User talk:Antiquistik

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Enjoy your stay at Wiktionary! --Vahag (talk) 19:58, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome! Antiquistik (talk) 20:35, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Old Persian

If Reconstruction:Old Persian/R̥tavazdā is the nominative singular, then what is Reconstruction:Old Persian/R̥tavazdaʰ? --Vahag (talk) 14:25, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Old Persian/R̥tavazdaʰ is the undeclined form. Antiquistik (talk) 15:06, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

We should choose one of these as the Lemma and have all the information in the lemma page. Also @Victar. --Vahag (talk) 16:30, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

I agree. Antiquistik (talk) 16:31, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

@Antiquistik, Vahagn Petrosyan: -ā is the nominative case ending of fem. a-stem or neut. s-stem, and -aʰ is a nominative masc. a-stem. Is there a reason you made them as two different stems? --{{victar|talk}} 17:00, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Looks like it was an error of my part. Feel free to correct it. Antiquistik (talk) 17:05, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Antiquistik, I got on your case about this on your IP talk page too, you need to first work out the Proto-Iranian reconstruction of a term to properly reconstruct OP, which includes the word's declension. Also, some Hinz/Tavernier reconstructions are really iffy, and at times conflicting, and might be better suited just for etymologies. --{{victar|talk}} 17:11, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

@Victar, do you have any source or other material I can use to be able to do reconstructions more properly in this case? Antiquistik (talk) 17:17, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

If it's a reconstruction, you'll have to look into {{R:ira:ESIJa}} or {{R:inc:IAIL}}, etc. You can find any good sources in Category:Proto-Iranian reference templates. --{{victar|talk}} 17:26, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll look into them. Antiquistik (talk) 17:27, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Also, @Victar, is there any protocol on Wiktionary for terms in Prakrit languages written in later non-Unicode encoded Brahmi variants? Or does Wiktionary simply not host entries on these at all? Antiquistik (talk) 17:48, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

We have several Prakrits written in Brahmi variants, so yes. If there is a specific question, I recommend posting it to Category talk:Prakrit languages. --{{victar|talk}} 20:02, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Reconstruction entries

Antiquistik, hey man, I've been cleaning up all your reconstruction entries for Old Persian and it takes a lot of work. I haven't even started the Median ones you created, which, from the looks of it, are actually mostly Old Persian. Can you please take a break from adding more and have a look at my corrections to try and avoid the same mistakes in the future? --{{victar|talk}} 07:20, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Ok, I'll take a break from adding more and do my best to not repeat the sane mistakes in the future. Antiquistik (talk) 11:34, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. The issue with the Old Median entries is that Old Persian borrowed a lot of terms from Median and Avestan that ended up displacing the native words. That's the case with *farnah, *ciθraʰ, and 𐎷𐎰𐎼 (mi-θ-r /⁠Miθraʰ⁠/). --{{victar|talk}} 23:18, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

@Victar is there any reason why you removed the Kharosthi text for the Gandhari descendants for 𐎻𐎡𐎭𐎳𐎼𐎴𐎠? Because they are fairly well attested. Antiquistik (talk) 10:34, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

There was an error in the characters being used, so I removed it to let someone else with more knowledge fill it. --{{victar|talk}} 16:18, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

What error? Antiquistik (talk) 16:41, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

{{l|pgd|𐨒𐨂𐨡𐨂𐨵𐨪‎|tr=Guduvhara}} --{{victar|talk}} 17:04, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

My entry was based on Sten Konow's reading in Kharoshṭhī Inscriptions with the Exception of Those of Aśoka, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Vol. II, Part I, which, as far as I know is still the accepted reading. However do let me know if you ever find any material that corrects or otherwise contradicts it. Antiquistik (talk) 18:05, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Feel free to add it back with the citation attached. Please remember to use {{cite-book}}. --{{victar|talk}} 19:25, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

@Victar: are *Spitaka and *Spitāma alright or do they need corrections too? Antiquistik (talk) 15:05, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

They do, I just haven't gotten around to them. --{{victar|talk}} 08:27, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Reference templates

Hey Antiquistik, I see you adding some sources, which is great, but many of the sources have already created reference templates, like {{R:ine:EIEC}}. Please reference language categories like WT:RTINE. --{{victar|talk}} 03:00, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

@Victar Thanks for informing me. I'll use the templates in the future. Antiquistik (talk) 06:57, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Scythian *spala

Antiquistik, all these etymologies of Scythian proper names with the element *spala- with the meaning "army" are very speculative. The Proto-Scythian term for "army" was *spāda. *spala- is said to come from the Spali tribe, which is of uncertain meaning. --{{victar|talk}} 21:52, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

