#Wiktionary

[hbmmaster]

[prokopetz]

Sometimes I wonder if the Wiktionary editors are just saying shit.

[victusinveritas]

(Posted for interest, not to start a linguistic nerds fighting with--if you wish to fight with each other about this, though, go at it with my blessing and may your tongues drift and phonemes malform or whatever.)

[luciosfanpage]

[april]

[cant-think-of-a-good-one]

AMATURES!

THIS link gives you a random English noun from all of wiktionary.

(appears or occurs or whatevers in front of you at this very moment. whatever makes sense the most)

[relevant-wikipedia-articles]

Trick, hold the treat.

[dedalvs]

Is there something up with the High Valyrian wiki?

https://wiki.languageinvention.com/index.php?title=High_Valyrian_language

I've had this link bookmarked since ages. I can't seem to load the page. I've tried all sorts of browsers and it is still not working. i wanted to get back into actively learning HV again and duolingo is kinda annoying so. Is there a different page/resource the wiki has moved on to? I also seem to recall an old forum for HV with a bunch of really good resources for it. is it possible for you to provide a link? Thanks so much anyway!!

Good question! This wiki, which you can find here..

...is a labor of love—not just from me, but from a team of dedicated individuals who want to get information about my languages up somewhere more or less permanent, editable by many, and all in one place.

For years I have had a hosting plan from DreamHost. For a fixed fee, DreamHost allows you, essentially, infinite storage. I've got a dozen or so websites hosted by the same DreamHost account. I have to pay for the urls (a yearly fee; everyone pays these), but the hosting itself is covered, no matter if I had one website or a hundred.

Creating a wiki that would function like Wiktionary was my idea. I love Wiktionary, and love the idea behind it. For example, let's say you wanted to look up mate. This is an English word. It's also a subjunctive form of matar "to kill" in Spanish. It's also the word for "saliva" in Swahili. It's also "dead" in Tahitian. It's also a word in several other languages. It's kind of cool to take an abstract form—going just by spelling—and seeing that it's a word in a bunch of different languages, all with different etymologies (some related, of course. For example, mate has something to do with death in a lot of Oceanic languages. In Hawaiian it's make, which looks like an entirely different English word!).

In Dothraki, the word tor is the number four. It comes from Proto-Plains *tur (and so would be tur in Lhazareen). It's also the word for "tower" in Hen Linge (this is one of the words coined by Andrzej Sapkowski, not created by me). In Noalath, from The Shannara Chronicles, it's the word for "wolf", and in Shiväisith, the language I created for the Dark Elves from Thor: The Dark World, it's the word for "sword". While it's true I didn't create the Hen Linge word, I created the others, so you can see it's a form I'm fond of, where the shape is possible.

Anyway, that's kind of cool! And that was the point of the site.

As it happens, the High Valyrian section of the site is…massive. To give you an idea, at the moment, the wiki has over 220,000 pages. Most of those are High Valyrian pages. This is because there's a dedicated team for High Valyrian that has added pages for every single noun, adjective, and verb inflection for every existing word on the wiki. To give you an idea, every verb of High Valyrian has around 200 forms (ipradagon "to eat", ipradan "I eat", ipradā "you eat", ipradas "s/he/it eats", etc.). Every single form for every single verb has its own page. This was accomplished primarily with a program that populated the inflectional pages, but however they got there, they're there.

Certain things on the wiki are templates that need to go through and "check" every single page. Additionally, a webcrawler goes through and checks every single page on the wiki. This requires a lot of RAM. As a result, periodically, the entire website just...shuts down.

Obviously this is not cool. I asked DreamHost about it, and though we have infinite space, we don't have infinite RAM. The first step was to disable all web crawlers. You know about SEO, and how you can do things to increase the page rank of your site? Well, we needed to do the opposite. We needed to make the site disappear from the net, effectively. And we did. This is why even if you type "David J. Peterson wiki language invention" into Google you get nothing. It's like we don't exist. We're there, but you have to know we're there and go to the site specifically. That helped, but our own programs still shut things down.

