Wiktionary:Information desk/2023/September

User Fenakhay abusing authority
user @Fenakhay has reverted my edits on the page بين continuously, with no justification, even though they are well supported by evidence and are helpful to the entry generally. The question is whether "bayna" as a preposition can lose the final -a, the answer to which is no (unless a pronoun is suffixed), because it is itself an accusative construct of baynun, and hence does not further inflect for case. Grammarians are clear on this issue, and this is of high importance for Arabic learners and Arabic students. However, certain individuals have taken a hostile approach to this without justifying their actions to any degree whatsoever. In the case of Fenakhay, he has abused his power to block me from editing this page without referring to either: 1) why my edit was wrong and 2) under which authority he is able to give me a block for my sourced edit without a consensus here. He has advised me to write a complaint on his talk page, which seems to be a scapegoat for him, since he hasn't responded to anything that has been posted there. شاه عباس (talk) 05:27, 3 September 2023 (UTC)


 * There is no "abusing authority" here. You were rightly blocked for edit warring.
 * "He has advised me to write a complaint on his talk page, which seems to be a scapegoat for him, since he hasn't responded to anything that has been posted there."
 * You posted it almost two hours ago. Nobody is on this site 24/7. &mdash; S URJECTION / T / C / L / 08:05, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I wasn't referring to just my message on his talk page, I was referring to the fact that he has answered none of the messages that other people have left either. شاه عباس (talk) 17:18, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * You reverted the page 4 times after 2 people told you you were wrong. You were already edit warring with an unrelated third party before Fenakhay got involved. If two people come and tell you your information in wrong, you really should should've started a discussion then. Also you just messaged him like 2-3 hours ago?? You realize he could be sleeping or just is not on the internet right now?? Why did you jump to the assumption that he was ignoring you? He hasn't even edited since you messaged him, so he obviously isn't even active right now.
 * Also, your note was just a description of the conjugation table under etymology 2. I'm pretty sure you were adding the information under the wrong etymology. Regardless it wasn't need since all that information was already present.  سَمِیر | Sameer  (مشارکت‌ها • با مرا گپ بزن) 08:20, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Next to your username it says "bâ marâ gap bizan", did you write that? It's not grammatically correct. It should be "bâ man...". Just letting you know. شاه عباس (talk) 17:06, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * marâ is more common in afghanistan  سَمِیر | Sameer  (مشارکت‌ها • با مرا گپ بزن) 18:23, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Marâ is not the problem, it's the fact that you're using both râ and bâ. It's either marâ gap bizan or bâ man gap bizan, saying bâ marâ gap bizan is like saying "speak with me to me". شاه عباس (talk) 18:25, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * You clearly have a very superficial grasp of Arabic grammar. is declined in the accusative case because it is a  which are . There is nothing in that grammar book that backs your indeclinability claim. Furthermore, you can say  with  in the  case. About, you wrote  as its plural, which is wrong.  isn't part of the root... it is the case marker. So please, whatever Arabic level you think you have, you don't have it. — Fenakhay ( حيطي · مساهماتي ) 16:18, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * please understand that you're not saying anything that is of any value whatsoever, I want to emphasise this. Bayna does not inflect for case as a preposition/adverb. The instances you are citing are not bayna as a proposition/adverb. Min bayni is treated as one preposition, where the genitive construct of baynun is placed since it is preceded by a preposition. Again, I implore you to find me one example where bayna, not min bayni, is inflection as either bayni or baynu. Or where you have the fictional constructs "baynuna", baynuhum, etc. If you can't find one example in millions of pages of Arabic literature maybe it's because it doesn't exist. I don't know which level of Arabic grammar you think you have mastered, but this is an elementary part of how Nahw is taught. شاه عباس (talk) 17:01, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Furthermore, none of this warranted you blocking me off a page for no reason. The first "editor" was an anonymous IP address, and in none of the cases where my edits were reverted by you did you mention what the reasoning was. Even if you were right (you aren't), blocking someone without a legitimate reasoning is an overt abuse of moderator powers. شاه عباس (talk) 17:03, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah, there is no because it is a, it is declined in the accusative case. You added nothing of value to the entry. — Fenakhay ( حيطي · مساهماتي ) 17:06, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * So it only exists in the accusative and isn't further inflected for case? I thought my edit was wrong, now it's just superfluous? شاه عباس (talk) 17:07, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * It is wrong because you are implying that it is indeclinable, when it is already declined in the accusative because of its function as an adverb of place. — Fenakhay ( حيطي · مساهماتي ) 17:09, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * that's not what I claimed, I clarified that it is the accusative construct of baynun and thus is already declined and can't be declined FURTHER as a preposition, being unable to lose the final fatha unless with -ī attached. Furthermore, the other "expert" who reverted my edit was literally