User talk:Urszag

Welcome!
Hello, Urszag, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:
 * Introduction and Getting started
 * Contributing to Wikipedia
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page and How to develop articles
 * How to create your first article
 * Simplified Manual of Style

You may also want to take the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit The Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or to ask for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! BracketBot (talk) 01:40, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

September 2015
Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=682787998 your edit] to Hera may have broken the syntax by modifying 1 ""s. If you have, don't worry: just [ edit the page] again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=edit&preload=User:A930913/BBpreload&editintro=User:A930913/BBeditintro&minor=&title=User_talk:A930913&preloadtitle=BracketBot%20–%20&section=new my operator's talk page].
 * List of unpaired brackets remaining on the page:

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, BracketBot (talk) 01:40, 26 September 2015 (UTC)
 * , equivalently Ἥρη, Hērē, in Ionic and Homer is the wife and one of three sisters of Zeus in the Olympian pantheon of [
 * as Zeus is said to have married her for love. Plato, [[

Bring
Hi Urszag, Please see my comments at Talk:List of English irregular verbs and attend to the problem. I don't want us just reverting each other, so am giving you a chance to think/talk about the problem and fix your own text. If you don't, I will delete the whole paragraph. --Doric Loon (talk) 08:07, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for August 12
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. An automated process has detected that when you recently edited 3753 Cruithne, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Irish. Such links are usually incorrect, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of unrelated topics with similar titles. (Read the FAQ* Join us at the DPL WikiProject.)

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 06:27, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

ArbCom 2022 Elections voter message
 Hello! Voting in the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2022 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:24, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for September 17
An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Palatalization in the Romance languages, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Borno.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 06:07, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Barnstar

 * @Nicodene Thank you! I've learned some interesting new stuff in the past few days while working on this—of course, there's still a lot more that can be added to it, which is why I'm happy about having it split off as its own article.--Urszag (talk) 04:30, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

ArbCom 2023 Elections voter message
 Hello! Voting in the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2023 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:45, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Stress and vowel reduction
I haven't gone through the sources on the page (at least not recently) but I know that Wells certainly uses "weak and strong vowels" which may be where I've read the most -- just so you know where I'm coming from. Wolfdog (talk) 22:02, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Oh right, to be clear, "weak and strong vowels" are certainly real terms (not discussed much in the article yet--I only see a link to "weak vowel merger"--so more could be added to the article about this terminology). The reason I reverted your edit was because "weak vowels and strong vowels" refers to a different (although related) concept from the terminology of "weak and strong forms of words", and the section was about the latter concept. It's discussed (with the variant spelling "weakform") in this blog post by Jack Windsor Lewis, who defines it as "an alternant form of a word so reduced in its articulation that it consists of a different set of phonemes".--Urszag (talk) 22:16, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Oh, I see the distinction now. Great article -- thanks! What do you thinking of changing the section heading from "words" to "function words"? (Otherwise, we may think it refers to words generally, leading to my original mixup.) Wolfdog (talk) 23:29, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * That seems reasonable to me, since the section restricts itself to discussing function words, although Windsor Lewis points out in another blog post ("How English is Really Pronounced") that there are "other parallel weakenings that happen to non-function words" (e.g. " /`sɜːtni/" for certainly or "/ˈjuːʒəli/" for usually).--Urszag (talk) 23:36, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * OK, great! The certainly one shocks me, while the usually one is absolutely my own pronunciation. Weird!

Disambiguation link notification for February 26
An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Homo sacer, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Herem.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 06:08, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Intense consonants of Old Romanian
Hi @Urszag

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you again for your work and main contribution to "Palatalization in the Romance languages". It is a great article.

Given your knowledge on such topic, I would also like to ask you for advice on a similar matter. In the article Old Romanian the source (Introduction - 1.2 Phonological features of old Romanian) says that:

"After consonants characterized as ‘intense’, the front vowels /e, i/ undergo velarization"

I added these consonants (n and r allophones) to a wikitable in the form nˠ and rˠ but I am unsure if this is the correct way of marking them. Any suggestions on this?