The second step was to get a private server (technically a virtual private server) for the site. This cost me an extra $25 a month ($300 a year) from what I was already paying. This definitely helped, but sometimes things get to be a bit too much, and so the site still shuts down. This is what you experienced.

You know how Wikipedia begs you for money every year? It's because of this. It's one thing to create an awesome resource; it's another thing for people to actually use it.

Hosting already costs me about $250 every two years, and every year I renew the urls for about 15 websites, which is another $300 a year. If I upgrade the VPS to the next level, it's even more money every year. And that's just me paying it.

Right now, we're in an okay spot. The site shuts down every so often, but most of the time it's more or less stable. Unless I start making a lot more money regulary, that's the way it's going to stay.

So if you go to the site and it's down, I'm very sorry, but it will be back. May take a few days, but it'll come back (as long as I'm alive, anyway).

[daybreaksys]

I have searched for the etymology of Wikipedia in Wiktionary and found out that the word "wiki" is older than Wikipedia, and not derived from it. But wait

the wiki in Wikipedia comes from WikiWikiWeb, which was the first "wiki", and it comes from the Hawaiian word "wiki", which means "fast", "quick".

The hawaiian word wiki is pronounced ˈʋiti.

Folks, it's pronounced Witi

it's Witipedia

(I'm not saying people should call it Witipedia, I'm just pointing out how wild that etymology is)

(and btw donate to Wikipedia)

[paw--on--heart]

favorite word?

I saw this ask in the first hour after waking up and I struggled with it because I'm not ready to have a publicly visible identity that early. Anyway I've had a few thoughts in the meantime, for one I like saying „presumably” and other unnecessarily sophisticated words like „wherewithal” and „deleterious” and „untoward”. I also like the word „pansy”

It's like „sissy” but without certain associations that one has. I'm reclaiming this one. It's also a flower. What's not to love

[bitstitchbitch]

yo, found out wiktionary.org is great for finding declensions for Czech nouns, at least a large portion of common nouns. I’m very much a beginner, but the declensions that I’ve been able to verify are correct (including ones like kočka that has a stem change). If anyone has a better source, I’d love to hear it, but wiktionary is seeming like a good start

[dude-ler]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:LGBT_fiction

Hey, yall! Some of you probably already know about this, but if you haven't, then you're in for a treat. If you are craving for LGBT fiction, this is the right page for you! There you can find some queer fiction, literature, media, and even fictional characters, including those you probably never heard of before. Even time a new LGBT characters is found, the pages get updated, I'm real obsessed with the character pages.

Seriously, though, I couldn't think of anything better to post for today. I've just been having some rough days and moments…

[victusinveritas]

Reminder: do not go down etymological rabbitholes at work unless that sort of thing is your job or don't have other people covertly checking what you browse. If you do fall into the trap of hunting for word origins, just use Wiktionary.

[vanishedgaze]

The sudden jump from eons of cultural exchange across vast continents and oceans to fandom jargon gave me whiplash.

[kholden83]

English Wiktionary's Word Of the Day for March 31st is Two-Spirit. Explicitly for TDOV. So that's cool

[lectronicproot]

Man this is SO nitpicky but like I wish wiktionary also showed the etymology of verb conjugations. Like, yeah I know me getting to learn these etymologies at all is thanks to the site but it’s just kinda annoying. It sometimes shows an etymology of the conjugation is irregular, but sometimes it doesn’t. For example Spanish has the etymologies for “soy” and “voy” but not “duermo”, and it isn’t like it’s hard to find an etymology for it, this irregularity is easily explained by stress rules and how Spanish handled stressed syllables.

But I’m not just asking for etymologies for all the irregular verbs, but for all the conjugated verbs even if the word isn’t irregular! It’s just a bit annoying, and I know it’s possible to figure out what conjugations come from where on other sources, but it kinda defeats the point of the site if the etymological source isn’t available…

Obv it’s hard to write them all but surely it can be done by a built in table or something? Really though maybe it is a hard problem and it’s not as easy as I say, but still…