User talk:Metaknowledge/2014

This page shows conversations on my talkpage from 2014.

bere
Hello Metaknowledge, first of all, I wish you a happy new year. Then, could you have a look on the talk page of bere. Indeed, it seems that [//en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=bere&diff=next&oldid=16157488 you added] the Middle English section :) Pamputt (talk) 15:37, 3 January 2014 (UTC)
 * And a joyous 2014 to you. Well, I've given up on Middle English at Wiktionary, because its too unstandardised (especially when it comes to inflection) and trying to present all the variants (some of which I don't understand) is too challenging. In this case, both the noun and verb are attested with the spelling bere in Middle English. I changed the entry to the noun for simplicity's sake, because arguably the lemma form for the verb should be at, although by the time some of my sources were written, the lemma form was as well. So at least the etymology matches the sense now, but the entry is incomplete. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 15:50, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

מתתיהו
Thanks for fixing it. I didn't even realize that I did that. I must have gotten confused with the transliteration. --WikiTiki89 16:38, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Sorry for accidentally insulting you with my edit summary... —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 03:18, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Twitter quotation of "wai"
Hey! I'm curious why you removed the quotation I added to wai. Is Twitter unacceptable as a source (if so, why allow Usenet?) or did you just think it wasn't a particularly illuminating quote? —Neil 20:47, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Not speaking for Metaknowledge, but we consider Usenet to be durably archived, while Twitter isn't (see WT:CFI). Nothing against Twitter- Wikipedia is in the same category. There are also distorting factors due to the length limit, but that's a case-by-case sort of thing. Of course, quotes just for illustrating things are a different issue from quotes that are used as evidence for something, but we don't give Twitter the same weight, in general. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:59, 25 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I reinstated it, but it's not a particularly helpful quote and, as Chuck noted, it doesn't do anything to attest the meaning. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 21:03, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Okay, thanks for explaining. I agree that it actually doesn't do a whole lot to illuminate the word, so I've removed it. But I still don't get why Usenet is considered durably archived while Twitter isn't. Twitter's archives are at least as durable as Google's, and at any rate the Library of Congress (and no doubt other institutions) are creating stable duplicates. Theoretically people can delete their tweets after a couple years, which perhaps can't done with Usenet posts, but they can't erase them from all the archives. —Neil 21:49, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Category:Latin praenominal abbreviations
Hiya Meta. Thanks for making use of and filling up Category:Latin praenominal abbreviations — I'd only just noticed that! :-)  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 00:52, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Swahili noun classes
Hi Metaknowledge! I have noticed that you have rewritten Appendix:Swahili noun classes. I would like to clarify the description of the noun classes in Wikipedia articles about Swahili (mainly the German one, but maybe also in other languages) and I have noticed that there are some differences between different sources: Some sources identify class 11 and 14, 10 and 12 or 15 and 17. Can you recommend any source clarifying why there are these different classifications? Thanks! --Chricho (talk) 01:32, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not exactly sure what your question is; all numerical classifications are used across many different Bantu languages, but for the page I rewrote, I used the (somewhat unorthodox) method of classifying based on prefixes, which is only valid for Swahili. The en.wiki article Swahili language has good coverage for this, but the classes you mentioned are as follows: 11 is u-, which has 12 for its plural (but in form, 9, 10, and 12 are all identical in Swahili, and at en.wikt we call them all "N class"). 14 is also u-, but it has no plural and is actually a different class (but at en.wikt, we call them both "U class"). 15 and 17 are both ku-, but 15 is a verbal noun (like an infinitive), whereas 17 is a locative (and so these are separate on en.wikt). To summarise, all these are situations in which the classes look the same in Swahili, but are actually different. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 03:24, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Oh, and if you need to cite a source, perhaps this would suffice? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 03:27, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi! There are some grammars merging 11/14, 10/12 (cf. “using Class XII, which as a class is sometimes considered as nonexistent”) or 15/17 and I think that a good article in an encyclopedia should take these different classifications into account. I know how these classes are differentiated (locatives vs. infinitives etc.), but grammatically they seem to behave in (approximately?) the same way (same genitives, pronouns etc.). But genetically these classes can be clearly separated? Do I understand the situation correctly? --Chricho (talk) 15:21, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I think class 11 had class 10 as its plural already in Proto-Bantu, so it's a cross-Bantu thing. Zulu has it too (but it doesn't have a class 12). 15:24, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

vallis, valles
I was a bit confused by the Latin entries for and. Is it correct that valles is an alternative nominative singular form of vallis? And if so, is the singular vallĕs or is it vallēs like the plural? --WikiTiki89 18:20, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I fixed the entry (the e must be long). I hope it's clear now. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 17:19, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Reason for blocking Wikitiki89
Hi,

