Talk:-a

Deletion discussion

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-a

1. Marks singular nouns, with a foundation in Greek or Latin, often implying femininity, especially when contrasted with words terminating in -us.
2. Marks nouns, with a foundation in Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese, implying femininity.

Compare -eau, where the English was deleted because it's not an English suffix, just some loanwords from French end in -eau. I find these two a little unclear anyway. For example, the example for the second one is stanza, that's a direct loan from Italian rather than stanz +‎ -a, also I don't see how it implies femininity. If it means the original Italian noun is feminine, then yes, but that's not relevant to the English definition. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:16, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

In names it can imply femininity and is often used to create a feminine name from a masculine one. --WikiTiki89 (talk) 07:05, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Why don't we have this (or similar endings) as suffices in the Latin namespace? Furius (talk) 07:05, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Kept for lack of consensus to delete. bd2412 T 21:13, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps we should be more specific about its use in creating female names like Kyla. Equinox ◑ 18:28, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Shortened version

Why's Etymology 8 reads Shortened version of preposition of, but the label of the definition says clitic form of o' ? --Backinstadiums (talk) 20:59, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

Meaningless metrical suffix

Wiktionary:Tea room/2020/May#-a. - -sche (discuss) 22:27, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

RFM discussion: April 2017–May 2020

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (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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-a

Merge senses “(Northern England) Same as -er in Standard English.” and “(Black English and slang) Used to replace -er in nouns.” Doesn’t this represent the same phenomenon? — Ungoliant ^(falai) 21:36, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

I would just delete both: spelling final -er as -a isn't specific to any morpheme- the sound it represents is from a general feature of the phonology. For instance mother/mutha has had that last syllable all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, and I can't imagine what the -er/-a would be attached to even if it didn't. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:22, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

Good point, I've reduced it to a mere see-also link to -er.  Done. - -sche (discuss) 16:23, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Translingual

Is this not Modern Latin? Rich Farmbrough, 17:41, 6 February 2023 (UTC).