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Wiktionary:Information desk/Archive 2014/January-June

= January 2014 =

Orange links
I seem to recall that we used to have the ability to turn language-specific links which existed, but didn't have the target language, orange. We still seem to have the function at WT:PREFS, but it's greyed out. Can anyone tell me if this feature still exists somewhere, and if not why it was killed? Many thanks. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 22:51, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
 * It does exist. Add importScript('User:Yair rand/orangelinks2.js'); to your vector.js or whatever you use. --Vahag (talk) 23:36, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I think this is very useful. --WikiTiki89 23:38, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks Vahagn. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 23:48, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, it is very useful. Helps me catch mistakes all the time. --Vahag (talk) 23:56, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Name of the two past tenses in Romance languages
I noticed that names them "preterite imperfect" and "preterite indefinite". But for Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan we use the terms "imperfect" and "preterite", and the latter is called "past historic" in French and Italian. This is a bit strange and could be confusing, especially the Asturian template which uses the word "preterite" with a different meaning from its close neighbours. What are the most common names for these tenses in English? 00:41, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Adding Klamath words—copyright-related tips?
I would like to add words for the Klamath language. My source would almost exclusively be Klamath Dictionary by M. A. R. Barker, which is copyrighted 1963 by the Regents of the University of California.

What limits should I keep in mind when using copyrighted sources like this? Is it fine to just add the words and give their English translations? How about to copy the usage examples given by the source dictionary? When should I, and when needn't I, cite the source? — Äþelwulf (talk) 19:45, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

 * I was bold and added a handful of words, like and . Is it all on the up-and-up? — Äþelwulf (talk) 14:49, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * It looks fine to me. In fact, there's no record at the U.S. Copyright Office website that the copyright on this book was renewed, in which case it's in the public domain in the U.S. now anyway. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:12, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

 * Cool! I can't find the corresponding Klamath Grammar or Klamath Texts (by the same author) in that database either. I called the University of California Press to confirm the status of all three books. They said Dictionary and Texts are in the public domain, because both were published in 1963 and the copyrights were not renewed. Yippee!

 * However, because Grammar was published in 1964, they told me it was still copyrighted. My hunch is that they believe the copyright was automatically renewed by the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992. Is it necessarily true that Grammar is still copyrighted, despite not appearing to be in that database? — Äþelwulf (talk) 22:43, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
 * It sure looks that way. According to "Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States", works published from 1964 to 1977 with a copyright notice are under copyright until 95 years after their publication date. So while Dictionary and Texts are public domain, Grammar won't be until January 1, 2060. Them's the breaks! —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 08:47, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Should I change my name?
I’m not really interested in liggies any more. I mean, they’re fancy and all, but I would rather focus on broader topics. I assume people have to copy and paste my name (or, Hell forbid, use alt codes) every time they need to talk about me, but it’s probably more common to cheat and write AE(&OE) or whatever. I’m asking because I don’t feel like I am invested enough in this project to warrant another name change, but you lot might disagree with that. So, if you want me to change my name, now is the time. But if you keep referring to me by obsolete usernames, I’m gonna be pissed off. (Hey, I’m just saying.) --Æ&Œ (talk) 18:49, 14 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Changing your name is not necessary for changing your focus. As for typing your name, I generally copy and paste all names anyway just to avoid misspellings, so yours isn't any different. --WikiTiki89 19:04, 14 January 2014 (UTC)
 * What's the matter with AE as a nickname? DCDuring TALK 20:04, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

 * I get the feeling that it’s a nickname chosen purely for convenience rather than taste. --Æ&Œ (talk) 20:19, 14 January 2014 (UTC)
 * What makes you hate your old usernames, Pilcrow? I'm just wondering. -- Liliana • 20:30, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

 * ‘Pilcrow’ is stained with bad experiences from my time as a 17‐year‐old. It was an awful, embarrassing time in my life, when I was constantly depressed, needlessly dramatic, unfunny, and needlessly serious. --Æ&Œ (talk) 20:50, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

 * You're Pilcrow?! I had no idea. Ƿidsiþ 20:58, 14 January 2014 (UTC)
 * @Æ&Œ: Nicknames ARE often chosen for the convenience of the user and used without great regard for the nominee's feelings or preferences. Orthography is the least respected part of a name or nickname. Unpronounceable names don't even have spelling pronunciation as a guide.
 * I think one could have an arbitrary, difficult name and accept whatever people make of it or have a simple name and expect people to use it. It seems unreasonable to have an arbitrary, difficult name and demand that people jump through the hoops that you have set for them. DCDuring TALK 21:12, 14 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Sure, you can change your name. Just don't do it as often as Wonderfool, and you should be fine! --Back on the list (talk) 13:53, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

recommendation needs to be changed
Entry layout explained says:
 * When there is no single word equivalent in the target language, use with embedded wikilinks for the individual words.

But redirects to, which advises
 * ,, and are legacy templates that now redirect to . They should not be used, and will most likely eventually be removed.

Plainly ELE should be changed, but as a Wiktionary (though not Wikipedia) newbie I'm not the one to do it.--Thnidu (talk) 07:19, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

How are Chinese traditional and simplified characters encoded?
Are they encoded differently, with different Unicode code points, or is the difference decided some other way? 02:51, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
 * They have different Unicode points. As far as I know, most simplified characters are also traditional characters and in the simplification process the more complicated characters were merged with the less complicated characters with the same pronunciation. But since I know very little about Chinese, you should probably wait for someone else to answer. --WikiTiki89 02:57, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I mainly wanted to know whether our use of script codes is key in keeping them apart. But it seems that it isn't, so I wonder if we can get rid of Hans and Hant and use only Hani. It probably would simplify things ) without really affecting anything. From your answer, I do understand that we can't use script detection by code point to keep them apart, if we wanted to.  03:06, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

 * Identical Japanese, Chinese simplified and traditional characters (also Korean hanja and Vietnamese Hán tự) may look differently because of the fonts used but you can't really use script detection for those characters. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 03:23, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

 * Unicode actually has a variation selector mechanism for tagging which variant of a CJK glyph you prefer to display. Generally it's only for very minor variations: where if the wrong form is used the reader probably wouldn't even notice. I don't know how widely used it is, or how it relates to simplified characters. Pengo (talk) 07:24, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Template:plural of
Is there any way to change/specify/modify where the internal link generated by the template points to, other than the default? Specifically, would there be any way to make the link "no" on the page noes point to no, rather than no? It Is Me Here  t / c 23:00, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't think that would be a good idea. What if someone else adds another noun section, or a translingual section, or names them differently? And how would you link to the noun section of another language when there's already an English noun? It creates more problems than it solves, and I'm not sure what the benefit of linking to the noun section would be anyway; linking to the English section should be good enough? 23:36, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
 * That problem could be avoided with or similar. --WikiTiki89 23:39, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
 * That too. So there isn't even a need to link to the noun section, when you can link to the exact sense you want. 00:01, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, but the question was "how?", and you still haven't answered that. --WikiTiki89 00:23, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
 * has an  parameter that you can use to link to the specific sense.  00:26, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
 * CodeCat: no already has more than one heading called "Noun" in read mode, but the URLs are things like no, so I don't think that's a problem. The point of it is that "noes" is the plural specifically of the noun ("a no" or what have you), rather than being the plural of the particle/whatever. It Is Me Here  t / c 00:34, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
 * If you actually want to make it clear to the user that it's only the plural of that specific sense, you shouldn't be using section links to do that. You should add a gloss to the definition, like . Section links don't convey information; you can hardly expect users to look at the URL to see what you mean. 00:38, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
 * English doesn't have plurals of anything other than nouns anyway (not counting pronouns). --WikiTiki89 00:41, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

English words
How can I get the list of all English words this Wiktionary has? Without derived/conjugated forms, without translations to other languages... I cannot find a category (or category tree) which answers the question. For example, ru:Категория:Английский язык now contains all presented English words. Infovarius (talk) 11:11, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
 * At the moment you can't. But I agree that it would be a good idea to be able to. --WikiTiki89 15:54, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Maybe something like Category:English lemmas. Or we could use Category:English parts of speech for that purpose, but we should probably rename it anyway. 16:31, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

 * de.Wikt and fr.Wikt have de:Kategorie:Englisch and fr:Catégorie:anglais containing all English words, which I think is useful. (Technically adept users can search the database for all instances of ==English== to obtain the same list, but less adept users can't.) I suppose a category for lemmata only would also be useful, but it would be inherently greyer. We would have to decide whether alternative forms were lemmata or not, and whether alternative spellings were, and alternative capitalizations, etc (and separate from our decisions would be the expectations of people who might think they could use the count of how many pages were in the category as a count of how many English lemmata we defined). But that isn't a reason not to have such a category. - -sche (discuss) 20:04, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
 * We would probably want to make a clearer separation between lemmas and inflections in that case, though. Maybe bring the "form" categories outside the "part of speech" tree altogether, and into its own tree. 18:38, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
 * A parallel "forms of" PoS category structure, as CodeCat suggests seems best. I don't see why we would want a category for the single purpose of calculating a number in real time that we use rarely. Is there a way that we could calculate the sum of language-PoS category totals periodically, even daily? I understand the function that does this is "expensive". The totals could be on some readily available page for all languages or the top 100 or.... Can we do chron jobs for such things? DCDuring TALK 15:35, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for mentioning Category:English parts of speech. So I suppose that the number (see source) provides first approximation to the answer.  why we would want a category for the single purpose of calculating a number in real time? Because it is the most simple and important statistics to external person about Wiktionary content. --Infovarius (talk) 14:14, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * There are other reasons why such a category might be useful in real time. But I dispute that your number is good count of what we might really want. Some possibilities for "what we want" are:
 * A number calculated on the same basis as the total in selected other dictionaries, especially the OED, OED online, MW 3rd, MW 2nd, MW Online, Century 1912.
 * The number of lemmas
 * The number of inflection lines
 * The number of unduplicated English words that are either inflection lines or redlinked English terms.
 * Assuming you are trying to count lemmas, the number you have calculated would undercount insofar as it would count a page with multiple PoSes with different "etymologies" (ie, homonyms) only once. It would overcount to the extent that it includes inflected forms as well as lemma forms.
 * At a more basic level, your count includes members of Category:English intensifiers and Category:English interrogatives, which are not PoS classes, misspells "postpositions", and excludes entries in Category:English proverbs and Category:English phrases. If it had included all member of Category:English phrases it would have included a good number of phrases of the kind not found in dictionaries, but rather found in phrasebooks. Lastly, taxonomic names are not included in any English PoS, but are arguably used in English. They are a large subset of Category:Translingual proper nouns.
 * Given the lack of clarity as to the total desired and the inaccuracies mentioned, producing an number in real time is just silly. Also, if one wants to compare us with other dictionaries, one would need some estimate of the number of entries in those other dictionaries. DCDuring TALK 17:34, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Just to note, this discussion has been continued at Beer parlour/2014/January. 17:38, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

How to enter phrases with personal pronouns or possessives?
In English, we use "one" for these in the lemma form. But not all languages have such a word. I'm struggling to find out where to put the translation of in one's opinion into Dutch. There's no equivalent for "one's". 13:52, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
 * What does Dutch use if it needs a possessive that refers back to men? German uses sein to refer back to man; does Dutch not use zijn that way? Alternatively, Irish uses the second person singular for it; could Dutch do that? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 14:01, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
 * It could, but I think most people nowadays feel to be too strongly masculine, so they would probably use  or similar. Occasionally, people use a dative possessive instead to work around it, but that doesn't work in this case.  14:04, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
 * What do other dictionaries do? --WikiTiki89 16:19, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't really know. I suppose we could use as a placeholder, but every entry that does that would need a usage note. Maybe a templatised one.  00:41, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

 * In Chinese we tend to put ellipsis (...). ---> Tooironic (talk) 21:24, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

What accent do Alex Kingston and Gwendoline Christie have?
What is the accent that Alex Kingston (who plays River Song in Doctor Who) and Gwendoline Christie (who plays Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones) have? Youtube has plenty of videos of them speaking if you haven't heard them before; they use the same accent in-character as out-of-character. Based only on the fact that they're from Surrey and Sussex, respectively, I guessed it might be Estuary English, but then I listened to Youtube videos of people speaking Estuary English and I'm not sure if it's the best match. - -sche (discuss) 21:52, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Category for tagging bad language names in translations
I've been running into "Translations to be checked" categories in Special:WantedCategories that refer to languages for which we have no language code. This is because User:Kephir's xte app wraps language names it doesn't find in our modules with the template.

This seems like a really bad idea, since non-existent categories don't show up anywhere except for Special:WantedCategories and as a redlink at the bottom of the tagged entry, so it's entirely possible for these to go unnoticed.

That raises the question, though: what categor[y/ies] should be added to these entries? Some may be typos, variants, or bad guesses, but others are lects that we don't treat as separate languages, or have been subdivided into multiple recognized languages. Do we have a cleanup category for unrecognized lect names? Chuck Entz (talk) 22:38, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
 * There is Category:Language code is name/ttbc/unrecognised. 22:45, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I obviously wasn't paying attention. It would seem that ttbc is picking up on these and adding them to a cleanup category. It still seems wrong to be adding them to a non-existent "Translations to be checked" category. Either xte should be adding a cleanup category directly and not using ttbc (what I would prefer), or ttbc should avoid adding the "Translations to be checked" category if it's already adding a hidden cleanup category that covers this class of errors. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:03, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Language code for Old Catalan
Should this have a code? Or should it be grouped under Old Occitan/Provençal? 03:22, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
 * says, "The Catalan language diverged from Old Occitan between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries", sourced to "Riquer, Martí de, Història de la Literatura Catalana, vol. 1. Barcelona: Edicions Ariel, 1964", so I'd say any Catalan terms from earlier than that period could be considered Old Occitan. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 07:57, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
 * The article mentions the vowel /y/, which doesn't exist in Catalan and has remained as /u/. It also says: "[o] apparently raised to [u] during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but the spelling was unaffected, hence flor /fluɾ/ "flower"." This also didn't affect Catalan, which still has /o/ there (many Catalan dialects raise unstressed /o/ to /u/, but not all of them do). So it seems that the phonological divergence must have happened before then, when /u/ and /o/ still had their Vulgar Latin pronunciations. 17:26, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * But since we deal in written language, the issue for us is more whether there were significant differences in the written dialects before the 14th century or so. If not, I'd use the Old Occitan label and tag words with as necessary. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:58, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Two notable early changes are Occitan -tz versus Catalan -u in verb endings, and Catalan ll- versus Occitan l-. I don't know if those changes are noted in texts, but they could help to distinguish the two. 18:44, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Also, another change I noticed is in . Catalan has here, where -sce- developed into -eix- regularly. So the form in that entry could never be the ancestor of the Catalan form. Our entry  also has .  18:51, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * And Catalan has unstressed -as > -es, which is already written that way in the 11th century Blanquerna. Occitan doesn't have this change and kept a back vowel instead. 18:53, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * But isn't it possible that the "x" developed due to the preceding "i"? How do we know it came directly from "sc"? Or that conoiser was actually pronounced with a /ʃ/? --WikiTiki89 18:55, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Combining overline vs macron

 * See also Information_desk.

