Wiktionary:Information desk/2023/July

Arabic Language
Is there a way that I can see the meaning of a word pop up in Arabic language when looking something up. In other words, If I am looking up what does a "Dictionary" means then I want to see the meaning in both Arabic and English at the same time.

Thank you,

Basem Khawaja Bkhawaja64 (talk) 23:32, 1 July 2023 (UTC)


 * : no, but you can always go to Arabic Wiktionary and see if they have an entry there. Since we have almost 7 1/2 million entries, some of which which are being revised at any moment pretty much every hour of the day, translating them would be simply impossible.
 * I suppose you could use Google Translate or some other machine translator to view our entries, but you can't count on their accuracy- especially with less common words. Some of our definitions are difficult to read even for native English speakers- after machine translation, I can guarantee that some of them would become total gibberish. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:20, 2 July 2023 (UTC)


 * If you flip the toggle Hide translations / Show translations in the side bar (under Visibility) to Show translations and keep it in that state, all you have to do to see the translation of an English word you have looked up (provided we have a translation) is search for “Arabic” on the page. --Lambiam 17:12, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

About ":"
Hello. I have a question about colon. In the orthography of Lhao Vo, a Burmish language spoken in China and Myanmar, the colon can be used as a tone maker for low tone, for example, "lo:" for /lō/ ("tiger"). I found that it may cause ambiguity and almost always treated as sth else, in the case of "lo:", Lao language Wiktionary. Only when there's no link with the same spelling, it would be treated as a lemma. Is there anything I can do to avoid this, formating them just texts, rather than links to versions in other languages of Wiktionary?

Thank you for any help.

Janinga Chang (talk) 07:23, 5 July 2023 (UTC)


 * There are some possibilities - formal check would require some tedious delving into the Unicode Character Database and the Unicode Line-Breaking Algorithm. In your question, you are using  U+003A COLON, the ASCII colon.  The likeliest solution is to use U+A789 MODIFIER LETTER COLON instead, thus spelling the word "lo&#xa789;".  Note that you will need to copy the modifier letter from a display for most uses on Wiktionary - the escape sequence & # x a 7 8 9 ; will sometimes (often?) not be interpreted correctly by templates.  If you can roll your own keyboard, this won't be too difficult. Here is a template-ready string: "lo꞉". --RichardW57 (talk) 12:43, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Agreed. That is the purpose of U+A789. Similarly, the loʼ and loˮ tones should be typeset as U+02BC and U+02EE if they're intended to be curly, as it appears they are from the Lhao Vo website. You shouldn't use quotation marks for those, because it can cause problems to use what Unicode defines as punctuation for letters, as you discovered for the colon.
 * One other point, though: IPA transcription should be IPA. There are no numbers in IPA. Thus *kʰui³⁵ should be either /kʰǔi/ or /kʰui꜔꜒/. Since it would appear there are only 4 tones, the first option would probably be the way to go. kwami (talk) 22:04, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much to both of you for your kind reply!
 * I'll try correcting Lhao Vo tone markers mentioned in Pela lemmas by me.
 * Janinga Chang (talk) 03:20, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Changing Translingual to a Specific Language
Moved to WT:Beer parlour/2023/July.

Using words as quotations for letters
Moved to WT:Grease pit/2023/July. --RichardW57 (talk) 03:12, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Moving pages creates unwanted redirects
Based on the discussion here, we decided to remove vowel accents from words in Lushootseed. I started moving some pages, but then it created redirects. I assumed these were okay since they were automatically created, but as was pointed out to me, it probably goes against WT:REDIR. So, should these redirect pages be deleted? Should we just remove the redirect command and leave the page blank? Any advice would be appreciated. AdJHu (talk) 16:03, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Admins have the ability to move pages without leaving redirects. It might be worth asking an admin to carry out the page moves since it sounds like they'd have to delete the redirects anyway. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 16:54, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
 * But WT:RFM says move anyway, with the implication that one then requests deletion of the redirect. --RichardW57m (talk) 13:10, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
 * And one can edit the redirect to replace its redirection by an invocation of speedy, which should sit there until ad admin deletes or decided there might be an argument for keeping the redirect. --RichardW57m (talk) 15:09, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

ย้อน issues
I have a number of issues with the word ย้อน, and I'm not sure how to progress them. Please advise if this is the wrong forum.

The one issue I can progress is that I suspect that is not actually Central Thai, but rfv-sense will handle that.

The other issues are:

1. I can find the word in a Lao-English dictionary with senses and uses not on the SEALang dictionary, but it's Becker's, which sanely does not distinguish North Eastern Thai and Laotian Lao. Can I quote that for both and let RfV sort it out if challenged? --RichardW57 (talk) 09:33, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

2. I want to take the etymology to the tea room. How do I leave a note on the main space page that a discussion has been initiated in the tea room? --RichardW57 (talk) 09:33, 23 July 2023 (UTC)