User talk:Lysdexia

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Category

If you're going to change Category:SLASHTHEM to Category:SlashTHEM, please ensure the new category actually exists first. Pinkbeast (talk) 21:33, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

There's nothing written on that page but category pages still work. Why don't you move the old one? Lysdexia (talk) 21:35, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

Language use

All - please keep it civil. This is the only warning that will be given. Thanks. K2 (talk) 22:01, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Hi,

I've been noticing you engaging in a lot of "corrections" directed at various users.

There are two issues with this, really, so let me address each separately:

Factual accuracy – some of the changes you are making are not actually correcting mistakes, and I'd argue actually making things harder to read. Arguably, some of your corrections change the meaning of what is being said; replacing a third-person pronoun ("they"/"their") with an indefinite pronoun ("one") when a specific entity has already been named implies the pronoun refers to a yet unspecified entity. ("They" specifically is widely accepted in everyday modern use as a gender-neutral third-person pronoun, for the record.)

To give another example, the distinction you made between "would" and "should" is not quite reflecting accepted real-world use of contemporary English.

Additionally, you've been making some suggestions about word choice that are counter-productive – to quote; "homosexual -> idemsexual; asexual -> insexual" – as the mixed-origin forms of these terms are well-established. You wouldn't call an "automobile" an "ipsemobile" or "autokineton" if you wanted people to understand what you are talking about, either.

However, having said all this, the more concerning issue to me is the tone in which you present your objections; it comes off as condescending, which is particularly jarring in cases where these objections are actually problematic per the above. I hope that isn't your intent, although it can be hard to tell from written words alone sometimes. This is a wiki, a collaborative platform. I have to ask you to at least try to approach other users politely; suggestions are welcome, dismissive comments generally aren't. Please remember we're (hopefully) all on the same page here in trying to provide the best NetHack resource we can.

—bcode ^{talk | mail} 13:57, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

If you know the names I use on the internet and my activity you'd know I argue how wrong the world is. So populism can't support itself for propriety. issue means "gone out"; you mean problem. Sometimes there are problems when there are nonissues and no problems when there are issues. I do distinguish between indefinite and definite. Tell me where I used one correspondent to the. If a they corresponded to a, that'd be improper definiteness besides number. Gender-neutral means neuter, neither gender; the third-person singular definite neuter is it. You mean gender-communal or common; the relative pronoun already works as the third-person definite singular [or plural] common which is why I use/enforce it.

You'd also know there is no contemporary English, as English died 1000 years ago sith Norman Conquest and everyone talks in "Einglish" now with loanwords and slang. The distinction between should and would still sometimes shows up, like in the recent edit where should is in the conditional. But contemporary usage is self-unaware and thus self-contradictory. Sometimes I use hybrid barbarisms, reluctantly, but not if their stems contradict other stems. Homo refers to the genus for humans and a- is short for ad- or ab-. Unless you know the languages the world steals its stems from, you don't know what it does wrong.

hard:soft -> touh:easy. What kind of dismissive comments aren't welcome? (if pinging here works: User:bcode) Lysdexia (talk) 22:31, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Gentlemen, without wishing to start any kind of debate on the proper use of language, and with all my respect to other Members of the Nethack Wiki, for the most part I HAVE TO AGREE with the points mentioned by Mister Lysdexia. I know that the subject of 'language purism' may seem out of place in a wiki whose main purpose is to explain the mechanics of a complex and highly interesting game such as Nethack, but I need to make my position clear if I have to contribute to the excellent information provided by this wiki. I am not going to repeat all the points that Mister Lysdexia has already made, let alone I am going to delve into detail, but let me state a few examples. The use of the plurals 'they', 'them', 'their', 'theirs' when referring to a noun or pronoun in the singular is GRAMMATICALLY WRONG. In English, either the indefinite 'one' or the masculine 'he', 'him', 'his' have been in use FOR CENTURIES. Likewise, the verbal auxiliaries 'shall', 'should' are not interchangeable with 'will', 'would'. I am not going to explain their different meaning according to person (first, second, third, singular or plural) and to intention (willingness or else obligation, or just statement of facts), but I affirm that they are different. And so with many other examples. I wish to make clear that I respect other contributors and I DO NOT INTEND to correct their work, but I expect to be also respected in the choice of vocabulary in MY OWN WRITING. My text is always, invariably, in classic British English. It is extremely improbable for me to make mistakes in English, though some occasional mistyping of course may happen even to me. What I desire to tell other contributors is that my writing is always carefully reviewed before publication, and it seldom needs 'corrections'. I may tolerate changes up to a certain limit, but if I see too many changes of 'style', I simply stop contributing to the wiki. Pray respect my classsic style and do not try to 'correct' my contributions. If necessary, contributors are always welcome to comment in a respectful manner in my talk page. Together we can help the growth of this excellent wiki, but not by 'correcting' one another as if we were first-time learners of the English language. Because we are not. Cssdixieland (talk) 19:00, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

