Project:Requests for cleanup

The Languages of David J. Peterson > Requests > Requests for cleanup

The Languages of David J. Peterson Request pages (edit) see also: discussions
Requests for cleanup add new | history | archives Cleanup requests, questions and discussions.	Requests for verification/English add new English request | history | archives Requests for verification in the form of durably-archived attestations conveying the meaning of the term in question.	Requests for verification/CJK add new CJK request | history Requests for verification of entries in Chinese, Japanese, Korean or any other language using an East Asian script.	Requests for verification/Italic add new Italic request | history Requests for verification of Italic-language entries.	Requests for verification/Non-English add new non-English request | history | archives Requests for verification of foreign entries.	Requests for deletion/Others add new | history Requests for deletion and undeletion of pages in other (not the main) namespaces, such as categories, appendices and templates.
Requests for moves, mergers and splits add new | history | archives Moves, mergers and splits; requests listings, questions and discussions.	Requests for deletion/English add new English request | history | archives Requests for deletion of pages in the main namespace due to policy violations; also for undeletion requests.	Requests for deletion/CJK add new CJK request | history Requests for deletion and undeletion of entries in Chinese, Japanese, Korean or any other language using an East Asian script.	Requests for deletion/Italic add new Italic request | history Requests for deletion and undeletion of Italic-language entries.	Requests for deletion/Non-English add new non-English request | history | archives Requests for deletion and undeletion of foreign entries.	Requests for deletion/​Reconstruction add new reconstruction request | history Requests for deletion and undeletion of reconstructed entries.
{{attention}} • {{rfap}} • {{rfdate}} • {{rfquote}} • {{rfdef}} • {{rfeq}} • {{rfe}} • {{rfex}} • {{rfi}} • {{rfp}}

All Project: namespace discussions 1 2 3 4 5 - All discussion pages 1 2 3 4 5

This is a manually created and maintained list of pages that require cleanup.

Adding a request: To add a request, place the template {{rfc}} to the messy entry, and then Languages of David J. Peterson.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Project:Requests_for_cleanup&action=edit&section=new make a new nomination here. Include an explanation of your reasons for nominating the page for cleanup, but please put any extensive discussion in the discussion page of the article itself.

Closing a request: A conversation should remain here at least for one week after the {{rfc}} tag is removed, then moved to that page’s talk page from here. When the entry has been cleaned, please strike the word here, and put any discussion on the talk page of the cleaned entry.

Pages tagged with the template {{rfc}} are automatically placed in Category:Requests for cleanup. They are automatically removed from the category when the template is removed, or, if the template has not been used, when Category:Requests for cleanup has been removed from the page.

If an entry needs attention from experienced editors in a specific language, consider using {{attention}} instead of {{rfc}}.

See also Project:Cleanup and deletion process, Help:Nominating an article for cleanup or deletion, and Project:Cleanup and deletion elements. Category:Pages with broken file links should also be cleaned out periodically.

2013

gall

English. Rfc-sense: "A bump-like imperfection resembling a gall."

This appears in the middle of nine definitions of gall, none of which have a picture or a graphic description. DCDuring 22:17, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

It looks to belong in Etym 2, as presumably also do the senses about sores and a pit (the context of this last definition is somewhat unclear). — Pingku 07:31, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Template:Ping I moved the disputed definition to Etymology 2, but didn't touch "sore" and "pit". --Hekaheka (talk) 05:58, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Sanskrit: Rfc-sense: "a species of plant" and "name of various plants"

These are virtually worthless as definitions, but similar definition are common among Sanskrit entries here. Can this be improved upon at all? Similar situations in Latin and especially Greek usually generate plausible conjectures. Some of the cases where a species name is given are not much better as the species name may be used nowhere but in dictionaries or south Asian languages. DCDuring 00:53, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

There are analogous cases in Old French especially regarding plants where there's no way to be sure all the authors are talking about the same plant. I can see a lot of problems on that page, "a species of plant" seems redundant but "name of various plants" is probably as good as it can get. Mglovesfun (talk) 01:25, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

That is a typical Sanskrit page with typical problems, including no differentiation of proper nouns, except for higher prevalence of "name of" as part of the definition. The definitions look like wikiformatted copies of old Sanskrit-English dictionaries, possibly different ones combined, with the old dictionaries not being as well done as LSJ (Ancient Greek)or L&S (Latin). The definiens often use polysemic English words with no gloss to suggest which modern sense. DCDuring 01:59, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

You haven't begun to guess at the true enormity of the problem: I've copypasted the relevant part of the Monier-Williams entry from a pdf I downloaded (enclosed in collapsible header templates for those who don't care to read through it all), and interleaved it with our definitions. The OCR severely mangled the romanized Sanskrit and it would have taken too long to fix it, so don't try to decipher that part. As you can see, our entry is simply the Monier-Williams translated into our format, stripped of the source abbreviations, and paraphrased a bit.

It seems like a combination of multiple dictionaries because Monier-Williams went through libraries-full of sources and made notes, then compressed those notes into an incredibly dense and cryptic format in order to fit everything (barely) into one very large volume. All the bulleted lines below take up what looks like a single 2 or 3 inch square in a much larger three-column page, with nothing separating them but spaces and semicolons. The amount of detail in that work is astonishing- it would take years to properly unpack all the abbreviations and taxonomic names and convert them to modern equivalents. Just one page would take days! Nobody has all the necessary reference material at hand to do it, anyway, so the best we seem to be able to do is reformat this massive lump of condensed shorthand to make it look like a Wiktionary entry, without properly decoding it.

→

1. powerful, mighty

• powerful, mighty, RV. ;

1. (ifc.) overcoming, vanquishing

• (ifc.) overcoming, vanquishing, MBh. ;

1. bearing, enduring, withstanding, defying, equal to, a match for (+ genitive or compound)

• bearing, enduring, withstanding, defying, equal to, a match for (gen. or comp.), MBh.;

1. causing, effecting, stimulating, exerting

• KSv. &c.; causing, effecting, stimulating, exerting, Sis. ;

1. able to, capable of (infinitive or compound)

• able to, capable of (inf. or comp.), Kalid. ;

1. the month मार्गशीर्ष (mārgaśīrṣa)

• m. the month Margasirsha (see sahas), VS.;

1. a particular fire

• a partic.Agni, MBh.;

1. a species of plant

• a species of plant, AV. ;

1. name of a son of manu

• N. of a son of Manu, Hariv.;

1. name of a son of प्राण (prā-ṇa) and ऊर्जस्वती (ūrjasvatī)

• of a son of Prana and Urjasvati, BhP. ;

1. name of a son of धृतराष्ट्र (dhṛtarāṣṭra)

• of a son of Dhritarashtra, MBh. ;

1. name of a son of Krishna and Madri

• of a son of Krishna and Madri, BhP.;

1. (with Buddhists) name of a division of the world

• (with Buddhists) N. of a division of the world (with loka-dhatu,'the world inhabited by men'),Karand.;

1. name of various plants

• N. of various plants (accord, to L.-Aloe Perfoliata, dandotpala, rasna &c.), VarBrS.;

1. Unguis odoratus

• Unguis Odoratus, L. ;
• (a), f. the earth, L.;

1. = बल (bala)

• n. = bala, L. ;

1. kind of salt

• a kind of salt, L. =I .

Chuck Entz (talk) 06:22, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

I had looked at some of the Dictionary pages given as references.

My interests and "expertise" are quite limited. I think I can modernize some of the taxonomic names from the 130-year-old ones that were the best he had to work with, but I have to always look at the dictionary page itself. Some of the species names I cannot find in any authoritative online source.

So our Sanskrit entries are "pretend" entries, even worse than the unchanged Webster 1913 entries (for current words). DCDuring 16:55, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

I guess what's worst is that many of the pages don't have the reference to the dictionary page. DCDuring 16:57, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

DCDuring keeps repeating that we're dealing with a "130-year old dictionary" but he fails to mention that the dictionary is a synthetic result of tens of thousands of man-hours, and that it's perfectly valid today due to the simple fact that Sanskrit is an extinct language that doesn't change anymore. If the respected authorities have failed to determine what exact species of plants saha denotes in some works, then probably nobody else will. Comparing it to Webster 1913 and modern English is stupid. Regarding proper nouns - they are not recognized as a separate lexical category by Sanskrit grammarians (there is no uppercase/lowercase distinction, there are tens of thousands of deities in Hinduism representing just about any imaginable concept). I have been separating proper/common nouns in some early entries, but have stopped doing so. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 15:53, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

It's a great dictionary. It's available online for free to scholars, so Wiktionary's having copied pages is simply duplicative. It's copied pages are only a first draft of a Wiktionary entry. DCDuring 16:27, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Apart from the research done on the new interpretation of meanings of Sanskrit words in the 20th and 21th century, it's a complete entry. Sanskrit entries copied from MW dictionary are far more complete than English entries copied from Webster 1913, because the language is not productive anymore as a literary device. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 22:53, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

I have three problems with our English entries based on MW 1913 and two with the Sanskrit entries. To me they have one problem in common.

1. with English entries from MW 1913:
   1. it has English words whose meaning and usage context have changed in some cases, whereas we have not brought the entry up to date.
   2. it uses a dated English for all of its definitions
   3. it includes lists of synonyms in the definiens (instead of under Synonyms), a defining style we don't use.
2. with Sanskrit entries:
   1. it does not adhere to Wiktionary format and structure eg, not having distinct L3/4 sections for proper and common nouns and non-definiens material in the definitions.
   2. it uses a dated English for all of its definitions.

Just as with MW 1913 entries: I am glad we have the Sanskrit entries. They are an excellent first draft. They need work to be up to our high standards. DCDuring 01:13, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

1. I've told you already: proper nouns are not recognized as a separate lexical category by Sanskrit grammarians. This "e.g." of yours is the only objection you actually have to the structure of Sanskrit entries, and yet you keep parroting it as if it is one of many. Non-definiens material (i.e. the list of works were the set of meanings makes appearance) is essential due to the fact that Sanskrit literature stretches over three millennia, and someone reading Rgveda is not interested in the same meanings as someone reading Gita Govinda. We already include non-definiens material in all of the entries - they are called context labels. I fail to see how "this meaning is only used in UK" is any different than "this meaning is only used in the Vedas".
2. Most of its English is perfectly fine. You're needlessly exaggerating. If you find "dated English" feel free to update it. Perhaps some terms are a bit dated, but often no clear non-dated synonyms exist, and replacing them could introduce new interpretation of some words. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:13, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

All of this makes it seem as if a user of the material would be better off to be using the complete text, not Wiktionary's half-formatted, subject-to-insufficiently-respectful-editing version. For example, see Category:Sanskrit proper nouns. Do we need 97 RfC for them?

What value are we adding if all we do is copy? One value might be that we can link to the Sanskrit from other language entries. But that is not for Sanskrit scholars who know the peculiarities of the original dictionary; it is for ordinary Wiktionarians and folks who are simply curious, even recreational users. As scholars have the free online source and should have page links in the Wiktionary entry to that source from every entry copied from it, our Sanskrit entries ought be rendered consistent with Wiktionary format to facilitate use by those other than scholars. DCDuring 17:12, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Half-formatted subject-to-insufficiently-respectful-editing version? I'm not annoyed by your half-baked attempts of pretend-trolling. Goodbye. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 17:19, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

The really terrible one is the neuter noun = बल (bala), because बल has 28 noun definitions. Which one of the 28, or all 28 of them? Limiting only to neuter nouns transliterated as bala, that's down to 14. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:22, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Template:Ping if either of you would like to modernize the entry any. - -sche (discuss) 21:34, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

• Well, it took ten years to add the gloss unknown which plant. Lethant (talk) 23:25, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

весь

Russian. At весь#Russian, the pronoun and adjective senses are mixed together and need to be carefully picked apart. --WikiTiki89 15:12, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

I think it would need to be changed into a Determiner anyway. "all" is not a property of something, but a reference specifier like other determiners. User:CodeCat/signature 00:23, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Regardless, the pronoun and determiner senses need to be picked apart. --WikiTiki89 00:26, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

You could ask Anatoli... he is the main Russian editor I think. User:CodeCat/signature 00:35, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

I could also do it myself. I was just feeling lazy when I requested this. Mostly because the pronoun sense needs to be split across весь, вся, всё, and все. Additionally, I'm not sure what part of speech it is in "оно всё там", which is the exact 100% equivalent of "it's all there". --WikiTiki89 00:45, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure I can clean as per the nomination but I'm happy to take suggestions. The choice for SoP itself is not so obvious and the Russian Wiktionary uses "местоиме́нное прилага́тельное" (pronominal adjective). Perhaps providing more usexes would make the senses clearer? --Anatoli / 01:44, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

It's not that they are unclear, just that the determiner is intermixed with the pronoun, when they really need separate headers. --WikiTiki89 01:47, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

You can try it yourself, if you wish. I'm not 100% sure what PoS your examples belong to. Which ones do you think are pronouns?--Anatoli / 01:52, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Well if it's used without a noun, it's a usually pronoun. --WikiTiki89 02:30, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

The split is required for derived/related всё and все then, not весь. It'll probably suffice to mention the two types of derivations, even if usexes use всё and все. --Anatoli / 03:58, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

"Бумажник упал в лужу и весь промок." What part of speech is that according to you? I guess you could say that it is an adverb and the second clause has a null subject, but then we'd have to add an adverb sense. Now that I think about it, I think that the adverb interpretation is more accurate because it also accounts for "Он весь промок." --WikiTiki89 04:08, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

It's tricky, indeed. See also какая часть речи слово "всё" --Anatoli / 04:25, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

That answer seems to agree with me that in "Бумажник упал в лужу и весь промок." and "Он весь промок.", it is an adverb. But this is a strange case of an adverb that agrees with a noun in gender, number, and case: "Я его всего высушил.", "её всю", etc. --WikiTiki89 04:49, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm lost in PoS here. Not sure. I will leave it as is for now. We can try Template:User and Template:User. --Anatoli / 04:58, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

We can get more people to weigh in than that. As I said above, the exact same dilemma exists in English, only since English does not have gender/number/case agreement, there's less of a problem calling it an adverb: "They all went home." ("Они все пошли домой."), "I ate it all." ("Я его/её всего/всю съел."). --WikiTiki89 13:02, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Most Russian dictionaries call весь определительное местоимение. I don't have an opinion. --Vahag (talk) 14:51, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

It just making everything horribly complex to satisfy some arcane sense of category. I don’t see anything wrong with it the way it is. This reminds me of a few years ago when Michael decided to rename a bunch of files to separate them into Wiktionary:X and Appendix:X, and then I could never find the pages that I used to use because I don’t share his sense of categories. I never again saw some of those pages. —Stephen 20:22, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm not suggesting getting rid of anything we have. It's just that certain senses are missing (the adjective/pronoun/whatever-they-are ones), but are present in usage examples. A sense needs to be created for them, and since it is not an adjective/determiner, we have to decide what it is. --WikiTiki89 20:27, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

That’s what I’m saying. To me, весь is one simple part of speech. We used to call it an adjective, and in my opinion, that is what it is. Or mark them with the Russian terminology, attributive pronoun. All this modernistic stuff about determiners and such is just so much nonsense to me. If you want to divide it up into all sorts of part of speech, you have to do it yourself. I don’t recognize those categories and I don’t see the need for them. —Stephen 02:47, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

That's not my point at all. I also consider the distinction between adjectives and determiners to be quite useless, especially in Russian. What I'm saying here is that in the cases I mentioned, it is not an adjective or determiner. It's either an adverb or a pronoun, depending on how you look at it. It makes more sense as an adverb, except for the fact that it declines for gender, number, and case. --WikiTiki89 02:57, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

February 2016

Entries in Rhymes:Romanian

After last night's controversy over Rhymes:Romanian/abilitate, which Equinox thankfully deleted, I have been going through this category and discovered that the user who contributed, has made a lot of errors. E.g.:

• Categorisation is wrong. For instance, Rhymes:Romanian/e is placed in an inexistent category named Romanian rhymes/e and this tends to happen to every page in the category Rhymes:Romanian. I compared it to Rhymes:French and it doesn't happen there.
• The category Rhymes:Romanian is a mess – among the many problems, we have for instance Rhymes:Romanian/easkɘ: Romanian doesn't have IPA ɘ. Also, the user who added these categories misinterpreted "rhyming with..." as meaning "words ending with..." which was proven last night after the Rhymes:Romanian/abilitate debacle.

If anyone is up to the task, please feel free to do so or let me know how I should go about making corrections. --Robbie SWE (talk) 10:45, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Template:Reply (See also Wiktionary:Information_desk/2021/October#What_are_the_Rhyme_pages_for?) Is the idea that we eventually delete the Rhymes: namespace? If so, I would be willing to go around and add the correct {{rhyme}} template to the articles and remove them from the Rhymes: namespace. Two questions:

• Is the ro.wikt IPA data reliable? I haven't come across any mistakes thus far.
• The rhyme is the the stressed nucleus and everything onwards, right?

--Fytcha (talk) 14:25, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Wow, don't even remember writing this! I'm afraid I'm not that familiar with the discussion about rhyme pages or the decision taken by the community. As for ro.Wiktionary IPA, it is for the most part correct. I'm no expert on rhymes so it's best to ask someone who deals with them regularly. Robbie SWE (talk) 17:46, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Template:Reply Okay, I will try to figure the things out with rhymes (this can take some time; I've already asked in two places and have gotten no answer in either) and then see what I can do with this category. Fytcha (talk) 19:34, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

• @Fytcha Yes, there has been a desire to delete the rhymes namespace in favour of the categories: Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2021/August § Automatic rhymes. At least in English, yes, rhymes consist of the stressed vowel and everything following. I assume it is the same for other languages. - (talk | contrib) 05:11, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

  Template:Re Thanks, this comment of mine above is from the time when I was new to Wiktionary. As for Rhymes:Romanian, I think it's easiest to just delete it entirely including all subpages (and preserve the red and yellow links to WT:Requested_entries_(Romanian)), I'll (hopefully) take care of {{IPA}} and {{rhymes}} within Romanian articles eventually. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 13:14, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

May 2016

ngaa

Moved from: Wiktionary:Requests for verification#ngaa

Pitjantjatjara. The word had a cleanup request from 21 February 2015 with the comment: "Almost certainly not Pitjantjatjara. It appears to be Ngaanyatjarra, but I can't be sure of that." IMHO that doesn't sound like it's a matter of RFC but of RFV. -Ikiaika (talk) 17:18, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes, but unattested items appearing in RfV could be deleted after just 30 days. RfVs for items in languages with very few contributors might not be seen for quite some time. RfC allows more time. DCDuring 17:34, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

It had an RFC tag for over a year and nothing changed. I might be mistaken, but I doubt that anything would change in the nearest time and I doubt that there would be much attention for the entry. So I hope that this discussion brings some attention towards the entry and that the RFC/RFV can be resolved. As ngaa also has other entries ("Gamilaraay" and "Hiligaynon"), it wouldn't be completely deleted anyway and one could still find the 'Pitjantjatjara' entry through the version history. However, I'd be okay with changing it to RFC again and moving this discussion to Wiktionary:Requests for cleanup to raise some attention and to give the entry some more time.

Maybe Template:Ping (he once added the Pitjantjatjara entry) or Template:Ping (he once added the RFC tag) can help to resolve this issue? -Ikiaika (talk) 18:24, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

There is heavy overlap between Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra. Some would consider them dialects of the same language. To make matters worse, texts are often misidentified as being in one language when they are actually in one of the others; a lot of reference works relating to these languages are old, use idiosyncratic orthographies, and contain inaccuracies; and Ngaanyatjarra in particular seems to have quite little material available. All this makes it very difficult to sort out the entries in these languages. We really need the assistance of an expert in Western Desert languages to sort out the situation and help organise our coverage.

It probably is a matter for RFV, but I don't think there are many users here who would be able to deal with this problem. I'd favour keeping the RFC tag in place for now. I will have to go and look up a Ngaanyatjarra word list in a library when I have time. This, that and the other (talk) 06:06, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Template:Ping Thanks for your reply. I changed it back and moved the discussion. Greetings, Ikiaika (talk) 11:39, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

It's certainly not Pitjantjatjara and shouldn't be labelled as such. This and many of Vedac13's other contributions to Pitjantjatjara are flagrant nonsense. BigDom 15:03, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

August 2016

English. Does this actually make sense? – Jberkel (talk) 15:37, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Yes. But I can't see a distinction between senses #1 and #2. It seems like the same thing (mild deformation of a sheet of metal) just one occurs in manufacturing and one occurs when the item is already in place (roofing). Presumably because oilcans are round and not flat sheets. I'd just reduce it to a single definition (like mine in brackets above) and be done with it. I assume existence is not an issue here? Renard Migrant (talk) 16:42, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

November 2016

кънига / ⰽⱏⱀⰻⰳⰰ, кънигꙑ

Old Church Slavonic. This OCS word is only attested in the plural. We have it lemmatized twice, once at the (unattested) reconstructed singular / and once at the plural . Presumably either the plural should be made into a form-of definition, or the singular should be deleted as unattested; what is the standard policy? —Vorziblix (talk) 22:12, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

Is it a plurale tantum, like Lower Sorbian knigły? Or is it only attested with a plural meaning as well? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 23:19, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

The former; it’s quite copiously attested with singular and plural meanings, and occasionally translates Greek singulars as well as plurals ( and both become ). —Vorziblix (talk) 08:11, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

I think there are some inflected singular forms, which need to be looked into (care should be taken in distinguishing Old Russian from OCS), such as dative "кънигу".--Anatoli T. / 08:37, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

The SJS claims that the one-time attested кънигоу is an error for къниги; the expected dative singular would be *кънигѣ in any case, since it’s an a-stem. All of the other attestations given in SJS and SS, which cover almost all of the OCS canon, are plural forms. Do you know of sources that attest the singular? —Vorziblix (talk) 09:13, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, I meant accusative, not dative. I couldn't find anything, not in the normalised spelling, anyway. --Anatoli T. / 12:04, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

January 2017

Proto-Slavic Reconstructions

• Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/veprь
• Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/pěsъkъ
• Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/šestъ
• Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/vъnukъ

Not an expert, so I can't really judge if these contributions from the same anon are unpolished gems or candidates for speedy deletion. Any takers? --Robbie SWE (talk) 18:40, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/šestъ appears to be a candidate for speedy deletion, since we have Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/šestь. The others I can't comment on with certainty. — Kleio (t · c) 18:51, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/vъnukъ appears to be a gem, so it needs to be polished. Mulder1982 (talk) 16:15, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

haldinn

Icelandic. The current definition "held" and the example sentences seem to have nothing to do with each other. DTLHS (talk) 16:57, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

WF left a message on my talk page asking about these a while back. The phrases used in the examples are real collocations/idioms (see here and here for dictionary definitions). Þungt haldinn seems pretty common ([1]) but I can only find a couple of hits for vera haldinn skemmdarfýsn [[2] (top right p.22) and [3] (bottom left p.5)]. They're definitely not the best usage examples for haldinn either way. BigDom 11:55, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

April 2017

Chitral

English. [may also be of interest to editors in Urdu. This, that and the other (talk) 09:07, 20 April 2022 (UTC)] Definitions are too long and the translations section may need examination. —suzukaze (t・c) 03:13, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

• We've had these issues for so long that the Chitral District (mentioned in sense 1) has split into upper and lower districts in the meantime. - (talk | contrib) 06:27, 10 November 2022 (UTC)
• Senses 2 and 3 have since been shortened significantly, and IMO sense 1 is not too long. —  00:25, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Appendix:Zulu given names

This list was created a few months ago by someone with apparently little knowledge of Zulu. In Zulu, all nouns, including names, must have a noun prefix in front of them, but it's lacking for these, which makes the list of relatively little lexicographical use. Template:Ping Any idea what to do with it? —CodeCat 23:33, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

I wouldn't say it's of little lexicographical use. It seems like the content is correct, so I'd add a note at the top about how it's very inexhaustive and the form of the prefix that names have when used in Zulu, and leave it at that. —Μετάknowledge 23:37, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Except that I don't know the prefix. Normally, it would be class 1a (prefix u-), as you probably know, but there's some names beginning with vowels and Zulu doesn't allow two vowels to be adjacent in native vocabulary. In theory, the prefix would become a consonant before a vowel-initial word, so is wAmahle an attested name? Modern loans use hyphens instead, so I guess u-Amahle is another possibility. I have no idea. —CodeCat 23:41, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

The u-Amahle version is what is actually used in Zulu. —Μετάknowledge 23:49, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

I found some results for uMahle too but whether they're names, I don't know. —CodeCat 00:06, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

One should also consider that the noun prefixes would only apply to languages that use them. (A super-obvious forest that seems to be missed for the trees of Zulu-ness.) These are the names as they would be used in many other languages that either don't have noun prefixes on names or use different ones. By stripping these down to the bare name, they are far more useful and less confusing. The noun prefix could be covered in a simple sentence: "When speaking Zulu, all the names would have the noun prefix 'u-' but this might not be a part of the name in other languages." Rather like the "o-" for female Japanese names at one point. So someone stopping by here from NaNoWriMo won't come to the conclusion that all their Zulu characters must have names beginning with U in their novel written in English, Spanish, or Mandarin.

-TŁÉÉʼ

Navajo. I can't even find the senses among those huge tables. Moreover, the senses are not marked with # in the wikitext. —CodeCat 19:10, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

-TŁʼIIZH

Navajo. Not as bad as the one above, but there's still a giant table in the place reserved for senses. Also, "stem set" is not an allowed section. —CodeCat 19:12, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

"Stem set" is the way Navajo roots change depending on mode and aspect. It is not a "conjugation" table in the standard meaning of it, but if you feel it better fits the practices here, I can make that change.

Then, regarding the "huge" table, it is how the Navajo vocabulary is built up, around roots to which various preffixes are added. In many Navajo verb pages, a lot of information is duplicated from verb to verb belonging to the same root. It is a lot more efficient and genuine to the language to gather this info inside a "root" page. This saves the burden to add to each verb their related verbs. See for instance yoołmas, haiłmáás, neiłmaas in their "related terms" section.