Aristeus01 (talk) 08:04, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I'm glad you like the palatalization article! "Intense" is not a very clear phonetic description by itself. I would not be confident that it refers to velarized consonants, although it might (given that would be a plausible reason for them to velarize vowels). In fact, sometimes we cannot reconstruct the exact phonetic value of historical phonemes. I would advise looking for additional sources that provide more detailed discussion of these sounds.
 * I found a reference to the "intense" r in The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology, chapter 6 The verb (Martin Maiden, Adina Dragomirescu,  Gabriela Pană Dindelegan,  Oana Uță Bărbulescu, Rodica Zafiu) which says a little bit more:
 * "the thematic vowel i [i], together with all other front vowels that come immediately after the root, has undergone a phonological process of centralization triggered by the preceding consonant. In standard Romanian, this conditioning environment was a rhotic. More specifically, it appears that what triggered centralization was a historically underlying ‘intense’ rhotic: *[rr] ( e.g. *orˈrire > urî ‘hate’; see Morariu 1925: 68–9, Densusianu 1938: 23, 37, Rothe 1957: 20, 108–9, Schulte 2005, Renwick 2014: 51–2). The subsequent loss of distinction between intense and simple rhotics means that the conditioning environment for centralization after rhotics is lost, some verbs in root-final [r] showing the centralized vowel and others not (see Pană Dindelegan 1987: 71)."
 * The use of the notation [rr] suggests to me that the authors here view 'intensity' as a matter of duration (or maybe that was just its original source). I accessed that through the Wikipedia Library; I hope you can too and can follow up on the references cited in this passage. I might also look more into this, but I unfortunately don't have any time left to do it today.--Urszag (talk) 08:24, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Thank you for taking the time to shine light on this.
 * Yes, the source is available to me. The information is very interesting and it helps me understand the topic better. I will follow your advice and perhaps I can find even more RS describing or even comparing it to rhotics in other languages which would help cite the more appropriate symbol in regards to phonetic precision.
 * Much appreciated!  Aristeus01 (talk) 09:18, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

Your new Barnstar!

 * Hi Urszag. Sorry to bother you. But wikt:SB. Whether to rollback or not is up to you. —  魔琴  (Zauber Violino) [ talk contribs ] 09:15, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Indovinello
Thanks for taking the time to work on the text for the Indovinello veronese. I hope you won't find it rude of me to pick a nit or two regarding the many references to Standard Italian, including the opening sentence. I fear there's no guarantee that the casual reader will know that a text in volgare of the Indovinello's time, and presumed place of origin, would only incidentally, as (very early) "sister" Romance language, be expected to share features with the Standard Italian that would centuries later emerge curated as national language from its Tuscan base. Nor, in what might seem to be a twist of that principle, that Standard Italian might not reflect actual usage even in Tuscany, where today bovi is pretty much the norm in informal discourse. Minor points, perhaps, as are a couple of others, but it's so common for people to interpret 'Italian dialect' as meaning 'dialect of Italian' that traps for misunderstanding matters linguistic in Italy are very easy to set unintentionally. I'm not a fan of articles in different languages being copies, but comparison can be helpful; the Indovinello article in Italian seems to me a case in point. Cheers. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 19:35, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
 * There's definitely a lot of room for improvement from where I left it (the lack of citations being an obvious place to start), so I don't take offense at any nitpicking. My thought behind using "Standard Italian" was mainly to make explicit what I saw as the implicit basis of comparison that had been used in the paragraph previously. That is, the use of the neuter plural ending "-a" on both nouns and adjectives is completely unremarkable in comparison to Latin, and isn't unknown in vernacular languages of Italy as a whole, so I supposed that the motivation for mentioning was because this point of grammar differs from the standardized language that is commonly just called "Italian". Likewise for the masculine ending -es: this is found in Latin, and in some Romance languages, so it's only noteworthy by comparison to the innovative ending -i as found in Standard Italian (among other languages). (The difference between "buoi" and "bovi" doesn't affect this point, since they both end in -i, although it might distract from it.) If there's no intention to compare the text to Standard Italian, then I'm unsure what the point is of the paragraph mentioning these grammatical features at all, since they are neither distinctively vernacular nor distinctively literary in the context of Latin and Romance as a whole. I don't have enough knowledge to write about how expected or unexpected the features of the text are relative to its specific historical and geographical context, but that seems like it would be the best approach.--Urszag (talk) 20:08, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Bullseye in those last couple of sentences. Examining the morphological and lexical features is the only pathway to trying to answer the question of what language the riddle is written in -- which can, and perhaps should, be viewed as entangled questions that sum up to what language did the author think he was writing, intend to write. The paucity of evidence of the time to use as touchstones pretty much forces Latin (of the time, when/if possible -- a dense thicket of caveats in order) and Veronese or more inclusive Venetan as prime candidates for comparison of details, while something like loss of final /t/ in imperfects is so common that it can be characterized as simply Romance in character (Sardinia notwithstanding).
 * Comparison with today's Italian is thus not totally irrelevant, but it's also not of any privileged relevance, and can (so I claim) mislead readers. With AIS maps now available online, it's relatively easy to check Verona and nearby. (I promised myself to be brief here, but I can't resist: or not all that nearby; given the plethora a century ago of what seems to have been /bofs/ in relic areas of Switzerland, what guarantee can there be that the scribe's boves didn't represent a genuine local Romance form, perhaps with interference of Latin spelling, perhaps not? Basta; I'm diddling away my time and yours.) Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 15:14, 16 July 2024 (UTC)