Currently, a number of entries link to appendices with names including combining overlines, e.g. makë links to. Should the combining overline be a macron instead ? - -sche (discuss) 06:20, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Are they all Proto-Albanian? --WikiTiki89 06:22, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Does it matter? I say yes, they should be macrons. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 08:12, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * It might have mattered. Maybe some languages distinguish between longer and shorter lines over a letter. --WikiTiki89 17:27, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

 * Yes, macrons are for marking letters in transcriptions or transliteration. The overline is for a continuous line in math (e.g., A̅B̅, 0.3̅3̅ – may not display correctly in your font), and sometimes for syntactic structure notation. —Michael Z. 2014-01-27 17:16 z

 * nani links to a Proto-Indo-European appendix *(h1)no̅̆- with overline and breve. - -sche (discuss) 17:44, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

 * Macron + breve works fine in my browser, looks better in the edit field: ō̆. —Michael Z. 2014-01-27 17:47 z

 * But is it logically coherent to use both in the name of a PIE root? Doesn't macron indicate length and breve brevity? na also links to a PIE root spelt using both characters, as does rrapë. - -sche (discuss) 17:57, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Using both means both the long and short versions are attested, or it isn't clear whether the vowel was long or short. *nō̆- is basically shorthand for *no-/nō-. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:31, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Can't we just not use any diacritic in that case? --WikiTiki89 20:02, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * No, a vowel letter with no diacritic over it is generally interpreted as short. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:28, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Searching for / Identifying Cross-Language Homophones
Is there a way to search for entries in the English Wikitionary based on whether the word has a homonym in a particular other language?

In particular, I'm looking for English words that are Hebrew homophones. Example: "Or" in English has the same pronunciation as "light" in Hebrew (אור)

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

94.230.87.52 11:48, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

 * There’s no way to undertake such a search. With good reason, we forbid the listing of terms in different languages as homophones. — Ungoliant (falai) 21:53, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

 * Also note that it rarely happens that the words are 100% homophonous. in Israeli Hebrew is pronounced [ɔʁ], while  in American English is pronounced [ɔɹ] or even [ɚ] when unstressed. So defining what constitutes cross-language homophony would be a challenge. --WikiTiki89 21:59, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Is this sentence correct?
"She has a khack for overstatement."
 * It is correct once knack is substituted for *khack. DCDuring TALK 13:25, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

= February 2014 =

translation from english to sanskrit
Hi I would be much grateful if you could translate I walk alone in sanskrit for me ,thanks in advance

 * अहम् एकाकी अटामि (aham ekākī aṭāmi) (if "I" is a man).
 * अहम् एकाकिनी अटामि (aham ekākinī aṭāmi) (if "I" is a woman). —Stephen (Talk) 09:03, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

You've come to the wrong place. This forum is for questions about using and editing Wiktionary. Try a web search for "translate English to Sanskrit". --Thnidu (talk) 01:31, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I think he confused this page with Translation requests. --WikiTiki89 01:34, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

concordances - categorization newbie question.
Is it possible to create a list concordance: Shakespeare, and gradually add words to it that are found in his work? If so, how? Joycemij (talk) 17:05, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

 * I should think you could create Appendix:Shakespeare (following the format that you will see in Appendix:A Clockwork Orange). —Stephen (Talk) 19:23, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Is "sum of parts" a valid reason for deletion?
I see tons of deletion nominations stating "Sum of parts" or "SOP", but that really isn't mentioned as a reason for deletion in either WT:CFI or WT:DELETE. Is there some other deletion policy page I missed? --Brainy J (talk) 15:14, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
 * We use SoP for "non-idiomatic" or "transparent". See WT:CFI. DCDuring TALK 15:23, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
 * See also [[WT:GL]]. —msh210℠ (talk) 05:34, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Egyptomania
Stupid question, but how do I format this etymology? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 05:00, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I guess we're lacking . --WikiTiki89 05:05, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I just created a preliminary version that would work for most cases including this one. --WikiTiki89 05:16, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

 * It doesn't work right. It adds the entry to Category:English words interfixed with -o- (which IMO should not exist) and does not add the entry to Category:English words suffixed with -mania (which IMO it should). —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 05:50, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I think that Category:English words interfixed with -o- should exist, because -o- is defined as an interfix. As for -mania, there is no way that a single template could predict what to categorize, unless of course we made a template specifically for the "-o- -mania" combination, which we could very well do. --WikiTiki89 05:55, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Just wanted to make sure I didn't screw up
I wanted to verify that my first edit was fine: diff. Since the quotation was clunky, I wanted to add it as a citation instead, but after I worked my way through it, I saw that it said "English citation" in the preview. Was adding it to the main entry the correct decision?--Gormadoc (talk) 05:28, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Is it a usage example, or a quotation? --WikiTiki89 05:31, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

script (February 2014)
The Latin script is superior to the Arabic script because it does not need diacretics. Am i correct? Pass a Method (talk) 15:17, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * The majority of Latin script languages use mandatory diacritics (French, Spanish, German, just to name a few). So I would say those languages need diacritics. Arabic, on the other hand, has optional diacritics and therefor does not need them. So no, you are not correct. --WikiTiki89 15:22, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Also, the absence (or presence) of diacritics doesn't make one script "superior to" another. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:34, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

 * I can read both Latin and Arabic although is speak very little Arabic. However i can pronounce:

However i'm unable to pronounce
 * "eu estou indo para a escola, porque eu quero aprender coisas" - a language i dont speak
 * "وانا ذاهب الى المدرسة لأنني أريد أن تعلم الاشياء" - a language i speak little, even though i understand the Arabic alphabet. Pass a Method (talk) 15:36, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Now go and try to pronounce Polish or Czech without diacritics. You'd have a really hard time even if you knew the phonology. That's why these languages make diacritics mandatory. Arabic doesn't do so, because once you know enough Arabic, you start being able to correctly guess how to pronounce a word you've never seen before. --WikiTiki89 15:48, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

I think alphabets are inherently superior to abjads. I hope Persian switches to a normal alphabet like Turkish did. --Vahag (talk) 19:43, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Good luck with that, Vahag :) Native Arabs, Persians, Hebrew speakers, etc. don't have any problem with abjads, they're even easier for writing, as they require less letters and are generally very phonetical, otherwise (considering missing short vowel, gemination symbols, etc.). Arabs are also unconcerned about short vowels, because words/forms have If I were a native speaker of an abjad language with authority, I would never change it to Roman but would probably introduce additional letters for foreign sounds (like p, v, g, č, ž, which are missing in classical Arabic) and increase the usage of diacritics and resources in fully vocalised texts. At some stage, I thought Chinese, Japanese must switch to Roman but once you know it on some level, you realise that's actually a bad idea, even if many people think that Han characters are extremely difficult and Japanese has "the most ridiculous writing system" (the level unpredictability of kanji readings is quite high). --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 23:05, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I completely agree with Anatoli here. --WikiTiki89 00:42, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I may agree in case of Semitic languages but not in case of Persian. That language has always had the bad fortune of being written in foreign non-alphabetic scripts, because of which to this date we argue whether something like is wāzār or wāčār, or  is gōhr, gōhar or something else. I hope a revolution happens there, they switch back to Zoroastrianism and adopt the Avestan alphabet :) --Vahag (talk) 05:39, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I too think that abjads are more suitable to some languages than others. The Hebrew script is great for Hebrew and Aramaic, but it's really cumbersome for Yiddish (partly because Yiddish tries to make an alphabet out of it); Yiddish (especially Standard Yiddish and the Litvish dialect) is IMHO much better suited to Cyrillic, but for political reasons it's unlikely to ever be changed. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 09:03, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * There are some things missing in Cyrillic for Yiddish, such as a representation of /h/, and there are some other complications, such the representation of /j/. Essentially I think that the optimal orthography for Yiddish would have been one similar to German (with a few changes). But the Hebrew orthography is not as bad as you make it out to be, and is certainly easier to read phonetically than the Hebrew orthography for Ladino. But I agree with Vahag that Persia should go back to Zoroastrianism and readopt the Avestan alphabet. --WikiTiki89 17:11, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * There are plenty of non-Slavic languages that use Cyrillic һ for /h/, and й for /j/ is unproblematic once you get over the Slavic prejudice against using it word-initially. Hebrew letters are just so big and blocky that words get really long and "heavy-looking" once you start using full-fledged letters like אַ, אָ, and ע for extremely common vowel sounds, not to mention the really clunky ײַ and the need to put a silent א at the start of vowel-initial words. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:38, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but German is pretty clunky for something that could have been spelled шах, that doesn't mean that German would be better off switching to Cyrillic. Russians often make fun of how Germans spell  (a two-letter word) as  (an eight-letter word). --WikiTiki89 19:31, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I make fun of the French for taking 8 letters to spell three sounds: = . —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 21:04, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

"archaic" qualifier
Hallo,

This is about the translation of last year into Hebrew.

The current translation has the qualifier "archaic". This is not quite correct. This word is not used in spontaneous informal speech today, but it's used quite frequently in documents and in news, both written and spoken.

The qualifier should probably be changed, but I'm not sure to what exactly. Is there a list of qualifiers somewhere?

Thanks. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 19:54, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * sounds like the right one. --WikiTiki89 20:01, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks, sounds appropriate.
 * But is there some kind of a list where I can find a reference of suggested qualifiers to use? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 20:15, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * blindly accepts anything, even gibberish, as a qualifier, but the standardized qualifiers are listed in the guts of the module that handles them, Module:labels/data. That isn't a very reader-friendly / übersichtlich list, though. Perhaps someone can use it to generate a reader-friendly, WT:LOF-style list, or perhaps someone already has. - -sche (discuss) 20:21, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I suppose one could sift through WT:GLOSS for appropriate terms, but there should be a separate page for contexts and other labels, if there isn't one already. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:57, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * It won't be easy to generate a useful list with what is in the data module right now. A module wouldn't be able to tell the difference between different types of label, so the best it could do is list them all together alphabetically. But that's a very long and dense list. 22:12, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * What we could do is a dump analysis of all uses of (and friends) and  and make a list of the most commonly used ones sorted by frequency. --WikiTiki89 22:37, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * This would be quite useful, particularly if the list contained even contexts that weren't recognised by the module yet. - -sche (discuss) 20:10, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Link color in inflection/declension templates
I noticed that some inflection templates, like those for Greek or Turkish, allow for links to pages that don't exist, with black instead of red links. Is there a specific way to accomplish this?, because I'm not sure from looking through their code what part is responsible. Thanks in advance for any advice. -68.98.97.239 01:24, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Adding a table to class="inflection-table" is usually what does this. For example:

 * --WikiTiki89 01:49, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
 * And, in case you were wondering, the inflection-table is defined in MediaWiki:Common.css as:  --WikiTiki89 01:52, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

היסטוריה
Are there any synonyms of this? --Æ&Œ (talk) 21:37, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
 * There's the archaic (which is also the Hebrew title of the Book of Chronicles). Found more usually in the construct form . --WikiTiki89 00:51, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * In addition to divréi-hayamím . . . it's sometimes used (like English ) to mean basically just "past", and in that sense it has the synonym . And Even-Shoshan (see ) says that it's used colloquially to mean "story", in which sense it has synonyms such as . —Ruakh TALK 07:39, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Pinyin third tone
If I encounter a Pinyin transliteration where the third tone is marked with a breve instead of a caron (e.g. 米国), should I change it to a caron instead? WarlordFrederick (talk) 03:00, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

 * Yes, caron. —Stephen (Talk) 03:43, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Template won't transclude cat
I tried googling, didn't come up with anything.

It's a pretty basic template and at the end there's an #if: – if param then no cat if not then cat but it doesn't work (and it's not caching – I did a m edit to a page where it should show up).

Also a minor question there is a lone closing  tag up where the navframe stuff is, is it there for a reason? (I think it was like that in the original). Thanks! Neitrāls vārds (talk) 07:12, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Try it now. — Ungoliant (falai) 13:09, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Neitrāls vārds (talk) 03:58, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Possible error in Italian conjugation tables
The 3rd person imperative for verbs ending in -ERE (e.g. vivere, chiedere, prendere) is listed on Wiktionary as ending in -I (i.e. vivi, chiedi, prendi). However all other sources I checked list the imperative as ending in -A (i.e. viva, chieda, prenda).

Could anyone verify/rectify this? (I'm new here and I don't know how to edit conjugation tables.)
 * Fixed. (thanks for spotting it) SemperBlotto (talk) 12:27, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Need help finding a Persian poem n the original Farsi
I would like to find this poem in its original Farsi.

I Have Learned So Much

I Have Learned So much from God That I can no longer Call Myself

A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of Itself With me

That I can no longer call myself A man, a woman, an angel, Or even a pure Soul.

Love has Befriended Hafiz so completely It has turned to ash And freed Me

Of every concept and image my mind has ever known.