Then, a group of such verbs comes usually in a number of predefined "categories", as motion, successive, operative.. depending on the set of prefixes that the roots can take (for instance, yoołbąs, haiłbąąs, neiłbąąs follows the same pattern as the examples cited above).

In the same way a Indo-European root page just lists the descendant terms in the daughter languages, in the Navajo root pages I just list the verbs, arranged by sense, theme, transitivity and "category". (The only difference being that the Navajo root is not a reconstructed root, it's a lexical root).

I believe that for learners of the Navajo language these are of great help since it helps structuring the lexicon.

The one issue I had I admit is that the # sign doesn't work when I have multiple submeanings with verb tables inbetween them.

What do you propose I do? I'm pinging Stephen because I'd like to get his input in that matter too. Template:Ping Julien Daux (talk) 20:34, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

We have pages for roots of attested languages (Category:Roots by language), that's not really an issue. They are treated like any other morpheme. For Proto-Indo-European, though, we list terms derived from a root under "Derived terms". There's nothing in principle against there being a table under "Derived terms" instead of a list, and I think it is a better location than right underneath each sense.

As for stem sets, if it's not a conjugation table, then I assume that these would be considered separate verbs, am I correct? If so, then the situation resembles that of Proto-Indo-European as well, which also had various ways to derive stems for aspects. We list those under "Derived terms" also. See *leykʷ- for example. Would such a format work for Navajo? —CodeCat 20:42, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Stem sets are not separate verbs, and if anything, are closer to a conjugation. For instance, yoołmas, yiłmáás, neiłmaas, all mean "he is rolling it", but the first one is progressive aspect (he rolls it along), the second is momentaneous (he is rolling it ), the third one is continuative (he is rolling it about). The difference is in the stem : -mas,-máás,-maas. Then each of these verbs can be conjugated for mode (imperfective, perfective, future...). Then many of these verbs can then take on lexical (non-aspectual) prefixes (just like English "to roll", "to roll up", "to roll out"...), like haiłmáás (he is rolling it out horizontally). That's why the notion of theme is so central to Athabaskan languages, because behind a given lexical verb actually hide multiple segments of somewhat predictable meaning, combining meaning, mode, aspect and lexical derivation. (sorry if that I'm not being clear enough).

Based on these premises, that's why I wanted to have the derived verbs right below each senseid, because the verbs are the incarnations of the themes. A meaning listed without actual verbs doesn't really make sense to me. I could move this to the derived section, but then it would be weird for the synonym section to come before the "derived" terms, because the derived terms are the root itself and a way to define it. And doing this would also make it very repetitive and not synoptic enough. Unless I'm allowed to have "derived terms" before "synonyms", and that I skip senses altogether? Julien Daux (talk) 22:18, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

I haven't really ever dealt with these languages but I'm trying to understand. If you consider what you might call a "whole" verb, with all of its forms, what is included in this? Would you consider yoołmas, yiłmáás and neiłmaas to be different forms of a single verb? Why or why not? —CodeCat 22:29, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

This is a very good question, and actually this is the central question of all Athabaskan linguistics. Verb mechanism in these languages is so foreign that trying to define it in terms of European linguistics necessarily leads to some categorizations and views that don't belong to it.

The lexicographic "tradition" in Navajo is to consider yoołmas, yiłmáás and neiłmaas as separate "verbs", just like "gain" / "regain" or "perceive" / "receive" are in English, even though the first pair is a predictable derivation and the second much less so. This also fits the definition by which these are the bare shape before any inflection for person, tense or mode is added. Anything that remains after removing person, tense or mode is considered a verb (in Wiktionary and in all Navajo dictionaries). This definition is workable because first this how native speakers feel it (they actually explicitly told Young and Morgan after a survey to arrange their 1980 dictionary by lexical verbs rather than per root), and also because as in any language, some unpredictable or specialized meanings sometimes emerge from these lexical verbs, so it means they can clearly stand on their own (for instance haaʼeeł means "it floats up out", but can also mean "it (a baby) is miscarried, aborted". No other verb derived from this root has this specialized meaning).

Now, other views have emerged in the 1970 that the "real" verbal unit is not the verb (like neiłmaas), not the root (like -MÁÁZ, which can occur in various actual meanings, like "to roll" but also "to be spherical", not that far semantically, but some other roots do have much more disparateness), but the theme, which is the combination of : a root, a thematic prefix compound (possibly null), a thematic classifier (possibly null) and a category (motion, stative, successive, operative....). It is a virtual unit, whose awareness to Navajo native speakers still need to be tested, but whose explanatory power is enormous, and articulates the entire lexicon. James Kari was one of the first to investigate that route with the Alaskan Ahtna language. No such work has ever been carried out for Navajo, even though the reality of themes is a striking overarching phenomenon.

A theme is for instance "Ø + Ø + -MÁÁZ (motion)" (to roll) or "ʼa + ni + Ø + -TʼIʼ (motion)" (to stagger) (you'll agree that that would be weird to have pages named so on Wiktionary, but that's how the paper dictionary of Tlingit is construed). Like many motion themes, these themes can combine with the lexical derivation "ná + di + yi + Momentaneous aspect" (to start to...), to give the following lexical verbs: "ńdiimáás" (to start to roll), "ná + ʼa + di + ni + yi + Ø + mom(TʼIʼ)" = "ńdíʼníitʼééh" (to start to wobble). The question being, can all motion themes accept this derivational prefix? Skimming through Young's dictionary, one can notice that many such combinations are missing from his dictionary, raising the question whether this combination can be freely formed or if it is lexical constrained. Until one finds this out, it better to consider each of these lexical verbs as separate lexical units as opposed to the result of a productive derivational process.

Making a break there :). Julien Daux (talk) 00:04, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Wow, ok. It seems, then, that Navajo verbs are quite similar to Proto-Indo-European ones, in that you have a root that can serve as the basis for one or more aspect stems, whose existance is unpredictable (not every root has every aspect) and whose meaning can also be idiosyncratic. However, I'm not quite clear on why it's necessary to list verbs by sense. The meaning of each verb is determined by the aspect/mood isn't it? —CodeCat 00:19, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Well, two things: 1. I needed one place where to list the verbs belonging to the same theme instead of the copied-pasted list found at the end of each verb entry. 2. Showing the actual possible verbs demonstrates the theme's well-foundedness and also shows places where expected forms would be missing. Also because just listing a root and a theme (like a+ni+Ø+T'I') is way too abstract to be useful to anyone. This was actually the first draft I came up with when I started creating pages for root, and after a couple of these, I saw how useless and disconnected from reality it was. See for instance -CHĮ́ that I didn't have time to reformat.

(Keep in mind that when I'm showing 12 derived verbs in a given theme, there can actually be close to 100 in reality...).

One thing that is in my plate is also to create Wiktionary categories for each theme, like "Navajo verbs derived from the theme X". Currently, the verb entries do not show their appartenance to a theme, the Etymology section just lists the prefixes, but doesn't distinguish between those that are thematic from those that are derivational. Julien Daux (talk) 00:45, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

I suppose that "huge table" refers to the theme/classifier tables. The tables look good to me. The Stem sets are important, and that's what they're called. I can't think of a better way to do them. Maybe the Stem sets could be reduced to mere bolded lines, placed under a headline such as ====Usage notes====. Not a very good solution, but if we're going to shoehorn Navajo stem sets into a format intended for English, it might work:

Usage notes

Stem set

—Stephen 02:26, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

May 2017

upgrade

English. Verb entries 2 and 3 doesn't seem clearly differentiated. Entry 1 talks about technology, but seems to refer to hardware. Only entry 3 is labeled as computing, though all seem tech-related. It seems to me that the example phrase at entry 2 fits better under entry 3. --SentientBall (talk) 04:16, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

I don't see that there is any transitive use of upgrade that is computing-specific. Differentiating transitive and intransitive use is a good first step in improving the entry, perhaps along the lines of MWOnline's:

transitive verb

to raise or improve the grade of: such as

a: to improve (livestock) by use of purebred sires

b: to advance to a job requiring a higher level of skill especially as part of a training program

c: to raise the quality of

d: to raise the classification and usually the price of without improving the quality

e: to extend the usefulness of (something, such as a device)

f: to assign a less serious status to upgraded the patient's condition to good

intransitive verb

to improve or replace especially software or a device for increased usefulness

DCDuring (talk) 18:10, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

I've added a missing noun sense, an adverb PoS section, transitive/intransitive labels, some new verb senses, some citations and usage examples. Senses a and f from MWOnline are clearly needed. I'm not as sure about b-e. DCDuring (talk) 19:16, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Διόνυσος

Ancient Greek. I was asked to put a notice here. The etymology is poorly written; it needs to be formatted and more easier to read. I am not an expert on Greek, but I have an interest on that language. TatCoolBoy (talk) 02:57, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

malware

English. Someone has been replacing translations that are direct borrowings from English (i.e. the word malware in other languages) with other terms. I have checked the three Portuguese translations they added and found that malware is much more common (about 5 times) than the most common of them, and the other two are quite rare.

I suspect that they’ve done the same thing to translations in other languages. — Ungoliant 13:09, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Removals were done by Special:Contributions/83.20.240.115 here. —Stephen 13:50, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

I have cleaned up the translations a bit and restored those borrowed terms. --2A00:F41:4860:4FD7:3411:839:4F7D:67C2 19:29, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

I appreciate your efforts and your participation in this discussion anon, but I feel that there are still some issues with your edits:

• you have reintroduced the rare term software mal-intencionado, writing that it is “used by Microsoft in Brazil”; however, even in Microsoft’s website this term is significantly less common than malware;
• the regional qualifiers you added to software malicioso and software mal-intencionado are absolutely incorrect; both (including software mal-intencionado, despite its rarity) are used in Brazil and Portugal;
• you added the qualifier Anglicism to several translations and as a label in the definitions; surely that’s information that belongs in the etymology sections of their respective entries, not in the translation table.

— Ungoliant 20:05, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

I've just corrected it. Please take a look.

As for software mal-intencionado, it does seem to be used by Microsoft as a translation of malicious software quite commonly. You can verify that here: https://www.microsoft.com/Language/en-US/Search.aspx --2A00:F41:4860:4FD7:3411:839:4F7D:67C2 20:27, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

malware#Translations

IP users (maybe the same person) have made a number of sum of parts entries in various languages, which are translations of the English malware. I {{rfd}}'ed some of them. --Anatoli T. / 12:50, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes, it seems to be the same person. They seem to be working off of some source with the translations of PC/Computer terms into a wide variety of languages- I'm guessing something put out by Microsoft. Since they don't know most of the languages, they can't tell if the terms are idiomatic. The entry at malware seems to have been their initial and main focus, but they've been working on the whole range of terminology relevant to PC operating systems and software.

I brought up the subject of their edits here in March with a concern that they were editing in so many languages that they couldn't possibly know all of them. You confirmed that their edits seemed to be accurate, and the discussion was archived to User talk:Anth2943. That account has since been renamed, so it's now User talk:Deletedarticle. There have been a series of edits blanking the page and others reverting the blanking, but for the moment you can see the archived discussion there. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:03, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

words ambiguously defined as "dinner"

These words define themselves as "dinner", which can mean either "midday meal", "evening meal", or "main meal of the day, regardless of when it's eaten". Can you clarify which sense is meant if you know any of these languages? (A few entries define themselves as "lunch, dinner" or "dinner, supper", but I can't tell if the second word is intended as a synonym or an indication the word refers to both the midday and evening meals. Some entries are homographic with words meaning "evening", but that doesn't ensure they mean "evening meal", compare middag!) Strike through words you've done. - -sche (discuss) 04:49, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

5. pranzu
7. pāʻina
8. unnukkorsiutit
9. àm-tǹg
11. вячэраць
12. дэшхын
15. обід
17. оройн хоол
18. павячэраць
21. ճաշ
22. սպաս
24. [[:]]
25. [[:]]
26. [[:]]
27. [[:]]
28. [[:]]

• What makes this one special? This kind of problem is so widespread that we could use some kind of automation to at least assist in identifying all the deficient FL definitions.

Don't we have {{rfgloss}} (or {{gloss-stub}} or whatever its real name is) for this? If not, we should create a template that addresses this specific kind of problem. DCDuring (talk) 15:30, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

An inspection of the number of entries in Category:Requests for clarification of definitions by language shows the very modest level of use of these templates. DCDuring (talk) 15:52, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

• I've tracked down references on, and clarified, a few more. - -sche (discuss) 05:49, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

Arbi

Albanian. Should the common noun sense be lowercase? Compare Arbër, arbër? (Also, will whatever bot adds {{also}} reach these at some point?) - -sche (discuss) 19:29, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

という

Japanese. It's a mere stub. —suzukaze (t・c) 04:51, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Also, do we want this entry? Can't this be analysed as just と+言う? (although, it is present in other dictionaries.) —suzukaze (t・c) 06:36, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, I see it also in dictionaries, and that puzzles me -- this doesn't strike me as particularly lexicalized, it's just と (to, quotative particle) + 言う (iu, “to say”).

@Shinji, are we missing something? Do you view this as more than just SOP? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ 09:46, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

How about making it a redirect? Daijisen has an entry for という, but the content is repeated in the entry of いう. という is special in that it can have a pause before it, but it is rather a characteristic of the particle と. — T Shinji (talk) 02:16, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Years ago, I co-authored a paper about the use of って versus と, and found that という patterns somewhat differently from other verbs (と思、と考える, etc.) in terms of colocations. Still, it certainly seems SoP in all the ways that normally matter for a dictionary entry. Cnilep (talk) 04:32, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

June 2017

Entries in Category:en:Language families

English. Language family names are generally both adjectives and nouns. But some of the entries here contain only an adjective definition, while others contain only a noun. Would anyone be willing to sort these out? —CodeCat 16:11, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Wiktionary:About Japanese

Japanese. Still mildly out-of-date, and the formatting makes it difficult to understand sometimes. —suzukaze (t・c) 17:04, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Wiktionary:About Han script

Out-of-date. —suzukaze (t・c) 17:05, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

July 2017

ÿ

Translingual. Maybe this definition should be distributed into the appropriate language sections. —suzukaze (t・c) 03:51, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Of interest to editors in: Dutch. Afrikaans. French. (adding dots for Ctrl+F convenience) This, that and the other (talk) 10:10, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

August 2017

Transliteration modules

Module:kaa-translit

Transliteration modules created by a user banned for making bad edits to transliteration modules. —suzukaze (t・c) 03:59, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

(None of them are in use.) —suzukaze (t・c) 10:00, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Some of these are still problematic. Template:Ping, fancy fixing them? —Μετάknowledge 09:08, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

I have struck the ones that have been overhauled since. Maybe the rest should just be deleted? — surjection ⟨⟩ 21:49, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Not sure if pings to IPs work, but Template:Ping who has cleaned up several of these modules. Are they correct and worth keeping? Or nonsense and to be deleted? This, that and the other (talk) 10:10, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

I cleaned those modules include sty-translit, uum-translit, dlg-translit, kim-translit, kaa-translit. and all the modules transliteration based on the omniglot transliteration. and I deleted letter that aren't existing omniglot or dictionary.

and That's languages module and letter are correct.

Please confirm my modified module. 118.216.30.67 19:45, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

camera

English. I have created a new entry for movie camera, and found some translations under camera. I would transfer them, but they appear to be a bit of a mess. DonnanZ (talk) 17:44, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Template:Ping The translation boxes at camera don't look messy to me (four years later). Do you have a reason to doubt the division of translations between the two senses? Is there anything left to do here? This, that and the other (talk) 10:10, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

Template:Reply I was referring to translations for movie cameras, not cameras in general. There also seems to be confusion between movie cameras and video cameras. I don't think the situation in 2017 has changed much. DonnanZ (talk) 09:19, 21 April 2022 (UTC)

Oh, I see you want a clearer distinction between the different types of moving picture cameras. This, that and the other (talk) 09:41, 21 April 2022 (UTC)

Template:Reply Looking at the translations given for "movie camera" also makes me wonder whether many languages have a word for it - many just mean "camera". DonnanZ (talk) 10:03, 21 April 2022 (UTC)

Advaita

English. First definition:

1. A Sanskrit philosophical term that may be literally rendered in English as nonduality: denoting that though differences and variegation appear in the human condition they are unreal or illusory and are not ultimately true.

This is supposed to be an English-language entry, not a Sanskrit one, and the wording smells of teaching Enlightenment to the ignorant. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:32, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

㑳

Chinese. —suzukaze (t・c) 05:16, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

一本

Japanese. Is "numeral" really the right way to describe this? —suzukaze (t・c) 06:31, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

No, "SOP" is a much better description- unless you think we should have entries like "四十三本"... Either delete it, or use {{&lit}} like the Chinese section already does. Chuck Entz (talk) 07:19, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Template:Ping. —Suzukaze-c (talk) 07:52, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

A numeral with a counter is traditionally classified as a numeral. See 数詞 on Daijisen. “SOP” is not a lexical class, so it’s irrelevant here. — T Shinji (talk) 09:39, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

• In English terms, any numeral + counter = noun. Consider "one pair", "two braces", "three sets", etc.

I've had an initial go at a cleanup. The entry still needs more work, including many senses yet missing from our page. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ 19:05, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

October 2017

Duckburg

English. Leaving aside the question of whether the proper-noun sense meets the requirements of WT:FICTION, this entry has a translation table full of terms in languages the sole editor of the entry doesn't speak, including Gothic. That's right- Gothic. Even scarier, some of the translations are bluelinks- because that same editor has been creating entries in languages they don't speak for a term that probably doesn't meet CFI. Chuck Entz (talk) 08:03, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

And what exactly should be cleaned up? Should t (in ) be changed into t-check? The German translation for example is correct, so it could be changed back to t. Whether or not the German term or any other translations meets WT:FICTION should be a matter of WT:RFVN to decide. -84.161.12.35 09:58, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

• Update: The term passed an RFV that was opened the same day as this discussion, suggesting it does meet WT:FICTION's requirements. —  07:27, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Jeames

English. Someone asked me on my talk page to clean this up. I don't really know what to do with it. Equinox ◑ 23:53, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

• Looking at User talk:Equinox, it doesn't seem like someone asked you on your user page: user page's first post is from 20zh November 2017 (Template:Revision), post above from 12th October.
• The etymology seems to be copied from it's source (Adrian Room, Dictionary of Pseudonyms, 5th ed., p. 518, s.v. C.J. Yellowplush). Is it a copyright violation?
• "used this name" - which name? The source makes it clear by the dictionary entry: The pseudonym C.J. Yellowplush. "The same character appeared" - which character? Charles James Yellowplush is the purported author and the servant was a living guy. "character" seems to refer to Charles James Yellowplush as if he is the purported author and the character in his story, but IMHO it's not so clear.

-80.133.98.186 04:27, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Category:en:Anatomy

English. A lot of entries here would be better placed in Category:en:Body parts or its subcategories. —Rua (mew) 14:11, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

Will this be done or not? Ffffrr (talk) 06:04, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Template:Ping: Seems like a good idea to me, but a fair bit of work. Why don't you do it? —Μετάknowledge 06:06, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Sure, but was any criteria decided for where to place some of the terms? Ffffrr (talk) 06:11, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

The main criterion is the difference between set categories and topical categories: set categories contain things that are examples of the kind of things named in the category titles. Thus, terms for body parts go in Category:en:Body parts. Topical categories contain terms about the topics named in the category titles. Terms that belong in Category:en:Anatomy are used when discussing the subject of anatomy. The blurring of the distinction has long been one of Rua's pet peeves.

Short answer: if it's the term for a body part, it goes in Category:en:Body parts or its subcategories. That would include arm, leg, spleen, skin, bones, islets of Langerhans, blood, endocrine system, serotonin, etc. Adjectives and other terms about anatomy stay in Category:en:Anatomy: axial, cardiac, cerebral, hepatic, as well as nephrology, innervation, splenotomy,etc.Chuck Entz (talk)

Category:en:Pathology

English. A lot of entries here would be better placed in Category:en:Diseases or Category:en:Disease. —Rua (mew) 14:16, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

It seems this user quit, so I don’t know what will be done Ffffrr (talk) 06:07, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Etymologies by User:Rajkiandris

They're formatted incorrectly and aren't actually etymologies, all they do is mention a Finnish cognate. They do this even if said Finnish cognate has an entry on the same page with a proper etymology. It seems to me like they just don't want to put any effort in but would rather leave it for someone else to clean up. —Rua (mew) 16:03, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Template:Ping, if you haven't noticed. I'm not sure anyone else has the expertise needed to clean these up. —Μετάknowledge 06:40, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

I've noticed, yes. My workflow on cleaning up the minor Finnic languages goes usually through checking up from Proto-Finnic entries once they've been sourced, though, so that may take a while before it hits all of these "naturally". I've barely even started the initial source literature scan (going on at User:Tropylium/Finnish inherited vocabulary).

This also makes me wonder if a database dump search for Etymology sections that do not use any of our etymology templates ({{der}}, {{inh}}, {{bor}}, {{suffix}}, {{compound}} etc.) might be worthwhile at some point. Maybe after our eternity project to depreciate {{etyl}} finishes… --Tropylium (talk) 12:47, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

This user is still highly active, although they seem to have moved on from adding Finnish cognates. I'm not sure whether the bigger challenge here is cleaning up the entries or finding those which need to be cleaned up. Template:U, would you perhaps consider reviewing your own edits from 2017 and addressing the issues mentioned here? This, that and the other (talk) 10:10, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

@Rajkiandris in case my ping above didn't work. See ^^ This, that and the other (talk) 10:15, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

I can take these as a project - I think it should be a reasonable task to scan through all Finnic and Uralic languages, find all pages linking to a Finnish or (Proto-)Finnic cognate that do not have anything else of value and add some details. I'll gather a list on User:Surjection/rajkiandris-uralic-etystub-cleanup tomorrow and start working on the list once I have it. — S 19:44, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

@Surjection If it isn't too much work (and no worries if it is), would it please be possible to create a list of these by language? I know there are a large number that need cleaning up in small languages with no/few editors. They've left a big mess in Mongolian, Buryat and Kalmyk, not to mention some Tungusic languages as well. Theknightwho (talk) 00:25, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

My earlier process didn't involve checking whether the etymologies were added by Rajkiandris, just for a specific pattern he liked adding. i don't know whether that applies to Mongolic languages as well. — S 06:30, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

absolute superlative

English. This entry is a confusing mess. The formatting issues are just the beginning; the real issue is that the definitions are actually just a collection of examples from various languages. As noted in the talk page, the concept of absolute superlative should be language independent; its definition should be something like:

1. An adjective form indicating a quality expressed to the greatest possible extent, in contrast to the comparative superlative, which instead indicates a quality expressed to the greatest extent within some specific context.

A significant feature of absolute superlatives is that some languages use different inflections for the absolute and comparative cases. Accordingly, it is reasonable to still include some language examples in that context.

As an additional observation, I think the Romanian examples are actually just intensifying adverbs, not absolute superlative forms. Wikipedia provides a different explanation using the adverb phrase cel mai and related forms. ―Rriegs (talk) 05:10, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Formatting should be slightly improved now (Template:Diff), but that doesn't address the real problems. The current senses maybe are better as usage notes in foreign entries; e.g. the Romanian sense could be put into an Romanian entry superlativ absolut (if the statement is accurate). -80.133.98.186 03:57, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

November 2017

Template:enm-verb

Middle English. This template is basically a copy of an old version of {{en-verb}}, and is woefully inadequate for Middle English. Middle English verbs have many more forms than just the ones given in this template. There should be a proper inflection table. —Rua (mew) 16:22, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

The Middle English templates in general could really use some love. Some templates just don't exist where useful ModEnglish varieties do (e.g. {{enm-adv}}, as well as a number of grammatical boxes such as personal pronouns)); in others a number of factors make ME more complicated than English (some adjectives having plural forms in addition to the typical comparative and superlative forms.) I'm fairly new so I don't know how templates are born or altered here (or even whether this discussion belongs in RFC as opposed to the Grease Pit), but it would make a huge difference if someone could update and expand the Middle English templates. --SanctMinimalicen (talk) 14:30, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

Overall our Middle English entries vary wildly in quality once you read past the etymology. A lot of entries wrongly list Modern English inflections or use raw {{head}}, probably because they were added by English editors (like me) who have no idea what the correct inflections should be. Of course, the whole language is a bit of a mess from a modern standpoint thanks to its many dialects and utterly chaotic spelling. But fixing up the headword-line templates would help to restore some confidence in our ME coverage. This, that and the other (talk) 10:48, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

December 2017

bever

English. Multiple pronunciation sections and multiple etymologies, unclear which refers to which. DTLHS (talk) 02:25, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

JLPT

English. I think the long translations of the full name should go to Japanese-Language Proficiency Test#Translations, and JLPT#Translations should be reserved for equivalent acronyms in other languages. —suzukaze (t・c) 04:56, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

January 2018

Contributions of Special:Contributions/98.113.14.63

In other technical details besides IP range, this IP is a perfect match to Template:Vandal, and indeed shows the same indiscriminate, high-volume and diverse editing- They seem to be adding translations in just about any language they can think of. Given that יבריב was blocked for making crappy edits in languages they don't know, this makes me very nervous. Depending on the source(s) they've been vacuuming up, their edits could very well range from ok to horribly, horribly wrong.

These need to be checked, but I don't have the expertise to do it myself. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 04:39, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

pug

English. Etymology 1 needs further splitting - these do not have the same etymology. --Gente como tú (talk) 13:00, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

I split off a few of the definitions which come from a common source, and added another sense with its own etymology. Etymology 1 still needs further work clarifying origins. --SanctMinimalicen (talk) 23:52, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Si

English. (relevant to Chinese. This, that and the other (talk) 10:48, 20 April 2022 (UTC)) Poor etymology formatting, dubious pronunciation. —suzukaze (t・c) 04:39, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/131.164.141.148

Are these edits good or bad? - -sche (discuss) 23:28, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

This user made less than 100 contributions, mainly to Scanian (gmq-scy) and Franc-Comtois (roa-fcm). Anyone able to help with these languages? This, that and the other (talk) 10:48, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

cps.

