Yezur Wiki:Ambiguous glosses

A working list of Dictionary entries whose English glosses do not distinguish them. It is the counterpart to a ruling the operator made on 2026-08-21 over calf and bone: where a language has two words and English has one, the one-word gloss inherited from the export hides the distinction rather than recording it, and the entries read as free variants when they are not.

Each row names the language, the competing lemmas, what their definitions currently say, and a suggested split. The suggestions are suggestions — the operator rules, and the ruling is what gets written.

How the list was made

Every row of the Lexemes table was grouped by language, part of speech and gloss; any group holding more than one lemma is a collision. Of 3,752 lexemes, 44 groups collided. Inflected-form pages, which carry no gloss, were excluded.

The collisions fall into three kinds, handled separately below: glosses where the definitions already draw the distinction and only the gloss field was stale; lemmas that genuinely need a ruling; and one case that is not an ambiguity at all but a mistake in an etymology.

Settled without a ruling

In these the entry already said the right thing and only the one-word gloss= field — which is what the collision check reads — was stale. Corrected 2026-08-21.

Language	Lemma	Was	Now	Because
Besoh	o'	fingernail	claw	The definition already reads "claw, talon (of beasts) — the human nail is kio'".
Besoh	go	ten	whole, full	The numeral sense is already marked archaic on the entry; it has passed to göj.
Besoh	bë	right	right (hand)	bë is the right hand and strong side; mon is right as in correct.
Besoh	mon	right	right (correct)	As above.
Proto-North-Andusian	*gira	play	game	From Proto-Andusian *gida ("dance"), and glossed "contest, game" on the entry. The plain verb is *gidz.

Dictionary:mum was also repaired in passing: its two Proto-South-Andusian etymologies had their part-of-speech headings at the same level as the etymologies, so neither nested under its own.

Part one: ruled and applied

The operator ruled every row on 2026-08-21 and the rulings are carried into the entries; the Notes column holds the ruling itself.

Herta-Olaic: one etymon, two reflexes

Thirteen Gaillean lemmas descend in pairs from a single Proto-Herta-Olaic word and reach Middle Airananwe still paired, with the same gloss on both. Two reflexes of one etymon is a normal thing for a language to have — but the pair almost always divides the sense-field between them, and here nothing records how.

#	Gloss	Proto	Gaillean	Middle Airananwe	Suggested split	Verdict	Notes
1	stone	*o:jig͡ɣ	oiat / oisie	oyte / oysye	Stone as a material against a stone as an object — the split already ruled for bone.	applied	oisie: piece of stone, oiat: material
2	sea	*kɸaɲɛx	piecia / qangha	piecie / qangyaa	The sea as an expanse against a named body of water; or inshore water against open water.	applied	synonyms
3	child	*ᵐbilwə	mbila / theste	mbile / these	A young person against someone's offspring, of any age.	applied	mbila: a child theste: offspring
4	burn	*rkaʒtə	awarei / reghazhtei	ooeree / regyasytee	Intransitive (to be alight) against transitive (to set alight).	applied	awarei: be on fire reghazhtei: transitive
5	live	*ruo:ʃt	rocettei / videi	rocetee / vindestee	To be alive against to dwell, to reside somewhere.	applied	rocettei: dwell videi: be alive
6	they	*aɪʃxe	aecei / icei	aycee / ecee	Animate against inanimate; or, given the pair below, the same distinction the singular makes.	applied	icei is female, aecei is male/generic.
7	he/she/it/etc	*xmɑtʲe:	athe / hima	—	As above. The gloss "he/she/it/etc" is itself worth replacing with whatever the ruling settles.	applied	hima is female, athe is male/generic.
8	you	*ixaβ (pl.) / *nwijɔ (sg.)	ihav / nio	hyaave / nie	Already answered upstream: the proto distinguishes plural from singular and Ancient Hertic labels its pair ιαπα (plural) / νου (singular). Gaillean and Middle need the same labels. See the error below.	applied	yes, clearly ihav and hyaave are plural, and nio/nie are singular.
9	in	*ho:tβ	hoth / ou	hoth / uue	Static location (in) against motion (into).	applied	hoth: inside of, contained by ou: more generically "at a location" -> in England.
10	at	*uztk	sou / uzh	—	Place against time; or a general locative against a precise one.	applied	sou: time uzh: place

Herta-Olaic: unrelated pairs

These three have no common etymon, so they are simply two words the export gave one gloss.

