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Deletion debate
Latest comment: 13 years ago25 comments15 people in discussion
IMO it should probably depend on the construction of the particular language. The numbers aren't a problem in English because we soon reach the point where there are guiding hyphens (ninety-nine is clearly ninety plus nine); do German numbers eventually split into multiple spaced or hyphenated units, or not? (Even if they don't, we are technically limited only to those numbers that are attestable, i.e. the ones somebody has bothered to write about; but that seems like a cop-out, because the potential "wordness" of the neglected ones isn't any lesser.) Equinox◑23:32, 5 September 2010 (UTC)Reply
"do German numbers eventually split into multiple spaced or hyphenated units, or not?" -- Yes they do, starting with eine Million "one million". Longtrend00:02, 6 September 2010 (UTC)Reply
What a lovely task for a bot. We could do this kind of thing for other languages too. And why let hyphens stop us? We could be up to 10 million entries by New Year. Or we could have one number appendix per language and all the morphemes used to construct numbers. DCDuringTALK00:15, 7 September 2010 (UTC)Reply
Delete, if I understand correctly that this isn't a single word, but rather a sequence of words meaning "nine thousand nine hundred nine and ninety" written solid. In English, if something is written solid, it's almost certainly a word worth an entry, but obviously that's not true of every language/orthography. —RuakhTALK00:59, 7 September 2010 (UTC)Reply
This really seems to be a case where a phrase is written solid in German (I can't think of any other example but numerals). In German, words usually have exactly one main stress but my intuition is that numerals such as the one in question have more than one main stress (neuntausendneunhundertneunundneunzig). But alternatively, they could also be analyzed as dvandvas which would suggest they are indeed words. This raises the question what is considered a word on Wiktionary. As I pointed out here, even the most regularly-formed and unidiomatic compounds are considered words in German rather than phrases (e.g. a possible, however not lexicalized word is Eiertisch "egg table", which is clearly a word as can be seen from its interfix-er-), so spelling is a bad criterion IMO. Longtrend09:09, 7 September 2010 (UTC)Reply
No German dictionary I know of includes spelled-out numbers greater than 20, because they are simply compound words built from elementary numbers according to well-known rules. Why should Wiktionary want to handle this differently? Only to say that we are the only dictionary with more than one million German entries? Delete --Zeitlupe08:25, 11 September 2010 (UTC)Reply
Keep unless and until some principles or a set of examples and counterexamples are presented based on which we could decide which solid-written German terms to include and exclude. This concerns not only German but also Finnish and other languages with long compound terms written solid. We need no entry for "nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine", as it contains spaces. Some other German terms that could be considered sum-of-parts: Kopfschmerz ("headache"), Abkürzungsverzeichnis (Verzeichnis of Abkürzungen), Akkordeonspieler (Spieler on Akkordeon), Freizeitzentrum (leisure center), Bedeutungsverallgemeinerung (generalization of meaning), Beschleunigungsmesser (accelerometer) etc. Some of these can be found in Category:German compound words. And there is the conspicuous Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.
There is a principle nowhere stated and not adhered to that policy making should be done through BP rather than through RFD; RFD should be for cases that are driven by CFI, seem not too controversial, or have clear precedents. I like this principle. The issue of "neuntausendneunhundertneunundneunzig" is not all that trivial, has not a list of precedents, has multi-lingual consequences and goes beyond current CFI. So this issue should IMHO be debated in Beer parlour, not on a single-word basis but rather as the complete subject of what to do with solid-written terms in languages with long solid-written compounds. --Dan Polansky08:24, 13 September 2010 (UTC)Reply
Per Dan Polansky on all points (i.e. keep) except that I still think spelling (i.e. whether a word contains spaces or not) should not be a criterion for inclusion at all. Longtrend11:47, 13 September 2010 (UTC)Reply
It already says in WT:CFI, under the heading "Idiomaticity": An expression is “idiomatic” if its full meaning cannot be easily derived from the meaning of its separate components.. This applies not only to English, but also to all other languages, and can be applied to this case too. -- Prince Kassad11:52, 13 September 2010 (UTC)Reply
Re Longtrend: If the space-containment should not be a criterion at all in English, then think of whether you would include "headache" (“headache”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.), "toothache" and the like. And also see WT:COALMINE, which is based on the distinction between a solid-written form and a space-containing form. I admit that space-containment works differently for English and for German.