German entry, but abbreviating a Latin term. At the momemt it's mis-categorised because of Category:Latin abbreviations. Properly, would need two language parameters to produce with category Category:German abbreviations. Should the abbreviation template be replaced by text and the category be added manually? -84.161.53.59 16:48, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Hmm, does the German cps. really have all of the meanings listed for Latin compositus? I would guess not, in which case we should list the meaning(s) it has as a German term at cps.. The term's Latin origin is etymological info, so it should be in the etymology. We need someone who knows how the German term is actually used. —  17:26, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

this way

English. No OneLook reference has even a redirect let alone an entry for this, but we have had the entry since before 2007 and we have translations etc, so we might want to try to make sense of this. I have a few questions:

1. What does the label "imperative determiner" mean? If it is a determiner, why is it in a Noun L2?
2. Isn't the noun definition SoP?
3. The three words presented as definitions on the same line in the Adverb L2 don't seem synonymous to me and there are no usage examples, let alone citations. Does anyone have a view on this.
4. Should we just RfD it? DCDuring (talk) 00:06, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

I added an example that might be of non-SoP usage:

It's good that he's gone. This way we don't have to argue with him all the time.

I don't know how to define it. It might just be an elliptical deixis, which doesn't seem to me to be much of a basis for inclusion. Is it? DCDuring (talk) 00:13, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

There's also "I wish he'd gone; that way we...", and "I would have preferred things the other way", etc. Equinox ◑ 00:22, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

Also with other definite determiners like "his way", "John's way", etc. I was just looking for something I was familiar with that might be idiomatic, it doesn't seem very idiomatic to me. MW Online has a two=definition entry for that way that resembles ours for this way. Oxford has a euphemistic sex-romance usage.

I am tempted to add as citations the lyrics from Walk This Way and Did You Ever See a Lassie?. DCDuring (talk) 19:00, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

Some cleanup seems to have occurred since 2018, but we still have a "Noun" sense glossed as "In the indicated direction or manner". Seems like a prepositional phrase, no? Most of the translations are adverbs. This, that and the other (talk) 10:48, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

• In particular:

1. The "imperative determiner" label has been removed.
2. The noun sense has been converted to a translation hub, so its idiomaticity is irrelevant now. But the fact that it may actually be a prepositional phrase that we have listed as a noun is still an issue.
3. The sense line used to, and still does, read, "In the way indicated; as follows; thus". These phrases do seem synonymous to me, but the sense is still without any usage examples or associated citations.
4. No RfD has occurred.

DCDuring's usage example now has a definition.

—  17:52, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

February 2018

Anglo-Saxon and Middle English in (New) English entries

As Anglo-Saxon and Middle English are not (New) English and as thus Anglo-Saxon and Middle English cites do not belong into (New) English entries but might nontheless be useful for Anglo-Saxon or Middle English entries to be created, I'm moving them to here now:

1. from God the Son, God the Father,God the Holy Ghost (maybe for God Fæder, Godes sunu, God þe son, God þe holi gost, though are the latter three idiomatic enough and not SOP?):
   • Template:Circa, Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (1891), iv. xvii. 312

     Wuldriende God Fæder butan fruman.

   • Template:Circa,, Aldred, Lindisfarne Gospels, John i. 1

     in fruma uæs uord & uord þæt is Godes sunu uæs mið God feder.

   • Template:Circa,, Primer, 47

     God, fadir of heuene... God þe son... God þe holi gost, haue merci of us!

2. from thereto (maybe for þher-to?):
   • c. 1430 (reprinted 1888), Thomas Austin, ed., Two Fifteenth-century Cookery-books. Harleian ms. 279 (ab. 1430), & Harl. ms. 4016 (ab. 1450), with Extracts from Ashmole ms. 1429, Laud ms. 553, & Douce ms. 55 [Early English Text Society, Original Series; 91], London: N. Trübner & Co. for the Early English Text Society, volume I, , page 11:

     Soupes dorye. — Take gode almaunde mylke […] caste þher-to Safroun an Salt […]

-80.133.98.90 19:38, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

This is difficult to address because our Middle English entries (if they exist at all) are in a poor state, with little standardization of spellings. DTLHS (talk) 19:41, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Follow the headwords in the Middle English Dictionary Online? — SGconlaw (talk) 11:50, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

As for a clean-up of (New) English entries, moving it to citation pages (like Citations:God, Citations:þher-to) as somewhat suggested in WT:RFC#thereto seems like a good idea. With Category:Old English citations, Category:Middle English citations the citations can than be found.

MED? -80.133.97.179 02:03, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

Following the headwords in the MED is a good safe bet, I think. We could then put the other spellings in alternative forms, I suppose? In some cases there are a plethora of spelling options, some of which are universal (e.g. the '-e' ending that may or may not be included; 'þ' and 'ð' instead of 'th' and vice versa, the wynn and the yogh, etc.)--it might be good to somehow standardize how those are handled as well. Or, perhaps, there are already ways the treatment thereof is standardized here--if so, I'd love to know. --SanctMinimalicen (talk) 00:05, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

No, there's not really any standards. This should be documented at Wiktionary:About Middle English, if something is agreed upon. DTLHS (talk) 01:18, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

• It's not really that simple. There is no hard dividing line between ME and modE, it's more of a sliding scale and some texts (like Malory) could fairly be counted as either. I think ME citations should not be removed from modE entries if they are doing the job of showing the word's usage through time. Ƿidsiþ 09:46, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

By time and WT:About Middle English, Malory is Middle English. -84.161.47.237 05:09, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Well, we picked 1500 as a dividing line, but that is arbitrary. Language did not morph into modern English overnight. Malory is right at the end of the ME period, and in fact is functionally identical to early modern English. He is a world away from (for example) Chaucer. Ƿidsiþ 04:51, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

I see this as a four-step process:

1. make a list of works/authors used in English quotes and quote requests
2. select from those a list of those which are from before modern English
3. make a list of English entries with pre-modern English quotes
4. go through the list and fix them

The first and third require processing the dumps, the second can be done by anyone who has the time to research or who knows already which is which, and the last requires someone who knows ME well enough to create entries.

It won't get everything, but it will at least catch a large subset of obvious ones. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:22, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

Quotes are not parseable enough to make step 1 feasible. DTLHS (talk) 16:40, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

It's also not necessarily desirable, since it's been established here already that Middle English citations can be used to support modern English definitions if the definition in question is also attested from the modern English period. Ƿidsiþ 14:29, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/151.255.69.66

Arabic. User:Kaixinguo~enwiktionary and myself spotted mass-editing of Arabic verb forms. The anon refuses to interact and the edits don't seem right. He may be a native speaker or, more likely an advanced learner, but they are not familiar with some forms and they bulk-remove them. Template:Ping, please review the edits, if you can. I have briefly checked some and I don't like what I see but would be better if they actually explained their actions. Please advise if a block or a warning is warranted. I wonder if they are one of formerly blocked users? --Anatoli T. / 11:24, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

I don't speak Arabic, but if you think the IP requires blocking please ping me. I will be online for the next few hours. — SGconlaw (talk) 13:54, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

In some cases, like Template:Diff or Template:Diff, this user seems to be deleting definition lines that have the same inflectional categories as another definition line, but link to an alternative form of the lemma. In the first case the alternative forms are [Term?] and [Term?], in the second [Term?] and [Term?]. WingerBot created the entry, and I guess Benwing had decided to include both alternative forms. — Eru·tuon 20:52, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

tunafoto, tular, gegantung

Malay or Indonesian. DTLHS (talk) 01:53, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

I've never seen them being used in Indonesia, but maybe an Indonesian could chime in. — Jeluang Terluang (talk) 21:57, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

March 2018

-phyte

English. Definition:

1. A taxonomic group of plants or algae, e.g. arthrophyte, cyanophyte.

Wrong. The taxonomic group names are translingual and end in -phyta. A cyanophyte is a member of the phylum Cyanophyta. I'm not exactly sure how to rework this, since it seems to be tied specifically to translingual -phyta, rather than being a general term for some taxonomic group. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:41, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Maybe it only misses a label like "in plural", as e.g. cyanophytes (collectively) = Cyanophyta. -84.161.47.237 05:09, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

I tried to clean it up. This, that and the other (talk) 10:48, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

unit

English. Metaknowledge expressed concern to me about the military senses. "Way too many badly written military senses... probably should all be clarified, and some might need to be sent to RFD". I agree, and I'm not familiar enough with the military to make a perfect judgement, but I can tell you now some of the red links look questionable, and one of the defs looks unnecessarily long. Any takers? PseudoSkull (talk) 04:43, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

April 2018

Appendix:English–French relations

The "identical spelling" section is a mess. Some entries are red linked. Some have only an English entry and some have only a French one. Would it be simpler to just delete it? SemperBlotto (talk) 16:23, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

Not having an entry isn't a good reason. Not existing in English or French would be a reason for removing single terms. A note could be missing: "The gender only applys to the French, not to the English". A reason for deletion could be, that the list would get to long as ~1/3 of the English vocabulary is of French (Old, Middle, New French) and Anglo-Norman origin, cp. File:Origins of English PieChart.svg, after all, l'anglais est un créole. -84.161.7.111 09:31, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

partialitas

English. Added by an IP today. "Where's a philosopher when you need one?" said no-one ever. Equinox ◑ 16:09, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

May 2018

bower

English. Pronunciations don't entirely align with etymologies. Also, several unrelated etymologies have been stuck together within Etymology 4. Dylanvt (talk) 02:21, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

万歳

Japanese. Bad etymology; doesn't have an Interjection section; mildly strange definitions (wording?), and the common reading of banzai isn't presented first. —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 08:05, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

@Suzukaze-c I reordered the etymologies, so your banzai is indeed first now—do you think we can remove the cleanup template now? I believe things are in a better state now.

I'm still concerned about one thing, though, which is that Etymology 3 says that the reading is goon, but in fact the goon for 万 is もん, not まん, so I believe this is in error. The まん reading is a kan'youon, and so isn't an "early borrowing" but must be some kind of vulgar alteration, probably from ばんざい. Kiril kovachev (talk) 13:13, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

那

Chinese. RFC-sense: Used after 咋, 咋就. so; that. — justin(r)leung  08:37, 12 May 2018 (UTC)

Template:Re It should be fixed now. Dokurrat (talk) 05:56, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Template:Re Could you add an example? There are too many senses for so and that, so it's hard to understand what it really means without an example. — justin(r)leung  06:05, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Template:Re Sorry that I can't. It's not of my lexicon. 汉语方言大词典 recorded this sense is found in various dialects. I speak none of them. Dokurrat (talk) 06:09, 13 November 2018 (UTC) (modified)

Template:Re I see. Is it referring to sense 7 (那麼；那樣)? — justin(r)leung  06:36, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Template:Re Yes, I was referring to sense 7 (那麼；那樣). Dokurrat (talk) 06:41, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Middle Japanese

Since nothing has been done, I am putting these here: かめ, かへる, かへす, かはる, かはす, かふ. DTLHS (talk) 22:44, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

kick ass

English. Two out of the three definitions and their usexes were based on confusion between this, which is intransitive, and kick someone's ass, which is transitive. I think I fixed the definitions, but I have no clue what to do with the translations. Perhaps they might be moved to the other term if someone would be so kind as to create it. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 00:09, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

June 2018

PAN

Proto-Austronesian lemmas needs help to use Wolff 2010 system in place of Blust 1999. The conversion is easy as stated on Wikipedia. IPA also needs to be updated a little though. --Octahedron80 (talk) 02:07, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Bavarian Old High German given names

Many of the Bavarian names in Category:Old High German given names need to have gender specified. - -sche (discuss) 21:49, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

I thought Bavarian Old High German was the default Old High German? Korn [kʰũːɘ̃n] (talk) 23:16, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

July 2018

mag-

Tagalog. A horrendous mess. I wouldn't know where to start. SemperBlotto (talk) 08:02, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

Category:English merisms

English. I apologize for creating and authoring the descriptive text for this category. Merism suggests that the term is polysemous in a way makes it a poor category name. I don't see what characteristics the members of the category have in common apart from being coordinate expressions. At least the category membership needs to be cleaned out. DCDuring (talk) 18:35, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

August 2018

〜

Translingual. Chinese. How is this a particle, and how is it used? — justin(r)leung  13:57, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

swidden

English. Overlong etymology, includes paragraph length encyclopedic content. Delete encyclopedic content or show-hide it and convert inline references to footnotes, etc. DCDuring (talk) 17:27, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

KYPark and Category:Korean citations

The few pages in this category have mostly been touched by the madness of our old "friend" KYPark, and I don't know who feels up to looking though them and deleting extraneous/weird material. Template:Ping? —Μετάknowledge 23:38, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Spanish and Portuguese Ordinal Abbreviations

I started to fix this, then realized I'm not up to the job at the moment. There doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency in the following areas:

• In many cases, there is an entry for Portuguese but not for Spanish;
• Sometimes plurals are included in the superscript, sometimes not (e.g. plural forms at 2.º vs. 3º vs. actual entries, like 2.ªs);
• The headers usually display plural/feminine inflections (3º), but sometimes not (3o);
• Sometimes "Ordinal Number" or "Abbreviation" is used as the header instead of "Adjective";
• 1ª is apparently nonstandard (according to the entry), with 1.ª being the main form, but elsewhere, no indication is given on whether one is more correct than the other;
• The "abbreviation of" information is sometimes in the definition line, sometimes in the etymology.

Good luck! Andrew Sheedy (talk) 20:13, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

September 2018

teta

Serbo-Croatian.

https://de.langenscheidt.com/deutsch-kroatisch/search?term=ujna&q_cat=%2Fdeutsch-kroatisch%2F

Langenscheidt reads that unja is the wife of an uncle/ujak. teta shows another definition. Does anyone know the real meaning? --Rasmusklump (talk) 22:26, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

Langenscheidt has: "Tante f Frau des Onkels mütterlicherseits", i.e. "[one's father's or mother's sister] [gender] [wife of the uncle on one's mother's side]", so for a person there are: person's mother -- person's mother's brother = person's uncle -- person's mother's brother's wife = person's unja -20:22, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

tȅtka is the sister of one’s mother or father (aunt by blood). tȅta is a hypocoristic form of tȅtka. ȕjāk is the brother of one’s mother (maternal uncle by blood). ȗjna is the wife of an ȕjāk, i.e. a mother’s brother’s wife (maternal aunt, not by blood). strȋna is a father’s brother’s wife (paternal aunt, not by blood). The entry at tȅta is wrong; it lumps together both strȋnas and ȗjnas as ȗjnas. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 04:39, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

November 2018

lianghui#English

English. The entry title is lowercase, but the entry says it is a proper noun. —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 05:52, 1 November 2018 (UTC)

adumbrationism

English. Non-standard "Sources" header; they're not all exactly references either. The most recent edits seem to have introduced an additional source which is presumably the origin of the quote given, so it should be converted as such. S 17:19, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

December 2018

Category:en:Star Wars

Category:English terms derived from Star Wars

Is it necessary to have both these categories? Can one of them be eliminated? (Note that we also have Category:en:Star Trek and Category:English terms derived from Star Trek. I haven't nominated those yet, pending the outcome of the current discussion.) — SGconlaw (talk) 04:38, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

They are subtly different, though overlapping. For example, Hand Solo is derived from a SW character's name but does not relate to SW itself (and so should be in the latter category but not the former); Machete Order was coined by a blog but relates directly to the films (and so should be in the former category but not the latter). In this fine distinction worth keeping? Ideally, yes, but it could be more trouble than it's worth. —Μετάknowledge 04:46, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Eeek. I don't think anyone will realize this subtle difference unless it is pointed out somewhere, and I doubt if the effort to try and maintain the distinction is worth it. — SGconlaw (talk) 04:47, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Template:Reply Feel free to propose either one to RFD. I agree with your arguments. Fytcha (talk) 13:21, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Template:Reply While I am still of the view that the distinction between the two types of categories is too fine and thus confusing for most editors, I note that "Category:English terms derived from Star Trek" has been nominated for deletion and merging with "Category:en:Star Trek", but it looks like the consensus is leaning towards "keep". If the consensus is confirmed, would someone (Template:Ping) please add usage notes to all these categories to explain clearly the difference between them. I, for one, can never remember which entries are supposed to be in "English terms derived from XYZ" and which in "en:XYZ". — SGconlaw (talk) 20:40, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Noël (interjection)

French. Def: "cry of celebration in the Middle Ages" Middle Ages end 1500, Middle French ends ~1600, i.e. after the Middle Ages. That doesn't make sense, needs a clarification. If the interjection was used in the Middle Ages, it's not New French (fr) but Middle French (frm) [though there could also be a New French interjection Noël, for example used in novels for historic effect but not used in the Middle Ages]; and if the interjection is New French, it wasn't used in the Middle Ages [though there could also be a Middle French interjection Noël which was used back than]. -84.161.36.174 11:55, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

January 2019

Special:Contributions/Angelucci

Needs an Italian speaker to identify which of the entries this user created are SoP & RFD(/speedy?) them, because there appear to be a lot. See Talk:infilare il fondo della camicia nei pantaloni. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 17:03, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Related: 79.32.128.0/21, possibly the same contributor. — surjection ⟨⟩ 13:59, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

give someone an inch and someone will take a mile

searching "give someone an inch" or "give them an inch" returns results for three pages, including this one; however, this page does not link to any of the similar alternatives, and this particular wording seems to be a deviation from the much more common use of 'they'. In this context I think that this page should be deleted.

"Someone" is not meant to be actually part of a saying, but rather a standard template per Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion#Idiomatic phrases intended to be replaced with the appropriate pronoun in context. But I agree that repeating "someone" sounds a little weird; we should tidy up that policy to spell out what should happen in that case. There are three options I can think of: 1) keeping "someone"; 2) using singular "they"; or 3) using "he or she". -- King of King of Hearts King of Hearts Contributions/King of Hearts ♠ 07:17, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

Interesting. In theory there might be a distinction between "X someone and they Y" (same person) and "X someone and someone Y" (two different people). Probably not in practice. Equinox ◑ 07:59, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

I think the distinction is between "X someone and they Y" and "X someone and someone else Y", with "X someone and someone Y" lying unsatisfactorily in between and thus sounding a bit strange.— Pingku 10:53, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't know which form is preferred, but either this needs to be redirected to give them an inch and they'll take a mile, or the other way around (or choose a different form). "He or she" is too clunky, and in modern usage they (and its other forms) have come to represent an indefinite gendered single person. -Mike (talk) 06:09, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

February 2019

al dan niet

Dutch. The current definitions for this adverb are "does or does not – in some cases does, in other cases does not" and "did or did not – in some cases did, in other cases did not". (talk) 13:19, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

• whether or not seems to be a popular translation. We happy with this? GreyishWorm (talk) 01:40, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

  In many cases, whether or not cannot be used in a translation to English, or only by rephrasing (changing the part of speech of some words while translating). Often the adverb is used in combination with of, and then whether or not can be used as a translation – but in these cases the English conjunction whether translates the Dutch conjunction of. Example:

  Ik wist niet of ik het al dan niet moest lezen.

  This is from a translated thriller; in the original English, the sentence reads,

  I didn't know whether to read it or not.

  The word al as used here is an obsolete synonym of the usually untranslatable adverb wel, the opposite of niet, and the word dan is an equally obsolete synonym of the conjunction of, surviving in dan wel and the idiom te ja dan te nee (“yes or no”). Together, the whole term is synonymous with wel of niet, and is perhaps best defined as or ... not. Usexes may suggest ways of translating this idiomatically in various contexts. For example:

  Dit is al dan niet een bewuste keuze.

  This may or may not be a conscious choice.

  Lambiam 10:54, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

Maybe just "possibly", "perhaps"? Thadh (talk) 11:02, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

April 2019

Burzyńska and probably many others

Template:Ping Something tells me that this is not the intended way to use the parameter... —Rua (mew) 18:39, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

Template:Ping I updated the entry so that it mirrors the masculine version. -Mike (talk) 22:09, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

Ok, that's one entry. But there are sure to be lots more that misuse on this template alone, and even more that misuse it on other entries. Also, Template:Ping there's no such thing as "feminine personal". —Rua (mew) 22:10, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

Template:Ping Good to know. I had never seen that before. -Mike (talk) 22:43, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

To make it easy to find misuses of the |dot= parameter, I made an updated list of form-of templates with |dot= , using the Template:Revision that Benwing2 gave me. Most of them have a single punctuation mark in |dot=. (Here are instances for which that isn't true.) But with the recent changes in template names, probably the list is incomplete.... — Eru·tuon 00:10, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Template:Ping But the template here is {{surname}}, not a form-of template. —Rua (mew) 10:24, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Template:Reply to Whoops. Not sure what I was thinking. Here's the list of all |dot= in {{surname}}, and these are the cases with a lengthier |dot= parameter (not empty and not just a single punctuation mark). There are quite a few Polish surnames in there. — Eru·tuon 19:09, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I figured there would be more. Should we start moving {{surname}} away from the parameter? —Rua (mew) 19:30, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Category:Hawaiian adverbs

According to Category talk:Hawaiian adjectives, there are no adverbs in Hawaiian. I'd clean these up myself but I don't know what they are supposed to be, so I'll leave it to someone who knows what they're doing. —Rua (mew) 17:07, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

May 2019

maha

Vilamovian. Needs a conjugation template for its inflected forms. Request posted in the entry:

Please create a template for Vilamovian weak verbs ending in -a like maha, I don't know how to design them. These verbs are regular and follow a common pattern, here the pattern is design around the root -mah-

— Eru·tuon 02:54, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

Category:Hunsrik lemmas or Hunsrik

If Hunsrik isn't Hunsrückisch but only Brazilian Hunsrückisch as Hunsrik and en.wikipedia claim, then the whole category needs a clean-up. For example, eich is Hunsrückisch but not (necessarily) Brazilian Hunsrückisch. Otherwise, if Hunsrik and Hunsrückisch is the same, namely a German dialect spoken in Hunsrück and Brazil, then the entry Hunsrik and en.wp need a clean-up. Daloda (talk) 16:24, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

There is no WT:About Hunsrik, so I can't give a definitive answer. Template:Ping should be able to shed some light. —Μετάknowledge 03:59, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Template:Ping Our language header Hunsrik (hrx) is South American Hunsrückisch. The reference given at eich does attest its use in Brazil, though being a self-published online PDF, it is questionable whether it should count for our attestation criteria.

As for the English entry Hunsrik, its definition(s) does not need to correspond to the name we use for hrx. If the term also refers to the lect of Hunsrück, you can add a definition (or to the definition). — Ungoliant 14:20, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Template:Ping: The reference you mention is only for eich (“you (objective, pl.)”) and not for eich (“I”). (Is the reference durably archived? If not, it's not sufficient as per WT:CFI.) P. J. Rottmann who was the source for eich (“I”) is Central Franconian as he was from Germany and has: and . --2003:DE:3727:FF66:943C:E458:552C:9B20 03:51, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Ah, I see what you mean now. You are right about that.

The reference is not durably archived. It is an enthusiast’s labour of love that he published on a blog from what I can tell, although this word is attested else (the 2nd person, not the 1st). — Ungoliant 15:23, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

decision stream

English. The current definition and the one that an IP just tried to add are solid blocks of technical-sounding jargon describing what seem to be a type of computer application and a rather specific organizational method. The Google Books hits I see, on the other hand, talk about an element in the analysis of processes- basically, a concept. This smells like someone trying to promote stuff that just happens to be available on their website(s).

At any rate, there seems to be real usage, so it would be great if someone who knows more than I do could make a real entry out of it, phrased so that ordinary human beings can understand it. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:18, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

June 2019

proprietor

I have not studied law where English is spoken to know what this word means, but I doubt that this word is interchangeable with “owner”, at least in the main sense as currently used – in any case the definition “owner” is hardly enough not to leave doubts about its application; and the second and third definitions are redundant to each other; probably also the third and second to the first if the first is correctly defined, and possibly even the fourth is just subcase.

The translation tables contain “Inhaber” for German. Indeed, how I see the word used in corpora, it translates well so. So there are trademark proprietors, and those are Markenrechtsinhaber in German. But “owner” is not Inhaber, it is Eigentümer, which means the complete might about a corporeal object and it cannot be applied to trademarks or other intellectual property rights. A Besitzer means the de facto control about a thing (borne by the will to possess; it is possessor), a word hardly pertinent to proprietor.

Is it just “someone to whom a right is assigned” at the end? Fay Freak (talk) 15:21, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

July 2019

Category:English collective nouns

Applying {{lb|en|collectively}} and {{lb|en|collective}} causes entries to be placed in this category. These labels have been applied to miscellany of terms, including to Entente Cordiale and Welsh. I would think we would not want to include demonyms or, indeed, any proper nouns in this category. Further, nouns like academia seem to not fit ordinary use of the term.

I am not sure how many problems are here, but some possibilities are:

1. the label is misapplied
2. the label needs to be reworded
3. the label should not categorize
4. our definition of collective noun is not specific enough
   1. In general as used in linguistics
   2. As should applied to determining category membership

I think this needs discussion before action, but I don't think it rises to BP. If there is a lot of disagreement, we should take it to BP once the problem(s) is/are sorted. DCDuring (talk) 15:50, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

Century 1911 has: "In gram., a noun in the singular number signifying an aggregate or assemblage, as multitude, crowd, troop, herd, people, society, clergy, meeting, etc."

