User:Doric Loon/PIE Roots project page
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Most of the vocabulary of the Indo-European languages is descended from roots (reconstructed words) in Proto-Indo-European. Some of the most important of these are listed at List of Indo-European roots. In total about 2200 PIE roots have been reconstructed.
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[edit] PIE Roots project
The idea of the PIE Roots project is to create separate articles on individual roots. This will allow a fuller presentation of these historical word families, with discursive explanations and user-friendly hyperlinking. The aim of this project, if we decide to undertake it, would in the first place be to provide a full picture of a few exemplary roots, rather than stubs on all 2200. Later this may grow to cover more or even all known roots. What this will provide, which other Wikimedia articles and other kinds of reference works do not, is an discussion of how the words change in form and semantics. And a discussion of current controversies. The articles should not simply be lists of data copied from existing reference books.
[edit] Previous debate
Some time ago separate roots articles were attempted and then abandoned. See: Talk:Proto-Indo-European language#"root" articles and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Indo-European root word articles. The decision to merge these into the present List of Indo-European roots was taken because they were really just lexical lists. The present proposal is different because we are looking at longer discursive essays on each root - as well as lexical lists of course.
[edit] Editors involved
To make this worth doing we need a core group of editors who are involved. The following have expressed at least provisional interest:
[edit] Locating the project
It has been suggested that the project could be located within Wikipedia or within Wictionary, or within Wikibooks, or could be a Wiki-project in its own right.
The advantage of Wikipedia is that links to and from other topics in historical linguistics like Indo-European ablaut or High German consonant shift would be easy. The disadvantage is that some may not think these articles suitable for an encyclopedia. This argument would be strong if we merely list lexemes, but rather weaker if we provide good analysis.
The advantage of Wictionary is that links to and from dictionary definitions of individual lexemes would be easy. The disadvantage is that Wictionary has a fixed article format, unlike Wikipedia, which has many types of article. Also, it is not the aim of these articles to define words, but rather to show contexts and connections, thus they are in fact to be more encyclopedic than lexical.
The advantages or disadvantages of Wikibooks?
The advantage of a separate Wiki-project is that we would produce an integrated work. The disadvantage is that the initial scope of the project would not be great enough to justify this.
It is not necessary to have a final decision on this at once. We could begin within Wikipedia and move the articles elsewhere later if a different consensus were reached.
[edit] Shape of the project
The actual shape of the project is still a little hazy, but it would certainly involve the roots articles themselves, and possibly index articles, categories, a template and a permanent project page.
[edit] Roots articles
If this is done in Wikipedia, the article titles would have to be something like PIE Root *reg-. In a different location it might be enough to have *reg-.
To begin with, we can try out a couple of sample articles here in this user space, to see how they develop. For this purpose the following have been created:
[edit] Index articles
Since it is not easy to know what root to look up for a particular word in a modern language, we would probably want an index article for each language. So for example, there might be an article English language PIE Roots index. This would contain an alphabetical list of English words contained in the roots articles, with a link to the appropriate article. One discipline of this will have to be that as the roots articles are being built up, each lexeme entered in them must be cross-referenced from the appropriate index. The indexes in turn should link from the articles on the languages themselves, in this case English language, so that people find their way into the project.
[edit] Categories
At least one giving a list of roots articles and one giving a list of index articles. Possibly also thematic ones?
[edit] Template
A small template to place at the top of each of the roots and index articles showing that it belongs to the project and asking people to read the project page before editing.
[edit] Project page
This page, which eventually will be moved to something like Wikipedia:PIE Roots project page and will explain why these articles are here and how to handle the particular problems of editing them.
[edit] Quality control
Difficult, since anyone can edit, but the project page can stress that no-one should add anything from what they think they know without confirming it from a relevant source.
