With Japanese, has anyone brought up making it possible to select the hiragana transcriptions of kanji with the mouse?

This would be very helpful to people who haven't mastered hiragana, like myself. Thanks!

(If most people can select them and this is on my end, please let me know.)

If I wanted to learn Sumerian I would download a textbook or two, work my way through it, and also find *university* resources on the language, such as dictionaries and grammars hosted by universities. For a lot of dead languages, universities and university-quality scholarly websites host a ton of resources. Sumerian will be more sparse than Latin or Greek, maybe even than Old English, but I can't imagine there are no good free resources hosted by universities.

I would try to translate things from Sumerian that have already been translated, and compare my results.

This would not give me an academic degree in Sumerian, nor the equivalent, but sometimes you have to do the next best thing.

I'm unsuspended. At some point I may explain the series of misunderstandings on my part that led to this, but for now I'm just really touched by all the support I've received in the last few days and glad to be back.

I misremembered - it was 16,000 a month.

My apologies. It's 16,000 a month, not 16,000 a day. I misremembered what I read.

Either way, that is 16 times as much as the people who add the second-most and third-most sentences. That's something we have good reason to want to prevent, for the sake of the future of this site.

But having this discussion in the midst of a discussion asking to limit sentences about Algeria specifically taints this.

A cap is a limit. I'm talking about a limit on the number of daily contributions.

16,000 sentences by one user in a day is too many. It's not natural. I'm disabled and I don't contribute anywhere near that much, nor has anyone contributed anywhere near that much before without using scripts.

The point is Algeria is already almost as well represented in the corpus as Australia - better represented even, proportionally to population. And that it will soon catch up to Australia in raw numbers.

Before Amastan was adding 16,000 new sentences in a month, someone else apparently used to add a similarly high amount, but their contributions were never capped. If we did the cap after Algeria caught up to Australia, you could say that both Algeria and Australia had benefitted equally from the situation before the cap was instituted. I don't know if this is less prejudicial or not; it's an idea.

There are currently 17,183 occurrences of the "wildcard" country "Australia" in the corpus, and 14,651 occurrences of "Algeria." Australia is the best thing to compare Algeria to, rather than Tom and Mary, which are names (and Amastan uses many names in his sentences).

If the cap is instituted once the number of occurrences of Algeria comes to roughly equal that of Australia, will that allay your concerns? It will mean both Algeria and Australia have equally benefited from the pre-cap situation. No one could say that Algeria has been disadvantaged; in fact, one could say that instituting this cap at any point (even now) makes it harder for any country to play catch-up to Algeria.

Disclaimer: I am not an administrator and do not have the power to make offers.

Did you still have a tab open from three days ago? I got rid of the native part of that post within an hour of making it (and my original comment said non-native contributions were fine, but that the volume of non-native contributions was the problem)

At any rate, the answer seems to be a cap on daily contributions.

To me the answer to "disproportionate number of sentences about Algeria" is to add more sentences about France, India, China, the U.S., Japan, Germany, Kenya, etc..

Granted, this is hard when someone adds such a volume of sentences that it dwarfs all others, so caps are a good idea

What it looks like to me is that there are two separate issues, and that they've been conflated. I see these two issues as:

1. A single person is adding far more sentences to the English corpus than the next two people combined.

2. People don't like that a lot of this person's sentences are about Algeria. That's too bad. More people should add sentences about their countries and cultures. He's doing nothing wrong by writing about his own, even if a lot of it amounts to political propaganda.

To address 1, I'll echo those who have suggested caps. I think the caps suggested are more than reasonable and would not prevent most users from adding the number of sentences that they are already adding.

soweli_Elepanto already uses Tomaso in Esperanto, and Latin contributors generally use Thomas or Didymus, so I think it's no problem to translate "Tom" as "Thomas" (or some other diminutive of Thomas, if one exists in Belarusian).

We've been addressing near duplicates for over a decade. I don't think they're going anywhere.

Clearly, a lot of people - not just me, who actually uses the names Tom and Mary most of the time - see much bigger and more serious problems than near-duplicates. Like the fact that the names Tom and Mary do not reflect their culture. And seeing this, they ignore the demand to eliminate near duplicates, which they never voted on. I support them doing this. It's unjust that people are pressured to use the names Tom and Mary, which is an extremely political and polarizing demand.

And when @AlanF_US ignores people who ask legitimate questions, what else should anyone do besides ignore his demands?