I would exclude multitude, crowd, people, society, clergy and include troop, herd, meeting, though I can't now specify the basis for the differences I find between the two groups. DCDuring (talk) 15:57, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

August 2019

djinhöv

Messy etymology; see the entry for explanation. — Eru·tuon 17:50, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

Category:ceb:Municipalities of the Philippines

Category:ceb:Barangays of the Philippines

Lots of subcategorisation here. Didn't we previously delete similar stuff about Bangladesh before? If we decide these should exist, then at least they should be added to the category data so that they can be used in multiple languages. —Rua (mew) 16:59, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/92.184.105.75

This French IP just added a whole bunch of Greek phonetic transcriptions of English given names with the definition "A male given name, equivalent to English […] " provided by the {{given name}} template. This is rather misleading, especially for names where the English forms are descended from Ancient Greek and the native Greek descendants of the Ancient Greek forms are far more common. These names seem to be attested, but I'm not sure whether they're really Greek or transcriptions of English. Can someone who knows some Greek, like Template:Ping advise on how to deal with these? Chuck Entz (talk) 02:54, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Template:Ping For ease of access I assume that Μαρκ, Μάικ, Μάικλ, Μπράιαν, Ουίλλιαμ, Ρόμπερτ, Ρίτσαρντ, Τζέιμς, Τζον, Ντέιβιντ are the names we are talking about. I looked at Pierre, Odysseus to see how we handled names which I know of personally in the UK of English people; Odysseus has a Greek mother. (I would rather term us all European, but we won't go into that!) The treatment of these two seems fair to me, English people having an extra Category:English male given names from French. The English are generous about given names - anything goes - I don't know how a Greek would define a Greek name, my initial trawl of Βικιπαίδεια didn't find any native examples of these names but that doesn't mean much Μαρκ may be rare but Μαρκός isn't. We need Greek input :) — SaltmarshSaltmarsh. 05:37, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Template:Ping, yes I can see Odysseus from the ancient name, but is anyone called Othysseas (Οδυσσέας -audio transcription of informal name-)? These are correct audio-transcriptions of the English names, unadapted, without declension: I am not sure of how these infinite code-switchings are handled. I do not know if you wish them to appear in Translations. I see the English Alexandros (transliteration of greek Αλέξανδρος/Ἀλέξανδρος) instead of Alexander. Or Alixandr, Aleksandr (of Александр). Perhaps, for Μάικλ something like...

• Transcription of the English male given name Michael in Greek script. Equivalent of the Greek (older, formal form) or Μιχάλης (Michális).

Same could be done for the French Michel & Michèle Μισέλ.

But are they used as Greek? No, they are used as English while speaking Greek. Would you add them at Category:Greek given names, or at Transliterations? Category:el:Transliteration of personal names

Example: I know a person called Γιάννης, passport with formal Ιωάννης or Ἰωάννης but his family call him Τζον (John). Is this a greek name? No. It is English. In Eng. we have Iannis, Yiannis, Ioannis (various transliterations of old and modern greek forms).

The reverse procedure IS indeed a normal greek lemma: A foreign name may be hellenized: Robert (transcription & transliteration: Ρόμπερτ) became Ροβέρτος, with full declension, which IS used (rarely) as a greek given name. sarri.greek (talk) 06:02, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Template:Ping Do we have 3 options (the first is non-commital)?

1. A male given name from the English Robert, equivalent to the Greek Ροβέρτος (Rovértos).

2. Template:Translit. a male given name equivalent to the Greek Ροβέρτος (Rovértos).

3. Template:Transcription. a male given name equivalent to the Greek Ροβέρτος (Rovértos).

The trouble with using {{given name}} is assignment as a Greek name, which might not be what we want. One option would be to use the first and leave the rest to the Etymology section. — SaltmarshSaltmarsh. 06:29, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

September 2019

give someone an inch and someone will take a mile

This entry needs a cleanup. It could be a proverb. --TNMPChannel (talk) 12:00, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

lv

Needs formatting, templating, separation from lowercase to uppercase, and some good old-fashioned TLC --Vealhurl (talk) 10:18, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

October 2019

кабак#Etymology_1, Kabacke#Descendants

The sections are contradicting as Low German (nds) and High German (de) are different languages. --2003:F8:13C7:59D1:2952:6150:4D4:3CAC 13:59, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

They aren’t, and Low German (nds) and High German (de) aren’t different languages. The word has been used just north and south the Benrath line. Comparing High Prussian and Low Prussian, they aren’t different languages but dialects. “German” is the Dachsprache. Fay Freak (talk) 14:05, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:R:Urseren

(Some of) those entries need a cleanup:

1. Some entries lack the page number, e.g. Eichhore, Nuss which are not even in the Wörterverzeichnis (p. 110ff.).
   • Nuss: The source has "nʊss Nuß" (p. 59). Properly it's not ʊ, but u neither. The source explains the characters on p. 7f.: "ı ı̄ [ı with macron] und ʊ ʊ̄ sind sehr offene Laute; [...] i und ī [i with macron] sind deutlich geschlossen; [...] Der mit u, ū bezeichnete Laut ist ein sehr geschlossenes u mit ganz leichter Palatalisierung". Thus apparently it's not "Nuss" and if the occurence on p. 59 is the source for the entry, the entry not only needs the page number but also a note or another cleanup.
2. Some entries need a note and possible other cleanups, e.g. Tuure, Määri.
   • Tuure: The source has "tʊ̄rə m. Turm, mhd. turn" (p. 19), "tʊ̄rə m. Turm, speziell der ‚Langobardenturm‘ in Hospental" (p. 34f.) and doesn't have "Tuure" on p. 34.
   • Määri: The source has "mǣrı n. Märchen, zu ahd. mâra" (p. 23, in § 26), "mǣrı n. Märchen" (p. 45, in § 51), and "Mä̂ri n. 26" (p. 112, inside the Wörterverzeichnis), and does not have "Määri" on p. 23. As for the Wörterverzeichnis, it begins with this note: "[...] Durch Aufhebung von Entrundung, Verdumpfung und Diphthongierung sowie der sekundären Dehnung und Kürzung ist der Lautstand soweit als möglich dem gemeinalemannischen Status angenähert worden. [...]". That is, the form in the Wörterverzeichnis is artificial, not really Urseren.

--Tybete (talk) 11:33, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/Theo.phonchana

I've skimmed through some of Theo's most recent contributions and found many dubious edits and some obvious errors. I'm not a Latin, Thai or Chinese expert, but I think those edits should be checked too considering that he has a tendency of reverting edits by knowledgeable users. I also issued a 1 week block so we can go through his edits and maybe let him cool down. --Robbie SWE (talk) 08:56, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

mood-thought

Can this be reworded? Tharthan (talk) 03:11, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

真

Japanese: etymology 3 has too many readings. — justin(r)leung  02:33, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Ah, names.

We don't really have any cohesive approach to the enormous variability of Japanese name (especially given-name) spellings and readings. I suppose, ideally, we'd treat each reading fully, but given the wide wide wide WIIIIIIDE range of spellings, I suspect we'd have to lemmatize at the kana renderings.

Template:Ping + anyone else I'm undoubtedly omitting in my present tiredness: what thoughts on this? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ 05:05, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

I would like to see given names lemmatized at kana only and surnames lemmatized at kanji or kana. I think listing these readings at {{ja-readings|nanori=}} would suffice. By the way, can we capitalize the rōmaji for the nanori readings? KevinUp (talk) 05:21, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Template:Re Listing only as nanori doesn't tell us whether it's a name in itself (not used in conjunction with other characters) and it doesn't tell us whether it's a male given name, female given name or surname. Thus, the romaji for the nanori readings should not be capitalized. — justin(r)leung  06:36, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

The idea is to have this information (male/female given name) at kana entries because there are multiple ways of writing the same name using different kanji (See ただし#Proper noun for example). I think nanori readings can be capitalized because they are proper nouns. KevinUp (talk) 06:54, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Template:Re Then they shouldn't just be listed as readings under the Kanji header, but also have a soft redirect. Nanori readings may not necessarily be proper nouns in themselves if they're only used in conjunction with other characters to form a proper noun. — justin(r)leung  07:00, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Template:Ping Any thoughts on this? Creating soft redirects is a good idea but may consume more memory and the page is already exhausted. KevinUp (talk) 07:05, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Ping also Template:Ping for comment. Are there any nanori readings that are only used in conjunction with other characters, and shall these entries be designated as affix instead? KevinUp (talk) 07:26, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

The page has dubious given names such as まさつぐ, しんじ, and ますみ, and dubious surnames such as さねさき, まがさき, しんさき, しんざき, and まやなぎ. They should be deleted, or at least RFVed. I prefer having only nanori readings in a kanji page and attested surnames. Given names are really free when it comes to kanji. — T Shinji (talk) 10:23, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Agree with @Shinji on this. And Template:Ping, re: capitalizing nanori, pretty much all nanori that I can think of at the moment can be used as parts of longer names, and as such, should probably be left as lower-case in the {{ja-readings}} list. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ 17:00, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Template:Reply Thanks for the explanation. I managed to clean up the compounds section and reduced the Lua memory from 50 MB to 35 MB. What are your thoughts on creating soft redirects for given names? KevinUp (talk) 17:54, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Template:Reply If you mean soft redirects to the lemma entry located at the kana spelling, sure. If you mean something else, please clarify.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ 07:24, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I meant. Are we going to lemmatize given names at kanji, kana spelling or both? KevinUp (talk) 09:16, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

November 2019

Jesus

Middle High German L2

Citations follow a non-standard format. DCDuring (talk) 03:21, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Template:Ping I have removed the textual variants because these serve no purpose on Wiktionary and removed the nesting. Does that fulfill the request in your view? (talk) 14:44, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

It does.

Template:Ping The citation beginning Wolfdietrich lacks a date. I couldn't tell whether the date shown was for the specific work or for an anthology-type republication. Can you tell? DCDuring (talk) 14:51, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Template:Ping It is a type of anthology that apparently includes various versions of the Wolfdietrich. The manuscript used for the quote is Hagens Handschrift, but I do not know what version that is though it is likely not version A. Also, the amount of variants of the work is a bit of a mess, so I have no idea what date to use. The surviving manuscripts themselves seem to be mostly 15th/16th century according to Wikipedia. (talk) 15:11, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Getting the right centur(y|ies) would be an improvement over no date at all. DCDuring (talk) 15:15, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Template:Ping I dated it at 1230, but I could also see why one would date it at the date of the manuscript on which the anthology publication was based. Do whatever you think is right. DCDuring (talk) 18:53, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Template:Ping It is apparently version B and the manuscript has the siglum MS H, which the Wikipedia article dates to the 2nd half of the 15th century. Version B is generally dated to the 13th century. (talk) 08:49, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. I suppose that, strictly speaking, one would want to date the citation at the date of the earliest manuscript that included the headword, but what would one do if the surrounding text differed in a way that influenced one's ascription of meaning? I suppose that it would be a rare user here that would be concerned. It makes me appreciate that most printed works are not subject to as much variation, except by well-defined editions, errata sheets, etc. DCDuring (talk) 12:28, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

Ford

make of car.

Apparently, all the citation dates are based on whatever edition the contributor found in their own library or on Google Books. I found 3 errors in the 3 that I checked, including Willa Cather's My Antonia dated 2006, rather than 1918, Elmore Leonard's Killshot dated 2003, rather than 1989. There are 10 others to be checked. DCDuring (talk) 03:57, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

evolutionary

Too many SOP derived terms. Ultimateria (talk) 23:48, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

I dunno, they seem pretty sound. I wanna keep 'em. GreyishWorm (talk) 01:57, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

パッシブアグレッシブ

1. should be an adjective instead?
2. meets WT:CFI?

—Suzukaze-c◇◇ 00:16, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

Seems to be primarily an adjective (パッシブ・アグレッシブな), but there are some noun uses. I've cleaned it up and moved it to パッシブ・アグレッシブ, since the quotations I found all had the dot. Cnilep (talk) 04:21, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

a little bird told me

The etymology trots out paragraphs of ancient references to people literally being told things by birds, and mentions carrier pigeons. Is this really necessary? Chuck Entz (talk) 23:35, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

• Additionally, the bare links in the References section are making the page display extra wide (so that I have to scroll horizontally) when using tabbed languages. - (talk | contrib) 23:47, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Rhymes:Estonian/en

Rhymes:Estonian/ɑɡu

Estonian has first-syllable stress on most native words, like Finnish. Rhymes:Estonian doesn't say anything about rhyming rules, but if they are anything like English, a lot of these words do not actually rhyme because they are not stressed on the first syllable of the rhyme. —Rua (mew) 15:55, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

The article Riim on the Estonian Wikipedia does not give a precise definition, but defines the rule loosely as “the same sound” (helide kordust) “in the last syllables of the word” (sõna viimastes silpides). The examples given (all polysyllabic) are all consistent with the hypothesis that the rules are like those for English rhyming poetry.  --Lambiam 15:08, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

December 2019

may the Force be with you

I'm tempted to rfv the entire translation table, since almost all of the translations look like simple calques of the English, and the phrase was only coined a few decades ago (Old Church Slavic... really?). Someone has obviously made it their mission to translate this into every language that ever existed and is posting the results on a web page somewhere.

Perhaps we need some kind of message on the page telling people not to add translations if they aren't aware of actual usage. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:22, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

I don't know if these books and/or movies have been translated into Church Slavonic (maybe they have after all); but wherever I met that phrase in any language it was as a literal translation of the English, and what's surprising about that? Star Wars is rating near the top of the box office all over the world, not only in English-speaking countries (and even non-native English-speakers watching it in the English original would then use a literal translation to their friends in their own language). Tonymec (talk) 00:52, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

[4] — surjection ⟨⟩ 15:54, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Appendix:Wu Chinese surnames

Looks really messy right now. — justin(r)leung  09:22, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

• Yes working on it right now. Could use some help aligning all the columns. Merry Christmas!--Prisencolin (talk) 19:39, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

January 2020

cannabin

I removed a lengthy, footnoted, POV defense of marijuana that was hanging like a goiter from the definition after the offending part had been excised, but the definition itself has been changed from the admittedly dated and awful Webster 1913 one to a sort of half-mutated form that doesn't make sense by old or modern standards. It talks about hemp, the taxonomic equivalent of Cannabis indica, hashish and "narcotic" properties all together, which strikes me as possibly wrong, and it's not completely clear to me how one would refer nowadays to whatever was meant by this obsolete chemical term. Someone better versed in the history of marijuana needs to make some sense out of this. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:17, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Cannabin seems to be archaic in the sense given. According to a document titled "How Tobacco and Cannabis Smoking Effects Human Physiology": "Cannabis, produced from the hemp plant, is employed in 3 forms: herbal cannabis, the dried leaves and flowering first-rate, additionally referred to as ‘cannabis,’ ganja,’ or ‘weed,’ among others; cannabin, the ironed secretions of the plant, referred to as ‘hashish’ or ‘charash;’ and cannabis oil, a mix ensuing from distillation or extraction of active ingredients of the plant." (There are a lot of hits for cannabin oids, attempting to exclude them causes google to scold me: "Showing results for cannabis -oil -kids".) There are more potentially useful papers behind paywalls. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 13:57, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Văn

Some of the things listed as homophones (e.g. dâng) do not appear to be pronounced the same, based on our pronunciation sections. Pinging two recently-active Vietnamese speakers Template:Ping, can one of you please take a look and either remove anything in the list of homophones which is not a homophone, or expand the pronunciation sections? - -sche (discuss) 22:26, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

(Notifying Mxn, PhanAnh123): Soon two years without any activity. --Fytcha (talk) 19:14, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

The pronunciation of the phoneme written <â> is quite messy: bits and pieces of Central and South Vietnam merge it with <ă>. I don’t know if there’s any place where this merger coincides with the merger of [loan creation]] which last does not correspond to formally foreign elements at all but is a direct invention to render a concept.

The passage “or at least more of the former than the latter if one reckons that there is no clear line” is also optional, but it would lead to doubtful black-white distinction. Fay Freak (talk) 19:28, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

-ల and Telugu plural genitives

I think this is the right place to discuss this issue... if it isn't, I apologize in advance. When -ల was created, it was erroneously marked as the suffix for the accusative form of plural nouns, rather than the genitive/possessive. I recently fixed it and a couple other pages, but I think this error may have been duplicated on a large scale. Is there any way to bot that can fix all words with this suffix mistakenly marked as accusative? (Side note: the Telugu noun declension template probably also needs some reworking and increased usage.) MSG17 (talk) 17:09, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Mathia

It looks like the etymology was "borrowed" from Wikipedia- reference templates and all- with an academic-style footnote added citing Wikipedia as a reference, and the usual Wiktionary etymology templates. Chuck Entz (talk) 07:58, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Heide

1. (East German dialects) woodland, forest

Is this regional ==German== in which case the label is wrong, or really dialectal German in which case it would be ==East Central German==? --幽霊四 (talk) 13:50, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

talpă

IMO too many cognates, presented in bad English. Beware of the oversensitive author. --Akletos (talk) 21:05, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

What is “too many cognates”? If we don’t have an ancestor page to reconstruct then on one page there must be a cognate list. Myself I am known as someone who in general rather deletes “too many cognates” when they are avoidable without loss of explanation. In this particular case it is particularly relevant where or how far related words are spread. This basis paves the way for a conclusion about a possible ultimate origin of this etymologically difficult word family for which the cited author needs about ten book pages – a conclusion which is on this Wiktionary page also drawn, briefly summarizing the scholarship, which already took me several hours to read and recapitulate, so the claim in the RFC template that it is but a list of cognates that “leads nowhere” is false, and not only contradictory conduct – in the nominator’s original deletion of everything but the cognates – but also apparently ignorant about how an etymology about a difficult etymology can look like. This word history is like that. Fay Freak (talk) 14:29, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Look, Fairy Boy, I'm sorry if I should have hurt your feelings, but often when you write something English in the namespace it gets really embarrassing for the project and everyone trying to contribute something useful to it.

• Your biggest problem is not that you don't know enough to contribute, but that you overestimate your knowledge and your language skills. Your English is just not good enough to write simple definitions, not to speak of longer passages on etymology. But because you think you're perfect you treat everyone that tries to correct your mistakes as an idiot that's not able to grasp your genius.
• Etymological sections like on talpă sound like a from nineteenth century schoolmaster dabbling in historical linguistics in his sparetime. It's kind of cute and there's some merit in your industrious effort to find cognates but you lack the linguistic training to get the picture, to consider alternative explanations, and to see where you should refrain from a definite conclusion on a problem.

FWIW I would recommend that you at least contact a native speaker of English before you enter something in the namespace to check if it's ok, but I know that I would be preaching to deaf ears. Have a nice day. --Akletos (talk) 08:22, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

余#Japanese

Conflation caused by shinjitai. 余<餘 (あまる、ヨ) ≠ 余<余 (われ、ヨ). —Suzukaze-c (talk) 23:23, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

I agree that it should be two kanji entries, since that's also done with 弁. I went ahead and split it. Tespi40 (talk) 08:07, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

February 2021

ごつ

From RFD. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 10:07, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

へつ

From RFD. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 10:08, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

cut

Sense "(cricket, of a shot) Played with a horizontal bat to hit the ball backward of point." Tagged, but not listed. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 10:15, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Not sure what there even is to cleanup. Fytcha (talk) 18:28, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

widdershins; withershins

Either widdershins or withershins needs to be made the lemma, duplicated content from the other entry relocated to the lemma, and the other entry converted to an alternative form entry. — SGconlaw (talk) 18:01, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Google Ngrams suggests that widdershins should be the main entry. —Mahāgaja · talk 18:45, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

entropy

Any good thing explainers around for this topic? – Jberkel 10:08, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Having just now stumbled on this mess, I'll have a go, but a few words of caution: looking at the entropy Talk page, it is clear that some of the contributors to either the entry or the Talk page permitted their confidence to exceed their expertise or their grasp, either of the literature or of the history and physics of the fields involved. A lot of mopping up will be in order.

I suspect that it will end in my removing a lot of explanatory material and referring to Wikipedia for the details. The hard part will be in making the residue useful without being misleadingJonRichfield (talk) 08:46, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

March 2021

Bocher

German, tagged by Template:User, but never listed. – Jberkel 18:52, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

twynne

The English verb sense. Tagged in March 2021 by an IP, who said (in the source), "Chaucer is Middle English (enm) and not English (en) - WT:RFVE for this?" - excarnateSojourner (talk | contrib) 20:36, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

冂

Middle Chinese is wrong? 72.76.95.136 23:00, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Can you explain what is currently wrong on the page? It seems fine to me. Sure, the Middle Chinese reconstruction seems off, but that does not necessarily make it wrong. ॥ ☼ সূর্যমান ☽ ॥ 14:46, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Template:Ping The modern Chinese forms do not reflect the Middle Chinese. Could they be two separate etymologies? Do we need to split them? 72.76.95.136 15:53, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

In that page there is a reference of the Kangxi Dictionary. It says 集韻：涓熒切音扃, which means that the pronunciation of 扃 existed back when the Jiyun was written. At the very least the pronunciation of 扃 should be included alongside 莫狄切.--ItMarki (talk) 17:19, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

(for context: currently /mek̚/) It seems to be equivalent to 冖 (Template:Ltc-l). Entry on Yundianwang; Guangyun scan. —Suzukaze-c (talk) 02:49, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Template:Ping That's right. It appears the two characters have been mixed up. One is ostensibly a variant of the other, but do we have any reliable sources confirming this, and which way does it go? 72.76.95.136 19:13, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

May 2021

Category:Sundanese romanizations

Per discussion here, I'd say all Latin entries be removed from this category. 72.76.95.136 19:15, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

वसु

This page requires severe cleanup and maintenance. The definitions are everywhere, and a lot of them don't make any sense. What sets "ray of light" and "particular ray of light" apart? What does "the the of the yoke of a plough" mean? And why are there twelve separate lines for names? TheTheRemover (talk) 19:29, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

A lot of our Sanskrit entries, such as this one, have been copied directly and basically unedited from the Monier-Williams Dictionary, which reveals that "the the of the yoke of a plough" is supposed to be "the tie of the yoke of a plough", which I've now corrected. But I agree that this, like at least 75% of our Sanskrit entries, needs to be cleaned up to look like a Wikionary entry instead of a Monier-Williams entry. —Mahāgaja · talk 21:01, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Language Category Edits by 2601:C8:281:8BB0:813C:EDD9:F7E4:118, etc.

I have lots of category pages on my watch list, so I wasn't surprised to see Category:Portuguese language there. When I checked, though, this IP had added Luxembourg and Switzerland to the list of countries where Portuguese is spoken. My surname is Swiss, so I'm fairly familiar with the languages spoken there. It's relatively complex, with Alemannic German, French, German Italian and Romansch all being important in one part or another- but not Portuguese.

It turns out that they've been adding and removing countries from the lists at a number of language-category pages. In some cases their edits made sense, in others they didn't, with no clear pattern. In some cases, such as Category:English language, both the before and after seem to have problems. I don't know if this is a vandal or a well-meaning person using some criteria I don't understand for what languages are spoken in which countries, and I don't really have the time or energy to sort all of this out.

Could someone who knows more than I do about the distribution of these languages check the edits in question? Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 04:00, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

June 2021

plus ultra

Tagged by Template:User, never listed. – Jberkel 21:27, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Sent to RFD. This, that and the other (talk) 09:05, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Two socks of a long-time problem user

I saw some Samaritan Hebrew edits by Template:Vandal and immediately thought of BedrockPerson aka יבריב aka AncientEgypt23 aka FourMastab aka NativeNames aka UkraineCityNameRepository, etc., etc., ad nauseam. So I ran checkuser on the account- confirmed. In the process, I found Template:Vandal.

For those not familiar with this individual, they skip the boring stuff and launch right into cranking out entries in languages they don't know using advanced sources that they don't understand. They're so convinced of their brilliance that they get angry and even abusive when challenged (see Dunning–Kruger effect).

Their penchant for advanced subjects and advanced sources makes it hard for generalists like me to deal with the aftermath. I'd appreciate it if some of you who are knowledgeable in Egyptian and Semitic languages would take a look- Template:Ping and Template:Ping come immediately to mind, and Template:Ping has more experience than anyone would want with this moron... Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 04:55, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

In my humble, uneducated opinion, we should just nuke it all - having wrong content is worse than not having any. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 19:01, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Template:Ping, for future reference, Surj is right — when it comes to a user this bad, if we can't check it, we should nuke it. That's exactly what I've done for all the Samaritan Hebrew entries. The only thing left is for Template:Ping to take a look at Reconstruction:Egyptian/ḏd-pꜣ-nṯr-jw.f-ꜥnḫ. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:45, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

Template:Reply to It’s an old suggested reconstruction by Steindorff in the Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde (volume 27), which, AFAICT, still remains plausible enough, if speculative. I must admit I don’t know my way around the literature surrounding צפנת פענח‎ well enough to say if anyone’s proposed anything better since then, though, or if scholarly opinion has settled on any different interpretation. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 07:07, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

{{rfe}}

{{rfv-etym}}

The templates need to be cleaned up/changed according to our current standards , which includes adding the patemetrs |y=, |m=, and for {{rfe}}, |fragment= or |section= (see User talk:Chuck Entz § {{rfe}} and {{rfv-etym}}: edit requests); quoting Chuck Entz: “The "dowork" part tells me that this is a relic of the pre-lua days, when people did all kinds of indirect and inscrutable things to get template syntax to do things it wasn't designed for.” J3133 (talk) 04:14, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

semi-learned borrowing

Existence of the term passed RFV, but the definition is contested. It needs updating to match the use in the citations. Template:Unsigned

Current definition is challenged as not matching the quotes. Kiwima (talk) 00:05, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

The 'current definition' that was challenged is the one that was still extant on 14 June 2021 UTC, as the first or only given (as opposed to requested) meaning, the definition that required that a semi-learned loan be a development of a learned loan. That meaning was gone before 23 June 2021. The term 'current' loses meaning without a time stamp. --RichardW57 (talk) 02:18, 24 June 2021 (UTC).

