User talk:Catsidhe

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Again, welcome! —Angr 20:43, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

I see that you translated the French quotations at Homo erectus and Homo sapiens sapiens (note that this quotation is also at Homines sapientes sapientes). I think if the original text uses the plural Homines erecti (and Homines sapientes sapientes), then it should not be changed to the singular (Homo Erectus; also note that erectus should not be capitalized) in the translation.

You have a point about the capitalisation, but I disagree with the plural on linguistic terms: translingual terms often find themselves subjected to the grammar of the language in whose context they find themselves. And the standard English usage for Species names is to treat them as indeclinable. A google search for "these homines erecti" or "those ..." results in no hits at all. Which isn't a hugely scientific test, but "these homo erectus" or "those homo sapiens sapiens", where the species is treated as a plural noun (as opposed to an adjective or an attributive noun phrase, as in "these homo erectus fossils" or the like) are plentiful in websites, books, and scientific papers.

I submit that the normal English usage is that Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo erectus are indeclinable.

Hi Catsidhe, I know you're in favour of adding a ghc code to Wiktionary, but I'm not completely sure if our views coincide or not. I've been trying to put this argument to Angr (which I have at times had to reword simply to make it sound less churlish), but in particular I say I'd describe it as "a neutral term to describe early Scottish Gaelic word forms corresponding to Early Modern Irish [but for which the term 'Irish' may be considered inappropriate.]", and I'm guessing you agree with this. However, it also came to me that I couldn't think of another use for it, because it seems to me Angr's right that ga can encompass EMI (because it's still MI). And just today it occurred to me I actually don't like the term "Classical Gaelic" all that much, because he made a lot of capital out of the fact that it's a literary language (which of course it is). So I ended saying that it maybe ought to be called simply 'Early Gaelic', which would point more clearly to the fact that it was once a living, spoken language in Scotland. Any thoughts? Gherkinmad (talk) 17:32, 21 August 2017 (UTC) Gherkinmad (talk) 17:32, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

The problem with using ghc for Early Modern Scottish Gaelic alone is that that isn't how it's defined. The canonical name for ghc is "Hiberno-Scottish Gaelic" and covers the early modern literary language of both countries (sensibly, since it was virtually identical in both countries). It sounds like you're now advocating using it only for the language of Scotland, or at least only in ScG etymologies.

(Sorry to write in Engilsh)

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Would it be possible to create a template like R:ga:Ó Dónaill for Foras na Gaeilge's New English-Irish Dictionary? There's loads that's in there but not in Ó Dónaill, and while I find it quite easy to type in the template for Ó Dónaill when I'm fixing something else or creating an entry, I'm reluctant to try to cite the newer dictionary when it means figuring out exactly how it should be formatted and such. A template would be lovely.

Mar seo?

{{R:ga:Foras|dictionary}}

“dictionary”, in New English-Irish Dictionary, Foras na Gaeilge, 2013–2024

Go díreach mar sin. Go raibh maith agat.

I see you reverted my table of seasons of the year from one entry (diff). It seems the problem is the cutesy images? I tried finding real-world photos of each season from Wikimedia Commons to add to the template, but it was difficult to find one for summer specifically, at least one that I would like. Also, cartoonish images work better in low resolutions, while detailed images would seem to require higher resolutions to look good. In any event, that's just my opinion. I've been adding the table to other entries linked in the multiple languages of Template:table:seasons/en, so it isn't a matter of keeping or deleting the table from 1 entry. If the template looks good now, or can be edited to look good, I would like it to be used in all the applicable entries.

In short, yes, I find the images twee, cutesy-poo and (at best) deeply annoying. I don't know that tricks like hiding them by default and making them expandable would make them any better.

Partly because they personally irritate me, partly because they make Wiktionary look like My First Illustrated Dictionary For Children (ages 4-8).

You know what works at every resolution? Text.

In a wider sense, I get the whole Be Bold attitude, but this is changing the look and feel of the whole project, and I'm not sure it's adding much, and I don't get the impression that you care much what anyone else thinks. (That is, you are offering the choices of "do it my way, or do it my way with trivial cosmetic changes". Not doing it your way is not an option, and your way involves -- requires -- doing it everywhere.)

I get that you're trying to make the project better, but I disagree that what you're doing necessarily does.

I'm not sure I especially like the way they look either. Plus, conception of seasons is very culture-dependent, and these images (or even for seasons) makes no sense in some languages.

This template does not have to be used for any languages which have seasons other than the 4-season system. I'm going to mention this on the BP.

Ok, I apologize for making it sound like only "my way" counts, Catsidhe. Let me explain: in your revert, you said "That is twee, insulting, and i would like you to stop that now. It's starting to feel like vandalism.", which is vague. I understood that you preferred the list format as opposed to the table format by reverting the edit, but I can see that the images could be called "twee" and I thought: "If there's any possibility to keep the table format, maybe the only problem are the images? I might as well ask." I was just presenting and trying to adapt my proposal if needed, I was not trying to invalidade what you think. In any event, I'm going to post a Beer Parlour discussion about this template now, which you could participate. I just want to make sure what format the community prefers for this. I'm ready to undo the changes, but I'd feel stupid if I re-edited the entries right now to return to the list format without any further discussions and other people wanted to discuss the issue or wanted the tables back.

