Talk:nepos

I removed the *h2 from the reconstruct in the etymology, since the α- in the Greek word is not a Laryngeal reflex. It goes back to *sm- (loss of aspiration was regular in the Ionian dialect, whence this word must have been borrowed into Attic). Homeric νέποδες also shows that there was no *h2.

I am not a classicist but I've noticed that OLD, Gaffiot and Georges all use a long ō in the nominative. Lewis & Short doesn't specify the length, so I've changed it. If someone has other sources, please correct it. FilipF013 (talk) 13:47, 11 April 2013 (UTC) FilipF013
 * I've now changed it properly (the macron isn't part of the actual lemma). SemperBlotto (talk) 14:07, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

RFC discussion: March 2021
This is a Latin entry, but I gave it an Old French rfc tag: the problem is with the Old French part of the descendants section.

did a whole wave of edits to Old French, which included newbie mistakes like using etyl in new etymologies and l enclosed in ' '_' ' instead of m}. Those were easy to fix. The real problems were with the cases where they made one entry an alternative form of another and moved everything to that main form without checking for entries linking to the alternative form. Even there, some were easy to fix- but this Latin entry has both the current main form and the current alternative form, with information added on the same line as the main form. If I were to switch the desc for the main entry to desctree, that added information would get pushed down several lines. Meanwhile, desctree has a module error because the Descendants section has been moved to the current main entry from the current alternative-form entry.

I don't know enough about Old French to figure out how to resolve this, and, I might add, I'm not entirely sure all of the changes to pronunciation sections were a good idea, either. Also pinging, who was the last one to edit the Old French part of this Descendants section.Chuck Entz (talk) 22:22, 7 March 2021 (UTC)


 * I apologize for the newbie mistakes. I'll do my best to avoid them from now on.


 * What I'm doing is an 'overhaul' of wiktionary's Old French entries with IPA, since they contained a number of mistakes (pace Hazarasp et al.) out of step with mainstream scholarship (see Phonological History of French for an excellent overview).


 * I figured it would be best to have the 'main' forms, to which various alternate forms link, all come from roughly the same time period (~ mid-11th to mid-12th c.) so that their phonetic shapes would be more consistent with each other. E.g. the 'main' pages would be Engleis, corteis, borgeis instead of a chaotic mixture of forms from different periods, some with -ois and others with -eis. The Nicodene (talk) 22:40, 7 March 2021 (UTC)


 * When Old French terms have several spellings, does pronunciation correlate with spelling? Vox Sciurorum (talk) 00:07, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for doing this; my work on Old French was mainly as a stopgap until someone more knowledgeable came along; I was starting out here and wasn't cognizant of the potential weightiness of my editing. Hazarasp (parlement · werkis) 00:55, 8 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Rather than using spellings form circa 1100, I think it would be more desirable to use spellings from the late 12th century for main entries (cortois, borgeois), circa 1200, for two reasons.
 * First, the bulk of Old French literature starts at that point, which means people looking up words in books are more likely to find the entry they want that way (of course, unless they're reading the Life of St. Alexis or the Song of Roland). Second, while Old French spellings don't closely correspond to pronunciation, late 12th-century spellings like cortois and nevou noticeably lasted for longer than those late 11th ones like corteis — Godefroy's Middle French dictionary regularly gives 15th-century examples of definitely non-updated spellings alongside updated ones E.g. the entry "corvage" cites updated courvage in a 13th-century document and non-updated corvage in three late 14th-century ones.
 * Although, incidentally, Godefroy's Middle French dictionary cites, for nevod > neveu ("neveu" in the Complément): nevout, neveur, nevor, nevour, nevouf, nepveut, neveult, neveuf, nepvef, nepveur, showing various etymological silent letters (p, t), conserved Old French spellings (nevout/nevor/nevour/nevouf seem to resemble nevo/nevou, neveult probably continues nevold/nevuld), and innovative likely-silent letters (r, f), even though they all probably represent [nəˈvø] (or [nəˈvøf] if the -f is "inorganic" rather than silent).
 * I've never been quite sure how Wiktionary should handle pre-modern languages and their spellings, since old languages are always less than fully standardized (even Latin shows quite a bit variation: a word like laetus has been variously spelled lætus, lętus, letus and even lets... And similarly Ægyptus ~ Aegyptus ~ Aegiptus, Vergilii ~ Vergili ~ Virgilii ~ Virgilii ~ uergili(i), inuleus, hinnulus, hinulus, innulus...) Is Wiktionary really supposed to be filled with as many variants as known?--Ser be être 是 talk/stalk 19:50, 20 March 2021 (UTC)