Wiktionary:Votes/2025-06/Improving the definition of "surface analysis" and standardizing its template

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Improving the definition of "surface analysis" and standardizing its template

Voting on: Requiring the use of the {{surf}} template for all surface analyses/etymologies (thus removing alternatives, e.g. "Analyzable as", "Equivalent to", and "Morphologically"), which would be defined as such:

The analysis of a term's apparent etymology based on components that currently exist in the language, as recognized by a knowledgeable native speaker, even if not all of them are productive. A sound change does not invalidate such analysis if it's minor and a form without it is unlikely or cannot be naturally created.

"Equivalent to" would be used for synchronic etymologies that don't fit this definition. This is the case, for example, when one of the morphemes is non-productive and obscure.

Rationale

It may be confusing to users that Wiktionary shows apparent etymologies in four different ways, some of which is an unnecessary linguistic jargon (Morphologically) or vague (Equivalent to). The same doesn't happen to other types of etymology, such as affixation, borrowing, blend, back-formation, and calque. One of the reasons for this is that the glossary definition for surface analysis seems to require the word's components have been present in an ancestor language, which isn't always the case, e.g. biology. Yet it and some other entries use the template.

Although "Analyzable as" is good, it's had 1,412 uses, unlike "By surface analysis", which has had 26,654 transclusions, and, after much discussion, the latter is still the most accepted option. Therefore, it's reasonable to adopt it as the standard. Finally, the English entry definition is easier to grasp and broader than the current glossary one and eliminates the need for alternate phrasings.

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