Is your name supposed to be pronounced as /kɛt.ʃi/, /kɑt.ʃið/, /kɑt.sið/, /kɑt.ʃiðe/ or what? I assumed the first one, but I just wanted to make sure.

In Modern (pre reformation) Irish, it's something like /kɑt ʃi:/.

In Old/Middle Irish, /kɑt ʃiðe/. But I pronounce it as Modern Irish.

Ah, I see. Thank you for the response.

Thanks for finding a citation. Your citation is for selaphobic, though.

Therein potentially lies a problem: these words go together as a semantic block. The condition is selaphobia, the description is selaphobic, the person suffering is a selaphobe. This is all perfectly regular, to the extent that if we can attest the concept, we may as well use that attestation to work for all (trivially predictable) forms. It's not exactly the same situation of using the genitive or plural as attestation of the lemma, but it is, I submit, very close. (We might even extend the idea to a template of related terms, such as "autism:autistic:autist", "schizophrenia:schizophrenic:schizophrenic", &c.)

Otherwise we've got the situation that we might not be able to find three attestations of "selaphobia", but can find only one each of "selaphobia", "selaphobe" and "selaphobic", and therefore the concept itself must be deleted in its entirely, being unattestable in any specific form.

As another question, all these -phobia words are largely from word lists... but they are in a lot of those lists, including fairly official-looking ones. (Medical dictionaries and the like.) Is it worth including these terms anyway, with a label or etymology note that it's (almost) exclusively found in such a list? Because I can see someone using such a word (because it's commonly packaged up in lists for that very purpose), someone else wanting to know what it means, and when they come here they can't find out because we've decided that it doesn't really exist. When we could have the far more useful "this word means "blah" in theory, but doesn't seem to be used in practice. It was probably invented for lexical completeness' sake."

We have such a list: Appendix:Invented phobias. I've mentioned it to the creator of these recent unattestables.

If you have to know exactly where to look to find a term, because it's not otherwise findable, maybe it's not so useful to hide things away there?

Then we can use the "stub" entries that just redirect to the appendix, as we have done with some fictional-universe junk, I suppose.

Hi, could you update Template:ga-noun/documentation to reflect the changes you just made? It looks like you added an option for a second genitive form, which is fine (though apart from talamh I can't think of any Irish nouns with more than one genitive form), but it looks like you might also have added an option for "no genitive". As far as I know, all Irish nouns have a genitive, although in fourth-declension nouns it has the same form as the nominative.

Yeah, I can do that. The "no genitive" option was already there, I just did a cut and paste from what was there. (It was probably cut and pasted from somewhere else ... should I change "no genitive" to repeat the nominative lemma in that position?)

I included it for beithir, which is declined in Old Irish as both what looks like ī-stem as beithre, and as gutteral stem as bethrach. Dinneen gives only the ī-stem genitive, but Ó Dónaill gives beithreach as a variant, and beathrach is the regular genitive in Scottish Gaelic (according to Dwelly, anyway).

I'll clean up and document the changes for ga-noun. I think I will add pl2= as well

Looks fine. Thanks!

Just letting you know that I moved your post from Translation Requests to WT:INFO. I hope you don't mind, I didn't think that it belonged in Translation Requests, since it wasn't supposed to translate anything.

   [smile] As you showed interest (and lack of offence) enuf to have replied, you certainly deserve a translation; i'm no doubt a lousy judge of how many people can puzzle out that sentence. I might do better using a consultant, but i think this is prolly pretty close:

"In Deutsch" is frequently described as [an] Englishism [or anglicism?], as [an] excessively word-for-word version of "in German".

I'm interested to notice that i accept those omissions of indefinite articles; i think they reflect a handful of verbs that call for the "as" equivalent "als", but not for an article. I don't think either of my teachers discussed the phenomenon, but they they must have tacitly demonstrated it.

   I looked some more at the page, which says (bcz it's on an English-language collection of "sites", apparently)

German Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of German wanting to discuss the finer points of the language and translation.

despite all the discussion being conducted in German.
   You might be interested that translation into German is "in Deutsch", and (i guess i was careless) for example, "... im deutschen Gebrauch..." would, i think, be correct for "... in German-language usage...". The word "im" is a contraction of "in dem" ("in the", with dative case reflected), and there are places (of course, i guess) where they expect a definite article but we would find its use there stilted.
   There are a lot of cases subtle enuf that it stopped being fun to read them. (BTW, you might, as a more serious lexicographer than i, be interested in wikipedia:Duden which describes a great example of deutsche Grundlichkeit or German thoroughness; the participants in the GLSE keep saying "Look, here's what Duden has about yet another special case.")
   Thanks again,

I have great sympathy for Mark Twain when he wrote

Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions." He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it.

But then you take a look at Old Irish verb conjugations, and crawl back to German, everything forgiven.

  I think my German teacher quoted part of that essay, which i think of as something close to "The Horrible German Language". What i specifically recall was a supposed job title, close to "Oberlandesbaudirektionsrechnungsabteilungsrevisionsassistent".

