User talk:EncycloPetey

Christmas competition
I seem to remember that you were behind some of the past Yuletide festivities at Wiktionary... are you going to set something up this year? (Please?) —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 07:21, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Much as I'd like to, I just don't think I'll have the time this year. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:15, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
 * OK... I guess I'd better get going with something. Do you at least have any really excellent ideas? (Even though I'm not Christian, I really want to have this not be passed over this year, even if Wonderfool ends up winning.) —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 23:26, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
 * If I'd come up with a good idea, I'd likely have tried to get it rolling, but I just haven't been thinking about it nor had the time to do so. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:27, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, that's not exactly holiday spirit... but I understand. Thanks anyway —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 23:38, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Lately, I've been far more active on Wikisource, and we're having to cope their with a major software glitch introduced in the latest update. A glitch that makes it impossible to access the text layer of an uploaded DjVu file, which is one of the more critical issues.  It means that we had to abandon the plan to work on Vanity Fair as the December collaboration, among other things.  I was also asked to keep an eye on certain things, as I've recently been made an admin over there, and one of the regular admins who organizes the Proofread of the Month has had to be away for several days.  Besides all that, November is the month of the great drive to finish off works that have been hanging around for a while without being completed.  So, I've been a bit busier over there than usual, and just drop in here a bit each week as things come up that I feel the urge to do. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:30, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Beware, miserly neglect of your Wiktionary word quota will lead to a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Pluperfect. Equinox ◑ 02:41, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
 * The Ghost of Christmas Future Perfect visited me, but I still don't when I will have been scared by it. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 03:36, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
 * And the Ghost of Christmas Past Contraconditional would have visited me, but it knew I'm Jewish. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 07:25, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

muffin
Can you record the pronunciation of the word muffin please ? Fête (talk) 20:44, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Done. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:36, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks a lot ! Fête (talk) 17:09, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Nguyen
Can you record the pronunciation of the name Nguyen please ? Fête (talk) 17:18, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

restaurant
Can you record the pronunciation of the word restaurant please ? Fête (talk) 02:20, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

women
Can you record the pronunciation of the word "women" with an American accent please ? Fête (talk) 22:25, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

rollback in error on Template:la-decl-2nd
I believe this rollback of Fsojic's edit was in error. Pengo (talk) 05:08, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
 * No. Interwiki links should be included in a documentation sub-page and not in the template proper. --EncycloPetey (talk) 10:13, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Samsung
Samsung is also pronounced /ˈsæm.sʊŋ/. See http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=samsung&submit=Submit Fête (talk) 20:29, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I believe that website is wrong, or is not using a native English speaker. There is no way to check up on them, anyway, so it's not a good source for information. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:31, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Certain varieties of Irish English, including Dublin English, lack the phoneme /ʌ/ and use /ʊ/ in its place. 20:33, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Then they might pronounce the word that way. If so, then the pronunciation should be marked for the appropriate region where that pronunciation is used. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:34, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Here is a video with in Ireland, by a representative of Samsung no less: . Note also that he says other as  which demonstrates the same thing.  20:40, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

In British English, it's pronounced /ˈsæmsʊŋ/ ? Fête (talk) 21:03, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Is it? I'd be surprised.  --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:07, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

fête
In Quebec French, fête is pronounced "fight". Fête (talk) 21:13, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Why are you telling me this? This is a non sequitur:. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:15, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te69JK28DDo Fête (talk) 21:24, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Again, why are you posting this information on my talk page. I do not understand the purpose in giving me this information.  What is your objective? Why should I care? --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:26, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

chow mein
Can you record the word chow mein please ? Fête (talk) 22:36, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Mason–Dixon Line ‎
Actually, according to w:MOS:DASH, the wiktionary entry should be using an endash, if we followed Wikipedia's rules on how to dash here, so shouldn't such forms exist as redirects to the ASCII dash forms used here? (or as full page entries, if you'd prefer) According to Wikipedia's rules, wiktionary's entry is wrong. -- 65.92.180.225 01:02, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * But why do those rules matter? 01:03, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * It shows an alternate form, so as such we can have a page at Mason–Dixon Line (Mason-Dixon Line on wiktionary), instead of having it be deleted. As to it being a redirect or an entry, I'll leave that up to you, since I thought it didn't really need a separate entry, but a redirect would do. If you cut and pasted such a form into the searchbox, it would lead to a searchpage, instead of the entry. The rules on wikipedia exist because there's been grammar pedantic editors at wikipedia who have been renaming all articles away from using ASCII dashes to use Unicode dashes on Wikipedia for several years now (most of the things left with the generic ASCII dash are articles that use hyphens).
 * Personally, I do prefer the ASCII dash form, since it's actually what people type, instead of what a typesetter or copyeditor places on a page.
 * w:Wikipedia:Hyphen luddites show the philosophical debate about the use of hypens and dashes on Wikipedia
 * -- 65.92.180.225 01:13, 27 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Having been more active on WP lately, I've seen the hyphen-vs-dash edit war which has been raging there (it's hard to miss, because its participants shop it to every forum they can), and I'm wary of it spilling over into Wiktionary. It's my experience and preference that Wiktionary always uses the ASCII hyphen in pagenames; Wiktionary also uses ASCII apostrophes and quotation marks in pagenames (in English and French, at least). Wiktionary has redirects like l’habit ne fait pas le moine to accommodate interwiki links to fr.Wikt, which uses such non-ASCII apostrophes. But Wiktionary doesn't have redirects for all typographical variants, e.g. we expressly don't redirect fiſh to fish. So, whether to have redirects from dash forms to hyphen forms is something that should be discussed in the BP. :b Should Wikipedia base its MOS on us? Probably not. - -sche (discuss) 01:58, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

creationism
creationism is not a Christian-specific doctrine. It is also present in Judaism and Islam and other Abrahamic religions. I have therefore reverted you there.Pass a Method (talk) 09:03, 30 December 2012 (UTC)
 * "Abrahamic theology" is neither a standard context label nor a category (nor should it be). There are at least two possible ways to introduce the change you are trying to make, while avoiding that problem: (1) use (Christian theology, Judaism, Islam), which is clear but a bit distracting, or (2) use (theology) and specify which theologies at the end of the definition. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:16, 30 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I chose the second one because the first tag was worded awkwardly. Pass a Method (talk) 20:57, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Comment
I would like for you to comment here.Pass a Method (talk) 09:35, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Speustic
Why did you delete my entry speustic? There was nothing wrong with it. 75.36.239.166 15:08, 30 December 2012 (UTC)
 * The principal problem with it was that you made it up. You can add it to WT:LOP, if you wish. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 17:54, 30 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Semper has noted that the term is in the OED, 2nd ed, but we have no quotations, and I could find none. I do not have access to the OED2, and so can't verify this for CFI (it might be a dictionary-only word, althoguh I'm less inclined to believe that's the case if it's in the OED). --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:22, 30 December 2012 (UTC)
 * OED2 was not excessively concerned about use, and there are dozens of words from it listed at Appendix:English dictionary-only terms. The only reason that could be helpful is that they had a charming habit of listing cites, but I have a suspicion that the OED is not likely to find a full three uses that we can't. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 20:39, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Shrinking Wikipedia links
I (Hlmswn) have just received an email from wiki@wikimedia.org which would seem (though the profusion of URLs within it has greatly confused me) to at least be strongly associated with you.

Through one of these URLs I found that I am not a User. However, as a non-user I have for some months been adding quotes in various places using short excerpts from books I happen to be reading. As I became more familiar with the process of adding quotes I have been tidying up the quotes and the formatting of their meanings.

