User talk:-sche/Archive/2017

Finno-Ugric to Uralic

Note that a bunch of module errors have been generated as a result. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:40, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Coorne citation

Please explain why you removed the OED Coorne citation. Note in particular that though it gives no actual quotation, it explicitly supplies the necessary citation. JonRichfield (talk) 12:04, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

That would be the type of citation that Wikipedia requires, but not the type that Wiktionary requires. It's one thing to list the OED as a source for more information in a separate section, but it's not a good idea to use an inline citation as if that verified the existence of the word to Wiktionary standards (we have an entire appendix of dictionary-only terms that can't be regular entries). If the OED gives examples of use, cite the usage in the original sources. See WT:CFI for details. Chuck Entz (talk) 18:52, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Chuck Entz thank you. I followed some of your refs. Would you care to comment on the looseness (by current standards) of earlier English spelling? Eg, Tyndale's bible had at least three spellings for corn, two of which occur in the quote I subsequently supplied. Coorne itself is labelled (correctly IMO) as obsolete in English. JonRichfield (talk) 19:31, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

It's a definite problem, because we treat Early Modern English as English, and that means 3 cites/quotes for verification. Wiktionary is structured around precise spellings, so coorn and coorne have to be verified separately. Lemmas, as our stand-in for the term as a whole, can be verified by inflected forms- so a quote for corns will verify our entry for corn- but these are alternative forms. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:54, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Chuck Entz I had thought of that independently, but as it happens Tyndale not only has been republished in editions by various editors who retained his spellings (which I have verified as accurate by looking very carefully at an image of the original) but also has been quoted more or less correctly (though at least one misquoted "corn" as "corne", but retained "coorne" correctly). Now, corn/corne does not look like much of a problem for most readers, in searching for corne in WKt the reader might well notice "corn" and make the connection, and besides spelling in those days (16th c and earlier) was pretty arbitrary (GBS would have LOVED it). But it is perfectly possible for someone reading coorne out of context, or in a different context, to read "coorne" and wonder what the bleep it meant ("coronet" for goodness' sake!!!) without making the corn connection. For such a reader that is IMO a definite justification for such an entry whether it is a ghost word or not. Furthermore, check the 15th century entry I have just added to the Dutch; in those days, English being what it was, it is quite conceivable that the form 'coorne' from the Dutch was known in southern England; and don't forget that the rejected OED entry, though it does not supply sources for that one, does give it for a variation of kernel, coornel, which should count as being as much of a cite as any other book, even if not as a satisfactory dictionary entry. (Other books also have their ghost words :D ) JonRichfield (talk) 11:28, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg

A language code was adding in this diff. Is it correct? I also wonder if the rest of the etymology is correct, after having looked at the Wikipedia article and a couple of its sources. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 01:48, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Check Chaubunagungamaug, where I haven't tampered with the etym. — AWESOME meeos ！ * ([nʲɪ‿nəʐɨˈmajtʲe sʲʊˈda]) 02:32, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Your involvement is why I noticed it, but isn't really the reason I asked. I noticed your edit when you made it, and made a mental note to ask about it later when I had time and when -sche seemed to have time to be asked. Discussing your edits jogged my memory, so I posted this today. My question still remains, though Angr's involvement does ease my concerns a bit. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:01, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

The base name is generally agreed to ultimately be Nipmuck. I consider it suboptimal to use the same code both in situations like this, where the language being referred to or speculated about is identifiable as the language of the Nipmucks, and also when dealing with the wordlist that is known by the obvious placeholder name "Loup A" that is merely assumed to be the same language. Nonetheless, sources do treat them the same, to such an extent that the Grammar of the Nipmuck Language identifies itself as "a grammatical sketch of Loup A". (Maybe I'll give Nipmuck an etymology-only code like New Latin, though. Or we could change the canonical name of Loup A.)

Thanks for adding the pronunciation, Awesomemeeos.

I've added some references explaining that the longer name is a 1920s hoax. - -sche (discuss) 03:34, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

It reminds me of the first assignment in the American Indian Languages class I took at UCLA thirty years ago: we were asked to look up the origin of a list of US place names (in books- the World Wide Web hadn't been invented yet). It was eye-opening how much bogus information there was in respectable references.