#	Gloss	Gaillean	Middle Airananwe	Suggested split	Verdict	Notes
11	by	ith / taw	ith / itaa	Agent ("written by her") against proximity ("by the door"). English merges these; most languages do not.	applied	taw: nearby / ith: action done by
12	for	bell / wiu	bel / iyu	Benefactive ("for you") against purpose or duration ("for three days").	applied	bell: purpose / iyu: benefactive
13	step-mother	siquiba / velna-hwith	siqie / velan-huith	velna-hwith is transparently a compound and siquiba is not, which usually means one is the plain word and the other formal, legal or distancing.	applied	siquiba is a more colloquial term, also meaning "adoptive mother" or "caretaker" or effectively "baby-sitter". velan-huith is the formal term.

Andusian

#	Gloss	Languages	Lemmas	Suggested split	Verdict	Notes
14	he, she, it	Proto-Andusian and all three branch protos, and Besoh	*dʰɛ / *o, and their reflexes	Two third-person pronouns run the length of the family with no distinction recorded anywhere. Proximal against distal, or animate against inanimate, would both be ordinary. Whatever is ruled propagates to eight entries.	applied	dhe: female o: male
15	hail	Proto-South-Andusian, Besoh	*mum / *rɔts, mium / roc	mum comes from *muᵐb ("snow"), rɔts from a word already meaning hail and ice. Soft hail or graupel against the hard hailstone would follow the etymologies.	applied	synonyms

Besoh: superseded senses left unmarked

Besoh repeatedly coined a new word to escape a homophone — and in one case, go / göj, the older entry says so plainly: "archaic: ten — the numeral sense has passed to göj." Four more pairs did the same thing without leaving the note, so both lemmas still claim the sense.

One ruling covers all four: whether the older word keeps the sense alongside the new one, or is marked superseded the way go is.

Human note: No, if there is a superseded form we don't keep the word on the old. This isn't divergent, it's just a differing path. If anything, we also don't list "lost final consonant restored" or "escaping homophones"; those are bordering on out-of-character comments.

#	Sense	Older lemma	Replacement	What the replacement's etymology says	Verdict	Notes
16	sharp	he (etymology 3)	heĥ	"the lost final consonant restored archaically"	applied
17	stone	ho (etymology 2)	hoĥ	"the lost final consonant restored archaically"	applied
18	spear	gö (etymology 3)	gön	"extended with -n to escape its homophones"	applied
19	new	ba' (etymology 2)	beza	"Origin uncertain" — so this pair may instead be a real split (ba' young, raw against beza new, fresh).	applied

An error, not an ambiguity

Gaillean ihav and its Middle Airananwe reflex hyaave both give their etymon as *nwijɔ — the singular — which is also the etymon of nio / nie. The plural *ixaβ has no Gaillean descendant at all, though Ancient Hertic ιαπα continues it and matches ihav in shape.

Reading ihav < *ixaβ fixes the etymology, gives the plural a reflex, and settles row 8 at the same time. It needs confirming rather than ruling, but it is a content change either way.

Human note: Confirmed - ihav and hyaave are from ixaB.

Part two: where English is the ambiguity

Filed 2026-08-21, after the operator's rulings above. The first list found places where one language had two words and English one gloss. This one finds the other half of the same problem: glosses that are a single English word which English itself splits. The operator's example is hair — the hair on a person's head, or one hair. Nothing in the corpus says which, so the gloss will eventually be translated wrong in both directions.

Every row of Lexemes was grouped by gloss; 258 single-word glosses are carried by four or more languages. The rows below are the ones where the English word does real damage, not the whole 258 — the rest are single-sense words (tooth, snake, five) that need nothing.

Fixed without a ruling

Housekeeping, corrected 2026-08-21 — these were inconsistencies in the gloss field rather than questions.

Was	Now	Affected	Why
i (Herta-Olaic) against I (Andusian)	I	4 entries	The first-person pronoun. Lowercase reads as the name of the letter.
left / left(-hand)	left (hand)	9 entries	The two halves of one family were glossed differently, and bare left can be read as a direction of travel or as "left over".
right / right(-hand)	right (hand)	9 entries	As above.
right (the Andusian moᵑg family)	correct	4 entries	These mean right as in correct, and now share the gloss the Herta-Olaic and Njeshan words for that sense already used.
right (*moᵑgets)	the right, entitlement	1 entry	It is the noun — "the right / law" — not the adjective.

