User talk:Urszag

Thanks for taking a look at this entry that I tagged for attention. It's not really fixed, though, until the inflected-form entries are dealt with. For instance, sicerae has "ablative singular of sīcera". If you view the previous revision, you can see what was linked to, or you can look through Special:WhatLinksHere/sicera. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:10, 4 May 2019 (UTC)Reply

Ah, thanks for the tip! I didn't realize that those other pages still had to be fixed. I'll take care of those now.--Urszag (talk) 05:11, 4 May 2019 (UTC)Reply

Hi - I understand your point about stem-final vowels with -tus, but I'm not sure I agree. Both crociō and barriō are of the -iō type (i.e. the stems are croc and barr respectively). It becomes more obvious when you compare action nouns from first conjugation verbs, which all take the participle form too (frūstrō to frūstrātus, armō to armātus, licentiō to licentiātus etc.), or fourth conjugation verbs in -io that have irregular participles that just so happen to be the same as the action noun (convenio to conventus, evenio to eventus). I'm just not sure that your statement that meātus is meā + tus is true, really, because that ⟨ā⟩ is part of the participle ending.

It could well be that the perfect passive participle derives from PIE *-tus, but I don't think we can just ignore the evident connection. Theknightwho (talk) 04:48, 27 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

@Theknightwho Hi, I'm glad to discuss. There are many areas of Latin word formation where there is not obviously only one correct analysis. I don't want to be dogmatic. I do value consistency, and the current categories for suffixed forms are based on a perspective where first, second, and fourth conjugation verbs have present stems ending in vowels, not consonants, and identical vowel-final stems are considered to occur in various derived words (this is made clear by the note at the top of Category:Latin words suffixed with -tus (action noun) and the content of that category). Even though the way that the inflection of these verb classes is presented commonly suggests that they attach vowel-initial inflectional "suffixes" along the lines of -āre, -ēre, -īre throughout their paradigm to consonant-final bases, there are many analysts who consider the morphological structure of the present-tense forms to actually consist of stems ending in -ā-, -ē-, -ī- that combine with suffixes that in many cases are shared between different "conjugations" (the present infinitive ending -re is a fairly straightforward case; some other suffixes such as third-person singular -t have further complications; e.g. due to a phonological rule, the underlyingly long stem vowels are shortened before this suffix).

Aside from the advantage of reducing the number of distinct suffixes with the same function that we need to postulate, treating the ī as part of the stem rather than the suffix in nouns ending in -ītus makes it clearer why such nouns exist for verbs that have present infinitives ending in -īre, but not for verbs that have present infinitives ending in -āre: the reason the verb selects which vowel is used before the -t- is because that vowel is really part of the phonological material of the verb rather than belonging to the suffix.

It's true that these nouns almost always have the same stem as the perfect passive participle (or perfect participle for deponent verbs) when it exists. Treating this as the base would result in analyzing the suffix not as -ītus, but rather as -us. But there are a few lines of argument for treating the noun-forming ending as -tus instead, the approach that is currently used by Wiktionary (similar arguments apply to the endings -tor and -tio). As you're aware, not all verbs have a perfect passive participle. Etymologically, the perfect passive participle ending comes from *-tós, a different source from the nominalizing ending *-tus. Even if originally unrelated etymologically, it's clear that there was analogy or paradigmatic pressure to end up using forms that are built the same way up until the /t/. But another argument is that the semantic meaning of -tus nouns doesn't seem to be built on the meaning of the perfect passive participle.

I've read a proof of "The morphome vs similarity-based syncretism" Latin t-stem derivatives" by Donca Steriade (2016), that discusses this topic. It's pretty detailed so I haven't finished it yet. While not directly relevant, Steriade's earlier The cycle without containment: Latin perfect stems (2012) discusses some general issues of Latin verb inflection and the stems involved in it.--Urszag (talk) 06:52, 27 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

You mentioned that your personal experience leads you to question the commonness of a cot-caught distinction in American speech.