By the way, I added an archive link to the Webster Lake Association website cite, since the site is now apparently defunct. Thanks, -sche! Chuck Entz (talk) 04:01, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks; I copied that one over from Wikipedia and, as you see, ultimately removed it as unnecessary/redundant. - -sche (discuss) 16:29, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Huh?

diff I think you made a mistake here? You removed a bunch of language codes. —CodeCat 01:24, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Yes; I've reverted myself except for the one change I was trying to make, to fix Chono's code. - -sche (discuss) 01:30, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Intersection-al and inter-sectional

Is it perhaps wise to divide intersectional into Etymology 1 and Etymology 2? The dominant sense today relates to intersectionality, which seems to have been coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in or about 1989. But there is also a literature on inter-sectional politics during the American Civil War, and I've seen mention (in twentieth century texts) that this notion of relationships across "sections" was popular among eighteenth- or nineteenth-century American thinkers – maybe Federalists? (See the two different noun senses at intersectionalist.)

In Google Books, before 1989 intersectional mainly seems refer to scientific meetings or sports tournaments, or to the Civil War-era intersectionalism. After 1989, it seems to refer mainly to (theories or treatments of) gender, race, discrimination, etc.

Any road, do you think it is worthwhile to think about dividing the word into senses with different etymologies? or is it fine as-is? Cnilep (talk) 00:52, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

The page could certainly be split that way. I only didn't make the effort doing that at the time because the two etymologies are pretty similar and ultimately both break down to the same inter- section -al. - -sche (discuss) 02:41, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. Maybe I'll think more about it if I have some free time in the future. Thanks, Cnilep (talk) 03:42, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

mombie

Hope this is where you wanted me to reply/discuss this.

Yes, I do adamantly feel the rollback is in error. Please kindly revert to my 4-10 updated mombie definition. There is currently no proper usage cited. Defined as a 'mombie' (even though male) myself I understand what it means fully. My definition had rave reviews by many mombie parents. The proper usage is as stated. This word is not always derogatory. The proper definition is becoming more popular and should be listed first. 9/10 actual mombies agree. Parenting is not easy by any means. Mombies give their all and then some. There needs to be a definition listed that is non-derogatory as well as the derogatory usage.

Let's get the accurate proper use of the word back online for all, please. It would mean a lot to myself and 'mombies' around the world. Thank you very much for your time.

Joshua Crum (talk) 14:41, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@Joshua Crum: First of all, don't add it back without discussion first. It wasn't reverted by mistake. Your definition obviously can't stand even if the non-derogatory sense is fine; if you look elsewhere in the dictionary, you will see that definitions are never self-aggrandising paragraph-long spiels. More importantly, though, not just any definition can be included. Only those that pass WT:ATTEST are allowed in English. Even if you personally use a word every day, if it hasn't entered into the popular lexicon of durably archived English, we can't accept it here. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:31, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

The long, aggrandizing paragraph was over the top, but I appreciate the point that usage is not always derogatory; some books and other uses I see are just referring to the sleep-deprivation-induced mindlessness you mentioned. I've tried to expand the definition a bit. Let me know if any key elements are still missing. - -sche (discuss) 21:15, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

das seine - pronunciation

Hi,

One of the Russian opposition journalists said that in "jedem das seine" there is no /z/ sound. While I agree that Russian /z/ is much more voiced than the German, I'd say that the final s in "das" is voiceless but the next "s" is slightly voiced, isn't it? Or is it completely devoiced? What do you think? --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 00:40, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

That's an unusual thing for Russian journalists to be discussing! The "s" in "seine" is /z/ in standard German, even after the /s/ of "das". - -sche (discuss) 01:55, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

What? Voicing of /z/ ⟨s⟩ is entirely facultative in every register of German. And progressive devoicing is completely normal. Korn [kʰũːɘ̃n] (talk) 12:13, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

The canonical sound is /z/, however. Compare for example aussöhnen, which the Duden (and e.g. Viëtor's Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch) transcribes [ˈaʊ̯szøːnən]; our colleagues at de.Wikt are missing the verb (as are we) but have Aussöhnung [ˈaʊ̯sˌzøːnʊŋ], as well as e.g. es sich [ɛs zɪç]. - -sche (discuss) 18:01, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

But even the section 'Genormte Lautung' (opposed with 'Umgangssprache') in the current Duden Aussprechewörterbuch only says something along the lines of /s/ can also be voiced in these positions (Same goes for vocalisation of /r/.) and then explicitly states that amongst these they pick one, but the others are always an equally standard alternative. I'd prefer if we use our (basically) infinite space to afford some wider precision over a brevity which might accidentally turn us non‐descriptivist. Also, I feel a bit impolite for barging into your talk page, sorry, but it's on my watchlist for some reason, and with German there is a lot of prescriptivist spirit floating around the Wiki projects. I also use the [sz] pronunciaton in these cases and I'm all for differentiating /ß/ from /s/, but we shouldn't make it wrongly sound like it's the one right way. Korn [kʰũːɘ̃n] (talk) 10:42, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Spellings in dialectal categories

(This is not another dispute on which English forms deserve lemma.)