saying that "it does" decline when he reverted my edit. He probably was treating it as a noun, just like yourself a few minutes ago when citing min bayni as a rebuttal. شاه عباس (talk) 17:13, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * That's what anyone would have understood from what you wrote. All nouns/adverbs would lose the final vowel when is attached to them. Should we add a usage notes to every entry because of that?  is from  + . — Fenakhay ( حيطي · مساهماتي ) 17:18, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I have indicated the purpose of my edit as a usage note, and in fact started it with "note:". If you are unhappy with having it on the page, that's fine with me, but you are blocking my access to Wikipedia Library resources over your own personal preference, and you didn't say anything regarding your reasoning until I had to literally bring the matter to the public forums. شاه عباس (talk) 17:22, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * You've engaged in edit warring and you have been quite hostile towards me and other editors because of it. That's enough of a reason. Next time, think before acting. — Fenakhay ( حيطي · مساهماتي ) 17:24, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I wasn't hostile towards you, I was contributing to a page and was blocked with 0 reasoning provided until after the fact (the "edit-warring" part was with someone who was saying that baynu and bayni exist as adverbs btw, and you have already sufficiently admitted that what I was saying isn't wrong). You can't claim not to be abusing authority and say "think before you act" in the same breath, at least not with a straight face! شاه عباس (talk) 17:30, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * You don't have to be factually wrong for your addition to be wrong. If I wrote in an English entry "as an adverb, this is not inflected for gender or number", that would imply that there was something different about this particular word that required a usage note- which there wouldn't be. If you want to play Captain Obvious, don't expect everyone to defer to you.
 * Here's a question: what are the "Wikipedia Library resources" that you consider so important? You're blocked from a single Wiktionary  page. We are not Wikipedia, and our rules are different- for one thing, we have more pages than Wikipedia with fewer contributors or admins, so we don't have as many layers of notification procedures and templates. Fenakhay may not have met all the Wikipedia procedural requirements, but we have all kinds of formatting requirements involving specific types of templates with mandatory language codes that would make no sense at all at Wikipedia. And Fenakhay, as a native speaker who has time to patrol new edits, is a rare resource that we try to not to overtax.
 * You could have made your case on the talk page, or on Fenakhay's talk page, or here, without making inflammatory accusations about vandalism and abuse of authority. Wiktionary is a descriptive dictionary based on usage, not an encyclopedia based on authoritative references- so quoting a grammar didn't mean as much as you thought it did.
 * Your behavior bears all the marks of a tourist who get's offended when the p easants  olice stop them for driving on the wrong side of the road. Not everything you add to an entry is a Word From On High. Please show some manners and some humility. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:11, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * ( Just to clarify what they're talking about since I think there are some wires getting crossed, Wikipedia Library is a collection of free resources available to anyone with an active WMF account in good standing. Apparently access is revoked if you're blocked on any WMF project, which I think is a bit silly if it's not global, but so it goes. IMO it might be worth commuting the full month in this case if they need to use the Library and agree to leave entries like this alone. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 21:26, 3 September 2023 (UTC))
 * : I was unaware of that (or I may have known that, but forgot about it). That makes things much clearer, though I don't think it changes much in the rest of what I had to say. The best solution IMO would be an agreement not to add the text in question until/unless there's consensus at the Tea Room in return for removing the block. This whole mess could have been avoided by first simply asking why they were reverted, rather than "How dare you! I'm going to report you!". Chuck Entz (talk) 22:34, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I have no power to report anyone, I was reported and blocked in silence, with no explanation. I brought the matter here precisely because nobody checks the talk pages for individual entries, and because the talk page of the user in question was desolate, and nobody there can hold anyone accountable. For all I know Fenakhay may be a genius of grammar and eloquence, it doesn't change the fact that the reverts were based on a mistaken notion that treated a prepositional adverb as a noun, and I was emphasising the nature of bayna as not a noun. Even until after I was blocked he was still insisting that my claim was false, until he realised that it wasn't. He, further said, that min bayni is from min+bayna, and cited this as evidence for why I was wrong, when in fact it's from min+baynun, this one is still included in "derived terms" of bayna. I genuinely don't understand how I can be blocked for a claim that isn't false, and restoring my edits when people who had no basis to assume that they were false kept reverting them without offering any explanation whatsoever (except the first time, when the anonymous user was saying the adverb did in fact decline). As I said, I have lost access to Wikipedia Library because one person thought I was wrong (when I wasn't), blocked me without telling me why, and now is saying to me "think before you act". شاه عباس (talk) 04:23, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

