User talk:Eric Kvaalen

"Problem"

See Talk:problem Robert Ullmann 17:17, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

epithelium

This word comes from Modern Greek? Are you sure? Also, please see WT:ELE for our page layout and section order. The Etymology should be added at the top of an entry. --EncycloPetey 13:48, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I didn't say it was from Modern Greek! Eric Kvaalen (talk) 05:17, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

strake as past of strike

I found a couple of citations that look all right. Equinox ◑ 15:30, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

zoo- pronunciations

Hi. Please add, don't just replace. Often there is more than one. Equinox ◑ 13:23, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

hour, whore

[1]

Skip to 7:58. --Romanophile ♞ (contributions) 01:21, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

@Romanophile Thanks for the link. But I'm not convinced that the august professor and his son are right, for the following reasons:

1. They say that "whore" was pronounced with no "h" sound. On what basis? It certainly had the "h" sound in Old English, and it has it now. If it lost the sound in Early Modern English, then why did it gain it back again? I think the only words with silent "h" are words of Latin origin, usually coming to English through French. "Whore" is not one of those words.

2. They say that "hour" was pronounced like "or". Well, in Middle English it was something like /urə/, and in Modern English it's /aʊə(ɹ)/. Just like many other words, the /u/ changed to /aʊ/. There's no reason to think that it passed through /ɔ/. If it had been pronounced like "or", then why would "or" and "hour" be pronounced different today?

In fact, one can ask the same question about "whore" and "hour". If they were pronounced the same back in Shakespeare's time, then why are they now pronounced different, reflecting in each case the Middle English pronunciation?

It seems to me that the only argument they have is that they think it makes a bad joke in "As You Like It" Act 2 Scene 7 if you pronounce the two words the same.

Eric Kvaalen (talk) 05:50, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

For the aspiration, see [2] & [3]. For the vowel, look at this (page 27) and compare it with this (page 63). --Romanophile ♞ (contributions) 07:29, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

@Romanophile Your first link says that sometimes people would drop the h at the beginning of words, but usually when they were unstress'd. Your second link gives two more examples of it. Probably even today a Cockney would say "or" for "whore". But that certainly doesn't mean that it was the usual pronunciation. Your next two links are to two lines from Act 5 Scene 2 of "Loves Labors Lost":

We foure in-deed confronted were with foure

In Rußian habit: heere they ſtay'd an houre,

(The two links are practically the same.) Well, it could just be a bad rhyme. We would need to do a study of all the words that Shakespeare rhymes with "hour", and all the words that he rhymes with "four", in order to know whether these two words really rhymed in his time. Again, I don't think so, because they didn't rhyme earlier and they don't rhyme now.

If Shakespeare really wanted to make a bawdy joke in "As You Like It", why would he spell the word as "hour" all four times, when two of them are supposedly meant to be "whore"?

Eric Kvaalen (talk) 17:32, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

For [] sakes, are you going to keep making excuses every time I present new evidence to you?

Also, the reason why ‘houre’ was spelt ‘hour’ is because the text was updated by another author, AND the Google page only shows two results because the workers at Google are incompetent. Go to this page and look up ‘16.’ If I knew that you were going to keep making excuses not to include a dialectal variant, I would have just left your revisions alone. --Romanophile ♞ (contributions) 20:07, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

I’m sorry

I’d like to apologize for snapping at you like that. Shakespeare has a reputation for being a good writer and, to a less extent, being internally inconsistent, so I assumed that you knew those and were therefore being slightly malevolent. I probably should have replied with that, but instead I lost my patience, took it out on you, and antagonized you by assuming that you were just making excuses. You’d be right to feel needlessly uncomfortable or hurt after reading what I wrote, and I am sorry about how I mistreated you and how poorly that I handled this conversation. I’ll manage my anger properly and avoid writing profanely to you. --— (((Romanophile))) ♞ (contributions) 21:41, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

@Romanophile Well, that's nice, thanks! All is forgiven. By the way, rereading the exchange, I wonder whether you thought I was questioning (on April 8th) why Shakespeare (supposedly) wrote "hour" instead of "houre". That's not what I meant. Eric Kvaalen (talk) 02:08, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

soak

Please don't silently remove rfquoteks, especially if it's a sense you don't know! Equinox ◑ 09:47, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

@Equinox Sorry, I don't know what rfquoteks are, and I didn't remove any quote. And I don't know what you mean by "silently". I wrote a long comment explaining what I did. I simply moved the quote to be under the new definition which I added. Why do you think "soak" means "to absorb or drain"? Certainly the quote from Upton Sinclair means "to take money from". Eric Kvaalen (talk) 19:12, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

Plural of Middle English calf

The Scots Wiktionary entry (cauf) that you mentioned in your email to me is the descendant of Middle English calf (“young cow”), not calf (“area behind the shin”). Of course there is a Scots word cauf (“area behind the shin”), but the plural of that is cauves, and it hasn't been added to Wiktionary yet (I'll add it). --Hazarasp (talk) 10:11, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

@Hazarasp: If it's true that the word for the part of the leg comes from the word for the animal, then why does it have a different plural? Are you sure the plural is "cauves"? Eric Kvaalen (talk) 10:20, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

@Eric Kvaalen: I'm sure about both the Scots and Middle English plural. By the way, the origin of the "part of the leg" of calf/cauf sense is unknown, but even if it was known to be a derivative of the "young cow" sense, then it's entirely possible for it to have developed a different plural (see English grind, which tends to have a regular past tense grinded in the sense "to perform repetitive activity in a video game for advancement", even though that sense is etymologically related the sense "to pulverise or blend into small pieces", which usually has ground as a past tense. --Hazarasp (talk) 10:42, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

