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Welcome back!
Latest comment: 11 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi. I noticed you adding lang and xml:lang attributes to templates. Our pages now have the HTML5 doctype <!DOCTYPE html> and the root html tag has only the lang attribute, and no xml:lang. HTML5 says “The attribute in no namespace with no prefix and with the literal localname "xml:lang" has no effect on language processing” and other confusing things, but I think the gist is that adding xml:lang is obsolete. —MichaelZ. 2013-01-31 20:42 z
Interesting, thank you Michael. I didn't know that. I just added in xml:lang to match what I saw in {{Jpan}}. I suppose that means we should strip xml:lang out of all our script and lang code templates? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig20:54, 31 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
I believe so. They are mainly harmless, but getting rid of extraneous code is helpful for editors and readers, in the long run. —MichaelZ. 2013-01-31 21:52 z
Icelandic/Old Norse
Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Do you actually know either of these? Your name kind of implies you do but your Babel doesn't say anything. Maybe non-0 or is-0 would be helpful to clarify? —CodeCat23:09, 8 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
I'm afraid I'm only up on German and English of the northwestern tongues. Well, some Dutch too. I tried teaching myself Danish once, but the materials I had didn't explain the rules about glottal stops, which seemed to come and go in the same word depending on context, and I got frustrated and fed up with the books and turned my attention elsewhere.
Frankly, I never understood why the -0 templates exist -- my working assumption has always been that any language a user knows nothing about simply isn't listed. If we all spent our time attempting to exhaustively list everything we *don't* know, we'd never get any useful editing done. :) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig18:18, 11 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
To followup on CodeCat’s question, per Wikipedia:Babel, the purpose for -0 templates is to assert that one does not know some language that one might be expected to know. As this is only semi-useful information, ’pedia now doesn’t have -0 categories – you probably aren’t interested in finding people who don’t know a language!
I’m using {{User Lua-0}} as a placeholder – I’m an experienced programmer, but I’m not yet familiar with Lua, and I expect to learn it in future. OTOH, I don’t expect to learn Chinese anytime soon, and despite having some grasp of Japanese I doubt anyone would expect me to know it, so I don’t see a reason to note that. (IRL people sometimes assume I speak German, due to name and accent, so {{User de-0}} would be useful, but no-one’s thought this online so there’s no need.)
Message added 07:11, 17 February 2013 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{talkback}} template.
Chechen language
Latest comment: 11 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Eirikr, you wrote: "... In other words, I don't think you'll encounter much opposition here at Wiktionary, if you decide to create a Swadesh list for Chechen that uses the Latin alphabet. Go right ahead." (then you deleted it!) / They are against everything! I already put a Chechen list in Latin alphabet on Appendix talk:Swadesh lists (but I found it, I didn't write it. I added a few things...) Chechen-Russian Dictionary in Cyrillic script: http://ingush.narod.ru/chech/dict.htm If they want, they can make a list. (but they are against this language!)They are saying: "We don't have volunteers for the Chechen language, so no one has created a Swadesh list for Chechen." /Do you believe it? The Chechens live in which conditions? Regards, Böri (talk) 09:03, 5 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Hello, Böri --
The reason I struck out my comment (which I didn't delete, i.e. I did not remove it from the page -- removing comments entirely is generally not considered a good thing) was that it was based on my initial misunderstanding about who "they" were. I thought at first that you were describing something that happened on Wikipedia, rather than on Wiktionary.
The concern about which script to use for any such Chechen-language list is because Wiktionary strives to be descriptive. We aim to describe how terms in a language are used. We do not take any position on how terms in any language _should_ be used -- that is being prescriptive, saying what _should be_, and Wiktionary does not do that. Entries can explain how other speakers of a language might view certain terms, such as the notes on the brung or taked entries, but again that is about describing.
So from a perspective of being descriptive, if Chechen is primarily written using the Cyrillic script, then Chechen entries on Wiktionary must include Cyrillic spellings. Those don't have to be the only spellings given, but they must be given. The key point here is: We don't care about the politics. We only care about how terms are actually used. Chechen is clearly used with the Cyrillic script, so we need to have Cyrillic spellings.
If you can show that Chechen is being written in the Roman script, and with consistent spellings, and in a way that meets our Criteria for Inclusion, then please bring up such criteria in the discussion in the Beer Parlor.
Latest comment: 11 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi. I'm undoing your edit to the etymology of ありがとう for now, because it isn't reflected in the cited source. If you think the source be wrong, can you find an reliable alternative that supports what you wrote? I was taught that these set forms were from the regular formal adjectival forms, as reflected in the current reference. I left the pronunciation addition alone. Cheers, Ulmanor (talk) 00:24, 6 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
I described the historical sound shifts at Talk:ありがとう; let me know if that makes sense to you. The reference given was intended as a reference for hyper-formal forms, which purpose I think it serves; that was not intended to describe the etymology in any way, as that page doesn't mention historical derivations at all. Their explanations such as "change final ai to ou and add ございます (gozaimasu)" do not describe the historical development of the terms, but rather how to derive the hyper-formal forms from the modern adjectives -- i.e., instructions for the language learner, not etymologies.
FWIW, my copy of Shogakukan's 大国語辞典 has this as the intro for the ありがとう entry:
（形容詞「ありがたい」の連用形「ありがたく」のウ音便）
ウ音便 here refers to the missing /k/ from the Muromachi-era sound shift.
Discussion of ergatives and perfect tense in Germanic
Latest comment: 11 years ago15 comments3 people in discussion
I would prefer to avoid derailing the discussion, but I also think it's interesting so I would like to continue it. If you prefer, we can continue it here, so could you cut it and paste it here? —CodeCat00:22, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
I was going to post here, too — maybe I should make this a separate discussion — but Eiríkr, I think you're confused about the term "ergative". You are obviously aware it's used in reference to the ergative case found in ergative-absolutive and tripartite languages; what you seem to be missing is that it's also used, unfortunately and nigh-unrelatedly, in reference to verbs that are inchoative/mediopassive when intransitive and causative/active when transitive. Just as we don't need {{nominative}} for (say) Latin, we presumably wouldn't need {{ergative}} for (say) Basque, so the question is whether {{ergative}} is useful for ergative verbs. —RuakhTALK02:47, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
It turns out that I should have previewed before posting, because surprisingly, we do have {{nominative}} for Latin! (But it's not a context template, obviously.) —RuakhTALK02:52, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Wow. That *is* unfortunate.
One reason I never got into linguistics during my formal academic career was my discovery that theoretical linguists were, perhaps ironically given the subject matter of "language", often remarkably terrible at actually *using* language to communicate. I would hazard that this overlapping use of "ergative" might be one such example. Which use came first, I have no idea, but the latter party did the world a disservice by not avoiding this ambiguity by choosing or coining a different term.
CodeCat, if your use of "ergative" is in reference to the definition Ruakh gives here, I cede the point. My understanding of "ergative" is solely based on what little I've read of ergative-absolutive languages and the fundamentally different verbal deictics used therein.
More generally, I would be happier if we could ourselves, here at the EN WT, *avoid* such ambiguities. I personally don't find this description of English verbs as "ergative" to be terribly useful, and as this entire thread has hopefully illustrated, such nomenclature can be quite confusing on the one hand, and on the other, perhaps overly technical as DCDuring has posited. Many, many English verbs could meet this quite loose definition of "ergative" as given above. For most non-academic types, I argue that it's enough to say that such-and-such verb is *both* transitive and intransitive, and leave it at that as far as grammatical context labels go. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig06:03, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Yes, I was talking about ergative verbs, I think I explained that in the discussion too. They are distinct from the ergative case, although they are related. Both are about the identical treatment of intransitive subject and transitive object as patient: the ergative case is used as subject for intransitive verbs and as object for transitive verbs (which suggests that it originally indicated the patient), while ergative verbs treat their subject as patient when in transitive, but their object as patient when intransitive. The relationship becomes very clear in a language with an ergative case, if you suppose that the ergative case always indicates the patient, then all verbs are automatically ergative or "passive" in nature. There is actually a system that aligns both of these together into a system called active-stative, in which there actually is a single case for the agent and another for the patient. In such a language, verbs may take either the agent case (nominative/absolutive) or patient case (accusative/ergative) or both depending on their meaning. It is thought that the ancestor of Proto-Indo-European was such a language, and that our modern accusative case derives from the ancient patient case. That, in turn, might explain why neuter nouns don't have a distinct nominative case: in the old language, they were "inanimate" nouns that rarely acted as agent, and thus did not need a separate agent case. —CodeCat14:31, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Rather that I didn't know that "ergative" meant anything other than the senses used for Ergative-absolutive_language until Ruakh's note above, your distinction in the thread at Wiktionary:TEA#Template:ergative was lost on me. You mentioned "ergative verbs", but didn't explain that, likely on the assumption that everyone was talking about the same thing. My primary understanding of "ergative" was in regard to a verb paradigm where transitive verb objects and intransitive verb subjects are treated grammatically identically. This structure does not happen in any PIE-derived language that I'm aware of, and it certainly doesn't happen in English. That's probably simply a product of what I've been exposed to, but it's what I've got to work from.
The running example here of "to melt" strongly suggests that this working defintion of "ergative" is not a useful distinction in English. As you note, this label indicates "the identical treatment of intransitive subject and transitive object as patient", but as "to melt" functions in English, this doesn't happen -- objects are treated differently than subjects. Yes, superficially they appear to be treated the same, as in DCDuring's example of "the ice melts; he melts the ice". However, swapping the pronoun for the ice makes it clear that these two verb uses do not involve identical treatment of subject and object: "he melts; she melts him".
