Happy Christian New Year! When you have a moment, could you please add Hebrew translations to the entry for hinder? Do watch out for edit conflicts, though, since I'm asking several folks for help with this. --EncycloPetey 19:58, 1 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I'll have to think about that one … (deprecated template usage) hinder's kind of a formal word, and my formal Hebrew vocabulary is rather limited. (Right now I'm thinking ikev, but I'll have to figure out how to spell that, and then confirm via Google searches that it's used how I think it is.) —Ruakh 23:33, 2 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I don't know whether it's the correct translation, but the spelling of ikev, held back, is עכב, fwiw.—msh210℠ 23:36, 2 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Really? I was assuming it was related to the word for "ankle", which would make it related to the etymon of "Jacob", which would mean it's spelled with a kuf. (As you might imagine, my Hebrew spelling is tedious and error-prone.) And of course, we both know it's spelled with a yud. :-) —Ruakh 23:38, 2 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

(Not sure whether you're really asking or that's rhetorical, so, just to be sure, I herewith answer:) Yes, really.—msh210℠ 18:14, 3 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Happy New Year. Could you help fill out the etymology of this one a little? Widsith 20:37, 1 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Done. :-) —Ruakh 23:39, 2 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! That was fast, once the message got to the right place. --EncycloPetey 00:42, 4 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for correcting the quotation format in mögöttem! --Panda10 19:17, 5 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

No prob. :-)   You might be interested in Wiktionary:Quotations, which gives details about our quotation format. —Ruakh 20:08, 5 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Concerning my use of "Palestine", note that that region of the world is known as Palestine, no matter what country may be situated there at any time. See w:Palestine. But Temple in Jerusalem has since been modified by myself and by Robert Ullmann, and now has neutral wording (and less encyclopedic content).—msh210℠ 18:09, 10 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

That region of the world is also known as (deprecated template usage) Israel, no matter what country may be situated there at any time … I'm not opposed to using the term (deprecated template usage) Palestine when talking about the Roman province, or the British colonial region, or modern Palestinian Arabs, but to use it in talking about Ancient Israel? If I hadn't seen that it was you who created the entry, I might have thought it was a strange form of vandalism or POV-pushing or something. —Ruakh 02:06, 11 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

You're right, Ruakh, he is identified as "Ed. Halley" at the start of that section, although elsewhere in the same tome, various sections are attributed to "E. Halley," "Edmund Halley," and "Edm. Halley." Book printers were pretty arbitrary about abbreviating first names back in those days and seemed to love to do it. Wikipedia actually has him as w:Edmond_Halley but acknowledges that sometimes he is called "Edmund." Gotta love these minutiae. -- WikiPedant 05:08, 13 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh, good call. :-) —Ruakh 14:18, 13 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I've hunted down citations for this one - could you revisit your RfD vote? Cheers! bd2412 T 16:44, 13 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the notice; I'll consider for a bit. :-)   Incidentally, you might want to take a look at Wiktionary:Quotations. —Ruakh 17:29, 13 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, it's good to be back. However, I don't think I'll be back for too long. School starts up soon, and I just won't have the time to spare. Anything special I can do for you while I'm here? Atelaes 03:24, 17 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh, are you one of those people who have lives outside the Internet? I'd read about them on cnn.com, but I never thought I'd actually meet one. ;-)   And no, I think I'm set. :-) —Ruakh 03:35, 17 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

The cites for the legal sense seem to take the prepositional phrase "but for", put it in quotes, and use it adjectivally. Does the entry need an Adjective header or does it not merit a sense because they are engaged in a linguistic discussion of the ordinary usage? Or, is there another way of looking at it? DCDuring 02:32, 18 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

No clue. I'm not even sure they're using it adjectivally; mentions usually act grammatically as nouns/nominals (e.g. in "'leave' is a verb", where "'leave'" is the subject), and in the quotes bd2412 has pulled up, we seem to have mentions being used as attributive nouns. (I'm not a linguist or anything; that's just my offhand impression.) Ordinarily we don't include mentions at all, but these quotes are really using the mentions to convey meaning. If we can't find any non-mention-y uses, I guess we'll have to figure out definition and part of speech based on the mention-y uses, but I think we should cross that bridge when we come to it. —Ruakh 02:52, 18 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

OK, pause in. DCDuring 03:25, 18 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Pause in? That's not an idiom I'm familiar with … —Ruakh 22:12, 18 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

My coinage. If "end of" can be used to end a discussion, then .... BTW, screwed looks pretty good. I'm still a little skeptical about the early timing of the linkage with sex, but I what's a hundred years among WTers? ("what's an X among friends?" seems very idiomatic to me, but what would the entry title be? Also, I don't know whether anyone would ever need to look it up.) DCDuring 22:35, 18 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

but maybe you know ... why does the he.wikt have a number of entries with " in them (e.g. U+0022, ordinary straight double quote). Do they imagine it looks like ... no, that can't be. Can it? Robert Ullmann 00:11, 21 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

While the gershayim character ((deprecated template usage) ״, used mainly in indicating acronyms) is recognized by Unicode as a distinct character (having codepoint U+05F4 and name "HEBREW PUNCTUATION GERSHAYIM"), it looks sufficiently like the ASCII double-quote that most people just use the latter. Israeli keyboards don't even include a special gershayim key combination (or if they do, I've never noticed it); I'm guessing there are historical reasons for this — I notice that ISO/IEC 8859-8 doesn't allocate a codepoint for the character, though that can't be decisive, since it doesn't allocate codepoints for any of the vowels, either. —Ruakh 00:29, 21 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

E.g.  ? Robert Ullmann 00:40, 21 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yups. That's a four-letter acronym, reish-mem-reish-zayin. They define it simply as its expansion, which appears to be the names of two rabbis; I'm not familiar with them, but I'm assuming they wrote some work together and this acronym is an abbreviated way of referring to that work. The entry belongs to the "family-name acronyms" category. —Ruakh 00:46, 21 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Nitpick: That looks like Rabbi Moshe Rabbi Zelig's, an old way of forming patrynomic surnames; cf. he:רמ"א.—msh210℠ 21:25, 21 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh! So it means the same as "Rabi Moshe ben Rabbi Zelig"? I take it the -ס is a Yiddish reflex of the German genitive ending? —Ruakh 21:34, 21 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

That's the way I understand it, at least. No guarantee I'm correct.—msh210℠ 05:42, 22 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I added the Hebrew section to נורא; would you mind making sure it accurately reflects modern usage?—msh210℠ 21:25, 21 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Looks good to me. I didn't know the sense of "very" was considered colloquial, but I'll definitely take your word for it. —Ruakh 21:32, 21 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for checking. It seems colloquial to me, but I may be behind the times. I'll leave the tag, but certainly have no objection if someone removes it.—msh210℠ 05:45, 22 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi. Could you add the etymology to this. I believe it is from ase-reth had-devarim, but I wouldn't know where to start in Hebrew !! Question. Would it be of any use to put Latin alphabet versions in for any words I come across that I know? Or would this be a wasted effort, or worse, distract attention from the need for a proper etymology? -- Algrif 14:25, 24 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Certainly the Ancient Hebrew term was as you say (spelled עשרת הדברים), but I can't tell you if that's the "etymology", per se. D'bharim doesn't mean "commandments", I don't think; it means "utterances" (and also "things"). I don't know whether whoever coined the term "Ten Commandments" thought that's what the Hebrew term meant. —Ruakh 19:14, 24 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I think the concept originated in the ancient Hebrew scriptures, and so this must be the basis for the translation in English, or any other language. In Spanish it exists in 2 forms.. Diez Mandamientos and Diez Palabras - if that helps at all. -- Algrif 10:58, 25 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

But I don't know if the English "Ten Commandments" is actually a translation of the Hebrew term (or a translation of some other language's translation of the Hebrew term), or simply a description of what they are (or a translation of a description in some other language of what they are). —Ruakh 12:36, 25 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

According to at least one religious reference work it is. That's where I got my Latin alphabet version from.-- Algrif 12:55, 25 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

That's fine, then; just because I don't know something doesn't mean we can't look it up in reference works. :-) —Ruakh 12:56, 25 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Could you do the honours, then? That way the Hebrew characters will be correct.  ;-) Thx -- Algrif 12:59, 25 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Please be careful. You eliminated my vote with this edit: --EncycloPetey 19:21, 27 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Eep! Sorry. I don't know how that happened. :-/ —Ruakh 21:25, 27 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I don't understand what your edit summary means at all. The other way around? Help me understand what information that pretty turn of phrase actually carries. My edit was an attempt to clarify what looked to me at first like an out-of-place spelling-frequency note, because it actually took a minute for me to realize that was saying, "this pronunciation refers usually to this other spelling." As is, it looks ambiguous, out-of-place, or misleading. With my edit, the intent of that note is more clear, especially to someone who can't readily read IPA and "get" what it's actually saying. -- Thisis0 23:42, 30 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

But I think it is an out-of-place spelling-frequency note. —Ruakh 23:54, 30 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Well, i wanna change it back now, so you're gonna hafta cough up more than that to deter me. I came to get your two cents before doing what I think is right. So, I was precisely removing that perceived ambiguity that you apparently shared. I do believe now that the author of that note was not commenting on preferred spelling, but rather that the second pronunciation was more related with the common contracted form. It's a useful bit of info, and if it's there I want it to not mislead or appear sloppy. -- Thisis0 00:01, 31 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

But spelling follows pronunciation. It's backward to say that a word is pronounced a certain way when it's spelled a certain way; rather, it's spelled a certain way when it's pronounced a certain way. At any rate, maybe we should have this discussion at the talk-page? —Ruakh 00:13, 31 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I do realize now what you are saying, finally in response to my first question. Your thought makes sense on some practical level, but here's a fact: You would read rock and roll as either fully pronounced, or "rocken-roll", but you would only read rock 'n' roll as "rocken-roll". Thus, pronunciation follows spelling. It was a true statement in that out-of-place note that you pronounce it "the second way" most often when it's contracted. And this chicken-before-the-egg stuff has been mere semantics since you started in on it. The truth is, there's just a two-way relationship with pronunciation and spelling and mentioning it one way doesn't preclude the other. It's just English. Anyway, what you've done (moving the note) opens it up for even more clarity, so there ya go.  :-) -- Thisis0 00:34, 31 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for welcoming me and explaining the general blocking guideline. I understand that there are inherent difficulties in scaling a limited staff of administrators to handle all instances of vandalism for such a prominent wiki. I did not mean to dismiss or challenge the status quo by posting at the Beer Parlour, however I did take issue with Connel's apparent volatility. It's obvious to me now that there's a deep history behind the current consensus of liberally applying blocks to stem vandalism. I also couldn't help but notice that my complaint revived a few longstanding personal feuds, so I'd like to take this chance to assure you that I am not interested in useless drama. (I agree that this is one of the pitfalls of en.wiki.)

As for the difficulties mentioned in the Beer Parlour thread, I'd like to make a bold suggestion. Wiktionary needs to solicit help for dealing with vandalism from the greater Wikimedia community. The English Wikipedia has thousands of eager and capable volunteers who focus their efforts on the tedious task of reverting petty vandalism and warning the offenders. These volunteers are aided by powerful anti-vandalism tools that could be adapted for Wiktionary use. To give you some idea of the potential utility, I'd like to bring up Huggle. Using that application, it is common for a vandalism patroller to perform upwards of a dozen reverts per minute. I'm not aware of the current rate of vandalism on Wiktionary, but my guess is that just a handful of users equipped with a similar tool could address the bulk of problem edits. Best regards, anetode 07:44, 9 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for your refreshing level-headedness. :-)   Re: "Wiktionary needs to solicit help for dealing with vandalism from the greater Wikimedia community.": That's a thought. We do share some admins with Wikipedia; perhaps I should ask some of them what they think about this. —Ruakh 16:50, 10 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

I noted that you have inserted a redirect to the lemma at this entry. I'm beginning to see that they do no harm if there isn't any separate meaning, although, in this case, there might be a comparative form. Whether a comparative form is worth noting I don't know. It does save time when doing a wikilink to have the inflected forms redirect to the lemma and blue links are easier on the eyes than red ones. Are there any other considerations? I now realize that many of the wikilinks I've inserted were blue but not as helpful as they might have been because not to lemmas. Do we care much about the raw count of entries for bragging rights relative to other dictionaries or wiktionaries ? DCDuring TALK 16:29, 10 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

I believe there's long¹-established consensus that the various forms of multiple-word idioms can simply redirect to one central form (typically plain form, singular, using one's, someone, etc.), but I don't think anyone objects to giving them normal form-of entries. (It's potentially objectionable to those who oppose form-of entries entirely, since a redirect saves a click, but I haven't actually heard any of them complain about this specifically.) Certainly a form-of entry is the only solution when there's more than one POS section; you seem to be suggesting that (deprecated template usage) fixed up can be an adjective? That sounds plausible.

1. "Long" on the Wiktionary timescale. So, >3 months. ;-)

—Ruakh 16:47, 10 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

When I started writing it hadn't yet occurred to me that it might be an adjective and I still haven't looked on b.g.c.

