Look a Proto-Scythian word up
scythian_searchLook a Proto-Scythian lemma up on Wiktionary and return its senses plus its full descendants payload — the reconstructed etymology and the reflex tree down to Ossetian and Khotanese, attested scholarship, not invention. Plain ASCII spellings are folded to the reconstruction's diacritics and the result notes the resolution. With search_language='eng' the query is an English word instead: the result lists the lemmas whose glosses match it (the translations block) plus their expanded entries. Returns Markdown plus the same result as structuredContent matching the declared outputSchema.
Results are cached server-side; first-time queries reach the live upstream politely and calls are rate limited — on a rate-limit error, wait a few seconds and retry. Content is from en.wiktionary.org (CC BY-SA 4.0 — attribute and share alike if republished).
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| query | Yes | The word to look up, in the language search_language names. Scythian (default): a SINGLE Proto-Scythian lemma — plain ASCII works ('tigri' finds *tiɣri: macrons and carons are folded, and ɣ→g, δ→d, β→b, ə→e, θ→t or th), with or without the reconstruction asterisk. English (search_language='eng'): the English word whose Proto-Scythian equivalents you want — matched against every entry's glosses. | |
| max_forms | No | Optional override for how many descendants payloads to expand this call (0–12). On an uncached query each payload is one politely paced upstream fetch, so high values on cold queries are slow. Omit for the server default. | |
| include_forms | No | When true (default), each match's full descendants payload — etymology, glosses and the reflex tree down to Ossetian and Khotanese — is returned INLINE in ONE call, no follow-up scythian_get_descendants. Set false for a cheap screen of which entries exist. Bounded by a per-search cap — use max_forms to adjust per call. For eng queries this governs the expanded entries; the matched-lemmas list itself is always returned. | |
| search_language | No | Language the query word is in: 'xsc' (default) looks the Proto-Scythian lemma up directly; 'eng' finds the lemmas whose English glosses match the query (the local gloss index — reconstructed languages have no translation tables) and returns their full entries. Glosses are in English either way. | xsc |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| found | Yes | False when nothing matched. For an eng query, True means the gloss index named Proto-Scythian lemmas — entries may still be empty when none of them could be expanded (see translations). | |
| query | Yes | ||
| source | No | Wiktionary, the free dictionary (en.wiktionary.org), Proto-Scythian reconstruction entries. Wikimedia Foundation. Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0; attribution and share-alike required when republishing. (CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) Adapted: reformatted and condensed from the original. | |
| entries | No | ||
| handles | No | ||
| language | Yes | ||
| translations | No | Populated only for eng queries (always [] for xsc): the Proto-Scythian lemmas whose glosses match the query. Entries/handles below are the expanded dictionary entries of those lemmas. | |
| resolved_from | No | The original query when resolved via the index; else empty. xsc queries only — always empty for eng results. | |
| search_method | No | How the match was found: 'direct' = the query itself matched; 'lemma_index' = an ASCII/diacritic-folded spelling resolved via the reverse index; 'translations' = an English query resolved via the local gloss index. | direct |
| resolved_lemma | No | The lemma actually searched when resolved; else empty. xsc queries only — always empty for eng results. | |
| forms_truncated | No | How many handles did NOT get an inline descendants payload because the per-search cap was reached. | |
| translations_truncated | No | How many distinct matched lemmas were NOT expanded into entries because the per-search expansion cap was reached (they still appear under translations). |