User:CosmicMuse

Hi there — I'm Nicola, a classicist and Indo-European linguistics and papyrology enthusiast. I'm a native English speaker and my languages (in descending order of ability), are as follows:


 * (and some awfully pronounced )
 * (and other )
 * (and other )
 * (and other )
 * (and other )

At present I hope to substantially improve Wiktionary's coverage of Bactrian terms (and greatly improve my knowledge of the language while doing so). I am beginning with simple Bactrian nouns, adverbs, particles, and prepositions, avoiding compound words (simple nouns first), verbs (conjugation complexities), and proper nouns (less importance; need to research contextual information).

Once this is done, I would like to work on the Old Persian, then Avestan dictionaries, cross-linking them to Bactrian. Then I would like to learn much more about Proto-Iranian and Proto-Indo-Iranian reconstruction (an infinitely fascinating topic, though my primary focus is extant languages).

My linguistic fantasies include learning and, fixing up my Modern Greek, coming to grips with  and , and understanding the influence of Sanskrit and the Prakrits on South-East Asian languages (there is so much to do!).

I'm a novice with Wiktionary formatting, but I'm trying to include as much detail as possible in my entries. I hope to eventually create Bactrian modules for Template:Q. If you feel up for it, any formatting advice would be welcomed.

Bactrian Tools

 * Bactrian Noun Entry Template (WIP): Template:User:CosmicMuse/xbc:noun-1

Bactrian Entry Approach (WIP)
As the Bactrian corpus is not large and there is no available dictionary, I'll be figuring out the best approach as I go. The current approach is as follows:
 * No uncited word forms:
 * I'll only add noun and verb forms if they are actually extant in the corpus.
 * This will likely need to be reconsidered in the future regarding headwords.
 * The oldest form of a word is the 'main form':
 * This approach makes the dictionary easier to approach for those coming to Bactrian from other Iranian or Indian languages, due to a smaller number of sound changes. It suits historical linguists generally (and me personally), and I anticipate there will be further finds of Bactrian texts from earlier periods (i.e. the ).
 * Transliteration is currently a compromise, generally following Sims-Williams and Gholami. More details/chart to follow.
 * Citation Script

Entry Style Approach (WIP)

 * Alternative forms are written as stubs with pronunciation and quotations.
 * Non-lemma forms are written as stubs with pronunciation only.
 * Old Persian lemmas are transliterated.