Wiktionary:Information desk/2017/December

I was on the Tony Kanal page earlier, and I tried searching up "Hollaback" here without success. Should it be redirected to "Holla Back"? Ranged Ranger (talk) 04:45, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

You're lost! This is Wiktionary, not Wikipedia. Equinox ◑ 04:51, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

@Equinox: I actually meant that I tried searching up the definition of "hollaback" in Wiktionary, after seeing the Wikipedia article. Sorry if that wasn't worded very well. :) Ranged Ranger (talk) 05:02, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

@Ranged Ranger: You may want to give it a shot as your first definition. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:09, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf: It's more like a redirect request. That said, how exactly do I create a redirect? Ranged Ranger (talk) 05:13, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

@Ranged Ranger: Strictly speaking, you can make a redirect just like at Wikipedia, in the form of #redirect] but usually we don't do that here. E.g. color and colour--alternative forms and spellings are worth retaining as a distinct entry. See also virtually any Chinese entry such as 𪋀. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:24, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf Lol my Chinese isn't that good, but I get what you're saying. Thanks for clarifying! Ranged Ranger (talk) 05:33, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

See Panjabi for example of alt-form entry. But how is hollaback used? It can't be a verb because that would imply the silly-sounding *hollabacking and *hollabacked. I've never seen it outside that Gwen Stefani song title. Equinox ◑ 05:26, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

@Equinox I honestly have no idea what it meant before I read holla back, and the WP article instance could be a typo. *shruggie* Should I still make an alt-form entry? Ranged Ranger (talk) 05:33, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

No... I searched Google Books and the single-word "hollaback" is the name of an organisation but not a normal dictionary word. Equinox ◑ 05:37, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

I have created (deprecated template usage) hollaback. I am assuming that it meets CFI. SemperBlotto (talk) 07:03, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

The French pronunciation of 'entretien' in IPA symbols is wrong, the s should be t. But I cannot edit that, when I press 'edit' I see no symbols at all. How does this work in Wiktionary? Can somebody else correct this error? Rudhar (talk)

Fixed. The page uses {{fr-IPA}} which predicts the pronunciation from the spelling. Since -tien in French is usually /sjɛ̃/, the template falsely predicted that it would be in this word as well. I've fixed that now. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 19:34, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

I was listening or rather reading a conversation about someone cooking tumshie? I could not find an example on google so I thought I'd try here but to no avail. sad.. could someone please explain or give me a link would be nice as well.

Thanks Happy Holidays! Lisa Bumgarner

According to it seems to be a Scots or Scottish English word for the rutabaga (known in Scotland as turnip and in England as swede). We do have the red link tumshie listed at turnip#Synonyms. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 15:15, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Note also that it would be at tumshie rather than Tumshie--capitalization counts at Wiktionary (compare polish and Polish or august and August). —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:27, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Hi. I am not sure how to edit this, because it is possibly a unique case in Spanish, or at least one of very few cases. The entry for "cruces", in the section for the meaning in Spanish, states correctly that it is the plural of "cruz". But "cruces" is also the plural of "cruce", as is correctly indicated at the entry for that word. To complicate matters, "cruz" is a feminine word, whereas "cruce" is masculine. So, the grammatical information is different for this other meaning. How do you proceed in a case like this? Thanks. --Eduarodi (talk) 17:17, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

@Eduarodi: great catch. There are a lot of words in English which have one spelling but multiple etymologies, so we just list the etymologies separately. I think the way it is now is probably close to optimal. Thanks a lot. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:11, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

They aren't truly distinct etymologies (cruce comes from a form of the verb cruzar, which in turn comes from cruz), so I combined them, but with two separate Noun headers, which is what we've done in similar situations in the past. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 18:32, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Yes, "cruz" is "a cross" and "cruce" is a "crossing", so they are etymologically connected. But because they have different meanings and genders, I wasn't sure how to proceed. Thanks for the help. --Eduarodi (talk) 18:48, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

"Phantasma" est verbum linguae Latini. — This unsigned comment was added by 2001:8003:4ECD:8500:3964:53A5:4791:4CA7 (talk).