Argentine Yiddish words of unknown degree of local usage
This concerns some words used in songs from Argentine Yiddish singer Jevel Katz. In particular,, and  found in the song A tragedye fun a pagarey. Should I add these to Wiktionary even though I'm not sure whether anyone outside of Katz uses/used those terms? Although is probably just an ad-hoc borrowing from  and nothing systematic. Insaneguy1083 (talk) 19:23, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Help removing unsourced "trans woman symbol"
Hi! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trans_woman displays a symbol that purports to refer to "trans female" people. However there's no source provided for this; the only other reference I can find on the internet is https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LGBT_symbols, where it was added without a citation.

To my knowledge this is symbol not in common use. I can't find it used anywhere else on the internet other than Wiki articles, to which it was added by a single user. I've asked a large group of trans people, and the consensus was that (a) nobody had ever seen this symbol before, and (b) it was offensive because of its similarity to the Mars symbol used to represent "male", evoking the common transphobic assertion that trans women are men.

Accordingly I've gone ahead and removed it from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LGBT_symbols on WP:NOCITE grounds. However I'm unable to do the same for https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trans_woman because it's edit-protected. Could someone help make that change? Crispiness (talk) 23:20, 6 September 2023 (UTC)


 * idk about any of the specifics, but I will say this- that Wikimedia Commons is one major route for uncited information to flow onto Wikipedia. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 23:44, 6 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Both the image and ⯱|the relevant entry are by so perhaps they can point to sources. That entry cites McElroy, Signs & Symbols of the World: Over 1,001 Visual Signs Explained, but without a page number, and the relevant section isn't fully accessible on Google Books. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 23:46, 6 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Yeah, unlike e.g. the trans symbol designed by Holly Boswell (which is maybe becoming dated, but has been common), and indeed unlike even the pansexuality P symbol which was discussed a while ago, which was 'citogenesis' (popularized by being added to WP, but actually popularized, to the point that it got taken up and is sometimes used: people make merch and art with it), I haven't managed to find any instances of this symbol yet outside of WMF wikis. It may be a failed 'citogenesis', or just a symbol promulgated by someone outside WP which never took off, but in either case, I don't think it particularly illustrates the word — surely a picture of a trans woman, or a collage of trans women, would be the more logical illustration? — and it doesn't seem to be used enough that we need to be featuring an image of it. If the symbol meets WT:ATTEST, I think we could get by with a link in the See also, no? - -sche (discuss) 01:51, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
 * If there's not sufficient attestation, I have no problem replacing it w something else. But being unable to access a reference isn't in itself reason for removal.
 * BTW, the same thing was done at transwoman, trans man and transman without discussion. The source is the same. kwami (talk) 01:57, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
 * My mistake, I just checked the TOC and the entire section on gender with various similar symbols at pp. 198–201 is in fact accessible and it's not listed in the source. The closest are a Mercury symbol ☿ with arrow instead of cross and another where the arrow at the bottom is barred, so rotated ⚦, both described as relating to hermaphrodites. The only one explicitly listed as transgender appears to be ⚧. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 02:05, 7 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Side note, I don't see a reason for images to be at alt forms (like transman) as opposed to wherever the content is, except perhaps in the rare case that an image illustrates something about the alt form specifically. - -sche (discuss) 02:58, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
 * From my point of view, even if it is attestable, it seems too obscure and uncommon to warrant being included as an illustration for the entry (whose purpose, after all, is to explain the term "trans woman", not to provide documentation of any symbols that have been used to express this idea). I therefore removed it.--Urszag (talk) 03:17, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