@Victar If there are better etymology proposals than Harmatta's, then I will need sources to correct the entries on these pages. Also, given we are having Scythian etymologies on Wiktionary, could we enable the rendering of Scythian on the etymology templates and the creation of pages for Scythian/Saka language entries? Antiquistik (talk) 20:42, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

The etymology is that it's simply from the tribe name, which is known and attested. "Spala is obviously borrowed from Parthian *spāδa ‘army’" is a preposterous sentence. I wouldn't trust this paper as far as I can throw it. "Enable the rendering of Scythian"? You're also using the terms Scythian and Saka interchangeably which isn't synonymous in linguistics. --{{victar|talk}} 02:39, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

@Victar Alright, I understand. However a source to be used as citation will still be needed for the pages containing these Saka etymologies. Leaving only this paper as citation for these etymologies is problematic. Antiquistik (talk) 07:36, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

@Victar Re: *spala-: a sound change from /d/ to /δ/ to /l/ is attested in some Scythian and Saka languages, such as the evolution of *Skuda- to *Skuδa- to *Skula-, and the original Scythian name from which Παραλάται was borrowed as a cognate of Avestan 𐬞𐬀𐬭𐬀𐬜𐬁𐬙𐬀 (paraδāta). Based on that, I don't think we should fully exclude a derivation of *spāda- > *spāδa- > *spāla-, and maybe we should maintain it as one of multiple possible etymologies. Antiquistik (talk) 21:43, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, all these at Category:Gandhari terms borrowed from Scythian languages should be in Category:Gandhari terms borrowed from Proto-Saka. --{{victar|talk}} 04:48, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

• Sidenote: Don't use abbreviations in etymologies, like cf., but instead use compare. --{{victar|talk}} 03:07, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

ʕaṯtar-

A lot of unexplained removals there, especially deleted Aramaic forms, which you seem to have deleted to be safe instead of assigning them to whence they are borrowed or inherited. The Lipiński references lack page numbers and I am not going to seek them out to reconstruct an eventual reasoning from your side. The Ancient North Arabian form appears duplicate. This is double-sad as the entry has a lot of popularity witnessed by its page views. Fay Freak (talk) 21:33, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

@Fay Freak I removed the Aramaic entries relating to ʿtrʿth because Lipiński and his source, Drijvers (1999), argue that ʿth is an Aramaean variant of ʿAnat, and that ʿtr- in her name was a prefix meaning "goddess," and not a reference to ʕaṯtar-.

The Ancient North Arabian form is not duplicate; the entry without the script is the proper Ancient North Arabian form of the name, with both a ṯ and a t, hence why it was borrowed into Aramaic and Phoenician as ʿAštarum, with ṯ > š; the entry with the script inserted is an Aramaic borrowing with a double t sound.

I would have added the page numbers, but I would need a template footnote like Wikipedia's {{sfn}} to be able to do so, since different separate pages from the same book make up the sources, but Wiktionary seems to be lacking one. Antiquistik (talk) 22:02, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Ehm, you can just put arbitrary content into |pages=, the possible link will be to the first number. It is not required by us that you also create footnotes. You can even write in words in the reference section what page is important to what etc., we often do that when we claim the opposite of what is in a reference for some reason. Fay Freak (talk) 22:09, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

@Fay Freak I'll do so. Although it would be a much welcome improvement to add the same citation templates as Wikipedia to Wiktionary, as the lack of those on Wiktionary makes editing quite difficult. Antiquistik (talk) 22:48, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Actually, consequentially, for making our treatment explicit, it is desirable to link the removed forms in the reference sections, stating that these and these forms are not listed by us in the descendants sections because the analysis according to the author is so and so. We totally do link wrongly connected words in reference sections following our logics. Fay Freak (talk) 22:17, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

@Fay Freak Since I don't know how Wiktionary normally explains wrongly connected words, what kind of format should I use for explaining these? Or are there any already pages with similarly incorrectly connected words which I could use as example? Antiquistik (talk) 22:51, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

e.g. قَلَطِي (qalaṭī), ء و ل (ʔ w l), ճռել (čṙel), σόλτ' (sólt'), մասուր (masur), թոխոր (tʻoxor), нишкъатӏ (nišq̇aṭ). Fay Freak (talk) 23:07, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

@Fay Freak After reviewing some additional sources, it does seem that Aramaic ʿtrʿth was indeed a composite of ʿtr derived from Proto-Semitic *ʕaṯtar-, and of Aramaic ʿth. However I think this should be mentioned in the page for Old Aramaic 𐡏𐡕𐡓‎ (ʿtr‎) rather than on the *ʕaṯtar- article. Antiquistik (talk) 16:49, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Ἀγάθυρσοι