The pending rows

The rows below were rewritten on 2026-08-28. Each pending gloss now has every entry behind it set out with what its own definition says, at Yezur Wiki:Ambiguous glosses/Part two. That page is where the ruling is done; this is the index.

Of the 459 entries behind these rows, 285 carry a definition that says more than the bare gloss. Most of the list therefore needs no ruling at all — only a gloss field brought back into step with an entry that already answers the question. Those are marked answerable and can be applied as written.

Section	Answerable from the entries	Needs a ruling
Two different words, spelled alike	6	0
Mass against count	14	2
Where the word covers a different extent	7	0
Adjectives running on two axes	0	10
Distinctions English lacks	1	5
total	28	17

What actually needs deciding

Stripped of the rows that answer themselves, these are the open questions:

• One standing question governs most of the adjectives: does a bare daughter entry inherit the sense-range its proto records, or is it read narrowly as the core physical sense only? Answering it once settles some three dozen rows across big, long, short, old, new, dull, thick, thin, heavy and full.
• Mass against count: stone and bone are the two the corpus genuinely splits; the other twelve of that shape follow whatever convention is set for them.
• Extent: breast — the chest against a woman's breast.
• Distinctions English lacks: we (inclusive against exclusive), know (a fact against a person), say, smell (giving off against perceiving) and come. These were never decided rather than mis-glossed, so no amount of evidence settles them.
• The four Proto-Njeshan adjectives have no parent entry to read down from, so each must be stated outright whatever is decided above.

Gloss against definition: a sweep (2026-09-07)

Prompted by the English hub pass, every foreign entry on the wiki was checked mechanically: does its gloss= field agree with its own first definition line? Of 3,513 headwords, 3,429 agree. The 84 that did not fall into three kinds.

Three were a mistake of mine, now repaired. On a homograph page split into Etymology 1 / Etymology 2, a gloss correction from the 2026-08 pass had been written onto the wrong section — always the first one:

Entry	carried	but is defined	cost
gö (Besoh, noun)	say (utter words)	"louse"	louse lost its Besoh translation
ke (Besoh, conjunction)	come (arrive at a place)	"because, for"	because lost its Besoh translation
kɛ (Proto-South-Andusian, conjunction)	come (arrive at a place)	"because, for"	because lost its Proto-South-Andusian translation

All three glosses are corrected and the three translations restored. Worth recording as a failure mode: a gloss written by position rather than by matching the section's own definition will land on the wrong homograph and then propagate silently into a translations box.

Four were a proto whose gloss lagged its definition, in each case with the narrower sense arriving only in the descendants. These were moved to the English lemma their definition actually names, and the gloss corrected to match:

• ᵐbawɔʃtʲ — glossed king, defined "chief… not necessarily a crowned monarch". Now on chief; king survives in the descendants embat, embaa, ebá.
• sʒatʀɪ — glossed road, defined "a beaten path… not a built thing". Now on path.
• av (Proto-Andusian) — glossed road, defined "path, track, way". Now on path; its North-Andusian descendant does mean road and stays.
• dʰɔt — glossed freeze, but freeze is its labelled sub-sense ({{lb}} of highland water); its core is "congeal, set, stiffen", where its three descendants already sat. Now on congeal.

The remaining rows are not errors — the gloss is the qualified form and the definition states the bare head (thick (in cross-section); dense against "thick"), or an affix entry elaborates its label. Two are genuinely undecided and are offered here rather than fixed:

• gira — ruled 2026-09-07: it means play and game alike, and part of speech matters little in a proto-language. The gloss stands; the form is now listed in the boxes on both play and game.
• go — ruled 2026-09-07: the Proto-South-Andusian numeral does mean ten, and it is that sense which leads into Besoh's whole, full — the numeral counts the fingers of both hands. Only the definition line had dropped the numeral, and it is restored; the development is now recorded in the Besoh entry's etymology, alongside the rebuilt numeral göj (“the count of the whole”).
• The four entries ruled to third person singular pronoun (*bso, imtha, tha, thai) still have "he/she/it/etc" as their definition line. The ruling was about the gloss; whether the definition should follow is not settled.

See also

• Yezur Wiki:Dictionary structure — the settled decisions, including the per-sense translations rule and the reciprocal-link rule
• Yezur Wiki:Daily routine/Report — the maintenance routine's own flag table