What's the address of a grain of sand in a mistral?
So in trying to track down who/how to contact about an unpreviewed badly done edit, I find it was done by a sockpuppet of a banned but now community approved editor, who will never be editing under one username, because they can't return to username Wonderfool, and because they are now explicitly permitted to continue using multiple socks.

Isn't there a specific rule that users should be contactable? Yet now there is no way to initiate discussion with this frequency-hopping gadabout? Since when is cooperative editing frowned on here? Shenme (talk) 03:06, 8 September 2023 (UTC)


 * This is one of many reasons why it is assumed that users will have one account and in the rare event that someone has a good reason to use multiple accounts, they should be declared and for explicit purposes, not just random name hopping across a thousand accounts. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:12, 8 September 2023 (UTC)
 * It didn't used to be hard to contact WF, because he does in fact monitor and respond on the user talk pages for accounts that aren't blocked. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 04:59, 8 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Assumed on Meta, btw, not assumed on Wiktionary. Other Wiktionary users also use multiple accounts out of whim with no real reason for complaint (Victar comes to mind). In any case I don't see why contacting the user to inform them of one specific error is helpful in this case as opposed to just correcting the entry. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 10:47, 8 September 2023 (UTC)


 * I am the frequency-hopping gadabout in question. How may I be of assistance? Jewle V (talk) 18:44, 8 September 2023 (UTC)
 * If it's about that edit in particular, yep, WP acknowledges it was a very sloppy edit! Wonderfool makes a lot of very sloppy errors, but also cleans up thousands of other sloppy errors from other sloppy editors. That's kind of how a wiki works. I hope to see you around more, Shenme :) Jewle V (talk) 18:47, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

ī̆
what is ī̆ in andhī̆kāra कालमैत्री (talk) 14:37, 8 September 2023 (UTC)


 * In Latin, a combined macron and breve over the same vowel means we're not sure what the original vowel length is. I haven't seen it used with other reconstructed languages but my best guess is that it would mean the same thing here too. — Soap — 18:14, 8 September 2023 (UTC)
 * It can also mean that both lengths were used, which I suspect is the meaning in this case, seeing as the vowel 'a' is another alternative. --RichardW57m (talk) 14:26, 12 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I've seen that meaning used too, but in a different context .... somewhere in Encyclopedia Britannica it said "when followed by ō̆". While I recognize that that is a valid meaning just as much as the "we dont know" meaning, I would discourage its use in a dictionary, particularly in the modern era when we have plenty of space on the screen to type out both possible forms, or if not, to use brackets like [ō|ŏ].  You may be right about this case but I would say that's poor practice on their part if so. — Soap — 14:31, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

