User talk:Msh210/Archive/חד משמעותי and such

This page is an archive of old discussion. Please don't edit this page. If you wish to communicate with me (msh210), you can do so at User talk:Msh210. Thanks!

חד משמעותי and such.

Hi Michael,

I was wondering what you thought of compounds with חד (khad-) and such; do they warrant inclusion? On the one hand, they seem SOP, and fairly productive; but on the other hand, it seems non-obvious what the parts are. (In the case of דו קומתי, for example, I'd say they're דו,‎ קומה, and ־י; it's not "doubly storic", but rather "two-story", used as an adjective. I'm not even sure whether קומתי would meet the CFI outside of a few fixed expressions such as these.)

I'm working on entries for חד,‎ דו, etc., right now, and my main plan is just to include lots of examples and explanations so a reader understands what's going on, but I'm not sure if I should be planning to include entries for the expressions I mention.

(I guess we have a similar issue with English -ed — “{one-leg}ged”, “{green-eye}d”, etc. — but I'm not sure whether all considerations of each applies to the other.)

I'd welcome your thoughts.

לשנה טובה ומתוקה,
—Ruakh_TALK 20:59, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I've seen you bring up the issue for English on several occasions, and am not sure what the solution is. (That is, I agree with you that du should have an entry, but am not sure about the SOP-ish terms' inclusibility.) The issues in the two languages seem to be parallel, as you note, so whatever we decide for one should, I think, work for the other. ("We" meaning Wiktionarians generally.) Sorry I'm not being much help.​—msh210℠ 16:30, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Incidentally, aren't du-komati and chad-mashmauti usually makafated? (Not that I've checked, but that's my impression.)​—msh210℠ 16:32, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. We've still got lots of single words to add, so it's not urgent to decide whether to add these. (I actually only brought it up because I wasn't sure if I should be listing the redlinks under "derived terms". I think for now I might split the difference by listing the phrases, but linkifying only the khad- part. That's easy to bot-fix if/when we reach a decision.)

As for the maqaf, my personal anglophone (anglograph?) instinct is to use one, but I Googled a few different expressions, and it seemed that most of the hits used a space (by a factor of anywhere from roughly 2:1 to roughly 5:1, depending on the expression, and on the type of search, with the news archive using fewer maqafs than the Web).

—Ruakh_TALK 02:59, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Actually, come to think of it, the general consensus seemed to be, for English, that we include legged and eyed with definition lines like "having the specified number of legs", but omit the SOP-ish entries. (But my memory of those discussions may be tainted.) If so, then for Hebrew we can include the parts, with komati defined analogously, but not the whole.​—msh210℠ 14:38, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

So, how does משמעותי look to you? —Ruakh_TALK 15:40, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Not my idea of an ideal definition line, but I can't think of anything better. (Perhaps adding a gloss into the {term} for mashmaut in the etymology would explain things a little better, though.)​—msh210℠ 17:26, 7 October 2009 (UTC)