In case you're wondering, I have added dictionary references, relevant to the entries Русьскаꙗ землꙗ and Русская земля the RFD at hand, which was reverted as "useless". Linking to dictionaries don't require explanation but removing them is POV, especially considering the current RFD. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 03:50, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I saw the discussion and I looked at the edit history before unblocking him. You should review WT:BLOCK and cool down. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 03:51, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Which part did I violate? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад)
 * Both parts of the policy hardly, if at all, apply in this case. Moreover, after the policy section is an extended discussion of blocking which notes, among others things, that:
 * >It is not acceptable to block a whitelisted user or an administrator unless they already know they will be blocked for their actions.
 * In any case, it has long been looked down upon here to block a party with whom one has a dispute; a third party should block if necessary. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 04:48, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * It's not about a dispute I was having, it was about continuous edit-warring, repeatedly removing references. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 07:14, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I had just as much reason to block you as you had to block me: continuous edit-warring, repeatedly re-adding content without responding to discussion (yes, I consider edit summaries to be discussion). You seem to think that every edit I make to that page has to do with the RFD discussion, but it doesn't; it has to do with improving the quality of the page. --WikiTiki89 14:10, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Latin gerund
Hi,

CodeCat is cleaning up the templates for Latin conjugation, and I'd like to make some improvements. I wonder if we shouldn't add a gerund line, which seems to be included in the future passive participle, while - as you already know - they're different things (even if sometimes one replaces the other). What do you think? --Fsojic (talk) 13:47, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes! I haven't looked at Latin conjugation templates recently, but they're really awful. I haven't looked at what CodeCat is doing, but I'd like to be able to call with no arguments on a simple, standard verb like, and I wish that there were less messy solutions for regularly irregular things like.
 * As for the topic on hand, we should have a line at the bottom for the gerund, and we can also use that line to show the supines, acc and abl, which for some reason have been ignored. There might be more that's missing but these are the only Classical things that jump out at me. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 17:40, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, I hadn't thought about the supine. Here are the conversations we have had: 1 and 2. --Fsojic (talk) 17:56, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks., can you address my gripe about arguments? I still don't see why any arguments are needed for regular verbs except to feed macra and unpredictable perfect stems. There is no reason I can fathom for why with Lua, amō would still require use to give the perfect stem. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 18:06, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

calamitas
If this is an inherited word from (early) Old Latin and Proto-Italic, then the second "a" must be long. A short vowel there would give "calimitās" instead because of vowel reduction. 03:09, 14 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I can't explain it, but the 2nd a is short, and (which to me is very clearly Old Latin) is attested, but evidently only to point out that  was fond of using it as a noticeable archaism. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 03:15, 14 February 2014 (UTC)
 * De Vaan 2008 doesn't make any mention of a -d-, nor kadamitās. So I think the connection between them is a bit dodgy. On the other hand he does mention as a related word. He notes that the second a might have been restored because of the preceding one, giving  and  as further examples.  03:29, 14 February 2014 (UTC)
 * So the cad- business is unsubstantiated, and Pompey was being pseudo-archaic? It's possible, but it makes me rather confused as to which language header to use. (I might also note that not mentioning it at all would seem like an omission on de Vaan's part. But it's a reliable source, although I saw mention elsewhere of as having encouraged the shift from d to l.) —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 03:45, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