QQ糖

Tagged by Template:Ping. — justin(r)leung _{{ (t...) | c=› }} 19:24, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

For the citations, how do we discern a specific type of candy from one brand from any squishy candy in general? --ItMarki (talk) 04:10, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

July 2021

plural sending to unexistent singular

I was reading in [5] that formgiving [book title!] (or formgivning [description below]) is Danish for design (actually, "the art of giving a form to something that previously hadn't"). I wanted to check if with <n> or not, and we have nothing in design except some vormgeving in NL, "designer" in SV as formgivare and SV formgivningen as plural for formgivning but link doesn't exist. Do we have a policy for inflected words without existent lemma? Sobreira ►〓 (parlez) 01:11, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

No, and I don’t see why we should. Sometimes man creates a spelling and puts there everything he knows, including inflected forms of pages which to create would be another job. Fay Freak (talk) 01:14, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

Coptic Entries Coming From a School IP

The IP range 69.67.82.94/20 geolocates to the Baltimore County, Maryland school district. Likewise, 100.18.42.190 is a Verizon IP that also geolocates to Baltimore and has been editing many of the same entries as well as some of their own. It looks like the same person has been editing both at school and on their own. Template:Ping has started to nominate some of the rather amateurish entries the first IP range has created, but I'm not sure if they're aware of the full scope of the Coptic contributions from all of these IPs. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:57, 23 July 2021 (UTC)

顧#Japanese

Messy formatting, including two POS headers and one conflicting headword template. —Suzukaze-c (talk) 00:02, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I've had a go. How's that? Cnilep (talk) 04:58, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

August 2021

तावत्

First of all, this isn't a "noun".

Also, this is one of the words that is difficult to translate into English, as it takes a syntactical role that's not easily paralleled in the English language. The best thing to do is to illustrate its usage with examples. (And there are many usage patterns!) --Frigoris (talk) 20:10, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

irritation

Is it just me, or does the way this definition is written make the reader thing that being sexually stimulated could be described as an irritation. The act of exciting, or the condition of being excited to action, by stimulation; -- as, the condition of an organ of sense, when its nerve is affected by some external body; especially, the act of exciting muscle fibers to contraction, by artificial stimulation; as, the irritation of a motor nerve by electricity; also, the condition of a muscle and nerve, under such stimulation. Wubble You (talk) 17:40, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

It’s not just you, in fact it sounds like any number of pleasant experiences could be thought of as ‘irritations’ under this weird definition and the sense below it is a medical one anyway, so is it really needed at all? I don’t know enough about physiology to help clean it up myself though. Overlordnat1 (talk) 18:58, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, I just stole the definition from Wikipedia, and claim the cleanup as satisfactory. Wubble You (talk) 19:46, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

That may not be wrong: I think sexual stimulation could be described as "irritation", in archaic English. e.g. ..."more or less unintentionally generate in each other a certain amount of sexual irritation, which they foster by mutual touching and kissing"; "It will be almost impossible to relieve the sexual irritation, while this condition of the bowels exists." Equinox ◑ 18:25, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Itch is used this way, as in seven-year itch. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 18:48, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Yola non-lemma forms

Recently, hundreds of non-lemma forms for Yola were erroneously added as lemmas. Can someone go in and fix them? --Numberguy6 (talk) 20:59, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

darkly

There are now dizzying lists of synonyms on each sense line. This is the result of numerous recent edits by User:96.39.65.90, though those edits probably include some improvements too. Equinox ◑ 18:24, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

September 2021

waterfall bong (2)

Was tagged in January 2019 by TheDaveRoss, who wrote: "definition needs a rewrite. Some of it seems likely wrong, some of it seems encyclopedic". I have changed the slang "marijuana" to "cannabis" but I don't really see the problem otherwise, unless the def is indeed wrong. Equinox ◑ 15:31, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

More duplicate translations boxes

Some more translation boxes that seem redundant to me:

• decline
  • "weakening" <-> weakening, diminution
  • "reduction of activity" <-> reduction, diminution
  • "cause to decrease or diminish" -> decrease, diminish (Template:Diff)
  • refuse -> refuse
• bid
  • "to invite" -> invite
  • "to utter a greeting or salutation" -> greet
  • "to make an attempt" -> attempt, try
  • "attempt, effort, or pursuit (of a goal)" -> attempt, effort, pursuit
• body
  • "corpse" -> corpse (Template:Diff, Template:Diff)
  • "torso" -> torso (Template:Diff, Template:Diff)
• bend
  • "curve" -> curve (or at least make the description/example a bit less reminiscent of roads/road curves)
  • "knot" -> knot
  • "decompression sickness" -> decompression sickness (Template:Diff, Template:Diff)

--Fytcha (talk) 02:58, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

decay: "to rot" -> rot (Template:Diff, Template:Diff

--Fytcha (talk) 03:30, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

rise: "to assume an upright position after lying down or sitting" -> get up (Template:Diff, Template:Diff)

rise: "to get up" -> get up (same as above)

rise: "to be resurrected" -> resurrect

--Fytcha (talk) 10:33, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

thou: "singular nominative form of you" -> you/translations#Pronoun

--Fytcha (talk) 09:51, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

Template:Reply why don’t you just replace the translation boxes you regard as duplicated with {{trans-see}}? — SGconlaw (talk) 11:28, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

@Sgconlaw I would do it and I've done it in the past. The problem is, some of the ones I've listed here I'm not 100% confident about. bend "decompression sickness"->decompression sickness is a clear cut case for trans-see in my opinion, but consider for instance bend "curve"->curve. From my own semantic understanding of bend and curve in these senses, I'd say that it is warranted for there to be two separate translation boxes, though the problem is that the header of the translation box in bend says "curve" and thusly most translations focus on road curves instead of what bend more generally means. I don't know what to do in such a case and I hoped we could find a common consensus for such cases. In the end, I also don't wanna do a lot of work only to get it all rolled back later; I'm sure you understand this. That said, I'm gonna go ahead and replace the clear cut ones now. --Fytcha (talk) 12:50, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

武汉SARS#Chinese, SARS#Chinese

—Suzukaze-c (talk) 06:24, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/spituz

This page is a mess - showing descendants that should and already belong at . Not sure if should be feminine or masculine. Also, Old Norse descendant shown doesn't belong here. Leasnam (talk) 21:13, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Pages listed in User:Qnm/8 with raw rhyme

• Horn
  • Rhymes with: Dorn, Korn, vorn, Zorn
• mésalliance
  • Rhymes: dalliance
• exordial
  • Rhymes: Exordial rhymes with primordial
• tablemate
  • Rhymes: labelmate, stablemate

I don't know how to deal with them without making mistakes. Crowley666 (talk) 03:50, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Fixed and struck the Finnish ones — surjection ⟨??⟩ 12:15, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

October 2021

bastille

Bit of a mess; a misformatted "confusion of" introduced in Special:Diff/64046091 and a bunch of translation tables that don't correspond to any of the listed senses. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 12:14, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Template:Reply Template:Done (and set as WOTD for 14 July 2023). — Sgconlaw (talk) 22:25, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

lenitive

The dates in the quotations section are wrong. Template:Unsigned

withdrawal; bad definition (4) and similarly bad translation box

Definition 4 of withdrawal reads: An act of withdrawing. However, as withdraw also has multiple meanings (most importantly transitive and intransitive ones), the translations under withdrawal are a bit of mess right now. Definition 4 should be split up into two (corresponding to transitive and intransitive usage of withdraw), and accordingly the translation box. Maybe a {{trans-see|retreat}} is also an option for the military sense. Fytcha (talk) 11:36, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

阿公店

formatting; and do people really ever refer to the reservoir with the unqualified name "阿公店"? —Suzukaze-c (talk) 22:03, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Redundant content in flip the bird, give the finger, flip off, flick off, possibly more.

All noun senses can be found in middle finger, we should also have just one article for the verb senses. The others shouldn't have redundant translation boxes, redundant definitions, pictures etc. It's probably best to replace them entirely by {{synonym of|en|principal article}}. Fytcha (talk) 22:24, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

If translations are duplicated and equivalent you can move them to one entry and then direct to it with {{trans-see}} or {{trans-top-also}} . – Jberkel 22:56, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

The main problem that I have in face of this mess is that I don't feel qualified to judge which of the articles will have the honor to become the new main article.

With regards to replacing the translations with {{trans-see}}: Thank you for the advice, though I have already done this many times. In this particular case, there's too many to do it by hand (for me at least). Is there a tool to merge translation boxes? If not, I could write one. Fytcha (talk) 23:17, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

If unsure, you could simply make the older article the main one. This is a common practice for altforms. However in this case I'd use the more "obvious", less slangy variant (give the finger). You can also check with tools like Google ngrams to see which form is more common. Or pick the one which already has more translations. As you can see, many possibilities, and very few hard rules here (= sometimes messy entries). – Jberkel 23:37, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for the advice, I feel more sure about the optimal course of action now. I will clean this up in a couple of days if nobody else will have done it by then. Fytcha (talk) 23:47, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

I agree that the “main” entry where the translations should be located should as far as possible be the most literal and easily understandable entry (in other words, avoid idiomatic expressions, or archaic or literary terms wherever possible). — SGconlaw (talk) 05:33, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Bot request: {{ro-interj}}

Can somebody with a bot please replace {{head|ro|interjection}} with {{ro-interj}}? The list of articles can be found here and there should be no additional parameters from what I know (it shouldn't be replaced if there's additional parameters but pointed out to me if possible). Thanks in advance. Fytcha (talk) 11:09, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

November 2021

Bot request: remove certain invisible characters

See Template:Diff. I've manually removed such symbols multiple times and those were only the ones I've noticed despite not seeing them. See also Wiktionary:Grease_pit#Is_it_possible_to_blacklist_certain_characters_from_translation_boxes? Fytcha (talk) 20:38, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Good idea. They usually belong to Duden :) I think there's now an abuse filter to avoid them slipping into page titles. – Jberkel 21:32, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, Duden is the root cause of these. The abuse filter works like a charm (having triggered it myself many times :) ) but we need checks in other places as well, e.g. when filling in translations into boxes (there's already so many checks going on there, why not add this one too?) as well as a cleanup of what is lingering in the database. Fytcha (talk) 02:18, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

pinging Template:Ping who has done similar cleanups. – Jberkel 12:28, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

I created a list. The character should definitely be removed from links, but I'm not sure about quotations. — Eru·tuon 19:04, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks! I fixed all the links and left the rest as-is. The script also found an audio file with a soft-hyphen in its file name (I've requested a rename on commons). – Jberkel 22:38, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

From links, but not etymologies and definitely not image descriptions. The character exists because it has legitimate use. Fay Freak (talk) 00:42, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

Oh, misread this one. What is it used for (in this diff)? – Jberkel 00:47, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

This particular ones probably do little, but it should maximize space use in long etymologies, and make them closer to justification format, which we lack as long as they aren’t inside templates. Fay Freak (talk) 09:46, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

Bot request: Dangling glossary links

I've just noticed, some pages such as the introductory page About Romanian page refer to the wrong glossary, in this particular case Wiktionary:Glossary#lemma instead of Appendix:Glossary#lemma. This leads me to believe that nobody has cared to check and fix all links upon Template:Diff. Can somebody with a bot do this work please? Fytcha (talk) 02:16, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

The two glossaries perform different functions; read the descriptions at the top. Jan's edit was (mostly) in line with this difference. Ultimateria (talk) 18:52, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Template:Reply Sorry, I don't understand what you're trying to tell me. I wasn't questioning the legitimacy of the move, I'm just pointing out that the links were not redirected when that move was carried out and as such have been dead for years. Fytcha (talk) 19:15, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Gerlach and Gerlachus

Very confusing etymologies. In the former article, there are four (modern!) languages that claim to have lent their word to Latin. Fytcha (talk) 20:49, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

낡

—Suzukaze-c (talk) 05:03, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

December 2021

fail safe, fail-safe (verb)

Fail safe is defined as an alternate form of fail-safe, specifically the verb sense. The hyphenated version has two verb definitions, one transitive which I am aware of -- to make something fail-safe. The second definition is intransitive -- to fail into a safe state. The two pages also indicate different conjugations, one modifying fail and the other modifying safe. Is it true that they are conjugated differently? If so how should that be indicated? Is the intransitive sense just SOP? - TheDaveRoss 14:11, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

瑅瑭#Chinese

—Suzukaze-c (talk) 08:59, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Mistakes in some canonical forms of Russian words

I use Wiktionary data for a project, and noticed that was some inconsistent data with the title of the page being entirely different from the bolded canonical forms of the words. But I don't know the stress of some words/don't know enough about Wiktionary templates to fix them, so I will leave them here.

These are typos (in Russian at least, I don't know about the other language)

• милосрден (milosrden)
• противположен (protivpoložen)

Here the title is in dative and not the proper base word

• насмешнице (nasmešnice)

Here the title is lowercase, but the word uppercase

• оруэлловский (oruellovskij)
• генассамблее (genassambleje)

In the rest the title and bolded word are entirely different as well:

• слышащею (slyšaščeju)
• сербохорватский (serboxorvatskij)
• Кении (Kenii)
• Кириллович (Kirillovič)
• растрескаться (rastreskatʹsja)
• бодрее (bodreje)
• окарикатуриваемый (okarikaturivajemyj)

I’ve fixed em all. Fay Freak (talk) 01:17, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

The IPA in слышащею is for the lemma form. Akletos (talk) 08:47, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

That's fixed now, too. —Mahāgaja · talk 11:36, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

can we mark this as closed now?

Category:ami:Action

This category should be reorganized or renamed in some way but I'm not sure how or into what. Ffffrr (talk) 21:04, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

This looks like a solely grammatical category, probably covering some subset of Category:Amis verbs. There's no reason to have this as a topical category. Template:Ping might be able to explain the rationale for this category, but they haven't edited here for over a year. I notice that most, but not all of the members in Category:Amis verbs are in this category- it might be possible to figure out the reason behind the category by comparing the non-overlapping words to the rest. The obvious guess is that the these are verbs that describe actions (dynamic as opposed to copulative or stative) verbs. Perhaps Template:Ping might be able to help. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:04, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

In this dissertation (Wu 2006), "action verbs" are mentioned as the complement of "state verbs", so yes, the term pretty much refers to the same thing as "dynamic verbs". I don't think this is a very useful category, as it does not fully predict the basic morphological properties of a verb in Amis (including lexicographically important information like the choice of the actor voice prefix which can be mi- or ma-). Also, the dictionary that is cited (new link: https://e-dictionary.ilrdf.org.tw/ami/search.htm) does not use the label "action verb", see e.g. caliw, which is categorized as "Action" here, but not – as far as I can see – in the e-dictionary entry: https://e-dictionary.ilrdf.org.tw/ami/terms/254601.htm.

Without hard criteria (Wiktionary:About Amis is still blank), the category is hard to maintain (e.g. why is caliw included, but not so'ot). –Austronesier (talk) 10:17, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Category:Plurals with a red link for singular

FYI that this exists if anyone wants to help out: types of entry include (1) Luxembourgish plurals which link to themselves instead of their singulars (Aarbechtskämpf), (2) Vilamovian entries where the pagenames have diacritics which are stripped from the links so either the pagename or the diacritic-stripping needs to be changed, like cȧjgjerynn-cȧjgjeryn, (3) entries that will be cleared from the category by a null edit, present because someone created them (sometimes months ago!) before creating the singular (dancerettes), and (4) entries where someone deleted the singular but forgot to delete the plural (adhesinomes, dames d'attendre, Excelências), plus some old vandalism (Beviers). - -sche (discuss) 20:49, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

January 2022

-ible

Lots of duplicate information with -able. --Fytcha (talk) 19:20, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

무신론

Template:Diff almost 10 years ago but not listed. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 05:24, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Hasse#German

Burenwurst#German

(Notifying Matthias Buchmeier, -sche, Atitarev, Jberkel, Mahagaja, Fay Freak): Tagged Template:Diff and Template:Diff almost 5 years ago but not listed. Burenwurst is easily cited as German, Hasse seems more difficult, should possibly be sent to RFV (and be converted to Bavarian if it fails). The comments regarding the ux'es are right though, technically they're in the wrong language. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 05:25, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

"Translated" the one in Burenwurst. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 05:42, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure "Hasse" should be moved to Haße regardless of whether it winds up being labeled German or Bavarian. —Mahāgaja · talk 07:53, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Seems to get written as Haaße to emphasize the long a, as in the ux and the quote. – Jberkel 11:27, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Category:English terms with alpha privatives and Category:English words prefixed with a- (not)

These categories seem to cover the same ground. Which one should be kept? (The latter one may be more in line with how our other prefix and suffix categories are named.) — SGconlaw (talk) 18:25, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

I feel like keeping the second would make more sense. Vininn126 (talk) 18:34, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, the latter is the one to keep. Entries can be added to it automatically by writing {{af|en|a-|<whatever>|id1=not}} in the etymology section. —Mahāgaja · talk 18:59, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Template:Reply is this something we could clean up by bot? — SGconlaw (talk) 11:23, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

Orwell

Back in September of 2019, Template:Ping added over 90 translations to this entry in less than half an hour, everything from Amharic to Thai. This has all the hallmarks of blind importation from a list somewhere. A couple of months later, I tagged the Old English translation as an obvious temporal anachronism, but I didn't think to look at the revision history to find out who added it.

Two comments: first, Koavf should have known better than to dump a ton of translations into an entry in languages he doesn't know- we've blocked people permanently for doing this. Second, something will have to be done to verify or remove all of these. The widespread use of this in the more common languages, combined with the fact that many dictionaries don't include names, is going to make that very, very hard. Not to mention the issue of code-switching vs. unadapted borrowings. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:59, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I removed them: they were from Wikidata and Wikipedias. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:21, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

For visibility also: 1, 2, 3, and 4. These two 1 and 2 are from over a decade ago and I did not remove all of them. Let me know if you think I should do so. The process for all most of these was looking at the Wikipedia articles' interwiki links or Wikidata, and as I recall, I used an online name dictionary for the "Justin" edit from way back and possibly the 2017 additions as well. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:40, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. I noticed a similar edit at Akhenaten a month later, and there may be others. This kind of thing happens from time to time, but usually it's some IP who comes up with what they think no one else has ever thought of before: harvesting all the names used in other wikis and adding them as translations. They don't realize that editors in many of the smaller Wikipedias who can't think of the correct name tend to just make up something up so they can write about it. Wiki-only terms get deleted at RFVN all the time. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:26, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Template:Ping And thank you. I can't recall any other times that I used this scheme but I confess there may be a few. As you can see, I have mostly reserved it for personal names/proper nouns, where I felt like the 1:1 correspondence would be a lot better or more likely than quotidian words, but I realize that this is a problem either way. I won't use this method in the future. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:40, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

February 2022

hook, line and sinker

English. Template:Unsigned

RFC concerns the translations. Reason given: "there are verbs, right?" — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 22:25, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

I think in cases like this, it's OK to have translations that don't perfectly match the English as long as they're labeled as such, as is the case with the Finnish and Icelandic translations here. Sometimes one language's idioms don't match another language's idioms perfectly and the best solution is to show the closest corresponding idiom, even if it has a different grammatical function (verb vs. adverb). —Mahāgaja · talk 08:53, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Agreed, there should be a qualifier or "no equivalent, but see". Vininn126 (talk) 12:54, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Kushan#Etymology

Epigraphic (Bactrian in Greek script) ΚΟϷΑΝ ''košan'', Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit ''Guṣāṇa'', Parthian ''kšn'', ultimately from {{etyl|zh|en}} {{zh-l|貴霜}}.

—Fish bowl (talk) 06:00, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Appendix:Old Chinese Swadesh list

Very messy appendix riddled with inconsistencies in the choice of reconstruction. — justin(r)leung _{{ (t...) | c=› }} 00:10, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

For the reconstruction, should we use Zhengzhang or Baxter-Sagart? --ItMarki (talk) 13:09, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

March 2022

遤#Korean

—Fish bowl (talk) 15:11, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/Genelingo56

This new user went on a translation-adding spree, including translations for an implausibly large number of unrelated languages. What caught my eye initially, though, were Old English translations for phrasebook entries such as how do I get to the airport. I reverted large blocks of their edits just to be on the safe side (basically, everywhere they added an Old English translation for a modern concept), but the reverted edits call into question all the unreverted edits, as well.

I would appreciate it if those who know the languages in question would check their translations- I know better than to rely on my own limited knowledge for that. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 03:54, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

William Dunbar (beuch, etc)

William Dunbar is sometimes cited for Scots, sometimes for English and sometimes for Middle English. That doesn't add up.

• Scots: beuch, drublie, dule, fuck, nicht, wallidrag.
• English: bog, deligent, ybent, grewhound, mimmerkin, rethor, tyrant
• Middle English: fewte (being dated as "Late 15th early 16th century")

--Astova (talk) 19:54, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

It does add up. The same text may have characteristics of multiple languages. Man writes Egyptian Arabic as Standard Arabic, Edmund Spenser writes Middle English, East Slavs write Surzhyk and Trasyanka. Quotes are categorizing for a certain language but are not categorized as in a certain language, this is but your idée fixe. Fay Freak (talk) 16:24, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out: the fewte entry has several problems; the Dunbar work was composed to mark a 1503 wedding, so cannot be Middle English (which ends in 1500); several other quotes in that entry are also misdated or misassigned, including two of the "Middle English" quotes being given dates of 1880 and 1980 (the 1880 one is in fact 1464, the 1980 one is c. 1513 and thus also in the wrong language section). An author could write in both English and Scots, but we should check whether this is the case or some quotes have been misassigned. Likewise, it's plausible (if, yes, a bit weird) that an author who published one thing in, say, 1469 and another in 1501 would have written in both Middle English and modern English/Scots, but we should check that this is the case, since it wasn't for the fewte quote (which was misdated). - -sche (discuss) 21:01, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

I have read of various somewhat arbitrary dates being cited as marking the "break" between Middle English and Early Modern English. OED says 1500; David Crystal says 1450; and others (who?) have said 1470. I suppose that one could place different kinds of documents written in the same year in different language periods. For example, private writings of someone born in the first half of the 15th century, not living in London and environs, and not part of the government or educated elite might be deemed Middle English even if written after 1500, whereas perhaps some official or learned texts following Chancery Standard spelling from before 1450 might possibly be deemed EME. Features internal to a text might influence the choice of period, such as use of more modern spellings, lack of certain inflections, etc. This leaves a lot of room for sound judgment, which is not something most contributors can provide in this regard. Maybe talk pages would be a good place for explanations of the placement of citations. It would also not be unreasonable to place citations of ambiguous placement into ME or EME in both ME and English sections, though one would not want to rely too much on such citations to determine the placement of a term in one period rather than another. Template:Ping should contribute to discussions of policy or practice in this area. DCDuring (talk) 15:06, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Maybe we could have an Appendix that assigned ME or English to certain (editions of) certain texts to provide a central repository of wisdom and discussion on these matters. DCDuring (talk) 15:11, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

I consider ME and modE to be just different periods of a single language, I don't think of it as a distinction between two separate languages. I don't mind what editors do on ME entries as long as I can still use ME citations to support an "English" word. As for setting a date, it's really a purely arbitrary decision since the texts show a slow continuum from one to the other. I would think ME editors can use texts from up to the 1520s or so, but using "judgement" to decide which features make a text Middle English and which make it modern English is kind of just admitting that the distinction doesn't have any real meaning, which is why I don't find it very helpful. Ƿidsiþ 19:00, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Yes - I broadly agree with this. The idea that a quotation from 1503 can't support ME because the cut-off must be 1500 is absurd. Theknightwho (talk) 16:39, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Since we treat Middle Scots as Scots, the quotes of Tua Mariit Wemen (beuch, nicht, wallidrag) and Meditatioun In Wyntir (drublie, dule) are correct (as Scots). OTOH, most "English" quotes are actually Scots: the quote in deligent is (post-1500) Scots, the 1508 quote in ybent was also Scots, likewise the misdated grewhound cite, and the mimmerkin cite which was furthermore not assigned to the right sense if the DSL is to be believed. Part of the issue seems to be people taking Google Books's dating of some later long-post-humous collection as the date of the work, and part is people not distinguishing (whether because they don't think there should be a distinction, or for another reason) Scots from English. rethor failed RFV. That leaves us to check the language of the 1503 Brash of Wowing cite of fuck, the 1507 cite of tyrant, and the 1513 cite of bog. - -sche (discuss) 01:35, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

The tyrant and bog cites are not English, so I moved them to Scots. The fuck cite was already given as Scots. I think this means everything is in the right place now. - -sche (discuss) 23:20, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

evacuation

English. Senses and translation boxes don't match. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 00:55, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Russian words/phrases without stress marks

I work with the data from Wiktionary for my ebook stress app and noticed that are about 160 words or phrases without stress. My Russian skills are unfortunately not good enough to correct them myself:

Note that if a word occurs here it does not mean that the base entry for the word has that error, it could also be in some sort of declension table or reference on another page. So maybe one has to dig a bit:

• шашия
• медицинское
• бальза́му на́ душу
• Френкель
• лады
• зангидский
• сложное вещество
• образованщина
• медицинское состояние
• бутах
• марал
• газированная
• солнечная вспышка́м
• бе-бе
• Мелетий
• третья
• бог знает кака́я
• Исаак
• Халкедон
• бог знает како́му
• при́ смерти
• Север
• буту
• тарбуш
• половой
• исчо
• Пальмирена
• бальза́м на́ душу
• хахаха
• синенький
• Тиньков
• солнечная вспышка́ми
• яркой
• безгневный
• буты
• солнечная вспышко́й
• Шахрияр
• рабо́чими днями
• пойма́л мыша
• бальза́мом на́ душу
• солнечная вспышке́
• бута
• третьих
• бальза́мам на́ душу
• и.о.
• Великороссия
• постность
• солнечная вспышки́
• облоко
• гав-гав
• бог знает како́м
• Свердловых
• бальза́мах на́ душу
• я русский
• бутом
• ото
• балабиль
• бог знает како́е
• сделай сам
• не́ от чего
• по́ хую
• Марія
• оба-на
• Тартус
• Хулагу
• Восточный Туркестана
• бутами
• Дэвид
• Хама
• Кааба
• до́ смерти
• буте
• Ксаверій
• бальза́мов на́ душу
• хафизский
• Свердлова
• присходит
• третьем
• шептало
• Шамбала
• бальза́ма на́ душу
• солнечная вспышко́ю
• когда ра́к на горе́ сви́стнет
• кровь и́з носу
• аппетит приходит во время еды
• космические станции
• правоверный
• Макарий
• э-э-э
• бог знает каки́е
• Маленко
• сам по себе
• как таковой
• мурза
• мелькит
• не́ от кого
• Восточный Туркестану
• сарабанда
• бог знает каки́х
• бутам
• да-а
• туго́й на́ ухо
• бальза́мами на́ душу
• с но́г на́ голову
• Восточный Туркестане
• агенство
• бальза́ме на́ душу
• дана
• равноапостольность
• Туран
• Игнатий
• бог знает каки́м
• бог знает каки́ми
• о-о
• ярманка
• бог знает каку́ю
• for микроволновая печь
• Восточный Туркестаном
• ебана
• тяв-тяв
• бутов
• Уокингема
• доброго времени суток
• абы
• Свердловы
• Оденат
• пендос
• кабы
• пыльность
• Аверроэс
• Сампсикерамид
• бог знает како́й
• хуясе
• ка́к бы то ни́ было
• никой
• балет-феерия
• жила
• внутреннюю
• Францискъ
• жило
• подо
• обо
• округа
• простое вещество
• не́ к чему
• ешь не спеша
• десятиричное
• of низкий
• кы-кы
• даны
• бог знает како́ю
• мелькитский
• солнечная вспышка́
• како́й у тебя телефо́н
• солнечная вспышку́
• бог знает како́го
• Берит
• солнечная вспышка́х
• среднего
• бальза́мы на́ душу
• бэ-бэ
• юла юла́
• ра́з в году и па́лка стре́ляет
• не́ к кому
• симпотичный

--MrBeef12 (talk) 10:59, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Template:cite-book in ꝫ

It produces:

"Cappelli, Adriano (1982)David Heimann; Richard Kay, transl., [...]"

