User:Filelakeshoe/Questionable cited material

"'It's clearly not true, but now that it's been reported in several reliable independent sources, under Wikipedia rules it makes no difference whether it's true or not' — anon"


 * Ústí nad Labem (diff) - "...sometimes also referred to as Aussyenad, Labem,..." - I would love to see more evidence of this being anything other than a lazy spelling and comprehension mistake (respectively) by the folks at Britannica. "Labem" is the Czech name of the river Elbe declined in the instrumental case (as governed by the preposition "nad"). "Aussyenad" looks like a spelling mistake of "Austí nad (Labem)", which is how the city's name would have been spelled in Czech before the 19th century orthography reform. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 11:26, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Name of the Czech Republic (diff) - "The current English ethnonym Czech comes from the Polish ethnonym associated with the area, which ultimately comes from the Czech word Čech." Thankfully the section above details a far more believable origin which doesn't detour via Poland, so the user can make up their own mind, and we can let the Anglophone lexicographers in those three "reliable sources" believe whatever they wanna. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 20:01, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Isn't Etymonline more reliable for etymology than English dictionaries? Because that just says "1848, from Czech". – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 21:07, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
 * "the central dialect, that of 16th–17th-century Prague, is the basis for standard written Czech." a grotesque and inaccurate oversimplification from the folks at Britannica there. The true story is far more exciting. It's a time-travelling koiné of "old" Central Bohemian, whatever time-travelling koiné of that and 16th-century Moravian created the Kralice bible, and 19th century Prague really isn't it? In other words Britannica while you are indeed correct that there is an element of "Prague" and an element of "16th century" in what forms the basis for Standard Modern Czech, the assertion that it's "16th century Prague" is your own bloody WP:SYN. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 09:21, 18 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Topic and comment "In English the topic/theme comes first in the clause, and is typically marked out by intonation as well. " - bollocks does it! – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 11:20, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
 * in fact, the issue here is possibly that Halliday (in the cite) doesn't treat topic/comment and theme/rheme as synonyms, yet our article treats them as such. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 11:36, 1 February 2023 (UTC)