But have you considered that California, where you have said you come from, and the West Coast in general is one of the places most known for the cot-caught merger, to the point that San Francisco has been referred to by some as a "dialect island" in California, because it has traditionally not exhibited the cot-caught merger (though from what I have read, many younger San Franciscans are coming to exhibit the merger)? So it wouldn't surprise me that you would struggle to meet very many in your neck of the woods who distinguish the vowels. Tharthan (talk) 20:40, 24 November 2022 (UTC)Reply

@Tharthan I'm sure that there are many American English speakers that are still unmerged. Maybe instead of "supposedly not uncommon" I should have used "reportedly not uncommon": I meant to emphasize my lack of personal knowledge of the frequency of this feature. My main point was to provide a contrasting perspective to Whoop whoop pull up's experience of hearing mostly "/ɔ/ for all three". The US is a big place so it's easy for a single person's experiences to not present a complete picture of the country in total. While I've mostly heard the speech of people from the West Coast of the US, I have also found a complete low back merger to be common among speakers from the Midwest that I have encountered.--Urszag (talk) 22:04, 25 November 2022 (UTC)Reply

Just curious as to the source of your username. The -sz- in the middle makes me think of Hungarian, but (so far as I can tell) there is no such Hungarian word. Cheers! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:06, 5 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

That's an accurate set of observations! It is in fact based on Hungarian, but only in an indirect sense. When I learned a bit of the language, I was taken with the use of the digraph "sz" for /s/ and decided to use it when creating a name for here. But the name is not intended to have any specific meaning. Does your username come from Norse?--Urszag (talk) 00:57, 6 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the reply! Én ís tanulom a magyar nyelvet, de csak egy kicsit. Köszönöm szépen! Re: my username, ya, it's from Norse -- given name, plus an epithet that has been geographically accurate to varying degrees over the years, and that has felt socially accurate for most of my life.  ;) I haven't formally studied Norse or Icelandic, and when I chose my username, resources online were pretty scarce; I'm still not entirely sure I got the right form for the epithet. I know that a word útlendi exists, at any rate.  :) Szia! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 00:04, 7 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

Regarding your edits in diff and diff, I am still confused. The edit to in- at diff doesn't fix the problem, but does the opposite of what I'm trying to say. To me, etymology 2 sense 1 ("in, within, inside") and the "into, upon, on" part of sense 2 don't make sense for this. Only the "against" part of sense 2 makes sense. Sense 3 (intensifier) also makes sense because versō sense 5 and vertō sense 5 have the meaning to be intensified. Perhaps the "against" part of etymology 2 sense 2 arose from a conflation with etymology 1 ("not"). I will illustrate the problem in a table:

I'm confused about how you are saying that "turn inside" could mean "invert." Though if an etymological dictionary concurs, then I would have to agree. However in that case, I would still be searching for the explanation for how the semantics of "turn into" could mean "invert". Could you offer one? Daniel.z.tg (talk) 22:17, 26 August 2023 (UTC)Reply

@Daniel.z.tg Hi! Thanks for asking. I don’t think that that I have provided a satisfactory definition of in- or of the etymology of invertō and inversō. The goal of my edits was not to say that inverto/inverso specifically means "turn inside", but simply to mark that these verbs were formed with the prepositional prefix in-, rather than the homophonous negative prefix, which is a basic fact about their etymology that should be presented even if a more complete explanation has not yet been added to the entries.

There are a couple of reasons I am sure that in- here is the preposition and not the negative prefix, despite not having a complete explanation of how inverto and inverso developed their meanings.

• First, the negative prefix in- was almost never attached to verbs: it was only productively used to negate adjectives. The few verbs that do start with negative in- appear likely to be either back-formations from negated participial adjectives (such as improbō, inoboediō, indecet, based on improbātus, inoboediēns, indecēns) or denominal verbs built on negated adjectives (such as ignōrō, based on ignārus).

• Second, the negative prefix does not fit well with the meaning of the verbs: inverto does not mean “not to turn” and inversus, when used as the participle of inverto, does not mean “unturned”.

Although some of Latin’s prepositional prefixes, such as circum-, have a fairly straightforward meaning, this is not the case for many others, such as ad- and in-. It is difficult to give general definitions of these prefixes that explain what they mean in all words in which they occur. (It is likewise often difficult to explain the meaning of English prepositions when used as "particles" or prefixes, as in upset, call off, etc.) There are not necessarily clear dividing lines between the subsenses currently listed at in-, and they are still a work in progress. That is why I think it’s best for the prepositional prefix to have only one sense id that links to the entire set of definitions under that etymology header, rather than linking to any one specific subsense. The sense id field of affixes is also used for splitting words into categories according to their etymologies in cases where there are two homophonous affixes of unrelated origin. The division between the prepositional prefix and the negative prefix is clear enough that it makes sense to place words with the negative prefix in a separate category, but I think it is best to put all words with the prepositional prefix into the same category, rather than attempting to split it along uncertain lines.