I’ve noticed that there are quite a few alternative spellings which are placed in the same category as regionalisms. A few examples include Euroskeptic, favor, gigametre and humourless, amongst others. Considering that we have categories for this purpose, e.g. category:Canadian English forms, all that it does is clutter. As well, template:standard spelling of appears to be using the wrong categories.

Is there any chance that we can fix up this? (@Daniel Carrero can also weigh in, since he seems familiar with this kind of thing.) — (((Romanophile))) ♞ (contributions) 04:38, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

@Romanophile

Switching from "British" to "British spelling" seems to bring about correct categorization, both in {{label}} and in {{standard spelling of}} (see my edits to gigametre), but going through all the entries in the regionalism categories and making sure they use the right labels will take a fair bit of work. I'm sorry for this delayed and probably disappointing response. I may try going through the dialect categories and checking labels with AWB sometime.

A tangentially related question is whether a word that's limited to, say, Shetland, should use {{lb|en|UK|dialectal|Shetland}} as some entries do, which puts them into "British English" although the words are not used in all or even most British English varieties. The lack of consistency about whether all entries which are dialectal go into "Category:English dialectal terms" or only some random entries do is also unfortunate.

- -sche (discuss) 03:52, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Categorizing Categories

Hi -sche, I haven't had a lot of users discussions yet, so if this needs to be at another place or done in a different way - let me know. I created a while ago category:English_false_friends_for_German_speakers. Your bot left a note for clean-up, also a while ago. But I do not really understand, how to add a language category to a category. Can you help? Thx. Hi.ro (talk) 09:35, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure the current name is the best name for the category, but the main issue is that I'm not sure where "false friends" categories like it fit into Wiktionary's system of categories. - -sche (discuss) 03:43, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

hommesse "woman"

I found the very rare French word hommesse, "woman", on the multilingual website: biblehub.com [[1]].

Genèse 2:23 French: Martin (1744): - Alors Adam dit : A cette fois celle-ci est os de mes os, et chair de ma chair; on la nommera hommesse, parce qu'elle a été prise de l'homme. -- New International Version: - The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man."

Th noun hommesse is listed on the fr.Wikt under Dérivés "Derived terms" for homme [[2]]. Therefore I think the word hommesse "woman" should not be deleted from the English Wiktionary, even if it is very rare. I think that separate Wiktionary pages for hommesse, "woman" ought to be created to show that this word was used in an earlier French translation of the Bible. Cf. German Mann / Manne "man" and Männin --

1 Mose 2:23 German: Luther (1912): Da sprach der Mensch: Das ist doch Bein von meinem Bein und Fleisch von meinem Fleisch; man wird sie Männin heißen, darum daß sie vom Manne genommen ist. [[3]] Have an excellent day! Hans-Friedrich Tamke (talk) 03:24, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

It would be fine to have an entry for it, which could note how rare a bit of wordplay is. But it's downright misleading to list it as a translation in the translations table at woman, which is why I removed it from there. Incidentally, it seems to more often mean something different, along the lines of "effeminate/androgynous man". - -sche (discuss) 03:39, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Nice 'crattage

Great admin work, -sche. So much so, I may have to nom you as our next bureaucrat. — This unsigned comment was added by Celui qui crée ébauches de football anglais (talk • contribs).

Thank you for prompting me to take care of so many of those old RFMs. Do you have aWa enabled? (Can non-admins enable it?) It would be preferable to archive old discussions to talk pages rather than just deleting them. - -sche (discuss) 22:30, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

I can't use aWa, no. It's only for autopatrollers and above. I know it is preferable to archive them, but I'm not known to do things the "right way". In fact, I'm no teven checking my spelling, punctuation or signing my posts these days, which really pisses people off .