Also I have been tidying up some of the links to Wikipedia. Sometimes the URL is right up the top where it impliedly would be relevant for all languages, though the link is specifically to en.wikipedia.org !! So I would sometimes shift it into just after the "English" heading. If the link was specific to one particular meaning I would shift it to that meaning.

One thing that irked me a lot was the frequent use of instead of the briefer. The smaller one is quite adequate for clicking on, does not complicate the formatting of nearby text and illustrations, and takes up much less space, thus allowing more of Wikipedia to be on the screen at the same time. Furthermore, it is appropriate to be put as close as possible to the meaning or meanings it would illuminate. Putting it down in "See also" is a waste of time.

In other words, I strongly disagree with your ruling. However, as I am a non-User and you apparently are a privileged editor, I will no longer shrink links. However, please do not expect me to go back over the many hundreds of additions I have made and reverse my changes. As someone in their 80s I fear I do not have enough time to waste in that way. (58.170.234.25 02:35, 5 January 2013 (UTC))


 * I did not send an e-mail. I posted on your talk page.  It is unfortunate that you are asking other people to clean up the mess that you have made.  It shows that you are not willing to take responsibility for your own actions, and that you expect to waste the time of other editors, who will have to do the job for you. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:31, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Okay, I can take a hint. Please remove Hlmswn from your system. But I would suggest that in future you offer anyone joining Wiktionary links to tuition about the culture of Wiktionary and warn them that they might not find that culture either agreeable or optimal.


 * You were given such a list of links. They're at the top of your talk page. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:38, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Please, please have me removed as a User. Until you came along I delighted in feeling that I was helping a good global cause. You have made me feel that I am regarded as an invader. Understand that I was a systems engineer for thirty years before I retired to a teaching job in 1988. I am not exactly ignorant at judging and designing system interfaces.

IPA fix
Sorry about those mistakes, my brain must have been on cruise control. Thanks for catching my mistake. Speednat (talk) 21:44, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Non sibi sed patriae
FWIW, "by" is translated with the ablative, and this is in the dative. Secondly, patria: means "fatherland" most literally, and is not used for one's family. by eliminating the pronoun altogether to match the grammatical ambiguity of the original, as Not for self, but for country, but that's semantically the same. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 23:18, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
 * If you take a look again at the edit history, I've already deleted my later addition, with an edit comment that I prefered your translation. ;) --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:25, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Ah, yes. Incidentally, I find it ironic that the anon didn't just bother to Google it. But any Latin practice is good Latin practice. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 23:29, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I know some teachers who might disagree with you on that. ;) --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:36, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Linguae mortuae semper vivant! —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 23:44, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Integrous
Is definitely not a word. Even wikiedit has a red squiggly line under it.
 * The absence of a word from a spellchecker database does not negate its existence. The entry for integrous has citations demonstrating both its existence and its use.  --EncycloPetey (talk) 07:22, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Brazilian Portuguese

 * Is this your native language? We desperately need a good contributor for Brazilian Portuguese. --EncycloPetey 00:23, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Affirmative. Anything you need, contact me. --User:Lukenji 17:00, 23 January 2013

aurigena
I really BSed the templates here, but I couldn't think of another way to get all the information in. What do we normally do for adjectives of one ending that work for all genders but inflect in the first declension? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 00:22, 28 January 2013 (UTC)


 * You did it right. The adjective does work with all genders, but only has a first-declension inflection. --EncycloPetey (talk) 09:18, 28 January 2013 (UTC)


 * But look at the headword line: it claims it's third declension! Do we need a template? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 01:58, 29 January 2013 (UTC)


 * This sort of thing is so rare, I don't think it's worth having a separate template. I've recoded the headword line using  .  It might be nice to amend that template to accept a "postscript", such as we have here. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:45, 29 January 2013 (UTC)


 * That's a little bit... . There are a bunch more -gena and -cola adjectives like this, so maybe a generalized template for weird Latin adjectives in in order to cover any possibilities without resorting to . What do you mean by "postscript"? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 04:26, 29 January 2013 (UTC)


 * The bit listing the declension that comes after the template, because that template currently does not support text after the parenthetical information. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:03, 30 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Well... it's not worth further complexifying {head}. If you're fine with the current setup, then I can live with it. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 04:27, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Latin 2nd declension -ius vocative
Hello. I am an administrator in the Spanish Wiktionary (Wikcionario), and am trying to refine our Latin declension templates. I noticed your participation in the discussion page for template la-decl-2nd, and was wondering if you knew for certain when the vocative singular for -ius second-declension nous ends in -ie, and when it's just -i.
 * - Wikipedia says it's -i,
 * - Bennet says it -ie (except for some proper and irregular nouns),
 * - wiktionary uses -ie some of the time (fluvius, genius, sagittarius), but not always (filius, simius, aquarius),
 * - the Latin wiktionary uses -i most of the time (filius, commentarius)
 * - and this source shows both most of the time, but not for genius.

I would really appreciate your insight! Thanks in advance, --Edgefield (talk) 20:27, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't use the vocative much, but my practice is to use -e for -us nouns, -i for -ius nouns, -(i)e for adjectives in both -us and -ius, and to observe the exceptions (like ). I think that Classical texts vary in this regard, but I'm pretty sure that the Latin I was taught is the modern standard. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 20:57, 5 February 2013 (UTC)


 * My Oxford Latin Grammar says that the vocative is -e for most masculine nouns in the second declension, but is -i for -ius nouns. Another of my sources says that -i is used for filius, genius, and proper nouns ending in -ius.  The latter view is supported by Allen & Greenough's New Latin Grammar.  The entries on Wiktionary are not always correct for their declension, as editors sometimes use existing templates without knowing the variations, so I wouldn't put much faith in what our entries say in situations where a word may not be part of the norm.  In the case of sagittarius and aquarius, I'd be inclined to think they would form the vocative in -e, since they have the (principally) adjectival ending -arius, and I've not seen evidence that it differs from the norm.  However, I don't have data to determine the matter one way or the other for such nouns, and a Google search was not particularly helpful, as there is no feature that will allow me to filter out "olde English spellyngs", nor a quick means of filtering genitive forms from potentially vocative ones. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:16, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Forced user renames coming soon for SUL
Hi, sorry for writing in English. I'm writing to ask you, as a bureaucrat of this wiki, to [//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Translate&group=page-Single+User+Login+finalisation+announcement%2FPersonal+announcement&filter=&action=page translate and review the notification] that will be sent to all users, also on this wiki, who will be forced to change their user name on May 27 and will probably need your help with renames. You may also want to help with the pages Rename practices and Global rename policy. Thank you, Nemo 13:08, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

lac
Is the latest modification to OK? SemperBlotto (talk) 15:45, 22 May 2013 (UTC)
 * No, but the original was incorrect as well. This word has no plural according to Oxford. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:59, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

esperpento and medidor de whiskey
[http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Harmonywriter&action=edit Click here to see (and immediately be directed to the edit tab on) my response on my talk page and please consider replying there in order to keep all the dialogue in one place. Thank you.]Harmonywriter (talk) 21:29, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Basque
Hi EncycloPetey! I've added the Basque translations for listen and parrot. However, I'm not sure about how to translate "parrot" in the sense of "parroter: person who repeats what was just said". Regards. --Zuiarra (talk) 23:51, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

On a category for 4th declension masculine nouns
I think this category is very useful for native speakers of Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan and Italian (and, to a much lesser extent, Romanian). Most of these nouns have descendants in these languages, either inherited or borrowed—however, they're almost completely or completely merged with the descendants of the second declension (the one exception being manus in Portuguese/Spanish/Italian and (maybe) Catalan). When native speakers of these languages study Latin, these are often seen by students as pseudo-irregularities of the second declension.

