Talk:ꞌ

RFD discussion: June 2019

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion.

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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I don't think this deserves a separate Spanish entry --XY3999 (talk) 11:06, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

Agreed; removed. —Born2bgratis (talk) 03:12, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

I don't agree. What reason is there not to include it? --Lvovmauro (talk) 05:55, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

It's not used in Spanish, it's used in other languages. The quotations are mentioning its use in those languages. You could find the same type of examples in English ([1]). DTLHS (talk) 06:01, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

Nobody is claiming it's used in the Spanish alphabet. The fact that the Spanish quotations are talking about another language does not mean the language of those quotations is no longer Spanish. You could equally argue that alfa should be deleted because Spanish isn't written in the Greek alphabet. People talk about other alphabets in Spanish. --Lvovmauro (talk) 06:10, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

"Alfa" is the name of the letter just like saltillo is the name for ꞌ. We don't have a Spanish entry for α even though people talk about the Greek alphabet in Spanish. DTLHS (talk) 06:12, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

The names of letters are often represented by the letter itself, and pronounced as the letter's name. In English H is a noun, pronounced /eɪtʃ/, and has a plural H's. H is just as much a noun as aitch, and the two could be considered variant spellings of the same word. Its grammatical status as a noun, that functions as such within English sentences, doesn't change based on whether you choose it to write it with one letter or with several letters. (And yet Wiktionary currently treats the two differently, which is clearly wrong.)

If you could find Spanish quotations using α in a sentence (e.g. la α, las αs), then I would accept α as a Spanish word, though that's probably rare. I consider ꞌ a Spanish noun because it's used in Spanish text with the definite article and a verb agreeing with it. --Lvovmauro (talk) 06:32, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

Here is your “la α”; it should not be hard to find many more cites. But take this English sentence: Your fable of the monkey and the pig is what the Italians call ben travata. Should we now have an entry ben travata#English? Clearly, the author of the sentence himself does not consider this to be English. Likewise, the author of the Nueva gramática griega might have been extremely surprised to hear that in a distant future people could consider his use of “la α” evidence of “α” being a Spanish word.  --Lambiam 07:46, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

"what the Italians call ben travata" is a mention, not a use. --Lvovmauro (talk) 12:00, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

In my opinion, so is the α in “la α”. That it is not explicitly set off as by quotation marks, like we see here, is surely because it was felt to be already sufficiently distinguished by being in another alphabet. Another way of looking at it is this: consider how “la α” will be translated if the grammar book is translated to some other language, like English or German. The translator would not consult a Spanish–English or Spanish-German translation dictionary to find a translation for α. They would simply leave it as is, using “the α” or “das α”. A point could be made to include the sense “the first letter of the Greek alphabet” under α#Translingual.  --Lambiam 08:22, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

About la α I tend to agree with Lambiam: in English too, when you write a comment about a sentence written in another language, you might use the before any foreign word, this cannot be considered as a use in English. It's not the same as highway used in French or autoroute used in English, which deserve entries. Lmaltier (talk) 06:37, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Delete. Per utramque cavernam 19:32, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

• Has already been deleted by someone --I learned some phrases (talk) 14:09, 10 June 2019 (UTC)