I do mean issue, which also means problem.

"populism can't support itself for propriety" – correctness in language depends on what is widely accepted as correct and proper. (There's a decent writeup about prescriptive vs descriptive ways to approach language, if you're interested.)

"Gender-neutral means neuter, neither gender" – no; "neuter" in English grammar refers to a third linguistic gender, the "it" to go with "he" and "she". The term "gender-neutral pronoun" is clearly understood to mean a pronoun that does not imply a real-world individual's gender without the dehumanization generally associated with the neuter forms of English which are typically reserved for objects and other non-person things. "Gender-communal", your suggestion, has not been widely used for this meaning. I'm afraid established usage disagrees with you, which effectively means you are wrong here.

"If a they corresponded to a, that'd be improper definiteness besides number." Again, you seem confused. If I say "A woman gave birth. She is now a mother", "a" is an indefinite article introducing an entity – "a woman" – who is now known, and has to be referred to by definite pronouns (such as "she"); using an indefinite pronoun would normally imply the referent is unknown. I think most native speakers would agree that my example sentence sounds more proper than "A woman gave birth. One is now a mother", for the sake of argument.

As for agreement in number for singular-meaning "they", I'm afraid that is a debate that has been had over and over by people (yet somehow, people don't mind using the plural-form "you" in a singular meaning, but I digress…) – Merriam-Webster's online dictionary has an article on use of singular they, and although it primarily refers to a specific modern use to refer to individuals neither male nor female, it does acknowledge the widely accepted gender-neutral use of the pronoun. (I acknowledge that certain style guides advise against its use. Ours does not, and I would recommend against following third-party style guides without understanding the underlying reasoning behind the rules.)

"Homo refers to the genus for humans and a- is short for ad- or ab-." In Latin, yes; not in (Ancient) Greek. You may dislike the fact that the English terms "homosexual" and "asexual" combine parts of different languages. Your personal dissatisfaction with language and its use does not mean, however, that it is wrong.

"Unless you know the languages the world steals its stems from, you don't know what it does wrong." Even if it were misusing morphemes by the source languages' standards, that is of no concern here. English is not Latin or Ancient Greek. I acknowledge that it can be odd to see English take bits and pieces from other languages and use them in ways that do not match the source language – "kindergarten" being one such example that can be confusing to people familiar with the subtly different meaning in German – but that is how language works. (For the record, I am familiar with Latin, as well as (to a much smaller degree) Ancient Greek. I'm afraid this does not make me think of English as being "wrong", either.)

"You'd also know there is no contemporary English, as English died 1000 years ago sith Norman Conquest and everyone talks in "Einglish" now with loanwords and slang." Nonsense; language evolves. You don't get to pick and choose some arbitrary point at which you start to become dissatisfied with the evolution of language, and proclaim that anything from that point on is no longer that language. Medieval Latin differed significantly from Old or even Classical Latin as well, yet it did not stop being Latin. This wiki uses English as it is used today, not as it was used 1000 years ago.

"What kind of dismissive comments aren't welcome?" To quote:

• "I hope I used the simple words you understand."
• "The post-classic (tho the proper calque is metaclassic) world introduced the first dumb improper changes you learnt."

