Talk:gaijins

RFD discussion: December 2014

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gaijins

grammatically incorrect; the plural of 'gaijin' is 'gaijin' 122.208.119.3 09:46, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

• In Japanese, yes. In English however, "gaijins" seems to be pretty common (I've added some citations to the entry), just as people talk about kimonos, katanas, bonsais, sumos, sudokus, samurais and ninjas. Words often change grammatically when borrowed from one language to another, and what we care about is how the words are actually used by speakers, not about what would make grammatical sense in the original language - otherwise we'd have to delete pretty much everything in Category:Wasei eigo... Anyway, RFD is not for challenging the existence of words. If you still think gaijins does not exist, I'd recommend taking this to WT:RFV, although I've already added several examples of the word being used by English speakers. Smurrayinchester (talk) 10:09, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Keep. Not grammatically incorrect because it's a singular with an s on the end to make a plural. Renard Migrant (talk) 11:20, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

• Smurrayinchester, I was baffled to discover that sumos even exists -- sumo is the sport, so it'd be like having soccers or croquets as plural nouns (our current entries are third-person singular simple present indicative verb conjugations).

... And now I'm relieved to discover that sumos is Spanish, and an adjective for that matter, that has nothing to do with traditional Japanese large-person wrestling.  ;)

Regarding the anon's comment about gaijins, Wiktionary tries to describe current usage, not prescribe what is considered "correct" usage. If a term can be found in use (in ways that meet our criteria for inclusion), then either Wiktionary already has such an entry, or our editors will get around to creating it at some point. So it is with gaijins: we have adequate quotes showing usage, so this term is sufficiently cited for us to keep. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 21:33, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

In English at least (if not Japanese), sumo can also mean sumo wrestler (see sense 2) and it has the plural sumos: [1], [2], [3]. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 21:57, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

• [...shudder...] Ah, well. Change is the nature of the universe. Anicca, anicca...

(Huh, looks like we're missing that entry.) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:26, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

@Smurrayinchester I can agree with all of those being able to be pluralised with -s except samurai. I've seen attestations of it being pluralised that way, but it seems ungrammatical to me.

As to gaijin, I don't think it's correct to pluralise it with "-s", but at the same time I don't give a blast about that word anyways, so I will abstain from voting. Tharthan (talk) 12:32, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

• @Tharthan Correctness isn't a criteria by which we keep or delete entries here -- simply whether a term can be shown in use, in sources that meet WT:CFI requirements.

Correctness is something that merits additional information in an entry, such as a “proscribed” context tag, or a usage note explaining the details. gaijin / gaijins etc. would probably benefit from such additions.

(FWIW, I agree with your impressions about the plural forms, but then, I'm also a Japanese linguist, and that colors my views.) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 16:07, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

@Tharthan the relevant words here are "I don't think". You alone don't get to decide which words English speakers use and don't use. Renard Migrant (talk) 16:30, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

@Eiríkr Útlendi Yeah, I know. I wasn't voting as much as I was commenting. I was more intending to suggest something along the lines of what you just said; a proscribed tag.

@Renard Migrant I think you misread the tone of my comment. I was simply giving my tuppence worth. I wasn't claiming it was any more important than what anyone else was saying. Tharthan (talk) 01:51, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

• Keep as long as this English plural is attested, which seems to be the case as per google books:"gaijins". Of interest, the singular in dicts: “gaijin”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:55, 14 December 2014 (UTC)
• Keep. Renard Migrant (talk) 14:17, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
• RFD kept per consensus. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:20, 20 December 2014 (UTC)