User:Tharthan

Hello, I am Tharthan. I hail from New England, a region in the northeastern United States of America (though I would prefer if you would refrain from referring to me as an "American" if possible, as I associate more with New England than I do the entirety of the United States of America. "New Englander" is much more preferable.) The dialects of English that are spoken in New England differ quite a bit from the speech, spelling and wordstock of other North American English dialects. I personally speak a Southeastern New England dialect of English, though idiolectally I lack the wine-whine merger. In addition, I maintain a partial lack of the horse-hoarse merger, I realise /ʊ/ as something close to /ɵ/, I realise /ɔ/ as [ɒː]~[ɒə̯] (though I realise /ɔɹ/ as /ɔɹ/), I realise /ɑ/ as something close to /ɑ̈/, and I sometimes use the vowel that I have in words within the STRUT lexical set in words within the LOT lexical set.

In addition to all of the above, I am a linguistic purist. This impacts me to the extent that, when reasonably possible, I may opt for the use of loan translations from other Germanic languages and/or English cognates (if they are close enough in meaning) of words in other Germanic languages (for example, I would prefer "ice bear" over "polar bear") over Latinates (unless the Latinates were present in Old English). That said, I may use a word derived from Latin that is ultimately Germanic in origin (for example: "seize"), or use back-formations/other derivations of words derived from Latin that are of Germanic origin if I find the general word in question to have too much of a Latin influence (for example, I am not keen on "burglar", but I will use "burgle", I am not keen on "mushroom", but I do not mind blends or the like that are prefixed with "mush-" in reference to mushrooms). However, most of the aforementioned doesn't apply to my Wiktionary contributions, but rather to other things that I do, like writing poetry.

My contributions to Wiktionary are mostly in the areas of New England pronunciation, word etymology, dialectal wordstock (regarding all languages), translation improvement (regarding all languages), definition improvement, blatant lie removal, and grammar fixes. I also discuss linguistic oddities or queries on talk pages occasionally.

I am also on Wikipedia, though I am not anywhere near as active there as I am on here. My contributions there are in the fields of linguistics, history, and folklore, although I sometimes also improve word definitions, make spelling and grammar fixes, insert etymologies into articles, remove blatant lies from articles, and a few other things.