From: 'The Gift' Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

 * It may be difficult to find the original Persian poem. Daniel Ladinsky has been accused of making up poems. "The Gift" is said to be nothing but a parody of Hafiz's poetic style. —Stephen (Talk) 07:22, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

ISO Language Code used for Slovincian?
I would like to add some entries for Slovincian. Is there a code for this language (considered a dialect of Kashubian by some)? I tried the ISO code provided in Wikipedia (and variants) but it only resulted in module errors.Vedac13 (talk) 12:27, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

 * Use zlw-slv. —Stephen (Talk) 12:37, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
 * There's a full list of languages and their codes at WT:LL. You can search through it to see if what you need is there. 13:46, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
 * There's no code for Slovio. Should we have one? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 13:37, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

adjectival form of hunger
What is the term for ‘of or pertaining to hunger?’ --Æ&Œ (talk) 22:44, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

 * Closest I can think of is orectic (relating to desire or appetite, orexis; compare anorexia etc.). We seem to define this in terms of psychological longing but that might be over-specific. Equinox ◑ 22:50, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

 * "hunger-related". I recommend not using obscure words that no one would understand. --WikiTiki89 22:52, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

 * Famelic. — Ungoliant (falai) 23:00, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Isn't this what attributive use of the noun is for? DCDuring TALK 01:52, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

hypernyms
I am guessing that the recommended practice for including hyperonyms is to list the immediate ones, never the distant ones. So for the word pizza, this is recommended:

Hypernyms

 * food

But this is not (even though it’s technically true):

Hypernyms

 * food
 * material
 * substance
 * thing

--Æ&Œ (talk) 02:12, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

 * I would agree, but in my opinion hypernyms are not so useful anyway. --WikiTiki89 02:17, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I kind of agree. In many cases, the hypernym is used as part of the definition anyway, isn't it? 02:20, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

 * Are they useless for foreign languages? --Æ&Œ (talk) 02:33, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * In my opinion, yes. But don't forget, I'm not a supreme authority on hyperyms or anything. --WikiTiki89 02:36, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

 * I think they are useful in some areas of research. records that kind of thing. Equinox ◑ 17:54, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

 * It’s a big topic in translation method and technology, since some languages, especially English, have extremely well developed systems of hypernyms and hyponyms, while the majority of languages are somewhat weaker in the area of hypernyms, and some languages have very few hypernyms at all. It’s always a problem when translating between English and a lot of other languages, such as Russian, because English relies heavily on its hypernyms, while Russian usually needs hyponyms. It means that the translator must add meaning that is not there, or lose meaning that exists in the original text, in order to make a good translation. American Indian languages are well known for having very few hypernyms. Sometimes all a translator can do when translating into Native American languages is say that these things (a given hypernym) are similar to this specific thing (a hyponym). —Stephen (Talk) 20:53, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * That's a good bit of insight, but I'm not sure how much listing hypernyms within a language will help with that. Take for example English and Russian  and : the entry for  can only list English hyponyms, of which there aren't any; while the entries for  and  can only list Russian hypernyms, of which there aren't any. But this case does happen to be naturally covered by definitions and translation tables:  and  are defined using, while  lists  and  in its translation table. --WikiTiki89 06:00, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

 * I don’t know of anyone who uses lists of hypernyms. Maybe teachers. Translators have to pull these things out of their heads. A translator often has to look for a definition, but the definition is only a hint. He decides on the right words to make the translation by searching through his learned vocabulary. —Stephen (Talk) 11:52, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * You are correct. But don't forget that this dictionary is not only for translations. It is also important whether lists of hypernyms/hyponyms are useful within a language (and I think that they are not very useful even within a language). --WikiTiki89 19:53, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

 * The recommended practice is to list immediate hypernyms (etc) rather than distant ones, so that"Western Hemisphere" shouldn't be listed in "flyover state", right? - -sche (discuss) 18:19, 15 March 2014 (UTC)
 * It's sometimes hard to tell what "immediate" means. But I totally agree that the things that has been adding to as many US cities/states/regions as he can are entirely irrelevant and entirely inappropriate. I have reverted some of them, but there are too many for me to go through. I was just about to post on the BP about this, but it seems I'm not the only one who has noticed. --WikiTiki89 19:16, 15 March 2014 (UTC)
 * For taxonomic names one benefits from having many layers of hypernyms, though I rather doubt that taxonomic names are a good model of the use of hypernyms in ordinary languages. DCDuring TALK 19:31, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

 * I think our topical categories do a much better job of capturing the relationships shown than hypernyms do.
 * As for PAM, I think they are totally devoid of any sense of proportion: everything they do is systematically taken to extremes in an apparent quest to be comprehensive. The definitions of all of those entries have enough information for anyone with a brain to figure out hypernyms, holonyms, etc. without explicitly listing them. I hope they don't start adding the planet, solar system and galaxy to the holonym list, or 49 other states and a number of territories as heteronyms, or thousands of counties, cities, towns, and other named geographical features as hyponyms. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:24, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

 * I dun know. The topical categories are broad; I doubt that the relationships would be more obvious. Also: ‘anyone with a brain’ (your words) does not accurately describe many readers of the project. Proof exists in the feedback section. --Æ&Œ (talk) 23:39, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Hypernym and hyponyms sections are useful for listing words it would be inaccurate to call synonyms. For example, at the entry for chevon, I've listed goatmeat as a synonym, but cabrito and kid as hyponyms, because these refer narrowly to the meat of young goats rather than broadly to the meat of any goat. -Cloudcuckoolander (talk) 09:22, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Formatting of translation sections
I've been making offline bilingual dictionaries using 's script. The conversion of some articles failed, and I'd like to know if this is because they had not been formatted correctly. So, are these allowed and if yes, how are they used? Also, and I can't remember the exact example, is a qualifier allowed inside the translation's gloss (i.e. inside the trans-top brackets. And a final question, I found some instances of  I understand that this is used to escape brackets. My question is for what other special characters it can be used. I'm guessing curly brackets as well, but is it also used e.g. for quotes? Jenniepet (talk) 09:06, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I believe that there are currently no rules strictly prohibiting template nesting inside, , etc. However, as this nesting tends to break all kinds of scripts, bots, etc. I try to remove them whenever possible.Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 19:03, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

 * Templates (,, , etc) should not be nested inside trans-top, parentheses should be used instead, e.g. ,  . This means "{" and "}" should never be used inside trans-top, except possibly if the translations are of those characters or words that denote them and the gloss is expressing this. Less than and greater than symbols should not be used, either (unless they are what is being translated). It might be valid for "[" and "]" to appear as part of a wikilink, but not under other circumstances, I think (unless perhaps, as with the other symbols, they are what is being translated). - -sche (discuss) 21:09, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks to both for your answers. I'll try to correct these entries then. I'd still appreciate some insight on whether the nowiki tag can be used for curly brackets or other special characters. Jenniepet (talk) 03:48, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

= March 2014 =

I'm planning to move to the UK.
Are there any language pitfalls I should watch out for? I've only learned to speak American and I don't want to do any silly mistakes due to words that may have different meanings on the other side of the pond. I'm already trying to get used to colloquial terms that are only used over there and that I am totally unfamiliar with, and it's causing me such headaches... -- Liliana • 15:01, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Aren't they mostly accustomed to American English? ANZ slang has more pitfalls I think. I recall a young woman from the US getting a lot of attention at a sports bar because she was rooting for the All-Blacks. DCDuring TALK 16:09, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Try not to fall on your (if you are of the female persuasion). SemperBlotto (talk) 16:16, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

 * I've never had a problem understanding the British, nor have any British ever had a problem understanding me. You might learn funny words like blagger, but it should never really get in your way. --WikiTiki89 17:00, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Refer to your as trousers: or (if applicable) jeans: but never as pants:, since the latter refers only to your . —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:56, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
 * It’s considered perfectly acceptable to knock women up. In the UK you can even knock men up. They don’t seem to mind. —Stephen (Talk) 21:41, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

 * fags are (usually) cigarettes, not homosexuals; a rubber is an eraser, not a condom. Equinox ◑ 21:46, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Merry go round
I've heard forever that a merry go round rotated counterclockwise and a Carousel rotated clockwise. True or false? RCWatkins (talk) 23:12, 3 March 2014 (UTC) RCWatkins (talk) 23:12, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

 * Perhaps this is relevant: . But a British person going to the US would probably call the carousels "merry-go-rounds", so the distinction is blurry. Equinox ◑ 23:14, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

 * I don't know how accurate that is. I'm American and in my experience, "merry-go-round" is the more common term and is what I have always called them. Even though I grew up with my parents calling them in Russian, all my English-speaking friends called them merry-go-rounds. But that could just be a New England thing. As for the direction, I've definitely seen them going both ways in America. --WikiTiki89 23:22, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Hebrew with Arabic punctuation
I dislike how Hebrew uses our left‐to‐right punctuation since it doesn’t really suit the script. I would prefer to write with some Arabic punctuation (namely: ؟ ,؛, ،), but I suspect that most people would reject this because it’s unconventional. Is everybody going to reject this practice? --Æ&Œ (talk) 10:43, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
 * You answered your own question there. -- Liliana • 12:08, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

 * Megillat Esther (1).jpg Aleppo Codex Joshua 1 1.jpg Hadran on Tractate Berakhot.JPG Traditional Hebrew texts don't use any of the three punctuation marks you just mentioned (, ?, ,). Those marks were introduced with the revival of Modern Hebrew because most of the revivalists came from Europe and spoke languages such as Russian, German, and French, all of which had already been using those punctuation marks. Traditional Hebrew texts have their own punctuation system. The Torah scrolls are written without any punctuation at all other than spacing. Biblical texts outside of traditional scrolls, use a system of cantillation marks which double as punctuation if you know them well enough. Other texts, such as siddurs, and Talmuds essentially use a single dot (which Unicode doesn't have a special character for, so a period . works) for a "comma" and a double dot (in Unicode either the sof pasuq ׃ or just a colon :) for a full-stop. As you can see, all the traditional punctuation marks are symmetrical anyway. I have included some example images at right; all these texts have questions in them, but they are punctuated as regular sentences. --WikiTiki89 16:30, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

