User talk:Brainy J

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It always helps to have a definition of a word. So I have added one to -ation. Cheers SemperBlotto 21:21, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

Placeholder categories
My understanding of categories such as "Nouns" is that they are placeholders, under which other catgeories such as "English nouns" fit. Individual words should be added to "English nouns", "Italian nouns" etc, but not to "Nouns". Do you have some reason for doing this? SemperBlotto 22:00, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

Oh I'm sorry, I didn't know. Thanks for clearing that up. --Atlantima 22:02, 12 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Adding any of the categories listed on your user page to an article is pointless since each of them would become far to big to have any use. Don't waste your time! Ncik 16:08, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Turkish
I don't speak Turkish, but your most recent edits are making me very uneasy. Turkish is an agglutinative language, so the line between compounding and inflection is very hard to see, especially for non-speakers. In the case of -ların, it looks to me like this is just the combination of two inflectional suffixes: -lar and -in, which would make it a genitive plural ending- the equivalent of -ōrum or -ārum in Latin, for instance (or English -s', in many cases). There's also the matter of vowel harmony, which causes alternation between i and ı depending on preceding vowels. In short, there are lots of ways you can go seriously, horribly wrong in Turkish if you don't know what you're doing- and I'm not so sure that you do. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 18:54, 27 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Chuck is right. I've deleted your Turkish entries and also σεξισμού, which is a form-of, not the base word. It looks like you're using Google translate for your translations. Do not edit languages you don't know the basics of. If you have good sources for them, find someone (most preferably on here) who speaks the language you're interested in and ask them for help. —  [Ric Laurent] — 21:10, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

awww, I thought I was helping :( --Brainy J (talk) 02:26, 28 June 2014 (UTC)


 * I appreciate that, but incorrect content is not helpful. —  [Ric Laurent] — 02:13, 29 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Way to be a jerk. You're acting as if I knew it was incorrect but added it anyway.--Brainy J (talk) 00:27, 2 July 2014 (UTC)


 * No I'm not. I'm acting as if you should be more careful. I've added stuff that I didn't realize was incorrect when I did so. I should have been more careful. As should you. You don't have to be offended about it. Just be careful. Don't add things from languages you don't speak, understand, or have good sources for that you can't verify. If you really want to add something from a language you don't know, compare sources or ask someone on here who does know that language. —  [Ric Laurent] — 20:38, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, sorry you don't agree, but I think it's pretty mean to tell a good faith contributor that "incorrect content is not helpful". Chuck was a lot more tactful. And the way I understand it, my edits weren't even truly incorrect, just "a form-of, not the base word". It's analogous to having separate entries for drive, driver, and drivers, or grande and grandísimo. None of those are deleted for being "incorrect"!--Brainy J (talk) 21:02, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, Dick isn't exactly Miss Manners (this is actually his helpful and courteous mode- when he's in a bad mood, you can trace his path in the charred and twisted remains visited by horrors beyond any comprehension of the human mind- and then, sometimes, he gets really angry...), but he does know some usefull stuff. More to the point, your entry for -ların tried to make a suffix out of two unrelated inflectional endings, and I'm sure there are other examples. I have a degree in Linguistics and decades of experience teaching myself dozens of languages- but I don't trust my judgement enough when it comes to languages like Turkish to do more than tweak the formatting of existing entries. What you just said is like someone rescued from a minefield saying: "look, I only lost an arm and a couple of toes- stop telling me how dangerous it is" Chuck Entz (talk) 05:10, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I already stopped "edit[ing] languages [I] don't know the basics of" on 28 June. I already understood that what I'd been doing was against whatever guidelines apply to Turkish entries. Continuing to correct me after that point seems like beating a dead horse. As for the minefield analogy: If noobish editing of WMF pages ever becomes literally hazardous to one's health, then I guess it would be acceptable to carry on scolding a user for nigh on two weeks.--Brainy J (talk) 19:30, 10 July 2014 (UTC)