Does that all make sense? I’m still trying to find some paper that discusses the meaning of verbs prefixed with in- that might shed more light on how they can be explained, so hopefully I can make further updates to those entries in the future.--Urszag (talk) 19:22, 27 August 2023 (UTC)Reply

@Urszag: Thank you for explaining your goals. I see now why you chose to unify the senseid. I the solution to my concern is for me to add "against" of sense 2 and sense 3 in the parentheses inside the {{af}}. Daniel.z.tg (talk) 19:33, 27 August 2023 (UTC)Reply

This word seems fishy to me (voci nihili simile). The source is valid but a search on Google gives 0 results. Then there is arietare with a perfect semantic match (ramming etc). I think we need to find at least 1 actual usage of that word to prove its existence. Imbricitor (talk) 01:35, 25 September 2023 (UTC)Reply

This is part of a series of additions of salacious and largely obscure Latin vocabulary items added by IP 45.72.209.233, apparently drawn from old dictionaries such as the cited source there. I saw these words come up in new Latin entries but haven't been able to check for usage examples yet (another one which is tricky to attest is ataurus), but in the case of arietīnō it was at least clear where the word was supposed to come from. As Latin follows LDL criteria for inclusion, "one use in a contemporaneous source is the minimum, or one mention is adequate subject to the below requirements the community of editors for that language should maintain a list of materials deemed appropriate as the only sources for entries based on a single mention, each entry should have its source(s) listed on the entry or citation page, and a box explaining that a low number of citations were used should be included on the entry page (such as by using the {{LDL}} template)." So the community could decide to keep such entries if the source is judged acceptable.--Urszag (talk) 01:50, 25 September 2023 (UTC)Reply

Hi Urszag,

I was wondering whether you are against this idea, or whether you might prefer keeping the ecclesiastical phonetic outputs at least? I'm leaning towards having the latter match our handling of Italian (which is phonemic) but thought I'd ask you first since we worked extensively on the phonetics. Nicodene (talk) 18:11, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hi, thanks for asking for my input. I've decided not to contribute any more to that module or participate in discussion about future changes to it.--Urszag (talk) 18:36, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

Fair enough, thank you. Nicodene (talk) 18:53, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

I noticed you moved the Latin distributive numerals from plural to singular. Are they attested in the singular as well? If so we should change the headwords to reflect this; if not they should probably not have been moved. Benwing2 (talk) 01:13, 7 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Some (such as binus, quinus, senus) are attested in the singular in Classical Latin (rarely, and mainly in poetry), and most have some singular attestations in Medieval Latin or New Latin. Given that all of these words are regular 1st/2nd declension adjectives, there is no uncertainty about the forms themselves, and I created a usage note describing the limited circumstances of their use at Template:U:la:distributive numeral. I'm currently in the process of updating the headwords and entries themselves. This was based on discussion in the Tea room February, which seemed to result in consensus between myself, Tim Utikal and -sche that these should be treated consistently, and between myself and Tim Utikal that the singular was preferable; I should have linked to that in the edit summary!--Urszag (talk) 01:22, 7 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Sounds good. Benwing2 (talk) 01:24, 7 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Please be more careful when editing languages ​​you don't know, this word in French has two etymologies and you forgot a lot of details Stríðsdrengur (talk) 11:14, 15 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the comment, but it's hard for me to know what to make of it when you haven't made any corrections yet to the actual entry. What is the second etymology? The TLFi has only one entry, and the etymology section says "Empr. au lat.quini « cinq chaque fois, cinq chacun »." I know that there are more senses, and I think it would be better to have all of them, but I didn't think that was a good reason to not create the entry.--Urszag (talk) 11:38, 15 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Did you know we had one? It can be fairly chill if you mute the right channels. Of course no pressure, the choice is on you. Catonif (talk) 12:13, 29 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

I had heard about it but so far felt it might be more trouble for me than it's worth; I also feel like as a theoretical matter, I prefer for discussions about Wiktionary to occur in public on this website as much as possible rather than taking place on the privately-owned medium of a Discord. I may reconsider that later though. Thanks for the invite!--Urszag (talk) 00:24, 30 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Alright, that is a very respectable opinion. Those are points that I also feel very close to home. Keep up the good work. :) Catonif (talk) 08:50, 30 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Salve, Urszag. Re your relemmatisation from injūstē to iniūstē, with both edits summarised “Making i-spelling the main entry and injuste an alternative form, as is standard for Latin J-spellings on WIktionary.” (differing only in whether injuste was linked), could you tell me where it's prescribed that i-spellings should be lemmatised, please? I think that's a bad rule, so if it exists, I'd like to advocate changing it in the Beer parlour. Thank you. 0DF (talk) 19:55, 12 July 2024 (UTC)Reply