If the "ergative" label simply means that a verb can be used both transitively and intransitively, I don't think that's very useful as a distinction. Any English verb that does not semantically require an object can probably be used this way. For example, sit, stand, grow, reach...
Again with "to melt", if the etymology of the English term aligns with that of Dutch smelten, then we have a verb where an intransitive form melded with its causative/transitive counterpart to produce the modern word. That doesn't sound terribly "ergative" either, in terms of treating the "subject as patient when in transitive, but their object as patient when intransitive".
(Though presumably you meant that the other way round? "subject as patient when _intransitive_, but their object as patient when _transitive_"?)
Actually, the case of "he melts; she melts him" is precisely what makes ergative verbs distinct. Here, the case marking on the pronouns shows unambiguously which word is the subject and which is the object. Yet, in the first case the subject is the one being melted, while in the second it's the object. That is what ergative verbs are all about. Normal verbs don't behave that way, the subject is either always the agent (as in he cooked, he cooked food) or always the patient and the verb is intransitive (he fell). But in ergative verbs, the role of agent and patient depends on the presence or absence of an object, which is very different from the behaviour of other optionally-transitive verbs. In a sense, ergative verbs without an object are implicitly passive, so the passive formation is redundant: he melts is the same as he is melted. There is a slight distinction in meaning, though, which relates to the implication of an agent. In he is melted, there is the implication that something is melting him, even if that person is not explicitly mentioned. On the other hand he melts carries no such implication, it is as if the action occurred "by itself". Such an action that occurs by itself without a clear agent is called mediopassive or middle voice, and has a very strong connection with the reflexive. Many languages form a mediopassive through reflexivity (such that he melts is the same as he melts himself). This is common in the Romance and Slavic languages, and it's also the origin of the (medio)passive in the North Germanic languages. —CodeCat15:35, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Okay, I feel like we're getting somewhere that might resemble common ground or a shared frame of reference. :) I need to chew on this some; I'll write more later once I have my thoughts in order. In the meantime, it looks like this bit of yours is key: "in ergative verbs, the role of agent and patient depends on the presence or absence of an object, which is very different from the behaviour of other optionally-transitive verbs." I don't suppose you could give a few examples of ergative verbs, and a few examples of non-ergative optionally-transitive verbs? I think I'd be able to grok this better if I had more text to work with. :) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig16:44, 12 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
I would say that it includes most of the remaining transitive verbs, because you can often leave out the object with the implication that there is one. cook is a good example because it contrasts with boil, which is ergative. However, cook is ergative in the phrase What's cooking?, while it's implicitly transitive in I'm cooking.. That brings up an important point too: ergativeness is a property of specific senses or uses, that's why we use it as a context label. A verb that is passive when used intransitively in one sense may be active in another sense. heal in particular is a nice example because neither of the senses is really more frequent or more likely to be understood. I heal could plausibly mean both that your health is getting better, or that you're making someone else's health better. So in that case, the transitive and the ergative sense are more or less equally used. In the case of turn or land it's actually ambiguous whether the meaning is active or passive, because it's not really clear whether you're speaking of yourself or your vehicle. If you are a pilot who has just landed, is the implication that you landed your plane (transitive) or that you were landed yourself (ergative)? —CodeCat00:41, 19 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Except "optionally-transitive" != "transitive with unstated object". A verb usage like "I eat" or "I cook" is transitive regardless of whether there is any explicit object. Depending on context, the object might be the "I" in a passive role with the agent left unstated, but the verb itself is inherently transitive.
Secondarily, you mention passivity, but in all of the putative ergative verbs listed above that have Germanic etymologies given here on the EN WT, what the etymologies show are examples of intransitive verbs (where the action occurred 'by itself') that have apparently merged with their causative forms. C.f. sink, fall, smelt (relevant etym found at smelten), even heal (which notably is traced to the proto-Germanic form *hailijanan, with the tell-tale causative infix -ij-, implying an intransitive form *hailanan). The verbs of Romance heritage are harder to parse, as Latin entries here don't mark transitivity, and the defs given are often ambiguous, such as "I parch" as the def for one of the senses of frigo, or "I turn" for torno. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig04:51, 19 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Actually the suffix -ij- had several different uses in Germanic. One was to derive causatives, but it was also widely used to create verbs from nouns or adjectives. *hailijanan is from *hailaz(“whole”). In Germanic, it was mostly likely a strictly transitive verb, though. In any case, there are plenty of verbs that didn't merge with their causatives. sink is a fairly certain example (it remains intransitive in Dutch, its causative is formed with the auxiliary doen), and in general any verb with either -i- or an original back vowel in the root can't be an original causative, because causatives normally had o-grade root and umlaut. —CodeCat13:32, 19 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Ran across something the other day that brought this back to mind.
From your description above, and from the unclear article at w:Ergative_verb, it sounds like "ergative" is meant to describe a certain use of transitive verbs. Is this correct?
If so, then semantically and etymologically, words like melt and sink and growcannot usefully or correctly be described as ergative. For a sentence like "the boat sinks, there is no actor, no agent that is making this happen. The action in question "happens by itself". These words are fundamentally intransitive, where the modern EN transitive uses have developed from a causative sense.
This is not to say that separate causative and passive constructions could not also exist. Compare:
The ice melts. -- intransitive
The ice is being melted by her. -- passive
She melts the ice. -- transitive
She makes the ice melt. -- causative
Semantically, in the kinds of environments that humans have historically found themselves, actions like melting and freezing are precisely the kinds of actions that "happen by themselves". There doesn't need to be any actor causing the action of "melting" to happen. Similarly for freeze, sink, grow, etc.
Meanwhile, the description of "ergative" could apply quite well to verbs that are semantically inherently transitive, such as cook. "Cooking" is not something that naturally happens by itself in the kinds of environments that humans have historically found themselves; this action requires an agent, an actor. This could be something inanimate, such as "heat", but the verb semantically requires someone or something to carry out the action. Note that there is no similar causative for such verbs, precisely because there is no semantically intransitive sense. When used causatively, the implication is that A causes B to do something transitively to C.
He cooks the eggs. -- transitive
*He makes the eggs cook. -- unnatural, incorrect causative
He makes him cook the eggs. -- causative, still transitive
The eggs are being cooked by him. -- passive
The eggs cook. -- ergative
This last instance is where the "ergative" label finally makes sense, as I've understood your description and the description in the WP article. This could also be analyzed as a kind of passive construction where the actor carrying out the transitive action is left unstated.
If my understanding of your explanation and the WP article's description of "ergative" is correct, then this label has been used incorrectly when applied to verbs that have intransitive senses (c.f. melt, sink, etc.).
If instead my understanding of your explanation and the WP article's description of "ergative" is incorrect, and "ergative" just means any old verb that can be used transitively with object A and intransitively with subject A, then this label does not convey anything meaningful in English grammar contexts that is not better and more commonly expressed by simply stating that the verb in question is both transitive and intransitive (c.f. melt, sink, etc.).
Latest comment: 11 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Have you got a copy of Young and Morgan's Lexicon of Navajo? I found myself in a massive uni library recently and photographed chunks of several books I thought might be useful to people here, including that one. If you haven't got a copy, I can e-mail you the (~70) pages. - -sche(discuss)00:10, 14 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Wow, that'd be awesome of you! Please email it whenever you have time. I have the book on my wishlist, but the prices folks are asking are just silly. Thanks for the offer! I'll look forward to perusing those images. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig18:49, 14 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Just nipping in for a bit, and about to crash for the night. I'm loath to dive in amidst the BP discussion on romaji entries, but I'll certainly give a look and rework as appropriate once there's an agreement on romanized entry format. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig07:32, 17 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Using {{ja-romaji}} with more than one hiragana/katakana
Latest comment: 11 years ago10 comments2 people in discussion
Good idea. I don't know from the top of my head but how about any words where long vowels are involved, especially ō - hiragana おう, おお, おー. We could also have ===Romanization 1===, ===Romanization 2===. I can't think of having more than three, theoretically. Perhaps hira2 / kata2 and hira3 / kata3 would cover all our needs. Are you able to add new optional parameters? --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)03:04, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Adding the new params would not be a problem -- I don't know if I'll have time to do it tonight, though, so that might have to wait until tomorrow. I think I'd prefer to use multiple params, each generating its own entry line, instead of using ===Romanization 2=== etc. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig03:21, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
OK, no rush. When you finish, please test the result on the above entries and change as appropriate. I have already updated the "About Japanese" page, as per BP outcome. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)03:29, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Have a look at wa#Japanese and let me know what you think. {{ja-romaji}} now handles up to three each of hira & kata values. One possible change is to list hira value 1, kata value 1, hira value 2, kata value 2, etc. It currently lists all the hira, then all the kata. I've provisionally tested with different params present or missing, and it seems to work well. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig06:03, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
What do we do about romaji entries for mixed hiragana/katakana entries, like イギリスじん, ウーロンちゃ, ローマじ, むねチラ, etc? Another possibility is mixed hiragana/katakana + Latin letters or numbers (katakana or Roman letters), e.g. バイQ. サンQ, 3Q. Could you please add one more optional parameter for mixed script, kana with Roman letters, kana with numbers? Duplicated this question on Haplology's talk page. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)22:40, 20 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 years ago7 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, thanks for the explanation of older forms of Japanese. That made sense and I have a much better grasp of ancient Japanese now, although there's much more studying I need to do.
That leads me to another question: would you agree to the creation of a category for -tari adjectives? A number of the uncategorized terms in the parent category Category:Japanese adjectives are those. Unless I'm missing something, any term in that category should have a child category, and if it's there, why not put it there.