--Astova (talk) 09:38, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, the |translators= parameter has that problem. I brought this up with Template:Ping 3 years ago at Template talk:cite-book#Translator parameter but nothing's changed since then. —Mahāgaja · talk 10:03, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, the spacing is really hard to work out and I haven't had time to look into it. — SGconlaw (talk) 12:56, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

厼#Korean

Odd, slightly messy formatting; and the information provided at Talk:厼 should be used somewhere. —Fish bowl (talk) 01:21, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

April 2022

修羅

Japanese. Tagged by User:Haplology in 2011 with the edit comment, "i can't sort the good from the bad". I didn't find any discussion here or on the page, so I'm not really sure what the issues are. Cnilep (talk) 05:24, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

I've had a go at cleaning the Japanese section. Cnilep (talk) 01:51, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

I'd wager that the problem is that it was created by User:Mare-Silverus, who authored numerous dodgy religion, cultural, and magyckall entries (一目瞭然 authorship) that still remain today. —Fish bowl (talk) 04:34, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

‐

Translingual. This is purportedly a Translingual entry, but only English examples are offered. Either the senses should be moved to an English entry, or non-English examples (of e.g. Punctuation mark sense 2.1) should be added. Conjunction sense 2 is likely English-specific. This, that and the other (talk) 11:49, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I've added cites to several of the senses, but I'm sceptical (and only more so if we change it to English) that the two conjunction senses are distinct senses. It seems like there's one sense, "Joins the components of compounds", which can be used for either of those types or others which currently go unmentioned; two senses seems a bit like having separate senses at . for

1. Begins an ellipsis

   . . .

2. Constitutes the middle dot of an ellipsis

   . . .

   . . . . .

No? - -sche (discuss) 18:52, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Do other languages create newly-formed adjectives (like newly-formed) using hyphens? It seems to me that many of the examples here are achieved in other ways in other languages. To my understanding, French uses hyphens in a very limited way, to form nouns only (like casse-tête); we don't even have a Category:French compound adjectives. And I think the situation is the same for other Romance languages. What about Germanic languages? This, that and the other (talk) 02:08, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Well, I see that your point is to make the sense more general. That's a great idea, but then we can have language-specific entries for how different languages use hyphens. This, that and the other (talk) 02:10, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

horses for courses

English. The "Phrase" and "Noun" headings have the same semantics. We have been striving to reduce the use of Phrase as a heading to those cases where the syntactic function is not clear. In this case, it may be that the "Phrase" uses make the term a Proverb, as the usage note suggests. If not, the two L3 sections should be merged. DCDuring (talk) 14:50, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

• I merged it into "Phrase", complete with the citations. Pious Eterino (talk) 19:43, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

ראשית

The definition line should probably be split and/or reformatted. 70.172.194.25 06:45, 10 April 2022 (UTC)

Yet more Polish Cleanup (Hopefully botable?)

Also (Notifying BigDom, Hythonia, KamiruPL, Tashi): so they can add/be aware. I have been polling random people (editors and non-editors) about two potential changes:

1. Most people show a preference for using {{surf}} in ety sections. It would match the style we have now with our other templates, and also I suppose is the most efficient character wise. I believe this would be doable by checking any ety section with {{bor+}}/{{bor}}, {{inh+}}/{{inh}}, and potentially {{der+}}(?)/{{der}} as well as {{af}} IN THE SAME ETY. It might also be able to look for "analyzable as", "equivalent to", "synchronically analyzable as". Most people show a preference to have option 3 in my sandbox, so {{inh+|pl|sla-pro|*babъka}}. {{surf|pl|baba|-ka}}. I'm not sure if there is a standard already in place.
2. Using {{rel adj}}. This is seems to have more mixed reviews - MOST readers I asked prefer it over the label template, but not all. It's slightly more character efficient (now that I made shortcuts). It seems this template was made and then never used, does anyone know why? If there's a reason, we can continue as we have it now. I think the best way to make the switch would be send the bot to check for any relational label in the definition bar and then check the nearest etymology, and then absorb the definition as a t= (perhaps with a link?) and I'm not sure about the gloss (if we go through with this, that is). Vininn126 (talk) 15:02, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

I'ma move this to the grease pit. Vininn126 (talk) 19:46, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

a.

English. The entry lists 59 possible things that "a." could stand for, without any context. I can't see how anyone would find this useful. Surely modern typographical conventions would see many of these sense appear without the ".", but I am happy to find no comparable list at a. Is it worth sending some of these to RFV, or even brutally attacking the list with the secateurs of speedy deletion? This, that and the other (talk) 14:23, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

a konto

The Norwegian Bokmål etymology section could probably be simplified or formatted in a more digestible way. The detailed treatment probably belongs on the Italian page or something? 70.172.194.25 17:36, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

May 2022

Jin

Is that river extant? GEOnet does not have it. [6][7]. The whole entry needs to be revamped honestly. Here's a map where I should have but didn't find the river:

File:Txu-pclmaps-oclc-22834566 g-9b.jpg

--Geographyinitiative (talk) 12:07, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

dual

Noun sense #3 "(grammar) dual number The grammatical number of a noun marking two of something (as in singular, dual, plural), sometimes referring to two of anything (a couple of, exactly two of), or a chirality-marked pair (as in left and right, as with gloves or shoes) or in some languages as a discourse marker, "between you and me". A few languages display trial number." - TheDaveRoss 14:13, 24 May 2022 (UTC)

I just deleted all that detail. It belongs in Wikipedia (I added a {{wikipedia}} box to that end). This, that and the other (talk) 06:36, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

June 2022

ছাগলী

Bengali. It has an Assamese declension template. This, that and the other (talk) 09:02, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Xhosa

This English entry is the only page in Category:Xhosa terms with audio links. The audio template is in the etymology, and demonstrates the click sound that is spelled with "Xh" in Xhosa. That's nice, but English speakers don't use clicks, and AFAIK, Xhosa speakers wouldn't say it without a noun-class prefix. I'm not really sure what to do with this, Chuck Entz (talk) 06:32, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Better now? —Mahāgaja · talk 13:47, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Template:Ping Well, the category wasn't really the problem, just what brought it to my attention. The conceptual dilemma (a pronunciation file that's inherently incorrect for both English and Xhosa, but sort of illustrates why the term starts with an "X") is still there. Template:Ping if an English entry treated a Yoruba term in a similar way, what would you think? Chuck Entz (talk) 23:34, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

I wouldn't say it's exactly wrong for English; there are English speakers who know how to make clicks, and those who do are likely to do so when uttering this word. I'll bet a good proportion of native English speakers in South Africa, not to mention linguists who like to show off (myself included), do refer to this language as /ˈǁʰoːsa/ when speaking English. —Mahāgaja · talk 08:17, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

BA.1

B.1.1.529

These seem to have been created by an over-zealous IP. The etymologies make me question competence (see "mutant version" on BA.2), and they're filled with redlinks that have never been filled out.

I thought it was worth bringing them here to see if we can turn them into something suitable, as they're right on the fringe of what we include. Theknightwho (talk) 16:12, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Einklemmschutz

einspeichen

German. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 11:54, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

Deism

English. Encyclopaedic, and the register is too informal. Theknightwho (talk) 01:43, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

crèche

Dutch.

The English translation 'crèche' has four rather different meanings. Which ones do the Dutch word translate to? --RichardW57m (talk) 11:39, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

Based on the synonyms, it's the 'day nursery' meaning. I added the {{gloss}}. It could, of course, have other senses as well. —Mahāgaja · talk 12:57, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

Nee, er is maar één betekenis voor het woord 'crèche' in het nederlands, en dat is dagopvang voor kleine kinderen. Zie de Dikke van Dale. Template verwijderd.

No, There is only one meaning of the word 'crèche' in Dutch, and that is 'day nursery'. See the Big van Dale dictionary. Template removed. --Hops Splurt (talk) 23:58, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

July 2022

old hat

English. Currently listed as a noun, but the quotations look like adjectives to me. --217.229.79.41 15:37, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

Looks like a noun to me. What's the issue? Equinox ◑ 15:43, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

Looks like an adjective to me too. The syntax of "he makes it seem old hat", "It is old hat for a sex scandal to bring down a politician", "perhaps the queen is old hat", and especially "feels kind of old hat at this point" is compatible with its being an adjective, not with its being a noun. Compare also "What's more old hat than robots!", which is also compatible with being an adjective, but not with being a noun. —Mahāgaja · talk 16:28, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

But you can't say "she's an old hat queen" or "that's very old hat" (???), can you? Let's check other dictionaries made by smarter people. -- Template:Reply to On what grounds do you call it an adjective in "It is old hat for a sex scandal to bring down a politician" (your example)? I could replace "old hat" with "a travesty" (noun) or "horror" (noun). Equinox ◑ 21:34, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

From a translation of Dostoyevsky: "everybody already knows they're stupid and too old hat to waste precious time on." From a 1972 magazine: "a care for the English language may seem a far cry from pacifism and very “old hat" indeed". From a 1956 journal: "Were Winston Churchill's skills too “old hat” and out-of-date to prevent him from carrying Great Britain through the difficult crises of World War II?". From a 1984 journal: "If, as the City now suggests, ' said Boydell, 'the Mies building is "old hat”, then the Mansion House is very old hat and St Paul's Cathedral very, very old hat.'"

I rest your case. DCDuring (talk) 00:08, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Finding unusual rare cases that meet an adjective proves that it can be an adjective, I guess? Although "this place is too Pizza Hut for me" doesn't really convince me that Pizza Hut is an adjective. However, it does not prove that it isn't also a noun. Take basic philosophy before you try to "rest my case", you peasant. Equinox ◑ 00:40, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

OED has an archaic noun sense for the vulva (seriously) and then colloquial "in predicative use" (what the hell does that mean? noun apologetics?) for "something considered to be old-fashioned, out of date, unoriginal, or hackneyed", and a second adj sense "that has become old-fashioned; hackneyed". This suggests that OED people are idiots really. Do you think they are scared of us? In any case they seem to be on DCDuring's adjectival side of the fence. Equinox ◑ 00:43, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Proper nouns are often used that way; common noun less so (!"That is such a White House approach" vs. *"That is such a white house approach").

I don't think that we can find much idiomatic use of old hat in this sense with modification be any determiners. DCDuring (talk) 01:27, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Template:Re In "It is old hat for a sex scandal to bring down a politician" you could replace old hat with a travesty or a horror, but the indefinite article is required. If old hat were a noun, we would say *"It is an old hat for...", but we don't. In all of the examples, old hat is replaceable with an unambiguous adjective like unfashionable but not with an unambiguous noun like chestnut (without the indefinite article). It is true that it's rare in attributive use (and usually hyphenated when it is attributive), but Google Books reveals "an assumption whose implausibility is, by now, rather an old-hat point, although I think a correct one", "Oftentimes, 'bidding' a job is an old-hat way to pit people against each other", and "That's an old hat view" (apparently without a hyphen) —Mahāgaja · talk 07:35, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Template:Re Are you saying that there is some kind of grammatical grinder, unknown to Chomsky, that turns nouns into adjectives when there isn't a determiner? I mean, in your sentence, I could say "it is incest for an X to do a Y" (in the same way I might say "it is incest for a brother to fuck a sister"). The fact that Adj and N can both occupy the same position in some made-up sentence proves nothing! Equinox ◑ 11:47, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Template:Re Chomsky is well aware of how parts of speech change into other parts of speech. And it's true that mass nouns like incest don't take an indefinite article either, so it is in principle possible for old hat to be a mass noun in "It is old hat for a sex scandal to bring down a politician". But mass nouns like incest still can't be modified with adverbs like extremely (*It is extremely incest for a father and mother to fuck their son at the same time), whereas adjectives can (Google Books has plenty of uses of extremely old hat meaning "extremely old-fashioned" and not referring to ancient headwear). —Mahāgaja · talk 11:59, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Yeeees, but is it "extremely (old hat)", or "(extremely old) hat". OK, you win, well done. Equinox ◑ 13:14, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

I don't think any of the citations in the entry for the sense under discussion support the sense being that of a noun. They are all for predicate use without a determiner. DCDuring (talk) 16:38, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

me too

English.

There is a translation table for a sense that was deleted. Template:Ping keeps trying to remove it, but I hate to see good translations just erased. Can someone find the correct entry for these translations, and add any of them to that entry that aren't already there? Chuck Entz (talk) 15:00, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

יום הדין

Hebrew. Created by User:Simplificationalizer: bad formatting, missing headword. --Anatoli T. / 01:04, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

Use template he-proper noun, removed Rosh Hashana from the definition, added link to wikipedia Taokailam (talk) 19:44, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

麒麟

While I appreciate the effort put into the etymology section, it has become too long and not concise. e.g. it mentions the appearance of the animal in the first sentence, which should better stay in the definitions; the paragraph beginning with The "giraffe" sense of …… contains information that should be listed under JKV etyms instead; the last paragraph spends 2.5 lines quoting Janhunen (2011), which is very unnecessary. -- Wpi31 (talk) 09:03, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

August 2022

Category:Cantonese jyutping

Some of the pages only include a few characters (often rare ones), e.g. dai1, fat1, and aren't really usable despite being linked from the pronunciation boxes. Most of these (if not all) are added by @User:Bumm13. The appendix pages contains way more useful information (even though it might contain a few errors here and there), which IMO could be trivially added to the mainspace entries using a bot. -- Wpi31 (talk) 05:09, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/Haoreima

Often lacking headwords. The manual categories are also often incorrect. Needs proper definition templates. See e.g. [8]. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 02:00, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

橻

Korean.

I believe that what is under the Translingual header should be under the Korean header. DCDuring (talk) 01:34, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

All the stuff about the character itself belongs under Translingual. Only the definitions seem out of place. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:20, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/Balltari

This user apparently doesn't understand things like headword templates and what the language codes in etymology templates are for. I went through their edits and made the minimal corrections, but I was a bit sleepy and caught myself making some absent-minded mistakes. I also don't know that much about Albanian, so my edits are better than nothing, but that's about it.

Also, although they've given references, I suspect they're continuing the long Wiktionary tradition of <ahem>...imaginative... Albanian etymologies. I'll leave that to others who know more to determine.

At any rate, I'd appreciate it if someone would go through and check my work and, more importantly, pick up where I left off in making real Wiktionary entries out of these. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 02:35, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Looks like I got their user name wrong- fixed. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:49, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

It turns out that they had their account renamed, so I wasn't mistaken at all, just going on old information. Pinging Template:Ping, who asked about this user on my talk page. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:33, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz They've used the nonstandard header "Old Albanian" on quite a few entries. Theknightwho (talk) 19:36, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

September 2022

Appendix:Cannabis_slang

Awhile ago I nominated a glossary of drinking slang for deletion on the grounds that the page was so full of obviously false entries that it provided no useful supplment to thesaurus:drunk. This page seems to be of a higher quality to me and I dont want to see it deleted, but if people are interested Im sure it could at least be trimmed down. It seems that someone has already nominated this for cleanup before, but that link goes nowhere, so I wonder if the request was just bypassed as we had other things going on. All the best, —— 21:00, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

ve

English. Etymology 2 (referring to ve as a neo-pronoun) is pretty encyclopaedic. Theknightwho (talk) 22:28, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Why shouldn't an etymology be encyclopaedic?

Ioaxxere (talk) 02:51, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Because a lot of it doesn't relate to etymology, but merely use. It's written more like a Wikipedia article, and notably omits to give any quotations. The final sentence merely tells us that the word was used in certain novels after the coinage. Not relevant to the etymology, and not how we lay out entries. Theknightwho (talk) 19:27, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

The first and third sentences are okay, if a bit verbose. The second sentence is probably obvious enough to go without saying. The information in the last sentence would be better handled as quotations. 98.170.164.88 19:36, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

I've condensed it a little. I think the sentences about Philologus and Varda are fine (distinct coinages, with differing objective forms). The last sentence, about Hulme and Egan using it, should be dropped in favour of just quoting them or adding {{rfquotek}}s. That'd leave two sentences, and we could also drop the entire "as an alternative to using "he or she," singular they, or one in sentences without a specified gender" clause if we want to be maximally brief. - -sche (discuss) 00:37, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Added the quotations. I'm not super impressed by the one from The Bone People, since the pronoun only seems to appear in one sentence (as a mention, at that), but I'll leave it. The Egan books use the pronoun throughout. 98.170.164.88 01:23, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks both! Theknightwho (talk) 01:34, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/StuckInLagToad

User leaves a trail of nonsense behind (detailed on their talk page) and is also unwilling to clean it up after it has been pointed out to them, most glaringly by adding nonsense translations (Template:Diff, Template:Diff) but the lack of stress marks and genders is also pretty annoying (Stryjewka). A block is already warranted in my opinion. CC Template:Re who has also aired his complaints on the talk page. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 19:17, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

Template:Ping: I think the problem is that they seem to have very little depth of knowledge in any subject or language (I wonder how old they really are), so their main focus is on figuring out ways to come up with content to add rather than getting the details correct.

If you follow the Wikipedia links in the examples you gave, it's pretty obvious that they got their translations from the Wikipedia articles and from the other Wikipedias in the interwiki links. When you pointed out they were coming up with unattestable nonsense, they stopped doing that. Judging by their edits to dawn redwood, it looks like their current method is taking definitions from the other Wiktionaries that have entries for a term. Like the Wikipedia method, this is a really bad idea, since people on wikis make stuff up all the time, and without knowledge of the grammar or morphology of other languages it's impossible to be sure whether the definition is a description, an improvised calque of the English, or an actual term that people use in the language to refer to the item in question. On top of that, there's a lot of unwritten information that needs to be spelled out for translations and headwords here, and they have no way to fill that in or even know that it's missing. They added a Khmer translation to that entry: I have a degree in Linguistics and decades of experience in extracting information from languages I don't know, and I would never add a Khmer translation without spending a lot of time getting up to speed on the language. As the saying goes, "fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

If you point out that they're making mistakes, they stop making those mistakes and change their methodology so the mistakes they make from then on are different. This makes correcting them a constantly moving, vague target. The truth is that there are no foolproof ways to come up with content in areas one knows basically nothing about, so no matter what specific things you tell them to do or not to do, it won't fix the underlying problem. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:16, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Template:Re Thanks, I agree with your analysis. Unfortunately, it seems like they've stopped editing altogether following my message on their talk page which is a pity because en.wikt is not exactly brimming over with editors. This makes me think of User_talk:Hans-Friedrich_Tamke#Some_points_regarding_your_recent_edits where I have perhaps also "scared away" an editor (which is very unfortunate) but OTOH I think I've been pretty calm and objective in my comments so I don't find much fault with my behavior. Just an unfortunate set of circumstances... — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 16:15, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Haha, your "some points…" is a 12-step laundry list, that is a bit intimidating (and makes it difficult to reply). It's a tricky balance. – Jberkel 16:43, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Fair point. I was just listing what I've observed and didn't think about this aspect. I'll keep it in mind. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 17:09, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

盆景

Japanese. Just has a pronunciation at the moment. Theknightwho (talk) 03:20, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

hackney

This article needs a serious overhaul. Here are the main problems:

• Lots of missing (archaic), (obsolete), and (historical) tags
• Very few quotes
• Many unhelpful and repetitive senses

We also need better integration between this article and the forms Hackney and hackneyed.

Ioaxxere (talk) 16:40, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

go ham

The etymology for this is definitely wrong. This phrase was known to my extremely white, baby boomer parents long before any song lyric included the phrase. We've removed the etymology before only to have it pop back up even more elaborately than before; it's time to stop this. Jemiller226 (talk) 02:42, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

Possible cite from 1932? https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Great_Magoo/Zo8PAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=great+magoo+%22go+ham%22&dq=great+magoo+%22go+ham%22&printsec=frontcover

Ioaxxere (talk) 03:28, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

Brethren

English.

As has been pointed out on the talk page, this is completely circular: the definitions use the headword without explanation. You can kind of figure that's it's some kind of religious denomination, but that's about it. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:53, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

Probably just delete it. I think it's just saying "brethren can be capitalised in multi-word proper nouns". We deleted the capital "New" of "New York"; see Talk:New. Equinox ◑ 14:55, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

It survived rfd on those grounds back in 2011. It's short for Church of the Brethren. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:10, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

This is very much the same problem #Mennonite listed above had. —Mahāgaja · talk 09:58, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Template:Re I've made a first pass at cleaning it up; take a look and improve as necessary. —Mahāgaja · talk 10:56, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

The entry previously suggested there was also a singular sense, but I can't find any evidence of common or literate "Brethrens" in GBooks. I think Mahagaja has done a good job here. Equinox ◑ 22:47, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

It's much more useful now, thank you! 98.170.164.88 22:49, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

loanable funds

Circular definition, using the phrase "loanable funds". Needs rewriting. Equinox ◑ 21:49, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

The definition uses SoP loanable + funds to define non-SoP loanable funds ("theory etc.") But, yes, it should be rendered more understandable. DCDuring (talk) 22:32, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

• I am not knowledgeable in the field, but I have taken a stab at it using Wikipedia's definition. —  04:26, 18 November 2022 (UTC)

October 2022

Entries by User:咽頭べさ

Following the block of this user, it may be a good idea to double-check some (all?) of the Mon entries they've created. Pinging also Template:Ping, since you seem to already be in the process of doing that. Thadh (talk) 21:41, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

ဗၞိက်

Mon.

The stated meaning "axis centre" makes no sense to me.

It's not clear to me whether the alternative form ဗဏိက်, which I found at the same heading level as and after the two nouns, applies only to the second. It would make etymological sense for the former noun 'merchandise'. However, isn't there a problem that NNA now indicates clear voice as opposed to breathy voice, analogous to the contrast between KA and GA. Or does dominance (a formerly voiced consonant overriding a resonant in the next syllable), as in Khmer, override the phonetic issue? --RichardW57m (talk) 13:00, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

I think it is supposed to say "axis, centre", but even then, I don't think ဗၞိက် has this sense. I couldn't find a dictionary that defines ဗၞိက် with the words "axis" or "centre." The closest is Robert Halliday's A Mon-English Dictionary, which has the definition "axis, centre", but for a different word, ဗၞိဟ်. About ဗဏိက်, I'm not sure if consonant dominance would turn NNA into a breathy-register consonant because according to Shorto's dictionary, other words with a formerly voiced consonant and NNA, such as ဂဏိၚ် /noiŋ/ and ဗဏိန် /hənɛn/, are in the clear register. So, ဗဏိက် should be pronounced like /hənoik/, in the clear register too. 2021nammoi (talk) 01:21, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

I found Shorto's ရိပၞဟ် [rìˀpənɔh] = woody fibres along longitudinal axis of jackfruit instead. But ပၞဟ် actually means jackfruit. I also found ပၞိဟ်/ปะนิฮ [panih] and alt ဗၞိဟ် (should be แปฺะนฺิฮ) in Thai Mon dic, means center. No record for Shorto. (Shorto doesn't have 100% lexicon anyway.) --Octahedron80 (talk) 02:25, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Template:Ping Sorry, I should have cross-referenced earlier. I am now very confident that this entry is a result of misreading - see the challenge currently at Wiktionary:Requests_for_verification/Non-English#ဗၞိက်. --RichardW57m (talk) 12:03, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

HMS

Some IP likes to create these ship prefix entries. In this entry it got out of control. Others look like questionable non-English prefixes, created as English. Perhaps they should be treated as translingual. – Jberkel 21:49, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

• @Jberkel HMS does have many senses and a complex structure of subsenses, but if they are all in use (or were in use where they are marked as obsolete), then the complexity seems unavoidable, and I don't see any problem with the entry. If it listed the names of individual ships that would be a different story. —  04:17, 18 November 2022 (UTC)

āgama

Pali.

The coverage of the grammatical term needs to be researched by someone, e.g. me. --RichardW57m (talk) 09:25, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

insignia

English.

