Wiktionary talk:Todo/proto problems

Alternate spellings
These are not "alternate spellings" in the usual sense of that phrase as used on Wiktionary. The usage of parentheses is well-established practice in reconstructions for stuff such as PIE s-mobile, or e.g. prothetic *j- in Proto-Slavic, to mention some of the examples that are listed. The parentheses can mean one of two things: The usage of parentheses is pretty standard in all the books and I suggest that we generally stick to it where it's appropriate. It is good to avoid it where it's possible in the entry titles (by deciding to lemmatize to a standard form, as we do for e-grades of PIE verbal roots), but in the etymology sections of the mainspace entries these ambiguities pop up much more often and it makes lots of sense to list them (redirects could be created to link to the main proto-page entry), especially if they are some kind of a middle step in the evolution of the word, peculiar to a specific language in question and no other. --Ivan Štambuk 21:48, 16 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The stuff listed in the parentheses is a part of the alternative reconstruction, equally plausible as the one omitting the parenthesized part, both being listed in a single form so as not to give preference to either. We have evidence pointing to both forms from different daughter languages. Both forms are however mutually exclusive, and one cannot be historically derived from the other. Most likely they both exited contemporaneously during the proto-language phase.
 * The stuff listed in the parentheses is optional, omitting it would cause no problems from the perspective of regularity of correspondence of sound changes, and the reason we include it is because we're not 100% sure it is not there. Ambiguity in reconstruction results from the ambiguity of sound changes, whereby multiple phonological changes result in the same "output" form.

Multiple forms in target
Should search for commas, but also brackets. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:32, 27 November 2011 (UTC)