I have been using infl for most verb phrases unless there is something not 100% obvious about "inflection" (e.g., I don't think one can say "lighted out"; I think it has to be "lit out"). However, because this does not facilitate using "inflected" forms in wikilinks as well as making the addition of adj PoSs (and less commonly noun PoSs), I'm wondering which approach is really best as a default. The choices are: 1. template: infl or 2. en-verb (with inf=). If en-verb, then a. leave red, b. redirect entry, or c. "inflected"-form entry. I've stopped adding the "inflected" forms unless there is a specific reason like a new PoS.

Maybe when there is new software enabling user-selected views of the data this will all look a bit different. I'm trying to not waste so much of my time on what might be or ought to be botable, though the various lists of non-conforming entries usually generate a high percentage of entries that are non-conforming in multiple ways, many of which I am now comfortable with correcting and which might not be readily bot-correctable. DCDuring TALK 17:49, 10 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

I really have no advice to give, I'm sorry. :-/ —Ruakh 19:21, 10 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

I don't want another good editor to leave over headstrong arguments. Look at how many votes have been opposed by just one or two people, and you'll see that pushing a point of view does not work here, though it may have a long time ago. If you can, walk away for a minute, or just let the comments slide, because many of us already take the words with a grain of salt anyway. DAVilla 00:11, 13 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Meh, this vote is already lost. And I have to admit, a lot of the "oppose"-s had convincing arguments (especially the argument that blocking is not a form of reprimand). But Connel's an <insert expletive here> who behaves ridiculously inappropriately and drives away editors en masse; the community has apparently decided that he's a special case? I generally try to be friendly and helpful, but I guess I can now make him a special case. (I'm not going to go out and make a point of harassing him, obviously, but I'm also finished making a point of biting my tongue with him.) But, thanks for your comment; I know you're just being helpful. :-) —Ruakh 00:22, 13 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

I've added קשת but suspect there are senses I haven't included. If you think of any, would you be able to add them, please? (Oh, and the gender and the plural. Is the latter קְשָׁתוֹת?)—msh210℠ 21:50, 14 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

I also suspect we may be missing a few senses. I'll try to look at this tonight. —Ruakh 00:03, 15 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, I guess I didn't do this. Unfortunately, I'm traveling this weekend, so I probably won't get a chance for a few days. :-/ —Ruakh 23:09, 15 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

O.K., I've added some senses and the plural, and Stephen G. Brown added the gender. Right now it's not formatted very well — I interspersed the pedialinks, because otherwise they're kind of useless, but it looks kind of silly to have them like that — but that's what collaborative editing is for. :-) —Ruakh 16:09, 16 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

As for the plural — it's definitely spelled and pronounced the same as קְשָׁתוֹת, but I don't know whether it would have a kamatz or a patakh, and whether or not there would be a dagesh in the first tav. Assuming you got those niqqud from somewhere and didn't just pull them from a magic hat, (magic hats being notoriously bad at diqduq), put 'em in. :-) —Ruakh 01:26, 17 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for all your help (and thanks to Stephen G. Brown, too). I've made a minor change or two.—msh210℠ 02:51, 17 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Regarding your this comment, "acute accent" was probably chosen to distinguish it from the dieresis (which isn't usually considered to be an accent mark, but may be by some). Rod (A. Smith) 00:55, 19 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. It seems unnecessary to me, since from context no one could be confused, but I don't actively mind it if people think it should be included. :-) —Ruakh 04:04, 19 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the emendations. Harris Morgan 01:12, 20 February 2008 (UTC).Reply

No prob. :-) —Ruakh 01:32, 20 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ruakh, thanks for moving my greasepit comments to the right place! I guess I should have noticed how it works, but I was nervous enough about posting in the right place at all -- it is not clear at all that this is the right place to post suggestions, and the last thing I want to do is step on peoples' toes. --Thundt 22:26, 23 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi Ruakh. In case you're interested, I'm trying to analyse and gloss this sentence, which is the beginning of the only book I have handy in Hebrew as well as English or Spanish (in this case both):

לפני שנכנסה למכונית, הציצה אל מעבר לכתפה כדי לוודא שאיש אינו אורב לה.

— hippietrail 17:04, 24 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ooh, suspense! It means roughly, "Before she got into the car, she peeked over her shoulder to make sure there wasn't a man about to ambush her." And you don't want "ma`avar" and "k'dai", but rather "mei`ever l'-" (which means "across, across from, over", and which is linked from מעבר but doesn't yet have an entry of its own) and "k'dei" (which means "in order", as in "in order to" or "in order that"). —Ruakh 17:12, 24 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hehe I know what it means but I need help breaking it down word by word. I can now spot the definite article and plurals, know what letters might be prefixes or feminine endings, but have lots of trouble with verb forms, binyanim, and multiple affixes on a single word.

I wonder if you might know somewhere on the web where I could find non-colloquial Israeli Hebrew at a level for kids or learners. Something like "The Little Prince" perhaps? — hippietrail 17:21, 24 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh, heh, sorry. If it helps, here's a fuller gloss: lifnéi she-nikhn'sá l-a-m'khonít, hitzítza el meiéver li-kh'téf-á k'déi l'vade she-ísh ein-o orev l-a. As for Web resources — if you find one, let me know. I probably read at, like, a first-grade level. :-P   Next time I visit my parents, I think I'll grab some of the children's books they have in the basement. I remember really liking העץ הנדיב (The Giving Tree) as a kid, but the version the Hebrew Wikipedia links to is formatted very painfully. Plus, it's missing the illustrations, so really, what's even the point?! :-P —Ruakh 17:49, 24 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! — hippietrail 18:07, 24 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hello Ruakh -- I absolutely adore the template you devised to allow quotation boxes to open and close for each sense (which is exactly how the online OED works), and regret that I completely missed the discussion of this last November. You have a number of very enthusiastic supporters and one boisterous critic. Can't this be revived and put to a formal vote or something? Is a vote even needed? Can't you just create the template in public space so that those who want to use it can do so? So far as I know, template creators don't need permission to put one out there. The formatting guidelines allow for quotations to be placed under individual senses and are silent on the question of whether it is permissible/impermissible to put them in windows that open and close. However, there is ample precedent for the use of such windows in Wiktionary. If there is a formal vote your principal critic can be as blustery as likes; he still only gets one vote. -- WikiPedant 20:05, 2 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! (I can't take too much credit, though; I just stole markup from the {{trans-*}} family and tweaked it until it worked inside our list structure — and as I recall, the bulk of the tweaking was just removing whitespace that MediaWiki interpreted as paragraph breaks.) If you'd like to start a fresh discussion and/or vote about using them, feel free; but given that it's been discussed before without a clear consensus emerging, I personally don't think it's a good idea to start using them without doing that. (As for moving them to main namespace, the thing is that {{User:Ruakh/quotations}} takes a bunch of boolean parameters, such as noborder=, that were only intended for the propose-and-discuss stage, to show the different options: for example, the real template should either always include a border or never include it, rather than offering an arcane mechanism for letting editors decide whimsically. This is trivial from a technical standpoint — given the existing flexi-version, any fixed version would take about 10 seconds to implement — but requires choosing values. The only parameter that might be genuinely useful in the real template is an optional 1=navbar text, which would be necessary for this template to be useful in quotations sections. Funnily enough, since that wasn't my intent in creating it, I didn't include such parameter, but again, it'd be about 10 seconds' work. I'll go do that now.) —Ruakh 21:30, 2 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thought you might be interested in the existence of template:he-decl-noun-segolate.—msh210℠ 18:23, 3 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Nice! :-)   —Ruakh 20:06, 3 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Shalom Ruakh,

I noticed that you reverted my changes to WT:enPR (and, peeping the history, that you wrote the page). Looking at it, I see that I confused w:Pronunciation spelling (non-standard spellings for rhetoric effect) with respelling (ad hoc phonemic transcription), as in: w:Pronunciation respelling for English. Sorry about that; I've added clarification at the WP page.

The w:Pronunciation respelling for English page seems a useful link (for context); it shouldn't be splattered around (it's not that useful on WT specifically); shall I put a link to it at the bottom of WT:enPR?

Nbarth (email) (talk) 01:20, 6 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh, sorry, I didn't notice that the "see also" link was different from the inline link. Yes, please re-add it; it looks very useful indeed. :-) —Ruakh 01:25, 6 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Done!

Nbarth (email) (talk) 23:15, 6 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Have I ever mentioned how much I appreciate you adding a polite and reasonable voice to discussions? Well, even if I have, I'll say it again. Also, I spent some time organizing the Hebrew language over the past few days, and I guess I didn't realize how far the language had progressed since the dark days of Dubaduba and 8 (although there is still an egregious amount of work left to be done). So, thanks. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 23:38, 11 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

:-) —Ruakh 00:15, 12 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

I was going to delete this when I saw it, but seeing as you aren't an anon I suppose it makes things different. Is this more than Sum of parts? Conrad.Irwin 23:02, 21 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

No clue. Feel free to RFD it. —Ruakh 23:03, 21 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ok, my bad ;) Mallerd 18:37, 22 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Don't worry about it. Really, I should have included a more helpful edit summary to begin with, but it's just so tempting to be lazy and just click the "rollback" link. :-P   —Ruakh 21:00, 22 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hello Ruakh -- Thanks for your support a couple weeks ago when I was accused of hanky-panky after inadvertently editing an old version of i.e. and clumsily wiping out some of EncycloPetey's edits. You correctly identified what had happened and I appreciate your pointing out the fact that it was nothing more sinister than good-faith klutziness. -- WikiPedant 05:06, 23 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

No prob. —Ruakh 15:32, 23 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

I wasn't trying to kill it. I just want folks to think about consequences for users. Frankly, Longman's seems a very good model for progressive user-oriented thinking, so their use of determiner as a PoS is interesting. Do you know how widespread is the use of determiner in English-language teaching? Who would know or how could we find out? DCDuring TALK 00:38, 5 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

I don't know. My first exposure to the concept was in a French grammar book, La Grammaire pour tous, which was organized alphabetically by concept (which is about as disorienting as it sounds) and had a section devoted to them (titled and alphabetized as déterminants, but noting in the section's introduction that they went by other names as well, such as déterminatifs and adjectifs non qualicatifs); you can make of that what you will. (I don't think the term is more common in French; rather, it's simply that I learned a little of French linguistics well before learning the little I know of English linguistics.) The thing is, the concept of determiners is really important, and it's pretty useless to tell someone that some or this is an adjective, because it can't be used anything like prototypical adjectives like red and big that most people think of. It's also pretty useless to tell someone that it's a determiner, because most of our readers don't know that term; but given the choice between uselessly accurate and uselessly misleading, I'll choose uselessly accurate any day of the week. ;-) —Ruakh 01:29, 5 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

The determiner concept doesn't seem (to my searches anyway) to be universally included even in ESL texts of b.g.c. Longman's DCE, which uses it as a PoS, also labels it as "technical" (a less pejorative substitute word for "jargon"), which they don't do for the other PoSs that they use (the usual suspects). Is there a way to have our cake and eat it? Could we put "determiner" in the inflection lines without changing the PoS header, for example? That + category would be supportive of those who find the concept useful. It's either (!!!) that, a potentially divisive headings vote, or do nothing and wait for "alternate universes" mediawiki software. Are there other ways of getting benefit from the "determiner" concept? DCDuring TALK 02:35, 5 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

As I said at the BP, I'd be fairly O.K. with using ==Adjective== but {{context|determiner}}. (It would be an unusual context tag in that it would need to categorize into Category:English determiners, Category:French determiners, etc. rather than into Category:Determiners, Category:fr:Determiners, etc.; but I don't think there's any technical reason we can't do that apparently {{context}} already supports that, and Robert has set up {{determiner}} to make use of that support, so we can start using it immediately if people are O.K. with it.) This approach would lose the benefit of conciseness, since in this case we'd need a separate ==Pronoun== section, but I don't think that's a huge deal. —Ruakh 12:37, 5 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Sorry to get into edit conflicts; as you can see using poscat= tells the context template to do all the correct magic. Robert Ullmann 13:25, 5 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

No worries! I think my last iteration actually worked fine, but of course it's easier to maintain things when the magic is all centralized. Thanks for your help. :-) —Ruakh 13:29, 5 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Does this not need any vote then? That would be desirable. Would it be possible to do an entry three different ways {no determiner at all, determiner as PoS, context determiner) to allow for direct comparison of the layouts? It should be one that illustrates the conciseness advantage of the Determiner heading. Even if this doesn't go to a vote now, the issue is likely to come up again. Time favors "Determiner", I think, though it might be more than a decade before final victory. It certainly seems to be gaining some favor in ESL texts. Many of our users seem to find our entries confusing. Some of the confusion seems to be because of things other than definitions interfering with what they want, which is often just the definition. Context tags might add to that confusion. OTOH, for these words, it is unlikely that a native speaker would be looking up the words to see what they mean as opposed to finding the limits on their use. DCDuring TALK 15:58, 5 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

I think a vote would be nice, just to confirm that people are O.K. with this outcome. Earlier today I created an entry for Hebrew (deprecated template usage) פחות (pakhót); let me finish fleshing out the usage notes a bit, and then I can create alternative set-ups in my user-space for people to look at. —Ruakh 16:51, 5 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

If you feel the vote would be necessary, them we might well want to consider the boldest of the three alternatives, especially if it has clarity advantages. What is the relationship to the numbers controversy? To what sources do we have recourse when deciding whether a given word is a determiner? Are there tests objective and sharp enough for us to rely on? DCDuring TALK 17:07, 5 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Actually, for that matter, there's no need for artificial examples: (deprecated template usage) יותר (yotér) is really the same, and uses ===Determiner=== (I created it back in October). The two entries are really quite comparable. —Ruakh 16:57, 5 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

I was responding to IS's unsolicited comments on Determiners. My initial attitude was like his, but on an uninformed basis, just general suspiciousness. I then started liking the idea, but have not really been impressed with the arguments, because no user benefit was offered, notwithstanding my considerable respect for your judgment and opinion on such matters. I'm still open to the PoS idea or to some less dramatic way of benefitting from the idea. It may be one of those ideas that is more useful in the more capacious intellectual workshop of professionals than in the homeowner's toolbox. DCDuring TALK 01:06, 11 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

My good faith with Connel disappeared years ago.

sure, he does a lot for Wiktionary. But his attitude is one of the biggest reasons Wiktionary still does not have beig team of helpers. He pisses off so many people.