diversorium
Hi,

Could you move this page to deversorium, which is a better orthography (it makes more sense semantically, and that's the lemma used by L&S)? --Fsojic (talk) 00:11, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
 * ✅, although I reckon you were just as capable of doing that as I was. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 00:46, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks (I'm never sure if a copy-paste is enough, it doesn't preserve the page's history...) --Fsojic (talk) 00:49, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I may be misinterpreting your comment, but, in case you were unaware: you don't have to be an admin to move a page. The only difference is that admins can move a page without leaving a redirect behind. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:15, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
 * But deversorium already existed before (as a form of deversorius), so I couldn't move diversorium to it. --Fsojic (talk) 01:19, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Ah, I did misinterpret. Yes, to do a history merge would require deleting and undeleting as well as moving, so only an admin can do it. To be within the terms of the licensing, there really should have been some kind of reference to the history of the deleted entry, but I'm not going to second-guess. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:46, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Hogwarts houses
I've started creating entries for the names of Hogwarts houses used as general terms to describe people with certain character traits, but I'm not certain about exactly what type of cites would meet WT:FICTION. Do cites have to make absolutely no reference to Harry Potter whatsoever, or are discussions from alt.fan.harry-potter in which people sort real people and characters from other media acceptable? -Cloudcuckoolander (talk) 06:01, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
 * To be honest, I never really grokked our policy on that count. I really wouldn't know whether those count, although I'd err toward assuming that a forum of HP fanboys counts as part of the extended HP universe, just as much as an HP fanfic would, and thus oughtn't to be legitimate. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 06:23, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Slytherin looks good at the moment, so that leaves Gryffindor and Ravenclaw to be shored up, and Hufflepuff to be created if I can find enough applicable cites. -Cloudcuckoolander (talk) 06:51, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Would you delete the entries for Gryffindor and Ravenclaw? I don't think I've been able to find enough supporting cites. -Cloudcuckoolander (talk) 12:16, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I am rather embarrassed to say that I forgot about this, but I'd much rather keep the entries, so perhaps this is much like the Fliesspapier incident in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Could we perhaps (even disingenuously) mark these as "hot words" instead per the recent discussion in the BP? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 05:46, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
 * These wouldn't qualify as "hot words" because there was no sudden viral explosion of their metaphoric usage. --WikiTiki89 05:54, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I admit that I may have jumped the gun in creating those two entries due to the lack of clarity over WT:FICTION. The optimal solution seemed to be to delete them for the time being. However, I actually don't doubt they're both citable. Harry Potter is popular enough that many of its elements have entered collective culture. The issue is locating suitable cites. Winnowing the select few that use the house names metaphorically from those which use them in the context of discussion of all things Potter. That's proving a lot more difficult than I expected. -Cloudcuckoolander (talk) 08:12, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Poe
Re this edit: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Poe&oldid=25734281&diff=prev

I'm not familiar enough with the rules here, but it seems to be the case that popularity of usage is one of the criteria. I've certainly come across the term plenty of times, usually on various blogs dealing with controversial topics. In any case, it's a shortening of Poe's Law, so maybe there's an appropriate way to add a "see also" link to that page? --Naught101 (talk) 04:37, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Need some new templates maybe
Are you still alive? You died on me via e-mail. Anyway, I need some help with a few templates regarding Classical Nahuatl. It has to do mostly with macrons and links again, as I find myself doing things manually again, I though it might be time to pay you a visit. Thanks. —Koszmonávt (talk / contribs) 07:07, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Welcome back
But you came at a bad time. A lot of drama in the BP right now... —CodeCat 00:40, 13 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you. I think my solution to that will be avoiding the BP, then. Really, all I know of what's happened in the last months is whatever template changes get posted on N4E. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 00:44, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

painstick
This is something from Star Trek (so might not meet WT:FICTION): see. The word seems to occur in a very few other sci-fi/fantasy books, for similar devices. Equinox ◑ 17:57, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
 * A brief survey on BGC left me with the impression that it was more generic in nature than the Star Trek version, but I couldn't tell quite how generic, hence my inability to define it. I'm pretty sure it meets the policy, though. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 18:12, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