I can accept your odd views on language, even if I disagree, as long as you don't apply them to the wiki without consensus. However, talking down to people as you did there and framing your view as the only correct one, implying any different view is "dumb" and "improper", isn't something we can tolerate on this wiki. We are here to work together, not to have shouting matches.

—bcode ^{talk | mail} 03:48, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, BCode, for having infinitely more patience in outlining the obvious flaws with this approach than I could be bothered to demonstrate. --Umbire the Phantom (talk) 03:52, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

No you don't mean issue; you mean problem. Your comment is all about the latter, not simply something to talk about and it's not clear what went out where. Linking to a dictionary without respect to etýma misses my point about the corrupt and contradictory usages/senses/definitions. The words only mean each other narrowly, like a spill or outage, and it makes no sense to say issue unless its root is respected.

What's widely accepted is wrong as most folk are average halfwits who can't discern, will not read history, repeat instead of prove, trust titles instead of reason, and don't care about facts over feelings. This is why words' usages contradict and meaning breaks down.

Not no, neither gender means neither masculine [sic, as mas with mulier is a sex, not a gender as vir and femina, thus virine and feminine] nor feminine, the same as the 0th gender neuter. Some time after I wrote the March comment I found the quality of it inaccurate; now I recognize it as indefinite, not definite. But sometimes I switch that and it. Here's the full paradigm:

singular definite common: who
singular definite neuter: that
singular indefinite common: one
singular indefinite neuter: it
plural definite common: they
plural definite neuter: those
plural indefinite common: some
plural indefinite neuter: some

The third gender is common/epicene/epicœne. Authors ignorant of this gender mark common words in dictionaries as mf instead. All subjects are objects (Newton's law) and some nonbinaries (so-called neutroises, when neuter already refers to gender and sterile to sex) are already served by that. Again I don't care about narrow-minded wide [ab]usage that doesn't determine whether I'm wrong.

You mistook referent (active) for referend (passive, or even referred, passive). Sometimes a thing can lead to the thing if there aren't other things like the former thing. This wiki often talks about figurative persons rather than real. I'd need to see the writing you had problem with.

Folk ignorant of the plural ye say you. I remember takan a poll of USA regional language where one question had almost a dozen words for the plural of you the taker used and mine wasn't there. Again, if they were gender-neutral (neuter), most should be offended when called a they in the same way as it or that, instead of gender-communal (common, c, mf).

The terms aren't English but Einglish, nonEnglish loanwords. Cognitive dissonanty, P600 waves, garden-path statements, general confusion, and conflict between formal and informal registers mean the construction is wrong. A false distinction between amoral and immoral is drawn from the same ignoramus. The corrupt barbaric constructions make new ones that rely on the accurate meanings of native stems touh to learn and popularize.

Einglish, the average of original and i-mutated spelling variants as listed by OED between Ormulum and Chancery sources, not English, borrows from those other languages. Otherwise one ouht hýphenate hybrid words or compound [mis]appropriated words, like English-Latin compound or English German kindergarten. In any case kindergarten doesn't literally/radically exclude the American usage, nor does the German usage conclude it. Languages decay when a culture borrows words then inevitably forgets native roots and stems that already meant the loans. There is some English in Einglish but they're usually not mutually intelligibil; that makes them different languages, kronolects. You believe that Einglish is English only wherefore it's written English but that doesn't make them the same language. Latin properly had Latinos, then Latinus, then Vulgaris. All of the Romans' loanwords need to be hýphenated or compounded too.

I know I can't make lots of changes I want on this wiki without conflict; I also can't spare the time to edit. Wikipedia likewise doesn't claim to be true: "Verifiability, not truth [sic, instead of truthe]". Lysdexia (talk) 01:37, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Five months to say all this nothing and miss the point so thoroughly. I'm almost impressed. --Umbire the Phantom (talk) 22:47, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

No, you, “rougelike” fan. Lysdexia (talk) 06:03, 27 July 2023 (UTC)