When I saw an entry that read ja-adj|decl=no I noticed that {{ja-adj}} still has a decl field. I was thinking the decl field should be obsoleted and replaced with an infl field, and behind the scenes there would be a line like decl = infl;. This is not to ask you to do it per se, more to make a proposal. It's been a while since I edited any templates so it's a little scary. It's not a big deal, maybe an issue for when the template gets converted to Lua, if it ever does. --Haplology (talk) 01:22, 23 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Re: -taru adjectives, sure, I'd be very much up for the creation of such a category. I don't know much about how to create cats, but if you want to take a stab at that, or propose on one of the fora that someone else create it, I'd lend what support I can.
Relatedly, would it be worthwhile to also create a cat for -naru adjectives? Most of these evolved into modern -na adjectives, but I dimly recall that there might be a few rarely-used ones that still take -naru but not -na (while the modern ones that usually take -na can take -naru when being all fancified, like 静かなる風景 or something). Then again, I just re-read ja:w:形容動詞, particularly sections 4 口語形容動詞の活用 and 5 文語形容動詞の活用, and I realize I might be mis-remembering, and all the -naru adjectives might now count as -na adjectives.
Re: decl vs. infl, I'd be happy to add an infl param to the {{ja-adj}} template. Then once I figure out bots, I can have that go through and turn all the instances of decl into infl, and then remove decl from the template.
...and, actually, I just added infl to the template, and changed all text instances of "declension" to "inflection". There was also a line in there for -no adjectives, which I commented out in light of recent discussions. :)
Great. I just made an adjustment to the template myself. I replaced part that created the category for -no adjectives with one that creates a category for tari adjectives. That leads me to a question: Do you think the category should be like this: Category:Japanese たり-tari adjectives ? That's how I have it set up right now, because the template had already specified them as "たり-tari inflection" (now たり-tari inflection.) Otherwise I would have made it たる-taru... I don't know which is better. I haven't created the category yet. It's a red link e.g. at 堂堂.
Speaking of -tari (or -taru?) adjectives, and how many of them are composed of two identical kanji, just to check, do you think the lemma entry should be 堂々, rather than 堂堂? There was a discussion a while ago, I don't know where, and I think that that was the conclusion. I can see merits to either way.
As for -naru adjectives, I'm not familiar with them, but I'll look into them when I have the chance. This would be a good stage to consider them, before a whole bunch of entries have been made. --Haplology (talk) 12:05, 23 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
About ending in -i or -u, I think -i is actually the traditional lemma form in JA<>JA dictionaries, as the old 終止形. I picked up on the -u ending as that's the 連体形. Modern JA doesn't distinguish between these two 形 for regular -い adjectives, hence my confusion. I suppose we should probably follow the convention for JA<>JA grammars and use -tari as the base form.
About doubled-kanji spellings and lemmata, I also dimly remember that there was a discussion, but I can't recall where. My recollection is that the rough consensus was to have the fully-spelled version like 堂堂 as the lemma, with the spelling that uses the kanji "ditto" mark like 堂々 as an alt form pointing to the full spelling. A quick look in my JA<>JA dictionaries to hand shows that this is how they do it; that's not the be-all-and-end-all of the matter for how we do it here, but it is perhaps a useful comparison.
About -naru adjectives, yes, taking our time would probably be good. :) Manually reworking large data sets can be a little less than an efficient use of our resources, though sometimes that's the best we can do. (Providing me more incentive to figure out bots...)
Great, in that case red linked category is fine the way it is. It feels a bit early to create it now but I'll create that category after a while if nobody else does.
I did have misgivings about treating 時々 as a lemma, because every other dictionary I have seen does not. It was indeed only a rough consensus, and I thought it was the other way. I must have misremembered. I'll have to dig it up and take a look. Either way I think it should be brought up again and settled for sure. Maybe a discussion for the BP? No other pages seem to get any attention. Thankfully at this stage, implementing a change is still not a huge task. --Haplology (talk) 02:31, 24 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
Entries spelled with 々
Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
(relevant text copied from above)
Speaking of -tari (or -taru?) adjectives, and how many of them are composed of two identical kanji, just to check, do you think the lemma entry should be 堂々, rather than 堂堂? There was a discussion a while ago, I don't know where, and I think that that was the conclusion. I can see merits to either way.
About doubled-kanji spellings and lemmata, I also dimly remember that there was a discussion, but I can't recall where. My recollection is that the rough consensus was to have the fully-spelled version like 堂堂 as the lemma, with the spelling that uses the kanji "ditto" mark like 堂々 as an alt form pointing to the full spelling. A quick look in my JA<>JA dictionaries to hand shows that this is how they do it; that's not the be-all-and-end-all of the matter for how we do it here, but it is perhaps a useful comparison.
I did have misgivings about treating 時々 as a lemma, because every other dictionary I have seen does not. It was indeed only a rough consensus, and I thought it was the other way. I must have misremembered. I'll have to dig it up and take a look. Either way I think it should be brought up again and settled for sure. Maybe a discussion for the BP? No other pages seem to get any attention. Thankfully at this stage, implementing a change is still not a huge task. --Haplology (talk) 02:31, 24 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
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This is the discussion, if it's long enough to be called a discussion, that I was thinking of: Wiktionary_talk:About_Japanese#.7E.E3.80.85. There may have been another one somewhere. How about calling those terms abbreviations, as in 隆々? I'm not sure if they're truly abbreviations or just alternative forms. There is also this category Category:Japanese terms spelled with 々 (I wrote the note at the top by the way), and while nothing is wrong with the category as far as I can tell, most of the members have 々 in {{ja-kanjitab}} which is not technically correct if I understand correctly that 々 is not a kanji. I'm thinking that at some point I will remove 々 from kanjitab and put in the category link so that the terms still appear in "Category:Japanese terms spelled with 々." --Haplology (talk) 06:27, 25 March 2013 (UTC)Reply
As best I understand it, 々 is a ditto mark, but just for kanji. There's a different ditto mark for kana, ゝ, which can take the 濁点 as ゞ. More at ja:々.
I'm not really wedded to using either full spellings or dittoed spellings as the lemma, so long as both exist so users can at least get to the lemma regardless of which spelling they enter. If you have a definite opinion on the matter, I'm happy to defer to you. :)
My edit was just a maintenance reaction to what appeared to be POV-pushing vandalism, consisting of the blanking of that section by an editor with only that edit in their history. FWIW, I'd be fine with the creation of a separate "dispute" page. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig19:43, 2 April 2013 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
In your discussion of {{ja-romaji}} you referred to the bot operating on page after the templates had been expanded. What is the sequence in which templates, Lua/Scribunto, HTML, CSS, and JS operate? It is easier for me to find out about anything that happens, say, within CSS (general vs. user CSS), than to get the big picture for this wiki. DCDuringTALK00:02, 5 April 2013 (UTC)Reply
Yes, that post was mostly surmising ("a surmise"? "a surmisation"? "a surm"?), and not a definite statement; but I do remember reading something maybe on the meta site about how templates get expanded. I'll see if I can find that. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig16:55, 5 April 2013 (UTC)Reply
Found it: ]. Doesn't say anything about bots, though. Also looked through ], and that doesn't say anything about expansion.
That said, the wikicode used when invoking {{ja-romaji}} does *not* include any # def numbers on individual lines. Since that's what KassadBot is looking for (as I understand it), and since KassadBot isn't flagging pages using {{ja-romaji}}, the only really likely explanation at this point is that KassadBot is seeing the page after template expansion.
I'm curious about this, though, so I'll keep looking. I'll post here if I find anything more.
I thought it was important to document what the template is doing, synchronise with About Japanese page a bit, show how it creates the definition line, why and how it puts limitations on romaji entry structure. Well, you voted against the vote but we still have to "sell" the new solution somehow. The clearer the documentation is, the less assumptions and false accusations the project will cause. There's no going back, IMO, every single romaji entry has been converted to the new style, only some abbreviations are left (their structure can be discussed later) --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)23:41, 8 April 2013 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
The etymology section currently reflects what Wikipedia says, but kogal previously claimed it was "disputed" (I changed that one to match the Japanese entry) and Anatoli had put this etymology up, which I suppose is also possible. Do you have a reference work we can check to get a trustworthy opinion on which etymology is correct? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds05:35, 15 April 2013 (UTC)Reply
The JA WP article lists some sources and gives more background. It sounds like the etymology is unclear, as is often the case with slang, with multiple possible derivations. The gyaru part on the end is consistent, while the ko part on the front could be from at least three identifiable terms. I've updated the コギャル entry accordingly. Let me know what you think. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig21:23, 25 April 2013 (UTC)Reply
Looks good, but I edited the kogal page to point more clearly to the Japanese etymology and I added the gyaru part in because 1) it's known for sure and 2) it categorises the word as a twice-borrowed term, which is a category I'm trying to build up. Thanks! —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds22:52, 25 April 2013 (UTC)Reply
Ta, looks like someone else pitched in. Just as well; work on my end has hotted up to where I can't contribute here as much as in the past, and my Māori skills are basic enough that I'm not sure how much I could have helped. I've also discovered that one of my prized Māori resources (the Te Matatiki dictionary) has gone missing, probably (hopefully?) just stuck in a box somewhere from the last time we moved. Anyway, cheers / kia ora! -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig21:27, 25 April 2013 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, I hope this message finds you well. I just wanted to show you the first presentable result of a project I've been working on, namely a frequency list drawn from Japanese Wikipedia. I used JUMAN as the morphological analyzer, and I believe that it does a pretty good job, although it stumbles sometimes (e.g. number 329, 他の). Fortunately it appears that WT has very good coverage of the top 1000 words, and with just a little more effort all of them will be covered. Let me know what you think. Thanks! --Haplology (talk) 10:05, 15 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Interesting! And good to know some more about the deeper projects that other editors are working on. :) I'll peruse that and see what I can add.
