Talk:Wōdanaz

message: As there's been some talk about bringing this matter to MoS, maybe I should mention one change I'd like to see, which is to link asterisks for the edification of those who aren't familiar with their use in historical linguistics. In the same way that (to pick a random example) Galileo positioning system says its cost "is estimated at €1.1 billion", this article could begin "*Wōđanaz or *Wōđinaz is the reconstructed name...". We might even start an article for the purpose: asterisk in historical linguistics. This way we can just link there every now and then, and we don't need to clutter up every article with a historical reconstruction with explanations. (Another possibility would be to use a template with a span markup: "*Wōđanaz is"...) QuartierLatin1968  15:23, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: good idea (I prefer the *). dab (ᛏ) 17:10, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Newsflash! I've talked to the good folks at , and we can use their template to produce something like this: . This gives us the roll-over option, links to asterisk, and forces unicode-friendly fonts. You just type  and voilà. QuartierLatin1968  17:02, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: that's not that great, since ideally you'd want a mouseover for the form itself, too, such as  ()... dab (ᛏ) 17:24, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

text: Oh; I didn't know about the  template. Shouldn't that template really include the asterisk anyway? It's not as though any PIE forms are directly attested. And leaving PIE aside, I don't think there should be separate templates for every possible proto-language, because that just reduplicates effort. We could add a new parameter to  toggling the span title if necessary. Would it seem more annoying to have to enter two templates à la  or one ? QuartierLatin1968  20:43, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: no, the asterisk should be added manually. of course PIE is all reconstructed, but imagine a declination table for example: you'd not put an asterisk in each table cell, after all. I was intending to do a  for some time: these are for language markup, much like , ,  and others. The problem of the asterisk is separate. You don't want it to give a "THIS IS RECONSTRUCTED" explanation every time, just the first time it appears in an article, so there should be a separate  for that. dab (ᛏ) 09:41, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yup, you've convinced me. And after all we can always just use  wherever there isn't already a proto-language template. I'll make the necessary change to  and we can start using it. I think I may take the liberty of copying this exchange over to template talk:* for future reference. QuartierLatin1968  15:03, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Asterisk link

message: I like this article if it was just me I would give it an A, but I understand you need to do a nominaton process to go higher than a B so consider my grade a B+++. Goldenrowley 02:14, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I give articles As (and used to give them "GA" before they attached an entire bureaucracy to that) just because I think they qualify. If people object, they can still remove the tag and take it to some review. Wikipedia isn't built by waiting for the red tape to catch up with events :) dab (𒁳) 11:06, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: OKay B changed to A. Skip GA thing. Goldenrowley 03:00, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: =myth review

message: I see you've rated yourselves an A and maybe the article deserves it, relatively speaking, but not on the etymology and technical details. I see up there a notification that this article may be too technical for some readers. I suppose whoever put that in did not put it in the article because he did not dare. I would start in on the etymology but I do not dare. It is very hard psychologically to break in on a solid group working very hard and all the time patting each other on the back. No doubt there is a lot to be back-patted about. I'll leave that to you and concentrate on the problems. Here is my partial list.
*What is with the barred d? I presume by that you mean the barred d mentioned under Proto-Germanic. By the way, that articles cites no sources, so we are taking its word for it. I don't see it in Pokorny and I don't see it in Watkins and more importantly I don't see it in the title. Maybe they didn't care to get that specialized or maybe Proto-Germanic is too early for the barred d. Watkins uses the dh in the AHD, which is online, you know, but he doesn't use it in his proto-Germanic words. Ah well, I just checked my basic Gothic book. There is one there, but maybe it's later than the proto-stage. How is the public supposed to know what this is all about unless you tell them? You need a note there. In some articles I've seen a small insertion on script explaining what this or that letter is. You need to make clear whose proto-Germanic that is and why you don't usually see the barred d. Can you do that? If not, the English d awaits.
*"the reconstructed name". Which one is it? "the" name is one name. Unfortunately I cannot espouse either of those because according to Watkins in AHD it is *Wod-enaz. Another possibility, another note.
*"Odin probably rose to prominance". Got a source?
* OHG Wotan. The dictionaries have Wuotan.
*"traditionally derived". Whose tradition? Apparently none in this country.
::(Sorry, which country?—New Zealander Koro Neil (talk) 09:13, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: My main objection to "pre-Proto-Germanic" is that it is more cumbersome than "pre-Germanic". The concept seems to me a priori a reasonable one. The similarities between the Germanic languages seem to indicate a later common ancestor than that of, say, the Celtic languages. Proto-Germanic is more likely to have been contemporary with classical Greek or early Latin than with Mycenean Greek or Proto-Italic. Indeed, it seems reasonable to assume a fairly considerable gap between the time when the ancestral forms of the various IE families could be considered dialects of a single language and the time when they were recognisably the proto-languages of any of the families. This is particularly true of Germanic, and probably more true of Slavonic. The prefix "pre-" seems a sensible way of designating the forms the ancestral languages took in the long interim. If Proto-Iranian had developed and Proto-Indo-Aryan had died out, then "pre-Iranian", or perhaps "Late pre-Iranian" would be a reasonable term for what we now call "Proto-Indo-Iranian". Koro Neil (talk) 16:57, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: F on the etymology