If you feel a change is needed, feel free to make it yourself! Wiktionary is a wiki, so anyone — including you — can edit any entry by following the edit link. You don't even need to log in, although there are several reasons why you might want to. Wiki convention is to be bold and not be afraid of making mistakes. If you're not sure how editing works, have a look at How to edit a page, or try out the Sandbox to test your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 13:54, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

But you probably mean phantasma without a capital P. Also, our Latin templates take a bit of getting used to - so I've added it for you. SemperBlotto (talk) 13:58, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Of course, the fact that a word is Latin or Latinate does not preclude it from being English; phantasma, by way of analogy was Greek in origin and form, and I doubt that the Romans of the day apologised for appropriating it :D JonRichfield (talk) 14:48, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

I have just started a discussion page for rankle, where I encountered rfquotek for the first time. Could someone please tell me where I may find a discussion of what it achieves, how, and with what authority? TIA JonRichfield (talk) 14:38, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

It's a template asking for help finding citations and references: {{rfquotek}}. —Stephen ^(Talk) 10:40, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BJokXg8eLE at 5:20

He keeps saying "second or third act pay-off". What does he mean by this? Sense 1, 2, 3, or other? I think he means "pay-off" to mean some kind of comedy/film jargon. PseudoSkull (talk) 09:16, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

It’s not jargon, but it’s not a sense we have yet either. In this context it means something like a resolution or denouement of something that was set up earlier. Things are set up in the early part of the film to ‘pay off’ later on, when they’re finally activated during the second or third act. I suppose in origin it’s a metaphor based on the idea of an investment paying off down the line. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 17:51, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

@PseudoSkull, Vorziblix: I took a stab at defining it. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:51, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

"leading" is generally an extreme adjective so "most leading" and "more leading" are very odd. Therefore "(comparative more leading, superlative most leading)" is, er, misleading.

• Fixed. SemperBlotto (talk) 10:19, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

e.g. "This convoluted case clearly illustrates the dangerous absurdity of our statutory copyright damages laws. EFF has explained how this draconian damages scheme." Each of the three links notionally has the caption "Congress could fix", but in reality each link is tied to one word of the phrase (probably bad for SEO etc.). I see this sometimes; does it have a name? Equinox ◑ 19:26, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Hello, Wiktionary world!

I am working on an open-source project designed for people learning Russian.

It would be very helpful to be able to run custom queries against the Wiktionary database, preferably offline.

I am currently downloading files from this page: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ruwikisource/20171220/

I imagine that somewhere there is a step-by-step guide to setting up the database on a development computer, and running queries against it, but I have not been successful in finding it. I would be very grateful if someone could point me in the right direction.

Many thanks in advance, James

Check this page. I used mwdumper several years ago. Getting it to work correctly was a nightmare though, do read the instructions carefully if you choose it. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 20:47, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

Wiktionary is not a database. You can set it up as a database, but that will only give you access to the raw page text. You need to do your own parsing depending on what queries you want. The file you probably want to download is enwiktionary-latest-pages-meta-current.xml.bz2. DTLHS (talk) 20:54, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

I notice that Wiktionary is not particularly big on references/citing sources, like Wikipedia is. On the page cat, for example, I don't see a single link to a citation or even any website that shows where information is coming from. Why is this? Doesn't this cause for even more disputes than on Wikipedia? Wolfdog (talk) 19:25, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