I don't see why English Wiktionary couldn't cater to such needs, considering many of such speakers have a decent knowledge of English (being a prestigious lingua franca and all), and often even prefer to use English-language resources when available. Linguistic resources produced in English often have a better quality and better coverage than those found in other languages, if only because a wider (and not to mention generally richer) market (comprised both of native and non-native speakers) encourages publishers. Or in the case of Wikimedia Foundation's projects, because said wider audience can and does participate (I don't think anybody can deny the large role non-native speakers of English play on English Wikipedia).

So there you go, this is my defense of the usefulness of a category for masculine nouns in the Latin fourth declension.--Serafín33 (talk) 22:40, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I see, the idea hadn't occurred to me. I'll change the labels then, and make "Latin feminine nouns in the fourth declension" a subcategory of a category named Latin fourth declension nouns.--Serafín33 (talk) 22:50, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

Latin pronunciation
I know I have to add the time-period, and if you looked at some pronunciations I've been adding I usually put it at the front. In this case I just forgot. >_< I'll follow your style of not adding the dot redundantly. I'll add that to Appendix:Latin pronunciation too.

As for the pronunciation of neuter, I used /ne.u-/ following W. Sidney Allen's scholarly work Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin, page 63:


 * eu is confined to the forms neu, ceu, seu, the interjections heu and heus, and Greek proper names and borrowings such as Orpheus, Europa, euge, eunuchus. [...] The sound may be produced by combining a short e with an u; what must certainly be avoided is the pronunciation [yū] as in the English neuter1 [...].
 * 1 Latin neuter is normally trisyllabic, i.e. nĕŭter.

However, he doesn't say how he knows that. I bet he got to know that from poetry scansion, but I don't know. Not that I've read other sources on the reconstruction of Latin (his certainly isn't the only one, I know from indirect comments that there's plenty of scholars who contradict him on his ideas of the pronunciation of vowel-final words when followed by a vowel-initial word, for example).Serafín33 (talk) 03:13, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Dē latīnā uocāle anteriōre rotundā...
I noticed that Appendix:Latin pronunciation recommends using ‹ʏ› for the Latin front rounded vowel. Is there any reason why ‹ʏ› is used instead of ‹y›? It's especially surprising because the symbols for the phonemes are otherwise the most accessible ones (i.e. the ones easier to type, following normal IPA conventions). That is, ‹i e o u› for the short vowels, instead of ‹ɪ ɛ ɔ ʊ› (which would be more representative of their pronunciation, well, if following W. Sidney Allen's reconstruction, anyway).--Serafín33 (talk) 03:31, 29 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I haven't found a source that makes a really good (or clear) case for any specific IPA value. Most of the good texts I've looked through in researching the sounds are a bit vague.  The choice of ‹ʏ› is based on a number of readings I've made, and it matches the conclusion the Latin experts on Wikipedia came up with.  See Latin spelling and pronunciation, where there is a section entitled "Adoption of Greek upsilon".  From what I understand, the unusual symbol is a result of (1) IPA assigning /y/ to the Classical Greek value, coupled with (2) the fact that the sound was not native to Latin, and Latin speakers were mostly unable to produce the sound as the Greeks did it.  The only unfortunate thing about the Wikipedia article is that this is one of the few sections nobody bothered to include citations for, but as I say, I'd reached the same conclusion from my researches back when I was looking for good info.  That said, the Appendix we have on Latin rponunciation may still include a few errors, or things that can be improved.  It was written very early in my phonological researches. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:57, 29 June 2013 (UTC)
 * As for the vowel qualities of short vowels /e i o u/, it doesn't matter to me anywa... Whether you use symbols closer to their pronunciation (as reconstructed by Allen: "/ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ/"), or something more abstract (i.e. "/e i o u/") in a phonemic transcription is just a matter of æsthetics. (Many Chinese bilingual dictionaries transcribe the English RP /eɪ ɑː ɔː/ phonemes as "/eː aː oː/" for example.)
 * I think you've misread the article on Wikipedia you linked to regarding the use of 〈ʏ〉, however. The use of the 〈〉 parentheses with small capitals in the middle does not refer to symbols to be used in a transcription, they refer to Latin orthography/spelling (they use 〈E〉 and 〈A⟩ elsewhere for /a aː e eː/ [a aː ɛ eː] for example). The Latinists on Wikipedia have made no conclusion you mention. There's no unusual IPA symbol used for it, because their use of 〈ʏ〉 is not an IPA symbol but a simple orthographical one. However, my question was about what IPA symbol to use.
 * I'm also very much confused by what you mean by those two points. I don't know how they support the use of 〈/ʏ/〉 as the IPA symbol at all. As for point (1), there's no issue with the IPA assigning the IPA symbol 〈y〉 to the French [y] sound. Plus, isn't the point Allen makes that they tried to imitate Greek [y] anyway? As for point (2), when they weren't able to pronounce Greek [y], they used their own /i iː/ [i iː] instead. I don't think there's anybody saying they used a near-close variant [ʏ] instead.
 * I strongly suggest changing the article so that using 〈/y/〉 is recommended.--Serafín33 (talk) 18:48, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I would imagine that if /i/ was realised as [ɪ] and /u/ was realised as [ʊ], then those Latin speakers who had mastered the sound would probably have produced [ʏ] when saying /y/ as well. Most speakers did not distinguish /y/ from /i/ though. 19:41, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
 * It's still odd that that it's recommended such vowel be written ‹/ʏ/› though, considering we don't write ‹/ɪ ɛ ɔ ʊ/›, especially because there's also words that Lewis & Short report are pronounced with a long high front rounded vowel: Hȳdra, tȳphon, sȳcē. These words would get their pronunciations written with ‹/ʏː/›(!), e.g. ‹/ˈhʏː.dra/›, for [ˈhyː.dra].--Serafín33 (talk) 02:16, 5 July 2013 (UTC)
 * When some of the older English-speaking Latinist writers say "long", they sometimes mean vowel duration and sometimes mean metrically heavy. That is, they are not careful to distinguish vowels of greater duration (e.g. /a/ vs.  /aː/) as opposed to vowels which occur in a metrically heavy syllable.  The word hydra is a case in point, where Lewis & Short indicate a "long" vowel with a macron, but modern dictionaries such as Feyerabend do not show a macron here.  In this situation, Lewis & Short have been superceded by more recent scholarship. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:23, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

muffin

 * [[File:En-us-muffin.ogg]]

You pronounce [ˈmʌfən] here ? 198.105.113.97 21:09, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't know. The audio player doesn't work for me, so I can't listen to these files right now.  I'm trying to get help on Commons. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:11, 12 July 2013 (UTC)


 * This in your voice. 198.105.113.97 21:15, 12 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, but I can't hear it. I can't play the file online.  The player does not work. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:24, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Cousin can be pronounced /ˈkʌzɪn/ too ? 198.105.113.97 21:22, 12 July 2013 (UTC)


 * In that situation it's not likely unless the person is deliberately trying to be overly correct. The /z/ is a voiced sibilant, which makes it less likely to have  following it before the nasal.  The more likely pronunciation is . --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:24, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

And the word medicine is pronounced /ˈmɛdɪsɪn/ ? 198.105.113.97 11:21, 13 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Not usually, no. In the UK:, , or .  In the US: . --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:27, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Latin Proper Nouns
Hi, I've been directed to you from Razorflame's talk page concerning some of my edits on a Latin entry. Here is my question I presented to Razorflame and now present to you:
 * "Sorry to bother you again. I was just trying to enter the non-lemma forms for some Latin words when I finally noticed that a proper noun, Remus, was showing a plural. I highly doubt that the name of a founder of Rome would be presented in the plural, but I cannot find anything on it, especially on Template:la-proper noun-form. Would you be able to advise me on whether the plural should be removed, and how one might do that?"

