User talk:Kenmayer

Please reverse your editions concerning Greek verbal stems

(Pinging @Erutuon for his reference) Hello there. I appreciate your enthusiasm for adding information about Ancient Greek, but some of your sources and theories are quite old and incorrect, and your additions, ill-formatted. Curtius is wildly out of date and his notion of a "T" aspect marker is merely the *-yeti and *-yéti along with reduplicated forms like τίκτω (tíktō) from *teḱ-. Many of these categories do not represent synchronically real formations but a merely diachronic artifacts and your category naming scheme leaves much to be desired. Furthermore, additions like this are incorrectly formatted. Please undo your additions and then make a proposal for a better system of labeling that is more in line with modern scholarship. Thank you. —*i̯óh₁n̥C^[5] 05:42, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your efforts on behalf of Wiktionary. I've done a lot of editing in Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, but I'm lost with a lot of the templates and practices in Wiktionary. I apologize for my enthusiasm. I came to Sihler late in this, and his explanations of the "T" aspect marker are convincing of course. Still, there does seem to be some real classification of Greek verbs by progressive aspect markers (or present tense markers, as most call them), as even Sihler (p. 515- 526) arranges Greek verbs by present markers. Should and could Wiktionary present this information in some logical way? Let me know how the categories should be called, and I'll go through the business of renaming them. It seems useful to me to continue to group the verbs with what I called "T" aspect markers in a category and have it a subcategory of the I/Y progressive aspect marker ("Labial roots adding a T as a reflex of a I progressive marker"), and there would be several subcategories of the various reflexes in different environments (dentals, nasals, liquids, etc.). Does that make sense?--Kenmayer (talk) 12:49, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

I appreciate your understanding. The question with these categories is what synchronic role they played in the language. I too enjoy adding categories, but the way we tend to do categorize them is with the {{affix}} ({{predix}}, {{suffix}}, {{infix}}) system. If we cannot use these templates, as in this case, it normally means that the categories in question were not analyzable/productive to speakers. Several of your categories are themselves mixes of other older effects which are do not belong together

• As mentioned before, the "T" category is merely a phonological effect of the suffixes *-yeti and *-yéti along with some reduplicated forms. If anything, these should be analyzed with these suffixes in Indo-European and not synchronically in Greek.
• The "E" marker (as you have presented it) is a mix of several unrelated phenomena: The standard *e-grade presents (both thematic and athematic), the *o-grade iterative/causatives (e.g. δοκέω (dokéō)), and denominatives (*-éh₁yeti, see -έω (-éō)).
• The "Ν Nu" and "2Ν double Nu" categories (whose names are difficult to understand without knowing already what they mean) represent the same category with one merely containing a bit of morphological renewal because Greek stopped allowing the root ablaut.
• As a side note, reduplication is indeed a hallmark of the perfect system, but Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit all have reduplicated presents and aorists, showing that they were productive categories in Indo-European. Notice also that almost all your examples given here are doubly marked for the present system (with *-sḱéti or *-yeti), indicating that the Greeks did not consider reduplication a strong marker of a present stem any more.

This information is fine to have in an appendix, but you are making strong claims about the active morphology of Ancient Greek which are difficult to support or based on incorrect groupings of apparent formations. Ancient Greek is full of productive verbal morphology, but this categorization does not fall into that system. Does this make sense? —*i̯óh₁n̥C^[5] 22:07, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for your time with this and with Wiktionary in general. Definitely all of these categories need to be renamed, removed, or reclassified. And of course, we can take my additions out of the Etymology section. I'm not sure that creating a category or group of categories in Wiktionary makes any claim about the productive verbal morphology or whether speakers would have been capable of analyzing/producing words along the category. If so, should we get rid of these random categories?

