Talk:אבד

אבד

(from WT:RFD)

Tagged but not listed a long time ago...still no usable content? --Connel MacKenzie 01:57, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

It makes sense to Semitic scholars. Terms such as Nif'al, Qal, Piel, Peel, and so on, are a traditional Semitic system that is the equivalent of parts of speech. Since Semitic languages have so many forms (some 70 for Arabic), it is more meaningful to scholars to take the word for "to do" (פעל, pa‘al) and apply the intended pattern, it shows the form intended (nif'al, piel, peel, af'el, peal, paal, etc.), it concisely expresses the form (many of which have no good equivalent in English). We do the same thing in Arabic, and the words that are translated as "noun", "verb", etc., are actually just forms of the verb "to do" with a certain nominal or verbal pattern applied to it.

When I have time, I will try to clean it up, but it is certainly useful to Hebrew scholars and students as it is. —Stephen 17:49, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, then in the meantime this should probably be moved to its talk page and the rfd tag changed to rfc (or removed?) --Connel MacKenzie 09:44, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

RFC discussion: June 2007

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for cleanup (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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אבד

Tagged but not listed. --Connel MacKenzie 21:13, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Students of Hebrew and Aramaic use those terms in English. There really are no common English equivalents that someone who knew nothing about Hebrew would understand. English has some parts of speech that do not exist in some other languages, and some languages have parts of speech that are different from the English ones. Sometimes we try to use an English term, such as gerund for the Russian деепричастие, but it causes a lot of confusion since it is quite different from an English gerund. For example, an English gerund is a verbal noun, but a деепричастие is in no way a noun. Trying to force foreign languages into an English mold may work for closely related languages such as Spanish, French, and German, but the more distant the language, the more it does not fit the mold. —Stephen 16:50, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Stephen, we don't ONLY have our current format, so that the end result is comprehensible (unlike this current entry.) We also avoid things like "Qal construction" as headings to avoid allegations that we are taking some of our material from copyright-protected sources. While I agree that the etym/POS breakdown does not work, even for English, it is the Wiktionary way. From my perspective, there is no way that the POS heading "Participle" can be a Level-5 heading. For the "Qal construction", that is quite absolutely, undeniably "Etymological" information!

This is the English Wiktionary, with articles written for ENGLISH READERS. Writing an entry in a style comprehensible only to Hebrew linguists is not appropriate. --Connel MacKenzie 09:25, 10 June 2007 (UTC)