Tharthan
| Babel user information | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||
| Users by language | |||||||||
Hello, I am Tharthan (IPA: [θɑːɹθən]). I hail from "New England", a region in the northeastern United States of America (though, I would prefer if you would refrain from referring to me as an "American" if possible, as I associate more with New England than I do the entirety of the United States of America. "New Englander" is much more preferable.) The dialects of English that are spoken in New England differ quite a bit from the speech, spelling and wordstock of other North American English dialects. I personally speak a Southeastern New England dialect of English, though idiolectally I also lack the wine-whine merger. In addition, I maintain a partial lack of the horse-hoarse merger, I realise /ʊ/ as something close to /ɵ/, I realise /ʌ/ as something close to /ɐ/, I realise /ɔː/ as something closer to /ɒː/ (though I recognise /ɔɹ/ as /ɔɹ/), I realise /ɑ/ as something in between /ɑ/ and /ä/ (/ɑ̈/?), I have no /a/ phoneme (except maybe in the /aʊ/ diphthong); /æ/ takes its place, and I sometimes realise /ɒ/ as (my) "/ʌ/".
In addition to all of the above, I am a linguistic purist. This impacts me to the extent that I may opt for the use of loan translations from and/or English cognates (if they are close enough in meaning) of words in other Germanic languages (for example, I would prefer "ice bear" over "polar bear") over Latinates (unless the Latinates were present in Old English). That said, I may use a word derived from Latin that is ultimately Germanic in origin (for example: "seize"), or use back-formations/other derivations of words derived from Latin that are of Germanic origin if I find the general word in question to have too much of a Latin influence (for example, I won't use "burglar", but I may use "burgle", I won't use "mushroom", but I will use blends or the like that are prefixed with "mush-" in reference to mushrooms). However, much of the aforementioned doesn't apply to my Wikimedia contributions, but rather to other things that I do, like my poetry.
I don't intentionally go out of my way to "contribute" to Wikimedia Commons, but I do upload files here when I need to use said files on other Wikimedia projects. That is not to say that I have anything against Wikimedia Commons; not at all. It's just that I have no particular reason to contribute things specifically for the purpose of improving Wikimedia Commons.
Regarding other Wikimedia projects, I can say that I am very active on the English Wiktionary, where I contribute New England dialectal pronunciations, word etymologies, dialectal vocabulary (spanning all languages), translation improvement (spanning all languages), word definition improvement, blatant lie removal, grammar fixes, and also (occasionally) queries and discussions on talk pages regarding linguistic oddities. I am also present on the English Wikipedia, although I am barely active at all on it, unlike how I am on the English Wiktionary. My contributions on the English Wikipedia are in the fields of linguistics, history and folklore, although I also sometimes improve how words are defined in articles, do spelling and grammar fixes, insert word etymologies into articles, remove blatant lies from articles, and a few other things.