message: Is there any reason why this article displays this curious mix of notes/literature/references? I don't mind doing the work of straightening them out. I'll do it tomorrow if no one objects. --Aryaman (talk) 11:59, 2 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notes/Literature/References 

message: I removed the following from the article: "By neo-pagans (not to confuse with the Ásatrú), Odin and the other Norse Gods and Goddesses, are twisted towards being part of some neo-pagan satanic-wannabe beliefs (see Odinism)." This seems a fairly obvious attack on neo-paganism. Posting here just in case there is some distinction between neo-pagan and Asatru that should be inserted in its place.--Khajidha (talk) 15:46, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removing vandalism 

message: The section associating Odin and Mercury is confusing, and in particular the statement that Tacitus was likely referring to Odin when writing of Mercury is especially confusing.  The section gets a little clearer as it goes, but it could ultimately be reworked to more clearly explain the connection (if any really exists) between the two gods. That is, it could better and more clearly convey the scholarly debate over the relationship between the two. Did one cause the other? Or, is this simply (as the section states at one point) a case of Greek and Roman writers interpreting foreign gods as their own under different names? What do modern scholars think on the matter? Is there a consensus? Or, is there a substantial modern debate? Clearing such matters up could help to better frame the matter and thus make the article clearer and more helpful to the casual reader.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.191.217.208 (talk) 20:11, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mercury and Tacitus 

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thread_title: File:Obrigheim Pressblech.png Nominated for speedy Deletion

message: It could be pointed out that the variant used by Richard Wagner, Wotan, is ahistorical; the modern German form would have regularly come out as **Wuten. :de:Odin#Etymologie points out that Wagner used Wodan initially, which is the "West Germanic" form (actually the form attested in Old Saxon and on the unshifted OHG inscription on the Nordendorf I fibula); but later he decided to use Wotan, which looks like a compromise between the previously used Wodan and "standard" Old High German Wuotan. According to wikt:Wotan, both Wodan and Wotan were used before Wagner, though. However, in early Old High German, non-diphthongised ō is still frequently attested; the diphthongised variants take over especially late in Old Bavarian (ō appears throughout the 9th century, and only by 900 is it completely ousted by uo), so Wōtan could conceivably appear in Old High German. In Lombardic, ō was never diphthongised and remained as such, and in fact, the German article claims that Wotan is once attested in Lombardic, besides the Romance-influenced spellings Guodan and Godan. It is also possible, however, as pointed out by Stefan Schumacher (pers. comm.), that the variant Wotan was created in the 19th century by misreading uuotan/VVOTAN (no letter case in OHG), as uuu for /wu/ was usually simplified to uu. On the other hand, in light of the above, some of these cases can also be genuinely undiphthongised. Also note that some Old High German dialects frequently show d instead of t, so Wōdan (as given at Wōden) can turn up in OHG, as well. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:57, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wotan 

message: Substituted at 10:56, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment