tend to use the nominative as the head form of nouns, and in Latin we seem to be using the infinitive of verbs, masculine of adjectives, etc. However, each word form should eventually get its own entry. See quaff for a simple English example, and hyperbole and austrinus as Latin examples of how to set this up. note that there are some paradigm templates available for regular forms of nouns and verbs in Latin, so there may also be such available for Greek. Some of the templates are "buggy", though, so watch out.

Good luck and good working! --EncycloPetey 00:46, 2 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

Nom Acc Gen Dat is the order of cases I learned. I thought it was common, as it was found in all the sources I cared to remember (primarily Indo-Europeanist ones, I think). I have since learned that Nom Gen Dat Acc—which I had thought was an aberration, or a variant influenced by German—is the traditional order, with ancient precedent going back to the ancient Greeks themselves (and the Romans, borrowing Greek grammar, added their extra cases directly to the end of the Greek order). —Muke Tever 21:33, 6 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

Yes, actually I learned about the traditional order when someone brought up the issue on the Latin Wiktionary's Taberna. I'm not sure if it was resistance properly (as the original question was about German cases) but it indicates that it can be confusing to people speaking languages that retain the traditional case order. —Muke Tever 02:01, 7 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

Hi Cerealkiller13, I'm a participant in the project WiktionaryZ. My user talk page is here. We would really like some Greek contributors to participate in this Ultimate Wiktionary (meta.wikimedia.org). I'd like to ask you to create an account and fill out babel templates there? If possible, leave a note at my talk page and/or join the #wiktionaryz IRC channel on freenode.org? Thank you and hope to see you there. Siebrand 22:18, 12 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

Hello, sorry for the late reply. There's not much to adhere to when doing the index, I've only mashed it together to look more like the others. Be bold and expand it as you wish. I've no idea which variants of Greek deserve an own index, but I guess Ancient Greek should be separate from modern Greek. Cheers, — Vildricianus 09:06, 15 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

It seems to me that we're in need of categories such as "Ancient Greek noun forms" (as Italian verb forms). Thank you so much for getting started on that. I'll pitch in as soon as I am able. Medellia 08:48, 28 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

I created the categories "Ancient Greek nouns forms" and "Ancient Greek adjective forms" and will commence with their usage. Thanks, again! Medellia 17:34, 28 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

I would so love to have some sort of "Greek genitive bot" or something like that, but haven't really done any research on how they work... it would be really nice to have one for nouns/adjectives since they're so straight-forward in Greek (as opposed to Latin!). Medellia 05:52, 29 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

And on a bit of a side note, I changed the verb template... does this work for you? Medellia 18:17, 29 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

All done! Here's it in action: φιλέω. I'll write up some documentation within the next two weeks. I think the best thing about it being done is that it will be very easy to adapt to other conjugation patterns. Medellia 04:17, 3 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

τέλος τέλεος τέλει τέλος τέλος τέλει ? ? τέλει τέλει τέλεα τελέων τέλεσι τέλεα τέλεα; I can't for the life of me recall the dual dative/genitive. (Though really they should be τελέοιν & τελοῖν, uncontracted and contracted respectively.) I forget which pattern it follows, but there ought to be some contraction somewhere... seems to me that it would turn out like γένος. That τέλους you found is the contracted genitive singular form. Hope that helped! Medellia 03:19, 7 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

What timing! I took a look at the template, and it looks perfect. I have one small request though: would you mind terribly if I renamed it (again)? I'm trying to keep a naming system in place for the templates... except I haven't explained it which makes it very difficult for others. And let me say, your template is so much better than my first. They take a while to get used to! Medellia 03:31, 7 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

Thank you! I'll do that straight off. The appendix is like this: Appendix:Greek second declension; they exist for all of the Latin declensions, but only existed for first and second of Greek when I joined. I wrote one for the Attic declension, but as the third is substantially more complex I've procrastinated on that task! Medellia 03:36, 7 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

I am very wary of using prp and pax interchangeably due to the fact that they represent different accents (namely, circumflex and acute). As far as prx/pax, I am as yet unsure. Generally, they follow the same inflection, and I'm struggling to come up with an example in which they don't. However, I have been making both templates for consistency's sake. At this point, we probably ought to make a decision one way or the other. I'll take a look at the Italian Wiktionary to see what they do since I know they have rather extensive templates for the first and second conjugations. I've also been debating about whether or not to add the dual to the templates... for nouns, it seems reasonable enough. I really don't know how the dual acts in verbs. Also, not sure if you saw this or not, but I wrote up some "documentation" on my template naming conventions. I apologize if it comes off as didactic! Medellia 17:43, 11 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

It would be actually very difficult to modify the bot I used for Spanish to work for ancient Greek, because of the limitations on character sets involved. I am not sure whether there is a bot framework available which would be better suited for the task, or if pywikipediabot can be extended to use more character sets somehow... For more info on the framework I was using you can check the IRC channel #pywikipediabot on irc.freenode.org or check out meta:pywikipediabot. Good luck, post on my talk page if I can be of any help, I am not around much at the moment due to the "real world" and "work", however I try to stop by as often as I can to at least check messages. - DaveRoss 22:38, 13 December 2006 (UTC)Reply