I've also noticed the additional problem of the macron on the "e" in "Rēmus", which Collins Latin Dictionary says should be absent in the name (with rēmus meaning an oar with the long vowel), and so obviously I will rectify that as well. Thank you in advance for your help. Benjitheijneb (talk) 17:47, 18 July 2013 (UTC)


 * There are several things going on here, so I'll try to tackle them one by one. First off, the Collins Latin Dictionary is not the most authoritative, and I'd not rely upon it for a decision about anything in doubt.  If you have access to the Oxford Latin Dictionary, that's one of the best available.  Now the issue of remus / Remus / Remi:  You are corect that the common noun  has a macron.  You are also correct that the name of Rome's legendary founder  should not have a macron.  However, there is (was) a tribe in Gaul known as the, and therein probably lies the confusion that's put a macron on the name of Rome's founder.


 * As to the formatting of inflection tables for Latin proper names: We never got around to developing a full set of templates to cover those. At the time that I helped set up (and revise) the templates we currently have, there weren't yet a lot of proper names, and I deliberately avoided them because (a) there was an on-going general debate at the time about how to handle elements of personal names, and (b) Classical Roman names don't fit the usual modern patterns anyway (praenomina, agnomina, gens, etc.).  I focussed on just getting the wrok done for common noun patterns, and for the other parts of speech, many of which had no templates, and especially the verb conjugations (which also had many templates missing). As a result, we have only a few unsuitable inflection table usages, like the one at, or none at all.  The same is true for inflection tables for place  names, where a locative ending needs to be included.  In that situation, sometimes a suitable table exists (as for , but sometimes it doesn't.


 * I hope this helps answer your questions. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:14, 18 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Certainly has, thank you very much! I have amended the macrons as necessary in the entries, including "Rēmi" and "Rēmus" included on account of the tribe, as you pointed out. I suppose the plural forms of Roman names can be rationalized with the generational usage of the same praenomina, nomina and cognomina (such as in Gaius Julius Caesar's case with his father), and given "the recognition of "Remus" as a cognomen, this applies. In terms of the dictionary, I only have access to Collins at present, but I will continue to consult others in doubt until I can acquire a copy of the Oxford Latin Dictionary. Thank you again! Benjitheijneb (talk) 18:11, 20 July 2013 (UTC)


 * There are a couple of new issues that you have introduced with your edits: (1) It's "Proper noun" not "Proper Noun". We don't capitalize after the first letter of a section header. (2) You've given Rēmus as a singular proper noun for a member of the tribe, but (a) the singular form is not attested in Classical Latin, so the lemma should be the plural. There are no known singular forms. And (b) a noun like Rēmus would not be a proper noun but a common noun.  While a tribal name can be a proper nohn, the noun indicating membership in a group would be a common noun, not proper.  I'ts analogous to Felis leo being the name of the lion species, but a member of that species is just a lion.  In the English language, French is a proper noun demonting a certain people, but Frenchman is a common noun.  Yes, it's capitalized, but that's because it derives from the capitalized word French, and not because it's a proper noun.  --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:48, 21 July 2013 (UTC)


 * I seem to be forgetting just about every convention of Latin linguistics (the common noun distinction for members of the group should have been obvious). Thank you again, I have removed the singular and will remove the inflection table for Rēmi (since I cannot find an appropriate inflection table for it which does not incorporate a singular), leaving just the nominative plural as the lemma without inflections until a suitable table can be devised. And I will also avoid capitalising section headers henceforth. Thank you again! Benjitheijneb (talk) 10:53, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Latin aeternus
Can this word also mean eternal? Since the descendants also are eternal, this makes me think that this word could also mean eternal in Latin. Could you confirm this? Razorflame 20:56, 28 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes. Added. SemperBlotto (talk) 07:09, 29 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, in fact this is (though intermediate stages) the source word from which we get English eternal. The problem with using "eternal" as a definition, however, is that it has multiple meanings, all of which apply to aeternus.  To put it another way, aeternus has multiple senses, and eternal (with its multiple senses) could translate any of them.  So, it can be used as a translation/definition, but not without additional clarification. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:46, 31 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Oh yeah, I know lots of words like this, and I wasn't expecting it to be able to be added without further clarification first :) Razorfl</b><b style="color:#003">am</b><b style="color:#000">e</b> 20:05, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

visit
In everyday speech, visit is pronounced /ˈvɪzɪt/ or /ˈvɪzət/ ? 198.105.105.42 14:48, 13 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It is pronouced both ways. The first is more fully enunciated, and more likely in the UK or eastern US, but the second pronunciation is common as well. --EncycloPetey (talk) 13:50, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Alpis
I've just created this, but the inflection looks wrong to me. Could you correct it please, or just delete it if totally wrong. SemperBlotto (talk) 11:30, 3 September 2013 (UTC)


 * It looks serviceable to me, and the forms cited in the Oxford Latin Dictionary match those in the table. The only downside is that you don't have the locative case.  Some of the templates have showing the location as an option, but others do not. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:45, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I had forgotten about the change to templates that automatically remove macrons, so was supplying the wrong parameters - fixed before you looked at it. SemperBlotto (talk) 07:10, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

napy
Hi there. Lewis & Short have  as a Latin word for mustard. I can't think how it would be inflected, or what templates to use. Any ideas? SemperBlotto (talk) 16:18, 15 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Judging by the OLD (Oxf. Latin Dict.), this is a hapax legomenon. It appears in Pliny's Natural History, where he appears to be saying something like "which the Anthenians call napy" and in anothe place "...the other shepherd's purse, called napy by the Persians".  So, it seems to appear only in Pliny and only in reference to what foreigners call thlaspi.  It thus seems to be an attempt by Pliny at a transliteration of a foreign word, and not a Latin one. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:30, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

havi
Hi, I noticed that you added the etymology to havi several years ago. Are you sure that it comes from habeo? It seems more likely to me that it comes from the English word "have", unless you know of a source that says otherwise. Let me know what you think. Mr. Granger (talk) 01:23, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * This source agrees with me, so I'm going to go ahead and make the change. Mr. Granger (talk) 03:05, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It's been so long ago, that I cannot recall what source suggested the etymology to me. Thanks for your edit. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:09, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Talkback
--AmaryllisGardener (talk) 14:15, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

sneak - as an adjective? (e.g. sneak peek, sneak preview, etc.)
Hi and thanks for the msg re: sneaked - I'm appreciative of the info.

Also, what do you think of sneak as an adjective? E.g. we have sneak peek, sneak preview (meaning advance look at a portion of a work). Also we have sneak thief (a thief who does so quietly and wanting to avoid detection). Also noticed "sneak photo" and "sneak look" in Google Books.

As for verbs, we have sneak up, sneak in, sneak away, sneak off (I'm not quite sure we need all these - then do we also need "sneak around", "sneak out", etc.? Facts707 (talk) 04:20, 14 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I'd say that "sneak" does look like an adjective based on the examples you've given. The combination sneak peek probably deserves to stay as an entry, as it's an extremely common and fixed collocation of those two components.  There is always the danger in assuming that this sort of construction makes the first component an adjective, as sometimes it's actually a noun.  In "computer table", for instance, "computer is a noun is apposition to "table", rather than an adjective description.  The same can be said of "dog collar", "book depository", or "exercise program".  So, you just have to be sure that you don't get fooled in these situations where "sneak" might actually be a noun sense.  You can always ask for additional opinions in the Tea Room.


