Template talk:PIE

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so far, a clone of Template:IPA, with the possibility to add customization options. dab (ᛏ) 08:49, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

The font definitions have been moved to MediaWiki:Common.css. See Template talk:IPA#Font declaration has been moved to Common.css. I used class="Unicode" rather than class="IPA" because the PIE text is not just (or even primarily) IPA codes. --teb728 06:22, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

I removed "text-decoration: none" from the style argument. Its presence was undesirable because it prevented PIE text from being underlined when it appers in a link. --teb728 02:41, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Italics

What is the reason for the forced italics? At least on my browser, it renders many characters (especially those with superscripts) unreadable. Can we remove this and let italics be set in articles? --Theodore Kloba 19:50, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Without italics, articles get confusing. To someone who doesn't know the history of this template, seing {{PIE|thrbt}} in an article doesn't mean anything, and coming to this page doesn't particularly improve matters. The use of italics at least leaves it clear that the word is in another language.

Take for example the article on homo (genus) (which is how I got here). It says simply "from the PIE dhǵhem- 'earth'"

I click on PIE and find that it's not something edible, but a group of languages, so I immediately think "dhghem must be one of those languages... so why does it have 'dash earth' in the other article?" I come here and realize "ah, so dhghem is the actual word meaning 'earth'!" I really don't think the average user is willing to go though all this trouble to find that out.

I say put back the italics (because there must be more articles out there depending on this template to put its words in PIE in italics) or go through all of them and put the little apostrophe couple in.

--190.39.202.68 20:22, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

The homo (genus) article shouldn't just have the abbreviation "PIE" anyway! It should spell out Proto-Indo-European. Why expect someone reading a biology article to know abbreviations of hypothetical languages?!?

Anyway, back to the italics issue... Where a single PIE word occurs in the midst of English text, I see your point. Unfortunately, when it's used in a table that's full of nothing but PIE words (where I encountered it), it's pointless and reduces legibility. Maybe there should be a different template for each. Of course there's nothing stopping you from manually adding italics around the template as I did in homo (genus) and as is done with the Latin words in that same sentence. --Theodore Kloba 21:23, 1 May 2007 (UTC)