Category talk:English plurals ending in "-en"

Is there any point in this massive category? The only non-redundant entries are:

• [wo]men
• children
• boxen
• oxen
• brethren

and a few archaic or incorrect forms: ahlspiessen, sistren, shamen. "Vaxen" is not even included. KiloByte 03:08, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

In my opinion, the page as it is now (including dozens of compounds with "man") does not display any sensible category. There are a few nouns like ox, which still take an -en ending (a regular plural ending of the weak declension in Old English) instead of the expected -(e)s (generalized from the nominative plural of strong declension masculine nouns in Old English, and gaining ground since at least the 13th century). Words like man and woman are properly classified together with mouse, as they show a vowel change in the stem to signal plural; they have never taken an -en ending. Svenonius (talk) 12:25, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

It seems useful for at least the examples listed above. Perhaps trimming down its list of entries would be more useful than eliminating it? WilliamKF (talk) 19:59, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Words either belong in this category or they do not. If some -man to -men words belong, then all do. If no -man to -men words belong here, then we need a category to properly accommodate the set of words having this unusual pluralization. bd2412 T 00:50, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Split into separate categories for different derivations

From a research standpoint, it is unhelpful to have hundreds of vowel replacement words swamping the (comparatively few) others that use an actual "-en" suffix. The ending "-men" is not a plural suffix, it's a vowel replacement (arguably within a suffix that denotes personhood).

I think there should be two categories, approximately English plurals formed by the addition of an "-en" suffix, and English plurals formed by changing "-man" to "-men" or perhaps English plurals formed by vowel replacement (which would include "mice" and "geese" as well as "men"). They would certainly be more useful for research than the current unrelated derivations.

RFD

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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Category:English plurals ending in "-en"

Doesn't conform to our category system and seems to collect a wide variety of terms which don't have anything in common other than ending in -en. Totally pointless category. -- Liliana • 15:46, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

• Keep. Absurd nomination, unless you plan to convince the English-speaking world to change the plural of "man" to "mans". This category is completely in conformance with our system of individually categorizing plurals with endings formed by something other than addition of an "-s". See Category:English plurals ending in "-es", Category:English plurals ending in "-ies", Category:English irregular plurals ending in "-des", Category:English irregular plurals ending in "-ves", Category:English irregular plurals ending in "-ae". If there are plurals in Category:English plurals ending in "-en" that are formed by some process which merits a separate category, then the solution is to improve categorization, not to treat "firemen" and "oxen" as if they were no different from "firemans" and "oxs". bd2412 T 00:51, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
  • At least it would be nice to move all those words that are word + men compounds (or word + women compounds) into a subcategory, so the rest stands out.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:13, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
    • I have no objection to that, but let's figure out the entire category scheme first and move everything once we know where it will go. It has always puzzled me, frankly, that "-en" plurals are not considered irregular plurals, and in particular I wonder if plurals like oxen and children should just be recategorized as Category:English irregular plurals ending in "-en", or if perhaps all of the derivations of "man" should be in a Category:English plurals ending in "-men". bd2412 T 01:57, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
      • Doesn't it become "English terms derived from man" by that point? I think a better choice for that would be Category:English umlaut plurals, so that it can also contain geese, mice and so on. —CodeCat 02:13, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
        • The pluralization of "man" (and "woman") to "men" (and "women") establishes a pattern replicated in hundreds of terms. Even if there is a category of plurals also including geese and mice, all those "-en" plurals would overwhelm it unless they were in a subcategory of their own therein. bd2412 T 03:41, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Keep. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:16, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

RFD-passed. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:32, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Is umlaut correct?

I am not anglophone, or germanophone. Is this w:Germanic umlaut correct? Ablaut? sarri.greek (talk) 08:50, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

RFM discussion: April 2021–October 2022

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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Category:English plurals ending in "-en"

This is a subcategory of "Category:English irregular plurals". Should it be renamed "Category:English irregular plurals ending in "-en"", to match other similar subcategories? (If so, "Category:English plurals ending in "-a"" and "Category:English plurals ending in "-oi"" should also be renamed.) — SGconlaw (talk) 17:18, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

• I would support this, but I note that there is some historical dispute about what makes a plural "irregular". For example, it is generally agreed that adding an "s" to a noun is the prime example of a regular plural, and it is generally agreed that added "es" after a final "s" or "x" or "ch" (bosses, boxes, crutches) is also a way of forming regular plurals. Some consider "f"/"fe" to "ves" endings (wolf to wolves, wife to wives) to be regular plurals as well, though I consider that a stretch. bd2412 T 19:49, 24 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Sounds like that needs to be decided first, then. If there is consensus that it is regular in English for plurals to be created by adding -a, -en and -oi (?!), then the corresponding subcategories should not have "Category:English irregular plurals" as a parent. — SGconlaw (talk) 19:53, 24 April 2021 (UTC)
    • We could go by what is says in the Wikipedia article on the subject, which classifies "f"/"fe" to "ves" endings as "near-regular plurals". bd2412 T 22:53, 24 April 2021 (UTC)
      • Yes, that's a good idea. Going by that article, we should then rename the subcategories mentioned above as "Category:English irregular plurals ending in "-a"", "Category:English irregular plurals ending in "-en"" and "Category:English irregular plurals ending in "-oi"". However, I'm not sure if we should rename "Category:English irregular plurals ending in "-ves"" as "Category:English plurals ending in "-ves"". The article seems to be talking more about the sounds that form plurals than the spelling. — SGconlaw (talk) 14:20, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

JoeyChen (talk • contribs) moved Category:English plurals ending in "-a" to Category:English irregular plurals ending in "-a", and similarly for "-en" and "-oi" in May and June, 2021, but did not thoroughly move the plurals themselves to the new category names. I have manually moved the (remaining) "-a" and "-oi" terms as there were not many, but "-en" still contains over 400, so I'm going to leave that for a bot. These plurals should use {{en-irregular plural of|<singular form>|ending=en}} on their sense line to add them to the new ("irregular") category, and should have the old, explicitly added category removed. - excarnateSojourner (talk | contrib) 02:46, 22 October 2022 (UTC)