 * The phrasal verbs with "sneak" (e.g. "sneak off") are probably legit as well. Print dictionaries tend to lump these under the main verb to conserve page space, but Wiktionary has opted to give them separate entries, when merited, as we are not limited by any page count.  We probably should have an entry for sneak out, and possibly for sneak around (although I'm less convinced of that). --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:45, 14 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks, sounds good to me. I'll have a go at it when I have another few minutes. Facts707 (talk) 07:22, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks!
Thanks for making me the word of the day :) YWelinder (WMF) (talk) 23:31, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

RQ
Do you have any idea what the "RQ" is supposed to stand for in the RQ templates (e.g. Template:RQ:Cicero Catiline)? -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 19:44, 30 November 2013 (UTC)
 * It stands for "reference quotation". --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:22, 30 November 2013 (UTC)
 * That's sort of what I thought, but....does it really make much sense? Wouldn't it make more sense to simply use Q?  -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 21:57, 30 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Sort of, but since "quotation" refers to the quote itself, and the templates are for the source of the quotations, they were called "reference quotation" templates. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:15, 1 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Just thought you might be interested. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 07:56, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Just thought you might be interested. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 07:56, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

-atio
Hi,

I've submitted this entry you created to deletion. Could you give your opinion about this? --Fsojic (talk) 16:04, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Probably should be deleted, or made into some kind of redirect. It's an old entry before I firgured out some of the nuances of Latin formative suffices. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:24, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Galician
I remember you used to run a Galician bot. Is it feedable? If so, I'd like to feed it with torturar. --Back on the list (talk) 11:53, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I haven't run the bot in a while, but hope to begin another round of Galician verbs and entry cleanup before too long. Suggestions have been sent to User talk:FitBot, and I'll work from there when I get things up and running again. I'm on and extended wikibreak for the present. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:25, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Hmm, Rockpilot and Rising Sun, two of the greatest ever perma-banned users, editted that page before. I guess I forget things quite easily. --Back on the list (talk) 18:01, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

civil code
Greetings! You deleted a poorly drafted entry for civil code six years ago. I think we should actually have this (see Civil code), and wanted to give you the first crack at restoring and rewriting it. Cheers! <i style="background:lightgreen">bd2412</i> T 03:49, 28 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I think that you'd probably be better suited to crafting a good definition for that one, and pass on the opportunity. --EncycloPetey (talk) 06:11, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Done. Cheers! <i style="background:lightgreen">bd2412</i> T 15:01, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

citation
Hello,

I would like to use one of your images (flexed/pronated arm). How would you prefer to be cited?

Best, Jcosru (talk) 17:37, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

User:DCDuring/Chinese materia medica
I have been working with a convenience sample of terms taken from the ingredients tables that are in some Chinese entries. The sample included many genitive forms of taxonomic names that are some of the most commonly used taxa in Wiktionary. For my initial purposes I am adding wikilinks to the component Latin terms. In addition to taxa (some not in WP or Wikispecies) and good Latin terms I have found obsolete taxa, non-standard spellings of taxa (mostly v/u and j/i substitutions), and Latin terms I cannot find in references available to me (eg,, probably just a misspelling of that appeared in Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China, Volume 1). I have also found a couple of terms that seem to not be SoP, even in botanical Latin. The two so far are:
 * 1) Bombyx Batryticatus, which seems to be Bombyx mori (silkworm) infected by  (now  (not in WP)?) (14 instances)
 * 2) Rhizoma Chuanxiong, which is Rhizoma of Ligusticum chuanxiong, now Ligusticum striatum (54 instances)

How Wiktionary ultimately presents these and all the other latinate expressions is open. First the tables in the Chinese entries are distinctly non-standard content, though they fit under the heading of Meronym (not a common heading!). If we were to keep the table contents, the component terms used would need to be defined as English or Translingual terms to be consistent with their use in the entries. That would mean adding all the genitive forms of the taxa used. Alternatively, the entire latinate expressions could be defined as English or Translingual expressions.

It will take me quite a while to mine the Chinese entries for the taxonomic names they contain, so I would like to put off any action on this, but, in view of your expressed interest in this area, I thought you might be interested. DCDuring TALK 13:12, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

If something about how these items are presented seems obvious and beyond dispute to you, please let me know so I can possibly incorporate it into my work on the Chinese entries as soon as practical. DCDuring TALK 13:28, 3 August 2014 (UTC)


 * It seems weird to me to define something as "rhizoma" in an English definition, when "rhizoma" is not an English word. The English is rhizome. I'm not sure there will be a fixed set of criteria, through certain principles may evolve as work progresses. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:51, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
 * These seem to be taken verbatim from contemporary books on traditional Chinese medicine.
 * I'm not sure how to interpret the practice in books written in English of using these terms. Doesn't that make them English, but just in a specific context? They don't necessarily seem to be good Latin, as agreement does not always look correct to me, eg, recente is an ablative, but would seem to be modifying either a nominative or genitive noun. Even if it were a Medieval or New Latin adverb, it doesn't make sense to me in the context of its use.
 * In any event I will continue to mine the Chinese entries for taxonomic names and linkify them as best I can, to the taxa and the Latin, English, or, possibly, Translingual lemma entries that seem closest. DCDuring TALK 16:59, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Please help to make the policy respected
I'm sorry to write you directly but nobody has answered in WT:BP: I think that if you decide to advise both of us may listen seriously. JackPotte (talk) 11:32, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
 * 1) Today, [//en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Wiktionary:Blocking_policy&diff=8342007&oldid=8342003 the blocking policy you've participated to write] is systematically violated by  as you can see: [//en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=block&user=Chuck+Entz&page=&year=&month=-1&tagfilter=&hide_thanks_log=1 he took the bad habit to never discuss when blocking] and the figures can objectively qualify his profile of a "happy trigger serial blocker" (and so he contravenes to WT:Be bold and Help:Interacting with humans too). Whereas he was elected with a presentation which talks about he's ability to justify himself with the "Undo" link.
 * 2) My bot account was a victim of his arbitrary decisions, so I had carefully followed the Wiktionary unblocking process without implying that the blocker should have something to reproach to himself.
 * 3) Than he wrote the BP paragraph which seemed to me enough wise.
 * 4) But now that this paragraph is no longer on the current BP page, I tried to conclude the event on his talk page. But he's ignoring everything from me and I don't understand these discriminations because I stayed factual, respectful and even friendly.

An important message about renaming users
Dear EncycloPetey,

I am cross-posting this message to many places to make sure everyone who is a Wikimedia Foundation project bureaucrat receives a copy. If you are a bureaucrat on more than one wiki, you will receive this message on each wiki where you are a bureaucrat.

As you may have seen, work to perform the Wikimedia cluster-wide single-user login finalisation (SUL finalisation) is taking place. This may potentially effect your work as a local bureaucrat, so please read this message carefully.

Why is this happening? As currently stated at the global rename policy, a global account is a name linked to a single user across all Wikimedia wikis, with local accounts unified into a global collection. Previously, the only way to rename a unified user was to individually rename every local account. This was an extremely difficult and time-consuming task, both for stewards and for the users who had to initiate discussions with local bureaucrats (who perform local renames to date) on every wiki with available bureaucrats. The process took a very long time, since it's difficult to coordinate crosswiki renames among the projects and bureaucrats involved in individual projects.