Re Prince Kassad: The definition stated in CFI is wrong in that it does not specify what is meant by "components". See my point with "headache". --Dan Polansky11:55, 13 September 2010 (UTC)Reply
Something to keep in mind as well is language learners. How easy can they peel apart the constituents of a compound word that is written without spaces? The Finnish hyväntekeväisyysjärjestö for example is made out of hyvä-tekevä-inen-yys-järki-stö (I think), and a native speaking should be able to pick that apart easily. But not every language learner can figure that out, it certainly took me a while and a lot of knowledge of Finnish grammar! —CodeCat13:30, 16 September 2010 (UTC)Reply
True, but numbers are usually the more systematically constructed compounds. The problem with compounds is usually how the compounds are hierarchially linked to one another. It might be trivial to someone who knows the constituent parts (i.e. a native speaker who already knows lots of words). But someone who doesn't know many words in that language will see such a word as an opaque 'block', and will not be able to know where to 'put the dashes' in the word, so to say. No matter how obvious it may be to a more experienced speaker. Hauptbahnhof may be trivial for a German, but not to someone who's never seen the words Haupt or Bahnhof (or even Bahn or Hof). —CodeCat16:10, 16 September 2010 (UTC)Reply
keep because this is a word. But I agree that this is not very useful, and I think that such entries (in German or in other languages) should not be created by bot (creating billions of such entries by bot would be a waste of resource). They should be created manually, and only with several real citations (this should be a new CFI rule). Don't worry, nobody will be willing to try to find millions of citations and to create manually millions of such entries. But such entries may be useful nonetheless in some cases, especially to people not knowing the language at all and trying to decode a text (e.g. a message they received), this is why they should not be forbidden. I think that they should be allowed even for very large numbers including spaces. Lmaltier15:02, 20 February 2011 (UTC)Reply
It looks like a word, so is probably a word. In that case we keep it. We should also allow all the others, but I can't imagine anyone bothering to add them all - just far too boring. SemperBlotto15:17, 20 February 2011 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 years ago35 comments16 people in discussion
This is attested, I'm not sure if it is a word, but regardless I don't think it's idiomatic because it can be understood by any German speaker from its parts. That is, a German speaker who has never seen or heard of this word can nonetheless figure out what it means, just like its English equivalent is perfectly transparent to English speakers. Therefore, I think this should be deleted. (A note: While I think other numeral compounds like neunundfünfzig also fit this argument, I would agree to keep some of them for practical uses a-la phrasebook. But this word is unlikely to have a practical use.) —CodeCat22:35, 27 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
Speedily keep as it has already passed RFD. Moreover, keep IMO, just as any (attested) word without punctuation or spaces in it in a language that normally separates words by spaces should IMO be kept, as anglophones will look it up, not necessarily knowing where to break it down. (As English Wiktionary, our main audience is anglophones.)—msh210℠ (talk) 22:41, 27 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
Terms can always be RFDed again, there is nothing wrong with that. And there are languages in North America in which entire phrases can be encoded into one orthographical word, but that doesn't make those words idiomatic, and I would oppose including them too. I also opposed including fasque for the same reason; it's not idiomatic. The argument given against fasque was that it's part of elementary Latin studies. I apply the same argument here; a beginner in German will understand this, too. —CodeCat22:45, 27 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
Delete. Not only can it be understood by breaking it up into parts, but it must be broken up into parts in order to be understood. --WikiTiki8922:55, 27 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
I don't think we usually re-RFD a closed RFD a mere year and half after closure, unless it as kept for no consensus. But I may be wrong. Anyway, I maintain my speedy-keep-as-already-passed view, above.—msh210℠ (talk) 23:00, 27 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
Move to RFV. I'd like to see whether it's actually attested in this form (as opposed to "9999") in three different uses (as opposed to mentions) in durably archived German texts. —Angr22:56, 27 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
Because they're very different cases. Fasque isn't a part of speech; it's not a syntactic constituent, nor even a contraction of two adjacent syntactic constituents like didn't and im#German and lena#Irish. But 9999 is a part of speech and a syntactic constituent. It's a compound like armhole and meateater and any number of other semantically transparent compounds, all of which we keep. —Angr16:28, 28 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
@Hekaheka: Only attested words can be entered, as you know. The Finnish example "yhdeksänsataayhdeksänkymmentäyhdeksäntuhattayhdeksänsataayhdeksänkymmentäyhdeksän" is not attested. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:27, 2 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
Keep (all words in all languages) - but I am not advocating adding any more, unless you honestly can't think of anything better to do with your time. SemperBlotto (talk) 15:21, 28 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
I disagree with that argument. Anything that should be kept should be added. Anything that shouldn't be added shouldn't be kept. --WikiTiki8915:26, 28 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
