Wiktionary talk:About Old Church Slavonic

Я in Old Church Slavonic
There are quite a few terms in OCS on Wiktionary that use the letter Я for 'ja'. However, as far as I know, that letter didn't actually exist at the time OCS was written. Ya (Cyrillic) explains that it developed as a scribal variant of Ѧ, which stood for a nasal vowel 'ę' which later developed into 'ja' in many Slavic languages. So it is a bit like distinguishing i/v and j/u in Latin. There is a big difference though: Ѧ itself is still used in OCS in its original form and sound 'ę', while the letter Ꙗ was used in OCS to represent the sound 'ja' and Ѩ stood for 'ję'. So using Я in those words seems like an anachronism. Should our OCS terms be moved to their OCS-era spellings, or are the spellings with Я actually attested in the original manuscripts? 15:42, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I think we should be using ꙗ whenever the OCS sound was [ja], ѧ whenever it was [ę] (i.e. [ɛ̃]) and ѩ whenever it was [ję] (i.e. [jɛ̃]). I'm not sure to what extent these get confused in the manuscripts, and a certain number of s may be necessary, but I think the main lemma should reflect the historically correct letter, meaning я shouldn't be used for OCS at all. —Angr 22:06, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
 * OCS spelling apparently followed a rule that any front vowel not preceded by a consonant had a j- inserted before it automatically (apparently there were no vowel-initial words?). So that would have eliminated most use cases for ѩ, and I'm not sure how widely it was used. OCS spelling was far from consistent and may often reflect dialectal pronunciation rather than normalised 'reconstructed' pronunciation. I am quite sure that я did not occur in OCS as it was just a variant of ѧ, but it's possible that words later spelled with ѧ/я etymologically should have ѧ, ꙗ or ѣ, which were or became [ja] in various dialects (but differently in each). So we would need to find out the etymological origin of our current words with я before we can move them. 22:54, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
 * ѩзꙑкъ is an example of a word spelled with ѩ. How many OCS words do we have spelled with я? It shouldn't be hard to find or figure out which letter is the right one. Looking through Category:Old Church Slavonic nouns it seems most entries with я were created by Ivan Štambuk. Maybe he could be prevailed upon to help put them right. —Angr 16:36, 19 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Archiving as stale. Feel free to move whatever pages need to be moved, if any still need to be moved. - -sche (discuss) 01:43, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Relationship to Bulgarian
Discussed at some length at Etymology scriptorium/2017/July. - -sche (discuss) 04:49, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Relationship to Old Russian (Old East Slavic)
Some scholar use term "East Old Church Slavonic" for Old East Slavic, emphasizing the fact that it is merely a redaction/recension of the same, mutually understandable language. So I wonder, is it ok in some cases to quote the text from the Old Russian recension to illustrate the use of an OCS term? --Mladifilozof (talk) 14:20, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Presence of palatalization marks in page titles
User:Огньметъка (whose user page extremely annoyingly is a redirect) has been moving pages to include the palatalization mark (as in поганꙑн҄и) in the page title. I'm 99% positive this is the wrong thing to do but I can't find the specific discussion about what the normalization conventions are. Can one of you comment? Thanks! Benwing2 (talk) 03:02, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't know the specific discussion either but it's in the links themselves links to египьтѣнꙑни without the symbols. The symbols should not be in the title. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 04:06, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Are palatalization marks in title pages forbidden? o.o
 * I thought that I could maybe first create a page without palatalization marks and then turn it into a redirect so that both
 * 1. a person who types the word in without diacritics / a person who clicks on a wiktionary link
 * and
 * 2. a person who types the word in with diacritics
 * get directed to the same page that correctly displays the palatalization. Is this wrong?
 * I had no clue that palatalization marks were not allowed in page titles and I can't find anything about it in Appendix:Old_Cyrillic_script
 * I assumed it'd be the right thing to do as they are a regular part in regular paper dictionaries and since other languages on dictionary require diacritics in page titles.
 * I apologize if I'm mistaken. No harm was meant. --Огньметъка (talk) Огньметъка (talk) 09:47, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Certain diacritics are not forbidden but they are to be used in the headword, not the page title. For OCS, the headword currently requires to use the parameter head but not for Bulgarian, e.g. in the entry, it's the 1st unnamed parameter (unnamed) . No need for redirects, just one correct entry. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 12:13, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
 * @User:Atitarev: I see, I wasn't aware. Should we maybe put it in Appendix:Old_Cyrillic_script so as to avoid other contributors repeating that mistake? And should I go back to redirect all pages with the diacritic in their title to ones without? Also may I inquire as to what the reasoning behind allowing some but not all diacritics is? Does the same logic go for titlo as well? --Огньметъка (talk) Огньметъка (talk) 14:06, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
 * It seems you need to reverse what the main entries are and what the redirects are. I've just changed - you can see that it links to поустꙑни (without the diacritics). You can see what diacritics are removed by testing the links with templates and languages codes. The headword contains the diacritics: . I've left a redirect behind when moving the page: поустꙑн҄и. : FYI. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 23:22, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, we need to reverse all of these page moves and restore the head parameter onto the moved pages where it has been removed. For some of them it may not be possible for non-admins to rename them onto the old page because there's been another commit (esp. User:JackBot runs automatically and tries to correct double redirects, which in this case only makes things worse). In that case, I or another admin will need to delete the redirect that's in the way. There should not be a redirect left behind that contains the diacritic in it, so when you move the page back, please make a list of all the redirect pages with diacritics that get left behind (e.g. поустꙑн҄и) so that I can delete them. Thanks!
