Wiktionary:Information desk/2015/March

Please translate Latin to English
SI QUIS VINO EIUS GENERIS UTI AUDEAT CELERITER MORIATUR. EODEM DIE FILIUS EIUS NATUS EST ET MORTUUS EST.
 * Non est forum translationum. Translation requests quaeris. —CodeCat 20:09, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

What to do when I accidently entered something in upper case
I added a new entry ("Monthly meeting") which really should be lower case ("monthly meeting"). I don't know how to fix this blunder now that it has been saved. Kiwima (talk) 02:41, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
 * You need to move the entry to the lower-case spelling. The menu option for doing that tends to be hidden in a menu labeled something meaningless like "More", but you should have it somewhere.
 * This will leave a redirect behind, which we try to avoid in most cases, but you can add a template to the redirect page to bring it to our attention, and an admin will delete it. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:59, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Keyboard
How do you guys type all of these characters of various languages? Are you using a software or the your windows input? Im just curious.
 * Windows allows you to set up your keyboard to input alternative "alphabets" from the standard keyboard (In Windows 8 - Control panel/Clock, language and Region/Language/Change input methods). So for example I can move from the "Roman alphabet" to the «ελληνικό αλφάβητο» (Greek) at the touch of a key.  &mdash; Saltmarsh συζήτηση-talk 21:55, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
 * There are other ways, too. There's a box below the text box when you're editing a page that allows you to click to insert special characters. I also use the Windows utility; for IPA I use the Transliterator add-on for Firefox, and for Burmese I use a Myanmar character picker. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 11:22, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Translation Request
Hi, I don't mean to be a bother but is the translation request page being monitored? I've put In two sentences in latin a few days ago and it has yet to be translated. Could someone check that? Thanks!.
 * You could be a bit more patient and less demanding? Nobody here has to translate it if they don't want to. —CodeCat 13:38, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Do we have a context label for sectarian slurs?
The IP Formerly Known As Pass A Method added rafidah, which is very rare in English, but does seem to have some usage among English-speaking Sunni Muslims as a sectarian slur against Shiites. I thought it would be a good idea to use a context label to indicate this highly-restricted context, but I couldn't think of any. We do have "ethnic slur", but religious differences aren't necessarily ethnic ones. I'm sure we can find lots of terms to use this on, though papist, heathen and Islamofascist are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:54, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
 * We can go with sectarian slur or religious slur (more common). — Ungoliant (falai) 13:43, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Other examples are Prod and its synonyms. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:43, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

citation
I would like to know how to cite the information that I need to use for a research paper. The information I found is on sugar.

string
I added in theism.

I added in theaism and in theinism.

When I click the links in theaism and in theinism, I get taken to the top of the theism page.

Should it scroll down the page to the actual sense or stay at the top of the page? Should I just craft a bare link? —BoBoMisiu (talk) 16:39, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Use : . —CodeCat 17:12, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
 * That makes sense. I couldn't find that in the documentation. TVM. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 17:21, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Nahuatl inflection
As far as I looked around, no Nahuatl word had an inflection table (e.g.: tlācohtli). One might argue, that an inflection table isn't needed if a few forms are mentioned (e.g. for normal pure Latin words just nom. sg., gen. sg., for German words nom. sg., gen. sg., nom. pl., for normal regular English words nom. sg.). But as there are inflection tables for some languages, this argument isn't valid.

So, accourding to [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Nahuatl_grammar] and compared with some basic grammar information on some web sites and in a book it should be like this: -07:42, 27 March 2015 (UTC), added by IP
 * In general the affix -yo would be missing, like "nonac" (my meat) & "nonacayo" (my meat which is a part of me, my own flesh). In case of "tlācohtli" (slave) this maybe doesn't make sense ("my slave which is a part of me" &c.), but maybe it can be used (similar to monarchic 1. ps. pl. "we"/"our").
 * In pillé resp. pilli it is stated that pillé is the vocative of pille. Besides that entry I haven't heard of "(grammatical) cases" in case of Nahuatl anywhere (i.e. it might be wrong), and it seems like Nahuatl has only two cases, subject and object (at least when exluding possessive/genitive like it's also done in some English grammar books). But maybe a vocative does exists or does exists for some words (like some but not all Latin words have a locative case).

Question about adding obsolete forms.
I have a little question about adding obsolete forms. There was a major spelling change in Swedish in 1906 where a lot of words were changed. Therefore I like to add this to the entries with the modern spelling:

Alternative forms


So, should I put it like that above or like this?:

Alternative forms



 * Portuguese has the same issue. What I do is use just in the alternative forms section of the main entry, and add a more detailed description in the definition of the obsolete form. — Ungoliant (falai) 16:28, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

How to find language codes?
I'm sorry, I have to vent my frustration. All I wanted was copy etymology information for one word (neume) from Wikipedia.

Of course I didn't expect it to be a simple copy and paste operation. I was prepared for the fact that the format is standardized differently from Wikipedia, and when I saw that the templates and  expect language codes, it didn't strike me as a problem. How wrong I was!

There was no link to the possible values anywhere, neither in the template documentation, nor in the editing help, nor, for that matter, a list of at least the most common ones in the "Advanced" editing features. After a long and frustrating search (involving several misleading steps, such as when the template description has Easter egg links marked "language codes" and "language families"), I finally arrived at List of families. Now that page doesn't list "medieval Latin" under that name, so I searched for the word "Latin". That turns out to be impractical, since it occurs many times in the "Scripts" column. Then I had what I thought was a clever idea: Well, I thought, "middle English" and "middle French" are "enm" and "frm", respectively, let's look for "lam". Wrong again! That stands for "Lamba", and there's nothing anywhere near that looks like medieval Latin. Then I realized that the table is sortable, and I happen to know the family; I'll just sort by that! But no, that doesn't work since the table is split in alphabetically, which makes the sorting pointless.

So I'm giving up now; I left the original Wikipedia text as a hidden comment so someone with more experience can convert the text to the proper layout later. SebastianHelm (talk) 07:04, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
 * You can simply type "Medieval Latin" as the language code (it's not a language of its own, so it doesn't have a proper language code - see List of languages/special). I've cleaned up the entry. Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:00, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Probably the easiest way to find this out on your own would have been to go to Category:English terms derived from Medieval Latin and see how an existing entry does it. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 09:56, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I had a similar problem when I first started. It was not clear to me what the set of non-ISO 639 codes included, until I read Etymology (which is only a draft). I still see a disconnect between, for example, Medieval Latin as a code but Latin as the language on the entry page of a Medieval Latin etyl coded word. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 15:31, 30 March 2015 (UTC), modified 17:07, 30 March 2015 (UTC) to add my username.
 * When writing template documentation, I always include a link to Languages in there. Something like what I did at Template:number box. —CodeCat 15:51, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Good to know, nevertheless, Languages is "a policy think tank" that may change; but the Latin probably will remain stable and not be usable in or  or most other templates which require the ISO codes. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 17:05, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, everyone - lots of good suggestions; that helps me already. Now I wonder if some of this could be included in the editing UI, so other new users can find it easily. On my monitor, there's plenty of space next to "Advanced - Special characters - Help". It seems to me this is more important than "Advanced", so how about inserting it before "Advanced"? If that's not possible, how about under Help, among the first three entries (Formatting/Links/Headings), for relatively easy discovery? SebastianHelm (talk) 23:50, 30 March 2015 (UTC)