Ah, that's silly, that you can't use it. Oh well! :p - -sche (discuss) 22:50, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Old Northwest

FYI, you just added it to a category that doesn't exist. Will you create the category? Purplebackpack89 23:21, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

I believe there is a bot that creates wanted categories that fit naming patterns. I know there is one for POS and derivation categories. - -sche (discuss) 23:37, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Now there's Category:en:Regions of the United States as well as Category:en:Regions of the United States of America... —CodeCat 00:05, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

The "cities" and "towns" categories use the full name, so presumably "regions" should, too, at least until we decide on an overarching policy. (A shorter name like just US would be easier to type, but some have felt the full name is more professional.) - -sche (discuss) 00:16, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

There's still a data entry in one of the modules of topic cat somewhere. —CodeCat 00:17, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Good catch (that was my own error and apparently also someone else's, since it was added twice; hah). Btw, do you know why we have both Module:category tree/topic cat/data/Place names and Module:category tree/topic cat/data/Place names old? Does the split serve a purpose or could I merge them, for example at Module:category tree/topic cat/data/Places? - -sche (discuss) 00:20, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

I think it was because I made some changes to the module that someone else didn't like so they forked it? —CodeCat 00:22, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Do you happen to notice any reason why it would cause errors if I started moving labels from the "old" module into the plain module? I don't; the formatting of the labels looks identical. Do you have a preference for whether they be un-forked at Module:category tree/topic cat/data/Places or at Module:category tree/topic cat/data/Place names? - -sche (discuss) 00:33, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Just "Places" would make more sense, since that's the new head of the tree. I don't know if the data entry for "Place names" would even belong in there anymore. —CodeCat 00:43, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

OK; I've started centralizing the labels there. I am inclined to leave "place names" as the only label in its module, for a while, while people adjust. - -sche (discuss) 01:51, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, User:Daniel Carrero did that when he created {{place}} and wanted to add a gazillion new items. He copied the existing module to Module:category tree/topic cat/data/Place names old and put his stuff in Module:category tree/topic cat/data/Place names. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:21, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz: Actually, my contribution to {{place}} is very minor. I basically just created a worthless stub template and then @Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV created a full module and made it work. Which is awesome. (I also checked the results and gave feedback while he did the hard work.) You mentioned my contributions in Module:category tree/topic cat/data/Places so I'll reply to that: You're welcome. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 19:48, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

You were more influential than you may think: the main reason I chose to do it was to avoid the proliferation of decentralised templates like {{place:Brazil/municipality}}. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 20:02, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm happy that you did it. I believe my ability in editing modules at the time was close to 0%, so I created the municipality thing because it was better than nothing. But it's way better to use {{place}} than decentralised templates like {{place:Brazil/municipality}}. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 20:14, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

I’d like to say that this sort of situation is exactly where I felt that something like {{place}} would be useful: people adding placenames only need to worry about the correctness of the information they are adding, and let the data module worry about its categorisation.

I am the first to admit that it became a kitchen sink, though. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 20:02, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm hoping to get place name information from Wikidata in the future. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 20:28, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

United States of America categories

There are name that are just "United States" without "of America":

• Category:History of the United States
• Category:States of the United States
• Category:US State Capitals (not sure how you should rename this but the caps are off)
• Category:en:State Nicknames of the United States (same as above).

If you can move these and the subcategories, that would be great. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:04, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

• • Category:en:State Nicknames of the United States. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:04, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for finding these. The "state capitals" one has been stagnating at RFC/RFM since 2009, I see! I'm going to go with the suggestion made there of "State capitals of..." [the United States of America]. I wonder what motivated the weird capitalization on it and the nicknames category. It'd be nice if category-redirects would also take any pages put into them and put them into the "main" category, so we could use short forms like "US" when typing the names out in entries, but I guess that's just wishful thinking! - -sche (discuss) 04:23, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

No problem. It would be easy (for someone who makes bots) to make a bot to do this. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:07, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Also, Category:Georgia (State). In addition to the caps, "state" means both an independent state (like the republic) and a subdivision of the U.S. On en.wp, we use "(U.S. state)". —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:29, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Shorter category names are much easier to enter. That's my tuppence worth. DonnanZ (talk) 23:58, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