 * I'm not sure what "left-to-right punctuation" means, or in what sense it "doesn't really suit the script". I guess you're used to seeing ? with the open part facing the question, but it's an arbitrary symbol, and there's no reason to expect it to point one way vs. the other. Writers of Arabic-script languages, when adopting European punctuation, reversed some marks and rotated some others; writers of Hebrew-script languages, when adopting the same punctuation, did not. (For that matter, you can see similar variations between European languages: for example, among those with guillemet-style quotation marks, some have them point outward, while others have them point inward.) I think you'll get about as much support for applying the Arabic convention to Hebrew as for applying the Hebrew convention to Arabic. —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 02:13, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I must add though, that the Arabic symbols happen to have an accidental advantage in the computer age due to Unicode, in that they appear on the correct side of text written in an LTR frame. Compare:
 * من أين أنت؟
 * מאין אתה?
 * --WikiTiki89 02:23, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Arabic (and Hebrew, etc.) has the same issue when using a full stop (.), brackets, European numerals and other LTR symbols, which are used with RTL languages - e.g. أنا من" أستراليا." or "20 درهم". It seems silly but to avoid the punctuation/numerals to appear on the wrong side, some form of code conversion should be used,.e.g. מאין אתה?, أنا من أستراليا., 20 درهم. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 13:35, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I was just pointing out an accidental benefit of the Arabic question mark. I don't know what you mean by "code conversion", but the way the lang/script templates work is by inserting something along the lines of the HTML <tt><span dir="rtl">...</span></tt> around the right-to-left text. --WikiTiki89 19:56, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I meant script conversion (such as templates in Wiktionary). RTL languages would also benefit from a RTL full-stop but there isn't one. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 20:19, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
 * All the script templates do is add something along the lines of <tt><span class="Hebr" lang="he">...</span></tt>, and all that does is tell the browser which CSS class to get the fonts from. There is no "conversion". --WikiTiki89 20:28, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The browser gets the right fonts and the script gets the right direction. I hope that helps. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 20:54, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
 * You're talking nonsense and I don't blame you because web design is a pretty tricky subject. A script on Wiktionary is nothing but a CSS class defined in MediaWiki:Common.css, which tells the browser which direction to display the text and which fonts to use. --WikiTiki89 21:45, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
 * That's what I meant, even if I didn't express it clearly/correctly. I didn't try and want to go into technical details. All I wanted to say is that templates help to show the text correctly and sometimes even show characters instead of square brackets, when fonts are missing on the client (e.g. with Han characters) and help with known text direction problems. No need to get aggressive, smart Alec, I wasn't even arguing with you or contradicting you. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 01:25, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Sorry if I came off as aggressive, I was just trying to make the templates seem less magical by explaining what they do. Unfortunately Wiktionary is not the only place in the world that uses Unicode, so it useful to know how to do it without our template magic. --WikiTiki89 01:40, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not familiar with Hebrew punctuation but apparently it doesn't use Arabic punctuation (e.g. ؟ ,؛, ،), so there is little choice. Even if we "borrow" some punctuation marks from Arabic into Hebrew, there are still others, for which Arabic doesn't have native symbols either, plus numbers. So, language/script specific templates, are probably the only way to deal with multi-directional texts in Wiktionary. Other environments need other solutions. There will always be problems with using right-to-left texts in left-to-right environments. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 10:40, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * That's why a called it an "accidental benefit of the Arabic question mark". --WikiTiki89 17:18, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * More precisely, it's "accidental benefit of the Unicode encoding of the Arabic question mark". After all, the English, Arabic, and Hebrew question marks are actually the same character; but Unicode decided to unify only the English and Hebrew, leaving Arabic separate. (This is presumably because ISO 8859 did the same, which in turn is presumably because of the superficial appearance of the glyphs.) That allowed Unicode to treat its Arabic-question-mark character as RTL, while it had to treat its English-and-Hebrew-question-mark character as directionally neutral. —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 19:09, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, but I don't see how Unicode could have possibly unified all three. How would the display know whether the context is Hebrew or Arabic even if it knows the direction is RTL? They could have unified the Arabic and English ones and had them flip directions like the parentheses, but then they would need an explicit Hebrew one that acts as RTL and does not flip directions, but I think that would have been an inferior approach to the one they did use. What might have been a good option would have been to have three separate code points: one for LTR, and two for RTL that are mirror images of each other. --WikiTiki89 19:38, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Re: "How would the display know whether the context is Hebrew or Arabic even if it knows the direction is RTL?": The same way that it would know, for a unified Han character, whether the context is Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese. (Of course, Han unification was controversial, and hasn't worked perfectly, and I'm not saying that Unicode should have unified the three question-mark variants. I'm just saying that they had multiple options for how to handle them, and that your comment about the "accidental benefit" has to do with the option that Unicode went with rather than with the underlying typographical situation.) —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 23:25, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * But how does Unicode know whether the context is Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, etc.? I always thought that these variants were just up to the font. --WikiTiki89 23:37, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * It relies on higher-level language– and script-tagging (<tt>lang</tt> and <tt>xml:lang</tt> attributes in HTML and XHTML, <tt>Content-Language</tt> headers in HTTP, etc.). (Which are mediated by fonts, yes.) —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 01:53, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * But that's not a Unicode thing, it's an HTML thing. --WikiTiki89 01:57, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Exactly. Unicode is specifically agnostic to these concerns. It encodes characters, not languages. It's up to the "encompassing" environment to decide what visual representation the characters have. HTML is one example, but there are other things too. Locale settings in the operating system will switch between б in Serbian Cyrillic and б in Russian Cyrillic, depending on what language you set. 02:01, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * But directionality is a Unicode thing, which is why it's feasible to have parentheses flip depending on directionality. But if we were to flip the question mark if the language were an Arabic-like language and not flip it if it were a Hebrew-like language, that would require knowledge of the language which as you said Unicode is agnostic to. --WikiTiki89 02:07, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * XML != HTML, HTTP != HTML, etc. But anyway, I'm not sure what your point is. I'm just answering your question about how Unicode works, namely: it doesn't concern itself with the mapping from characters to glyphs, and assumes that a higher-level protocol will make some sort of language information available so that this mapping can be done in a language-appropriate way. (Philosophically, this is no different from the decision not to concern itself with fonts, italics/bolding/font-size, etc.; that's just not what Unicode is for.) Unicode happens not to take advantage of language-agnosticism for question marks, but this would be for compatibility reasons (since there already existed an ISO 8859 code-page that distinguished ASCII and Arabic question marks, whereas with CJKV there were no legacy encodings that included characters from more than one of these languages), so there's no reason to suspect that the reasons you give were factors in that decision. (Similarly, Unicode includes a whole bunch of "presentation forms", not because it considers these to be legitimately within its remit, but because it sought round-trip compatibility with legacy software.) —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 03:45, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Re "XML != HTML, HTTP != HTML, etc.": Can you point out where anyone confused them? Re "I'm not sure what your point is": My point was to show that the differences between the question marks is more than just a font difference, since it should be theoretically possible (if you had enough time and file space) to design a single universal Unicode font that handles all languages properly. That would not be possible if the correctness of a character relied on choosing language-specific fonts. --WikiTiki89 03:58, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Re: first sentence: Well, I mentioned that Unicode expects language to be specified via a higher-level protocol such as HTML, XML, HTTP, etc., and your response was "that's not a Unicode thing, that's an HTML thing".  Re: rest of it: I don't think anyone said that the difference between the question marks is "just a font difference"; it's a language/script difference. Hence my example of . Any "single universal Unicode font that handles all languages properly" would, by construction, handle CJKV properly, and could therefore handle a unified question mark properly. End of story. —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 06:17, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Well now that I know what I found out below, yes it is end of story. --WikiTiki89 06:25, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * One font can contain more than one shape for the same character. The Cyrillic б is an example of that; it's still shown in the same font in Serbian, but a different shape is selected from the font. With the same logic, different shapes could be selected for ? depending on whether the language is Hebrew or Arabic. 04:11, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Now that's what I was looking for. How exactly does the font know the language? --WikiTiki89 04:16, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The application tells it that. Firefox does this (which is why I see it for Serbian), and other programs and libraries like Pango also support it (the Wikipedia article gives an example too). 04:20, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's the obvious bit. But firstly, what format is the "language" given as, as an ISO code? Secondly, does the font have a list of [answer-to-the-previous-question]s for each glyph that has language variants indicating which variant goes with what language, or what? --WikiTiki89 04:28, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Something like that. A font contains a "locl" table (or a few of them) listing glyphs which should be substituted for other glyphs in a given language environment (which seems to be specified by a combination of a ISO script code and a three-letter language code). The text rendering engine may look up this table to perform appropriate glyph substitutions. Or not. Keφr 13:43, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure why it was done that way either. It does complicate some things. But at the same time I imagine it was designed to make it easier to mix scripts together. If you ever want to quote a single Arabic word in an English text, it's not going to be helpful if the letters appear left-to-right. At the same time, though, it's impossible to show a Serbian б in plain text within an English text. So it's like they tried to make things convenient, but stopped half way. 02:12, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Cyrylica-ROS-SRB-MAC.png Am I supposed to pretend that I see a difference between Serbian б and Russian б ? Maybe browsers are supposed to do that, but they don't (yet). Using the "Russian" б for Serbian is not a huge problem at all. In fact I can't find any graphical evidence of the "Serbian" б in any actual (scanned) printed books in Google Books or Google Images. Out-of-context images like the one at right are the only place I've ever seen the supposed "Serbian" б in an upright print typeface. --WikiTiki89 02:45, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * That's strange, I do see them differently. And I see the Serbian shape on Serbian Wikipedia as well. And when I look for italics on a random Serbian page, and then force my browser to use a serif font, it shows the special Serbian italic shapes like in the picture. So your browser or font just might not have the right support for it. 03:22, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * And the Serbian printing presses also don't seem to have much support for this feature. Nor does the Serbian Government (see the images/logos). After clicking through numerous previews of Serbian books in Google Books, I finally find one (out of maybe 20 or so) that used the "Serbian" б. --WikiTiki89 03:32, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

"Box"
Hello, In your template you have next to the box of discussion a box called "documentation".How can we add a box here (I want the html code). Thank you.--Ζαμπέρ (talk) 20:03, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Do you mean the "tab"? I wouldn't call it a "box". The documentation tab is added with JavaScript. I don't know the details, but I'm sure someone here does. --WikiTiki89 20:12, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
 * It's in MediaWiki:Common.js; search that page for <tt>Make tabs for citations-pages and template-documentation-pages</tt>. —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 22:57, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Trans-language reference model
As indicated in the headline: which model/template/format should be used to link to other versions (i.e. languages) of the Wiktionary, under the <tt>===References===</tt> section? LouisTakePILLz (talk) 05:41, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * None. The links are added and maintained by bots and appear on the left sidebar. There is no need to link to them in any other way. --WikiTiki89 05:43, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * That's not quite what I meant; I think you might have misconstrued my question. I was actually inquiring about the <tt>===References===</tt> section, not the sidebar language entries.
 * I was wondering how information that is taken from another version of the Wiktionary should be referred as, in the references section.
 * I distinctively recall seeing those templates being used on the French version of Wiktionary (Wiktionnaire). LouisTakePILLz (talk) 05:54, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * You don't need to do that. Other Wiktionaries are not real references. You should either list the same references that the other Wiktionary lists, or not list any. --WikiTiki89 06:00, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Sure then, albeit, that leads me to wonder: why are other Wiktionary projects doing so? The French version actually has a model to indicate entries that contains (or is based upon) information of another's (e.g. The information in this article is partially or entirely based upon the Spanish Wiktionary). LouisTakePILLz (talk) 06:07, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I can't tell you why. I can only tell you that we don't do that. If you think we should, then we could start a discussion about that. --WikiTiki89 06:11, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Okay. Thanks anyhow! LouisTakePILLz (talk) 06:13, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

wildcard character problem
How do I look up words with exactly three letters? What if including acronyms, affixes, and in reverse order? 218.173.46.146 11:54, 7 March 2014 (UTC)Zachary Liao

panero
i got a problem about the word PANERO. People who are in politics or have a political carrier they call to each other PANERO. For example '' PANERO where are you going? I will talk to you later PANERO.

 * Well, first you have to determine what language you’re dealing with. After that, you may have to consider diacritics, such as pañero. And lastly, you have to define what you mean by "got a problem with"...is your problem that you don’t know how to spell it? —Stephen (Talk) 13:34, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

What does Pañero or in girl Pañera mean in English. People who are in politics or have a political carrier they call to each other Pañero. For example '' Pañero where are you going? I'm going to our session now Pañera. I will talk to you later Pañera. OK,take care Pañero. >>>What does Pañero or Pañera mean? The word Pañero or Pañera is Spanish.
 * Are you sure it's not compañero? Chuck Entz (talk) 18:31, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

 * I have the impression that he is talking about English, and the English slang use of a Spanish word. So, while a Spanish-speaker would not truncate compañero that way, an English-speaker might well drop the initial syllable and say pañero. —Stephen (Talk) 20:13, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Reverse Dictionary Search Capability?
I want to search in the definitions of words, not for the words themselves.

EX: Right now I'm trying to remember the term for the publisher's mark on the title page of a book.
 * I've looked up coda, pilcrow, colophon ... I think it begins with an 's' but I can't seem to come up with it.
 * I'm sure there are specialized websites where I could find it but it would be soooo cool if I could just access the Wiktionary definitions.
 * I couldn't find a way to search IN the definitions.

My Questions:
 * Does Wiktionary have this sort of Reverse Dictionary search capability?
 * If not, I'd like to request the concept be considered as a future feature.
 * If not exactly a Reverse Dictionary, is there a list of or way to search for Category Pages?
 * I was searching for knight weaponry/armor (sword, dagger, scabbard, hilt, gauntlet, shield)
 * FYI > the Armor Definition page doesn't point to the Armor Category.

 * Is there another resource online that you'd recommend for this sort of search?

I'll check back here or you can use the contact form at: http://about.me/sunny_snaith

Sunny Snaith --68.117.182.223 12:26, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

 * The search box has two buttons: Go (visit an entry by exact title) and Search (look for entries containing the words you typed, or similar spellings). For categories, see Categories. Equinox ◑ 13:55, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

lay: how to correct punctuation in template, or is it already correct?
Current page of lay has:
 * # when pertaining to position.

Rendering as: Should it be this instead?: Or maybe this: Or is it correct the way it is now?
 * 1) Simple past tense of lie. when pertaining to position.
 * 1) Simple past tense of lie, when pertaining to position. <--Comma instead?
 * 1) Simple past tense of lie (when pertaining to position). <--Or, maybe in parentheses is better?

If it needs to be corrected, how do I do it? The template seems to automatically add the period.

Sorry, I'm having trouble to find the correct way to do it, and I'm not sure I'm even asking in the right place. ZeniffMartineau (talk) 09:20, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
 * User:ZeniffMartineau: many of our templates support a  parameter which allows to change the final full stop to something else. This one did not; therefore I added it. Keφr 09:53, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you! :) And is it okay if I add usage documentation/example for parameter on templates which have it? I'm not sure if anyone besides me would need it though, or if it's appropriate to add to template documentation, especially since I'm new here...? ZeniffMartineau (talk) 11:00, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Go ahead. And good luck. Keφr 11:15, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
 * And note:- this template accepts three positional parameters, only the first of which is so far documented. SemperBlotto (talk) 11:17, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Circular definition
The definition given for "embryophyte" is given as "embryophyte" with no further definition.
 * Would you like to buy some stronger glasses? The definition is "Any member of the subkingdom Embryophyta; most land plants." SemperBlotto (talk) 16:21, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
 * They might have been looking at the French translation. This is a link, though, and clicking on it still works… Keφr 18:26, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Sorry. My bad. Don't know that the crack about glasses was entirely necessary.

How to categorize an audio file?
chipotle (English noun) has an audio pronunciation file that doesn't match the IPA for the US pronunciation:

I recorded myself pronouncing the IPA on the page. I uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons* and was asked to categorize it. Well, sure, but commons:Commons:Categories is all very high-level—
 * Find categories with the search engine (see Categorization tips)
 * or check how similar files/images are categorized (some may not be categorized though)
 * or start from the main topical category (Category:Topics)
 * Starting from these categories, check their parent or sub-categories to find an appropriate category. Avoid picking too general categories.

Not feasible. Where to begin? — and Categorization is all about words:
 * Grouping words by part of speech
 * Grouping words by language
 * [...]

Pronunciation sound files seem to have fallen through a crack, not discussed either here or there. There needs to be some documentation for categorizing them, maybe in Template:audio/documentation. --Thnidu (talk) 03:33, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

 * Originally as Chipotle.ogg, but then I requested a rename to En-us-chipotle.ogg.