Seriously, he should be banned from using RFD, RFV, RFC.--Richardb 02:12, 6 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Basically, if you thinking anyone should assume good faith in Connel using RFD, RFC, RFV, then I can hardly credit you with much intelligence. And don't woryy, I will just go away yet again. Get Connel under control, and you might see a lot of helpers come back.--Richardb 02:46, 6 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

I do not harass and attack Connel because he is unpleasant. I couldn't care less if he is unpleasant. I care that he is a VANDAL. Check a page I started a while ago User:Richardb/Monitoring Overzealous Admin and have added just a few entries to. He consistenly deletes pages without notice, misquotes CFI in a way that can only be deliberate and knowing. He always claims to speak for the whole Wiktionary community, when often he is going directly against something clearly stated in policy. The very reason I started the policy pages a few years ago was to try to get some control of Connel. And damn me if he didn't then unilaterally change and delete policy pages too. He is out of control, and a great danger to Wiktionary. And yet you are more concerned about me being "unpleasant". So, no worry, I'm not about to rejoin the community when sycophants still support Connel in his destructive ways. do something to get him under control, or continue to watch Wiktionary languish for lack of a decentr number of community minded contributors.--Richardb 03:28, 6 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Erm, you seem to be confusing me with Dmcdevit? At any rate, one could hardly call me a sycophantic supporter of Connel and his ways; but I do draw a very clear line at harassing an editor for good-faith edits. You say that Connel has plenty of bad-faith edits: fine, harass him for those. But you help nothing with comments like these. —Ruakh 03:33, 6 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

I'm thinking of posting the folowing to the Beer parlour:

Hebrew has a number of terms that translate into English as prepositions (from, to, others) and conjunctions (and, that), but which are attached to the fronts of words in the Hebrew. These are (deprecated template usage) ב-,‎ (deprecated template usage) ו-,‎ (deprecated template usage) כ-,‎ (deprecated template usage) ל-,‎ (deprecated template usage) מ-, and (deprecated template usage) ש-. Words formed of these, like (deprecated template usage) בארץ (b'eretz) (equals (deprecated template usage) ב- (b) plus (deprecated template usage) ארץ (eretz)), are written without space in the middle, and are recognized as one word by, for example, schoolchildren. Linguists consider them two words each, with the prefix counting separately from the rest. Certainly anyone who knows Hebrew can figure out the meaning if he can figure out where the prefix ends: if it's two words, then it's a sum of its parts. On the other hand, someone who doesn't know where the prefix ends will likely look up the whole thing. Ruakh says these are not entry-worthy; I say they are. I decided to take this issue here to the BP because it may well be relevant to other langages (Finnish, Hungarian, others). What do you all think?~~~~

I'm posting this here first to get your emendations, to not only my statement of your opinion and the italicized stuff, but also the rest.—msh210℠ 21:00, 8 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

I'm not a linguist; but yes, most or all of those are proclitics rather than prefixes, and not really part of the following word. And I'm not sure that they're "recognized as one word by, for example, schoolchildren"; if you have a reference for that statement, it might be helpful to include it, if only because such a reference would probably give additional background information. Other than that, I think your description is accurate; you don't explain why I think these aren't entry-worthy, but I can do that myself once you start the discussion, so, sounds good to me; thanks for asking. :-) —Ruakh 04:20, 9 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

I didn't include your reasoning because I don't fully understand it; my sentence "Linguists consider..." was meant as an appeal to authority, but that's the extent of my understanding of your opinion. I do hope to come to a fuller understanding when you reply in the BP; I have now posted the above, with a few minor changes (qualifying the schoolchildren claim with "I think", adding info on clitics vs. prefixes, fixing a typo or two).—msh210℠ 16:42, 9 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for fixing the root in the conjugation table, Ruakh! I think I see how the editing works now, so I can fix future typos myself. Best regards,--Ellenfalls 20:45, 21 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

I undid this: we need a list element, but we do not want it in the wikitext; id it is in the wikitext it will be a horrendous pain to try to remove later when we get Cite.php to give us a bit more flexibility.

I really want to keep this so it is fixable then without sorting through huge numbers of entries later, and meanwhile keep the HTML well-formed. Okay? Robert Ullmann 16:14, 22 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

To be a bit clearer (or maybe not): this should end up blank, with the individual lines generating "* ...", so that the resulting HTML is one list. If we can get one bit of extension to Cite.php it can be made to look very, very good. Robert Ullmann 16:18, 22 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

(I keep adding): the important bit now is to prevent people from adding "notes:" or "footnotes:" or whatever in the wikitext, so that the lines can be formatted better later, and the * list is one list in HTML. What I should do is improve the other MW:cite messages as much as possible now I suppose. Robert Ullmann 16:38, 22 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

I don't really understand what you're saying, but O.K., I'll accept that you have your reasons. :-) —Ruakh 16:47, 22 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

We received a (rather reasonable) complaint on this entry (see its talk page). I've cleaned it up to the best of my abilities, but those abilities only go so far. Would you be willing to give it a once over? Many thanks. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 23:08, 23 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Done, I think; thanks. :-)   I think the original problem was that Strong's has all sorts of theories and explanations for various things, and people take these at face value. Strong's is awesome and wonderful if you have your grains of salt handy, but if you don't, you come away believing that the Ancient Hebrews really didn't see a difference between (say) bread and war, or between maleness and noteworthiness. I mean, really. It's like the man had never heard of coincidence. (Or perhaps he believed that Hebrew was an inerrant gift from G-d, and therefore didn't experience coincidence?) —Ruakh 01:47, 24 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

In my estimation, earlier writers had less to go on than we, and as authorities in the field, were expected to come up with answers. You wouldn't call Aristotle stupid because of his biology, but you wouldn't call him correct either. :-) And I know I've asked you this before, but I feel compelled to do so again. There are many, many Hebrew words in such a condition. I realize that you devote yourself to many admirable tasks on Wiktionary, but ..... (bear in mind that this is coming from a person who well knows that there are a number of Ancient Greek verbs which are noted as "primary verb"s, as if they simply sprung out of thin air, and has not corrected them). And thanks for פן, it is a very distinct improvement. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 02:03, 24 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

I have difficulty being bold with those entries, because whoever created them knew a lot that I don't (even if much that they knew was false), and also because it's often clear that information is at the wrong entry but I'm not 100% sure what entry it's supposed to be at. However, I hereby resolve to try to be bolder. Feel free to bombard me with links. :-)   (Conveniently, my parents recently gave me a four-volume Hebrew dictionary that I'm excited about and that is organized in the old-fashioned way, with all verbs alphabetized under the underlying root, which is very convenient for fixing up these entries, since they're done likewise just less clearly.) —Ruakh 02:11, 24 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Rest assured that you would have some difficulty being more bold with Dubaduba's entries than I have thus far been. So far, I believe I've deleted at least thirty of them off hand, with no rfd, discussion, nothing. Also, any information which I have the slightest doubt about I always remove, without a tinge of guilt. Dubaduba's work is pure nonsense. Quite frankly, it would probably be a lateral move if we were to simply delete all his work, and start from scratch. Also, if you ever feel squeamish about removing information or deleting an entry, I'm always happy to hack away at Dubaduba's stuff. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 02:15, 24 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Umm. Actually I don't remember what was my point when I removed the "nodot" from the template. Sorry, I must've been distracted there. But in case you mean the category "English irregular past participles", well...to me it seems quite obvious that that participle is irregular. :) -- Frous 23:01, 24 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

It says I'm has a b.s. it should be I properly. --Glassfish 01:16, 26 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh, heh, thanks. :-) —Ruakh 01:17, 26 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks I appreciate you letting me know. What is done with articles that would have identical content (e.g. r.e.m. and R.E.M.?) Koavf 02:49, 27 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, but I don't understand the question. It's clear that you're already familiar with the concept of an "alternative spelling"; why wouldn't that work for r.e.m.? —Ruakh 11:45, 27 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for cleaning up the mess I made in longe. Much appreciated (wiktionary is new to me, mostly just dropping in from wikipedia to fix a couple of technical things about this stuff.) Montanabw 04:53, 27 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

No prob. It wasn't really a mess; it was just a bit off in various ways, and our structure here is amazingly rigid. —Ruakh 11:35, 27 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Just wondering if you might have any ideas on this. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 20:15, 1 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

By googling "goddesship", one gets less than 300 results, and the "did you mean" prompt. In addition, "goddessship" gets less than 7000 results. Since you did not supply any citations that "goddesship" is an alternatice spelling, I see it more dictionarylike to revert. All the evidence points to "goddesship" being the alternative spelling of "goddessship", not the other way around. Teh Rote 20:43, 5 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Well, both spellings are rare; google:goddesship gets only 76 distinct hits, and google:goddessship gets only 256. However, unless you want to go through all of those hits and determine how many are real (as opposed to dictionaries, word lists, people talking about the joys of words that supposedly have triple letters, etc.), it seems more sensible to use Google Books. google books:goddesship gets 121 distinct hits, while google books:goddessship gets only 24; so, I think the latter is the alternative spelling. —Ruakh 20:52, 5 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Well, the number of results isn't the only significant object, what we should also be looking for is how a word has stood the test of time. Otherwise, how do we know a certain spelling was not but a common misconception (unthaw) or a passing fad joke (plutoed)? My case here is that the trilettered spelling is spread over multiple books throughout centuries, rather than most of them being located in the early 1800s, like the duallettered spelling. Concomitantly, I can find more dictionary definitions of goddessship than goddesship. It seems to me that Wiktionary should follow suit if it is most commonly accepted by other dictionaries. Teh Rote 00:57, 6 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the template fix. Spanish (and I suspect, all foreign languages really) doesn't really have a consistent convention for plurals and feminines. In fact, before a couple of days ago, there was no inflection template for any Spanish plurals or feminine forms, adjective or noun, and only one poorly-made category (Spanish plurals, as a subcat of Spanish nouns, which I suspect was just a mirror of the English structure, which has no plural adjectives). Now, Nadando and I, with some template help from Conrad, have {{es-noun-pl}} and {{es-adj-pl}} which differentiate between "Spanish plural adjectives" and "Spanish plural nouns" categories, plus completely reworked {{es-noun-mf}} and {{es-adj}} so they can equally go on feminine or masculine forms and still show all the right inflections.

But I'm still trying to figure out how they should look for the forms. I listed all the possible forms for nouns at User:Dmcdevit/Spanish forms—basically, it can be a plural of a common male or female noun, the feminine form of a noun that can have either male or female forms, the masculine plural or feminine plural of such a noun, or the plural in one form of such a noun (as in the "-ista" ones). Maybe you can see now why I put "feminine plural" on novias, and only "plural of" on casas; I have the sense that they should be differentiates somehow, as one is a plural of female noun (i.e., feminine, but not a feminine form since the original is feminine, just a plural form) and one is a feminine form as well as a plural form. Or something. That's the problem, at least, which isn't to say that I am particularly attached to my attempt... do you have any opinions on how these options should all be formatted? Dmcdevit·t 06:09, 15 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Personally, I'd prefer to treat (deprecated template usage) novio and (deprecated template usage) novia as separate (but obviously related) nouns. You can see what we're doing for Hebrew at the entries for (deprecated template usage) איש (ish) and (deprecated template usage) אישה (ishá): each is taken as a lemma and has a full entry, which then links to its counterpart via the inflection line. With Spanish if we used that approach, the plurals would just use {{plural of}}; {{masculine plural of}} and whatnot would only be needed for adjectives.

However, a number of editors dislike that approach, and I'd be O.K. with treating (deprecated template usage) novio and (deprecated template usage) novia as two forms of a single noun, whose lemma is (deprecated template usage) novio; but in that case, (deprecated template usage) novias is the feminine plural of (deprecated template usage) novio, not of (deprecated template usage) novia (just as (deprecated template usage) vamos is the first-person plural present indicative of (deprecated template usage) ir, not of (deprecated template usage) voy). From a linguistic standpoint, one good argument for this approach is that the masculine plural is used for a mixed-sex group, and the masculine singular is (to a lesser extent) used with a referent of unknown gender, so clearly there is a sense in which these are a single noun. (We did a bit of literature review — and by "we" I think I mean Rod — and professionals seemed to be somewhat divided in how they approached these.)