• Category:Latin_terms_with_IPA_pronunciation
• Category:Latin terms with Ecclesiastical IPA pronunciation
• Category:Latin_terms_with_audio_links
• Category:Latin terms derived from Proto-Indo-European
• Category:Terms derived from Proto-Indo-European
• Category:Disputed Interlingua words of Stanley A. Mulaik
• Category:Occitan terms with IPA pronunciation
• Category:la:Primates
• Category:la:Arthropods
• Category:Requests for quotation/Silius Italicus
• Category:Yiddish terms derived from Middle High German
• Category:Terms with unknown etymologies by language
• Category:Saterland Frisian entry maintenance

It seems like categories serve Wiktionary users and creators in a lot of interesting ways that are hard to reduce to one formula. I think Wiktionary's audience comes here for more than just the cutting-edge linguistics, but for a wide variety of reasons. Do we not think that students of Greek could benefit from an attempt to group Ancient Greek verbs by progressive/present markers? --Kenmayer (talk) 22:30, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

To clarify, I was only talking about morphological categories because you are creating morphological categories. Of course we have categories for many things, though notice that the majority of the categories you've added are produced by templates, with the obvious exceptions of Category:Disputed Interlingua words of Stanley A. Mulaik, Category:la:Primates, and Category:la:Arthropods (though these latter two categories may be added by {{C}}). As for naming conventions, normally categories have names which:

• Use clear linguistic terminology, not abbreviations
• Use native scripts (e.g. -νυ-, -τ-) or reconstructions (-*ye-)

Also, I'd make note of the CAT:Ancient Greek reference templates. If you have any frequently useful references, you should make new templates based off of these.

For now, just come up with new names of the categories and we'll discuss them. Also, if you want me to respond more quickly, you should use the {{ping}} and {{reply}} templates (and read this). —*i̯óh₁n̥C^[5] 01:15, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

Note: related discussion also found at Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2018/September § How to unpack the etymology of θαυμάζω?. I gave an opinion on the yod marker, which may express a similar point to @JohnC5's about "active morphology".

For my part, I agree that information on verb stem formation is useful to learners, or at least it was to me when my beloved Hansen and Quinn described, for instance, the development of the present stem of πάσχω (páskhō), and think it should be included somehow, but am not sure how it should be included. In particular, we like to be specific about when, in what period of the language or of an ancestor language, the affix was added, which sometimes also has bearing on what form the affix had when it was added (for instance, whether it was a yod or one of the reflexes of the yod), and that takes a bit of work. Smyth's grammar, and probably the older sources you have read, doesn't attempt to get so specific. (He didn't know about Mycenaean or Proto-Hellenic.)

I had considered making an appendix on this, but found the volume of the task overwhelming. I'm not bothered by the categories that Kenmayer has added, because it should be fairly easy to change them once we arrive at a system. Using a page as an organizing tool before adding any more categories is a good idea. It's easier to edit a single page than to do all this work in many different entries. It could become an appendix later on. — Eru·tuon 05:35, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

@Erutuon: I took Greek from Hardy Hansen this summer! —*i̯óh₁n̥C^[5] 05:38, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

@Erutuon: It's just that sort of "ah-ha" moment about progressive markers and the present system that I'd like Wiktionary to inspire. Maybe my text or instructors talked about them when I first learned Greek, but I didn't pay attention or let it sink in until I helped teach the linguistics-based intensive Ancient Greek course in Austin 10 years later. Of course I saw patterns in λαμβάνω, λανθάνω, μανθάνω,τυγχάνω, λαγχάνω, etc., but it really was eye-opening to get a logical explanation. So, *i̯óh₁n̥C, where do you envision this single page? Do you mean something on Wikipedia, like this? w:en:Ancient Greek present progressive markers?

I was actually the one suggesting making a page. I guess it would look something like that, but it would have to be on Wiktionary so that we can add notes on category-related issues (and it is nice to be able to see whether the entry exists). We can include as many examples as possible so that it's easier to determine what sort of category structure would make sense.

I would avoid the term "progressive", because the Ancient Greek imperfect and present have a wider meaning than just progressive: they sometimes express habituality or are applied to stative verbs, unlike the English progressive. I usually just say "present stem". — Eru·tuon 22:09, 30 September 2018 (UTC)