@Wolfdog The function of a citation is different here than in Wikipedia but citations and quotations are definitely encouraged, especially for things like the first instance of the usage of a term, a famous author or particularly notable quotation using it, or usages which can clarify confusing terms. Both Wikipedia and Wiktionary need a lot more references and it's completely appropriate to have one for cat. For instance, when was this term first used? (Likely long before written language was common, so when is the earliest citation we can find?) Or, when did it started being used in the sense of referring to a cool cat like in jazz terminology rather than a feline? It would be very helpful to have some citations there but there are diminishing returns when we have an indefinite amount of citations from every news story that says "cat" in it. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:57, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf Thanks for the quick response. Cat was just a random example. For a more specific concern, I notice that page stoop defines the noun form as "(chiefly Northeastern US, chiefly New York, also, Canada)". It would be helpful to know where this extra info comes from, since I don't see that it's chiefly Northeastern US in other dictionaries and I was wondering how accurate this info was. Anyway, I understand if citations are still a long way off in Wiktionary. Maybe one day! Thanks Wolfdog (talk) 22:48, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

@Wolfdog: No, thank you--pointing out what we lack is a really important part of how we can improve. Do you by chance have any feedback on how we can streamline suggestions? We have a feedback page and you can also request citations. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:50, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf I'm not sure what you mean exactly, but this page has worked well for me to get feedback. Wolfdog (talk) 18:02, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

@Wolfdog: A lot of information here is "original research", and is backed up by primary sources (i.e. quotations that show the word being used in running text) rather than secondary or tertiary sources (i.e. dictionaries and grammars). Our criteria for inclusion are in this way very different from Wikipedia's. After all, the goals of a dictionary and an encyclopedia are different. —Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 19:24, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

@AryamanA: It was more a lack of any sources whatsoever that I was noticing, but I see the distinction you give about primary sources. Obviously, however, a quotation and accompanying primary source don't show anything about a term's etymology, its chief usage, its part of speech, etc. Wolfdog (talk) 20:05, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

@Wolfdog We have to apply the general rules of reason and common sense, including usual linguistic methods to terms. Consider the lack of sources mentioned for Arabic in WT:About Arabic – there is not even an etymological dictionary of Arabic!

Not everything has been researched or stated by someone else, sometimes sources are hard to access, and often we can not do more than a guess: There are phonological and semantic criteria and extralinguistic facts: A craft that we can master perhaps not worse than some dudes from universities. You can just look at some discussions in the Etymology scriptorium to see how it works, for example Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2017/December § جيب‏,‎ جیب‏, or Reconstruction talk:Proto-Semitic/ṭāb- where it becomes visible that we are even better than the sources, because the other sources, which are not many, only give ṭayb or even ṭayyib: The other sources are only some well-known daredevils around Sergei Starostin. We would be destitute if we would rely on the sources. The goal of Wikipedia is not to replace the usual sources in a field, but to give more meagre overviews, whereas the goal of Wiktionary is not only to be on par with them, but to exceed them, which we can make by transforming, abstracting language usage into entries. The lack of references in that extent known from Wikipedia is a corollary of it. It’s all okay if make the certainties clear, isn’t it. After all we are not writing biographies of living persons. And after all you must not forget that on Wiktionary there are not that many people, so if you are itched by the lack of citations, you should consider that the more interesting words would be absent in Wiktionary if we would quote and reference the common words the existences of which are evident by some search engine searches or whatever. That is in many cases necessarily work for later generations. Palaestrator verborum ^{sis loquier 🗣} 20:46, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

@Wolfdog: Yes, and for some very well studied languages like English, French, Spanish, etc, there is a plethora of resources to use, and so if something seems wrong on here using a secondary source to verify information is easy. Quotations do in fact show dialectical usage, part of speech, etc. They do not provide etymology or pronunciation, you are right about that. In that case, out of copyright resources (such as Webster's 1913 English dictionaries) are very handy; some time ago the entirety of Webster 1913's data was imported here. Public domain works don't need to be cited, so an entry may rely on such sources without explicitly mentioning it.