BTW, there's nothing to say we have to use just one approach for all affected entries. It might make sense for us to treat (deprecated template usage) novio and (deprecated template usage) novia as separate nouns because their English translations are different, but then to treat (deprecated template usage) profesor and (deprecated template usage) profesora as one noun that means "teacher". But personally, I do think it's probably easier if we treat all such entries the same. (Another possible criterion: as I recall, one of the sources Rod found treated them as a single noun if it was an -o/-a pair, or a -Ø/-a pair, but then treated e.g. (deprecated template usage) actor and (deprecated template usage) actriz as separate nouns.)

For the case where both genders are identical, I think our entries for (deprecated template usage) artista and (deprecated template usage) artistas handle this perfectly.

—Ruakh 12:03, 15 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hm, well I agree that I prefer full entries (and for all forms, not just singular, either), but I'm thinking more about what would be our ideal forms if, say, TheCheatBot were making them and then humans could add on later—just the basic structure. Personally, I don't have a strong opinion on whether novias should be marked as a form of novio or novia, but I am more concerned about the definition line used. I don't think the lemma/inflection distinction is particularly useful here; whether we consider novio/novia two lemmas or one, they are both oppositely-gendered forms of the other. My only concern is that if we stick with "plural of novia" it equates it with other common nouns and obscures that fact that this is a feminine form, with a masculine partner, as well as a plural form, whereas casas isn't a feminine form (all forms of casa are feminine). I may be worrying over nothing. I was actually talking to someone on IRC about getting a bot like TheCheatBot for Spanish, which is what got me looking at out articles, and realizing that we really have no standard structure for noun or adjective forms. Dmcdevit·t 16:25, 15 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! --EncycloPetey 13:12, 16 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

:-) —Ruakh 18:45, 16 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

I'd never seen that before, except at Simple. I should have looked at the result for carefully. Thanks. DCDuring TALK 02:08, 21 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

No prob. In your place, I'd probably have done the exact same thing you did. —Ruakh 03:06, 21 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

I am having difficulty with using b.g.c. (not scholar, web, news, etc.). I have this bad feeling it has to do with heavy use for citing. Has anyone had a problem like this? DCDuring TALK 02:27, 21 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

I'm also getting internal server errors. I don't think it's you. :-) —Ruakh 03:02, 21 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Sorry. I didn't think it was against etiquette. DCDuring TALK 02:55, 28 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

No worries. I don't think it's against etiquette here, but I wish it were, as it's a huge peeve of mine. (I don't generally linkify terms that I use, as it seems condescending to me — like I don't expect my readers to understand me, and don't even trust them to look up words they don't know. No one else here seems to feel that way, so I guess it's fine, but I hate it anyway. :-P ) —Ruakh 03:17, 28 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

I will respect your wishes. If I forget, please remind me. I sometimes linkify for my own convenience and to show that we do or don't have an entry for it. Sometimes all three. I use an idiom, wonder whether we have it, show that we don't, make the entry, show that we do. DCDuring TALK 04:47, 28 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

? --nwspel ^tork _kontribz 14:42, 1 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I'm actually in the middle of writing an explanation on your talk-page. —Ruakh 14:43, 1 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

No prob! I'm glad I was helpful; at first I was worried I might just be confusing you worse. (And if you have any more questions, please feel free to ask!) —Ruakh 18:40, 1 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the clean up work on rendition. RJFJR 02:24, 6 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

:-) —Ruakh 14:25, 7 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hello Ruakh -- Remember those templates you created a while back that produce drop-down boxes for quotations in between the senses? Did you ever put any version of those templates in mainspace and use them in any entries? I'm working on a complicated new entry where that function might be worth using, so I'm tempted to put the templates in mainspace (with a caveat notation that they are experimental and should be used sparingly) if you haven't already done so. (I have copies of the templates in my own user subpages and a while back created a simple test entry here.) -- WikiPedant 04:40, 7 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

I remember them, yes. :-)

I never put them in the main namespace, nor used them in any entries.

I think there are plenty of complicated entries, both new and old, where that function might be worth using; but, I know what you mean. :-P

If you're going to put User:Ruakh/quotations-top in the template namespace (or for that matter User:WikiPedant/quotations-top, which is almost identical, differing only in that (1) it doesn't support 1=title-bar text, and (2) it says just "Quotations" or "Examples" rather than "Quotations in this sense" or "Examples in this sense"), I'd ask that you:

• remove all the parameters except 1=; each of those qualities should be either always-on or always-off, rather than being controlled by a parameter. (Oh, and it might be O.K. to keep examples=, if you think that when there are made-up examples, they should go in the same collapse-y box, but that otherwise it should say "Quotations". Though in that case maybe it should be switched around, with "Examples" being the default, and the template being at {{examples-top}} or something.)
• move the remaining documentation to the talk-page, like we do with other templates.

Let me know how it goes! :-)

—Ruakh 14:24, 7 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Not really, for pretty much the same reasons as previously: I come and go too much, I would end up doing relatively little actual admin work, and I'm unclear what being an admin on wikt: entails anyway. Circeus 15:55, 7 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Well, I don't think adminship here has any active responsibilities, only the passive one of not abusing the tools. (It's nice when admins do admin-y stuff — patrolling recent changes and going through RFV being two painful examples — but plenty of admins don't.) Obviously if you have no plans to make any use of the tools, there's no point going through a vote; but I saw your comment in BP asking an admin to edit {{transitive}} for you, so I thought I'd ask. No pressure or anything. :-) —Ruakh 16:30, 7 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Could you look at / move the Hebrew section of this page to the correct Hebrew script? Thanks. Nadando 22:42, 7 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

We already have the Hebrew entry (עבד), so I just removed it. Thanks for pointing it out. :-) —Ruakh 22:51, 7 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

You mentioned on the RFV page for this word "There is something odd about this word, I can't quite put my finger on it". I think I know what you mean. The word looks odd because it has 6 "s"s, right? (I'll probably be adding possessionlessness soon, so I guess that'll look even weirder!) Teh Rote 17:10, 9 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

I don't think that's it, but it really doesn't matter, as it's got hundreds of b.g.c. hits. (Aside: I feel that a sentence just isn't a sentence unless it contains three clauses, each using the word "it" in a different way. Do you agree? :-)   However, looking through b.g.c., I get the impression that this adjective is not often predicative; so, I'm going to change our example sentence. —Ruakh 00:38, 10 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Just thought I'd bring this to your attention, as one of the participants in the original discussion. Oh, and I replied to your query on my talk page, if you hadn't already noticed. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 07:46, 11 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks ×5. :-)   —Ruakh 11:52, 11 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Do you know whether אחד באפריל is a keeper, like Fourth of July, or tossable, like first of April?—msh210℠ 21:30, 11 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

I think it's a keeper. —Ruakh 21:43, 11 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

All right; thanks.—msh210℠ 22:43, 11 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

So it is possible to search for special characters and capitalization in Google if one has the patience for the typing and enough knowledge of how to select appropriate characters to exclude. Can you point me toward any possible source of documentation or guidance on getting the most out of Google search from a wiktionarian/lexicographer perspective? I assume that Google is steadily enhancing the capabilities of their search and that there might be features that are useful for us though they are not the purpose of their efforts. Is it as much of a moving target as my assumptions would make it? DCDuring TALK 23:28, 11 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Total moving target. Every day it gets better and better at figuring out what you'd really mean if you were actually interested in the things you were Googling. Someday soon, we won't be able to cite vulgarities without Google ordering prostitutes for us and sending them to our homes. —Ruakh 00:08, 12 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

BTW, you say "special characters and capitalization", but last I checked, it doesn't work for capitalization, sadly. —Ruakh 00:10, 12 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

I must have picked a search that gave me some illusion that we could do searches for capital letters, but I confirmed that it does not work using + and -. It is great at doing things that keep consumers coming back for more, but not at providing a transparent tool for research purposes. The one, two, three things I really like about it as a research tool are the price, the speed, the multiple corpera, the fact that I can use the same tool for almost all personal, citizenship, business, entertainment, and wiki purposes, etc. DCDuring TALK 00:29, 12 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

As Connel is mainly AFK at the moment, I suspect he only noticed the comment recently. User:Teh_Rote was warned previously (by me) to stop commenting there, so this time I feel that Connel's actions were justifiable, if belated. Yours Conrad.Irwin 17:16, 14 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi Conrad!

Thanks for your comment, but I completely disagree. The rest of this comment is a long-winded explanation why, but you don't have to read it if you're not interested. :-P

Connel's block comment was "Stupidity: Continued trolling on my talk page". After Connel's previous comment on his talk-page (when he obviously was not AFK), the only edits Teh Rote had made to said talk page were:

• To re-add an arbitrary edit link.
  • I consider this slightly inappropriate, but it was not unconsidered (he cited Thryduulf's difficulties editing the section).
  • After I reverted it (well before the block), my reversion stood.
  • Note that Wiktionary does not have a norm of talk-page sovereignty where that interferes with Wiktionary functioning; for example, I couldn't just revert your comment here and pretend that no one had criticized my action.
  • One could hardly describe it as trolling, and certainly referring to it as trolling is completely out of the question. If this is what Connel meant, he has to learn to write block comments that actually justify his blocks.
• To add a polite comment objecting to Connel's block of Thryduulf and requesting that it be explained.
  • This was completely appropriate, except that Connel and Teh Rote were already at loggerheads, so Teh Rote perhaps wasn't the right person to leave this comment. However, since the loggerheads are Connel's doing, not Teh Rote's (normally I say it takes two to tango, but with Connel that's simply not true), it hardly justifies further antagonizing action on Connel's part.

It's true that you had advised Teh Rote not to comment further on Connel's talk-page (and I think that was good advice on your part), and that he disregarded that advice. Likewise, I had told Connel that he should stop blocking Teh Rote, and that he should leave it to other admins to deal with if need be. Personally, I find it much harder to AGF about Connel's blocks than about Teh Rote's arbitrary-edit-link and polite comment.

A belated block is understandable in some circumstances (but fairly rare ones — if the user is no longer active then it's generally too late, and if the user is still active then it's generally their current behavior that's relevant), but in a case like this, where it's obvious that other admins are aware of the situation and have chosen not to block, there's no admin prerogative to jump in like this and block a user several days later.

—Ruakh 17:45, 14 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Sorry to put you to so much trouble, I hadn't intended to push the point further, merely to state my opinion. I could see why you unblocked and did not intend my comment as a criticism of your judgement. Conrad.Irwin 17:53, 14 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

No trouble whatsoever; I like talking too much. :-)   Thanks for stating your opinion, and don't worry, I had no sense that you were trying to "push the point further" or anything like that. :-)   —Ruakh 17:56, 14 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi Ruakh,

As per your request, I’ve added a {{Babel}} box on my page – hope it helps!

Nbarth (email) (talk) 01:06, 16 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! :-) —Ruakh 01:33, 16 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

I was being facetious. You have never done anything but earned my respect even if we disagree on a point or even an issue. I was anticipating arguments I had heard before. Rather than wait to hear them from someone, which would mean I would run the risk of antagonizing the individual advancing them, I thought I could do better ridiculing them in advance. Either that or I was just venting. You have been doing a better job than I in maintaining a positive tone in what I have seen of your interactions with (almost!!!) all.

As to improving Googleability, any constructive step is long overdue. I could not understand why in the previous discussion there seemed to be some negative to it. It would seem worth overcoming some technical problems to get higher search engine placement.

In the same vein, do we have any way of counting hits from WP? I have lately added a few in-line links to WT entries from WP entries that looked like they could use them. Similarly, aren't there addins for text editors that would enable an editor to look up a word on Wiktionary from within the text editor? Would/do those lookups be recordable? Would Google have a way of registering them into its rankings? DCDuring TALK 21:10, 17 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

I've responded further on my talk page.—msh210℠ 20:49, 18 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for your help with my entries at eye. The quote from the source seems to limit 'eye' as slang for 'private detective' or 'private eye', although the author's useage seems to include any detective/investigator (private or govt) who works in the field of law. (I worked as a legal investigator for 16 years. I heard 'eye' rarely. 'Gumshoe' was more common. And 'dick' occasionally, from some wag.)

Please advise me how to change the definition to include non-private 'eyes'. Or, you may fix the entry, whichever takes less of your time. Thanks, Wayne Roberson, Austin, Texas 15:55, 20 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

And, I hope you also enjoyed Erik Larson's Devil in the White City....

