Category talk:German unknown gender nouns
Latest comment: 4 years ago by -sche in topic RFC discussion: May 2016–December 2019
The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for cleanup (permalink).
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Many nouns in the category have a known gender: Given names of male persons are masculine, given names of female persons are feminine, names of cities are neuter. While it's easy to add the gender, it's maybe not so easy to verify it, and it's not so easy to add the genitive.
As for the gender:
- For greater cities one should be able find examples like "das schöne Berlin", "in Berlin, das", "Berlin ... es". For smaller and less known cities it might be harder to find such examples.
Some examples for the gentive:
- Catharina should have the genitives (der) Catharina and Catharinas, maybe also Catharina's (obsolete nowadays, though colloquially it might be written with a Deppenapostroph). Note that the proper noun genitive Catharinas is an exception of the rule that feminine nouns are invariable in the singular.
- Kassel should have the genitives (des) Kassel and Kassels, maybe also Kassel's (obsolete nowadays, though colloquially it might be written with a Deppenapostroph).
- Worms should have the genitives (des) Worms and Worms', maybe also Wormsens (similar to e.g. Klausens). "Wormsens Bischof" and "Bevölkerung Wormsens" can be found, but "Wormsens" is rare anyway.
When just adding the gender, the templates often automatically add a genitive which (often) is incorrect or incomplete in case of proper nouns. -Ikiaika (talk) 22:19, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
- Well, I knocked out 50 of them. - -sche (discuss) 22:00, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
- @-sche: I'm working on some more. But part of the problem is that if you mark the gender as plural (e.g. Komoren), it still throws a fit. The categorisation itself is partly at fault. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 22:09, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
- Yes. For cases where a singular exists (or at least, a singular form of the gender-carrying part exists), I think the "intended" solution is to specify n-p, etc. But where no singular exists, the question of gender is meaningless and the template should accept "p" as a "known gender". I will change
["p"] = "unknown gender",in Module:de-headword to["p"] = "plural",to accomplish this. That this will also populate Category:German plural nouns seems desirable or at least tolerable to me, but could of course be overridden... - -sche (discuss) 22:31, 20 January 2018 (UTC)- @-sche: Thank you. I think I slightly support suppressing the plural category, but I don't have an articulated reason. Another issue is surnames, which are a major remaining component in the category. I'm not really sure how those work, as they seem essentially to be genderless, in that they take the referent's gender. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 22:39, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
- Yes. For cases where a singular exists (or at least, a singular form of the gender-carrying part exists), I think the "intended" solution is to specify n-p, etc. But where no singular exists, the question of gender is meaningless and the template should accept "p" as a "known gender". I will change
- @-sche: I'm working on some more. But part of the problem is that if you mark the gender as plural (e.g. Komoren), it still throws a fit. The categorisation itself is partly at fault. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 22:09, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
- To follow up, this category got moved and merged with other things a number of times and is now Category:Requests for gender in German entries. - -sche (discuss) 05:32, 26 December 2019 (UTC)