Odd about 他の. I thought maybe it showed up because of lots of links to that non-entry, but Special:WhatLinksHere/他の shows only five entries, and one is this page and another is your list. I'm now curious as to what algorithms JUMAN uses, and if you ran it against Wiktionary, or against something else? I'm completely ignorant as to what JUMAN is, so maybe that's the wrong question. :)
のだ also looks like an inappropriate inclusion -- it's a particle + copula, not a word. And what of duped entries where one is kana and the other is kanji? I see ともに as well as 共に, for instance. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig16:11, 15 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
I'm glad you like it. JUMAN apparently uses bigram Marcov models, but I don't understand what those are. All the heavy lifting was done by the Kurohashi-Kawahara lab at the U of Kyoto. I just fed it pages of plain text extracted from Wikipedia articles (that extractor was courtesy of a university in Italy btw.) If you're curious there's a comparison of JUMAN to three other morphological analyzers on the page of yet another analyzer called MeCab ]
Thanks for calling attention to the duplicate entries. I think I had noticed that but forgotten or maybe subconsciously chosen to ignore them. Fortunately JUMAN can take a mix of hiragana and kanji and return a single lemma. E.g. given the sentence 他の人とつき合った, it returns
That example also seems to show what happened with 他の. I'll investigate のだ. I don't know if there's a way to avoid misses like that, but on the next run I'll try to pull out the 代表表記, and that should reduce duplicated entries by quite a lot. --Haplology (talk) 17:12, 15 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Small kana in historical spelling
Latest comment: 11 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
I notice that you have used small kana (や, ゆ, よ) in the hhira parameter in several entries. In the dictionaries I use the historical spellings never have small kana, and from the Wikipedia article I also understand that the historical spellings did not make size distinctions. I just changed 凝集. Is there any particular reason you have put these in, or are these simply mistakes? – Krun (talk) 22:55, 21 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Heh. I was just writing on your page. :)
Nope, not mistakes, rather based on the historical spellings given in:
One of my other sources is Daijirin, and that gives historical usage in half-width katakana. I thought I remembered that half-width katakana fonts don't include the subscripted glyphs for combined forms (though checking just now, I realize I was wrong about that), so the lack of smaller kana never signified with me.
Yes, my source is the Sūpā-Daijirin (which uses hiragana; in my version, anyway). This and the Daijisen (which uses katakana) both use only full size kana. I can see the practicality of the small kana, especially for clarity in long words, but they aren’t really necessary, and we should use the style which was actually used in the literature. So the question becomes: was there ever a time (before the 新仮名遣い) when these small kana were standard and widely used? If not, we should not use them. – Krun (talk) 23:24, 21 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Agreed. I just read through the EN WP articles about the subject, and other than stating that the orthography reform occurred in 1946, none of the related articles seemed to have anything to say about when the smaller-kana versions were first used. I'll poke around the JA WP and see what they have to say about it (I suspect more). -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig23:26, 21 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Still not finding as much as I'd like. The JA WP pages specifically about w:ja:拗音 and w:ja:字音仮名遣い don't have much to say about the history of the small-kana spellings. w:ja:字音仮名遣い#.E5.86.85.E5.AE.B9 (sub-section titled 内容) even uses the small-kana spellings for historical forms, but then other spellings further down the page use the full-kana renderings.
w:ja:ゃ notes that the small-kana ャ was used in Edo-period Japanese to spell the particle ya. w:ja:ゎ lists a few historical spellings using this small-kana variant. w:ja:っ gives the most information that I can find so far, noting that small っ was used 1904-1908 in primary school education, with school materials reverting to full-sized つ pretty much until the 1946 spelling reform.
w:ja:捨て仮名#.E6.AD.B4.E5.8F.B2 (歴史) states that small-kana variants have been used for quite some time (「送りがな・添え仮名としては古くから用いられた」), but that consistent use for 拗音 has only been since 1946, and with hiragana only since 1955.
Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, Eirikr. Thank you for the minor formatting you performed on 女, which indicates how I should be formatting similar data for other characters. I've uploaded about 60 entries to this point, and am waiting to see what kind of feedback is generated. When I return to editing, I'll follow your example and amend the formatting of these 60 characters. Thanks again. Lawrence J. Howell (talk) 01:03, 4 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
No worries, happy to help. You seem to be working in earnest, which I can appreciate, and I'm aware of the challenges of getting up to speed with things here. :) Welcome, and good luck! -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig05:43, 4 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I'm positive there was a more efficient way to go about things, one that wouldn't force me to revisit and tidy up each entry, but offering for the community's critique a representative sample of raw data appealed to me as a straightforward, open, all-cards-on-the-table approach. I expect that, once the unsustainable portions of the data have been stripped away and a serviceable foundation for the remainder laid, input from Wikitionarians with a broad range of interests will produce fascinating results during the years to come. Thank you again. Lawrence J. Howell (talk) 08:51, 4 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
New appendix
Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Unfortunately, that site isn't a verifiable source, nor does it list its own sources. Websites generally aren't usable as sources. Do you have any dead-tree material confirming the name?
Then again, even the website you provide notes that Merida is the name of a Spanish city, and if that's the correct source, this name would have entered English from Spanish, not from Latin. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig23:31, 6 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
Aizen Myoo
Latest comment: 11 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
According to "Shinto/Buddhism - Angelfire", (http://otakuyume.angelfire.com/snb.html), the name for the Shinto deity of love is called "Aizen Myoo", but according to you that's wrong. Who is the Shinto deity of love?
The main problems there were ... well, let me just list the big ones.
This isn't an English term.
The name was spelled wrong.
This isn't a love god, as in a god about falling in love and going gooey-eyed. Have you seen any pictures? This deity is commonly shown sitting on a lotus blossom, with many arms, with all-red skin, with bared fangs, carrying a bow and arrow, as male, and with a distinctly angry face. I can't think of much else that would be less like a Shintō love god and still humanoid.
Even in terms of what the deity might be worshipped for, regardless of appearance, the closest I can get to finding anything about "love" per se is that one might pray to Aizen Myōō asking to be better liked and respected in the world. Other common objects of prayer were apparently health, wealth, and the capitulation of one's enemies. Again, not a love god.
Granted, lust is part of his purview, but only in terms of going beyond earthly desires to reach spiritual enlightenment.
Aizen Myōō (note the long ō’s) is a 明王 (みょうおう, myōō), a Buddhist deity deriving from Hindu roots. There's a hint right in the deity's title that this might not be Shintō.
In short, random sites on the internet are not a reliable source for information when attempting to study a foreign culture. By way of example, this site claims that Benzaiten is the Japanese goddess of love, with the implication being that she's Shintō. Benzaiten is female, but 1) she's originally a Hindu figure, Saraswati (see w:Benzaiten), then Buddhist, not really Shintō; and 2) she's the godess of music, wealth, and wisdom, not love. I also spot-checked the list on the Angelfire page. Amatsu Mikaboshi, for instance, isn't the god of evil; and his name means something more like “Heaven's Jug Star”. Amida is a Buddha, not a god of death; see w:Amitābha. Nikko-Bosatsu isn't a Buddhist god, but rather a w:Boddhisattva, i.e. someone who reached enlightenment and then hung around to help others. Etc.
Try to find something with references, something that at least lists its sources. And ask questions. Time allowing, I'm happy to answer questions or even create or add to entries. But don't just jump in with unconfirmed stuff you saw somewhere some time. Compared to Wikipedia, the Wiktionary editor community isn't anywhere near as forgiving of incorrect additions. Read around, get corroboration from multiple different sources, and multiple different kinds of sources.
If you're interested in Aizen Myōō the deity, have a look at the Wikipedia article, w:Rāgarāja. FWIW, I'm working on the etymology for 伊邪那美 (Izanami) tonight (and probably tomorrow too).
Oh, and in answer to your question ("who is the Shinto deity of love"), I'm not sure there is one, per se. The Greek and Norse gods generally covered specific areas, but the Buddhist-Shintō syncretic pantheon isn't so narrowly focused. One deity can cover several areas, and share those with different gods. I'll keep my eyes and ears open though. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig06:56, 7 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I will rephrase my earlier question; who are the Japanese deities of love?; (for example, I know that Benzaiten, as well as a goddess of luck, would be also be a goddess of luck in love, just as Bishamonten is a god of war, as well as luck.)
Longer answer: I'm no expert on Japanese mythology, but what I have read and heard about makes it sound like "love" as a concept doesn't work the same way in Japanese myths as it does in western myths.
Details: I just did a quick search of the electronic resources I have to hand for all entries containing the phrases 愛の神, 恋の神, or 恋愛の神, and didn't come up with much -- mostly just entries for the Greek and Roman gods.
FWIW, my JA-JA dictionaries describe the Saraswati-derived Benzaiten as having purview over eloquence, wealth, good luck, wisdom, and longevity, and mentions that one might pray to her in order to avoid misfortune or to achieve success. No mention of love here.
The description of the Benzaiten as one of the seven gods of good luck says that the Saraswati Benzaiten later became conflated with Kichijōten, a different goddess of good luck, and/or somewhat conflated with grain god Uga, and in this version, Benzaiten is a goddess who might grant good fortune and wealth. Again, though, no mention of love. I suppose finding love might be viewed as part of being lucky (compare the English phrase get lucky), but the various words for "love" are missing from this dictionary entry, suggesting that love isn't a very important part of Benzaiten's mythology.
