Wiktionary talk:Votes/2007-10/Lemma entries/words

Some "fixes":

• The etymology is for word, not for words: is this from an OE plural, or form an OE singular with a modern plural suffix appended, or what?
• "Zero, multiple, or an unknown or undisclosed number of distinct units" is too wordy: how about just "Units"?
• The inflection line (both parts of speech) has the wrong word: word. Instead perhaps have inflection lines (better wikified than I'm writing it, but similar to): words (plural form of (deprecated template usage) word) ]; and words (third-person singular simple present form of (deprecated template usage) word) ]. (Better yet, use {{en-noun-form|plural|word}}, which will categorize.
• And link to the translation table on the lemma's page, or something, per my comment on Wiktionary:Votes/2007-10/Lemma entries.

—msh210℠ 18:37, 31 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

I don't think form-of entries need an etymology section, unless it's somehow different than that of the root word. Synonyms, antonyms, related terms, translations, see also, et cetera are basically the same. What we want is useable information, not regurgitations of the same stuff that's in the main entry. I'm going to put 2 examples after this message. These entries really don't need that much information, but I think to just list the "form of" and nothing else is heinous :-p — — 19:22, 31 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Some seem to like the idea of adding translations to non-lemma entries, but when it comes to verbs in heavily inflected languages, how would we handle this exactly? It's an interesting idea, but is it practical? I'm going to use "said" (past particple and simple past form of say) as an example here.

That's easy enough, IF we don't go into numbers and genders, which some say they want to do. But then...

At least for Romance languages, the simple past is a personal form, meaning that there is no real simplest way to put it. And for every possible language? Notice that those examples only have 6 forms, but consider Slovenian which has 3 numbers rather than 2, and since technically past tense verbs are conjugated according not only to number, but gender.... that's a lot of forms to be stickin' in this table. Comments, suggestions? We can't just go doing this without some kind of plan of action. — — 20:32, 1 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Indeed. I added the past forms of just a single Korean translation to the above example. It really should be about four times larger, though, because there are multiple common translations of "said" into Korean. This would be a maintenance nightmare. Rod (A. Smith) 20:52, 1 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

These should have person, number, etc. indicated. An alternative approach follows, but I don't know enough about languages to know whether it's at all feasible; it's not if there a large number of different number-person-etc. combinations that are not shared by many languages.

etc.—msh210℠ 21:00, 1 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

I threw in those number and person indicators for Romanian and Spanish. Looks a little better, but still that's a lot of information to be sticking in a translation table. Multiple tables would be easier to organize information, but....

drop downs within the drop down, watch out!