Ἀγάθυρσοι is a good example, to be blunt, of your lack of understanding of Iranian linguistics, unable to form proper reconstructions, let alone comprehensively parse the data. The creation of a Proto-Scythian entry in this case, as with the majority of others your suggesting, would be recklessly speculative. Onomastics, by nature, is inherently dubious, and without proper knowledge, simply bad linguistics. I urge you to reconsider creating any more Iranian reconstructions. --{{victar|talk}} 20:53, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

@victar I am aware that the etymologies at Ἀγάθυρσοι (Agáthursoi) (and Ἰδάνθυρσος (Idánthursos)) are extremely dubious, and I am myself very sceptical of them. However, if you are telling me this in relation to the discussion we've had in the Beer Parlour, then I don't see the relation between what you are telling me now and that other discussion. I don't need Proto-Scythian entries for highly speculative etymologies like Ἀγάθυρσοι (Agáthursoi), I need entries for ones that can be more reliably reconstructed by Scythologists, such as the ones for Lipoxais, Arpoxais and Kolaxais, which themselves rest on a firmer basis than for Ἀγάθυρσοι (Agáthursoi). Antiquistik (talk) 05:42, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

@Victar I also see that you haven't responded to me asking whether I should send you those studies. If you don't integrate the work of Bukharin, Kullanda and Tokhtasyev into your understanding of Scythian languages, it will significantly hinder the coverage of Scythian languages and Scythian-derived terms on Wiktionary.

You can't reconstruct the relationship between the different Scythian languages without taking account both the historical movement of populations as attested by archaeology and the corresponding epigraphic evidence. It shows in how you insisted that the language of the Pontic Scythians was part of the Ossetic family even though:

1. Tokhtasyev has already shown that epigraphically attested Pontic Scythian and Sarmato-Alanian names exhibit too many differences to be classifiable as a single language, and that Abaev had used only data from Sarmatian onomastics while ignoring Scythian data which showed differing morphology to hypothesise the existence of a single Scytho-Sarmatian language (what you call Old Ossetic).
2. the formation of the Sarmatians from the absorption of the Sauromatians by Saka groups from Central Asia such that there is archaeological continuity between the Sarmatians and those Saka groups but not with the Sauromatians possibly means that the Sarmatian language (and its Alanian and Ossetic descendants) isn't descended or closely related to Scythian or even Sauromatian, but might instead be more closely related to the eastern Saka languages than to Pontic Scythian.

And it also shows in how you corrected 𐨭𐨿𐨤𐨫𐨒𐨡𐨨 (Śpalagadama) to derive from Spalä (tribe name), no doubt based on Tuomo Pekkanen's 1973 paper, even though the Spali were a Pontic Scythian tribe while Śpalagadama was one of the Saka who entered South Asia in the late 1st millennium BCE from the easternmost Eurasian steppe, meaning that the language that the name "Śpalagadama" is from must have had different features while still belonging to the Scythian language family.

Antiquistik (talk) 14:16, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Gaulish spellings of /k/ and /w/

For reconstructed words in attested languages, we generally spell them in the same orthography as the other attested words in the language. This is true from languages ranging from Primitive Irish (spelled in the Ogam alphabet), Proto-Norse (spelled in runes), Old English and Latin (both of which use the letter C, not K, to render /k/). There is no reason for Gaulish to be any different, and Gaulish inscriptions in the Latin script don't use K or W, they use C and U instead. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 18:08, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

@Mellohi! Thanks for explaining. However, based on @Victar's explanation to me that there is a rule of using cuneiform only for attested Old Persian words but the phonetic Romanisation for non-attested ones, I was under the impression that this was the Wiktionary standard for all languages. I am a bit confused now. Antiquistik (talk) 14:02, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

It's true, most academic reconstructions are written in Latin script, for clarity, and that's especially the case for languages like cuneiform Old Persian, which are orthographically unpredictable and difficult to read. To the point of Primitive Irish, I can't find any author that reconstructs it in Ogam, and there is probably a good argument to reconstruct it in Latin script as well, and I would support that if brought up in a discussion.

Regarding the spelling of Gaulish, Mellohi recently respelled all the Gaulish entries to /c/ and /u/, without discussion. I don't really care either way, so long as we're consistent, but if you prefer one way over another, feel free to bring it up in the Beer Parlour.

--{{victar|talk}} 20:11, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Reconstruction:Old Persian/jīvakah

This entry has a nice etymology, but no part of speech or headword- sort of like a calf born with no head or legs (Please read WT:ELE). You left me with 2 choices: either fix it(crudely) myself, which I can't do without knowing the part of speech, or delete it as "No usable content given." I would rather that you would provide me a third choice, and fix it yourself. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 20:56, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

My bad, I must have missed it when creating the page. Thanks for letting me know, I've fixed it. Antiquistik (talk) 07:05, 26 August 2024 (UTC)