I agree with that. How about we create category-redirects at shorter names, maybe systematically replacing "[the] United States of America" with "US". Then we could empty out the redirects periodically by bot. I've created Category:en:Georgia (US) and Category:en:Cities in Georgia (US). By the way, Hotcat is a great help with adding categories without having to spell out their full names. - -sche (discuss) 02:19, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Someday we might decide to make the "US" short forms the main categories,but so far there has been disagreement in the various discussions at WT:RFM and elsewhere whenever this has come up, between those who want short names and those who want "professional" full names on the finished product. - -sche (discuss) 02:22, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

I have successfully edited Module:place/data to adapt to your moving Category:US State Capitals to pt:State capitals of the United States of America.--Jusjih (talk) 02:00, 31 March 2018 (UTC)

Macrolanguages

I think we need an actual idea of how to approach to handling macrolanguage codes that coexist with codes for the constituent lects. Guaraní has an open RFM on this issue at the moment: the macrolanguage code gn has been used almost entirely, if not entirely, for Paraguayan Guaraní, which has its own code, gug. The RFM drew overwhelming interest and support for a merger (well, overwhelming by our usual standards), but some confusion about which code/name to keep and which to merge. There are other cases, like Kurdish, that I want to bring up at RFM, but first I wanted to get your thoughts on how best to solve these: allow one dialect to take the macrolanguage status, or retire the macrolanguage code altogether? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:06, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

If we consider all the dialects of Guaraní to be one language, then it makes sense to merge all the codes into gn (obviously).

And if we consider all the dialects of a language to be distinct enough to keep separate, then IMO it's clearer to retire the macrolanguage code, even where one dialect is more prominent than the others ... unless there is a clear tendency for the unmarked language name to refer to that dialect even when other dialects are being talked about. (For example, we merged ekk into et rather than vice versa.)

There is only one case that comes to mind where we let a dialect have a macrolanguage code although the situation was arguably not that clear, namely mhr = chm, which is silly because we still call the language "Eastern Mari" ... that should probably be revisited. (Als into sq, although not as clear at ekk into et, is probably fine.)

In this case, "Guaraní" does seem to usually be identified with gug (almost certainly helped by the fact that gug has many orders of magnitude more speakers), so it would probably be fine to merge gug into gn even if other dialects are kept separate, especially because we probably want to keep the name as "Guaraní".

For Kurdish, it seems like it might make more sense to retire the macrolanguage code, since no one dialect seems to have an overwhelming case for taking it on (Kurmanji has the most speakers, but only 2-3 times as many as Sorani, and Sorani is standard in Iraq), although I only made a brief look into it and could be wrong.

Guillermo's comment "[nhd] is similar and very close to [gug] but it's slightly different and always confused with [gug]" actually supports merging those codes, IMO, although he's arguing the opposite. Wikipedia is ambivalent about what should be done with them, and I'm not sure yet either.

- -sche (discuss) 04:30, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Todo/Mismatched POS - Head - Verb, Adverb, Adjective

Hey. Could you make this page and similars again? Perhaps an updated list is already somewhere else. In that case, it could probably be deleted. --Celui qui crée ébauches de football anglais (talk) 11:07, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

 Done. I'll suggest in the Grease Pit that edit filters could perhaps be used to catch many cases in real-time. - -sche (discuss) 15:50, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

term → m

About diff. I've been converting {{term}} to {{m}} and adding the language code. Please don't do the opposite. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 20:42, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Sorry; that was because I copied the text from an older revision of the page. - -sche (discuss) 20:44, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

No problem. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 20:47, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

@Daniel Carrero, shouldn't we have a bot doing that? --Victar (talk) 00:24, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Only a human editor can figure out cases where no language code is specified with total accuracy. A bot could probably fix a lot of cases, though, like links to terms in scripts used by only one language, or links to long terms where only one language section exists on the target page, or where a language name immediately precedes the link (maybe a bot even already did some of those? I don't recall)... - -sche (discuss) 00:34, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

I seem to recall that at some point @CodeCat used her bot to fix instances of {{etyl|xx|yy}} {{term|word}}, at least. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 00:45, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