The SUL finalisation will be taking place in stages, and one of the first stages will be to turn off Special:RenameUser locally. This needs to be done as soon as possible, on advice and input from Stewards and engineers for the project, so that no more accounts that are unified globally are broken by a local rename to usurp the global account name. Once this is done, the process of global name unification can begin. The date that has been chosen to turn off local renaming and shift over to entirely global renaming is 15 September 2014, or three weeks time from now. In place of local renames is a new tool, hosted on Meta, that allows for global renames on all wikis where the name is not registered will be deployed.

Your help is greatly needed during this process and going forward in the future if, as a bureaucrat, renaming users is something that you do or have an interest in participating in. The Wikimedia Stewards have set up, and are in charge of, a new community usergroup on Meta in order to share knowledge and work together on renaming accounts globally, called Global renamers. Stewards are in the process of creating documentation to help global renamers to get used to and learn more about global accounts and tools and Meta in general as well as the application format. As transparency is a valuable thing in our movement, the Stewards would like to have at least a brief public application period. If you are an experienced renamer as a local bureaucrat, the process of becoming a part of this group could take as little as 24 hours to complete. You, as a bureaucrat, should be able to apply for the global renamer right on Meta by the requests for global permissions page on 1 September, a week from now.

In the meantime please update your local page where users request renames to reflect this move to global renaming, and if there is a rename request and the user has edited more than one wiki with the name, please send them to the request page for a global rename.

Stewards greatly appreciate the trust local communities have in you and want to make this transition as easy as possible so that the two groups can start working together to ensure everyone has a unique login identity across Wikimedia projects. Completing this project will allow for long-desired universal tools like a global watchlist, global notifications and many, many more features to make work easier.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns about the SUL finalisation, read over the Help:Unified login page on Meta and leave a note on the talk page there, or on the talk page for global renamers. You can also contact me on my talk page on meta if you would like. I'm working as a bridge between Wikimedia Foundation Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Stewards, and you to assure that SUL finalisation goes as smoothly as possible; this is a community-driven process and I encourage you to work with the Stewards for our communities.

Thank you for your time. -- Keegan (WMF) talk 18:24, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

--This message was sent using MassMessage. Was there an error? Report it!

Template:la-noun parameter for secondary genitive forms
Hello EP. Given all you've written at Template talk:la-noun, you may be interested to learn that the named parameter <tt>gen2</tt> now works properly in generating the display of secondary genitive forms for entries that need them; see, for example,, which lists the two genitive forms and. If you believe this new functionality is sufficiently important, would you mind posting a note about it in News for editors, please? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:49, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

My deleted entries
User Kephir deleted my Wiktionary entries: Amun-Ra, Serqet, Apep, Nut, Nephthys, Toth, Geb, Shu, Asarphes, Onuris, Horemhem most of them Ancient Egyptian Gods or Pharaohs but there are already pages like Tutankhamon or other names with etymologies there, could you please return them?

Kind regards, Xand 金日光旦照 (talk) 19:06, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Latin Pronunciations
In producing your audio of the pronunciation of words in classical Latin, why did you distinguish the quantity of the short 'i' and the long 'i' but not the quality?--73.204.246.150 05:42, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I have answered you on Commons, where you also posted this question. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:14, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

The R in Classical Latin
Was the R rolled or tapped in Classical Latin? Did it vary by region? I've noticed that your audio files do not have rolled R's, but the IPA is transcribed with [r] rather than [ɹ]. Thanks. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:38, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
 * On the other hand, you tapped (I think that's a tap) the R in your pronunciation of la:. Are the rules more complicated than I thought or did you modify your understanding of Latin pronunciation? Andrew Sheedy (talk) 03:04, 26 August 2015 (UTC)


 * I really appreciate what you're doing with the pronunciation. It's greatly helping my Latin learning. Not sure if you're around right now, but my above question will likely remain relevant for a some time, since I've not been able to find the answer elsewhere. Figuring out the pronunciation rules for that R (which you pronounce at least three different ways in your audio files) would be great, since not all sources seem to agree on what it should be (some say it's rolled, some say it's as in English). Thanks again. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:14, 1 September 2015 (UTC)


 * The /r/ is not (necessarily) referring to [r]; although by Late Latin it seems certain that it was indeed [r], some phonological evidence suggests that, at least in certain environments, it was a different rhotic phone in classical and anteclassical times. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 04:53, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
 * That's helpful, thank you. In some instances, EncycloPetey's pronunciation has [ɹ] or [ɾ] where the phonetic transcription (I'm not worried about the phonemic transcription here) is [r]. If I'm aiming or a Classical pronunciation, am I safe consistently using an alveolar trill? Or is it just something that isn't clear about Latin pronunciation? Andrew Sheedy (talk) 00:16, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
 * There is no one Classical pronunciation. Classical Latin was spoken over a massive area by a wide range of peoples for a long period of time, and we know a lot less about it and its variations than you might think, despite linguistic writings and prescriptivist rants or satirical pieces (e.g. Catullus 84). But on a practical level, if we acknowledge those issues, I'd go for a short alveolar trill. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 01:19, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Alright, thanks. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:22, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Classical /r/ is one of the sounds I find challenging to reproduce with my own voice. This is one reason that I have not uploaded an audio file for certain common Latin words containing r: I am not satisfied with the results of my attempts to generate the proper sound. Someone with greater vocal control and auditory skill than myself might be able to produce better audio files for those words. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:22, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

aclydas
Salve! I see that is on the wanted list. I would have thought it was a form of but it is not included in that entries declension. Any ideas? SemperBlotto (talk) 04:36, 21 January 2016 (UTC)
 * The citations page suggests it's a proper noun Aclydas, and the spelling and ending suggest to me that it's Latinized from Greek. But I find nothing in my print resources on a quick look.


 * Checking google books, the results divide into two groups: (1) scannos for aclydes and (2) a host of hits that all seem to be versions of the same annotated copy of Virgil. These latter citations seem to be exactly what you thought: a variant form of aclys, which the OLD traces back to Virgil. So, it is either a misprint that was reprinted, or a variant form.  Either way, the information should probably lead the user to aclys.  --EncycloPetey (talk) 06:14, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Blocked
I know that I am blocked because I vandalized, but I won't do it again. Can I please edit again?

User talk:Awesomedjh

12:22, 4 February 2016

P.S. could you respond on my talk page?


 * What will you do if unblocked? Your first and only edit was to delete a translation and insult users. It's great that you've pledged not to vandalise, but what will you do to contribute that makes it worth unblocking you? --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:46, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

Shunpiking has also come to mean an avoidance of major highways (regardless of tolls) in preference for bucolic and scenic interludes along lightly traveled country roads.
That's from the WP article, which i consulted to reassure myself that it was the deleter, and not i (as is so often the case) who is uninformed (viz., about the practice of shunning the pikes for pleasure rather than penuriousness). Editing wikt doesn't give me the same satisfaction i find at WP, so perhaps this verbum sap. suffices. Cheers. Oh, BTW, was pleased to learn the origin of "piker" in the vertical pikes; i came here to check my notion that [mere] pikers were etymologically shunpikers, the cheapskates shunning the horizontal pikes. Live, speak, and learn, i guess! --Jerzy•t 19:54, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