For less documented languages (like Arabic, as Palaestrator verborum said) we give more leeway on an editor's knowledge. For example, my other native language, Hindi. I can assure you no Hindi dictionary includes most of the terms in Category:Hindi slang, and by extension their etymologies and pronunciations. The entries are only backed up by quotations (primary sources) and my own personal knowledge (or as WP would call it, original research). They are all real words that are used, some only in certain regions, but no secondary source even mentions them. This kind of thing has made Wiktionary more lenient on citing stuff; a lot of obscure, regional, niche, and slang terms would otherwise be uncitable can be included.

And common sense plays an important role here too; no one will argue that our primary definition of cat as "An animal of the family Felidae" is wrong. Citations are really only important for information that would be contentious. —Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 21:47, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

I checked this website, and it claims that "cabbage" (singular) has 2 syllables and "cabbages" (plural) has 3 syllables. But I think that's wrong, isn't it? Thanks in advance.

• https://www.howmanysyllables.com/words/cabbage
• https://www.howmanysyllables.com/words/cabbages

--Daniel Carrero (talk) 12:49, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

No, that's right. The -es of the plural is pronounced . --2A02:2788:A4:F44:1C3B:A3D9:F0BD:7B60 12:52, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

Yep. To generalize, the plural ending (as well as the third-person singular ending) is pronounced as /ɪz/ or /əz/ whenever the singular ends in a sibilant (/s z ʃ ʒ tʃ dʒ/), as in masses, fizzes, mashes, fishes, matches, badges. — Eru·tuon 17:57, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

(Does any English word end in /ʒz/, even a loan word? I can't think of any.) Equinox ◑ 19:40, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

No; /ʒz/ and /dʒz/ are not possible consonant clusters in English except across a syllable break (and even then I can only think of examples across a word break, like beige zipper or huge zoo). Neither are /ʃs/ and /tʃs/ for that matter. Interestingly, the rule of /ɪ}/-insertion is not carried over into German when it borrows such words from English: the plural of German Sandwich is Sandwichs pronounced /ˈzɛnt.vɪtʃs/ in two syllables. —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 19:51, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

tillages (looks wrong) DTLHS (talk) 20:04, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

Any English pronunciation added by Sae1962 is suspect. They fortunately decided on their own to stop adding them after some of their errors were pointed out to them. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:27, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

If it's possible to quit working for the Wikimedia Foundation, then what are the procedures? --Lo Ximiendo (talk) 04:09, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

You probably have to be an employee first. Then I imagine you could just tell them you're quitting. DTLHS (talk) 04:11, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

@DTLHS Then is terminating an account possible? If so, then what are the procedures? --Lo Ximiendo (talk) 07:37, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

@Lo Ximiendo: w:Wikipedia:FAQ#How do I change my username/delete my account? —suzukaze (t・c) 07:40, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Those of you who like memes on Facebook will hopefully appreciate that some meme-makers on Facebook like us too: —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:35, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

One more: . Wyang (talk) 14:54, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

... I'm enjoying this page way more than I should. Another one: , looking suspiciously like it's based on 你好. Wyang (talk) 15:30, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Me too...some of their memes also use screenshots of Wiktionary. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 15:52, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

This one might actually require real attention . Did they really have those shades of meaning? —Rua (mew) 15:53, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

These are great: —Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 16:09, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

—Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 16:10, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

I spot italic Cyrillic and Greek. I thought we disabled that? —Rua (mew) 16:20, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

@Rua: Not for mobile, since MediaWiki:Common.css does not apply to it. Not even our vsSwitcher inflection tables work on mobile. —Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 16:32, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

And this is why copying Sanskrit definitions from an 1800s dictionary is a bad idea: —Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 16:18, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Oh man, you improved the entry and ruined the meme :( —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:00, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

... the ميم, lol! Wyang (talk) 20:42, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

lol, it lives on in Monier's dictionary (see धे (dhe), in the leftmost column). —Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 22:34, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

@माधवपंडित —Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 22:41, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

@AryamanA: LOL. -- माधवपंडित (talk) 02:04, 23 January 2018 (UTC)