In my experience (deprecated template usage) eye means private investigator, or at least independent investigator, but if your experience differs, please don't hesitate to correct the entry. :-) —Ruakh 03:36, 21 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

What would one have to do to make a shortcut for an appendix that was actually short? Would the appendix need to be moved to WT? Is there any reason that Appendix:Glossary could not be moved to WT under a new name, like "Entry Glossary" ? Or can Appendix have an alias? DCDuring TALK 11:22, 21 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Good questions all. I guess the answer is that appendices, like entries (and unlike project pages), are part of our actual content, so there shouldn't be that sort of redirect. However, I assume it would be fine to have a page in the WT: namespace (i.e. a page outside our actual content) redirect to an appendix, and it probably wouldn't be a huge deal if the appendix used {{shortcut}} to advertise the fact. (With the glossary there's the awkwardness that both Wiktionary:Glossary and Appendix:Glossary exist, which makes it hard to choose distinct shortcuts; but then, it's probably a bad idea for those two pages to have the same name, anyway, since that's just asking people not to understand the difference. We might want to re-evaluate this.) —Ruakh 14:24, 21 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

An even better question is why we have an Appendix:Glossary at all. (I could go either way on that.) I think most general dictionaries define any terms they use in the body of the dictionary. There seems a kind of eat your own dog food justice to this. Abbreviations they use may be in a separate listing. I would like the application of the EYODF principle to "singulare tantum" and "plurale tantum" where the Latin phrases don't mean what we try to make the tags mean. DCDuring TALK 18:01, 21 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

You seem to be saying that (1) the terms in our tags should be used accurately by said tags and (2) said accurate uses should be defined in the body of the dictionary. I agree with both of these statements. However, you seem to conclude that (3) provided the above, there's no need to cover them in a special section. I'm not sure I agree with this. For one thing, we're a mostly descriptivist dictionary, meaning that we do (or should) include definitions like (deprecated template usage) a common or proper noun that's capitalized and (deprecated template usage) a word of any part of speech that denotes an action or process and (deprecated template usage) a form or group of forms of a verb or other word and so on. For another, some things can be very subjective, such as the distinction between (deprecated template usage) dated, (deprecated template usage) archaic, and (deprecated template usage) obsolete, and I think it's wonderful that we aim for halfway-objective criteria that we then document. Also, we frequently give brief halfway-encyclopedic examples in Appendix:Glossary, and I don't think an eat-your-own-dog-food policy is a worthwhile one if it means we have to give that up. However, that doesn't mean Appendix:Glossary is the best solution; it does have disadvantages, and there might be other approaches that are better. —Ruakh 20:49, 21 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

I was certainly saying 1 and 2. I'm not sure about 3. I'm concerned about drift of glossary text away from text that is subject to RfV/RfD. I'd like our use of terms to be constrained to be close to widely accepted senses of the words used. Whenever we depart from common understanding of terms we run the risk of not serving the needs of casual anon users. Our glossary does not actually make explicit the criteria for the terms that we use. We seem to have difficulty coming to agreement that we could VOTE on. I would very much favor having explicit criteria and documenting them. Our criteria for applying terms would be designed to follow the definition, not the other way around.

We could categorize the entries whose terms we use and tag the specific definitions that we actually use and thereby make a glossary using the category feature that retained its connection with the dictionary meanings.

It looks to me that the print dictionaries try to only use terms that are readily understood by their ordinary users (which is my real point, anyway). All general dictionaries and almost every dictionary has fairly extensive explanatory notes, but the labels they use, except for some abbreviations, are standard terms not used in a special way, except possibly "Determiner" in Longmans DCE, which they label as "technical" !!! Though I am not in favor of slavishly following print dictionaries, most of their practices have a certain amount of wisdom to them.

I'm not sure what the best next step is to tighten up our documentation and our style guidelines anyway. My grand plan is limited to trying to make us better for anons and new contributors. I assume that we will get more and more ability to customize the presentation of our entries for registered users, so that the needs of our regular contributors and admins ought to be taken care of thereby. DCDuring TALK 23:48, 21 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi Ruakh,

Why did you revert my edits to my user talk page?

I’d archived the discussions at: User talk:Nbarth/Archive 2008, since they seemed to be finished.

I’m not annoyed so much as confused – what’s up? (Presumably an honest mistake or the archives weren’t prominent?)

I’ve re-instated my edit/archiving; if you’d like to continue a thread, could you start a new thread, optionally referencing the archived one?

Thanks!

Nbarth (email) (talk) 17:47, 21 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh, sorry, I didn't notice the archive. In future, you might want to include an edit summary like "archiving" or "archiving 1 discussion to User talk:Nbarth/Archive 2008" or the like, so it doesn't look like you're just deleting the discussion. (And also, I personally think you should wait at least a week before archiving; it's not like your talk-page is getting flooded with traffic and you need to keep on top of it.) Still, this was my bad; I should have looked first to see if there was archiving. Sorry about that! —Ruakh 20:55, 21 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

No worries – I don’t generally bother with comments on editing my talk page or user page, since I don’t feel that they’re of sufficient interest to so comment.

I’ll try to remember to comment “archiving” in future, since it seems it’s of some interest or concern.

I’ve replied in more detail (to a comment by Atelaes) at:

User talk:Nbarth#Constant archiving

…and yes, I do prune aggressively to keep on top of things.

Nbarth (email) (talk) 03:59, 22 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

You havent taken a break. You should.

Cheers, Iamthe7DeadlySins (talk • contribs)

How did I mess up? —Ruakh 00:46, 27 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

I would love to be an admin 1. Because of the title, 2. Because of the blocking abilities (im anti-vandalism, and all i can do is warn vandals:[), and 3. Because i find that stuff exciting, you see im a web page designer and i love computers, CSS, and HTML, all of which adminship greatly expands. So, as much as i love the wiki (or wiktionary ) and will non stop edit and create like crazy, i will also be ecstatic when i become admin. And as for the How did i mess up? Simple, you havent taken a break yet. You should. Cheers,

Iamthe7DeadlySins (talk • contribs)

oh, and P.S: I would really like to give you a nice user page. All you have to do is ask, and you could have a really nice userpage/talk page. I love making good looking pages. Just ask, and it will be done.

#1 is not really a good reason, and makes me feel uncomfortable (though I do appreciate your honesty).

#2 is disconcerting for me (I don't like blocking editors, and in my experience it doesn't seem to deter vandalism any better than warnings do), but I guess it's a valid reason at least.

#3 also concerns me a bit, because your user-page and talk-page lead me to believe that you prefer prettiness to readability; but since admins aren't supposed to make major CSS changes unilaterally anyway, I guess it's not a big deal.

I take many breaks, and am not sure what you want from me on that point.

I have a nice user page and talk page, but thanks for the offer. :-)

—Ruakh 03:37, 27 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

So that's how it's done. Thanks. DCDuring TALK 20:51, 28 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

They are there for people looking for documentation on those parser functions (as I was), and try to find them by typing in the name of the function as a page in the Help namespace. It might also be a good idea to make Template_talk:ifeq, etc, so people looking there will also find pointers to the actual documentation. The general idea is that it should be possible to look up the title of any thing in {{'s and find the documentation for it; if it's not a template, there should be a Help namespace page for it. Hope this explains things! JesseW 02:20, 30 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

But, how would someone know to look there? Why Help:titleparts and not Help:titleparts parser function or Help:parser functions or google:MediaWiki titleparts? —Ruakh 03:02, 30 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Because, looking at the wikicode, they know it's called "titleparts" but not that it's a parser function, or even that it's built-in to MediaWiki. The Help namespace may not be the best place, but some page with the same name as the function is useful, simply because the function name is the one piece of information someone looking at the wikicode is guaranteed to have. Sorry for the long response times... JesseW 06:30, 4 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

But my point is that they'll never think to look at Help:titleparts, either, so our goal should be to make it findable via search, not to accommodate the 0.0 users who happen to have a certain exact thought. —Ruakh 13:52, 4 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

That makes sense; but it still leads to wanting a page whose title is the function name, as the wiki search shows matching page names first. Hm, I just did a search for "ifeq" and the Help page didn't come up, but various Template_talk pages did; this indicates that putting the soft-links in the Template_talk namespace is a better choice. That way, they will come up in a search. I'll move them in a few days... JesseW 05:44, 9 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

I thought this was a noun - the funeral feast - and that arval-bread was eaten at that meal. SemperBlotto 14:51, 5 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

I'm sure you're right. I'd never heard this word before; I went based on what I could find at b.g.c., which gave me the impression that "arval supper" (but usually capitalized) was the funeral feast and "arval bread" or "arval-bread" or "arval-loaf" was the bread; but now having the idea that it might be a noun and searching for uses of "arvals", I do find support for what you say. Please be bold. :-)   —Ruakh 14:58, 5 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ah, yes, you're right: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003174.php. I was a bit behind in my reading; usually I read Language Hat's mention of a word before I see it requested here, but this time it went a bit backward. :-P   —Ruakh 17:29, 5 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ruakh, I am expanding w:Book of Habakkuk, and would like to link to our article on חבק, since it is one root suggested for the author's name. However, we have no such article. Could you create a nice one? Thanks for any help you can provide. --EncycloPetey 22:39, 6 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Well, I've started it, but between the words of that spelling (three nouns and one verb, all from the same root) there are a lot of different senses … this'll take a while. —Ruakh 23:42, 6 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks; the verb is most relevant for my situation, although it may not be the primary use in Hebrew. --EncycloPetey 00:31, 7 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Glad to hear it. I'll take my time, then. :-)   —Ruakh 00:56, 7 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

For some reason i am not permitted to contact you through email. How can I? — This unsigned comment was added by Radical (talk • contribs) at 19:11, 7 July 2008 (UTC).Reply

Special:EmailUser/Ruakh should work. If it doesn't, let me know what error message you get. —Ruakh 19:50, 7 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

I usually figure that the morphological derivations don't matter too much except for getting someone to an entry with a fuller real etymology. We would need more dates of first attested use to do a really good job on this kind of thing. Go Gutenberg. DCDuring TALK 13:49, 18 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

You made this edit, which is highly confusing. On the one hand, you warn people not to use the template, but in the edit you say that it PASSED RfD, which means it was decided to keep the template. --EncycloPetey 15:38, 20 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

> On the one hand, you warn people not to use the template

Strictly speaking, that's not true; that request was added by Conrad.Irwin back on 28 April. (See http://en.wiktionary.orghttps://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Notred&diff=4497564.) It shows up in the diff only because I changed it from a level-one header (which seemed like overkill) to a normal paragraph (but with em<big>gened text).

> in the edit you say that it PASSED RfD, which means it was decided to keep the template.

True. Conrad struck the RFD discussion as "kept" on 2 June. (See http://en.wiktionary.orghttps://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Wiktionary:Requests_for_deletion/Others&diff=4680856.)

But to address your main point: yes, it's confusing. The outcome of the discussion was basically that the template's original behavior (not linking to redlinks) was not desired, and that the desired red-free effect could now be achieved by adding inflection tables to the inflection-table class, but that it wasn't a huge problem to use the template because it had now been modified to use that class as well.

In other words, you could describe it as "Kept (mostly harmless)". :-P

—Ruakh 15:56, 20 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

So, if it's being kept, then why are you removing calls to the template? This looks as if you are doing an end-run around the community decision. --EncycloPetey 20:10, 20 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

It was kept as useless-but-now-harmless, and the administrator who marked it kept (Conrad.Irwin) did not remove his request that it not be used. I'm removing references to it for three reasons: (1) it complicates template code, making it less obvious what a template is doing and more difficult to create other similar templates; (2) it adds needless bloat to the HTML being sent (adding <span class="inflection-table"> and </span> to every link); and (3) the template page requests that it not be used, and no one has (so far as I'm aware) suggested that that request is obsolete or should be removed. If you object, please explain why. (Do you feel that the community decision was to advocate continued use of this template?)

By the way, since we're discussing it — it seems like the inflection-table class should also blacken bluelinks, and de-bold selflinks, right? I realize that those are less distracting than redlinks, but they still seem undesirable, don't they?

—Ruakh 20:41, 20 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Bold or blue I have less problem with. Red is used in many situations as a warning color, as it draws extra attention, which is undesirable is a table the surveys forms. Blue and black are close enough that I don't personally mind seeing them mixed. The bold test appears only in certain situations. For instance, many of the Latin templates are set up to point to the Latin-specific section (using #Latin), so the link will not appear bold anyway. Those templates that do not do this (yet) have not been edited to standard. --EncycloPetey 20:59, 20 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

> Those templates that do not do this (yet) have not been edited to standard.

O.K., I'll fix that for the remaining templates. (Unfortunately, though, I've already done most of them.) —Ruakh 21:40, 20 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

There's actually a lot more work to do on the Latin templates, besides standardizing them. So much so that I've been putting it off for a while to get other things done. --EncycloPetey 21:42, 20 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh! It just occurred to me that we might be miscommunicating. If so, let me clarify: I'm not changing the behavior of these templates, just simplifying the template code. —Ruakh 20:44, 20 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

I figured that bit out after looking at the code, but thanks. --EncycloPetey 20:59, 20 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ah, thanks for letting me know, and thanks for fixing my references at burn book. Seems the Wikipedia way is not the Wiktionary way... J Milburn 22:19, 20 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Would you mind checking this over? I'm in particular dissatisfied with the wording of the usage note.—msh210℠ 19:31, 23 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Nice; thanks. (Not that I agree with the ===POS=== and {{infl}} change, but okay.)—msh210℠ 22:03, 23 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Feel free to change them back; I have no particular attachment to this approach, I just thought it was How We Do It. —Ruakh 22:33, 23 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Okay, I've reverted {{infl}} so as to categorize as a Hebrew phrase, but kept the Abbr header.—msh210℠ 23:07, 23 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi Widsith,

Did you mean to blank out Wiktionary:Languages without ISO codes?