The words for "love" are also missing from the JA Wikipedia article at ja:w:弁才天. The only 愛 on the page is for 愛知県 (Aichi-ken), w:Aichi Prefecture, and 恋 is missing entirely.
There are still tons of deriveds and idioms to add, as well as the derivation of the on'yomi, but the bulk of the etym stuff you were looking for should be up there now. HTH, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig00:27, 8 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I don't know how much you know about Korean etyms, so forgive me if I'm repeating stuff you're already aware of. Middle Korean of the mid-1400s is the oldest we can get, since Korean just wasn't a written language before then -- before the invention and promulgation of Hangul, Korean scholars wrote in Classical Chinese, much as happened in Japan until the popularization of kana. There are a few words here and there, and maybe even scraps of phrases, but since they're recorded in Chinese characters, the phonetics are pretty much lost to time. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig00:30, 8 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion
草薙の剣 / Kusanagi no Tsurugi; why do you keep singleing this one out, it's one of THREE of Japan's Imperial Regalia. The entries for 八咫鏡 and 八尺瓊曲玉 both mention 草薙の剣, but for some reason, you keep removing them from 草薙の剣.
Because this entry has had a lot of encyclopedic information added to it. Wiktionary is not Wikipedia.
Because a number of the additions have been incorrectly formatted, and / or incorrectly organized.
Because your track record is, frankly, abysmal, and any additions by users in your IP address range are immediately suspect.
I'll grant you that the two other imperial treasures merit linking. I will format those appropriately.
However, Ama no Murakumo no Tsurugi is a synonym, not a coordinate term. I will move that link to the correct header.
Long term, please do more research before adding to Wiktionary. Roughly 80% of your edits are problematic at best, or just plain wrong at worst. If you intend to continue editing, I strongly recommend that you create an account. As it is, you've been editing under multiple IPs, with addresses sometimes changing within minutes. This is a big warning flag for admins, and is very likely to get your IP address blocked for a while. You seem to have little trouble changing addresses, but even so, we *do* have the facility to block IP address ranges. Your case is severe enough that we might consider doing so -- a high percentage of your edits require cleanup, revision, and / or outright deletion.
My personal ideal would be for you to 1) create an account, 2) engage the rest of the editors in conversation about meanings, content, and formatting, among other things, 3) get some Japanese-English dictionaries and other resources, 4) learn more about how to research terms, and 5) learn more about Wiktionary formatting and stylistic norms. I appreciate your interest and passion, but your energies are too often spent unproductively. I look forward to your becoming a more effective editor. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig03:10, 10 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
While we have your attention: please don't use automated translators like Bing or Google Translate. They're not designed to give definitions: with the current state of technology, they can only give a crude guess as to what the meaning of a text is. here is an example of what Bing Translate does to a Japanese Wikipedia page (my favorite line is "Knife short term extended shall not extremely spicy treat in timing "). Imagine what it does to the English that you type into it. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:59, 10 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
Notably, neither 手かぎ手虎 nor 手鉤手虎 exist as a string anywhere in the JA WP, and the only hits for substring 手虎 were for place names. Moreover, the EN WP article at w:Tekagi-shuko is completely unsourced, so I can't even easily figure out where the article authors think they're getting their information. Also notably, I get zero hits at google books:"手鉤手虎" and only three hits for google:"手鉤手虎", with two of those being the same text where this string only appears as parts of three separate words, as 少林拳でいう月矛又手、鉤手、虎爪掌といった技で... (“In the techniques called, in Shaolin, the moon spear andhand, the hook hand, and the tigerclaw...” -- bolded to match where the target JA phrase occurs). I strongly suspect that this is a bogus non-term, possibly the result of someone misunderstanding a Japanese (or even Chinese?) source text.
Even using hiragana for the kagi part doesn't produce anything any more promising -- google books:"手かぎ手虎" yields zero hits, and although google:手かぎ手虎" gives 37, most of these are Wiktionary or Wikipedia echoes -- google:"手かぎ手虎" -"were two of the many kakushi buki" (excluding a specific phrase used in the WP article) yields only 15 hits, of which 5 are definitely dupes, and many others may be dupes-in-translation. None of the hits are for pages actually written in Japanese, strongly suggesting that this isn't a real term.
手虎 on its own doesn't generate much either: google books:"手虎" "は" (adding the は to filter for Japanese results) only nets 423 hits on the wider web, of which many appear to be either scannos or cases where the characters each belong to separate words. The few that look like possibly valid 手虎 appear to be parts of placenames. Searching google:"手虎" "は" on the wider web brings in 7,250, but many of these are again problematic -- excluding Twitter alone cuts the hits by 1.5K. Skimming through several pages of the remainder, I can't find anything relevant to any weapon called a 手虎.
Tekkō kagi would be spelled 手甲鉤. Note the long ō. 手甲 (てっこう, tekkō) == the back of the hand; 鉤 (かぎ, kagi) here means hook. The text at w:ja:手甲鉤 mentions 手鉤 (てかぎ, tekagi) as an alt name.
There is a w:ja:猫手 page, but no images. Google searching so far produces mostly mentions and images of cat paws, since that's also what 猫手 could mean (though usually with a の in the middle).
Yes, the 脇差 entry is on my list. The last additions included other problems, and the image didn't give a good sense of scale -- it's hard to tell anything about size when the wakizashi is just sitting in isolation on a stand -- so ultimately it was easier to back everything out. I'd intended to set directly to reworking the entry, but then real life intervened. :) I'll get to it today or tomorrow, however. Cheers, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig15:26, 13 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I've started the process of building up to the 脇差 entry. Working backwards into this term's constituent parts, I just finished a massive expansion of the 脇 entry; that still needs oodles of derived terms, and the on'yomi etymology and related sub-sections. Next I'll look at the verb 差す -- but probably not today, as I'm short on time. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig21:45, 17 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
There isn't a kanji spelling. No Japanese word I can find would be romanized as shigehto, and there is no such sacred bow.
There *is* a kind of regular, non-sacred bow called a shigedō, spelled as 重籐, 滋籐, or 繁籐, covered in black lacquer and wrapped in rattan. However, there are many different kinds of wrapping, each with different stylistic significance. This kind of bow manufacture was first applied to single-piece wooden bows to help prevent breakage, then later to composite wood and bamboo bows. More recently, the rattan is often wrapped in 36 bands above the grip and 28 bands below the grip. Shogakukan's Kokugo Dai Jiten describes the 36 bands as representing 禽(tori, “chickens”), and the 28 bands as representing 宿(yado, “inns”), but I'm baffled as to what that's supposed to signify.
The JA WP article at w:ja:弓_(武器) has a section on 和弓 that mentions the 重籐の弓, but it makes zero mention of "sacred", zero mention of Oda Nobunaga, and zero mention of anything about "unity".
I'm calling "bullshit" on that website. They've gotten something wrong. It's entirely possible that there was such a tradition in the past, but it's certainly not current from what I can find. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig19:19, 20 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
傿
Latest comment: 11 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
It looks like the kun-reading of 傿 might be かけねをする (掛け値をする) rather than かけねおする with an お. Is this correct? I think there are several entries with some errors in their readings. I believe I came across one with a reading ending in the particle は, but romanized as ha, and without spaces. Then there is the case of 十, where the reading じっ is romanized as JITSU in the Unihan database, although it is < *jip, and only occurs in gemination. There might be other such cases. I have also come across historical readings without a modern equivalent listed, e.g. in 岧, 卬, 廧, 崲. I wonder if we could bot-generate a list of kanji to take a look at. It could include kanji with:
Long readings (5+ kana) which have お, を, え, へ, は, or わ in them
Any on-readings with we, wo, kw, gw, au, eu, iu in them
Any readings ending in -fu
Both an on-reading ending in -ū or -ō and one ending in -tsu
I can't find any JA-JA resources that list 傿 with anything other than the readings provided by KANJIDIC, which I've learned myself can include errors, as you note. That said, ya, I think you're right. The Mandarin Tools entry gives a meaning of "fraudulent price", which would be more like 掛け値をする, as you also note. Ostensibly, then, this reading should still have 送り仮名(okurigana) of at least る at the bare minimum to show the verbal inflection -- 傿る (かけねをす.る, kakeneosu.ru).
FWIW, this is one of those vanishingly unusual readings that I mentioned before -- this should be clearly marked as very rare to avoid confusing users.
About categorically tracking down likely-bogus readings, I like your idea, but I'm not sure how best to implement it. I know Haplology (talk • contribs) has some experience using maybe-applicable tools for analyzing large text corpi. Maybe we should ping him? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig22:30, 12 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I don’t think we need worry about okurigana, especially if there is no source with info on that. If we don’t have more information, I think it is enough to list the reading without a break. It also remains to be seen whether this character was ever really used to write that phrase. As I understand it, many kun-readings are mainly, or even only, a sort of official gloss for a Chinese character, i.e. only a traditional translation of the Chinese word or morpheme represented by the character and its on-yomi, and never actually used in text to represent that native word. (Compare the Korean eumhun (音訓), where the hun is always only a gloss, as Chinese characters are only used with their eum (音), for their Chinese meaning or as some sort of ateji, whereas their corresponding native Korean words are written with hangul.) In such cases I think we must point users to the most usual kanji spelling(s) of the word or phrase in question. – Krun (talk) 09:57, 13 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
Yes, certainly, okurigana only if we can find instances of it. You remind me that the kun readings in kanbun often don't have any okurigana, which certainly makes reading the Man'yōshū an interesting challenge, even after folks have been kind enough to render the text in modern fonts instead of the earliest extant forms written in ancient cursive. :)
Hmm. Well, in the absence of any context, ippon would presumably be 一本 (ippon), i.e. “one straight slender long thing”. But then the only term I can find that might be romanized as datara or tatara (assuming rendaku) would be 蹈鞴, 炉, 鑪(tatara, “foot bellows; a furnace using a foot bellows”), but then I don't think these would be counted using the 本 (hon) counter, since they aren't long and skinny. Googling for google:"一本蹈鞴" turns up 82 hits for me at the moment, the first page of which don't seem to have anything to do with foot bellows, but do all seem to be in Chinese, and mostly related to some sort of manga.
