User:Erutuon



Welcome to my user page. I'm an amateur linguist, botanist, and pianist. People sometimes ask linguists how many languages they've studied; my list would be Attic and Homeric Greek, Latin, Old Norse, Old English, German, and Arabic. Regrettably, I'm not fluent in any language besides English, though I can pronounce some of them pretty well.

I love growing European cyclamens, taking pictures of flowers and insects, drinking Chinese teas, and playing music by Sebastian and Emanuel Bach on piano. Only the first two loves have influenced my Wikipedia editing; maybe I'll get to the rest one of these days.

If you have the Gentium font installed, you will see that this page uses that font. I'm rather fond of its Greek characters.

Thoughts on Wikipedia
My philosophy is to write understandably. If an article, even on a specialized subject, is impossible to understand, that's a problem. Language is communication, and if it fails to communicate, it needs to be rewritten. Brevity and simplicity are stylistic virtues. I'm also obsessive about explaining every edit with an edit summary.

I've worked on improving the articles on Latin and Ancient Greek pronunciation, and recorded a few soundfiles as illustrations. While many phonetic details are unknown, enough is known to create an approximation that gives us some understanding of the music of Ancient Greek and Latin poetry, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Athenian tragic playwrights, and the Aeneid.

Wikipedia needs a general article on Ancient Greek and Latin poetry and its meter. At the moment, information on the topic is fragmented between articles such as Prosody (Latin),, Dactylic hexameter, Greek lyric, and Iambic trimeter. Since Greek and Latin poetry share characteristics, they should be described together in an overview article. The current situation is a nightmare for someone wanting to learn more about Latin and Greek poetry.

Gnome work

 * converting cm and mm to fractions of inches in articles on plants using :

Tools

 * TypeGreek.com: type polytonic Greek using Beta Code
 * International Phonetic Alphabet "keyboard": a chart allowing you to type most IPA symbols (not all, regrettably)

Works
Greek and Latin grammar:
 * Aorist (Ancient Greek)
 * First, second, and third declension
 * Compensatory lengthening (on Ancient Greek)
 * Quantitative metathesis
 * Spurious diphthong

Poetics:
 * Correption
 * Metaplasm
 * Arsis and thesis

Other linguistic stuff:
 * E caudata (on Old Norse)
 * Debuccalization

Ancient Greek and Latin templates:
 * Template:LSJ (Liddell and Scott)
 * Template:L&S (Lewis and Short)
 * Template:Odyssey
 * Template:Thucydides
 * Template:Grc

Plant-related templates:
 * Template:NPIN
 * Template:BONAP
 * Template:Silvics
 * Template:FEIS
 * Template:CalPhotos

Other templates:
 * Template:Average temperature table (associated row templates use a module created by )

Modules:
 * Module:Language (generates Wiktionary links for wikt-lang and wt)
 * Module:Perseus (generates section links for the Ancient Greek reference template Smyth)
 * Module:Ancient Greek (transliterates Ancient Greek, used by grc-transl; not my own work, but a copy of a previous version of a Wiktionary module)
 * Module:Weather/sandbox (in development; modifications to a module by )

Cyclamen:
 * Cyclamen hederifolium, africanum
 * Cyclamen purpurascens, colchicum
 * Cyclamen coum, alpinum, parviflorum, elegans
 * Cyclamen repandum, balearicum
 * Cyclamen rohlfsianum
 * Auricle (botany)

Climate:
 * List of cities by temperature

Editing scripts:
 * imageSize.js: adds a button automatically converts image sizes from pixels to scaling values
 * footnoteCleanup.js: moves footnotes or tags like citation needed after punctuation; handles several levels of

Ideas

 * Russian transliteration (transcription) that matches pronunciation