—Ruakh_TALK 17:19, 26 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Er...it looks OK to me..? (I meant to add Jèrriais.) Widsith 07:42, 27 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ok, that's really creepy. I see a completely blank page. When I look at the dif, I see you removing all the content, and yet the current version has all the content still there. Weird. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 08:08, 27 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ok, I reverted your edits, and then redid them. Hopefully Ruakh and I can see the page (I can't even imagine why we couldn't and Widsith could). Creepy. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 08:12, 27 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Weird, thanks. :-)   —Ruakh 12:51, 27 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Well spotted - I had marked the stress incorrectly (now fixed). Thryduulf 23:51, 27 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

I know that there are few hits for shardings. But it is false to say that it is uncountable and hard to fathom why we would not help someone form a plural. We would be better off to simply not provide plural forms for nouns forming plurals than to promulgate this falsity. Similarly for adjectives that are deemed "not comparable". As we present these things to users now, we are simply doing them a disservice. This is a perverse and careless kind of new prescriptivism to no good end. I don't understand why nobody wants to change it. It often makes us look silly. I know, I know, "all words in all languages". It is a mantra that seems to end discussion and suppress thought. DCDuring TALK 04:19, 28 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

It's true that it's uncountable, but if that word really bothers you, we can use {{infl|en|noun}} to sidestep the issue. We can't help someone form a plural because we don't have the level of evidence that we require to document a plural. With how few hits (deprecated template usage) shardings has, it almost seems more likely that (deprecated template usage) sharding has a different plural, one we haven't picked up on, than that our readers will need to re-coin (deprecated template usage) shardings. (I guess both seem equally likely: roughly zilch.)

English is infinitely flexible, and I think it's our job to describe the flexibility that people do use, not the flexibility that they could use.

—Ruakh 11:30, 28 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

How is it uncountable? Semantically there is nothing about it that would prevent use in plural. A sharding is a division of work. One can have more than one such division. There is simply not enough use yet to generate enough cites for our attestation process. I was not seeking to make a new entry. I was trying to reverse a falsehood. I suppose that I believe such plurals to be as inevitable as all the other rule-based language use, like common noun usage of proper nouns, which we seem to also not want to show correctly. As to the argument that there will be some plural like "shardinges", I am rendered speechless. DCDuring TALK 11:52, 28 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

If you can show decent countable singular use in this sense, I'll happily concede the plural as well. —Ruakh 11:57, 28 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

I was thinking the same thing. Good resolution, potentially. DCDuring TALK 14:30, 28 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Sorry I havn't been editing here properly in a while. Things have been quite busy here. I hope to be back properly soon. --nwspel ^tork _kontribz 20:55, 30 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

No worries, and no need to apologize. There is absolutely no expectation that Wiktionarians maintain any level of activity; indeed, wiki-breaks help an editor to maintain perspective and avoid burnout. —Ruakh 23:28, 30 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Since it's clear that Connel isn't going to give a response without blocking me, could this page possibly be unprotected? There's nothing bad about the title (as you mentioned on his page) unless I missed something? Teh Rote 00:01, 31 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

As I mentioned there, the title isn't blocked by the software, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable. I don't know whether there exists a community consensus about asterisks in entry titles; to find that out, I recommend asking someone who's been here longer, such as EncycloPetey or Robert Ullmann; or, asking in the beer parlour. Be prepared for Connel to lambaste you wherever you ask the question, and do your best not to give him any ammunition: be neutral and straightforward in your comment, and link to the discussion on his talk page. —Ruakh 01:06, 31 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

I saw this message in teh beer parlor but didn't understand it: RJFJR 16:03, 31 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Indeed, the whole thing is silly, because the one kind of entry that we don't want to count — the much-reviled misspelling entry — still counts, because of the prolific editors at vi.wikt who seem to have every entry we do (or maybe they watch our create-log and keep pace?). —RuakhTALK 03:05, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

The vi.wikt 'bots import everything they can find. We add a misspelling entry, carefully not including a link so it doesn't count. They import it, Interwicket adds the iwiki, and now it does count. (contains ","framed":false,"label":"Reply","flags":,"classes":}'>Reply

Yes, that's it. That's how the better dictionaries (IMHO) show it (MW, Collins DCE, CambID, COxfdED). (Don't have OED available.) I'm still not sure whether all users would find it before giving up. MW says "usually" with possessive, but no example of an exception comes to mind. Can you think of one? The others seem to imply always. Is it always a "reflexive" possessive? (It would be path-breaking English to say "Jack had Jill's fill of oatmeal.", wouldn't it?) If and entry "one's fill" automagically generated all the possessive pronoun forms as redirects to one's fill, I would think almost all users would find it. DCDuring TALK 02:07, 7 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Some searching of Google and Google Books pulls up a few possessive-less examples that nonetheless seem to mean the same thing; for example, T. E. Lawrence's autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom contains the sentence “We, for our one day, had a fill of hardship.” (It sounds wrong to me, but obviously Lawrence spoke a different form of English from my own.) As for "reflexive"-ness, I think you're right, but I think that's better conveyed with examples than expressed overtly. (I don't think English has "reflexive possessives" per se, and if I were forced to apply that term to English, I'd use it to refer to (deprecated template usage) his own and so on — “Did he take his own book, or someone else’s?”)

I'd be down with redirects. Would we then put a definition at one's own ]?

—Ruakh 03:01, 7 August 2008 (UTC) edited 20:13, 7 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Where else? I didn't mean to make you do the searching. I think that a "literary" exception that has not earned followers demonstrates that the exception is truly exceptional. By reflexive I only meant that the pronoun must refer to the subject of the clause. I couldn't think of a better word for it. Is the implication of "one's" rather than "someone's" that the construction is "reflexive" in the sense I have misused the word? BTW, have you seen the discussions on Pronunciation? I welcome your thoughts whichever PoV you have. DCDuring TALK 03:24, 7 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I think we're on the same page. :-)   I think (deprecated template usage) one’s tends be tied to something else, but not necessarily the subject, nor even necessarily something overt in the sentence: consider “one’s childhood can often be grown out of, but never gotten away from”, which means roughly “one can often grow out of one’s childhood, but one can never get away from it”. I don't know how that interacts with lemma considerations, though. Re: pronunciation: I've seen the discussion, but don't really have an opinion. I do wish pronunciation took up less space, but it's not a simple issue. —Ruakh 19:24, 7 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

I was thinking of "one's" vs. "someone's" in the headword of an idiom. Consider "to gore one's ox" vs. "to gore someone's ox". The "one's" version would seem to me to imply that the gorer was goring his own ox, whereas the "someone's" version did not have that implication.

There may be simple palliative steps: eliminating boxes, putting all representations of a single pronunciation on a single line (SAMPA, IPA, EnPR, audio), placing Homophones, Hyphenation, and Rhymes on a single line. That way at least the problem would be reduced. I don't really think very many folks agree on the goal, so a Vote, even on this, seems premature. In any event, a Vote in August seems almost sneaky. DCDuring TALK 20:06, 7 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

I agree that "one's" seems reflexive in the headword of a verb idiom, because there it seems to refer back to the infinitive's implicit subject, but I don't know that that applies to other kinds of idioms. As for pronunciation — I think homophones, hyphenation, and rhymes shouldn't be under that header; conceptually it does make sense to put them there (at least, homophones and rhymes; maybe not hyphenation), but in practice we're ceding lede-space to something that's only helpful when we fail in our overt attempts to be helpful (i.e. when a reader gives up on understanding our explicit pronunciations and resorts to reading the homophones and rhymes). —Ruakh 20:12, 7 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Cambridge International Dictionary (which often has multiple pronunciations) actually uses show/hide for their phonetic representations. No dictionary uses as much space as en.wikt for material that is useless to many users (who never bother to learn any phonetic alphabet). Even if one is learning English as a non-native speaker, it is often easier to ask someone on the spot to repeat something or to pronounce something for you, at least if you are in an English-speaking environment. Hitting show/hide or registering as a user so that customization could occur would seem to be small prices to pay for phonetic spellings for the users who do value them.

There is such inertia on this and so many other issues. How can we make some progress? How important/doable is this compared to other issues? DCDuring TALK 21:48, 7 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I really have no idea, hence my not participating in the discussions on it elsewhere. —Ruakh 04:05, 8 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Sorry about that; I did it correctly on {{cite-usenet}} then broke it on cite book... Sigh; this is why I shouldn't edit when I'm tired. Thanks for fixing it. JesseW 18:38, 7 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

No worries. :-)   —Ruakh 19:24, 7 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yes, I would accept a nomination. I can't make a big time commitment, so I would just promise to use my admin powers for good and not evil.

If you'd still like to nominate me, what's the process?

Thanks. —Michael Z. 2008-08-10 00:51 z

As you commented on the recent Proto etymon templates deletion request I thought you might wish to comment on this. Thryduulf 18:35, 10 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! —Ruakh 18:38, 10 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Since you've commented on both of the recent RFDO's, I thought you might have something to say (specifically, something agreeing with me ;-)). -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 02:16, 11 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the help cleaning it up, etc. A couple of things, though - the definition is incorrect; the def. should include "defined as a Maori word for “drum”, “fife”, or “conclusion”". I will add it, I just don't want you to think I'm stepping on toes.

Also, should the RFV template be re-added as it is still active? sewnmouthsecret 20:32, 18 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Re: definition: I disagree, but I don't feel strongly about it. If you feel that the definition should explain the word's purported meaning, go ahead and add it.

Re: the RFV template: Yes.

Thanks!

—Ruakh 20:57, 18 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

I don't necessarilly feel strongly about that def. per se, but it can't be defined as "ghost word"; although it is a ghost word, ghost word does not define the term. I guess the way I look at it is this: if someone were to ask me what it means, I wouldn't say "it means a ghost word". I would say "it is a ghost word purported to mean..." and explain that it is a joke word with rare usage. Anyway, I'm rambling... I'll re-add the RFV. :) sewnmouthsecret 21:03, 18 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

It doesn't mean "a ghost word", but it also doesn't mean "a ghost word purported to mean ". That's why we have {{non-gloss definition}}. —Ruakh 23:18, 18 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi,

Thanks for the comment on my user page. I've replied to it there. Maybe you might like to insert in the quotation if you think it is appropriate. — Paul G 09:45, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hey Ruakh, as the creator of the template I was wondering if we could move it out of the 3-letter domain as it should be used for an existing language code. See Template_talk:bgc. Is there anyone else that uses it much that I should talk to? Thanks. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 21:19, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

I moved it to {{b.g.c.}} and updated all existing uses of it. The great majority were my own comments; Visviva used it a few times, but he's been inactive for a few months now, so he can figure it out when he gets back. I didn't notice any uses by anyone else; there may have been one or two, but it's probably not worth worrying about.

Thanks for your work on these language-code templates!

—Ruakh 02:22, 20 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Done, thanks for doing it so quickly. cheers.--Bequw → ¢ • τ 05:25, 20 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the kind words of welcome Ran. Also, I’m sorry that, in my typical style, it took me about two weeks and a half to respond! :-S When you sent me that, things were getting a tad hectic at my end, but now things are calm again. I was uncertain, but I do now think that I’m getting back into editing Wiktionary on a more or less regular basis — at least for the next few months. I have a few interesting books to which I shall make liberal reference in my editing (which, despite my actions thus far, will not be limited to ligated spellings and obscure etymologically-consistent plurals (!)); I also have an old (out-of-copyright) book which — once I get my scanner and OCR software up and running — I want to copy to Wikisource and then pillage for citations. Should be at least some interesting stuff in all that…

Anyway, that’s enough of my waffle about plans that may or may not come to pass; how’re things with you? What’ve you been up to in my absence? And as a third, unrelated quæstion: Where is Connel? –I don’t see any contributions by him on my watchlist; is he away or something? (OK, that’s technically four.)

Looking forward to workin’ mittcha! † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 01:21, 23 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Things are good with me, with one exception: due to a gas leak, they cut off gas to my apartment complex on Tuesday. The weather's quite warm here at the moment, and the stove is electric, so that's good at least, but it nonetheless sucks having to shower in freezing cold water. But other than that, things are good. :-)   How about you?

I haven't really been up to anything interesting here. I've been fairly busy in real life, so here I've been participating in discussions (← easy) more than contributing content (← hard). Of my last 500 edits, only 43% have been in the main namespace. :-/

Connel is running an archive-bot now for RFV, RFD, etc., and that runs under his main account; but aside from that, I've seen neither hide nor hair of him for a month or two now. I'm assuming he's just taking a wiki-break or something — else he would have handed his archive-bot on to someone else, presumably — but it's sufficiently prolonged that Versageek has started two votes for new CheckUser privileges to be assigned, since apparently each wiki is required to have at least two active CheckUsers, and right now we only have one (TheDaveRoss).