The mysterious workings of descendants tree
The documentation for template descendants tree does not explain from which data the tree is constructed. I am trying to understand why is not listed in the Descendants section of, while  is. --Lambiam 14:39, 9 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Desctree pulls all descendants from the target page, so anything "after" it. Consider the West Slavic tree of Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/domъ, where pulls all the descendants on the Old Polish lemma, that being Polish and Silesian. Vininn126 (talk) 14:44, 9 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Unless I'm missing something the desctree template isn't used at, those descendants have been entered manually. It is used at , where it reproduces the data from the Yiddish page. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 15:46, 9 September 2023 (UTC)
 * What am I missing - Togo isn't even mention on the Hebrew page. Vininn126 (talk) 15:48, 9 September 2023 (UTC)
 * The problem is that Dutch received the word by two different routes, according to our etymologies: treef from, which was a borrowing from the Yiddish, and treife directly from the Yiddish. Since trefu came directly from the Yiddish word, it should have been listed in the descendants section there.
 * This brings up an oddity in our Sranan Tongo coverage: there are a number of Sranan Togo words said in our etymologies to be borrowed from Yiddish, but doesn't mention Yiddish at all. I can only guess that there were bilingual English/Yiddish speakers present during the British colonial period, or that someone has been connecting the wrong dots. Chuck Entz (talk) 17:29, 9 September 2023 (UTC)
 * See ; however, the fact that the settlers were Sephardim suggests that the term may have been borrowed directly from Hebrew. Trefu is currently the sole inhabitant of Category:Sranan Tongo terms borrowed from Yiddish. --Lambiam 20:47, 9 September 2023 (UTC)
 * While van Donselaar’s Woordenboek van het Surinaams-Nederlands mentions Yiddish, the more scholarly Etymologisch woordenboek by van Veen and van der Sijs gives Hebrew as the sole donor. --Lambiam 21:09, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

How to add a category to a category
I am trying to add the category French unconjugated words with irregular pronunciations to the French language category. I can't find any page with a list of daughter categories, they all just say autocat. Dngweh2s (talk) 02:55, 10 September 2023 (UTC)
 * If this category is to exist then I would suggest following the example of Category:Russian terms with irregular pronunciations; ie add




 * to the daughter category page. I would also suggest renaming the category to Category:French terms with irregular pronunciations ("terms" is used to mean lemmas in category names, which I think is what you mean by "unconjugated words"). However, a problem with the idea of this category is that French does not really have a "regular" system of spelling in the same way that Russian does. If the category is going to exist it could be added to pages automatically by fr-IPA like the Russian one is, but I'm not sure if that would be appropriate. See the second table on that template page for other examples of "irregular" French pronunciations which are not in the category at the moment. Weylaway (talk) 18:43, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Nuh
Nuh is also identified as a name of a clan in Thetsumi Village under Chakhesang Tribe of ethnic Naga people in Northeastern part of India. Renilo77 (talk) 18:03, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

multiple references
At shifter, I want to put all the references together on one loine. I remember there was something like refname for this, but I forget how to use it. Jewle V (talk) 10:02, 12 September 2023 (UTC)


 * These should be supported with quotes, but I made the change. Vininn126 (talk) 10:10, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

German section of Haare
The English section of Haare refers to the German section of Haare, which does not exist, resulting in the same page being displayed with a different URL. —Coroboy (talk) 11:24, 12 September 2023 (UTC)
 * What page is that? Haare looks okay to me. But in general, we sometimes get ahead of ourselves, especially in etymology sections, by linking to something that doesn't yet exist.  This isn't ideal, but the way the etymology sections are coded makes it easier to have a link than to have no link, so we would need to manually suppress the links otherwise.  (And they don't display as red links because they're links to the same page.) Also, it may help encourage active editors to fill in the blanks.  — Soap — 15:55, 12 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah, red links are an implicit invitation to contribute and not a bad thing. IMO probably a good thing in fact that we don't have the Wikipedia phenomenon of people constantly delinking red links because they just don't like the look of them. It would be nice to have the orange links gadget extended to links within the same page—I originally wrote that the same applies to them but I realise they actually don't appear in that case. It might be too much overhead though. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 00:16, 13 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Orange links not working for the same page frequently confuses me, so I too would appreciate their being made to work. --RichardW57m (talk) 12:04, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Possible error in Turkish conjugation template(s)
I was looking at. I saw that the 2nd person plural present aorist is given as. While I don't speak Turkish, I have some knowledge of grammar and phonotactics. The nz ending looks unusual, especially comparing the other 2nd person forms. It is also very rare on Google, so I strongly suspect that the correct form is. -- If so, please correct the template and also check the other templates. Thank you. 88.65.40.9 21:47, 12 September 2023 (UTC)
 * It seems to be affecting that particular verb, so it's possible the template parameters were entered wrong. The template itself seems to be working well on similarly spelled verbs such as bulamak. But I still have to leave this up to others to figure out what precisely needs to be fixed .... I'm not going to trust myself to just copy over the other template, change the letters, and assume it's right. Thanks for pointing this out. Best wishes, — Soap — 22:09, 12 September 2023 (UTC)
 * It turned out to be an easily fixable typo in Template:tr-conj-v. --Lambiam 15:32, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