@0DF For sure. You can see this policy stated at Wiktionary:About Latin#I and J.--Urszag (talk) 19:59, 12 July 2024 (UTC)Reply

I really should have been aware of that policy page already! Well, thank you for pointing me toward it. 0DF (talk) 21:53, 12 July 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thank you alot for fixing my mistakes i learn alot from it Aedificaveruntmuros78290 (talk) 19:15, 7 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

My point in including "compare -ārium" in either etymology section was that they both share the same semantic derivation in their coming to life, viz. through substantivation of neuter adjectives. I thought it worth adding. Saumache (talk) 15:59, 11 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

I see; I didn't understand the intended significance of "compare". There are other examples of neuter adjective substantivization, e.g. -ium, -tōrium, which could be mentioned as well.--Urszag (talk) 16:05, 11 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

I may be overusing it, my "compare" means something like: "go see this page and read its etymology section to understand what may link them". I'd like people to think for themselves a bit, it's all about curiosity, etymology headers not to be cram-full of stuff which are better explained elsewhere and make use of the great page-interactivity wiktionary provides just as well. Saumache (talk) 19:48, 11 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

Hi - I think it might be a good idea for us to show various Latin spelling conventions on entries, which should help to clear up some of the confusion we have at the moment. I had the thought that we could show something like this on the right-hand side of the entry:

The Ecclesiastical spelling is based on the conventions used in the Liber Usualis, where the stressed syllable is commonly given with an acute accent (especially in anything metrical). In most cases, the Academic transcription would only require one or two forms, and publications which use the third (i.e. neither distinction) seem to capitalise "u" as "V", so perhaps there may be a better way of distinguishing the three. There are also Renaissance conventions (e.g. ⟨-ij⟩ and duûm) to take account of, but I haven't looked into them in any detail. Theknightwho (talk) 12:01, 23 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Theknightwho Hi, I'm happy to give input! Here are my thoughts for now.

I'm a little concerned that this kind of tabular presentation could give a false impression of being exhaustive, even though it's actually incomplete—particularly the "Ecclesiastical" row, which does not reflect the range of forms that can be seen in Ecclesiastical Latin. For example, the 1957 edition of the Liber Usualis uses "ae", not the ligature "æ", and uses the acute even on disyllabic words (at least in text set to music). The 1972 Ordo initiationis christianae adultorum uses "æ", but also uses "i" instead of "j", and only uses the acute in words of more than two syllables. The 2021 apostolic letter Traditionis custodes uses "ae", "i" instead of "j" (e.g. "iudicio", "iubemus"), and doesn't use the acute accent. All of these are undeniably Ecclesiastical Latin, so it may not really clear up confusion much if we tell readers that this word is spelled "præjudicáveram" in Ecclesiastical Latin. I'm not sure that's even the most common spelling nowadays in material produced by the Roman Catholic Church.

The other rows don't have as many problems in this regard, but if you get pedantic about it, there are some complications there too in terms of misleading spellings, since the spelling conventions that are standardly adopted by Latin textbooks are sometimes not exactly the same as those used in the Republican era of Classical Latin (e.g. it seems likely Cicero was accustomed to writing VOLGVS, SERVOM rather than VVLGVS, SERVVM, and we are told he used double II in words like MAIIOR).

I also feel like a table is a pretty visually busy addition to the standard entry layout. Overall, I'm not really enthusiastic about it, although I agree that the current way these variants are handled isn't ideal either. Could it be made collapsed by default, like Ancient Greek pronunciations?--Urszag (talk) 21:00, 23 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Urszag That's a very good point - I threw this together pretty quickly, so there are definitely some parts that could be expanded. I think we could probably have a reduced form (which should include the Classical spelling at the bare minimum), with the expanded form having all the variations, including variant Ecclesiastical and Republican forms etc. A more vertical format may work better, too.

My main concern is that the "Alternative forms" section is often just a random list at the moment, and typically they're trivial to derive if you already know the rules, but utterly useless if you don't, so they're of no use to anyone.

One other thing is that this table is a useful place to put forms that may not themselves be worthy of an entry, which would give room for things like MAꟾOR, for instance. Theknightwho (talk) 21:14, 23 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Theknightwho I think a quick and simple guide to regular variants (of the i/j and u/v kind, or a list of attested variant spellings, could both in principle be useful features for a Latin dictionary. There's maybe a bit of tension between trying to do both of those things in the same place. That is, I think people who aren't familiar with basic aspects of the Latin alphabet (like which letters were and weren't originally distinct) would not benefit much, or perhaps at all, from being shown forms such as MAꟾOR (which basically only appear if you're looking at inscriptions or diplomatic transcriptions thereof), and on the other hand, an experienced Latinist who's trying to find out which spellings are actually attested in inscriptions and manuscripts won't benefit from being shown typographic variants that are trivially predictable.

