User talk:Kwamikagami

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Word/quotation of the moment:

Lame duck à l'orange (AKA canard à l'orange)

Trumpanzee also seems appropriate about now

(Previous quotes)

It is a mortifying circumstance, which greatly perplexes many a painstaking philosopher, that nature often refuses to second his most profound and elaborate efforts; so that often after having invented one of the most ingenious and natural theories imaginable, she will have the perverseness to act directly in the teeth of his system, and flatly contradict his most favorite positions. This is a manifest and unmerited grievance, since it throws the censure of the vulgar and unlearned entirely upon the philosopher; whereas the fault is not to be ascribed to his theory, which is unquestionably correct, but to the waywardness of Dame Nature, who, with the proverbial fickleness of her sex, is continually indulging in coquetries and caprices, and seems really to take pleasure in violating all philosophic rules, and jilting the most learned and indefatigable of her adorers. [...] The philosophers took this in very ill part, and it is thought they would never have pardoned the slight and affront which they conceived put upon them by the world had not a good-natured professor kindly officiated as a mediator between the parties, and effected a reconciliation. Finding the world would not accommodate itself to the theory, he wisely determined to accommodate the theory to the world.
— Washington Irving, Knickerbocker's History of New York

Pela primeira vez na sua vida a morte soube o que era ter um cão no regaço.
For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog in her lap.
— José Saramago, Death with Interruptions / Death at Intervals

It is now generally accepted that the megaliths that make up Stonehenge were moved by human effort.
— as opposed to by what?

Anybody who says you only have yourself to blame is just not very good at blaming other people.
— It's Happy Bunny

When poppies pull themselves up from their roots
and start out, one after the other, toward the sunset –
don't follow them.
— Slavko Janevski, 'Silence'

And the dough-headed took their acid fermentation for a soul, the stabbing of meat for history, the means of postponing their decay for civilization.
— Stanislaw Lem, Return from the Stars

The Church says that the Earth is Flat,
but I know that it is Round,
for I have seen its Shadow on the Moon,
and I have more Faith in a Shadow than in the Church.
— (commonly misattributed to Magellan)

In the early years of the study there were more than 200 speakers of the dialect, including one parrot.
— from the WP article Nancy Dorian

Mikebrown is unusually eccentric and not very bright. [...] Astronomers have not noticed any outbursts by Mikebrown.
— from the WP article 11714 Mikebrown

Ecce Mono

Keep Redskins White!

"homosapiens are people, too!!"

a sprig of spaghetti

"I've always had a horror of husbands-in-law."

awkwardnessful

anti–zombie-fungus fungus

"Only an evil person would eat baby soup." (said in all sincerity)

Daily pageviews of Rongorongo

Daily pageviews of Decipherment_of_rongorongo

Daily pageviews of Extensions_to_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet

Daily pageviews of Hadza_language

Daily pageviews of Esperanto grammar

Daily pageviews of Origin of Hangul

Daily pageviews of Cistercian numerals

Your GA nomination of Cistercian numerals

The article Cistercian numerals you nominated as a good article has been placed on hold . The article is close to meeting the good article criteria, but there are some minor changes or clarifications needing to be addressed. If these are fixed within 7 days, the article will pass; otherwise it may fail. See Talk:Cistercian numerals for issues which need to be addressed. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Ealdgyth -- Ealdgyth (talk) 16:02, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Cistercian numerals

The article Cistercian numerals you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:Cistercian numerals for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Ealdgyth -- Ealdgyth (talk) 16:42, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

"Buenaventura language" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Buenaventura language. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 January 11#Buenaventura language until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 11:59, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Another quotation

From Most Phallic Building contest:

"Cabinet wrote that the Ypsilanti Water Tower, called "the brick dick" by locals, "is clearly the world's most phallic." [...] Located on the highest point in Ypsilanti, erection began in 1889 [...]" --Florian Blaschke (talk) 07:36, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Ha! Thanks, @Florian Blaschke: I used to live in Ypsi, actually, and the tower was only a couple minutes walk from my house. It was something of a joke, but we mostly took it for granite. — kwami (talk) 00:58, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Wolaytta language page move

Dear Kwami, we've had this kind of discussion already some years ago: please, please do not make page moves out of the blue without any kind of preceding discussion. You moved Wolaytta language to Wolaitta language without giving any reason, probably having none, as Ethnologue, Glottolog and WALS all agree on calling it Wolaytta. This kind of move is not only pointless, but actually quite disruptive, as the title of the page now gives a different spelling than the first line, and Ethiopian language names are already confusing enough as they are. Most Wolaytta people can't even agree on how to spell their own given names, so why do we need to reinforce that when at least for the language name some kind of consensus has arisen, at least in the academic literature about the language? So, I kindly ask you to redo this move, or I will have to get myself into the trouble of finding out how to do this. Cheers, Landroving Linguist (talk) 08:18, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

(talk page stalker)@Landroving Linguist: If you cannot not move it back, I think you can place a technical request ("revert of a bold move"). But unexplained does not mean pointless: at least Ngram has almost even counts of "Wolaytta language" and "Wolaitta language"; without "language", "Wolaitta" is quite dominant over "Wolaytta". So a discussed move request might be more fruitful. –Austronesier (talk) 13:47, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Good point - I shouldn't come over so aggressive and should first assume that Kwami wouldn't do it without a good reason. So please take my apologies! In any case, I think Wikipedia should spell the language (the correct spelling is anyone's guess with the messy Wolaytta orthography) the same way as the other three large online repositories on languages, particularly as they all agree on one spelling. Landroving Linguist (talk) 15:02, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

I don't care which spelling we use. The reason I moved it was that I created a link w the 'i' spelling, and it was red. That surprised me. I could've created a rd directly or by moving the page, and it was easier to move the page. But I certainly won't object if you move it back.

One point, though -- the 3 repositories you mention are not independent sources. Glottolog started off with Ethnologue's language inventory and then set out to correct, augment and purge it. If they leave an Ethn spelling, that can just mean that they don't care. (And they generally don't care about labels.) I believe WALS also uses ISO spellings. So they're really a single source, ISO, which is not a RS for which name is best. If Glotto and WALS go along with ISO, that may just mean that it's close enough to not bother with, not that it's the dominant spelling in the lit. (Which in this case AFAICT it's not.)

Personally, I don't think that we should use ISO, an industrial standard, to determine language-name preferences for linguistics. — kwami (talk) 22:05, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

All fair enough, which leaves me with the point that just short of deleting a page a move to a different page name is about the most impactful thing you can do to a Wikipedia page, particularly as it is not easily fixed. If you are really in the habit of moving pages because they don't happen to match the spelling of a link you create somewhere, you have something that you should seriously address in your life. And you should not do it without having a discussion first, or people here will hate your guts. Well, since the spelling in the case of this language really doesn't matter (the dictionaries I worked on often used three different spellings on the same page), and since the redirect still works from Wolaytta, and since I really don't know how to go about this, I will leave it at that. Landroving Linguist (talk) 22:21, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

I didn't move it because it didn't match the spelling of a link I made. I moved it because the most common spelling didn't exist and it needed to. I then had a choice of how to create the rd, and saw no reason not to do it by moving the article to the more common name. There are cases where I've moved an article half a dozen times to create half a dozen redirects. If anyone's ever objected, it was a trivial number compared to the thousands of page moves I've made and thousands of redirects I've created. And the choice is usually a trivial one anyway. Some of these languages, including some in Ethiopia, are so poorly covered in English that a single publication can change the dominant name or spelling in the literature. — kwami (talk) 22:33, 14 January 2021 (UTC)