And yeah, again, welcome back! RFV has a crazy backlog, if you'd like to spend a few hundred hours citing obscure words. :-P

—Ruakh 03:35, 24 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Meh. Showering in cold water isn’t that bad. I’ve recently discovered the refreshing effect that ending each (hot) shower with a 1–2-minute freezing-cold shower has — I find it clears my mind and gives me a lot more energy; I highly recommend it, especially that now you’ll be used to cold showers.

I’m doing all right; keeping busy and such, trying to better manage my time and gain a sleep pattern. (I’m having a lot more success with the former than I am with the latter, although circumstance will soon force my hand on that one.)

I find content easier than discussions, on the whole. Though that may just be my associations here of “discussion = conflict”   ;-)   (not with you, of course). I see Connel is back now, and that there’s no love lost betwixt you… Ne’er mind. He and I seem to be getting on fine ATM, what little contact we’ve had. I may soon reïnitiate one of the many discussions I was having with him before I left.

Working on RFV sounds like a good idea, but I keep getting distracted ATM! I should probably take the high-volume discussion pages off my watchlist — that RFD discussion regarding -manship, though interesting and churning up an impressive number of words and citations therefor, is taking a rather long time…

One last thing: You must teach me how to use Wiktionary’s chat function! Or do you have a Facebook account? Perhaps that would be a more user-friendly medium…   :-)   † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 03:08, 27 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

I don't know how to say this over Facebook, so if you don't mind my modality-bending: Re: the chess application: No thanks, I suck horribly at chess, and don't have the patience for it. :-P   How do you feel about Scrabble? (If you're pro-, shoot me an e-mail.) —Ruakh 22:55, 27 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Scrabble’s good; I have (deprecated template usage) Scrabulous added already. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 01:45, 28 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

The original RfVd entry had badding as a noun with the definition now deleted. I discovered it to be a verb with badding as present participle. I am always loath to delete something out of process, not that it is always obvious what the process is supposed to be and whether it is to be taken seriously. DCDuring TALK 23:39, 24 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

And thanks for the improvement at bad#Verb. DCDuring TALK 23:41, 24 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

I'm going to have to revert your reversion, and I regret having to do this.

Your edit is inaccurate. Rocket engines don't necessarily contain any propellant, that's very often taken from tanks or the body of the vehicle, but 'rocket' there is still the rocket engine, so your addition actually is incorrect.

Also, see Wolfkeeper 21:33, 26 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ah, O.K., understood. :-)   In the future, when you're removing information, please explain why in the edit summary. Or better yet, don't remove information, correct it. Right now our definition may be correct, but it's not terribly informative. If the primary sense of (deprecated template usage) rocket really is “rocket engine”, then we should be defining that sense at our entry for (deprecated template usage) rocket. If not, then our senses should be reordered. But yeah, thanks for explaining. :-)   —Ruakh 22:24, 26 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

I've moved this from U 2008 to T 2008 as per your comment that the user had posted it in the wrong place. As it is bad form to edit other users' comments, I've left in place your comment about the contribution being the wrong place, but now of course it looks odd because it is no longer true. I'll leave it to you to strike it, remove it or do whatever else you think is appropriate. — Paul G 09:30, 27 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Heh, thanks. I don't think I'll worry about it; it gives my comment character. :-P —Ruakh 12:00, 27 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

You were right to do this. Words like aviatrix, ambassadrix, and castratrix were almost certainly formed in English, rather than being borrowed as-is from Latin. Unaware of this, Connel moved the entire “Derived terms” section from the English section to the Latin one. I’ve been meaning to sort this properly for a long time… † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 16:12, 27 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

I'm not actually sure that he was unaware, as you say; given previous discussions about the entry, that edit of his looks suspiciously like POV pushing. But yeah, thanks for reminding me about that. I've now moved that section back into the English section, as decided at the Tea room. I've also added a clarifying note. —Ruakh 22:51, 27 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

That looks adæquate for the time being, although it could probably do with some work in future. (Then again, creating entries for the words whereto it links is most likely a higher priority.) In re POV-pushing: Ah, y’know — AGF and all that… † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 01:27, 28 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ok, I have formally requested at Wiktionary talk:Quotations that we end citation lines with a colon. It's just the way it should be! bd2412 T 03:50, 28 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

k, replied there. :-)   —Ruakh 11:47, 28 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

• Ah, fair enough. So basically Arial Unicode MS doesn't really work; in which case anyone wanting to use Lao will effectively have to download a new font. Which is not that surprising really. (PS, go get Phetsarath, it's great!) Ƿidsiþ 07:05, 28 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

• Will do. :-)   —Ruakh 11:47, 28 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

There are only four items left in the missing English definition category after I cleaned it out, mostly by adding # or similar changes, occasionally something more substantive. I think the ones that remain probably warrant keeping until some heavy lifting is done to improve the entries. Long entries, as for "set", have not been our strong point. DCDuring TALK 23:00, 1 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I figured that out afterward. This might be a good use for <!-- hidden comments to other editors -->. —Ruakh 23:02, 1 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Maybe I will work up enthusiasm for proceeding through the short words on the high-frequency lists to see where we have a small number of definitions compared to the OneLook dictionaries and insert defn en and a hidden comment. It might be a way to keep my mind off the space-wasters above the fold. DCDuring TALK 23:11, 1 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yes, my "why stop there" wasn't a circumspect throwing up of the hands, but rather a prod to broaden the debate. By the way, did anything I said about intransitive prepositions sway you at all?--Brett 01:13, 3 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ah, O.K., cool. :-)   And maybe, but I don't think I'm ready yet for Wiktionary to make that leap (though obviously I'd go along with it if the community decided it was ready). —Ruakh 16:51, 3 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Well, I'm Italian and I studied Italian grammar. Plus, en.wikipedia is much better than your grammar book (I'm of course more the best source, since I'm Italian, but I understand you guys can't just take that to change everything).

Anyway, you can look at other sources or other wikis, like the Italian one Condizionale, or the English one again Conditional mood (The conditional mood is the form of the verb used in conditional sentences to refer to a hypothetical state of affairs, or an uncertain event that is contingent on another set of circumstances. This mood is thus similar to the subjunctive mood, although languages that have distinct verb forms for the two use them in distinct ways.)

Now, you look at the sources and decide if your grammar book is better. Look, you are doing a great job. Trust me, conditional mood (in Italian) is not the indicative mood and it doesn't belong to it. --58.8.188.150 03:14, 5 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

I'm flabbergasted that you would rather write a three-paragraph empty comment attacking "my grammar book" (what, have I only got one?) than answer a simple question, especially since (as it turns out) the answer was in your favor. As I said, in English and in most Romance languages, the conditional is both a distinct mood and a tense of the indicative. Traditionally it was more commonly called a tense; nowadays it's more commonly called a mood; you've given no evidence that our current handling is a problem. —Ruakh 11:15, 5 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks so much for your editing assistance! — This unsigned comment was added by 24.251.216.251 (talk) at 17:07, 7 September 2008 (UTC).Reply

You're welcome. More work is still needed, though. —Ruakh 11:33, 8 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi. I found a deletion tag that you placed on this page in October 2007, but I can't find any active or archived discussion. Is the request still open? If so, what's the reasoning? Thanks. —Michael Z. 2008-09-08 04:57 z

I don't remember, but it might have something to do with ]. —Ruakh 11:25, 8 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ah. There was a similar, inconclusive discussion recently at WT:BP#Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, and others. I'll remove the tag, since this is not going anywhere. I think WT:CFI#Names of specific entities is not quite meeting consensus, and needs some overhauling. —Michael Z. 2008-09-08 23:44 z

Hi. Edit conflict. I take it you don't think this is a phrasal verb then? Reasons? (it's always difficult with the the verb to be. I could easily be wrong :)) -- ALGRIF talk 14:18, 8 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh, sorry. I think this is the same disagreement as always; in my view, the primary use of the verb (deprecated template usage) be is simply to link a subject to a non-verbal predicate (note: the linguistic terms in this comment might not all be exactly right, but hopefully you'll understand what I mean overall), and if there's any idiomaticity, it's entirely in the predicate. As evidence, I point out that other linking verbs ((deprecated template usage) seem, (deprecated template usage) feel, (deprecated template usage) become) can be used with these predicates, as well as object-linking verbs ((deprecated template usage) think, (deprecated template usage) consider), certain subordinating conjunctions ((deprecated template usage) though, (deprecated template usage) while), and in some cases, non-linking verbs ((deprecated template usage) want, (deprecated template usage) let). In the specific case of (deprecated template usage) in on, not all of these seem to be attested (though I'm not sure), but enough of them are that I think it's part of the same pattern. But I know from past discussions that you disagree, so it doesn't seem worth wrangling over every time. :-P   If you want to create ], be my guest. :-)   —Ruakh 15:19, 8 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

How can a single quote be used twice on a page to support two completely different senses? It supports one or the other, not both. --EncycloPetey 21:36, 12 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Because the quote uses the word twice, once in each sense. (And I wouldn't say they're completely different senses; one is a noun and one is an adjective, but the meaning is basically the same.) —Ruakh 23:51, 12 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

I'll add it back in, then. Kwamikagami 01:16, 14 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi Ruakh,

I noticed your comment on Usonian that it needs a lot of cleanup. Can you direct me to an overview of the standards for a good article? I haven't been able to find anything browsing around on my own.

Thanks, Kwamikagami 21:48, 12 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi Kwamikagami,

First of all, thanks for all of your additions to that entry!

The broadest overview is Wiktionary:Entry layout explained, but where I'd really like to direct your attention is Wiktionary:Quotations, which explains how to format quotations. (Quotation format is particularly important, because readers can't interpret a string of numbers like “2000:346 (1936)” outside of a specific quotation format. Indeed, our format doesn't include strings of numbers like that; we prefer to make almost everything explicit.)

—Ruakh 23:56, 12 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Double t spellings of (deprecated template usage) turlute (blowjob or masturbation in European slang, IIRC, and also the verb/noun for the lark's cry) are common enough that I'd list it as a (currently) proscribed alternative spellings. It's a bit muddled, and fr: wp and wikt are both at best confused. The best solution might be to give in to the published dictionary by listing them at their traditional spellings, with the other ones given as alternates. FOr the record, those are turluttes for angling. Circeus 19:03, 13 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

It's no longer needed- as it seems, I didn't read WT:ALA, where the rules regarding macrons seem to apply to Old English as well. Actually, what we need is an Old English section on ea- the macrons are not necessary, and project-wanted-articles is only for red links. Teh Rote 15:53, 14 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ah, O.K. Thanks for explaining. :-)   —Ruakh 16:33, 14 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

I noticed just now that you reverted my last edit to this. I understand that it is "still being discussed" but the discussion would seem to at a standstill. So if you can please try to get some people with the right knowledge to continue the discussion. IMO it shouldn't be the way it is because if you leave it like this then I'm sure people will jump on the bandwagon creating unnecessary entries. Seriously I could not see the reasoning behind creating ningyou when we have ningyō, and youkai to go with yōkai, etc.

In a nutshell:There really is no need for non-Hepburn entries. However, if a word had been accepted into English from Japanese an exception might be made since most anglicised words do not have accents.--50 Xylophone Players talk 22:03, 17 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Re: your first three sentences: The problem is that you put the entry on RFV, which isn't intended for these discussions, and won't help resolve them. You might try RFD instead.

Re: the rest of your comment: I have little opinion on the topic, and little interest in forming one. Frankly, I'm not convinced we should have entries at all for uncited romaji, and my talk-page isn't the best place to try to hammer out details of which ones we should include.

—Ruakh 00:09, 20 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi Widsith,

Judging from your edit to the translation of the first quotation at ], you're analyzing "lo que es corporomental y culturalmente posible" as "lo que es {corporomental} y {culturalmente posible}", i.e. "lo que es corporomental y es culturalmente posible", but I've thought about it for a while, and I think it's actually "lo que es {corporomental y cultural}mente posible", i.e. "lo que es corporomentalmente y culturalmente posible". This is something that happens sometimes in Spanish — for example, see google:"lenta y rapidamente" — and in this case I think that (1) from a rhetorical standpoint, "dicha posibilidad" should refer back to the entire previous clause and (2) from a lexical standpoint, "dicha posibilidad" doesn't seem to cover "corporomentaldad + posibilidad" very well.

However, your Spanish is probably better than mine, so if you disagree, I'll defer to you.

