User talk:Doric Loon/PIE Root *reg-

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Proposing an idea of what a good root page should look like and include: 惑乱 分からん 17:14, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

That looks good. We could set each article up automatically with something like that as a template. --Doric Loon 17:30, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Maybe fix the design or something... 惑乱 分からん 20:32, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Borrowings and loanwords

We need to find a good way of including common loanwords. Some loanwords are very old, for instance, *reg was borrowed as *rik in Proto-Germanic from a Celtic language. Other borrowings are newer, like for instance a lot of Latin words in modern languages, and English "copyright" into many other languages. This page should give an overview of languages spoken by millions of people through thousands of ages, though, so it would be quite a complex issue to make accessible for laymen. 惑乱 分からん 04:51, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

One possibility is to include loans under the language they are loaned from. Under Latin regalis we write "hence English regal". That keeps groups together which belong lingusitically together. It does mean that in a case like *reg- which has a complicated history, English may appear in five or six places, but I don't see that as a problem. In the case of very early borrowings like Germanic *rik- it does mean that a whole Germanic complex will appear as a sub-set of Celtic.

The other option would be to keep all forms within a language together, but I think that would badly obscure lines of descent in cases where a single root produces many parallel lines of descent.

Something similar happens with derived forms within a language which then have separate subsequent histories. And that possibly is my one quibble about your idea of structuring the whole page according to languages, as though we were dealing with a single tree. For example, to take a relatively simple case, after *rik- established itself in Germanic, it produced two distinct forms, a noun and an adjective. Both of those find their way into all the Germanic language: English rich and (bishop)ric etc. Now we have to choose: if we structure according to languages we privilege the synchronic over the diachronic, which means it is easy to see what forms exist in, say, German but the reader has to work a little harder to see what forms are linguistically most closely related:

English

rich

-ric

German

reich

Reich

On the other hand, if we structure according to related forms (on balance my preference), we privilege the diachronic, which after all is what the page is about, making it easy to see the connections, but the reader must work a little harder to find all the forms of a given language:

Germanic adj form

English rich

German reich

Germanic noun form

English -ric

German Reich

See what I mean? We do need this decided at the very beginning or there would be chaos.

Another thing we must decide is conventions. I would put cited words in italics and translations of these in single inverted commas. Any thoughts? --Doric Loon 11:11, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

For words such as "copyright", "film", "regal" etc. we could add a (widely borrowed) comment in paranthesis, I think it's more neutral and simpler. 惑乱 分からん 14:50, 1 April 2006 (UTC)