 * As for documenting this, yes I agree we need to document this somewhere like Appendix:Old Cyrillic script. The general principle here is we don't lemmatize page titles using diacritics that aren't usually written in the primary sources (i.e. we give the page a title that does not include these diacritics). Hence for example, stress marks in Russian and macrons in Latin aren't in the page titles, but are found in the headwords on the respective pages, and are automatically stripped out of links to those pages. (For example, if I write, the result is ; note how it displays вода́ with an accent but links to вода without the accent.) Contrarily, we do include acute accents in Spanish page titles, macrons in Latvian page titles, acute and circumflex accents in Ancient Greek titles, etc. because in all of these cases, the diacritics are standardly written in primary sources and are considered mandatory. There are occasional exceptions here; for example, in Russian, we do normally lemmatize pages containing ё even though in primary sources this is normally written as е without the diacritic. This follows other dictionaries, which universally write such words with ё. In cases like this, the page without the diacritic is created as a soft redirect to the page with the diacritic; for example, дергать is a soft redirect to дёргать. ("Soft redirect" means if you visit the page дергать, it tells you to visit the page дёргать using a message such as Alternative spelling of or something more specific. "Hard redirect" means that if you go to the page, it automatically redirects you to the other page in your browser. We tend to avoid hard redirects because individual pages contain multiple languages, and sometimes we need the page to exist as a lemma for another language. An example is елка, which contains a Macedonian lemma as well as a soft redirect to the Russian lemma ёлка.) So for OCS we need page titles to not contain the palatalization diacritic, but the headword should contain the version with the diacritic. We don't want page titles that contain the palatalization diacritic, even as soft redirects, because the automatic diacritic stripping will make it difficult to link to them (and because the palatalization diacritics are not so easy to enter on most keyboards). Benwing2 (talk) 00:21, 22 July 2022 (UTC)
 * OK, I went ahead and undid all the "fixes" by User:JackBot. You still can't move pages onto them without deleting the destination first but at least the bad changes are undone. BTW if you're wondering which pages you moved, you can look at your contributions using the link in the upper right hand corner or by using this link: Benwing2 (talk) 00:26, 22 July 2022 (UTC)
 * @User:Benwing2
 * > please make a list of all the redirect pages with diacritics that get left behind (e.g. поустꙑн҄и) so that I can delete them. Thanks!
 * I see, of course. Most of them were just the ones containing the -ꙑн҄и suffix but there are some other ones like кръчьмар҄ь... I'll have to, as you said, look at my contributions menu
 * > The general principle here is we don't lemmatize page titles using diacritics that aren't usually written in the primary sources
 * > There are occasional exceptions here; for example, in Russian, we do normally lemmatize pages containing ё even though in primary sources this is normally written as е without the diacritic. This follows other dictionaries, which universally write such words with ё.
 * I'm sorry if I'm terribly mistaken but isn't that the case for OCS too? All of the dictionaries(Андрей Бояджиев's Старобългарска читанка; sofia uni's histdict; gorazd) I use properly write the palatalizing diacritic and from the few primary sources I've read, that seems to be the norm as well. Admitedly I mainly encounter primary sources when searching for quotes to add to the wiktionary pages so maybe I'm just not exposed enough.
 * Also what do about words like солоун҄ѣнинъ? Treating the canonical form of the word without the diacritic feels really off to me...
 * > You still can't move pages onto them without deleting the destination first but at least the bad changes are undone.
 * Really? I just moved богꙑн҄и back to богꙑни without touching the destination page first without a problem.
 * Thanks! --Огн҄еметъка (talk) 19:08, 22 July 2022 (UTC)
 * @Benwing2
 * Oh I see... now it isn't allowing me to redirect ег҄ипьтѣнꙑн҄и to египьтѣнꙑни because there already is such a page...
 * Also I was wondering... since links on wiktionary strip the diacritic... can the same also be done when typing in the url alone? I have wiktionary as a quick search engine on my browser and it when I look up "богꙑн҄и" it doesn't strip the diacritic. If not should we maybe use hard or soft redirects there so that people can easily find the lemmatized form? Thanks! --Огн҄еметъка (talk) 19:15, 22 July 2022 (UTC)

y in Glagolitic
@Огньметъка, @Atitarev, @Useigor

There are 3 ways to write in Glagolitic:,  and. Is there any standardized form? It is important for creating alternative forms and declension tables I'm working on, (eg. hard a-stems have -y in genitive). In there are only 2 Glagolitic notations. Having 3 gen. forms might be annyoing. We should decide what to do about it. Sławobóg (talk) 17:05, 8 July 2023 (UTC)


 * @Sławobóg: Sorry, I am not well-versed in Glagolitic. I would go by evidence, which unfortunately, may not be standard or normalised. Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 23:50, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
 * After going through a few of my books and readers, it seems ⱏⰹ is most favoured, with ⱏⰻ second, and ⱏⰺ solidly always third.
 * I also ran pdfgrep on one of the bigger digitalized readers I have and I got the following resultsː
 * ⱏⰹ: 271
 * ⱏⰻ: 28
 * ⱏⰺ: 13
 * ⱐⰹ: 1
 * ⱐⰻ: 6
 * ⱐⰺ: 0
 * I'm for prioritizing ⱏⰹ, but I'd be happy either way as long as it's standardized. Ѻгн҄еметꙑн҄и/Ogňemetyňi (talk) 18:45, 19 July 2023 (UTC)