"epic kung-fu style"
I was surfing the internet when I stumbled upon a screenshot of the article for huh. The fourth audio file is described as "epic kung-fu style", which I believe would go against the style guide, even though I couldn't find anything exactly. What should I do about this? I opened up a talk topic, but I don't know what to do further. Evenite (talk) 03:28, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I removed it for now ( in case we want it back) though it does maybe correspond to a martial arts noise sense that's missing at the entry atm if it's attestable—compare ha. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 09:14, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
 * It was originally added by User:Wonderfool, a notorious but good-humoured and likeable vandal. Then re-added by (also good-humored and likeable) non-vandal User:Ioaxxere. P. Sovjunk (talk) 08:50, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Arabic Conj Table for Uzbek Wikt
Hello! Uzbek wiktionary lacks Arabic conjugation table. Please inform me how can I add it to Uzb. Wiktionary? Yokubjon Juraev (talk) 04:08, 17 September 2023 (UTC)


 * @Yokubjon Juraev just copy and paste the text in the templates. You can find the template name while editing and find the template by looking up "template: ", then you can copy the text and make the same template page on Uzbek wiktionary. You only really need to copy and paste, there's really no reason to change any of the code.  سَمِیر | Sameer  (مشارکت‌ها • کتی من گپ بزن) 07:58, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Hello Sameer! Thank you for your reply! I tried doing it but I couldn’t as I am still trying to wrap my head around some things. There seems to be 2 very different things in English Wiktionary: modules and templates. Arabic conjugation code seems to be written in modules, not templates. And I think I must create modules. But I have never encountered modules on Uzbek Wiktionary. Another problem I am trying to figure out is how to make modules and templates into one functional unit. Yokubjon Juraev (talk) 21:46, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
 * @Yokubjon Juraev Modules and templates do different things so they can't be combined into one thing. After looking at it, the Arabic conjugation module depends on a lot of other modules... So you would have to port over a bunch of modules... It might be a bit difficult. I wish I could do more to help but it seems like Uzbek Wiktionary is lacking a lot of infrastructure.
 * You can try to copy over
 * Module:utilities,
 * Module:links,
 * Module:ar-utilities,
 * Module:languages, and
 * Module:ar-nominals (and all the templates mentioned on that page)
 * But just a warning, those modules have modules they depend on too, you might end up having to port over a lot. Unfortunately, that's all I can say to help you. Without a lot of the base infrastructure we have, many tools used here are of little use on Uzbek wiktionary.  سَمِیر | Sameer  (مشارکت‌ها • کتی من گپ بزن) 04:50, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the reply! I think those modules for Uzbek Wiktionary must be created on Wiki Media. Am I right? Yokubjon Juraev (talk) 17:32, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Voicing of Mandarin
Most Mandarin Chinese consonants are standardly notated as voiceless, but English typically pronounces many of them in a way that's (notated as) voiced, even when the voiceless sounds exist in English. Why? Many examples could be explained as spelling pronunciations based on the pinyin (whence also the /j/ and /w/ in yi and wu syllables that aren't present in Chinese), but it seems difficult to explain them all that way: for example, nothing about "ui" suggests it should be read as /weɪ/ (pinyin i is otherwise /ɪ/ or /i/, u is otherwise /u/ or similar, and /eɪ/ is expressed by ei), so I would expect (and do find!) anglicized pronunciations of Guizhou like /gu.i-/ ~ /gwi-/ ... and I might expect that if someone were knowledgeable enough about Mandarin and making enough of an effort to mimic Mandarin that they were pronouncing the ui part of gui as /weɪ/, they would also pronounce the g the Mandarin way (/k/), but instead the usual pronunciation is /ɡ/. It's not just English, either; French too has /ɡɥi.dʒo/ for Mandarin /ku̯eɪ̯⁵¹ ʈ͡ʂoʊ̯⁵⁵/ and /be.dʒiŋ/ for /peɪ̯²¹⁴⁻²¹ t͡ɕiŋ⁵⁵/, German has /dʒuˈaŋ/ for Mandarin /ʈ͡ʂu̯ɑŋ⁵¹/, etc. Is it just a phonemic notation issue, is the actual phonetic difference between Mandarin /p/, /t/(-/ʈ͡ʂ/-...), etc and English/French/German /b/, /d/(-/dʒ/-...), etc slighter than the notations would suggest? - -sche (discuss) 23:17, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