siccity
Please explain what "having multiple definitions" has to do with having or not having a translation table. DTLHS (talk) 19:49, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
 * First, please refer to WT:WWIN, specifically (4) "Wiktionary is not paper". We don't have to pare down entries to bare minimum to save space. Deleting a translations section is never necessary. Second, the entry for siccity has a single definition, but dryness has two definitions. Referring the reader from an entry with a single definition to an entry with two definitions leaves the reader uncertain which of the various translation may or may not apply. In general, trans-see should only be used if the words involved are 100% synonyms, with no difference in meaning or usage. Third, the word siccity is rare and jargonistic, whereas dryness is common English, so the two have different usages, and cannot be considered 100% equivalent. Their translations will thus also differ. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:53, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
 * If "siccity" isn't a synonym of dryness then you need to edit the definition to make that clear. DTLHS (talk) 19:55, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Furthermore, saying that Wiktionary is "not paper" and therefore there is no reason to ever delete translations is ridiculous. Every entry has a real, measurable cost of maintenance, and editors' time and energy is finite. DTLHS (talk) 20:01, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Wiktionary is a volunteer effort. I did not set up the siccity entry or write its original definition. Nor did I assume it was a 100% synonym of another word. Rather, you made that assumption and deleted structure. In such situations, the resposibility falls upon you to do the legwork to verify that what you are assuming is correct. Do not toss off that responsibility so lightly. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:08, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I assumed nothing that was not already present in the entry. Since you're so sure it's non-synonymous you should be able to come up with a better definition, and also translations that can't go in dryness. DTLHS (talk) 20:12, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
 * You seem more interested in arguing that editing, so your argument about "measurable cost of maintenance" is clearly disingenuous. I can no longer assume good faith from you. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:16, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Fine, let's ask someone who actually regularly adds translations to entries., if you saw this translation section in siccity, would you redirect it to dryness? DTLHS (talk) 20:17, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, it makes sense, since it's a rare word. It's better not to provide translations for each synonym (if they are close enough) or alternative form. Translations need to be merged if they exist in both tables. There are cases where I disagree with the usage of, e.g. I don't think scold and reprimand are close enough to merge translations. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 01:12, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
 * , the issue here is that there are two translations tables at the target location, but only one definition at the source. So how will the user know which definition of dryness applies, and thus which translation table to use? --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:15, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Either the source has incomplete definitions or the target has a redundant sense. If the source matches only one sense of the target, you could use that sense in the redirect - . --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 03:51, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
 * And now an ad hominem. Perhaps it's time for you to take a wiki-break? --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:19, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

Theodoric
Hi. Many years ago you changed the language for the entry Theodoric from Ancient Germanic to Old High German. Now a discussion has arisen whether the proper noun is (Old High) German at all, or simply just English. If you can shed light on that question, please join the discussion. --Lambiam 18:59, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Permission required for shahab.bot on en.wiktionary
my user name is شہاب. I have successfully used my account shahab.bot for automated page uploads (PageFromFile) on Urdu wiktionary about six months back. Now I was trying to use it on English wiktionary but i get this error message about logging-in. ERROR: Login failed (Failed). Kindly authorize me as shahab.bot for English wiktionary or guide me where to make such applications. Thanks. شہاب (talk) 13:39, 20 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Where did you look for policy? Ours is explained at Bots. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:17, 20 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks for guidance.

شہاب (talk) 15:16, 22 November 2018 (UTC)