camīnāta
Could you please create the Latin entry? --WikiTiki89 18:47, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure how best to treat it. L&S only gives a quote from Pliny and decides to assume that it is the past participle of a verb camīnō, but it's so rare that it could just as easily be a one-off adjective, albeit one with an implicit verb that might just as easily exist if anyone else were to use a word this esoteric. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 06:21, 4 September 2014 (UTC)
 * So do you have any ideas for a possible definition it could have had? It has descendants with the meanings "chimney" and "room". --WikiTiki89 12:08, 4 September 2014 (UTC)
 * I have never seen this word before; you can see what L&S say. I suppose that the semantic shift makes some sense. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 20:18, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Talk:albifrons
In retrospect I think you were right to suggest that inflected specific epithets may as well be treated as Latin. Requiring the extra steps of creating Translingual inflection-line templates seems silly. I am leaving the uninflected specific epithets and the genitive forms of pseudo-Latin (SB's term) personal surnames as Translingual. If there were a clear consensus for another solution, I would go that way, but the practical advantage for speeding proper Translingual entries with comprehensible specific epithet information, not present in any existing taxonomic databases that I've seen, seems substantial. I think there are databases, some fairly comprehensive, that have specific epithets, but they are not very convenient for casual users. DCDuring TALK 16:39, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
 * I remain, like you (as far as I know), deeply sceptical of how we can handle Translingual entries without guidelines and demarcations clearer than those that exist at present. I haven't time to do much work on these matters any longer, nor will I for months, but if you create a vote or discussion and leave me a notification here, I will be happy to (briefly) critique, debate, or vote as the situation demands, if it can help lead us to a clear-cut solution on entries like this one. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 21:08, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Some features that reduce the risk are the presence of New Latin labels in many of the debatable Latin adjectives, the small number of Translingual adjectives, and the existence of categories marking entries as using or needing Latin or Translingual specific epithets. If necessary we could reverse almost all the choices made so far fairly quickly. Though I have worked on these for a while I don't really have a preference for the ultimate solution. DCDuring TALK 21:55, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

re: rollback to "kuri"
I came across alternative form "goorie" and couldn't find it in wiktionary but a Google search brings up lots of references linking it to kuri and "mongrel dog" Goadeff (talk)
 * The word goorie is never used in Māori; I do not know how or if it is used in other languages, but a Google search is not sufficient to prove its use for Wiktionary's purposes. Please do not add words in languages you are not comfortable with, and review WT:ATTEST for how we demonstrate that a word is inclusible. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 19:44, 30 September 2014 (UTC)
 * To elaborate a little: the spelling "goorie" looks like the way a native English-speaker who doesn't know anything about Maori would try to represent kuri: it's very easy to mistake a "k" without aspiration for a "g", and Maori "u" rhymes with English words that end in "oo". If you don't know Maori well enough to spot that, you're just spreading other people's mistakes. "Goorie" as an alternative spelling for kuri makes about as much sense as Sumisu for an alternative spelling of Smith, because that's how a native Japanese-speaker might spell it in our alphabet. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:02, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

rebenyu
A Google search has led me to believe that rebenyu may mean something in Tagalog. Since you have experience in Polynesian languages, I thought I'd ask you about it. --WikiTiki89 11:54, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
 * That's like asking you about a word in Albanian because of your expertise in Slavic languages: Tagalog is only very remotely related to anything Polynesian. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:25, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
 * A quick search leads me to believe it's a loan from English revenue. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:33, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
 * If there were no other Indo-Europen speakers around, the Albanian would be the right person to ask. Plus, I thought he'd appreciate the cross-linguistic pun. Anyway, thanks for the answer, it looks like you're right. --WikiTiki89 15:50, 30 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I did take a look at studying Tagalog, and although I did like some parts of the language, overall the orthography and the syntax drove me mad. Tagalog has a lot of English and Spanish borrowings, and this word looks very much not autochthonous. But it seems Chuck already figured all that out. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 17:38, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Yiddish dialects
You and User:Angr may be interested in the Yiddish dialectal vowel table I added to About Yiddish. --WikiTiki89 14:28, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I like it, although I don't know enough to assess it all. We really ought to add those orange links, though. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 20:52, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
 * It's based on information given in Neil G. Jacobs (2005) Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction, which I bought for some light reading. I'm thinking we could make a pronunciation generator based on this table, if only we had a reference for determining which group a vowel in a particular word belongs to, since etymology alone is not reliable enough. --WikiTiki89 22:13, 3 November 2014 (UTC)