Talk:Pseudoword

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 17 August 2020 and 23 November 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): TJEevee.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 07:23, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Ployer is a bad example

"'Ployer' is a pseudoword in English, while 'dfhnxd' is not."

Pseudo my behind: ploy + -er == ployer, one who uses a tactic, strategy, or gimmick. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 00:11, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Someone replaced it with Vonk, which seems to be better.--Elvey (talk) 19:15, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

list of commonly used pseudowords

I think this would be a great addition to wikipedia and could even be included in wiktionary.

for example: impractical is not word. I'm sure there are many more. Rotorius.kool (talk) 00:20, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Merriam-Webster disagrees with you. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 14:45, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

I found a couple interesting ones, perhaps: the output of

grep "\(\w\w\w\w\w\w\)\1$" /usr/share/dict/words

(on my system anyway) is killeekillee and tangantangan, and yet I can't find any definition of the words online (other than on a tripod page), or use outside of Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science: Algorithms and Complexity - Volume 1 - Page 261.--Elvey (talk) 19:15, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Proposed merger with Logatome

Logatome gives practically the same definition, with the only difference being that it mentions usage in experiments in the psychology of learning. Allens (talk) 00:32, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

• Support merger. I'm not familiar with the term logatome from the scientific literature, which may suggest different technical terminology in different fields. My training is in linguistics; the sources cited at Logatome come from speech therapy and the sub-sorter says the article is related to psychology. They seem to be the same concept used in related fields. By the way, wug words is another name for pseudowords used in learning experiments, as mentioned on Pseudoword. See also Accidental gap, which is not the same concept but is vaguely related. Cnilep (talk) 03:27, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
  • I've put in a "see also" link for Accidental gap. It appears that a redirect for wug word is also indicated? Thanks! Allens (talk) 17:06, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
• Support merger – seem identical/synonym (putting “also known as logatome or wug word” at top of pseudoword, and merging content/refs seems sufficient). Thanks Allen!

  —Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 05:40, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose - There is a difference: a logatome usually consists just of one syllable and is used in particular in acoustic experiments. So it is actually some kind of variant of a pseudoword, which deserves a separate article. I have tried to make it clearer in the article logatome. The Wiki ghost (talk) 08:40, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Thank you for your efforts, but... I am biased, of course, but I think that given the length of the two articles (Logatome in particular), merger with a full separate section for Logatome (noting both the one-syllable nature and it being used in particular in acoustic experiments) makes more sense than keeping the material two separate places with cross-references. Otherwise, people have to go back and forth between the two pages (Pseudoword gives a much fuller description than Logatome), which is especially problematic if printed out or on a slow connection. What do others think? Are there Wikipedia standards for this other than WP:SIZERULE, which with only 468 bytes of readable text (not links or references, using User:Dr_pda/prosesize) for Logatome supports merging it? And is there anyplace else that I should post regarding this proposed merger, to get more viewpoints in? Sorry for only thinking about posting to people's talk pages after a delay - I'm glad I didn't just go ahead with the merger; I do want to include all viewpoints! Allens (talk) 11:17, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
• Support Exactly how the merged text is worded is likely to depend on the answer to this question: Does a "logatome" still "consist[] most of the time of just one syllable" even in languages with mostly open syllables, such as Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and especially Hawaiian? Or (checking Logatome#References) does this tendency have something to do with the systemic bias toward German and English, whose roots tend monosyllabic, in the references? --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 14:13, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
  • That's an excellent question... I will confess that I have no professional background in linguistics (having taken a total of one course in the subject); my interest comes from the synthesis of new "words" for role-playing gaming and other constructed languages. (I have a bit more knowledge of psychology; in terms of the experimentation usage, my doctorate is in the natural sciences, so that's an area I'm pretty confident in.) Could you explain further the relevance of closed vs open syllables? Is this because of a correlation with monosyllabic vs multisyllabic roots? (If so, it would be nice if that were noted in the article section on open vs closed syllables, with appropriate referencing, of course...) Allens (talk) 18:20, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
    • (Here come the calculations) By the definition of a syllable, the number of potential pseudowords of one syllable equals number of onsets times number of nuclei times number of codas. Because open-syllable languages have only one coda, there are far fewer possible open syllables. (Here comes the original research) Languages tending toward open syllables tend to have few monosyllabic open class words simply because there are fewer possibilities. As for referencing, Monosyllabic language needs sources too. I gave English and German as examples of languages in which CVC syllables are pronounceable, but I'm hesitating on going further without sources. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 23:23, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
• Support: while the logatome article is not particularly clear on its exact definition, it does make clear that is is a type of pseudoword. A subsection in the pseudoword article may (or may not) be warranted, but this is a distinct issue from these articles covering similar areas. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 20:15, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

 Done Consensus supported merger. And for good measure, I tossed in Nonsense syllable, which was saying much the same thing as Logatome. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 23:23, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Pseudoword and accidental gap

Some discussion about this topic at my userpage: User talk:Oiyarbepsy/2014#Pseudo-words and accidental gaps Oiyarbepsy (talk) 04:24, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

"ciphers" and "typos" are pseudowords?

Is it just me, or does the second paragraph of the lede imply (or even explicitly state) that the words "ciphers" and "typos" are pseudowords? In any case, that whole paragraph seems to me to be rather poorly written. ComeAndHear (talk) 04:58, 16 July 2024 (UTC)