 * Put it into this category: [Category:English pronunciation of terms]. When they rename your file, they will also change the extension (from .ogg to .oga). —Stephen (Talk) 17:33, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

no problema
Is this good Spanish? --Æ&Œ (talk) 13:51, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * No. Per, correct Spanish is sin problema or no hay problema. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:08, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Ladino
I want to adject Ladino terms, but citations on Google Books for this language are nearly non‐existent. How can I create entries for this language without getting into trouble? --Æ&Œ (talk) 02:16, 15 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Articles from the Ladino magazine Aki Yerushalayim are available online . — Ungoliant (falai) 02:22, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Linking to wikisource
Is there a simple way to link citations to non-English wikisource, for example to [] this? --Makaokalani (talk) 12:14, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

 * Les Misérables TI L4. Keφr 12:23, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

 * User:Atelaes made Module:Quotations which can do that, but I wouldn't call it “simple”. See an example in Armenia for a link to Latin Wikisource. --Vahag (talk) 12:24, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

"a /æ/ phoneme"
Reading the entries graham and mayonnaise, I stumbled over the phrase "a /æ/ phoneme". Shouldn't the article be "an" here? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:56, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

 * I would agree, but I suppose some people might read it as the consonant-initial [ˈnɪəɹˌoʊpɪnˈfɹʌntˌʌnˈɹaʊndɪdˈvaʊwəl] rather than as the vowel initial [æ]. --WikiTiki89 15:53, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

 * Yes, some people might, but most of us don't, so I've changed an indefinite article to the definite one (without change of meaning), thus avoiding the problem.  D <font color="#00ccff">b <font color="#44ffcc">f  i  r  s   16:22, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

 * I think this is just like "a historic event" vs "an historic event". But until someone who actually prefers "a" comes here to complain, I think we're good. --WikiTiki89 16:45, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

 * Well "a" or "an" before "historic" tells us whether the writer pronounces the "h" or not (or sometimes whether their teacher did, or even their teacher's teacher). Writing "a" or "an" before "herb" tells us whether the writer is British or American (or follows the corresponding pronunciation). My view is that there is only one /æ/ phoneme, so using "the" is correct and matches the definite article in the preceding clause. And Florian did come here, perhaps not to complain, but to ask about a perceived error. I agree, though, that the entries were not glaringly bad, and I wouldn't have bothered changing them were it not for Florian's question.  D <font color="#00ccff">b <font color="#44ffcc">f  i  r  s   17:18, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * There are two ways of looking at the word "phoneme": "The English language has one /æ/ phoneme." vs "Batman has two /æ/ phonemes." Clearly the latter is what was originally meant, but it doesn't make much of a difference. What I meant was until someone comes here to complain about "an /æ/". Also, "a historic event" vs "an historic event" does not necessarily reflect pronunciation; a while ago, schools in the US used to teach the spelling "an historic" despite virtually everyone (outside of New York) pronouncing the /h/. --WikiTiki89 17:45, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, the same thing happens with some British educators. That's why I wrote "or even their teacher's teacher". It's strange how educators teach the rule that they learnt even when the reason for it has vanished. I agree with your view on singular and plural phonemes.  D <font color="#00ccff">b <font color="#44ffcc">f  i  r  s   21:24, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Another way to skirt the issue is to write "a phoneme /æ/". —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:23, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I would say "but that's just skirting the issue", but you already said that. --WikiTiki89 18:59, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

 * Thanks everyone. The thought of avoiding the issue by rephrasing came to me, too. I just thought this one was an interesting problem. The reason I came here instead of simply changing the article is that I was simply not 100% confident in my judgment. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 23:54, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Audio File troubles
Hi, I tried uploading an en-us audio file for the word "pertinent" but ran into trouble following the instructions and creating the category. Not sure how to fix it. Can someone take a look? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:En-us-pertinent.ogg BrianAdler (talk) 12:23, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Fixed. --WikiTiki89 15:30, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Need some help with entry hyperlinks
Hi all, I've run into a problem on the ora page. Whenever I click on the Latin "Etymology 3" link from the top, it takes me to the Italian section. I see why it's happening, but I don't know enough to fix it. Any help? Bionisam (talk) 14:13, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I don’t think there’s anything that can be done. Section linking is not a very flexible with the current entry layout we use at Wiktionary. — Ungoliant (falai) 00:16, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Hmm... I knew the site made all the links automatically, I just assumed I had structured something wrong. — Bionisam (talk) 15:11, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Are archaisms always O.K. for poetry?
I noticed that a lot of archaisms are also acceptable for poetry. Is it just me? I know that they’re not suitable for colloquial speech (‘Yo, dost thou got any crack for me, O my deare childe?’ would be extremely inappropriate and incongruous, obviously), but surely poetry is not colloquial. --Æ&Œ (talk) 19:05, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Many archaisms are often acceptable in poetry. But certainly not all and not always. --WikiTiki89 19:24, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Poetry can be stilted, colloquial, antiquated, modernist, or anything the writer desires. Choosing the words is even more important than choosing the rhymes. Bad choices are a sign of a bad poet, but there are generally no rules. The only rules are those dictated by certain styles, such as haiku, if such a style is selected by the poet to work in; or whatever rules a poet sets for himself, if he wants to set rules. —Stephen (Talk) 20:58, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
 * There's a chicken-and-egg question here: most of these archaisms would be obsolete rather than archaic if they weren't preserved in poetic, religious, and other stylized forms of speech, so one could argue that they're archaic because they're used in poetry, and not the other way around.
 * My guess is that certain words and turns of phrase have acquired associations and connotations from the way they were used in the past, and since poetry is more about associations and connotations than simple transfer of information, poets have decided to keep using them long after they've disappeared from everyday speech.
 * Archaisms do mark speech or text as poetic, so what I mentioned above doesn't explain everything, but it's also true that only certain archaisms will do: I doubt you could use swive to give your speech a poetic feel, for instance.
 * Of course, as Stephen mentioned, genre plays an important part- there are plenty of modernist poets who would start to gouge their eyes out if they had to listen to thees and thous for very long. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:13, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

thing
Does anyone know in which dialect is pronounced with a /k/ in the end? — Ungoliant (falai) 04:19, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Other than the Russian-accent dialect? I have no idea. --WikiTiki89 04:24, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
 * In certain (especially fake) German accents, too. You can search Google Books for "somethink" and see if you can figure out what dialect the books are trying to represent: it seems to be one or more seedy, city accent(s), possibly British. Villains: Crime and Community in the Inner City often uses "somethink" in transcribing the speech of a scrap metal dealer who I think (based on the snippets of the book that are visisble to me) is in London. - -sche (discuss) 05:04, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Somefink would be cockney (think of Only Fools and Horses), though the same pronunciation might also be used in other dialects elsewhere.  D <font color="#00ccff">b <font color="#44ffcc">f  i  r  s   07:49, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

= April 2014 =

Probable template error
There seems to be some syntactic error in stiga upp, probably in the templates (an extra pair of double square brackets is introduced and messes up the entry). Could somebody take a look and fix it? --LPfi (talk) 06:44, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
 * ✅ diff. --WikiTiki89 06:57, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

Where could ice be categorised?
It might go with Category:en:Water, but it's not actually liquid water. So where does it go? Similar for other things made of ice, like snow, glacier, iceberg, frost, hail etc. 02:12, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

 * Why does there have to only be one place. It can go in Category:en:Water as well as Category:en:Winter and Category:en:Construction. --WikiTiki89 02:19, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

 * Maybe it merits its own subcategory under Water, but then there's steam, mist, fog, moisture, and humidity to complicate things. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:36, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

 * It's still water in sense 1 ("H₂O") even if it's not water in subsense 1 ("liquid H₂O"). Unless the number of icy words is so large that they require their own category (>80), I would leave them in "Category:en:Water". - -sche (discuss) 03:31, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * The problem with that is that it is a subcategory of Category:en:Liquids. So the implication is that everything in Category:en:Water is also a liquid. 12:50, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

 * Not sure about that implication. For example, hydrokinesis and aquifer are in the category, but they are not liquids. Equinox ◑ 12:56, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

 * Don't take the implications so seriously. Reality is too complicated to map precisely onto a simple tree structure like our category framework, so it's not hard to come up with some odd results from traversing it: Nature > Zoology > Animals > Vertebrates > Mammals > Primates > Human > Thinking. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:42, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Font?
Did Wiktionary change its default font for headings to a serif font instead of a sans-serif font? I'm wondering if I have a virus or something, or did Wiktionary change the defaults? -- 70.24.250.235 05:12, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

 * Yes, Wikimedia Foundation has changed it — not a decision of Wiktionary. Equinox ◑ 05:21, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Ossetian æ again
I just noticed that the Ossetian terms with æ’s have been moved to pages with ӕ’s. I can’t find any recent discussion that authorized this mutation. —Æ&Œ (talk) 18:53, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * No discussion or authorization is needed to justify using a Cyrillic letter rather than a Latin letter in words written in the Cyrillic alphabet. (Of course if we have any Latin-alphabet Ossetian entries, they should use the Latin letter.) —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:24, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * There was some discussion about this some time ago. I remember that it was mentioned that Ossetian, for some reason, is written in Unicode with the Latin æ, not the Cyrillic one, even if the other letters are Cyrillic. 20:39, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * But aren't the letterforms identical? It seems to me that this may be only because the Cyrillic ӕ was unavailable or inaccessible. The same reason that some online Russian text in the old orthography uses Latin i instead of Cyrillic і. --WikiTiki89 20:42, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Apparently, Ossetians still write this way though. The Wikipedia article Ossetian language uses it too. 20:45, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Well yes, once they started, it became a backwards compatibility thing. In my view, Unicode should never have made separate code-points for identical characters in different scripts. There really is no good solution to this problem so I think the best one would be to include spellings with Cyrillic ӕ as redirects to spellings with Latin æ, or vice versa. --WikiTiki89 20:55, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Try applying a sensible sorting algorithm when you cannot distinguish H from Н and Η. — Keφr 21:10, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Sorting is not well-defined outside the context of a particular language anyway. For example, ç is sorted differently in French and Turkish. --WikiTiki89 21:21, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Try Serbian Bosnian  Montenegrin Serbo-Croatian. — Keφr 11:17, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
 * If we do end up doing redirects, the least disruptive way would be Latin to Cyrillic, because we can't rule out the possibility that other Cyrillic languages might only use the Cyrillic ӕ for the same spelling. If we don't redirect, we should make sure we have linking both versions. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:07, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Well I actually meant soft redirects. Also, we can't rule out the possibility that other Cyrillic languages might also use the Latin æ. --WikiTiki89 07:13, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I'm the one who unilaterally moved Latin æ’s to Cyrillic ӕ’s for the reasons given above by Angr. Hard redirects have been kept and whenever I create a new entry with ӕ, I also create a redirect for Latin. The fact that Ossetians use Latin æ on the Internet is not relevant. Bear in mind that this part of world is not well computer-educated. Most Caucasians use Latin I or 1 for palochka. Most Armenians use Romanized Armenian on Facebook because they don't have keyboard drivers. The ones that do, use ASCII equivalents for some punctuation symbols, i.e. <:> for <։> and <.> for <․>, because they don't know anything about Unicode standards and because their keyboard drivers do not support them (this has been fixed in Windows 8). We should promote best practices in Wiktionary. The case with ӕ should not be controversial at all, as people searching with Latin æ will be redirected. --Vahag (talk) 08:41, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree with Vahag. I have been doing the same with Ossetian entries and translations and cases of incorrect usage of palochka. The fact that Wikipedians use the wrong spelling doesn't prove anything. The same was done here in the past. FYI, Cyrillic ӕ was specifically designed for Ossetian (AFAIK, it's the only language using it) and all Cyrillic based languages officially use only Cyrillic letters. There are other rather new Cyrillic letters, which look like their Latin counterparts. E.g. Chuvash is another language that often use Latin forms, even if the official letters are Cyrillic - cf. ӑ/ă, ӗ/ĕ. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 09:17, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

 * I have added more languages to User:Conrad.Irwin/editor.js where erroneous palochka or other letters are common. Also: convert to Cyrillic "ӦӧІі" for Komi varieties. It's not really a "fix" but it will create a link to the correct form, if someone adds a translation in the wrong script, e.g. if someone types "тилĕ" instead of "" in Chuvash language, the raw link will be Cyrillic "тилӗ" (the correct form) on that translation. There are a lot of possibilities, of course, which are not yet covered, e.g. entering Roman "ə" instead of Cyrillic "ә" in Kazakh, etc. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 03:28, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

The current tradition is to use Latin æ in all Ossetic texts, as it's absolutely identical but is covered in all existing fonts (in contrast to the Cyrillic one). I would be grateful to the community if it avoids repressive solutions, thinking of coping strategies instead (like treating bot Æs synonims in Ossetic contexts etc.). Amikeco (talk) 17:17, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Social terms categorization
I notice that Category:Farewells has no topic cat parent, while Category:Greetings is under Category:Communication. These seem to have in common that they're used to establish or confirm social relationships and/or hierarchies, rather than merely convey literal meaning: whether I say "hi, how are you" or "good morning", or "greetings", I'm acknowledging my relationship with whomever I'm addressing, rather than giving or receiving information.

Our categories don't address this sort of thing very well, and sometimes, not at all (they end up categorized merely as phrases). Should we have a category of something like "Social acts"? Is there some better term for it? What should it go under in the category tree? Is it a topical category, a type of phrase (, or a lexicon ?

As a side issue, there are also classes of terms with a social dimension, such as terms of address,, titles, honorifics, etc., that might be related, somehow. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:15, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
 * This seems like a significant gap in our categorization. It seems not to be an area of interest of our group of committed contributors and thus neglected despite its importance. It would even be an important foundation element for a serious phrasebook.
 * It is not a "topic", but rather the whole realm covered by pragmatics that is potentially involved, though large portions of pragmatics do not lead to much that is lexical. Some phrases are considered inclusion-worthy solely because of their pragmatic function, often indicated by a (shortcut: ).  is transcluded some 5000+ times, but many uses are for senses of grammatical function words. But many more terms do not use this template, eg, greetings defined with glosses like "hello". That template with one or more additional named parameters or a more specific variant could be useful in categorizing such expressions that have essentially pragmatic content. DCDuring TALK 00:15, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Geequinox
Why is Equinox allowed to incinerate his talk page whenever he wants but everybody else’s has to be archived for all eternity? --Æ&Œ (talk) 22:23, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

 * As far as I know, it’s a personal choice. In 2003–2005, I used to delete the old items, or unimportant items, on my talk page, but after 2006 people started archiving it, so I did as well. Yes, some people such as Luciferwildcat were threatened and blocked for deleting things from their talk page, but I think they were just being bullied and harassed. —Stephen (Talk) 05:26, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

 * Bloody hell you're never happy are you? AFAIK, other people's talk pages don't "have to be" archived. That's why we have the "user page deleted on owner's request" deletion reason. Equinox ◑ 06:05, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

 * I requested that my talk page be deleted a few times years back. Only one person (Martin) complied, and then after that nobody respected my other requests, obviously because it would have calmed me down instead of stressing me out. I don’t quite feel so insecure about it now. I just think that this ties in well with Wiktionarian relativism. --Æ&Œ (talk) 07:19, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

 * P.S. It's very childish and petty of you to keep calling me a geek, etc. when you whined previously about me calling you by your actual old user name of Pilcrow. Grow some balls and don't be so passive-aggressive; as I said, if you have a problem with me, confront me about it. Equinox ◑ 06:06, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

 * No, all whiners, childish people, passive‐aggressive people, and petty people must be exterminated to ensure a better future for our grandchildren and the project as a whole. --Æ&Œ (talk) 07:19, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

 * Comment: I think that even if editors want to remove conversations from their talk pages, the page histories should still be kept publicly viewable for anyone who wants to look up past discussions. —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 01:09, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

Is anti‐semitism a hyponym of racism?
--Æ&Œ (talk) 02:37, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Whether it is or isn't is not for a dictionary to decide. --WikiTiki89 02:51, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Why do you think that? It is certainly a matter a dictionary can make a decision about. This dictionary includes hyponym and hypernym sections; see e.g. the entry hypernym. Even if it didn't, it would include entries for anti-Semitism and racism. It is simple to check if is there a sense of anti-Semitism by which it is a of some sense of . The answer to Æ&Œ's question is: Yes, there is a sense of anti-Semitism which is a hyponym of racism: specifically, anti-Semitism’s sense "prejudice, discrimination [...] directed against ethnic [...] Jews" is a hyponym of racism’s sense "prejudice or discrimination based upon race" (where race is defined by one dictionary as "a group of tribes or peoples forming an ethnic stock", and by us even more broadly as "a group of sentient beings, particularly people, distinguished by common heritage or characteristics"). - -sche (discuss) 04:09, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Point taken. I guess what I meant is that we can't decide which is the "correct" definition of racism. --WikiTiki89 04:29, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * It's not. Anti-semitism is an opinion. And Jewish people aren't a "race" like Africans or Mongols, so it can't be racism. -- Liliana • 23:09, 13 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Racism is also just an opinion. And whether the Jewish people are a race is a debated question and exactly something that dictionaries should not pick sides on. See our definition #1.1 of race. --WikiTiki89 03:07, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I think it's a hyponym of xenophobia. And it's not just an opinion. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 23:18, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

Editing a paradigm
How does one go about editing individual words within the drop-down paradigm boxes? I want to change the perfect middle/passive infinitive on the λείπω page from "λελείφθαι" to "λελεῖφθαι".

 * Hmmm..that is an interesting case. Give me a little time to research the paradigm, and see if the template needs to be tweaked, or if it's a one-off kind of thing. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 03:30, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

 * Well, it appears that certain classes of infinitives, including the perfect m/p infinitive, always accent the penult, which is contrary to the typical tendency of verbs to have a recessive accent. I'm sorry I missed that. I'll adjust the template to allow for that, and then make the necessary addition to the entry. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 03:46, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

 * Fixed. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 03:51, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

I just assume it's the same pefect-tense funny business that gives paroxytones to participles like λελειμμένος.

I noticed a similar instance with the accentuation given for the m/p perfect infinite of γίγνομαι. It should be γεγενῆσθαι. It seems the template is marking the -αι ending as long, when it should be here treated as short.

 * It's not that simple....or perhaps it's not that complicated. The template doesn't know whether a given vowel or diphthong is long or short. All it does is join the proper parameter with the appropriate ending. The problem is that I didn't know about this facet of perfect inflection when I wrote the template, and so I didn't include a parameter for the passive stem with a circumflex on its ultimate. For future reference, all you have to do if you see the problem in the future is to enter a 7th parameter with the appropriate stem/accent combo, like I did on γίγνομαι. I'll go through the perfect templates and make sure they all make use of it. If you don't feel comfortable doing so, just give me a holler and I'm happy to take care of it. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 23:16, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

Is there a guide on how to edit the paradigms for nouns, as well? I tried to change the dative plural of σφήξ from σφησί to σφηξί but couldn't figure out how. -Buskin (talk) 04:17, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

 * A few of them do, but most of them don't. Medellia wrote the first ones, and she included documentation on a precious few, and I don't think I wrote documentation for any of my noun/adjective ones. I would suggest the following things: 1. Read User:Medellia/Atelier/Ancient Greek to get a feel for the naming conventions, so that you can look at an inflection template category, and pick out the one you need. 2. If you're having difficulty figuring out the correct inputs, look at the template page itself, or call the template and preview it without any parameters. This will often give you a good feel for what they should be. 3. Please feel free to drop me a line if you're having difficulty. grc inflection is a hideously complex monster (I blame the Greeks, not myself :-)). So, taking as an example. You start at Category:Ancient Greek inflection-table templates, a link I keep on my userpage for easy access and suggest you do the same. You know the word is a noun, so you click on Category:Ancient Greek noun inflection-table templates. You know it's third declension, so you click on Category:Ancient Greek 3rd declension templates. Now, if you read Medellia's explanatory page, you'll recognize the first part of the problem.  was using, which is for dentals, while the stem of  ends on a palatal (not really a palatal, but closer to a palatal than a dental). On first and second declension nouns you can tell the accent from the nom sing, but with thirds you need to look at the gen sing. It's penultimate, which, according to Medellia's page, is unmarked in template names. So, the correct template is , the template for a third declension noun, ending on a labial or palatal, with accent on the ultimate syllable. If you click on the template and show it, you'll see all the different spots, and what parameters are used in them. The nom sing is simply parameter 1, so you know your first parameter. Parameter 2 appears before endings with an accent, so it's the stem with no accent. Parameter three appears before endings with no accent, so it's probably the stem with an acute on the last stem syllable. All that's left is 4, which is the trickiest one, but I imagine you've already got if figured out. It's simply the stem with no accent plus sigma, which merges with kappa to become xi. I know that's a lot to go through, and it's pointless because I already fixed it, but I promise, if you labor through the process, it'll become intuitive in a hurry. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 04:55, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Latin Pronunciations
New here, so hopefully I'm doing this right. I noticed inconsistencies with the pronunciations of short vowels in Latin Pronunciation, Latin Phonology, and Latin spelling and pronunciation. It could be just a matter of using ɪ, ɛ, ɔ, and ʊ only in the phonetic transcriptions (between square brackets) and i, e, o, and u in the phonemic transcriptions (between slashes) of Latin. I just don't feel I have the authority to make the call. --Brentypie (talk) 02:09, 16 April 2014 (UTC)
 * There's actually a discussion going about this right now in the Beer Parlour. Maybe you could contribute? 02:17, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

What are the rules for translation of new technical terms between languages ?
Hello.

I recently created a technical term [|here] in the English Wiktionnary and want to create its translation in the French Wiktionnaire. To make any answers useful to others, I am asking the following question so that it applies to all pairs of languages. The problem must be fairly common so if it has already been dealt with, please could anybody link from here to the right topic ?

Question:

Is there a standard for translating technical terms between languages ? This global question could be subdivided into four parts:

1. The translation of the term itself is unlikely to be a word-to-word. It has to be intuatively understandable in the destination language and easy to remember. It may also have culturel criteria. Finding a good term is also creative, even witty. It could be open to criticism. Is this creatifity accepted ?

2. It would be good to be able to translate then link to the original definition in the original language. But then the original-language definition could get modified. Is referral between different-language wiktionaries allowed ?

3. When translating a scientific paper or article, one would prefer to get a proper word on-line in the Wikitionnary first, then use it in the translation. This avoids the risk of "orphan" words, rejected and never to be used again. It also gives an opening for constructive criticisme of word choice. It does imply that a yet never-used word will momentarly appear in the Wiktionnary. Is this procedure accepted by the community ?

4. Referral to source-language references from the destination-language definition will be foreign and maybe not understandable to the reader who wants to check. Is this between-languages referencing allowed ?

Thankyou for any suggestions.

Paul_Wi11iams

 * Translations are frequently, if not usually, not word for word. There are some important differences that pertain to various kinds of translation: technical translations do not have to be intuitively understandable, and often are only understandable to professionals in the industry; they certainly do not need to be creative or witty, and generally are not open to criticism. Literary translations usually are broadly understandable, and sometimes wit and creativity are appropriate.
 * Most of the terms you will find in Wiktionary are not technical terms, but literary terms. Translators of scientific and engineering papers probably would not find Wiktionary very useful. As for word choice, that is a big thing in literary translations, but in technical translations, there is much less word choice, and technical terms frequently have only one or two appropriate translations (although in some languages, masking terms (such as hypernyms) are often needed to avoid repeating a certain term too often, which is frowned on in some cultures.
 * We do not make source-language references. References are made by way of citations taken from printed works in the same language.
 * The more relevant consideration for us here is that the word, in order to be acceptable as dictionary material, must be spelled correct, written in the proper script, described properly in terms of grammar (gender, conjugation, declension, etc.), and used in at least three separate printed books over a year old. —Stephen (Talk) 09:45, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Someone is purposefully manipulating a topic
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shutter_shades

Someone has locked this page from edits in an attempt to discredit the work of an individual and a company that coined the term and trademarked it. They are posing the term as an example of "trademark erosion" for legal advantage.

Shutter Shades Inc. coined the term with respect to sunglasses and has been an entity since 2007. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/shutter-shades

Please advise on how to correct this massive error.

Thank you. Neogeo911 (talk) 18:51, 16 April 2014 (UTC)
 * From what I've seen, you've attempted to change the meaning of the word, and removed any mention of trademark erosion and other good content from the page. You also did this several times, being reverted each time. This counts as "edit warring" and is a cause for blocking. By all appearances, it is you who is purposefully manipulating the entry, not anyone else. The entry was protected to prevent this from happening again. If you represent this company, you should not be editing the entry as it presents a conflict of interest. 19:09, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

 * Wiktionary is a dictionary. We include all words that are attestable by our standards. This includes brand names that have come to be used generally to refer to products of a certain type. Other examples: kleenex, band-aid, and jello. The fact that we include such entries isn't an attempt to "discredit" the brands in question. It's simply part of our mission to document the English language. -Cloudcuckoolander (talk) 19:39, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

Plurals?
I spend a bit of time around here, but I'm definitely not part of the woodwork, and occasionally I wonder what I should do in a given set of circumstances. I came across element (a bit of a mess, which is fairly common for this kind of entry) and also elements. There is quite some duplication between the two entries. What is the usual practice for these "plural only" senses? Do they go in the singular entry or the plural entry? This, that and the other (talk) 12:06, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * There was some discussion about this a while ago. I think most people agreed that we should not spread definitions across multiple forms of the same word. So that would mean that we maintain a strict separation between lemma entries and form-of entries, and one lemma ("element" in this case) can't have more than one lemma entry with definitions in it. 12:46, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * But the problem is that element has senses that are usually or exclusively found in the plural; these are currently senses 5 and 9, which correspond to senses 2 and 4 of elements. I can certainly understand the desire to keep those definitions at the plural form, just as the main definitions of scissors and trousers are at the plural forms, not at scissor and trouser. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 14:02, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * As far as I know, the agreement was to use one lemma entry per lemma, to avoid scattering definitions for what is essentially the same word across different entries, making them hard to find. But that doesn't mean the lemma entry has to be at the singular form. For words like scissor and trouser it makes more sense to have the senses at the plural, and have the singular entries as "singular form of", because the plurals are much more widely used. With element that's not the case, it's used more in the singular. 14:10, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, "more commonly used" shouldn't be the only criterion; words like shoes, toes, eyes, and ears are more commonly used in the plural than the singular (and so, according to b.g.c. Ngrams is elements), but that doesn't mean we should use the plurals as the lemma forms in those cases. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 14:19, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I would argue that scissor needs to include as a definition "a pair of scissors" (possibly with some label) with a usage example "Hand me a scissor", whereas trouser is not often used similarly in my experience. DCDuring TALK 17:04, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

= May 2014 =

Technical question about the citation namespace tab: could I get help creating a similar setup on another wiki?
Hi, I saw that this wiki has a citation namespace as a counterpart to the main articles. I'm helping start a historical wiki where there will be a draft namespace along with the main articles. Could someone who has the experience with JavaScript please help us out with creating a script to add a draft namespace tab? It should come before the discussion tab, if possible. The two namespaces we need draft tabs for are Draft and Journal draft. The topic of the wiki is history, and we're aiming at creating a more reliable version of Wikipedia. We'll be using attributed content from Wikipedia to start. Wiki Historian (talk) 20:37, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

"Predicative" part of speech
A user has added with this as the part of speech. I had never heard of anything like that before, so I asked (discussion), and they said that it's a commonly used term for adjectives (as I understand it anyway) that don't occur attributively with nouns, but only on their own. They also pointed out that we already have Category:Russian predicatives, which are presumably similar. I'm not really sure what the common understanding of these terms is. I had certainly never hard of predicatives before, so I wonder if they are a common term in these languages specifically. Dutch also has some adjectives that can only be used in the predicate, but we just list those as adjectives (see Category:Dutch predicative-only adjectives). 14:13, 3 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Predicate-only adjectives are still adjectives. --WikiTiki89 15:28, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

 * It refers to the part of the sentence or clause which states something about the subject or the object of the sentence, and it normally includes a verb or a structure that acts as a verb. In the sentence "The dog barks loudly", the predicate is "barks loudly". Russian has a type of adjective that works like this. Unlike a normal adjective, a predicative does not decline. Predicatives are often used with the dative case, as in (mir ist heiß). —Stephen (Talk) 15:55, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

 * Since there haven't been any other comments on what to do and the entry has been left the way I created it, I'll add some clarification here. In Slovene linguistics, the predicative (povedkovnik, predikativ) is treated in two ways, either as a completely separate PoS class (this is somewhat newer and seems to be gaining traction) or it's treated as a subclass within the wider group of adverbs. The predicative category is further divided into adjectival, nominal and adverbial predicatives. Všeč is treated as an adverbial predicative. 78.0.232.36 14:52, 8 May 2014 (UTC)
 * What is not clear to me is how these are different from regular adjectives that happen to not be used in attributive roles, like the Dutch examples I gave. What is fundamentally so different about them that they would deserve their own part of speech label? 15:45, 8 May 2014 (UTC)
 * If you would like any new headers like "Predicative" to be accepted, then make the further subdivisions into subcategories, but not headers. Can the same predicative be in more than one of the subcategories?
 * In English we have the somewhat similar problem that "adverb" and "determiner" are classes that fairly beg to be subdivided. Tradition and the need to not place excessive demands on ordinary users has led us to avoid proliferating headers.
 * BTW:
 * Does sl.wiktionary admit the equivalent of "Predicative" as a header?
 * Which WP article covers this best?
 * Do we have an adequate definition at [[predicative]] to encompass this usage in Slavic linguistics?
 * It would be much easier to gain acceptance for the novel header with some answers to these questions. DCDuring TALK 16:35, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

 * What 78.0.232.36 describes as the Slovene predicative sounds about the same as the Russian predicative. Most Russian predicatives look like adverbs and are indeclinable like adverbs, and usually they are adverbs as well as predicatives; but most of Russian predicatives are a type of adjective, even though they do not look like adjectives or decline like adjectives (all normal Russian adjectives are fully declined and do not resemble adverbs). Russian Wiktionary does not have POS headers at all, but rather a common generic header that translates to Morphological and syntactic properties, and the predicatives are labeled предикатив under that common header.
 * (where the first drunk is an adjective and the second a predicative.)
 * The Russian definition of the predicative is this:
 * (linguistics) In a number of languages, the predicative is a part of speech used as a predicate and which refers to the process, state, or quality that is perceived as a state.
 * Example: The main difference between the predicative in Esperanto and the Russian predicative is that in Esperanto the nominal part of the predicative always has the form of a simple nominative case.
 * The WP article that covers this best is Predicative expression. —Stephen (Talk) 19:25, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

assistance on "LaBoracay"
Created a new definition (see here). Does it lack something (references, definitions)? Can it be moved to the main namespace after meeting certain requirements? Thanks. -Ianlopez1115 (talk) 05:52, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

 * Yes, it does lack something. You need to find two more examples of usage (citations) covering at least 12 months, to prove that it is not just a protologism. I can't find any usage in Google Books.  D <font color="#00ccff">b <font color="#44ffcc">f  i  r  s   10:08, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

How do you get a new word added to Wikipedia?
I have applied for a trademark and received a supplemental registry which in 4 1/2 more years it will be a full trademark. Please advise. Terry Bridie terry@betterdaysnow.com
 * According to WT:CFI, trademarks are not to be added into Wiktionary. However, if you do want to add other words, type that word in the search box on the top right-hand corner, click the link below the line saying contaning..., and then you'll be guided to a search page. You should see the line You may create the page "[PAGENAME]" on a blank page, request its creation or create it using the New Entry Creator!. Then, if you know the formatting of Wiktionary entries, you may click onto the red link directly, or else you should use the New Entry Creator to do it. Please note that Wiktionary is CASE-SENSITIVE, that means kind will be different from Kind. Please reply here if you have further questions or anything to comment about. --kc_kennylau (talk) 13:46, 7 May 2014 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict) You don't. First of all, this is Wiktionary, not Wikipedia. More importantly, we're a descriptive dictionary: we only cover the way terms are actually used, and you're talking a bout a new word that isn't being used. Besides, we don't have entries for trademarks unless they've become a more general part of the language, like aspirin or kleenex, which you, as a trademark owner, wouldn't want- it's often called trademark erosion. See our WT:CFI for more information. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:53, 7 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Wait, I did misread the title. So, according to the Wikipedia rules, you can create articles of companies in Wikipedia, as long as you follow the rules there. One of the big rules there is NPOV (Neutral Point Of View), which states that you must have a neutral point of view (i.e. not biased) when you're writing down the information. Secondly, don't ever copy things from web without reference, or when the web's license doesn't permit you to do so. Thirdly, w:Template:Infobox company may be useful when creating the article. Fourthly, please do read w:Help:Editing and w:Wikipedia:Tutorial/Formatting before you attempt any editing. Fifthly, please do not indent when starting a paragraph, as this may create formatting issues. Sixthly, ask your questions regarding Wikipedia in Wikipedia. Seventhly, good luck! --kc_kennylau (talk) 15:33, 7 May 2014 (UTC)
 * At Wikipedia, writing an article about one's own company or product is not against the rules per se, but it is Very Strongly Discouraged because of the great difficulty of writing neutrally about something in which one has a vested interest (financial or otherwise). —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:26, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

trunking, British use
I encountered a material termed "trunking" on a UK website <http://www.weatherforschools.me.uk/docs/weather_box_trunking.pdf>. I'm fairly certain the same material is in the USA, but i can't tell from the illustrations what it would be called here -- foamboard? Can someone in the UK please help with adding to the definition at "trunking"? Thanks! Filé gumbo (talk) 06:41, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

 * Done (two related but slightly different senses). Is the system of ducts not called trunking in the US? What is the thin plastic tube with a rectangular cross-section and a snap-on cover called in the US?  D <font color="#00ccff">b <font color="#44ffcc">f  i  r  s   17:45, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Synonyms for the surface-mounted wiring protectors: conduit (round), raceway, cable tray, wire molding, wire mold. DCDuring TALK 18:13, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks. The round variety is called conduit here too, and the wider stuff is sometimes called a cable tray.  D <font color="#00ccff">b <font color="#44ffcc">f  i  r  s   22:41, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Words in Frequency Orders
How do I look up numbers of words in frequency orders?122.117.198.232 06:20, 15 May 2014 (UTC)Zachary Liao
 * Check this page. — Ungoliant (falai) 06:23, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Danish Wiktionary
Why doesn't Danish Wiktionary have any entries for word forms? Isn't Wiktionary's purpose here to have entries for every word in every language that is possible? Also, the source code there is much more complicated there than here. They don't even have the necessary templates for plurals. Why don't we talk to the Danish Wiktionary people about this? I see this as a huge problem. Ready Steady Yeti (talk) 01:01, 17 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Feel free to. 02:18, 17 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I will tomorrow, and the Danish Wiktionary is a bit of a mess too in some other ways. But for now, I think I'm going to bed. See you guys tomorrow morning. Ready Steady Yeti (talk) 02:27, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Category:Singularia tantum by language
Is there a reason we haven't converted these to use ? If not, I'd be happy to do it. Chuck Entz (talk) 11:17, 17 May 2014 (UTC)
 * The English one looks like a good one to clean up. Eg, I don't think there any sense of assault that is singular-only. DCDuring TALK 12:59, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

personism?
What’s a noun that means ‘the belief that some people are superior or inferior to others?’ --Æ&Œ (talk) 10:40, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Bigotry? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 12:06, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * supremacism? — Keφr 21:36, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Not exactly right, but nonegalitarian, nonegalitarianism come close. Equinox ◑ 19:00, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Linking of unrelated separate components in Template:en-proper_noun?
The template, Template:en-proper_noun, splits apart "Bella Coola" into "Bella" and "Coola". But, there doesn't seem to be any shared meaning of "Bella" between info from Bella and w:Nuxalk_language or BC Geographical Names' "Bella Coola River" (via w:Bella_Coola_River).

How should this be changed, if at all? Should the possible etymology be added somewhere, or should links be changed somehow, or should the template just not split apart the parts of the noun?

Thanks to anyone for any advice~Have a good day! :) Zeniff (talk) 00:05, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

 * ✅ Equinox ◑ 00:07, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm really beginning to doubt whether this feature was such a good idea. 00:40, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

 * I find it saves me a lot of typing, most of the time. Equinox ◑ 00:41, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Me too. — Ungoliant (falai) 00:50, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, it save time when you're editing an entry and can bypass the feature if it's not right. The problem is that it does the same thing to huge numbers of entries that no one is looking at, let alone editing- so we don't know which ones need fixing. If there were a way to restrict this to only new, non-bot edits, it would be great- but there isn't. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:08, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I think it would be possible to restrict it to entries with last edit after a certain date and to override the restriction with a switch. This would limit but not eliminate the damage. One could also create a maintenance category to capture the proper noun entries edited after a certain date and decategorize them with another switch. DCDuring TALK 03:20, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

 * Based on my experience since the change, I’d remove automatic from proper nouns. Most proper nouns containing a whitespace are either borrowed from another language (Abai Sungai, Bella Coola, etc.) or contain at least one word that is not a proper noun and needs to be decapitalised with head= (New York, Spanish Flu, South Pole, etc.) — Ungoliant (falai) 21:34, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Why do synthetic languages have prepositions?
--Æ&Œ (talk) 02:45, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

 * Not everything is expressed with inflections, even though potentially it could, if more forms existed. E.g. "I write with a pen.", "This note is written by the author" is expressed in Russian by using the instrumental case - ру́чкой, а́втором but to express location both prepositions and cases (here prepositional or locative) are used - "in America" - . Finnish simply uses inessive case - Amerikassa, without any preposition. It depends. Does that answer your question? --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 03:12, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

 * More specifically, I was wondering why Latin possesses prepositions when cases already exist. My presumptions were that they are used either for emphasis, or for clarity. --Æ&Œ (talk) 07:37, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

 * I don't enough Latin enough to give good examples in Latin but like in English, languages express ideas in various ways - in one's mind/mentally. Russian prepositional case is always used with a preposition. Like verbs govern nouns with specific cases (accusative, dative), prepositions too, govern nouns. An idea may not even have a verb - senso - without, ad - to, etc. Prepositions and cases are used in combinations in many synthetic languages. It's just the way it is. There's a limit to what cases can do, even in languages with a large number of cases. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 07:52, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Latin in particular doesn't have nearly enough cases to cover all prepositions. For example, both and  take the ablative; you couldn't reasonably use the bare ablative to cover both of them (as well as all the other prepositions that take the ablative). A language would need two dozen cases or more in order to completely dispense with adpositions; not even Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish manage that. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 10:20, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
 * You could also consider why in English there is both and .  11:16, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

White spaces
I can't say enough, I hate white spaces!!!!!!! Why do they have to be there? I read and write much better without them. They confuse me.

It's better for me to read:

bla

bla

bla

than

bla

bla

blaReady Steady Yeti (talk) 22:26, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

 * The only objectionable white spaces that I can see on this page are the ones that you put above as illustrations. Are there any objectionable white spaces in any Wiktionary entries? A single blank line often improves readability for me.  D <font color="#00ccff">b <font color="#44ffcc">f  i  r  s   08:56, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

anarcho-feminist
This entry needs to be redirected to anarcha-feminist (which I have just created), because that is the proper term for it. The filter keeps disallowing this. 108.95.130.150 00:42, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Why is anarcha-feminist the proper term? Looks like a pseudohispanism to me. — Ungoliant (falai) 01:08, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

 * (edit conflict) Please read WT:REDIR. We never do redirects in such cases. Besides, we're a descriptive dictionary, which means we describe the way people actually use words, not how they're supposed to: regardless of what anyone has decided is the "proper" term, the other form is fairly widely used, and merits an entry- if nothing else, as "Alternative form of" anarcha-feminist. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:14, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

 * So I'm guessing we should include both? Yeah, I guess that's right: now that I think about it, even the paper dictionary has improper and nonstandard words in it (even though I hardly ever use the paper dictionary). Thx for pointing this out :) Although I might have one more question: if anarcha-feminist really is the proper term (giving the benefit of anybody's doubt), is there any sort of note that should be placed on the anarcho-feminist entry regarding this? 108.95.130.150 01:51, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
 * We don't make judgment calls on what's "improper" at all. We indicate that a term is "nonstandard" only in very clear cases where several usage guides and other dictionaries have indicated that the term is nonstandard. This does not seem to be the case with anarcho-feminist. Google Books Ngrams suggests that the anarcho- and anarcha- forms are about equally popular. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 12:21, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

How do I make a "related words" section? Where do I find this sort of info myself?
I want to mention placid in the entry for placate. What section would that go in? What's the model I should use?

(This sort of question must come up frequently. I always look for documentation but never find any. Is there something I'm missing?) Gronky (talk) 17:53, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

 * We have a heading "Related terms" that is intended for exactly such a relationship. To give you a model most conveniently, I added the section to [[placate]]. "Related terms" should appear one level lower than the section to which it applies, which is either an Etymology section or a part-of-speech section (eg, Verb, Noun). The information you seek can in general be found in WT:ELE, though it may not be obvious there. Feel free to ask on this page if it is not clear. DCDuring TALK 18:27, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Just to clarify, by "one level lower", DCDuring means one header size lower, so with one more = on each side of the header name in the page's wiki code. 18:33, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

Catching vandalism.
I want to catch vandalism. Any easy tools for this? Ready Steady Yeti (talk) 22:14, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

 * If you hang around for a while (i.e. months) and make good edits, you'll quite possibly be promoted to administrator, which gives you a few extra tools for deleting junk quickly. Your enthusiasm so far is great, but I would actually suggest you relax and slow down a bit, 'cause this is a very small community compared to Wikipedia, and discussions aren't always resolved immediately. Equinox ◑ 23:03, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't really have a desire to be administrator, but something as simple as rollback rights might be cool! I'm actually partly here because I want to make my own wiki very soon, using MediaWiki, to create my own website, so I want to be able to use things like templates and such. I want to become very good at wikicode (yes that entry is on my to-do list as well) so I can make the wiki I will create the best I can make it. Also, don't forget, I also love Wiktionary so I want to contribute here a lot too. My main goal here is to improve Danish coverage. For instance, we don't have a word for over even in this dictionary. I want you to be able to take any page or article out there, copy and paste any random word in any language, look it up here, and it gives a result. That would make this dictionary perfect. Ready Steady Yeti (talk) 23:08, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, would be good. Maybe someone at WT:GP could do some nerdy magic and give you a list of terms in the Danish Wiktionary that are missing from the English Wiktionary. Equinox ◑ 23:16, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, and like I said before the Danish Wiktionary is kind of a mess in my opinion, missing some words that should obviously be there, like det and other things. I'll bring it up.

