Talk:12°s

RFC discussion: March 2012–August 2017

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

---

Translingual plurals

• 12°s,
• 4°s,
• §§,
• 12°.

Does Translingual language have a grammar? The first two entries were created as English and then changed to Translingual, so I think they should be deleted or changed back into English. 12° has a Translingual header but categories and templates are for English. Maro 19:14, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't think so, though an argument could be made for a kind of grammar for binomial taxonomic names. But that is a looser definition of grammar than I think we mean. I think delete. DCDuring TALK 19:19, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

12° seems Translingual, like the other paper sizes, and I have made it so.

§§ seems plural to me, even as a Translingual, though they could be.

For all of these and for all the paper and book size entries, some attestation would be useful. The families that are from Latin or are purely graphic or typographic, like §§, may well be used in many languages. It would not be fun to attest them. Probably the most effective way would be to find whether reference works in various languages contain them. DCDuring TALK 20:28, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

The -s forms look to me like a mixture of translingual and English, much like you see with kanji and hiragana in Japanese. The test would be whether such forms ever appear in any language that forms plurals differently. As for §§, I think we would be better treating it as a translingual representing a plural rather than the pural of a translingual. How do we treat Chinese characters that are different depending on the gender of the referent (spoken Chinese has no grammatical gender)? Chuck Entz (talk) 21:33, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

I found the example I was thinking of: the 3rd person singular 她 is a version of 他 that's used to refer to females, as in English "she". Spoken Chinese has no grammatical gender, so the distinction is strictly translingual- they're both tā in pinyin and are spoken the same. We mention 他 in the etymology section of 她, but we don't treat it as the feminine form of 他. More evidence that we shouldn't treat translinguals as inflected forms. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:49, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Also see spp. and pp. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:03, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

I have doubts about the translinguality of 12°. In fact I'm under the impression that most countries in the World use ISO 216 standard in which 12° does not belong. On the other hand, if it is translingual, twelvemo is hardly its translingual synonym, probably duodecimo neither. Might be safest to change it back from Translingual to English. --Hekaheka (talk) 22:18, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Whatever they use now, the older standard (and a current standard among used booksellers) includes all the forms that are in the table that involve only Latin or Italian derivation. The singulars for many of these can be found in a few European languages. There may be some individual items that are not attestable, even in English. I can find the plurals for many in English, but not in other languages, not even French. I think we could start by making all the plurals English and, of course, eliminating any instances of {{en-noun}} from the inflection line for the Translingual entries. If we would like to make all of the paper/book sizes English, subject to attestation in other languages, that would be fine with me. I am personally much more confident in the English, I never have high expectations about attestation effort in languages other than English, and, after all, this is English Wiktionary. DCDuring TALK 23:31, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

• Some were fixed, others redirected. Nothing more to see here, chaps --WF on Holiday (talk) 13:59, 18 August 2017 (UTC)