Latin audio
A quick note to say thanks for the Latin audio on Wiktionary. We are using it on Latin starting with Classified Vocabulary List. If you felt like adding more we'd be incredibly grateful! But I realise that would be s big ask. Also thanks for keeping the file name conventions clear. JimKillock (talk) 19:32, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm glad to hear it! The words that I recorded were deliberately selected from the beginning chapters of several major published Latin courses. Unfortunately, I am not currently able to record new words, in part because I am so busy on Wikisource. Additionally the Audacity software I was using has borked, and try as I might, it no longer plays well with my computer's OS. I do not anticipate recording additional vocabulary in the forseeable future. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:59, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Adding locatives
Are you making edits like this based on attestation of the locative form in Classical Latin? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 22:15, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
 * How would you distinguish the locative from the genitive and dative in the attestation? It looks like you mass created entries for Roman locations without adding the locative to any of them. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:12, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
 * You can distinguish it if you know Latin grammar, that's how! Allen & Greenough say that the locative is usually only for cities and small islands. Again, I will ask if you have any evidence in attestation — if not, please undo that part of your edits. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 23:28, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
 * You are looking at the first edition of Allen & Greenough, I assume. The 1903 revised edition amends their statement. What is your rationale for including the vocative on all of these entries, but omitting the locative? --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:16, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not actually looking at any edition, as that was from memory. In any case, the vocative is theoretically possible even when semantically bizarre ("o chair!"), but as far as I know, a locative on a country like Lycia is simply wrong (instead, you'd use the preposition ). Again, please present evidence or else remove the locatives. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 00:30, 5 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Capital O. "O chair!" It is not right to write "o chair" and any chair that reads the text might feel marginalised. Equinox ◑ 00:38, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but your imperfect memory is not a sound basis for making policy decisions. The examples given in my copy of Allen & Greenough are Rōmae and rūri. There is no statement there to support your claim from memory. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:04, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * My memory is imperfect, but on the other hand, my Latin is better than yours, and you confirmed the statement was in A&G (and continue to refuse to produce evidence). You seem very defensive, so I'm just going to ping a few other people who know Latin who might help out here. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 02:33, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * No, I confirmed the statement was not in A&G. You seem to have trouble understanding English. I only guessed you were using an earlier outdated edition, but you now admit to not actually looking at that source for any verification, and are claiming that my negative is a support for your erroneous claim. You have the audacity to claim superiority on the matter when you are inventing quotes from the air and attributing them to sources that don't actually have them? How are you still an admin? --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:50, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Firstly, it is in A&G. (Here's the link.) I try to be more patient with newbies, but you should know better than to argue like this. Anyway, maybe one of the people I've pinged will have the patience to explain this to you. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 03:30, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * That statement is the logical converse of what you said. It does not say that "the locative is usually only for cities and small islands" as you claimed. Rather it makes a statement that, within the context of the names of towns and small islands, the locative is one way in which the relation of place may be expressed. You are refusing to admit that your "knowledge" is fraudulent, and persist in trying to back up your point of view, when it clearly is not backed up by anything. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:46, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * The statement in Allen and Greenough is strictly speaking the converse. (However, this sort of a traditional grammar tends to try to be exhaustive so that in this context the statement "this form exists for these words" tends to strongly suggest "this form does not exist for other words than these". If the grammar weren't exhaustively specifying the words that have this form, meaning in this case that there was another semantic class of nouns that have locatives, I'd regard it as an error or at least a major omission that needed to be corrected.) But apparently the practice here is to show the locative if there's evidence for it, not if there isn't evidence against it. That's roughly what Latin declension does. (I think someone removed unattested locatives from the tables there somewhat recently.) So, not being a town or small island, only gets to show off a locative if it's attested. It would be good if someone wrote this up at WT:ALA so there don't have to be further disputes about it. — Eru·tuon 05:53, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the politeness of your response. Most of the pins I have been getting from Wiktionary in recent months have come from Metaknowledge calling me over to disparage me, so it is refreshing to see someone here being polite. I do have three things I'd like to put to you: (1) Adding a footnote to the declension table for the locative akin to the one used for the alternative genitive singular in the 2nd declension would allow for linking to an explanation of the Locative, perhaps in an appendix on the matter. (2) I am an admin here, although I edit very little here anymore because of Wiktionary's toxic environment, so I wonder at your statement "apparently the practice here is..."; does this mean you don't know, and that you're assuming? (3) Allen & Greenough make an opening statement about "towns and small islands", but when they begin discussing the locative, Athens, Philippi, and Rome are listed among the "towns" and Cyprus is listed as a "small island". I will grant the list of exceptional nouns listed in section a. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:50, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I was assuming, partly based on the documentation of . There are several not-small-island-or-town place names that currently show locatives on Wiktionary, such as and  (even bigger than Cyprus),, , , . All but  are too recent to be used in Classical Latin, so unfortunately A&G isn't quite sufficient to establish whether their locatives might occur. I don't do much conversation in Latin so don't know if they might not be used in modern Latin. Perhaps it depends on how Classical the speaker wants to be. An odd thing with regard to "towns" is that what was a town in the Classical era may be a city now, so the "rule" couldn't continue to hold unless a town is demoted from having a locative once it becomes a city. I have no idea where to look to find out modern Latin usage of the locative though. — Eru·tuon 18:25, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I know that the locative gets a mention in a few prominent places in modern works without qualification, and appears in a riff on Classical Latin grammar instruction in a Monty Python film. These uses might be enough to prompt some modern writers to utilize it, but modern "resurrection" of the locative is not an issue I can offer insight into. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:51, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * The Loc. formally equivalent to Gen. is very rare in country names, so rare I'd never encountered it or even seen it mentioned, and would have considered it a mistake before just now (which is instructive against prompt judgements). Here's a an article discussing its occurrence in Vitruvius. Here a translation of Zumpft cites just three instances, although it does add "&c" later. Here are the instances I've just collected: Graeciae (Cic), Aegyptī (Caes), Chersonēsī (Nep), Peloponnēsī (Varr), Thessaliae (Plīn), Lūcāniae (Flōr), Rōmae Numidiaeque (Sall), Crētae et Āfricae, Asiae, Phrygiae, Paphlagōniae (Vitr*4), Galliae (Hirt), Ēpīrī (Serv). It's apparent that similar instances are in the habit of either being explained or emended away. Pinkster 2015, The Oxford Latin Syntax p. 819 (available at libgen) treats the topic of space expressions as a whole sufficiently well, but unfortunately doesn't address the Genitive-like "Locatives" separately.
 * All of the above is far from being the case in bare Acc./Abl. answering quō? and unde?, and even the latter two cases need to be treated separately and not lumped together.
 * Super-condensed school grammars that cite no research at all, like A&G, should not be relied on even for personal use, let alone to cite as sources - they simply don't stand up to scrutiny by modern scientific standards, and their main use has always been to give students as well as teachers statements to parrot without any innate (acquisition-based) or scientific understanding of the matter. Every time I see them cited, I see an appeal to authority. The statement in question is a prime example of this - how could anyone think it fit to draw any conclusions from? Here we read "Large islands, and all places when thought of as a territory and not as a locality, are treated like names of countries", followed by two quotes and a made-up counterexample - this is the entirety of their discussion of the issue at hand.
 * The Monty Python thing, I'm afraid, is both a factual and a reasoning mistake - domum isn't a Locative answering ubi? but an Accusative of motion answering quō?. Even if it really was a Locative, for instance domī, this use provides no implication on the use of forms like Rōmae or Athēnīs. They're two different kinds of usage - one (domī, mīlitiae, marī) is a closed and shrinking class of extraparadigmatic forms of restricted usage (read: adverbials) describing abstract locations like "I'm coming home", another is about open-class geographic locations like "I'm coming to London".
 * Frankly I'm a bit uncertain what to do with auto-generated Locatives of names of countries. The use undeniably exists, but also seems suspiciously like an analogical overshoot that was the furthest from idiomatic out of all the prepositionless uses. Perhaps it was influenced by the reanalysis of expressions like Dōdōna cīvitās Ēpīrī est where Ēpīrī is? was? adnominal - indeed deciding whether it is or isn't seems impossible in most instances. The difference in attestation from the idiomatic "town/small island" use (which, to address the "demotion" question, in no way excludes cities, as is evident from Rōmae, Alexandriae, Athēnīs) speaks very clearly to their different status. We editors have ourselves been on the receiving end of lumping together of these two different uses under the same label - so on the receiving end of what I believe fits the definition of the correlation fallacy. Since the "Locatives" of country names don't have the same claim to being idiomatic and/or paradigmatic as placenames on the one hand and as Acc./Abl. of country names on the other, I think they need to get the extraparadigmatic treatment that forms like duim, faxō and cēnāssit are getting - which are way better attested by the way. Anybody who feels the need to freely coin forms analogical to either Graeciae or cēnāssit will hopefully be doing so with some understanding of the issue. Hell, they might even want to do that after seeing these forms once in a Wiktionary entry and thinking they look cool for all I care. But the general reader shouldn't be mislead to believe that "Locatives" of country names were or can be used freely - otherwise they're at the receiving end of the same correlation fallacy and have no one but us to blame. It seems to be one of those issues that a dictionary cannot successfully address - and is that surprising when the grammars can't either?
 * , I appreciate the mention. Brutal Russian (talk) 02:12, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the input. Given this evidence, I'm not sure how you think we should best proceed. As you can see from the discussion above, my bias is always to follow the attestation, and your idea of treating these as "extraparadigmatic" seems to follow that course of logic (although they could go in the table, or else be mentioned as rare in prose immediately following the table). What do you want to do about it? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 01:13, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
 * If they appear in the table in the same cell as e.g. Rōmae, it would mislead the reader as described above. It's not obvious how else one can fit them in a table, hence my mention of extraparadigmatic forms that we simply mention in notes outside the table (the paradigm). I wonder though if it isn't possible to make two different Locative cells, one of which would come with the annotation saying that since the entry is a country name, the use of the Locative for the usual in + Abl. is very rare. Or else be able to manually add such an annotation to Locatives only in country names. I too feel that limiting this use to attested instances only is the better course of action, but I wouldn't mind it being added to all country names as long the annotation makes the difference clear - like, it's not ungrammatical or anything, just either unidiomatic or marked. I think the reason might be that people simply didn't usually conceive of whole countries as homogenous localities back in those days, but rather as geographic areas (something that only became more pronounced in the Middle Ages and seems to hold true even for modern Italy). By the way, while it may have been already rare in prose, I've yet to see a single occurrence in poetry. Brutal Russian (talk) 06:31, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, rather than hassle the people who could make a fancy solution, I think we should simply write a short note under the table. I too would prefer we limit ourselves to those that are attested, and if anyone should insist on adding them to country names more generally, at least say that the locative is not known to be attested in the note. EncycloPetey, do you accede to this distillation of Brutal Russian's course of action? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 16:46, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

Afar numerals
Yo, I am following the L'Afar of Hassan Kamil and the numerals that I encounter don't match those you have added, at all. Could you drop me a link where you got them from? I'm not very sure how to go from this point...

For reference:


 * It has been so long since I worked on those that I do not remember my source. --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:48, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Understandable. I'll set yours to then. I'd appreciate though when you have time (no rush) that you still find the source, because it's quite divergent from the forms above. Thadh (talk) 17:56, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
 * , I'm just going to send them to RFV. The confusion between /ħ/ and /h/ suggests to me that these might ultimately be from an oral source, which could explain the other errors as well. If you find more like this, RFV is the best option. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 19:14, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Category:Latin nomina gentilia
Hi. Can you perchance consider renaming this category you created, to "Latin gentilicia" (plural of gentilicium)? This is a much more common term than "nomina gentilia", which I'm not sure is even correct (ngram). I'm told in the move interface that moving categories here isn't the same thing as in Wikipedia, and I don't know if there's a correct procedure I'm missing. Avilich (talk) 00:02, 30 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not active here much anymore. You'd need to determine which template is categorizing the names, and seek to have that template changed.  Then create the new category. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:29, 30 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Can you give me a headstart on how to do that? Avilich (talk) 19:20, 1 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but most of the modern templates tht do this were set up after the time I was last active here. I'm not even sure who it the best person to ask, but the Grease pit is the place to ask these kinds of technical questions. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:55, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

How we will see unregistered users
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