All right, thanks. Eric Kvaalen (talk) 18:42, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Replied about cool

Can never remember how to ping. Equinox ◑ 19:07, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

Russian word stress marks

Moved from Talk:забраться:

@Atitarev: I don't know how to add word stress marks. Can you explain it to me? (And please ping me.) Eric Kvaalen (talk) 13:02, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Hi. I moved your question to your talk page:

1. In the edit mode select Cyrillic at the bottom drop-down box. Click on "acute" symbol right after the stressed vowel.
2. Copy stressed vowels from WT:RU TR or copy the word from entries (this Wiktionary or the Russian Wiktionary).
3. Everyone uses their own tools, editors, plug-ins, etc. There are some ways to get a stress mark in MS Word, redefine your won keyboard, etc but the above methods should work for everyone.

You don't have {{Babel-8}}, so I don't know your level of Russian but I think you're far from fluent. Please remember that stress marks should be correct, don't assume that stress marks are the same in word forms as in the lemma. Adding stress marks is a good practice and are important but it's better to have no stress at all than a wrong stress. Thank you. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 21:23, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@Atitarev: Спаси́бо! I'll add {{Babel-8}} to my user page. Eric Kvaalen (talk) 11:37, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Nigari

@Eirikr: You wrote in a comment to your edit of "nigari" "nigari is bittern, not just magnesium chloride", and you changed the definition from

 magnesium chloride, particularly that used in the manufacture of tofu

to

bittern: the liquor remaining after halite (common salt) has been harvested from saline water (brine), used as a coagulating agent in the manufacture of tofu

I don't think that's right. According to Tofu it's a white powder obtained by evaporating said liquor. It may not contain just magnesium chloride, but it's not a liquid. Do you have a source for your definition? Eric Kvaalen (talk) 06:31, 7 March 2020 (UTC) (another Eirikr!)

Hi, just saw this, apologies for the delay.

Re: the meaning of English nigari in reference to tofu production, Japanese sources consistently define the term as a liquid. I see a couple spellings, 苦汁 as the most common and 滷汁 as a less-common alternative. Note that both include the character 汁 (“broth”), also implying a liquid.

From the KDJ entry:

海水から食塩を晶出させたあとの残液で、製塩の副産物。マグネシウム塩、カリウム塩、硫酸イオン、臭素イオンなどを含む苦味のある水溶液。無機薬品工業原料とされるほか、豆腐製造、窯業、石膏製造などに広く用いられる。

From the DJR entry:

海水から食塩を結晶させた残りの苦みをもつ溶液。塩化マグネシウム・硫酸マグネシウム・塩化カリウムなどを含み，古くから豆腐を固める材料として用いられる。

Both describe a liquid: the KDJ uses the term 残液 (zan'eki, “remaining or residual liquid”), and the DJR uses the term 溶液 (yōeki, “solution”). Both also describe a mix of various salts, mentioning magnesium salts, potassium salts, and ionic sulfates, among others. I see too that the JA WP article at w:ja:にがり describes the substance as an 液体 (ekitai, “liquid”) -- and also as a 粉末 (funmatsu, “powder”). That page has much more to say about the liquid form, and only mentions the powder once at the top. Iit might depend on the tofu-making tradition as to which form of nigari is used.

HTH, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 04:16, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

@Eirikr: All right, thanks. I also saw a reference somewhere after I ask'd you, referrin' to it as a liquid. I guess both forms exist. I came across the term in an article in New Scientist, which refers to it as "a salt produced from seawater". Eric Kvaalen (talk) 07:08, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

"No, we don't do that"

@PUC: You undid my edit, in which I added the meanings of the verbs which were referred to, with the comment "No, we don't do that". Why not? It makes it more understandable to the user! Why have "rules" that result in more confusion and less clarity? Eric Kvaalen (talk) 08:31, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Translingual

I have changed schlicht back to English. There are no "Translingual adjectives" because Translingual is not a language and has no grammar. If it's the same word in other languages, then of course you can add those language sections. Translingual is appropriate for symbols like "cos" for cosine, but not for words used in a sentence like adjectives. Equinox ◑ 14:34, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

@Equinox: Well, I don't know much about Translingual, but the word "schlicht" you could say exists in every language. When you're discussing functions of a complex variable in whatever language, if you want to say that one of these functions is schlicht, you would say "schlicht"! So what do we do with international words like this? I don't think we should put hundreds of subdivisions into our page, one for each language of Wiktionary, do you? Eric Kvaalen (talk) 18:46, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Yes, we should. Please re-read my first comment. There is no such thing as a Translingual adjective because Translingual is not a language and has no grammar. This is important to get right. Also we are not paper and have unlimited space. "Naïve" is a word in both English and French, but we can't put it under Translingual, because each language has its own grammar (masculine-feminine in French; and naïver-naïvest comparatives in English). If a word truly exists in many languages, we must include it separately for each. "Translingual" is not intended for this purpose. Equinox ◑ 22:12, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

@Equinox: Well then you do it. Here is the list of languages: Wiktionary:List_of_languages. You can use the same definition for all 8169 of them (other than German, of course). Eric Kvaalen (talk) 17:13, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

I have deleted Equinox's foul-language threat. Eric Kvaalen (talk) 10:49, 19 November 2022 (UTC)