Category talk:Italian phrasal verbs with particle (via)

Technical difficulties with categorization

@Benwing2, I'm not very savvy with templates, "postcatboiler"s, etc. But you seem to be. So do you think you could fix the error message at the top of this category page ("The automatically-generated contents of this category has errors")? Imetsia (talk) 16:37, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

@Imetsia Should be fixed. Benwing2 (talk) 19:54, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Delete or do automatically

@Imetsia venire via is the only verb categorized in CAT:Italian phrasal verbs. IMO if we are to categorize Italian verbs in this fashion, it should be done automatically, otherwise adding all the categories will be a fool's errand; so we should in the meantime delete Category:Italian phrasal verbs with particle (via). See for example CAT:Hindi compound verbs with base verb करना and the other subcategories of Category:Hindi compound verbs by base verb, all of which are added automatically. The only issue I see is determining whether and under what circumstances a verb + object is a phrasal verb. For example, maybe we should exclude cases where the object is more than one word, so probably venire a capo is not a phrasal verb while venire su and venire via are, but what about e.g. venire meno? We have several other idiomatic entries for verb + via: andare via, buttare via, dare via, lavare via, mandare via, mettere via, portare via, volare via. But we have none others like venire meno; closest are fare a meno, fare di meno. Should these two be excluded? For that matter, we also have dare il via, prendere il via, spianare la via, presumably these should be excluded? Or do we need a curated list of phrasal particles? Benwing2 (talk) 06:30, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2: I agree with categorizing these automatically. I would include all phrasal verbs with prepositions with only one object. If we were to do a category for, e.g., "Italian phrasal verbs with particle (meno)," we wouldn't have very many to add to that category anyways. dare il via and similar would be excluded simply because via acts as a noun, not a preposition in those constructions. We could also create a curated list. Sticking with only prepositions would be a good start, but maybe there are other particles that are worthy of categorization. Imetsia (talk) 00:20, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

@Imetsia OK, sounds good. It's a bit difficult to determine automatically if a given Italian word is a preposition (at least, it's difficult to do this on-the-fly when categorizing, because you have to parse the Wikicode of the page in question, which is an expensive operation). But it's easy to generate a list of prepositions from a bot, and we can hard-code that list in the Lua code; the number of one-word prepositions in Italian is fairly small and the class shouldn't change much, so this should be feasible. It's also not possible to know automatically whether e.g. via is acting as a noun, adverb or preposition; but I think we can just say that we exclude cases where there's more than one word after the verb. Benwing2 (talk) 01:56, 11 January 2023 (UTC)