一本だたら: Ippon-Datara, “One-legged Smith”
... One of the links is to the ZH WP, w:zh:日本妖怪列表, a loooong table which lists 一本蹈鞴 through to the JA WP article at w:ja:一本だたら. That article makes it clear that the ippon part refers to “one foot” as a property of this particular monster, while the tatara portion refers to the process of making steel, as some legends state that this monster lives in or near iron ore mines, and / or as an allusion to the somewhat mangled appearance of many smiths after a hard working life, and / or as an allusion to the one-eyed and crippled appearance of the forge god Kagutsuchi. So the monster's name might be parsed as something like “One-legged Smith”.
The JA article also lists an alternate kanji spelling of 一本踏鞴, adding 踏鞴 to the list of possible spellings for tatara. However, the JA WP article mostly just spells the tatara part in kana, with the rendaku, for 一本だたら.
So the answer about the kanji spelling is that the lemma form would probably be 一本だたら, with alternate spelling entries at 一本踏鞴 and 一本蹈鞴. It appears that the theoretically possible spellings of 一本炉 and 一本鑪 don't actually get much use.
Where are you getting your information for Ippon-Datara?
Ippon-Datara is *not* a kami of any sort. Ippon-Datara is a yōkai, i.e. a monster / bogeyman / goblin / thingie. Here is a decent explanation in English that matches what I've read in Japanese.
There is no EN Wikipedia article for w:Ippon-Datara. Stop adding WP links to non-existent articles.
Amanomahitotsu == Amatsumara == Kajishin. I got Kajishin and Kagutsuchi crossed in my head; apologies for that confusion. One means "forge god" and the other is a god of the forge, but Kagutsuchi doesn't appear to be identified with Amamnomahitotsu / Amatsumara. Regardless, none of these four names or titles is a synonym for Ippon-Datara. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig06:33, 18 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
Never, and I mean never, take anything from a manga-related source at face value for etymological purposes.
Some of the issues with the information in that Trivia section:
Deidarabotchi is an alternate for Daidarabotchi, but does *not* mean giant at all -- it's a name. The dai at the front is probably 大(dai, “big”). The dara in the middle is probably related to だれる(dareru, “to be dull, to become uninteresting”) and だらだら(daradara, “bumping, thumping; dragging along”). The botchi on the end shows up in various places, and is probably a diminutive corruption of 坊ちゃん(botchan, “boy; son, sonny”). The name could thus be parsed as “big oaf boy”. Meanwhile, giant in Japanese is 巨人 (kyojin).
Daidarabotchi is a kind of giant in various tales, and these giants have been responsible for creating different landscape features. This might be a mythological recollection of old creation gods. See ja:w:ダイダラボッチ for more detail, and w:Daidarabotchi for an English version, but the EN WP article is way too short, and is incorrect in some ways (describes this as "a gigantic yōkai ... his size", while the JA WP article makes it clear that this was many different giant myths, often with different names).
Ippon-Datara is a yōkai, not a kami. I haven't run into any legend stating that Ippon-Datara *is* Amanomahitotsu, though there are references to broad similarities in being one-eyed. I have trouble imagining a major god like Amanomahitotsu being reduced so much in common myth, without there being some massive upheaval in the culture, such as an invasion by a different ethnicity that brought their own myths which replaced the older ones. Since Japan has no such history, I find it very unlikely that Ippon-Datara could be Amanomahitotsu.
"Datara" is not a Japanese term. The closest would be tatara as described further above. This would never appear on its own with the first consonant voiced as "d" -- that only happens in rendaku, i.e. in compounds.
What manga writers do is what many writers do -- they trawl the older tales for ideas, and then mix and match and synthesize to come up with something new and original, and ideally interesting. But in the process, much of the origins of their ideas get obscured.
I'm not sure what you mean by mixed answers. If you're referring to the kanji spelling for Ippon-Datara, I laid it all out for you above. To recap, there are multiple possible spellings, of which 一本だたら should be the main entry, and 一本踏鞴 and 一本蹈鞴 should be stub entries using {{alternative spelling of}} to point back to 一本だたら.
I strongly suspect this was borrowed from Chinese, probably Middle Chinese. I doubt that this was coined in Japanese, which is what the etym at 青金石#Japanese currently says.
Latest comment: 11 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
I just want to ask you a few things about readings. I saw a strange thing on ja.wikt about 兄; it said: 呉音 : キョウ（キャウ）（古代音：クヰャウ）. This last one really surprised me, so I googled and found this elsewhere as well as others like クヰャク. Are these legitimate readings or just some transcription of what it originally might have sounded like in Japanese or even in the Chinese dialect from which the reading was borrowed? I also want to ask about presumably one-mora readings with kw-/gw-, like クヱ, グヰ; are these possible, or only hypothetical? I ask, because I often see ki and/or ke listed alongside a kwai, so it looks as if the w was never included in the shorter readings. The last question is about Chinese -m; on 吟 I copied historical readings ending in -む from the ja.wikt, but I am having doubts about them. I had always understood that before the Meiji era there was no spelling distinction between mu and moraic N anyway. Some of the -n endings come from Chinese -m, some from Chinese -n, and others from native ni, mi, mu, bu, etc., but was there ever a distinction in spelling (or pronunciation, for that matter)? – Krun (talk) 19:19, 19 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
Wow, that's a lot. :)
I've got to shift gears here shortly, so I don't have a lot of time at the mo', but looking into 兄, that *is* weird. That would presumably have to be a transcription of the pre-borrowed Chinese pronunciation, as the historical goon and kan'on are the furthest back we get for a given reading in Japanese, as far as I've understood things.
Exploring the zh:兄 entry shows a Middle Chinese reading of xjwæng and a reconstructed Old Chinese reading of /*m̥raŋ/, nothing even vaguely resembling クヰャウ /kwjau/. I'd be tempted to just flat-out call "bullshit" on the JA WT entry, as none of these even have a /k/ sound, but then I also see that the zh:兄 entry lists an alternate reading of kuàng -- but with no explanation of where this came from or what historical provenance it might have. I suppose it's possible that an initial sound of /kju/ could have palatalized further in some dialect into modern xio- and un-palatalized (if that's a word) into ku- in another dialect.
But this is only speculation, and with no sources I can find to back this up, and none given for the JA WT entry reading, I don't feel comfortable including that anywhere in our entry. I'll look more into this later as time allows.
PS -- The 古代 reading was added in this edit by an anon, with most edits in 2006 and none since 2010. A few of their 2006 edits were reverted, but not this one. I'd take that reading with a big grain of salt. ;) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig19:47, 19 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
Back to it for a bit.
I also want to ask about presumably one-mora readings with kw-/gw-, like クヱ, グヰ; are these possible, or only hypothetical? I ask, because I often see ki and/or ke listed alongside a kwai, so it looks as if the w was never included in the shorter readings.
I think these are actual historical readings. The JA WP article on ja:w:拗音 (yōon palatalized or labio-velarized sound, like nya or kwa) has a section called 合拗音, describing how the /kwi/, /kwe/, /gwi/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g), /gwe/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g) (/kʷi/, /kʷe/, /gʷi/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g), /ɡʷe/) sounds all existed in Japanese, but that the /kwa/, /gwa/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g) (/kʷa/, /gʷa/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g)) pair was the only one that lasted for long past the initial borrowing stage. These apparently finally converged with /ka/, /ga/ replace g with ɡ, invalid IPA characters (g) some time during the Edo and Meiji periods, relatively recently.
The header paragraph on ja:w:拗音 also explains that these combinations were still counted as one mora.
The last question is about Chinese -m; on 吟 I copied historical readings ending in -む from the ja.wikt, but I am having doubts about them. I had always understood that before the Meiji era there was no spelling distinction between mu and moraic N anyway. Some of the -n endings come from Chinese -m, some from Chinese -n, and others from native ni, mi, mu, bu, etc., but was there ever a distinction in spelling (or pronunciation, for that matter)?
I'll have to read up on this a bit. I dimly recall that む was read mostly as /mu/, with the /ɴ/ pronunciation developing later. I'm not familiar with any other kana being read as /ɴ/, so any change like /ni/ > /ɴ/ or /bu/ > /ɴ/ would be new to me. There are some clear cases of abbreviation or contraction, like の turning into ん, such as in 桜ん坊 or 赤ん坊, or み turning into ん over time, such as in the derivation of modern 札 (fuda) from earlier uncontracted 文板 (fumiita) (/fumiita/ > /fumita/ > /funda/ > /fuda/), but these are cases of phonetic changes eventually being represented in the spelling, not of the kana actually being read that way.
But maybe that kind of gradual contraction is what you meant?
Suffice to say, historical spellings that include む did, as best I know so far, actually use a pronunciation of /mu/, at least in formal, non-contracted speech. (Compare ending す in modern Japanese -- this often contracts to /s/, but in formal or careful speech, you will hear speakers actually enunciate this as /su/.) In fact, the hiragana ん evolved from a cursive form of 无, an alternate character (変体仮名 (hentaigana)) for む. The ja:w:ん article has a section titled 「ん」が日本語に現れる時期, stating that the ん kana and /ɴ/ reading only appear in the Muromachi period, and that /mu/ was probably read as-is before this.
