User:Tharthan



Hello, I am Tharthan. I hail from "New England", a region in the northeastern United States of America (though, I would prefer if you would refrain from referring to me as an "American" if possible, as I associate more with New England than I do the entirety of the United States of America. "New Englander" is much more preferable.) The dialects of English that are spoken in New England differ quite a bit from the speech, spelling and wordstock of other North American English dialects. I personally speak a Southeastern New England dialect of English, though idiolectally I lack the wine-whine merger. In addition, I maintain a partial lack of the horse-hoarse merger, I realise /ʊ/ as something close to /ɵ/, I realise /ʌ/ as something close to /ɐ/), I realise /ɑ/ as something in between /ɑ/ and /ä/ (/ɑ̈/?), I have no /a/ phoneme (except maybe in the /aʊ/ diphthong); /æ/ takes its place, and I sometimes realise /ɒ/ as (my) "/ʌ/".

In addition to all of the above, I am a linguistic purist. This impacts me to the extent that I may opt for the use of loan translations from and/or English cognates (if they are close enough in meaning) of words in other Germanic languages (for example, I would prefer "ice bear" over "polar bear") over Latinates (unless the Latinates were present in Old English). That said, I may use a word derived from Latin that is ultimately Germanic in origin (for example: "seize"), or use back-formations/other derivations of words derived from Latin that are of Germanic origin if I find the general word in question to have too much of a Latin influence (for example, I won't use "burglar", but I may use "burgle", I won't use "mushroom", but I will use blends or the like that are prefixed with "mush-" in reference to mushrooms). However, much of the aforementioned doesn't apply to my Wikipedia contributions, but rather to other things that I do, like my poetry.

My contributions to Wikipedia are mostly in the fields of linguistics, history, and folklore, although I also sometimes improve word definitions, make spelling and grammar fixes, insert etymologies into articles, remove blatant lies from articles, and a few other things.

I am much more active on Wiktionary, where I contribute to New England dialectal pronunciation, word etymology, dialectal wordstock (regarding all languages), translation improvement (regarding all languages), word definition improvement, blatant lie removal, grammar fixes, and also (occasionally) the discussion of linguistic oddities and queries on talk pages.