Category talk:English rare spellings

I don't get it. Where do the rare spellings without accented characters go? And it seems that even very common spellings with accented characters are here. — hippietrail 04:25, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Basically, if the definition "(rare) Alternative spelling of foo bar" is true, "Rare spelling of foo bar." should be the definition instead. In addition, the existing subcategories (such as English terms spelled with *) are supposed to contain words spelled with rare characters. --Daniel. 04:37, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Well, at the moment, they don’t say that; every specific letter category has as its preface “This category lists English terms spelled with [specific character(s)], a character considered rare.” (my emboldenment). Firstly, it doesn’t make sense to say that something is “considered rare” — it’s either rare or it isn’t (given a definition that specifies a threshold for rarity, either in absolute or proportional terms); secondly, as hippietrail has pointed out, many of these spellings (not to consider the characters themselves, for now) aren’t rare — you certainly couldn’t say that about café and cliché and some are possibly less common in their undiacriticked than in their diacriticked forms (consider creme brulee vs. crème brûlée + crême brûlée + creme brûlée + crème brulée + crême brulée + creme brulée + crème brûlee + crême brûlee + creme brûlee). IMO, the supercategory should be Category:English diacriticked spellings and the “a character considered rare” afterthought of the subcategories’ prefaces should be dropped. The renaming of the supercategory necessarily omits Category:English terms spelled with Æ, Category:English terms spelled with Œ, Category:English terms spelled with !, Category:English terms spelled with *, Category:English terms spelled with Α, and Category:English terms spelled with Β; for those, Category:English ligated spellings would be an appropriate supercategory for the first two, whereas Category:English terms spelt with non-Roman characters could house the last four. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 15:48, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Rather than creating various supercategories, perhaps it's better to simply use [[Category:English spellings by character]]. --Daniel. 19:40, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Whilst Category:English spellings by character is useful, I think the few supercategories I propose are also useful — people are likely to want to see categories of only diacriticked words, or only ligated words, or only words written with Greek letters, or whatever; conversely, what good is a category of “rare” spellings, which have nothing but infrequency in common and, as presently populated, not even that? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 02:44, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Indeed. The categories you suggested would be useful, since people are likely to search for words grouped in the manner you described. However, these four subgroups are not the only possibilities of usefulness. People are also likely to search for English words with macrons (Ā, Ī, etc.) and English words with adorned A. As you can see at [[Category:English spellings by character]], each subcategory describes only one character and all subcategories are ordered by digits, then by symbols, followed by Greek letters and finally the Latin letters in alphabetical order. Therefore, if numbers, non-Roman letters, symbols that aren't letters nor digits, Greek letters, any diacritics, any ligatures, particular diacritics, particular letters and all subcategories together are the only possible groups of subcategories to be searched, 6 out of 9 possibilities are found intuitively, simply by looking at the current supercategory. Rather than creating more supercategories to fulfill more expectations, it's better to provide details in an appendix, where words may be listed together and categories may be linked. --Daniel. 11:41, 12 January 2010 (UTC)