The kuang4 reading of 兄 (< xjwæng < *m̥raŋ, "elder brother") comes from its derivative glyph 況 (< xjwangH < *m̥aŋ-s, "situation; to compare; more; besides"). MC x- corresponds regularly to Japanese k- (eg. 曉). I guess kwjau represents a moderately early stage of borrowing, after MC x- and -aŋ were approximated with native k- and -au, but before the Japanese finally gave up on pronouncing this too-difficult double glide + diphthong. Wyang (talk) 13:51, 15 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
There is something fishy about the historical readings of じょう (“lock”). Daijirin lists this as one entry, but gives ぢやう as the historical reading for the spelling 錠, but じやう for 鏁/鎖. You have given じやう for 錠, of which it can hardly be an authentic on-reading, since Chinese has d- and other Japanese readings also have t-. The じょう readign of 鎖, however, you give as ぢやう, which is plausible since it is a kan’yōon reading anyway, but still, Daijirin gives じやう, so I don’t know what to make of it. – Krun (talk) 11:08, 21 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
Yes, Daijirin I've found useful as a general reference, but they're pretty lean on etymological details. Shogakukan has more information on that score. To quote:
Looking further at 錠, the right-hand element on its own (定) also has the on'yomi of じょう < ぢやう, same as for 錠, so the change for 鎖 from sō to jō was probably the influence of this other character of similar meaning. I'll reword the etym at 鎖 accordingly, and make sure the hhira values are consistent. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig06:58, 22 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
Updated. Have a look at the wikicode -- I notice that you have a habit of adding "lit.: xxx" to etym lines, but that's not actually how we do etymologies here. I updated the entry to use the fully-templatized formatting that's standard for Japanese compounds. Cheers, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig18:46, 28 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
What about 斬馬刀, 経絡系, (and 点穴 (てんけつ, tenketsu), 急所 (きゅうしょ, kyūsho), 穴位 (けつい, ketsui)), and 羅針盤?
Any chance you might register and use an account? Not being able to communicate with you was the main reason we started blocking you every time we saw your edits. I can give you our standard welcome, which has a lot of links explaining how to do things. If you have problems about getting emails, you can set up a gmail or hotmail account to set as your user email address (I have my account set up that way, but mostly because hotmail is what I use for email most of the time), or change your settings so you only receive a couple of emails to get the account started, and to reset your password (if needed). Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 00:02, 30 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I have tried, but for some reason it won't work. I cannot get Hoymail, either. Also, I cannot get software to see the characters, (Kanji etc), on my laptop, all I see are squares. I've just been trying to bring the articles to you attention. I apologise if any of my information was bad.
FWIW, 観音 is much more commonly read as かんのん (Kannon) due to a phenomenon known as 連声 (renjō). It's a bit similar to how a turns into an before words that start with vowels, or how didyou turns into didja in running speech.
Also, I created {{ja-five-dhyani}} for inclusion in the ====Coordinate terms==== sections of the relevant entries. Have a look at the wikicode for 大日如来 for an example of use.
Assuming that the romaji here is representative, the kana would most likely be ばくようさく. And as for the kanji, I haven't the foggiest. Titles can be based on very non-standard spellings. If I were forced to guess, it might be 博奕(bakuyō, “gambling”, obsolete, non-standard) + 作(saku, “creation, title, episode”). Amusingly, it might also be 爆(baku, “explosion, explosive”) + 傭作(yōsaku, “employment”, rare).
FWIW, the Japanese title of that episode is 妖異 太陽が二つの国 (Yōi: Taiyō ga Futatsu no Kuni, “Mystery: The Land with Two Suns”). Still not sure where bakuyōsaku fits into this. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig01:23, 12 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
If you've watched the episode, (see also; http://www.greatsage.net/monkey/series_two.php) you'll know that it is the name of a weapon that even Monkey admits rivals his "Magic Wishing Staff". Whilst the subtitles say that "Bakuyohsaku" is a arrow, the characters always seem to be refering to the great red and gold war bow.
Latest comment: 11 years ago8 comments3 people in discussion
Hi, I wanted to get your feedback on an idea I had for new categories. As an example, I added what I had in mind to 念力, and I was thinking that those would go into two parent categories each, the preexisting one for the kanji, such as Category:Japanese terms spelled with 念, and another one for the reading, like Category:Japanese terms spelled with kanji read as ねん which would in turn go in Category:Japanese_kanji_readings. Note that the two categories at 念力 are formatted differently (with or without "spelled") to compare them side by side. Sometimes readings cannot be easily segmented into kanji, but they can in the majority of cases, and I think grouping terms together that way would be very helpful for learners to get a handle on readings. BTW I pinged CodeCat about it here thinking that it would be a good idea to use ja-kanjitab to do it automatically, but I'm starting to think it would be too hairy. In that post I introduced my proposal with some background on how kanji readings have been handled up till now, but I was thinking categories would supplement rather than necessarily replace content on the entries, as complementary approaches to the same thing. --Haplology (talk) 15:16, 19 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
I think leveraging {{ja-kanjitab}} might be a good idea, even so -- simply add optional params for the kana reading, and add the appropriate categories if these params have values, or ignore them if they're empty.
As you noted in the message to CodeCat, some multi-kanji terms also have multiple readings. In such cases, unfortunately, we're just shit out of luck, if you'll pardon the expression -- the MediaWiki software is completely incapable of adding the same index item (the term) to the same category with multiple collations (the readings). I posted on Meta about this issue here, but no one has responded. I also recall that someone here at EN WT might have posted a specific bug number for this issue, but I can't find it. Anyway, the requirements for a Japanese dictionary are just not met by the MediaWiki back-end, and there's not much we can do about that in the short term.
By way of example, our entry for 汝 has nine readings, all using the appropriate format of the JA POS header template ({{ja-pos}} for pronouns, in this case). Any comprehensive Japanese dictionary should list this single-kanji term under each reading. However, our index of pronouns at Category:Japanese_pronouns only lists 汝 under な (na), for the last reading given on the 汝 page -- なんじ (nanji). The 汝 kanji is not listed under any of the other readings, which is a rather grave shortcoming.
For that matter, categories for kanji-spelled Japanese terms should ideally list the kanji under the expected first kana -- and also give the full reading in hiragana. So the kanji 汝 should be listed under な (na) in the category listing, as it currently is, and it should also ideally have the full reading なんじ either preceding the kanji or following it.
Again, I'm not really sure how to proceed with regard to this MW categorization failure. The workaround mentioned before of creating an entry with a non-displaying character to use as a redirect *does* work, but it's not very scalable -- manually creating and maintaining so many redirect entries is a daunting tedium. I can't think of anything other than a bot approach that could begin to work acceptably. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig22:21, 19 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
What about creating a dummy subpage for each reading, consisting of categories and a redirect to the lemma: kanji/reading1, kanji/reading2, kanji/reading3... If you could get someone to write a JavaScript app to add these, analogous to the accelerated entry-creator, it might not be that much more work. You would have to get consensus for adding this new type of structure, but if it works well enough, it might be worth it. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:41, 20 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Aside from what can be done with ja-kanjitab, first I was hoping for some sort of approval for a new set of categories like the ones at 念力 and a new parent category for those. I wanted to get agreement from any interested editors before creating a whole bunch of categories. --Haplology (talk) 02:45, 21 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Ah, apologies -- I'm perfectly fine with the creation of such new categories: Support. As you noted, I think these could be a help to learners of Japanese, since learning kanji readings is a big part of gaining functional literacy in the language. Just so long as we editors are aware of the limitations of how categories work, when dealing with multi-reading entries. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig17:33, 22 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
That's good. I've gone ahead and added a number of pages, such as in Category:Japanese_terms_spelled_with_物. I was wondering if I could trouble you for your judgement in one area where I'm not sure how to proceed: for a term like 物質, would you say that 物 is read as ぶつ or ぶっ? I was a little unsure about cases of rendaku as well, which I encountered with ぢから in 底力. Thanks! --Haplology (talk) 11:48, 23 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Well, technically, the sokuon and rendaku readings are based on the underlying readings of ぶつ and ちから in your two examples, and both compounds should ideally be listed under the ====Derived terms==== headers for the relevant readings on the 物 and 力 pages. I think JA-JA materials handle it this way, and I don't think I've ever seen reference books that list kanji by the sokuon or rendaku readings. However, all the references I've worked with have been intended for JA speakers, which is quite frustrating if you don't already know the language, so for non-JA-speaking learners, who might not know about sokuon or rendaku or the mechanisms by which these things happen, having the sokuon and rendaku readings might be a good idea. Perhaps sokuon and rendaku readings should be in addition to the "regular" readings? So your examples would add cats for both ぶつ and ぶっ, and for both ちから and ぢから. That way, you get the "regular" reading as the kanji would be listed in native JA-JA materials, and the modified actual in-context reading, which is all the learner has to go on. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig17:05, 23 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Ah, thanks. I understand now, and that puts the question in context. After digesting that information, at the risk of making very long category names I'm thinking of adding the qualifier "with sokuon" or "with rendaku," producing e.g. Category:Japanese terms spelled with 物 read as ぶつ with sokuon for 物質, and that would be a subcategory of Category:Japanese terms spelled with 物 read as ぶつ. Maybe those subcategories should have a category boiler template that produces a short blurb includes a link to a definition of sokuon or rendaku. I'm not completely sure about the names. Maybe "ぶっ following sokuon" or something else would be better, or maybe just leaving out a qualifier and making it a subcategory is enough, but that would be less informative. --Haplology (talk) 03:25, 24 July 2013 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Has been FWOTD nominated specifically for the 6th August. Could you see if you could get it some citations and a pronunciation? - I don't know any Japanese. Cheers. Hyarmendacil (talk) 09:45, 1 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Pardon me for jumping in, but I saw this and added one citation. Wikisource has three others, but they are all about the same thing (the law) so I didn't see much point in adding them. As for the pronunciation, I can't help much there. --Haplology (talk) 15:18, 1 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Heya folks, was out of town & out of email contact for a much-needed two-week mental reset (a.k.a. vacation :). It's too late for the 6 August listing, but I'll have a look at the entry all the same.
