User: Dmh
From open-dictionary.com - the free dictionary.
Background
- B.S. in math/computer science
- Some graduate work in English literature
- Have lived in
- US: Kansas, Michigan, South Dakota, LA, Silicon Valley and North Carolina
- Europe: Holland and London with extended visits to Lombardy and Geneva
- Native speaker of American English, enough to get into trouble in
- Dutch
- Spanish
- German
- Italian
- French
- Maybe a phrase or two of
- Hebrew
- Japanese
- Portugese
- Romanian
- Albanian
- Welsh
Oh yes. I take my tea white, no sugar. Coffee likewise, preferring latte to cappucino.
Interests
- Linguistics, philology, lexicography
- Cognitive science
- Mathematics, theoretical and practical computing
- Music theory and practice
- Literature
- Group work activities, including Wiki
- Evolution, market economics and other emergent phenomena (including Wiki)
Wiktionaria
I'm currently trying to contribute or flesh out definitions for the most common words, with an eye toward increasing Wiktionary's usefulness. I'm most interested in teasing out the various senses of words and laying out how they interrelated.
Typically I try to put the core, most phyiscal meaning first and work outward from there by metaphoric extension (see Wikipedia article on conceptual metaphors. I try to show a clear path of development from concrete and general to more abstract and/or specialized senses. Assuming there is such a path.
After initially trying to gather idioms under the headword, I've seen the wisdom of calling them out as separate entries.
I generally leave etymology alone, except a brief note when it seems to illuminate the core meaning or development of a word (e.g., species). I don't add pronunciation partly because I haven't taken the time to fully absorb IPA (except on occasion, if it stands for India Pale Ale), and partly because my accent is neither completely standard nor interestingly non-standard.
I could probably add a translation here and there, but there are plenty of others clearly more qualified (Blijkbaar zijn er wel enige Nederlanders, bijvoorbeeld).