The pluralness of this word seems complex. "An insignia" forcibly strikes me as a grammatical error, but some editors seem happy to write it. We should include a clear example of insignia as a singular. It also has two singulars, and the plural 'insignias' seems secure in the sense of 'sets of insignia' when the sets differ. I am not sure how to catch all this. --RichardW57 (talk) 05:59, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

Additionally, the etymology of insignium, in various languages, ought to be determined and recorded. Perhaps an {{rfe}} should be raised. It looks as though that word is a mediaeval Latin back-formation from insignia, but for English, it could certainly be reformed nowadays in English. --RichardW57 (talk) 05:59, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

A usage note would probably do? I can find insignium being used as the singular in English as well: [9], [10] (from Edgar Allan Poe), [11]. Second-declension insignium is well-attested in Medieval Latin, though I'm not sure if it's just a back-formation from insignia since it also has an alternative meaning "sign, miracle"; there may be a parallel derivation from īnsigniō at work as well. —Al-Muqanna (talk) 12:52, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

I found two examples of insignia used as a singular noun in different eras and genres: an 1819 record of British military awards and a 2017 work on Aboriginal art. Not sure whether the second would be a quotation or a reference; however, it is an example of the use of insignia as a singular noun in formal written English. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 07:28, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

I've added a usage note (and refs). - -sche (discuss) 04:48, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

Category:Noun plural forms by language

German has its plural noun forms categorized as Category:German noun forms whereas various other gmh descendants (Ctrl-F "German") have their plurals categorized as Noun plural forms (e.g. Category:Alemannic German noun plural forms but in practice this means they're spread out to both categories). Middle English has all its plurals neatly in Category:Middle English noun plural forms while English plural nouns are categorized under Category:English noun forms.

I really fail to see the underlying system here but whatever it is, it should be documented in the category header and possibly be enforced by {{head}}. Also, given that the categories have been applied inconsistently to the German lects, I have little faith in the consistency when it comes to the other 150 something languages. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 02:49, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

I can assure you there's no consistency here among the Celtic languages either, nor any desire (on my part at least) to clean them up so there is consistency. —Mahāgaja · talk 08:47, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Category:Translingual adjectives, Category:Translingual nouns

Translingual. Some examples from the categories:

• Category:Translingual adjectives:
  • adalberti, adansonii, balansae
  • rufipogon
• Category:Translingual nouns:
  • archeri, guatemalae, wiedii
  • hercules, oxycoccos

Obviously, that's completely inconsistent. ICZN Code sates (in 31.1.):

"A species-group name formed from a personal name may be either a noun in the genitive case, or a noun in apposition (in the nominative case), or an adjective or participle"

So the correct categories are:

• Category:Translingual nouns: hercules (m?), oxycoccos (m?), rufipogon (m?) (nouns in the nominative case)
• Category:Translingual noun forms: archeri, adalberti, adansonii, balansae, guatemalae, wiedii (nouns in the genitive case)

--Amicus vetus (talk) 07:39, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I agree with your categorization of the noun rufipogon. It just seems like a mistake. But the ICZN is not the last word on our headings and categories. Functionally, the specific epithets that are formed in the manner of Latin genitives, but not from lemmas that are used in other forms in Latin text or as genitives of taxonomic proper nouns (usually, genus names), can be viewed as adjectives. I would not object to achieving consistency in the headings and categorization of such genitive-form specific epithets, whether as nouns or adjectives, but the benefit doesn't seem worth the effort. Do you have an estimate of how many of such genitive-form terms are categorized and headed as adjectives and how many as nouns? DCDuring (talk) 14:21, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Translingual terms are not Latin. Genitive nouns and indeclinable adjectives are indistinguishable when used in taxonomic names. In my opinion, specific epithets should be classed as "adjectives" even if derived from Latin genitives. Or we could even implement a specific PoS header: "Specific epithet". This, that and the other (talk) 02:00, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

Aetokthonos, Aetokthonos hydrillicola

Translingual.

• Aetokthonos: "Aetokthonos m" + "Aetokthonos hydrillicola (Ah) - sole accepted species"
• Aetokthonos hydrillicola: "Aetokthonos hydrillicola f"

The genders are contradicting. --Amicus vetus (talk) 07:39, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Someone followed the all-to-common error made by taxonomists of inferring gender from what they read as the gender of the supposed adjective. The gender of the genus may have been added after the species entry was created. It can be tedious to determine the gender of a genus by more correct means, so there are many entries for genera that lack gender information. DCDuring (talk) 14:28, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

In this case, the specific name is a noun, which by default is masculine, but is feminine if all the referents are female. So I've just corrected the gender of the species to masculine. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:37, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

Why is hydrillicola shown as an adjective? As a Latin word, it's clearly a noun. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:40, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

The categorization of Latin compounds ending in -cola or -gena as nouns vs. adjectives is actually not very clear. While analyzing them as nouns that occur frequently in apposition may be the simplest perspective, there is a long history of considering them to be adjectives in some circumstances, e.g. Ovid's "Tempore ruricolae patiens fit taurus aratri" is cited by Lewis and Short as a case where ruricola is used as an adjective modifying the neuter noun aratrum. See also the still-unresolved suggestion here to remove the currently existing adjective entries for all such Latin words.--Urszag (talk) 02:28, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

There are a number of genera with names ending in -cola and thus nouns, and there are some specific epithets ending in -colus, which seem to be agreeing with masculine genus names. Some of those aren't derived from -cola, but I was able to come up with one that seems to be: Falco rupicolus (going all the way back to Linnaeus), where rupicolus looks like it comes from rūpēs + -cola.

To really be sure about the nature of -cola in taxonomic names would require sifting through a lot of taxonomic references and looking for either specific epithets ending in -cola,-colus or -colum that changed their endings when assigned to different genera or ones that didn't, even though others did when assigned to those same genera. After that, one would have to sift through the results to figure out whether any of those are really from -cola and not -scolus, etc. Even then, there might be some cases of adjectives and others of nouns.

If memory serves, gender of taxonomic names derived from Greek or Latin is supposed to follow that of the Greek or Latin ones, but I don't remember if there are rules in the taxonomic codes requiring adherence to Latin or Greek parts of speech. The only requirements as to POS that I know of are that generic names are nouns in the nominative singular and specific epithets are either adjectives that agree in gender and number with the generic name or nouns in apposition that can be nominative or genitive and get their gender and number from their referents. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:54, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Just to be thorough, here are the taxonomic codes I'm aware of: animals, plants and other things that used to be considered plants, bacteria and other prokaryotes, and [12]. Of the four, virus nomenclature is, for the most part, completely different from the others- forget about trying to apply Latin grammar to "SARS-CoV-2". Chuck Entz (talk) 04:22, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

The genitives are not in apposition; they are nouns used attributively, as in English noun stacks. At least for animals, they can also be genitives of adjectives used as epithets for another species, as with a genus that parasitises another genus. (That must get confusing when the genus of the parasitised species changes.) RichardW57 (talk) 11:22, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

As far as I recall, The textbooks I used didn't accept adjectives in -cola or -gena. It seems that the distinction is irrelevant for taxonomy, as generic names have to be singular. --RichardW57 (talk) 11:36, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

November 2022

acatour

English. Tagged by This, that and the other in May 2022 with this comment: Template:Tq - (talk | contrib) 02:33, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

acquite

English. Tagged by Irekoto in June 2021, who said: Template:Tq - (talk | contrib) 06:03, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

adjoint

English. Tagged by an IP in November 2016, who gave the following comment regarding the translations: Template:Tq - (talk | contrib) 05:37, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

aloeid

English. The definition reads, "Any member of the Aloeidae". Chuck Entz tagged it in 2020, pointing out that Template:Tq. Basically the same as #aeacid above. - (talk | contrib) 05:56, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Annam

English. Tagged by Brown*Toad (last edit 2019) in 2019. They left the following message, which is now hidden in the source:

On 1 October 2014 ([13]), the English entry was split into two noun sections, but the translations weren't changed. Now the noun section's definition ("one of the French protectorate in Vietnam") and the translation's section definition ("former name of Vietnam") inside that noun section don't match. Additionaly, compared with Wikipedia another sense ("A name of Vietnam used prior to 1945") is missing here as the first noun is only "the southernmost province of Imperial China between 679–939" and the second "a former subdivision of French Indochina".

- (talk | contrib) 06:10, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

awkward

English. Tagged by Marontyan in 2019, who said: Template:Tq - (talk | contrib) 06:25, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

back to the wall

English. Tagged by DCDuring in 2012, who said in the summary of their next edit of the page: Template:Tq. Equinox pointed out the same issue on the talk page in 2017. —  20:42, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

Probably we need to resort to {{n-g}}. Other dictionaries define verb phrases like back is to the wall, have one's back against the wall to make things easier on themselves, but we're right that neither the verb nor the pronoun is essential (Template:B.g.c.). - -sche (discuss) 04:05, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

bank slip

English. Tagged by User:Fish bowl in 2021 with the comment Template:Tq. The definition currently reads, "document in a sheet of paper which is used to pay taxes or other types of payment." It's difficult to find a reliable definition of this exact term online to compare ours with. —  20:57, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Etymology

Lots of outdated crap here GreyishWorm (talk) 02:08, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

I removed the RFC template after removing some of said crap, but it really could be tightened up further. It's a bit verbose and not really structured in a coherent way. This, that and the other (talk) 09:10, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Barca

English. Tagged by -sche, who said the quotations should use WT:" formatting. In their edit summary they said, Template:Tq. —  02:47, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

benim

English. Tagged by Template:User in 2022, with the message, Template:Tq. —  03:31, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

December 2022

pathology

English. Def 5 is the actual primary one based on other sources, like en.wp, yet User:Quercus solaris made it "historical" with this mess. — S 12:57, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

It's not a mess, it's a delineation of the differentiated senses of the term that people who don't work in health care often don't realize exists. In other words, when the surgeon sends a specimen for biopsy, they are not sending it to an academic basic science department, they are sending it to a clinical laboratory (applied science for humans specifically). The word sense in which there is no ontologic difference between those 2 things is historical. A good revision to present the same facts in a different way would be to move def "5" to become def "1" and then to list the differentiated subsenses below that as 1.1, 1.2, and so on, whereas they represent the specifics of the "now usually and especially" general sense. Quercus solaris (talk) 17:38, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

PS, to explain further what I mean, the study of the causes and nature of diseases is no longer specific to a particular medical specialty called pathology, among other specialties. That's what makes the "study of" sense historical within the context of medicine. Quercus solaris (talk) 17:41, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

Low German: "Ravensbergisch-Lippisch" and "Suerländer-Märkisch"

See this search. "Ravensbergisch-Lippisch" would be Ravensbergisch and Lippisch. However, the provided term in oga, drom is different from the Lippisch term (attested in Korl Biegemann, Wilhelm Oesterhaus, kinder-lippe.de). So, what's this "Ravensbergisch-Lippisch"? Template:Diff & Template:Diff (as an example) indicates, it's only Ravensbergisch. It also speaks for itself, that the term "Ravensbergisch-Lippisch" is only found in wikis and clones thereof (like wordsense.eu). But what's the source for the "Ravensbergisch-Lippisch" terms? Are they attested somewhere, or made up like the term "Ravensbergisch-Lippisch"? PS: Similar issue with "Suerländer-Märkisch", this search. At least the term looks made up as well. --14:03, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Template:it-conj

The template that generates Italian verb paradigms appears to add diacritics to indicate stress. This is inappropriate for Italian, which already uses diacritics in its orthography to indicate vowel quality. The resulting tables are therefore ambiguous; without knowledge of Italian, it is impossible to tell whether accents have been added by Wiktionary or whether they belong to the generally-accepted spelling of the word.

For example, the paradigm generated for avere gives the future tense forms 'avrò', 'avrài', 'avrà, 'avrémo', 'avréte', 'avrànno'. The accepted Italian orthography would be 'avrò', 'avrai', 'avrà, 'avremo', 'avrete', 'avranno'. That is to say, two forms are correct, and four don't reflect generally-accepted spelling.

Suggested fix: the paradigm template should be amended to reflect generally-accepted spellings. 141.255.3.23 21:28, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

The way to tell the usual spelling is by clicking the link: "avrò" links to [[avrò]], while "avrémo" links to [[avremo]], and so on. —Mahāgaja · talk 08:26, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

This is in no way going to be clear to the average user. In the unlikely event they even notice it, they're left with two forms: avrémo and avremo, and no explanation for why Wiktionary has given them two different forms and which they should use. It's also impractical: we cannot require a user to click through ~51 links to see the paradigm of a verb in its usual orthography. I'm not at all opposed to indicating stress in some way, but it cannot come at the expense of clearly indicating the form's actual spelling. 141.255.3.23 09:47, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

This was the subject of a recent BP or GP discussion I can't find offhand. It does seem like a bad idea to be mixing real and notional / notational spellings. - -sche (discuss) 20:46, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

I created this template. It is usual in monolingual Italian dictionaries to add acute and grave accents to the spelling of words to indicate their pronunciation, and I think it's important to include this information. IMO once you understand the basic rule that the actual spelling only includes accents on the last letter of the word, it's not hard to see what's going on. If you have a better idea of how to indicate the position of the accent (and the nature of the vowel if it's e or o), please describe it. We add diacritics to the spelling of many languages (Russian, Bulgarian, Latin, Old English, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbo-Croatian, Arabic, etc.) to indicate missing pronunciation information. It is true that it may be a bit confusing to someone not familiar with Italian spelling conventions due to the fact that words do include accents on the last letter, but I think this is not such a big deal. One possibility is to include two tables, one with the actual spelling and one with the extra diacritics; another is to include both spellings in the same table, but that could crowd the table. Benwing2 (talk) 22:21, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

Etymology 2 without Etymology 1

A search for Template:Search finds several entries (and a lot of false-positive chaff) with an ===Etymology 2=== not preceded by an ===Etymology 1===. In Erwachsene this is because User:AutoDooz (User:JeffDoozan) dropped the 1, on the other hand at ellum AutoDooz edited correctly and it was a human who dropped ety 1. Other pages include 粲. There are also some higher numbered ety issues, e.g. ブス was changed [by a human] to have an ety 1 and 3 but no 2. - -sche (discuss) 19:14, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

uncurled is also an error by AutoDooz, though, and kask; is there an issue with the code? - -sche (discuss) 20:45, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Template:Re Thank you for bringing this up. Fixes like this are exactly what AutoDooz attempts to handle so that human editors can focus on more important issues. Here's an explanation of why it didn't fix the mentioned pages as expected:

• Erwachsene uses the template {{de-adj noun forms of|mn|etym=2}} to generate the entire ==Etymology 2== section and child sections. Since AutoDooz operates on the wikicode, it just sees {{de-adj}} as another template. This seems to go against the norm that templates shouldn't generate section headers. Are there other templates besides {{de-adj}} that generate section headers? I can update the code to better handle these templates or skip sections that are using them.

• The bot would correct the counters on 粲 if it could, but it skips the ==Chinese== section because it contains a L3 ===Definitions=== section, which deviates from allowed WT:ELE sections and could be a sign that the page needs human attention.

• Again, the bot would fix ブス but skips it because ===Etymology 1=== has no child sections, which it takes as a signal that the page needs human attention.

• The bot only adjusts counters for sections with the same level. In the case of kask and uncurled, there is a L3 "Etymology 1" and a L4 "Etymology 2". Since there is only one L3 "Etymology" section, it drops the counter. The L4 ====Etymology 2==== section is left untouched because it doesn't make adjustments to sections found at unexpected depths. I'll see what can be done to better handle these cases.

See User:JeffDoozan/lists/section_levels/countable_bad_lineage for a list of pages where the bot found 'Etymology' or 'Pronunciation' sections in unexpected places.

JeffDoozan (talk) 21:56, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

... I'm as surprised as you are to realize we have a template generating its own etymology- and other- headers! But I can see why it was set up to do that; it saves a ton of typing and space when generating such systematically-generable forms. So I suppose the bot should either ignore language sections with such templates, or if possible, know how to interpret them. User:Benwing2, do you know if there are other templates which generate their own etymology headers, which this bot should watch out for? Yes, if the bot finds "Etymology 2" (etc) at an unexpected level, then instead of dropping the counter from "Etymology 1", it should either correct the level (if possible) or skip the page and flag it for human review. I was going to suggest that if there are enough cases where people put Etymology headers at mismatched levels, we could set up an edit filter to flag such cases, but then I realized we could do something even simpler: are there any cases where a numbered or unnumbered Etymology header is validly at any level other than L3, or can we just have an edit filter flag all instances of "Etymology" at a level other than L3 as an issue to review? (We have some entries which split things by ===Pronunciation 1===, ===Pronunciation 2=== like -ta, but those don't seem to have ety sections nested inside them, because if they did, the entry should just be refactored to be split by ety, no?) - -sche (discuss) 21:32, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

Template:Ping I don't think there are any other templates that generate their own headers, at least not things that I've written. The closest are the templates like {{ru-noun-alt-ё}} and variants, which generate both the headword and definition lines, but not any headers. Possibly there are Asian-language (CJK) templates that do this; the CJK code is kind of in an "abandon all hope, ye who enter here" state. I'm pretty sure, for example, there are CJK templates that copy entire pages, but I'm not sure which ones do this. As for ==Pronunciation 1== headers, this is also an "abandon all hope" situation. I'm strongly opposed to having these headers at all and I tried to get them banned, but some people like them and keep adding them. I've seen Etymology N sections nested under Pronunciation N sections (see 干 for an example), as well as Pronunciation N sections nested under Etymology N sections, as well as interleaved Etymology N/Pronunciation N sections (e.g. in some Tagalog entries). I have a bot script that attempts to correct misindented section headers, and I've run it on the lemmas of most languages, but it skips pages with Pronunciation N headers because of their wild-west nature. Benwing2 (talk) 22:10, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

Template:Re It looks like Erwachsene is the only page that uses {{de-adj noun forms of}} with the etym= parameter so it's definitely an edge case. I'll be interested to know if there are other templates that behave the same way that the should look out for.

According to User:JeffDoozan/stats/sections/latest there are 220 instances of L4 Etymology sections. I just edited an entry, kati#Tagalog that has multiple pronunciations each with multiple etymologies that doesn't look like it would be much simpler if it were organized by etymology and then pronunciation, but I like your idea and I would support a filter on non-L3 Etymology headers. JeffDoozan (talk) 22:03, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

January 2023

mînak

Northern Kurdish. Duplicate, conflicting Pronunciation sections Template:Unsigned

përmjerr

Albanian. Duplicate, conflicting etymologies Template:Unsigned

udstede

Danish. Multiple, conflicting pronunciation sections JeffDoozan (talk) 22:57, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

yo

Indonesian. Two etymologies for one interjection, plus a bonus template error JeffDoozan (talk) 23:05, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/panay

Proto-Japonic.

• MYS.15.3625, line 9 (text available at ONCOJ here):

  Template:Ja-usex

Middle Chinese pronunciation of the first two syllables 波祢:

• /puɑ nei/

On'yomi pronunciation:

• ha nai/ne

More details later.

printing

Verb

printing

1. Template:Present participle of
2. (Can we clean up⁽⁺⁾ this sense?)

To inadequately carry a concealed weapon such that its silhouette is visible on the person wearing it.

Sense 2 was added by Rfc1394 on 26 June 2016. When I added the RFC tag on 13 October 2022, I wrote in the edit summary, “User:Rfc1394: Does the sense you added apply to the verb “to print” (and thus should be moved there) or is it a noun, “printing”, with the definition of a verb?”; however, Rfc1394 did not reply. J3133 (talk) 06:51, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Polizei

Silesian section needs cleanup/formatting. - -sche (discuss) 00:56, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

better

English, etymology 1, adverb, sense 3: (colloquial shortening) Had better. Tagged by Chuck Entz in 2020 with the message (hidden in the source): "Template:Tq". —  22:03, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

February 2023

propaganda of the deed

English: The meaning section is way too long and complex, plus for some reasons the English term used French quotation as well. Needs simplification and English quotes.廣九直通車 (talk) 08:49, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

sup

English.

This request was made by an IP who said in the tag at sup, "some senses are Template:Ic not Template:Ic" (formatting added by me), referring to the fact that Template:Ic is our one and only (English) IPA pronunciation for eight different etymologies. —  18:53, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

I put in a note by the pronunciation. One could say that we really should split the etymologies out but that would take up a lot of space since most of the definitions would then just be "abbreviation of super", etc. —— 21:54, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

bilicyanine

English. Tagged by -sche in December 2022 giving the reason, Template:Tq. —  19:29, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

biopedturbation

English. Tagged by Kephir in June 2014 giving the reason: Template:Tq —  19:34, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

birthday boy

English. Tagged by Expulsus in November 2018, giving the reason: Template:Tq —  19:44, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Template:head/documentation

The table on the bottom of the page is filled with text in raw wikisyntax. Maybe this is due to the tables template (?) not accepting wikisyntax input. However, this complicates it's understanding.

I personally don't understand the line containing the phrase "script code with category", and at first didn't notice that |sc= was wrongly unrendered wikisyntax. Then, I also don't understand, why in it's second column, two coded labels (namely cat and sc) were given, while one of them (sc) had already been assigned the line before. --Utonsal (talk) 18:54, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

• @Utonsal The table is generated by the TemplateData extension, which treats the contents of the table cells as plain text, not Mediawiki markup, and there is no way to change this (Phabricator task to change this). I find this to be a critical flaw of the extension. —  05:47, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

bleed

English. Tagged by User:Marontyan in 2019, giving the reason: Template:Tq —  19:19, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/papumi

Proto-Japonic. The given reconstruction cannot produce the Old Japanese term pemi ("snake"), nor does this explain the almost-Old Japanese form pami ("snake, specifically a poisonous one"), and the phonological path to Ryukyuan is far from clear either.

Adding to that, the given source of "JLTT 404" appears to be this entry from Starling's Altaic work. Starling has been wildly off-base with other Japanese etymologies, and I don't think we can use this as any kind of reputable source.

If any other reliable authors are writing about , or indeed any other reconstruction of the proto-form for modern Japanese 蛇 (hebi, “snake”), I strongly suggest we use that and eschew Starling entirely.

PS: If this should be moved to another forum, please move it.

‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ 23:37, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

March 2023

Citations:boak

English. Tagged by -sche-bot in 2012. -sche recently explained, Template:Tq —  06:21, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

bur block

English. Tagged by Msh210 in 2010 when he created the entry, saying, Template:Tq. —  06:38, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

public service

English. Weird US/UK distinction, what about other countries?– Jberkel 10:45, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

It looks like sense 4 might be acceptable everywhere, while senses 1 and 3 are US-specific, and sense 2 is just a broadening of sense 4 to include utilities. If this assessment is true, sense 4 should go first, with sense 2 next looking like “(US) More generally, any service or utility provided [...]”. --N4m3 (talk) 15:38, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

button

English. Specifically etymology 2, verb sense 3: "(informal) To stop talking." Tagged by Imetsia in 2020, who said in his edit summary, Template:Tq. —  00:34, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

child

English. Tagged by an IP in 2022 with the reason, "the translation tables don't exactly map onto the senses, particularly with regard to whether only descent or age is signified". —  00:47, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

Template:table:Solar System

I've tried cleaning this up, but keep getting reverted, and told the discussion should be on the "the appropriate forum", not on the template talk page. Is this the appropriate forum?

There is/was a row header "Planets and most likely dwarf planets", but the list does not include the most likely dwarf planets, only Ceres and Pluto. The wording is from when we did include the most likely dwarfs. Because the point of the table is translations, I'd be happy with adding just Eris; because Eris is a classical name, it has established forms (e.g. Eride) in European languages. (Though Orcus [e.g. Orko] does as well.) With Eris included, I think "IAU planets and notable dwarf planets" would be accurate.

There is a second row header "Notable moons", which includes all of Pluto's moons, despite only Charon being notable in the sense of the others. I cut that cell down to Charon; let's see if it sticks. kwami (talk) 03:31, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

I agree, it should only be Charon for Pluto, and Eris should be included, since it is weightier than Pluto. It would seem driving a political point to include Pluto but not include Eris. -- 65.92.244.249 23:30, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Template:Support cutting down the number of moons of Pluto and adding dwarf planets like Eris. The RFC banner in নেপচুন (Bengali term for Neptune) has led me to this discussion. Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs) 04:14, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Should we have other TNOs, or are Eris and Pluto enough? kwami (talk) 04:17, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Tornado Alley

Dixie Alley

English.

The definitions are a weird and redundant mixture of {{lb}}, {{place}} and poorly worded plain text, along with poorly worded usage notes that vaguely compare the two terms to each other. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:21, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Thesaurus:Native American

Needs qualifiers added by someone familiar with how these terms are used, pretty sure many of them are offensive. —Al-Muqanna (talk) 17:32, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

I took a stab at it. I'm not sure if "Native American" is the best title for the Thesaurus entry. It's an American term, rather than a universal one. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 04:44, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

April 2023

seafood

Confusing. Maybe needs usage notes. – Jberkel 18:56, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

This was added by an IP who is apparently obsessed with the taxonomy of what ocean life humans eat. I've restored the definition to what it was before July 2021. Ultimateria (talk) 00:58, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

[[:]]

Arabic. No entry JeffDoozan (talk) 17:43, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

I made a first pass on the basis of other Arabic roots, but someone who actually works on Arabic entries should take a look. I do wish that Arabic root entries didn't get automatically categorized into CAT:Arabic multiword terms, though. —Mahāgaja · talk 17:49, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

lessee

English. We have three definitions where other dictionaries have one. (What about OED? Black's?) Are there differences with respect to synonymy or application by type of property (tangible/intangible, real/personal)? DCDuring (talk) 16:48, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

Gümüşhane

Turkish. multiple, conflicting etymology sections JeffDoozan (talk) 19:17, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

jyu1

Cantonese. duplicate, conflicting pronunciation sections JeffDoozan (talk) 19:54, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

Done Mcph2 (talk) 02:19, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

lek and laik

It'd be nice to know in which ridings which pronunciation is used, and then for this note to be copied to the laik page. For what it's worth, I'm dubious about the idea that the isogloss follows riding boundaries, because where I grew up, well within the West Riding, the preferred form had changed from “laik” when my father was a child to “lek” a generation later. Usually you expect the West Riding to be the most linguistically influential, so if anything you'd expect the older “laik” to spread elsewhere. N4m3 (talk) 16:22, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/sh₂ey-

I have percieved a discrepancy with the citations for the definitions for this entry. *seh₂- meaning here "to bind, fetter" links to a page that says "to satiate, satisfy". Lumbering in thought (talk) 17:24, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Slight correction, *seh₂- itself is shown as "to bind", but its root is a bit different as "to bind, fetter". *seh₂- is still the culprit as it is way different than the other page.Lumbering in thought (talk) 17:45, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Qtrs.

English. table doesn't render. JeffDoozan (talk) 14:44, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

I found the original image at this URL. while the original editor surely put a lot of work into coding that table, it might be better to just use plain text with line-breaks instead of trying to get the columns to line up. Thats what i will do if no one else can see a quick fix .... im not sure it's even possible to put a table inside of a quote template since, among other things, MediaWiki tables use the | character to make new cells and templates treat any | as the end of a line. We can get around that by replacing the string-literal with a template that types out a pipe, but only works if we assume MediaWiki has "on again, off again" behavior in how it renders strings passed through templates. Anyway I htink the best solution is to just type the text in three rows. —— 11:03, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

blanchisseuse de fin

Seems to exist (see Template:B.g.c.), also Template:B.g.c., in English as well as French, but the definition needs work. - -sche (discuss) 13:29, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

May 2023

mayon(n)aise

I mentioned this at the Tea room, but an RfC seems to be better suited. The content (which was commented out because of bad formatting) needs to be cleaned up. J3133 (talk) 10:15, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

ne manuti

Albanian. Recently added by an anon. I tidied it up as best I could, but needs attention from an Albanian editor. —Mahāgaja · talk 22:20, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

網飛

Chinese. Someone knowledgeable please add etymology, pronunciation, and transliteration(s). —Mahāgaja · talk 22:34, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

sausage

English (verb). Some quotations do not fit the definition. J3133 (talk) 17:24, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

lay

English.

• (intransitive, proscribed, see usage notes) To lie: to rest in a horizontal position on a surface.
• (proscribed) To be in a horizontal position; to lie (from confusion with lie).

These senses should be merged; however, they are in different etymology sections for some reason. J3133 (talk) 13:14, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Template:Re Because of the issue of contamination - the sense 'lie' partially derives from the preterite of lie. I fear that how to handle it may be a matter of taste. --RichardW57m (talk) 15:38, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Template:Reply That information can be included under one etymology—there is no need to duplicate definitions; this also causes issues, such as, under which one to place quotations? J3133 (talk) 15:42, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Template:Re Yes. The question is whether lay (“lie”) gets an etymology section to itself. --RichardW57m (talk) 15:46, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

I've merged them. A {{head|en|verb form}} section is not a place for a verb lemma, in addition to the problem with it being duplicated. - -sche (discuss) 04:54, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

functional load

Def. 2 (linguistics) by which an occurs or becomes relevant in a language.

"Frequency" implies that functional load is a single measure, but it actually seems to be a concept that has been measured in several ways.

Opposition is not a term for which Wiktionary has a linguistic definition. Does "opposition" refer to phonemic distinction/contrast in linguistics? Is it limited to that?

Could this be: "The importance in a language of a phonemic difference in distinguishing lexemes, measured in various ways"?

An example box would help.

Def. 1 would also benefit from some love. For example, sometimes functional load seems to refer to "importance"; sometimes to "stress". Are the non-engineering usages metaphorically derivative of engineering usage. DCDuring (talk) 17:50, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Template:Re You already know the answer to the questions from my talk page which ultimately lead to you hither: “opposition” could have a linguistic definition, which is not restricted to phonemes (the very reason of this cautious formulation), so the request has to be to expand that page. The importance is constituted by frequent occurrence, and thought in that way, even though “measured” i.e. assessed in several ways; basically you try to distinguish here how much it is subjective to the speakers of a language or an objective property, which is dubious inasmuch as a language is not without being related to its understanding by users. Fay Freak (talk) 18:54, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I would know the answer if I believed what you've written. An expansion is warranted only if there are citations or, at the very least, authorities to support expansion. Could you give me an example of linguistic usage other than for phonemes? Can you find a definition for opposition or functional load (esp., one not about phonemes) in a dictionary of linguistics? A definition is supposed to make the definiendum more comprehensible, not less. I think that the existing definitions make it harder to understand functional load than functional + load + usage context. I am fairly sure that frequency alone is not enough, unless heavily qualified. It two words are distinguished by a single phoneme but are not commonly used in the same usage context or in the similar grammatical constructions, then one's definition of "frequency" has to be adjusted. If one of the two words is not of great significance in and of itself (in context), than the frequency doesn't matter. DCDuring (talk) 20:07, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Template:Re The first article I now quoted in the entry straightforwardly matches my definition with “expansion” and specific mention of frequency and also contains a whole history of the term; focus on phonology is statistically expected due to the coining Prague School’s focus on phonology. Your selective induction-based disbelief is fallacious. A particulari ad universale non valet consequentia. Fay Freak (talk) 14:27, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

There are a reasonable number of hits for "functional load of intonation". There are also people for whom phonemes are segmental and therefore don't recognise tones as phonemes. It's not common to see functional load quantified, so I think 'frequency' is too precise, but one rather often sees 'high functional load' or 'low functional load'. I think 'amount' would be a better word than 'frequency'. --RichardW57m (talk) 15:27, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Template:Ping Is there a word that is common hypernym of phoneme and intonation that accepts -ic as a suffix? DCDuring (talk) 16:54, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

peace be upon her

peace be upon her is in a noun category but is not a noun. I do not see it in wikicode. Template:Unsigned

{{feminine equivalent of}} automatically puts entries into a language's "female equivalent nouns" category. Apparently it was assumed that the template would be used only on nouns. —Mahāgaja · talk 06:25, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

I suppose the easiest(?) thing to do is have it keep defaulting to nouns but have an optional override to set a different category...? - -sche (discuss) 04:50, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

Or just change the category name to "female equivalent forms". —Mahāgaja · talk 08:19, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

Template:Ping There is already a |POS= param to {{female equivalent of}}, which I added to this entry. The issue I have with "female equivalent forms" is the word "forms" suggests non-lemma forms to me, which isn't the case here. Benwing2 (talk) 19:19, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

guru

Sense 1 needs to be cleaned up (if kept): “In Indian traditions,it means a knowlegable teacher who guides his shishya(disciple/lit. seeker of [of knowledge or truth])”. Added by भारत्पराक्रमि on 1 March with the edit summary “how is this redundan?The first definition was in spritual sense and the other was about its use in us etc. which does not pertains to its defination as a general teacher”. J3133 (talk) 10:01, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Template:pi-alt/documentation

Pali.

The documentation has not been cleanly updated since automatic transliteration was incorporated. Proper handling of the arguable quirks is required.

I hope I will now remember to see to this documentation update, but am logging the need here as a reminder and in case I don't. --RichardW57m (talk) 10:54, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Template:Done --RichardW57 (talk) 17:05, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

погост

Pinging East Slavic editors because there seems to be no Old East Slavic workgroup (Notifying Atitarev, Benwing2, Useigor, Guldrelokk, Fay Freak, Tetromino, PUC, Brutal Russian, Atitarev, Benwing2, Underfell Flowey, Voltaigne, ZomBear, Atitarev, Benwing2, PUC): . Some of the senses at погост appear to belong to Old East Slavic, so perhaps the article should be split. The Finnish descendants belong under the Old East Slavic term according to SSA, which is what alerted me to this. brittletheories (talk) 13:28, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

@Brittletheories: The senses seem OK. The Old East Slavic orthography was wrong. It's , not "погост". @Benwing2: I have fixed the etymology on the Russian descendant пого́ст (pogóst). Anatoli T. / 00:08, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Category:Ubykh_language

It appears that some 1,350 words in this language use a transcription system that is, to put it lightly, completely made up. The guide for the transliteration (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Ubykh_transliteration) given has no basis in Ubykh literature and in the user talk pages you can see these editors discuss what letters are used for the transliteration.

The only writing system this language has used in recorded history was the Turkish Latin alphabet and a transcription system based off of this snippet is in the back of A Grammar of Ubykh (ISBN-10: 3862880508) which can be visually shown here. ~ Burned Toast (talk)

June 2023

Appendix:Numerals in various languages

A user has posted an RFC for this appendix, but no discussion has been made. I'm mentioning it here for further discussion. 17lcxdudu (talk) 02:51, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/Mmanka

Proto-Japonic.

M indicates unknown pre-nasalized stop.

July 2023

よる#Japanese

よる has many kanji spellings which seem to have at least two etymologies and somewhat related meanings. I’m not sure whether this page should have soft redirects with {ja-see} to the kanji spellings, or be the main entry using {ja-def} for the kanji spellings like it does now, with the kanji entries redirecting to this page. Mcph2 (talk) 14:50, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

cisoid

The definition "a cis person" should be removed. It's an Urban Dictionary definition with only 8 upvotes at time of writing. I don't think a use that obscure warrants any mention whatsoever. Key Jam (talk) 14:55, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

This is an RFV situation, I tagged the entry and created the conversation there. - TheDaveRoss 15:04, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

requesting input from fluent speakers on the meanings of pederast and its cognates in contemporary language

I've seen paper dictionaries list words like pédéraste as terms for male homosexuals without any commentary. We have that particular word listed as archaic. But on our pederast page, most of the words are glossed as "homosexual" without any such qualifier, and no other meaning is listed. Since I can't trust paper or even online dictionaries with a word like this, I am hoping native speakers can contribute from their knowledge and figure out how many of these languages still use this word this way, and whether it should be marked as disparaging, archaic, or something else. I note also that most of them just say "homosexual", not even restricting its use to men. Is this correct? Was it ever correct? In English the only nonstandard use we list is that of also including pedophiles who are attracted to young girls.

I am posting here because this page moves much more slowly than the Tea Room. This page is surely also less watched, but in this case I think it will be a better choice, on balance, as I am seeking input from fluent speakers of each of the languages we list.

Best regards, —— 17:48, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

piling on

Definitions are overwordy, and there's probably some crossover between the senses Alegoil (talk) 15:20, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Sanibel

Sense 1 looks messy. Equinox ◑ 19:07, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Bit of a dirty fix, but does that work? There don't seem to be separate categories for Lee County or Islands in Florida, but unless someone adds a "nocaps" parameter to {{place}}, that's the best I've got.... Andrew Sheedy (talk) 19:21, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

I've tidied it up a bit more. —Mahāgaja · talk 06:57, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

Adam, Bertil, Olof, etc

These are listed as ===Interjection===s, whereas other phonetic alphabet letters like Juliett are listed as ===Noun====s. They should all be switched to be nouns (like also alpha, gimel, etc). Aside from the rest of the Swedish phonetic alphabet (kryss for X, etc), are there other entries that use other parts of speech for letter names? - -sche (discuss) 07:49, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

Canis lupus arctos and other species listed as common nouns

Most species names (even Canis lupus!) seem to be entered as proper nouns, but some like this are common nouns. Why? Does anyone want to systematically search for other instances and standardize them? - -sche (discuss) 07:52, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

• I edited Canis lupus arctos with this diff. This might be more than most would want to do.

I tried the following regex searches:

'hastemplate:"head" species insource:/head\|mul\|noun/' and got 70 hits mostly specific epithets, some simple adjectives, some genitives of nouns in form.

'incategory:"Translingual nouns" species' yielded 6 hits of varied characteristics.

Substituting 'genus', 'subgenus', 'subspecies' for 'species' gets more. Possibly 'family', 'tribe', and 'order' too.

More selective regex searches (eg. with leading capitals in the title) might yield the more specifically problematic entries that got Template:Ping's attention. DCDuring (talk) 17:18, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

ॸ

Marwari. This "Letter" entry needs a proper definition and reference. This, that and the other (talk) 01:23, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/kanto and multiple other JPX-PRO entries

@User:Chuterix has been adding pronunciation sections to many Proto-Japonic (JPX-PRO) entries. Rather than remove these outright, I'm bringing this up here to request help with cleanup, due to the following issues:

• No sources.

  Last I knew, there was uncertainty regarding the exact vowel values of even Old Japanese. I question how we can be so certain about even-older Proto-Japonic. Whose reconstructions are we basing our sections on? Are there other writers who propose different reconstructions? Building our entries around one or two authors, when there are many working in this space, strikes me as deeply problematic.

• No links to any explanatory materials regarding reconstructed Proto-Japonic phonology.

  If someone wanted to read more about this topic, where would they go? Our current JPX-PRO pronunciation sections are dead ends.

• Obtuse and unexplained notation.

  These edits also include text like:

Accent class 2.4.

This text has no further explanation, nor any links. What is an "accent class" in this context? What does "2.4" mean? Whose work is this based on? Etc. etc.

• Misleading phonemic notation.

  Assuming that the initial "2" refers to two-syllable words, we have other notation problems, as at , where the phonemic guide of /kutui/ seems to indicate three syllables. If the latter /-tui/ is meant to be a single-syllable diphthong, should this not be shown differently? Per w:International_Phonetic_Alphabet#Diphthongs, presumably we should show this as /-tu͜i/, /-tui̯, /-tu̯i/, /-tuⁱ/, or /tᵘi/.

If I should bring this to some other forum instead, please advise and I'm happy to move the thread. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ 00:47, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

@Eirikr:

Pronunciation is based on our conversion of the widely accepted reconstructed PJ phonology (6 vowels; 13 consonants including pre-nasalized clusters that become voiced stops) from modified hepburn to standard IPA. For example: PJ becomes /jəkə/, accent class 2.1 according to Martin 1987 (forgot the page, but it exists), or a better example, PJ , has IPA pron /sima/ and applying Martin 1987's accent data (p. 524), we get /sìmà/ + accent class 2.3. This is the worst reason why you blocked me.

I'm not sure about how we're supposed to handle diphthongs though, let alone accenting them.

Anyways my original answers, before answering the "who reconstructs this, who reconstructs that, etc." questions:

My sources are Template:Ja-ref, they show accent IDs (L, H, R, etc.) and the accent pattern. I can add them, but you blocked me from Mainspace and Reconstruction space for at most 3 days.

Pinging Template:Ping; however lately he has not been answering any of my questions lately for some reason.

Also notifying Template:Ping (Aramaki-Morozov): he's got pitch accent and more Ryukyuan accent class (A, B, C, etc.) that is possible to work with. Chuterix (talk) 01:42, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Various issues.

• Any pronunciation information added to proto-Japonic / proto-Ryukyuan entries must include sourcing. Since there are few such sources, using tags, and possibly also templates, seems most appropriate.
• References must include full author names and actual titles. Non-specialists must be able to read these, and they must provide sufficient information for readers to find the actual sources.
• Any accent class must be explained. So far, entries provide no explanations, nor links to explanations, for what is meant by things like "accent class 2.3". This is entirely unusable to the vast majority of potential readers.
• Your spellings are problematic. In IPA, ⟨y⟩ indicates a different sound than the /i/ used in mainstream Japonic romanizations. Your use of spellings like is confusing and ambiguous.
• Overall, your handling of reconstructed proto-terms for those Japanese nouns that exhibit vowel fronting when used as standalone nouns or the latter component in compounds leaves much to be desired. As far as I'm aware, there is still no consensus for whether this is an additive process (where an originally unfronted vowel becomes fronted when the noun is used in specific ways, presumably due to addition of an /i/ suffixing element), or instead a subtractive process (where some final /i/ element is removed when the noun is used as the first component in a compound). Consequently, we cannot say with any certainty that there ever was any single term like that gave rise to both Old Japanese compounding kutu and standalone kuti: the etymon may instead be , and the standalone Old Japanese kuti may be evidence of a derived or inflected form.

‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ 18:38, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

미국놈

Korean. Tagged by User:Fenakhay. I cleaned up a bit but a further cleanup and check is needed. --Anatoli T. / 00:09, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

August 2023

, (comma)

Translingual. Many of the senses here are actually English-only, or limited to certain specific languages at least, and need to be separated out of the Translingual section. This was brought up on Discord ages ago by Template:Ping but it doesn't look like it was ever actioned. —Al-Muqanna (talk) 20:58, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

Template:Re Could you add more detail, so one knows when the clean-up is done. For example, are you hoping for some action on the rôle as a digit separator? How do we split up the usage notes on serial commas by language - there may well be modern comma-using languages that don't normally use the word for 'and' or 'or' in lists. --RichardW57m (talk) 10:30, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Ancient Greek diocritical marks

The titles of the pages all have diacritical marks, but many of the initial breathings are missing for the pages that begin with Alpha. If someone could tell me how to alter a page title, I would correct this. 2600:1700:30C0:6E50:B1EB:E381:8EB1:232A 00:34, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

You need to keep the difference straight between -, language code "el", and -, language code "grc". Looking at Category:Ancient Greek lemmas and Category:Ancient Greek non-lemma forms, which together include all of our Ancient Greek entries, you'll see that all of the ones starting with Alpha have the breathing on either the Alpha (, ), or on the following vowel for diphthongs (). The only exceptions are a handful of nomen sacrum forms such as , which have no diacritics at all.

Modern - is different: as I understand it, mainstream usage doesn't have any diacritics at all except for a simple accent called a tonos, but there was a revival of the old system called Katharevousa, so there are some exceptions. See Category:Greek lemmas and Category:Greek non-lemma forms for all our modern Greek entries. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:55, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

Citations:tiptop

Tagged but not listed for cleanup by @WingerBot, so I thought I should list it here as that seems to be the correct protocol. I’m not really sure what the point tagging a Citations page rather than an entry is though tbh. Overlordnat1 (talk) 10:03, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

verge escapement

English. A very encyclopaedic definition. Pious Eterino (talk) 18:57, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Is it good enough now? DCDuring (talk) 22:51, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

As someone unversed in horology, I'm reticent to assess the entry. As a rank-and-file Wiktionarian, though, I say it's better than before, probably enough to remove the cleanup template. Pious Eterino (talk) 23:15, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

cut (12 August 2023)

(Adjective) 4. (Can we clean up(+) this sense?) (cricket, of a shot) Played with a horizontal bat to hit the ball backward of point.

(Noun) 7. (cricket) A batsman's shot played with a swinging motion of the bat, to hit the ball backward of point. 8. (cricket) Sideways movement of the ball through the air caused by a fast bowler imparting spin to the ball.

I know little about cricket, and these definitions are as mysterious to me as most of the words used in that game. "Backward of point" has no meaning to me. I know that the word is used as a noun in baseball, referring to a swing of the bat: "He had a good cut at that pitch, but he missed."

Noun #7 seems different than Adjective #4.

(adjective) 2. Reduced.

   The pitcher threw a cut fastball that was slower than his usual pitch.

This is a less than satisfactory example. A "cut" fastball has no consistent meaning as far as I know. It doesn't mean that the ball is thrown more slowly; that's a "change-up." "Cut" seems to me to be a word used by a baseball announcer. It may mean that the pitcher's arm movement is less than his usual one, or it may mean that the ball unintentionally curves, or does something unexpected. This is also perhaps a reference to the practice by the pitcher of cutting the ball with a hidden tool to make it act unpredictably or increase its sideways, upward or downward motion when it's thrown with a spin. This practice is banned, of course. Notable examples are pitchers (for example, Gaylord Perry) getting caught with a nail file or emery board and Juan Marichal using a sharpened part of his belt buckle.

Anyway, because cricket and baseball are somewhat related, it seems possible that these definitions are all somehow related and have taken on different meanings. A "British" tag might be appropriate for the cricket uses, and an "American" tag for the baseball ones. The definition I gave above (a swing of a baseball bat) should be added, and it is perhaps handed down from cricket, but used more generally in baseball because a baseball bat is round and cannot be held horizontally. I have read about cricket, and I came to the conclusion that it would take an unlimited amount of time to learn the jargon. However, I can watch a game and grasp the essentials. No doubt some feel the same about baseball. Wastrel Way (talk) Eric

Category:Cree language

Since we already handle the various Cree lects as separate languages - as we well should - that means that all entries currently labeled as "Cree" should actually be one of the dialects. I further propose we delete any of those that we cannot identify (following WT:RFV, since attestation should lead to identification) within the appropriate timespan, and retire as a language code, and set it as the family code for Cree languages. Thadh (talk) 17:17, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Nicolas

In this diff, a translation table was added by User:NicWarren, with the gloss "Transliterations of the surname". There has never been a definition for the surname, so it is unclear what the table is referring to. I'm hesitant to just change the gloss or remove the table, so I'll leave this to anyone who might know what the actual mistake is. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 17:46, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Just noting that with the exception of the Nepali all of the translations are already present at Nicholas. —Al-Muqanna (talk) 17:55, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

chiron

French.

There's a dictionary entry in there... somewhere... Chuck Entz (talk) 07:34, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

at.óow

Tlingit. — 12:41, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Appendix:Glossary of contract bridge

English. Anyone know anything about bridge? This page uses a range of nonexistent templates to try to show various aspects of the game, including suits (the templates probably exist on Wikipedia - for instance w:Template:BridgeSuit and w:Template:Ds). Also the initial case of each defined term (or in some cases, each individual word in a multi-word term) needs to be checked; all our other glossaries use lowercase initial letters. This, that and the other (talk) 12:32, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

This seems to just be a poorly-maintained/less complete duplicate of Glossary of contract bridge terms? —Al-Muqanna (talk) 13:16, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

It is. Back in 2007, Connel MacKenzie's bot transwikied it from Wikipedia here, on the presumption that a glossary of terms was more appropriate for a dictionary than an encyclopedia. Since then, it's barely been touched here. —Mahāgaja · talk 14:26, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Arguably they were right, but in practice Wiktionary appendices are basically invisible to readers and potential editors whereas Wikipedia articles of general interest within a particular niche like this one tend to be well-maintained. I think there's a good case to RFD this one. —Al-Muqanna (talk) 15:00, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

On my to-do list/bucket list is to try and bring some order to the chaos that is the Appendix namespace, perhaps through a "breadcrumb trail" like what {{auto cat}} generates at the top of category pages, and in the long term, possibly even proposing to rearrange the appendix by language: Appendix:French/Verbs, Appendix:English/Star Wars vocabulary, etc. Then we can feel proud of the appendix and add a link to it (as well as the thesaurus, rhymes section, ...) from the sidebar, making it much more visible! This, that and the other (talk) 23:40, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Hessian: Category:Hessian German, Gude, Hesse, Kolter, Schnatz

Confusion of proper Hessian (Hessian dialect; Hessisch), a Rhine Franconian (gmw-rfr) sub-dialect; and Hessian regiolect (hessischer Regiolekt) as sub-form of Category:Regional German, i.e. (Standard High) German (de). Label "(Hessian)" [with that link] doesn't belong into de entries. Template:Unsigned

ᠲᠥᠯᠦᠢ

Please delete the ᠲᠥᠯᠦᠢ wrong spelling word, Toli (mirror) in Mongolian is ᠲᠤᠯᠤᠢ Толуй, see sources https://mongoltoli.mn/history/h/79 https://nom.imu.edu.cn/zh-hans/journals/paper/15774/ Eupakistani (talk) 07:23, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/Khunou S

This editor is quite enthusiastic about improving our coverage of Naga peoples and languages, but they have no clue about the difference between a dictionary and an encyclopedia and/or a mini-essay, for instance, or any number of other things. A good example is Khiamniungan Naga, which looks like an English term, but only has an entry for Khiamniungan Naga, complete with authentic-looking tonal pronunciation and a a definition which is really a description of the people, the etymology of Khiamniungan, and the festivals that are part of their culture. They also have included things like at the tops of pages with the wrong kind of brackets (it should be {{also|Appendix:Variations of "pau"}}) so it links to "also" instead of to the (nonexistent) Appendix:Variations of pau. They've also done some rather odd page moves, like àāngtsyōkiu->Khèi->āusám. Template:Ping left a message and a welcome template on their talk page and has cleaned things up a bit, but even looking through their edit histories makes me tired- it could end up as a full-time job to make sense of all of this. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:38, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

聲, 死

The list of Chinese senses is messy because it is a wall of text with approximately 10 senses in a random order. It would be easier to read if the senses were grouped and sorted into subsenses. A good example that does this is how User:Wpi did a good job organizing .

I tried to do the cleanup by myself, but my edits were reverted. See User_talk:Wpi#Your_undos_of_my_edits_at_死 for context, but the focus of this RFC is the sorting/grouping not the etymology. This task is important because it's becoming unreadable with that excessively long list. User:Wpi thought that my groupings were wrong and inaccurate, so now I am asking here in RFC for more experienced editors to help as discussed on the talk page. Daniel.z.tg (talk) 20:14, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

Gude

Someone tagged this as both RFV and Cleanup, saying that it's wrongly categorized. It's probably true that there could also be a "Rhine-Franconian" entry here, but I'm confused about the rest. Is it incorrect to use {{label|de|Hessian}} for words used when speaking Standard German in Hesse? Saying "Gude" doesn't mean you're speaking full-on Hessisch, any more than saying "moin" means you're speaking Plattdeutsch. Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:31, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

The thread was started above at #Hessian: Category:Hessian German, Gude, Hesse, Kolter, Schnatz. The problem is not unique to Hessian; in any diglossic situation you encounter words from the basilect being used in mesolectal or even acrolectal speech, and when we consider the basilect a different language from the acrolect (e.g. Jamaican Creole ↔ English, Scots ↔ English, any of the German traditional-dialects ↔ German) it can be very difficult to know which words to assign to which variety, and of course to know how to label them unambiguously. —Mahāgaja · talk 08:51, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, we also have e.g. Scots vs. Scottish English. If a word is attested as being used in an otherwise standard German context then it should be marked as regional/dialectal German and not as (or rather, as well as) the full-on language. —Al-Muqanna (talk) 08:57, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

I realize now the problem is that the entry is labeled as German and categorized as CAT:Hessian German (a regiolect of ), but the Wikipedia link inside the label points to the article on the Hessian variety of Rhine Franconian. —Mahāgaja · talk 09:23, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

OK, then the easiest thing might be to change the label data, which I've done to fix that link. Smurrayinchester (talk) 09:40, 1 September 2023 (UTC)