An alternative to a table perhaps could be establishing rules for organizing the Alternative forms section, e.g. dividing it into two rows, one for variants that appear in ancient manuscripts or inscriptions and one for modern typographic variants, with a link at the start of each row to some explanation (e.g. in an appendix) that describes the patterns to where these kinds of variants show up.

Another division I'm thinking about regarding the purpose of showing variant forms is if it's meant to facilitate recognition or production. If someone sees a form and wants to know what word it is, or what it means, they would presumably look up that form first and get a soft redirect if it's not the spelling that we've adopted as standard. A table of variant forms at the lemma wouldn't add much to this experience. (Hard redirects would probably be more convenient, and it makes the most sense in my opinion for a Latin dictionary to simply treat v/u or i/j as exactly the same letter for the purposes of digital search, but this is problematic on Wiktionary given its multi-lingual nature.) On the other hand, if someone wants to produce their own Latin text, I think we can say that they're expected to use more resources than just the entries in this dictionary (e.g. we label case-forms of nouns and adjectives but don't explain how to use them, leaving that work to grammars of Latin).--Urszag (talk) 11:45, 25 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

Well, the alternative forms section isn't really for attestations - that's the point of the citations section/page. I think trying to get people to do it manually is a bit of a fool's errand, and having a standardised format is generally helpful for users who want to quickly find what they're looking for, or who need to cross-compare between them. Having it laid out in the same way in each entry is the kind of thing that works well in other languages, and if people are looking for specific attestations using a particular, we already handle that in the appropriate place.

Given that we already normalise entries anyway, I'm not really sure there's any reason not to do the same thing for other normalisations either - especially when they're ones which readers are reasonably likely to come across in other publications. Given that we don't have the option of treating u/v and i/j as the same letters, it seems sensible to make the distinction for both. Theknightwho (talk) 14:31, 25 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

I can't find the thread now, but I remember we were toying around with the idea of making a reconstruction page *invernum to replace this.

I wonder now, though, how methodologically sound that really is. It's a bit troubling that the varieties which separated earliest from the rest of Latin~Romance, viz. Sardinian and Romanian, do not show the extra /N/. We are left, then, with a ‛fad’ whose distribution is Italo-Western and which seems not to have decisively prevailed in any region by the time local Romance begins to be written (cf. the variations in old Ibero-Romance and old Italian). For all we know it could have started in the 11th century in southern France and hopped its way down the Iberian and Italian peninsulas.

Perhaps we can simply give the relevant etymologies as ‛Inherited from Late Latin hībernum. See there for other Romance cognates with an additional nasal consonant’ or such? Nicodene (talk) 21:28, 14 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Nicodene I think Wiktionary:Etymology_scriptorium/2025/January#inverno is the discussion you're remembering. I think it might have been more about how to spell the reconstructed form rather than about whether it needed a separate reconstructed page. I'm going to need to wait a little bit before I have time to write new comments on this.--Urszag (talk) 21:37, 14 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, that's the one. Nicodene (talk) 21:47, 14 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Nicodene Getting back to this: I think all descendants, with nasal or no, should be listed at hībernum and should link to this entry. I don't think there should be a separate entry for the hypothesized ancestral form with an inserted nasal. If we reconstruct this form (for the purpose of mentioning it, unlinked, on the entry for hībernum and on the entries of the relevant descendants), I think it makes most sense to write it as something like " "*īnvernum" or "*ī̆nvernum" (like e.g. the "*invernum" used in Theodor Gartner's Raetoromanische Grammatik), since the consonant seems to be -v- rather than -b- in descendants that make a distinction, and the addition of the nasal consonant seems to have been associated with a morphological reinterpretation of it as a prefixed word (and writing *hīn- doesn't really do a good job of showing that, since hīn- is not a Latin prefix). I'm fine also with leaving out an explicit Latin reconstructed form and using wording like "from Latin hībernum; see there for other Romance cognates showing the insertion of a nasal in the first syllable".--Urszag (talk) 06:20, 18 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. I've cleaned up all the *hīnbernum-s (hopefully) and left a note about possible influence from īnfernum in the descendants section of hībernum. Nicodene (talk) 00:41, 20 May 2025 (UTC)Reply