User talk:Mnemosientje

Hello Mnemosientje, I saw that you are a native Dutch speaker; could you help me with something? In the last full paragraph of this page, what do you understand by this sentence?

"De gemeene man maekt messen van zekeren steen, welke messen zy Ituque noemen: en ook van riet, die zy Taquoaquia heten. Anders gebruiken ook Hollantse messen."

More specifically, is it possible to unequivocally establish what "Ituque" refers to, whether it is the stone or the knife made from that stone? The same applies to "Taquoaquia": does it refer to the bamboo or the knife made from that bamboo?

Thank you! RodRabelo7 (talk) 23:00, 19 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

@RodRabelo7 Hey! The translated passage reads:

The common man makes knives out of a certain [type of] stone, which knives they name Ituque; and [they] also [make knives] out of reed, which they call Taquoaquia. Otherwise they also use Hollandic knives.

It is possible to unequivocally establish that Ituque refers to the knives, not the stone: welke messen zy Ituque noemen is unambiguous, and explicitly states that it is the knives which are called Ituque.

It is also possible to unequivocally establish that Taquoaquia refers to the knives, not the reed of which they are made, as they are referred to with the relative pronoun die. That pronoun is used for masculine and feminine gender words in the singular, and in the plural it is used for all genders, which applies here as messen is plural. Whereas if the text were to refer to the material, the pronoun would have to have been the neuter singular relative pronoun dat, as riet is neuter singular, and not masculine or feminine or plural. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 13:36, 20 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Who is the best editor to help me out here - there have been a lot of spurious names in this category - Low German listed as High German because someone never checked Forstemann's citations for provenance, Bavarian place names from Schatz listed as given names, and a variant of the OHG precursor of Pferd "horse" listed as a given name with capitalisation (not always used for given names in OHG and not for nouns). and now someone is just adding made up names as roots of misspelled German surnames Griffon77 (talk) 15:45, 28 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

"now someone is just adding made up names as roots of misspelled German surnames". @Juliusmborris, you need to stop doing this. We cannot have entries for words that haven't existed, and many of the forms you've added don't seem to be attested anywhere. Names like Oustih give no results anywhere on the internet except for Wiktionary. If not sourced they should all be deleted. ᛙᛆᚱᛐᛁᚿᛌᛆᛌ ᛭ Proto-Norsing ᛭ Ask me anything 21:31, 28 February 2025 (UTC)Reply