I think so too. Voting keep is an implicit "we want this" vote, while delete means "we don't want this". So if you say that you want this, but not any others like it, then what do you actually want? —CodeCat16:04, 28 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
If you start with a well-documented language like German or Finnish, make sure the bot first checks BGC, Usenet, etc., to make sure each number is actually attested—written out in full as uses, not mentions—at least three times. If voting keep is an implicit "we want this" vote, I'm clarifying I only "want this" in the case of numerals that actually meet our attestation requirements. —Angr16:28, 28 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
OK. But first, I'll add the remaining missing words from English, French, Italian and German. (as I said before, we have better things to do with our time) SemperBlotto (talk) 16:32, 28 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
I fully agree with Semperblotto, except about the bot: I think that a good rule in such cases is the one suggested by Angr: Allow ordinary numbers above 100 only with (e.g.) 3 independent attestations in normal sentences, and without the help of a bot. The rationale for forbidding bots is that they could need an almost infinite disk space (as the set of integers is infinite), and that the Foundation cannot accept that. Lmaltier (talk) 22:03, 28 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
I'm going to reiterate my delete. We're not going to have a dictionary that is theee quarters of numbers in all languages. Not as long as I still live on this planet. -- Liliana•16:43, 28 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
After checking first 30 BGC hits, I'm changing my opinion regarding this particular word. It seems that in many cases it is used to signify "a large number of" and not literally 9,999. Thus, we do not need deletion, we need a new sense. --Hekaheka (talk) 22:33, 28 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
Keep attested single word per CFI. This nomination seems to be an attempt to redefine "separate components" in WT:CFI's definition of "idiomatic" (WT:CFI#Idiomaticity), following on the apparent success of wrong argumentation (wrong IMHO anyway) at #fasque, having started on 14 January 2013. The relevant CFI regulation: 'An expression is “idiomatic” if its full meaning cannot be easily derived from the meaning of its separate components.' If this RFD nomination is to be understood as being made within CFI, the nomination tries to broaden the word "separate" even more than it was already broadened in the "fasque" discussion, failing to make it clear why "headache" should be included and "neuntausendneunhundertneunundneunzig" should be excluded. As an aside: in the previous RFD discussion archived at Talk:neuntausendneunhundertneunundneunzig, there were 7 boldfaced keeps and 4 boldface deletes if one counts the nominator as bold pro-delete. For a 2011 attempt to delete a German compound, see Talk:Zirkusschule. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:27, 2 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
I still don't understand why the "single word" argument is valid. There are many languages where entire sentences can be made from a single word. In such languages, "word" is an open set because almost anything can be a word. Are we going to have entries for words meaning "my hamburger tastes funny" if they happen to be attestable? —CodeCat04:15, 5 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
Delete. And in my opinion, the comments that mention attestation are missing the point of the attestation requirement. If we decide that we really want entries for the German words/phrases for all numbers 1 through 9,999, then I think it's the height of wikilawyering to distinguish between the ones that meet the letter of the attestation requirement and ones that do not. —RuakhTALK05:54, 5 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
The attestation requirement is there for a reason. Specifically, as the start of the CFI says: "A term should be included if it’s likely that someone would run across it and want to know what it means. This in turn leads to the somewhat more formal guideline of including a term if it is attested and idiomatic." If a word is not attested, it's not that there's some technicality we manage to get off on so we don't include it: it's that no one will have any cause to want to know what it means so we don't include it. (That said, I'm not about to RFV German 9996 if someone creates it.)—msh210℠ (talk) 06:32, 5 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
Well, no. Our attestation requirement is only a proxy for the real question, which, as you say, is "Would someone run across it?". It's true that no one would run across a truly unattested term, but our attestation requirement does not distinguish "attested" from "truly unattested". (Don't get me wrong, I support the attestation requirement in general. I think it's a valuable proxy for things that actually matter. And it does a good job of suppressing pointless arguments. But if someone wants to write a bot for the forms that everyone agrees as the German written-out representations of the numbers 1 through 9,999, then I think "O.K., fine overall . . . but hey, wait a sec, some of those forms get only two b.g.c. hits!" is not a sensible response.) —RuakhTALK16:37, 5 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
Comment: Any number is a word and it should be kept if it is special enough. Then, why 9999? The determiner of the largest number written without a space in German is 999999 (neunhundertneunundneunzigtausendneunhundertneunundneunzig), and the longest is 777777 (siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig). — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 06:08, 14 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