 * It's because the salient distinction in Mandarin is actually in general aspiration vs. non-aspiration, and in English voiced consonants are not aspirated whereas unvoiced ones are (in stressed/initial positions), so it works well enough for English-speakers to pretend it's a voicing distinction. Unlike the vowel sound /weɪ/—and judging from my experience in Mandarin and Korean classes—aspiration isn't something English-speakers intuitively understand, whereas voicing is. Another way of putting it is that in fact the native initial sound in "Guizhou" does not exist in English, inasmuch as initial unaspirated [k] is not a standard feature in English. Given that Mandarin doesn't have /ɡ/ an English-speaker enunciating it with [ɡ] will be more readily understood than if they enunciate English /k-/ = [kʰ-], in which case they are pronouncing a different phoneme in Mandarin. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 23:29, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Standard English has a combination of aspiration and vowel length distinctions for oral stops instead of voicing distinctions, so for many English speakers, the difference between Mandarin initial "b" and "p" is identical to the difference between English initial "b" and "p". Whether "voiced" stops are actually voiced or not doesn't determine whether such English speakers will perceive them as voiced (I believe the "voiced" vs. "voiceless" terminology comes from other European languages such as French or Latin). The romanization with its apostrophes doesn't make much sense to English speakers because we don't think in terms of aspiration, but  seems perfectly natural to us for the pronunciation of stops because it seems to have been designed with languages like English in mind.
 * As for Mandarin "gui": most English speakers will voice the stop due to the folowing semivowel, but won't notice that they're doing so. If someone managed to pronounce the stop as voiceless in that cluster, it would still sound like a "g" to us. We do have voicing distinctions in fricatives and affricates, so the equivalence breaks down somewhat for sounds like Mandarin "z" and "c". The different "j"/"ch" sounds such as "zh"/"j" and "ch"/"q" also don't really match English, either. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:38, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm curious about this. Re "If someone managed to pronounce the stop as voiceless", English-speakers seem to have no trouble producing /kw/ in e.g. Quinn, and telling it apart from e.g. Gwen (a minimal pair for pin-pen merging speakers; another is guar vs the Southern folk pronunciation of queer). More generally, these explanations would make a lot of sense if English-speakers were regularly hearing Mandarin speakers pronounce minimal pairs (or at least, words where /k/ and /kʰ/, /p/ and /pʰ/ etc contrast) and were then trying to keep those pairs distinct in English... but (1) are English speakers really thinking about whether there's another town somewhere called 痰桶 with /tʰ/ that they need to distinguish 丹東 /t/ from?, and (2) English-speakers seem to have no problem collapsing other Mandarin phonemes, e.g. /t͡ɕ/ and /ʈ͡ʂ/ seem to both typically become /d͡ʒ/ (likewise /t͡ɕʰ/, /ʈ͡ʂʰ/ collapse to /t͡ʃ/; /ɕ/, /ʂ/ to /ʃ/). (Maybe pinyin g vs k being more seemingly-intelligible than pinyin x or j is the determining factor after all...) - -sche (discuss) 03:57, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I think meant 'as voiceless unaspirated'. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:41, 20 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it's harder to think of minimal pairs for unaspirated voiceless and unaspirated voiced consonants in English (one might be vocal/Vogel (surname), though even then the latter one tends to drop the schwa completely and have syllabified l). Ultimately it's of course from natural reading of the pinyin, but above I was mainly responding to 's point about how even people who are more familiar with Chinese pronunciation will use /ɡ/—it's a passable approximation of the aspiration distinction. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 12:12, 20 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Interestingly, Tao seems to have been borrowed early enough that people initially retained the /t/, only to later switch it to /d/ to make the pronunciation more of a [not-the-]spelling pronunciation (not just we but also other dictionaries say that the spelling Tao, and not just the spelling Dao, can now also be pronounced with /d/). - -sche (discuss) 13:21, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