Hi, are you thinking about making the headword template for Irish adjectives, {{ga-adj}}?

It has crossed my mind.

I have recently expanded the page Wiktionary:About Irish. Please take a look, be bold in changing it, and make comments on the talk page. Thanks!

If {{str right}} were restored, would it be able to check the last letter of a preceding string? In particular, what I would like to do is make a declension-table template for Lower Sorbian, in which t and d sometimes turns into ś and ź respectively, except that st and zd turn into sć and zdź. So given a template input like {{dsb-decl-n-18|blabla|t}} it would generate blablaśe, but given {{dsb-decl-n-18|blablas|t}} it would see the "s" at the end of the first parameter and generate blablasće rather than *blablasśe. Is that doable?

It's theoretically doable, but there are complications. Main amongst these is the {{str len}} function being a crawling horror.

And yet... It looks like some actual string parsing functions may now be enabled as inherent functions (which is to say, Special:Version mentions having https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ParserFunctions enabled, which appears to have https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:StringFunctions mostly folded into it, which actually features useful tools.

I'll have to experiment with seeing if it actually works, and if it does, quite a lot of things will suddenly become easier, and more will become practically possible.

Give me some time to have a hack around and see what works...

I take it back. The string extensions are not enabled on Wiktionary.

From a quick look what it requires for them to be enabled is

Add to the bottom of LocalSettings.php:

require_once( "$IP/extensions/ParserFunctions/ParserFunctions.php" );

If you want to use the integrated string function functionality, add just after that line

$wgPFEnableStringFunctions = true;

which is something the Site admins have to do.

Once that's done, taking the final character of a string is a native expression (not a template function), and as simple as {{#pos:string|-1}}, which currently is invalid, but if/when the string extensions are enabled, will return "g". (And {{#pos:string|-2}} returns "ng", etc.

With String Extensions enabled, a lot of things which are currently difficult, impossible, or so expensive as to be dangerous, become trivial.

Why in hell do we not have this enabled???? I thought the devs were opposed to it or something, but it seems like it'd be ridiculous to keep going on without string manipulation and hoping that Scribunto will be deployed (will that even happen this year?).

To the Batmobile Grease Pit!

Well, for now, I've made {{dsb-decl-noun-2}} such that the user simply has to specify whether the stem ends in d/t or zd/st. Ain't nobody got time for that!

I would have left comments on the talk pages of your subpages, but I'm not sure you'd see them. User talk:Catsidhe/sga-lenite, for example, is considered a subpage of your talk page, not the talk page of a subpage of your user page, so watchlisting one doesn't entail watchlisting the other. Anyway:

User:Catsidhe/sga-lenite

As in Modern Irish, s doesn't lenite in Old Irish before c m p t, only before vowels and l n r, so for s it's necessary to see what the following letters is.

User:Catsidhe/Old Irish Nouns

Declension-table templates are usually named "xx-decl-...", so when you make these into full-fledged templates they should be named things like {{sga-decl-m}}, {{sga-decl-m2}}, {{sga-decl-n}}, {{sga-decl-f}}, and the like. Also, per WT:ASGA, lenited f and s are shown unchanged in name pages, so when things like ḟer appear in tables, the link should be [[fer|ḟer]], not [[ḟer]].

Re: lenition of s: thank you. That was exactly the detail I knew I was missing, but could neither remember nor find. I suppose the {{sga-lenite|w}}ord invocation will need to be strongly deprecated, then.

Re: naming: I would be replacing the tables with their *2 version, of which only the masc exists so far. It's complicated to write, and complicated squared to do anything clever.

Re: page titles: I'm ahead of you there. If you look at the *2 template, it shows the lenited/nasalised version, but links to the unmutated form.

Part of the joy is figuring out how to do the calculations of which form to infer if it's not specified for a given declension. This, of course, changes per stem as well as per gender. -o- and -io- currently get a correct table with only ns, as, gs and ds supplied. I'm trying to extract these patterns from Strachan and to a lesser extent Thurneysen, but it's almost as brain-stretching as is writing the templates in the first place.

--Catsidhe (talk) 20:52, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

But as I've mentioned somewhere else, I'm not sure we should be listing inferred forms. Old Irish is a very unpredictable language, and it may be best if we list only forms that are actually attested, not forms that are inferred or reconstructed.

Also, I see I was mistaken: User talk:Catsidhe/sga-lenite is considered the talk page of User:Catsidhe/sga-lenite, so I could have commented there, but this way the conversation is all in one place.

Unpredictable, at times, and often opaque, but hardly random.

How about, then: if no stem is given ({{sga-decl-m||..., then no inferral is done. Otherwise, inferral per standard tables. -o- and -io- stems are pretty well attested, and Strachan does point out that, eg., Vocative forms aren't provided for any consonantal stem cases because vs=ns and vp=ap for all of them. In any case, an override is fairly simple to provide.

It's also possible (although tricky) to set up an override such that if, say, as is not provided then it is replaced with vs, but if it is provided but blank (ie., ...|as=|..., then it is left blank in the table. (ie., overridden with nothing at all.)

Those both sound look good ideas.