The thing is with languages like French or Spanish I can take any word out of a random WP article and enter it in Wiktionary and it translates for me. Although I can't say that much for Danish. That's what I want to happen. That's my personal goal here. Ready Steady Yeti (talk) 23:20, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * You're still having trouble understanding the rules, and you're not to the point where we can trust you enough to stop patrolling your edits- so why should we give you the ability to patrol the edits of others? You can always undo edits, and you can undo a series of edits by editing and saving an older version in the history. That's what I did before they made me an admin. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:21, 25 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm saying for in the future. It's just an idea for later. Maybe later I'll have enough grasp on the rules and such, but now I think I just want to contribute. I like this place, Wiktionary itself is more fun than a lot of things. Ready Steady Yeti (talk) 01:26, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

Non-globally banned/blocked users
Does anyone here care if a user is for example a vandal on Wikipedia but here is not vandalizing? Could that get someone blocked here? Just wondering. Ready Steady Yeti (talk) 21:31, 25 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I would never block someone here for doing something that is bad but unrelated to Wiktionary. — Ungoliant (falai) 00:29, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

 * People who have been blocked on WP for vandalism or plagiarism may be watched more closely and blocked more quickly if they repeat their misbehaviour here, since repeated misbehavior is evidence of an incorrigible lack of desire to edit WMF projects productively. But in my experience, pre-emptive blocks are not issued; i.e. users are only blocked here if they do misbehave here. Some users who have been blocked on WP have edited productively here, in some cases helped by the fact that some of the kinds of misbehaviour that are possible on WP are not possible here: someone blocked on WP for tendentiously editing John Q. Pakistani Pseudoscientist's Wikipedia article (or for repeatedly inserting the Urdu word for phrenology into Phrenology) will find that we don't have any entry on JQPP for them to tendentiously edit, but we do have an entry on phrenology that they can add Urdu translations to without running into trouble. - -sche (discuss) 16:38, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Unknown French word
I’m having trouble finding a word. I think that it means ‘weapon.’ The closest that I can come up with is flangue, but apparently that doesn’t exist in French. --Æ&Œ (talk) 22:21, 25 May 2014 (UTC)
 * The closest thing we have is flang- but that's English, and not a weapon. Without the n there's flagelle and its derivatives, but that's not a whole lot better. If you go here and entre "^fl" under "Vedette (avec possibilité de tronquer)" and "arme" under "Tout l'article", you'll get a list of every entry in the French Academy dictionary that starts with "fl" and has the word "arme" anywhere in the text- there aren't many. You can do a few other types of regular expressions in that same form, so you might be able to come up with an answer that way. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:12, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Nevermind, it’s flingue. --Æ&Œ (talk) 04:49, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Anagrams
Is there a tool Wiktionary has that allows you to find anagrams by looking for anagram articles on this site in a language? I really do need help anagramming. Ready Steady Yeti (talk) 01:12, 26 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Some words have anagrams sections but they haven’t been updated for quite some time. — Ungoliant (falai) 01:26, 26 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Are there any tools or bots that help with anagrams? If not we should seriously make something like this. Anagram websites don't have exceptional words like Wiktionary does. Ready Steady Yeti (talk) 01:51, 26 May 2014 (UTC)
 * The bot that did it was run by, who is no longer active. Personally I’d favour moving all our anagram content to the appendix namespace, as I don’t think it is useful enough to justify its use of space. — Ungoliant (falai) 02:04, 26 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I disagree. We should ask Conrad if another admin can run the bot themselves, or make a duplicate, or something. Ready Steady Yeti (talk) 02:11, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Is Polish a zero copula language?
In other words, is być optional? --Æ&Œ (talk) 16:51, 26 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Usually no. However, you can often see the word omitted when defining terms inside some sort of a lexicon or encyclopaedia (e.g. ; the dash could be replaced with or simply, so you may consider this an ellipsis; other styles also exist). Omitting the copula in other circumstances would be probably seen as a Russianism. Or just poor language. — Keφr 09:26, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

 * Ah, O.K. I already knew that Russian was zero copula, and since both languages are Slavic, I assumed that they had this feature in common. Though I dun know exactly how similar these tongues are (maybe there’s a percentage somewhere?). --Æ&Œ (talk) 10:05, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Percentage? Of what? This seems like an ill-posed question. — Keφr 15:44, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

 * Lexical similarity. --Æ&Œ (talk) 16:26, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
 * And how is it supposed to be measured with a percentage? — Keφr 16:51, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
 * See . — Ungoliant (falai) 16:54, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Slavic languages, even remote ones, as a minimum, share about 60% of common roots - there are a few researches about this - you can search for this or even compare vocabularies of languages such as Slovene or Czech and Russian (on the ends of the dialect continuum). That makes them, if not mutually comprehensible, easily learnable. Common roots doesn't necessarily mean the roots always have the same meanings and there are sometimes substantial differences in pronunciation (often consistent and predictable). The war in Yugoslavia, growing nationalism, break-up of Czechoslovakia, current Russian-Ukrainian conflict didn't help promote the similarities but the reverse, the differences are highlighted. Now we have Serbo-Croatian officially split into at least three languages. Polish is not considered hard by Russians, even if they don't have exposure to it. Bulgarian has a huge common written vocabulary with Russian due to Old Church Slavonic influence (while Ukrainian and Belarusian often differ - also heavy Polish influence) but grammars are quite different between Bulgarian and Russian.
 * East Slavic languages are all zero copula languages (in the present tense!) but "to be" is still used to highlight or stress something, in expressions. In modern Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian the surviving remainders of "to be" (, and ) are 3rd person singular forms:,  and  correspondingly. They are used by all persons and numbers, not just 3rd person singular. Other present tense forms are mostly archaic. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 00:17, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

 * Lower Sorbian, which is more closely related to Polish than Russian is, is definitely not a zero copula language. Even the "l-form" of the past tense is still a true participle which requires a form of "to be", e.g. wón jo cytał knigły "he read [or 'was reading' I guess since it's imperfective] a book", where Russian and (I believe) Polish both treat the "l-form" as the main verb: он читал, on czytał (right?). —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 11:43, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Slovene and Serbo-Croatian work the same way. They require an auxiliary verb with the l-participle. 11:47, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I am not sure what you mean by "the main verb", but the -ł (-ła, -ło) form is considered a regular past tense. The copula was used for the pluperfect tense, however. — Keφr 15:44, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I wasn't sure what I meant by that either. A finite verb, I guess, as opposed to a participle, which is nonfinite. Our definition of finite verb is pretty sucky, incidentally; I'm not convinced that all finite verbs in all languages can stand alone as a complete sentence. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:30, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

watchlist
can anybody explain the meaning of what is written below?:

(diff | hist). . mercatino dell'usato; 19:06. . (-233) . . SemperBlotto (Talk | contribs) (one day she'll get the message)

 * Nobody can understand that. You have to provide a diff: like this. It shows what was edited, deleted, etc.
 * It means that, for one thing, the three definitions, rummage sale, jumble sale, garage sale, are synonyms. They are the same thing, so they belong on the same line.
 * Then he also wants you to use (instead of ) . Especially, the template  instead of . This also shows the plural form. —Stephen (Talk) 02:54, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Thank you Stephen but what I do not understand is the comment between brackets! In any case to whom it may concern I belong to male gender as my name is Maurizio (with final O)
 * I think philosophers sometimes use as a generic third-person pronoun. I am not sure if User:SemperBlotto feels like a philosopher. Pinging for clarification. (Right now Angelucci is, according to Special:Preferences.) — Keφr 17:44, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

can't understand sth in a BBC video
I've listened to it several times, but I can't make out what is being said in this video at 00:17 ("where the president ..."). Could you help me out? --Fsojic (talk) 23:38, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
 * 00:17 is "the long war in Afghanistan will wind it down". I didn't hear "where the president" though. Wyang (talk) 23:57, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

 * Beginning at 00:17 ... “Americans have learned that it’s harder to end wars than it is to begin them. And this is how wars end in the 21st century. Not through signing ceremonies, but through decisive blows against our adversaries, transitions to elected government, security forces who are trained to take the lead and, ultimately, full responsibility.” —Stephen (Talk) 02:48, 28 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks (must have dreamt for "where the president"...)--Fsojic (talk) 10:01, 28 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Actually that's not exactly the same video as before... --Fsojic (talk) 10:03, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Statistics
Well I understand we are working very hard here on this project, all of us. But how many people actually use this as a dictionary without necessarily editing? Kind of like how millions of people use Wikipedia as an encyclopedia. Ready Steady Yeti (talk) 22:26, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

= June 2014 =

require
Is this good English: ‘I require to take a shit?’ --Æ&Œ (talk) 17:15, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

 * I don't think so. "Need" takes the to-infinitive but "require" doesn't. Comparable case: "I love to fly" but not "I adore to fly". Equinox ◑ 17:27, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

 * So what’s a superior way to compose it? ‘I require taking a shit?’ Is that good English? --Æ&Œ (talk) 18:19, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

 * "Require" is very formal and "shit" is very informal, so that still sounds silly. What's wrong with "need"? Equinox ◑ 18:23, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

 * ‘To take a shit’ is just an example, something that was quick and easy for me to conceive. Just replace it with whatever verb you prefer. --Æ&Œ (talk) 18:59, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

 * Well, "I require a shit" is grammatically acceptable! I don't think you're going to find a way to include the verb with "require", because it just doesn't sound right with verbs, in the same way that "wish" doesn't sound right with nouns. ("I want or wish to be paid", "I want payment", but not "I wish payment".) Equinox ◑ 19:08, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
 * By saying "I require to take a shit.", you're saying that "to take a shit" is mandatory, which actually doesn't make sense. Although saying "I require you-" or "I require him to take a shit." might be more acceptable. But still I think these are even grammatically incorrect. Ready Steady Yeti (talk) 20:22, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

 * Acceptable is "I am required to take a shit." I don’t believe it is grammatical to say "I require to [verb]": I require to eat, I require to sleep, I require to play baseball. "I require" takes a noun: I require food, I require sleep. —Stephen (Talk) 03:25, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * But "I am required to [verb]" doesn't mean the same thing as "I need to [verb]". The first implies something or someone that is doing the requiring. I suppose "I require myself to [verb]" is grammatical, but a native speaker would rarely use that construction in preference to "I need to [verb]". DCDuring TALK 19:17, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * "I require myself to [verb]" is acceptable in the sense "I impose upon myself the requirement that I [verb]", though, isn't it? As in, "I require myself to examine all claims thoroughly." Or how would you express that? - -sche (discuss) 20:14, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, the construction can make sense, but it is not quite the same as "need to verb". To me it has the flavor of (resorting to expressive if unscientific Freudian terms) "I (superego) require myself (ego, id?) to [verb]". DCDuring TALK 23:11, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Types of object
In sentences like "I painted the wall red" or "They made the cave their home", what is the syntactic role of the two constituents following the verb ("the wall" / "the cave" and "red" / "their home")? Direct, indirect, something else? 20:47, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

 * It’s an object complement. An object complement is a noun, pronoun, or adjective that follows a direct object to rename it or state what it has become. —Stephen (Talk) 03:59, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

‘God bless you’
Is there a secular equivalent to this? --Æ&Œ (talk) 15:51, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Gesundheit. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:14, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

 * Ehh, I was thinking more along the lines of an encouragement. --Æ&Œ (talk) 16:34, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

 * Hm, interesting question. What GBY usually means is "you have done something good for me; I hope God rewards you", so the secular equivalent (where you don't believe there's a God who can do this) would probably just be an emphatic thank you! (or perhaps wishing them good fortune, karma etc. if you believe in those other wacky things). Equinox ◑ 16:53, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
 * bless you: should suffice for all except those who would excise, root and branch, all traces of religion in our cultural history. DCDuring TALK 17:19, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

New entry
Hi

How long does it take before a new entry goes live and can be picked up by Google?

Yesterday, I entered the term Generation 9k but cannot see it via Google.

Be grateful for your advice.

Thank you

Steph

depth, width, height, length
Is there an appropriate category to gather all these words? --Fsojic (talk) 14:10, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Category:Dimensions and Category:en:Dimensions don't exist, but we could consider creating them. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:33, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
 * What else would they contain? — Keφr 15:35, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Time, maybe? Considering there are only three dimensions in space, I'm impressed we even have four terms to put in. More generally, I see that WP has w:Category:Physical quantities for pretty much everything that can be measured; maybe we could have that too. Or just put them in Category:en:Geometry, perhaps? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:37, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

THANKS
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR BEING HERE FOR ME. YOU ARE THE "ANSWERS" TO ALL MY INQUIRES.
 * You're very much welcome!

(my troll senses are tingling...) BUT EVEN SO, that is so true, Wiktionary is amazing. Ready Steady Yeti (talk) 23:22, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

searching words
Can I search a word in English and find that word in singular and plural form in other languages to, all being in English?

 * You can search a word in English and, if you're lucky, find the lemma form of that word (usually, just the singular) in the language you're interested in under the "Translations" header. If it's a blue link, you can go to the entry and (hopefully) find the plural there. If it's a red link, you're out of luck. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:25, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

parsing
I don't understand how this phrase is built: "To hear this history rehearsed, for that there be inserted in it no fables, shall be perhaps not delightful." Could you help me out? --Fsojic (talk) 11:32, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
 * for that = for the reason that: obsolete for "because" is the definition given in Webster 1913. Hobbes used it c. 1629. However I gloss it as "in order that" or "so that". I'm not sure whether he means that the reader will find that he repeats parts of the narrative from different reporters or something else. DCDuring TALK 12:01, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
 * so that no fables be inserted in it. ("there" is a pronoun that refers to "no fables".) —Stephen (Talk) 15:38, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Category:mul:Taxonomic names (species)
Is these page really useful? Isn't they duplicated to Wikipedia and Wikispecies? How many species are allowed?--GZWDer (talk) 16:24, 16 June 2014 (UTC)
 * There are no limits on how many species are allowed. We only require that the taxonomic names be used three times in durably archived works, as any other terms included.
 * As you know, neither Wikispecies nor Wikipedia have anything close to a complete listing of currently accepted species or other taxa. Nor do they have many translations of such terms. Nor do they usually have information about etymology (more relevant for genus and supra-generic names) or of the gender of each term, most relevant for genus and sub-generic terms.
 * As to duplication, I always wondered why Wikispecies had any translations and why Wikipedia had any etymologies or translations. DCDuring TALK 18:23, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Translation display
At your mileage may vary, ten translations are provided: three for one alternate version of the phrase, and seven for another alternate. In both, Finnish is by itself on one side, while everything else is on the other side. Why? I checked the code, so I know that it's hardcoded; I'm asking why this is the standard setup, or if this is non-standard and should be changed. Nyttend (talk) 21:51, 24 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Usually, which is run by , takes care of that, but it seems it hasn't run for a long time. You can fix it manually. --WikiTiki89 22:09, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

how can i learn form wiktionary?
how can i learn form wiktionary? Main question from my side. Are you People teaching us, etymology or just a language translation?
 * look, this is just a dictionary. --kc_kennylau (talk) 07:49, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

 * First, you decide what you want to know about a word. If you want to know its etymology, look at that. If you want to know its translation into other languages, look at that. If you want its pronunciation, look at that. If you want its definition, look at that. If you want synonyms, look there. If you want antonyms, look there. If you want related terms, look there. If you want anagrams, look there. If you want to know the plural or past tense, look at that. Look for what interests you and ignore the rest. —Stephen (Talk) 16:57, 25 June 2014 (UTC)