The page "stressen" needs an entry for German.
The German verb "stressen" is referenced on the page "gestresst". —Coroboy (talk) 12:27, 20 September 2023 (UTC)
 * ✅ Jberkel 13:02, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Quote or cite?
Was thinking of adding to cyka blyat. But the title, well, I'm not sure it's quoting the term exactly so thought I'd ask for a second opinion. Paper is paywalled. Or, if anyone has journal access and wants to find a passage to quote from it, be my guest! 47.155.41.104 23:00, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Gallery of birds
I'd like all the spinetails pictures to be neatly presented, please. I've asked this before, but forget the trick. Thanks in advance. If any other taxonomic nerd wants to improve the page, and add a whole bunch more spinetails to it, and modernify the definitions, be my guest! P. Sovjunk (talk) 08:52, 24 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Is it necessary to have so many? This is a dictionary, not an encyclopedia, so I think we should have one or two images and leave the rest to the pages for the individual species. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 16:48, 24 September 2023 (UTC)


 * I just really like spinetails... P. Sovjunk (talk) 18:45, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Stubs?
How does one mark a newly-created entry as a stub? From the French Wiktionary's Modèle:ébauche I landed on Template:stub but that serves only to mark a template as being a stub (the wikidata will need correcting). I went through the Help and Template categories without any luck. Help? Urhixidur (talk) 12:03, 26 September 2023 (UTC)
 * We don’t really use the concept of ‘stubs’ here. If an entry is missing some information that’s desired, just add the appropriate request template – see Category:Request templates. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 12:59, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

tetracussate phyllotaxy
tetracussate (Gr. tetra-,  a group of four +  -cussate f. decussate )   Leaf arrangement (phyllotaxy) with each whorl of four displaced to the gaps between the leaves of the preceeding whorl  (in the manner of decussate) so that the leaves fall into eight ranks (longitudinal rows) overall, each displaced by 45° from its neighbouring row; a rare arrangement in conifers found among others, in Callitris pancheri syn. Neocallitropsis pancheri,, cones of Microcachyrys tetragona, and some shoots of Callitris macleayana, this arrangement does not allow production of the flattened sprays of branchlets found in some crisscross-leaved species (cf. crisscross, decussate, tricussate). Source: Eckenwalder, James E.: ''Conifers of the World. The Complete Reference''. 2009, Timber Press, Portland, OR / London, ISBN 978-0-88192-974-4 Iain C R (talk) 02:04, 27 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Are you trying to make a new entry in the dictionary? —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:07, 27 September 2023 (UTC)
 * . RichardW57 (talk) 11:50, 30 September 2023 (UTC)