Latest comment: 11 years ago10 comments3 people in discussion
Hi Eirikr, welcome back from your vacation. A week or two ago I tried making a ja-kanjitab that displayed reading info and added links to the categories I was talking about, and it looked good so I went with that and since then I've been busy in the past couple of weeks mainly with converting ja-kanjitab to {{kanji readings tab}} where possible, but also:
I ja-noun, ja-adj, ja-pos, ja-verb, and ja-verb-suru all call a new function in Module:ja called jsort which generates the type of sort key used for hidx etc. Therefore hidx is now completely automatic. As long as there is a hira, kata, or if the page name is any mix of kana, it works fine. In fact those templates completely ignore hidx now and probably it should be removed with AWB or something so as not to confuse newbies.
ja-adj actually generates romaji automatically if it is not supplied in the rom parameter. I am thinking of adding the same feature to the other templates.
ja-noun, ja-verb, ja-verb-suru, and ja-adj (but not yet ja-pos) check the supplied romanization with the romanization that Module:ja would have produced, and when they don't match, it puts the term in the hidden maintenance category Category:Japanese terms with unexpected Romanizations
There are several new nominations of Japanese terms in RFD.
I'm thinking that a {{kanji readings tab}} can or should be added under every etymology, since the readings are usually different so the tabs present different information as opposed to ja-kanjitab which is the same for every etymology on an entry.
I think that's everything. As always feedback etc. is welcome. Unfortunately so far it seems like nobody else is really interested in any of the things above. Even the items in RFD are being largely ignored. --Haplology (talk) 04:20, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Wow, looks like you've been busy! :) A quick off-the-cuff suggestion might be to include y and j as alternate argument values for yutōyomi and yutōyomi . Past there, I had noticed that you were adding {{kanji readings tab}}, but I hadn't looked into what all that template does. I think what you've described here is a whole collection of good ideas. Thank you for all of this! I think this should improve WT's usability for Japanese terms.
I'm very glad to hear that. It has been unnerving working alone so far, especially as this project will change the face of Japanese entries when completed. Until I started all of this I didn't know that kan'on readings existed, let alone what they were, nor yutōyomi or jūbakoyomi, so to present all of that information to the world accurately has been stressful, and any corrections or suggestions are greatly appreciated. In particular I'm uncertain about the wordings of the categories, so I'm open to suggestions about that. Out of uncertainty I haven't created "Japanese terms read with on'yomi" yet or its kun'yomi counterpart. In the meantime I've added y and j, as well as on and kun. --Haplology (talk) 16:46, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Minor note: don't think that your efforts are being ignored; people are scared to comment in RFD about entries in languages they don't know. When I post Swahili ones, they get even less attention than Japanese. But I for one do use Wiktionary for all my Japanese dictionary needs (comes up more often than you'd think when you watch this much anime), so I can definitely tell you I appreciate the work. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds16:50, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Thanks, that's reassuring--I was a little taken aback by the lack of responses in RFD. To me, a question about whether the name of a castle meets CFI is a question about CFI (to take the request about 伏見城 as an example), but I suppose most people see the kanji and scroll past. --Haplology (talk) 17:21, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, all the different types of readings -- whee! I've learned a lot myself in the past year or two as I really dig into Japanese etymologies, which revolve around the readings. The ways in which a single "spelling" (as a single string of kanji) can wind up with multiple readings and multiple derivations is both fascinating and daunting. But hey, if you really want to tsukaikonasu(tsukaikonasu) your Japanese, you've gotta go deep. :)
FWIW, I've generally omitted reading type information for compound terms unless they're consistent -- things like 手刀打ち or フランス語 where the constituent parts use different reading types. If the whole compound is on or kun, I'll say as much, but otherwise I leave that out. Perhaps there's a better way of proceeding?
Also, it might be a good idea to further leverage Module:ja to generate proper romaji for kana-only entries like フランス, so we could just add {{ja-noun}} / {{ja-verb}} / etc. without any arguments, and have the template actually do all the work, as was originally envisioned (and now, with Lua for the funky string processing bits, is *finally* possible :).
Leaving reading type information for consistent compounds sounds like the best approach. In addition I have noticed that given names and family names sometimes have mixes of readings, and as I understand, the kanji selected for given names are highly variable and more or less arbitrary, so classifying those according to reading might not be helpful.
The code that I added in ja-adj should do that with katakana entries as-is, and Module:ja has the code to make argument-less entries like that possible. I was pondering a universal template for every pos (ja-term?) that would assume noun with nothing, would deduce verb given a conjugation type or transitivity, would deduce adjective given inflection type, and would accept other parts of speech with flags as ja-pos does. --Haplology (talk) 18:07, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Cool about {{ja-adj}} -- I'll have to look at that later.
About a possible {{ja-term}}, I would caution against overgeneralization -- editors are already very used to the paradigm of {{-}} for headword templates for one, and making things too general can obfuscate what they're for and how they're used. There are many reasons that single-celled organisms aren't the only life form, for instance. :)
That said, it might make sense to have a common back end, where {{ja-noun}}, {{ja-verb}}, etc. all wind up serving as wrappers and just passing along arguments to a back-end template or module. But in doing so, I would strongly recommend that the formatting side, at least, be as clear as possible -- some recent changes to {{compound}} have changed appearances in unexpected and unwelcome ways, and now that {{compound}} is Luafied, it's not at all clear how to go about changing the formatting. (For that matter, I need to check that GP or BP thread to see if anyone's replied...)
I see what you mean about over-generalizing. Probably it would be better and easier to keep the existing headword templates and it tweak the code at each one to use the new features available through Module:ja. I suppose that a backend would be possible but it would only save one or two steps, and it would add some complexity at the same time. I added automatic script detection to ja-adj, so it's fully automatic now, and for katakana or hiragana entries, all one needs to do is specify the inflection type. I updated the documentation as well. I'm planning to add the same changes to the other templates soon. --Haplology (talk) 02:40, 17 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
It might be, but the only source I currently have that lists it (the EB science dictionary given in the Refs section at ブルマ) spells it with the short u. I wasn't familiar with the Latin term either until doing research for the request for ブルマ. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig07:00, 29 August 2013 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, I came across ろうまじ and afaict it's flat-out wrong and should be deleted on sight, moved to ろおまじ, or labelled as a misspelling, but the first two options are little drastic so I wanted to check with you first, especially given that the creator is a legendary admin. Also, recently I reverted your move of Nichiyōbi to nichiyōbi, but if you're sure it's a proper noun I'll take your word for it and revert it back or let it be reverted back. My thinking was that the main entry calls it a noun, as it did in your last edit to 日曜日, so maybe capitalizing it was sort of accidental. Speaking of init caps for proper nouns, ja-pos now automatically generates init-capped romanizations when set to "proper," so an entry like けんいちろう need only {{ja-pos|proper}}. --Haplology (talk) 15:30, 1 September 2013 (UTC)Reply
Heya, things on my end have gotten extremely busy -- I'm now head of a complicated long-term project at work, and it's eating up all my time.
Re: ろうまじ, I'm not entirely opposed to such pages existing as redirection stubs, as users could conceivably try to look up the term that way -- and given Wiktionary's appallingly bad search feature, having actual pages for redirects is about the only way to ensure that users still find what they're looking for. That might have been what Ullmann intended in creating the page.
Re: ichiyōbi, fine. I had assumed (apparently erroneously) that days of the week were proper nouns.
Re: {{ja-pos}} and all your other JA template streamlining, **thank you** many times over! Your work has made the templates much easier to use, and has removed a lot of the why-the-heck-doesn't-this-work-automatically, numblingly-dull tedium and redundancy required of our pre-Lua templates.
I've blocked this user for abusing multiple IPs and adding generally rubbish entries to the dictionary, especially Mandarin ones. Jamesjiao → T ◊ C22:32, 9 October 2013 (UTC)Reply
Eirikr can't answer right away because he is very busy right now. To check a word, a good way is to look it up on Jim Breen's online dictionary . If a word is on there, it's probably OK. Haplology (talk) 03:54, 11 October 2013 (UTC)Reply
Thanks, guys. I'm still way busy with other stuff right now IRL and expect to remain so for months yet. I had a moment of rare downtime today and redid the entry for 剣, but that's probably all you'll see of me in the near term. :( Hope those of you in the States (or at least of a USian persuasion) had a good Thanksgiving last week! :D ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig23:08, 2 December 2013 (UTC)Reply
Another one-off. That was ... a bit different from what actual researched sources had to say. But admittedly not as far off-base as some entries have been. :)
Wow. That *is* unfortunate.
If there is some third interpretation that would resolve this apparent dichotomy, by all means please lay it out. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 16:43, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
I'll keep looking, but I don't expect to find much. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:21, 10 June 2013 (UTC)
I've started the process of building up to the 脇差 entry. Working backwards into this term's constituent parts, I just finished a massive expansion of the 脇 entry; that still needs oodles of derived terms, and the on'yomi etymology and related sub-sections. Next I'll look at the verb 差す -- but probably not today, as I'm short on time. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 21:45, 17 June 2013 (UTC)