A bot can convert {{term}} to {{m}}, and save people that extra second x however many entries. We can also have a bot convert |lang= to |1=, no, for those instances? --Victar (talk) 00:48, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Oh, I'm pretty sure CodeCat also converted all cases of {{term|word|lang=xx}} into {{m|xx|word}}. Apparently, all current instances of {{term}} don't have a language code. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 00:53, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Ah, OK. --Victar (talk) 02:15, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

knobkierie#Etymology

Hi -sche. How can we templatise the last part of that etymology? The code for Khoisan languages has been commented out. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 14:46, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes, it's been commented out because it's not a genetic family. Wikipedia attributes it specifically to the Nama language, so I've switched it to that. - -sche (discuss) 22:33, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 20:58, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

siccity

The fundamental problem is that siccity has a single definition, but dryness has two definitions. So, if we direct the user to the dryness translations, how will they know which definitions, and thus which translation tables, apply to siccity? There is no means of informing the user in this regard. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:17, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

If siccity can be used in either sense (as seems to be the case), then there is no problem; all the senses and translations of dryness are relevant. If siccity were limited to one sense, then the definition could be made adequate by the addition of a {{gloss}}, the common means of informing users which senses of another word are meant. (Very rarely — so rarely that it seems to be nonstandard — I have seen people add separate sense lines all saying {{synonym of|foo}} with different glosses, and separate {{trans-see}}s, for every sense of foo that some other word bar is a synonym of, but that does seem to be nonstandard.) - -sche (discuss) 03:32, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Turkish / Kutayca (happiness)

Do you know what the "Kutayca" translation here is supposed to be? There's a Turkish entry but it doesn't mean happiness. DTLHS (talk) 00:37, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

No, I can find no evidence of a Kutayca language. It seems to be the name of an athlete(?). It was added in diff by an IP from Turkey; I would guess it's vandalism. - -sche (discuss) 00:48, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. DTLHS (talk) 00:54, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

He's at it again

Category:en:United States county index. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:55, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

The crime would appear to be not in having the category, but in populating it. Therefore it has a token population, so it doesn't register as an empty category, until attitudes change. DonnanZ (talk) 13:42, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

It was deleted and you recreated it. Why? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:22, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

The category still worked and was still very useful despite its deletion, until Koavf removed all the entries under the pretext "remove redlinks". Because of that I decided to reopen the category with a token number of entries, and Koavf has only himself to blame for that. Furthermore, due to continued interference by that user, no further county entries are planned at the moment. DonnanZ (talk) 09:00, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

We can't use deleted categories. If a category is deleted, then it is removed from the entries. No one can oblige you to do any work here, so if you want to not make entries, that's totally up to you but you also can't expect that anyone will accept your deliberately malformed edits as the only way you will add to the dictionary. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:43, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

There is no need for me to respond to that. I am waiting for a reply from -sche. DonnanZ (talk) 18:45, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

Cat

@-sche Have been perusing this etymology again; and would have to state that my thanks was for your edit as opposed to that of Huehnergard. Although I do not know him, his idea comes over as irrational: how far back does he think Proto-Germanic began; does he think that it is older than the origins of Proto-Celtic? You know the answer to these questions; but apart from in Latvian I know of no significant morphological divergent from the source lexeme for cat in any European language. What did they name the wild cats in Scotland? However, I will try to check that of Breton, whose natives fled there from Cornwall in the sixth century, before any Germanic influence had time to be absorbed. So far, all the Celtic forms are from the same pre-historic source, but we cannot be sure of that source: it was certainly older than Proto-Germanic! The Basque forms are probably borrowed, unless cats are and always were native there. My equally invalid assumption was that their ultimate root was the pre-historic *CAD (sharp), because of their claws and teeth. "Cad" was the pre-historic name for the River Plym, and it signified "sharp flowing" at that time! I shall try more research! Kind Regards. Andrew H. Gray 07:35, 15 July 2017 (UTC)Andrew

Checkuser

Do you want to be one? I reckon you're pretty well trusted in the community, besides being established. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:15, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

I appreciate the confidence in me that you express, but I don't want to be a CheckUser. I also don't know that I would meet the spirit of the policy: I am absent from the site for months at a time, during which time there would effectively be only one CheckUser. (Whereas, when I'm absent as an admin, there are always other admins around.)

Perhaps we should ask a global checkuser to look at en.Wikt's checkuser log and tell us how often we actually use that mop, to get a sense of how much we actually need a local checkuser.

- -sche (discuss) 06:55, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

I am strongly of the opinion that having a local checkuser is good. (I think having two is actually unnecessary, hence me not minding if one is absent now and again). I simply would not want to bother making a formal request to the stewards over a local issue that they would not immediately understand. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 07:53, 4 September 2017 (UTC)