—Ruakh_TALK 22:56, 17 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

• No, that sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Ƿidsiþ 08:29, 18 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

• O.K., thanks, I'll re-edit it then. —Ruakh 00:03, 19 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

In re your revision: According to our glossary definition of “hypercorrect” (which, granted, I myself very recently wrote), a word, phrase, or sense is hypercorrect when it is “ncorrect because of the misapplication of a standard rule”. The -man → -men pluralisation rule is standard, but in the case of shaman has been misapplied; i.e., shamen arises because of the misinterpretation of (deprecated template usage) shaman as an agent noun. (“One who ‘shas’”?!) Therefore, it is hypercorrect, nay? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 00:58, 19 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

That definition of (deprecated template usage) hypercorrect is too broad. Would you also say that “he swimmed” is a hypercorrection? —Ruakh 12:17, 19 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

No, but I’d say that highlit, instead of highlighted, is. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 13:19, 19 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh, and Mussulmen is another (more similar) example of this sort of hypercorrection. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 13:20, 19 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

I think "hypercorrect" usually implies that the speaker/writer is ignoring the form that sounds/looks natural to him, and instead using a nonstandard and less-natural form in a failed attempt to mimic standard speech/writing. For example, some forms of English don't have the /h/ sound; these forms are stigmatized, so their speakers sometimes try to "add the /h/'s back in", if you will — and sometimes, in these attempts, they'll put some /h/'s where there's no <h> and where speakers of /h/-having dialects don't include them. For another example, Modern English has mostly lost the (deprecated template usage) who/(deprecated template usage) whom distinction, with (deprecated template usage) who being used exclusively except in formal registers (not that the distinction is perfectly preserved even in standard formal English); and speakers who don't control the distinction will frequently use (deprecated template usage) whom where only (deprecated template usage) who is correct. I'm not sure about (deprecated template usage) octopi — it may have started as a hypercorrection, but I think it's now standard — and I'm really not sure about (deprecated template usage) shamen. More importantly, even if it is a hypercorrection, the attached reference didn't say so. —Ruakh 00:05, 20 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

As an unrelated aside, could you point me toward a tutorial for creating wiki-templates? I really want to learn, but all those numbers, vertical bars, braces, et cætera confound me… † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 14:27, 19 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

See the first few paragraphs of m:Help:Template. —Ruakh 00:05, 20 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi,

how come you have 2 different Babel on Hebrew? Mallerd 08:01, 21 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Because I couldn't decide. I grew up speaking Hebrew at home, and speak it fluently, but I'm basically illiterate (I can only read text when it has vowels, and I can't spell worth a darn), and don't have a great grasp of formal/educated vocabulary. At some point I'll get around to making myself a template that says he-4/2 or something. —Ruakh 12:12, 21 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Haha, I see. I have somewhat the same problem. I can speak Indonesian, but I often make spelling errors. I tend to write the words like I say them. That's why I always use a wordlist when I'm planning to add like big chonks of vocabulary to Wiktionary at a time. I just removed any Babel I wasn't actually sure how to write the words :D לְהִתְרָאוֹת! (in case you can't read that, it says goodbye :P) Mallerd 18:27, 22 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

No idea how that happened sorry. Phatom87 14:47, 22 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

At last, an admin has arrived! I tried two others, but apparently I missed them...anyways, there's some pretty persistent vandalism going on, it's all over recentchanges. I've been doing my best to revert, but I'll need you to block/protect, the works. Teh Rote 23:25, 22 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh, never mind, Robert Ullmann's handling it. Teh Rote 23:26, 22 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Several of us ;-) thanks! Robert Ullmann 23:33, 22 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh poo; apricot is so a colour. Maybe not the right one, but let us be semantically accurate here, not pragmatically squeamish! † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 00:07, 28 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

The article on duodena strikes me as a very appropriate place for squeamishness. :-) —Ruakh 03:12, 28 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Perhaps both amusing and true, but you get what I mean — there are better, single words to describe that colour. We shouldn’t eschew using præcise colour names just because the blokes down the pub would chuckle and call us foofy for using them. I’d find the right name myself, but EP is suggesting that it may need to be changed to ensure that colour-blind people can see the difference, so doing so may be a wasted effort. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 21:43, 29 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel that color words like "salmon" and "apricot" work best with some form of the word "color". I thought that "shown in" sounded more professional than "colored", so I went with a color name that I thought worked well even without "color"; if you disagree, please be bold and change it to whatever you think best. I made what I thought was an improvement, but I'm certainly open to other editors making what they think are improvements as well. :-)   BTW, I'm going to be leaving shortly for R"H services, and I might not be back on Wiktionary until Wednesday evening (it depends how long the services go, whether I get invited to someone's house for R"H lunch, how good a Jew I feel like being, and possibly other factors as well), so if you don't hear from me, it's not personal. I realize you probably don't celebrate R"H, but have a good and sweet new year anyway. :-)   —Ruakh 21:53, 29 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

I get what you mean, but I think that semantic accuracy outweighs that stylistic concern.

Thanks for wishing me well. Excuse me for not knowing, but what is (deprecated template usage) R"H? –I’ve never heard of it. Whatever holiday it is anyway (sounds like a New-Year’s celebration), I hope it is an enjoyable one (as well as its possessing whatever other attributes that are deemed appropriate). Also, you needn’t have given me prior warning of your absence, but thanks for it anyway. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 22:54, 29 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Oh, sorry, R"H = Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, though not exactly New Year's "celebration", or at least, not what I picture when I hear that phrase. —Ruakh 19:43, 30 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for letting me know. I'd changed it into Cherokee, forgetting that it doesn't show up correctly for everyone. I've put it back to being in the Roman alphabet now. --Neskaya ^kanetsv 23:22, 4 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

I see you added this as a non-standard variant of disaffection. Are you sure about that? I think the person who put up the request might have been after w:disaffectation, which is quite a different beast. Equinox 17:39, 5 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi Equinox, thanks for your comment.

Hippietrail most likely added the request because it was mentioned at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=673. I don't know how much looking around he did before adding the request; he might well have done some cursory searches to make sure that the word met the CFI, and in the course of that, he might well have read the Wikipedia article.

As for me, I visited google books:disaffectation, google books:disaffectations, google books:disaffection, and ], and wrote an entry based on what I saw. I think that the sense I describe does exist, but I could be wrong; and even if I'm right, nowise does that mean no other definitions exist. If the sense described at ] is citeable, then it should be included.

—Ruakh 18:12, 5 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for your questions in the Beer Parlour; they've been answered now (and gee, I probably should have mentioned where I'm learning the language in the first place – problem with that is that I speak so many languages that I forget). --Neskaya ^kanetsv 20:19, 6 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Ah, O.K., thanks. :-)   —Ruakh 22:34, 6 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Not a problem at all. —Neskaya ^kanetsv 22:44, 6 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Someone edited the entry immediately after you, adding a variety of other conjugations as derived terms. - Amgine/^talk 23:46, 7 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the heads-up. (And, sorry for the late reply; I haven't been here for a few days, and right now am just dropping in for a minute or two before a few more days of being gone.) I feel bad for that editor; (s)he's putting a lot of effort in that just gets undone because it's not useful, and what's more, the entire entry will probably end up failing RFV and getting deleted, simply because the editor isn't interested in figuring out how Wiktionary works. :-(   —Ruakh 15:33, 10 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

My vision of a technical solution would be some kind of analog to the watch tab. The idea being that there would be a flag that removed the item from my personal view of any (?) maintenance list. I have no idea as to whether the WMF resource cost would be high or low compared to the WMF resources wasted on looking at the same entry multiple times. I know my time is often wasted, but that is often assigned low value except by me.

A cleaner-seeming variation with other benefits would be that we (admins, whitelisted users, registered users ?) each subscribed to various maintenance lists or categories, the entries showing up in our personal maintenance list (sortable by date of problem detection, maintenance category or other). It would remain there until we removed it or (optionally ?) the tag was removed by someone else. DCDuring TALK 17:58, 11 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Let me think about that for a bit. —Ruakh 18:40, 11 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Replied on my talk page. --EncycloPetey 17:29, 16 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi. I wrote the following on Williamsayers' Talk Page:

This is very minor, but for the Comparative of and Superlative of templates, it currently creates entries as follows:

Comparative form of glassy: more glassy.

Would a semicolon make more sense than a colon?

Comparative form of glassy; more glassy. sewnmouthsecret 18:27, 14 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

And he replied with: I'd say a semi-colon would make more sense.

Do you disagree with the change? sewnmouthsecret 05:13, 17 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yes, I disagree. I think the colon makes a lot more sense. If you had brought this up on either template's talk-page, I'd have said that, and explained my opinion. —Ruakh 12:08, 17 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

You were getting me confused there. Are you saying that numbers of the form x + yi are always complex, but are real numbers if y=0 and imaginary otherwise? SemperBlotto 14:32, 17 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

That's what I said in my first edit summary, but I was wrong. Numbers of the form x + yi are always complex, but are real numbers if y=0 and imaginary if x=0 and y≠0. There doesn't seem to be a catch-all term for non-real complex numbers. —Ruakh 15:00, 17 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Note: Earlier today, we were 20,000 entries ahead of the French. That lead is now only 10,000. We are less than 6,000 away from reaching one million entries. If we don't reach one million entries in the next 24 hours, I expect the French will get there first. --EncycloPetey 00:34, 18 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

This is the tail end of our discussion which you participated in. I use it here because I don't want to have to explain again.

6 Marking pages in progress

I think that the idea of marking pages in progress is actually okay. But it has to be implemented in a reasonable fashion. The Czech Wikipedia has a template and policy that makes it possible to soft lock a page for, I think, 3 days, by placing a marker template in there. The marker contains text that encourages editors, after the three days are gone, to remove the marker and edit the page as they see fit. However, three days is not three weeks, emphatically. --Dan Polansky 10:46, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

At this point in time I don't really give a crap load what your ideas are. That you can even write that last paragraph shows a self serving, overweening, blockhead that is beyond my capacity to work with. I've tried to plow on despite the roadblocks you've put forward and it has taken it's toll on my health. The "free hand" that was promised to me when I resurrected this project was as ephemeral as the "paint with broad strokes" encouragement. Do enjoy your new job, Polansky. Wikisaurus is all yours. Admin can delete my profile. Amina (sack36) 00:56, 18 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

I'm so sorry to hear that. Please be well; I hope your health improves quickly. (And should you ever change your mind, you will of course be gladly welcomed back.) —Ruakh 01:19, 18 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

I know the stress mark goes before the stressed syllable in IPA, but does it go behind it in enPR? Actually I've never heard the word pronounced (which is why I had put there the {{rfp}} in the first place) and only meant to "render" enPR into IPA. Duncan MacCall 14:22, 18 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, the tradition in American dictionaries (which enPR is an attempt to imitate) is to put an upward-angled stress mark after the stressed syllable. See for example the headwords in http://books.google.com/books?id=6aARAAAAIAAJ, where there's actually no pronunciation information except the stress mark. (It's not just American dictionaries — see http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/elearnaid/oxf-oed-pronunciation-key.jpg for an OED pronunciation guide, which puts a dot on the median line after the stressed syllable — but nowadays my understanding is that it's mostly American ones, since AFAIK foreign dictionaries tend to use IPA.) —Ruakh 17:22, 18 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

I see. You know, in Czech, which is my native language, the stress is always on the first syllable, so that Czech-English dictionaries usually don't even use a stress mark at all unless it falls on another syllable, and thus it didn't even occur to me that a stress mark after the first syllable might actually refer to it. Thanks for a speedy answer, again I'm a bit wiser. --Duncan MacCall 20:34, 18 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

It's about something. From a bunch of entries without explanation in edit summary. I would like my both of my accounts (Dekoshu and my IP address please). Next time, I'll explain in the edit summary and the RFV. Everybody needs a second chance, including me. I don't want each and every of my IP address and account to be blocked forever! How can I explain in the edit summary? How can I really have my IP address and account unblocked? How can I appreciate you? How can I really explain in the edit summary? What is a edit summary? Don't block this account too, please. :'( Nukeman X 05:59, 26 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

I think you're being a bit melodramatic with "everybody needs a second chance" and "I don't want to be blocked forever"; it was a one-day block. Also, I left on the ability to send e-mails (using Special:Emailuser/Ruakh), so you didn't need to create a sockpuppet account to contact me with. To answer your question: an edit summary is, well, an edit summary. When you're editing an entry, right above the "This is a minor edit" and "Watch this page" checkboxes, there's an "Edit summary" field. You can use it to summarize your edit.

The main reason I blocked you is that that you were wrongly removing {{rfv}}s. The secondary reason is that your edit summaries didn't mention doing it, and you weren't explaining why you were doing it, so it looked like you were trying to be sneaky about it.

I've unblocked Dekoshu now; please stop using sockpuppets.

—Ruakh 17:27, 26 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

I've started a tearoom discussion about this, please see Wiktionary:Tea room#fifth. Thryduulf 14:34, 2 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi. Just curious: why link the singular in the declension line, when it's already linked in the etymology line directly above? I find that linking the declension line reduces the visual impact of the main headword, so I try to avoid it, and as a general rule I think that redundant links don't improve a web page. I was also surprised to find that it's not recommended by WT:ELE. —Michael Z. 2008-11-06 14:43 z

That's a good question. It should probably be discussed in the beer parlor, with the conclusion documented at ELE and/or ]. (The latter does mention it, but only stubbily.) —Ruakh 03:43, 8 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

Posed the question at Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Redundant links in etymology and headword. —Michael Z. 2008-11-09 18:25 z

Hi Ruakh, FYI: I added pevná linka to the Tea room for discussion. Best regards, Karelklic 15:44, 8 November 2008 (UTC).Reply

Thanks. —Ruakh 15:53, 8 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

FYI: User_talk:Karelklic#stabil. I apologize for the time you've lost on this word. --Duncan MacCall 01:18, 9 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

There's aught I do but of mine own free will, and on its account, none but I must needs apologize to me. :-)   —Ruakh 02:32, 9 November 2008 (UTC)Reply